"No one around here to play it with, I suppose? I might like to learn." He hoped he was right in assuming Derek would hardly offer to teach him.
He was. "The last person I played with here was that secretary of Kennington's. The one who stole a quarter-million worth in jewelry. Heard about that, I expect?" Melrose nodded. "Tree was really good. Used to play with him in the Blue Boy. Of course, I'm sure it was a set-up straight from the beginning."
"How do you mean?"
"That's why he took the job in the first place. Wouldn't be at all surprised if she were in it with him."
" ‘She'?"
"The high-and-mighty Lady-bloody-Kennington. Tree was an attractive bloke, I expect. Wouldn't trust him out of my sight, of course. He was too sharp. Somehow, I always ended up standing drinks."
Tree must have been sharp, thought Melrose, who had put the younger Bodenheim down as one of the world's great borrowers.
"He was a Wizard-Master." At Melrose's questioning look, Derek said, "The one who controls the play. What rules there are are set by the Master."
"What I heard was there was talk he had a partner to bring it off. Someone in the village."
Derek was perhaps not quite so stupid as his vapid eye and slack face suggested. "Don't look at me, chum."
"Was I?"
Heatedly, Derek asked the same question as Julia: "What the devil's your interest in this? Did you hear about it when you were looking at Stonington, or something? Afraid it's got a curse on it? That girl was on her way there, I hear. Poor bitch. Hell of a way to snuff it, face down in the mud."
V
For a few more minutes, Melrose moved among the crowd which seemed to swell and thin out by turns. The smell of popcorn combined with the sickly sweet smell of cotton-candy: the very air seemed pink and sticky with it. He saw that the tea tent was even more crowded, and that Miss Pettigrew still stood guard over her baked goods: not much change in the pieman's wares. The voices of the children grew, like the sun itself, bright and coppery. To get away from it, Melrose decided to walk up to the Church of St. Pancras, to have a look at the window that had inspired all of this activity.
It was after he'd got to the church and turned on the rise of ground that he saw, at a distance, the woman in white and black standing at the gate, exchanging a few words with Peter Gere as she dug in her bag for change. Peter was apparently doing his stint, taking Miles Bodenheim's place. The dress was quite striking, its black-and-white zebra stripes running diagonally from short silken sleeves to the bottom of the skirt. And the pallor of the skin was highlighted by the coal-black hair. She moved through the gate and through the crowd with a queenly bearing that seemed as inappropriate to the gathering as was the dress on this cool September afternoon. He wondered who she was, as she picked things up and put them down in the various stalls. He watched her having a rather long conversation with Derek Bodenheim, erasing some of the slack look from Derek's face and replacing it with an intensity unusual for him. Then he watched her at the Bring 'n Buy table being cut dead by Sylvia Bodenheim. Watched the woman in black and white, in turn, say something to Miles which did not make him at all happy. Finally, he watched her loop an arm through the arm of Freddie Mainwaring, who looked this way and that, obviously uncomfortable. Melrose got the impression that quite a few people could have dispensed with her presence.
He went inside the little church, where the air was deliciously cool and free from the mingled odors of lemonade, iced lollies, and cotton-candy. It was also deliciously quiet. He looked round at its pleasant plainness. It was no wonder that the Reverend Finsbury was pleased with the idea of stained glass. The window, though small, was quite beautiful, catching the sun as it did right now.
The church had been the one thing fixed on Katie's map like a star, looking off-if one used one's imagination-toward the River of Blood. Melrose stood at an easterly window, looking off and down. A policeman seemed to be drawing a stick through the stream quite a long way away.
He spent some time in the church, staring out of the window, and more time walking about, not expecting to find anything, but still looking for possible hiding places. He was surprised when the bell tolled four o'clock.
It was then that he heard the screaming.
People were rushing in waves, yanking children along, and for a moment he imagined they were converging on the Bottle Toss. His mind was so full of Polly's strychnine-in-the-wine, that it took him a minute to see they were moving, rather, in the direction of the carriage, parked in the shadow of the wood. And even as he looked, he thought he saw Emily Louise fall from her driver's perch.
VI
But Emily Louise Perk was too used to keeping a firm seat on a saddle to fall out of anything. She hadn't fallen; she'd jumped.
The screams were issuing from some children, Melrose saw, once he'd cut through the crowd-their two white faces looking out of the carriage and one yelling and fumbling at the latch, all butterfingers. Emily Louise, always master of the situation, yanked it open, and children seemed to tumble from everywhere-though there were only the requisite three-arms and legs flailing, pointings of fingers, tears and tremblings all round as they rushed into the protecting arms of their respective mothers.
From what he could gather, there was a Thing in the phaeton.
He could not really get a good view of the proceedings, as he had come up near the end of the crowd and was circling it and looking over shoulders. Peter Gere had managed to hack his way through and was trying to hold back the wave of people. As Gere managed to create a path for himself, Melrose caught a glimpse inside the carriage: from the rug which was rolled up on the floor of the black carriage dangled an arm, marble-white and (he guessed) marble-cold. There was a red-lacquered hand, the edge of a black-and-white sleeve.
What a short time he had known her.
NINETEEN
I
THE fête was a shambles. Fear, confusion, and shock had resulted in trampled shrubberies, trippings over headstones, upset booths, runaway dogs, and screaming children as their parents tried to drag them out of the path of the Hertfield police.
There was, fortunately, no dearth of police. The forensic crew seemed to spill out of the wood. Nathan Riddley had been the first medical man on the scene and had pronounced Ramona Wey very dead indeed. Except for the thin trickle which had run down her arm and caked in a dark ribbon, there was very little blood.
From what Melrose could gather in the general confusion that reigned, the weapon was a small, silver awl-like thing used, back in Victorian days, for punching holes in canvas for needlework.
It had, apparently, come from Sylvia's Jumble table. It had been donated by Sylvia herself. She was none too pleased, now, with her generosity. The sterling hole-puncher had come home to roost on her doorstep.
Melrose marveled at the nerve of the murderer, killing the woman with the whole Hertfield constabulary back there in the wood. The position of the carriage had effectively masked any maneuver-opening the door, shoving the body in, and covering it with the rug. The murderer had taken advantage of one of the rest periods.
"What godawful nerve," said Riddley to Carstairs, who had arrived at the scene in nothing flat from Hertfield. "Can't believe anyone would be that reckless."
"Or that desperate," Melrose heard Carstairs say as he walked off.
Melrose was rather enjoying watching the Bodenheims being ground exceeding small in the mills of the Hertfield constabulary. D. I. Carstairs had commandeered Rookswood for questioning, and Miles Bodenheim had had a time of it, trying to herd people like sheep to the public footpaths.
"Disgraceful," he said to Melrose as they stood in the hallway of Rookswood. He seemed to think the murder had been done to ruin the festivities. "It's given Sylvia a sick-headache and Julia is simply overcome with nerves." Melrose seriously doubted both. "That such a thing could happen in our village-twice, mind you-" (as if Melrose had forgotten the first murder) "and now here's police simply tramping about our drawing room, and all of those people . . . Ah! There's the Craigie sisters come in . . . I must speak to them at once . . . Ernestine! Augusta!" He sailed off.
Most of the visitors to the fête had been questioned briefly by police and been permitted to leave. A handful remained in the drawing room of Rookswood-the Craigies, Mainwaring, the Bodenheims, Polly Praed, and, of course, the children who had made the grisly discovery and their mums, one of whom was being quite vocal. "Disgraceful," she announced to anyone who would listen, echoing the opinion of Sir Miles. "Disgraceful, I calls it. Here's little Betty, and her only nine, being questioned by police." Little Betty's mother heaved a giant carryall up to her lap and looked as dour as one of the Bodenheim ancestors hanging about in portraits on the walls. Little Betty was a moon-faced child with eyes like brown buttons who enjoyed inspecting the tacky blood on her shoe.
Sylvia Bodenheim, sick-headache or not, had been brought down from her bed for questioning. Under her eyes were dark smudges, and her complexion had a distinctly greenish cast as she sat wrenching a handkerchief. Melrose thought her reaction was owing less to the object taken from her Jumble table and the consequent tragedy in the wood, than to the tragedy in her drawing room, now overrun with unwanted villagers and, worse, actual strangers.