Authors: P D James
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hesitated over the choice before deciding that her usual trousers might be seen as inappropriate for a visit to a convent. He suspected that, despite his sex, he might be more at home there than Kate.
His hope, never realistic, of stealing five minutes for a brisk walk along the edge of the beach was due to be frustrated. The convent stood on rising ground above a dull but busy main road, separated from it by an eight-foot brick wall. The main gate stood open and, turning in, they saw an ornate building in harsh red brick, obviously Victorian and as obviously designed as an institution, probably to house the first sisters of the order. The four storeys of identical windows placed closely together and ranged with precision reminded Dalgliesh uncomfortably of a prison, a thought which may have occurred to the architect since the incongruous addition of a thin spire at one end of the building and a tower at the other looked like afterthoughts, designed as much to humanize as to embellish. A wide sweep of gravel curved upwards to a front door of almost black oak banded with iron, which would have been more appropriate as the entrance to a Norman keep. To their fight they could glimpse a brick-built church, large enough to serve a parish, with a graceless spire and narrow lancet windows. To the left was contrast; a low modern building with a covered terrace and small formal garden, which he guessed was the hospice for the dying.
There was only one car, a Ford, standing in front of the convent and Dalgliesh parked neatly beside it. Pausing outside the car for a moment, he glanced back over the terraced lawns and could at last glimpse the English Channel. Short streets of small coloured houses, pale blue, pink and green, their roofs patterned with a frail geometry of television aerials, ran down in parallel lines to the layered blue of the sea, their precisely ordered domesticity contrasting with the heavy Victorian pile at his back.
There was no sign of life from the main building but, as he turned to lock the car door, he saw a nun turn the corner of the hospice with a patient in a wheelchair. The patient wore a striped white and blue cap with a red bobble and was covered with a rug drawn up to the chin. The nun bent to whisper and the patient laughed, a thin falling trickle of joyous notes on the quiet air.
He pulled the iron chain to the left of the door and heard its echoing clangour even through the thick iron-bounded oak. The square grille slid open and a gentle-faced nun looked out. Dalgliesh
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gave his name and held out his warrant card. At once the door was opened and the nun, wordless, but still smiling, gestured them to enter. They found themselves in a wide hall which smelled not unpleasantly of mild disinfectant. The floor was chequered with black and white tiles which looked freshly scrubbed and the walls were bare except for a sepia portrait, obviously Victorian, of a formidable grave-faced nun whom Dalgliesh assumed to be the foundress of the order, and a reproduction of Millais' Christ in the Carpenter's Shop in an ornate carved wood frame. The nun, still smiling, still wordless, ushered them into a small room to the fight of the hall and with a somewhat theatrical gesture silently invited them to sit. Dalgliesh wondered if she was deaf and dumb. The room was sparsely furnished but was not unwelcoming. The central table, highly polished, held a bowl of late roses and there were two easy chairs covered with faded cretonne set in front of the double windows. The walls were plain except for a large and ornate wood and silver crucifix of horrific realism to the right of the fireplace. It looked, Dalgliesh thought, Spanish and as if it must once have hung in a church. Over the fireplace was a copy in oil of a Madonna offering a bunch of grapes to the Christ Child which it took him some time to identify as Mignard's La Vierge la Grappe. A brass plaque bore the name of the donor. There were four upright dining chairs set in an uninviting line against the right-hand wall, but Dalgliesh and Kate remained standing. They were not kept waiting long. The door opened and a nun entered with brisk self-assurance and held out her hand. 'You are Commander Dalgliesh and Inspector Miskin? Welcome to St Anne's. I am Mother Mary Clare. We spoke when you telephonel, Commander. Would you and the Inspector care for some coffee?' The hand which briefly grasped his was plump but cool. He said: 'No thank you, Mother. That is kind of you but we hope not to inconvenience you for too long.' There was nothing intimidating about her. Her short and sturdy body was dignified by the long blue-grey habit bound with a leather belt, but she looked as comfortable in it as if the formal garb were workaday clothes. A single heavy cross in dark wood hung from a cord round her neck and her face, soft and pale as dough, bulged like a baby's from the constricting wimple. But the eyes behind the steel spectacles were shrewd, and the little mouth, for all its delicate
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softness, held the promise of an uncompromising firmness. Dalgliesh knew that he and Kate were subject to a scrutiny as keen as it was unobtrusive.
Then, with a little nod, she said: 'I'll send Sister Agnes to you. It's a lovely day, perhaps you would care to walk together in the rose garden.'
It was, Dalgliesh recognized, a command not a suggestion, but he knew that in that first brief encounter they had passed some private test. Had she been less than satisfied he had no doubt that the interview would have taken place in this room and under her supervision. She tugged at the bell-cord and the little smiling nun who had let them in again appeared.
'Will you ask Sister Agnes to be good enough to join us?'
Again they waited in silence, still standing. In less than two minutes the door opened and a tall nun entered alone. The Mother Superior said: 'This is Sister Agnes. Sister, this is Commander Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard and Inspector Miskin. I have
suggested that you might like to walk outside in the rose garden.' With a valedictory nod but no formal goodbye she was gone.
The nun who confronted them with wary eyes could not have been more different from the Mother Superior. The habit was the same, except that her cross was smaller, but on her it conferred a hieratic dignity, remote and a little mysterious. The Mother Superior had looked dressed for a stint at the kitchen stove; it was difficult to imagine Sister Agnes except at the altar. She was very thin, long-limbed and strong-featured, the wimple emphasizing the high cheekbones, the strong line of the eyebrows and the uncompromising set of the wide mouth.
She said: 'Then shall we look at the roses, Commander?' Dalgliesh opened the door and he and Kate followed her out of the reception room and through the hall on almost silent feet.
She led the way down the grand path to the terraced rose garden. The beds were in three long rows divided by parallel gravel paths, each path four stone steps down from the one above. There would be just room for the three of them to walk abreast, first along the top path, then down the steps, then back along the second path to the second flight of steps and the forty yards of the lowest path before turning, a bleak perambulation carried out in full view of all the convent windows. He wondered if there was a more private garden at
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the rear of the convent. Even if there was they were not, apparently, expected to walk there.
Sister Agnes paced between them, almost as tall as his six feet two inches, her head held high. She was wearing a long grey cardigan over her habit and with each hand thrust deeply into the opposite cuff as if for warmth. With her bound arms held tightly against her body she reminded Dalgliesh uncomfortably of old pictures he had seen of mental patients in strait-jackets. It seemed that she walked between them like a prisoner under escort, and he wondered if that was how the three of them would appear to any secret watcher from the high windows. The thought, and it was not agreeable, apparently also entered Kate's mind for, muttering an excuse, she dropped a little behind and, kneeling, appeared to be tying the shoelace of her brogues. When she caught up with them she took her place next to Dalgliesh.
It was Dalgliesh who broke the silence. He said: 'It is good of you to see us. I'm sorry to have to trouble you, particularly as it must seem an intrusion on private grief. I need to ask you about the death of your sister.'
'"Intrusion on private grief". That was the telephone message I received from Mother Superior. I suppose they are words you often have to use, Commander.'
'Intrusion is sometimes inseparable from my job.'
'And have you specific questions you hope I can answer, or is this a
more general intrusion?'
'A little of both.'
'But you know how my sister died. Sonia killed herself, there is no possible doubt about that. She left a note at the scene. She also posted a letter to me on the morning she died. She didn't think the news was worth a first-class stamp. I received it three days later.'
Dalgliesh said: 'Would you mind telling me what was in the note? I know, of course, what was in the note to the coroner.'
She didn't speak for a few seconds which seemed much longer, then spoke without emphasis as if reciting a piece of prose learned by heart. "'What I am about to do will seem a sin in your eyes. Please try to understand that what you see as sinful is to me both natural and fight. We have made different choices but they lead to the same end. After the vacillating years at least I can be absolute for death. Try not to grieve for me too long; grief is only an indulgence. I could not have had a better sister."'
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She said: 'Is that what you want to hear, Commander? It is hardly relevant, surely, to your present inquiry.'
'We have to look at anything which happened at Innocent House in the months before Gerard Etienne died which could have had a beating even remotely on that death. One is your sister's suicide. The gossip in London literary circles and at Innocent House seems to be that Gerard Etienne drove her to that act. If he did, her friend - a particular friend - might have wished him harm.'
She said: 'I was Sonia's particular friend. She had no particular friends except me, and I had no reason to wish Gerard Etienne dead. I was here on the day or night when he died. That is a fact you can easily check.'
Dalgliesh said: 'I was not suggesting, Sister, that you were in any way personally concerned with Gerard Etienne's death. I am asking if you knew of any other person close to your sister who could have resented the way she died.'
'None except myself. But I resented it, Commander. Suicide is the final despair, the final rejection of God's grace, the ultimate sin.'
Dalgliesh said quietly: 'Then perhaps, Sister, it will receive the ultimate mercy.'
They had reached the end of the first path and together they descended the steps and turned left. Suddenly she said, 'I dislike roses in autumn. They are essentially summer flowers. The December roses are the most depressing, brown and shrivelled buds on a tangle of prickles. I can hardly bear to walk here in December. Like us, roses don't know when to die.'
He said: 'But today we can almost believe it is summer.' He paused, then added: 'I expect you know that Gerard Etienne died from carbon monoxide poisoning and in the same room as your sister. It is unlikely in his case to have been suicide. It could be accidental death, a blocked flue which caused the gas fire to malfunction, but we have to consider a third possibility, that the fire was deliberately tampered with.'
She said: 'You're saying that you believe he was murdered?'
'It can't be ruled out. What I have to ask you is whether you have any reason to believe that your sister could have interfered with the fire. I'm not suggesting it was a plot to kill Etienne. But is it possible that she might have planned a suicide which would look like accidental death and then changed her mind?'
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'How can I possibly tell you that, Commander?'
'It was a very long shot, but I had to ask. If anyone is brought to trial for murder it is a possibility that the defence counsel will certainly put forward.'
She said: 'It would have saved a great deal of distress for other people if she had troubled to make her death look like an accident, but suicides so seldom do. It is, after all, the supreme act of aggression and what satisfaction is there in aggression if it hurts only oneself? To make suicide look accidental wouldn't have been so very difficult. I could think of ways, but they don't include dismantling a gas fire and blocking the flue. I'm not sure that Sonia would have known how to do that. She wasn't mechanically minded in life; why should she be so in death?'
'And the note she sent you, that was all? No reason, no explanation?' 'No,' she said. 'No reason, no explanation.'
Dalgliesh went on: 'It seems to have been assumed that your sister killed herself because Gerard Etienne had told her that she had to go. Does that seem likely to you?'
She didn't reply, and after a minute he gently persisted. 'As her sister, as someone who knew her well, does that explanation satisfy you?'
She turned to him and, for the first time, looked him full in the face. 'Is that question relevant to your inquiry?'
'It could be. If Miss Clements knew something about Innocent House, or about one of the people who worked there, something so distressing to her that it contributed to her death, that something could also be relevant to the death of Gerard Etienne.'
Again she turned. She said: 'Is there any question of reopening the manner of my sister's death?'
'Formally? None at all. We know how Miss Clements died. I would like to know why, but the verdict of the inquest was correct. Legally that is the end of it.'
They paced in silence. She seemed to be considering a course of action. He was aware of, or perhaps imagined, the muscles taut with tension of the arm which briefly brushed his own. When she spoke her voice was harsh.
'I can satisfy your curiosity, Commander. My sister died because the two people she cared for most, perhaps the only two people she ever cared for, left her and left her finally. I took my vows the week
before she killed herself; Henry Peverell died eight months earlier.'
Until now Kate had been silent. She said: fou're saying that she was in love with Mr Peverell?'