Rainbow's End Read online

  Dick Scroggs, stout and fiftyish, finally entered with his paintcan and Diane drew the shape of a martini glass in the air. Then she said, “Are you two still working on your lists? I finished mine ages ago.” She tapped an envelope lying on the table with a red-painted fingernail. “Deadline’s tomorrow morning; you said so yourselves.”

  “That’s right. But I keep changing my mind about the name of the wife.” Marshall Trueblood went back to chewing on his pencil and staring at the air. He was satisfied with the names he’d chosen for the children of the Chelseaites, but not the names he’d chosen for the mother.

  Diane continued, “I hope this family moving here doesn’t mean London has discovered Long Piddleton, for God’s sake. We’ve been free of that sort of person thus far.”

  Considering that Diane Demorney had moved to Long Piddleton direct from London with no stopover in a That Sort of Person decompression chamber, it was hard to distinguish her from a London “emigrée,” in other words, That Sort of Person. Melrose reminded her of this.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I was never from Chelsea or Sloane Square or even South Ken. I was way, way down the King’s Road, practically in Parson’s Green, which is hardly fashionable”—Diane had lately started making a fashion out of being “un-”—“and, anyway, I haven’t the energy to be a Week-End Man—or Woman. I thought they were supposed to move into Watermeadows months ago. Where are they?”

  “They’re probably out Walesing,” offered Trueblood.

  Melrose wrote a name on his tablet. “They’re going to be disappointed. You can’t Wales around here.”

  Vivian Rivington gave up on spring and turned from the casement window. “Don’t be silly; you can’t Wales anywhere anymore.” Her naturally rosy complexion was quite pale, and the awful artichoke-colored jumper she was wearing did nothing to heighten either skin or auburn hair.

  “The Week-End Man can. ‘Walesing’ is a state of mind, independent of royal indiscretions, divorces, or geography,” Trueblood explained.

  Diane Demorney yawned and ran a tiny garlic clove around the edge of her martini glass. Finally, Dick Scroggs had reappeared and was mixing up a fresh Demorney martini. She had to furnish her own garlic cloves—essential, she claimed, for the perfect martini. She had also furnished the perfect glass. The vodka itself was a Demorney find: it had buffalo grass in it, long threadlike things waving about in the bottle that looked as if they’d been harvested from the ocean floor. Trueblood had named it the Captain Nemo martini.

  The Week-End Man that Trueblood was describing was actually a Week-End Family, who had presumably taken a lease on the country estate between Long Piddleton and Northampton called Watermeadows. The trouble was, they could get no information out of the estate agent, Mr. Jenks. Mr. Jenks, a thinnish man somewhere in his sixties, had many vices: greed, avarice, a manipulative character masked by a crust of blandness, like a beef Wellington made from gristle, but he had made himself unpopular mainly because he’d upset the balance of shops along the High Street by annexing the building next to Trueblood. He did have one virtue, if refusing to give out information regarding his clients could be called virtuous. Actually, it could well be merely another facet of his vices: acquisitiveness and secretiveness.

  Mr. Jenks had set himself up in a shop sporting a double-sided sign, one side advertising his estate agency, the other his travel agency. He was likewise the double-hatted representative of both firms. This Janus-faced shop was a narrow Georgian building with a bowfront window, companion to Trueblood’s Antiques. Marshall Trueblood was doubly irritated by this takeover of premises he had himself been thinking of purchasing in order to expand his own business. But he took it with the same soigné grace with which he took most things, and even listened with a fair amount of patience when Mr. Jenks talked about market upheavals, sliding interest rates, mortgage buyouts. Mr. Jenks was always hard on the trail of anyone who couldn’t meet his mortgage payments.

  This was not, however, the reason the vast estate of Watermeadows had been let—not sold, but let—to the family Marshall Trueblood and Melrose Plant were making up lists about.

  “The children will have names like Alistair and Arabella. You said they had two children, didn’t you, Viv-viv?” said Trueblood, chewing his pencil.

  “No.” Her chin in her fisted hands, she had turned once again to the window. A crust of snow ruffled the sill, refusing to melt on this sunny February day. Melrose noted that her awful artichoke twin set was set off by a moldy green skirt. Beautiful as she was, she seemed determined to deglamorize herself.

  Trueblood continued. “He’ll be wearing a rubber coat with a hood and elbow patches; she’ll have razor-cut blond hair and a tweed jacket. Two chocolate Labs, of course. They’ll call out ‘Cheer-o’ and describe everything as ‘simply lovely.’ And a Land Rover. Let’s not forget the Land Rover. Or a Range, makes no difference. Labs in back, with, perhaps, a marmalade cat. The cat is Arabella’s. She insisted on bringing it though Mummy would have preferred to leave it home with Cook. It sheds so. Its name is—”

  Vivian turned from the window. “For heaven’s sakes, do stop going on.” The request was not rancorous, merely slightly bored. They had been going on about these new people for weeks.

  Vivian was about to make one more trip to Venice. How many had she made (Melrose wondered) since her engagement to that Italian count? How many times had the wedding been put off, delayed, usually through some subterfuge Plant and Trueblood had cooked up? This last time the respite had been supplied by the death of one of the Giopinno aunts. But that was over, the family having survived the loss remarkably well. Marrying the Count Franco Giopinno, Melrose had told her at tea at Ardry End, seemed to be a sort of hobby for her, something she could take up, like tennis or the Times crossword, when she hadn’t anything better to do. Vivian had thrown a watercress sandwich at him.

  “Well, perhaps I’m wrong about the cat.” Trueblood twisted round to call to Dick for another pint of that execrable ale Dick was making to keep up with Trevor Sly, proprietor of the Blue Parrot. “Frankly, I’m just as glad they’ll only come at the weekend,” said Diane Demorney. “At least that way we don’t have to put up with them all year round.”

  “Honestly,” said Vivian, “you both act as if you own Long Pidd. As if you own all of Northants.”

  “I do,” said Melrose. He added, sotto voce, “Hell’s bells, here’s Agatha.”

  Lady Agatha Ardry entered, her big black cape swirling about her, talking as she did so: “Well, I can certainly tell you one thing about them,” she announced, “them” having been such a hot topic during the past days that it was unnecessary to identify “them.”

  Marshall Trueblood sat up. “Ah! You’ve seen them?” He was mildly annoyed. It would be extremely irritating if Agatha were to be the first to see the new tenants of Watermeadows. “How many are they? What do they look like? Their dogs? Cats? Cars?”

  Agatha took a vast amount of time settling herself, straightening the collar of a brownish-yellow suit that made her stout, compact form look just like a bale of hay. Her dull gray hair must have been freshly done; curls were shaped and plastered, newly minted, as if the beautician had scrubbed them with silver polish. She called for Dick Scroggs to wait upon her, before saying sententiously, “They’re entitled to their privacy, Mr. Trueblood. Some of us don’t spend half the day in beer and gossip.”

  Entitled to their privacy, thought Melrose, simply meant she didn’t know anything.

  “Did you see them?” asked Diane.

  “Not . . . precisely.”

  “Meaning,” said Melrose, “not imprecisely, either.”

  Dick Scroggs was paying no attention to the queenlike wave of Agatha’s hand, palm rocking back and forth. He rolled a toothpick in his mouth and kept on reading the Bald Eagle. So she shouted, which was her wont anyway. “Shooting sherry over here!”

  “Meaning,” continued Melrose, as Scroggs spilled his pint over the paper, “that you haven’t re
ally come upon them at all.”

  Agatha was arranging the folds of the cape with a self-important air. “Hate to disillusion you, Mr. Trueblood—”

  Few things she’d rather do, thought Melrose.

  “—but your Week-End Family is not from Chelsea.”

  Trueblood looked alarmed. “But they are from SW3 or -4, aren’t they?”

  “Or WI, that might do,” said Melrose.

  Agatha looked pleased with herself to bursting. “I haven’t got my drink yet, I notice. Mr. Scroggs—” she turned towards the bar, where Dick was leaning over the newspaper with the toothpick in his mouth—“is ignoring me, as usual.”

  Trueblood called to Scroggs. Scroggs looked up, nodded. “So where? Where do they come from?”

  As soon as Scroggs plunked down her sherry, she said, “EII.”

  Trueblood choked. “The East bloody End? You’ve got to be joking.”

  “Whitehall or Shoreditch,” said Diane, exhaling a plume of smoke. “Although Shoreditch might be E13.” Diane had once memorized all of the postal district numbers to impress a postal carrier she fancied.

  “Good God!” Trueblood clapped his forehead. Then his face lit up. “Wait a tick, you’re talking Docklands! Well, that’s different. A lot of Chelsea and Sloane Square are moving to there since it’s been gentrified.”

  “They got it for a song,” said Agatha. “That’s what Jenks told me. They’re not just anybody, they’re some sort of relation.”

  Melrose looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Mr. Jenks told you that? Mr. Jenks of the zippered lip? Don’t make me laugh. You heard something from Mrs. Oilings”—Agatha’s weekly char—“so we can discount that because Oilings doesn’t know anything either.”

  “Oh? Oh, really?” asked Agatha, working as much sarcasm into her tone as possible. “I’ll have you know that Mrs. Oilings chars for Mr. Jenks!” She sat back in triumph. Until she realized she’d been trapped.

  Melrose smiled. “Saturday afternoons. When nobody’s there.”

  Agatha quickly changed the subject. “I can also tell you they like their drink.”

  Said Diane, “Who doesn’t?”

  “How do you know that?” asked Vivian.

  “Because one of them spends a great deal of time”—here she raised her voice again, directing her words towards Dick Scroggs—“at the Blue Parrot!”

  Scroggs wheeled at the mention of his rival. “What’s that, now?” He forgot his newspaper and headed for their table.

  Delighted that she had bad news to impart to Dick Scroggs, and any news to impart about the new tenants of Watermeadows, Agatha looked pleased as punch.

  Scroggs stood, hands on beefy hips. “Since when do you go to the Blue Parrot?”

  “I? Don’t be ridiculous; I wouldn’t be caught dead there. I just happened to notice their car nipping down that dirt road. And the only thing on it is the Blue Parrot.”

  “And how,” asked Melrose, “did you know the car was the Watermeadows car?”

  “It came out of their drive, didn’t it?”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes. The one that leads down to the Northampton Road.”

  “And you followed it.” Vivian looked disapproving.

  “I didn’t follow it. It was ahead of me on the Northampton Road, is all.” Agatha pursed her lips, considering the next detail. “I was driving to Northampton.”

  “No, you weren’t,” said Melrose. “You never drive to Northampton. You make me drive to Northampton when you want to go there. What you were doing was lying in wait down at the bottom of the drive in case anyone drove out.”

  “Spying? I have better things to do with my time.”

  Dick Scroggs said, “Well, I can see how it’s going to be, can’t I? Them as want can take their business to Trevor Sly, be my guest.” Disgusted, he stomped off back to the bar, where he noisily rattled glasses and bottles.

  Melrose called over, “Don’t worry, Dick. One taste of Cairo Flame and they’ll run for the door with fire shooting out of their ears. I’m still tasting the stuff.”

  That Trevor Sly brewed his own beer was hardly a consolation to Dick Scroggs, who had been trying to do exactly that for some time now and hadn’t been very successful. He broke a glass and cursed.

  Vivian sighed and let her eyes rest on a row of some half-a-dozen white envelopes. She picked one up. “R. JURY,” it read. She dropped it back, shaking her head at Jury’s name. “You’re even corrupting him. He’s getting to be as silly as you.”

  Trueblood frowned. “You know, he scarcely gave his list a second thought. Did you notice? He just stood right there and scribbled it out without half thinking.”

  Vivian spoke more to the casement window than to the table. “Why does he keep going to Stratford-upon-Avon? He was just there.” Her tone was crotchety.

  “Friends,” said Melrose. He thought it better not to mention it was one friend, and of the female variety. Melrose had never really sorted out the relationship between Vivian and his friend Jury. Something (he suspected) had happened a long time ago, when Jury had first come to Long Piddleton. Now he felt crotchety.

  Taking up his own line, Trueblood went on: “He didn’t spend more than two or three minutes on it.”

  “In a hurry,” said Melrose, crossing out “Fiona” and replacing it with “Polly.” That was a good Chelsea-sounding name. “He wanted to get to Exeter.”

  “Exeter? I thought he was going to Stratford,” said Vivian.

  “Exeter afterward.”

  With a note of alarm, Trueblood said, “You don’t think perhaps he actually knows, do you? I mean, after all, he is a CID man. It would be no trick at all just to march into Jenks’s and demand to see his files.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Plant. “Jury wouldn’t cheat.”

  But Trueblood looked apprehensively at the R. JURY envelope.

  “It would hardly be worth the trouble for only sixty pounds,” said Diane. Ten pounds was the contest fee. Six had paid up. “And the next time you go tooting off to Northampton, Agatha, let me know, would you? There’s an off-license there where you could pick up some buffalo-grass vodka for me.”

  Agatha, thought Melrose, would sooner get her a buffalo. Agatha loathed Diane Demorney.

  “But you never told us, old sweat,” said Trueblood, pencil poised over his list, “what kind of car was it?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Trueblood, slapping his hand down over Agatha’s envelope, the one she was surreptitiously reaching for. “No you don’t.”

  Diane Demorney had apparently been thinking, a task she didn’t often engage in. “Exeter. Is it that Exeter Cathedral business? The one he got the phone call about?”

  “That’s it,” said Melrose, folding his sheet of paper into an envelope.

  “It’s the Stendhal syndrome,” said Diane, eyes on the plume of lavender smoke rising from her cigarette. “You remember. I told you about Stendhal fainting when he saw great art?”

  “Stendhal,” said Melrose, as he rubbed down the flap on his envelope, “never took another shower.”

  THREE

  Richard Jury did not know why, in the short time that had intervened since he last saw her, he thought Elsie would have grown. Perhaps simply because she was a little girl, and children grew magically, grew as beings did in fairy tales, one day small as a pea, and the next, tall as one of those Grecian statues in the garden.

  “Hullo, Elsie. Remember me?”

  “Oh, yes!” she said, with a great deal of enthusiasm. “You were from Scotland Yard! Are you still?”

  It was as if “Scotland Yard” were some summer address, dropped when the season was over. “Am I still? Absolutely. Richard Jury, superintendent, CID.”

  Elsie smiled up at him, clearly impressed. She was wearing her apron, a large white one unevenly wrapped so that points of the hemline just missed the floor. From the direction of the kitchen came the most deliciously pungent fumes, redolent w
ith onion and wine and herbs he couldn’t identify.

  Elsie held the door wide. He imagined she remembered what a fine captive audience he had made on his last visit and probably would do again. “I expect you’re busy. Have I come at a bad time?” he asked her seriously.

  Taking her cue from that, Elsie tempered her enthusiasm with a sigh. “Oh, that’s all right. I’m just keeping the stock stirred. It’s for the cockle vine. Come on in and sit down.”

  Settled in his chair, Jury tried to identify “cockle vine,” but couldn’t. Was it some trendy green? Like radicchio? He looked out at the small patio, leaves dripping rain, and thought that, once again, his mind had been drawn to comparisons with Grecian statues because Jenny Kennington had at one time lived in a huge house with colonnaded walks whose courtyard contained such a statue (though not Grecian), the image of which reclaimed his mind whenever he came into her presence; not her presence, even, but her surroundings.

  Smoothing out her apron, Elsie informed him that Lady Kennington was “down the pub.” Like a rather bored young matron, she drew a magazine from the end table and flipped through it casually. Elsie was ten, and looked ten, but wished to adopt the insouciance of bored society. The image was just a little tainted, though, since the magazine she now tossed aside was neither Majesty nor Country Life but Chips and Whizzer. Rearing up, she said with alarm that she’d forgotten to chill the shadow child.

  Jury was left to turn this over in his mind, but reached no conclusion, and then she was back. “You went to chill—” He inclined his head to one side, inquisitively.

  “The wine. To have with dinner. I had to put it in the chiller.”

  Wine. She had said—

  “Yes, that’s right. It’s a very good year for shadow child.” Casually, she reclaimed Chips and Whizzer. “Lady Kennington is buying a pub. I expect you might know that.”

  Jury imagined Elsie suspected he knew nothing of the sort and was pointing out to him that not everyone had the ear of Lady Kennington. “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I remember her saying something about opening a restaurant, though. Where is this pub?”