Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (7 page)
“What was so funny to me was that I was—am—tall and skinny,” Violet continued. “Now this was somehow desirable, this thinness. I assure you, I was not like the others in my profession, who lived on coffee and cigarettes and nothing else. I went through all the adolescent agonies trying to gain weight but could not. And then suddenly it didn’t matter.” She shrugged at the absurdities of the fashion world.
She talked on in her high, cultivated voice, Sir Adrian beaming at her side like a proud curator unveiling a newly discovered Picasso. Sarah found herself mesmerized by Violet; this was a woman who tended to command, to dominate—qualities Sarah admired vicariously, knowing she would never possess them herself. The others were less smitten, reminding themselves they were in the presence of the enemy. Albert drank steadily, his usual response to novelty, boredom, or any condition in between; George, soon tiring of any conversation that did not revolve around himself, was surreptitiously studying his nails; Ruthven and Lillian exchanged meaningful glances across the Turkish carpet. Otherwise, the family avoided looking at one other. Natasha was wondering with admiration from what designer Violet had got her dress.
All this, in spite of his apparent state of blissful infatuation, Sir Adrian did not fail to notice.
Violet eventually subsiding, he clasped her strong, masculine hand in his pudgy, veined, wrinkled one. Sarah looked away, realizing she had never once seen her parents holding hands.
Sir Adrian raised his glass.
“To families.” He beamed. It was all going pretty much as he had hoped. The only thing to make his happiness complete would be the appearance of Chloe, the mother of this despised brood.
Sarah and Lillian each took a polite, submissive sip. George and Ruthven gave a half-hearted lift of their glasses but did not drink.
Albert drained his glass.
Sir Adrian, having set the cat among the pigeons, was content.
Sarah was in the midst of unpacking in what had been her bedroom while she was growing up—growing up being a strange euphemism for the wrenching separation from everything her childhood represented to her: hostility, sarcasm, criticism, a general feeling of being the uninvited guest at her own party.
The room in fact bore no resemblance to the bedroom of her childhood. Sir Adrian had hardly waited for each of his children to be boarded off to school before bringing in a team of decorators to remove all vestiges of their occupancy. Sarah’s was what was now called the Victoria room, festooned, quite unlike that stumpy, dark queen, in a glut of rose sateen and pink lace. Even Sarah, the most unworldly of people and the least aware of her surroundings, recognized that the room was hideous. The deep rose color reminded her of uncooked liver. The bathroom was even worse: Its ceiling, walls, and even its door were covered in red, flocked-velvet wallpaper. Shutting the door was like being sealed in a coffin. She gagged exaggeratedly as she looked about her, longing for the cramped but comforting darkness of her flat.
She was just folding one of the cavernous caftans she favored into a drawer when the knock sounded. It was Ruthven, accompanied by George and Albert. The loathsome Lillian was not in evidence, she saw with relief.
“Family council meeting? How nice,” she said, trying and failing to remember them ever having banded together in the way they had today. A saying went through her mind:
The enemy of my
enemy is my friend.
While their father had always been the common enemy, they had tended to deal with him before now—or rather, tried to—on their own, in their own ways.
It felt strange having her brothers in her room, grown men who through some miracle had become larger versions of the small boys she remembered: Ruthven, always the bully; George, always vain, but with no particular grounds for being so. Only Albert had changed, it seemed to her—he was diminished, smaller than she remembered, his striking good looks fast fading into the pale anonymity of middle age.
“I wanted a word before tomorrow,” Ruthven said, naturally taking charge. Years of planning redundancies and squelching union organizers had given him the edge in any situation calling for hypocrisy or doublespeak. He smoothed a hand over the top of his head, as if it still held an unruly growth of hair that had constantly to be tamed into submission. “Although I certainly wish the old man well, I am sure we all arrived here with similar agendas of trying to dissuade him.”
“You wish him well, do you?” said Albert, from his roost on Sarah’s bed. “That’s rich. And when did you first notice this altruistic side of your nature coming to the fore?” Sarah, watching him throughout dinner, had noted that his intake of food had been diluted by alcohol at the rate of about seven ounces to one morsel of food. He seemed to be looking around even now for more reinforcements. Something would have to be done about Albert.
“But it’s obvious to me that for all the good we’re doing, we may as well leave tonight,” Ruthven went on, ignoring him. “There’s no hope of influencing this … course he’s set himself on. He’s clearly infatuated with the woman. Worst of all, I can even see why.”
“She is rather charming, isn’t she? Flirtatious in that rather old-fashioned way,” said Sarah. “The kind who I imagine makes a man feel the center of the universe. Some women seem to have that sort of appeal all their lives.”
George, who could seldom see the charm in any woman over thirty, grunted.
“On the way down here, we had talked of going to him
en masse
to see if we couldn’t persuade him out of the idea,” said Sarah, forgetting that Ruthven was to have been excluded from that course. George and Albert glared at her.
“And I gather I was to be left out,” picked up Ruthven. “Not that I don’t understand your reasoning,” he said, “and not that I hold it against you”—although he made a mental note to hold it against them when it was more convenient—“but surely you see everything’s changed now? Look, there is nothing we can say or do against this woman that would have any effect except to make him more pig-headed in his determination to go through with it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was doing it for the publicity value. But he’s not.”
George, who was sure he understood all about publicity, perked up at this.
“What makes you say so?”
“Two reasons. He doesn’t need the publicity to sell his books. He hasn’t given an interview in years—at least not one where he wasn’t pulling the interviewer’s leg the whole time—and it’s never stopped his books from spurting to the top of the best-sellers list. Everyone wants the newest Miss Rampling for Christmas—the irony, yes, yes, we all know that better than anyone, but that’s how it is. In the season of good will, his murderous little books sell themselves.”
“The other reason?” asked Sarah.
“The other reason seems nearly impossible, but as Miss Rampling would say, in her muddled way: ‘What isn’t impossible, once all the real impossibilities are excluded, must be the truth.’”
“You’ve actually read his tosh, then?” said Albert.
“Since it’s one day going to be my tosh, you can bet I have.”
George, Sarah, and Albert exchanged glances.
Not any more, it’s
not.
“Anyway,” Ruthven went on. “I think the real reason is the old fool is in love—or in such a state of extreme infatuation as makes no difference. Because the kind of publicity he will receive from this is of the kind even he would blanch at—and, as I’ve said, of a kind he doesn’t need, anyway. But it’s an occupational hazard, I’d guess, in his case.”
“You’re talking riddles,” said Albert. He wanted to go in search of the nearest liquor cabinet, but the whirling room when he attempted standing defeated him.
“You do realize who she is, don’t you? Her maiden name was Mildenhall but her married name was Winthrop.”
He looked around him, to be met by blank stares.
“The Winthrop murder. Surely you remember? She was accused, and people think, rightly so, of murdering her husband.”
_______________________
“MY GOD,” SAID SARAH.
“It can’t be.”
“I already have someone in my office checking the files, but you can be sure I’m right. It was sometime in the mid-1950s. We were unborn, then, of course, and even later you might have been too young to care about such things, but I, before long, was reading every newspaper I could lay my hands on. The coverage and speculation about the case went on for years.”
Interested in what he was saying, they all nodded encouragingly, suppressing irritation at Ruthven’s image of himself as child prodigy, tackling at a tender age the baroque yet subtle nuances of the
Daily Mirror
.
“Oh, yes, it’s she, all right,” Ruthven went on. “I recognized her face before the name dropped into place. Her photograph was everywhere at one time, and photographers simply hounded her for decades.”
“What a pretty, sanitized version we heard of her past this evening,” said George. “What was it she said about having made a famous marriage? Well put, that. I thought I’d seen her somewhere. But it was more recent.”
“No doubt,” said Ruthven. “Every so often the papers dig up the story for a rehash of the mystery.”
“They never caught who did it, did they?” said Sarah.
“They never tried,” said Ruthven. “They already
had
who did it. But money talks, then as now. There was even some question of evidence being removed, tampered with, although it was probably a matter of incompetence more than outright corruption. By the time the police got through trampling all over the clues and losing the evidence, there was no question of ever bringing her to trial. A complete farce. The old man had no family to speak of so there wasn’t even much of a stink raised from that end. And there was, indeed, a certain camp among the reading public that tended to plump for her innocence. Even then, it was felt a woman couldn’t have committed any crime that didn’t involve a little genteel poisoning.”
“He was bludgeoned to death, wasn’t he?” said Sarah.
“Something along those lines, I believe. I’ll have the details by tomorrow.”
“It is hard to picture her doing that, having met her,” said Sarah doubtfully.
“No doubt the police felt the same. Lizzie Borden, always the model for this kind of thing, was a big bear of a girl, and people had trouble believing her capable of wielding an axe to such stunning effect.”
He clapped his hands on his knees and rose to leave.
“So you see, it’s a thornier problem than we thought. I would suggest we all sleep on what to do about it.”
“We have to tell him,” said Sarah. “Warn him.”
“Don’t be daft,” said Albert. “He must know. In fact, knowing him, it’s part of the attraction.”
Sarah frowned, doubtful.
‘Marrying a known killer?” George considered. “I suppose I wouldn’t put it past him, but still, it does rather give one the creeps. I can’t say I like the idea of sleeping under the same roof with her, myself, come to that.”
Ruthven soon left, and after some further discussion of the “Can you believe this?” variety the rest wandered off to their assorted rooms.
Sarah took the precaution of locking the door behind them, before preparing for bed and settling down to a disturbed rest. Her last waking thought before drifting off was, “I don’t care what Ruthven says. I must warn him.”
Breakfast at Waverley Court was always an informal affair. Guests staggered down from upstairs as hunger moved them, to where vast quantities of food sat keeping warm under covered dishes on the sideboard. Sir Adrian always had a tray in his dressing room while he savored his latest fan mail, too voluminous to answer personally, even had he been inclined to do so. It was one of Jeffrey’s duties to keep from him any letter containing even a hint of criticism of him or his books, and to forge his signature on a standard form reply to his admirers.
Sarah was first down, looking decidedly the worse for wear, clumping into the room in giant Birkenstocks that made her look as if she had strapped cow pats to the soles of her feet. Today she was draped in a brown serge fabric gathered at the waist with something resembling hemp rope, making comparison with a sack of potatoes unavoidable.
