Original Sin (4 page)

'Yes, Miss Claudia.'

Mandy handed up her typed lists. Miss Etienne glanced at them dismissively and said: 'Right, the job is yours if you want it. Start tomorrow at nine-thirty.'

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4

Ten days after Sonia Clements' suicide and exactly three weeks before the first of the Innocent House murders, Adam Dalgliesh lunched with Conrad Ackroyd at the Cadaver Club. It was at Ackroyd's invitation, given by telephone with that conspiratorial and slightly portentous air with which all Conrad's invitations were invested. Even a duty dinner party given to pay off outstanding social obligations promised mystery, cabals, secrets to be imparted to the privileged few. The date suggested was not really convenient and Dalgliesh rearranged his diary with some reluctance while reflecting that one of the disadvantages of advancing age was an increasing disinclination for social engagements combined with an inability to summon the wit or energy to circumvent them. The friendship between them - he supposed the word was appropriate enough; they were certainly not mere acquaintances - was based on the use each occasionally made of the other. Since both acknowledged the fact, neither could see that it needed justification or excuse. Conrad, one of the most notorious and reliable gossips in London, had often been useful to him, notably in the Berowne case. On this occasion Dalgliesh would obviously be expected to confer the benefit, but the demand in whatever form it came would probably be more irritating than onerous, the food at the Cadaver was excellent and Ackroyd, although he could be facetious, was seldom dull.

Later he was to see all the horrors that followed as emanating from that perfectly ordinary luncheon, and would find himself thinking: if this were fiction and I were a novelist, that's where it would all begin.

The Cadaver Club is not among the most prestigious of London's private clubs but its coterie of members find it among the most convenient. Built in the 8oos, it was originally the house of a wealthy if not particularly successful barrister who, in 892, bequeathed it, suitably endowed, to a private club formed some five years earlier which had regularly met in his drawing-room. The club was and remains exclusively masculine, the main qualification for membership being a professional interest in murder. Now, as then, it lists among

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the members a few retired senior police officers, practising and retired barristers, nearly all of the most distinguished professional and amateur criminologists, crime reporters, and a few eminent crime-novelists, all male and there on sufferance since the club takes the view that, where murder is concerned, fiction cannot compete with real life. The club had recently been in danger of moving from the category of eccentric to the dangerous one of fashionable, a risk which the committee had promptly countered by blackballing the next six applicants for admission. The message was received. As one disgruntled applicant complained, to be blackballed by the Garrick is embarrassing, but to be blackballed by the Cadaver is ridiculous. The club kept itself small and, by its eccentric standards, select.

Crossing Tavistock Square, in the mellow September sunshine, Dalgliesh wondered how Ackroyd qualified as a member until he recalled the book his host had written five years earlier on three notorious murderers: Hawley Harvey Crippen, Norman Thorne and Patrick Mahon. Ackroyd had sent him a signed copy and Dalgliesh, dutifully reading it, had been surprised at the careful research and the even more careful writing. Ackroyd's thesis, not entirely original, had been that all three were innocent in the sense that none had intended to kill his victim, and Ackroyd had made a plausible, if not entirely convincing case, based on a detailed examination of the medical and forensic evidence. For Dalgliesh the main message of the book had been that men wishing to be acquitted of murder should avoid dismembering their victims, a practice for which British juries have long demonstrated their distaste.

They were to meet in the library for a sherry before luncheon and Ackroyd was already there ensconced in one of the leather high-backed chairs. He got to his feet with surprising agility for one of his size and came towards Dalgliesh with small, rather prancing steps, looking not a day older than when they had first met.

He said: 'It's good of you to make time, Adam. I realize how busy you are now. Special adviser to the Commissioner, member of the working party on regional crime squads and an occasional murder investigation to keep your hand in. You mustn't let them overwork you, dear boy. I'll ring for sherry. I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact. We'll be downstairs in the Snug.'

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Ackroyd had married in late middle age, to the astonishment and consternation of his friends, and lived in connubial self-sufficiency in an agreeable Edwardian villa in St John's Wood where he and Nelly Ackroyd devoted themselves to their house and garden, their two Siamese cats and Ackroyd's largely imaginary ailments. He owned, edited and financed from a substantial private income The Paternoster Review, that iconoclastic mixture of literary articles, reviews and gossip, the last carefully researched, occasionally discreet, more often as malicious as it was accurate. Nelly, when not ministering to her husband's hypochondria, was an enthusiastic collector of x92os and x93os girls' school stories. The marriage was a success although Conrad's friends still had to remind themselves to ask after Nelly's health before enquiring about the cats.

The last time Dalgliesh had been in the library the visit had been professional and he had been in search of information. But then the case had been murder and he had been greeted by a different host. Little seemed to have changed. The room faced south over the square and this morning was warm with sunlight which, filtering through the fine white curtains, made the thin fire almost unnecessary. Originally the drawing-room, it now served both as sitting-room and library. The walls were lined with mahogany cases which held what was probably the most comprehensive private library of books on crime in London, including all the volumes of the Notable British Trials and Famous Trials series, books on medical jurisprudence, forensic pathology and policing and the club's few first editions of Conan Doyle, Poe, Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, in a smaller case as if to demonstrate fiction's innate inferiority to reality. The large mahogany showcase was still in place, filled with articles collected or donated over the years; the prayer book with the signature, Constance Kent, on the flyleaf, the flintlock duelling pistol, suppos-edly used by the Reverend James Hackman for the murder of Margaret Wray, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, a phial of white powder, allegedly arsenic, found in the possession of Major Herbert Armstrong. There was an addition since Dalgliesh's last visit. It lay curled, sinister as a lethal snake, in pride of place beneath a label stating that this was the rope with which Crippen had been hanged. Dalgliesh, turning to follow Ackroyd out of the library, mildly suggested that the public display of this distasteful object was barbaric, a protest which Ackroyd as mildly repudiated.

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'A trifle morbid, perhaps, but barbaric is going a little far. After all, this isn't the Athenaeum. It probably does some of the older members good to be reminded of the natural end of their previous professional activities. Would you still be a .detective if we hadn't abolished hanging?'

'I don't know. Abolition doesn't help with that particular moral dilemma as far as I'm concerned, since personally I would prefer

death to twenty years in prison.' 'Not death by hanging?' 'No, not that.'

Hanging, for him, as he suspected for most people, had always held a particular horror. Despite the reports of Royal Commissions on capital punishment which claimed for it humanity, speed and the certainty of instantaneous death, it remained for him one of the ugliest forms of judicial execution encumbered with horrifying images as precisely lined as a pen drawing: mass victims in the wake of triumphant armies, the pathetic, half-demented victims of seven-teenth-century justice, the muted drums of the quarterdecks of ships where the navy exacted its revenge and issued its warning, women convicted in the eighteenth century of infanticide, that ridiculous but sinister ritual of the small black square formally placed atop the judge's wig, the concealed but ordinary-looking door leading from the condemned cell to that last brief walk. It was good that they were all part of history. For a moment the Cadaver Club was a less agreeable place in which to lunch, its eccentricities more repugnant than amusing.

The Snug at the Cadaver Club is well named. It is a small basement room at the rear of the house with two windows and a french door opening on to a narrow paved courtyard bounded by a ten-foot ivied wall. The yard could comfortably accommodate three tables, but the members of the club are not addicted to dining outside, even in the occasional hot spell of an English summer, apparently regarding the habit as a foreign eccentricity incompatible with the proper apprecia-tion of food or the privacy necessary to good talk. To dissuade any member who might be tempted to this indulgence, the courtyard is furnished with terracotta pots of various sizes planted with gera-niums and ivy, and space further restricted by a huge stone copy of the Apollo Belvedere propped in the wall against the corner and rumoured to be the gift of an early member of the Club whose wife

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had banished it from their suburban garden. The geraniums were still in full bloom and the bright pinks and reds glowed through the glass enhancing the immediate impression of welcoming domesticity. The room had obviously once been the kitchen and one wall was still fitted with the original iron grate, its bars and ovens polished now to ebony. The blackened beam above was hung with iron cooking instruments and a row of copper pans, battered but gleaming. An oak dresser ran the whole length of the opposite wall, serving as a receptacle for the display of the gifts and bequests of members which were deemed unsuitable for, or unworthy of, the library cabinet.

Dalgliesh remembered that the Club had an unwritten law that no offering from a member, however inappropriate or bizarre, should be rejected and the dresser, like the whole room, bore witness to the idiosyncratic tastes and hobbies of the donors. Delicate Meissen plates were ranged in incongruous proximity to Victorian ribbon-decorated souvenirs bearing pictures of Brighton and Southend-on-Sea, a toby jug which looked like a fairground trophy stood between a Victorian Staffordshire flatback, obviously original, of Wesley preaching from a double-decker pulpit, and a fine Parian bust of the Duke of Wellington. An assortment of coronation mugs and early Stafford-shire cups was suspended in precarious disorder from the hooks. Beside the door hung a painted glass picture of the burial of Princess Charlotte; above it a stuffed elk's head with an old Panama hat slung on its left horn gazed glassy-eyed with lugubrious disapproval at a large and lurid print of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The present kitchen was somewhere close; Dalgliesh could hear small agreeable tinklings and from time to time the thud of the food lift descending from the first floor dining-room. Only one of the four tables was set, the linen immaculate, and Dalgliesh and Ackroyd seated themselves beside the window.

The menu and wine list were already to the right of Ackroyd's place. Taking them up, he said: 'The Plants have retired, but we've got the Jacksons now, and I'm not sure that Mrs Jackson's cooking isn't even better. We were lucky to get them. She and her husband used to run a private nursing home but they got tired of the country and wanted to return to London. They don't need to work but I think the job suits them. They've kept on with the policy of having only one main dish a day at luncheon and dinner. Very wise. Today, white bean and tuna fish salad followed by rack of lamb with fresh

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'A trifle morbid, perhaps, but barbaric is going a little far. After all, this isn't the Athenaeum. It probably does some of the older members good to be remindet of the natural end of their previous professional activities. Would 3rou still be a detective if we hadn't abolished hanging?' 2 don't know. Atbolition doesn't help with that partiCUlar moral dilemma as far as I'm concerned, since personally I would prefer death to twenty yeaxs in prison.' Zlot death by hatging?' 'No, not that.' Hanging, for hire, as he suspected for most people, had always held a partiCUlar horror. Despite the reports of Royal Commissions on capital punishment which claimed for it humanity, speed and the certainty of instantaneous death, it remained for him one of the ugliest forrs of judicial exeCUtion encumbered with horrifying images as precisely lined as a pen drawing: mass victims in the wake of triuraphant armies the pathetic, half-demented victims of seventeenth~century justice, the muted drums of the quarterdecks of ships where the navy exacted its revenge and issued its warning, women convicted in the eiglateenth century of infanticide, that ridiculous but sinister ritual of the small black square formally placed atop the judge's wig, the concealed but ordinary-looking door leading from the condemned cell to that last brief walk. It was good that they were all part of history. For a moment the Cadaver Club was a less agreeable place in which to lunch, its eccentricities more repugnant than amusing. The Snug at the Cadaver Club is well named. It is a small basement roon at the rear of the house with two windows and a french door opening on to a narrow paved courtyard bounded by a ten-foot ivied wall. The yard could comfortably accommodate three tables, but the members of the club are not addicted to dining outside, even in the occasional hot spell of an English summer, apparently regarding the habit as a foreign eccentricity incompatible with the proper appreciation of food or the privacy necessary to good talk. To dissuade any merber who might be tempted to this indulgence, the courtyard is furnished with terracotta pots of various sizes planted with geraniurs and ivy, and space further restricted by a huge stone copy of the Apollo Belvedere propped in the wall against the corner and rurn0ured to be the gift of an early member of the Club whose wife