The Case Has Altered (38 page)

“There was only one set of tire marks.”

“Follow the same reasoning we used for Grace Owen: she could have left it near Fosdyke, walked the rest of the way. It's not that far. Anyway,
Price could have provided an alibi only up until the time she appeared again, a little after eleven.”

“Nevertheless, why wouldn't he have come forward?”

“My guess is because she didn't want it known she was with him. I'm curious as to why Pete Apted hasn't called Jack Price as a witness, though.” Jury said this to Charly.

She had been silent since they'd come in here, nor did she answer at once. Jury prompted her. “Charly?”

She sighed. “Oliver Stant would have a field day. Doesn't it occur to you—” She paused.

“Doesn't what?”

“This isn't what we believe, understand.”

Jury nodded. “Fine. Just tell us what you don't believe.”

“The prosecution could easily raise the question—were they in it together?” She held up her hands when Melrose and Jury were about to protest. “The two of them. The two cars. Each could have driven one back to Fengate.”

“And
his
motive?”

She shook her head. “Don't know. But I'm sure Verna had a good deal to do with Jack Price in the past. Possibly even in the present.” After Melrose lit her cigarette, she said, “Pete won't allow Jenny to testify because she'd make a terrible witness. She's been caught out in lies several times; she hasn't been registering much emotion; she's secretive—Oliver Stant would make a meal of her.
Did
she go to his studio that night? We still can't be sure.”

“Since when was sex a motive for murder?” asked Melrose.

Charly dipped her head to look into his downturned face. “You
are
kidding?”

H
e's not the sanguine sort of cop people take him for.” Jury was talking about DCI Bannen. They were dining, Plant and Jury, at a local restaurant on roast beef and browned potatoes and drinking a Brazilian wine sturdy enough to stand up to beef and Yorkshire pudding. Melrose planned on mince pie for dessert.

Jury lay down his knife and fork, tines spearing a bite of rare beef. He had thought he wouldn't be able to eat. But hunger had consumed him. “As much as we dislike it, old friend, face it: the evidence points to her and her story's terribly weak.”

“But the prosecution's case is even weaker, when it comes to the murder of Dorcas Reese. Yes, she
could
conceivably have driven back to Lincolnshire, but that's really forcing the issue.” Melrose stopped in the act of refilling their glasses. “It would have been more convincing, though, to say she'd gone to Price's studio, never mind the ‘why.' It's going to be no secret that she knew him. And why
shouldn't
she have known him? Why was she keeping that a secret as well? Why are these people so secretive? Jenny, Verna, Price?”

“Too many secrets, that's the trouble, or one of them.” Jury pushed back from the table, pined for a cigarette, and said, “What worries me is that she's keeping things from Pete Apted.” He shook his head and felt weary again. “Such as what were they fighting about.”

“Then you don't believe it was Max Owen?”

Jury shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because Max Owen's not a fool. He'd be able to see through Verna Dunn's manipulations. She tried it on him enough times, I expect.”

The old waiter came to ask them if they'd quite finished. They had, they said, and the waiter collected their plates and shambled off.

Melrose thought for a moment.

“What about Parker?”

“What about him?”

“He left Fengate at eleven, didn't he? I'm still wondering why he didn't pass her. I'm surprised Oliver Stant hasn't called him.” He was distracted by a young woman with black hair who reminded him of Miss Fludd. “Unless they'd planned to meet . . . no, that doesn't make sense. She'd just met him.”

“So she
says,”
Jury said, wryly. “It's a little hard to tell whom Jenny does and doesn't know.” He had a table of cigarette-smokers under close scrutiny. He shook his head. “The trouble is, she's been found out in too many lies.”

“This business about the Wash: It's possible, you know. The more I think about it . . . Verna Dunn leaves the wood right after Jenny does, gets in her car, drives the four miles or so to the Wash. That would only have happened, surely, if she'd been meeting someone—”

“Well, obviously, it wouldn't have been Jenny, then.” Jury watched a good-looking woman bring a silver lighter up to her cigarette. “I don't think anybody's out of it. I wonder abut Grace Owen,” Jury said after they sat in silence for a while. “If what Jenny implied was true, that Verna Dunn could have had something to do with Grace's son's death. God, talk about motive . . . ”

“Grace was with Max and Parker, though.”

“Not all the time. Not after eleven o'clock. I'm suspicious of this ‘headache' that had her sleeping through Jenny's return.”

“How would she have got there, to the Wash? There'd have to have been another car.”

Jury went on. “Burt Suggins saw the Porsche at the bottom of the drive sometime after midnight, so assuming Grace wasn't in bed, there'd have been ample time. Maybe she took her own car, left it in Fosdyke.”

“And about the tides. I can believe one might choose to kill another on
the Wash because the body would be carried out to sea. What I
can't
understand is making a pig's breakfast of the tides. There
are
tables, after all. And the shifting sands: true enough, they do shift, but this is very iffy.”

“I agree.” Jury thought for a moment. “Suggins's testimony will pretty much let Max Owen off the hook, if not Grace.” Jury sighed; he wanted coffee. His brain felt addled from thinking about this case. He changed the subject. “So tell me about her.”

“ ‘Her'?” Melrose screwed up his face in a near-cartoon version of puzzlement.

“You know who. Miss Fludd.”

“I told you, she's related to Lady Summerston. Distant, you know, like a hundredth-cousin-by-marriage.”

Jury looked at him for an uncomfortably long time. Melrose looked away. “Lady Summerston has given her the use of . . . the place for an indefinite time.” He didn't want to name it.

Watermeadows
. No one really had to say the name to him. That episode seven years ago was always just under the surface of Jury's mind. It took very little to start a wave of memory.
Watermeadows
. The place itself impressed him by its sadness, the gorgeous, overgrown grounds, as if beauty were so ample they could afford to bury it or toss it to the winds; the great silent mirrored room he had been told to wait in, probably a
salon
when such things were fashionable. Furnished only with a long silk and gilt sofa, a small table holding a vase of flowers. Watermeadows was a place one encounters in dreams. Uninhabited, a place from which everyone has fled. Jury wondered if such dream-houses weren't symbols of the self. He could almost hear the wind blowing through that wide, unfurnished room. Blowing through him.

He sighed, lifted the fresh glass of white wine—another bottle Plant had ordered. It tasted of winter. He thought of Nell Healy. Hannah Lean, Nell Healy, Jane Holdsworth. Jenny Kennington. “What is it with me and women?”

Happy to be off himself and women, still, Melrose was surprised. Jury didn't often speak in these terms.

“Am I doomed? Is every relationship doomed?”

“Not you. Perhaps the women are,” said Melrose, sadly.

Jury laughed abruptly. “You're no better, that's certain. You ignore them even with them falling all over you.”

“What?
Me?
Falling all over
me
? You're crazy. The only one ever interested in me was Penny Farraday, and she was fourteen,
and
she lost interest after I told her I wasn't an earl any longer.”

“Uh-huh.” Jury laughed.

“Meaning what? Just name one. Go on, name me a woman you've seen ‘falling all over' me.”

“You
are
kidding.”

Rather violently, Melrose shook his head. “No, I'm not. You can't think of anyone—”

“Polly Praed, Vivian Rivington, Ellen Taylor. Even Lucy St. John, remember her?”

Melrose made a rubbery sound with his lips, a mock-laugh, disbelieving. “Oh, hold on! You said Vivian. That's
Vivian Rivington
. You have never in your life seen Vivian falling all over me.”

“I don't mean literally. But haven't you noticed that they
all
act in the same way around you? Sticks out like a sore thumb.”

“What? Act how?”

“As if they can't stand you.”

Melrose looked stupidly up at the ancient waiter who placed his pie before him and a dish of brandy sauce between them. “
This
is supposed to make me feel loved?
This
is supposed to be good?”

The elderly waiter backed off a step, aggrieved. “I'm terribly sorry, sir, but we've never had any complaints about our mincemeat pie.”

Melrose reddened, apologized profusely. When the old man had gone off, Melrose whispered savagely, “This is your evidence?”

Tucking into his dessert, Jury said, “Suit yourself.”

“ ‘Suit myself?' What's that supposed to mean?”

Jury shrugged, cut into his pie. “Brandy sauce, good.”

Realizing Jury wouldn't say anything more, Melrose shrugged too. “Tomorrow, I have to leave, you know.”

Jury frowned. “Leave Lincoln? Why?”

“I've been subpoenaed, that's why.”

“Oh—
please!”

“Subpoenaed, right. I'm to testify in the matter of the dog and the chamber pot. I saw with my own eyes the horrific attack on my dear old aunt's ankle by the slobbering dog.”

“My God, he's only two inches long. What damage could he do?”

“None, of course.” Melrose shrugged. “Don't ask me why Agatha thinks she has a Chinaman's chance of winning. Anyway, Trueblood seems very pleased with himself.”

“Trueblood's always pleased with himself. Why this time?”

“I thought I told you: he's handling Ada Crisp's defense.”

Jury quickly returned the bite of brandy-sauced pie to his plate. He would have choked on it, laughing. “It's better than Jurvis and the pig. I still can't believe Agatha won. What a hell of a deal.”

“Hell of a deal, is right. Pass the brandy sauce.”

O
liver Stant did not appear to be clever, devious, or sly. He was, Melrose decided, all of those things, as Stant set about questioning his next witness, Annie Suggins. He began by establishing Mrs. Suggins in the Owen household, where she had worked for twenty-two years, she and Burt Suggins, her husband. In the course of the questioning, Mrs. Suggins told the court she had had little contact with the defendant, so could not attest to Lady Kennington's comings and goings. Yes, the Owens occasionally went to the Case Has Altered.
A very nice sort of pub, it is. Quite homey and frequented by pleasant decent folk, none of this disco stuff you see nowadays
. What happened the night of February first, she couldn't really say, as she'd been up late in the kitchen, and that's the rear of the house. She wouldn't have heard anything going on outside.

“All I knew was when Burt come into the kitchen and asked me did I see Miss Dunn. It was after eleven, after Major Parker'd left and after Mr. and Mrs. Owen had gone upstairs to bed. Oh, eleven-thirty or thereabouts. Well, no, I says to Burt, not since dinner. There was a bit of a commotion, naturally, when Lady Kennington got back and no Miss Dunn with her.”

“And what was the reaction to this on the part of the Owens?”

“Naturally, Mr. Owen was puzzled. But he didn't bother Mrs. Owen with it, as she'd gone upstairs with a headache. Mr. Owen supposed Miss Verna just must've got in that fancy car of hers and gone back to London. But then more'n an hour later, Burt saw—”

“Don't mind about that, Mrs. Suggins. We'll be speaking to your husband a bit later. “They did not notify the police?”

“Why should they? It warn't as if Miss Verna never did nothing peculiar.” She sniffed.

Stant smiled, nodded. “The Owens retired at about eleven?”

“I expect so; I mean they'd've gone upstairs. Mr. Owen, he liked to stay up to all hours, fooling about with those antiques of his, or up in his study reading up on 'em.” Her brief laugh was indulgent; Max Owen might have been a child with a fancy electric train. “Mrs. Owen, like I said, she had a headache and went straight to bed and didn't know about it till the morning.”

“And what happened the next morning with regard to Verna Dunn?”

“She warn't there for breakfast. Mr. Owen rung up her London house and no one—I think she has a housekeeper—had seen her. Well, now the Owens was in a real stew, you can imagine, after Burt told 'em about her car. That's when they rang up the police. Me, I still thought it was some trick or other. I was cook to Mr. Owen all the time he was married to her, and I don't mind saying anything's possible with that one.” She squared and resettled her shoulders, posture conveying what she thought of Verna Dunn.

“I take it,” said Oliver Stant, again with that smile, “you didn't much care for her.”

“I did not. Why that woman was back in Fengate was more'n I could explain. But Mrs. Owen, patience of a saint, she didn't mind. Well.” Mrs. Suggins shook her head, making the little fruit bouquet on her straw hat bobble. She was dressed in a bright blue suit, fitted tight and a little strained across the bosom. It was clear that witnessing to her was an occasion.