Free The Five Bells and Bladebone by Martha Grimes Page B

waiting to be pounded into her book.
    Lady Summerston was probably somewhere in her seventies, with fine, parchment-like skin and crisp brown eyes. But if Lady Summerston was frail, that fragility would have to be unearthed from what looked like dozens of pieces of clothes — a dragon-embroidered dressing gown, a ruby-colored Burmese shawl, a Victoria Cross on a chain round her neck, a palmetto fan, which she swished with the gusto of one waving off flies, and a pink turban-wrapped band to which was attached a weeping veil such as a certain caste of Indian women wear. Lady Summerston wore the Empire on her back.
    “Sit, sit,” she said, with a fluttery gesture, indicating one of the white ironwork chairs, which was, Jury found when he tried to adjust his tall frame to it, as uncomfortable as those chairs always appear to look, sitting clustered on the patios of the rich.
    Lady Summerston seemed in no hurry at all for him to explain his presence on this balmy afternoon on her balconyas she relentlessly thwacked another stamp into place. Since police had already appeared, perhaps she thought one more would make little difference.
    Jury smiled at the intensity with which she went about her pasting-up. “Got any special system, Lady Summerston?”
    “System? Good Lord, no. They’re just stamps. You stick ’em in any old way.” She turned the frown from Jury back to the stamps as if the beastly little things might have loosened and jumped to other squares while she looked away.
    “I thought perhaps you might be doing them by country,” said Jury. “All of those in front of you seem to be British Commonwealth.”
    “Of course they are.” (Thump!) “They’re Gerry’s — my late husband’s — collection. I found them amongst his belongings. I keep all of his things” — here she nodded off in a direction meant to indicate the hallway beyond her door — “in a room at the end. Sometimes I go in there just to have a look round. Most people would say that’s morbid. We’re supposed to get rid of anything that reminds us of the dead, I expect. Give it all over to charity or the church fête or Oxfam. As if we could rush headlong into forgetfulness.” Another stamp was aimed at its square. Bull’s-eye. “That seems to be what Simon thought.” She sighed, closed the album, and tapped her heavily ringed fingers on its surface. “Well, you’ve come about Simon and find me totally unrepentant.”
    “Is there something you should repent, then?”
    “My lack of feeling, I daresay.” Her look at him was shrewd, but in the brown eyes was still a film of sadness. “I absolutely disliked him. Except for Hannah’s sake, I’m glad he’s dead.” She shrugged. “I expect at the inquest the coroner will make something of that .”
    “You’re very straightforward about it.”
    “A lot of killers are straightforward. Look you right in the eye” — and here she leaned toward him, fastening theglittery eyes on him — “and say, ‘How I loathed the man.’ ”
    Jury laughed. “You’re making quite a case for yourself as a prime suspect.”
    Now she had picked up the deck of cards and was handling them with swift, sure strokes. “It’s merely being clever. I had motive, opportunity, no alibi. And could easily have seen him go into the summerhouse.” Here she reached to the chair and picked up a pair of Zeiss binoculars. “I’m also a bird-watcher. These are quite powerful.”
    As he watched her switch a black king to a red queen, Jury asked: “And what about the weapon?”
    “A dagger-cane. Fourteen inches long, tempered steel, knobbly walnut casing.” She swept up the rows of cards, shuffled, reshuffled, and started slapping them down again in rows. “Have you met Hannah? No, Crick would have brought you here first. Hannah is probably taking it very badly —”
    “ ‘Probably’?”
    “Well, I haven’t seen her but for a moment — she looked totally drained — but she has an astonishing way