Death of an Expert Witness

BOOK THREE An Experimental Man

Postmill Cottage lay two miles to the west of the village at the junction of Stoney Piggott's Road and Tenpenny Lane, where the road curved gently upwards, but so imperceptibly that it was difficult for Dalgliesh to believe that he was on slightly higher ground until the car was parked on the grass verge and, turning to close the door, he saw the village strung out along the road below him. Under the turbulent painter's sky, with its changing clusters of white, grey and purple cumulus clouds massing against the pale azure blue of the upper air, and the sunlight moving fitfully across the fields and glittering on roofs and windows, it looked like an isolated frontier outpost, but welcoming, prosperous and secure. Violent death might lurk eastwards in the dark fen lands but surely not under die se neat domestic roofs.

Hoggatt's Laboratory was hidden by its belt of trees, but the new building was immediately identifiable, its concrete stumps, ditches and half-built walls looking like the orderly excavation of some long-buried city.

The cottage, a low building of brick with a white wood-cladded front and with the rounded top and sails of the windmill visible behind, was separated from the road by a wide ditch. A wooden plank bridge and white-painted gate led to the front path and the latched door. The first impression of melancholy neglect, induced perhaps by the cottage's isolation and the bareness of outer walls and windows, proved on second glance illusory. The front garden had the dishevelled, overgrown look of autumn, but the roses in the two circular beds, one each side of the path, had been properly tended. The gravel path was clear of weeds, the paintwork on door and windows was shining. Twenty feet farther on two wide and sturdy planks bridged the ditch and led to a flag stoned yard and a brick garage.

There was an old and grubby red Mini already parked next to a police car. Dalgliesh deduced from the bundle of parish magazines, a smaller one of what looked like concert programmes and the bunch of shaggy chrysanthemums and autumn foliage on the back seat, that the rector, or more probably his wife, was already at the cottage, probably on her way to help with the church decorations, although Thursday was an unusual day, surely, for this ecclesiastical chore. He had scarcely turned from this scrutiny of the rectory car when the door of the cottage opened and and a woman bustled down the path towards them. No one who had been born and bred in a rectory could be in any doubt that here was Mrs. Swaffield. She looked indeed like a prototype of a country rector's wife, large-bosomed, cheerful and energetic, exuding the slightly intimidating assurance of a woman adept at recognizing authority and competence at a glance, and making immediate use of them. She was wearing a tweed skirt covered with a flowered cotton apron, a hand-knitted twin set thick brogues and open-work woollen stockings. A felt hat, shaped like a pork pie, its crown stabbed with a steel hat ping was jammed uncompromisingly over a broad forehead.

"Good morning. Good morning. You're Commander Dalgliesh and Inspector Massingham. Winifred Swaffield. Come in, won't you. The old gentleman is upstairs changing. He insisted on putting on his suit when he heard you were on the way, although I assured him that it wasn't necessary. He'll be down in a minute. In the front parlour would be best I think, don't you? This is Constable Davis, but of course you know all about him. He tells me that he's been sent here to see that no one goes in to Dr. Lorrimer's room and to stop any visitors from bothering the old gentleman. Well, we haven't had any so far except one reporter and I soon got rid of him, so that's all right.

But the constable has really been very helpful to me in the kitchen.

I've just been getting some lunch for Mr. Lorrimer. It'll only be soup and an omelette, I'm afraid, but there doesn't seem to be much in the larder except tins and he might be glad of those in the future. One doesn't like to come laden from the rectory like a Victorian do-gooder.

"Simon and I wanted him to come back to the rectory at once but he doesn't seem anxious to leave, and really one mustn't badger people, especially the old. And perhaps it's just as well. Simon's down with this two-day 'flu--that's why he can't be here--and we don't want the old gentleman to catch it. But we can't let him stay here alone tonight. I thought that he might like to have his niece here, Angela Foley, but he says no. So I'm hoping that Millie Gotobed from the Moonraker will be able to sleep here tonight, and we'll have to think again tomorrow. But I mustn't take up your time with my worries."

At the end of this speech, Dalgliesh and Massingham found themselves ushered into the front living-room. At the sound of their footsteps in the narrow hall Constable Davis had emerged from what was presumably the kitchen, had sprung to attention, saluted, blushed and given Dalgliesh a glance of mingled appeal and slight desperation before disappearing again. The smell of home-made soup had wafted appetizingly through the door.

The sitting-room, which was stuffy and smelt strongly of tobacco, was adequately furnished, yet gave an impression of cheerless discomfort, a cluttered repository of the. mementoes of ageing and its sad solaces. The chimney breast had been boarded up and an old-fashioned gas fire hissed out an uncomfortably fierce heat over a sofa in cut moquette with two greasy circles marking where innumerable heads had once rested. There was a square oak table with bulbous carved legs and four matching chairs with vinyl seats, and a large dresser set against the wall opposite the window, hung with the cracked remnants of long-smashed tea sets. On the dresser were two bottles of Guinness and an unwashed glass. To the right of the fire was a high winged armchair and beside it a wicker table with a ramshackle lamp, a tobacco pouch, an ashtray bearing a picture of Brighton pier, and an open draught-board with the pieces set out, crusted with dried food and accumulated grime. The alcove to the left of the fire was filled with a large television set. Above it were a couple of shelves holding a collection of popular novels in identical sizes and bindings, issued by a book club to which Mr. Lorrimer had once apparently briefly belonged. They looked as if they had been gummed together unopened and unread.

Dalgliesh and Massingham sat on the sofa. Mrs. Swaffield perched upright on the edge of the armchair and smiled across at them encouragingly, bringing into the room's cheerlessness a reassuring ambience of home-made jam, well conducted Sunday schools and massed women's choirs singing Blake's "Jerusalem." Both men felt immediately at home with her. Both in their different lives had met her kind before. It was not, thought Dalgliesh, that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life. She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down.

Dalgliesh asked: "How is he, Mrs. Swaffield?"

"Surprisingly well. He keeps talking about his son in the present tense, which is a little disconcerting, but I think he realizes all right that Edwin is dead. I don't mean to imply that the old gentleman is senile. Not in the least. But it's difficult to know what the very old are feeling sometimes. It must have been a terrible shock, naturally. Appalling, isn't it? I suppose a criminal from one of those London gangs broke in to get his hands on an exhibit. They're saying in the village that there were no signs of a break-in, but a really determined burglar can get in anywhere, I've always been told. I know Father Gregory has had terrible trouble with break-ins at St. Mary's at Guy's Marsh. The poor-box has been rifled twice and two pews of kneelers stolen, the ones the Mothers' Union had specially embroidered to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. Goodness knows why anyone should want to take those. Luckily we've had no trouble of that kind here. Simon would hate to have to lock the church. Chevisham has always been a most law abiding village, which is why this murder is so shocking."

Dalgliesh wasn't surprised that the village already knew that there had been no break-in at the Lab. Presumably one of the staff, on the excuse of needing to telephone home and say that he wouldn't be back for luncheon and avid to break the exciting news, had been less than discreet. But it would be pointless to try to trace the culprit. In his experience news percolated through a village community by a process of verbal osmosis, and it would be a bold man who tried to control or stem that mysterious diffusion. Mrs. Swaffield, like any proper rector's wife, had undoubtedly been one of the first to know.

Dalgliesh said:

"It's a pity that Miss Foley and her uncle don't seem to get on. If he could go to stay temporarily with her that would at least solve your immediate problem. She and her friend were here when you arrived this morning, I take it?"

"Yes, both of them. Dr. Howarth came himself with Angela to break the news, which I think was thoughtful of him, then left her here when he went back to the Lab. He wouldn't want to be away for more than a short time, naturally. I think Angela phoned her friend and she came at once. Then the constable arrived and I was here shortly afterwards.

There was no point in Angela and Miss Mawson staying on once I'd come, and Dr. Howarth was anxious for most of the staff to be actually in the Lab when you arrived."

"And there are no other relatives and no close friends, as far as you know?"

"None, I think. They kept themselves very much to themselves. Old Mr. Lorrimer doesn't come to church or take part in village affairs, so that Simon and I never really got to know him. I know that people expect the clergy to come round knocking at doors and rooting people out, but Simon doesn't really believe it does much good, and I must say I think he's right. Dr. Lorrimer, of course, went to St. Mary's at Guy's Marsh. Father Gregory might be able to tell you something about him although I don't think he took a very active part in church life.

He used to pick up Miss Willard from the Old Rectory and drive her over. She might be worth having a word with, although it seems unlikely that they were close. I imagine that he drove her to church because Father Gregory suggested it rather than from inclination.

She's an odd woman, not really suitable to look after children, I should have thought. But here comes the one you really want to talk to."

Death, thought Dalgliesh, obliterates family resemblance as it does personality; there is no affinity between the living and the dead. The man who came into the room, shuffling a little but still upright, had once been as tall as his son; the sparse hair brushed back from a high forehead still showed streaks of the black it had once been; the watery eyes, sunken under the creased lids, were as dark. But there was no kinship with that rigid body on the laboratory floor. Death, in separating them forever, had robbed them even of their likeness.

Mrs. Swaffield made the introductions in a voice of determined encouragement as if they had all suddenly gone deaf. Then she melted tactfully away, murmuring something about soup in the kitchen.

Massingham sprang to help the old man to a chair, but Mr. Lorrimer, with a stiff chopping motion of the hand, gestured him aside.

Eventually, after some hesitation, as if the sitting-room were unfamiliar to him, he lowered himself into what was obviously his usual place, the shabby, high backed armchair to the right of the fire, from which he regarded Dalgliesh steadily.

Sitting there, bolt upright, in his old fashioned and badly cut dark blue suit, which smelt strongly of mothballs and now hung loosely on his diminished bones, he looked pathetic, almost grotesque, but not without dignity. Dalgliesh wondered why he had troubled to change.

Was it a gesture of respect for his son, the need to formalize grief, a restless urge to find something to do? Or was it some atavistic belief that authority was on its way and should be propitiated by an outward show of deference? Dalgliesh was reminded of the funeral of a young detective constable killed on duty. What he had found almost unbearably pathetic had not been the sonorous beauty of the burial service, or even the young children walking hand in hand with careful solemnity behind their father's coffin. It had been the reception afterwards in the small police house, the carefully planned home-cooked food and the drink, ill-afforded, which the widow had prepared for the refreshment of her husband's colleagues and friends. Perhaps it had comforted her at the time, or solaced her in memory. Perhaps old Mr. Lorrimer, too, felt happier because he had taken trouble.

Settling himself some distance from Dalgliesh on the extra ordinarily lumpy sofa, Massingham opened his notebook. Thank God the old man was calm anyway. You could never tell how the relatives were going to take it. Dalgliesh, as he knew, had the reputation of being good with the bereaved. His condolences might be short, almost formal, but at least they sounded sincere. He took it for granted that the family would wish to cooperate with the police, but as a matter of justice, not of retribution. He didn't connive at the extraordinary psychological interdependence by which the detective and the bereaved were often supported, and which it was so fatally easy to exploit. He made no specious promises, never bullied the weak or indulged the sentimental.

And yet they seem to like him, thought Massingham.

God knows why. At times he's cold enough to be barely human.

He watched Dalgliesh stand up as old Mr. Lorrimer came into the room; but he made no move to help the old man to his chair. Massingham had glanced briefly at his chief's face and seen the familiar look of speculative detached interest. What, if anything, he wondered, would move Dalgliesh to spontaneous pity? He remembered the other case they had worked on together a year previously, when he had been a detective sergeant; the death of a child. Dalgliesh had regarded the parents with just such a look of calm appraisal. But he had worked eighteen hours a day for a month until the case was solved. And his next book of poems had contained that extraordinary one about a murdered child which no one at the Yard, even those who professed to understand it, had had the temerity even to mention to its author. He said now:

"As Mrs. Swaffield explained, my name is Dalgliesh and this is Inspector Massingham. I expect Dr. Howarth told you that we would be coming. I'm very sorry about your son. Do you feel able to answer some questions?"

Mr. Lorrimer nodded towards the kitchen. "What's she doing in there?"

His voice was surprising; high timbred and with a trace of the querulousness of age, but extraordinarily strong for an old man.

"Mrs. Swaffield? Making soup, I think."

"I suppose she's used the onions and carrots we had in the vegetable rack. I thought I could smell carrots. Edwin knows I don't like carrots in soup."

"Did he usually cook for you?"

"He does all the cooking if he isn't away at a scene of crime. I don't eat much dinner at midday, but he leaves me something to heat up, a stew from the night before or a bit of fish in sauce, maybe. He didn't leave anything this morning because he wasn't at home last night. I had to get my own breakfast. I fancied bacon, but I thought I'd better leave that in case he wants it for tonight. He usually cooks bacon and eggs if he's late home."

Dalgliesh asked: "Mr. Lorrimer, have you any idea why anyone should want to murder your son? Had he any enemies?"

"Why should he have enemies? He didn't know anyone except at the Lab.

Everyone had a great respect for him at the Lab. He told me so himself. Why would anyone want to harm him? Edwin lived for his work."

He brought out the last sentence as if it were an original expression of which he was rather proud.

"You telephoned him last night at the Laboratory, didn't you? What time was that?"

"It was a quarter to nine. The telly went blank. It didn't blink and go zig-zag like it sometimes does. Edwin showed me how to adjust the knob at the back for that. It went blank with just one little circle of light and then that failed. I couldn't see the nine o'clock news, so I rang Edwin and asked him to send for the TV man. We rent the set, and they're supposed to come at any hour, but there's always some excuse. Last month when I telephoned they didn't come for two days."

"Can you remember what your son said?"

"He said that it wasn't any use telephoning late at night. He'd do it first thing this morning before he went to work. But, of course, he hasn't. He didn't come home. It's still broken. I don't like to telephone myself. Edwin always sees to everything like that. Do you think Mrs. Swaffield would ring?"

"I'm sure that she would. When you telephoned him did he say anything about expecting a visitor?"

"No. He seemed in a hurry, as if he didn't like it because I phoned.

But he always said to ring the Lab up if I was in trouble."

"And he said nothing else at all except that he'd ring the TV mechanic this morning?"

"What else would he say? He wasn't one for chatting over the telephone."

"Did you ring him at the Laboratory yesterday about your hospital appointment?"

"That's right. I was supposed to go in to Addenbrooke's yesterday afternoon. Edwin was going to drive me in. It's my leg, you see. It's psoriasis. They're going to try a new treatment."

He made as if to roll up his trouser leg. Dalgliesh said quickly:

"That's all right, Mr. Lorrimer. When did you know the bed wasn't available after all?"

"About nine o'clock they rang. He'd only just left home. So I phoned the Lab. I know the number of the Biology Department, of course.

That's where he works--the Biology Department. Miss Easterbrook answered the phone and said that Edwin was at the hospital attending a postmortem but she would give him the message when he got in.

Addenbrooke's said they'd probably send for me next Tuesday. Who's going to take me now?"

"I expect Mrs. Swaffield will arrange something, or perhaps your niece could help. Wouldn't you like her to be here with you?"

"No. What can she do? She was here this morning with that friend of hers, the writing woman. Edwin doesn't like either of them. The friend--Miss Mawson, isn't it?--was rummaging around upstairs. I've got very good ears. I could hear her all right. I went out of the door and there she was coming down. She said she'd been to the bathroom. Why was she wearing washing-up gloves if she was going to the bathroom?"

Why indeed? thought Dalgliesh. He felt a spasm of irritation that Constable Davis hadn't arrived sooner. It was perfectly natural that Howarth should come with Angela Foley to break the news and should leave her with her uncle.

Someone had to stay with him, and who more suitable than his only remaining relative? It was probably natural, too, that Angela Foley should send for the support of her friend. Probably both of them were interested in Lorrimer's will. Well, that too was natural enough.

Massingham shifted on the sofa. Dalgliesh could sense his anxiety to get upstairs into Lorrimer's room. He shared it. But books and papers, the sad detritus of a dead life, could wait. The living witness might not again be so communicative. He asked:

"What did your son do with himself, Mr. Lorrimer?"

"After work, do you mean? He stays in his room mostly. Reading, I suppose. He's got quite a library of books up there. He's a scholar, is Edwin. He doesn't care much about the television, so I sit down here. Sometimes I can hear the record-player. Then there's the garden most weekends, cleaning the car, cooking and shopping. He has quite a full life. And he doesn't get much time. He's at the Lab until seven o'clock most nights, sometimes later."

"And friends?"

"No. He doesn't go in for friends. We keep ourselves to ourselves."

"No weekends away?"

"Where would he want to go? And what would happen to me? Besides, there's the shopping. If he isn't on call for a scene of-crime visit he drives me into Ely Saturday morning, and we go to the supermarket. Then we have lunch in the city. I enjoy that."

"What telephone calls did he have?"

"From the Lab? Only when the Police Liaison Officer rings up to say that he's wanted at a murder scene. Sometimes that's in the middle of the night. But he never wakes me. There's a telephone extension in his room. He just leaves me a note and he's usually back in time to bring me a cup of tea at seven o'clock. He didn't do that this morning of course. That's why I rang the Lab. I rang his number first but there wasn't any reply so then I rang the reception desk. He gave me both numbers in case I couldn't get through to him in an emergency."

"And no one else has telephoned him recently, no one has come to see him?"

"Who would want to come and see him? And no one has telephoned except that woman."

Dalgliesh said, very quietly: "What woman, Mr. Lorrimer?"

"I don't know what woman. I only know she rang. Monday of last week it was. Edwin was having a bath and the phone kept on ringing so I thought I'd better answer it."

"Can you remember exactly what happened and what was said, Mr.

Lorrimer, from the time you lifted the receiver? Take your time, there's no hurry. This may be very important."

"There wasn't much to remember. I was going to say our number and ask her to hang on, but she didn't give me any time. She started speaking as soon as I lifted the receiver. She said:

"We're right, there is something going on." Then she said something about the can being burned and that she'd got the numbers."

"That the can had been burned and she'd got the numbers?"

"That's right. It doesn't sound sense now, but it was something like that. Then she gave me the numbers."

"Can you remember them, Air Lorrimer?"

"Only the last one, which was 1840. Or it may have been two numbers, 18 and 40.1 remembered those because the first house we had after I was married was number 18 and the second was 40. It was quite a coincidence, really. Anyway, those numbers stuck in my mind. But I can't remember the others."

"How many numbers altogether?"

"Three or four altogether, I think. There were two, and then the 18 and 40."

"What did the numbers sound like, Mr. Lorrimer? Did you think she was giving you a telephone number or a car registration, for example? Can you remember what impression they made on you at the time?"

"No impression. Why should they? More like a telephone number, I suppose. I don't think it was a car registration. There weren't any letters you see. It sounded like a date; eighteen forty."

"Have you any idea who was telephoning?"

"No. I don't think it was anyone at the Lab. It didn't sound like one of the Lab staff."

"How do you mean, Mr. Lorrimer? How did the voice seem?" The old man sat there, staring straight ahead. His hands, with the long fingers like those of his son, but with their skin dry and stained as withered leaves, hung heavily between his knees, grotesquely large for the brittle wrists. After a moment he spoke. He said:

"Excited." There was another silence. Both detectives looked at him.

Massingham thought that here again was an example of his chiefs skill.

He would have gone charging upstairs in search of the will and papers.

But this evidence, so carefully elicited, was vital. After about a moment the old man spoke again. The word, when it came, was surprising. He said:

"Conspiratorial. That's what she sounded. Conspiratorial." They sat, still patiently waiting, but he said nothing else. Then they saw that he was crying. His face didn't change, but a single tear, bright as a pearl, dropped on to the parched hands. He looked at it as if wondering what it could be. Then he said:

"He was a good son to me. Time was, when he first went to College up in London, that we lost touch. He wrote to his mother and me, but he didn't come home. But these last years, since I've been alone, he's taken care of me. I'm not complaining. I daresay he's left me a bit of money, and I've got my pension. But it's hard when the young go first. And who will look after me now?"

Dalgliesh said quietly: "We need to look at his room, examine his papers. Is the room locked?"

"Locked? Why should it be locked? No one went into it but Edwin."

Dalgliesh nodded to Massingham, who went out to call Mrs. Swaffield.

Then they made their way upstairs.

It was a long, low-ceilinged room with white walls and a casement window which gave a view of a rectangle of unmown grass, a couple of gnarled apple trees heavy with fruit burnished green and gold in the autumn sun, a straggling hedge beaded with berries and beyond it the windmill. Even in the genial light of afternoon the mill looked a melancholy wreck of its former puissance. The paint was peeling from the walls and the great sails, from which the slats had fallen like rotten teeth, hung heavy with inertia in the restless air. Behind the windmill, the acres of black fen land newly sliced by the autumn ploughing, stretched in glistening clumps between the dykes.

Dalgliesh turned away from this picture of melancholy peace to examine the room. Massingham was already busy at the desk. Finding the lid unlocked, he rolled it back for a few inches, then let it drop again.

Then he tried the drawers. Only the top left-hand one was locked. If he were impatient for Dalgliesh to take Lorrimer's keys from his pocket and open it, he concealed his eagerness. It was known that the older man, who could work faster than any of his colleagues, still liked occasionally to take his time. He was taking it now, regarding the room with his dark sombre eyes, standing very still as if he were picking up invisible waves.

The place held a curious peace. The proportions were right and the furniture fitted where it had been placed. A man might have space to think in this uncluttered sanctum. A single bed, neatly covered with a red and brown blanket, stood against the opposite wall. A long wall shelf above the bed held an adjustable reading lamp, a radio, a record-player, a clock, a carafe of water and the Book of Common Prayer. In front of the window stood an oak working-table with a wheel-back chair. On the table was a blotter and a brown and blue pottery mug stacked with pencils and Biro pens. The only other items of furniture were a shabby, winged armchair with a low table beside it, a double wardrobe in oak to the left of the door, and to the right an old-fashioned desk with a roll top. The telephone was fitted to the wall. There were no pictures and no mirror, no masculine impedimenta, no trivia on desk-top or table-ledge. Everything was functional, well used, unadorned. It was a room a man could be at home in.

Dalgliesh walked over to look at the books. He estimated that there must be about four hundred of them, completely covering the wall. There was little fiction, although the nineteenth-century English and Russian novelists were represented. Most of the books were histories or biographies, but there was a shelf of philosophy: Teilhard de Chardin's Science and Christ, Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness: A Humanist Outlook, Simone Weil's First and Last, Plato's Republic, the Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. It looked as if Lorrimer had at one time been trying to teach himself Greek. The shelf held a Greek primer and a dictionary.

Massingham had taken down a book on comparative religion. He said:

"It looks as if he was one of those men who torment themselves trying to discover the meaning of existence."

Dalgliesh replaced the Sartre he had been studying. "You find that reprehensible?"

"I find it futile. Metaphysical speculation is about as point less as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing."

"And life is for living. You find that an adequate personal credo?"

"To maximize one's pleasures and minimize one's pain, yes, sir, I do.

And I suppose, to bear with stoicism those miseries I can't avoid. To be human is to ensure enough of those without inventing them. Anyway, I don't believe you can hope to understand what you can't see or touch or measure."

"A logical positivist. You're in respectable company. But he spent his life examining what he could see or touch or measure. It doesn't seem to have satisfied him. Well, let's see what his personal papers have to tell."

He turned his attention to the desk, leaving the locked drawer to the last. He rolled back the top to reveal two small drawers and a number of pigeon-holes. And here, neatly docketed and compartmentalized, were the minutiae of Lorrimer's solitary life. A drawer with three bills waiting to be paid, and one for receipts. A labelled envelope containing his parents' marriage lines, his own birth and baptismal certificates. His passport, an anonymous face but with the eyes staring as if hypnotized, the neck muscles taut. The lens of the camera might have been the barrel of a gun. A life assurance certificate. Receipted bills for fuel, electricity and gas. The maintenance agreement for the central heating. The hire-purchase agreement for the television. A wallet with his bank statement. His portfolio of investments, sound, unexciting, orthodox.

There was nothing about his work. Obviously he kept his life as carefully compartmentalized as his filing system. Everything to do with his profession, the journals, the drafts of his scientific papers, were kept in his office at the Lab. They were probably written there.

That might account for some of the late hours. It would certainly have been impossible to guess from the contents of his desk what his job had been.

His will was in a separate labelled envelope together with a brief letter from a firm of Ely solicitors, Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt.

The will was very short and had been made five years earlier. Lorrimer had left Postmill Cottage and 10,000 pounds to his father, and the rest of his estate absolutely to his cousin, Angela Maud Foley. To judge from the portfolio of investments, Miss Foley would inherit a useful capital sum.

Lastly, Dalgliesh took Lorrimer's bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the top left hand drawer. The lock worked very easily. The drawer was crammed with papers covered with Lorrimer's handwriting.

Dalgliesh took them over to the table in front of the window and motioned Massingham to draw up the armchair. They sat there together.

There were twenty-eight letters in all and they read them through without speaking. Massingham was aware of Dalgliesh's long fingers picking up each sheet, dropping it from his hand then shifting it across the desk towards him, then picking up the next. The clock seemed to him to be ticking unnaturally loudly and his own breathing to have become embarrassingly obtrusive. The letters were a liturgy of the bitter exfoliation of love. It was all here: the inability to accept that desire was no longer returned, the demand for explanations which, if attempted, could only increase the hurt, the excoriating self-pity, the spasms of irrational renewed hope, the petulant outbursts at the obtuseness of the lover unable to see where her happiness lay, the humiliating self abasement.

"I realize that you won't want to live in the fens. But that needn't be a difficulty, darling. I could get a transfer to the Metropolitan Lab if you prefer London, Or we could find a house in Cambridge or Norwich, a choice of two civilized cities. You once said that you liked to live among the spires. Or if you wished, I could stay on here and we could have a flat in London for you, and I'd join you whenever I could. I ought to be able to make it most Sundays. The week without you would be an eternity, but anything would be bearable if I knew that you belonged to me. You do belong to me. All the books, all the seeking and the reading, what does it come to in the end? Until you taught me that the answer was so simple."

Some of the letters were highly erotic. They were probably the most difficult of all love letters to write successfully, thought Massingham. Didn't the poor devil know that, once desire was dead, they could only disgust? Perhaps those lovers who used a private nursery talk for their most secret acts were the wisest. At least the eroticism was personal. Here the sexual descriptions were either embarrassingly Lawrentian in their intensity, or coldly clinical. He recognized with surprise an emotion that could only be shame. It wasn't just that some of the outpourings were brutally explicit. He was accustomed to perusing the private pornography of murdered lives; but these letters, with their mixture of crude desire and elevated sentiment, were outside his experience. The naked suffering they expressed seemed to him neurotic, irrational. Sex no longer had any power to shock him; love, he decided, obviously could.

He was struck by the contrast between the tranquillity of the man's room and the turbulence of his mind. He thought: at least this job teaches one not to hoard personal debris. Police work was as effective as religion in teaching a man to live each day as if it were his last.

And it wasn't only murder that violated privacy. Any sudden death could do as much. If the helicopter had crashed on landing, what sort of a picture would his leavings present to the world? A conformist, right-wing philistine, obsessed with his physical fitness? Homme mo yen sensual and mo yen everything else for that matter? He thought of Emma, with whom he slept whenever they got the opportunity, and who, he supposed, would eventually become Lady Dungannon unless, as seemed increasingly likely, she found an elder son with better prospects and more time to devote to her. He wondered what Emma, cheerful hedonist with her frank enjoyment of bed, would have made of these self-indulgent, masturbatory fantasies, this humiliating chronicle of the miseries of defeated love.

One half-sheet was covered with a single name. Domenica, Domenica, Domenica. And then Domenica Lorrimer, a clumsy, un euphonic linking.

Perhaps its infelicity had struck him, for he had written it only once.

The letters looked laboured, tentative, like those of a young girl practising in secret the hoped-for married name. All the letters were undated, all without superscription and signature! A number were obviously first drafts, a painful seeking after the elusive world, the holograph scored with deletions.

But now Dalgliesh was pushing towards him the final letter. Here there were no alterations, no uncertainties, and if there had been a previous draft, Lorrimer had destroyed it. This was as clear as an affirmation.

The words, strongly written in Lorrimer's black upright script, were set out in even lines, neatly as an exercise in calligraphy. Perhaps this was one he had intended to post after all.

"I have been seeking for the words to explain what has happened to me, what you have made happen. You know how difficult this is for me.

There have been so many years of writing official reports, the same phrases, the same bleak conclusions. My mind was a computer programmed to death. I was like a man born in darkness, living in a deep cave, crouching for comfort by my small inadequate fire, watching the shadows flickering over the cave drawings and trying to find in their crude outlines some significance, a meaning to existence to help me endure the dark. And then you came and took me by the hand and led me out into the sunlight. And there was the real world, dazzling my eyes with its colour and its beauty And it needed only your hand and the courage to take a few small steps out of the shadows and imaginings into the light. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem."

Dalgliesh laid the letter down. He said: "Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live." Given the choice, Lorrimer would probably have preferred his murder to go unavenged than for any eyes but his to have seen these letters. What do you think of them?"

Massingham was uncertain whether he was expected to comment on their subject matter or their style. He said cautiously:

"The passage about the cave is effective. It looks as if he worked over that one."

"But not entirely original. An echo of Plato's Republic. And like Plato's caveman, the brightness dazzled and the light hurt his eyes.

George Orwell wrote somewhere that murder, the unique crime, should result only from strong emotions. Well, here is the strong emotion.

But we seem to have the wrong body."

"Do you think Dr. Howarth knew, sir?"

"Almost certainly. The wonder is that no one at the Lab apparently did. It's not the kind of information that Mrs. Bidwell, for one, would keep to herself. First, I think, we check with the solicitors that this will still stands, and then we see the lady."

But this programme was to be changed. The wall telephone rang, shattering the peace of the room. Massingham answered. It was Sergeant Underhill trying, but with small success, to keep the excitement out of his voice.

"There's a Major Hunt of Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt of Ely wants to see Mr. Dalgliesh. He'd prefer not to talk over the telephone. He says could you ring and say when it would be convenient for Mr.

Dalgliesh to call. And sir, we've got a witness! He's over at Guy's Marsh police station now. The name's Alfred Goddard. He was a passenger last night passing the Lab in the nine-ten bus."

"Running down drive he were like the devil out of hell."

"Can you describe him, Mr. Goddard?"

"Naw. He weren't old."

"How young?"

"I never said 'e were young. I never seed 'im near enough to tell. But he didn't run like an old 'un."

"Running for the bus, perhaps."

"If 'e were 'e never catched it."

"He wasn't waving?"

""Course he weren't. Driver couldn't see 'im. No point in waving at back of bloody bus."

Guy's Marsh police station was a redbrick Victorian building with a white wooden pediment, which looked so like an early railway station that Dalgliesh suspected that the nineteenth-century police authority had economized by making use of the same architect and the same set of plans.

Mr. Alfred Goddard, waiting comfortably in the interview room with a huge mug of steaming tea before him, looked perfectly at home, neither gratified nor impressed to find himself a key witness in a murder investigation. He was a nut brown, wrinkled, undersized countryman who smelt of strong tobacco, alcohol and cow-dung. Dalgliesh recalled that the early fen settlers had been called "yellow-bellies" by their highland neighbours because they crawled frog-like over their marshy fields or "slodgers," splashing web footed through the mud. Either would have suited Mr. Goddard. Dalgliesh noticed with interest that he was wearing what looked like a leather thong bound round his left wrist, and guessed that this was dried eel-skin, the ancient charm to ward off rheumatism. The misshapen fingers stiffly cradling the mug of tea suggested that the talisman had been less than efficacious.

Dalgliesh doubted whether he would have troubled to come forward if Bill Carney, the conductor of the bus, hadn't known him as a regular on the Wednesday evening service travelling from Ely to Stoney Piggott via Chevisham, and had directed the inquiring police to his remote cottage.

Having been summarily dug out of his lair, however, he displayed no particular resentment against Bill Carney or the police, and announced that he was prepared to answer questions if, as he explained, they were put to him "civil-like." His main grievance in life was the Stoney Piggott bus: its lateness, infrequency, rising fares and, in particular, the stupidity of the recent experiment of using double-deckers on the Stoney Piggott route and his own subsequent banishment each Wednesday to the upper deck because of his pipe.

"But how fortunate for us that you were there," Massingham had pointed out. Mr. Goddard had merely snorted into his tea.

Dalgliesh continued with the questioning: "Is there anything at all you can remember about him, Mr. Goddard? His height, his hair, how he was dressed?"

"Naw. Middling tall and wearing a shortish coat, or mac maybe.

Flapping open, maybe."

"Can you remember the colour?"

"Darkish, maybe. I never seed 'im for more'n a second, see. Then trees got in the way. Bus were moving off when I first set eyes on him."

Massingham interposed: "The driver didn't see him, nor did the conductor."

"More than likely. They was on lower deck. Isn't likely they'd notice. And driver were driving bloody bus."

Dalgliesh said: "Mr. Goddard, this is very important. Can you remember whether there were any lights on in the Lab?"

"What do you mean, Lab?"

"The house the figure was running from."

"Lights in the house? If you mean house why not say house?" Mr.

Goddard pantomimed the ardours of intensive thought, pursing his lips into a grimace and half closing his eyes. They waited. After a nicely judged interval he announced:

"Faint lights, maybe. Not blazing out, mind you. I reckon I seed some lights from bottom windows."

Massingham asked: "You're quite sure it was a man?" Mr. Goddard bestowed on him the glance of mingled reproof and chagrin of a viva-voce candidate faced with what he obviously regards as an unfair question.

"Wearing trousers, wasn't he? If he weren't a man then he ought to have been."

"But you can't be absolutely sure?"

"Can't be sure of nothing these days. Time was when folk dressed in a decent, God-fearing manner. Man or woman, it were human and it were running. That's all I seed."

"So it could have been a woman in slacks?"

"Never run like a woman. Daft runners women be, keeping their knees tight together and kicking out ankles like bloody ducks. Pity they don't keep their knees together when they ain't running, I say."

The deduction was fair enough, thought Dalgliesh. No woman ran precisely like a man. Goddard's first impression had been that of a youngish man running, and that was probably exactly what he had seen.

Too much questioning now might only confuse him.

The driver and conductor, summoned from the bus depot and still in uniform, were unable to confirm Goddard's story, but what they were able to add was useful. It is not surprising that neither of them had seen the runner, since the six-foot wall and its overhanging trees cut off a view of the Laboratory from the bottom deck and they could only have glimpsed the house when the bus was passing the open drive and slowing down at the stop. But if Mr. Goddard were right and the figure had only appeared when the bus was moving off, they still wouldn't have seen him.

It was helpful that they were both able to confirm that the bus, on that Wednesday evening at least, was running on time. Bill Carney had actually looked at his watch as they moved away. It had shown nine-twelve. The bus had halted at the stop for a couple of seconds.

None of the three passengers had made any preliminary moves to get off, but both the driver and the conductor had noticed a woman waiting in the shadows of the bus shelter and had assumed that she would board.

However, she hadn't done so, but had turned away and moved back farther into the shadow of the shelter as the bus drew up. The conductor had thought it strange that she was waiting there, since there wasn't another bus that night. But it had been raining slightly and he had assumed, without thinking about it very deeply, that she had been sheltering. It wasn't his job, as he reasonably pointed out, to drag passengers on the bus if they didn't want a ride.

Dalgliesh questioned them both closely about the woman, but there was little firm information they could give. Both agreed that she had been wearing a headscarf and that the collar of her coat had been turned up at her ears. The driver thought that she had been wearing slacks and a belted mackintosh. Bill Carney agreed about the slacks but thought that she had been wearing a duffle-coat. Their only reason for assuming that the figure was a woman was the headscarf. Neither of them could describe it. They thought it unlikely that any of the three passengers on the lower deck would be able to help. Two of them were elderly regulars, both apparently asleep. The third was unknown to them.

Dalgliesh knew that all three would have to be traced. This was one of those time-consuming jobs which were necessary but which seldom produced any worthwhile information. But it was astonishing how much the most unlikely people did notice. The sleepers might have been jogged awake by the slowing down of the bus and have had a clearer look at the woman than either the conductor or driver. Mr. Goddard, not surprisingly, hadn't noticed her. He inquired caustically how a chap was expected to see through the roof of a bloody bus shelter and, in any case, he'd been looking the other way hadn't he, and a good job for them that he had. Dalgliesh hastened to propitiate him and, when his statement was at last completed to the old man's satisfaction, watched him driven back to his cottage, sitting in some style, like a tiny upright manikin, in the back of the police car.

But it was another ten minutes before Dalgliesh and Massingham could set out for Ely. Albert Bidwell had presented himself conveniently if belatedly at the police station, bringing with him a hefty sample of the mud from the five-acre field and an air of sullen grievance.

Massingham wondered how he and his wife had originally met and what had brought together two such dissimilar personalities. She, he felt sure, was born a cockney; he a fen man He was taciturn where she was avid for gossip and excitement.

He admitted to taking the telephone call. It was a woman and the message was that Mrs. Bidwell was to go to learnings to give Mrs. Schofield a hand instead of to the Lab. He couldn't remember if the caller had given her name but didn't think so. He had taken calls from Mrs. Schofield once or twice before when she had rung to ask his wife to help with dinner parties or suchlike. Women's business. He couldn't say whether the voice sounded the same. Asked whether he had assumed that the caller was Mrs. Schofield, he said that he hadn't assumed anything.

Dalgliesh asked: "Can you remember whether the caller said that your wife was to come to learnings or go to learnings?"

The significance of this question obviously escaped him but he received it with surly suspicion and, after a long pause, said he didn't know.

When Massingham asked whether it was possible that the caller hadn't been a woman but a man disguising his voice, he gave him a look of concentrated disgust as if deploring a mind that could imagine such sophisticated villainy. But the answer provoked his longest response.

He said, in a tone of finality, that he didn't know whether it was a woman, or a man pretending to be a woman, or, maybe, a lass. All he knew was that he'd been asked to give his wife a message, and he'd given it to her. And if he'd known it would cause all this botheration he wouldn't have answered the phone.

And with that they had to be content.

In Dalgliesh's experience, solicitors who practised in cathedral cities were invariably agreeably housed, and the office of Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt was no exception. It was a well preserved and maintained Regency house with a view of the Cathedral Green, an imposing front door whose ebony-black paint gleamed as if it were still wet, and whose brass knocker in the shape of a lion's head had been polished almost to whiteness. The door was opened by an elderly and very thin clerk, Dickensian in his old-fashioned black suit and stiff collar, whose appearance of lugubrious resignation brightened somewhat at seeing them, as if cheered by the prospect of trouble. He bowed slightly when Dalgliesh introduced himself and said:

"Major Hunt is, of course, expecting you, sir. He is just concluding his interview with a client. If you will step this way he won't keep you waiting more than a couple of minutes." The waiting-room into which they were shown resembled the sitting-room of a man's club in its comfort and air of controlled disorder. The chairs were leather and so wide and deep that it was difficult to imagine anyone over sixty rising from them without difficulty. Despite the heat from two old fashioned radiators there was a coke fire burning in the grate. The large, circular mahogany table was spread with magazines devoted to the interests of the landed gentry, most of which looked very old. There was a glass-fronted bookcase packed with bound histories of the county and illustrated volumes on architecture and painting. The oil over the mantelpiece of a phaeton with horses and attendant grooms looked very like a Stubbs, and, thought Dalgliesh, probably was.

He only had time briefly to inspect the room, and had walked over to the window to look out towards the Lady Chapel of the cathedral when the door opened and the clerk reappeared to usher them into Major Hunt's office. The man who rose from behind his desk to receive them was in appearance the opposite of his clerk. He was a stocky, upright man in late middle age, dressed in a shabby but well-tailored tweed suit, ruddy-faced and balding, his eyes keen under the spiky, restless eyebrows. He gave Dalgliesh a frankly appraising glance as he shook hands, as if deciding where exactly to place him in some private scheme of things, then nodded as if satisfied. He still looked more like a soldier than a solicitor, and Dalgliesh guessed that the voice with which he greeted them had acquired its loud authoritative bark across the parade-grounds and in the messes of the Second World War.

"Good morning, good morning. Please sit down, Commander. You come on tragic business. I don't think we have ever lost one of our clients by murder before."

The clerk coughed. It was just such a cough as Dalgliesh would have expected, inoffensive but discreetly minatory and not to be ignored.

"There was Sir James Cummins, sir, in 1923. He was shot by his neighbour, Captain Cartwright, because of the seduction of Mrs.

Cartwright by Sir James, a grievance aggravated by some unpleasantness over fishing rights."

"Quite right, Mitching. But that was in my father's time. They hanged poor Cartwright. A pity, my father always thought. He had a good war record--survived the Somme and Arras and ended on the scaffold.

Battle-scarred, poor devil. The jury would probably have made a recommendation to mercy if he hadn't cut up the body. He did cut up the body, didn't he, Mitching?"

"Quite right, sir. They found the head buried in the orchard."

"That's what did for Cartwright. English juries won't stand for cutting up the body. Crippen would be alive today if he'd buried Belle Elmore in one piece."

"Hardly, sir. Crippen was born in 1860."

"Well he wouldn't have been long dead. It wouldn't surprise me if he'd reached his century. Only three years older than your father, Mitching, and much the same build, small, pop eyed and wiry. They live forever, that type. Ah well, to our muttons. You'll both take coffee, I hope. I can promise you it will be drinkable. Mitching has installed one of those glass retort affairs and we grind our own fresh beans. Coffee then, please, Mitching."

"Miss Makepeace is preparing it now, sir." Major Hunt exuded postprandial well-being, and Massingham guessed, with some envy, that his business with his last client had been chiefly done over a good lunch. He and Dalgliesh had snatched a hurried sandwich and beer at a pub between Chevisham and Guy's Marsh. Dalgliesh, known to enjoy food and wine, had an inconvenient habit of ignoring meal-times when in the middle of a case. Massingham wasn't fussy about the quality; it was the quantity he deplored. But, at least, they were to get coffee.

Mitching had stationed himself near the door and showed no inclination to leave. This was apparently perfectly acceptable. Dalgliesh thought that they were like a couple of comedians in the process of perfecting their antiphonal patter, and reluctant to lose any opportunity of practising it. Major Hunt said:

"You want to know about Lorrimer's will, of course."

"And anything else you can tell us about him."

"That won't be much, I'm afraid. I've only seen him twice since I dealt with his grandmother's estate. But of course I'll do what I can.

When murder comes in at the window privacy goes out of the door. That's so, isn't it, Mitching?"

"There are no secrets, sir, in the fierce light that beats upon the scaffold."

"I'm not sure that you've got that one right, Mitching. And we don't have scaffolds now. Are you an abolitionist, Commander?"

Dalgliesh said: "I'm bound to be until the day comes when we can be absolutely sure that we could never under any circumstances make a mistake."

"That's the orthodox answer, but it begs quite a lot of questions, doesn't it? Still you're not here to discuss capital punishment.

Mustn't waste time. Now the will. Where did I put Mr. Lorrimer's box, Mitching?"

"It's here, sir."

"Then bring it over, man. Bring it over." The clerk carried the black tin box from a side table and placed it in front of Major Hunt. The Major opened it with some ceremony and took out the will.

Dalgliesh said: "We've found one will in his desk. It's dated 3rd May 1971. It looks like the original."

"So he didn't destroy it? That's interesting. It suggests that he hadn't finally made up his mind."

"So there's a later will?"

"Oh, indeed there is, Commander. Indeed there is. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Signed by him only last Friday and both the original and the only copy left here with me. I have them here.

Perhaps you'd like to read it yourself."

He handed over the will. It was very short. Lorrimer, in the accepted form, revoked all previous wills, proclaimed himself to be of sound mind and disposed of all his property in less than a dozen lines.

Postmill Cottage was left to his father together with a sum of ten thousand pounds. One thousand pounds was left to Brenda Pridmore "to enable her to buy any books required to further her scientific education." All the rest of his estate was left to the Academy of Forensic Science to provide an annual cash prize of such amount as the Academy should see fit for an original essay on any aspect of the scientific investigation of crime, the essay to be judged by three judges selected by the Academy. There was no mention of Angela Foley.

Dalgliesh said: "Did he give you any explanation why he left his cousin, Angela Foley, out of the will?"

"As a matter of fact he did. I thought it right to point out that in the event of his death his cousin, as his only surviving relative apart from his father, might wish to contest the will. If she did, a legal battle would cost money and might seriously deplete the estate. I didn't feel any obligation to press him to alter his decision. I merely thought it right to point out the possible consequences. You heard what he replied, didn't you, Mitching?"

"Yes, indeed, sir. The late Mr. Lorrimer expressed his disapprobation of the way in which his cousin chose to live, in particular he deplored the relationship which, he alleged, subsisted between his cousin and the lady with whom I understand she makes her home, and said that he did not wish the said companion to benefit from his estate. If his cousin chose to contest the will, he was prepared to leave the matter to the courts. It would no longer be of any concern to himself. He would have made his wishes clear. He also pointed out, if I remember rightly, sir, that the will was intended to be transitional in its nature. He had it in mind to marry and if he did so the will would, of course, become void. In the meantime he wished to guard against what he saw as the remote contingency of his cousin inheriting absolutely should he die unexpectedly before his personal affairs became clearer."

"That's right, Mitching, that in effect is what he said. I must say that it reconciled me somewhat to the new will. If he were proposing to get married obviously it would no longer stand and he could think again. Not that I thought it necessarily an unjust or unfair will. A man has the right to dispose of his property as he sees fit, if the state leaves him anything to dispose of. It struck me as a bit odd that, if he were engaged to be married, he didn't mention the lady in the interim will. But I suppose the principle's sound enough. If he'd left her a paltry sum she'd hardly have thanked him, and if he'd left her the lot, she'd probably promptly have married another chap and it would all pass to him."

Dalgliesh asked: "He didn't tell you anything about the proposed marriage?"

"Not even the lady's name. And naturally I didn't ask. I'm not even sure that he had anyone particular in mind. It could have been only a general intention or, perhaps, an excuse for altering the will. I merely congratulated him and pointed out that the new will would be void as soon as the marriage took place. He said that he understood that and would be coming to make a new will in due course. In the meantime this was what he wanted and this was what I drew up. Mitching signed it, with my secretary as a second witness. Ah, here she is with the coffee. You remember signing Mr. Lorrimer's will, eh?"

The thin, nervous-looking girl who had brought in the coffee gave a terrified nod in response to the Major's bark and hastened out of the room. Major Hunt said with satisfaction:

"She remembers. She was so terrified that she could hardly sign. But she did sign. It's all there.

All correct and in order. I hope we can draw up a valid will, eh, Mitching? But it will be interesting to see if the little woman makes a fight for it."

Dalgliesh asked how much Angela Foley would be making a fight for.

"The best part of fifty thousand pounds, I daresay. Not a fortune these days but useful, useful. The original capital was left to him absolutely by old Annie Lorrimer, his paternal grandmother. An extraordinary old woman. Born and bred in the fens. Kept a village store with her husband over at Low Willow. Tom Lorrimer drank himself into a comparatively early grave--couldn't stand the fen winters--and she carried on alone. Not all the money came from the shop, of course, although she sold out at a good time. No, she had a nose for the horses. Extraordinary thing. God knows where she got it from. Never mounted a horse in her life to my knowledge. Shut up the shop and went to Newmarket three times a year. Never lost a penny, so I've heard, and saved every pound she won."

"What family had she? Was Lorrimer's father her only son?"

"That's right. She had one son and one daughter, Angela Foley's mother. Couldn't bear the sight of either of them, as far as I can see. The daughter got herself in the family way by the village sexton and the old woman cast her off in approved Victorian style. The marriage turned out badly and I don't think Maud Foley saw her mother again. She died of cancer about five years after the girl was born. The old woman wouldn't have her granddaughter back, so she ended up in local authority care. Most of her life's been spent in foster homes, I believe."

"And the son?"

"Oh, he married the local schoolmistress, and that turned out reasonably well as far as I know. But the family were never close.

The old lady wouldn't leave her money to her son because, she said, it would mean two lots of death duties. She was well over forty when he was born. But I think the real reason was simply that she didn't much like him. I don't think she saw much of the grandson, Edwin, either, but she had to leave the money somewhere and hers was a generation which believes that blood is thicker than charitable soup and male blood thicker than female. Apart from the fact she'd cast off her daughter and never taken any interest in her granddaughter, her generation didn't believe in leaving money outright to women. It only encourages seducers and fortune-hunters. So she left it absolutely to her grandson, Edwin Lorrimer. At the time of her death I think he had qualms of conscience about his cousin. As you know, the first will made her his legatee."

Dalgliesh said: "Do you know if Lorrimer told her that he intended to change his will?"

The solicitor looked at him sharply. "He didn't say. In the circumstances it would be convenient for her if she could prove that he did."

So convenient, thought Dalgliesh, drat she would certainly have mentioned the fact when first interviewed. But even if she had believed herself to be her cousin's heir, that didn't necessarily make her a murderess. If she wanted a share of her grand mother's money, why wait until now to kill for it?"

The telephone rang. Major Hunt muttered an apology and reached for the receiver. Holding his palm over the mouth piece, he said to Dalgliesh:

"It's Miss Foley, ringing from Postmill Cottage. Old Mr. Lorrimer wants to have a word with me about the will. She says he's anxious to know whether the cottage now belongs to him. Do you want me to tell him?"

"That is for you. But he's the next of kin; he may as well know the terms of the will now as later. And so may she."

Major Hunt hesitated. Then he spoke into the receiver. "All right, Betty. Put Miss Foley on the line."

He looked up again at Dalgliesh. "This piece of news is going to put the cat among the pigeons in Chevisham."

Dalgliesh had a sudden picture of Brenda Pridmore's eager young face shining across Howarth's desk at him.

"Yes." he said grimly. "Yes, I'm afraid it is."

Howarth's house, learnings, was three miles outside Chevisham village on the Cambridge road, a modern building of concrete, wood and glass cantilevered above the flat fen lands with two white wings like folded sails. Even in the fading light it was impressive. The house stood in uncompromising and splendid isolation, depending for its effect on nothing but perfection of line and artful simplicity. No other building was in sight except a solitary black wooden cottage on stilts, desolate as an execution shed, and, dramatically, an intricate mirage hung above the eastern skyline, the marvelous single tower and octagon of Ely Cathedral.

From the rooms at the back one would see an immensity of sky and look out over vast un hedged fields dissected by learnings dyke, changing with the seasons from black scarred earth, through the spring sowing to the harvest; would hear nothing but the wind and, in summer, the ceaseless susurration of the grain.

The site had been small and the architect had needed ingenuity. There was no garden, nothing but a short drive leading to a paved courtyard and the double garage. Outside the garage, a red Jaguar XJS stood beside Howarth's Triumph. Massingham cast envious eyes on the Jaguar and wondered how Mrs. Schofield had managed to get such quick delivery. They drove in and parked beside it. Even before Dalgliesh had switched off the engine, Howarth had strolled out and was quietly waiting for them. He was wearing a butcher's long blue and white striped overall in which he seemed perfectly at ease, evidently seeing no need either to explain or remove it. As they made their way up the open-tread, carved wooden stairs Dalgliesh complimented him on the house. Howarth said:

"It was designed by a Swedish architect who did some of the modern additions at Cambridge. Actually it belongs to a university friend.

He and his wife are spending a couple of years' sabbatical at Harvard.

If they decide to stay on in the States, they may sell. Anyway, we're settled for the next eighteen months, and can then look around if we have to."

They were mounting a wide circular wooden staircase rising from the well of the house. Upstairs someone was playing, very loudly, a record of the finale of the third Brandenburg Concerto. The glorious contrapuntal sound beat against the walls and surged through the house; Massingham could almost imagine it taking off on its white wings and rollicking joyously over the fens. Dalgliesh said, above the music:

"Mrs. Schofield likes it here?"

Howarth's voice, carefully casual, came down to them. "Oh, she may have moved on by then. Domenica likes variety. My half-sister suffers from Baudelaire's horreur de domicile--she usually prefers to be elsewhere. Her natural habitat is London, but she's with me now because she's illustrating a new limited edition of Crabbe for the Paradine Press."

The record came to an end. Howarth paused and said with a kind of roughness, as if regretting an impulse to confide:

"I think I ought to tell you that my sister was widowed just over eighteen months ago. Her husband was killed in a car crash. She was driving at the time but she was lucky. At least, I suppose she was lucky. She was scarcely scratched. Charles Schofield died three days later."

"I'm sorry," said Dalgliesh. The cynic in him wondered why he had been told. Howarth had struck him as essentially a private man, one not lightly to confide a personal or family tragedy. Was it an appeal to chivalry, a covert plea for him to treat her with special consideration? Or was Howarth warning him that she was still distraught with grief, unpredictable, unbalanced even? He could hardly be implying that, since the tragedy, she had indulged an irresistible impulse to kill her lovers.

They had reached the top of the stairs and were standing on a wide wooden balcony seemingly hung in space. Howarth pushed open a door and said:

"I'll leave you to it. I'm making an early start on cooking dinner tonight. She's in here." He called:

"This is Commander Dalgliesh and Detective Inspector Massingham of the Met. The men about the murder. My sister, Domenica Schofield."

The room was immense, with a triangular window from roof to floor jutting out over the fields like a ship's prow, and a high curved ceiling of pale pine. The furniture was scant and very modern. The room looked, in fact, more like a musician's studio than a sitting-room. Against the wall was a jangle of music stands and violin cases and, mounted above them, a bank of modern and obviously expensive stereo equipment. There was only one picture, a Sidney Nolan oil of Ned Kelly. The faceless metallic mask, with the two anonymous eyes gleaming through the slit, was appropriate to the austerity of the room, the stark blackness of the darkening fens. It was easy to imagine him, a grim latter-day Hereward, striding over the clogging acres.

Domenica Schofield was standing at a drawing desk placed in the middle of the room. She turned, unsmilingly, to look at them with her brother's eyes, and Dalgliesh encountered again those disconcerting pools of blue under the thick, curved brows. As always, in those increasingly rare moments when, unexpectedly, he came face to face with a beautiful woman, his heart jerked. It was a pleasure more sensual than sexual and he was glad that he could still feel it, even in the middle of a murder investigation.

But he wondered how studied was that smooth deliberate turn, that first gaze, remote yet speculative, from the remarkable eyes. In this light, the irises, like those of her brother, were almost purple, the whites stained with a paler blue. She had a pale, honey-coloured skin, with flaxen hair drawn back from the forehead and tied in a clump at the base of her neck. Her blue jeans were pulled tightly over the strong thighs and were topped with an open-necked shirt of checkered blue and green. Dalgliesh judged her to be about ten years younger than her half-brother. When she spoke, her voice was curiously low for a woman, with a hint of gruffness.

"Sit down." She waved her right hand vaguely towards one of the chrome and leather chairs. "You don't mind if I go on working?"

"Not if you don't mind being talked to while you do, and if you don't object to my sitting while you stand."

He swung the chair closer to her easel, from where he could see both her face and her work, and settled himself. The chair was remarkably comfortable. He sensed that already she was regretting her lack of civility. In any confrontation the one standing has a psychological advantage, but not if the adversary is sitting very obviously at ease in a spot he has himself selected. Massingham, with an almost ostentatious quietness, had lifted a second chair for himself and placed it against the wall to the left of the door. She must have been aware of his presence at her back, but she gave no sign. She could hardly object to a situation she had herself contrived, but, as if sensing that the interview had started unpropitiously, she said:

"I'm sorry to seem so obsessively busy, but I have a deadline to meet.

My brother's probably told you that I'm illustrating a new edition of Crabbe's poems for the Paradine Press. This drawing is for "Procrastination'--Dinah among her curious trifles."

Dalgliesh had known that she must be a competent professional artist to have gained the commission, but he was impressed by the sensitivity and assurance of the line-drawing before him. It was remarkably detailed but un finicky a highly decorative and beautifully composed balance of the girl's slender figure and Crabbe's carefully enumerated objects of desire. They were all there, meticulously drawn: the figured wallpapers, the rose carpet, the mounted stag's head and the jewelled, enamelled clock. It was, he thought, a very English illustration of the most English of poets. She was taking trouble with the period details. On the right-hand wall was mounted a cork board on which were pinned what were obviously preliminary sketches: a tree, half finished interiors, articles of furniture, small impressions of landscape. She said:

"It's as well one doesn't have to like a poet's work to illustrate him competently. Who was it called Crabbe "Pope in worsted stockings?"

After twenty lines my brain begins to thud in rhymed couplets. But perhaps you're an Augustan. You write verse, don't you?"

She made it sound as if he collected cigarette cards for a hobby.

Dalgliesh said:

"I've respected Crabbe ever since I read as a boy that Jane Austen said she could have fancied being Mrs. Crabbe. When he went to London for the first time he was so poor that he had to pawn all his clothes, and then he spent the money on an edition of Dryden's poems."

"And you approve of that?"

"I find it appealing." He quoted:

"Miseries there were, and woes the world around, But these had not her pleasant dwelling found; She knew that mothers grieved and widows wept And she was sorry, said her prayers and slept:

For she indulged, nor was her heart so small That one strong passion should engross it all."

She gave him a swift elliptical glance. "In this case there is happily no mother to grieve nor widow to weep. And I gave up saying my prayers when I was nine. Or were you only proving that you could quote Crabbe?"

"That, of course," replied Dalgliesh. "Actually I came to talk to you about these."

He took a bundle of the letters out of his coat pocket, opened one of the pages and held it out towards her. He asked:

"This is Lorrimer's handwriting?"

She glanced dismissively at the page. "Of course. It's a pity he didn't send them. I should have liked to have read them, but not now perhaps."

"I don't suppose they're so very different from the ones he did post."

For a moment he thought that she was about to deny receiving any. He thought: "She's remembered that we can easily check with the postman."

He watched the blue eyes grow wary. She said:

"That's how love ends, not with a bang, but a whimper."

"Less a whimper than a cry of pain."

She wasn't working, but stood still, scrutinizing the drawing. She said:

"It's extraordinary how unattractive misery is. He'd have done better to have tried honesty. "It means a lot to me, it doesn't mean very much to you. So why not be generous? It won't cost you anything except an occasional half-hour of your time." I'd have respected him more."

"But he wasn't asking for a commercial arrangement," said Dalgliesh.

"He was asking for love."

"That's something I didn't have to give, and he had no right to expect."

None of us, thought Dalgliesh, has a right to expect it. But we do.

Irrelevantly a phrase of Plutarch fell into his mind. "Boys throw stones at frogs in sport. But the frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest."

"When did you break it off?" he asked. She looked surprised for a moment.

"I was going to ask you how you knew that I'd done the breaking. But, of course, you've got the letters. I suppose he was whining. I told him that I didn't want to see him again about two months ago. I haven't spoken to him since."

"Did you give him a reason?"

"No. I'm not sure that there was a reason. Does there have to be?

There wasn't another man if that's what you have in mind. What a beautifully simple view you must have of life. I suppose the police work produces a card-index mentality.

Victim--Edwin Lorrimer.

Crime--Murder.

Accused--Domenica Schofield.

Motive--Sex.

Verdict--Guilty.

What a pity that you can't any longer finish it off neatly with Sentence--Death. Let's say I was tired of him."

"When you'd exhausted his possibilities, sexual and emotional?"

"Say intellectual, rather, if you'll forgive the arrogance. I find that one exhausts the physical possibilities fairly soon, don't you?

But if a man has wit, intelligence, and his own peculiar enthusiasms, then there's some kind of purpose in the relationship. I knew a man once who was an authority on seventeenth-century church architecture.

We used to drive for miles looking at churches. It was fascinating while it lasted, and I now know quite a lot about the late seventeenth century. That's something on the credit side."

"Whereas Lorrimer's only intellectual enthusiasms were popular philosophy and forensic science."

"Forensic biology. He was curiously inhibited about discussing it. The Official Secrets Act was probably engraved on what he would have described as his soul. Besides, he could be boring even about his job.

Scientists invariably are, I've discovered. My brother is the only scientist I've ever met who doesn't bore me after the first ten minutes of his company."

"Where did you make love?"

"That's impertinent. And is it relevant?"

"It could be--to the number of people who knew that you were lovers."

"No one knew. I don't relish my private affairs being giggled over in the women's loo at Hoggatt's."

"So no one knew except your brother and yourself?" They must have decided in advance that it would be stupid and dangerous to deny that Howarth had known. She said:

"I hope you're not going to ask whether he approved."

"No. I took it for granted that he disapproved."

"Why the hell should you?" The tone was intended to be light, almost bantering, but Dalgliesh could detect the sharp edge of defensive anger. He said mildly:

"I am merely putting myself in his place. If I had just started a new job, and one of some difficulty, my half-sister's affair with a member of my own staff, and one who probably thought he'd been supplanted, would be a complication I'd prefer to do without."

"Perhaps you lack my brother's confidence. He didn't need Edwin Lorrimer's support to run his Lab effectively."

"You brought him here?"

"Seducing one of my brother's staff here in his own house? Had I disliked my brother, it might have given the affair extra piquancy.

Towards the end I admit it could have done with it.

But as I don't, it would merely have been in poor taste. We both have cars, and his is particularly roomy."

"I thought that was the expedient of randy adolescents. It must have been uncomfortable and cold."

"Very cold. Which was another reason for deciding to stop it." She turned to him with sudden vehemence.

"Look, I'm not trying to shock you. I'm trying to be truthful. I hate death and waste and violence. Who doesn't? But I'm not grieving, in case you thought of offering condolences. There's only one man whose death has grieved me, and it isn't Edwin Lorrimer. And I don't feel responsible. Why should I? I'm not responsible. Even if he killed himself I shouldn't feel that it was my fault. As it is, I don't believe his death had anything to do with me. He might, I suppose, have felt like murdering me. I never had the slightest motive for murdering him."

"Have you any idea who did?"

"A stranger, I imagine. Someone who broke into the Lab either to plant or to destroy some forensic evidence. Perhaps a drunken driver hoping to get his hands on his blood sample. Edwin surprised him and the intruder killed him."

"The blood alcohol analysis isn't done in the Biology Department."

"Then it could have been an enemy, someone with a grudge. Someone he'd given evidence against in the past. After all, he's probably well known in the witness box. Death of an expert witness."

Dalgliesh said: "There's the difficulty of how his killer got in and out of the Lab."

"He probably gained entrance during the day and hid after the place was locked up for the night. I leave it to you to discover how he got away. Perhaps he slipped out after the Lab had been opened for the morning during the kerfuffle after that girl--Pridmore, isn't it?--discovered the body. I don't suppose that anyone was keeping an eye on the front door."

"And the false telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell?"

"Probably no connection, I'd say. Just someone trying to be funny.

She's probably too scared to admit what happened. I should question the junior female staff of the Lab if I were you. It's the kind of joke a rather unintelligent adolescent might find amusing."

Dalgliesh went on to ask her about her movements on the previous evening. She said that she hadn't accompanied her brother to the concert, having a dislike of rustic junketing, no wish to hear the Mozart indifferently played, and a couple of drawings to complete.

They'd had an early supper at about six forty-five, and Howarth had left home at seven-twenty. She had continued working uninterrupted either by a telephone call or a visitor until her brother returned shortly after ten, when he had told her about his evening over a shared nightcap of hot whisky. Both of them had then gone early to bed.

She volunteered without being asked that her brother had seemed perfectly normal on his return, although both of them had been tired. He had attended a murder scene the night before and had lost some hours' sleep. She did occasionally make use of Mrs. Bidwell, for example before and after a dinner party she and Howarth had given soon after their arrival, but certainly wouldn't call on her on a day when she was due at the Lab.

Dalgliesh asked: "Did your brother tell you that he left the concert for a time after the interval?"

"He told me that he sat on a tombstone for about half an hour contemplating mortality. I imagine that, at that stage of the proceedings, he found the dead more entertaining than the living."

Dalgliesh looked up at the immense curved wooden ceiling. He said:

"This place must be expensive to keep warm in winter. How is it heated?"

Again there was that swift elliptical flash of blue. "By gas central heating. There isn't an open fire. That's one of the things we miss.

So we couldn't have burnt Paul Middlemass's white coat. Actually, we'd have been fools to try. The most sensible plan would be to weigh it down with stones in the pockets and sling it into learnings' sluice.

You'd probably dredge it up in the end, but I don't see how that would help you to discover who put it there. That's what I would have done."

"No, you wouldn't," said Dalgliesh mildly. "There weren't any pockets."

She didn't offer to see them out, but Howarth was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. Dalgliesh said:

"You didn't tell me that your sister was Lorrimer's mistress. Did you really convince yourself that it wasn't relevant?"

"To his death? Why should it be? It may have been relevant to his life. I very much doubt whether it was to hers. And I'm not my sister's keeper. She's capable of speaking for herself, as you've probably discovered." He walked with them out to the car, punctilious as a host speeding a couple of unwelcome guests. Dalgliesh said, his hand on the car door:

"Does the number 1840 mean anything to you?"

"In what context?"

"Any you choose." Howarth said calmly."

"Whewell published Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences; Tchaikovsky was born; Berlioz composed the Symphonic Funebre et Triomphale. I think that's the limit of my knowledge of an unremarkable year. Or if you want a different context, the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron."

Massingham called from the other side of the Rover: "I thought that was 1836, unless you're not fussy about rounding up. Good-night, sir."

As they turned out of the drive, Dalgliesh asked: "How do you come to remember that remarkably irrelevant piece of information?"

"From school. We may have been disadvantaged when it came to social mix, but the teaching wasn't bad. It's a figure which sticks in the mind."

"Not in mine. What did you think of Mrs. Schofield?"

"I didn't expect her to be like that."

"As attractive, as talented, or as arrogant?"

"All three. Her face reminds me of someone, an actress. French I think."

"Simone Signoret when she was young. I'm surprised that you're old enough to remember."

"I saw a revival last year of Casque d'Or."

Dalgliesh said: "She told us at least one small lie." Apart, thought Massingham, from the one major lie which she may or may not have told.

He was experienced enough to know that it was the central lie. the affirmation of innocence, which was the most difficult to detect, and the small, ingenious fabrications, so often unnecessary, which in the end confused and betrayed.

"Sir?"

"About where she and Lorrimer made love, in the back of his car. I don't believe that. Do you?"

It was rare for Dalgliesh to question a subordinate so directly.

Massingham disconcertingly felt himself under test. He gave careful thought before replying.

"Psychologically it could be wrong. She's a fastidious, comfort-loving woman with a high opinion of her own dignity. And she must have watched the body of her husband being pulled from the wreckage of their car after that accident when she'd been driving.

Somehow I don't think she'd fancy sex in the back of anyone's car.

Unless, of course, she's trying to exorcize the memory. It could be that."

Dalgliesh smiled. "Actually I was thinking on less esoteric lines. A scarlet Jaguar, and the latest model, is hardly the most inconspicuous vehicle for driving round the country with a lover. And old Mr.

Lorrimer said that his son hardly left home in the evenings or at night, unless to a murder scene. These are unpredictable. On the other hand he was frequently late at the Lab. Not all the lateness could have been work. I think that he and Mrs. Schofield had a rendezvous somewhere fairly close."

"You think it important, sir?"

"Important enough to cause her to lie. Why should she care if we know where they chose to disport themselves? I could understand it if she told us to mind our own business. But why bother to lie? There was another moment, too, when very briefly she lost composure. It was when she talked about seventeenth-century church architecture. I got the impression that there was a small, almost undetectable moment of confusion when she realized that she'd stumbled into saying some thing indiscreet, or at least something she wished unsaid. When the interviews are out of the way tomorrow, I think we'll take a look at the chapel at Hoggatt's."

"But Sergeant Reynolds had a look at it this morning, sir, after he'd searched the grounds. It's just a locked, empty chapel. He found nothing."

"Probably because there's nothing to find. It's just a hunch. Now we'd better get back to Guy's Marsh for that Press conference and then I must have a word with the Chief Constable if he's back. After that I'd like to see Brenda Pridmore again; and I want to call later at the Old Rectory for a word with Dr. Kerrison. But that can wait until we've seen what Mrs. Gotobed at the Moonraker can do about dinner."

Twenty minutes later, in the kitchen at learnings, an incongruous compromise between a laboratory and rustic domesticity, Howarth was mixing sauce vinaigrette. The sickly, pungent smell of the olive oil, curving in a thin golden stream from the bottle, brought back, as always, memories of Italy and of his father, that dilettante collector of trivia, who had spent most of each year in Tuscany or Venice, and whose self-indulgent, hypochondriacal, solitary life had ended, appropriately enough since he affected to dread old age, on his fiftieth birthday. He had been less a stranger to his two motherless children than an enigma, seldom with them in person, always present mysteriously to their minds.

Maxim recalled a memory of his dressing gowned figure, patterned in mauve and gold, standing at the foot of his bed on that extraordinary night of muted voices, sudden running footsteps, inexplicable silences in which his stepmother had died. He had been home from prep-school for the holidays, eight years old. Ignored in the crisis of the illness, frightened and alone. He remembered clearly his father's thin, rather weary voice, already assuming the languors of grief.

"Your stepmother died ten minutes ago, Maxim. Evidently fate does not intend me to be a husband. I shall not again risk such grief. You, my boy, must look after your stepsister. I rely on you." And then a cold hand casually laid on his shoulder as if conferring a burden. He had accepted it, literally, at eight years old, and had never laid it down.

At first the immensity of the trust had appalled him. He remembered how he had lain there, terrified, staring into the darkness. Look after your sister. Domenica was three months old. How could he look after her? What ought he to feed her on? How dress her? What about his prep-school? They wouldn't let him stay at home to look after his sister. He smiled wryly, remembering his relief at discovering next morning that her nurse was, after all, to remain. He recalled his first efforts to assume responsibility, resolutely seizing the pram handles and straining to push it up the Broad Wilk, struggling to lift Domenica into her high chair.

"Give over, Master Maxim, do. You're more of a hindrance than a help."

But afterwards the nurse had begun to realize that he was becoming more of a help than a nuisance, that the child could safely be left with him while she and the only other servant pursued their own unsupervised devices. Most of his school holidays had been spent helping to look after Domenica. From Rome, Verona, Florence and Venice his father, through his solicitor, sent instructions about allowances and schools.

It was he who helped buy the clothes, took her to school, comforted and advised. He had attempted to support her through the agonies and uncertainties of adolescence, even before he had outgrown his own. He had been her champion against the world. He smiled, remembering the telephone call to Cambridge from her boarding school, asking him to fetch her that very night "outside the hockey pavilion--gruesome torture house--at midnight. I'll climb down the fire escape.

Promise." And then their private code of defiance and allegiance:

"Contra mundum."

"Contra mundum." His father's arrival from Italy, so little perturbed by the Reverend Mother's insistent summons that it was obvious that he had, in any case, been planning to return.

"Your sister's departure was unnecessarily eccentric, surely. Midnight assignation. Dramatic car drive across half England. Mother Superior seemed particularly pained that she had left her trunk behind, although I can appreciate that it would have been an encumbrance on the fire escape. And you must have been out of college all night. Your tutor can't have liked that."

"I'm post-graduate now, Father. I took my degree eighteen months ago."

"Indeed. Time passes so quickly at my age. Physics, wasn't it? A curious choice. Couldn't you have called for her after school in the orthodox way?"

"We wanted to get as far away from the place as possible before they noticed she'd gone and started looking."

"A reasonable strategy, so far as it goes."

"Dom hates school, Father. She's utterly miserable there."

"So was I at school, but it never occurred to me to expect otherwise.

Reverend Mother seems a charming woman. A tendency to halitosis when under stress, but I shouldn't have thought that would have troubled your sister. They can hardly have come into intimate contact. She isn't prepared to have Domenica back, by the way."

"Need Dom go anywhere, Father? She's nearly fifteen. She doesn't have to go to school. And she wants to be a painter."

"I suppose she could stay at home until she's old enough for art college, if that's what you advise. But it's hardly worth opening the London house just for one. I shall return to Venice next week. I'm only here to consult Dr. Mavers-Brown."

"Perhaps she could go back to Italy with you for a month or so. She'd love to see the Accademia. And she ought to see Florence."

"Oh, I don't think that would do, my boy. Quite out of the question.

She had much better take a room at Cambridge and you can keep an eye on her. They have some quite agreeable pictures in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Oh dear, what a responsibility children are! It's quite wrong that I should be troubled like this in my state of health.

Mavers-Brown was insistent that I avoid anxiety."

And now he lay coffined in his final self sufficiency, in that most beautiful of burial grounds, the British Cemetery in Rome. He would have liked that, thought Maxim, if he could have borne the thought of his death at all, as much as he would have resented the overaggressive Italian drivers whose ill-judged acceleration at the junction of the Via Vittoria and the Corso had placed him there.

He heard his sister's steps on the stairs. "So they've gone."

"Twenty minutes ago. We had a brief valedictory skirmish. Was Dalgliesh offensive?"

"No more offensive than I to him. Honours even, I should have said. I don't think he liked me."

"I don't think he likes anyone much. But he's considered highly intelligent. Did you find him attractive?"

She answered the unspoken question. "It would be like making love to a public hangman." She dipped her finger in the vinaigrette dressing.

"Too much vinegar. What have you been doing?"

"Apart from cooking? Thinking about father. Do you know, Dom, when I was eleven I became absolutely convinced that he'd murdered our mothers."

"Both of them? I mean yours and mine? What an odd idea. How could he have? Yours died of cancer and mine of pneumonia. He couldn't have fixed that."

"I know. It's just that he seemed such a natural widower. I thought at the time that he'd done it to stop them having any more babies."

"Well it would do that all right. Were you wondering whether a tendency to murder is inherited?"

"Not really. But so much is. Father's total inability to make relationships, for example. That incredible self-absorption. Do you know, he'd actually put me down for Stonyhurst before he remembered that it was your mother, not mine, who'd been R C."

"A pity he did find out. I should like to have seen what the Jesuits made of you. The trouble with a religious education, if you're a pagan like me, is that you're left all your life feeling that you've lost something, not that it isn't there."

She walked over to the table and stirred a bowl of mushrooms with her finger.

"I can make relationships. The trouble is that I get bored and they don't last. And I only seem to know one way to be kind. It's as well that we last, isn't it? You'll last for me until the day I die. Shall I change now or do you want me to see to the wine?"

"You'll last for me until the day I die." Contra mundum. It was too late now to sever that cord even if he wanted to. He remembered Charles Schofield's gauze-cocooned head, the dying eyes still malicious behind two slits in the bandages, the swollen lips painfully moving.

"Congratulations, Giovanni. Remember me in your garden in Parma."

What had been so astounding was not the lie itself, or that Schofield had believed it, or pretended to believe it, but that he had hated his brother-in-law enough to die with that taunt on his lips. Or had he taken it for granted that a physicist, poor philistine, wouldn't know his Jacobean dramatists? Even his wife, that indefatigable sexual sophisticate, had known better. "I suppose you'd sleep together if Domenica happened to want it. A spot of incest wouldn't worry her. But you don't need to. do you? You don't need anything as normal as sex to be more to each other than you are. Neither of you wants anyone else. That's why I'm leaving. I'm getting out now while there's still something left of me to get out."

"Max, what is it?" Domenica's voice, sharpened with anxiety, recalled him to the present. His mind spun back through a kaleidoscope of spinning years, through superimposed swirling images of childhood and youth, to that last unforgettable image, still, perfectly in focus, patterned forever in his memory, Lorrimer's dead fingers clawing at the floor of his laboratory, Lorrimer's dull, half open eye, Lorrimer's blood. He said:

"You get changed. I'll see to the wine."

"What will people say?"

"That's all you ever think of, Mum, what will people say. What does it matter what they say? I haven't done anything to be ashamed of."

"Of course not. If anyone says different your dad'll soon put them right. But you know what tongues they have in this village. A thousand pounds. I couldn't hardly believe it when that solicitor rang. It's a tidy sum. And by the time Lillie Pearce has passed the news around in the Stars and Plough it'll be ten thousand, more than likely."

"Who cares about Lillie Pearce, silly old cow."

"Brenda! I won't have that language. And we have to live in this village."

"You may have to. I don't. And if that's the kind of minds they've got the sooner I move away the better. Oh, Mum, don't look like that!

He only wanted to help me, he wanted to be kind. And he probably did it on impulse."

"Not very considerate of him, though, was it?

He might have talked it over with your dad or me."

"But he didn't know that he was going to die." Brenda and her mother were alone in the farmhouse, Arthur Pridmore having left after supper for the monthly meeting of the Parochial Church Council. The washing-up was finished and the long evening stretched before them. Too restless to settle to the television and too preoccupied with the extraordinary events of the day to take up a book, they sat in the firelight, edgy, half excited and half afraid, missing Arthur Pridmore's reassuring bulk in his high-backed chair. Then Airs Pridmore shook herself into normality and reached for her sewing basket.

"Well, at least it will help towards a nice wedding. If you have to take it, better put it in the Post Office. Then it'll add interest and be there when you want it."

"I want it now. For books and a microscope like Dr. Lorrimer intended. That's why he left it to me and that's what I'm going to do with it. Besides, if people leave money for a special purpose you can't use it for something else. And I don't want to. I'm going to ask Dad to put up a shelf and a workbench in my bedroom and I'll start working for my science "A levels straight away."

"He ought not to have thought of you. What about Angela Foley?

She's had a terrible life, that girl. She never got a penny from her grandmother's will, and now this."

"That's not our concern, Mum. It was up to him. Maybe he might have left it to her if they hadn't rowed."

"How do you mean, rowed? When?"

"Last week sometime. Tuesday it was, I think. It was just before I came home and most of the staff had left. Inspector Blakelock sent me up to Biology with a query on one of the court reports. They were together in Dr. Lorrimer's room and I heard them quarrelling. She was asking him for money and he said he wouldn't give her any and then he said something about changing his will."

"You mean you stood there listening?"

"Well I couldn't help it, could I? They were talking quite loudly. He was saying terrible things about Stella Mawson, you know, that writer Angela Foley lives with. I wasn't eavesdropping on purpose. I didn't want to hear."

"You could have gone away."

"And come up again all the way from the front hall? Anyway, I had to ask him about the report for the Munnings case. I couldn't go back and tell Inspector Blakelock that I hadn't got the answer because Dr.

Lorrimer was having a row with his cousin. Besides, we always listened to secrets at school."

"You're not at school now. Really, Brenda, you worry me sometimes. One moment you behave like a sensible adult, and the next anyone would think you were back in the fourth form.

You're eighteen now, an adult. What has school to do with it?"

"I don't know why you're getting so het up. I didn't tell anyone."

"Well, you'll have to tell that detective from Scotland Yard."

"Mum! I can't! It hasn't got anything to do with the murder."

"Who's to say? You're supposed to tell the police anything that's important. Didn't he tell you that?"

He told her exactly that. Brenda remembered his look, her own guilty blush. He had known that she was keeping some thing back. She said, with stubborn defiance:

"Well, I can't accuse Angela Foley of murder, or as good as accuse her anyway. Besides," she proclaimed triumphantly, remembering something Inspector Blakelock had told her, "it would be hearsay, not proper evidence. He couldn't take any notice of it. And, Mum, there's another thing. Suppose she didn't really expect him to alter the will so soon? That solicitor told you that Dr. Lorrimer made the new will last Friday, didn't he? Well that was probably because he had to go to a scene of crime in Ely on Friday morning. The police call only came through at ten o'clock. He must have gone into his solicitors then."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. Only if people think that I had a motive, then so did she."

"Of course you didn't have a motive! That's ridiculous. It's wicked!

Oh, Brenda, if only you'd come to the concert with Dad and me."

"No thank you. Miss Spencer singing "Pale Hands I Loved," and the Sunday School kids doing their boring old Maypole dance, and the W.I. with their hand-bells, and old Mr. Matthews bashing away with the acoustic spoons. I've seen it all before."

"But you'd have had an alibi."

"So I would if you and Dad had stayed here at home with me."

"It wouldn't have mattered where you'd been if it weren't for that thousand pounds. Well, let's hope Gerald Bowlem understands."

"If he doesn't, he knows what he can do! I don't see what it's got to do with Gerald. I'm not married to him, nor engaged for that matter.

He'd better not interfere."

She looked across at her mother and was suddenly appalled. She had only seen her look like this once before, the night when she had her second miscarriage and had been told by old Dr. Greene that there could never now be another baby. Brenda had only been twelve at the time. But her mother's face, suddenly remembered, had looked exactly as it did now, as if an obliterating hand had passed over it, wiping off brightness, blunting the contours of cheek and brow, dulling the eyes, leaving an amorphous mask of desolation.

She remembered and understood what before she had only felt, the anger and resentment that her mother, indestructible and comforting as a great rock in a weary land, should herself be vulnerable to pain. She was there to soothe Brenda's miseries, not to suffer herself, to comfort, not to seek comfort. But now Brenda was older and she was able to understand. She saw her mother clearly, like a stranger newly met. The cheap Crimplene dress, spotlessly clean as always, with the brooch Brenda had given her for her last birthday pinned to the lapel.

The ankles thickening above the sensible low-heel shoes, the pudgy hands speckled with the brown stains of age, the wedding ring of dull gold biting into the flesh, the curly hair that had once been red gold like her own, still brushed plainly to one side and held in a tortoiseshell slide, the fresh. almost unlined skin. She put her arms round her mother's shoulders.

"Oh, Mum, don't worry. It'll be all right. Commander Dalgliesh will find out who did it and then everything will be back to normal. Look, I'll make you some cocoa. Don't let's wait till Dad's back from the P.C.C. We'll have it now. Mum, it's all right. Really it is. It's all right."

Simultaneously their ears caught the hum of the approaching car. They gazed at each other, speechless, guilty as conspirators. This wasn't their ancient Morris. And how could it be? The Parochial Church Council never finished their business before half past eight.

Brenda went to the window and peered out. The car stopped. She turned to her mother, white-faced.

"It's the police! It's Commander Dalgliesh!"

Without a word, Mrs. Pridmore got resolutely to her feet. She placed a hand briefly on her daughter's shoulder, then went out into the passage and opened the door before Massingham had lifted his hand to knock. She said through stiff lips:

"Come in please. I'm glad that you're here. Brenda has something to tell you, something that I think you ought to know."

The day was nearly over. Sitting in his dressing gown at the small table in front of the window in his bedroom at the Moonraker, Dalgliesh heard the church clock strike half past eleven.

He liked his room. It was the larger of the two which Mrs. Gotobed had been able to offer. The single window looked out over the churchyard towards the village hall and beyond it the clerestory and square flint tower of St. Nicholas's Church. There were only three rooms for guests at the inn. The smallest and noisiest, since it was over the public bar, had fallen to Massingham. The main guest-room had already been taken by an American couple touring East Anglia, perhaps in search of family records. They had sat at their table in the dining parlour, happily occupied with maps and guide books, and if they had been told that their newly arrived fellow guests were police officers investigating a murder, they were too well bred to betray interest.

After a brief smile and a good-evening in their soft transatlantic voices they had turned their attention again to Mrs. Gotobed's excellent casserole of hare in cider.

It was very quiet. The muted voices from the bar had long since been silent. It was over an hour since he had heard the last shouted goodbyes. Massingham, he knew, had spent the evening in the public bar hoping, presumably, to pick up scraps of useful information. Dalgliesh hoped that the beer had been good. He had been born close enough to the fens to know that, otherwise, Massingham would have found it a frustrating evening.

He got up to stretch his legs and shoulders, looking around with approval at the room. The floorboards were of ancient oak, black and stout as ship's timbers. A fire of wood and turf burned in the iron Victorian grate, the pungent smoke curtseying under a decorated hood of wheat-ears and flower posies tied with ribbons. The large double bed was of brass, high and ornate with four great knobs, large as polished cannon-balls, at the corners. Mrs. Gotobed had earlier folded back the crocheted cover to reveal a feather mattress shaken to an inviting plumpness. In any four-star hotel he might have enjoyed greater luxury, but hardly such comfort.

He returned to his work. It had been a crowded day of interrogation and renewed interrogation, telephone calls to London, a hurriedly arranged and unsatisfactory Press conference, two consultations with the Chief Constable, the gathering of those odd-shaped pieces of information and conjecture which, in the end, would click together to form the completed picture. It might be a trite analogy, this comparison of detection with fitting together a jigsaw. But it was remarkably apt, not least because it was so often that tantalizing elusive piece with the vital segment of a human face that made the picture complete.

He turned the page to the last interview of the day, with Henry Kerrison at the Old Rectory. The smell of the house was still in his nostrils, an evocative smell of stale cooking and furniture polish, reminding him of childhood visits with his parents to over-large, ill-heated country vicarages. Kerrison's housekeeper and children had long been in bed and the house had held a melancholy, brooding silence as if all the tragedies and disappointments of its numerous incumbents still hung in the air.

Kerrison had answered the door himself and had shown him and Massingham into his study where he was occupied in sorting coloured slides of post-mortem injuries to illustrate a lecture he was to give the following week to the detection training school. On the desk was a framed photograph of himself as a boy with an older man, obviously his father. They were standing on a crag, climbing-ropes slung round their shoulders. What interested Dalgliesh as much as the photograph itself was the fact that Kerrison hadn't bothered to remove it.

He hadn't appeared to resent his visitors' late arrival. It was possible to believe that he welcomed their company. He had worked on in the light of his desk-lamp, fitting each slide into his view, then sorting it into the appropriate heap, intent as a schoolboy with a hobby. He had answered their questions quietly and precisely, but as if his mind were elsewhere. Dalgliesh asked him whether his daughter had talked to him about the incident with Lorrimer.

"Yes, she did tell me. When I got home for lunch from my lecture I found her crying in her room. It seems that Lorrimer was unnecessarily harsh. But Nell is a sensitive child and it's not always possible to know the precise truth of the matter."

"You didn't talk to him about it"?

"I didn't talk to anyone. I did wonder whether I ought to, but it would have meant questioning Inspector Blakelock and Miss Pridmore, and I didn't wish to involve them. They had to work with Lorrimer. So, for that matter, did I. The effectiveness of an isolated institution like Hoggatt's largely depends on good relationships between the staff.

I thought it was best not to take the matter further. That may have been prudence, or it may have been cowardice. I don't know."

He had smiled sadly, and added: "I only know that it wasn't a motive for murder." A motive for murder. Dalgliesh had discovered enough motive in this crowded but not very satisfactory day. But motive was the least important factor in a murder investigation. He would gladly have exchanged the psychological subtleties of motive for a single, solid, incontrovertible piece of physical evidence linking a suspect with the crime. And, so far, there was none. He still awaited the report from the Metropolitan Laboratory on the mallet and the vomit.

The mysterious figure seen by old Goddard fleeing from Hoggatt's remained mysterious; no other person had yet been traced or had come forward to suggest that he wasn't a figment of the old man's imagination. The tyre-marks near the gate, now definitely identified from the tyre index at the laboratory, still hadn't been linked to a car. Not surprisingly, no trace had been found of Middlemass's white coat and no indication whether or how it had been disposed of. An examination of the village hall and the hobbyhorse costumes had produced nothing to disprove Middlemasss account of his evening and it was apparent that the horse, a heavy all-enveloping contraption of canvas and serge, ensured that its wearer would be unidentifiable even, in Middlemass's case, to his elegant hand-made shoes. The central mysteries of the case remained. Who was it who had telephoned the message to Lorrimer about the can being burned and the number 1840? Was it the same woman who had rung Mrs. Bidwell? What had been written on the missing sheet from Lorrimer's rough notebook?

What had prompted Lorrimer to make that extraordinary will?

Lifting his head from the files, he listened. There was a noise, faintly discernible, like the creeping of a myriad insects. He remembered it from his childhood nights, lying awake in the nursery of his father's Norfolk vicarage, a sound he had never heard in the noise of cities, the first gentle sibilant whisper of the night rain. Soon it was followed by a spatter of drops against the window and the rising moan of the wind in the chimney. The fire spluttered and then flared into sudden brightness. There was a violent flurry of rain against the pane and then, as quickly as it had begun, the brief storm was over. He opened the window to savour the smell of the damp night air, and gazed out into a blanket of darkness, black fen earth merging with the paler sky. As his eyes became accustomed to the night, he could discern the low rectangle of the village hall and, beyond it, the great medieval tower of the church. Then the moon sailed out from behind the clouds and the churchyard became visible, the obelisks and gravestones gleaming pale as if they exuded their own mysterious light. Below him, faintly luminous, lay the gravel path along which, the previous night, the morris-dancers, bells jangling, had made their way through the rising mist. Staring out over the churchyard he pictured the hobby-horse pawing the ground to meet them, rearing its grotesque head among the gravestones and snapping the air with its great jaws. And he wondered again who had been inside its skin. The door beneath his window opened and Mrs. Gotobed appeared and crooned into the darkness, enticing in her cat: "Snowball! Snowball! Good boy now." There was a flash of white, and the door was closed. Dalgliesh latched his window and decided that he, too, would call it a day.