The Deer Leap (14 page)

“I can assure you, the Brindles have their odd little ways.”

“. . . so we thought, taking enclosed into account, another five hundred might be worth your time. I remain, truly yours . . .” and a flourish of a signature. “What does he mean?”

Busy measuring out her gin, Regina just looked at Jury. “That he wants five hundred pounds, Superintendent. Even my spongy brain could ascertain that.”

“Mind if I keep this?”

She waved the letter away. “By all means. Poor Carrie. Her name isn't even real. So there it is, she came to me with no documents at all.”

“You make her sound like a purebred dog with dubious credentials.”

She laughed. “Ah, Carrie would like nothing
better
than that comparison.”

Jury smiled. “What about Gillian Kendall?”

“She's a Londoner and was having morning coffee in the local tea-palace when she overheard a conversation that I was looking for a secretary. I was beginning to bore myself, though that might be hard to believe, and when she came up the drive to offer her services six months ago I said yes on the spot. Couldn't stand to advertise and have half of Hampshire
on the doorstep. But I'm not sure I care for her very much. I dislike people who walk on tiptoe and always seem to be carrying something in their hands — vases, decanters, flowers. Who knows but underneath there might not be a knife or a gun?”

H
ard to believe that Gillian Kendall had a knife or a gun hidden under the cardigan she kept drawing more closely about her.

They were walking between the privet hedges that made up the maze, another of the Baron's practical jokes, she told him. “It's very carefully constructed,” said Gillian Kendall.

“Isn't that the idea behind all mazes?” Jury thought Regina's assessment of Gillian Kendall was off the mark. She did not walk on tiptoe, nor did she seem nervous. On the contrary, she struck Jury as composed. Composition. It was the right word, if one were an artist. An extra brushstroke here and there would have colored over the too-pale cheek, brought a spark to the eye that would have doubled its effect.

“It's quite intricate,” she went on. “For one thing, it's round. It can't help but give the impression a person is going in circles.”

“Metaphorically speaking, a person usually is.”

She stopped and looked at him. For a moment he thought she might be going to say something less oblique. But what she said was, “I've got lost here several times. The Baron apparently
wanted to make sure that once his wife got in here, she couldn't get out. Oh, no malice. None. He liked games. This one I imagine would be sexual hanky-panky.” Gillian looked away. “Funny. She speaks of him with surprising devotion. I would have thought she'd only have done it for the money.”

“You don't care for her very much, I take it.”

A gust of wind whipped her hair, even in this privet-sheltered place. Hiding the little row of buttons that marched up her prim dress by pulling the cardigan closer, she said, “I honestly don't know. She's like a wine that hasn't aged well.” Gillian laughed. “A sixty-five Bordeaux, perhaps.”

“A bad year?”

There was a pause as she picked at the hedge. “A very bad year.”

Jury didn't think she was talking about wine.

Gillian looked along the curving path they had taken, one they could have continued along, or taken another to their right. “We've got three options,” said Gillian. “Go on, go back, or go right. I leave it to you. Which way?”

There was an arched opening in the hedge. Through that he could see several others, like a series of archways down a long hall. It was much like the mural. “Well, that vista is a trick, I'd say. It appears so obviously an escape that it probably leads straight back to the center of the maze. So I'll take the fourth option.”

“There are only three. Back, forward, out.”

“There's also down.” Jury enjoyed the feel of her arm as he pulled her to one of the benches they'd passed. “Strategically placed. Let's sit.”

Shaking her head, she sat down. “Not fair.”

“I disagree. Perhaps we can talk our way out. Or I can. After all, you know the way, and you've been leading.”

The eyes she turned on him were cool. “You think I've deliberately led you into a trap?”

Jury smiled. “Sure.”

“I don't understand. What have I said?”

“It's what you haven't. You've been having a hell of a good time walking round here, telling me about the Baron and his little practical jokes. But I would think that, knowing I'm from Scotland Yard, you'd wonder why I'm here.”

“Why are you, then?”

“You must have known Una Quick.”

She frowned. “Everyone did. But you're not here on her account —”

Jury interrupted. “A few days ago her dog was poisoned.”

“That's right.” She shivered and pulled her cardigan closer. “It was awful for Una. She was a sick woman, anyway. Paul — Dr. Fleming — he's the local vet. . .”

“I've met him. What about him?” Given the way she hesitated over the name, Jury wondered if the handsome Dr. Fleming was the reason for another bad year.

“Only that he said Una claimed the door to the potting shed was locked.”

“Do you put that down to Miss Quick's forgetfulness? Or a local animal-hater?”

“That's hard to believe. But if I had to, I suppose I'd say it was the Crowley boys. They're awful. One truly is retarded, and the other acts as if he were. I can't think why Amanda doesn't put Bert — they call him ‘Batty' — in an institution, instead of that ‘special school' she sent him back to.”

Looking through the corridor of openings, Jury said, “Institutions can be pretty grim places.” He remembered his own years in the orphanage the social services had put him in after his mother had been killed in the last bombing of London. He had been six, but he would still, in his mind, walk the cold corridors, sit on the brown-blanketed bed, taste the watery potatoes. “Maybe she loves the boy too much.”

“Amanda loves Amanda.” Her profile, above the collar pulled up around her chin, was like the sculpted profile of
one of the statues. “It allows her to play the martyr. It also allows her to play with several thousands of pounds a year. Twenty, Regina says. Amanda's the executor of the will. The father knew the youngest — that's Batty — might be put in some sort of institution right after he died. So the bequests, he made were contingent on that.” Gillian turned to Jury, her smile sardonic. “I imagine most people could put up with a few pranks for twenty thousand a year, don't you?”

Gillian Kendall did not seem especially cynical. Her face had a wasted look right now, the expression of one who's gone down for the count once too often.

Jury changed the subject. “Who collects the post?”

She looked puzzled. “Well, it depends. I do, Mrs. Lambeth does sometimes; she's our cook. Randolph, who's supposed to be gardener. Carrie Fleet. Whoever happens to be near the post office.”

“Did the Baroness Regina ever mention her suspicion that Una Quick was reading people's letters?”

“Oh, yes. I'm quite sure she's right, too. I sent Paul — Dr. Fleming — a note that he was positive had been opened. He laughed about it.”

Her face burned.
She
hadn't laughed about it.

Jury asked her point-blank. “What's your relationship with Dr. Fleming, then?”

Another pause. “Nothing.” She looked at him squarely. “I'm not sure there ever was.”

“That's hard to believe.”

She looked away.

“The Baroness says you've been here for about six months. Are you really her secretary or just good company?”

Gillian laughed. “I'm really her secretary. She enjoys having me read her morning post to her. That way, she can hold on to both her cigarette and her coffee, spiked, as you saw, with a tot of gin. As for company, I doubt I'm much company for anyone.”

“I'm not having a bad time.”

It was the first genuine smile he'd seen from her. “And if you pull that cardigan tighter, I'll be forced to take off my coat and put it around you. Did you see this letter?”

She looked at the one Regina had handed over to him.
“Those
people. Yes, I saw it —” Gillian looked a bit startled. “They can't actually
do
anything about Carrie, can they?”

“No. Extortion isn't held in much esteem by police. Didn't you think it peculiar? Brindle's saying ‘the enclosed' ought to be good for another five hundred quid. What was ‘enclosed'?”

Gillian frowned. “I don't know. There was nothing.” She read the letter through. “I supposed he was talking about the rest of the letter. The trouble and worry — the poor girl'd been attacked, apparently. Doctor's bills—” Gillian shrugged.

“Brindle? From what I can see he's a tuppenny-ha'penny crook. Probably on the dole. Social services would have seen to all that. Well, never mind.”

But she looked as if she minded very much, and Jury asked her if she'd heard about Sally MacBride.

With surprising bitterness, she said she hadn't. Jury wondered how many men Mrs. MacBride had got on her list. Fleming, perhaps?

Jury told her, and her look changed quickly.

“God!
How awful! I didn't know her that well. I've been to the Deer Leap a few times, talked to her a bit, but that's all.” She shaded her eyes with her hand, gazed up at the cold blue of the sky. “What's going on in this village?”

“Good question.” Jury got up. “I think I'll have a word with Carrie Fleet.”

She smiled. “
A
word is about what you'll get.” And she rose from the bench, too.

“You'll lead me out of this maze, I hope.”

She looked at him as if she wished she could.

It had once been an arbor, now bricked in, ivy-bound, and moss-encrusted. The stone mason had done rather a sloppy job of it: there were cracks, some of them stuffed with rags against the weather. Though the weather today was fine, a throwback to spring.

The building was long, and at first he saw not her but the wooden crates and metal cages. Some were empty, unused perhaps, or temporarily vacated by their tenants.

Their keeper must certainly have been a virtuoso performer. Cats, dogs, a rooster scratching in the dust, and in the largest compartment — more of a horse box — was a donkey. And on his walk through the grounds he had been startled to see a pony that definitely bore the stamp of the New Forest. It chomped at grass in a patch of woodland behind a statue with a broken arm. It had looked at him for some few moments, apparently used to the occasional two-legged animal, and then returned to its grazing.

 • • • 

Jury's appearance in the doorway caught her by surprise. She had been forklifting hay into the donkey's stall. He tried to remember where he had seen such an expression before; it might have been struck from metal, and that was where he had seen it, on all of the coins bearing the profile of the Queen.

A black and white terrier with a missing leg stayed close to her as she went about her work.

“Now, what's a New Forest pony doing roaming through the woods of ‘La Notre'?” Jury smiled.

He was surprised to see her blush before she turned back to the donkey. “It got hit by a car. Tourist, probably,” she added without rancor.

“But how did you get it here?”

“Pickup truck.”

He leaned against the doorway of the dark hutlike place and simply shook his head. If she shot, no reason to be surprised she drove.

“Doesn't the Forestry Commission take care of them anymore? Those ponies are protected.”

“Nothing's protected,” she said evenly. She stepped back and surveyed the donkey. “I got him from a tinker. I had to pay him twenty pounds. Him, his caravan, and everything in it wasn't worth that. But I didn't have a gun.”

“You usually carry a gun?”

“No. Mostly when I'm in the woods. Poachers, see.”

“Most people don't go along with the idea of somebody carrying a shotgun around, you know.”

Carrie opened a cage door in which some mourning doves cooed, put in some feed, and turned to look at Jury. “Especially policemen.”

“Especially.”

There was a long silence. She stood there in her blue dress with a sweater underneath, very straight, like a lightning rod. Jury thought that in that place she was quite firmly grounded. And the longer she looked at him, the deeper the blush. She turned the high color of her face away and took a cat out of its cage. It was a rather ugly black tom with one eye permanently closed.

“Blackstone,” she said. Carrie put him down and hunkered down beside him. “Blackstone, come on.” There was a combination of command and kindness in her tone. He had heard that quality occasionally in good leaders. The cat didn't move; he seemed afraid to move. She put something a little way away from him. A toy catnip mouse it could have been. It was dusky in the arbor, which had been wired with one bulb. The cat sprang. Carrie smiled.