The Man with a Load of Mischief (3 page)

Melrose Plant felt slightly doomed himself, as he listened to the vicar relate the grisly murder, some years ago, of a barmaid in Cheapside.

A
rdry End was known to the villagers as the Great House. It was a turreted and towered manor house built of sandstone — hues ranging from rose to russet, depending upon the angle of the sun. Its approach was as elegant as the house itself, over a bridge of the same stone, which crossed the Piddle River on a road routed through acres of green land, now patched with snow. Ardry End's situation, amidst the streams and the sheep and the lavender hills, nearly brought Lady Agatha Ardry to tears because she didn't own it. That her own husband had not been the eighth Earl of Caverness and twelfth Viscount Ardry had always been a searing wound. The Honorable Robert Ardry had been, instead, the useless younger brother of Melrose Plant's father. Where her nephew had dropped the title of
Lord Ardry
, Agatha had picked it up and dusted it off, transforming herself overnight into “Lady” Ardry. Melrose's uncle died in a gaming room at the age of fifty-nine, having lost what little money remained to him, so that Lady Ardry was more or less dependent upon the generosity of her brother-in-law — a fact that did not add to Melrose's popularity. His father had been an industrious
member of the House of Lords and vice-president of a stock brokerage. Richer when he died than he had allowed when he was living, he had seen to it that his brother's widow had received a comfortable annuity.

Thus, the marble and parqueted halls of Ardry End being forever beyond her grasp, Agatha never ceased in her nudges and hints to Melrose about “needing a woman round the place.” He pretended to believe the broad winks and nods were pointers that he should take a wife, knowing full well that a wife was the last thing his aunt wanted him to have, since he assumed she was fervently counting the hours until some rare disease would bring about his premature demise, and she would come into the inheritance she was apparently certain he would be willing to provide, there being no other relatives of whom she was aware. And she was aware of everything that applied to Melrose Plant's estate — or so it seemed.

Melrose Plant regarded his aunt as the albatross which his uncle had shot down and left to hang around his nephew's neck. Lord Robert had shot her down in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he had been on a pleasure tour of the United States. Agatha was an American. But she buried this as well as she could under tweed suits, walking sticks, sensible shoes, interminable plates of cucumber sandwiches, and a good ear for the English idiom but a terrible one for proper names.

His aunt used every pretext to appear suddenly at Ardry End to look covetously at the bisque statuary, the portraits, the Chinese and William Morris wall coverings, the Waterford, the pleasaunce, the swans — all of those appointments of the serene, stately home. Lady Ardry would turn up at all hours, and in all weathers, uninvited. It was nerve-racking to go into the study at midnight with the rain slicing through the winter darkness to see a black-caped, white-faced figure outside the French windows, suddenly illuminated in a flash of lightning. It was equally unnerving to have the figure enter, bulky and sopping, puddling the Persian rugs like a big dog and taking the attitude that it was all Melrose's fault — why hadn't that silly twit of a butler, Ruthven (a name she always mispronounced), why hadn't he answered the front door? Then she would sigh and
look about with that “no room at the inn” expression, as if her nephew had been the flint-hearted tavernkeeper relegating her to her hayrick back in the village.

 • • • 

Cycling along, Melrose took deep, appreciative gulps of the December air, and thought of these two murders which had been done within twenty-four hours of one another. They had given the village something to speculate about other than his marital status. And had made everyone wary, very wary, of doing what Plant was doing now — traveling down a lonely road by himself. It was not that he was particularly brave, only that he was particularly commonsensical. He had already deduced a pattern into which he, as a victim, did not fit. Both murders had taken place at inns, and both were grotesque almost to the point of absurdity. Whatever the murderer had in mind was something definite, and the criminal seemed to be the sort whose diabolical crimes were planned to please himself. At least, he seemed to be making quite a production of it.

Plant rolled his bike up the last remaining feet to the iron gate of Ardry End. The gate was guarded by two gilt lions set atop high stone pillars. His aunt audibly and frequently wondered why he didn't have a few large, noble dogs to rush forward and greet his visitors:
The Hound of the Baskervilles
had taken its toll in her youth. Melrose unhinged the gate, closed it again, and pushed the bike along up the sweep of drive, looking at the place with his aunt's practiced eye. The hawthorn hedges on either side were high and neat. Melrose had nearly had to beat the gardener back with a hoe to keep him from turning the hedges into a topiary showplace, the sort of thing Lorraine Bicester-Strachan, his nearest neighbor, went in for.

If Ardry End didn't resemble Hampton Court, Mr. Peebles, the gardener, thought its grounds certainly extensive enough to be compared favorably with Hatfield House. Peebles was applauded in all of his attempts to turn Ardry End into a show-place by Lady Ardry. These two got on like a team of old dray horses, pulling imaginary loads of ornamental and exotic plants through the grounds, to shape, form, and reform these green expanses which Melrose only wanted to leave to the pleasures
of wind and weather. His aunt plumped for views and vistas and
coups d'oeil
, perhaps the surprise of a miniature Pantheon across the lake, its Corinthian columns blinding white in the sun. Left to Aunt Agatha and Mr. Peebles, his natural lawns and woods would have been strangled with knot gardens and stylized patterns drawn in clipped dwarf box, privet, thorn, and yew. Peebles, seconded by his aunt, had been victorious in the one lily pond enclosed in a clipped yew hedge, with a small, discreet fountain at the center. The gardener had tried to sneak lead fish into the bottom of the pond, but Melrose made him remove them. To make amends for the lead fish, Melrose had agreed to two real swans and a family of ducks for the lake. But the swans and the pond were his only concession. Lady Ardry and Mr. Peebles would have spelled out the Mountardry-Plant name on the front lawn in flowering plants, like a municipal building.

 • • • 

The door to Ardry End was opened by the butler, Ruthven. To say that Ruthven was of the old school was to put it very mildly. Plant speculated that every other manservant in England might have gone to school to Ruthven. Melrose could remember him from the time he was a tiny tot; Ruthven could be anywhere between fifty and a hundred — he had always looked the same to Melrose.

Plant had inherited Ruthven along with the portraits and stocks and Morris wallpapers, and during the course of their relationship, the master had done only one thing to upset the butler. Melrose had given up his title several years ago, after a few sessions in the House of Lords. It had nearly brought Ruthven to his bed. The news had been handed the butler one morning at breakfast, casually, like someone giving back the plate for more kippers:
Oh, incidentally, Ruthven, it won't be “my lord” any longer
. And Ruthven had stood there, carved out of rock, his expression magnificently unchanged. I
thought it inappropriate, you know, holding down a job, at the same time having that awkward title
. Ruthven had merely bowed and held out the silver dish of buttered eggs circumscribed by plump sausages.
And, anyway, I never have fancied taking my seat in the House of Lords. What a bloody bore that would be
. As a
sausage went
plop
on the plate, Ruthven begged to excuse himself, saying he felt a bit unwell.

 • • • 

Lady Ardry had received the news with far more ambivalence. On the plus side lay the fact that she had finally topped Melrose: now
she
had a title, but
he
hadn't. For that she was overjoyed. On the minus side was the terrible un-Englishness of it all. How could he
dare
throw away something it had taken so many years and such impeccable breeding to acquire? And on those rare occasions when distant relatives trooped in from the States, Lady Ardry had gloried in showing off her “ancestral home,” and Melrose along with it (“my nephew, the eighth Earl of Caverness and twelfth Viscount Ardry”) and they would all look him up and down as if he were one of the
objets d'art
. Agatha was on the real horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, how delightful to tell herself he was “my nephew, the commoner”; on the other, it was like pulling back the pretty pink bunting, with the relatives standing round, only to discover the baby had suddenly grown warts.

Thus the title was now the one department where she had bested him. She had nothing else to offer as competition. He was not terribly rich, but rich enough; not terribly handsome, but handsome enough; not terribly tall, but tall enough. When he removed his sedate gold-rimmed spectacles to polish them, one could see his eyes were an amazing, glittering green. And his referring to “holding down a job” was a bit of an understatement. Melrose held the chair of French Romantic poetry at the University of London where he taught for about four months out of the year, leaving echoes of himself to reverberate for the other eight.

So to top it all, he was Professor Melrose Plant. It made Lady Ardry positively shudder. He was like a cat with nine lives, or the Man in the Iron Mask, or the Scarlet Pimpernel: a man with extra identities he could leave behind him like calling cards on a silver salver.

And he had one other vice which caused her no end of suffering: he was simply too damnably clever.

Plant could do the
Times
crossword in less than fifteen minutes.
She had challenged him at one point to a crossword-puzzle duel. Unfortunately, it took Lady Ardry a half-hour just to straighten out the ups and downs, so she had given up in disgust, claiming it was a childish waste of time. But then Melrose didn't really have to work for a living, did he? — implying for herself a wretched Cinderella role of missed balls, doomed to carrying out the ashes of the world so that others (like Melrose) might dance all night, to wake between satin sheets with their breakfast trays and their
Times
crosswords.

Plant sighed as he sat gloomily in front of the fireplace. Now there was this beastly murder business to which his aunt would bring all of her nonexistent deductive skills. And drag him into it, merely by proximity. Well, he supposed he was in it, anyway, by virtue of having been at the Jack and Hammer yesterday morning. But he really did not want to be forever talking about it. He did not want to hear about this Small person, or the other, either, but he would be forced to hear about them, possibly for the rest of his natural life.

For Melrose did not put too much stock in the deductive powers of the nation's police force, either.

S
hielding his eyes with his hand like a man facing into the full glare of the sun, Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury squinted suspiciously at Chief Superintendent Racer, who was sitting on the other side of his immaculate desk — he was always quick to get the work off it and onto somebody else's — calmly smoking one of his hand-rolled cigars. Superintendent Racer's other hand toyed with a gold chain running from one vest pocket to the other. His French-cuffed shirt was powder blue and his Donegal tweed suit from his bespoke tailor. Inspector Jury regarded his superior as a bit of a dandy, a bit of a dilettante, and a bit — a very little bit— of a detective.

It was not that Inspector Jury suffered under the illusion that his colleagues in New Scotland Yard were all solid with integrity and full of the milk of human kindness — the London bobby in domed hat and short cape happily directing tourists all over town. Or the higher-ups such as himself appearing in neat, shiny suits, under the fanlights of dark doorways, saying to the bathrobed mistress, “Merely a routine inquiry, madam.” No, they were not all cool-headed, diamond-witted upholders
of law and order. But Racer contributed so little to that pleasant old stereotype. He sat there now, looking terribly county, and thinking, probably, about his dinner or the latest conquest with whom he would share it, leaving the Jurys of the world to sort out the mess.

Jury looked out from under the tent of his hand. “A man with his head shoved in a beer keg?” He still hoped Racer would tell him it was all a bad joke.

Racer only smiled sourly. “Never heard of the Duke of Clarence, eh?” The superintendent was fond of matching wits with Jury, and in the way of true masochists and gamblers, kept it up, though he never won.

“He was drowned — or so the story goes — in a butt of Malmsey,” said Jury, stealing Racers little bit of erudition.

Annoyed, Racer snapped his fingers as if he were calling a dog. “The facts, let's hear the facts.”

Jury sighed. Having been given a rundown on the murders in Northamptonshire, he was now expected to give it back, like a stenographer. Racer always listened carefully for errors.

“The first victim, William Small, found in the wine cellar of the Man with a Load of Mischief. Choked with a length of wire, his head shoved in a beer keg. The proprietor brews his own occasionally —”

Racer interrupted: “Too many brewers taking over all these old inns. Give me a free house every time. . . .” He took out his little gold toothpick and, while starting in on his rear molars, motioned for Jury to continue.

“The second victim, Rufus Ainsley, found at the Jack and Hammer, on the wooden support beam above the clock, the one the carved figure of the smith stands on. . . .” Once again, Jury looked at Racer, hoping he would tell him it was a joke. But the chief superintendent merely sat there, having removed the toothpick and looking as if the elves had come in the night to stitch together his leathery lips along with the shoes. What unnerved Jury was that Racer found nothing at all odd in this lot. Apparently, since the Duke of Clarence had got his, heads in kegs of beer were not to be wondered at.