The Old Fox Deceived

by Martha Grimes

“Rackmoor. In Yorkshire.”

  “Yes, that’s right. There was a policeman from Yorkshire, he was here only two days ago. You’re not the first.”

  Jury smiled. It sounded like a confession to the loss of virginity. He took the picture Harkins had given him from his pocket. “Is this Gemma Temple?”

  “Yes, it does look like her. Sun’s in her face, though. But, yes, that’s Gemma.”

  Jury took back the snapshot. “You said that you didn’t know much about her past, only that she’d mentioned a family named Rainey.”

  “That’s right. I think she went to see them a couple of times whilst she was living with me.”

  “How did you find Gemma?”

  “Through an advert. I needed someone to split the cost of the flat.” She looked about her wanly. “Though it’s not all that big, just this room and a bedroom, but it’s better,” she assured him, “than a bed-sit, you’ve got to admit.”

  “Much better than mine. Cigarette?” He handed over his packet.

  It was obvious she didn’t smoke much, the way she looked at the packet as if it were some sort of exotic bird. Finally, she pinched one out carefully and just as carefully leaned forward, holding her hair back, out of the way of Jury’s match. Then she leaned back and blew tentative puffs into the air, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger. She relaxed then, as if she’d just gone down on opium, crossed her legs, and swung her foot in its furry slipper. The impression of a little girl playing around with her mother’s makeup and fags was overpowering.

  “So she answered your ad . . . ”

  “Um.”

  “Tell me, did you like Gemma? Did you get along okay?”

  She looked at him, looked away. “Well, we didn’t have any real set-to’s, if that’s what you mean. But I didn’t like her all that much. And she was, you know, vague about herself. I should have got references, shouldn’t I?” She looked at Jury, wide-eyed and apologetic, as if he might castigate her for being stupid.

  “Hindsight is always wonderful, Josie. I’ve solved a hundred cases with it. Do you think Gemma Temple had any references to give? Or was she pretty much a floater?”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice a little, as if her mum might find her out here behind the barn, smoking and telling dirty secrets. “Floater’s too nice, I’d say. She brought men here. And not the same one twice, either, far as I know. I’d lie in bed in there and hear them. . . . ” Josie leaned back with a look on her face not of outrage at this invasion of her home, but of perplexity, as if wondering what they’d been doing. She went on: “Thing is, Gemma said she was an actress. I think once she might have got this little bitty part in one of those theatres that’s just a loft and they put down the chairs before each performance. Not much, know what I mean? Anyway. Gemma didn’t really work. But she got money from time to time. . . . ”

  “You’re saying she worked the streets, that it?”

  Josie nodded, went back to concentrating on the tip of her cigarette, as if trying to get the hang of it.

  “She never said anything at all about her past?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why did you give her the loan of your car, if you didn’t trust her?”

  She got defensive. “Well, hers was ever so much better, wasn’t it? And she wrote me out something like a receipt. Said if anything happened to mine, I was to have hers. It’s the yellow one out there now, but I expect they’ll take it away.” Her tone said she was sadder to see the car go than to see Gemma go.

  “How’d she get the money for the car in the first place?”

  Josie’s smile was lopsided. “You tell me, then we’ll both know. From one of those men, I don’t wonder.”

  “Did you ever actually meet any of them?”

  “Only on the stairs, like, when I was going to work. Once, in here. In the middle of the day, mind you.” It was always more sinful in the middle of the day. “Always a different one. No, I was just on my way to asking her to find another place.”

  “But you never knew their names? No one I could ask about her?”

  Genuinely sad, she regarded Jury. “Gee, I’m sorry. I never got one of their names.”

  “That’s not your fault, is it?” Jury got up. “Where do you work?”

  “In the launderette just down the street.” She stood with her face against the doorframe, looking up at him, almost as if she were sorry to see him go. Wrapping her sweatered arms around her she said, “Well, good-bye. You don’t think they’ll do anything to me about the car, do you? I mean, letting her drive it and all?”

  He handed her his card. “No one’s going to do anything to you, Josie. Just give me a call if anyone comes round. But I doubt anyone will. You didn’t commit any crime, after all.”

  Her enormous relief was palpable. She smiled and her small, white teeth nearly glittered in the dark. It gave him an odd sense of exhilaration, knowing she had this one lovely feature, something to get by on. “Good night, then, Josie.”

  • • •

  Dead end, he thought, outside the block of flats. He looked up and down the street and saw the Three Tuns on the corner, debated whether to have a beer or to go along to the Chalk Farm stop and wait for Mrs. Wasserman, whom he had promised to pick up. It was 10:15, too early for that. A drink might help him sleep. He flicked his cigarette into the gutter and that was when he saw the small car, a sickly yellow in the ghostly glow of the street lamp.

  You horse’s ass, he said to himself, staring at the L-plate. All that time talking about the plates, and he hadn’t even tumbled to it.

  3

  Melrose Plant had no idea how he was going to eat his way through six more Chinese restaurants. The ones in Soho and Kensington had earned him heartburn for his labors and he had been wrong in thinking that buying a meal would buy him information. Uncomprehending looks from the waiters (who also pretended not to understand English) had been his reward when he had produced the picture of Gemma Temple. It was after eleven, but he couldn’t sleep until he’d made one final try. So he unbent himself from the tube at the Aldgate East stop and headed for Limehouse.

  • • •

  He found the Sun Palace restaurant on a grim side street where the sun probably never shone. It was not very large, outfitted with a plate-glass window and the iron railing against which Gemma Temple had been posing. Flaking gold paint spelled out a curve of letters: SUN PALACE.

  It was closed.

  Sighing, Melrose looked around, saw no one, started up the street in hopes he might find someone who knew the restaurant.

  • • •

  “ ’Allo, love,” she said, but without much enthusiasm. “Slumming?”

  The young lady was attractive enough — exactly how young was difficult to determine in the pool of light cast by the street lamp, which turned her lipstick black and gave her whole face a leaden look. She was sitting on the steps leading up to a scarred door of a building so narrow there was room only for the fanlighted door and a window no wider than a wound. The building was cramped between a lock-up shop and another, similar house to its right, which looked as if it might have been this house’s other half some years back. Together they would have made one ordinary brownstone. The two houses were mirror-images of one another and he half-expected to see the girl’s duplicate sitting on the steps next door.

  Melrose stopped and leaned against the low, peeling stone post against which she rested her back, her one leg bent at the knee on the same step, the other on the step below, showing off jeans tight as a wet suit, culminating in bare ankles and stiletto heels. Topping this, quite informally, was a cardigan with sleeves pushed up and neckline down. This was accomplished by the top four buttons having been undone and the ends of the sweater tucked in to make a low V. Her clothes were so pasted to her body she could have swum the channel merely by kicking off the shoes and adding a swimming cap. The cap would have been a pity, though, for it would have hidden a mop of Shirley Temple curls. They were silky, br
own, natural, her own. He could tell that. They were like something left around from childhood, something she hadn’t been able to tame or to burn out of her from the past. It was strange. The curls seemed to reduce the rest of her, the whole act, the whole sexual aura, to a shambles, while the little girl rose, like a phoenix, out of the ashes of Limehouse.

  “Me name’s Betsy,” she said, rising, dusting her bottom, turning up the steps. He stood there for a while as she swayed up the steps; seeing he was not following, she waved her arm impatiently. “C’mon, then, mate.”

  Melrose followed her.

  Beyond the door was a long, blank hallway, fitted out with old linoleum, overblown roses on a gray background. A bulb covered with a fly-blown shade hung from the ceiling on a long cord. He wondered if the doors going off to the left and right held other Betsys. One door opened and a tangled mop of red hair hung out, took in the action, and pulled itself back in.

  Betsy led him into the first room on the left, the one with the high, narrow window. She had a view of a warehouse. The room was monopolized, as might be expected, by an enormous bed, the grandeur of which took Melrose’s breath away. It was a magnificent period piece, Tudor or Renaissance, a four-poster with marquetry inlays. Besides the bed there were a dressing table, triple-mirrored, covered in flaking pale green paint, a chest of dubious heritage, and a single painted wooden chair. Up and down the dingy wallpaper, little knotted bouquets crept like faded reminders of flowergirls.

  With one hand she shut the door, with the other she automatically reached toward him — to remove something, no doubt. “Whyn’t you take off your glasses? Smashing eyes you’ve got. Green as a bottle of Abbot’s.”

  He doubted that was part of the routine; he imagined compliments were hardly necessary. She smiled a little and further contributed to the childish image: her teeth were small and one was missing.

  When he brushed her hand away (knowing the removal of the glasses would only be a preliminary to the removal of other things), she shrugged and turned away. “Suit yourself.” She flopped on the bed, began tugging at the jeans. She was scowling. Not at him, but at the jeans painted to her body. Clearly, she had to lie down in order to get them off at all. “ ’Ere, ’elp me off wi’ these bleedin’ pants, love.” She had got them down far enough that he could see the flowered bikini underneath.

  “Do you think we could talk, Betsy?”

  “Talk?” She stopped tugging and looked at him as if the idea were new and rather novel. “ ’Bout what?” She continued wiggling impatiently. She needed help with the jeans, like John Wayne getting his boots off. Melrose wondered how she ever managed it by herself and then supposed she never had to.

  “I’m looking for somebody.”

  Indifferently, she shrugged, gave up on the pants and started on the sweater buttons. “Ain’t we all?”

  Her metaphorical interpretation of his literal statement startled him utterly. He took out his cigarette case, and offered it. “Cigarette?”

  She shook her curls, bent over the buttons of the cardigan, which she was undoing with childish concentration, her small brows knotted. Short of violence, it was apparently impossible to stop Betsy once she got going. But he was more interested in information than he was in Betsy. He had found in his life only a few fascinating women — intelligent, intriguing. The others were, at best, endearing — like Betsy, nearly done now with her buttons, the Shirley Temple curls bobbing, as she began to struggle out of the sweater, which was hard for her because she was straitjacketed by the jeans. Underneath the sweater was a wispy bra, flowered like the panties. One of the straps was attached to the cup with a tiny safety pin. It made him feel desolate, he did not know why.

  When her hands reached behind her back to unhook the bra, he said, “Hold it, Betsy!”

  Her gamin face looked up at him. “You queer, or what? Just like to watch? You some kind of vayer?”

  He assumed she meant voyeur. “Probably.” Melrose extracted both the snapshot he had taken from Julian Crael’s room and a ten-pound note from his billfold. Both of these he passed across to her. “All I want, truly, is a bit of information.”

  She looked from him to the money. She smiled, showing the broken tooth. “My, ain’t we the nob. Here now, how come you dress so posh?” Then as she was stuffing the bill into her bra, her eyes narrowed. “Crickey. You police?” She struggled wildly with her jeans, trying to drag them back up.

  “No. Look at the picture, there. Do you ever remember seeing her going into or coming out of the Sun Palace down the street?”

  She shook her curls, peered more closely at the snapshot. “Fancy frock, ihn’t? Looks pricey.”

  “The clothes are expensive, but the lady is not.”

  “She in the trade?”

  Melrose rested his elbow on his knee, smoking. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Absently, Betsy rolled a curl round her finger, making even more of a corkscrew of it. “Looks a bit la-de-da, if you ask me.”

  “That’s probably just the clothes, Betsy.”

  Her eyes came up to meet his. “That’s nice, the way you say my name.”

  “How many ways are there to say it?”

  She shrugged. “Most of ’em never say it atall.” She lay back, the sweater still off, unconscious of the bra straps slipping off and spreading her breasts. Losing interest in the picture, she looked all ready to tell him about her hard life.

  He forestalled that: “Perhaps someone else here — I presume there are others?”

  “Ain’t you a caution?” she said without smiling, and hooking the strap back up, and swinging the legs, repacked in the jeans, off the bed. “Want I should ask?”

  “I’d certainly appreciate it. Show the picture round. Someone might recognize her.”

  Betsy yawned. He added, “For whoever can find out about her, who she is and where she lived — there’s fifty pounds in it.”

  That got her on her feet like a shot. “Fifty quid? Gawd. Be back in a tic.” Coyly she flounced her hip. “Don’t you go way now.”

  But he hardly had time to go away. In five minutes there was gabbling at the door. Three others stood there, all taller than Betsy: the redhead, an African with long purple earrings, and a very fat one who wouldn’t see forty again. All wore kimono-type wrappers, as if they’d just finished with the chorus line. And all started talking at once. But it was the fat one who managed to take over.

  “I seen her,” she said, her breath heaving as she sat down on the bed, one fat thigh drawn up. Melrose saw a stocking rolled and held below the knee with a garter. “I can’t say’s I know her, but I seen her.”

  “Where?”

  The fat woman drew a strand of bleached hair through her berry lips and chewed, her expression gravely concerned. “I been thinkin’.”

  That, thought Melrose, must be a job in itself. She snapped her pudgy fingers. “It was at the Sun —” and she clapped her hand over her mouth. Then she simpered. “Do I get the fifty quid if I can tell you who does know her?”

  “Twenty-five,” said Melrose. “The person who can tell me about her gets the other twenty-five. That’s fair.”

  Not to the black girl and the redhead. Somehow they seemed to feel mere association with the fat one should gain them some reward. He gave them each a five-pound note and they brightened. The other, the fat one, took her twenty-five and stuffed it in the rolled stocking. “It’s Jane Yang knows her. She works at the restaurant. That’s where I seen this one. Waitressing in the Sun Palace. She mighta been on the block too, I don’t know. But Jane Yang can tell you.”

  Melrose got up. “Thanks very much. Who can I say told me about Miss Yang?”

  “Just say Fat Bertha. She’ll know.”

  “Fat Bertha. All right, thanks.” The girls were all lounging about the door. To Betsy he said, “Is that your bed?” He picked up his silver-knobbed walking stick, adjusted his coat.

  She looked puzzled. “Well I was just all over it, wasn’t I? Yes, it’s
mine.”

  “I mean, do you own it?”

  “No. The landlady does.”

  Melrose could imagine what the landlady did for a living. “Think she’d sell it?”

  “Sure, she’d sell her own gran if she had one.”

  “What do you think she’d ask for it?”

  “Why, you want it? Fifty, sixty quid she offered it me for.”

  “No, I don’t want it. But if you can raise the fifty, buy it, Betsy.” He took out a card and wrote a name on the back and handed it to her. “Then ring up this gentleman and ask him to come and value it. I don’t know, but I’d say you could get a thousand, easy.”

  Her large eyes grew larger. “You kiddin’ me?” He shook his head. “Gawd.” As he ran the gamut at the door, she threw her arms around him and kissed him. The others giggled.

  4

  The ringing of the telephone overlapped in Jury’s dream with the mournful wail of the Whitby Bull and when his eyes finally came unglued and he looked toward the window, he wondered why it wasn’t blanketed with fog. He groped for the telephone beside his bed.

  “London is lucky.” Chief Superintendent Racer’s voice slid down the wire. “You’re back. The question is, why are you back and why aren’t you down here, giving me a report? If it weren’t for Sergeant Wiggins, who, along with the sense to blow his nose, also has the sense to report in, I wouldn’t know where the hell you were, Jury.”

  Jury’s bedside alarm said 7:50. Racer in the office that early? Jury picked the clock up and shook it. “I’ve got to go to Lewisham, sir—”

  “You can bloody well go to Lewisham on your way to hell, Jury, there’ll be plenty of time for a stop-off. I want to see you within the hour. Get your socks on.” The phone went dead.

  5

  Fiona Clingmore was a pale blonde who favored black. Today, it was a tight black jumper tucked into a tight black skirt. She served as Racer’s secretary and general dogsbody; Jury hoped she wasn’t serving as anything else.

  Fiona belonged to the ’40s. She was like a character from a dated play who had stumbled onto a modern stage. Whenever he looked at her — at the outmoded hairdo, the mouth re-formed with red lipstick, the pillbox hats she liked — Jury was swamped by feelings of nostalgia which he could not fully explain. A few times he had taken Fiona out for a meal and wondered if it were not in the faint hope that some sense of the past would rub off on him. Although she pretended, whenever he mentioned the war, to have no living memory of it, he suspected that she was older than he. Once when she had taken out her wallet, he had seen stuck amongst the credit cards and other pictures, an old snapshot of a good-looking young man in R.A.F. uniform. He asked her if this was the “Joe” she kept referring to and she had blushed and said the picture was of a friend of her mum’s. Much too old he would have been for Fiona.