the photos. A darkroom, they called it. I asked him could I have it, the photo. It was me kitchen, after all.”
He turned a page. This time, another black and white group, but of a very different kind: a gathering of about thirty people, all dressed formally for dinner, posed stiffly on a carved wooden staircase. He scanned the faces, many of them of people probably long gone. There… there was a diminutive Chloe, looking like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s finest, her neck and wrists encircled with massive diamonds intended for the larger woman she had become.
“After the mairder, the castle wair shut oop. Lady Vi was gone, the master dead.” Defensively, she added, “Well, that photo was just sittin’ there, and no one to mind me having it.”
The photographer had arranged them so that the guests fanned out behind what were clearly the hosts of the party, a distinguished man in his sixties, a beautiful, much younger woman at his side, one hand resting on his arm. Sir Winnie Winthrop and his lady. The women’s stiff bouffant hairstyles and fulsomely petticoated dresses identified it as a scene from the fifties. Violet was instantly recognizable, sleek in classic, form-hugging black, her hair pulled back into the chignon she still affected.
But this was a different Violet, one unaltered by fifty years and a surgeon’s hand, and there was something about the hands, the eyes… He held the photo closer.
Agnes was saying something about eyes, as well.
“The goings on, weekends in that house, you wouldna believe. Accairding to what the maids told me, noon stayed in the beds they was given, not for long. Scampering aboot half the night, they was. There-that’s the gentlemon there the weekend of the mairder, the one who said he was with Violet. Any road, he was making calf ’s eyes at Violet all the weekend. Right behind her on the stair, see? Could hardly stand to be more than a foot away. Handsome, was he. But she’d ’ave noon of it, not me Lady Vi, not she. I dunna recall his name. Welsh, he was, though he tried to put on airs like he ware fooling someone aboot that.”
“John Davies.”
“What?”
He’d forgotten her infirmity. “John Davies,” he shouted.
“Aye, I believe you’re right. The one who told such tales later at the inquest.”
“And went on to make a living at it. Telling tales, that is.”
Being driven back down the hill some time later in another taxi, St. Just sat looking again at the photos Agnes had let him borrow, turning over the possibilities in his mind. Now he had all the pieces to the puzzle, but could not for the life of him see how they fit together. The driver, launched on a monologue about the local rugby match, seemed not to notice his passenger wasn’t listening, might indeed have been miles away.
Competing images crowded St. Just’s mind, but what he kept coming back to was the look of pride and accomplishment on Chloe’s face when she told him of capturing a title for “Daddy.” A rose by another name, he thought. Davies. Beauclerk-Fisk.
Some rose. That second-hand, shopworn title of Sir Adrian’s. Had she funded not only its purchase, but the forged identity that must have been necessary to attain it?
He looked again at the photos. The faces, young and old, passed before him as in an identity parade: Mrs. Romano. Chloe. Violet. Sir Adrian. All at Waverley Court-by design, or by chance? Spencer- a common enough name. Jeffrey’s father?
They passed again the church with its nativity scene, his thoughts on crimes, old and new, on births, miracle and otherwise.
And suddenly, he saw the truth, unfolding before him like a bolt of shimmering cloth. Finding his mobile, St. Just punched in Sergeant Fear on speed dial, smiling as he imagined the receiving instrument bursting into the happy strains of “Jingle Bells.”
24. TOO MANY CROOKS
SERGEANT FEAR DROVE TOWARD Waverley Court at a speed sufficient to peel the paint off the car. St. Just jostled against his seat harness in a way he felt reflected his fettered thinking on the case from the beginning.
“Three murders,” he was saying. “Two of them growing out of the first. All of it, Fear. All of it woven together.”
Fear slowed just enough to be able to talk over the straining engine.
“Hang on… What could any of this have to do with the Win-throp case?” he asked. “If anyone wanted revenge against Violet for that, they certainly waited a long time.”
St. Just answered indirectly, his mind still retracing the steps that had led him to the solution. Had he missed anything? Lost the trail somewhere? No. The “who” was clear; the “why,” if he had it right, was astounding.
“I thought the motive was confused,” he said, “an explosion of years, decades of spite-an explosion going off, as explosions by definition do, in all directions. Where there is years-long suffering, the desire to make your enemy suffer includes the wish to prolong his pain, the way yours has been prolonged. A quick kill isn’t enough: the demolishing of your enemy’s dreams, before his eyes, must come first. Perhaps, too, anything or anyone remotely associated in your mind with your enemy becomes a target. But making the enemy pay, suffer, that is paramount, and by any means at hand. What was at hand was Sir Adrian’s investment in Ruthven as his heir.”
“But Ruthven-”
“Yes. What the murderer didn’t know was that Sir Adrian’s dreams for Ruthven had already been demolished. How frustrating- maddening-it must have been, to learn all the ‘effort’ of killing Ruthven had been wasted. Sir Adrian had already stopped caring about Ruthven-instantly, in the way a man of his nature could turn his limited affections on and off. No matter that Ruthven had been raised as his son; he was not his flesh and blood. He ceased to matter once Sir Adrian learned the truth.”
St. Just closed his eyes as they nearly ran the car up into the back of a lorry.
“Slow down. It can all wait. Some of them have waited years, after all.”
Fear, after talking with St. Just in Cornwall, had telephoned ahead to Waverley Court, telling Maria that the inmates were to gather and await the pleasure of the Chief Inspector. The car having returned to a velocity somewhere below the speed of light, St. Just continued:
“We know that Sir Adrian liked to play games with his will. A game of Russian roulette, as his solicitor called it. Perhaps a better comparison would be that his heirs were all perpetually riding a Ferris wheel. When one of them was at the top, it meant the rest were below. They’d almost become used to this over the years, resigned to it. What, after all, could they do about it but hope, when the old man finally did go to his reward, they’d be the one who happened to be riding at the top when the wheel stopped?
“But then, the unexpected happens. He’s added a new player, yet another person to ride this infernal wheel with them, reducing the odds in their favor even further. That, I thought, was what made them-made someone- finally snap. Sir Adrian had fatally underestimated the extent to which his lack of feeling might finally, fatally, antagonize one, or all, of the members of his little family.”
“That explains why Sir Adrian was killed, perhaps, but it doesn’t explain Ruthven’s death-unless, as you say, that was a mistake on the killer’s part,” said Fear. “But if one of them wanted to kill off the competition, so to speak, surely the most likely target was Violet- the newcomer?”
“Of course, you’re quite right about that.”
“And?”
But, again, St. Just didn’t appear to be listening. At times like these the DCI could be maddening. If he, Fear, was so right, why was Violet still hanging about? Fear slowed the car just enough to fishtail into the drive.
St. Just continued thoughtfully:
“Adrian, as we have sensed from the beginning, was the catalyst for murder. He certainly had everything to do with setting in motion the machinery that led to Ruthven’s death. And eventually, even inevitably, he became the catalyst for his own death.”
