Death of an Expert Witness (15 page)

Mrs. Bidwell said: “I wouldn’t expect many dirty coats, not on a Thursday. They usually manages to make them last a week and drop them in here on Friday before they go home. Monday’s the busy day for laundry and putting out the new coats. Looks as though Miss Easterbrook spilt her tea yesterday. That’s not like her. But she’s particular is Miss Easterbrook. You wouldn’t find her going round with a dirty coat; no matter what day of the week.”

So there was at least one member of the Biology Department, thought Dalgliesh, who knew that Mrs. Bidwell would make an early visit to the Lab to put out a clean white coat. It would be interesting to learn who had been present when the fastidious Miss Easterbrook had had her accident with the tea.

The male washroom, apart from the urinal stalls, differed very little from the women’s. There was the same round open window, the same absence of any marks on the panes or sill. Dalgliesh carried over one of the chairs and, carefully avoiding any contact with the window or the sill, looked out. There was a drop of about six feet to the top of the window beneath, and an equal drop to that on the first floor. Below them both a paved terrace ran right up to the wall. The absence of soft earth, the rain in the night and Mrs. Bidwell’s efficient cleaning meant that they would be lucky to find any evidence of a climb. But a reasonably slim and sure-footed man or woman with enough nerve and a head for heights could certainly have got out this way. But if the murderer were a member of the Lab staff, why should he risk his neck when he must have known that the keys were on Lorrimer? And if the murderer were an outsider, then
how to account for the locked front door, the intact alarm system, and the fact that Lorrimer must have let him in?

He turned his attention to the washbasins. None was particularly dirty, but near the rim of the one nearest the door there was a smear of porridge-like mucus. He bent his head over the basin and sniffed. His sense of smell was extremely acute and, from the plug-hole, he detected the faint but unmistakably disagreeable smell of human vomit.

Mrs. Bidwell, meanwhile, had thrown open the lid of the laundry basket. She gave an exclamation.

“That’s funny. It’s empty.”

Dalgliesh and Massingham turned. Dalgliesh asked: “What were you expecting to find, Mrs. Bidwell?”

“Mr. Middlemass’s white coat, that’s what.”

She darted out of the room. Dalgliesh and Massingham followed. She flung open the door of the Document Examination Room and glanced inside. Then she closed the door again and stood with her back against it.

She said: “It’s gone! It’s not hanging on the peg. So where is it? Where’s Mr. Middlemass’s white coat?”

Dalgliesh asked: “Why did you expect to find it in the laundry basket?”

Mrs. Bidwell’s black eyes grew immense. She slewed her eyes furtively from side to side and then said with awed relish: “Because it had blood on it, that’s why. Lorrimer’s blood!”

Lastly they went down the main staircase to the Director’s office. From the library there was a broken murmur of voices, subdued and spasmodic as a funeral gathering. A detective constable was standing at the front door with the detached watchfulness of a man paid to endure boredom but ready to leap into action should, unaccountably, the boredom end.

Howarth had left his office unlocked and the key in the door. Dalgliesh was interested that the Director had chosen to wait with the rest of the staff in the library, and wondered whether this was intended to demonstrate solidarity with his colleagues, or was a tactful admission that his office was one of the rooms which had been due to receive Mrs. Bidwell’s early morning attention, and must, therefore, be of special interest to Dalgliesh. But that reasoning was surely too subtle. It was difficult to believe that Howarth hadn’t entered his room since the discovery of the body. If there were anything to remove, he best of all must have had the chance to do it.

Dalgliesh had expected the room to be impressive, but it still surprised him. The plasterwork of the coved ceiling was
splendid, a joyous riot of wreaths, shells, ribbons and trailing vines, ornate and yet disciplined. The fireplace was of white and mottled marble with a finely carved frieze of nymphs and piping shepherds and a classical overmantel with open pediment. He guessed that the agreeably proportioned salon, too small to be partitioned and not large enough for a working laboratory, had escaped the fate of so much of the house more for administrative and scientific convenience than from any sensitivity on Colonel Hoggatt’s part to its innate perfection. It was newly furnished in a style guaranteed not to offend, a nice compromise of bureaucratic orthodoxy and modern functionalism. There was a large glass-fronted bookcase to the left of the fireplace, and a personal locker and a coat-stand to the right. A rectangular conference table and four chairs, of a type provided for senior public servants, stood between the tall windows. Next to it was a steel security cupboard fitted with a combination lock. Howarth’s desk, a plain contraption in the same wood as the conference table, faced the door. Apart from an ink-stained blotter and a pen-stand it held a small wooden bookshelf containing the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
, a dictionary of quotations,
Roget’s Thesaurus
and
Fowler’s Modern English Usage
. The choice seemed curious for a scientist. There were three metal trays marked “In,” “Pending” and “Out.” The “Out” tray held two manila files, the top labelled “Chapel—Proposals for transfer to Department of the Environment,” and the second, a large, old and unwieldy file which had been much mended, was marked “New Laboratory—Commissioning.”

Dalgliesh was struck by the emptiness and impersonality of the whole room. It had obviously been recently decorated for Howarth’s arrival, and the pale grey-green carpet, with its matching square under the desk, was as yet unmarked, the curtains hung in pristine folds of dark green. There was only
one picture, positioned in the overmantel, but this was an original, an early Stanley Spencer showing the Virgin’s Assumption. Plump, foreshortened, varicosed thighs in red bloomers floated upwards from a circle of clutching work-worn hands to a reception committee of gaping cherubim. It was, he thought, an eccentric choice for the room, discordant both in date and style. It was the only object, apart from the books, which reflected a personal taste; Dalgliesh hardly supposed that it had been provided by a Government agency. Otherwise the office had the underfurnished, expectant atmosphere of a room refurbished to receive an unknown occupant, and still awaiting the imprint of his taste and personality. It was hard to believe that Howarth had worked here for almost a year. Mrs. Bidwell, her tight little mouth pursed and eyes narrowed, regarded it with obvious disapproval.

Dalgliesh asked: “Is this how you would have expected to find it?”

“That’s right. Every bloody morning. Nothing for me to do here really is there? Mind you, I dusts and polishes around and runs the Hoover over the carpet. But he’s neat and tidy, there’s no denying it. Not like old Dr. MacIntyre. Oh, he was a lovely man! But messy! You should have seen his desk of a morning. And smoke! You couldn’t hardly see across the room sometimes. He had this lovely skull on his desk to keep his pipes in. They dug it up when they was making the trench for the pipes to the new vehicle examination extension. Been in the ground more than two hundred years, Dr. Mac said, and he showed me the crack—just like a cracked cup—where his skull had been bashed in. That’s one murder they never solved. I miss that skull. Real lovely that used to look. And he had all these pictures of himself and his friends at university with oars crossed above them, and a coloured one of the Highlands
with hairy cattle paddling in a lake, and one of his father with his dogs, and such a lovely picture of his wife—dead she was, poor soul—and another big picture of Venice with gondolas and a lot of foreigners in fancy dress, and a cartoon of Dr. Mac done by one of his friends, showing the friend lying dead, and Dr. Mac in his deerstalker hat looking for clues with his magnifying glass. That was a real laugh that was. Oh, I loved Dr. Mac’s pictures!” She looked at the Spencer with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

“And there’s nothing unusual about the room this morning?”

“I told you, same as usual. Well, look for yourself. Clean as a new pin. It looks different in the day, mind you, when he’s working here. But he always leaves it as if he isn’t expecting to come back in the morning.”

There was nothing else to be learned from Mrs. Bidwell. Dalgliesh thanked her and told her that she could go home as soon as she had checked with Detective Sergeant Reynolds in the library that he had all the necessary information about where she had spent the previous evening. He explained this with his usual tact, but tact was wasted on Mrs. Bidwell.

She said cheerfully and without rancour: “No use trying to pin this on me, or Bidwell come to that. We was together at the village concert. Sat five rows back between Joe Machin—he’s the sexton—and Willie Barnes—he’s the rector’s warden—and we stayed there until the end of the show. No sneaking out at half-time like some I could mention.”

“Who sneaked out, Mrs. Bidwell?”

“Ask him yourself. Sat at the end of the row in front of us, a gentleman whose office we might or might not be standing in at this very moment. Do you want to talk to him? Shall I ask him to step in?” She spoke hopefully and looked towards the door like an eager gun dog, ears pricked for the command to retrieve.

“We’ll see to that, thank you, Mrs. Bidwell. And if we want to talk to you again we’ll get in touch. You’ve been very helpful.”

“I thought I might make coffee for them all before I go. No harm in that, I suppose?”

There was no point in warning her not to talk to the Lab staff, or, come to that, the whole village. Dalgliesh had no doubt that his search of the cloakrooms and the missing bloodstained coat would soon be common knowledge. But no great harm would be done. The murderer must know that the police would be immediately alive to the possible significance of that false early morning call to Mrs. Bidwell. He was dealing with intelligent men and women, experienced, even if vicariously, in criminal investigation, knowledgeable about police procedure, aware of the rules which governed his every move. He had no doubt that, mentally, most of the group now waiting in the library to be interviewed were following his actions almost to the minute.

And among them, or known to them, was a murderer.

Superintendent Mercer had selected his two sergeants with an eye to contrast or, perhaps, with a view to satisfying any prejudices which Dalgliesh might harbour about the age and experience of his subordinates. Sergeant Reynolds was near the end of his service, a stolid, broad-shouldered, slow-speaking officer of the old school and a native of the fens. Sergeant Underhill, recently promoted, looked young enough to be his son. His boyish, open face with its look of disciplined idealism was vaguely familiar to Massingham, who suspected that he might have seen it in a police recruitment pamphlet, but decided in the interest of harmonious co-operation to give Underhill the benefit of the doubt.

The four police officers were sitting at the conference table in the Director’s office. Dalgliesh was briefing his team before he started on the preliminary interviews. He was, as always, restlessly aware of time passing. It was already after eleven and he was anxious to finish at the Laboratory and see old Mr. Lorrimer. The physical clues to his son’s murder might lie in the Laboratory; the clue to the man himself lay
elsewhere. But neither his words nor his tone betrayed impatience.

“We start by assuming that the telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell and Lorrimer’s death are connected. That means the call was made by the murderer or an accomplice. We’ll keep an open mind about the caller’s sex until we get confirmation from Bidwell, but it was probably a woman, probably also someone who knew that old Mr. Lorrimer was expected to be in hospital yesterday, and who didn’t know that the appointment had been cancelled. If the old man had been home, the ruse could hardly hope to succeed. As Miss Easterbrook has pointed out, no one could rely on his going early to bed last night and not realizing until after the Lab opened this morning that his son hadn’t come home.”

Massingham said: “The killer would have made it his business to get here early this morning, assuming that he didn’t know that his plan had misfired. And assuming, of course, the call wasn’t a double bluff. It would be a neat ploy, wasting our time, confusing the investigation and diverting suspicion from everyone except the early arrivals.”

“But for one of the suspects, it could have been an even neater ploy,” thought Dalgliesh. It had been Mrs. Bidwell’s arrival at Howarth’s house in obedience to the call which had given the Director himself the excuse for arriving so early. He wondered what time Howarth usually put in an appearance. That would be one of the questions to be asked.

He said: “We’ll start by assuming that it wasn’t a bluff, that the murderer, or his accomplice, made the call to delay Mrs. Bidwell’s arrival and the discovery of the body. So what was he hoping to do? Plant evidence or destroy it? Tidy up something which he’d overlooked; wipe the mallet clean; clear up the evidence of whatever it was he was doing here last night; replace
the keys on the body? But Blakelock had the best opportunity to do that, and he wouldn’t need to have taken them in the first place. The call would have given someone the chance to replace the spare set in the security cupboard here. But that would be perfectly possible without delaying Mrs. Bidwell’s arrival. And, of course, it may have been done.”

Underhill said: “But is it really likely, sir, that the call was intended to delay the finding of the body and give the killer time to replace the keys? Admittedly Mrs. Bidwell could be expected to be first in the Biology Department this morning when she put out the clean coats. But the murderer couldn’t rely on that. Inspector Blakelock or Brenda Pridmore could easily have had occasion to go there.”

Dalgliesh thought it a risk that the murderer might well have thought worth taking. In his experience the early morning routine in an institution seldom varied. Unless Blakelock had the early morning job of checking on Lab security—and this was yet another of the questions to be asked—he and Brenda Pridmore would probably have got on with their normal work at the reception desk. In the ordinary course of events Mrs. Bidwell would have been the one to find the body. Any member of staff who went into the Biology Lab before her would have needed a good excuse to explain his presence there, unless, of course, he was a member of the Biology Department.