Original Sin (40 page)

It was, Dalgliesh recognized, a command not a suggestion, but he knew that in that first brief encounter they had passed some private test. Had she been less than satisfied he had no doubt that the interview would have taken place in this room and under her supervision. She tugged at the bell-cord and the little smiling nun who had let them in again appeared.

“Will you ask Sister Agnes to be good enough to join us?”

Again they waited in silence, still standing. In less than two minutes the door opened and a tall nun entered alone. The Mother Superior said: “This is Sister Agnes. Sister, this is Commander Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard and Inspector Miskin. I have suggested that you might like to walk outside in the rose garden.”

With a valedictory nod but no formal goodbye she was gone.

The nun who confronted them with wary eyes could not have been more different from the Mother Superior. The habit was the same, except that her cross was smaller, but on her it conferred a hieratic dignity, remote and a little mysterious. The Mother Superior had looked dressed for a stint at the kitchen
stove; it was difficult to imagine Sister Agnes except at the altar. She was very thin, long-limbed and strong-featured, the wimple emphasizing the high cheekbones, the strong line of the eyebrows and the uncompromising set of the wide mouth.

She said: “Then shall we look at the roses, Commander?” Dalgliesh opened the door and he and Kate followed her out of the reception room and through the hall on almost silent feet.

She led the way down the grand path to the terraced rose garden. The beds were in three long rows divided by parallel gravel paths, each path four stone steps down from the one above. There would be just room for the three of them to walk abreast, first along the top path, then down the steps, then back along the second path to the second flight of steps and the forty yards of the lowest path before turning, a bleak perambulation carried out in full view of all the convent windows. He wondered if there was a more private garden at the rear of the convent. Even if there was they were not, apparently, expected to walk there.

Sister Agnes paced between them, almost as tall as his six feet two inches, her head held high. She was wearing a long grey cardigan over her habit and with each hand thrust deeply into the opposite cuff as if for warmth. With her bound arms held tightly against her body she reminded Dalgliesh uncomfortably of old pictures he had seen of mental patients in straitjackets. It seemed that she walked between them like a prisoner under escort, and he wondered if that was how the three of them would appear to any secret watcher from the high windows. The thought, and it was not agreeable, apparently also entered Kate’s mind for, muttering an excuse, she dropped a little behind and, kneeling, appeared to be tying the shoelace of her brogues. When she caught up with them she took her place next to Dalgliesh.

It was Dalgliesh who broke the silence. He said: “It is good of you to see us. I’m sorry to have to trouble you, particularly as it must seem an intrusion on private grief. I need to ask you about the death of your sister.”

“ ‘Intrusion on private grief.’ That was the telephone message I received from Mother Superior. I suppose they are words you often have to use, Commander.”

“Intrusion is sometimes inseparable from my job.”

“And have you specific questions you hope I can answer, or is this a more general intrusion?”

“A little of both.”

“But you know how my sister died. Sonia killed herself, there is no possible doubt about that. She left a note at the scene. She also posted a letter to me on the morning she died. She didn’t think the news was worth a first-class stamp. I received it three days later.”

Dalgliesh said: “Would you mind telling me what was in the note? I know, of course, what was in the note to the coroner.”

She didn’t speak for a few seconds which seemed much longer, then spoke without emphasis as if reciting a piece of prose learned by heart. “ ‘What I am about to do will seem a sin in your eyes. Please try to understand that what you see as sinful is to me both natural and right. We have made different choices but they lead to the same end. After the vacillating years at least I can be absolute for death. Try not to grieve for me too long; grief is only an indulgence. I could not have had a better sister.’ ”

She said: “Is that what you want to hear, Commander? It is hardly relevant, surely, to your present inquiry.”

“We have to look at anything which happened at Innocent House in the months before Gerard Etienne died which could have had a bearing even remotely on that death. One is your
sister’s suicide. The gossip in London literary circles and at Innocent House seems to be that Gerard Etienne drove her to that act. If he did, her friend—a particular friend—might have wished him harm.”

She said: “I was Sonia’s particular friend. She had no particular friends except me, and I had no reason to wish Gerard Etienne dead. I was here on the day or night when he died. That is a fact you can easily check.”

Dalgliesh said: “I was not suggesting, Sister, that you were in any way personally concerned with Gerard Etienne’s death. I am asking if you knew of any other person close to your sister who could have resented the way she died.”

“None except myself. But I resented it, Commander. Suicide is the final despair, the final rejection of God’s grace, the ultimate sin.”

Dalgliesh said quietly: “Then perhaps, Sister, it will receive the ultimate mercy.”

They had reached the end of the first path and together they descended the steps and turned left. Suddenly she said, “I dislike roses in autumn. They are essentially summer flowers. The December roses are the most depressing, brown and shrivelled buds on a tangle of prickles. I can hardly bear to walk here in December. Like us, roses don’t know when to die.”

He said: “But today we can almost believe it is summer.” He paused, then added: “I expect you know that Gerard Etienne died from carbon monoxide poisoning and in the same room as your sister. It is unlikely in his case to have been suicide. It could be accidental death, a blocked flue which caused the gas fire to malfunction, but we have to consider a third possibility, that the fire was deliberately tampered with.”

She said: “You’re saying that you believe he was murdered?”

“It can’t be ruled out. What I have to ask you is whether
you have any reason to believe that your sister could have interfered with the fire. I’m not suggesting it was a plot to kill Etienne. But is it possible that she might have planned a suicide which would look like accidental death and then changed her mind?”

“How can I possibly tell you that, Commander?”

“It was a very long shot, but I had to ask. If anyone is brought to trial for murder it is a possibility that the defence counsel will certainly put forward.”

She said: “It would have saved a great deal of distress for other people if she had troubled to make her death look like an accident, but suicides so seldom do. It is, after all, the supreme act of aggression and what satisfaction is there in aggression if it hurts only oneself? To make suicide look accidental wouldn’t have been so very difficult. I could think of ways, but they don’t include dismantling a gas fire and blocking the flue. I’m not sure that Sonia would have known how to do that. She wasn’t mechanically minded in life; why should she be so in death?”

“And the note she sent you, that was all? No reason, no explanation?”

“No,” she said. “No reason, no explanation.”

Dalgliesh went on: “It seems to have been assumed that your sister killed herself because Gerard Etienne had told her that she had to go. Does that seem likely to you?”

She didn’t reply, and after a minute he gently persisted. “As her sister, as someone who knew her well, does that explanation satisfy you?”

She turned to him and, for the first time, looked him full in the face. “Is that question relevant to your inquiry?”

“It could be. If Miss Clements knew something about Innocent House, or about one of the people who worked there, something so distressing to her that it contributed to her
death, that something could also be relevant to the death of Gerard Etienne.”

Again she turned. She said: “Is there any question of reopening the manner of my sister’s death?”

“Formally? None at all. We know how Miss Clements died. I would like to know why, but the verdict of the inquest was correct. Legally that is the end of it.”

They paced in silence. She seemed to be considering a course of action. He was aware of, or perhaps imagined, the muscles taut with tension of the arm which briefly brushed his own. When she spoke her voice was harsh.

“I can satisfy your curiosity, Commander. My sister died because the two people she cared for most, perhaps the only two people she ever cared for, left her and left her finally. I took my vows the week before she killed herself; Henry Peverell died eight months earlier.”

Until now Kate had been silent. She said: “You’re saying that she was in love with Mr. Peverell?”

Sister Agnes turned and looked at her as if noticing her presence for the first time. Then she again turned her head and with an almost imperceptible shiver clasped her arms more tightly across her breast. “She was his mistress for the last eight years of his life. She called it love. I called it an obsession. I don’t know what he called it. They were never seen together in public. The affair was kept deeply secret at his insistence. The room in which they made love was the one in which she died. I always knew when they had been together. Those were the nights when she stayed late at the office. When she came in I could smell him on her.”

Kate protested: “But why the secrecy? What was he afraid of? Neither was married, they were both adults. This was no one’s business but their own.”

“When I asked that question she had her answers ready, or rather his. She said that he had no wish to marry again, that he wanted to stay faithful to the memory of his wife, that he disliked the idea of his private affairs being the subject of office gossip, that the relationship would distress his daughter. She accepted all the excuses. It was enough for her that he apparently needed what she could provide. It may, of course, have been quite simple, that she was adequate to satisfy a physical need but not sufficiently beautiful or young or rich enough to tempt him to marry her. And for him, I think the secrecy added an additional frisson to the affair. Perhaps this was what he enjoyed, humiliating her, testing the limits of her devotion, stealing up to that drab little room like a Victorian employer pleasuring his parlourmaid. It was not the sinfulness of the relationship which distressed me most, it was the vulgarity.”

He had not expected such openness, such confidence. But, perhaps, it was not so surprising. She must have endured months of self-imposed silence and now, to two strangers whom she need never see again, the pent-up bitterness was released. She said: “I am the elder by only eighteen months. We were always very close. He destroyed that. She couldn’t have him and her religion so she chose him. He destroyed the confidence between us. How could there be confidence when each of us despised the other’s god?”

Dalgliesh said: “She had no sympathy with your vocation?”

“She had no understanding of it. Nor had he. He saw it as a retreat from the world and from responsibility, from sexuality and from involvement, and what he believed she believed. She had known for some time, of course, what I had in mind. I suppose that she hoped no one would have me. There are not many communities which welcome middle-aged postulants. A convent isn’t intended as a refuge for the unsuccessful and
disillusioned. And she knew, of course, that I had no practical skills to offer. I was—I am—a book-restorer. Reverend Mother still releases me from time to time to work in libraries in London, Oxford and Cambridge, provided that there is a suitable house—I mean a convent—in which I can be lodged. But that work is becoming infrequent. It takes a great deal of time to restore and rebind a valuable book or manuscript, more time than I can be spared for.”

Dalgliesh recalled a visit three years previously to the library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge when he had been shown the Jerusalem Bible, taken under escort to Westminster Abbey for successive coronations, together with one of the earliest illuminated copies of the New Testament. The recently rebound treasure, lifted lovingly from its special box, had been placed on the padded V-shaped lectern, the pages turned with a wooden spatula to avoid handling. He had looked in wonder across five centuries at the meticulous drawings, still as bright as when the colours had flowed with such gentle precision from the artist’s pen, drawings which, in their beauty and essential humanity, had brought him close to tears.

He said: “Your work here is regarded as more important?”

“It is judged by different criteria. And here my lack of the more commonplace practical skills is no disadvantage. Anyone with a little training can operate a washing machine, wheel patients to the bathroom, give out bedpans. I can’t be sure how long even these services will be required. The priest who is our chaplain here is converting to Roman Catholicism following the decision of the Church of England to ordain women. Half of the sisters want to follow him. The future of St. Anne’s as an Anglican order is in doubt.”

They had now walked the length of the three paths and, turning, began the journey again. Sister Agnes said: “Henry
Peverell wasn’t the only person who came between us in the last years of my sister’s life. There was Eliza Brady. Oh you needn’t trouble to look for her, Commander, she died in 1871. I read about her in a report of an inquest in a Victorian newspaper which I found in a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road and which unhappily I passed over to Sonia. Eliza Brady was thirteen years old. Her father worked for a coal merchant and her mother had died in childbirth. Eliza became the mother to four younger brothers and sisters and the baby. Her father gave evidence at the inquest that Eliza was mother to them all. For fourteen hours a day she worked. She washed, she made the fire, she cooked, she shopped, she cared for the whole of that little family. One morning, when she was drying the baby’s napkins on a guard in front of the fire, she leaned on the guard and it collapsed into the flames. She was horribly burnt and died in agony three days later. The story affected my sister powerfully. She said, ‘So this is the justice of your so-called loving God. This is how he rewards the innocent and the good. He wasn’t satisfied with killing her. She had to die horribly, slowly and in agony.’ My sister became almost obsessed with Eliza Brady. She made her into a kind of cult figure. If she had had a picture of the child she would probably have prayed in front of it, although I don’t know to whom.”