The fountain of enthusiasm dried up pretty quickly. “You?”
“Why not? I certainly spend enough of my time reading your rumpled drafts.” Probably, that’s what made her scoff. If he turned his hand to the trade, he wouldn’t be available for editing. He sighed. “What does the absolutely final deadline apply to? What book?”
“Remember Death of a Doge?”
“Actually, I’ve been trying to forget it.”
“Well, ta very much! Anyway, this is the sequel.”
“Pardon me?” If there was one book that did not cry out for a sequel, it was Death of a Doge. “Don’t you remember what an awful time you had writing that book?”
“Yes, but I liked Aubrey.”
Melrose didn’t. Was he once more to have to follow the travails of Aubrey Adderly in his escape through the misty byways of Venice? “I thought Aubrey was snuffed out there.”
“No, you’re thinking about somebody else.”
“If this book was the one I remember, I’m thinking about everybody else.” Polly had no problem bumping off a dozen people in as many pages. “Polly, you’ve got too much Venetian competition. Why don’t you choose another setting? Portsmouth or Bury St. Edmunds, for instance.”
“Oh, don’t be dim. Those places are never used.”
“That’s my point. Indeed, what about here? Are you still killing off the Bodenheims?”
Another topic she delighted in. “I just did in Julia for the eighteenth time.”
Julia Bodenheim was the daughter, not only a snob, but a snob on horseback.
“Whilst she was riding to hounds, her mount threw her off the other side of a hedge and half of the field of horses jumped it and trampled her to death. Bloodcurdling.” She uttered a satisfied sigh. For years, she’d been killing off the Bodenheims, one after another.
“Do you know, I saw Miles Bodenheim coming out of the post office.” Melrose sank farther into the comfortable armchair. Polly might not have known clothes, but she certainly knew furniture. Her little cottage was beautifully done up. “I can’t believe it’s been ten years. Ten years.” He studied the ceiling molding. “The place is caught in a time warp.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Argument, to Polly, meant contradiction. She passed him the cheese and crackers.
“No? Well, I’d swear Bodenheim had that same smarmy look on his face, the one he always got when he’d succeeded in making life hell for someone. In this case, the postmistress—what’s her name?”
“Pennystevens.” If they weren’t to talk about her books, she’d leaf through that magazine.
“Miss Pennyfeathers. Now, she looked ready to retire when I saw her ten years ago. But here she is. Here they are. Lord knows, Bodenheim looks the same right down to the egg on his waistcoat.”
“You’re being sentimental. You probably like A. E. Housman—‘What are those blue, remembered hills.’ That stuff.”
“You’re certainly attached to your Venetian stuff, aren’t you?”
She yawned by way of answer.
“Well, I expect I’d better be going. You’re tired.”
Ah, the yawn had backfired, had it? “No! No, you don’t have to . . . ” she ended up whining.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Polly. Perhaps we could have lunch.”
Her expression was thoughtful, suspicious. “Did you see her?”
“Lady Kennington, you mean? No, she wasn’t at the pub.”
“Yes, she is. I saw her.”
“I mean, she’s gone out somewhere.”
Polly studied the air. “Probably to that house she used to own. Skulking around the grounds, probably.”
In Polly’s darkling world, people didn’t simply look and walk; they peered and skulked.
Melrose did not want to say that Stonington was where he was heading. “I think I’d like to take a walk round the village. See if I’m not right. See if it’s not just the same.”
“You can’t go home again.”
One of the sappier entries in the cliché sweepstakes, he thought.
“Yes, you can. Goodnight, Polly.”
2
MELROSE HAD NEVER been on the other side of the stone wall, but he remembered the wall itself and the small brass plate fitted into the stone with the name Stonington engraved on it.
He had looked before through its iron gates, remembered the grounds as being overgrown and unpruned in summer; February’s leafless trees allowed for a better view of the house itself, which was huge. He inspected the stone posts for some sort of call box or electronic thing by which to gain admittance, saw nothing, then saw that the gate was neither locked nor chained and swung when he pushed it.
Up the gravel drive he walked, a drive that needed some seeing to, he thought, avoiding the potholes. He wondered how long it had stood vacant, for it had all of the appearance of a place not lived in for a very long time. It was the most hushed and deserted landscape he could remember. Birds should have found a bird paradise here, what with the overgrown privets, the untended herbaceous borders, but he heard no birds. He was probably still under the influence of Baltimore and Edgar Allan Poe, for he found he enjoyed finding sere landscapes, abandoned buildings he could think of as Poe-esque.
Melrose walked up the wide steps and when he got to the top cupped his face in his hands to look inside, as Polly had done earlier that evening to spy out his arrival.
What would he find?
How bloody ridiculous. He would find Lady Kennington, that’s what. The bored, hence gossipy, secretary in the estate agent’s office had told him Lady Kennington was most likely at the house, for she spent a lot of time there, looking at things, probably taking measurements, and did he know that once she owned it? Oh, yes, she had, and her husband, Lord Kennington, up and died on her, and she just stayed on as long as she could, well, I’d never, not alone I wouldn’t, not after those grisly murders, and did he know about that? That woman found in the—
Yes, Melrose knew, he said, and thanked her and left.
• • •
THE STATUE at the center of the courtyard must have served as a still point about which the household moved. It fascinated him that it could be seen from every room, upstairs and down-, for the rooms on the ground floor gave out on this courtyard, and those on the first each had a little balcony.
He observed this through the tall windows of a large, empty room, after observing the figure of a woman—not the statue, but near it, standing, and sometimes stooping in the garden around it. And what was she doing? Weeding? At night? Presumably, for when she stood up, her gloved hand was full of black, stemlike things. It amused him the way she seemed to be surveying the impossibly overgrown garden that surrounded the statue. Still, she bent down again to continue this thankless job. If she didn’t officially own the place, Melrose thought, she very much belonged to it. Like that statue, really. A permanent fixture.
Now, he was unsure what to do, that is, how to make his appearance without scaring the hell out of her. Tap on the windowpane? No, that would be even more frightening in an empty house. And her back was to him, so if he came from this direction, she wouldn’t able to see him coming. He walked through this room to another, to step through the french window there so that she could see him approaching.
And she did. She rose from whatever fruitless task she was performing, looked at him for a long moment, her head cocked to one side, and smiled and said, finally:
“I remember you.” She said it as if some question of identity, long plaguing her, had finally been answered; as if some destiny had finally been fulfilled.
Or that was the way Melrose wanted to hear it. “We never really met.”
“No, but you were at—the funeral.” For a moment, her eyes looked away.
“That’s right. Ten years ago. I’m amazed you can remember.”
“That long.” She shook her head. “Time plays such tricks. You’d never think this house had been lived in, would you? But it was rented for severa
l years. Now it’s up for sale.” And then, quickly, she asked, “You’re not—?”
He smiled at the anxiety in her tone. “No, I’m not a prospective buyer, Lady Kennington.”
“Oh, don’t call me that.” She smiled that glittery smile. “I never did like all that ‘Lady’ business. And now my husband’s dead, I don’t feel . . . Just Jenny. But, if you haven’t come to view the place, then, why—?”
“I’ve been looking for you,” said Melrose.
That was the understatement of the century.
FORTY-FIVE
“Prescription number,” said Jury.
He was in Exeter headquarters, it was after the dinner hour, and the third person in Macalvie’s office, a Dr. Sloane, looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else, including down in an open grave silting earth—anywhere but sitting in an office with a couple of coppers.
Macalvie creaked back in his swivel chair. He smiled. “I knew it’d be worth it, going to New Mexico.”
Jury fiddled with the photocopied page of the address book. “Give Wiggins the credit. It was his prescription.”
“I called your friend Lady Cray and asked her to check the medicine cabinets. What she found were some of those nitroglycerin patches.”
“Heart condition, I know.”
Macalvie nodded. “Strong stuff. Nothing to fool around with. Ms. Hamilton was taking a hell of a risk, bad smoking habit combined with that kind of medication. After I talked to you, I rang Frances Hamilton’s doctor. He’d written a prescription before she went to the States, precisely with the length of this trip in mind. He didn’t want her to run out. When she came back here, she got the prescription refilled. In other words, she didn’t need to see a doctor in the States.”
“So the prescription—assuming that’s what the number meant-—wasn’t for her, even though it was written in her address book.”
Dr. Sloane, with an exaggerated look at his watch, said, “I need to go back to the lab, Superintendent.”
Macalvie made some insincere gesture of apology, said, “Tell him what you told me.”
Sloane sighed. “It’s all in the—”
“Report. I know. It’s just that you tell it so much better.”
Dr. Sloane didn’t change his expression, but Jury smiled. Dr. Sloane was clearly a Macalvite, one of those very few whom Macalvie admired. Dr. Sloane let his watch fall backward on his wrist and said: “A toxic dose of nicotine produces tachycardia, mental confusion, convulsions, amongst other symptoms, such as violent nausea. In the case of this victim—” Sloane gestured toward the wash of papers on Macalvie’s desk, among them, photographs of the body of Angela Hope—“it would explain one puzzling thing: how she could have fallen into that enclosure at Old Sarum. The Wiltshire police were right; she couldn’t have simply slipped. But in the state she’d have been in from nicotine poisoning, the last of her worries would have been slipping and falling. It’s unfortunate no one saw her and that I didn’t have presenting symptoms, but I can see her in my mind’s eye, certainly. I can easily believe the mental confusion and convulsions could force her in, if not actually catapult her into that pit. She wouldn’t have been grabbing at grass, she’d have been grabbing her own body—”
“You’re certain, then, it was a toxic dose of nicotine?” As soon as he said it, Jury could have cut out his tongue.
The pause was a mere heartbeat, but it was trenchant with implications of “Stop wasting my time” and “Haven’t you been listening?” Since Sloane had the same reactions to Macalvie, Jury didn’t take it personally. Sloane pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it across to Jury, who looked at its spiky lines and percentages and drug names with a fair amount of incomprehension.
“Results of a gas chromatogram that give you what’s found in extracted blood. The level of nicotine that shows up here isn’t surprising, since the victim was a heavy smoker.”
At that moment, like the assistant in a magician’s act, Macalvie pulled out an opened carton of Marlboro cigarettes and slapped it on his desk.
Jury looked from Sloane to Macalvie, said, “Sorry, I don’t get it. I’m a heavy smoker—was a heavy smoker—” he smiled serenely—“too, but I’m not going into convulsions. I hope.”
“Let’s hope not,” said Sloane, in his reassuring way. “I was interrupted.” Here a look at Macalvie possibly as toxic as a nicotine overdose. “If you could dispense with the pyrotechnics, Superintendent? At least until I’m out of here?”
Macalvie grinned. It was hard to put him down when he was getting going.
Sloane continued. “A lethal dose of nicotine for humans ranges from about thirty to sixty milligrams. One pack of cigarettes contains around 300 milligrams.” With this, Dr. Sloane let a lingering glance fall on Macalvie’s overflowing ashtray, raised his eyes from that to Macalvie, and gave the superintendent a withering smile. “Most is burned off or metabolized, of course. Nevertheless—”
“Cigars are worse,” said Macalvie.
Oh, you fool, Sloane’s deprecating smile said. He turned to Jury and went on. “Death can occur within a few minutes, in this case, myocardial infarction resulting from valvular heart disease, probably owing to the earlier rheumatic fever.”
“Within minutes? But why did it happen at Old Sarum, then?”
Sloane answered, “Can occur within minutes. But it might be as much as four hours, a more likely time frame—” he shrugged—“one hour. It all depends on the dose and the victim.”
Macalvie nodded. “When Plant talked to the North London boyo—Gabriel Merchant—he mentioned something that he hadn’t talked about before, a detail that wouldn’t have registered to him as important. When he saw her in that exhibit, she was ‘picking at something.’ Like a sticking plaster—”
“The nitroglycerin patch?” Jury frowned. “I thought we were talking about nicotine—”
Macalvie held up his hand. “The printed directions for this stuff tell you to remove it immediately if symptoms occur, for one thing. She looked pretty bad, according to what this Gabe told Plant, white, or maybe green—anyway, sick. She left the portrait exhibit in a hurry. Next she shows up, not long after, in the Pre-Raphaelite room. Still looking sick. Sick to death, you might say.” Macalvie leaned halfway across his desk, the blue eyes and copper hair incendiary. “Jury. If you were going to stop smoking—”
“If?”
“—and you’d tried just about everything—”
Details clicked in Jury’s mind with the precision of a combination for busting a safe: “I’ve tried every bloody thing—pills . . . patches . . . therapy . . . ”
“—and nothing worked, wouldn’t you try a doctor for nicotine—”
“Patches,” said Jury.
Dr. Sloane crossed his arms before his chest as if the February sleet were falling in his office. “What was making the lady sick was nicotine. Administered transdermally.”
“Nicotine patches need a prescription. At least in the United States, they do. You don’t get them over the counter. Surely, no doctor would have prescribed a nicotine system for a woman who was already dosing herself with nitroglycerin—” Jury stopped.
“Now here we’ve got another woman who can’t stop smoking, but who hated doctors—”
“Angela Hope, you mean.”
Macalvie went on: “—and those patches can only be obtained through a doctor.”
“Unless, of course—”
Macalvie nodded, smiling.
“—you happen to have a pharmacist in the family.”
The three sat there, silent, looking at one another. Even Dr. Sloane seemed to be enjoying things now. He said, “A pharmacist could easily inject a toxic dose of nicotine through the paper covering with a very sharp needle. Administered through the skin, one of the most toxic poisons I can think of. And even if the victim removes the patch, it’s imperative that all of the contaminant be flushed off because if it isn’t, the skin continues the absorption process. Nothing to fool around with, gentlemen
.” Dr. Sloane rose. “I’ll leave the less technical aspect of this to Commander Macalvie.” A chilly smile, here.
“Gee, thanks. Words of one syllable I can handle. Just.”
Dr. Sloane walked out of the room.
Finally, Jury said. “She was right.”
“Who was right?”
“Mary Dark Hope.”
“The kid sister. Let’s hope she doesn’t advertise it. At least not around Dolores Schell. And here I have to make one of my brilliant imaginative leaps: the nicotine patches passed through the hands of Nell and, I’m certainly assuming, Frances Hamilton. Speculation, but could we assume it was in the address book because Angela Hope asked one or both of them to pick up the prescription? Did they simply take a couple to ‘try out’? More likely Angela gave them some.” Then he picked up the carton of cigarettes, waggled it a few times. “Found in Angela’s room at the Red Lion. Dolores Schell was being helpful, gathered up Angela’s stuff, thought maybe police had missed something. Oh, they had. Cigarettes. You look like you don’t understand, Jury.”
“I don’t. What was a woman who was using nicotine patches doing with a carton of cigarettes?”
“That’s the point, she wasn’t. The cigarettes were a prop furnished by Dolly. Dolly stashed them in Angela’s room in case nicotine turned up in a routine analysis. If there hadn’t been any cigarettes and Angela was known to be a heavy smoker, Rush might have wondered. But Dolly worked it out: if she ‘found’ a carton of cigarettes, then nicotine in the system would hardly be surprising. Even if Angela hadn’t pulled off the damned patch, police would still assume she’d been smoking while doctoring herself with these patches. That’s a very dangerous thing to do and would satisfactorily explain cardiac arrest.” Macalvie leaned back, stared at the ceiling. “What’s Dolores Schell’s motive?”
“She told me she disliked Angela. Although I’m sure she downplayed the extent of her hatred and jealousy. The reason she told me herself was that she thought I’d probably find out anyway, from someone else, and it wouldn’t look good. Over the years Dolly had had to watch Angela Hope ‘seduce’ everyone away from her, including her own father.”
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