That raising no response, Melrose looked round to see what else offered conversational possibilities. Since there was no electricity laid on, it was difficult to sort out the various stuffed, glass-globed, and otherwise encased objects for more particular comment. In their frosted covers, weak flames spurted, throwing ominous shapes along the walls.
It was the narrowest terraced house Melrose had ever seen, in Dark Street, which was more a mews than a street. It turned into Scroop Street at the one end. Its only other means of coming and going was Dagger Alley, nothing more than a crude stone walk between the Bell and a warehouse on the High.
“You are quite a collector, sir,” said Melrose, feeling somewhat at a loss to explain his presence here. Bertie was no help, nor did Bertie seem at all out of place. He was examining some sort of a sea-urchin-like mess on a shelf. Arnold had immediately taken possession of an old piece of quilt tossed in a corner. There was the tiny scraping sound of the shells being rearranged on the desk. The movement sent several papers fluttering to the floor, but Percy Blythe seemed all unaware of the spillage around him — banks of papers like sand drifts about to slide away; ruined columns of books on tables, sills, and floor.
Never had Melrose seen anyone less inclined to meet the demands of even the most rudimentary social intercourse.
“I told him,” said Bertie, “that you had all kinds of stuff. What’s this here?” Bertie held up a kind of bonelike thing. But Bertie was apparently indifferent to Percy Blythe’s silences, for he merely returned the object to the shelf and went to scrutinizing a planked fish.
Melrose shifted his silver-headed stick from one hand to the other and leaned that way for a bit. All of this verbal inactivity might have been the less disconcerting had they been invited to sit, had they been asked at least to remove their coats, but Percy Blythe seemed as indisposed to do that as he was to engage in any other of the social graces. So they still stood, fully accoutered, except for Arnold, sound asleep on a blanket. Bertie was quite at home, passing one object after another through his hands, humming. Only Melrose seemed to be cast adrift to sink or swim in Percy Blythe’s monumental sea of silence. He cleared his throat and tried again:
“Mr. Blythe, I’m visiting at Old House; I’m a friend of Sir Titus Crael.” This merely earned him a darkling glance before the head bent once again over the shells.
“You remember, Percy, how you was telling me how queer that Julian Crael was.” Bertie was holding a bowl with water and a dark object floating in it. “What’s this here? It looks alive.”
Melrose seriously doubted it. But he picked up on Bertie’s indirect reference to the crime. “It’s really quite appalling to think that such a ghastly murder could occur in this little fishing village.” No answer. Melrose plodded on: “Indeed, you were probably as shocked by this gruesome crime as were the other inhabitants of Rackmoor.” No sign did Percy Blythe give of shock. “You, yourself . . . ” said Melrose, switching his walking stick back to the other side and leaning that way for a while, “ . . . must have been surprised to imagine such a beastly thing could occur in your own village.” One crabbed finger pushed the shells about, knocking one to the floor, which he didn’t bother to retrieve. “It might interest you to know, Mr. Blythe, that there was quite an awful series of crimes in my own village in Northamptonshire just about this time last year. And Chief Inspector Jury was the officer in charge there too. I expect he’ll be coming along to ask you a few questions.”
“D’ya think I could have that shell you promised me, Percy?”
There was a vague, fluttery movement of the arm beneath the shawl.
“Perhaps you remember something of the night of the murder?” Melrose prompted. Percy Blythe merely looked up at Melrose over his spectacles, shook his head, and returned to scrutinizing the shells. Perhaps the man, thought Melrose, was simply pathologically shy. Perhaps he felt comfortable only with stuffed or otherwise preserved objects.
“Ah, sure you do, Percy,” Bertie said. “You remember you was telling me how you said you wasn’t surprised. When that woman come to town you thought trouble’d follow after.”
This earned Bertie a venomous glance, as if warning him off from dragging Percy Blythe into this witless conversation.
But Melrose quickly picked up on the point: “Why did you think that, Mr. Blythe?” There was, of course, no answer, and Melrose felt as if he were slowly being washed out to sea along with the shells and other flotsam and jetsam. Funny, he had always thought of himself as an engaging, if not a brilliant, conversationalist. Let Jury do it, he sighed, pulling on his gloves. He rather relished the confrontation; he hoped Jury would permit him to come along. “Well, I expect we’d best be off. I’ve got to meet someone.”
“And I got to go to work, Percy. Be seeing you. Hop it, Arnold!”
Melrose jumped as a cat, frightened awake by Bertie’s command, catapulted from a high shelf. Melrose had presumed it to be stuffed. He turned toward the door.
“Ask Evelyn,” said Percy Blythe.
Melrose turned. But Percy Blythe was transferring shells to pockets and gave no sign at all of having delivered this cryptic message.
10
The girl who opened the door had a face too thin for conventional beauty, but a fragile blondness, transparent, like glass. It was already dark at five o’clock and mist layered the air between the girl and Jury. An oil lamp behind her fuzzed the outline of the dress she wore, low-necked and white, full and formless. It fit her like a cloud, made her ghostly. Jury thought all she needed was a tallow in her hand to make him think he’d been dropped into some revenge tragedy.
“Miss Siddons?” Jury handed over his card. “I’m Richard Jury. C.I.D. I hope I haven’t come at a bad time. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Oh.” She bunched the dress in at the waist as if its very looseness were somehow embarrassing. “I’m just fitting this dress. I haven’t a form and, well, I’m using myself. Not that there’s much fit to it. Come on in.” He did so and she shut the door behind him. “I’ll just take it off, if you don’t mind.”
He could see there were pins in the dress, around the neck and defining the shoulders. “You’re sewing it?”
“Not for myself. For one of the women in the village. I do occasionally, in the winter, when there’s not much business at the café. The Bridge Walk is my place.”
Jury nodded. “I know. The dress, though. It suits you.” She had an unusual face, now that he could see it better. Triangular, with amber eyes. Her skin had the sheen of pearls.
Her hand came up to the neckline of the dress, apparently noticing the drift of Jury’s gaze. “I’ll only be a minute. Really,” she said anxiously, as if more than a minute might find them all sliding out to sea. He nodded and she rushed from the room and up the stairs.
Jury looked over the sitting room, stuffed with flowered chintz chairs and bric-a-brac. Little ornaments and pictures seemed to overflow every corner — shelves, mantels, tables; they held cups and saucers, fluted pitchers, small china boxes. There was even, to his surprise, a crystal floating on a bed of black velvet. He picked it up, turned it round, peered into its depths but got no fortune back. He replaced it on its velvet bed. There were trinkets with painted greetings from Bognor Regis, Tunbridge, Southend-on-Sea—all of those once-fashionable resorts where ladies with parasols and fans promenaded, now replaced by amusement piers and fat children with sandbuckets. There were pictures too on the tables and around the walls, some of these apparently taken at those same resorts. One showed a young woman on a pier in the outmoded dress of the fifties catching at the brim of her hat. It must have been a windy day; a sea-breeze had sent her skirts flying, and she was also catching at these modestly, with the other hand. For a snapshot, it was very good, much the best of the pictures on the table, fresh, alive, and the girl quite lovely. But when he looked at it again he wondered why she had been placed so poorly in the camera’s lens, mashed up against the left-hand edge of the picture. H
e returned that picture to its place and looked over the others, crowded on the table in square and oval frames. Most of them were of the same woman taken at different places, different times. One had been taken at Old House; he recognized the stable yard. He assumed the woman must be Lily Siddons’s mother.
“That’s my mother.” Her voice came from behind him, confirming it. “She’s dead now. She died young.”
Jury looked around. “The Duchess of Malfi?”
“What?”
“I thought you were quoting from the play.”
She tilted her head a bit and her amber eyes caught the light from the fire. “I don’t know it.”
“It was spoken by her brother. The duchess’s, I mean. ‘Cover her face; she died young.’ ” Jury replaced the picture carefully as if he might shatter the life of the woman in it again. “The brother, Ferdinand, was mad.” He felt oppressed; anxiety knotted his stomach; he did not know why.
“Like Julian Crael, you mean?” She wrapped her arms round herself, covering her breasts in that unconscious movement women used to ward off violation.
“Julian Crael?”
“He was always odd.” Lily sat down on a small, chintz-covered sofa. “Would you like some coffee?”
Jury shook his head. “Odd in what way?”
She shrugged her shoulders, as if dismissing Julian Crael. And then she said, “Did he kill her?”
The blandness of her tone, as much as the question, surprised Jury. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he’s capable of it, I suppose.”
Jury smiled slightly. “We’re all capable of it. Given the right circumstances.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe that.” With her cat’s eyes, she regarded Jury coolly. “Could you? Murder somebody?”
“Yes. I expect so. But you were speaking of Julian.”
She pushed her fair hair, which was held back from her face by two tortoiseshell combs, away from her shoulders. “I’ve never liked him. I suppose you know I lived in that house for a long time, all the while I was growing up. Until my mother . . . died.” Her eyes trailed from his face over to the little pie-crust table on which were grouped the pictures.
“Colonel Crael told me. He’s fond of you.”
“He’s the only one of them who’s really decent. A gentleman.”
“Not Julian?”
“Julian.” A slight gesture of her hand dismissed that possibility. “Definitely not Julian.”
Jury wondered if there were some thwarted romance in the background. Somehow, he doubted it. “You went to a dinner party at Old House the night before the murder.”
“Yes. The Colonel invited me up to dinner. I thought at first—” She paused. “I thought at first she—” Lily Siddons appeared distracted, or meditative, running her hand across her brow, as if chasing some vagrant shadow of a thought.
“What?”
“Didn’t Colonel Crael tell you she looked exactly like his ward? The girl who left fifteen years ago. Didn’t he tell you about Dillys?”
“You tell me.”
Lily looked down at the hands locked in her lap and said, as if she were reading a history from a book: “They took her in after her parents died. When she was around eight or nine. I was only a baby then. She was five years older, but we more or less grew up together. She liked to lord it over me. I was only Cook’s girl, see. In games I was always the handmaiden and she the duchess. Lady Margaret spoiled her to death. Of course, we went to different schools. Dillys and Julian both went to the public school and I had to go to comprehensive. That was when we were older. She always kept telling me no matter how much I put myself about, I’d never be . . . as if I thought . . . ”
“And how did you feel when you first saw Gemma Temple, then?”
“I was afraid she’d come back.” She looked him straight in the eye. “If you want someone with motive, yes, I had one. After my father left us — Mummy and me — we had to live there. I suppose it was very decent of the Craels having me in, giving me a roof. But Dillys. She was like a fallen tree across my path. I couldn’t move her; I couldn’t get round her.” Lily stopped and looked into the fire.
“When the Colonel told you she was a distant cousin, did you believe it?”
She looked surprised. “Why shouldn’t I have done? If it was Dillys, why would they have lied?”
“But didn’t you think it extremely odd that Dillys March went off the way she did, leaving all that money she was to inherit?”
“Are you telling me it was Dillys?”
“No. I’m just asking. Inspector Harkins says you told him you think that the person who killed Gemma Temple really meant to kill you. That’s very strange, Miss Siddons. Would you mind explaining it?”
“Someone has been trying to kill me.” She leaned back with an exhausted sigh and turned her face to the fire. The flames gilded her pale skin, lit up her amber eyes, made bands of gold down her silk-stockinged legs. The legs, Jury noticed, were very good. But he was not so much aroused sexually as he was mystified by her, here in this habitat. She was like a rare species of butterfly drifted out of its territory. A Clouded Yellow in a cold climate.
“The first time was when I was riding. It was back in October and I’d taken out Red Run — that’s the horse the Colonel lets me ride. I jumped a wall near Tan Howe and just barely missed a big hay rake which had been left on the other side. A few more inches and I’d have gone down on the tines. It was up-ended.”
“Could anyone have known where your ride would take you, though? Even assuming the hay rake had been left there purposely?”
“That’s just the point. I’d been practicing jumping Red Run at just that place because during the hunt he’d refused that wall several times and I was trying to get him over the fear. Of course, then I thought it was all accidental. But I told the Colonel and he said he’d make sure the farmer never left it there again. He was very upset.”
“When was the next time?”
“Three or four weeks later. In November. It was the brakes on my car. They failed. I keep it in the lot at the top of the hill. You know, the first one.” Jury nodded. “I don’t use it at all in the village, except this one day I had to load up at the café. Some cakes and pies I was taking to a church fete in Pitlochary. When I got in the car I remembered I needed some things in Whitby, so instead of driving down the hill then, I drove the other way. Thank God. You’ve seen that hill. I’d have ended through the wall of the Bell. You see, it wasn’t really until this . . . thing happened to Gemma Temple that I figured it out. Those other times weren’t accidents. People knew I was taking the car down that day.”
“Who knew?”
Impatiently, she said: “Lots. Kitty Meechem and I talked about it in the Fox. Adrian was there. The Craels knew; I’d mentioned it in front of them.” Her face was tallow-white in the gloom. The only light was from the fire.
“So you think it was the costume?” She nodded. “Why was Gemma Temple wearing your costume?”
“At dinner the night before the Colonel said that Gemma hadn’t a costume and could I lend her something? Then Maud suggested we — Maud and I—go as Sebastian and Viola out of Twelfth Night. Well, it seemed appropriate. So I let her wear mine.”
“Why didn’t she go along as Viola with Mrs. Brixenham?”
Lily shrugged. “With her being a stranger, she didn’t really know Maud.”
“Why didn’t she go when you did? Kitty Meechem says she didn’t leave the Fox until ten after ten.”
Lily laughed. “That’s obvious. I’m sure she wanted to make an entrance, all by herself.” Her tone was bitter. “Actress! Jumped-up little shop girl’s more like it.”
“Then all of these people at dinner the evening before knew you wouldn’t be wearing the black and white costume.”
Lily shook her head. “No. Only Maud and the Colonel. The others weren’t in the room at the moment we discussed it. Anyway, at the party I got a little sick. I think it must h
ave been the fish paste sandwiches; they’ve never agreed with me. Or maybe it was the punch. It’s deadly the way they make it at Old House. I didn’t see but a few people there. The only people I can be sure weren’t trying to kill me are the Colonel and Maud. They knew I’d switched costumes.”
Which might conceivably have eliminated them if it were really Lily Siddons who was the intended victim.
“If I hadn’t given her my costume, she might still be . . . I feel guilty.”
Jury took out his notebook. “You told Inspector Harkins you got back to the cottage here around ten fifteen.”
“That’s right. Maud stayed with me for a bit to make sure I hadn’t got a bad case of food poisoning. Then she left. I got into my robe and read for a while, until about eleven.”
“Adrian Rees saw Gemma Temple walking along Grape Lane a little after. About eleven fifteen, just before the Fox closed. Near the Angel steps.”
Lily was staring into the fire and nodded slightly. “I know.”
“Had she been here?”
Her head whipped round at that. “Here? Why would she have been here?”
Jury didn’t answer. He looked at her, his face impassive. “She’d been someplace between the time she left the Fox — Kitty Meechem says ten past ten — and when Rees saw her. She was not on her way to the party, apparently.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she went up the Angel steps.”
“Well, people do use those steps.”
“Not in winter, do they? Not with the sign warning them off. She must have met someone there.” Jury waited, but Lily said nothing. “And Kitty Meechem stopped here to see you just after the pub closed. That’d be around eleven thirty or even earlier. About eleven twenty-five, she said.”
Lily rolled her head back and forth on the chintz cover of the couch, wearily. “I don’t know. I suppose so. I wasn’t looking at the time.”
The Old Fox Deceived Page 9
