Death of a Cozy Writer

Do you think that’s possible?”

Again feeling like a news announcer, skipping now to the tabloid news, he said:

“You didn’t feel we needed to know that Ruthven was not Sir Adrian’s natural son?”

She could make a quick recovery; he had to hand that to her. Hesitating only for a second, she said defiantly:

“No, I didn’t. What possible bearing could it have?”

“Quite a lot, I should think.”

She shrugged her shoulders, spreading open palms before him. Think what you like.

“How did you find out?” she asked at last.

“He was working on a book when he died. A work of nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction. A Death in Scotland was the title.”

He was watching her closely for a reaction. She blinked several times, but otherwise her expression remained frozen.

He kept pitching, hoping to catch her in contradiction. And now for news from the publishing world…

“Are you aware Sir Adrian had already made arrangements to leave you the proceeds from this manuscript?”

“No,” she said slowly. “No, I wasn’t…” She paused, clearly thinking through the ramifications, then said, “ But it was precisely the kind of joke he enjoyed. A Conception in Scotland might be a better title, for his purposes. For that, of course, is where Ruthven was conceived. By quite a dashing young man with a title who dashed off and left me holding the baby, literally. Said young man had decided this was all getting much more serious than he had intended, you see. And not long after that I met Adrian, who… shall we say… turned his attentions to me.

“I honestly didn’t know-to an absolute certainty, Chief Inspector- whose child it was. God-that didn’t quite come out the way I meant it to sound. What I mean to say is, I didn’t know I was pregnant when I took up with Adrian. Then later… perhaps I suspected Ruthven wasn’t his, but I didn’t know. As the years went on, and I came to the point I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Adrian, I came to believe Ruthven wasn’t his, because I preferred to believe that. Then, the first time Ruthven had to have his blood typed, when he was sent off to school-then…Well. I said nothing to Ruthven at the time-that came later-and certainly not to Adrian. You don’t know how it was in those days. Although I don’t suppose that kind of announcement would go over big today, either. So that’s what Adrian chose to write about in this wretched book: How I trapped him into marriage, and with a child that wasn’t even his.”

“That was part of his topic, certainly,”

She wasn’t listening. He imagined she was trying to piece together, as he had been, the implications of the rest of the family’s learning of Ruthven’s true parentage.

“I wonder how Adrian found out?”

“When Ruthven was in hospital. Ruthven was type A. Sir Adrian was type O. You had to be type A yourself for Adrian to have been the father of Ruthven.”

“Which I’m not. However did he?-wait. That explains what he was doing, coming to visit me. I carry a medical card in my purse-I’m a diabetic, as Adrian well knew, so all my information is there in case they have to tow me out of Harrods on a stretcher one day. Sneaky, creeping little bastard. Adrian paid no attention to Ruthven while he was growing up; it doesn’t surprise me it took him this long to tumble to it.”

“The book seems to have been some form of revenge, from what I know of it, or of him, yes. He seems to have started on it right about the time of Ruthven’s operation.”

“And then made sure it was going to be left to me. I suppose he thought it would place me on the horns of a dilemma, giving me the choice of destroying the manuscript-which would be worth a fortune-or publishing it for the proceeds, and destroying my own reputation in the process. I can see how he would love that, knowing he’d put me in a position where I was damned whichever choice I made.”

“Would you publish it?”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Of course not. I have money of my own, Inspector. This was probably his twisted way of leaving me something essentially worthless. On the whole, I think I may douse it in oil and set fire to it.”

“I’m not certain that option is in your hands. It’s the proceeds he’s left you, not the decision whether or not to publish. He made his secretary the literary executor.”

“The American chap? How extraordinary. I’ll have to have a word with him, now, won’t I?”

The news didn’t please her, he could see. Had she known what Sir Adrian was writing? And if she had-what might she have done to stop him?

She paused, looked around her.

“God, how I hate this house. Do you know how many years since I set foot in here? And I never would have, if he weren’t dead and gone. Very freeing, it is.”

“That seems to be the common sentiment.”

“For the children especially, yes. For us all.” She sighed. “It wasn’t always quite this bad, you know. I thought I’d made a good bargain, at first. But it all went pear-shaped after the children were born.”

Catching his involuntary glance, she laughed, that attractive, deep-throated chuckle that had no doubt, at one time, been part of her attraction for Sir Adrian.

“I didn’t mean that, Inspector. Although that certainly went pear-shaped as well. I meant the marriage. It’s hard to trace these things back to the single, defining moment when you know you have to get out for the sake of your sanity, when you can stand no more, when the whole thing just comes unstuck. With Adrian, there were so many such moments.”

“But you stayed with him, all those children…”

“It was what one did in those days, Inspector.”

“Was he always so…?” An array of possible words presented themselves. Malicious, vindictive, and petty topped the list.

“Adrian?” A faraway look came into her eyes. She might have been surveying the ravaged, wartorn past, looking under pieces of wreckage for signs of life. “No. No, he wasn’t. Or he didn’t appear so, at first. Oh, he was always selfish and full of himself. Confident, in the extreme, of his talents. I used to admire that. So much.”

“What happened?”

“To turn him into a monster, you mean?”

“Something like that, yes.”

She considered. “I used to think it had something to do with his chosen profession. After all, how often can one contemplate murder by poison, stabbing, pushing someone off a cliff or throwing them down a well, et cetera, et cetera, without it all starting to work on one’s mind? Then I started to meet his competitors. What he would call his imitators. He didn’t have colleagues, of course. And they were lovely people-most of them, at any rate. Wouldn’t say boo to a mouse. In the end I decided Adrian was simply born the way he was. Preprogrammed to get nastier with each passing year. His profession had nothing to do with it. In fact, it may have prevented him from doing actual bodily harm to someone.”

“He sublimated his murderous impulses into writing about murder?”

“Hmm. Yes, something like that. Though if someone told me he actually had killed someone, I wouldn’t doubt it for a moment.”

In spite of her words, her face still held a look of melancholy.

“You loved him very much, didn’t you? Once?”

“Once,” she said, but now with the finality of a book slammed shut. “It must be hard for you to imagine, looking at him as he became. But he was… beautiful… once. All the women were after him-there was a lot of the working-class hero about Adrian that was very appealing, in spite of his ridiculous attempts to cover it up. But he singled me out, for some reason. Well, who am I kidding? For my money. And, as you know, I needed a rescuer right about then. Would that he hadn’t. Singled me out. But Adrian was a force of nature.”

“He remained so. A force of nature, I mean.”

She laughed, nearly a shout of surprise. She was perhaps thinking of tornados, floods, and earthquakes-every form of unstoppable destruction known to man.