The Five Bells and Bladebone Page 5

  Who indeed? thought Melrose.

  Six

  A REMOVAL VAN sat with two wheels on the curb in front of Trueblood’s Antiques, a smart Tudor building next to the Jack and Hammer. Marshall Trueblood was too busy wringing his hands and shouting after a beefy man to please be careful of that urn —

  That the removal men were paying no attention was evident from the thud and clatter and the wail of Trueblood. “Let’s not stop,” said Melrose.

  The Jack and Hammer was suffering from its usual midday tedium, the stillness punctuated by the staccato snores of Mrs. Withersby. Having earned her char money, she was drinking it up and sleeping it off at the bar, her head propped against the snob screen. An elderly couple sat at a table in back and neither spoke nor looked at one another, in that way of survivors of long-standing marriages. They looked alike with their thatched gray hair and dressed alike in their dark broadcloth despite the pleasant weather. They sat solemn as seals and stared at the door.

  • • •

  Perhaps he was a sadist; still, Melrose always enjoyed watching Vivian Rivington’s reaction when she encountered Richard Jury. The meetings were rare and accidental, and it was only the one in Stratford-upon-Avon that Vivian had managed to handle with anything approaching self-possession. And that, thought Melrose, probably had something to do with her being on the arm of — more or less propped up by — Count Franco Giappino. That, or else the clothes she always dragged out of mothballs whenever she’d just returned from Italy. Probably it would give any woman an edge, standing there with someone slim and expensive, with that Mediterranean patina and its sinister implications, the sort of dilettantish air that so beguiled Henry James into wanting to scrape it off. That the count’s aura was not nearly so seductive as the superintendent’s, Melrose was quite sure Vivian had known for some time.

  After she returned from one of her Venetian excursions, she would for a time wear the outfits she’d acquired during the trip, many of them exquisitely expensive-looking and artfully shapeless. But then the old Vivian would reassert herself, turning up in twin sets and good wool skirts. Today she had opted for the frankly feminine; she was quite lovely in a frock of flowered georgette with a coppery background just the shade of her hair and Miss Broadstairs’s roses. She sat at a table in the Jack and Hammer, hands folded neatly, purse beside her, looking as if she were waiting for a bus.

  Jury leaned down and kissed her cheek and she blushed and floundered, searching the empty table for something to rearrange. There was only the tin ashtray, so she went for that, turning it in little circles.

  “Well, it’s too bad about your car, but you finally got here.” The tone was almost fractious.

  “My car?”

  “You know —”

  “All right, all right,” said Melrose in an unnaturally loud voice. “Drinks, drinks, what’re we having?”

  Vivian paid no attention to him and said to Jury, “Still, things have a way of working out, don’t they? I mean, if it hadn’t been for the breakdown, you’d never have met your old friend, would you?”

  “My friend?” Jury frowned.

  Melrose was calling to Scroggs and rubbing his hands with enthusiasm. “The Thunderbolt, you must try it. Vivian, what’s the removal van doing sitting in front of Trueblood’s place? Isn’t he coming over? Dick!” he shouted. “The superintendent will have a Thunderbolt!”

  Her voice was getting testier as she said to Jury, “I’m surprised you didn’t go to Woburn Abbey, I mean, as long as you were almost there. She’d probably have liked that, the weather being so beautiful and all.” Her face was burnished as if she’d been sitting too long beside a fire.

  Jury was searching her face as one does when one is looking for signs of mild lunacy, as Melrose was leaning across her to get a better look, over the stained glass that said “Hardy’s Crown,” at the shop next door. “There’s Trueblood, directing the removal men. He’s pulling his hair and shrieking . . . .”

  Trueblood’s shrieks made no difference to Vivian, who by now had got herself in so deep she couldn’t pull herself out, as if her wellingtons just kept sucking mud. She was talking about the lions at Woburn Abbey. Jury was fascinated, his chin propped in his hands, staring at her and smiling as she made her mental journey with him and his old friend through the safari park.

  Fortunately, Dick Scroggs’s enthusiasm for his Thunderbolt matched Vivian’s apparent enthusiasm for wild animals. He interrupted and told Jury all about the new pub that probably wouldn’t stay in business long, not where it was located. If that didn’t kill it, it would be snapped up by one of the big breweries and sell nothing but the Yellow Peril. “Sly’s only a manager, now. You can always tell them what’s managed, I mean there’s not the extra little bit of trouble took to have things just right, is there, sir? An owner now, he can’t let up a minute, that’s what I say.”

  Jury agreed wholeheartedly, and Scroggs left with a big smile and went behind the bar, stuck a toothpick in his mouth, and started reading the local paper, the Bald Eagle.

  • • •

  Marshall Trueblood walked in, dressed in his usual rainbow fashion — Italian silk shirt, splotch of russet neckerchief, spread of pale yellow cashmere cap. In his kaleidoscope of colors, he reminded Plant of one of the Tiffany lamps in his antiques shop. His greeting to Jury was as effusive as his costume. Melrose thought for a moment Trueblood might be going to hug him, but he settled for a handshake, catching Jury’s in both of his, and making a little moue with his mouth as if he were blowing kisses. It was all such an act on Trueblood’s part, though Melrose had no idea who the intended audience was — probably Trueblood himself.

  “What a pity about your breakdown, Superintendent. Well, you’re here now —”

  Said Vivian, “I was just telling him —”

  “What’s the van doing in front of your place?” asked Melrose hurriedly.

  “Delivering my furniture. You really must see it. Cost me four thousand and I expect I can only get six or seven for it.”

  “That’s hardly worth your time,” said Vivian.

  “Wouldn’t you like to see it? Come along, come along.”

  “No thank you,” said Vivian, her mind still on Woburn Abbey.

  The others rose and trooped next door.

  • • •

  Crammed as it was with what Melrose calculated to be a million quid’s worth of silver and gilt, display cases filled with Lalique and Georgian crystal, inlaid firescreens, commodes, mahogany shelves filled with leatherbound books, Trueblood had still found space for his prized acquisition, a rosewood fall-front desk with brass handles.

  His manner notwithstanding, Marshall Trueblood was nobody’s fool; excepting Melrose himself and Vivian Rivington, he was the richest person in Long Pidd. He had a feeling for the marketplace that seemed more an act of grace than of business perspicacity; when no one would touch Empire, he snapped it up everywhere and made a tidy fortune; when everyone else was buying oak, he stored his in a back room and waited for it to go out of fashion in order to come in again. He had the nose of a bloodhound and the methods of a stockbroker.

  Trueblood was showing Jury the secrétaire when Melrose wandered back, past a collection of jade and a syllabub table he considered purchasing.

  “You’ve no idea what I had to go through to pry this from Lady Summerston’s clawlike grip.” He inserted a small key into the brass escutcheon at the top of the closed writing surface.

  “It’s a fall-front desk, is it?” asked Jury.

  “A secrétaire à abattant. There was a matching commode, but she wouldn’t part with it. She lives in this great peeling but noble villa called Watermeadows,” said Trueblood, lowering the writing surface to expose an array of pigeonholes and tiny drawers.

  “Very nice. It needs some refinishing,” said Melrose. “And a few of the pigeonholes could do with fixing. Looks like dry rot —” He stuck his finger in one of them.

  Trueblood sighed. “Four thousand I paid,
and all you can talk about is dry rot.”

  Melrose peered closer into another of the pigeonholes and then stepped back. He blinked and shook his head. “I think —” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “— you’ve got a little more there than dry rot. Have a look, will you,” he said to Jury.

  Bewildered, Jury peered into the pigeonhole, paused, and then quickly pulled the blossoming yellow handkerchief from Trueblood’s pocket.

  Astonished, Trueblood said, “What in the hell . . . ?” He shouldered his way between Melrose and the bank of pigeonholes and quickly turned round, his back to the secrétaire. “An eye. There’s an eye in there.”

  With both hands holding the handkerchief, Jury slowly pulled out the whole array of holes and drawers.

  The pale blue shirt of the torso was stippled in blood. The head fell forward with a thud onto the writing surface of Trueblood’s four thousand quid’s worth of secrétaire à abattant.

  Seven

  “SIMON LEAN.”

  Melrose and Trueblood said the name simultaneously, and all three of them stepped back, Melrose nearly toppling a Lalique vase, which he managed to catch before it hit the floor.

  Jury looked at the neck and upper arms. Rigor had passed off, which might have meant he’d been dead for twelve hours, since late the night before or early morning. Jury knew how unreliable such estimates of time of death were. “Ring up your local doctor.”

  “Carr? God, you don’t want him. He’s half blind —”

  “Nevertheless,” said Jury, frowning.

  “All right, all right.” Melrose moved to the telephone.

  “His name is Simon Lean?” said Jury to Trueblood, who had collapsed on a love seat so deeply cushioned in down he looked as if he might never rise again.

  “Watermeadows. Yes. That’s where he lives. Lived. Lived. Why isn’t he there? What in the hell is he doing in my secrétaire?” Trueblood seemed trying to make some further objection to this desecration of his premises, couldn’t, and merely flailed with his arms. “I bought the desk, not the body; send it back.”

  “Where was this secrétaire, then?”

  “Where?” Trueblood’s eyes were still hypnotized by the sight of Simon Lean’s torso lying on the writing surface as if he’d fallen asleep over a boring piece of correspondence. “Watermeadows, of course. Not in the house proper; in what they call a summerhouse. Gathering dust. I just happened to be walking by and took a peek inside. The old lady is loaded with the most priceless pieces of late-eighteenth-century stuff —”

  “Just a minute, Marshall. You were ‘walking by,’ you say? . . . What are you doing?” This was directed to Melrose, who was now redialing.

  “Doing? Ringing Pluck.”

  “Hang up, will you?”

  “But he’s going to have to get Northampton —”

  “Leave it.” He turned to Trueblood. “Go on.”

  “After I saw this secrétaire à abattant, which is something I’ve been on the lookout for for years, I thought I’d just go along to the main house and try to talk Lady Summerston into selling it to me. The old dear is so sentimental about her possessions, given they all belonged to her late, beloved husband, it’s like trying to pick barnacles off a ship’s hull. Do you know what I had to give for a limited edition of Ulysses she’d got squirreled away —” Trueblood wheeled around. “My God, the books? Where are they, and where is it?”

  “Never mind them for a moment —”

  “Never mind? You must be out of yours if you think a book by Joyce with etchings by Matisse —”

  “And a body by Trueblood,” Melrose said, with a gracious smile. “I’d forget James Joyce for the moment.”

  “And get back to your visit,” said Jury.

  “There’s nothing more. We had tea on her balcony and chatted, mostly about the past. Hers, not mine. And after she’d knocked up the price by a thousand, I fixed up about having the removal men fetch it this morning.” Trueblood’s glance fastened on the body in the secrétaire and he shivered. “And so it was. Let’s send it back.” He smiled weakly.

  “Nothing else?” asked Jury, who was examining the wound. It was a stab wound, but it did not have the appearance of one made by an ordinary knife. “Who else knew it was to be collected this morning?”

  “Possibly the old butler. The granddaughter, perhaps, though I doubt it. She doesn’t seem to be around much.”

  “But the removal men had to call in at the house.”

  “No. There’s a sort of lay-by and a short road that leads to within a hundred yards of the summerhouse. They’d have taken it from there.”

  “It borders my property,” said Melrose. “I mean the Watermeadows acres more or less join up with mine. There’s no dividing line except for that dirt road. Then there’s the footpath.”

  “In other words, public access.”

  They both nodded.

  Jury turned from his inspection of the wound. “Okay. That means anyone could conceivably have got into this summerhouse fairly easily, if Marshall here simply walked in. Why, if there were valuable pieces, wouldn’t it have been locked?”

  “This isn’t London, old sweat. People don’t bother things much about here.”

  “Really?” Jury nodded toward the corpse. “You could have fooled me.”

  Trueblood went on: “Lady S. isn’t an especially acquisitive person. Except for certain things that belonged to her late husband, I don’t think she cares much about possessions.”

  Jury nodded to Melrose. “Call the constable.”

  “About time,” said Melrose. “You’re holding up a murder investigation, you know, whilst we get our stories straight,” he added with a grim smile.

  “Have you got hold of yourself enough by now to tell your story, Marshall? Where’s the bill of sale?”

  Trueblood went to a handsomely carved kneehole desk and started jerking open drawers. Melrose, in the meantime, had sat down on a rose velvet settee and was trying to find a comfortable position in the cramped space.

  “Be careful!” said Trueblood, “or you’ll break the Spode.” Then to Jury, “Wait a moment. You seem to be taking the tack that I, I am going to be looked upon as a suspect.”

  “It would be a little careless of you, wouldn’t it,” asked Melrose, “to have the corpse delivered to yourself like a parcel?”

  • • •

  Superintendent Charles Pratt stood staring at the body of Simon Lean, waiting for his medical examiner to finish. To no one in particular, he said, “I must admit I haven’t seen a corpse in such an unwieldy position as this since the last time I was called to Long Piddleton.” It was as if Long Piddletonians were particularly adept at arranging bodies.

  The Scene-of-Crimes officer had been no less surprised as he had gone about adjusting and readjusting his camera to get shots of the body from every angle. The medical examiner, a sprightly man named Simpson, had completed a cursory examination of the wound and now asked the Scene-of-Crimes man if they could set about dismantling the desk so that the body could be removed to a stretcher.

  The word dismantle seemed to throw Trueblood into further paroxysms of distress, but at least the noise from upstairs had stopped — the sound of furniture shoved about, of legs scraping hardwood — and the two uniformed police had come down, together with the fingerprint man. Dusting for fingerprints amongst the crystal and cloisonné had finally been given up in the circumstances, since it was highly unlikely that although Simon Lean might have been delivered here, he was killed here . . . .

  . . . Although Pratt’s inspector seemed to want to make a great deal of that likelihood.

  “He had nothing to do with it,” said Melrose Plant, who was sitting on the edge of the fauteuil, his chin resting on his hands, and his hands clasping the end of his walking stick.

  MacAllister had his notebook out, and his smile was not friendly. He was one of those policemen who took an abundance of delight in his authority, unlike Charles Pratt, who did not necessarily believe
the rest of the world was guilty until he himself proved it innocent. “And how do you know that?”

  “Superintendent Jury and I were here when that secrétaire was opened.”

  “But not when it was delivered,” said MacAllister. “No reason the body couldn’t have been secreted somewhere in the shop and put in that chest there afterwards.” MacAllister was eyeing an old sea trunk.

  “Not ‘chest,’ ” said Trueblood, “secrétaire à abattant.” In his book, murder — even one on his own doorstop — appeared to take second place to educating purblind civil servants.

  Charles Pratt did not hide his impatience. “I’d give it up, Mac. It would hardly seem worth the trouble to secrete a body in one piece of furniture and then move it to another.”

  The writing surface had been carefully unhinged and the cabinet doors at the bottom removed after the position of the torso had been chalked in. The body of Simon Lean was lowered to the floor. To Simpson, Pratt said, “Very little blood.”

  Simpson grunted. “Internal hemorrhaging, it must have been. I can’t tell precisely until I get him to the mortuary, but the thrust of the weapon — and it doesn’t look like the entry wound of a knife — appears to be upward. Longer than a knife, would be my guess.” He thought for a moment. “Sort of wound that could possibly be made with a sword or a dagger, possibly.”

  Melrose Plant, who had been leaning on his walking stick, looked a little ashen. “This isn’t a sword stick, doctor. It’s a cosher. I don’t care much for sword sticks.”

  Pratt smiled slightly and, seeing that Trueblood had put his head in his hands, said, “Something wrong?”

  Through his splayed fingers, Trueblood answered caustically: “What could possibly be wrong?”

  “It must have taken a hell of a lot of strength to shove the body in and up,” said MacAllister.

  “Not necessarily,” said Pratt. “People under stress usually find what strength they need. Any ideas as to time of death?” asked Pratt.