The Wrong Rite

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Did you go in with her?” Madoc asked him.

  “I did not. Why should I?”

  “To carry her bags and buy her ticket?”

  “She had no bags, just a carryall thing which she managed quite capably by herself. And I’d already bought her two pints of bitter and a sausage roll, mainly in the vain hope of stopping her mouth for a while. I’d have been willing to open the car door for her, but she bounced out before I could get to it. So I tooted a mildly enthusiastic farewell and came on home.”

  “The Daimler was running, all right, was it?”

  “Like a breeze. I can’t think why Tom had to take it to Billy. He’s an abominable driver, of course. Oh, God! Here they come back, and that ass Williams with them. Got any boiling oil handy, Lisa?”

  “Don’t kill them yet,” said Madoc. “We have to talk.” It was too late anyway, they were in the kitchen, all three fairly well sauced. Iseult gave Williams a roguish shove forward.

  “Look what we found. Can we keep him?”

  “So long as you don’t expect me to feed him,” Lisa told her. “There’s tea and precious little else. Sit down, Madoc wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh goody! We’re going to be grilled by a real, live Mountie.”

  “No we’re not,” said Tom. “You’re only the law in Canada, right, Madoc?”

  “Wrong, Tom. I’ve been given temporary constabulary status by the local magistrate.”

  “Who happens to be your uncle.”

  “Exactly. And who’s given me sufficient authority to run you in on suspicion if you don’t cooperate.”

  “Suspicion of what, for God’s sake?”

  “Murdering Mary Rhys by putting gunpowder in her pockets before she leaped the balefire.”

  “What? That’s crazy!”

  “Oh yes, but it’s what happened. We’ve had a report from the county coroner.”

  “But why?” demanded Iseult. “I grant you Mary was a bore and a nuisance, but that frowsy little mouse? Why should anybody have wanted to kill her?”

  Madoc glanced at Janet and shrugged. He saw no sense in holding back, not with half the family already in the picture. They might as well have it straight from him instead of garbled via the grapevine.

  “What it seems to boil down to is that Mary knew how and why Arthur Ellis was murdered in Marseilles eight years ago and was systematically blackmailing the person who killed him. We’re working on the hypothesis that the killer got tired of paying.”

  “Bloody hell! Who’d have thought the old trout had it in her?”

  Tom’s voice held more than a hint of admiration, Janet thought. She wasn’t surprised.

  “I’m amazed you didn’t think of that yourself, Tom,” drawled Iseult.

  “Oh, I did. My problem was that I didn’t know whom to put the bite on. Sorry, Lisa, I’m being despicable again. But who could have imagined it? Mary was always such a soggy doormat for that disgusting brother of hers. ‘Yes, brother dear. Whatever you say, brother dear. Hit me again, brother dear.’ Ugh! I can see Bob as a blackmailer far more easily than I can Mary. Are you sure she wasn’t just fronting for him, Madoc? He could be laying it on her to shield himself, couldn’t he?”

  “Evidence of the blackmailing didn’t come from Bob, Tom. He maintains he knew nothing of what his sister was up to.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “I’m willing to entertain the possibility, because he’s so bloody-minded about money. I don’t think Bob would have cared a pennyworth how Mary got it, what infuriated him was that she wouldn’t give him the handling of it. Bob had always kept total control of the family cash, despite the fact that Mary was the sole breadwinner. According to Dai, he wouldn’t even let her buy a pair of slippers unless he went along and picked them out. Since she started getting this mysterious independent income, she’d become increasingly inclined to flout his authority, to the point where she was threatening to clear out and leave him to live on what he’d already grabbed.”

  “Which would have made excellent sense,” said Iseult. “But if Mary didn’t start getting paid off until after Arthur was offed, and Bob wouldn’t give her a bean to travel with, she could hardly have been at the scene of the crime, could she? So then how did she know whom to blackmail?”

  “That’s a good question, to which Bob has provided a plausible answer. As a gem-cutter, Mary actually does seem to have had a certain reputation. She was asked occasionally to take on special assignments in other countries, and she was on the Continent at the time. Bob thinks she was supposed to be in Ostend; but he suspects that she might have lied to him, cashed in the ticket he’d bought her, and gone to Marseilles instead. He can’t say for sure because, after Arthur died, Mary burned her passport and vowed never to travel again.”

  “A likely story! You’re not intimating that she and Arthur were have an affaire? That greasy-faced frump?”

  “No, Iseult, nothing like that. According to Bob, Mary suspected Arthur was cheating her out of some of her fees by holding back his best stones and getting somebody else to cut them. Could that have been possible, Lisa?”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t have been cheating. Arthur and Mary weren’t in any legal partnership, you know; it was just that their fathers had had a long-standing gentlemen’s agreement about the buying and cutting. After the old men died, Arthur felt honor-bound to carry on with the arrangement even though he detested having to do business with Bob and wasn’t always satisfied with Mary’s work. She insisted on doing everything her own way, and sometimes hers wasn’t the best way.”

  “Do you mean she’d spoil his stones?”

  “Not spoil them, exactly; but not cut them as Arthur thought they should be done. Sometimes she’d wind up with a less impressive cut than he’d expected. That would mean a smaller profit, of course, which wouldn’t go down too well. After a while, he got tired of always having to fight with her and began quietly taking his more important stones to a different cutter. There was no reason for him to lose money just to keep Mary pacified, but naturally she wouldn’t have seen it that way.”

  “Then Bob’s suspicion that Mary meant to follow Arthur in the hope of catching him cheating on her, as she saw it, might not be so far off the mark?”

  “Knowing what their relationship had been ever since Arthur’s father died, I’d say it was quite likely. But if Mary actually did follow Arthur to Marseilles and watched him die, why in God’s name didn’t she come and tell me? How could she simply”—Lisa’s voice was starting to crack—“simply sit back and smirk, and trade my husband’s life for a new pair of slippers?”

  Chapter 22

  “OH, COME OFF IT, Lisa!” Now that he’d burned his bridges, Tom wasn’t bothering to be civil to his stepsister. “You appear to be taking one hell of a lot for granted. Why should there have been any connection between Arthur’s death and Mary’s, shall we say, fund-raising activities? The French police, not to mention the French juge d’instruction, decided he’d simply been mugged and robbed according to time-honored local custom by some thug who either knew he’d be carrying valuable gemstones with him or else just happened into a stroke of luck. Why can’t you accept their verdict, for God’s sake?”

  “Because it wasn’t that simple.”

  “All right, Lisa. I grant you the whole business was a ghastly horror story, but why turn it into a long-running serial? Mary could have been lying when she told her brother the money was coming in on account of Arthur. If brother Bob had her booked for Ostend that day, I for one can’t picture her slapping on a false mustache and chugging off to Marseilles after Arthur, much less her knowing which of its many bawdy houses he’d be most apt to frequent.”

  “Very amusing, Tom,” snarled Dafydd, “but hardly enlightening.”

  “Then let’s try a different scenario. Do you remember what Mary said night before last about gem-cutters being able to recognize individual stones? What if somebody had stolen some fairly impressive specimens, pried them out of
the dowager’s tiara or wherever they’d been, and sold them to Arthur, who in turn brought them to Mary to be recut?”

  “So that they wouldn’t be spotted as stolen goods when Arthur tried to peddle them again?” Lisa’s voice was cold as death. “You’re saying Arthur Ellis was a fence who worked with thieves?”

  “It was only a supposition.”

  “Then kindly keep your suppositions to yourself.”

  Iseult, for some reason, elected to play peacemaker. “Oh Lisa, do quit sniping at poor Tom. I can’t say I find his suggestion so awfully farfetched. Arthur needn’t have known the jewels were stolen. But Mary would have stuck her clever little eyeglass into her beady little eye and seen at once that these particular stones could only have come to Arthur via some highly respected nobleman who’d have been kicked out of his clubs and warned off the cricket crease should it become generally known that he was running a sideline in upper-class thievery. Like Raffles, the Gentleman Cracksman. You’d have made a superb Raffles, Dafydd, you were always quite good at cricket, for a tenor. You didn’t happen to be in Marseilles on the night, by any chance?”

  “Yes, I was, and Madoc knows all about it. I had met my parents for drinks and dinner. I had to be in Munich for rehearsal the following day, so I left them about half-past nine and spent the night on the train to Munich. After I’d checked into my hotel, I telephoned Gwen in London, and that was the first I knew of Arthur’s death.”

  “Gwen even telephoned me at the studio,” Tom broke in, “which was more than anybody else bothered to do. I was out of my office at the moment, as it happened, so I didn’t get to speak with her, but I remember thinking it was awfully decent of her to leave the message. Sorry, old boy, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Dafydd’s studied calm had come unstuck, he was halfway to the boil by now. “In short, Iseult, I did not murder Arthur Ellis: firstly, because he was someone I liked and respected; secondly, because I would not have wished to cause Lisa grief; thirdly, because I was not then and am not now an amateur cracksman; and fourthly, because I simply wouldn’t have had the time.”

  Iseult still wasn’t giving up. “Oh, but you would, if you’d flown to Munich instead of going by train.”

  “I’m well aware of that, thank you, and so is Madoc.”

  “How nice for both of you.”

  This was too much for Janet. “You were in Marseilles yourself that night, Iseult.”

  “I was not!”

  Iseult had packed enough temperament into her scream to have kindled another Beltane fire, but she wasn’t fazing Janet a whit.

  “Oh yes, you were. You walked past a restaurant not far from where the body was found, about half-past ten that same night. You were wearing very high heels and a tight miniskirt, and carrying a transparent bubble umbrella with a green band around it. What made you tell such a silly lie this morning, Iseult?”

  “I didn’t lie to you! Why should I? Where did you get this faradiddle? From Dafydd?”

  “No, I got it from Lady Rhys. After they’d put Dafydd into a taxi, she and Sir Emlyn had stayed on at the restaurant. They’d finally got ready to leave and were out under the awning trying to hail a cab for themselves when you walked by. They didn’t speak to you because some man standing next to them made a rude remark. You had your face so plastered with makeup that he evidently took you for a streetwalker, and you know how Dafydd’s mother feels about his father’s position. I should add in fairness that they both assumed you’d been performing and hadn’t taken off your stage makeup.”

  “How charitable of them. It’s all rot, of course. Whatever that woman may have been, she certainly wasn’t I. Lady Rhys had better get her lorgnette adjusted.”

  “My mother has excellent eyesight,” said Dafydd. “She never forgets a name or a face, she never gets people mixed up, and she is not a malicious liar. Where in Marseilles were you performing that night, Iseult?”

  “Et tu, Brute?” Iseult pushed back her chair and stood up. “If this is the liveliest entertainment you have to offer, I think I’ll stroll back down to the Gas and Gaiters and seduce the village idiot. One does need to keep in practice. Coming, Tom?”

  “If Madoc’s quite through with his inquisition. One doesn’t want to flout his authority. Not that he really has any to flout, Uncle Huw to the contrary notwithstanding. Do you, old boy? Why don’t you go back to Canada and try it on the Esquimaux?”

  Madoc was not at all ruffled. “I’ve been deputized to help Cyril Rhys because Uncle Caradoc prefers to keep the investigation in the family as far as possible. If you’d prefer to have the chief constable call in Scotland Yard, I expect that could be arranged.”

  “Oh, don’t trouble on my account. What about it, Williams? You’re not family, come join the grilling session. Cousin Madoc wants to know why you blew up Cousin Mary last night.”

  “Oh? Why does anybody blow up anybody? That reminds me, Mrs. Ellis, I have a message for you. Your daughter wanted me to say that she’d got the constable’s bicycle back without being pinched and she’s going to stay and help hunt the handbag. Is that another old Welsh custom?”

  “No, the Welsh custom is for ladies to keep a very tight grip on their handbags,” said Tom. “Right, Lisa?”

  “Quite right. Thank you for telling me, Mr. Williams.”

  “Not at all. Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner. By the way, I’d planned to drive Iseult back to London today, but I’m told we aren’t allowed to leave. For how long, does anyone know?”

  “Until you’re either blown up or carted off to the jug,” Tom replied. “Which would you prefer?”

  “The jug, please. At least I might be able to get some work done there. Regardless of all that about Arthur Ellis, it must have been the brother who killed her, don’t you think? Motive incestuous lust, I hope. Incest’s rather high on the list just now in what we scriptwriters laughingly refer to as our profession. Insanity’s passé, and money’s so trite. Did she have any, by the way?”

  “Money, or unnatural yearnings?”

  “Ridiculous question. Money, of course.”

  “Pots of it. Too bad you missed your chance, Reuel old chap. Where were you when the lights went out?”

  “In the dark, as I so often am. Who gets the oodle: the brother, the nephew, or you?”

  “I should be so lucky. Bob, of course. He has a natural affinity for money, however come by. Madoc’s going to arrest him as soon as we’ve finished our game of cops and robbers. Aren’t you, old boy? Or do you incline to the loaded pistol in the library, since it’s a matter of saving the family honor?”

  “Good question, I haven’t quite decided. How long have you and Iseult known each other, Mr. Williams?”

  “Too long, I sometimes think. About—what, Iseult? Four years? Four and a half? Shortly after I got back from the States, anyway.”

  “And how long were you in the States?” Madoc’s voice was still mild.

  “Almost twelve years. I’d got tired of writing documentaries; that one I did with the late Miss Rhys was the first of far too many. I’d become locked into that particular slot, you see, and I wanted out. I knew any chap with a British accent would be leapt upon with cries of joy in Hollywood, not because of our skill with the language but because we add such a nice touch of class to the producers’ wives’ indiscretions. Anyway, I decided to try it long enough to redefine myself as a scriptwriter, so over I went. The climate was appalling but the money was good, so I stayed on, as one does, you know. Got married and all that. When the marriage broke up, I decided it was time to come home. Not very interesting, is it?”

  “You did come back for visits, however, or on special assignments?”

  “Lord, no. I don’t make visits unless somebody pays my way, and Hollywood film moguls wouldn’t dream of sending Brits to Britian. That would be far too obvious. We got shipped off to Malaysia or the Sea of Okhotsk, places like that, suffered nasty afflictions from the native foods, and came back to tacos and guacamole. I bel
ieve what really precipitated my return to the homeland was that I’d developed an overwhelming yen for a plate of bubble and squeak.”

  “Naturally one would. This was about five years ago, you say?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I sailed back on the QE2 to give myself a few days’ worth of image-polishing, and passed my fortieth birthday sicking up in the Newfoundland Basin. I’m forty-five now, God help me, so that does it, doesn’t it? Anyway, I got a job at Goldilox Flix on the strength of my American accent. Iseult was there on loan from Curvaceous Cinema at the time, her script wasn’t right, and I was given a go at fixing it. That worked out, so Iseult moved over to Goldilox and it got to be more or less taken for granted that I’d be doing her scripts. So back I am in another rut. At least this one’s drier than the Sea of Okhotsk. Part of the time, anyway.”

  “And there’s no dearth of bubble and squeak,” Madoc replied understandingly. “Did you ever meet a gem buyer named Arthur Ellis?”

  “I had a lovely time in Caracas once with a girl named Stefanya Ellis, only I’m not sure that’s how she spelled it. No relation, I don’t suppose?”

  “Probably not. Have you ever been to Marseilles?”

  “Oh yes, quite often when I was in my documentary period. I was there again just a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact, for the first time since I got back to the old sod. Had a rather touching encounter, by the way. I dropped in at a place over near the Cannebière that I’d frequented as a golden-haired stripling, and the old girl who runs it remembered me. She stood me a bottle of awful champagne and we got quite matey, reminiscing about the dear dead days of long ago. She asked what I was doing these days, and when I said writing for the flicks, she opened another bottle. Seems she’d had this gorgeous rousse working there for a while, who’d gone on to become a famous film star. She appeared to take this as a personal triumph, she’d even kept a scrap-book. It wasn’t something she showed to everybody—one had to be discreet, after all—but with an old friend like me and one actually in the business, eh bien, pourquoi pas? So we had quite a cozy time looking at the photos, and it didn’t cost me a cent. Madame Fifine, she calls herself.”