Rainbow's End (23 page)

“I think I gave Superintendent Jury the wrong impression. Unfair of me.” She too sank back into the pillows of the sofa, her glass in both of her hands, her eyes trained on the ceiling.

“Never too late to amend it.” He smiled and thought how pleasant it was to sit in this room, not unlike one of those in Ardry End, and to be talking to a woman distinctly dissimilar to his aunt. What a difference in company and conversation! She was probably the same age, perhaps a bit older than Agatha. “Richard Jury is particularly interested in the trip she took to America. That is, the part of her trip
after
she went to Pennsylvania.”

Lady Cray's frown deepened as she looked upward in thought, as if it had been brought on by the plaster cherubs whose chubby hands bore up plaster draperies. “Superintendent Jury seems to think there's
some connection with a woman who died in Exeter.” She sighed. “I have no idea how he makes this connection.”

“I'm not sure he's the one making it. There's a divisional commander who seems to be, but this particular policeman is seldom wrong.”

Somewhere, flute music played from the recesses of a room beyond this room. Flute music and then a deep sort of chanting. It was utterly unlike the melodic strains Melrose was used to. He mentioned the music.

“Fanny's. She brought it back from the Southwest. Native American, I believe. I find it very restful.”

“So do I.” Melrose thought for a moment, then asked, “What was her nephew like?”

Lady Cray reflected on her answer to this question. Perhaps, having shortchanged Fanny Hamilton, she wanted to be sure she didn't do the same to the nephew. “Honest. He was honest. I was struck by that.”

Melrose nodded, drank his drink, and waited for her to go on.

“You know, if you're like that, you mightn't have many friends. People find you disturbing, and you find other people, well, shallow. Because people who are not honest will talk about anything in the world except what they truly think and feel. We don't do enough of that, I think. Most of us waste most of ourselves most of the time.” Lady Cray inspected her glass.

Melrose murmured agreement as he looked past the marble fireplace to the french windows and the little garden. The flute was by turns distant, eerie, haunted, clear, close. “And she went to America straightaway.” He watched the delicate branches of an ornamental willow lift in a stiff breeze and fall again into the drained concrete of an oval pool. He thought of Watermeadows. He thought of Hannah Lean. Poor Hannah. “It must be the worst thing imaginable. To lose the person most important to you. I don't know how I'd handle that.”

“You've had to, haven't you? Your parents are both dead.”

He did not turn his face from the overhanging willow and the empty pond. “Yes,” simply.

“Well, then.” She finished her drink.

Well, then.

Light had turned milky, nearly opaque and thick like fog, dense. The border of dahlias bent as if the light weighed too heavily. Light seemed to have crept into the room, not in shafts of sunlight or blue dawn or some late-afternoon rainbow diffusion. It had crept in.

“Do you have a picture of him?” he asked.

Lady Cray looked at Melrose, puzzled. “Of whom?”

“Sorry. Of Philip Calvert. Given Mrs. Hamilton was so fond of him, I'd imagine there were photos. Snapshots.”

“He was murdered,” she said, as if in answer to his strange question regarding the photograph.

“I was just thinking about something, something when I was sitting in the Tate. And I wondered—” Melrose broke off, not even sure what he wondered, then or now.

Lady Cray smiled, indicated the wall behind and to the left of the sofa where he sat. “Not very observant, are you?”

He turned toward that area of the wall between the two double doors leading to the long foyer. On the eight or ten feet of wall space above the moulding were arranged paintings of various sizes and variously framed. The largest in the top row, a portrait of a young man, was lit by a small lamp. Melrose got up and, then, as if a walk across the room would seem a rude departure, said, “May I?”

Lady Cray nodded.

The portrait showed Philip Calvert seated in a fancy Victorian chair drawn up to a small table, the sort of useless bits of furniture one often encounters in portraits, chairs and little tables too delicate to serve a purpose other than to rest an elbow on or position a hand or make a jaunty display of cap and scarf. All of these were here: Philip Calvert's elbow rested on the table, his hand supporting his head; the other hand was furled against the end of the chair arm; a soft wool cap carelessly listed against the base of the lamp as if it had been tossed there (which of course it never would have been, not against that lamp) together with a pair of driving goggles. A dark cashmere scarf drifted away from his neck and fell along the arm of the chair, as if he'd been in the process of pulling it off. “Jauntiness” being, as it would seem, the effect aimed for. A young man, stopping between drives in his sporty car, barely able to restrain himself in the chair for all of this brushwork. But the composition itself was totally at odds with Philip. Yes, he was smiling, but it was fleeting, one could tell. It made Melrose think of that pale and empty sky behind him from which the coil of birds had fled so swiftly, as if pursued by that encroaching light. All of the colors here were mournful variations of brown. The brown at the top of the canvas was so dark it was nearly black, and this melted down into sable shadows, then into the coffee color of lampshade and dubious drapery. The
few colors in the weave of the cap—burgundy, flecks of hunter green—were so dark and dull they bled into their background. And so Phil Calvert's pale face and light brown eyes approached a stage of near-translucency, caught as they were within these dark surroundings.

Melrose thought it was a wonderful little portrait, but something of a contradiction, its subject out of synch with his surroundings. It was all too redolent of comfort and privilege, of casual elegance. Too rich, much too rich. From what Jury had told him about Philip Calvert, Melrose wondered if the young man hadn't been trying to escape all of that. And he said as much to Lady Cray.

Emphatically, she nodded. “That is exactly so. In a nice way, he used to argue with Fanny, for she, having so much money, naturally wanted him to share it. Money made Philip uncomfortable. It does so, with some people. I've never had enough to acquire that particular posture.”

Melrose said: “He does not look happy.”

“No. He does not. But I do not know why. For he seemed to be—not ‘happy,' perhaps, but sure enough that he was doing the right things for himself that he was fairly content.”

In silence, they studied the portrait. Then she said, “But Mr. Plant. You're surely not suggesting that
that
particular crime has something to do with
Fanny's
death?”

“No. Philip Calvert's murderer was discovered. I don't mean it in that way.”

“In
what
way, then?”

Melrose smiled. “I can tell you a theory favored by a friend of mine in Long Piddleton. That is, if you're prepared to hear something pretty damned silly.”

“Say on. Silliness, my dear, is my stock in trade.”

“Come on, Lady Cray. I know you, remember? You're anything
but
.”

She winced and dropped her hand from his arm. “Oh, don't exaggerate my virtues so. I am many things
but.
So, let's hear the silly theory.”

“She calls it ‘the Stendhal syndrome.' ”

“The what?”

Melrose explained. “Art addicts, such as Stendhal was, might conceivably collapse in front of great paintings.”

“Good Lord. Are you suggesting that Fanny—who was hardly that impressionable when it came to great art, anyway—took in too much at the Tate?”

Melrose answered obliquely. “I walked into the Swagger Portrait exhibit, and when I suddenly came upon one of the portraits, I felt as if I had been horribly—
hit
, you know, as if a wall of hands had forced me back. I expect that's what people mean by having the breath knocked out of them.” He thought she would speak, inquire as to which portrait it was that had affected him so singularly, but she didn't. Perhaps Lady Cray was respecting a privacy that he himself had intruded upon without wanting to.

Lady Cray's finely arched brows drew together. “What was Fanny looking at?”

“Chatterton.”

Her gaze returned to Philip's portrait. “But there's no resemblance, really.”

“Oh, I think there is.”

Again, that frown. “Chatterton, from all I remember, was very young—”

“Seventeen.”

“—indigent, friendless, and worst of all, exposed as a plagiarist. Something like that. An artist, yes, and so was Philip. But I don't see any resemblance, beyond that.”

“Well, I wonder about the temperamental similarity.” Melrose motioned with his hand to stave off an objection. “But that's not the point. That isn't what I mean. I mean something much simpler.” Melrose nodded at the picture. “He would have looked different when he was dead.”

“Naturally, but Fanny didn't see—”

“Didn't see him? No. But the manner of his death would have been described to her. Philip Calvert was lying on a sort of bed-sofa. She didn't see him. All the worse. She imagined him. My guess is she would have seen him lying like Chatterton, thrown across a narrow bed. Even the books, the papers on the floor. At least, that's what Richard Jury was told about the appearance of Philip Calvert's body.”

When she turned her head to look at him, her silvery-blue eyes glinted. “Be sensible. There could be no possible reason then for Superintendent Jury to relate Fanny's death to the death of this unfortunate woman in Exeter. And God knows, not to the body found outside of Salisbury. They were not
all
, I presume, admiring the painting of poor, dear Chatterton?” Lady Cray was moving from the portrait of Philip back to her place on the ice-blue sofa as she said this.

“No. But your friend Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Hawes were apparently in Santa Fe at the same time.”

“Mrs. Hawes?”

“Helen Hawes was the woman in the cathedral. And the dead woman found at Old Sarum was from Santa Fe.” He said this to the portrait rather than to Lady Cray. For some reason, he had grown almost enamored of the light in it, the infinitesimal dots of gold that were sprayed across the scarf and table; the sheen of the boy's skin. He cocked his head to one side; it all bothered him inexplicably. Then he turned to reseat himself and accept a fresh drink.

“At the same time?” She gave a short laugh as she topped up his glass. “Well, so were a thousand others, I expect.”

“They're not dead.”

She looked at him, shrugged slightly. “Of course, that's true. I'm being dense.”

From his inside jacket pocket, Melrose withdrew the photocopied pages Jury had sent to him. “Look at this, will you?”

She took the pages, studied them carefully, before asking, “Should this be familiar to me? It appears to be an engagement book.”

“One of those little address books. You probably haven't seen the book itself, but what about the handwriting?”

“Are you suggesting it's Fanny's?”

“Asking. It was actually in the possession of the woman who died in Exeter Cathedral, only it wasn't hers. The Exeter police are sure of that.”

Lady Cray frowned over the pages. “It's difficult to say. . . . But it looks like two
different
hands, doesn't it? See here—” she handed the pages back to Melrose—“the
C
and the
o
in ‘Canyon' look quite different from the ones in ‘Coyote.' What an odd name, ‘Coyote Village.' But I don't understand—” She looked up at Melrose. “If it was found with this other woman's belongings . . . Haven't I told her again and again, those precise little numbers of hers were absolutely impossible to read. Her nines looking like fives, and so forth.” Lady Cray sighed deeply and sat back, eyes nearly shut. “Poor Fanny.” She sighed.

As if a confusion between nines and fives had been the death of her.

Well, perhaps she was right. It was no more unlikely than the Stendhal syndrome.

Melrose smiled and thanked her and took his leave.

When he saw the Cripps kiddies hammering on dustbin lids, Melrose thanked the Lord that this time he hadn't driven the Rolls into Catchcoach Street. Last time, he'd had to pay them protection money. He counted five of them—no, six, for there was one in the center of the ring—and, of course, they couldn't have been the same six. This was just another set. He imagined the Crippses came in sets.

But there was no mistaking the Cripps look, passed on from generation to generation—whey- or pudding- or pasty-faced; bleached-out hair and eyelashes; eyes so colorless they were nearly transparent. The Crippses all looked as if they'd gone round in the washers down at the launderette just one too many Mondays.

But what their looks lacked in color, their actions made up for. Melrose stood across the street, just to observe their latest game. Five of them were engaged in marching round in a ring where, in the center, stood one benighted sixth—being somewhat androgynous, hard to tell whether boy or girl—blindfolded and holding a potted plant. Those in the circle were either banging the dustbin lids, or putting what appeared to be tools to other purposes. A garden rake served as a pole to which a tattered Irish flag was tied. A hoe bore a hand-lettered (and naturally misspelt) message—
DOWN WITH FUCKIN MAJERS.
The theme of this demonstration was taken, apparently, from the morning's headlines about another IRA protest, one of the perpetrators taken into custody, which was the reason for the kiddies' sentiment. Their sympathies lay with any organization which could wreak havoc. It was unclear why they had taken one of their own to play the part of prisoner, however. But Melrose supposed the Crippses would have it both ways if they possibly could, thereby losing no
opportunity for mistreating anyone or anything they could, be it Country or Cousin.