Death of an Expert Witness (31 page)

Dalgliesh wondered by what mental process she had arrived at that glib psychological assessment. Not, he thought, that it was necessarily wrong. He felt profoundly sorry for Kerrison.

Suddenly Massingham felt sick. The warmth and feculent smell of the room overpowered him. A blob of cold sweat dropped on his notebook.

Muttering an apology, he strode over to the window and tugged at the frame. It resisted for a moment then slammed down. Great draughts of cool reviving air poured in. The frail light before the carved Madonna flickered and went out.

When he got back to his notebook, Dalgliesh was already asking about the previous evening. Miss Willard said that she had cooked a meal of minced beef, potatoes and frozen peas for supper, with a blancmange to follow. She had washed up alone and had then gone to say good-night to the family before returning to her sitting-room. They were then in the drawing-room, but Dr. Kerrison and Nell were about to take William up to bed. She had seen and heard nothing else of the family until just after nine o'clock when she had gone to check that the front door was bolted. Dr.

Kerrison was sometimes careless about locking up and didn't always appreciate how nervous she felt, sleeping alone and on the ground floor. One read such terrible stories. She had passed the study door, which was ajar, and had heard Dr. Kerrison speaking on the telephone.

She had returned to her sitting room and had switched on the television.

Dr. Kerrison had looked in shortly before ten o'clock to talk to her about a small increase in her salary, but they had been interrupted by a telephone call. He had returned ten minutes or so later and they had been together for about half an hour. It had been pleasant to have the opportunity of a private chat without the children butting in. Then he had said goodnight and left her. She had switched on the television again and had watched it until nearly midnight, when she had gone to bed. If Dr. Kerrison had taken out the car, she felt fairly sure that she would have heard it since her sitting-room window looked out at the garage, which was built at the side of the house. Well, they could see that for themselves.

She had overslept the next morning and hadn't breakfasted until after nine. She had been woken by the telephone ringing, but it hadn't been until Dr. Kerrison returned from the Laboratory that she knew about Dr. Lorrimer's murder. Dr. Kerrison had returned briefly to the house shortly after nine o'clock to tell her and Nell what had happened and to ring the hospital to say that any calls for him should be transferred to the reception desk at the Laboratory.

Dalgliesh said: "I believe Dr. Lorrimer used to drive you to the eleven o'clock service at St. Mary's at Guy's Marsh. He seems to have been a solitary and not a very happy man. No one seems to have known him well. I was wondering whether he found in you the companionship and friendship he seems to have lacked in his working life."

Massingham looked up, curious to see her response to this blatant invitation to self revelation. She hooded her eyes like a bird, while a red blotch spread like a contagion over her throat. She said, with an attempt at archness:

"Now I'm afraid you're teasing me, Commander. It is Commander, isn't it? It seems so odd, just like a naval rank. My late brother-in-law was in the Navy, so I know a little of die se matters. But you were talking of friendship. That implies confidence. I should like to have helped him, but he wasn't easy to know. And there was the age difference. I'm not so very much older, less than five years, I suppose. But it's a great deal to a comparatively young man.

No, I'm afraid we were just two reprobate High Anglicans in this Evangelical swampland. We didn't even sit together in church. I've always sat in the third pew down from the pulpit and he liked to be right at the back."

Dalgliesh persisted: "But he must have enjoyed your company. He called for you every Sunday, didn't he?"

"Only because Father Gregory asked him. There is a bus to Guy's Marsh, but I have to wait half an hour and, as Dr. Lorrimer drove past the Old Rectory, Father Gregory suggested that it would be a sensible arrangement if we travelled together. He never came in. I was always ready and waiting for him outside the drive. If his father were ill or he himself was out on a case, he'd telephone. Sometimes he wasn't able to let me know, which was inconvenient. But I knew that if he didn't drive up at twenty to eleven he wouldn't be coming, and then I'd set off for the bus. Usually, of course, he came, except during the first six months of this year when he gave up Mass. But he rang early in September to say that he would be stopping for me as he used to.

Naturally I never questioned him about the break. One does go through these dark nights of the soul."

So he had stopped going to Mass when the affair with Domenica Schofield began, and had resumed his churchgoing after the break. Dalgliesh asked:

"Did he take the Sacrament?"

She was unsurprised by the question. "Not since he started coming to Mass again in mid September. It worried me a little, I confess. I did wonder whether to suggest to him that if anything was troubling him he should have a talk with Father Gregory. But one is on very delicate ground. And it really wasn't any concern of mine."

And she wouldn't want to offend him, thought Massingham. Those lifts in the car must have been very convenient. Dalgliesh asked:

"So he did very occasionally telephone you. Have you ever rung him?"

She turned away and fussed herself plumping up a cushion. "Dear me, no! Why should I? I don't even know his number."

Massingham said: "It seems odd that he went to church at Guy's Marsh instead of in the village."

Miss Willard looked at him severely. "Not at all. Mr. Swaffield is a very worthy man, but he's Low, very Low. The fens have always been strongly Evangelical. When my dear father was rector here, he had constant fights with the Parochial Church Council over Reservation. And then I think that Dr. Lorrimer didn't want to get drawn into church and village activities. It's so difficult not to once you're known as a regular member of the congregation. Father Gregory didn't expect that; he realized that Dr. Lorrimer had his own father to care for and a very demanding job. Incidentally, I was very distressed that the police didn't call for Father Gregory. Someone should have called a priest to the body."

Dalgliesh said gently: "He had been dead some hours when the body was discovered, Miss Willard."

"Even so, he should have had a priest." She stood up as if signifying that the interview was at an end. Dalgliesh was glad enough to go. He said his formal thanks and asked Miss Willard to get in touch with him immediately if anything of interest occurred to her. He and Massingham were at the door when she suddenly called out imperiously:

"Young man!" The two detectives turned to look at her. She spoke directly at Massingham, like an old-fashioned nurse admonishing a child:

"Would you please shut the window which you so inconsiderately opened, and relight the candle."

Meekly, as if in obedience to long-forgotten nursery commands, Massingham did so. They were left to find their own way out of the house and saw no one. When they were in the car fastening their seat-belts, Massingham exploded:

"Good God, you'd think Kerrison could find someone more suitable than that old hag to care for his children. She's a slut, a dipsomaniac, and she's half-mad."

"It's not so simple for Kerrison. A remote village, a large, cold house, and a daughter who can't be easy to cope with. Faced with the choice of that kind of job and the dole, most women today would probably opt for the dole. Did you take a look at the bonfire?"

"Nothing there. It looks as if they're periodically burning a lot of old furniture and garden rubbish which they've got stacked in one of the coach-houses. William said that Nell made a bonfire early this morning."

"William can talk, then?" Dalgliesh asked.

"Oh William can talk. But I'm not sure that you'd be able to understand him, sir. Did you believe Miss Willard when she gave that alibi for Kerrison?"

"I'm as ready to believe her as I am Mrs. Bradley or Mrs. Blakelock when they confirmed Bradley's and Blakelock's alibis. Who can tell?

We know that Kerrison did ring Dr. Underwood at nine and was here to receive his return call at about ten. If Miss Willard sticks to her story, he's in the clear for that hour, and I've a feeling that it's the crucial hour. But how did he know that? And if he did, why suppose that we should be able to pin down the time of death so precisely? Sitting with his daughter until nine and then calling on Miss Willard just before ten looks very like an attempt to establish that he was at home during the whole of that hour."

Massingham said: "He must have been, to take that ten o'clock call.

And I don't see how he could have got to Hoggatt's, killed Lorrimer and returned home in less than sixty minutes, not if he went on foot. And Miss Willard seems confident that he didn't take the car. I suppose it would just be possible if he took a short cut through the new Laboratory, but it would be a close thing."

Just then the car radio bleeped. Dalgliesh took the call. It was from the Guy's Marsh control tower to say that Sergeant Reynolds at the Lab wanted to contact them. The Met Lab report had been received.

They opened the door together. Mrs. Bradley held a sleeping child in her arms. Bradley said:

"Come in. It's about the vomit, isn't it? I've been expecting you."

They moved into the sitting-room. He gestured Dalgliesh and Massingham to the two chairs and sat down on the sofa opposite them. His wife moved close to him, shifting the baby's weight against her shoulder.

Dalgliesh asked:

"Do you want a solicitor?"

"No. Not yet, anyway. I'm ready to tell the whole truth and it can't hurt me. At least, I suppose it can lose me my job. But that's the worst it can do. And I think I'm almost beyond caring."

Massingham opened his notebook. Dalgliesh said to Susan Bradley:

"Wouldn't you like to put the baby in her pram, Mrs. Bradley?"

She gazed at Dalgliesh with blazing eyes, and shook her head vehemently, holding the child more tightly as if she expected them to tear her from her arms. Massingham was grateful that, at least, the child was asleep. But he wished that neither she nor her mother were there. He looked at the baby, bunched in her pink sleeping suit against her mother's shoulder, the fringe of longer hair above the tender hollowed neck, the round bare patch at the back of the head, the close shut eyes and ridiculous, snubbed nose. The frail mother with her milky bundle was more inhibiting than a whole firm of recalcitrant anti-police lawyers.

There was a lot to be said for bundling a suspect into the back of a police car and taking him off to the police station to make his statement in the functional anonymity of the interrogation room. Even the Bradleys' sitting-room provoked in him a mixture of irritation and pity. It still smelt new and unfinished. There was no fireplace, and the television held pride of place above the wall mounted electric heater with, above it, a popular print of waves dashing against a rocky shore. The wall opposite had been papered to match the flowered curtains, but the other three were bare, the plaster already beginning to crack. There was a metal baby's high chair and, underneath it, a spread of plastic sheeting to protect the carpet. Everything looked new, as if they had brought to their marriage no accumulation of small personal impedimenta, had come spiritually naked into possession of this small, characterless room. Dalgliesh said:

*OL "We'll take it that your previous account of your movements on Wednesday night wasn't true, or was incomplete. So what did happen?"

Massingham wondered for a moment why Dalgliesh wasn't cautioning Bradley; then he thought he knew. Bradley might have had the guts to kill if provoked beyond endurance, but he'd never have had the nerve to drop from that third floor window. And if he didn't, how did he get out of the Laboratory? Lorrimer's killer had either used the keys or he had made that climb. All their investigations, all their careful and repeated examination of the building had confirmed that hypothesis.

There was no other way.

Bradley looked at his wife. She gave him a brief, transforming smile and held out her free hand. He clasped it and they edged closer. He moistened his lips, and then began speaking as if the speech had been long rehearsed.

"On Tuesday Dr. Lorrimer finished writing my annual confidential report. He told me he wanted to talk to me about it next day before he passed it to Dr. Howarth, and he called me into his private room soon after he arrived in the Lab. He'd given me an adverse report and, according to the rules, he had to explain why. I wanted to defend myself, but I couldn't. And there wasn't any real privacy. I felt that the whole Laboratory knew what was happening and was listening and waiting. Besides, I was so frightened of him, I don't know why exactly. I can't explain it. He had such an effect on me that he'd only have to be working close to me in the Laboratory and I'd start shaking. When he was away at a scene of crime it was like heaven. I could work perfectly well then. The annual confidential report wasn't unjust. I knew that my work had deteriorated. But he was partly the reason why. He seemed to take my inadequacy as a personal denigration of himself. Poor work was intolerable to him. He was obsessed by mistakes. And because I was so terrified, I made them all the more."

He paused for a moment. No one spoke. Then he went on: "We weren't going to the village concert because we couldn't get a baby-sitter, and, anyway, Sue's mother was coming for supper. I got home just before six. After the meal--the curry and rice and peas--I saw her off on the seven forty-five bus. I came straight back here. But I kept thinking of the adverse report, what Dr. Howarth would say, what I was going to do if he recommended a move, how we could possibly sell this house. We had to buy when prices were at their peak, and it's almost impossible to find buyers now, except at a loss. Besides, I didn't think another lab would want me. After a time I thought I'd go back to the Laboratory and confront him. I think I had some idea that we might be able to communicate, that I could speak to him as another human being and make him understand how I felt. Anyway, I felt that I would go mad if I stayed indoors. I had to walk somewhere, and I walked towards Hoggatt's. I didn't tell Sue what I was going to do, and she tried to persuade me not to go out. But I went."