A Mind to Murder (18 page)

Miss Bolam had lived on the fifth floor of a solid, redbrick block near Kensington High Street. There was no difficulty over the key. The resident caretaker handed it over with formal and perfunctory expressions of regret at Miss Bolam’s death. She seemed to feel that some reference to the murder was necessary, but managed to give the impression that the company’s tenants usually had the good taste to quit this life in more orthodox fashion.

“There will be no undesirable publicity, I hope,” she murmured, as she escorted Dalgliesh and Sergeant Martin to the lift. “These flats are very select and the company are most particular about their tenants. We have never had trouble of this kind before.”

Dalgliesh resisted the temptation to say that Miss Bolam’s murderer had obviously not recognized one of the company’s tenants.

“The publicity is hardly likely to affect the flats,” he pointed out. “It’s not as if the murder took place here.” The caretaker was heard to murmur that she hoped not indeed!

They ascended to the fifth floor together in the slow, old-fashioned panelled lift. The atmosphere was heavy with disapproval.

“Did you know Miss Bolam at all?” Dalgliesh inquired. “I believe she had lived here for some years.”

“I knew her to say good morning to, nothing more. She was a very quiet tenant. But then all our tenants are. She has been in residence for fifteen years, I believe. Her mother was the tenant previously and they lived here together. When Mrs. Bolam died her daughter took over the tenancy. That was before my time.”

“Did her mother die here?”

The caretaker closed her lips repressively.

“Mrs. Bolam died in a nursing home in the country. There was some unpleasantness, I believe.”

“You mean that she killed herself?”

“I was told so. As I said, it happened before I took this job. Naturally I never alluded to the fact either to Miss Bolam or to any of the other tenants. It is not the kind of thing one would wish to talk about. They really do seem a most unfortunate family.”

“What rent did Miss Bolam pay?”

The caretaker paused before replying. This was obviously high on her list of questions that should not properly be asked. Then, as if reluctantly admitting the authority of the police, she replied:

“Our fourth and fifth floor two-bedroom flats are from £490 excluding rates.”

That was about half Miss Bolam’s salary, thought Dalgliesh. It was too high a proportion for anyone without private means. He had yet to see the dead woman’s solicitor, but it looked as if Nurse Bolam’s assessment of her cousin’s income was not far wrong.

He dismissed the caretaker at the door of the flat and he and Martin went in together.

This prying among the personal residue of a finished life was a part of his job which Dalgliesh had always found a little distasteful. It was too much like putting the dead at a disadvantage. During his career he had examined with interest and with pity so many petty leavings. The soiled underclothes pushed hurriedly into drawers, personal letters which prudence would have destroyed, half-eaten meals, unpaid bills, old photographs, pictures and books which the dead would not have chosen to represent their taste to a curious or vulgar world, family secrets, stale make-up in greasy jars, the muddle of ill-disciplined or unhappy lives. It was no longer the fashion to dread an unshriven end but most people, if they thought at all, hoped for time to clear away their debris. He remembered from childhood the voice of an old aunt exhorting him to change his vest. “Suppose you got run over, Adam. What would people think?” The question was less absurd than it had seemed to a ten-year-old. Time had taught him that it expressed one of the major preoccupations of mankind, the dread of losing face.

But Enid Bolam might have lived each day as if expecting sudden death. He had never examined a flat so neat, so obsessively tidy. Even her few cosmetics, the brush and comb on her dressing-table were arranged with patterned precision. The heavy double bed was made. Friday was obviously her day for changing the linen. The used sheets and pillow-cases were folded into a laundry box which lay open on a chair. The bedside table held nothing but a small travelling clock, a carafe of water and a Bible with a booklet beside it appointing the passage to be read each day and expounding the moral. There was nothing in the table drawer but a bottle of aspirin and a folded handkerchief. A hotel room would have held as much individuality.

All the furniture was old and heavy. The ornate mahogany door of the wardrobe swung open soundlessly to reveal a row of tightly packed clothes. They were expensive but unexciting. Miss Bolam had bought from that store which still caters mainly for country-house dowagers. There were well-cut skirts of indeterminate colour, heavy coats tailored to last through a dozen English winters, woollen dresses which could offend no one. Once the wardrobe was closed it was impossible accurately to recall a single garment. At the back of them all, closeted from the light, were bowls of fibre, planted no doubt with bulbs whose Christmas flowering Miss Bolam would never see.

Dalgliesh and Martin had worked together for too many years to find much talking necessary and they moved about the flat almost in silence. Everywhere was the same heavy, old-fashioned furniture, the same ordered neatness. It was hard to believe that these rooms had been recently lived in, that anyone had cooked a meal in this impersonal kitchen. It was very quiet. At this height and muffled by the solid Victorian walls the clamour of traffic in Kensington High Street was a faint, distant throbbing. Only the insistent ticking of a grandfather clock in the hall stabbed the still silence. The air was cold and almost odourless except for the smell of the flowers. They were everywhere. There was a bowl of chrysanthemums on the hall table and another in the sitting-room. The bedroom mantelpiece held a small jug of anemones. On the kitchen dresser was a taller brass jug of autumn foliage, the gatherings perhaps of some recent country walk. Dalgliesh did not like autumn flowers, the chrysanthemums which obstinately refuse to die, flaunting their shaggy heads even on a rotting stem, scentless dahlias fit only to be planted in neat rows in municipal parks. His wife had died in October and he had long recognized the minor bereavements which follow the death of the heart. Autumn was no longer a good time of the year. For him the flowers in Miss Bolam’s flat emphasized the general air of gloom, like wreaths at a funeral.

The sitting-room was the largest room in the flat and here was Miss Bolam’s desk. Martin fingered it appreciatively.

“It’s all good solid stuff, sir, isn’t it? We’ve got a piece rather like this. The wife’s mother left it to us. Mind you, they don’t make furniture like it today. You get nothing for it, of course. Too big for modern rooms, I suppose. But it’s got quality.”

“You can certainly lean against it without collapsing,” said Dalgliesh.

“That’s what I mean, sir. Good solid stuff. No wonder she hung on to it. A sensible young woman on the whole, I’d say, and one who knew how to make herself comfortable.” He drew a second chair up to the desk where Dalgliesh was already seated, planted his heavy thighs in it, and did indeed look comfortable and at home.

The desk was unlocked. The top rolled back without difficulty. Inside was a portable typewriter and a metal box containing files of paper, each file neatly labelled. The drawers and compartments of the desk held writing paper, envelopes, and correspondence. As they expected, everything was in perfect order. They went through the files together. Miss Bolam paid her bills as soon as they were due and kept a running account of all her household expenditure.

There was much to be gone through. Details of her investments were filed under the appropriate heading. At her mother’s death the trustee securities had been redeemed and the capital reinvested in equities. The portfolio was skilfully balanced and there could be little doubt that Miss Bolam had been well advised and had increased her assets considerably during the past five years. Dalgliesh noted the name of her stockbroker and solicitor. Both would have to be seen before the investigation was complete.

The dead woman kept few of her personal letters; perhaps there had been few worth keeping. But there was one, filed under P, which was interesting. It was written in a careful hand on cheap lined paper from a Balham address, and read:

Dear Miss Bolam,

These are just a few lines to thank you for all you done for Jenny. It hasn’t turned out as we wished and prayed for but we shall know in His good time what His purpose is. I still feel we did right to let them marry. It wasn’t only to stop talk as I think you know. He has gone for good, he writes. Her Dad and me didn’t know that things had got that bad between them. She doesn’t talk much to us but we shall wait patiently and maybe, one day, she will be our girl again. She seems very quiet and won’t talk about it so we don’t know whether she grieves. I try not to feel bitterness against him. Dad and I think it would be a good idea if you could get Jenny a post in the health service. It is really good of you to offer and be interested after all that’s happened. You know what we think about divorce so she must look to her job now for happiness. Dad and I pray every night that she’ll find it.

Thanking you again for all your interest and help. If you do manage to get Jenny the post I’m sure she won’t let you down. She’s learnt her lesson and it’s been a bitter one for us all. But His will be done.

Yours respectfully,

E
MILY
P
RIDDY
(Mrs.)

It was extraordinary, thought Dalgliesh, that people still lived who could write a letter like that, with its archaic mixture of subservience and self-respect, its unashamed yet curiously poignant emotionalism. The story it told was ordinary enough, but he felt detached from its reality. The letter could have been written fifty years ago; almost he expected to see the paper curling with age and smell the tentative scent of potpourri. It had no relevance, surely, to that pretty, ineffectual child at the Steen.

“It’s unlikely to have any importance,” he said to Martin. “But I’d like you to go over to Clapham and have a word with these people. We’d better know who the husband is. But, somehow, I don’t think he’ll prove to be Dr. Etherege’s mysterious marauder. The man—or woman—who killed Miss Bolam was still in the building when we arrived. And we’ve talked to him.”

It was then that the telephone rang, sounding ominously strident in the silence of the flat as if it were calling for the dead. Dalgliesh said:

“I’ll take it. It will be Dr. Keating with the P.M. report. I asked him to ring me here if he got through with it.”

He was back with Martin within two minutes. The report had been brief. Dalgliesh said:

“Nothing surprising. She was a healthy woman. Killed by a stab through the heart after being stunned, which we could see for ourselves, and
virgo intacta
which we had no reason to doubt. What have you got there?”

“It’s her photograph album, sir. Pictures of Guide camps mostly. It looks as if she went away with the girls every year.”

Probably making that her annual holiday, thought Dalgliesh. He had a respect bordering on simple wonder for those who voluntarily gave up their leisure to other people’s children. He was not a man who liked children and he found the company of most of them insupportable after a very brief time. He took the album from Sergeant Martin. The photographs were small and technically unremarkable, taken apparently with a small box camera. But they were carefully disposed on the page, each labelled in neat white printing. There were Guides hiking, Guides cooking on primus stoves, erecting tents, blanket-swathed around the camp-fire, lining up for kit inspection. And in many of the photographs there was the figure of their captain, plump, motherly, smiling. It was difficult to connect this buxom, happy extrovert with that pathetic corpse on the record-room floor—or with the obsessional, authoritative administrator described by the staff of the Steen. The comments under some of the photographs were pathetic in their evocation of happiness remembered:

“The Swallows dish up. Shirley keeps an eye on the spotted dick.”

“Valerie ‘flies up’ from the Brownies.”

“The Kingfishers tackle the washing-up. Snap taken by Susan.”

“Captain helps the tide in! Taken by Jean.”

This last showed Miss Bolam’s plump shoulders rising from the surf, surrounded by some half-dozen of her girls. Her hair was down and hanging in flat swaths, wet and dank as seaweed, on either side of her laughing face. Together the two detectives looked at the photograph in silence. Then Dalgliesh said:

“There haven’t been many tears shed for her yet, have there? Only her cousin’s and they were more shock than grief. I wonder whether the Swallows and the Kingfishers will weep for her.”

They closed the album and went back to their search. It disclosed only one further item of interest, but that was very interesting indeed. It was the carbon copy of a letter from Miss Bolam to her solicitor, dated the day before her death, and making an appointment to see him “in connection with the proposed changes to my will which we discussed briefly on the telephone yesterday night.”

After the visit to Ballantyne Mansions there followed a hiatus in the investigation, one of those inevitable delays which Dalgliesh had never found it easy to accept. He had always worked at speed. His reputation rested on the pace as well as the success of his cases. He did not ponder too deeply the implications of this compulsive need to get on with the job. It was enough to know that delay irritated him more than it did most men.