Original Sin (41 page)

Her compulsive gregariousness went with an untidiness which had never ceased to amaze him during their eighteen months together and which he could never reconcile with her fussiness about small items of dcor. He remembered her holding up against the sitting-room wall three small prints, vertically mounted on a length of ribbon and surmounted by a bow. 'Just here, darling, or another two inches to the left? What do you think?'

It scarcely seemed to matter when they had a kitchen sink full of unwashed dishes, a bathroom whose door had to be pushed open against the weight of a heap of dirty and malodorous towels, unmade beds and clothes strewn over the bedroom. With this sluttishness over domestic detail went a compulsive need to bathe and to wash her clothes. The flat was perpetually noisy with the thump and whirl of the washing machine and the hiss of the shower.

He recalled how she had announced the end of their relationship: 'Darling, Terry wants me to join him in New York. Next Thursday, actually. He's sent a first-class ticket. I didn't think you'd mind. We haven't been having a lot of fun together recently, have we? Don't you think that something fundamental has gone out of the relationship? Something precious we once had has been lost. Don't you feel that

something has just drained away?'

'Apart from my savings.'

'Oh darling, don't be mean. It's so unlike you.'

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He had asked: 'What about your job? How will }rou work in the States? It isn't easy getting a green card.'

'Oh, I shan't bother about a job, not at once. Terry's loaded. He says I can amuse myself decorating.his apartment.'

Their parting had been unacrimonious. It was almost impossible, he found, to quarrel with Fenella. He was resigned, even wryly amused, to discover that this amiability went with a keener commercial sense than he had expected.

'Darling, I think you'd better buy me out at half what we paid for the flat, not half what it's worth now. It's gone down terribly, everything has. I'm sure you can get a higher mortgage. And if you pay me my half of what the furniture cost, I'll leave it all for you. You must have something to sit on, sweetie.'

It seemed hardly worthwhile pointing out that he had paid for, although not chosen, most of the furniture and liked none of it. He noticed, too, that the more valuable of her small acquisitions disappeared with her and were presumably now in New York. The tat remained, and he had neither the time nor the will to dispose of it. She had left him with a crippling mortgage, a flat full of furniture he disliked, an outrageous telephone bill consisting mainly of calls to New York and a lawyer's bill he could only hope to pay by instalments. It was the more irritating to find how much he occasionally missed her.

There was a small washroom and lavatory off the landing outside the archives room. While Robbins was washing the dirt of decades from his hands Daniel, on impulse, telephoned Wapping Police Station. Kate wasn't there. He waited, thought for less than a second, then rang her home number.

She answered, and he said: 'What are you doing?'

'Arranging papers. What about you?'

'Disarranging papers. I'm still at Innocent House. Would you care for a drink?'

She hesitated for a couple of seconds, then said: /hy not. Where do you suggest?'

'The Town of Ramsgate. It's convenient for us both. I'll meet you there in twenty minutes.'

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Kate parked her car at the bottom of Wapping High Street and walked the fifty yards or so to the Town of Ramsgate. As she approached, Daniel appeared from the alleyway leading to Wapping Old Stairs.

He said: 'I've been looking at Execution Dock. D'you suppose the pirates were alive when they tied them to the piles at low tide and left them until they'd been washed by three tides?'

'I shouldn't think so. They probably hanged them first. The eighteenth-century penal system was barbaric but not that barbaric.'

They pushed open the pub door and were received into the multicoloured glitter and Sunday-night conviviality of a London pub. The narrow seventeenth-century tavern was crowded and Daniel had to edge and push his way through the throng of regulars to get his pint and Kate's half-pint of Charrington's Ale. A man and woman were getting up from two seats at the end of the room close to the door into the garden and Kate quickly secured them. If Daniel had come primarily to talk rather than to drink, this was as good a place as any. The pub was orderly but the noise level high. Against this background babble of voices and sudden guffaws of laughter they could talk with more privacy and less notice than if the bar had been empty.

He was, she sensed, in an odd mood and she wondered whether, in ringing her, he had been looking for a sparring partner rather than a drinking companion. But the call had been welcome. Alan hadn't telephoned and, with the flat now almost in order, the temptation to ring him, to see him once more before he left, had been too strong for comfort. She was glad to be out of the flat and away from temptation.

Daniel's temper had probably been soured by his frustrating evening in the archives. She would take her turn the next evening and probably with as little expectation of success. But if the object wrenched from Etienne's mouth had indeed been a cassette, if this murderer had needed to tell the victim why he had been lured to his death, then the motive might well lie in the past, even in the distant

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past; an old evil, an imagined wrong, a hidden danger. The decision to examine the old records might be one of AD's famous hunches but like all his hunches, it was rooted in reason.

Looking down into his beer, Daniel said: `you worked with John Massingham, didn't you, on the Berowne case. Did you like him?'

'He was a good detective, although not as good as he thought. No, I didn't like him. Why?'

He left the question unanswered. 'Nor do I. He and I were detective-sergeants together in H Division. He called me a Jew-boy. I wasn't meant to hear, of course, he would have thought that was rather bad form, insulting a chap to his face. Admittedly his actual words were "our clever little Jew-boy", but somehow I don't think it was meant as a compliment.'

When she didn't comment, he went on: Nhen Massingham uses the expression "when I succeed", you know he isn't talking about making Chief Superintendent. What he's talking about is inheriting his dad's title. Chief Constable, the Lord Dungannon. It won't do him any harm. He'll get there before either of us.'

Certainly before me, thought Kate. For her, ambition had to be governed by reality. Someone had to be the first woman Chief Constable. It could be she, but it was folly to count on it. She had probably entered the force ten years too soon.

She said: `you'll make it, if you really want it.'

'Perhaps. It's not easy being a Jew.'

She could have retorted that it wasn't easy being a woman in the macho world of the police, but that was a common complaint and she had no intention of whining to Daniel. She said: 'It's not easy being illegitimate.'

'Are you? I thought that was fashionable.'

'Not my kind of illegitimate. And so is being a Jew - prestigious anyway.'

'Not my kind of Jew.'

'How is it difficult?'

'You can't be a cheerful atheist like other people. You feel the need to keep explaining to God why you can't believe in him. Then you have a Jewish mother. That is absolutely essential, it comes with the package. If you haven't got a Jewish mother then you aren't a Jew. Jewish mothers want their sons to marry nice Jewish girls, produce Jewish grandchildren and be seen With them in the synagogue.'

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'You could do that last occasionally without too much violence to your conscience, if atheists have one.' 'Jewish atheists do. That's the trouble. Let's go and look at the river.' There was a small garden at the rear of the tavern overlooking the river which, on warm summer nights, could become unconformably crowded. But on an October night few of the regulars had any inclination to carry their drinks outside and Kate and Daniel walked out into a cool river-scented silence. The one lamp shining from the wall shed a soft glow over the upturned garden chairs and the tubs of woody-stemmed tangled geraniums. They moved together and rested their glasses on the river wall. There was a silence. Then Daniel said abruptly: vVe're not going to get this chap.' She said: 'Why so sure? And why chap? It could be a woman. And why so defeatist? AD is probably the most intelligent detecfive in Britain.' 'More likely a man. Dismantling and replacing that gas fire is more likely to be the work of a man. Le's assume he's a man anyway. We shan't get him because he's as intelligent as AD and he's got one big advantage: the criminal jusfice system is on his side, not ours.' This was a familiar gripe. Daniel's almost paranoid dis'ust of lawyers was one of his obsessions, like his dislike of having his name shortened to Clan . She was used to his complaint that the criminal justice system was less concerned with convicfing the guil than in devising an ingenious and lucrative obstacle course for lawyers to demonsfrate their cleverness. She said: 'That's nothing new. The criminal jusfice system has favoured criminals for the last fory years. That's a fact we live with. Fools h-y to get over it by improving the evidence when they know damn well their man is guil. All that does is discredit the police, set guil men free and produce more legislation which ips the balance against convictions still further. You know that, we all know it. The answer is to get good honest evidence and make it stick in courL' 'Good evidence in a really serious case is often the evidence of informers and undercover agents. For God's sake Kate, you know that. Now we have to feed that to the defence in advance so we can't use it without putting lives at risk. Do you know how many major cases we've had to aband�n in the last six months in the Met alone?'

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'That won't happen in this case, will it? When we get the evidence we'll produce it.'

'But we aren't going to get it, are we? Not unless One of them cracks, and they won't. It's all circumstantial. We haven't a single fact which we can link with one of the suspects. Any of them could have done it. One of them did. We could put a case together against any of them. It wouldn't even get to court. The DPP would throw it out. And if it did get to court, can't you imagine what the defence would make of it? Etienne could have gone up to that room for his own purposes. We can't prove that he didn't. He could have been looking for something in the archives, checking an old contract. He doesn't expect to stay long so he leaves his coat and keys in his office. Then he comes upon something which is more interesting than he expects and settles down to study it. He feels cold so he shuts the window, breaking the window cord, and lights the fire. By the time he realizes what's happening he's too disorientated to get to the fire to turn it off. So he dies. Then hours later the firm's mischief-maker finds the body and decides to add a note of morbid mystery to what is, in fact, an unfortunate accident.'

Kate said: /e've gone over all that. It doesn't really stand up, does it? Why did he collapse next to the fire? Why not go out of the door? Etienne was intelligent, he must have known the risks from a gas fire in a badly ventilated room, so why shut the window?'

'All right, he was trying to open it, not shut it, when the cord broke.'

'Dauntsey says it was open when he last used the room.' 'Dauntsey is the chief suspect; we can ignore that evidence.'

'His counsel won't. You can't build a case by ignoring inconve-nient evidence.'

'All right, he was trying either to shut or open the window. We'll leave that.'

'But why light the fire in the first place? It wasn't that cold. Where are these records that so intrigued him? The ones on the table were old contracts from fifty years ago, the writers dead, unremembered. Why should he want to look at those?'

'The mischief-maker changed them. We've no way of knowing what records he was actually looking at.'

'Why should he change them? And if Etienne went to the room to work, where was his pen, his pencil, his Biro?'

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'He went to read not to write.' 'He couldn't write, could he? He couldn't even scribble the name of his killer. He had nothing to write with. Someone had stolen his diary with the pencil attached. He couldn't even write the name in dust. There was no dust. And what about that scratch on his palate? That's incontrovertible, that's fact.' 'Connected to no one. We won't be able to prove how that was made unless we can produce the object that made it. And we don't know what made it. We probably never shall know. All we've got is suspicion and circumstantial evidence. We haven't even enough to put one of the suspects under surveillance. Can't you imagine it, the outcry, if we did? Five respectable people, not one of them with a criminal record. And two of them with alibis.' Kate said: 'Neither of them worth a damn. Rupert Farlow admitted frankly that he'd swear de Witt was with him true or not. And that story of needing him during the night, he was careful to give us the precise times, wasn't he?' 'I imagine you tend to notice the precise time when you're dying.' 'And Claudia Etienne claims she was with her fiance. He's going to marry a very rich woman, a bloody sight richer than she was a week ago. Do you think he'd hesitate to lie for her if she asked him?' Daniel said: 'OK. It's easy to disbelieve the alibis, but can we disprove them? And they could be telling the truth, both of them. We can't assume they're lying. And if they are, then Claudia Etienne and de Witt are in the clear. Which leads us back to Gabriel Dauntsey. He had the means and the opportunity and he has no alibi for the half hour before he left for that pub reading.' Kate said: 'But that goes equally for Frances Peverell and she's the one with a motive. Etienne chucked her for another woman, proposed to sell Innocent House over her head. She had more reason to wish him dead than anyone. And try convincing a jury that a rheumatic man of seventy-six could get up those stairs or take that slow creaking lift, do what he had to do in the little archives room and get back to his flat in about eight minutes. OK, Robbins did that trial run and it was just about possible but not if he had to go down to the ground floor to fetch the snake.' 'We've only Frances Peverell's word for it that it was eight minutes. And they could be in it together. That's always been one of our possibilities. And the bath water running away means nothing.