Vertigo 42 Read online

  “Not yet. Late last night, early this morning.”

  “And the body lay here all that time before—?”

  “A delivery lad found her just an hour ago. This road isn’t much used, and that tower sits far back from it.”

  “I would have thought the red dress—”

  “The red might have meant flowers to someone—roses, poppies. It’s quite a distance from the road. You’d have to be closer than that to make out a body, I think.”

  “It could have been murder; she could have been forced out of that window.” Jury looked up.

  “There’s always that,” said Brierly, dryly.

  Jury looked toward the cottage. “The aunt, how—”

  “Did we find the aunt so quickly? Bit of paper with a phone number written on it.” Brierly held up a scrap of paper. “The aunt was a bit surprised when her niece stopped to visit. Hadn’t seen her in some time. So they had a drink and a wee chat and Belle seemed to be in good spirits, you know.”

  Jury didn’t know.

  “The aunt said Belle didn’t like to drive as it makes—made—her nervous.”

  Jury was reminded of Stanley’s redundant renaming. “So this Blanche Vesta has no idea why her niece would have driven here?”

  “She called it a ‘very queer thing indeed.’ Kept repeating that.”

  Jury looked over toward the little cottage. “She’s there?”

  Brierly nodded. “Our WPC organized some tea I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Jury thanked Brierly and walked across the grass toward the cottage, where smoke was curling out of the chimney.

  ____

  The woman police constable, WPC Mary Wells, said, “I expect I shouldn’t have taken the liberty, sir,” speaking of the fire, “but it was so chilly and the fire was already laid, as if someone was meant to put a match to it.”

  WPC Wells had a fey quality about her, as if she might expect to see fairies dancing on the hearth. “I hope it’s all right, sir, that I made tea.”

  “I’m sure your DCI can square it with the owner.”

  Blanche Vesta, who lived, she said, in Meecham Lane just off the Old Post Road, had not known Belle all that intimately, her living in London as she did. Wembley, near the park.

  “Wembley Park?”

  Blanche nodded. “At least when she was married. I went there once or twice to visit. I don’t care for London; it’s too big.”

  The cottage was probably being used by its owner only intermittently, and had no heat laid on when he wasn’t there; fortunately, the electric was, and the resourceful WPC had put the kettle on and managed to scare up a packet of PGs. Despite its chilliness, Tower Cottage was quite cozy, the armchairs deep and comfortable. With the round deal table between them, Blanche and Jury were both having a cup.

  “The thing is this, sir,” said Blanche, pulling her dark wool skirt tighter over her knees, not from modesty, but against the chill.

  Jury noticed the skirt adjusting and reached behind him for a wool throw he’d seen on a nearby stool. He handed this to her.

  “Why, thank you.” She took a moment to be flustered and to arrange the blanket over herself. “The thing is this,” she said again. “Belle completely surprised me, her turning up in Sidbury. Last time she did that—it was practically a year ago. When she was living with her husband, Zachariah, I’d visit them occasionally in Wembley, as I said. They’re separated, but they’re still friendly. I know he’d like to get back together, but . . .” She stopped, then said, “Well, her going up that tower’s not that surprising. She always liked heights. Ferris wheels, roller coasters, slides, when she was little . . .”

  “Could she have been going to meet someone? A man?”

  “Dressed like that, she must’ve been. She was married, but they separated. A pity, that was, as I always liked Zachariah. He was such a sweet boy. But I guess Belle wanted more.”

  “And she didn’t tell you where she was staying?”

  Blanche Vesta shook her head.

  “Blanche. Forgive me for asking this, but I must, in the circumstances. Is it possible Belle might have thought of suicide?”

  A curt shake of the head, and then a little laugh. “Belle? Kill herself ? Too flighty was Belle for that.”

  Jury had heard reasons for not committing suicide, but flightiness was never one of them.

  “No. Besides she was Church of England. You know what the church has to say on that score.”

  Jury wasn’t sure what the church had to say on any score. He sat back and looked at the weak fire. “Did she know anyone else in Sidbury besides you, Blanche?”

  She shook her head slowly. “No one I ever knew of. But it’s not impossible she did. There’s other places she might’ve been going. Northampton, maybe? Not that I ever heard her mention anyone there. She did get a call . . . or did she make one? I’m too flustered to remember right.”

  “That’s all right. You’ll remember later. You can’t think of any reason why she suddenly turned up to visit you.”

  Blanche Vesta looked about the room as if just now assessing her presence in it. “Maybe she didn’t.”

  Jury frowned. “Meaning—?”

  “It wouldn’t be me she got herself turned out as she did. That dress, those shoes! That’s never the way Belle dressed. Skirts and cardies, fawn and brown: that was Belle’s style. Such a dress that was. Beautiful, but it must have cost the earth, and wherever was Belle getting that kind of money? Well, it’s like you said: maybe her purpose was to see somebody else, and her visit to me was just, you could say, because I was here?”

  ____

  And they were all there, lined up on the other side of the police tape—Melrose Plant, Vivian Rivington, Diane Demorney, with Stanley in tow, and Joanna Lewes. Marshall Trueblood was pouring words into the ear of one of the police constables, as if the PC were a jug, but who, to give Trueblood credit, appeared to be listening. It was not getting Trueblood under the tape, however.

  Theo Wrenn Brown was moving among some other people who either had heard of the death or had been driving by, though hardly anyone ever used the road. Cars were pulled up in the lay-by, or off on the grassy verge. Theo Wrenn Brown was exhibiting what he considered his special status as the one who had passed the scene first. He was pointing at the tower and sweeping his arm about, taking in the scene.

  When they saw Jury coming, Diane and the others waved and grinned as if they were a party of six announcing their presence to a maître d’ who could be absolutely counted on for a table by a window.

  Jury thought Trueblood was about to raise the police tape as if it were a velvet rope.

  Diane Demorney was pulling back on Stanley’s lead. The dog seemed very interested in the police business at the tower. Diane had a thermos that Jury assumed held vodka, but he was surprised to see her produce a little bowl from her suitcase-size purse, which she filled with water from the thermos and put on the ground for Stanley. The dog slurped it up. Jury thought Diane would have been the last person to ever bring water for an animal. So much for his profiling ability.

  Jury said, “You don’t suppose the lady in red is Stanley’s owner, do you?”

  “No, of course not,” said Diane.

  Jury let that subject drop. Brierly would find that out.

  Joanna Lewes asked, breathlessly, “But what happened?”

  “Did she really jump?” asked Vivian. Her dark red hair was tucked in the collar of a hyacinth-colored coat. Jury kept forgetting how beautiful Vivian was.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Don’t know?” said Trueblood. “All of this police presence and you can’t tell if someone jumped or fell accidentally?”

  “The way your minds work—like bullet trains—well, we police have to slog along muddy trails of thought and evidence until we finally, perhaps luckily, come to a
conclusion.”

  Jury walked across the grass to where DCI Brierly was standing, writing in a notebook. Jury said to him, “Blanche Vesta is a clearheaded woman. According to her, Belle Syms rather enjoyed heights and her aunt thought she might have gone up the tower, but it’s hard to believe she’d gone on her own. And where’s her car?”

  “Right.” Brierly looked up toward the top of the tower. “Larking about with her date, you think?”

  “With her date, possibly. But I wouldn’t call it larking.” Jury looked down at the body, turned away. “You see that Staffordshire terrier over there—” Jury nodded toward the group. “The dog’s straining at his lead. We found him.”

  “You think it might have been the victim’s?”

  “But if her niece had a dog in tow, Blanche Vesta would surely have mentioned it.”

  Brierly nodded. “Good-looking dog.”

  Jury looked down. “Good-looking girl.”

  Ardry End

  Tuesday, 7:00 P.M.

  6

  * * *

  They’re going to be all over it, you know,” said Melrose Plant to Richard Jury that evening as Ruthven placed two whiskies in cut glass tumblers at their elbows.

  The dog Joey lay snoozing by the fire on an old scrap of ratty-­looking rug that he had developed a special attachment toward. Ruthven couldn’t get it away from the dog, much to the butler’s distress. Right now, Joey patrolled Ruthven’s every move through half-closed eyes.

  “ ‘They’?” said Jury, raising glass and eyebrows simultaneously. “Why ‘they’? You’re the ringleader.”

  “Don’t be daft.” Melrose was fingering a cigarette out of a silver box. “Trueblood is.”

  “Ah. So you admit there is a gang.”

  “There’s no gang. We all go our separate ways.”

  “No, you all go the same way. The interfering way.”

  “The Interfering Way. Sounds like a sequel to The Guermantes Way or perhaps a highway on the Isle of Skye. Could we just stick to the subject?”

  “Was there one?” Jury had bolted his whiskey and was about to summon Ruthven, only he didn’t see a summoning device.

  “The lady in red, of course.”

  Jury held up his empty glass. “Another?”

  Melrose left the comfort of his wing chair and tugged at a damask bell pull to the right of the mantel.

  “I haven’t seen anyone do that since Upstairs, Downstairs. Does it really ring a bell someplace?”

  “In the stable. You’ll see Aggrieved pass the window with your whiskey. Now, all I was saying is that Trueblood will have all of us investigating. It will be really silly.”

  “It usually is. You better steer clear of the crime scene or Brierly will charge you with interfering with an ongoing investigation.”

  “Well, you certainly lost no time getting to the Old Post Road to interfere.”

  “I’m a detective. I get to interfere.”

  Joey looked up smartly when Ruthven appeared.

  Jury held out his glass. Smartly. “What’s for dinner, Ruthven?”

  Melrose interfered. “Black pudding and Spotted Dick.”

  Ruthven offered a crimped little smile and was about to answer when there was a knock like doom on the front door. The knocker was raised and lowered several times before Ruthven could get there. They heard him politely murmuring, the murmur overridden by the voice of Melrose’s aunt, and a third voice, belonging to her bosom friend, Lambert Strether. Both voices had Melrose sliding down in his chair.

  And Jury rising from his with undisguised glee, sensing the door opening on a bit of theater.

  Ruthven announced both of the visitors: “Lady Ardry and Mr. Strether, sir.” They were in the room before it was out of his mouth.

  She stumped in, short and stout, Lambert Strether in her wake. “Superintendent! How good of you to come!”

  As if it were her house rather than her nephew’s. Melrose now got up slowly from his watered silk chair like a sponge from the bottom of the sea. “Ah, Agatha. I’ve not seen you all day.” To Strether, he nodded and mumbled an hello.

  “I’ve been to London!” she said.

  As if no one else ever had.

  Not having waited for Ruthven to take her cape, she was divesting herself of it now, unhooking the cord that joined the two big buttons. It might simply have landed on the floor had Ruthven not stepped up to collect it. It was a swirl of tartan, and Melrose was trying to decide whether she put him in mind of Batman on the Isle of Mull or Dame May Whitty in The Lady Vanishes.

  And would she? No, she would not vanish; she would sit and ask for a Shooting Sherry. Strether settled for “whatever you two are imbibing, ho ho.”

  His name was Lambert Strether, born to a mother who was so fond of The Ambassadors that she named him after its protagonist. This Lambert Strether was not what Henry James had in mind. He was a con man who had tried to pass off phony papers claiming he was the inheritor of their old pub, the Man with a Load of Mischief. Had tried until the little group sitting in the Jack and Hammer’s window had killed this plan quickly, and Richard Jury had come along and driven nails into its coffin.

  Agatha thought the world of Lambert, but then Agatha’s world was a restricted field of Agatha-stuff, like dusty owls on the mantel and ratty fur pieces and custard over nursery puddings, which she thought the very essence of British-ness. Agatha had come from America decades before to claim whatever she could as Melrose’s aunt-by-marriage to his uncle, the Honorable Robert. She called herself “Lady Ardry,” whereas she was merely a widow, a wiped-out Mrs. It both irritated her and pleased her that Melrose, as his father had been the seventh, was the eighth Earl of Ardry, a title that he had jettisoned years before. So now he was merely an irritant.

  Having greeted his uninvited guests, the irritant resat himself while Ruthven served the Shooting Sherry and whiskey.

  “What brings you here, Agatha?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve heard, since I don’t know what it is.”

  Lambert Strether drank his whiskey and waded in. “Been a peculiar bit of bother at the Blue Parrot. You know the place?”

  “What bother?”

  Lambert had lost interest in his own announcement and was already looking around for the decanter, ready for a top-up.

  Melrose repeated, “What bother? Has Trevor Sly finally realized that Rick and what’s-her-name—Ida? Irma?—are not going to show up in the Blue Parrot?”

  What’s-her-name being Ingrid Bergman, thought Jury.

  “Or,” Melrose went on, “has that cardboard camel Trevor keeps parked by the door got bored with the whole thing and just wandered into the sandbox he calls his car park?”

  Jury quite liked the Blue Parrot. The film posters all depicting outposts in exotic places; the swinging beaded curtains, the questionable life of the colorful parrot itself. Jury thought it might have been a little dead the last time.

  At just that moment Ruthven appeared with stunning prescience, announcing dinner. Coughing lightly behind his hand, he asked, “Shall I set another—”

  Melrose cut that off with a swift rise to his feet. “No, Ruthven, you shan’t.” He turned to the visitors. “So sorry, Agatha, Mr. Strether, but the superintendent and I can’t delay dinner. It’s Soufflé Day, and you know how Martha is about that!” He turned to Jury. “Richard.”

  Thus commanded, Jury rose. This managed to get Agatha up, but with a struggle. Strether said, “Haven’t finished my drink, dear boy.”

  Melrose wouldn’t have cared if he hadn’t finished his blood transfusion; he took Strether’s elbow, difficult as it was, since it was planted on the chair arm, and helped him and his whiskey to their feet. “Nice you could drop by.”

  Of course, it infuriated Lady Ardry (as wasn’t) that her nephew an
d his friend weren’t chaining her to her chair to force her to talk about the “bit of bother.” “Very well, you’ll have to go to the Blue Parrot to find out.”

  Melrose ushered them, one on each side, to the front door. Out of sight, his frosty Good night spun into the dark.

  “Come on.” Melrose motioned from the big marble-floored foyer for Jury to come. The dining room was on the other side of the house.

  As they walked toward it, Jury said, “What do you suppose she was talking about?”

  “Look, if anything had happened at Trevor Sly’s we’d’ve heard the parrot squawking all the way here.” He frowned. “Ilda? Inga?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ingrid in Casablanca. What the devil is her name?”

  Jury shrugged. “Can’t remember.”

  They had arrived in the gleaming rosewood dining room, white napkins, polished silver, candles.

  “Elsie?”

  Jury sighed. “Look, she walked into Bogart’s gin joint and changed the world. Who cares what her name was?”

  They sat down. “Certainly, that’s one way of looking at it.” Melrose snapped open his snowy napkin and stared at the ceiling. “Ilka?”

  ____

  The Grand Marnier soufflé having been floated in double helpings onto their plates, the brandy sipped, the cigarette—just Melrose’s—been lit, they decided there was nothing for it but to go to the Blue Parrot and check out the “bother.”

  “Ruthven,” called Melrose toward the kitchen. He hated using the little bell.

  Ruthven appeared. “We’re going out. I think I’ll wear my camel coat.”

  Jury winced. “That’s beneath you.”

  Melrose was still snickering as Ruthven assisted him with his bespoke, camel-haired coat. And Jury with his unbespoke mack.

  The Blue Parrot

  Tuesday, 10:00 P.M.