“You’re very frank. But the murder of Simon Lean doesn’t seem to stir up waves of emotion in you.”
“Must we talk about that? It’s all so dreary.” Diane hooked her shoe back on her heel, recrossed her legs, and added another go of gin to the pitcher. “Are you going to be boringly acrimonious?”
Melrose smiled. “I’m just mildly surprised that you seem to care so little that everyone knows about your affair with Simon.”
“Are they all talking? How nice.”
“Part of the they is the Northants constabulary.”
“They’ve been here. Your friend Mr. Jury has also been here. Now there’s a man one would be happy to pick up the bill for.”
“Did you for Lean?”
She laughed. “Once or twice. Simon had money, but he also had a turf accountant. He was extraordinarily charming. Well, he had to be, hadn’t he? Handsome and soigné and clever. He had nothing going for him in the way of character. He was decorative.”
“But you said clever; how clever?”
“Quite. He was a schemer, a plotter. ‘A nasty bit of work,’ as they say. Why did she marry him in the first place? Well, I’ve just said, haven’t I? His facile charm. I’m surprised it wasn’t the other way round. That he didn’t kill her.”
“Did he mention his wife?”
“ ‘Did he’ — ?” She nearly spilled her drink, laughing. “For God’s sakes, what do you think married men do when they’re with the ‘other woman’?”
“What did he say? What gave you the notion it wouldn’t have been surprising if he were to kill her?”
Bored, Diane had risen and was walking around the room, shoes off, auditioning for whatever role might be available up at the manor, talking about Simon Lean’s hatred of Lady Summerston, of his situation at Watermeadows. In front of the glaze of ice that passed for a mirror above the mantel, she pressed her lips together, turned her head this way and that like an actress checking her makeup, her best side.
Melrose listened closely, studying her just as closely, and at the room that surrounded her like a stage set. For as long as he had known Diane Demorney he had assumed that all of this backdrop — the artistry of her carefully arranged self, of her mind, even, and its little pinpricks of knowledge — was all a means to an end: money, men, admiration. He thought now that the persona was an end in itself. Probably, it delighted her to watch others watching her, to see her reflection in others’ eyes, as if she were walking down a corridor of mirrors.
“So he resented Lady Summerston’s grip on the purse strings.”
“Naturally. One of the reasons Hannah so annoyed him was that she isn’t interested in money, and didn’t even make an attempt to get her grandmother to divvy up before she died. Of course, he had an allowance, and a very generous one at that. Lady Summerston could hardly be called a pinchfist. But if the money isn’t one’s own . . .” She shrugged and accepted a light for another cigarette, exhaling a stream of smoke, flawless as a ribbon. “The last time I saw him — yes, at that summerhouse, before you ask — he seemed quite edgy. My guess is she meant to ask for a divorce. Or already had.”
Melrose frowned. “When was that?”
“Oh, six weeks ago, perhaps.” She had leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her palm. The black hair, cut slightly longer in front, curved in a perfect frame round her chin. “I am starved, my dear; sure auntie can’t wait?”
“Sorry.” Diane seemed to assume that if she were dressed for an occasion, some man would come along to name it.
Diane sighed and rose. “Then I shall just have to go by myself.” She held out her light coat to him. The silk lining whispered against her arms as she said, “You know, I think I’d be absolutely smashing in the dock of the Old Bailey. And, of course, no one could possibly prove I did it; any sharp solicitor could get me off. It would be an experience!”
How many times had he heard that judgment passed in the last three days? By Diane, by Dick Scroggs, by Marshall Trueblood: A sharpish solicitor can get her off?
• • •
Agatha couldn’t agree more, although she thought it was Jurvis who would have the experience of the dock.
“You must be joking,” said Melrose, knowing that she wasn’t. “Sir Archibald is a barrister. You don’t even need a solicitor. Anyway, isn’t old Euston-Hobson going to sit on your case?” He wished it were literally true.
“I don’t care for your tone, Plant. And I should certainly think you wouldn’t stand on such technicalities where family’s involved.”
He supposed he would have to humor her if he wanted her to cooperate. “Very well, I’ll mention it to him.” Like hell he would. Even his solicitors would laugh themselves sick, to say nothing of Sir Archibald.
At the moment he was inspecting a hunt cup engraved with the Caverness crest. It was sitting on the fat-legged table where she kept her supply of port. His supply, rather: it was the Amontillado from the Ardry End wine cellar. “Where’d you get this? It’s Father’s.”
There was a pause. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“In the manner that he owned it.”
“You weren’t aware of the terms of Viscount Nitherwold’s will . . .”
“At the age of two, I was not sitting about reading wills.” Melrose replaced the hunt cup. Good heavenly days, if she had to go rooting that far back for a legacy, there was no point in discussing it. He let her go rambling on as he thought of the Summerston money. Hannah Lean must at some time have made a will. Surely . . . He interrupted the reading of Viscount Nitherwold’s will to say: “Agatha, what was that business you said about ‘almost’ having lunch with Mrs. Lean?” How could one “almost” have lunch? he wondered.
“It was my day in Northampton. I was looking in the window of Tibbet’s, you know, where you got that rather nice little emerald-and-ruby bracelet for me, oh, years ago.”
As if he’d spent not a penny on her since. “You were taking it to Tibbet’s for an appraisal?”
“Don’t be absurd. I was merely looking in the window at a lovely emerald brooch. It’s the one in the corner. Lower left hand, between a square-cut diamond and a Russian amber —”
He held up his hands. “I get the picture. What about Hannah Lean?”
“She walked into the shop. Well, I didn’t know it was she at the moment; I found that out later.”
“You went in.”
“To ask to see the brooch. The manager was waiting on her. She’s a bit mousy looking for a murderess, don’t you think? He’d brought out a diamond necklace.” When she leaned toward her nephew, she must have forgot about her painful injury, for her foot came off the stool quite smartly. “Would you believe how much it cost?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Sixteen thousand. Sixteen —”
“Did she buy it, then?” From the picture he’d been able to form in his own mind about Hannah Lean, interest in jewels didn’t fit.
“Yes. And told him to deliver it to Watermeadows. That’s when I knew, of course, who she —”
“Deliver it?”
“— was, and introduced myself. I thought we could have a spot of lunch, but she seemed in a hurry. Naturally, she said she’d love to, some other time.”
“Naturally.” Had she not wanted to carry about such a valuable piece of jewelry? Or had the woman no intention of purchasing it, but had wanted instead to fix a face and address in the mind of the manager of Tibbet’s? Melrose took out the two snapshots and showed them to Agatha. “Is this the woman you saw?”
“Yes. Where’d you get them?”
“Found them. How are you so sure?”
“What do you mean, found them? Were they floating by in the gutter, or something?”
Melrose simply refused to mention Richard Jury or he’d be here until the sun went down. Actually, it was so dark in the house anyway, with the creepers grasping the lead of the mullioned windows, that the sun might never have risen. “In Simon Lean’s pocket,” he s
aid quickly. “Which one of these women, Agatha?”
“Both.”
Oh, hell. He should have guessed. “You mean they’re the same person?”
She sighed with impatience and spoke slowly enough so that even her nitwit nephew could understand. “This looks a bit more like her . . . .” She tapped the picture Jury had taken from Watermeadows. “But in this one she’s wearing the same necklace.”
“What necklace?”
Agatha pointed to the pearls round the throat of the young woman with high-piled hair. “She was wearing it that day in Tibbet’s. The pearls. They’re very good ones, too. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s jewelry.”
That was certainly true, thought Melrose, looking at his mother’s silver brooch on her bosom.
Thirty-one
SHE WAS STANDING on the other side of the dry pools, wearing the same oversized sweater, her hands behind her. If it hadn’t been for the clothes — outsized sweater and overlong skirt — she could have been one of the ornamental statues.
She was watching him closely as he walked from the stone steps across the grass, making no secret of her interest in his approach. There was no pretense of being out here to inspect the concrete, to see if there were further signs of erosion; or of some intention to cut flowers for the table.
“You’re back,” she said, when he had circumvented the pool.
“That’s what your grandmother said.” He looked up at a sky of the pale blue transparency of whey. “I wonder if that’s really what Penelope said to Odysseus. ‘You’re back.’ ”
She did not respond except to offer him a slightly puzzled smile. Why had he said it, anyway? To catch her out? To see if this was the educated, presumably well-read woman who had lived at Watermeadows all these years?
Then she said: “More questions, I suppose. Inspector MacAllister was here yesterday with Superintendent Pratt. It’s perfectly clear they neither of them believe me. They think I killed Simon. Shall we walk?” When she turned, he did not, and she said, “Or are you going to stare the truth out of me?”
He smiled slightly. “I wish I could.”
That brought her around again, hands shoved deep in the pockets of the sweater like weights that would drag her down. “You think I’m lying.”
“Yes. I think you’re lying.”
Her fingers pushed back strands of hair that wind whipped in her face. She started to walk away, stopped, said: “About what?”
“Your feelings about your husband, for one thing.”
She walked back to him, and even in her step there was a kind of fury. In her eyes, a tiny flare-up of gold like a struck match. “Are you saying you don’t believe I was about to divorce him?”
“Something like that.”
“Why on earth not? Was I to put up forever with his infidelity?”
“No. But why had you put up with it for years?”
“People have their breaking point.”
“You didn’t — don’t — seem at all broken.”
“Then I’d have small motive for killing my husband. I mean, if I weren’t insanely jealous.”
He looked at her for a while, feeling the envelope with the pictures sweat in his hand. “You’ve got it the wrong way round, haven’t you? Insane jealousy often ends just that way — in a vengeful killing.”
She had been turned from him, her profile hard against the background of a distant stone wall; now she turned back. “You think I killed him, too. It’s obvious that’s what Superintendent Pratt thinks.”
“It’s become a bit more complicated than that.”
“What do you mean?”
There was no place to sit down here. Jury said, “You were right; I think we should walk and find someplace to sit down.”
“The summerhouse —”
“No.”
“I thought you might like tea —”
“Your grandmother was kind enough to give me that.” As they circled the second of the drained pools, Jury suddenly remembered that tea of two days ago. It was he who had made it, brought it in. She did not drink hers. She did not, literally, touch it. Of course, that gloominess of mind of which she spoke would explain wanting to be catered for. She had asked him if he would fix it; she had asked him to make his own drink. Had she not wanted to leave her fingerprints on the cup?
“I found the woman your husband was seeing.” He waited, but she said nothing. They were sitting on the same wooden bench in the secluded garden where he had been just over an hour before. “She lives in Limehouse. Well-off, a decorator. She’s done up one of those warehouse lofts that cost a mint.” Still, she said nothing. “Aren’t you interested?”
She leaned back, looked up at a sky that had hardened and darkened to slate and said, “It just doesn’t seem to make much difference anymore. Is she especially pretty?”
Jury smiled, looking at her flawless profile. “You’re more beautiful.”
Then she said to him, the thin crust of ice that had been informing her answers broken, “So I might be a killer, but at least a good-looking one.” There was more hopelessness than rancor in her tone.
“There’s something else; something more important. The other woman he was seeing —”
“ ‘Other’? My God, he must have lost count. Diane Demorney would make a third. Who is this ‘other’?”
From the envelope he drew the pictures, handed her first the one that was least contorted, a shot that had concentrated on the face and upper torso where no blood had seeped through. Even he, who had looked at it a dozen times before, still felt that shock of recognition. Carefully, he watched her face. Her look was at first merely puzzled, and then she registered astonishment. Shaking her head, closing her eyes as though she’d drive this vision of her own corpse away, she said, “What is this? Who is this?”
“You’ve never seen her before?”
The eyes hardened, flashed metallically. “May I see the others?”
She outreached the gloved hand and Jury put the worst of the lot in it. Not too bad, perhaps, compared with the corpses he’d seen so soaked in their own blood that their clothes melded to their bodies. But there was blood seeping through the blouse, spreading across the shoulders like the double-pattern of a Rorschach figure. She said nothing and returned it, looked at the two others, again said nothing. Her sigh was shuddery, broken.
“Her name is Sarah Diver. Lived in Limehouse.”
She put her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. “Did he kill her?”
“No, we don’t think so.”
Jury followed her movements as she rose and moved about the garden. Her face was screened from his eyes by the shadows cast by the greenery. “When did you mention the divorce? How long ago, I mean?”
“I don’t remember. A few months ago, perhaps. Two or three.”
“He may have met her about that time: two months ago.” There was no answer. “You’re not stupid; if you’d divorced him, he’d have been straight out in the cold. Men in that position often choose desperate remedies. Very desperate, in this case, considering what he’d lose. But also extremely well thought out.” Still she said nothing. “You said he was mad enough to kill you.”
“You can’t be suggesting that —?”
“What?”
“This woman was to impersonate me? That’s impossible.”
“It’s perfectly possible, if you stop to think about it. Who had she to convince, after all, but Lady Summerston, Crick, your part-time help. And there would be a scattering of friends, if it came down to it.”
Absently, she had plucked a rose from one of the overhanging vines and turned it in her fingers. “No. Simon couldn’t have thought up such a plan. He couldn’t even keep bridge scores.”
“When a fortune is at stake, ingenuity has a way of increasing by leaps and bounds. But it wasn’t just greed; there’d also have been the motive of revenge. He was pretty much despised in this house.”
“That’s not true! He was treated perfectly kindly
.”
Jury could not help a laugh at this, contorted by anger. “Oh, ‘kindly.’ One could say the same thing about Charlotte Stant. Exiled, but with perfect kindness. Or, you could say like Prince Amerigo. Kept, with perfect kindness.”
The remarkable thing about her was her control over responses. She had the actress’s gift of feeling something through, of gauging what was appropriate and yet keeping her face as clear as water, devoid of expression. The eye did not falter, no small muscle tensed in the cheek.
“Exiled by and kept by Maggie Verver. Your favorite book, Mrs. Lean. Your grandmother and I were talking about it.”
“The Golden Bowl, you mean.” She looked off, and then said the perfect thing: “It’s been too long since I’ve read it. Your interpretation threw me for a moment.” She half smiled and took another few moments to add to it. “My own feelings about Maggie Verver are perhaps not as cynical.”
If Jury had regarded his cases as battles of wits, he would have taken some perverse delight in her ingenuity. Her response was admirable. He said: “Perhaps the Prince was the one who, in the end, wasn’t dissembling.”
“This is total nonsense.” She started away down the path. “If you think Simon was somehow the one who wasn’t dissembling — well . . .” She raised her hands in a gesture of hopelessness.
“I was more interested, I expect, in the collusion. She was the alleged victim, Maggie. Don’t you think so?”
Forcefully, she retraced her steps along the path. “And so was I, is that what you mean? At least I agree there, if what you say is true, except I’m not sure I care for the ‘alleged’ part. The victim of my husband, the victim of police. You’re standing here telling me that Simon Lean and his mistress — or one of them —” The comment was etched in acid. “—meant to murder me. Now that would take an enormous amount of planning; it would involve switching identities. Not an easy thing to do, if one thinks of all the paraphernalia, the baggage we carry about to establish it in the first place. There would be witnesses. There would be, for example, handwriting. Not to mention fingerprints. All that has to be done is to compare the prints of the dead woman —”
The Five Bells and Bladebone Page 23
