A Taste for Death Page 38

  “Why?”

  “She tried to see him the day before she killed herself. She went to his office, to the Department. It was tactless—the kind of thing only an innocent would do—and she couldn’t have chosen a worse time. He was just due to go into an important meeting. He could have made five minutes to see her, but it wouldn’t have been convenient and it wouldn’t have been prudent. When the young civil servant in his Private Office brought in the news that a Miss Theresa Nolan was in the front hall asking to see him urgently, he said that she was probably one of his constituents and sent down a message asking her to leave her address and he’d get in touch. She went away without saying a word. He never heard from her again. I think he would have got in touch, given time. But he wasn’t given time. The next day she was dead.”

  It was interesting, thought Kate, that this piece of news hadn’t come out when Dalgliesh was interviewing Sir Paul’s civil servants. Those careful men, by training and instinct, protected their Minister. Were they extending this protection beyond death? They had spoken of Paul Berowne’s speed and skill in mastering a complicated submission, but there had been no mention of the inconvenient arrival of an importunate young woman. But perhaps it wasn’t surprising. The officer who had taken the message had been comparatively junior. It was another example of the man who had the interesting information not even being questioned. But even if he had been, he might not have thought it important, unless he had read the inquest report and recognized the girl, and perhaps not even then.

  Carole Washburn still stood gazing into the woodlands, hands deep in her jacket pockets, her shoulders hunched as if there blew from the tangled wilderness the first chill wind of winter. She said:

  “She was slumped against the trunk—that trunk. You can barely see it now, and in high summer it’s invisible. She could have been there for days.”

  Not for long, thought Kate. The smell would soon have alerted the park keepers. Holland Park might be a small paradise in the middle of the city, but it was no different from any other Eden. There were still predators on four legs prowling in the undergrowth and predators on two walking the paths. Death was still death. Bodies still stank when they rotted. She glanced at her companion. Carole Washburn was still staring into the woodland with a painful intensity as if conjuring up that slumped figure at the foot of the silver birch. Then she said:

  “Paul told the truth about what happened, but not the whole truth. There were two letters in her jacket pocket, one addressed to her grandparents asking forgiveness, the one read out at the inquest. But there was another, marked confidential and addressed to Paul. That’s what I’ve come to tell you.”

  “Did you see it? Did he show it to you?” Kate tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice. Could this, she thought, be physical evidence at last?

  “No. He brought it to the flat, but he didn’t give it to me to read. He told me what was in it. Apparently while Theresa was nursing at Pembroke Lodge, she was transferred to night duty. One of the patients had been brought some bottles of champagne by her husband and they’d had a party. It’s that kind of place. Anyway, she was a little tipsy. She was gloating over the baby, a son after three girls, and said ‘thanks to darling Stephen.’ Then she let out that if patients wanted a child of a particular sex, Lampart would do an early amniocentesis and abort an unwanted foetus. Women who hated childbirth and weren’t prepared to go through with it just to get a child of the wrong sex knew where to go.”

  Kate said:

  “But he was—he is—taking a terrible risk.”

  “Not really. Not if there’s never anything on paper, never anything specifically said. Paul wondered if some of the pathological reports were falsified to show an abnormality in the foetus. Most of his lab work is done on the premises. Afterwards Theresa tried to get some evidence, but it wasn’t easy. When she questioned the patient the next day, she laughed and said that she was joking. But she was obviously terrified. That afternoon she discharged herself.”

  So this was the explanation of those mysterious jottings which AD had found in Theresa’s missal. She had been trying to collect evidence about the sex of the patients’ previous children. Kate asked:

  “Did Theresa speak to anyone at Pembroke Lodge?”

  “She daren’t. She knew that someone had libelled Lampart once, and been made bankrupt as a result. He was—he is—notoriously litigious. What could she hope to do, a young nurse, poor, without powerful friends, against a man like that? Who would believe her? And then she found that she was pregnant and had her own problems to think about. How could she speak against what she saw as his sin when she was about to commit mortal sin herself? But when she was preparing to die she felt that she had to do something to put a stop to it. She thought about Paul. He wasn’t weak, he had nothing to fear. He was a Minister, a powerful man. He would see that it was stopped.”

  “And did he?”

  “How could he? She hadn’t any idea what kind of burden she was putting on him. As I said, she was an innocent. They’re always the ones who do the most harm. Lampart is his wife’s lover. If he tackled him, it would look like blackmail or, worse, revenge. And his own guilt over her death, the lie about her being a constituent, his failure to help her, that must have seemed morally worse than anything Lampart was doing.”

  “What did he decide?”

  “He tore up the letter while he was with me and flushed it down the lavatory.”

  “But he was a lawyer. Wasn’t his instinct to preserve evidence?”

  “Not that evidence. He said: ‘If I haven’t the courage to use it, then I must get rid of it. There’s no compromise. Either I do what Theresa wanted or I destroy the evidence.’ I suppose he thought that hoarding it might be degrading, might smack of potential blackmail, carefully preserving evidence against your enemy in case you needed it in future.”

  “Did he ask your advice?”

  “No. Not advice. He needed to think it through, and I was there to listen. That’s what he usually needed me for, to listen. I realize that now. And he knew what I would say, what I wanted. I would say: ‘Divorce Barbara and use that letter to make sure that she and her lover make no trouble over it. Use it to get your freedom.’ I don’t know whether I would have said it so brutally, but he knew that’s what I wanted him to do. Before he destroyed it he made me promise to say nothing.”

  “He took absolutely no action, you’re sure of that?”

  “I think he may have spoken to Lampart. He told me that he would, but we never discussed it again. He was going to tell Lampart what he knew and admit that he had no evidence. And he took his money out of Pembroke Lodge. There was quite a bit, I think, originally invested by his brother.”

  They began walking slowly down the path. Kate thought: Suppose Paul Berowne had spoken to Lampart. With the evidence destroyed, and pathetically inadequate evidence at that, the doctor would have little to fear. A scandal could hurt Paul Berowne as much as it harmed Lampart. But after Sir Paul’s experience in that vestry, things might be very different. Perhaps the changed Berowne, his own career thrown away, would see it as his moral duty to expose and ruin Lampart, evidence or no evidence. And what of Barbara Berowne, faced on the one hand with a husband who had chucked away both job and prospects, and was even proposing to sell their home, and on the other with a lover who might be facing ruin. Kate decided on a blunt question which in other circumstances she might have felt unwise:

  “Do you think Stephen Lampart killed him, with or without her connivance?”

  “No. He’d be a fool to involve her in anything like that. And she hasn’t the courage or the wit to plan it alone. She’s the kind of woman who gets a man to do her dirty work for her and then persuades herself that she knows nothing about it. But I’ve given you a motive, a motive for both of them. It ought to be enough to make life uncomfortable for her.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  The girl turned round on her and said with sudden passion:

&nbs
p; “No, that’s not what I want. I want her to be harried and grilled and frightened. I want her disgraced. I want her arrested, imprisoned for life. I want her dead. It won’t happen, none of it will happen. And the awful thing is that I’ve hurt myself more than I can ever hurt her. Once I’d made that call to you, once I’d said I’d be here, then I knew I had to come. But he told me in confidence, he trusted me, he always trusted me. Now there’s nothing left, nothing I can remember about our loving that will ever be free of pain and guilt.”

  Kate looked at her and saw that she was crying. She was making no sound, not even a sob, but from eyes fixed and staring as if in terror the tears ran in a steady stream over the drained face and the half-open quivering mouth. There was something frightening about this steady, silent grief. Kate thought: There isn’t a man, any man in the world, who is worth this agony. She felt a mixture of sympathy, helplessness and irritation which she recognized was tinged with slight contempt. But the pity won. There was nothing she could find to say which might comfort, but at least she could make some small practical response, ask Carole back to the flat for coffee before they parted. She was opening her mouth to speak, then checked herself. The girl wasn’t a suspect. Even if it were reasonable to think of her in those terms, she had an alibi, a late meeting out of London for the time of death. But suppose Carole were required to give evidence in court, then any suggestion of friendship, of an understanding between them, could be prejudicial to the prosecution. And more than to the prosecution; it could be prejudicial to her own career. It was the kind of sentimental error of judgement which wouldn’t exactly displease Massingham if he came to hear of it. And then she heard herself saying:

  “My flat is very close, just across the avenue. Come and have coffee before you go.”

  In the flat Carole Washburn moved over to the window like an automaton and gazed out without speaking. Then she moved over to the sofa and stood regarding the oil painting on the wall above, three triangles, partly superimposed, in a browny-red, clear green and white. She asked, but not as if she greatly cared:

  “Do you like modern art?”

  “I like experimenting with shapes and different colours laid against each other. I don’t like reproductions and I can’t afford originals, so I paint my own. I don’t suppose they’re art, but I enjoy them.”

  “Where did you learn to paint?”

  “I just bought the canvas and oils and taught myself. The small bedroom is a kind of studio. I haven’t had time to do much lately.”

  “It’s clever. I like the texture of the background.”

  “Done by pressing a tissue over the paint just before it dried. Texture’s the easy part, it’s applying the oil smoothly that I find tricky.”

  She went into the kitchen to grind the coffee beans. Carole followed and stood listlessly watching from the doorway. She waited until the grinder had been switched off, then suddenly asked:

  “What made you choose the police?”

  Kate was tempted to reply: For much the same reasons that you chose the Civil Service. I thought I could do the job. I was ambitious. I prefer order and hierarchy to muddle. Then she wondered whether Carole needed to ask, not answer, questions, to reach out, however tentatively, to another’s life. She said:

  “I didn’t want an office job. I wanted a career where I could earn well from the start, hope for promotion. I suppose I like pitting myself against men. And they were rather against the idea at the school I went to. That was an added inducement.”

  Carole Washburn made no response but watched her for a moment, then drifted back into the sitting room. Kate, hands busy with percolator, mug and saucers, tray and biscuits, found herself recalling that last interview with Miss Shepherd, the careers adviser:

  “We had rather hoped that you would set your sights higher, university, for example. You’re safe, I’d say, for two As and a B at A-level.”

  “I want to start earning.”

  “That’s understandable, Kate, but you’ll get a full grant, remember. You can manage.”

  “I don’t want to have to manage. I want a job, a place of my own. University would be three wasted years.”

  “Education is never wasted, Kate.”

  “I’m not giving up education. I can go on educating myself.”

  “But a policewoman … We had rather hoped that you would choose something more, well, socially significant.”

  “You mean more useful.”

  “More concerned, perhaps, with basic human problems.”

  “I can’t think of anything more basic than helping to make sure that people can walk safely in their own city.”

  “I’m afraid, Kate, that recent research shows that walking in safety has little to do with the level of policing. Why not read that pamphlet in the library, ‘Policing the Inner City: A Socialist Solution’? But if this is your choice, naturally we shall do what we can to help. How do you see yourself? In the Juvenile Bureau?”

  “No. I see myself as a senior detective.” She had been tempted to add mischievously: “And as the first woman Chief Constable.” But that, she had known, was as unrealistic as a recruit to the WRAC seeing herself as commanding the Household Cavalry. Ambition, if it were to be savoured, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility. Even her childhood fantasies had been anchored to reality. The lost father would reappear, loving, prosperous, repentant, but she had never expected him to descend from a Rolls-Royce. And in the end he hadn’t come, and she had known that she had never really expected him.

  There were no sounds from the sitting room, and when she carried in the tray of coffee she saw that Carole was sitting on a chair, stiffly upright, gazing down at her clasped hands. Kate set down the tray, and at once Carole slopped milk into her mug, then clasped both hands round it and gulped avidly, hunched in her chair like an old starved woman.

  It was strange, thought Kate, that the girl seemed more distraught, less under control, than at their first meeting, when they had briefly chatted in her own kitchen. What, she wondered, had happened since then to prompt her betrayal of Berowne’s confidence, to produce this bitterness and resentment? Had she somehow learned that there was no mention of her in his will? But that, surely, was what she must have expected. But perhaps it mattered more than she had ever thought possible, the public and final confirmation that she had always been on the periphery of his life, officially non-existent after death as she had been in their years together. She thought that she had been indispensable to him, that he had found with her, in that ordinary, seldom-visited flat, a still centre of fulfillment and peace. Maybe he had, at least for a few snatched hours. But she hadn’t been indispensable to him; no one had. He had compartmentalized people as he had the rest of his over-organized life, filing them away in the recesses of his mind until he needed what they had to offer. But then, she asked herself, is that so very different from what I do with Alan?

  She knew that she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to ask what had brought the girl to this meeting, and it wasn’t really important to the enquiry. What was important was that Berowne’s confidence had been broken and Lampart’s motive immensely strengthened. But how far did that really get them? One piece of hard physical evidence was worth a dozen motives. They were back to the old question, could Lampart and Barbara Berowne really have had the time? Someone, Berowne or his killer, had been using the washroom at St. Matthew’s at eight o’clock. Three people had seen the gush of water, none of them could be shaken. So either Berowne was alive at eight or the murderer was still on the premises. Either way it was difficult to see how Lampart could have arrived at the Black Swan by eight thirty.

  When she had finished her coffee Carole managed a weak smile and said:

  “Thank you. I’d better go now. I suppose you want all this on paper.”

  “We’d like a statement. You could call in at the Harrow Road station, there’s an incident room there, or come to the Yard.”

  “I’ll call in at Harrow Road. There won
’t be any more questions, will there?”

  “There could be, but I don’t think we’ll want you for long.”

  At the door they stood for a moment facing each other. Suddenly Kate thought that Carole was going to step forward and fall into her arms, and knew that her unpractised arms might even know how to hold and comfort, that she might even be able to find the right words. But the moment passed and she told herself that the thought had been embarrassing and ridiculous. As soon as she was alone she rang Dalgliesh, careful to keep any note of triumph out of her voice:

  “She came, sir. There’s no new physical evidence, but she has strengthened one of the suspects’ motives. I think you’ll want to go to Hampstead.”

  He said:

  “Where are you ringing from? Your flat?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’ll be there in about half an hour.”

  But it was less than that when the bell of the entry phone rang. He said:

  “I’m parked further up Lansdowne Road. Could you come down now?”

  He didn’t suggest that he should come up, and she hadn’t expected it. No senior officer was more scrupulous in respecting the privacy of his subordinates. She told herself that in him it hardly counted for virtue. He was too scrupulously careful to protect his own. Going down in the lift she realized that the more she learned of Berowne, the more alike he seemed to Dalgliesh. She felt a spurt of irritation against both of them. Here waiting for her was a man who might also cause that extremity of grief for a woman unwise enough to love him. She told herself that she was glad that she had that temptation at least well under control.

  four

  Stephen Lampart said:

  “It isn’t true. Theresa Nolan was psychologically disturbed; or, if you prefer bluntness, mad enough to kill herself. Nothing she wrote before that act counts as reliable evidence, even if you have this alleged letter, which I assume you haven’t. I mean, if it were actually in your possession you’d be flourishing it in my face, surely. What you’re relying on is third-hand information. We both know what that’s worth in a court of law, or anywhere else for that matter.”