The Man with a Load of Mischief (11 page)

“Where did you hear that?” she asked, casually.

Jury immediately switched the subject. “Tell me about this accident to James Rivington.”

She sighed, a woman whose patience was wearing thin. “It was in Scotland one summer. When I was down from school. God, I hated it — the north of Scotland. Sutherland. An isolated, windy place — nothing to do but count the rocks and trees and heather. No-man's-land, as far as I was concerned. We couldn't even keep servants, except for one old cook.
They
loved it — Vivian and James. Well, Vivian had this horse she specially liked, stabled with the others out back. One evening Vivian and her father had an awful row, and she got so furious she just rushed right out in the dark and jumped up on that horse and he — James, I mean — came out after her. They were yelling at one another, and the horse shied and kicked her father in the head.”

“It must have been very traumatic for your sister — being so young, to have that happen, and herself up on the horse at the time. Was your sister very spoiled? Did she get much supervision?”

“Spoiled? No, not really. She had a lot of fights with James. As to supervision, I suppose she had her complement of nannies and so forth. And James was pretty strict, certainly. As I said, a bit of a chauvinist. Of course, Vivian was quite sick about the accident. I even think it might have . . .” She paused and picked up the smoldering cigarette, which had turned half to ash in the glass ashtray.

“ ‘Might have —'?”

Isabel blew out a narrow stream of smoke. “Unhinged her mind a bit.”

Strange that these were Lady Ardry's very words. “You think your sister is psychotic?”

“No. I didn't mean that. But she's certainly a recluse. You wonder why we left London. It wasn't my choice, certainly. All she does is sit and write poetry.”

“That's not so odd that one would call it ‘unhinged,' is it?”

“Why must people feel they've got to protect Vivian even before they've met her?” Her smile was tight.

Jury didn't answer. “Did you benefit by your stepfather's will?”

A shadow brushed her face, as if a raven had flown past. “What you are working up to — isn't it? — is what will happen to me when Vivian gets her money. You're dead wrong if you think she's going to throw me out in the snow.”

Jury studied her for a moment, pocketed his notebook, and rose. “Thank you Miss Rivington. I'll be leaving now.”

As he followed her to the front door, Jury pondered on the geography of Scotland, and something an artist friend of his had said about the quality of the light there. There was something in her story of the death of James Rivington that sounded very fishy.

 • • • 

Jury took a deep breath of fresh air and observed the imprint of his boots in the fine crust of new snow; he looked longingly
at the sparkling expanse of whiteness which was the village square. As he crossed the road, he saw two children on the bridge. They looked about eight or nine, and were rolling the fresh snow into balls along the gray stone balustrade. It was an odd little bridge with two semicircular arches. As he passed the bridge, he solemnly bade the children good-day and wondered what it was like to be that age again, and have your cheeks turn pink in the cold and your hair stand up in wet spikes. It wasn't until he'd gone another fifty feet and turned to look back that he realized they were following him. They stopped suddenly and pretended to be inspecting one of the pollarded limes along the High Street.

He started back toward them, and they were set to cut and run, when he called out. Clearly, they knew who he was. Trying to keep a straight face, he drew out his badge in the worn leather folder and displayed it. “Here, now. Were you following me?”

Their eyes widened into plates, the girl pinched her lips together, and they both shook their heads violently.

Jury cleared his throat, and in very official-sounding tones said, “I'm about to go into that tearoom just there” — and he pointed across to the bakery — “and have my morning coffee. Probably they serve chocolate, and I'd like to put a few questions to you, if you wouldn't mind coming along.”

The boy and girl stared at each other, trying to read permission in one another's faces, then back at Jury, their expressions mingling fear, puzzlement, and temptation. Temptation, of course, won out. They nodded, and one on each side of him, the three of them tramped along to the square.

The Gate House Tearoom and Bakery was a stone building that had once served the purpose from which it took its name: a little house above a lych-gate, through whose narrow arch one could go up the walk to the Church of St. Rules. It was up a very short lane that led directly off the square, with the church beyond it. The tearoom was on the level above the narrow passageway, and the bakery was below.

Around one half of the square were tile-hung and half-timbered cottages whose upper stories jutted out over the narrow
walk that ran as a perimeter around the square. On the west side of the square, there were other cottages, interspersed with a sweet shop, a narrow little dry goods store, and a post office. Most of the shops were back beyond the bridge, but these had smuggled their way into these quieter surroundings. They were all mixed higgledy-piggledy, as if glued together by some child.

Jury imagined the square leafy and green in summer. In the middle was a duck pond, and from this distance he could see the ducks bunched up on one side, bobbing within the reedy marsh grasses like buoys. The snow was coming down a little more now, and the square was the most tempting length of shiny, crusty, unbroken snow Jury had ever seen. Not a track on it, not a print. He stopped as they reached the edge of the square, and reflected that it was not really a good example for the children to have their man from New Scotland Yard, that bastion of Law and Order, go cutting across the park when there were perfectly good paths meant for going around it. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed they were both looking up at him, waiting for him to make his move. The ways of the Yard were, and would ever be, inscrutable.

Jury coughed, blew his nose, and then said sternly: “What do you two know about identifying prints? Footprints? You don't happen to remember seeing any about the Jack and Hammer? Any strange ones? About this size?” Jury planted his outsized Wellington firmly in the fresh snow layering the green. It made a delicious scrunch.

They looked from his large print to him and both, again, shook their heads. He thought he might as well make it edifying. “Do you know the difference between the prints of a man running and a man walking?” Mystified, their small heads flicked back and forth. “Are you willing to help out the Yard in this matter, then?”

Now their heads were bobbing up and down just as furiously.

“Very well. What's your name?” he asked the boy.

“James.” The boy spat it out, then clamped his lips tightly, as if he might have given away secret information.

“Good. Now then, what's yours?”

But the girl only lowered her head and plucked at the hem of her coat.

“Hmmm. Then it must be James, too. Very well, James and James.” He waited for her to mumble some correction, but she merely kept her head down, though he thought he saw a smile, like a mouse, creep across her downturned mouth.

“Listen carefully, now. It might be most important in our investigations. You, James, I want you to
run
, fast as you can, up to that duck-pond, and wait. And you, James” — and he put his hand on the girl's shoulder — “I want you to
walk
to the pond, making circles as you go. Every once in a while, walk around in a circle.”

Both of them looked at him as if they were waiting for a gun to go off, and when he nodded, the boy took off with something equivalent to the speed of light, sending up clouds of snow behind him. The girl started walking very slowly and carefully, planting her feet firmly, and every now and again making an ever-widening circle. Jury himself chose a smooth, unbroken expanse of snow and crunched over it as noisily as he could. When he reached the pond, the boy was puffing from the exertion and the girl was still out there making circles. Finally, she circled her way to where they were standing.

All three of them then stood looking back at their handiwork.

“Excellent,” said Jury. “Notice, now, these tracks where you were running, and how only the first part of the boot, the ball of the foot, hits the snow. And notice how”— he crouched down and ran his gloved finger around the girl's print — “one tends to lean to the outside when one goes round in a circle.”

Both of them nodded vigorously.

“And now, perhaps I can set you a riddle.” Jury and the children walked round to the other side of the duck pond. The ducks remained undisturbed, their heads still tucked beneath their wings. He looked across the remaining expanse of nice, crusty, unbroken snow, and said, “All three of us will walk about five feet apart so our tracks are completely separate, to the edge of the road. Let's go.”

It took them only two or three minutes and then they turned and looked back. Jury felt wonderful, like a man with an addiction
who had just had a fix. He tried to wipe the smile from his face as he looked over the ransacked greensward, all that fine, clear glittering, unbroken white, now a crisscross of black marks and potholes.

For a moment as they stared at him, he forgot what lesson they were supposed to be learning. Oh, yes, the riddle. “Now suppose right here, right in front of us, there was a body.” The girl slid behind him and grabbed on to his coat. “And
suppose
the three people who had made these prints were back there now at the duck pond. How did they get back without there being footprints going in that direction?” It was the old Reichenbach Falls gambit, but he doubted they had read “The Final Problem.” He didn't think he'd put it quite sensibly, anyway. Jury scratched his head. Why would the suspect go
back
to the duck pond?

No one answered his riddle. He turned and started to walk backward. “Like this!”

The boy grinned all over his face and showed a large gap of missing teeth. The girl giggled, but quickly clapped her mittened hand over her mouth.

Jury held up a finger like a teacher gathering the attention of his class. “Always remember: when a murder's been done” — they gasped at the words — “there'll always be something odd, something funny, something that oughtn't to be there.” How he wished it were true; it sounded bookish, though. “I appreciate your help. Let's go in. Here's the tearoom.” A small, white sign, neatly lettered in italics, was stuck in one corner of the upstairs bay window and announced:
Morning Coffee Now Being Served
. They walked up a dark enclosed staircase to the floor above, the redolent bakery-aroma perfuming the passageway. As they removed their wet outer garments, an elderly woman, pleasant-looking like a pudding, came forth from a curtained alcove at the rear. Jury ordered up coffee and hot chocolate and a plate of biscuits, then added to that cakes, scones, jam, and cream.

“Well, now!” said Jury heartily, and rubbed his hands toward the fireplace before which the lady had kindly seated them. The boy gaped and grinned, his hair sticky with snow standing
up in even pointier points. The girl turned her face down to the tabletop as if she were studying her reflection, Narcissus-wise, in its polished top. Jury did not mind their lack of response. He had not supposed that once inside they would hold forth on the molecular structure of the universe.

The coffee and cakes finally arrived, with fresh cream and jam and buttered scones, enough to feed several times their party. The two Jameses didn't need to be invited to tuck in. The boy held a scone in one hand and a fairy cake in the other and took turns biting. The girl pinched up a fruit scone with her little mouse fingers and nibbled away as if she might scurry back to her hole if Jury so much as peeped.

Before the elderly waitress left, Jury showed his identification, and asked if he might speak with the proprietress, Miss Ball.

The effect was dramatic. The poor woman's cheeks flamed and her hand flew to her face. The guilty flee, thought Jury, sighing, when no man pursueth, and so do the innocent.

“Just you wait, sir,” she said, retreating by walking backward to the door.

The children had nearly cleaned the cake plate, and Jury thought they would probably be ill, but after all it was Christmas, and they didn't look well off enough to expect many sugarplums. He was pouring himself some coffee from the pot, when a woman in an apron (Miss Ball, he presumed) walked in — though that was a sedate way of putting it. He thought she might have trounced anything — cats, dogs, muffins — in her path to him, as if he were someone long overdue from her past.

“
You're
Chief Inspector Jury, from New Scotland Yard.”

He rose and extended a hand. “Yes, I am. Miss Ball?”

Miss Ball nodded as if she were ecstatic to be Miss Ball. She took a seat. “I was just down in the bakery making up the Christmas stollen — there's such a lot of orders for it, and the day after tomorrow being Christmas, and . . .” She paused, noticing Jury's morning-coffee companions. “If it isn't the Double children. Wherever did you meet up with them?” She did not wait for Jury's answer. “You're here, I know, about these awful murders —”

As if they had suddenly concluded they had been lured here by cocoa and cakes, the Doubles exchanged glances and jumped up. “We got to go, we do. Me Mum'll be mad as hoppers —” And he was backing away from the table. For James, it was quite a lengthy speech. The girl still kept her eyes fastened on the cake plate. Just before she turned to run, she crept back to Jury and gave him a little pinch on the arm, probably as close she could come to a kiss. Then she whipped the last fairy cake from the plate and cut for the door.