Minty said, “When I’m in here I’m private. Leave me alone,” but Auntie took no notice.
“Getting rid of that knife was wise,” she continued. “It was harboring untold millions of germs.” Was Auntie actually addressing her at last? She seemed to be. “I’ve just seen Jock’s mother. You didn’t know Mrs. Lewis was here with me, did you?”
“Go away.” Minty thought she’d die if Mrs. Lewis manifested herself.
The rain was coming down in sheets when she went downstairs. The house seemed empty. It felt cold, the air gray like twilight. Laf came round at four under a big umbrella with palm trees on it and said he’d be taking the car, it was pouring so. God knew where he’d park but he’d do his best. Auntie’s words had upset Minty. Auntie and Mrs. Lewis might come into the cinema. She started feeling nervous. And there was no wood to touch in a cinema, it was all plastic and cloth and metal.
Kind and gracious, proud of her newfound humility, Sonovia went ahead into their row, smiling over her shoulder. “There you are, my deah, you sit between us. You got the popcorn, Laf?”
He had and it was clean and dry, quite fit for Minty to eat. The cinema was filling up, all the seats in front of them occupied. There was no room for Auntie and Jock’s mother. The lights dimmed and suddenly the screen was filled with the bright flashing colors and ear-splitting noises she associated with her banishing of Jock. Minty delicately picked out the smaller pellets of popcorn and relaxed.
When she did get to see Mrs. Lewis she’d ask what had happened to her money and make the old woman answer. Maybe she’d write it down. They never answered when you spoke to them but they might if it was all down on paper. As the big picture started she was planning what she’d write, how she’d push the paper in front of Mrs. Lewis’s face, and it was quite a long time before she lifted her eyes to the screen.
Chapter 18
JIMS GAVE VERY little more thought to what Zillah had told him of the police’s intention to call on him on Monday morning. He’d be at home, so of course he’d see them, it was his duty as a citizen; he’d answer their routine questions and later he’d stroll across to the Commons. Unaccustomed to spending much time at home, he found this Sunday evening almost unbearably tedious. Leonardo had invited him to a gay club, the Camping Ground in Earl’s Court Square, and Jims would have loved to accompany him but knew where to draw the line. Instead, with Eugenie sitting beside him making critical comments, he watched as much of a Jane Austen costume drama on television as he could bear and went to bed early.
Something woke him at four o’clock in the morning. He sat up in bed in his solitary and rather austere bedroom, remembering that he hadn’t spent the entire weekend in Casterbridge and Fredington Crucis, as last evening he had taken for granted and sent to the back of his mind. Now it resurfaced, but in a different form. On Friday afternoon he’d driven back to London to recover the mislaid notes for his hunting speech. And he couldn’t simply tell the police that, because the notes hadn’t been in his own home in Abbey Gardens Mansions but in Leonardo’s house in Chelsea. A faint but consistent sheen of sweat broke out across Jims’s face, down his neck, and across his smooth golden chest. He switched the light on.
They would want to know why those papers were in Glebe Terrace and even if he could somehow satisfy them on that point, would inquire why, having recovered them, he failed to go home and spend the night with his new wife in Westminster. It wasn’t as if she was away somewhere-they knew she was at home because they had phoned her there, as she’d told him last night. They’d want to know why, instead, he’d passed the night under the same roof as Leonardo Norton, of the well-known London and Wall Street stockbrokers Frame da Souza Constantine. Various options presented themselves. He could omit to tell them he’d returned to London. Or he could tell them he had returned in the afternoon, had found Zillah asleep, and-unwilling to disturb her-had recovered the papers and gone straight back to Dorset. Or he could say he’d come home late in the evening, found the papers, spent the night with Zillah, and left again very early in the morning before the police came. This would necessitate Zillah’s lying for him. He thought it likely she’d agree, and the children didn’t count since they’d both have been in bed asleep.
Jims hadn’t much in the way of morals; he was generally unprincipled and unscrupulous and quite capable of telling a “white lie” to the police. But when he thought of asking his wife to lie for him, to tell a detective inspector of the murder squad (or whatever they’d changed its name to) that he had been here when he hadn’t, his blood ran cold. He was a member of Parliament. Last week the leader of the Opposition had smiled on him, patted his shoulder, and said, “Well done!” Other MPs referred to him in the Chamber as the honorable member for South Wessex. The honorable member. “Honor” wasn’t a word Jims often much considered but he considered it now. In his position and capacity, honor was supposed to be attached to him; it was as much invested in him as in any medieval knight or servant of the sovereign. Sitting up in bed, wiping the perspiration off himself with a corner of the sheet, Jims told himself he couldn’t ask someone else to lie for him.
What he’d do was forget all about having come home for those notes. Between now and nine when the police were arriving, it would slip his mind. After all, he hadn’t really needed them and could easily have delivered a successful speech without them. It was only that he disliked going unprepared to any function at which he had to speak. He made an effort to get back to sleep but he might as well have tried to turn time back a couple of days, which he would also have liked to do. At six he got up and found that Eugenie and Jordan had already destroyed the peace of his living room by switching on the television to a noisy and very old black-and-white Western. By the time the police came he was cross and moody, but he contrived to sit on the sofa beside Zillah, holding her hand.
The detective inspector was the same woman who had gone with Zillah to the mortuary. She had another plainclothes officer with her, a sergeant. Zillah asked her if she minded Jims’s wife being present and she said not at all, please stay. Zillah squeezed Jims’s hand and looked lovingly into his face, and Jims had to admit to himself that sometimes she could be an asset to him.
He was asked about the weekend and he said he’d spent it in Dorset. “I went down to my constituency on Thursday afternoon and held my appointments in Casterbridge on Friday morning. At the Shire Hall. After that I drove back to my house in Fredington Crucis and worked on a speech I was making on Saturday evening to the Countryside Alliance. I spent the night there and the following day, made my speech later on, and dined with the alliance. I drove home here on Sunday morning.”
The sergeant took notes. “Is there anyone who can confirm your presence in your Dorset house on Friday, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
Jims put on an expression of incredulity. It was one he’d often worn in the House of Commons when some government member made a remark he thought it would become him to regard as ludicrous. “To what are these questions tending?”
He knew the answer he’d get. “They are a matter of routine, sir, that’s all. Is there someone who can confirm your presence? Perhaps a member of your staff?”
“In these degenerate days,” drawled Jims, “I do not have a staff. A woman comes up from the village to clean and keep an eye on things. A Mrs. Vincey. She provides food in the fridge for the weekend when I’m going to be there. She wasn’t there that day.”
“No one called on you?”