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  Contents

  Part One: London and Littlebourne

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: Wizards and Warlords

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Three: Music and Memory

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  For Colleen and Jack

  Part One

  LONDON

  and

  LITTLEBOURNE

  ONE

  I

  IT was a dead time in the London underground—after lunch and before rush hour—when the last plaintive notes of a Chopin nocturne floated from Katie O’Brien’s violin down the tiled corridor.

  Anything drifting in the air of the Wembley Knotts tube station besides wind you could taste the soot in was a rare occurrence. She plucked the strings and thought of what to play next. Ruefully, she glanced down to check the contents of the open violin case. Paganini hadn’t earned her any 10p pieces. Neither had Beethoven. Indeed, there was only one addition to the coins she had put there herself, and that was five pence tossed in by a begrimed child of nine or ten who looked as if he should be spending it on milk. Yet he had given Katie his unqualified attention for the space of two minutes, his head nodding in rhythmic little jerks as if he had a small conductor trapped in there. Then, unsmilingly, he had deposited his coin and walked on, swallowed up in the warren of dun-tiled corridors. The boy had been her only audience for the last fifteen minutes. Charing Cross, King’s Cross, Piccadilly: all of those would have brought more money, but also more risk. Police tended to be thick on the ground in those places, as if all they had to do was weed out the buskers—guitarists and accordion players—who kept sprouting up with their open cases and entertainment.

  Five pence. At this rate she would never save enough, not even for a new lipstick, much less for a pink satin shirt she fancied. It had taken six months of stopping here playing just to collect the money for the jeans and blouse she was wearing.

  She would have to go soon because she had to allow herself time to change back into her dress before catching the train at Highbury. The dress was neatly folded away in the big carryall that also contained the latest Heartwind Romance and a Cadbury bar. There was a Telegraph in there too, bought only to cover up the jeans and magenta shirt in case her mother looked into the bag. Katie O’Brien plucked the strings of her violin and sighed.

  In the hollow tunnel, the notes echoed. A train rumbled in the distance and another pull of air, like an enormous indrawn breath, sucked hair round her face and blew soot in her eyes and bounced scraps of paper at her feet. Unmindful of her new blouse, she leaned against the wall and wondered what to play next, if it was worth playing anything at all. Across from her was an Evita poster. The corridor was lined with posters of films and museum exhibitions and adverts for travel. Evita wore a strapless gown, her arms shot straight up in the air in a sort of victory pose. Microphones bristled in front of her. A mustache had been penciled in over her pearly lips, prominent nipples had been drawn on the bodice, and between the upraised hands were a hammer and sickle.

  Katie wondered when someone had found time and opportunity to muck up the poster and then decided it would be easy enough, at least now in the Wembley Knotts station. No one at all had come by except for the dirty little boy with the 5p.

  She heard footsteps in the distance and tucked the violin under her chin. As the steps came nearer down the windy tunnel, she started in on “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” hoping it would be more popular than the nocturne. She closed her eyes, simulating total absorption in the music. After a bit, she saw the feet halt in front of a grate below the poster, and added a few unscored flourishes to her song, waiting for the ping of coins in the violin case. But pretending indifference to money, she didn’t look up.

  That was why she didn’t see it coming.

  The brutal blow to the back of her head buckled her knees, and the dirty, ocher-colored floor of the tunnel came up to slap her in the face. She heard the sound of running feet. Darkness swept over her like sand, more and a little more. Before she was totally buried in it, she had time to wonder, almost whimsically, if Evita had stepped out of her poster, lowered the arms holding the hammer, and then hurried off, back to the Argentine.

  Don’t cry for me—

  II

  The small, woolly dog trotted across the Green with its teeth clamped round its latest treasure. It crossed the High and continued its walk, pausing at every portal, deciding none was a good enough hiding place for this particular treat, and trotted on.

  The little dog belonged to no one in the village, but had been seen round and about. It had been noticed most often digging under the Craigie sisters’ rosebushes, or chasing mice or elves in the Horndean wood. When the little dog saw a thin figure come out of the sweet shop, it paused, cocked its head as if debating the worth of this creature, and then rushed in a frolicsome way towards her. He recognized Miss Augusta Craigie, the one whose rosebushes he had lately left in tatters. Augusta Craigie tried to shoo it off. She quite loathed the dog.

  The dog merely took the waves and flourishes as a friendly offer to romp. It barked and let the bone fall at Miss Craigie’s feet. She started to kick it away, but the tip of her sensible shoe stopped just short of kicking. She looked closer at the bone and determined it was not a bone, but a finger.

  The Hertfield police were there within ten minutes of the call from the village. But no matter what blandishments they used—bits of red meat, head-pattings, and so on—the little dog was not about to lead them to the rest of the body.

  III

  Superintendent Richard Jury was stuffing an extra pair of socks into a duffel bag, preparatory to his weekend in Northamptonshire, when the telephone rang.

  He stared at the phone. No one in his right mind would be calling at seven-fifteen on a Saturday morning unless it was something he definitely did not want to hear. He listened to four more rings, telling himself not to pick it up, but then in the manner of all humans, who are convinced the one call gone unanswered must be The Call, the hot-line from the Universe, Jury weakened and plucked up the receiver. “Jury here.”

  “Su-per-in-ten-dent Jury.” The voice made a double-treble of the word. Nor did the voice belong to God, although its owner at New Scotland Yard might have contested this. In plummy accents, Detective Chief Superintendent Racer began to set Jury up for the fall. “Well, well, not left yet, lad? I wondered why London was still so happy.”

  “I was just finishing packing,” said Jury, refusing to rise to the bait.

  The smooth voice became acerbic. “Well, you can just leave out the pink coat, Jury. You’re not goin
g to Northants.”

  Racer, who considered himself very county, assumed anyone with a title and a house the size of Ardry End must invariably ride to hounds.

  “I don’t quite take your meaning,” said Jury, who took Racer’s meaning perfectly. The phone was in the kitchen, and Jury was now leaning on the open fridge door inspecting the stark interior. One chicken leg and a half-pint of milk.

  “My meaning, Jury, is that you’re going to Hertford, not Northants, place called—”

  While Racer turned from the phone to have a mumbled conversation on the other end of the wire, Jury took out the chicken leg, wondering if the role of the forlorn, possibly starving policeman fit his overall image, decided it didn’t, and slammed the fridge door shut. He carried the plate and the receiver, cradled on his shoulder, into the sitting room and waited for Racer to get down to business.

  “Littlebourne,” came the irascible voice, and when Jury didn’t immediately respond, said, “Jury!”

  “Sir!”

  A silence. “Are you being sarcastic, Jury?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me, lad. You never did when you were inspector, so you damned well wouldn’t be doing it now. I don’t have time for your warped—and, I might add, unprofessional—sense of humor.” Papers rattled. “Littlebourne. You got that? That’s the one-eyed village you’re going to. About three miles from Hertfield where the swells go to buy antiques. There’s a downtrain every half-hour from Islington—”

  Jury cut him off. “I’m not on call. You do know there is a rota?”

  The wire crackled in his ear as Racer said, “Rota. I’m well aware there’s a rota. You trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Jury? Perkins is in hospital and Jenkins is flat on his back with some kind of flu the Chinks are handing round. Hertfield police are shorthanded, and it looks like they’ve got an especially nasty murder. Trouble is, they can’t find the body.”

  Can’t find the body? Jury looked down at the chicken leg which lay congealed in a puddle of grease. “Then how do they know they’ve got a murder? Someone gone missing, or something?”

  “Listen, and I’ll tell you.” More shuffling of papers. “Some woman named Craigie was out walking her dog. No, wait a tic. Not her dog . . . ”

  Jury closed his eyes. Racer would not simply hand over the facts; he would chronicle it. The Chief Superintendent considered himself a raconteur of bardic proportions.

  “ . . . and then this woman comes out of a shop and tries to get the mutt out of her way and he drops the bone in his mouth. Only—”

  There was a dramatic pause. Jury waited, inspecting the chicken leg with a sense of foreboding. Only it wasn’t a bone. That had to be it.

  “ . . . it wasn’t a bone,” said Racer with a good deal of relish. “It was a finger. Get cracking Jury. Take Wiggins with you.”

  “Sergeant Wiggins is in Manchester. He’s visiting his people.”

  “He’s giving all the Mancuneans the Black Death, that’s what he’s doing. I’ll dig him out, never fear. With Wiggins that would be literal. Well, I’m sorry to delay your weekend in the country, Jury. No hunting, no shooting for you. A policeman’s life is full of grief.”

  Click went the telephone at Scotland Yard.

  Jury got out his address book and put through a trunk call to Ardry End. While he waited he sat with his head in his hand. A finger.

  IV

  Ardry End was a manor house of rose-hued stone, seat of the Earls of Caverness (when there were Earls of Caverness), hidden in its own wood of September gold and russet like a figure in an old tapestry.

  The tapestry was even more faded, though, on this particular September morning, gray with mists and rain floating like gauze over the Northamptonshire fields. It was dark enough that the lamps glowed dully behind the mullioned panes of a downstairs room.

  Thus a passer in the rain might have looked with longing through the windows of this room in the east wing—a room at once elegant and comfortable, a combination of Queen Anne couches and plumped-up pillows, of crystal chandeliers and cozy corners, of oriental carpets and warm hearths.

  One might have taken its two occupants—a nearly handsome man in his early forties; a stout, dumpy woman in her late sixties—for mother and son, or old friend and young, or happy host and merry guest. Or, indeed, for any of those sentimental couplings we attribute to those sitting in the warmth of light and fire, while the poor, drenched passerby looks through the starry pane, envious of the comfort within.

  One might have felt that there by the blazing fire, with the lumbering old dog at their feet, these two surely presented the most amiable picture in the world.

  One might have supposed that here was friendship, here was intimacy, here was conversation at its best.

  One would have been wrong.

  • • •

  “You’re becoming an alcoholic, Melrose. That’s your second shooting sherry,” said Lady Agatha Ardry.

  “If mere numbers count, you’re becoming a fairy cake. That’s your third,” said Melrose Plant, the last in the line of the Earls of Caverness. He returned to perusal of a road map.

  She threw him a dark glance while she peeled the fluted paper from the little cake. “What are you doing?”

  “Reading a road map.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s got roads on it.” Melrose stoppered up the decanter and sipped from his morsel of Waterford crystal.

  “You’re being funny, Plant.”

  “I’m being literal, dear Aunt.” Melrose had found Hertfield; but where was this Littlebourne village?

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. You’re not thinking of going anywhere, are you? If you’re going up to London, I shouldn’t. You ought to stay here and tend to your affairs. But if you must go to London, I should certainly like to go too. I’ve a lot of shopping to do and I want to stop in at Fortnum’s and get some of their cakes.”

  Plant did not bother contradicting her, since she would have him up to London and back again faster than a flying carpet, and he could resume his map-study. He yawned. “Fortnum’s don’t do fairy cakes, Agatha.”

  “Certainly they do.”

  “Well, I expect we shall never know.”

  Lady Ardry regarded her nephew with suspicion, as if his remark held some nugget of meaning she must pry loose, like a gold filling from a tooth.

  Gold was not the least of Agatha’s concerns, either. She had just finished appraising Plant’s latest acquisition, a small gold statue. She picked it up again, turned it every which way, and said, “This must have been dear, Melrose.”

  “I can show you the sales slip.” He resettled his spectacles on his nose and looked at her over the rim of his sherry glass.

  “Don’t be vulgar. I’ve no interest in what you give for things.”

  He saw she now had her enormous purse open and was rooting through it, taking out and putting on the table all sorts of nondescript objects. Was she making room for the gold statue? Melrose occasionally visited her cottage in Plague Alley, partly as a gentlemanly gesture, partly to see some of his belongings. How she managed to get whole clumps of furniture out of Ardry End without his knowing was a mystery he had never solved. One day he would cycle up the drive to find a removal van in front of the door. Well, Ardry End was enormous, and he didn’t really care, so long as she left the portraits in the gallery and the ducks in the pond. Then he spied something she had just transferred from purse to table.

  “Isn’t this mine?” he asked.

  She colored slightly. “Yours? Yours? My dear Plant, whatever would I be doing with your calling-card case?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  “I’m not sure I care for what you’re implying.”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m saying you took my visiting-card case.”

  She thought for a moment. “You don’t remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Your dear mother
, Lady Marjorie—”

  “I remember my mother, yes. That was her visiting-card case.” Melrose opened his own gold cigarette case and lit a cigarette. “Are you going to tell me Mother gave it to you?”

  Rather than answer this directly, she began to reminisce. “Your dear mother, the Countess of Caverness—”

  “You have a way of reminding me of particulars of my family history that suggests you believe I cannot sort them out. I remember that my mother was the Countess of Caverness. My father was the seventh Earl of Caverness. And your late husband, the Honorable Robert Ardry—”

  “Stop trying to be funny again, my dear Plant.”

  “Allow me to continue. Robert Ardry was my uncle. And I, to everyone’s consternation, am no longer the eighth Earl. There, now. All ship-shape and Bristol fashion.”

  “Kindly do not use such sordid, lower-class expressions. Your dear mother—”

  “My mother was indeed dear and she swore like a scullery maid.”

  “No respect for the family. Never had.”

  “You’re here, dear Aunt.”

  She played for time by rearranging the falls of bright-leaved chiffon, totally inappropriate for the day, and calling for Ruthven, Melrose’s butler.

  “Why are you dressed for an afternoon on the lawn, Agatha?” Melrose looked at her more closely. “And where’d you get that amethyst brooch? That looks like Mother’s, too.”

  Ruthven entered and she requested some more cakes. She would stagger her ‘elevenses’ right into luncheon if he weren’t careful, Melrose knew.

  Ruthven shot her a glance like a poisoned arrow and swanned out of the room.

  With that interruption she could now deftly turn the subject away from amethyst brooches. “I noticed Lady Jane Hay-Hurt paying special attention to you last Sunday.”

  Since Lady Jane was a fifty-eight-year-old maiden lady with prominent teeth and receding chin, Agatha no doubt thought it safe to imply a possible liaison between the lady and Melrose.