How old was she? Forty-two? Older? Far too old to be thinking of herself as the baby, in any event. St. Just felt irritation rising, but in the next moment, a rush of compassion, remembering the many troubled, abandoned children he’d come across in his years on the force. He didn’t imagine that money filled the void, any more than reaching adulthood automatically effected a cure for that unique brand of loneliness. Part of the problem seemed to be that if at too young an age you lost the voice that taught right from wrong, danger from safety, you never learned to internalize the necessary restrictions.
“Last night-” he began.
“I went to my bedroom straight after that ghastly dinner,” she said quickly. “I came down after a bit to get a book out of the library. But I heard nothing, saw nothing. All night.”
“I see,” said St. Just. “Did you ever wish him dead, your brother- the favorite?”
“‘If wishes were horses,’ Inspector?” She studied her hands. “Honestly, no. No, I don’t think I ever did.”
***
By bad chance or design, St. Just’s interview with Natasha Wellings followed hard on that with Sarah. The contrast between the two women was painful. St. Just felt he had never seen any human being so extraordinarily flawless. Just managing to keep from staring, seeking out the flaw-there must be one, he reasoned-he began to ask about her background.
“Oh, the usual,” she shrugged, pushing a shiny lock of hair back into line. “I worked as a chalet girl in Switzerland and later as a nanny. Hardly career-builders, so once I caught on to the fact I needed a real job, I returned to England and started a course in interior architecture. Turned out to be the thing I most enjoyed, much to my surprise. I met George when he was looking around for someone to redesign his gallery.”
“I had no idea. Isn’t the whole point of galleries that they just have walls on which to hang paintings?”
“Oh, my, you are behind the times, Inspector. No, the whole idea is to create an ‘experience’ for the viewer, beyond just looking at things hanging on walls. There’s a science to it, as well as a lot of smoke and mirrors. You’d be amazed.”
“I imagine I would. Now, you came down here this weekend with George. How did that come about?”
“I called him, just to chat. He mentioned this… situation… with his father. He seemed to feel he would need moral support. I gather I was also brought along to prove that little Georgie was becoming a grown-up with responsibilities, at last. I was curious to meet the famous author, Sir Adrian. So naturally I said I’d come along. Rather wish I hadn’t, now, of course. I say, are we going to be held here long? George and I were planning to leave Monday.”
“I’d change my plans if I were you.”
“Would you really?”
“Tell me a bit about what’s gone on in this house since you arrived.”
“Until now, nothing. A bit of argy-bargy last night at dinner- George had warned me the family was quarrelsome but I had no idea. Of course, they all had nearly as much to drink as Albert, which didn’t help. I couldn’t get away fast enough and went upstairs as soon as I could.”
“With George?”
“He came up about an hour later.”
“And you were together all night?”
“As far as I know, yes. Excepting the parts where I was asleep, of course.”
“Hear or see anything unusual?”
“Not a thing. Sorry. Wait… wait-I’d nearly forgotten. Ruthven made a telephone call. Or someone rang him. I overheard part of it, on my way toward the stairs-there’s a phone in the hall there. He didn’t sound happy, whoever it was.”
“Did you overhear a name?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. An unusual name… Manda. I don’t recall the exact words, but it was clear he was trying to-extricate himself from something unpleasant. When he saw me walking toward him, he rang off.”
“I see. We’ll need you to stay around, indefinitely, of course.” He held up a hand, fending off her look of dismay. “No, I can’t tell you for how long. When you’re free to go my sergeant or I will be in touch. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.”
Natasha looked about to say something but decided against it. With a shrug, she rose and glided out. The woman seemed to move on wheels.
“Crikey,” said Fear. “Whatever is a woman like that doing with a prat like George?”
“It’s a mystery, Sergeant. Well, is that it-the whole lot?”
“Well bred, well spoken. One of these modern women, but less annoying than most.”
“Yes, thank you, Sergeant. My impression, generally speaking, as well. Your other thoughts? For example, is she telling the truth?”
“They’re all more or less telling the truth. It’s what they’re not saying that’s important. George didn’t just dislike his brother, he hated him.”
“Right you are. So, who’s left?”
“One more. The other son, Albert. Oh, and the secretary. Jeffrey Spencer.”
“Let’s first see what this Jeffrey person will or will not share with us. At least he may have a more objective view than the others.”
***
Barely awake, Jeffrey appeared in the conservatory in due course, sleepy eyed and wearing the standard-issue uniform of jeans and sweatshirt.
“I see you played for the Vikings, Sir,” said St. Just. He shook Jeffrey’s proffered hand and then waved him to a seat.
“What? No, no, just showing my support. Paulo told me the news. Jeepers, I can’t believe this has happened.” His blue eyes opened wider, as if that would somehow help him process the news.
Beneath what appeared to be Jeffrey’s genuine shock, St. Just felt he could detect that frisson of excitement so many people seemed to experience at being in the thick of a murder scene. Often, the one who turned out to be the killer seemed just as excited as everyone else.
Just wait until they’ve seen a hundred scenes of crimes, he thought wearily.
“What time was he killed?” Jeffrey was asking.
St. Just saw no reason not to answer, since they had only the vaguest time frame to go on at the moment, anyway.
“At a guess, between ten and two AM. The medical examiner is the only one who can be more specific.”
“I think I can help with that. I ran into-the victim-in the library around midnight, it must have been. He said he was looking for a book.”
“What book was that, sir?”
“Crime and Punishment. Awful coincidence, what? Then Sarah came in. We spent some time chatting. Well, a long time, actually. A long, long time. Very long.”
Sergeant Fear peered at him skeptically from beneath raised eyebrows. Jeffrey had just earned several stars for his insistence on the time. Fear’s experience was that the more people repeated themselves, the more doubtful it was they were repeating the truth. It was a bit too obvious this bloke was trying to give Sarah an alibi.
***
“You won’t have to look far for a motive. Cherchez la femme. Like father, like son.”
Albert had to some degree composed himself by this point, although he still looked like a man emerging from a sleep-deprivation experiment. Still, St. Just could see the resemblance to his siblings, who all had that undefined, eerie likeness of brothers and sisters.
“Ruthven tended to philander, like his father, do you mean to say, Sir?”
“Dear God, yes. They once chucked Father out of Yaddo-hardly known as a monastery-years ago. He dined out on that story for ages. Ruthven was worse, if anything.”
“And how did Lillian, his wife, react to this behavior?”
“She didn’t care.”
“Surely, Sir-”
“No need for the ‘Sir’ and no need for the disbelief, either. I tell you, she didn’t give a tinker’s damn. Lillian’s attitude seemed to be, let someone else bonk him-just don’t let it interfere with my shopping.”
“All right. About your brother’s movements before he was killed. Did you see him during the day?�
��
“At breakfast, yes. And at dinner.”
“What did you talk about at breakfast?”
“He’d dug up the old dirt on Violet. Quite a bit of it, in fact. In brotherly fashion, he shared this news with me. I wish I had done what he wanted, now.”
“And what was that?”
“He wanted me to-what is it they say in the gangster films?- grass her out? Spill the beans on her past. I refused. I doubt it would have made any difference. Oh, I don’t really know if it would. But if you’re looking for a killer, we are reputed to have quite a catch right here. Violet Winthrop. You must have heard of her.”
St. Just barely managed to hide his shock. Fear was drawing a blank, but carefully wrote down the name.
“Yes, I’ve heard of Dr. Crippen, as well. Thank you. Do you know, the others didn’t actually mention anything about that.”
“Not surprising. They know it would antagonize the old man. Lillian especially will be wondering if she’s even in the picture any more, but she won’t want to scuttle her chances.”
“I see. We’ll certainly be following up on that train of thought. But what possible motive could Violet have to kill Ruthven?”
“Do deranged killers need a motive?”
“She struck me as anything but deranged,” said St. Just mildly. “However, to answer your question, they do, without exception, have a motive, these deranged killers. It’s just that it’s not a motive that makes sense to normal people.”
“I can understand why you would look to Ruthven’s near and dear for a motive,” said Albert. “But I can tell you this much: My sister is incapable of this. Absolutely. So am I. My father-I can’t see him having the physical strength. And George doesn’t have the gumption. You’ll need to look elsewhere than the immediate family.”
“Thank you, Sir. We’ll certainly keep that in mind. How did you come to be the one to find the body?”
“I went down to the cellar in the small hours to get a drink.”
“There must have been an easier way to get a drink in this house.”
“Not without provoking comment on how much I drink in general, Inspector. Besides, I wanted a particular kind of brandy. Bourgogne. Father has everything you can name stashed away down there.”
“I see. You saw no one there, or on your way there?”
“Not a soul. Except… I did think I saw a door closing into the servant’s stairs. I can’t be sure…”
They talked for some minutes more, but Albert did little more than reiterate that no one could possibly have killed Ruthven, while it was patently obvious someone had. At last, St. Just gave Albert the usual warnings of staying within easy reach, to which Albert acquiesced with surprising ease-enthusiasm, even.
“Well, Sergeant, what have we got?”
“Part of the truth, as usual.”
“Yes, as usual. They’re all scared, that’s obvious. But of what?”
“I would venture to say, Sir, that it’s a case of ‘all hands to the pumps’ in the current crisis. That Albert doesn’t want us looking too closely at his sister as a suspect, that’s for certain. He would prefer that we take a close look at Violet. Or one of these supposed mistresses of Ruthven’s.”
“We’ll do both-all.”
Sergeant Fear looked encouragingly at his superior. The sheer physicality of the man should have had witnesses quailing, so Fear had always thought. Instead, it was comforting-walking reassurance that the great British public was safe in his large, capable hands. While St. Just kept some arrows in his quiver for special occasions, overall his demeanor was genial, disarming, and entirely effective in getting witnesses to say more than they intended.
Fear had never known him to fail. Still, it seemed to him the more questions they had asked, the more the motives became blurred. And all of them, especially that actor fellow, he was sure, were keeping something back.
He was about to ask about Violet when his mobile erupted again. Maybe, thought Fear, his wife could talk Emma into reprogramming it back to the way it was. Or at least talk her into helping him find the volume control.
***
Albert had once been in a play where he carried the part of a drunken polo-playing prat who lied to the police about his involvement in a hit-and-run accident. That had not ended well for the prat, as he recalled. But in many another play, Albert’s character had gotten away with all kinds of things, up to and including murder.
Albert wondered if his moral compass were being constantly reset by the last part he had played, the last movie he had seen. It was a sobering thought that made him reach for the glass of whiskey at his elbow. He sat back, looking at the faded tapestry hanging on his bedroom wall, a depiction of Cain bashing in Abel’s head as a naked Adam and Eve watched, wringing their hands, from a distance. Surely they had learned to clothe themselves by the time the children came along? Albert wasn’t sure if the wall-hanging were yet another example of his father’s macabre sense of humor or his poor taste in decorators. Probably a bit of both. Given the circumstances, something about the portrayal struck him as prophetic. Albert looked away.
He drained his glass and thought some more about his find in the cellar-not Ruthven’s body, but his father’s manuscript. Instinctively, he wanted to know what was in that manuscript-the manuscript he had carefully avoided mentioning to St. Just-before he handed it over to the police and unleashed heaven-knew-what furies on himself, Sarah-on all of them, for that matter. One thing was certain: With Adrian as the author of whatever secrets it might contain, the manuscript could only be a ticking time bomb.
13. TO LONDON, TO LONDON
THE NEXT AFTERNOON ST. Just found himself in Chelsea, his car penned in by Mercedeses, BMWs, limousines, and other necessities of the wealthy. Why did the French call it circulation when nothing moved?
The house he was seeking-its address yielded by Ruthven’s laptop-was tucked discreetly away in an enclave overlooking houseboats docked along the Thames. The eighteenth-century structure had at some point been converted into three flats. St. Just didn’t dare estimate what they cost their owners; he would probably be off in his guess by half.
The flat of Chloe Beauclerk-Fisk, as he saw when he had shown his warrant card and been admitted by a diminutive maid with a pronounced dowager’s hump and a flesh-colored hearing aid in each ear, was decorated in a spare, minimalist style with a strong Asian influence. Looking around him as he minced behind the woman leading him through the foyer, shortening his long steps to keep from running her down, St. Just felt that Chloe Beauclerk Fisk, Ruthven’s mother, might be a devotee of-what was it called? Dung Shoe or something like that. Sung Fu? The latest craze where yuppies who had spent their lives acquiring rubbish now couldn’t wait to pay someone to get rid of it.
He decided on short acquaintance with Chloe herself that overall, this minimalist décor might be a good thing, perhaps even prolonging her life, for he gained the strong impression within five minutes in her company that she was half in the bag most of the time. The lack of clutter probably helped prevent her falling on her face all day long.
Seeing him and the maid hovering at the entry to the drawing room, Chloe waved away the old woman with one hand while signaling him to enter with the other, like someone guiding a plane in for landing. A Pekinese teetered over to inspect him-one of those dogs he always felt looked like it came with batteries-and apparently finding nothing amiss, disappeared on unknown canine business.
Still without a word, she indicated that St. Just should sit in an unyielding wooden structure that resembled nothing so much as the executioner’s chairs he had seen in American documentaries on the telly. The chair proved to be lower than he had calculated and he fell into it hard, like a collapsing bridge.
She herself chose to remain standing-rather, weaving, though ramrod-straight-by the fireplace. She was a stout woman, her figure sheathed in unyielding foundation garments, her bosom a shelf-like, impenetrable Latex fortress. Two round earrings the size of wa
lnuts eclipsed the lobes of her ears. Pouches of fat padded her chin and cheeks-perhaps she was hoarding the rest of the nuts. But her face in profile as she turned to gaze out the window was flat, the nose nearly bridgeless. She wore a coral shade of lipstick, carelessly applied-a difficult color for any woman to wear, an impossible one in her case.
He looked around. There was little else in the room on which to rest the eye, excepting a large Japanese screen hung over the fireplace in place of the traditional painting. Beneath it sat a glass of what probably was vodka, and a waterless vase holding one stark, dried tree branch.
Her voice when she spoke was deep, seductive, whiskey-soaked, like Lauren Bacall doing voiceovers for cat food. It also conveyed a distinctly American accent, overlaid by a British upper-class drawl.
“What are you doing to catch my son’s killer? Anything?” she asked. The words might have been belligerent; the tone conveyed only shocked anguish. Her eyes struggled to bring into focus this bearer of bad tidings in the form of an oversized plainclothes detective.
It was possibly St. Just’s least-favorite question from the public, and he was not yet ready to answer.
“All that we can,” he said at last, adding: “I didn’t realize you were American.”
“Oh, yes. Well, of course, I became a British citizen years ago.”
What she actually said could best be rendered as, “became a Brishish zhitizhen,” but St. Just could just about catch the spirit of what she was trying to say. Good lord, the woman was boiled as an owl, and it was just on two in the afternoon. Even allowing for the extra rations allotted for grief, he felt somehow that with Chloe, this was no rare occurrence.
She was looking about the room now, as if wondering where on earth she’d left her British passport. Like St. Just, she found little to divert her gaze, and after awhile she dropped her eyes to study the contents of the glass she was now clutching like a crystal ball. Silence hung in the room, except for the faint, annoying tinkle of some chimes on the balcony just visible through glass doors.
Death of a Cozy Writer Page 13
