Original Sin Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been that all three were innocent in the sense that none had intended to kill his victim, and Ackroyd had made a plausible, if not entirely convincing case, based on a detailed examination of the medical and forensic evidence. For Dalgliesh the main message of the book had been that men wishing to be acquitted of murder should avoid dismembering their victims, a practice for which British juries have long demonstrated their distaste.
    They were to meet in the library for a sherry before luncheon and Ackroyd was already there ensconced in one of the leather high-backed chairs. He got to his feet with surprising agility for one of his size and came towards Dalgliesh with small, rather prancing steps, looking not a day older than when they had first met.
    He said: “It’s good of you to make time, Adam. I realize how busy you are now. Special adviser to the Commissioner, member of the working party on regional crime squads and an occasional murder investigation to keep your hand in. You mustn’t let them overwork you, dear boy. I’ll ring for sherry. I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you’re still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact. We’ll be downstairs in the Snug.”
    Ackroyd had married in late middle age, to the astonishment and consternation of his friends, and lived in connubialself-sufficiency in an agreeable Edwardian villa in St. John’s Wood where he and Nelly Ackroyd devoted themselves to their house and garden, their two Siamese cats and Ackroyd’s largely imaginary ailments. He owned, edited and financed from a substantial private income
The Paternoster Review
, that iconoclastic mixture of literary articles, reviews and gossip, the last carefully researched, occasionally discreet, more often as malicious as it was accurate. Nelly, when not ministering to her husband’s hypochondria, was an enthusiastic collector of 1920s and 1930s girls’ school stories. The marriage was a success although Conrad’s friends still had to remind themselves to ask after Nelly’s health before enquiring about the cats.
    The last time Dalgliesh had been in the library the visit had been professional and he had been in search of information. But then the case had been murder and he had been greeted by a different host. Little seemed to have changed. The room faced south over the square and this morning was warm with sunlight which, filtering through the fine white curtains, made the thin fire almost unnecessary. Originally the drawing room, it now served both as sitting room and library. The walls were lined with mahogany cases which held what was probably the most comprehensive private library of books on crime in London, including all the volumes of the Notable British Trials and Famous Trials series, books on medical jurisprudence, forensic pathology and policing and the club’s few first editions of Conan Doyle, Poe, Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, in a smaller case as if to demonstrate fiction’s innate inferiority to reality. The large mahogany showcase was still in place, filled with articles collected or donated over the years: the prayer book with the signature Constance Kent on the flyleaf; the flintlock duelling pistol, supposedly used by the Reverend James Hackman for the murder of Margaret Wray, mistress of theEarl of Sandwich; a phial of white powder, allegedly arsenic, found in the possession of Major Herbert Armstrong. There was an addition since Dalgliesh’s last visit. It lay curled, sinister as a lethal snake, in pride of place beneath a label stating that this was the rope with which Crippen had been hanged. Dalgliesh, turning to follow Ackroyd out of the library, mildly suggested that the public display of this distasteful object was barbaric, a protest which Ackroyd as mildly repudiated.
    “A trifle morbid, perhaps, but barbaric is going a little far. After all, this isn’t the