Macalvie broke in. “Someone has it in for the Ashcrofts, then? But why kill the kids? The worst possible revenge? Let me see that will.”
Jury handed it over to Macalvie. “I had a talk with Simon Riley’s stepmother. Maiden name — Wiggins reminded me — Elizabeth Allan. Born in County Waterford, but not much Irish blood flows through her veins or her voice.”
Macalvie was silent for a moment, combing through James Ashcroft’s will. Then he turned to shout over the jukebox din that if Freddie liked “Jailhouse Rock” that much, he could arrange for her to hear it from the inside. “I told you these cases were related. And I told you about Mary Mulvanney, except you still don’t believe it.” He grinned. “Scotland Yard, two; Macalvie, two.” He looked Plant up and down. “You, one.”
“Thanks,” said Melrose Plant, offering Macalvie a cigar, which (to Wiggins’s fright) Macalvie took.
“Robert Ashcroft, Molly Singer —”
“Mary Mulvanney,” Macalvie corrected Jury automatically, eyes closed so that he could enjoy the inhalation of smoke to the maximum.
“God, Macalvie,” said Jury. “You’re so damned right all the time.”
Macalvie opened his eyes. “I know.”
“Sam Waterhouse. Just assume for the moment he was guilty of Rose Mulvanney’s murder —”
Macalvie shook his head.
“Where is he?”
Macalvie shrugged.
Jury almost laughed. “You’re the only person I know who can lie with a shrug. You’re worse than Freddie. No wonder you hang around here. Why the hell don’t you stop trying to protect Sam Waterhouse?”
Macalvie studied the coal-end of his cigar. “Okay. He was in here.”
Jury looked at Melrose Plant. “You met him?”
Plant nodded. “It does sound as if police were looking for a scapegoat. The evidence against him was pretty circumstantial. You think so, too, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. But I certainly think the evidence against Molly Singer is circumstantial.”
“Mary Mulvanney.” Macalvie’s kneejerk response.
“How’d she do at Ashcroft?” Jury asked Melrose.
“Miss Singer? Incredibly well —”
“She’s no more phobic than I am,” said Macalvie generously.
Melrose Plant smiled. “I’d be careful with comparisons if I were you, Mr. Macalvie.”
“So we’ve got the pictures, so what have we got? Yeah, there was an advert. Robert Ashcroft went to see a Roller in Hampstead Heath.” Macalvie stuffed a couple of Plant’s cigars in his pocket before he got up. “The hell with it. It’s time we had a little talk with Robert Ashcroft.”
On his way out, Macalvie kicked the jukebox and “Don’t Be Cruel.”
II
“Mr. Ashcroft,” said Macalvie, “you usually interview potential tutors or governesses or whatever you call them at home, don’t you?”
There was a decanter of whiskey at his elbow, and Macalvie had no hesitation in helping himself. It went down well with Plant’s cigars.
“That’s right.” Robert Ashcroft looked from Macalvie to Jury to Wiggins taking notes. He frowned. “I’m sorry. I don’t —”
Macalvie made a sign with his hand that Ashcroft didn’t have to understand a damned thing. Yet. “But this time you went to London to interview the applicants.”
Ashcroft smiled. It was an easy smile. “I decided it might be better. I believe I’d misjudged my niece’s ability to make the final choice.”
“The lady Jessica not being such a hot judge of character?”
Ashcroft’s smile was even more disarming. “On the contrary, a wonderful judge. She always chose the one least suitable.”
Macalvie frowned. “As a governess?”
“No. As a wife. Jess is afraid I’m going to be snagged by Jane Eyre.”
“With you as Rochester,” said Macalvie. “So you’re not in danger of marriage, then?”
“I never thought of marriage as ‘dangerous.’ Are you suggesting some sexual leaning? That every couple of months I go up to London to indulge my perverse tastes?”
Macalvie turned the cigar round and round in his mouth. “We weren’t thinking particularly of you down in your lab drinking something that would turn you into Hyde, no.”
“Superintendent —”
“Chief.” Macalvie smiled.
“I beg your pardon. Are you still upset about that crazy ruse of Jess’s that brought you all out here?”
“Hell, no. Kids will be kids, won’t they?” His smile flickered less like the flame than the moth. “You stayed at the Ritz, right? On the tenth to the fifteenth?”
“Yes. What’s that —?”
“You interviewed several applicants for this post.”
Robert Ashcroft nodded, frowning.
“What else did you do?”
“Nothing much. Went to see a Rolls-Royce in Hampstead But it wasn’t what I wanted.”
“And —?”
Ashcroft had risen from the sofa and gone to toss his cigarette into the fireplace. The picture of his brother hung over him. Jury wondered how heavily. “I went to the theater and the Tate. Walked round Regent’s Park and Piccadilly. What’s this all about?”
“What’d you see?”
Ashcroft’s bewilderment turned to anger. “Pigeons.”
“Funny. The play, I mean.”
“The Aspern Papers. Vanessa Redgrave.”
“Good?”
“No. I walked out.”
Macalvie put on his surprised and innocent look. “You walked out on Vanessa Redgrave?”
“I didn’t exactly throw her over for another woman.”
“I don’t imagine many people walked out.”
“I wasn’t checking. Except my coat,” Ashcroft said, acidly.
“So since probably no one would walk out on Vanessa, I bet the cloakroom attendant would remember you.”
Ashcroft was furious. “What in the hell is this about, Chief Superintendent Macalvie?”
“What was at the Tate?”
“Pictures.”
It wasn’t as easy to unnerve Ashcroft as Jury thought.
“Mr. Ashcroft, would you try not playing this for laughs? What was at the Tate?”
“The Pre-Raphaelities.”
Macalvie was silent, turning the cigar.
“Ever heard of them?”
“Rossetti and that bunch. I’ve heard. Why didn’t you drive to London with all those cars sitting around out there?”
“For the obvious reason. I thought I’d be buying a car — the Rolls.”
Jury sat there, smoking, saying nothing.
Robert Ashcroft had an answer for everything. And Macalvie knew it.
TWENTY-SIX
“THAT’S it for tonight, then.” Sara slapped the book shut.
Jessie, whose bed they were lying on, since she refused her nightly story in the Laura Ashley room, had been getting so drowsy her head had nearly drifted onto Sara’s arm. Quickly, she snapped out of it. To have Sara think she was actually cozying up to her would be dreadful. “You’ve left off at the best part. Where Heathcliff is carrying Cathy’s dead body around.”
“You do put things in the most morbid way.”
“I didn’t write it, did I?” said Jess, reasonably. She felt as if Sara had reprimanded her, no matter how mildly. Jess gave Henry (who was lying at the bottom of the bed) a little kick. If she was being scolded, then Henry would have to come in for his share of it. What was really bothering her was that, against her will — and that would require a strong force indeed — she was afraid she might begin to like Sara. The Selfless Sara. Jessie sighed. But she didn’t think she liked her as much as that lady photographer. Maybe it was because the one named Molly had fears, just as Jess had, only they wouldn’t admit it.
It was an awful dilemma, liking someone you wanted to hate, the worst dilemma since the ax-murderer call to police. All of that blood in her mind had become so vivid it might have bee
n really running down the walls. She shuddered.
“What’s the matter?” asked Sara.
“Nothing.” Jessie picked up the glossy magazine Molly Singer had given her. Executive Cars.
Sara was saying something about Heathcliff. “I thought you thought he was so romantic.”
Romance? How disgusting. Better to imagine murderers stalking her (and Henry) across the moor. Green, green bogs with liverworts and moss, like Cranmere Pool, and peat, and rush ground where you could be sucked down, your head just dangling, as if guillotined, your little hand (and Henry’s paw), the last thing to disappear from the sight of all those gathered round, throwing ropes, calling to you. . . .
“Romance is stupid.”
Sara hit her lightly over the head with the book. “You’re the one asked me to read it.” Sara sat up suddenly, her back rigid. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Jessie was looking at a picture of a Lamborghini, newer than Molly’s. Twenty thousand pounds. Maybe Mr. Mack —
“It sounded like a car. Down the drive.”
Jessie yawned, her eyes getting heavy. “Maybe it’s Uncle Rob and Victoria coming back.” She thought her uncle had been awfully moody at dinner. Victoria got him to go out for a drive and a drink at a new pub several miles away. Maybe Victoria would worm out of him what was wrong. Her eyes snapped open.
Victoria, Jessie realized suddenly, was rather good at getting her uncle in a better frame of mind. She frowned and thought about that.
“It’s too early for them to be back,” said Sara.
Now Sara looked moody and worried. What was the matter with everyone? “I want hot chocolate and toast. Come on, Henry.”
Moody himself, Henry clambered down off the bed.
II
Jess sat at the kitchen table, turning the pages of Executive Cars, while the kettle for tea and the pan of milk for chocolate heated on the hob. Sara got out the granary loaf to cut and toast. “I wish the Mulchops were here,” she said.
The Mulchops had gone to Okehampton to visit some relative or other. “Them? Whatever for?”
Sara shrugged. “I just feel — edgy.”
Jess slapped over another page, annoyed. “Well, they wouldn’t be any help. I mean if some ghost was walking around or something.”
“Stop talking like that.”
Jess shrugged. Sara was spoiling one of Jess’s favorite times. The kitchen chill around the edges, but nice and warm right here by the fire, without Mrs. Mulchop bustling and kneading dough and Mulchop slopping down soup and giving Jessie evil looks. He didn’t like her, she knew, because she got under the cars.
Probably because she was “edgy,” Sara started humming to herself, and then singing while she sliced the bread. She must have thought ghosts and vampires and werewolves ran away when they heard old Irish tunes. Jess glanced up when she heard “. . . when she was dead, and laid in grave . . .” “That’s ‘Barbara Allan.’ ”
Sara looked stricken. “Oh, I’m sorry. Really. I suppose it’s because I hear so much about your mother —” She stopped, staring toward the kitchen door, the one that led out to the courtyard. “There is a noise out there.”
This time Jess heard it too. A sort of scraping sound. But the wind was getting higher, and one of the stable doors banged; the sound could have been anything. “It’s just the horses.” She really wished Sara weren’t such a mouse about things. It was just like the wife in Rebecca. She thrust that thought from her mind.
Sara went back to cutting the bread, and just as suddenly stopped. “It sounds like footsteps.” She listened intently, shook her head, went back to the bread.
Well, it had sounded like footsteps, but Jess refused to give in. “It’s just Henry; sometimes he scrapes his paw in his sleep.” Henry never moved anything in his sleep, as Jess knew perfectly well.
She went on looking at the cars. Daimlers, Rollers, Ferraris . . . next page, another Daimler and some cheaper cars, but still collector’s items. Beside the black Daimler was a little Morris Minor, vintage.
The Daimler . . . she kept her eyes averted because they were filling with tears. Her father James had been taken to the cemetery in a Daimler. And once again the graveyard scene sprang up, as if it were yesterday, and she saw herself standing beside the grave. The mourners — thick-veiled women, black-suited men. Her uncle had been the only spot of light in that dark-shrouded world.
That Daimler had had a Y registration. Jess blushed from remembering having noticed, even in her grief, the registration on the funereal Daimler. And then her skin went cold.
She turned back to the page before. Morris Minor. Black. R registration. Jess’s thoughts stopped suddenly, braking. It must be what an animal feels, maybe even Henry. The thoughts stop. Senses take over. You see, you hear, you feel fright. . . .
What she heard, and Sara, too, given the knife had stopped slicing bread, was the creaking in the kitchen entry. Sara’s face was pale, looking toward the door that, when Jess had nerved herself to look around, was opening.
Molly Singer stood there in her silvery cape, white-faced, black-haired. In her fright, Jess almost thought she was seeing a ghost.
Except that this ghost was holding a gun in her black-gloved hand.
Despite all of this, the only thing that Jess could see in her mind’s eye was a black Daimler and a Morris Minor. R registration. Not vintage.
She stared at Molly Singer and then back at the kitchen table, where an entire loaf of bread lay sliced, and wondered, what had Sara Millar’s car been doing at her father’s funeral?
II
Five miles away in the Help the Poor Struggler, Macalvie was still arguing that Ashcroft had gone about the whole interviewing business in a damned peculiar way.
Melrose Plant was drinking Old Peculier and smoking. And wondering about Robert Ashcroft’s “interviews.”
“He could have left that play deliberately so he’d establish that he’d been in London. How many people walk out on Vanessa?” asked Macalvie.
Wiggins said, “The cloakroom attendant recognized the picture immediately. No luck yet though with the car lots. But we’ve only had a few hours.” He made a bit of a production of unzipping a box of lozenges to call the divisional commander’s attention to the fact that Macalvie was smoking. Again.
“And why didn’t he call home? Gone for five days and not a word back to his beloved niece,” Macalvie went on, looking from Plant to Jury, irritated that he seemed to be arguing without an opponent.
“It was coincidence that the note to Jessica went under the rug. A coincidence with wretched consequences, unfortunately. Wasn’t it the same thing Angel Clare did?” asked Jury.
“Who the hell’s Angel Clare?” asked Macalvie.
Melrose Plant looked at him. “Commander, if you were hiring a tutor, you’d damned well make sure he or she was extremely well read, wouldn’t you?”
Macalvie gave him an especially magical Macalvie-smile. “If you need a tutor, Plant, I’m sorry I don’t come up to your standards.”
“Ah, but you do. Superintendent Jury told me the pre-Raphaelites held for you no horrors. Nor did Jane Eyre. What about Hester and Chillingworth?”
Macalvie cadged a cigar and looked at Plant as if he’d gone mad “What the hell is this? A literary quiz?”
“In a way.”
“The Scarlet Letter. So what?”
Plant shrugged. “I’d just think any tutor would —”
“Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” said Jury, absently. He looked very pale and was getting out of his chair. “My God, all of this time and we forgot —”
He made for the telephone in the middle of the heartrending voice of Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel.”
It was one of the last songs Elvis Presley had sung.
III
At first, when Molly Singer said the name, Jess thought she was talking to her. But then she said it again.
“Let her go, Tess.”
Jessie knew what real f
ear was as the arm tightened around her shoulders and the knife nearly bit into her throat. Sara — but was that her real name? — whispered, “Get out! Who are you?”
“Mary.”
The arm moved up, nearly cutting off Jessica’s wind. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. Where, where, was everybody? She heard Henry whine. Henry knew she was in trouble.
The flat, now unfamiliar voice of the young woman choking her was saying, “I don’t know you. I don’t know you.”
“But I know you, Tess.” Molly’s voice wavered, but the gun-hand didn’t. “I took some pictures. Of the Marine Parade. I had one of them blown up because there was something familiar about the girl in the picture. It might be years since I’ve seen you, but I’d know you anywhere, anywhere. You always looked like Mum, even when you were little.”
It was as though Sara didn’t hear her. “Put down the gun or I’ll cut her up right now, right here. I was waiting for him to come back, damn him and all the Ashcrofts. It has to be here in the kitchen. I’ll write him a message in her blood. . . . He killed Mum, don’t you realize that? They were there in the house together. And then I came down in the morning . . .”
This was coming out in gasps, and Jess felt tears on the top of her head, on her hair. But the knife was still there, sharply honed, edge now against her chest. “So you’ve got to put down the gun, Mary.”
Jess could see the gun shake in the hand of Molly Singer. Don’t let her have it, please, please. She would have cried it out, but the arm was like a steel band around her shoulders. And then, in despair, she watched Molly drop the gun. The sound when it hit the floor flooded Jess with terror.
Sara was shoving Jess toward the kitchen table, whispering to her, or to Molly, that it was just the sacrifice, you see, of Isaac. It had to be done. Like the others. “Only I didn’t have to cut the others up.”
“And you’re not going to do it to Jessica, either.”
It was another voice, a man’s.
Jess felt the knife move away from her, the obstructing arm torn from her shoulders and the voice saying, Run, Jess.
Help the Poor Struggler Page 17
