The Case Has Altered (22 page)

Parker scratched his forehead, then scraped the soft and thinning hair across it in a boyish gesture. He gave the impression that he'd been waiting for ages for just such a person as Melrose Plant to come along so that he could get down to the business of living. And Melrose thought this must be the source of his magnetism—that he gave the impression the company he had to hand was the only company that suited him down to the ground. He did not waste time in small talk; he plunged right into the way he felt about life. Unlike many who gave the impression of divided attention—whose minds, you knew, were elsewhere—Parker's attention was wholly concentrated on the person he was with; he projected a sense of immediacy. He was not afraid to reveal things about himself, which invited whoever he was with to do the same. This was the source of the comfort Parker unknowingly and unselfconsciously offered. One felt at home. Parker was the sort of person one confided in without intending to, perhaps even without knowing one was doing it. Melrose therefore wondered how many confidences the man had shared and how many secrets he knew.

“You've known Max Owen for a long time, haven't you?”

“Yes. So I also knew his first wife.”

Parker's somewhat inscrutable smile implied that he knew what Melrose had really come to talk about. Melrose moved in his chair, as if trying to shake free of the suspicion that everyone could see straight through him. “I must admit I wonder about her, the dead woman. It's very queer, isn't it?”

“To tell the truth, I'm not surprised somebody finally did in Verna, a manipulative bitch by anybody's standards. Beauties usually are, aren't they? Moneyed and beautiful is doubly bad—spoiled and with the means to indulge it.”

“I thought she'd come here to ask for money. From Max Owen.”

“For the play, you mean? Yes, well perhaps she did, but I doubt it. Verna just enjoyed making mischief.” Parker tossed back the rest of his glass and poured himself another finger of whiskey.

Melrose declined a refill and wondered if Parker himself had been manipulated. He ventured: “For everyone or only Max?”

For a moment Parker simply looked down at his glass, then answered obliquely. “She was a good deal of trouble, that woman. As far as I'm concerned, anyone of us might have been moved to do it; I was only surprised by the one who finally did.”

“Lady Kennington? But that, of course, hasn't really been proved.” He said this a little too passionately for a disinterested party.

“She's a friend of yours, Max says.”

“Not really. More of an acquaintance. I met her once in Stratford-upon-Avon.”

Parker grunted. “Nice woman.” He paused. “Unusually so, I'd say. A sympathetic person. The Spanish have a better word—
simpatico
. It suggests ‘kinship.' He paused again, drank off his whiskey, said, “Come on, let's eat our stew. It's very good.”

It was indeed. Seldom had Melrose eaten food so delicious. “I heard about your cooking. You've got a great fan.”

“Oh? Who?”

“That little girl, the groundskeeper's niece. Zel.”

Parker laughed. “Ah, she's an experience, I can tell you.”

“She says you're the best cook in Lincolnshire. Your specialty is plum ice cream.”

“Which says more about her taste than about my cooking.” Parker refilled their wineglasses and returned the bottle to a cylindrical stone cooler. “Zel comes over here quite a lot. She helps me cook and she is, for one so young, remarkably good at it. Says she wants to be a chef.”

Melrose smiled. “That says a lot for your influence.”

Parker colored slightly, but seemed pleased. “Zel is the sort of child who makes one a bit sorry he hasn't any. This wine is quite good.” He poured.

Melrose noticed the label. “It should be. You drink a Grand Cru with lunch every day?”

“Oh, no. Sometimes I suffer through a Premier Cru. When the lunch isn't all that good.”

“This lunch certainly is ‘all that good.' ” Melrose broke a flaky roll, buttered it, and said, “It's too bad about Zel's uncle. What happened?”

“Shooting accident. Did you see that old punt boat of his? He liked to take that out in the early mornings, out for partridge or plover. Some damned idiot trying to shoot in all of that fog accidentally shot Peter. Didn't even know he'd done it, so Peter lay there half the day until some anglers found him. Damned fools with guns. They're a menace. I keep telling Max's gardener to stop shooting at anything that moves.” Parker sighed. “Pretty awful thing to happen to a man whose whole life is the outdoors. Peter's just unlucky, I think. Everything bad that could happen, happened. He might have told you he worked for years as a young man on this hunting estate in Perthshire. When his uncle stopped, he took over the estate—huge estate. I expect he's one of the youngest factors there ever was, a plummy job. There was a young lady, Scottish lass he was going to marry, but she drowned when she slipped from a footbridge. Peter was blamed, although he said he wasn't within a mile of the place, poor fellow.”

“That's pretty rotten.”

“Worse, the girl's father claimed Peter had pushed her because he didn't want to marry her. You see, the coroner discovered the girl was several months pregnant. Old Mordecai was a fire-breathing fundamentalist Presbyterian—”

“You sound as if you know all of these people.”

Parker looked surprised. “Do I? Well, I expect somehow I do after listening to Peter talk about it over the years. The father triggered an investigation, but there seemed little to investigate. Still, he was arrested and tried for manslaughter. Poor devil couldn't put together much of a defense—how could he? And he didn't deny he was the father. I think the thing that told most against him was that he was quite the ladies' man—by his own admission—well, he's still a very handsome fellow, but after he met Maggie, he changed his ways. The prosecution nonetheless managed to stir up feeling that Peter went about seducing and then leaving sweet young things. He was convicted. But the sentence was light, only two years, and he got out after serving one.

“After he came to Lincolnshire, I first hired him to do odd jobs, realized how good he was, then kept him on and let him have the cottage.”

“What about Zel? Where are her parents?”

“According to Peter, the mother was a tart, the father—his own brother—a shiftless drifter. Neither one of them wanted a child. So Peter took her in. I've no idea where they are now.”

“That must be pretty hard on her.”

“Yes. It might account for her extremely lively imagination.”

Melrose smiled. “Zel thinks the public footpath out there is cursed. She's inclined to blame Black Shuck.”

Parker laughed. “Oh, yes, I've heard about him. It.”

Melrose said, “Quite the lad, he or it is. That reminds me. Zel said the Reese girl—woman, I mean—often took the public footpath.”

“Stick with ‘girl.' Not very grown up was Dorcas. More soufflé?”

Melrose held out his plate. “Twist my arm.” Parker served him and he said, “You knew her, didn't you?”

“Of course. Saw her in the pub any night I happened to go there.”

“Did she do any work for you?” Melrose couldn't think how to put a question of Dorcas's visits. “Helping you with the cooking, perhaps?”

Parker looked up as surprised as if Melrose had valued all of his collection as worthless. “Cook? Dorcas? Not likely.” He laughed.

But Melrose had picked up another note behind the laughter. Not quite comfortable with this line of questioning, Parker wasn't. “No one seems to have
known
the girl, really. Excepting perhaps for Mrs. Suggins.”

“It's not surprising.”

“Mrs. Suggins said she was rather, ah, too inquisitive—”

Parker smiled. “Bit of a snoop, Dorcas was. Perhaps when you haven't a life of your own, you want to borrow others.”

“She must have had some life of her own. She told one or two people she was pregnant, after all.”

“Ah, yes. Forgot about that. Maybe that's why she was killed. Some fellow that didn't want to marry her—Dorcas was the type who'd marry or be damned.” Parker topped off their wineglasses. “Or there's the possibility she knew she wasn't and just went about saying it. To show, as I said, she had a life.”

“It's quite possible, yes. Only, if she wanted people to know it, why wouldn't she have told people who'd be likely to spread it about? The aunt sounds more like a person who'd keep a secret.”

“Madeline? Any secret would be safe with her. But, then, the girl was murdered and I suppose secrets do come out.”

“Not enough to clear things up, though.” Melrose sat back, feeling drowsy from the weight of the food and the wine. “I was thinking more of something else: that she might have overheard something, or seen something that made her dangerous.”

Parker was silent, thinking this over. “Hmm! That's a thought, certainly. Knew something about the death of Verna Dunn, you mean?”

“Possibly.”

Parker picked up his wineglass, swirled the wine a bit, thought some more. “Dorcas was the type of servant who could be right at your elbow and you'd not know it. The girl was infinitely unknowable. She simply didn't stick.” He drank his wine.

There it was again, this queer feeling that poor Dorcas
was
so “unknowable” she faded right into the background of watery land and opaque pearl sky. She fit it so well, this flatness, so difficult to measure and, by some accounts, so dire.

 • • • 

H
eading toward Northampton, Melrose could not fathom how he'd wound up in the Deepings and Cowbit on his journey to Algarkirk.
He put it down to a total lack of any sense of direction. Or probably he'd gone into one of his fugue states that followed some interminable conversation with his aunt. Just outside of Loughborough, he ran into road works and pulled up behind a stream of cars that looked as if they'd been there for days. Melrose sat and thrummed his fingers on the steering wheel, wishing the Rolls people had had the foresight to include a CD player in these old Silver Shadows. A bit of Lou Reed would shake up these yobs in their neon orange vests, who appeared to be taking a tea break. At least the one standing over by the side had a Styrofoam cup in his hand. Staring at Melrose as if planning where to put the next stick of dynamite. Resentment of the Ruling Class, that was it.

The beefy fellow walked over to the Silver Shadow, said to Melrose, “Nice car, verra nice, like one meself, I would, only it's too pricey for me.”

“Well, you'll be getting this one pretty soon when all of us die from exposure, sitting around watching you chaps.”

The man laughed, thought that was rich. “Never mind, at least you don't have to take the bleedin' detour. Had to route traffic off onto one of the B roads and they weren't 'alf mad 'cause of that, I can tell you. But we'll be finishing up in two days time, or should be.”

“How long's this lot been going on, then?”

“ 'Bout two weeks, I expect. No, less than that, as we started on the Wednesday, I remember it was the fifth because me mum's birthday came on that day and I missed the cake. She wasn't 'alf mad, me being the only son—”

Drone, drone
, thought Melrose, closing his eyes as the roadworks fellow went on about his mum.
Birthday!
Melrose snapped awake. Oh, God, Agatha's birthday was either today, or perhaps yesterday. Or tomorrow. Sometime around now. How old was she, anyway? A hundred and twenty? Of course, he'd got nothing for her and checked his watch, wondering if he could make it to Northampton before the shops closed.

“Okay, mate, be on your way in a minute. Nice talkin' to you.” The roadworks fellow slapped the side of the car as a small truck leading the
traffic in the other lane came close. Well, he decided, getting past the ditch-digging or whatever they were doing, he'd make it to Northampton after all.

A smile split his face as he thought of the perfect present. He gunned the car and blasted off, waving dementedly back to his new pal.

J
ury sat in the Stratford-upon-Avon police station, waiting for Sam Lasko to reappear. The way Lasko's secretary described the inspector's comings and goings made him sound a little like the genie-out-of-a-lamp. Jury was her Aladdin, a little kid without an ounce of imagination who came here occasionally to call in his wish-markers. Since this visit was his third, it better be his last (Jury could almost hear her say).

“I'll wait, thanks,” he had said fifteen minutes before. She had given a little
suit yourself
shrug of the shoulders and returned to her brisk typing.

She was middle-aged, possibly more than “middle,” tall and thin and wearing a putty-colored jumper over a cloyingly pink blouse the color of bubble gum. Everything about her looked pulled tight—her hair in a punishingly tight chignon, her straight, flat mouth, her thin nose. She put Jury in mind of a schoolmistress who fastens on the lives of her charges, looming in disapproval over the clumsy translations of Ovid. The name on the little black plaque on her desk read
C. Just.
Miss Just. Jury liked that. During the fifteen minutes of his presence, she had looked up from the rattling typing and said that she had no idea as to when Inspector Lasko would return, and wouldn't he prefer to come back? In the question there had not been a trace of concern for the comfort of the visitor, merely the testiness of one who feels her work interrupted by the looming shadow of Scotland Yard. It was clear to Jury the first time he'd seen Miss C. Just that she suffered poorly policemen whose rank outstripped that of her boss.

Sam Lasko finally appeared, his lamp left behind somewhere, looking his usual woeful self. The look had nothing to do with the way things
were going in his life; he'd cultivated it over the years to disarm the public in general, and to throw suspects off their guard in particular. And to get favors out of people like Jury. Could anyone refuse such a miserable man as D.I. Lasko? Jury hadn't been able to resist Lasko's hangdog look once, and he'd found himself involved in a triple-murder in Stratford some years back.