The Case Has Altered

by Martha Grimes

  She said, “It’s somebody walked on that path that did it.” Suddenly, the subject was changed. “Can you touch your toes?” She started going up-down, up-down.

  “Of course I can.”

  “But with your hands flat?” Down she went again, straight-armed, palms out, her long hair cascading over her head and fanning out. It looked less reddish-gold than hair on fire.

  “Probably, but why would I want to? Now, listen—”

  But she didn’t. She was too intent on placing the flat of her hands against the ground. Never had Melrose seen such electric energy; she might just as well be plugged into a socket. Bob watched her, beating his tail on the stone walk like a baton keeping time with her movement. “Are you married?”

  “No. I haven’t had the good luck to be.”

  “Are you going to get married?”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  She stopped dead and made a face. “I’m not old enough. I’m going on ten. Uncle Peter almost was, but she fell in a river.”

  Somehow, that way of reporting the tragedy made Melrose want to laugh. “That’s terrible, awful.”

  “She was really beautiful, too.” She bounced a spitball on her palm. “It was up in Scotland.”

  “I’m sorry.” Melrose sighed. “This is jolly, but I must get on. It’s going on two. Well, good-bye and it was lovely meeting you.” He said this to her downturned head. “I must be leaving now.”

  Less than a dozen steps down the cobbled path, he heard her voice. “That Dorcas was always going over to Mr. Parker’s. He lives away over there.”

  That did interest him, as she knew it would. She had discovered a way to keep him stopping here indefinitely; she would let out just enough information to keep him hooked. He walked back the several paces. “Why would she do that? What for?”

  Deaf and dumb, she set about doing waist-whittling exercises that Bob could not mimic, as he had no waist. Hands on hips, she twisted back and forth. Bob turned in circles.

  Melrose supplied a possible answer to his question: “Perhaps she was working for him?” Though given her two jobs—at Fengate and the pub—it was hard to see how. “Cooking, possibly?”

  Zel’s fiery hair flew about her face as she turned quickly from one side to the other. Decisively, she said: “No. She. Wasn’t.”

  “Look here, you can’t be so certain of this. How do you know that she didn’t go there occasionally to cook a meal for him? She helped Mrs. Suggins, after all. And Major Parker lives alone; he’d probably be glad for the company.” Melrose thought suddenly of Ruthven and his wife, Martha, and tried to picture Ardry End without them. He couldn’t.

  “Well, maybe he’d want the company, but not the cooking.” Zel stilled herself long enough to add: “Dorcas wasn’t a good cook. She was only vegetable cook, and she wasn’t even good at that. She got things mushy.” Zel made a face. “I’m a better cook than Dorcas ever was; Mr. Parker says so. He’s the best cook around. He hardly ever goes out to meals because he doesn’t like the way other people cook. Except for Mrs. Suggins.”

  The dog Bob, who had been listening to them with a disturbing intensity, once again drew back his mouth, exposing his yellow teeth for Melrose’s delight. “What does your dog think I am, a dentist? All the same”—Melrose went on, as Bob streaked off in pursuit of a hare—“you can’t really know what she was doing at Major Parker’s.”

  “I know that, don’t I? Mr. Parker wouldn’t pay anybody to cook for him. The Owens, that’s different. He thinks their cook’s the best, next to him.”

  Melrose was delighted to discover that Annie Suggins had been right about this facet of Parker’s personality.

  Zel went back to her exercises, saying, “I bet you can’t cook, except eggs.”

  “Of course I can cook. I was once sous-chef at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. Now, why—?”

  “No, you weren’t!” Her response rang in the frosty air. “I’m going to be a chef.”

  “A chef! What a much more noble aspiration that is than teacher or doctor. I’ll certainly come to your kitchen for dinner, then.”

  “If you’re invited. Mr. Parker makes plum ice cream.”

  That would go a long way toward making Parker the most popular adult in Lincolnshire. “Well, I can make Christmas pudding. With silver charms in it.”

  That stopped her turning. “You?”

  Melrose proceeded to describe that morning’s performance, only with him in the starring role instead of Annie Suggins.

  Zel was impressed. But not for long. She started hopping. “Mr. Parker makes it, too. And plum ice cream.”

  “You said that. So . . . you were spying on Dorcas.”

  She stopped and looked at him. Hopeless, hopeless. “I wasn’t spying. I was seeing.”

  “Ah! You were ‘seeing.’ Then what happened?”

  “Nothing. She could’ve come out and gone to the pub. That’s where everybody goes that takes the footpath. It goes nearly to the back door of the pub.”

  “Did you just see this once?”

  “No. Lots of times.”

  That could mean anywhere from two to two hundred.

  “Mr. Parker’s rich. You can do anything if you’re rich.”

  “No, you can’t.” Melrose contradicted her.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m rich.”

  That stopped her. “Can you buy cars and hogs and houses if you want?”

  “Yes. I’m not especially set on the hogs, although my groundskeeper might argue the point.”

  She gasped. “You have a keeper? Like Uncle Peter?”

  “No, nothing like your uncle, believe me. Mine just roams around and shoots things.”

  “Is he a good shot?”

  “No. And it’s just as well.”

  “Uncle Peter used to be the best shot around. He could shoot out a snake’s eye.”

  “An admirable accomplishment.” Melrose stopped to dislodge a pebble from his shoe sole.

  Zel said, “Wyatt Earp could. Did you ever hear of him?”

  “Off and on. It’s a shame your uncle lost his sight. It’s as bad as could happen to a man, I expect.”

  He assumed her silence meant compliance with this judgment. No.

  “Yes, there is. You could be captured and tortured until you talked.”

  “Oh? Is this the fate you envision for yourself, then?”

  “No-oh!”

  There it was again, that drawn out o like a lasso round his neck. Melrose loved the way she could drag two syllables from a single one. But he thought the response too certain to pass for denial. “We should be glad we don’t have information someone else wants.” He glanced at her.

  Her mouth was as set as concrete. “I don’t know anything to be tortured about, but I don’t know about you.”

  “You needn’t sound hopeful.”

  “What’s the worst torture you can think of?”

  Children were so bloodthirsty. “Having to watch Bob floss his teeth.” Melrose canvassed the surrounding landscape. “Where is he? I don’t want him jumping into my path with his ivory grin.” Although it would be a hard landscape for Bob, or anyone, to hide in.

  Zel moved off down the path, steering her perpendicular course, a sidewise skipping movement. Her brilliant hair leapt and settled with each movement.

  Melrose shook his head in wonder at the way children could abandon themselves to motion, certainly in a way forbidden to adults. In the short while he had known her, Zel seemed to have shed whole lives—cook, nurse, caretaker, crabbed adult—to arrive at her ten-year-old selfhood.

  Thoughtfully, he said, “ ‘Zel.’ ‘Zel’ is a most unusual name.”

  She didn’t comment; she kept on skipping.

  “Is it a nickname?”

  “No.”

  “Is it a family name?”

  “No!”

  “Is it from the Bible, then?”

  “No!” she called back. She was some distance away, by an
old stone wall that had once been the limit of someone’s land. Her answer rang frostily in the air.

  The fens stretched away beneath a sky that looked so close to the ground he fancied he could see the earth’s curvature. The footpath shot on, arrow-straight until it was lost in the distance. He thought he could make out a broken line of roofs and chimney stacks of which the Case Has Altered might have been one.

  “Windy Fen’s just beyond,” cried Zel, pointing to a part of the landscape whose outline was undifferentiated trees and thickets. And further off ran a road—the A17, he thought—the one on which he himself had traveled and on which distant cars passed.

  Zel was back, huffing from her bout of exercise. “I can’t go any farther; you’ll have to get along without me. I don’t want to meet up with the bogey-dog.”

  Melrose checked his watch. “It’s only a little after three o’clock. Does he come out before dark? Anyway, he’s probably up in the Highlands by now.” He paused. “Look, are you sure you don’t want me to walk back a little of the way with you?”

  “You’d only get lost. Then I’d have to find you.” To prove how nonchalant she was, she ran off speedily, moving so quickly her bright hair streamed behind her like the tail of a comet. Three times she stopped to look back and wave.

  Her small body seemed to melt into the land. He felt bereft. For some inexplicable reason he felt that he and this child shared some secret history, some common past, as if he’d known her for a long time.

  • • •

  Wyndham Fen was acres of waterland in the care of the National Trust. Once it had been drained to plant wheat and corn; then, the whole area had been reflooded. Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, the Isle of Ely were once an enormous mere. Mere, bog, and reed-bed. The wide washes of the Great Ouse, the Nene, and the Welland testified to that. When the Romans came, they would have needed boats to move through this countryside.

  He found the boardwalk erected so that the visitor could walk over the dikes and observe. It was windy and the tall reeds rattled like sabers. Disturbed, a mass of birds that he couldn’t put a name to flew upward in a blue blur. Marsh violets moved gently in the water where he imagined Dorcas Reese had lain—such a pathetic and insignificant little person that people had to think before they could call up her face.

  Melrose looked off in the direction of the public footpath, judging the distance. Anyone at all might have known of Dorcas’s habitual attendance at the Case Has Altered. Had she been going to meet someone here? He looked off toward the small building that he supposed was the Visitors’ Center and which lay some hundred feet away. She might have waited there, taking shelter from the rain.

  It was so silent that Melrose could hear something plash in the water. An owl hooted. Over the top of a stunted willow, there was a quick stir of wings as a line of mallard beat upward. He watched them against the sky and then silence rushed back to claim the fen again.

  15

  The man who stood in the living room gazing out of the long window in an attitude of deep contemplation turned at Melrose’s entrance. The meditative expression evaporated and was replaced by one even less committal. He cleared his throat, brought a closed fist up to his mouth and said, “You must be the Owens’ houseguest. The antiques appraiser?”

  Melrose wished people would stop calling him that, and simply call him by name, but he smiled and reached out his hand. “My name’s Melrose Plant.”

  “I’m Bannen. Lincoln CID.”

  He gave the impression of being the mildest of men, a façade that Melrose supposed exerted a certain charm over witnesses. But the mild manner didn’t fool Melrose, not after his long acquaintance with Scotland Yard CID. Jury could also appear mild, sometimes to the point where his selfhood almost vanished, offering whatever witness he was questioning a mirror image of himself. This Chief Inspector Bannen, Melrose bet, was that kind of copper. If to countermand any impression of cleverness, Bannen rather clumsily raised his hand and rubbed at his neck. It was a farmer’s gesture, one that went with the pause to adjust the cap, to wipe the sweat from a forehead.

  Bannen’s thin mouth seemed to stray upward in a half-smile. Only half for Melrose. “I expect you know about this business, Mr. Plant. Awfully unpleasant it is.” He shoved his hands deep in his trouser pockets.

  Melrose agreed with him, finding it strange—and somehow discomfiting—that Bannen was alone in here. It was as if having a high-ranking CID man standing in one’s living room were the most natural thing in the world. “You’ll probably have it all sorted out in no time,” said Melrose. How banal. But he felt uncomfortable just standing there.

  “I do hope so.”

  “I’m slightly acquainted with one of the people involved. Jennifer Kennington.” Melrose wanted to get that on record and not give the man a chance to think Melrose was hiding something. “Hard to imagine she’d have anything to do with all this.”

  “Ah.” Bannen nodded. It was perfectly clear that the chief inspector already knew about Melrose’s acquaintance with Jenny Kennington; whether he set any store by it, however, was not at all evident. “And were you acquainted with either of the victims, Mr. Plant?”

  “No. No, I wasn’t. Do you—do you think the two murders are connected, then?” Another banal question.

  “Yes, I’d say so.” He sighed. “The death of Verna Dunn made quite a splash in the tabloids. She’s very newsworthy, I take it, having once been an actress. I expect she was fairly well known. And prominent in London society.” He rubbed his thumbnail across his forehead, as if he could rid himself of the frown that had creased it.

  Melrose waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. As much to relieve a tense situation as to get information, he said, “But it’s difficult to discover a motive in all of this. I mean, no one seems to have one.” When Bannen simply watched him with his mild but disconcerting gray eyes, Melrose went on, now from sheer nerves. “No one in this house, at least. They seemed all to have been on such good terms.”

  Bannen smiled. “But then of course you don’t know them, do you? I mean, except for Jennifer Kennington.”

  Melrose shook his head. He didn’t much like the pause before Jennifer’s name. He knew something was seriously wrong, but he felt helpless to protest.

  • • •

  The two rooms—living room and gallery—jutted out, with their side windows at an angle to one another, so that anyone standing at one could see into the near end of the other room. It had been in the living room that Bannen had stood waiting—for what? Melrose had the odd feeling when he now walked into the gallery that the detective and Grace Owen could have been looking out of their respective windows, staring at one another. It was the angle of her head that told him Grace was looking not directly ahead, but to her right, into the living room.

  She had not heard him come in, so intent was she on whatever she was looking at. She had opened the curtain of this side window only, and an oblong of light lay across her skirt and the statue behind her. The rest of the room was as usual in deep shadow and now came this clear pale banner of light, cold and brittle. The gallery, always colder than the other rooms, seemed frigid. His hands were like ice.

  He meant to speak, opened his mouth to speak to her, but did not. Instead, he stepped even farther back into the unlit corner where Max’s painting of Sargent’s two little girls hung in strange anonymity. He thought of Zel.

  With the cold, the silence deepened. The only sound was the ticking of the longcase clock. At another time, he might have found it comforting, like a heartbeat. Now it sounded merely relentless, a message that time was running out.

  Melrose thought he heard a door close—the front door, he decided, judging from the heavy thunk of the door’s feudal bearings. Grace Owen leaned forward a little and held the curtain with one hand, probably to see better who had left the house. Through that part of the window which he could see, he made out the figure of the CID man. He was moving about at the mouth of the copse, leaving and entering Melr
ose’s line of vision. Bannen had turned and seemed to be staring straight in through the window. Grace took a step back, and, absurdly, Melrose himself tried to melt farther into the shadowy corner. But the inspector probably could not see Grace, for the clear thin light had faded. Bannen was simply standing, turning his head.

  Then in the distance Melrose thought he heard a car approaching, and from the sound of the gears shifting, it was Max Owen’s pricey sports car. Grace must have been watching the car, yet made no move to go out and greet her husband.

  Melrose left the room and climbed the stairs to his own room to find pen and paper with which to write a note to Jury. No, he should phone. His face was hot with what he assumed must be shame at his voyeurism. With his strong sense of privacy he could not think what impelled him to watch from the shadows of the gallery. The writing table in his room was directly in front of the window, a window above and to the right of the gallery window. He saw that Max Owen had not come directly into the house, but had stopped outside, been stopped, he assumed, by Bannen. They stood talking. Rather, Bannen talked. Max simply listened. The conference did not last more than a few minutes before Bannen turned and walked across the gravel to his car.

  Max watched the policeman head down the drive.

  What had happened? Max Owen had left the circular drive, and Melrose found that he was looking out on the vacant day, bleached of color, everyone gone.

  16

  Pete Apted, QC, shied an apple core toward his wastebasket and watched it arc, glance off the metal rim, and tumble to the floor.

  “You’re not in trouble again, are you, Superintendent?” Pete Apted smiled. He was referring to that sad episode several years back when Jury had been a suspect in a murder case. The case hadn’t gone to trial. Jury had discovered most of the truth; Apted had discovered the rest. Jury wished he hadn’t. Ever since then, the thought of Pete Apted had made him flinch.

  But not now. Now, the thought of Pete Apted, QC, made him hopeful. Apted was one of the most respected barristers in London. He would certainly have been a member of Parliament had he chosen to be.