The Murder Room Read online

  “Unless we change, the numbers will continue to fall. Frankly there are two problems: we’re not giving value for money and we don’t know what we’re for. Both are fatal. We can’t go on living in the past and the present political setup is on our side. There is no advantage for parents in sending girls abroad now—this generation of rich kids skis at Klosters every winter and they’ve been travelling since childhood. The world is a dangerous place and it’s likely to become more dangerous. Parents will become increasingly anxious to have their daughters finished in England. And what do we mean by being finished? The concept is out of date, almost risible to the young. It’s no use offering the usual regimen of cooking, flower arranging, childcare, deportment, with a little culture thrown in. They can get most of that, if they want it, free from local authority evening classes. And we need to be seen as discriminating. No more automatic entrance just because Daddy can pay the fees. No more morons; they aren’t teachable and they don’t want to learn. They pull down and irritate the rest. No more psychological misfits—this isn’t an expensive psychiatric unit. And no more delinquents. Shoplifting from Harrods or Harvey Nicks is no different from stealing from Woolworth’s, even if Mummy has an account and Daddy can pay off the police.”

  Lady Swathling had sighed. “There was a time when one could rely on people from a certain background to behave in a certain way.”

  “Could one? I hadn’t noticed it.” She had gone on inexorably: “Above all we need to give value for money. At the end of the year or eighteen-month course the students should have something to show for their efforts. We have to justify our fees—God knows they’re high enough. First of all they need to be computer-literate. Secretarial and administrative skills will always have value. Then we need to ensure they’re fluent in one foreign language. If they already are, we teach them a second. Cooking should be included; it’s popular, useful and socially fashionable, and it should be taught to cordon bleu standards. The other subjects—social skills, childcare, deportment—are matters of choice. There will be no problem with the Arts. We have access to private collections and London is on our doorstep. I thought we might arrange exchanges with schools in Paris, Madrid and Rome.”

  Lady Swathling had said, “Can we afford it?”

  “It will be a struggle for the first two years, but after that the reforms will begin to pay. When a girl says, ‘I had a year at Swathling’s,’ that should mean something, and something marketable. Once we achieve the prestige, the numbers will follow.”

  And they had followed. Swathling’s became what Caroline Dupayne had planned it to be. Lady Swathling, who never forgot an injury, also never forgot a benefit. Caroline Dupayne had become at first joint Principal and then partner. Lady Swathling knew that the school would flourish without her, but not without her colleague. There was still the final acknowledgement of her debt of gratitude. She could bequeath both house and school to Caroline. She herself had no children and no close relatives; there would be no one to challenge the will. And now that Caroline was a widow—Raymond Pratt had smashed himself into a tree in his Mercedes in 1998—no husband to grab his share. She hadn’t yet spoken to Caroline. There was, after all, no hurry. They were doing very well as they were. And she enjoyed the knowledge that, in this one thing at least, she held the power.

  They went methodically through the business of the morning. Lady Swathling said, “You’re happy about this new girl, Marcia Collinson?”

  “Perfectly. Her mother’s a fool, but she isn’t. She tried for Oxford but didn’t make it. There’s no point in her going to a crammer, she already has four top-grade A levels. She’ll try again next year in the hope that persistence will be rewarded. Apparently it’s Oxford or nowhere, which is hardly rational given the competition. She’d have a better chance, of course, if she came from the state system, and I don’t suppose a year here will help much. Naturally I didn’t point that out. She wants to become proficient on a computer, that’s her top priority. And her language choice is Chinese.”

  “Won’t that present a problem?”

  “I don’t think so. I know a postgraduate in London who would be glad to take individual sessions. The girl has no interest in a gap year abroad. She seems devoid of a social conscience. She said she had enough of that at school, and in any case service abroad was only a form of charitable imperialism. She mouths the fashionable shibboleths, but she has a brain.”

  “Oh well, if her parents can pay the fees.”

  They moved on. During the break for coffee, Lady Swathling said, “I met Celia Mellock in Harvey Nichols last week. She brought up the Dupayne Museum in the conversation. I can’t think why. After all, she was only with us for two terms. She said it was odd the students never visited it.”

  Caroline said, “The art of the inter-war years isn’t on the syllabus. The modern girl isn’t much interested in the 1920s and ’30s. As you know, we are specializing this term in modern art. A visit to the Dupayne could be arranged, but the time would be more profitably spent at Tate Modern.”

  Lady Swathling said, “She said one curious thing as she left—that the Dupayne would certainly repay a visit, and that she was grateful to you for 1996. She didn’t explain. I was wondering what she meant.”

  Lady Swathling’s memory could be erratic, but never about figures or dates. Caroline reached to refill her coffee cup. “Nothing, I imagine. I’d never even heard of her in 1996. She was always an attention-seeker. The usual story: an only child with wealthy parents who gave her everything except their time.”

  “Do you intend to keep the museum on? Isn’t there some problem about the lease?”

  The question sounded no more than an innocuous enquiry. Caroline Dupayne knew that it was more than that. Lady Swathling had always valued the school’s tenuous relationship with a prestigious if small museum. It was one reason why she had strongly approved of her partner’s decision to revert to her family name.

  Caroline said, “There’s no trouble over the lease. My elder brother and I are determined. The Dupayne Museum will continue.”

  Lady Swathling was persistent. “And your younger brother?”

  “Neville will, of course, agree. The new lease will be signed.”

  5

  The time was five o’clock on Sunday 27 October, the place Cambridge. Under Garrett Hostel Bridge the willows dragged their frail wands in the deep ochre of the stream. Looking over the bridge, Emma Lavenham, Lecturer in English Literature, and her friend Clara Beckwith watched as the yellow leaves drifted downstream like the last remnant of autumn. Emma could never pass over a foot-bridge without pausing to gaze down at the water, but now Clara straightened up.

  “Better keep going. That last haul up Station Road always takes longer than one expects.”

  She had come from London to spend the day with Emma in Cambridge. It had been a time of talking, eating and strolling in the Fellows’ garden. By mid-afternoon they had felt the need of more vigorous exercise and had decided to walk to the station by the longest route, along the backs of the colleges then through the city. Emma loved Cambridge at the start of the academic year. Her mental picture of summer was of shimmering stones seen through a haze of heat, of shadowed lawns, flowers casting their scent against sun-burnished walls, of punts being driven with practised energy through sparkling water or rocking gently under laden boughs, of distant dance music and calling voices. But it was not her favourite term; there was something frenetic, self-consciously youthful and deeply anxiety-making about those summer weeks. There was the trauma of tripos and feverish last-minute revision, the ruthless seeking after pleasures soon to be relinquished and the melancholy knowledge of imminent partings. She preferred the first term of the academic year with the interest of getting to know the new entrants, the drawing of curtains shutting out the darkening evenings and the first stars, the distant jangle of discordant bells and, as now, the Cambridge smell of river, mist and loamy soil. The fall had come late this year and after one of the most beaut
iful autumns she could remember. But it had begun at last. The streetlights shone on a thin golden brown carpet of leaves. She felt the crunch of them under her feet and could taste it in the air, the first sour-sweet smell of winter.

  Emma was wearing a long tweed coat, high leather boots and was hatless, the coat’s upturned collar framing her face. Clara, three inches shorter, stumped along beside her friend. She wore a short fleece-lined jacket and had a striped woollen cap drawn down over a fringe of straight dark hair. Her weekend bag was slung over her shoulder. It held books she had bought in Cambridge, but she carried it as easily as if it were weightless.

  Clara had fallen in love with Emma during their first term. It was not the first time she had been strongly attracted to a woman obviously heterosexual, but she had accepted disappointment with her usual wry stoicism and set herself out to win Emma’s friendship. She had read mathematics and had achieved her first class degree, saying that a second was too boring to be contemplated and only a first or a third were worth enduring three years’ hard labour in the damp city of the plains. Since in modern Cambridge it was impossible to avoid being seriously overworked, one might as well make the extra effort and get a first. She had no wish for an academic career, asserting that academe, if persisted in, made the men either sour or pompous while the women, unless other interests supervened, became more than eccentric. After university she had moved promptly to London where, to Emma’s surprise and a little to her own, she was pursuing a successful and highly profitable career as a fund manager in the City. The full tide of prosperity had ebbed, throwing up its human jetsam of failure and disillusionment, but Clara had survived. She had earlier explained to Emma her unexpected choice of career.

  “I earn this totally unreasonable salary but I live comfortably on a third of it and invest the rest. The chaps get stressed because they’re handed half-million-pound bonuses and begin to live like someone who earns close on a million a year—the expensive house, the expensive car, the expensive clothes, the expensive woman, the drinking. Then of course they’re terrified of being sacked. The company can fire me tomorrow and I wouldn’t particularly care. I aim to make three million and then I’ll get out and do something I really want to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Annie and I thought we might open a restaurant close to the campus of one of the modern universities. There you’ve got a captive group of customers desperate for decent food at prices they can afford; homemade soup, salads that are more than some chopped lettuce and half a tomato. Mostly vegetarian, of course, but imaginative vegetarian. I thought maybe in Sussex, on the downs outside Falmer. It’s an idea. Annie’s quite keen except that she feels we should do something socially useful.”

  “Surely few things are more socially useful than providing the young with decent food at reasonable prices.”

  “When it comes to spending a million, Annie thinks internationally. She has something of a Mother Teresa complex.”

  They walked on in companionable silence. Then Clara asked, “How did Giles take your defection?”

  “As you’d expect, badly. His face showed a succession of emotions—surprise, disbelief, self-pity and anger. He looked like an actor trying out facial expressions in front of a mirror. I wondered how on earth I could have fancied him.”

  “But you did.”

  “Oh yes, that wasn’t the problem.”

  “He thought you loved him.”

  “No he didn’t. He thought I found him as fascinating as he found himself and that I wouldn’t be able to resist marrying him if he condescended to ask me.”

  Clara laughed. “Careful, Emma, that sounds like bitterness.”

  “No, only honesty. Neither of us has anything to be proud of. We used each other. He was my defence. I was Giles’s girl; that made me untouchable. The primacy of the dominant male is accepted even in the academic jungle. I was left in peace to concentrate on what really mattered—my work. It wasn’t admirable but it wasn’t dishonest. I never told him I loved him. I’ve never spoken those words to anyone.”

  “And now you want to speak them and to hear them, and from a police officer and a poet of all people. I suppose the poet is the more understandable. But what sort of life would you have? How much time have you spent together since that first meeting? Seven dates arranged, four actually achieved. Adam Dalgliesh might be happy to be at the call of the Home Secretary, the Commissioner and the senior officials at the Home Office, but I don’t see why you should be. His life is in London, yours is here.”

  Emma said, “It isn’t only Adam. I had to cancel once.”

  “Four dates, apart from that disorienting business when you first met. Murder is hardly an orthodox introduction. You can’t possibly know him.”

  “I can know enough. I can’t know everything, no one can. Loving him doesn’t give me the right to walk in and out of his mind as if it were my room at college. He’s the most private person I’ve ever met. But I know the things about him that matter.”

  But did she? Emma asked herself. He was intimate with those dark crevices of the human mind where horrors lurked which she couldn’t begin to comprehend. Not even that appalling scene in the church at St. Anselm’s had shown her the worst that human beings could do to each other. She knew about those horrors from literature; he explored them daily in his work. Sometimes, waking from sleep in the early hours, the vision she had of him was of the dark face masked, the hands smooth and impersonal in the sleek latex gloves. What hadn’t those hands touched? She rehearsed the questions she wondered if she would ever be able to ask: Why do you do it? Is it necessary to your poetry? Why did you choose this job? Or did it choose you?

  She said, “There’s this woman detective who works with him. Kate Miskin. She’s on his team. I watched them together. All right, he was her senior, she called him sir, but there was a companionship, an intimacy which seemed to exclude everyone who wasn’t a police officer. That’s his world. I’m not part of it. I won’t ever be.”

  “I don’t know why you should want to be. It’s a pretty murky world, and he’s not part of yours.”

  “But he could be. He’s a poet. He understands my world. We can talk about it—we do talk about it. But we don’t talk about his. I haven’t even been in his flat. I know he lives in Queenhithe above the Thames, but I haven’t seen it. I can only imagine it. That’s part of his world too. If ever he asks me there I know everything will be all right, that he wants me to be part of his life.”

  “Perhaps he’ll ask you next Friday night. When are you thinking of coming up, by the way?”

  “I thought I’d take an afternoon train and arrive at Putney at about six if you’ll be home by then. Adam says he’ll call for me at eight-fifteen, if that’s all right by you.”

  “To save you the hassle of getting across London to the restaurant on your own. He’s been well brought-up. Will he arrive with a propitiatory bunch of red roses?”

  Emma laughed. “No, he won’t arrive with flowers, and if he did they wouldn’t be red roses.”

  They had reached the war memorial at the end of Station Road. On his decorated plinth the statue of the young warrior strode with magnificent insouciance to his death. When Emma’s father had been Master of his college, her nurse would take her and her sister for walks in the nearby botanical garden. On the way home they would make a short diversion so that the children could obey the nurse’s injunction to wave to the soldier. The nurse, a widow of the Second World War, had long been dead, as were Emma’s mother and sister. Only her father, living his solitary life among his books in a mansion flat in Marylebone, remained of the family. But Emma never passed the memorial without the pang of guilt that she no longer waved. Irrationally it seemed a wilful disrespect for more than the war dead generations.

  On the station platform lovers were already indulging in their protracted goodbyes. Several couples strolled hand in hand. Another, the girl pressed hard against the waiting-room wall, looked as motionless as if they had b
een glued together.

  Emma said suddenly, “Doesn’t the very thought of it bore you, the sexual merry-go-round?”

  “Meaning?”

  “The modern mating ritual. You know how it is. You’ve probably seen more of it in London than I have here. Girl meets boy. They fancy each other. They go to bed, sometimes after the first date. It either works out and they become a recognized couple or it doesn’t. Sometimes it ends the following morning when she sees the state of the bathroom, the difficulty of getting him out of bed to go to work and his obvious acceptance that she’ll be the one to squeeze the oranges and make the coffee. If it works out he eventually moves in with her. It’s usually that way round, isn’t it? Have you ever met a case where she moves in with him?”

  Clara said, “Maggie Foster moved in with her chap. You probably don’t know her. Read maths at King’s and got a two-one. But it’s generally believed that Greg’s flat was more convenient for his work and he couldn’t be bothered to rehang his eighteenth-century water-colours.”

  “All right, I’ll give you Maggie Foster. So they move in together. That too either works out or it doesn’t, only the split, of course, is messier, more expensive and invariably bitter. It’s usually because one of them wants a commitment the other can’t give. Or it does work out. They decide on a recognized partnership or a marriage, usually because the woman gets broody. Mother starts planning the wedding, father calculates the cost, auntie buys a new hat. General relief all round. One more successful skirmish against moral and social chaos.”

  Clara laughed. “Well, it’s better than the mating ritual of our grandmothers’ generation. My grandmother kept a diary and it’s all there. She was the daughter of a highly successful solicitor living in Leamington Spa. There wasn’t any question of a job for her, of course. After school she lived at home doing the kind of things daughters did while their brothers were at university: arranging the flowers, handing round the cups at tea-parties, a little respectable charity work but not the kind that brought her into touch with the more sordid reality of poverty, answering the boring family letters her mother couldn’t be bothered with, helping with the garden fête. Meanwhile, all the mothers organized a social life to ensure their daughters met the right men. Tennis parties, small private dances, garden parties. At twenty-eight a girl started getting anxious; at thirty she was on the shelf. God help the ones who were plain or awkward or shy.”