I Am the Only Running Footman

by Martha Grimes

  “Yes, I’d love some coffee. As for the guests: you might have seen them go in; but did you see them come out?”

  David laughed, then asked Edward, “Where the devil are the servants?”

  “Bunburying,” said Ned Winslow, smiling.

  “What, again?”

  “What’s bunburying?” asked Lucinda.

  “Bunbury was Algie’s mythical old friend; don’t you remember? Anytime he wanted to leave London, he’d say old Bunbury was ill. Well, I shouldn’t complain, I suppose I’m doing it myself. Anything to get out of London. I expect Lucinda’s told you about what happened.” He looked at Melrose, got up again, and headed for the vodka. “I’m glad to help police with their inquiries—” He smiled. “—but it’s getting tiresome. If not actually dangerous.”

  “There’s not a bit of evidence, David,” said Lucinda. “They haven’t found anything yet.”

  David stopped the brandy decanter in midair and said to her, “I like that ‘yet.’ It’s not particularly reassuring to think tomorrow they’ll find my fingerprints smeared all over Hays Mews.”

  “They won’t,” said Ned shortly, as he went to poke up the fireplace. He turned and rested his arm along the green marble, much in the manner in which he was posed in the portrait above. It was a portrait of the three of them — the woman there looked enough like David Marr to be his twin. Melrose could not put his finger on what was so compelling about the painting: it was perhaps what it said of the relationship between the three. Melrose wondered where the husband was. Perhaps St. Clair was right. “They won’t because you had nothing to do with it,” said Ned.

  “If only the police would see it that way.”

  “They will.”

  David rolled his head, resting against the back of the sofa, back and forth, sighing. “Well, not to worry. It’s just a damned nuisance being told not to leave the country. Why does one always want to leave the country when one is told not to? Why does one always have the urge to visit Monte Carlo or the Himalayas when someone insists one stay at home? Why—?”

  “The Himalayas might do you good. The last time you were in Monte, Mother had to send money.”

  There was great good humor in Ned Winslow’s tone. Melrose had the impression they all indulged one another’s weaknesses.

  David shrugged. “Maybe I shall do a Bunbury. Incidentally, Marion is having a lie-down; she’s not feeling well. I hope it’s not because of me. Where’s the coffee, Lucinda?”

  Lucinda went as she was bid, Edward to help her. Melrose wondered how she could think she had a chance with this man, who watched her departing back without a flicker of interest. It was too bad; Edward and Lucinda seemed a suitable couple, though he wondered why “suitability” had anything to do with it; love was not a well-cut suit of clothes.

  “Lucinda says you’re quite an authority on the French Romantics.” He smiled. “About which I know sod-all. But did you know Edward is a poet.” David rose with his glass; this time, however, he headed for the bookshelves rather than the commode. He drew out the volume Melrose recognized as Edward Winslow’s. “You should read it.”

  “I have; Lucinda gave me the copy intended, I fear, for Pearl St. Clair.”

  David laughed. “I’m sure Pearl didn’t mind; that relieves her temporarily of having to pretend she can read.” He leafed through the book, and said, “It’s so simple, Ned’s poetry. I guess I mean old-fashioned or something. “ ‘Where have you gone to, Elizabeth Vere—?’ ” David snapped the book shut, replaced it, moved to the lacquer commode. “Ned isn’t very happy. He should get married again.”

  “I’m a little surprised you’d think that an antidote for happiness.” Melrose smiled. “In their refusal to gossip, the St. Clairs did manage to let slip that your nephew was once married . . . to a woman who was, well —”

  “Not terribly reliable. No, Rose was not reliable at all.” His smile this time was decidedly chilly, a crack in ice. “He’s very deep, Ned. Not at all like me. I’m about this deep.” He held up the bottle with the remaining measure of vodka.

  “Oh, I’d say you’re a great deal alike.” Melrose looked up at the portrait above the marble mantel. “The artist who painted that seems to think so, too.”

  “Paul Swann. Well, he’s known us for a long time, but I don’t see that in the painting, really.”

  “He’s a friend of yours?”

  “Yes; he lives near me in Shepherd Market. Paul was in the Running Footman that night. Only he’d left, I think. If my memory of events weren’t so clouded by this” — he held up the glass — “it would be easier. Fortunately, there’s that telephone call to my sister.”

  Fortunately, thought Melrose.

  • • •

  After coffee, they stood in the entry hall, a vast expanse of walnut paneling and sweeping staircase. Ned Winslow was to return Melrose to the Mortal Man; Lucinda was to stay behind to keep David company. The only company that David seemed interested in was the fresh bottle of vodka he’d found.

  It was down that staircase that the woman in the portrait came. She was tall and dark like her brother, her hair a shimmery mahogany, swept up on her head in a carelessly done knot, dressed in a velvet morning robe of deep sable brown.

  If this was poor Marion, there was something to be said for the ennobling effects of misfortune.

  • • •

  Inclining her head toward Melrose, she apologized for not coming down earlier. “I have a fierce headache, Mr. Plant. I hope you’ll pardon me.” That she remained standing on the stairs testified to her intention of going up them again as quickly as possible. Still, she struck Melrose more as a withdrawn, distant woman than a cold one. And very well bred. After all, she hadn’t needed to come down at all; she could merely have conveyed her regrets, or indeed said nothing. He thought she gave Lucinda a chilly look, probably for having gotten her son to invite this stranger here in the first place.

  Melrose wished she would stay; he would have liked to get more of an impression of her, which was why she was leaving, probably. In the circumstances, he supposed she thought the briefer the acquaintance, the better.

  “Good Lord, Marion,” said David, “why do you give that layabout couple leave to go when you’re not feeling well?”

  She smiled, but the smile did little toward warming the high, cold brow. “Too tired to pour your own brandy, David?” There was no real recrimination in the tone. “Don’t worry, they said they’d be back today or tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think you should be here alone and fending for yourself, that’s all.”

  “Well, now I have you to fend for me.” The humor in her voice was mixed with concern.

  The expression on David Marr’s face was strange, looking up the staircase. A strained, almost rapt expression, as if he were looking but not hearing.

  Indeed, Melrose thought, all of them in this moment of silence and studied attention might have been grouped here, sitting for the portrait in the library.

  A telephone rang in the distance, and Edward made a move toward a door across the wide hallway.

  “Oh, hell!” said David. “That’s the police, I’d bet my last drink on it.” As Edward disappeared through the door, David called, “Don’t answer it, Ned, let the damned answering machine do it. That’s what it’s there —”

  He must have realized what he’d said the moment the words were out, for he broke off abruptly and polished off the rest of his drink.

  There goes the alibi, thought Melrose.

  • • •

  “Is this the garden that Mr. St. Clair seems to feel is the happiest in Sussex?” asked Melrose. They had come to the end of a path that led through beeches to an informal garden at one side of which ran a long, serpentine wall overgrown with moss, covered in wisteria, and under the shelter of overhanging laburnum whose branches dripped rain.

  Edward Winslow laughed. “Yes, this is it. It might be larger than his, but it’s hardly impressive. Still, try to tell Sinjin that
. If he owns it, it’s dreadful. Modesty run amok. He’s a nice man, though. Actually, I’m surprised that John manages to keep things in such good shape.” Ned waved to the gardener, who seemed to be hacking away at a monkey-puzzle vine in the distance. “Crusty old beggar thinks he’s Gertrude Jekyll; still, he does a good job out here. You see the garden wall there?” Ned nodded toward the laburnum grove. “It’s our family plot. Several great-aunts and my grandparents are buried there. And Phoebe.”

  “That must have been pretty dreadful.”

  Ned was silent for a moment, staring at the little graveyard. “We all loved Phoebe so much.”

  “I’m sure. I’ve never had children.”

  “Nor I. My wife didn’t want any. Rose didn’t much care for the country here. Actually, she didn’t much care for me, I think, and the proximity to Mother. Mother can be, as you might guess, a formidable person. But she never interfered, never. It’s just her presence. She can move us about, you know.”

  There was no resentment in his tone. Melrose could well imagine Marion Winslow “moving them about.”

  “One day I woke up,” continued Ned, “and she was gone. I don’t know where; she had talked about the States, about Canada. But she didn’t bother leaving a note. So I don’t know where, do I?”

  “Where have you gone to . . .?” Melrose could not help but think of the poem.

  Ned looked from the graves to the wall to the sky. “There was another man, I’m sure. Didn’t even know she’d been seeing him. Didn’t even know him. That’s how blind a poet can be.”

  “Or how blind a wife can be.” Ned Winslow gave him the impression of a man who’d accepted the past as nothing but a missed train on a wasted journey; he would stand on the platform or travel through life with his cases empty.

  Melrose had been carrying the small book of poems in his pocket and drew it out. He thumbed through the pages until he came to the poem David had mentioned.

  “It’s very old-fashioned, as David says. Rhyme, meter, quatrains.”

  “There is something to be said for what you call ‘old-fashioned.’ Here it is.” Melrose read:

  “Where have you gone to, Elizabeth Vere,

  Far from the garden, the blossom, the bole?

  Rain glazes the stream — ”

  Melrose looked off toward a small stream partly shrouded in ice that meandered close to the garden wall. “It sounds like this place. Was it meant for someone in particular?” He returned the book to his pocket.

  Ned stood looking off toward the grove of beeches, frowning. “A writer never really knows who he means, does he? Perhaps that really is blindness, not to know.” He changed the subject. “If you knew David, you’d know it’s impossible for him to have strangled that girl. Anyway, there’s no reason, no motive. Ivy must’ve been killed by a mugger, someone like that. Wouldn’t you think that the obvious answer?”

  Ned Winslow looked at him as if Melrose were a magician who just might pull the right rabbit out of the hat. “If that were the case, the killer certainly didn’t want much. There appears to be no motive.”

  “There’s none with David, either. He had no motive.”

  Melrose thought of what Jury had told him of the women, Sheila Broome and Ivy Childess. “ ‘Then glided in Porphyria —’ ”

  Ned reached out to pull a weed from between the stones of the wall. “That’s an odd allusion. If you’re thinking of David as a Porphyria’s lover type —” Ned laughed. “Believe me, he hadn’t any passionate attachment to Ivy Childess.” He turned those molten umber eyes on Melrose. “And what about Porphyria herself?”

  “Porphyria? She struck me as being rather pathetic.”

  “She struck me as being a bit of a tramp,” said Ned, with a smile.

  13

  “WTHAT is the matter with you, Dolly? You’ve been in a sulk — well, not that perhaps — on edge, more, ever since you came here.” And as Kate set the cup of tea and a toasted tea cake before her sister, she wondered once again why Dolly had come. Her visits up to now had been in the spring or summer, especially summer, the clement weather and quieter ocean allowing her to show off her near-perfect figure. “Job? Man? What?”

  Dolly looked up at her sister. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just a bit under the weather is all.” She set about cutting up her tea cake.

  “And speaking of being here . . . you know you’re always welcome, of course . . . but why now?”

  Dolly sighed. “I should think that would be obvious. It’s the Christmas holiday, isn’t it?”

  Kate watched her lick the butter off her fingers, slowly, like a cat. Dolly moved with a languor that was also catlike and totally at odds with her temperament. The edginess of which Kate had just spoken was not unusual, except in its intensity.

  “It’s a man, isn’t it?” With Dolly it usually was.

  “No.” She said nothing else as she pulled up the glove-leather high-heeled boots. She fitted a magnificent white fur Cossack hat to her head and shoved the ends of her hair up under it. She reminded Kate of a photo of a Russian spring, cold light shining on ice and snow.

  “Where’re you going?” Kate was clearing away her tea things.

  “Only to Pia’s.”

  That was another thing, thought Kate. Dolly was forever waiting for Fate to step in, always counting on the planets to tilt in her favor. Two years ago it had been the medium, and following her fall from grace, the astrologer and the reader of tarot. Pia, to whom Dolly was currently entrusting her future, was a clairvoyant with a reputation in Brighton for honesty. The astrologer had been safe. With all of the open doors in one’s horoscope through which one’s fate could exit, astrology generally was safe. Unfortunately, Pia Negra wasn’t. She told her clients what she knew, good or bad. And in Dolly’s case, Kate supposed it must be rather bad, for she often came back more nervous and anxious than when she’d left.

  It must be a man, thought Kate once again. The wrong man, of course. Why was it Dolly, who could have probably any man she fancied, always chose the wrong one? Married, sometimes; too old, sometimes; sometimes both. Whenever she told Kate about one who sounded (at least to Kate) eminently suitable, Dolly sounded bored.

  It occurred to Kate just then that it was Dolly, not she, who had been the loser, had been the unfortunate object of their father’s obsessive love. He had left her a legacy of his two broken marriages, disastrous love affairs, frustrations. And then he had left her the means to get all of these things for herself. Dolly needed only to sit and be adored, like their mother, beautiful and, now, rich. Perhaps that was really the reason that Kate did not resent his leaving everything but the house to Dolly. Kate had always thought of herself as the prisoner of this house; but wasn’t Dolly a prisoner of the wider world? Had her freedom been bought with a fence around it?

  At least she had her television work to steady her, although perhaps it offered Dolly too much celebrity for her own good.

  In that little role of hers, Dolly had probably entered into the fantasies of most of the men in London.

  PART III

  Garden Wall

  14

  THE parlor of Stella Broome’s terraced house had a view across the street of a launderette and a Chinese restaurant and take-away called Mr. Wong and Son.

  Jury sat on one of a pair of armchairs slipcovered in a design of fading chrysanthemums; the rug was garlanded in the center and the corners with roses; the wallpaper was an endless repetition of pagodas, Roman columns, and hanging gardens down whose walls trailed roses and wisteria. The apron that Stella Broome wore was patterned with camellias, and the ashtray she held in her lap gave off a woodsy odor.

  She had, he suspected, the beginnings of emphysema, given the way she hacked when she inhaled. He was glad Wiggins wasn’t here to see her light one cigarette from the stub of another. She was a woman in her fifties, overweight and careless of her looks. Her face was round and the skin tight and slightly waxy, reflecting the camellia pattern of the apron.

&nbs
p; It was depressing, this dead garden of a room, and as if to emphasize the fact that nothing moved or breathed, there were vases spotted here and there on tables and mantel filled with either plastic or paper or dried flowers.

  Stella Broome had been talking about the death of her daughter: “I told her, didn’t I? I told her she’d get into trouble, hitching rides like she did. But she wouldn’t listen, not her.” She shook her head and reclaimed her glass of sherry.

  That she talked about the death as if it were an infraction of parental discipline suggested to Jury an attempt to bury the fact, to draw her daughter back — late perhaps, drunk perhaps, but back.

  “No, I can’t help. All I know is Sheila left here in the morning for work and said she’d got a ride to Bristol.”

  “From all we’ve found, she didn’t seem to know anyone there,” said Jury.

  “Oh, that’d make no odds to Sheila. She just wanted to get away. She was always wanting to get away.” Stella Broome poured another glass of sherry, pulled a tissue from the box beside a silver-framed photograph of Sheila.

  “What about her friends, Mrs. Broome? The fellow she was going about with, for instance.”

  “I’ve told all this to police before. That commander or whatever he calls himself —”

  “Divisional commander.” Jury had to smile. From the way she spoke, Macalvie might have been pulling ranks out of a hat.

  “Whatever. Harassment, that’s what I call it.” She lit another cigarette.

  “Divisional Commander Macalvie is very thorough. And sometimes that might seem like harassment—” And sometimes is, he thought. “— but witnesses have been known to forget details that can come out if questions are asked over again.” Especially if they’re lying first time around. Though Jury didn’t think the mother was lying, necessarily.

  “Maybe,” she said. She sounded doubtful. “Well, there’s Gerald, Gerald Fox. That was her young man, such as he is.” She sniffed. “Though I will say he was cut up over her —” Stella Broome pressed the wadded tissue to her mouth to forestall a bout of tears.