The Murder Room by P. D. James Read Free Book Online Page B

won’t sign a piece of paper. You must put a stop to that nonsense.”
    He took up the sherry bottle and, moving over to her, refilled both their glasses. They raised them simultaneously as if in a pledge.
    â€œYes,” he said gravely. “If necessary I must put a stop to Neville.”
    4
    In the Principal’s room at Swathling’s, Lady Swathling and Caroline Dupayne settled down at precisely ten o’clock on Saturday morning for their weekly conference. That this should be a semi-formal occasion, cancelled only for a personal emergency and interrupted only for the arrival of coffee at eleven, was typical of their relationship. So was the arrangement of the room. They sat facing each other in identical armchairs at a mahogany partners’ desk set in front of the wide south-facing window which gave a view of the lawn, its carefully tended rosebushes showing their bare prickly stems above the crumbly weedless soil. Beyond the lawn, the Thames was a glimpse of dull silver under the morning sky.
    The Richmond house was the main asset Lady Swathling brought to their joint enterprise. Her mother-in-law had established the school and it had passed on to her son and now to her daughter-in-law. Until the arrival of Caroline Dupayne, neither school nor house had improved during her stewardship, but the house, through good times and bad, remained beautiful. And so, in the opinion of herself and of others, did its owner.
    Lady Swathling had never asked herself whether she liked her partner. It was not a question she asked herself of anyone. People were useful or not useful, agreeable to be with or bores to be avoided. She liked her acquaintances to be good-looking or, if their genes and fate hadn’t favoured them, at least to be well groomed and to make the most of what they had. She never entered the Principal’s room for the weekly conference without a glance in the large oval mirror which hung beside the door. The look was by now automatic, the reassurance it gave unnecessary. No smoothing was ever needed of the grey silver-streaked hair, expensively styled but not so rigidly disciplined as to suggest an obsessive concern with externals. The well-cut skirt reached mid-calf, a length she adhered to through changing fashions. A cashmere cardigan was slung with apparent carelessness over the cream silk shirt. She knew that she was seen as a distinguished and successful woman in control of her life; that was precisely how she saw herself. What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure. She recognized that her appearance was an asset to the school, as was her title. Admittedly it had originally been a “Lloyd-George” barony, which the
cognoscenti
well knew had been bestowed for favours to the Prime Minister and Party rather than to the country, but today only the naÏve or the innocent worried about—or indeed were surprised at—that kind of patronage; a title was a title.
    She loved the house with a passion she felt for no human being. She never entered it without a small physical surge of satisfaction that it was hers. The school which bore her name was at last successful and there was enough money to maintain the house and garden with some to spare. She knew that she owed this success to Caroline Dupayne. She could recall almost every word of that conversation seven years earlier when Caroline, who had been working for seven months as her personal assistant, had put forward her plan for reform, boldly and without invitation, and seemingly motivated more by her abhorrence of muddle and failure than by personal ambition.
    â€œUnless we change, the numbers will continue to fall. Frankly there are two problems: we’re not giving value for money and we don’t know what we’re for. Both are fatal. We can’t go on living in the past and the present political setup is on our side. There is no advantage for parents in