Death of an Expert Witness (26 page)

Unless, of course, she's trying to exorcize the memory. It could be that."

Dalgliesh smiled. "Actually I was thinking on less esoteric lines. A scarlet Jaguar, and the latest model, is hardly the most inconspicuous vehicle for driving round the country with a lover. And old Mr.

Lorrimer said that his son hardly left home in the evenings or at night, unless to a murder scene. These are unpredictable. On the other hand he was frequently late at the Lab. Not all the lateness could have been work. I think that he and Mrs. Schofield had a rendezvous somewhere fairly close."

"You think it important, sir?"

"Important enough to cause her to lie. Why should she care if we know where they chose to disport themselves? I could understand it if she told us to mind our own business. But why bother to lie? There was another moment, too, when very briefly she lost composure. It was when she talked about seventeenth-century church architecture. I got the impression that there was a small, almost undetectable moment of confusion when she realized that she'd stumbled into saying some thing indiscreet, or at least something she wished unsaid. When the interviews are out of the way tomorrow, I think we'll take a look at the chapel at Hoggatt's."

"But Sergeant Reynolds had a look at it this morning, sir, after he'd searched the grounds. It's just a locked, empty chapel. He found nothing."

"Probably because there's nothing to find. It's just a hunch. Now we'd better get back to Guy's Marsh for that Press conference and then I must have a word with the Chief Constable if he's back. After that I'd like to see Brenda Pridmore again; and I want to call later at the Old Rectory for a word with Dr. Kerrison. But that can wait until we've seen what Mrs. Gotobed at the Moonraker can do about dinner."

Twenty minutes later, in the kitchen at learnings, an incongruous compromise between a laboratory and rustic domesticity, Howarth was mixing sauce vinaigrette. The sickly, pungent smell of the olive oil, curving in a thin golden stream from the bottle, brought back, as always, memories of Italy and of his father, that dilettante collector of trivia, who had spent most of each year in Tuscany or Venice, and whose self-indulgent, hypochondriacal, solitary life had ended, appropriately enough since he affected to dread old age, on his fiftieth birthday. He had been less a stranger to his two motherless children than an enigma, seldom with them in person, always present mysteriously to their minds.

Maxim recalled a memory of his dressing gowned figure, patterned in mauve and gold, standing at the foot of his bed on that extraordinary night of muted voices, sudden running footsteps, inexplicable silences in which his stepmother had died. He had been home from prep-school for the holidays, eight years old. Ignored in the crisis of the illness, frightened and alone. He remembered clearly his father's thin, rather weary voice, already assuming the languors of grief.

"Your stepmother died ten minutes ago, Maxim. Evidently fate does not intend me to be a husband. I shall not again risk such grief. You, my boy, must look after your stepsister. I rely on you." And then a cold hand casually laid on his shoulder as if conferring a burden. He had accepted it, literally, at eight years old, and had never laid it down.

At first the immensity of the trust had appalled him. He remembered how he had lain there, terrified, staring into the darkness. Look after your sister. Domenica was three months old. How could he look after her? What ought he to feed her on? How dress her? What about his prep-school? They wouldn't let him stay at home to look after his sister. He smiled wryly, remembering his relief at discovering next morning that her nurse was, after all, to remain. He recalled his first efforts to assume responsibility, resolutely seizing the pram handles and straining to push it up the Broad Wilk, struggling to lift Domenica into her high chair.

"Give over, Master Maxim, do. You're more of a hindrance than a help."

But afterwards the nurse had begun to realize that he was becoming more of a help than a nuisance, that the child could safely be left with him while she and the only other servant pursued their own unsupervised devices. Most of his school holidays had been spent helping to look after Domenica. From Rome, Verona, Florence and Venice his father, through his solicitor, sent instructions about allowances and schools.

It was he who helped buy the clothes, took her to school, comforted and advised. He had attempted to support her through the agonies and uncertainties of adolescence, even before he had outgrown his own. He had been her champion against the world. He smiled, remembering the telephone call to Cambridge from her boarding school, asking him to fetch her that very night "outside the hockey pavilion--gruesome torture house--at midnight. I'll climb down the fire escape.

Promise." And then their private code of defiance and allegiance:

"Contra mundum."

"Contra mundum." His father's arrival from Italy, so little perturbed by the Reverend Mother's insistent summons that it was obvious that he had, in any case, been planning to return.

"Your sister's departure was unnecessarily eccentric, surely. Midnight assignation. Dramatic car drive across half England. Mother Superior seemed particularly pained that she had left her trunk behind, although I can appreciate that it would have been an encumbrance on the fire escape. And you must have been out of college all night. Your tutor can't have liked that."

"I'm post-graduate now, Father. I took my degree eighteen months ago."

"Indeed. Time passes so quickly at my age. Physics, wasn't it? A curious choice. Couldn't you have called for her after school in the orthodox way?"

"We wanted to get as far away from the place as possible before they noticed she'd gone and started looking."

"A reasonable strategy, so far as it goes."

"Dom hates school, Father. She's utterly miserable there."

"So was I at school, but it never occurred to me to expect otherwise.

Reverend Mother seems a charming woman. A tendency to halitosis when under stress, but I shouldn't have thought that would have troubled your sister. They can hardly have come into intimate contact. She isn't prepared to have Domenica back, by the way."

"Need Dom go anywhere, Father? She's nearly fifteen. She doesn't have to go to school. And she wants to be a painter."

"I suppose she could stay at home until she's old enough for art college, if that's what you advise. But it's hardly worth opening the London house just for one. I shall return to Venice next week. I'm only here to consult Dr. Mavers-Brown."

"Perhaps she could go back to Italy with you for a month or so. She'd love to see the Accademia. And she ought to see Florence."

"Oh, I don't think that would do, my boy. Quite out of the question.

She had much better take a room at Cambridge and you can keep an eye on her. They have some quite agreeable pictures in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Oh dear, what a responsibility children are! It's quite wrong that I should be troubled like this in my state of health.

Mavers-Brown was insistent that I avoid anxiety."

And now he lay coffined in his final self sufficiency, in that most beautiful of burial grounds, the British Cemetery in Rome. He would have liked that, thought Maxim, if he could have borne the thought of his death at all, as much as he would have resented the overaggressive Italian drivers whose ill-judged acceleration at the junction of the Via Vittoria and the Corso had placed him there.

He heard his sister's steps on the stairs. "So they've gone."

"Twenty minutes ago. We had a brief valedictory skirmish. Was Dalgliesh offensive?"

"No more offensive than I to him. Honours even, I should have said. I don't think he liked me."

"I don't think he likes anyone much. But he's considered highly intelligent. Did you find him attractive?"

She answered the unspoken question. "It would be like making love to a public hangman." She dipped her finger in the vinaigrette dressing.

"Too much vinegar. What have you been doing?"

"Apart from cooking? Thinking about father. Do you know, Dom, when I was eleven I became absolutely convinced that he'd murdered our mothers."

"Both of them? I mean yours and mine? What an odd idea. How could he have? Yours died of cancer and mine of pneumonia. He couldn't have fixed that."

"I know. It's just that he seemed such a natural widower. I thought at the time that he'd done it to stop them having any more babies."

"Well it would do that all right. Were you wondering whether a tendency to murder is inherited?"

"Not really. But so much is. Father's total inability to make relationships, for example. That incredible self-absorption. Do you know, he'd actually put me down for Stonyhurst before he remembered that it was your mother, not mine, who'd been R C."

"A pity he did find out. I should like to have seen what the Jesuits made of you. The trouble with a religious education, if you're a pagan like me, is that you're left all your life feeling that you've lost something, not that it isn't there."

She walked over to the table and stirred a bowl of mushrooms with her finger.

"I can make relationships. The trouble is that I get bored and they don't last. And I only seem to know one way to be kind. It's as well that we last, isn't it? You'll last for me until the day I die. Shall I change now or do you want me to see to the wine?"

"You'll last for me until the day I die." Contra mundum. It was too late now to sever that cord even if he wanted to. He remembered Charles Schofield's gauze-cocooned head, the dying eyes still malicious behind two slits in the bandages, the swollen lips painfully moving.

"Congratulations, Giovanni. Remember me in your garden in Parma."

What had been so astounding was not the lie itself, or that Schofield had believed it, or pretended to believe it, but that he had hated his brother-in-law enough to die with that taunt on his lips. Or had he taken it for granted that a physicist, poor philistine, wouldn't know his Jacobean dramatists? Even his wife, that indefatigable sexual sophisticate, had known better. "I suppose you'd sleep together if Domenica happened to want it. A spot of incest wouldn't worry her. But you don't need to. do you? You don't need anything as normal as sex to be more to each other than you are. Neither of you wants anyone else. That's why I'm leaving. I'm getting out now while there's still something left of me to get out."

"Max, what is it?" Domenica's voice, sharpened with anxiety, recalled him to the present. His mind spun back through a kaleidoscope of spinning years, through superimposed swirling images of childhood and youth, to that last unforgettable image, still, perfectly in focus, patterned forever in his memory, Lorrimer's dead fingers clawing at the floor of his laboratory, Lorrimer's dull, half open eye, Lorrimer's blood. He said:

"You get changed. I'll see to the wine."

"What will people say?"

"That's all you ever think of, Mum, what will people say. What does it matter what they say? I haven't done anything to be ashamed of."

"Of course not. If anyone says different your dad'll soon put them right. But you know what tongues they have in this village. A thousand pounds. I couldn't hardly believe it when that solicitor rang. It's a tidy sum. And by the time Lillie Pearce has passed the news around in the Stars and Plough it'll be ten thousand, more than likely."

"Who cares about Lillie Pearce, silly old cow."

"Brenda! I won't have that language. And we have to live in this village."

"You may have to. I don't. And if that's the kind of minds they've got the sooner I move away the better. Oh, Mum, don't look like that!

He only wanted to help me, he wanted to be kind. And he probably did it on impulse."

"Not very considerate of him, though, was it?

He might have talked it over with your dad or me."

"But he didn't know that he was going to die." Brenda and her mother were alone in the farmhouse, Arthur Pridmore having left after supper for the monthly meeting of the Parochial Church Council. The washing-up was finished and the long evening stretched before them. Too restless to settle to the television and too preoccupied with the extraordinary events of the day to take up a book, they sat in the firelight, edgy, half excited and half afraid, missing Arthur Pridmore's reassuring bulk in his high-backed chair. Then Airs Pridmore shook herself into normality and reached for her sewing basket.

"Well, at least it will help towards a nice wedding. If you have to take it, better put it in the Post Office. Then it'll add interest and be there when you want it."

"I want it now. For books and a microscope like Dr. Lorrimer intended. That's why he left it to me and that's what I'm going to do with it. Besides, if people leave money for a special purpose you can't use it for something else. And I don't want to. I'm going to ask Dad to put up a shelf and a workbench in my bedroom and I'll start working for my science "A levels straight away."

"He ought not to have thought of you. What about Angela Foley?

She's had a terrible life, that girl. She never got a penny from her grandmother's will, and now this."

"That's not our concern, Mum. It was up to him. Maybe he might have left it to her if they hadn't rowed."

"How do you mean, rowed? When?"