The Black Tower by P. D. James Page A

jauntily with them looking round with lively curiosity as if the place were new to him. Dalgliesh wondered whether he had come to keep an eye on Lerner or on Dalgliesh himself.
    As they passed from room to room, Lerner lost his first diffidence and became confident, almost voluble. There was something endearing about his naïve pride in what Anstey was trying to do. Anstey had certainly laid out his money with some imagination. The Grange itself, with its large, high rooms and cold marble floors, its oppressively panelled dark oak walls and mullioned windows, was a depressingly unsuitable house for disabled patients. Apart from the dining-room and the rear drawing-room, which had become a TV and communal sitting-room, Anstey had used the house mainly to accommodate himself and his staff and had built on to the rear a one-storey stone extension to provide ten individual patients’ bedrooms on the ground floor and a clinical room and additional bedrooms on the floor above. This extension had been joined to the old stables which ran at right angles to it providing a sheltered patio for the patients’ wheelchairs. The stables themselves had been adapted to provide garages, a workshop and a patients’ activity room for woodwork and modelling. Here, too, the handcream and bath powder which the Home sold to help with finances were made and packed at a workbench behind a transparent plastic screen erected, presumably, to indicate respect for the principle of scientific cleanliness. Dalgliesh could see, hanging on the screen, the white shadows of protective overalls.
    Lerner said:
    â€œVictor Holroyd was a chemistry teacher and he gave us the prescription for the handcream and powder. The cream is really only lanolin, almond oil and glycerine but it’s very effective and people seem to like it. We do very well with it. And this corner of the workroom is given over to modelling.”
    Dalgliesh had almost exhausted his repertoire of appreciative comments. But now he was genuinely impressed. In the middle of the workbench and mounted on a low wooden base was a clay head of Wilfred Anstey. The neck, elongated and sinewy, rose tortoise-like from the folds of the hood. The head was thrust forward and held a little to the right. It was almost a parody, and yet it had an extraordinary power. How, Dalgliesh wondered, had the sculptor managed to convey the sweetness and the obstinacy of that individual smile, to model compassion and yet reduce it to self-delusion, to show humility garbed in a monk’s habit and yet convey an overriding impression of the puissance of evil. The plastic wrapped lumps and rolls of clay which lay, disorderly, on the workbench only emphasized the force and technical achievement of this one finished work.
    Lerner said:
    â€œHenry did the head. Something’s gone a little wrong with the mouth, I think. Wilfred doesn’t seem to mind it but no one else thinks that it does him justice.”
    Julius put his head on one side and pursed his lips in a parody of critical assessment.
    â€œOh, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that. What do you think of it, Dalgliesh?”
    â€œI think it’s remarkable. Did Carwardine do much modelling before he came here?”
    It was Dennis Lerner who answered:
    â€œI don’t think he did any. He was a senior civil servant before his illness. He modelled this about a couple of months ago without Wilfred giving him a sitting. It’s quite good for a first effort, isn’t it?”
    Julius said:
    â€œThe question which interests me is did he do it intentionally, in which case he’s a great deal too talented to waste himself here, or were his fingers merely obeying his subconscious? If so, it raises interesting speculations about the origin of creativity and even more interesting ones about Henry’s subconscious.”
    â€œI think it just came out like that,” said Dennis Lerner simply. He looked at it with