But he didn’t. He stood there watching Melrose and Jenny, still talking, still absorbed. Neither noticed him, or any reflection of him.
Jury continued walking thus, through one room after another, not knowing what the various rooms were, for none had furnishings to identify them, except for the big library, with its floor-to-ceiling shelves, its huge fireplace. Finally, he had circuited the entire house and was in the last room, a little place off the marble entrance hall. He stopped here and saw now Jenny’s back, Melrose Plant’s face. The face looked happy. Jury had no idea why he had done this, why he had engaged in this voyeuristic performance, and felt a little ashamed. And then not ashamed, because he was, after all, in full view of his audience of two. Or was he himself the audience, an audience of one?
He stepped through the glass door here, out onto the walk that ran around the courtyard.
Oddly, it was Jenny who sensed his presence, even though her back was to him, and they must have been thirty or forty feet away. Plant didn’t even see him. She turned.
“Richard!”
For a moment he was cheered; she all but sang out his name; she all but clapped with a sort of childlike delight. He did not know he’d been so irrationally annoyed until he ceased to be. Then Plant called out, too, and waved.
Jury walked up to them, and he could not help the rising anger. At both of them. He glared at Plant. “ ‘She is found,’ is she?”
Jenny looked from one to the other, uncomprehending.
And Plant looked sheepish. Unfortunately, Plant looking sheepish, with that tilted smile on his face, was also Plant looking charming. “Sorry about that,” he said, with an appealing shrug.
Nothing else. He didn’t ask about the case, about the trip, about Macalvie, about Wiggins. About sod all. Jury said, icily, “Sam Lasko—of the Stratford-upon-Avon police department, if you recall—”
Her hands flew to her face. “Oh, God. We should have rung him immediately.” She was looking at Melrose.
We should have, should we?
Melrose said, “I did. This morning. I told him you were here. I thought I told you I told him . . . ”
And then Jury studied the sky as they had a tiny little argument about who told who what. He thought of the night before, his conversation—if you could call it that—with Sammy Lasko. And his worry. “Well, no need to worry.” He tried on a little heartiness, but it rang so false, he returned to grumpiness. “You shouldn’t have left, Jenny.” She looked at him, seriously troubled. It was impossible to tell the source of the trouble, though. Then, trying to regain a bit of distance, he said, “I’ll be off, then. My desk is piled high, what with being gone for five days.”
“But you must stay, Richard,” she said.
Melrose agreed, and with unmistakable sincerity. “We’re just going off to have some lunch. There’s a place between here and Horndean—”
Jury shook his head, managed a smile. “Back to London. A policeman’s life, as my guvnor likes to say, is full of grief.”
His guvnor, for once, was right.
3
RAGGED, torn, tattered, and bearing little resemblance to its original self, the stuffed coyote was once again being hauled into Racer’s office by the cat Cyril.
The abuse was not, however, being meted out by Cyril (who, according to Fiona, loved the coyote), but by Chief Superintendent Racer. Again, according to Fiona.
“Said he was going to rip it to shreds and tear its heart out—the coyote’s, pre-sum-ably—if he found it in his office again. Tried throwing it away, but unless you throw it out the window, I told him, you know Cyril’ll just get it out of the wastebasket.” Fiona whisked an emery board across her nails.
Jury listened to it rasping, wondered if he was going to spend half of his life watching women refurbish themselves. Between Fiona and Carole-anne, it seemed likely.
Fiona held up her filed fingernails and went on. “It’s that little Velero tab on the back: can’t think what it’s for, can you? Anyway, he—” she gave an unenthusiastic nod in the direction of Racer’s office—“come back from his club yesterday all in an uproar. Said he’d been the laughingstock when his friends asked him why he was wearing a coyote on the back of his coat.” She blew on her nails. “Can you imagine? So I says to him, Well, whyn’t you toss it in the dustbin along the pavement, or something? ‘Oh, no. Oh, no,’ he says, with ever such a mean smile. So you just know he’s got something evil in mind.” Fiona sighed.
Jury watched Cyril through the open door. He’d jumped up on Racer’s desk, coyote still firmly in mouth, and seemed debating a problem. He set the coyote on the fax machine and looked from one to the other. “Maybe Racer’s got something evil in mind, but Cyril’s got something eviler.” Jury smiled at her and left.
• • •
“I’M TAKING IT easy first day back, of course,” said Wiggins, stirring a powdered something into his glass of beef tea. “Not wanting to relapse.” He smiled weakly.
Jury was sitting before his decidedly un-stacked-up desk with his feet on an open file drawer. “True. You don’t want to activate some dormant electrical charge.”
Wiggins finished stirring, tapped the spoon gently against his cup, and sat back, sipping with a satisfied sigh. “I’ll say this, sir. The way you and Mr. Macalvie worked all that out was quite brilliant. Quite.”
“No brilliance at my end,” said Jury. Gloomily, he sat.
Wiggins frowned. “Shouldn’t wear your overcoat inside. Just inviting a chill, you are, when you go out.”
“Which is now.” Jury rose slowly. Ever since he’d driven back from Littlebourne, he’d felt slow, lumbrous.
“You just got here not a half-hour ago. Where’re you going now, sir?”
“Nowhere.”
FORTY-NINE
“Nowhere” turned out to be Salisbury and Old Sarum.
His car did not drive him (for that’s how Jury felt, as if he’d punched in cruise control) to Northamptonshire or Stratford-upon-Avon (she wouldn’t be there anyway, would she?), or any other vaguely formulated destination, such as police HQ in Exeter, where he might be expected to go.
So it was night when Jury finally pulled into the empty car park at Old Sarum, and for a few moments sat there wondering how he could have driven for a couple of boring motorway hours to a place that, number one, was closed; number two, he couldn’t see anyway, as it was eight o’clock and dark. A total and depressing winter dark.
As he got out of the car and slammed the door he saw that there was, after all, one other car down there at the end. Probably a couple of kids, touching each other up, which made him think of Bea and Gabe, and that made him think of his own lost youth, a loss occurring, he estimated, about one hundred years ago. He crossed the wooden bridge.
Jury stood on the ridge of the hill looking down into formless black depths—the Bishop’s Palace if his memory served him right. He did not know how long he had stood there, looking blindly around, when he heard something off to his left.
A voice. He squinted. A tiny light. A voice smoking a cigarette, some dark amorphous form trudging toward him, the devil, no doubt, risen out of the ancient stone. Oh, for God’s sake, he told himself, disgusted with his self-dramatization. The voice (which actually belonged to an ordinary human being) and the red coal end of the cigarette drew closer.
“You police?”
“No.” The denial came quite spontaneously to Jury’s lips. He wondered why. “You security?”
They could see each other clearly enough now. They were both smiling. Sheepishly, perhaps. A lark hanging about when the place was closed to visitors.
“Thing is,” said the other man, “they just took away their Crime Scene—Do Not Cross tape. The coppers, I mean.” His breath came frosty cold as he dropped the cigarette to the ground.
Jury watched the cataract of silver sparks before it was ground out underheel. “Something happened, did it?”
“Dead lady. American. I was the one found her, to t
ell the truth.” He tried to keep the satisfaction out of his voice, but couldn’t. “Down there.” Here he pointed off toward the stone ruin of the Bishop’s Palace. “See, I work for the Trust couple of days a week. So I was here. Only one here, as a matter of fact. Down there she was, in one of the latrines. Garderobes, they used to call ’em. Fancy name for privy. Let’s sit down a bit. Over there’s a bench.”
They walked a few feet, sat down. Trevor Hastings introduced himself; so did Richard Jury. Glad to make each other’s acquaintance.
And then in the way of sealing a pact, rather like some antiquated ritual of secret handshakes or pricking thumbs and drawing blood, Trev offered Jury his pack of cigarettes.
Jury looked at the glimmering white pack—what were they, Marlboros? Silk Cuts? As if it made a difference. It could have been a pack of corn husks, and he’d still feel like reaching for them. “I stopped, Trevor. Thanks just the same.”
“Stopped? Good lad. I been trying to do that for years.”
Jury smiled. “I’ve only been stopped for a week, so don’t give me too much credit.”
“I ration ’em.” He lit up.
“To what? One every three minutes?”
Trev laughed and that made him cough. “Sound like the wife, you do. I get out of the house just to have a quiet smoke, sometimes, not have ’er nattering on. You married?”
“No.”
Trev grunted. “How’d you stop, then?”
“Well, I more or less made a pact with a friend. Girl I know who works a cigarette and magazine kiosk at Heathrow.”
Trev grunted. “Helluva job if you’re trying to stop.”
“Yes. I expect if Desdemona can stay off them, well, I can.”
“Desdemona, huh? Shakespeare. Othello?”
Jury nodded.
“Me and the wife, we saw that, must’ve been ten, twelve years ago. Went up to Stratford-upon-Avon—”
Jury sighed. You thought you’d got away from something, but it just came at you round another corner.
“—and that’s what was playing. They got this Royal Theatre or something there.”
“Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The RSC. Royal Shakespeare Company, they’re called.”
“That’s it. It all comes back. It’s this king, what a yob he was, kills his wife—that’s Desdemona, right?—because he thinks she’s been messing around. Stupid twit takes the word of—what’s his name?”
“lago.”
“That’s the fella. lago. Bit of a wide lad, him. So all he has to do is flash this hankie in front of the king’s face and tell him he found it in you-know-who’s bed and Bob’s-your-uncle, that’s the end of Desdemona. If the coppers looked at evidence the way that yobbo did, we’d all of us be in the nick. She never had a chance, did Desdemona. Jealousy, that’s what. ‘Beware the green-eyed monster,’ and so on.” Trevor sighed, and the end of his cigarette glowed red as he dragged in. “Just goes to show.”
The two of them sat in the dark, both pulling their collars up against the cold, both wishing it were sunup or sunset, a sight that might make the sitting here worth it, maybe Nature sympathizing for a change, saying, You put up with a lot, you yobs, but look at this, now. Flash!
Jury was smiling. “Just goes to show.”
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
* * *
A bizarre murder disturbs a sleepy Yorkshire fishing village.
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
* * *
Murder makes the tiny village of Littlebourne a most extraordinary place.
The Anodyne Necklace
* * *
In Shakespeare’s beloved Stratford, Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle of Sarasota, Florida, takes her last drink.
The Dirty Duck
* * *
Jury has himself a mysterious little Christmas set in a chilly English landscape and Gothic estate.
Jerusalem Inn
* * *
Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three children have been brutally murdered.
Help the Poor Struggler
* * *
In Ashdown Dean, a little English village, animals are dying in a series of seemingly innocuous accidents.
The Deer Leap
* * *
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
* * *
A dismembered corpse is found in the compartments of an antique writing bureau.
The Five Bells and Bladebone
* * *
Jury witnesses a killing in West Yorkshire inn The Old Silent.
The Old Silent
* * *
Jury finds himself a suspect, detained in London, while his friend Melrose Plant investigates in the Lake District.
The Old Contemptibles
* * *
Jury is called to Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, Edgar Allen Poe, and a murderer.
The Horse You Came In On
* * *
The Lincolnshire fenlands are the perfect setting for Richard Jury’s latest case, a mystifying double murder.
The Case Has Altered
* * *
Jury and Melrose Plant follow a complex case from the depths of London's East End to the heights of Mayfair's art scene.
The Stargazey
* * *
First in the Andi Oliver Series
Biting the Moon
* * *
First in the Emma Graham Series
Hotel Paradise
* * *
Featuring Maud Chadwick from the Emma Graham Series
The End of the Pier
* * *
A Mystery in Poetry Form
Send Bygraves
* * *
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Martha Grimes
Previously published in 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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First Scribner ebook edition June 2013
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ISBN 978-1-4767-3296-1(ebook)
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