The Man with a Load of Mischief

by Martha Grimes

  Was Simon her memory, too?

  Matchett shook his head. “Can’t say off-hand. No, wait. That would have been two nights before this chap Small was killed —” He halted the fork and spoon in midair. “I was here, I remember, all afternoon and evening.”

  “I must have been at home,” said Vivian, uncertainly. “I think Oliver stopped in.” Jury noted Matchett’s grimace.

  “Don’t you ever go off duty, Inspector?” Matchett grated fresh cheese over the greens and tossed in a handful of croutons.

  “I would do, if only our murderer would do the same.”

  Matchett passed over two glass plates of salad. When Jury sampled it, he found it delicious. There must not be many men who could discuss a fresh murder, mix a Caesar salad, and be the intended of this lovely creature, Vivian Rivington. Whatever he was, he wasn’t Simple Simon.

  • • •

  “Now Daphne, about Ruby Judd.”

  It was an hour later, and they were sitting at the same table in the dining room. Matchett had left to take Vivian Rivington home.

  Daphne had wadded up and discarded a whole pocketful of tissues, from all of her crying since Jury had told her about Ruby. “You were on friendly terms with her, weren’t you? I understand it was you who got her the job at the vicarage?” Jury had pulled the picture from his wallet and placed it between them on the table. It was a standard, static pose. Ruby had long, black hair, a pretty, vacuous face. The other snapshot showed more of her figure, which was heavily endowed: large breasts pushing at a too-tight jumper, and well-formed legs. Her mouth was drawn up in that unflattering expression that comes of squinting into the sun. The face was half in shadow.

  “Yes, sir. ‘Twas me,” said Daphne, shoveling damp curls back from her forehead, which shone from nervous perspiration. Her face was puffy and crimson from weeping.

  “How long had you known her, Daphne?”

  “Oh, for years. I knew her in school. We was classmates. I come from Weatherington, you know. When the vicar’s housemaid took herself off to get married, and there was only that Mrs. Gaunt from the village to do for him — an old poker, she is — I asked him would he like another girl, as I knew one out of a job and a very good worker. He said to send her along.” Daphne looked down at her shoes, and added rather wanly, “I guess I should’ve thought twice about it, sir. I mean, sir, with her not bein’ the most dependable person in the world.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth at having implied some ill of the dead.

  “What do you mean, not dependable?” Jury noticed Twig was making quite a job of polishing the crystal goblets; he’d been at the same one for five minutes.

  Daphne lowered her voice: “Ruby’d been in one or two little scrapes, see.”

  “What sort?” Jury was fully aware the scrapes were probably sexual, given the rising color in the waitress’s face. She seemed unable to find her tongue, so he helped her out: “Was Ruby pregnant?”

  “Oh, no, sir. I mean, not to my knowledge. She never told me she was. But . . . well, she had been. Once. Maybe even more than once.” Daphne looked almost as if it were she who had trodden the primrose path.

  “She had an abortion, is that it? Perhaps more than one?”

  Daphne nodded, mutely, casting a surreptitious glance in Twig’s direction. But the old Boots had moved down the line of tables, under Jury’s stare.

  “Sometimes, though, I felt almost sorry for her. What else is a girl to do, if she can’t get no help from her family? Ruby’s family’s a bunch of old sticks. She daren’t have told them. When she was little she had an uncle and aunt she was always bein’ sent off to live with. Aunt Rosie and Uncle Will, she said. She liked them ever so much more than her mum and dad. I think they just wanted to be rid of her, I do.”

  “Then you and Ruby were pretty thick?”

  Daphne ran a tissue under her nose. “In a way, yes. But the stuff she’d tell me, it was more like by way of teasing me into asking questions, not like she was really confiding in me.”

  Jury was gratified by this ability of the girl to make such a fine distinction. Most girls would have thought that giggling innuendos were exchanges of confidence.

  She went on: “Ruby wasn’t walking out with anyone round here I knew of. But she was always dropping hints she’d more’n one fellow she was —” Daphne blushed and smoothed the skirt of her black uniform.

  “Sleeping with, you mean.”

  She nodded, apparently finding the phrase less vulgar on the lips of a policeman. “The thing is, Ruby always acted that way — secretive like. Whether there was anything in it or not. She wanted to make a big mystery out of everything. Like, didn’t I want to know where she’d got a new dress, or bag, or bit of jewelry, or something, as if someone in Long Pidd was — well — keeping her. And she had this gold bracelet she always wore — always had it on her — my, but didn’t she set great store by that! First it’s somebody gave it her, and later on, it’s that she found it. You never knew when Ruby was telling the truth. Then there was all the stuff she was trying on with that Mrs. Gaunt. Ruby didn’t do her work by half, the work she was paid to. When she was supposed to be dusting or cleaning, she’d start chattering to the vicar, and he’d start in back, and she’d pretend to be interested, and he’d not realize she wasn’t doing her work — just whisking the feather duster across his desk. When she was supposed to be sweeping the church, she’d just sit out there and read a film magazine, or write in her diary. Sometimes she even lacquered her nails.” Daphne giggled.

  “Ruby kept a diary? Did you ever see it?”

  “Oh, no, sir. She’d hardly be showing it to me, now would she? Not her bein’ so secretive, the way she was.”

  Jury made a mental note to have Wiggins question Mrs. Gaunt on this point.

  “One thing Ruby did say that really made me wonder was as how she’d got something on someone in Long Pidd.”

  “Those were her words?”

  Daphne nodded. “Have you any idea what she might have meant?” Daphne shook her head so decisively the light brown curls bobbed like little corks round the rim of her starched white cap.

  “No, sir. I was real curious about what she did mean, and I kept trying to worm it out of her, but the harder I tried, the more she laughed and just kept saying what a surprise it would be, that she had somebody on a piece of string, and wouldn’t we all be half surprised?”

  Jury sighed. It would be hard, with a girl like Ruby Judd, to separate out the wheat from the chaff. Her “secret” could be anything from seeing one of the local ladies pull down her knickers for the milkman . . . to murder.

  • • •

  Weatherington was a medium-sized town, about twice the size of Sidbury, which was in turn about twice the size of Long Piddleton. They lay equidistant from one another, Sidbury some ten or eleven miles west of Long Piddleton; Weatherington another eleven southwest of Sidbury. The Home Office had set up one of its labs in Weatherington to assist provincial police forces. And there was a small hospital where Appleby had his postmortem room.

  Chipped paint was the overall effect of the station, with glossy beige walls. But, then, the place wasn’t built for beauty. Jury went through to the charge room, past the switchboard where a grandmotherly lady sat knitting a red wool scarf. In the charge room, the station officer was bent over his book, sitting beneath one of the yellow “No Waiting” notices. Jury often wondered who would want to come to these places just to loiter. He passed counters and cupboards where documents spilled from insides and tops, and men who seemed to be spending most of their time moving the typewriters about, like a team of reporters. He put in a call to Appleby.

  “No, she wasn’t,” said the doctor, when Jury asked him if Ruby Judd had been pregnant when she died. “Doubt she ever would have been. Not the way she was torn up inside. I’d say more than one abortion, certainly. Several years ago.”

  In a way, Jury was relieved. Had she been pregnant, he might have had to start searching along the lines
of the lover who didn’t want marriage, disgraced if Ruby had gone blabbing her mouth off. Such an explanation of her death would surely have separated Ruby’s murder from the others. The vicar, Jury thought, had got it just the wrong way around: the other murders didn’t lead up to Ruby’s; they must have led away from it.

  “Thanks, Dr. Appleby. I’m sorry I had to ring you up so late.”

  “Late? It’s only half-ten, man. We small-town boys work the clock round.” Appleby snickered and rang off.

  Jury went over to a detective constable at the desk. There were at least a dozen men in the station, at this hour. They were only too eager to get in on the show and seemed delighted Jury had turned up. “The superintendent isn’t here, is he?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you got the report on the Celia Matchett case? The one at that inn in Dartmouth years ago?”

  “Yes, sir, if you’ll just wait a bit, I’ll —”

  “No matter. I’ve got to see the Judd family, so I’ll pick it up when I come back.” Jury turned to Wiggins, who was getting his notebook and pencils together. “You rang the Judds?” Wiggins nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

  • • •

  Mr. and Mrs. Jack Judd lived in Weatherington’s newer district, a development of rows of brick bungalows, indistinguishable at night as they probably were even by day. Perhaps a step above the gray council houses on the other side of town, but not a big step. Weatherington held few charms. It had begun as one of those projects, the planned garden-city type, and then somewhere along the line the funds must have dribbled off, or been diverted into other, unaesthetic pockets. The result was an amorphous mass wherein no special style predominated.

  In the dark garden-plot in front of the Judd’s bungalow, Jury could make out the outlines of decorative additions, probably plaster geese and ducks and rock-nooks, nearly hidden now under snow.

  It was a young woman who answered the door. She was a more angular version of Ruby, if Ruby’s picture were a good likeness. It must be the sister, thought Jury. “Yes?” Her voice was nasal, and her pretense of not knowing who he was reminded him of Lorraine Bicester-Strachan. Only Miss Judd hadn’t quite the air to bring it off.

  “Miss Judd, is it?” She nodded, managing to keep her nose — which rode rather high on her thin face anyway — in the air.

  “Inspector Richard Jury, Miss, C.I.D. And Detective Sergeant Wiggins.” Wiggins tipped his hat. “I believe Sergeant Wiggins rang you that we were coming.”

  She stood aside. Jury noticed as he and Wiggins walked past into the darkened hall that there wasn’t much of the air of the mourner about her. There was no offer, either, to take their coats, so Jury tossed his over the banister.

  “In there,” was all she said, pointing to a room down the narrow, dark hall to the rear of the house. Probably a back parlor, since the front one was unlit. Saved up for Sunday tea. A scraggly, tinseled tree stood in one corner of the room, its base surrounded by imitation snow.

  In the room at the rear, warmed by an electric fire and night-storage heaters, the Judds sat, incredibly dry-eyed.

  Mrs. Judd, a stout woman who scarcely looked up from her knitting when she spoke, and even then made it sound as if Ruby were someone else’s daughter, said, “It’s terrible to think you work your fingers to the bone for them, and they turn out this way.”

  It was difficult for Jury to control his temper in the face of such cold-bloodedness. “I doubt your daughter was looking for what she got, Mrs. Judd. I don’t think she wanted to end her life in a ditch.” He made the description as cold as Mrs. Judd’s reception of the news of her daughter’s death.

  Mr. Judd said nothing; he made guttural sounds in his throat. He was one of those who let his wife do the talking.

  “Ever since she was little there’s been no controlling Ruby. Only people who could do anything with her was her Aunt Rosie — that’s Jack’s sister. We’d just pack Ruby off to Devon when we couldn’t do nothing with her. Then after she grew up, she was in and out of our lives as if we wasn’t even kin to her, much less her mum and dad. Never sent a tad of money home, never paid her keep those months she wasn’t working. Living on the cheap with us, she was. Not like our Merriweather, here —” And the mother smiled fondly at the dry stick of a girl reading a film magazine by the electric log. Merriweather smiled primly, then tried to look distressed at the thought of her sister’s death. She even had a handkerchief wadded in her hand to catch the tears that didn’t fall.

  “Our Merry’s never given us a sleepless night.” Mrs. Judd rocked, and looked smugly at the girl as her knitting needles clicked away. Judd, in vest and suspenders, finally put in: “Don’t go speakin’ ill of the dead, Mother. It ain’t Christian.”

  Seldom had Jury seen such indifference to the death of a child. Not death, even, murder. None of the Judds showed the least interest in the attendant horrors of their daughter’s death. Well, the hell with it. It would make his job easier. No condolences, no soft-spoken and guarded questions to protect ravaged feelings.

  “Mrs. Judd, when was the last time you saw your daughter?” Wiggins had taken out his notebook and a box of licorice lozenges. He began to suck and write his shorthand, while Mrs. Judd put by her knitting and looked at the ceiling, thinking over her answer:

  “That would have been, let’s see, this is Thursday — last Friday week. Yes, I remember, because I was just in from the fishmonger’s. Had fresh plaice and I remember remarking to Ruby about it.”

  “But I thought you said she seldom saw you. That would only have been about two weeks ago. Only a few days before she died. We think she was murdered on the fifteenth.”

  “Well, that was it, then. But she only stayed the night. Said she’d got to be back on the Saturday, as the vicar needed her for something, she said.”

  “Why did she come?”

  Mrs. Judd shrugged. “Who ever knew with Ruby? Suppose she came to see some boy. She had too many of them for her own good, I can tell you. That policeman this afternoon said Ruby’s told people she was visiting us when she went off last week. That’s a laugh, that is. Gone off with some fellow, she was.”

  “Apparently not, Mrs. Judd,” said Jury, keeping his voice level. But the arrow hit home, at least. She reddened. “She was popular with the men, was she?”

  “It don’t take much to be popular with men, Inspector.” And she looked him up and down as if he ought to know. “Ruby was always out, gadding, those months she was living at home. Now, Merriweather —”

  But Jury had no interest in the excellent Merriweather Judd, with her wedge-shaped face and crinkled hairdo. When she caught Jury looking at her, she dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief.

  “Where was Ruby, then, before she came here to live with you? That is, where was her last job?”

  “London. Don’t ask me doing what. Said she was a hairstylist’s assistant, but where did she ever get the training for that?”

  “You don’t know her address or who her friends were in London? Or why she came back here?”

  Mrs. Judd looked at him as if he were a not very fresh piece of plaice himself. “I told you, because she hadn’t got the money to live in her usual high style —”

  “Probably she wasn’t just a hairdresser’s assistant,” interrupted Merriweather. “Probably got her money from other sources.”

  “Are you both hinting that Ruby was a prostitute?”

  The effect was electric. Mrs. Judd turned beet-red and dropped her knitting. Merriweather gasped. Even Judd stirred in his chair.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say about a poor, dead girl!” Mrs. Judd searched a tissue out of her apron pocket. Judd patted her arm.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Judd.” He turned to Merriweather. “It was the remark about the money, Miss; I assumed that’s what you meant.”

  “She just said she was going to be living on Easy Street one of these days. Plenty of money she’d have, she said.”

  Jury riveted his attention on Merri
weather. “When was that?”

  The girl wet her finger, turning the page of the magazine. “When she was here. When Mum said. Last Friday week. She hinted this and that like she always does. I never pay any attention to her.”

  “What sort of hints?” Jury persisted.

  “Oh, like ‘I’ll be buying my clothes at Liberty’s and not Marks and Sparks from now on.’ Silly things like that.”

  “Nothing as to who might be going to give her this money, or why?”

  Merriweather only shook her head, her face still on the magazine.

  “I understand Ruby kept a diary. Have any of you ever seen it?” Three heads shook in unison.

  “I’ll just send an officer round tomorrow, then, to look at her room.”

  “It’s been gone over once,” said Mrs. Judd. “I should think you lot would have more feeling that to be bothering the poor kin —”

  Feeling a sour taste rise in his throat at this blatant hypocrisy, Jury rose quickly. Wiggins got up too, stuffing his pen in the pocket of his shirt. “Your daughter’s body will be released to you for the funeral as soon as we get Home Office approval.”

  Mrs. Judd managed a commendable act there at the end, crying, Oh, Jack, our poor Ruby. And Judd saying, There, there, Mother.

  Merriweather alone forgot to do her part. As she walked them to the door, she was smiling down over a picture of Robert Redford.

  • • •

  On the way back to Long Piddleton Jury slowed for the “dead man,” now lit with lanterns beyond the dark Cock and Bottle. He saw once again in his mind’s eye the arm of Ruby sticking out from the hardpacked earth. He shivered and ran a hand over his face. Some vagrant thought seemed trying to work its way up from the depths of his mind. What was it? He was still trying to make it surface as he bumped the Morris up to the front of the Man with a Load of Mischief.

  • • •

  Jury fell asleep that night with the folder on the Matchett murder propped on his chest.