The Five Bells and Bladebone

by Martha Grimes

  The doctor shrugged. “Rigor’s already passed off in the face, the jaw, the hands. But not in the lower extremities.” He shrugged. “There’s the movement of air to be considered in that thing” — he nodded toward the secretary — “that might speed it up. And then there’s the stabbing itself — the violence of the death might speed up the rigor and make it pass off more quickly. Say, as a guess, thirteen, fourteen hours.” He stripped off the rubber gloves, put his instruments back, and asked dryly, “Could you deliver the corpse minus the coffin? Thanks.” He walked out.

  Two attendants came in carrying a stretcher and a polyethylene sheet. Trueblood closed his eyes as they made their way down the narrow aisle, one leg of the stretcher scraping against a rosewood breakfront.

  • • •

  Constable Pluck, having given over his desk to Superintendent Pratt and his one-room station to the Northants constabulary in general — not to mention Scotland Yard — had positioned himself like someone shouldering his way to the center of a photograph and seemed to be enjoying the situation immensely. Thus when Pratt asked him if he knew Simon Lean’s wife, the constable said he’d known the people up at Watermeadows as well as anyone. The statement was the perfect truth; however, since no one really knew them, apparently, Pluck was caught in the uncomfortable position of middleman.

  Pratt pushed the phone toward him. “Then call — what is it? Watermeadows — and inform them the police would like to talk with Mrs. Lean and her grandmother.”

  Then he turned to Jury. “You’ve said precious little, Superintendent.”

  “Precious little call to. This isn’t my patch. And,” he added, smiling, “I’m on holiday.”

  MacAllister gave him a look that said he’d wished he’d stay on it.

  “More or less a busman’s holiday, I’d say.” Charles Pratt leaned his chin in his hands and gave Jury a piercing blue glance. “You’ll make one of the best witnesses it’s ever been my luck to round up.” He sat back, still smiling, and rocked a little in the swivel chair. “We’ve just been called away from a messy domestic killing in Northampton. Time-consuming, half of the constabulary is on that job.” He paused. “I’m taking my men there, and I’ll break the news to her. It would be nice if you could just stop by later on . . . .”

  “ ‘Just stop by.’ ” Jury sighed. “Either that or I am to make myself available for questioning — as we say in the Job — at any old hour of the night or day. Charles, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Anyway, it’ll have to go through headquarters —”

  It was as if Pratt were simply completing Jury’s sentence for him: “— and Chief Superintendent Racer, after one or two acerbic comments about a murder having occurred the moment you turned up, said that the least you could do would be to assist. As he put it, you’re at the disposal of the Northamptonshire constabulary, and he expressed regrets —”

  “— that my holiday would be interrupted. A policeman’s life is full of grief, Superintendent Pratt.”

  Pratt was unzipping a ten-packet of Benson and Hedges. “His very words. Cigarette?”

  Eight

  “WAS THE KILLER,” asked Melrose, studying the ragged hindquarters of a pewter-colored dog curled on Marshall Trueblood’s hearth, “trying to conceal or reveal? Good Lord, it must have been obvious Marshall here would discover it as soon as he opened that writing desk.”

  “Truer words have never been spoken, old sweat.” The words were muffled, coming as they did from a face pressed against the back of an ivory brocade sofa. He was lying there, arms hugging his waist. “And to top it all, I haven’t got my Ulysses.”

  “Oh, stop it,” said Melrose. “Sit up like a man.” Melrose punctuated this statement by rapping his walking stick several times on the coffee table.

  “First time I’ve ever been asked to do that.”

  Jury smiled as Trueblood sighed hugely, unwound himself from his fetal position, and sat up. His hair was ruffled, his silk shirt wrinkled, his scarf hanging limply.

  “And this,” said Melrose, “is the first time I’ve seen you looking anything other than sartorially perfect. Why are you letting all of this mess get to you? We know you’d nothing to do with it.” He looked innocently at Jury. “Don’t we?”

  Trueblood nearly strangled himself with an adjustment to his scarf, mimicking Melrose. “ ‘Don’t we, don’t we?’ ” He looked accusingly at Jury. “Nor did I hear you answer him. Well?”

  Jury pulled at his earlobe as if considering. He was sitting on the arm of the couch from which Trueblood had now risen, since all the chairs in the room with their gilt legs, fretwork, or little claw feet looked entirely too delicate to bear his weight. It was a room as sleek and silky as its owner, and nothing in it was less than a hundred years old, he bet, except for the rough-looking gray dog coiled on a flimsy bit of rug before the fireplace screen, and he even wondered about it. Occasionally, it yawned, creaked up on all fours, turned and turned and collapsed again.

  “Thanks. Couple of mates you two are.” Trueblood gave them as black a look as the Black Russian he was taking from a cloisonné box. “Why am I letting it get to me?” he asked, standing with head bowed, the very picture of tragedy. “The Northants police have practically turned my cottage into one of their incidents rooms, have questioned me round the clock —”

  “The clock hasn’t gone round; only a couple of hours —” said Melrose helpfully.

  “—And,” said Trueblood, “they are on the verge of reading me my rights. I can’t imagine why that makes me nervous.”

  “Come on, now,” said Jury, who’d slid onto the sofa vacated by Trueblood. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Neither would Norman Bates.”

  Melrose went on: “The body could much more easily have been disposed of in the lake or in the grounds or downriver. Even fetched over to my property . . . now there’s an interesting possibility . . . .”

  “Let’s not explore it, if you don’t mind,” said Jury. “Instead, the body was stuffed into a chest that was to be collected almost immediately. Hmm. You don’t really think it was Browne, do you?” he asked Trueblood.

  “Why not? The man can’t abide the idea that he’s a mere dilettante and I’m an expert. I don’t write, of course, but then neither does he. Joanna the Mad told me about that manuscript of his. Now there’s a thought: why didn’t he kill her instead of Simon Lean?”

  “What manuscript?” asked Jury.

  “About an hallucinating terrorist at Wimbledon. Or was it Doncaster? He thought Joanna might use a little clout. Send it to her editor, I expect. She said her editor would hire a terrorist to kill her for forcing Theo’s manuscript on him. Well, T.W.B. hasn’t spoken to her since, of course. Won’t carry her books in that bird’s nest of his . . . Stop prodding my dog, damnit.”

  Melrose drew back his walking stick. “Sorry. Didn’t Simon Lean have something to do with a publishing house? Did he work at one?”

  “Work? Him? . . . Or do I recollect that he said something about a publishing house that the Summerstons counted amongst their investments?” Trueblood raised his foot, shod in Italian leather, to inspect the shine.

  “So you did know him, more or less?” asked Jury.

  “Less, much less. He came into the shop once . . . well, Pratt’s going to find out anyway.”

  “Find out what?”

  “That I sold him a dagger-cane. He collected stuff like that.” Trueblood nodded toward Melrose’s cosher. “Tried to buy that, too, but I was saving it for Melrose. It was some time ago, two months, three.” He sighed and slid down on the sofa. “How grim.”

  Jury helped himself to a Black Russian, which he looked at with some suspicion before lighting up. “Don’t worry; that won’t count for much except to MacAllister.”

  “He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he? Thick as two boards and probably can’t stand one of my sexual persuasion.” Trueblood rose and started pacing.

  Melrose said, “I didn’t know you had one.”

>   “It would be interesting if Mr. Browne had approached Lean about his book.”

  Trueblood stopped to study himself in a cheval glass — adjusting his cravat, smoothing back his hair, his flirtation with the gallows apparently over for the time being. “I’m sure T.W.B. approached him, but I doubt it was just for a manuscript.”

  “You’re not suggesting Lean was gay, are you?”

  “Lord, no. That was the trouble, as far as T.W.B.’s concerned. And then to have his sister-in-arms, that Demorney person, meeting him on the sly . . . The more I think of it, the better Theo Wrenn Browne looks as a candidate. Kill two birds with one stone. Simon and yours truly. What a coup. It would fire the imagination of an hallucinating terrorist turf accountant, or whoever the idiot is in his book.”

  Jury checked his watch and rose. “I’m on my way to Watermeadows; ring there if MacAllister turns the thumbscrews.”

  Nine

  ITS SILENCE, its absence of life in the midst of what had been splendor were the things that struck Jury first about Watermeadows.

  The gardens covered acres and encompassed pools, reflecting ponds, statues now crumbling and patchy with moss all surrounding a baroque house. In the front was a formal pond from whose centerpiece of marble children and dolphins Jury imagined water must have gushed up and outward, falling round an elaborately carved basin in a curtain translucent and shimmering in the May light of another year. No water gushed from it now. And on the sloping hill behind the large house were terraced gardens. Thus in the midst of what was otherwise a splendid English arrangement of yew and box hedges, beds of grape hyacinths, long borders of aubrietas and wallflowers, there had been at one time an attempt to bring to the English formality something of the Italian, water springing up from hidden reservoirs and cascading down the hillside.

  Around the drive were yew trees; beyond them, paths winding through herbaceous borders, row after row of pink and mauve and blue, beds and carpets of flowers, bushes, sumach shrubs, low and high walls, and what looked like an ancient cupola, some sixteenth-century ruin, nearly overgrown with moss. Out there in the distance, beyond a screen of beech trees, he glimpsed silvery water and the roof of a small building that might have been the Watermeadows summerhouse.

  Watermeadows was a splendid rotting beauty, but Jury saw no one about to enjoy its splendor.

  • • •

  The servant who opened the door was a frail old form who fit the grand design of the estate. This was Crick (he told Jury), older than Plant’s butler Ruthven, thinner and dustier, as if he, together with the broken marble figure in the foyer, a faded painting of Malvern, and a worn Antwerp carpet, needed a good touching up.

  He asked Jury if he would be so kind as to wait, that he would tell Lady Summerston that he was here.

  When Jury said that it was Mrs. Lean that he had come to see, Crick simply replied that Mrs. Lean was resting — after all, it had been a dreadful shock — and it was Lady Summerston that he would see first in the circumstances.

  That the butler, in his old-world and excessively polite way, took it upon himself to decide what circumstances best fit whom, so amused Jury that he simply did as he was bid — waited in a large room off the rotunda-like entry-room.

  • • •

  The room was huge, shadowy, high-ceilinged, and nearly empty of furniture. At the far end was a Regency sofa whose gilt was peeling, flanked by armchairs in worn tapestry. They sat near a fireplace with a green and black marble surround. The floor was inlaid, the doorframes marble, the mirrors enormous. A massive crystal chandelier hung from a frescoed ceiling and there were in each corner Doric columns of the same green and black marble, as if the size of the room needed this extra support. Long windows behind the sparse furnishings, uncurtained, over-looked a terrace that served almost as a stage for the sweep of the gardens. Beyond the terrace were also formal pools, but these were now only drained concrete. To the side of each was a statue of a partially clothed maiden, one with a garland, one with a bouquet, both with their skirts slightly raised, toes pointing forward, as if they’d meant to dip them in the pool, marble harbingers of spring.

  He turned from the light and looked into the crypt-like darkness of the room. Soothing to the eye, depressing to the spirit. It reminded him of those palatial rooms he used to see in old war films, apartments from which the wealthy had fled, taking what possessions they could, before the enemy closed in.

  To Jury it was an environment he had come to dread more than any other, though he was not sure why: the ghostly elegance, the remnants of beauty, the fragmented past.

  • • •

  Crick returned to say that Lady Summerston would see him now.

  Like the rest of him, Crick’s voice was thin and reedy. As he led Jury to her room, he spoke of Lady Summerston as a rather frail person, “bit of a heart problem there, sir,” who seldom left her room. Nothing terribly serious, you understand, but that was the way it was when one got older, continued Crick, exempting himself — he whose wafer-thin lips, sunken eyes, and dewlaps would surely have made him, in the physical sense, at least, fit company for the lady he so devotedly served.

  He told Jury all of this while preceding him up the broad sweep of staircase. As they labored upward, he murmured about “this business, this business,” without actually directly referring to the murder of Mr. Lean. “This business” was quite naturally taking its toll on her ladyship, what with police here with their questions and taking over the old summerhouse. The formality of his dress — the old, black cutaway and starched collar — did not in the least reflect his manner, for Crick was as chatty as could be, although his breathing was growing raspier toward the top. He was, indeed, quite voluble about the murder and quite voluble in his own assessment of Mr. Lean, “with all due respect,” of which, Jury decided, there was little. During their alpine climb (would they never reach the top?), Jury pretty much decided it was Upstart Simon, and that Crick, for one, wouldn’t miss him and wouldn’t miss the furniture . . . . “That appallingly poor example of eighteenth-century secrétaire à abattant.”

  They had acquired the heady heights of the upper floor and Jury was glad that Trueblood hadn’t heard him.

  • • •

  Jury congratulated Crick on negotiating this stairway several times a day and with a tray in his hands. Crick told him then that there was a lift, but that he disliked this newfangled technology and that a bit of exercise did wonders to keep us all in the pink, didn’t it? The contraption (as he called it, pointing down the hall) with its old ironwork cage, gilt-painted, hardly seemed much of a technological advance. Near the top of the stair in a shadowy enclosure was a portrait of a young woman with dark hair and eyes, sitting on a bench in the grounds of Watermeadows. It was Mrs. Lean, said Crick, done ten years ago, but she never seemed to change.

  Down the dark hall they walked. A quick rat-tat on the door at the end was answered from inside. “Come!”

  • • •

  Lady Summerston’s room, or suite of rooms (for he was shown into a sitting room), was a clutter of Victoriana, completely out of keeping in both size and ambience with the rest of the big house.

  She herself was sitting outside, on the balcony, which overlooked the rear gardens and the crescent of lake that showed in the distance.

  “Superintendent!” she said gaily, looking up from a huge leatherbound book in which she’d been pasting stamps. On the chair beside her were several other albums, probably containing photographs, and a double deck of cards. She had, it would seem, enough hobbies to keep her going through many an afternoon on the balcony, for the balcony had an oddly lived-in look, despite its openness to the elements.

  Her voice, when she fluted his rank, was as gay as if she had been waiting for him all the day long, and made it appear that the death of her granddaughter’s husband was an event that made a change in an otherwise routine day of looking over albums or playing solitaire. She was positioning a stamp in her book and bringing her fist down on
it with a force that could have cracked the glass-topped table. Another dozen or more stamps had been dropped like confetti from a japanned box on the table before her, waiting to be pounded into her book.

  Lady Summerston was probably somewhere in her seventies, with fine, parchment-like skin and crisp brown eyes. But if Lady Summerston was frail, that fragility would have to be unearthed from what looked like dozens of pieces of clothes — a dragon-embroidered dressing gown, a ruby-colored Burmese shawl, a Victoria Cross on a chain round her neck, a palmetto fan, which she swished with the gusto of one waving off flies, and a pink turban-wrapped band to which was attached a weeping veil such as a certain caste of Indian women wear. Lady Summerston wore the Empire on her back.

  “Sit, sit,” she said, with a fluttery gesture, indicating one of the white ironwork chairs, which was, Jury found when he tried to adjust his tall frame to it, as uncomfortable as those chairs always appear to look, sitting clustered on the patios of the rich.

  Lady Summerston seemed in no hurry at all for him to explain his presence on this balmy afternoon on her balcony as she relentlessly thwacked another stamp into place. Since police had already appeared, perhaps she thought one more would make little difference.

  Jury smiled at the intensity with which she went about her pasting-up. “Got any special system, Lady Summerston?”

  “System? Good Lord, no. They’re just stamps. You stick ’em in any old way.” She turned the frown from Jury back to the stamps as if the beastly little things might have loosened and jumped to other squares while she looked away.

  “I thought perhaps you might be doing them by country,” said Jury. “All of those in front of you seem to be British Commonwealth.”

  “Of course they are.” (Thump!) “They’re Gerry’s — my late husband’s — collection. I found them amongst his belongings. I keep all of his things” — here she nodded off in a direction meant to indicate the hallway beyond her door — “in a room at the end. Sometimes I go in there just to have a look round. Most people would say that’s morbid. We’re supposed to get rid of anything that reminds us of the dead, I expect. Give it all over to charity or the church fête or Oxfam. As if we could rush headlong into forgetfulness.” Another stamp was aimed at its square. Bull’s-eye. “That seems to be what Simon thought.” She sighed, closed the album, and tapped her heavily ringed fingers on its surface. “Well, you’ve come about Simon and find me totally unrepentant.”