He was not sure whether it was a barn or one of the old long houses that provided shelter for both people and animals. The roofbeams were high with heavy crucks and, at one end, three rows of loopholes that allowed for needed ventilation (given the somewhat pongy dung-smell coming from the other end) and on this brighter-than-ordinary morning tossed confettilike patterns of sunlight on the floor.
At the other end, off to his left, where Abby seemed to be ministering to a cow, was the byre with wood-framed slate boskins that partitioned off the animals: in this case, the pony and donkey he had seen earlier behind the barn.
What must have been the old threshing floor lay between doors on either side of the barn. The door across had been boarded up. Melrose stood on a large slate floor with small rugs strewn about to make it appear homey, he imagined.
In front of a stone fireplace were a makeshift table (an oblong board across two sawhorses), a heavy mahogany chair, and a high stool. He concluded this was the dining area, and the kitchen was beside it: here was a table covered with oilcloth on which lay a loaf of bread and some meat and cheese. Refrigeration was left to the window ledge, where a bottle of milk sat beside a square of butter on a plate. A kettle hung on an iron rod that swung into the fireplace.
Against the end wall to the right was a creaky-looking cot covered in a layer of quilts. Beside it was a crate piled with books and a lamp.
But what especially struck Melrose was the number of posters and prints decorating the walls—Dire Straits, Elvis Presley. The recent acquisition that Ethel had labored over was a poster of the rock group Sirocco. Indeed, it might have been that same glossy one lately in Malcolm's possession. It was tacked up beside a smaller scene of a Cornwall cliffside and beside that one ... oh, hell, Venice. Venice floating in its unearthly way, distant across the water. Insubstantial as it was, it still looked more real than the Cornwall cliffs dashed with high plumed waves. . . .
A very large and beautiful poster in a baroque frame that Melrose was certain was one of the Magritte "empires of light" hung above the book crate. To see it in a barn—but then Abby Cable appeared to make her home in this place— was strange indeed. Strange as the picture itself. It showed a house with a lit window and a streetlamp glowing in darkness; yet above this was a clear blue sky with clouds. He had seen it before reproduced on cards.
Having been admitted, apparently, to this sanctuary, Melrose was not quite sure what to say, and so said words he would gladly have chewed up and swallowed once they were out of his mouth: "Well! This is certainly a pleasant barn!"
Abby Cable turned upon him a look that might have been fashioned by the toilers at Stonehenge, a look that had come down through the ages by way of Antigone and Lady Macbeth, a look that had worn itself into the fabric of the world. A look that barely suffered fools to live. As if that weren't enough to stop a train, it had to be that deep blue that is often falsely, if poetically, attributed to Aegean seas and island skies.
"If you like barns," she said. Then remembering apparently he had saved her cat, she said, "That's Ethel."
Ethel was much more forthcoming, probably because it allowed her to drop the odious paddle and come to have him look her over—her ruffled shirtwaist, her fancy ribbon. She smiled up at him and showed two missing teeth. "We're having tea. You can have tea with us, can't he, Abby?" There was no response from Abby, who was busy trying to adjust the straps of the oat bag to the pony's head. Ethel adjusted the bow in her hair and seemed to provide the answer to her own question by announcing: "I'm older than Abby."
When no congratulations were forthcoming from Mel-rose, and no sign from Abby that she had heard, Ethel flounced over to the oil-cloth-covered table where the loaf of granary bread sat and continued cutting. "That's my dog, over there." Ethel pointed with the breadknife toward the big dog. "It's not a plain sheepdog; it's a Kuvasz." She emphasized the word carefully, looking at Melrose to see if mention of this marvelous breed would stir him. When it didn't appear to, she went on (by rote, he thought, as if the child had memorized a book): "They were owned by the King of Babylon who made laws for them. That they couldn't be killed or bothered. Long, long before that the King of Summertime breeded them. My dog's Hungarian and his name is King."
Abby Cable squinted in pain at this account of the dog's pedigree. "I told you before there's no King of Summertime. There never was. And his name's Tim, not King. Tim's what it was when you got him."
Melrose's smile reached from one to the other. "It's rather delightful, though, you must admit. The King of Summertime." When the Fury looked at him he realized he'd made a tactical error. "But I do agree. I mean practi-cally speaking I doubt there's such a person." He wondered what it was, though, or who, that Ethel had confused with "summertime." A king of Sumeria? That must be it.
"I told you he wasn't that stupid," said Abby, dragging the feed bucket over to the donkey.
Melrose didn't know whether to be flattered she'd apparently been telling Ethel about him or wonder just how stupid, if not that stupid, he seemed.
Ethel, mouth clamped in a narrow, angry little line, cut away at the cheese.
"It's just rough sandwiches," said Abby. The tone was neutral. She came out of the stall and latched the door. When it shut Melrose saw that here was another poster. Each animal had its own favorite, apparently. He couldn't see the cow's, but the donkey's was an old Dylan poster and the pony's was that American singer who, he thought, had died. Ricky Nelson.
"Thank you very much, but as it's only a bit after ten, I don't think I could handle a sandwich. Certainly not after that huge breakfast your aunt gave me." Since she had said nothing by way of encouragement here, Melrose added, as the kettle screeched, "But a cup of tea would be very pleasant."
While the pony made mushy noises, content with his bag of oats, Abby stood back from the stall, hands on hips, regarding either Ricky Nelson or the horse. Since her back was turned, Melrose couldn't tell which. Ricky, apparently, for she said, "We have to take your poster down, Ethel."
Knife in hand, Ethel whirled. "It's my poster."
"It's my barn."
Ethel wailed, "I love him."
"It's too bad," said Abby, firmly. Melrose thought he discerned an echo of the words that had been hurled at the vet's receptionist when she added, "He's dead."
Stranger sat up, sensing a confrontation.
"He's in heaven, then," whined Ethel. "He's singing up in heaven. And I can marry him when I get there." Her high little voice trumpeted forth with the triumph of a Gabriel.
Matter-of-factly, Abby answered, "Who says there's a heaven?" She squelched a bucket of feed over to the door and sat it down in readiness for the chicken yard.
So appalled Ethel must have been at this heretical statement that she could think of no response. She slapped two plates down on the cloth-covered sawhorse table, bouncing the bread and cheese, furious. Then she dragged over the wobbly stool, apparently meant for Melrose, and thumped it down at one end of the table.
Abby gave Ethel a pained look. "That's too little for him. He can have my chair. I'll get the other one."
Before she collected the chair, she stood upon it, reached in her pocket, and brought out some chewing gum. Holding back the top corner of the poster as she chewed, she then stuck the doughy stuff to the stone and pressed the corner of the poster in place.
Ethel, red-faced, stuck her tongue out at Abby's back and, when she heard the voices at the door, quickly tried to regain her princessy demeanor. He could see, though, that she was searching for a killing last word. "Well, then you'll never find my hiding place. I was going to tell you—"
A lie. Even Melrose knew that.
Abby kept herself rigid. "You can't have a hiding place in my barn."
This was a longstanding argument, clearly, cut off by the voices outside. An elongated shadow that fell across the threshing floor doubled as the man and woman separated at the door. Abby thumped at the corner of the poster one last time and clambered down from th
e chair.
"Hullo, Abby."
"Hello."
The gentleman and lady standing there spoke simultaneously, the woman with a little more authority than the man, who seemed, although smiling, less certain of his welcome.
Abby merely turned from the poster-fixing, returned the greeting glumly, and went back to resticking the chewing gum.
"Having tea, are you?" the lady said, looking from Mel-rose to Ethel, to the makeshift table and back at Melrose at the same time she dropped the hood of her coat from bronze-colored hair vaguely streaked with white, whether from age or highlighting he couldn't say; she appeared to be in her forties, and was dressed in some long, loose, patchwork-bright garment that the Princess probably would have approved for sheer flamboyance.
When Abby didn't turn from her work, the woman walked over to the wall, turning to say "Rena," when Charles Citrine had introduced her as "Irene." She held out a small package to Abby that was (Melrose heard her say) ". . . from Nell."
Abby looked at the brown wrapping and slipped it in one of the big pockets of her skirt.
Melrose caught snatches of their—or her—conversation as the brother spoke casually to Melrose about the weather, the country in January, and Weavers Hall. Citrine (with a nod of his head in some direction back there) said he lived in an old house "across the moor."
Irene Citrine stood there conversing with Abby. Although converse was hardly the word, since Abby's end of this conversation was uncompromisingly monosyllabic. Melrose made out that the box was from "Nell, who specially wanted you to have it ... had she tried rubber cement to hold up the poster? ... a handsome poster. . . . Who are they? . . . Nell's sorry she couldn't . . . Nelligan's flock is ... need anything . . . ?"
They were wandering in decidedly unlabyrinthine avenues of conversation, given Abby's answers:
"Thanks."
"No."
"Yes."
"Rock band."
"Well."
"Yes."
"No."
In other words, a typical Abbyesque exchange with someone she was indifferent to, although she appeared to prize the gift if not the giver. Melrose thought the giver was surely trying her best.
Charles Citrine was trying his, too. Citrine was a man who would be tagged "affable" straightaway. In these circumstances, however, the manner was strained. The man's thoughts were elsewhere; the pale blue eyes fixed on his sister and Abby, at the same time he exhausted the conversational possibilities with Melrose about the weather, the countryside, the Hall.
It was, perhaps, simply a more mannered version of Ab-by's own responses to Nell Healey's aunt.
Once the Citrines had gone, Abby walked to the byre and then back to her "bedroom" and then over to the table, where she exchanged the thick chipped mug Ethel had set out for Melrose for a fluted cup and a mismatched saucer with tiny blue flowers.
"Well? What u it?" demanded Ethel. "What's the present?'
"I didn't open it," said Abby calmly.
Ethel fluttered her hands excitedly. "Open it, open it."
"It's in my hiding place. Get the kettle." Abby sat with her hands folded.
Grimly Ethel swung the kettle from the rod with a thick cloth and poured it into the pot while Abby settled herself on the low wooden chair. Since Ethel's seat was the stool with a cast-off cushion, their relative heights round the table were wholly disproportionate. Melrose felt as if he might be looking down from that heaven that Abby disclaimed any knowledge of.
Abby poured the tea, Melrose's cup first, plunked down the pot, and picked up her sandwich. These were indeed "rough" sandwiches, ill-cut portions of cheese between hunks of bread.
"Well, this is a welcome relief from the morning's events."
When Abby looked at him, apparently doubting great things had come of a morning at Weavers Hall, he wished he could stop being so hearty.
There was a ritual silence as they drank their tea. The two dogs had each been given their meal and Stranger took this as a signal to relax his vigil and lie by the fireplace. Tim had left in search of something more inviting than this inactive person.
Abby divided her attention between her plate and the empty air round Melrose's shoulder.
Ethel, despite her prim neatness, turned out to be a noisy eater, chomping her cheese, slurping her tea, and beating a tattoo with her heels against the stool. Having hit upon one more thing to madden her friend, she said to Melrose, "I've got things hid in this barn and Abby don't know where."
Given Abby's stony look, she apparently believed it. "You can't have a hiding place in somebody else's barn. I told you."
Ethel simpered. "Well, I do. You don't know, I could keep a gun there." She then started in, nonstop, on the murder at the inn.
"Blood all over—"
"No, there wasn't." Abby's voice was a flat-out contradiction. "Stop talking about it."
But given the sacrilege earlier paid to the dead singer, Ethel was clearly going to get hers back. Crumbs gathered in the corners of Ethel's mouth as she went on: "She shot him. Splat!"
"Ethel!"
Melrose himself would have hesitated to continue, faced down by that pair of eyes, but Ethel was going to turn the knife. Anyway, it wasn't every day such juicy gossip came along in this isolated region.
"We wasn't to talk about it." Abby's voice was level but her look would have stunned the animals in the stall.
"That Missus Healey, she's your friend."
Ethel, Melrose saw, for all her milky-whiteness, her ribbons and ruffles and dimples, was a small fiend, sitting there with that hair of fiery licks, the upright kitchen fork like a trident.
"And she can't come here, can she? Because your auntie won't let her."
This was delivered in a snide, singsongy voice meant to engage and enrage her hostess. Ethel was bringing out the big guns. "And anyway, you got the pictures of dead people"—she motioned with a nod of her head toward the crate that held the books—"right over there. I saw them all. There's pictures of that little boy, Billy, and his friend." When there was no response to this, she said, "They're terrible, my mam says. Says they just let that little Billy die. I saw all the pictures of you and him and the other one, that Tony."
"Toby." The correction was automatic, issuing forth from some brain and mouth not Abby's own.
Melrose interrupted. "I suggest you stop talking about things you know nothing about." He shoved his chair back, looked at Abby, wondered if she were some sort of magnet for negative planetary waves. Ever since he had first seen her, she seemed always to be bedeviled.
Although she said nothing, the vibrations issuing from her stony posture made the table appear to quiver, the dirt floor beneath them vibrate; on her face was the expression Medea might have worn on Jason's return.
"Go home," said Abby.
"We're having the funeral. You said we were."
It was then that Melrose noticed the small black-draped box by the bed. A votive candle, unlit, stood at one end. Buster. Melrose looked away.
And Abby merely repeated, "Go home."
"But we've got to bury Busted Or she'll start smelling up the whole barn."
The air, Melrose thought, should have been redolent with the smell of Buster, given the cat had been there for twenty-four hours.
"Go home," Abby said again, in that same atonal voice.
Ethel tossed down what was left of her sandwich and got up, haughtily, as if to say it made no odds to her whether she stayed or went. But as she pushed her sleeves into her coat on her way to the barn door, she issued one parting shot.
"And if there's no heaven and we just turn into vapors, then just where's your mother, I'd like to know!"
Abby's eyes were turned to the old beams of the roof. "With Ricky Nelson."
Part Two: THE KING OF SUMMERTIME
18
Lost cause was a term that never applied to any case Brian Macalvie was working on; it often extended to the people working under him, however.
Often, b
ut not always. The female voice Jury heard coming from the forensics lab at the end of the corridor belonged to Gilly Thwaite, Macalvie's Scene-of-Crimes officer.
When Macalvie saw Jury appear at the open door, he motioned him in with an impatient wave of his hand as if Jury were an overdue referee.
Not that Macalvie needed one; he was standing in his usual posture, hands pushed in trouser pockets and shoving back the raincoat he seemed never to remove, and chewing gum at a rate roughly equivalent to the fast-talking Gilly Thwaite. Across the lab table she leaned into him. like a heavy wind.
Jury sat down in a white enamel folding chair and tipped it back, watching Macalvie stand there like the tree that wouldn't be uprooted. She was trying to face him down about fingerprints, or the lack of them, in the case they were working on.
". . . no partials, no latents, only elimination. For the sixth damn time. Nothing!" Her big black-rimmed glasses took over half of her small, triangular face like goggles.
Gilly Thwaite was more than usually edgy, thought Jury. She was smart enough to know that what Macalvie's co-workers thought of as the chief superintendent's "arro-gance" was better described as his simple confidence that he was right ninety percent of the time—which he was. Ma-calvie allowed a margin for error or natural disasters: flooding of the River Dart, the collapse of Exeter Cathedral, the disappearance of the Devon-Cornwall coast, or worse—information withheld from him. This was why Gilly Thwaite was being defensive, Jury knew. She suspected that Macalvie was going to pull the rug out.
"The toilet seat, Gilly? I mean under the toilet seat. Even a bastard that could shove an old guy's skull in can be very fastidious about—"
"Yes! Under, over, inside the tank. ..." She came close to slapping him with the folder she fanned in front of his face; Macalvie brushed it away as if it were a mosquito. "Look, you seem to forget I'm not your print expert—"
Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent Page 16
