Vertigo 42 Read online

  7

  * * *

  Trevor Sly, owner of the Blue Parrot, appeared to be a more broken man than usual, not spiritually, but actually, physically broken. This seeming dislocation of joint and vertebrae was owing to Trevor’s tall spindliness and his ability to bend himself in just about any direction, as if he were a collection of pipe cleaners.

  To say he was tall and thin, with sticks for arms and legs, didn’t quite catch it. This physical bending into any position went right along with his obsequiousness, this bending of his own wishes to meet those of whoever was in front of him, who at the moment happened to be Melrose Plant, and Melrose didn’t trust Trevor any further than he could throw him. Fortunately, he’d no need to throw him anywhere.

  Trevor loved to think of himself as every man’s confidant. He was not a man to confide in; he’d probably use a confidence as a cudgel. On the one hand he was servility itself; on the other, a man with strong tendencies toward blackmail.

  This Uriah Heep of Northamptonshire ran his public house all on his own, employing neither cook nor barmaid nor bottle washer.

  Jury had always liked the place, not in spite of its rather kitsch-lit ambience, but because of it. To Jury it was almost bad taste turning a corner and running into something else—prepackaged nostalgia, maybe. The walls were adorned with old film posters, Casablanca prominent among them.

  He tried to recall her film name and still couldn’t. He looked at Ingrid and Humphrey looking at each other. It was on the tip of his tongue.

  On one wall a big poster advertising The Road to Morocco showed Bing Crosby and Bob Hope riding a camel. There was Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. There was A Passage to India. Peter O’Toole he supposed was still alive, but what a loss to theater had come with the death of Peggy Ashcroft. The film posters hung side by side, Lawrence on top of that train and Peggy in a howdah atop a camel. They seemed to be moving toward one another as if about to meet, but it was a meeting that would never take place.

  Beneath the kitsch, Jury saw a crushing sadness. Bogart and Bergman, Peggy, Bing and Bob—how could all of these people be dead? They seemed to lie at his feet in terrible heaps, as if he’d shot them.

  It was the desert Trevor Sly seemed to like, exoticism that he featured. The tables were covered with red-and-white-checkered cloths, and on each was a little desert scene: palm trees, camels with howdahs or grouped as a family, little tents, figures of nomads. Palm frond fans creaked above the eight tables and their little enactments of desert life.

  He left off looking at the camel train, much like the cars of the actual train atop which Lawrence moved, and joined Melrose at the bar.

  “What can I get you, Mr. Jury?”

  Jury studied the optics, saw Glenfiddich, looked at the beer pulls, saw Guinness, decided on that, partly for the aesthetic experience.

  “All right, Trevor, go on with what happened. Incidentally, was my aunt here with that Strether-fellow when this ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ incident took place?”

  Jury was watching the foam gather atop his glass, Guinness foam being like no other in the way it perfected itself. Jury turned from the foam to Melrose. “Owl Creek? What are you talking about?”

  “You recall that story by Ambrose Bierce. The Confederate sympathizer captured and being hanged on Owl Creek Bridge. The rope’s round his neck and he goes down. Then you see the rope snap and he drops, free, into the water below. He swims like hell, all the while they’re shooting at him. Farther upriver he drags himself onto the bank and then starts running for home. Home we see is an antebellum mansion, a lovely wife and sweet children. He runs through woods toward it and her, his arms outstretched, yet oddly, they don’t meet.”

  Jury thought of Peggy Ashcroft on that camel and Peter O’Toole running across the cars of the train, fated never to meet.

  “In the film version of this story, he keeps on doing it,” Melrose continued. “I mean, runs toward her again and again, the film repeating the incident over and over. Now, suddenly, we’re back at Owl Creek Bridge, where the rope’s round his neck and he drops and is dead.”

  “You mean the escape never happened? All of that running and finding his wife, all of that was what he thought of in the few seconds between dropping and dying.” When Melrose nodded, Jury said, “That’s one of the saddest things I ever heard.” He turned to Trevor. “So what happened here?”

  Trevor, having sliced the foam from the pint with a knife and served it to Jury, pulled up a stool behind the bar and leaned over to get a bit more cheek-by-jowl experience. “Well, a gent comes in here, four-ish it was, looking distraught, clothes a bit all anyhow—you know, tie askew, mud on the shoes. He’s wanting to know where the Old Post Road is—”

  Melrose opened his mouth to say something, but Jury put a hand on his arm.

  “—and he’d really like a drink, double whiskey. I pour it, he downs it in ten seconds. I give him directions to the Old Post Road as best I can, he pays and runs out. I walked to the door to see his car speeding away. In a right hurry, he was.”

  “Didn’t he give any clue—” Jury said before Trevor interrupted.

  “Oh, but that’s not the end of it. Just wait now.” Trevor drew even closer. “Then he’s back again, asking for a drink. This about five, only an hour later.”

  “How strange,” said Jury.

  “Stranger still. He asks me again where the Old Post Road is. I told him he’d been in before, asking the same question and that I’d told him. Well, he gives me this odd look but doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then he asks—”

  “You’ll love this.” Melrose gave Jury’s side an elbow.

  “You see a strange dog around here?”

  Jury choked on his beer.

  “Well, I says, ‘No, there’s no dog been round the Blue Parrot today.’ ” Trevor went on, “And I ask him, ‘Is it your dog, then?’ And he nods. Then I ask him where he’d last seen the dog. He says, ‘The Old Post Road.’ ” Trevor shrugged. “And just like that, he turns and walks out. Then, a minute or two later I hear a shot ring out. Came from the direction of the car park out there.” He pointed toward the front of the pub.

  “A shot? Just a single shot?” said Jury.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Did you do anything?”

  “Such as what, I’d like to know? Go dashing out and get shot meself ?”

  Wryly, Jury answered, “I was thinking more along the lines of calling police.”

  Trevor said, no, he hadn’t. Would police have come? Probably thought he was barmy.

  They conferred for a while longer about the man and his dog before Jury and Plant left.

  ____

  Melrose pushed into the driver’s seat and started up the hummingbird engine of his Silver Shadow. Jury thunked closed the passenger seat door and clicked on his seat belt.

  Said Melrose, as they slid along the rough dirt road the Rolls mistook for silk, “Well, there’ll be no living with them now.” He spoke, of course, of his friends at the Jack and Hammer. “What do you think?”

  “That I’m glad I’m going to Exeter.”

  If the dirt road to the Blue Parrot was silk, the Northampton Road was air, and they fairly flew all the way back to Ardry End.

  Exeter, Devon

  Wednesday, 1:00 P.M.

  8

  * * *

  Exeter Cathedral was one of the fifty-six cathedrals in England, and Jury had been in very few of them. He tried ticking off on his fingers the ones he had visited—Salisbury (not far away), Lincoln, Wells, Canterbury—and found he had many more fingers than cathedrals.

  He wondered how he could be so ignorant of cathedral architecture. Did all of them have vaulted ceilings such as this, such intricately designed ceiling bosses? Probably.

  But none of the other fifty-five had Brian Macalvie walking down the nav
e in his signature macintosh and carrying a book into which several file folders were stuffed. The Devon-Cornwall Constabulary was headquartered in Middlemoor, outside of Exeter. Macalvie was a divisional commander.

  Jury had last seen him two months before. It seemed like yesterday and it seemed like years. Time had a way of dissolving.

  “When you weren’t across the street, I figured you’d be here.”

  “Why?”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  Jury smiled slightly and shook his head. They were both looking at the rondels, brilliantly colored tapestry cushions, lined up all along the ledge of the nave.

  “Remember,” said Macalvie, “Fanny Hamilton?”

  “I remember her.”

  Fanny Hamilton had been their case.

  They left the cathedral and crossed over the square to a small café that looked out on the green.

  “And Tess Williamson,” said Brian Macalvie. “I remember her. She’d be hard to forget.”

  They were sitting in the same café in which Jury had met him years before when Macalvie had been working on a case involving the deaths of three women, Fanny Hamilton having been one.

  They were drinking coffee and eating from a double-tiered tray of miniature pastries—small brioche and croissant, others dappled with apricot or peaches in a custard. Jury had eaten three of them while drinking his first cup of coffee.

  Macalvie had eaten none; rather, he looked at them as if they presented a fresh puzzle. To Macalvie, everything was a puzzle, a murder case being the Great Puzzle.

  “Tess Williamson.” He said again and smiled briefly. “Unforgettable.”

  Jury picked up a miniature croissant. “You make it sound as if you knew her well.” He stuffed the croissant into his mouth. One bite.

  “I did.”

  Jury nearly choked. “What?”

  “I knew her. I met her in here one day. All the tables were taken. She waved me over to hers. She was sitting alone. This table, actually. She said she liked the view of the cathedral.” He now picked up one of the fruit-filled pastries. “She loved this stuff.”

  Jury was astonished. “It sounds as if you met like old friends. Tom Williamson didn’t mention that.”

  Macalvie shrugged. “She probably never mentioned it to him. As to old friends, we weren’t. Friendship has a history. We didn’t.”

  “Then how?”

  Macalvie sighed. “Let me give you the facts, since you have clearly stereotyped the whole thing.”

  Jury smiled. “That’s me. More coffee?” He looked around for the waitress.

  “I had coffee in here with Tess Williamson maybe five times. She used to come to Exeter to do charity work for the cathedral. One of the holy dusters.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They dust, don’t they? Polish, clean. She thought it her proper station in life.” Macalvie smiled.

  Jury thought for a moment. “It sounds like penance.”

  “You’re getting clever. Yes, I’d say she had the makings of a penitent. She was here like clockwork. I, of course, don’t exactly have a clockwork schedule. But I did meet up with her those several times. Originally, when she introduced herself, I remembered the Hilda Palmer case, nearly five years earlier. I’ll tell you, I wished I’d been working it.” The book holding the files was on the table. He took out one of the files, held it up. “Ludicrously inconclusive. You know what happened?”

  “I know what her husband told me.” Jury repeated what he knew about Hilda Palmer’s death.

  “So these kids were all over the grounds, the other woman”—he turned over a page—“Elaine Davies was in the front and supposed to be watching the kids, but not very hard, as she knew sod-all about what was going on, or so she said. Then the discovery of Hilda Palmer at the bottom of that dry pool and Tess Williamson with her.”

  Jury said, “What about Tess Williamson’s own death? Tom Williamson thinks she was murdered. Shoved down that flight of stone stairs.“

  Macalvie nodded. “There was that possibility. Forensic did a computer simulation of the fall, posited on the direction in which she’d been standing, the blood spatter along the way, the bruising, et cetera, et cetera. They decided that it was an accident. They were wrong.”

  The waitress was at their table looking annoyed. Macalvie ordered two more coffees, and she turned and left.

  Jury always liked the way Macalvie discounted evidence so calmly and unambiguously.

  “So you think it was murder too?”

  “Of course it was. Or suicide.”

  “Why?”

  “The fall. You’ll see what I mean when you see the house.”

  “I expect it struck you, the points of similarity between the death of the girl Hilda Palmer and Tess Williamson,” said Jury.

  “It struck me. What you’re getting at is some motive for murder, right? The girl’s mother might have wanted to duplicate the circumstances in Tess’s death. Yes, it occurred to me, but I didn’t think about it for long before I decided it was coincidence. Whatever similarity there was in their both dying at Laburnum isn’t strange, since Tess Williamson spent so much time there. But the fall down that flight of stairs? I’d never put that down to vertigo. Perhaps suicide made to look like an accident. Also, five years seems a long time to wait to seek revenge, especially if it was a parent. A parent’s emotions would be boiling hot right afterward, but she’d simmer down over the years.”

  Jury nodded, though he didn’t necessarily agree. “Those times you met her, did she bring the case up? Did you?”

  “Did I? Of course not. Had she wanted to talk about it, I guess she would’ve. She didn’t.”

  “What was she like?”

  Macalvie stirred coffee already stirred to death. “Generous. Compassionate. But what I noticed most was the way she paid attention. You’ve known people like that? They’re rare, the ones who really listen. But the generosity . . . the kind of person who’d see a stray cat and go get it some milk. Nothing escaped her notice. We talked about nothing in particular: my work, her house, which she loved, her husband, Tom, whom she also loved. And Thomas Hardy’s books. We talked about having lunch one day—”

  “Brief Encounter,” said Jury, drinking his coffee.

  “What? Bloody hell. You’re revoltingly sentimental. It was nothing at all like that.” Macalvie drew a match across the upright box on the table held straight by prongs. He inhaled, said, “You still stopped?” He wiggled the cigarette.

  Glumly, Jury nodded. “When are you going to stop?”

  “Never, seeing the effect it’s had on you.”

  Jury laughed.

  “You want to see it?”

  Jury’s hand was hovering over the last of the little pastries. “See what?”

  Macalvie stared at the ceiling, shook his head. “What we’ve been talking about, for God’s sakes. Laburnum. The Williamsons’ house. It’s not far from here.”

  “You bet. Now?”

  “If you’re not going to order another pastry selection.”

  Old Post Road

  Wednesday, 1:00 P.M.

  9

  * * *

  Melrose Plant pulled his early-model Jag into the leaf-matted drive of Tower Cottage and its FOR SALE sign, FREEHOLD (believable); LOVELY VIEWS OVER THE COUNTRYSIDE (Aren’t there always?), ALL MOD CONS (unlikely).

  He crunched across the gravel and leaves to the front door, passing by some pots of geraniums that looked the worse for wear. Owen Archer was not one to be out here in all weathers in his gardening togs, deadheading roses and pushing a wheelbarrow of manure around.

  Melrose stood on the stoop and gave the dolphin doorknocker a couple of goes, admiring Archer for his scruffy front garden. One did get tired of perfect pruning and grass cut to glassy smoothness. Had Melrose himself not had people who
came at mysterious times (for he never seemed to see them) to shear and trim, Ardry End would have looked like Kurtz’s place in the Congo.

  As he stood leaning against the doorjamb, he observed some very tall dark green plants crowded at the corner of the cottage that looked to be swaying in the breezeless air. Melrose wondered if there were any more triffids around, or if John Wyndham had used them all up. Triffids marching, one, two . . .

  The door opened suddenly, and since Melrose’s shoulder had been against it, he nearly fell into the little hallway.

  “I do beg your pardon,” he said as he righted himself and reset his jacket on his shoulders.

  Owen Archer laughed. “Quite all right. I do it myself. Come on in.”

  “I do it myself ?” That rather overflowed the banks of hospitality, didn’t it? “Thank you. You’re Mr. Archer?”

  “I am. You’re Lord Ardry?”

  Melrose nodded. He trotted out his title once in a while when it suited him. He had been resourceful enough to get Owen Archer’s name and number from the listing agent, and had called.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” Archer waved vaguely in the sofa’s direction. “Tea?” A teapot sat on the round table between sofa and armchair.

  Melrose took a seat on the sprigged muslin sofa, finding it quite comfortable. Archer had been seated in the opposite armchair, to judge from the cup, the book, and the lamp. Right now he opened a corner cabinet, which housed some very old china, and took out a cup and saucer. He set it before Melrose and poured tea into it. He moved the small milk jug and sugar bowl from the middle of the table to keep company with the cup.

  “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion, but as I said over the phone, the Scotland Yard detective superintendent who’s been staying with me had to go to Devon and asked me to visit in his stead . . .” How banal, how unconvincing, how, indeed, absurd.