Original Sin Page 3

  She didn’t miss the sudden note of hope in his voice. So he was more worried than he would admit. She said bitterly: ‘That would be a neat way out of our troubles, wouldn’t it? But how could she have been, Gerard? She was off sick, remember, when the Stilgoe proofs were tampered with and visiting an author in Brighton when we lost the illustrations for the Guy Fawkes book. No, she’s in the clear.’

  ‘Of course. Yes, I’d forgotten. Look, I’ll ring the police now while you go round the office and explain what’s happened. That’s less dramatic than getting everyone together for a general announcement. Tell them to stay in their rooms until the body has been removed.’

  She said slowly: ‘There is one thing. I think I was the last person to see her alive.’

  ‘Someone had to be.’

  ‘It was last night, just after seven. I was working late. I came out of the cloakroom on the first floor and saw her going up the stairs. She was carrying a bottle of wine and a glass.’

  ‘You didn’t ask her what she was doing?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. She wasn’t a junior typist. For all I knew she was taking the wine to the archives room to do a spot of secret drinking. If so it was hardly my concern. I thought it odd that she was working so late, but that’s all.’

  ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She didn’t look round.’

  ‘And no one else was about?’

  ‘Not at that hour. I was the last.’

  ‘Then say nothing about it. It isn’t relevant. It doesn’t help.’

  ‘I did have a feeling, though, that there was something strange about her. She did look – well – furtive. She was almost scurrying.’

  ‘That’s hindsight. You didn’t check on the building before you locked up?’

  ‘I looked in her room. The light wasn’t on. There was nothing there, no coat, no bag. I suppose she’d locked them in her cupboard. Obviously I thought she’d left and gone home.’

  ‘You can say that at the inquest, but no more. Don’t mention seeing her earlier. It might only lead the coroner to ask why you didn’t check the top of the building.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But Gerard, if I’m asked when I saw her last …’

  ‘Then lie. But for God’s sake, Claudia, lie convincingly and stick with the lie.’ He moved over to the desk and lifted the receiver. ‘I suppose I’d better dial 999. It’sodd, but this is the first time in my memory that we’ve ever had the police at Innocent House.’

  She turned from the window and looked full at him. ‘Let’s hope that it’s the last.’

  3

  In the outer office Mandy and Miss Blackett sat each at her word processor, each typing, eyes fixed on the screen. Neither spoke. At first Mandy’s fingers had refused to work, trembling uncertainly over the keys as if the letters had been inexplicably transposed and the whole keyboard had become a meaningless jumble of symbols. But she clasped her hands tightly in her lap for half a minute and by an effort of will brought the shaking under control, and when she actually began typing the familiar skill took over and all was well. From time to time she glanced quickly at Miss Blackett. The woman was obviously deeply shocked. The large face with its marsupial cheeks and small, rather obstinate mouth was so white that Mandy feared that at any moment she would slump forward over the keyboard in a faint.

  It was over half an hour since Miss Etienne and her brother had left. Within ten minutes of closing the door Miss Etienne had put her head round it and had said: ‘I’ve asked Mrs Demery to bring you some tea. It’s been a shock for both of you.’

  The tea had come within minutes, carried in by a red-haired woman in a flowered apron who had put down the tray on top of a filing cabinet with the words: ‘I’m not supposed to talk so I won’t. No harm in telling you, though, that the police have just arrived. That’s quick work. No doubt they’ll be wanting tea now.’ She had then disappeared, as if aware that there was more excitement to be had outside the room than in.

  Miss Blackett’s office was an ill-proportioned room, too narrow for its height, the discordancy emphasized by the splendid marble fireplace with its formal patterned frieze, the heavy mantelshelf supported by the heads of two sphinxes. The partition, wooden for the bottom three feet with paned glass above, cut across one of the narrow arched windows as well as bisecting a lozenge-shaped decoration on the ceiling. Mandy thought that if the large room had had to be divided, it could have been done with more sensitivity to the architecture, not to mention Miss Blackett’s convenience. This way it gave the impression that she was grudged even enough space in which to work.

  Another but different oddity was the long snake in striped green velvet curled between the handles of the two top drawers of the steel filing cabinets. Its bright button eyes were crowned with a minute top hat and its forked tongue in red flannel hung from a soft open mouth lined with what looked like pink silk. Mandy had seen similar snakes before; her gran had had one. They were intended to be laid along the bottom of doors to exclude draughts, or wound round the handles to keep the door ajar. But it was a ridiculous object, a kind of kid’s toy, and hardly one she had expected to see in Innocent House. She would have liked to have asked Miss Blackett about it but Miss Etienne had told them not to talk and Miss Blackett was obviously interpreting this as prohibiting all speech except about work.

  The minutes passed silently. Mandy would shortly be at the end of her tape. Then Miss Blackett, looking up, said: ‘You can stop that now. I’ll give you some dictation. Miss Etienne wanted me to test your shorthand.’

  She took one of the firm’s catalogues from her desk drawer, handed Mandy a notebook, moved her chair beside her and began reading in a low voice, hardly moving her almost bloodless lips. Mandy’s fingers automatically formed the familiar hieroglyphics but her mind took in few of the details of the forthcoming non-fiction list. From time to time Miss Blackett’s voice faltered and Mandy knew that she too was listening to the sounds outside. After the initial sinister silence, they could now hear footsteps, half-imagined whispering, and then louder footfalls echoing on the marble and confident masculine voices.

  Miss Blackett, her eyes on the door, said tonelessly: ‘Perhaps you’d read it back now?’

  Mandy read back her shorthand faultlessly. Again there was a silence. Then the door opened and Miss Etienne came in. She said: ‘The police have arrived. They are just waiting for the police surgeon and then they’ll be taking Miss Clements away. You’d better stay here until it’s all clear.’ She looked at Miss Blackett. ‘Have you finished the test?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Claudia.’

  Mandy handed up her typed lists. Miss Etienne glanced at them dismissively and said: ‘Right, the job is yours if you want it. Start tomorrow at nine-thirty.’

  4

  Ten days after Sonia Clements’ suicide and exactly three weeks before the first of the Innocent House murders, Adam Dalgliesh lunched with Conrad Ackroyd at the Cadaver Club. It was at Ackroyd’s invitation, given by telephone with that conspiratorial and slightly portentous air with which all Conrad’s invitations were invested. Even a duty dinner party given to pay off outstanding social obligations promised mystery, cabals, secrets to be imparted to the privileged few. The date suggested was not really convenient and Dalgliesh rearranged his diary with some reluctance while reflecting that one of the disadvantages of advancing age was an increasing disinclination for social engagements combined with an inability to summon the wit or energy to circumvent them. The friendship between them – he supposed the word was appropriate enough; they were certainly not mere acquaintances – was based on the use each occasionally made of the other. Since both acknowledged the fact, neither could see that it needed justification or excuse. Conrad, one of the most notorious and reliable gossips in London, had often been useful to him, notably in the Berowne case. On this occasion Dalgliesh would obviously be expected to confer the benefit, but the demand in whatever form it
came would probably be more irritating than onerous, the food at the Cadaver was excellent and Ackroyd, although he could be facetious, was seldom dull.

  Later he was to see all the horrors that followed as emanating from that perfectly ordinary luncheon, and would find himself thinking: if this were fiction and I were a novelist, that’s where it would all begin.

  The Cadaver Club is not among the most prestigious of London’s private clubs but its coterie of members find it among the most convenient. Built in the 1800s, it was originally the house of a wealthy if not particularly successful barrister who, in 1892, bequeathed it, suitably endowed, to a private club formed some five years earlier which had regularly met in his drawing-room. The club was and remains exclusively masculine, the main qualification for membership being a professional interest in murder. Now, as then, it lists among the members a few retired senior police officers, practising and retired barristers, nearly all of the most distinguished professional and amateur criminologists, crime reporters, and a few eminent crime-novelists, all male and there on sufferance since the club takes the view that, where murder is concerned, fiction cannot compete with real life. The club had recently been in danger of moving from the category of eccentric to the dangerous one of fashionable, a risk which the committee had promptly countered by blackballing the next six applicants for admission. The message was received. As one disgruntled applicant complained, to be blackballed by the Garrick is embarrassing, but to be blackballed by the Cadaver is ridiculous. The club kept itself small and, by its eccentric standards, select.

  Crossing Tavistock Square, in the mellow September sunshine, Dalgliesh wondered how Ackroyd qualified as a member until he recalled the book his host had written five years earlier on three notorious murderers: Hawley Harvey Crippen, Norman Thorne and Patrick Mahon. Ackroyd had sent him a signed copy and Dalgliesh, dutifully reading it, had been surprised at the careful research and the even more careful writing. Ackroyd’s thesis, not entirely original, had been that all three were innocent in the sense that none had intended to kill his victim, and Ackroyd had made a plausible, if not entirely convincing case, based on a detailed examination of the medical and forensic evidence. For Dalgliesh the main message of the book had been that men wishing to be acquitted of murder should avoid dismembering their victims, a practice for which British juries have long demonstrated their distaste.

  They were to meet in the library for a sherry before luncheon and Ackroyd was already there ensconced in one of the leather high-backed chairs. He got to his feet with surprising agility for one of his size and came towards Dalgliesh with small, rather prancing steps, looking not a day older than when they had first met.

  He said: ‘It’s good of you to make time, Adam. I realize how busy you are now. Special adviser to the Commissioner, member of the working party on regional crime squads and an occasional murder investigation to keep your hand in. You mustn’t let them overwork you, dear boy. I’ll ring for sherry. I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you’re still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact. We’ll be downstairs in the Snug.’

  Ackroyd had married in late middle age, to the astonishment and consternation of his friends, and lived in connubial self-sufficiency in an agreeable Edwardian villa in St John’s Wood where he and Nelly Ackroyd devoted themselves to their house and garden, their two Siamese cats and Ackroyd’s largely imaginary ailments. He owned, edited and financed from a substantial private income The Paternoster Review, that iconoclastic mixture of literary articles, reviews and gossip, the last carefully researched, occasionally discreet, more often as malicious as it was accurate. Nelly, when not ministering to her husband’s hypochondria, was an enthusiastic collector of 1920s and 1930s girls’ school stories. The marriage was a success although Conrad’s friends still had to remind themselves to ask after Nelly’s health before inquiring about the cats.

  The last time Dalgliesh had been in the library the visit had been professional and he had been in search of information. But then the case had been murder and he had been greeted by a different host. Little seemed to have changed. The room faced south over the square and this morning was warm with sunlight which, filtering through the fine white curtains, made the thin fire almost unnecessary. Originally the drawing-room, it now served both as sitting-room and library. The walls were lined with mahogany cases which held what was probably the most comprehensive private library of books on crime in London, including all the volumes of the Notable British Trials and Famous Trials series, books on medical jurisprudence, forensic pathology and policing and the club’s few first editions of Conan Doyle, Poe, Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, in a smaller case as if to demonstrate fiction’s innate inferiority to reality. The large mahogany showcase was still in place, filled with articles collected or donated over the years; the prayer book with the signature, Constance Kent, on the flyleaf, the flintlock duelling pistol, supposedly used by the Reverend James Hackman for the murder of Margaret Wray, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, a phial of white powder, allegedly arsenic, found in the possession of Major Herbert Armstrong. There was an addition since Dalgliesh’s last visit. It lay curled, sinister as a lethal snake, in pride of place beneath a label stating that this was the rope with which Crippen had been hanged. Dalgliesh, turning to follow Ackroyd out of the library, mildly suggested that the public display of this distasteful object was barbaric, a protest which Ackroyd as mildly repudiated.

  ‘A trifle morbid, perhaps, but barbaric is going a little far. After all, this isn’t the Athenaeum. It probably does some of the older members good to be reminded of the natural end of their previous professional activities. Would you still be a detective if we hadn’t abolished hanging?’

  ‘I don’t know. Abolition doesn’t help with that particular moral dilemma as far as I’m concerned, since personally I would prefer death to twenty years in prison.’

  ‘Not death by hanging?’

  ‘No, not that.’

  Hanging, for him, as he suspected for most people, had always held a particular horror. Despite the reports of Royal Commissions on capital punishment which claimed for it humanity, speed and the certainty of instantaneous death, it remained for him one of the ugliest forms of judicial execution encumbered with horrifying images as precisely lined as a pen drawing: mass victims in the wake of triumphant armies, the pathetic, half-demented victims of seventeenth-century justice, the muted drums of the quarterdecks of ships where the navy exacted its revenge and issued its warning, women convicted in the eighteenth century of infanticide, that ridiculous but sinister ritual of the small black square formally placed atop the judge’s wig, the concealed but ordinary-looking door leading from the condemned cell to that last brief walk. It was good that they were all part of history. For a moment the Cadaver Club was a less agreeable place in which to lunch, its eccentricities more repugnant than amusing.

  The Snug at the Cadaver Club is well named. It is a small basement room at the rear of the house with two windows and a french door opening on to a narrow paved courtyard bounded by a ten-foot ivied wall. The yard could comfortably accommodate three tables, but the members of the club are not addicted to dining outside, even in the occasional hot spell of an English summer, apparently regarding the habit as a foreign eccentricity incompatible with the proper appreciation of food or the privacy necessary to good talk. To dissuade any member who might be tempted to this indulgence, the courtyard is furnished with terracotta pots of various sizes planted with geraniums and ivy, and space further restricted by a huge stone copy of the Apollo Belvedere propped in the wall against the corner and rumoured to be the gift of an early member of the club whose wife had banished it from their suburban garden. The geraniums were still in full bloom and the bright pinks and reds glowed through the glass enhancing the immediate impression of welcoming domesticity. The room had obviously once been the kitchen and one wall was still fitted
with the original iron grate, its bars and ovens polished now to ebony. The blackened beam above was hung with iron cooking instruments and a row of copper pans, battered but gleaming. An oak dresser ran the whole length of the opposite wall, serving as a receptacle for the display of the gifts and bequests of members which were deemed unsuitable for, or unworthy of, the library cabinet.

  Dalgliesh remembered that the club had an unwritten law that no offering from a member, however inappropriate or bizarre, should be rejected and the dresser, like the whole room, bore witness to the idiosyncratic tastes and hobbies of the donors. Delicate Meissen plates were ranged in incongruous proximity to Victorian ribbon-decorated souvenirs bearing pictures of Brighton and Southend-on-Sea, a toby jug which looked like a fairground trophy stood between a Victorian Staffordshire flatback, obviously original, of Wesley preaching from a double-decker pulpit, and a fine Parian bust of the Duke of Wellington. An assortment of coronation mugs and early Staffordshire cups was suspended in precarious disorder from the hooks. Beside the door hung a painted glass picture of the burial of Princess Charlotte; above it a stuffed elk’s head with an old Panama hat slung on its left horn gazed glassy-eyed with lugubrious disapproval at a large and lurid print of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  The present kitchen was somewhere close; Dalgliesh could hear small agreeable tinklings and from time to time the thud of the food lift descending from the first-floor dining-room. Only one of the four tables was set, the linen immaculate, and Dalgliesh and Ackroyd seated themselves beside the window.