Desperately she looked round the sitting room at the dark and heavy furniture which her mother had brought with her when she married. Either the great ornate bookcase or the corner cupboard would have made an effective barrier to the door if only she could have moved them. But she was helpless. Heaving herself from the narrow bed she grasped her crutches and swung herself into the kitchen. In the glass of the kitchen cabinet she saw her face reflected, a pale moon with eyes like black pools, the hair heavy and dank like the hair of a drowned woman. A witch’s face. She thought: “Three hundred years ago they would have burnt me alive. Now they aren’t even afraid of me.” And she wondered whether it was worse to be feared or pitied. Jerking open the cabinet drawer she seized a fistful of spoons and forks. These she balanced in a row on the edge of the narrow window ledge. In the silence she could hear her own breath rasping against the pane. After a moment’s thought she added a couple of glasses. If he tried to climb in through the kitchen window at least she would have some warning in the tinkle of falling silver and the smashing of glass. Now she looked round the kitchen for a weapon. The carving knife? Too cumbersome and not really sharp enough. The kitchen scissors perhaps? She opened the blades and tried to pull them apart but the rivet was too strong even for her tough hands. Then she remembered the broken knife which she used to peel vegetables. The tapering blade was only six inches long but it was keen and rigid, the handle short and easy to grasp. She whetted the blade against the stone edge of the kitchen sink and tested it with her finger. It was better than nothing. Armed with this weapon she felt better. She checked again that the bolts on the front door were secure and placed a row of small glass ornaments from the corner cupboard on the window ledge of the sitting room. Then, without taking the braces from her legs, she propped herself upright on the bed, a heavy glass paperweight on the pillow beside her, the knife in her hand. And there she sat, waiting for fear to pass, her body shaken with her heartbeats, her ears straining to hear through the faraway sighing of the wind, the creak of the garden gate, the tinkle of falling glass.
BOOK TWO. LONDON
1
Dalgliesh set out next morning after an early and solitary breakfast, pausing only to telephone Reckless to ask for Digby Seton’s London address and the name of the hotel at which Elizabeth Marley had stayed. He didn’t explain why he wanted them and Reckless didn’t ask but gave the information without comment except to wish Mr. Dalgliesh a pleasant and successful trip. Dalgliesh replied that he doubted whether it would be either but that he was grateful for the Inspector’s co-operation. Neither troubled to disguise the irony in his voice. Their mutual dislike seemed to be crackling along the wire.
It was a little unkind to call on Justin Bryce so early but Dalgliesh wanted to borrow the photograph of the beach party. It was several years old but was a good-enough likeness of the Setons, Oliver Latham and Bryce himself to help an identification.
Bryce came paddling down in response to his knock. The earliness of the hour seemed to have bereft him of sense as well as speech and it was some time before he grasped what Dalgliesh wanted and produced the snap. Only then, apparently, was he struck with doubt about the wisdom of handing it over. As Dalgliesh was leaving he came scurrying down the path after him, bleating anxiously: “You won’t tell Oliver that I let you have it, will you, Adam? He’ll be absolutely furious if he learns that one is collaborating with the police. Oliver is the teeniest bit distrustful of you, I’m afraid. One must implore secrecy.”
Dalgliesh made reassuring noises and encouraged him back to bed, but he was too familiar with Justin’s vagaries to take him at face value. Once Bryce had breakfasted and gained strength for the day’s mischief he would almost certainly be telephoning Celia Calthrop for a little cosy mutual speculation about what Adam Dalgliesh could be up to now. By noon all Monksmere including Oliver Latham would know that he had driven to London, taking the photograph with him.
It was a comparatively easy journey. He took the quickest route and, by half past eleven, he was approaching the city. He hadn’t expected to be driving into London again so soon. It was like a premature ending to a holiday already spoilt. In a half-propitiatory hope that this might not really be so, he resisted the temptation to call at his flat high above the Thames near Queenhithe and drove straight on to the West End. Just before noon he had garaged the Cooper Bristol in Lexington Street and was walking towards Bloomsbury and the Cadaver Club.
The Cadaver Club is a typically English establishment in that its function, though difficult to define with any precision, is perfectly understood by all concerned. It was founded by a barrister in 1892 as a meeting place for men with an interest in murder and, on his death, he bequeathed to the club his pleasant house in Tavistock Square. The club is exclusively masculine; women are neither admitted as members nor entertained. Among the members there is a solid core of detective novelists, elected on the prestige of their publishers rather than the size of their sales; one or two retired police officers; a dozen practising barristers; three retired judges; most of the better-known amateur criminologists and crime reporters; and a residue of members whose qualification consists in the ability to pay their dues on time and discuss intelligently the probable guilt of William Wallace or the finer points of the defence of Madeline Smith. The exclusion of women means that some of the best crime writers are unrepresented but this worries no one; the Committee takes the view that their presence would hardly compensate for the expense of putting in a second set of lavatories. The plumbing at the Cadaver has, in fact, remained virtually unaltered since the club moved to Tavistock Square in 1900 but it is a canard that the baths were originally purchased by George Joseph Smith. The club is old-fashioned in more than its plumbing; even its exclusiveness is justified by the assumption that murder is hardly a fit subject for discussion in front of women. And murder at the Cadaver seems itself a civilised archaism, insulated from reality by time or the panoply of the law, having nothing in common with the sordid and pathetic crimes which took up most of Dalgliesh’s working life. Murder here evokes the image of a Victorian maid-servant, correct in cap and streamers, watching through a bedroom door as Adelaide Bartlett prepares her husband’s medicine; of a slim hand stretched through an Edinburgh basement railing proffering a cup of cocoa and, perhaps, arsenic; of Dr. Lamson handing round Dundee cake at his wealthy brother-in-law’s last tea party; or of Lizzie Borden, creeping, axe in hand, through the quiet house in Fall River in the heat of a Massachusetts summer.