P James - Devices & Desires

Rickards closed the door and opened the opposite one on the right of the passage. This led to the kitchen, a purely functional, rather uninteresting room, well enough equipped but in stark contrast to the kitchen at Martyr's Cottage.

Set in the middle of the room was a small wooden table, vinyl-covered, with four matching chairs all pushed well in. On the table was an uncorked bottle of wine with the cork and the metal opener beside it. Two plain wineglasses, clean and upturned, were on the draining board.

Rickards said: 'Two glasses, both washed, by her or her killer. We'll get no prints there. And an open bottle. Someone was drinking with her here tonight.'

Dalgliesh said: 'If so he was abstemious. Or she was.'

Rickards with his gloved hand lifted the bottle by its neck and slowly turned it. 'About one glass poured. Maybe they planned to finish it after her swim.' He looked at Dalgliesh and said:' 'You didn't come earlier into the cottage, Mr Dalgliesh? I have to ask everyone she knew.'

'Of course. No, I didn't come earlier into the cottage. I Was drinking claret tonight, but not with her.'

'Pity you hadn't been. She'd be alive now.'

'Not necessarily. I might have left when she went to change for her swim. And if she did have someone with her here tonight that's probably what he did.' He paused, wondered whether to speak, then said: 'The left-hand glass is slightly cracked at the rim.'

Rickards lifted it to the central light and turned it slowly.

'I wish I had your eyesight. It's hardly significant, surely.'

'Some people strongly dislike drinking from a cracked glass. I do myself.'

'In which case why didn't she break it and chuck it away? There's no point in keeping a glass you aren't prepared to drink from. When I'm faced with two alternatives I start by taking the more likely. Two glasses, two drinkers. That's the common-sense explanation.'

It was, thought Dalgliesh, the basis of most police work. Only when the obvious proved untenable was it necessary to explore less likely explanations. But it could also be the first fatally easy step into a labyrinth of misconceptions. He wondered why his instinct insisted that she had been drinking alone. Perhaps because the bottle was in the kitchen not in the sitting room. The wine was a '79 Chateau Talbot, hardly an all-purpose tipple. Why not carry it into the sitting room and do it justice in comfort? On the other hand, if she were alone and had needed only a quick swig before her swim she might hardly have bothered. And if two people had been drinking in the kitchen she had been meticulous in pushing back the chairs. But it was the level of the wine that seemed to him almost conclusive. Why uncork a fresh bottle to pour only two half-glasses? Which didn't, of course, mean that she wasn't later expecting a visitor to help finish it.

Rickards seemed to be taking an unnatural interest in the bottle and its label. Suddenly he said gruffly:

'What time did you leave the mill, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'At 9.15. I looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and checked my watch.'

'And you saw no one during your walk?'

'No one, and no footprints other than hers and mine.'

'What were you actually doing on the headland, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'Walking, thinking.' He was about to add: 'And paddling like a boy,' but checked himself.

Rickards said consideringly: 'Walking and thinking.'

To Dalgliesh's oversensitive ears he made the activities sound both eccentric and suspicious. Dalgliesh wondered what his companion would say if he had decided to confide. 'I was thinking about my aunt and the men who loved her, the fiancé who was killed in 1918 and the man whose mistress she might or might not have been. I was thinking of the thousands of people who have walked along that shore and who are now dead, my aunt among them, and how, as a boy, I hated the false romanticism of that stupid poem about great men leaving their footprints on the sands of time, since that was essentially all that most of us could hope to leave, transitory marks which the next tide would obliterate. I was thinking how little I had known my aunt and whether it was ever possible to know another human being except on the most superficial level, even the women I have loved. I was thinking about the clash of ignorant armies by night, since no poet walks by the sea at moonlight without silently reciting Matthew Arnold's marvellous poem. I was considering whether I would have been a better poet, or even a poet at all, if I hadn't also decided to be a policeman. More prosaically, I was, from time to time, wondering how my life would be changed for better or worse by the unmerited acquisition of three-quarters of a million.'

The fact that he had no intention of revealing even the most mundane of these private musings, the childish secrecy about the paddling, induced an irrational guilt, as if he were deliberately withholding information of importance. After all, he told himself, no man could have been more innocently employed. And it was not as if he were a serious suspect. The idea would probably have struck Rickards as too ridiculous even for consideration, although with logic he would have had to admit that no one who lived on the headland and had known Hilary Robarts could be excluded from the inquiry, least of all because he was a senior police officer. But Dalgliesh was a witness. He had information to give or withhold, and the knowledge that he would have no intention of withholding it didn't alter the fact that there was a difference now in their relationship. He was involved, whether he liked it or not, and he didn't need Rickards to point out that uncomfortable reality. Professionally it was none of his business, but it was his business as a man and a human being.

He was surprised and a little disconcerted to discover how much he had resented the interrogation, mild as it had been. A man was surely entitled to walk along the beach at night without having to explain his reasons to a police officer. It was salutary for him personally to experience this sense of privacy violated, of virtuous outrage which the most innocent of suspects must feel when faced with police interrogation. And he realized anew how much, even from childhood, he had disliked being questioned. 'What are you doing? Where have you been? What are you reading? Where are you going?' He had been the much-wanted only child of elderly parents, burdened by their almost possessive parental concern and over-conscientiousness, living in a village where little the rector's son did was safe from scrutiny. And suddenly, standing here in this anonymous, over-tidy kitchen, he recalled vividly and with heart-stopping pain the moment when his most precious privacy had been violated. He remembered that secluded place, deep in the laurels and elderberries, at the bottom of the shrubbery, the green tunnel of leaves leading to his own three square yards of moist, mould-rich sanctuary, remembered that August afternoon, the crackle of bushes, the cook's great face thrust between the leaves. 'Your ma thought you'd be in here, Master Adam. Rector wants you. What do you do in there, hiding yourself away in all those mucky bushes? Better be playing out in the sunshine.' So the last refuge, the one he had thought totally secret, had been discovered. They had known about it all the time.

He said: 'Oh God from You that I could private be.'

Rickards looked at him. 'What was that, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'Just a quotation that came into my mind.'

Rickards didn't reply. He was probably thinking: 'Well, you're supposed to be a poet. You're entitled.' He gave a last searching look around the kitchen as if by the intensity of his gaze he could somehow compel that unremarkable table and four chairs, the opened bottle of wine, the two washed glasses to yield up their secret.