P James - Unnatural Causes

“And the meal was? As if I need to ask!”

“Fried scampi with sauce tartare. Green salad with French dressing. Brown bread and butter, Danish blue cheese and biscuits, washed down with Chianti.”

“I shall be surprised if he ate that at Monksmere,” said Dalgliesh. “It’s a typical London restaurant meal. What about the hands, by the way?”

“Chopped off some hours after death. Dr. Sydenham thinks they may have been taken off on Wednesday night, and that would be logical enough, Mr. Dalgliesh. The seat of the dinghy was used as a chopping block. There wouldn’t be much bleeding but if the man did get blood on him there was plenty of sea to wash it away. It’s a nasty business, a spiteful business, and I shall find the man who did it, but that’s not to say it was murder. He died naturally.”

“A really bad shock would have killed him, I suppose?”

“But how bad? You know how it is with these heart cases. One of my boys has seen this Dr. Forbes-Denby and he says that Seton could have gone on for years with care. Well, he was careful. No undue strain, no air travel, a moderate diet, plenty of comfort. People with worse hearts than his go on to make old bones. I had an aunt with that trouble. She survived two bombing-outs. You could never count on killing a man by shocking him to death. Heart cases survive the most extraordinary shocks.”

“And succumb to a mild attack of indigestion. I know. That last meal was hardly the most appropriate eating for a heart case, but we can’t seriously suppose that someone took him out to dinner with the intention of provoking a fatal attack of indigestion.”

“Nobody took him out to dinner, Mr. Dalgliesh. He dined where you thought he might have done. At the Cortez Club in Soho, Luker’s place. He went there straight from the Cadaver Club and arrived alone.”

“And left alone?”

“No. There’s a hostess there, a blonde called Lily Coombs. A kind of right-hand woman to Luker. Keeps an eye on the girls and the booze and jollies along the nervous customers. You know her, I daresay, if she was with Luker in fifty-nine when he shot Martin. Her story is that Seton called her to his table and said that a friend had given him her name. He was looking for information about the drug racket and had been told that she could help.”

“Lil isn’t exactly a Sunday-school teacher but, as far as I know, she’s never been mixed up in the dope business. Nor has Luker-yet. Seton didn’t tell her the name of his friend, I suppose?”

“She says that she asked but he wouldn’t tell. Anyway, she saw the chance of making a few quid and they left the club together at nine-thirty. Seton told her that they couldn’t go back to his club to talk because women weren’t admitted. That’s true; they aren’t. So they drove around Hyde Park and the West End in a taxi for about forty minutes, he paid her five quid for her information-I don’t know what sort of a yarn she pitched him-and he got out at Paddington Underground Station leaving her to take the cab back to the Cortez. She arrived back at ten-thirty and remained there in view of about thirty customers until one in the morning.”

“But why leave in the first place? Couldn’t she have spun him the yarn at his table?”

“She said he seemed anxious to get out of the place. The waiter confirmed that he looked nervy and on edge. And Luker doesn’t like her to spend too much time with one customer.”

“If I know Luker he’d take an even poorer view of her leaving the club for forty minutes to take a trip round Hyde Park. But it all sounds very respectable. Lil must have changed since the old days. Did you think it a likely story?”

Reckless said: “I’m a provincial police officer, Mr. Dalgliesh. I don’t take the view that every Soho tart is necessarily a liar. I thought she was telling the truth, although not necessarily the whole truth. And then you see, we’ve traced the cab driver. He confirmed that he picked them up outside the club at nine-thirty and dropped Seton outside the District Line entrance at Paddington about forty minutes later. He said they seemed to be talking together very seriously for the whole of the journey and that the gentleman made notes in a pocket book from time to time. If he did I should like to know what happened to it. There was no pocket book on him when I saw the body.”

Dalgliesh said: “You’ve worked quickly. So the time he was last seen alive is pushed forward to about ten-ten. And he died less than two hours later.”

“Of natural causes, Mr. Dalgliesh.”

“I think he was intended to die.”

“Maybe. But I’m not arguing with facts. Seton died at midnight last Tuesday and he died because he had a weak heart and it stopped beating. That’s what Dr. Sydenham tells me and I’m not going to waste public money trying to prove that he’s wrong. Now you’re telling me that someone induced that heart attack. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I am saying that there’s no evidence yet to support it. I’m keeping an open mind on this case. There’s a lot we don’t know yet.”

That remark struck Dalgliesh as a considerable understatement. Most of the facts Reckless didn’t yet know were surely almost as crucial as the cause of death. He could have catalogued the unanswered questions. Why had Seton asked to be dropped at Paddington? Who, if anyone, was he on the way to meet? Where had he died? Where was his body from midnight on Tuesday onwards? Who moved it to Monksmere and why? If the death had indeed been premeditated how did the murderer contrive so successfully to make it look like natural death? And this led on to a question which Dalgliesh found the most intriguing of all. Having done so, why didn’t he leave the body in London, dumped perhaps at the side of the road to be later identified as that of a middle-aged, unimportant detective novelist, who had been walking in London on his own mysterious business and had been overcome by a heart attack? Why bring the body back to Monksmere and stage an elaborate charade which couldn’t fail to arouse suspicion of foul play and which would inevitably bring the whole Suffolk CID buzzing around his ears?

As if he could read Dalgliesh’s thoughts Reckless said: “We’ve no evidence that Seton’s death and the mutilation of his body are directly related. He died of natural causes. Sooner or later we shall find out where. Then we shall get a lead on the person responsible for all the subsequent nonsense; the mutilation; the false telephone call to Digby Seton-if it were made; the two manuscripts sent to Miss Kedge-if they were sent. There’s a joker in this pack and I don’t like his sense of humour; but I don’t think he’s a killer.”

“So you think that it’s all an elaborate hoax? With what purpose?”

“Malice, Mr. Dalgliesh. Malice against the dead, or the living. The hope of throwing suspicion on other people. The need to make trouble. For Miss Calthrop, maybe. She doesn’t deny that the handless corpse in a dinghy was her idea. For Digby Seton. He stands to gain most by his half-brother’s death. For Miss Dalgliesh, even. After all, it was her chopper.”

Dalgliesh said: “That’s pure conjecture. The chopper’s missing, that’s all we know. There’s no evidence whatsoever that it was the weapon.”

“There’s evidence now. You see, it’s been returned. Switch on the lights, Mr. Dalgliesh, and you’ll see.”

The chopper had, indeed, been returned. At the far end of the room stood a small eighteenth-century sofa table, a delicate and charming thing which Dalgliesh remembered from his childhood as part of the furniture of his grandmother’s sitting room. The chopper had been driven into the centre, the blade splitting the polished wood almost in two, the shaft curving upward. In the bright centre light which now flooded the room Dalgliesh could see clearly the brown stains of blood on the blade. It would be sent for analysis, of course. Nothing would be left to chance. But he had no doubt that it was Maurice Seton’s blood.