Read Online Death of an Expert Witness by P. D. James - Free Book Online

didn't reply. She looked at him and said: "What's wrong?"
    "How did Lorrimer know about Gina?" He didn't need to ask her if it was she who had told him. Whatever else she may have confided, it would not have been that. She went across, ostensibly to study the Stanley Spencer set in the over mantel of the fireplace, and asked lightly:
    "Why? He didn't mention your divorce, did he?"
    "Not directly, but the allusion was intended." She turned to face him.
    "He probably took the trouble to find out as much as possible about you when he knew that you were a candidate for the job here. It isn't such a large service after all."
    "But I came from outside it."
    "Even so, there would be contacts, gossip. A failed marriage is one of those unconsidered trifles he might expect to sniff out. And what of it? After all, it's not unusual. I thought forensic scientists were particularly at risk. All those late hours at scenes of crime and the unpredictable court attendances. They ought to be used to marital breakups."
    He said, knowing that he sounded as petulant as an obstinate child:
    "I don't want him in my Lab."
    "Your Lab? It isn't quite as simple as that, is it? I don't think the Stanley Spencer is right over the fireplace. It looks incongruous.
    It's strange that Father bought it. Not at all his kind of picture I should have said. Did you put it here to shock?"
    Miraculously, his anger and misery were assuaged. But then she had always been able to do that for him.
    "Merely to disconcert and confuse. It's intended to suggest that I may be a more complex character than they assume."
    "Oh, but you are! I've never needed Assumption at Cookham to prove it. Why not the Greuze? It would look good with that carved over mantel "Too pretty." She laughed, and was gone. He picked up Clifford Bradley's report and, in the space provided, wrote:
    "Mr. Bradley's performance has been disappointing, but not all the difficulties are of his making. He lacks confidence and would benefit from more active encouragement and support than he has received. I have corrected the final marking to what I consider a more just assessment and have spoken to the senior biologist about the personnel management in his department."
    If he did finally decide, after all, this wasn't the job for him, that snide comment should go some way to ensure that Lorrimer stood no chance of succeeding him as Director of Hoggatt's.
    At one forty-eight precisely Paul Middlemass, the Document Examiner, opened his file on the clunch pit murder. The Document Examination Room, which occupied the whole of the front of the building immediately under the roof, smelled like a stationer's shop, a pungent amalgam of paper and ink, sharpened by the tang of chemicals. Middlemass breathed it as his native air. He was a tall, rangy, large-featured man with a mobile, wide-mouthed face of agreeable ugliness and iron-grey hair which fell in heavy swathes over parchment coloured skin. Easy-going and seemingly indolent, he was in fact a prodigious worker with an obsession for his job. Paper in all its manifestations was his passion. Few men, in or outside the forensic science service, knew so much about it. He handled it with joy and with a kind of reverence, gloated over it, knew its provenance almost by its smell.
    Identification of the sizing and loading of a specimen by spectrographic or X-ray crystallography merely confirmed what touch and sight had already pronounced. The satisfaction of watching the emergence of an obscure water-mark under soft X-rays never palled, and the final pattern was as fascinating to his unsurprised eyes as the expected potter's mark to a collector of porcelain.
    His father, long dead, had been a dentist, and his son had taken for his own use the old man's inordinately large store of self-designed surgical overalls. They were old-fashioned in exit, wasted and full-skirted as the coat of a Regency buck, and with crested metal buttons fastening high to the side of the throat.