“I would if I knew what it was. Your fish is getting cold.”
“The king’s yard was the measurement between the end of the king’s nose and the tip of his finger. Right?” He raked his fish off the bone.
“If you say so.” The trout was delicious.
“If you think of this measurement in terms of ‘deep time,’ our civilization would disappear in a single fingernail filing.” He prodded his fish with his fork.
“Then let’s hope the king doesn’t get a manicure.”
Macalvie gave him a dark look. “I’m serious.” Ignoring his plate, he gazed at the river. “Movement in time is deceptive, Jury. Because we’re in the wrong time frame. You know how I feel? As if I’m accelerating at a hundred per and holding in my hand one of those time-release photos of . . . I don’t know . . . the petals of a flower opening slowly as I watch. It’s jarring. Did you ever think there might be two worlds moving along, side by side, but at different times?”
Jury smiled. “Only when I’m with you, Macalvie.”
“Very funny. Stonehenge, Sarum, Avebury—they make me feel that. Everything we do now is speeded up so much, the time release working in the opposite way.” Macalvie separated the long bone from the fish, looked at it. “I like the patience of science, the way they can repeat experiments ad infinitum. Like Denny Dench.” Dench was a forensic anthropologist.
Jury thought it was probably the fishbone that reminded him. The only time Jury had met this brilliant forensics man, Dench had been lining up the bones of a quail he’d been eating.
“What do you think is the most potent motive for murder, Jury? Love? Greed?”
“Revenge.” Jury was surprised that his answer was so emphatic. “The Greeks knew that.”
The two of them sat now in silence, turned toward the window and the river beyond. The rim of the sun, vapor-orange, showed just at the edge of the trees. The sky was nearly purple. “It’s rainbow mechanics,” said Macalvie after a time. “There appear to be colors, separate bows of color, but they really just bleed into one another. If they’re there at all.” He kept looking out of the window, at the sky. “She was only thirty. At least if you live to fifty or sixty you’ve had a chance to work things out. Not that you’ve taken advantage of it, but at least you had the chance. You had a proper go.”
“A proper go,” thought Jury, watching the swan under the dripping boughs on the other side of the river seem to drift, propelled by the motion of the water. “ ‘Fondly I watched her move here and move there . . . ’ ”
Macalvie raised an eyebrow in question.
Jury hadn’t even realized he’d said it aloud. “It’s an old poem, or an old song.” He turned again to the evening sky, the river.
“And then she went homeward with one star awake,
As the swan in the evening drifts over the lake.”
From a state of equanimity, Jury was plunged without warning into a terrible sadness. He tried to counteract it by saying, “I’ll talk to Lady Cray again. And A Division.”
“I knew you’d see reason, Jury.”
SEVEN
Funnels of yellow dust blew out from the rear wheels of the Bentley as Melrose Plant and Marshall Trueblood made their bumpy way across the wasteland that lay between the Northampton Road and the Blue Parrot pub.
“I’ve wondered who in hell would come here but us. It’s a good mile off the main road and nothing but dry fields. Is that wheat? It looks burnt.”
“That’s the point,” said Melrose. “Sly does everything he can to create the illusion you’re trekking across hot sands and thinking, ‘God, I’m thirsty,’ when you really aren’t. Sells more beer that way.”
The Blue Parrot was an undistinguished-looking square building out in the middle of nowhere that no one would even find had Trevor Sly not had the foresight to put a large and gaudy sign out on the Northampton Road. The pub was painted bright blue, in honor of its name, and over it hung another gaudy sign, a smaller version of the one by the road, this one depicting a veiled lady with bejeweled forehead and a couple of rough turbanned types. They must all have just de-cameled, for their mounts were tethered to a post. One could just make out, through the painted open door, a belly dancer doing her stuff in the sign’s den of iniquity.
Since Melrose had last been here, a whole new little desert scene had been enacted to embellish the Moroccan image. There had never been grass around the Blue Parrot, but there had been a brownish stubble enclosing a dry stone fountain. The fountain was, of course, still dry, but was now surrounded by sand, as was the pub itself. And on an iron post-perch above one window swung an anomalous blue-green painted bird with a yellow beak that could have been anything from a blue hawk to a blue vulture. It swung gently in a freshening breeze.
“Rain? Do I smell rain?” asked Marshall, with a dry, parched little cough.
“Not here, you don’t.”
The orangish yellow light splashed around outside by the setting sun stopped short at the door. Directly inside, it was dark as pitch.
“I can’t see! I’m blind!” yelled Trueblood, clutching at Melrose’s sleeve.
“Oh, shut up.” Melrose pushed aside the beaded curtain (also new) that had been hung here to make a little alcove of the entrance. On the other side of this curtain, gray light filtered through slat-shuttered windows. Ceiling fans whirred softly; the fronds of potted palms drooped; and tendrils of smoke appeared to be swirling around the ceiling, forming, dissipating, re-forming.
“Is something burning?” Trueblood sniffed the air.
“Be careful of the camel.”
Trueblood, in his so-called blindness, had nearly toppled the large camel cutout that was used to display the menu for the day. And the menu looked similar to the ones Melrose had seen when he was here with Jury two years ago. How could Trevor Sly keep serving the same food month after month, year after year, given the food was (supposedly) some sort of Middle Eastern stuff, Lebanese, perhaps. Melrose could see how a Happy Eater might serve up the same egg, beans, and chips for a zillion years, but how long could you keep cooking up Kibbi Bi-Saniyyi? And then Melrose remembered that all of the main dishes bore a surprising resemblance to one another and also to minced beef.
“What the hell’s Kifta Mishwi?” Trueblood was leaning over, squinting at the blackboard menu.
“Same as Kibbi Bi-Saniyyi.”
“That’s a help.”
Trueblood continued to study the hump of the camel, part of the chalky blackboard, as Melrose looked around the room, eyes having adjusted to a darkness that he didn’t remember. There hadn’t been shutters before, that was it. Melrose threaded his way between tables and chairs that looked much too delicate for hordes of Riffs and opened one of the shutters to let in more light.
Otherwise, the Blue Parrot was all as he remembered it: little tin camels on each table, with mustard-pot howdahs standing beside Branston pickle and catsup. The green-glowing palm-tree lamps were new, however. So were the slot machines. He wandered over to the three machines and saw that the winning combinations weren’t (as was usual) cherries and bells, oranges and lemons; they were sand dunes and turbans, palm trees and (once again) camels. Where on earth had Trevor Sly managed to secure those specimens?
Posters of exotic locales—pyramids, burning sands, shadowy courtyards, dusty doorways full of olive-eyed children looking earnest—all lined the walls. Scattered in amongst them were old film posters; there was Casablanca, naturally; there was the dark camel train plodding along from A Passage to India; and the real train along which strode Lawrence of Arabia—or, rather, Peter O’Toole as Lawrence. Plant wondered what milieu Trevor Sly had in mind for the Blue Parrot: it could have been an outpost in Arabia, Calcutta, L.A., or Las Vegas, from the look of it.
Customers might have got the idea that the owner himself hailed from some far-flung, romantic place, some distant sand dune, and that he would be a swarthy man with a ring in his ear and a knife in his teeth. However, he was none of this.
<
br /> Trevor Sly (from Todcaster) slipped like a shadow through another beaded curtain, which separated the long, polished bar from the back—the kitchen and his own private rooms. He was tall and thin, stretched thin, he looked, as pale as pulled taffy. He carried his thin hands before him, limp appendages that he liked to wash together when he talked, and now he was talking, had started even before the curtain tinkled together behind him.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen . . . ” The voice ran down like a windup toy and then picked up again. “It’s Mr. Plant, isn’t it? How lovely to see you again. And your friend?” His peaked eyebrows rose, his liquid brown eye glittered (the other was slightly off-center), and he washed his hands in anticipation.
“Mr. Trueblood.” Plant pegged Trevor Sly as a person who would have preferred to get on a first-name basis as quickly as possible.
“A pint of my Cairo Flame? Or the Tangier?” Trevor Sly’s smile split his lantern jaw. He brewed his own beer, not because he was a great believer in CAMRA but because it was both cheaper and gave him an outlet for his ingenuity.
“The last time I drank your Cairo Flame, I woke up in Cairo. Just some of the real stuff.” Melrose added, when Sly looked puzzled, “You know, the brown stuff with a bit of foam on top. How about an Old Peculier?”
Trevor Sly pursed his lips, shook his head in a no-accounting-for-tastes manner.
Trueblood said, “I’ll have a pint of the Tangier.”
“Bottled lava,” said Melrose. “Draft lava,” he corrected himself, when he saw Trevor Sly’s fingers touch one of the beer pulls.
“And have something yourself, Mr. Sly.”
Trevor Sly smiled broadly, winked, and went into action. His long arms, reaching for glasses, sliding about amongst the optics and beer pulls, the bowls of nuts, packets of crisps, cigarettes, and jars of pickled eggs, appeared to be involved in many more things at once than two arms could possibly be. The same could be said of his two legs, after he’d set the Old Peculier and Trueblood’s pint before them, and had settled himself on a high stool behind the bar, twining and twining the spindly legs like ivy round the rungs. Trevor Sly was everywhere, and in constant jittery motion, even when he was seated.
“What’s this funny sediment on the bottom?” asked Trueblood, pint raised to the light.
“I told you,” said Melrose, cherishing his pleasantly familiar Old Peculier. “They’ve got the same thing at Vesuvius. Mr. Sly, where did you get the fruit machines?”
“The what?” Trevor raised his eyebrows, followed the direction of Plant’s gaze to the back wall and the slot machines.
“Those. They call them ‘fruit machines’ in the States. Though I expect they’d call yours ‘camel machines.’ ”
“Mate of mine, lives in Liverpool.” Sly studied the ceiling fan and the flies lazing round it. “I believe he’s in the secondhand furniture business.”
“Lorry decor, that it?” said Trueblood, finally taking a drink of his Tangier, and coughing. “My God,” he wheezed, “that’s strong stuff.”
“You were warned,” said Melrose. He added, when Trevor pushed a menu toward him, “No, nothing to eat. We had a camel for luncheon.”
“You are a treat, Mr. Plant,” said Trevor.
Weakly, Melrose smiled, and introduced the subject they had really come calling about. “You know, speaking of lorries, as we were passing Watermeadows, I could have sworn I saw a van. Removal van, it looked like. Is Lady Summerston returning, do you know?”
“Far as I know, yes.” Trevor was at the optics, eking out his portion of gin.
This totally unexpected answer left both Plant and Trueblood staring open-mouthed at the dispenser of gin and beer.
“But we—I—thought the property had been let. . . . ”
“A family, that’s what I heard,” said Melrose. “Husband, wife, two children.”
“And two Labradors,” said Trueblood.
Melrose gave his ankle a kick. They’d invented the Labs themselves, for God’s sake. But, then, they’d invented nearly everything, hadn’t they?
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know where you heard that.” Trevor Sly took a puff of his cigarette, laid it, coal end out, on the edge of the bar. And added nothing at all to Melrose’s speculations.
“I think it was . . . Mr. Jenks. Yes!” Melrose snapped his fingers as if in sudden recollection. “You know him, that new estate agent in Long Pidd.”
Trevor gave a short laugh that was more of a snort. “Oh, don’t I ever. I know him all right. Him as worked for that Sidbury firm and scarpered with their listings. Right villain, that one.”
“Really?” Melrose feigned interest in the villainous estate agent, exaggerated villainy, he was quite sure. All Melrose wanted to know was who in hell was living at Watermeadows.
Trueblood took time out to gag on another swallow of Tangier and asked, “Didn’t we see a Land Rover up the drive near the fountain?”
“Can’t see the fountain from the Northampton Road, can you?” Trevor rubbed his hands together, twining the fingers in his spidery way. “I seriously doubt you saw a Land Rover, Mr. Trueblood.”
Hell’s bells, the man doubted and denied but wasn’t telling them one damned thing. “Then you say it’s Lady Summerston come back?”
“No, I didn’t exactly say that, did I?” Trevor Sly rewound himself on his high stool and smiled.
“I can’t imagine she’d want to live there alone, with just that butler of hers,” said Trueblood. “Not after that murder several years ago.” He was more concerned over the role played in it by his own exquisite secrétaire à abattant.
“But she’s not alone.”
“No?” said Melrose, leaning forward.
“She isn’t?” Trueblood perked up.
Trevor Sly studied his fingernails, hand flat out in front of him. “Well, you know, they keep themselves to themselves, don’t they? And I’m not one to talk.”
Oh, but he was, he was, which was why Melrose and Trueblood had come.
“We were told they were from London. Docklands, to be precise. Took the place for a year.” At least, that was true enough.
“Ah, yes. I expect so.”
Wasn’t that just the way with gossips? thought Melrose, with a sigh. When you didn’t want to listen to them, you couldn’t shut them up.
Trueblood said, “And they’ve really taken to the Jack and Hammer.”
That got a response. “Jack and Hammer?” Sly flicked the towel from his shoulder he’d lately been polishing glasses with, swatting at air as if he couldn’t breathe for all the flies. “They wouldn’t bother themselves. Not when the Parrot’s here, right close and where they can get real beer, and not that yellow swill Dick Scroggs pulls. Why, just the other day, Miss Fludd was saying—”
“Miss Fludd?” Plant and Trueblood chorused, leaning across the bar like two shipwrecked sailors over the edge of their lifeboat, so eager at a report of land they’d gladly swim for it.
“That’s right. Miss Fludd was just saying—well well well, hello hello hello!”
This gibbered greeting trilled past their shoulders and towards the door.
Melrose turned.
The girl who stood stopped in the doorway wore an old black mackintosh and had hair the color of the coat. Light was behind her and he couldn’t see her eyes very clearly, their color or expression. When she moved, it was with difficulty, for she had to drag the right leg, which was in a heavy and unwieldy brace. Yet, she moved with a certain smiling energy, as if she were simply carrying a rather heavy package, an inconvenient encumbrance but one that she would soon be able to set down and get rid of. She was, actually, carrying a package, a very small one, under her arm.
“Hullo, Mr. Sly,” she said, pulling herself up on one of the high bar stools and smiling from Trevor Sly to the two other customers. She shook herself free of the shapeless black mac to reveal a plain dove-gray dress beneath it. She studied the dress for just a moment (like a child making sure she’d put
on what she’d wanted to), then smiled again.
The face was calm and gentle and the smile almost beatific, like something bestowed. She crooked her finger, calling Trevor Sly over. He moved down the bar and she engaged him in a low-voiced colloquy as she opened her package and offered him something. It looked like a thin cookie or cake, and he took a bit, munched it, and nodded. He moved back to the beer pulls to get her drink and she smiled at Plant and Trueblood as if she’d just performed a clever trick.
Melrose stared at her, rather blindly, and feeling a bit as if he’d fallen over the edge of the lifeboat. It was difficult to guess her age. Suffering might make a young face old; forbearance might make an old face young. Melrose guessed she was in her early thirties, and then he thought she could almost as easily have been thirteen. She sat there in her gray dress, looking at the beer pulls, the mirror, the shelves of beer and brandy glasses, and smiling as if the object of her outing were about to be realized.
That was what got Melrose: her smile, her expression. It was the smile of a little kid and the satisfied expression of one whose toils were finally to be rewarded. That she should turn up in a place like this, the Blue Parrot, down this dusty road (how had she got here?), struck him as an utter anomaly, like finding a seashell in the Strand.
Trueblood was joshing her about the half-pint Sly was setting before her. “Tangier! My God! Do you also like to crawl around inside active volcanoes?”
Trevor Sly gave his silly, high-pitched giggle. “Oh, now, Mr. Trueblood, you do tell tales. I’m sure it’s not that strong.” Sly minced his way down the bar again to give Melrose and Trueblood refills.
“To tell the truth,” said Miss Fludd, “a volcano would make a change.” The long sigh she exhaled seemed to release something into the room. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see, oh, Mount St. Helens?” Then she slid from her stool, and, carrying her half-pint of strangely orangish beer, made her difficult way across the room, her object being, apparently, to view the posters which lined the walls, as if Sly’s collection were paintings in a gallery.
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