And there was something else which he had done to her. But that was something it was better not to remember. And afterwards he had taken the bodkin back to the office, holding it under the tap in the bathroom until no spot of blood could have remained. Then he had replaced it in his desk drawer with half a dozen identical others. There had been nothing to distinguish it anymore, even to his eyes.
It had all been so easy. The only blood had been a gush on his right cuff as he withdrew the bodkin. And he had burned the coat in the office furnace. He still recalled the blast on his face as he thrust it in, and the spilled cinders like sand under his feet.
There had been nothing left to him but the key of the flat. He had seen it on the sitting-room table and had taken it away with him. He drew it now from his pocket and compared it with the key from the estate agent, laying them side by side on his outstretched palm. Yes, they were identical. They had had another one cut, but no one had bothered to change the lock.
He stared at the key, trying to recall the excitement of those weeks when he had been both judge and executioner. But he could feel nothing. It was all so long ago. He had been fifty then; now he was sixty-six. It was too old for feeling. And then he recalled the words of Mr. Bootman. It was, after all, a very commonplace murder.
On Monday morning the girl in the estate office, clearing the mail from the letter box, called to the manager.
“That’s funny! The old chap who took the key to the Camden Town flat has returned the wrong one. This hasn’t got our label on it. Unless he pulled it off. Cheek! But why would he do that?”
She took the key over to the manager’s desk, dumping his pile of letters in front of him. He glanced at it casually.
“That’s the right key, anyway—it’s the only one of that type we still have. Probably the label worked loose and fell off. You should put them on more carefully.”
“But I did!” Outraged, the girl wailed her protest. The manager winced.
“Then label it again, put it back on the board, and for God’s sake don’t fuss, that’s a good girl.”
She glanced at him again, ready to argue. Then she shrugged. Come to think of it, he had always been a bit odd about that Camden Town flat.
“OK, Mr. Morrisey,” she said.
The Boxdale Inheritance
“You see, my dear Adam,” explained the Canon gently, as he walked with Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh under the vicarage elms, “useful as the legacy would be to us, I wouldn’t feel happy in accepting it if Great Aunt Allie came by her money in the first place by wrongful means.”
What the Canon meant was that he and his wife wouldn’t be happy to inherit Great Aunt Allie’s fifty thousand pounds if, sixty-seven years earlier, she had poisoned her elderly husband with arsenic in order to get it. As Great Aunt Allie had been accused and acquitted of just that charge in a 1902 trial which, for her Hampshire neighbours, had rivalled the Coronation as a public spectacle, the Canon’s scruples were not altogether irrelevant. Admittedly, thought Dalgliesh, most people faced with the prospect of fifty thousand pounds would be happy to subscribe to the commonly held convention that, once an English Court has pronounced its verdict, the final truth of the matter had been established once and for all. There may possibly be a higher judicature in the next world but hardly in this. And so Hubert Boxdale would normally be happy to believe. But, faced with the prospect of an unexpected fortune, his scrupulous conscience was troubled. The gentle but obstinate voice went on:
“Apart from the moral principle of accepting tainted money, it wouldn’t bring us happiness. I often think of that poor woman, driven restlessly round Europe in her search for peace, of that lonely life and unhappy death.”
Dalgliesh recalled that Great Aunt Allie had moved in a predictable pattern with her retinue of servants, current lover and general hangers-on from one luxury Riviera hotel to the next, with stays in Paris or Rome as the mood suited her. He was not sure that this orderly programme of comfort and entertainment could be described as being restlessly driven round Europe or that the old lady had been primarily in search of peace. She had died, he recalled, by falling overboard from a millionaire’s yacht during a rather wild party given by him to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday. It was perhaps not an edifying death by the Canon’s standards but Dalgliesh doubted whether she had, in fact, been unhappy at the time. Great Aunt Allie (it was impossible to think of her by any other name), if she had been capable of coherent thought, would probably have pronounced it a very good way to go.
But this was hardly a point of view he could put forward comfortably to his present companion.
Canon Hubert Boxdale was Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh’s godfather. Dalgliesh’s father had been his Oxford contemporary and lifelong friend. He had been an admirable godfather: affectionate, uncensorious, genuinely concerned. In Dalgliesh’s childhood, he had always been mindful of birthdays and imaginative about a small boy’s preoccupations and desires.
Dalgliesh was very fond of him and privately thought him one of the few really good men he had known. It was only surprising that the Canon had managed to live to seventy-one in a carnivorous world in which gentleness, humility and unworldliness are hardly conducive to survival, let alone success. But his goodness had in some sense protected him. Faced with such manifest innocence, even those who exploited him, and they were not a few, extended some of the protection and compassion they might show to the slightly subnormal.
“Poor old darling,” his daily woman would say, pocketing pay for six hours when she had worked five and helping herself to a couple of eggs from his refrigerator. “He’s really not fit to be let out alone.” It had surprised the then young and slightly priggish Detective Constable Dalgliesh to realise that the Canon knew perfectly well about the hours and the eggs, but thought that Mrs. Copthorne, with five children and an indolent husband, needed both more than he did. He also knew that if he started paying for five hours she would promptly work only four and extract another two eggs, and that this small and only dishonesty was somehow necessary to her self-esteem. He was good. But he was not a fool.
He and his wife were, of course, poor. But they were not unhappy; indeed it was a word impossible to associate with the Canon. The death of his two sons in the 1939 war had saddened but not destroyed him. But he had anxieties. His wife was suffering from disseminated sclerosis and was finding it increasingly hard to manage. There were comforts and appliances which she would need. He was now, belatedly, about to retire and his pension would be small. A legacy of fifty thousand pounds would enable them both to live in comfort for the rest of their lives and would also, Dalgliesh had no doubt, give them the pleasure of doing more for their various lame dogs. Really, he thought, the Canon was an almost embarrassingly deserving candidate for a modest fortune. Why couldn’t the dear, silly old noodle take the cash and stop worrying? He said cunningly: “Great Aunt Allie was found Not Guilty, you know, by an English jury. And it all happened nearly seventy years ago. Couldn’t you bring yourself to accept their verdict?”
But the Canon’s scrupulous mind was totally impervious to such sly innuendos. Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert’s conscience—that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn’t sounded or that he hadn’t heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.