“You knew that she was dead, of course?”
“Yes. I read about it in this morning’s papers.”
“Did you know that she was pregnant?”
This at least produced emotion. The boy’s tight face whitened. His head jerked up and he stared at Dalgliesh silently for a moment before replying.
“No. I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me.”
“She was nearly three months’ pregnant Could it have been your child?”
Dowson looked down at his hands.
“It could have been, I suppose. I didn’t take any precautions, if that’s what you mean. She told me not to worry, that she’d see to that After all, she was a nurse. I thought she knew how to take care of herself.”
“That was something I suspect she never did know. Hadn’t you better tell me about it?”
“Do I have to?”
“No. You don’t have to say anything. You can demand to see a solicitor and make any amount of fuss and trouble and cause a great deal of delay. But is there any point? No one is accusing you of murdering her. But someone did. You knew her and presumably you liked her. For some of the time, anyway. If you want to help you can best do it by telling me everything you knew about her.”
Dowson got slowly to his feet. He seemed as slow-moving and clumsy as an old man. He looked round as if disoriented Then he said:
“I’ll make some tea.”
He shuffled over to a double gas ring, fitted to the right of the meager and unused fireplace, lifted the kettle as if testing by weight that it held sufficient water, and lit the gas. He took down two of the mugs from one of the boxes and set them out on a further box which he dragged between himself and Dalgliesh. It held a number of neatly folded newspapers which looked as if they hadn’t been read. He spread one over the top of the box and set out the blue mugs and a bottle of milk as formally as if they were about to drink from Crown Derby. He didn’t speak again until the tea was made and poured, Then he said:
“I wasn’t her only lover.”
“Did she tell you about the others?”
“No, but I think one of them was a ‘doctor. Perhaps more than one. That wouldn’t be surprising in the circumstances. We were talking once about sex and she said that a man’s nature and character were always completely revealed when he made love. That if he were selfish or insensitive or brutal he couldn’t conceal it in bed whatever he might do with his clothes on. Then she said that she had once slept with a surgeon and it was only too apparent that most of the bodies he came into contact with had been anaesthetized first; that he was so busy admiring his own technique that it never occurred to him that he was in bed with a conscious woman. She laughed about a great many things.”
“But you don’t think she was happy?”
He appeared to be considering. Dalgliesh thought: And for God’s sake don’t answer, “who is?”
“No, not really happy. Not for most of the time. But she did know how to be happy. That was the important thing.”
“How did you meet her?”
“I’m learning to be a writer. That’s what I want to be and I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I have to earn some money to live while I get my first novel finished and published, so I work at night as a continental telephone operator. I know enough French to make it possible. The pay isn’t bad. I don’t have many friends because there isn’t time and I never went to bed with any woman until I met Jo. Women don’t seem to like me. I met her last summer in St James’s Park. She was there on one of her off-duty days and I was there to watch the ducks and see what the park looked like. I wanted to set one of the scenes in my book in St James’s Park in July, and I went there to make some notes. She was lying on her back on the grass staring at the sky. She was quite alone. One of the pages of my notebook got detached and blew across the grass into her face. I went after it and apologized, and we chased it together.”
He was holding the mug of tea looking at it as if staring again into the summer surface of the lake.
“It was an odd day-very hot sunless and blustery. The wind blew in warm gusts. The lake looked heavy like oil.”
He paused for a moment and when Dalgliesh didn’t speak, went on:
“So we met and talked, and I asked her to come back for tea. I don’t know what I expected. After tea we talked more and she made love to me. She told me weeks later that she didn’t have that in mind when she came here but I don’t know. I don’t even know why she came back. Perhaps she was bored.”
“Did you have h in mind?”
“I don’t know that either. Perhaps. I know that I wanted to make love to a woman. I wanted to know what it was like. That’s one experience you can’t write about until you know.”
“And sometimes not even then. And how long did she continue to provide you with copy?”
The boy seemed unaware of the irony. He said:
“She used to come here about once a fortnight on her day off. We never went out together except to a pub occasionally. She would bring in some food and cook a meal and afterwards we would talk and go to bed.”
“What did you talk about?”
“I suppose I did most of the talking. She didn’t tell me much about herself, only that both her parents had been killed while she was a child and that she had been brought up in Cumberland by an elderly aunt. The aunt is dead now. I don’t think Jo had a very happy childhood. She always wanted to be a nurse but she got TB when she was seventeen. It wasn’t very bad and she spent eighteen months in a sanatorium in Switzerland and was cured. But the doctors advised her not to train as a nurse. So she did a number of other jobs. She was an actress for about three years; but that wasn’t much of a success. Then she was a waitress and a shop assistant for a time. Then she became engaged but nothing came of it. She broke it off.”
“Did she say why?”
“No, except that she found something out about the man which made it impossible to marry him.”
“Did she say what it was or who the man was?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. But I think he may have been some kind of sexual pervert.”
Seeing Dalgliesh’s face he added quickly:
“I don’t really know. She never told me. Most of the things I know about Jo just came up casually in conversation. She never really talked about herself for long. It’s just an idea I have. There was a kind of bitter hopelessness about the way she spoke of her engagement.”
“And after that?”
“Well, apparently she decided that she might as well go back to her original idea of being a nurse. She thought she could get through the medical examination with luck. She chose the John Carpendar Hospital because she wanted to be near London but not actually in it, and thought that a small hospital would be less arduous. She didn’t want her health to break down, I suppose.”
“Did she talk about the hospital?”
“Not much. She seemed happy enough there. But she spared me the intimate details of the bedpan rounds.”
“Do you know whether she had an enemy?”
“She must have had, mustn’t she, if somebody killed her? But she never told me about it. Perhaps she didn’t know.”