he felt its presence behind the tightly closed and numbered doors as he made his way unchallenged to the upper floors.
Number 14 was on the top floor at the back. As he approached the door he heard the sharp staccato clatter of typing. He knocked loudly and the sound stopped. There was a wait of more than a minute before the door half opened and he found himself facing a pair of suspicious and unwelcoming eyes.
“Who are you? I’m working. My friends know not to call in the mornings.”
“But I’m not a friend. May I come in?”
“I suppose so. But I can’t spare you much time. And I don’t think it’ll be worth your while. I don’t want to join anything! I haven’t the time. And I don’t want to buy anything because I haven’t the money. Anyway, I’ve got everything I need.” Dalgliesh showed his card.
“I’m not buying or selling; not even information which is what I’m here for. It’s about Josephine Fallon. I’m a police officer and I’m investigating her death. You, I take it, are Arnold Dowson.”
The door was opened wider.
“You’d better come in.” No sign of fear but perhaps a certain wariness in the gray eyes.
It was an extraordinary room, a small attic with a sloping roof and a dormer window, furnished almost entirely with crude and unpainted wooden boxes, some still stenciled with the name of the original grocer or wine merchant They had been ingeniously fitted together so that the walls were honey-combed from floor to ceiling with pale wooden cells, irregular in size and shape and containing all the impedimenta of daily living. Some were stacked close with hard-backed books; others with orange paper-backs. Another framed a small two-bar electric fire, perfectly adequate to heat so small a room. In another box was a neat pile of clean but unironed clothes. Another held blue-banded mugs and other crockery, and yet another displayed a group of
The tenant suited the room. He looked almost excessively tidy. He was a young man, probably not much over twenty, Dalgliesh thought. His fawn polo-neck sweater was clean, with each cuff neatly turned back to match its fellow, and the collar of a very white shirt visible at the neck. His blue jeans were faded but unstained and had been carefully washed and ironed. There was a crease down the center of each leg and the ends had been turned up and stitched carefully into place. It gave an oddly incongruous effect to such an informal outfit He wore leather sandals of the buckled style normally seen on children, and no socks. His hair was very fair and was brushed into a helmet which framed his face in the manner of a medieval page. The face beneath the sleek fringe was bony and sensitive, the nose crooked and too large, the mouth small and well shaped with a hint of petulance. But his most remarkable feature were his ears. They were the smallest Dalgliesh had every seen on a man, and were without color even at the tips. They looked as if they were made of wax. Sitting on an upturned orange box with his hands held loosely between his knees and his watchful eyes on Dalgliesh, he looked like the centerpiece of a surrealist painting; singular and precise against the multi-cellular background. Dalgliesh pulled out one of the boxes and seated himself opposite the boy. He said:
“You knew that she was dead, of course?”
“Yes. I read about it in this morning’s papers.”
“Did you know that she was pregnant?”
This at least produced emotion. The boy’s tight face whitened. His head jerked up and he stared at Dalgliesh silently for a moment before replying.
“No. I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me.”
“She was nearly three months’ pregnant Could it have been your child?”
Dowson looked down at his hands.
“It could have been, I suppose. I didn’t take any precautions, if that’s what you mean. She told me not to worry, that she’d see to that After all, she was a nurse. I thought she knew how to take care of herself.”
“That was something I suspect she never did know. Hadn’t you better tell me about it?”
“Do I have to?”
“No. You don’t have to say anything. You can demand to see a solicitor and make any amount of fuss and trouble and cause a great deal of delay. But is there any point? No one is accusing you of murdering her. But someone did. You knew her and presumably you liked her. For some of the time, anyway. If you want to help you can best do it by telling me everything you knew about her.”
Dowson got slowly to his feet. He seemed as slow-moving and clumsy as an old man. He looked round as if disoriented Then he said:
“I’ll make some tea.”
He shuffled over to a double gas ring, fitted to the right of the meager and unused fireplace, lifted the kettle as if testing by weight that it held sufficient water, and lit the gas. He took down two of the mugs from one of the boxes and set them out on a further box which he dragged between himself and Dalgliesh. It held a number of neatly folded newspapers which looked as if they hadn’t been read. He spread one over the top of the box and set out the blue mugs and a bottle of milk as formally as if they were about to drink from Crown Derby. He didn’t speak again until the tea was made and poured, Then he said:
“I wasn’t her only lover.”
“Did she tell you about the others?”
“No, but I think one of them was a ‘doctor. Perhaps more than one. That wouldn’t be surprising in the circumstances. We were talking once about sex and she said that a man’s nature and character were always completely revealed when he made love. That if he were selfish or insensitive or brutal he couldn’t conceal it in bed whatever he might do with his clothes on. Then she said that she had once slept with a surgeon and it was only too apparent that most of the bodies he came into contact with had been anaesthetized first; that he was so busy admiring his own technique that it never occurred to him that he was in bed with a conscious woman. She laughed about a great many things.”
“But you don’t think she was happy?”
He appeared to be considering. Dalgliesh thought: And for God’s sake don’t answer, “who is?”
“No, not really happy. Not for most of the time. But she did know how to be happy. That was the important thing.”
“How did you meet her?”
“I’m learning to be a writer. That’s what I want to be and I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I have to earn some money to live while I get my first novel finished and published, so I work at night as a continental telephone operator. I know enough French to make it possible. The pay isn’t bad. I don’t have many friends because there isn’t time and I never went to bed with any woman until I met Jo. Women don’t seem to like me. I met her last summer in St James’s Park. She was there on one of her off-duty days and I was there to watch the ducks and see what the park looked like. I wanted to set one of the scenes in my book in St James’s Park in July, and I went there to make some notes. She was lying on her back on the grass staring at the sky. She was quite alone. One of the pages of my notebook got detached and blew across the grass into her face. I went after it and apologized, and we chased it together.”
He was holding the mug of tea looking at it as if staring again into the summer surface of the lake.
“It was an odd day-very hot sunless and blustery. The wind blew in warm gusts. The lake looked heavy like oil.”
He paused for a moment and when Dalgliesh didn’t speak, went on:
“So we met and talked, and I asked her to come back for tea. I don’t know what I expected. After tea we talked more and she made love to me. She told me weeks later that she didn’t have that in mind when she came here but I don’t know. I don’t even know why she came back. Perhaps she was bored.”
“Did you have h in mind?”
“I don’t know that either. Perhaps. I know that I wanted to make love to a woman. I wanted to know what it
