The Black Tower

CHAPTER THREE A Stranger for the Night

BEFORE DINNER Anstey suggested that Dennis Lerner should show Dalgliesh round the house. He apologized for not escorting the guest himself, but he had an urgent letter to write. The post was delivered and collected shortly before nine o’clock each morning from the box on the boundary gate. If Adam had letters to send he had only to leave them on the hall table, and Albert Philby would take them to the box with the Toynton Grange letters. Dalgliesh thanked him. There was one urgent letter he needed to write, to Bill Moriarty at the Yard, but he proposed to post that himself later in the day at Wareham. He had certainly no intention of leaving it exposed to the curiosity or speculation of Anstey and his staff.

The suggestion for a tour of the Grange had the force of a command. Helen Rainer was helping the patients wash before dinner and Dot Moxon had disappeared with Anstey, so that he was taken round only by Lerner accompanied by Julius Court. Dalgliesh wished the tour were over, or better still, that it could have been avoided without giving hurt. He recalled with discomfort a visit he had paid as a boy with his father to a geriatric hospital on Christmas Day; the courtesy with which the patients accepted yet one more invasion of their privacy, the public display of pain and deformity, the pathetic eagerness with which the staff demonstrated their small triumphs. Now, as then, he found himself morbidly sensitive to the least trace of revulsion in his voice and thought that he detected what was more offensive, a note of patronizing heartiness. Dennis Lerner didn’t appear to notice it and Julius walked jauntily with them looking round with lively curiosity as if the place were new to him. Dalgliesh wondered whether he had come to keep an eye on Lerner or on Dalgliesh himself.

As they passed from room to room, Lerner lost his first diffidence and became confident, almost voluble. There was something endearing about his naïve pride in what Anstey was trying to do. Anstey had certainly laid out his money with some imagination. The Grange itself, with its large, high rooms and cold marble floors, its oppressively panelled dark oak walls and mullioned windows, was a depressingly unsuitable house for disabled patients. Apart from the dining-room and the rear drawing-room, which had become a TV and communal sitting-room, Anstey had used the house mainly to accommodate himself and his staff and had built on to the rear a one-storey stone extension to provide ten individual patients’ bedrooms on the ground floor and a clinical room and additional bedrooms on the floor above. This extension had been joined to the old stables which ran at right angles to it providing a sheltered patio for the patients’ wheelchairs. The stables themselves had been adapted to provide garages, a workshop and a patients’ activity room for woodwork and modelling. Here, too, the handcream and bath powder which the Home sold to help with finances were made and packed at a workbench behind a transparent plastic screen erected, presumably, to indicate respect for the principle of scientific cleanliness. Dalgliesh could see, hanging on the screen, the white shadows of protective overalls.

Lerner said:

“Victor Holroyd was a chemistry teacher and he gave us the prescription for the handcream and powder. The cream is really only lanolin, almond oil and glycerine but it’s very effective and people seem to like it. We do very well with it. And this corner of the workroom is given over to modelling.”

Dalgliesh had almost exhausted his repertoire of appreciative comments. But now he was genuinely impressed. In the middle of the workbench and mounted on a low wooden base was a clay head of Wilfred Anstey. The neck, elongated and sinewy, rose tortoise-like from the folds of the hood. The head was thrust forward and held a little to the right. It was almost a parody, and yet it had an extraordinary power. How, Dalgliesh wondered, had the sculptor managed to convey the sweetness and the obstinacy of that individual smile, to model compassion and yet reduce it to self-delusion, to show humility garbed in a monk’s habit and yet convey an overriding impression of the puissance of evil. The plastic wrapped lumps and rolls of clay which lay, disorderly, on the workbench only emphasized the force and technical achievement of this one finished work.

Lerner said:

“Henry did the head. Something’s gone a little wrong with the mouth, I think. Wilfred doesn’t seem to mind it but no one else thinks that it does him justice.”

Julius put his head on one side and pursed his lips in a parody of critical assessment.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that. What do you think of it, Dalgliesh?”

“I think it’s remarkable. Did Carwardine do much modelling before he came here?”

It was Dennis Lerner who answered:

“I don’t think he did any. He was a senior civil servant before his illness. He modelled this about a couple of months ago without Wilfred giving him a sitting. It’s quite good for a first effort, isn’t it?”

Julius said:

“The question which interests me is did he do it intentionally, in which case he’s a great deal too talented to waste himself here, or were his fingers merely obeying his subconscious? If so, it raises interesting speculations about the origin of creativity and even more interesting ones about Henry’s subconscious.”

“I think it just came out like that,” said Dennis Lerner simply. He looked at it with puzzled respect, clearly seeing nothing in it either for wonder or explanation.

Lastly, they went into one of the small rooms at the end of the extension. It had been arranged as an office and was furnished with two wooden ink-stained desks which looked as if they were rejects from a government office. At one Grace Willison was typing names and addresses on a perforated sheet of sticky labels. Dalgliesh saw with some surprise that Carwardine was typing what looked like a private letter at the other desk. Both the typewriters were very old. Henry was using an Imperial; Grace a Remington. Dalgliesh stood over her and glanced at the list of names and addresses. He saw that the newsletter was widely distributed. Apart from local rectories, and other homes for the chronic sick, it went to addresses in London and even to two in the United States and one near Marseilles. Flustered at his interest, Grace jerked her elbow clumsily and the bound list of names and addresses from which she was working fell to the floor. But Dalgliesh had seen enough; the unaligned small e, the smudged o, the faint almost indecipherable capital w. There was no doubt that this was the machine on which Father Baddeley’s note had been typed. He picked up the book and handed it to Miss Willison. Without looking at him, she shook her head and said:

“Thank you, but I don’t really need to look at it. I can type all the sixty-eight names by heart. I’ve done it for so long you see. I can imagine what the people are like just from their names and the names they give to their houses. But I’ve always been good at remembering names and addresses. It was very useful to me when I worked for a charity to help discharged prisoners and there were so many lists to type. This is quite short, of course. May I add your name so that you get our quarterly magazine? It’s only ten pence. I’m afraid with postage so expensive we have to charge more than we’d like.”

Henry Carwardine looked up and spoke:

“I believe this quarter we have a poem by Jennie Pegram which begins:

It’s worth ten pence to you Dalgliesh, I should have thought, to discover how she tackles that little problem of rhyming.”

Grace Willison smiled happily.

“It’s only an amateur production I know, but it does keep the League of Friends in touch with what is going on here, our personal friends too, of course.”

Henry said:

“Not mine. They know I’ve lost the use of my limbs but I’ve no wish to suggest that I’ve lost the use of my mind. At best the newsletter reaches the literary level of a parish magazine; at worst, which is three issues out of four, it’s embarrassingly puerile.”

Grace Willison flushed and her lip trembled. Dalgliesh said quickly:

“Please add my name. Would it be easier if I paid for a year now?”

“How kind! Perhaps six months would be safer. If Wilfred does decide to transfer the Grange to the Ridgewell Trust they may have different plans for the newsletter. I’m afraid the future is very uncertain for all of us at present. Would you write your address here? Queenhythe. That’s by the river, isn’t it? How pleasant for you. You won’t be wanting any of the handcream or bath powder, I suppose, although we do send the powder to one or two gentlemen customers. But this is really Dennis’s department. He sees to the distribution and does most of the packing himself. I’m afraid our hands are too shaky to be much use. But I’m sure he could spare you some of the bath powder.”

Dalgliesh was saved from the need to reply to this wistful enquiry by the booming of a gong. Julius said:

“The warning gong. One more boom and dinner will be on the table. I shall return home and see what my indispensable Mrs. Reynolds has left for me. By the way, have you warned the Commander that dinner at Toynton Grange is eaten Trappist fashion in silence? We don’t want him to break the rule with inconvenient questions about Michael’s will or what possible reason a patient in this abode of love could have for hurling himself over the cliff.”

He disappeared at some speed as if afraid that any tendency to linger would expose him to the risk of an invitation to dine.

Grace Willison was obviously relieved to see him go but she smiled bravely at Dalgliesh.

“We do have a rule that no one talks during the evening meal. I hope that it won’t inconvenience you. We take it in turns to read from any work we choose. Tonight it’s Wilfred’s turn so we shall have one of Donne’s sermons. They’re very fine of course—Father Baddeley enjoyed them, I know—but I do find them rather difficult. And I don’t really think that they go well with boiled mutton.”

Henry Carwardine wheeled his chair to the lift, drew back the steel grill with difficulty, clanged the gate closed and pressed the button to the floor above. He had insisted on having a room in the main building, firmly rejecting the unsubstantial, meanly proportioned cells in the annex, and Wilfred, despite what Henry thought were obsessive, almost paranoid fears that he might be trapped in a fire, had reluctantly agreed. Henry had confirmed his committal to Toynton Grange by moving one or two chosen pieces of furniture from his Westminster flat and virtually all his books. The room was large, high ceilinged and pleasantly proportioned, its two windows giving a wide view south-west across the headland. Next door was a lavatory and shower which he shared only with any patient being nursed in the sickroom. He knew, without the least qualm of guilt, that he had the most comfortable quarters in the house. Increasingly he was retreating into this tidy and private world, closing the heavy carved door against involvement, bribing Philby to bring up occasional meals on a tray, to buy for him in Dorchester special cheeses, wines, pâté and fruit to augment the institutional meals which the staff of the Grange took it in turns to cook. Wilfred had apparently thought it prudent not to comment on this minor insubordination, this trespass against the law of togetherness.

He wondered what had provoked him to that spatter of malice against harmless, pathetic Grace Willison. It wasn’t the first time since Holroyd’s death that he had caught himself speaking with Holroyd’s voice. The phenomenon interested him. It set him thinking again about that other life, the one he had so prematurely and resolutely renounced. He had noticed it when chairing committees, how the members played their individual roles, almost as if these had been allocated in advance. The hawk; the dove; the compromiser; the magisterial elder statesman; the unpredictable maverick. How swiftly, if one were absent, a colleague modified his views, subtly adapted even his voice and manner to fill the gap. And so, apparently, he had assumed the mantle of Holroyd. The thought was ironic and not unsatisfying. Why not? Who else at Toynton Grange better fitted that rebarbative, non-conforming role?

He had been one of the youngest Under Secretaries of State ever appointed. He was confidently spoken of as the future head of a Department. That was how he saw himself. And then the disease, touching nerves and muscles at first with tentative fingers, had struck at the roots of confidence, at all the carefully laid plans. Dictating sessions with his personal assistant had become mutual embarrassments to be dreaded and deferred. Every telephone conversation was an ordeal; that first insistent, anxiety pitched ring was enough to set his hand trembling. Meetings which he had always enjoyed and chaired with a quiet if abrasive competence had become unpredictable contests between mind and unruly body. He had become unsure where he had been most confident.

He wasn’t alone in misfortune. He had seen others, some of them in his own Department, being helped from their grotesquely graceless invalid cars into their wheel-chairs, accepting a lower grade and easier work, moving to a division which could afford to carry a passenger. The Department would have balanced expediency and the public interest with proper consideration and compassion. They would have kept him on long after his usefulness justified it. He could have died, as he had watched others die, in official harness, harness lightened and adjusted to his frail shoulders, but nevertheless harness. He accepted that there was a kind of courage in that. But it wasn’t his kind.

It had been a joint meeting with another Department, chaired by himself, that had finally decided him. He still couldn’t think of the shambles without shame and horror. He saw himself again, feet impotently padding, his stick beating a tattoo on the floor as he strove to take one step towards his chair, the mucus spluttering out with his welcoming words to shower over his neighbour’s papers. The ring of eyes around the table, animals’ eyes, watchful, predatory, embarrassed, not daring to meet his. Except for one boy, a young good-looking Principal from the Treasury. He had looked fixedly at the Chairman, not with pity but with an almost clinical interest, noting for future reference one more manifestation of human behaviour under stress. The words had come out at last, of course. Somehow he had got through the meeting. But for him, it had been the end.

He had heard of Toynton Grange as one did hear of such places, through a colleague whose wife received the Home’s quarterly newsletter and contributed to its funds. It had seemed to offer an answer. He was a bachelor without family. He couldn’t hope indefinitely to look after himself, nor on a disability pension could he buy a permanent nurse. And he had to get out of London. If he couldn’t succeed, then he would opt out completely, retire to oblivion, away from the embarrassed pity of colleagues, from noise and foul air, from the hazards and inconveniences of a world aggressively organized for the healthy and able bodied. He would write the book on decision-making in Government planned for his retirement, catch up on his Greek, re-read the whole of Hardy. If he couldn’t cultivate his own garden, at least he could avert fastidious eyes from the lack of cultivation in everyone else’s.

And for the first six months it had seemed to work. There were disadvantages which, strangely, he hadn’t expected or considered; the unenterprising, predictable meals; the pressures of discordant personalities; the delay in getting books and wine delivered; the lack of good talk; the self-absorption of the sick, their preoccupation with symptoms and bodily functions; the awful childishness and spurious joviality of institutional life. But it had been just supportable and he had been reluctant to admit failure since all alternatives seemed worse. And then Peter had arrived.

He had come to Toynton Grange just over a year ago. He was a polio victim, the seventeen-year-old only child of a haulage contractor’s widow from the industrial Midlands who had made three preparatory visits of officious and ill-informed inspection before calculating whether she could afford to accept the vacancy. Henry suspected that, panicked by the loneliness and debased status of the early months of widowhood, she was already looking for a second husband and was beginning to realize that a seventeen-year-old chairbound son was an obstacle to be carefully weighed by likely candidates against her late husband’s money, her own ageing and desperate sexuality. Listening to her spate of obstetric and marital intimacies, Henry had realized once again that the disabled were treated as a different breed. They posed no threat, sexual or otherwise, offered no competition. As companions they had the advantage of animals; literally anything could be spoken in front of them without embarrassment.

So Dolores Bonnington had expressed herself satisfied and Peter had arrived. The boy had made little impression on him at first. It was only gradually that he had come to appreciate his qualities of mind. Peter had been nursed at home with the help of district nurses and had been driven, when his health permitted, to the local comprehensive school. There he had been unlucky. No one, least of all his mother, had discovered his intelligence. Henry Carwardine doubted whether she was capable of recognizing it. He was less ready to acquit the school. Even with the problem of understaffing and overlarge classes, the inevitable logistic difficulties of a huge city comprehensive, someone on the staff of that overequipped and ill-disciplined menagerie, he thought with anger, ought to have been able to recognize a scholar. It was Henry who conceived the idea that they might provide for Peter the education he had lost; that he might in time enter a university and become self-supporting.

To Henry’s surprise, preparing Peter for his ‘O’ levels had provided the common concern, the sense of unity and community at Toynton Grange which none of Wilfred’s experiments had achieved. Even Victor Holroyd helped.

“It seems that the boy isn’t a fool. He’s almost totally uneducated, of course. The staff, poor sods, were probably too busy teaching race relations, sexual technique and other contemporary additions to the syllabus and preventing the barbarians from pulling the school down around their ears to have time for someone with a mind.”

“He ought to have maths and one science, Victor, at least at ‘O’ level. If you could help …”

“Without a lab?”

“There’s the clinical room, you could fix something up there. He wouldn’t be taking a science as a main subject at ‘A’ level?”

“Of course not. I realize my disciplines are included merely to provide an illusion of academic balance. But the boy ought to be taught to think scientifically. I know the suppliers of course. I could probably fix something up.”

“I shall pay, of course.”

“Certainly. I could afford it myself but I’m a great believer in people paying for their own gratifications.”

“And Jennie and Ursula might be interested.”

Henry had been amazed to find himself making the suggestion. Affection—he had not yet come to use the word love—had made him kind.

“God forbid! I’m not setting up a kindergarten. But I’ll take on the boy for maths and general science.”

Holroyd had given three sessions a week each of a carefully measured hour. But there had been no doubt about the quality of his teaching.

Father Baddeley had been pressed into service to teach Latin. Henry himself took English literature and history and undertook the general direction of the course. He discovered that Grace Willison spoke French better than anyone else at Toynton Grange and after some initial reluctance, she agreed to take French conversation twice a week. Wilfred had watched the preparations indulgently, taking no active part but raising no objections. Everyone was suddenly busy and happy.

Peter himself was accepting rather than dedicated. But he proved incredibly hardworking, gently amused perhaps by their common enthusiasm but capable of the sustained concentration which is the mark of a scholar. They found it almost impossible to overwork him. He was grateful, biddable, but detached. Sometimes Henry, looking at the calm girlish face, had the frightening feeling that the teachers were all seventeen-year-old children and the boy alone burdened with the sad cynicism of maturity.

Henry knew that he would never forget that moment when, at last, and joyfully, he had acknowledged love. It had been a warm day in early spring; was it really only six months ago? They had been sitting together where he sat now in the early afternoon sunshine, books on their laps ready to begin the two-thirty history lesson. Peter had been wearing a short-sleeve shirt, and he had rolled up his own sleeves to feel the first warmth of the sun prickling the hairs of his forearm. They had been sitting in silence as he was sitting now. And then, without turning to look at him, Peter had lain the length of his soft inner forearm against Henry’s and, deliberately, as if every movement were part of a ritual, an affirmation, had twined their fingers together so that their palms too were joined flesh against flesh. Henry’s nerves and blood remembered that moment and would do until he died. The shock of ecstasy, the sudden realization of joy, a spring of sheer unalloyed happiness which for all its surging excitement was yet paradoxically rooted in fulfilment and peace. It seemed in that moment as if everything which had happened in life, his job, his illness, coming to Toynton Grange, had led inevitably to this place, this love. Everything—success, failure, pain, frustration—had led to it and was justified by it. Never had he been so aware of another’s body; the beat of the pulse in the thin wrist; the labyrinth of blue veins lying against his, blood flowing in concert with his blood; the delicate unbelievably soft flesh of the forearm; the bones of the childish fingers confidently resting between his own. Besides the intimacy of this first touch all previous adventures of the flesh had been counterfeit. And so they had sat silently, for unmeasured unfathomable time, before turning to look, at first gravely and then smilingly, into each other’s eyes.

He wondered now how he could have so underestimated Wilfred. Happily secure in the confidence of love acknowledged and returned, he had treated Wilfred’s innuendos and expostulations—when they pierced his consciousness—with pitying contempt, seeing them as no more real or threatening than the bleatings of a timid, ineffectual schoolmaster obsessively warning his boys against unnatural vice.

“It’s good of you to give up so much time to Peter, but we ought to remember that we are one family at Toynton Grange. Other people would like a share of your interest. It isn’t perhaps kind or wise to show too marked a preference for one person. I think that Ursula and Jennie and even poor Georgie sometimes feel neglected.”

Henry had hardly heard; had certainly not bothered to reply.

“Henry, Dot tells me that you’ve taken to locking your door when giving Peter his lesson. I would prefer that you didn’t. It is one of our rules that doors are never locked. If either of you needed medical help suddenly, it could be very dangerous.”

Henry had continued to lock his door keeping the key always with him. He and Peter might have been the only two people at Toynton Grange. Lying in bed at night he began to plan and to dream, at first tentatively and then with the euphoria of hope. He had given up too early and too easily. There was still some future before him. The boy’s mother hardly visited him, seldom wrote. Why shouldn’t the two of them leave Toynton Grange and live together? He had his pension and some capital. He could buy a small house, at Oxford or Cambridge perhaps, and get it adapted for their two wheelchairs. When Peter was at university he would need a home. He made calculations, wrote to his bank manager, schemed how it might be organized so that the plan in its ultimate reasonableness and beauty could be presented to Peter. He knew that there were dangers. He would get worse; with luck Peter might even slightly improve. He must never let himself be a burden to the boy. Father Baddeley had only once spoken to him directly of Peter. He had brought over to Toynton Grange a book from which Henry had planned to set a passage of précis. On leaving he had said gently, as always not baulking the truth.

“Your disease is progressive, Peter’s isn’t. One day he’s going to have to manage without you. Remember that, my son.” Well, he would remember.

In early August Mrs. Bonnington arranged for Peter to spend a fortnight with her at home. She called it taking him for a holiday. Henry had said:

“Don’t write. I never expect anything good from a letter. I shall see you again in two weeks.”

But Peter hadn’t come back. The evening before he was due to return Wilfred had announced the news at dinner, eyes carefully avoiding Henry’s.

“You’ll be glad for Peter’s sake to hear that Mrs. Bonnington has found a place for him nearer his home and that he won’t be returning to us. She hopes to marry again fairly soon and she and her husband want to visit Peter more frequently and have him home for occasional weekends. The new home will make arrangements for Peter’s education to continue. You have all worked so hard with him. I know you’ll be glad to hear that it won’t be wasted.”

It had been very cleverly planned; he had to give Wilfred that credit. There must have been discreet telephone calls and letters to the mother, negotiations with the new home. Peter must have been on the waiting list for weeks, possibly months. Henry could imagine the phrases.

“Unhealthy interests; unnatural affection; driving the boy too hard; mental and psychological pressure.”

Hardly anyone at Toynton Grange had spoken to him about the transfer. They had avoided the contamination of his misery. Grace Willison had said, shrinking from his angry eyes:

“We shall all miss him, but his own mother … It’s natural that she should want him close to her.”

“Of course. By all means let us defer to the sacred rights of motherhood.”

Within a week they had apparently forgotten Peter and returned to their old pursuits as easily as children discarding new and unwanted Christmas toys. Holroyd had disconnected his apparatus and packed it away.

“Let it be a lesson to you, my dear Henry. Put not your trust in pretty boys. We can hardly expect that he was dragged to the new home by force.”

“He may have been.”

“Oh, come now! The boy is practically of age. He has the use of brain and speech. He can hold a pen. We have to face it that our company here was less fascinating than we had deluded ourselves. Peter is amenable. He made no objections when he was dumped here and I’ve no doubt he made none when he was dragged away.”

Henry, on impulse, had grasped Father Baddeley’s arm as he passed and asked him:

“Did you collude in this triumph for morality and mother-love?”

Father Baddeley had briefly shaken his head, a gesture so slight that it was hardly discernible. He had seemed about to speak and then, with one pressure on Henry’s shoulder, had moved on, for once at a loss, offering no comfort. But Henry had felt a spurt of anger and resentment against Michael as he hadn’t against anyone else at Toynton Grange. Michael who had the use of his legs and voice, who wasn’t reduced by anger into a jibbering, slobbering buffoon. Michael who could surely have prevented this monstrous thing if he hadn’t been inhibited by timidity, by his fear and disgust of the flesh. Michael who had no place at Toynton Grange if not to affirm love.

There had been no letter. Henry had been reduced to bribing Philby to collect the post. His paranoia had reached the stage when he believed that Wilfred might be intercepting letters. He didn’t write himself. Whether or not to do so was a preoccupation which took most of his waking hours. But, less than six weeks later, Mrs. Bonnington had written to Wilfred to say that Peter was dead of pneumonia. It could, Henry knew, have happened anywhere at any time. It didn’t necessarily mean that the medical and nursing care at the new home had been less good than at Toynton Grange. Peter had always been peculiarly at risk. But in his heart Henry knew that he could have kept Peter safe. In scheming his transfer from Toynton Grange Wilfred had killed him.

And Peter’s murderer went about his business, smiled his indulgent lopsided smile, ceremoniously drew the folds of his cloak around him to preserve him from the contamination of human emotion, surveyed complacently the flawed objects of his beneficence. Was it his imagination, Henry wondered, that Wilfred had become afraid of him? Now they seldom spoke. Naturally solitary, Henry had become morose since Peter’s death. Except for meal times he spent most of his days in his room, looking out over the desolate headland, neither reading nor working, possessed by a profound ennui. He knew that he hated rather than felt hatred. Love, joy, anger, grief even, were emotions too powerful for his diminished personality. He could entertain only their pale shadows. But hatred was like a latent fever dormant in the blood; sometimes it could flare into terrifying delirium. It was during one such a mood that Holroyd had whispered to him, had wheeled his chair across the patio and manoeuvred it close to Henry. Holroyd’s mouth, pink and precise as a girl’s, a neat, suppurating wound in the heavy blue jaw, puckered to discharge its venom. Holroyd’s breath sour in his nostrils.

“I have learnt something of interest about our dear Wilfred. I shall share it with you in time but you must forgive me if I savour it alone for a little longer. There will be a right moment for disclosure. One strives always for the maximum dramatic effect.” Hatred and boredom had reduced them to this, thought Henry, two schoolboy buddies whispering secrets together, planning their petty stratagems of vengeance and betrayal.

He looked out of the tall, curved window westward over the rising headland. The darkness was falling. Somewhere out there the restless tide was scouring the rocks, rocks washed clean for ever of Holroyd’s blood. Not even a twist of torn cloth remained for the barnacles to fasten on. Holroyd’s dead hands like floating weeds moving sluggishly in the tide, sand-filled eyes turned upwards to the swooping gulls. What was that poem of Walt Whitman which Holroyd had read at dinner on the night before he died:

Why that poem, in its sentimental resignation, at once so alien to Holroyd’s embattled spirit, and yet so prophetically apposite? Was he telling them, even subconsciously, that he knew what must happen, that he embraced and welcomed it? Peter and Holroyd. Holroyd and Baddeley. And now this policeman friend of Baddeley’s had arrived out of his past. Why, and for what? He might learn something when they drank together after dinner with Julius. And so, of course, might Dalgliesh. “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” But Duncan was wrong. There was a great deal of art and one in which a Commander of the Metropolitan Police would be better practised than most. Well, if that was what he had come for, he could make a beginning after dinner. Tonight he, Henry, would dine in his room. Philby when summoned would bring up his tray and plonk it unceremoniously and grudgingly in front of him. It wasn’t possible to buy civility from Philby but it was possible, he thought with grim exultation, to buy almost anything else.

“My body is my prison; and I would be so obedient to the Law, as not to break prison; I would not hasten my death by starving or macerating this body. But if this prison be burnt down by continual fevers, or blown down with continual vapours, would any man be so in love with the ground upon which that prison stood, as to desire rather to stay there than to go home?”

It wasn’t so much, thought Dalgliesh, that the Donne didn’t go with the stewed mutton, as that the mutton didn’t go with the home-brewed wine. Neither was in itself unpalatable. The mutton, cooked with onions, potatoes and carrots, and flavoured with herbs, was unexpectedly good if a little greasy. The elderberry wine was a nostalgic reminder of duty visits paid with his father to house-bound and hospitable parishioners. Together they tasted lethal. He reached for the water carafe.

Opposite him sat Millicent Hammitt, her square slab of a face softened by the candlelight, her absence during the afternoon explained by the pungent scent of lacquer which was wafted to him from the stiff, corrugated waves of greying hair. Everyone was present except the Hewsons, dining presumably in their own cottage, and Henry Carwardine. At the far end of the table, Albert Philby sat a little apart, a monkish Caliban in a brown habit, half crouching over his food. He ate noisily, tearing his bread into crusts and wiping them vigorously around his plate. All the patients were being helped to eat. Dalgliesh, despising his squeamishness, tried to shut his ears to the muted slobbering, the staccato rattle of spoon against plate, the sudden retching, unobtrusively controlled.

“If thou didst depart from that Table in peace, thou canst depart from this world in peace. And the peace of that Table is to come to it in pace desiderii, with a contended minde….”

Wilfred stood at a reading desk at the head of the table, flanked by two candles in metal holders. Jeoffrey, distended with food, lay ceremoniously curved at his feet. Wilfred had a good voice and knew how to use it. An actor manqué? Or an actor who had found his stage and played on, happily oblivious of the dwindling audience, of the creeping paralysis of his dream? A neurotic driven by obsession? Or a man at peace with himself, secure at the still centre of his being?

Suddenly the four table candles flared and hissed. Dalgliesh’s ears caught the faint squeak of wheels, the gentle thud of metal against wood. The door was slowly swinging open. Wilfred’s voice faltered, and then broke off. A spoon rasped violently against a plate. Out of the shadows came a wheelchair, its occupant, head bent, swaddled in a thick plaid cloak. Miss Willison gave a sad little moan and scratched the sign of the cross on her grey dress. There was a gasp from Ursula Hollis. No one spoke. Suddenly Jennie Pegram screamed, thin and insistent as a tin whistle. The sound was so unreal that Dot Moxon jerked her head round as if uncertain where the sound was coming from. The scream subsided into a giggle. The girl clamped her hand against her mouth. Then she said:

“I thought it was Victor! That’s Victor’s cloak.”

No one else moved or spoke. Glancing along the table, Dalgliesh let his eyes rest speculatively on Dennis Lerner. His face was a mask of terror which slowly disintegrated into relief, the features seeming to droop and crumble, amorphous as a smudged painting. Carwardine wheeled his chair to the table. He had some difficulty in getting out his words. A globule of mucus gleamed like a yellow jewel in the candle light and dribbled from his chin. At last he said in his high distorted voice:

“I thought I might join you for coffee. It seemed discourteous to absent myself on our guest’s first night.”

Dot Moxon’s voice was sharp:

“Did you have to wear that cloak?”

He turned to her:

“It was hanging in the business room and I felt cold. And we hold so much in common. Need we exclude the dead?”

Wilfred said:

“Shall we remember the Rule?”

They turned their faces to him like obedient children. He waited until they had again begun to eat. The hands which gripped the sides of the reading desk were steady, the beautiful voice perfectly controlled.

“That so riding at Anchor, and in that calme, whether God enlarge thy voyage, by enlarging thy life, or put thee into the harbour by the breath, by the breathlessness of Death, either way, East or West, thou maist depart in peace….”

It was after eight-thirty before Dalgliesh set out to wheel Henry Carwardine to Julius Court’s cottage. The task wasn’t easy for a man in the first stages of convalescence. Carwardine, despite his leanness, was surprisingly heavy and the stony path wound uphill. Dalgliesh hadn’t liked to suggest using his car since to be hoisted through the narrow door might be more painful and humiliating for his companion than the customary wheelchair. Anstey had been passing through the hall as they left. He had held open the door and helped guide the wheelchair down the ramp, but had made no attempt to assist, nor did he offer the use of the patients’ bus. Dalgliesh wondered whether it was his imagination that detected a note of disapproval of the enterprise in Anstey’s final goodnight.

Neither man spoke for the first part of the journey. Carwardine rested a heavy torch between his knees and tried to steady its beam on the path. The circle of light, reeling and spinning before them with every lurch of the chair, illumined with dazzling clarity a secret circular night world of greenness, movement and scurrying life. Dalgliesh, a little light-headed with tiredness, felt disassociated from his physical surroundings. The two thick rubber handgrips, slippery to the touch, were loose and twisted irritatingly beneath his hands, seeming to have no relation to the rest of the chair. The path ahead was real only because its stones and crevices jarred the wheels. The night was still and very warm for autumn, the air heavy with the smell of grass and the memory of summer flowers. Low clouds had obscured the stars and they moved forwards in almost total darkness towards the strengthening murmur of the sea and the four oblongs of light which marked Toynton Cottage. When they were close enough for the largest oblong to reveal itself as the rear door of the cottage, Dalgliesh said on impulse:

“I found a rather disagreeable poison pen letter in Father Baddeley’s bureau. Obviously someone at Toynton Grange didn’t like him. I wondered whether this was personal spite or whether anyone else had received one.”

Carwardine bent his head upwards. Dalgliesh saw his face intriguingly foreshortened, his sharp nose a spur of bone, the jaw hanging loose as a marionette’s below the shapeless void of mouth. He said:

“I had one about ten months ago, placed inside my library book, I haven’t had one since, and I don’t know of anyone else who has. It’s not the kind of thing people talk about, but I think the news would have got around if the trouble had been endemic. Mine was, I suppose, the usual muck. It suggested what methods of somewhat acrobatic sexual self-gratification might be open to me supposing I still had the physical agility to perform them. It took the desire to do so for granted.”

“It was obscene, then, rather than merely offensive?”

“Obscene in the sense of calculated to disgust rather than to deprave or corrupt, yes.”

“Have you any idea who was responsible?”

“It was typed on Toynton Grange paper and on an old Remington machine used chiefly by Grace Willison to send out the quarterly newsletter. She seemed the most likely candidate. It wasn’t Ursula Hollis; she didn’t arrive until two months later. And aren’t these things usually sent by respectable middle-aged spinsters?”

“In this case I doubt it.”

“Oh, well—I defer to your greater experience of obscenity.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Only Julius. He counselled against telling anyone else and suggested I tear the note up and flush it down the WC. As that advice coincided with my own inclination, I took it. As I said, I haven’t had another. I imagine that the sport loses its thrill if the victim shows absolutely no sign of concern.”

“Could it have been Holroyd?”

“It didn’t really seem his style. Victor was offensive but not, I should have thought, in that particular way. His weapon was the voice, not the pen. Personally I didn’t mind him as much as some of the others did. He hit out rather like an unhappy child. There was more personal bitterness than active malice. Admittedly, he added a somewhat childish codicil to his will the week before he died; Philby and Julius’s housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, witnessed it. But that was probably because he’d made up his mind to die and wanted to relieve us all of any obligation to remember him with kindness.”

“So you think he killed himself?”

“Of course. And so does everyone else. How else could it have happened? It seems the most likely hypothesis. It was either suicide or murder.”

It was the first time anyone at Toynton Grange had used that portentous word. Spoken in Carwardine’s pedantic, rather high voice it sounded as incongruous as blasphemy on the lips of a nun.

Dalgliesh said:

“Or the chair brakes could have been defective.”

“Given the circumstances, I count that as murder.”

There was silence for a moment. The chair lurched over a small boulder and the torch light swung upwards in a wide arc, a miniature and frail searchlight. Carwardine steadied it and then said:

“Philby oiled and checked the chair brakes at eight-fifty on the night before Holroyd died. I was in the workroom messing about with my modelling clay at the time. I saw him. He left the workroom shortly afterwards and I stayed on until about ten o’clock.”

“Did you tell the police that?”

“Since they asked me, yes. They enquired with heavy tact where exactly I had spent the evening and whether I had touched Holroyd’s chair after Philby had left. Since I would hardly have admitted the fact if I had, the question was naïve. They questioned Philby, although not in my presence, and I’ve no doubt that he confirmed my story. I have an ambivalent attitude towards the police; I confine myself strictly to answering their questions, but on the premise that they are, in general, entitled to the truth.”

They had arrived. Light streamed from the rear door of the cottage and Julius Court, a dark silhouette, emerged to meet them. He took the wheelchair from Dalgliesh and pushed it along the short stone passage leading into the sitting-room. On the way Dalgliesh just had time to glimpse through an open door the pine-covered walls, red tiled floor and gleaming chrome of Julius’s kitchen, a kitchen too like his own where a woman, overpaid and underworked to assuage her employer’s guilt for hiring her at all, cooked the occasional meal to gratify one person’s over-fastidious taste.

The sitting-room occupied the whole of the front ground floor of what had obviously originally been two cottages. A fire of driftwood crackled on the open hearth but both the long windows were open to the night. The stone walls vibrated with the thudding of the sea. It was disconcerting to feel so close to the cliff edge and yet not know precisely how close. As if reading his thoughts, Julius said:

“We’re just six yards from the forty-foot drop to the rocks. There’s a stone patio and low wall outside; we might sit there later if it’s warm enough. What will you drink, spirits or wine? I know Henry’s preference is for claret.”

“Claret please.”

Dalgliesh didn’t repent of his choice when he saw the labels on the three bottles which were standing, two already uncorked, on the low table near the hearth. He was surprised that wine of such quality should be produced for two casual guests. While Julius busied himself with the glasses, Dalgliesh wandered about the room. It contained enviable objects, if one were in a mood to prize personal possessions. His eyes lit on a splendid Sunderland lustreware jug commemorating Trafalgar, three early Staffordshire figures on the stone mantelpiece, a couple of agreeable seascapes on the longest wall. Above the door leading to the cliff edge was a ship’s figure-head finely and ornately carved in oak; two cherubs supported a galleon topped with a shield and swathed with heavy seaman’s knots. Seeing his interest, Julius called out:

“It was made about 1660 by Grinling Gibbons, reputedly for Jacob Court, a smuggler in these parts. As far as I can discover, he was absolutely no ancestor of mine, worse luck. It’s probably the oldest merchant ship figure-head known to exist. Greenwich think they have one earlier, but I’d give mine the benefit of a couple of years.”

Set on a pedestal at the far end of the room and faintly gleaming as if luminous was the marble bust of a winged child holding in his chubby hand a posy of rosebuds and lilies of the valley. The marble was the colour of pale coffee except over the lids of the closed eyes which were tinged with a faint pink. The unveined hands held the flowers with the upright, unselfconscious grip of a child; the boy’s lips were slightly parted in a half-smile, tranquil and secretive. Dalgliesh stretched out a finger and gently stroked the cheek; he could imagine it warm to his touch. Julius came over to him carrying two glasses.

“You like my marble? It’s a memorial piece, of course, seventeenth or very early eighteenth century and derived from Bernini. Henry, I suspect, would like it better if it were Bernini.”

Henry called out:

“I wouldn’t like it better. I did say I’d be prepared to pay more for it.”

Dalgliesh and Court moved back to the fireplace and settled down for what was obviously intended to be a night of serious drinking. Dalgliesh found his eyes straying around the room. There was no bravura, no conscious striving after originality or effect. And yet, trouble had been taken; every object was in the right place. They had, he thought, been bought because Julius liked them; they weren’t part of a careful scheme of capital appreciation, nor acquired out of an obsessive need to add to his collection. Yet Dalgliesh doubted whether any had been casually discovered or cheaply bought. The furniture too, betrayed wealth. The leather sofa and the two winged and back buttoned leather chairs were perhaps too opulent for the proportions and basic simplicity of the room, but Julius had obviously chosen them for comfort. Dalgliesh reproached himself for the streak of puritanism which compared the room unfavourably with the snug, unindulgent shabbiness of Father Baddeley’s sitting-room.

Carwardine, sitting in his wheelchair and staring into the fire above the rim of his glass, asked suddenly:

“Did Baddeley warn you about the more bizarre manifestations of Wilfred’s philanthropy, or was your visit here unpremeditated?”

It was a question Dalgliesh had been expecting. He sensed that both men were more than casually interested in his reply.

“Father Baddeley wrote to say that he would be glad to see me. I decided to come on impulse. I’ve had a spell in hospital and it seemed a good idea to spend a few days of my convalescence with him.”

Carwardine said:

“I can think of more suitable places than Hope Cottage for convalescence, if the inside is anything like the exterior. Had you known Baddeley long?”

“Since boyhood; he was my father’s curate. But we last met, and only briefly, when I was at university.”

“And having been content to know nothing of each other for a decade or so, you’re naturally distressed to find him so inconveniently dead.”

Unprovoked, Dalgliesh replied equably:

“More than I would have expected. We seldom wrote except to exchange cards at Christmas but he was a man more often in my thoughts, I suppose, than some people I saw almost daily. I don’t know why I never bothered to get in touch. One makes the excuse of busyness. But, from what I remember of him, I can’t quite see how he fitted in here.”

Julius laughed:

“He didn’t. He was recruited when Wilfred was going through a more orthodox phase, I suppose to give Toynton Grange a certain religious respectability. But in recent months I sensed a coolness between them, didn’t you, Henry? Father Baddeley was probably no longer sure whether Wilfred wanted a priest or a guru. Wilfred picks up any scraps of philosophy, metaphysics and orthodox religion which take his fancy to make his Technicolor dreamcoat. As a result, as you’ll probably discover if you stay long enough, this place suffers from the lack of a coherent ethos. There’s nothing more fatal to success. Take my London club, dedicated simply to the enjoyment of good food and wine and the exclusion of bores and pederasts. It’s unstated of course, but we all know where we stand. The aims are simple and comprehensible and, therefore, realizable. Here the poor dears don’t know whether they’re in a nursing home, a commune, a hotel, a monastery or a particularly dotty lunatic asylum. They even have meditation sessions from time to time. I’m afraid Wilfred may be getting a touch of the Zens.”

Carwardine broke in:

“He’s muddled, but which of us isn’t? Basically he’s kind and well meaning, and at least he’s spent his own personal fortune at Toynton Grange. In this age of noisy and self-indulgent commitment when the first principle of private or public protest is that it mustn’t relate to anything for which the protestor can be held in the least responsible or involve him in the slightest personal sacrifice that, at least, is in his favour.”

“You like him?” asked Dalgliesh.

Henry Carwardine answered with surprising roughness.

“As he’s saved me from the ultimate fate of incarceration in a long-stay hospital and gives me a private room at a price I can afford, I’m naturally bound to find him delightful.”

There was a short, embarrassed silence. Sensing it, Carwardine added:

“The food is the worst thing about Toynton, but that can be remedied, even if I do occasionally feel like a greedy schoolboy feasting alone in my room. And listening to my fellow inmates read their favourite bleeding chunks from popular theology and the less enterprising anthologies of English verse is a small price to pay for silence at dinner.”

Dalgliesh said:

“Staffing must be a difficulty. According to Mrs. Hewson, Anstey chiefly relies on an ex-convict and an otherwise unemployable matron.”

Julius Court reached out for the claret and refilled the three glasses. He said:

“Dear Maggie, discreet as always. It’s true that Philby, the handyman, has some kind of record. He’s not exactly an advertisement for the place, but someone has to sluice the foul linen, slaughter the chickens, clean the lavatories and do the other jobs which Wilfred’s sensitive soul cringes at. Besides, he’s passionately devoted to Dot Moxon, and I’ve no doubt that helps to keep her happy. Since Maggie has let slip so much, you may as well know the truth about Dot. Perhaps you remember something of the case—she was that notorious staff nurse at Nettingfield Geriatric Hospital. Four years ago she struck a patient. It was only a light blow but the old woman fell, knocked her head against a bedside locker and nearly died. Reading between the lines at the subsequent enquiry report, she was a selfish, demanding, foul-mouthed virago who would have tempted a saint. Her family would have nothing to do with her—didn’t even visit—until they discovered that there was a great deal of agreeable publicity to be made out of righteous indignation. Perfectly proper too, no doubt. Patients, however disagreeable, are sacrosanct and it’s in all our ultimate interests to uphold that admirable precept. The incident sparked off a spate of complaints about the hospital. There was a full-dress enquiry covering the administration, medical services, food, nursing care, the lot. Not surprisingly, they found plenty to enquire into. Two male nurses were subsequently dismissed and Dot left of her own accord. The enquiry, while deploring her loss of control, exonerated her from any suspicion of deliberate cruelty. But the damage was done; no other hospital wanted her. Apart from the suspicion that she wasn’t exactly reliable under stress, they blamed her for provoking an enquiry which did no one any good and lost two men their jobs. Afterwards, Wilfred tried to get in touch with her; he thought from the accounts of the enquiry that she’d been hard done by. He took some time to trace her, but succeeded in the end and invited her here as a kind of matron. Actually, like the rest of the staff, she does anything that’s needed from nursing to cooking. His motives weren’t entirely beneficent. It’s never easy to find nursing staff for a remote specialized place like this, apart from the unorthodoxy of Wilfred’s methods. If he lost Dorothy Moxon he wouldn’t easily find a replacement.”

Dalgliesh said:

“I remember the case but not her face. It’s the young blonde girl—Jennie Pegram, isn’t it?—who looks familiar.”

Carwardine smiled; indulgent, a little contemptuous.

“I thought you might ask about her. Wilfred ought to find a way of using her for fund raising, she’d love it. I don’t know anyone who’s better at assuming that expression of wistful, uncomprehending, long-suffering fortitude. She’d make a fortune for the place properly exploited.”

Julius laughed:

“Henry, as you have gathered, doesn’t like her. If she looks familiar, you may have seen her on television about eighteen months ago. It was the month for the media to lacerate the British conscience on behalf of the young chronic sick, and the producer sent out his underlings to scavenge for a suitable victim. They came up with Jennie. She had been nursed for twelve years, and very well nursed, in a geriatric unit, partly, I gather, because they couldn’t find a more suitable place for her, partly because she rather liked being the petted favourite of the patients and visitors, and partly because the hospital had group physiotherapy and occupational therapy facilities of which our Jennie took advantage. But the programme, as you can imagine, made the most of her situation—“Unfortunate twenty-five-year-old girl incarcerated among the old and dying; shut away from the community; helpless; hopeless.” All the most senile patients were carefully grouped round her for the benefit of the camera with Jennie in the middle doing her stuff magnificently. Shrill accusations against the inhumanity of the Department of Health, the regional hospital board, the hospital managers. Next day, predictably, there was a public outburst of indignation which lasted, I imagine, until the next protest programme. The compassionate British public demanded that a more suitable place be found for Jennie. Wilfred wrote offering a vacancy here, Jennie accepted, and fourteen months ago she arrived. No one quite knows what she makes of us. I should give a lot to look into what passes for Jennie’s mind.”

Dalgliesh was surprised that Julius had such an intimate knowledge of the patients at Toynton Grange, but he asked no more questions. He dropped unobtrusively out of the chatter and sat drinking his wine, half listening to the desultory voices of his companions. It was the quiet, undemanding talk of men who had acquaintances and interests in common, who knew just enough about each other and cared just sufficiently to create an illusion of companionship. He had no particular wish to share it. The wine deserved silence. He realized that this was the first fine wine he had drunk since his illness. It was reassuring that yet another of life’s pleasures still held its power to solace. It took him a minute to realize that Julius was talking to him directly.

“I’m sorry about the proposed poetry reading. But I’m not altogether displeased. It illustrates one thing that you’ll realize about Toynton. They exploit. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it. They say that they want to be treated as ordinary people, and then make demands no ordinary person would dream of making, and naturally one can’t refuse. Now, perhaps, you won’t think too harshly of those of us who seem less than enthusiastic about Toynton.”

“Us?”

“The little group of normals, physically normal anyway, in thrall to the place.”

“Are you?”

“Oh, yes! I get away to London or abroad so that the spell never really has a chance to take hold. But think of Millicent, stuck in that cottage because Wilfred lets her have it rent free. All she wants is to get back to the bridge tables and cream cakes of Cheltenham Spa. So why doesn’t she? And Maggie. Maggie would say that all she wanted was a bit of life. Well, that’s what we all want, a bit of life. Wilfred tried to get her interested in bird watching. I remember her reply. ‘If I have to watch another bloody seagull shitting on Toynton Head I’ll run screaming into the sea.’ Dear Maggie. I rather take to Maggie when she’s sober. And Eric? Well, he could break away if he had the courage. Looking after five patients and medically supervising the production of hand lotion and bath powder is hardly an honourable job for a registered medical practitioner, even one with an unfortunate predilection for little girls. And then there’s Helen Rainer. But I rather fancy that our enigmatic Helen’s reason for staying is more elemental and understandable. But they’re all a prey of boredom. And now I’m boring you. Would you like to hear some music? We usually listen to records when Henry’s here.”

The claret, unaccompanied by speech or music, would have contented Dalgliesh. But he could see that Henry was as anxious to hear a record as Julius probably was to demonstrate the superiority of his stereo equipment. Invited to choose Dalgliesh asked for Vivaldi. While the record was playing he strolled out into the night. Julius followed him and they stood in silence at the low barricade of stone at the cliff edge. The sea lay before them, faintly luminous, ghostly under a scatter of high, unemphatic stars. He thought that the tide was on the ebb but it still sounded very close, thudding against the rocky beach in great chords of sound, a bass accompaniment to the high, sweet counterpoint of the distant violins. Dalgliesh thought that he could feel the spume light on his forehead, but when he put up his hand he found it was only a trick of the freshening breeze.

So there must have been two poison pen writers, only one genuinely committed to his or her obscene trade. It was obvious from Grace Willison’s distress and Carwardine’s laconic disgust that they had received a very different type of letter from the one found at Hope Cottage. It was too great a coincidence that two poison pens should be operating at the same time in so small a community. The assumption was that Father Baddeley’s note had been planted in the bureau after his death, with small attempt at concealment, for Dalgliesh to find. If this were so, then it must have been put there by someone who knew about at least one of the other letters; had been told that it was typed on a Toynton Grange machine and on Toynton Grange paper, but who hadn’t actually seen it. Grace Willison’s letter had been typed on the Imperial machine and she had confided only in Dot Moxon. Carwardine’s, like Father Baddeley’s, had been typed on the Remington, and he had told Julius Court. The inference was obvious. But how could a man as intelligent as Court expect such a childish ruse to deceive a professional detective, or even an enthusiastic amateur? But then, had it been intended to? Dalgliesh had signed his postcard to Father Baddeley only with his initials. If it had been found by someone with a guilty secret as he searched feverishly through the bureau it would have told him nothing except that Father Baddeley was expecting a visitor on the afternoon of 1st October, a visitor who was probably as innocuous as a fellow clergyman or an old parishioner. But, just in case Father Baddeley had confided that something was on his mind, it might have seemed worthwhile to concoct and plant a false clue. Almost certainly, it had been placed in the bureau shortly before his arrival. If Anstey were telling the truth about looking through Father Baddeley’s papers on the morning after his death, it was impossible that he should have missed the poison pen note or failed to remove it.

But even if all this were an elaborate and over-sophisticated edifice of conjecture, and Father Baddeley had indeed received the poison pen note, Dalgliesh now felt certain that it wasn’t the reason for his summons. Father Baddeley would have felt perfectly competent both to discover the sender and to deal with him. He was unworldly but not naïve. Unlike Dalgliesh, he had probably seldom become involved professionally with the more spectacular sins but that didn’t mean they were outside his comprehension or, for that matter, his compassion. It was arguable, anyway, that those were the sins which did least damage. Of the more corrosive, petty, mean-minded delinquencies in all their sad but limited variety he, like any other parish priest, would have had his fill. He had his answer ready, compassionate but inexorable, offered, Dalgliesh remembered wryly, with all the gentle arrogance of absolute certainty. No, when Father Baddeley wrote he wanted professional advice he meant just that; advice which he could only get from a police officer on a matter which he felt unable to deal with himself. And that was unlikely to include the detection of a spiteful but not particularly vicious poison pen writer operating in a small community of which every member must have been known intimately to him.

The prospect of trying to discover the truth filled Dalgliesh with a profound depression. He was at Toynton Grange merely as a private visitor. He had no standing, no facilities, no equipment even. The task of sorting Father Baddeley’s books could be stretched to cover a week, perhaps longer. After that, what excuse would he have to remain? And he had discovered nothing which would justify bringing in the local police. What did these vague suspicions, this sense of foreboding amount to? An old man, dying of heart disease, suffering his final and expected attack peacefully in his fireside chair, reaching perhaps in his last conscious moment for the familiar feel of his stole, lifting it over his head for the last time for reasons, probably only half understood, of comfort, of reassurance, of symbolism, of the simple affirmation of his priesthood or his faith. One could think of a dozen explanations, all simple, all more plausible than the secret visit of a murderous mock penitent. The missing diary; who could ever prove that Father Baddeley hadn’t himself destroyed it before his admission to hospital? The forced bureau lock; nothing but the diary was missing and, as far as he knew, nothing valuable had been stolen. In the absence of other evidence, how could he possibly justify an official enquiry into a mislaid key and a broken lock?

But Father Baddeley had sent for him. There had been something on his mind. If Dalgliesh, without too great involvement, inconvenience or embarrassment, could discover in the next week or ten days what it had been, then he would do so. He owed that at least to the old man. But there it would end. Tomorrow he would pay a duty visit to the police and to Father Baddeley’s solicitor. If anything came to light, then the police could deal with it. He was finished with police work, professional or amateur, and it would take more than the death of one old priest to change that decision.

When they got back to Toynton Grange shortly after midnight Henry Carwardine said roughly:

“They’ll be relying on you to help me to bed, I’m afraid. Dennis Lerner usually wheels me to Toynton Cottage and calls for me at midnight, but since you’re here … As Julius said, we’re great exploiters at Toynton Grange. And I’d better shower. Dennis is off duty tomorrow morning and I can’t stomach Philby. My room is on the first floor. We take the lift.”

Henry knew that he sounded ungracious but that, he guessed, would be more acceptable to his silent companion than humility or self-pity. It struck him that Dalgliesh looked as if he could have done with help himself. Perhaps the man had been more sick than they realized. Dalgliesh said calmly:

“Another half bottle and I suspect we would both have needed help. But I’ll do my best. Put down my clumsiness to inexperience and the claret.”

But he was surprisingly gentle and competent, getting Henry out of his clothes, supporting him to the lavatory, and finally, wheeling him under the shower. He spent a little time examining the hoist and equipment and then used them intelligently. When he didn’t know what was needed, he asked. Apart from these brief and necessary exchanges, neither spoke. Henry thought that he had seldom been put to bed with such imaginative gentleness. But, catching a glimpse in the bathroom mirror of his companion’s drawn preoccupied face, of the dark secretive eyes cavernous with fatigue, he wished suddenly that he hadn’t asked for help, that he had tumbled unshowered and fully dressed on to his bed, free from the humiliating touch of these competent hands. He sensed that, behind the disciplined calm, every contact with his naked body was a disagreeable duty. And for Henry himself, illogically and surprisingly, the touch of Dalgliesh’s cool hands was like the touch of fear. He wanted to cry out:

“What are you doing here? Go away; don’t interfere; leave us in peace.” The urge was so strong that he could almost believe that he had spoken the words aloud. And when, at last, he was comfortably bedded by his temporary nurse and Dalgliesh said an abrupt goodbye and immediately left him without another word, he knew that it was because he couldn’t bear to hear even the most perfunctory and least gracious word of thanks.