But she knew that Rickards would have confided in Adam Dalgliesh. He said: 'I don't think Alex Mair is a man to deceive himself about uncomfortable facts. He must know the truth. But that doesn't mean that he'll admit it to the police. Officially he accepts their view that the murderess is dead but that it's now impossible to prove whether that murderess was Amy Camm, Caroline Amphlett or Alice Mair. The difficulty is that there still isn't a single piece of concrete evidence to connect Miss Mair with Hilary Robarts's death and certainly not enough circumstantial evidence posthumously to brand her as the killer. If she had lived and withdrawn her confession to you I doubt whether Rickards would have been justified even in making an arrest. The open verdict at the inquest means that even the suicide theory is unproved. The fire investigator's report confirms that the fire was caused by the overturn of a pan of boiling fat, probably while she was cooking, perhaps trying out a new recipe.'
Meg said bitterly: 'And it all rests on my story, doesn't it? The not-very-likely tale told by a woman who has made trouble before and who has a history of mental breakdown. That came out clearly when I was being questioned. Inspector Rickards seemed obsessed with the relationship, whether I had a grudge against Alice, whether we had quarrelled. By the time he had finished I didn't know whether he saw me as a malicious liar or her accomplice.'
Even three and a half months after the death it was difficult to think of those long interrogations without the familiar destructive mixture of pain, fear and anger. She had been made to tell her story over and over again under those sharp and sceptical eyes. And she could understand why he had been so reluctant to believe her. She had never found it easy to lie convincingly and he had known that she was lying. But why? he had asked. What reason did Alice Mair give for the murder? What was her motive? Her brother couldn't be forced to marry Hilary Robarts. And it's not as if he hadn't been married before. His ex-wife is alive and well, so what made this marriage so impossible for her? And she hadn't told him, except to reiterate obstinately that Alice had wanted to prevent it. She had promised not to tell, and she never would, not even to Adam Dalgliesh, who was the only man who might possibly have been able to make her. She guessed that he knew that too, but that he would never ask. Once when she was visiting him in hospital she had suddenly said: 'You know, don't you?'
And he had replied: 'No, I don't know, but I can guess. Blackmail isn't an uncommon motive for murder.'
But he had asked no questions, and for that she was grateful. She knew now that Alice had told her the truth only because she had planned that Meg wouldn't be alive the next day to reveal it. She had meant them to die together. But in the end she had drawn back. The whisky, almost certainly drugged with her sleeping tablets, had been gently but firmly taken from her hand. In the end Alice had kept faith with their friendship and she would keep faith with her friend. Alice had said that she owed her brother a death. Meg had pondered on those words but could still find no real meaning in them. But if Alice had owed Alex a death she, for her part, owed Alice her loyalty and her silence. She said: 'I'm hoping to buy Martyr's Cottage when the repairs are finished. I have some capital from the sale of the London house and the promise of a small mortgage which is all I'll need. I thought I could let it in summer to help with the expenses. And then, when the Copleys no longer need me, I could move in and live there. I'd like the thought that it would be waiting for me.'
If he was surprised that she should want to return to a place with such traumatic memories, he didn't say so. As if she had a need to explain Meg went on: 'Terrible things have happened in the past to people living on this headland, not only to Agnes Poley, to Hilary, to Alice, to Amy and Caroline. But I still feel at home here. I still feel that this is my place. I still feel that I want to be part of it. And if there are ghosts at Martyr's Cottage, they will be friendly spirits.'
He said: 'It's a stony soil in which to put down roots.'
'Perhaps that's the kind of soil my roots need.'
An hour later she had said her last goodbye. The truth lay between them, unspoken, and now he was leaving and she might never see him again. She realized with a smile of happy surprise that she was a little in love with him. But it didn't matter. It was as devoid of pain as it was of hope. When she reached a low ridge on the headland she turned and looked north at the power station, the generator and symbol of the potent and mysterious power which she could never separate from the image of that curiously beautiful mushroom cloud, symbol too of the intellectual and spiritual arrogance which had led Alice to murder, and it seemed to her for a second that she heard the echo of the last warning siren screaming its terrible message over the headland. And evil didn't end with the death of one evildoer. Somewhere at this moment a new Whistler could be planning his dreadful revenge against a world in which he had never been at home. But that was in the unforeseeable future and the fear had no reality. Reality was here, in a single moment of sunlit time, in the shivering grasses of the headland, the sparkling sea layered in blue and purple to the horizon and winged with a single sail, the broken arches of the abbey in which the flints struck gold from the mellowing sun, the great sails of the mill, motionless and silent, the taste of the sea-salted air. Here the past and the present fused and her own life, with its trivial devices and desires, seemed only an insignificant moment in the long history of the headland. And then she smiled at these portentous imaginings and, turning to wave a final goodbye to the tall figure still standing at the mill door, she strode out resolutely for home. The Copleys would be waiting for their afternoon tea.
P. D. James
P. D. James was born in Oxford in 1920 and educated at Cambridge High School. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service as an administrator, and the experience she gained from her job helped her with the background for Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower and A Mind to Murder. In 1968 she entered the Home Office as Principal, working first in the Police Department concerned with the forensic science service, and later in the Criminal Policy Department. She retired in 1979. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was a Governor of the BBC from 1988 to 1993 and was a member of the Board of the British Council from 1988 to 1993. She served on the Arts Council and was Chairman of its Literary Advisory Panel from 1988 to 1992. She has served as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She has won awards for crime writing from Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, and has received honorary degrees from five universities. In 1983 she received an OBE and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors. She has been a widow for over twenty-five years and has two children and five grandchildren.
Her novels include An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Innocent Blood and The Skull beneath the Skin (also available as Trilogy of Death); Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower and Death of an Expert Witness (also available as A Dalgliesh Trilogy); A Taste for Death, A Mind to Murder and Devices and Desires (also available as A Second Dalgliesh Trilogy); Cover Her Face; Unnatural Causes; The Children of Men; Original Sin; and A Certain Justice. She is co-author, with T. A. Critchley, of The Maul and the Pear Tree. Most of her books are published by Penguin.
