Free A Taste for Death by P. D. James Page A

Two more of the nave lights had been switched on but the church was still dim compared with the harsh glare of the arc lights trained on the scene and it took him a minute to locate Father Barnes,
    a dark shape at the end of the first row of chairs under the pulpit. He walked up to him, aware of the ring of his feet on the tiled floor, wondering whether they sounded as portentous to the priest as they did to him.
    Father Barnes was sitting bolt upright on his chair, his eyes staring ahead at the gleaming curve of the apse, his body taut and contracted, like that of a patient expecting pain, willing himself to endure. He didn't turn his head as Dalgliesh approached. He had obviously been summoned in a hurry. His face was unshaved and the hands, rigidly damped together in his lap, were grubby, as if he hffd gone to bed unwashed. The cassock, whose long black lines etiolated still further his lean body, was old and stained with what looked like gravy. One spot he had tried in-effectively to rub away. His black shoes were unpolished, the leather cracked at the sides, the toes scruffed into greyness. There came from him a smell, half-musty, half disagreeably sweet, of old clothes and incense, overlaid with stale sweat, a smell which was a pitiable amalgam of failure and fear. As Dalgliesh eased his long limbs in the adjoining chair and rested his arm along its back, it seemed to him that his body encompassed and, by its own calm presence, gently eased a core of fear and tension in his companion, so strong that it was almost palpable. He felt a sudden compunction. The man would, of course, have come fasting to the first Mass of the day. He would be craving hot coffee and food. Normally someone at or near the scene would be brewing tea but Dalgliesh had no in-tention of using the wahshroom even to boil a kettle until
    the scene of crime officer had done his work.
    He said:
    'I won't keep you long, Father. There are just a few questions and we'll let you go back to the Vicarage. This must have been a horrible shock to you.' Father Barnes still didn't look at him. He said in a low voice:
    'A shock. Yes, it was a shock. I shouldn't have let him have the key. I don't know really why I did. It isn't easy to explain.' The voice was unexpected. It was low with an agreeable trace of huskiness and with a hint of more power
    than the frail body would suggest; not an educated voice but one on which education had imposed a discipline which hadn't quite obliterated the provincial, probably East Anglian, accent of childhood. He turned now to Dalgliesh and said again:
    'They'll say I'm responsible. I shouldn't have let him
    have the key. I'm to blame.'
    Dalgliesh said:
    'You aren't responsible. You know that perfectly well and so will they.' The ubiquitous, frightening, judgemental 'they'. He thought, but did not say, that murder provided its own dreadful excitement for those who neither mourned nor were directly concerned and that people were commonly indulgent to those who helped provide the entertainment. Father Barnes would be surprised - agree-able or otherwise - by the size of next Sunday's congrega-tion. He said:
    'Could we start at the beginning? When did you first meet Sir Paul Berowne?'
    'Last Monday, just over a week ago. He called at the Vicarage at about half past two and asked if he could see the church. He'd come here first and found he couldn't get in. We'd like to keep the church open all the time but you know how it is today. Vandals, people trying to break open the offertory box, stealing the candles. There's a note in the north porch saying that the key is at the Vicarage.'
    'I suppose he didn't say what he was doing in Pad-dington?'
    'Yes, he did, actually. He said that an old friend was in St Mary's Hospital and he'd been to see him. But the patient was having treatment and couldn't see visitors so he had an hour to spare. He said he'd always wanted to see St Matthew's.'
    So that was how it had started. Berowne's life, like