Dalgliesh answered evenly: “Not many whom I care to answer… I like the job; it’s one I can do reasonably well; it allows me to indulge a curiosity about people; and, for most of the time anyway, I’m not bored by it.”
“Ah yes! Boredom. The intolerable state for any writer. But isn’t there something else? Doesn’t being a policeman protect your privacy? You have a professional excuse for remaining uninvolved. Policemen are separate from other men. We treat them, as we do parsons, with superficial fellowship but essential distrust. We are uneasy in their company. I think you are a man who values his privacy.”
“Then we are alike,” suggested Dalgliesh. “I have my job, you have Priory House.”
Sinclair said: “It didn’t protect me this afternoon. We had a visit from your colleague, Inspector Stanley Gerald Reckless. Tell Mr. Dalgliesh about it, Alice.”
Dalgliesh was wearying of disclaiming any responsibility for Reckless but was curious to know how Sinclair had discovered the Inspector’s full name. Probably by the simple expedient of asking.
Alice Kerrison said: “Reckless. It isn’t a Suffolk name. He looked ill to me. An ulcer most likely. Worry and overwork maybe…”
She could be right about the ulcer, thought Dalgliesh, remembering the pallor, the pain-filled eyes, the deep clefts between nose and mouth. He heard the calm voice continue.
“He came to ask if we had killed Mr. Seton.”
“But with more tact, surely?” suggested Dalgliesh.
Sinclair said: “He was as tactful as he knew how to be. But that’s what he came for, nevertheless. I explained to him that I didn’t even know Seton although I had tried to read one of his books. But he never came here. Just because I can no longer write myself I’m under no obligation to spend my time with those who never could. Fortunately Alice and I can give each other an alibi for Tuesday and Wednesday nights which we understand are the significant times. I told the Inspector that neither of us had left the house. I am not sure that he altogether believed me. Incidentally, Jane, he asked whether we had borrowed your chopper. I deduced from that question that you had unwittingly supplied the weapon. We showed the Inspector our two choppers, both in excellent order I am glad to say, and he could see for himself that no one had used them to chop off poor Maurice Seton’s hands.”
Alice Kerrison said suddenly: “He was a wicked man and he’s better dead. But’s there’s no excuse for murder.”
“In what way was he wicked?” asked Dalgliesh. The question was a formality. He was going to be told whether he wanted it or not. He could feel Sinclair’s amused and interested eyes searching his face. So this was one reason for the dinner party. It wasn’t just that Sinclair hoped to gain information. He had some to give.
Alice Kerrison was sitting bolt upright, her face blotched with emotion, her hands clasped under the table. She gave Dalgliesh the truculent, half-pleading look of an embarrassed child and muttered: “That letter he wrote to her. It was a wicked letter, Mr. Dalgliesh. He drove her to death as surely as if he’d forced her into the sea and held her head under the water.”
“So you read the letter?”
“Not all of it. She handed it to me almost unthinking and then took it back again when she’d pulled herself together. It wasn’t a letter any woman would want another woman to read. There were things in it I couldn’t ever tell a soul. Things I’d rather forget. He meant her to die. That was murder.”
Dalgliesh asked: “Can you be sure he wrote it?”
“It was in his handwriting, Mr. Dalgliesh. All five pages of it. He only typed her name at the top, nothing more. I couldn’t mistake Mr. Seton’s hand.”
Of course not, thought Dalgliesh. And Seton’s wife would have been even less likely to mistake it. So Seton had deliberately driven his wife to suicide. If this were true it was an act of wanton cruelty greater in degree but of the same nature as the killing of Bryce’s cat. But somehow this picture of a calculating sadist was subtly out of focus. Dalgliesh had only met Seton twice but the man had never struck him as a monster. Was it really possible that this pedantic, nervous and self-opinionated little man with his pathetically overvalued talent could have nourished so much hatred? Or was this scepticism merely the arrogance of a detective who was beginning to fancy himself as a diagnostician of evil? After all even if one gave little Crippen the benefit of the doubt, there were still plenty of nervous, ineffectual men on record who had proved far from ineffectual when it came to getting rid of their wives. How could he, after two brief meetings, know the essential Seton as well as Alice Kerrison must have known him? And there was the evidence of the letter, a letter which Seton, whose carefully filed correspondence at Seton House was all typewritten, had taken the trouble to write with his own hand.
He was about to ask what Dorothy Seton had done with it when the telephone rang. It was an incongruously strident noise in the silence of that immense, candle-lit room. Dalgliesh, startled, realised that he had unreasonably taken it for granted that there was no electricity at Priory House. He peered around for the instrument. The bell seemed to be ringing from a bookcase in the dark recess at the far end of the room. Neither Sinclair nor Alice Kerrison made any move to answer it.
Sinclair said: “That will be a wrong number. No one ever rings us. We only have the telephone in case of emergency but the number isn’t in the book.” He glanced across at the instrument complacently as if gratified to know that it was actually in working order.
Dalgliesh got up. “Excuse me,” he said. “But it may be for me.” He groped for the instrument and laid hold of its smooth coldness among the objects which littered the top of the bookcase. The irritating noise ceased. In the quiet he could almost believe that everyone present could hear Inspector Reckless speaking.
“Mr. Dalgliesh? I’m speaking from Pentlands. Something has happened which I think you should know about. Would it be convenient for you to come now?” Then, as Dalgliesh hesitated, he added: “I’ve got the PM report. I think it will interest you.”
He made it sound like a bribe, thought Dalgliesh. But he would, of course, have to go. The formal, unemphatic tone of the request didn’t deceive either of them. If they had been working on a case together Superintendent Dalgliesh would have summoned Inspector Reckless, not the other way round.
But they weren’t working on a case together. And if Reckless wanted to interview a suspect-or even the nephew of a suspect-he could choose his own time and place. All the same, it would be interesting to know what he was doing at Pentlands. Miss Dalgliesh hadn’t locked the cottage when they left for Priory House. Few people at Monksmere bothered to lock up and the possible murder of a neighbour hadn’t induced his aunt to change her habits. But it was unlike Reckless to make himself so at home.
He made his excuses to his host who accepted them with little sign of regret. Dalgliesh suspected that Sinclair, unused to company other than his aunt, was glad enough to see their party reduced to the familiar three. For some reason of his own he had wanted Dalgliesh to hear Alice Kerrison’s story. Now it had been told and he could speed his guest with satisfaction and some relief. He merely reminded Dalgliesh to pick up his torch on the way out and instructed him not to return for his aunt as he and Alice would escort her home. Jane Dalgliesh seemed happy enough with this arrangement. Dalgliesh suspected that she was being tactful. Reckless had only asked to see him and his aunt had no wish to be an unwelcome third even in her own house.
He saw himself out, stepping into darkness so impermeable that at first his eyes could distinguish nothing but the white blur of the path at his feet. Then the clouds moved from the face of the moon and the night became visible, a thing of forms and shadows heavy with mystery and pungent with the sea. Dalgliesh thought how in London one could rarely experience the night, riven as it was by the glare of lights and the restlessness of men. Here it was an almost palpable presence so that there moved along his veins the stirring of an atavistic fear of darkness and the unknown. Even the Suffolk countryman, no alien to the night, could hardly walk these cliff paths without a sense of mystery. It was easy to understand how the local legends had grown that sometimes, on an autumn night, one could hear the muffled beats of horses’ hoofs as smugglers brought their kegs and bales from Sizewell Gap to hide them in the marshes or carry them inland across the desolate Westleton heathlands. Easy, too, on such a night to hear from the sea faint bells of long-drowned churches, St. Leonard’s, St. John’s, St. Peter’s and All Saints clanging their dirges for the souls of dead men. And now there might be new legends to keep the countryman indoors on the autumn nights. The October legends. One of a naked woman, pale under the moon, walking through the waves to her death; one of a dead and handless man drifting out on the tide.