The Man with a Load of Mischief by Martha Grimes Page A

the servants all cringing in the kitchen of some arcane country house? All there nice and neat. Here he had to go mucking about over half of Northants, and the trail days old, so cold that a trained bloodhound couldn’t snuffle it out. For a moment, looking down the High Street where the winter light glittered on the gum-drop houses and danced off the snowy roofs, he wondered if he had landed bangup in a fairy-tale town on this Christmas Eve.
    The Rivingtons’ house was the large Tudor structure just on the other side of the bridge, in the square. When he got closerto it, from the vantage point of the humpbacked bridge, he could see it was two houses together really, quite large.
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    This morning Isabel Rivington was dressed in a camel’s hair suit and a white silk blouse, looking just as elegant as she had yesterday. Although, frankly, Jury would have preferred Sheila Hogg, who was a bit steamier. This one came on as a kind of piranha. Jury wouldn’t have been surprised to see a finger or two missing when he left.
    â€œI was hoping to see your sister — Vivian, is it? — today, too.”
    â€œShe’s up at the vicarage.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œThe night of the seventeenth, the night Small was murdered, do you recall seeing him in the bar before dinner?”
    Having invited Jury to sit down, she plucked a cigarette from a china holder and leaned toward the match he held out. She seemed in no hurry to get down to answers. “If he was the one sitting with Marshall Trueblood, well, yes, I saw him I suppose. But I didn’t take much notice. There were several people in the saloon bar.”
    â€œAnd you didn’t go down to the wine cellar after his body had been found?”
    â€œNo.” She crossed silky legs, down one of which the firelight made a band of gold. “I’m a bit of a coward about that sort of thing.”
    Jury smiled. “Aren’t we all? Your sister did though.”
    â€œVivian? Well, Vivian’s—” She shrugged, as if discounting Vivian’s predilection to look at dead bodies. “And she’s not my sister, exactly. We’re stepsisters.”
    â€œYou’re the trustee of your sister’s estate?”
    â€œBarclay’s and I, Inspector. What’s that to do with the murders of two strangers?” She seemed to expect him to answer.
    He didn’t. “Then you don’t have complete freedom in deciding how the money will be spent.” Her expression shifted from bored acquiescence to irritation. “When does she come into the money herself?” Jury asked.
    Her heavy gold bracelet clanged against the ashtray as she tapped her cigarette. “When she’s thirty.”
    â€œRather late, isn’t it?”
    â€œHer father — my stepfather — was a bit of a chauvinist. Women can’t handle money — that sort of thing. Actually, she could have got it any time she married, by the terms of the will. Otherwise, when she’s thirty.”
    â€œAnd when will that be?” From the way she was looking everywhere except at him, Jury concluded he had found a sore spot. There was something about Isabel Rivington to which he took an instinctive and near-immediate dislike, something dissolute. She was beautiful in a sluggish sort of way that bespoke overindulgence in syrupy liqueurs and two-martini lunches. But her skin was still very good, the pores tight and fine, and her hands well kept. The nails were lacquered in a modish brown-rose shade and so long that the tips were beginning to curl in at the ends. It might be difficult to strangle a man and avoid scratching him with nails like that. He wondered sometimes if that part of his mind which registered such details even as he was talking about other things might not simply have frozen over, impervious to the human tragedy, catching up facts like flies in amber.
    â€œVivian’ll be thirty