Now the story: At Peverell Press, a publishing house, there are a suicide and a suspicious death. When Gerard Etienne’s body is found, the police instantly suspects foul play and investigate.
I’ll go straight to the ending because I want to talk about what enraged me.
Gerard wasn’t the only one killed, one of their authors was too, old Esmé Carling, simply because she had seen something even if she didn’t know the importance of what she had seen. Also Gerard’s sister Claudia, but that happens at the end. The murderer was Gabriel Dauntsey, a man who had served during the second world war, and he came back to learn that his jewish wife and twin kids had been killed. For years he had looked for evidence and now he had find proof that Gerard’s father, consider a sort of war hero because he worked for the resistance in France, had been the one responsible for telling the Germans about them. Inspector Daniel Aaron, the one who replaced Massingham, was the first of them to learn the truth finding the evidence that Gabriel had accumulated over the years and also a picture of his wife and kids. He understood that Gabriel had taken revenge on the Etienne family, and instead of calling Dalgliesh immediately he felt rage for what old Etienne had done and sympathy for Dauntsey and thought only of warning him. He didn’t discover Claudia’s body when he chased after him with his car, and when he learned about it from Frances Peverell who had been taken along against her will he didn’t even flinch. He understood that Dauntsey had acted his own justice, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, and still was on his side. How many civilians had Dauntsey killed during the war? Those don’t matter because he was on the winning side? Or Daniel didn’t think of that because those lives meant nothing to him while the woman and kids were jewish like his family and him? At the end Gabriel kills himself without killing old Etienne when he’s told that Gerard and Claudia were not blood related to him at all, Etienne’s wife wanted children and he couldn’t have them so they adopted two children; Gabriel had thought ‘you killed my son and daughter, I killed your son and daughter, this is justice’ but realized that he had killed two people who had nothing to do with him. Justice he called it, even if they had been related to Etienne they had done nothing terrible, they weren’t guilty. I could understand Gabriel’s folly, because it was his family and because he probably had felt guilty of not being with them, but Daniel! He felt for their death because they were jewish and didn’t feel a thing for Gerard, Claudia or even Esmé. He was so strict, accusing Etienne of not even remember their names as if they were nothing, as if during wartime those who fight know the names of all the civilians that they kill. Of course this case was a bit different because he was supposed to protect them, being part of the resistance, but felt he had to gain and keep the trust of the Germans to be able to keep doing it. Still, we don’t know everything he did, how it really went, we only know a bit of what he did during that time. It’s never right when civilians die during a war because they have no choice if their Countries become belligerent, what can they do? How can someone say that one case is acceptable and the other isn’t? I saw the film on the Enigma code, and how they let a ship full of people be attacked in order to keep that knowledge and win the war. How many civilians died, did they know or remember all their names, what would their families feel? We know that Etienne sacrificed at least three people, maybe more, but what else did he do, did he save others, did he help win the war? Who can say what is right and what isn’t during a war? I only know that wars are bad and shouldn’t happen.
The fact that they were not blood related was important so that Dauntsey would kill himself, but it should have been otherwise irrelevant; a son should never be held accountable for what his father did, otherwise where would it end? The children, the spouse, brothers and sisters, parents, cousins??
Some people would never stand a chance even before their birth! And why stop at relatives, what if someone kills someone from your own town, do you take revenge on a random person from his own town? Surely everyone can see the madness of it.
The fact that Daniel never lied to Dalgliesh and was very straightforward telling him the whole truth about what he did only shows that he thought he was in the right, but he wasn’t.
Daniel was so wrong and unforgivable to side with a man who had killed in cold blood three people who had nothing to do with his tragedy at all, and I really hope I won’t be seeing him in future books I read.
More comments:
I was glad that James DeWitt had nothing to do with it, I liked him, and was glad that Frances went back to him safe, so I can guess that she’ll become the new head of Peverell Press and marry James. Another scenario might be that she leaves the PP to him and chooses a different path for herself since she never really loved her job apparently but only entered into it to try and please her father. Both are nice.
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