The Case Has Altered (17 page)

Melrose listened to this tale of the
bonheur-du-jour
with a certain enjoyment and even a certain awe. What he found so compelling was that Max could hardly remember at all a christening, a wedding, a funeral at the same time he recalled every detail about the
bonheur-du-jour
, everything that had happened to it in the seventeen or eighteen years before he'd become its owner. It was as if this charming piece of furniture stirred in Max Owen all of the affection, or all of the poignance one ordinarily attached to beloved family heirlooms, or to photographs of one's family or even—and perhaps this was the point—to one's family itself. He didn't doubt but what there would be similar tales told about this needlework settee, about the heavy old mulberry-wood chest, the fabulous Court Chest, the papier-mâché and painted metal tables, the Renaissance bronzes. So if Melrose had supposed Max Owen to be one of the idle and acquisitive rich, he knew now that he was wrong.

Melrose got up to look at the Court Chest again. “You don't honestly intend to turn these things over to Sotheby's auction block, do you?”

Max's expression, the candid eyes and slow smile, was as beguiling as a child's. He seemed to be studying the end of his cigarette, and then he chuckled as if it were all a great joke. “No way.”

Melrose smiled at the Americanism. “Then why did you need them appraised?” Melrose hoped he wasn't talking himself out of this job.

“I expect I didn't want an appraisal. I wanted an audience. No, not exactly an audience, just some smart fellow to talk to.”

When he turned that smile on Melrose, Melrose felt a pang of guilt, as if he had intruded upon a scene of passion, a secret tryst.

Max went on. “The only one around here is Parker. Of course, there's Grace, but I've probably bored that dear woman to death with my accounts. Although she's willing to listen endlessly. She likes those Romanesque statues. I got those at auction; why I'm not sure. That was in my early days. Grace calls them ‘the cold ladies.' Isn't that marvelous?” Then Max paused, flushing a little. “I must strike you as tremendously shallow, talking about bureaus and writing tables when there've just been two murders.”

Speaking of that!
Melrose wanted to say. But he was sympathetic. “Well, your ‘stuff,' as you call it, might be your ‘still point.' Your ‘center.' ” For there was no question that the man seemed to be enthralled by these possessions, no more and no less than are children who invest objects with magical powers. The dish runs away with the spoon; the Red Queen canters; the chessmen shout their disapproval of beleaguered Alice. “Magic,” he muttered.

Max looked at him questioningly.

“Oh . . . I was only thinking of our relationship to our things when we were young, when we were children.”

“Obsessive,” Max said. “Maybe so; maybe we think they share in our problems and delights. Or maybe they're like children themselves.” He lit another cigarette with Melrose's Zippo, flicking the lid open and closed and open again. “We don't have any children.” He said this as if he were explaining something to himself. “Grace had a son.” And as if this were a fact he hadn't quite come to terms with, he frowned and kept opening and closing the Zippo lid. “She was young—nineteen, twenty—when she was married the first time, and Toby was born a couple of years later. He died when he was twenty.” Max leaned back with a kind of shudder. “Only twenty, and he had a riding accident, fell off his horse—” He motioned with his head to some vague point before them in a distant landscape. “Out there. It wouldn't've been serious for most riders, but Toby
was a hemophiliac and he bled internally, you see, afterward.” Max shook his head. “Grace hated to see him riding at all. But what can you do? Can't put a boy in cotton wool and never let him do anything. He liked riding, even though he had a hard time with horses. He'd hunted ever since he was young, when they'd lived in Leicester. It isn't really very far from here. Grace said he could never sit a horse properly. Still . . . ” Max shrugged, somewhat helpless to convey his sorrow, or Grace's. Then he was silent.

“I'm sorry,” Melrose said, helpless himself.

Max sat back. “You know, I think that's why she likes the gallery so much. She can look out of all of those windows to the copse. Maybe she sees him, I don't know. Out there in the mist.” He rose, the cigarette dangling from his mouth, as if he'd forgotten its presence, and leaned down to look at the
bonheur-du-jour
, at its painted top. With his thumbnail he scraped at something. Then he straightened, remembered the cigarette, snuffed it in the ashtray. “It was my horse, you see. I'd got it for him for his nineteenth birthday. Bought it from Parker, who kept a couple of horses back then. So it was the one I'd given him.”

“But he apparently had trouble with any horse—not just the one you'd given him.”

“Yes.” With his hands shoved hard into his pockets, Max said, “Still, I can't help but wonder if she holds me somewhat responsible. Instead of some impenetrable Fate. Me.”

Melrose said, “She doesn't strike me as a blaming kind of person.”

“No.” Max turned and smiled at him. “You're right, she isn't.” The smile lingered, and thoughts of Grace vanished at the thought of death. “Poor girl.”

It had been Grace's comment over the death of Dorcas Reese.

Then Max was up and telling Melrose to come with him to the long gallery.
Oh, hell
, Melrose thought.
Not valuing the paintings, I hope.

But it wasn't that. Max simply wanted to talk about them, to have them looked at by a fresh pair of eyes. Melrose followed as he moved from a small Picasso sketch, through some quite beautiful landscapes, past a Landseer of a roomful of dogs, on down past several portraits, one of which they lingered over. It was a charming study of two little girls in a garden, lighting Japanese lanterns, that he'd noticed yesterday.

“John Singer Sargent,” said Max, “not the original, of course. That's in the Tate. Still, it is a superior copy. He hasn't lost the light.”

Cones of delicate yellow shone upward from the light-suffused paper lanterns onto the two little girls' faces. Melrose said, “I'm used to seeing only formal portraits of Sargent. Not this sort of study.”

“Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
, it's called.” Then Max recited:

Have you seen where Flora goes
,

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

“I like that. Which one is Flora, do you guess?”

Melrose smiled. “Or ‘Lily'? Or ‘Rose'?”

His eyes still on the painting, Max said, “Grace wasn't jealous of my first wife. I had the feeling that detective from Lincoln thought Grace would have naturally hated her. Grace didn't dislike her; I think she even enjoyed her company.”

Was it safe to ask? Melrose tried to be casual. “And the others?”

Max looked over at him. “Parker? Jack?”

Melrose shrugged. “I just thought . . . ” He let his voice trail off.

But Max apparently didn't find the question odd. “They both knew Verna, of course. She lived here for several years.”

“But did they like her?”

Max laughed. “Good lord, no. Neither one of them. Verna was a strange and pernicious woman. Verna was easy to hate, once you caught on to her.”

“Well,” said Melrose, “somebody certainly caught on.”

P
eter Emery's cottage looked like something out of a fairy tale: the whitewashed stone, the cobbled walk from the white gate to a door painted a bird's-egg blue, the neat window boxes of bulbs one or two of which were already sending out green shoots. Upended near the door was an old flat-bottomed boat that looked as if it might be getting a new coat of paint to judge from the paint can near it. Several fishing rods were leaning against the wall beside it. Melrose knocked on the door, which was opened by a girl of perhaps ten or eleven, with flamboyant ginger hair, a pearly skin, and eyes the cider color of the sky just before sunup. A fairytale child.

Not exactly. “We don't want none, neither of us.” The door was firmly shut in his face.

Melrose stood staring at the blue door. He looked behind him and around him in some attempt to discover whatever would cause solicitors, pollsters, canvassers, beggars, or Hare Krishna-ites to beat a path to the door in such numbers the occupants would feel harassed by pleas to buy or sign or give. He knocked again. He refused to be put off by this fiery-headed imp of Satan. The face reappeared at the window, eyes peering out over the bulbs, and then withdrew.

Melrose tapped his foot. It seemed an ungodly long time until the door opened again.

“I
said—”

“—that you didn't want none, neither of you. I am not soliciting, so call off your dog.” The dog looked from between her legs. It was small
and its stiff-haired gray coat looked like armor. Its lips stretched back in what might have been a snarl, or simply a Bogart dry-as-gin grin, for it made no noise. Melrose could see a mouthful of teeth. The girl was apparently thinking his words over and looked as if she might be about to shut the door again. He put his hand against it and his foot between it and the sill. She might have been spunkier, but he was bigger. “Do you
mind?”
He hated giving way to sarcasm.

The dog started circling round in a frenzy, then made a rush at Melrose, teeth still very much in evidence but still silent. Melrose braced his foot against the animal and his hand against the door. “Listen, now—I'm a friend of the Owens, you know them, the ones who live at Fengate. Mrs. Owen told me to visit. I was just out walking—” When she finally released her hold on the door, he nearly went sprawling into the dim little hall. He straightened up and looked down into those cider-colored eyes, flecked with brown and gold and anger. “I don't see why on earth you're so put out by me.
I
haven't done anything.”

“You probably will. You're the police.”

“Absolutely not! I only came here to talk for a bit with your father.” Poor man.

“He can't talk to you. He's blind.”

“I'm exceedingly sorry to hear that, but I've never known blindness to interfere with conversation.”

“And he's not my father, he's my uncle.”

From the inward rooms came a deep voice. “Zel, who is it now?”

“Nobody,” she yelled back.

Melrose raised his own voice. “I'd like to contest that.”

The owner of the masculine voice appeared in the doorway. He had to stoop to clear the lintel, as he was very tall. Tall and muscular and handsome, an advertisement for the outdoor life. The fishing rods and boat must be his.

“I told him you was busy.”

“Find your manners, gurl!”

Melrose was sure he'd turn to a pillar of salt before Zel ever found her manners. Over the years of occasionally having to deal with the young
(anyone under eighteen), Melrose had come to realize that he couldn't do it. Then he remembered Sally, and felt a moment of triumph until he also remembered he had had to save her from the grim sentence imposed by Theo Wrenn Browne, in addition to actually buying the book in question. With Jury, it was usually the other way round: kiddies usually gave
him
things. Jury could make a meal of one jelly-baby handed him by a half-pint person; whereas, Melrose had to promise them the whole sweet shop in order to get information. Jury's effortless manner of extracting facts annoyed Melrose no end. Often as not, it was some kiddy Melrose (he liked to think) had softened up, and then along came Jury to reap the rewards, Jury with his uncanny knack for worming his way into their little hearts and minds. Melrose usually didn't get beyond the
“we-don't-want-none”
stage.

It was the kitchen doorway Peter Emery had come through; Melrose glimpsed an Aga cooker, white as snow, in the room behind him. He would not have known straightaway that Emery was blind, for the man shifted the direction of his unseeing eyes to the source of the voice speaking, and even downward to the dog, who was now yapping. He told Zel to go and make some coffee. “The best coffee in Lincolnshire, Zel does.” Zel bloomed in the sun of her uncle's approval. “And some of those biscuits you made. Zel's a first-rate cook, and I do like good cooking. Maybe it's because she's forever hanging around at Major Parker's house.” Peter added, “If you'd rather tea, I think the kettle's about to boil.”

“Coffee's fine,” said Melrose, as the kettle did indeed shriek out its readiness. It was as if Peter Emery had not only fine-tuned his other senses, but had replaced the sight he'd lost with second sight.

Zel went off obediently, almost merrily, to make the coffee. And after Melrose's preamble to conversation, that he was a guest of the Owens come to look over Max Owen's collection, they settled down for real talk, most of it Peter's. Melrose was perfectly satisfied to listen; listening was the reason he'd come.

Peter had lived in Lincolnshire most of his life, but had spent many years in Scotland where his uncle had been factor on a great estate in
Perthshire at the foot of Glenolyn. Hundreds of acres this estate had comprised, with walked up grouse shooting and black game and stalking. And, of course, fishing in rivers clear as glass. It was his uncle who'd taught him to fish and hunt. Before “this” happened he'd been one of the best shots in the country. He made an impatient, stabbing gesture at his eyes. “Damned annoyance.” He went on. “Most people say the land round here's dull, that the fens is dull, for it's all this great flatness. It always amazes me, how people only have one notion of beauty. They have to be in the bloody Alps to appreciate mountains. How can they miss this mysteriousness, like when the fog comes down of a sudden so thick it looks solid as a wall?”