But Enid Bolam might have lived each day as if expecting sudden death. He had never examined a flat so neat, so obsessively tidy. Even her few cosmetics, the brush and comb on her dressing table were arranged with patterned precision. The heavy double bed was made. Friday was obviously her day for changing the linen. The used sheets and pillowcases were folded into a laundry box which lay open on a chair. The bedside table held nothing but a small travelling clock, a carafe of water and a Bible with a booklet beside it appointing the passage to be read each day and expounding the moral. There was nothing in the table drawer but a bottle of aspirin and a folded handkerchief. A hotel room would have held as much individuality.
All the furniture was old and heavy. The ornate mahogany door of the wardrobe swung open soundlessly to reveal a row of tightly packed clothes. They were expensive but unexciting. Miss Bolam had bought from that store which still caters mainly for country-house dowagers. There were well-cut skirts of indeterminate colour, heavy coats tailored to last through a dozen English winters, woollen dresses which could offend no one. Once the wardrobe was closed, it was impossible accurately to recall a single garment. At the back of them all, closeted from the light, were bowls of fibre, planted no doubt with bulbs whose Christmas flowering Miss Bolam would never see.
Dalgliesh and Martin had worked together for too many years to find much talking necessary and they moved about the flat almost in silence. Everywhere was the same heavy, old-fashioned furniture, the same ordered neatness. It was hard to believe that these rooms had been recently lived in, that anyone had cooked a meal in this impersonal kitchen. It was very quiet. At this height and muffled by the solid Victorian walls the clamour of traffic in Kensington High Street was a faint, distant throbbing. Only the insistent ticking of a grandfather clock in the hall stabbed the still silence. The air was cold and almost odourless except for the smell of the flowers. They were everywhere. There was a bowl of chrysanthemums on the hall table and another in the sitting room. The bedroom mantelpiece held a small jug of anemones. On the kitchen dresser was a taller brass jug of autumn foliage, the gatherings perhaps of some recent country walk. Dalgliesh did not like autumn flowers, the chrysanthemums which obstinately refuse to die, flaunting their shaggy heads even on a rotting stem, scentless dahlias fit only to be planted in neat rows in municipal parks. His wife had died in October and he had long recognized the minor bereavements which follow the death of the heart. Autumn was no longer a good time of the year. For him the flowers in Miss Bolam’s flat emphasized the general air of gloom, like wreaths at a funeral.
The sitting room was the largest room in the flat and here was Miss Bolam’s desk. Martin fingered it appreciatively.
“It’s all good solid stuff, sir, isn’t it? We’ve got a piece rather like this. The wife’s mother left it to us. Mind you, they don’t make furniture like it today. You get nothing for it, of course. Too big for modern rooms, I suppose. But it’s got quality.”
“You can certainly lean against it without collapsing,” said Dalgliesh.
“That’s what I mean, sir. Good solid stuff. No wonder she hung on to it. A sensible young woman on the whole, I’d say, and one who knew how to make herself comfortable.” He drew a second chair up to the desk where Dalgliesh was already seated, planted his heavy thighs in it and did indeed look comfortable and at home.
The desk was unlocked. The top rolled back without difficulty. Inside was a portable typewriter and a metal box containing files of paper, each file neatly labelled. The drawers and compartments of the desk held writing paper, envelopes and correspondence. As they expected, everything was in perfect order. They went through the files together. Miss Bolam paid her bills as soon as they were due and kept a running account of all her household expenditure.
There was much to be gone through. Details of her investments were filed under the appropriate heading. At her mother’s death the trustee securities had been redeemed and the capital reinvested in equities. The portfolio was skilfully balanced and there could be little doubt that Miss Bolam had been well advised and had increased her assets considerably during the past five years. Dalgliesh noted the name of her stockbroker and solicitor. Both would have to be seen before the investigation was complete.
The dead woman kept few of her personal letters; perhaps there had been few worth keeping. But there was one, filed under P, which was interesting. It was written in a careful hand on cheap lined paper from a Balham address and read:
Dear Miss Bolam,
These are just a few lines to thank you for all you done for Jenny. It hasn’t turned out as we wished and prayed for but we shall know in His good time what His purpose is. I still feel we did right to let them marry. It wasn’t only to stop talk, as I think you know. He has gone for good, he writes. Her dad and me didn’t know that things had got that bad between them. She doesn’t talk much to us but we shall wait patiently and maybe, one day, she will be our girl again. She seems very quiet and won’t talk about it so we don’t know whether she grieves. I try not to feel bitterness against him. Dad and I think it would be a good idea if you could get Jenny a post in the health service. It is really good of you to offer and be interested after all that’s happened. You know what we think about divorce so she must look to her job now for happiness. Dad and I pray every night that she’ll find it.
Thanking you again for all your interest and help. If you do manage to get Jenny the post, I’m sure she won’t let you down. She’s learnt her lesson and it’s been a bitter one for us all. But His will be done.
It was extraordinary, thought Dalgliesh, that people still lived who could write a letter like that, with its archaic mixture of subservience and self-respect, its unashamed yet curiously poignant emotionalism. The story it told was ordinary enough, but he felt detached from its reality. The letter could have been written fifty years ago; he almost expected to see the paper curling with age and smell the tentative scent of potpourri. It had no relevance, surely, to that pretty, ineffectual child at the Steen.
“It’s unlikely to have any importance,” he said to Martin. “But I’d like you to go over to Balham and have a word with these people. We’d better know who the husband is. But, somehow, I don’t think he’ll prove to be Dr. Etherege’s mysterious marauder. The man—or woman—who killed Miss Bolam was still in the building when we arrived. And we’ve talked to him.”
It was then that the telephone rang, sounding ominously strident in the silence of the flat as if it were calling for the dead. Dalgliesh said: “I’ll take it. It will be Dr. Keating with the PM report. I asked him to ring me here if he got through with it.”