It was a room filled with ruby velvet, cream brocade and gilt, a room that looked straight out of a decorator's album of Elegant Country House Drawing Rooms, right down to the portraits and paintings, a combination of awful Bodenheim ancestors and awful views of the Versailles gardens. The room had been chosen by the police because it had the advantage of adjoining Sir Miles's snuggery, which was the place Inspector Carstairs was using for the questioning of witnesses. A constable stood guard at the door. Thus, the pride of Rookswood had been turned into little more than a railway waiting room, to be sloughed off as passengers moved toward their trains.
Melrose watched as Sylvia moved quickly to admonish one of the three squalid kiddies who had been in the carriage. This one had decided the brocade bellpull would make a nice plaything. Its mum grabbed it back with a Come 'ere, lovey, and a dirty look at Sylvia's retreating figure.
"Lovey" pretended to bury her face in her mother's front, but was, instead, sticking out her tongue, either at Melrose or, more likely, Emily Louise beside him. She gladly returned the gesture. This continued until Lovey's mum gave her a smack and nearly hurled her onto the brocade loveseat.
Around the room, the other Bodenheims registered various attitudes of outrage and ennui; the Craigie sisters sat like stumps against the wall; Miss Pettigrew kneaded her brows as if she were making muffins in her mind. A few villagers, such as Mrs. Pennystevens, who had tended the other booths had been questioned and permitted to leave.
The door opened and Freddie Mainwaring came out of the snug, looking like a pile of ashes, from his gray slacks to his gray face. Next to enter the snug was Derek. It was rather like waiting to be called up before the headmaster.
The star of this occasion, although she took it with as little grace as she usually took anything involving her precious time and presence, was Emily Louise Perk. It was her carriage, after all, her golden horse cropping the woodland grass, and, by implication, her body. She had had her little stint with Detective Inspector Carstairs, and if Melrose felt sorry for anyone, it was Carstairs. Melrose wondered how much information the poor man had got from Emily Louise by using that syrupy "little lady" approach. From what he could gather, Emily knew no more than what had happened after the children had started screaming. Lacking her own mum (for whom many calls had been put in, but none of them effective), she had wedged herself into a gilt armchair beside Melrose and now sat, arms folded across her chest, hunting cap over her eyes.
"Your mother should be here," said Melrose. "Where is she?"
"At the pictures, I expect."
"Why wasn't she at the fête? Everyone else was."
"Doesn't like fêtes. Anyway, she isn't here. Where's that man from Scotland Yard? He's supposed to be seeing about things."
Melrose liked that way of putting it. "He's in London. I'm sure he's been contacted, though. What happened?"
"I don't know, do I? I just heard the nasty Winterbournes screaming and I drove straight back."
He started to ask her another question when he saw the constable beckon to him.
That Melrose was in Littlebourne to buy property seemed scarcely a satisfactory answer to Inspector Carstairs, since he had been in no hurry to look the property over. Still, Mainwaring had confirmed that Plant had been to his estate office, so the inspector took the explanation with as much grace as possible, which wasn't much. "You say you were watching the dead woman as she was walking about."
This question had been put to him in at least half-a-dozen different ways. "She wasn't dead then, Inspector."
"Please don't be flippant, Mr. Plant. This is a murder investigation."
They always said that in books, thought Melrose, sighing inwardly. With the blood running down the walls and the bodies sprawled all round, someone invariably mauled in and said, This is a murder investigation. "Sorry. But you seem to be thinking I had some particular reason for keeping this woman under observation."
"Did you?" Carstairs snapped.
"No. She was someone I'd not seen before and I found her rather remarkable looking."
"Meaning?"
"Oh, I don't know . . . white and dark and deadly."
"Why ‘deadly'?"
"I told you, Inspector. It was merely an impression. She was walking about the place, but didn't seem part of it. As if she hadn't come for the festivities at all, I suppose-"
"And you saw her at the Jumble table."
"Yes."
"Talking to Mrs. Bodenheim."
"Not precisely ‘talking,' from what I could observe." He almost felt sorry for old Sylvia, who had had possession of the silver puncher at just the wrong time.
Carstairs looked at him for a long moment and then said, "Thank you, Mr. Plant, that'll be all for the moment."
Melrose stood up and ventured the question, "Has, ah, Superintendent Jury been informed of this new development?"
Carstairs's look was dark indeed, and Melrose was surprised that he answered at all. "We're trying to locate him." He returned to his sheaf of papers.
Trying to? wondered Melrose, as he looked round at the gilt and brocade, empty now except for the clutch of policemen smoking in a corner and a thin woman with cotton-candy hair sitting stiffly upright in a chair. Trying to? Could a superintendent of the C.I.D. simply slip through a crack?
The hell with it, he thought, reclaiming his stick and his coat. If the Hertfordshire constabulary couldn't put his finger on Jury, he bet he could.
TWENTY
I
SLIPPING through a crack would have been an appropriate description for finding oneself in the salvage depot of the Crippses' front room, where Jury was at the moment as far removed from gilt and brocade as one could be who had not actually hit another galaxy.
He had made two other stops first, however, upon returning to London. One had been on the other side of Chief Superintendent Racer's desk.
The question at New Scotland Yard was not whether the chief superintendent was mad, but whether he had gone madder. If Racer would not give way to God, he certainly would have had to give way to the commissioner, who had, along with everyone else, wondered when Racer would go down for the last time.
Jury was about the only one left who would listen to him with something resembling patience, a response not motivated so much by altruism as by curiosity: he wondered how often Racer could bob up again before the waves finally sucked him under. Although Racer seemed to think the collapse of the Empire was imminent with his resignation, he also believed it would rise again out of the ashes of his memorable accomplishments. He had just expended some few moments outlining one of his early cases to Jury in filigree detail, a case which bore, as far as Jury was concerned, little resemblance to the one he was now working on.
He said so. "I don't see how that's relevant, sir."
Racer, who had got up, apparently to twitch his Savile Row lapels into smoother place, sat down again. He shook his head, a bit sadly.
"Do you know the difference between you and Sherlock Holmes, Jury?" Racer was having a go at the game map, which Jury had produced for his inspection.
Jury pretended to think this question over seriously before answering, "I could think of quite a few differences, yes."
Racer shook his head violently. Even when Jury agreed with him, Racer assumed he was disagreeing. Once a mug, always a mug, the look leveled at Jury said. "Imaginative grasp!" Racer grabbed for a fistful of air. "You're a plodder, Jury. Always have been."
"You've always accused me of being a corner-cutter before."
"You're that, too," said Racer crisply. Would Moses have taken back one of the Commandments even if the good Lord had come along with an eleventh that punched holes in the first ten? He looked up from the map. "So you've got the Hertfordshire police turning over every stick and stone in this godforsaken wood looking for a necklace?" Racer shoved the cat Cyril off his desk. The cat had been discovered one day walking through the halls of New Scotland Yard; no one knew how it had got in. But it had seemed determined on reporting something. Jury considered the cat had an ulterior motive in attaching itself to Chief Superintendent Racer, probably because Racer couldn't stand it. It liked to sit on Racer's desk with its tail wrapped around its legs like an ornament, part of a matched desk set.
Now it sat the same way on the floor, waiting its chance.
"The necklace," said Jury, "is only part of it. They're out there searching for clues to the murder of Cora Binns. What would you have me do, sir?"
It was apparently just such an opening that Racer had been waiting for. "What would I have you do?" He smiled slightly and shoved himself back from his desk to get up and walk about the room. He could not resist talking down to Jury, literally as well as figuratively. "To sum up: what we have here is: One, a bundle of anonymous letters; Two, a girl coshed on the head in a tube station; Three, another woman murdered in a wood outside this one-eyed village; Four, a necklace worth a king's ransom stolen by a small-time dip a year ago-"
"I wouldn't call Trevor Tree a small-time anything-"
Racer ignored the interruption. " . . . And, Five, this damned map thing. Diagram, game plan. Whatever the hell you call it. So we are dealing with several disparate elements." Racer had stopped somewhere behind Jury's chair. The cat Cyril flicked its ear, as if warning Jury.