The Man with a Load of Mischief (10 page)

The woman who opened the door was, by anyone's standards, dishy. A bit tartish, perhaps, the way she lounged there in the doorway in such fabulous disarray, her burgundy-red housecoat nearly falling off her shoulder. Wanting only to see her reaction, Jury said: “Mrs. Darrington?” and then watched her face register, in rapid succession, embarrassment, irritation, and sadness. In Jury's experience, the Darringtons of this world seldom married ladies with “modeling” jobs in London. Even if you met this one inside 10 Downing Street you might still think you were slumming.

“I'm Sheila Hogg. Long
o
, please. Oliver Darrington's secretary. You're the police, aren't you? Come in.” And she held the door wide, but not happily. Her manner was just a shade too bored to be convincing. In the circumstances, no one could be that offhand about a visit from the police.

He followed her through to the living room, divesting himself of his raincoat as he went. It was a handsome room into which she led him, with scrolled and pointed paneling around the door. On either side of the fireplace was a very comfortable
looking couch, and it was onto one of these that Sheila Hogg more or less dropped, before she remembered that Scotland Yard would also want to see Oliver. She excused herself, went to the bottom of the staircase in the hall, and called up that the police had come. When she came back, she pushed some newspapers and magazines from the couch and invited Jury to sit. On the butler's table in front of the couch were the leavings of a toast-and-coffee repast, and she offered coffee to Jury, though without much enthusiasm. He declined, and got to the point before she struck up a conversation about the weather, for lack of something better.

“What time did you and Mr. Darrington arrive at the Man with a Load of Mischief the evening Mr. Small was killed?”

She had taken a cigarette from a packet on the table and was waiting for Jury to give her a light. She screwed up her face at this question. “Nine, I think, perhaps nine-thirty. We came in on the heels of Marshall Trueblood.” As she leaned over to accept Jury's light, her robe fell open slightly; as he had suspected, there was nothing underneath. “Let's see: Agatha and Melrose Plant were already there. But then, Agatha's always first everywhere. Afraid she'll miss something. How Melrose stands her is beyond me. He's got the patience of a saint. Wonder how he's managed to stay single.”

Jury imagined Sheila probably thought of most men in terms of coupling. If not with her, at least with someone.

“Are you?” she asked, looking him up and down.

“Am I what?”

“Single.” Her glance was appreciative.

Jury was spared answering by a voice behind him: “Oh, for God's sake, Sheila. Whether the inspector's married is none of your damned business. Oliver Darrington, Inspector.” He held out a deeply tanned and well-tended hand, which Jury rose to shake. Turning once more to Sheila — Darrington seemed embarrassed by her very presence — he said, “And we usually dress for Scotland Yard, Sheila.”

Her robe showed a good deal of leg, curled up as she was on the couch. She stubbed out her cigarette and swung her legs down. “For heaven's sake, Oliver, he's the
police
. Nothing
bothers them, they're like doctors. Seen everything, haven't you, love?” And she turned on Jury a sultry and winning smile.

Jury simply smiled at her in answer. She might be a trollop, but Darrington was a prig, and he preferred trollops to prigs. Jury felt the same antipathy toward Darrington as he had toward Isabel Rivington.

Darrington was wearing a fawn-colored jacket, exactly the shade of his hair, an expensive silk shirt, open at the neck, into which was stuffed an equally expensive ascot. It made Jury slightly self-conscious of his own blue necktie, slightly askew. The man was handsome, but with a profile a little too Greek, features a bit too chiseled; and, like a statue, he seemed chilly and unbending.

Darrington poured himself some coffee and told Jury the same story the others had told — or hadn't, since they were all looking at it through wine-starred eyes. The only thing he added was that Matchett had supplied the champagne. “Holidays, and all that. He can be very generous at times.” The implication was that at other times he couldn't.

“Talking about Simon, are you?” said Sheila, who had come back into the room in about the same condition she had left, having merely exchanged the revealing robe for an equally revealing one-piece, green velvet lounging-pajama thing, the long zipper of which still dipped below breast level. The secretive smile that played on her lips suggested to Jury that Matchett might have been generous in more ways than one. However, this did not dispel Jury's impression that Sheila's main mission in life was Oliver Darrington.

Oliver said he had not talked to Small and had not noticed anyone going down to the cellar except the old waiter at one point.

“Drunk as lords, we both were,” put in Sheila, winking at Jury through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He noticed the hand holding the cigarette had very long fingernails. Secretary, my eye.

“So you neither of you saw this William Small after you went into dinner?” They shook their heads.

“I can't recall seeing him either after
or
before,” said Darrington.

“And Ainsley—?” They both shook their heads. “But you were there the night Ainsley was murdered?”

“Yes. Sheila left a bit before I did. We had a . . . misunderstanding. Over my buying Vivian Rivington a drink.” A smile played on Darrington's face, as if such misunderstandings were a source of constant amusement to him.

A coal fell in the grate and lay smoldering. It had nothing on Sheila. “Don't be silly,” was her weak response.

Jury remembered Lady Ardry's account — albeit undependable — of the various relationships between these people. “I understand Mr. Matchett is engaged to Miss Rivington. Vivian.” Simultaneously, there came an angry
no
from Darrington and a
yes
from Sheila.

Oliver blustered. “Well, there's been some talk of it. But Vivian would never throw herself away on someone like Matchett.”

“Who would she throw herself away on, love?” Icicles hung from every word.

Jury felt almost sorry for Sheila. She was shallow but not, he thought, brainless. Whereas, he suspected Darrington was a bit of both. He couldn't quite square this with the crisp style of the Bent mysteries, and said, “I've read your book, Mr. Darrington. Only the first one, I must admit.”

“Bent on Murder
?” Oliver preened. “Yes, that was probably the best.”

Sheila looked away, as if she were uneasy. Jury wondered why she should be disturbed by the mention of Darrington's books. It was a point worth pursuing, thought Jury, who often annoyed his colleagues by not sticking to the facts. But what were “the facts,” strained through the grid of the individual perception, assuming even that one wanted to tell the truth? And most people didn't because most people had something to hide. He was almost glad this lot had been drunk — or were said to have been — it made them realize that the picture was blurred. He could always tell when something had shifted
center, and something had definitely shifted with Sheila. It wasn't the mention of Vivian Rivington, either; that had been pure, straightforward jealousy. Whatever this was, it was not straightforward. She was staring at the air over his head.

“I wonder if you might have a copy of your second book?”

Darrington's eyes flicked toward the bookcase beside the door and then quickly away. Sheila got up from the couch and walked over to the fireplace, avoiding Jury's eyes. She threw the stub of her cigarette into the fire and then started, yes, washing her hands together. The Lady Macbeth syndrome. Jury had seen it often enough.

“The second one wasn't too well received,” said Darrington, making no move toward the bookcase.

Jury did it for him. There they were, the colorfully dust-jacketed Bent mysteries, all in a row. “Isn't this it?” Jury pulled it from the bookcase and watched Darrington dart a quick glance at Sheila. “Would you mind if I borrowed it? And the third also? Your Superintendent Bent might give me an idea or two.”

Darrington recovered himself, and said, “If you want to bore yourself, go right ahead.” His laugh was unconvincing.

They were both relieved to see Jury out.

 • • • 

Jury glanced at the map Pluck had made for him as he walked down the High Street, at the X showing the Rivingtons' house. Why couldn't these people have been gathered together for him fifteen minutes after the murder, the family all grouped in the drawing room, choking on their tea, the servants all cringing in the kitchen of some arcane country house? All there nice and neat. Here he had to go mucking about over half of Northants, and the trail days old, so cold that a trained bloodhound couldn't snuffle it out. For a moment, looking down the High Street where the winter light glittered on the gum-drop houses and danced off the snowy roofs, he wondered if he had landed bangup in a fairy-tale town on this Christmas Eve.

The Rivingtons' house was the large Tudor structure just on the other side of the bridge, in the square. When he got closer
to it, from the vantage point of the humpbacked bridge, he could see it was two houses together really, quite large.

 • • • 

This morning Isabel Rivington was dressed in a camel's hair suit and a white silk blouse, looking just as elegant as she had yesterday. Although, frankly, Jury would have preferred Sheila Hogg, who was a bit steamier. This one came on as a kind of piranha. Jury wouldn't have been surprised to see a finger or two missing when he left.

“I was hoping to see your sister — Vivian, is it? — today, too.”

“She's up at the vicarage.”

“I see.”

“The night of the seventeenth, the night Small was murdered, do you recall seeing him in the bar before dinner?”

Having invited Jury to sit down, she plucked a cigarette from a china holder and leaned toward the match he held out. She seemed in no hurry to get down to answers. “If he was the one sitting with Marshall Trueblood, well, yes, I saw him I suppose. But I didn't take much notice. There were several people in the saloon bar.”

“And you didn't go down to the wine cellar after his body had been found?”

“No.” She crossed silky legs, down one of which the firelight made a band of gold. “I'm a bit of a coward about that sort of thing.”

Jury smiled. “Aren't we all? Your sister did though.”

“Vivian? Well, Vivian's—” She shrugged, as if discounting Vivian's predilection to look at dead bodies. “And she's not my sister, exactly. We're stepsisters.”

“You're the trustee of your sister's estate?”

“Barclay's and I, Inspector. What's that to do with the murders of two strangers?” She seemed to expect him to answer.

He didn't. “Then you don't have complete freedom in deciding how the money will be spent.” Her expression shifted from bored acquiescence to irritation. “When does she come into the money herself?” Jury asked.

Her heavy gold bracelet clanged against the ashtray as she tapped her cigarette. “When she's thirty.”

“Rather late, isn't it?”

“Her father — my stepfather — was a bit of a chauvinist. Women can't handle money — that sort of thing. Actually, she could have got it any time she married, by the terms of the will. Otherwise, when she's thirty.”

“And when will that be?” From the way she was looking everywhere except at him, Jury concluded he had found a sore spot. There was something about Isabel Rivington to which he took an instinctive and near-immediate dislike, something dissolute. She was beautiful in a sluggish sort of way that bespoke overindulgence in syrupy liqueurs and two-martini lunches. But her skin was still very good, the pores tight and fine, and her hands well kept. The nails were lacquered in a modish brown-rose shade and so long that the tips were beginning to curl in at the ends. It might be difficult to strangle a man and avoid scratching him with nails like that. He wondered sometimes if that part of his mind which registered such details even as he was talking about other things might not simply have frozen over, impervious to the human tragedy, catching up facts like flies in amber.

“Vivian'll be thirty in about six months.”

“Then she'll have control of her money?”

Angrily, Isabel stubbed out her cigarette, the end fragmenting like a shell. “Why do you make it sound as if I'm juggling the books?”

All innocence, Jury said, “Was I? All I'm attempting to do is gather the facts.”

“I still don't see what this has to do with two men coming here and getting killed.”

“How long have you lived in Long Piddleton?”

“Six years,” she answered and glumly drew another cigarette from a silver case.

“And where before?”

“London,” was her unembellished answer.

London, thought Jury, had certainly discovered Long Piddleton. “A bit different, isn't it?”

“I've noticed,” she said.

“Vivian's — your stepsister's — father was quite wealthy, wasn't he?”

The subject of money having arisen again, she turned her head sharply away, and did not answer.

“There was some sort of accident, wasn't there? Miss Rivington's father?”

“Yes. When she was about seven or eight. He was killed by a horse kicking him. He died instantly.”

Jury noticed this brief recital was not very remorseful. “And her mother?”

“Died right after Vivian was born. My own mother died about three years after marrying James Rivington.”

“I see.” Jury watched her as she crossed and recrossed her legs, nervously making little jabs toward the ashtray with a fresh cigarette. He thought he'd take a shot in the dark. “Your stepsister is going to marry Mr. Matchett, is she?” Not precisely true, but it riveted her attention on him. Her fingers were poised over the ashtray, her head snapped around, her feet were planted firmly on the floor. Then she smoothed out her expression, and bland indifference reasserted itself. Jury wondered if her interest in Simon Matchett were more than merely friendly.