Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (5 page)

“Didn’t half cost the moon, let me tell you. Still, folk seem to like it.”

The two of them sat in mutual friendly silence, both gazing raptly at the decor. In a chair nearest the fire, the orange tabby who had been alive since Albert could remember—could it possibly be the same cat?—roused herself, stretched, and began a fastidious cleansing of her paws, fixing Albert the while with a suspicious green-eyed glare. Disconcerted, Albert turned away. Apart from the cat, he and Jim were alone in the pub; it was both too late and too early in the day for his regulars.

“He must be getting on by now, your dad,” said Jim, reverting to his earlier subject. It was unusual to find Albert down here at all; in fact, Jim was trying to calculate the last time he had seen him. Must have been well over a year or two ago, some family gathering. Sir Adrian’s birthday, was it? If memory served, that had gone about as well as the other gatherings at the manor house. It was well known in the village that their most famous resident could be “difficult.”

“He was seventy this year. Sometime in April, I think.”

Jim registered the vagueness, rightly aligning it in his mind with indifference, pretended or otherwise. Straightening a few bar towels unnecessarily, for Jim ran a spotless establishment (his lady wife saw to that), he said casually, “Artists can be difficult, can’t they?”

“I should know. I’m surrounded by them all the time.”

“Oh, aye. Still in the theatre, are you?”

Albert winced. To have to be asked whether one was still in the theatre was a lethal blow to any actor’s ego.

“I’m starting rehearsals for
Dinner at Eight
next month.” He forbore to mention that the play was not only being produced by a repertory group, it was being produced by a repertory group in Sheffield. He felt sure even Jim would recognize this was about as far from the West End as any actor, respectable or otherwise, would care to be seen dead.

“Bit late for dinner, isn’t it? Eight?” was Jim’s only comment. “Generally we finish serving ’round here at seven, except for stragglers who’ve lost their way into Cambridge.”

Albert grinned in spite of himself. He was still having a little trouble getting Jim’s face entirely into focus.

“Quite sensible, too. My father certainly would agree with you. I suppose that’s why this execrable family dinner of his is planned for seven tomorrow night. Did you know he was planning to get married?”

“Oh, aye, Watters was in here last week. He said he hadn’t met the bride-to-be, although he had the idea she was likely younger than Sir Adrian. He didn’t seem to know much else about what was going on. It all seemed to have come on sudden-like,” said Jim, as if he were discussing a flu epidemic.

“Good old Watters. ‘Younger.’ There’s an understatement for you. I’d say if you put her age around a third of my father’s you wouldn’t be far off.”

Jim found from somewhere behind the bar a filthy rag that had escaped his wife’s notice and proceeded to smear the highly polished surface of the bar with it. Outside, he could hear the wind kicking up to an unholy howl, the pub sign swinging madly on its hinges. Business would be slow tonight.

“It takes men like that sometimes, you know. Mind,” and here he lowered his voice, glancing around as if there were someone other than the cat to overhear. “Mind, if the missus were to pop off I might be tempted to give a younger woman a try—who’s there among us doesn’t have our daydreams, eh?” He paused, remembering just in time that Albert’s orientation was rumored to be in the other direction, and that his daydreams, presumably, were likewise directed the other way. Jim Tanner’s mind, broad enough to encompass most of the variety of the human condition (“You see it all in my line of work,” was his oft-repeated motto), still skittered away from wandering into any of the specifics of what might constitute Albert’s daydreams. Recovering himself, he went on, “But I think on the whole a more mature woman’s what a man my age needs. The missus when she were young were handful enough—a strong-minded lass, she were.” He paused, paying mental tribute to the red-headed virago that was the Mrs. Tanner of forty years ago. “Not sure I could live through that twice, not at my age. You follow?”

“Oh, I follow all right. You mean he’s set to make a gigantic fool of himself.” For the first time, anger seeped through the alcoholic haze that had kept Albert barely tamped down all day. “And a fool of his family, while he’s at it.” He attempted to slam his fist on the bar and missed. The impetus from the swing nearly pulled him off the barstool.

Registering the change in climate, Jim decided that Albert’s next beer would be one of those nonalcoholic pissbrews he kept on tap for just such occasions. When they were as drunk as young Albert here they didn’t even notice the difference.

“You do realize what this does to us, his children?”

“Oh, aye, emotionally like—”

“Emotionally be buggered.” Albert had known Jim most of his life and saw no need to pretend the Beauclerk-Fisk family laundry couldn’t stand an airing like anyone else’s, even had discretion ever been a part of his nature—which it had never been. Furthermore, a lifetime of theatre training, while rewarding him poorly in a financial sense, had encouraged a natural tendency to speak from the heart, regardless of the consequences.

“What I want to know is what he’s going to do with the will this time,” he continued now. “He’s owned and disowned most of us several dozen times over the years—I don’t think even Ruthven, the mercenary little shit, has any idea what Father is worth or how much, if anything, is liable to be Ruthven’s cut. And with this wedding … well, you do see, don’t you? We don’t any of us even know who this woman is.”

Jim, who at his death would probably be worth no more than 5,000 pounds once the Inland Revenue got through raping his widow, still could appreciate the similarities. Where there was money at stake, even piddling amounts, the heirs were sure to behave badly. Why, when Mrs. Cottle up the way had died last year her two daughters had had a regular knock-down drag-out in her front garden over some trinket the old lady’d probably bought at Torquay for ten pence back in the 1930s. Jim, whose reading was largely confined to racing forms, had no idea what a famous writer like Sir Adrian might have raked in over the years; he only knew the mansion itself was probably worth a few million. And if some stranger were to come along and grab the whole lot now that the old man was approaching his twilight years … yes, Jim could see where this could lead to a right mess in any family. ’Specially this one.

“Sarah thinks—”

Just then, the wind caught the door, blowing it open with a crash. Its squat medieval frame was filled to capacity by a large form in black. Both Jim and the cat jumped; the cat was not seen again for many hours. As Jim told his regulars later, it looked like nothing so much as a witch blown in on the rising storm. Had he had either Albert’s theatrical background or his level of alcohol, he would have thought the entire cast of the witches’ scene in Macbeth had come crowding through the door at once.

“I recognized the car,” announced the apparition, unwrapping itself from a dripping black anorak.

“Sarah!”

Albert stumbled off the barstool, again righting himself just in time. He threw his arms around his sister as far as they could reach. Jim thought he looked like a drowning man clutching a rubber dinghy.

“I see you had the same thought I did,” said Sarah, gently disengaging herself. “No way am I going up to that madhouse without fortification. Jim!”

Sarah had two volumes, inaudible and bellowing. Her voice now rang out across the room, as if to be heard over a thronging crowd at the bar.

“How are you? Let’s see the wine list.”

Jim, who had two wines to his name, both plonk varietals in boxes from which he refilled the two bottles he kept behind the bar for appearances, was momentarily at a loss. Sarah, who shared her father’s passion for only the finest when it came to drink, sensed the problem and sighed. “Just bring me a red, then.”

She and Albert moved to a table in the corner near the fire.

“I decided I had to come,” she announced, looking around as if she’d somehow found herself in the wrong pub by accident. An antique scythe hung from the rafters just over her head, she noticed, and shifted her position a foot or so to the right.

Jim brought their drinks to the table and then discreetly disappeared toward the back.

“I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of not being here,” said Albert.

“More or less my thinking, too.” Sarah was in a rare belligerent phase, thought Albert. She seemed all her life to have careened between knuckling under to their father and doing things designed to annoy him. Her weight—a bone, so to speak, of contention the whole time she was growing up—was one of those things. She was a pretty girl, Albert recognized, and had been heartbreakingly beautiful as a child, but by wearing no makeup and swathing herself in dark drapery she made sure no one would suspect. She gazed at him now out of blue eyes in a round face framed by a too-short brown fringe she clearly had cut herself, now plastered to her forehead in zigzag fashion by wind and rain.

“Has it occurred to you,” she continued, “that he’s done this deliberately? I mean, what else could get us out here in a howling gale like this?” She paused to wipe the fringe off her face, so that now it pointed skyward. “I’ve heard from Ruthven and George— they’re both coming, Ruthven with Lillian in tow, naturally. George is bringing a girlfriend.”

Albert nodded noncommittally. He’d also heard from Ruthven, gaining the distinct impression in the course of the conversation that Ruthven was trying to discourage him from showing up. Fat ruddy chance, thought Albert. It had only put the seal on his decision to come.

“On the way down I was trying to remember the last time the whole clan was together like this. And I couldn’t. Remember, I mean. It seems that even on one or another of his birthdays, one or another of us was out of favor.”

“Out of the will, to be specific. Have you talked to him at all?”

“I rang to tell him I was on my way. Maria took a message.”

“I thought it was regrets only. I have no regrets.”

Sarah smiled. “What do you think the story is with—”

The pub door again swung open, fanning the fire into loud crackles of falling wood. This time, two lean black figures scurried in from the gloom.

George, shrugging out of a black leather jacket, glanced at the pair at the table, then looked around him, as if disappointed at the small audience. George never went anywhere he didn’t expect or hope for a crush of frenzied females to come out of the woodwork. Sarah didn’t recognize the girl who followed him in, flapping her arms and spraying water in all directions, surmising it was George’s latest semi-permanent, and searching memory for her name. Natasha, that was it.

Sarah and Albert made room for them at the table. Albert noticed that, by creating some unnecessary disturbance for the rest of the party, George managed to seat himself where he had the best view into the gilt-edged mirror hanging on the wall opposite. Also, that his girlfriend was left to fend for herself in disentangling herself from her coat, George being engaged in arranging his long blonde hair back into the artfully tousled look he paid a London salon to maintain for him, at a cost of the average working man’s weekly pay packet.

And they say actors are vain, thought Albert.

After exchanging the usual pleasantries (“If we’d traveled any farther, the wind would have sent us into a ditch,” George explained), the three siblings quickly turned to the topic uppermost in all their minds. Natasha, unsurprisingly, as quickly looked bored—she had heard it all a million times on the drive down—and hoved off in search of drinks.

“Right,” said George, clasping his manicured hands on the table in a without-further-ado manner. “I think we’re all agreed that we’ve got to put a stop to this farce. The question is, how?”

“I had thought a confrontation might be in order. What they call an intervention,” offered Sarah.

They both looked at her as if she were mad.

“He’s not a drug user,” said George, patiently, as to a child.

“I know that,” she said, with some asperity. “But what’s the alternative? I’ve never known reasoning with him one-on-one to produce the desired result. A show of force, on the other hand …”

“I think Sarah’s right,” said Albert.

“Should we include Ruthven?” she asked.

“No!” This from George and Albert simultaneously.

“He’ll only try to grab a bigger share,” said Albert, “and we’ll be back where we started. Provided, of course, the whole thing isn’t a joke to begin with.”

“He’s never gone this far before,” said George. “This is different, I tell you. Playing around with the will practically every week is one thing. This marriage is another. I want to know—I demand to know from him—what the arrangements are.”

“Demand, do you?” said Albert. “That will get you far. Besides, do you seriously believe he’s going through with it? I don’t. I think he’s playing games with us, hoping to spark a reaction. I’d be willing to bet there is no bride, he’s just making this up.”

“Why?” asked Sarah, wanting to believe he was right.

“Because of the way he’s gone about this. The invitation only last week. The fact that not one of us, so far as I know, has ever heard of or seen the bride before. It’s almost like he’s done the one thing he knew would send us all scurrying up here, as if he wanted us all on the spot, together, and this was the only way he could dream up that he was fairly certain would work.”

“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” said Sarah. “But the same thought occurred to me. Perhaps he’s just … lonely … wanting to see us all together, knowing it would take something like this to bring us running, as you say.”

“Fine family feeling at last? Decades too late for that. But … perhaps. He couldn’t just ask us in the normal way, that’s for certain,” said Albert. “Knowing we’d all suspect a trap if he did.” He took a long draught of his ale, wondering why it seemed to be sobering him up rather than having the desired, memory-obliterating effect. “God, for a normal father!” he added with feeling.