“What do you mean, short-sighted?” said George, thoroughly affronted. “The old man might have been dead long before we had to decide what to do about the kid.”
“Thank you for illustrating my point so nicely. As it happens, the ‘old man’ was.
“Natasha wasn’t planning to reveal her identity-at least to the necessary extent-until well after Sir Adrian was dead and the inheritance secure. But once her mother spilled the beans, she couldn’t risk having Sir Adrian start snooping into her affairs. So she moved up the timetable for Sir Adrian’s death, which I am certain she had planned from the first. When the time was right, she would strike. With Ruthven dead, George took his place as heir; her mother had already secured rights to the proceeds by her marriage. Everything was in place. Why not, then, strike now? She would win either way. But her relationship with George, cold and calculated as it was, must not be subjected to analysis.
“What did Sir Adrian do, Natasha, when you went for your friendly little chat with your new stepfather? Suggest a blood test, that very subject being so fresh in his mind? Just as I did to George, just now?”
Natasha held her silence, but her expression told him the game was up. If she hadn’t chosen to tell so many direct lies-about the child, just for one-she might have gotten away with it.
Wonderful, he thought, what a good line of bluff can produce. Didn’t she know: The National Health released medical records to the police only under threat of torture. And sometimes, not even then.
26. ST. JUST IS DENIED
AS THEY DROVE AWAY some time later, Sergeant Fear’s mind was still following the strings that had led his superior to Natasha. He drove slowly this time, but distractedly; several times St. Just had to warn him off a ditch on the narrow drive away from the house. Natasha, George, and Paulo had been taken into custody on their various charges and been driven off to be sorted out on their journeys through the legal system. George would be out in a few years; there was little, so far as St. Just knew, to stop him inheriting Adrian’s precious title, but he wondered how easy a time he and Paulo would have getting their hands on the money, under the circumstances. Somehow, he felt a good solicitor might be able to sort all that out. It seemed a shame, but there it was.
“Will it stick?” Fear asked at last.
“Oh, yes, I believe so. George, her ‘alibi,’ isn’t going to stand by their mutual story for a minute. Then there are Ruthven’s phone records, his credit card receipts, his appointments calendar- somewhere, I would be willing to bet, there’s at least one waiter who saw this unforgettable beauty dining with Ruthven in London. But most of all, there’s Ruthven’s child. We’ve got her for lying straight down the line. Circumstantial? Some of it. But the prosecution will have more than enough to go on when George caves, which he will.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Sir,” Sergeant Fear said at last. “Just who in hell did kill Winnie Winthrop?”
“You want my guess or my certainty? We’ll have to wait in part for Mrs. Butter’s complete translation to confirm it. But Violet, of course, with Sir Adrian’s help in the coverup. You can put five stars by her statement regarding her deep love for Winnie Winthrop. She wanted out, and she wanted the cash to go with her.”
“Sir Adrian’s help?”
“Back in the days when he was plain old John Davies, yes. Madly in love with the delectable, completely unattainable Lady Winthrop, as he was all his life, but having to settle in the end for plain old Chloe. Adrian, as we are the last to know, was part of that whole crowd at the time. He’d fallen head over heels with Violet, who barely noticed he was alive, but found him immensely useful when he offered to testify he was in bed with her at the time of the murder.
“As I shall explain in great detail to Mrs. Romano, her vow of silence to him is now officially broken. She’s coming to the station, and this time to tell all. She knew he was in bed with someone, just that it wasn’t Violet.”
“He paid her, all these years, for her silence?”
“And the big payoff was to come at the end. When he met Maria Romano again, years later, I think it was by chance. He realized: so much time had passed, but she hadn’t told what she knew. I imagine he considered her discretion made her worth her weight in gold, but it would be as well to assure her silence. He took her in, took care of Paulo, left them both extremely well off in the will, at least by Mrs. Romano’s standards. If Paulo isn’t yet another illegitimate by-blow in this case, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Good God, you don’t mean-?”
“I do. Just a guess. But that would explain so much about her silence, would it not? Why not just tell me she worked at the bloody Winthrop castle? Mrs. Romano is basically an honest soul; it’s the one thing she did that didn’t add up, and the discretion of a good servant didn’t entirely account for it. She doesn’t even seem to resent, if she realizes it, that her cut of the will is a fraction of what the others got. Anyway, it’s irrelevant to the case against Natasha, so I’m not going to press her on where Paulo came from- yet. Not if she tells me what she knows about that night: that it was she who was with Sir Adrian. Which of course she was afraid to tell the authorities at the time. I’d bet my last shilling she was in the country illegally, which probably answers to her silence, as well.
“As for Sir Adrian-are we really surprised? No one doubted for a minute he had the heart of a murderer, that he was a man of many guilty secrets, some major, some minor. He’d changed his name to get the title illegally, but who cared about that? Only he and Chloe. But, by the way, there’s one other thing that got in our way: He was Welsh, which helped him even more in keeping his origins quiet.”
“I don’t follow, Sir.”
“Davies is a common name in Wales. And, by tradition, children in Wales sometimes take different names from their parents, often a name evocative of the father’s place of origin, creating even more of a muddle for anyone interested enough to try to trace his origins. I wondered why, according to Albert, Sir Adrian worked so hard to squash reporters not willing to swallow intact whatever he fed them. That whole title business-he was as big a snob about it as Chloe. In that regard, it was a match made in heaven.”
“But, Sir, why in the name of all that’s holy would he write a book about a murder that he himself had helped cover up?”
“Maybe because he thought he was so clever, no one would realize it was not a work of fiction. Or maybe he didn’t care about anything but creating a stir that would guarantee his reputation would live on forever. Who knows, with an ego like that? I do know his instructions were explicit-that was the one book that was not to be published until his death, when he was beyond the reach of our law, anyway.
“Sir Adrian, as I have noted before, was a childish man, recklessly indiscreet. He couldn’t resist the fun he was having with his ready-made plot, regardless of the fact he was telling a lot of tales in there that other people didn’t want told. Yet another reason for Natasha to get rid of him, you know-if she knew about the book, which I think she did. She was, all her life, the daughter of that notorious, adulterous murderess, Lady Violet Winthrop. A book by Sir Adrian called A Death in Scotland could only be about her mother’s case.”
“I can see why she would want it not to come out,” said Sergeant Fear. “But how would she learn about the book?”