Vertigo 42

by Martha Grimes

  But Owen Archer apparently didn’t need convincing and took Melrose’s visit at face value. “Yes. Imagine returning from London to find your place overrun by police, dead bodies, ambulances, patrol cars—”

  Melrose wondered how long the list would be. Especially since nearly all of those things had vanished by the time Archer returned. “Then you saw her?”

  “The victim? No. Sorry. I was dramatizing everything. One of the detectives had me look at police photos. Poor woman. It’s a helluva way to commit suicide or murder, though, don’t you think?”

  Melrose started in his chair. “I don’t understand. Police think it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Apparently not. Not according to that inspector—Briars? Is that his name? I was somewhat concerned there for a while, that I was a ‘person of interest,’ as they say. But I got the distinct impression they’d someone else on the books, though he didn’t say that, not directly. They had me go up in the tower to see if I could tell them if anything looked strange or out of place . . . you know.”

  No, Melrose didn’t know. Owen Archer was a mine of fresh information.

  “And was there anything?”

  “Just a chair and a small table pulled round in front of the window, ostensibly to help her get up to the window. I can’t imagine choosing that as a site for a suicide, the window’s too difficult to reach.”

  He went on. “People do sometimes pull up here to look at the tower. Well, it’s a folly, isn’t it? The Old Post Road isn’t much used, which is one of the reasons I bought this place. I expect it’s going to be heavily trafficked now. At least a dozen cars have stopped, but no one has attempted to cross over and investigate. I don’t think the whole experience is going to do much for property value.”

  “On the contrary. As it didn’t happen in the house itself, there might be a certain ghoulish attraction to owning the tower. You’re just back from London, then?”

  Archer nodded. “Christie’s auction. Not much there, and what there was I thought too pricey. People lose their heads at auctions, don’t they?”

  “I see you have one or two very handsome pieces: that chest by the fireplace.”

  “That? Oh, yes. Restoration, that is. I’ve got a number of things I’ll have to sell.”

  Why in hell wasn’t Trueblood handling this assignment? He had the perfect excuse to come here. “I’ve a good friend in the village—well, you might have been to his shop. Trueblood’s Antiques. It’s next door to the Jack and Hammer.”

  “Yes, I have. He’s got very fine stock for being out there in the sticks.”

  The sticks? “Yes, I expect we probably are too far from London for our own good.” Hardly little more than an hour. “Agrarians, you might say.”

  “Really? Farm country? I wouldn’t have thought—”

  Melrose wondered, then, what are “the sticks”?

  “—since I haven’t seen any farming around.”

  “Well, I do keep animals. Horses, goats—” Melrose recalled some article in Country Life which always featured an aspiring debutante, this one a young woman who “kept a pig.” Meaning kept it for photo ops. Melrose was now thinking of getting a pig of his own.

  Archer smiled broadly. “Gentleman farmer, are you?”

  “Oh, no, just a gentleman.”

  Frowning the tiniest bit, Archer said, “It’s Lord Ardry, right? Then that means you sit in the House of Lords?”

  Melrose was as far from sitting in the House of Lords as he was from sitting in Agatha’s lap. But having presented himself at the door as “Lord” he could hardly drop the title on the other side of the sill, and he had no intention of giving Owen Archer his reasons for abandoning his title.

  He got back to the business at hand: “The victim, Mr. Archer, you only saw photos? You didn’t see the body at all? I mean, police didn’t ask you to identify it?”

  “Me? Why would they?” He was peering into the teapot and apparently finding it wanting. He rose. “I’m going to put the kettle on again. Won’t be a minute.”

  Archer had seemed unoffended by the questions. But why take that particular moment to escape to the kitchen?

  He said he had gone up to London. How hard would it be to get someone, a woman friend, to lure one’s lover, say, by telling her over the phone, “Listen, darling, take off those four-inch heels and meet me at the top of the tower where I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Melrose flinched when the kettle screeched.

  Archer was back and pouring fresh water over old tea leaves. Melrose wondered if Ruthven or Ruthven’s wife, Martha, ever did that. He hoped not. Yet it was an oddly British practice, wasn’t it? Most Americans didn’t do it, he guessed.

  “You were saying . . . ?” Melrose said as Archer handed him his refilled cup. Melrose sipped it and set it aside. “About its being your tower.”

  “Yes. Well, I can see that a death in my backyard might make me look suspicious. Only, it’s not literally in my backyard, is it? It’s a tower, a folly that tourists just take it upon themselves to go into. If they see signs of my presence, they go ahead and investigate anyway. I suppose they don’t necessarily attach the folly to the house. I mean, it’s a bit of distance from it.” Archer’s frown deepened. “Why would anyone choose that tower?”

  “That, of course, is a good question. You keep some of your antiques there?”

  “Yes, until I have enough to fill a container and get them back to the States.” He thought for a moment. “If it wasn’t premeditated—the murder, I mean—if it wasn’t premeditated, if he just suddenly went into a rage or something . . .”

  “That’s possible.”

  “It still doesn’t explain,” Archer went on, “why they’d gone up in the first place. Unless, again, it caught their eye in passing, you know, like any tourist might.” He shook his head, slid down in his chair a little. “But dressed as she was, seems unlikely.”

  Laburnum, Devon

  Wednesday, 2:30 P.M.

  10

  * * *

  A brass plate set in the ivy-covered brick of the stone wall said LABURNUM. Jury got out to push open an iron gate nearly hidden by vines and overhanging branches which Macalvie then maneuvered the car through. The quarter-mile drive was so thick with vegetation that Jury had again to get out to remove a fallen branch from their path.

  “Thought there was a gardener who still saw to things,” he said, slamming the car door. “Tom Williamson mentioned one.”

  “He still comes; it clears out once we get to the house.”

  Jury looked at him. “You’ve been here before.”

  “Of course I’ve been here. Remember? I was on the case.”

  No, thought Jury, more recently. It wouldn’t have looked like this back then, wouldn’t have needed clearing at the time Tess Williamson died.

  What he said instead was, “I’d have thought she’d find this house awfully painful. But she kept returning.”

  “Some things you can’t stay away from. Obsession.”

  Jury glanced at him, thinking that comment strangely out-of-­character for Macalvie, until he remembered that Melrose Plant had mentioned some terrible experience Macalvie had been through in Scotland, but not told him the details. It was clear it had involved death and a woman.

  “You think this place was an obsession with Tess Williamson?”

  “I’d say so.”

  They left the car, but instead of walking through the house, they walked round it to the rear, to the patio, the gardens, the pools. There were large stones lying near the side of the house, partially sunk into the ground.

  “Sarsen stones,” said Macalvie. “Like the ones in Avebury, only smaller.”

  They were on a path that ran between the pools where a marble statue of a Grecian or Roman maiden stood, its granite surface pitted. On her slightly down-turned face Jury c
ould see tiny marks, discolorations near her eye, a little line of them down her face, like tears. One was tempted to be a fool and try to wipe them away.

  Standing between the empty pools, they looked back toward the house, at the wide patio with its bank of French doors behind and the high stone steps below it.

  “Those are the stairs she fell down?” said Jury. Stand on the highest pavement of the stair. Iconic, the stairs seemed, almost a staircase wedded to myth.

  “Right,” said Macalvie, to some thought process of his own as he folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “Husband said she suffered from vertigo, which went a long way toward convincing the coroner it was an accident. Forensic reconstructed the fall.” Macalvie once again removed the computer-generated picture from the file in his hand and handed it to Jury.

  “This shows she fell forward—”

  “Pretty much took a dive, sustaining multiple injuries, none serious, mostly bruising on the left side of the torso, arm, thigh. Minor wounds, abrasions from the stone, chipped edges, loose rocks, so there was blood spatter.”

  “Hell of a memory, Macalvie.”

  “For this.”

  Jury looked at him. “You really liked her.”

  Macalvie nodded briefly. “I did.”

  Jury looked again at the stairs, the urn at the top. Lean on a garden urn. The marble statue on the base of which she had struck her head. From this distance he couldn’t tell much. He would have to look more closely. Although he wondered why he thought he might have something useful to add to the forensic analysis.

  Wondering about the scene, Jury said, “She couldn’t have fallen backward?”

  Macalvie frowned slightly. “No. That would have set up a different pattern of wounds.”

  “Possibly. But what if she tumbled—” Jury’s hand twisted, trying to simulate a circular motion. “She could have hit the steps on her back, been ‘bounced’ by the force, gone over on her left side, scraped along enough to bruise and cut herself.”

  “Why? I mean, why do you like that scenario better?”

  Jury was silent for a few moments, then said, “There were flowers everywhere.”

  “Yeah. She must have been collecting them, roses mostly, then peonies, some feathery fern, picking them for the house. She liked flowers.”

  “They were all over the steps—”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The roses, the flowers.”

  Macalvie waited.

  “Wouldn’t she have been taking them into the house? Wouldn’t she have been going up the stairs? Made a misstep, gone backward . . .”

  “She could have simply turned to go back down, or just to look at something.”

  “I saw the photograph of her taken on those stairs. Photographer . . . what was his name?”

  “Andrew Cleary. We talked to him. He was, he said, just a friend. My own guess was he was just something else.”

  “You’re probably half-right. According to Williamson, Cleary was probably in love with her. A feeling she didn’t return.”

  “Cleary had an alibi. He was with her in Paris. The alibi, that is. His lady friend. Not only was he with her, he was in hospital with pneumonia. So it’s not just his girlfriend vouching for him. They’re living there now, I think. In Paris, I mean. You’re bothered by the way she was posed?”

  “I’m just standing here now, seventeen years later. I don’t know anything about the Williamsons other than what he told me. I wonder how they fell. I wonder if they fell, or were thrown.”

  “Are you still talking about the flowers?”

  “You don’t think it would make any difference?”

  “Whether the flowers simply fell from her arms or she tossed them down? Yes, it would make a bloody difference; she’d have been angry.”

  Jury drew the Eliot poem from his raincoat pocket. “It’s a poem that she and Cleary were fond of.”

  Macalvie read silently in the dusty light.

  “You never wear glasses, Macalvie.”

  “Never needed them.” He read aloud, ‘So I would have had her stand and grieve—’ What happens here? It seems staged. I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t either. Especially given the irony, or the lack of sentiment. She’s not really grieving; he’s not necessarily leaving. The effect the speaker wants is all in his mind. It’s all posturing.”

  Macalvie shook his head. “I don’t know. He seems disturbed that it didn’t happen the way he saw it: the grief, the leaving. I think the point is—it didn’t happen. None of it.”

  “Andrew Cleary,” said Jury, meditatively. “She called him Angel Clare.”

  “Who?”

  “A character in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”

  “The Hardy book. Yeah, she really liked Hardy.”

  “Hardy’s Tess was in love with the solemn sod named Angel Clare.”

  “Where we are now is practically in Dorchester. This is Hardy country.”

  Jury looked around at the thick trees filtering the pale light. “Fate.”

  “Fate?”

  “Thomas Hardy. Hardy seemed to think destiny was irrevocable.” He looked at the folders Macalvie didn’t seem to want to let go of. “You’ve got the file there about Hilda Palmer’s death?”

  “Got it all. It was the pool to your right where she was found. Or I should say, they were. Hilda Palmer and Tess Williamson. At the end closest to the house.”

  They walked toward the house, stopped at the bottom of the drained pool. It would have been fairly deep for a child, five or five and a half feet. What he saw was broken rock and concrete and fallen branches. “Was it like this then?”

  “Pretty much, from what I read. No branches in it twenty years ago, but as much broken stone and concrete, I’d say, given the injuries.”

  “Who were these kids?”

  Macalvie turned a page in the file. “Children present: two boys, four girls. Boys were Kenneth Strachey, twelve; John McAllister, ten. Girls were Madeline Brewster, aged twelve; Veronica D’Sousa, nine; Arabella Hastings, eight; and the victim Hilda Palmer, ten years old. The adults present were Tess Williamson and a friend of hers, Elaine Davies.”

  Macalvie went on. “Except for Tess Williamson, who was in the kitchen getting food ready. Here—” He produced a colored snapshot of Tess and a woman Jury took to be Elaine Davies, both standing by a white enameled kitchen table on which rested an elaborately decorated chocolate cake. Frills of chocolate and honey-colored icing were looped around it.

  “It was one of their birthdays. McAllister’s I think.”

  Jury kept gazing at the picture. “God, but she was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Her hair was as honey-colored as the icing where the light hit it through the kitchen window.

  “She was,” said Macalvie.

  “Mind if I keep this for a bit?”

  Macalvie shrugged. “Okay by me, I made copies of everything. Anyway, to go on with logistics: Everyone else was in the front or near the front. All outside—”

  “But isn’t this the Davies woman? She’s inside.”

  “That picture was taken much earlier. Elaine Davies wasn’t one of the parents. She testified she came along just so there’d be another adult present to watch the kids. Except she didn’t do much watching, just sat on a bench reading Country Life. She claimed she could see the kids from there, but how closely was she looking?”

  “The children could have been anywhere when they were hiding.”

  “Well, not if they were following the rule Tess had laid down: they weren’t to play around the ponds. And the kids themselves had made the rule that they couldn’t go back in the gardens; otherwise the place was just too big and the one playing ‘It’ would never have found them all.”

  “Hide-and-seek’s a short game. Counting to ten—”

  “Veronica D
’Sousa, who was ‘It’—” Macalvie held up the file. “This is her statement if you want to read it.”

  Jury shook his head. “Not now. Go ahead.”

  “Veronica said they always counted up to a hundred, for nearly two minutes to give the kids plenty of time to hide. First one she found was Kenneth Strachey, who had stuffed himself between two of the sarsen stones you saw back there. Arabella Hastings was simply hiding behind a tree. It took Veronica a long time before she found Madeline Brewster, who’d climbed up on the front iron fence, hiding in plain sight, she said.

  “The other boy, John McAllister, was found after they’d discovered Hilda Palmer. He’d been hiding in the laburnum grove, up a tree, a place strictly off-limits. He was sick from eating the seeds of the tree. After they pumped out his stomach, he said he’d gone there because ‘Hilda dared me—’ ” Macalvie thumbed the page over. “When they started in playing the game, she’d said John wouldn’t dare go into the grove. They took him to hospital, pumped out his stomach. DCI Bishoff asked him why he ate the seeds. ‘Didn’t you know they were poisonous?’ ”

  “ ‘I just wanted to see how much. Veronica was taking too long to find me. I guess it was because of Hilda.’ Starts to cry. ‘Did you like Hilda especially?’ Shakes his head hard. ‘No. She was mean.’ ”

  Macalvie stopped reading. “That was pretty much a standard response. All of the kids thought she was mean. Mean or hateful or awful. None of them had anything good to say about Hilda Palmer.”

  They had begun to climb the stone steps. “Then what was she doing at this party?”

  “Good question. Tess Williamson said that she felt sorry for the girl and thought maybe she’d settle in and not be quite so ‘ireful.’ Her word.” Macalvie smiled, mouthed it again.

  Jury looked at him, smiling himself. “You got a kick out of her, didn’t you?”

  “Big kick. Who else would say ‘ireful’?” They were standing on the stone patio, its front circled by pollarded shrubs. “Maybe you should talk to the kids. Not kids now, of course, but they must be around, here and there, in some guise, doing something.”