A Taste for Death Page 11

  The coffee, as always, was the cheapest kind of bottled grains. It was even less palatable now that its strength made the taste discernible. On the brown surface a few globules of half-sour milk swam and coalesced. There was a smear of what looked like lipstick on the rim of the cup and he turned it away from him slowly, so that she shouldn’t notice. He knew that he could have carried the coffee into the comparative serenity of his study, but he hadn’t the courage to get to his feet. And to leave before both cups had been drained would only offend her. She had said, on her first morning with him, “Mrs. Kendrick and me always had a cup of coffee together before I got started, nice and friendly like.” He had had no way of knowing whether this was the truth, but the pattern of spurious intimacy had been established.

  “That Paul Berowne, he was an MP, wasn’t he? Resigned or something. I remember reading about him in the Standard.”

  “Yes, he was an MP.”

  “And a Sir, too, didn’t you say?”

  “A baronet, Mrs. McBride.”

  “What was he doing in the Little Vestry, then? I never knew we had any baronets attending St. Matthew’s.”

  It was too late now to take refuge in discretion.

  “He didn’t. He was just someone I knew. I gave him the key. He wanted to spend some time quietly in the church,” he added, in a vain hope that a confidence so dangerously close to intimacy, to his job as priest, might flatter her, might even silence curiosity. “He wanted somewhere quiet to think, to pray.”

  “In the Little Vestry? A funny place to choose. Why wasn’t he on his knees in a pew? Why wasn’t he in the Lady Chapel in front of the Blessed Sacrament? That’s the proper place to be praying, for them who can’t wait till Sunday.” Her voice with its note of aggrieved disapproval suggested that both the place and the praying were equally reprehensible.

  “He could hardly sleep in the church, Mrs. McBride.”

  “And why should he want to be sleeping? Hadn’t he his own bed to be going home to?”

  Father Barnes’s hands had begun to shake again. The coffee cup lurched in his fingers and he felt two scalding drops on his hand. Carefully, he replaced the cup in its saucer, willing the dreadful shaking to stop. He almost lost her next words.

  “Well, if he did kill himself, he died clean, I’ll say that for him.”

  “Died clean, Mrs. McBride?”

  “Wasn’t he washing himself when Tom and I passed by last night just after eight o’clock? Him or Harry Mack. And you can’t be telling me that Harry went near running water if he could help it. Fairly gushing out of the drainpipe it was. ’Course we thought you were there. ‘Father Barnes is having a stripwash in the vestry kitchen.’ That’s what I said to Tom. ‘Perhaps he’s saving on the gas bill back at the vicarage.’ We had a laugh about it.”

  “When exactly was this, Mrs. McBride?”

  “I told you, Father, just after eight. We were on our way to the Three Feathers. We wouldn’t have been passing the church except that we called in to collect Maggie Sullivan and it’s a shortcut from her place to the Feathers.”

  “But the police ought to know. This could be important information. They’ll be interested in anyone who was near St. Matthew’s last night.”

  “Interested? Is that what they’ll be? And what are you getting at then, Father? You’re saying that Tom and old Maggie Sullivan and I cut his throat for him?”

  “Of course not, Mrs. McBride. That’s ridiculous. But you could be important witnesses. That gushing water. It means that Sir Paul was alive at eight o’clock.”

  “Someone was alive in there at eight and that’s for sure. And a fine rush of water he was using.”

  Father Barnes was struck with a terrible possibility and, without thinking, gave it voice:

  “Did you notice what colour it was?”

  “And what would I be doing peering down drains? Of course I didn’t notice what colour it was. What colour would it be? But it was running away, fast and furious, that’s for sure.”

  Suddenly, she pushed her face over the table towards him. Her huge breasts, so much at odds with the thin face and the bony arms, were pushed into great half moons by the table edge. Her coffee cup clattered in the saucer. The sharp little eyes widened. She whispered with alliterative relish:

  “Father, are you saying that it would be running red?”

  He said weakly:

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “You think he was in there, do you, Father, washing his bloody hands? Oh, my God! Suppose he had come out and seen us. We could have been murdered on the spot, Tom and Maggie and me. He could have slit our throats for us then and there and thrown us in the canal, likely as not. Holy Mother of God!”

  The conversation had become bizarre, unreal, totally uncontrollable. He had been told by the police to say as little as possible to anyone. He had meant to say nothing. But now she knew the names of the victims, she knew who had found them, she knew that the door had been unlocked, she knew how they had died, although surely he hadn’t mentioned the slitting of throats. But that could have been guesswork. A knife was, after all, a more likely weapon in London than a gun. She knew all that and, more, she had actually been passing at the time. He gazed back at her across the stained table with appalled eyes, linked to her by that bloodstained gurgle of water which was gushing through both their minds, sharing the same dreadful imagining of that silently emerging figure, the raised and bloody knife. And he was aware of something else. Horrible as was the deed that bound them in a fascinated confederacy of blood, they were, for the first time, having a conversation. The eyes, which met his across the table top, were bright with horror and with an excitement which was too close to relish to be comfortable. But the familiar glance of insolence and contempt had gone. He could almost deceive himself that she was confiding in him. The relief was so great that he found that his hand was creeping across the table towards hers in some gesture of mutual comfort. Ashamed, he quickly drew it back.

  She said:

  “Father, what shall we do?” It was the first time she had ever asked him that question. He was surprised at the confidence in his voice.

  “The police have given me a special telephone number. I think we ought to ring now, at once. They’ll send someone round, either here or to your house. After all, you and Tom and Maggie are very important witnesses. And then when we’ve done that, I shall need to be undisturbed in the study. I wasn’t able to say Mass. I shall read Morning Prayer.”

  “Yes, Father,” she said, her voice almost meek. And there was something else he ought to do. Strange that the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. Surely it must be his duty to call in the next day or so on Paul Berowne’s wife and his family. Now that he knew what had to be done, it was remarkable how different he felt. A biblical phrase dropped into his mind, “Doing evil that good may come.” But he quickly put it away from him. It was too close to blasphemy to be comfortable.

  BOOK TWO

  Next of Kin

  one

  After leaving the church Dalgliesh went briefly back to the Yard to pick up his file on Theresa Nolan and Diana Travers, and it was after midday before he arrived at 62 Campden Hill Square. He had brought Kate with him, leaving Massingham to supervise what remained to be done at the church. Kate had told him that at present there were only women in the house, and it seemed sensible that he should have a woman with him, particularly as it was Kate who had first broken the news. It was not a decision he had expected Massingham to welcome, and nor had he. These first interviews with the next of kin were crucial and Massingham wanted to be there. He would work with Kate Miskin loyally and conscientiously because he respected her as a detective and that was what he was required to do. But Dalgliesh knew that Massingham still half-regretted the days when women police officers were content to find lost children, search female prisoners, reform prostitutes, comfort the bereaved and, if they hankered for the excitement of criminal investigation, were suitably occupied coping wi
th the peccadillos of juvenile delinquents. And, as Dalgliesh had heard him argue, for all their demands for equality of status and opportunity, putting them in the front line behind the riot shields, taking the petrol bombs, the hurled stones and, now, the bullets, only made the job of their male colleagues even more onerous. In Massingham’s view the instinct to protect a woman in moments of high danger was deep-seated and ineradicable, and the world would be a worse place if it weren’t. He had, as Dalgliesh knew, grudgingly respected Kate’s ability to look down at the butchered bodies in St. Matthew’s vestry and not be sick, but he hadn’t liked her the better for it.

  He knew that he would find no police officer at the house. Lady Ursula had gently but firmly rejected the suggestion that someone should stay. Kate had reported her words:

  “You are not, presumably, expecting this murderer, if he exists, to turn his attention to the rest of the family. That being so, I hardly see the need for police protection. You, I am sure, have a better use for your manpower and I would prefer not to have an officer sitting in the hall like a bailiff.”

  She had, too, insisted on herself breaking the news to her daughter-in-law and the housekeeper. Kate was given no opportunity to observe the reaction of anyone other than Lady Ursula to Paul Berowne’s death.

  Campden Hill Square lay in its midday calm, an urban oasis of greenery and Georgian elegance rising from the ceaseless grind and roar of Holland Park Avenue. An early-morning mist had cleared and a fugitive sun glinted on leaves which were only now beginning to yellow and which hung in heavy swathes, almost motionless in the still air. Dalgliesh couldn’t remember when he had last seen the Berowne house. Living as he did high above the Thames on the fringe of the city, this wasn’t his part of London. But the house, one of the rare examples of Sir John Soane’s domestic architecture, was pictured in so many books on the capital’s buildings that its elegant eccentricity was as familiar to him as if he commonly walked these streets and squares. The conventional Georgian houses each side of it were as high, but its neo-classical facade in Portland stone and brick dominated the terrace and the whole square, inalienably a part of them, yet looking almost arrogantly unique.

  He stood for a minute looking up at it, Kate unspeaking at his side. On the second floor rose three very high, curved windows, originally, he suspected, an open loggia but now glazed and fronted with a low stone balustrade. Between the windows, mounted on incongruous corbels which looked more Gothic than neo-classical, were stone caryatids, whose flowing lines reenforced by the typically Soanian pilasters at the corners of the house drew the eye upwards, past the square windows of the third storey to an attic storey faced in brick and, finally, to the stone balustrade with its row of curved shells echoing the curve of the lower windows. As he stood contemplating it, as if hesitating to violate its calm, there was a moment of extraordinary silence in which even the muted roar of the traffic in the avenue was stilled and in which it seemed to him that two images, the shining facade of the house and that dusty blood-boltered room in Paddington, were held suspended out of time, then fused so that the stones were blood-splattered, the caryatids dripped red. And then the traffic lights released the stream of cars, time moved on, the house lay uncontaminated in its pale pristine silence. But he had no sense that they were being watched, that somewhere behind these walls and the windows glinting in the transitory sun there were people waiting for him in anxiety, grief, perhaps in fear. Even when he rang the doorbell it was a full two minutes before the door was opened and he faced a woman who he knew must be Evelyn Matlock.

  She was, he guessed, in her late thirties, and was uncompromisingly plain in a way it struck him few women nowadays were. A small sharp nose was imbedded between pudgy cheeks on which the threads of broken veins were emphasized rather than disguised by a thin crust of make-up. She had a primly censorious mouth above a slightly receding chin already showing the first slackness of a dewlap. Her hair, which looked as if it had been inexpertly permed, was pulled back at the sides but frizzed over the high forehead rather in the poodle-like fashion of an Edwardian. But as she stood aside to let them enter he saw that her wrists and ankles were slim and delicate, curiously at odds with the sturdy body, heavy-busted, almost voluptuous, under the high-necked blouse. He remembered what Paul Berowne had said of her. Here was the woman whose father he had unsuccessfully defended, to whom he had given a home and a job, who was supposed to be devoted to him. If that was true, she was concealing her grief at his death with remarkable stoicism. A police officer, he thought, is like a visiting doctor. One is greeted with no ordinary emotions. He was used to seeing relief, apprehension, dislike, even hatred; but now, for a moment, he saw in her eyes naked fear. It passed almost at once and gave place to what seemed to him an assumed and slightly truculent indifference, but it had been there. She turned her back on them, saying:

  “Lady Ursula is expecting you, Commander. Will you please follow me.”

  The words, spoken in a high, rather forced voice, had the repressive authority of a nurse-receptionist greeting a patient from whom she expects nothing but trouble. They passed through the outer vestibule, then under the fluted dome of the inner hall. To their left, the finely wrought balustrade of a stone cantilevered staircase rose like a border of black lace. Miss Matlock opened the double door to the right and stood back to let them enter. She said:

  “If you will wait here I will let Lady Ursula know that you have arrived.”

  The room in which they found themselves ran the whole width of the house and was obviously both the formal dining room and library. It was full of light. At the front, two high curved windows gave a view of the square garden while at the rear one huge expanse of glass looked out over a stone wall with three niches, each containing a marble statue: Venus, naked, one hand delicately shielding the mons veneris, one pointing at her left nipple; a second female figure, half robed and wearing a wreath of flowers; and between them, Apollo with his lyre, laurel-crowned. The two sections of the room were divided by projecting piers formed of mahogany glass-fronted bookcases from which sprang a canopy of three semicircular arches decorated and painted in green and gold. High bookcases lined the library walls and stood between the windows, each topped with a marble bust. The volumes, bound in green leather and tooled in gold, were identical in size and fitted the bookshelves so precisely that the effect was more of an artist’s trompe l’oeil than of a working library. Between the shelves and in the recesses over them were mirrors so that the rich splendour of the room seemed to be endlessly reflected, a vista of painted ceilings, leather books, of marble, gleaming mahogany and glass. It was difficult to imagine the room being used for dining, or indeed, for any purpose other than the admiring contemplation of the architect’s romantic obsession with spatial surprise. The oval dining table stood before the rear window, but it held in the middle a model of the house on a low plinth as if it were a museum exhibit, and the eight high-backed dining chairs had been set back against the walls. Over the marble fireplace was a portrait, presumably of the baronet who had commissioned the house. Here the delicate fastidiousness of the painting in the National Portrait Gallery was metamorphosed into a sturdier nineteenth-century elegance, but with the unmistakable Berowne features still arrogantly confident above the faultlessly tied cravat. Looking up at it, Dalgliesh said:

  “Lady Ursula Berowne, remind me of what she said, Kate.”

  “She said: ‘After the first death there is no other.’ It sounded like a quotation.”

  “It is a quotation.” He added without explanation, “Her elder son was killed in Northern Ireland. Do you like this room?”

  “If I wanted to settle down for a quiet read I’d prefer the Kensington public library. It’s for show rather than use, isn’t it? Odd idea, having a library and dining room in one.” She added: “But I suppose it’s splendid in its way. Not exactly cosy, though. I wonder if anyone has ever been murdered for a house.”

  It was a long speech for Kate.

  Dalg
liesh said:

  “I can’t say that I remember a case. It might be a more rational motive than murdering for a person; less risk of subsequent disenchantment.”

  “Less chance of betrayal, too, sir.”

  Miss Matlock appeared in the doorway and said with cold formality:

  “Lady Ursula is ready to see you now. Her sitting room is on the top floor, but there is a lift. Would you please follow me.”

  They could have been a couple of unpromising applicants for a minor domestic job. The lift was an elegant gilded birdcage in which they were borne slowly upwards in a repressive silence. When it jerked to a stop they were led out into a narrow carpeted passage. Miss Matlock opened a door immediately opposite and announced:

  “Commander Dalgliesh and Miss Miskin are here, Lady Ursula.” Then without waiting for them to step into the room, she turned and left.

  And now, as he entered Lady Ursula Berowne’s sitting room, Dalgliesh felt for the first time that he was in a private house, that this was a room which the owner had made peculiarly her own. The two high, beautifully proportioned windows with their twelve panes gave a view of sky delicately laced with the top boughs of the trees, and the long narrow room was full of light. Lady Ursula was sitting very upright to the right of the fireplace, her back to the window.

  There was an ebony cane with a gold knob leaning against her chair. She did not rise when they came in but held out her hand as Kate introduced Dalgliesh. Her clasp, quickly released, was surprisingly strong, but it was still like holding briefly a disconnected set of bones loosely enclosed in dry suede. She gave Kate a quick appraising glance and a nod which could have been acknowledgement or approval and said: