The Old Contemptibles (36 page)

There was a humming sort of silence, as if speech could leave the sort of afterimage on the ear a camera’s flash could leave on the eye. For a few moments none of them seemed to realize she’d stopped.

“Then
what happened?” said Adam Holdsworth; and with small flicks of his hands urged, “Go on, go on!”

“There’s nothing to be going on
with.”
She placed a finger against her cheek, thoughtfully. “Except, I’d certainly say that whatever
you’re investigating, I doubt very much he did it. I can’t say the same for the other one. Did the letters tie up properly, Sergeant?”

Wiggins still sat with his pencil poised over his notebook, staring at her. “What?”

“The ribbon. When I took it off I looked at the marks it had left. It didn’t seem to fit.” She looked from Wiggins to Jury and back again.

His eyes still full on her, Wiggins tossed the packet of letters to Jury. At last, it was business as usual. “I don’t think it’s the original ribbon, sir.”

Jury held the letters up at eye level, moved the ribbon, moved it back. “It isn’t. Too new, too narrow.” He turned his gaze to Lady Cray. “ ‘The other one,’ Lady Cray?”

“Psychiatrist. You know, Dr. Viner. Well . . . I know you’re very fond of her, Adam, as is everyone else here. She’s awfully—plausible, isn’t she? But, my instincts say she’s definitely not quite the ticket.”

Jury smiled, still holding up the ribbon-tied letters. “Meaning?”

She just looked round at the three of them and sighed. “Men.”

 • • • 

“Pack of cards.”

This new voice amongst them came from Alex, who had entered through a window, suddenly. Now he stood in the room very still, looking at the letters as he might have looked at a cobra.

Said his great-grandfather, “Dammit, come in through doors once in a while. You always act like you’re on the lam. As they say in the States.” He sounded gruff; he was covering up other feelings, thought Jury.

Jury would have known him from her pictures; he thought he would have known him even without them. Alex Holdsworth had the coloring of his handsome father, but he had
her
expression, her mannerisms, her inflection. Even in the few seconds the boy stood there, Jury could tell this. He was overwhelmed once again by loss. If things had been different, this boy might have been his stepson. No, he thought. No. It wouldn’t have worked even if she’d lived. “Alex?”

The boy shoved back the hair out of his eyes and looked at Jury, vacantly. “Sir?”

“I’m—we’re—policemen. Scotland Yard. We’re—rather unofficially—looking into the death of your mother.”

For a moment, Jury thought he hadn’t heard, that he still had his mind on the letters.

Alex said, “S-U-P-T. R. Jury. I know.”

Wiggins rose and put out his hand and, in an uncharacteristic try at humor, said, “S-G-T. Wiggins. How d’ya do?” They shook hands.

Jury thought Alex looked awfully pale; his face had the pellucid look of a lake after a rain. “What did you mean just then, about the cards?”

“Nothing.” He glanced at Jury, glanced away. Poor lie. “I only came to see Granddad.” He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. Jeans and a rather ratty-looking Aran sweater was what he was wearing.

“I think I’ll be going,” said Lady Cray, who had, throughout this entire meeting, remained standing. Now she appeared to feel she was in the way.

“Not you, Alex,” said Jury, stepping toward him as the boy turned and nearly had one leg over the sill. “I’d like to talk to you, all right?”

Alex seemed to be considering. Then he just nodded.

“You were a friend of my mother.”

“Yes,” said Jury.

“She didn’t do it. She didn’t commit suicide. She wouldn’t have.”

He sounded, Jury thought, ferociously defensive. They were sitting in the conservatory amidst the potted palms, the gloxinias, the hanging plants. Jury had collected two coffees from a sideboard where a silver pot was, apparently, replenished throughout the day.

Alex told him about the close check he kept on his mother’s medicine. And then he handed him a small paper.

“What’s this?” Jury set his cup on the quarry-tiled floor.

“A list of people who were at the house—up here, I mean—when Mum lost some medicine. Any one of them could have taken it. And then I thought—hell, doctors, nurses, they can get hold of Seconal in the time it would take Fortune’s Son to do a sixteenth of a mile.”

“That’s true.” Jury looked at the list, feeling desolate, not knowing what to say to Alex. So he asked him about that “pack of cards.”

“It’s a dream. It keeps coming back, recurring.” Alex told Jury the details. “I knew something was missing from Mum’s room, but not what. She kept those letters in the drawer of her nightstand. They must have been important.” He stopped. “I don’t understand the Queen of Hearts. Dr. Viner said that it probably had to do with feeling guilty about being sent down from school.” He looked over at Jury. “I play poker. I got caught. I bet the horses. I got caught.”

Jury wanted to laugh. “You’re pretty young to be getting into betting shops.”

“Betting shop?” His look at Jury was scornful. “I wouldn’t bother. I past-post.”

“What’s that?”

“You wait until the race is run and you know the winner. You call your turf accountant and bet the horse. But, of course, the turf accountants, they turn around and time the race, so they don’t cover the bet until they’ve seen whether the horses left the gate before you phoned in your bet. They’re not completely stupid. But they’re greedy, like most people. Now, it’s obviously got to be done quick and you’ve got to set up the bookmaker, don’t you? So you phone in bets over a long period of time on long shots. He doesn’t take the bet until he times the race, and since it’s already run, he just phones back and says thanks, but no thanks. And thinks you’re round the bend anyway because you’re betting these long shots. You have to vary the size—some small, some larger—to prepare for the big bet. You’re doing long shots, really long, but then you vary that a little, too. What he thinks he’s got on the other end of the line is someone who’s, one, dumb about horses; two, plain dumb, betting those twenty- and thirty-to-one shots. He always checks to see if the bet’s placed late. Eventually, you wear him down. You wear him down because he’s got a totally green face and there’s nothing he’d like to see more than really tall money. I’ve got a partner, of course, because the calls have to go through
very
fast. I’m in the tree with my phone; he’s on the ground in his car with
his
phone. The second the horse hits the finish I call him and he calls the accountant. This time it took us about two months to set him up. It was a big bet on really long odds and he could see those fifty quid notes stampeding straight toward him. So the big bet he finally takes without timing the race and there isn’t one effing thing he can do about it, not even when he finds out the bet went down after the horses left the gate. Out of the gate? Mine was over the finish, the post, see. And the thing for Ned and me was, there was absolutely no way we could lose. If he’d taken a small bet earlier, well, we’d just’ve got less money. But lose? No way. That’s past-posting. If you ever want to try. I told the biology master I was doing a study of leaf fungus. That’s why I was always up in the trees. The binoculars weren’t suspicious because I told him
too I was studying the migratory patterns of certain birds when I wasn’t doing the leaves.”

Silence hummed. Jury shut his mouth, cleared his throat, said, “You and Lady Cray would make a good team.”

“Why’s that?”

“Never mind. Dr. Kingsley didn’t recognize you last night at dinner?”

“Not unless he’s a good actor.”

Jury rose. “Let’s go and find out, shall we?”

 • • • 

As they walked the blue corridor and neared Kingsley’s door, Alex said, “Know what Millie thought about the Queen of Hearts?” He stopped. He smiled as if there were still some brightness left in the day. “That it was the Red Queen from
Alice in Wonderland.”

Millie, thought Jury, might be right.

“Wait here, Alex, until I come for you.”

 • • • 

“Never saw them before.” Maurice Kingsley, looking gloomy, was turning the beribboned letters over and over. “What in hell’s going on?” Anger surfaced above the gloom.

“I thought you might help to answer that question,” said Jury. “That packet was on your bookshelf.” Jury scanned the rows of books, thought he saw what might be fake spines. “They were in one of those hollowed-out books you keep for whiskey.”

Kingsley seemed stunned. “How . . . ? Who . . . ?” He closed his eyes, leaned back. “Lady Cray. Christ, does the woman have X-ray—” Kingsley flicked the ribbon. “This is it, isn’t it? She saw the ribbon. Oh, my God. ‘No, not a Wispa bar; I simply
must
have some
boxed
chocolates.’ ”

Jury couldn’t help smiling. It was a credible imitation of Lady Cray’s inflection. “Go ahead. You can read them.”

Kingsley quickly removed the ribbon and now stared at the top envelope.
“Jane?”
He spread them out, looked at the postmark. “They’re all to Jane. Five, six years old.”

Jury nodded.

Kingsley read through the letters in total silence. Then he replaced each in its envelope, made a neat stack, and sat staring at the stack. Still, he said nothing.

After some moments had passed in this way, Jury said, “Well?”

Kingsley shot him a hard glance. “I’m thinking, Superintendent.”

“Good.” Suspects seldom did. Jury waited.

Finally, Maurice Kingsley said, “Anyone could have told you I was going to London the day of her death. But then so were Genevieve and Madeline—and anyone else, except for Helen and Crabbe Holdsworth. And after police came here, a number of people knew I was actually sitting outside her house the
night
of her death. Why would I do it? Why would I kill Jane?” He shoved the letters back with the tip of his finger. “I certainly didn’t write these.”

“I know. I also know you had no motive for killing Jane Holdsworth. But you don’t get the point.”

“Enlighten me.”

“I will, if what I’m saying stays in this room.”

Kingsley nodded his assurance of that.

“I think she killed herself. I think she wanted me—I was a . . . personal friend—to find out what really happened to Virginia Holdsworth and Annie Thale.”

Kingsley stared at him, got up and moved to the shelf holding the hollow books. “I’m having a drink on that one.” He pulled a pint bottle of whiskey from one volume and held it up to Jury.

“Not at the moment. I’m sure the motive is money. For example, Genevieve would have a motive to kill Virginia Holdsworth in order to get into the family, to get next to Adam’s millions. But ‘next to’ can still leave a large gap. Madeline? Same thing. George Holdsworth is of the family, but he’d gain nothing more by killing his sister-in-law. Fellowes, even less. And he’s out for other reasons. And the wild card here, the really wild card, is Annie Thale. The only reason I can think of is because of what she knew about Graham Holdsworth.”

“You mean she knew he was homosexual?”

“No. She was fairly sure that he wasn’t.”

Kingsley drank off a finger of whiskey and poured another. He said nothing, only looked at Jury.

“Those letters are about Graham’s problems; there’s more than a hint there that the writer thinks divorce is the best choice.”

“They could’ve been written by anyone. Typed on any number of machines here, at Tarn House, in London, on the moon, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, come on, Dr. Kingsley. You know—” Jury inched his chair closer to the desk. “I want you to talk to Alex.”

Kingsley snapped up eyes that had been staring into his glass. “Why?”

Jury walked to the door, opened it and told Alex to come in.

Alex stood in the middle of the room, his head cocked slightly. “Remember me?” He was staring at Kingsley.

“Of course I remember you. We had dinner together.” Kingsley’s smile was strained.

Jury had dragged over another chair and Alex sat down. “We warmed a bench together, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He squinted at Alex.

Jury asked him, “Did you have a total blackout from the booze?”

Kingsley looked down and up again at Alex. “Not total. I vaguely remember someone sitting next to me. I expect it was a bench; I expect—well, police
assured
me it was outside of Jane’s house. It always keeps coming back to me, doesn’t it?” He exchanged glances with Jury.

Alex sat stiff in his chair. Finally, he said, “Did you kill my mother?”

“No.”

“Why the hell should I believe you?”

“You shouldn’t.” Kingsley shrugged. “I’m lazy, I’m a drunk, I have a rotten temper.” His eyes met Alex’s squarely.

Alex grew less rigid. He started to smile, caught himself, kept the line of his mouth thin as he looked at Jury.

“He had no reason to kill your mother, Alex. None.” Then Jury added, “Why don’t you tell him that dream?”

Alex frowned. “Why? I already told Dr. Viner and it didn’t help.”