A Taste for Death (23 page)

'Is it important, sir, whether he could get into the mews fiat?'

'I think so. This murderer was aiming at verisimilitude. There's a copy of Simpson's Textbook on Forensic Medicine in Halliwell's bookcase. It's all set out there in Chapter Five with the writer's usual clarity, a table showing the dis-tinction between suicidal and homicidal cuts of the throat. Swayne could have seen it at any time, browsed through it, remembered it. So, too, could anyone else at Campden Hill Square with access to the garage fiat, and most easily, of course, Halliwell himself. Whoever slit Berowne's throat knew exactly what effect he was aiming to produce.'

Massingham asked:

'But would Halliwell have left the Simpson there for u, to find?'

'If other people knew of its existence, to destroy it would be more incriminating than to leave it on the shelf. But Halliwell has to be in the clear if Lady Ursula is telling the truth about those two telephone calls, and I can't see her giving Halliwell an alibi for the murder of her son. Or

any other suspect for that matter.'

Massingham said:

'Or Halliwell giving Swayne an alibi unless he had to. There's no love lost there. He despises the man. Inci-dentally, I knew I'd seen Swayne somewhere before. I've

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remembered now. He was in that play at the Coningsby Theatre in Camden Town a year ago. The Garage. The cast actually constructed a garage on the stage. In the first act they put it up, in the second they knocked it down.'

'I thought it was a wedding tent.'

'Wrong play, sir. Swayne played the local psychopath, one of the gang who pulled it down. So he must have an Equity card.'

'How did he strike you as an actor?'

'Energetic but unsubtle. Not that I'm much of a judge. I prefer films. I only went because Emma was going through her cultural stage. The play was highly symbolic. The garage was supposed to represent Britain, or capital-ism, or imperialism, or, maybe, the class struggle. I'm not sure the author knew. You could tell that it was going to be a great critical success. No one spoke a literate line and a week later I couldn't remember a word of the dialogue. There was some fairly energetic fighting in the second act. Swayne knows how to handle himself. Still, kicking in a garage wall isn't the most suitable training for slitting a throat. I can't see Swayne as a killer, not this killer, anyway.'

They were both experienced detectives, they knew the importance at this stage of keeping the detection rational, of concentrating on the physical, ascertainable facts. Which of the suspects has the means, the opportunity, the knowledge, the physical strength, the motive? It was unproductive so early in the investigation to begin asking: has this man the ruthlessness, the nerve, the desperation, the psychological make-up to commit this particular crime? And yet, seduced by the fascination of human personality, they nearly always did.

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6

In the small back bedroom on the second floor of 49 Crowhurst Gardens, Miss Wharton lay rigidly awake and stared into the darkness. Her body, pressed into the hard mattress, felt unnaturally hot and heavy as if weighted with lead. Even to turn in search of greater comfort was too great an effort. She hadn't expected to sleep soundly, but she had gone through her nightly routine with a dogged hope that adhering to these small and Comforting rituals would deceive her body into slumber, or at least into quietude; the chapter of scripture prescribed in her book of devotions, the hot milk, the one digestive biscuit, final indulgence of the day. None had worked. The passage from St Luke's Gospel had been the parable of the good shepherd. It was one of her favourites, but tonight she had read it with a sharpened, perversely questioning mind. What, after all, was a shepherd's job? Only to care for the sheep, to make sure they didn't escape so that they could be branded, sheared and then slaughtered. Without th need for their wool, their flesh, there would be no job the shepherd.

Long after she had closed her Bible she lay rigid fo what seemed an endless night, her mind burrowing anti scurrying like a tormented animal. Where was Darren? How was he? Who was making sure that he wasn't lying uncomforted or distressed? He hadn't seemed too affected by the horror of that awful scene, but with a child one never knew. And it was her fault that they were cut off from each other. She should have insisted on knowing where he lived, meeting his mother. He had never spoken of his mother and when she had asked him he had shrugged and not replied. She hadn't liked to press it. Perhaps she could reach him through the police. But ought she to worry Commander Dalgliesh when he had two murders to solve?

And the word 'murder' brought on a new anxiety. There was something she ought to remember but couldn't; some

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thing she ought to have told Commander Dalgliesh. He had questioned her briefly, gently, sitting beside her on one of the small chairs in the children's corner of the church, as if uncaring, even unaware, how oddly it suited his tall figure. She had tried to be calm, accurate, matter-of-fact, but she knew there were gaps in her memory, thai there was something the horror of the scene had blotted out. Yet what could it be? It was something small, possibly insignificant, but he had said she must tell him every detail, however trivial.

But now another and more immediate worry surfaced. She needed to go to the lavatory. She switched on her bedside light, fumbled for her spectacles and peered at the carriage clock ticking gently on her bedside table. It was only ten past two. There was no hope of waiting until morning. Although she had her own sitting room, bedroom and kitchen, Miss Wharton shared the bathroom with the McGraths in the flat below. The plumbing was old-fashioned and if she had to use the lavatory in the night, Mrs McGrath would complain next morning. The alternative was to use her chamberpot but that had to be emptied and the whole morning would be dominated by her anxious listenings to know when it would be safe to carry it down to the lavatory without meeting Mrs McGrath's bold, contemptuous eyes. Once she had bumped into Billy McGrath on the stairs with the covered pot in her hand. The memory of it still burned her cheeks. But she would have to use it. The night was still so quiet she couldn't face creeping down to shatter its peace with cascades of swirling water, those long drawn-out shakes and grumbles of the pipe.

Miss Wharton didn't know why the McGraths disliked her so much, why her inoffensive gentility should be so provocative to them. She tried to keep out of their way, although this wasn't easy when they shared the same front door, the same narrow entrance passage. She had ex-plained Darren to them on his first visit to her room by telling them that his mother worked at St Matthew's. The lie, blurted out in panic, had seemed to satisfy them and

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she had subsequently put it resolutely out of her mind since she could hardly include it in her weekly confession and Darren was so swift in his comings and goings that there was little risk they would question him. It was as if he sensed that the McGraths were enemies, better avoided than encountered. She attempted to propitiate Mrs McGrath with a desperate overpoliteness and even by small acts of kindness; taking her milk bottles in out of the sun in summer, leaving a jar of homemade jam or chutney on her doorstep when she came home from St Matthew's Christmas Fair. But these signs of weakness seemed only to increase their enmity, and she knew in her heart that there was nothing to be done about it. People, like countries, needed someone weaker and more vulnerable than them-selves to bully and despise. This was what the world was like. As she gently dragged the chamberpot from under the bed and crouched over it, muscles tense, trying to regu-late and quieten the flow, she thought again how much she would have liked to have a cat. But the garden, twenty yards of unmown grass, hummocky as a field, surrounded by an almost obliterated border of overgrown rose bushes, and torn, unflowering shrubs, belonged to the bottom flat. The McGraths would never let her have use of it and it wouldn't be fair to keep a cat cooped up all night and day in her own two small rooms.

Miss Wharton had been taught to fear in her childhood and it isn't a lesson children can ever unlearn. Her father, a schoolmaster in an elementary school, had managed to maintain a precarious tolerance in the classroom by a compensating tyranny in his own home. His wife and three children were all afraid of him. But shared fear hadn't brought the children closer. When, with his usual irra-tionality, he would single out one child for his displeasure, the siblings would see in each other's shamed eyes their relief at this reprieve. They learned to lie to protect them-selves, and were beaten for lying. They learned to be afraid, and were punished for cowardice. And yet, Miss Wharton kept on her side table a silver framed photograph of both her parents. She never blamed her father for past

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or present unhappiness. She had learned her lesson well. She blamed herself.

She was now virtually alone in the world. Her younger brother, John, to whom she had been closest, more psy-chologically robust than his siblings, had fared best. But John had been burnt alive in the rear gun turret of his Lancaster bomber the day before his nineteenth birthday. Miss Wharton, mercifully ignorant of the steel-bound in-ferno in which John had screamed away his life, had been able to prettify his death into the peaceful picture of the single German bullet finding the heart, the young, pale-faced warrior being gently wafted earthwards, his hand still resting on his gun. Her older brother, Edmund, had emigrated to Canada after the war and now, divorced and childless, worked as a clerk in some small northern town whose name she could never remember since he so seldom wrote.

She slid the chamberpot back under the bed, then put on her dressing gown and padded on naked feet across the narrow hall and into her front sitting room to the single window. The house was very quiet. Under the lights the street shone ebony black between the banks of parked cars. Even with her window closed she could hear the muted roar of night traffic along the Harrow Road. It was a night of low cloud, stained red with the glare of the restless city. Sometimes it seemed to Miss Wharton, looking out into that eerie half-darkness, that London was built on coal and was perpetually smouldering, that Hell, unrecognized, was all around her. To the right, silhouetted against the hectic glow, was the campanile of St Matthew's. Usually it gave her comfort. Here was a place where she was known, valued for the small services she could give, kept busily occupied, solaced, shriven and at home. But now the thin, alien tower, stark against the ruddy sky was a symbol of horror and death. And her twice-weekly walk to St Matthew's along the towpath; how could she face that now? The path had seemed to her mysteriously exempt from the terrors of the city streets, except for those brief stretches under the bridges. Even on the darkest

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morning she had walked there in blessed freedom from fear. And in recent months she had had Darren. But now Darren was gone, safety was gone, the towpath would always be slippery with imagined blood. Creeping back to bed her mind journeyed across the roofs to the Little Vestry. It would be empty now, of course. The police would have taken the bodies avay. The black windowless van had been parked there ready even before she had left. There would be nothing now but the bloodstains browning on the carpet - or would that, too, have been taken away? Nothing but emptiness and darkness and the smell of death, except in the Lady Chapel where the sanctuary light would still be gleaming. Was she to lose even this, she wondered? Was this what murder did to the innocent? Took away the people they loved, loaded their minds with terror, left them bereft and unfriended under a smouldering sky.

7

It was after eleven thirty when Kate Miskin clanged the lift door behind her and unlocked the security lock of her fiat. She had wanted to wait at the Yard until Dalgliesh and Massingham had returned from seeing Halliwell. But AD had suggested that it was time she called it a day and there was little more that she or anyone could do until the morning. If AD was right, and Berowne and Harry Mack had both been murdered, she and Massingham could be regularly working a sixteen-hour day, sometimes longer. It wasn't a possibility she feared; she had done it before. As she switched on the light and double-locked the door behind her it struck her as odd, perhaps even reprehensible, that she should be hoping that AD was right. Then almost immediately she absolved herself with the universal and comforting platitude. Both Berowne and Harry were dead; nothing could bring them back. And if Sir Paul Berowne hadn't slit his own throat, then the case promised to be

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fascinating as well as important, and not only to her personally, to her chance of promotion. There had been a certain amount of opposition to the setting-up in C1 of a special squad to investigate serious crimes which were thought to be politically or socially sensitive and she could name a number of senior officers who wouldn't be sorry if this, their first case, collapsed into a commonplace tragedy of murder followed by suicide.

She entered her fiat, as always, with a sense of satisfac-tion, of coming home. She had lived in Charles Shannon House for just over two years. Buying the flat on a carefully calculated mortgage had been the first step in a planned upward progress; even eventually to one of the converted warehouses on the Thames, wide windows overlooking the river, huge rooms with their bare rafters, a distant view of Tower Bridge. But this was a beginning. She rejoiced in it, and sometimes had to prevent herself from prowling round, touching the walls, the furniture, to reassure herself of its reality.

The fiat, a long sitting room with a narrow iron balcony running its whole width, two small bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom and separate lavatory, was on the top floor of a Victorian block just off Holland Park Avenue. It had been built in the early 1860s to provide studios for artists and designers in the growing arts and crafts movement, and a couple of blue commemorative plaques over the door testified to its historic interest. But archi-tecturally it was without merit, an aberration of yellowish London brick set amidst the surrounding Regency ele-gance, immensely tall, castellated and incongruous as a Victorian castle. The soaring walls, broken by numerous carved and oddly proportioned windows and criss-crossed with iron fire escapes, rose to a roof topped with rows of chimney pots between which sprouted a variety of tele-vision aerials, some long defunct.