The Black Tower

CHAPTER TWO Death of a Priest

ELEVEN DAYS LATER, still weak and with his hospital pallor but euphoric with the deceptive well-being of convalescence, Dalgliesh left his flat high above the Thames at Queenhythe just before the first light and drove southwest out of London. He had finally and reluctantly parted with his ancient Cooper Bristol two months before the onset of his illness and was now driving a Jensen Healey. He was glad that the car had been run in and that he was already almost reconciled to the change. To embark symbolically on a new life with a totally new car would have been irritatingly banal. He put his one case and a few picnic essentials including a corkscrew in the boot and, in the pocket, a copy of Hardy’s poems, The Return of the Native and Newman and Pevsner’s guide to the buildings of Dorset. This was to be a convalescent’s holiday: familiar books; a brief visit to an old friend to provide an object for the journey; a route left to each day’s whim and including country both familiar and new; even the salutary irritant of a personal problem to justify solitude and self-indulgent idleness. He was disconcerted when, taking his final look round the flat, he found his hand reaching for his scene-of-crime kit. He couldn’t remember when last he had travelled without it, even on holiday. But now to leave it behind was the first confirmation of a decision which he would dutifully ponder from time to time during the next fortnight but which he knew in his heart was already made.

He reached Winchester in time for late breakfast at a hotel in the shadow of the Cathedral, then spent the next two hours rediscovering the city before finally driving into Dorset via Wimborne Minster. Now he sensed in himself a reluctance to reach journey’s end. He meandered gently, almost aimlessly, north-west to Blandford Forum, bought there a bottle of wine, buttered rolls, cheese and fruit for his lunch and a couple of bottles of Amontillado for Father Baddeley, then wandered south-east through the Winterbourne villages through Wareham to Corfe Castle.

The magnificent stones, symbols of courage, cruelty and betrayal, stood sentinel at the one cleft in the ridge of the Purbeck Hills as they had for a thousand years. As he ate his solitary picnic, Dalgliesh found his eyes constantly drawn to those stark embattled slabs of mutilated ashlar silhouetted high against the gentle sky. As though reluctant to drive under their shadow and unwilling to end the solitude of this peaceful undemanding day he spent some time searching unsuccessfully for marsh gentians in the swampy scrubland before setting off on the last five miles of his journey.

Toynton Village; a thread of terraced cottages, their undulating grey stone roofs glittering in the afternoon sun; a not too picturesque pub at the village end; the glimpse of an uninteresting church tower. Now the road, bordered with a low stone wall, rose gently between sparse plantations of fir and he began to recognize the landmarks on Father Baddeley’s map. Soon the road would branch, one narrow route turning westward to skirt the headland, the other leading through a barrier gate to Toynton Grange and the sea. And here, predictably, it was, a heavy iron gate set into a wall of flat, uncemented stones. The wall was up to three feet thick, the stones intricately and skilfully fitted together, bound with lichen and moss and crowned with waving grasses, and it formed a barrier as old and permanent as the headland from which it seemed to have grown. On each side of the gate was a notice painted on board. The one on the left was the newer; it read:

The one on the right was more didactic, the lettering faded but more professional.

Under the notice was fixed a large postbox.

Dalgliesh thought that any motorist unmoved by this nicely judged mixture of appeal, warning and threats would hesitate before risking his car springs. The track deteriorated sharply beyond the gate and the contrast between the comparative smoothness of the approach road and the boulder edged and stony way ahead was an almost symbolic deterrent. The gate, too, although unlocked, had a heavy latch of intricate design, the manipulation of which gave an intruder ample time in which to repent of his rashness. In his still weakened state, Dalgliesh swung back the gate with some difficulty. When he had driven through and finally closed it behind him it was with a sense of having committed himself to an enterprise as yet imperfectly understood and probably unwise. The problem would probably be embarrassingly unrelated to any of his skills, something that only an unworldly old man—and he perhaps getting senile—could have imagined that a police officer could solve. But at least he had an immediate objective. He was moving, even if reluctantly, back into a world in which human beings had problems, worked, loved, hated, schemed for happiness, and since the job he had determined to relinquish would go on despite his defection, killed and were killed.

Before he turned again to the car his eye was caught by a small clump of unknown flowers. The pale pinkish white heads rose from a mossy pad on top of the wall and trembled delicately in the light breeze. Dalgliesh walked over and stood stock still, regarding in silence their unpretentious beauty. He smelt for the first time the clean half-illusory salt tang of the sea. The air moved warm and gentle against his skin. He was suddenly suffused with happiness and, as always in these rare transitory moments, intrigued by the purely physical nature of his joy. It moved along his veins, a gentle effervescence. Even to analyse its nature was to lose hold of it. But he recognized it for what it was, the first clear intimation since his illness that life could be good.

The car bumped gently over the rising track. When some two hundred yards further on he came to the summit of the rise he expected to see the English Channel spread blue and wrinkled before him to the far horizon and experienced all the remembered disappointment of childhood holidays when after so many false hopes, the eagerly awaited sea still wasn’t in sight. Before him was a shallow rock-strewn valley, criss-crossed with rough paths, and to his right what was obviously Toynton Grange.

It was a powerfully built square stone house dating, he guessed, from the first half of the eighteenth century. But the owner had been unlucky in his architect. The house was an aberration, unworthy of the name of Georgian. It faced inland, north-east he estimated, thus offending against some personal and obscure canon of architectural taste which, to Dalgliesh, decreed that a house on the coast should face the sea. There were two rows of windows above the porch, the main ones with gigantic keystones, the row above unadorned and mean in size as if there had been difficulty in fitting them beneath the most remarkable feature of the house, a huge Ionic pediment topped by a statue, a clumsy and, at this distance, unidentifiable lump of stone. In the centre was one round window, a sinister cyclops eye glinting in the sun. The pediment debased the insignificant porch and gave a lowering and cumbersome appearance to the whole façade. Dalgliesh thought that the design would have been more successful if the façade had been balanced by extended bays, but either inspiration or money had run out and the house looked curiously unfinished. There was no sign of life behind the intimidating frontage. Perhaps the inmates—if that was the right word for them—lived at the back. And it was only just three-thirty, the dead part of the day as he remembered from hospital. Probably they were all resting.

He could see three cottages, a pair about a hundred yards from the Grange and a third standing alone higher on the foreland. He thought there was a fourth roof just visible to seaward, but couldn’t be sure. It might be only an excrescence of rock. Not knowing which was Hope Cottage it seemed sensible to make first for the nearer pair. He had briefly turned off his car engine while deciding what next to do and now, for the first time, he heard the sea, that gentle continuous rhythmic grunt which is one of the most nostalgic and evocative of sounds. There was still no sign that his approach was observed; the headland was silent, birdless. He sensed something strange and almost sinister in its emptiness and loneliness which even the mellow afternoon sunlight couldn’t dispel.

His arrival at the cottages produced no face at the window, no cassock-clad figure framed in the front porch. They were a pair of old, limestone single-storeyed buildings, whose heavy stone roofs, typical of Dorset, were patterned with bright cushions of emerald moss. Hope Cottage was on the right, Faith Cottage on the left, the names comparatively recently painted. The third more distant cottage was presumably Charity, but he doubted whether Father Baddeley had had any hand in this eponymous naming. He didn’t need to read the name on the gate to know which cottage housed Father Baddeley. It was impossible to associate his remembered almost total uninterest in his surroundings with those chintzy curtains, that hanging basket of trailing ivy and fuchsia over the door of Faith Cottage or the two brightly painted yellow tubs still garish with summer flowers which had been artfully placed one each side of the porch. Two mushrooms, looking mass-produced in concrete, stood each side of the gate seeming so cosily suburban that Dalgliesh was surprised that they weren’t crowned with squatting gnomes. Hope Cottage, in contrast, was starkly austere. There was a solid oak bench in front of the window serving as a seat in the sun, and a conglomeration of sticks and an old umbrella littered the front porch. The curtains, apparently of some heavy material in a dull red, were drawn across the windows.

No one answered to his knock. He had expected no one. Both cottages were obviously empty. There was a simple latch on the door and no lock. After a second’s pause he lifted it and stepped into the gloom inside to be met with a smell, warm, bookish, a little musty, which immediately took him back thirty years. He drew back the curtains and light streamed into the cottage. And now his eyes recognized familiar objects: the round single-pedestal rosewood table, dull with dust, set in the middle of the room; the roll-top desk against one wall; the high-backed and winged armchair, so old now that the stuffing was pushing through the frayed cover and the dented seat was worn down to the wood. Surely it couldn’t be the same chair? This stab of memory must be a nostalgic delusion. But there was another object, equally familiar, equally old. Behind the door hung Father Baddeley’s black cloak with, above it, the battered and limp beret.

It was the sight of the cloak that first alerted Dalgliesh to the possibility that something was wrong. It was odd that his host wasn’t here to greet him, but he could think of a number of explanations. His postcard might have gone astray, there might have been an urgent call to the Grange, Father Baddeley might have gone into Wareham to shop and missed the return bus. It was even possible that he had completely forgotten the expected arrival of his guest. But if he were out, why wasn’t he wearing his cloak? It was impossible to think of him in summer or winter wearing any other garment.

It was then that Dalgliesh noticed what his eye must have already seen but disregarded, the little stack of service sheets on top of the bureau printed with a black cross. He took the top one over to the window as if hoping that a clearer light would show him mistaken. But there was, of course, no mistake. He read:

He had been dead eleven days and buried five. But he would have known that Father Baddeley had died recently. How else could one account for that sense of his personality still lingering in the cottage, the feeling that he was so close that one strong call could bring his hand to the latch? Looking at the familiar faded cloak with its heavy clasp—had the old man really not changed it in thirty years?—he felt a pang of regret, of grief even, which surprised him by its intensity. An old man was dead. It must have been a natural death; they had buried him quickly enough. His death and burial had been unpublicized. But there had been something on his mind and he had died without confiding it. It was suddenly very important that he should be reassured that Father Baddeley had received his postcard, that he hadn’t died believing that his call for help had gone unregarded.

The obvious place to look was in the early Victorian bureau which had belonged to Father Baddeley’s mother. Father Baddeley, he remembered, had kept this locked. He had been the least secretive of men, but any priest had to have at least one drawer or desk private from the prying eyes of cleaning women or overcurious parishioners. Dalgliesh could remember Father Baddeley fumbling in the deep pockets of his cloak for the small antique key, secured by string to an old-fashioned clothes peg for easier handling and identification, which opened the lock. It was probably in one of the cloak pockets still.

He dug his hand into both pockets with a guilty feeling of raiding the dead. The key wasn’t there. He went over to the bureau and tried the lid. It opened easily. Bending down he examined the lock, then fetched his torch from the car and looked again. The signs were unmistakable: the lock had been forced. It had been quite a neat job and one requiring little strength. The lock was decorative but unsubstantial, intended as a defence against the idly curious but not against determined assault. A chisel or knife, probably the blade of a penknife, had been forced between the desk and the lid and used to pry the lock apart. It had done surprisingly little damage, but the scratch marks and the broken lock itself told their story.

But not who had been responsible. It could have been Father Baddeley himself. If he had lost the key there would have been no chance of replacing it, and how in this remote spot would he have found a locksmith? A physical assault on the desk lid was an unlikely expedient for the man, Dalgliesh remembered; but it wasn’t impossible. Or it might have been done after Father Baddeley’s death. If the key couldn’t be found, someone at Toynton Grange would have had to break open the lock. There might have been documents or papers which they needed; a health insurance card; names of friends to be notified; a will. He shook himself free from conjecture, irritated to find that he had actually considered putting on his gloves before looking further, and made a rapid examination of the contents of the desk drawers.

There was nothing of interest there. Father Baddeley’s concern with the world had apparently been minimal. But one thing immediately recognizable caught his eye. It was a neatly stacked row of quarto-size child’s exercise books bound in pale green. These, he knew, contained Father Baddeley’s diary. So the same books were still being sold, the ubiquitous pale green exercise books, the back cover printed with arithmetical tables, as evocative of primary school as an ink-stained ruler or india rubber. Father Baddeley had always used these books for his diary, one book for each quarter of the year. Now, with the old black cloak hanging limply on the door, its musty ecclesiastical smell in his nose, Dalgliesh recalled the conversation as clearly as if he were still that ten-year-old boy and Father Baddeley, middle-aged then but already seeming ageless, sitting here at his desk.

“It’s just an ordinary diary then, Father? It isn’t about your spiritual life?”

“This is the spiritual life; the ordinary things one does from hour to hour.”

Adam had asked with the egotism of the young.

“Only what you do? Aren’t I in it?”

“No. Just what I do. Do you remember what time the Mothers’ Union met this afternoon? It was your mother’s drawing-room this week. The time was different, I think.”

“It was 2.45 p.m. instead of 3.0 p.m., Father. The Archdeacon wanted to get away early. But do you have to be accurate?”

Father Baddeley had seemed to ponder this question, briefly but seriously as if it were new to him and unexpectedly interesting.

“Oh, yes, I think so. I think so. Otherwise it would lose its point.”

The young Dalgliesh, to whom the point was already lost beyond ken, had wandered away to pursue his own more interesting and immediate concerns. The spiritual life. It was a phrase he had often heard on the lips of his father’s more ultra mundane parishioners although never on the Canon’s own. He had occasionally tried to visualize this mysterious other existence. Was it lived at the same time as the ordinary regulated life of getting up, meal times, school, holidays; or was it an existence on some other plane to which he and the uninitiated had no access but into which Father Baddeley could retreat at will? Either way it had surely little to do with this careful recording of daily trivia.

He picked up the last book and looked through it. Father Baddeley’s system had not been changed. It was all here, two days to the page, neatly ruled off. The times at which he had daily said morning prayer and evensong; where he had walked and how long it had taken; the monthly trip by bus into Dorchester; the weekly trip to Wareham; his hours spent helping at Toynton Grange; odd treats baldly recorded; the methodical account of how he had disposed of every hour of his working day year after unremarkable year, documented with the meticulousness of a book-keeper. “But this is the spiritual life; the ordinary things that one does from day to day.” Surely it couldn’t be as simple as that?

But where was the current diary, the book for the third quarter of 1974? It had been Father Baddeley’s habit to keep old copies of his diary covering the last three years. There should have been fifteen books here; there were only fourteen. The diary stopped at the end of June 1974. Dalgliesh found himself searching almost feverishly through the desk drawers. The diary wasn’t there. But he did find something. Pushed beneath three receipted bills for coal, paraffin and electricity was a sheet of cheap rather thin paper with Toynton Grange printed inexpertly and lopsidedly at the top. Underneath someone had typed:

“Why don’t you get out of the cottage you silly old hypocrite and let someone have it who would really be some use here? Don’t think we don’t know what you and Grace Willison get up to when you’re supposed to be hearing her confession. Don’t you wish you could really do it? And what about that choir boy? Don’t think we don’t know.”

Dalgliesh’s first reaction was to be more irritated by the note’s silliness than angered by its malice. It was a childish piece of gratuitous spite but without even the dubious merit of verisimilitude. Poor old seventy-seven-year-old Father Baddeley, accused simultaneously of fornication, sodomy and impotence! Could any reasonable man have taken this puerile nonsense seriously enough even to be hurt by it? Dalgliesh had seen plenty of poison pen letters in his professional life. This was a comparatively mild effort; he could almost suppose that the writer’s heart hadn’t been in it. “Don’t you wish you could really do it?” Most poison pen writers could find a more graphic description of that implied activity. And the belated reference to the choir boy, no name, no date. That hadn’t been dredged from any real knowledge. Could Father Baddeley really have been concerned enough to have sent for a professional detective and one he hadn’t seen for nearly thirty years just to advise on or investigate this petty nastiness? Perhaps. This might not be the only letter. If the trouble were endemic at Toynton Grange, then it was more serious. A poison pen at work in a closed community could cause real trouble and distress, occasionally he or she could literally be a killer. If Father Baddeley suspected that others had received similar letters he might well have looked around for professional help. Or, and this was more interesting, had someone intended Dalgliesh to believe precisely that? Had the note been deliberately planted for him to find? It was odd, surely, that no one had discovered and destroyed it after Father Baddeley’s death. Someone from Toynton Grange must have looked through his papers. This was hardly a note one would leave for others to read.

He folded it away in his wallet and began to wander around the cottage. Father Baddeley’s bedroom was much as he had expected. A mean window with a dingy cretonne curtain, a single bed still made-up with sheets and blankets but with the counterpane pulled taut over the single lumpy pillow; books lining two walls; a small bedside table with a shoddy lamp; a Bible; a cumbersome and gaudily decorated china ashtray bearing an advertisement for beer. Father Baddeley’s pipe still rested in its bowl and beside it Dalgliesh saw a half-used booklet of cardboard matches, the kind given away in restaurants and bars. This bore an advertisement for Ye Olde Tudor Barn near Wareham. One single used match was in the ashtray; it had been shredded down to the burnt-out tip. Dalgliesh smiled. So this small personal habit, too, had survived over thirty years. He could recall Father Baddeley’s small squirrel-like fingers delicately shredding the sliver of thin cardboard as if attempting to beat some previous personal record. Dalgliesh picked up the match and smiled; six segments. Father Baddeley had excelled himself.

He wandered into the kitchen. It was small, ill-equipped, neat but not very clean. The small gas stove of old-fashioned design looked as if it would soon qualify for a folk museum. The sink under the window was of stone fitted on one side with a scarred and discoloured wooden draining board smelling of stale fat and sour soap. The faded cretonne curtains faintly patterned with overblown roses and daffodils unseasonably intertwined were pulled back to show an inland view of the far Purbeck hills. Clouds tenuous as smoke puffs were drifting and dissolving in the limitless blue sky and the sheep lay like white slugs on their distant pasture.

He explored the pantry. Here at least was evidence that he was expected. Father Baddeley had indeed bought extra food and the tins were a dispiriting reminder of what for him had constituted an adequate diet. Pathetically, he had obviously provided for two, one of whom he confidently expected to have a larger appetite. There was one large tin and one small of many of the staple provisions: baked beans, tuna fish, Irish stew, spaghetti, rice pudding.

Dalgliesh went back to the sitting-room. He was aware of weariness, that the journey had tired him more than he had expected. He saw by the heavy oak clock over the fireplace still ticking solidly on, that it was still not four o’clock, but his body protested that this had already been a long hard day. He craved tea. There had been a caddy of tea in the pantry but no milk. He wondered whether the gas was still on.

It was then that he heard the footfall at the door, the clank of the latch. There was a woman’s figure framed against the afternoon light. He heard a gravelly deep but very feminine voice with a trace, no more, of an Irish accent.

“For God’s sake! A human being and a male at that. What are you doing here?”

She came into the room leaving the door open behind her and he saw her clearly. She was about thirty-five, he guessed, sturdy, long-legged, her mane of yellow hair, visibly darker at the roots, worn in a long sweep to her shoulders. Her eyes were full-lidded and narrow in the square face, her mouth wide. She was wearing brown ill-fitting slacks with a strap under the foot, dirty, grass-stained white plimsoles and a sleeveless white cotton top, low-necked, which showed a brown and mottled triangle of sunburn. She wore no brassiere and the full, heavy breasts swung loose under the thin cotton. Three wooden bangles clanked on her left forearm. The total impression was of a raffish but not unattractive sexuality, so strong that, although she wore no scent, she brought into the room her own female and individual smell.

He said: “My name’s Adam Dalgliesh. I came here intending to visit Father Baddeley. It seems that it won’t now be possible.”

“Well, that’s one way of putting it. You’re exactly eleven days late. Eleven days too late to see him and five days too late to bury him. Who are you, a chum? We didn’t know that he had any. But then, there were quite a number of things we didn’t know about our Reverend Michael. He was a secretive little man. He certainly kept you hidden.”

“We hadn’t met except briefly since I was a boy and I only wrote to tell him I was coming the day before he died.”

“Adam. I like that. They call a lot of kids that nowadays. It’s getting trendy again. But you must have found it a bit of a drag when you were at school. Still, it suits you. I can’t think why. You aren’t exactly of the earth, earthy are you? I know about you now. You’ve come to collect the books.”

“Have I?”

“The ones Michael left you in his will. To Adam Dalgliesh, only son of the late Canon Alexander Dalgliesh, all my books to keep or dispose of as he sees fit. I remember it exactly because I thought the names were so unusual. You haven’t lost much time, have you? I’m surprised that the solicitors have even got round to writing to you. Bob Loder isn’t usually that efficient. But I shouldn’t get too excited if I were you. They never looked particularly valuable to me. A lot of dry old theological tomes. By the way, you weren’t expecting to be left any of his money were you? If so, I’ve got news for you.”

“I didn’t know that Father Baddeley had any money.”

“Nor did we. That was another of his little secrets. He left £19,000. Not a great fortune, but useful. He left it all to Wilfred for the benefit of Toynton Grange, and it came just in time from all I hear. Grace Willison is the only other legatee. She got that old bureau. At least she will get it when Wilfred bothers to have it moved.”

She had settled down in the fireside chair, her hair thrown back against the headrest, both legs splayed wide. Dalgliesh pulled out one of the wheel-backed chairs and sat facing her.

“Did you know Father Baddeley well?”

“We all know each other well here, that’s half our trouble. Are you thinking of staying here?”

“In the district perhaps for a day or two. But it doesn’t seem possible now to stay here …”

“I don’t see why not if you want to. The place is empty, at least until Wilfred finds another victim—tenant, I should say. I shouldn’t think that he’d object. Besides you’ll have to sort out the books won’t you? Wilfred will want them out of the way before the next incumbent moves in.”

“Wilfred Anstey owns the cottage then?”

“He owns Toynton Grange and all the cottages except Julius Court’s. He’s further out on the headland, the only one with a sea view. Wilfred owns all the rest of the property and he owns us.”

She looked at him appraisingly.

“You haven’t any useful skills, have you? I mean you’re not a physiotherapist or a male nurse or a doctor, or even an accountant? Not that you look like one. Anyway, if you are I’d advise you to keep away before Wilfred decides that you’re too useful to let go.”

“I don’t think that he’d find my particular skills of much use.”

“Then I should stay on if it suits you. But I’d better put you in the picture. You might then change your mind.”

Dalgliesh said:

“Start with yourself. You haven’t told me who you are.”

“Good God, nor have I! Sorry. I’m Maggie Hewson. My husband is resident medical officer at the Grange. At least, he lives with me in a cottage provided by Wilfred and appropriately named Charity Cottage, but he spends most of his time at Toynton Grange. With only five patients left you’d wonder what he finds to amuse him. Or would you? What do you suppose he finds to amuse him, Adam Dalgliesh?”

“Did your husband attend Father Baddeley?”

“Call him Michael, we all did except Grace Willison. Yes, Eric looked after him when he was alive and signed the death certificate when he died. He couldn’t have done that six months ago, but now that they’ve graciously restored him to the Medical Register he can actually put his name to a piece of paper to say that you’re properly and legally dead. God, what a bloody privilege.”

She laughed, and fumbling in the pocket of her slacks produced a packet of cigarettes and lit one. She handed the packet to Dalgliesh. He shook his head. She shrugged her shoulders and blew a puff of smoke towards him.

Dalgliesh asked:

“What did Father Baddeley die of?”

“His heart stopped beating. No, I’m not being facetious. He was old, his heart was tired and on 21st September it stopped. Acute myocardic infarction complicated by mild diabetes, if you want the medical jargon.”

“Was he alone?”

“I imagine so. He died at night, at least he was last seen alive by Grace Willison at 7.45 p.m. when he heard her confession. I suppose he died of boredom. No, I can see I shouldn’t have said that. Bad taste, Maggie. She says he seemed as usual, a bit tired of course, but then he’d only been discharged from hospital that morning. I came in at nine o’clock the next day to see if he wanted anything from Wareham—I was taking the eleven o’clock bus; Wilfred doesn’t allow private cars—and there he lay, dead.”

“In bed?”

“No, in that chair where you’re sitting now, slumped back with his mouth open and his eyes closed. He was wearing his cassock and a purple ribbon thing round his neck. All quite seemly. But very, very dead.”

“So it was you who first found the body?”

“Unless Millicent from next door came pussy-footing in earlier, didn’t like the look of him and tiptoed home again. She’s Wilfred’s widowed sister in case you’re interested. Actually, it’s rather odd that she didn’t come in, knowing that he was ill and alone.”

“It must have been a shock for you.”

“Not really. I was a nurse before I married. I’ve seen more dead bodies than I can remember. And he was very old. It’s the young ones—the kids particularly—who get you down. God, am I glad to be finished with all that messy business.”

“Are you? You don’t work at Toynton Grange then?”

She got up and moved over to the fireplace before replying. She blew a cloud of smoke against the looking glass over the mantelpiece then moved her face close to the glass as if studying her reflection.

“No, not when I can avoid it. And by God, do I try to avoid it. You may as well know. I am the delinquent member of the community, the non-co-operator, the dropout, the heretic. I sow not, neither do I reap. I am impervious to the charms of dear Wilfred. I close my ears to the cries of the afflicted. I do not bend the knee at the shrine.”

She turned towards him with a look half challenging, half speculative. Dalgliesh thought that the outburst had been less than spontaneous, the protest had been made before. It sounded like a ritual justification and he suspected that someone had helped her with the script. He said:

“Tell me about Wilfred Anstey.”

“Didn’t Michael warn you? No, I suppose he wouldn’t. Well, it’s an odd story but I’ll try to make it short. Wilfred’s great grandfather built Toynton Grange. His grandfather left it in trust jointly to Wilfred and his sister Millicent. Wilfred bought her out when he started the Home. Eight years ago Wilfred developed multiple sclerosis. It progressed very swiftly; within three months he was chairbound. Then he went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and got himself cured. Apparently he made a bargain with God. You cure me and I’ll devote Toynton Grange and all my money to serving the disabled. God obliged, and now Wilfred’s busy fulfilling his part of the bargain. I suppose he’s afraid to back out of the agreement in case the disease returns. I don’t know that I blame him. I’d probably feel the same myself. We’re all superstitious at heart, particularly about disease.”

“And is he tempted to back out?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. This place gives him a sensation of power. Surrounded by grateful patients, regarded as a half-superstitious object of veneration by the women, Dot Moxon—the matron so-called—fussing round him like an old hen. Wilfred’s happy enough.”

Dalgliesh asked:

“When exactly did the miracle happen?”

“He claims, when they dipped him in the well. As he tells it, he experienced an initial shock of intense cold followed immediately by a tingling warmth which suffused his whole body, and a feeling of great happiness and peace. That’s exactly what I get after my third whisky. If Wilfred can produce it in himself by bathing in ice cold germ-laden water, then all I can say is, he’s bloody lucky. When he got back to the hospice he stood on his legs for the first time in six months. Three weeks later he was skipping around like a young ram. He never bothered to return to St. Saviour’s hospital in London where he was treated, so that they could record the miraculous cure on his medical record. It would have been rather a joke if he had.”

She paused as if about to say something further and then merely added:

“Touching, isn’t it?”

“It’s interesting. How does he find the money to fulfil his part of the bargain?”

“The patients pay according to means and some of them are sent here under contractual arrangements by local authorities. And then, of course, he’s used his own capital. But things are getting pretty desperate, or so he claims. Father Baddeley’s legacy came just in time. And, of course, Wilfred gets the staff on the cheap. He doesn’t exactly pay Eric the rate for the job. Philby, the odd job man, is an ex-convict and probably otherwise unemployable; and the matron, Dot Moxon, wouldn’t exactly find it easy to get another job after that cruelty investigation at her last hospital. She must be grateful to Wilfred for taking her on. But then, we’re all terribly, terribly grateful to dear Wilfred.”

Dalgliesh said:

“I suppose I’d better go up to the Grange and introduce myself. You say there are only five patients left?”

“You’re not supposed to refer to them as patients, although I don’t know what else Wilfred thinks you can call them. Inmates sounds too much like a prison although, God knows, it’s appropriate enough. But there are only five left. He’s not admitting from the waiting list until he’s made up his mind about the Home’s future. The Ridgewell Trust’s angling for it and Wilfred’s considering handing the whole place over to them, lock, stock and gratis. Actually, there were six patients a fortnight or so ago, but that was before Victor Holroyd threw himself over Toynton Head and smashed himself on the rocks.”

“You mean he killed himself?”

“Well, he was in his wheelchair ten feet from the cliff-edge and either he slipped the brakes and let himself be carried over or Dennis Lerner, the male nurse with him, pushed him. As Dennis hasn’t the guts to kill a chicken let alone a man the general feeling is that Victor did it himself. But as that notion is distressing to dear Wilfred’s feelings we’re all busy pretending that it was an accident. I miss Victor, I liked him. He was about the only person here I could talk to. But the rest hated him. And now, of course, they’ve all got bad consciences wondering if they may have misjudged him. There’s nothing like dying for putting people at a disadvantage. I mean, when a chap keeps on saying that life isn’t worth living you take it that he’s just stating the obvious. When he backs it up with action you begin to wonder if there wasn’t more to him than you thought.”

Dalgliesh was spared the need to reply by the sound of a car on the headland. Maggie, whose ears were apparently as keen as his own, sprang from her chair and ran outside. A large black saloon was approaching the junction of the paths.

“Julius,” Maggie called back to him in brief explanation and began a boisterous semaphoring.

The car stopped and then turned towards Hope Cottage. Dalgliesh saw that it was a black Mercedes. As soon as it slowed down Maggie ran like an importunate school-girl beside it, pouring her explanation through the open window. The car stopped and Julius Court swung himself lightly out.

He was a tall, loose-limbed young man dressed in slacks and a green sweater patched army fashion on the shoulders and elbows. His light brown hair, cut short, was shaped to his head like a pale glinting helmet. It was an authoritative, confident face but with a trace of self-indulgence in the perceptible pouches under the wary eyes and the slight petulance of the small mouth set in a heavy chin. In middle age he would be heavy, even gross. But now he gave an immediate impression of slightly arrogant good looks, enhanced rather than spoilt by the white triangular scar like a colophon above his right eyebrow.

He held out his hand and said:

“Sorry you missed the funeral.”

He made it sound as if Dalgliesh had missed a train. Maggie wailed:

“But darling, you don’t understand! He hasn’t come for the funeral. Mr. Dalgliesh didn’t even know that the old man had snuffed out.”

Court looked at Dalgliesh with slightly more interest.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d better come up to the Grange. Wilfred Anstey will be able to tell you more about Father Baddeley than I. I was at my London flat when the old man died so I can’t even provide interesting death bed revelations. Hop in both of you. I’ve got some books in the back for Henry Carwardine from the London Library. I may as well deliver them now.”

Maggie Hewson seemed to feel that she had been remiss in not effecting a proper introduction; she said belatedly:

“Julius Court. Adam Dalgliesh. I don’t suppose you’ve come across each other in London. Julius used to be a diplomat, or is it diplomatist?”

As they got into the car Court said easily:

“Neither is appropriate at the comparatively lowly level I reached in the service. And London is a large place. But don’t worry, Maggie, like the clever lady in the TV panel game, I think I can guess what Mr. Dalgliesh does for a living.”

He held open the car door with elaborate courtesy. The Mercedes moved slowly towards Toynton Grange.

Georgie Allan looked up from the high narrow bed in the sick bay. His mouth began to work grotesquely. The muscles of his throat stood out hard and taut. He tried to raise his head from the pillow.

“I’ll be all right for the Lourdes pilgrimage won’t I? You don’t think I’ll be left behind?”

The words came out in a hoarse, discordant wail. Helen Rainer lifted up the edge of the mattress, tucked the sheet neatly back into place in the orthodox hospital approved style and said briskly:

“Of course you won’t be left behind. You’ll be the most important patient on the pilgrimage. Now stop fretting, that’s a good boy, and try to rest before your tea.”

She smiled at him, the impersonal, professionally reassuring smile of the trained nurse. Then lifted her eyebrow at Eric Hewson. Together they went over to the window. She said quietly:

“How long can we go on coping with him?”

Hewson replied:

“Another month or two. It would upset him terribly to have to leave now. Wilfred too. In a few months’ time both of them will be readier to accept the inevitable. Besides, he’s set his heart on this Lourdes trip. Next time we go I doubt whether he will be alive. He certainly won’t be here.”

“But he’s really a hospital case now. We aren’t registered as a nursing home. We’re only a home for the young chronic sick and disabled. Our contract is with the local authorities not the National Health Service. We don’t pretend to offer a full medical nursing service. We aren’t even supposed to. It’s time Wilfred either gave up or made up his mind what he’s trying to do here.”

“I know.” He did know, they both did. This wasn’t a new problem. Why, he wondered, had so much of their conversation become a boring repetition of the obvious, dominated by Helen’s high didactic voice.

Together they looked down at the small paved patio, bordered by the two new single-storey wings which contained the bedrooms and dayrooms, where the little group of remaining patients had gathered for the last sit in the sun before tea. The four wheelchairs were carefully placed a little apart and faced away from the house. The two watchers could see only the back of the patients’ heads. Unmoving, they sat looking fixedly toward the headland. Grace Willison, her grey untidy hair ruffled by the light breeze; Jennie Pegram, her neck sunk into her shoulders, her aureole of yellow hair streaming over the back of her wheelchair as if bleaching in the sun; Ursula Hollis’s small round poll on its thin neck, high and motionless as a decapitated head on a pole; Henry Carwardine’s dark head on its twisted neck, slumped sideways like a broken puppet. But then, they were all puppets. Dr. Hewson had a momentary and insane picture of himself rushing on to the patio and setting the four heads nodding and wagging, pulling invisible strings at the back of the necks so that the air was filled with their loud, discordant cries.

“What’s the matter with them?” he asked suddenly. “Something’s wrong about this place.”

“More than usual?”

“Yes. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Perhaps they’re missing Michael. God knows why. He did little enough. If Wilfred’s determined to carry on here he can find a better use for Hope Cottage now. As a matter of fact, I thought about suggesting that he let me live there. It would be easier for us.”

The thought appalled him. So that was what she had been planning. The familiar depression fell on him, physical as a lead weight. Two positive, discontented women, both wanting something that he couldn’t give. He tried to keep the panic from his voice.

“It wouldn’t do. You’re needed here. And I couldn’t come to you at Hope Cottage, not with Millicent next door.”

“She hears nothing once she’s switched on the TV. We know that. And there’s a back door if you do have to make a quick get-a-way. It’s better than nothing.”

“But Maggie would suspect.”

“She suspects now. And she’s got to know some time.”

“We’ll talk about it later. It’s a bad time to worry Wilfred just now. We’ve all been on edge since Victor died.”

Victor’s death. He wondered what perverse masochism had made him mention Victor. It reminded him of those early days as a medical student when he would uncover a suppurating wound with relief because the sight of blood, inflamed tissue and pus was so less frightening than the imagination of what lay beneath the smooth gauze. Well, he had got used to blood. He had got used to death. In time he might even get used to being a doctor.

They moved together into the small clinical room at the front of the building. He went to the basin and began methodically sluicing his hands and forearms as if his brief examination of young Georgie had been a messy surgical procedure requiring a thorough cleansing. Behind his back he could hear the clink of instruments. Helen was unnecessarily tidying the surgical cupboard yet once more. With a sinking heart he realized that they were going to have to talk. But not yet. Not yet. And he knew what she would say. He had heard it all before, the old insistent arguments spoken in that confident school prefect’s voice. “You’re wasted here. You’re a doctor, not a dispensing chemist. You’ve got to break free, free of Maggie and Wilfred. You can’t put loyalty to Wilfred before your vocation.” His vocation! That was the word his mother had always used. It made him want to break into hysterical laughter.

He switched on the tap to full and the water came gushing out, swirling round the basin, filling his ears like the sound of the incoming tide. What had it been like for Victor, that hurtle into oblivion? Had the clumsy wheelchair, heavy with its own momentum, sailed into space like one of those ridiculous flying contraptions in a James Bond film, the little manikin secure among his gadgets, ready to pull the lever and sport wings? Or had it twisted and tumbled through the air, bouncing off the rock face, with Victor coffined in canvas and metal, flailing impotent arms, adding his screams to the cry of the gulls? Had his heavy body broken free of the strap in mid-air, or had the canvas held until that final annihilating crash against the flat iron rocks, the first sucking wave of the relentless unthinking sea? And what had been in his mind? Exaltation or despair, terror or a blessed nothingness? Had the clean air and the sea wiped it all away, the pain, the bitterness, the malice?

It was only after his death that the full extent of Victor’s malice had been known, in the codicil to his will. He had taken trouble to let the other patients know that he had money, that he paid the full fee at Toynton Grange, modest though that was, and wasn’t, as were all the others except Henry Carwardine, dependent upon the benevolence of a local authority. He had never told them the source of his wealth—he had, after all, been a schoolmaster and they were hardly well paid—and they still didn’t know. He might have told Maggie of course. There were a number of things he might have told Maggie. But on this she had been unaccountably silent.

Eric Hewson didn’t believe that Maggie had taken an interest in Victor simply because of the money. They had, after all, had something in common. They had both made no secret that they hated Toynton Grange, that they were there of necessity not of choice, that they despised their companions. Probably Maggie found Victor’s rebarbative malice to her liking. They had certainly spent a great deal of time together. Wilfred had seemed almost to welcome it, almost as if he thought Maggie was at last finding her proper place at Toynton. She had taken her turn at wheeling Victor in his heavy chair to his favourite spot. He had found some kind of peace in sight of the sea. Maggie and he had spent hours together, out of sight of the house, high on the edge of the cliff. But it hadn’t worried him. He knew, none better, that Maggie could never love a man who couldn’t satisfy her physically. He welcomed the friendship. At least it gave her something to occupy her time, kept her quiet.

He couldn’t remember exactly when she had begun to become excited about the money. Victor must have said something. Maggie had changed almost overnight. She had become animated, almost gay. There had been a kind of feverish and suppressed excitement about her. And then Victor had suddenly demanded that he be driven to London for an examination at St. Saviour’s Hospital and to consult his solicitor. It was then that Maggie had hinted to him about the will. He had caught something of her excitement. He wondered now what either of them had hoped for. Had she seen the money as a release merely from Toynton Grange, or also from him? Either way, surely, it would have brought salvation for them both. And the idea wasn’t absurd. It was known that Victor had no relatives except a sister in New Zealand to whom he never wrote. No, he thought, reaching for the towel and beginning to dry his hands, it hadn’t been an absurd dream; less absurd than the reality.

He thought of that drive back from London; the warm, enclosed world of the Mercedes; Julius silent, his hands resting lightly on the wheel; the road a silver reel punctuated with stars slipping endlessly under the bonnet; road signs leaping out of darkness to pattern the blue-black sky; small petrified animals, fur erect, briefly glorified in the headlamps; the road verges drained pale gold in their glare. Victor had sat with Maggie in the back, wrapped in his plaid cloak and smiling, always smiling. And the air had been heavy with secrets, shared and unshared.

Victor had indeed altered his will. He had added a codicil to the bequest which left the whole of his fortune to his sister, a final testimony of petty malice. To Grace Willison, a bar of toilet soap; to Henry Carwardine, a mouthwash; to Ursula Hollis, body deodorant; to Jennie Pegram, a toothpick.

Eric reflected that Maggie had taken it very well. Really very well indeed; if you could call that wild, ringing, uncontrolled laughter taking it well. He recalled her now, reeling about their small stone sitting-room, helpless with hysteria, throwing back her head and baying out her laughter so that it echoed harshly back from the walls, like a menagerie, and rang out over the headland so that he was afraid they would hear it as far as Toynton Grange.

Helen was standing by the window. She said, her voice sharp:

“There’s a car outside Hope Cottage.”

He walked over to her. Together they looked out. Slowly their eyes met. She took his hand, and her voice was suddenly gentle, the voice he had heard when they had first made love.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about, darling. You know that, don’t you? Nothing to worry about at all.”

Ursula Hollis closed her library book, shut her eyes against the afternoon sun and entered into her private daydream. To do so now in the brief fifteen minutes before teatime was an indulgence, and quick as always to feel guilt at so ill-disciplined a pleasure, she was at first afraid that the magic wouldn’t work. Usually, she made herself wait until she was in bed at night, wait even until Grace Willison’s rasping breath, heard through the unsubstantial partition, had gentled into sleep before she allowed herself to think of Steve and the flat in Bell Street. The ritual had become an effort of will. She would lie there hardly daring to breathe because the images, however clearly conjured up, were so sensitive, so easily dispelled. But now it was happening beautifully. She concentrated, seeing the amorphous shapes and the changing patterns of colour focus into a picture, clearly as a developing negative, tuning in her ears to the sounds of home.

She saw the brick wall of the nineteenth-century house opposite with the morning sun lighting its dull façade so that each brick was individually distinct, multi-colored, a pattern of light. The pokey two-roomed flat above Mr. Polanski’s delicatessen, the street outside, the crowded heterogeneous life of that square mile of London between Edgware Road and Marylebone Station had absorbed and enchanted her. She was back there now, walking again with Steve through Church Street market on Saturday morning, the happiest day of the week. She saw the local women in their flowered overalls and carpet slippers, heavy wedding rings sunk into their bulbous toil-scarred fingers, their eyes bright in amorphous faces, as they sat gossiping beside their prams of second-hand clothes; the young people, joyfully garbed, squatting on the kerbstone behind their stalls of bric-à-brac; the tourists cheerfully impulsive or cautious and discerning by turns, conferring over their dollars or displaying their bizarre treasures. The street smelt of fruit, flowers and spice, of sweating bodies, cheap wine and old books. She saw the black women with their jutting buttocks and high barbaric staccato chatter, heard their sudden deep-throated laughter, as they crowded round the stall of huge unripe bananas and mangoes as large as footballs. In her dreams she moved on, her fingers gently entwined with Steve’s like a ghost passing unseen down familiar paths.

The eighteen months of her marriage had been a time of intense but precarious happiness, precarious because she could never feel that it was rooted in reality. It was like becoming another person. Before, she had taught herself contentment and had called it happiness. After, she realized that there was a world of experience, of sensation, of thought even, for which nothing in those first twenty years of life in the Middlesbrough suburb, or the two and a half years in the Y.W.C.A. hostel in London, had prepared her. Only one thing marred it, the fear which she could never quite suppress that it was all happening to the wrong person, that she was an imposture of joy.

She couldn’t imagine what it was about her that had so capriciously caught Steve’s fancy that first time when he had called at the enquiry desk in the Council offices to ask about his rates. Was it the one feature which she had always thought of as close to a deformity; the fact that she had one blue and one brown eye? Certainly it was an oddity which had intrigued and amused him, had given her, she realized, an added value in his eyes. He had changed her appearance, making her grow her hair shoulder length, bringing home for her long gaudy skirts in Indian cotton found in the street markets or the shops in the back streets of Edgware Road. Sometimes, catching a glimpse of herself in a shop window, so marvellously altered, she would wonder again which strange predilection had led him to choose her, what possibilities undetected by others, unknown to herself, he had seen in her. Some quality in her had caught his eccentric fancy as did the odd items of bric-à-brac on the Bell Street stalls. Some object, unregarded by the passers-by, would catch his eye and he would turn it to the light this way and that in the palm of his hand, suddenly enchanted. She would make a tentative protest.

“But darling, isn’t it rather hideous?”

“Oh, no, it’s amusing. I like it. And Mogg will love it. Let’s buy it for Mogg.”

Mogg, his greatest and, she sometimes thought, his only friend, had been christened Morgan Evans but preferred to use his nickname, regarding it as more appropriate to a poet of the people’s struggle. It was not that Mogg struggled greatly himself; indeed Ursula had never met anyone who drank and ate so resolutely at other people’s expense. He chanted his confused battle cries to anarchy and hatred in local pubs where his hairy and sad-eyed followers listened in silence or spasmodically banged the table with their beer mugs amid grunts of approval. But Mogg’s prose style had been more comprehensible. She had read his letter only once before returning it to the pocket in Steve’s jeans, but she could recall every word. Sometimes she wondered whether he had intended her to find it, whether it was fortuitous that he had forgotten to clear out the pockets of his jeans on the one evening when she always took their dirty clothes to the washeteria. It was three weeks after the hospital had given her a firm diagnosis.

“I would say I told you so except that this is my week for abjuring platitudes. I prophesized disaster, but not total disaster. My poor bloody Steve! But isn’t it possible for you to get a divorce? She must have had some symptoms before you married. You can—or could—get a divorce for V.D. existing at the time of marriage and what’s a dose of clap compared with this? It astounds me, the irresponsibility of the so-called establishment about marriage. They bleat about its sanctity, about protecting it as a staple foundation of society, and then let people acquire a wife with less physical check-up than they would give to a second-hand car. Anyway, you do realize that you must break free don’t you? It will be the end of you if you don’t. And don’t take refuge in the cowardice of compassion. Can you really see yourself wheeling her invalid chair and wiping her bottom? Yes, I know some men do it. But you never did get much of a kick out of masochism did you? Besides, the husbands who can do that know something about loving, and even you, my darling Steve, wouldn’t presume to claim that. By the way, isn’t she an R.C.? As you married in a Registry Office I doubt whether she considers herself properly married at all. That could be a way out for you. Anyway, see you in the Paviours Arms, Wednesday 8.0 p.m. I will celebrate your misfortune with a new poem and a pint of bitter.”

She hadn’t really expected him to wheel her chair. She hadn’t wanted him to perform the simplest, least intimate physical service for her. She had learnt very early in their marriage that any illness, even transitory colds and sickness, disgusted and frightened him. But she had hoped that the disease would spread very slowly, that she could continue to manage on her own at least for a few precious years. She had schemed how it might be possible. She would get up early so that he needn’t be offended by her slowness and ungainliness. She could move the furniture just a few inches, he probably wouldn’t even notice, to provide unobtrusive supports so that she needn’t take too quickly to sticks and callipers. Perhaps they could find an easier flat, one on the ground floor. If she could have a front door ramp she could get out in the daytime to do her shopping. And there would still be the nights together. Surely nothing could change those?

But it had quickly become evident that the disease, moving inexorably along her nerves like a predator, was spreading at its own pace, not hers. The plans she had made, lying stiffly beside him, distanced in the large double bed, willing that no spasm of muscle should disturb him, had become increasingly unrealistic. Watching her pathetic efforts, he had tried to be considerate and kind. He hadn’t reproached her except by his withdrawal, hadn’t condemned her growing weakness except by demonstrating his own lack of strength. In her nightmares she drowned; thrashing and choking in a limitless sea, she clutched at a floating bough and felt it sink, sponge soft and rotten, beneath her hands. She sensed morbidly that she was acquiring the propitiatory, simperingly pathetic air of the disabled. It was hard to be natural with him, harder still to talk. She remembered how he used to lie full length on the sofa watching her while she read or sewed, the creature of his selection and creation, draped and celebrated with the eccentric clothes which he had chosen for her. Now he was afraid for their eyes to meet.

She remembered how he had broken the news to her that he had spoken to the medical social worker at the hospital and that there might be a vacancy soon at Toynton Grange.

“It’s by the sea darling. You’ve always liked the sea. Quite a small community too, not one of those huge impersonal institutions. The chap who runs it is very highly regarded and it’s basically a religious foundation. Anstey isn’t a Catholic himself but they do go regularly to Lourdes. That will please you; I mean that you’ve always been interested in religion. It’s one of the subjects that we haven’t really seen eye to eye about. I probably wasn’t as understanding about your needs as I ought to have been.”

He could afford now to be indulgent of that particular foible. He had forgotten that he had taught her to do without God. Her religion had been one of those possessions that, casually, neither understanding them nor valuing them, he had taken from her. They hadn’t really been important to her, those consoling substitutes for sex, for love. She couldn’t pretend that she had relinquished them with much of a struggle, those comforting illusions taught in St. Matthew’s Primary School, assimilated behind the draped terylene curtains of her aunt’s front sitting-room in Alma Terrace, Middlesbrough, with its holy pictures, its photograph of Pope John, its framed papal blessing of her aunt and uncle’s wedding. All were part of that orphaned, uneventful, not unhappy childhood which was as remote now as a distant, once-visited alien shore. She couldn’t return because she no longer knew the way.

In the end she had welcomed the thought of Toynton Grange as a refuge. She had pictured herself with a group of patients sitting in their chairs in the sun and looking at the sea; the sea, constantly changing but eternal, comforting and yet frightening, speaking to her in its ceaseless rhythm that nothing really mattered, that human misery was of small account, that everything passed in time. And it wasn’t, after all, to be a permanent arrangement. Steve, with the help of the local authority social services department, planned to move into a new and more suitable flat; this was only to be a temporary separation.

But it had lasted now for eight months; eight months in which she had become increasingly disabled, increasingly unhappy. She had tried to conceal it since unhappiness at Toynton Grange was a sin against the Holy Ghost, a sin against Wilfred. And for most of the time she thought that she had succeeded. She had little in common with the other patients. Grace Willison, dull, middle-aged, pious. Eighteen-year-old George Allan with his boisterous vulgarity; it had been a relief when he became too ill to leave his bed. Henry Carwardine, remote, sarcastic, treating her as if she were a junior clerk. Jennie Pegram, for ever fussing with her hair and smiling her stupid secret smile. And Victor Holroyd, the terrifying Victor, who had hated her as much as he hated everyone at Toynton Grange. Victor who saw no virtue in concealing unhappiness, who frequently proclaimed that if people were dedicated to the practice of charity they might as well have someone to be charitable about.

She had always taken it for granted that it was Victor who had typed the poison pen letter. It was a letter as traumatic in its way as the one she had found from Mogg. She felt for it now, deep in a side pocket in her skirt. It was still there, the cheap paper limp with much handling. But she didn’t need to read it. She knew it now by heart, even the first paragraph. She had read that once, and then had turned the paper over at the top so that the words were hidden. Even to think about them burnt her cheek. How could he—it must be a man surely?—know how she and Steve had made love together, that they had done those particular acts and in that way? How could anyone know? Had she, perhaps, cried out in her sleep, moaning her need and her longing? But, if so, only Grace Willison could possibly have heard from the adjoining bedroom, and how could she have understood?

She remembered reading somewhere that obscene letters were usually written by women, particularly by spinsters. Perhaps it hadn’t been Victor Holroyd after all. Grace Willison, dull, repressed, religious Grace. But how could she have guessed what Ursula had never admitted to herself?

“You must have known you were ill when you married him. What about those tremors, the weakness in your legs, the clumsiness in the mornings? You knew you were ill, didn’t you? You cheated him. No wonder he seldom writes, that he never visits. He’s not living alone, you know. You didn’t really expect him to stay faithful, did you?”

And there the letter broke off. Somehow she felt that the writer hadn’t really come to the end, that some more dramatic and revelationary finish was intended. But perhaps he or she had been interrupted; someone might have come into the office unexpectedly. The note had been typed on Toynton Grange paper, cheap and absorbent and with the old Remington typewriter. Nearly all the patients and staff occasionally typed. She thought she could remember seeing most of them use the Remington at one time or another. Of course, it was really Grace’s machine; it was recognized as primarily hers; she used it to type the stencils for the quarterly newsletter. Often she worked alone in the office when the rest of the patients considered that they had finished the working day. And there would be no difficulty in ensuring that it reached the right recipient.

Slipping it into a library book was the surest way of all. They all knew what the others were reading, how could they help it? Books were laid down on tables, on chairs, were easily accessible to anyone. All the staff and patients must have known that she was reading the latest Iris Murdoch. And, oddly enough, the poison letter had been placed at exactly the page which she had reached.

At first she had taken it for granted that this was just a new example of Victor’s power to hurt and humiliate. It was only since his death that she had felt these doubts, had glanced surreptitiously at the faces of her fellow inmates, had wondered and feared. But surely this was nonsense? She was tormenting herself unnecessarily. It must have been Victor and, if it were Victor, then there would be no more letters. But how could even he have known about her and Steve; except that Victor did mysteriously know things. She remembered the scene when she and Grace Willison had been sitting with him here in the patients’ patio. Grace lifting her face to the sun and wearing that silly, gentle smile had begun to talk of her happiness, about the next Lourdes pilgrimage. Victor had broken in roughly:

“You’re cheerful because you’re euphoric. It’s a feature of your disease, D.S. patients always have this unreasonable happiness and hope. Read the textbooks. It’s a recognized symptom. It’s certainly no virtue on your part and it’s bloody irritating for the rest of us.”

She recalled Grace’s voice already tremulous with hurt.

“I wasn’t claiming happiness as a virtue. But even if it’s only a symptom, I can still give thanks for it; it’s a kind of grace.”

“As long as you don’t expect the rest of us to join in, give thanks by all means. Thank God for the privilege of being no bloody use to yourself or anyone else. And while you’re about it, thank Him for some of the other blessings of His creation; the millions toiling to get a living out of barren soil swept by flood, burnt by drought; for potbellied children; for tortured prisoners; for the whole doomed, bloody, pointless mess.”

Grace Willison had protested quietly through the first smart of her tears:

“But Victor, how can you talk like that? Suffering isn’t the whole of life; you can’t really believe that God doesn’t care. You come with us to Lourdes.”

“Of course I do. It’s the one chance to get out of this boring crack-brained penitentiary. I like movement, I like travel, I like the sight of the sun shining on the Pyrenees, I enjoy the colour. I even get some kind of satisfaction from the blatant commercialism of it all, from the sight of thousands of my fellow beings who are more deluded than I.”

“But that’s blasphemy!”

“Is it? Well, I enjoy that too.”

Grace persisted: “If only you would talk to Father Baddeley, Victor. I’m sure that he would help you. Or perhaps to Wilfred. Why not talk to Wilfred?”

He had burst into raucous laughter, jeering but strangely and frighteningly shot through with genuine amusement.

“Talk to Wilfred! My God, I could tell you something about our saintly Wilfred that would give you a laugh, and one day, if he irritates me enough, I probably shall. Talk to Wilfred!”

She thought she could still hear the distant echo of that laughter. “I could tell you something about Wilfred.” Only he hadn’t told them, and now he never would. She thought about Victor’s death. What impulse had led him on that particular afternoon to make his final gesture against fate? It must have been an impulse: Wednesday wasn’t his normal day for an outing and Dennis hadn’t wanted to take him. She remembered clearly the scene in the patio. Victor, importunate, insistent, exerting every effort of will to get what he wanted. Dennis flushed, sulky, a recalcitrant child, finally giving way but with a poor grace. And so, they had left together for that final walk, and she had never seen Victor again. What was he thinking of when he released those brakes and hurled himself and the chair towards annihilation? Surely it must have been the impulse of a moment. No one could choose to die with such spectacular horror while there were gentler means available. And surely there were gentler means; sometimes she found herself thinking about them, about those two most recent deaths, Victor’s and Father Baddeley’s. Father Baddeley, gentle, ineffectual, had passed away as if he had never been; his name now was hardly mentioned. It was Victor who seemed to be still among them. It was Victor’s bitter uneasy spirit which hung over Toynton Grange. Sometimes, particularly at dusk, she dared not turn her face towards an adjacent wheelchair in case she should see, not the expected occupant, but Victor’s heavy figure shrouded in his heavy plaid cloak, his dark sardonic face with its fixed smile like a rictus. Suddenly, despite the warmth of the afternoon sun, Ursula shivered. Releasing the brakes on her chair she turned and wheeled herself towards the house.

The front door of Toynton Grange was open and Julius Court led the way into a high square hall, oak panelled and with a chequered black and white marble floor. The house struck very warm. It was like passing through an invisible curtain of hot air. The hall smelt oddly; not with the usual institutional smell of bodies, food and furniture polish overlaid with antiseptic, but sweeter and strangely exotic as if someone had been burning incense. The hall was as dimly lit as a church. An impression reinforced by the two front windows of Pre-Raphaelite stained glass one on each side of the main door. To the left was the expulsion from Eden, to the right the sacrifice of Isaac. Dalgliesh wondered what aberrant fancy had conceived that effeminate angel with his curdle of yellow hair under the plumed helmet or the sword embellished with glutinous lozenges in ruby, bright blue and orange with which he was ineffectively barring the two delinquents from an apple orchard Eden. Adam and Eve, their pink limbs tactfully if improbably entwined with laurel, wore expressions respectively of spurious spirituality and petulant remorse. On the right the same angel swooped like a metamorphosized batman over Isaac’s bound body, watched from the thicket by an excessively woolly ram whose face, understandably, bore an expression of the liveliest apprehension.

There were three chairs in the hall, bastard contraptions in painted wood covered with vinyl, themselves deformities, one with an unusually high seat, two very low. A folded wheelchair rested against the far wall and a wooden rail was screwed waist high into the panelling. To the right an open door gave a glimpse of what could be a business room or cloakroom. Dalgliesh could see the fold of a plaid cloak hanging on the wall, a pegboard of keys and the edge of a heavy desk. A carved hall table bearing a brass tray of letters and surmounted by a huge fire bell stood to the left of the door.

Julius led the way through a rear door and into a central vestibule from which rose a heavily carved staircase, its banister half cut away to accommodate the metal cage of a large modern lift. They came to a third door. Julius threw it dramatically open and announced:

“A visitor for the dead. Adam Dalgliesh.”

The three of them passed into the room together. Dalgliesh, flanked by his two sponsors, had the unfamiliar sensation of being under escort. After the dimness of the front hall and the central vestibule the dining-room was so bright that he blinked. The tall mullioned windows gave little natural light but the room was harshly lit by two tubes of fluorescent lighting incongruously suspended from the moulded ceiling. Images seemed to fuse together and then parted and he saw clearly the inhabitants of Toynton Grange grouped like a tableau round the oak refectory table at tea.

His arrival seemed to have struck them momentarily into silent surprise. Four of them were in wheelchairs, one a man. The two remaining women were obviously staff; one was dressed as a matron except for the customary status symbol of a cap. Without it, she looked curiously incomplete. The other, a fair-haired younger woman, was wearing black slacks and a white smock but succeeded, despite this unorthodox uniform, in giving an immediate impression of slightly intimidating competence. The three able-bodied men all wore dark brown monk’s habits. After a second’s pause, a figure at the head of the table rose and came with ceremonial slowness towards them with hands held out.

“Welcome to Toynton Grange, Adam Dalgliesh. My name is Wilfred Anstey.”

Dalgliesh’s first thought was that he looked like a bit-player acting with practised conviction the part of an ascetic bishop. The brown monk’s habit suited him so well that it was impossible to imagine him in any other garb. He was tall and very thin, the wrists from which the full woollen sleeves fell away were brown and brittle as autumn sticks. His hair was grey but strong and shaved very short revealing the boyish curve of the skull. Beneath it the thin long face was mottled brown as if the summer tan were fading unevenly; two shining white patches on the left temple had the appearance of diseased skin. It was difficult to guess his age; fifty perhaps. The gentle questioning eyes with their suggestion of other people’s suffering meekly borne were young eyes, the blue irises very clear, the whites opaque as milk. He smiled, a singularly sweet lopsided smile spoilt by the display of uneven and discoloured teeth. Dalgliesh wondered why it was that philanthropists so often had a reluctance to visit their dentist.

Dalgliesh held out his hand and felt it imprisoned between Anstey’s two palms. It took an effort of will not to flinch from this clammy encounter of moist flesh. He said:

“I had hoped to pay a few days’ visit to Father Baddeley. I’m an old friend. I didn’t know until I arrived that he was dead.”

“Dead and cremated. His ashes were buried last Wednesday in the churchyard of St. Michael’s Toynton. We knew that he would wish them to lie in consecrated ground. We didn’t announce his death in the papers because we didn’t know that he had friends.”

“Except us here.” It was one of the women patients who added the gentle but firm correction. She was older than the other patients, grey haired and angular as a Dutch doll propped in her chair. She looked at Dalgliesh steadily with kind and interested eyes.

Wilfred Anstey said:

“Of course. Except us here. Grace was, I think, closer to Michael than anyone else and was with him on the night he died.”

Dalgliesh said:

“He died alone, Mrs. Hewson tells me.”

“Unhappily yes. But so at the last do we all. You’ll join us for tea I hope. Julius, you too, and Maggie of course. And did you say that you hoped to stay with Michael? Then you must, of course, spend the night here.”

He turned to the matron.

“Victor’s room, I think, Dot. Perhaps, after tea, you would prepare it for our guest.”

Dalgliesh said:

“That’s very kind of you, but I don’t want to be a nuisance. Would there be any objection if, after tonight, I spent a few days in the cottage? Mrs. Hewson tells me that Father Baddeley left me his library. It would be helpful if I could sort and pack the books while I’m here.”

Was it his imagination that the suggestion wasn’t entirely welcome? But Anstey hesitated only for a second before saying:

“Of course, if that is what you prefer. But first let me introduce you to the family.”

Dalgliesh followed Anstey in a formal charade of greetings. A succession of hands, dry, cold, moist, reluctant or firm clasped his. Grace Willison, the middle-aged spinster; a study in grey; skin, hair, dress, stockings, all of them slightly dingy so that she looked like an old-fashioned, stiffly jointed doll neglected too long in a dusty cupboard. Ursula Hollis; a tall, spotty-faced girl dressed in a long skirt of Indian cotton who gave him a tentative smile and brief, reluctant handshake. Her left hand lay limply in her lap as if wearied by the weight of the thick wedding ring. He was aware of something odd about her face but had moved on before he realized that she had one blue eye, one brown. Jennie Pegram; the youngest patient but probably older than she looked with a pale, sharp face and mild lemur-like eyes. She was so short necked that she seemed hunched into her wheelchair. Corn gold hair, parted in the middle, hung like a crimped curtain around the dwarfish body. She cringed deprecatingly at his touch, gave him a sickly smile and whispered “hullo” on a gasp of intaken breath. Henry Carwardine; a handsome, authoritative face but cut with deep lines of strain; a high beaky nose and long mouth. The disease had wrenched his head to one side so that he looked like a supercilious bird of prey. He took no notice of Dalgliesh’s proffered hand but said a brief “how do you do” with an uninterest amounting almost to discourtesy. Dorothy Moxon, the matron; sombre, stout and gloomy eyed under the dark fringe. Helen Rainer; large, slightly protruding green eyes under lids as thin as grape skins and a shapely figure which even the loose-fitting smock couldn’t wholly disguise. She would, he thought, be attractive were it not for the discontented droop of the slightly marsupial cheeks. She shook hands firmly with Dalgliesh and gave him a minatory glance as if welcoming a new patient from whom she expected trouble. Dr. Eric Hewson; a fair, good-looking man with a boyish vulnerable face, mud-brown eyes fringed with remarkably long lashes. Dennis Lerner; a lean, rather weak face, eyes blinking nervously behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, a moist handshake. Anstey added, almost as if he thought Lerner needed a word of explanation, that Dennis was the male nurse.

“The two remaining members of our family, Albert Philby, our handyman, and my sister Millicent Hammitt you will meet later I hope. But I mustn’t, of course, forget Jeoffrey.” As if catching his name, a cat, who had been slumbering on a window seat, uncurled himself, dropped ponderously to the floor and stalked towards them, tail erect. Anstey explained:

“He is named after Christopher Smart’s cat. I expect you remember the poem.

Dalgliesh said that he knew the poem. He could have added that if Anstey had destined his cat for this hieratic role, then he had been unlucky in his choice of the litter. Jeoffrey was a barrel-shaped tabby with a tail like a fox’s brush who looked as if his life were dedicated less to the service of his creator than to the gratification of feline lusts. He gave Anstey a disagreeable look compounded of long suffering and disgust and leapt with lightness and precision on to Carwardine’s lap where he was ill-received. Gratified at Carwardine’s obvious reluctance to acquire him, he settled down with much purring and foot padding and permitted his eyes to close.

Julius Court and Maggie Hewson had settled themselves at the far end of the long table. Suddenly Julius called out:

“Be careful what you say to Mr. Dalgliesh, it may be taken down and given in evidence. He chooses to travel incognito but actually he’s Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard. His job is catching murderers.”

Henry Carwardine’s cup began an agitated rattle in its saucer. He tried ineffectively to steady it with his left hand. No one looked at him. Jennie Pegram gave an apprehensive gasp, then looked complacently round the table as if she had done something clever. Helen Rainer said sharply:

“How do you know?”

“I live in the world, my darlings, and occasionally read the newspapers. There was a notorious case last year which gained the Commander some public notice.”

He turned to Dalgliesh:

“Henry will be drinking wine with me after dinner tonight and listening to some music. You may care to join us. You could perhaps wheel him over. Wilfred will excuse you, I know.”

The invitation hardly seemed courteous, excluding as it did all but two of the company and peremptorily claiming the new arrival with no more than a token acknowledgement to his host. But no one seemed to mind. Perhaps it was usual for the two men to drink together when Court was at his cottage. After all, there was no reason why the patients should be compelled to share each other’s friends, or those friends obliged to issue a general invitation. Besides, Dalgliesh was obviously invited to provide an escort. He said a brief thank you and sat down at the table between Ursula Hollis and Henry Carwardine.

It was a plain, boarding-school tea. There was no cloth. The scarred oak table reamed with scorch marks held two large brown teapots wielded by Dorothy Moxon, two plates of thickly cut brown bread, thinly spread with what Dalgliesh suspected was margarine, a jar of honey and one of marmite, a dish of rock buns, home made and pebbled with an excrescence of bullet black currants. There was also a bowl of apples. They looked like wind-falls. Everyone was drinking from brown earthenware mugs. Helen Rainer went over to a cupboard set under the window and brought over three similar mugs and matching plates for the visitors.

It was an odd tea party. Carwardine ignored the guest except to push the plate of bread and butter towards him, and Dalgliesh at first made little headway with Ursula Hollis. Her pale intense face was turned perpetually towards him, the two discordant eyes searched his. He felt uncomfortably that she was making some demand on him, desperately hoping to evoke a response of interest, of affection even, which he could neither recognize nor was competent to give. But, by happy chance, he mentioned London. Her face brightened, she asked him if he knew Marylebone, the Bell Street market? He found himself involved in a lively, almost obsessive discussion about London’s street markets. She became animated, almost pretty and, strangely, it seemed to give her some comfort.

Suddenly Jennie Pegram leaned forward across the table and said with a moue of simulated distaste:

“A funny job catching murderers and getting them hanged. I don’t see how you fancy it.”

“We don’t fancy it, and nowadays they don’t get hanged.”

“Well, shut up for life then. I think that’s worse. And I bet some of those you caught when you were younger got hanged.”

He detected the anticipatory, almost lascivious gleam in her eyes. It wasn’t new to him. He said quietly:

“Five of them. It’s interesting that those are the ones people always want to hear about.”

Anstey smiled his gentle smile and spoke as one determined to be fair.

“It isn’t only a question of punishment though, Jennie, is it? There is the theory of deterrence; the need to mark public abhorrence of violent crime; the hope of reforming and rehabilitating the criminal; and, of course, the importance of trying to ensure that he doesn’t do it again.”

He reminded Dalgliesh of a school master he had much disliked who was given to initiating frank discussion as a matter of duty but always with the patronizing air of permitting a limited expression of unorthodox opinion provided the class came back within the allotted time to a proper conviction of the rightness of his own views. But now Dalgliesh was neither compelled nor disposed to cooperate. He broke into Jennie’s simple, “Well, they can’t do it again if they’re hanged, can they?” by saying:

“It’s an interesting and important subject, I know. But forgive me if I don’t personally find it fascinating. I’m on holiday—actually I’m convalescing—and I’m trying to forget about work.”

“You’ve been ill?” Carwardine, with the deliberate care of a child uncertain of its powers, reached across and helped himself to honey.

“I hope your call here isn’t, even subconsciously, on your own behalf. You aren’t looking for a future vacancy? You haven’t a progressive incurable disease?”

Anstey said:

“We all suffer from a progressive incurable disease. We call it life.”

Carwardine gave a tight self-congratulatory smile, as if he had scored a point in some private game. Dalgliesh, who was beginning to feel himself part of a mad hatter’s tea party, wasn’t sure whether the remark was spuriously profound or merely silly. What he was sure was that Anstey had made it before. There was a short, embarrassed silence, then Anstey said:

“Michael didn’t let us know he was expecting you.” He made it sound like a gentle reproof.

“He may not have received my postcard. It should have arrived on the morning of his death. I couldn’t find it in his bureau.”

Anstey was peeling an apple, the yellow rind curved over his thin fingers. His eyes were intent on his task. He said:

“He was brought home by the ambulance service. It wasn’t convenient that morning for me to fetch him. I understand that the ambulance stopped at the postbox to collect any letters, probably at Michael’s request. He later handed a letter to me and one to my sister, so he should have received your card. I certainly found no postcard when I looked in the bureau for his will and for any other written instructions he may have left. That was early on the morning after his death. I may, of course, have missed it.”

Dalgliesh said easily:

“In which case it would still be there. I expect Father Baddeley threw it away. It’s a pity you had to break into the bureau.”

“Break into?” Anstey’s voice expressed nothing but a polite, unworried query.

“The lock has been forced.”

“Indeed. I imagine that Michael must have lost the key and was forced to that extremity. Forgive the pun. I found the bureau open when I looked for his papers. I’m afraid I didn’t think to examine the lock. Is it important?”

“Miss Willison may think so. I understood that the bureau is now hers.”

“A broken lock does, of course, reduce its value. But you will find that we place little store on material possessions at Toynton Grange.”

He smiled again, dismissing a frivolity, and turned to Dorothy Moxon. Miss Willison was concentrating on her plate. She didn’t look up. Dalgliesh said:

“It’s probably foolish of me, but I wish I could be sure that Father Baddeley knew that I hoped to visit him. I thought he might have slipped my postcard into his diary. But the last volume isn’t in his desk.”

This time Anstey looked up. The blue eyes met the dark brown, innocent, polite, unworried.

“Yes, I noticed that. He gave up keeping a diary at the end of June apparently. The surprise is that he kept one, not that he gave up the habit. In the end one grows impatient of the egotism which records trivia as if it had a permanent value.”

“It’s unusual surely after so many years to stop in mid-year.”

“He had just returned from hospital after a grave illness and can’t have been in much doubt about the prognosis. Knowing that death could not be far off, he may have decided to destroy the diaries.”

“Beginning with the last volume?”

“To destroy a diary must be like destroying memory. One would begin with the years one could best endure to lose. Old memories are tenacious. He made a start by burning the last volume.”

Grace Willison again spoke her gentle but firm correction:

“Not by burning, Wilfred. Father Baddeley used his electric fire when he got home from hospital. The grate is filled with a jam pot of dried grasses.”

Dalgliesh pictured the sitting-room of Hope Cottage. She was, of course, right. He recalled the old-fashioned grey stone jar, the crumpled bunch of dried leaves and grasses filling the narrow fireplace and thrusting their dusty and soot laden stalks between the bars. They probably hadn’t been disturbed for the best part of a year.

The animated chatter at the other end of the table died into speculative silence as it does when people suddenly suspect that something interesting is being said which they ought to hear.

Maggie Hewson had seated herself so close to Julius Court that Dalgliesh was surprised that he had room to drink his tea and had been overtly flirting with him during the meal, whether for her husband’s discomfiture or Court’s gratification it was difficult to say. Eric Hewson, when he glanced towards them, had the shame-faced look of an embarrassed schoolboy. Court, perfectly at his ease, had distributed his attention among all the women present, with the exception of Grace. Now Maggie looked from face to face and said sharply:

“What’s the matter? What did she say?”

No one replied. It was Julius who broke the moment of sudden and inexplicable tension:

“I forgot to tell you. You’re doubly privileged in your visitor. The Commander doesn’t confine his talents to catching murderers, he publishes verse. He’s Adam Dalgliesh, the poet.”

This announcement was met with a confused congratulatory murmur during which Dalgliesh fastened on Jennie’s comment of “how nice” as the most irritatingly inept. Wilfred smiled encouragingly and said:

“Of course. We are certainly privileged. And Adam Dalgliesh comes at an opportune time. We are due to hold our monthly family social evening on Thursday. May we hope that our guest will recite some of his poems for our pleasure?”

There were a number of answers to that question but, in the present disadvantaged company, none of them seemed either kind or possible.

Dalgliesh said:

“I’m sorry but I don’t travel with copies of my own books.”

Anstey smiled,

“That will present no problem. Henry has your last two volumes. I am sure he will lend them.”

Without looking up from his plate, Carwardine said quietly:

“Given the lack of privacy in this place, I’ve no doubt you could provide a verbal catalogue of my whole library. But, since you’ve shown a complete lack of interest in Dalgliesh’s work until now, I have no intention of lending my books so that you can blackmail a guest into performing for you like a captive monkey!”

Wilfred flushed slightly and bent his head over his plate.

There was nothing further to be said. After a second’s silence, the talk flowed on, innocuous, commonplace. Neither Father Baddeley nor his diary were mentioned again.

Anstey was obviously unworried by Dalgliesh’s expressed wish after tea to talk to Miss Willison in private. Probably the request struck him as no more than the pious protocol of courtesy and respect. He said that Grace had the task of feeding the hens and collecting the eggs before dusk. Perhaps Adam could help her?

The two larger wheels of the chair were fitted with a second interior wheel in chrome which could be used by the occupant to drive the chair forward. Miss Willison grasped it and began to make slow progress down the asphalt path jerking her frail body like a marionette. Dalgliesh saw that her left hand was deformed and had little power so that the chair tended to swivel, and progress was erratic. He moved to her left and, while walking beside her, he laid his hand unobtrusively on the back of the chair and gently helped it forward. He hoped that he was doing the acceptable thing. Miss Willison might resent his tact as much as she did the implied pity. He thought that she sensed his embarrassment and had resolved not to add to it even by smiling her thanks.

As they walked together he was intensely aware of her, noting the details of her physical presence as keenly as if she were a young and desirable woman and he on the verge of love. He watched the sharp bones of her shoulders jerking rhythmically under the thin grey cotton of her dress; the purple tributaries of the veins standing like cords on her almost transparent left hand, so small and fragile in contrast to its fellow. This, too, looked deformed in its compensating strength and hugeness as she gripped the wheel as powerfully as a man. Her legs, clad in wrinkled woollen stockings, were thin as sticks; her sandalled feet, too large surely for such inadequate supports, were clamped to the footrest of her chair as if glued to the metal. Her grey hair flecked with dandruff had been combed upward in a single heavy plait fixed to the crown of her head with a plastic white comb, not particularly clean. The back of her neck looked dingy either with fading suntan or inadequate washing. Looking down he could see the lines on her forehead contracting into deeper furrows with the effort of moving the chair, the eyes blinking spasmodically behind the thin framed spectacles.

The hen house was a large ramshackle cage bounded by sagging wire and creosoted posts. It had obviously been designed for the disabled. There was a double entry so that Miss Willison could let herself in and fasten the door behind her before opening the second door into the main cage, and the smooth asphalt path, just wide enough for a wheelchair, ran along each side and in front of the nesting boxes. Inside the first door a rough wooden shelf had been nailed waist high to one of the supports. This held a bowl of prepared meal, a plastic can of water and a wooden spoon riveted to a long handle, obviously for the collection of eggs. Miss Willison took them in her lap with some difficulty and reached forward to open the inner door. The hens, who had unaccountably bunched themselves in the far corner of the cage like the nervous virgins, lifted their beady spiteful faces and instantly came squawking and swooping towards her as if determined on a feathered hecatomb. Miss Willison recoiled slightly and began casting handfuls of meal before them with the air of a neophyte propitiating the furies. The hens began an agitated pecking and gulping. Scraping her hand against the rim of the bowl Miss Willison said:

“I wish I could get more fond of them, or they of me. Both sides might get more out of this activity. I thought that animals developed a fondness for the hand that feeds them but it doesn’t seem to apply to hens. I don’t see why it should really. We exploit them so thoroughly, first take their eggs and when they’re past laying wring their necks and consign them to the pot.”

“I hope you don’t have to do the wringing.”

“Oh, no, Albert Philby has that unpleasant job; not that I think he finds it altogether unpleasant. But I eat my share of the boiled fowl.”

Dalgliesh said:

“I feel rather the same. I was brought up in a Norfolk vicarage and my mother always had hens. She was fond of them and they seemed fond of her but my father and I thought they were a nuisance. But we liked the fresh eggs.”

“Do you know, I’m ashamed to tell you that I can’t really tell the difference between these eggs and the ones from the supermarket. Wilfred prefers us not to eat any food which hasn’t been naturally produced. He abhors factory farming and, of course, he’s right. He would really prefer Toynton Grange to be vegetarian, but that would make the catering even more difficult than it is now. Julius did some sums and proved to him that these eggs cost us two and a half times more than the shop ones, not counting of course for my labour. It was rather discouraging.”

Dalgliesh asked:

“Does Julius Court do the book-keeping here then?”

“Oh, no! Not the real accounts, the ones included in the annual report. Wilfred has a professional accountant for those. But Julius is clever with finance and I know Wilfred looks to him for advice. It’s usually rather disheartening advice, I’m afraid; we run on a shoestring really. Father Baddeley’s legacy was a real blessing. And Julius has been very kind. Last year the van which we hired to drive us back from the port after our return from Lourdes had an accident. We were all very shaken. The wheelchairs were in the back and two of them got broken. The telephone message that reached here was rather alarmist; it wasn’t as bad as Wilfred thought. But Julius drove straight to the hospital where we had been taken for a checkup, hired another van, and took care of everything. And then he bought the specially adapted bus which we have now so that we’re completely independent. Dennis and Wilfred between them can drive us all the way to Lourdes. Julius never comes with us, of course, but he’s always here to arrange a welcome home party for us when we return after the pilgrimage.”

This disinterested kindness was unlike the impression that, even after a short acquaintanceship, Dalgliesh had formed of Court. Intrigued he asked carefully:

“Forgive me if I sound crude but what does Julius Court get out of it, this interest in Toynton?”

“Do you know, I’ve sometimes asked myself that. But it seems an ungracious question when it’s so apparent what Toynton Grange gets out of him. He comes back from London like a breath of the outside world. He cheers us all. But I know that you want to talk about your friend. Shall we just collect the eggs and then find somewhere quiet?”

Your friend. The quiet phrase quietly spoken, rebuked him. They filled up the water containers and collected the eggs together, Miss Willison scooping them up in her wooden spoon with the expertise born of long practice. They found only eight. The whole procedure, which an able-bodied person could have completed in ten minutes, had been tedious, time-consuming and not particularly productive. Dalgliesh, who saw no merit in work for the sake of work, wondered what his companion really thought about a job which had obviously been designed in defiance of economics to give her the illusion of being useful.

They made their way back to the little courtyard behind the house. Only Henry Carwardine was sitting there, a book on his lap but his eyes staring towards the invisible sea. Miss Willison gave him a quick worried glance and seemed about to speak. But she said nothing until they had settled themselves some thirty yards from the silent figure; Dalgliesh at the end of one of the wooden benches and she at his side. Then she said:

“I can never get used to being so close to the sea and yet not being able to look at it. One can hear it so plainly sometimes as we can now. We’re almost surrounded by it, we can sometimes smell it and listen to it, but we might be a hundred miles away.”

She spoke wistfully but without resentment. They sat for a moment in silence. Dalgliesh could indeed hear the sea clearly now, the long withdrawing rasp of the shingled tide borne to him on the onshore breeze. To the inmates of Toynton Grange that ceaseless murmur must evoke the tantalizingly close but unobtainable freedom of wide blue horizons, scudding clouds, white wings falling and swooping through the moving air. He could understand how the need to see it might grow into an obsession. He said deliberately:

“Mr. Holroyd managed to get himself wheeled to where he could watch the sea.”

It had been important to see her reaction and he realized at once that to her the remark had been worse than tactless. She was deeply shaken and distressed. The frail left hand, curved in her lap, began an agitated shaking. Her right hand tightened on the arm of the chair. Her face crimsoned in an unlovely wave, and then became very pale. For a moment he almost wished that he hadn’t spoken. But the regret was transitory. It was returning despite himself, he thought with sardonic humour, this professional itch to seek out the facts. They were seldom discovered without some cost, however irrelevant or important they finally proved to be, and it wasn’t usually he who paid. He heard her speaking so quietly that he had to bend his head to catch the words.

“Victor had a special need to get away by himself. We understood that.”

“But it must have been very difficult to push a light wheelchair like this over the rough turf and up to the edge of the cliff.”

“He had a chair which belonged to him, like this type but larger and stronger. And it wasn’t necessary to push him up the steep part of the headland. There’s an inland path which leads, I understand, to a narrow sunken lane. You can get to the cliff edge that way. Even so it was hard on Dennis Lerner. It took him half an hour hard pushing each way. But you wanted to talk about Father Baddeley.”

“If it won’t distress you too much. It seems that you were the last person to see him alive. He must have died very soon after you left the cottage since he was still wearing his stole when Mrs. Hewson found his body next morning. Normally he would surely have taken it off very soon after hearing a confession.”

There was a silence as if she were making up her mind to something. Then she said:

“He did take it off, as usual, immediately after he’d given me absolution. He folded it up and placed it over the arm of his chair.”

This, too, was a sensation which in the long dog days in hospital he had thought never to experience again, the frisson of excitement along the blood at the first realization that something important had been said, that although the quarry wasn’t yet in sight nor his spore detectable, yet he was there. He tried to reject this unwelcome surge of tension but it was as elemental and involuntary as the touch of fear. He said:

“But that means that Father Baddeley put on his stole again after you had left. Why should he do that?”

Or someone else had put it on for him. But that thought was best unspoken and its implications must wait.

She said quietly:

“I assume that he had another penitent; that is the obvious explanation.”

“He wouldn’t wear it to say his evening Office?”

Dalgliesh tried to remember his father’s practice in these matters on the very rare occasions when the rector did not say his Office in church; but memory provided only the unhelpful boyhood picture of them both holed up in a hut in the Cairngorms during a blizzard, himself watching, half bored, half fascinated, the patterns of the swirling snow against the windows, his father in leggings, anorak and woollen cap quietly reading from his small black prayer book. He certainly hadn’t worn a stole then.

Miss Willison said:

“Oh no! He would wear it only when administering a sacrament. Besides, he had said evensong. He was just finishing when I arrived and I joined him in a last collect.”

“But if someone followed you, then you weren’t the last person to see him alive. Did you point that out to anyone when you were told of his death?”

“Should I have done? I don’t think so. If the person himself—or herself—didn’t choose to speak it wasn’t for me to invite conjecture. Of course, if anyone but you had realized the significance of the stole it wouldn’t have been possible to avoid speculation. But no one did, or if they did, they said nothing. We gossip too much at Toynton, Mr. Dalgliesh. It’s inevitable perhaps, but it isn’t—well—healthy morally. If someone other than I went to confession that night, it’s nobody’s business but theirs and Father Baddeley’s.”

Dalgliesh said:

“But Father Baddeley was still wearing his stole next morning. That suggests that he might have died while his visitor was actually with him. If that happened surely the first reaction, however private the occasion, would be to summon medical help?”

“The visitor might have had no doubts that Father Baddeley had died and was beyond that kind of help. If so there might be a temptation to leave him there sitting peaceably in his chair and slip away. I don’t think Father Baddeley would call that a sin, and I don’t think you could call it a crime. It might seem callous but would it necessarily be so? It could argue an indifference to form and decorum perhaps, but that isn’t quite the same thing, is it?”

It would argue, too, thought Dalgliesh, that the visitor had been a doctor or a nurse. Was that what Miss Willison was hinting? The first reaction of a lay person would surely be to seek help, or at least confirmation that death had actually occurred. Unless, of course, he knew for the best or worst of reasons that Baddeley was dead. But that sinister possibility seemed not to have occurred to Miss Willison. Why, indeed, should it? Father Baddeley was old, he was sick, he was expected to die and he had died. Why should anyone suspect the natural and the inevitable? He said something about determining the time of death and heard her gentle, inexorable reply.

“I expect that in your job the actual time of death is always important and so you get used to concentrating on that fact. But in real life does it matter? What matters is whether one dies in a state of grace.”

Dalgliesh had a momentary and impious picture of his detective sergeant punctiliously attempting to determine and record this essential information about a victim in an official crime report and reflected that Miss Willison’s nice distinction between police work and real life was a salutory reminder of how other people saw his job. He looked forward to telling the Commissioner about it. And then he remembered that this wasn’t the kind of casual professional gossip which they would exchange in that final slightly formal and inevitably disappointing interview which would mark the end of his police career.

Ruefully, he recognized in Miss Willison the type of unusually honest witness whom he had always found difficult. Paradoxically, this old-fashioned rectitude, this sensitivity of conscience, were more difficult to cope with than the prevarications, evasions, or flamboyant lying which were part of a normal interrogation. He would have liked to have asked her who at Toynton Grange was likely to have visited Father Baddeley for the purpose of confession, but recognized that the question would only prejudice confidence between them and that, in any case, he wouldn’t get a reply. But it must have been one of the able bodied. No one else could have come and gone in secret, unless, of course, he or she had an accomplice. He was inclined to dismiss the accomplice. A wheelchair and its occupant, whether pushed from Toynton Grange or brought by car, must surely have been seen at some stage of the journey.

Hoping that he wasn’t sounding too much like a detective in the middle of an interrogation he asked:

“So when you left him he was—what?”

“Just sitting there quietly in the fireside chair. I wouldn’t let him get up. Wilfred had driven me down to the cottage in the small van. He said that he would visit his sister at Faith Cottage while I was with Father Baddeley and be outside again in half an hour unless I knocked on the wall first.”

“So you can hear sounds between the two cottages? I ask because it struck me that if Father Baddeley had felt ill after you’d left, he might have knocked on the wall for Mrs. Hammitt.”

“She says that he didn’t knock, but she might not have heard if she had the television on very loudly. The cottages are very well built, but you can hear sounds through that interior wall, particularly if voices are raised.”

“You mean that you could hear Mr. Anstey talking to his sister?”

Miss Willison seemed to regret that she had gone so far, and she said quickly:

“Well, just now and then. I remember that I had to make an effort of will to prevent it disturbing me. I wished that they would keep their voices lower, and then felt ashamed of myself for being so easily distracted. It was good of Wilfred to drive me to the cottage. Normally, of course, Father Baddeley would come up to the house to see me and we would use what is called the quiet room next to the business room just inside the front door. But Father Baddeley had only been discharged from hospital that morning and it wasn’t right that he should leave the cottage. I could have postponed my visit until he was stronger but he wrote to me from hospital to say that he hoped I would come and precisely at what time. He knew how much it meant to me.”

“Was he fit to be alone? It seems not.”

“Eric and Dot—that’s Sister Moxon—wanted him to come here and be looked after at least for the first night, but he insisted on going straight back home. Then Wilfred suggested that someone should sleep in his spare room in case he wanted help in the night. He wouldn’t agree to that either. He really was adamant that he should be left alone that night; he had great authority in his quiet way. Afterwards I think Wilfred blamed himself for not having been more firm. But what could he do? He couldn’t bring Father Baddeley here by force.”

But it would have been simpler for all concerned if Father Baddeley had agreed to spend at least his first night out of hospital at Toynton Grange. It was surely untypically inconsiderate of him to resist the suggestion so strenuously. Was he expecting another visitor? Was there someone he wanted to see, urgently and in private, someone to whom, like Miss Willison, he had written to give a precisely timed appointment? If so, whatever the reason for the visit, that person must have come on his own feet. He asked Miss Willison if Wilfred and Father Baddeley had spoken together before she had left the cottage.

“No. After I’d been with Father Baddeley about thirty minutes he knocked on the wall with the poker and, soon afterwards, Wilfred honked on the horn. I manoeuvred my chair to the front door just as Wilfred arrived to open it. Father Baddeley was still in his chair. Wilfred called out goodnight to him, but I don’t think he answered. Wilfred seemed in rather a hurry to get home. Millicent came out to help push my chair into the back of the van.”

So neither Wilfred nor his sister had spoken to Michael before driving away that evening, neither had seen him closely. Glancing down at Miss Willison’s strong right hand Dalgliesh toyed momentarily with the possibility that Michael was already dead. But that notion, apart from its psychological unlikelihood, was of course, nonsense. She couldn’t have relied on Wilfred not coming into the cottage. Come to think of it, it was odd that he hadn’t done so. Michael had only returned from hospital that morning. Surely it would have been natural to come in and enquire how he was feeling, to spend at least a few minutes in his company. It was interesting that Wilfred Anstey had made so quick a getaway, that no one had admitted visiting Father Baddeley after seven forty-five.

He asked:

“What lighting was there in the cottage when you were with Father Baddeley?” If the question surprised her, she didn’t show it.

“Only the small table lamp on the bureau top behind his chair. I was surprised that he could see to say Evensong, but the prayers, of course, would be familiar to him.”

“And the lamp was off next morning?”

“Oh yes, Maggie said that she found the cottage in darkness.”

Dalgliesh said:

“I find it rather strange that no one looked in later that night to enquire how Father Baddeley was or help him get to bed.”

She said quickly:

“Eric Hewson thought that Millicent was going to look in last thing and she had somehow got the impression that Eric and Helen—Nurse Rainer, you know—had agreed to do so. They all blamed themselves very much the next day. But, as Eric told us, medically it could have made no difference. Father Baddeley died quite peaceably soon after I left.”

They sat in silence for a minute. Dalgliesh wondered whether this was the right time to ask her about the poison pen letter. Remembering her distress over Victor Holroyd, he was reluctant to embarrass her further. But it was important to know. Looking sideways at the thin face with its look of resolute tranquillity, he said:

“I looked in Father Baddeley’s writing bureau very soon after I arrived, just in case there was a note or unposted letter for me. I found a rather unpleasant poison pen letter under some old receipts. I wondered whether he had spoken to anyone about it, whether anyone else at Toynton Grange had received one.”

She was even more distressed by the question than he had feared. For a moment she could not speak. He stared straight ahead until he heard her voice. But, when at last she answered, she had herself well in hand.

“I had one, about four days before Victor died. It was … it was obscene. I tore it into small fragments and flushed it down the lavatory.”

Dalgliesh said with robust cheerfulness:

“Much the best thing to do with it. But, as a policeman, I’m always sorry when the evidence is destroyed.”

“Evidence?”

“Well, sending poison pen letters can be an offence; more important, it can cause a great deal of unhappiness. It’s probably best always to tell the police and let them find out who’s responsible.”

“The police! Oh, no! We couldn’t do that. It isn’t the kind of problem the police can help with.”

“We aren’t as insensitive as people sometimes imagine. It isn’t inevitable that the culprit would be prosecuted. But it is important to put a stop to this kind of nuisance, and the police have the best facilities. They can send the letter to the forensic science laboratory for examination by a skilled document examiner.”

“But they would need to have the document. I couldn’t have shown the letter to anyone.”

So it had been as bad as that. Dalgliesh asked:

“Would you mind telling me what kind of letter it was? Was it handwritten, typed, on what kind of paper?”

“The letter was typed on Toynton Grange paper, in double spacing, on our old Imperial. Most of us here have learned typewriting. It’s one of the ways in which we try to be self-supporting. There was nothing wrong with the punctuation or spelling. There were no other clues that I could see. I don’t know who typed it, but I think the writer must have been sexually experienced.”

So, even in the middle of her distress, she had applied her mind to the problem. He said:

“There are only a limited number of people with access to that machine. The problem wouldn’t have been too difficult for the police.”

Her gentle voice was stubborn.

“We had the police here over Victor’s death. They were very kind, very considerate. But it was terribly upsetting. It was horrible for Wilfred—for all of us. I don’t think we could have stood it again. I’m sure that Wilfred couldn’t. However tactful the police are, they have to keep on asking questions until they’ve solved the case, surely? It’s no use calling them in and expecting them to put people’s sensitivities before their job.”

This was undeniably true and Dalgliesh had little to argue against it. He asked her what, if anything, she had done apart from flushing away the offending letter.

“I told Dorothy Moxon about it. That seemed the most sensible thing to do. I couldn’t have spoken about it to a man. Dorothy told me that I shouldn’t have destroyed it, that no one could do anything without the evidence. But she agreed that we ought to say nothing at present. Wilfred was particularly worried about money at the time and she didn’t want him to have anything else on his mind. She knew how much it would distress him. Besides, I think she had an idea who might have been responsible. If she were right, then we shan’t be getting any more letters.”

So Dorothy Moxon had believed, or had pretended to believe, that Victor Holroyd was responsible. And if the writer now had the sense and self-control to stop, it was a comfortable theory which, in the absence of the evidence, no one could disprove.

He asked whether anyone else had received a letter. As far as she knew, no one had. Dorothy Moxon hadn’t been consulted by anyone else. The suggestion seemed to distress her. Dalgliesh realized that she had seen the note as a single piece of gratuitous spite directed against herself. The thought that Father Baddeley had also received one, was distressing her almost as much as the original letter. Knowing only too well from his experience the kind of letter it must have been, he said gently:

“I shouldn’t worry too much about Father Baddeley’s letter. I don’t think it would have distressed him. It was very mild really, just a spiteful little note suggesting that he wasn’t of much help to Toynton Grange and that the cottage could be more usefully occupied by someone else. He had too much humility and sense to be bothered by that kind of nonsense. I imagine that he only kept the letter because he wanted to consult me in case he wasn’t the only victim. Sensible people put these things down the WC. But we can’t always be sensible. Anyway, if you do receive another letter, will you promise to show it to me?”

She shook her head gently but didn’t speak. But Dalgliesh saw that she was happier. She put out her withered left hand and placed it momentarily over his, giving it a slight press. The sensation was unpleasant, her hand was dry and cold, the bones felt loose in the skin. But the gesture was both humbling and dignified.

It was getting cold and dark in the courtyard; Henry Carwardine had already gone in. It was time for her to move inside. He thought quickly and then said:

“It isn’t important, and please don’t think that I take my job with me wherever I go. But if during the next few days you can recall how Father Baddeley spent the last week or so before he went into hospital, it would be helpful to me. Don’t ask anyone else about this. Just let me know what he did from your own memory of him, the times he came to Toynton Grange, where else he may have spent his hours. I should like to have a picture in my mind of his last ten days.”

She said:

“I know that he went into Wareham on the Wednesday before he was taken ill, he said to do some shopping and to see someone on business. I remember that because he explained on the Tuesday that he wouldn’t be visiting the Grange as usual next morning.”

So that, thought Dalgliesh, was when he had bought his store of provisions, confident that his letter wouldn’t go unanswered. But then he had been right to be confident.

They sat for a minute not speaking. He wondered what she had thought of so odd a request. She hadn’t seemed surprised. Perhaps she saw it as perfectly natural, this wish to build up a picture of a friend’s last days on earth. But suddenly he had a spasm of apprehension and caution. Ought he perhaps to stress that his request was absolutely private? Surely not. He had told her not to ask anyone else. To make more of it would only arouse suspicion. And what danger could there be? What had he to go on? A broken bureau lock, a missing diary, a stole replaced as if for confession. There was no real evidence here. With an effort of will he reasoned away this inexplicable spasm of apprehension, strong as a premonition. It was too disagreeable a reminder of those long nights in hospital when he had struggled in restless half-consciousness against irrational terrors and half-understood fears. And this was equally irrational, equally to be resisted by sense and reason, the ridiculous conviction that a simple, almost casual and not very hopeful request had sounded so clearly a sentence of death.