The Old Fox Deceived

by Martha Grimes

  “It’s important. Unless you could move quicker than lightning, you could hardly have got to the Angel steps and back in ten minutes.”

  She looked at him, her eyes darkening to the color of cornelian. “You don’t believe me, do you? That someone’s trying to kill me?”

  “It’s not that. I certainly think you believe it. But what would be the motive? Money? Revenge? Jealousy?”

  “I’ve no money. And as far as I know, I certainly haven’t done anything to anyone. Jealousy — of what?”

  “Men. We could start there.”

  “You mean a jealous lover, something like that?” She laughed, but not happily. “In Rackmoor that’s not likely.”

  “Did you ever feel the Colonel thought you and Julian might . . . ?” He stopped when the color flared up in her cheeks.

  “Julian? Me and Julian? That’s daft! The Craels don’t marry the daughters of servants.”

  “What happened to your father, Lily?”

  “He went off when I was very little. I hardly remember him at all.” She reached over to the small table, plucked the crystal from the velvet. “I like to look in this. Percy Blythe gave it to me. In the summer I take it to the café, pretend I can tell fortunes, can see things. Well, the tourists love it. Give me your hand.” Jury extended his right hand, which she took and held. “You’ve a wide palm; you’re very tolerant. A long thumb — that’s strength of purpose. Straight fingers. Sympathetic. It’s a very good hand.” Then she dropped it as if it weren’t good at all, and her eyes strayed to the little pie-crust table studded with all the pictures. Her hand went to the one of the woman on the pier.

  “You were very fond of your mother, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like bringing this up; it must be painful . . . ” He dealt in pain, he felt; dealt it out in little slices like cards off a deck. “That day she drowned.” Lily did not look up. “Why would your mother have taken such a dangerous path when the tide was about to come in?” Lily shook her head. Clearly, she was near tears.

  “Was it an accident?”

  Lily’s head was bent over the picture and she was crying.

  Jury slid to the edge of his chair, took the picture from her hands, and replaced it with his handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Lily. I’ll be going now.”

  Jury walked out of the cottage and around the little cove to the Old Fox Deceiv’d. The blue and green cobles bobbed in the dark water like strange flowers.

  He had the picture in his pocket.

  11

  “Give me a Rackmoor Fog,” said Melrose Plant.

  Kitty turned to Jury: “What about you, sir? Care to try one?”

  “From what I’ve heard, it’d be worth my job. Just whisky, please, Kitty.” Wiggins was already eating a plate of fish, chips, and peas.

  She moved off and Jury turned to Melrose. “Well, Mr. Plant, and how did your inquiries go on?”

  Melrose glared at him. “Arnold was most forthcoming. Far more, I must say, than Percy Blythe.”

  “Percy Blythe? That name is not familiar. Who’s he?” Jury stole a chip from Wiggins’s plate.

  “You must find out for yourself, Inspector; you must come along and question him.”

  “I could do, of course, if he knows something. Was he on Harkins’s list, Wiggins?”

  Around a mouthful of cod and peas, Wiggins said, “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m surprised he’s on anyone’s list.”

  Kitty brought their drinks. The Rackmoor Fog was in a large rummer — a cloudy-looking brew from the top of which misty tendrils escaped.

  Wiggins stabbed his fork toward it. “What’s that stuff coming out the top?”

  “Fog.” Melrose brought the concoction to his lips, drank, made a face. “And barnacles and a shark’s fin.”

  “Doesn’t look very healthy to me,” Wiggins said, eyeing it and then returning to his safer tea. Jury watched wonderingly as his sergeant spooned sugar into it with no regard at all for the tooth fairy.

  “Do you know what runic message passed his parched and warty lips just as we were leaving?”

  “Percy Blythe’s, you mean?”

  “Yes. ‘Ask Evelyn.’ ”

  “Who’s she?” Plant shook his head. “Wiggins? Was there an Evelyn Somebody on that list?” Wiggins shook his head also. “Where’s this Blythe chap live?”

  “In Dark Street.”

  Wiggins speared a piece of fish as if it were still running underwater. “Now you mention it, I do recall a name like that from Harkins’s notes, but I don’t think this Blythe had anything important to say.”

  “No kidding,” Melrose said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “We’ll go round there after our meal.”

  “Goody,” said Melrose.

  “I mean Sergeant Wiggins and I’ll go round.”

  “Could you do without me, sir? I’ve got all these notes I want to get together from questioning people up at Old House. Must be reams of them.”

  “That’s right. Let Sergeant Wiggins do up his notes. Remember, I’ve been to Percy Blythe’s. Why, I very nearly discovered him.” Melrose tried on his winning smile, didn’t think that was working, and changed it to a sad look.

  “Oh, very well, Mr. Plant. Mind you don’t interrupt my questioning, though.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Chief Inspector. And really it’s a meeting I’d hate to miss.” Melrose looked owlish.

  “Thought you’d left the force, Mr. Plant. Very well, then. But let’s have something to eat; I’m famished. Kitty does a very good steak and kidney pie, I hear.”

  “Has she any wine, do you think? Château de Meechem, 1982. Aged in the cask.” Melrose looked round the saloon bar of the Fox Deceiv’d and said, “I wonder if Surtees decorated this place. Look at all those hunting prints.” When Melrose and Jury surveyed the room, several pairs of eyes stared back. A great deal of celebrity had attached itself to Jury. When he had walked in heads swiveled as if on oiled castors, eyes squared off, talk ceased. Quickly, they looked away, the regulars feigning disinterest in their table. “I expect the entire field to rush through, giving chase, yelling ‘Wind ’em, wind ’em,’ or some such rot. I feel like I’m back in the middle of Tom Jones.”

  Over in the corner, near the kitchen door, Kitty seemed to be having an argument with Bertie Makepiece who was white-aproned and carrying a tray under his arm. “Who’s the lad?” Jury asked.

  “Bertie Makepiece.” Melrose looked at the door between the saloon bar and the rear dining room. “And that’s Arnold, in case you’ve not met.” Arnold was lying across the sill of the door.

  Kitty made her way to their table. “Excuse me, Mr. Jury.” She pushed locks of light brown hair back from her high forehead and looked very red-faced. “Bertie is raising a fuss. I do give the lad work here, only when there’s people for dinner. I know he’s but twelve, and he shouldn’t be working in a public house but I don’t let him serve at the bar nor carry spiritous liquors — well, perhaps just the odd bottle of wine. The thing is, you see, his mum’s left and the child does need the money. He wants to wait on your table awful bad and you being the police and all —”

  Jury interrupted. “The child labor laws are hereby rescinded.” He smiled.

  Melrose watched Kitty Meechem grip the back of the empty chair, probably to keep from melting at Jury’s feet when he smiled at her.

  • • •

  “Veal and kidney pie, please,” said Jury, giving his order to Bertie. They were the only occupants of the small dining room where a fire burned brightly and copper and pewter gleamed on the walls.

  Melrose opted for the mixed grill. “And we’ll have a bottle of your best wine, Copperfield. You wouldn’t have a wine list, would you? I notice you’re not wearing your key tonight.”

  “No list, sir. But there’s lots of bottles down in the cellar that looks dusty enough they ought to be used up. Not,” Bertie assured Melrose suavely, “that nothing’s wrong with them.
But another year or two won’t do them no good.”

  “Well, if you can find a bottle of Côte de Nuit, ’sixty-four, bring it along. Mind you don’t shake it; just dust it off a bit.”

  “I’ll hoover it for you.” Bertie dashed off, tray held high.

  “That’s the lad whose mother’s gone missing. Where is she, then?”

  “No idea. Belfast, he says.” Melrose snapped a snowy-white, tablecloth-sized napkin across his lap. “The linen’s clean, at least. More hunting prints, I see. Did you know Sir Titus owns half this place? Why do you think it’s called The Old Fox Deceiv’d? He’s titular head of the whole village, I hear. Someone told me he wanted to rename it ‘Fox-moor.’ But they wouldn’t let him. Obsessed with hunting, that old gentleman is.”

  “How did you leave Lady Ardry, Mr. Plant?”

  “With the greatest difficulty, I assure you. She was on my coattails till the last.”

  Jury smiled. “I’ve missed her.”

  “No one else ever has. She’s in York. I keep getting daily bulletins about what she and this Teddy-creature are doing. If she knew you were here, she’d come rolling across the North York moors like a big snowball.”

  Bertie brought the first course. “Here’s your starters, sir.” He plopped the two small plates on the table. “No smoked salmon, sorry,” he said to Melrose, and continued sotto voce, as if they’d raided a secret hoard, “but Kitty found this nice piece of fresh fish from Whitby and sauced it up for you.” He whisked off, stopping to admonish Arnold, who was lying quietly in the doorway watching Melrose.

  Melrose poked suspiciously under the sauce. “Plaice, I’ll bet. Wonder how this sauce will mix with the Rackmoor Fog? I wish Kitty Meechem would give me the recipe. I could serve up a few to Agatha and leave her behind the Minster. Have you noticed how that dog keeps staring at me? I suppose you won’t tell me, but who have you lined up as chief suspect?”

  “No one.”

  Melrose sighed. “I supposed you wouldn’t tell me.”

  Jury shook his head and began on the fish. “It’s the truth. No one.”

  “Julian Crael would appear to have the strongest motive.”

  “That’s what Inspector Harkins thinks.”

  “How disturbing. I’d hate to think what he does.”

  “Why’s that? He’s an astute chap.”

  “A dandy and a martinet, far as I’m concerned. And, frankly, he seems to be wondering just why I —a stranger — am staying with the Craels. The Wandering Moors Murderer, that’s what he’s got me down for. Ah, here’s the wine.” Melrose rubbed his hands together.

  Bertie was back, tray under one arm, bottle of wine grasped in the other hand. “Have a look, sir. I’m sure you’ll approve.” He thrust the label up to Melrose’s face for inspection. “It’s not that whatever-it-was you asked for, but it’s got a nice color to it. Red.”

  “Red. Yes. But it’s a nineteen sixty-six. No nineteen sixty-four, I take it?”

  Bertie pursed his mouth. “Fresher,” he said with authority. “I’ll just yank out this here cork.” With the bottle between his legs, Bertie applied the corkscrew. When he had disengaged the cork, he dropped it on the table where it rolled around. “Cork, sir.”

  “It does look like one, yes.”

  “Well, ain’t you supposed to smell it, sir?”

  “Ah, yes. Stupid of me.” Melrose ran the cork under his nose. “Rich bouquet.”

  Bertie held the bottle to his chest, raptly attentive. “Thought you’d like it sir. Have a taste.” Carefully throttling the bottle neck, he poured out a portion into Melrose’s glass. “Just roll that round on your tongue.”

  Melrose did as instructed. “Excellent. A bit young, but excellent nonetheless.” He extracted a note from his wallet, stuffed it in Bertie’s pocket. “Clearly, you come from a long line of sommeliers.”

  Bertie beamed. “Leave it breathe, that’s the ticket.” He whisked off, tray afloat on his upstretched hand.

  “The wine ritual had a certain élan, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I thought it was swell,” said Jury. “But tell me why you think Crael’s the guilty party. You’ve had more opportunity to observe him than I.”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was Crael. I merely said he’s got the strongest motive. It could cut rather deeply into his inheritance if this Dillys March should reappear. They seemed to have regarded her almost as a daughter. The Colonel and Lady Margaret, that is.”

  “Would still do—were she to turn up. If the woman who came to Rackmoor were not Dillys March, but Gemma Temple, then someone must have given the Temple woman a great deal of information. So the last person to do that would be Julian Crael.”

  Melrose was thoughtful. “I see what you mean. But why are you so eager to defend Julian Crael?”

  “I don’t defend him. I’m merely stating an hypothesis. You don’t like him, obviously.”

  “I find him cold, hardhearted, and secretive.”

  “Secretive?”

  “Antisocial.” Melrose poked a chop around his plate and then took a bite. “Unlike Sir Titus. He’d be having the whole county to tea if he could. Well, I don’t mean to be unkind . . . it occurs to me that to say something unkind about the Colonel makes one feel guilty. Anyway, Julian lives a hermitlike existence. Doesn’t go in for the hunting, hates parties. Didn’t even go to the Twelfth Night party. And doesn’t seem to get along with the old man at all. Flaming rows they’ve had about this Gemma Temple or Dillys March or whoever she is. Was. Well, not flaming, exactly. Julian doesn’t flame, does he? He just ices over. Colonel Crael was all for having her up to Old House, bag and baggage. Julian swears she’s an impostor. But how could she hope to pass herself off as the March girl?”

  “It might not be so difficult as you’d think. Not with inside help and a man as easy to convince as the Colonel. Julian would be the only problem, really.”

  They ate in companionable silence for a while. Then Melrose said, “Old House reminds me of Poe’s Usher. Unsuspecting I drive up in my carriage at midnight—” Melrose held up his two hands as if framing a picture. “The manor house against the black sky, illuminated only by the pale disc of a full moon. Knarled oaks reflected in the dark tarn. The fissure running down the wall. And Roderick — that’d be Julian — glooming away at the pianoforte, lit by candelabra . . . ”

  “That the way it happened?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “The house seems pretty substantial to me.”

  “Well, Julian doesn’t. He’s more like the ghost of himself. Like fog. I get the feeling I could run my hand through him.”

  “I found him to be rather melancholy, but not especially wraithlike.”

  “Have you no imagination?”

  “Not really. I’m just a plodding policeman. But your analogy is interesting: Roderick Usher.” Jury remembered Lily Siddons’s remark. “Is it that you find Julian a trifle mad?”

  “A ‘trifle’ mad? What a curious way of putting it. Losing one’s mind is surely like losing one’s virginity. Lose a little, lose a lot.”

  “However you want to say it, then. Unbalanced, psychotic— ?”

  “Capable of murder, do you mean?”

  Jury’s gesture was dismissive. “It doesn’t take madness to commit murder. Murder’s a rather mundane act. I’m only trying to understand these people.”

  “There’s something about the whole family that throws me off balance. The Craels, past and present.” Melrose stuck his fork in a grilled tomato. “That house echoes with the past. They live in the past.”

  Jury swirled the dregs of his wine. “Don’t we all?” He looked away. “Do they talk about it so much, then?”

  “No. They talk about the present. But they’re thinking about the past. It’s as if one eye were permanently fixed on the portraits of the dead. Especially that one of Lady Margaret. There’s a woman I’d liked to have known.”

  Jury smiled. “Do you expect—as in the case of the Lady Madelei
ne — to hear scrabblings on the coffin lid?”

  “Really, you are a ghoul. No, I don’t expect that. But one does feel her presence.”

  “And does one feel the presence of Dillys March also?”

  “Not so much. Perhaps she was too young to leave that much of a permanent stamp upon things. But as part of the pervasive gloom — yes, I guess so. And Julian lives like a monk, might as well be in a monastery for all he goes about. He walks and he thinks.”

  “What does he think about?”

  “Julian does not open his heart to me, Inspector. If he has one.”

  The image of Julian Crael leaning against the mantel came back to Jury. “Oh, he has one, I think.”

  “It certainly has not been melted by any of the county ladies.”

  Bertie was back with the sweet, a plum tart. Jury said to him as he cleared their plates away, “Tell me, Bertie. How long’s your mother been gone?”

  “Upwards of three months, sir.”

  “A long time to be alone.”

  Jury looked at him, but it was impossible to read the expression in his eyes, masked as they were by the thick lenses of his glasses. And the rest of his small, rather pinched face was quite blank. Perhaps it was a lark, to be left on one’s own at twelve and not have one’s mum to be nattering at one all the time. A lark, that is, if you knew she was coming back.

  “It’s odd your mother didn’t arrange for anyone to take care of you.”

  “Oh, but she did, sir,” was Bertie’s quick reply. “Cod — I mean, Miss Cavendish. And Miss Frother-Guy. Religious they are about it. Always around.”

  Jury hid a smile. It was clear what Bertie thought of the policing. “She went to Ireland, did she?”

  “Northern Ireland,” said Bertie, pointedly. “It’s her old gran. I think she kind of thought of her gran as her own mum. When her gran got sick she had to go.”

  “Yes. But to leave you alone —”

  “I ain’t alone. There’s Arnold. And, like I said, Miss Cavendish —”

  “Where in Northern Ireland does her gran live?”

  “Belfast,” was the crisp reply. Then a darting glance as he added: “The Bogside.” Off he went.