Death of an Expert Witness (27 page)

“Oh, Mum, don’t worry. It’ll be all right. Commander Dalgliesh will find out who did it and then everything will be back to normal. Look, I’ll make you some cocoa. Don’t let’s wait till Dad’s back from the PCC. We’ll have it now. Mum, it’s all right. Really it is. It’s all right.”

Simultaneously their ears caught the hum of the approaching car. They gazed at each other, speechless, guilty as conspirators. This wasn’t their ancient Morris. And how could it be? The Parochial Church Council never finished their business before half past eight.

Brenda went to the window and peered out. The car stopped. She turned to her mother, white-faced.

“It’s the police! It’s Commander Dalgliesh!”

Without a word, Mrs. Pridmore got resolutely to her feet. She placed a hand briefly on her daughter’s shoulder, then went out into the passage and opened the door before
Massingham had lifted his hand to knock. She said through stiff lips: “Come in please. I’m glad that you’re here. Brenda has something to tell you, something that I think you ought to know.”

The day was nearly over. Sitting in his dressing gown at the small table in front of the window in his bedroom at the Moonraker, Dalgliesh heard the church clock strike half past eleven.

He liked his room. It was the larger of the two which Mrs. Gotobed had been able to offer. The single window looked out over the churchyard towards the village hall and beyond it the clerestory and square flint tower of St. Nicholas’s Church. There were only three rooms for guests at the inn. The smallest and noisiest, since it was over the public bar, had fallen to Massingham. The main guest-room had already been taken by an American couple touring East Anglia, perhaps in search of family records. They had sat at their table in the dining parlour, happily occupied with maps and guide books, and if they had been told that their newly arrived fellow guests were police officers investigating a murder, they were too well bred to betray interest. After a brief smile and a good-evening in their soft transatlantic voices they had turned their attention again to Mrs. Gotobed’s excellent casserole of hare in cider.

It was very quiet. The muted voices from the bar had long since been silent. It was over an hour since he had heard the last shouted goodbyes. Massingham, he knew, had spent the evening in the public bar hoping, presumably, to pick up scraps of useful information. Dalgliesh hoped that the beer had been good. He had been born close enough to the fens to know that, otherwise, Massingham would have found it a frustrating evening.

He got up to stretch his legs and shoulders, looking around with approval at the room. The floorboards were of ancient oak, black and stout as ship’s timbers. A fire of wood and turf burnt in the iron Victorian grate, the pungent smoke curtseying under a decorated hood of wheat ears and flower posies tied with ribbons. The large double bed was of brass, high and ornate with four great knobs, large as polished cannon balls, at the corners. Mrs. Gotobed had earlier folded back the crocheted cover to reveal a feather mattress shaken to an inviting plumpness. In any four-star hotel he might have enjoyed greater luxury, but hardly such comfort.

He returned to his work. It had been a crowded day of interrogation and renewed interrogation, telephone calls to London, a hurriedly arranged and unsatisfactory Press conference, two consultations with the Chief Constable, the gathering of those odd-shaped pieces of information and conjecture which, in the end, would click together to form the completed picture. It might be a trite analogy, this comparison of detection with fitting together a jigsaw. But it was remarkably apt, not least because it was so often that tantalizing, elusive piece with the vital segment of a human face that made the picture complete.

He turned the page to the last interview of the day, with Henry Kerrison at the Old Rectory. The smell of the house was still in his nostrils, an evocative smell of stale cooking
and furniture polish, reminding him of childhood visits with his parents to over-large, ill-heated country vicarages. Kerrison’s housekeeper and children had long been in bed and the house had held a melancholy, brooding silence as if all the tragedies and disappointments of its numerous incumbents still hung in the air.

Kerrison had answered the door himself and had shown him and Massingham into his study where he was occupied in sorting coloured slides of post-mortem injuries to illustrate a lecture he was to give the following week to the detective-training school. On the desk was a framed photograph of himself as a boy with an older man, obviously his father. They were standing on a crag, climbing ropes slung round their shoulders. What interested Dalgliesh as much as the photograph itself was the fact that Kerrison hadn’t bothered to remove it.

He hadn’t appeared to resent his visitors’ late arrival. It was possible to believe that he welcomed their company. He had worked on in the light of his desk lamp, fitting each slide into his view, then sorting it into the appropriate heap, intent as a schoolboy with a hobby. He had answered their questions quietly and precisely, but as if his mind were elsewhere. Dalgliesh asked him whether his daughter had talked to him about the incident with Lorrimer.

“Yes, she did tell me. When I got home for lunch from my lecture I found her crying in her room. It seems that Lorrimer was unnecessarily harsh. But Nell is a sensitive child and it’s not always possible to know the precise truth of the matter.”

“You didn’t talk to him about it”?

“I didn’t talk to anyone. I did wonder whether I ought to, but it would have meant questioning Inspector Blakelock and Miss Pridmore, and I didn’t wish to involve them. They had to work with Lorrimer. So, for that matter, did I. The effectiveness of an
isolated institution like Hoggatt’s largely depends on good relationships between the staff. I thought it was best not to take the matter further. That may have been prudence, or it may have been cowardice. I don’t know.”

He had smiled sadly, and added: “I only know that it wasn’t a motive for murder.”

A motive for murder. Dalgliesh had discovered enough motive in this crowded but not very satisfactory day. But motive was the least important factor in a murder investigation. He would gladly have exchanged the psychological subtleties of motive for a single, solid, incontrovertible piece of physical evidence linking a suspect with the crime. And, so far, there was none. He still awaited the report from the Metropolitan Laboratory on the mallet and the vomit. The mysterious figure seen by old Goddard fleeing from Hoggatt’s remained mysterious; no other person had yet been traced or had come forward to suggest that he wasn’t a figment of the old man’s imagination. The tyre marks near the gate, now definitely identified from the tyre index at the laboratory, still hadn’t been linked to a car. Not surprisingly, no trace had been found of Middlemass’s white coat and no indication whether or how it had been disposed of. An examination of the village hall and the hobby-horse costumes had produced nothing to disprove Middlemass’s account of his evening and it was apparent that the horse, a heavy, all-enveloping contraption of canvas and serge, ensured that its wearer would be unidentifiable even, in Middlemass’s case, to his elegant handmade shoes.

The central mysteries of the case remained. Who was it who had telephoned the message to Lorrimer about the can being burned and the number 1840? Was it the same woman who had rung Mrs. Bidwell? What had been written on the
missing sheet from Lorrimer’s rough notebook? What had prompted Lorrimer to make that extraordinary will?

Lifting his head from the files, he listened. There was a noise, faintly discernible, like the creeping of a myriad insects. He remembered it from his childhood nights, lying awake in the nursery of his father’s Norfolk vicarage, a sound he had never heard in the noise of cities, the first gentle sibilant whisper of the night rain. Soon it was followed by a spatter of drops against the window and the rising moan of the wind in the chimney. The fire spluttered and then flared into sudden brightness. There was a violent flurry of rain against the pane and then, as quickly as it had begun, the brief storm was over. He opened the window to savour the smell of the damp night air, and gazed out into a blanket of darkness, black fen earth merging with the paler sky.

As his eyes became accustomed to the night, he could discern the low rectangle of the village hall and, beyond it, the great medieval tower of the church. Then the moon sailed out from behind the clouds and the churchyard became visible, the obelisks and gravestones gleaming pale as if they exuded their own mysterious light. Below him, faintly luminous, lay the gravel path along which, the previous night, the morris-dancers, bells jangling, had made their way through the rising mist. Staring out over the churchyard he pictured the hobby-horse pawing the ground to meet them, rearing its grotesque head among the gravestones and snapping the air with its great jaws. And he wondered again who had been inside its skin.

The door beneath his window opened and Mrs. Gotobed appeared and crooned into the darkness, enticing in her cat: “Snowball! Snowball! Good boy now.” There was a flash of white, and the door was closed. Dalgliesh latched his window and decided that he, too, would call it a day.

Sprogg’s Cottage, low-built and top-heavy under its low, occluding roof of thatch, wire-netted, strong against the fen winter gales, was almost invisible from the road. It lay about three-quarters of a mile north-east from the village and was fronted by Sprogg’s Green, a wide triangular grass verge planted with willows. Pushing open the white wicker gate on which someone had optimistically but fruitlessly substituted the word “Lavender” for Sprogg’s, Dalgliesh and Massingham stepped into a front garden as brightly ordered and conventional as that of a suburban villa. An acacia tree in the middle of the lawn flaunted its autumn glory of red and gold, the yellow climbing roses trained over the door still gleamed with a faint illusion of summer and a massed bed of geraniums, fuchsia and dahlias, supported by stakes and carefully tended, flared in discordant glory against the bronze of the beech hedge. There was a hanging basket of pink geraniums beside the door, now past their best, but still bright with a few tattered blooms. The knocker was a highly polished brass fish, every scale gleaming.

The door was opened by a slight, almost fragile woman, bare-footed and wearing a cotton overblouse, patterned in greens and brown, above her corduroy slacks. She had coarse dark hair strongly streaked with grey and worn in a short bob, with a heavy fringe which curved low to meet her eyebrows. Her eyes were her most remarkable feature, immense, the irises brown speckled with green, translucently clear under the strongly curved brows. Her face was pale and taut, deeply etched with lines across the forehead and running from the widely springing nostrils to the corners of the mouth. It was the face, thought Dalgliesh, of a tortured masochist in a medieval triptych, the muscles bulging and knotted as if they had been racked. But no one coming under the gaze of those remarkable eyes could call it plain or ordinary.

Dalgliesh said: “Miss Mawson? I’m Adam Dalgliesh. This is Inspector Massingham.”

She gave him a direct, impersonal gaze and said without smiling: “Come through into the study, will you? We don’t light the sitting-room fire until the evening. If you want to speak to Angela, I’m afraid she’s not here at present. She’s over at Postmill Cottage with Mrs. Swaffield meeting the Social Security people. They’re trying to persuade old Lorrimer to go into an old people’s home. Apparently he’s being obstinately resistant to the blandishments of bureaucracy. Good luck to him.”

The front door opened directly into a sitting room with a low, oak-beamed ceiling. The room surprised him. To enter it was like walking into an antique shop, but one where the proprietor had arranged his oddly assorted wares with an eye to the general effect. The mantelshelf and every ledge bore an ornament, three hanging cupboards held a variety of mugs, teapots, painted jugs and Staffordshire figures, and the walls
were almost covered with prints, framed old maps, small oil-paintings and Victorian silhouettes in oval frames. Above the fireplace was the most spectacular object, a curved sword with a finely wrought scabbard. He wondered whether the room reflected merely an indiscriminate acquisitiveness, or whether these carefully disposed objects served as comforting talismans against the alien, undomesticated spirits of the encroaching fens. A wood fire was laid but not lit in the open hearth. Under the window a polished gate-legged table was already laid for two.

Miss Mawson led the way through to her study. It was a smaller, less cluttered room at the back with a latticed window giving a view of a stone terrace, a lawn with a sundial in the middle, and a wide field of sugar beet, still unharvested. He saw with interest that she wrote by hand. There was a typewriter, but it stood on a table by itself. The working-desk under the window held only a pad of unlined paper, covered with a black upright holograph in an elegant italic. The lines were carefully patterned on the paper, and even the marginal alterations were aligned.

Dalgliesh said: “I’m sorry if we’re interrupting your work.”

“You aren’t. Sit down, won’t you both. It isn’t going well this morning. If it were I should have hung a ‘don’t disturb’ notice on the knocker and you wouldn’t have got in. Still, it’s nearly finished; only one chapter to do now. I suppose you want me to give Angela an alibi. Helping the police, isn’t it called? What were we doing on Wednesday night; and when, and why, and where, and with whom?”

“We would like to ask you some questions, certainly.”

“But that one first, presumably. There’s no difficulty. We spent the evening and night together from six-fifteen, which was the time she arrived home.”

“Doing what, Miss Mawson?”

“What we normally do. We separated the day from the evening, me with whisky, Angela with sherry. I asked about her day and she inquired about mine. Then she lit the fire and cooked the meal. We had avocado pear with sauce vinaigrette, chicken casserole and cheese and biscuits. We washed up together and then Angela typed my manuscript for me until nine. At nine we turned on the television and watched the news, followed by the play. That brought us to ten forty-five, cocoa for Angela, whisky for me, and bed.”