At Euston Station, Alex slipped two twenties on the turntable and asked for a single, first-class ticket to Windermere. Both ticket and change were spun back to him without the clerk’s even looking up.
• • •
Perhaps it was a waste of money, he thought, stowing his rucksack and slicker overhead in the empty compartment. He could as easily have paid for a second-class and then just moved along here once his ticket had been punched. But he was young. If you’re young, you’re expected to do something either illegal or rude. What he would have to do at some point was find an Eton jacket and school tie to use for British Rail rides.
Right now, though, it was more important to have a place to himself to think. He had managed, with endless cups of coffee, to stay awake. Sleep was out; he wouldn’t dare. He would dream. He would dream about his mother and it would be one of those diabolically happy dreams that one never wanted to wake from even in the best of circumstances. And in waking, he would be totally vulnerable to the onslaught of feeling he had armored himself to avoid. He remembered too many times waking up to misery (at the Holdsworths’, in the scummy gray darkness of Severn School, at frozen points on a railway station when his father was coming to collect him long ago when he’d wake on the train . . .). If the dreams had themselves been miserable, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it was all a trick, wasn’t it, life? Dream of a field grazed by sheep and wake up to wolves.
He took a small notebook and a pen from his pocket and held them, notebook open, pen unscrewed. HELL. He wrote it down. And then he crossed it out. Why would anyone, anything, bother to think up a Hell in the afterlife when all you had to do was stop awhile in this one?
Fields flew past, unremarked. All Alex saw was his own dim reflection in the pane. Occasionally a telephone pole here, a silo there. Farther along light shimmered over fields encircling some distant mirage of a village.
He leaned back. Money, fortunately, was no problem. Alex hadn’t saved for rainy days; he’d counted on torrents, and one had come.
Some of the money he had just won on Fortune’s Son was now on his person. For two years he had accumulated money to get him and his mum to someplace the Holdsworths had never heard of—Lithuania, he understood, was pleasant. Fourteen hundred pounds. A hundred in his wallet (less the train fare), six hundred strapped in a small money-bag round his ankle, four sewn into the lining of his jacket, the rest in an inside pocket of the rucksack.
Over four thousand quid had been accumulated during his business dealings at Severn School. Twice he had been sent down for cardplaying, although the headmaster could never understand why he played poker, since he never seemed to win.
• • •
When it had finally been decided that Alex must go off to private school, he had made the best of it. It wasn’t that he minded so much going to Severn School—actually, it made a change for a while from his comprehensive-school “mates,” whose idea of having a good time was spending Saturdays at the cinema, or going biking, or sitting about in some clubby way smoking and lying about their conquests with girls.
Alex certainly had nothing against girls; he just couldn’t find one with any imagination. They turned out to be merely prettier versions of the boys; they went to the cinema and had sleep-over parties where they smoked and talked about the boys.
While his schoolchums were sneaking into X-rated films and leaving with only Parently Approved girls, Alex was studying racing forms, the stock market, and estate agents’ brochures and adverts for properties in Ibiza. Merely for practice, he’d follow the gentrification of the London burbs. He’d take the tube to Limehouse, Wanstead, even Bow—which was now trendy. Bow, would you believe it? Alex decided that once he got the stake he’d start a trend.
Alex studied demographics, not people. He knew about people simply from listening in on conversations in tea rooms, on park benches, and in whatever pubs he could get into in dark glasses shoved on top of his head just to show he didn’t have anything to hide. He was tall for his age and his voice, fortunately, had changed early.
But he couldn’t get into the betting shops. Sitting on a park bench he’d found a seedy old con man named Ned Rice, a really convincing charmer with an uppercrust accent, whom he’d taken on as partner. It was Ned who sat in the battered Land Rover and got a third. Alex got two-thirds; the ideas were his.
In addition, he’d take bets for a few, a very few, of his mates. When they didn’t have two pence to rub together he’d tell them they could bet on margin. He tried to explain it was betting on the future, a concept they loved, since the unmoneyed future was abstract. Anyway, rarely did they lose.
As Alex looked at his reflection in the glass now, his head swaying dozingly with the motion of the train, he thought that was about as much as you could expect. Living on Margin.
• • •
He felt his shoulder being shaken, looked up, saw the youngish face of the conductor, heard him ask for the ticket.
Thank God it had only been a light doze, not the deep sleep that he feared. He pulled out the ticket. . . .
Jesus. The conductor.
Alex’s mind flashed to the morning newspaper, not knowing whether her death would be of any interest to the papers or be merely a statistic. But what if the authorities wanted to get hold of Alex enough to put a picture in the paper. And why, anyway, was he so intent on keeping his whereabouts a secret? He didn’t know. He merely pondered this with his face turned to the window image of himself as the conductor’s punch bit into his ticket.
The man might remember the face of the boy who detrained in Oxenholme.
Now he was asking Alex if he was all right.
“Never better, guv.” Alex gave him a broad smile. “Bored, is all.” Alex shook his head. “School, bloody school.”
The train conductor probably wasn’t too long out of it; his uniform and a complexion made pasty by his indoor work made his ferret-face look older. He had a thin nose and thin lips that tilted up in a smile now. “Thought you’d be ’avin’ yer ’olidays round about now.”
“Nah.” Alex unzipped a pocket of his rucksack and pulled out a deck of greasy cards. “You must get a bit of time off from patrolling them corridors. What say to a game? Penny a point, odds against me, can’t say fairer than that.” In one smooth motion he had fanned out the deck.
Challenged to a game he knew he’d be a sure loser; cards held no interest for him except insofar as they offered an opportunity for bluffing—for freezing the facial muscles, for hiding feelings. Anyway, he could only play if there was a lot of money in the pot.
The conductor’s smile broadened. “Not with one handles a deck like that, mate. I’ve me wife and kiddies t’look out fer.”
He left the carriage.
In his mind’s eye, Alex saw him looking at his, Alex’s, picture in the paper. Nah, couldn’ be ’im, cheeky young bastard. No one’d want to play cards with his mum just dead.
2
Outside the Windermere station there was a rack for bikes. Upon inspecting the four that had been shoved in, Alex found one that hadn’t a lock on it. He looked it over carefully, decided it was worth maybe twenty, thirty pounds and left fifty in a grubby envelope he’d rooted from a dustbin. He hoped the owner of the bike would see the envelope forked into the slot where the bike had been.
As he wheeled away, alternately hopping up and pushing with his foot, he imagined this was how a fugitive must feel, guilty or innocent.
• • •
He couldn’t get across the lake—he probably wouldn’t have wanted to take the ferry anyway—but at least, on the bike, once he got to the other side of Windermere and to Coniston Water, he could find tracks inaccessible to automobiles and thereby get to Boone by a more direct route.
Direct. That was a laugh. It was teatime when he finally skirted the hamlet and dusk was coming on when he got to the Holdsworth property. In the distance he could hear water coursing. The countryside was full of becks and ghylls so that often
, in spring, there were parts of Lake land that turned into ballets of water: tiny falls into larger streams; streams into great forces; water flowing into tarns and lakes.
Alex came to the corner of the long fieldstone wall that had once surrounded the house but now only managed to turn a rough corner before it began its disintegration, crumbling away to nothing. It served no purpose, anyway. He went off to the left and followed the wall a quarter of a mile until it ended. Alex got off the bike and pushed it the rest of the way into the trees.
What he was headed for was the tree house. He and Millie had hammered the boards together three years ago, chiefly for a sanctuary for Millie, somewhere for her to go to get away from the family.
He walked a bit to a large beech tree and saw it. It looked just as he’d remembered. Not only was it well hidden because it was so high up, but even the leafless branches covered it, and the beech was also surrounded by conifers.
Alex laid the bike on its side in a moss and blanketed it in lichen, twigs and dead leaves. Then he walked over to the beech, upended the ladder and started to climb. He was amazed it had all held together for this long. The ladder hadn’t rotted and the house itself, when he was up far enough to see inside, looked clean. He wondered if Millie still used it.
Food. Lord, but he was hungry. He dumped his rucksack in the corner, took the gun and ammunition out of his pockets and shoved them into the sack. He tore the wrapping from a cheese and cucumber roll and gulped the sandwich down in four bites. The milk was warm, but he drank the whole container.
He fell asleep still holding the milk carton.
13
Jury liked Brown’s, a hotel that could easily have been missed in the street in Mayfair because of its unpretentious façade. It had always been a favorite place for afternoon tea, with its firelit lounge and tiered cake plates, which was what Madeline Galloway was looking over now.
“You look like your sister,” he had said when he’d first seen her.
“We’ve been told that,” she answered, offering him tea.
“I could use a cup, thanks.”
He could not tell whether the next few moments of banal conversation implied relative indifference to death or was a way of avoiding it.
She poured another cup of tea for herself, held the pot aloft by way of question, but Jury shook his head. “Haven’t finished the first.”
“Haven’t started the first,” she said. And then, “Did you know Jane well?”
“Well enough,” he responded a little tightly. He did not care what she inferred from that.
“Oh.” She looked into her cup, not at him, kindly.
“You’ve been working for the family more-or-less as an assistant to Mr. Holdsworth? Inspector Kamir wasn’t quite clear as to your duties.”
She laughed, and then perhaps thinking laughter was out of place, cut it off. “More-or-less is right. He’s been writing, for years, a study of the Lake poets, though I don’t think he’s seriously thinking of getting it published. Since he writes from inspiration, very little actual writing gets done.”
“The inspector said you’d been interviewing people for a librarian’s post.”
She sighed. “No joy there. Who’d want to come to a remote area in the Lakes for the small salary he’s offering? And for something as dull as indexing and cataloguing books? I should have been more specific in my advert, I expect. It’s an enormous library, floor to ceiling, and I can barely reach the top even on a ladder. He thought at first I might as well do it, but, thank you, no. I told him I couldn’t, especially the foreign-language volumes; and that it would take Lord knows how long at the rate I’m going.”
They were skirting, Jury knew, and thought she did, the issue.
“What would have caused the suicide? Any ideas at all?”
Madeline shook her head. “Only that the Holdsworths were continually harassing her about Alex. And she wasn’t at bottom a happy person.”
“I know, I think, what you mean. There were times when she could shut a person out.” Times he remembered Jane staring out of the window as if she were waiting for someone or something. She was miles away from him. For what? For what was she waiting?
Madeline merely shook her head. “I thought she loved her son too much to put him through something like this. I can imagine her not being able to go on if something happened to Alex—if he died, say, or went missing for years. I can imagine that. And now he has gone missing.”
“No, I wouldn’t say missing. ‘Escape’ is a better word. Apparently, through a bathroom window.”
Her laughter released some of the tension. “That sounds like Alex. But why would he?”
“I don’t know; perhaps you can tell me. You just said it sounded like Alex.”
“I mean only that he, well, gets up to all sorts of things.”
“Such as?”
With a shrug of impatience, she asked, “Does it matter?” She looked inside the teapot, looked as if she had not found what she wanted, and put the top back.
“It might explain . . . something about him. How many children could you imagine finding a parent dead without their breaking down, going into shock—those are the usual reactions.”
“How many times have you had cases where children discover parents dead?”
Had her tone been less hostile, he wouldn’t have said it: “My own. I found my mother dead after a bomb gutted our house.”
She looked off into the fire, said only, “I’m sorry.”
“The point is that police at the scene said the boy was like ice; he didn’t cry; he was as hostile as you just now; he wouldn’t answer questions, or when he did he lied. He told the inspector he had no other family.”
Her head came up and she said, “That’s not a lie.” The words came out flat, uninflected.
“What about you? You’re his aunt, you’re fond of him, and you don’t appear to share the opinion of the grandparents.”
She had taken one of the several scattered pillows on the sofa and was holding it against her like soft armor. “There is another family member Alex likes. Adam, his great-grandfather.” She smiled. “To tell the truth, that’s who Alex reminds me of. Adam’s a curmudgeonly old man who prefers to live in a swank retirement home and make visits to his own home. It’s all his, you know.”
“ ‘All his’? The house, you mean?”
“All of it. Tarn House—the estate—and the money. The lot.”
“You say ‘the lot’ as if there were a great deal of it.”
“Well, good heavens, there is.” She looked at him squarely, not dropping her eyes, not attempting to distract him with the pot or the plate from the inference he might be drawing. “It’s hard to know what goes on in Adam Holdsworth’s mind; he undoubtedly likes it that way, you know, to keep people on edge. He certainly does not appear to hold his son and daughter-in-law in high regard.” She smiled slightly. “ ‘That Person’ is how he refers to Genevieve.” She reached for a small meringue, inspected it, put it on her plate, untasted. “Whenever Alex and Jane came down from London, Adam always made it a point to be on hand.”
She let that hang. Jury said, “In other words, Adam Holdsworth liked them.”
“Especially Alex. I’ve seen the two of them, Alex pushing the wheelchair, escape to some part of the grounds and have everyone looking for them. They plotted, I think. There’s nothing that man likes so much as a trick.”
“Then Alex, and perhaps his mother, would have expectations.”
She lit a cigarette with a porcelain lighter and sat there, her knees together, leaning forward, looking thoughtfully into the fire. “To be sure.”
“And now it’s just—Alex? That is, for most of this ‘lot.’ ” He thought perhaps the smile would draw her out. It didn’t.
“I don’t understand what anyone’s expectations have to do with my sister’s death,” she said frostily, as she flicked ash into a floral tray.
“I’m sorry.” He had seen her, sized her up somewhat, whic
h was all he could do at the moment. “Could I take you to your train?”
She had put out her cigarette and risen, looking down at him speculatively. “I’ve ordered a cab. I’ve still got over an hour.”
Which she didn’t want to spend with him, clearly.
Jury pulled out one of his cards and handed it to her. “I’d better be going. Please ring me if you remember anything.”
“What is there to remember?”
A great deal, thought Jury. “Incidentally, I think I know someone who might just fit that librarian’s position. He’s good with languages. I wouldn’t worry about the salary end; he’s just scraping by as it is.”
“I’d be eternally grateful.”
“I’ll ring him. He’s quite brilliant, really. Eccentric. Likes to do odd things.” Jury studied the cake plate. “Anything to get away from the family.”
14
“If Yngie J. Malsteem can’t drive her out, no one can,” said Melrose, as much to the stuffed cheetah Scroggs had dragged in to the Jack and Hammer as to Scroggs himself.
Dick Scroggs turned another page of the Bald Eagle, whose paper wings he always managed to spread all over the bar. “Would that be one of your guitarist friends, my lord?”
Melrose sighed. “Get me another half of Old Peculier.” He shoved his glass forward.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, stop calling me that and stop talking down your nose. Ever since you painted ‘saloon’ over ‘bar’ on the door you’ve been doing it.” Saloon had been scrolled in white paint on the frosted glass; it was part of Dick’s campaign for a stylish new decor. “It’s all because of the Blue Parrot. We told you Sly’s place was too far outside the village to be giving you competition. Though God knows his camel looks better than your cheetah. It’s molting.”
Dick knifed off the collar of foam and said (still looking over half-glasses he’d also taken to wearing), “I find it lends the place a bit of style, even if some don’t.”
The big stuffed animal, poised to strike, was crouching by the huge fireplace. Its fur was rubbed, even bald in places, and its front teeth were missing. It bore an eerie resemblance to Mrs. Withersby, who had come to char, stayed to drink and was now snoring beside the cheetah, an objet d’art that had been part of some hunting buff’s estate that Trueblood had bought up. There were a few other objets d’art, also, deployed about the Jack and Hammer, such as the monkey hanging from a vine of rope.
The Old Contemptibles Page 9