And the Sayers character was without conscience.
If one could be said to lack something in abundance, Diane Demorney’s lack of conscience was scandalous.
At least, she hoped so.
Five
“RECOVERED COMPLETELY, Alice,” said Lavinia Vine in answer to Miss Alice Broadstairs. The question was in regard to the health, not of Lavinia, but of her Blue Moon rosebush, which had been drooping by Lavinia’s door for days. “But isn’t that black spot I see?”
Miss Alice Broadstairs, games mistress of Sidbury School for Girls, looked shocked. “Not on my tea roses, I assure you!” In her huge sunhat, she resumed her snipping.
“I mean there and there,” said Lavinia smugly, pointing at a coral tea rose with the small antique spyglass she always carried in her pocket when she went for her walk past Miss Broadstairs’s gate.
• • •
Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine had ridden every metaphorical horse in an attempt to beat each other to the ribbon, medal, and cup at the Sidbury flower show. In odd years, Miss Broadstairs won, in even, Lavinia Vine. And of course at the flower show each year they had gritted their teeth and shaken hands (both sun-brown and dry and with a trickle of liver spots) harder and harder across the years until Melrose was sure he had heard the sound of small bones breaking.
• • •
Having sighted Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine, Melrose Plant was telling Richard Jury all of this as they walked slowly down Shoe Lane, the last little path curling off from the green and the duck pond. They were enjoying the sublimity of a fine spring morning, drenched in the scent of hundreds of roses — tea, musk, perpetual; bedding, climbing, hedging; claret, crimson, lavender, coral, yellow; climbers cascading down brick walls and climbing up them; floribunda hedging the walk.
The dogs and cats they had passed were all sprawled in various states of drunken delight, the effect of the roses, the sun, the glittering air, as if Melrose’s old dog Mindy were back there at Ardry End, beaming out signals to sleep, sleep, sleep. Miss Crisp’s Jack Russell, which usually took its naps on a weathered chair outside her secondhand furniture shop, had struck out on its own from the High Street, looking for action round the duck pond. But it was now collapsed by the small stone pillar atop which sat Miss Broadstair’s oafish gray cat, itself too lazy to do anything other than lie with its face against the warm stone, its paws dropped down the pillar. All dreaming of roses.
“Good morning, Miss Broadstairs, Miss Vine,” said Melrose.
The two rose-enthusiasts turned their deadly frowns on him, and then realized they were not looking at each other. They smiled brightly as Melrose introduced them to Jury, who commented on the marvel of the Broadstairs garden to the displeasure of Lavinia, who immediately invited the superintendent to take tea with her in her garden.
Jury thanked her, and then remarked on the several roses Miss Broadstairs had cut that now lay in her woven basket.
“Souvenier d’un Ami,” said Miss Broadstairs, proudly, holding out a glowing copper-colored rose.
Lavinia looked at them with disdain. “Coals to Newcastle, if you sent those to Watermeadows,” said Lavinia, immediately shifting the subject to her own Blue Moon rosebush, and a lengthy discourse on aphids.
Plant flicked a crimson petal from his shoe with the cosher he had taken to carrying about and wished them a good morning, adding a good-bye for Desperado, the gray cat, still with his nose mashed on the stone, and still sleeping.
“That’s an appropriate name,” said Jury, yawning out the last word.
“Desperado is just another specie of rose.” They had turned the corner and were nearing the tiny village park (if one bench beneath a willow and a pond could be called that). It lay lush and green under the eye of the Church of St. Rules, situated on a rise of ground behind Betty Ball’s bakery. The ducks were motionless as decoys, wings folded, hemmed in by sleep.
Melrose yawned and checked his watch. “In another moment you’ll find me on the pavement with Miss Crisp’s terrier. The pub’s not open yet.” Melrose thought for a moment. “Speaking of falling asleep, why not get your obligatory visit to Agatha over with?”
• • •
Plague Alley lay at the other end of the High Street, a twisting little lane among a jumble of little lanes that spread off, vinelike, from the Sidbury Road. Cubes of white-daubed and dark-windowed cottages seemed to have landed among these narrow paths like tossed dice, with no particular plan or scheme to their arrangement. If Long Piddleton could be said to have social strata, this particular stratum was somewhere in the middle of the ladder, although Agatha was constantly upping it a rung or two.
Indeed, the only one who seemed concerned with Long Piddleton’s high and low society was Agatha herself. The lines she drew were constantly changing and shifting as she went about laying them out like someone making an ordnance map. Her line of demarcation was the Piddle River. When Diane Demorney, and then Theo Wrenn Brown, had come to the village, she was actually less concerned with the contents of the removal vans than with deciding whether they were on the right or the wrong side of the river. Since the Piddle River was an extraordinarily egalitarian body of water that narrowed in some spots to a trickle, had a way of actually stopping midstream and then springing up again virtually at one’s feet, and another way of turning itself to mud and marsh (near Agatha’s cottage), she had her work cut out for her. Which was, of course, the way Agatha liked her work. Her study of the ebb and flow of the Piddle added nothing to her knowledge of its vegetable or marine life, but did assist her in putting people in their social places. Since the river disappeared after it shot the rapids under the humpbacked bridge, that more or less left the shopowners along the High Street out of the social swim. It also had an annoying way of twining in and around the Withersby enclave (of which Mrs. Withersby was materfamilias), all of whom lived in a little row of derelict cottages several hundred feet to the rear of Miss Crisp’s secondhand shop and Jurvis, the butcher’s. These were once almshouses (and still were, if one considered the principal employment of the inhabitants) with just the sort of mild historical interest that moneyed tourists loved to get their hands on and sink the kind of cash into that would have renovated Manderley.
Thus, Lady Ardry, fifteen minutes after her nephew’s and the superintendent’s arrival in her front parlor, was filling him in quick stroke by quick stroke on the new inhabitants of Long Piddleton, while Melrose, putting on his gold-rimmed spectacles, was scrutinizing the eclectic furnishings of the cottage. He came here only on duty visits — such as the one today — or whenever some small, valued bit of his personal junk had gone missing. There was such an overflow of bits and bobs that any little thing from Ardry End could have gone missing for decades. She was living, Melrose had often told her, in a time capsule.
One would never have known it was spring sitting inside this cottage where a shadowy, winterlike darkness seemed to swallow up people and furnishings alike. Objects winked at him out of the gloom — the glass-eyed owl on the mantelpiece, the stuffed parrot glued to its perch by the door to the pantry, the pair of caged parakeets that Melrose assumed were alive, but he wasn’t sure. The room had that deathly, airless stillness of a Hitchcockian landscape before the sudden onslaught of beaks and wings.
The woman who had come in to “do” for Agatha since the accident had materialized out of the shadows to bring them a plate of cakes and biscuits. Mrs. Oilings was one of the Withersby clan, and liked to work about as much as the rest of them. She could hold her own, however, in any gossip competition, which probably explained her presence here now. Agatha, being unable to get round the village on her own, could always send Mrs. Oilings to pick up greengroceries, meats, library books, and rumors.
“. . . the Demorney woman’s living in the Bicester-Strachans’ house and has completely redone it in some inappropriate modern — Melrose, do be careful of that!”
He intended to be, since the jade Buddha belonged to him. His mot
her had been fond of smiling Buddhas.
“. . . and those books Joanna the Mad writes. Of course, she makes a tidy fortune, but then who wouldn’t?”
“You wouldn’t,” said Melrose yawning. “I wouldn’t. Joanna Lewes makes no bones about art; she’s perfectly honest in saying that she writes to a formula and the formula was never any good to begin with.”
Jury bit into a ladyfinger, looked at it dubiously, and said, “She sounds interesting.”
“Well, she isn’t. Stop fidgeting with that figurine and pour the sherry,” she said to Melrose. Turning from her lackey-nephew to Jury, she said, “I would do morning coffee for you, Superintendent, but as you see —” Her tone was long-suffering as she tapped the cast on her ankle with her cane. “You do know how this came to happen, I expect. Mr. Jurvis —”
“He knows,” said Melrose, to avoid the long story of the accident between her secondhand Austin, Mr. Jurvis’s plaster pig, and Betty Ball’s bicycle. No one had seen this accident since Betty Ball had been in Miss Crisp’s shop at the time and Jurvis was back in his frozen-food locker. The plaster pig that graced Jurvis’s butcher shop was, according to Agatha, “the perpetrator” in this criminal affair, since it had been put right in the center of the pavement. The bicycle was also at fault as it had been left leaning against the shop front so that Agatha’s right front wheel had grazed it as she had run the car up over the curb. All of this she had explained to Constable Pluck, adding that the pig had really been the cause of the damage to the bicycle, since it had fallen directly onto its rear wheel.
Thus the unmanned bicycle and the inert pig had divided the blame between them and Agatha was suing for damages, having got Constable Pluck on her side. Melrose said, “I saw Pluck leaving Plague Alley yesterday.” Agatha and Constable Pluck seemed to work hand in glove. “Has he been running at the mouth again?” Melrose selected a small slice of porter cake, which he assumed had come from Betty Ball’s bakery, feared it might have been from the past Christmas lot, and picked up a digestive biscuit instead.
“I had just been giving him a bit of advice.”
“It was parking meters on the High Street last time. That was nipped in the bud, I’m glad to say.” Melrose tested his front tooth with his finger; he thought he might have chipped it on the Eccles cake, hard as a rock.
“Naturally, I can’t divulge information,” said Agatha, as she set about divulging it. “But it concerns the Leans. They live at Watermeadows; you don’t know Watermeadows, Superintendent. It has fabulous gardens. Hannah Lean is the granddaughter of Lady Summerston; both of them are recluses — like me, you know. That’s why we get on so well.”
“What’s all this ‘Hannah’ business? You don’t even know Mrs. Lean.”
“I certainly do. I saw her in Northampton two weeks ago; we nearly had luncheon.”
For Agatha a near-miss with the reclusive Mrs. Lean was as good as nine courses with anyone else.
Sitting forward, she whispered, “According to the grapevine —”
Of which she was chief pruner and waterer —
“— something’s been going on between Simon Lean and that Demorney person.”
“Well, as the grapevine hasn’t throttled me with its news, I can’t say.” He squinted into the darkness where one of the shadows separated and pounced. Agatha’s one-eyed cat had made a four-point landing on top of her chair. Three-point, for part of its fourth leg had got in the way of a tire-iron some time ago. Melrose checked his watch. The Jack and Hammer was open, thank heavens. He had sat here this long partially out of ingrained politeness and partially because he meant to pay obeisance to whatever god was responsible for not having Agatha break her ankle on the steps of Ardry End.
“Smirk if you like, Plant,” she said, tapping her cane three times on the floor, their local wizard about to wave her wand and transform pedestrian facts into fantasies. “Something is going on.” She turned to Jury. “Watermeadows is an extensive estate. Finest in Northamptonshire.” She bethought herself. “Second finest. At least, no finer than Ardry End.”
Melrose sighed. Difficult for Ardry End not to come out on top, since she had expectations. It did not appear to occur to Agatha that she would die before Melrose; her twenty-five-year headstart did not put a crimp in her designs.
“The grounds and gardens are quite fabulous; Lady Summerston owns the lot, you see, and Hannah will come into a fortune. Probably what the husband’s hanging on for.”
“You’ve never even seen Watermeadows. All you know is what you’ve heard from Marshall Trueblood when he went up there to negotiate for that fall-front desk.”
“That opportunist! Only gave half what it’s worth, I expect.” Leaving out the Withersby family, the person she loathed most in Long Piddleton was Marshall Trueblood.
“Don’t be silly. He’s perfectly honest. For an antiques dealer, that is. Speaking of him, we’re supposed to meet at the pub. Come on, Richard.”
They said their good-byes to Agatha, who lost no opportunity to make them feel as if they were the last of the medics deserting the sick and wounded. Even Jury’s promise to return and the appearance of Mrs. Oilings with a fresh batch of cakes and gossip did not suffice.
• • •
As they left the shadowy fastness of Plague Alley, Melrose related the story of Agatha’s accident.
“Are you telling me that your constable let her get away with that fabrication?” asked Jury.
“Agatha and Constable Pluck are on very good terms; she drowns him in sherry and gossip.”
As they rounded the corner, Melrose said a good morning to a thick-set woman with a frown and a bulldog standing hard by her heels. The frown seemed perpetual since the skin appeared to have set in thin ropes across her forehead, and the corners of her mouth were victims of the pull of gravity. She strongly resembled her bulldog, Trot. She was hanging over the gate of her picket fence and Trot was glaring out between the rails.
“Visitin’ yer auntie, was ya, m’lord?” The frown deepened and Trot made an unearthly noise in his throat like the sounds from bad plumbing. The accusation in her tone was clear, as if Melrose had been neglecting his familial duties for too long. “Well, and ain’t it a fine thing when shopkeepers can endanger the lives of innercent folk. That Jurvis thinks he owns the High, he does. Just clutters up the pavement so it ain’t even safe to walk.”
That people had been walking past the butcher shop for a good thirty years without incident made no odds, apparently. Melrose bowed slightly, and they strolled on.
He said to Jury, “You can bet Agatha’s going to be groaning with pain until this is settled. Why do you think she’s staying off that foot of hers? Except for coming into the pub yesterday to check on your progress, she goes nowhere, and Long Piddleton is getting its first respite in some fifteen years. Would anything keep her from making her daily rounds but the threat of losing her small-claims case?” They had just crossed the Sidbury Road, which ended now where the High Street began. Melrose pointed with his stick to the butcher shop between Miss Crisp’s and the bicycle shop. “Let’s drop in. I can pick up the chops for Martha and see how poor Jurvis is keeping his sanity.”
“So it’s between the pig, the bicycle, and the Austin. That it?”
“Yes. The pig and the bicycle managed to move themselves to the edge of the pavement and assault the Austin.”
• • •
Jurvis the Butcher was located in a cramped little building between Miss Crisp’s “Better Buys” and a bicycle shop, the owner of which would probably be called as an expert witness about the possibility of a bicycle’s running down an Austin. Behind the plate-glass window lay a suckling pig, mouth agape round an apple, splayed on a metal tray encircled by lettuce leaves and slices of minted apple rings.
“Be careful: it might rush through the glass and throw you to the ground.”
Mr. Jurvis was delighted to see Melrose, no matter who his relations were. “The chops — oh, yes. I’ll just get them. Wo
uld you be wanting anything else? That’s a nice silversides, there. And the mince is especially good today.”
Melrose was gazing into the case where the assortment of meats was as splendidly arranged amidst parsley snippets and candied cherries as a Cartier’s display. The whole shop was clean and neat and gave no indication that knives were set to hew and hack in the back rooms. It reminded Melrose of an operating room washed free of blood.
Jury was looking at the big plaster pig, supposedly the perpetrator of this “accident,” standing inside the door. It was a happy-looking pig, painted a bronzy-gold, with a chain of daisies and bluebells twined about its head and ears, drooping over one huge eye. Below its flowery countenance the pig was holding a little tray with a long slot for a sign. This one announced the price of pork as the daily special.
Mr. Jurvis returned with Melrose’s chops wrapped in butcher’s paper and explained to Jury about the pig. “It was sitting outside to advertise the special. Beef mince, it was. One pound thirty. I paid more than a penny, I can tell you, for this pig here. Disgusting that someone could just drive right up on the curb, run over whatever’s there — thank God my little Molly was upstairs, not out here playing with the pig like she likes to do — and then This Person blames it on everyone and everything else. Mind, I’m reasonable. I’d’ve let it go, only charged damages like to get the pig mended, but This Person has to get shirty about it — sorry, Mr. Plant.” Jurvis colored slightly.
“No need to be. Looks like you got the pig patched up.” Melrose pointed to the fresh plaster of the leg.
“Might have been better to leave it, Mr. Jurvis,” said Jury. “If you mean to collect damages.”
Jurvis’s hand flew to his face. “You mean that pig might be needed as a witness?”
“Well, not exactly. But as evidence, quite possibly.” Seeing the butcher looking sadly at the evidence, Jury added, “But I doubt it’ll come to that, Mr. Jurvis. Who’d be dotty enough to make a court case of it?” Jury smiled broadly.
The Five Bells and Bladebone Page 4
