Rainbow's End (46 page)

He was sure the sergeant would appreciate this, and the sergeant did: “It makes up for me not being allowed to have my own medications in here.” Sergeant Wiggins was wont to think of his own vials and bottles as medicines, things contrived by the hands of beamish doctors for him and him alone, too rich and exotic for the general run of suffering mortals. He inspected the bowl of herbs, sighed contentedly, and asked Melrose about one he said he'd never seen before.

Melrose had never seen
any
of them before today, and this one, pink and barbish-looking, he thought was probably cactus, or maybe simply dead, but he recalled something he'd read in a sporting magazine,
The Field
, possibly, and answered with authority. “Burdock. It's absolutely marvelous for cleaning out the kidneys.” Yes, he had read that somewhere, for he recalled how strange it was that sporting folk were concerned with cleaning out the kidneys.

“Is it really? I've heard of that,” said Wiggins. “Never tried any, though.”

Melrose pulled up a chair and made himself comfortable (if that was possible in a hospital), and noticed the bookmark in
The Daughter of Time.
Wiggins was close to the end.

“Well, you deserve it, Sergeant Wiggins, all of the thought you've put into this case. It certainly stumps me.”

As if it were a breviary, Wiggins picked up
The Daughter of Time
and pressed it to his chest. At least, thought Melrose, not to his lips. “Quite nasty for him, wasn't it, all the while being condemned by history and being thought to have murdered his nephews in the Tower.” He was speaking of Richard III, the subject of Tey's mystery novel. Sadly, Wiggins looked at Melrose. “And him with that hump.”

Quite naturally, Wiggins would drag the hump to center stage, physical disabilities being much closer to his heart than political intrigue. Melrose replied, “Yes, well, I wouldn't take Tey's version for gospel were I you. Richard was probably guilty as hell. I hear you're getting out of here soon.”

Most people would have responded with a brusque “Can't be too soon for me, mate!” Sergeant Wiggins, however, looked unhappy.

And Wiggins wasn't alone, apparently, in his sadness. There was the private nurse Melrose had retained and who had given him this information out in the corridor. Nurse Lillywhite was a jolly, amiable nurse, and would have been exceptionally pretty had her eyes, leaf-green and exotically tilted, been aligned on the same course. As it was, one of the eyes drifted off-center, slightly skewed, so that it looked to be following its own line of inquiry or searching out someone more interesting than Melrose.

Nurse Lillywhite had stood by the nurses' station, weighed down by books, saying, “He'll be leaving in two or three days' time.” Nurse Lillywhite was saddened by the prospect. “Honestly, he's been no trouble at all, ever so nice he's been, not like some that keeps me running my legs off, go here, go there, go everywhere; fetch me this, fetch me that . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she hefted the several books up on her hip. They suggested her favorite patient was himself
pretty heavily into the fetch-and-carry trade. Melrose said something to this effect.

She was surprised. “Oh, but this is so
interesting
, this research Mr. Wiggins has been doing.” Sotto voce and with a quick look round she said, “He's working on a case—not that he's told me anything about police business, I do assure you,” she was quick to add. “But I think it's simply splendid how he can lie there with nothing but the four walls and the telly to stare at and do all of these deductions in his mind.” They were continuing down the hall together. “Now, I'll tell you what: he don't need these ones right now, seeing he's got a visitor, so you just go on in and I'll nip round later with a pot of tea.”

“That would be very kind of you. You've done a wonderful job, taking care of him.” Melrose had already written the check for the nurse and was now attempting to foist it on her. She recoiled slightly, as if not wanting to put her relationship with the interesting sergeant on a financial footing. “Miss Lillywhite, you've more than earned it.” Melrose folded the check and tucked it into the pocket of her uniform. Amid her profuse thanks he bowed and walked away down the corridor.

 • • • 

“TWO OR THREE
days,” said Wiggins, in answer to Melrose's comment. He was not eager to leave.

Books were in abundance here, too; a stack of them sat on Wiggins's bedside table. “I met your nurse in the corridor. Looks like she has another order of books for you.”

Wiggins looked quite happy. “Lillywhite's been really helpful. Gone over to Dillon's on her lunch break, or round to the library. There's a lot of research involved here, Mr. Plant.”

Melrose couldn't imagine
any
research involved here.

Voice at whisper level, Wiggins asked, “Did you do as I suggested, Mr. Plant? Did you study those rondels carefully?”

“I did. But I saw nothing that could be taken as a message, no matter how abstruse.”

“If there had been,” whispered Wiggins, “I expect the cushion would have been removed by now.”

Melrose rubbed at his forehead. The whole notion of embroidered messages made his head ache. Then Wiggins wanted to know if
anything had come from “Stateside” (as he put it). Had the superintendent sent any information? Melrose capsulized Macalvie's report from Richard Jury, not wanting to give Wiggins too many fresh fields.

Wiggins reflected on this, his expression painfully studious, then said, “So the Hope woman had a mystical turn of mind.”

Wanting to skirt mysticism at all costs, Melrose said, “Oh, I don't think a few visits to Mesa Verde and a handful of crystals constitute mysticism.”

“Well, you wouldn't, Mr. Plant, you being a skeptic.”

Melrose frowned. Was he? He had always thought of himself as rather gullible, too prone to believe nearly anything told him.

“The point is that Angela Hope was ‘spiritual'—if you prefer that word—according to Mr. Jury's report. She often went to Mesa Verde, and, of course, there's that Indian housekeeper. No, I see Angela Hope as a person who could have been very much interested in Indian lore.”

Indian lore. Oh, dear. “I don't really think—”

But Wiggins didn't care what he thought; already, he was pulling a book out of his bedside stack and thumbing through it. “You know the American Indians believed in putting hexes on people? This is called
Black Elk Speaks
—” and here he held the book cover-forward so that Melrose could see for himself. “Let me just read this bit here—”

Melrose really did not want to hear Black Elk speaking. But he allowed Wiggins to drone on, as he scanned the room and observed that most of the vases held now badly wilted bouquets and made a mental note to send some more. Whose name hadn't he used? Who was left as a likely . . . ah! Vivian! She was thoughtful enough to send some, and she had met Sergeant Wiggins a couple of years ago. Roses, Vivian would send. The book's snapping shut brought him out of his rosy reverie and he nodded. “Well, that's very interesting. But don't you think it's a bit, well,
contrived
as a method for murder? Putting a hex on somebody?”

“Nothing contrived about it, not if you're Indian.”

“But that would mean
three
hexes, Wiggins. What about Nell Hawes and Frances Hamilton?”

Wiggins had replaced Black Elk and sorted through the pile on the floor for another book, which he was now thumbing through. “What do you know about the Anasazi, Mr. Plant?”

“Enough to get by,” Melrose answered, looking round at the door, hoping Nurse Lillywhite would get her skates on and bring that tea.

HAVING DONE
his part to succor the sick, he left the hospital and walked down the Fulham Road and across to the Old Brompton Road, pausing for a moment to look into a shop window displaying the latest in shapeless fashion. Why was it that women wanted to walk around in frocks that looked like great big pockets into which they'd been stuffed? The mannequin would have looked the same standing on her head as on her feet.

Inside the Victoria and Albert museum, Melrose received his little metal tag in return for his money and made for the rooms that housed the museum's paintings.

Standing before Constable's painting of Stonehenge, he felt a little disappointed. The canvas was certainly large enough for its subject, the painting struck him as almost banal, saved largely by its sky. He knew Constable was famous for his skies, that he would go (as the artist said) “skying.” Here there were gray slabs of sky, like shattered rock. Yet the stones themselves looked as if a stiff wind might overturn them. They looked wet with new sunlight, listing, some of them fallen. There was something too watery, too filmy about the prospect, as if light were dissolving the stones. Fragile, smoky, spectral—and with the broad pastel sweep of a rainbow—it wasn't the image of Stonehenge Melrose had carried round in his mind all of these years. It struck him as romantic, almost sentimental, a noble ruin which could easily be assimilated by this landscape. Melrose had always felt one of the great appeals of Stonehenge was that it could not easily be absorbed by its surroundings; it did not blend. It was dark, gaunt, impenetrable—ironic, even. Hardly sentimental.

Nevertheless, Constable's rendition, rainbow and all, was certainly beautiful. Melrose stepped closer. Down in the corner Constable had painted a rabbit. He wanted to laugh.

Melrose walked aimlessly for a few moments in air that had the coldness of marble. Finally, he strayed into the exhibition of fashion design—a collection of women's wear of past decades and centuries. That outfit (Melrose thought), a plain but beautifully cut pale green
wool, would look good on Vivian. This one, on Miss Fludd. She was intruding upon his thoughts again, and he didn't even know her.

This mannequin in lemon yellow, he imagined setting out for afternoon tea at the Ritz or Brown's Hotel; that one, wearing midnight blue velvet and clutching an evening bag of seed pearls, he saw in the foyer of the Royal Albert Hall for the opening of
Swan Lake.
(Melrose had seen only one ballet in his entire life, that one.) She would be attending the ballet with her friend, the mannequin in peach silk, making a foursome, probably. In the next display was a mannequin dressed for an afternoon at Lord's or Wembley, or better still, for Newcastle races where (in company with her friends in gray linen and pale blue cotton) she would enjoy a picnic hamper from Fortnum's. Melrose could see them all clustered around the pulled-down rear door of their Range Rover.

(And this suggested to Melrose that Vivian, instead of sending flowers to Wiggins, would send a hamper from Fortnum's.)

God. Was he going crazy standing around these androgynous, glass-enclosed mannequins, devising little worlds? More important was his stance amongst real women. Vivian, Ellen, Polly, Miss Fludd. He had the tenderest feelings for all of them, really, but had little idea how they felt about him. To Vivian Rivington he must be pure old slippers (and there was that damned Italian Count Dracula to whom she was affianced); to Polly Praed and Ellen Taylor, he appeared to be a think tank, one extra editor to bolster their egos; and to Miss Fludd, he was, quite clearly, Nothing.

Yes, they were all wonderful in their way, and yet . . . and yet. Perhaps more important, why did all of these women elude him in some way? How had he missed out, surrounded by so many flesh-and-blood women, so much that he was standing here amongst wooden ones? He was embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that he clung to the adolescent belief in love at first sight; he believed in hearts leaping, stomachs plunging, speech faltering, and time stopping. Reason dashed upon rocks where the Lorelei sung. And the more he tried to wrench away, scrape away this adolescent attitude, the more it clung, limpet-wise, to his heart.

How was it that passion had passed him by? Was he blind to his own feelings? Perhaps because he was overly susceptible, he armed himself against those feelings with port and Old Peculier and his own hearth. Now as he looked from the lady in lemon yellow to the one in
amber silk, their hands raised in static attitudes of meeting or parting, Melrose could find nothing warm or hospitable, nothing to tempt him away from his fireplace.

He sighed, lingering before the sportily dressed lady in black, a raffish cap stuck on her curls, who seemed out of place beside her somber sisters. He was reminded of Ellen Taylor. But then he looked into the empty eyes of the mannequins and felt the enormous indifference of his surroundings.

Recalling how the Cripps kiddies climbed like slugs all over his Bentley several years back, Melrose found a parking space up the block from the house, near Perkins—Choice Meats and Game butcher shop. And it was out of this shop that the youthful perpetrators of East End blight were filing, yelling at the top of their lungs as they proceeded down Catchcoach Street with a couple of white-wrapped packets and, no doubt, their protection money.

After locking his car, Melrose looked past the suckling pig (wondering whoever would buy that around here) behind the shop's plate glass and into the dim interior. The kiddies had probably come merely on the innocuous errand of buying mince for their tea. However, “innocuous” and “Cripps” being a contradiction in terms, Melrose entered the shop, tinkling the tiny bell above the door, and looked around. Should he go back and inspect the meat locker? Assuming there was one? In Catchcoach Street, cows and hogs might have appeared in the bloom of health at the back door, only to meet Mr. Perkins's cleaver and go bubble-wrapped out the front. Melrose shuddered: it was the influence of Cripps effluvia that brought such bloodthirsty visions to mind.

But Mr. Perkins finally appeared out of the rear of his shop, and in a relatively fresh apron, his cheeks as pink as the porker in the window. He asked Melrose how he could be of service.