Excerpt of The Lighthouse by P.D. James
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Commander
Adam Dalgliesh was not unused to being urgently summoned to
non-scheduled meetings with unspecified people at inconvenient times,
but usually with one purpose in common: he could be confident that
somewhere there lay a dead body awaiting his attention. There were other
urgent calls, other meetings, sometimes at the highest level. Dalgliesh,
as a permanent ADC to the Commissioner, had a number of functions which,
as they grew in number and importance, had become so ill-defined that
most of his colleagues had given up trying to define them. But this
meeting, called in Assistant Commissioner Harkness's office on the
seventh floor of New Scotland Yard at ten-fifty-five on the morning of
Saturday, 23 October, had, from his first entry into the room, the
unmistakable presaging of murder. This had nothing to do with a certain
serious tension on the faces turned towards him; a departmental debacle
would have caused greater concern. It was rather that unnatural death
always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realisation that
there were still some things that might not be susceptible to
bureaucratic control.
There were only three men awaiting him and Dalgliesh was surprised to
see Alexander Conistone of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He liked
Conistone, who was one of the few eccentrics remaining in an
increasingly conformist and politicised service. Conistone had acquired
a reputation for crisis management. This was partly founded on his
belief that there was no emergency that was not amenable to precedent or
departmental regulations, but when these orthodoxies failed, he could
reveal a dangerous capacity for imaginative initiatives which, by any
bureaucratic logic, deserved to end in disaster but never did. Dalgliesh,
for whom few of the labyrinths of Westminster bureaucracy were wholly
unfamiliar, had earlier decided that this dichotomy of character was
inherited. Generations of Conistones had been soldiers. The foreign
fields of Britain's imperialistic past were enriched by the bodies of
unmemorialised victims of previous Conistones' crises management. Even
Conistone's eccentric appearance reflected a personal ambiguity. Alone
among his colleagues, he dressed with the careful pinstriped conformity
of a civil servant of the Thirties while, with his strong bony face,
mottled cheeks and hair with the resilient waywardness of straw, he
looked like a farmer.
He was seated next to Dalgliesh opposite one of the wide windows. Having
sat through the first ten minutes of the present meeting with an unusual
economy of words, he sat, his chair a little tilted, complacently
surveying the panorama of towers and spires, lit by a transitory
unseasonable morning sun. Of the four men in the room—Conistone, Adam
Dalgliesh, Assistant Commissioner Harkness and a fresh-faced boy from
MI5 who had been introduced as Colin Reeves—Conistone, the one most
concerned with the matter in hand, had so far said the least while
Reeves, preoccupied with the effort of remembering what was being said
without the humiliating expedient of being seen to take notes, hadn't
yet spoken. Now Conistone stirred himself for a summing up.
"Murder would be the most embarrassing for us, suicide hardly less so in
the circumstances. Accidental death we could probably live with. Given
the victim, there's bound to be publicity whichever it is, but it should
be manageable unless this is murder. The problem is that we haven't much
time. No date has been fixed yet, but the PM would like to arrange this
top-secret international get-together in early January. A good time.
Parliament not sitting, nothing much happens just after Christmas,
nothing is expected to happen. The PM seems to have set his mind on
Combe. So you'll take on the case, Adam? Good."
Excerpted
from The Lighthouse by P. D. James Copyright © 2005 by P. D.
James. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
