Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (3 page)

His sister’s voice drew him back to the present.

“—although I don’t think I want to go, I suppose there’s really no choice.”

“To the, er, nuptials, you mean?”

“What else? Not going isn’t an option, of course; it would hurt his feelings—”

As if the old reprobate had feelings!

“—and it might look as if I cared”—that, at least, sounded nearer the truth—“but I’m on deadline for my next book, for one thing. And it might be awkward all ’round, don’t you think? If George is there it will be unbearable.” George was their elder brother, second in line behind Ruthven. Another thought gave an edge of panic to her voice. “And who—who is going to tell Mother?” There was a tentative pleading as she said that last that suggested she was hoping Albert might volunteer.

Not a chance, thought Albert. Let her favorite break it to her.

“I should imagine Ruthven is on the telephone to her right now, never you worry,” said Albert.

Ruthven was in fact on the telephone to his mother, but it was she who had called him. The instrument rang just as he was getting ready to pick up and dial. Any distraction at all was welcome from the grilling he’d been receiving from his wife for the past half hour.

“Ruthven, is that you? It’s your mother, dear. I’ve just had the most amazing, er, communication.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did. Some cherub thing. The envelope looks like it was addressed by a twelve-year-old.”

“That would be Violet. Not far off on the guess at age, I’d say. Oh, sorry, Mother, I didn’t—”

“Never fear. The poor girl has my sympathy, not my envy. At my age, one is relieved to be past the attentions of men. But what can he—she—both of them—be thinking, to invite me? Surely he doesn’t imagine I’ll come, bearing gifts. Is he that far gone, do you think?”

“When I last saw him, which, admittedly, was several months ago, he seemed to be much as ever. Argumentative, repellent. Perhaps more reptilian than usual. Looking to pick a fight, as always. Fortunately, I didn’t have time to give him one. This takeover bid with Grobbetter has been like perching in several rings of Hell simultaneously.” Ruthven had made and lost several fortunes buying up small Midland newspapers, sacking most of their workers save the sales staff whilst sucking the places dry of every conceivable asset (“increasing productivity,” was how his press releases put it), and selling the newly productive yet emaciated product to a competitor.

His take-no-hostages philosophy had made him a legend in the publishing world, certainly in his own mind. Thinking he would one day in all likelihood inherit his father’s fortune made it easier for him to be fearless than other men.

“Funny. That might have been the last time I saw him, too. At any rate, it was several months ago.”

“Really?” Ruthven was genuinely stunned. His parents had parted on chilly rather than acrimonious terms—his mother was too vague for the kind of knock-down, drag-out the circumstances almost certainly warranted—that seemed even more to guarantee a complete and final breaking of all ties between them. Even though her brood at the time had barely moved on from formula to solid food, she had never really looked back.

“Yes. He came down to London, on some pretext or other, I rather thought. Said he’d been for his annual in Harley Street. And something about his publishers … Anyway, he showed up completely out of the blue, didn’t telephone or write ahead. I thought I might faint, dear, when Mrs. Ketchen announced him. It was so unprecedented, I realized something must be up. Curiosity got the better of me. It has been a long time, you know. So many years I’ve lost count.”

“I haven’t. It was my sixth birthday.”

“Yes, dear. Rather awful for you.” She added, rather as if just remembering she had three other children, “For all of you, of course.”

“What did he want?”

“He didn’t say. That was the odd thing. I knew from the moment I saw him he was up to something—you know that gleam he gets in his eye when he’s just about to turn the screws—but in the end he ended up just exchanging the most banal pleasantries and after about an hour he left. I’m still puzzled by it. And rather put out: I cancelled my bridge game to find out what it was he wanted—I thought it might have something to do with you, so I was determined to hear him out, however unpleasant—and yet he never got around to telling me. Talked about his stock portfolio, mostly, as if I cared. He said the gout was troubling him worse than ever, but he wouldn’t take the painkillers the doctor had prescribed. He said he didn’t want to end up looking like Elizabeth Taylor in rehab.”

“Perhaps he wanted to hear your views on Violet.”

“I’m sure he didn’t have to ask to know my views,” his mother shot back.

Oh, ho.
So, she wasn’t quite as indifferent as she sounded.

“I mean really, Ruthven. A girl like that, probably a Page Three girl.” She was fairly hissing now. “What can he be thinking? People have always been most sympathetic, but the press will have a field day—a threeday’s wonder, of course, it’s not like royalty getting married or having its phone calls intercepted, after all, but still. The worst of it is, the real tragedy of it is, what it’s going to mean to you. Has he given any hint? Have you heard from him?”

“You mean apart from this execrable invitation? Not a word.”

“We’ll have to put our heads together, Ruthven. There must be a way to make him see reason.”

“Funny. Those are the exact words Lillian used.”

THE LION IN HIS DEN

_______________________

SIR ADRIAN
BEAUCLERK-
FISK
SAT
complacently surveying the luxurious study of his manor house, basking in the Rembrandtesque glow of its dark-paneled walls, the gleaming surfaces of which reflected light from the flames in the carved eighteenth-century fireplace—a real fireplace, thank you very much, none of the fakecoal contraptions so beloved by the common people. The light reflected as well off Sir Adrian’s Toby-mug-like features, the silk of his smoking jacket, and the polished mahogany of the carefully chosen (by his hired London expert) antique furniture. Sir Adrian had shown the man a photo of the effect he wanted, torn from an article on Marlborough House in
British Heritage
.

He contrived to look, in fact, every inch the gentleman he was not. His expression as he surveyed the room through piggy eyes said as clearly as words,
Mine. All Mine.

He picked up his twenty-four-carat-gold-nibbed pen and contemplated the scattered pages of manuscript before him. A Biro might have been less trouble than the pen, which constantly needed refilling from the antique inkwell, but the pen had seen him through thirty-nine best sellers and, writers being the superstitious creatures that they are, nothing could separate him from it—certainly not the lure of one of those infernal personal computers with their floppy disks. Besides, he had that poncy American secretary to do the drudge work of transcribing his mostly illegible writing and cleaning up his spelling.

Sir Adrian indulged himself in several superstitions related to his writing, in addition to the pen. He would write only on flimsy blue air-mail paper of a kind produced only by a certain manufacturer in Paris—the kind on which he had penned his first best seller. He now bought the paper in bulk, a hedge against the day its manufacturer might go bankrupt or change the content of the paper. His novels were always precisely twenty-six chapters long, often regardless of whether or not this served the needs of the narrative. His desk, although he had pointed it out to no one, especially the hapless reporters who liked to interview him on such things as when he worked and how he got his ideas, faced directly south, in imitation of the direction his desk had faced in the Parisian garret of his youth. Due south, which he had learned somewhere in his wide-ranging reading was the direction of good fortune in Asia. That this forced him away from the view of spacious gardens outside the French windows of the room was probably all to the good, the eternal Miss Rampling requiring more and more in the way of extremes of ingenious solutions to keep Sir Adrian’s vast public entertained. He had tried to kill her off more than once; his agent had remonstrated and his publishers had refused to publish. He had tried another sleuth, but the public revolted, staying away in droves from his Cornish Chief Inspector. No, Miss Rampling it must be, the reading public demanded it. He was wedded to the old bat as if by holy matrimony.

The reminder of matrimony brought a smile to his lips, a smile of the kind so accurately described by Ruthven as reptilian. Sir Adrian paused in his work, literally hugging his flabby girth with glee.

Sir Adrian felt he had a lot to smile about that day. The current book was going swimmingly—he was discovering that a
roman á
clef
was much easier going than his usual fictional scampers down the too-familiar High Street and through the rectory of Saint Edmund-Under-Stowe with the sprightly Miss Rampling. He wondered if maybe he should adopt this method for future books. He sat tapping his pen, contemplating with serpentine relish the long list of his enemies, many long dead. At the age of seventy, Sir Adrian viewed with some regret the diminishing ranks of those he viewed as his opponents, most of them older mentors who had had their kindnesses to Sir Adrian repaid with his own peculiar brand of ruthless, childish spite.

Still, there was his family, he thought cheerfully. Yet he surveyed this field with some bafflement. Not one of them worth a tinker’s damn. Only Ruthven even approached being worthy of the vast fortune Sir Adrian had amassed, for while George, if untalented, was certainly ruthless (which quality Sir Adrian admired above all others), only Ruthven possessed the perseverance necessary to turn the pitiless streak he had learned at Sir Adrian’s knee into vast pots of gold. As for the younger two—not worth mentioning. That his youngest son had turned into a drunken, poncy, fourth-rate actor was a family disgrace—more so for the feebleness of his acting talent than for his ponciness or his drinking, vices Sir Adrian was willing to tolerate because of their upper-class overtones. Sarah he dismissed with two words—fat cow, then amended that in his mind to, stupid fat cow—unaware of any irony as he absentmindedly contemplated his own vast girth spilling over the rope of his smoking jacket.

They think all they’ve got to do is while away their time until I die, he thought. Cookbooks and revivals of deservedly neglected plays and art gallery openings. He made a snorting sound that cannot effectively be rendered into English, and was turning once again to his manuscript when he heard a tapping at the door of his study. Quickly, Sir Adrian gathered the scattered sheets and shoved them under the ink blotter on his desk.

“Come.”

The door edged open to admit a blondish young man in the indeterminate middle years between thirty-five and forty-five. Slight of build, he still somehow exuded an American robustness that Sir Adrian found extremely tedious at the best of times. He was often to be observed prancing, as Sir Adrian put it, around the vast grounds of the estate, engaged in the pointless American pastime they called power walking. Sir Adrian predicted direly that the young man would not live to see his fiftieth birthday if he didn’t learn to relax, take up smoking, and knock back a few ales at the local.

“What is it?” Sir Adrian demanded now. The secretary, for it was he, flashed him a blinding white smile, displaying the results of a lifetime of proper oral hygiene.

“Just popped in to give you the latest pages, and to ask if you’ve any more for me to be getting on with, what?”

Another of Jeffrey Spencer’s many, many annoying mannerisms, to Sir Adrian’s mind, was his adoption of what he hoped was a British accent complete with British slang and figures of speech.

Sir Adrian, when in the mood, reacted to this by slinging back as much American speech as he could recall from his telly viewing.

“Nope, Jeff,” he said now. “Reckon I’ll hang on to these here pages a mite longer, pardner. But you can mosey on down t’store yonder and fetch me some of this here special ink fer the inkwell. I’ve done tuckered it all out.”

Jeffrey—as he preferred to be called—blinked. There was something just that bit off in the phrasing of the last sentence. Sir Adrian wondered if he hadn’t gone rather too far this time, laid it on a bit thick. But, no. He could see the American shrug inwardly at the request, delivered as it was in what was still, to his ear, unmistakably a British accent
. The old boy’s just having one of his off days,
thought Jeffrey, wondering if he’d ever seen Sir Adrian having an on day.

“Rightee-o,” he said. “I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Again he flashed the fluoridated smile that could have launched a thousand ships, or at least, lighted them safely past the shoals, bouncing exuberantly on the balls of his feet.

“Okey dokey,” came the rejoinder.

The door slammed. Sir Adrian sighed. The man was an idiot, but, partly because he knew how to wrestle a personal computer into submission, and partly because he was one of the few souls alive who could decipher Sir Adrian’s handwriting, he had lasted longer than most of the secretaries, who, one by one, had been tested in the turbulent waters of Sir Adrian’s charm and emerged, scalded and terrified.