The Case Has Altered (34 page)

Melrose wondered, as he looked at the big birdcage by the door, why it had taken Trevor Sly so long to bring in a parrot. Fake, of course, with multicolored feathers—it irritated Melrose that it wasn't blue, but he was damned if he'd ask—and riding on a painted perch. Melrose stayed clear of it; it was voice-activated and sat by the door so that every customer who entered got treated to
Ahoy!
followed by some scrofulous comment Melrose couldn't make out. He wondered if Sly himself had taught the parrot its alphabet.

Speaking of customers—

Where were they? The place was blank as a dune even though the banner across the mirror announced a
HAPPY HOUR
4-6
FREE BAR SNACKS
. Melrose was the only customer in the place, and Mine Host was now coming through the beaded curtain with a plate of the free bar snacks.

Trevor Sly was an uncommonly tall, thin man with arms as long as pulled taffy and stiltlike legs. And when he started in with his humming
sort of voice and sycophantish head-dippings, Melrose wondered if Sly might be about to coil.

Actually, he did when he arranged himself on the tall stool he liked to sit on and twined his legs round it. First, though, he placed the suspect-looking tidbits on the bar. Melrose looked them over. Cheese? Potato? Fish paste? At any rate, Trevor did try to ingratiate himself to his customers, which was more than could be said for Dick Scroggs.

Sly claimed his custom came not before dinnertime, but after it. “Mostly at night, you know. We attract a fairly wild bistro-type crowd, the young ones, you know.”

Melrose didn't. The “young ones” he'd seen could hold a party in a dustbin; they had no need to search out a pub in the middle of the Mojave and be insulted by a parrot.

Melrose pushed his glass forward for another Cairo Flame (was he mad?) and told Trevor Sly to set himself up, too, at which the man slid off his stool like a waterfall and thanked Melrose with many a humble hand-washing. He then served himself an inch of fifty-year-old single malt whiskey and collected Melrose's ten-pound-note.

After Sly resettled himself, Melrose looked around and said, “No one about much,” as if he were genuinely surprised.

“Never is on Tuesdays,” said Trevor.

He always had some inexplicable reason for the lack of custom.

“Still, I have to do the bar snacks, as that's what I've advertised. And you never know, someone might come. I just started my Happy Hour and news travels slow around here, as you know.”

Slow? He must not know Agatha. “But you do have a few regulars from near here. They're the people at Watermeadows, isn't that so?”
The people
meaning Miss Fludd. Miss Fludd was the real reason Melrose had come here.

“Oh, yes,” said Trevor Sly. He did not embroider.

Melrose sighed and drank his Cairo Flame. Must he have another to pry information out of the man? “Finished your drink, Mr. Sly? I say we have another!” Melrose thought that sounded hearty enough.

Sly simpered and uncoiled himself and set up the drinks again. Why was it, Melrose wondered, that the man had to shut up like an oyster
when there was something he really wanted to know? On the subject of the Fludds of Watermeadows, Sly was perversely mum. Lord knows it wasn't out of discretion, which Trevor Sly lacked in abundance.

“I recall that Miss Fludd was here one day when Marshall Trueblood and I stopped in. I expect, with Watermeadows being so near” (which it wasn't—it was just nearer to Sly's than to anywhere else) “that she must be one of your regulars.”

Trevor Sly served him his drink and then took down the pricey whiskey, pouring out another inch. He collected another tenner from Melrose, recoiled himself on the stool, and cast his eye ceilingward, speculating on the truth of what Melrose had said. “I suppose you could say that, um.”

Melrose laughed, artificially. “Actually, Watermeadows is my neighbor. It's next to Ardry End, you know.” If
next to
could sensibly describe two houses with so much land between they were a good half mile apart. “So Miss Fludd—the Fludds—are by way of being my neighbor. I haven't met all of them, though. Only her. And she seems a nice enough person. Wouldn't you say?”

“Oh, indeed, Mr. Plant, indeed. Quite a nice person.”

Silence fell like lead.

Melrose racked his brain for some way of getting Sly to talk. He ought not to have bought him that second whiskey so soon. Yet, Melrose doubted Sly was keeping mum deliberately. The best explanation was the man didn't know anything. He should have brought Trueblood along. Trueblood would have wrung it out of him. The trouble was, Trueblood was so all fired up with the Law these days—more strictly speaking, with his interpretation of same—that it was hard to get his attention about anything.

The Fludds (however many of them there were) had turned out to be cousins of Lady Summerston, who owned Watermeadows but hadn't been in residence for some years. Miss Fludd was the only Fludd he'd met. He had been so smitten he'd even forgotten to find out her first name.

“It's a shame,” said Melrose, “that Miss Fludd has that difficulty with her leg.”

“Sad, init? She wears a brace.”

As if Melrose were blind. “I can see that. I wonder how it happened.”

“Yes. I wonder myself.”

“Can't be polio. I mean, polio was stamped out ages ago. Now, if we were all living back four decades ago, why, polio's the first thing I'd think of.”

Sly's mouth formed in a little moue. “And you'd be right, sir, I expect. Yes, I do expect you'd be right.”

Tired of this mirror-talk, Melrose stopped speculating and stared at the sediment in his glass. Steel shavings, probably. And he'd now drunk two of them. That's what being smitten will do to a fellow. He sighed. What disturbed him was that he couldn't work out
why
he was smitten. She was pretty, but no prettier than, say, Polly Praed. Not as pretty as Ellen Taylor. And not a patch on Vivian. Or Jenny Kennington—

Oh, God. He should have been putting all of these frivolous thoughts to one side and thinking about Jenny. Poor Jenny! Melrose drew from his jacket pocket the little spiral notebook he'd taken to carrying (which looked like the one Jury used) and opened it.

“Headache, Mr. Plant?”

“What? Oh, no. Mr. Sly, if you don't mind, I shall take my drink to one of the tables and try to work on something I've been thinking about. I don't mean to be rude—”

Trevor Sly flapped a long-fingered hand at him and said, “Not at all, not at all. You just go right on.” He picked up the plate of untasted bar snacks. “I'll just pop these in the microwave for a few seconds to reheat 'em.”

Melrose took his notebook over to one of the tables in the shadows—the Blue Parrot being drenched in them—and thumbed backward through the few notes he'd made.
Table à la Bourgogne. Ispahan. Verna Dunn
. More items on his list. J.
Price
. Notes on J. Price. He flicked back and forth, surprised the notebook was nearly full.
The Red Last
. That house in Cow-bit with the odd name . . .

“Hullo.”

His head snapped up. His mouth dropped open. And his cracked voice echoed the greeting as he started to rise from his chair.

“Oh, please don't let me disturb you. He”—her head made a gesture toward Trevor Sly—“told me I'd better not bother you, that you were trying to concentrate, that you were working on a case,” said Miss Fludd.

Melrose smiled but when he looked in Sly's direction his thoughts were murderous.

“—but I just wanted to say ‘hello' and hope maybe we might have another talk sometime.”

“This
time. I mean, uh, right now. Please have a seat. Sit down.”

If she noticed this odd mode of address, combined pleas and commands, she gave no sign. How in the name of God could he have missed seeing or at least hearing her come in? The leg brace she wore dragged against the floor planks quite audibly. He was beside her, pulling out a chair, taking her drink and setting it gently on the table as if it, as well as she, might break if he wasn't careful. She was wearing the same dark coat, a bit short in the sleeve, barely covering the wrist bone. Her hair this time was drawn back loosely and held with a narrow band of black ribbon into which a few blossoms had been shoved. Cornflowers and daisies.

He sat down. “I like your hair,” he blurted.

She reached back to touch the flowers. “I thought, well, it's nearly April, and I should do something.” Then she pulled a cornflower from the hair-bouquet, reached across the table, and pulled the stem through the buttonhole of his jacket. This gesture appeared to her to be completely natural, expected. “That's a beautiful jacket. It's some sort of silk wool, isn't it?”

Melrose pulled back the side as if he'd find a label with the name of the owner or the blend of the material there. He shrugged. “Don't know.”

“It is. I know material. That's of a very high quality.”

“It is?”

She nodded and drank her beer. He hoped it wasn't Cairo Flame.

She said, “I've been hoping you'd come back. I really enjoyed our talk. I don't often get an opportunity to really talk—”

“Beggin' your pardon, both of your pardons—” Trevor Sly slumped over them washing his hands and smiling his quarter-moon smile. “But I see you don't have a drink, Mr. Plant, and you, miss, you've nearly finished yours—”

“Two more!” barked Melrose. Damn the man. “Did you come here from London?”

“Yes. I was living in London, in Limehouse. When Aunt Nora offered Watermeadows for the year, I loved the idea. Space to roam around in, country air, all that.”

“ ‘Aunt Nora?' ”

“Lady Summerston. Eleanor. She's my great-aunt. Well, by marriage.”

Suddenly, Melrose sat back, as shocked as if Sly had thrown the beer in his face that he was now setting on the table. Then he walked off. Slithered, more like. “But then you must be some relation of—” Melrose really didn't want to say
Hannah Lean
. It had all been simply too sad. For Jury, not for him. He looked at his glass, moved it in damp circles.

Waiting for him to finish, she leaned toward him slightly. “Related to who—?” It was her turn to recognize the significance that Watermeadows would have to the people who lived around here. The
who
 . . . ended on a long indrawn breath. “Ah. Hannah. That's who you mean isn't it? Hannah Lean? Aunt Nora's granddaughter.” Sadly, she shook her head.

Melrose saw that she too was studying her drink, or whatever was deep and beyond it.

“I heard . . . some story . . . about her husband. I never knew him.” She looked expectantly at Melrose, as if he might be able to tell her the story.

Which he did. That part she didn't already know.

“How awful.”

They drank their drinks and looked in different directions at indifferent space. Her view would have been the barren land beyond the window; his was the poster of the film
Lawrence of Arabia
. And beside it
A Passage to India
. It had been four or five years, but he still felt awful when he thought about Hannah Lean. And Jury.

“Do you like it? Watermeadows, I mean.” He wondered how she felt about living at the site of such a tragedy. He expected the question to elicit an immediate response. Instead, she sat silently looking at her glass of bitter. For a long time, she did this. Long enough for Melrose to become a little uncomfortable in the silence. He hoped he wasn't prey to the
anxiety occasioned by silence, as so many were, and therefore filled the air with empty talk.

Yet she seemed quite unaware of this, when she finally said, “I don't know. It's certainly beautiful, the most beautiful place I think I've seen. Those gardens and that lake. The willow trees, the statuary. It's Italianate, I think, a lot of it. I'm not much good at gardening—” She patted the brace just below her knee. “—it's all of that kneeling, that getting up and down, but I am good at pruning. I take care of the trellises and some of the rosebushes.

“I've lived all of my life in London, with my uncle. We have this narrow little house in Limehouse. A ‘mean' little house, some would say. ‘Mean,' that is, before the gentrification of Limehouse when ‘mean' became ‘chic.' The old moldy warehouses, now luxury flats. My uncle could have sold his house for an astonishing price. He used to laugh about it. He likes to count the foreign cars. The ‘gin and Jag set' he calls the gentrifiers.” She laughed. “Anyway, he wasn't about to sell up, and then Aunt Nora offered us Watermeadows. Uncle Ned jumped at it, but I think it was for me, not for him. He wanted to get me out of London. Fresh air and flowers.”

She leaned forward, cupped her chin in her hands. “I'm glad he only rented it, though. I love that London house. There's nothing at all to distinguish it from a million other terraced houses, but I love it. It has an attic you have to have the skills of a rock climber to get up to. It's got these mingy little stairs. But there's a window up there looks right out over the Thames. The room's very dark and the window's round; it reminds me of a
camera obscura
, for it seems more like a screen than a window, and the panorama more like something viewed through a periscope or a mirror-reflection. It's so dark my eyes never really adjust to the light. Through that window I could see the Isle of Dogs. People complain about how things have been ruined by all of this new development. But the outlines are still there, the footprints.” Abruptly, she stopped speaking, and then said, “I don't know what this means.” But she seemed to be questioning herself, rather than Melrose.

She went on: “What I saw out of the attic window looked more like a representation of the Thames—a moving picture, a series of snapshots—
than it did the Thames itself. As if I could remain aloof from reality.” She shrugged. “I don't know. Yes, I like Watermeadows, but I expect nothing's quite as good as the house you left behind. Don't you feel that way about Ardry End?”