From the kitchen came the rush of water and the roar of a gas boiler. Eric and Maggie were washing up. Suddenly the boiler was turned off and he heard Maggie’s voice:
“You’re so bloody weak! You let them all use you. If you are poking that supercilious bitch—and don’t think I care a damn either way—it’s only because you can’t say no to her. You don’t really want her any more than you want me.”
Eric’s reply was a low mutter. There was a crash of crockery. Then Maggie’s voice rose again:
“For Christ’s sake, you can’t hide away here for ever! That trip to St. Saviour’s, it wasn’t as bad as you feared. No one said anything.”
This time Eric’s reply was perfectly intelligible:
“They didn’t need to. Anyway, who did we see? Just the consultant in physical medicine and that medical records officer. She knew all right and she let me see it. That’s how it’d be in general practice, if I ever got a job. They’d never let me forget it. The practice delinquent. Every female patient under sixteen tactfully diverted to one of the partners, just in case. At least Wilfred treats me like a human being. I can make a contribution. I can do my job.”
Maggie almost yelled at him:
“What kind of a job, for God’s sake?” And then both their voices were lost in the roar from the boiler and the rush of water. Then it stopped and Dalgliesh heard Maggie’s voice again, high, emphatic.
“All right! All right! All right! I’ve said I won’t tell, and I won’t. But if you keep on nagging about it, I may change my mind.”
Eric’s reply was lost but it sounded like a long expostulatory murmur. Then Maggie spoke again:
“Well, what if I did? He wasn’t a fool, you know. He could tell that something was up. And where’s the harm? He’s dead, isn’t he? Dead. Dead. Dead.”
Dalgliesh suddenly realized that he was standing stock still, straining his ears to hear as if this were an official case, his case, and every surreptitiously stolen word was a vital clue. Irritated, he almost shook himself into action. He had taken a few steps back to the doorway and had raised his fist to knock again and more loudly when Maggie, carrying a small tin tray, emerged from the kitchen with Eric at her back. She recovered quickly from her surprise and gave a shout of almost genuine laughter.
“Oh God, don’t say Wilfred has called in the Yard itself to grill me. The poor little man has got himself into a tizzy. What are you going to do, darling, warn me that anything I say will be taken down and may be given in evidence?”
The door darkened and Julius came in. He must, thought Dalgliesh, have run down the headland to arrive so quickly. Why the hurry, he wondered. Breathing heavily, Julius swung two bottles of whisky on to the table.
“A peace offering.”
“So I should think!” Maggie had become flirtatious. Her eyes brightened under the heavy lids and she slewed them from Dalgliesh to Julius as if uncertain where to bestow her favours. She spoke to Dalgliesh:
“Julius has been accusing me of attempting to roast Wilfred alive in the black tower. I know: I realize it isn’t funny. But Julius is, when he’s trying to be pompous. And honestly, it’s a nonsense. If I wanted to get my own back on St. Wilfred I could do it without pussyfooting about the black tower in drag, couldn’t I darling?”
She checked her laughter and her glance at Julius was at once minatory and conspiratorial. It provoked no response. Julius said quickly:
“I didn’t accuse you. I simply enquired with the utmost tact where you’d been since one o’clock.”
“On the beach, darling. I do go there occasionally. I know I can’t prove it, but neither can you prove that I wasn’t there.”
“That’s rather a coincidence isn’t it, your happening to walk on the beach?”
“No more a coincidence than your happening to drive along the coast road.”
“And you didn’t see anyone?”
“I told you darling, not a soul. Was I expected to? And now, Adam, it’s your turn. Are you going to charm the truth out of me in the best Metropolitan tradition?”
“Not I. This is Court’s case. That’s one of the first principles of detection, never interfere with another man’s conduct of his case.”
Julius said:
“Besides, Maggie dear, the Commander isn’t interested in our paltry concerns. Strange as it may seem, he just doesn’t care. He can’t even pretend an interest in whether Dennis hurled Victor over the cliff and I’m covering up for him. Humiliating, isn’t it?”
Maggie’s laugh was uneasy. She glanced at her husband like an inexperienced hostess who fears that the party is getting out of control.
“Don’t be silly, Julius. We know that you aren’t covering up. Why should you? What would there be in it for you?”
“How well you know me, Maggie! Nothing. But then, I might have done it out of sheer good nature.” He looked at Dalgliesh with a sly smile and added:
“I believe in being accommodating to my friends.”
Eric said suddenly and with surprising authority:
“What was it you wanted, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“Just information. When I arrived at the cottage I found a booklet of matches by Father Baddeley’s bed advertising the Olde Tudor Barn near Wareham. I thought I might try it for dinner tonight. Did he go there often, do you know?”
Maggie laughed.
“God, no! Never I should think. It’s hardly Michael’s scene. I gave him the matches. He liked trifles like that. But the Barn’s not bad. Bob Loder took me there for lunch on my birthday and they did us quite well.”
Julius said:
“I’ll describe it. Ambience: a chain of coloured fairy lights strung round an otherwise genuine and agreeable seventeenth-century barn. First course: tinned tomato soup with a slice of tomato to add verisimilitude and colour contrast; frozen prawns in bottled sauce on a bed of limp lettuce; half a melon—ripe if you’re lucky; or the chef’s own homemade pâté fresh from the local supermarket. The rest of the menu you may imagine. It’s usually a variety of steak served with frozen vegetables and what they describe as french fried. If you must drink, stick to the red. I don’t know whether the owner makes it or merely sticks the labels on the bottles but at least it’s wine of a kind. The white is cat’s pee.”
Maggie laughed indulgently.
“Oh, don’t be such a snob darling, it’s not as bad as that. Bob and I had quite a decent meal. And, whoever bottled the wine, it had the right effect as far as I was concerned.”
Dalgliesh said:
“But it may have deteriorated. You know how it is. The chef leaves and a restaurant changes almost overnight.”
Julius laughed:
“That’s the advantage of the Olde Barn Menu. The chef can and does change fortnightly but the tinned soup is guaranteed to taste the same.”
Maggie said:
“It won’t have changed since my birthday. That was only the 11th September. I’m Virgo, darlings. Appropriate, isn’t it?”
Julius said:
“There are one or two decent places within driving distance. I can let you have a few names.”
He did so and Dalgliesh dutifully noted them at the back of his diary. But as he walked back to Hope Cottage his mind had already registered more important information.
So Maggie was on lunching terms with Bob Loder; the obliging Loder, equally ready to alter Father Baddeley’s will—or to dissuade him from altering it?—and to help Millicent cheat her brother out of half his capital from the sale of Toynton Grange. But that little ploy, had, of course, been Holroyd’s idea. Had Holroyd and Loder cooked it up between them? Maggie had told them about her luncheon date with sly satisfaction. If her husband neglected her on her birthday she wasn’t without consolation. But what of Loder? Was his interest no more than a readiness to avail himself of a complaisant and dissatisfied woman, or had he a more sinister motive for keeping in touch with what happened at Toynton Grange? And the shredded match? Dalgliesh hadn’t yet compared it w
ith the stubs in the booklet still by Father Baddeley’s bed, but he had no doubt that one of the stubs would match. He couldn’t question Maggie further without rousing suspicion, but he didn’t need to. She couldn’t have given the booklet of matches to Father Baddeley before the afternoon of 11th September, the day before Holroyd’s death. And on the afternoon of the eleventh, Father Baddeley had visited his solicitor. He couldn’t, then, have received the booklet of matches until that evening at the earliest. And that meant that he must have been in the black tower on either the following morning or afternoon. It would be useful when opportunity offered, to have a word with Miss Willison and ask whether Father Baddeley had been at the Grange on the Wednesday morning. According to the entries in his diary it had certainly been his invariable routine to visit the Grange every morning. And that meant that he had almost certainly been in the black tower on the afternoon of the twelfth, and, possibly, sitting at the eastern window. Those drag marks on the fibre matting had looked very recent. But even from that window, he couldn’t have seen Holroyd’s chair go over the cliff; couldn’t even have watched the distant figures of Lerner and Holroyd making their way along the sunken lane to that patch of green turf. And, even if he could, what would his evidence be worth, an old man sitting alone, reading and probably dozing in the afternoon sun? It was surely ludicrous to search here for a motive for murder. But suppose Father Baddeley had known beyond doubt that he had neither dozed nor read? Then it wasn’t a question of what he had seen, but of what he had singularly failed to see.
CHAPTER SIX
A Bloodless Murder
I
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, on the last day of her life, Grace Willison sat in the courtyard in the afternoon sun. Its rays were still warm on her face but now they touched her parched skin with a gentler valedictory warmth. From time to time a cloud moved across the face of the sun and she found herself shivering with the first intimation of winter. The air smelt keener, the afternoons were darkening fast. There wouldn’t be many more days warm enough or her to sit outside. Even today she was the only patient in the courtyard and she was grateful for the warmth of the rug across her knees.
She found herself thinking about Commander Dalgliesh. She wished that he had come more often to Toynton Grange. He was still at Hope Cottage apparently. Yesterday he had helped Julius rescue Wilfred from the fire in the black tower. Wilfred had bravely made light of his ordeal as one would expect. It had only been a small fire caused entirely by his own carelessness; he had never been in real danger. But, all the same, she thought, it was fortunate that the Commander had been at hand to help.
Would he leave Toynton, she wondered, without coming to say goodbye to her? She hoped not. She had liked him so much in their brief time together. How pleasant it would be if he could be sitting here with her now, talking about Father Baddeley. No one at Toynton Grange now ever mentioned his name. But, of course, the Commander couldn’t be expected to give up his time.
The thought was entirely without bitterness or resentment. There really wasn’t anything to interest him at Toynton Grange. And it wasn’t as if she could issue a personal invitation. She allowed herself for one minute to indulge in regret for the retirement which she had hoped for and planned. Her small pension from the Society, a little cottage, sun filled and bright with chintz and geraniums; her dear mother’s possessions, the ones she had sold before she came to Toynton; the rose-patterned tea service; the rosewood writing table; the series of water colours of English cathedrals; how lovely to be able to invite anyone she liked to her own home to take tea with her. Not a communal institutional tea at a bleak refectory table, but proper afternoon tea. Her table; her tea service; her food; her guest.
She became aware of the weight of the book on her lap. It was a paperback edition of Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset. It had lain there all the afternoon. Why, she wondered, was she so strangely reluctant to read it? And then she remembered. This had been the book she was rereading on that dreadful afternoon when Victor’s body had been brought home. She hadn’t opened it since. But that was ridiculous. She must put the thought out of her mind. It was stupid, no, it was wrong, to spoil a book she so loved—its leisurely world of cathedral intrigue, its sanity, its delicate moral sensibility—by contaminating it with images of violence, hatred and blood.
She curved her deformed left hand around the book and parted the pages with her right. There was a book mark between the last pages she had read, a single pink antirrhinum pressed between a sheet of tissue. And then she remembered. It was a flower from the small posy Father Baddeley had brought her on the afternoon of Victor’s death. Normally he never picked wild flowers except for her. They hadn’t lasted long, less than a day. But this single flower she had pressed at once between the leaves of her book. She gazed at it, motionless.
A shadow fell across the page. A voice said:
“Anything wrong?”
She looked up and smiled.
“Nothing. It’s just that I’ve remembered something. Isn’t it extraordinary how the mind rejects anything which it associates with horror or great distress? Commander Dalgliesh asked me if I knew what Father Baddeley did on the few days before he went into hospital. And, of course, I do know. I know what he did on the Wednesday afternoon. I don’t suppose it’s the least important, but it would be nice to tell him. I know that everyone here is terribly busy but do you think that …?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll find time to drop in at Hope Cottage. It’s time he showed his face here if he proposes to stay on much longer. And now, don’t you think it would be wise for you to come in? It’s getting chilly.”
Miss Willison smiled her thanks. She would have preferred to have stayed out a little longer. But she didn’t like to insist. It was meant kindly. She closed her book again and her murderer grasped the chair with strong hands and wheeled her in to her death.
II
Ursula Hollis always asked her nurses to leave her curtains undrawn and tonight in the faint haze of light from her luminous bedside clock, she could still just discern the oblong frame which separated darkness outside from the darkness within. It was nearly midnight. The night was starless and very still. She lay in blackness so thick that it was almost a weight on her chest, a dense curtain descending to stifle breath. Outside, the headland was asleep, except, she supposed, for the small animals of the night scurrying among the rigid grasses. Inside Toynton Grange she could still hear distant sounds; brisk footsteps passing down a passage; the quiet closing of a door; the squeak of unoiled wheels as someone moved a hoist or a wheelchair; the mouselike scrabbling sounds from next door as Grace Willison moved restlessly in her bed; a sudden blare of music, instantly muted, as someone opened and shut the sitting room door. Her bedside clock snatched at the seconds and ticked them into oblivion. She lay rigid, the warm tears flowing in a constant stream over her face to seep, suddenly cold and sticky, into her pillow. Under the pillow was Steve’s letter. From time to time she folded her right arm painfully across her chest and insinuated her fingers under the pillow to feel the envelope’s knife sharp edge.
Mogg had moved into the flat; they were living together. Steve had written the news almost casually as if it were merely a temporary and mutually convenient arrangement for sharing the rent and the chores. Mogg was doing the cooking; Mogg had redecorated the sitting room and put up more shelves; Mogg had found him a clerical job with his publishers which might lead to a permanent and better post. Mogg’s new book of poems were due out in the spring. There was only a perfunctory enquiry after Ursula’s health. He hadn’t even made the usual vague and insincere promises to visit. He had written no word about her return home, the planned new flat, his negotiations with the local authority. There was no need. She never would return. They both knew it. Mogg knew it.
She hadn’t received the letter until teatime. Albert Philby had been unaccountably late in fetching the post and it was after four o’clock before it was placed in her hand. She was grateful that s
he had been alone in the sitting-room, that Grace Willison hadn’t yet come in from the courtyard to get ready for tea. There had been no one to watch her face as she read it, no one to make tactful enquiries, or, more tactfully, to refrain. And anger and shock had carried her through until now. She had held on to anger, feeding it with memory and imagination, willing herself to eat her usual two slices of bread, to drink her tea, to contribute her sentences of platitude and small talk to the party. Only now, when Grace Willison’s heavy breathing had settled into a gentle snoring, when there was no longer a risk that Helen or Dot might pay a last visit, when Toynton Grange was finally wrapping itself in silence for the night, could she give way to desolation and loss and indulge in what she knew was self-pity. And the tears, when once they started, would not stop. The grief once indulged was unassuageable. She had no control over her crying. It no longer even distressed her; it had nothing to do with grief or longing. It was a physical manifestation, involuntary as a hiccup, but silent and almost consoling; an interminable stream.
She knew what she had to do. She listened through the rhythm of her tears. There was no sound from next door except Grace Willison’s snoring which was now regular. She put out her hand and switched on the light. The bulb had the lowest wattage which Wilfred could buy but the brightness was still blinding. She imagined it, a dazzling oblong of light shining out to signal her intention to all the world. She knew that there was no one to see it, but in imagination the headland was suddenly full of running feet and loud with calling voices. She had stopped crying now but her swollen eyes saw the room as if it were a half-developed photograph, an image of bleared and distorted shapes, shifting and dissolving and seen through a stinging curtain pierced with needles of light.