Death of an Expert Witness (28 page)

BOOK FOUR

Hanged by the Neck

Sprogg's Cottage, low-built and top-heavy under its low, occluding roof of thatch, wire-netted, strong against the fen winter gales, was almost invisible from the road. It lay about three-quarters of a mile north-east from the village and was fronted by Sprogg's Green, a wide triangular grass verge planted with willows. Pushing open the white wicker gate on which someone had optimistically but fruitlessly substituted the word "Lavender" for Sprogg's, Dalgliesh and Massingham stepped into a front garden as brightly ordered and conventional as that of a suburban villa. An acacia tree in the middle of the lawn flaunted its autumn glory of red and gold, the yellow climbing roses trained over the door still gleamed with a faint illusion of summer and a massed bed of geraniums, fuchsia and dahlias, supported by stakes and carefully tended, flared in discordant glory against the bronze of the beech hedge. There was a hanging basket of pink geraniums beside the door, now past their best, but still bright with a few tattered blooms.

The knocker was a highly polished brass fish, every scale gleaming.

The door was opened by a slight, almost fragile woman, bare-footed and wearing a cotton overblouse, patterned in greens and brown, above her corduroy slacks. She had coarse dark hair strongly streaked with grey and worn in a short bob, with a heavy fringe which curved low to meet her eyebrows. Her eyes were her most remarkable feature, immense, the irises brown speckled with green, translucently clear under the strongly curved brows. Her face was pale and taut, deeply etched with lines across the forehead and running from the widely springing nostrils to the corners of the mouth. It was the face, thought Dalgliesh, of a tortured masochist in a medieval triptych, the muscles bulging and knotted as if they had been racked. But no one coming under the gaze of those remarkable eyes could call it plain or ordinary. Dalgliesh said: "Miss Mawson? I'm Adam Dalgliesh. This is Inspector Massingham."

She gave him a direct, impersonal gaze and said without smiling:

"Come through into the study, will you? We don't light the sitting-room fire until the evening. If you want to speak to Angela, I'm afraid she's not here at present. She's over at Postmill Cottage with Mrs. Swaffield meeting the Social Security people. They're trying to persuade old Lorrimer to go into an old people's home.

Apparently he's being obstinately resistant to the blandishments of bureaucracy. Good luck to him."

The front door opened directly into a sitting room with a low, oak-beamed ceiling. The room surprised him. To enter it was like walking into an antique shop, but one where the proprietor had arranged his oddly assorted wares with an eye to the general effect. The mantel shelf and every ledge bore an ornament, three hanging cupboards held a variety of mugs, teapots, painted jugs and Staffordshire figures, and the walls were almost covered with prints, framed old maps, small oil paintings and Victorian silhouettes in oval frames. Above the fireplace was the most spectacular object, a curved sword with a finely wrought scabbard. He wondered whether the room reflected merely an indiscriminate acquisitiveness, or whether these carefully disposed objects served as comforting talismans against the alien, undomesticated spirits of the encroaching fens. A wood fire was laid but not lit in the open hearth. Under the window a polished gate-legged table was already laid for two.

Miss Mawson led the way through to her study. It was a smaller, less cluttered room at the back with a latticed window giving a view of a stone terrace, a lawn with a sundial in the middle, and a wide field of sugar beet, still unharvested. He saw with interest that she wrote by hand. There was a typewriter, but it stood on a table by itself. The working-desk under the window held only a pad of unlined paper, covered with a black upright holograph in an elegant italic. The lines were carefully patterned on the paper, and even the marginal alterations were aligned.

Dalgliesh said: "I'm sorry if we're interrupting your work."

"You aren't. Sit down, won't you both. It isn't going well this morning. If it were I should have hung a 'don't disturb' notice on the knocker and you wouldn't have got in. Still, it's nearly finished; only one chapter to do now. I suppose you want me to give Angela an alibi. Helping the police, isn't it called? What were we doing on Wednesday night; and when, and why, and where, and with whom?"

"We would like to ask you some questions, certainly."

"But that one first, presumably. There's no difficulty. We spent the evening and night together from six-fifteen, which was the time she arrived home."

"Doing what, Miss Mawson?"

"What we normally do. We separated the day from the evening, me with whisky, Angela with sherry. I asked about her day and she inquired about mine. Then she lit the fire and cooked the meal. We had avocado pear with sauce vinaigrette, chicken casserole and cheese and biscuits.

We washed up together and then Angela typed my manuscript for me until nine. At nine we turned on the television and watched the news, followed by the play. That brought us to ten forty-five, cocoa for Angela, whisky for me, and bed."

"Neither of you left the cottage?"

"No."

Dalgliesh asked how long she had lived in the village.

"Me? Eight years. I was born in the fens--at Soham actually--and spent most of my childhood here. But I went up to London University when I was eighteen, took a second-class degree, and then worked, not particularly successfully, at various jobs in journalism and publishing. I came here eight years ago when I heard that the cottage was to let. That's when I first decided to give up my job and become a full-time writer."

"And Miss Foley?"

"She came to live here two years ago. I advertised locally for a part-time typist and she replied. She was living in lodgings at Ely then and wasn't particularly happy there, so I suggested that she moved in. She had to depend on the bus to get to work. Living here is obviously much more convenient for the Lab."

"So you've lived long enough in the village to get to know people?"

"As much as one ever does in the fens. But not well enough to point the finger at a murderer for you."

"How well did you know Dr. Lorrimer?"

"By sight. I wasn't told that Angela was his cousin until she came to live with me. They're not close and he never came here. I've met most of the Lab staff, of course. Dr. Howarth started a string quartet soon after he arrived, and last August they gave a concert in the Wren chapel. Afterwards there was wine and cheese in the vestry. I met a number of the staff then. Actually, I already knew them by sight and name, as one does in a village. We use the same post office and the same pub. But if you're hoping for village and Lab gossip, it's no use coming to me."

Dalgliesh said: "Was the concert, in the chapel successful?"

"Not particularly. Howarth is a very fine amateur violinist and Claire Easterbrook is a competent cellist, but the other two weren't up to much. He hasn't repeated the experiment. I gather that there was a certain amount of unkind comment about a new arrival who saw it as his duty to civilize the underprivileged natives, and it may have got to his ears. He does rather give the impression that he sees himself as bridging single-handed the culture gap between the scientist and the artist. Or perhaps he wasn't satisfied with the acoustics. My own view is that the other three didn't want to go on playing with him. As a leader of a quartet he probably behaved with much the same arrogance as he does as Director. The Lab is certainly more efficient; the work output is up twenty per cent. Whether the staff are happy is another matter."

So she wasn't altogether immune to Lab and village gossip, thought Dalgliesh. He wondered why she was being so frank. Equally frank, he asked bluntly:

"When you were at Postmill Cottage yesterday, did you go upstairs?"

"Fancy the old man telling you that! What did he think I was after, I wonder? I went up to the bathroom to see if there was a tin of scouring powder there to clean the sink. There wasn't."

"You know about Dr. Lorrimer's will, of course?"

"I imagine the whole village does. Actually I was probably the first to know. The old man was getting agitated to know whether there was any money coming, so Angela rang the solicitor. She'd met him at the time her grandmother's will was read. He told her that the cottage was to go to the old man with ten thousand pounds, so she was able to put his mind at rest."

"And Miss Foley herself got nothing?"

"That's right. And that a new clerical officer at the Lab, whom Edwin had apparently taken a fancy to, gets a thousand pounds."

"A not particularly just will."

"Have you ever known beneficiaries who thought a will was just? His grandmother's will was worse. Angela lost the money then, when it could have made a difference to her life. Now she doesn't need it. We manage perfectly well here."

"Presumably it wasn't a shock to her. Didn't he tell her of his intentions?"

"If that's meant to be a tactful way of finding out whether she had a motive for murder, you can ask her yourself. Here she is."

Angela Foley came through the sitting-room, tugging off her headscarf.

Her face darkened at the sight of the visitors and she said with quick defensive annoyance: "Miss Mawson likes to work in the mornings. You didn't say that you were coming."

Her friend laughed. "They haven't worried me. I've been getting a useful insight into police methods. They're effective without being crude. You're back early."

"The social work department rang to say that they can't get over until after lunch. Uncle doesn't want to see them, but he wants to see me even less. He's having lunch with the Swaffields at the rectory, so I thought I might as well come home."

Stella Mawson lit a cigarette. "You've arrived at an opportune time.

Mr. Dalgliesh was inquiring tactfully whether you had a motive for murdering your cousin: in other words, did Edwin tell you that he was about to alter his will?"

Angela Foley looked at Dalgliesh and said calmly: "No. He never discussed his affairs with me and I didn't discuss mine with him. I don't think I've spoken to him during the last two years except about Lab business." Dalgliesh said: "It's surprising, surely, that he should want to change a long-standing will without talking to you about it?"

She shrugged, and then explained: "It was nothing to do with me. He was only my cousin, not my brother. He transferred to Hoggatt's from the Southern Laboratory five years ago to live with his father, not because I was here. He didn't really know me. If he had, I doubt whether he would have liked me. He owed me nothing, not even justice."

"Did you like him?" She paused and thought, as if the question was one to which she herself wanted an answer. Stella Mawson, eyes narrowed, regarded her through the cigarette smoke. Then Miss Foley spoke:

"No, I didn't like him. I think I was even a little afraid of him. He was like a man psychologically burdened, unsure of his place in life.

Lately the tension and unhappiness were almost palpable. I found it embarrassing and, well, somehow menacing. People who were really secure in their own personalities didn't seem to notice or be bothered by it. But the less secure felt threatened. I think that's why Clifford Bradley was so afraid of him."

Stella Mawson said: "Bradley probably reminded Edwin of himself when he was young. He was painfully insecure, even in his job, when he first started. D'you remember how he used to practise his evidence on the night before he went into the box; writing down all the possible questions the opposing counsel might ask, making sure that he was word perfect with the answers, learning all the scientific formulae by heart to impress the jury? He made a mess of one of his first cases, and never forgave himself."

There was a strange little silence. Angela Foley seemed about to speak, then changed her mind. Her enigmatic gaze was fixed on her friend. Stella Mawson's eyes shifted. She walked over to her desk and stubbed out her cigarette. She said:

"Your aunt told you. She used to have to read out the questions for him over and over again; an evening of tension and incomprehensible boredom. Don't you remember?"

"Yes," said Angela in her high, dispassionate voice. "Yes, I remember." She turned to Dalgliesh.

"If there's nothing else you want to ask me, there are things I need to get on with. Dr. Howarth isn't expecting me at the Lab until this afternoon. And Stella will want to work." Both women showed them out, standing together in the doorway as if politely speeding departing guests. Dalgliesh almost expected them to wave goodbye. He hadn't questioned Miss Foley about the quarrel with her cousin. The time might come for that, but it wasn't yet. It had interested, but not surprised him that she had lied. But what had interested him more was Stella Mawson's story of Lorrimer rehearsing his evidence on the night before a trial. Whoever had told her this, he was fairly certain that it hadn't been Angela Foley.

As they drove away, Massingharn said: "Fifty thousand pounds could change her whole life, give her some independence, get her away from here. What sort of life is it for a young woman, just the two of them, stuck here in this isolated swamp? And she seems little more than a drudge."

Dalgliesh, unusually, was driving. Massingham glanced at the sombre eyes in the mirror, the long hands laid lightly on the wheel. Dalgliesh said:

"I'm remembering what old George Greenall, the first detective sergeant I worked under, told me. He'd had twenty-five years in the CID.