The Dirty Duck (12 page)

When they found her, Honey Belle would have hated to see what the hands sliding over her had done to that beautiful bod.

 • • • 

“ ‘Brightness falls from the air,/Queens have died young and fair.' ” Jury looked up from the theatre program on which Lasko's torch shone and then down at the mutilated body of Honey Belle Farraday.

It was ten-thirty and dark on Wood Street, except for the lights from the torches and the dull blue of the sodium streetlight. The blood, and there was a lot of it, had not had time to congeal. They had to be careful where they stepped.

She had been found by a couple coming from the other end of the block who had been having a late snack in the Golden Egg. The woman had had to be sedated and taken to hospital; her husband had just managed to ring up the police before he got sick all over the telephone kiosk. He was at the Stratford station.

“The doctor says she's been dead about an hour,” said Lasko. “We got the call twenty minutes ago. That means she was lying here forty minutes, and no one saw her?”

Jury looked up and down the street. “Nothing open but the Golden Egg, no pubs nearby, no traffic. It's not surprising. Did you check her for prints? The neck? The throat?”

“What
neck?
What
throat?” said Lasko, peevishly. “Look at her, man.”

“I've looked,” said Jury. “I was thinking more of under the chin. Which is how she was probably held, chin pulled back. The rest of the stuff came later.”

Stuff
was probably the right word. After the throat had been slit, laid
open back to the cartilage, the torso had been slashed from breastbone nearly to the thigh.

“So there it is again, then,” said Lasko, wearily, handing the theatre program back to the Scene of Crimes man.

They watched as the remains of Honey Belle Farraday were placed onto a polyethylene sheet. Jury didn't envy the police photographer. The bright flashes made blurred and misty arcs in the air like tracers and illuminated the night and the white faces of the curious who had gathered at both ends of the street. Police cars, red lights whirring, were stationed at either end and barricades erected. Jury could just see the
Times
and
Telegraph
people racing down the M-1.

“This poem . . . it reminds me of the first one,” said Lasko.

“It is the first one. Part of it, I mean.” Jury took out the facsimiles of the theatre programs and read:

“Beauty is but a flower

That wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair . . .”

“Where's it from, anyway? Shakespeare?”

Jury shook his head. “I don't know. It sounds familiar, but I don't know.” He watched the sheet containing the young girl, shrouded on a stretcher, shoved into the waiting ambulance. He thought of Farraday. The poor bastard. Jury hurt more for the stepfather than for the natural mother. Amelia Blue Farraday, he bet, could be counted on for a royal case of hysterics.

“I'll tell you what worries me,” said Jury.

“What?”

“How long is this poem?”

J
ury had been right about the hysterics.

If there was ever any doubt about Amelia Blue's having been an actress, it was quickly dispelled by her performance over her daughter's murder.

Because that's just what Jury thought it was—a performance. And it was not because he had grown callous in his twenty-odd years with Scotland Yard. After recovering from her initial swoon on the love seat in her Hilton sitting room (or near-swoon: it hadn't put her out of action long), there was a flying at Farraday with fingernails unsheathed, as if she were blaming him for having brought them to this murdering town in the first place; there was a raging at Lasko and Jury, the messengers who had brought the bad news; there was a stalking of the room, as if she'd got the stage blocking down pat. Go to window. Stare out. Move to table. Pick up picture of Honey Belle taken last summer.
Only
last summer, with her pack of boy friends at the beach. Clasp frame against bosom.

And she had the bosom for clasping. Perhaps the seed of Jury's suspicion of Amelia's maternal feelings had been planted by Penny as they sat by the River Avon.

If Farraday was a self-made man, Jury could see why. His control was far more convincing than the mother's lack of it. Danger, a statue that had suddenly decided to move and speak, had subdued his former anger over the boy's being missing, his loudmouthed demands for more and better police investigation, his threats regarding the American Embassy. His generally throwing his weight around.

It was instead Amelia Blue who had thrown one or two things; it was her husband who had restrained her.

“Hush up, Amelia. It won't do no good, acting this way—”

“You!
What do—well, maybe
you
just don't
care!
Maybe except only that pore, sweet li'l thing's not around anymore for you to—”

Farraday hit her. Not hard, but a backhanded slap that didn't budge her from where she stood, hands on hips, cheeks flaming. Her brightly rouged lips smiled one of the nastiest smiles Jury had ever seen.

They had all seemed to have forgotten Penny. She had gone outside to sit on a hard little bench in the shadowy darkness of the balcony, as if shadows and darkness were her lot in life. Leaving Lasko to referee and try to question the Farradays, Jury went out to sit beside her.

Penny was staring straight ahead at nothing or at some unspeakable scene being played out in her mind. Her long hair had been done in an awkward, loose braid up on top of her head, and it was spilling down now, the small flower that had been wound in it dead. The hairdo and the shapeless cotton dress at whose folds she was absently plucking Jury assumed had been donned for that night's performance of
Hamlet,
from which she had come back to find this news.

It was odd. It was Penny who really would have made the actress. Her silence was heavy with tragedy, but real tragedy. In her ill-fitting gown and disheveled hair, he half-expected her to say, again,
“Here's rosemary . . . that's for remembrance.”

But she didn't. He felt he must break her silence, for he knew it had a lot to do with guilt, and he put his arm around her.

In a whisper worse than a scream, she finally said, “Where's Jimmy?” And she started to sob, covering her face with her hands, leaning against Jury.

He knew what connection she was making. It was what Jury had been wondering too, ever since they'd found Gwendolyn Bracegirdle. Someone seemed to have it in for the people on Honeysuckle Tours.

Jury pulled her closer and said, “We'll find him; not to worry.” How often had he uttered those empty words today?

Penny leaned away from him and wiped her hand indelicately under her nose and down her dress. He pulled out his handkerchief, which she took and held but didn't use, except to twist it in her hands.

“Oh, Gawd! I feel so
guilty.
All them awful things I said about Honey Belle . . . well, but I can't take them back now. And there was times I just
wished
she'd—die.”

The stricken glance at Jury told him she knew she'd have to pay for that searing bit of honesty. “The Lord will strike me
dead
for all them things I said.” And she looked away, quickly.

Unintentional verse, he thought, like an amateur's attempt to imitate
something like the brilliance of that poem which he had just read:
Brightness falls from the air, / Queens have died young and fair.

Jury increased his hold on Penny Farraday.

And wondered, as she had wondered, where her brother was.

 • • • 

Fifteen minutes later Lasko and the Chief Superintendent were arguing in the lobby of the Hilton, while Jury, smoking a cigarette, looked on.

“Unless we arrest them all—and on the basis of
what
evidence?—I don't see how we can keep the whole damned tour in Stratford if they want to go to London. Except Farraday. He wants to stay here till the kid's found, but with the wife hysterical and wanting to get out . . . I mean, it's not like Stratford-upon-Avon has fond memories for her—”

“She's crazy, then. Either crazy or guilty.” Then Sir George, apparently not wanting to neglect Scotland Yard altogether, invited Jury to join the argument. “According to what you told me the other girl said, the woman was jealous as hell of her daughter—”

Lasko tipped back his bowler. “But to do
that
to her own daughter—”

“For God's sake, Sam. What are you going to say next? Blood is thicker than water? Damnit, the people on this tour are
suspects.”

“I just said it: on what evidence do I hold them? How can we say those two women weren't murdered by some Stratford psycho?”

“Some poetry-loving psycho.” Sir George snorted. “I'll bet. Have you found out where those four lines of poetry come from?”

“No,” said Lasko.

“No? Why not? You waiting for the library to open in the morning?”

“It's not that easy; we don't have any Elizabethan experts on the force—”

Jury interrupted. “You've got one among the suspects.”

They both stared at him.

“Schoenberg. He knows a hell of a lot about the period. Assuming it
is
that period. He's writing some sort of book on Christopher Marlowe.”

“Which hotel's he at, Sam?”

Lasko checked his list. “Hathaway.”

“Go over there and talk to him.” Then, morosely, Sir George regarded Jury. “I expect if they must go to London, they must.”

Jury looked back, expressionless. He had a feeling that neither Sir George nor Lasko minded all that much.

 • • • 

Wasn't it bad enough, wondered Melrose Plant, that he should be missing out on a murder, without having to sit here in the lobby of the Hathaway
Hotel at nearly midnight, listening to Harvey Schoenberg wax anecdotal? Robert Cecil (Bob), son of Lord Burghley; Tom Watson (Tom), friend of Marlowe; Robert Greene (another Bob), friend of Marlowe and enemy of Shakespeare—Harvey Schoenberg had trotted out all the hottest gossip about them over cigars and brandy and he was now into the adventures of Wally Raleigh.

“Are you referring,” asked Melrose frostily, “to
Sir Walter
Raleigh?” For some reason, he felt bound to defend the dignity of all of these dead Elizabethans, spies or not. He only wished that Sir Walter Raleigh had been there to see Vivian back to the Hathaway. Sir Walter could, no doubt, have found some remarkably gentlemanly way of extricating himself from the hands of Harvey Schoenberg.

“Sure. You know what he was up to,” said Harvey, now comfortably settled in the companion armchair to Plant's.

“Vaguely.” Melrose rattled his magazine. “Had something to do with the Babbington Plot against Queen Elizabeth.”
Why
was he encouraging this computer programmer to talk?

“No, no, no.
That
was Tom Babbington.”

“Well, I
did
deduce that Babbington had something to do with the Babbington Plot.” Melrose adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles and went back to
Country Life,
a magazine he normally loathed. But he had snatched it up from the reading table to hide behind. He leafed quietly through it while Schoenberg filled him in on the details of Sir Walter Raleigh's alleged atheism and passing out of seditious books in his efforts to keep the pot on the boil regarding Mary, Queen of Scots. Melrose looked at horses, looked at houses, looked at hounds, while Harvey told him about Kit Marlowe's barroom brawls, expending rather a lot of energy on the one in Hog Lane. Or ones. Kit always seemed to be fighting. Melrose yawned, and then suddenly grew alert.

Saved. Superintendent Jury was coming through the door of the hotel, saw him sitting here, obviously realized he was in the throes of
taedium vitae,
and quickly came over with the other detective, Lasko.

“Detective Superintendent Richard Jury. Mr. Schoenberg,” said Melrose, and watched Harvey's face light up. Someone new.

“Just call me Harve.” He grabbed Jury's hand.

“Sure, Harve,” said Jury with what struck Melrose as revolting warmth of manner. But that was Jury. “This is Detective Sergeant Lasko.”

Harvey shook hands. “I've just been filling Mel in on a few things about Shakespeare. See, I'm a computer—”

“Yes. Mr. Plant told me. What I was chiefly interested in, though, was your expertise when it comes to the Elizabethans.”

Scotland Yard calling on Harvey Schoenberg for advice? Melrose wondered if he hadn't landed in the middle of the Mad Hatter's tea party.

Schoenberg, of course, nearly gagged in his willingness to help out. And both of them came near to gagging when Lasko told them the reason.

“My God,” said Harvey, looking a little green. “Well . . . but fire away. What do you want to know?”

Lasko repeated the four lines of poetry. “Sound familiar to you?”

But comprehension failed to dawn in Harvey's face as he mouthed them over again. Indeed, he seemed totally vulnerable without his Ishi. Finally, he shook his head. “Sorry. No comprende.”

“ ‘Brightness falls from the air . . . ' That sounds awfully familiar.” Melrose said it several times, as if the brightness were indeed drifting down in silver motes.

“That ‘Beauty is but a flower'—that's not the first line of a poem. Otherwise, we'd have pegged it by now. But there's no way to index every line of every poem—”

Harvey ran his hands through his hair. “Oh,
God!
If only I had my IBM 8000.”