“About this Ruby Judd. I understand she was due back but hasn’t turned up. When did she leave, exactly?”
“It was Wednesday, I believe — good heavens, a week ago. How time does fly. She asked my permission to leave for a few days to visit her people in Weatherington.”
“I see. Is there a picture of Ruby somewhere? In her room, perhaps?”
The vicar looked puzzled at this request. “I don’t know. Mrs. Gaunt might.” He called in Mrs. Gaunt, skeletal and unhappy looking, every inch her name, to go up to Ruby’s room and fetch down a picture if there were one.
Mrs. Gaunt made some sound deep in her throat which might have been directed at any one of them, and took her leave.
Lowering his voice to a whisper, as if he might be a little afraid of her, Mr. Smith said, “Mrs. Gaunt isn’t too pleased with Ruby. Says she’s always sitting about reading film magazines and such, or even when she’s supposed to be sweeping down the church, Mrs. Gaunt has once or twice caught her sitting down on the job — quite literally — in a pew.”
“A religious girl, was she?” asked Jury.
The vicar chuckled. “Hardly. She was putting lacquer on her fingernails.”
At least the old man wasn’t overly pious, thought Jury. He seemed to think Ruby’s behavior rather rich.
Mrs. Gaunt was back in double-time, tight-lipped, with two snapshots. “Stuck in the mirror, they was.” She made the snaps sound like naughty calendar poses. She sniffed and left.
The vicar passed them over to Jury. “But you’re not thinking something’s happened to Ruby, are you? You might ask Daphne Murch about her. She and Ruby were quite thick, being about the same age. Indeed it was the Murch girl who suggested Ruby to me.”
Jury put the snaps in his wallet. “You don’t seem worried, yourself, Vicar. Does Ruby do this sort of thing often?”
“Well, she’s gone off once or twice before. My guess is a boy friend — in London, perhaps. Ruby’s not a bad girl. But like so many of these young people, she’s a bit flighty.”
Jury changed the subject. “You’re a good friend of Mr. Bicester-Strachan. I know that you wouldn’t want to break any confidences, but if you could just fill me in on the details of that business in London . . . ?” Jury did not add that he knew nothing about “that business” at all. And he counted on the vicar’s taste for gossip to override his finer feelings and wasn’t disappointed, though certainly Smith made quite a show of protesting. He sputtered a bit, then settled down to telling what he knew. “Bicester-Strachan was a minor official in the War Ministry, and there was an, ah, ‘incident’: apparently, information was falling into the wrong hands, information that only Bicester-Strachan and a few others had access to. He was never prosecuted; no one could ever really prove anything, as far as I know. He doesn’t like to talk about it, as you can well imagine. But it explains his early retirement. Bicester-Strachan isn’t as old as he looks. Not much over sixty but he looks eighty and I know it’s all from the shock of that ugly business.” The Reverend Smith sat back and announced pontifically: “Agatha thinks it’s the Communists who are behind all this, and she could be right.”
Melrose Plant, who had been patiently silent throughout the visit, had to ask, “And just how does my aunt manage to work them in?”
The vicar thought for a moment. “I can’t honestly say. You know Agatha is so close.”
“Close?” It was the first time Melrose had ever heard secrecy listed among his aunt’s traits.
“Hmmm. We were just batting about theories, and she thought, what with Bicester-Strachan’s history . . . well, it’s possible, isn’t it? They could be after him?”
“How well do you know Mr. Darrington, Vicar?” asked Jury, trying to divert his attention from double agents.
“Not well, really. Not much of a churchgoer, is Darrington. Used to work in publishing in London. You know he wrote those mystery stories.” He seemed to enjoy his next observation: “There are times when I rather doubt that Miss Hogg is, as he says, his ‘secretary.’ ”
“There are times when all of us doubt it,” said Melrose.
The vicar, according to Pratt’s report, was not present at the Jack and Hammer the night Ainsley was killed. Still, Jury asked him, “Did you happen to be in the vicinity of the Jack and Hammer on the Friday night, Vicar?”
The vicar looked almost disappointed that he had to answer, “No, afraid I can’t help you out there. Unusual, that Jack-arm. You know, there’s only one other like it, it’s in Abinger Hammer—”
Jury interrupted. “This business about the ‘nicks.’ That sort of thing is hardly common knowledge. Have you mentioned it to anyone else around here?”
The vicar turned a bit red. “I must admit, I do rather enjoy talking about the histories of these old places. Yes, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it to this or that person. I can’t remember, really.” Sitting in his comfortable chintz-covered chair, staring up at the ceiling, the vicar said, “There’s more than one murder been done in an inn. There was The Ostrich in Colnbrook —”
Melrose Plant hastily interrupted. He had no intention of sitting through the trapdoor adventures of the guests of the Ostrich again. “I daresay Inspector Jury is thinking of this pattern in a somewhat less literal way, Vicar.”
“Well, I certainly don’t think Matchett or Scroggs had anything to do with these awful deaths . . . though there is that unsavory business about Matchett’s former wife. Pity the past must rise to plague the present.” His eye flicked toward Jury, apparently in hopes of lighting a fire in that quarter. “Crime passionnel, something like that. Matchett had a lady friend —”
Jury smiled. “The police were satisfied at the time that Mr. Matchett had nothing to do with it.”
“Never found out who did, though,” said Smith, hating to see such a tasty morsel so summarily swallowed without being chewed over.
“You’d be surprised at the number of murders we have to put Paid to, Vicar. A bit of a disappointment to see how incompetent the police really are.” As the vicar blushed, Jury got up. “Thank you for your help, sir. Now, I must be going.”
• • •
Outside once again with Plant, Jury paused to look up at the beautiful east window of the church, seven lights of reticulated tracery in the head.
“If you’d like to go in . . .” said Plant.
Jury shook his head. “ ‘A serious place on serious earth it is.’ ”
They were both looking up at the bell tower, its windows louvered to let the sound drift up to the highest point. Plant said, “You like poetry, Inspector?”
Jury nodded.
“I saw Vivian going into the station to talk to you. Tell me, what did you think of her?”
Jury’s eyes moved from the bell tower to focus on a fascinating twig on the ground at his feet. “Oh,” he shrugged, “she seemed . . . pleasant enough.”
• • •
Mrs. Jubal Creed arrived at the Weatherington police station shortly after four and was taken off to the county hospital morgue to identify the mortal remains of her husband. When she returned, her color was not necessarily worse than when she had left, for Mrs. Creed possessed one of those impoverished complexions that suggested Nature had skimped on paints, settling upon a shade of dingy ocher. Mrs. Creed was no more fortunate in her figure than in her face: she was a scarecrow draped in outmoded and ill-fitting clothes.
Only when she gave her husband’s full name, did she refer to him as “Jubal” (which she rhymed with “rubble”); thereafter, he was “Mr. Creed.”
Holding a handkerchief to her mouth, which was flat and wide — more like a cutout of a mouth — she looked at Chief Inspector Jury with bleary eyes, and answered his question about Creed’s employment: “Mr. Creed’s been retired from the Cambridgeshire police for near five years. And no love lost, neither.”
“He felt he had been ill-treated?”
“Indeed he was. Passed over for promotion, ended up as detective sergeant in Wiggle
sworth. Bitter, he was. Can’t say as I blame him.” She sniffed her disapprobation of the police in general, and Jury and Wiggins in particular, as they sat in the stark, bare room in the Weatherington station.
“Mrs. Creed, can you imagine anyone at all who might, ah, wish to harm him?”
All she did was shake her head vigorously, bowed as it was in the cupped palm of her hand. Jury did not really think she was overcome by emotion, and rather imagined the Creeds’ marriage had been, at best, merely a civil one. Mrs. Creed, though unobjectionable, did not strike Jury as a woman of particularly deep feelings.
“He had no enemies you know of?”
“No. We led a quiet life, Mr. Creed and me.”
“In the course of his work, could he have made any?”
“If he done, I never did hear of it.”
Jury asked these questions more or less by rote, instinctively feeling that the line of questioning was fruitless. He doubted that Creed’s death had anything materially to do with dark patches in Creed’s own past. Jury opened a manila folder and took out a picture of William Small, one which showed him after he had been cleaned up a bit. Still it wasn’t pleasant. “Mrs. Creed, do you recognize this man?”
She looked at it, looked away quickly, and shook her head.
“Does the name ‘William Small’ mean anything to you?”
Her eyes were hazed over with unshed tears, and despite the lengthy silence, Jury doubted she was thinking very carefully. “No, the name don’t mean a thing to me.” To the picture of Ainsley, the one which had appeared in the newspapers, her response was the same. Then she looked again. “Wait a minute, here. Ain’t this a picture of that man who was killed — wait, now — wasn’t both of these men killed in some town around here — what’s the name — ?
“Long Piddleton. It’s about twenty miles away.”
She looked absolutely astonished. “You mean to tell me Mr. Creed was killed there, too? You got a mass murderer running round free as air, and you sit here asking me fool questions?”
• • •
They had by now got a full report from the Cambridgeshire police on Creed’s career — a career rather swiftly curtailed, according to Superintendent Pratt. “See, there’s your regular mumping, and there’s the kind of stuff Creed pulled off: he took commissions from certain garages for sending them breakdowns. It’s one thing to get repairs on the cheap for yourself — his superiors might have looked the other way if it had been that. Or the free meal, maybe we all do a bit of that. I’d like a pound for every free meal I’ve accepted from restaurants when I was doing a beat. So with Creed, it wasn’t bribery proper, but it was the next thing to. He’d almost got a nice little business going on the side. So you could certainly say he was on dab. Still, they let him ‘resign.’ Anyway, we’ve asked his old mates about this present business, and they haven’t a clue. Creed was a zero, a blank. Not very good at his job even in the best circumstances. It’s unlikely he’d ever have made D.I. anyway. No sign of his knowing these others — Small and Ainsley. His mates never see him anymore, anyway.” Pratt’s long legs were stuck up on the desk in the Weatherington station. He was still wearing his heavy overcoat and trying to light up an ancient pipe. “Thing is . . .” He sucked in on the stem and struck another match. “Bad press is killing us; the reporters are baying round me like wolves over in Northampton where I spend as much time as possible. For one thing it keeps them there and out of your hair, doesn’t it?” He sucked in on his pipe several times and finally got a weak, coal-like glimmer going. “I read everything that crosses my desk, and I swear I can’t make head nor tail of this business. What I wonder is whether the victims were chosen at random, or because they made up a pattern?” Pratt scratched the day’s growth of beard bristling on his chin with the stem of his pipe. It made a small, rasping noise. “Or were two of them done in to mask the other? The real victim?”
“It has also occurred to me that the real victim might not have been murdered yet.”
Pratt blinked his red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, God, that’s a lovely thought.” His pipe had gone out again. “You’re thinking it’s going to be someone in the village, is that it?”
“I don’t know. It’s certainly a possibility.”
“The murderer of Small did not come in that cellar door, that’s clear. So you’ve narrowed it down, I think, to just those people at the Load of Mischief that evening.”
“Less one, I think it’s safe to say: Melrose Plant. Of course, he hasn’t an alibi for the times Small and Ainsley were murdered, but it’s hard to believe more than one murderer is involved.”
Pratt scratched his chin again. “Then we’re a lot nearer finding him, if that’s the case. Next time that Superintendent Racer rings me up, I shall certainly tell him you’ve made considerable progress. Excuse me for asking — but has he something particular against you? Seems a trifle waspish where you’re concerned.”
“Oh, it’s just his way,” said Jury.
CHAPTER 12
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 24
The next morning Jury was sitting at Pluck’s battered wooden desk, Wiggins looking over his shoulder. They were studying Darrington’s book, Bent on Murder and its sequel, the second book, lying side by side on the desk. Jury would run his finger along a line of one, then shift to the other. “There’s a tremendous difference in the quality of these two. The style’s almost totally different. Or, let’s say one seems a clumsy imitation of the style of the other.”
Wiggins shook his head. “I don’t see it, myself, sir. Of course, I’m not that much of a reader.”
Jury closed the books. “I don’t think Darrington wrote Bent on Murder. I think he was trying to copy the style and botched it in this second book. I think whoever wrote the first book also wrote the third —” Jury pulled another from the stack of four. “Bent Takes a Holiday. Yes. Those two were written by the same hand. But not the other two. Darrington must have appropriated two manuscripts and then spaced them out.”
“But who do you suppose wrote the two good ones?”
“No idea. It presents the interesting possibility that someone else might have known about this plagiarism. And decided to blackmail Darrington.”
“Like Small, you mean? How would Ainsley and Creed come into it, then?”
“They could have been in it together. . . . What I want you to do is ring up London and have them check out the publishing firm where Darrington worked. That’s where he could easily have come by the manuscripts.” Jury rose and pocketed his cigarettes. “Myself, I’m simply going to put it to him, directly. See what happens.”
• • •
As Jury was getting into the blue Morris, Melrose Plant pulled up in his Bentley and rolled down the window.
“Where are you off to, Inspector Jury?”
“Oliver Darrington’s place.”
“Tomorrow is Christmas, you know. And I should like very much to have you dine with me.”
“I accept with pleasure, circumstances permitting.”
“Fine. Right now I’m on my way to Sidbury to pick up Agatha’s present.”
“What are you getting her?”
“I thought a pair of matched pistols might be nice. Mother-of-pearl handles, for dressy occasions.”
Jury laughed as Plant pulled away, and then turned the Morris toward the Sidbury Road.
• • •
It was Darrington this time who answered the door, and started talking the moment he saw Jury. “What in hell is this? About a copy of my book in the hands of this man who was found dead at the Swan?” His eyes blazed. Clearly, he was more concerned with the reading matter of the corpse than with the corpse itself.
“If I might just come in, Mr. Darrington?”
Darrington flung wide the door, and Jury noticed Sheila Hogg in the sitting room looking beautiful, worried, and nervous. He went in and took the seat he had occupied the day before. Oliver glowered over him, and Sheila fidgeted behind the couch opposite, picking at some
invisible thread along its back. She was fully dressed this afternoon — a flowered, silk pant dress — but managed still to look undressed. The outlines of her body simply leaped out at one, and that part of Jury’s mind not occupied with startling Darrington into some sort of admission took appreciative notice of this. “There are just a few questions I wanted to ask, Mr. Darrington.” They still made no move to sit down, so Jury made them wait while he lit a cigarette. “You obviously have got the news already that another man has been murdered, and I was wondering if you could tell me where you were between ten and a little past noon yesterday?”
“Right here. Sheila was with me.”
Jury did not see anything in their expressions to belie this, but had never known anyone like the guilty to stare you straight in the eye when they lied. He smiled and said, “Also, I just wanted to return these to you.” Jury held out the books. “They’re rather interesting, especially in their differences.” He observed the same nervous spasms of Sheila’s face and hands take hold. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking you might have had a bit of help there.” Jury put it so mildly, that even he was surprised when Darrington wheeled on Sheila.
“Bitch!”
“I didn’t tell him, Oliver! Honestly!”
His anger died down as quickly as it had arisen and he sighed. “Oh, hell, there’s one charade over. You might as well tell him.”
As usual, thought Jury, leaving Sheila to carry the can back.
“It was my brother,” said Sheila. “He was killed in a motorcycle accident. It was only by accident — when I was going through his things after he died — that I found the letter Oliver had written him about his book. I didn’t even know Michael — my brother — had written a book, much less that he was trying to get it published. I don’t think anyone knew. He was very secretive. Anyway, I went along to Oliver’s firm, I suppose with the intention of somehow seeing the book got published as — I guess — a nice memorial. Oliver was the editor on whose desk it had landed. He was very sympathetic and we had lunch and talked about Michael’s book, how good it was. Then we had dinner. Then lunch, then dinner, until . . .” Sheila sighed. “Well, I fell for him, which was” — she leveled a deadly glance at Darrington — “his intention, wasn’t it, love?”
The Man with a Load of Mischief Page 14