“Never mind the baking powder. What did you and she chat about?”
“Oh, this and that. And the oddest thing is, when I mentioned this Christmas house party and that my nephew was to be there, well, she absolutely insisted on ringing Charlie Seaingham —”
She hadn’t even heard of the man until yesterday and he was already “Charlie.”
“ — and he insisted that I come along, and, well —” She held out her arms in a hopeless gesture suggesting that, hard as it was on her, she was not one to shirk a request made in friendship.
Melrose sat morosely regarding his aunt as she jammed up another scone and tucked half of it into her mouth. “So what it amounts to is that you’ve been invited to the Seainghams’.”
“I shall not be out of place, after all, amongst artists and writers.”
“That’s nice. I shall feel very out of place.”
“You do not write, my dear Plant.”
He looked up over his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Are you going to tell me you’re still writing that mystery, Agatha? The one about the strange goings-on in Long Pidd, your ‘semi-documentary’? That was four years ago. I have yet to see a word.” He returned to the Times.
“I’ve decided to do a piece for the Long Pidd Press. A column, really. It was after I wrote that scorching letter about the Withersby person’s being found flat out on the High, in her cups.”
“Mrs. Withersby is seldom out of her cups, but I don’t see that’s any problem of yours. And the Long Pidd Press doesn’t exactly tell the news of the world. I’m not all that interested in the vicar’s healthy rose plants or exhortations not to throw beer bottles in the Piddle River. What is your column?”
“I thought it might be called ‘Eyes and Ears.’ ”
“That should have a wide audience, since everyone’s got two of each.”
“Don’t be snide. It’s to be a sort of sociological study of Long Pidd. After all it is a very old village, one of the oldest in Northants, and by interviewing people and keeping one’s — well, eyes and ears open —” Here she gave a clever little laugh.
“Gossip, in other words,” said Melrose.
“Certainly not! I hope I have better things to do with my time!”
“So do I,” said Melrose, snapping his London Times.
III
LONDON TIMES
SEVEN
1
THE cat Cyril was sitting on the sill behind Fiona Clingmore’s desk, observing the progress of a small bug making its painful way from sash to the brighter environs of glass, all unaware of the fate Cyril had in store for it.
From Chief Superintendent Racer’s point of view, it would have been a fitting analogy, thought Jury — Racer would imagine himself waiting before the window, ready to squash Jury the bug.
Fiona Clingmore, Racer’s secretary, sat in her usual chair performing her usual pre-lunch ablutions. It was an exhaustive process, which consisted not of merely dabbing on more lip rouge and fluffing up hair, but in revamping the whole model. Her black wool dress had had an extra tuck taken in at the bust, thereby battening down the hatches a little more. He noticed that her usual black ensemble extended today to stylish stockings decorated with tiny black butterflies.
Her compact snapped with a little click, and she gave Jury a brilliant smile. She also crossed her mod-stockinged legs, heaving up her hemline another inch or two. “Well, I think it’s a shame, getting you back here from your Christmas hols. How long’s it been since you had a proper leave?”
“Brighton when I was five, with my spade and pail. Not to worry. I had to come back anyway. Is Wiggins about?”
She nodded. “Saw him creeping round the halls a while ago. You want him?”
“Yes, I can use him.”
She sighed. “Sometimes I think you’re the only one that does. Poor Al.”
Jury smiled. “Poorly Al, don’t you mean?” He looked at Racer’s door. “I imagine he expected me two hours ago?”
She grimaced. “Now you’ll be keeping him from his lunch at the club. You know how he hates to miss his whiskey and soda spot on twelve.”
• • •
Other mysteries were negligible compared with Racer’s rise to a chief superintendency. There had been a long-standing rumor of neopotism, since someone had discovered that Racer’s wife was related to one of the higher-ups. Then had come the rumor he was going to resign. And now some other fishy smell was in the air, one that only the cat Cyril would appreciate — that Racer might stumble up the next rung into a deputy assistant commissionership.
The idea that Racer could find an even bigger horn to blow appalled everyone but Jury, who was used to having Racer roll the stone back down the hill, Sisyphus-like, to land at Jury’s feet.
At Jury’s feet at the moment was Cyril, who had slipped unobserved into the office to take his princely place on the sill behind Racer’s desk. Racer hated the mangy beast (as he called him). Cyril was anything but mangy. He was copper-colored and white-pawed and divided his time between his personal grooming and outwitting the Chief Superintendent.
Racer was just twitching the new coat from his bespoke tailor off the rack, getting ready to leave for his club. “You!” he said. He made Jury sound like a natural disaster. He slid his smoothly tailored jacket sleeve into the smoothly tailored topcoat and said, silkily: “Isn’t it too bad we had to get you back from Glasgow or whatever place your sister lives.”
Jury sat down, prepared to stay. That Racer was equally prepared to leave didn’t bother him at all. “Cousin. And it’s Newcastle, not Glasgow.”
“Pity the poor Glaswegians. You were supposed to call in this morning,” he snapped. “I’m on my way to lunch.”
“This morning I was on the train from Newcastle.”
“When you go on holiday, why don’t you stay away from provincial police? You’ve been messing about in their business. You know better than that.”
Jury looked out of the window, taking his time. Weak sunlight washed over the sill and Cyril, burnishing his fur as he sat there in stately silence, tail lapped round forepaws. On the wall beside the window was the official portrait of the Queen. Jury wondered if Cyril would still be there, glimmering in winter light, when crowns and coronets had sifted down to dust.
“Well?” Racer pounced. “I haven’t got all day, man.”
Jury came out of his dreams of feline grace. “Sorry. I’ve come across something up in Tyne and Wear which I think needs investigating.”
An imitation of a smile played on Racer’s mouth. The only thing Racer seemed to enjoy more than his club and girls half his age was cranking out laborious lectures to Jury on the state of the country’s police forces, beginning the history around the time of the Peelers and moving on to the formation of the provincial police forces and their advances in the detection of crime. “Even murder, Jury. Yes, even up in the northeast of England, they have police forces. Even Tyne and Wear. So what are you doing sticking your nose in what’s no concern of yours?”
Jury said nothing. Cyril flicked his tail whip-wise and yawned.
“Well? Well? You’ve kept me a goodish quarter-hour from my club; what have you got to say for yourself?”
The quarter-hour had been used by Racer himself setting Jury straight on the Peelers, the Bow Street Runners, and the buildings set aside in Whitehall for Scottish kings which gave Scotland Yard its name. “Nothing much, except I don’t see how all that’s quite relevant.”
“Relevant! I just told you, lad! The Northumbria police are fully equipped to deal with a murder — if it is murder — on their doorstep. They don’t need you.” Who does? the tone implied, as Racer prepared to leave for his club.
But Jury still sat with catlike patience and lit a cigarette, to Racer’s massive annoyance, as it meant Jury was settling in for the long haul. The quickest way to get what he wanted was to delay Racer’s lunch. “You see, the way it happened was . . . ”
After three or four minutes of Jury’s r
eview of the discovery of the body of Helen Minton, Racer interrupted. “All right, all right. No need to give me every bloody detail. Just what is it you want? You know perfectly well we can’t go sticking our long noses into the affairs of Northumbria unless they ask for help.”
“The sergeant I’ve been talking to doesn’t seem to mind — I don’t know about the Chief Constable. Anyway, they may need my help.”
“Your help, my aunt Fanny.” Cyril had slipped from his perch down a ladder of air and caught Racer’s eye. Racer made the intercom throb, ordering Fiona in to get the rat-eater out. Cyril made a circuit of the desk and rubbed up against Jury’s leg, purring like a power plant.
“My help,” Jury went on, “because I might have been the last person to talk to Helen Minton. I’m waiting for what the autopsy turns up. What I want to do is have a look round Helen Minton’s London house.”
“A search warrant, that’s it?” Racer flicked his gold wrist-watch and held it to his ear as if Jury’s appearance might have stopped all the clocks from Scotland Yard to Greenwich. “Well, get one then. It makes no odds.”
“Probably I won’t even need one, if there’s anyone in attendance at the house. We haven’t located the cousin.”
At this point Racer was colliding with Fiona Clingmore, coming in to collect Cyril. Racer did not immediately step back from Fiona, but said with Racer-sweetness, “If I find that ball of mange in my office once more, once more —” Here he became more interested in leaning further into Fiona’s frontage.
“Well, Cyril’s not mine, is he?” She was chewing gum and very nearly splattered a bubble across her chief’s face, he was standing that close. “I can’t watch his every move, can I?”
Jury interrupted this exchange by asking where Wiggins was.
“In sick bay,” said Racer, readjusting his lapels.
Jury sighed. “We don’t have a sick bay.”
“Don’t need one. We’ve got Wiggins.”
Cyril slipped between Racer’s legs and planted himself in front of the door to the corridor. He washed his already pristine paw until Racer got near enough to give a kick that Cyril artfully eluded by bounding up to Fiona’s desk, where he continued on his paw.
2
“JUST two shopping days to Christmas, and I’m sure I’m coming down with something,” said Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, the bottom half of his face masked in a handkerchief as if germ-warfare were here. He blew his nose. “And me with my gifts still to buy.”
They had parked the car on a curved moon of street off the King’s Road and had been walking toward Sloane Square when Wiggins had apparently been reminded of his gift-buying by the spangled windows of Peter Jones. Featureless, starved-looking mannequins were draped in gowns of silver and satiny black, apparently this season’s fashionable ensemble. In the next brightly lit window was a Nativity scene, more befitting the Royal Boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington, he supposed, than the poor display at the Jerusalem Inn. The Three Kings were dressed in flowing robes of gold lamé and silky stuff, as if they had come, not to pay homage to the child in the manger, but to call on the girls next door.
“It’s my family in Manchester — must be a dozen kiddies between them. I never know what to get kids, do you — I mean, not having any?” Wiggins popped a throat pastille in his mouth. “At least I’m glad to see the shop’s got some kind of religious theme to it.” The porcelain face of Mary looked done by Peter Jones’s makeup consultant.
“If you can call it that,” said Jury.
“It is a bit fancy, isn’t it? Look at the way they’ve done up the Three Kings’ presents. You’d think Bethlehem had a gift-wrap department.” Wiggins sneezed.
Jury said, “What you need is a little myrrh.”
Any unfamiliar medication would rivet Wiggins’s attention. “Myrrh? I always thought that was some perfume-y thing. You know how allergic I am to perfume.” His tone was reproachful.
Jury knew. Sergeant Wiggins was allergic to just about everything except plaice and chips. “It’s used in medicine, too, I think. Or used to be. Good for catarrh. And flu.” Jury hadn’t the least idea what it was good for, but it seemed to brighten Wiggins a bit, to think the Wise Men had had the sense to bring along something medicinal. Jury felt Wiggins’s interest in the manger scene was now renewed as he got closer to the window, a little sad perhaps that in there might be some cure, some amulet, some anodyne for whatever ailed him.
“Do you believe all that, sir?” asked Wiggins.
He could have been talking about myrrh or the whole Christian myth. Jury thought of Father Rourke, who spent his life answering questions like that. And he wondered if the window dresser with his magically suspended halos had displayed a certain intuitive sadness by placing the holiday party scene next to the Wise Men, as if it were all one big glitter palace.
When Jury didn’t answer, Wiggins added, “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
Jury was silent. He felt the loss of something irreplacable, as if a thief had come out of the night, velvet-gloved and softly shod, and taken whatever it was away without Jury’s ever having known, and slipped through the square, with its crisscrossed strings of tiny lights.
EIGHT
1
THE pretty maid who answered the door in Eaton Place was wearing a neat, bottle-green uniform, white-cuffed and polished as the brass knocker. But her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pale, her expression woebegone. The presentation of Jury’s card did nothing to help her. Yes, she had heard from the police in Northumbria. Behind them the hallway was wrapped in shadows, its gloom broken only by the dull light from the etched glass of a hanging fixture.
Her name, she said, was Maureen Littleton, and she was housekeeper here. Jury was surprised, given her youth. He apologized for the lateness of the hour and the circumstances that had brought them. It might have been better to assume a manner less sympathetic. Certainly Wiggins’s getting out his own handkerchief was no help, bringing the housekeeper dangerously near to tears. Jury stemmed a fresh onslaught by requesting a cup of tea.
“Sergeant Wiggins seems to be coming down with something, and I wouldn’t mind a cup myself. Perhaps we could just talk in the kitchen?”
Pressed to perform this routine task, she regained her control. The familiar and warm surroundings of the kitchen downstairs were a help, too.
It was her own parlor in which they sat and Jury had let her go about her tea ceremony without question or comment except for the usual dull chat about the weather and how the kiddies would have the best Christmas gift of all: snow.
The tea steamed as they sat in chairs where a coal fire glowed. They sat at a round table and she poured out tea with the ritual silence that she apparently felt it deserved. In the brighter light, Jury saw she was older than he had at first thought, but some of that might have been the result of the old-fashioned hairdo — dark brown hair rolled up all around like a Gibson girl. No makeup and, of course, the severely cut uniform. It could well have been her version of mourning-dress.
“How long have you been with Miss Minton?”
“Well, it’s the Parmengers I’ve been with. Nearly nineteen years. Helen — Miss Minton — was Mr. Parmenger’s charge. I was only a girl. I started out as kitchen maid. It was when Mr. Edward Parmenger was alive. Mr. Frederick’s his son. The painter. There were four of us servants then.” From her expression, it might have been another era. “It was when Miss Helen went away to school.”
Wiggins had been about to take out his notebook, but at Jury’s brief headshake, put it back and took out a packet of cough drops instead.
“She went away to school. What about Mr. Frederick?”
“Oh, no, sir. He went to school in London.”
Maureen Littleton couldn’t have been much older than Helen Minton herself. “She was your employer’s ward, I understand.”
Maureen nodded, the steam from her tea mug — Jury and Wiggins had been given proper cups — rising like river-mist, behind which
Jury saw the face lock up in sadness again.
“Did you know Miss Minton’s parents?”
“Her mother, I did. Not her father, though.”
“Did her uncle seem — fond of her?” Jury watched her look down into her cup, still the loyal servant years after the elder Parmenger’s death. Maureen was apparently not a gossip in any circumstances, least of all in these.
“He was a kind of — straitlaced person —”
Read for that, thought Jury, martinet, or termagent.
“ — and didn’t show his feelings much, except —”
Jury cued her when she stopped. “ ‘Except’?”
There was a slight shrug of her shoulders as she poured out more tea into Sergeant Wiggins’s proffered cup. “Well, he would get a bit angry now and then.”
Terrible temper, in other words. But he couldn’t get Maureen to go into any details. “Now, Miss Helen. I don’t think I ever heard a cross word from her to any of the servants. Not when she was young, and not when she was —” Once again, she had to look away.
“It seems a little strange that the house would be left to Helen Minton rather than his own son.”
Maureen did not find it so. “You see, Mr. Frederick —” She waved her hand as if Mr. Frederick’s status, both professional and financial, explained itself. “He has his own place. Smallish, it is. In St. Johns’s Wood. Near Keats’s house. The poet,” she explained to Jury, helpfully. “It’s got good light, he’s always saying. He comes here to dine with Miss Helen. And I’ve heard him talk about — skylights, or something. He’s a grand painter, but I don’t know much about that sort of thing.”
Maureen was clearly in awe of Mr. Frederick and those other luminaries whose names broke into print for whatever reason. Art, rock groups, movie stars. “They were on good terms, then?”
Jerusalem Inn Page 7