The Five Bells and Bladebone

by Martha Grimes

  “Is there something you should repent, then?”

  “My lack of feeling, I daresay.” Her look at him was shrewd, but in the brown eyes was still a film of sadness. “I absolutely disliked him. Except for Hannah’s sake, I’m glad he’s dead.” She shrugged. “I expect at the inquest the coroner will make something of that.”

  “You’re very straightforward about it.”

  “A lot of killers are straightforward. Look you right in the eye” — and here she leaned toward him, fastening the glittery eyes on him — “and say, ‘How I loathed the man.’ ”

  Jury laughed. “You’re making quite a case for yourself as a prime suspect.”

  Now she had picked up the deck of cards and was handling them with swift, sure strokes. “It’s merely being clever. I had motive, opportunity, no alibi. And could easily have seen him go into the summerhouse.” Here she reached to the chair and picked up a pair of Zeiss binoculars. “I’m also a bird-watcher. These are quite powerful.”

  As he watched her switch a black king to a red queen, Jury asked: “And what about the weapon?”

  “A dagger-cane. Fourteen inches long, tempered steel, knobbly walnut casing.” She swept up the rows of cards, shuffled, reshuffled, and started slapping them down again in rows. “Have you met Hannah? No, Crick would have brought you here first. Hannah is probably taking it very badly —”

  “ ‘Probably’?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen her but for a moment — she looked totally drained — but she has an astonishing way of guarding her feelings.” Lady Summerston looked up and off. “Like her mother. Like Alice. Strange, because both Gerry and I wore our emotions on our sleeves.”

  “Your daughter’s dead?”

  The hands stopped fluttering over the cards and there was a silence as full of regret as all of her words had been lacking in it. “Yes. When Hannah was very young. It was dreadful, especially since the father had walked out. The Summerston women never seem to choose the right man. The men fared better.” She gave Jury a sharp little smile. “I’m quite fond of Hannah: she keeps to herself; she occasionally comes up to play a game of cards; sometimes we dine together.”

  To Jury it sounded as if they afforded each other little companionship or consolation.

  “She was crazy about her grandfather — Gerry; she adored her mother. There were the four of us, then the three, now just the two.”

  Simon Lean had apparently not come in for consideration as the fifth.

  “Gerald — my late husband” (she explained again) “ — loved this place and brought nearly everything in it piece by piece back from his travels. So I hold on to things as long as I can. As if — for heaven’s sakes — there weren’t enough money to go round, as if we might all end up with begging bowls. Simon was hideously extravagant. Gambling debts, the lot. But he was the poor girl’s husband, and I’m sure she adored him. Some women are born to be victims, I think.” Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t one of them.

  “Was he running through her inheritance, then?”

  “No; she hadn’t got it yet. Oh, of course she has money, but not the real money.” Her smile was a knife-flash. “Gerald saw to that when she married Simon. But he certainly got enough from her to buy whatever he fancied. Including women, I expect. When I die she’ll come into an enormous amount, of course. She’s not interested in money; Simon was interested in nothing else.”

  Jury smiled. “It doesn’t sound as if you need to sell your furniture, Lady Summerston.”

  Her glance was quizzical. “I don’t. It’s the bargaining I like. I sold off a Vermeer to Sotheby’s and, as you know, that marvelous old secrétaire to Mr. Trueblood. Worse luck for him, I expect. Can you imagine how he must have felt when he found not books but a body in it?”

  “The books must have been unloaded before the body — well . . .”

  “Was stuffed in? If it hadn’t happened here, I’d say it was quite marvelous. But it’s too bad about the books. I knocked the price of that Ulysses up, but not as much as I would have done for that little swine, Theo Browne.”

  “Did Mr. Browne make you an offer?”

  She grimaced. “He’s always trying to get at Gerry’s library. But I find Mr. Trueblood rather a pleasant young man; first-rate poker player and a poker face. Naturally, he didn’t give half what I asked for the secrétaire, but then I asked twice what it was worth, so we both got what we wanted. How damned unpleasant for him now.” She held up the metal cross. “Do you know what this is, Superintendent?”

  “The Victoria Cross.”

  She let it drop. “It was Gerry’s. Just let me get his photograph from my desk —”

  Jury half-rose, but she was already out of her chair, moving quickly and purposefully toward her target. All of her movements were quick and purposeful, thought Jury. If this was Lady Summerston sick, he’d be almost afraid to see Lady Summerston well.

  Her voice preceded her as she returned with the picture. As if reading his mind, she was saying, “I imagine Crick told you I had a heart condition, a lung condition, a liver condition. The last might be true, but not the first two. There’s a decanter of whiskey on the bureau. Get it, will you? And” — she called after him — “get the toothbrush glass from the bathroom.”

  • • •

  As Jury searched the darkened room that smelled of very old and musty scents like lemon oil polish, pomegranate, and musk, Lady Summerston kept on talking away. What he heard of it was largely concerned with Lord Summerston’s experiences in France. From the glimpse he had got of the photograph, her husband had left the Second World War with a chestful of medals. Finally, he found the decanter — the room had more than one high bureau — on a tray depicting a brightly scarved Balinese dancer. The tray nearly hid from view a collection of model soldiers, a circlet of kneeling ones in front, armed with bayonets, another mounted behind as if defending the decanter-fortress from invasion. There was nearly an entire platoon of the Royal Field Artillery, lines of Zulu warriors, the Royal Home Artillery, Sudanese soldiers, Bedouins. All sorts of wars were being fought across this bureau. It was the sort of collection he would have given his eye-teeth for as a boy, and he stood there gazing at them, remembering the shop down the street from the Fulham Road flat . . . .

  “What’re you doing in there?”

  Jury shook himself from memories of the Fulham Road and dreams of boyhood glory and collected the tray. On the tray was one very fine crystal glass. He got the other glass from the bathroom. “I was looking at the model soldier collection,” said Jury, setting the tray amidst albums and cards.

  “You’ve certainly been long enough about it. Hannah loves them. Especially the Bedouin. Well, I’ve finished for the day!” She stacked the cards in the box, sat back, and took a deep breath, apparently pleased with the fulfillment of some odious task. “I’ll have the toothbrush glass; you have the good one.”

  “Do you want water?”

  She rolled her eyes. “When Gerry and I drank, we drank, Superintendent.” She accepted her glass from Jury’s hand.

  He smiled. Given the dust on the decanter, she mightn’t have had a drink since Gerry died. He paused then in the pouring of his own, feeling sad. It might have very nearly been true.

  Raising her glass she looked at the triple-framed photos of Gerald Summerston. It was clearly a toast, and Jury joined in. The Summerston on the left, sitting as he was with a glass in his hand, his long legs outstretched on just such a chair as this somewhere out there on the lawn, could easily have made a third at their party. The picture on the right might at first glance have seemed to be of an altogether different person, until one noticed the expression was more sheepish than serious, as if the medal-bedecked uniform weighed rather heavily. The one in the middle was poignant; it was taken when he was an adolescent, and the uncertainty in his expression showed how difficult it was to be young.

  “Why, incidentally, is Scotland Yard in on this? Unless Simon was doing something international, wh
ich wouldn’t at all surprise me. Drugs, forged documents, white slavery, the odd jeweled falcon from Malta. Or would that sort of thing be Interpol? Isn’t this just a local murder?”

  “I happened to be on hand.” Jury looked up at the placid pale blue of the sky, not a cloud, not a patch of gray in sight. “You have a devious mind, Lady Summerston.”

  “Living round Simon, you’d have to.”

  “He must have had more than his share of enemies.”

  “Any number would be ‘his share.’ ”

  “In particular?”

  “You’d have to ask Hannah that. I’ve always given Simon a wide berth. I prefer not to know of his exploits.” She was still shuffling through the photos. Jury wondered if her squinting over the pictures and in positioning the stamps resulted from her being too vain to wear glasses. “Gerry was dead set against Hannah’s marrying him, naturally. The man hadn’t even seen any military service —”

  Jury couldn’t help laughing here. “Not much for him to have seen.”

  She looked up smartly from the box. “There was the Falklands, Mr. Jury.”

  “True, but let’s not fight it out here on the balcony. Much too pleasant.”

  She was leaning toward him, squinting again. Curiosity must have won out over vanity, for she drew from her voluminous layers of materials a hinged spectacle case. Looking at him through the rimless eyeglasses, she said, “Are you married? I expect so; all the good-looking ones are.”

  Jury smiled, shook his head, and changed the subject. “I heard that Mr. Lean worked for a while for a publishing house.”

  “Gerry thought he should have a job; it would be less embarrassing for Hannah, even though it wouldn’t be a treat for Bennick Publishing. Gerry had a large holding of stocks there, and, I daresay, even Simon could read. He worked in the accounting department; that’s the best place for juggling books, I believe.”

  “Had they friends around here? In Long Piddleton or Northampton?”

  She smirked. “Simon had ‘friends’ everywhere. But not Hannah. She goes into Northampton to exchange her library books. Or to one of the bookshops. She’s a great reader. He was friendly — so the rumor reached me — with a few of the local women. The locals I wouldn’t know, though I’d heard him mention one or two. It’s no use —” She was looking at Jury’s small notebook. “— I never paid much attention to anything Simon said. Unless it had to do with money. Since any money he talked about was either mine or Hannah’s, one had to turn a sharp ear.”

  “Didn’t your dislike make it hard on your granddaughter?”

  “She knew when she married him we neither of us approved. Though Gerry would never have cut her out of his will; he wasn’t mean and he wasn’t melodramatic.”

  Out toward the lake Jury saw the figure of a woman standing on the bank, back turned. “Is that your granddaughter?”

  Her eyes followed his gaze, squinting again. “Yes, I believe it is.” She wasn’t even looking in the right direction, but she was too vain to admit she couldn’t see.

  “I think I’d like to talk to her.” Jury rose.

  “She’s got steel in her spine, that girl. It’s only been a few hours since that policeman was here. But, then, Hannah always was the picture of composure. Do you play poker?” The cards were being shuffled deftly.

  “I’m not very good at it.”

  “I am. So come back and bring some money.”

  Ten

  AS HE WALKED toward her across the lawn, Jury had the impression of an ordinary girl muffled in clothes that were too big for her, as if she were trailing around in her mother’s things. The oversized sweater might be, these days, called fashionably sloppy. But she didn’t give the impression of caring at all about fashion. Her wrists were bony, jutting out from sleeves that she kept pushing up and which came falling right back down. The skirt was too long, hemline uneven, as if the band listed at the waist. Her body was angular and moved inside the loose clothes like a bird in a covered cage.

  But the image of ordinariness was quickly dispelled standing now a foot from her. Her skin had the flawless look of a bisque doll, and her expression gave away just about as much. The mouth was immobile, the eyebrows as smooth and delicate as if they’d been painted. Her hair was very dark and unevenly cut, as if she’d taken the scissors to it herself in a moment of anger. It lay round her oval face in little licks, falling unevenly across her high forehead. When a breeze came up, she had to shove the strands from her eyes. They were hazel eyes that in the portrait had looked gray, but here the color shifted with the reflected light — green from the grass, blue from her sweater. A lack of makeup and the awkward clothes made it appear that Hannah Lean was dressing down, that beauty embarrassed her.

  “I’m terribly sorry about your husband.”

  She turned her head, looked off across the lake. She did not answer him except to say, “Would you like to walk by the lake? I feel the need to keep moving.”

  Jury nodded.

  • • •

  They walked through beeches, on a narrow path bordering the lake, the water crisscrossed with light, a golden net cast over it by the late sun. Through the trees he could see both the summerhouse and a small boathouse. Two rowboats, one green, one blue, were moored there, bobbing in the wind-ruffled water. Jury could see two men on the pier, two others coming round the side of the white cottage.

  “When will we be rid of them?” she said in that strangely flat voice, as if the Northants police were some annoying variety of insect infesting the gardens.

  “And here I am, too.”

  Hannah Lean turned to look at him squarely for the first time. “Yes. Here you are.” She looked away again, but said nothing else.

  Her body was tense, her fingers interlaced and straining at one another, as if she felt she should be able to do something with her hands, make an appropriate gesture, lash out, hit something. Hannah Lean was bearing up remarkably well. Then she said:

  “Why is tragedy often grotesque?”

  The death of Simon Lean was certainly that. As to the tragedy, her voice bore no stamp of it, nor her face the mask of it. And then he thought of the other thing Lady Summerston had said: that she was masterly at concealing her true feelings.

  But such coldness in the face of her husband’s bizarre death rankled. Jury had no business feeling this way. It was just that she otherwise seemed a woman with few defenses. Childlike, almost. Perhaps it was the clothes, the young, clear face in a woman of thirty-odd that seemed contradictory. Perhaps her seeming detachment was a form of denial, a psychic numbness.

  “I expect you’ll ask me the same questions as that Northants policeman.”

  “I expect so, yes.”

  “Why?” she asked curtly.

  Not Why must I be put through it again? “Things sometimes get missed out.” He smiled, but he couldn’t keep the chill out of his voice.

  They were sitting on a stone bench. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, face cupped in her hands. The movement pulled the outsized sweater down from her shoulder. It was a sensual pose; he could, with little effort, visualize the slim body beneath the clothes that masked it.

  She did not object; she did not reply. The lack of response to his implication that she might be hiding something made him wonder. He broke the long silence by reaching down and pulling a forget-me-not from the bank. Could any flower be so richly blue? he wondered, handing it to her.

  Turning it round and round, and without waiting for his questions, she said, “I was probably the last person to see Simon alive. Last night at dinner. He was going up to London.”

  “Why would he be going there that time of night?”

  “I imagine to see his lady-friend. He wasn’t the ideal husband, as you’ve no doubt heard from Eleanor. I’ve seen more than one woman out for his blood after he dropped her. Of course, police would think, including me.” She turned, smiling slightly, pulling the sweater back up on her shoulder. Then she looked off across the lake and her vo
ice was doleful as she shrugged and said, “I was used to it.”

  Jury watched her long fingers, turning the drooping flower. “I wouldn’t think a wife could ever get used to betrayal.”

  Ruefully, she looked round at him. “You sound a little like Eleanor. ‘Betrayal’ is a rather melodramatic notion these days, isn’t it?”

  “No. Do you know who he was seeing?”

  “Indirectly. There was a letter that came for him from London. E-one or -fourteen. The mark was blurred. No return address. Pale blue paper and smelling faintly of musky toilet water. Do women still do that sort of thing? Perfume their letters? And besides that one, there might also have been someone local. I saw him in Sidbury one day in the Bell, having a drink with a woman from the village. Her name’s . . . Demorney, something like that. She’s very good-looking, haute everything — you know: couture, coiffure, London polish.” Hannah Lean looked down at her own costume, as if making a mental match.

  “And this letter? Did you read it?”

  “No. It’s been months ago.” She nodded toward the summerhouse. “He’d burned it. In the grate.”

  She seemed unaware of the tears that had come to her eyes and that were silently spilling down her face. No sobs, no facial contortions, no attempt to wipe them away. Jury handed her his handkerchief and she dabbed at the tears listlessly as if the face were a stranger’s.

  “Did you see him drive away? Why would his car come to be parked in that lay-by near the summerhouse?”