A Fatal Winter (30 page)

Max nodded, but absently. Cricket was up there with the sports he understood but hardly saw the reason for, knowing only that a Zen-like patience was required of its fans. Looking at Wintermute, it was hard to reconcile him with the Buddha, but he supposed there were physical similarities.

The liquor seemed to be having an effect, if the wavering focus in Wintermute’s eyes were any indication. Max thought this might be a good time to ask how Jocasta fared in Oscar’s will.

“Jocasta and her descendants, had there been any, were remembered in Oscar’s will, along with the twins. Gwynyth faired poorly, as I’ve said.”

Wintermute spread himself a little wider in his plush chair, ran a hand through his thinning gray hair, and said, “Do you know, I have always found inherited wealth to be corrosive and disincentivizing. And the longer I am in my line of work, the more I believe that. In amounts seemingly finely calibrated to produce the effect, I have seen it breed some of the laziest human beings on the planet. Rarely does there emerge a personality strong enough to rise above the effects of the inculcated sense of entitlement, and to put the money to good and creative use.” It was an unexpected, even confessional, outburst, coming as it did from a man whose bread was buttered by the upper classes he served. “In the case of the Footrustle family,” he went on, “you could see the blood rapidly thinning out by the time of the present generation.”

Max said, “I wouldn’t be too sure of that just yet.”

“You are thinking in particular of the peculiar intelligence of Alec and Amanda,” Wintermute said, again surprising Max. The mind operated clearly despite the alcoholic fog. “It’s too early to say there. Gwynyth—Lady Footrustle—may have provided just the infusion of fresh blood that was needed. Non-blue blood, of course. Occasionally that’s necessary, you know, to keep the upper classes from going completely potty with all the inbreeding.” He tipped back his drink. Before he could head off to fetch a refill, Max asked how Lady Baynard’s death affected the situation.

“To answer that I’ll begin by referring you back to Lady Baynard’s inheritance from her husband,” said Mr. Wintermute. “There was little to inherit, I hasten to add. Old Baynard was what we used to call a blackguard, a word that sadly has fallen into disuse, along with cad and bounder. What money there was went to her in trust for life, and she had no control over its dispersal. Under the will of her late husband, it went to their children at her death. Of course, Lady Baynard was remembered handsomely by her brother.”

“Her estate would go to Randolph and Lester?”

“That is correct. And there’s a sum going to Lamorna, the granddaughter. Not as much as to the sons, but she was not left out.”

“That is interesting.”

“Hmm. Never leave grounds for a contested will. That is my motto,” said Wintermute.

So much for the visionary integrity motto, thought Max. Perhaps the real motto wouldn’t fit on the business card. “Have you yet met Simon, Jocasta’s husband?”

“Briefly,” said Wintermute. “That was all I needed. He’s likely a fortune hunter, but surely there can’t be all that much fortune to hunt, not if the quality of Mrs. Jones’s movies is any guide to her pay scale. Still, if you ask me, he’s kept her glued together all these years. If he’s a fortune hunter, he’s at least earned his fortune.”

“What about the money Jocasta might expect to receive from Oscar, her father?” said Max. He felt that Wintermute was positively letting his hair down at this point, and he wanted to press the advantage. “You don’t include that when you speak of her fortune?”

“Ah. Well. Oscar didn’t much approve of her choice of career, you know. Both he and his sister seem to have held old-fashioned views on this subject and regarded a career on the stage or in film as one step up from prostitution.”

Max chanced his arm. “One wonders how much inheritance Jocasta might in fact expect to, well, inherit?”

“Ah.” Again with the “Ahs,” thought Max. It appeared to be a topic full of hesitancies and doubts. “Not as much as Alec. Amanda also inherits less than Alec. If there had been natural issue of Jocasta’s union with Simon, well…”

“It would have made a difference to Lord Footrustle,” Max finished for him. “As you say, you had known Lord Footrustle—Oscar—a long time. Certainly you knew him when he first met Gwynyth?”

“Indeed, I did. And I did try to talk him out of it. As a friend, as a solicitor.”

“How did they meet? Lord Footrustle and Gwynyth?”

Wintermute replied, “He met her on a cruise to the Baltics, one of those cruises where widowed women outnumber eligible males by a thousand to one.” Max thought fleetingly of his own widowed mother, fascinating male passengers and crew as she sailed practically nonstop from one destination to another.

“So what were the chances he’d come home with a new bride—that he’d actually be married as soon as they landed?” Wintermute was saying. “She’d been a showgirl, part of a dancing and singing troupe onboard ship. Some cabaret-type extravaganza. It was a classic middle-aged crisis situation with Oscar. If he had not been on a ship he’d have bought a red sports car, too, no doubt.”

“Marriage to Gwynyth changed the equation for all of them, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it most certainly did, at least for a while—until the divorce, of course. She came back for more several times, and I would imagine that is why she is here now.”

“I’m not sure I understand the anger I’m sensing here, among certain of the family members.”

“Don’t you really? You’d have to go back a few years, I suppose. Lord Footrustle paid for everyone’s schooling, but they took the ‘fun’ courses rather than get proper qualifications. Lounging about became a permanent trait. Even Randolph’s photography was the sort of choice made by a young man who knows he has great wealth at his back. Lester, on the other hand, never made any choices that stuck and seemed to regard fast dealing as the best way to get ahead. Their cousin Jocasta—well, she at least tried to parlay that feeble talent into something, I’ll give her credit for that. Great expectations, yes, indeed. Then along came Gwynyth. It was what they call a real wake-up call for the younger branches of the family. It wasn’t until her removal—and some of them campaigned mightily for her removal—that hopes rose again, but the twins coming along in the meantime somewhat diluted those hopes. They were his flesh and blood, after all, and baby Alec was much to be desired as a male to carry on the title.”

“I gained no impression that Oscar was fond of the children,” said Max.

“Fondness had nothing to do with it. A hereditary title did.”

“Lord Footrustle was married before, a union which produced Jocasta. What happened to his first wife?”

“Oscar’s first wife is both divorced and dead,” said Wintermute. “In that order. Rather inconsiderate of her not to have spared him the trouble of divorce, so Lord Footrustle always seemed to think.”

“No love lost between them, then.”

“No.”

“He rather lost interest in Jocasta, I gathered, when the marriage dissolved.”

“Yes. And I have gathered from my very occasional reading of the more sensational press that Jocasta therefore sought attention elsewhere. Sadly, that’s not an uncommon reaction, is it?”

Wintermute was by this point on his third drink. He went to reach inside his jacket pocket for his Montblanc and dropped it on the floor. The interview ended with him on his knees crawling about while Max hobbled about trying to help, scanning the floor and the far corners where the pen might have rolled.

“The thing is,” said a thick, garbled voice coming from behind the sofa. “The thing is that I feel there will be an explosion, and soon. So much money, so many who feel slighted. Yes, it—aha!” Wintermute stood, holding the errant pen aloft.

“Mark my words,” he said. “We haven’t come to the end of the trouble yet.”

*   *   *

Max left Wintermute shortly afterward in the company of Cotton, who was attempting to get what sense he could out of the man while he was still on this side of sober. From outside the door, where Max listened unabashedly, he heard Wintermute again mention money in the neighborhood of fifty-plus million pounds.

A sum worth killing for, some might think. Max leaned back against the wall and wondered: Did Wintermute’s being again called to the castle become a sort of catalyst, speeding up the plan to kill Lord Footrustle—if plan there had been? For the killer, the natural assumption would be that Wintermute was contacted to draw up a new will for Lord Footrustle. And perhaps also a will for Lady Baynard, if for some reason she had changed her mind about including Lamorna in her bequests, or about any of a dozen other things. The killer wouldn’t want this complication … it could mean being left out. So any old, existing will was preferable to one that didn’t yet exist and might be deleterious. Of course, it might also have been to the killer’s benefit, but could he or she take the chance? One thing was certain, there was no way to ask anyone, and the killer couldn’t risk waiting to see—waiting for the final will to be prepared and sent back for signing. Or worse, to be signed.

And all this begged the question, did the killer even know about Oscar’s appointment with Wintermute for the coming new year?

Inheritance. Musing on the topic, Max was reminded of Lamorna’s mention of Esau and Jacob. She had said the whole thing reminded her of that Bible story. There had been an inheritance at stake there, and a trick played on the father. Jacob, with the connivance of his mother, had tricked his father into giving Jacob the blessing reserved for the firstborn son, Esau.

Max had always felt it was an unsatisfactory story in terms of bad behavior being rewarded rather than punished—the moral logic somehow felt muddled to him, and he always had the sense that pieces of the story were missing.

In addition, Max had always found it incredible that an old man, however blind, could mistake goatskin for his son’s hairy forearm.

He would have to look up the passage this evening. The day was getting away from him now. He wanted to talk with the disappointed Gwynyth, Lady Footrustle.

CHAPTER 20

I Feel Pretty

Max had hopped his way up a mercifully short flight of steps to the Tower Room of Gwynyth, Lady Footrustle, and knocked at the wooden door.

“Come on in,” she called. “I’m just putting on the finishing touches before dinner.”

He had a struggle with the massive door so she had had to come over to admit him. She wore a skirt that was more a suggestion of fabric than it was actual garb. It bore a print in shades of tan and buttercup yellow to match her hair, somehow highlighting her fairness, and the frailness of her fashionably thin form.

“That nice Inspector Cotton sent that dour little policewoman to tell me you’d be dropping by,” she told him.

Max watched her resettle herself at her makeup table, this gossamer woman who had somehow given birth to those changeling children. Her hair, held back with combs, fell into soft curls at the nape of her neck. As he watched from a chair by the window, she sucked in her cheeks and dusted a brush dipped in pearly pink over the resulting cheekbones before painting her Cupid’s bow mouth in a harmonizing shade. Now she had a little black pencil she was using to dab at her eyelids, a process Max could barely stand to watch without flinching and covering his own eyes.

“I’ve told the police everything already,” she said.
Dab. Dab.
Blink. “So I can’t imagine what new information you think can emerge now.”

“I just had a few questions. Call it curiosity, if you like. Of course, you’re not officially obliged to talk to me.”

She pivoted around to give him a flirtatious once-over.

“I can’t say I mind,” she said. “It’s just that I think you’re wasting your time.”

She sat posed like a Selfridges mannequin on the bench before the makeup table, toes pointed inwardly in a would-be sexy ingénue pose that managed only to appear infantile. He thought fleetingly of Lolita and her Humbert Humbert. It occurred to him that Gwynyth, even in her forties, had not quite achieved adulthood.

She had a face smooth as glass—a perfect complexion, with a somewhat flat aspect to her expression around the blue eyes. Like Amanda’s, her skin was so thick and creamy it seemed impossible blood could be flowing and veins pulsing beneath with the force of life. That type of skin barely wrinkled with age. Max was reminded by her flawlessness of a famous rock crystal skull he had seen once in the British Museum. Supposedly Aztec, it had been examined and proclaimed a fake. Max wished it were that simple with humans to spot the counterfeit.

She looked at him in the mirror, blinking her eyes and smiling with conscious allure.

“You wanted to ask me about something?” she said. “Well, shoot.”

“I gather Leticia’s death was as much a surprise to everyone as was Oscar’s?”

“Oh, yes. It was to
me
, anyway. It was surprising in completely different ways, of course, but it really is a double whammy to lose them both. Leticia complained of aches and pains, maybe too often. Is there a subject more
bor
ing? Mostly it seemed in line with her age. She was ancient. Seventy-five! But she was lively with it, if you follow. Given to loud, strong opinions, not all of which made perfect sense. One thing she said that I agree with was that all was not well in the Joneses’ marriage, if the veiled references to starlets and harlots were any guide.”

“Jocasta’s show business career was a problem for Leticia, I gather,” said Max.

“Oh, and mine!” Gwynyth abandoned her makeup for the moment, turned, and leaned forward in an exaggerated bid for sympathy. The wide-set eyes bored in on him with flattering attention. Max was reminded somehow of Lester. She was trying too hard. “Leticia could not seem to get it through her head that showgirl and prostitute are in no way related professions. I worked jolly hard, singing, dancing—I was rehearsing or performing
all
the time.”

“That must have given you and Jocasta something in common—your similar backgrounds.”

“You must be joking. Besides, Simon paid me much too much attention for Jocasta’s liking, if you know what I mean.”