Devices & Desires

'To be guilty, yes. But not to feel guilt. That must make it easier.'

'Oh, but I do feel it. I've been made to feel guilty from childhood. And if at the heart of your being you feel that you've no right even to exist, then one more cause of guilt hardly matters.'

Meg thought, I shall never be able to unlearn, never forget what's happening here this evening. But I have to know the whole of it. Even the most painful knowledge is better than half-knowledge. She said: 'That night I came here to tell you the Copleys were going to their daughter…'

Alice said: 'On the Friday after the dinner party. Thirteen days ago.'

'Is that all? It seems in a different dimension of time. You asked me to come and have supper with you when I got back from Norwich. Was that planned as part of your alibi? Did you use even me?'

Alice looked at her. She said: 'Yes. I'm sorry. You would have been here about half-past nine, just time for me to get back and be ready with a hot meal in the oven.'

'Which you would have cooked earlier in the evening. Safe enough with Alex at the power station, out of the way.'

'That's what I planned. When you declined I didn't press it. That would have looked suspicious later, too like trying to establish an alibi. Besides, you wouldn't have been persuaded to change your mind, would you? You never do. But the very fact of the invitation would have helped. A woman wouldn't normally invite a friend to even an informal supper if she's simultaneously planning a murder.'

'And if I had accepted, if I had turned up here at half-past nine, that would have been awkward, wouldn't it, given your later change of plan? You wouldn't have been able to drive over to Scudder's Cottage to give Ryan Blaney his alibi. And you would have been left in possession of the shoes and the belt.'

'The shoes would have been the greatest problem. I didn't think they'd ever be connected with the crime but I needed to get rid of them before next morning. I couldn't possibly explain my possession of them. I would probably have washed them and hidden them away, hoping for a chance to get them back to the jumble box the next day. Though I would have to have found a way of giving Ryan his alibi. Probably I would have told you that I couldn't get through by telephone and that we ought to drive over at once to tell him that the Whistler was dead. But it's all academic. I didn't worry. You said you wouldn't come and I knew you wouldn't.'

'But I did. Not to supper. But I came.'

'Yes. Why did you, Meg?'

'A feeling of depression after a heavy day, hating seeing the Copleys go, the need to see you. I wasn't looking for a meal. I had an early supper and then walked over the headland.'

But there was something else she needed to ask. She said: 'You knew that Hilary swam after watching the beginning of the main news. I suppose most people knew that who knew that she liked swimming at night. And you were taking trouble to see that Ryan had his alibi for nine fifteen or shortly after. But suppose the body hadn't been discovered until the next day? Surely she wouldn't normally be missed until she didn't turn up at the power station on Monday morning, and then they would telephone to see if she were ill. It might even have been Monday evening before anybody made any inquiries. She could have swum in the morning and not at night.'

'The pathologist can usually estimate the time of death with reasonable accuracy. And I knew she'd be found that night. I knew that Alex had promised to visit her when he got back from the power station. He was on his way to the cottage when he met Adam Dalgliesh. And now, I think, you know it all, except for the Bumble trainers. I came through the back gardens at the Old Rectory late on Sunday afternoon. I knew that the back door would be open and it was the time when you would be having high tea. I had a bag with me with a few items of jumble in case I was seen. But I wasn't seen. I took soft shoes, easy to wear, a pair that looked roughly my size. And I took one of the belts.'

But there was one more question to ask, the most important of all. Meg said: 'But why? Alice, I have to know. Why?'

'That's a dangerous question, Meg. Are you sure you really want the answer?'

'I need the answer, need to try to understand.'

'Isn't it enough that she was determined to marry Alex and I was determined that she shouldn't?'

'That isn't why you killed her. It can't be. There was something more than that, there had to be.'

'Yes, there was. I suppose you have a right to know. She was blackmailing Alex. She could have stopped him getting that job, or, if he had got it, could have made it impossible for him to function successfully. She had the power to destroy his whole career. Toby Gledhill had told her that Alex had deliberately held up publishing the result of their research because it might have prejudiced the success of the inquiry into Larksoken's second reactor. They discovered that some of the assumptions made in generating the mathematical models were more critical than had been thought. People opposing the building of the new PWR at Larksoken could have exploited it to cause delay, whip up fresh hysteria.'

'You mean that he deliberately falsified the results?'

'That's something he's incapable of doing. All he did was to delay publishing the experiment. He'll publish it within the next month or two. But that's the kind of information which, once it got into the press, would have done irreparable harm. Toby was almost prepared to hand it over to Neil Pascoe but Hilary dissuaded him. It was far too valuable for that. She meant to use it to persuade Alex to marry her. She faced him with the knowledge when he walked home with her after the dinner party and late that night, he told me. I knew then what I had to do. The only way he might have been able to buy her off was by promoting her from Acting Administrator to Administrative Officer of Larksoken, and that was almost as impossible for him as deliberately falsifying a scientific result.'

'You mean he might actually have married her?'

'He might have been forced to. But how safe would he have been even then? She could have held that knowledge over his head until the end of his life. And what would that life have been, tied to a woman who had blackmailed him into marriage, a woman he didn't want, whom he could neither respect nor love?'

And then she said in a voice so low that Meg only just heard it, 'I owed Alex a death.'

Meg said: 'But how could you be sure, sure enough to kill her? Couldn't you have talked to her, persuaded her, reasoned with her?'

'I did talk to her. I went to see her on that Sunday afternoon. It was I who was with her when Mrs Jago arrived with the church magazine. You could say that I went to give her a chance of life. I couldn't murder her without making sure that it was necessary. That meant doing what I'd never done before, talking to her about Alex, trying to persuade her that the marriage wouldn't be in either of their interests, to let him go. I could have saved myself the humiliation. There was no argument, she was beyond that. She was no longer even rational. Part of the time she railed at me like a woman possessed.'

Meg said: 'And your brother, did he know about the visit?'

'He knows nothing. I didn't tell him at the time and I haven't told him since. But he told me what he planned; to promise her marriage and then, when the job was secure, to renege. It would have been disastrous. He never understood the woman he was dealing with, the passion, the desperation. She was a rich man's only child, alternately overindulged or neglected, trying all her life to compete with her father, taught that what you want is yours by right if you've only got the courage to fight for it and take it. And she had courage. She was obsessed by him, by her need for him, above all by her need for a child. She said that he owed her a child. Did he think she was like one of his reactors, tameable, that he could let down into that turbulence the equivalent of his rods of boron-steel and control the force which he'd let loose? When I left her that afternoon I knew I had no choice. Sunday was the deadline. He had arranged to call at Thyme Cottage on his way home from the power station. It was fortunate for him that I got to her first.