The Murder Room (25 page)

Walking to the car, which by some miracle wasn't adorned with a parking ticket, Benton-Smith said, “We didn't get much out of him.”

“Probably all there was to get. And what was the point in asking him if Dupayne was depressed? He hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. Anyway, we know this isn't suicide. And you needn't have been so sharp with him about the possible passenger. That type doesn't respond to bullying.”

Benton-Smith said stiffly, “I didn't think I was bullying, sir.”

“No, but you were getting close to it. Move over, Sergeant. I'll drive.”

11

It was not the first time that Dalgliesh had visited St. Oswald's. He could recall two past occasions when, as a detective sergeant, he had gone there to interview victims of attempted murder. The hospital was in a square in North West London and when he reached the open iron gates he saw that outwardly little had changed. The nineteenth-century building of ochre-coloured brick was massive and with its square towers, great rounded arches and narrow pointed windows, looked more like a Victorian educational establishment or a gloomy conglomeration of churches than it did a hospital.

He found a space for his Jaguar without difficulty in the visitors' parking lot and passed under a ponderous porch and through doors that opened automatically at his approach. Inside there had been changes. There was now a large and modern reception desk with two clerks on duty and, to the right of the entrance, an open door leading into a waiting-room furnished with leather armchairs and a low table holding magazines.

He didn't report at the desk; experience had taught him that few people entering a hospital with assurance were challenged. Among a multitude of signs was one with an arrow pointing the way to Psychiatric Outpatients and he followed it along the vinyl-floored corridor. The shabbiness he remembered had vanished. The walls were freshly painted and were hung with a succession of framed sepia photographs of the hospital's history. The children's ward of 1870 showed rail cots, children with bandaged heads and frail unsmiling faces, Victorian lady visitors in their bustles and immense hats, and nurses with their ankle-length uniforms and high goffered caps. There were pictures of the bomb-damaged hospital during the V2 bombardment, and others showing the hospital tennis and football teams, the open days, the occasional visit by royalty.

The Psychiatric Outpatients department was in the basement and he followed the arrow down the stairs into a waiting-room which was now almost deserted. There was another reception desk with an attractive Asian girl sitting at a computer. Dalgliesh said that he had an appointment with Mrs. Angela Faraday and, smiling, she pointed the way to a far door and said that Mrs. Faraday's office was on the left. He knocked and the voice he had heard on the phone immediately answered.

The room was small and overcrowded with filing cabinets. There was hardly room for the one desk, the desk chair and a single armchair. The window gave a view of a back wall in the same ochre brick. Beneath it was a narrow flower bed, in which a large hydrangea, now leafless and dry-stemmed, showed its clumps of dried flowers, the petals delicately coloured and thin as paper. Beside it in the gritty earth was an unpruned rosebush, its leaves brown and shrivelled and with one cankered pink bud.

The woman who held out her hand to him was, he guessed, in her early thirties. He saw a pale, fine-featured, intelligent face. The mouth was small but full-lipped. The dark hair fell like feathers over the high forehead and the cheeks. Her eyes were huge under the high curved brows and he thought he had never seen such pain in any human eyes. She held her thin body tautly as if only containing by an act of will a grief which threatened to shake it into a flood of tears.

She said, “Won't you sit down?,” and pointed to the upright armchair set beside the desk.

Dalgliesh hesitated for a moment, thinking that this must be Neville Dupayne's chair, but there was no other and he told himself that the instinctive initial reluctance had been a folly.

She left him to begin and he said, “It's good of you to see me. Dr. Dupayne's death must have been a terrible shock for people who knew him and worked with him. When did you hear?”

“On the local radio news early this morning. They didn't give any details, just that a man had been burnt to death in a car at the Dupayne Museum. I knew then that it was Neville.”

She didn't look at him but the hands lying in her lap clenched and unclenched. She said, “Please tell me, I have to know. Was he murdered?”

“We can't be absolutely sure at present. I think it likely that he was. In any case we have to treat his death as suspicious. If this proves to be murder, then we need to know as much as possible about the victim. That's why I'm here. His daughter said that you'd worked for her father for ten years. One gets to know a person well in ten years. I'm hoping you can help me to know him better.”

She looked at him and their eyes held. Hers was a gaze of extraordinary intensity. He felt himself to be under judgement. But there was something more; an appeal for some unspoken assurance that she could talk freely and be understood.

He waited. Then she said simply, “I loved him. For six years we've been lovers. That stopped three months ago. The sex stopped, the loving didn't. I think Neville was relieved. He worried about the constant need for secrecy, the deceit. He was finding it difficult enough to cope without that. It was one anxiety less when I went back to Selwyn. Well, I'd never really left him. I think one of the reasons I married Selwyn was because I knew in my heart that Neville wouldn't want me for ever.”

Dalgliesh asked gently, “Did the affair end by your wish or by his?”

“By both, but mine chiefly. My husband is a good and kind man and I love him. Not perhaps the way I love Neville, but we were happy—we are happy. And then there's Selwyn's mother. You'll probably meet her. She's a volunteer at the Dupayne. She's not an easy woman but she adores him and she's been good to us, buying us a house, the car, being happy for him. I began to realize how much hurt I would cause. Selwyn is one of those people who love absolutely. He's not very clever but he knows about love. He would never be suspicious, never even imagine that I could deceive him. I began to feel that what Neville and I had was wrong. I don't think he felt the same, he hadn't a wife to worry about, and he and his daughter aren't close. But he wasn't really distressed when the affair ended. You see, I was always more in love with him than he was with me. His life was so over-busy, so full of stress that it was probably a relief to him not to have to worry anymore—worry about my happiness, about being found out.”

“And were you? Found out?”

“Not as far as I know. Hospitals are great places for gossip—I suppose most institutions are—but we were very careful. I don't think anyone knew. And now he's dead and there's no one I can talk to about him. It's odd, isn't it, that it's a relief just speaking of him to you. He was a good man, Commander, and a good psychiatrist. He didn't think he was. He never quite managed to be as detached as he needed to be for his own peace of mind. He cared too much and he cared terribly about the state of the psychiatric service. Here we are, one of the richest countries in the world, and we can't look after the old, the mentally sick, those who've spent a lifetime working, contributing, coping with hardship and poverty. And now, when they're old and disturbed and need loving care, perhaps a hospital bed, we offer them so little. He cared, too, about his schizophrenic patients, the ones who won't take their medication. He thought there ought to be refuges, places where they could be admitted until the crisis was over, somewhere they might even be relieved to go to. And then there are the Alzheimer's cases. Some of their carers are coping with appalling problems. He couldn't detach himself from their suffering.”

Dalgliesh said, “Given that he was chronically overworked, perhaps it isn't surprising that he didn't want to devote more time to the museum than he was already.”

“He didn't devote any time to it. He went to the quarterly trustees' meeting, he more or less had to. Otherwise he kept away and left the place to his sister to manage.”

“Not interested?”

“Stronger than that. He hated the place. He said it had robbed him of enough of his life already.”

“Did he explain what he meant by that?”

“He was thinking of his childhood. He didn't talk about it much, but it wasn't happy. There wasn't enough love. His father gave all his energy to the museum. Money too, although he must have spent a bit on their education—prep schools, public schools, universities. Neville did talk sometimes about his mother, but I gained the impression that she wasn't a strong woman, psychologically or physically. She was too afraid of his father to protect the children.”

Dalgliesh thought,
There wasn't enough love—but then is there ever? And protect against what? Violence, abuse, neglect?

She went on, “Neville thought we were too obsessed with the past—history, tradition, the things we collect. He said we clutter ourselves with dead lives, dead ideas, instead of coping with the problems of the present. But he was obsessed with his own past. You can't write it out, can you? It's over but it's still with us. It's the same whether it's a country or a person. It happened. It made us what we are, we have to understand it.”

Dalgliesh thought,
Neville Dupayne was a psychiatrist. He must have understood better than most how these strong indestructible tentacles can quiver into life and fasten round the mind.

Now that she had begun talking he could see that she couldn't stop. “I'm not explaining this very well. It's just something I feel. And we didn't talk about it often, his childhood, his failed marriage, the museum. There wasn't time. When we did manage an evening together all he wanted really was to eat, make love, sleep. He didn't want to remember, he wanted relief. At least I could give him that. Sometimes, after we'd made love, I used to think that any woman could have done the same for him. Lying there I felt more apart from him than I did in the clinic taking dictation, discussing his week's appointments. When you love someone you long to meet your lover's every need, but you can't, can you? No one can. We can only give what the other person is willing to take. I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm telling you all this.”

Dalgliesh thought,
Hasn't it always been like this? People tell me things. I don't need to probe or question, they tell.
It had begun when he was a young detective sergeant and then it had surprised and intrigued him, feeding his poetry, bringing the half-shameful realization that for a detective it would be a useful gift. The pity was there. He had known from childhood the heartbreak of life and that, too, had fed the poetry. He thought,
I have taken people's confidences and used them to fasten gyves round their wrists.

He said, “Do you think the pressures of his work, the unhappiness he shared, made him unwilling to go on living?”

“To kill himself? To commit suicide? Never!” Now her voice was emphatic. “Never, never. Suicide was something we talked about occasionally. He was strongly against it. I'm not thinking of the suicide of the very old or the terminally ill; we can all understand that. I'm talking of the young. Neville said suicide was often an act of aggression and left terrible guilt for family and friends. He wouldn't leave his daughter a legacy like that.”

Dalgliesh said quietly, “Thank you. That's very helpful. There's one other thing. We know that Dr. Dupayne kept his Jaguar in a garage at the museum and drove it away shortly after six o'clock every Friday evening, returning late on Sunday or early on Monday morning. Obviously we need to know where he went on those weekends, whether there was someone he regularly visited.”

“You mean whether he had another life, a secret life apart from me?”

“Whether those weekends had anything to do with his death. His daughter has no idea where he went and seems not to have inquired.”

Mrs. Faraday got up suddenly from her chair and walked over to the window. There was a moment's silence, then she said, “No, she wouldn't. I don't suppose any of the family asked or cared. They led separate lives, rather like royalty. I've often wondered whether this is because of their father. Neville sometimes spoke of him. I don't know why he bothered to have children. His passion was the museum, acquiring exhibits, spending money on it. Neville loved his daughter but felt guilty about her. You see, he was afraid that he'd behaved in exactly the same way, that he'd given to his job the care and attention he should have given to Sarah. I think that's why he wanted the museum closed. That, and perhaps because he needed some money.”

Dalgliesh said, “For himself?”

“No, for her.”

She had returned to her desk. He said, “And did he ever tell you where he went on those weekends?”

“Not where he went, but what he did. The weekends were his liberation. He loved that car. He wasn't mechanical and he couldn't repair it or service it, but he loved driving it. Every Friday he drove into the country and walked. He walked for the whole of Saturday and Sunday. He would stay at small inns, country hotels, sometimes in a bed and breakfast. He liked good food and comfort so he chose carefully. But he didn't repeat his visits too regularly. He didn't want people to be curious about him or to ask questions. He would walk in the Wye valley, along the Dorset coast, sometimes by the sea in Norfolk or Suffolk. It was those solitary walks away from people, away from the phone, away from the city, which kept him sane.”

She had been looking down at her hands clasped before her on the desk. But now she raised her eyes and gazed at Dalgliesh and he saw again, with a stab of pity, the dark wells of inconsolable pain. Her voice was close to a cry. “He went alone, always alone. That's what he needed and that's what hurt. He didn't even want me. After I married it wouldn't have been easy to get away, but I could have managed it. We had so little time together, just snatched hours in his flat. But never the weekends. Never those long hours together, walking, talking, spending the whole night in the same bed. Never, never.”

Dalgliesh said gently, “Did you ever ask him why not?”

“No. I was too afraid that he might tell me the truth, that his solitude was more necessary to him than I was.” She paused, and then said, “But there's something I did do. He'll never know and it doesn't matter now. I arranged to be free next weekend. It meant lying to my husband and mother-in-law, but I did it. I was going to ask Neville to take me with him, just once. It would only have been for once, I would have promised him that. If I could have been with him for just that one weekend I think I would have been willing to let go.”