Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (9 page)

At the thought, he turned to his wife.

“Lillian, my dear. Would you be so kind as to see if you can persuade Mrs. Romano to replenish the sideboard, if her worthless son cannot be found?”

“I?” The raising of one of Lillian’s painted eyebrows would have quelled a lesser man, but Ruthven was this morning determined to have a private word with his brother before Albert’s habitual cycle of drunkenness began for the day. He estimated that he had less than an hour before Albert began his “hair of the dog” regimen.

With the perception born of long years in marital harness, Lillian read the significance of Ruthven’s nod in Albert’s direction.

Stifling further protest, she set off in search of the kitchen, rather like Magellan seeking a new passage to the Spice Islands.

She could be gone for days, thought Ruthven, not without a frisson of pleasure. He took the precaution of shutting the double-paneled doors after her. He knew Sir Adrian always took a breakfast tray in bed, but God knew if his inamorata was with him or if she might appear downstairs at any moment. He’d seen George leave with the delectable Natasha. Sarah, Lillian had told him, had rushed from the room without explanation shortly before his own appearance.

Albert, meanwhile, had laid his head on the table, displaying to full effect the tonsure that had started to form in the center of his hair. He was emitting periodic mewling noises.

“Buck up, old sport. This is important,” said Ruthven.

This was greeted with a weak moan. “Not so loud,” Albert whispered.

“Here, drink mine, I haven’t touched it yet. Come on, man, pull yourself together.”

Albert accepted the proffered coffee with trembling hands. He doubted it would help his heaving stomach but his pounding head was winning, for the moment, the pain war.

“My office came through this morning with everything you could want to know, and more, about the Winthrop murder. Here—” he removed several folded sheets from his inner jacket pocket—“is just a sample. It’s Violet, all right. And the story’s even more sensational than I recalled.”

Albert took the pages and unfolded them, fumbling for his glasses. The fax machine had rendered the small newsprint almost unintelligible. The top sheet was dominated by a photo of a woman sitting sidesaddle in full hunting regalia atop a horse awash in a sea of beagles. Even allowing for the bleary quality of the reproduction, he could see she was strikingly beautiful, with the widely spaced eyes, high cheekbones, and chiseled jawline bestowed by the gods on only a blessed few. She even seemed to have a tiny cleft in her chin, which was rather gilding the lily, thought Albert. The only thing marring the impression of exquisite porcelain fragility were the hands holding the reins, Violet’s hands—not as pronouncedly veined and bony as they were today but still unmistakably large and out of proportion.

“How old was she then?” asked Albert.

“Early twenties. Twenty-one, I think one of the papers said.”

“‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?’” The headline over the photo was at complete odds with this image of heavenly near-perfection. The headline asked, simply, “Lady Murderess?”

Albert squinted at the page, holding it up to the light from the mullioned windows behind him, able to make out only the words in bold in the caption and the dateline: November 15—Edinburgh. The caption read, unhelpfully: “Lady Winthrop last fall, on Dundee Prince near the Winthrop estate in Gloucester.”

“There’s more, loads more,” Ruthven was saying, “photos and the lot, but on the next page is a summary from shortly after the inquest adjourned.”

“I can’t make it out,” said Albert.

“Here.” Ruthven took back the pages. Adjusting his glasses lower on his nose, he scanned the type until he found the section he wanted.

“It begins by announcing the verdict of ‘Murder by person or persons unknown,’ and the adjournment of the hearing. There never was an official finding beyond that, apparently. The coroner concluded that the police were stumped—reading between the lines, you understand. There was the usual jargon about pursuing various lines of enquiry—and pretty much it was left at that. Lady Winthrop herself was never called to give testimony; she got her physician to stipulate she was prostrate with grief. All nonsense, of course. If she’d been a charwoman they’d have brought her to the inquest on a litter. I haven’t been in Fleet Street all these years without knowing how these things go.”

Albert, now holding his temples, made a “speed-it-up” gesture with his index fingers.

“Very well,” said Ruthven. “On the night of November 10, the Winthrop household—it was Sir Winthrop’s estate near Edinburgh— was awakened by a crash of glass and furniture from the direction of the old man’s study. This according to the testimony of one Mrs. Grant—Agnes, the head cook. Much of what she actually said was summarized—the reporter, I gather, having trouble rendering her brogue into received English. But the substance was that she herself was already awake, having been unable to sleep and having taken herself to the kitchen for a cuppa, probably laced with Scotch, again reading between the lines. But she testified plainly enough that she heard scuffling sounds and shouts. When asked if she went to investigate she replied”—and here Ruthven adopted a passable Scottish accent—“ ‘It ware jest th’ ghostie so no a reason fare me to stir.’ This produced some laughter, according to the reporter, at which Agnes took umbrage. ‘I seen him meself many a time, I have. Headless, he is. ’Tis the fairst Laird Botwin, we think, him as were kilt by the Catlicks. He main us no harm so I let him gae on aboot his business, like mare folk should do.’”

“Anyway,” Ruthven went on in a normal voice, “more in this vein, but then she testified she heard a loud crash, followed by the sound of someone running.”

“‘He ne’er doon that afore,’ she said. ‘It scairt me, like, so I thought I’d best go have a look, me in me robe an’ all, but I dinna like the soond of it.’”

“The ghost didn’t scare her but a ghost acting out of character did. Good for Agnes,” said Albert.

“Wait for it. Apparently the coroner also was caught up in the ghost-as-suspect possibility.” Ruthven read again from the newspaper account: “Asked what it was the ghost had never done before— caused a loud crash or run away—Mrs. Grant replied, ‘A ghost dunna run in high heels.’”

“A headless Lord in high heels,” mused Albert. “Not impossible, granted a public school education. Still, I don’t see where Lady Winthrop comes into it. Unless she was the only woman in the house who owned a pair of heels. Not likely.”

“Agnes gets to that. All the women visiting the house—it was one of those ‘play cards and shoot whatever moves’ weekend parties such as Violet described yesterday—were lodged in the West wing that night. Agnes Grant was adamant she heard the high heels clicking their way toward the family quarters on the East side of the house, where Lord and Lady Winthrop resided in solitary splendor. Agnes gives it as her further opinion that only Violet of all those present would caper about at three
AM
in high-heeled slippers, ‘her bein’ a real clues-hearse as she is,’ but the coroner ignored that, of course, and rightly so.”

“What makes me think Agnes would soon find herself out of a job?” said Albert.

“She gave her opinion on that, as well: ‘I’ll not stay another night ’neath that roof to be mairdered in me sleep, even by her ladyship, who has always traited me fair.”

“So much for the fealty—not to say the discretion—of old retainers. Well, if that’s all the coroner had to go on I’m not surprised at the hazy verdict.”

“Oh, there was more. What is evident from the testimony, wrenched as it had to be from the guests, who had clearly decided it was an occasion for all titled hands to the pumps, was that Lord and Lady Winthrop were not getting along.”

“Well, how very rare an occurrence amongst married couples. I’m surprised they didn’t clap her in irons on the spot.”

“Wait for it, will you? Agnes wasn’t the most sensational witness, not by a long shot. That came later, a witness who testified that Violet Winthrop was with him—
him
—at the time Agnes heard the crashing and banging coming from the study.”

Albert perked up at this. At least, his eyebrows did, until he realized even that small movement made his head throb. Carefully, he narrowed his eyes again against the light, and said:

“At three
AM
?”

“Precisely. In high heels or no high heels, she was with him, so he said. Precisely what the gentleman was doing with Violet is not spelled out, but the implications were—and are—obvious. That must have sent the press in a virtual stampede out of the room to telephone in their stories. It’s the classic tale—older man, younger woman. All anyone had to do was fill in the blanks. Winthrop was”—and here Ruthven flipped back through the pages—“about forty years her senior.”

“Hmm,” said Albert. “A fact she failed to mention on first meeting, although one would hardly expect her to. Who was this Lothario of the wee hours, anyway?”

“One John Davies, who, having provided Violet with an alibi, seems promptly and handily to have disappeared without a trace. He may be long dead by now, of course, but I have my men on it. If he’s around, they’ll find him.”

“You sound like the head of Scotland Yard, with all the resources of Interpol at your fingertips.”

“Not too far from the truth,” said Ruthven complacently. “As I say, they’ll find him if he’s out there. Doesn’t help, of course, his having a common name like Davies. But if not him, someone else staying at the house that weekend, whose tongue may have been loosened by the passage of time.”

He set aside his glasses and folded his hands on top of the pile of faxed clippings in a “getting down to business” manner.

Uh oh,
thought Albert.

“Now the question is, what do we do with this information?” asked Ruthven.

“Surely you mean, what do you do? I haven’t a clue.”

“Really? I should think you’d have several.”

“Go to Father with these clippings, you mean? Perhaps shove them under the door of his study and then scarper like hell? Do you seriously think that wily fat fox is unaware of all this—hasn’t, perhaps, done his own digging, himself? You forget the man’s stock in trade is murder—fictionalized, with preposterous plots and methods and motives, granted, but murder, just the same. He probably has a rehashing of the case in one of those collections of unsolved crimes he has sitting on his bookshelves. We agreed, I thought, that part of the attraction he feels toward Violet may in fact be her bullet-riddled past.”

“She bludgeoned her elderly husband to death; she didn’t shoot him.”

“According to the coroner, she did neither. Also, according to her lover.”

“If he was telling the truth. You’re forgetting the times in which this happened: the mid-fifties. This wasn’t a case of
White Mischief
in the peat bogs, you know. It wasn’t even Brits misbehaving on holiday in Majorca. Casual affairs among the upper crust weren’t quite as winked at—even expected or encouraged—as they might have been even fifteen years earlier. They aren’t entirely winked at today. This was the same era in which Princess Margaret was forced to end her relationship with Townsend because he was divorced, for heaven’s sake. In other words, one wouldn’t cheerfully own up to an affair while under oath unless the alternative were much worse. And the far worse alternative might have been
not
to produce an alibi for Violet—even a phony one.”

“You mean that a real gentleman of the Empire would have lied under oath to protect Violet with a phony alibi, while only a scoundrel would have kissed and told the truth, even to save Violet from hanging?”

His headache, he noticed now, was blessedly beginning to recede as he focused on the implications of Ruthven’s tale. He thought he might just manage some toast, if he were careful.

“Something like that. Either way, she was in disgrace, especially for the times. Being a murderess was probably considered not much worse than sleeping around. The two things may have tied in a dead heat in the minds of the reading public. Certainly, had it come to a trial, a jury might not have made the distinction. Luckily for her, it never came to that. But that’s where we come in.”

Again, Albert raised an eyebrow at the “we” but held his tongue.

“As you say, all this may not come as news to Father, although I’d be willing to bet any version he’s heard from Violet has been highly sanitized.” Ruthven, recalling the look of besotted infatuation he’d seen on his father’s face the day before, added, “I doubt he cares what the truth of it is. It’s obvious he’s mad about her.”

“Yes, so I think you’ve mentioned before. Sickening, isn’t it?” Struck by a new thought, he said: “I wonder where they met?”

“At one of his book signings, according to George. Apparently he got that information out of her last night at dinner. Love at first sight, it was, so she says.”

“That I don’t believe. I can see what Adrian sees in her—even given her age, she’s quite lovely—but what in God’s name does she want with a bad-tempered monster like Adrian?”

“Perhaps the same thing we want with him.”

“Money? Surely not. To all appearances—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Certainly, she looks like she’s led a pampered life. Still, appearances mean nothing—as an actor, you know that better than I do. She’s had plenty of time to run through her husband’s fortune. Besides, his scattered family may have kicked up a fuss over the will, given the circumstances. My men—”

“Yes, I know, your men are on it.”

Ignoring him, Ruthven returned to his earlier theme.

“We have to do something to stop this marriage in any event, agreed? And if it’s money she’s after …”

“What?” said Albert. “I should go offer her my stamp collection if she’ll promise never to darken our doorway again? I have no money, you know that. At least, not the sort needed to buy someone off. I doubt I could buy off a poodle.”

“Between the three of us—me, George, and Sarah—I think we could come up with a goodly sum. Goodly enough to turn the trick. That leaves you to make the actual offer.”