“Her telephone wasn’t working, apparently. Was yours?”
“Mine? Damned if I know. I wasn’t making any calls around that time.”
“What time?”
Grimsdale stopped his inspection of the hare, looked sharply at Melrose, and said smugly, “You’re asking questions like police, sir. But you can’t catch me out with that old ruse. Everyone heard about Una Quick falling out of that call box close on ten. After all, one of my guests was the person she fell across. Praed, her name is. But you know her. Has some monster of a cat that’s clawed up half the draperies in her room. See she pays for ’em, there’ll be no mistake. Have to get a decorator in. Or get Amanda Crowley to sew a new batch.”
He stood there, apparently dreaming away about how he could stick Polly for the price of the drapes, while getting Amanda to volunteer her talents as seamstress.
Melrose lit up another cigar, trying to think how best to lie to get at the truth. “Ridiculous, of course, but you’re probably aware there’s been some talk in Ashdown about you and Mrs. MacBride.”
Grimsdale’s face seemed to take on all the hues of the fire in the grate. Eyes electric blue and sparking, cheeks like licks of flame, iron hair like volcanic ash. “That is a lie! What in God’s name would I be doing with the likes of that common . . . Anyway, Amanda and I —” He stopped short on that one, and quickly asked, “Where’d you hear it?”
“Here and there. She was known to take that little river walk at night that ends up, I suppose, at your pond. With the tame mallard.” Melrose smiled briefly.
Sebastian Grimsdale collapsed in a chair, and Melrose thought some confession was forthcoming. Then he sat up. “If you must know, there’s been talk about the MacBride woman and my kennel master. Thought Donaldson was smarter than that. I’d see a light in the stable house. Wondered what he’d be doing up at that hour. I let him live in that place just back of the kennels.”
Having reached his own solution to his satisfaction, Grimsdale sat back and lit up a cigar, shaking and shaking his head. “There it is, then. Fancy.”
“I imagine the superintendent might want to have a talk with him, then.”
“Can’t imagine why. Donaldson’s from Scotland. Got nothing to do with these people. He’s just here for the season.”
Melrose laughed, “Well, one can get up to any number of things waiting —”
He was interrupted by one of the most terrible rackets he’d ever heard.
“My God! What’s that?” Grimsdale shot out of his chair and looked wildly at Melrose. “Sounds like hounds rioting.”
It did indeed. Before Melrose could put down his glass and chuck his cigar into the fireplace, Grimsdale had rushed from the trophy room through the french windows and out into the court.
Melrose followed in the direction of the kennels and stableyard, where a soupy fog closed around him. In the midst of the chorus of foxhounds came the eerie sound of the deep baying of Grimsdale’s staghounds.
And as Melrose tried to make his way through the fog, he thought that mixed with all of this riot was the sound of a scream that no hound would make.
• • •
The handsome Donaldson was handsome no longer. He lay inside the kennel, ravaged by the staghounds, one of which lay beside him. In the light of Grimsdale’s torch, Melrose saw the other hound stagger and fall, its light markings now blood-smeared.
Then he heard feet running across the courtyard. Wiggins. Polly.
Grimsdale, having stood frozen, looking down at the bloody kennel floor, suddenly shouted, “Get Fleming!”
And that, thought Melrose, turning to stop Polly in her tracks, pretty well spoke the man’s obsession. Call for the vet, not the physician. Though Farnsworth couldn’t have done Donaldson any good now, neither could Fleming help the staghounds.
Wiggins took the torch from Grimsdale’s hand as Melrose practically had to wrestle with Polly to keep her away. “Nothing for you to see, old girl —”
“Oh, shut up.” She broke from his grasp, peered through the fog along the tracery of torchlight, and was back in an instant. “For once, you’re right.” Polly buried her head against his shoulder.
Across her dark head, Melrose squinted. A form seemed to emerge from the mist at the other end of the stableyard. It seemed to undulate as it came toward them, became a ghostly blob, finally turned into a recognizable form. Carrie Fleet.
A very dirty-looking Carrie Fleet.
When Grimsdale saw her, he stared for a few seconds and then slowly raised the rifle.
Melrose disengaged himself from Polly, but Wiggins, fortunately, was quicker. With a judolike kick, he knocked Grimsdale’s rifle arm upward and the shot went wide, broke glass somewhere — possibly one of the stable house windows.
Calmly, Wiggins took the gun. “I think that’ll be enough, sir. I really think that’ll be quite enough.”
Carrie Fleet just stood there, motionless.
Grimsdale screamed. “You devil! Always trouble —”
Melrose clamped his hand around Grimsdale’s arm. If anyone were possessed, he thought, it was Grimsdale.
“What’re you doing here, Carrie?” whispered Polly.
Carrie Fleet jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the edge of the New Forest. “Unstopping earths. I heard hounds.” She walked over to the kennels and peered in at the body of Donaldson and the dead hounds.
She shook her head and shook it. Then she looked one by one into the several cages housing the beagles.
Then she turned and walked back into the fog that closed round her like a glove.
No one tried to stop her. The night was deathly quiet.
• • •
“There’s no way of knowing for sure until I do an autopsy —”
Grimsdale, a large balloon-glass of brandy in hands that might have been palsied with all of their shaking, said, “They’d never have turned on Donaldson. Never.”
“We seem to have evidence to the contrary,” said Melrose coldly.
Wiggins, in the absence of Jury, wanted to get down to business. “Dr. Fleming — ?”
“I was about to say. It could be one of several drugs, administered anytime from minutes to days or even weeks before. Something like fentanyl. But that’s not easy to come by — unless you’re a doctor or a vet. Then there’s benzodiazafine. Valium. Easy enough to get hold of.” Fleming shrugged. “I’d have to do an autopsy.”
Wiggins made a note of that and said, with a frown, “That would mean that whoever went into that kennel would have been torn apart.”
“Yes,” said Fleming.
“But there were only two people who did,” said Melrose. “And Mr. Grimsdale, here, wouldn’t have gone into the kennel for any particular reason, not until tomorrow.”
Polly Praed, sitting in the trophy room in her old brown wrapper, chewed at her lip. “And that’s the third one. The murderer could have been anywhere when it happened. What a bloody awful way to kill a man.”
Melrose’s thoughts were on Polly Praed’s head on his shoulder when she added, turning those amethyst eyes on Wiggins. “But aren’t you going to get Superintendent Jury back here at the double?”
Twenty-seven
“And where do you think you’re going?” asked Polly Praed the next morning. She had just walked into the Lodge’s breakfast room to see Melrose finishing a sumptuous — by Gun Lodge standards — breakfast. The piece of toast she plucked from the toast rack was actually warm. So was the piece of bacon she plucked from his plate. “It’s only just gone nine.”
Then, apparently having lost interest in Melrose’s designs, she looked around the room. “I should have thought he’d be here by now.”
He meaning Jury. Melrose sighed. “According to Wiggins, the superintendent had rather a full schedule yesterday. But he might come walking in at any minute, so I suggest you get dressed. Not that the robe is unbecoming; I’m sure Sherlock Holmes would have loved it. Sorry I ate my breakfast,” he added, seeing her
staring at his plate. “But I imagine the Grimsdale cook, unobstructed by Grimsdale, will provide you with one.”
“Where is the awful man?”
“In the trophy room, last I saw. With Pasco and Detective Inspector Russell. Grimsdale does not look at all well.”
“He shouldn’t. He should look like death. He was going to kill that child. If it hadn’t been for Sergeant Wiggins. . . Where are you going?”
“To ‘La Notre.’ ”
“At this hour? Don’t baronesses and so forth sleep until noon?”
“I have no idea. But she might rise to see the Earl of Caverness.”
“Impostor,” said Polly, chewing the last piece of toast.
To see her, however, one ran the gamut.
Melrose’s Silver Ghost probably hastened the running of it, he guessed. A little maid in a cockeyed cap stared at it and then at him and the card he handed her, uncertain as to which of the three was the most impressive.
“I don’t mean to bother the Baroness Regina at this rather ungodly hour —” Melrose smiled. “I thought perhaps I could see —”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s no bother, Your Grace —”
He laughed. “I haven’t reached those heady heights. Only an earl.”
“Hullo,” said a voice from the shadows of the foyer. “Gillian Kendall.” Gillian put out her hand. “Regina’s secretary.”
“Miss Kendall.” She had been sorting the post on a silver plate, rather tarnished. “Sorry to be dropping by so early.” If nearly ten could be so considered.
She replaced the post and said, “That business last night at the Lodge. That was absolutely dreadful . . . .”
“Carrie told you?”
Gillian Kendall looked puzzled. “Carrie? No. What did she have to do with it?” Then she smiled. “Though she does have a way of turning up when there’s an animal crisis.”
It was Melrose who was puzzled now. “I’d call it more of a Carrie crisis. She didn’t tell you —?”
Before he could finish the statement, a vision, if not precisely of loveliness, but a vision nonetheless, came sweeping down the staircase. “How very kind of you to call, Lord Ardry. Coffee in the salon, Gillian?”
“Yes, of course. But what about Carrie?”
“Carrie? Carrie?” said the Baroness, attempting to upsweep her hair and hold it with the hairpins in her mouth. The mouth had been rather quickly painted; lipstick bleeding into the tiny pursed lines around it. Regina de la Notre apparently had no compunction about completing her toilette in public. “Carrie is always in trouble.” She sighed and stopped with her hair-pinning. “Now what’s she done? And to a peer of the realm, dear God.”
“It’s more what’s been done to Carrie.”
“Well, dear God! Why are we all standing here?” She said it as if chairs should materialize out of the very air, and looked sharply at Gillian, as if her magic act were rotten.
Gillian opened the doors into the salon and Regina swept in. Her dressing gown was definitely the sweeping sort, blue brocade and ivory insets and a long train.
Having arranged herself on a chaise longue and accepted a light for her cigarette, she was ready for the day’s disasters. Gillian still stood. “Now, what is all this?”
“Grimsdale nearly killed her last night. If it hadn’t been for Sergeant Wiggins, I doubt she’d be alive — I can’t imagine her not telling you.”
Both of them looked horrified, Regina enough that she seemed pulled from her chaise by invisible wires. She started pacing. “Blast and damn that man.” She whirled with quite an exquisite movement of pulling the train of brocade with her hand. “I trust the police have got him.”
“Questioned him, yes. Got him —?” Melrose shrugged.
“Assault with a deadly weapon — Gillian, will you please not stand there like a stick, dammit. Coffee!”
“Don’t you think Carrie takes precedence over coffee?” Gillian said, icily.
Fortunately the little maid was back, given instructions, and Gillian went out through the french doors. Despite the greater concerns of the morning, Melrose could not help but be fascinated by the trompe l’oeil murals.
When the Baroness had stopped her pacing, and restored herself to the chaise and another cigarette, Melrose told her what had happened.
“Donaldson? Killed by those beasts of Grimsdale’s?” She shuddered. Then she turned to Melrose. “I’ve been visited by a Scotland Yard superintendent. What on earth is your particular interest in all of this?” She plucked up his card from the table beside the chaise. “Earl of Caverness.”
Melrose smiled. “More or less.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My name is really Melrose Plant.”
“Mine’s Gigi Scroop. From Liverpool. I am actually a real baroness, not that it gets me much but lording it over the village. Why do you pass yourself off as an earl, then?”
“It’s not quite that. I simply gave up my titles.”
A well-plucked eyebrow shot up. “I’ll be damned. Gave them up? Well, to each his own tastes. Now, Grimsdale is done for, I hope. That should get him five to ten, wouldn’t you say?”
“Possibly —”
Gillian was back. “She’s with her menagerie. Not talking. It doesn’t surprise me. Bingo — that’s her dog — is missing.”
“Then I can imagine she’d be worried.”
He stood up. “Mind if I have a word with her?”
“Of course you may,” Regina swept her arm toward the french door. “It’s her sanctuary. Displaced-animal thing. I don’t mind, if that’s what keeps her happy. I only wish she’d get rid of the damned rooster. I’m not Judas.”
“No coffee, Mr. Plant?” asked Gillian.
“Later, thank you.”
As he started for the door, she said. “You’re a friend of the superintendent?”
Melrose turned. “Yes.”
She colored slightly. “You wouldn’t know when —”
“He’s coming back?” He smiled wearily. “Sometime today.” Certainly, she was a good-looking woman.
Not that that would get him anywhere.
She was taking a black cat out of a makeshift cage when he stood at the door to the little house. Or “Sanctuary,” he supposed, looking up at the rough-cut sign above the door.
Given the cat, an elderly Labrador, two badgers, a rooster, and what he could have sworn was a pony that had peered at him out of the trees, Melrose had to admit that Carrie Fleet didn’t play favorites. It didn’t even have to walk on all fours, apparently, given the rooster clawing at the dirt floor with its bandaged leg.
None of the animals seemed in terribly good repair — the Labrador looked as if it had been hit by a lorry. It lay quietly in a wooden box with slats, eyes blinking, breathing slowly.
“Oh. Hullo,” said Carrie, in the act of putting a much-abused stuffed mouse at the other end of the room. Hut would have been an apter description than “Sanctuary.”
“Hello, there.” He waited, with a warm smile, supposing her own greeting, not awfully friendly, but certainly not cold, to be the forerunner to a lengthy conversation about animal welfare.
It wasn’t. She had squatted down to give the cat a small push, apparently trying to work up interest in the mouse. There was something wrong with one of its hind legs, and it seemed resistant. “Go on, then,” said Carrie, giving it another little push.
“Well. I suppose it needs a bit of exercise, that it?”
She nodded.
It was as if the events of last night hadn’t happened. She just crouched there, running her long silvery hair behind her ear, watching the cat. Eventually, it got interested and made its clever play for the mouse.
She got up then, looking relieved.
“You have a way with animals, certainly . . . .” And then he felt an absolute fool as she looked at him with those milky-blue eyes almost devoid of expression.
“If you call not hitting them with cars and sticks.”
Almost a whole sentence. He wondered what it would take to get a smile out of her.
“Generally, of course, I don’t bother about the drover and his sheep. Just plow the car right through them.” Melrose’s own smile was brilliant.
It went unanswered.
He coughed. “Look, couldn’t I talk with you for a minute?”
“You are.” She opened the cage where the dog lay, ran her hand down its back, not so much petting it, but more in the manner of a doctor whose fingers can feel what the eye can’t see nor the ear hear.
Damn. Melrose would have hated to report to Jury he couldn’t get the girl to talk. “I’m a friend of the superintendent—”
That should get a reaction. And the usual question.
“Is he coming back?” There was a hesitancy, though, as if asking it gave something away.
“Of course. Today, I’m sure.”
“Then maybe he can find Bingo.”
“Bingo — oh. Your dog. I’m dreadfully sorry he’s missing.”
She came to the door of the dark little hut, blinking in the morning light. “At least you didn’t say, ‘He’ll turn up.’ ”
Had Melrose’s long-standing habit of refusing cheap condolences actually done him some good? “Don’t you think he will?”
Carrie squinted off toward the horizon and was silent, as if her eye scanned the hill for some sign of Bingo. She was perfectly still, fingering a narrow gold chain around her neck.
There was a bench there and Melrose sat down. “Would you mind sitting?”
She shrugged. Standing, sitting — little difference.
“Sebastian Grimsdale’s in a good deal of trouble about last night. I can’t imagine a man being so obsessed —” There had been very few times in his life when Melrose blushed. This was one.
But all he caught was a flicker of a smile. “He’s awful. With him, it’s either a huntable buck or trash.” She leaned over, her elbows resting on her knees.
“I had rather a long lecture on the intricacies of stag-hunting.”
“ ‘Nasty beasts,’ he calls them. Probably didn’t say anything about what deer do to escape. Like jump over cliffs. Try to swim out to sea —”
The Deer Leap Page 16
