The Horse You Came in On Read online

  “Stop her? My God, we’ve been stopping her for years. One way or another.” He grinned. He chuckled.

  Jury sighed. “Then I think you should go to America. Both of us can go.”

  “You mean you really are?” Melrose considered this.

  “To Philadelphia. How far’s Philadelphia from Baltimore?”

  “I don’t know. Several thousand miles, probably. The damned country is so big.”

  Jury shook his head. “They’re not that far apart—one, two hundred is my guess. Don’t you have a map of the States around here?”

  “Oh, there’s an atlas somewhere.” Melrose motioned vaguely with his hand at nowhere in particular. He yawned. “What airport?”

  “Don’t know. Kennedy? LAX?”

  “That’s L.A., for God’s sake.”

  Jury shrugged. He had told Plant about his conversation with Lady Cray. “I feel I owe her something, so I’m going to look into the death of Frances Hamilton’s nephew. It’ll make a change, what the hell? I’m taking Wiggins. Make a change for his allergies, too.”

  “She was wonderful, Lady Cray!” Melrose thought of her fondly. “She was clever. If she thinks something’s wrong, something probably is.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Melrose went on. “But I can’t stay away long. How long is it going to be?”

  “Not more than a few days, certainly. I doubt I’ll find anything. Tell me more about this student of Ellen’s, Beverly—”

  “Beverly Brown. According to Ellen she was murdered in—a churchyard, I think. Happened just a day or two ago. January nineteenth, she said. It had something to do with Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday. Peculiar. Anyway, she was rather incoherent, and I wasn’t paying all that much attention, anyway. Too busy trying to work out how to make an intelligent comment on her book without having read it.”

  Jury was thoughtful. “How about Sunday? We could leave on Sunday.”

  Melrose hesitated, frowning. “Trueblood and I have a sort of project going.”

  “Oh? Well, you did seem rather busy at the Jack and Hammer. Writing something, were you? I thought I saw you with a notebook.”

  “Writing? Oh, that’s just Trueblood’s account—no, his inventory book.” Melrose looked rather pleased with himself. “Yes, I’m helping him with his inventory.”

  “Trueblood? Taking inventory? I thought the only thing he ever inventoried was his wardrobe. His shop has been growing steadily more stuffed since I met him. It’ll take you years to inventory that lot.”

  “I expect so. But I promised.”

  There was a silence while they both got rather dozy, and then Melrose muttered something about Lady Cray again. “I get the unpleasant feeling wheels are coming full circle. Did you know there’s a rumor the Man with a Load of Mischief has been bought up? Or leased? By some London people.”

  Jury poured himself another whisky from the decanter. Thoughtfully, he said, “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  Melrose sighed and nodded and ran his long fingers through his hair, which looked, in the firelight, like a gold froth. “Maybe I should get the hell out. I’m beginning to feel this is where I came in.”

  VIII

  Happily full of both food and drink and friendship, Jury lay in bed, reading.

  He tented the black leather book over his chest and stared up at the ceiling. What the hell did they think they were writing . . . ? He yawned. Sunday. That was just the day after tomorrow. He supposed he could wait until he got back to see Pratt in Northampton. Tomorrow evening they could go up to London, then.

  Again, he opened the book. What were they up to?

  He fell asleep with the question unanswered.

  Interlude

  In the soft black hat and black overcoat, Wiggins looked as if he were palely loitering there beside the check-in counter at Heathrow. He was clutching his holdall to his chest like a breviary.

  “What’ve you got in your carry-on?” Jury knew the question was superfluous. He still wanted to hear the answer.

  Wiggins unzipped the small black bag. The original shaving kit was now doing duty as a portable medicine cabinet: the old shaving tackle had been removed and the plastic containers (such as the soap dish) pressed into service to hold throat lozenges, black biscuits, and some green liquid with which Jury wasn’t familiar. In addition, Wiggins had cleverly sewn in a strip of Velcro and pressed a companion piece into loops against it to hold half a dozen brown vials. A few of these were prescription medicine (the heavy artillery), but the others had been assembled from the Wiggins pharmacopoeia. Jury recognized the tobaccoey-looking herb as rue. At least Wiggins didn’t have it up his nose.

  “What’s that stuff, Wiggins?” Jury, fascinated notwithstanding years of watching Wiggins at his desk with tubes and teacups mixing up concoctions like a chemist, pointed to a plastic bottle filled with something that looked like sludge.

  Apparently it was. “That? Oh, that’s purely topical, sir. I’ve been bothered by a rash on my elbows. This is a mud pack mixed with herbs. It’s quite effective.”

  Only Wiggins would have a rash on his elbows, thought Jury. “Got any Dramamine? I don’t see any.”

  “For travel sickness, you mean? No. The best thing for that is to lean over and grab your heels with the opposite hands. I don’t believe a person should take more medication than absolutely necessary.”

  A number of replies occurred to Jury, but he settled for silence. Wiggins looked painfully serious. “Here’s Plant,” Jury said, raising his arm so that Melrose Plant, threading his way through the swirl of passengers, could see where they were.

  Melrose distributed reading material: “Punch, Private Eye, and a couple of paperbacks—in case you want to read the newest by Polly Praed.” He held up an incandescent cover. The gold foil glittered.

  “Excellent,” said Jury. “It’s been years since I’ve read one of Polly’s books. What’re the others?”

  “Remember Heather Quick?”

  “Joanna Lewes’s heroine? The one who seemed to be spending a lot of time slogging across the fens? Of course.” Jury fingered this equally garish cover. “What’s yours?”

  “A new Onions. In case I have trouble sleeping.”

  Sitting in the lounge waiting to be called to their flight was a woman with a mass of hair, chewing gum and rereading a romance novel. She had her little family with her: a baby in a carry cot and two tots. Melrose had entered into a staring contest with the moon-faced tots, a boy and a girl with eyes hard as pebbles. The girl stuck out her tongue, finally. The mother saw this and gave the girl a swift smack.

  “That lot will be sitting in front of us, just wait.”

  “Umm,” muttered Jury, turning a page of the book by Joanna Lewes.

  Nor could he get a response from Wiggins, who was ministering to himself with nose drops. He snuffled and dropped his head forward. Melrose sighed.

  One of the airline personnel was at last calling the first-class passengers to their comfortable seats and champagne, and Jury asked, “Why are you flying coach, anyway? It wouldn’t be out of consideration for your penniless comrades, would it?” Lady Cray had told him to be sure to get first-class seats; Jury had gone out and booked coach.

  “No. I don’t like the film they’re showing in first. I always make my air travel plans according to the films. It’s one of the few chances I get to go to the cinema.”

  Now they were up and moving toward the gate. “What ‘always’?” asked Jury. “You never fly anywhere.”

  “I beg your pardon? Who was it went all the way to Venice?”

  “What’s the film, then?”

  “Wait and be surprised.” Melrose didn’t know.

  • • •

  “I’m not sitting in the middle,” said Wiggins.

  “I’m not sitting in the middle,” said Melrose.

  “Stop haggling,” said Jury, as they displayed their boarding passes.

  Wiggins and Plant both turned and smiled at Jury.<
br />
  “Forget it,” said Jury.

  They moved past the barrier.

  • • •

  Now they were seated, amid the convivial hum of voices and laughter one hears from passengers eager to embark, who will probably be at one another’s throats before the dinner tray is served. Melrose watched the flight attendant. He felt a little sorry for her, flogging her orange life jacket and pretending the oxygen mask was dropping from above, and pressing instructions for their use on her inattentive audience. At least Wiggins was watching the young woman carefully, thereby letting her know her training had not been wasted. Wiggins was even following along with her, reading the printed instructions for bail-out and oxygen loss. He had carefully mustered all three of the paper bags for safekeeping.

  Jury had the window seat, Melrose the aisle, and Wiggins was sitting in the middle, having been talked into it by Melrose, who recited mind-numbing statistics from a report that proved that the person most likely to escape injury in the event of an accident was the passenger sitting in the middle on the left side. The one least likely to survive was the one in the window seat. Both of them turned to look at Jury, who was reading his book and paying no attention. Wiggins told Plant that was very interesting; he hadn’t known that, and why was the left side safer than the right? Melrose thought for a moment and answered that it had something to do with wind velocity.

  As the plane lifted off and gained altitude, Melrose began to realize the fix he was in: My God, he thought, gripping the arms of the seat, this huge craft with its load of innocent victims was about to test the laws of gravity. None of his neighbors appeared to realize this: the sweet-faced old woman across the aisle was clicking her knitting needles, slowly increasing the length of some white garment—a shroud probably; a leather-jacketed couple a few seats away were already sleepily entwined, the fellow with his mouth open in an O, snoring softly. How in heaven’s name could anyone sleep? And beside him, even Wiggins had his eyes closed, his hands linked in his lap, head bent in some form of meditation. Suddenly the plane broke through cloud cover into startling brightness and levelled off.

  He opened his eyes to the clatter of the flight attendant shoving the drinks trolley down the aisle. Thank the lord. Jury had a beer, Wiggins a Diet Coke, and Melrose two miniature bottles of whisky and a can of soda.

  Armed with his whisky and soda, he opened the Onions. The venue was a shop that sold baby birds. Inauspicious, he thought, and thumbed forward to see if the milieu changed. Yes, to the Caribbean. Someone was carrying a caged bird into a hotel there. He wondered, turning back, how long he’d have to hang around this bird shop in London EC1 before he could get to Antigua. He was absolutely certain by the time he’d reached page fifteen that The Parrot and Pickle was one of the books the monkeys had cast aside on their way to writing Hamlet. God, why were mystery writers so awful? Even Polly Praed, who could run rings round the Onions woman, could be pretty bloody awful.

  He replaced the Onions in his holdall and took out Ellen’s book and resettled himself. Ellen was no Onions, thank God. And if Windows was somewhat baffling, that did not obscure its quality. But he still found it incredibly enigmatic, despite or perhaps because of the style, which was simplicity itself. “Simple” was not the word, though, he would use to describe some of its other qualities: The name of the protagonist, the odd displacements in time, the relationship—if you could call it that—between the two characters (there seemed to be only two). He sighed and replaced it and looked once again at the Onions. Horrid cover. What were publishers thinking of, anyway? If Onions could get published, Joanna was right—anybody could, including him. He drew a composition book from his small bag. He had told no one he had taken up mystery writing, and he held it so that neither of his companions could see what he was writing. Wiggins was crawling over him for the third or fourth time with another vial of pills. He made his way to the water dispenser.

  Melrose turned to the last entry, where Smithson and Nora were hurtling along a narrow road on their way to Bury St. Edmunds. He frowned. Why? He could not remember any scene he’d planned in Bury St. Edmunds.

  “What’re you writing?” asked Jury.

  Melrose sighed. Wasn’t this always the way? A person could be sending out frantic SOS’s, or holding up huge signs fairly yelling “Save Me from This Ax Murderer,” and no one would notice; but just let a person try to get away with writing something in secret and everybody was all eyes. “Nothing much.”

  Jury plucked the paperback from the webbed holder in front of Melrose. “The Parrot and Pickle? What a strange title.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.” Melrose chewed his pencil but couldn’t for the life of him remember anything happening in Bury St. Edmunds. “One of the characters is poisoned by eating a pickle laced with cyanide. How Ms. Onions is going to solve the problem of that particular pickle landing in that person’s mouth, I don’t know.”

  “Ghastly cover.” A brightly plumed bird was hovering over a jar of gherkins. “Is it a pub name or something? Sounds like one of the Bruce’s Brewery lot.”

  “No. At least that would make some sort of weird sense. No, it’s a literal parrot and a literal pickle. That cover’s not the most seductive marketing approach, I agree. Here, read Ellen’s book.”

  Wiggins was back and crawling in. He looked whiter than usual. “You all right?” Jury asked.

  “A bit nauseous, sir.”

  “Something you ate?”

  Said Melrose, “Given the looks of that meal trolley that just rolled by, I’d say it will very soon be something he ate.”

  Wiggins was searching through his flight bag. “I wouldn’t wonder if I’ve got fear of flying. Claustrophobic.” He looked at Jury. “Have you ever known me to be?”

  Jury was looked upon as the repository for Wiggins’s medical history. Am I allergic to aubergines? Does rue make me break out in a rash? “No,” said Jury, opening Ellen’s book. “And you’re not going to find a cure for claustrophobia in that bag, anyway.”

  “Best cure for that, Sergeant, is walking round the plane,” Melrose said. “But you’ve got to do it . . . well, ritualistically.” Wiggins loved ritual. “You’ve got to make a circuit—down, over, up the other aisle, through the seats and back. Do that twice. Or three times. Works every time. I used to be violently claustrophobic.”

  “Really, sir?” Wiggins was already getting up again.

  Melrose nodded, still puzzling over the Bury St. Edmunds trip. Had he been writing in his sleep?

  And that reminded him. He’d forgotten to ask Marshall Trueblood if he’d rescued their notebook from Mrs. Withersby’s bucket. Melrose started biting the flesh round his thumb. Surely, Trueblood had. If the Withersby person found it, though, she’d ransom it off. Oh, well, nothing to be done from up here.

  Had they been, perhaps, a bit too theatrical?

  Part 2

  NICKEL CITY

  9

  Ellen Taylor hadn’t changed by a day, by an hour. She might even have been wearing the same clothes: jeans and a black leather jacket; her chain mail jewelry; a white T-shirt sporting a cartoon child with a square head topped with a spiky blond haircut, saying, “Yo Dude.” The leather jacket was tucked under one arm; in her mingled nervousness and excitement, she kept switching it from one arm to the other as the three of them approached.

  For she was excited, that was clear, she was also trying to disguise it by assuming an abstracted air, looking far and wide round the terminal, as if Melrose, Jury, and Wiggins were only three of many she’d come here to meet.

  As Melrose dragged his calfskin case from the carousel, she said, “Well, at least you didn’t come loaded down with luggage.”

  At least? Of what breach of traveller’s etiquette had he been guilty, then?

  She seemed pleased as punch to have Sergeant Wiggins, whom she’d never met, and Richard Jury, whom she had, but briefly, to lavish a bit of attention on, so as not to appear ungrateful for or unmindful of the trouble oth
ers were putting themselves to for her sake. Melrose was a different kettle of fish altogether. He (she appeared to like to pretend) was an old friend like an old sock, to be pulled on or cast aside till the next wash came around.

  Thus, she was all the more flustered when Melrose set down his case and swiftly put his arms around her and gave her a big, warm hug and a kiss he let linger on her cheek before he stepped back to watch the color wash across her face. To avoid his eyes she looked down at their suitcases and asked if this wine-colored calfskin and the dark blue canvas one were theirs in much the same way airport security had scrutinized them at Heathrow.

  “They have not been out of our sight; we packed them ourselves; no one’s passed us any parcels to take out of the country,” said Melrose.

  Jury laughed. “More or less.”

  “Say again?” Ellen’s face was still blotchy with receding blushes. She wore no makeup except for several shades of eye shadow running from dark brown through khaki to champagne. None of this eye art did a thing to enhance the large brown eyes beneath the lids, though. Melrose had always liked Ellen’s face, its triangular shape, pert chin, clear skin. Her hair was oat-colored and long enough to half-cover the shoulder-length metal earrings that swayed and clicked when she moved her head.

  “Are we riding on your motorcycle?”

  She did not appear to see the joke in this. “It’s in the shop. We’re taking a cab.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that, miss,” said Wiggins, seeing her about to shoulder his backpack.

  “That’s okay; I like to carry things.”

  Melrose doubted this, and put her wrestling her shoulders into the backpack down to the same nervous excitement. Anything for a distraction.

  As they made their way towards the exit, she asked them about their flight, and Wiggins obliged by telling her the details. He told her all the way across the lakelike lobby, down the ramp, and out the door into the cold wind of a Maryland afternoon.