Jerusalem Inn (30 page)

“Maybe she didn't like looking at herself.”

Parmenger was silent for a moment. “What,” the man asked dully, taking in the room with a wave of his arm, “am I supposed to do with all this?”

Jury got another glass from the cabinet, sat down on the chair opposite him, and said, “Have another drink, I suppose.” He poured out a measure for each of them. But Parmenger was not the type to sit and make a boozy confession to police. The silence descended like winter dusk out in the blighted garden where cold had turned the dahlia stems to
sticks, and thrown a membrane of frost across the field flowers. The old clock ticked for a minute while neither of them spoke. Parmenger's silence was more draining than histrionics would have been: a quick gesture of his hand suggesting he'd like to throw his glass at the substitute painting. In breaking the silence, Jury could almost hear the sound of breaking glass. His comment was deliberately mild: “You really liked her, didn't you?”

“Liked her? Yes.” His tone was wooden. He drank half of his whiskey and fell silent again.

“But you didn't make a point of seeing her often?”

“Helen was not terribly interested in seeing me.” He reached for the bottle and slopped out more. “Helen did not really like me.” Then he looked at Jury and smiled slightly. “You think I'm drunk — which I am, I often am — and that in my besotted state I am going to let all sorts of cats out of bags, tell you all the secrets I've kept buried for so long?” He slid down in his chair. “I will give you this: your technique is more soothing than Sergeant Cullen's.”

Jury said nothing.

Parmenger fixed Jury with his still very clear artist's eye.

“ ‘Patience on a monument,' eh? You won't sandbag me; you'll just wait me out.” He took another drink.

“I would do, maybe. If I knew what I was waiting for.”

“We none of us know that, do we?” It was said rather simply, without rancor, and without Parmenger's usual irony. “Amateurish work.” He nodded toward the picture of the Old Hall. “I could never make Helen out, not really. Although
I
was supposed to be the smart one. I am a genius.” He took another drink. Yet Parmenger seemed to be getting soberer, not drunker.

“You say that as if you didn't care much one way or the other.”

“I say only what the critics say.” He looked at Jury, smiling slightly. “And if Seaingham doesn't know who is and who
isn't, how the bloody hell should
I
know?” His tone changed as he added, “Nice chap, Charlie.”

“Helen Minton seemed to appreciate your painting.” Jury was looking at the abstract on the opposite wall. “It's surprising that anyone who's so good at portraiture would be appreciated mainly for his abstract —”

“You don't know sod-all about painting, Superintendent,” said Parmenger, quite matter-of-factly. “Neither do most of the people I know, even some of my fellow-artists.”

“Your father was a friend of Rudolph St. Leger, his wife says. Did you know him yourself?”

“I remember him. He was an ass, thought of himself as another Whistler, lugubrious scenes of trees and meadows and cows. Sentimental imitations of the late-nineteenth-century romantics. He hated my stuff. Tried to keep me out of the Academy. Upstart crow, he thought I was. Or cow. He couldn't paint a
real
cow. He couldn't have done much of anything if it hadn't been for
her.
I mean, she was the one with the money, the position, the contacts. She financed his shows and bullied the critics not only into coming but into at least passable reviews. Except Charlie. He remained as silent as Thomas More on the marriage of King Henry. Rather tactful of him, I thought. To be fair I have to admit old Rudy had some technique, which prevented his work from being
absolutely
embarrassing. I mean, I suppose he could paint a cow if you held a gun to his head. People like you — no offense — would naturally look at the cows and horses and think it was a quite decent painting. But Elizabeth St. Leger really thought the man was talented. I'm not sure it's good to have that sort of reinforcement. People who love you always lie to you, don't they? Maybe not deliberately. It's just they don't know the difference. Why am I going on like this? I haven't thought of old Rudy in years.”

“I'm interested.”

Parmenger looked at Jury with an artist's practiced eye. “I
bet you are,” he said. “I feel a little sorry for the boy. I know what it's like to have someone after you — Want some more?” He held up the bottle of whiskey, seemingly unaware that Jury's glass hadn't emptied very much. Jury held out his glass to be topped up. Parmenger went on: “My own father did everything he could to prevent me painting. Even threw out my paints once, in a tearing rage. Wouldn't give me money to go to art school — probably just as well. What he did want was for me to follow in his footsteps, or at least do something more than dab and daub — as he put it — at a piece of canvas.” Parmenger smiled ruefully. “He went into one of his tempers once, threw my paint and brushes out.”

Jury smiled. “I imagine Tommy Whittaker can hold his own. You did.”

“Had to. But if my father couldn't control
me
, he could Helen. After all, what did she have to fight him with?” He set his drink on the floor beside the armchair he had sunk into.

“He left her a good deal of money and the house, though. He must have felt guilty.”

Parmenger avoided the question of guilt, saying, “Who's talking about money? Helen had a lot of creative energy, but it never found a form. I taught her all that I could about technique. We used to go up in the attic to paint. I was always an artist, from the time I could hold a crayon.” He seemed to be explaining all of this more to himself than to Jury. “Even if I'd
wanted
to do something else, I'm sure I couldn't've . . . but that's stupid. The desire and the talent must go hand in hand, mustn't they? That attic —” And he looked at the ceiling as if it might still be there, a couple of floors above them, preserved through time here in this cottage. “ — that attic on some afternoons when there was enough sun was light-flooded. We'd sit in front of the window. It was an arched window, sort of Gothic like a church window, and round the top little panes of glass were set in, like red stained glass. When the sun shone through, our faces and arms would be
dappled with red. I often watched Helen as she tried her painting, sitting there, very concentrated, her pale face blood-patched. We painted what we saw out the window, the tops of the trees in Eaton Square, the gardens, the people down there sitting on the park benches.” He stopped. “It was a long time ago.”

Jury let him have his silent look back into the past for a few moments and then said, “You said she didn't like you. It doesn't sound like it.”

Parmenger finished off his drink, put the glass on the floor beside him. “That came later. We quarreled.”

“Over what?”

“Does that concern you?” Parmenger got out of his chair and went over to the french doors, where he stood, gazing out at the frost-hardened garden.

 • • • 

“Over something unpleasant that she found out. Perhaps you know the headmistress — Miss Hargreaves-Brown?”

Frederick Parmenger was a little slow in his denial. “Never heard of her. And what's all this in aid of?”

“She didn't want to ask direct questions, is my guess. In case she might embarrass someone. An interesting speculation.”

“Not to me, particularly.”

“I think she found the person she was looking for.”

“What person?”

“Her son.”

He turned slowly from the window. There was a volcanic force in the man, even with his senses dulled by whiskey. Watching Parmenger's expression change, Jury thought of a storm coming on, a sky turning to lead. Parmenger looked frightened.

“He was yours. I know. Go on, sit down before you fall down.”

Parmenger slumped in the chair. He had his fingers laced,
covering his face. “I didn't know it, not back then. Helen was —” Unable to bring it out, he stopped.

“Your half sister. I know that, too.”

Parmenger got up, went over to the drinks cabinet, saying, “You know bugger-all, Superintendent.”

“Miss Hargreaves-Brown — or let's say Annie Brown — told me.”

Parmenger's face was white. “That bitch. My sanctimonious father paid her well to keep her mouth shut.”

“I can't say I like her, either. How did you find out about the relationship between your father and his sister-in-law?”

“From one of his granite-faced colleagues who was instructed to give me the good news when my father died. I suppose to scare the hell out of me, in case I had any plans for some future with Helen —”

He broke off. He seemed to be looking around the room, into the deepening shadows, baffled. “My sister —” There was in the voice a sharp edge of hysteria, cut off, as Jury imagined Parmenger could repress, very quickly, any emotion he had to.

“How can you blame yourself? You didn't —”

“Sod off! Don't give me your police condolences. I ruined her life.”

“You ruined her life? Or could she have ruined yours?”

The implication of that sobered him. “What's that supposed to mean?” he asked in his bullying way.

“Would you have wanted this to come out?”

His look at Jury was pure contempt. “Don't be absurd. Helen wouldn't have told it, and anyway, I don't worry about my ‘reputation.' Let the critics do that; it keeps them off the streets.” Drink in hand, he was up and prowling the room, picking up first one and then another of Helen's small possessions, reluctantly putting them down, as if they might be an extension of their owner. To hold on to them was to hold on to her.

“Someone's trying to murder Grace Seaingham,” said Jury.

“Then someone's making a damned sloppy job of it.” Parmenger downed the rest of his drink.

“I'm not talking about the presumably mistaken attack on Beatrice Sleight. That was no mistake. Call it a sort of ‘safety play.' Beatrice Sleight was the intended victim all right. But someone is still trying to kill Grace Seaingham.”

Parmenger laughed. “Ridiculous.” But his expression changed quickly. “Why? You're not suggesting Charles?”

“Are you?”

“No. Only I know that Grace wouldn't divorce him.”

“So it's common knowledge that Seaingham was in love with Beatrice Sleight.”

Parmenger stopped in his walk about the room. “No.
I
know it. But then I'm observant — And how the devil have you deduced that, anyway? Nothing's happened to Grace.”

Jury didn't answer this directly. “Helen Minton, Beatrice Sleight, Grace Seaingham. . . . Helen wasn't — as far as I know — acquainted with either of the other women.”

“ ‘Helen'? Were you on a first-name basis then?” His face clouded over.

Jury thought of that earlier reference to Ferdinand, the insanely jealous brother of the Duchess of Malfi, who would see her dead before he'd see her happy with another man. “I knew her for an afternoon. Is that important now?”

Parmenger didn't answer. His eyes were fastened on the painting of the Old Hall, as if its amateurish execution were a source of secret pain.

“Helen had a visitor a week before she died.” He pulled out his notebook, flipped the pages. “ ‘ . . . terrible row.' That's according to Nellie Pond, who lives next door. ‘The voices would die down and flare up again.' . . . It was you who came to see her, wasn't it?”

“A cunning deduction. No.”

“Nothing cunning about it. You asked why she took the
picture down. How did you know your portrait had ever been hanging there? I mean, if you hadn't seen her for months —?”

His eyes remained on the picture. He sighed. “Very well. Yes, I did see Helen. And, yes. There was a row. I wanted her to stop.”

“ ‘Stop'?”

“Searching. I knew she'd come to the North. Maureen — she's Helen's housekeeper —”

“I know.”

Parmenger turned to look at him, but the rancor had left both his face and his voice. “Is there anything you
don't
know, Superintendent?”

“Lots,” said Jury, lighting up a cigarette. Parmenger shook his head when Jury held out the packet.

“Well, don't expect
me
to enlighten you. Maureen told me she'd come up here. That was weeks ago. You don't really think I'd have been staying at the Seainghams' all of this time to paint a portrait, do you?”

“Go on.”

“There's nothing to be going on
with.
Helen had undertaken this search and I wanted her to stop.”

“Why?”

Parmenger paused. “I was afraid,” he said, simply.

“That you'd have to take your share of the responsibility?”

“Oh, don't be so bloody sanctimonious. Maybe I was afraid of what she'd find. I mean, of what the child would be like.”

If Parmenger knew about Robin Lyte, he wasn't about to tell Jury. “Isn't that superstitious, Mr. Parmenger? The close blood-tie, the deranged child — Antigone was hardly deranged.”

Parmenger feigned surprise. “A Greek scholar, too. My, but your talents are endless.” His tone changed, and he said, “Helen felt guilty enough as it was.” He shook his head slowly, as if it were full of the dust, the cobwebs up in that
old attic by the window where they'd sat and painted the trees in Eaton Square. . . .

Jury watched Parmenger, who had got up now to prowl the room. He thought of Father Rourke's study of the Gospels. He thought of Isobel Dunsany, of Annie Brown, of the paints Edward Parmenger had flung out, and especially of Jerusalem Inn.