The Old Contemptibles (25 page)

“You don’t have a brother.”

“I could have sworn . . .” She shrugged. “Perhaps I’m mistaken. It must have been one of Mummy’s lovers’ kiddies. She had simply dozens. I was always left out. . . .” His head was moving from side to side. No good, that, either. “Do you read?”

Poker-faced, he said, “No. They’re all hollow. Just rows of fake spines.”

She tried not to smile, but couldn’t help it. “At least you’ve a sense of humor.” Her gaze netted the rows of books. “More or less.”

“Look, Lady Cray, we know perfectly well that you’re not a compulsive thief, although your family appears to think so.”

“ ‘Family.’ Have they the gall to call themselves that? My lank, greedy son-in-law and my wimpish daughter?”

He sat back. “Perhaps we’ve arrived at some sort of truth.”

What was he saying? And why taking notes? “You’ve obviously
not
talked to my grandson. Andrew.” She could feel herself beam;
blood suffusing her narrow frame. “He’s the only one worth tuppence. You know, he might be twice that boy’s age, but Andrew and Alex Holdsworth would truly hit it off.” He’d stopped taking notes. Or doodling.

He looked up at her under his thickish eyebrows. “You’ve got to know Adam well, haven’t you?”

“It’s where I stash the swag. His room.” Doodle, doodle.

Silence. Had she struck a nerve?

“The reason you want to be here is because you loathe living with your daughter. But why do you? You’re obviously independent. You’re rich. Gold silk and pure cashmere.” He nodded at her suit.

“I’ve never heard of impure cashmere, but I’m glad you like my outfit.” She looked down at her blouse, her lightweight suit. It
was
stunning. “My daughter and her husband do give people the false impression that
I
live with
them.
It is, in fact, the other way round. It is
my
house, although I occupy my own quarters, separate entrance, separate everything.” She sighed. “It was quite nice whilst Andrew was living with them. But he left and took the best of the fun with him. A friend showed me a brochure, several brochures, of retirement homes, nursing homes, mental homes.” She smoked and smiled. “I’d say you’ve all three here.”

He put down the cigar and flipped to another page of her file. “You’ve been arrested, let’s see—”

“Three times.
I
can tell you that. What other interesting tidbits did your Dr. Viner include after she vetted me?”

Again, he ignored her comment. “Mrs. Barrister claimed you took the candlestick from her table in the dining room.” He chewed his lip.

“Oh, my
God.
Now I’m to be accused of
everything
that goes missing. Why would I bother to take a candlestick?”

“Why would you bother to take a silver place-setting?” His eyes were round, innocent, feigning wonder.

“Mrs. Barrister shouldn’t even
have
a candle on her table. According to Adam, she set her hair on fire. Looked like the burning bush, he said.”

“Lady Cray, we can’t have our guests complaining all the time about their things being taken.”

“ ‘Guests’?
Most of them are totally bonkers. Just have a look out
the window. The Vicar is thrashing the life out of the rosebushes again.”

Kingsley shook his head, rose and went to the window where he observed the old gentleman hacking away. Lady Cray’s hand flashed out and deposited the lighter in her bag. Kingsley turned. “Admittedly, some of them are very elderly and not quite in full command of their faculties.”

“Loopy, scatty, round the twist. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Not
the majority.”

“Oh, all right, I will agree with that. Most of them are perfectly civilized and relatively sane. Why do you have books with fake spines?” She flexed her neck, indicating the bookcase to the left.

“You don’t miss a thing, do you?” Kingsley walked over, pulled down a “book” and, as she watched, he drew from its hollow core a bottle of a rare Lindisfarne mead.

“Your private stock! How wonderful! I could use a cordial.”

“No.”

“How dreary. You’re worse than police. Don’t drink on the job.” His head, she thought, came up rather quickly when she mentioned police. That was interesting. But he said nothing, merely bent over his appointment book.

“Ten o’clock all right with you?”

“That depends. For what?”

“It might be tough, since cooperation will be minimal, but I’m good, you know. I could help you. Unfortunately, I think you enjoy your little illness all too much.” He was observing her over tented fingers, smiling.

Outwardly, she smiled. Inwardly, she shivered. He was wrong. Wrong, at least, about the things she did feel compelled to take. The chocolates and the ribbons. Red ribbons, especially. To avoid meeting his eye, she let her own trail again over the rows and rows of books.

That one, there, behind him. By itself and three shelves above the one on which he’d just replaced the liqueur-filled book. Dr. Kingsley’s eyes were quite bad; she knew also that he must be a trifle vain, for his glasses—bifocals—rested on his desk. This particular “book” also had a fake leather spine, and in it was a marker, one of those one sees in especially nice old volumes, a ribbon. She could see it clearly. The color of blood.

“You know, dear Dr. Kingsley, I think it might be even better if I could see you again today.”

He looked up, totally surprised.

“If you have a free hour. Threeish, fourish? I feel that we get on rather well.” She hoped her dimple was showing.

“I’m amazed, but, yes. Three?”

“Wonderful.”

She watched as he stuck the cigar back in his mouth and searched for the black lighter.

“Oh, do allow me. I found mine.”

She reached over and lit his cigar and he thanked her.

Alex put on his best call-to-bookmaker voice and, when Hawkes answered, he asked to speak to Mr. Melrose Plant.

“It’s your solicitor, Mr. Plant,” said Hawkes, refusing to look directly at Mr. Plant, whom the butler had found in the library.

Melrose, sitting round-shouldered and nearsightedly over his index cards, looked up over his gold-rimmed glasses. “Solicitor? There must be some mistake.” Did nearsighted, droop-shouldered librarians on the brink of poverty
have
solicitors?

Hawkes, investing the repetition of the message with as much boredom as possible, added, meanly: “You may take the call in the kitchen.”

Why, wondered Melrose, would Simon Ledbetter be calling him
here?
Walking through the dining room to the kitchen, he suddenly thought: Agatha. She’s managed to get to the firm about his will.

But the voice at the other end wasn’t Ledbetter’s.

“Listen,” said Alex, “and don’t say anything.”

Both Mrs. Callow and Hawkes, although feigning indifference, were all ears. “Mr. Ledbetter? It’s been years since we’ve talked. Well, hardly anything to talk about, was there, considering the money’s gone.” Melrose laughed weakly.

“Is someone listening?”

“Obviously. That’s why I find myself in a rather difficult position.”

“Then stop talking. It was Dr. Kingsley. Maurice Kingsley. You don’t know him. He was the man on the bench. You know, outside Mum’s—”

The voice broke, trailed off.

Melrose himself could think of nothing to say. Another suspect, a
real
one, no smoke and mirrors. A man who had been at the scene of the crime and Alex could prove it. “Are you, ah, calling from your offices, Mr. Ledbetter?” That was stupid. Where the hell would a solicitor be calling from? A newsagent’s? Hawkes was staring at him.

“From the Castle. Granddad’s room. You’ll meet him tonight.”

The line went dead.

Meet who? Kingsley? Adam?

“Renovation all done, is it? Fine. . . . No, I really can’t help you out about those particular papers. . . . Yes, I’m sorry.” He hung up, debating.

Under the insolent stare of Hawkes, there was no way he could make a call, much less a trunk call to London, from here, although several cleverly coded conversations raced through his mind. And any call made from Tarn House would have to be made where he could keep Mrs. Callow in view, having been advised by Millie that she’d pick up when she saw one of the phone’s red snake eyes blink on.

He would include this new information in the typed-up report he had been about to take to the post-office store’s fax machine.

 • • • 

Madeline was studying the painting by window-light.

When Melrose returned from the kitchen to the library (where he’d left pillars of books stacked in front of the partially empty cases to simulate hard work), she started.

“Oh! I didn’t hear you.” The watercolor left her hands, drifted to the floor as if it were a large feather. She reclaimed it and put it back on the desk.

“I got it from Francis, if you’re wondering.”

“I wasn’t wondering anything, really. I’m surprised he’d have it; he hates that style.”

“Oh, he didn’t just ‘have it’; he painted it.”

“Francis did?” She appeared genuinely surprised.

“The day that Mrs. Holdsworth died, the day of her fall.” Melrose had moved round to his chair at the desk to stand beside her. Madeline
was tense, her hands clasped behind her, looking down at the view from Scafell toward Wasdale Head and Wast Water. He was about to comment further, but stopped. He did not want to appear the confidant of Francis Fellowes after only having just arrived within the week. He left it to Madeline. Better anyway.

It was odd to him that her proximity to him—the touch of her shoulder, her hip nearly grazing his—called up no response, not the slightest tingling, warmth, or feeling of arousal. And she was certainly not an unattractive woman with those tilted eyes, that soft hair that feathered about her face. “He said he was with her. That he and Virginia Holdsworth walked up Scafell together.”

“Yes. Francis was questioned in such a way you’d think he might have had something to do with it. But I expect it was only because he was at the scene.”

If her sister hadn’t come along, Madeline might have married Graham Holdsworth. And she had stayed when (Melrose thought) another woman would have absolutely run from the scene of such humiliation.

“Have you ever climbed it?”

Madeline’s face grew rosier at the same time that the bridge of her nose showed that telltale band of white. White anger. At him? At her dead sister?

She said nothing in answer to his question except, “Alex is back.”

At Alex.

 • • • 

“Alex is back.”

In the sort of watery, superimposition of faces one sees sometimes in films, Madeline had been replaced in the library by Genevieve, who carried the same news.

Bad news. No matter how she tried to arrange her expression, the eyes fired up, the smile looked stitched in place and soon vanished as she walked from rosewood end table to Chippendale sideboard, picking up her fashion magazines, riffling pages, thrusting them down. Terribly careless (he thought) of the impression she was making on Melrose, her pink-varnished nails lay on the silken sleeves of her blouse as she tapped her foot and stared out of the french windows.

“That’s wonderful,” said Melrose, rising, he hoped, to an occasion no one yet seemed eager to celebrate.

“Crabbe’s in Keswick; George doesn’t know it yet, either. He’s out with the dogs.”

From the tone, one might have thought that if George
had
known it, he’d set hounds yapping at the boy’s heels.

“Of course, Alex went along to Castle Howe and saw Adam first.”

He thought she’d tear the copy of the Harrods catalogue to pieces. Melrose suppressed a smile. Her manner suggested a future of looking at shop catalogues, rather than buying out the shop itself. It would be a bit like Marshall Trueblood having to pin up the latest wardrobe by Armani on his walls rather than settling it on his person.

“Adam and two or three others are coming to dinner.” Her head was still bent over the slick magazine. Finally, she threw it down and it slid from table to floor. She didn’t bother picking it up. That was for others. “Cocktails at seven. Dinner at eight.” She swung round and started for the library door, turning to announce, “A party for Alex.”

Melrose stared at the door that had come close to slamming.

Alex. It was all Alex. No use killing off Adam; he was an old man, anyway. To get to Adam’s millions, one would have to get over the hurdle of Alex.

Melrose looked down at the painting of Scafell. It would be about as easy as getting to Mickledore across the hurdle of Broad Stand.

“I don’t see why Hawkes has to pick us up,” said Adam. He had reworded and repeated the complaint several times as he tried unsuccessfully to do his black tie.

“Do stop whining.” Lady Cray sat in the chair beside the window in a gown of that strange color of Waterford crystal, grayish blue in its depths, nearly invisible hue. The gown was cut straight from straps to hem, on the bias, unadorned. The only piece of jewelry she wore was a smoky, square-cut diamond nearly the shade of the gown itself. This ensemble brightened her silvery, large-pupiled eyes. Her fingers drummed on her evening purse, made to match the gown. Drummed and drummed in what would have been a tattoo if the silky material hadn’t muted the fingers’ touch.

“Not whining. Carstairs makes its deliveries here right about now—” Adam checked his bedside clock. “—and after it leaves the Castle goes straight past Tarn House on its way to Boone. It’d be no trick at all, when the driver’s inside—” Here he pecked his head in the direction of the kitchens. “—to nip up the ramp of the lorry. You don’t even have to push. This thing’s electrified, remember?” He patted the wheelchair’s arm affectionately.

“And just how do you plan on getting the lorry to
stop
on the road in front of the house?”

He was pulling the end of the tie this way and that. “Oh, make a rumpus,” he said impatiently.

“A rumpus. How do we do that? By tossing lettuces out the slats? By hurling cabbages against the cab? Is it articulated, this lorry? That would be even a greater exercise of skill—”