A Taste for Death by P. D. James

Author:P. D. James [James, P. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-75898-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

BOOK FOUR

Devices and Desires

one

The Black Swan, despite its name, didn’t derive from a riverside pub but from an elegant two-storey villa built at the turn of the century by a prosperous Kensington painter seeking a weekend retreat with country quiet and a river view. After his death it had suffered the usual vicissitudes of a private residence too damp and inconveniently situated to be suitable as a permanent home and too large for a weekend cottage. It had been a restaurant of sorts for twenty years under its original name, but hadn’t flourished until Jean Paul Higgins took it over in 1980, renamed it, built on a new dining room with wide windows overlooking the river and the far water meadows, employed a French chef, Italian waiters, and an English doorman, and set out to win his first modest mention in the Good Food Guide. Higgins’s mother had been a Frenchwoman and he had obviously decided that, as a restaurateur, it was that half of his parentage he had better emphasize. His staff and customers called him Monsieur Jean Paul, and it was only his bank manager who, to his chagrin, insisted on greeting him with cheerful exuberance as Mr. Higgins. He and his bank manager were on excellent terms and for the best of reasons: Mr. Higgins was doing very well. In the summer it was necessary to book a table for luncheon or dinner at least three days in advance. In autumn and winter the place was less busy and the luncheon menu offered only three main dishes, but the standard of cooking and service never varied. The Black Swan was close enough to London to attract a number of city regulars willing to drive twenty-odd miles for the Black Swan’s peculiar advantages: an attractive ambience, tables spaced at a reasonable distance, a low noise level, no piped music, unostentatious service, discretion and excellent food.

Monsieur Jean Paul was small and dark with melancholy eyes and a thin moustache which made him look like a stage Frenchman, an impression strengthened when he spoke. He himself greeted Dalgliesh and Kate at the door with unflurried courtesy as if there were nothing he had been looking forward to more than a visit from the police. But Dalgliesh noticed that despite the early hour and the quietness of the house, they were shown into his private office at the rear of the building with the minimum of delay. Higgins was of the school which believes, not without reason, that even when the police come visiting in plainclothes and don’t actually kick down the door, they are always unmistakably the police. Dalgliesh didn’t miss his quick glance of appraisal at Kate Miskin, the quickly suppressed look of surprise changing to modified approval. She was wearing slacks in fawn gabardine with a well-cut, unobtrusive checked jacket over a rollneck cashmere jumper and with her hair bound back in a short, thick plait. Dalgliesh wondered what Higgins expected a plainclothes policewoman to look like, an

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