The Man with a Load of Mischief

by Martha Grimes

  “That it’s a regular locked-room mystery, sir.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, whoever did it must have come from inside the inn. But Mrs. Willypoole says that Mr. Matchett and Miss Rivington never left their table. And she could only know that if she was in the room, too, seeing they didn’t. So they all three have alibis.”

  “Very good, Wiggins. And since no one could have climbed that wall, nobody could have done this murder, by your reckoning.

  Wiggins smiled broadly. “Right, sir.”

  Jury smiled too. “Only somebody did, now, didn’t they? Go check the outside of that wall.”

  • • •

  “You say you found the deceased when you got curious about his being out there so long?”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Willypoole. “Couldn’t imagine why he’d want to go out in the first place. There he was sprawled over one of the tables. At first I thought maybe he’d come over sick. But something told me not to touch him.” She shuddered and asked Jury for a cigarette.

  “He was a guest here?”

  She nodded. “I don’t keep all that many sleeping rooms and sure not in winter. But he called up here a couple days ago —”

  “Called? From where?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. Said he needed a room just for the night, and that’s all. Surprised, I was. I mean, that anyone’s heard of the place outside of Dorking Dean or Long Pidd.”

  “So you knew he was a stranger.”

  “Well, he was to me, wasn’t he? He could have come from Dorking Dean, but why’d he want to book a room, then?”

  Jury had the register open before him. “Jubal Creed. He didn’t mention what his business was?” She shook her head. “Did he say why he wanted to take his drink outside?”

  “Just that he wanted a breath of air.”

  “Do many people from Long Piddleton visit The Swan?”

  “A fair amount. Mostly on their way to Dorking Dean, or further. There were two here this morning, I was telling your sergeant —”

  “That would be Simon Matchett and Miss Rivington?” She nodded. “Do you know them?”

  “Him I do. He owns the Man with a Load of Mischief.” Her eye softened. “Ever so nice, is Mr. Matchett. Simon. She’s been here several times, too, but I don’t know her all that well.”

  “Why were they here?”

  “Why? Well, to have a bar meal — ploughman’s lunch — bread, cheese, you know.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “About eleven. Early for lunch.”

  “Did they come together?”

  “Well, they came in together. But I took it they came in different cars, and met here.”

  “You say it was near eleven?”

  “Right after. I can’t say to the minute, but I know I’d only just opened up the bar for him.”

  “Did they sit up at the bar and talk, or what?”

  “Oh, no. I served them their lunch at that table back there.” She pointed to the farthest of one of a dozen tables in the saloon bar. “So you didn’t overhear anything they were saying?”

  “No.”

  “Did either of them leave the table?”

  “No. And I was in here all the time, so I’m sure of that.”

  “The only way to the garden is through that back door or the gate in the wall?” She nodded. “I noticed the terrace is partly enclosed between the wings of the building.” Jury picked up Wiggins’s box of cough drops and set it between and slightly to the rear of a bottle of catsup and some Branston pickle. “There are windows at the rear of these wings, but you can’t see into this part of the garden.” He put his hand on the cough drop box. “So, in effect, the only way anyone can see what’s going on in the garden where the tables are is through the door. Which was closed, it being winter.” She nodded again.

  “Do you know any of these people, Hetta?” Jury rattled off the names of all the others who had been at the Man with a Load of Mischief the night Small was murdered.

  “They’ve all been in one time or another. Even the vicar. I don’t know as I could tell you what they look like, but the names are familiar.”

  “How long did Mr. Matchett and Miss Rivington stay?”

  She ran a peeling red nail over her brow. “Umm. Maybe an hour, maybe forty-five minutes.”

  At that moment, Wiggins came through the front door of the Swan, looking pleased with himself. “I found it, sir. A window. Come outside, will you?” As Jury rose, Wiggins looked down at the condiment-and-cough-drop arrangement and rescued his box from the table.

  “Thanks very much, Hetta.” Jury smiled. “You’ve been a great help.”

  Hetta apparently remembered it was never too late. She straightened her jumper to its best advantage and smoothed back her red curls. “Well, I always say, if you can’t keep your head in a crisis, you’d best not go into trade. Bounced a few in my day, Mr. Jury. Men got to learn where to keep their hands, I always say.” She looked at Jury’s with a smile.

  “Absolutely. If we have more questions, you’ll be available?”

  “Yes, indeed.” The smile grew more roguish still.

  • • •

  “It’s the toilet, sir,” said Wiggins, pointing upward. They were standing on the outside of the wall, that part comprised of the converted stable block. “It’s not too hard; I just shoved the window in, crammed through it and came out the door into the courtyard.”

  Jury looked from the window down at the ground. The snow had nearly melted and the ground was hard. Not likely to take much of an impression. Jury hunkered down. “Pratt’s men must have been back here. I wonder if —”

  He heard a pssst from behind. He looked all around to determine the direction and then saw a small head dart back behind an oak.

  “What was that, sir?” asked Wiggins, looking about rather desperately and turning up his coat collar as if it were proof against strange woodland creatures.

  “I think I know,” said Jury, watching the tree. The head darted out again, and another just above it.

  Pssst. Pssst.

  “Come out of there,” called Jury, marshaling his most authoritative voice.

  It worked, perhaps a little too well, for the Double children appeared, their heads even lower than usual. The girl’s small hand gathered in the hem of her coat.

  Jury softened up his tone a bit. “Now, what are you doing out here James? And James?”

  The boy, ever the braver of the two, looked from Jury to Wiggins, studying the latter carefully and looking back at Jury, the message clearly inscribed in his expression. Get rid of that one. Or we ain’t talkin’.

  “Wiggins, go on inside and see if our Hetta has come up with anything else after several drinks, okay?”

  As soon as the sergeant had gone, the little girl started jumping up and down, bearly able to contain her excitement, and the boy said, in a near-reverential tone: “Tracks!” He jabbed his finger back toward the woods. Just beyond the wall was a stand of oak thickening into woodland beyond.

  The little girl had her platelike blue eyes clamped on Jury’s face, apparently thrilled to see their lesson would come in handy so soon.

  James whispered excitedly as he tugged Jury along: “We done just what you said, Mr. Jury. We looked for anything funny. You said wherever there’s a murder there’s bound to be something funny.”

  Had he said that? wondered Jury, as they pulled him along between them like a wagon. They let him go finally, and made a dash ahead of him through the trees. In the woods the snow hadn’t melted as much as it had near the wall of the Swan, and when he came up to them, James was pointing down at the imprint of a shoe or a boot. A few feet farther on there was another, again where the snow hadn’t melted. In another twenty feet they had reached a small clearing where the ground was hard and rutted.

  James pointed back toward the Sidbury-Dorking Dean Road, screened by trees, and said, “Used to be an old road back here. Ain’t no one uses it no more. Use
d to go round to Dorking.”

  There were old tire tracks and, when Jury got down and looked more closely, at least parts of one that did not look so old. A car could have pulled off the Sidbury-Dorking Dean Road and stopped here.

  Jury got up. “James,” he said, “and James.” He laid his hand on the girl’s knitted cap. “You’re brilliant.” Open-mouthed, they stared at one another, astonished to hear that word reserved for stars and sunlight applied to them. He took out his wallet and said, “The Yard customarily gives rewards for this sort of thing.” He handed each of them a pound note, which they accepted amid a peal of giggles. “This discovery is, of course, not to be mentioned.” The giggles stopped, heads nodded, and a new solemnity reigned. “You get along home now. And be careful. I’ll need you later.” The Doubles took off through the trees, but in a minute the boy was back, shoving something into Jury’s hand.

  “It’s for you, sir. I whittled it myself.” Then the boy danced off through the trees, and they both turned and waved frantically, and were gone.

  Jury looked at the present. It was a catapult, a very rough hewn one, with a rubber band for the sling. He smiled. Then he scuffed around through the snow looking for stones, turned up a few pebbles, and took some practice shots at the trees. When he was James’s age he had broken a whole line of school windows from a hundred feet away.

  Then, sheepishly, he looked over his shoulder to see if anyone might possibly have seen him. He shoved the catapult in his inside coat pocket and tramped back toward the Swan.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The ground was awfully hard, but we managed to get a bit of an impression of the tire marks,” said Superintendent Pratt, his feet firmly planted on Constable Pluck’s desk.

  “I don’t expect it’s going to do us much more good than the footprints. No one around here wears that size Wellington. If he’s smart enough to change his shoes, he’s certainly smart enough to change the tires on his car.”

  “Umm. Well, we’re checking them all, anyway. It was a fairly safe place to pull off and park, though.” Pratt closed his eyes as if envisioning the car in the woods again. “Screened from the main road by the trees and that small rise of hill.” He opened his eyes and looked at Jury. “Those cuts on the nose, now —”

  But Pratt was interrupted by Sergeant Pluck, who announced Lady Ardry’s arrival. “You sent for her, sir? That’s what she says.” Pluck was aghast, as if Jury must have taken leave of his senses.

  “I did,” said Jury. “And when Miss Rivington gets here, and Mr. Matchett, have them wait a bit, will you.”

  But Lady Ardry was already in the room, happily brushing past Pluck by laying her walking stick squarely against his chest. Pratt drank up the rest of his tea and said he had to be going. He nodded and left.

  Agatha sat there with her enormous cape making a great drift around her chair, gripping her walking stick with both hands. Jury especially liked the mittens, dark brown knitted ones, all ten fingers cut out just above the knuckles. Probably one finger had frayed, and she hadn’t bothered mending it. She looked pleased as punch that he had called her in. “You wanted to see me about this man Creed?”

  Jury was surprised. “How did you know his name, Lady Ardry?”

  “From the Town Crier,” she said, smiling meanly. “Sergeant Pluck. Warned you about him, didn’t I? He’s out there telling the world.” Then she puffed out her cheeks and offered her conclusion. “So Inspector, it seems this lunatic is still lurking in Long Pidd!”

  “You don’t really believe it’s some stranger hanging about the village, waiting to pounce?”

  “Good Lord, you aren’t suggesting it’s actually someone who lives here?” She snorted. “You’ve been talking to crazy Melrose.” She made it sound as if the Yard took all of its cues from crazy Melrose.

  “I’m afraid the lunatic, if he is one, is among you, Lady Ardry.” She reared back at that. “Now, you say you were riding your bicycle along the Dorking Dean road. About what time was that?

  “After I left you gabbing with Melrose, of course.”

  Idiot, Jury could just hear her adding mentally. “Yes. But could you be a bit more precise? How long did it take you to reach the Dorking Dean road from Ardry End?

  Her brow creased in an effort of remembrance. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “And it was then that the car passed you.”

  “Car? What car?”

  Jury prayed for patience. “The car which, I understand, stopped to tell you about what had happened at the Swan.”

  “Oh, that car? Why didn’t you say so? I was on the Dorking road by then. It was Jurvis, the butcher, who saw the lot outside the Swan, and stopped to tell me.”

  “And it would be about a half mile to the inn from that point.” Jury calculated. “You could make it in another few minutes or so.”

  “I could do. Had I wanted to. Can’t stand the Willypoole woman, all tarted up, that one. No better’n she should be.”

  Jury interrupted. “I merely meant you could have bicycled from here somewhere around eleven-thirty and got to the Swan before twelve.” Jury waited for her to make the connection.

  She didn’t. “Why should I want to do that?”

  Jury hid a smile. “Well, there’s one piece of good news I have for you.” He looked down at the scrap of paper on which he’d been calculating times. “I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else,” he whispered.

  She was nearly lying all over the desk in her eagerness to hear the secret. “My lips are sealed.” She lay a cutoff-mittened finger to her mouth.

  “One person has an airtight alibi. Unbreakable.” He smiled.

  Agatha cocked her head like a large bird, simpering, “Me, of course.”

  Jury feigned astonishment. “Oh, no, madam. That’s just what I’ve been talking about. The times. No, it’s Melrose Plant.” He smiled his winning smile. “I knew it would make you feel better.”

  Her mouth opened and closed. Her face was beet red. “But —”

  “You see, between about eleven-thirty and the time you returned to Ardry End, Mr. Plant was with me. Up until that time, he was with you.”

  She sat fiddling with her stick, plucking the ends of her mittens, and looking rather wildly about her. Then she brightened. “But that also supplies me with an alibi!” Looking as if she’d been quite clever, she leaned her chin on her hand, her elbows on the desk.

  “But it’s as we’ve been saying. Creed was murdered somewhere between ten-thirty and noon. We’ve established the time you left Ardry End and the amount of time it’d take you to bicycle to the Swan —”

  Finally, it hit her. He watched the flush spreading across her throat and rising to her face. She rose like a mountain. “Will that be all, Inspector?” Her voice trembled mightily and he knew where she would have liked to deposit that stick.

  “For now. But make yourself available for further questions, if you don’t mind.” Jury smiled brightly.

  As soon as her vast form disappeared through the door, he turned to the window behind him, rested his head on his arms, and laughed.

  • • •

  He only half-heard the door open and close behind him, because he was still laughing. It was the voice that made him turn.

  “Inspector Jury?”

  Without thinking, he wheeled around, still with the grin stamped all over his face.

  “I’m Vivian Rivington. Your sergeant said that I should just come in.” She was looking at him with a puzzled frown.

  Jury stood there, idiotically smiling, and unable to move. He had taken one look at Vivian Rivington and promptly fallen in love.

  • • •

  It was true, as Lady Ardry had said, she was wearing a dark brown sweater, belted, but her fists were not stuffed in the pockets. The hands were, at that moment, nervously plucking the hem of the sweater, as the little Double girl’s had plucked at her skirt. Her coloring was the coloring of an autumn day, one of those tawny-brown, deep-gold landscapes touched with russet. The
hair was satiny, like taffy; the face was triangular, devoid of makeup; the eyes were amber, with little flecks, bits and pieces of what looked like semiprecious stones. But it was her aura which reminded Jury of Maggie: a mournful, sad quality, which came through paradoxically as a kind of radiance. For him, it was charismatic.

  Her small, embarrassed cough called him from great distances. Jury pushed himself around the desk and held out his hand, drew it back, then outreached it again. She looked at the hand dubiously, carefully, as if it might disappear once more, leaving her grasping at air.

  Jury was trying to force himself to begin this interview, to say something, when Wiggins stuck his head in the door to tell Jury that Mr. Matchett was here. Jury said, “Thanks. I’ll see him in a moment. Would you please stay and take notes, Sergeant Wiggins.” He paid no attention to Wiggins’s rather surprised glance.

  Jury’s tone was so serious that he might have been asking the sergeant to finish up the Lindisfarne Gospels. “Miss Rivington,” he said, running his hand through his hair as if her face were his mirror. “I’m Inspector Jury. Richard Jury. Please sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  He looked down at the torn sheet of paper on which he’d doodled various times, along with objects that looked like fat ladies in big capes. Then he folded his hands on the desk and tried to look deadly serious. Too deadly, apparently, for she looked away over to Wiggins in the corner. Wiggins smiled and she seemed to relax a little.

  Jury tried to soften up his expression. “Miss Rivington, you were in the Swan during the time, ah, just before . . .” He wanted to put it gently; he didn’t know how.

  “This man was killed, yes.” She lowered her gaze.

  “Could you please state your business there?”

  “Of course. I was having lunch. I met Simon Matchett there.”

  Matchett. Jury had momentarily forgotten that Matchett was rumored to be going to marry this woman. He could ask her. No, he wouldn’t; not just yet.

  “Did I say something wrong, Inspector?”

  “Wrong? No, no, of course not.” He must have been frowning dreadfully, she looked that worried. So he turned the frown on Wiggins to suggest the source of the trouble lay there. “You getting this — all of it, Sergeant Wiggins?”