The Anodyne Necklace
Page 21
From his inside coat pocket Melrose took a visiting-card case which he kept for emergencies. On the table he dropped his card.
Dr. Chamberlen stuck his pince-nez on his nose, leaned over and read it, and then sat back, having difficulty in effecting the same indifferent manner.
The rest of them were not at all indifferent. “A bleedin’ earl? In the Necklace?” said Ash Cripps. “And where’d you meet up with Elephant?”
It took Melrose a moment or two to realize he was talking about Mrs. Cripps. “At your house. She was kind enough to direct me here.”
“And Superintendent Jury,” said Dr. Chamberlen, “appears to be a friend of yours.”
“True. But I’m not the police masquerading as the peerage, if that’s what you think.”
Chamberlen picked up a single die, shook it in his hand. “What’s your concern with us?”
“Wizards,” said Plant, smiling. As they all looked at one another, Melrose poked his stick among the scattered pages of graph paper. “I’m a thirteenth-degree Wizard-Master myself.”
The rest of them all turned to Chamberlen, who looked rather unhappy. “Cor!” said Keith. “They only go up to fifteen, Doc.”
Melrose was glad he hadn’t succumbed to the temptation to say twentieth.
“That’s very interesting,” said Chamberlen, who was now concentrating—or pretending to—on a plate of jellied eel set before him by Biggins. He tucked his napkin in his collar. “But I repeat: what’s it to do with us?”
“I’m interested in this.” Melrose put the map on the table.
“You mean the same map Superintendent Jury is interested in?” Chamberlen squeezed a triangle of lemon over the dish of eel and peppered it. “It’s of no interest to me.”
From his wallet Melrose took some notes and spread them on the table. “Five hundred pounds. Will that get me in the game?”
Except for Chamberlen’s, whose own mouth was busy with eel, all of the others’ fell open.
There was a moment’s reflection, a quick look at the money, and then Chamberlen said, “We don’t play for money.”
A man of principle, thought Melrose, knowing how fragile were such principles. “We don’t play for anything else. What I propose is that if you can work out what this map means before I do, you keep the five hundred. All of you, of course.”
“That’s not much of a bargain for you, is it? I’m afraid you have caught us at a moment of financial embarrassment. We none of us can cover five hundred pounds.”
Melrose shrugged. “That makes no odds. If I win, you’ll count me in on the game whenever I’m in town.” To keep Melrose out of the game would be more attractive to Chamberlen than the money, he imagined.
“I’m not sure I understand: if you’re a friend of the Superintendent, why didn’t he come to you in the first place?”
“Oh, he did.” Melrose picked up the map. “I don’t know what it means.”
That obviously made Dr. Chamberlen happy. “I would have to make one stipulation.”
“Go ahead.”
“This place”—Chamberlen stubbed his finger at the map—“is probably imaginary. And you can’t expect me to read Trevor Tree’s mind. Therefore, I think we would have to let the wager stand on breaking the key.”
What the hell was the key? wondered Melrose. “Very well, I accept.”
• • •
For the next fifteen minutes, Melrose, seated with his piece of graph paper and his pencil, and not knowing what to do with either, was subjected to the most inane or bizarre or mysterious conversation he had ever heard. Occasionally, he doodled something on his paper, since he noted the others were all going at theirs hammer and tongs. Money on the table had attracted most of the customers in the Anodyne Necklace.
“ . . . pick up twelve pieces of gold from Black Bear’s Cave.”
At this point Jury had come to stand behind him. Melrose looked at the message he had written: Ramona Wey worked at S.G.S.S.
When Keith and Nollie found themselves stuck in the Black Bear’s cave, Chamberlen put down his pencil and looked across at Plant. “You surely must see it by now.” His perky little smile told Melrose that Chamberlen had won, or thought he had. When Melrose said nothing, he went on, pleased with himself. “The key: the repetition—usually names, places, numbers. You’re a thirteenth-degree Master. I surely don’t have to tell you that elementary rule. The key here is obviously colors.”
“Perhaps you’d like to explain that,” said Melrose, laying his stick across the five notes toward which a hand was moving.
Dr. Chamberlen folded his hands on his stomach. “The River of Blood would obviously be red. Hardly a startling deduction. The Black Bear is rather clearly named, as are the Yellow Brick Road and the Blue Grotto. The footpath I’m uncertain about—brown, perhaps? The moat would be green or blue, probably water-green.”
“What about the King’s Road?”
“Surely, purple.” Chamberlen shrugged, looking from Plant to Jury. “Really, gentlemen, if I knew more I’d tell you. But that’s the key. I’m quite sure of it.”
Melrose removed his silver-knobbed stick from the bills which Chamberlen collected and, with surprising generosity, divided among the players.
• • •
Catchcoach Street was not often enough visited by peers and police superintendents that the patrons of the Anodyne Necklace cold allow them to leave so easily. Especially after Melrose Plant had stood drinks all around. It was difficult to watch such a benefactor go, and for White Ellie, who had been more than the rest at the receiving end of such largesse, it was to be met with an equal show of hospitality. “ ’Ere now, ’ow’s about you two comin’ back to the ’ouse for a nice fry-up?”
III
They stood beneath the sign of the Anodyne Necklace looking down Catchcoach Street. In the blue evening light, the lamps had come on and the narrow houses cast tall shadows across the pavements. A band of children up the street were playing some rough game.
“Colors,” said Melrose Plant, lighting a small cigar. “What in the hell does that mean? If we only had Emily and her crayons. . . . Anyway. Was your telephone call fruitful?”
“Yes. What I remembered was, Ramona Wey had been described to me by Sylvia Bodenheim as a ‘jumped-up little secretary from London.’ Granted, there are plenty of little secretaries in London, But it would appear that only a few of them work, or worked, for the Smart Girls Secretarial Service in King’s Cross. According to its manager, Ramona Wey was one of them, until she left over a year ago when an old auntie died and Ramona was able to chuck the typewriter.”
“You mean she must have known Cora Binns?”
“Oh, yes. Well, I can hardly blame her for not wanting to admit it in the circumstances. Better if she had, though. And I think the main reason was to set her own little plan into action. Blackmail, I suppose. Poor, stupid woman.”
For a moment they were both silent. The silvery voices of the children playing splintered the otherwise quiet street. Everyone else was in the pub.
“You say this secretarial agency was somewhere near King’s Cross?”
Jury nodded. “Why?”
“I just wondered: where’s this Wembley Knotts tube stop?”
“Not far. A few minutes away.”
“Could we have a look-in, do you think?”
“Sure. I have to be getting back to Littlebourne, though.”
“Yes. Just for a minute.” Melrose dropped his cigar in the gutter and looked up at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace. “Sawdust, gaslights, Chamberlen and Cripps. This place could live off chic for the rest of its life.”
• • •
They had come abreast of their cars. Plant’s walking stick must have done its job: the Silver Shadow was unscathed, untouched by either human or Crippses’ hands.
But Jury sighed. Across the windscreen of the police car was soaped a large PRAT, followed by a smaller direction to sod off.
Melrose shook his head. �
��Can’t they even teach them to spell in school?”
As Melrose piloted the Rolls with great care down the street, Jury saw the Crippses stop their game and dance along the pavement after it, waving.
Friendly was waving too, but not with his hand.
IV
The black woman was leaning over the small door of her kiosk, practicing impertinence on a family of wizened Orientals, when Jury showed his card and she grudgingly let them through. Of the Orientals she was demanding another thirty pence.
A train pulled out in the distance and wind like a hand pushed at them as they walked through the tunnel. From its other end, amplified by the curve of the tiled walls, came the sound of a guitar and a voice singing some melancholy song about going home, as if he had no hope of ever doing so. Jury had a strange sense of déjà vu. They rounded the curve and Melrose dropped some coins into the open guitar case; without stopping his song, the guitarist nodded his thanks and upped the volume as a reward for generosity.
• • •
“They found her here,” said Jury, stopping in front of the Evita poster, now further defaced by a long rip from the loose corner down through the center. One glittering arm was upraised; the other was off at the shoulder. Mustached and maimed, Evita still clung to the wall as, in real life, she must have clung to power.
Footsteps echoed near them and two teenage girls came around the corner. They were mirror images of each other—same long hair, deep eye shadow, jeans, gum.
“It’s such a public place,” said Melrose. “Taking a hell of a chance, this person, attacking her here.”
“I think maybe whoever it was had to. Didn’t want to be seen in the vicinity of Wembley Knotts and the Anodyne Necklace.”
They walked down the steps and out onto the train platform. Giant hoardings lined the wall across the tracks. Crystal-clear gin; a skirt blowing up over a rounded rear end packed neatly into tights; the eyes of an old woman imploring one to give to a home for destitute widows; the even more desolate eyes of a spaniel who would not (according to the RSPCA) last much longer. Jury turned away. The girls were down at the other end of the platform. A couple of boys in leather jackets and old-fashioned ducktail hairdos came through one of the archways. The kids all frisked one another with their eyes.
Jury turned to look at the wall behind him where Melrose Plant was pointing with his walking stick.
At that moment, their thoughts might have been packed together in one mind. Plant had directed his walking stick to a dark spot on the Underground map, one of the largest interchanges on the London tube. “King’s Cross St. Pancras.”
Each line was a different color, making it simple for even the dimmest passenger to find his way through the maze. Plant’s stick traced the narrow red bar which split central London in two. “The River of Blood, wouldn’t you say? The Central Line. Blue, Victoria Line; black, Northern; green, District—let’s have a look at your map.”
Jury drew it from his pocket. The Church of St. Pancras had been drawn at the spot Plant had first pointed out. “He drew this little replica of the necklace directly above the approximate spot where we are now. Wembley Knotts.”
“If you shut your eyes a bit it looks like one of Ernestine Craigie’s maps.”
How many times had he seen that map in the last two days alone? wondered Jury. Riding the tube and looking up at the varnished fingernails of the female pickpocket—and this map right beside it. Repeated endlessly, in every car, at every tube stop. He’d seen the map of the London Underground every day of his life.
“You mean,” said Melrose, “Tree hid it here? In a tube station?” He looked around as the first train thundered in, disgorged several passengers, picked up the girls and the boys in leather jackets.
The guitar player walked onto and down the platform carrying his black case. Jury’s mind only now absorbed the fact that the music had stopped. The guitarist lit a cigaratte and waited, leaning against the wall.
Jury looked at him and said to Melrose Plant, “You know, if you thought there was a chance, as Tree must have done, of police waiting for you outside or back in your digs, and you had an accomplice on this end—” The rest of the words were lost in the rush of wind as the train picked up speed and pulled into the dark patch of tunnel at the end.
“—you might wrap that necklace up in a pound note and just toss it in the case with the coins. But it sure as hell would have to be someone you trusted.”
Jury turned from the map of the Underground to look again at the miserable dog, whose eyes trusted no one. Could he have been dead wrong? It was difficult to believe it was Cyril Macenery. Difficult or not, he was at the hospital, done with Katie O’Brien. “Drop me at the hospital, will you, on your way back to Littlebourne?”
Plant was trying to keep up with him; they were nearly running back through the tunnel now. “Am I going back to Littlebourne?”
“Yes. To keep an eye on Emily Louise Perk. She was the one Katie gave the map to.”
“I’d feel,” said Melrose, running up the moving stairs behind Jury, “a lot safer if Emily Louise Perk would keep an eye on me.”
TWENTY-TWO
I
EMILY Louise Perk was sitting in the Littlebourne police station, her coloring book open before her, and wishing that Superintendent Jury would come back. True, Peter Gere was a policeman, but he was only the village bobby whom she’d seen every day of her life, nearly, and anyway, he was so busy on the telephone and that crackling box of his linked up to the Hertfield police that anyone could have reached in the door, hit her over the head, and bolted without Peter’s even knowing.
Emily Louise would almost rather have needles stuck in her fingernails than admit the happenings of the afternoon had made her extremely nervous. She felt she needed police protection. And Peter did not seem too enthusiastic about giving it. Twice he had told her to leave, that he was very busy.
He was telling her again. Clamping one hand over the receiver of the telephone, he said, “Emily, I’ve got a lot to do; you’d best be off.” And before he took his hand away from the receiver to answer the voice on the other end, he added, automatically, “Your mum wants you home. Yes, this is Gere . . . ” He turned away.
Why were they always telling her that? You’d think God had pushed a button on that box of Peter’s and a huge voice had come over it saying, This is your mummy speaking. Peter knew her mum was in Hertfield; she’d already told him; grown-ups simply never listened, except for a few, like Polly and Superintendent Jury.
She looked at the last picture in her coloring book with distaste. Snow White was patting Dopey on his polished head and wearing a smile that looked dipped in goo. Emily stuck out her tongue at the picture, slapped the book shut, and let her eye rove the room.
What it was drawn to was the map—several copies of it—stuck to Peter’s bulletin board with a drawing pin. With every policeman round about having one, the map was hardly a secret anymore.
Peter Gere’s back was turned, and she slid off her chair, hastily took down a copy, and went back to her crayons. It would make a wonderful picture, colored. She lined up the stubs of crayon and started in on the grotto, coloring it blue. After working for two or three minutes, she looked at the result, dissatisfied. Because her crayons were so dull, the grotto, river, moat and highway had come out thick and straight. She put her chin in her hands and studied it. What did it remind her of? She frowned. Then, when she saw Peter move to take his coat from the back of the chair, she snatched it up and stuck it in her coloring book and slid down and pretended to be asleep. He would kill her if he knew she’d been at his bulletin board. She had strict orders never to touch it.
“I’ve got to go Hertfield, Emily, so take yourself home, there’s a good girl.”
She yawned. “I’m supposed to feed the horses.”
“Well, go do it then, though for you to be running around this late . . . ” He mumbled something about her mother. “It’s gone eight already. What’s this in a
id of?”
Fatal. When she’d picked up the book the map had slid out.
“Emily! This is police evidence. What do you mean going and using it for coloring?”
She tried to distract him from that particular line of questioning. “It reminds me of something, I can’t think what.” She frowned. “It looks different colored, doesn’t it?”
Peter turned the map this way and that. “It doesn’t look like anything to me except like some fool treasure map. What do you mean it reminds you of something?”
Emily screwed up her eyes and studied a moth floating above the ceiling light. “I’ll think of it in a minute.”
His face was like a thundercloud. “Don’t you go playing that game with me, now. I’m not about to fill you up with crisps and sweets.”
When he turned away to ball up the paper and chuck it in the dustbin, she stuck out her tongue again at his back. It wasn’t a game. She would think of it.
Peter herded her out the door, flashed her another dark look, got in his car, and sped off down the High. When he was out of sight, Emily sneaked back into the station, rescued the map and smoothed it out.
On the way to Rookswood, she stopped in at Polly Praed’s and was much more satisfied with the response there than at Peter’s. It was Polly who had taken her to the London zoo and let her ride all over the city on the Underground.
To say nothing of the response—amounting to several fresh cream cakes—this latest revelation earned her in the Rookswood kitchen.
II
“You’re crazy!” said Cyril Macenery, half-rising from his chair before Jury pushed him back down.
Jury had run the gauntlet—literally—of the cross little nurse, several aides, a medicine trolley, and a woman who looked quite capable of tackling him and dragging him from the hospital by his heels. Matron, surely. But when he flashed his warrant card in her face, she could only clamp her mouth shut and accept the situation.