I Am the Only Running Footman (7 page)

“And she didn't see anything else? No car stopping?”

Macalvie shook his head. “Next time she looked, she didn't see Sheila. Now, tell me about Ivy.”

Jury told Macalvie the little they knew. Nodding his head
in the direction of the side street, he said, “You've had a look, I suppose.”

“Of course.”

“It was two or three hours later that she was found.”

“ ‘Hours'? You ought to be on my forensics team.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Patience on a monument, Jury, that's me. Go on.” Before his patience could be pressed into service, Macalvie turned to the table beside them and told the occupants to hold it down. They just stared.

“Princess and the pea is more like it. How many mattresses do you sleep on, Macalvie? The last her boyfriend saw of her she was standing in that doorway over there”— Jury nodded toward the entrance—“doing a slow burn.” Jury told him about the interview with David Marr.

“Cab-driver said she flagged him down and then changed her mind?”

Jury nodded.

“Cab-drivers can't see. All you have to do is grab a taxi to know that.”

“Let's assume this one could,” said Jury dryly. “It's not much of an alibi, anyway.”

“How true. So this makes two.”

“But muggings happen every day, a murder here and a murder in Devon —”

“Come on. We've just been
over
that. No rape, no robbery.”

“Those are
un
knowns, Macalvie. The only
known
here is the way they were garroted.”

“What more do you want? A bootprint on her forehead? It's like I said.”

Like he said, thought Jury. Case open. Theory closed.

S
HE
spent the morning and part of the afternoon in the shops, not buying, only looking, and after a while not seeing much of what she looked at. In an antiques shop in the Lanes, she picked up a miniature, one of several on a black walnut table, and opened the heart-painted top to read the legend inside:
Love Always.
Kate disliked these little, porcelain boxes that had no purpose but to sit on dressing tables or in escritoires gathering dust. Her mother had collected them, tops painted with ribbons, flowers, hearts, in that rather vague if feverish excitement her mother affected in nearly everything she did.

So Kate was surprised to find herself in another part of the shop looking at the old books, still holding the miniature in her hand. She must have been carrying it long enough to draw the riveted gaze of the shopkeeper to her. He had appeared again in the opening above the half-door to the room beyond, his hands clasped behind him, staring at her like a guard from a castle keep. Kate imagined that he thought she meant to nick it and she was embarrassed enough that she turned it over to see the price. Twenty pounds. It was not
even a good example of its kind: the heart was threaded with scratches, the gilt round the oval top was flaked. Indeed, it might not even have been an original, but under the censorious stare of the owner, she felt compelled to tell him she'd have it. Of course his manner altered accordingly, the gaze shifted, the tone when he spoke was as cottony as the small square placed into an overlarge box to act as a cushion.

It was easy enough to explain to herself when she was outside on the pavement once more. Another little gift to appease the gods. What a conscience she must have, she thought, standing there outside the shop with its partly shuttered windows. If she had ever tried to do anything criminal, it would have caught her out immediately. How had her parents, both shallow, feckless dilettantes, managed between them to fashion it? Far more artistry had tone into this paste momento she held. She smiled grimly, pulled up the high collar of her lamb's wool coat, and started down the narrow street toward the ocean. Her conscience put her in mind of some medieval chalice of the sort she remembered seeing at the Victoria and Albert. An elaborate, supposedly splendid (but Kate thought vulgar) liturgical icon, heavily chased with gold beading, studded about with jewels. Her conscience, she thought ruefully, was as impractical and flashy as her sister, Dolly.

Kate maneuvered the narrow space between a Ford Granada with its bonnet up and the drab window of a boutique. The snow had had time to turn to slush, and the shoppers sluggish. None of the faces that she passed looked pleased with their errands or with their glittery surroundings. It was old glitter anyway, not new. The Royal Pavilion was banked in by scaffolding, and a wide, blue hoarding covered part of its front while it underwent repair. How many hundreds of pounds must be going into keeping these impractical,
flashy minarets and turrets up. Kate thought again of Dolly.

No one except herself had forced Kate into those years of nursing their father, so she shouldn't blame Dolly for getting off scot-free. A flat in London, a score of lovers, and enviable looks were the rewards of self-indulgence — not to mention the money itself. Kate did not feel any bitterness with regard to her sister; Dolly had done nothing by way of manipulating the old man into leaving her the lion's share of the inheritance. It had long been clear that he would favor the child who, short of being the son, most resembled himself.

Kate had watched the progress of her father's illness over the years uncoil and make its slow way through tissue and bone. Still to the end the society of others had been his vocation; he drank champagne at breakfast and Glenfiddich at tea. Illness and dissipation had turned him into a hollow-cheeked, wasted man who looked twenty years older than he was, one whose mind had clouded over at the end: he had “visions,” he said. The visions were usually uncomplimentary to his elder daughter, thought Kate wryly, and undoubtedly helped along by the Glenfiddich.

What had surprised Kate and what now all but overwhelmed her was the knowledge that it hadn't made any difference and that if her years of servitude had been intended as some sort of sacrificial offering, she had to face now the fact that there had been no gods to appease. Brighton beach in the winter dusk and the hard, dark shell of the sea was not the place to mitigate against her terrible disappointment at the lack of freedom she felt. That was something she had been sure she could have counted on, a sense of freedom and release. Now she was able to go anywhere and to live as she liked. She had made all sorts of plans before her father's death that she meant to put into motion when he was dead. Now she watched them idle there at the ocean's edge as if
trying to grab hold or gain purchase on the shingle, breaking and pulling back, and breaking again. The romantic fancies became as repetitive as the collapsing waves and as dull and cold, too. A heavy drapery of fog covered the Palace Pier, hiding the flaking white paint, the rust. It had grown dimmer and dustier with the years, like the Pavilion back there. The West Pier farther away had been closed to visitors; it was dangerously in need of repairs. Away in the distance, floating like a shadow on the water, it looked delicate and fragile, made of matchsticks.

Kate went down the stair to the long seawalk, past the Arches beneath the King's Road, where most of the amusements were closed up now. She nodded to a young man who was painting the facade of the Penny Palace, painting bright marine blue pillars on its front. It was one of Kate's favorites, with its old machines that evoked so much of a Victorian Brighton. When her sister was small, she had loved to walk along the seafront with their father, past the Arches, licking ice cream or a stick of Brighton rock. But why her sister, who came down from London rarely, had appeared in Brighton now, Kate couldn't understand. On an impulse, Dolly had said.

Kate walked on to the next set of steps leading up, the carryall holding some chops and the wrapped-up box hitched on her wrist and her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets. She could feel a frayed seam. Whenever Dolly came down from London Kate grew more sensitive to things like her seven-year-old coat or an outmoded frock. Dolly stopped short of actual wardrobe trunks, but the several cases she would bring for her short stays bulged with outfits that spent their time in the cupboard, since there was nowhere they could go festive enough for turquoise silk or a fox-fur collar. Kate wondered sometimes if Dolly were still caught back in days of dress-up and blind-man's-buff.

Why had Dolly come? A man, perhaps. Dolly had never
had good luck with men, beautiful as she was. Well, that might have been part of it. Too beautiful. Perhaps because of the difference in their ages the two had never been close, and Kate supposed she had resented the baby sister and little girl that Dolly had been. She must have, but Kate couldn't really remember, though she would have been twelve when Dolly was born. A very awkward twelve that had replaced an ungainly eight and in turn a square-jawed, dubious-seeming child of five. In the photographs Kate saw herself always as hesitant, standing on the edge of the occasions that prompted the photographs, as if she'd strayed into the family circle grouped against the dark backdrop, Dolly centered there and always dressed in something soft with tucks of organdy or spills of ribbon.

Dolly spent her visits trailing what could have been a trousseauful of negligees and velvet wrappers through the dark, high-ceilinged rooms of the house in Madeira Drive, sometimes sitting long enough to leaf through a magazine and always with a cigarette and a cup of tea. Dolly was so much like their mother that Kate had once or twice felt a surge of panic, seeing her in the shadowed hall or in the dark of the stairwell. It was no wonder that their father had doted on her, had exaggerated notions about Dolly's career, and fantasized about her life in rough approximation to those fantasies he had had about his own. They were fantasies that Dolly fed, not for any gain other than that she fed her own ego in the telling.

For professional reasons, she said, she had changed the spelling of their name to “Sands.” It was easier to remember, looked simpler when the name flickered on the television screen at the end of the news report. Dolly had done well, very well. She had popularized something pretty dull.

Kate switched the carryall to her other hand, finding it a tiresome burden. The rashers and chops were best quality and probably half again as much as the price she would collect
for the room. Dolly had been extremely put out to find that the house, old and dark but still elegant, was being turned by Kate into a bed-and-breakfast. They didn't need the money, she had complained, and taking in roomers seemed terribly lower class.

Privacy. Kate had always heard her sister complain before of too much privacy — not even a servant to bring Dolly her early morning tea. Since Dolly never rose in the morning before nine, Kate didn't know to what use the morning would have been put.

Kate made for the promenade and the news agent she patronized, where she bought a
Times
and a piece of Brighton rock. It was a sweet she had loved as a child before they had moved here permanently, when they had come (as her father liked to say) for the season — as though those were the Edwardian days of parasols and tea at the Royal Pavilion.

She walked toward Madeira Drive. Round and round in her mouth she turned the rock candy, its cloying sweetness like the aftertaste of childhood.

•  •  •

Dolly sat at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking tea and occasionally reading a tidbit from a review of a new American film as Kate cut up some potatoes and swede. They might have presented a picture of conviviality, even intimacy, to a stranger. Kate knew they were neither. She had said almost as much, asking Dolly why she bothered with this Brighton trip now their father was dead. The answer had been a stock one, that she didn't want Kate to be “on her own” for the holidays. It was all dead dialogue out of one of Dolly's own television programs.

Leaning her chin on her cupped hand, Dolly said, “I don't know how you stand it, Kate. You should sell up and come to London and get a flat.”

“And do what?” Uninformed advice always irritated Kate. Dolly's was always that sort, suggesting that changing her life
was of no more moment than handing over a claim ticket at the lost luggage counter.

“Oh, you'd find something,” Dolly said vaguely, her eye returning to the social page. “You've got the education and you're really good-looking when you fix yourself up.”

Kate turned up the flame on the cooker and positioned the pot with the basin over it. She laughed briefly. “Thanks for
that
. But when anyone says, ‘Fix yourself up a bit,' that generally means a thorough turnout, like spring cleaning. The face will of course have to go. And the results of my A-levels dusted off and displayed —” She was getting angry. It was what she felt to be Dolly's total indifference to her masked by this spurious interest that made her situation stand out in sharp relief. “You haven't really thought about it. There's something a little mean about dragging out my dubious qualifications for this hypothetical something.” Loneliness washed over her in waves. She felt she was back looking out over the sea again, not here in a warm kitchen.

Dolly's silence in face of this little outburst made Kate turn to look at her. She was looking out of the window with much the same intensity of Kate looking out over the sea.

“Dolly?”

Her sister turned. In the clear skin Kate saw little lines etched, worrisome little lines.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing.” Dolly shook herself and went back to reading her paper. Then she said, “I don't like the idea of turning this into a bed-and-breakfast. It's so —”

“Lower class?” Kate felt the anger dissipate. She turned back to the cooker. “It gives me something to do.”

“And what do you know about the people you take in?”

“Not much. But I don't take many, you know.”

Her sister arranged the lime-green nightdress in folds over her good legs, and the shift in posture accentuated the play of light across her breasts. It was all unconscious, Kate knew.
The way she now held a match straight up to the tip of a fresh cigarette, the way she lowered her lashes, smoothed her hand over her pale gold hair. Then she rose and stretched, saying she thought she'd go up and have a bath and wash her hair.