The Case Has Altered Read online

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  Contents

  Part I

  DORCAS IS WILLING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II

  THE COLD LADIES

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part III

  THE RED LAST

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part IV

  HELLUVA DEAL!

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  The Way of All Fish Excerpt

  To the memory of Lucille Holland

  and to Christine, whose case has altered

  Part I

  Dorcas Is Willing

  1

  Dorcas hated the fens.

  A no-man’s-land once you got beyond the pub, whose cold window-panes behind her glowed like a row of golden fingerprints, and the only other lights were those of the occasional car moving along the A17. The endless monotony of the fens was bad enough in daylight, and worse at night because at night it got really spooky. Dorcas kept looking over her shoulder, seeing nothing but a vast black flatness and the tiny lights of the pub.

  It was a little after eleven o’clock on a cold February night, mid-February it was, that found Dorcas walking across Wyndham Fen. She set her feet down in the sopping field, made spongier by the incessant rains. She should never have worn these heels, inch and a half they were, but they made her legs look ever so much better. She was convinced that there must be quicksand about, despite people’s telling her this was marshy land, the fens, and though it might be soggy and spongy, it wouldn’t suck you down. There was always a first time, she thought.

  The pub was well behind her, probably a half-mile, its lights still visible. Now they looked as far off as stars, and nothing lay between her and the rim of the sky, black and blank. She especially hated Wyndham Fen because of the tourists who came into the pub and asked stupid questions. It gave her a kick to give them stupid answers sometimes and watch as the puzzlement grew on their faces. It was really a laugh how many tourists were actually eager to be separated from their two or more quid to have the experience of seeing a fen as it used to be hundreds of years ago. God, wasn’t it bad enough to see it now without pining over what it was? It was like her own mum poring over old photos, snaps of them all at Skegness, places like that.

  The dark shape of the Visitors’ Center drifted like a ship on the unsteady ground. The fens lent everything around a curiously breathing life—objects appeared bigger, trees grew larger, the spire of a distant church spiked higher, stumps engorged. Bright light would return these objects to their natural shapes, but even in the light of day the overwhelming flatness of the fens could make what appeared in the distance more distant, and at the same time, things that were closer looked closer still. It was as if there was never a time, day or night, when you could depend on the evidence of your own eyes.

  Her shoes sank in the spongy ground. There was peat beneath the grass and for some reason that always made her feel the ground was not secure. As if the ground itself floated on a raft through fog.

  The Visitors’ Center was the only building around, so the only place that offered cover. She was making her way to its porch, thinking it a very odd place to choose for a meeting. Why couldn’t they have just as easily met inside where there was warmth and light? The only light here was her torch spiking the ground, and she soon turned that off. Looking to her right where the boardwalk began to weave its way through the canals, she remembered how she hated water, had done ever since she’d been left in the tub alone as a tyke and slipped under and almost drowned because her tiny hands couldn’t get purchase, couldn’t find anything but slippery enamel—the very thought made her sick, even now. When the family went to Skegness every summer, she wouldn’t get any closer to the sea than halfway down the strand where she’d sit with her private hoard of film mags and sexy novels. She’d taken off the original dust jackets and replaced them with others. They were now entertaining her cloaked as Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, David Copperfield. Mum and Da would think that was what she was reading. “Improving your mind are you, Dorcas? Good girl, just don’t go getting too smart to get a paying job. Hah hah,” her father would say. Not much of a laugh her father wasn’t, but at least he wasn’t always at her like the ones some of her friends had.

  One of these books, David Copperfield it was, she was supposed to have read in school. She never finished it. The boys at the comprehensive seemed to have read Dickens for the sole purpose of taunting poor Dorcas, who had, at age thirteen, already something of a reputation. The boys had quickly put to use a slightly revised version of Barkis’s message to Nurse Peggotty, which became in their mouths: “Dorcas is willin’, Dorcas is willin’.” She pretended she couldn’t be bothered, but the taunt stung, and her reputation gained momentum with no help from Dorcas. The primary reason that Dorcas was willing was because she wasn’t pretty; she had nothing that would attract men except for being willing. And that had gone right round the comprehensive like wildfire. Dorcas hated Charles Dickens.

  For more than twenty years she’d been inwardly raging about her looks, not one feature she could be proud of except maybe for her teeth, but did any man ever tell a girl he loved her teeth? Not likely. And her shape didn’t make up for her face, either. Lying on the warm sands of Skegness she was painfully aware that the spandex of her bathing suit was girdle-tight and showed the rills and ridges around her middle. Her hair was rusty-red and stiffish, like one of the scouring pads she used for dishes. The only color in her round face came from the freckles that almost covered it.

  Well, her da couldn’t accuse her of not working, not with her two jobs, at the house and at the pub. Of course, if he knew why she was working two jobs, wouldn’t he be surprised? She’d already got her “going away” outfit: a washed-silk brownish gold suit that made her eyes look more honey-colored than just plain brown—worse than brown, a silt-color, muddy brown.

  As she hobbled along the path—she really shouldn’t have worn these shoes—she felt the burden of her plain looks lift a little, for they hadn’t done her any harm in the last analysis; they were not important. She had found someone who could see her inner beauty. For Dorcas had always been convinced that here she shone.

  She walked up the few steps, her feet killing her, and at the top took off her shoes and knocked off the mud. With shoes dangling from her fingers, she stood and looked out over Wyndham Fen and sighed. Here was history. She thought about that with absolutely no enthusiasm. Ba
ck in school she had been forced to go with her classmates to hear a boring lecture about how the fens were drained. And other boring details about the Levels. Did anybody really care except for the people who grew all of those acres of tulips and daffs?

  What she was looking out at—except she couldn’t see with the torch off—was what Wyndham Fen had looked like a hundred years before. Or was it a thousand? How could a person remember all that history? Then they’d drained all of the fens—she was unclear as to who “they” were, the Vikings maybe? No, that was too long ago. That Dutch yob, Vanderbilt? No, he was that American billionaire. Vander . . . Van Der—something? Anyway, he’d got this idea one fine day that you could make the fens produce crops and so forth if you went and drained them. This was good news she supposed if you wanted to be a farmer, maybe the dullest job in the world, but there it was, there’s men liked it. Then after they drained the whole of Lincolnshire, nearly, someone else—the National Trust, she guessed—got the idea that it would be nice to have at least one of the fens looking the way the fens had looked before. Why, she couldn’t imagine. So they de-drained this one where the Center was. Flooded it back or something with water. Dorcas stood there with her shoes dangling from her fingers thinking, My God, look at all the trouble for nothing. Bugger all, it was a bigger waste of time even than sixth form had been. Anyway, you can’t bring things back the way they were.

  That was a deep thought for Dorcas, and this pleased her, for she didn’t much like thinking. She meant to file it away to repeat when the two of them were talking. He’d be pleasantly surprised to know he was going to marry a woman who was good in bed and a good cook and a thinker of deep thoughts. She stood in the frigid mid-February air absently humming and wishing another deep thought would come her way. Maybe she should go read David Copperfield again.

  She wrapped her heavily sweatered arms about her. She chided herself for not wearing a coat because the sweater was prettier and the coat was black and awfully old. She shivered but not from the cold this time. No, she refused to think about the dead woman. She would not think about her, would not name her name, not even in the privacy of her own mind; she would set her aside. If she were nameless then she would lose her power to disrupt and unnerve. The police would or would not take care of that; they’d talked to everyone at the house, her included, till she was blue in the face.

  Dorcas hunched her shoulders and huddled down into her heavy sweater and looked out over the dark tangle of trees and tall grasses and canals that was the old fen. She’d rather save her two quid, ta very much, for her trousseau or a good cookery book.

  She heard a sound behind her, a creaking board. And then the arms encircled her waist. Romantic was her first thought. Something’s wrong, was her second thought, and she barely had time for the third before she felt the breath being squeezed out of her, not by hands but by a soft, silky thing tightening round her throat. For a few moments she tried to claw it away as she opened her mouth to scream, but there was no voice to do it.

  Dorcas ain’t willin’. Dorcas ain’t

  2

  Chief Inspector Arthur Bannen of the Lincolnshire police was in his late fifties, but looked ten years younger. His age was as enigmatic as the rest of him. If he resented Scotland Yard’s turning up in Lincolnshire, he didn’t show it. He was a man so soft-spoken one might wonder if anything could excite or harrow him. He said what he said with a smile, a small one, even a hurt one sometimes, as if it pained him his listener didn’t quite agree. He was presently engaged in folding a length of paper accordion style, like a map.

  “We haven’t asked for your help, Mr. Jury,” said Bannen, finally, but in a perfectly friendly way, while snipping away at the folded paper with his scissors. His feet were up on the edge of his desk, giving the impression of lethargy. Jury thought he was probably anything but lethargic.

  “I know you don’t need mine. I’m asking for yours.”

  They were discussing the murder of a guest who’d been staying at a small estate some forty miles away, called Fengate.

  Bannen started cutting the paper carefully with scissors and, when he turned his attention to Jury, apparently found Jury the less interesting and turned back to his cutting. “I see. Well, then, how can I help you?” He didn’t sound enthusiastic.

  “From what I’ve heard, Lady Kennington’s role in all of this is only—peripheral.”

  “If you mean by that she’s on the fringe, or, as they say, ‘out of the loop,’ I’d say, no, she’s definitely in the loop.” Bannen smiled slightly, as if delivering this news was not unpleasant. He continued cutting tiny triangles out of the paper.

  “You’re not saying that she’s a suspect, are you?”

  Bannen’s eyes were a mild and unengaging shade of gray, the color of the brackish water in the drains Jury had passed on his trip from London. “Everyone’s a suspect who was present at the time.”

  “I expect I’d use the word ‘witness.’ ”

  “Use whatever word you like,” Bannen said pleasantly, continuing to snip his design into the strip of paper. “She had opportunity; she and the Dunn woman were outside when the others were inside the house. Add to that, Jennifer Kennington and Verna Dunn were quarreling. Add to that your friend Lady Kennington was apparently the last to see the victim alive. After she’d left the Dunn woman, Jennifer Kennington was quite by herself, taking a walk.” He paused, considering. “Or so she says.” He snapped the scissors a few times, like crocodile jaws, and looked coolly at Jury. “Now if you were I, Superintendent, would you place Jennifer Kennington out of the loop?” Slowly, Bannen shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Snip.

  • • •

  In the dream, Jenny was moving across the fen; others joined her, forming a procession. He heard the barely audible bells of a censer at a service in Lincoln Cathedral.

  The telephone was next to his ear. Jury knocked it over groping for it. In his attempt to shake himself from sleep and retrieve it, he felt he was gulping down great droughts of air. His chest hurt, ached. A coronary? In a Lincoln B & B? If he was on his way out, he preferred to go in his own digs in Islington with Mrs. Wassermann and Carole-anne teary-eyed at his bedside. At last his groping hand found the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Bannen. Thought you’d never answer. You still sleeping? I’ve been up for hours.”

  Jury gritted his teeth. “Good for you. But what’s taxing your Lincolnshire police at six A.M.?”

  “Get your skates on and I’ll take you somewhere interesting.”

  “Where would that be?” Jury was rubbing what felt like glass dust from his eyes.

  “Wyndham Fen.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I can pick you up in twenty minutes. Be ready.”

  “I’ll be ready.” This fell on empty air, as Bannen had already hung up.

  The bedside clock stubbornly refused to advance its hands to a decent hour. It was six-ten on this February morning and dark as the grave.

  • • •

  Jury hadn’t expected they’d be driving forty miles southeast toward Spalding. But that’s what they had done. “National Trust Property,” Bannen had told him and not much else.

  At seven-thirty in the morning, Wyndham Fen was steeped in gray silence, except for the occasional hoot of an owl or saberlike rattle of the tall reeds in its narrow canals. Crystal cobwebs hung between post and rail of the boardwalk; out in the distant pastures, the rime-caked sheep looked as if they were dressed in glass coats. Morning might have been the time when the fens were most picturesque; Wyndham Fen would have been, except for the body.

  She was lying face upward in one of the canals, around her neck a blue bracelet of skin that told the manner of death—she’d been garroted. Floating there, her body moving gently, she was surrounded by rush grass and water violets, and Jury thought of the Burne-Jones painting of Ophelia. But unlike the beautiful Ophelia, this young woman was anything but pretty. Her face was engorged and blackened with blood; the eyes a
nd tongue protruded. But he could tell, even before this disfigurement, she probably hadn’t been pretty. The face would have been pudgy, the body more so. He bet she hadn’t had many chances in her short life and now she’d have none at all. She might have bloomed later in life, but there would be no later life for her.

  Bannen walked back along the narrow boardwalk that spanned the canal to consult with one of his men. A dozen cars and a couple of vans were pulled up near the small building which served as a tourist center, a place to disseminate brochures and pamphlets about the fens. Police who’d been in the cars were now fanned out over the spiky, frozen grass and the dirt road.

  It was cold; Jury shivered. He wasn’t dressed for a February morning in the Lincolnshire fens. Jury couldn’t take his eyes off the girl floating in the water. Bannen returned with the medical examiner, who set about getting his bag open. Jury thought he was probably not on the payroll of the constabulary, but was a simple country doctor.

  Bannen rocked back slightly on his heels and said, “Dorcas Reese.” He sighed and puffed out his cheeks.

  “Did you know her?”

  “I knew her slightly. She was housemaid and vegetable cook at Fen-gate.”

  Jury stared at him, shocked.

  Bannen frowned as the medical examiner directed the removal of Dorcas Reese’s body from the water. “You couldn’t do that in situ, could you?” When the doctor gave him a look, Bannen added, “No, I expect not.” He sighed. These provincials.

  Jury was dismayed by Bannen’s apparent sanguinity. “You’re saying that this is the second death connected with that house.”

  “Um. Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Bannen was still looking down at the water closing over the place where Dorcas Reese had floated. Bladderwort and water violets swayed on their delicate antennaelike stems. “She should have been looked at where she lay.” Bannen’s tone was disapproving, as if it were really difficult to get good help these days. “Strange, isn’t it?” he said, ambiguously. They were hoisting the body onto the board for the doctor’s examination. Bannen walked round the body, studying it, exchanging a few words with the doctor.