The Deer Leap (4 page)

“Well, if you didn't, the casting director must have a Seeing-Eye dog.”

She hesitated and then laughed. “Thanks.”

“That's your ambition, then? West End musicals?”

“West-bloody-End musicals? Well, it'd do for a start. What I'm really good at is the straight stuff. You know. Like that Judith Anderson or Shirley MacLaine, maybe.”

“You sweep the board, that's for sure. Had any lessons?”

“Some. Need a bit of training.” Her look was quite serious as she scrutinized her Scotch egg.

“A little, at least. I've got to get to work. I'll see you back to the house. I'm keeping an eye on you, Carole-anne.”

Shrugging a creamy shoulder toward the bar, she said, “So what else is new?”

“Polly? Polly
Praed?
In a phone booth — ?” Jury had left Carole-anne's flat after checking the dead-bolt lock and fixing the loose chain. (“
You going to bolt me in, Super?”
)

Just as he entered his own flat, the phone rang. He wasn't on rota, so it shouldn't be New Scotland Yard, but, knowing his chief superintendent's tendency to ignore who was first,
second, third down, he fully expected one of Racer's late-night calls-to-arms. That didn't mean anything was happening in criminal London that demanded Jury's attention, only that Racer's club and the pubs were closed.

So Jury was pleasantly surprised to hear the voice of his old friend Melrose Plant on the other end.

“Sure, I'm working on a case. Racer makes certain my hands are either full or tied behind my back. Where is this place?”

Jury wrote it down. “Okay. What else did she tell you? . . . Hmm. Well, you must bring out the best in her.” Jury smiled. “I'll see you there tomorrow. Unofficially, that is. The Hampshire police wouldn't appreciate my coming along uninvited.”

Hung up on him, had she? Jury shook his head, looked at the dull paperwork in his hand, tossed it back on the desk. From his memory of Polly Praed, getting her to talk about anything at all was like being stuck at a party of clams. She struck him as extremely shy, unless the subject got around to murder.

U
na Quick, according to Dr. Farnsworth, had died of cardiac arrest.

It was the storm and Ida Dotrice's account of Una's habit of calling her doctor, who signed the death certificate, that provided the Hampshire police with a reason for the accident. Dr. Farnsworth, whose practice was in the nearby town of Selby, examined Una Quick every month, like clockwork. It was unfortunate (Farnsworth had told police) that Miss Quick had not had a clockwork heart. Could go at any time.

Una had told Ida Dotrice that Dr. Farnsworth insisted she call him once a week — every Tuesday after office hours to report on her condition. How the latest medication was affecting her, or how the old ticker was doing, or whether she'd been going against his orders and drinking more than her limit of two cups of tea, and so forth.

But the storm Tuesday evening had brought down a telephone line and she hadn't been able to ring up the doctor from her cottage. So she had stupidly taken the walk up that
hilly High Street to the call box dutifully to report to the doctor.

The call had never gone through; Una had passed out in the kiosk and instead of slumping to the floor, as one might have suspected, she'd been supported by the telephone box itself. Must have thrown her arm across it — as police reconstructed the case — to keep from falling.

Dr. Farnsworth did not appreciate the irony of his patient's death put down to a gradual but nonetheless steep climb to a call box to report on the state of her health.

It was morning and Barney was still missing.

Melrose Plant would be here at any moment. Now, of course, she was hideously embarrassed that she'd got him all the way down here to Hampshire under false pretenses. Perhaps she could suggest they take a nice drive through the New Forest or have lunch somewhere. Or something. Polly scrunched down in her chair in the dining room of Gun Lodge.

Why she felt perfectly comfortable talking to
him
— he who was, or had been, one of the Earls of Caverness, and Viscounts Somebody, and a baron, and who knew what else, and had given it all
up
. . . Polly knifed the table mat as if it were one of the defunct titles. Not that she gave a fig for a title. She simply disliked people acting in a way contrary to what she would have them doing in her books. Earls and dukes and marquesses were supposed to stay that way.

“Ma'am,” said a spindly girl who seemed as shy as Polly herself. The girl had waited at table last night, had brought her early tea this morning, and seemed to be the only employee in Gun Lodge. She deposited a bowl on the table.

“What's that?” asked Polly, peering into the bowl.

“Porridge, ma'am,” said this pathetic breath of a girl, who then scurried away.

Polly had no appetite anyway. Not with Barney gone.

The girl was back.
Go away,
she thought with the embarrassment of one who doesn't want to be caught crying. “A gentleman to see you, ma'am.”

She looked down, listened to the approaching footsteps, said a brief (and rather surly)
Good morning
to Melrose Plant's
Good morning, Polly,
and without preamble, told him: “Coronary occlusion, that idiot doctor said. Well, maybe it was, but why was she in that call box anyway?”

Melrose Plant put his silver-knobbed stick on the table, sat down, and said, simply, “I don't know. Why're you crying?”

“I'm not,” said Polly, his obvious sympathy breaking a logjam of tears, which now flowed freely. “My cat's missing.”

“Barney?”

That was the trouble with him. He even remembered the name of her cat. Not only that, but he seemed more interested in her cat than that she'd got him here on a wild-goose chase. She wiped her face with her napkin. Why he seemed actually to
admire
her was beyond her comprehension. She was off-hand, rude, demanding, and temperamental. “You're a masochist,” she said, sniffling.

“Obviously,” said Melrose, looking at the bowl. “So must you be if you're eating that.” He took a spoon and stuck it in the porridge. It stood there.

“Don't touch it. You may never get back to Ardry End. I was met at the door by a gray-mustached, dreadful man who seemed to want a full accounting of my life before he'd rent me a room.”

“Why did you stay, then? There's a perfectly good little pub with rooms a bit farther along.”

Polly looked up, enraged. “He told me there
wasn't
any other place.”

Looking round at the prison-gray walls, the plastic place-mats, the porridge, Melrose said, “How else could he get custom?
Never mind. You can have my room at the pub and I'll stay here.”

“I can't. See, Barney might come looking for me.”

Remembering Barney's battle scars, more likely he was out looking for a leopard to fight.

“Don't worry. We'll find Barney.”

He was rewarded with a deep look from Polly's violet eyes. That he had been dragged all the way from Northamptonshire to Hampshire was nothing in the light of eyes like amethysts. The rest of her was ordinary enough. But who would bother looking at the rest of her? Melrose had to look away. “I take it you are thanking me?”

She churned the spoon in the awful gruel and more or less shrugged, dropping her glasses back in place. They often rode on her head. “Thanks.”

“Ah, the bliss! The everlasting gratitude! The hundred-mile drive —!”

“Do
stop being dramatic. You know you've nothing much to do.”

“How gracious. Except find your cat.” She deserved to be humbled a bit. “Well, not to worry. I called Superintendent Jury. He should be showing up in —” Melrose paused for a bit of drama with his gold watch “— in an hour or two.”

Medusa couldn't have done a better job of turning someone to stone than did the eyes of Polly Praed, now a stormy purple, staring into the green ones of Melrose Plant.
“What?”

“Why are you looking at me as if I'd just marshaled the Coldstream Guards?
You
were the one who hung up because you were so blasted angry I wouldn't call him. So, I called him.” Melrose poured himself a cup of lukewarm tea and asked if she minded if he smoked. From her look, he could have gone up in flames, and no one the sorrier. “Look, I
did
what you wanted.”

“Well,
this
is just wonderful. The poor woman keeled over from a coronary. But she didn't keel, that was the trouble.
There I was, thinking it was a live person making a call —”

“Not an unreasonable assumption. But you mean this is why I'm here?” He could see that her mind was somewhere on the A204 tracking Jury's car. Melrose might have been dragged from his own deathbed — that wouldn't worry her.

“How am I going to explain to Superintendent Jury that I'm not up on a murder charge — ?”

“The way you're pointing that knife, you soon might be.” He moved the blade away. “I don't know,” he said, smiling wonderfully. “Poor Jury. Dragged all the way from London on a missing cat case —”

Polly Praed slapped her napkin on the table and slid down in her seat, still staring at or through him.

Then she said, to his surprise, “Why didn't she have an umbrella?”

S
he wore a washed-out blue denim pinafore over a white jumper, sneakers faded like the denim, and no socks. Her hair was nearly platinum in the slant of sun breaking through the drizzling rain and the trees that surrounded Ashdown Heath. The shine of her hair made up for the lack of light in her face, a pale oval, glazed with rain. Her eyes were the same wash blue, faded like the rest of her. She looked like any other ordinary fifteen-year-old, except for the .412 shotgun butted against her shoulder, as she squinted along the barrel at the two boys thirty feet away.

“Put the cat down,” she said.

Billy and Batty Crowley had been stopped in the act of pouring the can of petrol on the ginger cat. It had a red bandanna round its neck and looked almost like a cartoon cat — eyes white and huge with terror, fur sticking out like pine needles. Batty Crowley was just about to strike a kitchen match.

She had walked softly up behind them, a quarter of the way across the heath, and they'd been so absorbed in their
game they hadn't heard her until she'd said it: “Put the cat down.”

They turned and stared at her, their own eyes frozen over now like the cat's. When they didn't react as fast as she liked, she cocked the gun and snicked the safety.

Then she said: “Take your shirts and sweaters off.”

They looked at each other and then back at her as if she were the mad one who'd contrived the merciless game in the first place. “What the bloody hell you mean?”

“Take your shirts and sweaters off. Now! Wipe that petrol off with the shirts.”

Both of them, each holding a leg of the squirming animal, bellowed with laughter —

Until she fired. She fired into the dirt of the cleared-off place where they were going to barbecue the cat. They ripped off shirts and sweaters and started wiping the cat down. They were sweating, half naked in the cold of the October morning.

“You're—” screamed Billy Crowley. He must have thought better of telling her what she was when he saw the shotgun come up slowly, aimed somewhere in the area of his forehead.

“You got the petrol off?”

They nodded, squatting down and wiping for all they were worth. The cat screeched and clawed Billy.

“Wrap those sweaters round the cat so it can't lick itself and put it in that box you brought it in.” When she motioned with the shotgun, they cringed. “Bring the box here.”