The Case Has Altered (19 page)

Zel moved off down the path, steering her perpendicular course, a sidewise skipping movement. Her brilliant hair leapt and settled with each movement.

Melrose shook his head in wonder at the way children could abandon themselves to motion, certainly in a way forbidden to adults. In the short while he had known her, Zel seemed to have shed whole lives—cook, nurse, caretaker, crabbed adult—to arrive at her ten-year-old selfhood.

Thoughtfully, he said, “ ‘Zel.' ‘Zel' is a most unusual name.”

She didn't comment; she kept on skipping.

“Is it a nickname?”

“No.”

“Is it a family name?”

“No!”

“Is it from the Bible, then?”

“No!” she called back. She was some distance away, by an old stone wall that had once been the limit of someone's land. Her answer rang frostily in the air.

The fens stretched away beneath a sky that looked so close to the ground he fancied he could see the earth's curvature. The footpath shot on, arrow-straight until it was lost in the distance. He thought he could make out a broken line of roofs and chimney stacks of which the Case Has Altered might have been one.

“Windy Fen's just beyond,” cried Zel, pointing to a part of the landscape whose outline was undifferentiated trees and thickets. And further
off ran a road—the A17, he thought—the one on which he himself had traveled and on which distant cars passed.

Zel was back, huffing from her bout of exercise. “I can't go any farther; you'll have to get along without me. I don't want to meet up with the bogey-dog.”

Melrose checked his watch. “It's only a little after three o'clock. Does he come out before dark? Anyway, he's probably up in the Highlands by now.” He paused. “Look, are you sure you don't want me to walk back a little of the way with you?”

“You'd only get lost. Then I'd have to find you.” To prove how nonchalant she was, she ran off speedily, moving so quickly her bright hair streamed behind her like the tail of a comet. Three times she stopped to look back and wave.

Her small body seemed to melt into the land. He felt bereft. For some inexplicable reason he felt that he and this child shared some secret history, some common past, as if he'd known her for a long time.

 • • • 

W
yndham Fen was acres of waterland in the care of the National Trust. Once it had been drained to plant wheat and corn; then, the whole area had been reflooded. Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, the Isle of Ely were once an enormous mere. Mere, bog, and reed-bed. The wide washes of the Great Ouse, the Nene, and the Welland testified to that. When the Romans came, they would have needed boats to move through this countryside.

He found the boardwalk erected so that the visitor could walk over the dikes and observe. It was windy and the tall reeds rattled like sabers. Disturbed, a mass of birds that he couldn't put a name to flew upward in a blue blur. Marsh violets moved gently in the water where he imagined Dorcas Reese had lain—such a pathetic and insignificant little person that people had to think before they could call up her face.

Melrose looked off in the direction of the public footpath, judging the distance. Anyone at all might have known of Dorcas's habitual attendance at the Case Has Altered. Had she been going to meet someone here? He looked off toward the small building that he supposed was the Visitors'
Center and which lay some hundred feet away. She might have waited there, taking shelter from the rain.

It was so silent that Melrose could hear something plash in the water. An owl hooted. Over the top of a stunted willow, there was a quick stir of wings as a line of mallard beat upward. He watched them against the sky and then silence rushed back to claim the fen again.

T
he man who stood in the living room gazing out of the long window in an attitude of deep contemplation turned at Melrose's entrance. The meditative expression evaporated and was replaced by one even less committal. He cleared his throat, brought a closed fist up to his mouth and said, “You must be the Owens' houseguest. The antiques appraiser?”

Melrose wished people would stop calling him that, and simply call him by name, but he smiled and reached out his hand. “My name's Melrose Plant.”

“I'm Bannen. Lincoln CID.”

He gave the impression of being the mildest of men, a façade that Melrose supposed exerted a certain charm over witnesses. But the mild manner didn't fool Melrose, not after his long acquaintance with Scotland Yard CID. Jury could also appear mild, sometimes to the point where his selfhood almost vanished, offering whatever witness he was questioning a mirror image of himself. This Chief Inspector Bannen, Melrose bet, was that kind of copper. If to countermand any impression of cleverness, Bannen rather clumsily raised his hand and rubbed at his neck. It was a farmer's gesture, one that went with the pause to adjust the cap, to wipe the sweat from a forehead.

Bannen's thin mouth seemed to stray upward in a half-smile. Only half for Melrose. “I expect you know about this business, Mr. Plant. Awfully unpleasant it is.” He shoved his hands deep in his trouser pockets.

Melrose agreed with him, finding it strange—and somehow discomfiting—that Bannen was alone in here. It was as if having a high-ranking CID man standing in one's living room were the most natural thing in the
world. “You'll probably have it all sorted out in no time,” said Melrose.
How banal.
But he felt uncomfortable just standing there.

“I do hope so.”

“I'm slightly acquainted with one of the people involved. Jennifer Kennington.” Melrose wanted to get that on record and not give the man a chance to think Melrose was hiding something. “Hard to imagine she'd have anything to do with all this.”

“Ah.” Bannen nodded. It was perfectly clear that the chief inspector already knew about Melrose's acquaintance with Jenny Kennington; whether he set any store by it, however, was not at all evident. “And were you acquainted with either of the victims, Mr. Plant?”

“No. No, I wasn't. Do you—do you think the two murders are connected, then?” Another banal question.

“Yes, I'd say so.” He sighed. “The death of Verna Dunn made quite a splash in the tabloids. She's very newsworthy, I take it, having once been an actress. I expect she was fairly well known. And prominent in London society.” He rubbed his thumbnail across his forehead, as if he could rid himself of the frown that had creased it.

Melrose waited for him to go on, but he didn't. As much to relieve a tense situation as to get information, he said, “But it's difficult to discover a motive in all of this. I mean, no one seems to have one.” When Bannen simply watched him with his mild but disconcerting gray eyes, Melrose went on, now from sheer nerves. “No one in this house, at least. They seemed all to have been on such good terms.”

Bannen smiled. “But then of course you don't know them, do you? I mean, except for Jennifer Kennington.”

Melrose shook his head. He didn't much like the pause before Jennifer's name. He knew something was seriously wrong, but he felt helpless to protest.

 • • • 

T
he two rooms—living room and gallery—jutted out, with their side windows at an angle to one another, so that anyone standing at one could see into the near end of the other room. It had been in the living room that Bannen had stood waiting—for what? Melrose had the odd feeling
when he now walked into the gallery that the detective and Grace Owen could have been looking out of their respective windows, staring at one another. It was the angle of her head that told him Grace was looking not directly ahead, but to her right, into the living room.

She had not heard him come in, so intent was she on whatever she was looking at. She had opened the curtain of this side window only, and an oblong of light lay across her skirt and the statue behind her. The rest of the room was as usual in deep shadow and now came this clear pale banner of light, cold and brittle. The gallery, always colder than the other rooms, seemed frigid. His hands were like ice.

He meant to speak, opened his mouth to speak to her, but did not. Instead, he stepped even farther back into the unlit corner where Max's painting of Sargent's two little girls hung in strange anonymity. He thought of Zel.

With the cold, the silence deepened. The only sound was the ticking of the longcase clock. At another time, he might have found it comforting, like a heartbeat. Now it sounded merely relentless, a message that time was running out.

Melrose thought he heard a door close—the front door, he decided, judging from the heavy thunk of the door's feudal bearings. Grace Owen leaned forward a little and held the curtain with one hand, probably to see better who had left the house. Through that part of the window which he could see, he made out the figure of the CID man. He was moving about at the mouth of the copse, leaving and entering Melrose's line of vision. Bannen had turned and seemed to be staring straight in through the window. Grace took a step back, and, absurdly, Melrose himself tried to melt farther into the shadowy corner. But the inspector probably could not see Grace, for the clear thin light had faded. Bannen was simply standing, turning his head.

Then in the distance Melrose thought he heard a car approaching, and from the sound of the gears shifting, it was Max Owen's pricey sports car. Grace must have been watching the car, yet made no move to go out and greet her husband.

Melrose left the room and climbed the stairs to his own room to find pen and paper with which to write a note to Jury. No, he should phone.
His face was hot with what he assumed must be shame at his voyeurism. With his strong sense of privacy he could not think what impelled him to watch from the shadows of the gallery. The writing table in his room was directly in front of the window, a window above and to the right of the gallery window. He saw that Max Owen had not come directly into the house, but had stopped outside, been stopped, he assumed, by Bannen. They stood talking. Rather, Bannen talked. Max simply listened. The conference did not last more than a few minutes before Bannen turned and walked across the gravel to his car.

Max watched the policeman head down the drive.

What had happened? Max Owen had left the circular drive, and Melrose found that he was looking out on the vacant day, bleached of color, everyone gone.

P
ete Apted, QC, shied an apple core toward his wastebasket and watched it arc, glance off the metal rim, and tumble to the floor.

“You're not in trouble again, are you, Superintendent?” Pete Apted smiled. He was referring to that sad episode several years back when Jury had been a suspect in a murder case. The case hadn't gone to trial. Jury had discovered most of the truth; Apted had discovered the rest. Jury wished he hadn't. Ever since then, the thought of Pete Apted had made him flinch.

But not now. Now, the thought of Pete Apted, QC, made him hopeful. Apted was one of the most respected barristers in London. He would certainly have been a member of Parliament had he chosen to be.

“No, I'm not in trouble. A friend of mine might be.”

“Who's the brief in this case? Ordinarily, I—”

“There isn't one, yet. I thought perhaps you could recommend one.”

Apted's chair squeaked as he shifted, took his hands from behind his head, took his feet off his desk. The desk wasn't large, nor were the other furnishings at all luxurious. The room had a pleasantly tatty quality. The long curtains were in need of cleaning and the grim portraits could have stood a dusting. Jury especially remembered these men in silks looking down at him as if they could hardly wait to prosecute.

“Good lord, Superintendent, you must know more solicitors than I do.”

“No. But the point is . . . I wanted to make certain you were free—”

“I'm never free.” Apted played a riff with his thumb down a stack of briefs.

Jury's smile was constrained. “Besides that, I mean.”

Apted's smile was warmer. He creaked back in the swivel chair and resumed his former position. “Okay, what's it about?”

“Do you remember the lady—actually she really is a lady—Lady Kennington—who retained you to help me?”

Apted looked away briefly, returned his look to Jury, said, “Kennington. Jane . . . no, Jennifer. Jane was the name of the other lady—” And then Apted looked away again quickly and cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

Apted, Jury thought, was a remorseless man, but not an insensitive one. He knew that for Jury, that affair had been extremely painful. “Never mind. Anyway, it's Jenny Kennington who's in trouble. A double murder in Lincolnshire—”

“I read about one—the actress Verna Dunn. I saw her once. Is the other murder connected?”

“Yes. I mean, I think they're connected.”

Pete Apted rooted in the brown bag on his desk and came up with another apple. “You're not supposed to ‘think.' ” He bit into the apple, said, “This is the law you're talking about.” He swallowed, turned the apple for another big bite. “We go by appearances, one and all.” The crisp sounds of chewing filled the room.

“Well, the appearance here is that Jennifer Kennington's guilty.”

“I'm not talking about that kind of appearance; I'm talking about the one that I'm remorselessly led to after sifting through the so-called facts.”

“I don't know what you mean. Anyway, this is a shift in your way of thinking. I seem to recall being told—by you—‘If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck—' ”

“ ‘It must be a duck,' ” Apted finished for him.

“Well, in this case it certainly looks like a duck. Jenny—Lady Kennington—was the one with the most opportunity. And possibly motive.” He told Pete Apted about the movements of the several guests after the dinner on the night of the first of February. Jury had to admit he had never been convinced that Jenny and Verna Dunn were strangers to one another.