The Man with a Load of Mischief Read online

  Melrose disliked coming to tea at the vicarage, especially when his aunt was invited. The vicar’s housekeeper was never at her best in the food department. Her baked goods would have helped in the Battle of Britain had the country run out of bullets and bombs. Melrose scanned the tiered cake plate, looking for something digestible: the rock cakes lived up to their name; the Maids of Honor looked left over from Victoria’s wedding; the Bath buns must have walked. He had been listening to his aunt and the vicar rehash these two murders for nearly two hours, and he was horribly hungry. He reached out with some trepidation for a brandy snap. Politely, he inquired of the vicar, “You mentioned The Ostrich?”

  Thus encouraged, Denzil Smith went on eagerly. “Yes. You see, when the proprietor came across a traveler with a good bit of money, he would book him into the room with a bed set over a trapdoor.” The vicar paused to select a stale-looking bun from the plate. “When the unfortunate and unwary guest was sleeping soundly the trapdoor sprang open, and he fell into a cauldron of boiling water.”

  “Are you suggesting that Matchett and Scroggs are disposing of their own guests, Vicar?” Lady Ardry sat there in the library, solid and square and gray as a cement block, her stubby legs crossed and her pudgy fingers busy with her second Eccles cake.

  “No, no,” said the vicar.

  “It’s obviously a psychotic madman,” said Lady Ardry.

  Plant let the redundancy pass, but asked, “What makes you so sure the murderer is psychotic, Agatha?”

  “Are you barmy? To shove a body up on that beam outside the pub? Why, it must be twenty feet up. Whoever would stick a body up there?”

  “King Kong?” suggested Melrose, running the brandy snap under his nose like the cork of an old wine.

  “You seem to be taking this horrible business rather lightly, Melrose,” said the Reverend Denzil Smith.

  “Don’t expect compassion from Melrose,” put in his aunt righteously, as she sank back into the huge Victorian armchair. “Living in that enormous house all alone, no one but that Ruthven person to do for you — it’s no wonder you’re antisocial.”

  And yet here he was at tea, being terribly social. Melrose sighed. His aunt always could fly in the teeth of the evidence. Cautiously he bit into the brandy snap and wished he hadn’t.

  “Well?” said Lady Ardry.

  Melrose raised his eyebrows. “ ‘Well’ what?”

  She made brief forays toward their cups with the Spode pot, then plunked it down. “I should think you’d have more to say than that about these murders. After all, you were there with Scroggs.” This clearly rankled. She added slyly: “It was Dick Scroggs who actually found him, though. So, of course, you didn’t get the awful shock I did when I went down to that cellar and saw this Small actually dangling out of that beer thing —”

  “You didn’t find him. The Murch girl did.” Melrose ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth. The cream had a decidedly metallic taste. But a pellet of poison would be better than listening to Agatha. “Are you sure the cream in these brandy snaps hasn’t gone off? They taste strange.” He returned the confection to his saucer and wondered how long he had before they sent round the van.

  “There was a similar case back in — let’s see — was it 1892? Woman named Betty Radcliffe, landlady at The Bell. That’s in Norfolk. Murdered by her lover, I believe, the gardener.”

  Denzil Smith was not a particularly pious man, but he was a curious one, which made him excellent company for Lady Agatha Ardry. They were dependent on one another in the mindless way of two gibbons dedicated to picking fleas off one another’s fur. He was the village repository of old scraps of history, both village and extravillage, a walking book of memorabilia.

  Looking around, Melrose thought the vicarage the perfect milieu for Denzil Smith. It was dark; it was as dusty as the waxen fruits that sat under glass globes. A stuffed owl, spread-winged, was stuck on the mantel. The thick-armed chairs and couch had incongruous animal feet sticking out from under their chintz dresses, so that Melrose had the feeling he had come to tea with the Three Bears. Clematis and bindweed roved freely along the windows. He wondered how it would feel to be strangled by a bindweed. No worse, surely, than the rock cakes. That reminded him of the murder of William Small: strangled with a length of wire used to wrap around the cork of a champagne bottle.

  Lady Ardry was talking about the expected visit from Scotland Yard. “The Northants police are calling in the Yard. Pluck told me. Wonder who they’ll put on the case.”

  Melrose Plant yawned. “Old Swinnerton, probably.”

  She sat up suddenly, her glasses perched on top of her frizzy gray head like the goggles of a racing driver. “Swinnerton? You know them?”

  He was sorry he had made up the name — wasn’t there always a Swinnerton? — for now she would worry it like a dog an old rag. Because Melrose had been born to his title (unlike his aunt, who had merely married one), she seemed prepared to believe he knew everyone from the Prime Minister on down. He diverted her attention by saying, “I don’t know why they need Scotland Yard here, when they have you, Agatha.”

  His aunt simpered, and passed him the awful cakes, his reward for recognizing genius. “I do spin intriguing plots, don’t I?”

  Long Piddleton had lately begun to attract artists and writers, and Lady Ardry, who had lived here for many years, fancied herself a writer of mysteries, having taken up the cudgel after the passing of the great lady of detective fiction. She did nothing with the cudgel, Melrose observed, except wave it. He had never seen any finished product; he assumed she regarded her writing in the light of a well-beloved child, a kind of fairy sprite who darts prettily about the yard but never knocks to have its dinner fixed. Never, to his knowledge, had she finished one of her “intriguing plots.”

  Hitting her fist into her hand, Agatha said, “Scotland Yard’ll want to talk to me straightaway, of course —”

  “I’ll be off, then,” said Plant, dreading the resumption of his aunt’s recitation of her role in these murders, which he’d heard several times before. He rose and bowed slightly.

  “I should think you’d be a bit more excited,” said Agatha. “Of course, it was Scroggs who actually found your body.” She didn’t want to allow Melrose a larger part than she absolutely had to.

  “More precisely, it was a Jack Russell. The Yard will question it first, no doubt. Good day, Agatha.”

  As the vicar walked Plant through the Gothic arch of the library and to the front door, Lady Ardry’s voice trailed after him — around corners, down the hall. “Your facetiousness in the face of this terrible business hardly becomes you, Melrose.” Then louder: “But it’s what I might have expected.” Louder, still: “Remember you’re taking us to Matchett’s for dinner this evening. Pick me up at nine.”

  Melrose Plant felt slightly doomed himself, as he listened to the vicar relate the grisly murder, some years ago, of a barmaid in Cheapside.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ardry End was known to the villagers as the Great House. It was a turreted and towered manor house built of sandstone — hues ranging from rose to russet, depending upon the angle of the sun. Its approach was as elegant as the house itself, over a bridge of the same stone, which crossed the Piddle River on a road routed through acres of green land, now patched with snow. Ardry End’s situation, amidst the streams and the sheep and the lavender hills, nearly brought Lady Agatha Ardry to tears because she didn’t own it. That her own husband had not been the eighth Earl of Caverness and twelfth Viscount Ardry had always been a searing wound. The Honorable Robert Ardry had been, instead, the useless younger brother of Melrose Plant’s father. Where her nephew had dropped the title of Lord Ardry, Agatha had picked it up and dusted it off, transforming herself overnight into “Lady” Ardry. Melrose’s uncle died in a gaming room at the age of fifty-nine, having lost what little money remained to him, so that Lady Ardry was more or less dependent upon the generosity of her brother-in-law — a fact that did not add to Melrose�
��s popularity. His father had been an industrious member of the House of Lords and vice-president of a stock brokerage. Richer when he died than he had allowed when he was living, he had seen to it that his brother’s widow had received a comfortable annuity.

  Thus, the marble and parqueted halls of Ardry End being forever beyond her grasp, Agatha never ceased in her nudges and hints to Melrose about “needing a woman round the place.” He pretended to believe the broad winks and nods were pointers that he should take a wife, knowing full well that a wife was the last thing his aunt wanted him to have, since he assumed she was fervently counting the hours until some rare disease would bring about his premature demise, and she would come into the inheritance she was apparently certain he would be willing to provide, there being no other relatives of whom she was aware. And she was aware of everything that applied to Melrose Plant’s estate — or so it seemed.

  Melrose Plant regarded his aunt as the albatross which his uncle had shot down and left to hang around his nephew’s neck. Lord Robert had shot her down in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he had been on a pleasure tour of the United States. Agatha was an American. But she buried this as well as she could under tweed suits, walking sticks, sensible shoes, interminable plates of cucumber sandwiches, and a good ear for the English idiom but a terrible one for proper names.

  His aunt used every pretext to appear suddenly at Ardry End to look covetously at the bisque statuary, the portraits, the Chinese and William Morris wall coverings, the Waterford, the pleasaunce, the swans — all of those appointments of the serene, stately home. Lady Ardry would turn up at all hours, and in all weathers, uninvited. It was nerve-racking to go into the study at midnight with the rain slicing through the winter darkness to see a black-caped, white-faced figure outside the French windows, suddenly illuminated in a flash of lightning. It was equally unnerving to have the figure enter, bulky and sopping, puddling the Persian rugs like a big dog and taking the attitude that it was all Melrose’s fault — why hadn’t that silly twit of a butler, Ruthven (a name she always mispronounced), why hadn’t he answered the front door? Then she would sigh and look about with that “no room at the inn” expression, as if her nephew had been the flint-hearted tavernkeeper relegating her to her hayrick back in the village.

  • • •

  Cycling along, Melrose took deep, appreciative gulps of the December air, and thought of these two murders which had been done within twenty-four hours of one another. They had given the village something to speculate about other than his marital status. And had made everyone wary, very wary, of doing what Plant was doing now — traveling down a lonely road by himself. It was not that he was particularly brave, only that he was particularly commonsensical. He had already deduced a pattern into which he, as a victim, did not fit. Both murders had taken place at inns, and both were grotesque almost to the point of absurdity. Whatever the murderer had in mind was something definite, and the criminal seemed to be the sort whose diabolical crimes were planned to please himself. At least, he seemed to be making quite a production of it.

  Plant rolled his bike up the last remaining feet to the iron gate of Ardry End. The gate was guarded by two gilt lions set atop high stone pillars. His aunt audibly and frequently wondered why he didn’t have a few large, noble dogs to rush forward and greet his visitors: The Hound of the Baskervilles had taken its toll in her youth. Melrose unhinged the gate, closed it again, and pushed the bike along up the sweep of drive, looking at the place with his aunt’s practiced eye. The hawthorn hedges on either side were high and neat. Melrose had nearly had to beat the gardener back with a hoe to keep him from turning the hedges into a topiary showplace, the sort of thing Lorraine Bicester-Strachan, his nearest neighbor, went in for.

  If Ardry End didn’t resemble Hampton Court, Mr. Peebles, the gardener, thought its grounds certainly extensive enough to be compared favorably with Hatfield House. Peebles was applauded in all of his attempts to turn Ardry End into a show-place by Lady Ardry. These two got on like a team of old dray horses, pulling imaginary loads of ornamental and exotic plants through the grounds, to shape, form, and reform these green expanses which Melrose only wanted to leave to the pleasures of wind and weather. His aunt plumped for views and vistas and coups d’oeil, perhaps the surprise of a miniature Pantheon across the lake, its Corinthian columns blinding white in the sun. Left to Aunt Agatha and Mr. Peebles, his natural lawns and woods would have been strangled with knot gardens and stylized patterns drawn in clipped dwarf box, privet, thorn, and yew. Peebles, seconded by his aunt, had been victorious in the one lily pond enclosed in a clipped yew hedge, with a small, discreet fountain at the center. The gardener had tried to sneak lead fish into the bottom of the pond, but Melrose made him remove them. To make amends for the lead fish, Melrose had agreed to two real swans and a family of ducks for the lake. But the swans and the pond were his only concession. Lady Ardry and Mr. Peebles would have spelled out the Mountardry-Plant name on the front lawn in flowering plants, like a municipal building.

  • • •

  The door to Ardry End was opened by the butler, Ruthven. To say that Ruthven was of the old school was to put it very mildly. Plant speculated that every other manservant in England might have gone to school to Ruthven. Melrose could remember him from the time he was a tiny tot; Ruthven could be anywhere between fifty and a hundred — he had always looked the same to Melrose.

  Plant had inherited Ruthven along with the portraits and stocks and Morris wallpapers, and during the course of their relationship, the master had done only one thing to upset the butler. Melrose had given up his title several years ago, after a few sessions in the House of Lords. It had nearly brought Ruthven to his bed. The news had been handed the butler one morning at breakfast, casually, like someone giving back the plate for more kippers: Oh, incidentally, Ruthven, it won’t be “my lord” any longer. And Ruthven had stood there, carved out of rock, his expression magnificently unchanged. I thought it inappropriate, you know, holding down a job, at the same time having that awkward title. Ruthven had merely bowed and held out the silver dish of buttered eggs circumscribed by plump sausages. And, anyway, I never have fancied taking my seat in the House of Lords. What a bloody bore that would be. As a sausage went plop on the plate, Ruthven begged to excuse himself, saying he felt a bit unwell.

  • • •

  Lady Ardry had received the news with far more ambivalence. On the plus side lay the fact that she had finally topped Melrose: now she had a title, but he hadn’t. For that she was overjoyed. On the minus side was the terrible un-Englishness of it all. How could he dare throw away something it had taken so many years and such impeccable breeding to acquire? And on those rare occasions when distant relatives trooped in from the States, Lady Ardry had gloried in showing off her “ancestral home,” and Melrose along with it (“my nephew, the eighth Earl of Caverness and twelfth Viscount Ardry”) and they would all look him up and down as if he were one of the objets d’art. Agatha was on the real horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, how delightful to tell herself he was “my nephew, the commoner”; on the other, it was like pulling back the pretty pink bunting, with the relatives standing round, only to discover the baby had suddenly grown warts.

  Thus the title was now the one department where she had bested him. She had nothing else to offer as competition. He was not terribly rich, but rich enough; not terribly handsome, but handsome enough; not terribly tall, but tall enough. When he removed his sedate gold-rimmed spectacles to polish them, one could see his eyes were an amazing, glittering green. And his referring to “holding down a job” was a bit of an understatement. Melrose held the chair of French Romantic poetry at the University of London where he taught for about four months out of the year, leaving echoes of himself to reverberate for the other eight.

  So to top it all, he was Professor Melrose Plant. It made Lady Ardry positively shudder. He was like a cat with nine lives, or the Man in the Iron Mask, or the Scarlet Pimpernel: a man with extra identi
ties he could leave behind him like calling cards on a silver salver.

  And he had one other vice which caused her no end of suffering: he was simply too damnably clever.

  Plant could do the Times crossword in less than fifteen minutes. She had challenged him at one point to a crossword-puzzle duel. Unfortunately, it took Lady Ardry a half-hour just to straighten out the ups and downs, so she had given up in disgust, claiming it was a childish waste of time. But then Melrose didn’t really have to work for a living, did he? — implying for herself a wretched Cinderella role of missed balls, doomed to carrying out the ashes of the world so that others (like Melrose) might dance all night, to wake between satin sheets with their breakfast trays and their Times crosswords.

  Plant sighed as he sat gloomily in front of the fireplace. Now there was this beastly murder business to which his aunt would bring all of her nonexistent deductive skills. And drag him into it, merely by proximity. Well, he supposed he was in it, anyway, by virtue of having been at the Jack and Hammer yesterday morning. But he really did not want to be forever talking about it. He did not want to hear about this Small person, or the other, either, but he would be forced to hear about them, possibly for the rest of his natural life.

  For Melrose did not put too much stock in the deductive powers of the nation’s police force, either.

  CHAPTER 4

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 21

  Shielding his eyes with his hand like a man facing into the full glare of the sun, Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury squinted suspiciously at Chief Superintendent Racer, who was sitting on the other side of his immaculate desk — he was always quick to get the work off it and onto somebody else’s — calmly smoking one of his hand-rolled cigars. Superintendent Racer’s other hand toyed with a gold chain running from one vest pocket to the other. His French-cuffed shirt was powder blue and his Donegal tweed suit from his bespoke tailor. Inspector Jury regarded his superior as a bit of a dandy, a bit of a dilettante, and a bit — a very little bit— of a detective.