The Deer Leap (3 page)

Vivian Rivington looked from him to the checkbook and said, in a small voice, “Whatever are you talking about, Melrose?
You
don't want my house.”

“True. But at least you'd have it sold, and then you wouldn't always have to be zipping back and forth between Northants and Venice.” He smiled obligingly. “Sixty thousand. Seventy? We could avoid all the rigmarole of estate agents, et cetera.” The pen was poised over the checkbook, calling her bluff.

She cleared her throat. “Well. . . it's not
certain
I want to sell . . . . I mean, Franco's been talking about keeping the place. For a bit of a holiday now and then . . .”

Melrose returned pen and checkbook to pockets. “Count Franco Dracula will find Long Piddleton bereft of nubile maidens or convenient crypts in which to stuff them —”

The usually quiet Vivian flared. “I
told
you to stop calling him that.”

“Yes, really, Melrose,” said Trueblood. “Viv's looking absolutely grand since she got back. Not pale at all.”

Her hazel eyes flashed Trueblood a warning, too. “Both of you make me sick.” She started to wrap her terribly de la Renta scarflike thing about her, preparatory to rising.

Trueblood was right: she did look quite different whenever she returned from Italy — but it was a difference Melrose could have done without. He suspected the fiancé (who'd been hanging on for some time now) had a good deal to do with her highlighted, upswept hair, her lacquered nails, her fashion-plate clothes. Why was that crushed-leather belt, for instance, riding down somewhere round her hips? Melrose sighed. It would take a couple of weeks to get her back into the old Vivian-rut of twin-sets and nice, shiny, shoulder-length hair.

“Oh, sit down, for heaven's sake,” he said crossly.

She sat. “Dick's closing up, anyway.”

“Well, he'll have to deal with Withers, first.”

Mrs. Withersby, although her longevity in the Jack and Hammer might have earned her the sobriquet, could not be called a pillar of the pub. At the moment she was sprawled across the hearth, out cold.

Scroggs, who seemed to have forgotten his call to arms of nearly a half-hour ago, was holding out the telephone receiver. “For you, m'lord,” he shouted across to Melrose Plant.

Plant frowned. “Me? At this hour . . . ?” It would be Ruthven, he thought. Ardry End, like Manderley, must be burning.

The connection was dreadful. Cracklings all along the line, as if someone had indeed sent out the fire brigade.

It was a trunk call, much to his surprise.

More to his surprise, from
Polly Praed.
He could not believe
she
was calling
him.
“What are you talking about, Polly? You fell out of a call box?”

On her end, Polly Praed wanted to throttle him.
“No! I
didn't fall out,
she
did. . . no, no, no!” As if Melrose could see as well as hear across the miles, she shook her dark curls in a frenzy. “I wasn't
in
the call box with her, you idiot!”

Melrose smiled. “Idiot” was a backhanded compliment. Melrose seemed to be the only adult this pathologically shy woman could confront. Around children, animals, and the Natural World, she did well. He had first met her in her village of Littlebourne, in colloquy with a tree. “Look, this line is awful. Can you hear me?”

“Enough of you.”

He wondered what that meant.

She spaced her words out carefully, as one does when talking with the demented. “This woman just fell
over
me.”

“Where are you?”

Irritated beyond belief, she squeezed her eyes shut. She'd told him twice. Through clenched teeth, she spelled it: “A-S-H-D-O-W-N-D-E-A-N. Borders the New Forest. They won't let me leave—”

When Constable Pasco turned a questioning glance on her, she slid down the counter, putting the telephone on her lap, and whispered.

“Did police
tell
you she was murdered?”

“Well, good Lord, what else could she be?”

“Try to be calm, Polly. Now, I take it you want me to come straightaway.”

“If you like.”

If he liked. How gracious. The New Forest was over a hundred miles away.

“I was just thinking . . .” Polly sat there on the station floor, winding the telephone cord round her finger.

Silence.

“You were just thinking,” said Melrose, “that I could get Superintendent Jury down there.” Under pain of death, Polly could never have called Richard Jury herself, though she knew him well enough. “No.” Melrose had to hold the receiver away from his ear.

When she was through yelling, he brought it back. “Jury has probably the usual mess of pottage on his platter — rapes, murders, thefts — and, anyway, he couldn't go to Hampshire without a formal request from that constabulary, which I doubt will be forthcoming.”

Silence again on her end. He sighed. “Polly. Have you
any
idea what happened?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “The lady didn't pay her bill and Telecom did her in!”

Smash
went the receiver in Ashdown Dean.

D
etective Superintendent Richard Jury was not, on that same evening, working on a case and might have welcomed an interruption of the little seduction scene taking place in the bed-sit directly above his own flat.

Carole-anne Palutski (a.k.a. Glo Dee Vine, her “stage” name), whom he had first met a month ago when she was wrestling an armchair up the narrow steps of the Islington terrace house, was bending down to a minuscule table for a couple of bottles of Carlsberg, gyrating her Sassoon jeans with a toss or two not absolutely necessary for the task at hand. On one of the rear pockets was an appliquéd
Smartass,
and when she turned, Operation Carlsberg successfully completed, the little heart appliquéd on the crotch fairly throbbed. Carole-anne believed in advertising fore and aft.

“Want an Elephant, love?”

Since she was holding up the Carlsberg, she meant beer. Jury wondered what the answer would have been from someone with less restraint — or not old enough to be her father, as Jury certainly was. Twenty-two was what she said she was.
He let it pass, mentally ringing up nineteen. “One more and I'll run downstairs like Niagara,” he said. “You look a little wobbly yourself, Carole-anne.”

She lifted a skintight-jeaned leg. “It's only the shoes, love. Four-inch heels these ones must be. And call me ‘Glo,'” she said, probably for the umpteenth time that evening.

“No. It doesn't suit you.”

Carole-anne pouted and set about decapping the Carlsberg in such a way the beer foamed over and ran down the tank top that didn't need anything more to let him know how little lay between thin cotton and skin.

“Now look what I've gone and done,” she said wonderingly, as if she hadn't for a minute meant to go and do it. Beer was snaking down her naked torso to the jeans. Where the “waistline” was supposed to be, only Sassoon knew: it seemed to ride her pelvis at the moment, the belt holders threaded with some silky stuff that ended in little balls cavorting with the red heart.

“Come here,” said Jury, who was seated on the lumpy day-bed.

The false lashes lowered over deep blue eyes, her whole expression saying
at last.
She swayed over to him, still holding the beer bottle, and landing the viscous torso right in front of his mouth.

Jury took out his handkerchief and wiped her stomach.

Her mouth fell open and her arms fell down, clutching the bottles as if she'd wring their necks. He took one from her and swigged it.

The empty hand went to her thrust-out hip. “Well, ain't you a hoot and a scream, then? You can't be queer, so what's the argy? I mean, I ain't exactly an old dripper.”

“Not since I wiped the beer off.” Jury smiled.

Her face went red and he thought she was going to yell, but instead she fell down on the bed giggling. “Takes all
kinds.” She sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder. “You're my first failure.”

“Maybe I'm your first success.”

All she did was screw her face up and look at him as if he must be crazy.

“Men are thick on the ground, Carole-anne. You know what I'd do if you were my daughter?”

“Nah. What?”

“Kick your little Smartass right across the room. Maybe buy you some Gloria Vanderbilt jeans — at least the swan's harmless — and a cashmere sweater. Loose.”

“You like kinky sex? That it?”

Jury put his forehead against the Carlsberg and laughed. That was the only way she could look at anything.

“Well, I was only trying to pay you back,” she said. “You know, for helping me with the furniture and all that.”

“For God's sake, Carole-anne, can't a man help you without your having to go to bed with him?”

She thought that over while she picked at the bottle label. Carole-anne shrugged. “Tits for tat.”

The odd-lot furniture hadn't taken a removal van to bring it, just a lad driving an old pickup. Her earthly possessions were vested largely in herself. She was gorgeous. Navy blue eyes, waist-length hair, a shape that would show through potato sacks. He'd helped her stow the furniture, turn the tiny bed-sit into some sort of home, and then taken her out to one of the locals for a bite.

On that warm-for-September moving day, she'd been wearing bright blue sateen shorts, cut up above the line where buttocks met legs, and over this, as if for modesty, a short skirt of the same material. The modesty was very mild, however, since the skirt was slit up both sides, thereby emphasizing
the legwork underneath rather than hiding it. The weather hadn't been
that
warm, but he doubted Carole-anne dealt much in coats.

Whether you started at the floppy sandals and worked your way up, or at the spaghetti straps of the cut-off blouse and worked your way down, the effect on the men at the bar was unanimous. Heads moved in a synchronized turn that would have done a chorus line proud.

Studying the chalked specials on the little blackboard at the serving bar, Carole-anne didn't give the starers and hopeful-gropers a second thought. “Cottage pie, couple of Scotch eggs, chips, salad.” Then when she saw Jury was ordering sausages, she added, “And one of them ones, too.” She left Jury to see to the filling of the plate and slapped her sandals over to a little table, stuffed next to a banquette. Moses parting the Red Sea couldn't have made more space than this vision in blue sateen.

 • • • 

“You're a
what
?” said Jury, halfway into his sausage, watching Carole-anne stuffing in cottage pie.

“You needn't get huffy. A topless dancer.” She shrugged a shoulder in some unidentifiable direction. “Over to King Arthur's. Never been?”

“That sweatshop? Only when I was nicking one of the dips that works the passage.”

“You? A superintendent? Lower yourself, don't you?”

“This one's a personal friend. Listen, you shouldn't be doing stuff like that. What in hell would your parents think? They probably don't know.”

“Listen to him, would you?” She appeared to be addressing the Scotch egg. “Mum's dead. And Da—” She shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, I can't even remember him.” She said it matter-of-factly.

“I'm sorry. But you must have
some
family.”

Her deep blue eyes looked up, slightly puzzled. “Why? There's lots don't. Do you?”

“Not much of a one. A cousin. Lives in Newcastle. How've you been getting by, Carole-anne?”

Again, those blue eyes regarded him, this time with a sparkle. “You kiddin'?”

Jury said nothing.

She sighed. “Oh, okay. I'm not into that. What I want to be is a dancer or actress.”

“Thought you were one,” he said.

“God, you're wors'n a dozen mums. I mean a
real
actress. Tried out for
Chorus Line.
Almost got a part, too.”