Death of an Expert Witness by P D James

Author:P D James [James, P D]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571204854
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2010-03-24T20:29:48+00:00

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 Medieval Philosophy. It looked as if Lorrimer had at one time been trying to teach himself Greek. The shelf held a Greek primer and a dictionary.

Massingham had taken down a book on comparative religion. He said:

"It looks as if he was one of those men who torment them selves trying to discover the meaning of existence."

Dalgliesh replaced the Sartre he had been studying. "You find that reprehensible?"

"I find it futile. Metaphysical speculation is about as point less as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing."

"And life is for living. You find that an adequate personal credo?"

"To maximize one's pleasures and minimize one's pain, yes, sir, I do. And I suppose, to bear with stoicism those miseries I can't avoid. To be human is to ensure enough of those without inventing them. Anyway, I don't believe you can hope to understand what you can't see or touch or measure."

"A logical positivist. You're in respectable company. But he spent his life examining what he could see or touch or measure. It doesn't seem to have satisfied him. Well, let's see what his personal papers have to tell."

He turned his attention to the desk, leaving the locked drawer to the last. He rolled back the top to reveal two small drawers and a number of pigeon-holes. And here, neatly docketed and compartmentalized, were the minutiae of Lorrimer's solitary life. A drawer with three bills waiting to be paid, and one for receipts. A labelled envelope containing his parents' marriage lines, his own birth and baptismal certificates. His passport, an anonymous face but with the eyes staring as if hypnotized, the neck muscles taut. The lens of the camera might have been the barrel of a gun. A life assurance certificate. Receipted bills for fuel, electricity and gas. The maintenance agreement for the central heating. The hire-purchase agreement for the television. A wallet with his bank statement. His portfolio of investments, sound, unexciting, orthodox.

There was nothing about his work. Obviously he kept his life as carefully compartmentalized as his filing system. Everything to do with his profession, the journals, the drafts of his scientific papers, were kept in his office at the Lab. They were probably written there. That might account for some of the late hours. It would certainly have

been impossible to guess from the contents of his desk what his job had been.

His will was in a separate labelled envelope together with a brief letter from a firm of Ely solicitors, Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt. The will was very short and had been made five years earlier.

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