Darrington merely studied his drink.
“There was another manuscript, Bent Takes a Holiday, that I also found amongst the things in Michael’s trunk. Oliver read it and said it was just as good as the first. The temptation was too much for him: he could publish the first under his own name and put the other away against a rainy day.” Sheila laughed artificially. “And when Oliver writes, it rains, all right.”
“Thanks,” said Darrington.
“Don’t mention it, love,” she said, bitterly. Then, to Jury: “There it is. Rotten, nasty — what can I say?”
A nice memorial, thought Jury. Love, he thought sadly. It had involved her in this dishonor and wouldn’t even throw in a marriage certificate. He felt sorry for her. “So you kept the second manuscript as a hedge against the possibility of the one you wrote yourself flopping at the book stalls?”
Oliver raised his face. At least he had the grace to be humiliated. “That’s right. I’d tried a bit of writing. I thought I could do a fair job, only I couldn’t. I’m a rotten writer. When the second book didn’t sell and got such bad reviews, I pulled out Hogg’s other manuscript and that put my star in the ascendancy again. I thought surely on the next try I could pull it off. And now . . .” He spread his hands in a futile gesture. Then he apparently remembered the discussion to hand was not the biggest problem. “Wait a minute, now, Inspector. What has all this to do with the man found this morning?”
“You didn’t know him?”
Darrington looked angry. “Damn it! Of course I didn’t know him!”
Jury enjoyed what he was about to say, in return for Oliver’s cheap treatment of Sheila. “Funny. He was an admirer of yours. That book, you know.” Jury pretended a fresh thought had come to him, and snapped his fingers. “Or perhaps not an admirer, after all. There’s always blackmail, you know, as a motive for murder.”
Darrington shot out of his chair. “My God! I didn’t kill him. I never saw the man before —”
“How do you know that, Mr. Darrington?”
“What?”
“I assume you’ve not seen him since he’s been murdered. How do you know you’ve never seen him, then?”
“Trying to trap me, aren’t you? I suppose my book in his hands just ties it all up for you, doesn’t it?”
Sheila, with more perception than Darrington had shown, said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Oliver. I don’t imagine Inspector Jury thinks three different people came here to blackmail you, do you, Inspector?”
Oliver looked from one to the other like a child who wonders if his parents are in collusion against him. What on earth, wondered Jury, did Sheila see in the man?
“The book is one thing that suggests you didn’t kill him.” Jury got up and pocketed his cigarettes. “For you yourself to leave a clue in the hands of the murdered man, one which points back to you, would be strange, now, wouldn’t it? Only a very daring person and one with iron composure, not to mention a rather macabre flair, would dare such a thing. And in you, Mr. Darrington, I haven’t seen any of those qualities.”
Sheila burst out laughing.
CHAPTER 13
Melrose Plant tooled along the Sidbury Road, smiling at the notion that Agatha would be smarting when she realized that she was still a suspect, but he wasn’t. Hardly sporting of Melrose to wriggle out of the viselike grip of New Scotland Yard that way, while she (after all of her dedicated assistance) was left to struggle alone. That’s how Agatha would see it. She would conclude it was all Melrose’s fault. Probably a conspiracy between Melrose and Jury.
As long sweeps of sun-starred meadow rolled by him, Melrose slid down in the seat of the Bentley and wondered if he had an unconscious hankering to be a detective, some dark side of his nature that had gone heretofore unsuspected. He entertained himself by reviewing the possible answers to this rash of killings. Had only one of the victims actually been the real object, the other two done in to disguise that? The old red herring gambit. A possibility, of course, but one somewhat undermined by the fact that all three were strangers. Why on earth bring strangers to town to kill them? Why not just kill off instead a couple of superfluous locals?
Melrose looked about him a little guiltily; it really was a rather cold-blooded way of thinking of the village folk. The only things looking back at him were a lamb and a ewe, out there in the fields, slowly chewing. What could they have found to eat in this cold?
It was possible that all of these present murders were only leading up to another, the rather shuddery prospect put forth by Jury. The reason it made his blood run cold was because the first person he thought of as the real mark was Vivian Rivington. All of that money, and so many people wanting it. The darkness that swept over his mind seemed projected in the sign ahead of him, a small one with a black spot, across from the Cock and Bottle, coming up on his left.
Plant lifted his foot from the peddle and slowed to a crawl so that he wouldn’t rip out his muffler going over the narrow rise of mounded earth meant to slow down cars for the oncoming turn. It was, appropriately enough, called a “dead man.” Something flashed in the strong sunlight as he approached the rise. Bumping over the “dead man” he peered out of his window and saw that the reflection had come from something lying there in the dirt, a bit of glass, probably. Then, suddenly, a picture of what he’d actually seen froze in his mind and he braked so hard he nearly threw himself through the windscreen. He sat there for a few seconds telling himself that the dirt-covered object couldn’t have been what he thought it was.
A ring. But had it really been attached to a hand?
• • •
While Sheila still laughed, Jury was pulling on his coat and leather gloves. “There’ll be more questions, Mr. Darrington. For both of you. At the moment, however, I haven’t time for them. What I’d like to do is use your telephone if I may, to call my sergeant?”
“It’s just through there,” said Darrington, indicating the door to the hall. A little of his old, sneering confidence returned when he said, “Then I take it, Inspector Jury, the fact that Bent on Murder turned up in the man’s hands is more or less proof that I had nothing to do with it?”
A bastard to the end, thought Jury. No concern for Sheila, who had given over probably all of her self-respect so that Darrington might rise in the world. The bloody fool needed a bit of a shakeup. “What I said was that it was one indication you didn’t do it. But it by no means lets you off. There’s one motive that only applies to you, Mr. Darrington: publicity. It would have done wonders for your failing reputation wouldn’t it? To have Bent on Murder on the front page of the newspapers? Send the sales of all of your books skyrocketing. So you rid yourself of the blackmailer, and give yourself a bit of publicity, to boot.”
Once again, Darrington went white.
“The phone, Mr. Darrington?”
As if cued for its entrance, the telephone rang. Sheila, with more self-possession than Darrington, went to answer it. From the hall she called back, “It’s for you, Inspector.”
He thanked her, and as he took the receiver and watched her go back to the drawing room, he hoped she’d find a better man than Darrington. Though he certainly hadn’t written off Sheila as a suspect. She’d more guts than her boy friend, that was sure.
“Jury, here,” he said, and listened with growing amazement to the words of Melrose Plant. “Look, Mr. Plant, just you stay right there. It’ll only take me ten minutes.” He slammed down the receiver, dialed the Long Piddleton station, and thought, as he listened to the brr-brr, that Wiggins or Pluck damned well better be there. Finally, Pluck answered, and Jury told him to get hold of the Weatherington station, get the Scene of Crimes officer, get Appleby, get the whole crew, and get them over to the Cock and Bottle without delay. There’d been another body found. Poor Pluck sputtered, stuttered, and finally said, “Yes, sir. Right away, sir. But there’s all these reporters crawling round the station demanding to talk to you. They streamed in from London not a half hour ago.”
“Forget the reporters, Sergeant. And don’t, for God’s sake, tell them a thing about this, or there’ll be so many cars on the road to Sidbury I won’t be able to get round them.”
“Right, sir. But I thought I should just mention,” and he lowered his voice, “that Lady Ardry’s been talking to these men from the London dailies six-to-the-dozen. And I should tell you that Superintendent Racer has been trying to get onto you for the past hour. Awful mad, he sounded.”
“Well, Sergeant, the next time he calls, let Lady Ardry talk to him.”
• • •
The blue Morris did the thirteen miles from the house to the Cock and Bottle in twenty minutes, calling forth outraged responses from the more sedate drivers, out for a pleasant Christmas Eve drive.
When Jury saw the Cock and Bottle about a quarter of a mile down the road, he swerved over onto the right shoulder and braked just before the rise of mounded earth. He jumped out of the car, not bothering to slam the door, and ran over to the spot where Melrose Plant was kneeling. The rise had been covered with a tarpaulin.
“I didn’t try to get the earth off; it’s very hard, anyhow. But I assumed you wouldn’t want the ground disturbed. I did brush some of the loose stuff off her arm.”
“You did the right thing, Mr. Plant.” Protruding from the hard, snow-encrusted mound was a hand and arm, about halfway up to the elbow. The nails of the hand were painted an incongruous, bright red, and a large, cheap ring encircled one finger. Jury felt the arm. Stiff as an icicle.
“It was pretty obvious,” said Plant, “that whoever belongs to that arm wasn’t down there still desperately trying to breathe. So I let it be. I threw the tarpaulin over it because of passing motorists. I didn’t imagine you’d want curious passersby to stop. I just stood here and directed them over to the other end of the road. Probably they thought I was the road works man.”
Jury couldn’t help smiling a bit, even in the circumstances. That suit Plant was wearing was probably not the common uniform of road works men. It did not take long for it to seep into Jury’s mind that the “dead man” was right in front of the Cock and Bottle, which sat well back from the road off to their left. Another inn. The papers would love it.
He said to Plant, “You’ve done a good job. It’s as well you didn’t try to dig her up. The Scene of Crimes officer would have our heads if anything had been disturbed.”
They stood there for another ten minutes, and Jury heard the whine of a siren. Well, at least Pluck had been quick about it. Weatherington was on the other side of Sidbury, about ten miles from the market town. “Mr. Plant, why don’t you go up to the inn, there, and soften up the proprietor — do you know him?”
“Not well. I’ve a kind of nodding acquaintance with him. Fell asleep once at the bar when he was telling me his life. What should I say?”
Jury looked down at the frozen hand as the police car rounded the bend. “Just tell him I’ll be up to ask him a few questions.”
• • •
Dr. Appleby waited, patiently smoking, as the Scene of Crimes officer, a man with a face like a graven image, recorded every detail. The marks of ligature were plainly visible on the victim’s neck. And the victim was, as Jury had suspected, one Ruby Judd, lately the vicar’s housemaid.
When the police photographer had finished up taking pictures from every angle, Dr. Appleby looked at the chief inspector the way a father sometimes rivets his eyes on a child who has gone off the straight and narrow once too often. Even Jury, who didn’t often dodge the eyes of his fellowman, looked away. “Inspector Jury, are you sure you wouldn’t like me to wander about the countryside lashed to your side? I seem to be turning up so often at the scene of one of your crimes.” Appleby’s nicotined fingers lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one.
“Very funny, Appleby. But it is not really ‘my’ crime, as you so charmingly put it. It is actually someone else’s.” Jury only wished he hadn’t been saddled with a wiseacre of a police surgeon. He suspected Appleby was thoroughly, if perversely, enjoying himself. How often was he called in to treat more than measles or women’s complaints or ulcerated stomachs?
Dr. Appleby puffed away, his answer ready: “ ‘Someone else’s’, yes. But the question still remains: Whose? The population hereabouts is steadily on the decrease.” The doctor flicked ash into the newly dug-out “dead man.” The corpse, wrapped in a polyethylene sheet to prevent the loss of any items on its person, had been removed to the ambulance. The fingerprint man, the one with the crew cut and the chewing gum and the whistle, had had very little to go on here and was now on his way to the vicarage, for a look at Ruby Judd’s room.
“Dr. Appleby, the facts, please.”
“I’ve given them to you three times before, why not just use the old ones — ?”
Jury’s impatience was growing. “Dr. Appleby —”
Appleby sighed. “Very well. From the condition of the body, I’d say anywhere from three days to a week. A little difficult to tell — the body’s fairly well preserved. She might as well have been in a frozen food locker.” Appleby lit another cigarette, and Wiggins, who had been taking down the doctor’s information in his notebook, took the opportunity to blow his nose and pull out a cough drop from a fresh packet. Dr. Appleby picked up his narrative again, in a droning voice: “Cause of death: strangulation, this time by a knotted cord of some sort. Possibly a thin headscarf, possibly a stocking. Hemorrhages on face and inside eyelids. No other damage done I can see. But of course, we haven’t a pathologist behind every tree, like you boys in London. Have to do the p.m. myself. Incidentally, nothing much on the Creed man that seems helpful, since you know he was killed somewhere between ten and noon. I certainly couldn’t fix it better than that.”
Having supervised the moving of the body to the ambulance, Appleby snapped up his bag and moved off. On either side of the road detective constables were combing the cold meadows for further evidence. Jury was hoping some sort of bag — a suitcase, perhaps — would turn up in the woods or the meadow near the Cock and Bottle. He imagined that whoever murdered her had got her to pack up a bag, probably under the pretense of a weekend of passion (which would have meant a man, if that were the case), knowing that no questions would be asked for at least a few days. Appleby said there was no sign of “sexual interference,” but he couldn’t tell Jury if she were pregnant until he did the postmortem. It was a cold, cold trail. But Jury had been right about one thing: Ruby Judd was no stranger.
• • •
When Jury finally ascended the hill to the Cock and Bottle, he found Melrose Plant seated at the bar with a half pint of Guinness before him. The beefy-looking proprietor was leaning across the bar, talking. His name was Keeble, and he was wiping his perspiring face with a bar towel, quite overcome. His wife, however, who had just come out of a door to the right of the bar, was granite-faced and dry-eyed.
Plant offered Jury a cigarette from his gold case and Jury took it gratefully. “What can you tell me about this young woman, Mr. Keeble?”
“Well, as I was just saying to the sergeant, here” — he indicated Wiggins, whose notebook was dutifully opened on the bar, handkerchief beside it — “this Ruby, I hardly ever seen her, except once or twice in the shops, so I can’t help much. They been working on that ‘dead man’ out there in front a long time.” Mrs. Keeble put in how bad it was for business, always having the road torn up.
“And when did the road works men finish filling it in?”
Keeble thought hard. “Now just a tic and I’ll tell you exact — aye, it was the afternoon of the fifteenth. Tuesday week. I remember because it was the next evening we had this big party to serve dinner to and I was glad it wasn’t all dug up out there.” He celebrated his part in the horrendous event by drawing off a beer for himself; his wife sniffed her disapproval. “Then one of them come back that night, to finish up. The night of the fifteenth last Tuesday.”
Tuesday had been the day Ruby had left, supposedly to visit her family
in Weatherington.
Keeble’s mention of the dinner party had suddenly made Jury hungry. Jury said, “We could do with a bite. Can you rustle us up something? You’re hungry, aren’t you, Mr. Plant? And Sergeant Wiggins?” They both nodded.
“We’ve only got plaice,” said Mrs. Keeble.
Plant made a noise in his throat, but Wiggins said, “And chips and peas, if you don’t mind.”
She looked at all three of them as if they had dragged the body of the girl there themselves, just to discommode her. She also looked as if she were debating whether she could expect Scotland Yard to pay, or whether she was stuck with doing her civic duty. Plant said to her, as she was passing through the kitchen door, “If we could just have a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet to wash that down?” She stared at him. He added, “Nineteen seventy-one?”
Her mouth set even more firmly. “We ain’t got no wine cellar; this an’t the Savoy.”
Plant surveyed the room with its plain fixtures. “Odd. I could have sworn . . .”
Mr. Keeble however, was more interested in their comfort, and said, “How’s about a pint of our best bitter, sir? On the house, it is.” He lowered his voice, and looked toward the kitchen.
“Kind of you Mr. Keeble,” said Jury. He accepted the pint gratefully and drank off a half.
Plant had left the bar and walked over to the gabled window in front of the inn. He stood there, gazing out. “You can’t see the ‘dead man’ from here, Inspector. My guess is you can’t see it from any of the windows, not with that stand of oak.”
The Man with a Load of Mischief Page 15