Help the Poor Struggler (18 page)

“Well, Lord Ardry, if you consider five hundred pounds meager, you must be wealthy indeed.” He managed to make inherited wealth sound like plunder.

“I am,” said Melrose simply. “I'll see the bequest is sent to the church, if that's suitable.”

“Thank you.”

With what struck Melrose as a rather summary dismissal in the circumstances, Mr. White started to turn and leave. “Just one more thing, Mr. White. I was wondering about the Ashcroft family.”

With five hundred pounds in the balance, the vicar must have felt something was due this Nosey Parker of an earl. “Wondering what?”

“Well, I've rather made a hobby of heraldry and that sort of thing. How long have the Ashcrofts been feudal overlords of Wynchcoombe and Clerihew Marsh?” The question, of course, would annoy the vicar.

“Feudalism is dead, Lord Ardry. At least the last I heard —”

Melrose smiled fatuously. “Dying, perhaps. But I sometimes wonder if the liberties the feudal barons took were not still being taken . . . ?”

“Sir, I have a very busy schedule.”

He seemed willing to look a five-hundred-pound gift-horse in the mouth after all. “I'm sorry. It's just that the Ashcroft family appears to be much the most important family about. James Ashcroft was the Earl of Curlew, wasn't he?”

The vicar frowned. “Yes.”

“I just wondered if perhaps ‘Curlew' weren't some deviant spelling of ‘Clerihew.' Or it would have been the other way round, I mean? ‘Clerihew Marsh' ought really to be ‘Curlew Marsh.' The curlew being a bird and the crest on the Ashcroft coat-of-arms.”

“That is correct.” Again he turned to go.

“And your first name, vicar. ‘Linley.' James Ashcroft was the Viscount Linley and one of his other names was ‘Whyte.' Spelled differently, of course.”

“If you're wondering whether I'm a relation of the Ashcrofts, yes, I am. But certainly a very distant one. His bequest to the church was even more surprising than yours. But he was generous, I'll say that for him.”

Melrose wondered what the vicar
wouldn't
say for James Ashcroft.

The vicar continued: “I was certainly surprised at his leaving fifty thousand pounds.”

So was Melrose.

 • • • 

Sara had been patiently hovering in the shadows all of this time, reading the account of the storm that described a visit from the Devil knocking the spire off the church.

“Sorry,” said Melrose.

“Oh, that's all right. Was that the vicar?”

“Yes. I'm thirsty. How about you?”

“I could do with a cup of tea. But I expect you prefer the pub?”

She was certainly agreeable. And attractive. And — well, quite the sort of young woman that a de Winter or a Rochester
might
marry.

No wonder Lady Jessica was trying to hand her over to Melrose.

 • • • 

After they left the church, they stood looking for some moments at the moss- and lichen-veiled headstones.

“Now I remember who the Reverend Mr. White reminds me of. Hester's Chillingworth.”

Sara was puzzled. “Chillingworth?”

“You know.
The Scarlet Letter.
I wonder if he looked upon Davey as a benighted little Pearl.”

“Whatever were you talking about all that time? You hadn't heard of him before, had you?”

Melrose paused to consider the question and decided two lies were no worse than one. “No. You don't see a post office about, do you? I need to post these letters.”

They walked off in search of one. Melrose took the quiet walk as an opportunity to reflect.

T
HE
cat Cyril sat on Fiona Clingmore's typewriter watching the noonday ritual of the rejuvenation of Fiona's face. Powder, mascara, lip rouge, eyeliner. When Jury walked in, Cyril appeared to have entered into some symbiotic relation with Fiona, in his stately posture on the typewriter, drawing his paw across his face, the student testing the lesson of the master.

There had been a great deal of speculation about the cat's appearance in the halls of New Scotland Yard. It was generally thought that Cyril had discovered the tunnel originally meant for theatergoers to a theater that never materialized and where the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police now sat, owing to some misadventure over cash flow or architectural fault or need. In any event, the cat Cyril had been seen prowling the halls as if his antennae were searching out (like some medium's familiar) the office of Chief Superintendent Racer. With Racer, Cyril enjoyed a slightly different symbiotic relation from the one with Fiona; and in Racer's case, it was doubtful that the relation was of benefit to both. But it certainly seemed to go down a treat with Cyril, who could
outwit and outmaneuver Chief Superintendent Racer any day.

It was testimony to Cyril's staying power that he had been hanging around Racer's office for upwards of a year (maybe even two), which was more than could be said of any member of the Met — uniformed, CID, or civilian. Except for Superintendent Jury, whose staying power (and, Jury suspected, slight masochistic streak) matched Cyril's. Fiona, of course, was made of such steely stuff she could have walked under falling ladders or falling bombs and still remained upright. Only such a woman could have stood it as Racer's secretary. She was constantly being told to get the mangy rat-catcher
out
from under Racer's eyes and feet or he'd fire her and kill Cyril. Fiona paid far more attention to refurbishing her eye makeup than she did to the exhortations of her boss. Racer himself had often tossed Cyril out in the hall. But Cyril always returned, like Melville's Bartleby, to sit on a convenient sill and stare from a window at the blind brick wall of another part of the Yard.

Thus both Fiona and Cyril were engaged in their prelunch ablutions when Jury walked into Racer's outer office. “Hullo, Fiona. Hullo, Cyril,” said Jury.

Fiona returned the greeting while running her little finger around the corners of her mouth; Cyril's tail twitched. He always appeared happy to see Jury, perhaps out of admiration for a soul-brother, one who could stick it.

“You're early, for once,” said Fiona, snapping her mirrored compact shut with a little click. Jury often wondered where she came by these pre-Second World War memorabilia: he hadn't seen a woman with one of those Art Deco compacts since he was a kid. Fiona herself was like an artifact: she had been and still was, in her way, pretty. Pretty like the old photos of movie starlets with cupid-bow mouths and upswept blond hairdos used to be. Jury suspected that Fiona's own yellow curls came from the bottle, neat. That there were
some silver threads amongst the gold Fiona had attributed to a good job of frosting at her salon. “He's still at his club,” she added.

Jury yawned and scrunched down in his chair. “White's? Boodles? The Turf?”

Fiona laughed and rested her newly primed face on her overlapped hands. “You think one of them would let him in?” She checked a gold circlet of a watch — also from prehistoric digs — and said, “Been gone two hours, so he ought to be popping in any minute.”

“Thanks, I'll wait in his office — give him a fright, maybe.” He winked at Fiona, who then asked him if he'd eaten yet. It was as much a ritual when Jury was there as the revamping of her face. Jury made his excuses. A policeman's life is full of grief, he told her. It was Racer's cautionary phrase that covered everything from being first on the rota to finding a mass-murderer in your closet.

He noticed as he stood up she was taking out her bottle of nail varnish — a Dracula-like deep purple, almost black. Fiona favored black. All of her outfits — sheer summer frocks, winter wools — were black. Maybe she wanted to be sure she was ready for Racer's funeral.

The cat Cyril, seeing his chance, followed Jury into Racer's
sanctum sanctorum
and plumped himself in the chief's swivel chair. Jury sat in the chair directly across from Cyril and the broad expanse of Racer's empty desk. If there was one thing the chief superintendent believed in, it was delegating authority. Seldom did Jury see folders, notepads, papers — the usual junk — defiling his chief's desk. Jury looked at Cyril, whose head alone could be seen over the top of the desk, and said, “What was it, sir, you wished to see me about? Oh? Yes . . . well, sorry. A policeman's life —”

He hadn't got the end of the old Racer shibboleth out before his chief's spongy step came up behind him. “Talking to yourself again, Jury?” Racer hung his Savile Row overcoat on
a coatrack and walked around to his swivel chair. Cyril had slipped like syrup from Racer's chair and was now under the desk to study (Jury was sure) the best avenue of attack.

Racer went on: “Well, it certainly can't be from overwork, lad. Obviously, you haven't been doing much on the Dorchester case or you'd have
reported in,
now wouldn't you? Not to say anything of the two others murdered! I do not like the Commissioner breathing down my neck, Jury. So what have you got to report. Meaning: what progress have you made?”

Jury told him as much as he felt was necessary for Racer to get the Commissioner off his back. It was, as always, too little for Racer. He would only have been satisfied with Jury's actually producing the murderer right there, in his office.

“That's
all,
Jury?”

“Afraid so.”

“As far as I'm concerned — what the hell's
that?”
Racer was looking under his desk. He punched the intercom and demanded Fiona's presence to get the beast out from under his desk. “This ball of mange has used up eight of its nine lives, Miss Clingmore! Swear to God,” he muttered, leveling a glance at Jury that suggested Jury might have used up nine-out-of-nine.

Fiona swayed into the office and collected Cyril. Fiona was certainly in no danger of using up
her
lives. The black-patent-leather belt she wore to nip in her waist sent the flesh undulating up and undulating down. Racer's eyes always seemed undecided on which direction to take.

“So go on,” said Racer, when Fiona had left.

“Nothing much to be going on with. Sir.” Jury always hesitated a little before the
sir.

And Racer always noticed it. Thus Jury was in for the “ever-since-you-made-superintendent” lecture, one that Racer must have practiced in his sleep, so refined had it become, so ornamental — like intaglio figurines around a priceless
vase. There was always something new to comment on, regarding the skill of the artisan.

Jury yawned.

“Where the hell's Wiggins? What's he been up to, except contaminating the Dorset police?”

Jury made no comment other than to say Sergeant Wiggins was in Devon.

“You do realize, don't you, how this psycho has hit the press? Three kids dead, Jury,
three.”
He held up his fingers in case Jury didn't understand the word itself. “And you can't nail one of these suspects?”

“Not on the evidence we have now, no. I want to see the Ashcroft solicitor.”

“Then get the hell out and go and see him. I've got enough work to do as it is.” The pristine condition of his desk did not attest to this.

“Robert Ashcroft? But I've known him as long as I've known — knew — his brother James.” He got up from his chair to pace several yards of cushioned carpet.

Mr. Mack, Jury decided, was solicitor to more than one moneyed family, given his surroundings: thick carpet, good prints on the walls, mahogany furniture, including the desk that shimmered like a small dark lake beneath its coats of beeswax. Its principal ornament was an elegant bronze cat, probably some pricey Egyptian artifact.

What interested Jury was that Mack did not simply reject the idea of imposture out of hand. Perhaps he was simply a very cautious fellow who would see all of the facets of an argument, no matter how prismatic.

His pacing was interrupted by the entrance of his secretary bearing a number of documents. His glance strayed up to Jury occasionally, as if he were turning the idea over as he turned the pages before him, signing each with a flourish.

The young lady who was Mack's secretary was the antithesis of Fiona Clingmore. One could tell her dress was expensive, not by its showiness but by the cut of the cloth. She was herself — hair, skin, nails — as polished as the desk itself.

But she lacked that certain something — that nice seamy presence which was the Fiona
brio.
Indeed, Jury wondered, as he watched the solicitor signing papers, if, in his realm of Ideas, Plato wouldn't have plumped for Racer, Fiona and Cyril, instead of Mack, Miss Chivers and the bronze cat.

Mr. Mack recapped his pen and Miss Chivers gathered up the papers and slid softly out, hazarding another look at Jury as she left. He smiled. She blushed.

Mack returned to the question of the Ashcroft identity. “No, it's improbable, Mr. Jury, that this Robert Ashcroft is not the real one. As you say, there was no one in the household who had known him, and the relations were all distant ones — but, no. When the will was probated, we certainly asked for Robert's bona fides — indeed, we did that of everyone. Victoria Gray, for example.”

“I wasn't aware she came into a part of the Ashcroft fortune.”

“She certainly did. Not much as an outright legacy, but a very substantial legatee were something to happen to Jessica. Very substantial. And insofar as Robert himself is concerned, I'm quite satisfied.” He had resumed his seat and rested his chin on the tips of his fingers, prayerfully.

“What about other bequests? Any other substantial ones?”

“Yes. There was one to a church. And also to his wife's former nurse, Elizabeth. She was a cousin of Lady Ashcroft's.” He ran a finger over the bronze cat. “Not a very pleasant person, as I recall.” A heave of shoulders here. After all, solicitors can't be choosers. “But the thing is, you see, none of these were outright bequests. I didn't care for it, but there it was. All of the money went to Jessica.”