Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (30 page)
“And then made sure it was going to be left to me. I suppose he thought it would place me on the horns of a dilemma, giving me the choice of destroying the manuscript—which would be worth a fortune—or publishing it for the proceeds, and destroying my own reputation in the process. I can see how he would love that, knowing he’d put me in a position where I was damned whichever choice I made.”
“Would you publish it?”
She didn’t hesitate.
“Of course not. I have money of my own, Inspector. This was probably his twisted way of leaving me something essentially worthless. On the whole, I think I may douse it in oil and set fire to it.”
“I’m not certain that option is in your hands. It’s the proceeds he’s left you, not the decision whether or not to publish. He made his secretary the literary executor.”
“The American chap? How extraordinary. I’ll have to have a word with him, now, won’t I?”
The news didn’t please her, he could see. Had she known what Sir Adrian was writing? And if she had—what might she have done to stop him?
She paused, looked around her.
“God, how I hate this house. Do you know how many years since I set foot in here? And I never would have, if he weren’t dead and gone. Very freeing, it is.”
“That seems to be the common sentiment.”
“For the children especially, yes. For us all.” She sighed. “It wasn’t always quite this bad, you know. I thought I’d made a good bargain, at first. But it all went pear-shaped after the children were born.”
Catching his involuntary glance, she laughed, that attractive, deep-throated chuckle that had no doubt, at one time, been part of her attraction for Sir Adrian.
“I didn’t mean that, Inspector. Although that certainly went pear-shaped as well. I meant the marriage. It’s hard to trace these things back to the single, defining moment when you know you have to get out for the sake of your sanity, when you can stand no more, when the whole thing just comes unstuck. With Adrian, there were so many such moments.”
“But you stayed with him, all those children …”
“It was what one
did
in those days, Inspector.”
“Was he always so …?” An array of possible words presented themselves. Malicious, vindictive, and petty topped the list.
“Adrian?” A faraway look came into her eyes. She might have been surveying the ravaged, wartorn past, looking under pieces of wreckage for signs of life. “No. No, he wasn’t. Or he didn’t appear so, at first. Oh, he was always selfish and full of himself. Confident, in the extreme, of his talents. I used to admire that. So much.”
“What happened?”
“To turn him into a monster, you mean?”
“Something like that, yes.”
She considered. “I used to think it had something to do with his chosen profession. After all, how often can one contemplate murder by poison, stabbing, pushing someone off a cliff or throwing them down a well, et cetera, et cetera, without it all starting to work on one’s mind? Then I started to meet his competitors. What he would call his imitators. He didn’t have colleagues, of course. And they were lovely people—most of them, at any rate. Wouldn’t say boo to a mouse. In the end I decided Adrian was simply born the way he was. Preprogrammed to get nastier with each passing year. His profession had nothing to do with it. In fact, it may have prevented him from doing actual bodily harm to someone.”
“He sublimated his murderous impulses into writing about murder?”
“Hmm. Yes, something like that. Though if someone told me he actually had killed someone, I wouldn’t doubt it for a moment.”
In spite of her words, her face still held a look of melancholy.
“You loved him very much, didn’t you? Once?”
“Once,” she said, but now with the finality of a book slammed shut. “It must be hard for you to imagine, looking at him as he became. But he was … beautiful … once. All the women were after him—there was a lot of the working-class hero about Adrian that was very appealing, in spite of his ridiculous attempts to cover it up. But he singled me out, for some reason. Well, who am I kidding? For my money. And, as you know, I needed a rescuer right about then. Would that he hadn’t. Singled me out. But Adrian was a force of nature.”
“He remained so. A force of nature, I mean.”
She laughed, nearly a shout of surprise. She was perhaps thinking of tornados, floods, and earthquakes—every form of unstoppable destruction known to man.
“Just like Violet,” was all she said.
A dawning suspicion had begun to emerge in St. Just’s mind.
“You say the same crowd traveled in packs in those days. Were you actually there in Scotland at the time of the murder of Winnie Winthrop?”
“Didn’t I mention that? How extraordinary of me. Yes, all that set were there, of course.”
“Go on,” he said carefully. How much more hadn’t these suspects thought worth mentioning to him?
“Let’s see. It was so many years ago, I hardly remember it all. Funny, what I mostly remember is that there was red tartan carpet all over the place, like they do in these old Scottish places. Really quite dreadful. I don’t suppose that’s of much use to you, though, is it?”
St. Just shook his head.
“Let’s see,” she said again. She settled back in her chair and looked at the ceiling, as if the past might be projected up there. “Well, there was a lot of alcohol involved, I can tell you that for a fact. Probably why my memory of events is a bit hazy here and there. I’m really not much of one for the country—it’s so goddamn noisy. There were curlews screeching the whole time we were there, it seemed. I could empathize with Violet on that score—she hated the place and made no bones about it. All peat bogs and bags of poor dead animals. Really, what’s the point when you can always order a good steak in London?”
St. Just sat back, letting her ramble. The oddest connections formed in people’s minds if you just left them alone.
“They were all out shooting when I arrived and the staff were stood down,” she said meditatively. “This mad little Scottish cook had to show me to my room, I recall. She wasn’t half put out about it, either. I can nearly remember her name …”
“Agnes?”
“You know, I believe you’re right. How odd you should know that. Restores one’s faith in the British bobby. She must be long gone by now. But she was the one who nearly pegged the thing onto Violet. I wasn’t there for the inquest—those of us who had nothing to contribute or had convinced the authorities that was so were quick to beat it out of there, let me tell you. But I read the newspaper accounts, of course.”
“You wouldn’t know where Agnes ended up, would you?”
“Good heavens, Chief Inspector. I mean really. Agnes was the
cook
.”
“Let me get this clear. You were there at the time of the Winthrop murder. You weren’t a suspect?”
“We were all suspects. But I had an alibi.”
“Which was?”
“I was busy bringing Ruthven into the world.”
This time at least, when he left her, she was smiling.
_______________________
THE TRIP TO ST.
Ives took nearly all day, Great Western Trains not having yet come around to a view of Cornwall as a place people might want to reach in a hurry. St. Just’s dog-legged journey deposited him at the far edge of England just around teatime, and he had still to find the Methodist Ladies’ Retirement Centre where Sergeant Fear had assured him he would find Agnes Baker, née Agnes Burns.
Locating her had not, Fear had assured him, repeatedly, been an easy task.
“She’s nearly ninety, Sir, and there was no guarantee she’d be alive. But what turned out to be the real problem was the fact she’s been married five times and changed her last name each time.”
“Five? And lived to tell the tale?”
“Apparently. All five of them died, her husbands—natural causes, although by all accounts living with Agnes might have been what you’d call a contributing factor. Anyway, she’s now Mrs. Peter Baker, widow, retired at long last to one of those ‘extended-living’ facilities or whatever they call them now. A home for wrinklies.”
“‘Assisted living’ is, I believe, the accepted euphemism, Sergeant. Well, have you been able to reach her by telephone?”
Fear shook his head.
“‘Deaf as a post’ is the matron’s diagnosis.”
“I think she’s important in terms of sorting out how Violet fits into all of this. Someone needs to go and see her. At least I know the way to St. Ives by heart, and who knows? The sea air might blow the cobwebs out. We seem no closer to nailing this one shut than we were at the beginning. There’s something we’re missing, and it’s right under our noses, too.”
So on the Thursday he set out, clutching his ancient Gladstone bag, lightly packed for overnight, and armed for the journey with one of Sir Adrian’s best sellers. He found he enjoyed it, far more than he would have expected. The whole, despite the litter of bodies at the end, recalled a gentler England—one which no doubt had never been, but which one wanted to believe had existed.
The train carried him across desolate gray moors, austere as a monastery in winter. The traveler’s rewards for patience, however, were the panoramic coastal vistas of the shore at journey’s end and the quaint old harbor town itself with its maze of narrow cobbled streets. The cliffs created a natural balcony overlooking the huddle of brightly painted fishing boats in the harbor.
St. Just wanted to linger, but instead, finding a taxi at the station, he was carried up and up one of the cobbled streets to the top of one of the promontories overlooking the town. On the way, they passed the old parish church with its tall tower; the well-worn nativity scene near the entrance looked nearly as old as the church itself. Only Joseph and one of the sheep looked newer than the rest; it was likely they were replacement parts taken from another ensemble. In keeping with tradition, the crèche was empty—the plaster infant Jesus wouldn’t make his appearance until Christmas Day.
The driver dropped him off near the top of the hill, pointing out one of the narrow, curving lanes that led even farther up from the harbor.
“As far as I can go, mate,” he told St. Just. “You’ll have to walk the last few yards. They won’t let us drive up the service road at back, it’s for the ambulances. And the hearses, here and there.”
St. Just approached the building with no small trepidation. He had had a particular abhorrence for such places ever since he had spent every weekend for four months trying to find a suitable accommodation for his mother several years before, determined to meet her expressed wish “to die by the sea.” She had in fact succumbed in a small, quiet, and fastidiously run establishment operated by Anglican nuns, not far from St. Ives. Still, he never could set foot in the door of any of these “assisted living” places without breathing a fervent prayer that he would die quickly, in his home, in his sleep.
He had taken enormous satisfaction, however, in getting one of these operations shut down by the local authorities; he periodically checked to make sure its former owner was still in his cage and likely to remain there.
This place was better than most, he could see right away. Quite pricey, too, from the look of things, although the decoration leaned heavily toward sentimental scenes from the Bible featuring a patient Christ dividing loaves, roughing up the money changers, or delivering the Sermon on the Mount. The place was spotless, with fresh flowers dotted about the hallway tables. Agnes must have done well for herself out of at least one of her husbands.
The woman who bustled up to him wore not the starched nurse uniform and cap of old, but a brightly colored smock over white nylon trousers, the smock covered with what looked to be bright yellow ducks roving happily in a field of red tulips at sunset. It would have been suitable garb for a preschool setting.
Catching his look, the nurse, who had introduced herself as Mrs. Mott, laughed.
“We try to do away with any reminders that they are effectively in a hospital and not, frankly, likely ever to leave under their own steam. Something cheerful to look at, that’s the ticket. I don’t much mind looking a bloody fool, although I do get some stares when I have to stop in the Sainsbury’s on my way home. Right! Now, you’re here to see Agnes. I’ve told her to expect a visitor, but I didn’t go into the details. Thought I might leave all that to you. You’ll find her on the tennis courts.”
At his look of surprise, she laughed.
“I should say, near the tennis courts. This used to be a school, you see. We still allow people from the village to use the courts. She likes to watch the players. Colin, I believe his name is, is her favorite. You’ll see. She’s quite deaf, you know, and will only wear her hearing aid when men aren’t around—terribly vain, but sweet, she is. So I warn you, you’ll need to shout.”
He found her in a wheelchair, knitting, her gnarled hands trembling slightly as she painstakingly worked the needles. Age spots had nearly turned the pale skin of her hands a uniform brown. She appeared to be working on one of those pointless decorative items people used, presumably, to keep their boxes of facial tissue warm. Her eyes never dropped to her knitting, which no doubt explained the gaping holes in the colorful green and red object emerging from the needles. She greeted him with a brief smile, revealing that she had kept many of her teeth, before again fastening her gaze on the two handsome tennis players visible over the hedge that divided the nursing home from the courts.
