The Old Fox Deceived
Page 12
“She was struck by the resemblance to Dillys March, is that it?”
“Struck by it? She was utterly shocked. Her face went as white as her dress. Well, apparently the resemblance was striking. But to say the woman really was this Dillys March . . . ” She shrugged. “Julian agrees with me, of course. The whole thing is preposterous.”
“Did she give any indication to you, I mean in the pub, that she was familiar with Rackmoor? Used to live here?”
“None. But I’m sure she was saving that tidbit. Playing it, as Les would say, cool. She didn’t strike me as the type to get herself killed. Not smart enough.”
That was certainly a fresh way of looking at it, thought Jury. “I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, she seemed more the sort to carry out someone else’s plans rather than instigate her own. Which has nothing to do with whether one gets murdered, does it?”
“What exactly did she say?”
“That she was on holiday. And had friends in Rackmoor. The Craels, of all people. I shouldn’t have connected her with them. Not their sort.”
“And did she go into any detail about her relationship with them?”
“No. But she said she’d known them a long time. As a child, she said. There wasn’t anything else really.”
“Exactly what route did you take through the village, I mean after coming down along the seawall?”
“Mind if I have another sherry to help this along? I just seem to be bone dry tonight. The writing’s not going well.” Up she sprang, cascading several loose pins from her hair and the leather thong belt which had been loosely tied round her India-print shirtwaist. At the cabinet once again she kept the bottle out of view and came back holding her palm upwards beneath the base of the brimful glass. Wiggins got out his inhaler as if politely joining her in this libation.
“We came down the Fox steps, you know, the ones that go up to the seawall, and passed the pub and then to Lily’s cottage. As I said before, I stayed with her for a bit, to see she wasn’t going to be in need of —”
A crash — not a crash, exactly; more a Klaxon call — pulled their three heads up. What was at first a deafening clamor finally separated itself into just-barely discernible instruments: electric guitars, drums, bass. Voices twanged rhythmically, but no words were recognizable, even as loud as the music was.
“Told you,” said Maud. Without getting up, she reached to the bookcase against which leaned a long pole, kept there, apparently for the purpose to which she now put it. Thump, thump, thump, she banged on the ceiling. The clamor diminished.
“What a treat. The Grateful Dead. I will join them if he doesn’t soon go back to the States.”
“Is that your nephew? He’s an American?”
“One look would tell you. He’s my sister’s boy. He’s from Michigan or Cincinnati or one of those places, and she thought it would broaden his horizons if he could spend his Christmas hols in England. Now he’s here and his holiday is supposed to be over, but I can’t pry him loose. Think he’s got some girl or other up in that new government housing project. And, of course, he’s not eager to go back to school, nor is my sister eager to have him back. Can’t imagine why.” She gave the ceiling a few more whacks with the stick. The noise lessened some more. “Since he’s been here I am sure I have suffered a temporary threshold shift. I understand that the human ear can tolerate only fifteen minutes of sound at a level of one hundred and fifteen decibels. The average rock concert — to which I am treated daily — is somewhere around one hundred and forty. The threshold of pain.” She gave them a toothy smile as the song came to its raucous end and the music stopped. There was the clumping of heavy boots on the staircase.
Wiggins, prone to catching anything, including deafness, testily drew his hands away from his ears.
A young lad of about sixteen canted into the room as if a heavy rain were at his back, pushing him on. Cowboy hat, jeans, boots, fringed jacket, dark glasses, all like separate stars fixed here and there, combined like an odd constellation in the midnight sky, so that he seemed to be more than just the sum of these parts.
“My nephew, Les Aird. This is Chief Inspector Jury of Scotland Yard.”
Jury remembered himself at sixteen doing just what Les Aird was doing now: trying hard not to be impressed. Had Jury ever really been this age? All he could scare up was the memory of an amorphous blob of a youngster, dull and ill-defined.
Les Aird was searching for some posture encompassing both respect and ennui. The gum stopped working and the glasses got adjusted and the throat got cleared and the hands got stuck in the jeans pockets. Playing for time. Finally he settled for simply sticking out his hand, snapping his chin in a curt, serious nod, and saying, “Hey, it’s cool.”
There was no lack of respect in the tone or the greeting. It matched some brigadier general’s “What ho, old chap!” Les’s had simply come from the sixteen-year-old storehouse of nonchalance.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Les.”
Murder can both excite and unnerve and Jury heard the slight crack in Les Aird’s voice as he said, “Okay, ask away.” He sat down on the settee next to his aunt, on the edge of it, Jury noticed, leaning forward, one arm across his blue-jeaned leg, and the other elbow jutting out, with the hand on the hip. “Shoot.”
It could have been a literal invitation. The gum started working at an even faster clip.
“It’s about the murdered woman. Had you ever seen her during the time she came here?”
“Yeah. One foxy lady, man.” He smiled and danced his eyebrows up and down above the glasses.
“Did you make any attempt to talk to her at all?”
“Say what?” The blank look was almost blinding.
“Did you talk to her, Les?”
“Uh-uh.”
“But you had seen her,” Jury said.
“Here and there.”
“On the night she was murdered?”
“No.” “Yes.”
They spoke together, Les Aird and Maud Brixenham. Maud looked exceedingly surprised.
“I did, Aunt Maud.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
Les shrugged. “Didn’t know it then.”
“You didn’t tell Inspector Harkins, either, Les.”
“Didn’t know it then, either. I mean that it was her. All he said was this lady got blown away. He never described her. How was I to know the one I saw was her? It was after we left the party, maybe around ten-thirty, quarter of, I saw her. With all those people in costume, I guessed she was just another one on her way up to the manor house. I don’t dig it, man. But the spread was okay. Food to the max. Real bad. But after I saw all the bunny-rabbits, I booked.”
Jury blinked. “Bunny-rabbits?”
“Musta been half-a-dozen rabbits running around. Crazy.”
Maud explained: “Three of the villagers decided to come as Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.”
“Which way did you take back to the village?”
“That path that comes out near the church and Psalter’s Lane.”
“Then where?”
“Then I went down that part of the Angel steps to Scroop Street. Arn was groovin’ along so I walked with him down Scroop Street and through Dagger Alley to the High. I mean it was weird, man, to see that face come at you out of this wall of fog. Vampire time. Face was half black, half white.” Les drew an imaginary line from his forehead down the bridge of his nose, blocking off the left side of his face. “Even Arn barked. And it takes a lot to make Arn bark.”
“And this was on the High Street?”
“Yeah. I thought maybe she was coming out of the Bell.”
“And where did she go from there? Up Dagger Alley?”
“Couldn’t say, man. Either there or on down the High.”
“And that was, you think, around ten-thirty?”
“Near as I can say.”
“It took you a half-an-hour to get from Old House to the High?”
Jury did not press the point; probably Les had stopped for the odd cigarette or two along the way; he doubted there was a more serious construction to put upon the time lapse. But he certainly wondered at the time lapse as far as the Temple woman was concerned.
“You saw her roughly at ten-thirty. Adrian Rees saw her just before the Fox Deceiv’d closed, around eleven-fifteen. Where was she during those forty-five minutes?” The question was put more to himself than to Les, but Les answered,
“Beats me. I booked, man. Up the hill to Strawberry Flats. To see my girl.”
“Who lives at that end of town, Wiggins? Let’s see the map.” There was Adrian Rees, of course. A good bet, that.
Wiggins took out and unfolded the map of the village supplied him by Harkins. “There’s Percy Blythe. Lives in Dark Street. The Steeds live across from the library; that’s down at the end of Scroop Street. Most of the houses are empty this time of year.”
Jury leaned over and studied the map. Never had he seen such a web of narrow streets. No, not a web; spiders were far more symmetrical with their web-making than were the streets of Rackmoor. Dark Street was a cul-de-sac with no means of egress to any other streets except Scroop Street. Dagger Alley was a blade-thin walkway between the Bell and an empty warehouse.
“Well, thanks, Les. Let me know if you remember anything else.”
“Later days.” Les jabbed his dark glasses back on his nose.
Maud Brixenham followed Jury and Wiggins to the door, trailing after her a bit of paper which had come unstuck from her shoe and a tiny button which had finally given itself up to the pull of gravity. Jury wondered how Maud Brixenham could possibly get away with murder: she’d leave a trail of clues all the way from Rackmoor to Scarborough.
Out in the fog, Jury turned to her and said, “Thanks, Miss Brixenham.”
“Don’t get lost in the fog.”
Jury smiled. “I don’t think Rackmoor’s quite big enough to get lost in.”
“Don’t you believe it. Used to be a smuggler’s haunt. Easy to hide in, these twisting little streets.”
Jury thought he detected a certain reluctance to leave on Wiggins’s part. “Did you have some more questions, Sergeant Wiggins?”
“I was just wondering,” Wiggins said to Maud Brixenham. “Is it difficult writing?”
Jury sighed and lit a cigarette. Was Wiggins trying to find his true self in Rackmoor?
14
The depression and anxiety which had gripped him when he had been talking to Lily Siddons washed over Jury like a dark wave when he awoke the next morning and turned his face to the window, knowing he would see nothing but the gray fog sealing off the room. Sadness hunched on his chest, like an incubus-dream.
He forced himself up and over to the window, looked out through sea-fret and minimal light to what he could see of the water, the color of pewter. He could barely make out the small green and blue cobles.
Jury got his clothes on, sat back down on the bed again with one shoe in his hand. He stared at the carpet, a fugue-like pattern of winding stems and leaves, faded almost into the gray background. He did not like this case; feelings which he had stashed away on the high shelves of his mind kept threatening to tumble down.
He tied his other shoelace, got up, walked over to the cheval glass, looked in it and for the hundredth, no, thousandth time, wondered why he had become a policeman and why he remained one. He wondered, too, if he were acting in unconscious collaboration with Superintendent Racer to keep that superintendency which he should have had long ago at arm’s length. He thought, looking in the mirror, that he looked like a cop, or somebody’s idea of one: big, square, dark-suited. Substantial. A cop or the Bank of England.
As often happened when he was depressed he studied his clothes with scrupulous attention to detail, as if, for example, the removal of a handkerchief from one pocket to the other would transform him from a frog to a prince.
It didn’t. Why was he wearing this old blue tie? The hell with it. He yanked off the stupid blue tie, took off the jacket, pulled on a heavy sweater, over which he could wear his windcheater. From the four-poster bed he took an Irish walking hat and stuffed that on his head. Why was he doing this, vainly stopping here in front of this mirror, fidgeting with his clothes like a debutante changing frocks before the ball? Now he looked like he only needed a couple of hounds and a blackthorn stick for a walk across the moors.
An image surfaced in his mind and quickly disappeared, like something floating on the edge of a pool, just out of range, reflecting briefly, sinking. Like the name on the tip of the tongue, the elusive face, the dream-image that rises and sinks again. It was looking in this mirror which had brought it to mind. He went back over everything he had done, standing here, but the thing refused to surface again. He was sure that if he could find it, that small detail, he would have a very important piece of the puzzle.
He kept looking at himself; he sighed. Was he even clever enough to be a cop? he wondered, turning to go down to breakfast.
• • •
Breakfast was a slightly more cheerful affair than dressing had been, even with Wiggins washing down two-toned pills with orange juice. But he had the grace this morning, at least, not to trot out descriptions of the various coughs and chills and drafts which had kept him tossing and turning all the night long. Indeed, Wiggins seemed chipper. He complimented Kitty’s breakfast of smoked herring, buttered eggs, fried bread and grilled tomatoes.
“Inspector Harkins called this morning — had some information to give you about Gemma Temple. It had to do with the Raineys, a family she lived with for eight or nine years.”
“Could they vouch for her being Gemma Temple?”
“Yes and no.”
“Meaning?”
“She didn’t come there until she was eighteen or nineteen. Came as au pair and general dogsbody. They live in Lewisham.” Wiggins read from his notebook: “Number four, Kingsway Close.”
“But they must have asked for references; they got her to take care of their kids.”
“Oh, she had references, but when Harkins checked them, he found out they were fake.”
“What about the picture of Dillys March? Couldn’t they tell anything from that?”
“Said it looked the spit of Gemma, yes. Of course, they could identify Gemma from the pictures taken at the morgue. It was Gemma, all right.”
“But was it Dillys? Did Harkins get any further with the dental records?”
“He didn’t say. This Olive Manning, I think you should speak to her, she’s that bitter about Dillys March. Strong motive, if you ask me.”
“Strong motive, maybe. But it’s rather unlikely that Dillys March actually caused Leo Manning’s breakdown. I don’t think people drive other people mad, do you?”
Wiggins seemed to be thinking. “Well, there was what Charles Boyer did to Ingrid Bergman. I saw that on telly just the other night.”
Jury pretended he didn’t hear that. “Did Olive Manning seem to believe this was the March girl returned to the fold?”
“Definitely not.”
“Then would she have a reason for killing her?”
“Well, no. But she could be lying about its not being Dillys.”
“Hmm. Look at this, Wiggins.” Jury produced the picture he had taken from Lily’s collection. “Mary Siddons, Lily’s mother.”
Wiggins picked it up. “Drowned, didn’t she?”
“Supposedly accidental; I’m sure it was suicide. As long as she lived here she knew damned well you can’t walk that dangerous stretch below the cliff at high tide. But the picture is what I’m interested in. It’s been cut.” Jury had removed it from its small frame. “On the left, there, look. I wondered why the woman in it was so far up against the edge of the picture. Cut, but why?”
“Trimmed, to fit in the frame?”
“More likely som
eone’s been cut out of it.”
Wiggins looked again. “The father, maybe? He went off and left them high and dry.”
Jury shrugged, repocketed the picture. Wiggins took out his nose drops.
Jury tilted back his chair and surveyed the row of hunting prints on the wall. “I’ve been thinking about that costume. Could there have been some motive in Lily’s giving that costume to Gemma Temple? Lily Siddons feared someone was trying to kill her. It’s happened twice before, two attempts. What if she simply decided to let Dillys March take her place?”
Applying the minuscule dropper to his right nostril, Wiggins answered, “Isbuhuffy.” He sniffed in the drops.
Although Jury had pretty well mastered Wiggins’s words coming through clouds of handkerchiefs and medicines, this particular phrase in the Wiggins’s lexicon was lost on Jury. “Translate, please.”
“Sorry, sir. It’s this damned wet that’s getting to my sinuses. I was just saying, it’s a bit ‘iffy,’ isn’t it? I mean, Lily Siddons isn’t even positive — or at least wasn’t before this murder of the Temple woman —that someone was trying to kill her. Just to have her wear that costume in the hopes the murderer would mistake the Temple woman for Lily herself, well, that’s awful uncertain. And what would she have against this Gemma Temple?”
“Nothing against Gemma Temple. A hell of a lot against Dillys March. She hated her. Probably mutual. Though I must agree with you. It would be a damned uncertain way of ridding herself of an enemy.”
“And what would she have to gain, except revenge?”
“Eventually, money from Colonel Crael. I can’t believe she doesn’t come in for a sizable sum, and that’s easy enough to check out. If Dillys March were to turn up now, she’d be cutting a wide swathe across that will, I’d think.” Jury leaned across the table. “Let’s take a brief look at those people who would probably lose out if Dillys March were to come back. Motive and opportunity: how much does each have?