BY SIX PM, MRS. Romano was concerned. By seven, she knew something was wrong. As the clock edged closer to eight, she knew something was very, terribly wrong.
At five she had followed long-established custom and surged her leisurely way to the door of Sir Adrian’s study, bearing a tray with a silver tea service and a Waterford decanter of whiskey. She knocked. No response. Knocked again. This time there was a bark. At least, a bark is what it sounded like. On reflection, she realized the bark was human: Sir Adrian, demanding to know what she wanted.
What she wanted? What she wanted? Every evening at five the ritual was the same: tea with a drop of whiskey for Sir Adrian, against doctor’s orders-Sir Adrian followed no one’s orders-and a half-hour or so of conversation, usually on banal topics like the weather, Watter’s lack of progress on the garden, or the wide-ranging folly of elected public officials. Only rarely did the conversation veer to the personal; that was not Mrs. Romano’s style, nor Sir Adrian’s. But these chats were Sir Adrian’s reward to himself for another day of isolation at his desk, a decompression period before his solitary dinner, or before cocktails in the drawing room with visitors, as tonight.
“Your tea, Sir Adrian,” she said. The “of course” was silent.
“Not now!” came the bark.
A crease formed in the otherwise flawless skin between her arched, black eyebrows. This was strange. This, in distant and recent memory, was unprecedented.
Then she realized what must be happening, remembering what had changed in recent days in her small world of Waverley Court, even apart from this unspeakable murder. Had she not been holding the tray, she would have smacked her hand against her forehead: Stupida! Of course. Sir Adrian was married. He was, in fact, on his honeymoon, in a manner of speaking, but, unlike the usual run of newlyweds, thoroughly enjoying himself by staying close to home to torment his family. Violet must be in there with him. Lady Beauclerk-Fisk, she corrected herself-she must get used to that. And they were-oh, God, it didn’t bear thinking about. But that’s what they were up to.
Put out with Sir Adrian, and somewhat embarrassed, she turned and made her thoughtful way back to the kitchen.
As usual, Watters was there, his tea and a plate of homemade biscotti before him. He was dipping a slice carefully in his tea before gnawing on it with new, ill-fitting dentures, courtesy of the National Health Service. Something about the look of abstracted concentration on his face made her think of Paulo. When he had been at the teething stage, she used to offer him the same treat, sometimes with a drop of brandy mixed in the tea and milk so he would sleep. Paulo had never been an easy child.
“Well, you won’t believe it,” she said and, borrowing a phrase she had learned from Paulo, added, “They’re ‘at it.’” She set down the tray with more force than was strictly necessary. She hadn’t meant to say anything, but she was so used to Watters’ hanging about, it was exactly like talking to the walls.
“At what? Who? They all fighting again?”
“Sir Adrian and the new wife. They are at it like rabbits. In the study. Good heavens, he might have warned me.”
“You don’t mean it.” Watters was all ears. “I never thought, at their age… Well, well…” He chewed his biscotti slowly as he pondered this geriatric exploit. “She’s a dark horse,” he finished.
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Romano. “I am surprised. Well, I mean that I am surprised that I am surprised. They are just newly married.”
“Aye, but we none of us thought it were a love match, like.”
Mrs. Romano, who rather thought it was, at least on one side, kept her own counsel. The jury, she felt, was very much still out on that subject.
Mrs. Romano held no illusions about her relationship with Sir Adrian, which was a little more than that of employer and employee, and a little less than a friendship. He needed her; she felt sorry for him and was grateful to him. She also did not approve of him. She thought him childish. But then, she thought all men childish.
Still, she was thrown off by the event, and what it might portend for her. What realignment of her position in the household was taking place-had already taken place. And like any female displaced by another, she did not like it. She did not like what was clearly happening, at all. Sir Adrian, when he was at home, had never missed their evening hour.
First a body in her cellar, and now this.
In some vague attempt to realign the order of her firmament, she sat with Watters and, as he gnawed his biscotti like a bone, distractedly drank two or three cups of Sir Adrian’s tea, adding a dash of his whiskey for good measure. After awhile, she set about finishing the dinner preparations, going through the motions perhaps a little more woozily than before.
It was seven the next time she looked, and now she really did not know what to do. Watters had left for his cottage in the village some fifteen minutes before, and Paulo had appeared, ready for his stint serving at table. The adenoidal Martha arrived, late, just after Paulo.
Most of the meal Mrs. Romano had prepared ahead of time- she was pleased with the afternoon’s culinary experiment, which included thickening the chicken gravy with carrot she’d puréed in her new Cuisinart-so she considered sharing another glass of whiskey with Paulo. She hesitated to share with him her news; she suspected he wouldn’t have believed her. He was still at the age where sex between partners over fifty he thought of as an impossibility, if he thought about it at all, like the conception of the Minotaur.
She decided she had better forego the whiskey; it wouldn’t do to have Paulo breathing fumes over the dinner party. She set about making the salad dressing, whisking olive oil, mustard, and vinegar together, creating rather more of a mess than usual. After awhile, she sent Paulo out to the drawing room to report on how things were progressing. He came back.
“They’re all there, except for Sir Adrian,” he told his mother.
Again, unprecedented. Then she realized what he was actually saying.
“His wife is there?”
Paulo nodded, not much interested, busy with getting the dishes ready for their journey to the hot plate-in actuality, a large black cabinet that resembled a bank vault-in the serving room. The distance of the dining room from the kitchen, separated from the family area by a long, winding corridor designed to keep cooking smells from traveling into the main part of the house, necessitated this holding stage to keep the food from cooling by the time it reached its final destination. It made meal preparation difficult on the best of days, and this day Martha was even less help than usual, nervously dropping knives and serving spoons that then had to be rewashed.
“Oh, give over, do,” snapped Paulo at last. “Let me do it; it will save time.”
Martha took this display of bad temper as a sign of Paulo’s gentlemanly and helpful nature. Tittering, pleased-for in her mind Paulo resembled the swashbuckling heroes, cross-eyed with lust, depicted on the covers of the romance novels she read, and he featured in more than a few of her daydreams-she sank into a chair by the wooden work table. For the first time, she noticed Mrs. Romano’s abstracted look.
“What’s wrong then, Mrs. R.?”
By way of answer, Mrs. Romano said to Paulo:
“You’re sure he’s not there?”
“It’s not like you can miss him, is it? I told you, he’s not there. The rest are. That Albert came in last, as usual. But they’re all there.”
“Something is wrong,” she said. “When have you ever known him to be a minute late for the cocktails? I should go…”
But the memory of her earlier rebuff at Sir Adrian’s door stilled her. She couldn’t risk it. Still, according to what Paulo said, Violet wasn’t with him. Perhaps he was changing for dinner-yes, that must be it. He was just thrown off schedule by the novelty of the evening tryst with his bride.
But by quarter to eight, when Paulo reported back with Sir Adrian’s continued non-appearance, she could no longer contain herself. Her dinner would be ruined, for one thing. And if this was the way things were going to be with her Ladyship in charge, Mrs. Romano felt she was going to have a few words to say on that subject with her employer.
She stood up.
“I’ll go see what’s the matter,” she said, in the manner of a gladiator stepping into the Coliseum. Unscheduled visits to Sir Adrian’s study, even by Mrs. Romano, were another item in the “unheard of ” column. He would bellow, he would rage. She didn’t care. Her chicken was going to be overdone.
Again she made her way down the long connecting corridors into the family area. She would one day attribute her long life to the exercise afforded by the floor plan of Waverley Court.
She stopped outside the massive double doors of the study. She knocked. Louder. Nothing. He must be upstairs. But just in case… Because she didn’t believe he was upstairs dressing. She believed he was behind these doors-every instinct told her this was so-and not answering. Something wrong, wrong, wrong; the word reverberated as she slowly turned the handle and peered through the opening.
Sir Adrian sat at his desk in his smoking jacket, as always, with his pen and papers and the other accouterments of his profession spread out before him. But he was slumped forward on the desk, head atop a sheaf of blue onionskin paper, eyeglasses askew, and with his hands spread out before him as if he had tried to brace himself from a blow, or made an effort to raise himself to confront his assailant. He had knocked over the poinsettia plant on his desk in his fall; for a moment all she could focus on was the damp black soil scattered across the green blotter.
But sticking out from Sir Adrian’s back, impossible to ignore, was a long, black, ornately carved object. It took Mrs. Romano’s brain, cushioned as it was by shock and whiskey, full seconds to register this as a handle attached to a knife, the handle dark against a large, spreading stain on his back that could only be blood.
She threw the door open wide, inching into the room. No, she thought, not a knife. Bigger. Spada. No, no, no: sword. Her brain scrambled for purchase in two languages as she processed what she was seeing, as if finding the words for what she saw would make it all come right. Sir Adrian, he was pretending? Si, it was one of his jokes. She inched closer. No, not, pretending: Dead! Dead! Morta! Dio mio! Dagger!
Mrs. Romano staggered a few more steps toward the body, her hands pressed tightly against her mouth. Then she dropped her hands and screamed. She screamed until she fell, unconscious, to the floor.
They came running, a jostling stampede from the direction of the drawing room, led by George, Albert bringing up the rear. Just inside the door they stopped as one, like a panicked herd brought up short by an electric fence.
They nearly trampled Mrs. Romano before they noticed her crumpled form on the carpet.
George spoke first, but Sarah’s screams had already begun to provide background music to his words.
“What the devil? Are they both dead? What’s going on in this house? Goddammit, Sarah, will you shut up?”
She would not. He drew back his hand and slapped her with all his considerable strength-something he’d seen done in films to quiet hysteria. Unlike in the films, it made her scream louder. Natasha, with a fierce look at George, grabbed Sarah, held her massive form against her own reedlike one, stroked her hair, and tried to soothe her. When she saw Natasha staggering under Sarah’s collapsing weight, Violet took the other side, sandwiching Sarah like a second slice of bread.
Meanwhile, a hubbub of exclamation rose around them as they all, like Mrs. Romano, tried to comprehend what had happened.
Only Albert, perhaps from what was beginning to seem like long practice, knew what to do. With no small sense of déjà vu- again playing the messenger part he seemed doomed to play-he ran to ring the police.
He thought of ringing the family doctor, or an ambulance. But what was the point?
Albert even knew what the weapon was: a Scottish dirk, one that had formerly hung in the hall, its lethal blade about a foot long. The weapon had been precisely inserted between the ribs, into the heart. No one could have survived that. Any fool, even one only trained in stage combat, could see Sir Adrian was dead.
The call, even though it bounced around Parkside Police Station a few minutes, reached St. Just in nearrecord time. He happened to be still at his desk, sitting amidst a clutter of takeout cartons and discarded “fortunes” from Wing Dynasty (“Beware the dragon of desire disguised as fear. Lucky numbers: 1, 6, 10, 24, 36”) mixed with piles of case files becoming overripe from neglect.
He had sent Sergeant Fear home to his family hours ago, and now sat staring once again at the scene-of-crime photos of Ruthven, hoping for a clue, seeing only a cold dead man in a cellar.
The Beauclerk-Fisk case had been stamped “priority” by the Chief Constable, who was tired of what he called “the hounds of hell” (the press) nipping at his heels. More than that (for St. Just was the type to say “yes” to his boss and then do as he pleased, for as long as he could get away with it), St. Just felt without any prodding that the situation at Waverley Court was only going to worsen the longer it took him to wade through the examiner’s report and Fear’s interview notes.
So it was that the call that reached him at seven fifty-eight this Sunday night came as little real surprise. In some subconscious way he had been expecting it, all the while helpless to prevent it. Something more had been due to erupt at that household, in spite of the police presence stationed inside and outside the gates, and here it was. It was as if someone had lit a fuse in that house with the killing of Ruthven Beauclerk-Fisk.
He swung by Fear’s house on the way, interrupting a family meal, which earned him awe-inspiring glowers from both Emma and Mrs. Fear. He and Fear took the dark narrow streets of Cambridge, its outer burbs, and the surrounding countryside at reckless speed. At the entry to the manor house, St. Just slowed just enough to signal Constable Porter, stationed outside the gate, to follow them in.
They arrived in a screech of tires and sirens that brought Paulo angling more rapidly than usual to the door.
And there he was, the famous man in the study that had been the scene-at least in his imagination-of countless poisonings, shootings, head coshings, and other acts of malicious mayhem.
“You’ve touched nothing?” barked St. Just to Paulo, who slouched in the doorway in a manner that managed to combine impertinence with idle curiosity. The rest of the family had hiked off at some point to various places of safety in the house, after the nearly senseless Sarah had been dragged to a sofa in the drawing room by Paulo and Albert and deposited like a sack of undelivered mail.
“I know better than that,” said Paulo.
“Good. Your prior knowledge of police procedure no doubt served you well. He was just found?”
Paulo raised an eyebrow, somewhat anxiously. Were they going to stir up that old dust again?
“Just now, by my mother. She’s in a right state.”
St. Just stepped delicately around the desk, taking in the scene: the scattered papers; the soil from the tipped-over pot; the ghastly, medieval weapon, reminder of a time that was more violent-perhaps- than his own. At least we’ve done away with the pots of boiling oil poured over the ramparts, he thought. Highly inefficient compared with nukes.
“Forensics on the way?” he asked Fear.
“So they said. On a Sunday Malenfant may have more trouble than usual rounding up his team.”
St. Just didn’t appear to be listening; he was bent over sideways trying to peer at the papers Sir Adrian had been working on. No hope from this distance; at any rate, the pages were largely covered by his round head. St. Just did a token check for pulse and saw that a poinsettia leaf was crushed in Sir Adrian’s hand, the milk from the broken leaf sticky in his grasp.
He turned and surveyed the rest of the room, once again taking in the linenfold paneling and packed bookshelves. The dying embers of a fire glowed faintly in the handsome old fireplace, but there was nothing else to show him how long Sir Adrian may have lain there.
Easy enough to see where the killer had gained entrance: One of the French doors behind the desk where the body lay stood slightly ajar. He walked over; it hadn’t been forced. Outside in a melting mush of snow and ice were the barest outlines of what seemed to be largish boot prints. He doubted forensics would be able to make much of that. Still, someone had been out here, that was clear. Someone who had been able to sneak up on the man as he sat engrossed in his work. Someone who walked softy and carried a big knife.
He turned back to Fear.
“Go see what’s missing from that goddamn display in the hallway. Hang it all, I guess we should have seized all of that crap in the first place.”
“There’s a kitchen full of knives. It wouldn’t have mattered-”
“Then go and find out where the bloody family’s got to.”
It took Malenfant nearly another twenty minutes to arrive, just ahead of the forensics team, peevish in an entirely Gallic way because his own leisurely Sunday meal had been interrupted. He spent a few minutes on a cursory exam, then turned to St. Just and said, “Yes, he’s dead. He’s been stabbed. A few hours but don’t press me for a time yet. Anything else you want to know?”
“The last one was bludgeoned to death. What do you think we have on our hands here? A multi-talented killer? Or two different killers?”
Malenfant shrugged.
“You’re the detective. How should I know? Although two killers seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“You haven’t met the family yet, have you? Nothing in this crowd would surprise me.”
“No forced entry?”
“No need. Either Sir Adrian let the killer in himself-which seems unlikely; he to all appearances was absorbed in his work- or he helpfully left the French door off the latch.”
“The ever-popular ‘Murder by Person or Persons Unknown’ will of course be my recommendation.”
Malenfant made it sound as if Sir Adrian were being put forward for membership in some exclusive London club. But the also-popular ‘Death by Misadventure’ was certainly out of the question- legal jargon St. Just had always thought made it sound as if the victim had hopped on a plane for Paris and somehow ended up in a Turkish prison.
Malenfant added, “There were no prints the first time, and I doubt there will be any this time. Is there a criminal alive today who doesn’t know from viewing Crime Watch to wipe up after himself? Still, there was a fireplace handy for destroying whatever evidence-gloves, say-the murderer wanted destroyed.”
Fear’s head appeared in the doorway.
“There’s something missing from the display, Sir. There’s a gap in the wall where there’s a collection of knives and daggers, and two bare brackets that once held something. There’s a sheath still hanging near the empty space. It would seem the killer just helped himself to what was handy.”
Malenfant was peering at the object protruding from the back of Sir Adrian’s body.
“It’s a dirk. Scottish. The kind of thing you see in museums. Appears to be the real thing. Nasty piece of work. The blade will be about a foot long unless I miss my guess, triangular in shape. See the ballocks?
“The what?”
“The ballocks. The bulges between the handle and blade. Supposed to represent testicles. Ay, ’tis a manly weapon, forsooth.”
“You don’t think a woman…?”
“Oh, a sturdy child could kill someone with a sharp blade like this. No problem. Just like cutting through butter.”
“Ugh. Well, thank you for widening the field: just what we needed. When will you be able to give us a time?”
“I’m never able to give you an exact time and you know it. Especially if that door was banging open and shut, which it probably was, and the fire dying down to nothing. I’ll be able to give you an estimate sometime tomorrow. But what you need to know, you know already. He’s been dead awhile, and somebody killed him.”
“Thanks,” said St. Just. “We’ll just sit around and wait for someone to confess, then.”