The Man with a Load of Mischief (22 page)

Twig was arranging the wooden bowl of lettuce and small dishes and vials of oil. When he began squeezing lemon juice onto the greens, Matchett got up, saying, “I'll do that, Twig.” Expertly, he dribbled oil round the bowl and began tossing the contents with a wooden fork and spoon.

“Where were both of you Tuesday a week ago, in the evening?”

Matchett went on calmly breaking an egg over the lettuce, but Vivian looked nervous as she said, “At home — I can't remember . . . Simon?”

Was Simon her memory, too?

Matchett shook his head. “Can't say off-hand. No, wait. That would have been two nights before this chap Small was killed —” He halted the fork and spoon in midair. “I was here, I remember, all afternoon and evening.”

“I must have been at home,” said Vivian, uncertainly. “I think Oliver stopped in.” Jury noted Matchett's grimace.

“Don't you ever go off duty, Inspector?” Matchett grated fresh cheese over the greens and tossed in a handful of croutons.

“I would do, if only our murderer would do the same.”

Matchett passed over two glass plates of salad. When Jury sampled it, he found it delicious. There must not be many men who could discuss a fresh murder, mix a Caesar salad, and be the intended of this lovely creature, Vivian Rivington. Whatever he was, he wasn't Simple Simon.

 • • • 

“Now Daphne, about Ruby Judd.”

It was an hour later, and they were sitting at the same table in the dining room. Matchett had left to take Vivian Rivington home.

Daphne had wadded up and discarded a whole pocketful of tissues, from all of her crying since Jury had told her about Ruby. “You were on friendly terms with her, weren't you? I understand it was you who got her the job at the vicarage?” Jury had pulled the picture from his wallet and placed it between them on the table. It was a standard, static pose. Ruby had long, black hair, a pretty, vacuous face. The other snapshot showed more of her figure, which was heavily endowed: large breasts pushing at a too-tight jumper, and well-formed legs. Her mouth was drawn up in that unflattering expression that comes of squinting into the sun. The face was half in shadow.

“Yes, sir. ‘Twas me,” said Daphne, shoveling damp curls back from her forehead, which shone from nervous perspiration. Her face was puffy and crimson from weeping.

“How long had you known her, Daphne?”

“Oh, for years. I knew her in school. We was classmates. I come from Weatherington, you know. When the vicar's housemaid took herself off to get married, and there was only that Mrs. Gaunt from the village to do for him — an old poker, she is — I asked him would he like another girl, as I knew one out of a job and a very good worker. He said to send her along.” Daphne looked down at her shoes, and added rather wanly, “I guess I should've thought twice about it, sir. I mean, sir, with
her not bein' the most dependable person in the world.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth at having implied some ill of the dead.

“What do you mean, not dependable?” Jury noticed Twig was making quite a job of polishing the crystal goblets; he'd been at the same one for five minutes.

Daphne lowered her voice: “Ruby'd been in one or two little scrapes, see.”

“What sort?” Jury was fully aware the scrapes were probably sexual, given the rising color in the waitress's face. She seemed unable to find her tongue, so he helped her out: “Was Ruby pregnant?”

“Oh, no, sir. I mean, not to my knowledge. She never told me she was. But . . . well, she had been. Once. Maybe even more than once.” Daphne looked almost as if it were she who had trodden the primrose path.

“She had an abortion, is that it? Perhaps more than one?”

Daphne nodded, mutely, casting a surreptitious glance in Twig's direction. But the old Boots had moved down the line of tables, under Jury's stare.

“Sometimes, though, I felt almost sorry for her. What else is a girl to do, if she can't get no help from her family? Ruby's family's a bunch of old sticks. She daren't have told them. When she was little she had an uncle and aunt she was always bein' sent off to live with. Aunt Rosie and Uncle Will, she said. She liked them ever so much more than her mum and dad. I think they just wanted to be rid of her, I do.”

“Then you and Ruby were pretty thick?”

Daphne ran a tissue under her nose. “In a way, yes. But the stuff she'd tell me, it was more like by way of teasing me into asking questions, not like she was really confiding in me.”

Jury was gratified by this ability of the girl to make such a fine distinction. Most girls would have thought that giggling innuendos were exchanges of confidence.

She went on: “Ruby wasn't walking out with anyone round here I knew of. But she was always dropping hints she'd more'n one fellow she was —” Daphne blushed and smoothed the skirt of her black uniform.

“Sleeping with, you mean.”

She nodded, apparently finding the phrase less vulgar on the lips of a policeman. “The thing is, Ruby
always
acted that way — secretive like. Whether there was anything in it or not. She wanted to make a big mystery out of everything. Like, didn't I want to know where she'd got a new dress, or bag, or bit of jewelry, or something, as if someone in Long Pidd was — well
— keeping
her. And she had this gold bracelet she always wore — always had it on her — my, but didn't she set great store by that! First it's somebody gave it her, and later on, it's that she found it. You never knew when Ruby was telling the truth. Then there was all the stuff she was trying on with that Mrs. Gaunt. Ruby didn't do her work by half, the work she was paid to. When she was supposed to be dusting or cleaning, she'd start chattering to the vicar, and he'd start in back, and she'd pretend to be interested, and he'd not realize she wasn't doing her work — just whisking the feather duster across his desk. When she was supposed to be sweeping the church, she'd just sit out there and read a film magazine, or write in her diary. Sometimes she even lacquered her nails.” Daphne giggled.

“Ruby kept a
diary?
Did you ever see it?”

“Oh, no, sir. She'd hardly be showing it to me, now would she? Not her bein' so secretive, the way she was.”

Jury made a mental note to have Wiggins question Mrs. Gaunt on this point.

“One thing Ruby did say that really made me wonder was as how she'd got something on someone in Long Pidd.”

“Those were her words?”

Daphne nodded. “Have you any idea what she might have meant?” Daphne shook her head so decisively the light brown curls bobbed like little corks round the rim of her starched white cap.

“No, sir. I was real curious about what she did mean, and I kept trying to worm it out of her, but the harder I tried, the more she laughed and just kept saying what a surprise it would be, that she had somebody on a piece of string, and wouldn't we all be half surprised?”

Jury sighed. It would be hard, with a girl like Ruby Judd, to
separate out the wheat from the chaff. Her “secret” could be anything from seeing one of the local ladies pull down her knickers for the milkman . . . to murder.

 • • • 

Weatherington was a medium-sized town, about twice the size of Sidbury, which was in turn about twice the size of Long Piddleton. They lay equidistant from one another, Sidbury some ten or eleven miles west of Long Piddleton; Weatherington another eleven southwest of Sidbury. The Home Office had set up one of its labs in Weatherington to assist provincial police forces. And there was a small hospital where Appleby had his postmortem room.

Chipped paint was the overall effect of the station, with glossy beige walls. But, then, the place wasn't built for beauty. Jury went through to the charge room, past the switchboard where a grandmotherly lady sat knitting a red wool scarf. In the charge room, the station officer was bent over his book, sitting beneath one of the yellow “No Waiting” notices. Jury often wondered who would want to come to these places just to loiter. He passed counters and cupboards where documents spilled from insides and tops, and men who seemed to be spending most of their time moving the typewriters about, like a team of reporters. He put in a call to Appleby.

“No, she wasn't,” said the doctor, when Jury asked him if Ruby Judd had been pregnant when she died. “Doubt she ever would have been. Not the way she was torn up inside. I'd say more than one abortion, certainly. Several years ago.”

In a way, Jury was relieved. Had she been pregnant, he might have had to start searching along the lines of the lover who didn't want marriage, disgraced if Ruby had gone blabbing her mouth off. Such an explanation of her death would surely have separated Ruby's murder from the others. The vicar, Jury thought, had got it just the wrong way around: the other murders didn't lead
up
to Ruby's; they must have led
away
from it.

“Thanks, Dr. Appleby. I'm sorry I had to ring you up so late.”

“Late? It's only half-ten, man. We small-town boys work the clock round.” Appleby snickered and rang off.

Jury went over to a detective constable at the desk. There were at least a dozen men in the station, at this hour. They were only too eager to get in on the show and seemed delighted Jury had turned up. “The superintendent isn't here, is he?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you got the report on the Celia Matchett case? The one at that inn in Dartmouth years ago?”

“Yes, sir, if you'll just wait a bit, I'll —”

“No matter. I've got to see the Judd family, so I'll pick it up when I come back.” Jury turned to Wiggins, who was getting his notebook and pencils together. “You rang the Judds?” Wiggins nodded. “Let's go, then.”

 • • • 

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Judd lived in Weatherington's newer district, a development of rows of brick bungalows, indistinguishable at night as they probably were even by day. Perhaps a step above the gray council houses on the other side of town, but not a big step. Weatherington held few charms. It had begun as one of those projects, the planned garden-city type, and then somewhere along the line the funds must have dribbled off, or been diverted into other, unaesthetic pockets. The result was an amorphous mass wherein no special style predominated.

In the dark garden-plot in front of the Judd's bungalow, Jury could make out the outlines of decorative additions, probably plaster geese and ducks and rock-nooks, nearly hidden now under snow.

It was a young woman who answered the door. She was a more angular version of Ruby, if Ruby's picture were a good likeness. It must be the sister, thought Jury. “Yes?” Her voice was nasal, and her pretense of not knowing who he was reminded him of Lorraine Bicester-Strachan. Only Miss Judd hadn't quite the air to bring it off.

“Miss Judd, is it?” She nodded, managing to keep her nose — which rode rather high on her thin face anyway — in the air.

“Inspector Richard Jury, Miss, C.I.D. And Detective Sergeant Wiggins.” Wiggins tipped his hat. “I believe Sergeant Wiggins rang you that we were coming.”

She stood aside. Jury noticed as he and Wiggins walked past into the darkened hall that there wasn't much of the air of the mourner about her. There was no offer, either, to take their coats, so Jury tossed his over the banister.

“In there,” was all she said, pointing to a room down the narrow, dark hall to the rear of the house. Probably a back parlor, since the front one was unlit. Saved up for Sunday tea. A scraggly, tinseled tree stood in one corner of the room, its base surrounded by imitation snow.

In the room at the rear, warmed by an electric fire and night-storage heaters, the Judds sat, incredibly dry-eyed.

Mrs. Judd, a stout woman who scarcely looked up from her knitting when she spoke, and even then made it sound as if Ruby were someone else's daughter, said, “It's terrible to think you work your fingers to the bone for them, and they turn out this way.”

It was difficult for Jury to control his temper in the face of such cold-bloodedness. “I doubt your daughter was looking for what she got, Mrs. Judd. I don't think she wanted to end her life in a ditch.” He made the description as cold as Mrs. Judd's reception of the news of her daughter's death.

Mr. Judd said nothing; he made guttural sounds in his throat. He was one of those who let his wife do the talking.

“Ever since she was little there's been no controlling Ruby. Only people who could do anything with her was her Aunt Rosie — that's Jack's sister. We'd just pack Ruby off to Devon when we couldn't do nothing with her. Then after she grew up, she was in and out of our lives as if we wasn't even kin to her, much less her mum and dad. Never sent a tad of money home, never paid her keep those months she wasn't working. Living on the cheap with us, she was. Not like our Merriweather, here —” And the mother smiled fondly at the dry stick of a girl reading a film magazine by the electric log. Merriweather smiled primly, then tried to look distressed at the thought of her sister's death. She even had a handkerchief wadded in her hand to catch the tears that didn't fall.

“Our Merry's never given us a sleepless night.” Mrs. Judd rocked, and looked smugly at the girl as her knitting needles
clicked away. Judd, in vest and suspenders, finally put in: “Don't go speakin' ill of the dead, Mother. It ain't Christian.”

Seldom had Jury seen such indifference to the death of a child. Not death, even,
murder
. None of the Judds showed the least interest in the attendant horrors of their daughter's death. Well, the hell with it. It would make his job easier. No condolences, no soft-spoken and guarded questions to protect ravaged feelings.

“Mrs. Judd, when was the last time you saw your daughter?” Wiggins had taken out his notebook and a box of licorice lozenges. He began to suck and write his shorthand, while Mrs. Judd put by her knitting and looked at the ceiling, thinking over her answer: