Joyce stared. ‘Moira was murdered by an intruder,’ she said.
I didn’t answer.
She took a large swallow of her vodka and tonic and looked at me bleakly. She had been barely twenty when I was born, barely nineteen when Malcolm had whisked her headlong from an antique shop in Kensington and within a month installed her in his house with a new wedding ring and too little to do.
Malcolm, telling me now and again about those days, had said, ‘She understood figures, you see. And she could beat me at cards. And she looked so damned demure. So young. Not bossy at all, like she was later. Her people thought me an upstart, did you know? Their ancestors traced back to Charles II, mine traced back to a Victorian knife-grinder. But her people weren’t rich, you know. More breeding than boodle. It was an impulse, marrying Joyce. There you are, I admit it. Turned out she didn’t like sex much, more’s the pity. Some women are like that. No hormones. So I went on seeing Alicia. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Joyce and I got on all right, pretty polite to each other and so on, until she found out about Alicia. Then we had fireworks, all hell let loose for months on end, do you remember? Don’t suppose you remember, you were only four or five.’
‘Five and six, actually.’
‘Really? Joyce liked being mistress of the house, you know. She learned about power. Grew up, I suppose. She took up bridge seriously, and started voluntary work. She hated leaving all that, didn’t much mind leaving me. She said Alicia had robbed her of her self-esteem and ruined her position in the local community. She’s never forgiven her, has she?’
Joyce had returned to the small Surrey town where her parents had lived and later died, their social mantle falling neatly onto her able shoulders. She bullied the local people into good works, made continual bridge-tournament forays, earned herself a measure of celebrity, and no, had never forgiven Alicia.
In the bar at Sandown she was dressed, as always, with a type of businesslike luxury: mink jacket over grey tailored suit, neat white silk shirt, long strings of pearls, high-heeled shoes, green felt hat, polished calf handbag. ‘A well-dressed, well-bred, brassy blonde’ Alicia had once called her, which was both accurate and unfair, as was Joyce’s tart tit-for-tat opinion of Alicia as ‘White meat of chicken aboard the gravy train’.
Joyce drank most of the rest of her vodka and said, ‘Do you really think one of the family is capable of murder?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But who?
‘That’s the question.’
‘It isn’t possible,’ she insisted.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Take them one by one. Tell me why it’s impossible in each individual case, according to each person’s character. Start at the beginning, with Vivien.’
‘No, Ian,’ she protested.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Help me. Help Malcolm. Help us all.’
She gave me a long worried look, oblivious to the movement and noise going on all around us. The next race was already in progress but without noticeable thinning of the crowd who were watching it on closed circuit television above our heads.
‘Vivien,’ I prompted.
‘Impossible, just impossible. She’s practically dim-witted. If she was ever going to murder anybody, it would have been long ago and it would have been Alicia. Alicia ruined Vivien’s marriage, just like mine. Vivien’s a sniffler, full of self-pity. And why would she do it? For those three wimpish offspring?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘They all need money. She hasn’t enough herself to bail them out of their holes.’
‘It’s still impossible.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘How about Donald? And Helen?’
Donald had been ten, more than half Joyce’s age, when she had married Malcolm, and he had been in and out of Quantum, as had Lucy and Thomas, whenever Malcolm had exercised his joint-custody rights and had them to stay. Joyce’s lack of interest in children had definitely extended to her step-children, whom she’d found noisy, bad tempered and foul mannered, though Malcolm disagreed.
‘Donald’s a pompous, snobbish ass,’ she said now, ‘and as insecure as hell under the bluster. Malcolm thinks Helen’s as brainless as she’s pretty, but I’d say you don’t need brains to murder, rather the opposite. I’d think Helen would fight like a fury to save her cubs from physical harm. But Moira wasn’t threatening her cubs, not directly. I’d think Helen could be only a hot-blood killer, but so could most people, driven hard enough to defend themselves or their young.’
I wondered if she knew about the school-fees crisis: if they