Chapter Eleven #2
They entered her pleasant sitting room together. Constance saw her at once, sprawled on a sofa, her plump fingers curled as though around the glass so close to her on the table. Or the half-empty gin bottle that stood beside it.
The familiarity of her mother’s pose—she had found her like this dozens of times in childhood and beyond—should have eased her alarm. It didn’t. She pulled free of Solomon and flew to her mother, dropping to her knees, grasping her hand, groping for a pulse.
At least Juliet’s eyes were closed, without that dreadful, blank stare of death. Beside her, lying flat on the sofa, was a bright red cushion.
“I can’t feel her pulse!” Her voice shook with panic. “Sol, I can’t—”
Solomon bent over her mother and gently took the hand, his fingers sliding over Juliet’s wrist.
“She’s fine, Constance. She’s asleep.”
Constance gasped, falling back onto her heels. She grasped her hair in both hands, tugging in an excess of relief and fury and old memory.
“Damn you, Juliet, wake up,” she said harshly. “Drunken old tart, wake up!”
Juliet snorted, one hand groping blindly as though for Constance’s voice. Or for the bottle. Constance seized the bottle and stoppered it before springing to her feet and removing both glass and bottle from the room. She was still shaking.
When she returned, moments later, her mother was hauling herself into a sitting position and smiling at Solomon. “Hello, my son! How did you get in? She been picking my locks again?”
“No, you left the damned door open,” Constance said. “What were you thinking of?”
The smile faded from Juliet’s lips, and from her slightly bleary eyes. The veils came down, as they often did. It had taken Constance a long time to realize that—that her mother was not the open, amiable book she showed the world.
“Must have needed a lie-down,” she said vaguely.
Abruptly, the anger drained out of Constance. “What happened?”
Juliet rubbed her forehead, as though it hurt. “Oh, nothing. I had a visitor and a drink. Reminded me of old times.”
There had only been one glass.
Memory came to Constance’s aid. “I’ll make tea.”
There were no teacups by the basin either. No teapot waiting to be washed. The kettle was cold. Constance filled it from the tap and set it on the stove. She could hear Juliet’s voice from the sitting room, with occasional interpolations from Solomon.
Impossible to know how much she’d had to drink.
She had always been adept at hiding her drunkenness from Constance.
Until she reached the comatose state, of course.
Until then, the only clues were generally the care with which she enunciated.
Oddly, although Constance hadn’t guessed it at the time, this was when she betrayed her original accent.
Drunk as a wheelbarrow, one could only control so many things at once.
While Constance gathered the necessary accoutrements onto the tray, and spooned tea from the old caddy into the pot, she calmed herself and began to think.
“Bless you, Connie,” Juliet said comfortably as Constance brought the tea tray into the sitting room. “Just what I need, a good cup of tea.”
Constance served her first, which was only polite. “What did Kellar want?” she asked casually.
Her mother didn’t pause as she reached for her teacup, but the faint twitch of her lip acknowledged the hit and told Constance she was ready for the question. “Oh, just to talk over old times.”
“What did you discuss?”
Juliet grimaced before taking a sip of tea. “Nothing. After thirty years with our lives gone in such different directions, there was very little to say.”
So she’d sent him away with a flea in his ear—if she’d let him in at all. “Did he mind?”
“Don’t see how he could have,” Juliet said carelessly. “It’s obvious I’m not the same girl he knew decades ago. I expect it was a relief to him. His responsibilities are at an end.”
“Then he is a man who takes his responsibilities seriously?” Solomon asked.
Juliet shrugged. “He used to.”
“Did he tell you,” Constance asked, “that he has applied for a position in London?”
Only the faintest flicker of her mother’s eyelid betrayed her surprise. If Constance hadn’t been watching her so closely, she would have missed it.
“No,” Juliet said without apparent interest. “He didn’t stay long.”
“He brought this case to us,” Constance said. “Caterina di Ripoli’s death. And we don’t know why, because now we consider him one of our three suspects. Is he capable of killing?”
“Most people are, for the right reasons.”
“Even if the victim was a woman?” Solomon asked.
Juliet smiled at him affectionately. “A life is a life.”
“The thing is,” Constance said, “until we know he didn’t do this, you mustn’t endanger yourself with him.”
“Don’t be daft, Connie. He’s got no reason to kill me.”
*
“He does,” Constance said half an hour later as the carriage finally took them toward home. “Kellar does have a reason to be rid of her.”
Solomon understood her immediately. “A man stepping into a prominent role in a government office does not need embarrassments from his past getting in the way. It’s a cold reason to kill.”
“We’ve been thinking of this as a crime of passion, because of the roses, but when you think about it, if Caterina’s death really was murder, then it was very well calculated.
There is no actual evidence to show that she was murdered, let alone who killed her.
I think that points to Kellar. But even if it doesn’t, I think he went to see Juliet to make sure she wouldn’t blab to the world that she—the eccentric shopkeeper, one-time fence and whore—was once almost engaged to the great Sebastian Kellar. ”
Solomon was frowning. “And she reassured him?”
“If he’s prepared to take the chance.”
“He took an interest in us,” Solomon said slowly, “made a mighty effort and risked his own neck to try to save your life, because you are Juliet’s daughter.”
“Maybe. But I can’t forgive him.”
“For what?”
“For bothering Juliet.”
“Was she bothered?” Solomon asked gently. “It seemed to me that you were the one upset.”
“Oh, she was bothered,” Constance said with certainty.
“She might have thrown him out after one minute or even ten, but she was upset enough to forget to lock the door behind him, to knock back a cartload of gin, and fall asleep. She hasn’t drunk like that in years, not in the daytime anyway, and certainly not since you found her the shop. ”
Solomon sat up straight, staring at her. “You think he threatened her?”
Constance shook her head. “That’s not his style, is it? He’s not some underworld villain from the East End. I doubt he makes threats at all, just acts when he considers it necessary.”
“Then what upset her?”
“He did. His existence, his presence.” And how far she had fallen.
*
There was nothing, Juliet reflected, like a daughter’s contempt to make a drunken old tart pull herself together.
She had needed the gin for her nerves after Sebastian’s visit.
She hadn’t meant to slug quite so much, though in truth she had needed the sleep too.
Still, Connie’s disapproving face could curdle the milk as well as sober the most legless of topers.
And despite the slightly woolly head, Juliet was stone-cold sober.
She hadn’t invited him to her sitting room, or even her kitchen for a cup of tea. But then, he hadn’t asked. He had only stopped to issue an invitation to dine. At a public place, too.
“A quiet eating house,” he had called it.
She had known he would come back after his visit to the shop.
But she certainly hadn’t expected it to be for that reason.
She had probably gawped at him with her ugly old mouth wide open.
Why the devil would he risk being seen with someone like her?
It wasn’t as if she had any beauty or even glamor left.
She could dress and paint herself into an eccentric, even interesting person, but not one of Sebastian’s class. At best, she was vulgar. At worst…
Well, there was no point in dwelling on the worst.
“I’ll think about it,” she had said, just to make him go. “But probably not. Goodbye, Sebastian.”
To her surprise, even a certain amount of foolish pique, he had not lingered, merely smiled as if he understood perfectly, which he probably did, the bastard. Then he had placed his hat back on his handsome head and departed, closing the door behind him.
Juliet had headed straight back upstairs, forgetting even to turn the key in the lock, and seized the gin with shaking hands.
Stupid, stupid. She let Constance down too often through gin, when life had seemed unbearable and all she had was a couple of hours of oblivion.
That wasn’t true, of course, and even when she behaved appallingly, she had never forgotten that what she had was Constance herself.
Trust the girl to turn up the only time she didn’t want her around.
She had done that as a child, too. As if she sensed her mother’s shameful weakness from afar and bolted back home to catch her at it.
Still, Connie’s astringence had had its sobering effects, along with Solomon’s calm yet powerful presence.
She would not be dining with Sebastian Kellar.
Really, she would not.