At first the students didn’t notice her return. Then three pairs of eyes were suddenly fixed on her, three figures stood frozen in a tableau of puzzled inquiry. Nurse Dakers leaned against the door post and opened her mouth soundlessly. The words wouldn’t come. Something seemed to have happened to her throat. Her whole jaw was trembling uncontrollably and her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her eyes pleaded with them. It seemed minutes while they watched her struggle. When the words did come she sounded calm, gently surprised.
“It’s Fallon. She’s dead.”
She smiled like someone waking from a dream, patiently explaining: “Someone’s murdered Fallon.”
The room emptied. She wasn’t aware of their concerted dash down the corridor. She was alone. The kettle was screeching now, the lid rattling under the force of the steam. Carefully she turned down the gas, frowning with concentration. Very slowly, like a child entrusted with a precious task, she took down the canister, the elegant teapot, the matching cup and saucer, and humming gently to herself, made Fallon’s early morning tea.
Chapter Three
I
“The pathologist is here, sir.”
A detective constable put his cropped head round the bedroom door and raised an interrogative eyebrow.
Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh turned from his ex-animation of the dead girl’s clothes, his six feet two inches uncomfortably trapped between the foot of the bed and the wardrobe door. He looked at his watch. It was eight minutes past ten. Sir Miles Honeyman, as always, had made good time.
“Right, Fenning. Ask him to be good enough to wait for a moment, will you? We’ll be finished in here in a minute. Then some of us can clear out and make room for ram.”
The head disappeared. Dalgliesh closed the wardrobe door and managed to squeeze himself between it and the foot of the bed. Certainly there was no room for a fourth person at present The huge bulk of the finger-print man occupied the space between the bedside table and the window as, bent almost double, be brushed charcoal carefully on to the surface of the whisky bottle, turning it by its cork. Beside the bottle stood a glass plate bearing the dead girl’s prints, the whorls and composites plainly visible.
“Anything there?” asked Dalgliesh.
The print man paused and peered more closely.
“A nice set of prints coming up, sir. They’re hers all right Nothing else, though. It looks as if the chap who sold it gave the bottle the usual wipe over before wrapping. It’ll be interesting to see what we get from the beaker.”
He cast a jealously possessive glance at it as it lay where it had fallen from the girl’s hand, lightly poised in a curve of the counterpane. Not until the last photograph had been taken would it be yielded up for his examination.
He bent again to his task on the bottle. Behind him the Yard photographer maneuvered his tripod and camera-a new Cambo monorail, Dalgliesh noticed-to the right-hand foot of the bed. There was a click, an explosion of light, and the image of the dead girl leapt up at them and lay suspended in air, burning itself on Dalgliesh’s retina. Color and shape were intensified and distorted in that cruel, momentary glare. The long black hair was a tangled wig against the whiteness of the pillows; the glazed eyes were exophthalmic marbles, as if rigor mortis were squeezing them out of their sockets; the skin was very white and smooth, looking repulsive to the touch, an artificial membrane, tough and impermeable as vinyl. Dalgliesh blinked, erasing the image of a witch’s plaything, a grotesque puppet casually tossed against the pillow. When he next looked at her she was again a dead girl on a bed; no more and no less. Twice more the distorted image leapt up at him and lay petrified in air as the photographer took two pictures with the Polaroid Land camera to give Dalgliesh the immediate prints for which he always asked. Then it was over. “That was the last. I’m through, sir,” said the photographer. I’ll let Sir Miles in now.“ He put his head around the door while the print man, grunting with satisfaction, lovingly lifted the drinking beaker from the counterpane with a pair of forceps and set it alongside the whisky bottle.
Sir Miles must have been waiting on the landing for he trotted in immediately, a familiar rotund figure with his immense head of Mack curling hair and eager beady eyes. He brought with him an air of music hall bonhommie and, as always, a faint smell of sour sweat He was unfretted by the delay. But then Sir Miles, God’s gift to forensic pathology or an amateur mountebank as you chose to take him, did not easily take offence. He had gained much of his reputation and also, possibly, his recent knighthood by adhering to the principle that you should never willingly offend anyone, however humble. He greeted the departing photographer and the fingerprint officer as if they were old friends, and Dalgliesh by his Christian name. But the socialities were perfunctory; his preoccupation preceded him like a miasma as he wriggled up close to the bed.
Dalgliesh despised him as a ghoul; hardly, he admitted, a rational cause for dislike. In a perfectly organized world, foot fetishists would, no doubt, become chiropodists; hair fetishists, hairdressers; and ghouls, morbid anatomists. It was surprising that so few of them did. But Sir Miles laid himself open to the implication. He approached each new corpse with eagerness, almost with glee; his macabre jokes had been heard at half the dining clubs in London; he was an expert in death who obviously enjoyed his work. Dalgliesh felt inhibited in his company by the consciousness of his dislike for the man. Antipathy seemed to crackle from him. But Sir Miles was oblivious of it He liked himself too well to conceive that other men might find him less lovable, and this endearing naivety gave him a kind of charm. Even those colleagues who most deplored his conceit, his publicity seeking, and the irresponsibility of most of his public utterances, found it hard to dislike him as much as they felt they should. Women were said to find him attractive. Perhaps he had a morbid fascination for them. Certainly his was the infectious good nature of a man who necessarily finds the world an agreeable place since it contains himself.
He always tut-tutted over a body. He did so now, plucking back the sheet with a curiously mincing gesture of his pudgy fingers. Dalgliesh walked over to the window and gazed out at the tracery of boughs through which the distant hospital, still lit up, gleamed like an insubstantial palace suspended in air. He could hear the faint rustling of bed linen. Sir Miles would only be making a preliminary examination, but even to think of those pudgy fingers insinuating themselves into the body’s tender orifices was enough to make one hope for a peaceful death in one’s own bed. The real job would be done later on the mortuary table, that aluminum sink with its grim accessories of drains and sprays on which Josephine Fallon’s body would be systematically dismembered in the cause of justice, or science, or curiosity, or what you will. And afterwards, Sir Miles’s mortuary attendant would earn his guinea by stitching it up again into a decent semblance of humanity so that the family could view it without trauma. If there were a family. He wondered who, if anyone, would be Fallon’s official mourners. Superficially there was nothing in her room-no photographs, no letters-to suggest that she had close ties with any living soul.