The Man with a Load of Mischief (20 page)

“Jury, here,” he said, and listened with growing amazement to the words of Melrose Plant. “Look, Mr. Plant, just you stay right there. It'll only take me ten minutes.” He slammed down the receiver, dialed the Long Piddleton station, and thought, as he listened to the
brr-brr
, that Wiggins or Pluck damned well better be there. Finally, Pluck answered, and Jury told him to get hold of the Weatherington station, get the Scene of Crimes officer, get Appleby, get the whole crew, and get them over to the Cock and Bottle without delay. There'd been another body found. Poor Pluck sputtered, stuttered, and finally said, “Yes, sir. Right away, sir. But there's all these reporters crawling round the station demanding to talk to you. They streamed in from London not a half hour ago.”

“Forget the reporters, Sergeant. And don't, for God's sake, tell them a thing about this, or there'll be so many cars on the road to Sidbury I won't be able to get round them.”

“Right, sir. But I thought I should just mention,” and he lowered his voice, “that Lady Ardry's been talking to these men from the London dailies six-to-the-dozen. And I should
tell you that Superintendent Racer has been trying to get onto you for the past hour. Awful mad, he sounded.”

“Well, Sergeant, the next time he calls, let Lady Ardry talk to him.”

 • • • 

The blue Morris did the thirteen miles from the house to the Cock and Bottle in twenty minutes, calling forth outraged responses from the more sedate drivers, out for a pleasant Christmas Eve drive.

When Jury saw the Cock and Bottle about a quarter of a mile down the road, he swerved over onto the right shoulder and braked just before the rise of mounded earth. He jumped out of the car, not bothering to slam the door, and ran over to the spot where Melrose Plant was kneeling. The rise had been covered with a tarpaulin.

“I didn't try to get the earth off; it's very hard, anyhow. But I assumed you wouldn't want the ground disturbed. I did brush some of the loose stuff off her arm.”

“You did the right thing, Mr. Plant.” Protruding from the hard, snow-encrusted mound was a hand and arm, about halfway up to the elbow. The nails of the hand were painted an incongruous, bright red, and a large, cheap ring encircled one finger. Jury felt the arm. Stiff as an icicle.

“It was pretty obvious,” said Plant, “that whoever belongs to that arm wasn't down there still desperately trying to breathe. So I let it be. I threw the tarpaulin over it because of passing motorists. I didn't imagine you'd want curious passersby to stop. I just stood here and directed them over to the other end of the road. Probably they thought I was the road works man.”

Jury couldn't help smiling a bit, even in the circumstances. That suit Plant was wearing was probably not the common uniform of road works men. It did not take long for it to seep into Jury's mind that the “dead man” was right in front of the Cock and Bottle, which sat well back from the road off to their left. Another inn. The papers would love it.

He said to Plant, “You've done a good job. It's as well you didn't try to dig her up. The Scene of Crimes officer would have our heads if anything had been disturbed.”

They stood there for another ten minutes, and Jury heard the whine of a siren. Well, at least Pluck had been quick about it. Weatherington was on the other side of Sidbury, about ten miles from the market town. “Mr. Plant, why don't you go up to the inn, there, and soften up the proprietor — do you know him?”

“Not well. I've a kind of nodding acquaintance with him. Fell asleep once at the bar when he was telling me his life. What should I say?”

Jury looked down at the frozen hand as the police car rounded the bend. “Just tell him I'll be up to ask him a few questions.”

 • • • 

Dr. Appleby waited, patiently smoking, as the Scene of Crimes officer, a man with a face like a graven image, recorded every detail. The marks of ligature were plainly visible on the victim's neck. And the victim was, as Jury had suspected, one Ruby Judd, lately the vicar's housemaid.

When the police photographer had finished up taking pictures from every angle, Dr. Appleby looked at the chief inspector the way a father sometimes rivets his eyes on a child who has gone off the straight and narrow once too often. Even Jury, who didn't often dodge the eyes of his fellowman, looked away. “Inspector Jury, are you sure you wouldn't like me to wander about the countryside lashed to your side? I seem to be turning up so often at the scene of one of your crimes.” Appleby's nicotined fingers lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one.

“Very funny, Appleby. But it is not really ‘my' crime, as you so charmingly put it. It is actually someone else's.” Jury only wished he hadn't been saddled with a wiseacre of a police surgeon. He suspected Appleby was thoroughly, if perversely, enjoying himself. How often was he called in to treat more than measles or women's complaints or ulcerated stomachs?

Dr. Appleby puffed away, his answer ready: “ ‘Someone else's', yes. But the question still remains: Whose? The population hereabouts is steadily on the decrease.” The doctor flicked ash
into the newly dug-out “dead man.” The corpse, wrapped in a polyethylene sheet to prevent the loss of any items on its person, had been removed to the ambulance. The fingerprint man, the one with the crew cut and the chewing gum and the whistle, had had very little to go on here and was now on his way to the vicarage, for a look at Ruby Judd's room.

“Dr. Appleby, the facts, please.”

“I've given them to you three times before, why not just use the old ones — ?”

Jury's impatience was growing. “Dr. Appleby —”

Appleby sighed. “Very well. From the condition of the body, I'd say anywhere from three days to a week. A little difficult to tell — the body's fairly well preserved. She might as well have been in a frozen food locker.” Appleby lit another cigarette, and Wiggins, who had been taking down the doctor's information in his notebook, took the opportunity to blow his nose and pull out a cough drop from a fresh packet. Dr. Appleby picked up his narrative again, in a droning voice: “Cause of death: strangulation, this time by a knotted cord of some sort. Possibly a thin headscarf, possibly a stocking. Hemorrhages on face and inside eyelids. No other damage done I can see. But of course, we haven't a pathologist behind every tree, like you boys in London. Have to do the p.m. myself. Incidentally, nothing much on the Creed man that seems helpful, since you know he was killed somewhere between ten and noon. I certainly couldn't fix it better than that.”

Having supervised the moving of the body to the ambulance, Appleby snapped up his bag and moved off. On either side of the road detective constables were combing the cold meadows for further evidence. Jury was hoping some sort of bag — a suitcase, perhaps — would turn up in the woods or the meadow near the Cock and Bottle. He imagined that whoever murdered her had got her to pack up a bag, probably under the pretense of a weekend of passion (which would have meant a man, if that were the case), knowing that no questions would be asked for at least a few days. Appleby said there was no sign of “sexual interference,” but he couldn't tell Jury if she
were pregnant until he did the postmortem. It was a cold, cold trail. But Jury had been right about one thing: Ruby Judd was no stranger.

 • • • 

When Jury finally ascended the hill to the Cock and Bottle, he found Melrose Plant seated at the bar with a half pint of Guinness before him. The beefy-looking proprietor was leaning across the bar, talking. His name was Keeble, and he was wiping his perspiring face with a bar towel, quite overcome. His wife, however, who had just come out of a door to the right of the bar, was granite-faced and dry-eyed.

Plant offered Jury a cigarette from his gold case and Jury took it gratefully. “What can you tell me about this young woman, Mr. Keeble?”

“Well, as I was just saying to the sergeant, here” — he indicated Wiggins, whose notebook was dutifully opened on the bar, handkerchief beside it — “this Ruby, I hardly ever seen her, except once or twice in the shops, so I can't help much. They been working on that ‘dead man' out there in front a long time.” Mrs. Keeble put in how bad it was for business, always having the road torn up.

“And when did the road works men finish filling it in?”

Keeble thought hard. “Now just a tic and I'll tell you exact — aye, it was the afternoon of the fifteenth. Tuesday week. I remember because it was the next evening we had this big party to serve dinner to and I was glad it wasn't all dug up out there.” He celebrated his part in the horrendous event by drawing off a beer for himself; his wife sniffed her disapproval. “Then one of them come back that night, to finish up. The night of the fifteenth last Tuesday.”

Tuesday had been the day Ruby had left, supposedly to visit her family in Weatherington.

Keeble's mention of the dinner party had suddenly made Jury hungry. Jury said, “We could do with a bite. Can you rustle us up something? You're hungry, aren't you, Mr. Plant? And Sergeant Wiggins?” They both nodded.

“We've only got plaice,” said Mrs. Keeble.

Plant made a noise in his throat, but Wiggins said, “And chips and peas, if you don't mind.”

She looked at all three of them as if they had dragged the body of the girl there themselves, just to discommode her. She also looked as if she were debating whether she could expect Scotland Yard to pay, or whether she was stuck with doing her civic duty. Plant said to her, as she was passing through the kitchen door, “If we could just have a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet to wash that down?” She stared at him. He added, “Nineteen seventy-one?”

Her mouth set even more firmly. “We ain't got no wine cellar; this an't the Savoy.”

Plant surveyed the room with its plain fixtures. “Odd. I could have sworn . . .”

Mr. Keeble however, was more interested in their comfort, and said, “How's about a pint of our best bitter, sir? On the house, it is.” He lowered his voice, and looked toward the kitchen.

“Kind of you Mr. Keeble,” said Jury. He accepted the pint gratefully and drank off a half.

Plant had left the bar and walked over to the gabled window in front of the inn. He stood there, gazing out. “You can't see the ‘dead man' from here, Inspector. My guess is you can't see it from any of the windows, not with that stand of oak.”

“Meaning?”

“That roads man wasn't really taking much of a chance of having someone see him from the inn, here. Nor on the road, either. It's really pretty flat; you can see for a good quarter mile either way. There's that bad dip in the road, of course, where the black spot is, but all the same . . .”

“Meaning the workman was not really a workman, I take it? Yes, the ground would have been easy enough to dig up again the night of the fifteenth. And if anyone had seen him, had passed that way, they would have taken him for a worker come back perhaps to finish up something. He could even have safely worked by lantern-light.”

“Ready-made grave, just waiting there,” said Plant. “A bit
of a change of clothes, a cap, and so on, and no one would really have thought much about it.”

“There was always the chance that he'd be seen dragging the body from — where? let's say that stand of oak — the short distance to the ‘dead man.' But by whom? From here one might see a man working on the road, but if the body were tarpaulined, or covered somehow, it's just too far off to be distinguishable.”

“And if he had enough nerve to bring this off, he'd not stick at waving a car round the shoulder, if one happened to pass.”

“Or
she
, Mr. Plant.”

“I can't believe all this was done by a woman.”

“But it's possible. A woman could as easily dress up as a road worker.”

“Very well. She could have done.”

Mrs. Keeble had banged in from the kitchen with a tray and deposited the food on the table. The three of them took the table against the wall by the cold fireplace where a deal table had been laid out with cutlery, napkins, and three white crockery plates, each with the same portions of fish, potatoes and mushy green peas.

Melrose Plant took one look and shoved his plate away and reclaimed the pint of bitter which Keeble had topped up. Jury looked disconsolately at the fish, fried, he was sure, in one of those batter mixes that comes in paper packets. Only Wiggins seemed to be digging in with relish, pounding the malt bottle on the bottom to shake the vinegar through the tiny holes.

“The wine,” said Plant, “will be along any minute. I only hope she remembers to let it breathe.”

Wiggins let out something somewhere between a giggle and a snicker. Jury was so unused to hearing Wiggins laugh, he couldn't quite identify the sound. “Incidentally, sir,” Wiggins was saying around a mouthful of chips, “Superintendent Racer says you're to call him immediately. I told him you hadn't hardly had a moment to even sit down since you got here, sir.” Wiggins was undoubtedly feeling guilty for the morning he had spent in bed, but it seemed to have done him good; it certainly had made him more voluble. He was shoveling in the fish and chips,
and scarcely hesitated at all when both Plant and Jury slid their own food onto his plate.

The front door of the Cock and Bottle opened and three men, one of them Superintendent Pratt, came in. Jury could spot reporters a mile away, and sighed.

They were equally adept at spotting the police. Over they came, the photographer clicking pictures right and left at different parts of the saloon bar as if it were a fashion model doing naughty poses for him.

“You'd be Chief Inspector Jury, C.I.D. I'm from the
Weatherington Chronicle
. (Small potatoes, thought Jury, and not hard to shake off.) The other didn't bother identifying himself, just stood with his pad and pencil at the ready. They asked their standard questions and got their standard answers. No, the police hadn't got their man, but investigations were proceeding . . . Jury thought he might have that stamped on his headstone:
Investigations Are Proceeding
. Yes, they'd have something to tell the press in a day or two. One of the reporters made a snide comment about Jury's having his pint at this particular moment, which drew an angry word from Pratt: if they worked half as hard as the chief inspector, they'd not have time to ask damnfool questions. The newspaper crew packed up their gear and left, coattails flying.