The Deer Leap (22 page)

There was a pause for nostalgic reflection. “Season's over in Exmoor now for stag-hunting. But if you're here again in the spring —”

“I rather doubt it,” said Melrose, trying on a smile. Looking at the stag at bay, the smile didn't quite fit.

Grimsdale noticed the weak reflection of a smile. “Oh, oh. You've been taken in by all that old Landseerian rubbish,
Monarch of the Glen
— sentimental nonsense. They're a nasty sort of beast, the stag. Do you know, one would push another out to take his place, if he was being hunted down.”

“Really.”

“Absolutely.” Grimsdale seemed determined to convince him that the stag was not a family man. “Push out another and lie right down in its place in the heather. Or mingle with hinds. No scruples.”

“None.”

“None,” repeated Grimsdale in a satisfied way. “Too bad you've not hunted stag. Hills, huge distances, awful streams, bad weather —”

“Sounds inviting.”

“Well! If the Devon-Somerset pack's out, at least you can hunt with the Buckland. New Forest. Fallow deer, there. Nothing to compare with the red.” Grimsdale checked his watch as if the hunt might begin at any time. “Nearly ten. Donaldson will be doing his rounds. Trying to start my own pack of staghounds. Those two staghounds you saw, handsome brutes, drafted those from one of the best foxhound kennels —”

“You've got your own pack of foxhounds. I should think that would keep you busy enough, Mr. Grimsdale.”

Whatever hint of disapproval there was in Melrose's tone was lost on Sebastian Grimsdale, who simply said there could never be enough hunting.

Melrose could see that. He was surrounded by the efforts of more than one taxidermist — he doubted
one
taxidermist would have had the time, even if he'd had the interest in working in so many different media: gray fox, pheasant, woodcock, badger — a few of the smaller displays. All under glass. While Grimsdale was lost in wonder at the larger of the mounted heads of stag and buck, Melrose picked up one of the glass cases, looked at the blue-tipped wings. Beautiful bird.

Grimsdale turned. “Ah, I see you like birds, Lord Ardry.” The tone suggested that Lord Ardry
must
have a passion for some sort of gunplay.

Alive, yes.

“Shoveler drake, that is. Hardly ever see one in these parts. It's when the weather gets so bad up country they want a warmer climate.” Grimsdale gazed at the drake with satisfaction, rubbing his pipestem against his cheek.

“This one found it, I guess.”

The sarcasm fell wide. Grimsdale picked another bird, mounted on a a limb, from the mantelpiece. “Teal. Dozen of them took off from the pond —”

“Pond? I didn't see one.”

“Round back.” Grimsdale laughed. “Not supposed to see it, Lord Ardry. Just luck it was there, surrounded by trees, bracken, rushes. Absolutely perfect. I keep the mallard there. That draws the others.”

Melrose was eyeing the shoveler drake, sorry for it, but feeling he'd warmed up Grimsdale enough, both with brandy and talk, to get round to the real subject.

“Hunting and shooting's not my line —”

“Worse luck for you, sir.” Grimsdale laughed.

“But doesn't the forestry commission slap a ban on shooting wildfowl if they're
driven
by weather to the south?” He knew he shouldn't have said it; he was usually more controlled. When he looked at this rosy-cheeked, iron-haired, smug Master of Foxhounds and Harriers, he couldn't help himself. The look on Grimsdale's face, as if he'd lost an old poaching-partner, told Melrose he'd have to make up the points if he wanted information.

“That's quite a stag there, Mr. Grimsdale.” Melrose raised his eyes to the twelve-pointer, the one Grimsdale himself had been admiring. “Where'd you get that one?”

“Auchnacraig. That's in Scotland.”

“I've heard of it,” said Melrose, without the trace of a smile. Nice to get the geography lesson along with how to shoot just about anything that walked or flew. But Grimsdale was bathing so much in his own glow, he didn't notice.

“Ah yes. Twenty-one stone. Nearly got a silver on that one.”

Melrose assumed he meant a medal. He smiled bleakly. “Wonderful. Where do you hunt the stag around these parts, Mr. Grimsdale?”

“Exmoor. For your red deer, that's the place. For buck, the New Forest. Donaldson's one of the best harborers there is. He's the one out at first light to find a warrantable stag. Can't get on without a shrewd harborer.”

“Right. Just as the superintendent can't go without his sergeant.”

For some reason, Grimsdale thought this rather rich and slapped his arm around Melrose's shoulders. Given the multiple brandies he'd had that evening, the ruddy glow of his complexion could have competed with the rather remarkable sunset they'd seen a few hours before.

“What did you think of Sally MacBride?” asked Melrose, suddenly.

The arm dropped just as suddenly away. “The MacBride woman?” The irritation gave way to feigned remorse. “Incredible thing, the way she died.” He shook his head, drank his brandy, gazed up at a broad beam of antlers, and repeated it. He might have been talking about the stag.

Melrose was sick of this dismissal of the death of the woman. “What do you make of the dogs and the cat?”

“Cat? Dogs?” he said, as if he'd never heard of anything that didn't run with a pack. “Oh, you mean, the Quick woman's dog. And the others? Well, what about it?” He answered his own question about Gerald Jenks's dog. “Good riddance. Tore up my damned rosebushes.” The glow deepened to the ruddier flush of anger.

“How well did you know them — Una Quick and Sally MacBride, I mean?”

Grimsdale was still looking at the stag, smiling. What was the life of the odd villager or two compared with twelve points and twenty stone? Then he refilled his glass and offered Melrose another. Melrose shook his head, wondering if the man were stalling, or merely dreaming of Auchnacraig and Exmoor. If dreaming, he seemed to waken suddenly to the distinct oddity of Lord Ardry's questions.

“I don't understand. I knew Miss Quick — she was postmistress, after all, everyone knew her. And Mrs. MacBride. I go to the Deer Leap, don't I? Only pub in the village, unfortunately.” He looked about at his own superior accommodations smugly. “They'd — he'd do better to fix it up a bit. But of course,
she
was such a layabout —”

Grimsdale stopped, coughed. Whether he saw the unintended pun, or simply thought it rude to speak ill of the dead, Melrose didn't know. But he did know the conversation would stalk all over hunt country if Melrose didn't get his eye
off that hare Grimsdale was now hefting in his hand. “What would you say to these women having been murdered, Mr. Grimsdale?”

The stuffed hare was replaced with a thud. “
What?”
Grimsdale looked slightly wild and then he laughed. It was a hearty laugh. “
Murdered?
Murder in Ashdown Dean?”

“It could,” said Melrose mildly, “happen anywhere.”

“Not here,” said Grimsdale, his eye now caught by a gray fox.

“Why do you think Scotland Yard is here, then? To investigate a case of cardiac arrest?”

“But that's what it was, man! If the damned fool woman didn't know enough not to go out in a storm up to that call box . . .” He shrugged.

“Her telephone wasn't working, apparently. Was yours?”

“Mine? Damned if I know. I wasn't making any calls around that time.”

“What time?”

Grimsdale stopped his inspection of the hare, looked sharply at Melrose, and said smugly, “You're asking questions like police, sir. But you can't catch me out with that old ruse.
Everyone
heard about Una Quick falling out of that call box close on ten. After all, one of my guests was the person she fell across. Praed, her name is. But you know her. Has some monster of a cat that's clawed up half the draperies in her room. See she pays for 'em, there'll be no mistake. Have to get a decorator in. Or get Amanda Crowley to sew a new batch.”

He stood there, apparently dreaming away about how he could stick Polly for the price of the drapes, while getting Amanda to volunteer her talents as seamstress.

Melrose lit up another cigar, trying to think how best to lie to get at the truth. “Ridiculous, of course, but you're probably aware there's been some talk in Ashdown about you and Mrs. MacBride.”

Grimsdale's face seemed to take on all the hues of the fire in the grate. Eyes electric blue and sparking, cheeks like licks of flame, iron hair like volcanic ash.
“That is a lie!
What in God's name would I be doing with the likes of that common . . . Anyway, Amanda and I —” He stopped short on that one, and quickly asked, “Where'd you hear it?”

“Here and there. She was known to take that little river walk at night that ends up, I suppose, at your pond. With the tame mallard.” Melrose smiled briefly.

Sebastian Grimsdale collapsed in a chair, and Melrose thought some confession was forthcoming. Then he sat up. “If you must know, there's been talk about the MacBride woman and my kennel master. Thought Donaldson was smarter than that. I'd see a light in the stable house. Wondered what he'd be doing up at that hour. I let him live in that place just back of the kennels.”

Having reached his own solution to his satisfaction, Grimsdale sat back and lit up a cigar, shaking and shaking his head. “There it is, then. Fancy.”

“I imagine the superintendent might want to have a talk with him, then.”

“Can't imagine
why.
Donaldson's from Scotland. Got nothing to do with these people. He's just here for the season.”

Melrose laughed, “Well, one can get up to any number of things waiting —”

He was interrupted by one of the most terrible rackets he'd ever heard.

“My God!
What's that?”
Grimsdale shot out of his chair and looked wildly at Melrose. “Sounds like hounds rioting.”

It did indeed. Before Melrose could put down his glass and chuck his cigar into the fireplace, Grimsdale had rushed from the trophy room through the french windows and out into the court.

Melrose followed in the direction of the kennels and stableyard,
where a soupy fog closed around him. In the midst of the chorus of foxhounds came the eerie sound of the deep baying of Grimsdale's staghounds.

And as Melrose tried to make his way through the fog, he thought that mixed with all of this riot was the sound of a scream that no hound would make.

 • • • 

The handsome Donaldson was handsome no longer. He lay inside the kennel, ravaged by the staghounds, one of which lay beside him. In the light of Grimsdale's torch, Melrose saw the other hound stagger and fall, its light markings now blood-smeared.

Then he heard feet running across the courtyard. Wiggins. Polly.

Grimsdale, having stood frozen, looking down at the bloody kennel floor, suddenly shouted,
“Get Fleming!”

And that, thought Melrose, turning to stop Polly in her tracks, pretty well spoke the man's obsession. Call for the vet, not the physician. Though Farnsworth couldn't have done Donaldson any good now, neither could Fleming help the staghounds.

Wiggins took the torch from Grimsdale's hand as Melrose practically had to wrestle with Polly to keep her away. “Nothing for you to see, old girl —”

“Oh, shut up.” She broke from his grasp, peered through the fog along the tracery of torchlight, and was back in an instant. “For once, you're right.” Polly buried her head against his shoulder.

Across her dark head, Melrose squinted. A form seemed to emerge from the mist at the other end of the stableyard. It seemed to undulate as it came toward them, became a ghostly blob, finally turned into a recognizable form. Carrie Fleet.

A very dirty-looking Carrie Fleet.

When Grimsdale saw her, he stared for a few seconds and then slowly raised the rifle.

Melrose disengaged himself from Polly, but Wiggins, fortunately, was quicker. With a judolike kick, he knocked Grimsdale's rifle arm upward and the shot went wide, broke glass somewhere — possibly one of the stable house windows.

Calmly, Wiggins took the gun. “I think that'll be enough, sir. I really think that'll be quite enough.”

Carrie Fleet just stood there, motionless.

Grimsdale screamed.
“You devil! Always trouble —”

Melrose clamped his hand around Grimsdale's arm. If anyone were possessed, he thought, it was Grimsdale.

“What're you doing here, Carrie?” whispered Polly.

Carrie Fleet jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the edge of the New Forest. “Unstopping earths. I heard hounds.” She walked over to the kennels and peered in at the body of Donaldson and the dead hounds.

She shook her head and shook it. Then she looked one by one into the several cages housing the beagles.

Then she turned and walked back into the fog that closed round her like a glove.

No one tried to stop her. The night was deathly quiet.

 • • • 

“There's no way of knowing for sure until I do an autopsy —”

Grimsdale, a large balloon-glass of brandy in hands that might have been palsied with all of their shaking, said, “They'd never have turned on Donaldson. Never.”

“We seem to have evidence to the contrary,” said Melrose coldly.

Wiggins, in the absence of Jury, wanted to get down to business. “Dr. Fleming — ?”

“I was about to say. It could be one of several drugs, administered anytime from minutes to days or even weeks before.
Something like fentanyl. But that's not easy to come by — unless you're a doctor or a vet. Then there's benzodiazafine. Valium. Easy enough to get hold of.” Fleming shrugged. “I'd have to do an autopsy.”