The Dirty Duck

by Martha Grimes

  “We’ll share it.”

  “Okay,” he said, smiling, and lighting it for her. “Where’re you going?”

  “There’s an aunt of mine, elderly and rather ill. She wants to go on a sea voyage and needs someone to go with her. I’m the only family she’s got left. And she’s all of mine. The rest are dead.” She exhaled and passed the cigarette to Jury. “It’s funny. Other people seem to keep adding to their lives—you know, husbands, children, grandchildren—; I seem to keep diminishing.”

  There was no self-pity in the words, which were more highly charged simply because she said them so flatly.

  Jury took a drag on the cigarette, tasting her mouth like a memory, and handed it back. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Her gaze seemed fixed on a point in air over his shoulder. “I wonder.” Her eyes rested on his, then.

  He tried on a smile; it didn’t seem to work very well. “If it’s just a voyage you’re going on—” He looked round the room. “Then why all this?”

  “It’s going to be a long voyage, I’m afraid.”

  The cigarette she had handed back to him was nearly spent. He did not smoke it. He was afraid of its going out. “But when you get back . . . I mean, you’ve got to settle somewhere. Don’t you know where?”

  Shaking her head, she said, “Not really. It might be that I’ll live with Aunt Jane for a while. Though, really, I don’t think she’s got that long in her condition—”

  “You don’t have to go,” he said suddenly.

  “I wish you’d come before,” she said.

  Jury watched the ash inch microscopically down the white cylinder and remembered the last time he’d seen her. Dust and ashes seemed to come between them. He wondered if he were growing fatalistic. “You can’t just drift about for the rest of your life.”

  “We used to live—my family, I mean—here. Not in Stratford. A ways outside of it. The place was much too large just for me to come back to. Anyway, it’s completely run down now, the wings are mostly rubble; the gate house is a sort of mound—”

  It was as though she were picking up the thread of a conversation after an interruption of minutes rather than months.

  “. . . When I went out there I realized you can’t get the past back again.”

  “ ‘Of course you can.’ ” The cigarette was burning his fingers. He had to let it drop on the bare floor. She put her foot over it, ground it out.

  When he looked up at her she was smiling bleakly. “I’ve never heard anyone say that. Do you really believe it?”

  “It was Gatsby who said it. You know. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. About Daisy.”

  She seemed to be looking everywhere in the room except at him. “Daisy. Yes.”

  Jury stood up. “I’ve got to be going. I’m going to London inside of an hour. Look. You’ll still be here, won’t you, for a few days? Or could you call me before you leave?” He gave her one of his cards, writing his home number on the back.

  “I’ll be here for another week, I expect.” She looked down at the card. “And, yes, I’ll call.”

  At the door, she said sadly, “But it didn’t work for him, did it? Gatsby, I mean.”

  Jury smiled. “I guess it depends how you read it.”

  • • •

  As he walked back down Ryland Street, he realized that not once had the subject of murder come up between them.

  20

  Having had Agatha for breakfast, Melrose was now having Harvey Schoenberg for lunch. There he sat, his arm draped over his computer, drinking stout, when Melrose entered the Dirty Duck fifteen minutes later.

  “Hey, Mel!” he called above the voices of a rather thinner lunch-crowd than usual. The tourists must have scattered like buckshot following the discoveries of the last two days.

  “Good morning,” said Melrose, depositing his stick on the table. “I thought Honeysuckle Tours would be on its way to London by now.”

  “It’s J.C. that’s holding us up. You know, Farraday. Your friend Rick’s trying to talk him into going. Says he won’t budge—”

  “ ‘Rick’?”

  “Yeah. The Scotland Yard guy.” Harvey raised his glass. “Want one?”

  “Sherry, if you don’t mind. Tio Pepe, dry.”

  “Tio. Got it. Guard this, okay?” he nodded to the Ishi computer.

  “With my life.”

  Harvey went off to the bar and Melrose drew the folded sheet of paper from his pocket. He reread it, especially the stanza the murderer had appropriated for his own macabre use.

  A few minutes later, Harvey was back, putting down the sherry and picking up the conversation as if he hadn’t been gone. “After all, you can hardly blame the poor bastard, since Jimmy hasn’t come back yet.” He lowered his voice. “You don’t think something’s happened to the kid, do you?” When Melrose didn’t answer immediately, he nudged him. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know. But it doesn’t quite fit the pattern, does it?”

  “Pattern? What pattern?”

  “Both victims have been women. You knew the Farraday boy pretty well, didn’t you? That is, he talked to you more than anyone else on the tour.”

  “Could be. About computers. I never saw anyone catch on so quick to computers. I was trying to set his sights toward the future. You know—career-wise. Kid’s a real brain. Well, I better be going.” He drained his glass, stood up, and slung the strap of the case over his arm. “Man, I can hardly wait to get to London. Can you feature it? Deptford, that’s the first place I’m hitting. Southwark, and maybe Greenwich. Listen, you should let me show you around.” He held out his hand, palm up, and tapped it. “I know the other side of the Thames like the palm of my hand, at least the way it was. It’s all those maps I read. Of course, I guess it’s different now.” He sighed, and was off, managing to raise some indignant eyebrows as the computer hammered at a few elbows on the way out.

  Jury was just coming in as Schoenberg was going out. They exchanged a few words and Harvey nodded, cuffed Jury on the shoulder, and went on.

  “Hello, Rick,” said Melrose, pushing out a chair. “Sit down and take the weight off.”

  “Thanks. Honeysuckle Tours is booked into Brown’s Hotel. Let’s hope they stay put.”

  “I can guarantee Harvey won’t. He’s got a brother coming to London, for one thing; not that I think brother Jonathan will be much of a companion in Harvey’s rambles. He’s already wandering mentally all over Southwark and Deptford. He has invited me along.”

  “He told me. About the brother, I mean. Apparently stays at Brown’s, too, when he’s in town. Honeycutt wasn’t kidding about his little group. The check we’ve run on them certainly shows they’re none of them hurting for cash.” Jury sighed. “No way to stop them leaving their hotel. Amelia Farraday’s ready to take the first plane back to the States; I’m not sure whether it’s to put distance between her and bad memories or between her and the Metropolitan Police. But I imagine we can find some way to block that move. Are you ready to leave? I’m having a drink first and something to eat. Incidentally, I got you digs at Brown’s, too. You can keep an eye on them. Let Harvey show you round Southwark. What the hell’s he expect to find?”

  “The inn where Old Kit Marlowe was killed raise its ghostly rafters over the Thames, I expect. I’ve done your homework for you. The poem—I wrote it down.”

  As Melrose took some legal-length foolscap from his pocket, Jury said, “How the hell did you find it when we’ve had every man in the department scouring books of poetry—?”

  “Simple. I assumed it was Elizabethan and fairly well anthologized and just got the fattest collection I could lay hands on in the library. I looked in the index of first lines.”

  “But I thought we said it wasn’t a first line.”

  “It isn’t. I used metrics.” Melrose adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “I eliminated at least three-fourths of the poems in the book that way. Perhaps more. It’s very regular rhythm, and it’s also iambic trimeter.
Had it been pentameter, or something, it would have been harder. I just ticked off every first line in trimeter.”

  “Hell,” said Jury, smiling.

  “Yes. Irritatingly clever of me, wasn’t it?” He cleared his throat and read:

  “Beauty is but a flower

  Which wrinkles will devour;

  Brightness falls from the air,

  Queens have died young and fair;

  Dust—”

  At that moment, the door to the Dirty Duck opened. Oh, God! Melrose thought. He had forgotten completely about Vivian Rivington, and there she stood.

  He shoved the paper in Jury’s face. “Here, read it.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, I’m not blind!” Jury said, lowering the paper and his head with it.

  They were sitting back in a corner. It was quite possible she would move on with her companion—a slim, dark fellow, no doubt the fiancé. Wonderful. Now, if only she didn’t turn and look round the room—

  She turned.

  And, of course, just then Jury, having read through the poem, raised his head to say something to Melrose.

  He was glad he wasn’t standing in the way of the look that shot between Vivian and Jury.

  “I’ll be damned—” Jury muttered, rising as she started toward their table, smiling and looking wonderful in nothing but jeans and a white silk blouse, the dark man in tow.

  She held out her hand. “Inspector Jury, for heaven’s sakes—”

  “Miss Rivington. This is certainly a surprise.”

  How banal, thought Melrose, relieved nonetheless. If they had never got beyond Inspector and Miss, what the hell was he worried about? Or was all this formality and everyone’s not knowing what to do with their hands or say next merely for the sake of the Count of Monte Cristo behind her?

  “I’m sorry, I—” Vivian turned to the swarthy fellow with the aquiline face, who stood with European gravity, hands in pockets of blazer, thumbs out, bending politely toward them. “Franco Giapinno, my, ah—Inspector Richard Jury and Lord—I mean, and Melrose Plant.”

  She blushed, the old familiar Vivian, like a child who’d forgotten lines in a play. There were murmurs of pleased-to-meet-you and small, guttural Italian utterances from Vivian and Giapinno, to whom Melrose took an immediate dislike.

  “Why is it a surprise?” asked Vivian of Jury. “Didn’t Melrose tell you I was here—?”

  Her voice trailed off as Jury leveled a look at Melrose that would have stopped a stampede of buffalo.

  “No,” was all he said.

  Melrose felt wedged between their looks. “Well, it isn’t ‘Inspector,’ anyway, Vivian,” he said heartily. “It’s ‘Superintendent’ now.”

  “It certainly should be,” she said with that sincerity that had always made even her most banal comments glow. “Franco and I, ah, are . . .”

  Where she dropped it, Franco seemed only too happy to pick it up. “Engaged.” With a disgustingly proprietorial gesture, Franco put his arm round her waist.

  Everybody smiled.

  Jury refused Giapinno’s invitation to join them for luncheon. “Sorry, but I’m just on my way to London. The car’s outside.”

  “Oh,” said Vivian, weighting the syllable with sadness. “It’s about . . . I heard there’d been a murder in Stratford . . . Is that it—?”

  “That’s it,” said Jury, rather overcrisply.

  The silly good-byes were like the silly hellos. Vivian and the Italian moved off. At least, thought Melrose, there hadn’t been an invitation to the wedding.

  There was a long silence as the two of them stood there. Melrose studied the floorboards, almost afraid to look at Jury, who was fumbling through the lighting of a cigarette.

  Jury finally spoke through a haze of smoke rising upwards.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world—she had to walk into mine.”

  II

  DEPTFORD

  “It strikes a man as dead

  As a great reckoning in a little room.”

  —As You Like It

  21

  Detective Chief Superintendent Racer slapped shut the folder and glared across his desk at Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, who, being totally innocent of any prior involvement with this case, was therefore the most likely target for Racer’s acrimony.

  Wiggins did what he always did in difficult circumstances—blew his nose.

  “Sorry to drag you out of sickbay, Sergeant,” said Racer with mock-solicitousness.

  With Wiggins, the sarcasm fell wide. Jury sat there thinking that Wiggin’s long survival was owing to his ability to take everything literally. “Quite all right, sir. It’s just this allergy. The pollen count this week has been fearful—”

  Racer’s face, already spongy-red from too many brandies for lunch at his club, grew redder with suppressed rage. Not suppressed for long, however. “I don’t give a bloody damn about the pollen count. I’m not a bee. And put that damned packet away!”

  Some men went for their guns under stress, some for their cigarettes. Wiggins went for his cough drops. He had just been stripping the cellophane from a fresh box. “Sorry, sir.”

  Jury yawned and continued to look out of the window of Racer’s office at the sludgy gray sky above New Scotland Yard, at the small square of the Thames beyond the embankment. Racer insisted on a room with a view. All the better, thought Jury, if he decided to throw himself out the window some day. Racer’s voice droned on at Wiggins, and Jury waited. He knew the Chief Superintendent was merely prepping for the real operation of dissecting Jury: pulling on the rubber gloves, lining up the knives, the scalpels, the forceps. Racer had missed his true calling with the Met. He should have been a medical examiner.

  Having finished with Wiggins, who looked a bit pale (but then, Wiggins always did), Racer rocked back in his leather swivel chair, picked a bit of lint from his exquisitely tailored suit, adjusted the miniature carnation in his buttonhole, and turned his thin-bladed smile on Jury.

  “The Slasher,” he said, looking at Jury as if The Slasher sat before him in all of his bloody glory. “It’s really remarkable, Superintendent,” (Racer had never forgiven Jury his promotion last year) “that you happen to go to Stratford-upon-Avon and manage to come back with two murders and one missing person to your credit.” Jury might have been a collector, the way Racer put it. He rose from his chair to take his usual few turns about the room and added magnanimously, “Not that I can hold you personally responsible for this lunatic’s activities—”

  “Thank you,” said Jury.

  A pause. “Superintendent Jury, sarcasm is both unprofessional and unprofitable.” He stood behind them, feeling perhaps a psychological advantage in talking to the backs of their heads. Wiggins, Jury noted out of the corner of his eye, took the opportunity to open his box of cough drops very quietly.

  “However,” Racer went on, “it’s not enough, is it, that you insist on involving yourself in a case that rightly belongs to the Warwickshire constabulary—did they ask for assistance from us? No indeed, they did not! Leaving me to smooth over things and soft-soap the Chief Constable—”

  Soft-soap? Racer? A bowl of acid in the eyes would be more like it. Padding behind them, a tiger without teeth, Racer droned on.

  • • •

  Metaphorically in his death throes, Chief Superintendent Racer still refused to die. Jury’s colleagues at New Scotland Yard had all been looking forward to Racer’s retirement last year. But it hadn’t occurred; Racer was still slouching toward it as if it were terminal. Having been so sure the Chief Superintendent was on his way out, they had rallied round the coffin (again, metaphorically speaking) only to find the corpse had scarpered and been resuscitated at its desk on Monday, Savile Row trousers knife-creased, buttonhole boutonniered.

  • • •

  “—not enough, oh, no! Then instead of quietly leaving it all to the Stratford boys, you bring the whole lot to London! Why, Jury? To London! To London!—”

&nbs
p; “To buy a fresh pig.” Jury couldn’t help himself sometimes.

  Silence. The padding stopped. Wiggins shot Jury a glance and then stared straight ahead, sucking stealthily on his cough drop.

  Leaning over Jury’s shoulder, breathing the effluvium of his brandy-and-sodas into Jury’s face, Racer said, “What was that, lad?”

  “Nothing. Sir.”

  The padding resumed. “Ever since you made superintendent, Jury—” Jury wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Now he’d deflected the lecture into even saltier streams of vituperation, for now Racer could get on Jury’s roller-coaster career. “You got up, lad. You can just as easily go down. . . .”

  Hell, at this rate they’d be here all afternoon.

  Fortunately, Racer’s secretary interrupted by walking in and dumping some papers on his desk. Fiona Clingmore was dressed today in what should have been a negligee, but was apparently a summer dress. It was black and layered with ruffles all down the front, the layers being the only thing that kept Fiona from absolutely showing through. She stood now, one hand leaning on the desk, the other on her outslung hip, scarlet fingernails drumming, and giving them all the benefit of her décolletage. Fiona had topped forty a couple of years ago, Jury knew, but she was going down fighting.

  “Miss Clingmore,” said Racer. “I would appreciate your knocking, if you don’t mind. And get that mangy cat out of here.”

  “Sorry,” she said, wetting her finger and replastering a curl against her cheek. “You’re to sign these straightaway. The A.C. wants them.” She flounced out, forgetting the cat, but not forgetting to give Jury a wink. He was fond of Fiona and her increasingly bravura performances. He winked back.

  The cat snaked its way round their several legs and immediately leapt to Racer’s desk, where it sat, solid as a paperweight.

  Racer shoved it off, uttering expletives that cats were apparently privy to, and sat down. “Now what the hell’s this group you’ve got staying at Brown’s? Are they implicated?”