The Dirty Duck

by Martha Grimes

  “Marlowe was always having duels. That’s why I can’t understand your tenacious belief in this absurd theory. Let’s have a drink.”

  • • •

  They had walked through a series of mean little streets fronting warehouses behind the cathedral until they had come upon a pub, crowded despite its location. Melrose wondered where in heaven’s name all of these people came from.

  “Look at it this way,” said Harvey, clasping his pint of stout between both hands, and looking with earnest gray eyes at Melrose. “Okay, I agree he was always jumping the gun with people. But explain how in the hell could an ‘accident’ like that happen? I mean, him running his own dagger into his own eye. Or right above it, I mean?”

  Melrose lit his cigar. “Simple. Allow me to demonstrate.” Melrose picked up his walking stick. “Assume that the knob of this stick is the hilt of a dagger. Assume you—Frizer—are sitting wedged between Poley and Skeres and Marlowe is pommeling you about the head with the dagger’s hilt. It was common to do that in that day and age, a kind of precursor to the serious bit of dueling or whatever. That means that the blade of the knife is pointed at Marlowe, doesn’t it? So when Frizer is trying to deflect the weapon it goes into Marlowe’s forehead.” Melrose shrugged. “I don’t see why that’s so hard to understand.”

  Harvey looked at him with some respect. “Say, you’ve really done your homework, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. I did a little reading in the Stratford library. Somehow I feel it is incumbent upon me to disabuse you of this theory about Shakespeare . . . I mean, really . . . oh, not that damned computer again, Harvey, for God’s sakes.”

  But Harvey had the computer out and was punching keys to beat the band. Then he sat, lips pursed, waiting for his file to come up. “Here it is: medical report. A wound like that couldn’t have killed him. It would have sent him into a coma.”

  “Medical report? What medical report?”

  Harvey scratched his head. “Well, an interpretation, let’s say. By a scholar. And another thing: if all this was going on, why the hell didn’t Bob Poley and Nick Skeres help old Kit out? Answer me that. They were his buddies, weren’t they? So they just sit there? The only reason they’d just sit there is because the whole thing was planned out in the first place!” He flicked off the Ishi and raised his glass in a gesture of triumph and gazed around the smoke-filled, crowded room. “Just imagine what these places used to be like.”

  Melrose hoped whatever imagining was going to take place would be in Harvey’s memory bank and not in the Ishi’s. If he was forced to watch him bring up one more file, Melrose would seriously consider throwing himself into the Thames.

  “Imagine pulling up your horse in the courtyard and having the servants run out to you, the hostler take your horse and the drawer light a fire in your chamber—”

  “And the hostler always managing somehow to feel the weight of your purse, and the chamberlain rob you of it afterwards—”

  “What a cynic.” Harvey continued, in a weepy tone: “And the host helping you off with your boots, just as if it were your own home; and the tapster chalking up the score at the bar—”

  “And ye merry host being as much moneylender, guller of country bumpkins and young gallants, as he was publican; and the drawer always managing to add a few more chalk-marks to the board than were rightfully yours—”

  “You’re really fun, Mel, you know that? But think of the meals you could get, sitting before the blazing hearth—for maybe eight shillings you’d have plates of mutton and chicken and bacon, pigeon-pies, bread and beer—”

  “And the inns gathering places for duelists and courtesans . . . at least it kept them off the streets.”

  “Oh, come on! Wouldn’t you give an arm and leg to set the clock back four hundred years if you could?”

  “Set the clock back? No, thank you. Back to a day when goldsmiths were bankers and barbers were surgeons? To a day when streets were no wider than lanes, so that only two creaking carts could pass; and lanes were as narrow as public footpaths? When those overhanging upper stories that Americans find so quaint were needed for living space? When there were riots, fires, rabbit warrens of tenements, and the air was so fetid with pestilence that one had to draw curtains round one’s bed to sleep through the night without getting the plague? When the constant refrain was ‘Chattels and goods had he none’? Set the clock back? Don’t be an idiot.” Melrose drank his ale.

  “Man, you’re really on a downer.”

  “The entire sixteenth century was on a downer, my dear fellow. If you Americans had had a taste of Elizabethan politics, you’d have applauded Nixon for being so forthcoming and upstanding.”

  “Nixon? That s.o.b.?”

  Feeling he’d gained an advantage in a most unexpected quarter, Melrose smiled a wonderful smile and said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always thought of Richard Nixon as Mary, Queen of Scots.”

  • • •

  “I can’t believe it,” said Harvey, looking sadly from his map of old Deptford up to the new, but seedy-looking, development. “Pepys Park. Can you feature it?”

  “You didn’t imagine, did you, that Deptford Strand would still be the site of duels and ruffs and painted ladies?”

  “Well, yeah. But, I mean really . . .” He looked behind them, across the street. There was a pub called the Victoria. They had passed the John Evelyn a while back. “I mean, can you imagine turning the whole damned place into a bunch of apartments?”

  “Yes.” Melrose looked down at Harvey’s map. “I see no Rose tavern there. Mistress Bull’s.”

  Harvey scratched his head. “Well, no one knew where it was, exactly. Come on, let’s keep walking.”

  “Let’s go back to Brown’s,” said Melrose.

  “Stop raining on my parade. Come on.”

  And they continued their walk toward the river.

  “How about this place?” said Harvey, looking up at the tall facade of an unsavory-looking pub with a dull sliver of yellow on its sign announcing it as the Half-Moon.

  “Good as any, I suppose. The original tavern belonging to your Mistress Bull is certainly gone by now.”

  “How do you know this wasn’t it?” To one side was an alley no wider than a gutter. An unprofessionally lettered sign with an arrow pointed, apparently that way. “See, it says there’s a garden out back.”

  “It’s probably the way to Kew.”

  The building was decidedly ugly, its dark frontage running up into an overhanging upper story, giving it a listing and dropsical look. A large lattice of flaking green paint flanked one side of the door.

  “The place must be old. That lattice used to be the sign of an ale house. They painted them red or green.” Harvey was looking reverently at the ugly building, his cap crushed in his hands.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You don’t really think you’re going to find the original, do you? Do you think it’s still standing as a living memorial to your theory? Come on; I’m thirsty. Let’s see if the happy host has some Old Peculier.”

  • • •

  The inside was no more inviting than the outside. No light intruded by way of the leaded glass panes made still more opaque by a layer of grime. Down the length of the long bar, being slowly wiped down by the publican chewing on his cigar, ran a quite magnificent beveled mirror with a gold-leaf frame sporting cupids and Pans and other minor deities probably doing things they’d no business doing in public. The few patrons—it was yet barely eleven in the morning—looked as if they’d been born in the place. They all seemed to have soaked up some of the darkness of the interior. From cigarettes, smoke rose in thin tendrils. The customers coughed. The room had a brackish, dead-fish smell. But there was the magnificence of the mirror and the old china beerpulls to salve the customers’ souls. Not that these looked terribly soulful.

  “Hiya,” said Harvey, plunking some coins down. “Two of those.” He pointed to one of the beerpulls. As the publican set up glasses, Harvey said, with his usua
l bonhomie, “Say, this wouldn’t by chance be the old Rose tavern, would it?”

  “The ol’ wot, mate?” The owner squinted his eyes.

  “Used to be a tavern in Deptford Strand they think was called the Rose. Run by one Eleanor Bull. Near as I can make out, it would have been around here. Christopher Marlowe was murdered there.” Harvey shoved Melrose’s ale down the bar and took a drink himself.

  “Murder?” He went a little pale. “Wot you talkin’ about? ’Ere now, you be police, or wot?”

  “Police? Who, us? No, no, no. You don’t understand—”

  Nor would he ever, thought Melrose with a sigh, separating himself from the uncomfortable wooden stool and taking his drink to a table. He watched Harvey natter on. A dour-looking woman who walked down the bar like someone with springs on her feet joined in the discussion. Harvey finally shrugged and came to join Melrose.

  “They never heard of the Rose, or Eleanor, or Marlowe. But they said in the back they did have a couple of separate rooms for people who wanted to have their own party. Come on, let’s check it out.”

  Harvey led the way down a narrow dark hall at the end of which two doors debouched off to right and left onto identical rooms, furnished with round tables and chairs just as uninviting as the ones in the main bar. The only other door led to the outside, with a sign on the lintel, “Mind Your Head.”

  Minding their heads, they crouched and went through into the garden, or what might at one time in the dim, dead past have been a garden, now gone to seed. An opening in the crumbling stone wall led to the alley.

  Melrose sat down on a listing bench as Harvey surveyed the scene, delighted. “It could have been just like this, Mel.” And he started going through a director’s motions, someone blocking out places on a stage, putting Kit there, Bob here. “I mean, can’t you just see it?”

  “No,” said Melrose, charmingly. He yawned.

  • • •

  “Don’t tell anyone,” said Harvey, once they had gained possession of a table in the Half-Moon’s dark public bar, “but I write a little poetry myself.”

  “Believe me,” said Melrose, wondering if anyone had ever drowned in a glass of ale like the Duke of Clarence in a butt of Malmsey, “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Sonnets, mostly. Yes sir, I got them all in here.” He patted the computer, drank his beer, and looked sidewise at Melrose. “Want to hear a line? ‘If sands still bear the imprint of a sandal—’ ”

  Melrose interrupted quickly. He would nip this recitation in the bud, even if it killed him. “Were I you, I’d stick to computer programming.”

  Sadly, Harvey shook his head. “You know what, Mel? You kind of take the bounce out of life.”

  “Not out of your life, surely. You’ll still go bouncing along with no hindrance from me.”

  “What do you do for fun, anyway? You got a girl?”

  “A ‘girl’?”

  “Yeah. You know.” Harvey drew curves in the air.

  “I know what they are. At the moment, unfortunately, no. You?”

  He looked off across the small sea of dark, empty tables. “Once I did. Was going to get married. I didn’t know her all that long. Love at first sight—for both of us.” He sighed. “ ‘But that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.’ ”

  Melrose was not at all surprised at Harvey’s quoting Marlowe, but at the extremely un-Harvey-like bitterness in his tone. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Ah . . .” and the motion of his hand seemed to wave away wench, death, and that other country. “I don’t brood. That’s the worst thing you can do is brood. You get to the point you can’t think of anything else, know what I mean? Listen—” Harvey smiled and slapped a pound note on the table. “Put up a quid—isn’t that what they call them, ‘quids’?”

  “Quids, yes.”

  “Okay, now you put up a quid and we’ll see who buys.” Harvey raised his glass. “I’m betting you don’t know who said this.”

  “Said what?” Melrose obediently unlayered a pound note from the wad in his money-clip.

  “ ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ ”

  Melrose frowned. “Good grief, every schoolboy knows that line. It’s Shakespeare.”

  Looking terribly smug, Harvey shook his head.

  “Of course it is. Ye gods, haven’t we all just seen As You Like It umpteen times? Touchstone says it.”

  “Uh-uh. Marlowe.”

  “Marlowe? Ho ho. You buy.”

  “Ho ho, you buy.”

  To Melrose’s eternal annoyance, he leaned over and tapped away at the Ishi, waited a moment, brought up a file, and sat back, complaisance written all over his face.

  Melrose leaned over and read:

  It lies not in our power to love or hate,

  For will in us is overruled by fate . . .

  Where both deliberate, the love is slight;

  Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight

  “From Hero and Leander,” Harvey said, and lifted his glass. “You buy.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Melrose, without rancor. He was always willing to be educated, even by the Harvey Schoenbergs of this world. “You mean the bard stole it?” Melrose gathered up their glasses.

  “Nah. He quoted it. Look at a text. It’s in quotes.” Harvey leaned across the table, said sotto voce, “Which is one more clue in my theory—”

  “See you later,” said Melrose quickly, making for the bar.

  • • •

  But of course, Harvey remembered his place quite perfectly. As Melrose set the pints down, Harvey repeated: “. . . one more clue.” He started punching up the Ishi again, saying at the same time: “Far as I’m concerned, you put the sonnets together with the stuff from this play, and it adds up to one word. For example, look at this. Touchstone again: ‘It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.’ ”

  Melrose frowned. “Referring to what?”

  “Marlowe’s murder, of course. Don’t you remember? ‘Le reckenynge’—it’s what the fight was over, the settling up of the bill in the tavern.” He outflung his arm as if they were indeed sitting in that selfsame tavern. “Do you know that line about love at first sight is the only time Shakespeare ever quoted another poet in his plays?”

  “So?”

  “Ah, come on, Mel. Use your loaf, as they say over here. Marlowe’s death is obviously really bugging the hell out of Shakespeare. Now put that together with everything else I’ve told you—”

  Melrose was quite happy to have forgotten everything Harvey had told him in case it resulted in brain rot. He studied the massive and ornate gold-leaf mirror over the bar as tap, tap, tap went Harvey’s nimble fingers on the Ishi.

  “—together with the other sonnets, and especially this one.” The screen scrolled up, Harvey banged a key in triumph, and read, “ ‘Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing—’ ”

  Melrose, feeling displays of temper to be ungentlemanly, not to say emotionally depleting, was seldom given to them. But now he banged his walking stick down on the table, making both Harvey and the Ishi jump. “You go too far! That is probably one of the most beautiful sonnets ever written, and obviously written for some woman—the Dark Lady, probably . . .” His voice trailed off. Melrose really was not at all sure of his ground, but he refused to let this sonnet become grist for the Schoenberg Ishi. “The Dark Lady,” he repeated. Why couldn’t they talk about the French symbolists?

  “Ah, don’t be so romantic. It was Shakespeare’s apologia, or whatever you call those things. Just wait till I tell all this to old Jonathan.” Harvey’s expression grew uncharacteristically dark. “He’ll be in this afternoon. Concorde.”

  “Jonathan must have a bit of the ready.” At Harvey’s questioning look, Melrose added, “Money.”

  “Yeah. Well, the folks had it.” Harvey brightened up and said, “But so do you, with a title to boot. Listen, come on and have dinner with us, okay?”

  Mel
rose was curious enough about the brother to agree. “You really dislike your brother, don’t you?”

  “No love lost on either side. But this Shakespeare-Marlowe business—I told you it could all be summed up in one word.”

  Blackly, Melrose regarded him; hating himself, he asked anyway. “What word?”

  “Remorse. Billy-boy knows what he’s done, and there’s an end on it.” Happily, Harvey drank his pint.

  “I certainly hope there’s an end on it.” Melrose bethought himself. “Do you realize we’ve been sitting here talking about Marlowe’s murder instead of these murders much closer to hand?” He looked at Harvey who was closing up the Ishi. “Tell me. You surely must have a theory on that.”

  Harvey shrugged. “Some nut. Who else could it be?”

  “One of you.”

  Harvey stared at him.

  And it was Melrose now who happily quaffed his ale.

  24

  “Honycutt,” said Wiggins, “is at the Salisbury pub.”

  “The Salisbury. He doesn’t waste any time, does he? Well, come on then, we might as well join him.”

  • • •

  The Ford idled away, seemingly forever, waiting for one of the green lights which never appeared to get one much farther round Piccadilly Circus and its eternal traffic snarl. In defiance of lights, laws, and even the knowledge that heavy metal can play hell with human flesh, pedestrians kept trying to make a break for it. One could hardly blame them, since all the cars were in competition with them, as if one and all were dicing to see who could get through the light first or last before it changed.

  “Why don’t they just take down the bloody lights and let’s have a free-for-all,” said Wiggins, nosing forward where three middle-aged ladies apparently didn’t know or care how close they were to his bumper. The base of the statue of Eros was crowded as usual with office workers and battalions of pigeons, all on their lunch-hour.

  “Excepting Farraday himself, we’re no clearer to a motive for any of these people than we were before. He might have murdered Amelia out of jealousy. Had plenty of reason, that’s for sure. And might also have killed the stepdaughter, who was a real sexual tease, though that seems a thin motive—”