G Malliet - Death of a Cozy Writer

“Oh, yes. Well, of course, I became a British citizen years ago.”

What she actually said could best be rendered as, “became a Brishish zhitizhen,” but St. Just could just about catch the spirit of what she was trying to say. Good lord, the woman was boiled as an owl, and it was just on two in the afternoon. Even allowing for the extra rations allotted for grief, he felt somehow that with Chloe, this was no rare occurrence.

She was looking about the room now, as if wondering where on earth she’d left her British passport. Like St. Just, she found little to divert her gaze, and after awhile she dropped her eyes to study the contents of the glass she was now clutching like a crystal ball. Silence hung in the room, except for the faint, annoying tinkle of some chimes on the balcony just visible through glass doors.

St. Just might not have been in the room; Chloe had retreated into some foggy area where, possibly, she mulled the problem of interest rates, global warming, or the death of her son-it was difficult to tell from her battened-down expression.

“Fucking chimes,” she said, finally, looking up. “The decorator said they would keep the bad spirits away. Guess not. Poncy little creep. I keep meaning to… Would you like a drink?”

He surprised her by nodding. She seemed to want company, but he felt it would be a delicate balancing act to keep her just sober enough to answer his questions. Maybe if he joined her he could control the pace of her consumption.

“Drinking on the job? Good for you,” she said. “That’s precisely why the sun never used to set on the British Empire. Don’t know what could have gone wrong. I’ll just ring for Augusta.” She lurched toward a bell pull at the side of the mantel. St. Just, who already had spied an elaborately carved drinks cabinet in one corner, stopped her. If Augusta was the woman who had admitted him, it would amount to cruelty to make her shuffle all the way back in here.

“Don’t bother. I can manage.” He walked over to the cabinet, which proved to contain a large array of bottles and glasses on the shelves inside, along with a recently filled ice bucket. He poured two weak ones on the rocks, ignoring her scornful look at the ice cubes as she accepted the drink.

“Cigarette?” She indicated the lacquered case on the glass coffee table.

He retrieved two, igniting them from the matching lighter. It had been months since he’d had a cigarette, and tended only to do so when trying either to annoy or relax a suspect. If it relaxed them enough to make them cough up the truth, so much the better. Chloe, although she seemed to him unlikely as a suspect, almost certainly held background information that might be useful.

“Lady-” he began. Then he realized he didn’t know what to call her. Surely Violet was Lady Beauclerk-Fisk now; there couldn’t be two of them holding the title at once. He wondered how Debrett’s would handle this one. He decided to err on the side of respect.

“Lady Beauclerk-Fisk,” he began.

“Oh, for God’s sake, call me Chloe.”

That settled that.

“The correct form of address would be Chloe, Lady Beauclerk-Fisk, it you want the whole shootin’ match,” she added. “That other one is now Lady Beauclerk-Fisk.” She flicked cigarette ash in the general direction of the tray on the coffee table. “I read somewhere that during the thirties, when divorce was all the rage, there were something like three times as many Duchesses as Dukes in the land. It must have been tremendously confusing for everyone.”

“I see. Interesting. Well, Chloe, I take it this means you knew about your husband’s-your former husband’s-remarriage?”

“Yes. Ruthven called me that night. Thank God I’d had the sense to stay away from that wretched dinner.”

“What time did he call you?”

“I don’t know. Ten. Eleven. Afterwards.”

St. Just imagined that time for Chloe was rather elastic, one hour warping into the other.

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Exactly? I couldn’t tell you exactly . Just that he-Adrian-had got them all up there using this engagement ploy, but that the deed had already been done some days before in a registry office in deepest Scotland.”

“Gretna Green, actually.”

“Ah, yes. The Las Vegas of the United Kingdom. The whole thing is classic Adrian. I should have seen this one coming, but he always could surprise me. Seldom pleasant surprises either, I assure you.”

“Did Ruthven mention his suspicions regarding Sir Adrian’s new, er, wife?”

“They were hardly suspicions, Inspector. Ruthven dealt in facts. Yes, he told me what he’d dug up.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What was your reaction? His?”

“Similar reactions, Inspector. If you want the truth, we were both rather hoping she’d do a repeat performance. Serve the old bastard right.”

“You don’t feel there’s any possibility it was, well, a genuine attachment?”

“True love, you mean? No. You’d get more affection from a goldfish than from Adrian. The whole thing-it’s preposterous.”

Or perhaps, so she needed to believe.

“You received an invitation to the wedding? Or the post-wedding event, as it turned out?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know the etiquette of these things, inviting the ex-wife. In California, I imagine it’s standard procedure.”

“But here?”

“Here I imagine it’s not.”

He waited for her to say more-there must have been more she had to say on the subject-but whatever damage had been done to her pride she was not going to invite sympathy by sharing it with him. He found he admired her for her reticence, or was it caution? Perhaps, she just had other things on her mind now.

“You were here last night?”

“I was at the theater. That play about the white painting.”

“ Art . Yes, I’ve seen it as well. Quite a short play, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Chief Inspector,” she said, eyes suddenly in focus, the churning sadness behind them diverted by anger. “Quite a short play, leaving me plenty of time to nip up to Cambridge and kill my own son and scamper back home. I can’t imagine what the motive would be, though, can you?”

No, he couldn’t. But it was clear that no matter how far blootered Chloe might become, she was more than capable of quick reaction. He wondered if Albert shared, along with her capacity for drink, her capacity for sudden focus where needed.

“Tell me a bit about your other children. How did they all get along?”

He knew the answer, but was curious as to whether the mother’s point of view in this case would be objective. It so seldom was. But so far, oddly, she had evinced no curiosity as to the reactions of her children to being on the scene of the murder-or even as to their safety. Or their possible guilt.

“When Adrian wasn’t busy setting them all against each other, you mean? I hardly know. You’ll hear sooner or later that I left my children, for the most part, when I left that wretched marriage. But I don’t myself recall a day when they all got along, even as toddlers. Constantly fighting from the day they could wave a spoon about; quite vicious they were. George probably still has a scar from when Albert brained him with a choo-choo.” She sighed, tapping varnished nails against folded arms. “Where to start? I can tell you Sarah, the youngest, was the strangest of the lot. Fey. What the kids today would call a nerd, I imagine. Her school’s headmistress told me once Sarah would sit in chapel every Sunday and take notes on the sermon-didn’t half get on the minister’s nerves. She also tends to weigh every thought until she’s completely paralyzed herself into inaction. Hardly a chip off the old block, mine or Adrian’s.