Around the drive were yew trees; beyond them, paths winding through herbaceous borders, row after row of pink and mauve and blue, beds and carpets of flowers, bushes, sumach shrubs, low and high walls, and what
looked like an ancient cupola, some sixteenth-century ruin, nearly overgrown with moss. Out there in the distance, beyond a screen of beech trees, he glimpsed silvery water and the roof of a small building that might have been the Watermeadows summerhouse.
Watermeadows was a splendid rotting beauty, but Jury saw no one about to enjoy its splendor.
• • •
The servant who opened the door was a frail old form who fit the grand design of the estate. This was Crick (he told Jury), older than Plant’s butler Ruthven, thinner and dustier, as if he, together with the broken marble figure in the foyer, a faded painting of Malvern, and a worn Antwerp carpet, needed a good touching up.
He asked Jury if he would be so kind as to wait, that he would tell Lady Summerston that he was here.
When Jury said that it was Mrs. Lean that he had come to see, Crick simply replied that Mrs. Lean was resting — after all, it had been a dreadful shock — and it was Lady Summerston that he would see first in the circumstances.
That the butler, in his old-world and excessively polite way, took it upon himself to decide what circumstances best fit whom, so amused Jury that he simply did as he was bid — waited in a large room off the rotunda-like entry-room.
• • •
The room was huge, shadowy, high-ceilinged, and nearly empty of furniture. At the far end was a Regency sofa whose gilt was peeling, flanked by armchairs in worn tapestry. They sat near a fireplace with a green and black marble surround. The floor was inlaid, the doorframes marble, the mirrors enormous. A massive crystal chandelier hung from a frescoed ceiling and there were in each corner Doric columns of the same green and black marble, as if the size of the room needed this extra support. Long windows behind the sparse furnishings, uncurtained, over-looked
a terrace that served almost as a stage for the sweep of the gardens. Beyond the terrace were also formal pools, but these were now only drained concrete. To the side of each was a statue of a partially clothed maiden, one with a garland, one with a bouquet, both with their skirts slightly raised, toes pointing forward, as if they’d meant to dip them in the pool, marble harbingers of spring.
He turned from the light and looked into the crypt-like darkness of the room. Soothing to the eye, depressing to the spirit. It reminded him of those palatial rooms he used to see in old war films, apartments from which the wealthy had fled, taking what possessions they could, before the enemy closed in.
To Jury it was an environment he had come to dread more than any other, though he was not sure why: the ghostly elegance, the remnants of beauty, the fragmented past.
• • •
Crick returned to say that Lady Summerston would see him now.
Like the rest of him, Crick’s voice was thin and reedy. As he led Jury to her room, he spoke of Lady Summerston as a rather frail person, “bit of a heart problem there, sir,” who seldom left her room. Nothing terribly serious, you understand, but that was the way it was when one got older, continued Crick, exempting himself — he whose wafer-thin lips, sunken eyes, and dewlaps would surely have made him, in the physical sense, at least, fit company for the lady he so devotedly served.
He told Jury all of this while preceding him up the broad sweep of staircase. As they labored upward, he murmured about “this business, this business,” without actually directly referring to the murder of Mr. Lean. “This business” was quite naturally taking its toll on her ladyship, what with police here with their questions and taking over the old summerhouse. The formality of his dress — the
old, black cutaway and starched collar — did not in the least reflect his manner, for Crick was as chatty as could be, although his breathing was growing raspier toward the top. He was, indeed, quite voluble about the murder and quite voluble in his own assessment of Mr. Lean, “with all due respect,” of which, Jury decided, there was little. During their alpine climb (would they never reach the top?), Jury pretty much decided it was Upstart Simon, and that Crick, for one, wouldn’t miss him and wouldn’t miss the furniture . . . . “That
appallingly
poor example of eighteenth-century
secrétaire à abattant
.”
They had acquired the heady heights of the upper floor and Jury was glad that Trueblood hadn’t heard him.
• • •
Jury congratulated Crick on negotiating this stairway several times a day and with a tray in his hands. Crick told him then that there was a lift, but that he disliked this newfangled technology and that a bit of exercise did wonders to keep us all in the pink, didn’t it? The contraption (as he called it, pointing down the hall) with its old ironwork cage, gilt-painted, hardly seemed much of a technological advance. Near the top of the stair in a shadowy enclosure was a portrait of a young woman with dark hair and eyes, sitting on a bench in the grounds of Watermeadows. It was Mrs. Lean, said Crick, done ten years ago, but she never seemed to change.
Down the dark hall they walked. A quick rat-tat on the door at the end was answered from inside. “Come!”
• • •
Lady Summerston’s room, or suite of rooms (for he was shown into a sitting room), was a clutter of Victoriana, completely out of keeping in both size and ambience with the rest of the big house.
She herself was sitting outside, on the balcony, which overlooked the rear gardens and the crescent of lake that showed in the distance.
“Superintendent!” she said gaily, looking up from a huge leatherbound book in which she’d been pasting stamps. On the chair beside her were several other albums, probably containing photographs, and a double deck of cards. She had, it would seem, enough hobbies to keep her going through many an afternoon on the balcony, for the balcony had an oddly lived-in look, despite its openness to the elements.
Her voice, when she fluted his rank, was as gay as if she had been waiting for him all the day long, and made it appear that the death of her granddaughter’s husband was an event that made a change in an otherwise routine day of looking over albums or playing solitaire. She was positioning a stamp in her book and bringing her fist down on it with a force that could have cracked the glass-topped table. Another dozen or more stamps had been dropped like confetti from a japanned box on the table before her, waiting to be pounded into her book.
Lady Summerston was probably somewhere in her seventies, with fine, parchment-like skin and crisp brown eyes. But if Lady Summerston was frail, that fragility would have to be unearthed from what looked like dozens of pieces of clothes — a dragon-embroidered dressing gown, a ruby-colored Burmese shawl, a Victoria Cross on a chain round her neck, a palmetto fan, which she swished with the gusto of one waving off flies, and a pink turban-wrapped band to which was attached a weeping veil such as a certain caste of Indian women wear. Lady Summerston wore the Empire on her back.
“Sit, sit,” she said, with a fluttery gesture, indicating one of the white ironwork chairs, which was, Jury found when he tried to adjust his tall frame to it, as uncomfortable as those chairs always appear to look, sitting clustered on the patios of the rich.
Lady Summerston seemed in no hurry at all for him to explain his presence on this balmy afternoon on her balcony
as she relentlessly thwacked another stamp into place. Since police had already appeared, perhaps she thought one more would make little difference.
Jury smiled at the intensity with which she went about her pasting-up. “Got any special system, Lady Summerston?”
“System? Good Lord, no. They’re just stamps. You stick ’em in any old way.” She turned the frown from Jury back to the stamps as if the beastly little things might have loosened and jumped to other squares while she looked away.
“I thought perhaps you might be doing them by country,” said Jury. “All of those in front of you seem to be British Commonwealth.”
“Of course they are.”
(Thump!)
“They’re Gerry’s — my late husband’s — collection. I found them amongst his belongings. I keep all of his things” — here she nodded off in a direction meant to indicate the hallway beyond her door — “in a room at the end. Sometimes I go in there just to have a look round. Most people would say that’s morbid. We’re supposed to get rid of anything that reminds us of the dead, I expect. Give it all over to charity or the church fête or Oxfam. As if we could rush headlong into forgetfulness.” Another stamp was aimed at its square. Bull’s-eye. “That seems to be what Simon thought.” She sighed, closed the album, and tapped her heavily ringed fingers on its surface. “Well, you’ve come about Simon and find me totally unrepentant.”
“Is there something you should repent, then?”
“My lack of feeling, I daresay.” Her look at him was shrewd, but in the brown eyes was still a film of sadness. “I absolutely disliked him. Except for Hannah’s sake, I’m glad he’s dead.” She shrugged. “I expect at the inquest the coroner will make something of
that
.”
“You’re very straightforward about it.”
“A lot of killers are straightforward. Look you right in the eye” — and here she leaned toward him, fastening the
glittery eyes on him — “and say, ‘How I loathed the man.’ ”
Jury laughed. “You’re making quite a case for yourself as a prime suspect.”
Now she had picked up the deck of cards and was handling them with swift, sure strokes. “It’s merely being clever. I had motive, opportunity, no alibi.
And
could easily have seen him go into the summerhouse.” Here she reached to the chair and picked up a pair of Zeiss binoculars. “I’m also a bird-watcher. These are quite powerful.”
As he watched her switch a black king to a red queen, Jury asked: “And what about the weapon?”
“A dagger-cane. Fourteen inches long, tempered steel, knobbly walnut casing.” She swept up the rows of cards, shuffled, reshuffled, and started slapping them down again in rows. “Have you met Hannah? No, Crick would have brought you here first. Hannah is probably taking it very badly —”
“ ‘Probably’?”
“Well, I haven’t seen her but for a moment — she looked totally drained — but she has an astonishing way of guarding her feelings.” Lady Summerston looked up and off. “Like her mother. Like Alice. Strange, because both Gerry and I wore our emotions on our sleeves.”
“Your daughter’s dead?”
The hands stopped fluttering over the cards and there was a silence as full of regret as all of her words had been lacking in it. “Yes. When Hannah was very young. It was dreadful, especially since the father had walked out. The Summerston women never seem to choose the right man. The men fared better.” She gave Jury a sharp little smile. “I’m quite fond of Hannah: she keeps to herself; she occasionally comes up to play a game of cards; sometimes we dine together.”
To Jury it sounded as if they afforded each other little companionship or consolation.
“She was crazy about her grandfather — Gerry; she
adored her mother. There were the four of us, then the three, now just the two.”
Simon Lean had apparently not come in for consideration as the fifth.
“Gerald — my late husband” (she explained again) “ — loved this place and brought nearly everything in it piece by piece back from his travels. So I hold on to things as long as I can. As if — for heaven’s sakes — there weren’t enough money to go round, as if we might all end up with begging bowls. Simon was hideously extravagant. Gambling debts, the lot. But he
was
the poor girl’s husband, and I’m sure she adored him. Some women are born to be victims, I think.” Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t one of them.
“Was he running through her inheritance, then?”
“No; she hadn’t got it yet. Oh, of course she has money, but not the
real
money.” Her smile was a knife-flash. “Gerald saw to that when she married Simon. But he certainly got enough from her to buy whatever he fancied. Including women, I expect. When I die she’ll come into an enormous amount, of course. She’s not interested in money; Simon was interested in nothing else.”
Jury smiled. “It doesn’t sound as if you need to sell your furniture, Lady Summerston.”
Her glance was quizzical. “I don’t. It’s the bargaining I like. I sold off a Vermeer to Sotheby’s and, as you know, that marvelous old
secrétaire
to Mr. Trueblood. Worse luck for him, I expect. Can you imagine how he must have felt when he found not books but a body in it?”
“The books must have been unloaded before the body — well . . .”
“Was stuffed in? If it hadn’t happened here, I’d say it was quite marvelous. But it’s too bad about the books. I knocked the price of that
Ulysses
up, but not as much as I would have done for that little swine, Theo Browne.”
“Did Mr. Browne make you an offer?”
She grimaced. “He’s always trying to get at Gerry’s library. But I find Mr. Trueblood rather a pleasant young man; first-rate poker player and a poker face. Naturally, he didn’t give half what I asked for the
secrétaire,
but then I asked twice what it was worth, so we both got what we wanted. How damned unpleasant for him now.” She held up the metal cross. “Do you know what this is, Superintendent?”
“The Victoria Cross.”
She let it drop. “It was Gerry’s. Just let me get his photograph from my desk —”
Jury half-rose, but she was already out of her chair, moving quickly and purposefully toward her target. All of her movements were quick and purposeful, thought Jury. If this was Lady Summerston sick, he’d be almost afraid to see Lady Summerston well.
Her voice preceded her as she returned with the picture. As if reading his mind, she was saying, “I imagine Crick told you I had a heart condition, a lung condition, a liver condition. The last might be true, but not the first two. There’s a decanter of whiskey on the bureau. Get it, will you? And” — she called after him — “get the toothbrush glass from the bathroom.”