The Old Fox Deceived

by Martha Grimes

  “That’s unkind, Vic. He is your nephew.”

  “By marriage.” And his look made it clear anything mental was definitely on her family’s side.

  To Jury, she said: “Tragic, it was. The boy had a kind of nervous breakdown a long time ago. Olive comes down here several times a year to see him. Terrible expensive, the place is, but she’d have it no other way. Leo gets the very best treatment.”

  “It must put quite a strain on Mrs. Manning’s purse-strings.”

  That was Victor’s cue to cut in again: “On our purse-strings. Mrs. Olive-bloody-high-and-mighty-Manning comes here to eat our food and drink our whisky.” Victor’s eye strayed to a cabinet near the window. “Would you like a wee nip, Inspector?” He held up thumb and forefinger to show his wife how “wee” the nip would be. This unexpected gesture of friendliness Jury knew was designed to procure a drop for Victor himself. If Jury refused, Victor would only continue to toss up whatever obstacles he could to Jury’s questions.

  “Thanks, don’t mind if I do. Just a small one.”

  Victor smiled broadly. “Well, then, I’ll just join you. Man can’t drink alone, I always say.” He rose and walked to the cabinet and opened the little door beneath. “Mother, what about you? Glass of sherry, perhaps?”

  With a face locked into disapproval of these early-afternoon libations, she shook her head. Victor Merchent became quite hearty and encouraging as he returned with bottle and glasses. “Fire away, Inspector Jury. You was saying about Leo . . . ?” Jury took the glass Victor pressed into his hand.

  “How did Mrs. Manning feel about the Craels? I mean, at the time?”

  “I’m not sure I take your meaning,” said Fanny.

  “Let’s begin back with their ward — you might remember the girl. Dillys March. She ran away, apparently, about fifteen years ago.”

  Fanny gave a loud hoot. “Her! Indeed I do remember that name. Olive hated the girl. You see, Olive blamed her for what happened to Leo.”

  “So who’s this Dillys March when she’s at home?” asked Victor, looking morosely into his already-empty, glass, and at the bottle, as if he wondered if he dared.

  “Oh, you remember, Vic. Olive talked about nothing else when Leo first had his trouble.”

  “I don’t pay no mind to that woman’s natter. Far as I’m concerned, Leo’s been funny in the head for all his life.” He returned to his racing form.

  “But she might have held the Craels generally responsible?” suggested Jury.

  “I think she did. She thought they never should have taken the girl in.” It must suddenly have occurred to Fanny Merchent that these questions had, oddly, to do with Olive, not Leo. Jury saw the question in her eyes before it was out of her mouth. “Why can’t you find all this out from Olive?” asked Fanny, stiffening in her chair.

  “I would do, of course, Mrs. Merchent.” Jury’s smile was at its disarming best. “Only I’m in London and she’s in Yorkshire. And you see, I happened to be in Victoria and recalled she said she’d been visiting her sister. . . . ” Jury shrugged. He thought if policemen really lived such a strolling, aimless, boulevardier existence, they wouldn’t get much done.

  Still, his “just happening by” seemed to satisfy Fanny, who was not disinclined to talk about the whole sorry business. “I see. Well, as I was saying, Olive was most upset about the Craels keeping this Dillys. She said the girl’d caused nothing but trouble ever since she’d got there and was that glad when she took herself off. Though Sir Titus Crael was heartbroken over it. Poor man. He’d lost his wife and son earlier, you know.”

  Jury nodded. “What sort of trouble did Dillys cause, according to your sister.”

  “Men, wasn’t it? Young as she was, too. And she was deceptive. ‘Little sneak,’ Olive always said.”

  “Was she jealous of the girl’s position in the house?”

  Fanny Merchent did not deny this. “I don’t know. But Olive is a funny sort of person —”

  Victor snorted. “Funny’s the word. All that lolly and she comes along here to live off us. Snooty she is to me. Why I’d like to know? She’s only the bleedin’ housekeeper, ihn’t she?” As if in defiance of Olive Manning, he poured himself another drink.

  “That’s no call to be nasty to her. As much grief as she’s got—”

  “Grief! I’ll show you grief, my girl. Just look at what’s been done to me. . . . ”

  Before Victor could begin on his downward path into self-pity, Jury said, “Nothing happened while Mrs. Manning was here that seemed to upset her, did it? Or make a change in her behavior?” Jury expected a negative answer to this, and was very surprised when Fanny Merchent said,

  “Yes, there was something. It was after that phone call. You remember, Vic, you answered once. That was the second one.” She reached over and flicked the paper with her fingernail to get his attention. He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the bottle as if a genie might vaporize out of its top.

  “What phone call was that?”

  She looked darkly from her husband to the whisky bottle and turned to Jury. “It was some woman called. I didn’t recognize the voice, and I was surprised someone’d be asking for Olive. Olive don’t know anybody round here, not that I know of. At first I thought it was the hospital, but I knew it wasn’t from the way she acted. Took the phone into another room after a bit and closed the door.” Fanny Merchent sniffed her disapproval of secrets kept from sisters. “All keyed up she was, after. For two weeks she was like that. Tense, kind of, but excited, you know. And she started going out then. Not to the hospital, for I usually went with her when she went there. She went somewhere else and every day, more or less at the same time. Just put me off when I asked, said she was going shopping. Wouldn’t let me come along.”

  “You said there were two phone calls.”

  “That’s right. Vic answered the second one. He just said it was someone ringing up Olive, and what’d Olive think this was, a B-and-B or something, expecting him to answer the telephone and all.”

  Victor Merchent held the bottle which had all the while been resting in his lap and poured himself another drink. He had given up including Jury in this ritual once Jury had served his purpose. “Bleedin’ hotel she thought the place was. Bleedin’ hotel.” Then his expression changed. He looked surprised into cleverness. Like a senile old man getting crystal visions of the long ago, he stared vacantly into space. “That was it, then. An hotel. It was somebody calling from an hotel because when I said Olive ain’t here, she said to tell her to call the Sawry Hotel.”

  His wife clucked her tongue. “You never told me, Vic.”

  Hastily, he said, “You never ast, did you?” and drank off his whisky.

  8

  Jane Yang was an exquisite, delicately formed girl in a turquoise dress with a high collar. Her black hair was cut straight across and down like a helmet. When Melrose walked into the Sun Palace, she was behind the counter, working the cash register.

  It was not yet noon, but the small, cramped restaurant was still crowded. Sullen-looking waiters streamed by with trays of silver-domed food, slapping in and out of the kitchen’s swinging door. It couldn’t have been the ambiance which accounted for the restaurant’s popularity, so it must have been the food. The air was redolent with mysterious, spicy mixtures.

  Melrose took up a place in line behind the half-dozen customers queued to pay their bills. When his turn came he handed over twenty pounds and the snapshot. “You’re Jane Yang? Fat Bertha told me you might know the woman in this picture here.”

  Miss Yang looked confused. Should she be mixing this bit of business with the bill-paying customers? But she held on to the twenty pounds.

  Behind Melrose, a burly man sighed. “Move it along mate. This ain’t Kew Gardens flower show.” The toothpick in his mouth moved acrobatically.

  “Could you wait over there?” said Miss Yang, apologetically. “Very busy.”

  Ignoring the giant sighs all down the line, Melrose produced the tw
in of the twenty. “Very rich.”

  She looked utterly startled by all of this money suddenly floating her way, at the same time looking at Melrose’s chesterfield and taking the bill from the man with the dancing toothpick.

  With her shoulder she motioned Melrose behind the counter and signaled a tiny woman, old, her brown face creased with wrinkles like a Chinese tea egg. Jane Yang’s beckoning finger brought the old woman shuffling over to listen without expression to the girl’s spurt of Chinese — probably directions about the cashier’s post.

  The girl led Melrose to a corner near the kitchen, plucked the second twenty from his fingers, then folded both of the notes to a neat square which she slid between two of the small, black frogs which served as closures down the length of the turquoise dress. He wondered why women seemed to think this was the last place a man would look.

  She had the picture in her hand. “I know her, yes. She waitress here, oh, three week, I think it was.” And she held up three fingers as if teaching Melrose a new language.

  “What was her name?”

  “Gemma. Gemma Temple.”

  “And then what happened to her? After she left here, I mean?”

  “She meet a man. I guess she go living with him.”

  “Did she meet him here? When she was working?”

  Jane Yang shook her head and the satiny helmet of hair swirled on her shoulders. “Somewhere — I forget — in London. Maybe train station? She go off one day to visit friend. Look —” She spread her hands. “We was not very close, you know. She not tell me much about private life.”

  Melrose nodded. “So you don’t know who this man was? She must have told you something, since you know she went off with him.”

  Again, the black hair swirled. “No. I just saw him.”

  “Saw him?”

  “Yes. He come to restaurant. Very posh, he was.” She looked Melrose up and down. “Like you.” She smiled. “The Prince.” To Melrose’s questioning eyebrow, she said, “I mean, that what she call him: The Prince. It was joke. But he did look . . . ” She seemed searching for words and her eye fell on a painting above the cash register which was totally out of keeping with the dragony decorations of the Sun Palace. It was a print of the Millais painting done for Pears’ Soap. “Like him. I mean, when the Prince was little, yes, he would look like that.”

  The description couldn’t have fit Julian Crael more aptly. The beautiful child, dressed in green velvet, golden curls tumbling: it was just what Julian might have looked like in that far-off age.

  “He came here to see her?”

  She nodded. “He come here with her. She stop work here, see. I guess she want to show him off to other girls. The Prince embarrassed, though. The gentleman used to another life.”

  Melrose smiled at the way she said it, so succinctly and so perceptively.

  “Did she tell you where she was going?”

  Her porcelain skin wrinkled slightly in concentration. “There was something. She tell me he live at fancy hotel. . . . ” She shook her head. “I cannot remember name.”

  At that moment, a small man, who made a twin-set with the little old woman, stomped out of the kitchen and, seeing Jane socializing, let loose with a spate of Chinese, gesturing wildly toward the register. The line had diminished and increased several times since they’d been talking, never disappearing altogether. Off to their right the door to the kitchen slapped open and whooshed shut continuously. The noise in there was even worse than the din of the customers’ chat. They must have been killing chickens in the kitchen, thought Melrose.

  “Sorry,” she said, turning to Melrose. “Papa very angry I leave cashbox. I must go.”

  Melrose brought out a card case, extracted his gold pen, and wrote both the number of his hotel and of Old House on it. “Look, if you should remember anything at all about this Gemma Temple, about her life, her family —”

  Jane Yang shook her head. “She got none. I think she raised in home. That all she tell me.”

  “And you can’t remember the hotel where he was staying?”

  They were back at the register now, the girl relieving Mama. “If I do remember, I call.” She shrugged her turquoise shoulders and smiled a smile that made the porcelain mask of her face open like a lotus on a blue lake. She was really quite beautiful, but so fragile-looking a man might be afraid of handling her. “Sorry,” she said once more, shrugging.

  He turned away. When he had his hand on the door, he heard, over the crowd, “Mister!” She was waving him back, smiling brightly. When he got back to the counter, she said, “That’s it! The hotel. Sawry. The Sawry Hotel.”

  She pronounced it just as she had sorry, erasing the r slightly. Melrose grinned. He would have produced the money-clip again, but the darkling looks of the bill-payers up and down the line were at this point congealing into one collective rain cloud. He thought they might all fall on him together, so he walked out of the restaurant.

  Once outside, he started whistling “Limehouse Blues.”

  9

  The Sawry Hotel was a well-kept London secret, closely guarded by those discriminating patrons who realized what would happen if the secret were to get out. It was not cheap; neither, though, was it outrageously expensive. Money seemed not to be the issue, as if excellence could not be measured in terms of pounds and pence.

  As the door smacked softly shut behind him, Melrose Plant was washed with a wave of nostalgia. It was more than thirty years since his father and mother had brought him here as a child during one snow-bedazzled Christmas holiday, and it had not changed one whit. The Sawry held tenaciously to its past. Melrose approved. He kept his own home as it had been when his parents were alive. He had only added a few pieces; he had removed none. To him the past was perfect as it stood, preserved beneath the glass bell of Ardry End.

  It was another reason he had never married: no matter how much she would have insisted on keeping him and the house intact, eventually she’d have had to start moving the furniture around.

  A blue, gold and rose Persian runner led straight to an Adam staircase that swept upward as if it were suspended, floating in space. Discreetly placed off the foyer was the desk attended by a gentleman in the Sawry’s customary uniform — black suit and white gloves.

  “May I be of assistance, sir?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Melrose. “I’m calling on Mr. Crael. I wonder could you ring him up and tell him Mr. Carruthers-Todd is here. Thank you.”

  The clerk, whose expression ordinarily wouldn’t have been changed by a dish of cold water in the face, registered surprise. “Oh, I’m very sorry, sir. But Mr. Crael isn’t staying with us.”

  Melrose’s feigned surprise was far weightier even than the clerk’s. “Surely, you must be mistaken. Why, I’ve a letter from Mr. Crael telling me he’d be visiting the Sawry on the eleventh. . . . ” Melrose made a great show of slapping pockets as if he were looking for the letter.

  The clerk smiled slightly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carruthers-Todd. Could you possibly be mistaken as to the date?”

  Melrose Carruthers-Todd drew himself up and offered the clerk a rather frosty look. The clear implication was that the Carruthers-Todds were seldom, if ever, mistaken about anything. “It was the eleventh; I distinctly remember.” His tone suggested that the clerk had better produce Mr. Crael in no short order and in good condition or there’d be trouble.

  He knew that establishments such as the Sawry did not give out information freely about their guests. But having put the clerk in the unfortunate position of now having to prove that Mr. Crael wasn’t indeed tied up in the broom closet, Melrose watched as the clerk brought out the guest register.

  “As you see, sir, Mr. Crael was staying with us on that date in December. Not January, sir.” The clerk managed not to appear too self-satisfied, as he turned the register round.

  “Drat!” said Melrose. He sighed deeply. “Then I suppose that Miss March isn’t here either?”

  The clerk raised a puzzled eyeb
row. “Miss March? I don’t believe I remember anyone by that name.”

  “Temple,” said Melrose, snapping his fingers. “Miss Temple is the one I mean. Friend of Mr. Crael.”

  “Ah, yes. No, sir, she isn’t with us either now, sir.”

  “Ummm. Guess she left the same time he did.” Melrose tried not to turn this into a question. The clerk nodded, beginning to look a trifle weary with the absent-minded Mr. Carruthers-Todd. “Well, blast and damn. I suppose that means poor old Benderby won’t get a chance to see them either. He’ll be most put out by this whole mix-up.” Melrose took from his pocket a small, gold pencil and his little notebook. “Look here, give this to him, will you, when he comes round. There’s a good chap.”

  The clerk was clearly puzzled. “I’m sorry sir, give this to whom?”

  “Benderby. He’ll probably be round asking after Crael. Well, I told him to meet us both here and he’s going to be deuced put out by it all. Eustace Benderby. Name’s on the front there.” Melrose glowered at the clerk as if the man’s schooling must have given him a great deal of trouble; he couldn’t even read the direction on the note.

  The clerk slipped the note in one of the cubbyholes kept for mail. “I shall certainly do that, sir.”

  Melrose mumbled distractedly and marched out.

  And once on the street, he started whistling again “Limehouse Blues.”

  10

  The clerk’s confusion deepened visibly when Chief Inspector Richard Jury turned up two hours later.

  “There isn’t any trouble, is there, Chief Inspector?”

  That sort of “trouble” was alien to the Sawry. “No, I don’t think so. I’m inquiring about one of your guests.” Jury pulled out the picture of Dillys March, taken when she was young. “Ever seen this woman?”

  The clerk took the picture in his gloved hand and looked at it for some moments before he said, “There is something familiar about her. But I can’t be sure. It’s rather an old picture, isn’t it?”