A Taste for Death (3 page)

But Massingham was uninterested in the procedural details for the resignation of a parliamentary seat. He said:

15

'Division are sure, sir, that the body is Sir Paul Ber Owne?'

te'One of ,t, he bodies. Don't forget the tramp. Yes, it's.

rown.e] Th.%e,s evidence of identity at the scene, ancl

parish pr%t knew him, apparently. It wasn't the first

time Berowne had spent the night in St Matthew's church

vestry.'

'An odd Pltce to choose to sleep.'

00r to .die. Iave you spoken to Inspector Miskin?'

nce they h v; toether they would both

De Callln her v . ank

Mas in g Kate, but now Dalghesh gave her her r .

s gnam

�� h,es off to, clay' sir, but I managed to get her, at her nat. lve aseq Robins to collect her gear and she 11 meet

us at the scen I've alerted the rest of the team.'

'Right, Joht' Get the Rover, will you. I'll meet you

outside. Four rrdnutes.'

It crossed 1....... Massin-ham mieht not have

� . IS mlno, tilia, t /b

oeen too aspleased had Kate Miskin already left her t

and be. n i. ..ssible to contact, the new squad had

set up m tl t% investigate serious, crimes that, for pohucal or other reasohs' needed particularly sensitive handling. It

had been so seqf. evident to Dalgliesh that the squad would need a senior

energy to cho woman detective that he had devoted his

.... %ain the right one, rather than to speculating

w well e od fit into the team. He had selected the

z -year-olate Miskin on her record and her perfor mance at interview, satisfied that she had the quifies for

which he wad looking. They were also the on he :ost

admired in a detective: intelligence, courage, discretion

and common ense What

remained to e sen He else she might have to contriutc

. knew that she and Mingtam

had worked E,.. -fore when he had been a n

promoted avaiona1 detective inspector and she a serg tt.

I was mred that the relationship had at times

trmy.. nt assingham had learned to dcipline so:

ms prqualcea since en, as he had the notorious singham teer' And a fresh, even an iconoclastic

fluence, even a little healthy dval, could be

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effective operationally than the collusive and macho freemasonry which frequently bound together a team of all male officers.

Dalgliesh began rapidly but methodically to clear his desk, then checked his murder bag. He had told Mas-singham four minutes, and he would be there. Already he had moved, as if by a conscious act of will, into a worm in which time was precisely measured, details obsessively noticed, the senses preternaturally alert to sounds, smell, sight, the flick of an eyelid, the timbre of a voice. He had been called from this office to so many bodies, in such different settings, such different states of dissolution, old, young, pathetic, horrifying, having in common only the one fact, that they were violently dead and by another's hand. But this body was different. For the first time in his career, he had known and liked the victim. He told him-self that it was pointless to speculate what difference, if any, this would make to the investigation. Already he knew that the difference was there.

The Commissioner had said:

'His throat is cut, possibly by his own hand. But there's a second body, a tramp. This case is likely to be messy in more ways than one.'

His reaction to the news had been partly predictable and partly complex and more disturbing. There had been the natural initial shock of disbelief at hearing of the unexpected death of any person even casually known. He would have felt no less if he'd been told that Berowne was dead of a coronary or killed in a car smash. But this had .been followed by a sense of personal outrage, an emptiness 'and then a surge of melancholy, not strong enough to be called grief but keener than mere regret, which had sur-prised him by its intensity. But it hadn't been strong enough to make him say:

'I can't take this case. I'm too involved, too commit-ted.'

Waiting briefly for the lift he told himself that he was no more involved than he would be in any other case. Berowne was dead. It was his business to find out how and

17

why. Commitment was to the job, to the living, not to the dead.

He had hardly passed through the swing doors when Massingham drove up the ramp with the Rover. Getting in beside him Dalgliesh asked:

'Fingerprints and photography, they're on their way?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And the lab?'

'They're sending a senior biologist. She'll meet us there.'

'Did you manage to get Doctor Kynaston?'

'No, sir, only the housekeeper. He's been in New Eng-land visiting his daughter. He always goes there in the autumn. He was due back at Heathrow on BA flight 214 arriving at seven twenty-five. It's landed, but he's probably stuck on the Westway.'

'Keep on trying his home until he arrives.'

'Doc Greeley is available, sir. Kynaston will be jet-lagged.'

'I want Kynaston, jet-lagged or not.'

Massingham said:

'Only the best for this cadaver.'

Something in his voice, a tinge of amusement, even contempt, irritated Dalgliesh. He thought, my God, am I getting over-sensitive about this death even before I've seen the body? He fastened his seat belt without speaking and the Rover slid gently into Broadway, the road he had crossed less than a fortnight earlier on his way to see Sir Paul Berowne.

Gazing straight ahead, only half-aware of a world outside the claustrophobic comfort of the car, of Mas� singham's hands stroking the wheel, the almost soundless changing of the gears, the pattern of traffic lights, he deliber-ately let his mind slip free of the present and of all the conjecture about what lay ahead, and remembered, by an exercise of mental recall, as if something important depended on his getting it right, every moment of that last meeting with the dead man.

18

It was Thursday 5 September and he was about to leave his office to drive to Bramshill Police College to begin a series of lectures to the Senior Command Course when the call came through from the private office. Berowne's pri-vate secretary spoke after the manner of his kind. Sir Paul would be grateful if Commander Dalgliesh could spare a few minutes to see him. It would be convenient if he could come at once. Sir Paul would be leaving his office to join a party of his constituents at the House in about an hour.

Dalgliesh liked Berowne, but the summons was in-convenient. He was not expected at Bramshill until after luncheon and had planned to take his time over the journey to north Hampshire, visiting churches at Sher-borne St John and Winchfield and lunching at a pub near Stratfield Saye before arriving at Bramshill in time for the usual courtesies with the Commandant before his two-thirty lecture. It occurred to him that he had reached the age when a man looks forward to his pleasures less keenly than in youth but is disproportionately aggrieved when his plans are upset. There had been the usual time-consuming, wearying and slightly acrimonious preliminaries to the set-ting up of the new squad in C1 and already his mind was reaching out with relief to the solitary contemplation of alabaster effigies, sixteenth-century glass and the awesome decorations of Winchfield. But it looked as if Paul Berowne wasn't proposing to take much time over their meeting. His plans might still be possible. He left his grip in the office, put on his tweed coat against a blustery autumnal morning and cut through St James's Park station to the Department.

As he pushed his way through the swing doors he thought again how much he had preferred the Gothic splendour of the old building in Whitehall. It must, he recognized, have been infuriating and inconvenient to work in. It had, after all, been built at a time when the rooms were heated by coal fires tended by an army of

19

minions and when a score of carefully composed hand-written minutes by the Department's legendary eccentrics were adequate to control events which now required three divisions and a couple of under secretaries. This new building was no doubt excellent of its kind, but if the inten-tion had been to express confident authority tempered by humanity he wasn't sure that the architect had succeeded. It looked more suitable for a multinational corporation than for a great Department of State. He particularly missed the huge oil portraits which had dignified that impressive Whitehall staircase, intrigued always by the techniques by which artists of varying talents had coped with the challenge of dignifying the ordinary and occasion-ally unprepossessing features of their sitters by the visual exploitation of magnificent robes and by imposing on their pudgy faces the stern consciousness of imperial power. But at least they had removed the studio photograph of a royal princess which until recently had graced the entrance hall. It had looked more suitable for a West End hairdressing salon.

He was smilingly recognized at the reception desk, but his credentials were still carefully scrutinized and he was required to await the escorting messenger, even though he had attended enough meetings in the building to be reasonably familiar with these particular corridors of power. Few of the elderly male messengers now remained, and for some years the Department had recruited women. They shepherded their charges with a cheerful, maternal competence as if to reassure them that the place might look like a prison but was as gently beneficent as a nursing home and that they were only there for their own good.

He was finally shown into the outer office. The House was still in recess for the summer and the room was un-naturally quiet. One of the typewriters was shrouded and a single clerk was collating papers with none of the urgency which normally powered a minister's private office. It would have been a very different scene a few weeks earlier. He thought, not for the first time, that a system which required ministers to run their departments, fulfil their

2O

,end

arliamentary resp�nsibilifies' and sperm:i

'P' -rain' to the devances of their constituons weaadCl'

SedeSsigned t'ensure that major decis exhauaa

bY men and women tired to the point o[ dependent

crtainly ensured that they were heavil were stthe:

their permanent officials. Strong minister/arionett,

wn men; the weaker degenerated into ' DepartmtIv�

0 /

that this would necessamly worry therir puppteve!/d

heads were adept at concealing from thalglieshMnt!r�v

the gentlest jerk of strings and wire. But Ygossip t0ho,0IPau

needed his private source of department ;nee abat?a0i

that there was nothing' of ths' limp subserv ,teru

Berowne /,nd heldt

He came forward from behind his desk os a facste,'t3

hand as if this were a first meeting. His vias tran/rev

even a little melancholy in repose, which ' - gl

when he smiled. He smiled now. He said:,4otice. I'qla))'rta 'I'm sorry to bring you here at short larly imp0aarv

we managed to catch you. It isn't partiO/ .tJn�,

but I think it ma become so.' Deing remde?itt

Dalghesh coulYnever see him without 3erowne, th,'llisti

to his king His only notable recorded .ait. But it ha)'

commission Van Dyck to paint his porlly, a vicotjl,'t,o

been enough to ensure him, at least pictor ,shire hadlon�,.iisn

immortality. The manor house in Ham

since passed from the family, the fortune

but Sir Hugo's long and melancholy fo

collar of exquisite lace still stared with

scension at the passing crowd, the definif

century Royalist gentleman. The present

to him was almost uncanny. Here was the

vas dimmed

e framd by

:rrogant ;0adc

ye seventat

aronet's eae

me long.ne,

9inted c th

face, the high cheekbones tapering to a f the lefielic

same widely spaced eyes with the droop ame stea bO

the same long-fingered pale hands, the

slightly ironic gaze. ,ost dear, Iw

Dalgliesh saw that his desk top was al'

b

on(

n

eye

ty

it'

minions and when a score of carefully composed hand-written minutes by the Department's legendary eccentrics were adequate to control events which now required three divisions and a couple of under secretaries. This new building was no doubt excellent of its kind, but if the inten-tion had been to express confident authority tempered by humanity he wasn't sure that the architect had succeeded. It looked more suitable for a multinational corporation than for a great Department of State. He particularly missed the huge oil portraits which had dignified that impressive Whitehall staircase, intrigued always by the techniques by which artists of varying talents had coped with the challenge of dignifying the ordinary and occasion-ally unprepossessing features of their sitters by the visual exploitation of magnificent robes and by imposing on their pudgy faces the stern consciousness of imperial power. But at least they had removed the studio photograph ora royal princess which until recently had graced the entrance hall. It had looked more suitable for a West End hairdressing salon.

He was smilingly recognized at the reception desk, but his credentials were still carefully scrutinized and he was required to await the escorting messenger, even though he had attended enough meetings in the building to be reasonably familiar with these particular corridors of power. Few of the elderly male messengers now remained, and for some years the Department had recruited women. They shepherded their charges with a cheerful, maternal competence as if to reassure them that the place might look like a prison but was as gently beneficent as a nursing home and that they were only there for their own good.

He was finally shown into the outer office. The House was still in recess for the summer and the room was un-naturally quiet. One of the typewriters was shrouded and a single clerk was collating papers with none of thc urgency which normally powered a minister's private office. It would have been a very different scene a few weeks earlier. He thought, not for the first time, that a system which required ministers to run their departments, fulfil their