The Old Contemptibles
Page 30
“I won’t? And how do you think you’ll prevent me?”
“I’ll ruin you. Here’s your choice: either I’ll make use of my ‘speculations’ and these letters and the painting and pictures; or you’ll resign your post here. And never come within breathing distance of Alex Holdsworth.”
She sighed. “Don’t be absurd. All of this”—she waved her hand over pictures and glass—“is pure conjecture.”
“The lawyer I have in mind will take this ‘pure conjecture’ and have you down the Old Bailey before you can turn around.”
“If you’re so certain, why give me a choice?”
The silence drew out as Jury looked at her. “Because of Alex. He couldn’t stand to know his mother committed suicide. Better that none of this come out.” Jury got up.
At the door he turned and said, “As far as I’m concerned, you ought to be shot, Dr. Viner.”
• • •
He walked back toward the main building on legs that felt rubbery. On a white bench some hundred feet away he saw Lady Cray sitting, facing his way, now waving him over.
“Hello,” he said. Jury felt hollow as he looked at the older woman. Lady Cray was sitting upright, her leather bag clutched in her hands. Above the large sapphire on her ring finger, the knuckle was white.
“I’m not spying. Dreadful woman, isn’t she?”
Jury couldn’t help but smile. “What have you got in there, Lady Cray? Ribbons? A gun?”
She sighed and relaxed a bit. “I told you; I’m off ribbons. Thank God. And I’m not carrying, as they say.”
He laughed.
She opened the bag, shut it again. “I do have a revolver and a license for it. But Mrs. Colin-Jackson thought it might be better if it were placed in the Castle Howe safe.”
Jury just looked at her for a moment. Then he said, “You know what you remind me of?”
“I’d probably rather not.”
“Greek theater. The deus ex machina.”
“Ah,” she breathed, her fingertips tight along the top of her bag. “I consider that a compliment.”
“It is. Did you want to see me?”
“I always want to see an attractive man. But the precise reason I waved you over is because Mr. Plant wants to see you. He called from the pub. Not to me, but to Mrs. Colin-Jackson. It sounded rather urgent.”
“How did you know where I was?”
She didn’t answer.
Jury looked behind him, following her gaze. “Why is her office set apart out here, and right amongst the flowers?”
“There was a similar situation in Eden, I believe.”
43
The girl in the tree shimmied down through the branches that blew and parted like wings, to drop the last few feet into a bed of flowers.
He’d followed her here and watched her get up from the same sort of stalks and petals he’d found her in long ago. She started off through the long grass and he followed, the grass barely separating over his head.
A rustle. Reflexively, he bellied down, tail twitching, tongue clicking. He was about to spring when he saw her ahead, getting away from him, and he sacrificed the smell nearby to the greater pull of the need to follow her.
This constant vigil was tiring, keeping her always in mind and nearly always in view. But she had been his business ever since he’d found her like a storm blowing over the vast lake, thunderclaps of rage, lightning flashes of terror. She was his business, and he’d better mind her.
A white stoat flashed across his line of vision, catching him off guard. He nearly veered from his straight path and gave chase. No.
Flutters and shadows of wings flowed above him, lit atop the hedge nearby and he pulled up again. No.
Now she was small in the distance because of these stops and starts of his, and he ran faster.
It seemed to take forever, moving through these crowded fields and crowded skies, and he was late. Already she had been up the old tree and was down on the ground.
She was worse than hounds, her anger fenced in but swirling like a dark sea. Now there was a different smell, a different sound. He had smelled it before; he had heard it before—the sudden slap and ratcheting sound.
Then she turned and walked back and the seam of tall grass closed behind her like the wake of a ship.
Rushes, flights, runs. Mice, robins, stoats. Some day there would be time for all that, not now.
He raced toward the house.
• • •
Alex was standing at the sink, eating a tasteless sandwich, a lump of cheese between hunks of bread. No one was about. The only sound that registered was the tick of the long-case clock over by the hearth.
He was staring over the field and thinking of his mother. He was indulging in the most fatal of fantasies: what his life might have been like if only . . .
R. Jury, Supt. He chewed and fantasized. What if his mum had married him and Alex could have had a Scotland Yard superintendent for a stepfather?
He looked down at the sink, dropped the sandwich into it, ashamed of himself. That was the kind of wish some little kid would have.
Staring down, he tried to pull back the old, dependable Alex, the one that seemed to be getting away from him. He was not some little kid, he thought, furiously blinking his eyes.
Alex swallowed, looked up and out the window and saw the cat streaking through the grass toward the kitchen.
Sorcerer? He opened the door, walked through the cramped mud-room and outside.
• • •
Sorcerer darted toward him then turned and darted back. Back and forth, back and forth.
Alex followed.
Up the tree. Look around. Jesus Christ! “Sorcerer?”
The cat nearly flew down a ladder of air and ran toward Castle Howe.
Alex followed him, stumbling through the long grass.
2
The car park of the Old Contemptibles was just about large enough for three cars. Nearly crowding Plant’s Japanese car out was a Jaguar XJ10, this year’s model, mirror-black, with a registration tag that in itself was worth a small fortune. It was personalized
FAN
having belonged, apparently, at one time to a “Fan” or a “Fanny” or a “Frances.” Only this one had been recustomized—a G, intaglio—very professional, very illegal. Jury looked at it and slowly shook his head.
He didn’t think anything could make him smile. This did.
• • •
“Superintendent!” called out Marshall Trueblood. “She insisted; we called from Long Pidd; we’re here; Agatha has tire tracks on her back.”
The regulars were used by now to Melrose, the librarian. But the two new additions were something else. Wiggins was standing at the bar, apparently trying to convince O. Bottemly to mix him up some medicinal brew.
Except that her absence had doubled the beauty of her sometimes sharply etched, sometimes blurred memory-face, Vivian Rivington might never have boarded that train in January. She rose fluidly from her chair in the same cream wool dress she had been wearing the last time Jury saw her; even the large-brimmed hat was there, lying on the table by her glass of sherry. Jury knew she would have rushed toward him, but, Vivian-like, checked herself and simply stood there.
If Vivian was a picture, Marshall Trueblood was a tableau: vicuna jacket, gray crepe de chine shirt into the neck of which was tucked a jade green ascot that matched his Sobranie cigarette, tasseled calfskin loafers. Trueblood had forgone Armani momentarily, thinking the Italian blood too hot, perhaps, for the Lakes.
“Vivian.” Jury felt the smile spreading through his body.
But she was wringing her hands as if she’d something to apologize for and saying, “When they told me in Venice about your getting mar—”
“A drink, a drink,” shouted Trueblood, as if they’d all been stranded in a desert. He got up and shoved Vivian down—rather roughly, Jury thought.
She continued: “When the three of us were in the Gritti Palace, they told me y
ou—”
Melrose grabbed her hand, stroked it (also rather roughly, Jury thought) and said, “Vivian, Vivian, let’s not go on about it.”
She broke free of Trueblood’s and Plant’s holds, rose, took two quick steps and slowly wound her arms round Jury’s neck. Her “I’m so sorry” came muffled from lips fast against his chest.
He could feel the small, shuddery sobs. “It’s all right, Vivian,” Jury said against her hair, his arms about her waist. “It was wonderful of you to come.”
“Don’t forget me, old sweat!” said Trueblood. “I chauffeured! We came straight up from Long Pidd after Vivian drove hell-for-leather from Heathrow.”
Jury turned his face from Vivian’s hair toward the window. “That your Jag out there?”
Trueblood said, “Actually, it’s Viv’s. Wedding present.”
Said Melrose, “It’s just what she needs in Venice.”
“It’s not for Venice. It’s for when she’s home.” Trueblood was collecting glasses for refills. Home was, and would always be, Long Piddleton.
“Interesting registration number.”
Trueblood said nothing.
Vivian was blowing her nose. “Registration number?”
“I didn’t think you’d seen it, love.” He held her at arm’s length. “And incidentally, thank you.”
“For what?”
“For hiring Pete Apted, Q.C.”
She looked confused. “Who?”
It wasn’t Vivian? Who, then?
He said to Melrose and Wiggins, who’d left the bar with his hot toddy, “We need to go back to Castle Howe.” Melrose was up in a flash. To Trueblood he said, “You two stay here. We’ll take Fang.”
3
“Helen Viner,” said Melrose. “Why didn’t I see it?”
“For the same reason Adam Holdsworth didn’t. For the same reason Alex could look at her almost as a surrogate mother,” said Jury, as the Jaguar left the hamlet of Boone.
“What’ll she do, sir, do you think?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I think she’ll do, Wiggins: I think she’ll try and bluff it out. She’s convinced she has so much influence with Adam Holdsworth and that she’s so indispensable to Castle Howe—which she, not Colin-Jackson, runs—why give up now?”
“There’s no hard evidence,” said Wiggins.
“None,” said Jury.
“She murdered two people outright and was responsible for the deaths of two others. She may have ruined the lives of two children.” He paused. “I don’t think the motive was money alone.”
Wiggins half-turned to look at him; Jury said nothing.
Melrose was thinking of his own conversation with Helen Viner. “She loves control; to her, it’s food and drink. She feeds on it.” He raised his eyes to watch the gray, scudding clouds. “You know who she reminds me of? Coleridge’s Geraldine.”
“Geraldine?” asked Jury.
“In ‘Christabel.’ The demon, the vampire-rapist. Helen Viner plays on sexual needs and fears. Do you really think she’s had her last taste of blood?” He paused. “Somewhere I heard that when Byron read ‘Christabel’ aloud, Shelley was so terrified he ran screaming from the room.” Through the windscreen Melrose saw, in the distance, the plinth that marked the Castle Howe driveway. “No hard evidence? She should be shot.”
“My words exactly,” said Jury.
44
Lady Cray was still sitting on the bench overlooking the deep lawn and gardens, watching many things.
She was watching the clusters of daffodils down there near the stone cottage swaying, but hardly “dancing” (Wordsworth would exaggerate so) in a stiff breeze that made her grip the collar of her lightweight coat.
She was watching as Adam Holdsworth played his newest, silly-arse game (the one the sergeant had taught him) of flying his wheelchair down the grassy incline, whooping all the way, waving to her after he turned; he started buzzing up the lawn again, only to repeat the process. Once, he had come close to ramming into the doctor’s cottage. She shook her head.
She was watching, with growing interest, the wide field on the other side of the gardens and the stone cottage, where a figure was walking along from the direction of Tarn House. Millie Thale. She could recognize the little girl even from this distance. Now Millie had reached the garden and was stopping, apparently oblivious to Adam Holdsworth’s sideshow (that wheelchair was surely operating against the laws of gravity, coming up that incline as it did) and was stooping to pick a bouquet of daffodils.
She was now watching another figure, far, far in the distance coming from the same direction. Running.
Lady Cray rose so suddenly that her bag slipped to the ground. She retrieved it.
As she set off down the lawn, she returned Adam’s wave.
2
“I brought you these,” said Millie Thale, her hands holding an enormous bouquet of daffodils.
Helen Viner, who had been sitting stock-still, frowning at the images in her own mind, rose as she changed her expression to one of smiling indulgence. “Millie! But daffodils, Millie?” She started to come from behind her desk.
“I expect I’m cured,” said Millie, holding out the flowers with both hands.
“Well, thank—”
The daffodils fell away and fluttered to the floor.
The impact of the bullet flattened Helen Viner against the wall. Her body seemed riveted there, palms pushed to the wall, eyes staring, when Alex Holdsworth wedged himself through the window, yelling at Millie. Sorcerer jumped from the sill.
“She killed my mum and I’ll kill her ten times.”
Alex grabbed the gun from her frozen, outstretched fingers. The second shot made Helen Viner lurch again; at the same time there was a thud, a whoop and a holler from outside the door.
Through the door came Lady Cray, who brought her small, neat hand down in a hard chop on Alex Holdsworth’s arm, forcing him to drop the Webley.
Lady Cray pushed in front of Adam Holdsworth’s wheelchair, took careful aim and shot Helen Viner. The body that had been sliding down the wall hit the floor. There was little blood.
“What in hell—?”
Lady Cray handed the gun to Adam. “Shoot her!”
“If you say so.” Adam’s hands wobbled the automatic up to some level or other and shot.
The four of them looked in one state of horror or another at the slumped form of Dr. Helen Viner.
Briskly, Lady Cray removed a small revolver from her bag, walked over to Helen Viner’s body, stood in the place where Helen Viner had last stood and shot carefully at the spot where Millie had been standing. Then she pressed the gun into the good doctor’s hand and let it fall away, quite naturally.
Millie was shaking and holding on to Alex.
Adam’s mouth was working, but no words came from it.
Alex stood stock-still, staring at Lady Cray.
“She’s quite dead,” said Lady Cray, “for which we, and Castle Howe, should be thankful.” Then she looked hard at Millie and Alex, and said, “But it’s impossible to know which bullet killed her and one of them went right into the wall. So we’re quite straight on that point, aren’t we?”
They all nodded, Adam blubbering something about the law.
“Rough justice,” snapped Lady Cray. “Now, we must get our story straight. Dr. Viner obviously attempted to shoot Millie—”
“To shoot me,” said Alex. “After all, it was my gun.” His face was flushed as he gripped Millie’s hand. “Millie grabbed the gun.”
“Very well. And clearly we had to shoot her in self-defense.”
“Are you daft?” shouted Adam. “That gun you just planted on her is your gun, not hers!”
Lady Cray sighed. “Of course it’s mine. You don’t think the staff of Castle Howe will allow their guests to tote revolvers about? She took it from me the first day I was here.”
“Oh,” said Adam, puzzled. He sighed and twirled his thumbs. “Too bad, nice woman.”
&nbs
p; “Nice? She was vile. That cat’s a better judge of character.”
Sorcerer was sitting on the desk, slowly blinking.
“She killed my mum and she made Alex’s dad kill himself. And other things. I was listening out there in the tree.” Millie’s voice was high and shrill.
“But for the Lord’s sake, woman,” Adam said, “we’ll land up in the nick!” Then he whooped and thumped his fists on his wheelchair. “In the nick at eighty-nine!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, no one will land in the nick. With a good lawyer, what court would convict an hysterical little girl, a schoolboy, a kleptomaniac, and a crazy old coot?”
“Crazy old coot?” shouted Adam, indignantly.
“So we’re agreed?”
They nodded.
“Then nothing leaves this room”—she whisked the Cadbury box from the bookshelf—“except these chocolates.”
By Martha Grimes
The Man with a Load of Mischief
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
The Anodyne Necklace
The Dirty Duck
Jerusalem Inn
Help the Poor Struggler
The Deer Leap
I Am the Only Running Footman
Five Bells and Bladebone
The Old Silent
The Old Contemptibles
Also Available in Print and eBook
DOUBLE DOUBLE is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people who are mother and son.