Mair's dinner party he thought he knew why. Now all the lights were blazing in the ground-floor rooms, the large rectangle of the picture window to the left reaching almost to the ground and the smaller square to the right which he thought was probably the kitchen. Normally they would have been a reassuring signal of life, normality and welcome, of a refuge from the atavistic fears of the enclosing wood, the empty moonlit headland. But now those bright, uncurtained windows added to his mounting unease and as he approached the cottage it seemed to him that there floated between him and those bright windows, like a half-developed print, the mental picture of that dead and violated face.
Someone had been here before him. He vaulted over the low stone wall and saw that the pane of the picture window had been almost completely smashed. Small slivers of glass gleamed like jewels on the cobbled yard. He stood and gazed between the jagged edges of the broken glass into the brightness of the sitting room. The carpet was littered with glass fragments like winking beads of silver light. It was obvious that the force of the blow had come from outside the cottage and he saw at once what had been used. Below him, face upwards on the carpet, was the portrait of Hilary Robarts. It had been slashed almost to the frame with two right-angled cuts forming the letter L.
He didn't try the door to see if it was unlocked. It was more important not to contaminate the scene than to save ten or fifteen minutes in ringing the police. She was dead. Speed was important, but it was not vital. Regaining the road he set off towards the mill, half running, half walking. And then he heard the noise of a car and, turning, saw the lights coming at him fast from the north. It was Alex Mair's BMW. Dalgliesh stood in the middle of the road and waved his torch. The car slowed and stopped. Looking up to the open right-side window he saw Mair, his face bleached by moonlight, regarding him for a moment with an unsmiling intensity as if this encounter were an assignation.
Dalgliesh said: 'I'm afraid I have shocking news for you. Hilary Robarts has been murdered. I've just found the body. I need to get to a telephone.'
The hand lying casually on the wheel tightened then relaxed. The eyes fixed on his grew wary. But when Mair spoke his voice was controlled. Only in that involuntary spasm of the hand had he betrayed emotion. He said: 'The Whistler?'
'It looks like it.'
'There's a telephone in the car.'
Without another word he opened the door, got out and stood silently aside while Dalgliesh spent an irritating two minutes getting through to Rickards's headquarters. Rickards wasn't there but the message given, he rang off. Mair had moved about thirty yards from the car and was staring back at the glitter of the power station as if dissociating himself from the whole procedure.
Now, walking back, he said: 'We all warned her not to swim alone but she wouldn't listen. But I didn't really believe there was any danger. I suppose all the victims thought that until it was too late. 'It can't happen to me.' But it can and it does. But it's still extraordinary, almost unbelievable. The second victim from Larksoken. Where is she?'
'On the fringe of the pines, where she usually swam, I imagine.' As Mair made a move towards the sea, Dalgliesh said: 'There's nothing you can do. I'll go back and wait for the police.'
'I know there's nothing I can do. I want to see her.'
'Better not. The fewer people who disturb the scene the better.'
Suddenly Mair turned on him. 'My God, Dalgliesh, don't you ever stop thinking like a policeman? I said I wanted to see her.'
Dalgliesh thought, this isn't my case and I can't stop him by force. But at least he could ensure that the direct path to the body lay undisturbed. Without another word he led the way and Mair followed. Why this insistence, he wondered, on seeing the body? To satisfy himself that she was, in fact, dead, the scientist's need to verify and confirm? Or was he trying to exorcize a horror which he knew could be more terrible in imagination than in reality? Or was there, perhaps, a deeper compulsion, the need to pay her the tribute of standing over her body in the quietness and loneliness of the night before the police arrived with all the official paraphernalia of a murder investigation to violate for ever the intimacies they had shared.
Mair made no comment when Dalgliesh led him to the south of the well-beaten path to the beach and still without speaking followed him as he plunged into the darkness and began tracking his way between the shafts of the pines. The pool of light from his torch shone on the brittle spars snapped by his previous breakthrough, on the carpet of pine needles dusted with sand, on dried pine cones and the glint of an old battered tin. In the darkness the strong resinous smell seemed to intensify and came up to them like a drug, making the air as heavy to breathe as if it were a sultry night in high summer.
Minutes later they stepped out of stultifying darkness into the white coolness of the beach and saw before them like a curved shield of beaten silver the moonlit splendour of the sea. They stood for a moment side by side, breathing hard as if they had come through some ordeal. Dalgliesh's footprints were still visible in the dry sand above the last ridge of pebbles and they followed them until they stood at the foot of the body.
Dalgliesh thought, I don't want to be here, not with him, not like this, both of us staring down unrebuked at her nakedness. It seemed to him that all his perceptions were preternaturally sharpened in this cold, debilitating light. The blanched limbs, the aureole of dark hair, the gaudy red and blue of the beach towel, the clumps of marram grass, all had the one-dimensional clarity of a colour print. This necessary guard on the body until the police could arrive would have been perfectly tolerable; he was used to the undemanding companionship of the recently dead. But with Mair at his side he felt like a voyeur. It was this revulsion, rather than delicacy, which made him move a little apart and stand looking into the darkness of the pines while remaining aware of every slight move and breath of the tall, rigid figure looking down at her with the concentrated attention of a surgeon.
Then Mair said: 'That locket round her neck, I gave it to her on August the twenty-ninth for her birthday. It's just the right size to hold her Yale key. One of the metal workers in the workshop at Larksoken made it for me. It's remarkable the delicacy of the work they do there.'
Dalgliesh was not inexperienced in the various manifestations of shock. He said nothing. Mair's voice was suddenly harsh.
'For God's sake, Dalgliesh, can't we cover her up?'
With what? thought Dalgliesh. Does he expect me to jerk the towel from under her? He said: 'No, I'm sorry. We mustn't disturb her.'
'But it's the Whistler's work. Dear God, man, it's obvious. You said so yourself.'
'The Whistler is a murderer like any other. He brings something to the scene and leaves something behind him. That something could be evidence. He's a man, not a force of nature.'
'When will the police arrive?'
'They shouldn't be long. I wasn't able to speak to Rickards but they'll be in touch with him. I'll wait if you want to leave. There's nothing you can do here.'
'I can stay until they take her away.'
'That might mean a long wait unless they're able to get the pathologist quickly.'
Then I'll have a long wait.'
Without another word he turned and walked down to the edge of the sea, his footprints parallel with Dalgliesh's own. Dalgliesh moved down to the shingle and sat there, his arms round his knees, and watched while the tall figure paced endlessly, backwards and forwards, along the fringes of the tide. Whatever evidence he had on his shoes, it wouldn't be there now. But the thought was ridiculous. No murderer had ever left his imprint more clearly on a victim than had the Whistler. Why then did he feel this unease, the sense that it was less straightforward than it seemed?
He wriggled his heels and buttocks more comfortably into the shingle and prepared to wait. The cold moonlight, the constant falling of the waves and the sense of that stiffening body behind him induced a gentle melancholy, a contemplation of mortality including his own. Timor mortis conturbat me. He thought: in youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It fs only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend. Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual death, even the death of the least attractive, the
