The Five Bells and Bladebone (6 page)

One would never have known it was spring sitting inside this cottage where a shadowy, winterlike darkness seemed to swallow up people and furnishings alike. Objects winked at him out of the gloom — the glass-eyed owl on the mantelpiece, the stuffed parrot glued to its perch by the door to the pantry, the pair of caged parakeets that Melrose assumed were alive, but he wasn’t sure. The room had that deathly, airless stillness of a Hitchcockian landscape before the sudden onslaught of beaks and wings.

The woman who had come in to “do” for Agatha since the accident had materialized out of the shadows to bring them a plate of cakes and biscuits. Mrs. Oilings was one of the Withersby clan, and liked to work about as much as the rest of them. She could hold her own, however, in any gossip competition, which probably explained her presence here now. Agatha, being unable to get round the village on her own, could always send Mrs. Oilings to pick up greengroceries, meats, library books, and rumors.

“. . . the Demorney woman’s living in the Bicester-Strachans’ house and has completely redone it in some inappropriate modern — Melrose,
do
be careful of that!”

He intended to be, since the jade Buddha belonged to him. His mother had been fond of smiling Buddhas.

“. . . and those books Joanna the Mad writes. Of course, she makes a tidy fortune, but then who wouldn’t?”

“You wouldn’t,” said Melrose yawning. “I wouldn’t. Joanna Lewes makes no bones about art; she’s perfectly honest in saying that she writes to a formula and the formula was never any good to begin with.”

Jury bit into a ladyfinger, looked at it dubiously, and said, “She sounds interesting.”

“Well, she isn’t. Stop fidgeting with that figurine and pour the sherry,” she said to Melrose. Turning from her lackey-nephew to Jury, she said, “I would do morning coffee for you, Superintendent, but as you see —” Her tone
was long-suffering as she tapped the cast on her ankle with her cane. “You do know how this came to happen, I expect. Mr. Jurvis —”

“He knows,” said Melrose, to avoid the long story of the accident between her secondhand Austin, Mr. Jurvis’s plaster pig, and Betty Ball’s bicycle. No one had seen this accident since Betty Ball had been in Miss Crisp’s shop at the time and Jurvis was back in his frozen-food locker. The plaster pig that graced Jurvis’s butcher shop was, according to Agatha, “the perpetrator” in this criminal affair, since it had been put right in the center of the pavement. The bicycle was also at fault as it had been left leaning against the shop front so that Agatha’s right front wheel had grazed it as she had run the car up over the curb. All of this she had explained to Constable Pluck, adding that the pig had really been the cause of the damage to the bicycle, since it had fallen directly onto its rear wheel.

Thus the unmanned bicycle and the inert pig had divided the blame between them and Agatha was suing for damages, having got Constable Pluck on her side. Melrose said, “I saw Pluck leaving Plague Alley yesterday.” Agatha and Constable Pluck seemed to work hand in glove. “Has he been running at the mouth again?” Melrose selected a small slice of porter cake, which he assumed had come from Betty Ball’s bakery, feared it might have been from the past Christmas lot, and picked up a digestive biscuit instead.

“I had just been giving him a bit of advice.”

“It was parking meters on the High Street last time. That was nipped in the bud, I’m glad to say.” Melrose tested his front tooth with his finger; he thought he might have chipped it on the Eccles cake, hard as a rock.

“Naturally, I can’t divulge information,” said Agatha, as she set about divulging it. “But it concerns the Leans. They
live at Watermeadows; you don’t know Watermeadows, Superintendent. It has fabulous gardens. Hannah Lean is the granddaughter of Lady Summerston; both of them are recluses — like me, you know. That’s why we get on so well.”

“What’s all this ‘Hannah’ business? You don’t even know Mrs. Lean.”

“I certainly do. I saw her in Northampton two weeks ago; we nearly had luncheon.”

For Agatha a near-miss with the reclusive Mrs. Lean was as good as nine courses with anyone else.

Sitting forward, she whispered, “According to the grapevine —”

Of which she was chief pruner and waterer —

“— something’s been going on between Simon Lean and that Demorney person.”

“Well, as the grapevine hasn’t throttled me with its news, I can’t say.” He squinted into the darkness where one of the shadows separated and pounced. Agatha’s one-eyed cat had made a four-point landing on top of her chair. Three-point, for part of its fourth leg had got in the way of a tire-iron some time ago. Melrose checked his watch. The Jack and Hammer was open, thank heavens. He had sat here this long partially out of ingrained politeness and partially because he meant to pay obeisance to whatever god was responsible for not having Agatha break her ankle on the steps of Ardry End.

“Smirk if you like, Plant,” she said, tapping her cane three times on the floor, their local wizard about to wave her wand and transform pedestrian facts into fantasies. “Something is going on.” She turned to Jury. “Watermeadows is an extensive estate. Finest in Northamptonshire.” She bethought herself. “Second finest. At least, no
finer
than Ardry End.”

Melrose sighed. Difficult for Ardry End not to come out on top, since she had expectations. It did not appear to
occur to Agatha that she would die before Melrose; her twenty-five-year headstart did not put a crimp in her designs.

“The grounds and gardens are quite fabulous; Lady Summerston owns the lot, you see, and Hannah will come into a fortune. Probably what the husband’s hanging on for.”

“You’ve never even seen Watermeadows. All you know is what you’ve heard from Marshall Trueblood when he went up there to negotiate for that fall-front desk.”

“
That
opportunist! Only gave half what it’s worth, I expect.” Leaving out the Withersby family, the person she loathed most in Long Piddleton was Marshall Trueblood.

“Don’t be silly. He’s perfectly honest. For an antiques dealer, that is. Speaking of him, we’re supposed to meet at the pub. Come on, Richard.”

They said their good-byes to Agatha, who lost no opportunity to make them feel as if they were the last of the medics deserting the sick and wounded. Even Jury’s promise to return and the appearance of Mrs. Oilings with a fresh batch of cakes and gossip did not suffice.

 • • • 

As they left the shadowy fastness of Plague Alley, Melrose related the story of Agatha’s accident.

“Are you telling me that your constable let her get away with
that
fabrication?” asked Jury.

“Agatha and Constable Pluck are on very good terms; she drowns him in sherry and gossip.”

As they rounded the corner, Melrose said a good morning to a thick-set woman with a frown and a bulldog standing hard by her heels. The frown seemed perpetual since the skin appeared to have set in thin ropes across her forehead, and the corners of her mouth were victims of the pull of gravity. She strongly resembled her bulldog, Trot. She was hanging over the gate of her picket fence and Trot was glaring out between the rails.

“Visitin’ yer auntie, was ya, m’lord?” The frown deepened and Trot made an unearthly noise in his throat like the sounds from bad plumbing. The accusation in her tone was clear, as if Melrose had been neglecting his familial duties for too long. “Well, and ain’t it a fine thing when shopkeepers can endanger the lives of innercent folk. That Jurvis thinks he owns the High, he does. Just clutters up the pavement so it ain’t even safe to walk.”

That people had been walking past the butcher shop for a good thirty years without incident made no odds, apparently. Melrose bowed slightly, and they strolled on.

He said to Jury, “You can bet Agatha’s going to be groaning with pain until this is settled. Why do you think she’s staying off that foot of hers? Except for coming into the pub yesterday to check on your progress, she goes nowhere, and Long Piddleton is getting its first respite in some fifteen years. Would anything keep her from making her daily rounds but the threat of losing her small-claims case?” They had just crossed the Sidbury Road, which ended now where the High Street began. Melrose pointed with his stick to the butcher shop between Miss Crisp’s and the bicycle shop. “Let’s drop in. I can pick up the chops for Martha and see how poor Jurvis is keeping his sanity.”

“So it’s between the pig, the bicycle, and the Austin. That it?”

“Yes. The pig and the bicycle managed to move themselves to the edge of the pavement and assault the Austin.”

 • • • 

Jurvis the Butcher was located in a cramped little building between Miss Crisp’s “Better Buys” and a bicycle shop, the owner of which would probably be called as an expert witness about the possibility of a bicycle’s running down an Austin. Behind the plate-glass window lay a suckling pig, mouth agape round an apple, splayed on a metal tray encircled by lettuce leaves and slices of minted apple rings.

“Be careful: it might rush through the glass and throw you to the ground.”

Mr. Jurvis was delighted to see Melrose, no matter who his relations were. “The chops — oh, yes. I’ll just get them. Would you be wanting anything else? That’s a nice silversides, there. And the mince is especially good today.”

Melrose was gazing into the case where the assortment of meats was as splendidly arranged amidst parsley snippets and candied cherries as a Cartier’s display. The whole shop was clean and neat and gave no indication that knives were set to hew and hack in the back rooms. It reminded Melrose of an operating room washed free of blood.

Jury was looking at the big plaster pig, supposedly the perpetrator of this “accident,” standing inside the door. It was a happy-looking pig, painted a bronzy-gold, with a chain of daisies and bluebells twined about its head and ears, drooping over one huge eye. Below its flowery countenance the pig was holding a little tray with a long slot for a sign. This one announced the price of pork as the daily special.

Mr. Jurvis returned with Melrose’s chops wrapped in butcher’s paper and explained to Jury about the pig. “It was sitting outside to advertise the special. Beef mince, it was. One pound thirty. I paid more than a penny, I can tell you, for this pig here. Disgusting that someone could just drive right up on the curb, run over whatever’s there — thank God my little Molly was upstairs, not out here playing with the pig like she likes to do — and then This Person blames it on everyone and everything else. Mind, I’m reasonable. I’d’ve let it go, only charged damages like to get the pig mended, but This Person has to get shirty about it — sorry, Mr. Plant.” Jurvis colored slightly.

“No need to be. Looks like you got the pig patched up.” Melrose pointed to the fresh plaster of the leg.

“Might have been better to leave it, Mr. Jurvis,” said Jury. “If you mean to collect damages.”

Jurvis’s hand flew to his face. “You mean that pig might be needed as a witness?”

“Well, not exactly. But as evidence, quite possibly.” Seeing the butcher looking sadly at the evidence, Jury added, “But I doubt it’ll come to that, Mr. Jurvis. Who’d be dotty enough to make a court case of it?” Jury smiled broadly.

Who indeed?
thought Melrose.

A
REMOVAL VAN
sat with two wheels on the curb in front of Trueblood’s Antiques, a smart Tudor building next to the Jack and Hammer. Marshall Trueblood was too busy wringing his hands and shouting after a beefy man to
please
be careful of that urn —

That the removal men were paying no attention was evident from the thud and clatter and the wail of Trueblood. “Let’s not stop,” said Melrose.

The Jack and Hammer was suffering from its usual midday tedium, the stillness punctuated by the staccato snores of Mrs. Withersby. Having earned her char money, she was drinking it up and sleeping it off at the bar, her head propped against the snob screen. An elderly couple sat at a table in back and neither spoke nor looked at one another, in that way of survivors of long-standing marriages. They looked alike with their thatched gray hair and dressed alike in their dark broadcloth despite the pleasant weather. They sat solemn as seals and stared at the door.

 • • • 

Perhaps he was a sadist; still, Melrose always enjoyed watching Vivian Rivington’s reaction when she encountered Richard Jury. The meetings were rare and accidental, and it was only the one in Stratford-upon-Avon that
Vivian had managed to handle with anything approaching self-possession. And that, thought Melrose, probably had something to do with her being on the arm of — more or less propped up by — Count Franco Giappino. That, or else the clothes she always dragged out of mothballs whenever she’d just returned from Italy. Probably it would give any woman an edge, standing there with someone slim and expensive, with that Mediterranean patina and its sinister implications, the sort of dilettantish air that so beguiled Henry James into wanting to scrape it off. That the count’s aura was not nearly so seductive as the superintendent’s, Melrose was quite sure Vivian had known for some time.