Dalgliesh is assigned to investigate the death on Combe Island

Adam Dalgliesh is assigned to investigate a death on Combe Island after an urgent meeting at New Scotland Yard on Saturday, 23 October. The task brings an apparently local death into contact with a top-secret international meeting planned for the island, while placing Dalgliesh in charge of an inquiry whose scale and public consequences will depend on what happened to the dead man.

The Assignment

At 10:55 a.m., Dalgliesh enters Assistant Commissioner Harkness’s office on the seventh floor of New Scotland Yard. He is accustomed to urgent meetings, but reads this one as the prelude to a murder investigation: the men’s expressions are less significant than the particular unease that unnatural death can provoke, a reminder that not everything can be brought under bureaucratic control.

Alexander Conistone of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office explains the immediate stakes. A murder would be especially embarrassing, and suicide almost as serious under the circumstances; either way, the victim’s identity would attract publicity. Conistone confirms that Dalgliesh is to take the case, before Harkness adds that the security rating of the planned gathering on Combe Island could not be higher.

Security and the Island

The death is entangled with preparations for a top-secret international meeting that the Prime Minister hopes to hold on Combe Island in early January. No date has been fixed, but the island has already been selected as the preferred location. The investigators are not told who will attend or why, keeping the diplomatic purpose outside Dalgliesh’s immediate brief even as it shapes the conditions of his work.

The island’s caretaker, Maycroft, had been given a telephone number and instructed to contact the Trustees if anything untoward occurred. He called as soon as possible after finding the body, apparently following those instructions. Dalgliesh is told to expect that local colleagues will need an explanation for the arrival of a Metropolitan Police commander and detective inspector in place of a routine local CID response.

Initial Investigation Plan

Dalgliesh proposes a deliberately small deployment. He is still awaiting a replacement for Tarrant, but will take Inspector Miskin and Sergeant Benton-Smith. At this early stage he expects to manage without a scene-of-crime officer or official photographer; if the death proves to be murder, however, he will need reinforcements or must hand the case to the local force.

A pathologist is also necessary. Dalgliesh initially intends to contact Kynaston, but Harkness says the inquiry will use Edith Glenister instead and explains that she is stationed in the south-west while Kynaston is unavailable. Harkness has arranged for Dalgliesh to travel by helicopter and for the body to be taken to the mortuary Glenister uses, with her report expected the following day. The assignment therefore begins with both an investigative uncertainty and an unusually managed chain of arrangements, setting the inquiry apart from an ordinary local death investigation.