The Old Fox Deceived

by Martha Grimes

  The wall before them seemed to jut up out of the mist, a purposeless boundary for all Melrose could see. Hounds were rioting, and that didn’t mean a find, even to his un-tuned ear. Colonel Crael seemed to be warning them off, and the second whip was standing there looking much whiter than the cold allowed for.

  Dear God! thought Melrose, when finally he saw her.

  Olive Manning was lying across the wall, face down, like a huge rag doll, her legs hanging down one side, arms straight out and down the other. Blood was everywhere — running down the stone, staining the snow, smeared on breeches, black Melton coat, boots. It was as if she had tried, before she died, to hoist herself up and off the murderous stones. The fence would have made any horse and rider refuse it and look for a gate or some other way through it. It was not its height which precluded a jump, but the fact it was coped with knife-edged pieces of limestone, laid transversely. It would be like falling on spikes.

  “Get Jury,” said Melrose, to no one in particular.

  2

  “I found her, Inspector Jury; that is, Jimmy and I did.” Colonel Crael was leaning against the wall as if his legs wouldn’t hold him.

  Between the time the second whip had ridden to Cold Asby to telephone the Fox Deceiv’d, and Jury’s arrival, Melrose Plant had done a good job of fending off the field and Tom Evelyn an equally good one of rounding up hounds.

  There was no one now on the moor except for Jury, Wiggins, Colonel Crael, and the body of Olive Manning.

  Jury was silently cursing himself all the while he was examining the body, waiting for Harkins and the Scenes of Crime man. Had he not given Olive Manning her several hours of freedom this wouldn’t have happened. “When was the last time you saw her this morning?”

  “I don’t recall I did see her, Inspector. There must be some fifty hunt members turned out; it’s a large field for this time of year. I wasn’t really looking for Olive.”

  “How was it she got off by herself? She was ahead of hounds?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Perhaps she’d been following the first fox, Tom’s fox.”

  “Tell me what happened, then.”

  “We were having a very fast gallop. Hounds must have gone for a half-hour or so without a check. Well, it’s a good scenting day, so they held on and held straight for Dane Hole. After that the pack divided about a half-mile back near Kier Howe. It’s the other side of Cold Asby. At any rate, I saw this fresh fox break from Badsby Hole. The second whip —that’s Jimmy —raised a view and we were off. As we neared this damnable fence, I wondered, Why are they checking so suddenly? I thought the line had been crossed and the ground foiled, you know, sheep-trodden. Sheep are worse than cattle sometimes; they can wipe out scent like a sponge—”

  Jury interrupted: “Yes. Go on.”

  “Then hounds went down the fence. I thought they were searching out the gap — there is one some way farther on, and then . . . well . . . Jimmy had come up beside me just when they started rioting. We both reached . . . Olive at the same time. And a few moments later Evelyn came down the hill over there with hounds in full cry.” The Colonel shrugged, looked off into the gray light. “That’s all. Evelyn got hounds under control and packed them off.”

  Jury turned away from the remains of Olive Manning. “Sergeant Wiggins, take the jeep and Colonel Crael and get back to Old House and make sure no one leaves.”

  “That’ll work a hardship on them, Inspector,” said Crael. “Some of them have to hack all the way to Pitlochary, and I’m sure—”

  “I don’t give a bloody damn how far they have to hack.”

  3

  Dr. Dudley wiped his hands and shook his head. “Clever. But couldn’t have happened.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jury, watching Harkins’s men feather out much like hounds, spreading thin all along the stone wall. They were combing everything—ground, cracks, snow for evidence.

  Harkins stood in his sheepskin-lined coat, smoking. “Clever is right.” Harkins ran his gloved hand across the stones. “I shouldn’t like to fall on that, not at all.”

  The doctor was packing up his bag. “Fall on it. But it won’t kill you, though it’d do a bit of damage.” He snapped his bag shut and got up. “Those stones will lacerate, but they can’t go through you like a row of knives. The wounds weren’t made by the stones, that’s all.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Jury said, looking at Dudley.

  “Same thing, I’d say, as was used on the Temple woman.”

  “And since we still don’t know what that was . . . ” Harkins went over to the spot where Olive Manning’s horse had been found, simply standing, as if waiting for her to remount. The body had been moved at Jury’s go-ahead and was being transported in its plastic cover to a waiting van, whose red light winked in the ghostly weather. The men from Pitlochary had reached the desolate murder-scene on an old dirt road which crept up from the Pitlochary-Whitby road and wound across Howl Moor. From there on it was rough going to where they were now. “So someone stabbed her, threw her over this wall to make it look as if the horse had thrown her, and then rode off. Clever, very. Except the someone was not so clever about the horse. It was standing on the wrong side of the fence.” Harkins clipped the end of a hand-rolled cigar.

  Jury looked at him. He wished Harkins were not quite so much of a martinet. He was a very good cop.

  The doctor said, “It would have happened about four, five hours ago. I’ll know better when I get her back to the morgue-room.”

  “Just before the hunt, then. It began around seven or seven-thirty, I understand.”

  “Hellish hour,” said Harkins, looking round at the cold, bleak moor. “And a hellish spot to meet someone.”

  “Yes. But I guess we know why it was chosen,” Jury said.

  • • •

  Jury nearly had to swim through a brown river of hounds, tails waving like flags, being herded into the rear of a waiting van by two of the hunt servants. Tom Evelyn came toward him on a glossy bay. Jury wondered how it was that some men fit their vocations so well. Scarlet-coated, leather-legged, up on that horse, Evelyn looked as if he’d been painted in place.

  “I’d like you to stick around for a while, Tom.”

  Evelyn touched his fingers to his cap, but said nothing.

  All across the grounds of Old House were scattered horse-carts, caravans, vans, trucks, cars, Land Rovers. Jury walked across the court, past the steaming horses, the men and women collected there in better or worse spirits, probably depending on how much of the stirrup cup they’d imbibed. Jury was starting up the stair when he heard a voice behind him:

  “Inspector Jury. I’ve brought you something.”

  Lily Siddons sat atop Red Run, her chestnut mare, and looked simply smashing. She was a far cry from the aproned lass he’d seen in the Bridge Café kitchen. She was wearing neither the black Melton nor the plain tweed of the other women. Lily was dressed in a velvet jacket of hunter’s green. It was hard to believe this was the same girl. Her amber eyes glinted even in this dull, morning light. Her cap was off, hitched to the bridle and her gold hair was blown by a small breeze. She was no longer “Cook’s girl.” This was her milieu. She looked elegant, composed, secure.

  She looked, indeed, every inch a Crael.

  • • •

  He reached up for the silver cup she was handing down to him. “What is it?” Jury tried to smile, but found it hard going.

  “Stirrup cup, something to take the chill off.” Her eyes darkened as he had seen them do before when she was troubled. “Terrible. I’ll tell the truth. I didn’t like Olive Manning, and there’s no point—” She shrugged slightly, moved Red Run off through the courtyard, the hooves echoing on the cobbles. Jury did not drink, just held the cup, as if transfixed. He watched her dismount there in the stables and wondered how in hell he could have been so blind.

  As he watched her the fog seemed to lift, disperse, recede back into the trees. There was no sun visible, but there
were clear tones. The sky was milky; the morning shone like old pewter. And the fragments of Lily Siddons’s life flew, in his mind, into place like broken bits of a kaleidoscope to form a design.

  The gold-dust twins: Julian and his brother Rolfe. Mary Siddons being discharged, summarily, by Lady Margaret. Rolfe, ladies’ man (and seldom the proper lady) whisked away to Italy. And Mary Siddons’s suicide.

  The gold-dust twins. That incredible hair, which he’d noticed the first night when she stood with the light behind her. Lady Margaret’s hair, passed on to Lily Siddons. Colonel Crael’s granddaughter.

  4

  Ian Harkins loosened his bindings, so to speak, unbuttoning that rich suede and sheepskin coat to reveal the slate blue suit beneath it. He settled back, crossing one silk-clad ankle over his knee, taking his ease in slow motion, keeping them all waiting.

  They were in the Colonel’s study — Jury, Harkins, the Colonel, and Wiggins. Jury had just filled Harkins in on what he had discovered in London and Harkins was none too happy that his own men — that he — hadn’t discovered it. Since Jury had bested him (at least, that’s the way Harkins clearly regarded it) on the London end, Jury had decided to let Harkins commence with the questioning in the Colonel’s study.

  Harkins refused the Colonel’s offer of a good cigar in favor of one of his better ones, slipping the cellophane from it. He lit it with a silver lighter and went about drawing it to a red coal. Jury let him take his time, let him, as Les Aird might have put it, “get his act together.” It must have been a tough act, for Jury also suspected that Harkins would have preferred not to tread on the toes of rank and privilege — in this case, the Colonel’s toes. His options were slim, then; he would not want to appear the sycophant in front of Jury, by deferring to Sir Titus Crael. He was the type of person to go whole hog the other way, to be abusive. For Harkins, Jury imagined this was not a quantum leap. Jury only wished that Harkins’s temper were less divided, for underneath he felt the man was a good policeman, shrewd and perceptive.

  Looking at Harkins now, who sat there looking at the Colonel, he felt he was getting the real Inspector Harkins, Harkins whole, Harkins en aspic.

  “Don’t you wonder, Sir Titus,” said Harkins, “why, if she was such a good horsewoman, she’d take that wall?”

  The question seemed to disorient the Colonel. “What?”

  “Why would Olive try to jump that wall?”

  Jury smiled slightly. Harkins was apparently on a first-name basis with Death, if not with Jury.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you?” Harkins asked, with a slight lift of an eyebrow.

  “No.”

  “Would anyone?”

  Colonel Crael frowned. “I’ve never known any of the field to do so before, no.”

  “Neither” — Harkins sliced the ash from his cigar with his little finger — “did she.” The Colonel looked at him, puzzled. “Oh, you must have suspected that, Sir Titus. She didn’t fall over those stones. She was put there.”

  “Put — ?”

  Harkins cut him off. “Where was your son this morning?”

  Coming out of left field as it did, the question hit the Colonel like a fist in the face. “Well, I suppose Julian was in bed. Or out for his walk. Sometimes he leaves early—”

  “Out for a walk on Howl Moor, perhaps?” Harkins crackled the slip of cellophane which had encased his cigar. The noise was grating, a good accompaniment to his tone. The Colonel’s color rose and he started to protest, but Harkins wouldn’t give him the opportunity. “In the circumstances, Sir Titus, didn’t you rather suspect your housekeeper had been murdered?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Harkins gave a snort of impatience at such dimness. “The murder of the Temple woman, of course. You say you went off on the line of a fresh fox, is that right?” The Colonel nodded. “You are far better acquainted with hunting etiquette than I, of course. But that strikes me as a breach of it.” The Colonel again could only register puzzlement. “I mean, Sir Titus, that your huntsman was following the first fox. It’s rather unusual for the Master to take off on the line of a second. That is not” — Harkins flashed a smile like a man showing a pass —“polite. No one would know that better than you.” He picked a bit of lint from his silk sock. “And the second fox took you straight to the spot.”

  The Colonel got very red, started out of his chair, sat down again, said, “Are you suggesting, Inspector Harkins, that I knew Olive Manning would be lying dead over that wall?”

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  In the silence that followed, Wiggins started to open a fresh box of cough drops, looked at Harkins, and put them back and sucked away on the tag end of the old one already in his mouth. Jury broke into this silence, and suffered a black look from Harkins for doing it. “Colonel Crael, we know that Gemma Temple was not your ward, Dillys. Her whole story was lies. She came here with the intention of picking up that inheritance.”

  Harkins threw a scathing look in Jury’s direction for giving out any information. In a way, Jury didn’t blame him, but he felt the Colonel had to know.

  Colonel Crael blinked his eyes slowly. Then he said, “Very well. But I just don’t see how she could have known so much about Dillys, about us.”

  “She was briefed.” Jury almost hated to say it. “By Olive Manning.”

  The Colonel’s face seemed to wither as he sat there. “Olive? Olive?”

  “I’m afraid so. She always resented the fact that her son was driven over the brink by Dillys March, or so she thought. It was by way of revenge. And greed. So Olive Manning was dangerous to someone—”

  “She knew who killed Gemma Temple.” Harkins said it with all the authority of a deus ex machina suddenly dropped onto the stage to clear up the sorry mess wrought by the players.

  “Perhaps,” Jury said. “Or perhaps something else. . . . ” He was thinking of the attempts made on Lily Siddons’s life. But he did not want to make any bald statement about Lily and the relationship he suspected between her and the Crael family, so he skirted it. “That trip to Italy that your wife and son planned. Did it come about suddenly?”

  “It’s been such a long time. . . . ”

  “Did Lady Margaret want to get Rolfe away — from somebody? Some woman?”

  “I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  Neither did Harkins, who was looking very unhappy about the turn the questioning had taken.

  “I mean Mary Siddons.”

  His surprise couldn’t have been feigned. Jury was sure that if there had been something between Rolfe and Mary Siddons, the Colonel wasn’t aware of it. But Jury bet Lady Margaret had been. “She was a pretty girl, a lovely girl, Mary Siddons.” The Colonel was silent. “Isn’t it just possible there was a love affair?” Jury could tell from the changing expressions on the old man’s face that it was more than possible. It was probable.

  “Dear heavens.” The Colonel indrew his breath. “Margaret tried to sack the girl. It was just before she and Rolfe left on that trip. I always wondered why. I never believed Mary took anything. Well, I wouldn’t have her go, I simply wouldn’t, and I won the day on that point, but—”

  Certainly lost it on others, thought Jury. “You had no notion of that liaison?”

  “I think, Chief Inspector, it might be wise to get back to the business at hand.” Harkins was frustrated.

  “It is the business at hand, indirectly,” said Jury. “Could Olive Manning have known about Rolfe and Mary, Colonel Crael?”

  “Olive? Well, it’s just possible. She certainly was close to Margaret.”

  “How old was Lily then?” He kept the question as casual as he could.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Ten or eleven, she must have been.”

  Mary Siddons had kept quiet for all those years. Bought off or frightened off, a husband found for her, and Rolfe too weak or too uncaring to stand up to his mother. But Mary Siddons must have tried one last time to attach him, an
d failed dismally. Rolfe got spirited away by his mother. Jury didn’t know whether it was the presence of Ian Harkins or simply intuition which kept him from saying all of this aloud. But he didn’t.

  “What will happen now?” asked the Colonel.

  “There’ll be another inquest. Your son doesn’t hunt, does he?”

  The way Harkins snapped the question out startled even Jury. And the color drained out of the Colonel’s face now the questions had come round to Julian once more. “No.”

  “Where was he this morning, then?”

  “I couldn’t say. You asked me that before, Inspector.” His voice was weary.

  “And he doesn’t follow on foot?”

  “No, he doesn’t. Julian doesn’t like hunting,” answered the Colonel in a battered voice.

  “But he does enjoy long walks. Knows Howl Moor pretty well, I expect.”

  “I don’t like the implication of your questions, Inspector Harkins,” snapped Colonel Crael.

  Jury was tired of the bullying. “Anyone could have arranged to meet Olive Manning out there, anyone on foot or any member of the hunt. So walks across the moor don’t prove much who killed her.”

  For that little speech he was rewarded by two very different sorts of looks.

  After a moment’s reflection, Colonel Crael said: “But wouldn’t it be extremely difficult for the murderer to come upon Olive out there on Howl Moor by that wall?”

  “Apparently not,” snapped Harkins. “You did.”

  • • •

  “I think the old man was rattled,” said Harkins, as they stood in the long gallery. A woman came out of the dining room, looking upset. It was in there that Harkins’s men were questioning the hunt members.

  “Yes, I think he was, too,” said Jury. “I certainly was.”

  Harkins smiled grimly. “That a compliment? Or don’t you care for my methods?” He applied flame to a fresh cigar, then said, “Julian Crael is the one I’d really like to get my hands on. And I doubt very much he has an alibi this time.”