Help the Poor Struggler

by Martha Grimes

  She found Cobble Cottage and left the dog there, inside the gate.

  Molly stood on the deserted Marine Parade, her own rented cottage at her back, the cold forgotten as she leaned against the railing where seaweed was tied like scarves, thrown up by the tide. The wooden groins along the shingle kept the sand from shifting. It would be nice if the mind could build itself such a protective wall.

  She looked along the Cobb to the pile of rocks from which she had come.

  All she could think of was the line from Jane Austen. The young people were all wild to see Lyme.

  SEVEN

  ELEVEN it might have been, but the manager of the White Lion didn’t argue about the licensing laws any more than had Freddie’s customers — though here it worked in reverse. The manager reopened the bar and smiled conspiratorially after Jury and Wiggins booked rooms. “Residents only,” he said.

  Wiggins, probably in some attempt to stay the awful effects of sea air, went straight to bed. It was the weather that had forced Jury and Wiggins to stop on the way back from Wynchcoombe. Rain and sleet that finally turned to hail. Each time a rock-sized chunk hit the windscreen, Wiggins veered. Jury imagined he was taking it personally, the weather. Weather and seasons were judged only in reference to Wiggins’s health: spring brought allergies; autumn, a bleak prognosis of pneumonia; winter (the killer season), colds and fevers and flu. Driving along the Dorchester Road, Jury knew what was going on in his sergeant’s mind, though mind-reading wasn’t necessary: Wiggins was always pleased to open his Pandora’s box of physical complaints and enlighten Jury as to which one had just flown by.

  Before that could happen, Jury pointed out the turn to Lyme Regis.

  Wiggins wasn’t any too happy about sea-frets, either.

  • • •

  Jury got his pint, asked for the phone, and called headquarters in Wynchcoombe to let them know where he was. On his way back to the bar, he noticed a thin, elderly woman in a floppy hat watching a television as antiquated as she was.

  Jury was slotting ten-p pieces into a stupid video game when she passed behind him, saying, “You can put money in that thing all night and you won’t get any back. It’s rigged.” She went up to the bar and knocked on it with her knuckles for service.

  “Thanks for the advice,” said Jury, smiling. “Buy you a drink?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  The manager, coming from an inner room, didn’t seem surprised to see her.

  “You a resident, then?” asked Jury.

  “Off and on.” She was wearing spectacles with sunglasses attached on tiny hinges. Why she needed the sunglasses in the murky light of the saloon bar, Jury couldn’t imagine. She flipped them up and squinted at Jury as if he were light that hurt her eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “Richard Jury.”

  She snapped the brown-tinted glasses down again. “Hazel Wing,” she said. The manager had already set up a pint of Guinness for Hazel Wing. Jury bought a drink for the manager, too.

  Hazel Wing raised her glass and said, “Here’s to getting through another one.”

  “Another what?” asked Jury.

  “Day.” Up went the sunglasses again and she squinted. This time, probably, to see if he was a little on the dim side.

  “I’ll drink to that, certainly.”

  “What do you do, if I may be so bold?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  This news did not seem to surprise her. She said, “Oh. I sort of thought so.”

  “Why? Do I look like one?”

  “No. You’re better-looking. I just supposed it was about the little girl.”

  He felt himself go cold. “What do you mean?”

  “That girl that’s gone missing. Don’t know her. Young. Got all of Lyme in a panic. You know. After that boy in Dorchester.” Hazel Wing, who seemed the sort to chop off emotions as she did her sentences, still allowed herself a shudder. “Kids. Parents keeping them in. Dorchester’s not far.”

  And neither was Wynchcoombe. “Excuse me.” Jury put down his pint and made for the telephone again.

  • • •

  He stared in silence at the telephone in the lobby of the hotel. Constable Green, in the Lyme police station, had finally to ask if Jury had got the message. “Yes. Don’t move her.” He hung up while the constable was assuring him no one would touch her.

  “Bad news,” said Hazel Wing. It was a statement, not a question. News came only in one way to her.

  “What’s the quickest way to the Cobb Arms?”

  “Walking or driving?”

  “Whichever’s faster.”

  Hazel Wing evaluated Jury’s six-feet-two and decided, for him, walking. “Straight down the hill and right on the Marine Parade. That pub’s at the other end. Ten minutes. If you’re in a hurry.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Good luck,” she said, the words unconvincing. Luck, like news, was seldom good.

  II

  The little girl under the cape was lying as if she’d been stuffed like a small sack in the crevice of the rock.

  “Hold the torch over here, will you?” Jury knelt down and picked the seaweed from her icy cheek. He knew he shouldn’t have touched her at all before the doctor or Scene of Crimes expert got there, but he felt he had to get that stuff off her face. Bladder wrack. He remembered it from a seaside town he had gone to as a boy. It was the stuff that would pop if you squeezed it. A wave collapsed against the rocks, spewing foam in their faces. The wet rocks made standing difficult.

  “Do you suppose she came out here,” asked Constable Green on a hopeful note, “to get the dog and then was trapped by the waves . . . ?”

  “No,” said Jury. “It was a knife.”

  III

  When Jury and Green got back to the Lyme Regis police station, Chief Superintendent Macalvie had been there for a quarter of an hour and ticking off every minute of it like a bomb.

  Throughout Green’s explanation of the anonymous telephone call and his finding the body, Macalvie sat in a chair tilted against the wall, sucking on a sourball. “So where’s the body?”

  “Hospital,” said Green. “We got the local doctor —”

  “Did he see her before she was moved?”

  Green retreated into monosyllables. “Yes.”

  “About this woman, Molly Singer —” Macalvie was waiting for Green to embroider upon his description. Green didn’t, so Macalvie went on. “Correct me if I’m wrong: you know the cape belongs to the Singer woman, you have a suspicion it was this woman who left the mutt at the Thornes’ cottage, and you also suspect she was the one who rang up, and yet with all of this, you haven’t brought her in for questioning.”

  “We went to her cottage, sir.” Green looked from Jury to Macalvie, uncertain as to who had jurisdiction here: Dorset, Devon, or Scotland Yard? “But you don’t know Molly Singer, sir —”

  “Obviously I don’t know her, Green. She isn’t here, is she?” Macalvie looked around the room. Then he said to Wiggins, who had been dragged from under his eiderdown quilt around two A.M., “Give me one of those Fisherman’s things, will you?”

  Wiggins did so. He was presently trying to fend off something terminal, in a chair drawn up to a single-bar electric fire, where his feet competed with a large ginger cat snugly curled there.

  Macalvie went on. “Because if she was here, then maybe the three of us could have a nice chin-wag and figure out what the hell she was doing on the end of the Cobb tonight.”

  Constable Green kept his expression as flat as the side of a slag heap and answered: “The Singer woman has lived in that cottage facing the Parade for nearly a year. No one in Lyme really knows her. She doesn’t chat up the neighbors. She isn’t friendly. She doesn’t go out, except I’ve seen her sometimes at night, walking my beat. You might say she’s eccentric —”

  Jury interrupted. “You might say she’s phobic, from what you told me earlier. Doesn’t go out to the shops; doesn’t mix with people at all . . .�
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  “I wouldn’t know about that.” Green turned to Jury with relief. “I’ve seen her a few times when I was making my rounds. I know that cape. Only, I couldn’t make up an Identikit on her. That’s how much she shows her face.”

  Macalvie’s chair slammed down. “I don’t believe it, Green. I just don’t believe it — that a person you think could be a witness, could be even the chief suspect —”

  “I never meant to say that.” Green’s voice rose in alarm. “It’s just she won’t talk to police.”

  Macalvie looked at Green and shook his head. He leaned across the PC’s desk and his blue eyes sparked like matches. “We’re talking murder, and all you can say is the chief witness is incommunicado.” Macalvie got up. “Come on,” he said to Jury, heading for the door. He looked over his shoulder at Wiggins, who had now grown as sluggish as the orange cat that had oozed its body straight out, paws fore and aft, stomach to glowing bar. That it was lying across the feet of Scotland Yard did not impress it at all.

  “Wiggins,” said Macalvie. “You going to toast crumpets or move?”

  “You think the three of us are going to the Singer woman’s house?” asked Jury.

  “Of course.”

  “Kick in the door? Is that it?” Jury was putting his coat on. Macalvie had never taken his off. “Try to browbeat someone who’s agoraphobic and see how far you get, Macalvie. I’ll go by myself, thanks. This is Dorset, remember? Not your patch; at the moment, it’s mine.”

  Macalvie was still sucking on the Fisherman’s Friend. “Pulling rank. Well. And would you mind if I went out on my own and had a word with the Thornes? The dad and mum? And as long as you’re going on your own, can I borrow your sergeant?”

  He didn’t wait for permission. The door of the station slammed after Macalvie and Wiggins.

  EIGHT

  JURY’S idea of eccentricity might have been Hazel Wing. It wasn’t Molly Singer, in spite of her off-the-rack Oxfam clothes: a shapeless sweater, a long and equally shapeless skirt. Jury guessed she was in her thirties; he had expected someone much older.

  The fire and a napping cat were the only things that gave the room a semblance of warmth. It was a typical holiday cottage, furnished with remnants that could have been washed up from a shipwreck — mismatched sling chairs, a small cabinet whose open shelf held several bottles of liquor, a lumpyish love seat now occupied by the cat. In front of the window was an all-purpose table. Nothing here but the bare essentials.

  Probably she was following the drift of his thoughts. “In the summer, this place costs the earth. It’s right on the Parade, has an ocean view, and the landlord cleans up.”

  “I can imagine,” said Jury.

  “I even had to buy the lamp —” She nodded toward a small, blue-shaped lamp, useless for reading or anything but giving off a watery light. “I hope you don’t mind the dark. I’m used to it by now.”

  Jury looked down at some books of poetry on the table and wondered if there was a double meaning in the comment. Emily Dickinson. Robert Lowell.

  “You like poetry? I’ve always liked those lines of Lowell: ‘The light at the end of the tunnel / Is the light of an oncoming train.’ ” She seemed to be talking out of sheer nervousness. “You could say I rent the cat, too. It wanders in every day and takes the best seat.” The cat could have been mistaken for a black pillow, it was so motionless. It opened its topaz eyes, looked at Jury warily, and went back to dozing. Molly Singer’s black hair and amber eyes were like the cat’s.

  They still had not sat down, and she was turning the card he had slipped under the door round and round in her fingers. “You took a chance, didn’t you, writing this message? ‘What fresh hell can this be?’ ” Her smile was strained. “Who said it?”

  “Dorothy Parker. Whenever she heard the bell to her flat.”

  “Sit down, won’t you?”

  The cat glared at Jury as Molly Singer picked it up and put it on one of the cold sling chairs.

  She offered him a drink and, when he accepted, reached down into the cabinet by the couch and brought out another glass and a whiskey bottle that was three-fourths empty. She gave him his and replenished her own glass.

  Jury felt strange in this room that had housed so many guests, like a room full of ghosts. A log crumbled and the fire spurted up, one of the ghosts stirring the ashes.

  “It’s the cape, I guess.”

  Jury had been avoiding this sudden plunge into the death of Angela Thorne. He nodded. “Constable Green recognized it.”

  “Which puts me in the thick of it, doesn’t it?”

  “You must have known the cape would be traced to you. Why’d you do it?”

  “You mean, kill her?” Her equanimity was more disturbing than a screaming denial would have been.

  “I didn’t say you killed Angela Thorne. It would be stupid to do that and leave that sort of evidence behind. What happened?”

  “I was walking along the Cobb somewhere around ten or ten-thirty. I heard a dog barking. It sounded rather terrible, you know, panic-stricken. I followed the sound to the rocks and found her. I returned the dog; I couldn’t return Angela,” she said with some bitterness.

  “Did you know her?”

  Molly shook her head. “I think I saw her once or twice. I don’t actually know anyone.”

  “How do you live?”

  Her smile was no more happy than her laughter. “I bolt the door, Superintendent.”

  “You’ve lived here nearly a year. Why? Do you like the sea, then?”

  “No. In a storm the waves crash over the walls; sometimes even drenching the cottages. Throwing up seaweed, rocks, whatever. It’s all so elemental.”

  “So you found the body, covered her with your cape, took the dog to the Thorne cottage. Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you rang up the police anonymously. Why?”

  “I didn’t want to get involved, I suppose.”

  “Then why did you leave your cape? You must have been freezing.”

  “I have another one,” she said simply, as if that explained everything.

  “Where did you live before?”

  “London, different places. No fixed address. No job. I’ve got some money still. I used to be a photographer. My doctor advised me to find some nice little seaside town. I was taking pictures of Lyme.”

  Jury looked at two fine photos above the mantel: the Lyme coast, the Marine Parade, with its lonely strollers.

  She left the couch and walked over to those pictures. “Don’t bother looking; I’m not much good anymore. The sea, the sea — it’s so elemental.” Her glass was empty, and she poured herself another double. “I drink too much, you’ve noticed.” She shrugged and went back to the mantel. The light from the fire suffused her face, sparked the strange dark gold eyes and gave her an almost daemonic look. He thought of the women of myths whom the ill-fated stranger — knight or country yokel — was constantly being warned to steer clear of.

  “Have you been reading the papers?” Jury asked. She shook her head. “Where were you earlier today?”

  “Here. I’m always here. Why?”

  “There was a boy killed in Wynchcoombe. And two days ago, one killed in Dorchester. You didn’t know about the Dorchester business?”

  Her eyes had a drowned look. “My God, no. What are you saying — that there’s a mass-murderer running round the countryside?”

  “There could be. Look, there’s no way you can avoid talking to police. You don’t want to go to the station. Then come along to the White Lion in the morning.” He was silent, looking at her, all sorts of sham comfort trying to form itself into words: it won’t be bad; Macalvie is a nice chap; there’ll only be the three of us. All of it lies. It would be bad; Macalvie was not a nice chap. And “only three of them” might as well be the whole Dorset police and Devon-Cornwall constabulary together, as far as Molly Singer was concerned.

  The silence waited on her. “Nine?” was all she said.

/>   “All right.”

  Jury picked up his coat, once again dislodging the cat from its slumbers — and Molly went with him to the door.

  She was still holding the card, folded and refolded, as if it were a message in a bottle that might give some report of land.

  NINE

  “GEORGE Thorne.” In the dining room of the White Lion, Macalvie speared a sausage and shook his head. “One and the same. Witness for the prosecution.”

  “That doesn’t make it look good for Sam Waterhouse, does it?”

  “He didn’t do it. Pass the butter, Wiggins.”

  Both Wiggins and Macalvie were having the full house. Jury, who couldn’t stick looking at sausages and bacon and eggs, had ordered coffee and toast. “Who’d have a better motive?”

  “Someone else,” said Macalvie, with perfect assurance.

  “But, sir —” Wiggins began and then stopped when Macalvie shot him a look.

  “Both of you seem to have forgotten one salient detail. It wasn’t Waterhouse that found the kid and tossed a cape over her. Oh, sure. Thorne was ranting on about Waterhouse out for revenge, et cetera. The guy looked like he’d just risen from the grave. Serves the bastard right. Big-deal solicitor.” Macalvie was busy with bacon and a reappraisal of the waitress whose Edwardian looks — black hair rolled upward, slim figure in ruffled white blouse and black skirt, and porcelain skin — he had already commented upon. “Yesterday, Angela Thorne was ‘acting up’ — her mum’s words — and trying to plead off school by saying she was sick to her stomach and being a pill nobody wants to swallow. Her teacher said the kid had got into a fight because some other girls were making fun of her. They made up this song: ‘Angela Thorne, Angela Thorne, don’t you wish you’d never been born? Kids are so cute, aren’t they?”

  “It was after one when you talked to the Thornes. When did you get a chance to talk to the teacher, for God’s sakes?” Jury imagined Macalvie was one of those cops who never slept.

  “Afterwards. Let me tell you, the Thornes don’t go down a treat. The teacher I knocked up around three —” Macalvie’s blue eyes glinted “— you know what that means in American? Anyway Miss Elgin — Julie — didn’t especially enjoy having her door busted down by the Devon-Cornwall constabulary, not with her dressed only in a flimsy wrapper —”