A Taste for Death Read Online Free Page B

join a party of his constituents at the House in about an hour.
    Dalgliesh liked Berowne, but the summons was in-convenient. He was not expected at Bramshill until after luncheon and had planned to take his time over the journey to north Hampshire, visiting churches at Sher-borne St John and Winchfield and lunching at a pub near Stratfield Saye before arriving at Bramshill in time for the usual courtesies with the Commandant before his two-thirty lecture. It occurred to him that he had reached the age when a man looks forward to his pleasures less keenly than in youth but is disproportionately aggrieved when his plans are upset. There had been the usual time-consuming, wearying and slightly acrimonious preliminaries to the set-ting up of the new squad in C1 and already his mind was reaching out with relief to the solitary contemplation of alabaster effigies, sixteenth-century glass and the awesome decorations of Winchfield. But it looked as if Paul Berowne wasn't proposing to take much time over their meeting. His plans might still be possible. He left his grip in the office, put on his tweed coat against a blustery autumnal morning and cut through St James's Park station to the Department.
    As he pushed his way through the swing doors he thought again how much he had preferred the Gothic splendour of the old building in Whitehall. It must, he recognized, have been infuriating and inconvenient to work in. It had, after all, been built at a time when the rooms were heated by coal fires tended by an army of
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    minions and when a score of carefully composed hand-written minutes by the Department's legendary eccentrics were adequate to control events which now required three divisions and a couple of under secretaries. This new building was no doubt excellent of its kind, but if the inten-tion had been to express confident authority tempered by humanity he wasn't sure that the architect had succeeded. It looked more suitable for a multinational corporation than for a great Department of State. He particularly missed the huge oil portraits which had dignified that impressive Whitehall staircase, intrigued always by the techniques by which artists of varying talents had coped with the challenge of dignifying the ordinary and occasion-ally unprepossessing features of their sitters by the visual exploitation of magnificent robes and by imposing on their pudgy faces the stern consciousness of imperial power. But at least they had removed the studio photograph of a royal princess which until recently had graced the entrance hall. It had looked more suitable for a West End hairdressing salon.
    He was smilingly recognized at the reception desk, but his credentials were still carefully scrutinized and he was required to await the escorting messenger, even though he had attended enough meetings in the building to be reasonably familiar with these particular corridors of power. Few of the elderly male messengers now remained, and for some years the Department had recruited women. They shepherded their charges with a cheerful, maternal competence as if to reassure them that the place might look like a prison but was as gently beneficent as a nursing home and that they were only there for their own good.
    He was finally shown into the outer office. The House was still in recess for the summer and the room was un-naturally quiet. One of the typewriters was shrouded and a single clerk was collating papers with none of the urgency which normally powered a minister's private office. It would have been a very different scene a few weeks earlier. He thought, not for the first time, that a system which required ministers to run their departments, fulfil their
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