“But the prosecution’s case is even weaker, when it comes to the murder of Dorcas Reese. Yes, she could conceivably have driven back to Lincolnshire, but that’s really forcing the issue.” Melrose stopped in the act of refilling their glasses. “It would have been more convincing, though, to say she’d gone to Price’s studio, never mind the ‘why.’ It’s going to be no secret that she knew him. And why shouldn’t she have known him? Why was she keeping that a secret as well? Why are these people so secretive? Jenny, Verna, Price?”
“Too many secrets, that’s the trouble, or one of them.” Jury pushed back from the table, pined for a cigarette, and said, “What worries me is that she’s keeping things from Pete Apted.” He shook his head and felt weary again. “Such as what were they fighting about.”
“Then you don’t believe it was Max Owen?”
Jury shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because Max Owen’s not a fool. He’d be able to see through Verna Dunn’s manipulations. She tried it on him enough times, I expect.”
The old waiter came to ask them if they’d quite finished. They had, they said, and the waiter collected their plates and shambled off.
Melrose thought for a moment.
“What about Parker?”
“What about him?”
“He left Fengate at eleven, didn’t he? I’m still wondering why he didn’t pass her. I’m surprised Oliver Stant hasn’t called him.” He was distracted by a young woman with black hair who reminded him of Miss Fludd. “Unless they’d planned to meet . . . no, that doesn’t make sense. She’d just met him.”
“So she says,” Jury said, wryly. “It’s a little hard to tell whom Jenny does and doesn’t know.” He had a table of cigarette-smokers under close scrutiny. He shook his head. “The trouble is, she’s been found out in too many lies.”
“This business about the Wash: It’s possible, you know. The more I think about it . . . Verna Dunn leaves the wood right after Jenny does, gets in her car, drives the four miles or so to the Wash. That would only have happened, surely, if she’d been meeting someone—”
“Well, obviously, it wouldn’t have been Jenny, then.” Jury watched a good-looking woman bring a silver lighter up to her cigarette. “I don’t think anybody’s out of it. I wonder abut Grace Owen,” Jury said after they sat in silence for a while. “If what Jenny implied was true, that Verna Dunn could have had something to do with Grace’s son’s death. God, talk about motive . . . ”
“Grace was with Max and Parker, though.”
“Not all the time. Not after eleven o’clock. I’m suspicious of this ‘headache’ that had her sleeping through Jenny’s return.”
“How would she have got there, to the Wash? There’d have to have been another car.”
Jury went on. “Burt Suggins saw the Porsche at the bottom of the drive sometime after midnight, so assuming Grace wasn’t in bed, there’d have been ample time. Maybe she took her own car, left it in Fosdyke.”
“And about the tides. I can believe one might choose to kill another on the Wash because the body would be carried out to sea. What I can’t understand is making a pig’s breakfast of the tides. There are tables, after all. And the shifting sands: true enough, they do shift, but this is very iffy.”
“I agree.” Jury thought for a moment. “Suggins’s testimony will pretty much let Max Owen off the hook, if not Grace.” Jury sighed; he wanted coffee. His brain felt addled from thinking about this case. He changed the subject. “So tell me about her.”
“ ‘Her’?” Melrose screwed up his face in a near-cartoon version of puzzlement.
“You know who. Miss Fludd.”
“I told you, she’s related to Lady Summerston. Distant, you know, like a hundredth-cousin-by-marriage.”
Jury looked at him for an uncomfortably long time. Melrose looked away. “Lady Summerston has given her the use of . . . the place for an indefinite time.” He didn’t want to name it.
Watermeadows. No one really had to say the name to him. That episode seven years ago was always just under the surface of Jury’s mind. It took very little to start a wave of memory. Watermeadows. The place itself impressed him by its sadness, the gorgeous, overgrown grounds, as if beauty were so ample they could afford to bury it or toss it to the winds; the great silent mirrored room he had been told to wait in, probably a salon when such things were fashionable. Furnished only with a long silk and gilt sofa, a small table holding a vase of flowers. Watermeadows was a place one encounters in dreams. Uninhabited, a place from which everyone has fled. Jury wondered if such dream-houses weren’t symbols of the self. He could almost hear the wind blowing through that wide, unfurnished room. Blowing through him.
He sighed, lifted the fresh glass of white wine—another bottle Plant had ordered. It tasted of winter. He thought of Nell Healy. Hannah Lean, Nell Healy, Jane Holdsworth. Jenny Kennington. “What is it with me and women?”
Happy to be off himself and women, still, Melrose was surprised. Jury didn’t often speak in these terms.
“Am I doomed? Is every relationship doomed?”
“Not you. Perhaps the women are,” said Melrose, sadly.
Jury laughed abruptly. “You’re no better, that’s certain. You ignore them even with them falling all over you.”
“What? Me? Falling all over me? You’re crazy. The only one ever interested in me was Penny Farraday, and she was fourteen, and she lost interest after I told her I wasn’t an earl any longer.”
“Uh-huh.” Jury laughed.
“Meaning what? Just name one. Go on, name me a woman you’ve seen ‘falling all over’ me.”
“You are kidding.”
Rather violently, Melrose shook his head. “No, I’m not. You can’t think of anyone—”
“Polly Praed, Vivian Rivington, Ellen Taylor. Even Lucy St. John, remember her?”
Melrose made a rubbery sound with his lips, a mock-laugh, disbelieving. “Oh, hold on! You said Vivian. That’s Vivian Rivington. You have never in your life seen Vivian falling all over me.”
“I don’t mean literally. But haven’t you noticed that they all act in the same way around you? Sticks out like a sore thumb.”
“What? Act how?”
“As if they can’t stand you.”
Melrose looked stupidly up at the ancient waiter who placed his pie before him and a dish of brandy sauce between them. “This is supposed to make me feel loved? This is supposed to be good?”
The elderly waiter backed off a step, aggrieved. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we’ve never had any complaints about our mincemeat pie.”
Melrose reddened, apologized profusely. When the old man had gone off, Melrose whispered savagely, “This is your evidence?”
Tucking into his dessert, Jury said, “Suit yourself.”
“ ‘Suit myself?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jury shrugged, cut into his pie. “Brandy sauce, good.”
Realizing Jury wouldn’t say anything more, Melrose shrugged too. “Tomorrow, I have to leave, you know.”
Jury frowned. “Leave Lincoln? Why?”
“I’ve been subpoenaed, that’s why.”
“Oh—please!”
“Subpoenaed, right. I’m to testify in the matter of the dog and the chamber pot. I saw with my own eyes the horrific attack on my dear old aunt’s ankle by the slobbering dog.”
“My God, he’s only two inches long. What damage could he do?”
“None, of course.” Melrose shrugged. “Don’t ask me why Agatha thinks she has a Chinaman’s chance of winning. Anyway, Trueblood seems very pleased with himself.”
“Trueblood’s always pleased with himself. Why this time?”
“I thought I told you: he’s handling Ada Crisp’s defense.”
Jury quickly returned the bite of brandy-sauced pie to his plate. He would have choked on it, laughing. “It’s better than Jurvis and the pig. I still can’t believe Agatha won. What a hell of a deal.”
“Hell of a deal, is right. Pass the brandy sauce.”
32
Oliver Stant did not appear to be clever, devious, or sly. He was, Melrose decided, all of those things, as Stant set about questioning his next witness, Annie Suggins. He began by establishing Mrs. Suggins in the Owen household, where she had worked for twenty-two years, she and Burt Suggins, her husband. In the course of the questioning, Mrs. Suggins told the court she had had little contact with the defendant, so could not attest to Lady Kennington’s comings and goings. Yes, the Owens occasionally went to the Case Has Altered. A very nice sort of pub, it is. Quite homey and frequented by pleasant decent folk, none of this disco stuff you see nowadays. What happened the night of February first, she couldn’t really say, as she’d been up late in the kitchen, and that’s the rear of the house. She wouldn’t have heard anything going on outside.
“All I knew was when Burt come into the kitchen and asked me did I see Miss Dunn. It was after eleven, after Major Parker’d left and after Mr. and Mrs. Owen had gone upstairs to bed. Oh, eleven-thirty or thereabouts. Well, no, I says to Burt, not since dinner. There was a bit of a commotion, naturally, when Lady Kennington got back and no Miss Dunn with her.”
“And what was the reaction to this on the part of the Owens?”
“Naturally, Mr. Owen was puzzled. But he didn’t bother Mrs. Owen with it, as she’d gone upstairs with a headache. Mr. Owen supposed Miss Verna just must’ve got in that fancy car of hers and gone back to London. But then more’n an hour later, Burt saw—”
“Don’t mind about that, Mrs. Suggins. We’ll be speaking to your husband a bit later. “They did not notify the police?”
“Why should they? It warn’t as if Miss Verna never did nothing peculiar.” She sniffed.
Stant smiled, nodded. “The Owens retired at about eleven?”
“I expect so; I mean they’d’ve gone upstairs. Mr. Owen, he liked to stay up to all hours, fooling about with those antiques of his, or up in his study reading up on ’em.” Her brief laugh was indulgent; Max Owen might have been a child with a fancy electric train. “Mrs. Owen, like I said, she had a headache and went straight to bed and didn’t know about it till the morning.”
“And what happened the next morning with regard to Verna Dunn?”
“She warn’t there for breakfast. Mr. Owen rung up her London house and no one—I think she has a housekeeper—had seen her. Well, now the Owens was in a real stew, you can imagine, after Burt told ’em about her car. That’s when they rang up the police. Me, I still thought it was some trick or other. I was cook to Mr. Owen all the time he was married to her, and I don’t mind saying anything’s possible with that one.” She squared and resettled her shoulders, posture conveying what she thought of Verna Dunn.
“I take it,” said Oliver Stant, again with that smile, “you didn’t much care for her.”
“I did not. Why that woman was back in Fengate was more’n I could explain. But Mrs. Owen, patience of a saint, she didn’t mind. Well.” Mrs. Suggins shook her head, making the little fruit bouquet on her straw hat bobble. She was dressed in a bright blue suit, fitted tight and a little strained across the bosom. It was clear that witnessing to her was an occasion.
“You know the accused”—Stant turned toward the witness box—“Jennifer Kennington?”
Mrs. Suggins nodded. “Only by way of her being a guest, sir.”
“And did you see her on that night of the first of February?”
“No, sir. I mean not except for a glimpse or two of the table when Dorcas was going in and out.”
“By Dorcas, you mean the Owens’ kitchen-helper and sometime maid, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
Stant turned then to the death of Dorcas Reese. Annie Suggins was in the process of lending a little shape, a little color to the image of the dead girl. “Moonin’ an’ moanin’ about like a sick calf.”
Oliver Stant smiled. “I like your description, Mrs. Suggins.” He had already complimented her on her hat, which had really gone down a treat with her. It was new. “Did she tell you the source of this moan of hers?”
With an expression of one who thought her questioner a bit simple, she said, “Well, for heaven’s sakes, thought ’erself in love, I expect. Don’t they always, these girls?”
“I see what you mean. When it comes to that sort of thing, you know, men aren’t as perceptive as women in—”
Pete Apted, used to Oliver Stant, was on his feet. “Your Honor, try as I will, I fail to perceive a question.”
The judge agreed and once again gently reprimanded Stant who, once again, apologized and went his merry way.
“What I was trying to ask, Mrs. Suggins, is whether Dorcas ever confided in you.”
The cook looked upward, as if the courtroom’s vaulted ceiling might lend her inspiration. “Now, ‘confide’ might be too strong a word, sir. She told me things, it’s true, you know, like as she just met some feller or t’other, and weren’t he the cutest lad ever? Well that’s all the lass thought about—men.”
Stant said, “I know what you mean. I’ve a daughter myself.” This earned him an indulgent smile from Annie Suggins, and severe glance from the judge. “My daughter seems to talk more to our cook than to us.” Another look of displeasure came down from the bench, but Stant pretended not to notice.
“If counsel could confine his remarks to the matter at hand?”
Stant bowed slightly, mumbled his apology.
“Sometimes she did tell me things—mostly made-up, I’d think,” said Annie, “but if you’re talking about her being preggers and all, no she didn’t tell me about that.”
“We’ll come back to that. But she’d not mentioned any man in particular.”
“No, sir. One day it’d be that boy from Spalding she’d be going with; the next day it’d be—someone else. Ever so flighty was Dorcas. Got ’erself into this spot, and from all I could tell, she was expecting ’im to marry ’er. She warn’t a comely girl, not in face nor figure. Nowt eyes, nor skin, nor teeth, nor hair had she a gift of.”
Melrose found this unexpected little poetical turn rather endearing.
Having established that Dorcas was a mercurial, perhaps scatterbrained young woman, Stant asked the witness if there was anything in her behavior just prior to her death that the cook found different.
“Yes, sir, I’d certainly say so. For a while there—oh, maybe a couple of months before, she was happy as a lark. That must have been when some man walked in. Then, a week or more before she—got herself murdered, like, well, she’d turned round completely, she was morose and bad-natured. That’s when I’d bet the man walked out. Same old story, been told dozens of times.”
“Indeed it has. Mrs. Suggins, she had told a friend and an aunt that she was nearly three months pregnant. Have you any idea why she’d make up such a story?”
Annie shifted her weight in the witness box and looked grim. “Who says she made it up? There warn’t much about the girl to make a person respect her, but I’d never known her to spread such a story. So I’ll bet she thought she was.” Annie drew herself up and in and seemed about to float up to the vaulted ceiling with her knowledge of this. “I must say, sir, I was that shocked, I was. But then there was all that time she spent at the pub, and lord knows what mischief she was getting up to. So much time, I thought she just might have an extra job at night. Starlighting, like.”
Even the judge smiled at that one. Melrose wrote it down for future reference.
“And you discovered that she did, indeed, have an extra job?”
“Yes, but only a few hours a week. Not a proper job. But that don’t account for all the time she spent there. I’d say it was more to hang around the men. There’s nowt agin them, though, if Dorcas got herself full of ideas. There must’ve been some young chap or other she’d set sights on.”
Oliver Stant paused, as if hesitating over his next question. Then he asked, “Did Dorcas ever speak of having particular f
eelings for anyone at Fengate?”
Annie Suggins reared back. “For Mr. Owen? Good lord.” Here she laughed, couldn’t help herself, even wiped a tear away.
“I was thinking more of Mr. Price.”
Annie’s brow furrowed, and she shook her head, slowly. “I’m afraid to say it, but, yes, I think she did. I told her straight out one morning when she was mooning about, talking on about how nice ’e was, I said, well, girl mebbe you’re thinking o’ ’im but I assure you, Mr. Price ain’t thinking o’ you!”
This sent another titter of laughter through the courtroom; the judge simply looked his displeasure at the field of faces.
“And how do you know that, Mrs. Suggins? Did Mr. Price say anything to you about Dorcas?”
“No, ‘course not. If she’d gone and left tomorrow, I don’t think Mr. Price’d notice. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean ‘e wasn’t appalled by the poor girl’s death, but not personal-like, you know what I mean.”
Oliver Stant smiled and nodded. “Did she always stay out so late? Eleven-thirty or so?”
“No. Most nights she’d be back around ten. Well, she ‘ad to get up early, di’n’t she? Still, many’s the morn I be dragging her outta bed by ’er feet. I complained once or twice to the missus, but Mrs. Owen, she’d never get rid of somebody just fer lyin’ abed, or—”
Melrose noted the pause. Annie Suggins was no doubt thinking about her husband, whom Mrs. Owen had not seen fit to discharge, either.
“—personal habits. Long as it didn’t interfere.”
“Were you surprised when Dorcas’s body was found in Wyndham Fen?”
The question was so abrupt, she drew back. “What a question! O’ course I was! Whatever that poor girl done, it’s no call for ’er to go get-tin’ ’erself murdered, no, she didn’t deserve that! You think dead bodies turns up every day on Windy Fen?”
Annie Suggins spoke much more like a woman entertaining a visitor to tea in her kitchen than a woman in a witness box. But this, thought Melrose, was simply testimony to Oliver Stant’s ability to create the sort of atmosphere that turns a witness box into a kitchen chair.
His answer to the cook’s question was, “I certainly hope not, Mrs. Suggins. And just before this, she was the same as always?”
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