“As far as I can go, mate,” he told St. Just. “You’ll have to walk the last few yards. They won’t let us drive up the service road at back, it’s for the ambulances. And the hearses, here and there.”
St. Just approached the building with no small trepidation. He had had a particular abhorrence for such places ever since he had spent every weekend for four months trying to find a suitable accommodation for his mother several years before, determined to meet her expressed wish “to die by the sea.” She had in fact succumbed in a small, quiet, and fastidiously run establishment operated by Anglican nuns, not far from St. Ives. Still, he never could set foot in the door of any of these “assisted living” places without breathing a fervent prayer that he would die quickly, in his home, in his sleep.
He had taken enormous satisfaction, however, in getting one of these operations shut down by the local authorities; he periodically checked to make sure its former owner was still in his cage and likely to remain there.
This place was better than most, he could see right away. Quite pricey, too, from the look of things, although the decoration leaned heavily toward sentimental scenes from the Bible featuring a patient Christ dividing loaves, roughing up the money changers, or delivering the Sermon on the Mount. The place was spotless, with fresh flowers dotted about the hallway tables. Agnes must have done well for herself out of at least one of her husbands.
The woman who bustled up to him wore not the starched nurse uniform and cap of old, but a brightly colored smock over white nylon trousers, the smock covered with what looked to be bright yellow ducks roving happily in a field of red tulips at sunset. It would have been suitable garb for a preschool setting.
Catching his look, the nurse, who had introduced herself as Mrs. Mott, laughed.
“We try to do away with any reminders that they are effectively in a hospital and not, frankly, likely ever to leave under their own steam. Something cheerful to look at, that’s the ticket. I don’t much mind looking a bloody fool, although I do get some stares when I have to stop in the Sainsbury’s on my way home. Right! Now, you’re here to see Agnes. I’ve told her to expect a visitor, but I didn’t go into the details. Thought I might leave all that to you. You’ll find her on the tennis courts.”
At his look of surprise, she laughed.
“I should say, near the tennis courts. This used to be a school, you see. We still allow people from the village to use the courts. She likes to watch the players. Colin, I believe his name is, is her favorite. You’ll see. She’s quite deaf, you know, and will only wear her hearing aid when men aren’t around-terribly vain, but sweet, she is. So I warn you, you’ll need to shout.”
He found her in a wheelchair, knitting, her gnarled hands trembling slightly as she painstakingly worked the needles. Age spots had nearly turned the pale skin of her hands a uniform brown. She appeared to be working on one of those pointless decorative items people used, presumably, to keep their boxes of facial tissue warm. Her eyes never dropped to her knitting, which no doubt explained the gaping holes in the colorful green and red object emerging from the needles. She greeted him with a brief smile, revealing that she had kept many of her teeth, before again fastening her gaze on the two handsome tennis players visible over the hedge that divided the nursing home from the courts.
“Isn’t the blonde one a sight fer tired eyes, though?” she asked.
St. Just smiled, nodded. The blonde one looked like the model for a Viking invader-tall, slim, broad-shouldered.
“It keeps me yoong, being around yoong folk,” she said. “There’s nothing but old folk livin’ here.”
They watched the game in companionable silence awhile, the only sound the distant swoosh of the waves and the thunk of the ball as the boys batted it back and forth. Suddenly, she turned to him and said:
“The saicret to a long life is to die a vairgin, and so the Chairch would have us believe. Me last oozeband was a layer and a farnicator, God rest his soul. It shairtened me life, living with that man.”
Again she gave him her Stonehenge smile. Looking at her, St. Just found her assertion difficult to countenance. She was one of the oldest living women he had ever seen, and if Mr. Baker had worn her down, there seemed little sign of it now. He would take odds she’d live to see a century.
During a break when one of the boys scurried off to retrieve a return that had gone wildly astray, he introduced his topic.
“Mrs. Baker.” When she didn’t respond, St. Just raised his voice several notches. “Mrs. Baker. I am a policeman investigating two particularly brutal recent murders that seem somehow to be connected with the death of Sir Winthrop decades ago. You were working for him at the time he was killed, weren’t you?”
“’Course I was. And I never forgot one minute of them goings-on, neither. But what I want to know is why it’s taken you so long to coom ask me aboot it?”
“I think, Mrs. Baker, because sometimes the wheels of justice grind finely but they grind exceedingly slowly. By coincidence or by design, Violet Winthrop, as was, is implicated in two very recent murders. I think it possible she’s being set up. I would like to know by whom.”
She peered at him out of the maze of wrinkles around her eyes, like a small prehistoric bird looking out from the undergrowth.
“What makes you so sairtain o’ that? I give it as me opinion at the time, it was Lady pushed Sir Winthrop off his pairch. I know what I haird. Only the yoong man said daifferent, and she was let off. And that’s an end on it. The truth o’ that matter noon wanted known. Maybe someone wants her punished now for what she done then. It’s a wicked thing, to be sairtain, but I dunna see how I can help you with it.”
Losing interest, she turned from him to resume watching the game. Colin thundered up and down the court on powerful legs. He was too big a lad to be agile, but he demolished the ball whenever by chance it caught his racket. His small, dark opponent scampered lightly back and forth, easily outmaneuvering him with precisely aimed returns.
Why had he come? he wondered. Surely, she was right. Whatever she knew of that, by all accounts, badly managed case was so lost in the mists of time as to be irretrievable as evidence now. He’d seen the reports, the statements taken by those “investigating.”
But every instinct told him that the Winthrop murder held the key to recent events. Anything else was coincidental beyond belief.
Eventually, Colin lost the match on the serve. The boys were packing up their gear when Agnes turned to him and announced she was cold. He unlocked the brakes of her chair, and, following her directions, took her up in the lift to her room, a small but cheerful private room with flowered wallpaper, overlooking the front of the building where a small ornamental waterfall spilled over into a rock garden. Perhaps a bite to eat in town while he put in time, he was thinking, waiting for the late train… “I have a photo of the castle as it was then, you know, if you care to see?”
He feigned curiosity, more out of politeness and deference to her age than anything, and followed her arthritic, pointing finger to the bottom shelf of a painted yellow bookcase against the wall. There on its side lay a large, velvet-covered photo album, of a type he hadn’t seen since his grandmother’s day. He hefted it over to the table where she sat and placed it before her, rather fearing a protracted stroll through all ninety years of Agnes’ memories. Indeed, she paused at pages bearing a photo montage of husbands one through five, and took a moment to introduce them all. But then she flipped back to near the beginning of the book.
He saw what looked like a professionally composed photograph of an imposing gray castle set against thundering gray skies. But what caught his eye were the people in the photo on the opposite page.