The Black Tower

CHAPTER FOUR The Dreadful Shore

HE AWOKE SLUGGISHLY soon before seven to disagreeably familiar noises; intrusive plumbing, the clang of apparatus, the squeal of chair wheels, sudden hurrying footsteps, determinedly cheerful exhortatory voices. Telling himself that the bathrooms would be needed for the patients, he shut his eyes resolutely on the bleak, impersonal room and willed himself to sleep again. When he woke an hour later after a fitful doze the annexe was silent. Someone—he dimly remembered a brown cloaked figure—had placed a mug of tea on his bedside table. It was cold, the greyish surface mottled with milk. He dragged on his dressing gown and went in search of the bathroom.

Breakfast at Toynton Grange was, as he had expected, laid out in the communal dining room. But, at eight-thirty, he was either too early or too late for the majority of the inmates. Only Ursula Hollis was breakfasting when he arrived. She gave him a shy good morning, then returned her eyes to the library book precariously propped against a jar of honey. Dalgliesh saw that the breakfast was simple, but adequate. There was a bowl of stewed apples; homemade muesli consisting mostly of porridge oats, bran and shredded apple; brown bread and margarine, and a row of boiled eggs each in its eggcup and individually named. The two remaining were cold. Presumably they were all cooked together earlier in the morning, and those who wanted their egg warm took the trouble to be on time. Dalgliesh helped himself to the egg pencilled with his name. It was glutinous at the top and very hard at the bottom, a result which he felt must have taken some perverse culinary skill to achieve.

After breakfast he went in search of Anstey to thank him for his overnight hospitality and to ask if there was anything he wanted in Wareham. He had decided that some of the afternoon had better be given over to shopping if he were to make himself comfortable in Michael’s cottage. A short search of the seemingly deserted house found Anstey with Dorothy Moxon in the business room. They were seated together at the table with an open ledger before them. As he knocked and entered they looked up simultaneously with something of the air of guilty conspirators. It seemed to take a couple of seconds before they realized who he was. Anstey’s smile, when it came, was as sweet as ever but his eyes were preoccupied and his enquiries over his guest’s comforts were perfunctory. Dalgliesh sensed that he wouldn’t be sorry to see him go. Anstey might see himself in the role of a welcoming medieval abbot, always ready with the bread and ale, but what he really craved were the gratifications of hospitality without the inconvenience of a guest. He said there was nothing he wanted in Wareham and then asked Dalgliesh how long he expected to be in the cottage. There was absolutely no hurry, of course. Their guest wasn’t to feel himself at all in the way. When Dalgliesh replied that he would stay only until Father Baddeley’s books were sorted and packed, it was difficult for him to conceal his relief. He offered to send Philby to Hope Cottage with some packing cases. Dorothy Moxon said nothing. She continued to stare fixedly at Dalgliesh as if determined not to betray her irritation at his presence and her desire to get back to the ledger by so much as a flicker of her sombre eyes.

It was comforting to be back in Hope Cottage, to smell again the familiar faintly ecclesiastical smell and to look forward to a long exploratory walk along the cliff before setting out for Wareham. But he had scarcely had time to unpack his case and change into stout walking shoes when he heard the patients’ bus stopping outside and, going to the window, saw Philby unloading the first of the promised packing cases. Swinging it on to his shoulder, he marched up the short path, kicked open the door, bringing with him into the room a powerful smell of stale sweat, and dropped the case at Dalgliesh’s feet with a brusque:

“There’s a couple more in the back.”

It was an obvious invitation to help unload them, and Dalgliesh took the hint. It was the first time he had seen the handyman in the full light, and the sight wasn’t agreeable. He had, in fact, seldom encountered a man whose physical appearance so repelled him. Philby was only a little over five feet tall and stockily built with short plump arms and legs as pale and shapeless as peeled tree trunks. His head was round and his skin, despite his outdoor life, was pink and glossy and very smooth as if blown-up with air. His eyes would have been remarkable in a more attractive face. They were slightly slanted and the irises were large and blue-black in colour. His black hair was scanty and combed straight back over the domed skull to end in an untidy and greasy fringe. He was wearing sandals, the right one fastened with string; a pair of dirty white shorts, so brief that they were almost indecent; and a grey vest, stained with sweat. Over this he wore, loosely open and held together only by a cord at the waist, his brown monk’s habit. Without this incongruous garb he would have looked merely dirty and disreputable. With it he looked positively sinister.

As he made no attempt to go once the cases were unloaded, Dalgliesh deduced that he expected a tip. The proffered coins were slipped into the pocket of the habit with sly expertise but with no thanks. Dalgliesh was interested to learn that, despite the expensive experiment with home-produced eggs, not all the economic laws were defunct in this unworldly abode of brotherly love. Philby gave the three boxes a vicious valedictory kick as if to earn his tip by demonstrating that they were sound. As they disappointingly remained intact, he gave them a final look of sour displeasure and then departed. Dalgliesh wondered where Anstey had recruited this particular member of the staff. To his prejudiced eye the man looked like a category ‘A’ rapist on licence, but perhaps that was going a little too far even for Wilfred Anstey.

His second attempt to set out was frustrated by a second visitor, this time Helen Rainer who had cycled the short distance from Toynton Grange with her bicycle basket piled high with the linen from his bed. She explained that Wilfred was concerned in case the sheets at Hope Cottage were inadequately aired. It surprised Dalgliesh that she hadn’t taken the opportunity to come with Philby in the bus. But perhaps, understandably, she found his proximity distasteful. She came in quietly but briskly and without too obviously making Dalgliesh feel he was a nuisance, unmistakably conveyed the impression that this wasn’t a social visit, that she hadn’t come to chat, and that there were more important duties awaiting her. They made the bed together, Nurse Rainer flicking the sheets into place and neatly mitring each corner with such brisk expertise that Dalgliesh, a second or two behind her, felt himself slow and incompetent. At first they worked in silence. He doubted whether this was the time to ask, however tactfully, how the misunderstanding had arisen over the neglected visit to Father Baddeley on the last night of his life. His stay in hospital must have intimidated him. It took an effort of will to say:

“I’m probably being over-sensitive, but I wish that someone had been with Father Baddeley when he died, or at least had looked in on him later that night to see that all was well.”

She could with justice, he thought, reply to this implied criticism by pointing out that it came inappropriately from someone who had shown no concern for the old man for nearly thirty years. But she said without rancour, almost eagerly:

“Yes, that was bad. It couldn’t have made any difference medically, but the misunderstanding shouldn’t have happened, one of us ought to have looked in. Do you want this third blanket? If not, I’ll take it back to Toynton Grange, it’s one of ours.”

“Two will be enough. What exactly happened?”

“To Father Baddeley? He died of acute myocarditis.”

“I mean, how did the misunderstanding arise?”

“I served him a cold lunch of chicken and salad when he arrived back from hospital and then settled him for his afternoon rest. He was ready for it. Dot took him his afternoon tea and helped him to wash. She got him into his pyjamas and he insisted on wearing his cassock on top. I cooked scrambled eggs for him in the kitchen here shortly after six-thirty. He was absolutely insistent that he wanted to spend the rest of the evening undisturbed, except, of course, for Grace Willison’s visit, but I told him that someone would come in about ten and he seemed perfectly happy with that. He said that he’d rap on the wall with the poker if he were in any distress. Then I went next door to ask Millicent to listen for him and she offered to look in on him last thing. At least, that’s what I understood. Apparently she thought that Eric or I would come. As I said, it shouldn’t have happened. I blame myself. It wasn’t Eric’s fault. As his nurse, I should have ensured that he was seen again professionally before he went to bed.”

Dalgliesh asked:

“This insistence on being alone; did you get the impression that he was expecting a visitor?”

“What visitor could he be expecting, other than poor Grace? I think he’d had enough of people while he was in hospital and just wanted some peace.”

“And you were all here at Toynton Grange that night?”

“All except Henry who hadn’t got back from London. Where else could we be?”

“Who unpacked his case for him?”

“I did. He was admitted to hospital as an emergency and had very few things with him, only those which we found by his bed and packed.”

“His Bible, prayer book and his diary?”

She looked up at him briefly, her face expressionless, before bending again to tuck in a blanket.

“Yes.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I left them on the small table beside his chair. He may have moved them later.”

So the diary had been with Father Baddeley in hospital. That meant that the record would have been up to date. And if Anstey were not lying about its being missing next morning, then it had been removed some time within those twelve hours.

He wondered how he could phrase his next question without arousing her suspicions. Keeping his voice light, he said:

“You may have neglected him in life but you looked after him very thoroughly after he died. First cremation and then burial. Wasn’t that a little over-conscientious?”

To his surprise she burst out as if he had invited her to share a justified indignation:

“Of course it was! It was ridiculous! But that was Millicent’s fault. She told Wilfred that Michael had frequently expressed his strong wish to be cremated. I can’t think when or why. Although they were neighbours, she and Michael didn’t exactly live in each other’s pockets. But that’s what she said. Wilfred was equally sure that Michael would want an orthodox Christian burial, so the poor man got both. It meant a lot of extra trouble and expense and Dr. McKeith from Wareham had to sign a medical certificate as well as Eric. All that fuss just because Wilfred had a bad conscience.”

“Did he? About what?”

“Oh, nothing. I just got the impression that he felt that Michael had been a bit neglected one way and another, the usual self-indulgent compunction of the bereaved. Is this pillow going to be adequate? It feels very lumpy to me, and you look as if you could do with a good night’s rest. Don’t forget to come up to the Grange if there’s anything you need. The milk is delivered to the boundary gate. I’ve ordered a pint for you each day. If that’s too much, we can always use it. Now, have you everything you need?”

With a sensation of being under firm discipline Dalgliesh said meekly that he had. Nurse Rainer’s briskness, her confidence, her concentration on the job in hand, even her reassuring smile of farewell, all relegated him to the status of a patient. As she wheeled her bicycle down the path and remounted, he felt that he had been visited by the district nurse. But he felt an increased respect for her. She hadn’t appeared to resent his questions, and she had certainly been remarkably forthcoming. He wondered why.

It was a warm misty morning under a sky of low cloud. As he left the valley and began to trudge up the cliff path a reluctant rain began to fall in slow heavy drops. The sea was a milky blue, sluggish and opaque, its slopping waves pitted with rain and awash with shifting patterns of floating foam. There was a smell of autumn as if someone far off, undetected even by a wisp of smoke, was burning leaves. The narrow path rose higher skirting the cliff edge, now close enough to give him a brief vertiginous illusion of danger, now twisting inland between a tatter of bronzed bracken crumpled with the wind, and low tangles of bramble bushes, their red and black berries tight and meagre compared with the luscious fruit of inland hedgerows. The headland was dissected by low broken walls of stone and studded with small limestone rocks. Some, half buried, protruded tipsily from the soil like the relics of a disorderly graveyard.

Dalgliesh walked warily. It was his first country walk since his illness. The demands of his job meant that walking had always been a rare and special pleasure. Now he moved with something of the uncertainty of those first tentative steps of convalescence, muscles and senses rediscovering remembered pleasures, not with keen delight but with the gentle acceptance of familiarity. The brief metallic warble and churling note of stonechats, busy among the brambles; a solitary black-headed gull motionless as a ship’s figurehead on a promontory of rock; clumps of rock samphire, their umbels stained with purple; yellow dandelions, pinpoints of brightness on the faded autumnal grass.

After nearly ten minutes of walking the cliff path began to slope gently downhill and was eventually dissected by a narrow lane running inland from the cliff edge. About six yards from the sea it broadened into a gently sloping plateau of bright green turf and moss. Dalgliesh stopped suddenly as if stung by memory. This then, must be the place where Victor Holroyd had chosen to sit, the spot from which he had plunged to his death. For a moment he wished that it hadn’t lain so inconveniently in his path. The thought of violent death broke disagreeably into his euphoria. But he could understand the attraction of the spot. The lane was secluded and sheltered from the wind, there was a sense of privacy and peace; a precarious peace for a man captive in a wheelchair and with only the power of its brakes holding the balance between life and death. But that may have been part of the attraction. Perhaps only here, poised above the sea on this secluded patch of bright moss, could Holroyd, frustrated and chairbound, gain an illusion of freedom, of being in control of his destiny. He might always have intended to make here his final bid for release, insisting month after month on being wheeled to the same spot, biding his time so that no one at Toynton Grange suspected his real purpose. Instinctively, Dalgliesh studied the ground. Over three weeks had passed since Holroyd’s death but he thought he could still detect the faint indentation of the soft turf where the wheels had rested and, less plainly, marks where the short grass had been matted with the scuffle of policemen’s feet.

He walked to the cliff edge and looked down. The view, spectacular and frightening, made him catch his breath. The cliffs had changed and here the limestone had given place to an almost vertical wall of blackish clay larded with calcareous stone. Almost a hundred and fifty feet below, the cliff tumbled into a broad fissured causeway of boulders, slabs and amorphous chunks of blue-black rock which littered the foreshore as if hurled in wild disorder by a giant hand. The tide was out and the oblique line of foam moved sluggishly among the furthest rocks. As he looked down on this chaotic and awe-inspiring waste of rock and sea and tried to picture what the fall must have done to Holroyd, the sun moved fitfully from behind the clouds and a band of sunlight moved across the headland lying warm as a hand on the back of his neck, gilding the bracken, marbling the strewn rocks at the cliff edge. But it left the foreshore in shadow, sinister and unfriendly. For a moment Dalgliesh believed that he was looking down on a cursed and dreadful shore on which the sun could never shine.

Dalgliesh had been making for the black tower marked on Father Baddeley’s map, less from a curiosity to see it than from the need to set an object for his walk. Still musing on Victor Holroyd’s death, he came upon the tower almost unexpectedly. It was a squat intimidating folly, circular for about two-thirds of its height but topped with an octagonal cupola like a pepperpot pierced with eight glazed slit windows, compass points of reflected light which gave it something of the look of a lighthouse. The tower intrigued him and he moved round it touching the black walls. He saw that it had been built of limestone blocks but faced with the black shale as if capriciously decorated with pellets of polished jet. In places the shale had flaked away giving the tower a mottled appearance; black nacreous scales littered the base of the walls and gleamed among the grasses. To the north, and sheltered from the sea, was a tangle of plants as if someone had once tried to plant a small garden. Now nothing remained but a dishevelled clump of Michaelmas daisies, patches of self-seeded antirrhinums, marigolds and nasturtiums, and a single etiolated rose with two white, starved buds, its stem bent double against the stone as if resigned to the first frost.

To the east was an ornate stone porch above an iron-bound oak door. Dalgliesh lifted the heavy handle and twisted it with difficulty. But the door was locked. Looking up he saw that there was a rough stone plaque set in the wall of the porch with a carved inscription:

A strange epitaph for a Victorian landed gentleman and a bizarre place in which to die. The present owner of Toynton Grange had perhaps inherited a degree of eccentricity. CONCEPTIO CULPA: the theology of original sin had been discarded by modern man with other inconvenient dogma; even in 1887 it must have been on the way out. NASCI PENA: anaesthesia had mercifully done something to vitiate that dogmatic assertion. LABOR VITA: not if twentieth-century technological man could help it. NECESSI MORI: ah, there was still the rub. Death. One could ignore it, fear it, even welcome it, but never defeat it. It remained as obtrusive but more durable than these commemorative stones. Death: the same yesterday, today and for ever. Had Wilfred Mancroft Anstey himself chosen and taken comfort from this stark memento mori?

He continued walking along the cliff edge, skirting a small pebbled bay. About twenty yards ahead was a rough path to the beach, steep and probably treacherous in wet weather but obviously partly the result of a felicitous natural arrangement of the rock face and partly the work of man. Immediately beneath him, however, the cliff fell away in an almost vertical face of limestone. He saw with surprise that even at this early hour there were two roped climbers on the rock. The upper and bareheaded figure was instantly recognizable as Julius Court. When the second looked up Dalgliesh glimpsed the face under the red climbing helmet and saw that his companion was Dennis Lerner.

They were climbing slowly but competently, so competently that he felt no temptation to move back in case the unexpected sight of a spectator should break their concentration. They had obviously done this climb before; the route, the techniques were familiar to them. Now they were on the last pitch. Watching Court’s smooth unhurrying movements, the splayed limbs leechlike on the rock face, he found himself reliving some of the climbs of his boyhood and making the ascent with them, mentally documenting each stage. Traverse right about fifteen feet with peg protection; step up with difficulty; then on to a small pinnacle block; gain the next ledge by a mantel-shelf; climb the groove with the aid of two pegs and one sling to the horizontal crack; follow the groove again to a small ledge in the corner; finally climb with the aid of two pegs to the top.

Ten minutes later Dalgliesh strolled slowly round to where Julius was heaving his shoulders over the edge of the cliff. He drew himself up and stood, slightly panting, beside Dalgliesh. Without speaking he banged a peg into a crack of the rock beside one of the larger boulders, clipped a sling through the peg and into his waistline and started hauling in the rope. There was a cheerful shout from the rock face. Julius settled himself back against the boulder, rope around his waist, shouted “Climb when you’re ready,” and began inching the rope through careful hands. Less than fifteen minutes later, Dennis Lerner stood beside him and began coiling the rope. Blinking rapidly Dennis took off his steel-rimmed spectacles, rubbed away what could have been spray or rain drops from his face and twisted the ends behind his ears with shaking fingers. Julius looked at his watch:

“One hour twelve minutes, our best so far.”

He turned to Dalgliesh.

“There aren’t many climbs on this part of the coast because of the shale, so we try to improve our time. Do you climb? I could lend you some gear.”

“I haven’t done much since I left school and judging from what I’ve just seen, I’m not in your class.”

He didn’t bother to explain that he was still too convalescent to climb safely. Once he might have found it necessary to justify his reluctance, but it had been some years now since he bothered how other people judged his physical courage. Julius said:

“Wilfred used to climb with me but about three months ago we discovered that someone had deliberately frayed one of his ropes. We were about to tackle this particular climb, incidentally. He refused to try to discover who was responsible. Someone at the Grange expressing a personal grievance, I suppose. Wilfred must expect these occasional contretemps. It’s an occupational hazard for playing God. He was never in real danger. I always insist on checking equipment before we start. But it unnerved him, perhaps gave him the excuse he was looking for to give up climbing. He was never much good. Now I depend on Dennis when he has a day off, as today.”

Lerner turned and smiled directly at Dalgliesh. The smile transformed his face, releasing it from strain. He looked suddenly boyish, confiding:

“I’m just as terrified as Wilfred most of the time but I’m learning. It’s fascinating; I’m getting to love it. There’s a mild climb about half a mile back, guillemot ledge. Julius started me off there. It’s really quite gentle. We could tackle that if you’d like to try.”

His naïve eagerness to communicate and share his pleasure was endearing.

Dalgliesh said:

“I hardly think I shall be long enough at Toynton to make it worthwhile.”

He intercepted their quick glance at each other, an almost imperceptible meeting of eyes in what? Relief? Warning? Satisfaction?

The three men stood silently while Dennis finished coiling the rope. Then Julius nodded towards the black tower.

“Ugly, isn’t it? Wilfred’s great grandfather built it shortly after he rebuilt the Grange. It replaced—the Grange I mean—a small Elizabethan manor house which originally stood on the site and was destroyed by fire in 1843. A pity. It must have been more agreeable than the present house. Great grandfather had no eye for form. Neither the house nor the folly have quite come off have they?”

Dalgliesh asked:

“How did he die here, by design?”

“You could say that. He was one of those unamiable and obstinate eccentrics which the Victorian age seemed to breed. He invented his own religion, based I understand on the book of Revelation. In the early autumn of 1887 he walled himself up inside the tower and starved himself to death. According to the somewhat confused testament he left, he was waiting for the second coming. I hope it arrived for him.”

“And no one stopped him?”

“They didn’t know he was here. The old man was crazy but cunning. He made his secret preparations here, stones and mortar and so on, and then pretended to set off to winter in Naples. It was over three months before they found him. Long before that, he’d torn his fingers to the bone trying to claw himself out. But he’d done his brick and mortar work too well, poor devil.”

“How horrible!”

“Yes. In the old days before Wilfred closed the headland, the locals tended to avoid the place, and so to be honest do I. Father Baddeley used to come here occasionally. According to Grace Willison, he said some prayers for great grandfather’s soul, sprinkled holy water around and that decontaminated the tower as far as he was concerned. Wilfred uses it for meditation, or so he says. Personally I think it’s to get away from the Grange. The sinister family association doesn’t seem to worry him. But then, it doesn’t really touch him personally. He was adopted. But I expect Millicent Hammitt has told you all about that.”

“Not yet. I’ve hardly spoken to her.”

“She will, she will.”

Dennis Lerner said surprisingly:

“I like the black tower, particularly in summer when the headland is peaceful and golden and the sun glints on the black stone. It’s a symbol really, isn’t it? It looks magical, unreal, a folly built to amuse a child. And underneath there’s horror, pain, madness and death. I said that to Father Baddeley once.”

“And what did he reply?” asked Julius.

“He said, ‘Oh, no my son. Underneath there’s the love of God.’”

Julius said roughly:

“I don’t need a phallic symbol erected by a Victorian eccentric to remind me of the skull under the skin. Like any reasonable man I prepare my own defences.”

Dalgliesh asked:

“What are they?”

The quiet question, even in his own ears, sounded stark as a command. Julius smiled:

“Money and the solace it can buy. Leisure, friends, beauty, travel. And when they fail, as your friend Father Baddeley would have reminded me, they inevitably will, and Dennis’s four horses of the apocalypse take over, three bullets in a Luger.” He looked up once more at the tower.

“In the meantime, I can do without reminders. My half Irish blood makes me superstitious. Let’s get down to the beach.”

They slid and clambered cautiously down the cliff path. At the foot of the cliff Dennis Lerner’s brown monk’s habit lay neatly folded, topped by a rock. He corded it round himself, exchanged his climbing boots for sandals taken from the pocket of the cloak and, thus metamorphosed and with his climbing helmet tucked under his arm, joined his companions as they trudged through the shingle.

All three seemed weary and no one spoke until the cliffs changed and they passed under the shadow of the black shale. The shore was even more remarkable seen close-to, a wide shining platform of boulder-strewn clay, fractured and crevassed as if by an earthquake, a bleak uncompromising shore. The pools were blue-black pits festooned with slimy seaweed; surely no northern sea bred such an exotic green? Even the ubiquitous litter of the shore—tarred splinters of wood, cartons in which the foam bubbled like brown scum, bottles, ends of tarred rope, the fragile bleached bones of a sea bird—looked like the sinister debris of catastrophe, the sad sludge of a dead world.

As if by common consent they moved closer together and picked their way cautiously over the viscous rocks towards the sea until the tide was washing the flatter stones and Dennis Lerner had to hitch up his cloak. Suddenly Julius paused and turned towards the rock face. Dalgliesh turned with him, but Dennis still looked steadfastly out to sea.

“The tide was coming in fast. It must have reached to about here. I got down to the beach by the path we used. It took some minutes of hard running but it was the nearer, really the only way. I didn’t see either him or the chair as I plunged and scrambled through the shingle. When I reached the black cliff I had to force myself to look at him. At first I could see nothing unusual, only the sea boiling between the rocks. Then I caught sight of one of the wheels of his chair. It was lying in the centre of a flat rock, the sun gleaming on the chrome and the metal spokes. It looked so decorative, so precisely placed, it couldn’t surely have landed there by chance. I suppose that it bounced off with the shock of impact and finally rolled on to the stone. I remember that I picked it up and hurled it towards the shore, laughing aloud. Shock, I suppose. The sound echoed back from the rock face.”

Lerner, without turning, said in a stifled voice:

“I remember. I heard you. I thought it was Victor laughing; it sounded like Victor.”

Dalgliesh asked:

“You saw the accident, then?”

“From a distance of about fifty yards. I’d got back to the cottage from London after lunch and decided to have a swim. It was an exceptionally warm day for September. I was just coming over the headland when I saw the chair lurch forward. There was nothing I, or anyone, could do. Dennis was lying on the grass about ten yards from Holroyd. He scrambled to his feet and ran after the chair hooting like a banshee. Then he ran backwards and forwards along the cliff edge, flailing his arms like a great brown demented crow.”

Lerner said through tight lips:

“I know that I didn’t behave with much courage.”

“It wasn’t exactly an occasion for courage, dear boy. No one could expect you to hurl yourself over the cliff after him, although, for a second, I thought you were going to.”

He turned to Dalgliesh.

“I left Dennis lying prone on the grass in what I suppose was a state of shock, paused long enough to yell at him to get help from Toynton Grange, and made for the cliff path. It took Dennis about ten minutes to pull himself together and get moving. It might have been more sensible if I’d paid more attention to him and then got him down here with me to help with the corpse. I nearly lost it.”

Dalgliesh said:

“The chair must have come over the cliff with considerable speed if he landed as far out as here.”

“Yes, odd isn’t it? I was looking for him further inshore. Then I saw a tangle of metal about twenty feet to the right already being washed by the tide. And lastly I saw Holroyd. He looked like a great stranded fish rolling in the tide. His face was pale and bloated, even when he was alive poor devil; something to do with the steroids Eric was giving him. Now he looked grotesque. He must have parted from the chair before impact; anyway he was some distance from the wreckage. He was wearing only slacks and a cotton shirt when he died, and now the shirt had been torn away by the rocks and the sea so that all I could see was this great white torso turning and rising as the tide washed over him. He had gashed open his head and cut the neck artery. He must have bled copiously, and the sea had done the rest. By the time I reached him the foam was still stained pink, pretty as a bubble bath. He looked bloodless, as if he had been in the sea for months. A bloodless corpse, half naked, wallowing in the tide.”

A bloodless corpse. A bloodless murder.

The phrase fell unbidden into Dalgliesh’s mind. He asked, making his voice unemphatic, hardly interested:

“How did you manage to get hold of him?”

“It wasn’t easy. As I’ve said, the tide was coming in fast. I managed to get my bathing towel under his belt and tried to haul him on to one of the higher rocks, an undignified, clumsy business for both of us. He was considerably heavier than I and his waterlogged trousers added to the weight. I was afraid they would come off. I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, but it seemed important at the time to preserve some dignity for him. I took advantage of each onrush of wave to heave him further to shore and managed to get him on to this rock here, as far as I can remember. I was soaking myself and shivering despite the heat. I remember thinking it odd that the sun didn’t seem to have the power to dry my clothes.”

Dalgliesh had glanced at Lerner’s profile during this recital. A pulse in the thin sun-reddened neck was beating like a pump. He said coolly:

“We must hope that Holroyd’s death was less distressing for him than it obviously was for you.”

Julius Court laughed:

“You must remember that not everyone has your professional predilection for these entertainments. When I’d got him this far I just hung on grimly like a fisherman to his catch until the party from Toynton Grange arrived with a stretcher. They came stumbling along the beach, the quicker way, strung out, falling over the stones, overladen like a disorganized picnic party.”

“What about the wheelchair?”

“I only remembered it when we got back to Toynton. It was a write-off, of course. We all knew that. But I thought that the police might want to examine it to see if the brakes were defective. Rather clever of me wasn’t it? The idea didn’t seem to occur to anyone else. But when a party from the Grange came back to look they could only find the two wheels and the main part of the body. The two side pieces with the ratchet hand-brakes were missing. The police searched more thoroughly next morning but with no better luck.”

Dalgliesh would have liked to have asked who it was from Toynton Grange who had done the searching. But he was determined not to betray real curiosity. He told himself that he had none. Violent death was no longer his concern and, officially, this violent death never would be. But it was odd that the two vital pieces of the wheelchair hadn’t been found. And this rocky shore, with its deep crevices, its pools, its numerous hiding places would have been an ideal place in which to conceal them. But the local police would have thought of that. It was, he supposed, one of the questions he would tactfully have to ask them. Father Baddeley had written to ask for his help the day before Holroyd had died, but that didn’t mean that the two events were totally unconnected. He asked:

“Was Father Baddeley very distressed about Holroyd’s death? I imagine so.”

“Very much, when he knew. But that wasn’t until a week later. We’d had the inquest by then and Holroyd had been buried. I thought Grace Willison would have told you. Michael and Victor between them gave us quite a day. When Dennis arrived back at the Grange with his news, the rescue party set out without saying anything to the patients. It was understandable but unfortunate. When we all staggered through the front door about forty minutes later, with what remained of Holroyd half slipping off the stretcher, Grace Willison was wheeling herself through the hall. Just to add to the excitement, she collapsed with shock. Anyway, Wilfred thought that Michael might start earning his money, and sent Eric off to Hope Cottage. Eric found Father Baddeley in the throes of his heart attack. So yet another ambulance was summoned—we thought it might finish Michael off if he had to share his journey to the hospital with what remained of Victor—and the old man went off in happy ignorance. The ward sister broke the news about Victor as soon as the doctors thought he was well enough to take it. According to her, he took it quietly, but was obviously upset. He wrote to Wilfred I believe; a letter of condolence. Father Baddeley had the professional knack of taking other people’s death in his stride, and he and Holroyd weren’t exactly close. It was the idea of suicide which upset his professional susceptibilities, I imagine.”

Suddenly Lerner said in a low voice:

“I feel guilty because I feel responsible.”

Dalgliesh said:

“Either you pushed Holroyd over the cliff or you didn’t. If you didn’t, guilt is an indulgence.”

“And if I did?”

“Then it’s a dangerous indulgence.”

Julius laughed:

“Victor committed suicide. You know it, I know it, so does everyone who knew Victor. If you’re going to start fantasizing about his death, it’s lucky for you that I decided to swim that afternoon and came over the brow of the hill when I did.”

The three of them, as if by common consent, began squelching their way along the shingled shore. Looking at Lerner’s pale face, the twitch of muscle at the corner of the slack mouth, the perpetually anxious blinking eyes, Dalgliesh felt they’d had enough of Holroyd. He began to ask about the rock. Lerner turned to him eagerly.

“It’s fascinating isn’t it? I love the variety of this coast. You get the same shale further to the west at Kimmeridge; there it’s known as Kimmeridge coal. It’s bituminous you know, you can actually burn it. We did try at Toynton Grange; Wilfred liked the idea that we might be self-supporting even for heating. But the stuff smelt so offensive that we had to give it up. It practically stank us out. I believe people have tried to exploit it from the middle of the eighteenth century but no one’s managed yet to deodorize it. The blackstone looks a bit dull and uninteresting now, but if it’s polished with beeswax it comes up like jet. Well, you saw the effect on the black tower. People used to make ornaments of it as far back as Roman times. I’ve got a book on the geology of this coast if you’re interested and I could show you my collection of fossils. Wilfred thinks that I ought not to take them now that the cliffs are so denuded, so I’ve given up collecting. But I’ve got quite an interesting collection. And I’ve got what I think is part of an Iron Age shale armlet.”

Julius Court was grating through the shingle a few feet ahead. He turned and shouted back at them:

“Don’t bore him with your enthusiasm for old rocks, Dennis. Remember what he said. He won’t be long enough at Toynton to make it worthwhile.”

He smiled at Dalgliesh. He made it sound like a challenge.

Before setting out for Wareham, Dalgliesh wrote to Bill Moriarty at the Yard. He gave such brief information as he had about the staff and patients at Toynton Grange and asked whether anything was officially known. He thought that he could imagine Bill’s reaction to the letter, just as he could predict the style of his reply. Moriarty was a first-class detective but, except mercifully in official reports, he affected a facetious, spuriously jovial style when talking or writing about his cases as if nervously anxious to decontaminate violence with humour, or to demonstrate his professional sang-froid in the face of death. But if Moriarty’s style was suspect, his information was invariably detailed and accurate. What was more, it would come quickly.

Dalgliesh, when stopping in Toynton village to post his letter, had taken the precaution of telephoning the police before calling in at divisional headquarters. His arrival was, therefore, expected and provided for. The Divisional Superintendent, called away unexpectedly to a meeting with his Chief Constable, had left apologies and instructions for the entertainment of the visitor. His final words to Detective Inspector Daniel, deputed to do the honours, had been:

“I’m sorry to miss the Commander. I met him last year when he lectured at Bramshill. At least he tempers the arrogance of the Met. with good manners and a plausible show of humility. It’s refreshing to meet someone from the smoke who doesn’t treat provincial forces as if we recruit by lurking outside the hill caves with lumps of raw meat on a pole. He may be the Commissioner’s blue-eyed boy but he’s a good copper.”

“Doesn’t he write verse, Sir?”

“I shouldn’t try to ingratiate yourself by mentioning that. I invent crossword puzzles for a hobby, which probably requires much the same level of intellectual skill, but I don’t expect people to compliment me on it. I got his last book from the library. Invisible Scars. Do you suppose, given the fact that he’s a copper, that the title is ironic?”

“I couldn’t say, Sir, not having read the book.”

“I only understood one poem in three but I may have been flattering myself. I suppose he didn’t say why we’re being honoured.”

“No, Sir, but as he’s staying at Toynton Grange he may be interested in the Holroyd case.”

“I can’t see why; but you’d better arrange for Sergeant Varney to be available.”

“I’ve asked Varney to join us for lunch, Sir. The usual pub, I thought.”

“Why not? Let the Commander see how the poor live.”

And so Dalgliesh found himself, after the usual polite preliminaries, invited to lunch at the Duke’s Arms. It was an unprepossessing pub, not visible from the High Street, but approached down a dark alleyway between a corn merchant and one of those general stores common in country towns where every possible garden implement and an assortment of tin buckets, hip baths, brooms, twine, aluminium tea pots and dogs’ leads swing from the ceiling above a pervading smell of paraffin and turpentine. Inspector Daniel and Sergeant Varney were greeted with uneffusive but evident satisfaction by the burly, shirt-sleeved landlord who was obviously a publican who could afford to welcome the local police to his bar without the fear of giving it a bad name. The saloon bar was crowded, smoky and loud with the burr of Dorset voices. Daniel led the way down a narrow passage smelling strongly of beer and faintly of urine and out into an unexpected and sun-filled cobbled yard. There was a cherry tree in the centre, its trunk encircled by a wooden bench, and half a dozen sturdy tables and slatted wooden chairs set out on the paved stones which surrounded the cobbles. The yard was deserted. The regulars probably spent too much of their working lives in the open air to see it as a desirable alternative to the camaraderie of the snug, smoke-filled bar, while tourists who might have valued it were unlikely to penetrate to the Duke’s Arms.

Without being summoned the publican brought out two pints of beer, a plate of cheese-filled rolls, a jar of homemade chutney and a large bowl of tomatoes. Dalgliesh said he would have the same. The beer proved excellent, the cheese was English Cheddar, the bread had obviously been baked locally and was not the gutless pap of some mass-production oven. The butter was unsalted and the tomatoes tasted of the sun. They ate together in companionable silence.

Inspector Daniel was a stolid six-footer, with a jutting comb of strong undisciplined grey hair and a ruddy suntanned face. He looked close to retirement age. His black eyes were restless, perpetually moving from face to face with an amused, indulgent, somewhat self-satisfied expression as if he felt himself personally responsible for the conduct of the world and was, on the whole, satisfied that he wasn’t making too bad a job of it. The contrast between these glittering unquiet eyes and his unhurried movements and even more deliberate countryman’s voice was disconcerting.

Sergeant Varney was two inches shorter with a round, bland, boyish face on which experience had so far, left no trace. He looked very young, the prototype of that officer whose boyish good looks provoke the perennial middle-aged complaint that the policemen get younger each year. His manner to his superiors was easy, respectful, but neither sycophantic nor deferential. Dalgliesh suspected that he enjoyed an immense self-confidence which he was at some pains to conceal. When he talked about his investigation of Holroyd’s death, Dalgliesh could understand why. Here was an intelligent and highly competent young officer who knew exactly where he was going and how he proposed to get there.

Dalgliesh carefully understated his business.

“I was ill at the time Father Baddeley wrote and he was dead when I arrived. I don’t suppose he wanted to consult me about anything important, but I have something of a conscience about having let him down. It seemed sensible to have a word with you and see whether anything was happening at Toynton Grange which might have worried him. I must say it seems to me highly unlikely. I’ve been told about Victor Holroyd’s death, of course, but that happened the day after Father Baddeley wrote to me. I did wonder, though, whether there was anything leading up to Holroyd’s death which might have worried him.”

Sergeant Varney said:

“There was no evidence that Holroyd’s death concerned anyone but himself. As I expect you know, the verdict at the inquest was accidental death. Dr. Maskell sat with a jury and if you ask me he was relieved at the verdict. Mr. Anstey is greatly respected in the district even if they do keep themselves very much to themselves at Toynton Grange, and no one wanted to add to his distress. But in my opinion, Sir, it was a clear case of suicide. It looks as if Holroyd acted pretty much on impulse. It wasn’t his usual day to be wheeled to the cliff top and he seemed to make up his mind to it suddenly. We had the evidence of Miss Grace Willison and Mrs. Ursula Hollis, who were sitting with Holroyd on the patients’ patio, that he called Dennis Lerner over to him and more or less nagged him into wheeling him out. Lerner testified that he was in a particularly difficult mood on the journey and when they got to their usual place on the cliff he became so offensive that Lerner took his book and lay some little distance from the chair. That is where Mr. Julius Court saw him when he breasted the hill in time to see the chair jerk forward and hurtle down the slope and over the cliff. When I examined the ground next morning I could see by the broken flowers and pressed grass exactly where Lerner had been lying and his library book, The Geology of the Dorset Coast, was still on the grass where he’d dropped it. It looks to me, Sir, as if Holroyd deliberately taunted him into moving some distance away so that he wouldn’t be able to get to him in time once he’d slipped the brakes.”

“Did Lerner explain in court exactly what it was that Holroyd said to him?”

“He wasn’t specific, Sir, but he more or less admitted to me that Holroyd taunted him with being a homosexual, not pulling his weight at Toynton Grange, looking for an easy life, and being an ungentle and incompetent nurse.”

“I would hardly describe that as unspecific. How much truth is there in any of it?”

“That’s difficult to say, Sir. He may be all of those things including the first; which doesn’t mean to say that he’d welcome Holroyd telling him so.”

Inspector Daniel broke in:

“He’s not an ungentle nurse and that’s for certain. My sister Ella is a staff nurse at the Meadowlands Nursing Home outside Swanage. Old Mrs. Lerner—over eighty she is now—is a patient there. Her son visits regularly and isn’t above lending a hand when they’re busy. It’s odd that he doesn’t take a post there, but perhaps it’s no bad thing to keep your professional and private life separate. Anyway, they may not have a vacancy for a male nurse. And no doubt he feels some loyalty to Wilfred Anstey. But Ella thinks very highly of Dennis Lerner. A good son, is how she describes him. And it must take the best part of his salary to keep Mum at Meadowlands. Like all the really good places, it’s not cheap. No, I’d say that Holroyd was a pretty impossible chap. The Grange will be a good deal happier without him.”

Dalgliesh said:

“It’s an uncertain way of committing suicide, I should have thought. What surprises me is that he managed to move that chair.”

Sergeant Varney took a long drink of his beer.

“It surprised me too, Sir. We weren’t able to get the chair intact so I couldn’t experiment with it. But Holroyd was a heavy chap, about half a stone heavier than I am, I estimate, and I experimented with one of the older chairs at Toynton Grange as close as possible to the model of his. Provided it were on fairly firm ground and the slope was more than one in three, I could get it moving with a sharp jerk. Julius Court testified that he saw Holroyd’s body jerk although he couldn’t say from that distance whether the chair was being thrust forward or whether it was a spontaneous reaction on Holroyd’s part to the shock of finding himself moving. And one has to remember, Sir, that other methods of killing himself weren’t readily to hand. He was almost entirely helpless. Drugs would have been the easiest way, but those are kept locked in the clinical room on the upper floor; he hadn’t a hope of getting to anything really dangerous without help. He might have tried hanging himself with a towel in the bathroom but there are no locks on the bathroom or lavatory doors. That, of course, is a precaution against patients collapsing and being too ill to summon assistance, but it does mean that there’s a lack of privacy about the place.”

“What about a possible defect of the chair?”

“I thought about that, Sir, and it was, of course, brought out at the inquest. But we only recovered the seat of the chair and one of the wheels. The two side pieces with the hand-brakes and the cross-bar with the ratchets have never been found.”

“Exactly the parts of the chair where any defects of the brakes, whether natural or deliberately produced, might have been apparent.”

“If we could have found the pieces in time, Sir, and the sea hadn’t done too much damage. But we never found them. The body had broken free of the chair in mid-air or on impact and Court naturally concentrated on retrieving the body. It was being tumbled by the surf, the trousers were waterlogged and it was too heavy for him to shift far. But he got his bathing towel into Holroyd’s belt and managed to hold on until help, in the persons of Mr. Anstey, Dr. Hewson, Sister Moxon and the handyman Albert Philby arrived with a stretcher. Together they managed to get the body on to it and struggled back along the beach to Toynton Grange. It was only then that they rang us. It occurred to Mr. Court as soon as they reached the Grange that the chair ought to be retrieved for examination and he sent Philby back to look for it. Sister Moxon volunteered to go with him. The tide had gone out about twenty yards by then and they found the main part of the chair, that is the seat and the back, and one of the wheels.”

“I’m surprised that Dorothy Moxon went to search, I would have expected her to stay with the patients.”

“So should I, Sir. But Anstey refused to leave Toynton Grange and Dr. Hewson apparently thought that his place was with the body. Nurse Rainer was off duty for the afternoon, and there was no one else to send unless you count Mrs. Millicent Hammitt, and I don’t think anyone thought of counting Mrs. Hammitt. It did seem important that two pairs of eyes should be looking for the chair before the light faded.”

“And what about Julius Court?”

“Mr. Court and Mr. Lerner thought they ought to be at Toynton Grange to meet us when we arrived, Sir.”

“A very proper thought. And by the time you did arrive no doubt it was too dark to make an effective search.”

“Yes, Sir, it was seven fourteen when we got to Toynton Grange. Apart from taking statements and arranging for the body to be removed to the mortuary, there was very little we could do until the morning. I don’t know whether you’ve seen that shore at low tide, Sir. It looks like a great sheet of black treacle toffee which some prodigious giant has amused himself by smashing-up with a gigantic hammer. We searched pretty thoroughly over a wide area but if the metal pieces are lodged in the crevasses between any of those rocks it would take a metal detector to find them—and we’d be lucky then—and lifting tackle to retrieve them. It’s most likely, I think, that they’ve been dragged down under the shingle. There’s a great deal of turbulence there at high tide.”

Dalgliesh said:

“Was there any reason to suppose that Holroyd had suddenly become suicidal, I mean—why choose that particular moment?”

“I asked about that, Sir. A week earlier, that is on the 5th September, Mr. Court with Doctor and Mrs. Hewson had taken him in Court’s car up to London to see his solicitors and a consultant at St. Saviour’s Hospital. That’s Dr. Hewson’s own training hospital. I gather that Holroyd wasn’t given much hope that anything more could be done for him. Dr. Hewson said that the news didn’t seem to depress him unduly. He hadn’t expected anything else. Dr. Hewson more or less told me that Holroyd had insisted on the consultation just for the trip to London. He was a restless man and liked an excuse to get away from Toynton Grange occasionally. Mr. Court was travelling up anyway and offered the use of his car. That matron, Mrs. Moxon, and Mr. Anstey were both adamant that Holroyd hadn’t come back particularly depressed; but then they’ve got something of a vested interest in discrediting the suicide theory. The patients told me a rather different story. They noticed a change in Holroyd after his return. They didn’t describe him as depressed, but he certainly wasn’t any easier to live with. They described him as excited. Miss Willison used the word elated. She said that he seemed to be making up his mind to something. I don’t think that she has much doubt that Holroyd killed himself. When I questioned her she was obviously shocked by the idea and distressed on Mr. Anstey’s account. She didn’t want to believe it. But I think that she did.”

“What about Holroyd’s visit to his solicitor? Did he learn anything there to distress him I wonder.”

“It’s an old family firm, Holroyd and Martinson in Bedford Row. Holroyd’s elder brother is now the senior partner. I did ring him to ask but I didn’t get far. According to him, the visit was almost entirely social and Victor was no more depressed than usual. They were never close but Mr. Martin Holroyd did visit his brother occasionally at Toynton Grange, particularly when he wanted to talk to Mr. Anstey about his affairs.”

“You mean that Holroyd and Martinson are Anstey’s solicitors?”

“They’ve acted for the family for over 150 years I understand. It’s a very old connection. That’s how Victor Holroyd came to hear about the Grange. He was Anstey’s first patient.”

“What about Holroyd’s wheelchair? Could anyone at Toynton Grange have sabotaged that, either on the day Holroyd died or on the evening before?”

“Philby could, of course. He had the best opportunity. But a number of people could have done it. Holroyd’s rather heavy chair, the one which was used for these outings, was kept in the workroom at the end of the passage in the southern extension. I don’t know whether you know it, Sir, but it’s perfectly accessible even to wheelchairs. Basically it’s Philby’s workshop. He has the usual standard equipment and tools for carpentry and some metal work there. But the patients can use it too and are, in fact, encouraged either to help him or to indulge in their own hobbies. Holroyd used to do some fairly simple carpentry before he got too ill and Mr. Carwardine occasionally models in clay. The women patients don’t usually use it but there’d be nothing surprising to seeing one of the men there.”

Dalgliesh said:

“Carwardine told me that he was in the workroom when Philby oiled and checked the brakes at eight forty-five.”

“That’s rather more than he told me. He gave me the impression that he hadn’t really seen what Philby was up to. Philby was a bit coy about whether he could actually remember testing the brakes. I wasn’t surprised. It was pretty obvious that they all wanted it to look like an accident if that could be done without provoking the coroner into too many strictures about carelessness. I had a bit of luck, however, when I questioned them about the actual morning of Holroyd’s death. After breakfast Philby went back to the workroom shortly after eight forty-five. He was there for just an hour and when he left he locked the place up. He was glueing some repairs and didn’t want them disturbed. I got the impression that Philby thinks of the workroom as his domain and doesn’t exactly welcome the patients being allowed to use it. Anyway, he pocketed the key and didn’t unlock the room until Lerner came fussing to ask for the key shortly before four o’clock so that he could get Holroyd’s wheelchair. Assuming that Philby was telling the truth, the only people at Toynton Grange without alibis for the time when the workroom was unlocked and unoccupied early on the morning of 12th September are Mr. Anstey, Holroyd himself, Mr. Carwardine, Sister Moxon and Mrs. Hewson. Mr. Court was in London and didn’t arrive back at his cottage until just before Lerner and Holroyd set out. Lerner is clear too. He was busy with the patients at all the relevant times.”

That was all very well, thought Dalgliesh, but it proved very little. The workroom had been unlocked the previous evening after Carwardine and Philby had left and, presumably, also during the night. He said:

“You were very thorough, Sergeant. Did you manage to discover all this without alarming them too much?”

“I think so, Sir. I don’t think they thought for a moment that anyone else could have been responsible. They took it that I was checking-up on what opportunity Holroyd had to muck about with the chair himself. And if it were deliberately damaged, then my bet is he did it. He was a malicious man, from what I hear. It probably amused him to think that, when the chair was recovered from the sea and the damage discovered, then everyone at Toynton Grange would be under suspicion. That’s the kind of final thought that would give him quite a kick.”

Dalgliesh said:

“I just can’t believe that both brakes failed simultaneously and accidentally. I’ve seen those wheelchairs at the Grange. The brakes system is very simple but it’s effective and safe. And it’s almost as difficult to imagine that there was deliberate sabotage. How could the murderer possibly rely on the brakes failing at that particular moment? Lerner or Holroyd might easily have tested them before starting out. The defect might be discovered when the chair was braked on the cliff top or even on the journey. Besides, no one apparently knew that Holroyd was going to insist on an outing that afternoon. What did exactly happen on the cliff top, by the way? Who braked the chair?”

“According to Lerner, Holroyd did. Lerner admits that he never looked at the brakes. All he can say is that he noticed nothing wrong with the chair. The brakes weren’t used until they reached their usual stopping place.”

For a moment there was silence. They had finished eating and Inspector Daniel felt in the pocket of his tweed jacket and produced his pipe. As he stroked its bowl with his thumb before filling it, he said quietly:

“Nothing was worrying you about the old gentleman’s death was it, Sir?”

“He was medically diagnosed as a dying man and somewhat inconveniently for me he died. I worry that I didn’t visit him in time to hear what was on his mind; but that’s a private worry. Speaking as a policeman, I should rather like to know who saw him last before he died. Officially, it was Grace Willison, but I’ve a feeling he had a later visitor than she; another patient. When he was found dead next morning he was wearing his stole. His diary is missing, and someone broke into his bureau. As I haven’t seen Father Baddeley for over twenty years it’s probably unreasonable of me to be so sure that it wasn’t he.”

Sergeant Varney turned to his Inspector.

“What would be the theological position, Sir, if someone confessed to a priest, got absolution and then killed him to make sure that he kept his mouth shut. Would the confession take as it were?”

The young face was preternaturally grave, it was impossible to tell whether the enquiry had been serious, whether this was a private joke directed against the Inspector, or made with some more subtle motive. Daniel took his pipe from his mouth:

“God, you young men are an ignorant lot of heathens! When I was a kid in Sunday School I put pennies in the collection plate for black bambinos not half as ignorant as your lot. Take it from me lad, it would do you no good theologically or otherwise.”

He turned to Dalgliesh.

“Wearing his stole, was he? Now that’s interesting.”

“I thought so.”

“And yet, is it so unnatural? He was alone and may have known that he was dying. Maybe he just felt more comfortable with the feel of it round his neck. Wouldn’t you say that, Sir?”

“I don’t know what he’d do, or what he’d feel. I’ve been content not to know for the past twenty years.”

“And the forced bureau. Maybe he’d decided to make a start with destroying his papers and couldn’t remember where he’d put the key.”

“It’s perfectly possible.”

“And he was cremated?”

“Cremated, on the insistence of Mrs. Hammitt, and his ashes buried with the appropriate rite of the Church of England.”

Inspector Daniel said nothing more. There was, Dalgliesh thought bitterly as they rose to go, nothing else to say.

Father Baddeley’s solicitors, the firm of Loder and Wainwright, occupied a simple but harmonious house of red brick facing directly on to South Street and typical, Dalgliesh thought, of the more agreeable houses which were built after the old town was virtually destroyed by fire in 1762. The door was propped open by a brass doorstop shaped like a miniature cannon, its dazzling muzzle pointing intimidatingly towards the street. Apart from this bellicose symbol the house and its furnishings were reassuringly welcoming, producing an atmosphere of solid affluence, tradition and professional rectitude. The white painted hall was hung with prints of eighteenth-century Dorchester and smelt of furniture polish. To the left, an open door led to a large waiting-room with an immense circular table on a carved pedestal, half a dozen carved mahogany chairs heavy enough to accommodate a robust farmer in upright discomfort, and an oil painting of an unnamed Victorian gentleman, presumably the founder of the firm, bewhiskered and beribboned and displaying the seal of his watch chain between a delicate thumb and finger as if anxious that the painter should not overlook it. It was a house in which any of Hardy’s more prosperous characters would have felt themselves at home, could with confidence have discussed the effects of the abolition of the corn laws or the perfidy of the French privateers. Opposite the waiting-room was a partitioned office occupied by a young girl, dressed up to the waist in black boots and a long skirt like a Victorian governess and above the waist like a pregnant milkmaid. She was laboriously typing at a speed which could have explained Maggie Hewson’s strictures about the firm’s dilatoriness. In response to Dalgliesh’s enquiry she glanced up at him through a curtain of lank hair and said that Mr. Robert was out at present but was expected back in ten minutes. Taking his time over lunch, thought Dalgliesh, and resigned himself to a half-hour wait.

Loder returned some twenty minutes later. Dalgliesh heard him galumphing happily into the reception office; there was the murmur of voices and a second later he appeared in the waiting-room and invited his visitor into his office at the rear of the house. Neither the room—poky, stuffy and untidy—nor its owner were quite what Dalgliesh had expected. Neither suited the house. Bob Loder was a swarthy, heavily built, square-faced man with a blotched skin and unhealthy pallor and small, discouraged eyes. His sleek hair was uniformly dark—too dark to be entirely natural—except for a thin line of silver at the brow and sides. His moustache was dapper and trim above lips so red and moist that they looked about to ooze blood. Noting the lines at the corner of the eyes and the sagging muscles of the neck Dalgliesh suspected that he was neither as young nor as vigorous as he was at pains to suggest.

He greeted Dalgliesh with a heartiness and bonhomie which seemed as unsuited to his personality as it was to the occasion. His manner recalled to Dalgliesh something of the desperate heartiness of ex-officers of his acquaintance who hadn’t adjusted themselves to civilian life, or perhaps of a car salesman with little confidence that the chassis and engine will hang together long enough to complete the sale.

Dalgliesh briefly explained the ostensible reason for his visit.

“I didn’t know that Father Baddeley was dead until I arrived at Toynton and the first I heard about his bequest to me was from Mrs. Hewson. That isn’t important. You probably haven’t had a chance to write yet. But Mr. Anstey wants the cottage cleared for the new occupant and I thought that I’d better check with you before removing the books.”

Loder put his head outside the door and yelled for the file. It was produced in a surprisingly quick time. After a perfunctory examination he said:

“That’s OK. Perfectly. Sorry about no letter. It wasn’t so much the lack of time as no address, don’t you know. The dear old chap didn’t think of that. Name familiar, of course. Ought I to know you?”

“I don’t think so. Perhaps Father Baddeley mentioned my name when he visited you. I believe he did call in a day or so before the start of his last illness.”

“That’s right, on Wednesday the eleventh p.m. That was only the second time we’d met, come to think of it. He first consulted me about three years ago, soon after he arrived at Toynton Grange. That was to make his will. He didn’t have much but, then, he hadn’t been spending much and it had accumulated into quite a nice little sum.”

“How did he hear of you?”

“He didn’t. The dear old chap wanted to make his will, knew that he’d need a solicitor and just took the bus into Wareham, and walked into the first solicitors’ office he came to. I happened to be here at the time so I got him. I drew up the will there and then since that was what he wanted and two of the staff here signed it. I’ll say this for the old dear, he was the easiest client I’ve ever had.”

“I wondered whether his visit on the eleventh was to consult you about anything that was worrying him. From his last letter to me I rather gathered that he had something on his mind. If there’s anything I ought to do …”

He let his voice trail away in a long interrogation.

Loder said cheerfully:

“The dear old chap came in some perturbation of spirit. He was thinking of changing his will but hadn’t quite made up his mind. He seemed to have got the idea that I could somehow put the money into limbo for him while he came to a decision. I said: ‘My dear Sir, if you die tonight the money goes to Wilfred Anstey and Toynton Grange. If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll have to make up your mind what you do want and I’ll draw up a new will. But the money exists. It won’t just disappear. And if you don’t cancel the old will or change it, then it stands.’”

“Did he strike you as sensible?”

“Oh, yes, muddled perhaps but more in his imagination than his comprehension if you get me. As soon as I pointed out the facts he understood them. Well, he always had understood them. It’s just that he wished for a moment that the problem wasn’t there. Don’t we all know the feeling?”

“And a day later he went into hospital, and less than a fortnight later the problem was solved for him.”

“Yes, poor old dear. I suppose he would have said that providence decided it for him. Providence certainly made its views known in no uncertain way.”

“Did he give you any idea what was on his mind? I don’t want to pry into professional confidences, but I did get a strong impression that he wanted to consult me about something. If he had a commission for me I’d like to try to carry it out. And I suppose I have the policeman’s curiosity to find out what he wanted, to clear up unfinished business.”

“A policeman?”

Was the flicker of surprise and polite interest in those tired eyes a little too obvious to be natural?

Loder said:

“Did he invite you as a friend or in a professional capacity?”

“Probably a bit of both.”

“Well, I don’t see what you can do about it now. Even if he’d told me his intentions about the will and I knew whom he wanted to benefit it’s too late to do anything about it now.”

Dalgliesh wondered whether Loder seriously thought that he had been hoping for the money himself and was enquiring into a possible way of upsetting Father Baddeley’s will.

He said:

“I know that. I doubt whether it was anything to do with his will. It’s odd, though, that he never wrote to tell me about my legacy, and he left the main beneficiary in the same ignorance apparently.” It was entirely a shot in the dark but it found its mark. Loder spoke carefully, a trifle too carefully.

“Did he? I’d rather thought that that particular embarrassment was part of the old chap’s dilemma, the reluctance to disappoint when he’d promised.”

He hesitated, seeming to think that he had said either too much or too little and added:

“But Wilfred Anstey could confirm that.”

He paused again as if disconcerted by some subtle implication in his words and, obviously irritated at the devious paths into which the conversation was leading him, said more strongly:

“I mean if Wilfred Anstey says he didn’t know that he was the principal legatee then he didn’t know and I’m wrong. Are you staying long in Dorset?”

“Rather less than a week, I imagine. Just long enough to sort out and pack the books.”

“Oh, yes, the books, of course; perhaps that’s what Father Baddeley meant to consult you about. He may have thought that a library of theological tomes would be more of a liability than an acceptable bequest.”

“It’s possible.” The conversation seemed to have died. There was a brief, somewhat embarrassed pause before Dalgliesh said, rising from his chair:

“So there was nothing else worrying him as far as you know except this problem of the disposal of his money? He didn’t consult you about anything else?”

“No, nothing. If he had, it might have been something I wouldn’t have felt able to tell you without breaking a professional confidence. But, as he didn’t, I don’t see why you shouldn’t know that. And what would he have to consult me over, poor old gentleman? No wife, no children, no relatives, as far as I know, no family troubles, no car, a blameless life. What would he need a solicitor for except to draw up his will?”

It was a little late to talk about professional confidence, thought Dalgliesh. There was really no need for Loder to have confided that Father Baddeley had been thinking of changing his will. Given the fact that he hadn’t in fact done so that was the kind of information which a prudent solicitor would feel was best left undisclosed. As Loder walked with him to the door, Dalgliesh said casually:

“Father Baddeley’s will probably gave nothing but satisfaction. One can hardly say as much of Victor Holroyd’s.”

The dull eyes were suddenly sharp, almost conspiratorial. Loder said:

“So you’ve heard about that, have you?”

“Yes. But I’m surprised that you have.”

“Oh, news gets around, don’t you know, in a country district. As a matter of fact I have friends at Toynton. The Hewsons. Well, Maggie really. We met at the Conservative dance here last winter. It’s a pretty dull life stuck there on the cliff for a lively girl.”

“Yes. It must be.”

“She’s quite a lass is our Maggie. She told me about Holroyd’s will. I gather that he went up to London to see his brother and it was rather taken for granted that he wanted to discuss his will. But it looks as if big brother didn’t much like what Victor proposed and suggested that he thought again. In the event, Holroyd drew up the codicil himself. It wouldn’t exactly present any problem for him. All that family have been brought up in the law and Holroyd started reading for the Bar himself before he decided to switch to schoolteaching.”

“I understand that Holroyd and Martinson act for the Anstey family.”

“That’s right, and have for four generations. It’s a pity grandfather Anstey didn’t consult them before drawing up his will. That case was quite a lesson in the unwisdom of trying to act as your own lawyer. Well, good afternoon, Commander. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”

As he looked back when turning out of South Street, Dalgliesh could see Loder still watching after him, the brass cannon shining like a toy at his feet. There were a number of things about the solicitor which he found interesting. Not the least was how Loder had learned his rank.

But there was one other task before he turned his mind to his shopping. He called at the early nineteenth-century hospital, Christmas Close. But here he was unlucky. The hospital knew nothing of Father Baddeley; they admitted only chronic cases. If his friend had suffered a heart attack he would almost certainly have been admitted to the acute ward of a district general hospital despite his age. The courteous porter suggested that he should try either Poole General Hospital, Blandford or the Victoria Hospital at Wimborne, and helpfully directed him to the nearest public telephone.

He tried Poole Hospital first as being the nearest. And here he was luckier than he could have hoped. The clerk who answered the telephone was efficient. Given the date of Father Baddeley’s discharge he was able to confirm that the Reverend Baddeley had been a patient and to put Dalgliesh through to the right ward. The staff nurse answered. Yes, she remembered Father Baddeley. No, they hadn’t heard that he had died. She spoke the conventional words of regret and was able to make them sound sincere. Then she fetched Nurse Breagan to the telephone. Nurse Breagan usually offered to post patients’ letters. Perhaps she could help Commander Dalgliesh.

His rank, he knew, had something to do with their helpfulness, but not all. They were kindly women who were disposed to take trouble, even with a stranger. He explained his dilemma to Nurse Breagan.

“So you see, I didn’t know that my friend had died until I arrived yesterday at Toynton Grange. He promised to return the papers we were working on to me, but they’re not among his things, I wondered whether he posted them back to me from hospital, either to my London address or to the Yard.”

“Well now, Commander, the Father wasn’t a great one for writing. Reading, yes; but not writing. But I did post two letters for him. They were both local as far as I can remember. I have to look at the addresses, you see, so that I post them in the right box. The date? Well, I couldn’t remember that. But he did hand them to me together.”

“Would those be the two letters he wrote to Toynton, one to Mr. Anstey and one to Miss Willison?”

“Come to think of it, Commander, I do seem to remember those names. But I couldn’t be sure, you understand.”

“It’s very clever of you to remember so much. And you’re quite sure you only posted those two?”

“Oh, quite sure. Mind you, one of the other nurses might have posted a letter for him, but I couldn’t find out for you without difficulty. Some of them have changed wards. But I don’t think so. It’s usually me that takes the letters. And he wasn’t one for writing. That’s how I remember the two letters he did send.”

It could mean something or nothing. But the information had been worth the trouble. If Father Baddeley had made an appointment for the night of his return home, he must have done so either by telephoning from the hospital once he was well enough, or by letter. And only Toynton Grange itself, the Hewsons and Julius Court were on the telephone. But it might have been more convenient for him to write. The letter to Grace Willison would have been the one arranging her appointment for confession. The one to Anstey might have been the letter of condolence on Holroyd’s death to which she had referred. But, on the other hand, it might not.

Before ringing off he asked whether Father Baddeley had made any telephone calls from the hospital.

“Well, he made one, that I do know. That was when he was up and about. He went down to make it from the outpatients’ waiting-hall and he asked me if there’d be a London directory there. That’s how I remember.”

“At what time was this?”

“The morning. Just before I went off duty at twelve.”

So Father Baddeley had needed to make a London call, to a number he had to look up. And he had made it, not during the evening, but in office hours. There was one obvious enquiry Dalgliesh could make. But not yet. He told himself that as yet he had learned nothing which could justify even his unofficial involvement. And even if he had, where would all the suspicions, all the clues, ultimately lead? Only to a few fistfuls of ground bones in Toynton churchyard.

It wasn’t until after an early dinner at an inn near Corfe Castle that Dalgliesh drove back to Hope Cottage and settled down to begin sorting Father Baddeley’s books. But first there were small but necessary domestic chores to tackle. He replaced the dim bulb in the table lamp with a higher wattage; cleaned and adjusted the pilot light on the gas boiler over the sink; cleared a space in the food cupboard for his provisions and wine; and discovered in the outside shed by the aid of his torch a pile of driftwood for kindling, and a tin bath. There was no bathroom at Hope Cottage. Father Baddeley had probably taken his baths at Toynton Grange. But Dalgliesh had every intention of stripping and sluicing himself in the kitchen. Austerity was a small price to pay to avoid the bathroom at Toynton with its hospital smell of strong disinfectant, its intrusive reminders of sickness and deformity. He put a match to the dried grasses in the grate and watched them flare instantaneously into black needles in one sweet-smelling flame. Then he lit a small experimental fire and found to his relief that the chimney was clear. With a wood fire, a good light, books, food and a stock of wine he saw no reason to wish himself elsewhere.

He estimated that there were between two hundred and three hundred books on the sitting-room shelves and three times as many in the second bedroom; indeed the books had so taken over the room that it was almost impossible to get to the bed. The books presented very few surprises. Many of the theological tomes might be of interest to one of the London theological libraries; some, he thought, his aunt might be glad to give a home to; some were destined for his own shelves. There was H. B. Swete’s Greek Old Testament in three volumes, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ; William Law’s Serious Call; a leather-bound Life and Letters of Eminent 19th Century Divines in two volumes; a first edition of Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons. But there was also a representative collection of the major English novelists and poets and, since Father Baddeley had indulged himself by buying an occasional novel, there was a small but interesting collection of first editions.

At a quarter to ten he heard approaching footsteps and the squeak of wheels, there was a peremptory knock on the door, and Millicent Hammitt entered bringing with her an agreeable smell of fresh coffee and wheeling after her a laden trolley. There was a sturdy blue banded jug of coffee, a similar jug of hot milk, a bowl of brown sugar, two blue banded mugs, and a plate of digestive biscuits.

Dalgliesh felt that he could hardly object when Mrs. Hammitt cast an appreciative glance at the wood fire, poured out two mugs of coffee and made it obvious that she was in no hurry to go.

Dalgliesh had been briefly introduced to her before dinner the previous evening, but there had been time for only half a minute’s conversation before Wilfred had taken his stance at the reading desk and the ordained silence fell. She had taken the opportunity to discover, by the expedient of a blunt interrogation with no attempt at finesse, that Dalgliesh was holidaying alone because he was a widower and that his wife had died in childbirth with her baby. Her response to this had been, “Very tragic. And unusual, surely, for these days?” spoken with an accusatory glance across the table and in a tone which suggested that someone had been inexcusably careless.

She was wearing carpet slippers and a thick tweed skirt, incongruously topped by an openwork jumper in pink wool, liberally festooned with pearls. Dalgliesh suspected that her cottage was a similar unhappy compromise between utility and fussiness, but had no inclination to find out. To his relief she made no attempt to help with the books but sat squatting on the edge of the chair, coffee mug cradled in her lap, her legs planted firmly apart to reveal twin balloons of milky white and varicosed thigh above the bite of the stockings. Dalgliesh continued with his job, coffee mug on the floor at his side. He shook each volume gently before allocating it to its pile in case some message should drop out. If it did, Mrs. Hammitt’s presence would be embarrassing. But he knew that the precaution was merely his professional habit of leaving nothing to chance. This wouldn’t be Father Baddeley’s way.

Meanwhile Mrs. Hammitt sipped her coffee and talked, encouraged in her volubility and occasional indiscretion by the belief which Dalgliesh had noticed before that a man who is physically working only hears half what is said to him.

“No need to ask you if you had a comfortable night. Those beds of Wilfred’s are notorious. A certain amount of hardness is supposed to be good for disabled patients but I like a mattress I can sink into. I’m surprised that Julius didn’t invite you to sleep at his cottage, but he never does have visitors. Doesn’t want to put Mrs. Reynolds out I suppose. She’s the village constable’s widow from Toynton Village and she does for Julius whenever he’s here. Grossly overpaid, of course. Well, he can afford it. And you’ll be sleeping here tonight, I understand. I saw Helen Rainer coming in with the bed linen. I suppose it won’t worry you, sleeping in Michael’s bed. No, of course it wouldn’t, being a policeman. You aren’t sensitive or superstitious about things like that. Quite right too; our death is but a sleep and a forgetting. Or do I mean life? Wordsworth anyway. I used to be very fond of poetry when I was a girl but I can’t get along with these modern poets. Still, I should have quite looked forward to your reading.”

Her tone suggested that it would have been a solitary and eccentric pleasure. But Dalgliesh had momentarily stopped listening to her. He had found a first edition of Diary of a Nobody with an inscription written in a boyish hand, on the title page.

Dalgliesh smiled. So he’d tested it, had he, the arrogant little blighter. What mysterious concoction of acids and crystals from the remembered chemistry set had resulted in that confident scientific pronouncement? The inscription reduced the value of the book rather more than had the stain, but he didn’t think that Father Baddeley had thought so. He placed it on the pile reserved for his own shelves and again let Mrs. Hammitt’s voice pierce his consciousness.

“And if a poet can’t take the trouble to make himself intelligible to the educated reader, then the educated reader had better leave him alone, that’s what I always say.”

“I’m sure you do, Mrs. Hammitt.”

“Call me Millicent, won’t you? We’re supposed to be one happy family here. If I have to put up with Dennis Lerner and Maggie Hewson and even that appalling Albert Philby calling me by my Christian name—not that I give him much opportunity, I assure you—I don’t see why you shouldn’t. And I shall try to call you Adam but I don’t think it’s going to come easily. You aren’t a Christian name person.”

Dalgliesh carefully dusted the volumes of Maskell’s Monumenta Ritualica Ecclesiae Anglicanae and said that, from what he had heard, Victor Holroyd hadn’t done much towards promoting the concept of all one happy family.

“Oh, you’ve heard about Victor then? Maggie gossiping, I suppose. He really was an extremely difficult man, inconsiderate in life and in death. I managed to get on with him fairly well. I think he respected me. He was a very clever man and full of useful information. But no one at the Grange could stand him. Even Wilfred more or less gave up in the end and left him alone. Maggie Hewson was the exception. Odd woman; she always has to be different. Do you know, I believe she thought Victor had willed his money to her. Of course we all knew that he had money. He took good care to let us know that he wasn’t one of those patients paid for by the local authority. And I suppose she thought that if she played her cards right some of it might come to her. She more or less hinted it to me once. Well, she was half drunk at the time. Poor Eric! I give that marriage another year at the most. Some men might find her physically attractive, I suppose, if you like that dyed blonde, blowzy, over-sexed type. Of course, her affair, if you can call it an affair, with Victor was just indecent. Sex is for the healthy. I know that the disabled are supposed to have feelings like the rest of us but you’d think that they’d put that sort of thing behind them when they get to the wheelchair stage. That book looks interesting. The binding’s good anyway. You might get a shilling or two for that.”

Placing a first edition of Tracts for the Times out of reach of Millicent’s nudging foot and among the books selected for himself, Dalgliesh recognized with transitory self-disgust that, however much he deplored Mrs. Hammitt’s uninhibited expression, the sentiment wasn’t far from his own thoughts. What, he wondered, must it be like to feel desire, love, lust even, and be imprisoned in an unresponsive body? Or worse, a body only too responsive to some of its urges, but uncoordinated, ugly, grotesque. To be sensitive to beauty, but to live always with deformity. He thought that he could begin to understand Victor Holroyd’s bitterness. He asked:

“What happened in the end to Holroyd’s money?”

“It all went to his sister in New Zealand, all sixty-five thousand of it. Very right too. Money ought to be kept in the family. But I daresay Maggie had her hopes. Probably Victor more or less promised her. It’s the sort of thing he would do. He could be very spiteful at times. But at least he left his fortune where it ought to go. I should be very displeased indeed if I thought that Wilfred had bequeathed Toynton Grange to anyone but me.”

“But would you want it?”

“Oh, the patients would have to go, of course. I can’t see myself running Toynton Grange as it is now. I respect what Wilfred’s trying to do, but he has a particular need to do it. I expect you’ve heard about his visit to Lourdes and the miracle. Well, that’s all right by me. But I haven’t had a miracle, thank God, and I’ve no intention of putting myself in the way of one. Besides, I’ve done quite enough for the chronic sick already. Half the house was left to me by father and I sold out to Wilfred so that he could start the Home. We had a proper valuation made at the time, naturally, but it wasn’t very high. At that time large country houses were a drag on the market. Now, of course, it’s worth a fortune. It’s a beautiful house isn’t it?”

“It’s certainly interesting architecturally.”

“Exactly. Regency houses of character are fetching fantastic prices. Not that I’m set on selling. After all, it was our childhood home and I have an affection for it. But I should probably get rid of the land. As a matter of fact, Victor Holroyd knew someone locally who would be interested in buying, someone who wants to set up another holiday caravan camp.”

Dalgliesh said involuntarily:

“What a horrible thought!”

Mrs. Hammitt was unabashed. She said complacently:

“Not at all. A very selfish attitude on your part, if I may say so. The poor need holidays just like the rich. Julius wouldn’t like it, but I’m under no obligation to consider Julius. He’d sell his cottage and get out I suppose. He owns that acre and a half of the headland, but I can’t see him driving through a caravan park every time he comes here from London. Besides, they’d more or less have to pass his windows to get down to the beach. That’s the only spot with a beach at high tide. I can see them, can’t you; knobbly-kneed fathers in natty little shorts carrying the picnic bag, mum following with a blaring transistor, squealing kids, yelling babies. No, I can’t see Julius staying here.”

“Does everyone here know that you stand to inherit Toynton Grange?”

“Of course; it’s no secret. Who else should get it? As a matter of fact, the whole estate should belong to me by right. Perhaps you didn’t know that Wilfred isn’t really an Anstey, that he was adopted?”

Dalgliesh said cautiously that he thought someone had mentioned as much.

“Then you may as well know the whole of it. It’s quite interesting if you’re concerned with the law.”

Mrs. Hammitt refilled her mug and wriggled back into her chair as if settling herself for a complicated dissertation.

“My father was particularly anxious for a son. Some men are like that, daughters don’t really count with them. And I can quite see that I was a disappointment. If a man really wants a son, the only thing that reconciles him to a daughter is her beauty. And that I’ve never had. Luckily, it didn’t seem to worry my husband. We suited very well.”

As the only possible answer to this announcement was a vague, congratulatory murmur, Dalgliesh made the appropriate sound.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Hammitt, as if acknowledging a compliment. She went happily on:

“Anyway, when the doctors told father that my mother couldn’t bear another child, he decided to adopt a son. I believe he got Wilfred from a children’s home, but I was only six at the time and I don’t think I was ever told how and where they found him. Illegitimate, of course. People minded more about that kind of thing in 1920 and you could take your pick of unwanted babies. I remember how excited I was at the time to have a brother. I was a lonely child and with more than my share of natural affection. At the time, I didn’t see Wilfred as a rival. I was very fond of Wilfred when we were young. I still am. People forget that sometimes.”

Dalgliesh asked what happened.

“It was my grandfather’s will. The old man distrusted lawyers, even Holroyd and Martinson who were the family solicitors, and he drew up his own will. He left a life interest in the estate to my parents and the whole property in equal shares to his grandchildren. The question was, did he intend to include Wilfred? In the end we had to go to law about it. The case made quite a stir at the time and raised the whole question of the rights of adopted children. Perhaps you remember the case?”

Dalgliesh did have a vague memory of it. He asked:

“When was your grandfather’s will made, I mean in relation to your brother’s adoption?”

“That was the vital part of the evidence. Wilfred was legally adopted on 3rd May 1921, and grandfather signed his will exactly ten days later on 13th May. It was witnessed by two servants, but they were dead by the time the case was fought. The will was perfectly clear and in order, except that he didn’t put in the names. But Wilfred’s lawyers could prove that grandfather knew about the adoption and was happy about it. And the will did say children, in the plural.”

“But he might have had it in mind that your mother would die first and your father remarry.”

“How clever of you! I can see that you’ve a lawyer’s devious mind. That’s exactly what my counsel argued. But it was no good. Wilfred won. But you can understand my feelings over the Grange. If grandfather had only signed that will before 3rd May things would be very different, I can tell you.”

“But you did get half the value of the estate?”

“That didn’t last long I’m afraid. My dear husband got through money very quickly. It wasn’t women, I’m glad to say. It was horses. They’re just as expensive and even more unpredictable but a less humiliating rival for a wife. And, unlike another woman, you can at least be glad when they win. Wilfred always said that Herbert became senile when he retired from the army, but I didn’t complain. I rather preferred him that way. But he did get through the money.”

Suddenly she glanced round the room, leaned forward and gave Dalgliesh a sly conspiratorial glance.

“I’ll tell you something that no one at Toynton Grange knows, except Wilfred. If he does sell out I shall get half the sale price. Not just half the extra profit, fifty per cent of what he gets. I’ve got an undertaking from Wilfred, properly signed and witnessed by Victor. Actually it was Victor’s suggestion. He thought it would stand up in law. And it isn’t kept where Wilfred can get his hands on it. It’s with Robert Loder, a solicitor in Wareham. I suppose Wilfred was so confident that he’d never need to sell, that he didn’t care what he signed or perhaps he was arming himself against temptation. I don’t think for one minute that he will sell. He cares too much about the place for that. But if he should change his mind, then I shall do very nicely.”

Dalgliesh said, greatly daring:

“When I arrived, Mrs. Hewson said something about the Ridgewell Trust. Hasn’t Mr. Anstey got it in mind to transfer the Home?”

Mrs. Hammitt took the suggestion more calmly than he had expected. She retorted robustly:

“Nonsense! I know Wilfred talks about it from time to time, but he’d never just hand over Toynton Grange. Why should he? Money’s tight, of course, but money always is tight. He’ll just have to put up the fees or get the local authorities to pay more for the patients they send. There’s no reason why he should subsidize the local authorities. And if he still can’t make the place pay, then he’d do better to sell out, miracle or no miracle.”

Dalgliesh suggested that, in all the circumstances, it was surprising that Anstey hadn’t become a Roman Catholic. Millicent seized on the thought with vehemence.

“It was quite a spiritual struggle for him at the time.” Her voice deepened and throbbed with the echo of cosmic forces linked in mortal struggle. “But I was glad that he decided to remain in our church. Our father”—her voice boomed out in such a sudden access of hortatory fervour that Dalgliesh, startled, half expected that she was about to launch into the Lord’s prayer—“would have been so very distressed. He was a great churchman, Commander Dalgliesh. Evangelical of course. No, I was glad that Wilfred didn’t go over.”

She spoke as if Wilfred, faced with the Jordan river, had neither liked the look of the water nor had confidence in his boat.

Dalgliesh had already asked Julius Court about Anstey’s religious allegiance and had received a different and, he suspected, a more accurate explanation. He recalled their conversation on the patio before they had rejoined Henry; Julius’s amused voice: “Father O’Malley, who was supposed to be instructing Wilfred, made it plain that his church would in future proclaim on a number of matters that Wilfred had seen as coming within his personal jurisdiction. It occurred to dear Wilfred that he was on the point of joining a very large organization and one which thought that, as a convert, he was receiving rather than bestowing benefit. In the end, after what I have no doubt was a gratifying struggle, he decided to remain in a more accommodating fold.”

“Despite the miracle?” Dalgliesh had asked.

“Despite the miracle. Father O’Malley is a rationalist. He admits the existence of miracles but prefers the evidence to be submitted to the proper authorities for thorough examination. After a seemly delay the Church in her wisdom will then pronounce. To go about proclaiming that one has been the recipient of special grace smacks to him of presumption. Worse, I suspect he thinks it in poor taste. He’s a fastidious man, is Father O’Malley. He and Wilfred don’t really get on. I’m afraid that Father O’Malley has lost his church a convert.”

“But the pilgrimages to Lourdes still go on?” Dalgliesh had asked.

“Oh, yes. Twice a year regularly. I don’t go. I used to when I first came here but it isn’t, in the contemporary idiom, exactly my scene. But I usually make it my business to provide a slap-up tea to welcome them all back.”

Dalgliesh, his mind recalled to the present, was aware that his back was beginning to ache. He straightened up just as the clock on the mantelshelf struck the three-quarters. A charred log tumbled from the grate shooting up a final cascade of sparks. Mrs. Hammitt took it as a signal that it was time to go. Dalgliesh insisted first on washing up the coffee mugs and she followed him into the little kitchen.

“It has been a pleasant hour, Commander, but I doubt whether we shall repeat it. I’m not one of those neighbours who keep dropping in. Thank God I can stand my own company. Unlike poor Maggie, I have resources. And I’ll say one thing for Michael Baddeley, he did keep himself to himself.”

“Nurse Rainer tells me that you persuaded him of the advantages of cremation.”

“Did she say that? Well, I daresay she’s right. I may have mentioned it to Michael. I strongly disapprove of wasting good ground to bury putrifying bodies. As far as I remember, the old man didn’t care what happened to him as long as he ended up in consecrated earth with the proper words said over him. Very sensible. My view entirely. And Wilfred certainly didn’t object to the cremation. He and Dot Moxon agreed with me absolutely. Helen protested over the extra trouble, but what she didn’t like was having to get a second doctor’s signature. Thought it cast some kind of aspersion on dear Eric’s clinical judgement, I suppose.”

“But surely no one was suggesting that Dr. Hewson’s diagnosis was wrong?”

“Of course not! Michael died of a heart attack, and even Eric was competent to recognize that, I should hope. No, don’t bother to see me home, I’ve got my torch. And if there’s anything you need at any time, just knock on the wall.”

“But would you hear? You didn’t hear Father Baddeley.”

“Naturally not, since he didn’t knock. And after about nine-thirty I wasn’t really listening for him. You see, I thought someone had already visited to settle him for the night.”

The darkness outside was cool and restless, a black mist, sweet-tasting and smelling of the sea, not the mere absence of light but a positive, mysterious force. Dalgliesh manoeuvred the trolley over the doorstep. Walking beside Millicent down the short path, and steadying the trolley with one hand, he asked with careful uninterest:

“Did you hear someone, then?”

“Saw, not heard. Or so I thought. I was thinking of making myself a hot drink and I wondered whether Michael would like one. But when I opened my front door to call in and ask, I thought I saw a figure in a cloak disappearing into the darkness. As Michael’s light was off—I could see that the cottage was completely dark—naturally I didn’t disturb him. I know now that I was mistaken. Either that or I’m going potty. It wouldn’t be difficult in this place. Apparently no one did visit him and now they’ve all got a bad conscience about it. I can see how I was deceived. It was a night like this. Just a slight breeze but the darkness seeming to move and form itself into shapes. And I heard nothing, not even a footfall. Just a glimpse of a bent head, hooded and a cloak swirling into the darkness.”

“And this was at about nine-thirty?”

“Or a little later. Perhaps it was about the time he died. A fanciful person could frighten herself imagining that she’d seen his ghost. That was what Jennie Pegram actually suggested when I told them at Toynton Grange. Ridiculous girl!”

They had almost reached the door of Faith Cottage. She hesitated and then said as if on impulse, and, he thought, with some embarrassment:

“They tell me that you’re worried about the broken lock of Michael’s bureau. Well, it was all right the night before he came back from hospital. I found I’d run out of envelopes and I had an urgent letter to write. I thought that he wouldn’t mind if I took a look in the bureau. It was locked then.”

Dalgliesh said:

“And broken when your brother looked for the will shortly after the body was found.”

“So he says, Commander. So he says.”

“But you have no proof that he broke it?”

“I’ve no proof that anyone did. The cottage was full of people running in and out. Wilfred, the Hewsons, Helen, Dot, Philby, even Julius when he arrived from London; the place was like a wake. All I know is that the bureau was locked at nine o’clock on the night before Michael died. And I’ve no doubt that Wilfred was keen to get his eyes on that will and see if Michael really had left Toynton Grange all he possessed. And I do know that Michael didn’t break the lock himself.”

“How, Mrs. Hammitt?”

“Because I found the key, just after lunch on the day he died. In the place where, presumably, he always kept it—that old tea tin on the second shelf of the food cupboard. I didn’t think he’d mind my having any little bits of food he’d left. I slipped it into my pocket in case it got lost when Dot cleared the cottage. After all, that old bureau desk is quite valuable and the lock ought to be repaired. As a matter of fact, if Michael hadn’t left it to Grace in his will, I would have moved it into here and looked after it properly.”

“So you still have the key?”

“Of course. No one has ever bothered about it but you. But, as you seem so interested you may as well take it.”

She dug her hand into the pocket of her skirt and he felt the cold metal pressed into his palm. She had opened the door of her cottage now and had reached for the light switch. In the sudden glare he blinked, and then saw it clearly, a small silver key, delicate as filigree, but tied now with thin string to a red plastic clothes peg, the red so bright that, for a dazzled second, it looked as if his palm were stained with blood.