The Case Has Altered (6 page)

“Max Owen. There've been two murders. So far.”

Melrose swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Really? Well, who's in charge of this case?”

“Detective Chief Inspector Bannen. DCI Arthur Bannen. Lincoln police. Not your typical village yob. He's too smart by half.”

“He'll see through me in an instant.”

“Of course he won't. He doesn't know anything about the value of
bonheurs-du-jour
.”

“I don't even know what it
is,
much less what it's worth!” Melrose snorted. Then he said, “Two murders.” Melrose seriously thought this over, then gave it up. “I revert to an earlier point: the family wouldn't want a stranger moving in, not on top of that. How would they know I'm not the Fiend of the Fens who'll strangle them in their sleep?”

“I think they'd be delighted to have a bloke around. Grace because she's very friendly, her husband because he's got a weakness for a title.”

Melrose sat up again. “I beg your pardon. I do not have a title.”

“You're an earl.”

“
Ex
-earl! Ex-!” Melrose got to his feet. Swayed a bit. “E-X, extinct. I'm the brontosaurus of earldom.”

“You've still got some of those old cards. Calling cards with crests on them.” Jury smiled. “I've seen you use them, haven't I? So it isn't as if you've never done this before. It's not as if you've never thrown your earldom or earlhood around to suit yourself. Once an earl, always an earl. It's like being Catholic.”

“
Yourself
, you mean. Not once in a dozen years have I become an earl again except where it suited
you,
old bean.”

Jury held out his glass again. “As long as you're up.”

Melrose went to his Waterford decanter, fuming. He splashed more whiskey in both glasses. A lot of it. “Those occasions—precious few of them, last time was in Dartmoor, wasn't it?—have always been to help you out. Here—” He handed Jury his glass. “But wanting me to be—”

“This is to help me out again. And Jenny—”

“—an antiques-expert besides—”

“—Kennington.”

Melrose fell silent. As Jury looked at him mildly, he sat back down in his wing chair, stared into the fire, said, finally: “Jenny? Be serious, will you?”

“I am being. Jenny's a witness.”

Melrose gave a short bark of laughter. “I should know. I was all over hell's half-acre looking for—” He could have cut off his tongue, bringing that up again.

“And prime suspect.”

“What?”
Melrose sat forward.

“DCI Bannen seems to think so. At least that was the strong implication.” Jury told him about the murder of Verna Dunn. “The ex-wife, shot with a .22 rifle.”

Melrose felt a little ashamed of himself. He was more intrigued than disturbed. “What in heaven's name is gained by killing off the
former
wife?”

“Especially in view of the more recent murder. One of the staff. A kitchen helper.”

Melrose put down his glass. “A second murder?”

Jury told him what had happened.

“Wouldn't that obliterate any motive for killing the ex-wife, though?”

Jury shrugged again. “That depends, doesn't it? We don't know the motive for either murder. There's also opportunity. The two of them, Jenny and the Dunn woman, were outside, arguing. This was the last time anyone saw Verna Dunn alive.”

“Good lord . . . well, in view of this kitchen-help getting murdered too—obviously your DCI Bannen thinks it's the same person.”

“Probably.”

“Well, then.” Melrose studied the fire again. “Jenny isn't there now, is she?”

Jury shook his head. “She's in Stratford again.”

“So if Bannen thinks it was the same person, that lets her off, anyway.” Melrose picked up his glass again.

“Except for where she was the night of the fourteenth. It's only a couple of hours, three at best, from Stratford-upon-Avon to Fengate.”

“God, but you sound like prosecuting QC.”

“It's absurd without a motive. Only . . . I think DCI Bannen knows a lot that he's not telling me. Still, I find it too difficult to believe . . . ” Jury slid down in the leather chair, eyes on the ceiling again.

In spite of the unhappiness of the subject, Melrose felt how pleasant it was, sitting here talking with Jury, how much it felt as if the clock had been turned back. Only it hadn't, and he had to get this off his chest. “Look, Richard. That day at Stonington—”

“What about it?”

“You left in such a hurry. . . . Well, I've always felt pretty rotten about that. I mean I thrust myself upon the scene—”

“But you were there only because I asked you to help find her. That's all. So how can you say you ‘thrust yourself upon the scene'? A noticeably archaic manner of speaking, I must say.” Jury smiled and drank his whiskey and held up the napkin he'd left on the chair arm. “That's not the reason you crossed her out, I hope. I'd say the decision here is monumental.”

“What decision?”

“I mean, if this were another kind of list. Such as a list of women you might possibly love. Or even marry.”

“What? What?”
Melrose sputtered. “Marry?
Me
? Who in hell would I be marrying, anyway?” Melrose uttered a short bark of laughter.

Jury waved the napkin. “One of these, presumably.”

“
Don't
be daft!” Melrose fell silent again. “I just didn't want you to get the idea that I was—” What? he wondered. “Lady Kennington and I aren't especially . . . compatible.”

“Funny. I'd have thought the opposite.”

“That's where you're wrong. I find her, well, a bit . . . dry. Do you know what I mean?”

Jury shook his head. “No. Dry like a twig?”

Exasperated, Melrose answered. “No. Of course not.”

“Like a leaf? Like a Diane Demorney martini?
There's
the quintessence of dryness for you.”

Melrose plowed on. “Jenny is not my type at all. I'm not criticizing her, understand. It's just that different people get on with . . . for instance, I can't imagine you and Ellen Taylor really hitting it off.”

“I can.” Jury took another gulp of his drink. “As a matter of fact, I can imagine hitting it off with any one of these women. Excepting Miss Fludd, naturally. Whom I don't know.”

“I mean, relatively speaking. Oh, hell—”

Jury's laughter was sincere and hearty. “You're a terrible liar. Anyway, it's all forgotten, that episode at Stonington.”

Melrose found this difficult to believe. “You're sure?”

“Absolutely. I mean how could I hold that against you when you're about to do me this tremendous favor. Being an antiques expert and an earl and going to school to Marshall Trueblood. Hell, you'd have to be a great friend to do that.” Jury smiled expansively.

“Blackmail.”

“Who?
Moi
? Surely you don't think I'd stoop—”

Melrose regarded him through narrow eyes. “To anything.”

“Okay, I will certainly admit I was very upset—mad as hell, I expect, that day at Stonington. I drove all the way to Salisbury to wander around Old Sarum, that godforsaken ruin. Well, that was the case we were working on then. And I met this chap who works there. He reminded me of Othello's rush to judgment over Desdemona. All Othello saw was a handkerchief.” He smiled at Melrose. “You can't rush to judgment over a handkerchief, can you? Or a napkin?” Jury waved it back and forth, at the same time running his eyes over the ceiling, one corner to another. “And we're forgetting something, aren't we?”

“What?”

“It's not our decision. It's hers. Whether she fancies one or the other of us—or even Max Owen. That's her decision. We're being pretty macho if we think it's ours.”

Melrose felt a great weight lift; he breathed more easily. For that was true. It wasn't their decision. He raised his glass. “Friends again?”

Jury raised his. “Always have been, far as I'm concerned. But there's one thing I do have to say.”

Jury's expression was grim as he sat looking at the ceiling, and Melrose felt a frisson of anxiety. “Yes, what?”

“For an earl you've got a hell of a lot of cobwebs up there.”

A
drop of this and I'll be right as rain,” said Wiggins, tap-tapping a spoon against his cup.

Richard Jury looked up from the small pink message slips scrambled on his blotter and wondered what on earth had brought his sergeant to this state of sanguinity. The sergeant had never been “right as rain” in all the long years of their association. He was getting smug, really. Wiggins could be insufferably smug. Well, there wasn't going to be any
con
-sanguinity on the part of Jury. He flicked a glance the sergeant's way and saw Wiggins was stirring something in a glass, something thick, amber, and medicinal. Wiggins stirred slowly and thoughtfully.

Waiting for him to comment, thought Jury. If there was anything Jury didn't feel, it was “sanguine.” Still sorting through his call slips, he could feel Wiggins's eyes on him, boring into his carefully constructed silence. Of course, Wiggins's announcement—for it had all of the gravitas of an engraved card or a black-edged telegram—was supposed to call forth an astonished gasp, or at least an eyebrow raised in query.

Getting neither, Wiggins stopped stirring and tapped his spoon again on the rim of his cup in regular beats that had the curious effect of sounding like a censer, shaking down clouds of bells or raindrop tinkles. Jury wouldn't have been too surprised to find the air perfumed with incense. Wiggins's complaints usually took on the tincture of ritual and religiosity. Now, he was sighing. Heavily. “So what's got you in such a life-affirming mood?” asked Jury, giving in.

Wiggins gave him a smile like the weak crescent of a waning moon.
“Life-affirming? Oh, no, it's just Vera has made me see that sometimes I talk myself into feeling under the weather.”

Vera?
Jury looked at Wiggins. “Vera?”

“Vera Lillywhite.”

Jury frowned.
Nurse
Lillywhite? “You mean Nurse Lillywhite?”

“Well, she
has
got a first name.” Wiggins seemed affronted.

“Yes, but you never use it.” Did this mean the relationship had shifted to ground farther up?

From a thermos Wiggins poured an amber-colored, thickish liquid into the cup to which he'd just dropped some feathery-looking stuff and assured Jury that yes, he and Vera had got to know one another rather well.

Jury remembered Nurse Lillywhite as a plumpish, rather pretty woman of unfailingly happy temperament. Well, you'd have to have a pleasant temperament, wouldn't you, to take on Wiggins's ills. Taking care of Wiggins was no small matter. There were, to begin, his complex ailments; that is, what Wiggins thought were his ailments—all of them fairly minor, but in such numbers they would war with one another, so that a flare-up of catarrh would exacerbate a fit of ague. Wiggins claimed to suffer from these medieval conditions, ones that Jury thought had been stamped out with the Black Death.

Jury quoted: “ ‘Oh, Gertrude, Gertrude, when ailments come, they come not single file, but in battalions.' ” At Wiggins's deep frown, Jury said, “Just quoting Claudius. You know,
Hamlet's
Claudius. Except there it was sorrows. ‘When sorrows come.' ” But Shakespeare only served to remind him of Stratford-upon-Avon and Jenny Kennington. He turned glum again.

Then Wiggins said, “Anyway, Vera's got me off a lot of my medications—”

Oh really? Then what's in those two bottles and what's that orange swill in your thermos?

“—and onto a health regimen. Vera believes in a holistic approach, you know, treating the whole person.”

“Were you only treating parts before?”

Wiggins uncapped one of the bottles and dropped something into the stuff in his glass that made it fizz. Bromo-Seltzer, probably, thought Jury. He'd been addicted to the stuff ever since the Baltimore trip.

Wiggins said, “I'm trying to be serious, sir.”

“Sorry.” Jury watched him twirl the cap back on the bottle, the movement of his fingers annoyingly lithe and balletic. A man without woman problems. Jury felt even more depressed.

“I'd think you'd be pleased. After all, it's you who've suffered as much as me.”

Nobody could suffer as much as Wiggins. But Jury was touched by his considering the possibility. “Holistic. Is that the medicine made of beet tops and things like that?”

“You're thinking of ‘homeopathic.' ”

Psychopathic
was more like it, he thought, as he watched Wiggins's glass sneeze up a spray of bubbles.

“Homeopathic's this sort of thing.” Wiggins held up a small tube. “Natural medicine is what it is.”

Jury nodded toward the amber glutinous stuff. “What's that, then?”

“Apricot juice with seafern.” Wiggins held the glass up as if toasting or blessing the office and tossed the lot back. He set down the glass with an
aaahh
as if he were a sailor who'd just had a shot of overproof rum.

Jury had to admit listening to Wiggins was in itself pretty good therapy. It took his mind off things, since he felt like strangling him a lot of the time and that used up energy that might instead have been consumed by brooding over Jenny Kennington.

This morning he had had a message from Jenny, but not in person. The message had come via Carole-anne Palutski, which was a whole different thing. It was akin to no message at all. What Jenny had really said and what Carole-anne
said
Jenny had said was the difference between chalk and cheese.