The Murder Room (4 page)

Dalgliesh said, “And what makes it specific to its age?”

“Rouse had served in the war and was badly injured in the head. His behaviour at the scene and at the trial was exceptionally stupid. I see Rouse as a casualty of the First World War.”

He might well have been, thought Dalgliesh. Certainly his behaviour after the murder and his extraordinary arrogance in the witness-box had done more than the prosecuting counsel to put the rope around his neck. It would have been interesting to know the extent of his war service and how he had been wounded. Few men who had served long in Flanders could have returned home completely normal.

He left Ackroyd to his researches and went in search of the library. It was on the west side of the same floor, a long room with two windows facing the car-park and a third overlooking the drive. The walls were lined with mahogany bookcases with three jutting bays and there was a long rectangular table in the middle of the room. At a smaller table near the window there was a photocopying machine with a notice saying that copies were ten pence per sheet. Beside it sat an elderly woman writing labels for exhibits. The room wasn't cold but she wore a muffler and mittens. As Dalgliesh entered, she said in a mellifluous, educated voice, “Some of the glass cabinets are locked but I have the key if you want to handle the books. Copies of
The Times
and other newspapers are in the basement.”

Dalgliesh had some difficulty in knowing how to reply. With the picture gallery still to see, he had no time to examine the books at leisure, but he didn't wish his visit to seem peremptory, the mere indulgence of a whim. He said, “It's my first visit so I'm just making a preliminary tour. But thank you.”

He walked slowly along the bookcases. Here, the majority in first editions, were the major novelists of the inter-war years and some whose names were unknown to him. The obvious names were represented: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Wyndham Lewis, Rosamond Lehmann, a roll-call of the variety and richness of those turbulent years. The poetry section had a case of its own which contained first editions of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden and Louis MacNeice. There were also, he saw, the war poets published in the 1920s: Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon. He wished that he had hours at his disposal in which the books could be handled and read. But even had there been time, the presence of that silent working woman, her cramped mittened hands moving laboriously, would have inhibited him. He liked to be alone when he was reading.

He moved to the end of the central table where half a dozen copies of
The Strand Magazine
were fanned out, their covers, differently coloured, all showing pictures of the Strand, the scene slightly varying with each copy. Dalgliesh picked up the magazine for May 1922. The cover advertised stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Gilbert Frankau and E. Phillips Oppenheim and a special article by Arnold Bennett. But it was in the preliminary pages of advertisements that the early 1920s most came alive. The cigarettes at five shillings and sixpence per hundred, the bedroom that could be furnished for £36 and the concerned husband, worried about what was obviously his wife's lack of libido, restoring her to her usual good spirits with a surreptitious pinch of liver salts in the early morning tea.

And now he went down to the picture gallery. It was at once apparent that it had been designed for the serious student. Each picture had beside it a framed card which listed the main galleries where other examples of the artist's work could be seen and display cabinets on each side of the fireplace contained letters, manuscripts and catalogues. They drew Dalgliesh's mind back to the library. It was on those shelves, surely, that the 1920s and '30s were better represented. It was the writers—Joyce, Waugh, Huxley—not the artists who had most forcibly interpreted and influenced those confused inter-war years. Moving slowly past the landscapes of Paul and John Nash, it seemed to him that the 1914 through 1918 cataclysm of blood and death had bred a nostalgic yearning for an England of rural peace. Here was a prelapsarian landscape re-created in tranquillity and painted in a style which, for all its diversity and originality, was strongly traditional. It was a landscape without figures; the neatly piled logs against farmhouse walls, the tilled fields under unthreatening skies, the empty stretch of beach, were all poignant reminders of the dead generation. He could believe that they had done their day's work, hung up their tools and gently taken their leave of life. Yet surely no landscape was so precise, so perfectly ordered. These fields had been tilled, not for posterity, but for a barren changelessness. In Flanders nature had been riven apart, violated and corrupted. Here all had been restored to an imaginary and eternal placidity. He had not expected to find traditional landscape painting so unsettling.

It was with a sense of relief that he moved to the religious anomalies of Stanley Spencer, the idiosyncratic portraits of Percy Wyndham Lewis and the more tremulous, casually painted portraits of Duncan Grant. Most of the painters were familiar to Dalgliesh. Nearly all gave pleasure, although he felt that these were artists strongly influenced by Continental and far greater painters. Max Dupayne had not been able to acquire the most notably impressive of each artist's work but he had succeeded in putting together a collection which, in its diversity, was representative of the art of the inter-war years, and this, after all, had been his aim.

When he entered the gallery, there was one other visitor already there: a thin young man wearing jeans, worn trainers and a thick anorak. Beneath its bulky weight, his legs looked as thin as sticks. Moving closer to him, Dalgliesh saw a pale, delicate face. His hair was obscured by a woollen cap drawn over the ears. Ever since Dalgliesh had entered the room the boy had been standing motionless in front of a war painting by Paul Nash. It was one Dalgliesh also wanted to study and they stood for a minute silently, side by side.

The painting, which was named
Passchendaele 2,
was unknown to him. It was all there, the horror, the futility and the pain, fixed in the bodies of those unknown, ungainly dead. Here at last was a picture which spoke with a more powerful resonance than any words. It was not his war, nor his father's. It was now almost beyond the memory of living men and women. Yet had any modern conflict produced such universal grieving?

They stood together in silent contemplation. Dalgliesh was about to move away when the young man said, “Do you think this is a good picture?”

It was a serious question but it provoked in Dalgliesh a wariness, a reluctance to appear knowledgeable. He said, “I'm not an artist, nor an art historian. I think it's a very good picture. I'd like it on my wall.”

And for all its darkness it would, he thought, find its place in that uncluttered flat above the Thames. Emma would be happy for it to be there, would share what he was feeling now.

The young man said, “It used to hang on my grandad's wall in Suffolk. He bought it to remember his dad, my great-grandad. He was killed at Passchendaele.”

“How did it get here?”

“Max Dupayne wanted it. He waited until Grandad was desperate for money and then he bought it. He got it cheap.”

Dalgliesh could think of no appropriate response, and after a minute he said, “Do you come to look at it often?”

“Yes. They can't stop me doing that. When I'm on job-seekers' allowance I don't have to pay.” Then, turning aside, he said, “Please forget what I've said. I've never told anyone before. I'm glad you like it.”

And then he was gone. Was it perhaps that moment of unspoken communication before the picture which had provoked such an unexpected confidence? He might, of course, be lying, but Dalgliesh didn't think so. It made him wonder how scrupulous Max Dupayne had been in pursuit of his obsession. He decided to say nothing to Ackroyd about the encounter and after one more slow circuit of the room took the wide staircase up from the hall back to the Murder Room.

Conrad, seated in one of the armchairs beside the fireplace and with a number of books and periodicals spread out on the table before him, was not yet ready to leave. He said, “Did you know that there's now another suspect for the Wallace murder? He didn't come to light until recently.”

“Yes,” said Dalgliesh, “I had heard. He was called Parry, wasn't he? But he's dead too. You're not going to solve the crime now, Conrad. And I thought that it was murder related to its time not the solution which interested you.”

“One gets drawn in deeper, dear boy. Still, you're quite right. I mustn't allow myself to be diverted. Don't worry if you have to leave. I'm just going to the library to make some copies and I'll be here until the place closes at five. Miss Godby has kindly offered me a lift as far as Hampstead tube station. A kind heart beats in that formidable bosom.”

A few minutes later Dalgliesh was on his way, his mind preoccupied with what he'd seen. Those inter-war years in which England, her memory seared by the horrors of Flanders and a generation lost, had stumbled through near dishonour to confront and overcome a greater danger, had been two decades of extraordinary social change and diversity. But he wondered why Max Dupayne had found them fascinating enough to dedicate his life to recording them. It had, after all, been his own time he was memorializing. He would have bought the first-edition fiction and preserved the papers and the journals as they appeared.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Was that the reason? Was it he himself that he needed to immortalize? Was this museum, founded by him and in his name, his personal alms to oblivion? Perhaps this was one attraction of all museums. The generations die, but what they made, what they painted and wrote, strove for and achieved, was still here, at least in part. In making memorials, not only to the famous but to the legions of the anonymous dead, were we hoping to ensure our own vicarious immortality?

But he was in no mood now to indulge in thoughts of the past. This coming weekend would be one of sustained writing and in the week ahead he would be working twelve-hour days. But next Saturday and Sunday were free and nothing was going to interfere with that. He would see Emma and the thought of her would illuminate the whole week as it now filled him with hope. He felt as vulnerable as a boy in love for the first time and knew that he faced the same terror; that once the word was spoken she would reject him. But they could not go on as they were. Somehow he had to find the courage to risk that rejection, to accept the momentous presumption that Emma might love him. Next weekend he would find the time, the place, and most importantly the words which would part them or bring them together at last.

Suddenly he noticed that the blue label was still stuck to his jacket. He ripped it off, crumpled it into a ball and slipped it into his pocket. He was glad to have visited the museum. He had enjoyed a new experience and had admired much that he had seen. But he told himself that he would not return.

3

In his office overlooking St. James's Park, the eldest of the Dupaynes was clearing his desk. He did it as he had done everything in his official life, methodically, with thought and without hurry. There was little to dispose of, less to take away with him; almost all record of his official life had already been removed. An hour earlier the last file, containing his final minutes, had been collected by the uniformed messenger as quietly and unceremoniously as if this final emptying of his out-tray had been no different from any other. His few personal books had been gradually removed from the bookcase which now held only official publications, the criminal statistics, White Papers, Archbold and copies of recent legislation. Other hands would be placing personal volumes on the empty shelves. He thought he knew whose. In his view it was an unmerited promotion, premature, not yet earned, but then his successor had earlier been marked out as one of the fortunate ones who, in the jargon of the Service, were the designated high-fliers.

So once had he been marked. By the time he had reached the rank of Assistant Secretary, he had been spoken of as a possible Head of Department. If all had gone well he would be leaving now with his K, Sir Marcus Dupayne, with a string of City companies ready to offer him directorships. That was what he had expected, what Alison had expected. Sometimes he thought that this was why she had married him. His own professional ambition had been strong but disciplined, aware always of the unpredictability of success. His wife's had been rampant, embarrassingly public. Every social occasion had been arranged with his success in view. A dinner party wasn't a meeting of friends, it was a ploy in a carefully thought-out campaign. The fact that nothing she could do would ever influence his career, that his life outside the office was of no importance provided it was not publicly disgraceful, never entered her consciousness. He would occasionally say, “I'm not aiming to end up as a bishop, a headmaster or a Minister. I'm not going to be damned or demoted because the claret was corked.”

He had come with a duster in his briefcase and now checked that all the drawers of the desk had been cleared. In the bottom left-hand drawer his exploring hand found a stub of pencil. How many years, he wondered, had that lain there? He examined his fingers, crusted with grey dust, and wiped them on the duster which he folded carefully over the dirt and placed in his canvas bag. His briefcase he would leave on his desk. The gold royal insignia on the case had faded now, but it brought a memory: the day when he had first been issued with an official black briefcase, its insignia bright as a badge of office.

He had held the obligatory farewell drinks party before luncheon. The Permanent Secretary had paid the expected compliments with a suspicious fluency; he had done this before. A Minister had put in an appearance and only once had glanced discreetly at his watch. There had been an atmosphere of spurious conviviality interspersed with moments of silent constraint. By one-thirty people had begun to drift unobtrusively away. It was, after all, Friday. Their weekend arrangements beckoned.