“Are you applying for a warrant?”
“Not yet. We’re not ready. If we don’t go carefully now, the whole case could come apart in our hands.”
Again he was visited by the chilling presentiment of disaster. He found himself analysing the case as if he had already failed. Where had it gone wrong? He had shown his hand to the murderer when he had taken the clinic diagnostic index so openly into the medical director’s room. That fact would be round the clinic quickly enough. He had meant it to be. There came a time when it was useful to frighten your man. But was this killer the kind who could be frightened into betraying himself? Had it been an error of judgement to move so openly?
Suddenly Martin’s plain, honest face looked irritatingly bovine as he stood there unhelpfully waiting for instructions. Dalgliesh said: “You went to the Priddys’ place, I suppose. Well, let’s have the dirt about that. The girl is married, I suppose?”
“There’s no doubt about that, sir. I was there earlier this evening and I had a chat with the parents. Luckily Miss Priddy was out, fetching fish and chips for supper. They’re in quite poor circumstances.”
“That’s a non sequitur. However, go on.”
“There isn’t much to report. They live in one of those terrace houses leading down to the southern railway line in Balham. Everything’s very comfortable and neat but there’s no television or anything like that. I suppose their religion’s against it. Both the Priddys are over sixty, I reckon. Jennifer’s the only child and her mother must have been more than forty when she was born. It’s the usual story about the marriage. I was surprised they told me but they did. The husband’s a warehouseman; used to work with the girl at her last job. Then there was a baby on the way so they had to get married.”
“It’s almost pitiably common. You’d think that her generation, who think they know all the answers about sex, would make themselves familiar with a few basic facts. However, we’re told these little mishaps don’t worry anyone these days.”
Dalgliesh was shocked by the bitterness in his own voice. Was it really necessary, he wondered, to protest quite so vehemently about so common a little tragedy? What was happening to him?
Martin said stolidly: “They worry people like the Priddys. These kids get themselves into trouble but it’s usually the despised older generation who have to cope. The Priddys did their best. They made the kids marry, of course. There isn’t much room in the house but they gave up the first floor and made it into a small flat for the young couple. Very nicely done it was too. They showed me.”
Dalgliesh thought how much he disliked the expression “young couple,” with its cosy undertones of dewy-eyed domesticity, its echo of disillusion.
“You seem to have made a hit in your brief visit,” he said.
“I liked them, sir. They’re good people. The marriage didn’t last, of course, and I think that they wonder now whether they did the right thing in forcing it. The chap left Balham over two years ago and they don’t know where he is now. They told me his name and I saw his photograph. He’s got nothing to do with the Steen Clinic, sir.”
“I didn’t think he had. We hardly expected to discover that Jennifer Priddy was Mrs. Henry Etherege. Neither her parents nor her husband have anything to do with this crime.”
Nor had they, except that their lives, like flying tangents, had made brief contact with the circle of death. Every murder case produced such people. Dalgliesh had sat more times than he could remember in sitting rooms, bedrooms, pubs and police stations talking to people who had come, however briefly, in touch with murder. Violent death was a great releaser of inhibitions, the convulsive kick which spun open the top of so many anthills. His job, in which he could deceive himself that non-involvement was a duty, had given him glimpses into the secret lives of men and women whom he might never see again except as half-recognized faces in a London crowd. Sometimes he despised his private image, the patient, uninvolved, uncensorious inquisitor of other people’s misery and guilt. How long could you stay detached, he wondered, before you lost your own soul?
“What happened to the child?” he asked suddenly.
“She had a miscarriage, sir,” answered Martin. Of course, thought Dalgliesh. She would. Nothing could go right for such as the Priddys. Tonight he felt that he, too, was tainted with their ill luck. He asked what Martin had learned about Miss Bolam.
“Not much that we didn’t know already. They went to the same church and Jennifer Priddy used to be a Girl Guide in Bolam’s company. The old people spoke of her with a great deal of respect. She was helpful to them when the baby was on the way—I got the impression that she paid to have the house converted—and, when the marriage failed, she suggested that the Priddy child should work at the Steen. I think the old people were glad to think that someone was keeping an eye on Jenny. They couldn’t tell me much about Miss Bolam’s private life, at least nothing that we don’t know. There was one odd thing though. It happened when the girl got back with the supper. Mrs. Priddy asked me to stay and have a meal with them but I said I’d better be getting back. You know what it is with fish and chips. You just buy the right number of pieces and it isn’t easy to fit in an extra. Anyway, they called the girl in to say ‘good-bye’ and she came in from the kitchen looking like death. She only stayed a second or two and the old people didn’t seem to notice anything. But I did. Something had scared the kid properly.”
“Finding you there, perhaps. She may have thought that you’d mentioned her friendship with Nagle.”
“I don’t think it was that, sir. She looked into the sitting room when she first got back from the shop and said ‘good evening’ without turning a hair. I explained that I was just having a chat with her parents because they were friends of Miss Bolam and might be able to tell us something useful about her private life. It didn’t seem to worry her. It was about five minutes later that she came back looking so odd.”
“No one arrived at the house or telephoned during that time?”
“No. I heard no one anyway. They aren’t on the phone. I suppose it was something that occurred to her while she was alone in the kitchen. I couldn’t very well ask her. I was on my way out and there wasn’t anything you could put tongue to. I just told them all that if they thought of anything that might help, they should let us know at once.”
“We’ve got to see her again, of course, and the sooner the better. That alibi’s got to be broken and she’s the only one who can do it. I don’t think the girl was consciously lying or even deliberately withholding evidence. The truth simply never occurred to her.”
“Nor to me, sir, until we got the motive. What do you want to do now? Let him sweat a bit?”
“I daren’t, Martin. It’s too dangerous. We’ve got to press on. I think we’ll go now and have a little chat with Nagle.”
But when they reached the Pimlico house twenty minutes later, they found the flat locked and a folded scrap of paper wedged under the knocker. Dalgliesh smoothed it out and read aloud. “Darling. Sorry I missed you. I must speak to you. If I don’t see you tonight, I’ll be at the clinic early. Love, Jenny.”
“Any point in waiting for him, sir?”