Original Sin (21 page)

Dalgliesh asked, “Which of you four last saw Mr. Etienne?”

Claudia said: “I did. I went into the office to talk to him before I left, just before half past six. He usually worked late on Thursday nights. He was still at his desk. There may have been other people in the building at the time but I think they had all gone. Obviously I didn’t check or make a search.”

“Was it generally known that your brother worked late on Thursdays?”

“It was known within the office. Probably other people knew as well.”

Dalgliesh said: “He seemed as usual? He didn’t tell you that he intended to work in the little archives office?”

“He seemed perfectly as usual, and he never mentioned the little archives office. As far as I know it wasn’t a room he
ever visited. I have no idea why he went up there or why he died there—if, in fact, that is where he died.”

Again the four pairs of eyes looked intensely into Dalgliesh’s face. He didn’t comment. After formally asking the expected question whether they knew of anyone who might wish Etienne dead and receiving their short and equally expected answers, he got up from his chair and the woman officer, who hadn’t spoken, got up too. Then he thanked them quietly and she stood a little aside so that he moved first out of the door.

After they had left there was a silence for half a minute then de Witt said: “Not exactly the kind of copper from whom one asks the time. Personally I find him terrifying enough to the innocent, so God knows what he does to the guilty. Do you know him, Gabriel? After all you’re in the same line of business.”

Dauntsey looked up and said, “I know his work, of course, but I don’t think we’ve ever met. He’s a fine poet.”

“Oh, we all know that. I’m only surprised you’ve never tried to wean him away from his publisher. Let’s hope he’s an equally good detective.”

Frances said: “It’s odd though, isn’t it, he never asked us about the snake?”

Claudia said sharply: “What about the snake?”

“He didn’t ask us whether we knew where to find it.”

“Oh he will,” said de Witt. “Believe me, he will.”

In the little archives room Dalgliesh asked: “Did you manage to speak to Dr. Kynaston, Kate?”

“No, sir. He’s in Australia visiting his son. Doc Wardle’s coming. He was in his lab so he shouldn’t be long.”

It was an unpropitious start. Dalgliesh was used to working with Miles Kynaston whom he both liked as a man and respected as probably the country’s most brilliant forensic pathologist. He had, perhaps unreasonably, taken it for granted that it would be Kynaston who would be squatting by this body, Kynaston’s stubby-fingered hands in the latex gloves, fine as a second skin, which would be moving about the corpse with as much gentleness as if these stiff limbs could still tense under his probing hands. Reginald Wardle was a perfectly capable forensic pathologist; he wouldn’t otherwise have been employed by the Met. He would do a good job. His report would be as thorough as Kynaston’s and would come on time. He would be as effective in the witness box, if it came to that, cautious but definite, unshakeable under cross-examination. But Dalgliesh had always found him irritating and suspected
that the mild antipathy, not strong enough to be called dislike or to prejudice their co-operation, was mutual.

Wardle, when called out, came promptly to the murder scene—no one could fault him there—but would invariably stroll in with leisurely unconcern as if to demonstrate the unimportance of violent death, and this corpse in particular, in his private scheme of things. He was apt to sigh and tut-tut over the body, as if the problem it presented was irritating rather than interesting and one which hardly justified the police in dragging him away from the more immediate concerns in his laboratory. He provided the minimum of information at the scene, perhaps from natural caution, but too often giving the impression that the police were unreasonably pressing him for a premature judgement. His most common words spoken over the corpse were: “Better wait, better wait, Commander. I’ll get him on the table soon enough and then we’ll know.”

He was, too, a self-publicist. At the scene he might give the impression of a boring and reluctant colleague but, surprisingly, he was a brilliant after-dinner speaker and probably enjoyed more free meals than most of his profession. Dalgliesh, who found it astonishing that a man could actually volunteer for, let alone enjoy, a protracted and usually poor hotel dinner for the satisfaction of getting on his feet afterwards, privately added this fact to the list of Wardle’s mild delinquencies. Once in his autopsy room, however, Doc Wardle was a different man. Here, perhaps because this was his acknowledged kingdom, he seemed to take a pride in demonstrating his considerable skills and was ready enough to share opinions and propound theories.

Dalgliesh had worked with Charlie Ferris before and was glad to see him. His nickname of “the Ferret” was rarely used to his face but it was perhaps too appropriate a soubriquet to be
always avoided. He had pale-lashed sharp little eyes, a long nose sensible to every variety of smell and tiny fastidious fingers which could pick up small objects as if by magnetism. He presented an eccentric and occasionally bizarre appearance when on the job, his preferred clothes for a search being tight-fitting cotton shorts or trousers, a sweatshirt, surgeon’s latex gloves and a plastic swimming cap. His professional creed was that no murderer left the scene of his crime without depositing some physical evidence and it was his business to find it.

Dalgliesh said: “Your usual search, Charlie, but we’ll need a gas engineer to take out that gas fire and make a report. Tell them it’s urgent. If there’s rubble blocking the flue I want that sent to the lab with samples of any loose pieces of the chimney lining. It’s a very old nursery gas fire with a removable tap. I don’t know whether we’ll get a useful print from there, almost certainly not. All surfaces of the fire need testing for prints. The window cord is important. I’d like to know if it snapped because of natural wear and tear or was deliberately frayed. I doubt whether you’ll get more than an opinion but the lab may be able to help.”

Leaving them to it he knelt by the body, studied it intently for a moment then, putting out his hand, touched the cheek. Was it his imagination and the ruddiness of the skin which made it feel slightly warm to the touch? Or was it that the warmth of his own fingers had for a few seconds given a spurious life to the dead flesh? He moved his hand to the jaw taking care not to dislodge the snake. The flesh was soft, the bone moved under his gentle urging.

He said to Kate and Dan: “See what you make of the jaw. Be careful. I want the snake in place until after the PM.”

They knelt in turn, Kate first, touched the jaw, looked closely into the face, put their hands to the naked torso.

Daniel said: “Rigor mortis is well established in the top part of the body but the jaw is free.”

“Which means?”

It was Kate who replied. “That someone broke the rigor in the jaw some hours after death. Presumably it was necessary in order to stuff the snake into the mouth. But why bother? Why not wind it round his neck? That would make the point just as well.”

Daniel said: “But less dramatically.”

“Maybe. But forcing open the jaw proves that someone visited the body hours after death. It could have been the murderer—if this is murder. It could have been someone else. We’d never have suspected that there was a second visit to the scene if the snake had been merely wrapped round the neck.”

Daniel said: “Perhaps it’s precisely what the murderer wanted us to know.”

Dalgliesh looked carefully at the snake. It was about five feet long and was obviously intended as a draught excluder. The top of the body was of striped velvet, the bottom of some tougher brown material. Under the softness of the velvet, it felt grainy to his touch.

There were leisurely footsteps approaching through the archives room. Daniel said: “It sounds as if Doc Wardle has arrived.”

He was over six feet three inches tall, his impressive head jutting above wide bony shoulders from which his ill-fitting and thin jacket drooped as if from a wire coat hanger. With the beaked, mottled nose, barking voice and keen darting eyes under bushy brows so luxuriant and vigorous that they seemed to have a life of their own, he looked and sounded like the stereotype of an irascible colonel. His height could have been a disadvantage in a job where corpses often lay
inconveniently concealed in ditches, culverts, cupboards and makeshift graves, but the long body could insinuate itself with unexpected ease, even grace, into the most unaccommodating place. Now he gazed round the room, deploring its stark simplicity and the uninviting business which had dragged him from his microscope, then knelt by the body and let out a lugubrious sigh.

“You’ll want the approximate time of death, of course, Commander. That’s always the first question after ‘Is he dead?’ and, yes, he is dead. That’s the one fact we can all agree about. Body cold, rigor mortis fully established. One interesting exception, but we’ll get on to that later. Suggests he’s been dead about thirteen to fifteen hours. The room’s warm, unnaturally so for the time of the year. Taken the temperature, have you? Sixty-eight degrees. That and the fact that metabolism was probably fairly pronounced at the time of death could delay the onset of rigor. You’ve already discussed the interesting anomaly, no doubt. Still, tell me about it Commander. Tell me about it. Or you, Inspector. I can see you’re longing to.”

Dalgliesh almost expected him to add, “It’s too much to hope that you could keep your hands off him.” He looked at Kate, who said: “The jaw is slack. Rigor mortis begins in the face, jaw and neck at five to seven hours after death and is fully established at about twelve hours. It passes off in the same sequence. So either it is already passing off in the jaw, which would put the time of death earlier by some six hours, or the mouth was forcibly opened. I’d say almost certainly the latter. The facial muscles aren’t slack.”

Wardle said: “I sometimes wonder, Commander, why you bother to call out a pathologist.”

Undeterred, Kate went on: “Which means that the snake’s head was put in the mouth not at the time of death but at least
five to seven hours later. So the cause of death can’t be suffocation, at least not with the snake. But then we never thought that it was.”

Dalgliesh said: “The staining and the position of the body suggests that he died face downward and was subsequently turned over. It would be interesting to know why.”

Kate suggested: “Easier to arrange the snake, stuff the head in his mouth?”

“Perhaps.”

Dalgliesh said no more, while Doc Wardle continued his examination. He had already encroached on the pathologist’s territory more than was prudent. He had little doubt about the cause of death and wondered whether it was perversity rather than caution which was keeping Wardle silent. It wasn’t the first case either of them had seen of carbon monoxide poisoning. The post-mortem lividity, more pronounced than usual because of the blood’s slower liquidation, the cherry-red coloration of the skin, so bright that the body looked as if it had been painted, were unmistakable and surely definitive.

Wardle said: “Copy-book, isn’t it? Hardly needs a forensic pathologist and a commander of the Met to diagnose carbon monoxide. But don’t let’s get too excited. Let’s get him on the table, shall we? Then the lab leeches can take their blood samples and give us an answer we can rely on. Do you want that snake kept in the mouth?”

“I think so. I’d prefer to leave it undisturbed until the autopsy.”

“Which you’ll want done, no doubt, immediately if not sooner.”

“Don’t we always?”

“I can do it this evening. We were due at a dinner party which our hostess has cancelled. Sudden attack of flu, or so she claims. Six-thirty at the usual mortuary if you can make
it. I’ll give them a ring, tell them to expect us. Is the meat wagon on the way?”

Kate said: “It should arrive any moment.”

Dalgliesh was aware that the PM would go ahead whether or not he could make it, but of course he would be there. Wardle was being unexpectedly co-operative, but then he reminded himself that when the chips were down Wardle invariably was.

As soon as he saw Mrs. Demery Dalgliesh knew that he would have no trouble with her; he had dealt with her kind before. The Mrs. Demerys, in his experience, had no hang-ups about the police, whom they assumed in general to be beneficent and on their side, while seeing no reason to treat them with inordinate respect or to credit male officers with more sense than was commonly found in the rest of the sex. They were, no doubt, as ready to lie as other witnesses when it came to protecting their own, but being honest and unburdened by imagination preferred to tell the truth as being on the whole less trouble and, having told it, saw no reason to torture their consciences with doubts about their own motives or the intentions of other people. They were obstinately firm, unshakeable and occasionally irreverent under cross-examination. Dalgliesh suspected that they found men slightly ridiculous, particularly when dressed in gowns and wigs and given to pontificating in arrogant voices over other people’s heads, and had no intention of being lectured to, browbeaten or put down by those irritating creatures.

Now the latest example of this excellent species settled herself opposite him and gave him a frank appraisal from bright intelligent eyes. Her hair, obviously recently dyed, was a bright orange-gold worn in a style seen in Edwardian photographs, swept up firmly at the back and sides and with a fringe of frizzy curls low on the forehead. With her sharp nose and bright, slightly exophthalmic eyes she reminded Dalgliesh of an exotic and intelligent poodle.

Without waiting for him to begin the conversation she said: “I knew yer dad, Mr. Dalgliesh.”

“Did you, Mrs. Demery? When was that? During the war?”

“Yes, that’s right. My twin brother and I was evacuated to your village. Remember the Carter twins? Well, of course, you wouldn’t. You wasn’t even a glint in yer dad’s eye then. Oh, he was a lovely gentleman! We wasn’t billeted at the rectory, they had the unmarried mothers. We was with Miss Pilgrim in her cottage. Oh God, Mr. Dalgliesh, that was a terrible place, that village. I don’t know how you put up with it when you was a kid. Put me off the country for life that village did. Mud, rain and that awful stink you get from the farmyard. And talk about boredom!”