Original Sin by P.D. James

Author:P.D. James
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780571248698
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2010-03-24T23:00:00+00:00

34

It was after 10.30 when Dalgliesh returned to the Wapping incident room and Robbins had been sent off duty. Kate and Daniel had bought sandwiches on their drive back from the mortuary and made do with them and coffee as the night wore on. They had already worked a twelve-hour day but it wasn’t over yet. Dalgliesh would want to assess progress and have a clear idea where they were going before they entered on the next stage of the inquiry.

He sat for ten minutes studying the papers Daniel had brought from Gerard Etienne’s study, then, closing the file without comment, looked at his watch then said: ‘Right. So what tentative conclusions have you reached from the facts as far as we know them?’

Daniel broke in immediately as Kate had expected him to. That didn’t worry her. They were of equal rank but she had seniority in service and felt no need to emphasize it. There was an advantage in going first; it prevented other people from taking credit for your ideas and showed keenness. On the other hand, there was a certain wisdom in biding one’s time. Daniel was taking care over his spiel; probably, she thought, he had been mentally practising it since their return from the mortuary.

He said: ‘Natural death, suicide, accident or murder? The first two are out. We don’t need the laboratory reports to be sure that this was carbon-monoxide poisoning, the post-mortem told us that. Told us too that, otherwise, he died healthy. There is absolutely nothing to indicate suicide, so I don’t think we need waste time on that.

‘So we come to accident. If this is an accidental death, what are we expected to believe? That Etienne decided for some reason to work up in the archives office, left his jacket on the chair downstairs and his keys in his desk drawer. That he felt cold, lit the fire with matches which we’ve no evidence he had on him, then got so engrossed in his work that he didn’t realize that the fire had started to malfunction until too late. Apart from the obvious inconsistencies, if it happened that way, I suggest that he’d have been found slumped over the table, not lying half-naked on his back with his head towards the fire. At this stage I’m not taking account of the snake. I think we have to make a clear distinction between what happened at the time of death and what happened to the body afterwards. Obviously someone found him after rigor had set in to the top part of the body, but there’s no evidence that the person who stuffed the snake in his mouth took off his shirt or moved him from the table to where he was found.’

Kate said: ‘He must have taken off his own shirt. It was clutched in his right hand. It looked as if he had taken it off with some idea of using it to put out the fire. I mean, look at the photograph.

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