Original Sin (49 page)

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Mrs Carling's flat was one floor down and at the front of the building. The heavy mahogany door was fitted with a keyhole and with two security locks, a Banham and an Ingersoll. The keys turned easily and Dalgliesh pushed open the door against the shifting weight of a pile of post. The hall smelled musty and was very dark. He felt for the light switch and pressed it down to reveal at a glance the simple layout of the flat, a narrow hall with two doors facing him and one at each end. He bent down to pick up the assorted envelopes and saw that they were merely circulars, with two obvious bills and an envelope which exhorted Mrs Carling to open it immediately and win the chance of half a million. There was also a sheet of folded paper with a message in a laborious hand. 'Sorry I can't come tomorrow. Have to go to clinic with Tracey on account of high blood pressure. Hope to see you next Friday. Mrs Darlene Morgan.'

Dalgliesh opened the door immediately ahead and switched on the light. They found themselves in the sitting-room. The two windows overlooking the street were close-shut, the curtains of red velvet half-drawn. At this height there was no risk of prying eyes even from the top deck of buses but the bottom halves of both windows were curtained in a patterned net. The main artificial light came from an inverted glass bowl painted with a faint design of butterflies which hung from a central rose on the ceiling, the glass spotted with the black shrivelled bodies of trapped flies. There were three table lamps with pink-fringed shades, one on a small table beside a fireside chair, one on a square table set between the two windows and the third on a huge roll-top desk against the left-hand wall. As if desperate for light and air, Kate drew back the curtains and pushed open one of the windows then went round the room and switched on all the lights. They breathed the cool air which gave the illusion of country freshness, and looked round at a room they could at last see clearly.

The immediate impression, emphasized by the pink glow of the lamps, was of a cushioned, old-fashioned cosiness which was the more appealing because the owner had made no concessions to

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popular contemporary taste. The room could have been furnished in the 93os and left virtually undisturbed. Most of the pieces looked as if they had been inherited; the roll-top desk which held her portable typewriter, the four mahogany dining chairs of discordant shape and age, an Edwardian glass-fronted cabinet in which assorted china objects and part of a tea service had been piled and stacked rather than arranged, two faded rugs so inappropriately placed that � Dalgliesh suspected they were concealing holes in the carpet. Only the

sofa and two matching armchairs which surrounded the fireplace were comparatively new, furnished with plump cushions and covered in linen patterned with pale pink and yellow roses. The fireplace itself looked original, an ornate contrivance in grey marble with a heavy overmantel, the grate surrounded by a double row of ornamental tiles, of flowers, fruits and birds. At each end of the mantelshelf two collared Staffordshire dogs with golden chains stared with bright-eyed intensity at the opposite wall. Ranged between them was a clutter of ornaments; a George VI and Queen Elizabeth coronation mug, a black japanned box, two diminutive brass candle-sticks, a modern porcelain figure of a crinolined woman holding a lap-dog, a cut-glass vase containing a bunch of imitation primroses. Behind the ornaments were two coloured photographs. One looked as if it had been taken at a prize-giving; Esm Carling stood pointing an imitation gun, surrounded by grinning faces. In the second she was at a book signing. The picture had obviously been carefully posed. A purchaser stood expectantly at her side, head unnaturally bent to get it in the picture, while Mrs Carling, pen raised from the page, smiled beguilingly into the camera. Kate briefly studied it, trying to superimpose on the square marsupial features, the small mouth and slightly hooked nose, that appallingly drowned and violated face which was the first glimpse she had had of Esm Carling.

Dalgliesh could understand the attraction this homely soft-cushioned room had held for Daisy. On this broad sofa she had read, watched television, briefly slept before being half-carried back to her own room. Here was a refuge from the terror of her imaginings in simulated terror, neatly contained within the covers of books, sanitized, fictionalized, to be tasted, shared, put aside, no more real than and as easily turned off as the dancing flames of the artificial log fire. There had been security here, companionship and, yes, love of a

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kind if love was the meeting of mutual need. He glanced at the books. The shelves held paperback copies of crime and detective stories, but he noticed that few of the writers were living. Mrs Carling's taste was for women writers of the Golden .Age. They all looked well-read. Below them was a shelf of real-life crime: books on the Wallace case, on Jack the Ripper, on the more famous Victorian murders, Adelaide Bartlett and Constance Kent. The lower shelves held leather-bound and gold-titled copies of her own works, an extravagance, Dalgliesh thought, unlikely to have been subsidized by Peverell Press. The sight of this harmless vanity depressed him, evoking a spasm of pity. Who would inherit this accumulated record of a life lived by murder and ended by murder? On what shelf in drawing-room, bedroom or lavatory would they find an honoured or tolerated place? Or would they be bought as a job-lot by some second-hand bookseller and priced as a set, their value enhanced by the horror and appalling appropriateness of her death? Surveying the titles so reminiscent of the 93os, of village policemen cycling to the scene of the murder, tugging their forelocks to the gentry, of autopsies undertaken by eccentric general practitioners after evening surgery and unlikely denouements in the library, he took them out and glanced at them at random. Death by Dancing apparently set in the world of formation ballroom competitions, Cruising to Murder, Death by Drowning, The Mistletoe Murders. He replaced them carefully feeling no condescen-sion. Why should he? He told himself that she had probably given pleasure to more people with her mysteries than he had with his poetry. And if the pleasure was different in kind, who was to say that one was inferior to the other? She had at least respected the English language and used it as well as lay in her power. In an age rapidly becoming illiterate that was something. For thirty years she had purveyed the fantasy of murder, the acceptable face of violence, the controllable terror. He hoped that when she had come at last face to face with reality the encounter had been brief and merciful.

Kate had moved into the kitchen. He joined her and together they surveyed the mess. The sink was piled with dirty crockery, the unwashed frying pan was on the stove, and the waste bin was spilling its tins and squashed cartons onto the gTimy floor. Kate said: 'She wouldn't have wanted us to find it looking like this. Tough on her that her Mrs Morgan couldn't come this morning.'

Glancing at her he saw the flush rise from her throat and knew that

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the remark had suddenly struck her as irrational and foolish and that she wished it unspoken.

But their minds had moved in tandem. 'Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live.' Surely few people could pray that prayer with any sincerity. The best one could hope for or want was enough time to tidy away the personal debris, consign one's secrets to the flames or the dustbin and leave the kitchen tidy.

For a couple of seconds, even as he opened the drawers and cupboards, he was back in that Norfolk graveyard hearing his father's voice, an instantaneous image powerful in its intensity and bringing with it the smell of cut hay, newly turned Norfolk earth, of the intoxication of lilies. The parishioners liked the rector's son to be present at village funerals and during the school holidays he always attended, finding a village burial more of an interest than an imposition, sharing the funeral tea afterwards, trying to contain his boyish hunger, while the mourners pressed on him the traditional cooked ham and rich fruit-cake, and murmured their thanks.

'Good of you to come, Mr Adam. Dad would have appreciated it. He was very fond of you, was Dad.'

His mouth sticky with cake, murmuring the expected lie: 'I was very fond of him, Mrs Hodgkin.'

He would stand there watching while old Goodfellow the sexton and the undertaker's men tilted the coffin into that neatly accommo-dating pit, hearing the soft thud of Norfolk earth on the lid, listening to his father's grave, scholarly voice as the breeze lifted his greying hair and billowed his surplice. And he would picture the man or woman he had known, the shrouded body encased in padded imitation silk, more ostentatiously bedded than it had ever been in life, and would picture every stage of its dissolution: the rotting shroud, the slowly decaying flesh, the final falling-in of the coffin-lid on the denuded bones, and had never from childhood been able to believe that magnificent proclamation of immortality. 'And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.'

They moved into Mrs Carling's bedroom but did not linger. It was large, overfumished, untidy and not very clean. The x93os dressing table with its triple mirror held a plastic tray patterned with violets containing a jumble of half-empty bottles of hand and body lotions, greasy jars, lipsticks and eye make-up. Without thinking, Kate

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unscrewed the largest jar of foundation cream and saw its single indentation where Mrs Carling had drawn her finger across the surface. The mark, so ephemeral yet, for a moment, seeming permanent and ineradicable, brought the dead woman's image so vividly to mind that she froze, the jar in her hand, as if she had been caught out in an act of private violation. The eyes in the mirror stared back at her, guilty and a little ashamed. She made herself go over to the wardrobe and open its door. There came out with the rustle of the hanging clothes a smell that brought back other searches, other victims, other rooms, the sweet-sour musty smell of age and failure and death. She closed its door quickly but not before she had seen the three whisky bottles hidden among the row of shoes. She thought: there are moments when I hate my job. But these moments were few and they never lasted long.

The guest bedroom was a narrow, ill-proportioned cell, the one high window giving a view of a brick wall grimed with decades of London dirt and angled with heavy drainpipes. But some attempt, even if misguided, had been made to make the room inviting. The walls and ceiling were covered with a paper of twining honeysuckle, roses and ivy. The curtains, elaborately pleated, were of a matching material and the single divan, placed under the window, had a pale pink coverlet, obviously chosen to match the pink of the roses. The attempt to prettify, to impose on bleak nothingness a feminine intensity, served only to emphasize the room's defects. The dcor had obviously been designed for a female guest, but Dalgliesh couldn't imagine a woman sleeping peacefully in this claustrophobic over-patterned cell. Certainly no man could, with the ceifing's synthetic sweetness pressing down on him, the bed too narrow for comfort, the bedside table a fragile reproduction, too small to hold more than the bedside lamp.

The time looking round the flat had not been wasted. Kate remembered one of the first lessons she had been taught as a young detective constable: know the victim. Every victim dies because of who he is, what he is, where he is at one moment of time. The more you know about the victim the closer you are to his murderer. But now as they sat down at Esm Carling's desk they were in search of more specific evidence.

They were rewarded as soon as they opened it. The desk was tidier and less cluttered than they had expected and lying on the top of a

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pile of recent unpaid bills were two sheets of paper. The first was obviously a draft of the note found on the ra'dings at Innocent House. There were few alterations; Mrs Carling's final version was little different from her first outpouring of pain and anger. But the writing was a scrawl compared with the firm and careful calligraphy of the final note. Here was confirmation, if it had been needed, that they were her words and written in her hand. Underneath was a draft of a letter in the same hand. It was dated Thursday x4 October.

Dear Gerard,

I have just heard the news from my agent. Yes, from my agent! You haven't even the decency or the courage to tell me direct. You could have asked me to come to talk to you at the office, or it wouldn't have hurt you to take me out to lunch or dinner to break the news. Or are you as mean as you are disloyal and cowardly? Perhaps you were afraid that I would disgrace you by howling in the soup. I'm a great deal tougher than that, as you will discover Your rejection of Death on Paradise Island would still have been unfair, unjustified and ungrateful, but at least I could have said these things to your face. And now I can't even reach you by telephone. I'm not surprised. That bloody woman, Miss Blackett, is good at blocking calls if nothing else. At least it shows that even you are capable of some shame.

Have you any idea what I have done for Peverell Press, long before you had any power? And what a disastrous day for the firm that has proved. I have produced a book a year for thirty years, all reliable sellers, and if sales of the last were disappoint-ing, whose fault is that? What have you ever done to promote me with the vigour and enthusiasm my reputation demands? I'm off to do a signing at Cambridge this afternoon. Who persuaded the bookshop to put that on? I did. I shall go alone as usual. Most publishers see that their top authors are properly accompanied and looked after. But the fans will be there, and they'll buy. I have devoted readers who look to me to provide what no other detective writer apparently does, a fair mystery with good writing and an absence of that sex, violence and filthy language which you apparently think people today want. Well they don't. If you have so little idea of what readers really

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want you'll drive Peverell Press to bankruptcy even quicker than the publishing world predicts.

I shall, of course, have to consider how best to safeguard my interests. If I move to another publisher I shall expect to take my back-list with me. Don't think you can throw me overboard and still exploit that valuable asset. And there's something else. These mysterious mishaps which are taking place at Peverell Press only began when you took over as Managing Director. If I were you, I'd take care. There have already been two deaths at Innocent House.