G Malliet - Death of a Cozy Writer

“I assume you are referring to Lady Beauclerk-Fisk.”

“Of course I mean Violet. What does she have to do, come running in here waving a poison-tipped spear and threatening to run us all through?”

“There’s no evidence…”

“Evidence? Her first, wealthy husband dies under ‘mysterious circumstances.’ She no sooner has her hooks into wealthy Adrian than he’s dead. What more evidence do you need? Oh, I see the truth now. Poor Ruthven. He probably got wind of what she was planning, so she killed him. She should have been locked up years ago, but all she had to do was bat those baby blues at male officialdom and off she flies to Gstaad or Monaco or wherever it was she disappeared to.”

“‘Baby blues?’ Had you met Violet before, then?”

“It’s just an expression.” She shrugged. “Oh, all right. I did know her, in the way one did know people in those days,” she said vaguely, not quite willing to meet his stare. “All the same crowd at the same wretched parties every weekend. Violet was always included because of the way she looked; I because of my money. I knew, and I didn’t care. Daddy sent me to England to snag a title and, by golly, I did.”

Her round, plain face brightened momentarily. Was marriage to Sir Adrian the singular accomplishment of her life, in Daddy’s eyes? And what would Daddy have said if he’d known the background to that title?

“You must have recognized her name on the invitation.”

“That’s exactly it, you see. I did not recognize the name Violet Mildenhall. I knew her as Violet Winthrop. You think I wouldn’t have mentioned that to Ruthven, if I’d put it together in time? I might have warned him to stay away from her, from this house, at a minimum.”

“All right.” Here St. Just felt it was time to divert the conversation into more procedural paths. There was still the looming question of what she had been doing when Sir Adrian met his demise. Feeling like a BBC news announcer forced to lurch from headline to unrelated headline, he put the question to her.

“At home, of course.”

“Can anyone vouch for you?”

“Mrs. Ketchen, of course.”

From what he had seen of Mrs. Ketchen, he thought it unlikely she had any idea whether on any given day her employer was at home, pinned under a lorry, or planting gunpowder in the basement of Westminster.

“All right,” he said patiently. “Tell me what you know, now, about that weekend in Scotland. And I mean, all that you know: gossip, facts, and innuendo. Let’s start with Violet. Everything you can remember. She was popular with men, Violet was, I take it?” “Popular? Pop ular?” Chloe, who had been peeking at the ending of a Graham Greene novel, swung on him, astonished, in an “is-there-no-limit-to-your-ignorance?” way. “Good God, man.

People nearly brought back dueling for Violet’s sake. She was a force of nature, no question about it. Pamela Harriman had nothing on her. Pam, of course, was older , but there was an enormous competition between them, at least on Pamela’s part. Quite deadly. Oh, yes, indeed. All the kiss-kiss in public, gloves off in private, if the rumors were true. I remember Averil-”

“Were you jealous of her? Then, I mean?”

“Then and now: no,” she said flatly. “You could really only gaze in dumbstruck awe where Violet was concerned, as at… oh, I don’t know. A thunderstorm. Or a train wreck. Somehow, she didn’t inspire jealousy, only wonder. Oh, there was the expected cattiness over her marriage to that old lizard Winthrop. But do you know, the more I saw them together, the more I came to believe that was a love match. Didn’t she have me fooled.”

“You were not in the camp that believed she killed him, then?”

“I wasn’t then. I am now. Do you really believe this is coincidence? Everywhere she goes, there’s a trail of bodies, or hadn’t you noticed? The problem was…” She didn’t seem to want to meet his eyes. “The problem was, I couldn’t imagine why she would kill him. It’s not as if he held her captive, you know. She was free to… you know…”

“I don’t know.”

Again the look of surprise. “To have discreet affairs, of course,” she said. “If she wanted them. It was quite the done thing in that crowd. I never got the impression that she did. Want affairs, I mean. Rather cold-blooded, she was, I always felt. All the men hoped differently, but I don’t think any of them got too far.”

In spite of her denials, St. Just wondered if there weren’t just a bit more jealousy here than she was willing to own to. And more than a shade of bitterness. She was taking Sir Adrian’s death with less hand-wringing than might have been expected, given the manner of his death, if nothing else. But then, it had been decades since their divorce.

He sat down, first leading her by the arm away from the bookshelves in front of which she’d planted herself and repotting her in a seat across from him.

“You weren’t entirely truthful with me when we first met, were you?”

“As truthful as the situation warranted. She killed Adrian, all right, but for the life of me I don’t see how Ruthven was a threat to her. Unless he knew she was planning to kill Adrian. And how could he? And-why wouldn’t she have waited a decent interval before killing him, if only to make it look good? Oh, I don’t know. I go ’round and ’round about it in my mind, and I can’t see the motive there. Not unless she’s insane. 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.”