Death of a Mystery Writer (20 page)

“That's very thorough of you, Miss Cozzens. But I don't expect to have to bother you. It looks as though, at least until we find
Black Widow,
we won't find anything very close to the way Oliver Fairleigh died.”

“You've found no trace of it, then?”

“None at all. Sir Edwin Macpherson is very concerned.”

“Well, he would be, wouldn't he?”

“For money reasons, you mean?”

“Well, it's certainly not the loss to literature that bothers him.” Miss Cozzens slapped her mouth to, in her not very humorous smile. “He will have to make do with
Murder Upstairs and Downstairs.
The case will still be fresh in everybody's mind when it comes out in October. Sir Edwin will be coining money from it.”

“He has the manuscript to that, of course.”

“Oh, yes. We were so behind with it I clean-typed most of it before it was quite finished—not a thing I would normally do, in case of changes. Sir Oliver came and got it after dinner when Mr. Simmington was here, and handed it over himself. He settled down to get the last chapters done the next day, and finished them in a morning. He could always get down to work if he wanted to. He would have hated to miss the Christmas market.”

Receiving a polite nod of thanks from Meredith, Barbara
Cozzens fixed her mouth into a thin, prim line, and walked purposefully away. The whole set of her body told Meredith she had not liked being questioned in front of the servants. In the elaborate dance of social do's and don't's, he seemed to have trodden on her toes.

The other three, meanwhile, had been following the conversation with eager half comprehension, and—in the case of Mrs. Moxon—with some twitches of irritation. Policemen who came down to her kitchen should concentrate their attention on her. She had twice folded her arms over her matronly bosom, in passable imitation of Mrs. Bridges, and when Miss Cozzens went up the stairs, she did it again. Mrs. Moxon, it seemed, was determined to be, not just Mrs. Moxon, but “Cook.”

“Right,” she pronounced finally. “And as I said a moment ago, not before time. Now, what do you want to know?”

“Lovely to find you so cooperative, ma'am,” said Meredith, imperceptibly exaggerating his Welsh singsong. “I've been looking forward to a little chat, like. Saving you up, you might say. We needn't trouble you, Mr. Surtees,” he went on, turning toward him, “since we've been over things, you and I.”

“No trouble,” said Surtees, sitting on massively, his face a mixture of curiosity and conceit. Meredith, his whole manner changing suddenly, fixed him with an eye of steely determination, and said nothing. Eventually Surtees grudgingly shifted his bulk, and let himself out of the door into the garden.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Mrs. Moxon. “The less you have to do with that type, the better.” This was ungrateful of Mrs. Moxon, for as a matter of fact she normally had a high opinion of Surtees as a fellow news gatherer and disseminator. The animosity dated from the moment on Sunday when Surtees had led the inspector into his private room and shut the door on her. This was not her idea of belowstairs honor. Therefore, glad to have had her revenge, she was content to have Wiggens sitting at her side, and gave the inspector to understand that with the two of them to represent servant opinion, he wouldn't go far wrong.

“I suppose you would hear a lot of what goes on in the house,
here, wouldn't you now?” Meredith asked, his voice oozing Celtic charm.

“Not much escapes us,” said Mrs. Moxon complacently.

Wiggens nodded. “What she doesn't hear of inside, I do out,” he said.

“That's splendid, then,” said Meredith. “Now, I'd like to hear your opinions of the various members of the household.”

Mrs. Moxom blossomed. It was just the sort of question in which she felt her own sort of informed acuteness would enable her to shine. “Well, now,” she said. “I suppose we should start at the top. Lady Fairleigh—she's a real lady. Had a lot to put up with—haven't we all? But her more than most—but she covers up beautifully, not that it would deceive a fly. She'd've made someone a very good wife and mother if she hadn't married Sir Oliver. Then there's Sir Mark. Well, Wiggens and me are pleased he got everything.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Because the alternatives was worse,” said Mrs. Moxon succinctly. “There was always this talk about Mark, but I never saw much harm in him, bar his being full as a fruitcake most of the time, and it's not as though the poor little blighter had much of a childhood.”

“Was it worse for him than for the others?”

“Oh, yes, him being the first, and then Miss Bella being the favorite, and Sir Oliver having exhausted himself a bit by the time Master Terry grew up, not that he exhausted himself as much as he ought, heaven knows. Well, where was I, oh, yes, then there's Bella—well, I don't quite know how I'd describe her, more a mixture really. Artful, she is. Knew how to twist her father round her little finger. It used to rile Lady Fairleigh, I know that, though she'd die if she thought she'd shown it. Miss Bella is a bit of a minx, I'd say, but she's not all bad.”

“Not like Terence?”

“Well, I didn't say that, you did, but there have been incidents, it's true—little things . . . I don't like the boy one little bit, and that's the truth. I mind once, years ago, when he can't have
been more than ten or eleven, he saw me take a few scraps of food home from this very kitchen for my own tea. I didn't know he'd noticed—he's never been the wide-eyed sort of child—but he watched me for a fortnight, watched everything I did. Then he came along with everything listed neat and tidy in a notebook, and he threatened to tell his father unless I gave him a pound a week. Have you ever heard the like?”

“What did you do?”

“Laughed in his face, what else? I could afford to. Good cooks write their own contracts these days, and Sir Oliver wouldn't dare to give me notice, no more he wouldn't dare say anything to me, lest I gave mine. I spelled it out for him, young as he was. That experience taught him a thing or two about blackmail, I shouldn't wonder.”

“It may very well have done. Well, that's the family. What about Miss Cozzens and John Surtees?”

“She's all right. Keeps herself
to
herself: ‘I'm not one of you, but I'll be nice as pie if you know your place.' She's been very matey these last few days—afraid of missing out on anything, I shouldn't wonder. Now Surtees—” She thought for a bit, obviously not having expected to be questioned about her fellow servant, and wondering how much loyalty was due to him. Not, it seemed, much. “Well, he likes money, and he likes power, and that's a fact. No morals either.” Mrs. Moxon seemed to swell, as if in consciousness of her own superiority in that respect. Her next words showed that to her (as to the Sunday papers) morals meant sexual morals. “He likes women, that's no secret, or at any rate, he likes to have women sniffing after him. He thinks he's the cat's whiskers—the prize tom in the neighborhood, in fact.” She cackled with laughter. “Thinks more of himself than he thinks of any of them, if you ask me, but there's always plenty of women as will make fools of themselves for a chap like him.”

“Did he and Miss Cozzens sleep together?”

“Miss Cozzens?” Mrs. Moxon looked genuinely startled, and her look made Meredith feel he should have used some such
phrase as “were intimate,” rather than his own particular circumlocution. At length she said: “Not that I know of, no. There's others in the house I wouldn't say the same for.”

“You mean Lady Fairleigh—?”

There came over Mrs. Moxon's plump face a look of the most utter outrage and rebuttal. For once she stuttered for lack of words, a rare experience for her. “Lady Fairleigh? Why, good heavens, man, you must be out of your mind. I've never heard of such a thing. She's a lady. She'd no more sleep with John Surtees than she would with Wiggens here.”

Wiggens gave a complacent grin, as if some sort of compliment were intended. He had been sitting silent, in an old check shirt dirtied by time rather than labor, so perhaps he was pleased at last to have some real part in the conversation.

“Miss Bella, then.”

“Got it on one. Two, anyway. He talks about it when he's had a few to drink sometimes, gives hints—subtle, he probably thinks them, but you'd have to be a half-wit not to understand.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Moxon,” said Meredith, turning now to the things that really interested him rather than those which were designed to show off Mrs. Moxon's powers as an observer, “when was it that the rumors of what Sir Mark had said in the Prince Albert at Hadley got to Wycherley?”

Mrs. Moxon, intent on being a key witness for the Crown, sat and pondered, in a real attempt to get at the right answer: “Well, now, I'd say it was Thursday,” she said, finally. “Because Thursday's my bread day, and my hands were sticky when I told Lady Fairleigh.”

“It was Thursday when you told me,” said Wiggens eagerly. “Because that's one of my pub nights, and I mind we chewed it over at the Arms that same day.”

“Then I must have heard from Betty Pratt on my way to work. Her husband had been over Hadley way the night before, and heard it then. I know Surtees went along to Sir Oliver with the story the next day, must have been Friday.”

“Did he always do that?”

“'Course he did. Sir Oliver used to slip him a fiver now and then, and a tenner if it was something he really wanted to know.”

“Then you don't think anyone in the area would have heard it earlier than Thursday morning.”

“Not they,” said Mrs. Moxon confidently. “If so, they'd have told me. I'm always the first to know. Everyone round here knows I like to hear what's going on. And I'm good about passing it on, aren't I?”

“You are,” confirmed Wiggens sagely.

“So if the poison was put in the decanter by one of the family, or conceivably by one of the servants,” went on Meredith, “it was likely to be on Thursday or after, if the intention was to incriminate Sir Mark after what he said at Hadley. Is that right?”

Mrs. Moxon looked at him with undisguised admiration: “I call that real logistics,” she said.

 • • • 

The journalistic siege of Wycherley Court went on, and seemed likely to continue until either the case was solved, or some equally sensational happening displaced it from the front page. A little army of ace reporters was now camped outside the gates and along the road into the village: men with faces lobster-pink from the unaccustomed fresh air and sunshine, with beer bellies poking unattractively through shirts with buttons missing, men with an air of living in a paradoxical state of continual excitement and inbred cynicism.

Inside Wycherley Court, the inhabitants withstood the siege as best they could. Bella and Terence were already talking about getting away, but they could hardly leave with decency before a week had gone by. With luck the funeral could be fixed for Friday or Saturday, and then they could take off, to nurse their disappointed expectations in conditions of greater privacy, or solicit the sympathy of friends for their grievances. Meanwhile they sulked and skulked around Wycherley Court, watched Mark gradually
assuming the reins of control, and felt their position in the home becoming more and more uncertain. Terence drank.

When Meredith came upon them on Tuesday afternoon it was teatime, and they were all tucking into shrimp sandwiches, fruitcake, and sponge fingers. The atmosphere was less tense than it had been, at least on the surface: perhaps Mark's revelation of the extent of his knowledge of their activities had had a sobering effect; or perhaps he or his mother had been pointing out to the younger children that a display of family animosities in front of the police was to nobody's benefit, least of all their own.

Meredith's arrival was a signal to Mark to do his duty as host and head of the household. He was getting quite good at it. Meredith was ushered to a seat, and plied with offers of sandwiches and tea. As he let himself be served by Lady Fairleigh, he eyed “the young master.” Mark was certainly looking better, as well as behaving better: the whites of his eyes were less like pink-and-red road maps, his suit was now older but more suitable than the sharp job he had been wearing, and his hand, when he passed the teacup, was almost entirely steady. His performance did not please Bella and Terence, but they had been sufficiently brought to heel to keep quiet, and they merely gazed ahead of themselves with an appearance of calm.

“Delicious!” said Meredith, biting a sandwich which was itself hardly more than bite-sized. “Now—business, I'm afraid. First of all, I'd like you to look at these: they're copies of an account Mr. Woodstock has prepared of the birthday party here last Saturday night—all very detailed and precise.”

“A preparation for his article for the
Sunday Grub,
I suppose,” said Bella. “I think he's contemptible.”

Meredith turned to her, his attractive face open and guileless. “You think you deserved better of him, do you?” he said. For some reason Bella flushed and remained silent. Terence shot a sharp, apprehensive gaze from his dulled eyes in Meredith's direction, but the inspector had merely settled himself back more comfortably in his chair.

“I'd like you all—Sir Mark excepted, of course—to look at his account of the positions around the desk at all stages of the present-opening, and tell me if it agrees with your memory of events. And, of course, his account of the conversations as well.”

They accepted their copies, and waited for him to go on.

“There was one more little thing I was thinking of asking,” he said, still more comfortably settled, and sipping his tea, like an old family friend. “Could you tell me the name of the secretary Sir Oliver had before Miss Cozzens?”