“I’ll have somebody checking the paper on that one, to see if there was a car. And check to see if Ashcroft really went to see it. But let’s assume — just for the sake of the argument —”
“I’m not trying to argue, Macalvie.” Jury handed the whiskey glass to Wiggins, knowing he wouldn’t drink from the same ditch. “I just think Jessica Ashcroft’s in trouble.”
Macalvie went on as if Jury hadn’t interrupted. “— that Ashcroft’s guilty. Ask again — why didn’t he drive up to London? He stayed at the Ritz. The doorman would have noticed any of those cars of Ashcroft coming in and out. He couldn’t have used his own cars. They’d attract too much attention. It’s got to be either train, bus, rented car. No, renting’s too risky. Probably train. Early morning train from Exeter to London on the tenth, and he has a talk with the stationmaster to make sure he’s remembered leaving the area. He checks into the Ritz. Train back to Dorchester — it’s only a three-hour trip — six hours coming and going. Or he could even have got off in Dorchester, killed the Riley boy, then gone on to London. On the twelfth, to Waterloo Station, late night train to Exeter — no, not Exeter. The stationmaster might remember him. Axminster. What about Axminster?”
Wiggins shook his head. “Why would he go to all of that trouble? Going back and forth? If he wants to put us on the trail of a psychopath —?”
“Because he’s got to be out of the area the killings are done in,” said Macalvie.
“Then what does he do,” said Jury, “after he gets off your Axminster train? He can’t walk to Wynchcoombe. How does he get there? And how does he get to Lyme Regis?”
“Not the train, then. So he doesn’t rent a car. He buys one in London. Something fast and pricey that’s already M.O.T.’d. Buys it from one of the sleazy grafters all over London. They don’t give a damn what name you tell them. That gives Ashcroft the thirteenth to do his interviewing of tutors and allows her to pack up and they go back to Ashcroft on the fifteenth.” He looked at Jury. “So what do you think?”
“Do you care?”
“Not particularly. We’ll circulate pictures round the used-car lots. Pictures. But I don’t want to breath on Ashcroft hard enough to make him suspicious.” Jury’s theory had now become his. “I can’t send a police photographer.”
“We’ve got a photographer,” said Jury.
Macalvie frowned. “Like who?”
“Molly Singer.”
Macalvie smiled. “You mean Mary Mulvanney.” He sat back and put his feet on his desk.
“Okay, just for the sake of argument, I’ll go along with you. Let’s say she is Mary Mulvanney. Given Sam Waterhouse, given Angela Thorne’s father, that certainly adds up to a lot of coincidences. Too many. There’s a connection between the murders. The old one and these new ones. The same theory that applies to Waterhouse might apply to her. Revenge. Though the killing of the Riley boy and Davey White isn’t clear. Anyway, we get Molly into Ashcroft as a photographer for some classy magazine about cars or the country gentleman. We can certainly work up some bona fides.”
Macalvie took his feet off the desk and frowned. “Jury, you’re saying you want to put your chief suspect in the same house with Jessica Ashcroft?”
“Who says she’s my ‘chief suspect’? And what about Waterhouse? Anyway, Jessica’s living there right now with another suspect. Her uncle. If Molly Singer were guilty, she’d hardly try anything in the house on a photography assignment.”
“Mary Mulvanney.” From his wallet, Macalvie drew a snapshot. It was a smiling trio of a woman, a little girl, and an older girl with pale skin and dark hair who was the smiling center of the three.
Jury shook his head. “I don’t see any more resemblance to Molly Singer than to any dark-haired girl.”
Macalvie returned the picture to his wallet.
That’s what got Jury. He’d been carrying it around for twenty years. “You’ll never get over that fifteen-year-old kid walking into your office and telling you the law’s scum, police are scum, and especially you’re scum. She really got to you, didn’t she?”
Macalvie didn’t answer for a moment. “No, Jury. She really got to you. Let’s go talk to her, if that’s the only way to convince you who she is.”
“A little browbeating?”
“Who, me?”
“Just let me handle the photography business, will you? After a chat with you she might not feel like cooperating with police.”
II
Macalvie had made himself at home in the chair by the fire, having picked up the black cat and dumped it on the floor. The cat sat like lead at his feet, its tail twitching.
They had appeared unannounced, Macalvie overriding Jury’s objections. It had taken enough persuasion on Jury’s part to keep the chief superintendent from dragging Molly Singer into the Lyme Regis station.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Molly, looking from Macalvie to Jury.
“The hell you don’t,” Macalvie said, working the old Macalvie magic. “Twenty years ago your mother, Rose, was murdered in a little place called Clerihew Marsh —”
“I’ve never heard of it,” said Molly.
“In Dartmoor, maybe forty miles from here.”
Her face was a mask, unreadable; her body rigid, untouchable. But the emotion she was holding back seemed forcibly to spread through the room. Jury felt simultaneously drawn to her and held off.
What interested him was that Macalvie seemed totally unaffected. It wasn’t that he was an unfeeling man; he just didn’t seem bothered by the electricity in the air.
“Would you like to see my birth certificate to prove who I am?”
“Love to.” He popped a hard candy in his mouth and leaned toward her. “Papers don’t mean sod-all. You could bring in the priest who officiated at your baptism and all the rest you’ve made your weekly confession to — you are a Catholic, I suppose — and it wouldn’t matter. You’re still Mary Mulvanney. What the hell are you doing in Lyme?”
“Must I get a solicitor?”
Macalvie smiled slightly. “Of course Singer could be your married name. Is it?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you finish telling us just what happened in Clerihew?”
The question surprised Jury. It clearly surprised Molly Singer. And as he asked the question, he had taken the snapshot from his wallet and handed it to her.
She wouldn’t take it, so he dropped it in her lap.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You really overwork that line, you know?”
Molly looked at Jury almost hopefully, as if he might untangle the web Macalvie was weaving. Jury said nothing, even though, strictly speaking, he had precedence. This was Dorset, not Devon. But there was a chemistry in the room, a delicate balance that he might upset if he intervened.
“Sam Waterhouse is out — but I expect you read about that.”
“I’ve never heard of him.” Her voice was flat; her expression bland.
Macalvie had played two aces in a row right off the bottom of the deck — showing her that picture and then suddenly bringing up Sam Waterhouse. Macalvie, for all of his surprises, didn’t use cheap ones. He grew serious. Unless that too was a trick. Maybe Macalvie’s pack didn’t have a bottom. “Let’s go over that story of what happened on the Cobb again.”
Molly Singer merely shook her head. Still she hadn’t touched the picture. “Why? You wouldn’t believe it.”
He slid down in the chair, crossed one leg over the other, and said, “You’d be surprised.” He sounded almost friendly.
She told him. It was the same story she’d told Jury. And she had no explanation. Impulse, she said. To Jury, her story had the form of a dream . . . this woman out on those rocks, finding a dead child, carrying back the dog . . .
He saw Macalvie look at him, reading the expression. His smile was taut and his message clear: Minder.
Molly was talking again: “It’s the truth, what I told you. I know you don’t h
ave sympathy for what might loosely be called ‘neurosis’ —”
“Try me.”
He sounded perfectly sincere. But what did that mean? “When you walked into the hotel dining room, you recognized me, didn’t you?”
“I never saw you before that day,” she said.
“Well, I sure as hell knew you: the kid who walked into my office twenty years ago and took the place to pieces. You’ve got to watch that temper, Mary — excuse me, Molly — or someday you’ll wind up killing somebody.”
She stared at him. “So now I’m the chief suspect.” She looked down at the picture and shook her head. “It’s a poor picture. How could anyone say this girl and I are the same person?”
“I’m not going by the picture and you damned well know it.” He reached out his hand for the snapshot.
“What motive would I ever have for killing Angela Thorne?”
“I’m no psychiatrist —”
Bitterly, she said, “That’s obvious.”
“— but I imagine it’d be very hard to think of your baby sister writing on the wall in her mother’s blood. Hard going to that nut-house and seeing her catatonic. And what you screamed at me twenty years ago was that no matter how long it took you’d get your revenge — against police, judges, God — anything responsible for not finding the real killer. Sam Waterhouse was a friend of yours. And you wouldn’t look kindly on anyone who helped put him away. George Thorne. The kid’s father.”
Her face was blank. “I don’t know her father or what he does or did. You’re just determined to make a case up out of whole cloth —”
“The cloth’s already cut to fit you, Mary.”
She glared at him.
“Circumstantial evidence alone —” said Macalvie.
“It would have been pretty stupid of me, then, to leave my cape and bring the dog back.”
“True. I haven’t worked that out yet.” There seemed to be no doubt in his mind that he would. “Like I say, I’m no psychiatrist.”
Molly Singer got up. “And I’m not Mary Mulvanney.”
As Macalvie rose, the black cat’s tail twitched again, the inverted triangles of its pupils glaring up at him as if to ask, What fresh hell can this be?
EIGHTEEN
“EAT your soldiers, Jess.”
Robert Ashcroft spoke absently from behind his newspaper. At the breakfast table now sat three where two had been perfectly comfortable before.
“I don’t like my toast cut in strips,” said Jessie, fingering a page of one of the books she had brought to the table.
Uncle Rob looked up from his paper. “Since when?”
“I don’t like my egg topped, either. I like to peel it.” Casually, she turned a page of Rebecca.
Sara Millar, the third of their party, cocked her head. She was sitting with her back to the window, and the morning light made her pale hair glow.
(Bleached, thought Jessie.)
“I’m sorry, Jessica. I guess I just assumed . . .” The quiet voice trailed off. The Selfless Sara had undertaken the job of fixing Jessie’s breakfast, thereby relieving the underworked Mrs. Mulchop of yet another chore.
“You’re still angry with me, aren’t you?” Robert Ashcroft looked unhappy.
Jess was sorry for the hurt look on his face and pained because she was its cause. But this was going to be a battle of wits, make no mistake. Thus she must harden her heart. She simply shrugged her indifference.
Of course, that worried her uncle more. “You’re acting awfully —”
Sara Millar interrupted, thereby cleverly deflecting the thrust of Robert’s words. “What are you reading, Jessie?”
She was clearly determined to be nice as ninepence. “Rebecca and Jane Eyre.” Jess looked Sara straight in the eye. Sara had nice eyes, widely spaced and the same bluish-gray of the suit she had worn yesterday. The eyes were set in just the face that Jessie would have expected: clear-skinned and, if not absolutely pretty, it was far from plain, framed as it was by that ash-blond hair. Round her hair was a dusty-rose band that matched her jumper. All of her clothes (Jessie bet) would have that dusty, subdued look — colors muted, makeup understated, just that bare hint of lipstick. The metamorphosis would come later, after she got her claws into Uncle Robert. Then would come trailing the plumy gowns, waterfalls of jewels (Barbara Allan’s emeralds, maybe?), the blond hair coiled but with little tendrils struggling free as Sultry Sara swept down Ashcroft’s magnificent staircase.
But as for now, Sara Millar was perfectly content to let her beauty lie skin deep.
She had been talking about the books during Jess’s ruminations over her transformation: “ . . . two of my favorites,” said the Selfless Sara.
Jess looked up from the book she was only pretending to read. Uncle Robert had once told her it was rude to read in others’ company, but she had merely taken him to task about his morning paper. Jessie was not disposed to bring books to the table, anyway, before now.
“Two of my favorites.” Sara would have said that if Jess had brought Beano and Chips and Whizzer along.
Sara quoted, “ ‘Last night I dreamed I was at Manderley again . . . ,’ ” and she had the nerve to look around the dining room as if Ashcroft might give Manderley a run for its money. “Isn’t that a smashing line? I only wish I could write one a quarter as good.”
Robert Ashcroft looked at her, seeming pleased. “Do you write, then?”
Sara Miller laughed. “Nothing you’d want to read, I’m sure.”
Jessie glared. If she was dreaming of Manderley, why didn’t she go back to it? She gave a little kick under the table.
Sara lurched slightly. “What’s that?”
Uncle Rob pulled up the tablecloth. “What’s Henry doing there? Get him out, Jess.”
“It’s all right,” said Sara, recovering quickly from the paw that had hit her silk-stockinged leg. “I was just surprised. Hullo, Henry.”
Jessie watched the traitor Henry burrowing out and accepting a head-rub, all uncaring of the knives grinding in his mistress’s mind. “May I be excused?” she asked in a determinedly polite manner.
“To go where?” asked Uncle Rob. “You have to begin lessons.”
A look passed between Sara and Uncle Rob. Jessie could barely control her rage. But the Mad Margaret had taught her a lot about control. “No, no, no, my dahling, No! You don’t scream the line out — ‘Not all the perfumes of Arabia can ever make this little hand clean.’ ”
“I’m going to sit on the wall.”
“The wall?” Sara looked puzzled.
“Around the grounds,” Jess answered, in a tone that suggested Sara must be a bit dim if she didn’t know grounds had walls. “I like to sit and look way off at the prison. Where the ax-murderer escaped from.”
“Jess, for the umpteenth time, no one escaped.”
She shrugged as if that made no difference. “Anyway, what about the murders?” This question was directed to Sara Millar. Jess hoped it might take the place of Rochester’s crazy wife.
“Jessie, you oughtn’t to be afraid —” Jessie’s look stopped Sara.
Afraid? Jess wasn’t afraid of anything except her uncle’s getting married. With her two books clutched to her chest — and wishing Mrs. Mulchop would wear black and give Sara Millar evil looks, just as Mrs. Danvers did the mouse that married de Winter, she started toward the door.
Victoria Gray was coming in, dressed for riding.
The good-mornings were spoken. Victoria was welcome to share the table, but she stood instead at the sideboard, helping herself to coffee from the silver pot. Since Sara had turned back to her own coffee, she didn’t see that dagger-like look that Victoria Gray planted in her back. Jess glanced from the one woman to the other. Although Victoria was better-looking, she was old. At least, nearly as old as Uncle Rob. Selfless Sara was young and dewy, maybe just the age of de Winter’s mousy wife.
“Well, I’m off,” said Victoria. “Do you ride?” she asked Sara, without enthusiasm
.
“A little,” Sara said, smiling.
Like she wrote. Probably she was the Brontë sisters and Dick Francis all rolled into one.
II
Don’t talk to strangers, Jess, Uncle Robert had cautioned her. As if whole platoons of strangers were walking by the wall trying to engage her in conversation.
She was sitting on the part of the wall that abutted onto one of the end posts that formed Ashcroft’s entrance to its long, tree-lined driveway, like a double-barricade against the drive’s low, stone wall. On the post was a simple bronze plaque, saying ASHCROFT. Jess often sat here, hoping she’d see something interesting on the road, but she never saw anything except the occasional car or a drover with a bunch of sheep.
It was too high for Henry to clamber up, and she wasn’t going to help him because he was doing penance for that head-rub he’d allowed Sara to give him. Henry didn’t seem aware he was doing penance; his position was, as usual, prone.
The full horror of her situation was beginning to wash over Jess. Sara Millar had been sitting at breakfast as if she belonged there just as much as the egg cups and the teapot and the toast. A familiar fixture. Yet, there had been no hint at all of her having “taken over.” She was merely — at ease.
Jess hit at the stone with her spanner and crumbled a bit of it that drifted dust down onto Henry. He didn’t care. No one . . . What was that?
Down the road to her right a car was coming, coming very slowly. Probably tourists limping along, taking their time. Then her eyes opened wide. What a car! It was long, elegant — a classic. And it seemed to be in some sort of trouble.
The automobile drew abreast of her and stopped. The driver rolled down the window. “I beg your pardon. You wouldn’t know of a garage around here?”
Jessie hopped from the wall and strolled over to the white car with its glistening finish. A dozen coats of lacquer, she bet. Red leather interior. And the winged hood ornament of a Rolls-Royce. She sighed. “No, there’s nothing for miles and miles. What do you want one for?”
He smiled. If he was the ax-murderer, he was certainly a good-looking one. Green eyes and sort of straw-colored hair. “Something’s wrong. It keeps cutting off —” On cue, the chariot of fire cut off.
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