The Wrong Rite (26 page)

Assuming that tale about the relentless Javert was not another grand-opera libretto. Please, God, Janet prayed, let it be the truth, and let Mary Rhys’s ghastly death be linked with that of Arthur Ellis, and let the guilty be found and this eight-year nightmare brought to an end.

At least one step had been taken. Thank heaven Lisa’d had that fight with her stepbrother, and that Tom and Iseult had gone off to the pub. Dafydd would never have opened up in front of them. Now if they’d only stay where they were!

Lisa had washed her face at the sink and scrubbed it dry on a yellow-checkered tea towel; now she was putting biscuits on a plate, calmly and deliberately. “Just as well Tib isn’t here, these would be gone in a minute. I wonder where she got to?”

“I sent her up to the farm on an errand for me,” Madoc explained. “She’s likely joined the hunt, which reminds me that I’d better find out whether they’ve had any luck. May I use your phone, Lisa?”

“Of course. Go straight on through to the front, it’s on a little stand next to the fern. I keep meaning to have another put in the kitchen, but I never do. What are they hunting for, Jenny?”

“Mary’s handbag. She had it hanging at her waist all day yesterday, as you may remember, but she took it off later and nobody knows where it’s got to.”

“Does it matter?”

“It could. Her nephew claims that she’d stolen the big emerald out of Uncle Caradoc’s crosier and left a lump of green glass in its place. Dai says Mary kept valuables in her handbag because her brother was in the habit of searching her room, which I must say I wouldn’t put past him. So Madoc has Constable Cyril and Owain’s lot out combing the grounds.”

“That’s better than having them huddled in corners whispering about Mary’s getting blown to bits, I suppose.” Lisa sighed. “It’s so hard to know if one’s doing the right thing.”

“I’m sure you are,” said Janet. “Tib strikes me as a pretty sane youngster. I wonder how Madoc’s making out in there.”

“N
OT TOO BADLY,” MADOC
told them a few minutes later. “They’ve found Mary’s collapsible ladder and her belt. At least Mavis claims it’s the belt Mary had on yesterday, and she’s probably right. She says Uncle Huw’s mobilized the lot of them, including the sheepdogs. He’s taken charge of the hunt and they’re all going at it like beagles, so I’ve sent Cyril on a different errand. That girl Patricia, Dafydd, can you tell me any more about her?”

“Not really. Let’s see, I’d come the day before you, rather late. Lisa and Tib picked me up at the train, we had dinner at the pub and spent a jolly evening chopping leeks.”

“Liar,” said Lisa fondly. “You conked out in front of the telly five minutes after we’d got home. We practically had to carry you upstairs. Tom blew in the next day just as I was dishing up a very late luncheon—his sense of timing is infallible when it comes to free food. Patricia was with him, I don’t think he ever mentioned her last name. They’d stopped at the manor and he’d shown her around the grounds, but they hadn’t gone in to see Uncle Caradoc. I made a rather pointed remark about not having an extra bed unless Tom cared to sleep up next to the cistern, which I knew he wouldn’t, but he said it didn’t matter. Patricia wouldn’t be staying, she’d just come to see the sheep. I could believe it, she didn’t talk about anything else all through the meal.”

“Nor did she let anybody else get a word in,” said Dafydd. “If she made one sensible remark, I didn’t hear it. Then Mother phoned down from the manor to remind me about picking you up, which I was only too glad to do. I’m meant to borrow Lisa’s car, but Tom said why didn’t I take the Daimler instead. It’s not often he makes a spontaneous gesture of generosity, so I snapped him up on it. Then Patricia suggested we all go and give you a great big welcome, all banging on kettles and cheering our heads off.”

“And scaring Dorothy into fits?” Janet was not amused.

“The thought did cross my mind,” said Dafydd. “Anyway, Tom wanted a nap and Lisa said she’d things to do and no kettles to spare, so I wound up stuck with Patricia. She babbled freely all the way to the station, but didn’t actually say much. I gathered the vague impression that she’s an actress of sorts, but that may have been because Tom’s women generally are. This isn’t helping, I don’t suppose.”

“Not much. What happened after you’d dropped us off?”

“Which was rude of me, but I couldn’t see turning that talking machine loose on the family. You know what it’s like to be trapped with someone who has nothing to say and insists on saying it anyway. I could see you all being painfully polite, dying to get down to the family gossip while some total stranger burbled on and on about nothing at all. My thought was to take Patricia back and dump her on Tom, but she wasn’t having any. She insisted on stopping at the pub to play darts. That wasn’t so bad, in fact she was surprisingly good. Better than I, to be brutally frank—she took fifty pence off me. So I paid up and bought her one for the road and said I expected she’d want to be off to wherever she was going. She said Swansea, I said the train service was excellent, and drove her to the station.”

“Did you go in with her?” Madoc asked him.

“I did not. Why should I?”

“To carry her bags and buy her ticket?”

“She had no bags, just a carryall thing which she managed quite capably by herself. And I’d already bought her two pints of bitter and a sausage roll, mainly in the vain hope of stopping her mouth for a while. I’d have been willing to open the car door for her, but she bounced out before I could get to it. So I tooted a mildly enthusiastic farewell and came on home.”

“The Daimler was running, all right, was it?”

“Like a breeze. I can’t think why Tom had to take it to Billy. He’s an abominable driver, of course. Oh, God! Here they come back, and that ass Williams with them. Got any boiling oil handy, Lisa?”

“Don’t kill them yet,” said Madoc. “We have to talk.” It was too late anyway, they were in the kitchen, all three fairly well sauced. Iseult gave Williams a roguish shove forward.

“Look what we found. Can we keep him?”

“So long as you don’t expect me to feed him,” Lisa told her. “There’s tea and precious little else. Sit down, Madoc wants to talk to you.”

“Oh goody! We’re going to be grilled by a real, live Mountie.”

“No we’re not,” said Tom. “You’re only the law in Canada, right, Madoc?”

“Wrong, Tom. I’ve been given temporary constabulary status by the local magistrate.”

“Who happens to be your uncle.”

“Exactly. And who’s given me sufficient authority to run you in on suspicion if you don’t cooperate.”

“Suspicion of what, for God’s sake?”

“Murdering Mary Rhys by putting gunpowder in her pockets before she leaped the balefire.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

“Oh yes, but it’s what happened. We’ve had a report from the county coroner.”

“But why?” demanded Iseult. “I grant you Mary was a bore and a nuisance, but that frowsy little mouse? Why should anybody have wanted to kill her?”

Madoc glanced at Janet and shrugged. He saw no sense in holding back, not with half the family already in the picture. They might as well have it straight from him instead of garbled via the grapevine.

“What it seems to boil down to is that Mary knew how and why Arthur Ellis was murdered in Marseilles eight years ago and was systematically blackmailing the person who killed him. We’re working on the hypothesis that the killer got tired of paying.”

“Bloody hell! Who’d have thought the old trout had it in her?”

Tom’s voice held more than a hint of admiration, Janet thought. She wasn’t surprised.

“I’m amazed you didn’t think of that yourself, Tom,” drawled Iseult.

“Oh, I did. My problem was that I didn’t know whom to put the bite on. Sorry, Lisa, I’m being despicable again. But who could have imagined it? Mary was always such a soggy doormat for that disgusting brother of hers. ‘Yes, brother dear. Whatever you say, brother dear. Hit me again, brother dear.’ Ugh! I can see Bob as a blackmailer far more easily than I can Mary. Are you sure she wasn’t just fronting for him, Madoc? He could be laying it on her to shield himself, couldn’t he?”

“Evidence of the blackmailing didn’t come from Bob, Tom. He maintains he knew nothing of what his sister was up to.”

“And you believe him?”

“I’m willing to entertain the possibility, because he’s so bloody-minded about money. I don’t think Bob would have cared a pennyworth how Mary got it, what infuriated him was that she wouldn’t give him the handling of it. Bob had always kept total control of the family cash, despite the fact that Mary was the sole breadwinner. According to Dai, he wouldn’t even let her buy a pair of slippers unless he went along and picked them out. Since she started getting this mysterious independent income, she’d become increasingly inclined to flout his authority, to the point where she was threatening to clear out and leave him to live on what he’d already grabbed.”

“Which would have made excellent sense,” said Iseult. “But if Mary didn’t start getting paid off until after Arthur was offed, and Bob wouldn’t give her a bean to travel with, she could hardly have been at the scene of the crime, could she? So then how did she know whom to blackmail?”

“That’s a good question, to which Bob has provided a plausible answer. As a gem-cutter, Mary actually does seem to have had a certain reputation. She was asked occasionally to take on special assignments in other countries, and she was on the Continent at the time. Bob thinks she was supposed to be in Ostend; but he suspects that she might have lied to him, cashed in the ticket he’d bought her, and gone to Marseilles instead. He can’t say for sure because, after Arthur died, Mary burned her passport and vowed never to travel again.”

“A likely story! You’re not intimating that she and Arthur were have an
affaire?
That greasy-faced frump?”

“No, Iseult, nothing like that. According to Bob, Mary suspected Arthur was cheating her out of some of her fees by holding back his best stones and getting somebody else to cut them. Could that have been possible, Lisa?”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t have been cheating. Arthur and Mary weren’t in any legal partnership, you know; it was just that their fathers had had a long-standing gentlemen’s agreement about the buying and cutting. After the old men died, Arthur felt honor-bound to carry on with the arrangement even though he detested having to do business with Bob and wasn’t always satisfied with Mary’s work. She insisted on doing everything her own way, and sometimes hers wasn’t the best way.”

“Do you mean she’d spoil his stones?”

“Not spoil them, exactly; but not cut them as Arthur thought they should be done. Sometimes she’d wind up with a less impressive cut than he’d expected. That would mean a smaller profit, of course, which wouldn’t go down too well. After a while, he got tired of always having to fight with her and began quietly taking his more important stones to a different cutter. There was no reason for him to lose money just to keep Mary pacified, but naturally she wouldn’t have seen it that way.”

“Then Bob’s suspicion that Mary meant to follow Arthur in the hope of catching him cheating on her, as she saw it, might not be so far off the mark?”

“Knowing what their relationship had been ever since Arthur’s father died, I’d say it was quite likely. But if Mary actually did follow Arthur to Marseilles and watched him die, why in God’s name didn’t she come and tell me? How could she simply”—Lisa’s voice was starting to crack—“simply sit back and smirk, and trade my husband’s life for a new pair of slippers?”

“O
H, COME OFF IT
, Lisa!” Now that he’d burned his bridges, Tom wasn’t bothering to be civil to his stepsister. “You appear to be taking one hell of a lot for granted. Why should there have been any connection between Arthur’s death and Mary’s, shall we say, fund-raising activities? The French police, not to mention the French
juge d’instruction,
decided he’d simply been mugged and robbed according to time-honored local custom by some thug who either knew he’d be carrying valuable gemstones with him or else just happened into a stroke of luck. Why can’t you accept their verdict, for God’s sake?”

“Because it wasn’t that simple.”

“All right, Lisa. I grant you the whole business was a ghastly horror story, but why turn it into a long-running serial? Mary could have been lying when she told her brother the money was coming in on account of Arthur. If brother Bob had her booked for Ostend that day, I for one can’t picture her slapping on a false mustache and chugging off to Marseilles after Arthur, much less her knowing which of its many bawdy houses he’d be most apt to frequent.”

“Very amusing, Tom,” snarled Dafydd, “but hardly enlightening.”

“Then let’s try a different scenario. Do you remember what Mary said night before last about gem-cutters being able to recognize individual stones? What if somebody had stolen some fairly impressive specimens, pried them out of the dowager’s tiara or wherever they’d been, and sold them to Arthur, who in turn brought them to Mary to be recut?”

“So that they wouldn’t be spotted as stolen goods when Arthur tried to peddle them again?” Lisa’s voice was cold as death. “You’re saying Arthur Ellis was a fence who worked with thieves?”

“It was only a supposition.”

“Then kindly keep your suppositions to yourself.”

Iseult, for some reason, elected to play peacemaker. “Oh Lisa, do quit sniping at poor Tom. I can’t say I find his suggestion so awfully farfetched. Arthur needn’t have known the jewels were stolen. But Mary would have stuck her clever little eyeglass into her beady little eye and seen at once that these particular stones could only have come to Arthur via some highly respected nobleman who’d have been kicked out of his clubs and warned off the cricket crease should it become generally known that he was running a sideline in upper-class thievery. Like Raffles, the Gentleman Cracksman. You’d have made a superb Raffles, Dafydd, you were always quite good at cricket, for a tenor. You didn’t happen to be in Marseilles on the night, by any chance?”