He was getting, thought Melrose, the answer he deserved — one that would stretch from here to Victoria Street and back. For a woman who could be determinedly cryptic, when Joanna the Mad got going, she traveled far and fast.
“Of course, I have difficulty keeping my pseudonyms straight. Ramona de la Mer is for the more exotic settings — Barbados, Montego Bay, Hong Kong, the Himalayas —”
Melrose tried to envision the couple on the cover of one of her books he had picked up tracking through a bunch of mountain goats in search of a guru.
“— Then there’s Robin Carnaby; in those the heroines are nurses or doing good work out in the Australian Bush; or well-bred shopgirls whose families have been ruined by something. The other two, Victoria Plum and Damson Duke, I got from jam jars. They’re nice for Englishy settings. Ruined castles, country manor houses, et cetera. That’s one of the ones I’m writing now: the heroine, Valerie, is an innocent — rich, of course — transplanted American who meets a mysterious — richer, of course — stranger on a plane. A collision, one might say, between two cultures. Although I doubt Henry James would agree, not when it comes to Matt and Valerie —”
Melrose wondered why Jury didn’t fall where he stood. He himself slid down in his seat and studied the style.
“How do you manage? Do you ever get your writing-names mixed up?”
“Of course. Once I had Ramona de la Mer writing a hospital exposé where a gorgeous lady doctor of nymphomaniacal inclinations — that was for the publisher who likes them randy — falls in love with a patient. But when I came to the end and realized this was a Ramona book and not a Robin, I simply turned the patient into a handsome Barbadian, stuck in some sand, and that took care of that. Naturally, I don’t have time to visit any of these exotic places I write about, but after all, one can see a long white beach quite as easily as a long white corridor, can’t one? I am actually working now on an entire new line of Heather Quicks — that is the name of the heroine. You see, I realized how much less work it would be to keep the same heroine and simply change the plot. Well, a little bit. Although my heroines are largely interchangeable, still this would relieve me of having constantly to go back and see what color hair, eyes, et cetera, each has. A new heroine means different bra sizes or bikinis. One needs a good memory for exposed flesh, but then I have my guidelines to refer to. And also one has to invent boring histories for them — families, friends, background, all of that filler stuff. Now with one heroine carried from book to book to book, I’d need only think up some dreadful problem for each story. I’m having her live in the Fens or the Norfolk Broads or Romney Marsh — some sort of place where the possibility of mysterious strangers turning up is increased tenfold.” She stared at Jury over the top of her pale rouge-colored glasses and said, “Like you, Superintendent! Ah. Now there’s a hero made to order. Why don’t you sit down?”
Jury smiled his thanks, pushed aside a Navajo blanket lying across the back of a wing chair of tired leather, tossed an apple core in the coal scuttle (already filling up with them), and sat down. Then, before another verbal onslaught, he said, “What about Simon Lean?”
A drawn bow could not have tightened more quickly. The question had stopped her cold, stopped all of them — Joanna, Ramona, Robin, Victoria, Damson, and Heather — dead in their tracks. “Oh. Oh,” was all she said, looking vaguely round the room, so recently peopled with leftovers from a Pirandello set, and finding it uncomfortably empty. “Absolutely frightful,” she went on, tucking a wisp of straying hair back into the bun at her neck.
“Did you know him well?” asked Jury, his face resting against his hand. Casual, almost sleepy he looked.
“Simon? Well, no. No, of course not —”
“But at least well enough to call him by his first name.” Jury smiled, as if to say, No harm meant.
Now she was busy tucking up her hair again, the pages on her lap sliding to the floor. Melrose reached to pick them up and she murmured her thanks. “Well, I expect it’s because his name’s on everybody’s lips; I mean, I scarcely knew the man at all.”
Jury’s smile broadened. “You know, everyone I’ve talked to just barely knew him, it seems. Except for Miss Demorney.”
The expression on her face shifted, but she said nothing. “It’s just that Watermeadows isn’t really in Long Pidd, you see. They’ve not much reason to come here. As for me, I stick close to my typewriter. An occasional drink at the Jack and Hammer is my social life.” As if inspired by this talk of socializing she said, “Wouldn’t you all like a sherry?” Without waiting for an answer she went to a drinks cabinet and returned with a decanter and three glasses.
“Invent something, Miss Lewes.”
Frowning, she looked up from her pouring. “What?”
“With all of your imagination, just make up a tale in which a corpse is found in a trunk or a closet or, of course, a fall-front desk.”
In spite of herself, she seemed fascinated, standing there clutching the sherry decanter and forgetting to give them some. “Something by Ramona, Robin, Victoria, or Damson Duke?”
“Oh, I’d much prefer Heather Quick as heroine.”
“Heather discovering a body.” She sat down heavily, decanter on one knee, glasses on another. “She could walk across the moor —”
“Fens,” said Melrose.
“Or broads. Or marsh. That would be best, I think. I’ve never been to Norfolk or even East Anglia, but that makes no odds. She could be squelching across —”
“Umm. No, tell it like you’d write it. Not ‘she,’ ‘Heather.’ ” Jury offered cigarettes around. Realizing she hadn’t poured their drinks, she did so, in quite a good balancing act. Probably like juggling her various writing names, thought Melrose, taking his sherry.
Joanna was clearly considering Heather’s dilemma as she bolted back one glass of sherry, poured another, and stood up, sherry decanter in hand.
“Let’s see, now: ‘Heather pulled off her wellies; it had been a beastly tramp across the marsh. She looked round the cottage, the fine old cottage out here in the middle of nowhere, and checked her watch. Ten o’clock. Hadn’t David said ten? She was irritated — no, she was bloody mad. Had she ever been able to depend on him?’ ” Joanna sat down on the fender again, and with her eyes closed, continued. “ ‘Tears began to spill from her sea-green eyes. Angry with herself, she brushed at them, looked at the port bottle, and poured herself a small one. Surely, just one wouldn’t hurt . . . .’ ” In her apparent delight that she might have found a new wrinkle in her plot, Joanna smiled slightly and rose, swinging the decanter to punctuate her thoughts. “ ‘Damn David!’ . . . No, let’s call him Jasper—”
Just don’t call him Melrose, thought Melrose, holding his glass toward the tick-tocking decanter. How on earth could Jury look so engrossed?
“ ‘Damn Jasper! How long could she let this affair go on? How long would she let him keep taking advantage of her? The promises he’d made . . . Heather’s eyes, used to looking out on the world calm and cool as the slate-gray ocean —’ ”
“Sea-green.”
“What?” She came out of her coma long enough to blink at Melrose.
“You said her eyes were sea-green before.” Melrose supposed she would describe his own eyes as “sparkling like emeralds.” Melrose smiled, avoiding Jury’s black stare.
Joanna laughed. “Oh, well, I do have trouble with eyes, hair, and extraneous details like that.”
“Mr. Plant perhaps doesn’t realize,” said Jury, “that distracting comments like that play hell with the flow of creativity.”
Melrose saw Jury look at Joanna with real slate-gray eyes, but very changeable gray. At the moment they looked storm-gray.
“Ah, but you do, Mr. Jury.”
“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking of writing my memoirs.” He held up his hand when Joanna looked, open-mouthed, about to remark on this. “We’ll talk about that some other time. Let’s get back to Heather.”
“Heather. All right
, she’s drinking her port, furious with David —”
Melrose bit his tongue. Did Polly Praed work like this?
“ ‘Heather refused to sit here, waiting. Let him think she simply hadn’t come at all. She pulled on her wellies and buckled her Burberry.’ ”
Thank God she’s leaving; perhaps we can too.
“ ‘She would simply go walk back across the beastly marsh to the pub . . . the inn where she’d booked a room, knowing in the back of her mind that this might happen, that Jasper wouldn’t be here. The inn she had disliked immediately; the owner sounded like a gossiping wretch who would go tell the world about her —’ ”
Who’s to tell? wondered Melrose.
“ ‘It was then that she saw the stain on the carpet. And when she looked more closely, she realized that it was a trickle leading away from the . . . cupboard.’ No . . . . ‘As she was pulling on her wellies she saw a dark line snaking across the rug from the cupboard. Blood. In horror, her slim hands flew to her mouth. The door that had been slightly askew looked as if it was opening!’ ”
In spite of himself, Melrose was edging forward in his chair, and was absolutely astonished when he heard Jury’s calm voice asking,
“Were you in love with Simon Lean, Miss Lewes?”
• • •
The rug at her feet was thick enough so that the decanter did not break when it slid from Joanna’s grasp. It rolled back and forth for a moment and stopped dead. A thin line of sherry oozed across the rug. She looked down at it blindly, then looked from Jury to Melrose and back again.
When she didn’t answer, Jury said, “I was wondering how many times he didn’t turn up. And how often you went to that summerhouse.”
• • •
“But that wasn’t supposed to be the question!” said Melrose as they walked back to the High Street. Joanna had simply refused to say anything, so Jury had said he would call on her again. Said it like a sympathetic doctor might to a fractious patient. “It was supposed to be ‘Was Simon Lean blackmailing you?’ Or something like that.”
“Why?” Jury looked up at the sky that had begun to darken, at the stars that showed there mistily as if behind a scrim.
“The coincidence of the publishing house. Blackmail or revenge. Perhaps Simon Lean had blasted one of her books a long time ago —”
“Lean was in the business end, accounting. Close to the money, you know.”
“I don’t see how on earth you deduced all that from Heather and Jasper.”
“A shot in the dark. When she gets wound up, even talking about the real world, she seems to forget herself.” Jury shrugged. “So I thought she’d get even more involved if she was telling a story. She couldn’t help herself. She even had her heroine staying at an inn in the middle of nowhere.”
“Like the Blue Parrot. Hell’s bells. I like old Joanna. I’d hate to think she was under suspicion.”
Jury smiled in the dark, shifting the stuffed monster from one arm to the other. “Not to worry, there’re no end of suspects.” They were nearing the Jack and Hammer. “And I have a suspicion I might find someone else in London. Simon Lean’s mistress, perhaps. If I can find her.”
“You’re not really going tonight?”
“Yes.”
They stood looking through the amber window of the Jack and Hammer, where Marshall Trueblood and Vivian Rivington were in deep conversation. “He just wanted the money,” said Jury, almost absently.
“Joanna’s, you mean?”
“I was thinking more of his wife.”
“What do you think? Is she the most likely suspect? Isn’t that usually so?”
“I expect so,” said Jury, watching as Trueblood collected the glasses and left his and Vivian’s table. Vivian was looking toward the window, where they stood in the unlit dark, looking not at them but through them.
“I’m off, then. I’ll be back, probably tomorrow. If I don’t have a breakdown on the M-1.”
Melrose watched him walk off down the shadowed street, the stuffed monster under his arm.
PART II
You owe me ten shillings, Say the bells of St. Helen’s.
Fifteen
TOMMY STOOD with his case on the pavement, much as he had stood on the dock at Gravesend. The fancy ironwork streetlamp, made to simulate the old gaslights, veiled him in its cone of light. The narrow, flat-roofed house had been done over in some attempt at Edwardian style; the ones on either side looked like cripples, broken windows boarded up. The first in the line was flush up against a black warehouse, graffiti fading from its slablike door. Limehouse Causeway and Narrow Street were pocked with such doors.
The address he was looking for was in Narrow Street. Its door had a brass knocker in the shape of a schooner. The house itself was up for sale, but the sign listed as if it had been planted there for some time. And no wonder, thought Tommy. More than two hundred thousand, leasehold. Sadie’s place was a basement flat. He wondered what her rent was; he’d have thought she’d more likely be living in one of the council flats across the road. Cap back on, he opened the wicket in the black iron railing and went down the four steps to Sadie’s flat, where a pinkish light glowed dimly behind frilled curtains.
He could not understand her absence; she’d known he was coming in late, and she said it would only take fifteen or twenty minutes to get to her place. Take a cab, she’d said; but he said he’d take a bus or the tube. That had made her laugh. Take a cab for once. But he hadn’t liked to spend the money she’d sent him on luxuries like cabs — and you always had to give a tip, and he wasn’t sure how much.
Now the door was locked, but since the dim light glowed behind the poplin curtains, he supposed she’d just gone out for a bit, gone down the pub, maybe. He lit a cigarette from the ten of Players he’d bought and inhaled as deeply as he could. Tommy hid his smoking habit, not that it was much of one. Aunt Glad was hell on smoking before you were at least eighteen. Why his lungs would collapse between fifteen and eighteen he didn’t know. Lungs, lungs, she kept nattering at him. If she ever saw him working side-by-side with Sid, cigarettes dangling out of the corners of their mouths, she’d probably kill him.
Again, he took the wristwatch with its broken strap from his pocket, shook it to see if it was running, wound it though it didn’t need winding. Exactly thirty-four minutes he’d been sitting here on the stone step, looking up sharply when he heard the click of heels, which was seldom. It would be another hour or so before the pubs closed, and he certainly hoped she wasn’t drinking and forgetting he was coming. He leaned his head back against the brickwork of the enclosure; his cigarette sparked the night as he drew on it. He stubbed it out suddenly, collected his case, and went up the stairs. He knocked and waited, knocked and waited. No one seemed to be in. The only lights were the streetlamp’s and Sadie’s.
Farther along, where Narrow Street converged with Limehouse Causeway, he saw a yellowish light flick on at the top, in what must have been one of those lofts the rich did up. Probably someone who’d been in bed and got up. Tommy left his case, walked along until he came to the warehouse. He could track the progress of the person up there by the light that moved from window to window, as if it were floating up there like an imprisoned moon. Then the house went dark for a moment until a rainy, rainbow pattern of colors washed over the stair where he stood from the stained-glass fanlight.
She’d been carrying an electric torch; that was what caused the ghostly movement of the light from window to window. Tommy had never seen any woman so good-looking, certainly not as old as this one, who had to be at least thirty, he guessed. Even Sadie wasn’t as pretty. This woman was tall and what they called “willowy” and had (at least from what he could tell in the dim light) long hair the color of Altman’s ale, Sid’s favorite drink. Smoky was what he’d call her eyes, though he couldn’t really make out their color.
When she asked him what he wanted, she frowned slightly.
“Sorry, miss, but that house down there — my sister live
s in the basement flat.” He stopped, embarrassed because he’d gotten her up.
It must have made her impatient, as if that was all he was going to say. “Yes?” she prompted him.
Nervously, he started wadding his cap as if he were playing an accordion. Bunch, spread, bunch, spread. “My sister’s not there, and there ain’t — isn’t — no one else at home. The thing is my sister —”
“What’s your sister’s name?” Opening the door to arm’s length, the hand of her outstretched arm held the door; her shoulder rested against the jamb. She seemed bored.
“Sadie. Sadie Diver. The thing is, she was to be here when I came, and I’ve been here for upwards of a half-hour, and there wasn’t no one else to ask. I’m her brother.”
“So I gathered,” she said, looking at a little wristwatch. “Probably at the Five Bells. It’s not eleven yet.”
Tommy frowned too. Ten was late to him; he was always up at dawn, his feet slapping down on cold linoleum. “Well, but . . .” He didn’t know what to say or ask. “Do you know her, then?”
“I don’t know the name. I may have seen her.” She yawned and ran both of her hands back through that old gold hair, looked at him and blinked. She couldn’t have been more bored.
“You mean you think I should go down to the —?”
“Five Bells. But that’s not the only pub . . .” Her voice trailed off, uninterested.
“It’s strange.”
“How, strange?”
Tommy thought a bit. “Well, really strange.”
“I mean in what way . . . oh, hell, you might as well come in. Can you fix fuses? All I’ve got for light is this damned thing.” She picked up the torch. “They went out a while ago. But not the whole street, obviously, because that streetlamp’s burning.” There was a kind of childish resentment in the tone. “Can you fix a fuse?”
Tommy was just looking at her. Of course, if you’re that pretty you’re expected to be dumb. He frowned. “You mean, can I change one? You don’t exactly ‘fix’ fuses. You just screw them in and screw —”
The Five Bells and Bladebone Page 12