Ruthven bowed slightly. “Thank you, sir. I’ll just do that now, then.” Gravely he exited, but suppressing what Melrose was sure was a fit of glee.
• • •
Wiggins said he’d tried to call Jury at Watermeadows, but he’d already left. There was no response yet on the recorded delivery letter. “Mr. Crick said that Master Tommy was with Lady Summerston, sir.”
“Yes. We’ll have to take him back to Gravesend tomorrow. She was enjoying his company so much she asked him to stay for dinner. The last I knew they were singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ on her balcony.”
“He was Australian, you know.”
“Who was?”
“Why, Lord Summerston. We got to talking, Mr. Crick and myself, about the heat there. How dry it was, and quite pleasant. So naturally, her ladyship would be very fond of that song, if her husband was Australian.”
“I expect you’re right,” said Jury, and hung up. In a way, it was merciful that Lady Summerston had retreated into the past. Or had she convinced herself that the gardens of Watermeadows over which she looked from her balcony were a grand scene in a play for which she had, in a sense, box seats. If she didn’t care for the performance, she could put down the binoculars, take out her stamps and cards.
• • •
Melrose was eating pâté on toast triangles when Jury returned. There was a small plate of pâté and truffles sitting on the floor beside Mindy, who nosed it about and went back to sleep, snoring on. “Ungrateful wretch of a dog.”
“How about dogfood? Ever try that?” Jury helped himself.
“But if Hannah Lean had been arrested as Sadie Diver? It would all come out, her real identity.”
“Double jeopardy. If not precisely double jeopardy, still, can you imagine what a circus a barrister would make of it in court? Coppers arresting a suspect under the wrong name? Do you really think the Crown would press for a second go at Hannah Lean? I doubt she’d ever have divorced him; I think she was wildly jealous and full of vengeance, and who could blame her? She knew she’d be the only real suspect. So she took over his plan. Ironic, isn’t it? Poetic justice.”
“I’d congratulate you, but you don’t look happy,” said Melrose. “You wouldn’t have preferred it the other way round, though.”
“No.”
Melrose raised his cup. “Hell, Richard, it’s spring. We can drink to that, at least.”
Jury gazed down the length of the room into the dusk and a trellis covered with climbing roses.
“To friendship,” said Jury, as he raised his coffee cup and watched the white petals drift down like snow.
Thirty-six
THE MOONLIGHT was almost viscous, lying across the walk. And across that part of the lake that Jury could see from the walk past the summerhouse, it was so bright it seemed to have crystallized and cast a sheet of ice along the water.
Because he liked the walk between the summerhouse and the main house, he had left the car in the lay-by and was at that point now where he could see the tag end of the pier. He stopped to breathe in air that was lush with the mingled scents of flowers, like potpourri. From the hedge came a rustle, a dark shadow fluttered off; somewhere an owl cried; a nightjar cawed.
His gaze trailed off to the end of the pier, where he saw the flash of white. It was the white cat, sitting like a beacon against the sky’s dark backdrop, stopped in its nocturnal rounds, apparently looking out over the lake.
One of the rowboats slapped against the pilings in a short stiff breeze that had come up. He didn’t see the other one.
Not until the moon had woven in and out of wisps of cloud, bringing into sharp relief the middle of the lake. Out there, the other rowboat drifted aimlessly on the water, turning in slow circles.
Police training, unless you were volunteering for Thames Division, didn’t concentrate on swimming. He was a lousy swimmer and it took twice as long as it would have done Roy Marsh to reach the boat.
• • •
She was lying facedown, her hand making a wake in the water like a girl out for a pleasant punt on the Cam. Her head was thrown over the side, her hair trailing dark ribbons.
The boat was small, and Jury had to maneuver carefully to hoist himself up and into it.
Carefully, he turned her over, saw the massive spread of blood. On the wrist that fell across her waist there were only tentative, almost searching, slashes; it was the wound on the wrist he drew from the water that had done the real damage. There was the smallest flutter of life beneath the fingers that felt for the pulse in her neck. Her skin was so translucent he thought he might have seen lake water through it.
She seemed to be making an effort to say something and Jury leaned closer.
“I’m not her.” Her head lolled, fell back against his arm.
He put his arms around her, lay his head against her hair.
Ambiguous to the end.
Thirty-seven
IN THE FIVE BELLS and Bladebone, Jury sat listening to the jukebox and waiting for Tommy Diver to shake a few hands and say good-bye.
He pegged five ten-p pieces into the jukebox and went up to the bar with his empty pint. Molly must have been out sweeping the streets for business; it looked as if everyone in the Commercial Road had landed up here. He could barely see Tommy in the back, where they had, naturally, started a game of poker or gin. Jury wondered how much money the kid had left.
Kath emerged through the smoke into his line of vision and decided to be generous with advice if he’d be as generous in the drinks department. He stood them all a round. “Long as you vote, it don’t make much of a damn who for. Excepting this one” — she pointed to a picture of a porcine-faced gentleman — “that’s standing for the same borough I am. He’s a thief and a fornicator.” Today she wore three hats, proceeds from her tenancy in the park: a sombrero, a trilby, and, topping those, a rugby cap.
“I’ll remember,” said Jury, stuffing the pamphlet in his pocket.
Jack Krael, eye fixed on a point in air before him, asked, “You getting anywheres with that Sadie Diver business?”
“Yes.” Jury put down his money and motioned to Molloy to fill Jack’s glass. “I think we’ve pretty much wound it up.”
Jack looked around at Jury. “It weren’t Ruby, were it? She, ah, knew the man, and there was talk going around . . .”
“No, definitely not. She’s right out of it.”
“Good.” That point settled, he returned his gaze to the air. Jury stood, back against the bar, listening to Linda Ronstadt, still trying to get home to the bayou:
“Savin’ nickles, sa-ha-vin’ dimes . . .”
Then Jack said, “If it wasn’t her, who was it then? Or can’t you say? I expect you can’t.”
Jury was silent for a moment, listening to the description of the fishing boats. “No one you knew. A stranger.” He stubbed out his cigarette in a tin ashtray.
“It’s too bad about the lad, though.” Jack was rolling a cigarette, pinching in the end, patting his pockets for matches.
Jury gave him a light. “Yes, it’s too bad.” He tossed the dead match in the ashtray. “Well, we better be going.”
Jack stuck out his hand. “Pleasure. Come round sometime.”
“ . . . and be happy again.”
“Thanks,” said Jury.
PART IV
When I grow rich, Say the bells of Shoreditch.
Thirty-eight
ONE WEEK LATER
MAJOR EUSTACE-HOBSON, local magistrate, managed to open his eyes long enough to inform Lady Ardry yet once again that she must stop addressing him as M’lud, that it wasn’t appropriate in this sort of case. He failed to add, however, that he wasn’t a lord, and sank back into his chair, small hands folded over a hard little grapefruit-like paunch.
Agatha should count her blessings, thought Melrose, as he sat between Vivian and Jury in the old schoolroom made quite warm by the presence of some thirty observers. Major Eustace-Hobson was known for meting out a sleepy jus
tice whenever he undertook a duty such as the present one. He was not a man who believed that Britain ever had been a nation of butchers, or that the welfare of the realm depended on its greengrocers.
He was, in other words, a dreadful snob, who kept sweeping away Mr. Jurvis’s objections and allowing Agatha her long-winded perorations.
In the absence of Sir Archibald, Agatha had decided to act as her own counsel, and was doing whatever she could to impress upon the court the physical pain this was causing her because of her foot. Raymond Burr in a wheelchair was a symphony of motion compared to Agatha dragging her foot. For a good five minutes now she had been blathering on about the rights of pedestrians, a dangerous tack to take, thought Melrose, since she herself had been driving her car. But she maneuvered around this point adroitly by shifting attention to that bane of the pedestrian’s life: the zebra crossing.
“You know and I know — well, we all know—” Here she swept her arm about the schoolroom. “— the disgraceful failure of motorists to allow us, the beleaguered pedestrians, to cross where it is our legal right to do so. I am merely pointing out that to put that pig on the pavement is as unlucky for the pedestrian as a speeding car at a zebra crossing. Now —”
Quickly, before Jurvis could get to his feet and question that analogy, she droned on. There was no question she had done her homework. She had cited and cited from behind a barricade of dusty books and papers, and was citing now:
“There was in nineteen-aught-fourteen the case of a gentleman who sued the local pub because its old gallows sign had become unhinged —”
Jurvis jumped up. The poor man could stand it no longer. “If anything’s unhinged round here, it’s —”
Major Eustace-Hobson’s eyelids snapped up and he told Mr. Jurvis in a very sharp tone that that would be enough.
“But there’s no comparison, sir: ’twas the sign moved there. My pig, it didn’t move a step.”
As Jurvis was told once again to sit down, Richard Jury, seated between Plant and Marshall Trueblood, pulled the Northampton paper from his pocket and reread the account of Hannah Lean’s death. A verdict of suicide had been reached, “whilst the balance of the mind.” And the motive for this was, of course, the shock caused by the tragic death of her husband.
Rough justice, at least, thought Jury. Pratt had done a superior job of stonewalling reporters. He had agreed with Jury that despite what happened finally, it was certain that the two of them meant to do away with Hannah Lean: the recorded delivery, the stuff that had been taken from Watermeadows, the talks police had had with the manager of Tibbet’s and even Trevor Sly — all pointed to that end.
And then Pratt had added sadly, “Any sharpish solicitor could have got her off for the murder of her husband. Didn’t that occur to her?”
Jury folded the paper, the account he’d read by now half-a-dozen times, and put it back in his pocket. It was just in time to hear Major Eustace-Hobson handing down a verdict.
Agatha won.
• • •
“And justice triumphs yet once again,” said Marshall Trueblood, as he stood in Shoe Lane lighting a green cigarette. “I think dear Agatha must have sent out invitations.” The four of them stood watching the onlookers swarm out of the old village school at the end of the lane. Like filmgoers, they came out chatting and laughing and having a jolly time going over the performance.
As they left Shoe Lane for the main street, Melrose heard Alice Broadstairs say to Lavinia Vine: “One pound thirty. You know that is a good price for mince.” Lavinia nodded. “Awfully good. We shall have to stop going to that man in Sidbury.”
“That’s the most unfair decision I’ve ever heard!” said Vivian, her face made even more beautiful by the heightened color her fury lent it. “If anyone was the perpetrator, it was Agatha! Poor Mr. Jurvis.”
“Jurvis! Don’t be an idiot, Viv-viv,” said Marshall Trueblood. “He’ll do a smashing business after all of this.”
“It’s the principle,” argued Vivian.
“It’s the money,” said Trueblood. He was holding the Ulysses under his arm. He tapped it. “It was only when Theo was told the book was relatively worthless because it’d been rebound that he decided to be awfully generous and return to me what was mine.”
“How could it be worthless? Who told him that?”
“A quite well-respected collector, a friend of mine, called round at the Wrenn’s Nest.”
Melrose stopped. They were standing outside of Pluck’s place, where three villagers were trooping in with cake boxes and biscuit tins. “How much did you pay this respected collector?”
“I? I?”
“You, you.” The four of them continued down the pavement.
Diane Demorney came up to them on the arm of Theo Wrenn Browne. “I must say I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in days.” Days, apparently, having been numbered since the investigation had taken the spotlight away.
“It was fixed,” said Vivian, rather snappishly.
Diane raised an eyebrow. “Well, good God, darling, I certainly hope so.” Her smile at Jury was blinding. “I’m having everyone round for cocktails, sixish. Do come.”
• • •
“Just look at that,” said Trueblood. “What’d I tell you? Won’t be an ounce of beef mince or a chop to put your name to after that lot’s through.” A line snaked from the door of Jurvis’s shop past Ada Crisp’s and the Wrenn’s Nest. Like strangers meeting in a bomb shelter, the people in the queue seemed to have developed a camaraderie.
“Come on, I’ll buy you all a Yellow Lightning, or whatever Scroggs is calling the new one,” said Trueblood, pulling at Vivian’s arm. “It’ll put blood in your veins, Viv-viv. You want to look spiffing for Count D. —”
“Oh, shut up!” And as they started away, she turned back. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Oh, yes,” said Melrose. “I just want to show Richard something.”
• • •
“I’ll be damned,” said Jury. They were standing out in the road looking up at the shop. There was a large, old sign with fresh paint. At least that part that spelled out Jurvis. Fine Meats, was fresh. It had been lettered in gold like an arch over the faded sign of the Pig and Whistle. It hung from a wrought-iron standard over the door. The plaster pig, now having achieved celebrity, stood right at the sill of the door in all of its glory and flamboyant garlands.
“Remember, I told you Sly’s place was once the Pig and Whistle. Naturally, he charged me a king’s ransom. Jurvis loves it. I don’t think Agatha’s seen it yet.” Melrose noticed the folded-up paper in Jury’s pocket, and also noticed it had got a lot of wear. “That was a terrible business,” he said, eyes still on the sign. “A dreadful irony. She should just have killed the bastard. Sentiment would have run completely in her favor.”
“That’s what Pratt said. Something like that.”
There was a long silence, as Jury and Plant stood there in the middle of the High Street, eyes turned up toward the sign.
“So the pig was guilty,” said Melrose.
“And the perp walked,” said Jury.
They turned and crossed the street to the pub, where Jury took out the paper, looked at it once again, and dropped it in a dustbin beside the door.
Also Available in Print and eBook
DOUBLE DOUBLE is a dual memoir of alcoholism written by Martha Grimes and her son Ken. This brutally candid book describes how different both the disease and the recovery can look in two different people—even two people who are mother and son.
* * *
THE WAY OF ALL FISH is a wickedly funny sequel to Grimes’s bestselling novel, Foul Matter, “a satire of the venal, not to say murderous practices of the New York publishing industry” (The New York Times Book Review).
Martha Grimes eBooks available from Scribner
First in the Richard Jury Mystery Series
The Man with a Load of Mischief
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
A bizarre murder disturbs a sleepy Yorkshire fishing village.
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
Murder makes the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place.
The Anodyne Necklace
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
In Shakespeare’s beloved Stratford, Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, takes her last drink.
The Dirty Duck
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
Jury has himself a mysterious little Christmas set in a chilly English landscape and Gothic estate.
Jerusalem Inn
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three children have been brutally murdered.
Help the Poor Struggler
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
In Ashdown Dean, a little English village, animals are dying in a series of seemingly innocuous accidents.
The Deer Leap
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
* * *
In a rainy ditch in a Devon wood, a hitchhiker is found dead. Almost a year later, on another rainy night, another murder.
I Am the Only Running Footman
The Five Bells and Bladebone Page 26
