“Hullo. I haven’t seen you here before.”
“I only come once a year,” Dalgliesh replied. He gave no explanation and she asked no questions.
Instead she said: “I wanted to see you. There’s something I think you ought to know. Are you off duty? If you aren’t, could you be unorthodox and talk to a suspect in a coffee bar? I’d rather not come to your office and it isn’t easy to ask for an interview at the clinic. I need some coffee anyway. I’m cold.”
“There used to be a place round the corner,” said Dalgliesh. “The coffee is tolerable and it’s pretty quiet.”
The coffee bar had changed in a year. Dalgliesh remembered it as a clean but dull café with a row of deal tables covered with plastic cloths and a long service counter embellished with a tea urn and layers of substantial sandwiches under glass domes. It had risen in the world. The walls had been panelled with imitation old oak against which hung a formidable assortment of rapiers, ancient pistols and cutlasses of uncertain authenticity. The waitresses looked like avant-garde débutantes earning their pin money and the lighting was so discreet as to be positively sinister. Miss Saxon led the way to a table in the far corner.
“Just coffee?” asked Dalgliesh.
“Just coffee, please.”
She waited until the order had been given and then said: “It’s about Dr. Baguley.”
“I thought it might be.”
“You were bound to hear something, I suppose. I’d rather tell you about it now than wait to be asked and I’d rather you heard it from me than from Amy Shorthouse.”
She spoke without rancour or embarrassment. Dalgliesh replied: “I haven’t asked about it because it doesn’t seem relevant but, if you’d like to tell me, it may be helpful.”
“I don’t want you to get a wrong idea about it that’s all. It would be so easy for you to imagine that we had a grudge against Miss Bolam. We didn’t, you know. At one time we even felt grateful to her.”
Dalgliesh had no need to ask who she meant by that “we.” The waitress, uninterested, came with their coffee, pale foam served in small, transparent cups. Miss Saxon slipped her coat from her shoulders and unknotted her head scarf. Both of them wrapped their fingers round the hot cups. She heaped the sugar into her coffee then pushed the plastic bowl across the table to Dalgliesh. There was no tension about her, no awkwardness. She had the directness of a schoolchild drinking coffee with a friend. He found her curiously peaceful to be with perhaps because he did not find her physically attractive. But he liked her. It was difficult to believe that this was only their second meeting and that the matter that had brought them together was murder.
She skimmed the froth from her coffee and said, without looking up: “James Baguley and I fell in love nearly three years ago. There wasn’t any great moral struggle about it. We didn’t invite love but we certainly didn’t fight against it. After all, you don’t voluntarily give up happiness unless you’re a masochist or a saint and we aren’t either. I knew that James had a neurotic wife in the way one does get to know these things, but he didn’t talk much about her. We both accepted that she needed him and that a divorce was out of the question. We convinced ourselves that we weren’t doing her any harm and that she need never know. James used to say that loving me made his marriage happier for both of them. Of course, it is easier to be kind and patient when one is happy, so he may have been right. I don’t know. It’s a rationalization that thousands of lovers must use.
“We couldn’t see each other very often, but I had my flat and we usually managed to have two evenings a week together. Once Helen—that’s his wife—went to stay with her sister and we had a whole night together. We had to be careful at the clinic, of course, but we don’t really see very much of each other there.”
“How did Miss Bolam find out about it?” asked Dalgliesh.
“It was silly, really. We were at the theatre seeing Anouilh and she was sitting alone in the row behind. Who would suppose that Bolam would want to see Anouilh, anyway? I suppose she was sent a free ticket. It was our second anniversary and we held hands all through the play. We may have been a little drunk. Afterwards we left the theatre still hand in hand. Anyone from the clinic, anyone we knew, could have seen us. We were getting careless and someone was bound to see us sooner or later. It was just chance that it happened to be Bolam. Other people would probably have minded their own business.”
“Whereas she told Mrs. Baguley? That seems an unusually officious and cruel thing to have done.”
“It wasn’t, really. Bolam wouldn’t see it that way. She was one of those rare and fortunate people who never for one moment doubt that they know the difference between right and wrong. She wasn’t imaginative so she couldn’t enter into other people’s feelings. If she were a wife whose husband was unfaithful, I’m sure that she would want to be told about it. Nothing would be worse than not knowing. She had the kind of strength that relishes a struggle. I expect she thought it was her duty to tell. Anyway, Helen came to the Steen to see her husband unexpectedly one Wednesday afternoon and Miss Bolam invited her into the AO’s office and told her. I often wonder what exactly she said. I imagine that she said we were ‘carrying on.’ She could make practically anything sound vulgar.”
“She was taking a risk, wasn’t she?” said Dalgliesh. “She had very little evidence, certainly no proof.”
Miss Saxon laughed. “You’re talking like a policeman. She had proof enough. Enid Bolam could recognize love when she saw it. Besides, we were enjoying ourselves together without a licence and that was infidelity enough.”
The words were bitter but she did not sound resentful or sarcastic. She was sipping her coffee with evident satisfaction. Dalgliesh thought that she might have been talking about one of the clinic patients, discussing with detached and mild professional interest the vagaries of human nature. Yet he did not believe that she loved easily or that her emotions were superficial. He asked what Mrs. Baguley’s reaction had been.
“That’s the extraordinary thing, or at least it seemed so at the time. She took it wonderfully well. Looking back I wonder whether we weren’t all three mad, living in some kind of imaginary world that two minutes’ rational thought would have shown us couldn’t exist. Helen lives her life in a series of attitudes and the one she decided to adopt was the pose of the brave, understanding wife. She insisted on a divorce. It was going to be one of those friendly divorces. That kind is only possible, I imagine, when people have ceased to care for each other, perhaps never have cared or been capable of caring. But that was the kind we were going to have. There was a great deal of discussion. Everyone’s happiness was to be safeguarded. Helen was going to open a dress shop—it’s a thing she’s talked about for years. We all three got interested in it and looked for suitable premises. It was pathetic really. We actually fooled ourselves that it was all going to come right. That’s why I said that James and I felt grateful to Enid Bolam. People at the clinic got to know that there was to be a divorce and that Helen would name me—it was all part of the policy of frankness and honesty—but very little was said to us. Bolam never mentioned the divorce to anyone. She wasn’t a gossip and she wasn’t malicious either. Somehow her part in it got about in the way these things do. I think Helen may have told someone, but Miss Bolam and I never talked about it ever.