The Old Contemptibles (11 page)

Jury was silent.

“You had, or meant to have, dinner with her last evening?”

“Meant to have, yes. But she said she couldn’t, that she had another appointment. How did you know?”

A deferential shrug. “The calendar. ‘R, din.’ was written in. And then crossed off.” Kamir shrugged. “You don’t know who it was she intended to see?”

Jury shook his head. “No.”

“But you must have questioned—”

“No,
I said. For some reason, she wouldn’t tell me.”

Again, a silence fell. Kamir finally broke it. “Who would have reason to kill her?”

Jury stared at Kamir.

“Do you think, Mr. Jury, we could walk a bit, sit on the heath, perhaps? I’m finding this café extremely depressing.” Wearily, he looked at Jury. “I see you are too.”

Jury had more than the café to be depressed about, he thought, as he agreed.

 • • • 

They were sitting on a bench along one of the paths crisscrossing the common. When Jury was a boy, Blackheath had been more exciting a prospect to visit than the Tower. He could almost see the coaches, hear the horses’ hooves, hear the thunder and yell of the highwaymen as they halted the great coaches.

He had told Kamir during their walk here that, unless one counted the grandparents, Jane Holdsworth had no enemies. Looking out over the enormous green, whose horizon had seemed endless when he was a lad, he told Kamir that Dick Turpin must have been on his mind.

Enemies. The word seemed to have no relation to Jane at all. And yet, she did not have particular friends, either; acquaintances, one or two of whom he’d met, but close friends, no.

Kamir was looking down at the spiral notebook, talking about the Cumbria family. In-laws, Jury reminded him. Except for the sister,
she had no family. And Alex, of course. He seemed to have made up an entire family for her on his own.

“What I’ve learned about them,” said Kamir, “you already know. You know far
more,
I’m sure. But I will tell you what I know. The husband, Graham—”

Jury felt an upsurge of jealousy.

“—is dead. The second Mrs. Crabbe Holdsworth—Graham’s father—Genevieve, who insists on the French ‘ve-
ev’
pronunciation, seemed far more concerned about her grandson’s whereabouts than about the death of the mother.”

“Hardly surprising. The death of the mother, as far as Genevieve is concerned, would land Alex on her doorstep. I believe she’s suffering under a misapprehension there, from what I’ve heard of Alex.” Jury was able to smile at that.

“There is the grandfather, Crabbe (what strange names you English have) Holdsworth, to whom I did not speak. There is his brother, George, unmarried; a painter-cousin who lives in a cottage on the grounds named Francis Fellowes; and, in addition to the servants, the sister.
Her
sister. I found it odd that Madeline Galloway was part of that household. She acts as Mr. Holdsworth’s secretary or assistant. I find this rather strange.” Kamir closed his notebook.

“It was through Madeline that Jane met her husband. Jane was visiting there.”

Kamir turned to Jury in surprise. “But that would mean Miss Galloway had been in the household for, what? Certainly over sixteen years.”

“Eighteen or nineteen. She was in her twenties, I think, when she first took that job.”

Kamir frowned. “But she looks so much younger than she must be.”

Jury turned quickly to meet Kamir’s frown. “ ‘Looks’? How on earth have you had time to see her?”

“Just this morning, early. But she’s here, Mr. Jury. In London. At Brown’s Hotel. And so is Genevieve Holdsworth. They’ve been here for two days; the sister came up to London to interview a few people for Mr. Holdsworth. He wishes to have his library catalogued, or some such thing. Mrs. Holdsworth came to shop, apparently. You didn’t know they were here?”

To Jury, Blackheath’s verdant green expanse and its far horizon
were shrinking to little more than a stingy garden plot, the leaden sky closing in. “I didn’t.” Why in the name of heaven keep something as simple as the visit of one’s sister a secret?
It’s just someone you don’t know.
He had been hurt enough to think that she’d needed to keep
any
visitor a secret. He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees and his head down.

Quickly, Kamir added, “Her purpose in coming here was not to see Jane Holdsworth. Although she did say she had intended to.”

Jury looked up into Kamir’s troubled face. “Then it wasn’t Madeline—or Genevieve—she was going to see last night?”

Kamir sighed. “Not according to Miss Madeline.”

“What about these calendar entries?” Jury felt a fool. Her lover, and he didn’t appear to know anything. “We—ate out usually. I didn’t see much of the kitchen.”
I hardly know a room in this house except the bedroom . . .
And then he looked at Kamir, hard. “Hadn’t she entered whoever it was on this damned calendar?”

“No. There was only your name.”

“Her sister. What was she like?”

“Pretty, in a thin, rather nervous sort of way. Intelligent. Rather strange a woman like that would reach middle-age without marrying.” Kamir looked at Jury.

“I believe she thought she would be. I believe she meant to marry Graham Holdsworth.”

Kamir held up his hands in a questioning gesture. “We spoke of enemies?”

“Would she have waited eighteen years?”

“Some will wait forever.”

“Alibi?”

“No.”

“Would you mind if I spoke with her?”

“No. As I said, she is at Brown’s. But I believe she leaves today on an afternoon train from Euston. Genevieve Holdsworth left early this morning.”

But Jury’s mind was less occupied with them at the moment than it was with Kamir’s earlier statement,
There was only your name.

He rose and said, “Perhaps I’ll also take an afternoon train from Euston.”

Kamir turned his brown, searching eyes on Jury’s face. “If the situation were reversed, Superintendent—”

Jury half-smiled. “I know, your name on the calendar; your prints all over the house; you, the last one as far as I knew, to ever see her alive . . .” He paused. “Oh, I’d tell you you wouldn’t be taking the train from Euston.”

At Euston Station, Alex slipped two twenties on the turntable and asked for a single, first-class ticket to Windermere. Both ticket and change were spun back to him without the clerk’s even looking up.

 • • • 

Perhaps it was a waste of money, he thought, stowing his rucksack and slicker overhead in the empty compartment. He could as easily have paid for a second-class and then just moved along here once his ticket had been punched. But he was young. If you’re young, you’re expected to do something either illegal or rude. What he would have to do at some point was find an Eton jacket and school tie to use for British Rail rides.

Right now, though, it was more important to have a place to himself to think. He had managed, with endless cups of coffee, to stay awake. Sleep was out; he wouldn’t dare. He would dream. He would dream about his mother and it would be one of those diabolically happy dreams that one never wanted to wake from even in the best of circumstances. And in waking, he would be totally vulnerable to the onslaught of feeling he had armored himself to avoid. He remembered too many times waking up to misery (at the Holdsworths’, in the scummy gray darkness of Severn School, at frozen points on a railway station when his father was coming to collect him long ago when he’d wake on the train . . .). If the dreams had
themselves been miserable, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it was all a trick, wasn’t it, life? Dream of a field grazed by sheep and wake up to wolves.

He took a small notebook and a pen from his pocket and held them, notebook open, pen unscrewed.
HELL.
He wrote it down. And then he crossed it out. Why would anyone,
anything,
bother to think up a Hell in the afterlife when all you had to do was stop awhile in this one?

Fields flew past, unremarked. All Alex saw was his own dim reflection in the pane. Occasionally a telephone pole here, a silo there. Farther along light shimmered over fields encircling some distant mirage of a village.

He leaned back. Money, fortunately, was no problem. Alex hadn’t saved for rainy days; he’d counted on torrents, and one had come.

Some of the money he had just won on Fortune’s Son was now on his person. For two years he had accumulated money to get him and his mum to someplace the Holdsworths had never heard of—Lithuania, he understood, was pleasant. Fourteen hundred pounds. A hundred in his wallet (less the train fare), six hundred strapped in a small money-bag round his ankle, four sewn into the lining of his jacket, the rest in an inside pocket of the rucksack.

Over four thousand quid had been accumulated during his business dealings at Severn School. Twice he had been sent down for cardplaying, although the headmaster could never understand why he played poker, since he never seemed to win.

 • • • 

When it had finally been decided that Alex
must
go off to private school, he had made the best of it. It wasn’t that he minded so much going to Severn School—actually, it made a change for a while from his comprehensive-school “mates,” whose idea of having a good time was spending Saturdays at the cinema, or going biking, or sitting about in some clubby way smoking and lying about their conquests with girls.

Alex certainly had nothing against girls; he just couldn’t find one with any imagination. They turned out to be merely prettier versions of the boys; they went to the cinema and had sleep-over parties where they smoked and talked about the boys.

While his schoolchums were sneaking into X-rated films and leaving with only Parently Approved girls, Alex was studying racing
forms, the stock market, and estate agents’ brochures and adverts for properties in Ibiza. Merely for practice, he’d follow the gentrification of the London burbs. He’d take the tube to Limehouse, Wanstead, even Bow—which was now trendy. Bow, would you believe it? Alex decided that once he got the stake he’d start a trend.

Alex studied demographics, not people. He knew about people simply from listening in on conversations in tea rooms, on park benches, and in whatever pubs he could get into in dark glasses shoved on top of his head just to show he didn’t have anything to hide. He was tall for his age and his voice, fortunately, had changed early.

But he couldn’t get into the betting shops. Sitting on a park bench he’d found a seedy old con man named Ned Rice, a really convincing charmer with an uppercrust accent, whom he’d taken on as partner. It was Ned who sat in the battered Land Rover and got a third. Alex got two-thirds; the ideas were his.

In addition, he’d take bets for a few, a very few, of his mates. When they didn’t have two pence to rub together he’d tell them they could bet on margin. He tried to explain it was betting on the future, a concept they loved, since the unmoneyed future was abstract. Anyway, rarely did they lose.

As Alex looked at his reflection in the glass now, his head swaying dozingly with the motion of the train, he thought that was about as much as you could expect. Living on Margin.

 • • • 

He felt his shoulder being shaken, looked up, saw the youngish face of the conductor, heard him ask for the ticket.

Thank God it had only been a light doze, not the deep sleep that he feared. He pulled out the ticket. . . .

Jesus. The conductor.

Alex’s mind flashed to the morning newspaper, not knowing whether her death would be of any interest to the papers or be merely a statistic. But what if the authorities wanted to get hold of Alex enough to put a picture in the paper. And why, anyway, was he so intent on keeping his whereabouts a secret? He didn’t know. He merely pondered this with his face turned to the window image of himself as the conductor’s punch bit into his ticket.

The man might remember the face of the boy who detrained in Oxenholme.

Now he was asking Alex if he was all right.

“Never better, guv.” Alex gave him a broad smile. “Bored, is all.” Alex shook his head. “School, bloody school.”

The train conductor probably wasn’t too long out of it; his uniform and a complexion made pasty by his indoor work made his ferret-face look older. He had a thin nose and thin lips that tilted up in a smile now. “Thought you’d be ’avin’ yer ’olidays round about now.”

“Nah.” Alex unzipped a pocket of his rucksack and pulled out a deck of greasy cards. “You must get a bit of time off from patrolling them corridors. What say to a game? Penny a point, odds against me, can’t say fairer than that.” In one smooth motion he had fanned out the deck.

Challenged to a game he knew he’d be a sure loser; cards held no interest for him except insofar as they offered an opportunity for bluffing—for freezing the facial muscles, for hiding feelings. Anyway, he could only play if there was a lot of money in the pot.

The conductor’s smile broadened. “Not with one handles a deck like that, mate. I’ve me wife and kiddies t’look out fer.”

He left the carriage.

In his mind’s eye, Alex saw him looking at his, Alex’s, picture in the paper.
Nah, couldn’ be ’im, cheeky young bastard. No one’d want to play cards with his mum just dead.

Outside the Windermere station there was a rack for bikes. Upon inspecting the four that had been shoved in, Alex found one that hadn’t a lock on it. He looked it over carefully, decided it was worth maybe twenty, thirty pounds and left fifty in a grubby envelope he’d rooted from a dustbin. He hoped the owner of the bike would see the envelope forked into the slot where the bike had been.

As he wheeled away, alternately hopping up and pushing with his foot, he imagined this was how a fugitive must feel, guilty or innocent.

 • • • 

He couldn’t get across the lake—he probably wouldn’t have wanted to take the ferry anyway—but at least, on the bike, once he got to the
other side of Windermere and to Coniston Water, he could find tracks inaccessible to automobiles and thereby get to Boone by a more direct route.