Fear had never known him to fail. Still, it seemed to him the more questions they had asked, the more the motives became blurred. And all of them, especially that actor fellow, he was sure, were keeping something back.
He was about to ask about Violet when his mobile erupted again. Maybe, thought Fear, his wife could talk Emma into reprogramming it back to the way it was. Or at least talk her into helping him find the volume control.
Albert had once been in a play where he carried the part of a drunken polo-playing prat who lied to the police about his involvement in a hit-and-run accident. That had not ended well for the prat, as he recalled. But in many another play, Albert’s character had gotten away with all kinds of things, up to and including murder.
Albert wondered if his moral compass were being constantly reset by the last part he had played, the last movie he had seen. It was a sobering thought that made him reach for the glass of whiskey at his elbow. He sat back, looking at the faded tapestry hanging on his bedroom wall, a depiction of Cain bashing in Abel’s head as a naked Adam and Eve watched, wringing their hands, from a distance. Surely they had learned to clothe themselves by the time the children came along? Albert wasn’t sure if the wall-hanging were yet another example of his father’s macabre sense of humor or his poor taste in decorators. Probably a bit of both. Given the circumstances, something about the portrayal struck him as prophetic. Albert looked away.
He drained his glass and thought some more about his find in the cellar-not Ruthven’s body, but his father’s manuscript. Instinctively, he wanted to know what was in that manuscript-the manuscript he had carefully avoided mentioning to St. Just-before he handed it over to the police and unleashed heaven-knew-what furies on himself, Sarah-on all of them, for that matter. One thing was certain: With Adrian as the author of whatever secrets it might contain, the manuscript could only be a ticking time bomb.
13. TO LONDON, TO LONDON
THE NEXT AFTERNOON ST. Just found himself in Chelsea, his car penned in by Mercedeses, BMWs, limousines, and other necessities of the wealthy. Why did the French call it circulation when nothing moved?
The house he was seeking-its address yielded by Ruthven’s laptop-was tucked discreetly away in an enclave overlooking houseboats docked along the Thames. The eighteenth-century structure had at some point been converted into three flats. St. Just didn’t dare estimate what they cost their owners; he would probably be off in his guess by half.
The flat of Chloe Beauclerk-Fisk, as he saw when he had shown his warrant card and been admitted by a diminutive maid with a pronounced dowager’s hump and a flesh-colored hearing aid in each ear, was decorated in a spare, minimalist style with a strong Asian influence. Looking around him as he minced behind the woman leading him through the foyer, shortening his long steps to keep from running her down, St. Just felt that Chloe Beauclerk Fisk, Ruthven’s mother, might be a devotee of-what was it called? Dung Shoe or something like that. Sung Fu? The latest craze where yuppies who had spent their lives acquiring rubbish now couldn’t wait to pay someone to get rid of it.
He decided on short acquaintance with Chloe herself that overall, this minimalist décor might be a good thing, perhaps even prolonging her life, for he gained the strong impression within five minutes in her company that she was half in the bag most of the time. The lack of clutter probably helped prevent her falling on her face all day long.
Seeing him and the maid hovering at the entry to the drawing room, Chloe waved away the old woman with one hand while signaling him to enter with the other, like someone guiding a plane in for landing. A Pekinese teetered over to inspect him-one of those dogs he always felt looked like it came with batteries-and apparently finding nothing amiss, disappeared on unknown canine business.
Still without a word, she indicated that St. Just should sit in an unyielding wooden structure that resembled nothing so much as the executioner’s chairs he had seen in American documentaries on the telly. The chair proved to be lower than he had calculated and he fell into it hard, like a collapsing bridge.
She herself chose to remain standing-rather, weaving, though ramrod-straight-by the fireplace. She was a stout woman, her figure sheathed in unyielding foundation garments, her bosom a shelf-like, impenetrable Latex fortress. Two round earrings the size of walnuts eclipsed the lobes of her ears. Pouches of fat padded her chin and cheeks-perhaps she was hoarding the rest of the nuts. But her face in profile as she turned to gaze out the window was flat, the nose nearly bridgeless. She wore a coral shade of lipstick, carelessly applied-a difficult color for any woman to wear, an impossible one in her case.
He looked around. There was little else in the room on which to rest the eye, excepting a large Japanese screen hung over the fireplace in place of the traditional painting. Beneath it sat a glass of what probably was vodka, and a waterless vase holding one stark, dried tree branch.
Her voice when she spoke was deep, seductive, whiskey-soaked, like Lauren Bacall doing voiceovers for cat food. It also conveyed a distinctly American accent, overlaid by a British upper-class drawl.
“What are you doing to catch my son’s killer? Anything?” she asked. The words might have been belligerent; the tone conveyed only shocked anguish. Her eyes struggled to bring into focus this bearer of bad tidings in the form of an oversized plainclothes detective.
It was possibly St. Just’s least-favorite question from the public, and he was not yet ready to answer.
“All that we can,” he said at last, adding: “I didn’t realize you were American.”
“Oh, yes. Well, of course, I became a British citizen years ago.”
What she actually said could best be rendered as, “became a Brishish zhitizhen,” but St. Just could just about catch the spirit of what she was trying to say. Good lord, the woman was boiled as an owl, and it was just on two in the afternoon. Even allowing for the extra rations allotted for grief, he felt somehow that with Chloe, this was no rare occurrence.
She was looking about the room now, as if wondering where on earth she’d left her British passport. Like St. Just, she found little to divert her gaze, and after awhile she dropped her eyes to study the contents of the glass she was now clutching like a crystal ball. Silence hung in the room, except for the faint, annoying tinkle of some chimes on the balcony just visible through glass doors.
St. Just might not have been in the room; Chloe had retreated into some foggy area where, possibly, she mulled the problem of interest rates, global warming, or the death of her son-it was difficult to tell from her battened-down expression.
“Fucking chimes,” she said, finally, looking up. “The decorator said they would keep the bad spirits away. Guess not. Poncy little creep. I keep meaning to… Would you like a drink?”
He surprised her by nodding. She seemed to want company, but he felt it would be a delicate balancing act to keep her just sober enough to answer his questions. Maybe if he joined her he could control the pace of her consumption.
“Drinking on the job? Good for you,” she said. “That’s precisely why the sun never used to set on the British Empire. Don’t know what could have gone wrong. I’ll just ring for Augusta.” She lurched toward a bell pull at the side of the mantel. St. Just, who already had spied an elaborately carved drinks cabinet in one corner, stopped her. If Augusta was the woman who had admitted him, it would amount to cruelty to make her shuffle all the way back in here.