I Am the Only Running Footman Read online

  • • •

  On this rare December morning Melrose sat at the rosewood dining table, the Times folded beside his plate of eggs. He penned in two down and one across. But he was only giving part of his mind to the crossword; the rest was on the call he had made to Richard Jury, who had told him certainly, absolutely to go to Somers Abbas. That he was acquainted with someone who knew the Winslow family could be extremely helpful. And for all of the past help, well, Jury thought he deserved a knighthood. A bit redundant, perhaps, but anyway . . .

  “I doubt very much that Chief Superintendent Racer would oblige with a knighthood. I doubt very much that Racer has been pleased . . . .”

  Melrose looked down the length of the table and out the French windows that on this unseasonable day had been opened. Their creamy curtains billowed slightly in the breeze. Beyond the window he caught a glimpse of the serpentine path that wound through the grounds and down which he loved to stroll. All of those grounds out there — the wide expanse of gardens, the silver wintercrust of the lake, the yew hedges and willows — reminded him of the walk he had taken with Lucinda St. Clair at Lady Jane’s party. Melrose could imagine, all the while, Sybil St. Clair watching with the patience of a puma straddled on a branch, waiting for the least flicker of movement from the quarry below. It was maddening to feel sorry for Lucinda, and impossible not to. She had, of course, been delighted that he was coming. And in face of all her mother’s objections, Melrose had insisted at a room at the local inn.

  He sighed and looked up, his eye moving round the walls and the portraits there that hung in such stately procession that the whole crowd of them might have been on its way to Westminster Abbey. Viscount Nitherwold, Ross and Cromarty, Marquess of Ayreshire and Blythedale, Earl of Caverness . . . one could hardly name them without pausing for a stiff drink in between. His eye came to rest on the portrait of his mother, one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, and one on whom that coronet must have weighed awfully heavily at the end. Filtered sunlight fell in dancing sequins on her pale gold hair, and humor was written all over her face.

  He smiled. His mother, if not the Queen, he was sure had been pleased . . . .

  • • •

  “More coffee, m’lord?” asked Ruthven, Plant’s paradigm of a gentlemen’s gentleman, who had been in the family practically as long as the portraits on the walls. He held the silver pot aloft.

  Melrose shook his head and put down his pen. “No thanks, Ruthven. I’d better be on my way.” He pocketed his gold-rimmed spectacles and shoved back his chair.

  “Will you be requiring the Flying Spur or the Rolls, sir?”

  Melrose looked again at the portrait of Lady Marjorie. Was she smiling? “You know, Ruthven, I think anyone who’s asked a question like that should be shot.”

  7

  THE last time Jury saw him, Brian Macalvie put his foot through a jukebox. Today, at least, he was only playing it. For a man whose sentiments ran toward moving through his men like Birnam Wood and shouting at suspects, the divisional commander showed a remarkable affinity for old songs and soft voices. It was probably Macalvie’s choice now that filled the Running Footman with its whispery tristesse.

  He barely raised his eyes from the menu of songs when he spoke. “Hi, Jury. Took you long enough.” Macalvie slotted another ten-p piece into the jukebox and hit the side when it didn’t respond.

  Jury could have run all the way from headquarters like the footman in the huge picture that gave the pub its name. However fast he was, it couldn’t be fast enough. Time did a peculiar dance around Macalvie; he picked up exactly where he left off. Two years ago, ten minutes, it made no difference. Just as last year’s murder was still today’s news for Macalvie. He never gave up.

  Jury smiled. “The world wags by three times, Macalvie: God’s, yours, and Greenwich Mean.”

  Macalvie might have been checking his watch against the other two because he shook it before he nodded. “Yeah. Have a beer. Just be careful of the Gopher; it’d take the scales off a brontosaurus.” He picked his pint from the top of the jukebox and walked to a table beneath the painting.

  When Jury came back with his own pint, Macalvie was standing and drinking and studying the painting. “That’s what we are, Jury, messengers. Good news, bad news — people’d complain no matter what we brought.” He sat down. “Where’s Wiggins?”

  For a divisional commander who was his own one-man police force because he couldn’t put up with the slightest show of foot-dragging or malingering, it was surprising that he got on so well with Wiggins. As good a man as Wiggins was, he could be sluggish. Sickness wouldn’t slow Macalvie down any more than a flea on a cheetah.

  Macalvie brought out a cigar. The cellophane crackled like Macalvie’s eyes. A walking conflagration with its roots in his Scotch-Irish ancestry spiked by a strong predilection for American cop films.

  “Why aren’t you chief constable yet, Macalvie?”

  “Beats me,” he said, with no trace of irony. “I would’ve got here sooner, only that train from Dorchester stops for chickens.”

  “You got here fast enough, considering we found the girl early this morning. I take it you think there’s a connection —”

  “Of course. Sheila Broome, found on a stretch of road beyond Taunton. For ten months I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “You were sure it would? And Ivy Childess is the shoe?”

  Macalvie shot him a look. “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to tread on your theory, Macalvie —”

  As if you could, the look said.

  “—but murderers aren’t all serial killers, and women get mugged every day. I don’t much believe in startling coincidences.”

  “Oh, come on. You don’t believe this started out as a mugging any more than I do.”

  True, he didn’t. “I’m just more conservative, Macalvie.”

  “No wonder you got to be superintendent, Jury.”

  Jury ignored that. “So tell me about this Sheila Broome.”

  “She set out on the night of twenty-nine February to go to Bristol. That’s according to her mum, only she told Mum she’d got a ride. To Bristol, that is. Since none of her friends knew anything about her leaving town and no one gave her a ride from around here, we figured she was getting lifts from along the road. She was not prissy Priscilla. There was nothing unusual about her — she snorted coke and slept around, her friends said. Age, twenty-six, hardly a schoolkid, never married. Pretty in a sulky way; not very likeable; did two O levels and then quit, so not ambitious, either. Worked at a pub in the new part of Exeter and didn’t tell the landlord she was quitting. She put me in mind of an old newspaper; you could have blown her to Bristol, and no one would notice.”

  “What is it about the murder that makes you think it was more than Sheila Broome being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “Because she wasn’t robbed and she wasn’t raped. And they were out of the car, both of them, smoking grass in the woods. Now, if you were tooling along looking over the hitcher situation, what’d you be looking for? Sex or money or both. But with Sheila it’s neither. I think it was someone who knew her; could have been a man, could have been a woman. I think it was someone looking for her —”

  “That’s a chancy way to get your victim, waiting until she hitches a ride.”

  “If you’re not in a hurry, it’s a swell way. Removes both of you from home ground.”

  “But the scarf; that doesn’t sound premeditated, Macalvie. He just used the available means.”

  Macalvie got up and collected their glasses. “Oh, I imagine he had something else, a stocking, a gun.” He went off to fill the glasses and, while he was waiting, to play the jukebox.

  The Running Footman wasn’t crowded; a few couples, a half-dozen singles that looked pleasant and not hurting for money. Jury supposed you weren’t if you lived in Mayfair.

  Macalvie walked back to the table, where they sat for a moment drinking and l
istening to the honey-voice of Elvis Presley. Elvis was Macalvie’s favorite.

  “Like I said, she wasn’t robbed. She was carrying about seventy quid in a rucksack, another ten or eleven in her jacket. There was a gold watch, strap broken, in the pack and a couple of rings on her fingers.”

  “What about cars, drivers? Did you find anyone?”

  “There was a lorry driver. I wouldn’t have found him except for a waitress in a Little Chef who thought she remembered Sheila Broome’s face, not so much because of the face itself, but because she was wearing a vest the waitress fancied and asked her where she got it. Electric blue, it was. And she remembered the artic because it was so big it took up nearly half the car park. Lucky for the driver that the waitress watched when they left; she said he must have started off with Sheila, but when Mary-the-waitress looked out the window, Sheila was stepping down from the cab. She could hardly see through the fog; it was that neon-blue vest. Then Sheila was trying to hitch another ride in front of the petrol station next to the cafe.”

  “And she didn’t see anything else? No car stopping?”

  Macalvie shook his head. “Next time she looked, she didn’t see Sheila. Now, tell me about Ivy.”

  Jury told Macalvie the little they knew. Nodding his head in the direction of the side street, he said, “You’ve had a look, I suppose.”

  “Of course.”

  “It was two or three hours later that she was found.”

  “ ‘Hours’? You ought to be on my forensics team.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Patience on a monument, Jury, that’s me. Go on.” Before his patience could be pressed into service, Macalvie turned to the table beside them and told the occupants to hold it down. They just stared.

  “Princess and the pea is more like it. How many mattresses do you sleep on, Macalvie? The last her boyfriend saw of her she was standing in that doorway over there”— Jury nodded toward the entrance—“doing a slow burn.” Jury told him about the interview with David Marr.

  “Cab-driver said she flagged him down and then changed her mind?”

  Jury nodded.

  “Cab-drivers can’t see. All you have to do is grab a taxi to know that.”

  “Let’s assume this one could,” said Jury dryly. “It’s not much of an alibi, anyway.”

  “How true. So this makes two.”

  “But muggings happen every day, a murder here and a murder in Devon —”

  “Come on. We’ve just been over that. No rape, no robbery.”

  “Those are unknowns, Macalvie. The only known here is the way they were garroted.”

  “What more do you want? A bootprint on her forehead? It’s like I said.”

  Like he said, thought Jury. Case open. Theory closed.

  PART II

  Reverie

  8

  SHE spent the morning and part of the afternoon in the shops, not buying, only looking, and after a while not seeing much of what she looked at. In an antiques shop in the Lanes, she picked up a miniature, one of several on a black walnut table, and opened the heart-painted top to read the legend inside: Love Always. Kate disliked these little, porcelain boxes that had no purpose but to sit on dressing tables or in escritoires gathering dust. Her mother had collected them, tops painted with ribbons, flowers, hearts, in that rather vague if feverish excitement her mother affected in nearly everything she did.

  So Kate was surprised to find herself in another part of the shop looking at the old books, still holding the miniature in her hand. She must have been carrying it long enough to draw the riveted gaze of the shopkeeper to her. He had appeared again in the opening above the half-door to the room beyond, his hands clasped behind him, staring at her like a guard from a castle keep. Kate imagined that he thought she meant to nick it and she was embarrassed enough that she turned it over to see the price. Twenty pounds. It was not even a good example of its kind: the heart was threaded with scratches, the gilt round the oval top was flaked. Indeed, it might not even have been an original, but under the censorious stare of the owner, she felt compelled to tell him she’d have it. Of course his manner altered accordingly, the gaze shifted, the tone when he spoke was as cottony as the small square placed into an overlarge box to act as a cushion.

  It was easy enough to explain to herself when she was outside on the pavement once more. Another little gift to appease the gods. What a conscience she must have, she thought, standing there outside the shop with its partly shuttered windows. If she had ever tried to do anything criminal, it would have caught her out immediately. How had her parents, both shallow, feckless dilettantes, managed between them to fashion it? Far more artistry had tone into this paste momento she held. She smiled grimly, pulled up the high collar of her lamb’s wool coat, and started down the narrow street toward the ocean. Her conscience put her in mind of some medieval chalice of the sort she remembered seeing at the Victoria and Albert. An elaborate, supposedly splendid (but Kate thought vulgar) liturgical icon, heavily chased with gold beading, studded about with jewels. Her conscience, she thought ruefully, was as impractical and flashy as her sister, Dolly.

  Kate maneuvered the narrow space between a Ford Granada with its bonnet up and the drab window of a boutique. The snow had had time to turn to slush, and the shoppers sluggish. None of the faces that she passed looked pleased with their errands or with their glittery surroundings. It was old glitter anyway, not new. The Royal Pavilion was banked in by scaffolding, and a wide, blue hoarding covered part of its front while it underwent repair. How many hundreds of pounds must be going into keeping these impractical, flashy minarets and turrets up. Kate thought again of Dolly.

  No one except herself had forced Kate into those years of nursing their father, so she shouldn’t blame Dolly for getting off scot-free. A flat in London, a score of lovers, and enviable looks were the rewards of self-indulgence — not to mention the money itself. Kate did not feel any bitterness with regard to her sister; Dolly had done nothing by way of manipulating the old man into leaving her the lion’s share of the inheritance. It had long been clear that he would favor the child who, short of being the son, most resembled himself.

  Kate had watched the progress of her father’s illness over the years uncoil and make its slow way through tissue and bone. Still to the end the society of others had been his vocation; he drank champagne at breakfast and Glenfiddich at tea. Illness and dissipation had turned him into a hollow-cheeked, wasted man who looked twenty years older than he was, one whose mind had clouded over at the end: he had “visions,” he said. The visions were usually uncomplimentary to his elder daughter, thought Kate wryly, and undoubtedly helped along by the Glenfiddich.

  What had surprised Kate and what now all but overwhelmed her was the knowledge that it hadn’t made any difference and that if her years of servitude had been intended as some sort of sacrificial offering, she had to face now the fact that there had been no gods to appease. Brighton beach in the winter dusk and the hard, dark shell of the sea was not the place to mitigate against her terrible disappointment at the lack of freedom she felt. That was something she had been sure she could have counted on, a sense of freedom and release. Now she was able to go anywhere and to live as she liked. She had made all sorts of plans before her father’s death that she meant to put into motion when he was dead. Now she watched them idle there at the ocean’s edge as if trying to grab hold or gain purchase on the shingle, breaking and pulling back, and breaking again. The romantic fancies became as repetitive as the collapsing waves and as dull and cold, too. A heavy drapery of fog covered the Palace Pier, hiding the flaking white paint, the rust. It had grown dimmer and dustier with the years, like the Pavilion back there. The West Pier farther away had been closed to visitors; it was dangerously in need of repairs. Away in the distance, floating like a shadow on the water, it looked delicate and fragile, made of matchsticks.

  Kate went down the stair to the long seawalk, past the Arches beneath the King’s Road, wher
e most of the amusements were closed up now. She nodded to a young man who was painting the facade of the Penny Palace, painting bright marine blue pillars on its front. It was one of Kate’s favorites, with its old machines that evoked so much of a Victorian Brighton. When her sister was small, she had loved to walk along the seafront with their father, past the Arches, licking ice cream or a stick of Brighton rock. But why her sister, who came down from London rarely, had appeared in Brighton now, Kate couldn’t understand. On an impulse, Dolly had said.

  Kate walked on to the next set of steps leading up, the carryall holding some chops and the wrapped-up box hitched on her wrist and her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets. She could feel a frayed seam. Whenever Dolly came down from London Kate grew more sensitive to things like her seven-year-old coat or an outmoded frock. Dolly stopped short of actual wardrobe trunks, but the several cases she would bring for her short stays bulged with outfits that spent their time in the cupboard, since there was nowhere they could go festive enough for turquoise silk or a fox-fur collar. Kate wondered sometimes if Dolly were still caught back in days of dress-up and blind-man’s-buff.

  Why had Dolly come? A man, perhaps. Dolly had never had good luck with men, beautiful as she was. Well, that might have been part of it. Too beautiful. Perhaps because of the difference in their ages the two had never been close, and Kate supposed she had resented the baby sister and little girl that Dolly had been. She must have, but Kate couldn’t really remember, though she would have been twelve when Dolly was born. A very awkward twelve that had replaced an ungainly eight and in turn a square-jawed, dubious-seeming child of five. In the photographs Kate saw herself always as hesitant, standing on the edge of the occasions that prompted the photographs, as if she’d strayed into the family circle grouped against the dark backdrop, Dolly centered there and always dressed in something soft with tucks of organdy or spills of ribbon.

  Dolly spent her visits trailing what could have been a trousseauful of negligees and velvet wrappers through the dark, high-ceilinged rooms of the house in Madeira Drive, sometimes sitting long enough to leaf through a magazine and always with a cigarette and a cup of tea. Dolly was so much like their mother that Kate had once or twice felt a surge of panic, seeing her in the shadowed hall or in the dark of the stairwell. It was no wonder that their father had doted on her, had exaggerated notions about Dolly’s career, and fantasized about her life in rough approximation to those fantasies he had had about his own. They were fantasies that Dolly fed, not for any gain other than that she fed her own ego in the telling.