The Case Has Altered

by Martha Grimes

  Max looked at him questioningly.

  “Oh . . . I was only thinking of our relationship to our things when we were young, when we were children.”

  “Obsessive,” Max said. “Maybe so; maybe we think they share in our problems and delights. Or maybe they’re like children themselves.” He lit another cigarette with Melrose’s Zippo, flicking the lid open and closed and open again. “We don’t have any children.” He said this as if he were explaining something to himself. “Grace had a son.” And as if this were a fact he hadn’t quite come to terms with, he frowned and kept opening and closing the Zippo lid. “She was young—nineteen, twenty—when she was married the first time, and Toby was born a couple of years later. He died when he was twenty.” Max leaned back with a kind of shudder. “Only twenty, and he had a riding accident, fell off his horse—” He motioned with his head to some vague point before them in a distant landscape. “Out there. It wouldn’t’ve been serious for most riders, but Toby was a hemophiliac and he bled internally, you see, afterward.” Max shook his head. “Grace hated to see him riding at all. But what can you do? Can’t put a boy in cotton wool and never let him do anything. He liked riding, even though he had a hard time with horses. He’d hunted ever since he was young, when they’d lived in Leicester. It isn’t really very far from here. Grace said he could never sit a horse properly. Still . . . ” Max shrugged, somewhat helpless to convey his sorrow, or Grace’s. Then he was silent.

  “I’m sorry,” Melrose said, helpless himself.

  Max sat back. “You know, I think that’s why she likes the gallery so much. She can look out of all of those windows to the copse. Maybe she sees him, I don’t know. Out there in the mist.” He rose, the cigarette dangling from his mouth, as if he’d forgotten its presence, and leaned down to look at the bonheur-du-jour, at its painted top. With his thumbnail he scraped at something. Then he straightened, remembered the cigarette, snuffed it in the ashtray. “It was my horse, you see. I’d got it for him for his nineteenth birthday. Bought it from Parker, who kept a couple of horses back then. So it was the one I’d given him.”

  “But he apparently had trouble with any horse—not just the one you’d given him.”

  “Yes.” With his hands shoved hard into his pockets, Max said, “Still, I can’t help but wonder if she holds me somewhat responsible. Instead of some impenetrable Fate. Me.”

  Melrose said, “She doesn’t strike me as a blaming kind of person.”

  “No.” Max turned and smiled at him. “You’re right, she isn’t.” The smile lingered, and thoughts of Grace vanished at the thought of death. “Poor girl.”

  It had been Grace’s comment over the death of Dorcas Reese.

  Then Max was up and telling Melrose to come with him to the long gallery. Oh, hell, Melrose thought. Not valuing the paintings, I hope.

  But it wasn’t that. Max simply wanted to talk about them, to have them looked at by a fresh pair of eyes. Melrose followed as he moved from a small Picasso sketch, through some quite beautiful landscapes, past a Landseer of a roomful of dogs, on down past several portraits, one of which they lingered over. It was a charming study of two little girls in a garden, lighting Japanese lanterns, that he’d noticed yesterday.

  “John Singer Sargent,” said Max, “not the original, of course. That’s in the Tate. Still, it is a superior copy. He hasn’t lost the light.”

  Cones of delicate yellow shone upward from the light-suffused paper lanterns onto the two little girls’ faces. Melrose said, “I’m used to seeing only formal portraits of Sargent. Not this sort of study.”

  “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, it’s called.” Then Max recited:

  Have you seen where Flora goes,

  Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

  “I like that. Which one is Flora, do you guess?”

  Melrose smiled. “Or ‘Lily’? Or ‘Rose’?”

  His eyes still on the painting, Max said, “Grace wasn’t jealous of my first wife. I had the feeling that detective from Lincoln thought Grace would have naturally hated her. Grace didn’t dislike her; I think she even enjoyed her company.”

  Was it safe to ask? Melrose tried to be casual. “And the others?”

  Max looked over at him. “Parker? Jack?”

  Melrose shrugged. “I just thought . . . ” He let his voice trail off.

  But Max apparently didn’t find the question odd. “They both knew Verna, of course. She lived here for several years.”

  “But did they like her?”

  Max laughed. “Good lord, no. Neither one of them. Verna was a strange and pernicious woman. Verna was easy to hate, once you caught on to her.”

  “Well,” said Melrose, “somebody certainly caught on.”

  14

  Peter Emery’s cottage looked like something out of a fairy tale: the whitewashed stone, the cobbled walk from the white gate to a door painted a bird’s-egg blue, the neat window boxes of bulbs one or two of which were already sending out green shoots. Upended near the door was an old flat-bottomed boat that looked as if it might be getting a new coat of paint to judge from the paint can near it. Several fishing rods were leaning against the wall beside it. Melrose knocked on the door, which was opened by a girl of perhaps ten or eleven, with flamboyant ginger hair, a pearly skin, and eyes the cider color of the sky just before sunup. A fairytale child.

  Not exactly. “We don’t want none, neither of us.” The door was firmly shut in his face.

  Melrose stood staring at the blue door. He looked behind him and around him in some attempt to discover whatever would cause solicitors, pollsters, canvassers, beggars, or Hare Krishna-ites to beat a path to the door in such numbers the occupants would feel harassed by pleas to buy or sign or give. He knocked again. He refused to be put off by this fiery-headed imp of Satan. The face reappeared at the window, eyes peering out over the bulbs, and then withdrew.

  Melrose tapped his foot. It seemed an ungodly long time until the door opened again.

  “I said—”

  “—that you didn’t want none, neither of you. I am not soliciting, so call off your dog.” The dog looked from between her legs. It was small and its stiff-haired gray coat looked like armor. Its lips stretched back in what might have been a snarl, or simply a Bogart dry-as-gin grin, for it made no noise. Melrose could see a mouthful of teeth. The girl was apparently thinking his words over and looked as if she might be about to shut the door again. He put his hand against it and his foot between it and the sill. She might have been spunkier, but he was bigger. “Do you mind?” He hated giving way to sarcasm.

  The dog started circling round in a frenzy, then made a rush at Melrose, teeth still very much in evidence but still silent. Melrose braced his foot against the animal and his hand against the door. “Listen, now—I’m a friend of the Owens, you know them, the ones who live at Fengate. Mrs. Owen told me to visit. I was just out walking—” When she finally released her hold on the door, he nearly went sprawling into the dim little hall. He straightened up and looked down into those cider-colored eyes, flecked with brown and gold and anger. “I don’t see why on earth you’re so put out by me. I haven’t done anything.”

  “You probably will. You’re the police.”

  “Absolutely not! I only came here to talk for a bit with your father.” Poor man.

  “He can’t talk to you. He’s blind.”

  “I’m exceedingly sorry to hear that, but I’ve never known blindness to interfere with conversation.”

  “And he’s not my father, he’s my uncle.”

  From the inward rooms came a deep voice. “Zel, who is it now?”

  “Nobody,” she yelled back.

  Melrose raised his own voice. “I’d like to contest that.”

  The owner of the masculine voice appeared in the doorway. He had to stoop to clear the lintel, as he was very tall. Tall and muscular and handsome, an advertisement for the outdoor life. The fishing rods and boat must be his.

  “I told him you was busy.
”

  “Find your manners, gurl!”

  Melrose was sure he’d turn to a pillar of salt before Zel ever found her manners. Over the years of occasionally having to deal with the young (anyone under eighteen), Melrose had come to realize that he couldn’t do it. Then he remembered Sally, and felt a moment of triumph until he also remembered he had had to save her from the grim sentence imposed by Theo Wrenn Browne, in addition to actually buying the book in question. With Jury, it was usually the other way round: kiddies usually gave him things. Jury could make a meal of one jelly-baby handed him by a half-pint person; whereas, Melrose had to promise them the whole sweet shop in order to get information. Jury’s effortless manner of extracting facts annoyed Melrose no end. Often as not, it was some kiddy Melrose (he liked to think) had softened up, and then along came Jury to reap the rewards, Jury with his uncanny knack for worming his way into their little hearts and minds. Melrose usually didn’t get beyond the “we-don’t-want-none” stage.

  It was the kitchen doorway Peter Emery had come through; Melrose glimpsed an Aga cooker, white as snow, in the room behind him. He would not have known straightaway that Emery was blind, for the man shifted the direction of his unseeing eyes to the source of the voice speaking, and even downward to the dog, who was now yapping. He told Zel to go and make some coffee. “The best coffee in Lincolnshire, Zel does.” Zel bloomed in the sun of her uncle’s approval. “And some of those biscuits you made. Zel’s a first-rate cook, and I do like good cooking. Maybe it’s because she’s forever hanging around at Major Parker’s house.” Peter added, “If you’d rather tea, I think the kettle’s about to boil.”

  “Coffee’s fine,” said Melrose, as the kettle did indeed shriek out its readiness. It was as if Peter Emery had not only fine-tuned his other senses, but had replaced the sight he’d lost with second sight.

  Zel went off obediently, almost merrily, to make the coffee. And after Melrose’s preamble to conversation, that he was a guest of the Owens come to look over Max Owen’s collection, they settled down for real talk, most of it Peter’s. Melrose was perfectly satisfied to listen; listening was the reason he’d come.

  Peter had lived in Lincolnshire most of his life, but had spent many years in Scotland where his uncle had been factor on a great estate in Perthshire at the foot of Glenolyn. Hundreds of acres this estate had comprised, with walked up grouse shooting and black game and stalking. And, of course, fishing in rivers clear as glass. It was his uncle who’d taught him to fish and hunt. Before “this” happened he’d been one of the best shots in the country. He made an impatient, stabbing gesture at his eyes. “Damned annoyance.” He went on. “Most people say the land round here’s dull, that the fens is dull, for it’s all this great flatness. It always amazes me, how people only have one notion of beauty. They have to be in the bloody Alps to appreciate mountains. How can they miss this mysteriousness, like when the fog comes down of a sudden so thick it looks solid as a wall?”

  Reminiscence was probably something Peter Emery seldom had an audience for. So Melrose was quiet and let him talk. “My daddy went through more’n one flood. I can remember one, I was maybe five or six, fen bank over on Bungy Fen broke. No matter how hard they worked to keep the dike from crumbling, it did, and pretty soon the whole of the land was a dozen feet under water. Far as the eye could see there was water, a vast sea of it. Our crop, my daddy’s barley crop, went a’ floating off and took the old scarecrow with it. The scarecrow from out the field, swimming right along—oh, there was a sight! We had the punt, except it got caught up too, so my daddy, he put us into a big tin washtub and I thought that was grand. Punt finally went aground, so we got it back; that’s it”—he inclined his head—“out there. I kept it all these years. I’ll tell you this—” He sat forward and said with a near-ferocious intensity, “You can’t let the elements stop you. Nature can be tough, so you’ve got to be tougher.”

  Melrose was intrigued by all of this. He was fascinated by this intrepid man, still young and active, who could refer to his blindness as an “annoyance.” There was a subtle sense of hubris about Emery, a suggestion of challenging God and nature. Melrose could picture, in his mind’s eye, Emery storming blindly across the heath in a scene out of Shakespearean tragedy.

  He was called back from this theatrical fantasy by Zel, who came in to serve the coffee. It was indeed excellent, and the accompanying shortbread, melting now in his mouth, turned him from Shakespeare to Proust. “Delicious!” Melrose exclaimed. “Best I’ve ever eaten.” This was the truth. Zel said he couldn’t have the recipe, for it was a secret.

  Having made a good impression with coffee and shortbread, she apparently set out to make a better one—the quartermaster who ran this outfit—by getting out a broom and rag and starting to dust the bookcases.

  Peter went on, talking about his father’s farm and how he had never liked farming much, but he had liked the shooting. Melrose didn’t share in his affection for frosty dawns and sitting pheasant, and lord knows not for lying on his stomach for hours in the old punt waiting for tough-fleshed birds to whisk out of water and fly upward against the sky.

  Melrose hesitated to bring up the murders while the little girl Zel was within earshot, so he asked her if he might not have another piece of shortbread. She left to get it.

  “If you know the Owens—”

  “I do, of course,” said Peter. “Grand people.”

  Melrose asked, “Then did you know the—did you know this Dunn woman?”

  “Indeed, I did,” he said roughly as he got up to mess with the fire, which was already drawing so well the flames stood up like spikes. With perfect assurance, his arm reached out for the poker, his hand found it and raised a log that then crumbled and spat. Peter replaced the poker, returned to his chair, and said nothing further.

  It was difficult to build on nothing, that is, if you weren’t a policeman, but Melrose tried. With an artificial laugh, he said, “Sounds like you didn’t care for her very much.”

  “Aye. You’re right there.”

  “But you weren’t the only one.”

  “Oh, of that I’m certain. A lot of trouble that woman—”

  They both stopped talking when Zel came in with the shortbread.

  “If the Queen’s biscuit cook gets wind of this shortbread, you’ll have to give up the secret.”

  Zel took the compliment with a blush and then set about her business. Or businesses, if one were to believe her round of activities was the usual round. It was as if she wanted it marked that her days were not spent in idle chatter before the fire. Melrose could scarcely keep up with her: Zel dusting, Zel sweeping invisible debris out the cottage door—the stuff Melrose was supposed to know he’d dragged in on his person—Zel adjusting things on shelves, Zel telling the dog Bob she’d get his dinner in a moment (and instructing him as to proper nourishment).

  It was exhausting in a wonderful sort of way. Her various duties performed, Zel planted herself between their two chairs and leaned heavily on the arm of Melrose’s. She was ready for relaxation, which meant, for her, tearing up bits of the local newspaper. These she rolled into tiny balls and tucked them into her jumper pocket. This activity went on for another ten minutes while Melrose and Peter talked about hunting and shooting and old-fashioned punting. Fifteen minutes had certainly exhausted Melrose’s knowledge of the subjects.

  Melrose did not feel he could justify lingering at the Emery cottage in his capacity of antiques expert before Peter Emery grew suspicious, so he thought he might as well leave the matter of Dorcas Reese for a later time. He said he must be off, that he had work to do at Fengate. “The Owens will be wondering where I’ve got to.”

  Emery started to get up, but Zel shoved him down again, an action Melrose attributed to her wanting to be Melrose’s escort, and not to any concern for her uncle’s well-being. Zel ran toward the door with Bob at her heels. They both stood just outside of the path, Zel looking up. In the west the sky looked bruised.


  “Rain,” said Zel. “You’re going to get wet.” She rocked on her heels and held her hands behind her back, one hand gently slapping the palm of the other, an older person’s posture for thinking weighty thoughts. “Where’re you going?”

  “No place in particular.” His destination was the dike in Wyndham Fen where Dorcas Reese’s body had been found. “Want to come along?”

  “No. I’m not walking on that footpath.” Resolutely, she folded her arms over her chest and glared at him as if prepared for an argument. Still, she did not seem terribly eager to get rid of him. They were moving slowly along the cobbled path and from here one could see the wood, just the edge of it, that graced the Fengate property. “You can’t tell what’s out there.” She scratched at her elbows. Bob was staring up at Melrose as usual with that silent snarl on his face. “It runs all the way from before the Owens back there and across Windy Fen.” She paused and tried to sound indifferent. “That’s where Dorcas got killed.”

  “Did you know her?”

  Zel reached into her pocket for one of the tiny balls, which she inspected as she shrugged the question away. “I used to see her. I wonder if you heard about Black Shuck. Did you?” She spit the newspaper ball at Bob, who yawned and shook his queer gray coat.

  “Black Shuck? No, I can’t say I’ve come across whatever that is.”

  “Black Shuck’s a ghost dog. He stalks people and kills them. Probably eats them too.” Another spitball in Bob’s direction. Bob was off his haunches and giving Melrose his silent snarl as if he, Melrose, were the ghost dog.

  He knew Zel was waiting for him to come up with something that would release her from the dread fantasy of Black Shuck. Like all adults (except, perhaps, Richard Jury), he came up empty-handed.