Bloodhounds (2 page)

"Will he be coming tonight?"

"I expect so, but not before we start. He likes to make an entrance."

Shirley-Ann wasn't yet convinced that she would tolerate Rupert as blithely as Jessica did.

A voice from the door said, "So sorry, everyone. What will you think of me? I dropped my car keys down a drain, and I've been trying to hook them up for the past twenty minutes." It had to be Polly Wycherley, and the poor dear was flushed with the experience, or her embarrassment. Her breathing sounded asthmatic. She raised the average age of the group closer to sixty, but there was a reassuring softness and mobility in her features. Short, chunky, silver-haired and wearing a pale green Dannimac coat, she was Shirley-Ann's idea of a favorite aunt.

"Did you get them back?" Milo asked.

"Yes—thanks to a kindhearted taxi driver who saw me on my knees by the side of the road. It happens quite often, apparently. Not to me, I mean." Dimples of amusement appeared in her cheeks. "I could tell you what to do if it happens to you, but I've wasted enough time already. Listen everyone, I've got to wash my hands. Why don't you begin without me?"

"Good suggestion," said Miss Chilmark. "Sit down, ladies and gentlemen."

"We can wait a few more minutes," said Jessica quickly.

"Yes, let's wait," Milo chipped in.

Miss Chilmark's eyes narrowed, but she said no more.

"What's the program tonight?" Shirley-Ann asked Milo.

"I'm not sure. We leave that up to Polly. We're not too rigid about the way we run it. One thing you should be prepared for: We take turns to talk about a book we enjoyed recently."

"Don't you dare mention
The Name of the Rose,"
murmured Jessica.

"I hope I don't have to go through some initiation rite."

Milo's eyes sparkled. "A secret ceremony?"

Jessica said, "Black candles and a skull? What's that club that writers belong to? The Detection Club."

Polly reappeared, and there was a general move toward the circle of chairs. The Bloodhounds didn't look as if they went in for secret ceremonies.

Chapter Three

"Come in, Peter, we're waiting with bated breath," said the Assistant Chief Constable.

"What for, sir?"

"You don't know?"

With distrust, Diamond eyed the amused faces around the oval table in the conference room. This was the evening when the ACC's monthly meeting of high fliers took place upstairs in the "eagle's nest" in Bath Central Police Station.

"For the story of your latest arrest. How you nicked the Saltford bank clerk."

"Am I being ever so gently sent up?"

"Good Lord, no. We want to share in your satisfaction. You let it be known in no uncertain terms that a decent murder hadn't come your way since you were reinstated as head of the squad. Now this falls into your lap."

"I wouldn't call it a decent murder," said Diamond. "Two little men in a bank. One gets on the other's wick, so he shoots him. It isn't worth the paperwork."

"Has he confessed?"

"In seventeen pages—so far."

The ACC commented, "That
is
some paperwork. It isn't so straightforward, then."

"He has a list of grievances going back six years."

Several sets of eyes met in amusement across the table. No one said it, but Diamond was well known for having grievances of his own, and one of them was the amount of form-filling in modern police work.

"Where did he get the gun?" someone asked.

"Right between the eyes," said Diamond.

"I meant where—"

"We haven't got to that yet. About page twenty-five, I should think."

"Don't despair, Peter," said the ACC—a relative newcomer who hadn't really earned the right to call anyone by his first name yet. "Keep taking the statement. Your bank clerk may turn out to have been a serial murderer."

Polite smiles all around.

Diamond shook his head and said, "A good old-fashioned mystery will do me. I don't ask for bodies at every turn. Just one will do if it presents a challenge. Is that too much to ask in Bath?"

"Anytime you feel like giving up ..." murmured John Wigfull, head of the murder squad until Diamond's recall. Wigfull now functioned as head of CID operations, and he wasn't a happy man either.

The ACC sensed that it was time to get down to business, and for the next hour Wigfull, rather than Diamond, was in the hot seat. The main item on the agenda was crime prevention and Wigfull had taken over Operation Bumblebee, the publicity campaign against burglary. It was a new baby for him, but he'd done his homework, and he managed to talk convincingly about the reduction in the crime figures. "It's an outstanding success however you measure it, sir," he summed up. "And of course all the break-ins reported go straight into the hive."

"The what?" said the ACC.

"The hive, sir. The computer system operated by the Bumblebee team. We analyze the results and decide on initiatives to sting the villains."

"So computer technology has a major role here?" said the ACC, worthily trying to head off a veritable swarm of bee references.

Diamond stifled a yawn. He wasn't in sympathy with computers any more than he was with bee-based PR campaigns. His thoughts turned to poetry, of all things. This was totally unlike him. He hadn't read a line of verse in years. Yet a phrase mugged up years ago for a school exam was stirring in his memory. What the devil was it? An illustration of some figure of speech?

The discussion of Operation Bumblebee persisted for another twenty minutes. Everyone else around the table seemed to feel it was a chance to make an impression on the new boss, and the squirm factor steadily increased, with talk of getting the buzz on burglars and how the entire station was humming.

Then that elusive phrase surfaced clear and sonorous in Diamond's mind. He spoke it aloud. "The murmur of innumerable bees."

The room went silent.

"Onomatopoeia."

"I suppose it is time we brought this to a close," the ACC said, after a long, baffled stare at Diamond.

Chapter Four

In the crypt, the Bloodhounds were in full cry.

"The puzzle is the thing," Milo Motion bayed. "The challenge of the puzzle. Without that, there's nothing."

"You said it!" Jessica rounded on him. "There's nothing in those books except the puzzle, and if the puzzle's no good you feel cheated at the end. Most of those so-called classic detective stories are flawed. Agatha Christie went to preposterous lengths to mystify her readers and she's reckoned to be the best of them. Take the plot of
The Mousetrap."

"Better not," Polly Wycherley gently cautioned her. "Just in case any of us hasn't seen the play."

Jessica jerked her head toward Polly in annoyance, and the flounce of the blond curls drew an envious sigh from Shirley-Ann. "Have a heart, Polly," Jessica said. "How can we have a serious discussion if we aren't allowed to analyze the plots?"

The reason why Polly was everyone's choice as chairman was made clear. She explained evenly, but with a distinct note of authority, "Jessica, dear, we all love discussing crime stories, or we wouldn't be here, but another reason for coming is to get recommendations from each other of marvelous books we haven't read. Don't let's rob any book of its mystery."

"I deliberately mentioned
The Mousetrap
because it isn't a book," Jessica pointed out.

"Yes, and we appreciate your restraint, but just in case some of us haven't seen the play ..."

"Is that a ruling from the chair?"

"No, we don't go in for rules," Polly said serenely. "If you want to criticize the puzzle story in general terms, my dear, I'm positive that you can do it, and still make the points you wish to."

"All right," offered Jessica. "What I'm saying without mentioning any titles—"

"Thank you, dear," murmured Polly.

"__is that in order to mystify people,
really
fox them, I mean, writers were forced into concocting story lines that were just plain silly, like one very well-known whodunit in which the person who tells the story is revealed as the killer in the last chapter."

"The last chapter but two, if my memory serves me right," put in Shirley-Ann.

Jessica widened her eyes. "I can see we're going to have to watch what we say in future."

Shirley-Ann felt herself reddening and was relieved when Jessica softened the remark with a smile.

Milo was not smiling. "What's wrong with the narrator doing it?"

"Because that's a trick," said Jessica. "A piece of literary sleight-of-hand. She had to go to absurd lengths to make it work. I mean, the writer did. This is so difficult, Polly."

"It didn't trouble me," said Milo. "And it didn't trouble millions of other people, judged by the success of the book you're talking about. It's still in print after seventy years."

"Is that how long ago it was written?" said Polly, dangerously close to offending the principle she had recommended a second or two before. But it seemed she was only steering the discussion in a less adversarial direction. Her piloting couldn't be faulted.

Miss Chilmark, the dragon empress, who had been silent up to now, waded in. "There's really no reason why a puzzle story shouldn't have other merits. I can think of a work with a wonderful, intricate puzzle that is intellectually pleasing as well as theologically instructive. A novel of character, with a respect for history ..."

"Any guesses? I never got past page forty-two," murmured Jessica, unheard by Miss Chilmark, who continued to rhapsodize on the merits of
The Name of the Rose
until she was interrupted by the barking of a dog.

"This will be Rupert," Jessica informed Shirley-Ann.

"With a dog?"

"The dog isn't the problem," said Milo.

As it turned out, Milo was mistaken. The dog was a problem. Everyone looked toward the door, and a large brown mongrel, perhaps a cross between a setter and a German shepherd, stepped in and sniffed the air. It had a thick, wavy coat gleaming from the drenching it had got, and it trotted directly to the center of the circle and shook itself vigorously. Everyone was spattered. There were shrieks of outrage, and the meeting broke up in disorder. A chair was overturned, and Polly's handbag tipped upside down. The dog, excited by the commotion, rolled on its back, got up, and barked some more.

Miss Chilmark cried, "Somebody take it outside. My dress is ruined."

The owner appeared, a tall, thin, staring man in a black leather jacket, dark blue corduroys and a black beret, and rapped out a command.

"Marlowe, heel!"

The dog wagged its tail, gave another shimmy, and distributed more moisture.

"It takes no notice of you whatsoever," Miss Chilmark complained. "You ought to have it on a leash. Or, better still, leave it at home."

"That's a flint-hearted attitude, if I may say so, madam," Rupert replied in an accent redolent of one of the better public schools. "Coming here is the high point of Marlowe's week. He's merely doing what dogs do to dry themselves."

Milo said, "And what about all the other things dogs do? Are we going to be treated to those? I can't bear the suspense."

"What have you got against dumb animals?" said Rupert. "How would you like to sit here in a sopping wet coat?"

"How would you like it if I sent you the dry-cleaning bill?" Miss Chilmark riposted.

"Call yourselves Bloodhounds, and you panic when a real dog turns up," Rupert said, with a grin that displayed more gaps than teeth.

Polly Wycherley judged this as the proper moment to restore order. "Why don't we all go back to our seats? Then Marlowe ought to settle down. He's usually no trouble."

"The chairs are wet," Miss Chilmark objected. "I refuse to sit on a wet chair."

A cloth was produced, the seats were wiped, and the meeting resumed with Marlowe in disgrace, anchored by a lead to his master's chair leg, and forced to lie outside the circle.

Shirley-Ann was intrigued that Rupert could appear so indifferent to the chaos he and his dog had just inflicted. He sat between Polly and Milo in a relaxed attitude with legs crossed and his left hand cupping his chin. It was a face without much flesh, dominated by a beak of a nose and dark, deepset, alert eyes overlapped by the front edge of the black beret.

Polly said, "We were having quite a fruitful discussion about the predominance of the puzzle in the classic detective novel."

"Tiresome, isn't it?" Rupert took up the challenge at once. "Totally unconnected with the real world. All those eccentric detectives—snobbish lords and little old ladies and Belgian refugees looking for unconsidered clues. Absolute codswallop. In the whole history of crime in this country, real crime, I defy you to name one murder that was solved by a private detective. You can't." His owlish eyes scanned the circle. "You can't."

"That doesn't put me off," Milo gamely answered. "I don't want my reading too close to real life."

"Or real death," said Jessica.

"Exactly." But Milo had missed the point.

Rupert laughed and displayed even more gum. He was quite a ruin, but extremely watchable. "Fairy stories for grownups."

"Why not?" said Milo. "I like a little magic, even if it turns out to have been a trick."

Shirley-Ann chimed in, "That goes for me, too."

Rupert gave her a pained look. "Another one suffering from arrested development. Hell's teeth, I'm seriously outnumbered now."

Polly sounded a lighter note. "When some of us heard P. D. James at the Pump Room a few years ago, she said she must have had the mind of a crime writer even as a child, because when she first heard the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, her thought was 'Did he fall, or was he pushed?'"

Even Rupert smiled, and then went straight on to the offensive again. "And they all live happily ever after?" he pressed them. "Is that what you want from your reading?"

"A sense of order restored, anyway," said Shirley-Ann. "Is that the same thing?"

Milo remarked, "I like the loose ends tidied up."

"So that you can sleep easy, knowing that all's right with the world," Rupert summed up with heavy irony. "Do you people ever read the crime statistics? Do you know what the clearup rate is? Has any of you ever had your house burgled?"

"Yes."

Heads turned abruptly, for it was Sid who had spoken. He was so inconspicuous that even a single word was quite a bombshell. Having let it fall, he lowered his eyes again, as if the flat cap resting on his knees had become more interesting than anything else in the room.

Shirley-Ann was intrigued to know what Sid was doing in a discussion group like this if he was so reluctant to join in. He plainly didn't wish to say any more. He avoided eye contact. His posture, his whole behavior, seemed to ask the others to ignore him, and that was what she herself had done up to now. She prided herself on being observant, so Sid obviously had a special talent for self-effacement. Not to be defeated, she regarded him minutely. Probably in his early forties, she guessed, with a more powerful physique than his bowed shoulders suggested. Slightly hooded blue-gray eyes, of which she had seen only glimpses, so her power of observation was not so faulty after all. Small, even teeth. Nothing in his looks could justify such shyness. Perhaps he felt out of his element socially. The clothes didn't give obvious clues, except that they were what you expected a man twenty years older to wear. A white shirt and black tie under the raincoat. Was he an undertaker, perhaps? Not a policeman, for heaven's sake? Dark blue trousers, probably part of a suit. Black, well-polished laced-up shoes. The workingman's raincoat that he wouldn't be shedding, however warm the surroundings. And the flat cap on his knees. You poor, pathetic bloke, Shirley-Ann summed up. You're not enjoying this one bit, so why are you here?

Rupert had been slightly thrown by Sid's observation. "The point I was about to make—I think—is that the sort of thing you people enjoy doesn't deserve to be called a crime novel. The only crime novelists worthy of the name are writers you've probably never heard of, let alone read. Ellroy, Vachss, Raymond—the ones bold enough to lift stones and show us the teeming activity underneath. Not country houses, but ghettos where young kids carry guns and murder for crack and even younger kids are sodomized. Corrupt cops taking bribes from pimps and beating confessions out of luckless Irish boys. Rape victims infected with AIDS. Squats littered with used syringes and verminous mattresses and roaches feeding on stale vomit."

"I don't have the slightest desire to read about stale vomit," said Miss Chilmark. "You get enough of that on the television."

"Precisely," said Rupert. "You switch channels and watch some sanitized story about a sweet old lady who makes nanas of the police through amateur detective work. The same formula week in, week out."

"As a matter of fact, I hardly ever watch television these days," Miss Chilmark told him loftily. "I don't know why I still keep the set in my drawing room."

Rupert's eyes glittered at the mention of Miss Chilmark's drawing room.

Polly cleared her throat and said, "Did anyone wish to say any more about the classic detective story?"

"Is that what we were discussing?" Milo said with a disdainful look at Rupert. "You could have fooled me. Yes, one of us obviously has to speak up for the story that challenges the reader, and as usual, it's me. I put it to you that the Golden Age writers between the wars brought the art of mystification to perfection. Regardless of what some of you were saying just now, I could name a dozen novels of that time, and probably more, that for the brilliance of their plotting stand comparison with anything written in the last half century. You may talk about the intricacy of a le Carre novel or the punching power of your hard-boiled Americans, but for me and for many others the test is whether the writer has the courage to lay out a mystery—a fair puzzle with clues—and say to the reader, 'Solve this if you can'—and then pull off a series of surprises topped by a stunning revelation at the end."

"But at the cost of many of the other merits one looks for in a decent novel," said Jessica with more restraint than Rupert.

"Such as . . . ?"

"Character, pace, sharp dialogue, and, above all, credibility. The books you're talking about were excellent in their time, Milo, but they were never more than pleasant diversions."

"Pastimes," suggested Shirley-Ann, and got a nod from Jessica.

"That's a word you don't hear so much these days," said Polly abstractedly. "Pastimes. Nice word."

Milo was not to be overridden. "Of course, the most basic and fascinating form of detective puzzle is the locked room mystery."

Rupert groaned and slid down in his chair with his long legs extended.

Milo ignored him. "The master of the locked room mystery was John Dickson Carr. The 'hermetically sealed chamber'— as he called it—was a feature of many of his finest novels. I don't know which of you has read
The Hollow Man."

Shirley-Ann gingerly raised a hand. The only other reaction came, surprisingly, from Sid, who gave a nod without removing his gaze from his flat cap.

Milo said, "In that case, I shall definitely bring my copy with me next week. Quite apart from being one of the most entertaining detective stories ever written,
The Hollow Man
has a famous chapter devoted to locked room mysteries. Dr. Fell, Dickson Carr's sleuth, holds up the action to deliver a lecture on the subject that is a delight from beginning to end. Am I right?" He looked toward Sid, who gave another nod.

"Yes, why not?" Milo went on. "I shall read it to you next week, and I'll warrant that Dr. Fell will make some converts among you, even if I can't."

Rupert confided loudly to Shirley-Ann, "He's hooked on this hogwash, poor fellow. We'll never get him off it. Belongs to the Clue Klux Christie and the Daughters of Dorothy L. and the Stately Holmes Society. Quite mad. They think of themselves as scholars, these people. Believe me, my dear, the only fan club worth joining is the Sherlock Holmes Society of Australia. They meet once a year,
get
totally plastered, fire guns in the air and sing, 'Happy Birthday, Moriarty, you bastard, happy birthday to you!' "