Death of an Expert Witness (10 page)

Suddenly they seemed to notice Brenda for the first time.

Mrs. Bidwell came towards her. She said: “Did you find him then? You poor little bugger!”

And suddenly it wasn’t a play anymore. The lights went out. The faces became amorphous, ordinary.

Brenda gave a little gasp. She felt Mrs. Bidwell’s arms go round her shoulders. The smell of the mackintosh was pressed into her face. The fur was as soft as her kitten’s paw. And, blessedly, Brenda began to cry.

In a London teaching hospital close by the river, from which he could in his more masochistic moments glimpse the window of his own office, Dr. Charles Freeborn, Controller of the Forensic Science Service, all six foot four of him, lay rigidly in his narrow bed, his nose peaked high above the methodical fold of the sheet, his white hair a haze against the whiter pillow. The bed was too short for him, an inconvenience to which he had accommodated himself by neatly sticking out his toes over the foot-board. His bedside locker held the conglomerate of offerings, necessities and minor diversions considered indispensable to a brief spell in hospital. They included a vase of official-looking roses, scentless but florid, through whose funereal and unnatural blooms Commander Adam Dalgliesh glimpsed a face so immobile, upturned eyes fixed on the ceiling, that he was momentarily startled by the illusion that he was visiting the dead. Recalling that Freeborn was recovering from nothing more serious than a successful operation for varicose veins, he approached the bed and said tentatively: “Hello!”

Freeborn, galvanized from his torpor, sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, scattering from his bedside locker a packet of tissues, two copies of the
Journal of the Forensic Science Society
and an open box of chocolates. He shot out a lean speckled arm encircled by the hospital identity bracelet and crushed Dalgliesh’s hand.

“Adam! Don’t creep up on me like that, damn you! God, am I glad to see you! The only good news I’ve had this morning is that you’ll be in charge. I thought that you might have already left. How long can you spare? How are you getting there?”

Dalgliesh answered the questions in order. “Ten minutes. By chopper from the Battersea Heliport. I’m on my way now. How are you, Charles? Am I being a nuisance?”

“I’m the nuisance. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. And the maddening part of it is that it’s my own fault. The op could have waited. Only the pain was getting rather tedious and Meg insisted that I had it done now before I retired, on the theory, I suppose, that better in the Government’s time than my own.”

Recalling what he knew of the ardours and achievements of Freeborn’s forty-odd years in the Forensic Science Service, the difficult war years, the delayed retirement, the last five years when he had exchanged his directorship for the frustrations of bureaucracy, Dalgliesh said: “Sensible of her. And there’s nothing you could have done at Chevisham.”

“I know. It’s ridiculous, this feeling of responsibility because one isn’t actually in post when disaster strikes. They rang from the duty office to break the news to me just after nine. Better that than learning it from my visitors or this evening’s paper, I suppose they thought. Decent of them. The Chief Constable must have called in the Yard within a few minutes of getting the news. How much do you know?”

“About as much as you, I imagine. I’ve spoken to the CC and to Howarth. They’ve given me the main facts. The skull smashed, apparently by a heavy mallet which Lorrimer had been examining. The Lab found properly locked when the Assistant Police Liaison Officer and the young CO arrived at eight-thirty this morning. Lorrimer’s keys in his pocket. He often worked late and most of the Lab staff knew that he proposed to do so last night. No sign of a break-in. Four sets of keys. Lorrimer had one set as the Senior PSO and Deputy Security Officer. The Assistant Police Liaison Officer has the second. Lorrimer or one of the Police Liaison Officers were the only people authorized to lock and open up the building. The Director keeps the third set of keys in his security cupboard, and the fourth are in a safe at Guy’s Marsh Police Station in case the alarm rings in the night.”

Freeborn said: “So either Lorrimer let in his murderer or the murderer had a key.”

There were, thought Dalgliesh, other possibilities, but now was not the time to discuss them. He asked: “Lorrimer would have let in anyone from the Lab, I suppose?”

“Why not? He’d probably have admitted any of the local police whom he personally knew, particularly if it were a detective concerned with a recent case. Otherwise, I’m not so sure. He may have admitted a friend or relative, although that’s even more doubtful. He was a punctilious blighter and I can’t see him using the Lab as a convenient place for a rendezvous. And, of course, he would have let in the forensic pathologist.”

“That’s a local man, Henry Kerrison, they tell me. The CC said that they called him in to look at the body. Well, they could hardly do anything else. I didn’t know you’d found a successor to Death-House Donald.”

“Nor have we. Kerrison is doing it on an item-of-service basis. He’s well thought of and we’ll probably appoint him if we can get the Area Health Authority to agree. There’s the usual difficulty about his hospital responsibilities. I wish to hell we could get the forensic pathology service sorted out before I go. But that’s one headache I’ll have to leave to my successor.”

Dalgliesh thought without affection of Death-House Donald with his ghoulish schoolboy humour—“Not that cake knife, my dear lady. I used it this morning on one of Slash Harry’s victims and the edge is rather blunted”—his mania for self-advertisement and his intolerable bucolic laugh, and was grateful that at least he wouldn’t be interrogating that redoubtable old phoney. He said: “Tell me about Lorrimer. What was he like?”

This was the question which lay at the heart of every murder investigation; and yet he knew its absurdity before he asked it. It was the strangest part of a detective’s job, this building up of a relationship with the dead, seen only as a crumpled corpse at the scene of crime or naked on the mortuary table. The victim was central to the mystery of his own death. He died because of what he was. Before the case was finished Dalgliesh would have received a dozen pictures of Lorrimer’s personality, transferred like prints from other men’s minds. From these amorphous and uncertain images he would create his own imaginings, superimposed and dominant, but essentially just as incomplete, just as distorted—as were the others—by his own preconceptions, his own personality. But the question had to be asked. And at least he could rely on Freeborn to answer it without initiating a philosophical discussion about the basis of the self.

But their minds must for a moment have flowed together, for Freeborn said: “It’s odd how you always have to ask that question, that you’ll only see him through other men’s eyes. Aged
about forty. Looks like John the Baptist without his beard and is about as uncompromising. Single. Lives with an elderly father in a cottage just outside the village. He is—was—an extremely competent forensic biologist, but I doubt whether he would have gone any higher. Obsessional, edgy, uncomfortable to be with. He applied for the job at Hoggatt’s, of course, and was runner-up to Howarth.”

“How did he and the Lab take the new appointment?”

“Lorrimer took it pretty hard, I believe. The Lab wouldn’t have welcomed his appointment. He was pretty unpopular with most of the senior staff. But there are always one or two who would have preferred a colleague to a stranger even if they hated his guts. And the Union made the expected noises about not appointing a forensic scientist.”

“Why did you appoint Howarth? I take it you were on the Board.”

“Oh, yes. I accept a share of the responsibility. That’s not to say that I think we made a mistake. Old Doc Mac was one of the really great forensic scientists—we started together—but there’s no denying that he’d let the reins slip a bit in recent years. Howarth has already increased the work turnover by ten per cent. And then there’s the commissioning of the new Lab. It was a calculated risk to take a man without forensic experience, but we were looking for a manager primarily. At least, most of the Board were and the rest of us were persuaded that it would be no bad thing, without, I confess, being precisely clear what we meant by that blessed word. Management. The new science. We all make obeisance to it. In the old days we got on with the job, jollied staff along if they needed it, kicked the sluggards in the backside, encouraged the unconfident and persuaded a reluctant and sceptical police force to use us. Oh, and sent in an occasional statistical
return to the Home Office just to remind them that we were there. It seemed to work all right. The Service didn’t collapse. Have you ever considered what exactly is the difference between administration and management, Adam?”

“Keep it as a question to confound the candidate at your next Board. Howarth was at the Bruche Research Institute wasn’t he? Why did he want to leave? He must have taken a cut in pay.”

“Not more than about six hundred a year, and that wouldn’t worry him. His father was rich, and it all came to him and his half-sister.”

“But it’s a bigger place surely? And he can’t be getting the research at Hoggatt’s.”

“He gets some, but essentially, of course, it’s a service laboratory. That worried us a bit on the Board. But you can hardly set out to persuade your most promising applicant that he’s downgrading himself. Scientifically and academically—he’s a pure physicist—he was well ahead of the rest of the field. Actually we did press him a bit and he gave the usual reasons. He was getting stale, wanted a new sphere of activity, was anxious to get away from London. Gossip has it that his wife had recently left him and he wanted to make a clean break. That was probably the reason. Thank God he didn’t use that blasted word ‘challenge.’ If I have to listen to one more candidate telling me he sees the job as a challenge I’ll throw up over the boardroom table. Adam, I’m getting old.”

Freeborn nodded his head towards the window. “They’re in a bit of a twitch over there, I need hardly say.”

“I know. I’ve had an exceedingly brief but tactful interview. They’re brilliant at implying more than they actually say. But obviously it’s important to get it solved quickly. Apart from confidence in the Service, you’ll all want to get the Lab back to work.”

“What’s happening now? To the staff, I mean.”

“The local CID have locked all the interior doors and they’re keeping the staff in the library and the reception area until I arrive. They’re occupying themselves writing out an account of their movements since Lorrimer was last seen alive and the local Force are getting on with the preliminary checking of alibis. That should save some time. I’m taking one officer, John Massingham, with me. The Met Lab will take on any of the forensic work. They’re sending a chap down from Public Relations Branch to handle the publicity, so I won’t have that on my plate. It’s obliging of that pop group to break up so spectacularly. That and the Government’s troubles should keep us off the front page for a day or two.”

Freeborn was looking down at his big toes with mild distaste as if they were errant members whose deficiencies had only now become apparent to him. From time to time he wriggled them, whether in obedience to some medical instruction or for his own private satisfaction, it was impossible to say. After a moment he spoke.

“I started my career at Hoggatt’s, you know. That was before the war. All any of us had then was wet chemistry, test tubes, beakers, solutions. And girls weren’t employed because it wasn’t decent for them to be concerned with sex cases. Hoggatt’s was old-fashioned even for the 1930 service. Not scientifically, though. We had a spectrograph when it was still the new wonder toy. The fens threw up some odd crimes. Do you remember the Mulligan case, old man who chopped up his brother and tied the remains to the Leamings’ sluice gates? There was some nice forensic evidence there.”

“Some fifty bloodstains on the pig-sty wall, weren’t there? And Mulligan swore it was sow’s blood.”

Freeborn’s voice grew reminiscent. “I liked that old villain.
And they still drag out those photographs I took of the splashes and use them to illustrate lectures on bloodstains. Odd, the attraction Hoggatt’s had—still has for that matter. An unsuitable Palladian mansion in an unexciting East Anglian village on the edge of the black fens. Ten miles to Ely, and that’s hardly a centre of riotous activity for the young. Winters to freeze your marrow and a spring wind—the ‘fen blow’ they call it—which whips up the peat and chokes your lungs like smog. And yet the staff, if they didn’t leave after the first month, stayed forever. Did you know that Hoggatt’s has got a small Wren chapel in the Lab grounds? Architecturally it’s much superior to the house because old Hoggatt never messed it about. He was almost entirely without aesthetic taste, I believe. He used it as a chemical store once it had been deconsecrated or whatever it is they do to unused churches. Howarth has got a string quartet going at the Lab and they gave a concert there. Apparently he’s a noted amateur violinist. At the moment he’s probably wishing that he’d stuck to music. This isn’t a propitious start for him, poor devil. And it was always such a happy Lab. I suppose it was the isolation that gave us such a feeling of camaraderie.”

Dalgliesh said grimly: “I doubt whether that will survive an hour of my arrival.”

“No. You chaps usually bring as much trouble with you as you solve. You can’t help it. Murder is like that, a contaminating crime. Oh, you’ll solve it, I know. You always do. But I’m wondering at what cost.”

Dalgliesh did not answer. He was both too honest and too fond of Freeborn to make comforting and platitudinous promises. Of course, he would be tactful. That didn’t need saying. But he would be at Hoggatt’s to solve a murder, and all other considerations would go down before that overriding task. Murder was always solved at a cost, sometimes to himself,
more often to others. And Freeborn was right. It was a crime which contaminated everyone whom it touched, innocent and guilty alike. He didn’t grudge the ten minutes he had spent with Freeborn. The old man believed, with simple patriotism, that the Service to which he had given the whole of his working life was the best in the world. He had helped to shape it, and he was probably right. Dalgliesh had learned what he had come to learn. But as he shook hands and said goodbye he knew that he left no comfort behind him.