The Man with a Load of Mischief (12 page)

Betty Ball, pursing up her small mouth, said, “They never so much as thanked you! Kids these days!”

Jury smiled, wondering at the oddity of adult concepts of justice. Then he said, “Miss Ball, I understand you made a delivery to Mr. Matchett's inn on the night the, ah, murdered man was found. Or rather, you were there in the afternoon?” She nodded. “And you went around to the back?”

“Yes. That's what I always do there. The kitchen's in back.”

“Did you notice anything at all out of place, or different?”

She shook her head.

“The cellar door was just as usual?”

“It's like I told the superintendent: I didn't see lights in the cellar, nor anything like that.” Suddenly she turned and called to “Beatrice,” who appeared from behind the flowered curtain as a gangly teenage girl, chewing gum ruminatively, like a cow its cud. “Get on with it, my girl! Get the Inspector some more coffee! I'm not paying you to sit back there and read those film magazines!”

Beatrice slopped over, looking ever-so-slightly in the family way. Jury allowed her to take the pot, but refused Betty Ball's offer of fresh scones. From eyes the color of a citrus peel, she looked sorrowfully at Jury, as if her baked goods were her only hedge against spinsterhood.

“Was it raining hard, Miss Ball? I understand a storm had come up.”

“That's right. I was nearly drenched just going from the car to the kitchen and back. Have you talked with Melrose Plant yet? He's terribly clever, really.” Jury listened as she sang Melrose
Plant's praises, and in the way her eyes lit up, he wondered if she had Cinderella designs on the lord of the manor.

 • • • 

By the time Jury left the Gate House Tearoom, the snow had resettled itself in a clean, unbroken sweep all across the square. Only if he looked hard could he see the tracks made by himself and the children, and even as he looked the nearer ones were closing up like dents in dough. The winds had died down and stopped driving the snow at a hard slant, so once again it was falling at a slow and steady pace, the same wet, fat flakes of the morning. Looking at the spire of the Church of St. Rules, he decided to see the vicar later. A long walk in the snow — the mile or so to the Bicester-Strachans and Ardry End — was what he needed. Think of all the fresh tracks he could make.

 • • • 

Shortly beyond the village limits, it was pure country. Snow and ice hung in tatters from hedgerows. Had he been a writer, he thought he could have done no better than to attempt to eulogize the English hedgerow, long and limitless stretches of yew, thorn, or copper beech, low sanctuaries for every kind of flower pushed from the field by the plow, and for so many kinds of birds. Jury sighed as he clumped on with wet black boots, at one point startling a cock pheasant into flashing upward in a flurry of green and chestnut. Jury's face was stiff with the cold, and he could think of worse things than to be greeted at the end with a crackling fire and a glass of vintage port.

 • • • 

Instead, he was greeted by the voice of Lorraine Bicester-Strachan, addressing him from the queenly perch of her chestnut mare: “If you've come about the washing-up machine, would you mind going round back?”

Jury had just applied his hand to the large brass door-knocker, when he heard a sound of something raking around the corner of the house, and looked up to see horse and rider pushing through the trees. It was perfectly clear to him, standing on the Bicester-Strachans' front step, that Mrs. Bicester-Strachan did not think he was a repairman. He was hardly dressed for the
part, nor was there a van in sight. She probably made a habit of putting people down.

He touched his hat in a polite salute. “Inspector Richard Jury, New Scotland Yard, madam. I'd like to speak with you and your husband, if I may.”

She dismounted but did not apologize for her error. At that moment, the front door swung back and Jury found himself looking into the eyes of an elderly man as tall as himself, and who would have been taller, except for his stoop.

“Oh, do forgive me for keeping you standing here. Ah, but I see my wife has found you —” He fitted a pince-nez, which had been dangling on a grosgrain ribbon, onto his nose.

As Lorraine introduced them, a boy, scarved and muffled up, came around the corner of the house to lead the horse away.

“There was a Superintendent Pratt here just yesterday. He was from the police in Northampton,” said Bicester-Strachan, as Jury was taking off his coat.

“Yes, well, I've a few questions I'd like to ask also, Mr. Bicester-Strachan.” They went into the lounge, which Jury thought rather coldly formal. The furniture ran to the rich but not the comfortable, and as Lorraine Bicester-Strachan turned to face him, it occurred to him that she ran very much the same. She was dressed in her riding habit — black Melton coat, stock perfectly done up, boots lustrous. When she removed her velvet hat, he observed that her hair was arranged in a rather affectedly outmoded style of the twenties. It ballooned round her face and was wound into a kind of bun on top. Her skin was ivory, her eyes onyx-black. Altogether she gave the impression of a tabloid fashion-model, coldly, if attractively, severe.

“Could we not offer the inspector a drink, my dear?” said Willie Bicester-Strachan.

“Does Scotland Yard drink?” she asked with mock wonder, as she poured herself a sherry from a cut-glass decanter.

Exasperated by this collective reference to him, Jury felt like belting back a double, but remembered who he was, and put on his bland face. Still he knew his irritation showed in his face, in his eyes. It had been something he could never quite master in Detective Training School, that expressionless face. Now,
however, he declined Bicester-Strachan's politer offer of a drink, while Lorraine stoppered up the decanter and brought her glass over to a rose velvet armchair. She slouched there, her legs straight out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, boyishly adolescent. “But it's really
Chief
Inspector Jury, isn't it? Why be modest?” She raised her glass an inch in salute.

“You knew I wasn't the dishwasher man, then, didn't you?”

She looked slightly embarrassed, but regained her arrogance quickly. “Oh, I suppose I guessed who you were. News travels fast here. It's just one gets tired of the police wandering over one's place as if they owned it. That Superintendent Pratt was tiresome, to say the least.”

“You seem more annoyed by all of this than upset.”

She shrugged. “Am I supposed to gush tears?”

“Really, Lorraine —” said her husband, settling himself in a velvet wing chair by the fire, before which sat a small table holding a chessboard. He bent his head as if studying a problem.

“I wanted to ask you about the nights in question — the seventeenth and eighteenth.”

“I may as well tell you,” said Lorraine, “I was too damned drunk for my recollection to be anything but fuzzy at best.”

“Then you wouldn't remember who was in the dining room between nine and eleven, say, and who was absent?”

“I'm not even sure if
I
was in the dining room,” said Lorraine.

Bicester-Strachan raised his white head. “I was having a game of draughts with the vicar — Mr. Smith. I don't know what my wife was doing,” he added, drily.

“I sat with Oliver — that's Oliver Darrington — for a longish while and then with Melrose Plant, until I could bear his snobbery no longer —”

“That's quite unfair, Lorraine. If you think Plant's a snob, you don't understand the man at all.”

She had gone to stand beside the fireplace after refilling her glass. One hand was upraised on the mantel and her boot was on the fender. She was every inch an add for
Country Living
. “Plant is an English anachronism. If he only had a monocle, he'd be perfect.”

“It seems rather inconsistent,” said Jury, “for someone that
conscious of his social position to give up his most enviable possession, doesn't it? I'm talking about his title.”

Bicester-Strachan chuckled. “He's got you there, Lorraine.”

But she merely grew more obdurate. “Melrose Plant is the sort who would do that to show how much better he was than all of his sword-bearing, ruffle-shirted, belted-earl ancestors.”

“Well, I rather admired that move,” said Bicester-Strachan, smiling down at the chessboard as if Plant were seated across from him. “He's original, is Plant. D'you know the reason he gave me, Inspector? He said that whenever the House sat, he always had the feeling he'd walked in on a colony of penguins.”

Jury smiled, but Lorraine didn't seem to find it amusing. “Merely proves my point,” she said.

Jury noticed how flushed her face was. When a woman belittled a man, it was generally one she couldn't get her hooks into. “Do you remember what time you were sitting with Mr. Plant?”

“I couldn't possibly fix the time. Everybody was table-hopping, you see, so I could hardly keep track of anyone's movements. The only two stationary objects were my husband and the vicar. The Reverend Denzil Smith! There's a treat, a walking compendium of trivia, knows every little detail about Long Piddleton and all the inns dotting the country-side, and is forever filling one's ears with their history, how many ghosts they have, or priests' holes in chimneys —”

“Denzil is a friend of mine, Lorraine,” said Bicester-Strachan mildly, his eyes fixed on the chessboard. Meditatively, he moved a bishop.

“You were in the Jack and Hammer the evening of the second murder?”

“For a bit, yes. Only a half hour or so,” said Lorraine.

“And you didn't speak to the victim?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “Someone about has rather a black sense of humor, haven't they?”

“People don't generally kill for the fun of it. So you had never seen either of these men before, Mr. Bicester-Strachan?”

He shook his head. “No one in Long Piddleton had seen them before, to my knowledge. They were total strangers.”

“You used to live in London, didn't you?” Jury mentally ran down the statement Pratt had taken. “In Hampstead, I believe?”

“You certainly know a lot about us, Inspector,” said Lorraine.

Something in her tone made him hesitate. To her the pause must have been suggestive, for she said, “Should I have a solicitor here?”

“Do you think you need one?”

Lorraine Bicester-Strachan set down her glass with more force than seemed necessary and folded her arms tightly across her breast, as if protecting herself from some invasion of honor or privacy. Her lustrously booted right leg swung back and forth nervously.

“We came here because it's a quaint village that's just becoming stylish — you know, for writers, artists, and so forth. No one goes to the Cotswolds anymore, do they? Isn't all that elfin beauty just a bit
démodé?
I ride and I paint.” She waved her arm about the room, taking in four walls of bad work. They were poorly executed seascapes of boiling waves and cast up, twisted branches. She hadn't even the imagination to see the beauty of the countryside right beyond her door. The village itself must have been an artist's dream.

“A bit boring after London, isn't it?”

“We were getting fed up with London. Really, it isn't at all the same anymore. I mean, one can't walk down Oxford Street without running into all of Arabia and Pakistan —”

“Why don't you tell the truth, Lorraine?” said Willie Bicester-Strachan from under the tent of his hand where his head was bent over the chessboard.

“What on earth are you talking about, Willie?” But the cool, white mask had slipped, and the voice was unnaturally high.

“The reason we came here.” Bicester-Strachan did not even look up from the chessboard as he said this. “We — I — went through rather a bad patch in London, Inspector. Or perhaps you have ferreted that out already.” He looked up then and smiled, but the smile was not a happy one.

Lorraine rose suddenly like a cat jumping out of a chair. “I thought we were rid of that — the newspapers, reporters, all that, when we left London. Now here they come rummaging round again because of these goddamned murders.”

She seemed to think the murders had been done merely to discommode her. Bicester-Strachan paid no attention to her outburst, and Jury realized that for all of her hauteur and her husband's own dotty, absent-minded act, it was he who was the stronger of the two.

“Several years ago I was in Whitehall. With the War Ministry, Inspector. I rather hope you'll forgive me for not going into details —”

“For God's sake, Willie! This is ridiculous. Why bring it up?”

Bicester-Strachan waved her words aside with an impatient flick of his hand. “This is Scotland Yard, Lorraine. Use your brains.”

Brains were not the most obvious of Lorraine's commodities, thought Jury. “Something happened, did it?”

“Indeed it did. It never came out because I chose to resign — to avoid any more unsavory publicity. I committed — I'm ashamed to say it — an . . . offense to do with some information that should not have got out. Fortunately, it was the wrong secret; even I was unaware it was misinformation.” He smiled wryly. “So I wasn't prosecuted.”

“Gave it away — to whom?”

“It doesn't matter, does it, Inspector?”

Jury didn't like badgering him; it had been painful for Bicester-Strachan to admit even this much. “I don't know, Mr. Bicester-Strachan.” Secrets from the past had certainly supplied more than one murderer with a motive. Jury rose. “I'll be leaving now. Thank you. I may have some more questions later on.”

Bicester-Strachan stood and shook hands with Jury. “It's really a rotten business. I simply can't imagine this quiet village — well, good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”