The Old Contemptibles (32 page)

Wiggins was back again, still determined. “I expect that’s so, sir; but even with three different canvases, tomorrow or the next day the
various lights might still never be the same. Have you thought of that?”

“No, Sergeant. I really am too busy trying to paint light to pay any actual attention to it, being as rank an amateur painter as there are amateur policemen.”

This was said utterly without malice. It wouldn’t have bothered Wiggins, anyway. Fellowes might have riddled the words out as if they were bullets; Wiggins was bulletproof.

“How well did you know Jane Holdsworth?”

Fellowes was collecting his tubes of paint. “Fairly well. Enough to think she didn’t kill herself.”

Jury was surprised he’d come across this way. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I can’t see any reason; she wasn’t the type; she was too fond of Alex, her son.” He looked from Jury to his easels. “Look, must we go through all of that ‘where were you on the night of business? Because I really must get my canvases back to the house.”

“I know all of that from Inspector Kamir. But just for your impressions, Mr. Fellowes, I’d like to talk to you later, if I could.” Jury was following him to an old van.

“Then you can find me at the Old Contemptibles. That’s where I am when I’m not here or at the house.”

As Fellowes finished loading his gear in the back of the van, carefully wedging the canvases so that they wouldn’t slip, Jury forestalled the comment about the middle painting he could almost see forming on Wiggins’s lips by stepping on the sergeant’s foot.

Fellowes drove away.

 • • • 

“You look knackered, Wiggins. Go back to the pub and have a kip. And some dinner. Drop me off at Castle Howe.”

Wiggins brightened, but said dutifully, “You’ll need the car to get to the pub, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it. I want to see this psychiatrist, Helen Viner.”

“What about Kingsley?”

“I’d rather wait until I see those letters Mr. Plant has. You know, I can’t imagine Melrose Plant out all day walking. My God, it’s all he can do at home to get from his front door to his garden bench.”

“Or up the pub, sir,” said Wiggins, smiling and rubbing his instep.

A stocky woman knitting what looked to be an interminably long scarf sat behind a highly polished, hotel-like front desk, hotel-like register, above which was a large mahogany box divided into pigeonholes for letters. She looked at him suspiciously over the tops of her spectacles.

It was the dinner hour (she said, as if that hour were sacrosanct) and Mrs. Colin-Jackson was not to be disturbed. She was doing the books. It was not this lady that Jury had asked to see (he reminded her); it was Dr. Helen Viner.

It was, however, a rule that Mrs. Colin-Jackson see any first-time caller at the Castle. She did not bother looking up from the black wool or stop the click-click of the needles as she said this.

“Then get her.” Jury shoved the leather wallet with his identification right up to her spectacles.

She reared back in her chair. But at least she got out of it.

 • • • 

Nobody here could be hurting for money, Jury thought, as he looked at the luxurious carpeting, the antiques assembled round an open hearth in a large drawing room, the heavy curtains, the burnished wallpaper and fitted bookcases.

From somewhere down the thickly carpeted hall came sounds of shoutings and clatterings. He walked back to inspect. To his right
was a lavish dining room of blue paint and white moldings, silver and crystal (even running to wineglasses), white cloths and linen napkins, the latter of which one spare woman whose tan and muscle testified to her deep involvement with real or false suns, tennis courts, horses, pools—this woman was snapping her napkin at another fattish one who returned the snaps with her own napkin wetted in her wineglass. Droplets flew, napkins flashed. The guests, still brightly eating what looked like some creamy French concoction, had to divide their eyes and time between that little show and another on the other side of the room. A man with a palsied hand was taking aim with a piece of meringue at a woman who had risen with a piece of cutlery, set to strike.

Applause all around.

Jury stood there, hands in pockets, hoping for more.

“Yes?”

The thick voice came from a heavily jowled woman, probably in her fifties, but looking older because of the tiny red lines that webbed her cheeks.

Mrs. Colin-Jackson, her face overlaid with too much blush and peachy-colored powder, brought with her the heady, combination of L’Air du Temps and gin. To all intents and purposes she was smashed. She could only
just
keep her eyes focused and her smile hooked up on one side as if her mouth had lost contact with muscle. He
bet
she’d been doing the books; he would love to know what an auditing of her books would disclose.

“Dr. Viner?” Mrs. Colin-Jackson adjusted her décolletage, tucked in a strand of hair highlighted to hide the gray and looked a little disconcerted that it wasn’t she herself Jury had come for. “I expect she’d be in her office—it’s her quarters really, a small cottage at the end of the gardens.” She pointed. “Down the hall, turn right, and go out the side door.”

 • • • 

Jury could see her in the lighted window, her head bent over her desk, the green-glass-shaded lamp directly above washing that part of the face he could see in watery rivulets. From this vantage point, Dr. Viner appeared to be a very attractive woman.

Up closer—after she opened the door at his knock—she appeared to be still more attractive; her face was mobile, expressive; her voice
was warm. As a policeman, Jury wasn’t used to a warm greeting. He told her he’d just come from Tarn House.

Dr. Viner had spent a long time in learning how to mask her own emotions; therefore, it was difficult to take her by surprise. She merely opened the door wider, motioned him in.

“It’s not much of a cottage,” she said. “But it’s private, at least. One does like to get away.” She nodded her head toward the main edifice and allowed herself a wicked little smile. “We’ve a strange combination of ‘guests.’ ”

Jury smiled. “I was outside the dining room. I thought pie-in-the-face went out with vaudeville.”

She sighed. “Are the Bannisters at it again? Husband and wife. Isn’t it sweet to take up retirement together?”

“If you’ve the money, very sweet.” Jury sat on the other side of the green pool of light and studied her mouth and chin. The eyes were in partial darkness. She hadn’t turned on any other lights. “Are they all receiving treatment?”

She shook her head, laughed. “Oh, my Lord, no. Actually, the minority. We’re here—Dr. Kingsley and I—for those who get a little out of hand. There’re also a GP who lives in Boone and another near Wasdale Head; and we have two very well-trained nurses.”

“Adam Holdsworth lives here, I understand.”

“Oh, Adam.” Her chair creaked back and her entire face was in shadow. “He’s one of my favorites. Definitely
not
one of my patients.”

“His grandson was, though.” There was a sudden stillness. Even the wavy, seawater light had stopped moving. “Graham Holdsworth.”

“I know who you mean, Superintendent.”

“Tell me about him.”

“As a friend?”

“As a patient.”

“No.”

The word was not charged with anger but with melancholy.

“Dr. Viner: you’re surely not going to invoke the confidentiality of a doctor-patient relationship for a man who’s been dead for five years.”

“There are other people still living.”

“Which tells me you know something painful.”

She exhaled a long breath, as if she’d been holding it for some time. “Hell,” she said, hoarsely. “I should learn to keep my mouth shut.”

“You’re doing a pretty good job.”

She leaned forward then over her crossed arms, and her mouth, though tightly clamped, seemed still to want to smile. Creases showed at each corner, a woman much given to smiling good humor. “I should do a better one. And I don’t see what on earth this has to do with Jane Holdsworth.”

“You’re assuming that’s why I’m here?”

Her swivel chair creaked as she leaned back again. “Well, that’s why all the
others
—police—have been here. Though I’m surprised a Scotland Yard detective would turn up, frankly. As a matter of fact, I was surprised the other detective from London came here.” The flat of her hand was rolling a pen back and forth on her blotter. “I think you all think it wasn’t suicide. You think it was murder.” She kept her eyes on the hand covering the pen.

“What do you think?”

For some time she didn’t answer. She stuck the pen in a jam jar that held her collection of ball-points, old fountain pens and pencils. Then she laid one hand over the other flat on the blotter and bent her head as if she were studying the intricacies of the hand’s faint bluish veins. She plucked out another pen, drew over a prescription pad, doodled a bit, shoved the pad aside. He wondered why she remained silent for so long. None of her movements came across as nervousness, or as any hesitancy in answering, but more as if she were taking stock.

Finally she sat, her hands in her lap, her shoulders hunched slightly forward, and looked at Jury. “No.”

“No to which?”

“To both, really.” Silence fell again. Her silences were deep, like the shadows gathered in the corners, reshaped by the movement of the branches of the large tree against the window. A wind rattled the casement, ruffled the papers on her desk, and set the smaller branches scraping the leaded panes. In his loneliness, Jury heard them as fingers tapping, someone trying to get in.

She shook her head as she spoke. “That someone she knew would have given her an overdose is too hard to believe. She had no enemies I know of. But if I have to choose . . . and obviously it was one or
the other—” She looked up at him with an expression of great sadness. “No to suicide. No.” She shook her head. “I just don’t think she could have done that, either to herself or to Alex. Her son.”

“You knew her well, did you?”

“Yes. We were good friends.”

Jury asked outright: “Had she—was she having an affair with Maurice Kingsley?”

Helen Viner didn’t seem shocked by the question. “I don’t see how. I can’t imagine them together.” She seemed amused at the thought. “I know he was there that night. Police were here yesterday. I can understand Maurice was in a state over that; he got quite drunk last night at the Holdsworths’ dinner party.” She shrugged. “But why, for heaven’s sake? Jealousy?”

Jury was, for the first time, very glad he had seen Pete Apted, glad that Apted had convinced him that Jane had indeed killed herself. That was hard as hell to handle in and of itself; to think she might also have been seeing someone else—like Kingsley—would have been much harder, a different kind of loss, a wrenching disenchantment. “I don’t know. I don’t see that Dr. Kingsley would have a motive. Of course, I haven’t talked to him yet, but police here have found no reason for him to have done it. I don’t believe he did.” He paused. “I don’t believe anyone did.”

This, for some reason,
did
surprise her, and she showed it, whirling round from the window which she had risen to wind inward. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

Jury smiled. “So you probably won’t need that alibi.”

Back at her desk, she frowned. “What ali—oh!” The smile returned. “I’d forgot. I
was
dining with friends in Kendal.”

“Kamir—Inspector Kamir—checked that. You’ve known the Holdsworths for some time?”

She nodded, her gaze returning to the tree, whose tapping still persisted. “Ghosts,” she murmured.

He was quiet, waiting for her to go on.

“Ten years. I’ve been here that long. I knew the first Mrs. Holdsworth, Virginia. I must admit I liked her a good deal better than the second. Ginny was a pleasant, enthusiastic, quite lovely person. She liked the area; Genevieve doesn’t. Not a true Laker, I don’t think.” Her mouth curved in that slow, disarming smile. “Ginny loved to walk. Unfortunately.” Her head dipped.

“Annie Thale?”

Her head came up, quickly. “Annie? What makes you mention her?”

“I would think that’d be obvious.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me; it isn’t.”

“Another accident. Very much like Mrs. Holdsworth’s.” When she didn’t comment, he went on. “Dr. Viner: two suicides, two fatal falls.”

“Yes. It’s tragic. Especially for Alex. Both parents . . . of course, Alex doesn’t believe his mother took her own life. He can’t believe it, can he?” Her head went down again.

“I want to know about his father. What
you
know.”

She shook her head.

Jury started up. “Okay. I’ll subpoena your records, Dr. Viner.”

She rose, splayed her hands on the table, leaned toward him. “Dammit! Leave the poor man
alone!”

Jury remained standing. “Homosexuality isn’t even shameful, not anymore.”

She stared at him, her mouth slightly open, and then sat down heavily. “Wherever did you hear that?” she asked, her voice soft, calm.

“Annie Thale. Or rather, her sister.”

Helen Viner looked totally taken aback. “Millie’s ‘Aunt Tom’? You’re not serious.”

“Yes, I’m serious. You must have known Holdsworth confided in the cook, Annie, and that he was fond of her. But she was much fonder of him.”

The silence lengthened, the twig-fingers tapped the black pane. Helen Viner put her head in her hands. “All right. Yes. Graham had been tormented most of his life by his feelings. Homosexual, perhaps bisexual—he had, certainly, a sexual relationship with Jane. But he couldn’t continue it.” Her hands came down.

“And Annie: was she so much in love with him that
she
couldn’t continue living?”

“I’d have to have known her far more intimately to know that. It’s possible, yes. Anything is. Tell me, what is she like?”

“Who? Oh, Miss Thale?” He thought of Millie’s “Aunt Tom.” “Um, perhaps a bit stiff. A bit cold.”

“Really? I was convinced Millie’d made it up.”

Jury was watching the shadows now cast by the moving branches. His oblique response to this was, “Adam Holdsworth’s very fond of Millie, isn’t he?”