G Malliet - Death of a Cozy Writer

“Miss Croom,” he began.

“Ms.”

“Ms. You were having an affair with Ruthven Beauclerk-Fisk.”

She pulled off her glasses, the better not to see him.

“Whoever told you that?” The attempt at indignant outrage was one of the poorer efforts St. Just felt he had ever witnessed.

“Er. Certain letters-e-mails-you sent him have come to our attention.”

She froze for a long moment, no doubt sorting out the possible responses. But at last her shoulders slumped, as if a puppet master had cut the strings tying her to the controller.

“You had no right,” she murmured. She fumbled her glasses back in place but wouldn’t look him in the eye; her gaze focused on nothing as she, no doubt, recalled certain choice words and phrases that she’d sent over the Internet for all the world, and the police, to see.

He trotted out the stock phrase:

“In a murder investigation, you will find we have quite a few rights. We obtained his wife’s permission to search his belongings, in any event.”

“Lillian? You didn’t-”

“There was no need for her to see them, no. This, Miss-Ms.- Croom, is, again, a murder investigation. We’re not interested in spreading gossip or stirring up trouble to no purpose. We’re interested in the truth. Your e-mails to the murdered man…”

“Yes, I can imagine what you thought after reading them. So I’m the prime suspect, now, am I?”

“You need to be eliminated as a suspect, it would be more accurate to say.”

“By all means, let’s be accurate. ‘Where were you on the night of the sixth?’-is that it?”

“Yes. I enjoy speaking in clichés wherever possible. So, Ms. Croom, where were you?”

“I’ll need to speak with my solicitor,” she said, all business again.

“Why? Does he know where you were?”

“Inspector…”

“Detective Chief Inspector St. Just.”

“All right, DCI St. Just, my solicitor is Reginald Carr-Galbraith, Esq. And I am certain he would advise me to arrange a time at our mutual convenience for me to talk with you in his presence.”

“You’re not under arrest, Ms. Croom.”

“But I am a suspect, Inspector, by your own admission.”

By my own admission? Just who was being questioned here?

Still, he felt he’d learned what he came to know. She had no real alibi, or she’d have come out with it. The blameless telly-watching alibi was his guess. And despite everything, he believed that was even quite possibly true. Possibly.

“Tomorrow morning, eight AM, Cambridgeshire Constabulary, then,” he said, handing her his card.

“Eight AM? You must be mad. There’s no way we can arrive that early. And I have a meeting with-”

He shrugged.

“Then face a charge of refusing to cooperate with the police, Ms. Croom,” he said rising. “It’s all the same to me. Eight AM sharp.”

But it was an appointment he was destined not to keep.

BY SIX PM, MRS. Romano was concerned. By seven, she knew something was wrong. As the clock edged closer to eight, she knew something was very, terribly wrong.

At five she had followed long-established custom and surged her leisurely way to the door of Sir Adrian’s study, bearing a tray with a silver tea service and a Waterford decanter of whiskey. She knocked. No response. Knocked again. This time there was a bark. At least, a bark is what it sounded like. On reflection, she realized the bark was human: Sir Adrian, demanding to know what she wanted.

What she wanted? What she wanted? Every evening at five the ritual was the same: tea with a drop of whiskey for Sir Adrian, against doctor’s orders-Sir Adrian followed no one’s orders-and a half-hour or so of conversation, usually on banal topics like the weather, Watter’s lack of progress on the garden, or the wide-ranging folly of elected public officials. Only rarely did the conversation veer to the personal; that was not Mrs. Romano’s style, nor Sir Adrian’s. But these chats were Sir Adrian’s reward to himself for another day of isolation at his desk, a decompression period before his solitary dinner, or before cocktails in the drawing room with visitors, as tonight.

“Your tea, Sir Adrian,” she said. The “of course” was silent.

“Not now!” came the bark.

A crease formed in the otherwise flawless skin between her arched, black eyebrows. This was strange. This, in distant and recent memory, was unprecedented.

Then she realized what must be happening, remembering what had changed in recent days in her small world of Waverley Court, even apart from this unspeakable murder. Had she not been holding the tray, she would have smacked her hand against her forehead: Stupida ! Of course. Sir Adrian was married. He was, in fact, on his honeymoon, in a manner of speaking, but, unlike the usual run of newlyweds, thoroughly enjoying himself by staying close to home to torment his family. Violet must be in there with him. Lady Beauclerk-Fisk, she corrected herself-she must get used to that. And they were-oh, God, it didn’t bear thinking about. But that’s what they were up to.

Put out with Sir Adrian, and somewhat embarrassed, she turned and made her thoughtful way back to the kitchen.

As usual, Watters was there, his tea and a plate of homemade biscotti before him. He was dipping a slice carefully in his tea before gnawing on it with new, ill-fitting dentures, courtesy of the National Health Service. Something about the look of abstracted concentration on his face made her think of Paulo. When he had been at the teething stage, she used to offer him the same treat, sometimes with a drop of brandy mixed in the tea and milk so he would sleep. Paulo had never been an easy child.

“Well, you won’t believe it,” she said and, borrowing a phrase she had learned from Paulo, added, “They’re ‘at it.’” She set down the tray with more force than was strictly necessary. She hadn’t meant to say anything, but she was so used to Watters’ hanging about, it was exactly like talking to the walls.

“At what? Who? They all fighting again?”

“Sir Adrian and the new wife. They are at it like rabbits. In the study. Good heavens, he might have warned me.”

“You don’t mean it.” Watters was all ears. “I never thought, at their age… Well, well…” He chewed his biscotti slowly as he pondered this geriatric exploit. “She’s a dark horse,” he finished.

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Romano. “I am surprised. Well, I mean that I am surprised that I am surprised. They are just newly married.”

“Aye, but we none of us thought it were a love match, like.”

Mrs. Romano, who rather thought it was, at least on one side, kept her own counsel. The jury, she felt, was very much still out on that subject.

Mrs. Romano held no illusions about her relationship with Sir Adrian, which was a little more than that of employer and employee, and a little less than a friendship. He needed her; she felt sorry for him and was grateful to him. She also did not approve of him. She thought him childish. But then, she thought all men childish.

Still, she was thrown off by the event, and what it might portend for her. What realignment of her position in the household was taking place-had already taken place. And like any female displaced by another, she did not like it. She did not like what was clearly happening, at all. Sir Adrian, when he was at home, had never missed their evening hour.

First a body in her cellar, and now this.

In some vague attempt to realign the order of her firmament, she sat with Watters and, as he gnawed his biscotti like a bone, distractedly drank two or three cups of Sir Adrian’s tea, adding a dash of his whiskey for good measure. After awhile, she set about finishing the dinner preparations, going through the motions perhaps a little more woozily than before.