A Taste for Death (5 page)

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we all know it. And, come to that, can we any longer rely on the received doctrine that it's for the Ghief Gonstable

to decide on the allocation of resources?'

Berowne said:

'You aren't, of course, about to utter heresy - that we ought to have a national force?' He spoke without appar-ent interest, his eyes fixed ahead. It was as if he were thinking: Since we're lumbered with this bore, let's throw him a predictable subject and hear his predictable views.

'No. But it might be better to have one by will and intention than by default. De jure, Minister, not de facto. Well, you'll have plenty to keep you busy, Gom-mander, and given the membership of the working party it won't be dull.' He spoke wistfully. Dalgliesh suspected that he had hoped to be a member. He heard him add: 'I suppose that's the attraction of the job for the sort of man you are.'

What sort of man, thought Dalgliesh. The poet who no longer writes poetry. The lover who substitutes technique for commitment. The policeman disillusioned with polic-ing. He doubted whether Mapleton intended his words to be offensive. The man was as insensitive to language as he

was to people.

He said:

Tve never been quite sure what the attraction is except

that the job isn't boring and it gives me a private life.' Berowne spoke with sudden bitterness:

'It's a job with less hypocrisy than most. A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.' The voice rather than the words discon-certed Mapleton. Then he decided to treat it as a joke and giggled. He turned to Dalgiiesh.

'So what now for you personally, Commander? Apart from the working party, of course?'

'A week of lectures to the Senior Command Course at Bramshill. Then back here to set up the new squad.'

'Well, that should keep you busy. What happens if I murder the member for Chesterfield West when the

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working party is actually sitting?' He giggled again at lx own audacity.

'I hope you'll resist the temptation, sir.'

'Yes, I must try. The committee is too important I have the senior police detective interest represented on part-time basis. And by the way, talking of murder, there a very odd paragraph about you, Bcrowne, in today Paternoster Review. Not altogether friendly, ! thought.'

'Yes,' said Berowne shortly. 'I've seen it.' He increas his pace so that Mapleton, already out of breath, had choose between talking or using his energy to keep u When they reached the Treasury, he obviously decid, that the reward was no longer worth the effort and with valedictory wave disappeared up Parliament Street. Bu! Berowne had been seeking a moment for further con dences it had disappeared. The pedestrian signal h turned to green. No pedestrian, seeing the lights in 1 favour at Parliament Square, hesitates. Berowne gave hi a rueful glance as if to say: 'See how even the lights consp' against me,' and walked briskly across. Dalgliesh watc[ as he crossed Bridge Street, acknowledged the salute of policeman on duty and disappeared into New Pal: Yard. It had been a brief and unsatisfactory e.ncounl He had the feeling that Berowne was in some trou deeper and more subtly disturbing than poison ! messages. He turned back to the Yard telling himself t, if Berowne wanted to confide he would do it in his o good time.

But that time had never come. And it had been on drive back from Bramshill a week later that he had tur on his radio and heard the news of Berowne's resignat of his ministerial post. The details had been sp Berowne's only explanation had been that he felt it time for his life to take a new direction. The Prime Minisl letter, printed in the next day's Times had been con tionally appreciative but brief. The great British pul most of whom would have been hard pressed to n three members of the Cabinet of this or any adminis tion, were pre-occupied with chasing the sun in one ot

rainiest summers in recent years and took the loss of a junior minister with equanimity. Those parliamentary gossips still in London enduring the boredom of the silly season waited in happy expectation for the scandal to break. Dalgliesh waited with them. But there was, appar-ently, to be no scandal. Berowne's resignation remained mysterious.

Dalgliesh had already sent while at Bramshill for the reports of the inquests on Theresa Nolan and Diana Travers. On the face of it there was no cause for concern. Theresa Nolan, after having a medical termination on psychiatric grounds, had left a suicide note for her grandparents which they had confirmed was in her handwriting and which made her intention to kill herself plain beyond any doubt. And Diana Travers, after drinking and eating unwisely, had apparently herself dived into the Thames to swim out to her companions who were messing about in a punt. Dalgliesh had been left with an uneasy feeling that neither case was as straightforward as the reports made it appear, but certainly there was no prima facie evidence of foul play in connection with either of the two deaths. He was uncertain how much further he was expected to probe or whether, in the light of Berowne's resignation, there was any point in his probing. He had decided to do nothing further for the present and leave it to Berowne to make the first move.

And now Berowne, the harbinger of death, was himself dead, by his hand or another's. Whatever secret he had been hoping to confide on that short walk to the House would remain for ever unspoken. But if he had, indeed been murdered then the secrets would be told; through hi.s dead body, through the intimate detritus of his life, through the mouths, truthful, treacherous, faltering, reluct-ant of his family, his enemies, his friends. Murder was the first destroyer of privacy as it was of so much else. And it seemed to Dalgliesh an ironic twist of fate that it should be he, whom Berowne had shown a disposition to trust, who should now be travelling to begin that inexorable process of violation.

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They were almost at the church before he wrenched his mind back to the present. Massingham had driven in, for him, an unusual silence as if sensing that his chief was grateful for this small hiatus between knowledge and discovery. And he had no need to inquire the way. As always, he had mapped his route before setting out. They were driving up the Harrow Road and had just passed the complex of St Mary's Hospital when the campanile of St Matthew's came suddenly into view on their left. With its crossed bands of stone, its high arched windows and copper cupola it reminded Dalgliesh of the brick towers he had laboriously erected as a child, brick on precarious brick, until they toppled in noisy disorder on the nursery floor. It held for him some of the same hubristic impermanence and, even as he gazed, he half expected it to bend and sway.

Without speaking, Massingham took the next turning to the left and drove towards it down a narrow road bordered on each side by a terrace of small houses. They were identical with their small upper windows, narrow porches and square bays, but it was obvious that the road w.as coming up in the world. Some few still showed the tell-tale signs of multiple occupation, dishevelled lawns, peeling paint and drawn secretive curtains. But these were succeeded by bright little bandboxes of social aspiration; newly painted doors, carriage lamps, an occasional hang-ing basket, the front garden paved to provide standing for the car. At the end of the road the huge bulk of the church with its soaring walls of smoke-blackened brick looked as much out of keeping as it was out of scale with this small domestic self-sufficiency.

The huge north door, large enough for a cathedral, was closed. Beside it a grime encrusted board gave the name and address of the parish priest and the time of services, but there was nothing else to suggest that the door was ever opened. They drove slowly down a narrow asphalt

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drive between the southern wall of the church and the railing bordering the canal, but still there was no sign of life. It was obvious that the news of a murder hadn't yet spread. There were only two cars parked outside the south porch. One, he guessed, belonged to Detective Sergeant Robins and the red Metro to Kate Miskin. He wasn't surprised that she was there before them. She opened the door before Massingham had time to ring, her handsome shield-shaped face composed under the light brown fringe, and looking in her shirt, slacks and leather jerkin as ele-gantly informal as if she had just come in from a country walk. She said:

'The DI's compliments, sir, but he had to get back to the station. They've got a homicide at Royal Oak. He left as soon as Sergeant Robins and I arrived. He'll be avail-able from midday if you need him. The bodies are here, sir. They call it the Little Vestry.'

It was typical of Glyn Morgan not to have disturbed the scene. Dalgliesh had a respect for Morgan as a man and a detective but was grateful that either duty, tact or a mixture of both had taken him away. It was a relief not to have to soothe and propitiate an experienced detective who could hardly be expected to welcome a commander from the new Cl squad intruding on his patch.

Kate Miskin pushed open the first door on the left and stood aside for Dalgliesh and Massingham to enter. The Little Vestry was garishly lit like a film set. Under the glare of the fluorescent light the whole bizarre scene, Berowne's sprawled body and severed throat, the clotted blood, the tramp propped like a stringless marionette against the wall, looking for a moment unreal, a Grand Guignol tableau too overdone and too contrived to be convincing. Hardly glancing at Berowne's body Dalgliesh picked his way across the carpet to Harry Mack and squatted beside him. Without turning his head he asked:

'Were the lights on when Miss Wharton found the bodies?'

'Not in the passage, sir. But she says this light was on. The boy confirms it.'

'Where are they now?'

'In the church, sir. Father Barnes is with them.'

'Have a word with them will you, John? Tall them I'll

to them as soon as I'm free. And try to cmct the

mother. We ought to get him away from &re as as possible. Then I want you here.' Harry looked as derelict in death as he must have done life. If it hadn't been for the breastplate of blood, he

have been asleep, legs stuck out, head slumped

his woollen cap slipped over his right eye. Dal-put his hand under the chin and gently lifted the He had the sensation that it would come apart from the body and roll over into his hands. He saw ttat he had expected to find, the single slash across the roat, apparently from left to right, cutting through the trachea to the vertebrae. Rigor morris was already well established and the skin was ice cold and goosefleshed as the erector muscles of the hairs contracted with the onset of rigor. Whatever concatenation of chance or desire had brought Harry Mack to this place, there was no mystery about the cause of death.

He was wearing old plaid trousers, over-large and loose as pantaloons, and tied at the ankles with string. Above them, as far as it was possible to see for the blood, he wore a striped knitted pullover over a navy jumper. A malo-dorous checked jacket, stiff with grime, was unbuttoned, the left flap lying open. Dalgliesh raised it with careful fingers touching only the extreme edge of the cloth and saw underneath a smudge of blood on the carpet about two centimetres long and thicker at the fight end than at the left. Peering closer he thought he could see a smear roughly the same length on the jacket pocket, but 'the cloth was too dirty for him to be sure. But the implication of the smear on the carpet was plain enough. One or more drops of blood must have fallen or been spilt from the weapon before Harry fell and had then been smeared along the carpet as the body was dragged against the wail. But whose blood? If it proved to be Harry's, the discovery was of small significance. But suppose it were Berowne's? Dalgliesh

felt impatient for the arrival of the forensic biologist, al-though he knew he couldn't hope for the answer, not yet. Samples of both victims' blood would be taken from the bodies at the post-mortem, but it would be three days at least before he could expect to get the result of the analysis.

He wasn't sure what impulse had made him go first to Harry Mack's body. But now he trod carefully across the carpet to the bed and stood silently looking down at the body of Berowne. Even as a 15-year-old boy, standing at the side of the bed of his dead mother, he hadn't felt the need to think, far less to utter, the word goodbye. You couldn't speak to someone who was no longer there. He thought: we can vulgarize everything but not this. The body in its stiff ungainliness, beginning already, or so it seemed to his over-sensitive nose, to emit the first sour-sweet stink of decay, yet had an inalienable dignity be-cause it once had been a man. But he knew, none better, how quickly this spurious humanity would drain away. Even before the pathologist had finished at the scene and the head was wrapped, the hands mittened in their plastic bags, even before Doc Kynaston got to work with his scalpels, the corpse would be an exhibit, more important, more cumbersome and more difficult to preserve than other exhibits in the case, but still an exhibit, tagged, docu-mented, dehumanized, invoking only interest, curiosity or disgust. But not yet. He thought: I knew this man, not well but I knew him. I liked him. Surely he deserves better of me than to gaze at him with my policeman's eyes.

He lay head towards the door and at an angle of forty-five degrees from the bed, his shoes touching the end. The left hand was flung out, the right lay closer to the body. The bed had been covered with a blanket of hand-knitted squares of bright wool. It looked as if Berowne had clutched it as he fell, half-pulling it from the bed, so that it lay partly bunched at his right side. An open razor, the blade thick with clotted blood lay on top of it, a few inches from his right hand. It was extraordinary how many de-tails simultaneously impressed themselves on Dalgliesh's

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mind. A thin wedge of what looked like mud caked be-tween the heel and the sole of the left shoe; the pattern of blood stiffening the fine fawn cashmere of the sweater; the half-open mouth fixed in a rictus between a smile and a sneer; the dead eyes seeming as he watched to shrink into their sockets; the left hand with its long pale fingers, curved and delicate as a girl's; the palm of the right hand thick with blood. But the whole picture struck him as wrong, and he knew why. Berowne couldn't both have held the razor in his right hand and clutched at the blanket as he fell. But if he had first dropped the razor, why should it be lying on top of the blanket and so conveniently close to his hand as if it had slipped from the opening fingers? And why should the palm be so thickly clotted, almost as if another's hand had lifted it and smeared it into the blood at the throat? If Berowne himself had wielded the razor, surely the palm which had clutched it would have been les bloodied.