The Deer Leap

by Martha Grimes

  She went on ranting. Wiggins, notebook out and handkerchief on the little Sheraton table, looked gratefully at his cuppa and unhappily at the gin. They had been there nearly an hour and the bottle had been in more or less constant motion. Cocktail hour, she had said when they walked in, inviting one and all to join. Where was Lord Ardry? Charming man. Jury thought he and Miss Praed had gone to the Deer Leap for a meal. How utterly revolting, and who is Miss Praed?

  To Jury’s questions about Woburn Place it was no, no, no. No, she had never heard the name Lister; no, she knew nothing about any sort of Alsatian; no, she had never seen Carrie before the meeting at the Silver Vaults, and what in hell were all of these questions about? She seemed to blame not Jury, who was asking them, but Wiggins, who was writing down the answers.

  All of this was taking place amidst pacing and sweepings of silk with her hand, and interspersed with the continued harangue. “Grimsdale — that odious creature — has done something to that terrier of hers, what does she call it?” The Baroness snapped her fingers as if in a fit of forgetfulness and addressed this question to Gillian.

  “Bingo.”

  Jury thought the look Gillian gave her employer was close to loathing. As if she thought the Baroness might, after all this time, at least remember the name of Carrie’s dog. Which, Jury was pretty sure, Regina did. She merely strived for effects.

  As now she clutched her fists to her handsome silk coat (one fist still around the neck of the bottle) and exclaimed: “He could actually believe Carrie — Carrie — had a hand in those damned dogs of his being poisoned? The creature’s round the twist, ought to be put away.” Distractedly, she looked about her like a woman gone quite mad with the news (which Jury was sure she hadn’t; it merely made a change) and asked, “Where’s Carrie? Where is she?”

  “Looking for Bingo, of course. Or in her animal hut, brooding. What would you expect?” said Gillian. She was now standing in front of the mirror, thus blocking Regina’s view of herself. Between the twin doors, the twin trompe l’oeil murals which again doubled the doors and the view outside, and the mirror facing the mirror on the back wall, Jury felt he had fallen, perhaps like Alice, into a world of reflections.

  Regina, by now quite drunk, though carrying it off to a fare-thee-well, ran her hand in a tragic gesture across her forehead. “She must be back for dinner. She knows we dine at eight-thirty.”

  Gillian raised her eyes to heaven and shook her head. Her dress tonight was a grayish brown, different from the other only in its style. Had she been asked to play down her own looks in order to enhance Regina’s, she couldn’t have done a better job. But colorless as the dress was, it was draped across breast and hip in such a way that — like the other — it could hardly hide what lay beneath.

  “So your meeting with Carrie Fleet was accidental,” said Jury mildly. The Silver Vaults were famous, well visited. It was possible that anyone in London might have gone there. No particular reason to be suspicious, but all the same . . . Liverpool could not be accounted for in the accent and aristocratic cheekbones of Regina de la Notre.

  The Baroness stopped in her tracks and came to look down at him as if he, too, like Grimsdale, must be insane. “I beg your pardon? Accidental?” She bent slightly over Jury, who could have filled a shot glass from her breath alone. “Of course not, Superintendent. I traveled from Woburn Place to Eastcheap to Shoreditch to Blackheath to Threadneedle Street to the Old Curiosity Shop to the Silver Vaults. Just searching, my dear, for a thirteen-year-old animal-minder. Good God!” And she was back to pacing again.

  Gillian was trying to look everywhere in the room but at Jury. “Your friend —” and now she paused for a name.

  “Lord Ardry,” said Jury, easily.

  “Lord Ardry, yes. He was talking with Carrie this morning.” She looked down at her intertwined hands. “I wonder if she told him about the note.”

  “What note was that?” Jury shifted uneasily, drank his whiskey.

  “It came with the morning post. She said it was just some silly thing from Neahle Meara. I wondered about it; Carrie never gets letters.”

  “Never? No one in her past—” He turned to Regina. “Didn’t you ever wonder, Baroness —”

  “Regina,” she corrected him, throatily, as she studied the mural before her.

  “— about Carrie Fleet’s past?”

  “For God’s sake, my dear, she hasn’t a past.”

  Jury looked at her, bleakly. She was right.

  Gillian ran through one of the french doors, calling over her shoulder she was going to look for Carrie.

  As Jury got up to follow her, the little maid announced dinner.

  “Well, my dear Sergeant, shall we . . . ?”

  If there was any more to that question, Jury didn’t hear it.

  • • •

  Gillian was standing at the door of the sanctuary, peering into blackness when Jury came up behind her.

  “She’s not here,” Gillian wailed. It was hard to know if her face was wet with rain or tears. “She’s not here!”

  Jury put his arm round her and his hand on her satiny hair and held her. “Then she’s looking for Bingo —”

  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand, you don’t —” And the weeping grew with every repetition. Jury drew her closer, as she kept shaking her head against his coat.

  “Gillian. What was in that note? Why’re you so upset?”

  The silky head kept shaking back and forth, back and forth, like Regina’s pacing. “I don’t know. But something’s wrong. Something’s wrong! Carrie’s so disciplined—” And she moved her head from Jury’s shoulder to look up at him. “You don’t know her. She really likes that old devil —”

  It was obvious she meant Regina.

  “Sorry. I didn’t really mean that. But if dinner’s at eight, Carrie’s there!” She was breathing in great, sobbing breaths. “I know . . . you don’t. . . believe me. Jealousy . . . something . . . but oh, where is she?”

  Jury pulled her back again, head against shoulder. “I’ll find her. Right now, I want you to have some brandy and lie down. I’ll take you up —”

  She seemed not to hear him. He shook her. “Gillian. We can stroll through the maze. Then I’ll take you up and tuck you in. Fair enough?”

  He thought the bad joke might be lost in the wind and the rain, but she did smile a little. “Fair enough. But no stroll. I’m too done in.”

  As they walked away from the arbor, she kept stopping and looking back, so that he had to urge her toward the house.

  After he saw that Gillian was in bed and drowsy from brandy and a sedative she’d taken from a small bottle, Jury went down the hall, looking for Carrie’s room. It wasn’t hard to distinguish it: snapshots of Bingo and other animals — possibly the ones at the Brindles’, one with the Brindle daughter in it. Had they then been mates of a sort? Had it been, for all of her posture of indifference, a painful parting?

  Jury sat on the narrow, white-counterpaned bed, in the narrow room, white-walled. No ruffles, no ribbons, no nonsense. He was sure the lack of ornament and the size of the room had nothing to do with Regina’s pinching pennies. It was definitely a Carrie Fleet room.

  He searched it. No note, no letter, but he hadn’t really expected to find one; she was too smart to leave something important lying about, or hidden in a drawer. He opened the cupboard. The few garments hanging there — another sweater, another dress like the one she’d worn when he met her, a coat. He went through the pockets. From the pinafore he drew out a snapshot. A shot, taken at night of a building, nondescript looking, nothing he’d seen.

  But no note. And he was sure the note had been important, otherwise she would have told them, at lunch, what was in it. Her dislike of talk Jury did not put down at all to secretiveness: he put it down to despair.

  Despair. A feeling that would be disallowed by adults and turned into something like “just going through a stage.” But Jury remembered sitting on a bed very similar t
o this one, only in a row of beds when he was a little younger than Carrie. For him, when his mother and father were killed in the Second World War, it had been an orphanage until an uncle had rescued him. For Carrie, it had been the Brindles, until the Baroness had rescued her.

  If rescue it had been.

  The scene in the dining room was a delight. The Baroness at one end of a long rosewood table, Wiggins at the other. They seemed to be getting on like a house on fire, a lively conversation in progress, probably owing more to the three wineglasses at each place than to Wiggins’s verve and wit.

  He could have asked Regina about the snapshot, but thought better of it.

  “Sergeant,” said Jury, interrupting.

  “Sir!” Wiggins stood up, his napkin falling to the floor.

  Jury sighed. It was one of those times when Jury was the drill sergeant.

  “My dear Superintendent! Please join us. My cook is superior —”

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry. It’s after nine, Regina. Aren’t you concerned about Carrie?”

  “She’s still looking for Bingo.” Regina sighed and put down her wineglass. “I’d hardly expect her to report for dinner spot on eight-thirty.”

  “If you’re through, Sergeant —”

  Leaving Regina sighing over Gillian’s absence — and no one to talk to — Jury and Wiggins got into their coats and then into their car.

  “Where’re we going, sir?”

  “The Deer Leap. To find Plant. And Neahle Meara.”

  Wiggins turned in surprise. “The little girl, sir?”

  “The little girl, yes.”

  They sat around the table in the saloon bar, used for the odd serving of meals, since few were served.

  “I don’t know,” said Neahle. “I didn’t write anything.”

  Jury smiled. “Didn’t think you did. But what do you make of it, Neahle?”

  The brown eyes looked from the snapshot and back at Jury. She shrugged. “I don’t know.” Her voice was tearful.

  “It’s all right, Neahle. Never mind then. Go on to bed.”

  But she sat like a rock now, her small chin in her fists. “Where’s Carrie?”

  “And what,” asked Melrose Plant, “makes you think something’s happened to Carrie?”

  She looked away, toward the fire that had burned down to sparkless ashes. “Because you’re all here asking funny questions.” Then she slipped from her chair. “I’m going to bed.” She ran out of the room.

  The snap was passed around and around again. “Pasco? Maybe he’d know.”

  “What makes you think it’s someplace around here?” asked Polly. “Maybe it’s near the East India Docks.”

  “What a vivid imagination, Polly. All of that ground — looks just like the Thames.”

  “Call Pasco, Wiggins.”

  Wiggins left.

  Plant took the picture and reluctantly headed for the bar, where Maxine Torres was wetting her finger, preparatory to turning a page in her magazine. Sullenly, she looked at Plant. “Again?” Obviously, she was referring to his pint of Old Peculiar. Plant, the raving alcoholic.

  “No, Maxine, not another pint. It is your gorgeous black eyes I am interested in.” He brought the picture near the eyes. “Recognize?”

  She shoved it back. “Am I blind?”

  “Don’t know. Do you recognize this place?”

  “Yeah. It’s that lab outside town. Outside Selby. Mile, two miles.” She was not interested in the snap or in the question. Or in Plant, certainly. Not having to refill his pint, she went back to the magazine.

  “Directions, please.”

  Maxine squinted at him. Directions were not part of her job as temporary publican, at least not until Plant tore a page from her magazine, plunked his gold pen beside it and repeated his request.

  She drew a few lines for roads and an X marking the lab. Then she gave him an evil look and shoved page and pen at him.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get you a subscription.”

  Wiggins had come back to say that Constable Pasco wasn’t at the station and wasn’t at home.

  “Neither place?”

  “Neither, sir.”

  Jury was silent for a moment. “Call the Selby C.I.D. See if they know where he is.”

  Polly shoved her glasses up on her head, as if that gave her a compass bearing. “But why? What makes you think Carrie would go there?”

  “Because that’s where she thinks someone took her terrier and I’m not going to sit around here arguing. No, not you,” said Jury as Polly gathered up her coat.

  “What do you mean, not me? I was here before either of you!”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” said Plant, buttoning his Chesterfield, picking up his stick. “We’re not exactly queuing for a bus.”

  “It’s a police matter, Polly,” said Jury.

  That made her drop the ugly glasses down over her eyes. “Then why’re you taking him?”

  Because I need him. But Jury didn’t say that. He leaned over the table and gave Polly a wonderful smile. “Because if I leave him here with you, you’ll have him in that Silver Ghost driving at eighty miles per out to that lab, dear Polly.” He kissed her cheek.

  Her glasses steamed up.

  PART 6

  An Amethyst remembrance

  Is all I own —

  Thirty

  From a clump of bracken she had been watching the dark lab for an hour or more and wished she’d brought the binoculars, but it would have been too much to carry along with the torch and shotgun.

  No one. At least no one had gone into the lab from her range of vision, so perhaps it wasn’t tonight. Carrie got up from the ground, which was squelchy and cold, and walked toward the long building, dark except for one amber light inside. She couldn’t understand that.

  Of course the gate was locked, but the fence was easy enough to scale, and she did, dropping first the gun and then herself on the other side. The ammunition was in her pocket.

  Because of the demonstrations, there had been talk of surrounding the whole building with barbed wire or electrifying the fence and getting a guard. The lab itself was hardly impregnable; if she couldn’t get in by way of a door, she could by way of a window. Three of the doors needed keys to get in. But one small one at the end was padlocked. Joe Brindle hadn’t been good for much, but he had taught her how to listen to the tumbler on a padlock, information he’d picked up from his safe-cracking days. Acute hearing’s what you got, girl. She turned the knob, her ear close to the lock, and heard the nearly inaudible clicks. Carrie opened the door.

  She had never come into this building, despite Fleming’s invitations — again, she thought of Dr. Fleming. The staff were the only ones with keys, and whoever intended her to come here certainly must have a key, unless the person intended to break a window, not having had the benefit of Brindle’s teaching. The single bulb at the other end of the corridor made a misty alley of light, showing rows of doors down both sides. The first ones were labeled “Restricted.” Carrie turned her torch on one and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked and she went inside.

  What she found was an antiseptically clean room, with cats in separate cages, most of them asleep. A few were awake, or had come awake when the light swept over the cages and they sat up. The doors of the cages were mesh, and she went from one to another, looking in, putting her fingers through the mesh. Some of them backed away into the shelter of a dark corner; others clawed at the mesh. At least, she thought, they hadn’t been declawed. The room was equipped with ultraviolet lights. Her hands took on a strange bluish glow. On the other side of the room were cats inside plastic bubbles. Carrie supposed by being in here she was contaminating the place.

  There was a lightswitch on the wall, but she was afraid to turn it on; it might attract attention.

  That was what she had found strange: the whole building should have been floodlit.

  She loaded the gun and in her soundless sneakers made her way to the door, stiffbacked against
the wall, peering as well as she could down the corridor. Not a sound.

  She looked back at the cats in their cages. Carrie would have expected the yowlings and meowings of animals upset by a change in routine, if nothing else. But they were still silent. Blood tests, Dr. Fleming had said. Fifty percent of them would probably die, just to see how big a dose it would take to kill them.

  One by one she opened the cages, being very quiet. It was almost as if the cats were cooperating, not letting whoever was in the building know where Carrie was. But it was really that they were scared, too scared to make a noise. The window was barred, but locked only with a simple latch. A high table beside the window she shoved beneath it. Then she peered down the corridor, still empty, stepped out, and closed the door.

  In the next room were rabbits. On a long table she saw the harnesses. These weren’t blood tests. Carrie knew what this was all about and she felt herself go cold. She thought she heard footsteps in the corridor, but she still inspected the rabbits. The harnesses were to keep their heads perfectly still, with little devices to hold their eyes open. So something could be sprayed into the eyes. That morning she had got soap in her eye, and the sting was terrible. But she could blink. She could dish cold water into it. The rabbits couldn’t.

  And where was Bingo, she wondered with growing terror, as the steps came closer. Carrie slowly raised the shotgun, stared at the rabbit whose eyes were so ravaged they looked like molten wax. The pain must have been unbearable. Her hands were shaking but she could still hold the butt to her shoulder as the steps came nearer. Your Majesty — she pretended to be addressing the Queen — I think I’d call this the “termination condition.”

  Carrie shot the rabbit.

  From the doorway, a voice said, “Hold it right there, Carrie.”

  Pasco. Constable Pasco.