Devices and Desires (2 page)

She wanted to break into a run but managed to resist. The creature, man or beast, crouching in the undergrowth was already sniffing her fear, waiting until her panic broke. Then she would hear the crash of the breaking bushes, his pounding
feet, feel his panting breath hot on her neck. She must keep walking, swiftly but silently, holding her bag tightly against her side, hardly breathing, eyes fixed ahead. And as she walked she prayed: “Please, God, let me get safely home and I’ll never lie again. I’ll always leave in time. Help me to get to the crossroads safely. Make the bus come quickly. Oh God, please help me.”

And then, miraculously, her prayer was answered. Suddenly, about thirty yards ahead of her, there was a woman. She didn’t question how, so mysteriously, this slim, slow-walking figure had materialized. It was sufficient that she was there. As she drew nearer with quickening step, she could see the swathe of long blond hair under a tight-fitting beret, and what looked like a belted trench coat. And at the girl’s side, trotting obediently, most reassuring of all, was a small black-and-white dog, bandy-legged. They could walk together to the crossroads. Perhaps the girl might herself be catching the same bus. She almost cried aloud, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” and, breaking into a run, rushed towards safety and protection as a child might to her mother’s arms.

And now the woman bent down and released the dog. As if in obedience to some command, he slipped into the bushes. The woman took one swift backward glance and then stood quietly waiting, her back half-turned to Valerie, the dog’s lead held drooping in her right hand. Valerie almost flung herself at the waiting back. And then, slowly, the woman turned. It was a second of total, paralysing terror. She saw the pale, taut face which had never been a woman’s face, the simple, inviting, almost apologetic smile, the blazing and merciless eyes. She opened her mouth to scream, but there was no chance, and horror had made her dumb. With one movement the noose of the lead was swung over her head and jerked tight and she was pulled from the road into the shadow of the bushes. She felt
herself falling through time, through space, through an eternity of horror. And now the face was hot over hers and she could smell drink and sweat and a terror matching her own. Her arms jerked upwards, impotently flailing. And now her brain was bursting and the pain in her chest, growing like a great red flower, exploded in a silent, wordless scream of “Mummy, Mummy.” And then there was no more terror, no more pain, only the merciful, obliterating dark.

Four days later Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard dictated a final note to his secretary, cleared his in-tray, locked his desk drawer, set the combination of his security cupboard and prepared to leave for a two-week holiday on the Norfolk coast. The break was overdue and he was ready for it. But the holiday wasn’t entirely therapeutic; there were affairs in Norfolk that needed his attention. His aunt, his last surviving relative, had died two months earlier, leaving him both her fortune and a converted windmill at Larksoken on the north-east coast of Norfolk. The fortune was unexpectedly large and had brought its own, as yet unresolved, dilemmas. The mill was a less onerous bequest but was not without its minor problems. He needed, he felt, to live in it alone for a week or two before finally making up his mind whether to keep it for occasional holidays, sell, or pass it over at a nominal price to the Norfolk Windmill Trust, who were, he knew, always anxious to restore old windmills to working order. And then there were family papers and his aunt’s books, particularly her comprehensive library of ornithology,
to be looked at and sorted and their disposal decided upon. These were pleasurable tasks. Even in boyhood he had disliked taking a holiday totally without purpose. He didn’t know from what roots of childhood guilt or imagined responsibility had grown this curious masochism, which in his middle years had returned with added authority. But he was glad that there was a job to be done in Norfolk, not least because he knew that the journey had an element of flight. After four years of silence his new book of poetry,
A Case to Answer and Other Poems
, had been published to considerable critical acclaim, which was surprisingly gratifying, and to even wider public interest which, less surprisingly, he was finding more difficult to take. After his more notorious murder cases, the efforts of the Metropolitan Police press office had been directed to shielding him from egregious publicity. His publisher’s rather different priorities took some getting used to and he was frankly glad of an excuse to escape from them, at least for a couple of weeks.

He had earlier said his goodbye to Inspector Kate Miskin, and she was now out on a case. Chief Inspector Massingham had been seconded to the Intermediate Command Course at Bramshill Police College, one more step on his planned progress to a Chief Constable’s braid, and Kate had temporarily taken over his place as Dalgliesh’s second-in-command of the Special Squad. He went into her office to leave a note of his holiday address. It was, as always, impressively tidy, sparsely efficient and yet feminine, its walls enlivened by a single picture, one of her own abstract oils, a study in swirling browns heightened with a single streak of acid green, which Dalgliesh was growing to like more each time he studied it. On the uncluttered desktop was a small glass vase of freesias. Their scent, at first fugitive, suddenly wafted up to him, reinforcing
the odd impression he always got that the office was more full of her physical presence when empty than it was when she was seated there working. He laid his note exactly in the middle of the clean blotter, and smiled as he closed the door after him with what seemed unnecessary gentleness. It remained only to put his head round the AC’s door for a final word and he was on his way to the lift.

The door was already closing when he heard running footsteps and a cheerful shout and Manny Cummings leapt in, just avoiding the bite of the closing steel. As always he seemed to whirl in a vortex of almost oppressive energy, too powerful to be contained by the lift’s four walls. He was brandishing a large brown envelope. “Glad I caught you, Adam. It is Norfolk you’re escaping to, isn’t it? If the Norfolk CID do lay their hands on the Whistler, take a look at him for me, will you, check he isn’t our chap in Battersea.”

“The Battersea Strangler? Is that likely, given the timing and the MO? Surely it isn’t a serious possibility?”

“Highly unlikely but, as you know, Uncle is never happy unless every stone is explored and every avenue thoroughly upturned. I’ve put together some details and the Identikit just in case. As you know, we’ve had a couple of sightings. And I’ve let Rickards know that you’ll be on his patch. Remember Terry Rickards?”

“I remember.”

“Chief Inspector now, apparently. Done all right for himself in Norfolk. Better than he would have done if he’d stayed with us. And they tell me he’s married, which might have softened him a bit. Awkward cuss.”

Dalgliesh said: “I shall be on his patch but not, thank God, on his team. And if they do lay hands on the Whistler, why should I do you out of a day in the country?”

“I hate the country and I particularly loathe flat country. Think of the public money you’ll be saving. I’ll come down—or is it up?—if he’s worth looking at. Decent of you, Adam. Have a good leave.”

Only Cummings would have had the cheek. But the request was not unreasonable, made, as it was, to a colleague his senior only by a matter of months, and one who had always preached co-operation and the common-sense use of resources. And it was unlikely that his holiday would be interrupted by the need to take even a cursory glance at the Whistler, Norfolk’s notorious serial killer, dead or alive. He had been at his work for fifteen months now and the latest victim—Valerie Mitchell, wasn’t it?—was his fourth. These cases were invariably difficult, time-consuming and frustrating, depending as they often did more on good luck than good detection. As he made his way down the ramp to the underground car-park he glanced at his watch. In three-quarters of an hour he would be on his way. But first there was unfulfilled business at his publisher’s.

The lift at Messrs. Herne & Illingworth in Bedford Square was almost as ancient as the house itself, a monument both to the firm’s obstinate adherence to a bygone elegance and to a slightly eccentric inefficiency behind which a more thrustful policy was taking shape. As he was borne upwards in a series of disconcerting jerks, Dalgliesh reflected that success, although admittedly more agreeable than failure, has its concomitant disadvantages. One of them, in the person of Bill Costello, Publicity Director, was waiting for him in the claustrophobic fourth-floor office above.

The change in his own poetic fortunes had coincided with changes in the firm. Herne & Illingworth still existed insofar as their names were printed or embossed on book covers under the firm’s ancient and elegant colophon, but the house was now part of a multinational corporation which had recently added books to canned goods, sugar and textiles. Old Sebastian Herne had sold one of London’s few remaining individual publishing houses for eight and a half million and had promptly married an extremely pretty publicity assistant, who was only waiting for
the deal to be concluded before, with some misgivings but a prudent regard for her future, relinquishing the status of newly acquired mistress for that of wife. Herne had died within three months, provoking much ribald comment but few regrets. Throughout his life Sebastian Herne had been a cautious, conventional man who reserved eccentricity, imagination and occasional risk-taking for his publishing. For thirty years he had lived as a faithful, if unimaginative, husband, and Dalgliesh reflected that, if a man lives for nearly seventy years in comparatively blameless conventionality, that is probably what his nature requires. Herne had died less of sexual exhaustion—assuming that to be as medically credible as puritans would like to believe—than from a fatal exposure to the contagion of fashionable sexual morality.

The new management promoted their poets vigorously, perhaps seeing the poetry list as a valuable balance to the vulgarity and soft pornography of their bestselling novelists, whom they packaged with immense care and some distinction, as if the elegance of the jacket and the quality of the print could elevate highly commercial banality into literature. Bill Costello, appointed the previous year as Publicity Director, didn’t see why Faber and Faber should have a monopoly when it came to the imaginative publicizing of poetry, and was successful in promoting the poetry list despite the rumour that he never himself read a line of modern verse. His only known interest in verse was his presidency of the McGonagall Club, whose members met on the first Tuesday of every month at a City pub to eat the landlady’s famous steak-and-kidney pudding, put down an impressive amount of drink and recite to each other the more risible efforts of arguably Britain’s worst poet ever. A fellow poet had once given Dalgliesh his own explanation: “The poor devil has to read so much incomprehensible modern verse
that you can’t wonder that he needs an occasional dose of comprehensible nonsense. It’s like a faithful husband occasionally taking therapeutic relief at the local cat-house.” Dalgliesh thought the theory ingenious but unlikely. There was no evidence that Costello read any of the verse he so assiduously promoted. He greeted his newest candidate for media fame with a mixture of dogged optimism and slight apprehension, as if knowing that he was faced with a hard nut to crack.

His small, rather wistful and childish face was curiously at odds with his Billy Bunter figure. His main problem was apparently whether to wear his belt above or below his paunch. Above was said to indicate optimism, below a sign of depression. Today it was slung only just above the scrotum, proclaiming a pessimism which the subsequent conversation served only to justify.

Eventually Dalgliesh said firmly: “No, Bill, I shall not parachute into Wembley Stadium holding the book in one hand and a microphone in the other. Nor shall I compete with the station announcer by bawling my verses at the Waterloo commuters. The poor devils are only trying to catch their trains.”

“That’s been done. It’s old hat. And it’s nonsense about Wembley. Can’t think how you got hold of that. No, listen, this is really exciting. I’ve spoken to Colin McKay and he’s very enthusiastic. We’re hiring a red double-decker bus, touring the country. Well, as much of the country as we can in ten days. I’ll get Clare to show you the rough-out and the schedule.”

Dalgliesh said gravely: “Like a political-campaign bus: posters, slogans, loudspeakers, balloons.”

“No point in having it if we don’t let people know it’s coming.”

“They’ll know that all right with Colin on board. How are you going to keep him sober?”

“A fine poet, Adam. He’s a great admirer of yours.”

“Which doesn’t mean he’d welcome me as a travelling companion. What are you thinking of calling it? Poets’ Progress? The Chaucer Touch? Verse on Wheels—or is that too like the WI? The Poetry Bus? That has the merit of simplicity.”

“We’ll think of something. I rather like Poets’ Progress.”

“Stopping where?”

“Precincts, village halls, schools, pubs, motorway cafés, anywhere where there’s an audience. It’s an exciting prospect. We were thinking of hiring a train, but the bus has more flexibility.”

“And it’s cheaper.”

Costello ignored the innuendo. He said: “Poets upstairs; drinks, refreshments downstairs. Readings from the platform. National publicity, radio and TV. We start from the Embankment. There’s a chance of Channel Four and, of course, Kaleidoscope. We’re counting on you, Adam.”

“No,” said Dalgliesh firmly. “Not even for the balloons.”

“For God’s sake, Adam, you write the stuff. Presumably you want people to read it—well, buy it anyway. There’s tremendous public interest in you, particularly after that last case, the Berowne murder.”

“They’re interested in a poet who catches murderers, or a policeman who writes poetry, not in the verse.”

“What does it matter as long as they’re interested? And don’t tell me that the Commissioner wouldn’t like it. That’s an old cop-out.”