The Old Contemptibles (24 page)

He had told his great-grandfather he was going straight to Tarn House (with his story of trauma, amnesia, or whatever his mind kicked up like pebbles along the way), but Alex lingered on the grounds of Castle Howe.

He no longer understood himself. What he had discovered about
Dr. Maurice Kingsley should have sent him right to Melrose Plant or to the telephone to ring up Inspector Kamir because now they had a person who could be absolutely placed at the scene of the crime. Whether they believed there
had
been a crime made no difference to Alex. He knew.

Yet he lingered. He walked through the gardens, looked down the long lawn toward Dr. Viner’s office in the little stone house, watched two elderly women (rich to their earlobes, just look at those diamonds) walking arm-in-arm and speaking intimately. One gave the other’s arm a bit of a squeeze and the other laughed.

They seemed so carefree. In his mind he repeated the word again and again. It sounded hollow, false, a word without meaning. Down the path edged with early primrose he walked, eyeing the beds of daffodils and thinking of Millie. Was there no end to it, this feeling of desolation?

He came to the entrance of the maze (his granddad’s favorite place) and stood there staring in. If he went in, could he get out? Did it make any difference? Alex looked up at the leaden sky. Feelings like this were totally unlike him, and even his mother’s death couldn’t explain this thing that went beyond depression. He felt dried out, shrunken, much like some of the feeble old people at Castle Howe. And yet even most of them seemed to have more life to them in their craziness, more energy in their madness, if it be madness. A few of them liked to wander in here, get lost, and start crying out
Help Help.
Kojak was always complaining; she wanted to level it to the ground, but his granddad wouldn’t let her. And he was Castle Howe’s biggest benefactor.

Anyway, someone looking down from the upper floor, or from the parapet, could track the person’s movements. There was no danger of a “guest” dying in here.

It put Alex in mind of the tree at Severn School, the binoculars, the racecourse. All of that seemed years ago, continents away, something lost.

He entered the maze, walked a bit and sat down on one of the wrought-iron benches placed at intervals in little nooks.

The horses, the card games, the scams. They seemed to belong to a past he remembered only mistily.

He had changed; he was frightened.

“Alex!”

 • • • 

When he saw her, he sprang up, surprised his body had the energy left for such a precipitate rise or his mouth the means to smile. But there was and had always been something about Dr. Viner that made his blood run quicker.

He even blushed as she came toward him from the opening a few feet away. He forgot to say hello.

“Alex.” She put her hands out, put them on his arms, made no move to embrace him, to crowd him. Her eyes, without seeming to move, searched his face. For signs. Signs of strain, signs of struggle.

And he could only just barely keep his expression controlled. As if beneath the tight skin, bone was cracking, muscle loosening—it was becoming the face of one of these old people. But it didn’t. He kept it still, looking at her. And it wasn’t easy to look at her because she reminded him of his mother. Same sandy-colored hair, goldish eyes. Or hazel, he supposed that was what they were, fretted with different colors—brown, green, topaz, blue. Worse, she had his mum’s sympathetic expression. No wonder they’d been such friends; no wonder Dr. Viner was such a good psychiatrist.

All of this went through Alex’s mind as he finally said hello to her and as she sat down on the bench and pulled him down beside her. Though it didn’t feel as if he were being pulled. It was more like a magnetic force. He looked away from her, his glance straight ahead, because he felt, in her presence, some new gravity, as if he would fall not down but sideways, toward her.

He almost, right then, told her about Kingsley. But that was news only for police.

“You don’t agree your mother killed herself, do you?”

She was so direct. Looking him right in the eye that way, naming the unnameable.

“I wonder, too. No matter what troubles she was having, no matter the depression, the pressure from the family, it’s too hard to believe she’d have done that. She loved you too much.”

What he had said to himself, what he had known all along still sounded sweet to his ears coming from someone else.

“The police said it was an overdose. They asked me how anyone could be given a fatal dose of Seconal without the victim’s knowing it.” The contemptuous expression wasn’t meant for Alex, when she looked at him. “As if their own pathologist couldn’t answer that
question. I told them obviously all anyone had to do was empty the capsules into liquid, and whiskey would hide the taste. Especially several whiskeys. They thanked me and went away. That is, after they’d talked to Maurice Kingsley. He’s in—” She sighed. “—a bit of a spot.”

Alex looked at her quickly.

“Maurice went to London that night. But you only just met Dr. Kingsley, didn’t you? He knew your mother. I’m honestly not sure what this inspector from London believes. He gave very little away. I was probably her best friend; Maurice less so, but a man. Jealousy, there, perhaps. I don’t think they’d worked out a motive for me—”

“You?”
Alex stared. “You’re the
last
person—”

She smiled. “One has to be careful about the
last
person. The thing is that any doctor would have access to prescription drugs.” She shook her head, lowered it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Alex.” She put her face in her hands. “My Lord,
I’m
the doctor and I’m crying on
your
shoulder.”

It made him feel somehow better that she was, the way he’d often felt with his mum. He felt he could return the confidence. He told her about the dream. The pack of cards wrapped in tape, the blighted landscape, the Queen, Millie’s notion. He didn’t tell her about the gun, though.

“Let’s walk,” she said. “I think better.”

“Will we get lost?” He tried on a smile.

“We’re already lost.” She stuck her hands in the wide pockets of her white coat.

 • • • 

“A desolate landscape contrasted with a beautiful horizon: Heaven and Hell, perhaps,” was her comment on the dreamscape.

“It’s the pack of cards I don’t understand.”

“You’re quite a cardsharp, Alex.” She smiled. “I’ve heard.”

“Don’t compare me with the Vicar and Mrs. Bradshaw. I could beat them blind.”

She turned to look at him. “Apparently, you did.”

“They couldn’t count. But the cards in the dream—”

“Mean more than that, I know.” Dr. Viner was silent for a while, walking slowly. “What’re your associations?”

“Nothing. None.”

“Oh, but that’s impossible. Your mind can’t be a blank. Look at it
from another point of view. For instance, the word
card
could refer to a person. A
pack of cards,
then, might be a group of your friends, tricksters, something like that. I’m only giving you that as an example.”

“House of cards?”

She said nothing, letting him think it through.

“My family. Take away Mum, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. As if she was the foundation.”

“Well? Does it seem to fit? It’s your dream.”

“No.”

Abruptly, she stopped. They were near another white bench, or perhaps it was the same one. How could he tell?

“You think it’s important?” she asked.

“I know it’s important.”

“Why?”

Now they had come to another opening, which presented them with a blind wall of boxwood hedge.

“It’s the something missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“From Mum’s room. There was something missing. Whatever it is, it registered and got turned into the cards. Someone reminded me of that film called
Spellbound.
Where a wheel in the dream is really a gun in reality.”

She smiled. “I saw it. Ingrid Bergman solves the puzzle. I only wish I were Ingrid Bergman.”

Alex broke off a bit of twig from the hedge. “Oh, you’re all right as Dr. Viner.”

“Thanks for that. Who else did you tell the dream to?”

“Who?”

“You said someone reminded you of the film.”

“Oh. Millie. She loves films.” She might find it odd he’d tell the new cataloguer of books, a perfect stranger. “I have this dream every night. I’ll remember at some point.” They had come to another hedgewall. “Right or left?”

“Left. I’ve memorized this maze. I had to; the Dunster sisters like to play hide and seek here.” As they neared the opening that would at last allow them to exit, she said, “It’s like sleight of hand, isn’t it? Or a good card trick?”

“Except this pack was Sellotaped together. And my mother had
something to do with it.” They were standing now on the stone path where the line of primroses began, and daffodils. “Then the bits blew away in the wind.”

She frowned, buttoning her coat against a chill in the air. For a moment she looked off toward the manor house. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you at dinner tonight. Your great-grandfather asked me and Lady Cray. Will they escape in the delivery van or simply leave through the front door?” She laughed and walked off.

He watched her go, thinking still of the confetti-like bits of the pack of cards carried away in a swirling wind.

The expression came unbidden to his mind.
Pack of lies.

Lady Cray gave a bright, birdlike look at the pill in Dr. Kingsley’s outstretched hand. “If you feel you really need it, take it.”

“That’s very funny.”

“I’m
expected to swallow it?”

He nodded.

“For what?”

“It’ll calm your nerves.”

“I’m so calm I’m nearly comatose.” She took out her gold cigarette case. “A cigarette will do far better. Please remove your hand from my face.”

“Tell you what. Take the pill, you may smoke.”

“What is it? Truth serum? Insulin shock therapy?”

Kingsley sighed. “For God’s sake, Lady Cray, it’s a mild tranquilizer.” He reached to the shelf behind him, along which sat a row of vials, and picked one up to show her.

“Oh, very well.” In the corner of his book-lined office—very psychiatristy, she’d thought, when she’d seen it (they all want you to think they can read)—was a water cooler. “Well, get me some
water.”

“Oh, sorry. I take them dry.”

She took them no way; the pill went under her tongue. When he brought back the little paper cup, she gulped down the water and
pushed the cup toward him in the manner of a shipwreck victim. “More.”

As he returned to the water cooler, she plucked out the pill and tossed it in his wastebasket. “I just love to see the bubbles pop, don’t you?” She nodded toward the glass tank, in which the water sucked down, came up and bubbled. She crumpled the cup and tossed it away too. Probably a behaviorist, she thought. Handsome, but doesn’t look smart enough for Freud or Jung. She smiled widely enough to show her dimple. She loathed dimples, but for some reason men thought one on a lady of a certain age to be absolutely disarming. Thus, she smiled charmingly when he handed her the second cup.

“So. What do you do to keep busy?” Lady Cray looked round the office. Big picture-window behind, so that one could turn in the leather chair and view the artifacts of the Stonehenge days making their way about with canes, walkers, Nurse Rhubarb, Lisping Lisgrove and the younger helpers. There was the Vicar (with what church he had once been connected, she had no idea, but it must have had wealthy patronage) slowly moving along the side of the beechwood hedge, thrashing at it with his cane. And far in the distance, Wast Water. Very far. So far, indeed, no one could see it except with binoculars up on the ramparts. The brochure was really stretching things to have its greensward rolling right to the lake’s shores. It was, she thought, a cold, unforgiving-looking body of water. Not like the other lakes. It was the deepest in all of England.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“Wast Water.”

“Why?”

“You tell me.”

“Why do I think you’re not going to cooperate?” He smiled, taking Adam’s cigar from his pocket. “I knew he kept them under the bed.”

“I’ve never been under it, so I wouldn’t know.” She took her slim gold cigarette case from her creamy leather purse and extracted a Black Russian. Beneath some papers, Dr. Kingsley found his lighter—equally slim, an elegant black Porsche. He lit his cigar after her cigarette.

“You doctors must make a packet at this place. That’s a handsome lighter. I have one just like it.” She rooted a bit in her purse. “You
psychiatrists, you’re truly clever at seeing things. You could see a cigar from the top of Nelson’s Column.”

Actually, it was she herself who could do that. Her vision had always been superb, a point she prided herself on. It was marvelous watching youngsters have to take out their glasses to see the Tower of London, when she could pick out one of its ravens from a half-mile away. Well, a
bit
of an exaggeration. Oh, dear, now he was talking about the silverware. Perhaps he wasn’t a behavioral psychologist after all. It was sounding much like the Freudian primer.

“. . . the need to supplant some loss in your childhood.”

She winced. The very
word
“childhood” made her want to rip apart every book in the cases—of which there were plenty. Three walls of them. So psychiatristy and he probably hadn’t read one. Beside one of the filing cabinets was a dainty table with a hot plate and things for tea-making. “It was the tea set,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “You see, Mummy gave me this wonderful dolly tea set. Little spoons and all. My brother smashed it. I still think about it.” Mummy was usually entertaining on-the-dole “artists” or actors “resting between roles” at one of her “salons.” Mummy drank her gin neat.

Maurice Kingsley was puffing and smiling. “Got to do better than that, Lady Cray.”

“I do?” One enameled-looking eyebrow shot up. “Why?”