She turned away toward the kitchen window. Outside was the iced-over garden, fallow until spring. Suddenly, everything around her seemed foreign; Sir Adrian had been the only anchor holding her here. She thought of her pre-Paulo days and traveled in her mind the long road back to where she had met her feckless young husband: he a handsome footman with big dreams, she a girl in service. It was he who had convinced her to move south to Cambridge, believing it would be warmer.
“God rest his soul,” she said.
St. Just assumed she was still speaking of Sir Adrian. It was the first time he’d heard him spoken of with affection.
He found Paulo nearby in the butler’s pantry, to which Mrs. Romano, now dabbing her eyes with a dish towel, had reluctantly directed him. The pantry lay just inside the brass-studded baize doors that led into the servants’ quarters. It was a large room that seemed to serve as both a supply area and Paulo’s personal sitting room, the furniture a mismatched jumble apparently accumulated at random over the years. Two plump armchairs in clashing plaids were drawn up close to the hearth. On a side table lay a stack of magazines, largely concerned with the opposing worlds of women and rugby.
Paulo was in mufti: artfully torn jeans and a Stanley Kowalski T-shirt. He gazed up out of doe’s eyes as beautiful and long-lashed as his mother’s. He struck St. Just as one of those men who had little use for other men and was fully aware of the effect he had on women (unlike St. Just, who was always taken aback). Still, he was friendly enough as he offered the policeman a drink.
“Whiskey, if you have it.”
“We have everything you could want in this house,” said Paulo.
“And more in the cellars besides?”
St. Just could almost hear Paulo’s brain whirring as he parsed the remark for hidden implications.
“Frightful, it was, what happened to Mr. Beauclerk-Fisk. To both of them.”
“Yes. About that cellar,” said St. Just, accepting the glass which Paulo now reluctantly handed him. “I’ve been wondering how a man in Sir Adrian’s condition could have managed those stairs.”
Paulo weighed loyalty to his former employer against the unwanted scrutiny of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, with whom he wanted no repeat dealings. Common sense and a strong sense of self-preservation tipped the scales. No contest: After all, the old man was dead now. Dropping the accent he normally assumed for his role as butler, he continued in his more normal mode of speech, a match for his street clothes.
“He asked me to start hiding this book he was working on down the cellar, a bit at a time,” said Paulo, settling back in his chair. “It was the only place he could think to hide it where his snoopy family might not trip over it somehow.”
“When was the last time you were down there?”
“The day before Ruthven was killed. Honest. Look, I don’t want trouble; it’s not as if there was anything wrong in it. Sir Adrian, he’d give me the pages, a handful at a time, like I said. You’d think I was transporting diamonds, the way he carried on about it. ‘Don’t lose a page. One page missing, it’s the end of you,’ stuff like that.
Tell me to hide them down there, he would-add them to the stack already there, and be careful to keep them in order. The night Ruthven was killed, I started to go down very early in the morning, when I thought they would all be asleep, like. I hadn’t counted on Albert. There he was, in the middle of the bloody night, stumbling down the stairs. I guess headed to the cellar. Because not long after that, he started the holy hubbub about finding his brother.”
“We haven’t found any manuscript down there, and the room’s been sealed since the crime.”
“Well, then, I figure Sir Adrian, he hadn’t counted on that Albert. Said, ‘Albert won’t find it if you put it in with the beer; he always drinks up all the good stuff when he’s home.’ So smart, he’d cut himself, that was Sir Adrian. Thought he knew them all so well. He hadn’t counted on Ruthven, either. That one would move heaven and earth to know what the old man was up to.”
He leaned forward confidingly.
“I can tell you this. Them two were plotting. Or, more exact-like, Ruthven wanted Albert to go to Violet- threaten her-with what Ruthven had dug up on her. Albert wouldn’t have no part of it. They fought. I heard them- just happened to hear them.”
More likely, eavesdropped until he heard them. Still, St. Just didn’t care how he came by his information. Eavesdroppers were always useful.
“And what else?”
“That’s all I heard. Albert, he blew him up; said Ruthven could do his own dirty work or get his men to do it for him.”
“And the manuscript? What was that about?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I? I reckon the old man trusted me with it because he figured I wouldn’t bother reading the thing. Even if I could of made it out, which I couldn’t.”
“You did try, then?”
“Well, sure, all right. I was curious. But there was no hope. I’m what they nowadays call dyslexic anyway, but a genius couldn’t read that scratch. So I just did like he told me. Every day or so, I’d collect more pages, and take them down there to hide. If they’re missing I don’t know bollocks about it. But you’d do well to ask that Albert. Or that Jeffrey bloke. He’d know, you mark my words.”
“Thank you, Paulo,” he said, putting aside his glass and rising. “What excellent advice I am getting on this case. I think I’ll do just that.”
18. FINE PRINT
“I HAVEN’T SEEN THE current manuscript in several weeks, Inspector. I’ve just kept busy updating files, answering correspondence, and so on. I did rather start to wonder…”
He spoke in a flat American accent reminiscent of a young Jimmy Stewart talking to his horse, but with twice the animation. St. Just found himself leaning forward as he listened, wishing for sub-titles, as he often did during American films. Fear, who had caught up with St. Just in the garden after his interview with Paulo, edged his chair closer.
Looking around Jeffrey’s flat, St. Just said, “This is quite a nice arrangement. Self-contained, I see, and separate from the house, so you have some privacy.”
“Yes, I must say, I’m pleased as punch about the arrangements.” He hesitated, unsure whether “pleased as punch” were a British or American saying. Was it perhaps, “pleased as Punch?” It was important that the Inspector understand him completely. Hands across the water, and all that.
“I’m very pleased with the arrangements,” he amended. “Very, very pleased indeed.”
“Good. Now, about this latest book of his…”
“I only saw the very early chapters, you understand. But I can tell you that it was different from the others.”
“How, different?”
Jeffrey squinted, diving into deep thought. After a moment he said:
“Better, for one thing. His books tended to be very plot-driven, low on characterization. He was often accused by the critics of using cardboard figures. They were right about that. Stick figures. You know, the absent-minded cleric-often the murderer-the sharp-eyed but sympathetic parson’s wife, the horsy county matron, the pukka sahib Colonel, all the rest. They were quite interchangeable, these characters, from book to book. This time was… different. It was almost as if he were describing real people. Which he wouldn’t have done,” Jeffrey added hastily. “Much too careful about being sued, was Sir Adrian.”
“Did you mention any of this to him?”
“Good heavens, no. He’d have taken my head off and had it for stew. I rather got the impression sometimes he thought I was stupid. But then, he held most Americans in the lowest possible regard.”
