Death of an Expert Witness (22 page)

Massingham had taken down a book on comparative religion. He said: “It looks as if he was one of those men who torment themselves trying to discover the meaning of existence.”

Dalgliesh replaced the Sartre he had been studying. “You find that reprehensible?”

“I find it futile. Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one’s lungs. They’re for breathing.”

“And life is for living. You find that an adequate personal credo?”

“To maximize one’s pleasures and minimize one’s pain, yes, sir, I do. And I suppose, to bear with stoicism those miseries I can’t avoid. To be human is to ensure enough of those without inventing them. Anyway, I don’t believe you can hope to understand what you can’t see or touch or measure.”

“A logical positivist. You’re in respectable company. But he spent his life examining what he could see or touch or measure. It doesn’t seem to have satisfied him. Well, let’s see what his personal papers have to tell.”

He turned his attention to the desk, leaving the locked drawer to the last. He rolled back the top to reveal two small drawers and a number of pigeon-holes. And here, neatly docketed and compartmentalized, were the minutiae of Lorrimer’s solitary life. A drawer with three bills waiting to be paid, and one for receipts. A labelled envelope containing his parents’ marriage lines, his own birth and baptismal certificates. His passport, an anonymous face but with the eyes staring as if hypnotized, the neck muscles taut. The lens of the camera might have been the barrel of a gun. A life-assurance certificate. Receipted bills for fuel, electricity and gas. The maintenance agreement for the central heating. The hire-purchase agreement for the television. A wallet with his
bank statement. His portfolio of investments, sound, unexciting, orthodox.

There was nothing about his work. Obviously he kept his life as carefully compartmentalized as his filing system. Everything to do with his profession, the journals, the drafts of his scientific papers, were kept in his office at the Lab. They were probably written there. That might account for some of the late hours. It would certainly have been impossible to guess from the contents of his desk what his job had been.

His will was in a separate labelled envelope together with a brief letter from a firm of Ely solicitors, Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt. The will was very short and had been made five years earlier. Lorrimer had left Postmill Cottage and £10,000 to his father, and the rest of his estate absolutely to his cousin, Angela Maud Foley. To judge from the portfolio of investments, Miss Foley would inherit a useful capital sum.

Lastly, Dalgliesh took Lorrimer’s bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the top left-hand drawer. The lock worked very easily. The drawer was crammed with papers covered with Lorrimer’s handwriting. Dalgliesh took them over to the table in front of the window and motioned Massingham to draw up the armchair. They sat there together. There were twenty-eight letters in all and they read them through without speaking. Massingham was aware of Dalgliesh’s long fingers picking up each sheet, dropping it from his hand then shifting it across the desk towards him, then picking up the next. The clock seemed to him to be ticking unnaturally loudly and his own breathing to have become embarrassingly obtrusive. The letters were a liturgy of the bitter exfoliation of love. It was all here: the inability to accept that desire was no longer returned, the demand for explanations which, if attempted, could only increase the hurt, the excoriating self-pity, the spasms
of irrational renewed hope, the petulant outbursts at the obtuseness of the lover unable to see where her happiness lay, the humiliating self-abasement.

“I realize that you won’t want to live in the fens. But that needn’t be a difficulty, darling. I could get a transfer to the Metropolitan Lab if you prefer London. Or we could find a house in Cambridge or Norwich, a choice of two civilized cities. You once said that you liked to live among the spires. Or if you wished, I could stay on here and we could have a flat in London for you, and I’d join you whenever I could. I ought to be able to make it most Sundays. The week without you would be an eternity, but anything would be bearable if I knew that you belonged to me. You do belong to me. All the books, all the seeking and the reading, what does it come to in the end? Until you taught me that the answer was so simple.”

Some of the letters were highly erotic. They were probably the most difficult of all love letters to write successfully, thought Massingham. Didn’t the poor devil know that, once desire was dead, they could only disgust? Perhaps those lovers who used a private nursery talk for their most secret acts were the wisest. At least the eroticism was personal. Here the sexual descriptions were either embarrassingly Lawrentian in their intensity, or coldly clinical. He recognized with surprise an emotion that could only be shame. It wasn’t just that some of the outpourings were brutally explicit. He was accustomed to perusing the private pornography of murdered lives; but these letters, with their mixture of crude desire and elevated sentiment, were outside his experience. The naked suffering they expressed seemed to him neurotic, irrational. Sex no longer had any power to shock him; love, he decided, obviously could.

He was struck by the contrast between the tranquillity of the man’s room and the turbulence of his mind. He thought:

at least this job teaches one not to hoard personal debris. Police work was as effective as religion in teaching a man to live each day as if it were his last. And it wasn’t only murder that violated privacy. Any sudden death could do as much. If the helicopter had crashed on landing, what sort of a picture would his leavings present to the world? A conformist, right-wing philistine, obsessed with his physical fitness?
Homme moyen sensuel
, and
moyen
everything else for that matter? He thought of Emma, with whom he slept whenever they got the opportunity, and who, he supposed, would eventually become Lady Dungannon unless, as seemed increasingly likely, she found an elder son with better prospects and more time to devote to her. He wondered what Emma, cheerful hedonist with her frank enjoyment of bed, would have made of these self-indulgent, masturbatory fantasies, this humiliating chronicle of the miseries of defeated love.

One half-sheet was covered with a single name. Domenica, Domenica, Domenica. And then Domenica Lorrimer, a clumsy, uneuphonic linking. Perhaps its infelicity had struck him, for he had written it only once. The letters looked laboured, tentative, like those of a young girl practising in secret the hoped-for married name. All the letters were undated, all without superscription and signature. A number were obviously first drafts, a painful seeking after the elusive world, the holograph scored with deletions.

But now Dalgliesh was pushing towards him the final letter. Here there were no alterations, no uncertainties, and if there had been a previous draft, Lorrimer had destroyed it. This was as clear as an affirmation. The words, strongly written in Lorrimer’s black upright script, were set out in even lines, neatly as an exercise in calligraphy. Perhaps this was one he had intended to post after all.

I have been seeking for the words to explain what has happened to me, what you have made happen. You know how difficult this is for me. There have been so many years of writing official reports, the same phrases, the same bleak conclusions. My mind was a computer programmed to death. I was like a man born in darkness, living in a deep cave, crouching for comfort by my small inadequate fire, watching the shadows flickering over the cave drawings and trying to find in their crude outlines some significance, a meaning to existence to help me endure the dark. And then you came and took me by the hand and led me out into the sunlight. And there was the real world, dazzling my eyes with its colour and its beauty. And it needed only your hand and the courage to take a few small steps out of the shadows and imaginings into the light
. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.

Dalgliesh laid the letter down. He said: “ ‘Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live.’ Given the choice, Lorrimer would probably have preferred his murder to go unavenged than for any eyes but his to have seen these letters. What do you think of them?”

Massingham was uncertain whether he was expected to comment on their subject matter or their style. He said cautiously: “The passage about the cave is effective. It looks as if he worked over that one.”

“But not entirely original. An echo of Plato’s
Republic
. And like Plato’s caveman, the brightness dazzled and the light hurt his eyes. George Orwell wrote somewhere that murder, the unique crime, should result only from strong emotions. Well, here is the strong emotion. But we seem to have the wrong body.”

“Do you think Dr. Howarth knew, sir?”

“Almost certainly. The wonder is that no one else at the Lab apparently did. It’s not the kind of information that Mrs. Bidwell, for one, would keep to herself. First, I think, we check with the solicitors that this will still stands, and then we see the lady.”

But this programme was to be changed. The wall telephone rang, shattering the peace of the room. Massingham answered. It was Sergeant Underhill trying, but with small success, to keep the excitement out of his voice.

“There’s a Major Hunt of Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt of Ely wants to see Mr. Dalgliesh. He’d prefer not to talk over the telephone. He says could you ring and say when it would be convenient for Mr. Dalgliesh to call. And sir, we’ve got a witness! He’s over at Guy’s Marsh Police Station now. The name’s Alfred Goddard. He was a passenger last night passing the Lab on the nine-ten bus.”

“Running down drive he were like the devil out of hell.”

“Can you describe him, Mr. Goddard?”

“Naw. He weren’t old.”

“How young?”

“I never said ’e were young. I never seed ’im near enough to tell. But he didn’t run like an old ’un.”

“Running for the bus, perhaps.”

“If ’e were ’e never catched it.”

“He wasn’t waving?”

“ ’Course he weren’t. Driver couldn’t see ’im. No point in waving at back of bloody bus.”

Guy’s Marsh Police Station was a red-brick Victorian building with a white wooden pediment, which looked so like an early railway station that Dalgliesh suspected that the nineteenth-century police authority had economized by making use of the same architect and the same set of plans.

Mr. Alfred Goddard, waiting comfortably in the interview room with a huge mug of steaming tea before him, looked perfectly at home, neither gratified nor impressed to find
himself a key witness in a murder investigation. He was a nut-brown, wrinkled, undersized countryman who smelt of strong tobacco, alcohol and cow dung. Dalgliesh recalled that the early fen settlers had been called “yellow bellies” by their highland neighbours because they crawled frog-like over their marshy fields, or “slodgers,” splashing web-footed through the mud. Either would have suited Mr. Goddard. Dalgliesh noticed with interest that he was wearing what looked like a leather thong bound round his left wrist, and guessed that this was dried eel skin, the ancient charm to ward off rheumatism. The misshapen fingers stiffly cradling the mug of tea suggested that the talisman had been less than efficacious.

Dalgliesh doubted whether he would have troubled to come forward if Bill Carney, the conductor of the bus, hadn’t known him as a regular on the Wednesday-evening service travelling from Ely to Stoney Piggott via Chevisham, and had directed the inquiring police to his remote cottage. Having been summarily dug out of his lair, however, he displayed no particular resentment against Bill Carney or the police, and announced that he was prepared to answer questions if, as he explained, they were put to him “civil-like.” His main grievance in life was the Stoney Piggott bus: its lateness, infrequency, rising fares and, in particular, the stupidity of the recent experiment of using double-deckers on the Stoney Piggott route and his own subsequent banishment each Wednesday to the upper deck because of his pipe.

“But how fortunate for us that you were there,” Massingham had pointed out. Mr. Goddard had merely snorted into his tea.

Dalgliesh continued with the questioning: “Is there anything at all you can remember about him, Mr. Goddard? His height, his hair, how he was dressed?”

“Naw. Middling tall and wearing a shortish coat, or mac maybe. Flapping open, maybe.”

“Can you remember the colour?”

“Darkish, maybe. I never seed ’im for more’n a second, see. Then trees got in the way. Bus were moving off when I first set eyes on him.”

Massingham interposed: “The driver didn’t see him, nor did the conductor.”

“More than likely. They was on lower deck. Isn’t likely they’d notice. And driver were driving bloody bus.”

Dalgliesh said: “Mr. Goddard, this is very important. Can you remember whether there were any lights on in the Lab?”

“What do you mean, Lab?”

“The house the figure was running from.”

“Lights in the house? If you mean house why not say house?” Mr. Goddard pantomimed the ardours of intensive thought, pursing his lips into a grimace and half closing his eyes. They waited. After a nicely judged interval he announced: “Faint lights, maybe. Not blazing out, mind you. I reckon I seed some lights from bottom windows.”

Massingham asked: “You’re quite sure it was a man?”

Mr. Goddard bestowed on him the glance of mingled reproof and chagrin of a viva-voce candidate faced with what he obviously regards as an unfair question. “Wearing trousers, wasn’t he? If he weren’t a man then he ought to have been.”

“But you can’t be absolutely sure?”

“Can’t be sure of nothing these days. Time was when folk dressed in a decent, God-fearing manner. Man or woman, it were human and it were running. That’s all I seed.”

“So it could have been a woman in slacks?”

“Never run like a woman. Daft runners women be, keeping their knees tight together and kicking out ankles like bloody
ducks. Pity they don’t keep their knees together when they ain’t running, I say.”