Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (2 page)

“The old fool’s gone and done it. He’s really gone and done it.” He threw the invitation across the breakfast table in the general direction of his wife. It missed (for it was a very large table), ricocheted off the silver toast rack, and skidded off onto the highly polished wooden floor.

“Done what, dear?” Lillian, her gaze held by a large display advertisement for precious gemstones, and herself inured, by long years of marriage, to her husband’s tantrums, ignored the card, which now lay face downward on the floor.

“He’s actually marrying one of his little tarts, that’s what.”

Lowering the paper, she peered at him over the headlines relating the latest brawl in Parliament. Lillian, skimming the front page on her way to the advertisements, had noted it seemed to have something to do with child care. If they couldn’t take care of the little brats, why did they keep having them, she wondered? The accompanying photo showed the Prime Minister emerging with a preoccupied scowl from 10 Downing Street, in conscious imitation of Churchill during the darkest days of the war.

She also had taken a glance in passing at the obituaries. She found it interesting that the unimportant people always seemed to die in alphabetical order. She was about to comment on this observable fact when the full import of Ruthven’s words took hold.

“Marrying?” Her voice caught on the last syllable. “Which one? Not the one with the enormous—”

“Probably.” Even with his wife, or especially with his wife, Ruthven could not bring himself to use the vulgarities that were the bedrock of his vocabulary in all-male company.

“—dachshund?” she finished faintly. “Has he lost his mind, do you think?” Her tone, although devoid of pity, suggested she thought it was a real possibility. On the last phrase, her voice rose on an ending squeak of hysteria.

“Far from it. Cunning and diabolical as ever, I’d say.”

She roughly folded the paper into a heap on the table, the sale on emeralds forgotten. Lowering her voice conspiratorially, remembering Alice in the kitchen, she stage-whispered.

“What is he going to do, do you think? To you, I mean?”

Ruthven was not so blind to his wife’s many faults as not to know what she really meant was, To Me.

“I haven’t a clue,” said Ruthven. “It could be his way of trying to cut me out of my inheritance entirely. But surely even he—”

“Try not to upset yourself, dear. Remember your heart …”

“Yes, yes.”

Another thought struck her as she bent to retrieve the gaudy missive from the floor. She straightened.

“Your poor mother.” This time the pity might have been sincere, a woman on the cusp of middle age viewing the fate of one many years past its vicissitudes. She looked at her balding, stout husband, so like his father (who looked more like a greengrocer than a famous author), and so unlike his mother, who was going to seed in a rather determined, yet fatalistic, way.

A fear seized Lillian, not for the first time in the twenty-odd years of her marriage. Although she had long ago rejected her religious upbringing as being inconveniently at odds with her avaricious nature, a prayer went through her mind:
Please
don’t let it all have been for nothing.

“Yes, I had better ring her. Preferably before it gets too late in the day. You know how she—”

“Yes, I know. Good God, this is a disaster. Quite apart from it making the family the laughingstock of the world. A disaster. Ruthven, we must do something.”

Meaning: Ruthven, you must do something. He sighed, stalling while he stacked the rest of the now-forgotten mail and put it to one side. One would have said his face held the expression of a man preparing to make a clean conscience of it, except that Ruthven had no conscience.

“My dear.” He cleared his throat. “My dear, I think it’s time we had a little chat.”

There remain rental flats in the greater London area that, were estate agents given to truth in advertising, would be fairly listed as dark, grotty, unwholesome bedsits with living space too small in which to swing a cat. Maida Vale, although having enjoyed huge victories in the ever-escalating real estate price war that had driven the average population farther and farther afield in search of shelter, still at the time of this story retained unsavory pockets that the most visionary of entrepreneurs had rejected as not holding the remotest potential for renovation. These sagging Victorians, too run down after decades of neglect to be resurrected to desirable states of tweeness, had been divided up by landlords in the middle part of the twentieth century into mean little flats designed to extract the maximum rent from the minimum square footage.

It was in such a flat that Sarah Beauclerk-Fisk received her issue of the invitation to her father’s wedding. Despite the hyphenated name, and despite the fact that the rent was far less than she could have afforded, Sarah had settled into her gloomy surroundings the way an animal will burrow into the smallest available space when it wants to hide from the world in general, and people in particular.

Everything in the place reflected darkly back on Sarah’s personality: The carelessly chosen second-hand furniture included two overstuffed chairs covered in faded roses that clashed with faded wallpaper that might once have been green but was now an indecipherable muddish gray. While bookshelves lining the walls might have offset the gloom with brightly covered novels, instead the dozens of worn books on the shelves blended into the mud like rocks, their covers, mostly black or gray, announcing obscure religious tracts of long-dead martyrs and other assorted lunatics.

It was in one of the overstuffed chairs that an overstuffed Sarah, herself upholstered in brown, had subsided to contemplate the pink leers of the cherubs on the unwelcome invitation she clutched now in her pudgy hands. To her eye, there was something faintly sacrilegious about the ostensibly religious figures, apart from their evident delight in their flagrant nakedness. She wondered if her father or—that woman—had picked out the cards. Her father, Sarah recognized, could be a vulgarian at times but this particular choice was—she searched for the word—common. Common. Just, she imagined, like (she scanned the card again; what was the woman’s name?)—Violet Mildenhall. So difficult keeping the names of her father’s girlfriends straight. Violet. An old-fashioned, pretty name—

The telephone rang. That had to be Albert, if he’d received a card as well. And why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like her father to play favorites; no, he treated all his children abominably. With an effort she hoisted herself to her feet; the telephone was in the kitchen, where Sarah spent most of her time.

“Sarah?”

“You’ve got one as well, then.”

“Yes. Oh, God, yes. It’s appalling, just appalling. He kept threatening to do it but I didn’t believe him. You know how he just likes to create a fuss. I thought he was just playing with us, hoping for a fight. Bloody old tyrant.”

“Well, letting him know we’re unhappy about it will only feed his happiness,” she said mechanically. At least he sounds sober, she thought, absentmindedly stirring the simmering pot on the cooker. Her love of food had after many years paid unexpected bonuses in the form of a book of baking recipes just out from her father’s publishers, Gregson’s. The book was called
What Jesus Ate
, ideas for which she had gleaned from a close reading of the scriptures; most of the instructions seemed to involve fish and olives and assorted desert plant life. Gregson’s had told her they expected it to make pots of money in the New Age market, and indeed it had become one of the surprise best sellers of that season’s list. She was currently working on
Cooking with the Magdalene
.

Albert sighed audibly, wondering, not for the first time, if his sister, although intelligent in her earnest, pedantic sort of way, was entirely
there
. He guessed she was just quoting from one of the idiot, platitudinous authors she read, although her apparent philosophical acceptance of the situation was grating. He didn’t want any oil poured on troubled waters; he wanted it poured on the flames.

Albert knew no one in the world as—he searched for the word—nebulous as Sarah. After joining a convent while still in her late teens, she had left after one year (“The food was inedible,” was her only explanation). She had next studied at one of the red brick universities to become a social worker, a trying period for the local poor on whom she had practiced. It was during this time she had gotten in touch with her true feelings and become self-actualized. Her enthusiasm for pop social and psychological theories now had morphed in some way with her brief flirtation with Catholicism into what Albert gathered was a garbled neo-pagan worship of Mother Earth, Father Sky. Where had she come by this stuff? Years of living with their father had made the rest of them tougher, cannier, albeit in different ways. It had also permanently obliterated whatever traces of the Judeo-Christian tradition he and his brothers had managed to have beaten into them in the medieval public schools to which they had been confined.

“It makes him happy, all right, knowing he’s screwing his children out of any hope of a decent inheritance and embarrassing them to boot by marrying this silly trollop. Happy? I’m certain he is. I can just see him gloating now.”

“What makes you say she’s a trollop? Have you met her?”

“No, in actual fact. Just stands to reason. She appears out of nowhere and the next thing we know there’s this pink horror in the mail. Clearly she wasted no time getting her talons into him.”

“He’s a grown man, Albert. I don’t suppose we can have any say in it. Although one is tempted to try.”

“There must be laws—”

“Waste of time, while he’s alive,” she said too quickly. So, her mind had already traveled down the same path as his. “Even if we had the legal right to challenge this, which I’m sure we don’t. He’ll have seen to that—or rather, his solicitors will. And he’s not insane, at least by any standards that can be proven.” She sighed heavily, adjusting the temperature under the yellowish mass thickening on the cooker. She was mixing ground sesame seeds, honey, and almonds. This, once stirred to the right consistency, was to be poured out into bars to make halvah. She was on her third try, and still the result was something you could use to build a house. But she was certain the Magdalene would have served this to all her friends, including Jesus. That and Chicken Provençal.

Sarah had reached this particular tortured conclusion after reading the legend that Mary Magdalene had done missionary work in the south of France following Jesus’ death. This opening up all kinds of French/Middle Eastern gastronomic avenues for her book, Sarah had seized on the myth with all the fervor of the convert. Looking at the hardening glob in the pan, she wished the Magdalene could have indulged herself once in awhile with chocolate fudge, but, sadly, there was little evidence for this, in or out of the Bible.

“What difference does it make, anyway? I never had any great expectations of him,” she said now, not entirely truthfully. Albert knew that, as with most of them, expectations there had been on countless occasions, but those expectations had been quickly, mercilessly dashed. Adrian liked to change his will as often as some women will change their hairstyles; it was part of the game he liked to play to keep them all on tenterhooks. “Although Ruthven and Lillian …”

“Yes, the most recent beneficiaries. I wonder how himself and Lady Macbeth are taking this.”

Sarah snorted.

“What do you think she sees in him?” Sarah asked.

“Lillian? I should think that would be obvious. His Visa card, his Barclay’s account …”

“No, I mean—what is her name, I suppose now I’ve got to make an effort to remember if she’s going to be my stepmother.” There was a pause while the ludicrousness of the situation penetrated even Sarah’s otherworldly brain.

“Violet. Same answer. Visa, et cetera. You can be taken by them anywhere.” He paused as another thought struck him. “I suppose there’s just a chance …”

Albert trailed off, calculating that since the marriage couldn’t possibly last, there might be wisdom in simply holding one’s tongue until Violet did simply take what she could carry and run with it. God knew there was enough money to go around. The old man’s last book,
Miss Rampling Decides
, was still high on the best seller lists a year from its launch, and the old horror—his father—had been cranking them out like that every year for decades. The British public seemingly couldn’t get enough of the wizened, serene old biddy who, by rights, should be well over 110 years old by now, living alone in the small village of Saint Edmund-Under-Stowe, its tiny population reduced to one by its mysteriously high crime rate.

Perhaps Adrian would finally write a book in which Miss Rampling was herself shown to be the killer of everyone in her village over the years, thought Albert. Wouldn’t put it past the old bugger to play one last nasty trick on his reading public.

Although Albert had years ago given up reading his father’s books, on principle, he had to admit his famous last name had helped him no end in his checkered theatrical career. Not without a painful self-knowledge, Albert recognized his career might have been even more checkered without the name to get and keep him in front of the footlights. The trouble was, he was fast reaching an age where even the rather wispy roles of pale yet interesting young supporting men suitable for Coward and Rattigan revivals were getting beyond his reach—or rather, he amended reluctantly, his age, despite nightly jaw-firming facial exercises. His brief flirtation with being a leading man had been just that—brief—for Albert, in spite of his looks, had always lacked the presence to command that sort of role. Becoming that dreaded thing—a character actor— was, he reminded himself firmly, at least five years in the future. But what to do in the meanwhile?