I Am the Only Running Footman (3 page)

Which he was using now, blowing his nose in the cold, dawn-lit parlor, along with Mrs. Childess, whose most recent bout with tears appeared to be, at least temporarily, under control. She held the handkerchief wadded in her lap; Wiggins stuffed his back in his pocket and went on with his routine questions in his nice, monotonous voice.

Given the photographs on the mantel, it seemed that Ivy had been the only child. Several snapshots were set round two studio portraits; one of the portraits was probably taken when she was eighteen or nineteen, a full-length photo in which she was holding a few drooping roses. The end of school term, perhaps, or of childhood. Her expression was rather smug and knowing, as if she'd passed through a bothersome phase of her life. The second might have been taken yesterday. Her hair spread like clear water over the shoulders of a jumper that he recognized as the one she'd been wearing when she was murdered, blue, scoop-necked, full-sleeved. He returned the photo to its place on the mantel and picked up its mate — a small one, unframed, also recent. Jury went back to the others and sat down a short distance away so that Wiggins could continue.

The mother looked completely spent; she rested her head, eyes closed, against the button-tufted back of the chair. The father had been talking about his daughter's job at Boots. “Makeup consultant, she was.”

For this, Jury read sales assistant.

“Did you know any of her other friends, aside from what you'd heard of the fiancé?”

Again, Trevor Childess looked a little shamefaced as he shook his head. “Ivy never did go out much when she lived with us. She wasn't one for pubs and the like. She was more a homebody, like her mother.”

There was a silence, during which Mrs. Childess roused herself and left the room. Then Jury rose and Wiggins pocketed
his notebook. He told Childess he would have to be called on to identify his daughter's body. The man's face was blank and ashen.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Childess. It has to be you or your wife and I wanted to wait until she was safely tucked in before even bringing it up.” Jury knew that the appeal to a greater strength than his wife could call on would help to give the man some purpose. “It can wait, at least until later today. We'll send a car round.”

Childess murmured something that might have been unfelt thanks and then said to Wiggins, “You won't be coming yourself, then?”

“Sorry, sir. We'll be getting on immediately to whoever might have been with Ivy.” From his coat pocket he pulled the packet of lozenges. “You don't want to let that cough go. Take these.”

Whatever it was — amulet or anodyne — Trevor Childess took the packet gratefully.

•  •  •

“Terrible thing,” said Wiggins, slamming the door shut on the driver's side. “And Ivy being the only one.” Wiggins always got on a first-name basis with the victims quickly. It was part of his charm.

“Yes. Only, I wonder. If there were five or six or ten, would it be much comfort? If you lose one, don't you suppose it's like losing them all?”

The engine turned over, coughed asthmatically, and went dead. Wiggins tried again, mumbling. Death and weather had a way of knitting themselves together in his mind. “You'd think they'd give us something better than this ten-year-old Cortina,” he said darkly as he tried to nurse the engine and hit the heater into action.

“What about Marr?”

“David L. Ex-directory and I thought for a moment I was going to have to call headquarters to get the address. Bloody
operator gave it to me finally.” The engine turned over and he pulled away from the curb. “It's Mayfair, all right. I didn't call him; didn't think you'd want to alert him.”

“Good. Where in Mayfair?”

“Shepherd Market.” He took his hands from the steering wheel and blew on them. “Not far from the Running Footman, is it?”

“No. Walking, how long?”

Wiggins thought for a moment. “Ten minutes, maybe. But I don't suppose he'd be walking in all this muck.”

Despite the errand and the cold, Jury smiled. The new snow furred the rusted car parts and rimmed the garishly painted porches and woodwork, blanketed the shabbiness of the street ahead. It lay blue and untrammeled in the morning light. Undisturbed, it seemed to bond the houses and fences together.

D
AVID
Marr fit his surroundings. He looked elegant and neglected. The knap of his dressing gown was as badly rubbed as the Axminster carpet, and the cord as frayed as the tasseled one that held back the Chinese silk curtain. The one on the robe hung at approximately the same angle as Marr's head. At six
A.M
. he was probably in the grip of a whale of a hangover.

Hangover or not, the man was handsome. Jury thought there was something vaguely familiar about the high cheekbones and dark hair, or perhaps it was the sort of face that might have belonged to some dissolute peer, one often served up by the seamier tabloids along with sex, drugs and girls.

Right now David Marr was sprawled in a worn-leather wing chair. His first reaction to the murder of Ivy Childess had been bafflement more than grief. His second, third, and fourth, Jury had been unable to see, since a cold flannel completely covered Marr's face, and had done during Jury's questions so far. Probably he could have used one or the other
of Sergeant Wiggins's remedies, but Jury had sent Wiggins to the Bayswater flat.

“Go on, then.” The muffled voice came from under the cloth.

“Mr. Marr, do you think perhaps we can talk face-to-face? It would be a help.”

Sighing, he said, “So you can see the subtle change of expression that will testify to my guilt?” His breath sucked in and puffed out the cloth that he now withdrew reluctantly. “It's not that I drank so much, it's that I stupidly drank the Dogbolter at the Ferret and Firkin. Bruce's Brewery, my friend. I was doing a bit of a pub-crawl before I met Ivy.” He dropped the flannel on a small table, and took the last cigarette from a black enamel case. “I'm being an insensitive boor, right?”

Jury smiled. “If you say so. You think I'm presuming you're guilty?” Jury lit up one of his own cigarettes.

Marr looked at Jury with a grim smile. “Your questions suggest that you've ruled out the most obvious answer: that poor Ivy was set upon by some mugger.” He looked away, toward the window where the pre-dawn darkness was as black as the enamel on the lighter he fingered. “Was she raped?”

“I don't know yet.” Jury pictured the body, a pale blue heap in the middle of the wet street. “I don't think so. Would you mind telling me what happened at the pub?”

Marr scrubbed at his hair with the cloth, then studied the end of his cigarette with an indifference that Jury suspected was feigned.

“We had an argument. She was angry and refused to let me take her home to Bayswater.” He looked at Jury. “I don't usually leave women standing in pub doorways.” He shrugged. “Ivy can be extremely stubborn. Doesn't look it, really, all that soft blue look and gorgeous hair. Well, I don't
really care for confrontations with women. Not worth it.”

“What was the argument about, Mr. Marr?”

“Money, marriage, you know. For some reason Ivy wanted to marry me, poor girl.”

“I'd think one reason might be pretty obvious — you move in a much headier social circle, I imagine.”

David Marr opened one eye. “How can you tell that?”

The question was rather innocent. Jury smiled. “I've been to the Childess house.”

“Bayswater?”

“Mile End. The parents' house. They were the ones who gave me your name.”

He frowned. “She hardly ever spoke of them. Hadn't much family feeling, had Ivy.”

“But you
were
engaged.”

Marr paused, his eyes shielded by his hand, in lookout fashion, as if he were tracking the progress of the morning light at the window. “That what the parents told you?”

“That's what the daughter told
them.”

The hand now pressed to his head, as if he were holding it on, Marr pushed himself out of the wing chair and moved toward a rosewood table. He held a bottle of Remy to his ear like a huge shell, shook it and put it down, frowning. Then he studied the remaining inch or two in a Glenfiddich bottle, looked over at Jury, and held it up by way of not very enthusiastic invitation.

“Too early for me, thanks, or too late, depending how you look at it.”

Marr poured the inch and a half into a tumbler. “I try not to look at it at all. If you're going to swallow a frog, better not stare at it too long, as they say. My head is killing me.” He drank it down and retied the robe. “A boor I may be — desolute, depraved, whatever. But engaged I was not. Whether that particular bit of information is important to your investigations, I don't know; you've only my word for it. Whatever
she told friends, family, co-workers, I didn't mean to marry Ivy.” He fell into the chair again and relit his cigarette.

“What was your relationship with her?”

“Um. Intimate, or at least sexual. There's probably a difference.”

Jury was mildly surprised he'd make the distinction. Marr looked quite human with some of the cool hauteur missing from his voice and eyes. “Then the ‘engagement' was a fiction invented by her?” Marr nodded. “Then she was simply trying to convince herself?”

“Trying to convince
me
is more like it.” He closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “On several occasions she definitely talked of marriage. Such as last night.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn't answer. Have another fag on you, Superintendent?”

Jury handed him the packet and leaned back. “Are you sure you did nothing to encourage her?”

Marr eased himself down in the chair, crossed his long legs, and shook his head in wonder. “For heaven's sakes. A few nights in bed over a period of several months would hardly give anyone but the most naïve of women
that
sort of encouragement, would it? I did not absolutely say, No, we are not going to be married, but I do think I showed a certain amount of hesitancy over it.  . . .”

“You left the pub around closing time?”

“About ten-forty-five or -fifty. When last drinks were called.”

“Did Ivy stay on or did she leave?”

“The last I saw of her she was standing in the doorway, hand on hip, coat collar pulled up, looking extremely determined.” He sighed and rubbed his head again. “Shouldn't have had the last of the Remy, I expect. She told me to more or less bugger off and I did. That's the last I saw of her, Superintendent.”

“The Running Footman would have closed shortly after that. She'd have taken a cab to her flat in Bayswater, wouldn't she?”

Marr smiled ruefully. “Knowing Ivy, she might have taken the underground. Cheaper.”

“You came directly home?”

Marr sighed. “Yes, of course. It's only a few minutes' walk. When I got here I called my sister, Marion. Talked for some time, but to no avail. I needed money.”

“You said money was one of the things you quarreled with Ivy Childess about.”

“That's right. I tried to borrow some.”

“But surely Ivy Childess wouldn't have had the sort you might need.”

Marr laughed. “If it has Her Majesty's face on it, I need it. The odd tailor here and there. A few gambling debts. Ivy would not dip into the money from her uncle's annuity; told me I should be gainfully employed. Yes, that's the way she put it: gainfully employed. I have
never
been employed. Much less gainfully. Work, good Lord.”

“Yes, that does seem a dim future.”

“That sort of irony exactly matches my sister's. She tells me I'm running through my share of our father's money with a speed that would have earned me a rowing Blue. Our solicitors do not like to advance me more than a sum which would hardly pay for the liquor.” This reminder of drink sent him back to the table laden with bottles, where he found a measure or two of whiskey and poured it out.

Jury made another note in a worn pigskin notebook that Racer had in one of his rare moments of largess given him several Christmases ago. Or perhaps it wasn't largess, just a hint to get to work. “You said you called your sister. Could you give me her number?”

“You're not going to bother old Marion with this, are you? Oh, very well.” He raked his fingers through his hair, sighed,
and gave Jury the number. “It's ex-directory, so don't lose it.” His smile came and vanished in a second. “She's not going to be happy about corroborating my alibi, if that's what you call it.”

“You said ‘after you got home'? Exactly when after?”

“After the rest of this, I suppose.” He held up the glass and turned it so that the whiskey ran round it in a little wave.

“Could you be more exact?” Jury asked mildly, quite sure that the man's offensive carelessness over the girl's death was pretty much facade. Underneath it, he was frightened, but how much, Jury couldn't guess.

He closed his eyes. “A little after eleven, perhaps. Don't hold it to me, Superintendent. Marion would know. She was sober. Always is, worse luck. Her name is Winslow and they have a place in Sussex, in Somers Abbas. Look, Superintendent. Couldn't you just leave old Marion out of this?”

“You want me to be discreet, that it?”

The clear, wide-eyed look on his handsome face made Marr look as if he'd just come wandering in from larking with a bag of kittens down at the lake. Wonderfully innocent and sly. “Oh, would you? I'd cooperate all over the place. You can question me for hours —”

“I would do, anyway.”

“You're not going to cooperate, I can tell. I have reservations for Tuesday next for Cannes, but I expect I shan't be permitted to leave the country now. Cigarette?” He looked at Jury's.