G Malliet - Death of a Cozy Writer

Again she gave him her Stonehenge smile. Looking at her, St. Just found her assertion difficult to countenance. She was one of the oldest living women he had ever seen, and if Mr. Baker had worn her down, there seemed little sign of it now. He would take odds she’d live to see a century.

During a break when one of the boys scurried off to retrieve a return that had gone wildly astray, he introduced his topic.

“Mrs. Baker.” When she didn’t respond, St. Just raised his voice several notches. “Mrs. Baker. I am a policeman investigating two particularly brutal recent murders that seem somehow to be connected with the death of Sir Winthrop decades ago. You were working for him at the time he was killed, weren’t you?”

“’Course I was. And I never forgot one minute of them goings-on, neither. But what I want to know is why it’s taken you so long to coom ask me aboot it?”

“I think, Mrs. Baker, because sometimes the wheels of justice grind finely but they grind exceedingly slowly. By coincidence or by design, Violet Winthrop, as was, is implicated in two very recent murders. I think it possible she’s being set up. I would like to know by whom.”

She peered at him out of the maze of wrinkles around her eyes, like a small prehistoric bird looking out from the undergrowth.

“What makes you so sairtain o’ that? I give it as me opinion at the time, it was Lady pushed Sir Winthrop off his pairch. I know what I haird. Only the yoong man said daifferent, and she was let off. And that’s an end on it. The truth o’ that matter noon wanted known. Maybe someone wants her punished now for what she done then. It’s a wicked thing, to be sairtain, but I dunna see how I can help you with it.”

Losing interest, she turned from him to resume watching the game. Colin thundered up and down the court on powerful legs. He was too big a lad to be agile, but he demolished the ball whenever by chance it caught his racket. His small, dark opponent scampered lightly back and forth, easily outmaneuvering him with precisely aimed returns.

Why had he come? he wondered. Surely, she was right. Whatever she knew of that, by all accounts, badly managed case was so lost in the mists of time as to be irretrievable as evidence now. He’d seen the reports, the statements taken by those “investigating.”

But every instinct told him that the Winthrop murder held the key to recent events. Anything else was coincidental beyond belief.

Eventually, Colin lost the match on the serve. The boys were packing up their gear when Agnes turned to him and announced she was cold. He unlocked the brakes of her chair, and, following her directions, took her up in the lift to her room, a small but cheerful private room with flowered wallpaper, overlooking the front of the building where a small ornamental waterfall spilled over into a rock garden. Perhaps a bite to eat in town while he put in time, he was thinking, waiting for the late train… “I have a photo of the castle as it was then, you know, if you care to see?”

He feigned curiosity, more out of politeness and deference to her age than anything, and followed her arthritic, pointing finger to the bottom shelf of a painted yellow bookcase against the wall. There on its side lay a large, velvet-covered photo album, of a type he hadn’t seen since his grandmother’s day. He hefted it over to the table where she sat and placed it before her, rather fearing a protracted stroll through all ninety years of Agnes’ memories. Indeed, she paused at pages bearing a photo montage of husbands one through five, and took a moment to introduce them all. But then she flipped back to near the beginning of the book.

He saw what looked like a professionally composed photograph of an imposing gray castle set against thundering gray skies. But what caught his eye were the people in the photo on the opposite page.

She pointed to it.

“The architect took that after he finished renavatin’ the castle kitchen. Lady Vi wasn’t half in a state over that, gettin’ it doon before the party arrived. There, that’s me, holding the book.”

The black and white photo showed a cavernous room with stone walls, feebly lit by a skylight levered open for ventilation. The five of them, four women in their twenties and thirties and one solemn young man, stood captured in various studied poses, not looking at the camera, apparently absorbed in their tasks. A much younger Agnes consulted her book of receipts; one woman sliced a potato as another stirred something in a large metal bowl, a bowl so deep one of her hands disappeared inside it to the elbow. Something about their stilted posture and calculated avoidance of the lens told the viewer it was not the casual shot it appeared to be but one carefully arranged by the photographer, right down to the props. One could almost hear him shouting directions at them down the century: “Try to look natural, for God’s sake! That’s it! Hold it!” Only the young man, one hand on an enormous metal canister, was turned slightly toward the camera as he stood near the cooker, spoiling the effect of industry caught unawares as he stole a sideways peek at the photographer. The fourth woman, holding by the neck a dead fowl with about half of its feathers left intact, spoiled the effect as well by staring off blindly into space as if wondering how on earth the thing had flown into her hand.

He took the album from Agnes, holding it close to his eyes for a nearer look, to make certain he was right.

It couldn’t be the same woman. It couldn’t. But it was. Among the array of old-fashioned ranges, cookers, and spits stood a very young Mrs. Romano, wearing a long white apron tied about her waist, and holding by the neck that bedraggled wildfowl.

“Who is this?” he asked carefully.

“The undercook, Maria. She left shairtly afterwards, run off with the footman. Told me she’d seen somethin’ that night, the night of the mairder. Said folk wairen’t in their beds as they claimed. Any road, many did leave aboot that time. I asked her was it the mairder upset her. She said, no, it was the haggis. But I think it were the mairder, just the same.”

He felt as if the more he peeled the layers off this case, the further he was from the center. Mrs. Romano had been there, Chloe had been there-who else had failed to mention their starring roles in that long-ago murder case?

He asked her to name the other people in the photo.

“Spencer, did you say?”

“That’s right. I don’t know I ever knew his first name. He left shairtly after, too. They all did, myself and oozeband number one included.”

“How did you come by these photos?”

“I told you, the architect took ’em. For posterior, like. They’d set him up with a little room to work in, to make 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.