Death of an Expert Witness (26 page)

“Your stepmother died ten minutes ago, Maxim. Evidently fate does not intend me to be a husband. I shall not again risk such grief. You, my boy, must look after your stepsister. I rely on you.” And then a cold hand casually laid on his shoulder as if conferring a burden. He had accepted it, literally, at eight years old, and had never laid it down. At first the immensity of the trust had appalled him. He remembered how he had lain there, terrified, staring into the darkness. Look after your sister. Domenica was three months old. How could he look after her? What ought he to feed her on? How dress her? What about his prep school? They wouldn’t let him stay at home to look after his sister. He smiled wryly, remembering his relief at discovering next morning that her nurse was, after all, to remain. He recalled his first efforts to assume responsibility, resolutely seizing the pram handles and straining to push it up the Broad Walk, struggling to lift Domenica into her high chair.

“Give over, Master Maxim, do. You’re more of a hindrance than a help.”

But afterwards the nurse had begun to realize that he was becoming more of a help than a nuisance, that the child could safely be left with him while she and the only other servant pursued their own unsupervised devices. Most of his school holidays had been spent helping to look after Domenica. From Rome, Verona, Florence and Venice his father, through his solicitor, sent instructions about allowances and schools. It was he who helped buy the clothes, took her to school, comforted and advised. He had attempted to support her through the agonies and uncertainties of adolescence, even before he had outgrown his own. He had been her champion against the world. He smiled, remembering the telephone call to Cambridge from her boarding school, asking him to fetch her that very night “outside the hockey pavilion—gruesome torture house—at midnight.
I’ll climb down the fire escape. Promise.” And then their private code of defiance and allegiance: “
Contra mundum
.”

“
Contra mundum
.” His father’s arrival from Italy, so little perturbed by the Reverend Mother’s insistent summons that it was obvious that he had, in any case, been planning to return.

“Your sister’s departure was unnecessarily eccentric, surely. Midnight assignation. Dramatic car drive across half England. Mother Superior seemed particularly pained that she had left her trunk behind, although I can appreciate that it would have been an encumbrance on the fire escape. And you must have been out of college all night. Your tutor can’t have liked that.”

“I’m post-graduate now, Father. I took my degree eighteen months ago.”

“Indeed. Time passes so quickly at my age. Physics, wasn’t it? A curious choice. Couldn’t you have called for her after school in the orthodox way?”

“We wanted to get as far away from the place as possible before they noticed she’d gone and started looking.”

“A reasonable strategy, so far as it goes.”

“Dom hates school, Father. She’s utterly miserable there.”

“So was I at school, but it never occurred to me to expect otherwise. Reverend Mother seems a charming woman. A tendency to halitosis when under stress, but I shouldn’t have thought that would have troubled your sister. They can hardly have come into intimate contact. She isn’t prepared to have Domenica back, by the way.”

“Need Dom go anywhere, Father? She’s nearly fifteen. She doesn’t have to go to school. And she wants to be a painter.”

“I suppose she could stay at home until she’s old enough for art college, if that’s what you advise. But it’s hardly worth opening the London house just for one. I shall return to Venice next week. I’m only here to consult Dr. Mavers-Brown.”

“Perhaps she could go back to Italy with you for a month or so. She’d love to see the Accademia. And she ought to see Florence.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would do, my boy. Quite out of the question. She had much better take a room at Cambridge and you can keep an eye on her. They have some quite agreeable pictures in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Oh dear, what a responsibility children are! It’s quite wrong that I should be troubled like this in my state of health. Mavers-Brown was insistent that I avoid anxiety.”

And now he lay coffined in his final self-sufficiency, in that most beautiful of burial grounds, the British Cemetery in Rome. He would have liked that, thought Maxim, if he could have borne the thought of his death at all, as much as he would have resented the over-aggressive Italian drivers whose ill-judged acceleration at the junction of the Via Vittoria and the Corso had placed him there.

He heard his sister’s steps on the stairs. “So they’ve gone.”

“Twenty minutes ago. We had a brief valedictory skirmish. Was Dalgliesh offensive?”

“No more offensive than I to him. Honours even, I should have said. I don’t think he liked me.”

“I don’t think he likes anyone much. But he’s considered highly intelligent. Did you find him attractive?”

She answered the unspoken question. “It would be like making love to a public hangman.” She dipped her finger in the vinaigrette dressing. “Too much vinegar. What have you been doing?”

“Apart from cooking? Thinking about Father. Do you know, Dom, when I was eleven I became absolutely convinced that he’d murdered our mothers.”

“Both of them? I mean yours and mine? What an odd idea.

How could he have? Yours died of cancer and mine of pneumonia. He couldn’t have fixed that.”

“I know. It’s just that he seemed such a natural widower. I thought at the time that he’d done it to stop them having any more babies.”

“Well it would do that all right. Were you wondering whether a tendency to murder is inherited?”

“Not really. But so much is. Father’s total inability to make relationships, for example. That incredible self-absorption. Do you know, he’d actually put me down for Stonyhurst before he remembered that it was your mother, not mine, who’d been RC.”

“A pity he did find out. I should like to have seen what the Jesuits made of you. The trouble with a religious education, if you’re a pagan like me, is that you’re left all your life feeling that you’ve lost something, not that it isn’t there.”

She walked over to the table and stirred a bowl of mushrooms with her finger. “I can make relationships. The trouble is that I get bored and they don’t last. And I only seem to know one way to be kind. It’s as well that we last, isn’t it? You’ll last for me until the day I die. Shall I change now or do you want me to see to the wine?”

“You’ll last for me until the day I die.”
Contra mundum
. It was too late now to sever that cord even if he wanted to. He remembered Charles Schofield’s gauze-cocooned head, the dying eyes still malicious behind two slits in the bandages, the swollen lips painfully moving.

“Congratulations, Giovanni. Remember me in your garden in Parma.”

What had been so astounding was not the lie itself, or that Schofield had believed it, or pretended to believe it, but that he had hated his brother-in-law enough to die with that taunt on
his lips. Or had he taken it for granted that a physicist, poor philistine, wouldn’t know his Jacobean dramatists? Even his wife, that indefatigable sexual sophisticate, had known better.

“I suppose you’d sleep together if Domenica happened to want it. A spot of incest wouldn’t worry her. But you don’t need to, do you? You don’t need anything as normal as sex to be more to each other than you are. Neither of you wants anyone else. That’s why I’m leaving. I’m getting out now while there’s still something left of me to get out.”

“Max, what is it?” Domenica’s voice, sharpened with anxiety, recalled him to the present. His mind spun back through a kaleidoscope of spinning years, through superimposed swirling images of childhood and youth, to that last unforgettable image, still perfectly in focus, patterned forever in his memory, Lorrimer’s dead fingers clawing at the floor of his laboratory, Lorrimer’s dull, half-open eye, Lorrimer’s blood.

He said: “You get changed. I’ll see to the wine.”

“What will people say?”

“That’s all you ever think of, Mum, what will people say. What does it matter what they say? I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”

“Of course not. If anyone says different your dad’ll soon put them right. But you know what tongues they have in this village. A thousand pounds. I couldn’t hardly believe it when that solicitor rang. It’s a tidy sum. And by the time Lillie Pearce has passed the news around in the Stars and Plough it’ll be ten thousand, more than likely.”

“Who cares about Lillie Pearce, silly old cow.”

“Brenda! I won’t have that language. And we have to live in this village.”

“You may have to. I don’t. And if that’s the kind of minds they’ve got the sooner I move away the better. Oh, Mum, don’t look like that! He only wanted to help me, he wanted to be kind. And he probably did it on impulse.”

“Not very considerate of him, though, was it? He might have talked it over with your dad or me.”

“But he didn’t know that he was going to die.”

Brenda and her mother were alone in the farmhouse, Arthur Pridmore having left after supper for the monthly meeting of the Parochial Church Council. The washing-up was finished and the long evening stretched before them. Too restless to settle to the television and too preoccupied with the extraordinary events of the day to take up a book, they sat in the firelight, edgy, half excited and half afraid, missing Arthur Pridmore’s reassuring bulk in his high-backed chair. Then Mrs. Pridmore shook herself into normality and reached for her sewing basket.

“Well, at least it will help towards a nice wedding. If you have to take it, better put it in the Post Office. Then it’ll add interest and be there when you want it.”

“I want it now. For books and a microscope like Dr. Lorrimer intended. That’s why he left it to me and that’s what I’m going to do with it. Besides, if people leave money for a special purpose you can’t use it for something else. And I don’t want to. I’m going to ask Dad to put up a shelf and a workbench in my bedroom and I’ll start working for my science ‘A’ levels straightaway.”

“He ought not to have thought of you. What about Angela Foley? She’s had a terrible life, that girl. She never got a penny from her grandmother’s will, and now this.”

“That’s not our concern, Mum. It was up to him. Maybe he might have left it to her if they hadn’t rowed.”

“How do you mean, rowed? When?”

“Last week sometime. Tuesday it was, I think. It was just before I came home and most of the staff had left. Inspector Blakelock sent me up to Biology with a query on one of the court reports. They were together in Dr. Lorrimer’s room and I heard them quarrelling. She was asking him for money and
he said he wouldn’t give her any and then he said something about changing his will.”

“You mean you stood there listening?”

“Well I couldn’t help it, could I? They were talking quite loudly. He was saying terrible things about Stella Mawson, you know, that writer Angela Foley lives with. I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose. I didn’t want to hear.”

“You could have gone away.”

“And come up again all the way from the front hall? Anyway, I had to ask him about the report for the Munnings case. I couldn’t go back and tell Inspector Blakelock that I hadn’t got the answer because Dr. Lorrimer was having a row with his cousin. Besides, we always listened to secrets at school.”

“You’re not at school now. Really, Brenda, you worry me sometimes. One moment you behave like a sensible adult, and the next anyone would think you were back in the fourth form. You’re eighteen now, an adult. What has school to do with it?”

“I don’t know why you’re getting so het up. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Well, you’ll have to tell that detective from Scotland Yard.”

“Mum! I can’t! It hasn’t got anything to do with the murder.”

“Who’s to say? You’re supposed to tell the police anything that’s important. Didn’t he tell you that?”

He told her exactly that. Brenda remembered his look, her own guilty blush. He had known that she was keeping something back. She said, with stubborn defiance: “Well, I can’t accuse Angela Foley of murder, or as good as accuse her anyway. Besides,” she proclaimed triumphantly, remembering something Inspector Blakelock had told her, “it would be hearsay, not proper evidence. He couldn’t take any notice of it. And, Mum, there’s another thing. Suppose she didn’t really expect him to
alter the will so soon? That solicitor told you that Dr. Lorrimer made the new will last Friday, didn’t he? Well that was probably because he had to go to a scene of crime in Ely on Friday morning. The police call only came through at ten o’clock. He must have gone into his solicitors then.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Only if people think that I had a motive, then so did she.”

“Of course you didn’t have a motive! That’s ridiculous. It’s wicked! Oh, Brenda, if only you’d come to the concert with Dad and me.”

“No thank you. Miss Spencer singing ‘Pale Hands I Loved,’ and the Sunday School kids doing their boring old Maypole dance, and the WI with their handbells, and old Mr. Matthews bashing away with the acoustic spoons. I’ve seen it all before.”

“But you’d have had an alibi.”

“So I would if you and Dad had stayed here at home with me.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered where you’d been if it weren’t for that thousand pounds. Well, let’s hope Gerald Bowlem understands.”

“If he doesn’t, he knows what he can do! I don’t see what it’s got to do with Gerald. I’m not married to him, nor engaged for that matter. He’d better not interfere.”

She looked across at her mother and was suddenly appalled. She had only seen her look like this once before, the night when she had her second miscarriage and had been told by old Dr. Greene that there could never now be another baby. Brenda had only been twelve at the time. But her mother’s face, suddenly remembered, had looked exactly as it did now, as if an obliterating hand had passed over it, wiping off brightness, blunting the contours of cheek and brow, dulling the eyes, leaving an amorphous mask of desolation.

She remembered and understood what before she had only felt, the anger and resentment that her mother, indestructible and comforting as a great rock in a weary land, should herself be vulnerable to pain. She was there to soothe Brenda’s miseries, not to suffer herself, to comfort, not to seek comfort. But now Brenda was older and she was able to understand. She saw her mother clearly, like a stranger newly met. The cheap crimplene dress, spotlessly clean as always, with the brooch Brenda had given her for her last birthday pinned to the lapel. The ankles thickening above the sensible low-heel shoes, the pudgy hands speckled with the brown stains of age, the wedding ring of dull gold biting into the flesh, the curly hair that had once been red-gold like her own, still brushed plainly to one side and held in a tortoiseshell slide, the fresh, almost unlined skin. She put her arms round her mother’s shoulders.