Devices and Desires (22 page)

The west door was unlocked and before leaving Salle he spent fifteen minutes in the church revisiting old pleasures: the carvings on the oak stalls, peasants, a priest, animals and birds, a dragon, a pelican feeding its young; the mediaeval wineglass pulpit, which after five hundred years still showed traces of its original colouring; the chancel screen; the great east window, which once had glowed in the glory of red, green and blue mediaeval glass but which now let in only the clear Norfolk light. As the west door clanged gently behind him, he wondered when he would return or if he would return at all.

It was early evening before he got home. What he had eaten of lunch had been stodgily filling, so that he was less
hungry than he had expected. He heated up the last of yesterday’s homemade soup and followed it with biscuits and cheese and fruit and then kindled the fire and sat on the low chair before it, listening to Elgar’s Cello Concerto and making a start on the job of sorting out his aunt’s photographs. Tipping them out of their faded envelopes he sorted them with his long fingers on the low mahogany table. It was a task which induced a gentle melancholy from which an occasional scribbled identification on the back of a print, a remembered face or incident would stab him into pain. And the Elgar was an appropriate accompaniment, the plaintive notes evoking those long, hot Edwardian summers known to him only from novels and poetry, the peace, the certainty, the optimism of the England into which his aunt had been born. And here was her fiancé, looking ridiculously young in his captain’s uniform. The photograph was dated 4 May 1918, only a week before he was killed. He gazed for a moment intently at that handsome, debonair young face which, God knew, must by then have seen enough of horror, but it told him nothing. Turning it over, Dalgliesh saw that it bore a pencilled message written in Greek. The young man was to have read classics at Oxford, and his aunt had studied Greek with her father. But he knew no Greek; their secret was safe enough with him and soon would be safe forever. The hand which had formed these fading characters had been dead now for seventy years, the mind that had first created them for nearly two thousand. And here in the same envelope was one of his aunt herself at about the same age. It must have been one she had sent to her fiancé at the Front or given to him before he left for war. One corner was stained browny-red with what must be his blood. Perhaps the photograph had been returned to her with the rest of his effects. She stood in her long skirt with the high-buttoned
blouse, laughing, her hair in two wings on either side and bound above the temples. Over the years her face had always had distinction, but he saw almost with a shock of surprise that once she had been beautiful. And now her death had freed him for a voyeurism which in her life would have been repugnant to them both. And yet she hadn’t destroyed the photographs. She must have known, realist that she was, that other eyes than hers would eventually see them. Or did extreme old age free one from all such petty considerations of vanity or self-esteem as the mind gradually distanced itself from the devices and desires of the flesh? It was with a sense of irrational reluctance, almost of betrayal, that eventually he threw both photographs into the fire and watched them curl, blacken and finally flare into ash.

And what was he to do with all these undocumented strangers, the women, sloping-bosomed, under immense hats piled with ribbons and flowers, the cycling parties, the men knicker-bockered, the women with their long, bell-shaped skirts and their straw boaters; the wedding parties, bride and bridesmaids almost hidden behind their immense bouquets, the chief participants grouped in recognized hierarchy and staring into the lens as if the click of the shutter could for a second halt time, hold it in thrall, proclaiming that this rite of passage at least had importance, binding the ineluctable past to the unseeable future? As an adolescent boy he had been obsessed with time. For weeks before the summer holidays he would feel a sense of triumph that now he had time by the forelock and could say, “Go as quickly as you like and the holiday will be here. Or, if you must, go slowly, and the summer days will last longer.” Now, in middle age, he knew of no contrivance and no promised pleasure which could halt the inexorable thudding of those chariot wheels. And here was
a photograph of himself in his prep-school uniform, taken in the rectory garden by his father, a stranger ridiculously overclad in cap and striped blazer standing almost to attention, facing the lens as if defying the terror of leaving home. That, too, he was glad to see the end of.

When the concerto was finished, the half-bottle of claret empty, he shuffled the remaining photographs together, placed them in the bureau drawer and decided to shake off melancholy with a brisk walk by the sea before bed. The night was too calm and beautiful to be wasted in nostalgia and futile regrets. The air was extraordinarily still, and even the sound of the sea was muted as it stretched, pale and mysterious, under the full moon and the bright pattern of stars. He stood for a moment under the soaring wings of the mill, then began walking vigorously over the headland towards the north, past the fringe of pines, until, three-quarters of an hour later, he decided to make for the beach. He half-slid down the sandy decline and saw before him the great square hunks of concrete half-buried in the sand, the curls of rotting iron springing from them like bizarre antennae. Moonlight, strong as the last light of the setting sun, had changed the texture of the beach, so that each grain of sand seemed separately illuminated, every pebble mysteriously unique. Suddenly he had a childish impulse to feel the sea washing over his feet and, taking off his shoes and socks, he stuffed the socks in his jacket pocket and, tying the laces, slung the shoes round his neck. The water, after the first sting of cold, was almost blood-warm, and he splashed vigorously along the fringe of the waves, pausing from time to time to look back at his footprints as he had as a child. Now he had reached the narrow strip of pine trees. There was, he knew, a narrow path which cut inland through them past Hilary Robarts’s cottage to the road. It was the simplest way of regaining the headland
without having to scramble up the friable cliffs to the south. Sitting on a ridge of shingle he tackled the familiar problem of the paddler: how, with an inadequate handkerchief, to rid the spaces between his toes of the gritty dusting of tenacious sand. That achieved, socks and shoes replaced, he trudged through the pebbles to the shoreline.

When he reached the powdery sand on the upper reaches of the beach, he saw that someone had been here before him: to his left was a double line of naked footprints, the mark of running feet. These, of course, would be Hilary Robarts’s. She must as usual have taken her nightly swim. Subconsciously he noticed how distinct they were. She must have left the beach nearly an hour and a half ago, yet on this windless night the indentations were as plain in the dry sand as if they had just been made. The path through the trees lay in front of him, leading out of moonlight into the enclosing shadows of the pine wood. And the night was suddenly darker. A low blue-black cloud had momentarily covered the moon, its ragged edges silvered with light.

He switched on his torch and played it over the path. It caught the gleam of something white to his left, a sheet of newspaper, perhaps, a handkerchief, a discarded paper bag. Feeling no more than mild curiosity, he stepped from the path to investigate. And then he saw her. Her distorted face seemed to leap up at him and hang suspended in the bright glare of the torchlight like a vision from a nightmare. Staring down, and for a moment transfixed, he felt a shock in which incredulity, recognition and horror fused into a second which made his heart leap. She was lying in a shallow depression of flattened marram grass, hardly a hollow but deep enough for the grasses on each verge to shield her body until he was almost on top of her. To her right, and partly beneath her, was a crumpled beach towel,
striped in red and blue and above it, placed precisely side-by-side, a pair of open sandals and a torch. Beside them, neatly folded, was what looked like a blue-and-white track suit. It must have been the edge of this which had first caught his eye. She lay on her back, the head towards him, the dead eyes upturned as if they had been fixed on him in a last, mute appeal. The small bush of hair had been pushed under the upper lip, exposing the teeth, and giving the impression of a snarling rabbit. A single black hair lay across her cheek and he had an almost irresistible impulse to kneel and pluck it away. She was wearing only the bottom half of a black bikini, and that had been pulled down over her thighs. He could clearly see where the hair had been sliced away. The letter
L
precisely in the centre of the forehead looked as if it had been cut with deliberation, the two thin lines precisely at right angles. Between the splayed and flattened breasts with their dark areolae and pointed nipples, milk-white against the brown skin of her arms, rested a key-shaped metal locket on a chain. And as he gazed down, slowly moving the torchlight over her body, the cloud moved from the face of the moon and she lay stretched out before him clearly, the naked limbs pale and bloodless as the bleached sands and as clearly visible as if it were day.

He was inured to horror; few manifestations of human cruelty, violence or desperation were unfamiliar to his practised eye. He was too sensitive ever to view a violated body with crude indifference, but only in one recent case, his last, had this sensitivity caused him more than momentary inconvenience. And with Paul Berowne at least he had been warned. This was the first time he had almost stumbled over a murdered woman. Now, as he looked down on her, his mind analysed the difference between the reaction of an expert summoned to the scene of the crime knowing what to expect
and this sudden exposure to ultimate violence. He was interested both in the difference and in the detachment which could so coolly analyse it.

Kneeling, he touched her thigh. It felt icy cold and as synthetic as inflated rubber. If he prodded it the mark of his fingers would surely remain. Gently he ran them through her hair. It was still slightly damp at the roots but the ends were dry. The night was warm for September. He looked at his watch: 10.33. He remembered being told, he couldn’t recall when or by whom, that it was her practice to take her nightly swim shortly after nine o’clock. The physical signs confirmed what he thought most likely, that she had been dead for less than two hours.

He had seen no footprints on the sand but his and hers. But the tide was ebbing; it must have been high at about 9.00, although the dustiness of the upper levels of the beach suggested that it didn’t reach the hollow where she lay. But the most likely path for the murderer to have taken was the one through the wood which she herself must have used. He would have had the protection of the trees and a place in their shadow where he could watch and wait unseen. The ground, with its mat of pine needles on the sand, was unlikely to yield footprints, but it was important that it shouldn’t be disturbed. Moving carefully, he backed away from the body, then walked about twenty yards to the south along a ridge of fine shingle. By the light of his torch, half-crouching, he tracked his way through the densely planted pine trees, snapping off the brittle lower twigs as he passed. At least he could be certain that no one had recently passed this way. Within minutes he had gained the road; another ten of brisk walking and he would be at the mill. But the nearest telephone would be at Hilary Robarts’s cottage. The probability was that the cottage was locked, and he had no intention of breaking in.
It was almost as important to leave the victim’s house undisturbed as it was not to violate the scene of the crime. There had been no handbag beside her body, nothing but the shoes and torch neatly placed at the head of the hollow, the track suit and the brightly striped red-and-blue beach towel on which she partly lay. Perhaps she had left the key at home, the cottage unlocked. On the headland, after dark, few people would worry if they left a cottage unlocked for half an hour. It was worth taking five minutes to look.

Thyme Cottage, seen from the windows of the mill, had always struck him as the least interesting house on the headland. It faced inland, a square, uncompromising building with a cobbled yard instead of a front garden and picture windows in modern glass which destroyed any period charm it once might have had and made it look like a modern aberration more appropriate to a rural housing estate than to this sea-scarred and remote headland. On three sides the pines grew so closely that they almost touched the walls. He had wondered from time to time why Hilary Robarts should have chosen to live here, despite its convenient distance from the power station. After Alice Mair’s dinner party he thought he knew why. Now all the lights were blazing in the ground-floor rooms, the large rectangle of the picture window to the left reaching almost to the ground and the smaller square to the right, which he thought was probably the kitchen. Ordinarily they would have been a reassuring signal of life, normality and welcome, of a refuge from the atavistic fears of the enclosing wood, the empty moonlit headland. But now those bright, uncurtained windows added to his mounting unease, and as he approached the cottage it seemed to him that there floated between him and those bright windows, like a half-developed print, the mental picture of that dead and violated face.

Someone had been here before him. He vaulted over the low stone wall and saw that the pane of the picture window had been almost completely smashed. Small slivers of glass gleamed like jewels on the cobbled yard. He stood and gazed between the jagged edges of the broken glass into the brightness of the sitting room. The carpet was littered with glass fragments like winking beads of silver light. It was obvious that the force of the blow had come from outside the cottage, and he saw at once what had been used. Below him, face upwards on the carpet, was the portrait of Hilary Robarts. It had been slashed almost to the frame with two right-angled cuts forming the letter
L
.

He didn’t try the door to see if it was unlocked. It was more important not to contaminate the scene than to save ten or fifteen minutes in ringing the police. She was dead. Speed was important, but it was not vital. Regaining the road, he set off towards the mill, half-running, half-walking. And then he heard the noise of a car and, turning, saw the lights coming at him fast from the north. It was Alex Mair’s BMW. Dalgliesh stood in the middle of the road and waved his torch. The car slowed and stopped. Looking up to the open right side window, he saw Mair, his face bleached by moonlight, regarding him for a moment with an unsmiling intensity, as if this encounter were an assignation.