Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James

Author:P.D. James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2012-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

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IT WAS A LONG, low-ceilinged room with white walls and a casement window that gave a view of a rectangle of unmown grass, a couple of gnarled apple trees heavy with fruit burnished green and gold in the autumn sun, a straggling hedge beaded with berries, and beyond it the windmill. Even in the genial light of afternoon the mill looked a melancholy wreck of its former puissance. The paint was peeling from the walls and the great sails, from which the slats had fallen like rotten teeth, hung heavy with inertia in the restless air. Behind the windmill, the acres of black fenland, newly sliced by the autumn plowing, stretched in glistening clumps between the dikes.

Dalgliesh turned away from this picture of melancholy peace to examine the room. Massingham was already busy at the desk. Finding the lid unlocked, he rolled it back for a few inches, then let it drop again. Then he tried the drawers. Only the top left-hand one was locked. If he were impatient for Dalgliesh to take Lorrimer’s keys from his pocket and open it, he concealed his eagerness. It was known that the older man, who could work faster than any of his colleagues, still liked occasionally to take his time. He was taking it now, regarding the room with his dark, somber eyes, standing very still as if he were picking up invisible waves.

The place held a curious peace. The proportions were right and the furniture fitted where it had been placed. A man might have space to think in this uncluttered sanctum. A single bed, neatly covered with a red and brown blanket, stood against the opposite wall. A long wall shelf above the bed held an adjustable reading lamp, a radio, a record player, a clock, a carafe of water, and the Book of Common Prayer. In front of the window stood an oak working table with a wheelback chair. On the table were a blotter and a brown and blue pottery mug stacked with pencils and ballpoint pens. The only other items of furniture were a shabby winged armchair with a low table beside it, a double wardrobe in oak to the left of the door, and to the right an old-fashioned desk with a rolltop. The telephone was fitted to the wall. There were no pictures and no mirror, no masculine impedimenta, no trivia on desk top or table ledge. Everything was functional, well-used, unadorned. It was a room a man could be at home in.

Dalgliesh walked over to look at the books. He estimated that there must be about four hundred of them, completely covering the wall. There was little fiction, although the nineteenth-century English and Russian novelists were represented. Most of the books were histories or biographies, but there was a shelf of philosophy: Teilhard de Chardin’s Science and Christ, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Humanist Outlook, Simone Weil’s First and Last, Plato’s Republic, the Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy. It looked as if Lorrimer had at one time been trying to teach himself ancient Greek.

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