Death of an Expert Witness

BOOK ONE A Call to Murder

The call had come at six-twelve precisely. It was second nature to him now to note the time by the illuminated dial of his electric bedside clock before he had switched on his lamp, a second after he had felt for and silenced the raucous insistence of the telephone. It seldom had to ring more than once, but every time he dreaded that the peal might have woken Nell. The caller was familiar, the summons expected.

It was Detective Inspector Doyle. The voice, with its softly intimidating suggestion of Irish burr, came to him strong and confident, as if Doyle's great bulk loomed over the bed.

"Doc Kerrison?" The interrogation was surely unnecessary. Who else in this half-empty, echoing house would be answering at six-twelve in the morning? He made no reply and the voice went on.

"We've got a body. On the wasteland--a clunch field--a mile north-east of Muddington. A girl. Strangulation by the look of it. It's probably pretty straightforward but as it's close ..."

"All right, I'll come." The voice expressed neither relief nor gratitude. Why should it? Didn't he always come when summoned? He was paid well enough for his availability, but that wasn't the only reason why he was so obsessively conscientious. Doyle, he suspected, would have respected him more if he had occasionally been less accommodating. He would have respected himself more.

"It's the first turn off the A142 after you leave Gibbet's Cross. I'll have a man posted."

He replaced the receiver, swung his legs out of bed and, reaching for his pencil and pad, noted the details while they were still fresh in his mind. In a clunch field. That probably meant mud, particularly after yesterday's rain. The window was slightly open at the bottom. He pushed it open, wincing at the rasp of the wood, and put out his head.

The rich loamy smell of the fen autumn night washed over his face; strong, yet fresh. The rain had stopped and the sky was a tumult of grey clouds through which the moon, now almost full, reeled like a pale demented ghost. His mind stretched out over the deserted fields and the desolate dykes to the wide moon-bleached sands of the Wash and the creeping fringes of the North Sea. He could fancy that he smelt its medicinal tang in the rain-washed air. Somewhere out there in the darkness, surrounded by the paraphernalia of violent death, was a body.

His mind recalled the familiar ambience of his trade: men moving like black shadows behind the glare of the arc-lights, the police cars tidily parked; the flap of the screens, desultory voices conferring as they watched for the first lights of his approaching car. Already they would be consulting their watches, calculating how long it would be before he could make it.

Shutting the window with careful hands, he tugged trousers over his pyjamas and pulled a polo-necked sweater over his head. Then he picked up his torch, switched off the bedside light and made his way downstairs, treading warily and keeping close to the wall to avoid the creaking treads. But there was no sound from Eleanor's room. He let his mind wander down the twenty yards of landing and the three stairs to the back bedroom where his sixteen-year-old daughter lay. She was always a light sleeper, uncannily sensitive even in sleep to the ring of the telephone. But she couldn't possibly have heard. He had no need to worry about three-year-old William. Once asleep, he never woke before morning.

Actions as well as thought were patterned. His routine never varied.

He went first to the small washroom near the back door where his Wellington boots, the thick red socks protruding like a pair of amputated feet, stood ready at the door. Pushing up his sleeves over the elbow, he swilled cold water over his hands and arms, then bent down and sluiced the whole of his head. He performed this act of almost ceremonial cleansing before and after every case. He had long ago ceased to ask himself why. It had become as comforting and necessary as a religious ritual, the brief preliminary washing which was like a dedication, the final ablution which was both a necessary chore and an absolution, as if by wiping the smell of his job from his body he could cleanse it from his mind. The water splashed heavily against the glass, and rising to fumble for a towel, he saw his face distorted, the mouth hanging, the heavily lidded eyes half hidden by glistening weeds of black hair like the surfacing visage of a drowned man. The melancholy of the early hours took hold of him. He thought:

"I'm forty-five next week and what have I achieved? This house, two children, a failed marriage, and a job which I'm frightened of losing, because it's the only thing I've made a success of." The Old Rectory, inherited from his father, was unmortgaged, unencumbered. This wasn't true, he thought, of anything else in his anxiety-ridden life. Love, the lack of it, the growing need, the sudden terrifying hope of it, was only a burden. Even his job, the territory where he moved with most assurance, was hedged with anxiety.

As he dried his hands carefully, finger by finger, the old familiar worry returned, heavy as a morbid growth. He hadn't yet been appointed as Home Office Pathologist in succession to old Dr. Stoddard and he very much wanted to be. The official appointment wouldn't give him more money. The police already employed him on an item of service basis, and paid generously enough for each case. That and the fees for coroner's postmortems provided an income which was one of the reasons why his professional colleagues in the pathology department of the district general hospital both envied and resented his unpredictable absences on police work, the long days in court, the inevitable publicity.

Yes, the appointment was important to him. If the Home Office looked elsewhere it would be difficult to justify to the Area Health Authority a continuing private arrangement with the local Force. He wasn't even sure that they would want him.

He knew himself to be a good forensic pathologist, reliable, more than competent professionally, almost obsessively thorough and painstaking, a convincing and unflappable witness. The Force knew that their meticulously erected edifices of proof wouldn't fall to pieces under cross-examination when he was in the witness box, although he sometimes suspected that they found him too scrupulous for complete comfort. But he hadn't the easy masculine camaraderie, the blend of cynicism and machismo which had bound old Doc Stoddard so strongly to the Force. If they had to do without him he wouldn't be greatly missed, and he doubted whether they would put them selves out to keep him.

The garage light was blinding. The overhead door swung up easily to his touch and the light splayed out over the gravel of the drive and the unkempt verges of silvered grass. But at least the light wouldn't wake Nell. Her bedroom was at the back of the house. Before switching on the engine he studied his maps. Muddington. It was a town on the edge of his area, about seventeen miles to the north-west, less than half an hour's drive each way if he were lucky. If the laboratory scientists were there already and Lorrimer, the Senior Biologist, never missed a homicide if he could help it then there mightn't be much for him to do. Allow, say, an hour at the scene, and with luck he would be home again before Nell woke and she need never know that he had been away. He switched off the garage light. Carefully, as if the gentleness of his touch could somehow silence the engine, he turned on the ignition. The Rover moved slowly into the night.

Standing motionless behind the curtains on the front landing, her right hand cupped round the pale flicker of her night-light, Eleanor Kerrison watched the sudden red blaze of the Rover's rear lights as the car stopped at the gate before turning left and accelerating out of sight.

She waited until the glare of the head lights had finally faded from view. Then she turned and made her way along the corridor to William's room. She knew that he wouldn't have woken. His sleep was a sensuous gluttony of oblivion. And while he slept she knew that he was safe, that she could be free of anxiety. To watch him then was such a mingled joy of yearning and pity that sometimes, frightened of her waking thoughts but more afraid of the nightmares of sleep, she would carry her night-light into his bedroom and crouch by the cot for an hour or more, her eyes fixed on his sleeping face, her restlessness soothed by his peace.

Although she knew that he wouldn't wake, she turned the handle of the door as carefully as if expecting it to explode. The night-light, burning steadily in its saucer, was unnecessary, its yellow gleam extinguished by the moonlight which streamed through the uncurtained windows. William, bagged in his grubby sleeping suit, lay as always on his back, both arms flung above his head. His head had flopped to one side and the thin neck, stretched so still that she could see the pulse beat, looked too fragile to bear the weight of his head. His lips were slightly parted, and she could neither see nor hear the thin whisper of breath. As she watched he suddenly opened sightless eyes, rolled them upwards, then closed them with a sigh and fell again into his little semblance of death.

She closed the door softly behind her and went back to her own room next door. Dragging the eiderdown from her bed, she wrapped it round her shoulders and shuffled her way down the landing to the top of the stairs. The heavily studded oak banister curved down into the darkness of the hall from which the tick of the grandfather clock sounded as unnaturally loud and ominous as a time bomb. The atmosphere of the house came up to her nostrils, sour as a stale vacuum flask, redolent with the sad effluent of stodgy clerical dinners. Placing the night-light against the wall she sat down on the top stair, humping the eiderdown high over her shoulders and gazing into the darkness. The stair-carpet was gritty to her bare soles. Miss Willard never vacuumed it, pleading that her heart couldn't stand the strain of lugging the cleaner from step to step, and her father never appeared to notice the drabness or dirtiness of his house. He was, after all, so seldom there. Sitting rigid in the darkness she thought of her father. Perhaps he was already at the scene of crime. It depended how far he had to drive.

If it were on the very fringe of his area he might not be back until lunchtime.

But what she hoped was that he would return before breakfast so that he would find her here, crouched lonely and exhausted on the top stair, waiting for him, frightened because he had left her alone. He would put away the car quietly, leaving the garage open in case the thud of the door woke her, then sneak in like a thief at the back door. She would hear the swirl of water from the downstairs washroom, his footsteps on the tessellated floor of the hall. Then he would look up and see her. He would come running up the stairs, torn between anxiety for her and fear of disturbing Miss Willard, his face suddenly old with weariness and concern as he put his arms round her trembling shoulders.

"Nell, darling, how long have you been here? You shouldn't be out of bed. You'll get cold. Come on, old girl, there's nothing to be frightened of now. I'm back. Look, I'll take you back to bed again and you try to get some sleep. I'll see to the breakfast. Suppose I bring it up on a tray in about half an hour. How would you like that?"

And he would guide her back to her room, cajoling, murmuring reassurance, trying to pretend that he wasn't frightened, frightened that she would start to cry for her mother, that Miss Willard would appear, censorious and whining, complaining that she had to get her sleep, that the precarious little household would fall apart and he would be parted from William. It was William he loved, William he couldn't bear to lose. And he could only keep William and stop the court from giving Mummy custody if she were at home to help care for her brother.

She thought about the day ahead. It was Wednesday, a grey day. Not a black day when she wouldn't see her father at all, but not a yellow day like Sunday, when, unless on call, he might be there most of the time.

In the morning, immediately after breakfast, he would be at the public mortuary doing the post-mortem. There would be other autopsies too, those who had died in hospital, the old, the suicides, the accident victims. But the body he was probably examining now would be first on the mortuary table. Murder has priority. Wasn't that what they always said at the Lab? She mused, but without real curiosity, on what he might be doing at this very moment to that unknown cadaver, young or old, male or female. Whatever he was doing, the body wouldn't feel it, wouldn't know about it. The dead had nothing to be frightened of anymore, and there was nothing to fear from them. It was the living who held the power to hurt. And suddenly two shadows moved in the darkness of the hall, and she heard her mother's voice, pitched high, frighteningly unfamiliar, a strained, cracked, alien voice.

"Always your job! Your bloody job! And my God, no wonder you're good at it. You haven't the guts to be a real doctor. You made one wrong diagnosis early on and that was the end, wasn't it? You couldn't take responsibility for living bodies, blood that can flow, nerves that can actually feel. All you're fit for is messing about with the dead. It makes you feel good, doesn't it, the way they defer to you? The phone calls at all hours of the day and night, the police escort. Never mind that I'm buried alive here in this bloody fen with your children. You don't even see me any more. I'd be more interesting to you if I were dead and laid out on your slab. At least you'd be forced to take some notice of me."

Then the low defensive mumble of her father's voice, dispirited, abject. She had listened in the darkness and wanted to call out to him:

"Don't answer her like that! Don't sound so defeated! Can't you understand that it only makes her despise you more?"

His words had come to her in snatches, barely audible.

"It's my job. It's what I do best. It's all that I can do." And then, more clearly. "It's what keeps us."

"Not me. Not any longer." And then the slam of the door. The memory was so vivid that for a second she thought she heard the echo of the slam. She stumbled to her feet, clutching the eiderdown around her, and opened her mouth to call to them. But then she saw that the hall was empty. There was nothing but the faint image of the stained glass in the front door where the moonlight streamed through, the ticking of the clock, the bundle of coats hanging from the hall stand She sank back again on to the stair.

And then she remembered. There was something she had to do. Slipping her hand into her dressing-gown pocket she felt the cold slippery plasticine of her model of Dr. Lorrimer. Care fully she drew it out through the folds of the eiderdown and held it close to the flame of the night-light. The model was a little misshapen, the face furred with fluff from her pocket, but it was still intact. She straightened the long limbs and pressed the strands of black cotton she had used for hair more firmly into the scalp. The white coat, cut from an old handkerchief, was particularly successful, she thought. It was a pity that she hadn't been able to use one of his handkerchiefs, a strand of his hair. The model represented more than Dr. Lorrimer, who had been unkind to her and William, who had practically thrown them out of the Laboratory. It stood for the whole of Hoggatt's Lab.

And now to kill it. Gently she knocked the head against the baluster. But the plasticine merely flattened, the head lost its identity. She remodelled it with careful fingers, then held it close to the flame. But the smell was disagreeable and she was afraid that the white linen would burst into flame. She dug the nail of her little finger deeply in behind the left ear. The cut was clean and sharp, right through to the brain. That was better. She sighed, satisfied. Holding the dead creature in her right palm she squeezed the pink plasticine, the white coat, the cotton hair into one amorphous lump. Then, huddling deep into the eiderdown, she sat and waited for the dawn.

The car, a green Morris Minor, had been toppled over the edge of a shallow depression in the wasteland, and had lurched to rest on a grassy plateau about ten feet from the ridge like a clumsy animal going to earth. It must have been there for years, abandoned to the plunderers, an illicit plaything for the local children, a welcome shelter for the occasional vagrant like the seventy-year-old alcoholic who had stumbled on the body. The two front wheels had been removed, and the rusted back wheels with their rotting tyres were firmly embedded in the chalky earth, the paintwork was battered and scratched, the interior stripped of instruments and steering wheel. Two mounted arc lights one directed downwards from the top of the bank and the other precariously planted on the edge of the plateau, illuminated its stark decrepitude. Thus brightly lit it looked, thought Kerrison, like some grotesque and pretentious modern sculpture, symbolically poised on the brink of chaos. The back seat, its padding springing from the slashed plastic, had been ripped out and hurled to one side.

In the front seat rested the body of a girl. Her legs were decorously planted together, the glazed eyes were slyly half open, the mouth, devoid of lipstick, was fixed in a drool elongated by two small trickles of blood. They gave a face which must have been pretty, or at least childishly vulnerable, the vacuous look of an adult clown. The thin coat, too thin surely for a night in early November, was pulled waist-high. She was wearing stockings; and the suspender clips bit into plump white thighs.

Drawing close to the body, under the watchful eyes of Lorrimer and Doyle, he thought, as he often did at such a scene, that it looked unreal, an anomaly, so singularly and ridiculously out of place that he had to stifle a nervous impulse to laugh. He didn't feel this so strongly when a corpse was far advanced in decay. It was then as if the rotting maggot infested flesh, or the tags of matted clothing, had already become part of the earth which clung to and enclosed them, no more unnatural or frightening than a clump of compost or a drift of decaying leaves. But here, colours and outlines intensified in the glare, the body, still outwardly so human, looked an absurd burlesque, the skin of the pallid cheek as artificial as the stained plastic of the car against which it rested. It seemed ridiculous that she should be beyond help.

As always he had to fight the impulse to fasten his mouth over hers and begin resuscitation, to plunge a needle into the still warm heart.

He had been surprised to find Maxim Howarth, newly appointed director of the Forensic Science Laboratory, at the scene, until he remembered that Howarth had said something about following through the next murder case. He supposed that he was expected to instruct. Withdrawing his head from the open door he said:

"It's almost certainly a case of manual throttling. The slight bleeding from the mouth is caused by the tongue being caught between the teeth. Manual strangulation is invariably homicidal. She couldn't have done this herself."

Howarth's voice was carefully controlled. "I should have expected more bruising of the neck."

"That's usual, certainly. There's always some damage to the tissues, although the extent of the bruised area depends on the position of the assailant and victim, the way in which the neck is grasped as well as the degree of pressure. I'd expect to find deep-seated internal bruising, but it's possible to get this with out many superficial signs. This happens when the murderer has maintained pressure until death; the vessels have been emptied of blood and the heart stops beating before the hands are removed. The cause of death is asphyxia, and one expects to find the usual signs of this. What is so interesting here is the cadaveric spasm. You'll see that she's clutching the bamboo handle of her bag.

The muscles are absolutely rigid, proof that the grasp occurred at or about the moment of death. I've never before seen cadaveric spasm in a case of homicidal manual throttling, and it's interesting. She must have died extraordinarily quickly. But you'll get a clearer idea of what exactly happened when you watch the postmortem."

Of course, thought Howarth, the postmortem. He wondered how early Kerrison would expect to get down to that job. He wasn't afraid that his nerve would fail him, only his stomach, but he wished he hadn't said he would be there. There was no privacy for the dead; the most one could hope for was a certain reverence. It now seemed to him monstrous that tomorrow he, a stranger, would be looking unrebuked at her nakedness. But for the present he had seen enough. He could step aside now without loss of face. Turning up the collar of his Burberry against the chill morning air, he climbed up the slope to the rim of the hollow and stood looking down at the car. This must be what shooting a film was like: the brightly lit scene, the ennui of waiting for the chief actors to appear, the brief moments of activity, the concentrated attention to detail. The body could easily be that of an actress simulating death. He half expected one of the police to dart forward and rearrange her hair.

The night was nearly over. Behind him the eastern sky was already brightening, and the wasteland, which had been a formless void of darkness above the lumpy earth, was assuming an identity and a shape.

To the west he could see the out line of houses, probably a council estate, a trim row of identical roofs and square slabs of darkness broken by patterned squares of yellow as the early risers switched on their lights. The track along which his car had bumped, rock-strewn and silver, alien as a moonscape in the glare of the headlights, took shape and direction, became ordinary. Nothing was left mysterious. The place was an arid scrubland between the two ends of the town, litter-strewn and edged with sparse trees above a ditch. He knew that the ditch would be dank with nettles and sour with rotting rubbish, the trees wounded by vandals, the trunks carved with initials, the low branches hanging torn from the boughs. Here was an urban no-man's-land, fit territory for murder.

It was a mistake to have come, of course; he should have realized that the role of voyeur was always ignoble. Few things were more demoralizing than to stand uselessly by while other men demonstrated their professional competence: Kerrison, that connoisseur of death, literally sniffing at the body; the photographers, taciturn, preoccupied with lighting and angles; Inspector Doyle, in charge of a murder case at last, impresario of death, tense with the suppressed excitement of a child at Christmas gloating over a new toy. Once, while waiting for Kerrison to arrive, Doyle had actually laughed, a hearty guffaw, filling the hollow. And Lorrimer? Before touching the body he had briefly crossed himself. It was so small and precise a gesture that Howarth could have missed it, except that nothing Lorrimer did escaped him. The others seemed unsurprised at the eccentricity. Perhaps they were used to it. Domenica hadn't told him that Lorrimer was religious.

But then his sister hadn't told him anything about her lover. She hadn't even told him that the affair was over. But he had needed only to look at Lorrimer's face during the past month to know that.

Lorrimer's face, Lorrimer's hands. Odd that he hadn't noticed how long the fingers were or with what apparent gentleness they had taped the plastic bags over the girl's hand to preserve, as he had tonelessly explained, conscientious in his role of instructor, any evidence under the fingernails. He had taken a sample of blood from the plump flaccid arm, feeling for the vein as carefully as if she could still flinch at the needle's prick.

Lorrimer's hands. Howarth thrust the tormenting, brutally explicit images out of his mind. He had never before resented one of Domenica's lovers. He hadn't even been jealous of her dead husband. It had seemed to him perfectly reasonable that she should eventually wish to marry, just as she might choose, in a fit of bore don or acquisitiveness, to buy herself a fur coat or a new item of jewellery. He had even quite liked Charles Schofield. Why was it then that, even from the first moment, the thought of Lorrimer in his sister's bed had been intolerable. Not that he could ever have been in her bed, at least not at learnings. He wondered yet again where they had managed to meet, how Domenica had contrived to take a new lover with out the whole Laboratory and the whole village knowing. How could they have met and where?

It had begun, of course, at that disastrous dinner party twelve months ago. At the time it had seemed both natural and civilized to celebrate the taking up of his directorship with a small private party at his house for the senior staff. They had, he remembered, eaten melon, followed by boeuf stroganoff and a salad. He and Domenica liked good food and, occasionally, she enjoyed cooking it. He had opened the 1961 claret for them because that was the wine he and Dom had chosen to drink and it hadn't occurred to him to offer his guests less. He and Dom had changed because that was their habit. It amused them to dine in some style, formally separating the working day from their evenings together. It hadn't been his fault that Bill Morgan, the Vehicle Examiner, had chosen to come in open-necked shirt and corduroys; neither he nor Dom had cared a damn what their guests chose to wear. If Bill Morgan felt awkward about these unimportant shibboleths of taste, he should learn either to change his clothes or to develop more social confidence in his sartorial eccentricities.

It had never occurred to Howarth that the six senior staff sitting awkwardly around his table in the candlelight, un mellowed even by the wine, would see the whole occasion as an elaborate gastronomic charade designed to demonstrate his social and intellectual superiority. At least Paul Middlemass, the Principal Scientific Officer Document Examiner, had appreciated the wine, drawing the bottle across the table towards him and refilling his glass, his lazy ironic eyes watching his host. And Lorrimer? Lorrimer had eaten practically nothing, had drunk less, pushing his glass almost petulantly aside and fixing his great smouldering eyes on Domenica as if he had never before seen a woman.

And that, presumably, had been the beginning of it. How it had progressed, when and how they had continued to meet, how it had ended, Domenica hadn't confided.

The dinner party had been a private and public fiasco. But what, he wondered, had the senior staff expected? An evening of solid drinking in the private snug in the Moonraker? A free for-all jollification in the village hall for the whole Laboratory including the cleaner, Mrs. Bidwell, and old Scobie, the Laboratory attendant? "Knees Up Mother Brown" in the public bar?

Perhaps they had thought that the first move should have come from their side. But that was to admit that there were two sides. The conventional sophistry was that the Laboratory worked as a team harnessed by a common purpose, reins lightly but firmly in the director's hands. That had worked well enough at Bruche. But there he had directed a research laboratory with a common discipline. How could you direct a team when your staff practised half a dozen different scientific disciplines, used their own methods, were responsible for their own results, stood finally alone to justify and defend them in the only place where the quality of a forensic scientist's work could properly be judged, the witness box of a court of law? It was one of the loneliest places on earth, and he had never stood there.

Old Dr. Mac, his predecessor, had, he knew, taken the occasional case, to keep his hand in as he would say, trotting out to a scene of crime like an old bloodhound happily sniffing after half forgotten scents, doing the analysis himself, and finally appearing, like a resurrected Old Testament prophet, in the witness box, greeted by the judge with dry judicial compliments, and boisterously welcomed in the bar by counsel like a long-missed old reprobate drinking comrade happily restored to them. But that could never be his way. He had been appointed to manage the Laboratory and he would manage it in his own style. He wondered, morbidly introspective in the cold light of dawn, whether his decision to see the next murder case through from the call to the scene of crime to the trial had really arisen from a desire to learn or merely from a craven wish to impress or, worse, to propitiate his staff, to show them that he valued their skills, that he wanted to be one of the team. If so, it had been one more error of judgement to add to the bleak arithmetic of failure since he had taken up his new job.

It looked as if they had nearly finished. The girl's rigid fingers had been prised from her handbag and Doyle's hands, gloved, were spreading out its few contents on a plastic sheet laid on the bonnet of the car.

Howarth could just make out the shape of what looked like a small purse, a lipstick, a folded sheet of paper. A love letter probably, poor little wretch. Had Lorrimer written letters to Domenica? he wondered. He was always first at the door when the post arrived, and usually brought his sister her letters. Perhaps Lorrimer had known that. But he must have written. There must have been assignations.

Lorrimer would hardly have risked telephoning from the Laboratory or from home in the evenings when he, Howarth, might have taken the call.

They were moving the body now. The mortuary van had moved closer to the rim of the hollow and the stretcher was being manoeuvred into place. The police were dragging out the screens from their van, ready to enclose the scene of crime. Soon die re would be the little clutch of spectators, the curious children shooed away by the adults, the Press photographers. He could see Lorrimer and Kerrison conferring together a little way apart, their backs turned, the two dark heads close together. Doyle was closing his notebook and supervising the removal of the body as if it were a precious exhibit which he was frightened someone would break. The light was strengthening.

He waited while Kerrison climbed up beside him and together they walked towards the parked cars. Howarth's foot struck a beer-can. It clattered across the path and bounced against what looked like the battered frame of an old pram, with a bang like a pistol shot. The noise startled him. He said pettishly:

"What a place to die! Where in God's name are we exactly? I just followed the police cars."

"It's called the clunch field. That's the local name for the soft chalk they mined here from the Middle Ages onwards. There isn't any hard building stone hereabouts, so they used clunch for most domestic building and even for some church interiors. There's an example in the Lady Chapel at Ely. Most villages had their clunch pits. They're overgrown now. Some are quite pretty in the spring and summer, little oases of wild flowers."

He gave the information almost tonelessly, like a dutiful guide repeating by rote the official spiel. Suddenly he swayed and reached for the support of his car door. Howarth wondered if he were ill or whether this was the extremity of tiredness. Then the pathologist straightened himself and said, with an attempt at briskness:

"I'll do the P.M. at nine o'clock tomorrow at St. Luke's. The hall porter will direct you. I'll leave a message."

He nodded a goodbye, forced a smile, then eased himself into his car and slammed the door. The Rover bumped slowly towards the road.

Howarth was aware that Doyle and Lorrimer were beside him. Doyle's excitement was almost palpable. He turned to look across the clunch field to the distant row of houses, their yellow-brick walls and mean square windows now plainly visible.

"He's over there somewhere. In bed probably. That is, if he doesn't live alone. It wouldn't do to be up and about too early, would it? No, he'll be lying there wondering how to act ordinary, waiting for the anonymous car, the ring at the door. If he's on his own, it'll be different, of course. He'll be creeping about in the half-dark wondering if he ought to burn his suit, scraping the mud off his shoes.

Only he won't be able to get it all off. Not every trace. And he won't have a boiler big enough for the suit. And even if he had, what will he say when we ask for it? So maybe he'll be doing nothing. Just lying there and waiting. He won't be asleep. He didn't sleep last night. And he won't be sleeping again for quite a time."

Howarth felt slightly sick. He had eaten a small and early dinner and knew himself to be hungry. The sensation of nausea on an empty stomach was peculiarly unpleasant. He controlled his voice, betraying nothing but a casual interest.

"You think it's relatively straightforward then?"

"Domestic murder usually is. And I reckon that this is a domestic murder. Married kid, torn stump of a ticket for the local Oddfellows'

hop, letter in her bag threatening her if she doesn't leave another bloke alone. A stranger wouldn't have known about this place. And she wouldn't have come here with him even if he had. By the look of her, they were sitting there cosily together before he got his hands on her throat. It's just a question of whether the two of them set off home together or whether he left early and waited for her."

"Do you know yet who she is?"

"Not yet. There's no diary in the bag. That kind don't keep diaries.

But I shall know in about half an hour."

He turned to Lorrimer. "The exhibits should be at the Lab by nine or thereabouts. You'll give this priority?"

Lorrimer's voice was harsh. "Murder gets priority. You know that."

Doyle's exultant, self satisfied bellow jangled Howarth's nerves.

"Thank God something does! You're taking your time over the Gutteridge case. I was in the Biology Department yesterday and Bradley said the report wasn't ready; he was working on a case for the defence. We all know the great fiction that the Lab is independent of the police and I'm happy to go along with it most of the time. But old Hoggatt founded the place as a police lab, and when the chips are down that's what it's all about. So do me a favour. Get moving with this one for me. I want to get chummy and get him quickly."

He was rocking gently on his heels, his smiling face uplifted to the dawn like a happy dog sniffing at the air, euphoric with the exhilaration of the hunt. It was odd, thought Howarth, that he didn't recognize the cold menace in Lorrimer's voice.

"Hoggatt's does an occasional examination for the defence if they ask us and if the exhibit is packed and submitted in the approved way.

That's departmental policy. We're not yet a police lab even if you do walk in and out of the place as if it's your own kitchen. And I decide priorities in my Laboratory. You'll get your report as soon as it's ready. In the meantime, if you want to ask questions, come to me, not to my junior staff. And, unless you're invited, keep out of my Laboratory."

Without waiting for an answer, he walked over to his car. Doyle looked after him in a kind of angry bewilderment.

"Bloody hell! His Lab! What's wrong with him? Lately, he's been as touchy as a bitch in heat. He'll find himself on a brain shrinker's couch or in the bin if he doesn't get a hold of himself."

Howarth said coldly: "He's right, of course. Any inquiry about the work should be made to him, not to a member of his staff. And it's usual to ask permission before walking into a laboratory."

The rebuke stung. Doyle frowned. His face hardened. Howarth had a disconcerting glimpse of the barely controlled aggression beneath the mask of casual good humour. Doyle said:

"Old Dr. Mac used to welcome the police in his Lab. He had this odd idea, you see, that helping the police was what it was all about. But if we're not wanted, you'd better talk to the Chief. No doubt he'll issue his instructions."

He turned on his heel and made off towards his car without waiting for a reply. Howarth thought:

"Damn Lorrimer! Everything he touches goes wrong for me." He felt a spasm of hatred so intense, so physical that it made him retch. If only Lorrimer's body was sprawled at the bottom of the clunch pit. If only it were Lorrimer's cadaver which would be cradled in porcelain on the post-mortem table next day, laid out for ritual evisceration. He knew what was wrong with him. The diagnosis was as simple as it was humiliating: that self-infecting fever of the blood which could lie deceptively dormant, then flare now into torment.

Jealousy, he thought, was as physical as fear; the same dryness of the mouth, the thudding heart, the restlessness which destroyed appetite and peace. And he knew now that, this time, the sickness was incurable. It made no difference that the affair was over, that Lorrimer, too, was suffering. Reason couldn't cure it, nor, he suspected, could distance, nor time. It could be ended only by death; Lorrimer's or his own.

At half past six, in the front bedroom of 2 Acacia Close, Chevisham, Susan Bradley, wife of the Higher Scientific Officer in the Biology Department of Hoggatt's Laboratory, was welcomed by the faint, plaintive wail of her two-month-old baby, hungry for her first feed of the day. Susan switched on the bedside lamp, a pink glow under its frilled shade, and reaching for her dressing gown, shuffled sleepily to the bathroom next door, and then to the nursery. It was a small room at the back of the house, little more than a box, but when she pressed down the switch of the low-voltage nursery light she felt again a glow of maternal, proprietorial pride. Even in her sleepy morning daze the first sight of the nursery lifted her heart: the nursing chair with its back decorated with rabbits; the matching changing-table fitted with drawers for the baby's things; the wicker cot in its stand which she had lined with a pink, blue and white flowered cotton to match the curtains; the bright fringe of nursery-rhyme characters which Clifford had pasted round the wall.

With the sound of her footsteps the cries became stronger. She picked up the warm, milky smelling cocoon and crooned reassurance.

Immediately the cries ceased and Debbie's moist mouth, opening and shutting like a fish, sought her breast, the small wrinkled fists freed from the blanket, unfurled to clutch against her crumpled nightdress.

The books said to change baby first, but she could never bear to make Debbie wait. And there was another reason. The walls of the modern house were thin, and she didn't want the sound of crying to wake Cliff.

But suddenly he was at the door, swaying slightly, his pyjama jacket gaping open. Her heart sank. She made her voice sound bright, matter of-fact.

"I hoped she hadn't woken you, darling. But it's after half past six.

She slept over seven hours. Getting better."

"I was awake already."

"Go back to bed, Cliff. You can get in another hour's sleep."

"I can't sleep."

He looked round the little nursery with a puzzled frown, as if disconcerted not to find a chair. Susan said:

"Bring in the stool from the bathroom. And put on your dressing-gown.

You'll catch cold."

He placed the stool against the wall and crouched there in sullen misery. Susan raised her cheek from resting against the soft furriness of the baby's head. The small, snub-nosed leech latched on to her breast, fingers splayed in an ecstasy of content. Susan told herself that she must keep calm, mustn't let nerves and muscles knot themselves into the familiar ache of worry. Everyone said that it was bad for the milk. She said quietly:

"What's wrong, darling?" But she knew what was wrong. She knew what he would say. She felt a new and frightening sense of resentment that she couldn't even feed Debbie in peace. And she wished he would do up his pajamas. Sitting like that, slumped and half-naked, he looked almost dissolute. She wondered what was happening to her. She had never felt like this about Cliff before Debbie was born.

"I can't go on. I can't go into the Lab today."

"Are you ill?" But she knew that he wasn't ill, at least not yet. But he would be ill if something wasn't done about Edwin Lorrimer. The old misery descended on her. People wrote in books about a black weight of worry, and they were right, that was just how it felt, a perpetual physical burden which dragged at the shoulders and the heart, denying joy, even destroying, she thought bitterly, their pleasure in Debbie.

Perhaps in the end it would destroy even love. She didn't speak but settled her small, warm burden more comfortably against her arm.

"I've got to give up the job. It's no use, Sue. I can't go on. He's got me in such a state that I'm as useless as he says I am."

"But Cliff, you know that isn't true. You're a good worker. There were never complaints about you at your last lab."

"I wasn't an H.S.O. then. Lorrimer thinks I ought never to have been promoted. He's right."

"He isn't right. Darling, you mustn't let him sap your confidence.

That's fatal. You're a conscientious, reliable forensic biologist. You mustn't worry if you're not as quick as the others. That isn't important. Dr. Mac always said it's accuracy that counts. What does it matter if you take your time? You get the answer right in the end."

"Not any longer. I can't even do a simple peroxidase test now without fumbling. If he comes within two feet of me my hands start shaking.

And he's begun checking all my results. I've just finished examining the stains on the mallet from the suspected Pascoe murder. But he'll work late tonight doing it again. And he'll make sure that the whole Biology Department knows why."

Cliff couldn't, she knew, stand up to bullying or sarcasm. Perhaps it was because of his father. The old man was paralysed now after a stroke and she supposed that she ought to feel sorry for him lying there in his hospital bed, useless as a felled tree, mouth slavering, only the angry eyes moving in impotent fury from face to watching face.

But from what Cliff had let slip he had been a poor father, an unpopular and unsuccessful schoolmaster yet with unreasonable ambitions for his only son. Cliff had been terrified of him. What Cliff needed was encouragement and affection. Who cared if he never rose any higher than H.S.O.? He was kind and loving. He looked after her and Debbie.

He was her husband and she loved him. But he mustn't resign. What other job could he get? What else was he suited for? Unemployment was as bad in East Anglia as it was elsewhere. There was the mortgage to pay and the electricity bill for the central heating --they couldn't economize there because of Debbie needing warmth--and the hire-purchase on the bedroom suite to find. Even the nursery furniture wasn't paid for yet. She had wanted everything nice and new for Debbie, but it had taken all their remaining savings. She said:

"Couldn't you apply to Establishment Department for a transfer?"

The despair in his voice tore at her heart. "No one will want me if Lorrimer says I'm no good. He's probably the best forensic biologist in the service. If he thinks I'm useless, then I'm useless."

It was this, too, which she was beginning to find irritating, the obsequious respect of the victim for his oppressor. Sometimes, appalled by her disloyalty, she could begin to understand Dr.

Lorrimer's contempt. She said:

"Why not have a word with the director?"

"I might have done if Dr. Mac was still there. But Howarth wouldn't care. He's new. He doesn't want any trouble with the senior staff, particularly now when we're getting ready to move into the new Lab."

And then she thought of Mr. Middlemass. He was the Principal Scientific Officer Document Examiner, and she had worked for him as a young S.O. before her marriage. It was at Hoggatt's Laboratory that she had met Cliff. Perhaps he could do something, could speak to Howarth for them, could use his influence with Estabs. She wasn't sure how she expected him to help, but the need to confide in someone was overwhelming. They couldn't go on like this. Cliff would have a break down. And how would she manage with the baby and Cliff ill and the future uncertain? But surely Mr. Middlemass could do something. She believed in him because she needed to believe. She looked across at Cliff.

"Don't worry, darling, it's going to be all right. We're going to think of something. You go in today and we'll talk about it in the evening."

"How can we? Your mother's coming to supper."

"After supper then. She'll be catching the quarter to eight bus. We'll talk then."

"I can't go on like this, Sue."

"You won't have to. I'll think of something. It's going to be all right. I promise you, darling. It's going to be all right."

"Mum, did you know that every human being is unique?"

"Of course I did. It stands to reason, doesn't it? There's only one of every person. You're you. I'm me. Pass your Dad the marmalade and keep your sleeves out of that butter."

Brenda Pridmore, recently appointed Clerical Officer/receptionist at Hoggatt's Laboratory, pushed the marmalade across the breakfast table and began methodically slicing thin strips from the white of her fried egg, postponing, as she had from early childhood, that cataclysmic moment when she would plunge the fork into the glistening yellow dome.

But indulgence in this small personal ritual was almost automatic. Her mind was preoccupied with the excitements and discoveries of her wonderful first job.

"I mean biologically unique. Inspector Blakelock, he's the Assistant Police Liaison Officer, told me that every human being has a unique fingerprint and no two types of blood are exactly the same. If the scientists had enough systems they could distinguish them all, the blood types I mean. He thinks that day may come in time. The forensic serologist will be able to say with certainty where the blood came from, even with a dried stain. It's dried blood that's difficult. If that blood is fresh we can do far more with it."

"Funny job you've got yourself." Mrs. Pridmore refilled the teapot from the kettle on the Aga hob and eased herself back into her chair.

The farmhouse kitchen, its flowered cretonne curtains still undrawn was warm and cosily domestic, smelling of toast, fried bacon and hot strong tea.

"I don't know that I like the idea of you checking in bits of body and bloodstained clothes. I hope you wash your hands properly before you come home."

"Oh Mum, it's not like that! The exhibits all arrive in plastic bags with identifying tags. We have to be ever so particular that all of them are labelled and properly entered in the book. It's a question of continuity of evidence, what Inspector Blakelock calls the integrity of the sample. And we don't get bits of body."

Remembering suddenly the sealed bottles of stomach contents, the carefully dissected pieces of liver and intestines, looking, when you came to think of it, no more frightening than exhibits in the science laboratory at school, she said quickly:

"Well, not in the way you mean. Dr. Kerrison does all the cutting up. He's a forensic pathologist attached to the Laboratory. Of course, some of the organs come to us for analysis."

Inspector Blakelock, she remembered, had told her that the Laboratory refrigerator had once held a whole head. But that wasn't the kind of thing to tell Mum. She rather wished that the Inspector hadn't told her. The refrigerator, squat and gleaming like a surgical sarcophagus, had held a sinister fascination for her ever since. But Mrs. Pridmore had seized gratefully on a familiar name.

"I know who Dr. Kerrison is, I should hope. Lives at the Old Rectory at Chevisham alongside the church, doesn't he? His wife ran off with one of the doctors at the hospital, left him and the two kids, that odd-looking daughter and the small boy, poor little fellow. You remember all the talk there was at the time, Arthur?"

Her husband didn't reply, nor did she expect him to. It was an understood convention that Arthur Pridmore left breakfast conversation to his women. Brenda went happily on:

"Forensic science isn't just helping the police to discover who's guilty. We help clear the innocent too. People sometimes forget that.

We had a case last month--of course, I can't mention names-when a sixteen-year-old choir girl accused her vicar of rape. Well, he was innocent."

"So I should hope! Rape indeed!"

"But it looked very black against him. Only he was lucky. He was a secreter."

"A what, for goodness' sake?"

"He secreted his blood group in all his body fluids. Not everyone does. So the biologist was able to examine his saliva and compare his blood group with the stains on the victim's ..."

"Not at breakfast, Brenda, if you don't mind." Brenda, her eyes suddenly alighting on a round milk stain on the tablecloth, herself thought that breakfast wasn't perhaps the most suitable time for a display of her recently acquired information about the investigation of rape. She went on to a safer subject.

"Dr. Lorrimer--he's the Principal Scientific Officer in charge of the Biology Department-says that I ought to work for an "A' level subject and try for a job as an Assistant Scientific Officer. He thinks that I could do better than just a clerical job. And once I got my A.S.O. I'd be on a scientific grade and could work myself up. Some of the most famous forensic scientists have started that way, he said. He's offered to give me a reading list, and he says he doesn't see why I shouldn't use some of the Laboratory equipment for my practical work."

"I didn't know that you worked in the Biology Department."

"I don't. I'm mainly on Reception with Inspector Blakelock, and sometimes I help out in the general office. But we got talking when I had to spend an afternoon in his Laboratory checking reports for courts with his staff, and he was ever so nice. A lot of people don't like him. They say he's too strict; but I think he's just shy. He might have been Director if the Home Office hadn't passed him over and appointed Dr.

Howarth."

"He seems to be taking quite an interest in you, this Mr. Lorrimer."

"Dr. Lorrimer, Mum."

"Dr. Lorrimer, then. Though why he wants to call himself a doctor beats me. You don't have any patients at the Lab."

"He's a Ph.D." Mum. Doctor of Philosophy."

"Oh, is he? I thought he was supposed to be a scientist. Anyway, you'd better watch your step."

"Oh, Mum, don't be daft. He's old. He must be forty or more. Mum, did you know that our Lab is the oldest forensic science lab in the country? There are regional labs covering the whole country but ours was the first. Colonel Hoggatt started it in Chevisham Manor when he was Chief Constable in 1912, then left the manor house to his force when he died. Forensic science was in its infancy then, Inspector Blakelock says, and Colonel Hoggatt was one of the first Chief Constables to see its possibilities. We've got his portrait in the hall. We're the only lab with its founder's name. That's why the Home Office has agreed that the new Laboratory will still be called Hoggatt's. Other police forces send their exhibits to their regional laboratory. North-East or the Metropolitan and so on. But in East Anglia they say "Better send it to Hoggatt's.""

"You'd better send yourself to Hoggatt's if you want to get there by eight-thirty. And I don't want you taking any short cuts through the new Lab. It isn't safe, only half-built, especially these dark mornings. Like as not you'd fall into the foundations or get a brick down on your head. They're not safe, building sites aren't. Look what happened to your Uncle Will."

"All right, Mum. We're not supposed to go through the new Lab anyway.

Besides, I'm going by bike. Are these my sandwiches or Dad's?"

"Yours, of course. You know your dad's home to dinner on Wednesdays.

Cheese and tomato this morning, and I've put you in a boiled egg."

When Brenda had waved goodbye, Mrs. Pridmore sat down for her second cup of tea and looked across at her husband.

"I suppose it's all right, this job she's found for herself." Arthur Pridmore, when he did condescend to talk at breakfast, talked with the magisterial authority of head of his family, Mr. Bowlem's bailiff and people's warden at the village church. He laid down his fork.

"It's a good job, and she was lucky to get it. Plenty of girls from the grammar school after it, weren't they? An established civil servant, isn't she? And look what they're paying her. More than the pig man gets at the farm. Pensionable too. She's a sensible girl and she'll be all right. There aren't many opportunities left locally for girls with good "O' levels. And you didn't want her to take a job in London."

No indeed, Mrs. Pridmore hadn't wanted Brenda to go to London, a prey to muggers, IRA. terrorists and what the Press mysteriously called "the drug scene." None of her infrequent, but uneventful and pleasant, visits to the capital on Women's Institute theatre excursions or rare shopping trips had failed to shake her conviction that Liverpool Street was the cavernous entry to an urban jungle, where predators armed with bombs and syringes lurked in every Underground station, and seducers laid their snares for innocent provincials in every office. Brenda, thought her mother, was a very pretty girl. Well, no point in denying it, she took after her mother's side of the family for looks even if she had her dad's brains, and Mrs. Pridmore had no intention of exposing her to the temptations of London. Brenda was walking out with Gerald Bowlem, younger son of her father's boss, and if that came off there's no denying it would be a very satisfactory marriage. He wouldn't get the main farm, of course, but there was a very nice little property over at Wisbech which would come to him. Mrs. Pridmore couldn't see the sense of more examinations and all this talking about a career. This job at the Lab would do Brenda very well until she married. But it was a pity that there was all this emphasis on blood.

As if reading her thoughts, her husband said: "Of course it's exciting for her. It's all new. But I daresay it's no different from other jobs, pretty dull most of the time. I don't reckon anything really frightening will happen to our Brenda at Hoggatt's Lab."

This conversation about their only child's first job was one they'd had before, a comforting reiteration of mutual reassurance. In imagination Mrs. Pridmore followed her daughter as she pedalled vigorously on her way; bumping down the rough farm track between Mr. Bowlem's flat fields to Tenpenny Road, past old Mrs. Button's cottage where, as a child, she had been given rice-cake and home-made lemonade, by Tenpenny Dyke where she still picked cowslips in summer, then a right turn into Chevisham Road and the straight two miles skirting Captain Massey's land and into Chevisham village. Every yard of it was familiar, reassuring, un menacing And even Hoggatt's Laboratory, blood or no blood, had been part of the village for over seventy years, while Chevisham Manor had stood for nearly three times as long. Arthur was right. Nothing frightening could happen to their Brenda at Hoggatt's.

Mrs. Pridmore, comforted, drew back the curtains and settled down to enjoy her third cup of tea.

At ten minutes to nine the post van stopped outside Sprogg's Cottage on the outskirts of Chevisham to deliver a single letter. It was addressed to Miss Stella Mawson, Lavender Cottage, Chevisham, but the postman was a local man and the difference in name caused him no confusion. There had been Sproggs living in the cottage for four generations, and the small triangle of green in front of the gate had been Sprogg's Green for almost as long. The present owner, having improved the cottage by the addition of a small brick garage and a modern bathroom and kitchen, had decided to celebrate the metamorphosis by planting a lavender hedge and renaming the property. But the villagers regarded the new name as no more than a foreigner's eccentric fancy which they were under no obligation either to use or recognize.

The lavender hedge, as if in sympathy with their views, failed to survive the first fen winter and Sprogg's Cottage remained Sprogg's.

Angela Foley, the twenty-seven-year-old personal secretary to the Director of Hoggatt's Laboratory, picked up the envelope and guessed at once by the quality of the paper, the expertly typed address and the London postmark what it must be. It was a letter they had been expecting. She took it through to the kitchen where she and her friend were breakfasting and handed it over without speaking, then watched Stella's face as she read. After a minute she asked:

"Well?"

"It's what we feared. He can't wait any longer. He wants a quick sale, and there's a friend of his who thinks he might like it for a weekend cottage. As sitting tenants we get first refusal, but he must know by next Monday whether we're interested."

She tossed the letter across the table. Angela said bitterly:

"Interested! Of course we're interested! He knows we are. We told him weeks ago that we were writing round trying to get a mortgage."

"That's just lawyer's jargon. What his solicitor is asking is whether we're able to go ahead. And the answer is that we can't."

The arithmetic was plain. Neither of them needed to discuss it. The owner wanted sixteen thousand pounds. None of the mortgage societies they had approached would advance them more than ten. Together they had a little over two thousand saved. Four thousand short. And, with no time left, it might just as well be forty.

Angela said: "I suppose he wouldn't take less?"

"No. We've tried that. And why should he? It's a fully converted, reed-thatched seventeenth century cottage. And we've improved it.

We've made the garden. He'd be a fool to let it go for under sixteen even to a sitting tenant."

"But, Star, we are sitting tenants! He's got to get us out first."

"That's the only reason why he's given us as long as he has. He knows we could make it difficult for him. But I'm not prepared to stay on here under sufferance, knowing that we'd have to go in the end. I couldn't write under those conditions."

"But we can't find four thousand in a week! And, with things as they are, we couldn't hope for a bank loan even if..."

"Even if I had a book coming out this year, which I haven't. And what I make from writing barely pays my part of the housekeeping. It was tactful of you not to say so."

She hadn't been going to say it. Stella wasn't a conveyor-belt writer.

You couldn't expect her novels to make money. What was it that last reviewer had said? Fastidious observation wedded to elegantly sensitive and oblique prose. Not surprisingly, Angela could quote all the reviews even if she some times wondered what exactly they were trying to say. Wasn't it she who pasted them with meticulous care into the cuttings-book which Stella so affected to despise! She watched while her friend began what they both called her tiger prowl, that compulsive pacing up and down, head lowered, hands sunk in her dressing-gown pockets. Then Stella said:

"It's a pity that cousin of yours is so disagreeable. Otherwise one might not have minded asking him for a loan. He wouldn't miss it."

"But I've already asked him. Not about the cottage, of course. But I've asked him to lend me some money."

It was ridiculous that this should be so difficult to say. After all, Edwin was her cousin. She had a right to ask him. And it was her grandmother's money after all. There was really no reason why Star should be cross. There were times when she didn't mind Star's anger, times even when she deliberately provoked it, waiting with half-shameful excitement for the extraordinary outburst of bitterness and despair of which she herself was less a victim than a privileged spectator, relishing even more the inevitable remorse and self-incrimination, the sweetness of reconciliation. But now for the first time she recognized the chill of fear.

"When?" There was nothing for it now but to go on.

"Last Tuesday evening. It was after you decided that we'd have to cancel our bookings for Venice next March because of the exchange rate.

I wanted it to be a birthday present, Venice I mean."

She had pictured the scene. Herself handing over the tickets and the hotel reservations tucked into one of those extra-large birthday cards.

Star trying to hide her surprise and pleasure. Both of them poring over maps and guide books, planning the itinerary of every marvelous day. To see for the first time and together that incomparable view of San Marco from the western end of the Piazza. Star had read to her Ruskin's description. "A multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light." To stand together on the Piazzetta in the early morning and look across the shimmering water to San Giorgio Maggiore. It was a dream, as insubstantial as the crumbling city. But the hope of it had been worth steeling herself to ask Edwin for that loan.

"And what did he say?" There was no chance now of softening that brutal negative, of erasing the whole humiliating episode from her memory.

"He said no."

"I suppose you told him why you wanted it. It didn't occur to you that we go away from here to be private, that our holidays are our own affair, that it might humiliate me to have Edwin Lorrimer know that I can't afford to take you to Venice, even on a ten-day package tour."

"I didn't." She cried out in vehement protest, horrified to hear the crack in her voice, and feel the first hot, gritty tears. It was odd, she thought, that it was she who could cry. Star was the emotional, the vehement one. And yet Star never cried.

"I didn't tell him anything, except that I needed the money."

"How much?"

She hesitated, wondering whether to lie. But she never lied to Star.

"Five hundred pounds. I thought we might as well do it properly. I just told him that I badly needed five hundred pounds."

"So, not surprisingly, faced with that irrefutable argument, he declined to hand out. What exactly did he say?"

"Only that grandmother had made her intentions perfectly plain in her will and that he had no intention of upsetting them. Then I said that most of the money would come to me after his death, anyway--I mean, that's what he told me when the will was read--and it would be too late then. I'd be an old lady. I might die first. It was now that was important. But I didn't tell him why I wanted it. I swear that."

"Swear? Don't be dramatic. You're not in a court of law. And then what did he say?"

If only Star would stop that agitated pacing, would only turn and look at her instead of questioning her in that cold, inquisitorial voice.

And the new bit was even harder to tell. She couldn't explain to herself why it should be, but it was something which she had tried to put out of her mind, for the present anyway. One day she would tell Star, the moment when it was right to tell. She had never imagined being forced into confidence with such brutal suddenness.

"He said that I shouldn't rely on getting anything in his will. He said that he might acquire new obligations. Obligations was the word he used. And if he did, the will would no longer stand."

And now Star swung round and faced her.

"New obligations. Marriage! No, that's too ridiculous. Marriage, that desiccated, pedantic, self-satisfied prude. I doubt whether he ever deliberately touches a human body except his own. Solitary, masochistic, surreptitious vice, that's all he understands. No, not vice, the word's too strong. But marriage! Wouldn't you have thought..."

She broke off. Angela said: "He didn't mention marriage."

"Why should he? But what else would automatically set aside an existing will unless he made a new one? Marriage cancels a will.

Didn't you know that?"

"You mean that as soon as he married I should be disinherited?"

"Yes."

"But that isn't fair!"

"Since when has life been noted for its fairness? It wasn't fair that your grandmother left her fortune to him instead of sharing it with you just because he's a man and she had an old-fashioned prejudice that women shouldn't own money. It isn't fair that you're only a secretary at Hoggatt's because no one bothered to educate you for anything else. It isn't fair, come to that, that you should have to support me."

"I don't support you. In every way except the unimportant one, you support me."

"It's humiliating to be worth more dead than alive. If my heart gave out tonight, then you'd be all right. You could use the life assurance money to buy the place and stay on. The bank would advance the money once they knew you were my legatee."

"Without you I shouldn't want to stay on."

"Well, if you do have to leave here, at least it will give you an excuse to live on your own, if that's what you want."

Angela cried out in vehement protest: "I shall never live with anyone else but you. I don't want to live anywhere but here, in this cottage.

You know that. It's our home."

It was their home. It was the only real home she'd ever known. She didn't need to look around her to fix with startling clarity each familiar loved possession. She could lie in bed at night and in imagination move confidently around the cottage touching them in a happy exploration of shared memories and reassurance. The two Victorian lustre plant pots on their matching pedestals, found in The Lanes at Brighton one summer weekend. The eighteenth-century oil of Wicken Fen by an artist whose indecipherable signature, peered at through a microscope, had provided so many shared moments of happy conjecture. The French sword in its decorated scabbard, found in a country sale room and now hanging above their fireplace. It wasn't just that their possessions, wood and porcelain, paint and linen, symbolized their joint life. The cottage, their belongings, were their joint life, adorned and gave reality to it just as the bushes and flowers they had planted in the garden staked out their territory of trust.

She had a sudden and terrifying memory of a recurrent nightmare. They were standing facing each other in an empty attic room, bare walls squared with the pale imprints of discarded pictures, floorboards harsh to the feet, two naked strangers in a void, herself trying to reach out her hands to touch Stella's fingers, but unable to lift the heavy monstrous bolsters of flesh that had become her arms. She shivered and then was recalled to the reality of the cold autumn morning by the sound of her friend's voice.

"How much did your grandmother leave? You did tell me, but I've forgotten."

"About thirty thousand, I think."

"And he can't have spent any of it, living with his old father in that poky cottage. He hasn't even renovated the windmill. His salary alone must be more than enough for the two of them, apart from the old man's pension. Lorrimer's a senior scientist, isn't he? What does he get?"

"He's a Principal Scientific Officer. The scale goes up to eight thousand."

"God! More in a year than I could earn from four novels. I suppose if he jibbed at five hundred he'd hardly part with four thousand, not at a rate of interest we could afford. But it wouldn't hurt him. I've a good mind to ask him for it after all."

Stella was only teasing, of course; but she recognized this too late to control the panic in her voice.

"No, please, Star! No, you mustn't!"

"You really hate him, don't you?"

"Not hate. Indifference. I just don't want to be under an obligation to him."

"Nor, come to that, do I. And you shan't be." Angela went out to the hall and came back pulling on her coat. She said:

"I'll be late at the Lab if I don't hurry. The casserole is in the oven. Try to remember to switch on at half past five. And don't touch the regulator. I'll turn down the heat when I get back."

"I think I can just about manage that."

"I'm taking sandwiches for lunch, so I shan't be back. There's the cold ham and salad in the fridge. Will that be enough, Star?"

"No doubt I'll survive."

"Yesterday evening's typing is in the folder, but I haven't read it through."

"How remiss of you."

Stella followed her friend out to the hall. At the door she said: "I expect they think at the Lab that I exploit you."

"They know nothing about you at the Lab. And I don't care what they think."

"Is that what Edwin Lorrimer thinks, too, that I exploit you? Or what does he think?"

"I don't want to talk about him." She folded her scarf over her blonde hair. In the antique mirror with its frame of carved shells she saw both their faces distorted by a defect in the glass; the brown and green of Stella's huge luminous eyes smeared like wet paint into the deep clefts between nostrils and mouth; her own wide brow bulging like that of a hydrocephalic child. She said:

"I wonder what I'd feel if Edwin died this week; a heart attack, a car accident, a brain haemorrhage."

"Life isn't as convenient as that."

"Death isn't. Star, shall you reply today to that solicitor?"

"He doesn't expect an answer until Monday. I can ring him at the London office on Monday morning. That's another five days. Anything can happen in five days."

"But they're just like mine! The panties I mean. I've got a pair like that! I bought them from Marks and Spencer's in Cambridge with my first salary cheque."

It was ten thirty-five and Brenda Pridmore, at the reception desk at the rear of the main hall of Hoggatt's Laboratory, watched wide-eyed while Inspector Blakelock drew towards him the first labelled bag of exhibits from the clunch pit murder. She put out a finger and tentatively slid it over the thin plastic through which the knickers, crumpled and stained round the crotch, were clearly visible. The detective constable who had brought in the exhibits had said that the girl had been to a dance. Funny, thought Brenda, that she hadn't bothered to put on clean underclothes. Perhaps she wasn't fastidious.

Or perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry to change. And now the intimate clothes which she had put on so unthinkingly on the day of her death would be smoothed out by strange hands, scrutinized under ultra-violet light, perhaps be handed up, neatly docketed, to the judge and jury in the Crown Court.

Brenda knew that she would never again be able to wear her own panties, their prettiness contaminated for ever by the memory of this dead unknown girl. Perhaps they had even bought them together in the same store, on the same day. She could recall the excitement of spending for the first time money she had actually earned. It had been a Saturday afternoon and there had been a crush round the lingerie counter, eager hands rummaging among the panties. She had liked the pair with the sprays of pink machine-embroidered flowers across the front. So, too, had this unknown girl. Perhaps their hands had touched. She cried:

"Inspector. Isn't death terrible?"

"Murder is. Death isn't; at least, no more than birth is. You couldn't have one without the other or there'd be no room for us all. I reckon I won't worry overmuch when my time comes."

"But that policeman who brought in the exhibits said that she was only eighteen. That's my age."

He was making out the folder for the new case, meticulously transferring details from the police form to the file. And his head, with the cropped dry hair which reminded her so of corn stubble, was bent low over the page so that she could not see his face. Suddenly she remembered being told that he had lost an only daughter, killed by a hit-and-run driver, and she wished the words unsaid. Her face flared and she turned her eyes away. But when he replied his voice was perfectly steady.

"Aye, poor lass. Led him on, I daresay. They never learn. What's that you've got?"

"It's the bag of male clothes, suit, shoes and underwear. Do you think these belong to the chief suspect?"

"They'll be the husband's, likely as not'

"But what can they prove? She was strangled, wasn't she?"

"No telling for certain until we get Dr. Kerrison's report. But they usually examine the chief suspect's clothes. There might be a trace of blood, a grain of sand or earth, paint, minute fibres from the victim's clothes, a trace of her saliva even. Or she could have been raped. All that bundle will go into the Biology Search Room with the victim's clothes."

"But the policeman didn't say anything about rape! I thought you said this bundle belongs to the husband."

"You don't want to let it worry you. You have to learn to be like a doctor or a nurse, detached, isn't it?"

"Is that how forensic scientists feel?"

"Likely as not. It's their job. They don't think about victims or suspects. That's for the police.

They're only concerned with scientific facts."

He was right, thought Brenda. She remembered the time only three days previously when the Senior Scientific Officer of the instrument section had let her look into the giant scanning electron microscope and watch the image of a minute pill of putty burst instantaneously into an exotic incandescent flower. He had explained.

"It's a coccolith, magnified six thousand times."

"A what?"

"The skeleton of a micro-organism which lived in the ancient seas from which the chalk in the putty was deposited. They're different, depending on where the chalk was quarried. That's how you can differentiate one sample of putty from another."

She had exclaimed: "But it's so lovely!"

He had taken her place at the eyepiece of the instrument. "Yes, nice, isn't it?"

But she had known that, while she looked back in wonder across a million years, his mind was on the minute scrape of putty from the heel of the suspect's shoe, the trace which might prove a man was a rapist or a murderer. And yet, she had thought, he doesn't really mind. All he cares about is getting the answer right. It would have been no use asking him whether he thought there was a unifying purpose in life, whether it could really be chance that an animal so small that it couldn't be seen by the naked eye could die millions of years ago in the depths of the sea and be resurrected by science to prove a man innocent or guilty.

It was odd, she thought, that scientists so often weren't religious when their work revealed a world so variously marvelous and yet so mysteriously unified and at one. Dr. Lorrimer seemed to be the only member of Hoggatt's who was known to go regularly to church. She wondered if she dared ask him about the coccolith and God. He had been very kind this morning about the murder. He had arrived at the Laboratory over an hour late, at ten o'clock, looking terribly tired because he had been up that night at the scene of crime, and had come over to the reception desk to collect his personal post. He had said:

"You'll be getting exhibits from your first murder case this morning.

Don't let them worry you, Brenda. There's only one death we need to be frightened of, and that's our own."

It was a strange thing to have said, an odd way to reassure her. But he was right. She was suddenly glad that Inspector Blakelock had done the documentation on the clunch pit murder. Now, with care, the owner of those stained panties would remain, for her, unknown, anonymous, a number in the biology series on a manila folder. Inspector Blakelock's voice broke into her thoughts:

"Have you got those court reports we checked yesterday ready for the post?"

"Yes, they've been entered in the book. I meant to ask you.

Why do all the court statements have "Criminal Justice Act 1967 sections 2 and 9' printed on them?"

"That's the statutory authority for written evidence to be tendered at committal proceedings and the Crown Court. You can look up the sections in the library. Before the 1967 Act the labs had a hard time of it, I can tell you, when all scientific evidence had to be given orally. Mind you, the court-going officers still have to spend a fair amount of time attending trials. The defence doesn't always accept the scientific findings. That's the difficult part of the job, not the analysis but standing alone in the witness box to defend it under cross-examination. If a man's no good in the box, then all the careful work he does here goes for nothing."

Brenda suddenly remembered something else that Mrs. Mallett had told her, that the motorist who had killed his daughter had been acquitted because the scientist had crumbled under the cross-examination; something to do with the analysis of chips of paint found on the road which matched the suspect's car. It must be terrible to lose an only child; to lose any child. Perhaps that was the worst thing that could happen to a human being.

No wonder Inspector Blakelock was often so quiet; that when the police officers came in with their hearty banter he answered only with that slow, gentle smile.

She glanced across at the Laboratory clock. Ten forty-rive. Any minute now the scene-of-crime course would be arriving for their lecture on the collection and preservation of scientific evidence, and this brief spell of quiet would be over. She wondered what Colonel Hoggatt would think if he could visit his Laboratory now. Her eyes were drawn, as they so often were, to his portrait hanging just outside the Director's office. Even from her place at the desk she could read the gold lettering on the frame.

He was standing in the room which was still used as a library, his ruddy face stern and bewhiskered under the sprouting plumes of his hat, his braided, bemedalled tunic fastened with a row of gilt buttons. One proprietorial hand was laid, light as a priestly blessing, on an oldfashioned microscope in gleaming brass. But the minatory eyes weren't fixed on this latest scientific wonder; they were fixed on Brenda. Under his accusing gaze, recalled to duty, she bent again to her work.

By twelve o'clock the meeting of senior scientists in the Director's office to discuss the furniture and equipment for the new Laboratory was over, and Howarth rang for his secretary to clear the conference table. He watched her as she emptied and polished the ashtray (he didn't smoke and the smell of ash offended him), collected together the copies of the Laboratory plans and gathered up the strewn discarded papers. Even from his desk, Howarth could see Middlemass's complex geometrical doodles, and the crumpled agenda, ringed with coffee stains, of the Senior Vehicle Examiner, Bill Morgan.

He watched the girl as she moved with quiet competence about the table wondering, as always, what, if anything, was going on behind that extraordinarily wide brow, those slanted enigmatic eyes. He missed his old personal assistant, Marjory Faraker, more than he had expected. It had, he thought ruefully, been good for his self conceit to find that her devotion didn't, after all, extend to leaving London where, surprisingly, she had been discovered to have a life of her own, to join him in the fens. Like all good secretaries she had acquired, or at least known how to simulate, some of the idealized attributes of wife, mother, mistress, confidante, servant and friend without being, or indeed expecting to be, any of these. She had flattered his self-esteem, protected him from the minor irritations of life, preserved his privacy with maternal pugnacity, had ensured, with infinite tact, that he knew all he needed to know about what was going on in his Laboratory.

He couldn't complain about Angela Foley. She was a more than competent shorthand typist and an efficient secretary. Nothing was left undone.

It was just that for her he felt that he hardly existed, that his authority, meekly deferred to, was nevertheless a charade. The fact that she was Lorrimer's cousin was irrelevant. He had never heard her mention his name. He wondered from time to time what sort of a life she led in that remote cottage with her writer friend, how far it had satisfied her. But she told him nothing, not even about the Laboratory. He knew that Hoggatt's had a heartbeat--all institutions did-but the pulse eluded him. He said:

"The Foreign and Commonwealth Office want us to take a Danish biologist for two or three days next month. He's visiting England to look at the service. Fit him in, will you, when I'm free to give him some time. You'd better consult Dr. Lorrimer about his diary commitments. Then let the F.C.O. know what days we can offer."

"Yes, Dr. Howarth."

At least the autopsy was over. It had been worse than he had expected, but he had seen it through and without disgrace. He hadn't expected that the colours of the human body would be so vivid, so exotically beautiful. Now he saw again Kerrison's gloved fingers, sleek as eels, busying themselves at the body's orifices. Explaining, demonstrating, discarding. Presumably he had become as immune to disgust as he obviously was to the sweet-sour smell of his mortuary. And to all the experts in violent death, faced daily with the final disintegration of the personality, pity would be as irrelevant as disgust.

Aliss Foley was ready to go now and had come up to the desk to clear his out-tray. He said:

"Has Inspector Blakelock worked out last month's average turn-round figures yet?"

"Yes, sir. The average for all exhibits is down to twelve days, and the blood alcohol has fallen to 1.2 days. But the figure for crimes against the person is up again. I'm just typing the figures now."

"Let me have them as soon as they're ready, please." There were memories which, he suspected, would be even more insistent than Kerrison marking out with his cartilage knife on the milk white body the long line of the primary incision.

Doyle, that great black bull, grinning at him in the washroom afterwards as, side by side, they washed their hands. And why, he wondered, had he felt it necessary to wash? His hands hadn't been contaminated.

"The performance was well up to standard. Neat, quick and thorough, that's Doc Kerrison. Sorry we shan't be able to call for you when we're ready to make the arrest. Not allowed. You'll have to imagine that bit. But there'll be the trial to attend, with any luck."

Angela Foley was standing in front of the desk, looking at him strangely, he thought.

"Yes?"

"Scobie has had to go home, Dr. Howarth. He's not at all well.

He thinks it may be this two-day 'flu that's going about. And he says that the incinerator has broken down."

"Presumably he telephoned for the mechanic before he left."

"Yes, sir. He says it was all right yesterday morning when Inspector Doyle came with the court orders authorizing the destruction of the cannabis exhibits. It was working then."

Howarth was irritated. This was one of those minor administrative details which Miss Faraker would never have dreamed of troubling him with. Miss Foley was, he guessed, expecting him to say something sympathetic about Scobie, to inquire whether the old man had been fit to cycle home. Dr. MacIntyre had, no doubt, bleated like an anxious sheep when any of the staff were ill.

He bent his head over his papers. But Miss Foley was at the door. It had to be now. He made himself say:

"Ask Dr. Lorrimer to come down for a few minutes, will you please?"

He could, perfectly casually, have asked Lorrimer to stay on after the meeting; why hadn't he? Probably because there might have been an echo of the headmaster in so public a request. Perhaps because this was an interview he had been glad to postpone, even temporarily.

Lorrimer came in and stood in front of the desk. Howarth took out Bradley's personal file from his right-hand drawer and said:

"Sit down will you, please. This annual report on Bradley. You've given him an adverse marking. Have you told him?"

Lorrimer remained standing. He said: "I'm required by the reporting rules to tell him. I saw him in my office at ten-thirty, as soon as I got back from the P.M."

"It seems a bit hard. According to his file, it's the first adverse report he's had. We took him on probation eighteen months ago. Why hasn't he made out?"

"I should have thought that was obvious from my detailed markings. He's been promoted above his capacity."

"In other words, the Board made a mistake?"

"That's not so unusual. Boards occasionally do. And not only when it comes to promotions."

The allusion was blatant, a deliberate provocation, yet Howarth decided to ignore it. With an effort he kept his voice level.

"I'm not prepared to countersign this report as it stands. It's too early to judge him fairly."

"I made that excuse for him last year when he'd been with us six months. But if you disagree with my assessment you'll presumably say so. There's a space provided."

"I intend to use it. And I suggest that you try the effect of giving the boy some support and encouragement. There are two reasons for an inadequate performance. Some people are capable of doing better and will if judiciously kicked into it. Others aren't. To kick them is not only pointless, it destroys what confidence they have. You run an efficient department. But it might be more efficient and happier if you learned how to understand people. Management is largely a matter of personal relationships."

He made himself look up. Lorrimer said through lips so stiff that the words sounded cracked:

"I hadn't realized that your family were noted for success in their personal relationships."

"The fact that you can't take criticism without becoming as personal and spiteful as a neurotic girl is an example of what I mean."

He never knew what Lorrimer was about to reply. The door opened and his sister came in. She was dressed in slacks and a sheepskin jacket, her blonde hair bound with a scarf. She looked at them both without embarrassment and said easily:

"Sorry, I didn't realize you were engaged. I ought to have asked Inspector Blakelock to ring."

Without a word, Lorrimer, deathly pale, turned on his heels, walked past her and was gone. Domenica looked after him, smiled and shrugged.

She said:

"Sorry if I interrupted something. It's just to say that I'm going to Norwich for a couple of hours to buy some materials. Is there anything you want?"

"Nothing, thank you."

"I'll be back before dinner, but I think I'll give the village concert a miss. Without Claire Easterbrook the Mozart will be pretty insupportable. Oh, and I'm thinking of going up to London for the best part of next week."

Her brother didn't reply. She looked at him and said: "What's wrong?"

"How did Lorrimer know about Gina?" He didn't need to ask her if it was she who had told him. Whatever else she may have confided, it would not have been that. She went across, ostensibly to study the Stanley Spencer set in the over mantel of the fireplace, and asked lightly:

"Why? He didn't mention your divorce, did he?"

"Not directly, but the allusion was intended." She turned to face him.

"He probably took the trouble to find out as much as possible about you when he knew that you were a candidate for the job here. It isn't such a large service after all."

"But I came from outside it."

"Even so, there would be contacts, gossip. A failed marriage is one of those unconsidered trifles he might expect to sniff out. And what of it? After all, it's not unusual. I thought forensic scientists were particularly at risk. All those late hours at scenes of crime and the unpredictable court attendances. They ought to be used to marital breakups."

He said, knowing that he sounded as petulant as an obstinate child:

"I don't want him in my Lab."

"Your Lab? It isn't quite as simple as that, is it? I don't think the Stanley Spencer is right over the fireplace. It looks incongruous.

It's strange that Father bought it. Not at all his kind of picture I should have said. Did you put it here to shock?"

Miraculously, his anger and misery were assuaged. But then she had always been able to do that for him.

"Merely to disconcert and confuse. It's intended to suggest that I may be a more complex character than they assume."

"Oh, but you are! I've never needed Assumption at Cookham to prove it. Why not the Greuze? It would look good with that carved over mantel "Too pretty." She laughed, and was gone. He picked up Clifford Bradley's report and, in the space provided, wrote:

"Mr. Bradley's performance has been disappointing, but not all the difficulties are of his making. He lacks confidence and would benefit from more active encouragement and support than he has received. I have corrected the final marking to what I consider a more just assessment and have spoken to the senior biologist about the personnel management in his department."

If he did finally decide, after all, this wasn't the job for him, that snide comment should go some way to ensure that Lorrimer stood no chance of succeeding him as Director of Hoggatt's.

At one forty-eight precisely Paul Middlemass, the Document Examiner, opened his file on the clunch pit murder. The Document Examination Room, which occupied the whole of the front of the building immediately under the roof, smelled like a stationer's shop, a pungent amalgam of paper and ink, sharpened by the tang of chemicals. Middlemass breathed it as his native air. He was a tall, rangy, large-featured man with a mobile, wide-mouthed face of agreeable ugliness and iron-grey hair which fell in heavy swathes over parchment coloured skin. Easy-going and seemingly indolent, he was in fact a prodigious worker with an obsession for his job. Paper in all its manifestations was his passion. Few men, in or outside the forensic science service, knew so much about it. He handled it with joy and with a kind of reverence, gloated over it, knew its provenance almost by its smell.

Identification of the sizing and loading of a specimen by spectrographic or X-ray crystallography merely confirmed what touch and sight had already pronounced. The satisfaction of watching the emergence of an obscure water-mark under soft X-rays never palled, and the final pattern was as fascinating to his unsurprised eyes as the expected potter's mark to a collector of porcelain.

His father, long dead, had been a dentist, and his son had taken for his own use the old man's inordinately large store of self-designed surgical overalls. They were old-fashioned in exit, wasted and full-skirted as the coat of a Regency buck, and with crested metal buttons fastening high to the side of the throat. Although they were too short in the arm so that his lean wrists protruded like those of an overgrown schoolboy, he wore them with a certain panache, as if this unorthodox working garb, so different from the regulation white coats of the rest of the Laboratory staff, symbolized that unique blend of scientific skill, experience and flair which distinguishes the good Document Examiner.

He had just finished telephoning his wife, having remembered rather belatedly that he was due to help out that evening with the village concert. He liked women, and before his marriage had enjoyed a succession of casual, satisfactory and uncommitted affairs. He had married late, a buxom research scientist from Cambridge twenty years his junior, and drove back to their modern flat on the outskirts of the city each night in his Jaguar--his chief extravagance--frequently late, but seldom too late to bear her off to their local pub. Secure in his job, with a growing international reputation, and uxoriously contented with his comely Sophie, he knew himself to be successful and suspected himself to be happy.

The Document Examination Laboratory with its cabinets and range of monorail cameras took up what some of his colleagues, notably Edwin Lorrimer, regarded as more than its share of room. But the Laboratory, lit by rows of fluorescent lights and with its low ceiling, was stuffy and ill-ventilated, and this afternoon the central heating, unreliable at the best of times, had concentrated all its efforts on the top of the building. Usually he was oblivious of his working conditions, but a sub-tropical temperature was difficult to ignore. He opened the door to the passage. Opposite and a little to the right were the male and female lavatories, and he could hear the occasional feet, light or heavy, hurried or dilatory, of passing members of staff, and hear the swing of the two doors. The sounds didn't worry him. He applied himself to his task.

But the specimen he was now poring over held little mystery. If the crime had been other than murder he would have left it to his Scientific Officer assistant, not yet returned from a belated lunch.

But murder invariably meant a court appearance and cross-examination--the defence seldom let the scientific evidence go unchallenged in this, the gravest of charges--and a court appearance put document examination in general, and Hoggatt's Laboratory in particular, on public trial. He made it a matter of principle always to take the murder cases himself. They were seldom the most interesting. What he most enjoyed were the historical investigations, the satisfaction of demonstrating, as he had only last month, that a document dated 1872 was printed on paper containing chemical wood pulp which was first used in 1874, a discovery which had initiated a fascinating unravelling of complicated documentary fraud. There was nothing complicated and little of interest about the present job. Yet, only a few years ago, a man's neck could have depended upon his opinion. He seldom thought of the half-dozen men who had been hanged during the twenty years of his forensic experience, primarily because of his evidence, and when he did, it was not the strained but oddly anonymous faces in the dock which he remembered, or their names, but paper and ink, the thickened downward stroke, the peculiar formation of a letter. Now he spread out on his table the note taken from the dead girl's handbag, placing on each side the two specimens of the husband's handwriting which the police had been able to obtain. One was a letter to the suspect's mother written on holiday at Southend--how, he wondered, had they managed to extract that from her? The other was a brief telephoned message about a football match. The note taken from the victim's purse was even briefer.

"You've got your own chap so lay off Barry Taylor or you'll be sorry.

It would be a pity to spoil a nice face like yours. Acid isn't pretty.

Watch it. A Wellwisher."

The style, he decided, was derived from a recent television thriller, the writing was obviously disguised. It was possible that the police would be able to provide him with some more samples of the suspect's handwriting when they visited the lad's place of work, but he didn't really need them. The similarities between the threatening note and the samples were unmistakable. The writer had tried to alter the slant of his hand and had changed the shape of the small r. But the lifts of the pen came regularly at every fourth letter--Middlemass had never found a forger who remembered to vary the interval at which he lifted pen from paper-and the dot above the i, high and slightly to the left, and the over-emphatic apostrophe were almost a trade-mark. He would analyse the paper sample, photograph and enlarge each individual letter and then mount them on a comparison chart, and the jury would pass it solemnly from hand to hand and wonder why it needed a highly paid expert to come and explain what anyone could see with his own eyes.

The telephone rang. Middlemass stretched out a long arm and held the instrument to his left ear. Susan Bradley's voice, at first apologetic then conspiratorial and finally close to tears, squeaked into his ear in a long monologue of complaint and desperation. He listened, made soft encouraging noises, held the receiver an inch or two from his ear, and meanwhile noted that the writer, poor bastard, hadn't even thought of altering the distinctive cross-bar of his small letter t. Not that it would have done any good. And he couldn't have known, poor devil, that his effort would feature as an exhibit in his trial for murder.

"All right," he said. "Don't worry. Leave it to me."

"And you won't let him know that I phoned you?"

"Of course not, Susan. Relax. I'll settle it."

The voice crackled on.

"Then tell him not to be a fool, for God's sake. Hasn't he noticed that we've got one and a half million unemployed? Lorrimer can't sack him. Tell Clifford to hang on to his job and stop being a bloody fool.

I'll deal with Lorrimer."

He replaced the receiver. He had liked Susan Moffat who, for two years, had worked for him as his S.O. She had both more brains and more guts than her husband, and he had wondered, without greatly caring, why she had married Bradley. Pity probably, and an over-developed maternal instinct. There were some women who simply had to take the unfortunate literally to their breast. Or perhaps it was just lack of choice, the need for a home of her own and a child. Well, it was too late to try and stop the marriage now, and it certainly hadn't occurred to him to try at the time. And at least she had the home and the kid. She had brought the baby to the Lab to see him only a fortnight ago. The visit of the prune-faced yelling bundle had done nothing to change his own resolution not to produce a child, but certainly Susan herself had seemed happy enough. And she would probably be happy again if something could be done about Lorrimer.

He thought that the time had perhaps come to do something about Lorrimer. And he had, after all, his own private reason for taking on the job. It was a small personal obligation, and to date it hadn't particularly fretted what he supposed other people called conscience.

But Susan Bradley's call had reminded him. He listened. The footsteps were familiar. Well, it was a coincidence, but better now than later.

Moving to the door he called at the retreating back:

"Lorrimer. I want a word with you." Lorrimer came and stood inside the door, tall, unsmiling in his carefully buttoned white coat, and regarded Middlemass with his dark, wary eyes. Middlemass made himself look into them, and then turned his glance away. The irises had seemed to dilate into black pools of despair. It was not an emotion he felt competent to deal with, and he felt discomforted. What on earth was eating the poor devil? He said, carefully casual:

"Look, Lorrimer, lay off Bradley will you? I know he's not exactly God's gift to forensic science, but he's a conscientious plodder and you're not going to stimulate either his brain or his speed by bullying the poor little beast. So cut it out."

"Are you telling me how to manage my staff?" Lorrimer's voice was perfectly controlled, but the pulse at the side of his temple had begun to beat visibly. Middlemass found it difficult not to fix his eyes on it.

"That's right, mate. This member of your staff anyway. I know damn well what you're up to and I don't like it. So stow it."

"Is this meant to be some kind of a threat?"

"More friendly warning, reasonably friendly anyway. I don't pretend to like you, and I wouldn't have served under you if the Home Office had been daft enough to appoint you Director of this Lab. But I admit that what you do in your own department isn't normally my business, only this happens to be an exception. I know what's going on, I don't like it, and I'm making it my business to see that it stops."

"I didn't realize that you had this tender regard for Bradley. But of course, Susan Bradley must have phoned you. He wouldn't have the guts to speak for himself. Did she telephone you, Middlemass?"

Middlemass ignored the question. He said: "I haven't any particular regard for Bradley. But I did have a certain regard for Peter Ennalls, if you can remember him."

"Ennalls drowned himself because his fiancée threw him over and he'd had a mental breakdown. He left a note explaining his action and it was read out at the inquest. Both things happened months after he'd left the Southern Laboratory; neither had anything to do with me."

"What happened while he was at the Lab had a hell of a lot to do with you. He was a pleasant, rather ordinary lad with two good "A' levels and an unaccountable wish to become a forensic biologist when he had the bad luck to begin to work under you. As it happens, he was my wife's cousin. I was the one who recommended him to try for the job.

So I have a certain interest, you could say a certain responsibility."

Lorrimer said: "He never said that he was related to your wife. But I can't see what difference it makes. He was totally unsuited for the job. A forensic biologist who can't work accurately under pressure is no use to me or the Service and he'd better get out. We've no room for passengers. That's what I propose to tell Bradley."

"Then you'd better have second thoughts."

"And how are you going to make me?"

It was extraordinary that lips so tight could produce any sound, that Lorrimer's voice, high and distorted, could have forced itself through the vocal cords without splitting them.

"I shall make it plain to Howarth that you and I can't serve in the same Lab. He won't exactly welcome that. Trouble between senior staff is the last complication he wants just now. So he'll suggest to Establishment Department that one of us gets a transfer before we have the added complication of moving into a new Lab. I'm banking on Howarth--and Estabs come to that--concluding that it's easier to find a forensic biologist than a Document Examiner."

Middlemass surprised himself. None of this rigmarole had occurred to him before he spoke. Not that it was unreasonable. There wasn't another Document Examiner of his calibre in the Service and Howarth knew it. If he categorically refused to work in the same Laboratory as Lorrimer, one of them would have to go. The quarrel wouldn't do either of them any good with the Establishment Department, but he thought he knew which one it would harm most.

Lorrimer said: "You helped stop me getting the directorship, now you want to drive me out of the Lab."

"Personally I don't care a damn whether you're here or not. But just lay off bullying Bradley."

"If I were prepared to take advice about the way I run my Department from anyone, it wouldn't be a third-rate paper fetishist with a second-rate degree, who doesn't know the difference between scientific proof and intuition."

The taunt was too absurd to puncture Middlemass's secure self-esteem.

But at least it warranted a retort. He found that he was getting angry. And suddenly he saw light. He said:

"Look, mate, if you can't make it in bed, if she isn't finding you quite up to the mark, don't take your frustration out on the rest of us. Remember Chesterfield's advice. The expense is exorbitant, the position ridiculous, and the pleasure transitory."

The result astounded him. Lorrimer gave a strangled cry and lunged out. Middlemass's reaction was both instinctive and deeply satisfying.

He shot out his right arm and landed a punch on Lorrimer's nose. There was a second's astonished silence in which the two men regarded each other. Then the blood spurted and Lorrimer tottered and fell forward.

Middlemass caught him by the shoulders and felt the weight of his head against his chest. He thought: "My God, he's going to faint." He was aware of a tangle of emotion, surprise at himself, boyish gratification, pity and an impulse to laugh. He said:

"Are you all right?" Lorrimer tore himself from his grasp and stood upright. He fumbled for his handkerchief and held it to his nose. The red stain grew. Looking down, Middlemass saw Lorrimer's blood spreading on his white overall, decorative as a rose. He said:

"Since we're engaging in histrionics, I believe your response ought now to be "By God, you swine, you'll pay for this.""

He was astounded by the sudden blaze of hate in the black eyes.

Lorrimer's voice came to him muffled by the handkerchief.

"You will pay for it." And then he was gone. Middlemass was suddenly aware of Mrs. Bidwell, the Laboratory cleaner, standing by the door, eyes large and excited behind her ridiculous up swept diamante spectacles.

"Nice goings on, I don't think. Senior staff fighting each other. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

"Oh, we are, Mrs. Bidwell. We are." Slowly Middlemass eased his long arms from his overall. He handed it to her.

"Drop this in the soiled linen, will you."

"Now you know very well, Mr. Middlemass, that I don't go into the gents' cloakroom, not in working hours. You put it in the basket yourself. And if you want a clean one now, you know where to find it. I'm putting out no more clean linen until tomorrow. Fighting, indeed. I might have known that Dr. Lorrimer would be mixed up in it. But he's not a gentleman you'd expect to find using his fists. Wouldn't have the guts, that would be my view. But he's been odd in his manner these last few days, no doubt about that. You heard about that spot of bother in the front hall yesterday, I suppose? He practically pushed those kids of Dr. Kerrison's out of the door. All they were doing was waiting for their dad. No harm in that, I suppose. There's a very nasty atmosphere in this Lab recently, and if a certain gentleman doesn't take a hold of himself there'll be a mischief done, you mark my words."

It was nearly five o'clock and dark before Detective Inspector Doyle got back to his home in the village four miles to the north of Cambridge. He had tried to telephone his wife once, but without success: the line was engaged. Another of her interminable, secretive and expensive telephone calls to one of her old nursing friends, he thought, and, duly satisfied, made no further attempt. The wrought-iron gate, as usual, was open and he parked in front of the house. It wasn't worth garaging the car for a couple of hours, which was all the time he could allow himself.

Scoope House hardly looked its best in the late afternoon of a dark November evening. No wonder that the agents hadn't recently sent anyone to view. It was a bad time of the year. The house was, he thought, a monument to miscalculation. He had bought it for less than seventeen thousand and had spent five thousand on it to date, expecting to sell it for at least forty. But that was before the recession had upset the calculations of more expert speculators than he. Now, with the property market sluggish, there was nothing to do but wait. He could afford to hang on to the house until the market quickened. He wasn't sure that he would be given a chance to hold on to his wife. He wasn't even sure that he wanted to. The marriage, too, had been a miscalculation, but given the circumstances of the time, an understandable one. He wasted no time on regrets.

The two tall oblongs of light from the first floor drawing-room window should have been a welcoming promise of warmth and comfort. Instead they were vaguely menacing; Maureen was at home. But where else, she would have argued, was there for her to go in this dreary East Anglian village on a dull November evening?

She had finished tea, and the tray was still at her side. The milk bottle, with its crushed top pressed back, a single mug, sliced bread spilling out of its wrapper, a slab of butter on a greasy dish, a bought fruit cake in its unopened carton. He felt the customary surge of irritation, but said nothing. Once when he had remonstrated at her sluttishness she had shrugged: "Who sees, who cares?" He saw and he cared, but it had been many months since he had counted with her. He said: "I'm taking a couple of hours' kip. Wake me at seven, will you?"

"You mean we aren't going to the Chevisham concert?"

"For God's sake, Maureen, you were yelling yesterday that you couldn't be bothered with it. Kids' stuff. Remember?"

"It's not exactly The Talk of the Town, but at least we were going out.

Out! Out of this dump. Together for a change. It was something to dress up for. And you said we'd have dinner afterwards at the Chinese restaurant at Ely."

"Sorry. I couldn't know I'd be on a murder case."

"When will you be back? If there's any point in asking?"

"God knows. I'm picking up Sergeant Beale. There are still one or two people we've got to see who were at the Muddington dance, notably a lad called Barry Taylor who has some explaining to do. Depending on what we get out of him, I may want to drop in on the husband again."

"That'll please you, won't it, keeping him in a muck sweat. Is that why you became a cop-because you like frightening people?"

"That's about as stupid as saying you became a nurse because you get a kick out of emptying bedpans."

He flung himself in a chair and closed his eyes, giving way to sleep.

He saw again the boy's terrified face, smelt again the sweat of fear.

But he'd stood up well to that first interview, hindered rather than helped by the presence of his solicitor, who had never seen his client before and had made it painfully apparent that he would prefer never to see him again. He had stuck to his story, that they'd quarrelled at the dance and he had left early. That she hadn't arrived home by one o'clock. That he'd gone out to look for her on the road and across the clunch pit field, returning alone half an hour later. That he'd seen no one and hadn't been anywhere near the clunch pit or the derelict car. It was a good story, simple, un elaborated possibly even true except in that one essential. But, with luck, the Lab report on her blood and the stain on his jacket cuff, the minute traces of sandy soil and dust from the car on his shoes, would be ready by Friday. If Lorrimer worked late tonight--and he usually did--the blood analysis might even be available by tomorrow. And then would come the elaborations, the inconsistencies, and finally the truth. She said:

"Who else was at the scene?" It was something, he thought, that she had bothered to ask. He said sleepily:

"Lorrimer, of course. He never misses a murder scene. Doesn't trust any of us to know our jobs, I suppose. We had the usual half-hour hanging about for Kerrison. That maddened Lorrimer, of course. He's done all the work at the scene--all anyone can do--and then he has to cool his heels with the rest of us, waiting for God's gift to forensic pathology to come screaming up with a police escort and break the news to us that what we all thought was a corpse is--surprise, surprise-indeed a corpse, and that we can safely move the body."

"The forensic pathologist does more than that."

"Of course he does. But not all that much more, not at the actual scene. His job comes later."

He added: "Sorry I couldn't ring. I did try but you were engaged."

"I expect that was Daddy. His offer still stands, the job of Security Officer in the Organization. But he can't wait much longer. If you don't accept by the end of the month, then he'll advertise."

Oh God, he thought, not that again. "I wish your dear Daddy wouldn't talk about the Organization. It makes the family business sound like the Mafia. If it were, I might be tempted to join. What Daddy's got are three cheap, shabby shops selling cheap, shabby suits to cheap shabby fools who wouldn't recognize a decent cloth if it were shoved down their throats. I might've considered coming into the business if dear Daddy hadn't already got Big Brother as a co-director, ready to take over from him, and if he didn't make it so plain that he only tolerates me because I'm your husband. But I'm damned if I'm going to fart around like a pansy floorwalker watching that no poor sod nicks the Y-fronts, even if I am dignified with the name security officer. I'm staying here."

"Where you've got such useful contacts." And what exactly, he wondered, did she mean by that? He'd been careful not to tell her anything, but she wasn't altogether a fool. She could have guessed.

He said:

"Where I've got a job. You knew what you were taking on when you married me."

But no one ever does know that, he thought. Not really.

"Don't expect me to be here when you get back."

That was an old threat. He said easily: "Suit yourself. But if you're thinking of driving, forget it. I'm taking the Cortina, the clutch is playing up on the Renault. So if you're planning on running home to Mummy before tomorrow morning, you'll have to phone Daddy to call for you, or take a taxi."

She was speaking, but her voice, peevishly insistent, was coming from far away, no longer coherent words but waves of sound beating against his brain. Two hours. Whether or not she bothered to rouse him, he knew that he would wake almost to the minute. He closed his eyes and slept.