“Oh, Inspector Jury, what would I do without you? It’s such a relief you living here, a real Scotland Yard policeman.” Quickly, she walked over to the fireplace, where an electric log burned, and took down a package from the white plaster mantel. She held it out to him. “For Christmas. Go on, go, open it.” She made a pushing motion with her hands.
“I don’t know what to say. Thank you.” He undid the bit of ribbon and flimsy tissue. It was a book. Quite beautiful, leather with gold tooling and a black, silk marker. Virgil’s Aeneid.
“I saw you reading it one day, at the Angel, remember? I know you love to read. Me, I don’t understand that deep stuff. It’s all Greek to me.” (Jury smiled.) “I read film magazines, romances, trash, ah, you know. Is it all right?” She seemed truly anxious about whether she had got the right book.
“It’s wonderful, Mrs. Wasserman. Really. Merry Christmas to you. You’ll be okay now?”
• • •
As he climbed the stairs with his book, Jury thought, Poor woman. That particular He who terrified her, from what vantage point had she seen His feet? Ground-level? Mat-level? Bed-level? Had she had to look down in order to avoid looking up? It was better for Mrs. Wasserman that The Feet stopped just beyond her grilled windows than that they should kick down the doors of memory.
CHAPTER 5
The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance. Who has not, in his imagination, leaned from its timbered galleries over the cobbled courtyard to watch the coaches pull in, the horses’ breath fogging the air as they stamp on dark winter evenings? Who has not read of these long, squat buildings with mullioned windows; sunken, uneven floors; massive beams and walls hung round with copper; kitchens where joints once turned on spits, and hams hung from ceilings. There by the fireplace the travelers of lesser quality might sit on wood stools or settles with cups of ale. There the bustling landlady sent the housemaids scurrying like mice to their duties. Battalions of chambermaids with lavendered sheets, scullions, footmen, drawers, stage-coachmen, and that Jack-of-all trades called Boots waited to assist the traveler to and from the heavy oaken doors. Often he could not be sure whether the floor would be covered with hay, or what bodies might have to be stepped over or crept past on his way to breakfast, if he slept in an inner room. But the breakfast more than made up for the discomfort of the night, with kidney pies and pigeon pies, hot mutton pasties, tankards of ale, and muffins and tea, poached eggs and thick rashers of bacon.
Who has not alighted with Mr. Pickwick in the courtyard square of The Blue Lion at Muggleton; or eaten oysters with Tom Jones at The Bell in Gloucestershire; or suffered with Keats at the inn at Burford Bridge? Or, hungry and thirsty, who has not paused for a half-pint of bitter and a cut of blue-veined Stilton, flakey Cheshire, or a knob of cheddar; or known that he would always find the brass gleaming, the wood polished, the fire enormous, the beer dark, the host tweeded, and, upstairs, the halls dark and narrow, the snug room nearly impossible to find — up two stairs, down three, turn right, up five, walk ten paces, like a child playing hide and seek or a counting game? If the streamers have gone from the white caps, and the host is there more in spirit than in fact, like a smile hovering in air — still, with all of this wealth in the vaults of memory, one could almost forget that the pound had dropped.
• • •
The Man with a Load of Mischief was no exception — a half-timbered, sixteenth-century coaching inn through the archway of which Melrose Plant now drove his Bentley, parking it in the unused stableyard. Here the stagecoach from Barnet might have clattered in and pulled up in the cobbled court, ringed round with galleries, over which Molly Mog waved and flirted with the footmen. To Lady Ardry, it was the quintessential English inn. In summer, clematis spread its long tendrils over the face of the building, competing with the climbing roses. The inn sat on a hill facing south, a long building which looked as if it had been put together in sections, in a drunken wave. Its thatched roof fitted its windows like a collar. Amid the green and glowing fields of summer, the silver, misty fields of winter, its diamond-paned windows looked off toward the village of Long Piddleton.
When Melrose Plant and Lady Ardry arrived, it was dark, and this made the lighted inside of the inn that much more inviting. The inn was a free house and its proprietor had every intention of keeping it from being swallowed up by the breweries.
That proprietor, Simon Matchett, greeted them now at the front door, making a good deal over Agatha but less over Melrose Plant, whom he afforded a nod and a smile, but the smile was not very broad. Melrose disliked him; he sensed in Matchett a climber after both wealth and position, a man of surface polish but underlying vulgarity. To be fair, he wondered if he might not simply be jealous. Matchett’s popularity with women could hardly be overstated. All he needed to do to enhance a door was walk through it. Matchett’s apparent attachment to Vivian Rivington disturbed Melrose.
Perhaps even the tragedy in Matchett’s past — something involving his deceased wife and another woman — might have added to the man’s romantic image, like a scar on the face of a duelist. This had all happened so long ago that not even Lady Ardry had been able to dig out all the details.
They stood now in the low, dimly lit hall, hung about with sporting prints and stuffed birds, his aunt and Simon Matchett making small talk smaller. Melrose simply leaned against the wall, the top of his head just grazing a rather tatty-looking brace of stuffed pheasant. He studied the dusty coaching prints on the other side. There were the passengers being deposited in a snowy bank as the coach gaily overturned. And now here they were whooping into the cobbled courtyard as Betsy Bunt waved from the upper gallery. Melrose wondered why coaching seemed to be regarded back then as a sport, something like rugby or bowls. He watched as his aunt and Matchett sauntered down the hall toward the saloon bar, ignoring him. Melrose started up the hall, where a narrow staircase lined with more pictures — these of grouse and pheasant hung upside down by their spindly feet — led to the long corridor of small, gabled bedrooms on the upper floor. On the right was the dining room. It had a low-beamed ceiling, with several stone monoliths as the chief support. They also served to section off alcoves, wherein sat tables. The stone was rough hewn, and the slabs looked too delicately poised between ceiling and floor to offer comfort. His aunt thought the room quaint, something like the refectory of an old monastery, which it probably was. Melrose always felt he was eating at Stonehenge. But the overall chilly effect was broken by Oriental rugs, fresh flowers, red-globed lamps on the tables, and polished brass plates lining the walls. Twig, the elderly waiter, was doing his best to look overworked by fussing red napkins into empty water goblets. The waitress, Daphne Murch, did the heavy stuff. She was inching along now with a laden tray, moving toward two prim old ladies seated in one of the alcoves. There was not much custom tonight; perhaps some were put off by the recent murder.
Twig was mumbling reprimands to Daphne Murch. Poor Murch could never do anything right, and that extended to finding dead bodies in the cellar.
“Melrose!” It was his aunt’s voice, from the saloon bar. “Will you be forever mooning about the dining-room door? Come along, come along!”
Should he have answered Yes, Auntie and skipped along with his stick and ball?
Agatha had seated herself at the little table in the bay window, on the one comfortable, cushioned chair, leaving the hard bench for Melrose. Matchett was lounging to her right. The diamond panes gave back the flickering lights of the monstrous stone fireplace across the room. Enormous logs spilled helter-skelter across its stone floor, unscreened. The flames surged and subsided and surged again as if entertaining ugly thoughts of their own. Unaware of its proximity to the gates of hell, a large dog of uncertain credentials was flopped on the hearth, dozing. When it saw Melrose come in, it opened one eye and watched his progress across the room. After he was seated the dog lumbered up, making its long-haired, clumsy progress to their table.
Its liking for Melrose he could never understand, for he did not return the admiration and tried to ignore the dog. Since it stood waist high it was like trying to ignore a woolly mammoth. The dog shoved its nose under Melrose’s armpit.
“Mindy, down,” said Matchett without much conviction.
In the meantime, Twig had shuffled in and taken their order for drinks. A pink gin for Agatha, a martini for Melrose. She leaned her ample bosom on folded arms and said, “Now, my dear Matchett, let’s have Murch in here. She may’ve remembered something else.” His aunt had acquired this silly habit of addressing men by their last names (My dear Plant, my dear Matchett), which Melrose found affected. No one talked like that anymore, except in the sanctum sanctorum of dusty men’s clubs, where rigor mortis seemed a cause rather than an effect of death.
Melrose knew his aunt only wanted the opportunity of putting questions to Daphne Murch in her best New Scotland Yard manner. “Why don’t you leave that poor girl alone?” he asked, striking a match against a small holder on the table and lighting a cigar.
“Because I’ve an interest in this whole, grisly business, even if you don’t! And the girl might have remembered something odd.”
“I should imagine that finding one of the paying guests with his head in a beer keg was distinctly odd. One can’t get much odder.”
“Let’s let her be,” agreed Matchett. “It’s all made her horribly upset, Agatha.”
Agatha was not happy. It was clear she wanted an entrée into the recounting of her own part in the finding of the body, which she managed to make a bit handsomer every time she told it. At least, thought Melrose, the Murch child stuck to the same story every time, afraid, perhaps, that any change in her account would see her in the dock of the Old Bailey.
As Twig sat their drinks before them, Matchett said, “What do you think, Plant, about this business?” He always managed to bring Melrose into conversations as if he had found him, like an old suit of clothes, on a Oxfam rack.
Melrose studied his cigar. “I suppose I agree with Wilde. Murder’s a mistake. You shouldn’t do anything you can’t talk about after dinner.”
“How cold-blooded of you —” Agatha began, but was interrupted by Matchett’s rising to greet two people who had walked into the bar. “Here’s Oliver and Sheila.”
Melrose watched his aunt try on several smiles to see which one fit. She loathed both Oliver and Sheila, but couldn’t let it show. Although Melrose shared her dislike of Oliver Darrington, he thought Sheila a pretty good sport. She was euphemistically described as Darrington’s “secretary,” but all knew she was his mistress. And although she appeared to be little more than a hanger-on, like a starlet on the arm of a producer, Melrose suspected she had twice the brains Darrington had — not much of a compliment, since he had none. What she concentrated largely on showing was her body, which, together with her face, made a very pleasant package. Melrose did not really go for the type, though he could understand how many men would. He liked a woman to look at him out of clear and honest eyes — Vivian Rivington’s eyes, perhaps. Sheila’s were so heavily outlined that he often got the impression, close up, of looking at a very pretty seal.
Sheila and Oliver drew up chairs, slung their coats across them, and seemed prepared to talk about the one subject Melrose was sick of.
“Oliver’s got a theory,” said Sheila.
“Only one?” asked Melrose, staring at a moose above the bar, whose cracked white plaster lips were in need of seeing-to by a taxidermist.
“It’s horribly clever,” said Sheila. “Just you listen.”
Melrose preferred to study the moose.
“Don’t you think so, Mel?” Sheila was nudging him.
“Think? About what?” Melrose yawned. His stomach rumbled.
Sheila pouted. “Oliver’s theory. About the murders. Haven’t you been listening?”
“Pay no attention to Melrose,” said Lady Ardry, adjusting her fox-fur neck piece. “He never listens.” Melrose thought the little glass eyes of the fox were imploring him. From the moose to the fox. Had he become a lover of the wild?
Whether Melrose wanted to know or not, Sheila was leaning across the table toward him, pouring out Oliver’s theory: “That it’s someone with a grudge against Long Piddleton. Someone that was wronged by the town, and the wound festered and festered, and he’s seen a way to get his revenge.”
“Why didn’t he just toss his badge in the dirt?” asked Melrose, discarding the long ash from his cigar. “Gary Cooper did.” He was very fond of old westerns.
Sheila looked perplexed and Oliver stopped smiling cleverly.
“I told you, Sheila. Pay no attention to him. Pretend he’s not here,” said Agatha, who then asked for another pink gin.
But Sheila persisted. “Oliver’s writing a book, you know. A kind of fictionalized documentary about this sort of thing —”
“This sort of thing?” inquired Melrose, politely.
“You know, about especially weird sorts of murders —”
“Come on, Sheila, don’t give it all away,” said Darrington. “You know I don’t talk about works in progress.”
Agatha was looking grim. In Long Piddleton, he was her chief competition, having enjoyed a modest fame for several years as a writer of detective novels. The fame (much to her delight) was racing downhill after his last effort.
Oliver now asked, with a deprecating laugh, “Who was it said, ‘If I want to read a good book, I’ll write one’?”
Probably you, thought Melrose, turning his attention back to the moose.
Simon Matchett tried to act the part of the perfect host, though Melrose knew he held Darrington in contempt. “That’s an interesting theory, Oliver. Someone with a grudge — but, surely, he would have to be psychotic.”
“Well, good God, he must be in any event, to go drowning people in beer and stuffing them up on wooden beams. The point is, these two men were perfect strangers to Long Pidd; now what possible motive —”
“You mean, we’ve been saying they’re strangers,” put in Melrose, a little fed up with their assumptions masquerading as facts.
They all looked at him as if he’d just pulled out a snake from under the table.
“Whatever in the world do you mean, Mel?” asked Sheila. Melrose watched as she put her hand over Matchett’s. Even old one-track-mind Sheila, who would gladly kill half the village to keep Oliver, could not resist this gesture.
“I think he’s saying that someone in Long Pidd must have known them,” said Simon, lighting a cigar. He got it going and then said, smiling, “So who do you think did it, then?”
“Did what?”
Simon laughed. “The murders, old chap. Since you seem to think it was someone in our fair village.”
Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? Now he would have to go along with the little game. “You, probably.”
They made, the group at the table, a rather nice little frieze: hands stopped in midair, mouths dropped open, as if the hinges had stuck; drinks paused at lips, cigarettes dangled. Indeed, the only one not locked into the still was Simon himself, who was laughing. “Marvelous! I could have been upholding the honor of my female guests, protecting them from the vile advances of Small.”
Melrose wondered at Matchett’s facility for driving an insult round the bend and having it come back a compliment.
“I find your sense of humor revolting, Melrose,” said Agatha.
“It’s always worse on an empty stomach, dear Aunt.”
CHAPTER 6
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22
Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury and his companion, Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, alighted from the 2:05 from London into a cloud of steam, on the other side of which came forth a figure, spectrelike. When the steam cleared, the figure formed itself into Constable Pluck of the Northamptonshire constabulary.
As he stowed Jury’s scarred valise in the rear of the bright blue Morris, Pluck said, “Superintendent Pratt’s waiting for
you in Long Piddleton. He asked me to apologize for not meeting you personal, sir.”
“Quite all right, Constable.” As they drove out of the station and into Sidbury, Jury asked, “Have you come up with any ideas as to why the body of Ainsley was stuck up there over the clock?”
“Oh, indeed, sir. It’s obviously a maniac doing these murders.”
“A maniac, is that it?”
Wiggins sat like a stone in the rear seat, his nose-blowing testifying to his still being among the living, for the time being.
They came to a roundabout clogged with traffic, but this didn’t deter Pluck, who scooted right in, nearly sending a Morris Mini to an early death in the rear of a Ford Cortina. Seeing the blue cone on top of the police car, the horns pulled their punches. “Near miss, that was,” said Pluck, implying it was everyone’s fault but his own. Then he took the Sidbury-Dorking Dean Road. Once beyond the twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit, Pluck hunched over the wheel, drove the speedometer up to fifty, and passed a lorry rounding a curve. He barely missed a black Mercedes coming from the other direction. As Jury brought his white-knuckled hand back from the dashboard, Pluck beamed and patted the instrument panel. “Nice little bugger, isn’t she, sir? Just got her last month.”
“You might not have her next month, Constable, at the rate you’re going.” Jury lit a cigarette. “I suppose the reporters have been thick on the ground over this.”
“Oh, God, yes. The ‘inn murders,’ they’ve been calling them. And don’t think people ain’t half-worried, afraid they’ll all be dead in their beds.”
“As long as they stay out of inn beds, perhaps they’ll be all right.”
The Man with a Load of Mischief Page 4