Authors: P. D. James
Natural or unnatural, he was through with it now. It was irritating that with a will so strong, his mind apparently needed this constant reassurance, that it was so obstinately reluctant to leave the problems alone. What possible justification, anyway, had he for going to the local police with a complaint that death was becoming a little too common at Toynton? An old priest dying of heart disease, without enemies, without possessions, except a modest fortune unexceptionally willed for charitable purposes to the man who had befriended him, a notable philanthropist whose character and reputation were beyond reproach. And Victor Holroyd? What could the police do about that death other than they had already most competently done. The facts had been investigated, the inquest jury had pronounced their finding. Holroyd had been buried, Father Baddeley cremated. All that remained was a coffin of broken bones and decaying flesh and a fistful of grey, gritty dust in Toynton churchyard; two more secrets added to the store of secrets buried in that consecrated earth. All of them were beyond human solving now.
And now this third death, the one for which everyone at Toynton Grange had probably been superstitiously waiting, in thrall to the theurgy that death comes in threes. They could all relax now. He could relax. The coroner would order a postmortem, and Dalgliesh had little doubt of the result. If Michael and Grace Willison had both been murdered, their killer was too clever to leave signs. And why should he? With a frail, sick, disease-ridden woman, it would have been only too easy, as simple and quick as a firm hand placed over nose and mouth. And there would be nothing to justify his interference. He couldn't say: I, Adam Dalgliesh, have had one of my famous hunchesâI disagree with the coroner, with the pathologist, with the local police, with all the facts. I demand in the light of this
new death that Father Baddeley's incinerated bones be resurrected and forced to yield up their secret.
They had reached Toynton Cottage. Dalgliesh followed Julius round to the seaward porch which led directly from the stone patio into the sitting-room. Julius had left the door unlocked. He pushed it open and stood a little aside so that Dalgliesh could go in first. Then they both stood stock still, stricken into immobility. Someone had been there before them. The marble bust of the smiling child had been smashed to pieces.
Still without speaking they moved together warily over the carpet. The head, hacked into anonymity lay among a holocaust of marble fragments. The dark grey carpet was bejewelled with gleaming grits of stone. Broad ribbons of light from the windows and open door lay across the room and, in their rays, the jagged slivers twinkled like a myriad of infinitesimal stars. It looked as if the destruction had at first been systematic. Both ears had been cleanly severed, and lay together, obscene objects oozing invisible blood, while the bouquet of flowers, so delicately carved that the lilies of the valley had seemed to tremble with life, lay a little distance from the hand as if tossed lightly aside. A miniature dagger of marble had lodged upright in the sofa, a microcosm of violence.
The room was very still; its ordered comfort, the measured ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelshelf, the insistent thudding of the sea, all heightened the sense of outrage, the crudity of destruction and hate.
Julius dropped to his knees and picked up a shapeless lump which had once been the child's head. After a second he let it drop from his loosened grasp. It rolled clumsily, obliquely, across the floor and came to rest against the foot of the sofa. Still without speaking, he reached over
and picked up the posy of flowers cradling it gently in his hands. Dalgliesh saw that his body was shaking; he was very pale and his forehead, bent over the carving, glistened with sweat. He looked like a man in shock.
Dalgliesh went over to the side table which held a decanter and poured out a generous measure of whisky. Silently he handed the glass to Julius. The man's silence and the dreadful shaking worried him. Anything, he thought, violence, a storm of rage, a spate of obscenity would be better than this unnatural silence. But when Julius did speak his voice was perfectly steady. He shook his head at the offered glass.
“No, thank you. I don't need a drink. I want to know what I'm feeling, know it here in my belly not just in my head. I don't want my anger dulled, and by God, I don't need it stimulated! Think of it, Dalgliesh. He died three hundred years ago, this gentle boy. The marble must have been carved very shortly afterwards. It was of absolutely no practical use to anyone for three hundred years except to give comfort and pleasure and remind us that we are dust. Three hundred years. Three hundred years of war, revolution, violence, greed. But it survived. It survived until this year of grace. Drink that whisky yourself, Dalgliesh. Raise the glass and toast the age of the despoiler. He didn't know that this was here, unless he peers and pries when I am away. Anything of mine would have served. He could have destroyed anything. But when he saw this, he couldn't resist it. Nothing else could have given him quite such an exaltation of destruction. This isn't just hatred of me you know. Who ever did it, hated this too. Because it gave pleasure, was made with an intention, not just a lump of clay thrown against a wall, paint stamped into a canvas, a piece of stone smoothed into innocuous curves. It had
gravity and integrity. It grew out of privilege and tradition, and contributed to it. God, I should have known better than to bring it here among these barbarians!”
Dalgliesh knelt beside him. He picked up two portions of a smashed forearm and fitted them together like a puzzle. He said:
“We know probably to within a few minutes when it was done. We know that it needed strength and that heâor sheâprobably used a hammer. There ought to be marks on that. And he couldn't have walked here and back in the time. Either he escaped down your path here to the shore, or he came by van and then went on to collect the post. It shouldn't be difficult to find out who is responsible.”
“My God, Dalgliesh, you have a policeman's soul haven't you? Is that thought supposed to comfort me?”
“It would me; but then, as you say, it's probably a matter of soul.”
“I'm not calling in the police if that's what you're suggesting. I don't need the local fuzz to tell me who did this. I know, and so do you, don't you?”
“No. I could give you a short list of suspects in order of probability, but that's not the same thing.”
“Spare yourself the trouble. I know and I'll deal with him in my own way.”
“And give him the added satisfaction of seeing you brought up on a charge of assault or G.B.H. I suppose.”
“I wouldn't get much sympathy from you would I, or from the local bench? Vengeance is mine saith Her Majesty's Commission of the Peace. Naughty, destructive boy, underprivileged lad! Five pounds fine and put him on probation. Oh! don't worry! I shan't do anything rash. I'll take my time, but I'll deal with it. You can keep your local pals out of it. They weren't exactly a flaming success when
they investigated Holroyd's death were they? They can keep their clumsy fingers out of my mess.”
Getting to his feet he added with sulky obstinacy, almost as an afterthought:
“Besides, I don't want any more fuss here at present, not just after Grace Willison's death. Wilfred's got enough on his plate. I'll clear this mess away and tell Henry that I have taken the marble back to London. No one else from the Grange comes here, thank God, so I shall be spared the usual insincere condolences.”
Dalgliesh said:
“I find it interesting, this concern for Wilfred's peace of mind.”
“I thought you might. In your book I am a selfish bastard. You've got an identikit to selfish bastards, and I don't precisely fit. Ergo, find a reason. There has to be a first cause.”
“There's always a cause.”
“Well, what is it? Am I somehow in Wilfred's pay? Am I fiddling the books? Has he some hold over me? Is there, perhaps, some truth in Moxon's suspicions? Or perhaps I'm Wilfred's illegitimate son.”
“Even a legitimate son might reasonably feel that it was worth causing Wilfred some distress to discover who did this. Aren't you being too scrupulous? Wilfred must know that someone at Toynton Grange, probably one of his disciples, nearly killed him, intentionally or otherwise. My guess is that he'd take the loss of your marble fairly philosophically.”
“He doesn't have to take it. He's not going to know. I can't explain to you what I don't understand myself. But I am committed to Wilfred. He is so vulnerable and pathetic. And it is all so hopeless! If you must know, he reminds me in some way of my parents. They had a small general store
in Southsea. Then when I was about fourteen, a large chain store opened next door. That was the end for them. They tried everything; they wouldn't give in. Extended credit when they weren't getting their money anyway; special offers when their profit margins were practically nil; hours spent after closing time rearranging the window; balloons given free to the local kids. It didn't matter, you see. It was all utterly pointless and futile. They couldn't succeed. I thought I could have borne their failure. What I couldn't bear was their hope.”
Dalgliesh thought that, in part, he did see. He knew what Julius was saying. Here am I, young, rich, healthy. I know how to be happy. I could be happy, if only the world were really as I want it to be. If only other people wouldn't persist in being sick, deformed, in pain, helpless, defeated, deluded. Or if only I could be just that bit more selfish so that I didn't care. If only there weren't the black tower. He heard Julius speaking:
“Don't worry about me. Remember I am bereaved. Don't they say that the bereaved always have to work through their grief? The appropriate treatment is a detached sympathy and plenty of good plain nourishment. We'd better get some breakfast.”
Dalgliesh said quietly:
“If you're not going to ring the police, then we might as well clear up this mess.”
“I'll get a dustbin. I can't bear the noise of the vacuum cleaner.”
He disappeared into his immaculate, fashionably overequipped kitchen, and came back with a dustpan and two brushes. In an odd companionship they knelt together to their task. But the brushes were too soft to dislodge the slivers of marble, and in the end they had to pick them up laboriously one by one.
The forensic pathologist was a locum tenens senior registrar, and if he had expected this three-week stint of duty in the agreeable West Country to be less arduous than his London job, he was disappointed. When the telephone rang for the tenth time that morning he peeled off his gloves, tried not to think about the fifteen naked cadavers still waiting on their refrigerated shelves and lifted the receiver philosophically. The confident masculine voice, except for its pleasant country burr, could have been the voice of any Metropolitan police officer, and the words, too, he had heard before.
“That you, Doc? We've got a body in a field three miles north of Blandford which we don't like the look of. Could you come to the scene?”
The summons seldom differed. They always had a body they didn't like the look of, in a ditch, a field, a gutter, in the tangled steel of a smashed car. He took up his message pad and asked the usual questions, heard the expected replies. He said to the mortuary assistant:
“OK Bert, you can sew her up now. She's no twelve-guinea special. Tell the Coroner's officer that he can issue the disposal order. I'm off to a scene. Get the next two ready for me, will you?”
He glanced for the last time at the emaciated body on the table. There had been nothing difficult about Grace Miriam Willison, spinster, aged 57. No external signs of violence, no internal evidence to justify sending the viscera for analysis. He had muttered to his assistant with some bitterness that if the local GPs were going to look to an over-stretched forensic pathology service to settle their differential diagnoses the service might as well pack up. But her doctor's hunch had been right. There was something
he'd missed, the advanced neoplasm in the upper stomach. And much good that knowledge now would do him or her. That, or the D.S. or the heart condition had killed her. He wasn't God and he'd taken his choice. Or maybe she'd just decided that she had had enough and turned her face to the wall. In her state it was the mystery of continuing life not the fact of death that needed explaining. He was beginning to think that most patients died when they decided that it was their time to die. But you couldn't put that on a certificate.
He scribbled a final note on Grace Willison's record, called out a final instruction to his assistant, then pushed his way through the swing doors towards another death, another body, towards, he thought, with something like relief, his proper job.
T
HE CHURCH OF ST. MICHAEL'S
at Toynton was an uninteresting Victorian reconstruction of an earlier building, the churchyard a triangular patch of swathed grass between the west wall, the road and a row of rather dull cottages. Victor Holroyd's grave, pointed out by Julius, was an oblong mound crudely patched with squares of weedy turf. Beside it, a simple wooden cross marked the spot where Father Baddeley's ashes had been buried. Grace Willison was to lie next to him. Everyone at Toynton Grange was at the funeral except Helen Rainer who had been left to nurse Georgie Allan, and Maggie Hewson whose absence, unremarked, was apparently taken for granted. But Dalgliesh, when he arrived alone, had been surprised to see Julius's Mercedes parked opposite the lych gate beside the Toynton Grange bus.
The churchyard was encumbered and the path between the headstones narrow and overgrown so that it took some time to manoeuvre the three wheelchairs round the open grave.
The local vicar was taking a belated holiday and his substitute, who apparently knew nothing of Toynton Grange, was obviously surprised to see four of the mourners garbed in brown monk's habits. He asked if they were
Anglican Franciscans, an enquiry which provoked a fit of nervous giggling from Jennie Pegram. Anstey's answer, unheard by Dalgliesh, apparently failed to reassure and the priest, puzzled and disapproving, took the service with carefully controlled speed as if anxious to free the churchyard as soon as possible from the risk of contamination by the imposters. The little party sang, at Wilfred's suggestion, Grace's favourite hymn “Ye Holy Angels Bright.” It was, thought Dalgliesh, a hymn peculiarly unsuited for amateur unaccompanied singing and their uncertain and discordant voices rose reed thin in the crisp autumnal air.