Death of an Expert Witness (17 page)

“And you stayed for the rest of the concert?”

“I intended to. Actually, the hall was incredibly stuffy and just before the interval at eight-thirty I slipped out. I stayed out.”

Dalgliesh asked what precisely he’d done.

“Nothing. I sat on one of those flat tombstones for about twenty minutes, then I left.”

“Did you see anyone, or did anyone see you?”

“I saw a hobby-horse—I know now that it must have been Middlemass deputizing for Chief Inspector Martin—come out of the male dressing room. He pranced around rather happily, I thought, and snapped his jaws at an angel on one of the graves. Then he was joined by the troupe of morris-dancers coming through the graveyard from the Moonraker. It was an
extraordinary sight. There was the racing moon and these extraordinary figures with their bells jingling and their hats decked with evergreens moving through the swirl of ground mist out of the darkness towards me. It was like an
outré
film or a ballet. All it needed was second-rate background music, preferably Stravinsky. I was sitting motionless on the gravestone, some distance away, and I don’t think they saw me. I certainly didn’t make myself known. The hobby-horse joined them, and they went into the hall. Then I heard the fiddle start up. I suppose I stayed sitting there for about another ten minutes, and then I left. I walked for the rest of the evening along Leamings Dike and got home about ten o’clock. My half-sister Domenica will be able to confirm the time.”

They spent a little time discussing the administrative arrangements for the investigation. Dr. Howarth said that he would move into Miss Foley’s room and make his office available to the police. There would be no chance of the Lab opening for the rest of the day, but Dalgliesh said that he hoped it would be possible for work to start again the next morning.

Before Howarth left, Dalgliesh said: “Everyone I’ve spoken to respected Dr. Lorrimer as a forensic biologist. But what was he like as a man? What, for example, did you know about him except that he was a forensic biologist?”

Dr. Howarth said coldly: “Nothing. I wasn’t aware there was anything to know, except that he was a forensic biologist. And now, if you’ve no more immediate questions, I must telephone Establishment Department and make sure that, in the excitement of his somewhat spectacular exit, they’re not forgetting to send me a replacement.”

With the resilience of youth, Brenda Pridmore had recovered quickly from the shock of finding Lorrimer’s body. She had resolutely refused to be taken home and by the time Dalgliesh was ready to see her she was perfectly calm and, indeed, anxious to tell her story. With her cloud of rich auburn hair and her freckled, wind-tanned face she looked the picture of bucolic health. But the grey eyes were intelligent, the mouth sensitive and gentle. She gazed across the desk at Dalgliesh as intently as a docile child and totally without fear. He guessed that all her young life she had been used to receiving an avuncular kindness from men and never doubted that she would receive it, too, from these unknown officers of police. In response to Dalgliesh’s questioning, she described exactly what had happened from the moment of her arrival at the Laboratory that morning to the discovery of the body.

Dalgliesh asked: “Did you touch him?”

“Oh no! I knelt down and I think I did put out my hand to feel his cheek. But that was all. I knew that he was dead, you see.”

“And then?”

“I don’t remember. I know I rushed downstairs and Inspector Blakelock was standing at the bottom looking up at me. I couldn’t speak, but I suppose he saw by my face that something was wrong. Then I remember sitting on the chair outside Chief Inspector Martin’s office and looking at Colonel Hoggatt’s portrait. Then I don’t remember anything until Dr. Howarth and Mrs. Bidwell arrived.”

“Do you think anyone could have got out of the building past you while you were sitting there?”

“The murderer, you mean? I don’t see how he could have. I know I wasn’t very alert, but I hadn’t fainted or anything silly like that. I’m sure I would have noticed if anyone had come across the hall. And even if he did manage to slip past me, he would have bumped into Dr. Howarth, wouldn’t he?”

Dalgliesh asked her about her job at Hoggatt’s, how well she had known Dr. Lorrimer. She prattled away with artless confidence about her life, her colleagues, her fascinating job, Inspector Blakelock who was so good to her and who had lost his own only daughter, telling with every sentence more than she knew. It wasn’t that she was stupid, thought Massingham, only honest and ingenuous. For the first time they heard Lorrimer spoken of with affection.

“He was always terribly kind to me, although I didn’t work in the Biology Department. Of course, he was a very serious man. He had so many responsibilities. The Biology Department is terribly overworked and he used to work late nearly every night, checking results, catching up with the backlog. I think he was disappointed at not being chosen to succeed Dr. Mac. Not that he ever said so to me—well he wouldn’t, would he?—I’m far too junior and he was far too loyal.”

Dalgliesh asked: “Do you think anyone could have misunderstood his interest in you, might have been a little jealous?”

“Jealous of Dr. Lorrimer because he stopped sometimes at the desk to talk to me about my work and was kind to me? But he was old! That’s just silly!”

Suppressing a grin as he bent over his notebook and penned a few staccato outlines, Massingham thought that it probably was.

Dalgliesh asked: “It seems there was some trouble the day before he died when Dr. Kerrison’s children called at the Laboratory. Were you in the hall then?

“You mean when he pushed Miss Kerrison out of the front hall? Well, he didn’t actually push her, but he did speak very sharply. She had come with her small brother and they wanted to wait for Dr. Kerrison. Dr. Lorrimer looked at them, well, really as if he hated them. It wasn’t at all like him. I think he’s been under some terrible strain. Perhaps he had a premonition of his death. Do you know what he said to me after the clunch pit exhibits came in? He said that the only death we had to fear is our own. Don’t you think that was an extraordinary remark?”

“Very strange,” agreed Dalgliesh.

“And that reminds me of another thing. You did say that anything might be important. Well, there was a funny kind of letter arrived for Dr. Lorrimer yesterday morning. That’s why he stopped at the desk, so that I could hand over any personal post. There was just this thin brown envelope with the address printed, printed by hand in capital letters, I mean. And it was just his name, no qualifications after it. Odd, wasn’t it?”

“Did he receive many private letters here?”

“Oh, no, none really. The Lab writing paper says that all communications have to be addressed to the Director. We deal at the desk with the exhibits received, but all the correspondence goes to the general office for sorting. We only hand over the personal letters, but there aren’t many of those.”

In the quick preliminary examination which he and Massingham had made of Lorrimer’s meticulously tidy office, Dalgliesh had found no personal correspondence. He asked whether Miss Pridmore knew if Dr. Lorrimer had gone home for lunch. She said that he had. So it was possible that he had taken the letter home. It could mean anything, or nothing. It was just one more small fact which would have to be investigated.

He thanked Brenda Pridmore, and reminded her again to come back to him if she remembered anything which could be of importance, however small. Brenda was not used to dissembling. It was obvious that something had occurred to her. She blushed and dropped her eyes. The metamorphosis from happy confidante to guilty schoolgirl was pathetically comic. Dalgliesh said gently: “Yes?”

She didn’t speak, but made herself meet his eyes and shook her head.

He waited for a moment, then said: “The investigation of murder is never agreeable. Like most unpleasant things in life, it sometimes seems easier not to get involved, to keep oneself uncontaminated. But that isn’t possible. In a murder investigation, to suppress a truth is sometimes to tell a lie.”

“But suppose one passes on information. Something private, perhaps, which one hasn’t any real right to know—and it throws suspicion on the wrong person?”

Dalgliesh said gently: “You have to trust us. Will you try to do that?”

She nodded, and whispered “Yes,” but she said nothing further. He judged that this was not the time to press her. He let her go, and sent for Angela Foley.

In contrast to Brenda Pridmore’s artless confiding, Angela Foley presented a bland, inscrutable gaze. She was an unusual-looking girl with a heart-shaped face and a wide, exceedingly high forehead from which hair, baby fine, the colour of ripe grain, was strained back and plaited into a tight coil on top of her head. Her eyes were small, slanted, and so deeply set that Dalgliesh found it hard to guess their colour. Her mouth was small, pursed and uncommunicative above the pointed chin. She wore a dress in fine fawn wool, topped with an elaborately patterned, short-sleeved tabard, and short laced boots, a sophisticated and exotic contrast to Brenda’s orthodox prettiness and neat hand-knitted twinset.

If she was distressed by her cousin’s violent death, she concealed it admirably. She said that she had worked as Director’s secretary for five years, first with Dr. Maclntyre and now with Dr. Howarth. Before that, she had been a shorthand typist in the general office of the Laboratory, having joined Hoggatt’s straight from school. She was twenty-seven. Until two years ago, she lived in a bed-sitting room in Ely, but now shared
Sprogg’s Cottage with a woman friend. They had spent the whole of the previous evening in each other’s company. Edwin Lorrimer and his father had been her only living relatives, but they had seen very little of each other. The family, she explained as if this were the most natural thing in the world, had never been close.

“So you know very little of his private affairs, his will, for example?”

“No, nothing. When my grandmother left him all her money, and we were at the solicitor’s office, he said that he would make me his heir. But I think he just felt guilty at the time that I wasn’t named in the will. I don’t suppose it meant anything. And, of course, he may have changed his mind.”

“Do you remember how much your grandmother left?”

She paused for a moment. Almost, he thought, as if calculating whether ignorance would sound more suspicious than knowledge. Then she said: “I think about thirty thousand. I don’t know how much it is now.”

He took her briefly but carefully through the events of the early morning. She and her friend ran a Mini, but she usually cycled to work. She had done so that morning, arriving at the Laboratory at her usual time, just before nine o’clock, and had been surprised to see Dr. Howarth with Mrs. Bidwell driving in before her. Brenda Pridmore had opened the door. Inspector Blakelock was coming downstairs and he had broken the news of the murder. They had all stayed in the hall together while Dr. Howarth went up to the Biology Lab. Inspector Blakelock had telephoned for the police and for Dr. Kerrison. When Dr. Howarth returned to the hall he had asked her to go with Inspector Blakelock and check on the keys. She and the Director were the only two members of staff who knew the combination of his security cupboard. He had stayed in the hall, she thought talking
to Brenda Pridmore. The keys had been in their box in the cupboard, and she and Inspector Blakelock had left them there. She had reset the combination lock and returned to the hall. Dr. Howarth had gone into his office to talk to the Home Office, telling the rest of the staff to wait in the hall. Later, after the police and Dr. Kerrison had arrived, Dr. Howarth had driven her in his car to break the news to old Mr. Lorrimer. Then he had left her with the old man to return to the Laboratory, and she had telephoned for her friend. She and Miss Mawson had been there together until Mrs. Swaffield, the rector’s wife, and a constable arrived, about an hour later.

“What did you do at Postmill Cottage?”

“I made tea and took it in to my uncle. Miss Mawson stayed in the kitchen most of the time doing the washing-up for him. The kitchen was in a bit of a mess, mostly dirty crockery from the previous day.”

“How did your uncle seem?”

“Worried, and rather cross about having been left alone. I don’t think he quite realized Edwin was dead.”

There seemed little else to be learned from her. As far as she knew, her cousin had had no enemies. She had no idea who could have killed him. Her voice, high, rather monotonous, the voice of a small girl, suggested that it was not a matter of much concern to her. She expressed no regret, advanced no theories, answered all his questions composedly in her high, unemphatic voice. He might have been a casual and unimportant visitor, gratifying a curiosity about the routine of the working of the Laboratory. He felt an instinctive antipathy towards her. He had no difficulty in concealing it, but it interested him since it was a long time since a murder suspect had provoked in him so immediate and physical a reaction. But he wondered whether it was prejudice that glimpsed in those
deep and secretive eyes a flash of disdain, of contempt even, and he would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind that high, rather bumpy forehead.

When she had left, Massingham said: “It’s odd that Dr. Howarth sent her and Blakelock to check on the keys. He must have immediately realized their importance. Access to the Lab is fundamental to this case. So why didn’t he check on them himself? He knew the combination.”

“Too proud to take a witness, and too intelligent to go without one. And he may have thought it more important to supervise things in the hall. But at least he was careful to protect Angela Foley. He didn’t send her alone. Well, let’s see what Blakelock has to say about it.”

Like Dr. Howarth, Inspector Blakelock chose not to sit. He stood at attention, facing Dalgliesh across Howarth’s desk like a man on a disciplinary charge. Dalgliesh knew better than to try to get him to relax. Blakelock had first learned the technique of replying to questions in his detective constable days in the witness box. He gave the information he was asked for, no more and no less, his eyes fixed on some spot a foot above Dalgliesh’s right shoulder. When he gave his name in a firm, expressionless voice, Dalgliesh half expected him to reach out his right hand for the Book and take the oath.