buckle?”
“At the back of the neck under the left ear. There’s a photograph of the indentation it made in the flesh later in the file.”
Cordelia did not look. Why, she wondered, had he shown her this photograph? It wasn’t necessary to prove his argument. Had he hoped to shock her into a realization of what she was meddling in; to punish her for trespassing on his patch; to contrast the brutal reality of his professionalism with her amateurish meddling; to warn her perhaps? But against what? The police had no real suspicion of foul play; the case was closed. Had it, perhaps, been the casual malice, the incipient sadism of a man who couldn’t resist the impulse to hurt or shock? Was he even aware of his own motives?
She said: “I agree he could only have done it in the way you described, if he did it. But suppose someone else pulled the noose more tightly about his neck, then strung him up. He’d be heavy, a deadweight. Wouldn’t it have been easier to make the knot first and then hoist him on to the chair?”
“Having first asked him to hand over his belt?”
“Why use a belt? The murderer could have strangled him with a cord or a tie. Or would that have left a deeper and identifiable mark under the impression of the strap?”
“The pathologist looked for just such a mark. It wasn’t there.”
“There are other ways, though: a plastic bag, the thin kind they pack clothes in, dropped over his head and held tight against his face; a thin scarf; a woman’s stocking.”
“I can see you would be a resourceful murderess, Miss Gray. It’s possible, but it would need a strong man and there would have to be an element of surprise. We found no sign of a struggle.”
“But it could have been done that way?”
“Of course, but there was absolutely no evidence that it was.”
“But if he were first drugged?”
“That possibility did occur to me; that’s why I had the coffee analysed. But he wasn’t drugged, the PM confirmed it.”
“How much coffee had he drunk?”
“Only about half a mug, according to the PM report, and he died immediately afterwards. Sometime between seven and nine p.m. was as close as the pathologist could estimate.”
“Wasn’t it odd that he drank coffee before his meal?”
“There’s no law against it. We don’t know when he intended to eat his supper. Anyway, you can’t build a murder case on the order in which a man chooses to take his food and drink.”
“What about the note he left? I suppose it isn’t possible to raise prints from typewriter keys?”
“Not easily on that type of key. We tried but there was nothing identifiable.”
“So in the end you accepted that it was suicide?”
“In the end I accepted that there was no possibility of proving otherwise.”
“But you had a hunch? My partner’s old colleague—he’s a Superintendent of the CID—always backed his hunches.”
“Ah, well, that’s the Met, they can afford to indulge themselves. If I backed all my hunches I’d get no work done. It isn’t what you suspect, it’s what you can prove that counts.”
“May I take the suicide note and the strap?”
“Why not, if you sign for them? No one else seems to want them.”
“Could I see the note now, please?”
He extracted it from the file and handed it to her. Cordelia began to read to herself the first half-remembered words:
A void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us …
She was struck, not for the first time, by the importance of the written word, the magic of ordered symbols. Would poetry hold its theurgy if the lines were printed as prose, or prose be so compelling without the pattern and stress of punctuation? Miss Leaming had spoken Blake’s passage as if she recognized its beauty, yet here, spaced on the page, it exerted an even stronger power.
It was then that two things about the quotation caught at her breath. The first was not something which she intended to share with Sergeant Maskell but there was no
“At the back of the neck under the left ear. There’s a photograph of the indentation it made in the flesh later in the file.”
Cordelia did not look. Why, she wondered, had he shown her this photograph? It wasn’t necessary to prove his argument. Had he hoped to shock her into a realization of what she was meddling in; to punish her for trespassing on his patch; to contrast the brutal reality of his professionalism with her amateurish meddling; to warn her perhaps? But against what? The police had no real suspicion of foul play; the case was closed. Had it, perhaps, been the casual malice, the incipient sadism of a man who couldn’t resist the impulse to hurt or shock? Was he even aware of his own motives?
She said: “I agree he could only have done it in the way you described, if he did it. But suppose someone else pulled the noose more tightly about his neck, then strung him up. He’d be heavy, a deadweight. Wouldn’t it have been easier to make the knot first and then hoist him on to the chair?”
“Having first asked him to hand over his belt?”
“Why use a belt? The murderer could have strangled him with a cord or a tie. Or would that have left a deeper and identifiable mark under the impression of the strap?”
“The pathologist looked for just such a mark. It wasn’t there.”
“There are other ways, though: a plastic bag, the thin kind they pack clothes in, dropped over his head and held tight against his face; a thin scarf; a woman’s stocking.”
“I can see you would be a resourceful murderess, Miss Gray. It’s possible, but it would need a strong man and there would have to be an element of surprise. We found no sign of a struggle.”
“But it could have been done that way?”
“Of course, but there was absolutely no evidence that it was.”
“But if he were first drugged?”
“That possibility did occur to me; that’s why I had the coffee analysed. But he wasn’t drugged, the PM confirmed it.”
“How much coffee had he drunk?”
“Only about half a mug, according to the PM report, and he died immediately afterwards. Sometime between seven and nine p.m. was as close as the pathologist could estimate.”
“Wasn’t it odd that he drank coffee before his meal?”
“There’s no law against it. We don’t know when he intended to eat his supper. Anyway, you can’t build a murder case on the order in which a man chooses to take his food and drink.”
“What about the note he left? I suppose it isn’t possible to raise prints from typewriter keys?”
“Not easily on that type of key. We tried but there was nothing identifiable.”
“So in the end you accepted that it was suicide?”
“In the end I accepted that there was no possibility of proving otherwise.”
“But you had a hunch? My partner’s old colleague—he’s a Superintendent of the CID—always backed his hunches.”
“Ah, well, that’s the Met, they can afford to indulge themselves. If I backed all my hunches I’d get no work done. It isn’t what you suspect, it’s what you can prove that counts.”
“May I take the suicide note and the strap?”
“Why not, if you sign for them? No one else seems to want them.”
“Could I see the note now, please?”
He extracted it from the file and handed it to her. Cordelia began to read to herself the first half-remembered words:
A void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us …
She was struck, not for the first time, by the importance of the written word, the magic of ordered symbols. Would poetry hold its theurgy if the lines were printed as prose, or prose be so compelling without the pattern and stress of punctuation? Miss Leaming had spoken Blake’s passage as if she recognized its beauty, yet here, spaced on the page, it exerted an even stronger power.
It was then that two things about the quotation caught at her breath. The first was not something which she intended to share with Sergeant Maskell but there was no
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