Original Sin (35 page)

“You can hardly expect AD to decide whether pleasing your nephew is more important than disobliging your aunt. If it’s important to you then go. Why make such a big thing about it?”

He didn’t reply, and as they made their way up Hillgate Street she thought, perhaps it’s because, for him, it is a big thing. Thinking back on it, the brief conversation surprised her. This was the first time he had even tentatively opened the door to his private life. And she had thought that, like her, he guarded with almost obsessive watchfulness that essentially inviolate portal. In the three months since he had joined the squad they had never spoken of his Jewishness, nor indeed of much else except work. Was he genuinely seeking advice or using her to clear his thoughts? If he needed advice it was surprising that he sought it from her. She had from the first been aware of a defensiveness in him which if not tactfully handled could become tricky, and she slightly resented the need for tact in a professional relationship. Police work was stressful enough without the need to propitiate or accommodate a colleague. But she liked him or, it might be truer to say, was beginning to like him without being sure why. He was sturdily built, hardly taller than she, strong featured, fair haired and with slate-grey eyes which shone like polished pebbles. When he was angry they could darken almost to black. She recognized both his intelligence and an ambition which mirrored her own. And at least he had no hang-up about working with a woman senior to himself or, if he had, was more skilful than most of his colleagues at concealing it. She told herself, too, that she was beginning to find him sexually attractive as if this formal and regular recognition of the fact could guard her against the follies of propinquity. She had seen too many colleagues make a mess of their private and professional lives to risk that kind of involvement, always so much easier to begin than to end.

She said, wanting to match his confidence and fearing that she had been too dismissive: “There were a dozen different religions among the children at Ancroft Comprehensive. We seemed always to be celebrating some kind of feast or ceremony. Usually it required making a noise and dressing up. The official line was that all religions were equally important. I must say that the result was to leave me with the conviction that they were equally unimportant. I suppose if you don’t teach religion with conviction it becomes just one more boring subject. Perhaps I’m a natural pagan. I don’t go in for all this emphasis on sin, suffering and judgement. If I had a God I’d like Him to be intelligent, cheerful and amusing.”

He said: “I doubt whether you’d find him much of a comfort when they herded you into the gas chambers. You might prefer a god of vengeance. This is the street isn’t it?”

She wondered if he had wearied of the subject or was warning her off his private ground. She said: “Yes. It looks as if the high numbers are at the other end.”

There was an entryphone at the left of the door. Kate pressed the bell and when a masculine voice responded said: “This is Inspector Miskin and Inspector Aaron. We’ve come to see Mr. Farlow. He is expecting us.”

She listened for the buzz which would indicate that the door lock had been released, but instead the same voice said: “I’ll be down.”

The wait of a minute and a half seemed longer. Kate had looked at her watch a second time when the door was opened and they found themselves confronted by a stocky young man, barefoot and wearing tightly fitting trousers in a blue and white check and a white sweatshirt. His hair was cut in very short spikes giving the round head the look of a bristled brush. His nose was wide and chubby and the short round arms with
their patina of brown hair looked as softly plump as a child’s. Kate thought that he had the snug compactness of a toy bear, needing only a price tag dangling from the earring in his left ear to complete the illusion. But the pale blue eyes meeting hers were initially wary, then changed as she met them to frank antagonism, and when he spoke there was no welcome in his voice. Ignoring the proffered warrant card he said: “You’d better come up.”

The narrow hall was very warm, the air permeated with an exotic smell, part floral, part spicy, which Kate would have found agreeable if it had been less strong. They mounted the narrow stairs behind their guide and found themselves in a sitting room which ran the whole length of the house. A curved archway showed where once there must have been the dividing wall. At the rear a small conservatory had been built out to overlook the garden. Kate, who thought that she had brought to an art the ability to take in details of her surroundings without betraying too obvious a curiosity, now noticed nothing but the man they had come to see. He was lying propped up on a single bed to the right of the conservatory and he was obviously dying. She had seen the extremity of emaciation often enough pictured on her television screen; viewing almost routinely in her sitting room the dead eyes and shrivelled limbs of starvation. But now, encountering it for the first time she wondered how any human being could be so diminished and still breathe, how the great eyes, which seemed to be floating free in their sockets, could hold her with such a look of intense, slightly ironic amusement. He was enveloped in a dressing gown of scarlet silk but it could give no glow to the sickly yellow skin. There was a card table close to the head of the bed with a facing chair and two packs of cards ready on the green baize top. It looked as if
Rupert Farlow and his companion were about to begin a game of canasta.

His voice was not strong but it did not waver; the essential self was still alive, still heard in its high clear tones. “Forgive me if I don’t get up. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I’m conserving my energies for ensuring that Ray doesn’t get a sight of my cards. Do sit down if you can find a seat. Would you like a drink? I know you’re not supposed to drink on duty but I insist on regarding this as a social call. Ray, where did you hide the bottle?”

The boy, seated at the card table, made no move. Kate said: “We won’t drink, thank you. And this shouldn’t take long. It’s about Thursday evening.”

“I thought it might be.”

“Mr. de Witt says that he came straight home from the office and was here with you all the evening. Could you confirm that?”

“If that’s what James told you then it’s true. James never lies. That’s one of the things about him that his friends find so trying.”

“And is it true?”

“Naturally. Hasn’t he said so?”

“What time did he arrive home?”

“The usual time. About six-thirty, isn’t it? He’ll tell you. He has told you, surely.”

Kate, who had pushed a heap of magazines to one side, had seated herself on a Victorian sofa opposite the bed. She said: “How long have you lived here with Mr. de Witt?”

Rupert Farlow turned on her his immense, pain-filled eyes, moving his head slowly as if the weight of this denuded skull had become too great for his neck to bear. He said: “Are you asking how long I’ve shared this house as opposed, shall we say, to sharing his life, sharing his bed?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”

“Four months, two weeks, three days. He took me in from the hospice. I’m not sure why. Perhaps being with the dying turns him on. It does some people. There was no shortage of visitors at the hospice, I assure you. We’re the one charity they can always get volunteers for. Sex and death, a great turn-on. We weren’t lovers, incidentally. He’s in love with that boringly conventional woman, Frances Peverell. James is depressingly heterosexual. You needn’t be frightened to shake his hand or even indulge in more intimate physical contact if you’d like to try your luck.”

Daniel said: “He arrived here from work at six-thirty. Did he go out later?”

“Not as far as I know. He went up to bed at about eleven and he was here when I woke at three-thirty and four-fifteen and five forty-five. I made a careful note of the hours. Oh, and he did various messy things for me at about seven o’clock in the morning. He certainly wouldn’t have had time between these hours to get back to Innocent House and dispose of Gerard Etienne. But I may as well warn you that I’m not particularly reliable. I would say that anyway. It isn’t exactly in my interest to have James carted off to prison, is it?”

Daniel said: “Nor in your interest to be an accessory to murder.”

“That isn’t the worry. If you take James you may as well take me. I should be more of an inconvenience to the criminal justice system than you would be to me. That’s the advantage of dying. It hasn’t a lot to be said for it but it does put you beyond the power of the police. Still, I must try to be helpful, mustn’t I? There is one piece of corroborative evidence. You rang and spoke to James, didn’t you, Ray, at about seven-thirty?”

Ray had taken up a second pack of cards and was expertly shuffling them. “Yeah, that’s right, seven-thirty. Rang to enquire. He was here then.”

“There you are then. Wasn’t it clever of me to remember?”

Kate said impulsively: “Are you—surely you must be—the Rupert Farlow who wrote
The Fruit Cage
?”

“Have you read it?”

“A friend gave it to me last Christmas. He managed to find a hardback. Apparently they’re rather sought after. He told me that the first edition was sold out and that they didn’t reprint.”

“A literate cop. I thought you only got them in fiction. Did you like it?”

“Yes, I liked it.” She paused, then added: “I thought it was wonderful.”

He raised his head and looked at her. His voice changed and he spoke so softly she could hardly hear the words. “I was quite pleased with it myself.”

Looking into his eyes she saw, appalled, that they were glistening with tears. The frail body in its crimson shroud trembled and she had an impulse, so strong that she had almost physically to fight it, to move forward and take him in her arms. She looked away and said, trying to make her voice sound normal: “We won’t tire you any more but we may have to come back and ask you to sign a statement.”

“You’ll find me at home. Or if I’m not, you’ll be unlikely to get a statement. Ray will see you out.”

The three of them walked down the stairs in silence. At the door Daniel turned and said: “Mr. de Witt has told us that no one telephoned this house on Thursday evening, so one of you is either lying or mistaken. Is it you?”

The boy shrugged. “OK, maybe I was mistaken. That’s no great deal. It could have been another night.”

“Or no night? It’s dangerous to lie in a murder investigation. Dangerous for you and the innocent. If you have any influence over Mr. Farlow you should tell him that the best way he can help his friend is by telling the truth.”

Ray had his hand on the door. He said: “Don’t give me that crap. Why should I? That’s what the police always say, that you help yourself and the innocent by telling the truth. Telling the truth to the fuzz is in the fuzz’s interest. Don’t try telling us it’s in ours. And if you want to come back, you’d better ring first. He’s too weak to be badgered.”

Daniel opened his mouth, restrained himself and said nothing. The door closed firmly behind them. They walked into Hillgate Street without speaking. Then Kate said: “I shouldn’t have said that about his novel.”

“Why not? What’s the harm—that is, if you were being honest.”

“It’s because I was being honest that I did the harm. It upset him.” She paused then said: “What do you think that particular alibi is worth?”

“Not much. But if he sticks to it, and my guess is he will, we’re in trouble, no matter what else we manage to grub up about de Witt.”

“Not necessarily. It’ll depend on the strength of any further evidence. And if we find the alibi unconvincing so will a jury.”

“If you ever get that chap in front of a jury.”

Kate said: “There’s one thing though. It might just have been chance but I wonder. Obviously that friend of his, Ray, was lying, but how did Farlow know that the alibi was needed for around seven-thirty? Or was it just a lucky guess?”

Dalgliesh’s appointment with Jean-Philippe Etienne, conveyed by Claudia Etienne, had been made for 10.30, a time which necessitated a comfortably early start from London. The time of the appointment had been surprisingly specific for a man whose day was presumably his own. Dalgliesh wondered if it had been chosen to ensure that, even if the interview were more protracted than expected, Etienne would feel under no obligation to invite him to lunch. This, too, suited him. To lunch alone in a strange place where he was unknown and unrecognized, even if the food proved disappointing, a place where he could eat in the assurance that no one in the world knew who he was and that no telephone could reach him, was a rare pleasure, and he intended after the interview to make the most of it. He had a meeting at the Yard at four o’clock and then would go straight to Wapping to hear Kate’s report. There would be no time for a solitary walk or for exploring an interesting-looking church. But after all, a man had to eat.

It was dark when he set out and the day lightened into a dry but sunless morning. But as he shook off the last eastern
suburbs and drove between the muted colours of the Essex countryside, the grey canopy lightened into a white transparent haze with the promise that the sun might eventually break through. Beyond the cropped hedges spiked with the occasional wind-distracted tree, the ploughed fields of autumn, stippled with the first green shoots of winter wheat, stretched to the far horizon. He felt a sense of liberation under the wide East Anglian sky, as if the weight of an old and familiar burden had been temporarily lifted.

He thought about the man he was to meet. He was coming to Othona House with few expectations but he was not coming totally unprepared. There had been no time for detailed research into the man’s history. He had spent some forty minutes in the London Library and had talked on the telephone to an ex-member of the Resistance living in Paris, whose name had been supplied by a contact at the French Embassy. He now knew something of Jean-Philippe Etienne, hero of the Resistance in Vichy France.

Etienne’s father had owned a flourishing newspaper and printing press in Clermont-Ferrand and had been one of the earliest and most active members of the Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée. He had died of cancer in 1941 and his only son, recently married, had both inherited the business and taken over his father’s role in the struggle against the Vichy authorities and the German occupiers. Like his father, he was a fervent Gaullist and strongly anti-Communist, distrustful of the Front National because it was founded by Communists, even though many of his own friends, Christians, socialists, intellectuals, were members of the Front. But he was by nature a loner and worked best with his own small, secretly recruited band. Without quarrelling openly with the major organizations, he had concentrated on propaganda rather than on armed
struggle, circulating his own underground paper, distributing Allied leaflets dropped by air, providing London with regular but invaluable information and attempting even to suborn and demoralize German soldiers by infiltrating propaganda into their camps. His family newspaper continued, but now less a paper of record than a literary journal, its careful, non-political stance enabling Etienne to retain more than his share of printer’s ink and paper, all rationed and closely supervised. By careful husbandry and subterfuge he was able to divert resources to his underground press.