“Your father was a friend of Rudolph St. Leger, his wife says. Did you know him yourself?”
“I remember him. He was an ass, thought of himself as another Whistler, lugubrious scenes of trees and meadows and cows. Sentimental imitations of the late-nineteenth-century romantics. He hated my stuff. Tried to keep me out of the Academy. Upstart crow, he thought I was. Or cow. He couldn’t paint a real cow. He couldn’t have done much of anything if it hadn’t been for her. I mean, she was the one with the money, the position, the contacts. She financed his shows and bullied the critics not only into coming but into at least passable reviews. Except Charlie. He remained as silent as Thomas More on the marriage of King Henry. Rather tactful of him, I thought. To be fair I have to admit old Rudy had some technique, which prevented his work from being absolutely embarrassing. I mean, I suppose he could paint a cow if you held a gun to his head. People like you — no offense — would naturally look at the cows and horses and think it was a quite decent painting. But Elizabeth St. Leger really thought the man was talented. I’m not sure it’s good to have that sort of reinforcement. People who love you always lie to you, don’t they? Maybe not deliberately. It’s just they don’t know the difference. Why am I going on like this? I haven’t thought of old Rudy in years.”
“I’m interested.”
Parmenger looked at Jury with an artist’s practiced eye. “I bet you are,” he said. “I feel a little sorry for the boy. I know what it’s like to have someone after you — Want some more?” He held up the bottle of whiskey, seemingly unaware that Jury’s glass hadn’t emptied very much. Jury held out his glass to be topped up. Parmenger went on: “My own father did everything he could to prevent me painting. Even threw out my paints once, in a tearing rage. Wouldn’t give me money to go to art school — probably just as well. What he did want was for me to follow in his footsteps, or at least do something more than dab and daub — as he put it — at a piece of canvas.” Parmenger smiled ruefully. “He went into one of his tempers once, threw my paint and brushes out.”
Jury smiled. “I imagine Tommy Whittaker can hold his own. You did.”
“Had to. But if my father couldn’t control me, he could Helen. After all, what did she have to fight him with?” He set his drink on the floor beside the armchair he had sunk into.
“He left her a good deal of money and the house, though. He must have felt guilty.”
Parmenger avoided the question of guilt, saying, “Who’s talking about money? Helen had a lot of creative energy, but it never found a form. I taught her all that I could about technique. We used to go up in the attic to paint. I was always an artist, from the time I could hold a crayon.” He seemed to be explaining all of this more to himself than to Jury. “Even if I’d wanted to do something else, I’m sure I couldn’t’ve . . . but that’s stupid. The desire and the talent must go hand in hand, mustn’t they? That attic —” And he looked at the ceiling as if it might still be there, a couple of floors above them, preserved through time here in this cottage. “ — that attic on some afternoons when there was enough sun was light-flooded. We’d sit in front of the window. It was an arched window, sort of Gothic like a church window, and round the top little panes of glass were set in, like red stained glass. When the sun shone through, our faces and arms would be dappled with red. I often watched Helen as she tried her painting, sitting there, very concentrated, her pale face blood-patched. We painted what we saw out the window, the tops of the trees in Eaton Square, the gardens, the people down there sitting on the park benches.” He stopped. “It was a long time ago.”
Jury let him have his silent look back into the past for a few moments and then said, “You said she didn’t like you. It doesn’t sound like it.”
Parmenger finished off his drink, put the glass on the floor beside him. “That came later. We quarreled.”
“Over what?”
“Does that concern you?” Parmenger got out of his chair and went over to the french doors, where he stood, gazing out at the frost-hardened garden.
• • •
“Over something unpleasant that she found out. Perhaps you know the headmistress — Miss Hargreaves-Brown?”
Frederick Parmenger was a little slow in his denial. “Never heard of her. And what’s all this in aid of?”
“She didn’t want to ask direct questions, is my guess. In case she might embarrass someone. An interesting speculation.”
“Not to me, particularly.”
“I think she found the person she was looking for.”
“What person?”
“Her son.”
He turned slowly from the window. There was a volcanic force in the man, even with his senses dulled by whiskey. Watching Parmenger’s expression change, Jury thought of a storm coming on, a sky turning to lead. Parmenger looked frightened.
“He was yours. I know. Go on, sit down before you fall down.”
Parmenger slumped in the chair. He had his fingers laced, covering his face. “I didn’t know it, not back then. Helen was —” Unable to bring it out, he stopped.
“Your half sister. I know that, too.”
Parmenger got up, went over to the drinks cabinet, saying, “You know bugger-all, Superintendent.”
“Miss Hargreaves-Brown — or let’s say Annie Brown — told me.”
Parmenger’s face was white. “That bitch. My sanctimonious father paid her well to keep her mouth shut.”
“I can’t say I like her, either. How did you find out about the relationship between your father and his sister-in-law?”
“From one of his granite-faced colleagues who was instructed to give me the good news when my father died. I suppose to scare the hell out of me, in case I had any plans for some future with Helen —”
He broke off. He seemed to be looking around the room, into the deepening shadows, baffled. “My sister —” There was in the voice a sharp edge of hysteria, cut off, as Jury imagined Parmenger could repress, very quickly, any emotion he had to.
“How can you blame yourself? You didn’t —”
“Sod off! Don’t give me your police condolences. I ruined her life.”
“You ruined her life? Or could she have ruined yours?”
The implication of that sobered him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked in his bullying way.
“Would you have wanted this to come out?”
His look at Jury was pure contempt. “Don’t be absurd. Helen wouldn’t have told it, and anyway, I don’t worry about my ‘reputation.’ Let the critics do that; it keeps them off the streets.” Drink in hand, he was up and prowling the room, picking up first one and then another of Helen’s small possessions, reluctantly putting them down, as if they might be an extension of their owner. To hold on to them was to hold on to her.
“Someone’s trying to murder Grace Seaingham,” said Jury.
“Then someone’s making a damned sloppy job of it.” Parmenger downed the rest of his drink.
“I’m not talking about the presumably mistaken attack on Beatrice Sleight. That was no mistake. Call it a sort of ‘safety play.’ Beatrice Sleight was the intended victim all right. But someone is still trying to kill Grace Seaingham.”
Parmenger laughed. “Ridiculous.” But his expression changed quickly. “Why? You’re not suggesting Charles?”
“Are you?”
“No. Only I know that Grace wouldn’t divorce him.”
“So it’s common knowledge that Seaingham was in love with Beatrice Sleight.”
Parmenger stopped in his walk about the room. “No. I know it. But then I’m observant — And how the devil have you deduced that, anyway? Nothing’s happened to Grace.”
Jury didn’t answer this directly. “Helen Minton, Beatrice Sleight, Grace Seaingham. . . . Helen wasn’t — as far as I know — acquainted with either of the other women.”
“ ‘Helen’? Were you on a first-name basis then?” His face clouded over.
Jury thought of that earlier r
eference to Ferdinand, the insanely jealous brother of the Duchess of Malfi, who would see her dead before he’d see her happy with another man. “I knew her for an afternoon. Is that important now?”
Parmenger didn’t answer. His eyes were fastened on the painting of the Old Hall, as if its amateurish execution were a source of secret pain.
“Helen had a visitor a week before she died.” He pulled out his notebook, flipped the pages. “ ‘ . . . terrible row.’ That’s according to Nellie Pond, who lives next door. ‘The voices would die down and flare up again.’ . . . It was you who came to see her, wasn’t it?”
“A cunning deduction. No.”
“Nothing cunning about it. You asked why she took the picture down. How did you know your portrait had ever been hanging there? I mean, if you hadn’t seen her for months —?”
His eyes remained on the picture. He sighed. “Very well. Yes, I did see Helen. And, yes. There was a row. I wanted her to stop.”
“ ‘Stop’?”
“Searching. I knew she’d come to the North. Maureen — she’s Helen’s housekeeper —”
“I know.”
Parmenger turned to look at him, but the rancor had left both his face and his voice. “Is there anything you don’t know, Superintendent?”
“Lots,” said Jury, lighting up a cigarette. Parmenger shook his head when Jury held out the packet.
“Well, don’t expect me to enlighten you. Maureen told me she’d come up here. That was weeks ago. You don’t really think I’d have been staying at the Seainghams’ all of this time to paint a portrait, do you?”
“Go on.”
“There’s nothing to be going on with. Helen had undertaken this search and I wanted her to stop.”
“Why?”
Parmenger paused. “I was afraid,” he said, simply.
“That you’d have to take your share of the responsibility?”
“Oh, don’t be so bloody sanctimonious. Maybe I was afraid of what she’d find. I mean, of what the child would be like.”
If Parmenger knew about Robin Lyte, he wasn’t about to tell Jury. “Isn’t that superstitious, Mr. Parmenger? The close blood-tie, the deranged child — Antigone was hardly deranged.”
Parmenger feigned surprise. “A Greek scholar, too. My, but your talents are endless.” His tone changed, and he said, “Helen felt guilty enough as it was.” He shook his head slowly, as if it were full of the dust, the cobwebs up in that old attic by the window where they’d sat and painted the trees in Eaton Square. . . .
Jury watched Parmenger, who had got up now to prowl the room. He thought of Father Rourke’s study of the Gospels. He thought of Isobel Dunsany, of Annie Brown, of the paints Edward Parmenger had flung out, and especially of Jerusalem Inn.
TWENTY-FIVE
NELL HORNSBY was wiping down the optics when Jury walked in. She gave him a big smile, drew a pint of Newcastle for him, and said, “Happy Christmas.”
“Thanks, Nell. Not many people in here this evening. I’m surprised.”
“Oh, aye. We’ve only just opened. They’ll be in later. Christmas Eve’s a big night.”
There were only the elders on the bench. Marie and Frank nose to nose, and the chap in the anorak with his book and his nervous whippet. “Where’s Robin?” asked Jury.
“Robbie? Last I saw him he was in the back room.” As she gestured with the hand that held the bar towel, Jury saw a flash of skirt disappear through the door to the living quarters upstairs.
“Chrissie!” called Nell. No answer. She sighed. “The bairn just won’t leave that doll alone.”
Jury smiled. “She’ll bring it back. Probably gone to give it a wash.”
Nell shook her head and turned to wipe the beer pulls, and Jury took his glass over to the table near the fireplace. All he wanted, for the moment, was to think.
• • •
He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there with Alice all wrapped up in a blanket to which bits of hay were still stuck. “After tomorrow, I can have her back, Mam said.”
“That’s good. Are you glad to see Christmas come, then?”
“Aye. I’m getting Smurfs and a Barbie Doll and coloring books and a new dress.” She sat down and adjusted the blanket more firmly around Alice.
“You know everything you’re getting, then?”
She nodded. “I looked. It’s all upstairs in the closet. I wrapped them back up again.” Her gaze at Jury was clear and straight. “You going to tell?”
“Do I look like somebody who’d tell?”
She shrugged. “Maybe not.” She looked him over carefully. “Mam said you was police.”
“True. We’ve all been taught to keep secrets. People don’t get things out of us easily.”
Her hair, recently washed, matted damply about her small face like dark leaves. Her brown eyes stared into Jury’s. “I took off the swaddling clothes. They got dirty. And I pinned him into this blanket. Do you think that’s okay?”
Chrissie took these sudden sex changes in stride. “I’m sure it is,” said Jury. “I don’t think Mary and Joseph will mind, as long as the baby’s put back.”
She cocked her head. “Are they so dumb they don’t know it’s Alice?”
And with that sacrilege, she slipped off the chair and hunkered under the rope to stuff the doll in the crib.
Jury sat there for a moment looking at the creche. He wondered how it was he could have heard the same thing over and over and paid no attention —
Melrose Plant put his hand on Jury’s shoulder, shaking it. “Where’ve you been? Tommy’s back there” — Melrose nodded toward the back room — “beating them all blind in less time than it takes me to do a crossword. He just laid several snookers on Tattoo that you wouldn’t believe. I’m thinking of being his manager. You’re not listening. . . . Why are you staring at the Nativity scene?”
“Am I so dumb I didn’t know it was Alice?” He got up and started for the telephone beside the bar.
“What are you talking about?”
Jury turned back. “I’m going to call Grace Seaingham. I’m going to ask her to invite me to dinner. I shall, of course, be careful what I eat.”
• • •
Having finished his telephone call over which Plant thought he had taken an inordinately long time, Jury came back to the table with the remainder of his own drink and a pint of Old Peculier.
“Thank God they’ve got Old Peculier on draught,” said Melrose. “Much stronger. What’re you drinking? Lye?”
Jury smiled. “Newcastle Brown Ale. Same thing in strength.”
“I did as you said, and had a little chat with Susan Assington. I’ve been reading up on poisons.”
Jury still stared at the shabby little Christmas scene, thinking of skis and priests and paintbrushes, and said, “What did you find out?”
“I was thinking of this business of being snowed in: you know, that the Minton woman’s murderer couldn’t have been one of our happy band. Then I hit on cross-country skiing. MacQuade. Who could live in the wilds for weeks with a rifle —”
“You mean his hero could.”
Melrose shrugged and raised his glass. “Here’s to life: it’s only a story.” He went on. “But after reading up on the properties of aconitine, it was pretty clear that whoever poisoned her, number one, could have been doing it over a period of time, and, number two, didn’t have to be there when she took the lethal dose.”
“I know. I’ve been talking to Cullen.”
“A nonlethal dose passes out of the system very quickly. Maybe that’s what was giving her those side effects. It could, couldn’t it, have been in the medicine?”
“That’s the way a chap named Lamson disposed of his victim. It’s what I thought too, at first. Go on.”
Melrose drew damp rings on the table with his mug. “So scratch MacQuade. No more opportunity than anyone else, no motive.” Turning ash from his cigar, Melrose said, “Now there’s Grace Seaingham. According to her, you
say, someone’s trying to poison her.”
“You think she’s lying?”
“She won’t let Assington do any tests, will she?”
“A good point. But she is ill.”
“People have been known to administer little doses to themselves — God knows it would divert suspicion. But let me go on —” Melrose shoved his cigar in his mouth, put the book on the table, opened to a page that he had marked with a little pinkish-white flower. “As the American poet Frost might say, ‘What has this flower to do with being white?’ Helleborus niger, the black hellebore. The Christmas rose with the fatal root. Extremely poisonous. A whole houseful supplied by Susan Assington, how about that? Our little Mary-Quite-Contrary gardener.”
“And you’re saying that since the source of aconite is also a flower —?”
“Well, I’m only saying what I’m saying. Sir George and Beatrice Sleight. Sir George and, possibly, Grace Seaingham? Or, at least, in little Mary’s book. Or garden, perhaps.”
“But what have you decided Susan Assington’s connection is with Helen Minton?
“I haven’t. But she’s exactly the sort Polly Praed would have chosen. All of that featherbrained, dopey little shopgirl act hiding an absolutely pathological personality.”
Jury smiled. “I’ll reserve judgment, for Polly’s sake.” He picked up his glass and said, “Let’s go back and see how Whirlwind Whittaker’s doing.”
• • •
“I had a long talk with Father Rourke,” said Jury, watching the player with Tommy address the ball with a dithering style that wasn’t going anywhere. “He’s the priest in Washington Village and he knew Helen Minton. Rourke is a structuralist —”
“Really? I’d rather be a manager.”
“ — and he was going over various interpretations of the Gospels. Fascinating. I wish I’d paid more attention.”
Plant lit a cigar. “I’m glad you didn’t or we might be here till the snows come up to the sills. But go on.”
“What I remembered later was what he’d said about the ‘psychological’ interpretation: he was talking about the story of the Prodigal Son and its Oedipal implications.” Tommy’s opponent made a traditional break on the reds, but didn’t place the cue ball near a color.
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