I Am the Only Running Footman

by Martha Grimes

  Hugh Winslow seemed as isolated as the privileged strollers in the park across the street; it would need a key to get in.

  “I have talked with her; it isn’t David Marr I wanted to ask you about, particularly. It’s Ivy Childess.”

  The decanter froze in midair. Then he put it down, replaced the stopper, and said, “I really don’t know what you mean.” It was a poor effort to regain his composure. The key had turned; the gate was open.

  “I mean that you knew Ivy Childess.”

  “I met her once. It was here, at a small cocktail party.”

  “And you’d met her since, hadn’t you? At the Running Footman.”

  He looked over at the dying fire. Then he turned and said, “Yes.”

  “But why see her at the pub your brother-in-law often went to?” Jury thought he knew the answer to that.

  And it was confirmed when Winslow said it had been Ivy’s idea; she liked the place. “But they knew nothing about Ivy and me. Marion certainly didn’t.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t suspect?”

  “Yes. If she had—”

  “If she had, she might have divorced you, is that it?”

  “Ivy kept up her relationship with David simply so no one would suspect.”

  Perhaps he really believed that. “Was she holding out for marriage? Did she threaten to make a scene?” Jury knew he was right from the unhappy look Hugh Winslow gave him. “Which is perhaps a price you weren’t prepared to pay. Your wife has a great deal of money in her own right.”

  “I am not exactly a pauper, Superintendent. Oh, you’re right, in a way. I wasn’t prepared to pay the price. I love Marion; I had no intention of marrying Ivy.”

  Jury was silent for a moment. His mind had turned to the talk with Stella Broome. Flash cars and flash men. Like Ivy Childess, in a way. “Mr. Winslow, about ten months ago there was a young woman murdered in a wood off the road between Exeter and Bristol. Her name was Sheila Broome. Mean anything to you?”

  Hugh Winslow seemed relieved that they had left the subject of Ivy Childess. “No, no, I’ve never heard the name.”

  “The end of February. The twenty-ninth, it was.”

  He tried to laugh, but it caught in his throat. “Superintendent, you seem to be asking me where I was.”

  Jury smiled. “That’s right.”

  Winslow’s voice frosted over. “I believe I was out of the country. I have offices in Paris. But I can certainly check my calendar, although I doubt that particular appointment would be noted, were I going to Devon.”

  “Check it anyway, Mr. Winslow. Is that your Jaguar outside?”

  He seemed confused. “Well, no. The Mercedes is mine. Why?”

  “Ever own a Jaguar?”

  “Of course.” He shrugged.

  Hasn’t everyone? Jury smiled. “When was that?”

  “Oh, two or three years ago, I expect. But I don’t see why —?”

  “You said you had no intention of marrying Ivy. That sounds very much like what your brother-in-law said.”

  Winslow shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Ivy was — well, she was a terrible opportunist. And I’ve never known anyone so adept at finding out things. The sort of woman you confide in and wish you hadn’t —” He stopped.

  Jury thought for a moment. “Would your brother-in-law be likely to confide in her?”

  “David? Probably; he’s a much softer person than people suppose. But I’m not sure what there would have been to confide; David is very open.”

  Given that Hugh had been excluded from the family circle, Jury thought him to be fairly charitable. “Mr. Marr seems to have run through a great deal of money, your wife said. And he seems fond of going off to places like Cannes and Monte Carlo —” An image of David Marr’s pleasantly sloppy bulletin board came to Jury’s mind. “Has he ever been to America?”

  Hugh Winslow frowned. “Not that I know of. None of us has. Rose — that was Edward’s wife — used to talk about going there. I’ve always wanted —”

  “Yes, so’ve I. David Marr does not really seem to have expensive tastes, although he talks about gambling, casinos, the fast life. It makes me wonder about the money he’s run through.”

  “I can’t imagine David buying Ivy’s silence. David’s much more the publish-and-be-damned type.”

  “Depends on what might get published, I expect. And what about you, Mr. Winslow? Are you the same type?”

  Startled, Winslow turned away. “I imagine I did let Ivy borrow a bit.”

  “Borrow. How much would a ‘bit’ be?”

  “A few thousand.” Hastily, he added, as if it would justify the loan, “She wanted to buy into the shop she worked in as assistant. It’s in Covent Garden —”

  “Perhaps that’s your idea of ‘small’; it’s not mine. A blackmailer might call it ‘small,’ of course.”

  Winslow looked ashen.

  “That accident to your little girl happened around ten —”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Perhaps a great deal. At ten o’clock at night, Phoebe ran out into the street. You say she had tantrums. Is that by way of explaining why an eight-year-old would run out into a dark street late at night? Or was there some other reason? Although Edward was here, you say, he wasn’t staying here. That meant you were here with Phoebe. And someone else, possibly.”

  “Ivy was here,” he said, his head propped up by his hand, like something broken. “Phoebe saw us.” He looked upward, as if visualizing a scene on the floor above. “It was dreadful.” His head dropped in his hand again. “But she wasn’t blackmailing me, Superintendent.”

  “Not technically, perhaps. But didn’t it come to the same thing? ‘A few thousand quid, and I won’t tell Marion what happened that night’?”

  Winslow didn’t answer.

  Jury rose and said, “I’ll want to talk with you later.”

  Hugh Winslow saw him to the door, where he said, as if they were still speaking about her, “The price would have been Marion. I’m already a pariah, I expect. They don’t communicate much anymore.” He looked very weary.

  “Yes,” was all of Jury’s answer. A pariah. Standing in the hall, Jury looked at him with sympathy, thought of his isolation. They had sent him to Coventry.

  He looked back from the pavement to see the man still framed in the doorway, the pediment with its faded coat of arms above him, origins probably long forgotten.

  In the little park across the way one or two people walked, enjoying privacy and privilege.

  19

  THERE once was a marketplace, but it had been replaced by a grimly commercial double-storied shopping mall with its collection of boutiques, forbidding health food restaurants, candy shops, card shops, novelty shops, all of them charging inflated prices because of the address. Jury preferred cabbages and fishmongers. So did Wiggins, apparently.

  “I liked it the other way; I liked them selling fresh vegetables and so forth. I wish the Council would just have left it alone, so what if it was a bit grotty and smelly. That was London, after all.”

  “You’re right, Wiggins. That was London.”

  • • •

  Blue neon shading into silver stuttered out the shop’s name, Starrdust. Against the black background, the last three letters trailed off into another dimension, dusted with silver.

  The shop faced Covent Garden’s new marketplace — at least Jury would always think of it as new. As he stood with Wiggins and looked into the window, Jury thought Starrdust might even be a sort of oasis amidst all of this clamor, the rush of rock music rolling in waves from shop fronts; the endless trade in records and jeans and croissant sandwiches.

  At first Jury thought it must be a magic shop. Against a cloth backdrop of black velvet (itself sprinkled with silver dust) the window displayed black-coned hats with gold quarter moons, ebony wands topped with fake jeweled stars, silver cutouts of planets hanging by invisible threads. And off to one side was a little house in the woods,
and out of this house on an electrified rail came a mechanical Merlin, in his black and starry cape and hat, clutching a tiny wand that he raised once as if in benediction before he rolled silently home.

  “Did you see that, sir?” said Wiggins, apparently unaware of the three children that had lately gathered for the wizard performance.

  Jury studied the cardboard constellations, names dangling on bits of silver string — Pluto, Scorpio — down through all of the signs of the zodiac. And a sun, giving off a pale wintry light that directed one’s attention to a large book, opened, with illuminated writing. And farther down a small gold sign said “Horoscopes and Rare Books.” The shop catered not for magicians but for fatalists.

  When Jury cupped his hands and looked through the glass of the door (that also bore a sign “Shop assistant wanted”), he thought the place must be closed for lunch, it was so dark. Yet Wiggins had called to say they were coming. He turned the knob and the door opened. Wiggins dragged himself away from Merlin and the three children and followed him.

  • • •

  Like a theater that takes a little getting used to, Starrdust was appropriately cave-dark. Jury blinked. The room was quite long and narrow, and he could not see into its farthest reaches. Whoever had done the place up was highly imaginative. If it was Andrew Starr, he had had the good fortune of never quite growing up. There were lights in the place, bright points of light, that made Jury remember reading under the covers with a flashlight. The room got vaguely lighter. Off in one corner was a child-sized house, painted in the neon blue of the sign, covered with astrological symbols and with a bright sign over its door: Horror-Scopes. The three children who didn’t look like they’d a pence between them had swarmed in with Jury and Wiggins and made for the playhouse. They were obviously well acquainted with the wonders of Starrdust. Against the long wall several tall bookcases were spaced. Between them on the wall hung silver-framed photos of film stars, long-ago ones like Judy Garland, Ronald Colman. They all looked out of the past amid a spattering of stars and little moons. Jury looked at the books and saw they were indeed antiquarian stuff, stacked among the moons and stars like a lunar library.

  The pièce de résistance had already been discovered by Wiggins, who was gazing up at a domed ceiling of which the owner had taken best advantage and made into a sort of mock planetarium. “Look at that,” said Wiggins again. “Like Madam Tussand’s that one is.”

  “Not quite,” said Jury, star-gazing up himself. “See, there goes Venus —” A light dimmed behind the planet. “— and here comes Mars.” A light switched silently on. The starworks continued operating its little lights and giving the eerie feeling that the skies were moving.

  “Feel like I’m floating,” said Wiggins.

  From the horror-house came an almost drowsy laughter.

  From somewhere in the rear came the Tin-Panny sound of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” But there was no blare, no stereo. Surprisingly the record, which sounded very scratched, was being played on a simple record player. Time seemed to stretch like the room itself. Jury actually checked his watch, although he knew they’d only been here a minute or less.

  Out of the well at the rear, two girls of probably nineteen or twenty came forward. They were dressed in gray cords and black peasant blouses with some sort of silvery thread that winked in the light of the planetarium-ceiling. They both had pale hair held back with star-crusted combs; pale, almost opalescent skin; eyes shaded in blue and silver, pearly-pink lipstick so that the light that washed over them turned to a dissolving rainbow. One might have thought they were twins, though they weren’t; weren’t, perhaps, even sisters. One asked if they could help. The other giggled slightly. The first gave her a look of warning. Yet they exuded such an air of good humor, Jury couldn’t help but laugh himself a little, seeing them standing there straight, each with an arm round the other’s waist, like skaters on a pond.

  At Jury’s response, their clear faces grew even brighter, if that were possible, almost as if the lights behind the planets had switched on behind their eyes. He showed them his warrant card.

  “Oh!” said one of the stardust twins. “It’s Andrew you’ll be wanting to see. See, he told us to look out for two coppers —” She coughed and blushed and said, sorry, “—but you neither of you look nothing like police. . . .”

  Jury smiled as her voice trailed off. Wiggins probably didn’t look like much of anything except a star-gazer. He was still at it. “Andrew Starr, is it? My sergeant talked to him earlier.”

  “Andrew, that’s right. We’ll just get him.” The stardust twins apparently did everything in two’s. There were fresh giggles, but not from the girls. “It’s them kids again, Meg,” said one. “Oh, Andy don’t mind,” said the other. Mind or not, they shooed the children out of the painted house. They trooped about for a bit, looking but not touching, and then came to stand and stare, openmouthed, gap-toothed, up at Jury, who knew not what precisely they were assessing him for, but to take no chances, he plunked down a ten-p piece and took three jelly babies from the glass bowl.

  They looked at one another, smiled a little, and then trooped out. Another day in the Starrdust.

  • • •

  Andrew Starr had come in on their exiting coattails and looked at them now on the outside staring in at the toy Merlin. He shook his head. “They’re here several times a week,” he said without introduction. “A few of the regulars. Like a pub, the Starrdust is. It’s got its regulars.”

  Jury looked at Wiggins, still transfixed by the stars, and thought the Starrdust might have added one more to its list.

  Andrew Starr was a good-looking young man, slight but well built and well dressed, a person who could make his unexceptionable outfit — tailored cotton shirt and jeans — look as if they came from a bespoke tailor. His hair and eyes were dark, his bones finely structured. He wore a heavy pendant, probably his own astrological sign, and a gold link bracelet, which he habitually turned.

  “Of course, it’s about Ivy, isn’t it?” Starr sat down behind his counter and fished a cigarette from a porcelain mug. He lit up and offered the cigarettes to Jury. Wiggins had finally come down to earth and was getting out his notebook. The stardust twins were shelving books from a crate.

  “Ivy Childess, yes. How long had she been working here?”

  “Year or less. Had a job behind a counter at Boots before she came here. Ivy was much too ambitious to spend her days dusting eyeshadow on middle-aged women.”

  “Ambitious?”

  “Oh, my, yes. There were three words to describe Ivy. Ambition, ambition, ambition. Of course, she was very good here —”

  “What’d she do, exactly?”

  “Shop assistant; as you see, I’m looking for another one. Sorry, that sounds a bit macabre. Well, I just can’t get all worked up about Ivy. I didn’t honestly like her much, but as I said, she was damned good. Besides that,”— Starr reached beneath the counter — “she was a pretty good Madame Zostra.”

  He had brought out a spangled satin wraparound headpiece, something like a turban, and a large pack of cards, the tarot deck. Jury smiled. “Ivy told fortunes, did she?”

  Andrew Starr smiled broadly. “For fun, for entertainment. No attempt to rip off the clientele. Much as she wanted to,” he added dryly.

  Jury spread out the cards. “You don’t believe in all this, then?”

  Starr looked a little wounded. “Of course I do. Astrology, that is. And most of my customers I’ve had for ages.” He looked toward the photographs between the bookcases. “Theater, film stars. Well, not them up there. Guess they’re all dead. Never did see Marilyn Monroe, worse luck.”

  Jury smiled. “You’d have been much too young to appreciate her.”

  “Not for Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Did Ivy believe in the tarot, astrology, that sort of thing?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no. That’s probably why she was better at selling stuff. She could sell a pig a silver trough. No, but she knew a
good thing — Starrdust is a good thing, I can tell you —”

  “I believe it, Mr. Starr.”

  “Andrew. Call me Andrew. Well, Ivy had a bit of money and she kept nagging me to buy in. Wanted to be my partner, she did. I didn’t pay any attention to her because I thought she hadn’t any more than a few hundred quid — what I mean is, I didn’t really bother saying I didn’t want a partner. Well, she must have taken this as encouragement. Comes in one day with a check for two thousand quid. Then, of course, I put her right off. Said I didn’t need a partner. But the damned girl — sorry — Ivy was as tenacious as her name. If she wanted something, she just went for it. Power was what she wanted, and money meant power. Take this chap, David, she went about with —”

  “David Marr.”

  “Poor devil. He came in here a few times before closing, hung about, waiting for her. I thought he was a pleasant fellow myself. You know, it’s odd the way some people, no matter how simply they dress and talk, simply reek of money. Marr was one. So of course she hung on to him. Pardon.” He reached behind him and spun another record onto the machine. It was scratchy, like the first. The voice of Dinah Shore singing “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

  “Ivy wanted to marry him, you think?”

  Andrew hooted. “My God, but didn’t she. The man was loaded. Well, would have been. She talked a lot about what he’d come into. As if she were coming into it too, of course. Only, you know, he didn’t seem all that interested. At least not in marrying Ivy. But I suppose she thought she’d wear down his resistance; she’d sit here and flip through the cards and keep saying she’d an ‘ace’ up her sleeve.”

  “What do you think she meant by that?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno.” Andrew twisted the gold bracelet round and round his wrist and frowned. “You know, I think this Marr fellow thought at first he was getting a sweet little shop-girl in Ivy, and then found out she was a grasping, cold-hearted little bitch. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize, Andrew. The dead are no more likable because they’re dead.”