Death of an Expert Witness

BOOK TWO Death in a White Coat

It was very peaceful in the front hall of Hoggatt's at eight-forty in the morning. Brenda often thought that this was the part of the working day she liked best, the hour before the staff arrived and the work of the Lab got really under way, when she and Inspector Blakelock worked together in the quiet emptiness of the hall, still and solemn as a church, making up a supply of manila folders ready to register the day's new cases, repacking exhibits for collection by the police, making a final check of the Laboratory reports to courts to ensure that the examination was complete, that no relevant detail had been omitted.

Immediately on arrival she would put on her white coat, and at once she felt different, no longer young and uncertain, but a professional woman, almost like a scientist, a recognized member of the Lab staff.

Then she would go into the kitchen at the back of the house and make tea. After the dignification of the white coat this domestic chore was something of a let-down, and she didn't really need a drink so soon after breakfast. But Inspector Blake lock, who motored from Ely every day, was always ready for his tea, and she didn't mind making it.

"That's the stuff to give the troops," he would invariably say, curving back moist lips to the mug's brim and gulping the hot liquid down as if his throat were asbestos. "You make a nice cup of tea, Brenda, I'll say that for you." And she would reply:

"Mum says the secret is always to warm the pot and let the tea brew for just five minutes."

This small ritual exchange, so invariable that she could silently mouth his words and had to resist an impulse to giggle, the familiar domestic aroma of the tea, the gradual warmth as she curved her hands around the thick mug, constituted a reassuring and comforting beginning to the working day.

She liked Inspector Blakelock. He spoke seldom, but he was never impatient with her, always kind, a companionable father figure. Even her mother, when she visited the Lab before Brenda took up her post, had been happy about her working alone with him. Brenda's cheeks still burned with shame when she remembered her mother's insistence that she should visit Hoggatt's to see where her daughter was going to work, although Chief Inspector Martin, the Senior Police Liaison Officer, had apparently thought it perfectly reasonable. He had explained to her mother how it was an innovation for Hoggatt's having a clerical officer on the desk instead of a junior police officer. If she made a success of the job it would mean a permanent saving in police manpower as well as a useful training for her. As Chief Inspector Martin had told her mother: "The reception desk is the heart of the Laboratory." At present he was with a party of police officers visiting the United States and Inspector Blakelock was totally in charge doing the two jobs, not only receiving the exhibits, making out the register of court attendances and preparing the statistics, but discussing the cases with the detective in charge, explaining what the Laboratory could hope to do, rejecting those cases where the scientists couldn't help, and checking that the final statements for the court were complete. Brenda guessed that it was a big responsibility for him and was determined not to let him down.

Already, when she had been making the tea, the first exhibit of the day had arrived, brought in no doubt by a detective constable working on the case. It was another plastic bag of clothes from the clunch pit murder. As Inspector Blakelock turned it over in his large hands, she glimpsed through the plastic a pair of dark blue trousers with a greasy waistband, a wide-lapel led striped jacket, and a pair of black shoes with pointed toes and ornate buckles. Inspector Blakelock was studying the police report. He said:

"These belong to the boyfriend she was messing about with at the dance.

You'll need a new file for the report, but register it to Biology under the Muddington reference with a sub-group number. Then attach one of the red Immediate slips. Murder gets priority."

"But we might have two or three murders at the same time. Who decides the priority then?"

"The head of the department concerned. It's his job to allocate the work to his staff. After murder and rape, it's usual to give priority to those cases where the accused hasn't been bailed."

Brenda said: "I hope you don't mind my asking so many questions. Only I do want to learn. Dr. Lorrirner told me that I ought to find out all I can and not just look on this job as routine."

"You ask away, lass, I don't mind. Only you don't want to listen too much to Dr. Lorrirner. He isn't the director here, even if he thinks he is. When you've registered that clobber, the bundle goes on the Biology shelf."

Brenda entered the exhibit number carefully in the day-book and moved the plastic-shrouded bundle to the shelf of exhibits waiting to go into the Biology Search Room. It was good to be up to date with the entering. She glanced up at the clock. It was nearly eight-fifty.

Soon the day's post would be delivered and the desk would be heaped with padded envelopes containing yesterday's blood samples from the drink and driving cases. Then the police cars would start arriving.

Uniformed or plainclothes policemen would bring in large envelopes of documents for Mr. Middlemass, the Document Examiner; specially prepared kits issued by the Laboratory for the collection of saliva, blood and semen stains; unwieldy bags of stained and dirty bed linen and blankets; the ubiquitous blunt instruments; bloodstained knives carefully taped into their boxes.

And at any moment now the first members of staff would be arriving.

Mrs. Bidwell, the cleaner, should have been with them twenty minutes ago. Perhaps she had caught Scobie's influenza. The first of the scientific staff to arrive would probably be Clifford Bradley, the Higher Scientific Officer in the Biology Department, scurrying through the hall as if he had no right to be there, with his anxious hunted eyes and that stupid, drooping moustache, so preoccupied that he hardly noticed their greeting. Then Miss Foley, the Director's secretary, calm and self-possessed, wearing always that secret smile. Miss Foley reminded Brenda of Mona Rigby at school, who was always chosen to play the Madonna in the Christmas nativity play. She had never liked Mona Rigby--who wouldn't have been chosen twice for the coveted role if the staff had known as much about her as did Brenda--and she wasn't sure that she really liked Miss Foley. Then someone she did like, Mr.

Middlemass, the Document Examiner, with his jacket slung over his shoulders, leaping up the stairs three steps at a time and calling out a greeting to the desk. After that they would come in almost any order. The hall would become alive with people, rather like a railway terminus, and at the heart of the seeming chaos, controlling and directing, helping and explaining, were the staff of the reception desk.

As if to signal that the working day was about to begin, the telephone rang. Inspector Blakelock's hand enveloped the receiver. He listened in silence for what seemed a longer period than normal, then she heard him speak.

"I don't think he's here, Mr. Lorrimer. You say he never came home last night?"

Another silence, Inspector Blakelock half turned away from her and bent his head conspiratorially over the mouthpiece as if listening to a confidence. Then he rested the receiver on the counter and turned to Brenda:

"It's Dr. Lorrimer's old dad. He's worried. Apparently Dr. Lorrimer didn't take him his early tea this morning and it looks as if he didn't come home last night. His bed hasn't been slept in."

"Well, he can't be here. I mean, we found the front door locked when we arrived."

There could be no doubt about that. As she had come round the corner of the house from putting her bicycle in the old stable block, Inspector Blakelock had been standing at the front door almost as if he were waiting for her. Then, when she had joined him, he had shone his torch on the locks and inserted the three keys, first the Yale, and then the Ingersoll, and lastly the security lock which disconnected the electronic warning system from Guy's Marsh police station. Then they had stepped together into the unlighted hall. She had gone to the cloakroom at the back of the building to put on her white coat and he had gone to the box in Chief Inspector Martin's office to switch off the system which protected the inner doors of the main Laboratory rooms.

She giggled and said: "Mrs. Bidwell hasn't turned up to start the cleaning and now Dr. Lorrimer's missing. Perhaps they've run away together. The great Hoggatt scandal."

It wasn't a very funny joke, and she wasn't surprised when Inspector Blakelock didn't laugh. He said:

"The locked door doesn't necessarily signify. Dr. Lorrimer has his own keys. And if he did make his bed and then come in extra early this morning, like as not he'd have relocked the door and set the internal alarms."

"But how would he have got into the Biology Lab, then?"

"He'd have had to have opened the door and then left it open when he reset the alarms. It doesn't seem likely. When he's here alone he usually relies on the Yale."

He put the receiver again to his ear and said:

"Hold on a moment will you, Mr. Lorrimer. I don't think he's here, but I'll just check."

"I'll go," said Brenda, anxious to demonstrate helpfulness. Without waiting to lift the flap she slipped under the counter. As she turned she saw him with startling clarity, brightly instantaneous as a camera flash. Inspector Blakelock, with his mouth half-open in remonstrance, his arm flung out towards her in a gesture, stiff and histrionic, of protection or restraint.

But now, uncomprehending, she laughed and ran up the wide stairs. The Biology Laboratory was at the back of the first floor, running with its adjoining search room almost the whole length of the building. The door was shut. She turned the knob and pushed it open, feeling along the wall for the light switch. Her fingers found it and she pressed it down. The two long fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling blinked, then glimmered, then glowed into steady light.

She saw the body immediately. He was lying in the space between the two large central examination tables, face downwards, his left hand seeming to claw at the floor, his right arm hunched beneath him. His legs were straight. She gave a curious little sound between a cry and a moan and knelt beside him. The hair above his left ear was matted and spiked like her kitten's fur after he had washed, but she couldn't see the blood against the dark hair. But she knew that it was blood.

Already it had blackened on the collar of his white coat and a small pool had separated and congealed on the Lab floor. Only his left eye was visible, fixed and dull and retracted, like the eye of a dead calf.

Tentatively she felt his cheek. It was cold. But she had known as soon as she had seen the glazed eye that this was death.

She had no memory of closing the Lab door or coming down the stairs.

Inspector Blakelock was still behind the counter, rigid as a statue, the telephone receiver in his hand. She wanted to laugh at the sight of his face, he looked so funny. She tried to speak to him, but the words wouldn't come. Her jaw jabbered uncontrollably and her teeth clattered together. She made some kind of gesture. He said something that she couldn't catch, dropped the receiver on the counter and raced upstairs.

She staggered to the heavy Victorian armchair against the wall outside Chief Inspector Martin's office, Colonel Hoggatt's chair. The portrait looked down at her. As she watched, the left eye seemed to grow larger, the lips twisted to a leer.

Her whole body was seized with a terrible cold. Her heart seemed to have grown immense, thudding against the ribcage. She was breathing in great gulps, but still there wasn't enough air. Then she became aware of the crackling from the telephone. Rising slowly like an automaton, she made her way over to the counter and picked up the receiver. Mr. Lorrimer's voice, frail and querulous, was bleating at the other end. She tried to say the accustomed words "Hoggatt's Laboratory here. Reception speaking."

But the words wouldn't come. She replaced the receiver in its cradle and walked back to her chair.

She had no memory of hearing the long peal of the doorbell, of moving stiffly across the hall to answer it. Suddenly the door crashed open and the hall was full of people, loud with voices. The light seemed to have brightened, which was odd, and she saw them all like actors on a stage, brightly lit, faces made grotesque and heightened by make-up, every word clear and comprehensible as if she were in the front row of the stalls. Mrs. Bidwell, the cleaner, in her mackintosh with the imitation-fur collar, her eyes bright with indignation, her voice pitched high.

"What the hell's going on here! Some bloody fool phoned my old man and told him that I needn't come in today, that Mrs. Schofield wanted me.

Who's playing silly buggers?"

Inspector Blakelock was coming down the stairs, slowly and deliberately, the protagonist making his entrance. They stood in a small circle and looked up at him. Dr. Howarth, Clifford Bradley, Miss Foley, Mrs. Bidwell. The Director stepped for ward. He looked as if he were going to faint. He said:

"Well, Blakelock?"

"It's Dr. Lorrimer, sir. He's dead. Murdered."

Surely they couldn't all have repeated that word in unison, turning their faces towards each other, like a Greek chorus. But it seemed to echo in the quiet of the hall, becoming meaningless, a sonorous groan of a word. Murder. Murder. Murder.

She saw Dr. Howarth run towards the stairs. Inspector Blake lock turned to accompany him, but the Director said:

"No, you stay here. See that no one gets any further than the hall.

Phone the Chief Constable and Dr. Kerrison. Then get me the Home Office."

Suddenly they seemed to notice Brenda for the first time. Mrs. Bidwell came towards her. She said:

"Did you find him then? You poor little bugger!" And suddenly it wasn't a play anymore. The lights went out. The faces became amorphous, ordinary. Brenda gave a little gasp. She felt Mrs.

Bidwell's arms go round her shoulders. The smell of the mackintosh was pressed into her face. The fur was as soft as her kitten's paw. And, blessedly, Brenda began to cry.

In a London teaching hospital close by the river, from which he could in his more masochistic moments glimpse the window of his own office, Dr. Charles Freeborn, Controller of the Forensic Science Service, all six foot four of him, lay rigidly in his narrow bed, his nose peaked high above the methodical fold of the sheet, his white hair a haze against the whiter pillow. The bed was too short for him, an inconvenience to which he had accommodated himself by neatly sticking out his toes over the foot-board. His bedside locker held the conglomerate of offerings, necessities and minor diversions considered indispensable to a brief spell in hospital. They included a vase of official-looking roses, scentless but florid, through whose funereal and unnatural blooms Commander Adam Dalgliesh glimpsed a face so immobile, upturned eyes fixed on the ceiling, that he was momentarily startled by the illusion that he was visiting the dead. Recalling that Freeborn was recovering from nothing more serious than a successful operation for varicose veins, he approached the bed and said tentatively:

"Hello!" Freeborn, galvanized from his torpor, sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, scattering from his bedside locker a packet of tissues, two copies of the Journal of the Forensic Science Society and an open box of chocolates. He shot out a lean speckled arm encircled by the hospital identity bracelet and crushed Dalgliesh's hand.

"Adam! Don't creep up on me like that, damn you! God, am I glad to see you! The only good news I've had this morning is that you'll be in charge. I thought that you might have already left. How long can you spare? How are you getting there?"

Dalgliesh answered the questions in order. "Ten minutes. By chopper from the Battersea heliport. I'm on my way now. How are you, Charles?

Am I being a nuisance?"

"I'm the nuisance. This couldn't have happened at a worse time. And the maddening part of it is that it's my own fault. The op could have waited. Only the pain was getting rather tedious and Meg insisted that I had it done now before I retired, on the theory I suppose, that better in the Government time than my own."

Recalling what he knew of the ardours and achievements of Freeborn's forty-odd years in the Forensic Science Service, the difficult war years, the delayed retirement, the last five years when he had exchanged his directorship for the frustrations of bureaucracy, Dalgliesh said:

"Sensible of her. And there's nothing you could have done at Chevisham."

"I know. It's ridiculous, this feeling of responsibility because one isn't actually in post when disaster strikes. They rang from the duty office to break the news to me just after nine. Better that than learning it from my visitors or this evening's paper, I suppose they thought. Decent of them. The Chief Constable must have called in the Yard within a few minutes of getting the news. How much do you know?"

"About as much as you, I imagine. I've spoken to the C.C. and to Howarth. They've given me the main facts. The skull smashed, apparently by a heavy mallet which Lorrimer had been examining. The Lab found properly locked when the Assistant Police Liaison Officer and the young C.O. arrived at eight-thirty this morning. Lorrimer's keys in his pocket. He often worked late and most of the Lab staff knew that he proposed to do so last night. No sign of a break-in. Four sets of keys. Lorrimer had one set as the Senior P.S.O. and Deputy Security Officer. The Assistant Police Liaison Officer has the second.

Lorrimer or one of the Police Liaison Officers were the only people authorized to lock and open up the building. The Director keeps the third set of keys in his security cupboard, and the fourth are in a safe at Guy's Marsh police station in case the alarm rings in the night."

Freeborn said: "So either Lorrimer let in his murderer or the murderer had a key."

There were, thought Dalgliesh, other possibilities, but now was not the time to discuss them. He asked:

"Lorrimer would have let in anyone from the Lab, I suppose?"

"Why not? He'd probably have admitted any of the local police whom he personally knew, particularly if it were a detective concerned with a recent case. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. He may have admitted a friend or relative, although that's even more doubtful. He was a punctilious blighter and I can't see him using the Lab as a convenient place for a rendezvous. And, of course, he would have let in the forensic pathologist."

"That's a local man, Henry Kerrison, they tell me. The C.C. said that they called him in to look at the body. Well, they could hardly do anything else. I didn't know you'd found a successor to Death-House Donald."

"Nor have we. Kerrison is doing it on an item of service basis. He's well thought of and we'll probably appoint him if we can get the Area Health Authority to agree. There's the usual difficulty about his hospital responsibilities. I wish to hell we could get the forensic pathology service sorted out before I go. But that's one headache I'll have to leave to my successor."

Dalgliesh thought without affection of Death House Donald with his ghoulish schoolboy humour--"Not that cake-knife, my dear lady. I used it this morning on one of Slash Harry's victims and the edge is rather blunted"--his mania for self-advertisement and his intolerable bucolic laugh, and was grateful that at least he wouldn't be interrogating that redoubtable old phoney. He said:

"Tell me about Lorrimer. What was he like?" This was the question which lay at the heart of every murder investigation; and yet he knew its absurdity before he asked it. It was the strangest part of a detective's job, this building up of a relationship with the dead, seen only as a crumpled corpse at the scene of crime or naked on the mortuary table. The victim was central to the mystery of his own death. He died because of what he was. Before the case was finished Dalgliesh would have received a dozen pictures of Lorrimer's personality, transferred like prints from other men's minds. From these amorphous and uncertain images he would create his own imaginings, superimposed and dominant, but essentially just as incomplete, just as distorted--as were the others--by his own preconceptions, his own personality. But the question had to be asked.

And at least he could rely on Freeborn to answer it without initiating a philosophical discussion about the basis of the self. But their minds must for a moment have flowed together, for Freeborn said:

"It's odd how you always have to ask that question, that you'll only see him through other men's eyes. Aged about forty. Looks like John the Baptist without his beard and is about as uncompromising. Single.

Lives with an elderly father in a cottage just outside the village. He is--was--an extremely competent forensic biologist, but I doubt whether he would have gone any higher. Obsessional, edgy, uncomfortable to be with. He applied for the job at Hoggatt's, of course, and was runner-up to Howarth."

"How did he and the Lab take the new appointment?"

"Lorrimer took it pretty hard, I believe. The Lab wouldn't have welcomed his appointment. He was pretty unpopular with most of the senior staff. But there are always one or two who would have preferred a colleague to a stranger even if they hated his guts. And the Union made the expected noises about not appointing a forensic scientist."

"Why did you appoint Howarth? I take it you were on the Board."

"Oh, yes. I accept a share of the responsibility. That's not to say that I think we made a mistake. Old Doc Mac was one of the really great forensic scientists--we started together--but there's no denying that he'd let the reins slip a bit in recent years. Howarth has already increased the work turnover by ten per cent. And then there's the commissioning of the new Lab. It was a calculated risk to take a man without forensic experience, but we were looking for a manager primarily. At least, most of the Board were and the rest of us were persuaded that it would be no bad thing, without, I confess, being precisely clear what we meant by that blessed word. Management. The new science. We all make obeisance to it. In the old days we got on with the job, jollied staff along if they needed it, kicked the sluggards in the backside, encouraged the unconfident and persuaded a reluctant and skeptical police force to use us. Oh, and sent in an occasional statistical return to the Home Office just to remind them that we were there. It seemed to work all right. The Service didn't collapse. Have you ever considered what exactly is the difference between administration and management, Adam?"

"Keep it as a question to confound the candidate at your next Board.

Howarth was at the Bruche Research Institute wasn't he? Why did he want to leave? He must have taken a cut in pay."

"Not more than about six hundred a year, and that wouldn't worry him.

His father was rich, and it all came to him and his half-sister."

"But it's a bigger place surely? And he can't be getting the research at Hoggatt's."

"He gets some, but essentially, of course, it's a service laboratory.

That worried us a bit on the Board. But you can hardly set out to persuade your most promising applicant that he's downgrading himself.

Scientifically and academically--he's a pure physicist--he was well ahead of the rest of the field. Actually we did press him a bit and he gave the usual reasons. He was getting stale, wanted a new sphere of activity, was anxious to get away from London. Gossip has it that his wife had recently left him and he wanted to make a clean break. That was probably the reason. Thank God he didn't use that blasted word 'challenge." If I have to listen to one more candidate telling me he sees the job as a challenge I'll throw up over the boardroom table.

Adam, I'm getting old."

He nodded his head towards the window. "They're in a bit of a twitch over there, I need hardly say."

"I know. I've had an exceedingly brief but tactful interview. They're brilliant at implying more than they actually say. But obviously it's important to get it solved quickly. Apart from confidence in the service, you'll all want to get the Lab back to work."

"What's happening now? To the staff, I mean."

"The local CID. have locked all the interior doors and they're keeping the staff in the library and the reception area until I arrive. They're occupying themselves writing out an account of their movements since Lorrimer was last seen alive and the local Force are getting on with the preliminary checking of alibis. That should save some time. I'm taking one officer, John Massingham, with me. The Met Lab will take on any of the forensic work. They're sending a chap down from Public Relations Branch to handle the publicity, so I won't have that on my plate. It's obliging of that pop group to break up so spectacularly. That and the Government's troubles should keep us off the front page for a day or two."

Freeborn was looking down at his big toes with mild distaste as if they were errant members whose deficiencies had only now become apparent to him. From time to time he wriggled them, whether in obedience to some medical instruction or for his own private satisfaction, it was impossible to say. After a moment he spoke. "I started my career at Hoggatt's, you know. That was before the war. All any of us had then was wet chemistry, test tubes, beakers, solutions. And girls weren't employed because it wasn't decent for them to be concerned with sex cases. Hoggatt's was old-fashioned even for the 1930 service. Not scientifically, though. We had a spectrograph when it was still the new wonder toy. The fens threw up some odd crimes. Do you remember the Mulligan case, old man who chopped up his brother and tied the remains to the learnings' sluice-gates? There was some nice forensic evidence there."

"Some fifty bloodstains on the pig-sty wall, weren't there? And Mulligan swore it was sow's blood."

Freeborn's voice grew reminiscent. "I liked that old villain. And they still drag out those photographs I took of the splashes and use them to illustrate lectures on bloodstains. Odd, the attraction Hoggatt's had--still has for that matter. An unsuitable Palladian mansion in an unexciting East Anglian village on the edge of the black fens. Ten miles to Ely, and that's hardly a centre of riotous activity for the young. Winters to freeze your marrow and a spring wind--the fen blow they call it-which whips up the peat and chokes your lungs like smog. And yet the staff, if they didn't leave after the first month, stayed for ever. Did you know that Hoggatt's has got a small Wren chapel in the Lab grounds? Architecturally it's much superior to the house because old Hoggatt never messed it about. He was almost entirely without aesthetic taste, I believe. He used it as a chemical store once it had been de consecrated or whatever it is they do to unused churches. Howarth has got a string quartet going at the Lab and they gave a concert there. Apparently he's a noted amateur violinist.

At the moment he's probably wishing that he'd stuck to music. This isn't a propitious start for him, poor devil. And it was always such a happy Lab. I suppose it was the isolation that gave us such a feeling of camaraderie."

Dalgliesh said grimly: "I doubt whether that will survive an hour of my arrival."

"No. You chaps usually bring as much trouble with you as you solve.

You can't help it. Murder is like that, a contaminating crime. Oh, you'll solve it, I know. You always do. But I'm wondering at what cost."

Dalgliesh did not answer. He was both too honest and too fond of Freeborn to make comforting and platitudinous promises. Of course, he would be tactful. That didn't need saying. But he would be at Hoggatt's to solve a murder, and all other considerations would go down before that overriding task. Murder was always solved at a cost, sometimes to himself, more often to others. And Freeborn was right.

It was a crime which contaminated everyone whom it touched, innocent and guilty alike. He didn't grudge the ten minutes he had spent with Freeborn. The old man believed, with simple patriotism, that the Service to which he had given the whole of his working life was the best in the world. He had helped to shape it, and he was probably right. Dalgliesh had learned what he had come to learn. But as he shook hands and said goodbye he knew that he left no comfort behind him.

The library at Hoggatt's was at the rear of the ground floor. Its three tall windows gave a view of the stone terrace and the double flight of steps going down to what had once been a lawn and formal gardens, but which was now a half-acre of neglected grass, bounded to the west by the brick annexe of the Vehicle Examination Department, and to the east by the old stable block, now converted into garages. The room was one of the few in the house spared its former owner's transforming zeal. The original bookcases of carved oak still lined the walls, although they now housed the Laboratory's not inconsiderable scientific library, while extra shelf-room for bound copies of national and international journals had been provided by two steel movable units which divided the room into three bays. Under each of the three windows was a working table with four chairs; one table was almost completely covered by a model of the new Laboratory.

It was in this somewhat inadequate space that the staff were congregated. A detective sergeant from the local CID, sat impassively near the door, a reminder of why they were so inconveniently incarcerated. They were allowed out to the ground-floor cloakroom under tactful escort, and had been told they could telephone home from the library. But the rest of the Laboratory was at present out of bounds.

They had all, on arrival, been asked to write a brief account of where they had been, and with whom, the previous evening and night.

Patiently, they waited their turn at one of the three tables. The statements had been collected by the sergeant and handed out to his colleague on the reception desk, presumably so that the preliminary checking could begin. Those of the junior staff who could provide a satisfactory alibi were allowed home as soon as it had been checked; one by one and with some reluctance at missing the excitements to come they went their way. The less fortunate, together with those who had arrived first at the Laboratory that morning and all the senior scientists, had been told they must await the arrival of the team from Scotland Yard. The Director had put in only one brief appearance in the library. Earlier he had gone with Angela Foley to break the news of Lorrimer's death to his father. Since his return he had stayed in his own office with Detective Superintendent Mercer of the local CID.

It was rumoured that Dr. Kerrison was with them.

The minutes dragged while they listened for the first hum of the approaching helicopter. Inhibited by the presence of the police, by prudence, delicacy or embarrassment from talking about the subject foremost in their minds, they spoke to each other with the wary politeness of uncongenial strangers stranded in an airport lounge. The women were, on the whole, better equipped for the tedium of the wait.

Mrs. Mallett, the typist from the general office, had brought her knitting to work and, fortified by an unshakeable alibi--she had sat between the post mistress and Mr. Mason from the general store at the village concert--and with something to occupy her hands, sat clicking away with understandable if irritating complacency until given the order of release. Mrs. Bidwell, the Laboratory cleaner, had insisted on visiting her broom cupboard, under escort, and had provided herself with a feather duster and a couple of rags with which she made a vigorous onslaught on the bookshelves. She was unusually silent, but the group of scientists at the tables could hear her muttering to herself as she punished the books at the end of one of the bays.

Brenda Pridmore had been allowed to collect the exhibits-received book from the counter and, white-faced but outwardly composed, was checking the previous months figures. The book took more than its share of the available table space; but at least she had a legitimate job. Claire Easterbrook, Senior Scientific Officer in the Biology Department and, with Lorrimer's death, the senior biologist, had taken from her briefcase a scientific paper she had prepared on recent advances in blood grouping and settled down to revise it with as little apparent concern as if murder at Hoggatt's were a routine inconvenience for which, prudently, she was always provided.

The rest of the staff passed the time each in his own way. Those who preferred the pretence of business immersed themselves in a book and, from time to time, made an ostentatious note. The two Vehicle Examiners, who were reputed to have no conversation except about cars, squatted side by side, their backs against the steel bookracks, and talked cars together with desperate eagerness. Middlemass had finished The Times crossword by quarter to ten and had made the rest of the paper last as long as possible. But now even the deaths column was exhausted. He folded the paper and tossed it across the table to eagerly awaiting hands.

It was a relief when Stephen Copley, the Senior Chemist, arrived just before ten, bustling in as usual, his rubicund face with its tonsure and fringe of black curly hair glistening as if he had come in from the sun. Nothing was known to disconcert him, certainly not the death of a man he had disliked. But he was secure in his alibi, having spent the whole of the previous day in the Crown Court and the evening and night with friends at Norwich, only getting back to Chevisham in time for a late start that morning. His colleagues, relieved to find something to talk about, began questioning him about the case. They spoke rather too loudly to be natural. The rest of the company listened with simulated interest as if the conversation were a dramatic dialogue provided for their entertainment.

"Who did they call for the defence?" asked Middlemass.

"Charlie Pollard. He hung his great belly over the box and explained confidentially to the jury that they needn't be frightened of the so-called scientific expert witnesses because none of us, including himself of course, really know what we're talking about. They were immensely reassured, I need hardly say."

"Juries hate scientific evidence."

"They think they won't be able to understand it so naturally they can't understand it. As soon as you step into the box you see a curtain of obstinate incomprehension clanging down over their minds. What they want is certainty. Did this paint particle come from this car body?

Answer Yes or No. None of those nasty mathematical probabilities we're so fond of."

"If they hate scientific evidence they certainly hate arithmetic more.

Give them a scientific opinion which depends on the ability to divide a factor by two-thirds and what do you get from counsel? "I'm afraid you'll have to explain yourself more simply, Mr. Middlemass. The jury and I haven't got a higher degree in mathematics, you know." Inference: you're an arrogant bastard and the jury would be well advised not to believe a word you say"

It was the old argument. Brenda had heard it all before when she ate her lunch-time sandwiches in the room, half-way between a kitchen and a sitting-room, which was still called the junior Mess. But now it seemed terrible that they should be able to talk so naturally while Dr.

Lorrimer lay there dead upstairs. Suddenly she had a need to speak his name. She looked up and made herself say:

"Dr. Lorrimer thought that the Service would end up with about three immense laboratories doing the work for the whole country with exhibits coming in by air. He said that he thought all the scientific evidence ought to be agreed by both sides before the trial."

Middlemass said easily: "That's an old argument. The police want a local lab nice and handy, and who's to blame them? Besides, three quarters of forensic scientific work doesn't require all this sophisticated instrumentation. There's more of a case for highly equipped regional laboratories with local out-stations. But who'd want to work in the small labs if the more exciting stuff went elsewhere?"

Miss Easterbrook had apparently finished her revision. She said:

"Lorrimer knew that this idea of the lab as a scientific arbiter wouldn't work, not with the British accusatorial system. Anyway, scientific evidence ought to be tested like any other evidence."

"But how?" asked Middlemass. "By an ordinary jury? Suppose you're an expert document examiner outside the service and they call you for the defence. You and I disagree. How can the jury judge between us?

They'll probably choose to believe you because you're better-looking."

"Or you, more likely, because you're a man."

"Or one of them--the crucial one--will reject me because I remind him of Uncle Ben and all the family know that Ben was the world's champion liar."

"All right. All right." Copley spread plump hands in a benediction of appeasement. "It's the same as democracy. A fallible system but the best we've got."

Middlemass said: "It's extraordinary, though, how well it works. You look at the jury, sitting there politely attentive, like children on their best behaviour because they're visitors in an alien country and don't want to make fools of themselves or offend the natives. Yet how often do they come up with a verdict that's manifestly perverse having regard to the evidence?"

Claire Easterbrook said drily: "Whether it's manifestly perverse having regard to the truth is another matter."

"A criminal trial isn't a tribunal for eliciting the truth. At least we deal in facts. What about the emotion? Did you love your husband, Mrs. B.? How can the poor woman explain that, probably like the majority of wives, she loved him most of the time, when he didn't snore in her ear all night or shout at the kids or keep her short of Bingo money."

Copley said: "She can't. If she's got any sense and if her counsel has briefed her properly, she'll get out her handkerchief and sob, "Oh yes, sir. A better husband never lived, as God's my witness." It's a game, isn't it? You win if you play by the rules."

Claire Easterbrook shrugged: "If you know them. Too often it's a game where the rules are known only to one side. Natural enough when that's the side which makes them up."

Copley and Middlemass laughed. Clifford Bradley had half hidden himself from the rest of the company behind the table holding the model of the new Laboratory. He had taken a book from the shelves at random but, for the last ten minutes, hadn't even bothered to turn the page.

They were laughing! They were actually laughing! Getting up from the table he groped his way down the furthest bay and replaced his book in the rack, leaning his forehead against the cold steel. Unobtrusively Middlemass strolled up beside him and, back to the company, reached up to take a book from the shelf. He said:

"Are you all right?"

"I wish to God they'd come."

"So do we all. But the chopper should be here any minute now."

"How can they laugh like that? Don't they care?"

"Of course they care. Murder is beastly, embarrassing and inconvenient. But I doubt whether anyone is feeling a purely personal grief. And other people's tragedies, other people's danger, always provoke a certain euphoria as long as one is safe oneself." He looked at Bradley and said softly:

"There's always manslaughter, you know. Or even justified homicide.

Though, come to think of it, one could hardly plead that."

"You think I killed him, don't you?"

"I don't think anything. Anyway, you've got an alibi. Wasn't your mother-in-law with you yesterday evening?"

"Not all the evening. She caught the seven forty-five bus."

"Well, with luck, there'll be evidence that he was dead by then." And why, thought Middlemass, should Bradley assume that he wasn't?

Bradley's dark and anxious eyes narrowed with suspicion.

"How did you know that Sue's mother was with us last night?"

"Susan told me. Actually, she telephoned me at the Lab just before two. It was about Lorrimer."

He thought and then said easily, "She was wondering whether there was a chance he might ask for a transfer now that Howarth has been in his post a year. She thought I might have heard something. When you get home, tell her that I don't propose to tell the police about the call unless she does first. Oh, and you'd better reassure her that I didn't bash in his head for him. I'd do a lot for Sue, but a man has to draw the line somewhere."

Bradley said with a note of resentment:

"Why should you worry? There's nothing wrong with your alibi. Weren't you at the village concert?"

"Not all the evening. And there's a certain slight embarrassment about my alibi even when I was ostensibly there."

Bradley turned to him and said with sudden vehemence: "I didn't do it!

Oh God, I can't stand this waiting!"

"You've got to stand it. Pull yourself together, Cliff! You won't help yourself or Susan by going to pieces. They're English policemen, remember. We're not expecting the KGB."

It was then that they heard the long-awaited sound, a distant grinding hum like that of an angry wasp. The desultory voices at the tables fell silent, heads were raised and, together, the company moved towards the windows. Mrs. Bidwell rushed for a place of vantage. The red and white helicopter rattled into sight over the top of the trees and hovered, a noisy gadfly, above the terraces. No one spoke. Then Middlemass said:

"The Yard's wonder boy, appropriately, descends from the clouds. Well, let's hope that he works quickly. I want to get into my lab. Someone should tell him that he's not the only one with a murder on his hands."

Detective Inspector the Honourable John Massingham disliked helicopters, which he regarded as noisy, cramped and frighteningly unsafe. Since his physical courage was beyond question either by himself or anyone else, he would normally have had no objection to saying so. But he knew his chief's dislike of unnecessary chat, and strapped as they were side by side in uncomfortably close proximity in the Enstrom Fz8, he decided that the Chevisham case would get off to the most propitious start by a policy of disciplined silence. He noted with interest that the cockpit instrument panel was remarkably similar to a car dashboard; even the airspeed was shown in miles per hour instead of knots. He was only sorry that there the resemblance ended.

He adjusted his earphones more comfortably and settled down to soothe his nerves by a concentrated study of his maps.

The red-brown tentacles of London's suburbs had at last been shaken off, and the cheque red autumn landscape, multi-textured as a cloth collage, unrolled before them in a changing pattern of brown, green and gold, leading them on to Cambridge. The fitful sunshine moved in broad swathes across the neat, segmented villages, the trim municipal parks and open fields. Miniature tin cars, beetle-bright in the sun, pursued each other busily along the roads.

Dalgliesh glanced at his companion, at the strong, pale face, the spatter of freckles over the craggy nose and wide forehead, and the thatch of red hair springing under the headphones, and thought how like the boy was to his father, that redoubtable, thrice-decorated peer, whose courage was equalled only by his obstinacy and naiveté. The marvel of the Massinghams was that a lineage going back five hundred years could have produced so many generations of amiable nonentities.

He remembered when he had last seen Lord Dungannon. It had been a debate in the House of Lords on juvenile delinquency, a subject on which His Lordship considered himself an expert since he had, indubitably, once been a boy and had, briefly, helped organize a youth club on his grandfather's estate. His thoughts, when they finally came, had been uttered in all their simplistic banality, in no particular order of logic or relevance, and in a curiously gentle voice punctuated by long pauses in which he had gazed thoughtfully at the throne and appeared to commune happily with some inner presence. Meanwhile, like lemmings who have smelt the sea, the noble lords streamed out of their chamber in a body to appear, as if summoned by telepathy, when Dungannon's speech drew to its close. But if the family had contributed nothing to statesmanship and little to the arts, they had died with spectacular gallantry for orthodox causes in every generation.

And now Dungannon's heir had chosen this far from orthodox job. It would be interesting to see if, for the first time and in so unusual a field, the family achieved distinction. What had led Massingham to choose the police service instead of his family's usual career of the Army as an outlet for his natural combativeness and unfashionable patriotism Dalgliesh had not inquired, partly because he was a respecter of other men's privacy, and partly because he wasn't sure that he wanted to hear the answer. So far Massingham had done exceptionally well. The police were a tolerant body and took the view that a man couldn't help who his father was. They accepted that Massingham had gained his promotion on merit although they were not so naive as to suppose that being the elder son of a peer did any man harm. They called Massingham the Honjohn behind his back and occasionally to his face, and bore no malice.

Although the family was now impoverished and the estate sold--Lord Dungannon was bringing up his considerable family in a modest villa in Bayswater--the boy had still gone to his father's school. No doubt, thought Dalgliesh, the old warrior was unaware that other schools existed; like every other class, the aristocracy, however poor, could always find the money for the things they really wanted. But he was an odd product of that establishment, having none of the slightly de gage elegance and ironic detachment which characterized its alumni.

Dalgliesh, if he hadn't known his history, would have guessed that Massingham was the product of a sound, upper-middle-class family-a doctor or a solicitor, perhaps--and of an old established grammar school. It was only the second time they had worked together. The first time, Dalgliesh had been impressed by Massingham's intelligence and enormous capacity for work, and by his admirable ability to keep his mouth shut and to sense when his chief wanted to be alone. He had also been struck by a streak of ruthlessness in the boy which, he thought, ought not to have surprised him since he knew that, as with all good detectives, it must be present.

And now the Enstrom was rattling above the towers and spires of Cambridge, and they could see the shining curve of the river, the bright autumnal avenues leading down through green lawns to miniature hump-backed bridges, King's College Chapel upturned and slowly rotating beside its great striped square of green. And, almost immediately, the city was behind them and they saw, like a crinkled ebony sea, the black earth of the fens.

Below them were straight roads ridged above the fields, with villages strung along them as if clinging to the security of high ground; isolated farms with their roofs so low that they looked half submerged in the peat; an occasional church tower standing majestically apart from its village with the gravestones planted round it like crooked teeth. They must be getting close now; already Dalgliesh could see the soaring west tower and pinnacles of Ely Cathedral to the east.

Massingham looked up from his map-reading and peered down. His voice cracked through Dalgliesh's earphones:

"This is it, sir." Chevisham was spread beneath them. It lay on a narrow plateau above the fens, the houses strung along the northerly of two converging roads. The tower of the impressive cruciform church was immediately identifiable, as was Chevisham Manor and, behind it, sprawling over the scarred field and linking the two roads, the brick and concrete of the new Laboratory building. They rattled along the main street of what looked like a typical East Anglian village.

Dalgliesh glimpsed the ornate red-brick front of the local chapel, one or two prosperous-looking houses with Dutch gables, a small close of recently built, semi-detached boxes with the developer's board still in place, and what looked like the village general store and post office.

There were few people about, but the noise of the engines brought figures from shops and houses and pale faces, their eyes shielded, strained up at them.

And now they were turning towards Hoggatt's Laboratory, coming in low over what must be the Wren chapel. It stood about a quarter of a mile from the house in a triple circle of beech trees, an isolated building so small and perfect that it looked like an architect's model precisely set in a fabricated landscape, or an elegant ecclesiastical folly, justifying itself only by its classical purity, as distanced from religion as it was from life. It was odd that it lay so far from the house. Dalgliesh thought that it had probably been built later, perhaps because the original owner of the mansion had quarrelled with the local parson and, in defiance, had decided to make his own arrangements for spiritual ministrations. Certainly the house hardly looked large enough to support a private chapel. For a few seconds as they descended, he had an unimpeded view through a gap in the trees of the west front of the chapel. He saw a single high-arched window with two balancing niches, the four Corinthian pilasters separating the bays, the whole crowned with a large decorated pediment and topped with a hexagonal lantern. The helicopter seemed almost to be brushing the trees. The brittle autumn leaves, shaken by the rush of air, flurried down like a shower of charred paper over the roof and the bright green of the grass.

And then, sickeningly, the helicopter soared, the chapel lurched out of sight and they were poised, engines rattling, ready to land on the wide terrace behind the house. Over its roof he could see the forecourt patterned with parking lots, the police cars tidily aligned and what looked like a mortuary van. A broad drive, bordered with straggling bushes and a few trees, led down to what the map showed as Stoney Piggott's Road. There was no gate to the driveway. Beyond it he could see the bright flag of a bus stop and the bus shelter. Then the helicopter began to descend and only the rear of the house was in view. From a ground floor window he could see the smudges of watching faces.

There was a reception committee of three, their figures oddly foreshortened, the necks straining upwards. The thrash of the rotor blades had tugged their hair into grotesque shapes, flurried the legs of their trousers and flattened their jackets against their chests.

Now, with the stilling of the engines, the sudden silence was so absolute that he saw the three motionless figures as if they were a tableau of dummies in a silent world. He and Massingharn unclasped their seat-belts and clambered to earth. For about five seconds the two groups stood regarding each other. Then, with a single gesture, the three waiting figures smoothed back their hair and advanced warily to meet him. Simultaneously his ears unblocked and the world again became audible. He turned to thank and speak briefly to the pilot. Then he and Massingham walked forward.

Dalgliesh already knew Superintendent Mercer of the local CID.; they had met at a number of police conferences. Even at sixty feet his ox-like shoulders, the round comedian's face with the wide upturned mouth, and the button bright eyes, had been instantly recognizable.

Dalgliesh felt his hand crushed, and then Mercer made the introductions. Dr. Howarth; a tall fair man, almost as tall as Dalgliesh himself, with widely spaced eyes of a remarkably deep blue and the lashes so long that they might have looked effeminate on any face less arrogantly male. He could, Dalgliesh thought, have been judged an outstandingly handsome man were it not for a certain incongruity of feature, perhaps the contrast being the fineness of the skin stretched over the flat cheekbones and the strong jutting jaw and uncompromising mouth. Dalgliesh would have known that he was rich. The blue eyes regarded the world with the slightly cynical assurance of a man accustomed to getting what he wanted when he wanted it by the simplest of expedients, that of paying for it. Beside him, Dr. Henry Kerrison, although as tall, looked diminished. His creased, anxious face was bleached with weariness and there was a look in the dark, heavily lidded eyes which was uncomfortably close to defeat. He grasped Dalgliesh's hand with a firm grip, but didn't speak. Howarth said:

"There's no entrance now to the back of the house; we have to go round to the front. This is the easiest way."

Carrying their scene-of-crime cases, Dalgliesh and Massingham followed him round the side of the house. The faces at the ground-floor window had disappeared and it was extraordinarily quiet. Trudging through the leaves which had drifted over the path, sniffing the keen autumnal air with its hint of smokiness, and feeling the sun on his face, Massingham felt a surge of animal well being. It was good to be out of London.

This promised to be the kind of job he most liked. The little group turned the corner of the house and Dalgliesh and Massingham had their first clear view of the facade of Hoggatt's Laboratory.

The house was an excellent example of late seventeenth-century domestic architecture, a three-storey brick mansion with a hipped roof and four dormer windows, the centre three-bay projection surmounted by a pediment with a richly carved cornice and medallions. A flight of four wide, curved stone steps led to the doorway, imposing on its pilasters but solidly, unostentatiously, right. Dalgliesh paused momentarily to study the facade. Howarth said:

"Agreeable, isn't it? But wait till you see what the old man did to some of the interior."

The front door, with its elegant but restrained brass door handle and knocker, was fitted with two security locks, a Chubb and an Ingersoll, in addition to the Yale. At a superficial glance there was no sign of forcing. It was opened almost before Howarth had lifted his hand to ring. The man who stood aside, unsmiling, for them to enter, although not in uniform, was immediately recognizable to Dalgliesh as a police officer.

Howarth introduced him briefly as Inspector Blakelock, Assistant Police Liaison Officer. He added:

"All three locks were in order when Blakelock arrived this morning. The Chubb connects the electronic warning system to Guy's Marsh police station. The internal protection system is controlled from a panel in the Police Liaison Officer's room."

Dalgliesh turned to Blakelock.

"And that was in order?"

"Yes, sir."

"There is no other exit?" It was Howarth who answered.

"No. My predecessor had the back door and one side door permanently barred. It was too complicated coping with a system of security locks for three doors. Everyone comes in and goes out by the front."

"Except possibly one person last night," thought Dalgliesh. They passed through the entrance hall, which ran almost the whole length of the house, their feet suddenly loud on the marble tessellated floor.

Dalgliesh was used to receiving impressions at a glance. The party did not pause on their way to the stairs, but he had a clear impression of the room, the high moulded ceiling, the two elegant pedimented doors to right and left, an oil painting of the Laboratory founder on the right-hand wall, the gleaming wood of the reception counter at the rear. A police officer with a sheaf of papers before him was using the desk telephone, presumably still checking alibis. He went on with his conversation without glancing up.

The staircase was remarkable. The balustrades were carved oak panels decorated with scrolls of acanthus foliage, each newel surmounted by a heavy oak pineapple. There was no carpet and the unpolished wood was heavily scarred. Dr. Kerrison and Superintendent Mercer mounted behind Dalgliesh in silence. Howarth, leading the way, seemed to feel the need to talk:

"The ground floor is occupied with Reception and the Exhibits Store, my office, my secretary's room, the general office and the Police Liaison Officer's room. That's all, apart from the domestic quarters at the rear. Chief Inspector Martin is the chief PLO, but he's in the U.S.A. at the moment and we only have Blakelock on duty. On this floor we have Biology at the back, Criminalistics at the front and the Instrument Section at the end of the corridor. But I've put a plan of the Lab in my office for you. I thought you might like to take that over if it's convenient. But I haven't moved any of my things until you've examined the room. This is the Biology Lab."

He glanced at Superintendent Mercer, who took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door. It was a long room obviously converted from two smaller ones, possibly a sitting room or small drawing-room. The ceiling carvings had been removed, perhaps because Colonel Hoggatt had thought them inappropriate to a working laboratory, but the scars of the desecration remained. The original windows had been replaced by two long windows occupying almost the whole of the end wall. There was a range of benches and sinks under the windows, and two islands of work benches in the middle of the room, one fitted with sinks, the other with a number of microscopes. To the left was a small glass-partitioned office, to the right a darkroom. Beside the door was an immense refrigerator.

But the most bizarre objects in the room were a pair of unclothed window-dressers' dummies, one male and one female, standing between the windows. They were unclothed and denuded of their wigs. The pose of the bald egg-shaped heads, the jointed arms stiffly flexed in a parody of benediction, the staring eyes and curved arrow like lips gave them the hieratic look of a couple of painted deities. And at their feet, a white-clad sacrificial victim, was the body.

Howarth stared at the two dummies as if he had never seen them before.

He seemed to think that they required explanation. For the first time he had lost some of his assurance. He said:

"That's Liz and Burton. The staff dress them in a suspect's clothes so that they can match up bloodstains or slashes." He added: "Do you want me here?"

"For the moment, yes," answered Dalgliesh. He knelt by the body.

Kerrison moved to stand beside him. Howarth and Mercer stayed one each side of the door.

After two minutes Dalgliesh said: "Cause of death obvious. It looks as if he was struck by a single blow and died where he fell. There's surprisingly little bleeding."

Kerrison said: "That's not unusual. As you know, you can get serious inter cranial injury from a simple fracture, particularly if there's extra dural or subdural haemorrhage or actual laceration of the brain substance. I agree that he was probably killed by a single blow and that wooden mallet on the table seems the likely weapon. But Blain-Thomson will be able to tell you more when he gets him on the table. He'll be doing the P.M. this afternoon."

"Rigor is almost complete. What sort of estimate did you make of the time of death?"

"I saw him just before nine and I thought then that he'd been dead about twelve hours, perhaps a little longer. Say between eight and nine P.M. The window is closed and the temperature pretty steady at sixty-five Fahrenheit. I usually estimate a fall in body temperature in these circumstances of about one-and a-half degrees Fahrenheit an hour. I took it when I examined the body and, taken with the rigor which was almost fully established then, I'd say it was unlikely that he was alive much after nine P.M.

But you know how unreliable these estimates can be. Better say between eight-thirty and midnight."

Howarth said from the door: "His father says that Lorrimer rang him at a quarter to nine. I went to see the old man this morning with Angela Foley to break the news to him. She's my secretary. Lorrimer was her cousin. But you'll be seeing the old man, of course. He seemed pretty confident about the time."

Dalgliesh said to Kerrison: "It looks as if the blood flowed fairly steadily, but without any preliminary splashing. Would you expect the assailant to be bloodstained?"

"Not necessarily, particularly if I'm right about the mallet being the weapon. It was probably a single swinging blow delivered when Lorrimer had turned his back. The fact that the murderer struck above the left ear doesn't seem particularly significant. He could have been left handed, but there's no reason to suppose he was."

"And it wouldn't have required particular force. A child could probably have done it."

Kerrison hesitated, disconcerted. "Well, a woman, certainly." There was one question which Dalgliesh had formally to ask although, from the position of the body and the flow of the blood, the answer was in little doubt.

"Did he die almost immediately, or is there any possibility that he could have walked about for a time, even locked the door and set the alarms?"

"That's not altogether unknown, of course, but in this case I'd say it was highly unlikely, virtually impossible. I did have a man only a month ago with an axe injury, a seven-inch depressed fracture of the parietal bone and extensive extra dural haemorrhage. He went off to a pub, spent half an hour with his mates, and then reported to the casualty department and was dead within a quarter of an hour. Head injuries can be unpredictable, but not this one, I think?"

Dalgliesh turned to Howarth. "Who found him?"

"Our clerical officer, Brenda Pridmore. She starts work at eight-thirty with Blakelock. Old Mr. Lorrimer phoned to say that his son hadn't slept in his bed, so she went up to see if Lorrimer were here. I arrived almost immediately with the cleaner, Mrs. Bidwell.

Some woman had telephoned her husband early this morning to ask her to come to my house to help my sister, instead of to the Lab. It was a false call. I thought that it was probably some stupid village prank, but that I'd better get in as soon as possible in case something odd was happening. So I put her bicycle in the boot of my car and got here just after nine. My secretary, Angela Foley, and Clifford Bradley, the Higher Scientific Officer in the Biology Department, arrived at about the same time."

"Who at any time has been alone with the body?"

"Brenda Pridmore, of course, but very briefly, I imagine. Then Inspector Blakelock came up on his own. Then I was here alone for no more than a few seconds. Then I locked the Laboratory door, kept all the staff in the main hall, and waited there until Dr. Kerrison arrived. He was here within five minutes and examined the body. I stood by the door. Superintendent Mercer arrived shortly afterwards and I handed over the key of the Biology Lab to him."

Mercer said: "Dr. Kerrison suggested that I call in Dr. Greene--he's the local police surgeon-to confirm his preliminary findings. Dr.

Greene wasn't alone with the body. After he'd made a quick and fairly superficial examination I locked the door. It wasn't opened again until the photographers and the fingerprint officers arrived. They've taken his dabs and examined the mallet, but we left it at that when we knew the Yard had been called in and you were on your way. The print boys are still here, in the Police Liaison Officer's room, but I let the photographers go."

Putting on his search gloves, Dalgliesh ran his hands over the body.

Under his white coat Lorrimer was wearing grey slacks and a tweed jacket. In the inside pocket was a thin leather wallet containing six pound notes, his driving licence, a book of stamps, and two credit cards. The right outer pocket held a pouch with his car keys and three others, two Yale and a smaller intricate key, probably to a desk-top drawer. There were a couple of ballpoint pens clipped to the top left-hand pocket of his white coat. In the bottom right-hand pocket was a handkerchief, his bunch of Laboratory keys and, not on the bunch, a single heavy key which looked fairly new. There was nothing else on the body.

He went over to study two exhibits lying on the central work bench, the mallet and a man's jacket. The mallet was an unusual weapon, obviously hand-made. The handle of crudely carved oak was about eighteen inches long and might, he thought, have once been part of a heavy walking stick. The head, which he judged to weigh just over two pounds, was blackened on one side with congealed blood from which one or two coarse grey hairs sprouted like whiskers. It was impossible to detect in the dried slough a darker hair which might have come from Lorrimer's head, or with the naked eye to distinguish his blood. That would be a job for the Metropolitan Police Laboratory when the mallet, carefully packed and with two identifying exhibit tags instead of one, reached the Biology Department later in the day.

He said to the Superintendent: "No prints?"

"None, except for old Pascoe's. He's the owner of the mallet. They weren't wiped away, so it looks as if this chap wore gloves."

That, thought Dalgliesh, would point to premeditation, or to the instinctive precaution of a knowledgeable expert. But if he came prepared to kill it was odd that he had relied on seizing the first convenient weapon; unless, of course, he knew that the mallet would be ready to hand.

He bent low to study the jacket. It was the top half of a cheap mass-produced suit in a harsh shade of blue with a paler pinstripe, and with wide lapels. The sleeve had been carefully spread out and the cuff bore a trace of what could have been blood. It was apparent that Lorrimer had already begun the analysis. On the bench was the electrophoresis apparatus plugged into its power pack and with two columns of six paired small circles punched in the sheet of agar gel.

Beside it was a test-tube holder with a series of blood samples. To the right lay a couple of buff-coloured laboratory files with biology registrations and, beside them, flat open on the bench, a quarto-sized loose-leaf notebook with a ring binding. The left-hand page, dated the previous day, was closely covered in hieroglyphics and formulae in a thin, black, upright hand. Although most of the scientific jottings meant little to him, Dalgliesh could see that the time at which Lorrimer had started and finished each analysis had been carefully noted. The right-hand page was blank.

He said to Howarth: "Who is the senior biologist now that Lorrimer's dead?"

"Claire Easterbrook. Miss Easterbrook, but it's advisable to call her Ms."

"Is she here?"

"With the others in the library. I believe she has a firm alibi for the whole of yesterday evening, but as she's a senior scientist she was asked to stay. And, of course, she'll want to get back to work as soon as the staff are allowed into the Laboratory. There was a murder two nights ago in a clunch pit at Muddington--that jacket is an exhibit--and she'll want to get on with that as well as coping with the usual heavy load."

"I'd like to see her first, please, and here. Then Mrs. Bidwell. Is there a sheet we could use to cover him?"

Howarth said: "I imagine there's a dust-sheet or something of the kind in the linen-cupboard. That's on the next floor."

"I'd be grateful if you'd go with Inspector Massingham and show him.

Then if you'd wait in the library or your own office I'll be down to have a word when I've finished here."

For a second he thought that Howarth was about to demur. He frowned, and the handsome face clouded momentarily, petulant as a child's. But he left with Massingham without a word. Kerrison was still standing by the body, rigid as a guard of honour. He gave a little start as if recalling himself to reality and said:

"If you don't want me any longer I ought to be on my way to the hospital. You can contact me at St. Luke's at Ely or here at the Old Rectory. I've given the sergeant an account of my movements last night. I was at home all the evening. At nine o'clock, by arrangement, I rang one of my colleagues at the hospital, Dr. J. D. Underwood, about a matter which is coming up at the next medical committee. I think he's already confirmed that we did speak. He hadn't got the information I was waiting for but he rang me back at about a quarter to ten."

There was as little reason to delay Kerrison as there was at present to suspect him. After he had left, Mercer said:

"I thought of leaving two sergeants, Reynolds and Underbill, and a couple of constables, Cox and Warren, if that will suit you. They're all sound, experienced officers. The Chief said to ask for anyone and anything you need. He's at a meeting in London this morning, but he'll be back tonight. I'll send up the chaps from the mortuary van if you're ready for them to take him away."

"Yes, I've finished with him. I'll have a word with your men as soon as I've seen Miss Easterbrook. But ask one of the sergeants to come up in ten minutes to pack up the mallet for me Yard lab, will you? The chopper pilot will want to get back."

They spoke a few more words about the liaison arrangements with the local Force, then Mercer left to supervise the removal of the body. He would wait to introduce Dalgliesh to his seconded officers; after that, his responsibility would end. The case was in Dalgliesh's hands.

Two minutes later Claire Easterbrook was shown into the laboratory.

She entered with an assurance which a less experienced investigator than Dalgliesh might have mistaken for arrogance or insensitivity. She was a thin, long-wasted girl of about thirty, with a bony, intelligent face and a cap of dark curling hair which had been layered by an obviously expert, and no doubt expensive, hand to lie in swathes across the forehead and to curl into the nape of her high-arched neck. She was wearing a chestnut-brown sweater in fine wool belted into a black skirt which swung calf length above high-heeled boots. Her hands, with the nails cut very short, were ring less and her only ornament was a necklace of large wooden beads strung on a silver chain. Even without her white coat the impression she gave--and no doubt intended-was of a slightly intimidating professional competence. Before Dalgliesh had a chance to speak she said, with a trace of belligerence:

"I'm afraid you'll be wasting your time with me. My lover and I dined last night in Cambridge at the Master's Lodge of his college. I was with five other people from eight-thirty until nearly midnight. I've already given their names to the constable in the library."

Dalgliesh said mildly: "I'm sorry, Ms Easterbrook, that I had to ask you to come up before we were able to remove Dr. Lorrimer's body. And as it seems impertinent to invite you to sit down in your own laboratory, I won't. But this isn't going to take long."

She flushed, as if he had caught her out in a social solecism. Glancing with reluctant distaste at the shrouded, lumpen shape on the floor, at the stiff protruding ankles, she said:

"He'd be more dignified if you'd left him uncovered. Like this he could be a sack of rubbish. It's a curious superstition, the universal instinct to cover up the recently dead. After all, we're the ones at a disadvantage."

Massingham said lightly: "Not, surely, with the Master and his wife to vouch for your alibi?"

Their eyes met, his coolly amused, hers dark with dislike. Dalgliesh said: "Dr. Howarth tells me you're the senior biologist now. Could you explain to me, please, what Dr. Lorrimer was doing here last night? Don't touch anything."

She went at once over to the table and regarded the two exhibits, the files and the scientific paraphernalia. She said:

"Would you open this file, please?" Dalgliesh's gloved hands slipped between the covers and flipped it open.

"He re-checked Clifford Bradley's result on the Pascoe case. The mallet belongs to a sixty four-year-old fen labourer called Pascoe whose wife has disappeared. His story is that she's walked out on him, but there are one or two suspicious circumstances. The police sent in the mallet to sec if the stains on it are human blood. They aren't.

Pascoe says that he used it to put an injured dog out of his misery.

Bradley found that the blood reacted to anti-dog serum and Dr. Lorrimer has duplicated his result. So the dog it was that died."

Too mean to waste a bullet or send for a vet, thought Massingham savagely. It struck him as odd that the death of this unknown mongrel should, for a moment, anger him more than the killing of Lorrimer.

Miss Easterbrook moved over to the open notebook. The two men waited.

Then she frowned and said, obviously puzzled:

"That's odd. Edwin always noted the time he began and finished an analysis and the procedure he adopted. He's initialled Bradley's result on the Pascoe file, but there's nothing in the book. And it's obvious that he's made a start with the clunch pit murder; but that isn't noted either. The last reference is five forty-five and the final note is unfinished. Someone must have torn out the right-hand page."

"Why do you suppose anyone should do that?"

She looked straight into Dalgliesh's eyes and said calmly: "To destroy the evidence of what he'd been doing, or the result of his analysis, or the time he'd spent on it. The first and second would be rather pointless. It's obvious from the apparatus what he's been doing, and any competent biologist could duplicate the work. So it's probably the last."

So the appearance of intelligence wasn't misleading. Dalgliesh asked:

"How long would he take checking the Pascoe result?"

"Not long. Actually, he'd started on that before six and I think he'd finished when I left at six-fifteen. I was the last to leave. The junior staff had gone. It isn't usual for them to work after six. I usually stay later, but I had to dress for the dinner party."

"And the work he's done on the clunch pit case--how long would that have taken?"

"Difficult to say. I should have thought it would have kept him busy until nine or later. He was grouping a sample of the victim's blood and the blood from the dried stain by the ABO blood group system, and using electrophoresis to identify the haptoglobins and PGM, the enzyme phosphoglucomutase. Electrophoresis is a technique for identifying the protein and enzyme constituents of the blood by placing the samples in a gel of starch or agar and applying an electric current. As you can see, he'd actually started the run."

Dalgliesh was aware of the scientific principle of electrophoresis, but didn't think it necessary to mention the fact. He opened the clunch pit file, and said: "There's nothing on the file."

"He would write up the result on the file later. But he wouldn't have started the analysis without noting the details in his book."

There were two pedal-bins against the wall. Massingham opened them.

One, plastic-lined, was obviously for laboratory waste and broken glass. The other was for waste paper. He stirred the contents: paper tissues, a few torn envelopes, a discarded newspaper. There was nothing which resembled the missing page.

Dalgliesh said: "Tell me about Lorrimer."

"What do you want to know?"

"Anything which could throw light on why someone disliked him enough to smash in his skull."

"I can't help you there, I'm afraid. I've no idea."

"You liked him?"

"Not particularly. It's not a question I've given much thought to. I got on all right with him. He was a perfectionist who didn't suffer fools gladly. But he was all right to work with if you knew your job.

I do."

"So he wouldn't need to check your work. What about those who don't know their jobs?"

"You'd better ask them, Commander."

"Was he popular with his staff?"

"What has popularity to do with it? I don't suppose I'm popular, but I don't go in fear of my life."

She was silent for a moment, then said in a more conciliatory tone:

"I probably sound obstructive. I don't mean to be. It's just that I can't help. I've no idea who could have killed him or why. I only know that I didn't."

"Had you noticed any change in him recently?"

"Change? You mean, in his mood or behaviour? Not really. He gave the impression of a man under strain; but then, he was that kind of man, solitary, obsessional, overworked. One rather odd thing. He's been interesting himself in the new C.O." Brenda Pridmore. She's a pretty child, but hardly his intellectual level, I should have thought. I don't think there was anything serious, but it caused a certain amount of amusement in the Lab. I think he was probably trying to prove something to someone, or, perhaps, to himself."

"You've heard about the telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell, of course?"

"I imagine the whole Lab knows. It wasn't I who rang her, if that's what you're thinking. In any case, I should have known that it wouldn't work."

"How do you mean, it wouldn't work?"

"It depended, surely, on old Lorrimer not being at home yesterday.

After all, the caller couldn't rely on his not noticing that Edwin hadn't come home last night until he didn't get his early tea brought to him. As it happens, he went off to bed quite happily. But the hoaxer couldn't have known that. Normally, Edwin would have been missed much earlier."

"Was there any reason to suppose that old Mr. Lorrimer wouldn't be at the cottage yesterday?"

"He was supposed to be admitted to Addenbrooke's hospital in the afternoon for treatment of a skin complaint. I think the whole Biology Lab knew. He used to telephone often enough, fretting about the arrangements and whether Edwin would get time off to drive him there.

Yesterday, just after ten, he rang to say that the bed wouldn't be available for him after all."

"Who took the call?"

"I did. It rang in his private office and I took it there. Edwin hadn't returned from the clunch pit autopsy. I told him as soon as he arrived."

"Who else did you tell?"

"When I came out of the office I think I said something casually about old Mr. Lorrimer not having to go into hospital after all. I'm not sure of the actual words. I don't think anyone made a comment or took much apparent notice."

Suddenly she lost her composure. She flushed and hesitated, as if realizing for the first time where all this was leading. The two men waited. Then, angry with herself, she burst out, clumsily defensive:

"I'm sorry, but I can't remember. You'll have to ask them. It didn't seem important at the time and I was busy. We were all busy. I think everyone was there, but I can't be certain."

"Thank you," said Dalgliesh coolly. "You've been remarkably helpful."

Mrs. Bidwell arrived at the door as the two attendants from the mortuary van were carrying out the body. She seemed to regret its disappearance and looked at the chalk outline marked by Massingham on the floor as if this were a poor substitute for the real thing. Gazing after the covered metal container, she said:

"Poor devil! I never thought to see him carried out of his lab feet first. He were never popular, you know. Still, I don't suppose that's worrying him where he is now. Is that one of my dust-sheets you've had over him?"

She peered suspiciously at the sheet, now folded neatly at the end of one of the benches.

"It came from the laboratory linen-cupboard, yes."

"Well, as long as it's put back where you found it. Come to that, it had better go straight into the soiled linen. But I don't want any of your chaps taking it away. Laundry disappears fast enough as it is."

"Why wasn't he popular, Mrs. Bidwell?"

"Too particular by half.

Mind you, you've got to be these days if you want to get any work done.

But from what I hear he was too fussy for his own good. And he'd been getting worse, no doubt about that. And very odd he'd been lately, too. Nervy. You heard about the unpleasantness in the reception hall the day before yesterday, I suppose? Oh well, you will. Ask Inspector Blakelock. Just before lunch it was. Dr. Lorrimer had a real old tussle with that barmy daughter of Dr. Kerrison's. Nearly pushed her out of the door. Screeching like a banshee, she was. I came into the hall just in time to see it. Her dad isn't going to like that, I said to Inspector Blakelock. He's crazy about those kids. Mark my words, I said, if Dr. Lorrimer doesn't take a hold of himself there'll be murder done in this Lab. I said the same to Mr. Middlemass."

"I want you to tell me about the telephone call this morning, Mrs. Bidwell. What time was it?"

"It was near enough seven o'clock. We was eating breakfast and I just filled the teapot for second cups. Had the kettle in me hand when it rang."

"And who answered it?"

"Bidwell. Phone's in the hall and he got up and went out to it.

Cursin' he was 'cos he'd just settled down to his kipper. He hates cold kipper, does Bidwell. We always has kippers on Thursday on account of Marshall's fish van coming from Ely Wednesday afternoons."

"Does your husband usually answer the phone?"

"He always answers the phone. And if he's not in I lets it ring. I can't abide the drat ted things. Never could. Wouldn't have it in the house if our Shirley hadn't paid to get it put in. She's married now and lives Mildenhall way and she likes to think we can ring her if we want her. Fat lot of use that is. I can't never hear what anyone says. And the ring is enough to put the fear of God in a soul.

Telegrams and phone rings. I hate 'em both."

"Who at the Lab would know that your husband always answered the phone?"

"Best part of them, more than likely. They knows I won't touch the thing. There's no secret about that. We're all as the good Lord made us and some of us a sight worse. Nothing to be ashamed of."

"Of course not. Your husband's at work now, I expect?"

"That's right. Yeoman's Farm. Captain Massey's place. Tractor work mostly. Been there twenty years, near enough."

Dalgliesh nodded almost imperceptibly to Massingham and the Inspector slipped out to have a quiet word with Sergeant Underbill. It would be as well to check with Mr. Bidwell while his memory of the call was fresh. Dalgliesh went on:

"What happened then?"

"Bidwell came back. Said that I wasn't to go to the Lab this morning because Mrs. Schofield wanted me over at learnings particular. I was to bike there and she'd run me and the bike home afterwards. Sticking out of the back of that red Jaguar she's got, I suppose. I thought it was a bit of a cheek seeing as I'm due here mornings but I've nothing against Mrs. Schofield and if she wanted me I wasn't above obliging. The Lab would just have to wait, I said to Bidwell. I can't be in two places at once, I said. What don't get done today will get done tomorrow."

"You work here every morning?"

"Except weekends. Gets here as near eight thirty as makes no odds, and works till about ten. Then back at twelve in case any of the gentlemen wants their lunch cooking. The girls mostly manage for themselves.

Afterwards I washes up for them. I reckons to get away by two-thirty most days. Mind you, it's light work. Scobie--he's the Lab attendant--and he sees to the working labs but all the heavy cleaning is supposed to be done by the contractors. They comes on Mondays and Fridays only, from seven until nine, a whole van full of them from Ely, and does the main hall, the stairs and all the heavy polishing.

Inspector Blakelock gets here early those mornings to let them in and Scobie keeps an eye on them. Not that you'd know they'd been most days. No personal interest, you see. Not like the old days when me and two women from the village did the lot."

"So what would you normally have done as soon as you arrived if this had been an ordinary Thursday? I want you to think carefully, Mrs.

Bidwell. This may be very important."

"No need to think. I'd do the same as I does every day."

"Which is?"

"Take off me hat and coat in the downstairs cloakroom. Put on me overalls. Get cleaning bucket and powder and disinfectant from the broom cupboard. Clean the toilets, male and female. Then check dirty laundry and get it bagged up. Put out clean white coats where wanted.

Then dust and tidy Director's office and general office."

"Right," said Dalgliesh. "Let's do the rounds then, shall we?" Three minutes later a curious little procession made its way up the stairs.

Mrs. Bidwell, clad now in a navy-blue working overall and carrying a plastic bucket in one hand and a mop in the other, led the way.

Dalgliesh and Massingham followed. The two lavatories were on the second floor at the rear opposite the Document Examination Laboratory.

They had obviously been converted from what had once been an elegant bedroom. But now a narrow passage leading to the single barred window had been constructed down the middle of the room. A mean-looking door gave entry to the women's cloakroom on the left and, a few yards down, a similar door led to the men's washroom on the right. Mrs. Bidwell led the way into the left-hand room. It was larger than Dalgliesh had expected, but poorly lit from a single round window with pivoting opaque glass set about four feet from the floor.

The window was open. There were three lavatory cubicles. The outer room contained two wash-hand basins with a paper-towel dispenser and, to the left of the door, a long Formica covered counter with a glass above it which apparently served as a dressing-table. To the right were a wall-mounted gas-fired incinerator, a row of clothes-hooks, a large wicker laundry-basket and two rather battered cane chairs.

Dalgliesh said to Mrs. Bidwell: "Is this how you would expect to find it?" Mrs. Bidwell's sharp little eyes peered round. The doors to the three lavatories were open and she gave them a quick inspection.

"No better nor no worse. They're pretty good about the toilets. I'll say that for them."

"And that window is usually kept open?"

"Winter and summer, except it's bitter cold. That's the only ventilation you see."

"The incinerator is off. Is that usual?"

"That's right. Last girl to leave turns it off at night, then I puts it on next morning."

Dalgliesh looked inside. The incinerator was empty except for a trace of carbon ash. He went over to the window. Rain had obviously driven in some time during the night and the dried splashes were clearly visible on the tiled floor. But even the inside pane, where no rain could have splashed, was remarkably clean and there was no discernible dust around the sill. He said:

"Did you clean the window yesterday, Mrs. Bidwell?"

"Of course I did. It's like I told you. I cleans the lavatories every morning. And when I cleans, I cleans. Shall I get on with it now?"

"I'm afraid there'll be no cleaning done today. We'll pretend you've finished in here. Now what happens? What about the laundry?"

The laundry-basket contained only one overall, marked with the initials C.M.E. Mrs. Bidwell said:

"I wouldn't expect many dirty coats, not on a Thursday. They usually manages to make them last a week and drop them in here on Friday before they go home. Monday's the busy day for laundry and putting out the new coats. Looks as though Miss Easterbrook spilt her tea yesterday.

That's not like her. But she's particular is Miss Easterbrook. You wouldn't find her going round with a dirty coat; no matter what day of the week."

So there was at least one member of the Biology Department, thought Dalgliesh, who knew that Mrs. Bidwell would make an early visit to the Lab to put out a clean white coat. It would be interesting to learn who had been present when the fastidious Miss Easterbrook had had her accident with the tea.

The male washroom, apart from the urinal stalls, differed very little from the women's. There was the same round open window, the same absence of any marks on the panes or sill. Dalgliesh carried over one of the chairs and, carefully avoiding any contact with the window or the sill, looked out. There was a drop of about six feet to the top of the window beneath, and an equal drop to that on the first floor. Below them both a paved terrace ran right up to the wall. The absence of soft earth, the rain in the night and Mrs. Bidwell's efficient cleaning meant that they would be lucky to find any evidence of a climb. But a reasonably slim and sure-footed man or woman with enough nerve and a head for heights could certainly have got out this way. But if the murderer were a member of the Lab staff, why should he risk his neck when he must have known that the keys were on Lorrimer? And if the murderer were an outsider, then how account for the locked front door, the intact alarm system, and the fact that Lorrimer must have let him in?

He turned his attention to the washbasins. None was particularly dirty, but near the rim of the one nearest the door there was a smear of porridge-like mucus. He bent his head over the basin and sniffed.

His sense of smell was extremely acute and, from the plug-hole, he detected the faint but unmistakably disagreeable smell of human vomit.

Mrs. Bidwell, meanwhile, had thrown open the lid of the laundry-basket. She gave an exclamation.

"That's funny. It's empty."

Dalgliesh and Massingham turned. Dalgliesh asked: "What were you expecting to find, Mrs. Bidwell?"

"Mr. Middlemass's white coat, that's what."

She darted out of the room. Dalgliesh and Massingham followed. She flung open the door of the Document Examination Room and glanced inside. Then she closed the door again and stood with her back against it. She said:

"It's gone! It's not hanging on the peg. So where is it? Where's Mr. Middlemass's white coat?"

Dalgliesh asked: "Why did you expect to find it in the laundry-basket?"

Mrs. Bidwell's black eyes grew immense. She slewed her eyes furtively from side to side and then said with awed relish:

"Because it had blood on it, that's why. Lorrimer's blood!"

Lastly they went down the main staircase to the Director's office. From the library there was a broken murmur of voices, subdued and spasmodic as a funeral gathering. A detective constable was standing at the front door with the detached watchfulness of a man paid to endure boredom but ready to leap into action should, unaccountably, the boredom end.

Howarth had left his office unlocked and the key in the door. Dalgliesh was interested that the Director had chosen to wait with the rest of the staff in the library, and wondered whether this was intended to demonstrate solidarity with his colleagues, or was a tactful admission that his office was one of the rooms which had been due to receive Mrs.

Bidwell's early morning attention, and must, therefore, be of special interest to Dalgliesh. But that reasoning was surely too subtle. It was difficult to believe that Howarth hadn't entered his room since the discovery of the body. If there were anything to remove, he best of all must have had the chance to do it.

Dalgliesh had expected the room to be impressive, but it still surprised him. The plaster work of the coved ceiling was splendid, a joyous riot of wreaths, shells, ribbons, and trailing vines, ornate and yet disciplined. The fireplace was of white and mottled marble with a finely carved frieze of nymphs and piping shepherds and a classical over mantel with open pediment. He guessed that the agreeably proportioned salon, too small to be partitioned and not large enough for a working laboratory, had escaped the fate of so much of the house more for administrative and scientific convenience than from any sensitivity on Colonel Hoggatt's part to its innate perfection. It was newly furnished in a style guaranteed not to offend, a nice compromise of bureaucratic orthodoxy and modern functionalism. There was a large glass-fronted bookcase to the left of the fireplace, and a personal locker and a coat-stand to the right. A rectangular conference table and four chairs, of a type provided for senior public servants, stood between the tall windows. Next to it was a steel security cupboard fitted with a combination lock. Howarth's desk, a plain contraption in the same wood as the conference table, faced the door. Apart from an ink stained blotter and a pen-stand it held a small wooden bookshelf containing the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a dictionary of quotations, Roget's Thesaurus and Fowlers Modern English Usage. The choice seemed curious for a scientist. There were three metal trays marked "In,"

"Pending" and "Out." The "Out" tray held two manila files, the top labelled "Chapel--Proposals for transfer to Department of the Environment," and the second, a large, old and unwieldy file which had been much mended, was marked "New Laboratory--Commissioning."

Dalgliesh was struck by the emptiness and impersonality of the whole room. It had obviously been recently decorated for Howarth's arrival, and the pale grey-green carpet, with its matching square under the desk, was as yet unmarked, the curtains hung in pristine folds of dark green. There was only one picture, positioned in the over mantel but this was an original, an early Stanley Spencer showing the Virgin's Assumption. Plump, foreshortened, varicosed thighs in red bloomers floated upwards from a circle of clutching work-worn hands to a reception committee of gaping cherubim. It was, he thought, an eccentric choice for the room, discordant both in date and style. It was the only object, apart from the books, which reflected a personal taste; Dalgliesh hardly supposed that it had been provided by a Government agency. Otherwise the office had the under furnished expectant atmosphere of a room refurbished to receive an unknown occupant, and still awaiting the imprint of his taste and personality.

It was hard to believe that Howarth had worked here for almost a year.

Mrs. Bidwell, her tight little mouth pursed and eyes narrowed, regarded it with obvious disapproval. Dalgliesh asked:

"Is this how you would have expected to find it?"

"That's right. Every bloody morning. Nothing for me to do here really is there? Mind you, I dusts and polishes around and runs the Hoover over the carpet. But he's neat and tidy, there's no denying it. Not like old Dr. MacIntyre. Oh, he was a lovely man! But messy! You should have seen his desk of a morning. And smoke! You couldn't hardly see across the room sometimes. He had this lovely skull on his desk to keep his pipes in. They dug it up when they was making the trench for the pipes to the new vehicle examination extension. Been in the ground more than two hundred years, Dr. Mac said, and he showed me the crack--just like a cracked cup--where his skull had been bashed in.

That's one murder they never solved. I miss that skull. Real lovely that used to look. And he had all these pictures of himself and his friends at university with oars crossed above them, and a coloured one of the Highlands with hairy cattle paddling in a lake, and one of his father with his dogs, and such a lovely picture of his wife--dead she was, poor soul--and another big picture of Venice with gondolas and a lot of foreigners in fancy dress, and a cartoon of Dr. Mac done by one of his friends, showing the friend lying dead, and Dr. Mac in his deerstalker hat looking for clues with his magnifying glass. That was a real laugh that was. Oh, I loved Dr. Mac's pictures!" She looked at the Spencer with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

"And there's nothing unusual about the room this morning?"

"I told you, same as usual. Well, look for yourself. Clean as a new pin. It looks different in the day, mind you, when he's working here.

But he always leaves it as if he isn't expecting to come back in the morning."

There was nothing else to be learned from Mrs. Bidwell. Dalgliesh thanked her and told her that she could go home as soon as she had checked with Detective Sergeant Reynolds in the library that he had all the necessary information about where she had spent the previous evening. He explained this with his usual tact, but tact was wasted on Mrs. Bidwell. She said cheerfully and without rancour:

"No use trying to pin this on me, or Bidwell come to that. We was together at the village concert. Sat five rows back between Joe Machin--he's the sexton--and Willie Barnes--he's the rector's warden, and we stayed there until the end of the show. No sneaking out at half-time like some I could mention."

"Who sneaked out, Mrs. Bidwell?"

"Ask him yourself. Sat at the end of the row in front of us, a gentleman whose office we might or might not be standing in at this very moment. Do you want to talk to him? Shall I ask him to step in?" She spoke hopefully and looked towards the door like an eager gun dog, ears pricked for the command to retrieve.

"We'll see to that, thank you, Mrs. Bidwell. And if we want to talk to you again we'll get in touch. You've been very helpful."

"I thought I might make coffee for them all before I go. No harm in that, I suppose?"

There was no point in warning her not to talk to the Lab staff, or, come to that, the whole village. Dalgliesh had no doubt that his search of the cloakrooms and the missing bloodstained coat would soon be common knowledge. But no great harm would be done. The murderer must know that the police would be immediately alive to the possible significance of that false early morning call to Mrs. Bidwell. He was dealing with intelligent men and women, experienced, even if vicariously, in criminal investigation, knowledgeable about police procedure aware of the rules which governed his every move. He had no doubt that, mentally, most of the group now waiting in the library to be interviewed were following his actions almost to the minute.

And among them, or known to them, was a murderer.

Superintendent Mercer had selected his two sergeants with an eye to contrast or, perhaps, with a view to satisfying any prejudices which Dalgliesh might harbour about the age and experience of his subordinates. Sergeant Reynolds was near the end of his service, a stolid, broad-shouldered, slow speaking officer of the old school and a native of the fens. Sergeant Underbill, recently promoted, looked young enough to be his son. His boyish, open face with its look of disciplined idealism was vaguely familiar to Massingham, who suspected that he might have seen it in a police recruitment pamphlet, but decided in the interest of harmonious co-operation to give Underbill the benefit of the doubt.

The four police officers were sitting at the conference table in the Director's office. Dalgliesh was briefing his team before he started on the preliminary interviews. He was, as always, restlessly aware of time passing. It was already after eleven and he was anxious to finish at the Laboratory and see old Mr. Lorrimer. The physical clues to his son's murder might lie in the Laboratory; the clue to the man himself lay elsewhere. But neither his words nor his tone betrayed impatience.

"We start by assuming that the telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell and Lorrimer's death are connected. That means the call was made by the murderer or an accomplice. We'll keep an open mind about the caller's sex until we get confirmation from Bidwell, but it was probably a woman, probably also someone who knew that old Mr. Lorrimer was expected to be in hospital yesterday, and who didn't know that the appointment had been cancelled. If the old man had been home, the ruse could hardly hope to succeed. As Miss Easterbrook has pointed out, no one could rely on his going early to bed last night and not realizing until after the Lab opened this morning that his son hadn't come home."

Massingham said: "The killer would have made it his business to get here early this morning, assuming that he didn't know that his plan had misfired. And assuming, of course, the call wasn't a double bluff. It would be a neat ploy, wasting our time, confusing the investigation and diverting suspicion from everyone except the early arrivals."

"But for one of the suspects, it could have been an even neater ploy," thought Dalgliesh. It had been Mrs. Bidwell's arrival at Howarth's house in obedience to the call which had given the Director himself the excuse for arriving so early. He wondered what time Howarth usually put in an appearance.

That would be one of the questions to be asked. He said:

"We'll start by assuming that it wasn't a bluff, that the murderer, or his accomplice, made the call to delay Mrs. Bidwell's arrival and the discovery of the body. So what was he hoping to do? Plant evidence or destroy it? Tidy up something which he'd overlooked; wipe the mallet clean; clear up the evidence of whatever it was he was doing here last night; replace the keys on the body? But Blakelock had the best opportunity to do that, and he wouldn't need to have taken them in the first place. The call would have given someone the chance to replace the spare set in the security cupboard here. But that would be perfectly possible without delaying Mrs. Bidwell's arrival. And, of course, it may have been done."

Underbill said: "But is it really likely, sir, that the call was intended to delay the finding of the body and give the killer time to replace the keys? Admittedly Mrs. Bidwell could be expected to be first in the Biology Department this morning when she put out the clean coats. But the murderer couldn't rely on that. Inspector Blakelock or Brenda Pridmore could easily have had occasion to go there."

Dalgliesh thought it a risk that the murderer might well have thought worth taking. In his experience the early-morning routine in an institution seldom varied. Unless Blakelock had the early-morning job of checking on Lab security-and this was yet another of the questions to be asked--he and Brenda Pridmore would probably have got on with their normal work at the reception desk. In the ordinary course of events Mrs. Bidwell would have been the one to find the body. Any member of staff who went into the Biology Lab before her would have needed a good excuse to explain his presence there, unless, of course, he was a member of the Biology Department.

Massingham said: "It's odd about the missing white coat, sir. It can hardly have been removed or destroyed to prevent us learning about the fight between Middlemass and Lorrimer. That unedifying but intriguing little episode must have been round the Lab within minutes of its happening. Mrs. Bidwell would see to that."

Both Dalgliesh and Massingham wondered how far Mrs. Bidwell's description of the quarrel, given with the maximum dramatic effect, had been accurate. It was obvious that she had come into the laboratory after the blow had been struck, and had in fact seen very little.

Dalgliesh had recognized, with foreboding, a familiar phenomenon: the desire of a witness, aware of the paucity of her evidence, to make the most of it lest the police be disappointed, while remaining as far as possible within the confines of truth. Stripped of Mrs. Bidwell's embellishments, the core of hard fact had been disappointingly small.

"What they were quarrelling about I couldn't take it on myself to say, except that it was about a lady, and that Dr. Lorrimer was upset because she'd telephoned Mr. Middlemass. The door was open and I did hear that much when I passed to go in to the ladies' toilet. I daresay she rang him to arrange a date and Dr. Lorrimer didn't like it. I never saw a man more white. Like death he looked, with a handkerchief held up against his face all bloodied, and his black eyes glaring over the top of it. And Mr. Middlemass was turkey red. Embarrassed, I daresay. Well, it's not what we're used to at Hoggatt's, senior staff knocking each other about. When proper gentlemen start in with the fists there's usually a woman at the bottom of it. Same with this murder if you ask me."

Dalgliesh said: "We'll be getting Middle mass's version of the affair.

I'd like now to have a word with all the Lab staff in the library and then Inspector Massingham and I will start the preliminary interviews:

Howarth, the two women, Angela Foley and Brenda Pridmore, Blakelock, Middlemass and any of the others without a firm alibi. I'd like you, Sergeant, to get on with organizing the usual routine. I shall want one of the senior staff in each department while the search is going on. They're the only ones who can tell whether anything in their lab has changed since yesterday. You'll be looking--admittedly without much hope--for the missing page of Lorrimer's notebook, any evidence of what he was doing here last night apart from working on the clunch pit murder, any sign of what happened to the missing coat. I want a thorough search of the whole building, particularly possible means of access and exit. The rain last night is a nuisance. You'll probably find the walls washed clean, but there may be some evidence that he got out through one of the lavatory windows.

"You'll need a couple of men on the grounds. The earth is fairly soft after the rain and if the murderer came by car or motorcycle there could be tyre-marks. Any we find can be checked against the tyre index here; we needn't waste time going to the Met Lab for that. There's a bus stop immediately opposite the Laboratory entrance. Find out what time the buses pass. There's always the possibility that one of the passengers or crew noticed something. I'd like the Laboratory building checked first, and as quickly as possible so that the staff can get back to work. They've a new murder on their hands and we can't keep the place closed longer than is absolutely necessary. I'd like to give them access by tomorrow morning.

"Then there's the smear of what looks like vomit on the first basin in the men's washroom.

The smell from the pipe is still fairly distinct. I want a sample of that to go to the Met Lab urgently. You'll probably have to unscrew the joint to get at the basin of the U-bend. We shall need to find out who used the room last yesterday evening and whether he noticed the smear on the basin. If no one admits to having been sick during the day, or can't produce a witness that he was, we shall want to know what they all ate for the evening meal. It could be Lorrimer's vomit, so we'll need some information on his stomach contents. I'd also like a sample of his blood and hair to be left here at the Lab. But Dr. Blain Thomson will be seeing to that."

Reynolds said: "We take it that the crucial time is from six-fifteen, when he was last seen alive in his lab, until midnight?"

"For the present. When I've seen his father and confirmed that he made that call at eight forty-five we may be able to narrow it down. And we shall get a clearer idea of the time of death when Dr. Blain-Thomson has done the P.M. But judging from the state of rigor, Dr. Kerrison wasn't far out."

But Kerrison didn't need to be far out. if he were the murderer. Rigor mortis was notoriously unreliable, and if he wanted an alibi for himself, Kerrison could shift the time of death by up to an hour without suspicion. If the timing were tight he might not need even an hour. It had been prudent of him to call in the police surgeon to confirm his estimate of the time of death. But how likely was Dr.

Greene, experienced as he might be in viewing bodies, to disagree with the opinion of a consultant forensic pathologist unless the latter's judgement was manifestly perverse? If Kerrison were guilty, he had run little risk by calling in Greene. Dalgliesh got to his feet. "Right," he said. "Let's get on with it, shall we?"

Dalgliesh disliked having more than one other officer present with him at his preliminary and informal interview, so Massingham was taking the notes. They were hardly necessary; Dalgliesh, he knew, had almost total recall. But he still found the practice useful. They were sitting together at the conference table in the Director's office, but Howarth, perhaps because he objected to sitting in his own room other than at his desk, preferred to stand. He was leaning casually against the fireplace. From time to time Massingham lifted an unobtrusive eyebrow to glance at the clear-cut, dominant profile outlined against the classical frieze. There were three bunches of keys on the table:

the bunch taken from Lorrimer's body, that handed over by Inspector Blakelock, and the set which Dr. Howarth, manipulating the security lock, had taken from its box in the cupboard. Each set of keys was identical, one Yale key and two security keys to the front door, and one smaller key on a plain metal ring. None was named, presumably for security reasons.

Dalgliesh said:

"And these are the only three sets in existence?"

"Except for the set at Guy's Marsh police station, yes. Naturally, I checked earlier this morning that the police still have their set. The keys are kept in the safe under the control of the station officer, and they haven't been touched. They need a set at the police station in case the alarm goes off. There was no alarm last night."

Dalgliesh already knew from Mercer that the station keys had been checked. He said: "And the smallest key?"

"That's the one to the Exhibits Store. The system is for all incoming exhibits, after they've been registered, to be stored there until they're issued to the head of the appropriate department. It's his responsibility to allocate them to a specific officer. In addition, we store the exhibits which have been examined and are awaiting collection by the police, and those which have been presented to the court during the case and are returned to us for destruction. Those are mainly drugs. They're destroyed here in the incinerator and the destruction witnessed by one of the Laboratory staff and the officer in charge of the case. The Exhibits Store is also protected by the electronic alarm system, but, obviously, we need a key for internal security when the system hasn't been set."

"And all the Laboratory internal doors and your office were protected last night once the internal alarm system was set? That means that an intruder could only have got out undetected through the top-floor lavatory windows. All the others are either barred or fitted with the electronic alarm?"

"That's right. He could have got in that way too, of course, which was what concerned us most. But it wouldn't have been an easy climb, and the alarm would have gone off as soon as he tried to gain access to any of the main rooms in the Laboratory. We did consider extending the alarm system to the lavatory suite soon after I arrived, but it seemed unnecessary. We haven't had a break-in in the seventy-odd years of the Lab's existence."

"What are the precise arrangements about locking the Laboratory?"

"Only the two Police Liaison Officers and Lorrimer as the Deputy Security Officer were authorized to lock up. He or the Police Liaison Officer on duty was responsible for ensuring that no staff were left on the premises and that all the internal doors were shut before the alarm was set, and the front door finally locked for the night. The alarm system to Guy's Marsh police station is set whether the door is locked on the inside or the out."

"And these other keys found on the body, the three in this leather pouch and the single key. Do you recognize any of those?"

"Not the three in the pouch. One is obviously his car key. But the single one looks very like the key to the Wren chapel. If it is, I didn't know that Lorrimer had it. Not that it's important. But as far as I know, there's only one key to the chapel in existence and that's hanging on the board in the Chief Liaison Officer's room. It isn't a security lock and we're not particularly worried about the chapel.

There's nothing left there of real value. But occasionally architects and archaeological societies want to view it, so we let them borrow the key and they sign for it in a book in the office. We don't allow them through the Laboratory grounds to get at it. They have to use the back entrance in Guy's Marsh Road. The contract cleaners take it once every two months to clean and check the heating --we have to keep it reasonably warm in winter because the ceiling and carving are rather fine-and Miss Willard goes there from time to time, to do some dusting.

When her father was rector of Chevisham, he used occasionally to hold services in the chapel, and I think she has a sentimental regard for the place."

Massingham went out to Chief Inspector Martin's office and brought in the chapel key. The two matched. The small note book which he had found hanging with the key showed that it had last been collected by Miss Willard on Monday, 25th October. Howarth said: "We're thinking of transferring the chapel to the Department of the Environment once we occupy the new Laboratory. It's a constant irritation to the Treasury that our funds are used to heat and maintain it. I've set up a string quartet here, and we held a concert on August 2 6th in the chapel, but otherwise it's completely unused. I expect you will want to take a look at it, and it's worth seeing in its own right. It's a very fine specimen of late seventeenth-century church architecture, although, in fact, it isn't by Wren but by Alexander Fort, who was strongly influenced by him."

Dalgliesh asked suddenly: "How well did you get on with Lorrimer?"

Howarth replied calmly: "Not particularly well. I respected him as a biologist, and I certainly had no complaints either about his work or about his co-operation with me as Director. He wasn't an easy man to know, and I didn't find him particularly sympathetic. But he was probably one of the most respected serologists in the Service, and we shall miss him. If he had a fault, it was a reluctance to delegate. He had two scientific officer serologists in his department for the grouping of liquid blood and stains, saliva and semen samples, but he invariably took the murder cases himself. Apart from his casework and attendance at trials and at scenes of crime, he did a considerable amount of lecturing to detective training courses, and police familiarization courses."

Lorrimer's rough notebook was on the desk. Dalgliesh pushed it towards Howarth and said:

"Have you seen this before?"

"His rough notebook? Yes, I think I've noticed it in his department, or when he was carrying it with him. He was obsessively tidy and had a dislike of odd scraps of paper. Anything of importance was noted in that book, and subsequently transferred to the files. Claire Easterbrook tells me that the last page is missing."

"That's why we're particularly anxious to know what he was doing here last night, apart from working on the clunch pit murder. He could have got into any of the other laboratories, of course?"

"If he'd switched off the internal alarm, yes. I believe it was his usual practice, when he was last on the premises, to rely on the Yale lock and the bolt on the front door and only check the internal doors and set the security alarm before he finally left. Obviously it's important not to set off the alarm accidentally."

"Would he have been competent to undertake an examination in another department?"

"It depends on what he was trying to do. Essentially, of course, he was concerned with the identification and grouping of biological material, blood, body stains and the examination of fibres and animal and plant tissues. But he was a competent general scientist and his interests were wide--his scientific interests. Forensic biologists, particularly in the smaller laboratories, which this has been up to now, become pretty versatile. But he wouldn't attempt to use the more sophisticated instruments in the Instrument Section, the mass spectrometer, for example."

"And you personally have no idea what he could have been doing?"

"None. I do know that he came into this office. I had to look up the name of a consultant surgeon who was giving evidence for the defence in one of our old cases, and I had the medical directory on my desk when I left last night. This morning, it was back in its place in the library. Few things irritated Lorrimer more than people removing books from the library. But if he was in this office last night, I hardly imagine it was merely to check on my carelessness with the reference books."

Lastly, Dalgliesh asked him about his movements the previous night.

"I played the fiddle at the village concert. The rector had five minutes or so to fill in and asked me if the string quartet would play something which he described as short and cheerful. The players were myself, a chemist, one of the scientific officers from the document examination department, and a typist from the general office. Miss Easterbrook should have been the first cello, but she had a dinner engagement which she regarded as important, and couldn't make it. We played the Mozart Divertimento in D major and came third on the programme."

"And you stayed for the rest of the concert?"

"I intended to.

Actually, the hall was incredibly stuffy and just before the interval at eight thirty I slipped out. I stayed out."

Dalgliesh asked what precisely he'd done. "Nothing. I sat on one of those flat tombstones for about twenty minutes, then I left."

"Did you see anyone, or did anyone see you?"

"I saw a hobby-horse--I know now that it must have been Middlemass deputizing for Chief Inspector Martin--come out of the male dressing room. He pranced around rather happily, I thought, and snapped his jaws at an angel on one of the graves. Then he was joined by the troupe of morris-dancers coming through the graveyard from the Moonraker. It was an extraordinary sight. There was the racing moon and these extraordinary figures with their bells jingling and their hats decked with evergreens moving through the swirl of ground mist out of the darkness towards me. It was like an outre film or a ballet. All it needed was second-rate background music, preferably Stravinsky. I was sitting motionless on the gravestone, some distance away, and I don't think they saw me. I certainly didn't make myself known. The hobby-horse joined them, and they went into the hall. Then I heard the fiddle start up. I suppose I stayed sitting there for about another ten minutes, and then I left. I walked for the rest of the evening along learnings Dyke and got home about ten o'clock. My half-sister Domenica will be able to confirm the time."

They spent a little time discussing the administrative arrangements for the investigation. Dr. Howarth said that he would move into Miss Foley's room and make his office available to the police. There would be no chance of the Lab opening for the rest of the day, but Dalgliesh said that he hoped it would be possible for work to start again the next morning. Before Howarth left, Dalgliesh said:

"Everyone I've spoken to respected Dr. Lorrimer as a forensic biologist. But what was he like as a man? What, for example, did you know about him except that he was a forensic biologist?"

Dr. Howarth said coldly: "Nothing. I wasn't aware there was anything to know, except that he was a forensic biologist. And now, if you've no more immediate questions, I must telephone Establishment Department and make sure that, in the excitement of his somewhat spectacular exit, they're not forgetting to send me a replacement."

With the resilience of youth, Brenda Pridmore had recovered quickly from the shock of finding Lorrimer's body. She had resolutely refused to be taken home and by the time Dalgliesh was ready to see her she was perfectly calm and, indeed, anxious to tell her story. With her cloud of rich auburn hair and her freckled wind-tanned face she looked the picture of bucolic health. But the grey eyes were intelligent, the mouth sensitive and gentle. She gazed across the desk at Dalgliesh as intently as a docile child and totally without fear. He guessed that all her young life she had been used to receiving an avuncular kindness from men and never doubted that she would receive it, too, from these unknown officers of police. In response to Dalgliesh's questioning, she described exactly what had happened from the moment of her arrival at the Laboratory that morning to the discovery of the body. Dalgliesh asked:

"Did you touch him?"

"Oh no! I knelt down and I think I did put out my hand to feel his cheek. But that was all. I knew that he was dead, you see."

"And then?"

"I don't remember. I know I rushed downstairs and Inspector Blakelock was standing at the bottom looking up at me. I couldn't speak, but I suppose he saw by my face that something was wrong. Then I remember sitting on the chair outside Chief Inspector Martin's office and looking at Colonel Hoggatt's portrait. Then I don't remember anything until Dr. Howarth and Mrs. Bidwell arrived."

"Do you think anyone could have got out of the building past you while you were sitting there?"

"The murderer, you mean? I don't see how he could have. I know I wasn't very alert, but I hadn't fainted or anything silly like that.

I'm sure I would have noticed if anyone had come across the hall. And even if he did manage to slip past me, he would have bumped into Dr.

Howarth, wouldn't he?"

Dalgliesh asked her about her job at Hoggatt's, how well she had known Dr. Lorrimer. She prattled away with artless confidence about her life, her colleagues, her fascinating job, Inspector Blakelock who was so good to her and who had lost his own only daughter, telling with every sentence more than she knew. It wasn't that she was stupid, thought Massingham, only honest and ingenuous. For the first time they heard Lorrimer spoken of with affection.

"He was always terribly kind to me, although I didn't work in the Biology Department. Of course, he was a very serious man. He had so many responsibilities. The Biology Department is terribly overworked and he used to work late nearly every night, checking results, catching up with the backlog. I think he was disappointed at not being chosen to succeed Dr. Mac. Not that he ever said so to me--well he wouldn't, would he?-I'm far too junior and he was far too loyal."

Dalgliesh asked: "Do you think anyone could have misunderstood his interest in you, might have been a little jealous?"

"Jealous of Dr. Lorrimer because he stopped sometimes at the desk to talk to me about my work and was kind to me? But he was old! That's just silly!"

Suppressing a grin as he bent over his notebook and penned a few staccato outlines, Massingham thought that it probably was.

Dalgliesh asked: "It seems there was some trouble the day before he died when Dr. Kerrison's children called at the Laboratory. Were you in the hall then?

"You mean when he pushed Miss Kerrison out of the front hall? Well, he didn't actually push her, but he did speak very sharply. She had come with her small brother and they wanted to wait for Dr. Kerrison. Dr.

Lorrimer looked at them, well, really as if he hated them. It wasn't at all like him.

I think he's been under some terrible strain. Perhaps he had a premonition of his death. Do you know what he said to me after the clunch pit exhibits came in? He said that the only death we had to fear is our own. Don't you think that was an extraordinary remark?"

"Very strange," agreed Dalgliesh.

"And that reminds me of another thing. You did say that anything might be important. Well, there was a funny kind of letter arrived for Dr. Lorrimer yesterday morning. That's why he stopped at the desk, so that I could hand over any personal post. There was just this thin brown envelope with the address printed, printed by hand in capital letters, I mean. And it was just his name, no qualifications after it. Odd, wasn't it?"

"Did he receive many private letters here?"

"Oh, no, none really. The Lab writing-paper says that all communications have to be addressed to the Director. We deal at the desk with the exhibits received, but all the correspondence goes to the general office for sorting. We only hand over the personal letters, but there aren't many of those."

In the quick preliminary examination which he and Massingham had made of Lorrimer's meticulously tidy office, Dalgliesh had found no personal correspondence. He asked whether Miss Pridmore knew if Dr. Lorrimer had gone home for lunch. She said that he had. So it was possible that he had taken the letter home. It could mean anything, or nothing. It was just one more small fact which would have to be investigated.

He thanked Brenda Pridmore, and reminded her again to come back to him if she remembered anything which could be of importance, however small.

Brenda was not used to dissembling. It was obvious that something had occurred to her. She blushed and dropped her eyes. The metamorphosis from happy confidante to guilty schoolgirl was pathetically comic.

Dalgliesh said gently:

"Yes?" She didn't speak, but made herself meet his eyes and shook her head. He waited for a moment, then said:

"The investigation of murder is never agreeable. Like most unpleasant things in life, it sometimes seems easier not to get involved, to keep oneself uncontaminated. But that isn't possible. In a murder investigation, to suppress a truth is sometimes to tell a lie."

"But suppose one passes on information. Something private, perhaps, which one hasn't any real right to know--and it throws suspicion on the wrong person?"

Dalgliesh said gently: "You have to trust us. Will you try to do that?"

She nodded, and whispered "Yes," but she said nothing further. He judged that this was not the time to press her. He let her go, and sent for Angela Foley.

In contrast to Brenda Pridmore's artless confiding, Angela Foley presented a bland inscrutable gaze. She was an unusual-looking girl with a heart shaped face and a wide, exceedingly high forehead from which hair, baby fine, the colour of ripe grain, was strained back and plaited into a tight coil on top of her head. Her eyes were small, slanted, and so deeply set that Dalgliesh found it hard to guess their colour. Her mouth was small, pursed and uncommunicative above the pointed chin. She wore a dress in fine fawn wool, topped with an elaborately patterned, short-sleeved tabard, and short laced boots, a sophisticated and exotic contrast to Brenda's orthodox prettiness and neat hand-knitted twin set If she was distressed by her cousin's violent death, she concealed it admirably. She said that she had worked as Director's secretary for five years, first with Dr. MacIntyre and now with Dr. Howarth.

Before that, she had been a shorthand typist in the general office of the Laboratory, having joined Hoggatt's straight from school. She was twenty-seven. Until two years ago, she lived in a bed-sitting-room in Ely, but now shared Sprogg's Cottage with a woman friend. They had spent the whole of the previous evening in each other's company. Edwin Lorrimer and his father had been her only living relatives, but they had seen, very little of each other. The family, she explained as if this were the most natural thing in the world, had never been close.

"So you know very little of his private affairs, his will, for example?"

"No, nothing. When my grandmother left him all her money, and we were at the solicitor's office, he said that he would make me his heir. But I think he just felt guilty at the time that I wasn't named in the will. I don't suppose it meant anything. And, of course, he may have changed his mind."

"Do you remember how much your grandmother left?" She paused for a moment. Almost, he thought, as if calculating whether ignorance would sound more suspicious than knowledge. Then she said:

"I think about thirty thousand. I don't know how much it is now."

He took her briefly but carefully through the events of the early morning. She and her friend ran a Mini, but she usually cycled to work. She had done so that morning, arriving at the Laboratory at her usual time, just before nine o'clock, and had been surprised to see Dr. Howarth with Mrs. Bidwell driving in before her. Brenda Pridmore had opened the door. Inspector Blakelock was coming downstairs and he had broken the news of the murder. They had all stayed in the hall together while Dr. Howarth went up to the Biology Lab. Inspector Blakelock had telephoned for the police and for Dr. Kerrison. When Dr. Howarth returned to the hall he had asked her to go with Inspector Blakelock and check on the keys. She and the Director were the only two members of staff who knew the combination of his security cupboard. He had stayed in the hall, she thought talking to Brenda Pridmore. The keys had been in their box in the cupboard, and she and Inspector Blakelock had left them there. She had reset the combination lock and returned to the hall. Dr. Howarth had gone into his office to talk to the Home Office, telling the rest of the staff to wait in the hall. Later, after the police and Dr. Kerrison had arrived, Dr. Howarth had driven her in his car to break the news to old Mr. Lorrimer. Then he had left her with the old man to return to the Laboratory, and she had telephoned for her friend. She and Miss Mawson had been there together until Mrs. Swaffield, the rector's wife, and a constable arrived, about an hour later.

"What did you do at Postmill Cottage?"

"I made tea and took it in to my uncle. Miss Mawson stayed in the kitchen most of the time doing the washing-up for him. The kitchen was in a bit of a mess, mostly dirty crockery from the previous day."

"How did your uncle seem?"

"Worried, and rather cross about having been left alone. I don't think he quite realized Edwin was dead."

There seemed little else to be learned from her. As far as she knew, her cousin had had no enemies. She had no idea who could have killed him. Her voice, high, rather monotonous, the voice of a small girl, suggested that it was not a matter of much concern to her. She expressed no regret, advanced no theories, answered all his questions composedly in her high, unemphatic voice. He might have been a casual and unimportant visitor, gratifying a curiosity about the routine of the working of the Laboratory. He felt an instinctive antipathy towards her. He had no difficulty in concealing it, but it interested him since it was a long time since a murder suspect had provoked in him so immediate and physical a reaction. But he wondered whether it was prejudice that glimpsed in those deep and secretive eyes a flash of disdain, of contempt even, and he would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind that high, rather bumpy forehead.

When she had left, Massingham said: "It's odd that Dr. Howarth sent her and Blakelock to check on the keys. He must have immediately realized their importance. Access to the Lab is fundamental to this case. So why didn't he check on them himself? He knew the combination."

"Too proud to take a witness, and too intelligent to go without one.

And he may have thought it more important to supervise things in the hall. But at least he was careful to protect Angela Foley. He didn't send her alone. Well, let's see what Blakelock has to say about it."

Like Dr. Howarth, Inspector Blakelock chose not to sit. He stood at attention, facing Dalgliesh across Howarth's desk like a man on a disciplinary charge. Dalgliesh knew better than to try to get him to relax. Blakelock had first learned the technique of replying to questions in his detective constable days in the witness box. He gave the information he was asked for, no more and no less, his eyes fixed on some spot a foot above Dalgliesh's right shoulder. When he gave his name in a firm expressionless voice, Dalgliesh half expected him to reach out his right hand for the Book and take the oath.

In reply to Dalgliesh's questioning he described his movements since leaving his house in Ely to come to the Laboratory. His account of the finding of the body tallied with that of Brenda Pridmore. As soon as he had seen her face as she came down the stairs he had realized that something was wrong and he dashed up to the Biology Lab without waiting for her to speak. The door had been open and the light on. He described the position of the body as precisely as if its rigid contours were imprinted on the mind's retina. He had known at once that Lorrimer was dead. He hadn't touched the body except, instinctively, to slip his hand into the pocket of the white coat and feel that the keys were there.

Dalgliesh asked: "When you arrived at the Laboratory this morning you waited for Miss Pridmore to catch you up before coming in. Why was that?"

"I saw her coming round the side of the building after having put her bicycle away, and it seemed courteous to wait, sir. And it saved me having to re-open the door to her."

"And you found the three locks and the internal security system in good order?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you make a routine check of the Laboratory as soon as you arrive?"

"No, sir. Of course if I found that any of the locks or the security panel had been tampered with I should check at once. But everything was in order."

"You said earlier that the telephone call from Mr. Lorrimer senior was a surprise to you. Didn't you notice Dr. Lorrimer's car when you arrived this morning?"

"No, sir. The senior scientific staff use the end garage."

"Why did you send Miss Pridmore to see if Dr. Lorrimer was here?"

"I didn't, sir. She slipped under the counter before I could stop her."

"So you sensed that something was wrong?"

"Not really, sir. I didn't expect her to find him. But I think it did briefly occur to me that he might have been taken ill."

"What sort of a man was Dr. Lorrimer, Inspector?"

"He was the senior biologist, sir."

"I know. I'm asking you what he was like as a man and a colleague."

"I didn't really know him well, sir. He wasn't one for lingering at the reception desk to chat. But I got on all right with him. He was a good forensic scientist."

"I've been told that he took an interest in Brenda Pridmore. Didn't that mean that he occasionally lingered at the desk?"

"Nor for more than a few minutes, sir. He liked to have a word with the girl from time to time. Everyone does. It's nice to have a young thing about the Lab. She's pretty and hard working and enthusiastic, and I think Dr. Lorrimer wanted to encourage her."

"No more than that, Inspector?"

Blakelock said solidly: "No, sir."

Dalgliesh then asked him about his movements on the previous evening.

He said that he and his wife had bought tickets for the village concert, although his wife was reluctant to go because of a bad headache. She suffered from sinus headaches which were occasionally disabling. But they had attended for the first half of the programme and, because her headache was worse, had left at the interval. He had driven back to Ely, arriving home about a quarter to nine. He and his wife lived in a modern bungalow on the outskirts of the city with no near neighbours and he thought it unlikely that anyone would have noticed their return. Dalgliesh said:

"There seems to have been a general reluctance on the part of everyone to stay for the second part of the programme. Why did you bother to go when you knew your wife was unwell?"

"Dr. MacIntyre--he's the former Director, sir--liked the Laboratory staff to take part in village activities, and Chief Inspector Martin feels the same. So I'd got the tickets and my wife thought we might as well use them. She hoped that the concert might help her to forget her headache. But the first half was rather rowdy and, in fact, it got worse."

"Did you go home and fetch her, or did she meet you here?"

"She came out earlier in the afternoon by the bus, sir, and spent the afternoon with Mrs. Dean, wife of the Minister at the Chapel. She's an old friend. I went round to collect my wife when I left work at six o'clock. We had a fish and chip supper there before the concert."

"That's your normal time for leaving?"

"Yes, sir."

"And who locks up the Laboratory if the scientists are working after your time for leaving?"

"I always check who's left, sir. If there are junior staff working then I have to stay until they're finished. But that isn't usual. Dr.

Howarth has a set of keys and would check the alarm system and lock up if he worked late."

"Did Dr. Lorrimer normally work after you had left?"

"About three or four evenings a week, sir. But I had no anxiety about Dr. Lorrimer locking up. He was very conscientious."

"Would he let anyone into the Laboratory if he were alone?"

"No, sir, not unless they were members of the staff, or of the police force, maybe. But it would have to be an officer he knew. He wouldn't let anyone in who hadn't got proper business here. Dr. Lorrimer was very particular about unauthorized people coming into the Laboratory."

"Was that why he tried forcibly to remove Miss Kerrison the day before yesterday?"

Inspector Blakelock did not lose his composure. He said: "I wouldn't describe it as a forcible removal, sir. He didn't lay hands on the girl."

"Would you describe to me exactly what did happen, Inspector?"

"Miss Kerrison and her small brother came to meet their father. Dr.

Kerrison was lecturing that morning to the Inspector's training course.

I suggested to Miss Kerrison that she sit down on the chair and wait, but Dr. Lorrimer came down the stairs at that moment to see if the mallet had arrived for examination. He saw the children and asked rather peremptorily what they were doing there. He said that a forensic science lab wasn't a place for children. Miss Kerrison said that she didn't intend to leave, so he walked towards her as if he intended to put her out. He looked very white, very strange, I thought. He didn't lay a hand on her but I think she was frightened that he was going to. I believe she's very highly strung, sir. She started screeching and screaming "I hate you. I hate you." Dr.

Lorrimer turned and went back up the stairs and Brenda tried to comfort the girl."

"And Miss Kerrison and her small brother left without waiting for their father?"

"Yes, sir. Dr. Kerrison came down about fifteen minutes later and I told him that the children had come for him but had left."

"You said nothing about the incident?"

"No, sir."

"Was this typical of Dr. Lorrimer's behaviour?"

"No, sir. But he hadn't been looking well in recent weeks. I think he's been under some strain."

"And you've no idea what kind of strain?"

"No, sir."

"Had he enemies?"

"Not to my knowledge, sir."

"So you've no idea who might have wanted him dead?"

"No, sir."

"After the discovery of Dr. Lorrimer's body, Dr. Howarth sent you with Miss Foley to check that his bunch of keys were in the security cupboard. Will you describe exactly what you and she did?"

"Miss Foley opened the cupboard. She and the Director are the only two people who know the combination."

"And you watched?"

"Yes, sir, but I can't remember the figures. I watched her twisting and setting the dial."

"And then?"

"She took out the metal cash box and opened it. It wasn't locked. The keys were inside."

"You were watching her closely all the time, Inspector? Are you absolutely sure that Miss Foley couldn't have replaced the keys in the box without your seeing?"

"No, sir. That would have been quite impossible."

"One last thing, Inspector. When you went up to the body Miss Pridmore was here alone. She told me that she's virtually certain that no one could have slipped out of the Laboratory during that time. Have you considered that possibility?"

"That he might have been here all night, sir? Yes. But he wasn't hiding in the Chief Liaison Officer's room because I would have seen him when I went to turn off the internal alarm. That's the room closest to the front door. I suppose he could have been in the Director's Office, but I don't see how he could have crossed the hall and opened the door without Miss Pridmore noticing even if she were in a state of shock. It isn't as if the door were ajar. He'd have had to turn the Yale lock."

"And you are absolutely certain that your own set of keys never left your possession last night?"

"I'm certain, sir."

"Thank you, Inspector. That's all for the present. Would you please ask Mr. Middlemass to come in?"

The Document Examiner strolled into the office with easy assurance, arranged his long body without invitation in Howarth's armchair, crossed his right ankle over his left knee and raised an interrogatory eyebrow at Dalgliesh like a visitor expecting nothing from his host but boredom, but politely determined not to show it. He was wearing dark-brown corduroy slacks, a fawn turtle necked sweater in fine wool and bright purple socks with leather slip-on shoes. The effect was of a de gage informality, but Dalgliesh noticed that the slacks were tailored, the sweater cashmere, and the shoes handmade. He glanced down at Middlemass's statement of his movements since seven o'clock the previous evening. Unlike the efforts of his colleagues, it was written with a pen, not a Biro, in a fine, high, italic script, which succeeded in being both decorative and virtually illegible. It was not the kind of hand he had expected. He said: "Before we get down to this, could you tell me about your quarrel with Lorrimer?"

"My version of it, you mean, as opposed to Mrs. Bidwell's?"

"The truth, as opposed to speculation."

"It wasn't a particularly edifying episode, and I can't say I'm proud of it. But it wasn't important.

I'd just started on the clunch pit murder case when I heard Lorrimer coming out of the washroom. I had a private matter I wanted a word about so I called him in. We talked, quarrelled, he struck out at me and I reacted with a punch to his nose. It bled spectacularly over my overall. I apologized. He left."

"What was the quarrel about? A woman?"

"Well, hardly, Commander, not with Lorrimer. I think Lorrimer knew that there were two sexes but I doubt whether he approved of the arrangement. It was a small private matter, something which happened a couple of years ago. Nothing to do with this Lab."

"So we have the picture of your settling down to work on an exhibit from a murder case, an important exhibit since you chose to examine it yourself. You are not, however, so absorbed in this task that you can't listen to footsteps passing the door and identify those of Lorrimer. It seems to you a convenient moment to call him in and discuss something which happened two years ago, something which you've apparently been content to forget in the interim, but which now so incenses you both that you end by trying to knock each other down."

"Put like that, it sounds eccentric."

"Put like that, it sounds absurd."

"I suppose it was absurd in a way. It was about a cousin of my wife's, Peter Ennalls. He left school with two "A' levels in science and seemed keen on coming into the Service. He came to me for advice and I told him how to go about it. He ended up as an S.O. under Lorrimer in the Southern Lab. It wasn't a success. I don't suppose it was entirely Lorrimer's fault, but he hasn't got the gift of managing young staff. Ennalls ended up with a failed career, a broken engagement and what is euphemistically described as a nervous breakdown. He drowned himself. We heard rumours about what had happened at the Southern.

It's a small service and these things get around. I didn't really know the boy; my wife was fond of him.

"I'm not blaming Lorrimer for Peter's death. A suicide is always ultimately responsible for his own destruction. But my wife believes that Lorrimer could have done more to help him. I telephoned her after lunch yesterday to explain that I'd be late home and our conversation reminded me that I'd always meant to speak to Lorrimer about Peter. By coincidence I heard his footsteps. So I called him in with the result that Mrs. Bidwell has no doubt graphically described. Mrs. Bidwell, I don't doubt, detects a woman at the bottom of any male quarrel. And if she did talk about a woman or a telephone call, then the woman was my wife and the telephone call was the one I've told you about."

It sounded plausible, thought Dalgliesh. It might even be the truth.

The Peter Ennalls story would have to be checked. It was just another chore when they were already hard-pressed and the truth of it was hardly in doubt. But Middlemass had spoken in the present tense:

"Lorrimer hasn't got the gift of managing junior staff." Were there, perhaps, junior staff closer to home who had suffered at his hands? But he decided to leave it for now. Paul Middlemass was an intelligent man. Before he made a more formal statement he would have time to ponder about the effect on his career of putting his signature to a lie. Dalgliesh said:

"According to this statement you were playing the part of a hobby-horse for the morris dancers at yesterday evening's village concert. Despite this, you say you can't give the name of anyone who could vouch for you. Presumably both the dancers and the audience could see the hobbyhorse galumphing around, but not you inside it. But wasn't anyone there when you arrived at the hall, or when you left?"

"No one who saw me to recognize me. It's a nuisance but it can't be helped. It happened rather oddly. I'm not a morris-dancer. I don't normally go in for these rustic rites and village concerts aren't my idea of entertainment. It was the Senior Liaison Officer's show, Chief Inspector Martin, but he had the chance of this U.S.A.

visit unexpectedly and asked me to deputize. We're about the same size and I suppose he thought that the outfit would fit me. He needed someone fairly broad in the shoulders and strong enough to take the weight of the head: I owed him a favour--he had a tactful word with one of his mates on highway patrol when I was caught speeding a month ago--so I couldn't very well not oblige.

"I went to a rehearsal last week and all it amounted to was, as you say, galumphing round the dancers after they'd done their stuff, snapping my jaws at the audience, frisking my tail and generally making a fool of myself. That hardly seemed to matter since no one could recognize me. I'd no intention of spending the whole evening at the concert, so I asked Bob Gotobed, he's the leader of the troupe, to give me a ring from the hall about fifteen minutes before we were due to go on. We were scheduled to appear after the interval and they reckoned that that would be about eight thirty. The concert, as you've probably been told, started at seven-thirty."

"And you stayed working in your lab until the call came?"

"That's right. My S.O. went out and got me a couple of beef and chutney sandwiches and I ate them at my desk. Bob phoned at eight-fifteen to say that they were running a bit ahead of time and that I'd better come over. The lads were dressed and were proposing to have a beer in the Moonraker. The hall hasn't a licence, so all the audience get in the interval is coffee or tea served by the Mothers' Union. I left the Lab at, I suppose, about eight-twenty."

"You say here that Lorrimer was alive then as far as you know?"

"We know that he was alive twenty-five minutes later, if his dad is right about the telephone call. But actually I think I saw him. I went out of the front door because that's the only exit but I had to go round the back to the garages to get my car. The light was on then in the Biology Department and I saw a figure in a white coat move briefly across the window. I can't swear that it was Lorrimer. I can only say that it never occurred to me at the time that it wasn't. And I knew, of course, that he must be in the building. He was responsible for locking up and he was excessively tedious about security. He wouldn't have left without checking on all the departments, including Document Examination."

"How was the front door locked?"

"Only with the Yale and a single bolt. That's what I expected. I let myself out."

"What happened when you got to the hall?"

"To explain that I'll have to describe the architectural oddities of the place. It was put up cheaply five years ago by the village builder and the committee thought they'd save money by not employing an architect. They merely told the chap that they wanted a rectangular hall with a stage and two dressing rooms and lavatories at one end, and a reception hall, cloakroom and a room for refreshments ai the other. It was built by Harry Gotobed and his sons. Harry is a pillar of the Chapel and a model of Nonconformist rectitude. He doesn't hold with the theatre, amateur or otherwise, and I think they had some difficulty in persuading him even to build a stage. But he certainly didn't intend to have any communicating door between the male and female dressing rooms. As a result what we've got is a stage with two rooms behind, each with its separate lavatory. There's an exit at each side into the graveyard, and two doors on to the stage, but there's literally no common space behind the stage. As a result the men dress in the right-hand dressing-room and come on to the stage from the prompt side, and the women from the left. Anyone who wants to enter from the opposite side has to leave the dressing-room, scurry in their costume and probably in the rain through the graveyard and, if they don't trip over a gravestone, break their ankle, or fall into an open grave, finally make a triumphant, if damp, appearance on the proper side."

Suddenly he threw back his head and gave a shout of laughter, then recovered himself and said:

"Sorry, poor taste. It's just that I was remembering last year's performance by the dramatic society. They'd chosen one of those dated domestic comedies where the characters spend most of their time in evening dress making snappy small talk. Young Bridie Corrigan from the general store played the maid. Scurrying through the churchyard she thought she saw old Maggie Gotobed's ghost. She made her entrance screaming, cap awry, but remembered her part sufficiently to gasp:

"Holy Mother of God, dinner is served!" Whereat the cast trooped dutifully off stage, the men to one side and the women to the other.

Our hall adds considerably to the interest of the performances I can tell you."

"So you went to the right-hand dressing room?"

"That's right. It was a complete shambles. The cast have to hang up their outdoor coats as well as keeping the costumes there. There's a row of coat hooks and a bench down the middle of the room, one rather small mirror and space for two people only to make up simultaneously.

The single hand basin is in the lavatory. Well, no doubt you'll be looking at the place for yourself. Last night it was chaotic with outdoor coats, costumes, boxes and props piled on the bench and overflowing on to the floor. The hobby-horse costume was hanging on one of the pegs, so I put it on."

"There was no one there when you arrived?"

"No one in the room, but I could hear someone in the lavatory. I knew that most of the troupe were over at the Moonraker. When I had got myself into the costume the lavatory door opened and Harry Sprogg, he's a member of the troupe, came out. He was wearing his costume."

Massingham made a note of the name: Harry Sprogg. Dalgliesh asked:

"Did you speak?"

"I didn't. He said something about being glad I'd made it and that the chaps were over at the Moonraker. He said he was just going to dig them out. He's the only tee totaller of the party so I suppose that's why he didn't go over with them. He left and I followed him out into the cemetery."

"Without having spoken to him?"

"I can't remember that I said anything. We were only together for about a couple of seconds. I followed him out because the dressing-room was stuffy--actually it stank--and the costume was extraordinarily heavy and hot. I thought I'd wait outside where I could join the boys when they came across from the pub. And that's what I did."

"Did you see anyone else?"

"No, but that doesn't mean there was no one there. Vision's a bit restricted through the headpiece. If someone had been standing motionless in the graveyard I could easily have missed him. I wasn't expecting to see anyone."

"How long were you there?"

"Less than five minutes. I galumphed around a bit and tried a few trial snaps of the jaw and whisks of the tail. It must have looked daft if anyone was watching. There's a particularly repulsive memorial there, a marble angel with an expression of nauseating piety and a hand pointed upwards. I pranced around that once or twice and snapped my jaws at its asinine face. God knows why! Perhaps it was the joint effect of moonlight and the place itself. Then I saw the chaps coming across the graveyard from the Moonraker and joined up with them."

"Did you say anything then?"

"I may have said good evening or hello, but I don't think so. They wouldn't have recognized my voice through the headpiece anyway. I raised the front right-hand hoof and made a mock obeisance and then tagged on behind. We went into the dressing-room together. We could hear the audience settling into their seats, and then the stage manager put his head in and said "Right, boys." Then the six dancers went on, and I could hear the violin strike up, the stamping of feet and the jangling of bells. Then the music changed and that was the signal for me to join them and do my bit. Part of the act was to go down the steps from the stage and frolic among the audience. It seemed to go down well enough to judge by the girlish shrieks, but if you're thinking of asking whether anyone recognized me, I shouldn't bother. I don't see how they could have."

"But after the performance?"

"No one saw me after the performance. We came tumbling down the steps from the stage into the dressing-room, but the applause went on. Then I realized with considerable horror that some fools in the audience were calling out 'encore." The lads in green needed no second invitation and they were up the stairs again like a troop of parched nav vies who'd just been told that the bar's open. I took the view that my agreement with Bill Martin covered one performance, not including an encore, and that I'd made enough of a fool of myself for one evening. So when the fiddle struck up and the stamping began I got out of the costume, hung it back on the nail, and made off. As far as I know no one saw me leave and there was no one in the car-park when I unlocked my car. I was at home before ten and my wife can vouch for that if you're interested. But I don't suppose you are."

"It would be more helpful if you could find someone to vouch for you between eight forty five and midnight."

"I know. Maddening, isn't it? If I'd known someone was proposing to murder Lorrimer during the evening I'd have taken good care not to put the headpiece on until the second before we went on stage. It's a pity the beast's head is so large. It's supported, as you'll discover, from the wearer's shoulders and doesn't actually touch the head or face. If it did you might find a hair or some biological evidence that I'd actually worn the thing. And prints are no good. I handled it at the rehearsals and so did a dozen other people. The whole incident is an example to me of the folly of indulging in good nature. If I'd only told old Bill just what he could do with his blasted hobbyhorse I should have been home, and, quite literally, dry before eight o'clock with a nice cosy alibi at the Panton Arms for the rest of the evening."

Dalgliesh ended the interview by asking about the missing white coat.

"It's a fairly distinctive design. I've got half a dozen of them, all inherited from my father. The other five are in the linen cupboard here, if you want to have a look at them. They're wasted, in very heavy white linen, buttoning high to the neck with crested Royal Army Dental Corps buttons. Oh, and they've got no pockets. The old man thought pockets were unhygienic."

Massingham thought that a coat already stained with Lorrimer's blood might be seen by a murderer as a particularly useful protective garment. Echoing his thought, Middlemass said:

"If it is found again I don't think I could say with certainty exactly what bloodstains resulted from our punch-up. There was one patch about four inches by two on the right shoulder, but there may have been other splashes. But presumably the serologists would be able to give you some idea of the comparative age of the stains."

If the coat were ever found, thought Dalgliesh. It wouldn't be an easy thing to destroy completely. But the murderer, if he had taken it, would have had all night to dispose of the evidence. He asked:

"And you dropped this particular coat in the soiled-linen basket in the men's washroom immediately after the quarrel?"

"I meant to, but then I thought better of it. The stain wasn't large and the sleeves were perfectly clean. I put it on again and dropped it in the soiled-linen-basket when I washed before leaving the Lab."

"Do you remember what wash-basin you used?"

"The first one, nearest the door."

"Was the basin clean?" If Middlemass were surprised by the question, he concealed it.

"As clean as it ever is after a day's use. I wash fairly vigorously so it was clean enough when I left. And so was I."

The picture came into Massingham's mind with startling clarity; Middlemass in his blood spattered coat bending low over the washbasin, both taps running full on, the water swirling and gurgling down the waste-pipe, water stained pink with Lorrimer's blood. But what about the timing? If old Lorrimer really had spoken to his son at eight forty-five then Middlemass must be in the clear, at least for the first part of the evening. And then he pictured another scene: Lorrimer's sprawled body, the raucous ring of the telephone. Middlemass's gloved hand slowly lifting the receiver. But could old Lorrimer really mistake another voice for that of his son?

When the Document Examiner had left Massingham said: "At least he has one person to corroborate his story. Dr. Howarth saw the hobbyhorse prancing round the angel memorial in the churchyard. They've hardly had opportunity this morning to concoct that story together. And I don't see how else Howarth could have known about it."

Dalgliesh said: "Unless they concocted the story in the graveyard last night. Or unless it was Howarth, not Middlemass who was inside that hobbyhorse."

"I didn't like him, and I was frightened of him, but I didn't kill him.

I know everyone will think that I did, but it's not true. I couldn't kill anyone or anything; not an animal, let alone a man."

Clifford Bradley had stood up fairly well to the long wait for questioning. He wasn't incoherent. He had tried to behave with dignity. But he had brought into the room with him the sour contagion of fear, that most difficult of all emotions to hide. His whole body twitched with it; the restless hands clasping and unclasping in his lap, the shuddering mouth, the anxious blinking eyes. He was not an impressive figure, and fear had made him pitiable. He would make an ineffective murderer, thought Massingham. Watching him, he felt some of the instinctive shame of the healthy in the presence of the diseased. It was easy to imagine him retching over that wash-basin, vomiting up his guilt and terror. It was less easy to envisage him tearing out the page of the notebook, destroying the white coat, organizing that early morning telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell. Dalgliesh said mildly:

"No one is accusing you. You're familiar enough with Judge's Rules to know that we wouldn't be talking like this if I were about to caution you. You say that you didn't kill him. Have you any idea who did?"

"No. Why should I have? I don't know anything about him. All I know is that I was at home with my wife last night. My mother-in-law came to supper and I saw her off on the seven forty-five bus to Ely. Then I went straight home, and I was home all the evening. My mother-in-law telephoned about nine o'clock to say that she'd reached home safely.

She didn't speak to me because I was having a bath. My wife told her that. But Sue can confirm that, except for taking her mother to the bus, I was home all the evening."

Bradley admitted that he hadn't known that old Mr. Lorrimer's hospital admission had been postponed. He thought he had been in the washroom when the old man's call came through. But he knew nothing of the early telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell, the missing page from Lorrimer's notebook, or Paul Middlemass's missing white coat. Asked about his supper on Wednesday night, he said that they had eaten curry made with tinned beef, together with rice and tinned peas. Afterwards there had been a trifle which, he explained defensively, had been made with stale cake and custard. Massingham suppressed a shudder as he made a careful note of these details. He was glad when Dalgliesh said that Bradley could go. There seemed nothing else of importance to be learned from him in his present state; nothing more to be learned, indeed, from anyone at the Laboratory. He was fretting to see Lorrimer's house, Lorrimer's next of kin.

But before they left, Sergeant Reynolds had something to report. He was finding it difficult to keep the excitement from his voice.

"We've found some tyre-marks, sir, about half-way up the drive among the bushes. They look pretty fresh to me. We've got them protected until the photographer arrives and then we'll get a plaster cast made.

It's difficult to be sure until we compare them with a tyre index, but it looks to me as if the two back tyres were a Dunlop and a Semperit.

That's a pretty odd combination. It should help us to get the car."

It was a pity, thought Dalgliesh, that Superintendent Mercer had told the photographers they could go. But it wasn't surprising. Given the present pressure of work on the Force, it was difficult to justify keeping men hanging about indefinitely. And at least the fingerprint officers were still here. He said:

"Have you been able to get in touch with Mr. Bidwell yet?"

"Captain Massey says he's up on the five-acre raising sugar beet. He'll tell him you want to see him when he comes in for his doc key "His what?"

"His doc key sir. That's the meal break which we have in these parts at about half past ten or eleven."

"I'm relieved that Captain Massey has a proper sense of priority between agriculture and murder."

"They're a good bit behind with the five-acre, sir, but Captain Massey will see that he calls in at Guy's Marsh station as soon as they've finished work this afternoon."

"If he doesn't, you'd better dig him out, even if you have to borrow Captain Massey's tractor to do it. That telephone call is important.

I'll have a word with the senior scientists in the library now and explain to them that I want them present in the departments when you do the internal search. The rest of them can go home. I'll tell them that we hope to have finished searching by the end of the day. It should be possible for the Lab to open again tomorrow morning.

Inspector Massingham and I will be seeing Dr. Lorrimer's father at Postmill Cottage. If anything breaks, you can contact us there or through the car radio control from Guy's Marsh."

Less than ten minutes later, with Massingham at the wheel of the police Rover, they were on their way.