I Am the Only Running Footman

by Martha Grimes

  It could have been that glassful of sherry, he thought, but perhaps that merely helped release bottled-up feelings. He wondered if the flowery sentiments of the room were not some unconscious desire to express emotions she otherwise repressed. He thought Stella Broome probably prided herself on toughness. Her life must have been lonely; perhaps she had to marshal all of her forces in order to defend herself against this new onslaught. Hence the carping criticism.

  “I wonder if I could have a little of that sherry?” asked Jury. It might afford her a bit of companionship. He filled her glass and went to the kitchen for another one. It gave her a few minutes to weep without being stared at by Scotland Yard.

  “Thank you.” She blew her nose. “Don’t know what came over me.”

  “You should let go more, Mrs. Broome.” Inwardly, he smiled. He sounded like Wiggins. He asked again about Gerald Fox, feeling it was merely repetitive; Macalvie would have covered that ground thoroughly.

  “Yes, well, he was devoted to Sheila and she treated him like he wasn’t worth nothing. Felt sorry for him sometimes, I did. That’s the only reason she went up to London — to make him jealous. Oh, I knew it was probably all lies, the men she said she went out with. An old man with plenty of money, used to call him her Sugar Daddy — that was one. She said he’d come round to the flat to pick her up in his fancy car. If that ain’t something! Then there was a dancer in some West End musical, fairy I’d bet; and —”

  Jury interrupted. “Did she ever mention any names?”

  “Guy-somebody. That was the dancer. Had a fancy car, some foreign make. Anyone had a flash car Sheila’d just swoon over. Flash cars and flash men, that was Sheila’s style. Well, she didn’t have a license herself; I mean, they took it away from her for drink-driving. Far as I’m concerned, they should. Too much drinking these days, anyway.” Mournfully, she looked at her glass. Perhaps she was thinking she hadn’t set the best example; that she might have nudged Sheila off the straight and narrow herself. “If I’d of got married again, maybe Sheila wouldn’t have been so wild. It needs a man to straighten out a girl like that. All those men she said courted her —”

  Stella Broome pressed her fingertips to her forehead as if remembering gave her a headache. Finally, she shook her head. “All I know is Sheila’d talk and talk about these fellas, probably to Gerald, too, to make him jealous. I don’t even know she was telling the truth. Why’d any rich man dance attendance on Sheila?”

  Jury looked at the photograph sitting next to the sherry bottle. “She was very pretty.” Pretty, in a tartish way, he thought. Too much makeup, bleached hair. What had Macalvie said — “bottled-in-blond”? Jury frowned. “You said something about an older man. What about him?”

  “Him? Well, I don’t know, exactly. When she’d start in like that, I’d just stop listening, sometimes. All those men she claimed she’d got on a string.” Her forehead creased with the effort of thinking and she stopped rocking suddenly. “That lorry driver that picked her up. They let him go.” Stella Broome wadded the handkerchief under her nose again and shivered.

  “A waitress at the Little Chef saw her get out of the cab, and the artic pull away. Commander Macalvie was satisfied he had nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, it’s past now. I don’t know why police are raking it over again. It was some psycho picked her up. Some psycho.”

  “Yes, that’s perfectly possible. But I’ll tell you why we’re raking it up, Mrs. Broome. There was a woman killed in London, killed the same way your daughter was, with her own scarf.”

  She stopped rocking suddenly. “Oh, dear. Oh, that’s terrible. You think it was the same person?”

  “Because of the — method, it’s just possible.”

  “But then it must be like I said. Some crazy.”

  “Did your daughter ever mention a David?”

  “Not that I remember.” She had taken another plunge or two into the sherry bottle; by now she was on her fourth or fifth. The words slurred slightly as she said, “Don’t think she ever said that name.” Stella seemed to be studying the wallpaper over Jury’s shoulder; taking an imaginary walk through her botanical gardens, perhaps.

  He waited for a moment to see if anything would occur to her. But she appeared to be rocking — and drinking — herself to sleep. Her head nodded like a flower on its stem. He got up and said, “Well, I’ll be leaving now, Mrs. Broome. If you remember anything, anything at all, you’ll get in touch, won’t you?”

  Her head snapped up and she shook herself. “Yes.” She got up with considerable effort, steadying herself on the arm of the sofa. “But I ain’t calling him, that commander or whoever he is.” On their way to the door, she plucked the dried flowers from the table and ran her fingers over them, dusting them. “Where’ll you be?”

  Jury handed her a card. “New Scotland Yard. Just call this number, Mrs. Broome.”

  Now she seemed as reluctant to let him go as she had first been to have him stay. She kept looking and looking at the card as if it might be a lucky souvenir.

  He did not like leaving her alone, but he couldn’t stop here all day. And anyway there would always be another day to be faced. Jury looked round the room, at the dried bouquets, the walled gardens. A fragment of a poem came to him . . . Be still, the hanging gardens are a dream . . . that over Persian roses blew to kiss . . . . What had “kiss” rhymed with? He could not remember where the lines came from or for whom the kiss was meant. A queen, he thought. What Sheila Broome had wanted to be, perhaps.

  “I like your wallpaper. It’s very . . . pretty,” he added lamely, unable to find a proper word. “Good-bye, Mrs. Broome. Don’t forget to call. You’ve been very helpful.”

  On the pavement, he looked back. She was still there, clutching the fake bouquet. He wondered if the younger Stella had clutched her bridal bouquet that way. Probably she had forgotten the happiness of such a day. And Sheila would never experience it.

  • • •

  Sergeant Wiggins was sitting in Macalvie’s office drinking a cup of tea when Jury walked in.

  “Where is he?” Jury nodded at the desk as big as a lake and afloat beneath a pile of papers, pens, and files.

  “Forensics lab,” said Wiggins. “To see someone named Thwaite.” He sniffed and drew out his snowdrift of a handkerchief. “Only glad I’m not Thwaite.”

  “That makes two of us.” Jury smiled and nodded toward the door. “Come on, let’s go look for him.”

  • • •

  A uniformed police constable directed them to the lab, which lay at the end of a confusion of corridors.

  Once through the swinging doors to the last corridor, the directions became superfluous. Jury simply followed the sound of a voice, which finally gave way to an onslaught of invectives as they came nearer.

  It wasn’t a him, Jury saw, as he looked through the glass square set in the door. The woman barely came up to Macalvie’s shoulder, but she was reaching for somewhere around the temples, given the way she was handling the microscope.

  Macalvie, although not inordinately large, managed to gain six inches in height and girth by arranging himself like a cliffside in front of this object of his displeasure, whom Jury assumed to be Sergeant Thwaite. Given the tension in the room, any knock would probably have ricocheted off the door, so Jury simply pulled it open to hear the divisional commander going on about the ax.

  Or Exe, as Jury now deciphered it.

  “. . . stand there and tell me all day, Gilly. We pulled him outta the Exe, but he wasn’t in the effing Exe when he died—” Macalvie turned a fraction, caught sight of Jury, nodded by way of indifferent greeting, and returned to his argument.

  “If I could just have that back now,” said Gilly Thwaite, reaching for the microscope that Macalvie had wrested from her. “Do you think that specimen is going to stand up and salute?”

  “You’re not forensics, Gilly.”

  “Neither are you,” she snapped.

  Jury gave Thwaite a gold star
for courage. She had brown curls as tight as springs and smoky gray eyes, the smoke no doubt funneling up from the fires within. One arm leaned on the black marble of the lab table, the hand fisted as if she could hardly wait to slug him. When she opened her mouth, Macalvie looked at it like a dentist with a drill.

  He turned to Jury. “Let’s get out of here; I need a drink,” he said, pulling Wiggins along with him less by the hand on his shoulder than by the air sucked into any vacuum the D.C. left in his wake. He turned back to Sergeant Thwaite. “Would you just let Waliman do his job? Such as he is,” Macalvie added sotto voce.

  Gilly Thwaite, back to her microscope, looked up. “You’ll just have to carry on without me.”

  “What a mouth. If she parked her tongue, it’d be on a yellow line,” said Macalvie.

  • • •

  The pub was in the old part of Exeter in one of the Tudor buildings surrounding the cathedral green. The short trip in the police Cortina, with Macalvie cannoning from curb to curb around old Exeter’s confines, was filled with various complaints and imprecations — he hadn’t eaten in two days (Jury could believe it); he was going to quit and take off for America (Jury didn’t believe it) and get a private license (ditto). “You’ve seen The Maltese Falcon once too often, Macalvie,” said Jury as they pushed open the door of the Black Swan.

  • • •

  Macalvie peered through the glass-surround of the steam table and asked the girl to serve up a plate of cottage pie, sausages, peas, and bread. He inspected the plate to see if there was any more room, then said, “You guys want anything? They do good bar meals.”

  Jury shook his head; Wiggins asked the girl for a cheese toastie. Then, looking at Macalvie’s piled-up plate, Wiggins shook his head. “Roughage, you need. Lettuce. You’re probably like him.” Wiggins nodded toward Jury. “Don’t eat right for days and try to make up for it all in one go, and stuff yourself with the wrong things.”

  “You call a cheese toastie a right thing?” Still, he looked doubtfully at his plate and handed it back for some salad. Jury went to the other end of the bar for the drinks, thinking they must have some common ancestor. Macalvie, who took advice from no one but the archangel Gabriel, often took Wiggins’s dissertations on health with more than a grain of salt.

  It was salt they were arguing over when Jury sat down at the table. “Hypertension, hell.” He snowed his cottage pie under with a half-dozen shakes. “So what happened with Stella Broome?” Macalvie made a little pool in the center of his potatoes.

  “Nothing that you don’t already know, I imagine. She talked about Sheila’s boyfriends, a Gerald Fox, Guy somebody, others nameless. Unfortunately, Stella often tuned her out. What about this older man, the one Sheila called her Sugar Daddy?”

  “That’s a nil, Jury. Oh, there apparently was some old guy — old meaning twice her age. I chatted up Vera, the one she used to visit, about him. Too bad Vera didn’t much care for Sheila, said she was a freeloader, and didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to what she said either. But she did catch a glimpse of him standing beside his car. One of those Jag XJ6s. You know, the kind with the fourteen interchangeable roofs they issue cops like us. But we couldn’t trace the guy.”

  Macalvie shook his head, poured on more salt. “It’s all in the files. We talked to two, three hundred people. Relatives, relatives of relatives. Friends, friends of friends. Nothing.”

  Wiggins was depositing two or three drops of a neon-yellow fluid in his lager. “Couldn’t this lorry driver, Riley, have picked her up later —?”

  Macalvie was fascinated, watching the descent of the drops as he said, “It wasn’t the driver. There wasn’t the sign of any lorry parked in that woods . . . . Wiggins, what is that stuff?”

  The lager had taken on an alien color. “Got something in my chest.” He coughed and hit his chest with his fisted hand.

  “Probably a Martian,” said Macalvie, as he went back to his sausages. “The waitress said he set Sheila down at the edge of the road just after they left the Little Chef. The Higgins dame certainly wasn’t lying and she seemed to be very observant. Though she couldn’t identify the picture of David Marr we showed her. I mean, couldn’t say yes or no, definitely. Just that he looked ‘familiar.’ That’s something to go on. Only the constable I had go in there and grab a coffee, he’s tall and dark like Marr — he looked ‘familiar’ too. I think she was trying too hard to be helpful.”

  Wiggins was following up the yellow drops with a small white envelope filled with pink crystals that he tapped into the lager. “It’s just that you seem determined it was someone who knew Sheila. That silence inside the cafe sounds like maybe they’d been fighting and it flared up again when she got in the cab.” He drank the lager, which had turned a turgid shade of pinkish yellow.

  “What condition have you got, Wiggins, the Black Death? Yes, they knew each other, I still say they knew each other.”

  “The scarf doesn’t suggest premeditation to me, Macalvie. It sounds spur of the moment.”

  Macalvie shrugged. “Not if he knew she always wore one. Most women do. Anyway, you think he couldn’t have been carrying something else? Knife? Gun?”

  Jury shook his head. “As I said, it could have been that Sheila just walked into the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You make it sound like Fate, Jury. I don’t believe in star-crossed paths.”

  “It happens.”

  “Not in Devon.” Macalvie smiled.

  15

  THE house itself had no name. Through the twilit snow, Jury’s lights picked out only a small bronze plaque bearing the single word Winslow, set in a stone pillar at the end of the curving drive. For a few moments he sat in the car, smoking and looking through the small wood where fallen branches and rotting logs showed the groundskeeper — if there was one — was anywhere but in the grounds. He slammed the door of the Ford, sending a small landslide of snow from the bonnet of the car to the ground.

  Jury pulled at the bell and looked up at the straight gray face of the house. He would not have chosen it as a sanctuary from London, although it was certainly quiet enough. “Desolate” would be a better word, he thought. Perhaps it was that, really, that added to its baronial splendor.

  A rustic-looking man, his face fretted with the tiny lines of the excessive drinker, opened the door and stuck his head around it, scanning Jury’s person with suspicion that only increased when Jury showed him his warrant card and said he was here to see Mrs. Winslow.

  The man opened the door farther and beckoned with his hand as if he were trying to pull the malingerer on the step inside. “Coom on in; I’ll tell ’em.” No proper butler, certainly; probably the absentee groundsman or gardener.

  The hall was large and cold and added to the impression of baronial splendor, with the array of armaments on one wall, the niches on the other into which plaster busts of saints or gods had been set. A central staircase of highly polished mahogany climbed up to a galleried first floor. He walked to the newel post and looked up; the picture Plant had mentioned on the telephone showed a blond young woman and a little girl of perhaps seven or eight.

  On each side of the front door, an arched window gave a narrow view of the woodland. Snow drifted slowly down, masking the black beeches and yews. They looked more like shadows of trees. It turned his mind toward the Bristol road, the wood in which Sheila Broome had been found. He frowned slightly; something bothered him, something he had heard about Sheila Broome, a tiny print left on his mind much like the dark and delicate tracks of the birds. A missal thrush landed and rocked a thin branch of the nearest beechwood; small clumps of snow sifted down.

  “Sorry, Superintendent, for keeping you waiting.”

  It was David Marr. Jury had not heard him coming and was momentarily disoriented from staring out at the hypnotic scene.

  Marr smiled slightly. “We’ve met.”

  “I know.” Jury also smiled. “I think I was a little mesmerized by your wood. I like the snow.�
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  Marr raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “You go out in it, do you?”

  “Occasionally. I’m a little late because of the roads.”

  They were walking toward a double door to the right of the hall. “Don’t apologize. We’re the ones who kept you waiting. John isn’t really much of a butler. Not much of a groundskeeper, either, come to think of it. We’re in the drawing room here, all properly arranged for your questions.”

  • • •

  Properly arranged was what the Winslows were. It was masterly, in a way; they stood or sat rather like actors who had just been blocked and who had now left off wrestling with their scripts. Marion Winslow, wearing a black velvet lounge-robe, sat in a high-backed mahogany armchair pulled out several feet from a huge marble fireplace. A Christmas tree, undecorated except for strings of unlit lights and a tiny, spun-glass angel on top, stood rather gloomily to the right of the mantel. Edward Winslow stood in front of the fireplace, smoking. David Marr lent the casual touch, just the right touch to make it all convincing, impromptu, as he fixed Jury and himself a whiskey and water. In the positions of Marion Winslow and her son, there was almost an imitation of the pose in the portrait directly above the overmantel, yet it did not seem at all to be a self-conscious posing. After handing Jury his drink, David sat down on a fine Queene Anne sofa, his legs stretched out before him.

  Jury intended to talk with each of them separately, but not right now. He did not want to break up this family gathering; it was interesting.

  They talked for a few moments politely about the condition of the roads and the unexpected snowfall, while Jury lit a cigarette and let his eye stray to the circular claw-footed table near him that held a collection of photographs, some small, some large; simply or elaborately framed. When the talk had died down like the slowly drifting snow, Jury reached for a small picture in a chased silver frame of the child in the painting on the landing. She was very pretty, with large liquid eyes and pale hair. His little sister looked, Jury thought, as Edward Winslow might have looked at that age.