Book Read Free

The Anodyne Necklace

Page 18

by Martha Grimes


  • • •

  The Bake Sale was lorded over by Miss Pettigrew of the Magic Muffin. Ramrod straight she stood, arms splayed either side of her wares. They all looked pretty much as if they’d come from the same batter. There was a decided muffin-y scent in the air, a strange mixture of carrot and cinnamon.

  • • •

  The small carousel of four horses, two pigs, a lamb and a goose was grinding out some unidentifiable tune as it circled very slowly, and the tots on the faded painted animals whipped them along with imaginary crops. Aside from Emily’s phaeton rides (which Melrose observed circling the outer edge of the church grounds), the carousel was the most popular of the attractions. Melrose watched the golden horse, glowing in a shaft of sun, trotting the carriage along. He saw two small heads poke out, apparently yelling something to friends on the carousel as they passed. Almost as quickly, they pulled their heads back in when the driver, whip in hand, turned toward them.

  IV

  Derek Bodenheim was gathering up the small plastic hoops used for the Bottle Toss as Melrose approached. Ignoring Derek’s surly look, Melrose said happily, “Think I’ll have a go. How much?”

  “Three for twenty-five.”

  He handed over the money and received in return three hoops. He missed all three and requested three more. By the time Melrose had missed his twelfth shot at ringing a bottle, Derek’s surly attitude had changed to his more familiar, supercilious one.

  “Guess I’m not exactly a dab hand at this sort of thing,” said Melrose, modestly. In truth, he was a dab hand at anything like quoits, horseshoes, darts—whatever demanded judging distances. But he had managed to put Derek more in the mood for a bit of a chat.

  “It’s quite simple, really, if you’ve any coordination,” said Derek, with his usual nobility of spirit. “Mainwaring got three in a row.”

  Melrose expressed astonishment at Mainwaring’s prowess and asked, “What’s in the bottles?”

  “Wine, whiskey, hair tonic—”

  Strychnine, thought Melrose, smiling. “I’m not any good at games demanding physical dexterity. Chess, now. That’s more my game.” Melrose hadn’t played it since he was ten years old. “Something that requires concentration . . . and a little imagination.” He looked off toward the Penny Toss and saw Emily squandering her newfound riches. Away across the churchyard, the horse cropped grass. Rest time. “Someone was telling me about a game that’s all the rage, called ‘Wizards.’ Ever play it?”

  Derek’s expression didn’t change as he said, “When I’m up at Cambridge. It’s quite fun. Very complicated. Takes a lot of imagination and you sort of make it up as you go along.”

  “No one around here to play it with, I suppose? I might like to learn.” He hoped he was right in assuming Derek would hardly offer to teach him.

  He was. “The last person I played with here was that secretary of Kennington’s. The one who stole a quarter-million worth in jewelry. Heard about that, I expect?” Melrose nodded. “Tree was really good. Used to play with him in the Blue Boy. Of course, I’m sure it was a set-up straight from the beginning.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That’s why he took the job in the first place. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if she were in it with him.”

  “ ‘She’?”

  “The high-and-mighty Lady-bloody-Kennington. Tree was an attractive bloke, I expect. Wouldn’t trust him out of my sight, of course. He was too sharp. Somehow, I always ended up standing drinks.”

  Tree must have been sharp, thought Melrose, who had put the younger Bodenheim down as one of the world’s great borrowers.

  “He was a Wizard-Master.” At Melrose’s questioning look, Derek said, “The one who controls the play. What rules there are are set by the Master.”

  “What I heard was there was talk he had a partner to bring it off. Someone in the village.”

  Derek was perhaps not quite so stupid as his vapid eye and slack face suggested. “Don’t look at me, chum.”

  “Was I?”

  Heatedly, Derek asked the same question as Julia: “What the devil’s your interest in this? Did you hear about it when you were looking at Stonington, or something? Afraid it’s got a curse on it? That girl was on her way there, I hear. Poor bitch. Hell of a way to snuff it, face down in the mud.”

  V

  For a few more minutes, Melrose moved among the crowd which seemed to swell and thin out by turns. The smell of popcorn combined with the sickly sweet smell of cotton-candy: the very air seemed pink and sticky with it. He saw that the tea tent was even more crowded, and that Miss Pettigrew still stood guard over her baked goods: not much change in the pieman’s wares. The voices of the children grew, like the sun itself, bright and coppery. To get away from it, Melrose decided to walk up to the Church of St. Pancras, to have a look at the window that had inspired all of this activity.

  It was after he’d got to the church and turned on the rise of ground that he saw, at a distance, the woman in white and black standing at the gate, exchanging a few words with Peter Gere as she dug in her bag for change. Peter was apparently doing his stint, taking Miles Bodenheim’s place. The dress was quite striking, its black-and-white zebra stripes running diagonally from short silken sleeves to the bottom of the skirt. And the pallor of the skin was highlighted by the coal-black hair. She moved through the gate and through the crowd with a queenly bearing that seemed as inappropriate to the gathering as was the dress on this cool September afternoon. He wondered who she was, as she picked things up and put them down in the various stalls. He watched her having a rather long conversation with Derek Bodenheim, erasing some of the slack look from Derek’s face and replacing it with an intensity unusual for him. Then he watched her at the Bring ’n Buy table being cut dead by Sylvia Bodenheim. Watched the woman in black and white, in turn, say something to Miles which did not make him at all happy. Finally, he watched her loop an arm through the arm of Freddie Mainwaring, who looked this way and that, obviously uncomfortable. Melrose got the impression that quite a few people could have dispensed with her presence.

  He went inside the little church, where the air was deliciously cool and free from the mingled odors of lemonade, iced lollies, and cotton-candy. It was also deliciously quiet. He looked round at its pleasant plainness. It was no wonder that the Reverend Finsbury was pleased with the idea of stained glass. The window, though small, was quite beautiful, catching the sun as it did right now.

  The church had been the one thing fixed on Katie’s map like a star, looking off—if one used one’s imagination—toward the River of Blood. Melrose stood at an easterly window, looking off and down. A policeman seemed to be drawing a stick through the stream quite a long way away.

  He spent some time in the church, staring out of the window, and more time walking about, not expecting to find anything, but still looking for possible hiding places. He was surprised when the bell tolled four o’clock.

  It was then that he heard the screaming.

  • • •

  People were rushing in waves, yanking children along, and for a moment he imagined they were converging on the Bottle Toss. His mind was so full of Polly’s strychnine-in-the-wine, that it took him a minute to see they were moving, rather, in the direction of the carriage, parked in the shadow of the wood. And even as he looked, he thought he saw Emily Louise fall from her driver’s perch.

  VI

  But Emily Louise Perk was too used to keeping a firm seat on a saddle to fall out of anything. She hadn’t fallen; she’d jumped.

  The screams were issuing from some children, Melrose saw, once he’d cut through the crowd—their two white faces looking out of the carriage and one yelling and fumbling at the latch, all butterfingers. Emily Louise, always master of the situation, yanked it open, and children seemed to tumble from everywhere—though there were only the requisite three—arms and legs flailing, pointings of fingers, tears and tremblings all round as they rushed into the protecting arms of their res
pective mothers.

  From what he could gather, there was a Thing in the phaeton.

  He could not really get a good view of the proceedings, as he had come up near the end of the crowd and was circling it and looking over shoulders. Peter Gere had managed to hack his way through and was trying to hold back the wave of people. As Gere managed to create a path for himself, Melrose caught a glimpse inside the carriage: from the rug which was rolled up on the floor of the black carriage dangled an arm, marble-white and (he guessed) marble-cold. There was a red-lacquered hand, the edge of a black-and-white sleeve.

  What a short time he had known her.

  NINETEEN

  I

  THE fête was a shambles. Fear, confusion, and shock had resulted in trampled shrubberies, trippings over headstones, upset booths, runaway dogs, and screaming children as their parents tried to drag them out of the path of the Hertfield police.

  There was, fortunately, no dearth of police. The forensic crew seemed to spill out of the wood. Nathan Riddley had been the first medical man on the scene and had pronounced Ramona Wey very dead indeed. Except for the thin trickle which had run down her arm and caked in a dark ribbon, there was very little blood.

  From what Melrose could gather in the general confusion that reigned, the weapon was a small, silver awl-like thing used, back in Victorian days, for punching holes in canvas for needlework.

  It had, apparently, come from Sylvia’s Jumble table. It had been donated by Sylvia herself. She was none too pleased, now, with her generosity. The sterling hole-puncher had come home to roost on her doorstep.

  Melrose marveled at the nerve of the murderer, killing the woman with the whole Hertfield constabulary back there in the wood. The position of the carriage had effectively masked any maneuver—opening the door, shoving the body in, and covering it with the rug. The murderer had taken advantage of one of the rest periods.

  “What godawful nerve,” said Riddley to Carstairs, who had arrived at the scene in nothing flat from Hertfield. “Can’t believe anyone would be that reckless.”

  “Or that desperate,” Melrose heard Carstairs say as he walked off.

  Melrose was rather enjoying watching the Bodenheims being ground exceeding small in the mills of the Hertfield constabulary. D. I. Carstairs had commandeered Rookswood for questioning, and Miles Bodenheim had had a time of it, trying to herd people like sheep to the public footpaths.

  • • •

  “Disgraceful,” he said to Melrose as they stood in the hallway of Rookswood. He seemed to think the murder had been done to ruin the festivities. “It’s given Sylvia a sick-headache and Julia is simply overcome with nerves.” Melrose seriously doubted both. “That such a thing could happen in our village—twice, mind you—” (as if Melrose had forgotten the first murder) “and now here’s police simply tramping about our drawing room, and all of those people . . . Ah! There’s the Craigie sisters come in . . . I must speak to them at once . . . Ernestine! Augusta!” He sailed off.

  • • •

  Most of the visitors to the fête had been questioned briefly by police and been permitted to leave. A handful remained in the drawing room of Rookswood—the Craigies, Mainwaring, the Bodenheims, Polly Praed, and, of course, the children who had made the grisly discovery and their mums, one of whom was being quite vocal. “Disgraceful,” she announced to anyone who would listen, echoing the opinion of Sir Miles. “Disgraceful, I calls it. Here’s little Betty, and her only nine, being questioned by police.” Little Betty’s mother heaved a giant carryall up to her lap and looked as dour as one of the Bodenheim ancestors hanging about in portraits on the walls. Little Betty was a moon-faced child with eyes like brown buttons who enjoyed inspecting the tacky blood on her shoe.

  • • •

  Sylvia Bodenheim, sick-headache or not, had been brought down from her bed for questioning. Under her eyes were dark smudges, and her complexion had a distinctly greenish cast as she sat wrenching a handkerchief. Melrose thought her reaction was owing less to the object taken from her Jumble table and the consequent tragedy in the wood, than to the tragedy in her drawing room, now overrun with unwanted villagers and, worse, actual strangers.

  It was a room filled with ruby velvet, cream brocade and gilt, a room that looked straight out of a decorator’s album of Elegant Country House Drawing Rooms, right down to the portraits and paintings, a combination of awful Bodenheim ancestors and awful views of the Versailles gardens. The room had been chosen by the police because it had the advantage of adjoining Sir Miles’s snuggery, which was the place Inspector Carstairs was using for the questioning of witnesses. A constable stood guard at the door. Thus, the pride of Rookswood had been turned into little more than a railway waiting room, to be sloughed off as passengers moved toward their trains.

  Melrose watched as Sylvia moved quickly to admonish one of the three squalid kiddies who had been in the carriage. This one had decided the brocade bellpull would make a nice plaything. Its mum grabbed it back with a Come ’ere, lovey, and a dirty look at Sylvia’s retreating figure.

  “Lovey” pretended to bury her face in her mother’s front, but was, instead, sticking out her tongue, either at Melrose or, more likely, Emily Louise beside him. She gladly returned the gesture. This continued until Lovey’s mum gave her a smack and nearly hurled her onto the brocade loveseat.

  Around the room, the other Bodenheims registered various attitudes of outrage and ennui; the Craigie sisters sat like stumps against the wall; Miss Pettigrew kneaded her brows as if she were making muffins in her mind. A few villagers, such as Mrs. Pennystevens, who had tended the other booths had been questioned and permitted to leave.

  The door opened and Freddie Mainwaring came out of the snug, looking like a pile of ashes, from his gray slacks to his gray face. Next to enter the snug was Derek. It was rather like waiting to be called up before the headmaster.

  The star of this occasion, although she took it with as little grace as she usually took anything involving her precious time and presence, was Emily Louise Perk. It was her carriage, after all, her golden horse cropping the woodland grass, and, by implication, her body. She had had her little stint with Detective Inspector Carstairs, and if Melrose felt sorry for anyone, it was Carstairs. Melrose wondered how much information the poor man had got from Emily Louise by using that syrupy “little lady” approach. From what he could gather, Emily knew no more than what had happened after the children had started screaming. Lacking her own mum (for whom many calls had been put in, but none of them effective), she had wedged herself into a gilt armchair beside Melrose and now sat, arms folded across her chest, hunting cap over her eyes.

  “Your mother should be here,” said Melrose. “Where is she?”

  “At the pictures, I expect.”

  “Why wasn’t she at the fête? Everyone else was.”

  “Doesn’t like fêtes. Anyway, she isn’t here. Where’s that man from Scotland Yard? He’s supposed to be seeing about things.”

  Melrose liked that way of putting it. “He’s in London. I’m sure he’s been contacted, though. What happened?”

  “I don’t know, do I? I just heard the nasty Winterbournes screaming and I drove straight back.”

  He started to ask her another question when he saw the constable beckon to him.

  • • •

  That Melrose was in Littlebourne to buy property seemed scarcely a satisfactory answer to Inspector Carstairs, since he had been in no hurry to look the property over. Still, Mainwaring had confirmed that Plant had been to his estate office, so the inspector took the explanation with as much grace as possible, which wasn’t much. “You say you were watching the dead woman as she was walking about.”

  This question had been put to him in at least half-a-dozen different ways. “She wasn’t dead then, Inspector.”

  “Please don’t be flippant, Mr. Plant. This is a murder investigation.”

  They always said that in books, thought Melrose, sighing inwardly. With th
e blood running down the walls and the bodies sprawled all round, someone invariably mauled in and said, This is a murder investigation. “Sorry. But you seem to be thinking I had some particular reason for keeping this woman under observation.”

  “Did you?” Carstairs snapped.

  “No. She was someone I’d not seen before and I found her rather remarkable looking.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . white and dark and deadly.”

  “Why ‘deadly’?”

  “I told you, Inspector. It was merely an impression. She was walking about the place, but didn’t seem part of it. As if she hadn’t come for the festivities at all, I suppose—”

  “And you saw her at the Jumble table.”

  “Yes.”

  “Talking to Mrs. Bodenheim.”

  “Not precisely ‘talking,’ from what I could observe.” He almost felt sorry for old Sylvia, who had had possession of the silver puncher at just the wrong time.

  Carstairs looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Thank you, Mr. Plant, that’ll be all for the moment.”

  Melrose stood up and ventured the question, “Has, ah, Superintendent Jury been informed of this new development?”

  Carstairs’s look was dark indeed, and Melrose was surprised that he answered at all. “We’re trying to locate him.” He returned to his sheaf of papers.

  • • •

  Trying to? wondered Melrose, as he looked round at the gilt and brocade, empty now except for the clutch of policemen smoking in a corner and a thin woman with cotton-candy hair sitting stiffly upright in a chair. Trying to? Could a superintendent of the C.I.D. simply slip through a crack?

  The hell with it, he thought, reclaiming his stick and his coat. If the Hertfordshire constabulary couldn’t put his finger on Jury, he bet he could.

 

‹ Prev