"Death of an Expert Witness"

[fiefoe]

P. D. James likes to describe buildings, both interior and exterior, a lot. It's still a very zippy read, with some parts downright cinematic. The femme fatale in the center of the tale reads very British, and quite dated.

• "It's a cocolith, magnified six thousand times." "A what?" "The skeleton of a microorganism that lived in the ancient seas from which the chalk in the putty was deposited."
  It would have been no use asking him whether he thought there was a unifying purpose in life, whether it could really be chance that an animal so small that it couldn't be seen by the naked eye could die millions of years ago in the depths of the sea and be resurrected by science to prove a man innocent or guilty.
• I don't think the Stanley Spencer is right over the fireplace. It looks incongruous. ... I've never needed Assumption at Cookham to prove it. Why not the Greuze?
• It was the strangest part of a detective's job, this building up of a relationship with the dead, seen only as a crumpled corpse at the scene of crime or naked on the mortuary table.  The victim was central to the mystery of his own death.  He died because of what he was.  Before the case was finished Dalgliesh would have received a dozen pictures of Lorrimer's personality, transferred like prints from other men's minds.  From these amorphous and uncertain images he would create his own imaginings, superimposed and dominant, but essentially just as incomplete, just as distorted--as were the others--by his own preconceptions, his own personality.
• But he would be at Hoggatt's to solve a murder, and all other considerations would go down before that overriding task.  Murder was always solved at a cost, sometimes to himself, more often to others.  And Freeborn was right.  It was a crime which contaminated everyone whom it touched, innocent and guilty alike.
• He would make an ineffective murderer, thought Massingham.  Watching him, he felt some of the instinctive shame of the healthy in the presence of the diseased.
• Both in their different lives had met her kind before.  It was not, thought Dalgliesh, that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life.  She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down.
• He thought: at least this job teaches one not to hoard personal debris.  Police work was as effective as religion in teaching a man to live each day as if it were his last. And it wasn't only murder that violated privacy.  Any sudden death could do as much.
• Dalgliesh said: "I've respected Crabbe ever since I read as a boy that Jane Austen said she could have fancied being Mrs. Crabbe.
  He quoted: "Miseries there were, and woes the world around, But these had not her
  pleasant dwelling found; She knew that mothers grieved and widows wept
  And she was sorry, said her prayers and slept:
  For she indulged, nor was her heart so small That one strong passion
  should engross it all."
• "Congratulations, Giovanni.  Remember me in your garden in Parma."
  What had been so astounding was not the lie itself, or that Schofield had believed it, or pretended to believe it, but that he had hated his brother-in-law enough to die with that taunt on his lips.  Or had he taken it for granted that a physicist, poor philistine, wouldn't know his Jacobean dramatists?
• As she hesitated, the clouds parted like ponderous hands to unveil the full moon, frail and transparent as a communion wafer.  Gazing at it she could almost taste the remembered transitory dough, melting against the roof of her mouth.  Then the clouds formed again and the darkness closed about her.  And the wind was rising.
• But life had taught him that the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven. It was possible to do police work honestly; there was, indeed, no other safe way to do it.  But it wasn't possible to do it without giving pain.
• The clunch field was alive with voices and laughter.  Even the discarded beer-cans glinted like bright toys and the waste paper bowled along merrily in the wind.  The air was keen and smelt of the sea.  It was possible to believe that the Saturday shoppers trailing with their children across the scrubland were carrying their picnics to the beach, that the clunch field led on to dunes and marram grass, to the child-loud fringes of the sea.  Even the screen, which the police were fighting to erect against the wind, looked no more frightening than a Punch-and-Judy stand with a little group of curious people standing patiently at a distance, waiting for the show to begin.

On Crabbe's Procrastination:
https://movingtoyshop.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/crabbe-tale-4procrastination/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Tis_Pity_She%27s_a_Whore