1
On Friday 25 October, exactly one week before the first body was discovered at the Dupayne Museum, Adam Dalgliesh visited the museum for the first time. The visit was fortuitous, the decision impulsive and he was later to look back on that afternoon as one of life's bizarre coincidences which, although occurring more frequently than reason would expect, never fail to surprise.
He had left the Home Office building in Queen Anne's Gate at two-thirty after a long morning meeting only briefly interrupted by the usual break for brought-in sandwiches and indifferent coffee, and was walking the short distance back to his New Scotland Yard office. He was alone; that too was fortuitous. The police representation at the meeting had been strong and Dalgliesh would normally have left with the Assistant Commissioner, but one of the Under Secretaries in the Criminal Policy Department had asked him to look in at his office to discuss a query unrelated to the morning's business, and he walked unaccompanied. The meeting had produced the expected imposition of paperwork and as he cut through St. James's Park underground station into Broadway he debated whether to return to his office and risk an afternoon of interruptions or to take the papers home to his Thames-side flat and work in peace.
There had been no smoking at the meeting but the room had seemed musty with spent breath and now he took pleasure in breathing fresh air, however briefly. It was a blustery day but unseasonably mild. The bunched clouds were tumbling across a sky of translucent blue and he could have imagined that this was spring except for the autumnal sea-tang of the river -- surely half imagined -- and the keenness of the buffeting wind as he came out of the station.
Seconds later he saw Conrad Ackroyd standing on the kerb at the corner of Dacre Street and glancing from left to right with that air of mingled anxiety and hope typical of a man waiting to hail a taxi. Almost immediately Ackroyd saw him and came towards him, both arms outstretched, his face beaming under a wide-brimmed hat. It was an encounter Dalgliesh couldn't now avoid and had no real wish to. Few people were unwilling to see Conrad Ackroyd. His perpetual good humour, his interest in the minutiae of life, his love of gossip and above all his apparent agelessness were reassuring. He looked exactly the same now as he had when Dalgliesh and he had first met decades earlier. It was difficult to think of Ackroyd succumbing to serious illness or facing personal tragedy while the news that he had died would have seemed to his friends a reversal of the natural order. Perhaps, thought Dalgliesh, that was the secret of his popularity; he gave his friends the comforting illusion that fate was beneficent. As always, he was dressed with an endearing eccentricity. The fedora hat was worn at a rakish angle, the stout little body was encased in a plaid tweed cloak patterned in purple and green. He was the only man Dalgliesh knew who wore spats. He was wearing them now.
"Adam, lovely to see you. I wondered whether you might be in your office but I didn't like to call. Too intimidating, my dear. I'm not sure they'd let me in, or if I'd get out if they did. I've been lunching at a hotel in Petty France with my brother. He comes to London once a year and always stays there. He's a devout Roman Catholic and the hotel is convenient for Westminster Cathedral. They know him and are very tolerant."
Tolerant of what? wondered Dalgliesh. And was Ackroyd referring to the hotel, the cathedral, or both? He said, "I didn't know you had a brother, Conrad."
"I hardly know it myself, we meet so seldom. He's something of a recluse." He added, "He lives in Kidderminster," as if that fact explained all.
Dalgliesh was on the point of making tactful murmurings of imminent departure when his companion said, "I suppose, dear boy, I couldn't bend you to my will? I want to spend a couple of hours at the Dupayne Museum in Hampstead. Why not join me? You know the Dupayne of course?"
"I've heard of it but never visited."
"But you should, you should. It's a fascinating place. Dedicated to the inter-war years, 1919 through 1938. Small but comprehensive. They have some good pictures: Nash, Wyndham Lewis, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson. You'd be particularly interested in the library. First editions and some holographs and, of course, the inter-war poets. Do come."
"Another time, perhaps."
"You never manage another time, do you? But now I've caught you, regard it as fate. I'm sure you have your Jag tucked up somewhere in the Met's underground garage. We can drive."
"You mean I can drive."
"And you'll come back to Swiss Cottage for tea won't you? Nellie will never forgive me if you don't."
"How is Nellie?"
"Bonny, thank you. Our doctor retired last month. After twenty years together it was a sad parting. Still, his successor seems to understand our constitutions and it might be as well to have a younger man."
Conrad and Nellie Ackroyd's marriage was so well established that few people now bothered to wonder at its incongruity or to indulge in prurient speculation about its possible consummation. Physically they could hardly have been more different. Conrad was plump, short and dark with inquisitive bright eyes and moved as sprightly as a dancer on small nimble feet. Nellie was at least three inches taller, pale-skinned and flat-chested, and wore her fading blonde hair curled in plaits on each side of her head like earphones. Her hobby was collecting first editions of 1920s and 1930s girls' school stories. Her collection of Angela Brazils was regarded as unique. Conrad and Nellie's enthusiasms were their house and garden, meals -- Nellie was a superb cook -- their two Siamese cats and the indulgence of Conrad's mild hypochondria. Conrad still owned and edited The Paternoster Review, notable for the virulence of its unsigned reviews and articles. In private life he was the kindest of Jekylls, in his editorial role an unrepentant Hyde.
A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian villa in Swiss Cottage with its comfortable sitting-room and atmosphere of timeless indulgence. Dalgliesh was occasionally among them. The meal was a nostalgic and unhurried ritual. The delicate cups with their handles aligned, the thin brown bread and butter, bite-size cucumber sandwiches and homemade sponge and fruit cakes made their expected appearance, brought in by an elderly maid who would have been a gift to a casting agent recruiting actors for an Edwardian soap opera. To older visitors the tea brought back memories of a more leisurely age and, to all, the temporary illusion that the dangerous world was as susceptible as was this domesticity to order, reason, comfort and peace. To spend the early evening gossiping with the Ackroyds would, today, be unduly self-indulgent. All the same, Dalgliesh could see that it wouldn't be easy to find a valid excuse for refusing to drive his friend to Hampstead.
He said, "I'll drive you to the Dupayne with pleasure, but I might not be able to stay if you plan a long visit."
"Don't worry, dear boy. I'll get a cab back."
It took Dalgliesh only a few minutes to collect the papers he needed from his office, hear from his PA what had happened during his absence and drive his Jaguar from the underground car-park. Ackroyd was standing near the revolving sign looking like a child obediently waiting for the grown-ups to collect him. He wrapped his cloak carefully around him, climbed into the car with grunts of satisfaction, struggled impotently with the seat belt and allowed Dalgliesh to strap him in. They were travelling along Birdcage Walk before he spoke.
"I saw you at the South Bank last Saturday. You were standing by the window on Level Two looking out at the river with, I might say, a remarkably beautiful young woman."
Without looking at him, Dalgliesh said evenly, "You should have come up and been introduced."
"It did occur to me until I realized that I would be de trop. So I contented myself with looking at your two profiles -- hers more than yours -- with more curiosity than might have been considered polite. Was I wrong in detecting a certain constraint, or should I say restraint?"
Dalgliesh did not reply and, glancing at his face, at the sensitive hands for a second tightening on the wheel, Ackroyd thought it prudent to change the subject. He said, "I've rather given up the gossip in the Review. It isn't worth printing unless it's fresh, accurate and scurrilous, and then you risk the chance of being sued. People are so litigious. I'm trying to diversify somewhat. That's what this visit to the Dupayne is all about. I'm writing a series of articles on murder as a symbol of its age. Murder as social history, if you like. Nellie thinks I could be on to a winner with this one, Adam. She's very excited. Take the most notorious Victorian crimes, for example. They couldn't have happened in any other century. Those cluttered claustrophobic drawing-rooms, the outward respectability, the female subservience. And divorce -- if a wife could find grounds for it, which was difficult enough -- made her a social pariah. No wonder the poor dears started soaking the arsenical flypapers. But those are the easiest years. The inter-war years are more interesting. They have a room at the Dupayne dedicated entirely to the most notorious murder cases of the 1920s and '30s. Not, I assure you, to titillate public interest -- it's not that kind of museum -- but to prove my point. Murder, the unique crime, is a paradigm of its age."
He paused and looked at Dalgliesh intensely for the first time. "You're looking a little worn, dear boy. Is everything all right? You're not ill?"
"No, Conrad, I'm not ill."
"Nellie said only yesterday that we never see you. You're too busy heading that innocuously named squad set up to take over murders of a sensitive nature. 'Sensitive nature' sounds oddly bureaucratic -- how does one define a murder of an insensitive nature? Still, we all know what it means. If the Lord Chancellor is found in his robes and wig brutally battered to death on the Woolsack, call in Adam Dalgliesh."
"I trust not. Do you envisage a brutal battering while the House is sitting, no doubt with some of their Lordships looking on with satisfaction?"
"Of course not. It would happen after the House had risen."
"Then why would he be sitting on the Woolsack?"
"He would have been murdered somewhere else and the body moved. You should read detective fiction, Adam. Real-life murder today, apart from being commonplace and -- forgive me -- a little vulgar, is inhibiting of the imagination. Still, moving the body would be a problem. It would need considerable thought. I can see that it might not work."
Ackroyd spoke with regret. Dalgliesh wondered if his next enthusiasm would be writing detective fiction. If so, it was one that should be discouraged. Murder, real or fictional, and in any of its manifestations, was on the face of it an unlikely enthusiasm for Ackroyd. But his curiosity had always ranged widely and once seized by an idea he pursued it with the dedicated enthusiasm of a lifelong expert.
And the idea seemed likely to persist. He went on, "And isn't there a convention that no one dies in the Palace of Westminster? Don't they shove the corpse into the ambulance with indecent haste and later state that he died on the way to hospital? Now, that would create some interesting clues about the actual time of death. If it were a question of inheritance, for example, timing could be important. I've got the title, of course. Death on the Woolsack."
Dalgliesh said, "It would be very time-consuming. I should stick to murder as a paradigm of its age. What are you expecting to get from the Dupayne?"
"Inspiration perhaps, but mostly information. The Murder Room is remarkable. That's not its official name, by the way, but it's how we all refer to it. There are contemporary newspaper reports of the crime and the trial, fascinating photographs including some originals, and actual exhibits from the scene of the murder. I can't think how old Max Dupayne got his hands on those, but I believe he wasn't always scrupulous when it came to acquiring what he wanted. And, of course, the museum's interest in murder coincides with mine. The only reason the old man set up the Murder Room was to relate the crime to its age, otherwise he would have seen the room as pandering to depraved popular taste. I've already selected my first case. It's the obvious one, Mrs. Edith Thompson. You know it, of course."
"Yes, I know it."
Everyone interested in real-life murder, the defects of the criminal justice system, or the horror and anomalies of capital punishment knew of the Thompson-Bywaters case. It had spawned novels, plays, films, and its share of the journalism of moral outrage.
Apparently oblivious of his companion's silence, Ackroyd prattled happily on. "Consider the facts. Here we have an attractive young woman of twenty-eight married to a dull shipping clerk four years her senior and living in a dull street in a drab east London suburb. Do you wonder she found relief in a fantasy life?"
"We have no evidence that Thompson was dull. You're not suggesting dullness is a justification for murder?"
"I can think of less credible motives, dear boy. Edith Thompson is intelligent as well as attractive. She's holding down a job as the manageress of a millinery firm in the City and in those days that meant something. She goes on holiday with her husband and his sister, meets Frederick Bywaters, a P&O Line steward eight years her junior, and falls desperately in love. When he's at sea she writes him passionate letters which, to the unimaginative mind, could certainly be interpreted as an incitement to murder. She claims that she's put ground electric lightbulbs in Percy's porridge, the probability of which the forensic pathologist, Bernard Spilsbury, discounted at the trial. And then on 3 October 1922, after an evening at the Criterion Theatre in London, when they're walking home, Bywaters springs out and stabs Percy Thompson to death. Edith Thompson is heard crying out 'Don't -- oh don't!' But the letters damned her, of course. If Bywaters had destroyed them she'd be alive today."
Dalgliesh said, "Hardly. She'd be a hundred and eight. But could you justify this as a specifically mid-twentieth-century crime? The jealous husband, the young lover, the sexual enslavement. It could have happened fifty or a hundred years earlier. It could happen today."
"But not in exactly the same way. Fifty years earlier she wouldn't have had the chance of working in the City for one thing. It's unlikely she'd ever have met Bywaters. Today, of course, she would have gone to university, found an outlet for her intelligence, disciplined her seething imagination and probably ended up rich and successful. I see her as a romantic novelist. She certainly wouldn't have married Percy Thompson and if she did go in for murder, psychiatrists today would be able to diagnose a fantasist; the jury would take a different view of extra-marital sex and the judge wouldn't indulge his deep prejudice against married women who took lovers eight years their junior, a prejudice undoubtedly shared by a 1922 jury."
Dalgliesh was silent. Ever since, as an eleven-year-old, he had read of that distraught and drugged woman being half-dragged to her execution, the case had lain at the back of memory, heavy as a coiled snake. Poor dull Percy Thompson had not deserved to die, but did anyone deserve what his widow had suffered during those last days in the condemned cell when she finally realized that there was a real world outside even more dangerous than her fantasies and that there were men in it who, on a precise day at a precise hour, would take her out and judicially break her neck? Even as a boy the case had confirmed him as an abolitionist; had it, he wondered, exerted a subtler and more persuasive influence, the conviction, never spoken but increasingly rooted in his comprehension, that strong passions had to be subject to the will, that a completely self-absorbed love could be dangerous and the price too high to pay? Wasn't that what he had been taught as a young recruit to the CID by the older, experienced sergeant now long retired? "All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing. They'll tell you, laddie, that the most dangerous is loathing. Don't you believe it. The most dangerous is love."
He put the Thompson-Bywaters case resolutely out of mind and listened again to Ackroyd.
"I've found my most interesting case. Still unsolved, fascinating in its permutations, absolutely typical of the 1930s. Couldn't have happened at any other time, not in precisely the way it did happen. I expect you know it, the Wallace case? It's been written about extensively. The Dupayne has all the literature."
Dalgliesh said, "It was once featured on a training course at Bramshill when I was a newly appointed detective inspector. How not to conduct a murder investigation. I don't suppose it's included now. They'll choose more recent, more relevant cases. They're not short of examples."
"So you know the facts." Ackroyd's disappointment was so evident that it was impossible not to indulge him.
"Remind me."
"The year was 1931. Internationally the year that Japan invaded Manchuria, Spain was declared a republic, there were riots in India and Cawnpore was swept by one of the worst outbreaks of inter-communal violence in the country's history, Anna Pavlova and Thomas Edison died and Professor Auguste Piccard became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. At home the new National Government was returned in the election in October, Sir Oswald Mosley concluded the formation of his New Party, and two and three-quarter million were unemployed. Not a good year. You see, Adam, I've done my research. Aren't you impressed?"
"Very. That's a formidable feat of memory. I don't see its relevance to a very English murder in a suburb of Liverpool."
"It puts it in a wider context. Still, I may not use it when I come to write. Shall I go on? I'm not boring you?"
"Please do. And you're not boring me."
"The dates: Monday the nineteenth and Tuesday the twentieth of January. The alleged murderer: William Herbert Wallace, fifty-two years old, Prudential Company insurance agent, a bespectacled, slightly stooping, undistinguished-looking man living with his wife Julia at twenty-nine Wolverton Street in Anfield. He spent the days going from house to house collecting insurance money. A shilling here, a shilling there against a rainy day and the inevitable end. Typical of the time. You might have barely enough to feed yourself but you still put by a bit each week to ensure you could pay for a decent funeral. You might live in squalor, but at least you could make something of a show at the end. No quick dash to the crematorium and out again in fifteen minutes or the next lot of mourners will be hammering on the door.
"Wife Julia, fifty-two, socially a little superior, gentle-faced, a good pianist. Wallace played the violin and sometimes accompanied her in the front parlour. Apparently he wasn't very good. If he was enthusiastically scraping away while she was playing, you have a motive for murder but with a different victim. Anyway, they were reputed to be a devoted couple, but who's to know? I'm not distracting you from the driving, am I?"
Dalgliesh recalled that Ackroyd, a non-driver, had always been a nervous passenger. "Not in the least."
"We come to the evening of nineteenth January. Wallace was a chess player and was due to play at the Central Chess Club which met at a café in the centre of the city on Monday and Thursday evenings. On that Monday a call was received asking for him. A waitress took it and called the captain of the club, Samuel Beattie, to speak to the caller. He suggested that as Wallace was due to play but had not yet arrived, the man should try again later. The caller said he couldn't, he had his girl's twenty-first birthday on, but would Wallace come round tomorrow at seven-thirty to discuss a business proposition. He gave the name R. M. Qualtrough, the address twenty-five Menlove Gardens East, Mossley Hill. What is interesting and important is that the caller had some difficulty getting through, either genuine or contrived. As a result we know the operator reported the time of the call: twenty minutes past seven.
"So the next day Wallace set off to find Menlove Gardens East which, as you already know, doesn't exist. He needed to take three trams to get to the Menlove Gardens area, searched for about half an hour and inquired about the address from at least four people including a policeman. Eventually he gave up and went home. The next-door neighbours, the Johnstons, were getting ready to go out when they heard knocking at the back door of number twenty-nine. They went to investigate and saw Wallace, who said that he couldn't get in. While they were there he tried again and this time the door handle turned. The three of them went in. Julia Wallace's body was in the front room lying face down on the hearth-rug with Wallace's bloodied mackintosh lying against her. She had been battered to death in a frenzied attack. The skull had been fractured by eleven blows delivered with terrific force.
"On Monday second February, thirteen days after the murder, Wallace was arrested. All the evidence was circumstantial, no blood was found on his clothes, the weapon was missing. There was no physical evidence linking him with the crime. What is interesting is that the evidence, such as it was, could support either the prosecution or the defence depending on how you chose to look at it. The call to the café was made from a phone box close to Wolverton Street at the time Wallace would have been passing. Was that because he made it himself, or because his murderer was waiting to ensure Wallace was on his way to the club? In the view of the police he was preternaturally calm during investigation, sitting in the kitchen with the cat on his knee and stroking it. Was that because he was uncaring, or because he was a stoic, a man who concealed emotion? And then the repeated inquiries about the address, was that to establish an alibi or because he was a conscientious agent who needed business and didn't give up easily?"
Dalgliesh waited in the queue at yet another traffic light as he was recalling the case more clearly. If the investigation had been a shambles, so had been the trial. The judge had summed up in Wallace's favour, but the jury had convicted, taking only an hour to reach their verdict. Wallace appealed and the case again made history when the appeal was allowed on the grounds that the case was not proved with that certainty which is necessary in order to justify a verdict of guilty; in effect, that the jury had been wrong.
Ackroyd prattled on happily while Dalgliesh gave his attention to the road. He had expected the traffic to be heavy; the homeward journey on a Friday began earlier each year, the congestion exacerbated by families leaving London for their weekend cottages. Before they reached Hampstead, Dalgliesh was already regretting his impulse to see the museum and mentally calculating the lost hours. He told himself to stop fretting. His life was already overburdened; why spoil this pleasant respite with regrets? Before they reached Jack Straw's Castle the traffic was at a standstill and it took minutes before he could join the thinner stream of cars moving down Spaniards Road, which ran in a straight line across the Heath. Here the bushes and trees grew close to the tarmac, giving the illusion that they were in deep country.
Ackroyd said, "Slow down here, Adam, or we'll miss the turning. It's not easy to spot. We're coming to it now, about thirty yards to the right."
It was certainly not easy to find and, since it meant turning right across the traffic, not easy to enter. Dalgliesh saw an open gate and beyond it a drive with thickly entwined bushes and trees on either side. To the left of the entrance was a black board fixed to the wall with a notice painted in white. THE DUPAYNE MUSEUM. PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY.
Dalgliesh said, "Hardly an invitation. Don't they want visitors?"
"I'm not sure that they do, not in large numbers. Max Dupayne, who founded the place in 1961, saw it as something of a private hobby. He was fascinated -- one might say obsessed -- by the inter-war years. He was collecting in the 1920s and '30s, which accounts for some of the pictures; he was able to buy before the artist attracted big money. He also acquired first editions of every major novelist and those he thought worth collecting. The library is pretty valuable now. The museum was intended for people who shared his passion and that view of the place has influenced the present generation. Things may change now that Marcus Dupayne is taking control. He's just retiring from the Civil Service. He may well see the museum as a challenge."
Dalgliesh drove down a tarmacked drive so narrow that two cars would have difficulty in passing. On each side was a narrow strip of turf with, beyond it, a thick hedge of rhododendron bushes. Behind them spindly trees, their leaves just fading to yellow, added to the dimness of the road. They passed a young man kneeling on the turf with an elderly angular woman standing over him as if directing his work. There was a wooden basket between them and it looked as if they were planting bulbs. The boy looked up and stared at them as they passed but, beyond a fleeting glance, the woman took no notice.
There was a bend to the left and then the lane straightened out and the museum was suddenly before them. Dalgliesh stopped the car and they gazed in silence. The path divided to curve round a circular lawn with a central bed of shrubs, and beyond it stood a symmetrical red-brick house, elegant, architecturally impressive and larger than he had expected. There were five bays, the central one brought well forward with two windows, one above the other, four identical windows in the two lower storeys on each side of the central bay and two more in the hipped roof. A white-painted door, glass-panelled, was set in an intricate pattern of brickwork. The restraint and complete symmetry of the building gave the house a slightly forbidding air, more institutional than domestic. But there was one unusual feature: where one might have expected pilasters there was a set of recessed panels with capitals in ornate brickwork. They gave a note of eccentricity to a façade which might otherwise have been formidably uniform.
Ackroyd said, "Do you recognize it, the house?"
"No. Should I?"
"Not unless you've visited Pendell House near Bletchingley. It's an eccentric Inigo Jones dated 1636. The prosperous Victorian factory owner who built this in 1894 saw Pendell, liked it and didn't see why he shouldn't have a copy. After all, the original architect wasn't there to object. However, he didn't go as far as duplicating the interior. Just as well; the interior of Pendell House is a bit suspect. Do you like it?"
He looked as naÏvely anxious as a child, hoping his offering wouldn't disappoint.
"It's interesting, but I wouldn't have known it was copied from Inigo Jones. I like it, but I'm not sure I'd want to live in it. Too much symmetry makes me uneasy. I've never seen recessed brickwork panels before."
"Nor has anyone, according to Pevsner. They're said to be unique. I approve. The façade would be too restrained without them. Anyway, come and see inside. That's what we're here for. The car-park is behind those laurel bushes to the right. Max Dupayne hated to see cars in front of the house. In fact, he hated most manifestations of modern life."
Dalgliesh restarted the engine. A white arrow on a wooden sign directed him to the car-park. It was a gravelled area of some fifty yards by thirty with the entrance to the south. There were already twelve cars neatly parked in two rows. Dalgliesh found a space at the end. He said, "Not a lot of space. What do they do on a popular day?"
"I suppose visitors try the other side of the house. There's a garage there but that's used by Neville Dupayne to house his E-type Jag. But I've never seen the parking spaces full, or the museum particularly busy for that matter. This looks about normal for a Friday afternoon. Some of the cars belong to the staff anyway."
There was certainly no sign of life as they made their way to the front door. It was, thought Dalgliesh, a somewhat intimidating door for the casual visitor, but Ackroyd seized the brass knob confidently, turned it and thrust the door open. He said, "It's usually kept open in summer. You'd think with this sun it's safe to risk it today. Anyway, here we are. Welcome to the Dupayne Museum."
Copyright © 2003 by P. D. James
)
Commander Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James's formidable and fascinating detective, returns to find himself enmeshed in a terrifying story of passion and mystery--and in love. The Dupayne, a small private museum in London devoted to the interwar years 1919-1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is brutally and mysteriously murdered. Yet even as Commander Dalgliesh and his team proceed with their investigation, a second corpse is discovered. Someone in the Dupayne is prepared to kill and kill again. Still more sinister, the murders appear to echo the notorious crimes of the past featured in one of the museum's galleries: the Murder Room. The case is fraught with danger and complications from the outset, but for Dalgliesh the complications are unexpectedly profound. His new relationship with Emma Lavenham--introduced in the last Dalgliesh novel, Death in Holy Orders--is at a critical stage. Now, as he moves closer and closer to a solution to the puzzle, he finds himself driven further and further from commitment to the woman he loves. The Murder Room is a powerful work of mystery and psychological intricacy from a master of the modern novel.
