Devices and Desires (3 page)

“All right, I won’t, but he wouldn’t.”

And there was after all nothing new to be said. He had heard the questions innumerable times and he had done his best to answer them, with honesty if not with enthusiasm. “Why does a sensitive poet like you spend his time catching
murderers?” “Which is the more important to you, the poetry or the policing?” “Does it hinder or help, being a detective?” “Why does a successful detective write poetry?” “What was your most interesting case, Commander? Do you ever feel like writing a poem about it?” “The love poems, is the woman you’ve written them to alive or dead?” Dalgliesh wondered whether Philip Larkin had been badgered about what it felt like to be both poet and librarian, or Roy Fuller on how he managed to combine poetry with law.

He said: “All the questions are predictable. It would save everyone a great deal of trouble if I answered them on tape; then you could broadcast them from the bus.”

“It wouldn’t be at all the same thing. It’s you personally they want to hear. Anyone would think you didn’t want to be read.”

And did he want to be read? Certainly he wanted some people to read him, one person in particular, and having read the poems he wanted her to approve. Humiliating but true. As for the others: well, he supposed that the truth was that he wanted people to read the poems but not be coerced into buying them, an overfastidiousness which he could hardly expect Herne & Illingworth to share. He was aware of Bill’s anxious, supplicating eyes, like those of a small boy who sees the bowl of sweets rapidly disappearing from his reach. His reluctance to co-operate seemed to him typical of much in himself that he disliked. There was a certain illogicality, surely, in wanting to be published but not caring particularly whether he was bought. The fact that he found the more public manifestations of fame distasteful didn’t mean that he was free of vanity, only that he was better at controlling it and that in him it took a more reticent form. After all, he had a job, an assured pension and now his aunt’s considerable fortune. He didn’t have to care. He saw himself as unreasonably privileged compared
with Colin McKay, who probably saw him—and who could blame Colin?—as a snobbish, oversensitive dilettante.

He was grateful when the door opened and Nora Gurney, the firm’s cookery editor, came briskly in, reminding him as she always did of an intelligent insect, an impression reinforced by the bright exophthalmic eyes behind huge round spectacles, familiar fawn jumper in circular ribbing and flat pointed shoes. She had looked exactly the same since Dalgliesh had first known her.

Nora Gurney had become a power in British publishing by the expedient of longevity (no one could remember when she had first come to Herne & Illingworth) and a firm conviction that power was her due. It was likely that she would continue to exercise it under the new dispensation. Dalgliesh had last met her three months previously at one of the firm’s periodic parties, given for no particular reason as far as he could tell, unless to reassure the authors, by the familiarity of the wine and canapés, that they were still in business and basically the same lovable old firm. The guest list had chiefly comprised their most prestigious writers in the main categories, a ploy which had added to the general atmosphere of inadvertence and fractionized unease: the poets had drunk too much and had become lachrymose or amorous as their natures dictated; the novelists had herded together in a corner like recalcitrant dogs commanded not to bite; the academics, ignoring their hosts and fellow guests, had argued volubly among themselves; and the cooks had ostentatiously rejected their half-bitten canapés on the near est available hard surface with expressions of disgust, pained surprise or mild, speculative interest. Dalgliesh had been pinned in a corner by Nora Gurney, who had wanted to discuss the practicality of the theory she had developed: Since every set of fingerprints was unique, could not the whole
country be printed, the data stored on a computer and research carried out to discover whether certain combinations of lines and whorls were indicative of criminal tendencies? That way crime could be prevented rather than cured. Dalgliesh had pointed out that, since criminal tendencies were universal, to judge from the places where his fellow guests had parked their cars, the data would be unmanageable, apart from the logistical and ethical problems of mass fingerprinting and the discouraging fact that crime, even supposing the comparison with disease to be valid, was, like disease, easier to diagnose than to cure. It had almost been a relief when a formidable female novelist, vigorously corseted in a florid cretonne two-piece which made her look like a walking sofa, had borne him off to pull out a crumple of parking tickets from her voluminous handbag and angrily demand what he was proposing to do about them.

The Herne & Illingworth cookery list was small but was strong, its best writers having a solid reputation for reliability, originality and good writing. Miss Gurney was passionately committed to her job and her writers, seeing the novels and verse as irritating if necessary adjuncts to the main business of the house, which was to nourish and publish her darlings. It was rumoured that she herself was an indifferent cook, one more indication of the firm British conviction, not uncommon in more elevated if less useful spheres of human activity, that there is nothing so fatal to success as knowing your subject. It didn’t surprise Dalgliesh that she had seen his arrival as fortuitous and the chore of delivering Alice Mair’s proofs as a near-sacred privilege. She said: “I suppose they’ve called you in to help catch the Whistler.”

“No, that, I’m thankful to say, is a job for the Norfolk CID. Calling in the Yard happens more often in fiction than real life.”

“It’s convenient that you’re driving to Norfolk, whatever the reason. I wouldn’t really wish to trust these proofs to the post. But I thought your aunt lived in Suffolk? And surely someone said that Miss Dalgliesh had died.”

“She did live in Suffolk until five years ago, when she moved to Norfolk. And, yes, my aunt has died.”

“Oh well, Suffolk or Norfolk, there’s not a lot of difference. But I’m sorry she’s dead.” She seemed for a moment to contemplate human mortality and to compare the two counties to the disadvantage of both, then said: “If Miss Mair isn’t at home you won’t leave this at the door, will you? I know that people are extraordinarily trusting in country districts but it would be quite disastrous if these proofs were lost. If Alice isn’t at home her brother, Dr. Alex Mair, may be. He’s the Director of the nuclear-power station at Larksoken. But perhaps, on second thoughts, you’d better not hand it to him either. Men can be extremely unreliable.”

Dalgliesh was tempted to point out that one of the country’s foremost physicists, who was responsible for an atomic-power station and, if the papers were to be believed, was strongly tipped for the new post of nuclear-power supremo, could presumably be trusted with a parcel of proofs. He said: “If she’s at home, I’ll hand it to Miss Mair personally. If she isn’t, I’ll keep it until she is.”

“I’ve telephoned to say that it’s on its way, so she’ll be expecting you. I’ve printed the address very clearly. Martyr’s Cottage. I expect you know how to get there.”

Costello said sourly: “He can map-read. He’s a policeman, remember.”

Dalgliesh said that he knew Martyr’s Cottage and had briefly met Alexander Mair but not his sister. His aunt had lived very quietly, but neighbours sharing the same remote
district inevitably do get to know each other and, although Alice Mair had been away from home at the time, her brother had made a formal visit of condolence to the mill after Miss Dalgliesh’s death.

He took possession of the parcel, which was surprisingly large and heavy and crisscrossed with an intimidating pattern of Sellotape, and was slowly borne downwards to the basement, which gave access to the firm’s small car-park and his waiting Jaguar.

Once free of the knotted tentacles of the eastern suburbs, Dalgliesh made good time, and by 3.00 he was driving through Lydsett Village. Here a right turn took him off the coastal road onto what was little more than a smoothly macadamed track bordered by water-filled ditches and fringed by a golden haze of reeds, their lumbered heads straining in the wind. And now, for the first time, he thought that he could smell the North Sea, that potent but half-illusory tang evoking nostalgic memories of childhood holidays, of solitary adolescent walks as he struggled with his first poems, of his aunt’s tall figure at his side, binoculars round her neck, striding towards the haunts of her beloved birds. And here, barring the road, was the familiar old farm gate still in place. Its continued presence always surprised him, since it served no purpose that he could see except symbolically to cut off the headland and to give travellers pause to consider whether they really wanted to continue. It swung open at his touch, but closing it, as always, was more difficult, and he lugged and half-lifted it into place and slipped the circle of wire over the gatepost with a familiar
sensation of having turned his back on the workaday world and entered country which, no matter how frequent his visits, would always be alien territory.

He was driving now across the open headland towards the fringe of pine trees which bordered the North Sea. The only house to his left was the old Victorian rectory, a square, red-bricked building, incongruous behind its struggling hedge of rhododendron and laurel. To his right the ground rose gently towards the southern cliffs. He could see the dark mouth of a concrete pillbox, undemolished since the war, and as seemingly indestructible as the great hulks of wave-battered concrete, remnants of the old fortifications which lay half-submerged in the sand along part of the beach. To the north the broken arches and stumps of the ruined Benedictine abbey gleamed golden in the afternoon sun against the crinkled blue of the sea. Breasting a small ridge, he glimpsed for the first time the topsail of Larksoken Mill and beyond it, against the skyline, the great grey bulk of Larksoken Nuclear Power Station. The road he was on, veering left, would lead eventually to the station but was, he knew, seldom used, since normal traffic and all heavy vehicles used the new access road to the north. The headland was empty and almost bare; the few straggling trees, distorted by the wind, struggled to keep their precarious hold in the uncompromising soil. And now he was passing a second and more dilapidated pillbox, and it struck him that the whole headland had the desolate look of an old battlefield, the corpses long since carted away but the air vibrating still with the gunfire of long-lost battles, while the power station loomed over it like a grandiose modern monument to the unknown dead.

On his previous visits to Larksoken he had seen Martyr’s Cottage spread out beneath him when he and his aunt had
stood surveying the headland from the small top room under the cone of the mill. But he had never been closer to it than the road, and now, driving up to it, it struck him again that the description “cottage” was hardly appropriate. It was a substantial two-storey, L-shaped house standing to the east of the track, with walls partly flint and partly rendered, enclosing at the rear a courtyard of York stone which gave an uninterrupted view over fifty yards of scrub to the grassy dunes and the sea. No one appeared as he drew up and, before lifting his hand to the bell, he paused to read the words of a stone plaque embedded in the flints to the right of the door.

The plaque was unadorned, the letters deeply carved in an elegant script reminiscent of Eric Gill, and Dalgliesh remembered his aunt telling him that it had been placed there by previous owners in the late 1920s when the cottage was originally extended. One of the advantages of a religious education is the ability to identify at least the better-known texts of scripture, and this was one which it needed no effort of memory to recall. As a delinquent nine-year-old at his prep school, he had once been required by the headmaster to write out in his best handwriting the whole of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, old Gumboil, economical in this as in all matters, believing that writing lines should combine punishment with literary and religious education. The words, in that round childish script, had remained with him. It was, he thought, an interesting choice of text.

That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past
.

He rang and there was only a short delay before Alice Mair opened the door. He saw a tall, handsome woman dressed with careful and expensive informality in a black cashmere sweater with a silk scarf at the throat and fawn trousers. He would have recognized her from her strong resemblance to her brother, although she looked the elder by some years. She took it for granted that each knew who the other was and, standing aside to motion him in, she said: “It’s good of you to be so accommodating, Mr. Dalgliesh. I’m afraid Nora Gurney is implacable. Once she knew you were on your way to Norfolk you were a predestined victim. Perhaps you would bring the proofs through to the kitchen.”

It was a distinguished face with the deep-set, widely spaced eyes beneath straight brows, a well-shaped, rather secretive mouth and strong greying hair swept upwards and curled into a chignon. In her publicity photographs she could, he recalled, look beautiful in a somewhat intimidating, intellectual and very English mould. But seen face-to-face, even in the informality of her own house, the absence of a spark of sexuality and, he sensed, a deep-seated reserve, made her seem less feminine and more formidable than he had expected, and she held herself stiffly, as if repelling invaders of her personal space. The handshake with which she had greeted him had been cool and firm and her brief smile was surprisingly attractive. He knew that he was oversensitive to the timbre of the human voice, and hers, although not jarring or unpleasant, sounded a little forced, as if she were deliberately speaking at an unnatural pitch.