Melrose handed him the fifty. “Well, say in an hour or so?”
“Done.” Holding up the note, he added, “You trust me with this?”
“Why not? You brought the poison.”
3
The car was a newly minted silver Jaguar with ox-blood-red leather seats. These people probably had to impress their clients with proof of the agency’s solvency. Esther Laburnum was the agent for this particular property, named Seabourne.
Melrose had seen the picture in
The properties shown usually took up a page apiece and as often as not failed to give the asking price; instead, the copy indicated the property’s price would be given “upon request.” This bit of showmanship Melrose imagined was from the “if-you-have-to-ask” school. Melrose didn’t. He’d torn the page from the magazine and gone to the telephone.
That had been several days ago, and he was pleased with himself for undertaking to see the real thing. He discovered now, as he stood looking at it, that the picture of Seabourne hadn’t done it justice.
But, then, it would be quite impossible to capture the atmosphere, the slight menace, the rather edgy romanticism that the place stirred in him. He told himself he was being overimaginative. It did no good.
Architecturally, the house wasn’t especially imposing. It was Georgian, built of gray stone that worked as a kind of camouflage, making it fade into the land and woods around it. It sat on a cliff, a craggy rock-strewn promontory above the sea. It had been this setting that particularly appealed to him, as it surely would to anyone with an ounce of romance in him. The whole prospect-house, woods, rocks, sea-looked drained of color, which added to the romance. If a grim-faced chatelaine in black to her ankles had opened the heavy oak door, it would have added even more. Melrose was fully prepared to be swept away.
But it was Esther Laburnum of Aspry and Aspry who swept back the double doors to the largest of the reception rooms (there were three) with a flourish, saying, “There!” in a pleased-as-punch tone suggesting she had just worked some sleight of hand and had called up a fully furnished room, right down to the pictures on the wall.
Three of the walls were papered in a serene gray and the fourth, with a fireplace at its center, was given over to shelves for books and niches in which were displayed various pieces of sculpture: Etruscan heads, marble busts. A mahogany sideboard, flanked by walnut armchairs, sat beneath a portrait of an undistinguished old man with a churlish look that said he’d sooner be anywhere at all other than sitting for his portrait. The hound at his feet sported a similar look.
Except for the sculpture, nothing else suggested any interest in the exotic; the room was as English as English could be. Easy chairs and sofa were covered in linen and chintz, patterns of bluebells or intertwining ivy and hollyhocks. One of the chairs was drawn up to a kidney-shaped writing table with marquetry inlay. Against one wall between long windows was a campaign chest, a fine example of its kind.
“Isn’t it lovely?” trumpeted Esther Laburnum. She was a large woman with a boisterous voice, the sort that carries through a restaurant and condemns the other diners to hearing its business.
The room looked so lived-in, thought Melrose. It was as if the occupants, hearing the approach of Mrs. Laburnum’s Jaguar, had decided to run and hide.
“Is the rest of the house this comfortably furnished?” When she assured him it was, Melrose said, “But the owners have left so many of their personal belongings behind.” He nodded toward the portraits and pictures.
Esther Laburnum agreed but said the house was on the market when she’d joined Aspry and Aspry. It had been on the market for some time now, and she hadn’t known the owners. She was new to the area. “In any event, the owners are apparently open to letting it or selling it or some combination of both. I mean, if you’d want to let it for a while to see how you get on.”
They walked from the living room to the dining room, in which stood a twin-pedestaled dining room table and two sideboards opposite each other on facing walls. If he pulled out drawers and opened cabinet doors, he bet he would find silver, napkins, china.
From there they went to the rest of the house and the study (or, as Esther Laburnum called it, the “snuggery” or “snug”). Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined three walls. In front of one a refectory table of English oak stood upon a carpet that Melrose thought he recognized as Turkestan (a payoff of those countless hours spent being taught antiques by Marshall Trueblood). Against the fourth wall sat a large desk, its top covered with the tools of writing: letters, accounts, journals.
It was a smallish and clearly much-used room. One could almost sense the impress of bodies against the stuffed armchairs. “Snuggery” here was rightly applied. With the fireplace alight, especially on days such as this one (rain-lashed, wind-lashed, he thought in melodramatic terms), snug is what he felt. Melrose walked around checking the many leather-bound or gaudily jacketed newer books; it was quite a library, one appealing to diverse tastes. One end of the refectory table held another half-dozen small silver-framed pictures.
“Are these the family?” he asked her, picking up first one and then another.
“I expect so. Would you look at that fireplace mantel! What carving!”
Melrose followed his own line of thought. “I don’t understand why people would go off and leave behind such personal things. One ordinarily tucks them safely away in a locked cupboard or trunk or some such place. One doesn’t leave them out.” He sounded quarrelsome, as if such behavior shouldn’t be condoned.
Mrs. Laburnum answered with no more than an uninterested “Um,” leaving Melrose to peruse this little hoard of pictures and pursue his little mystery. There were four or five people represented here, all informally caught on film. The core group appeared to consist of a fortyish couple, very handsome; an elderly man who looked like the one in the portrait-yes, there was a trace of that squinty look; a pretty little girl of perhaps six or seven; and a little boy, probably a year or so younger, shown with his father on a sailboat. Several other pictures were taken aboard this boat. Melrose wondered how well off they were; judging by this house and the size of the boat, very. One or the other of these four was in the other photos with relations and friends. The grand-parents seemed to be represented wholly by the old man.
Rarely did Melrose envy other people, for at home he was surrounded by friends more or less like him- unmarried, childless, unattached, really-and if anyone in his circle was to be envied it was he himself, with his manor house, his land, his money. What struck him about the family in these snapshots was that they seemed so hugely happy. Even the old man finally dropped the bad-humored look. Their smiles were not the camera’s but their own. Melrose envied them no end.
“Lovely little family, aren’t they?”
He had forgotten Esther Laburnum in his absorption in the pictures.
“So sad about the children. I believe they drowned.”
“Drowned?” Melrose took this awful news almost as he would a personal loss.
“It was all extremely sad. It happened-oh, five years ago. What must have made it worse for them-the parents-was that they were out when it happened. I wasn’t here then.” She had already told him this a couple of times. It was as if she were trying to dissociate herself from the house and its owners. “Would you like to see the upstairs now?”
He told her he would. Yet he hated leaving the father and mother to the hellish knowledge that they hadn’t been around to save their children. Obediently, Melrose followed Esther Laburnum (in whom he detected now an impatience to get the house “viewed” and out of here).
There were five bedrooms, none of which Melrose lingered in, but just glanced around standing at the door. He saw some more framed photographs in the master bedroom and would have liked to have a look at them, but with the agent at his heels like a terrier, he didn’t.
One room facing the sea intrigued him. It was entirely empty except for a grand piano. Sheet music sat on the piano stand and lay on the floor, as if a breeze had drifted it there. Yet he detected no drafts; indeed, the house
