The Deer Leap (2 page)

Una Quick lay in bed three days later, not having risen since the funeral. Stiff as adamantine, hands clasped over her bosom, a votive candle burning beside her.

The vicar hadn't wanted to read the service over Pepper, she was sure. Beneath him.
Him.
Fidgety old fool, he was. Some just didn't understand how you got attached to an animal.

Here in her tiny cottage in Aunt Nancy's Lane — two up and two down — she'd nursed a crotchety mother for twenty years. And forty-five years keeping the post-office stores. Little
enough thanks had she got from the villagers for
that.
Selling soup and sorting post. So what if she had her bit of fun with it. That taint of perfume on letters to Paul Fleming. Handsome, thought he was God's gift.

The candle guttered in a tiny gust of wind. She had held one at the funeral, and when that went out she had lit another and then another. Keeping watch. In that breeze she smelled a storm coming. Una thought of it waiting out there, like Death.

When the steel band gripped her below the breast, she winced. The beat of her heart was uneven and ragged as her breath. Dr. Farnsworth had come and gone directly after the funeral to check on her again. Would he be annoyed if she called him on the Monday? Tonight? Instead of Tuesday?

The band loosened and the constriction eased. No, she mustn't fall prey to the habit of some patients. He had laughed, pleasantly enough, his arm round her shoulder, and told her to stop dwelling on her heart, as it only made matters worse. But it had almost killed her this time, what with Pepper's passing away. Arsenic. It must have been horrible . . . .

Across the room the telephone rang, and she wondered if she should make the effort. It persisted. She dug her feet into slippers and went to it.

The voice was strange. Strangled, almost.

The message was stranger.

She wiped beads of perspiration from a brow cold as pearl.

O
rdinarily a person who could be rendered speechless by the public in general, Polly Praed was ready to strangle the woman in the public call box. At least she thought it was a woman; it was hard to tell in the rain pouring down the call box, drenching Polly's yellow slicker, water flung like sea-spray against her eyes. A sudden beak of lightning turned the blood-red box a livid yellow, but the damned fool just nattered on.

Had she not been
in extremis,
Polly Praed would no more have thought of pounding on the glass of the door than she would have considered giving a speech at the annual Booker Award ceremonies. Not that she'd ever get the chance. The trees that lined the High Street could have accepted the award better than Polly Praed. Ten minutes now. Ten minutes. She wanted to scream.

Unfortunately, screaming was out, too. She had failed her est course in London. When commanded to fall on the floor and scream, she had sat like a rock.

She had failed her Assertiveness Training course in Hertford, too.

Any call from her editor threw her into paroxysms of fright; he would call to “check on her progress.” In his sly, friendly way.

About the only people she could manage were a few of her friends in Littlebourne, and she was cursing herself for a fool for not staying there in the first place.

The rain poured, the lightning clawed, and that odious man at Gun Lodge had had the nerve to tell her the Lodge telephone was for private use only and directed her up this hill to the call box.

She felt like throwing herself against it, toppling the damned thing and the person inside who must be calling everyone in Ashdown Dean. Fortunately, it was a tiny village. Probably only another twenty calls to go.

If her editor hadn't phoned her to “check on progress,” she'd never have set off on this harebrained literary excursion in the first place. Canterbury first, then Rye, as if the imaginations of Chaucer and James might fall at her feet like cathedral stones or tiles off roofs. Then up to Chawton and Jane Austen. Not even Jane could make the wheels start turning.

Had she stuck with Assertiveness Training, she would simply have told that Grimsdale person —
demanded
— that she must use his telephone. Then, of course, the storm hadn't risen to gale force. So she had trekked up here.

Raining cats and dogs.

She wouldn't have minded if it had rained down her own cat, Barney. That dreadful person said no animals allowed. Barney was used to the car, having made this literary pilgrimage with her. And she had gone sneaking out after dark to bundle him in.

Only Barney wasn't there.

If she hadn't got kicked out of est, she would have been able to go to police, rout out whoever was around. But she knew, instead, who to call and who would give her advice,
since he had been so free with advice over the last two years whether she wanted it or not.

Finally, in a furor, Polly put her hand in the metal pull and yanked the door open.

“I'm
sorry!
It's an
emergency!”

The woman responded quickly enough. She fell backward across Polly Praed's feet. Her hand was still holding the receiver and the cord lay snakelike, half in, half out of the call box, as the lightning knifed again and showed a waxen face.

 • • • 

It was too much like her stories to be believed.

Here she sat in the police station on a hard chair waiting for Constable Pasco to come back. Polly, having done a great deal of research in the course of writing her mystery novels, knew that rigor mortis had either passed off or not yet started in the body whose head had used her feet as its cushion. Having gingerly removed those feet, she had had no choice then but to step over the elderly woman and ring up the local police. The lonely public telephone in the rain had quickly become a carnival of whirling blue lights and villagers materializing out of Ashdown Dean's cottages and narrow streets.

For a good twenty minutes she had been sitting on this chair, waiting. Since Constable Pasco was the single local policeman, he had sent to some town five miles on another edge of the New Forest for reinforcements. Polly had been surrounded at the call box, questioned, plunked down here.

And no one cared about Barney. She told herself not to worry. Barney had probably just crawled out the window. Barney wore a red neckerchief and would have got the gold medal in Assertiveness Training . . . .

Literary inspiration. Good God.

She was absolutely stuck for a plot and she had that contract staring her in the face, promising January delivery of a book that she hadn't even started. And it was October
twenty-second. All the way from Canterbury to Battle she'd contrived a plot around six people in a first-class train compartment making bets on which of them could tell the most interesting story before they got to their destination. She had been killing them off one by one as each had to leave for the toilet or somewhere. She didn't know who was doing the killing or why . . . the Chaucer scholar, perhaps, who had thought it up.

Battle had scratched that plot when she saw the Battle Rolls in the Abbey and wondered if a murder incorporating William the Conqueror might not be instructive. But think of all that research . . . .

Then Rye. Henry James. Inside Lamb House she wondered how a mystery in which several people have achingly endless, convoluted conversations over tea and biscuits, all of them knowing there
was
that body in the solarium but, with their Jamesian sensibilities, making such oblique references that no one knew if anyone knew if he or she knew. Including the reader. Her fascination with the endless possibilities of this grew. It would break new ground in the mystery world. A mystery within a mystery. A cobweb-covered windowpane. Her editor wouldn't know what was going on, but would of course have to pretend he did, being a man of Jamesian sensibility himself.

But her hopes were dashed when she picked up
The Awkward Age
and tried reading it over tea and cakes and realized that, although she couldn't make head nor tail of it, Henry James probably knew what he was doing. Damn the man!

Why hadn't she stayed in Rye for dinner at the Mermaid, as she'd been tempted to do? Or spent that extra day in Canterbury? Or never left Littlebourne, where she would be just settling down in bed with somebody else's mystery, hoping there might be something she could nick?

Thus did Polly Praed, like a film running backward, retrace her movements over the last three days. After leaving
Jane Austen's imagination in Hampshire (where she now was), Polly had planned to motor along and make a casual stopover in Long Piddleton, Northamptonshire, though she didn't see how one could merely be straying by the family seat of the Earls of Caverness. Well, he kept
asking
her to visit, didn't he?

Half an hour. No police. Constable Pasco had questioned her quite thoroughly and, she thought, with some suspicion. Why hadn't she used the telephone at Gun Lodge? Because that Grimsdale person wouldn't
let
her.

Finally, he came in, and she found a sliver of steel in her spine, enough to say, “I'm allowed one call.”

Feeling a fool for all of the times she'd heard that on American television programs, she blushed. Pasco, a tall, laconic policeman, merely plunked the telephone on the counter and told her to go ahead, miss.

Pleased at least by the
miss
— Polly had left her “miss” days behind her like a string of pop beads — she picked up the receiver. If he was so plentiful with advice and succor, let him advise and succor his way out of
this
mess.

In this way, Polly Praed decided to dump the whole thing on the former Lord Ardry, eighth Earl of Caverness, pretty much like she dumped her hastily written books on an unsuspecting public.

“T
ime!”
called Dick Scroggs.

The publican of the Jack and Hammer called for last rounds at ten. The deference he showed his occasional overnight guest was absent with his regulars, not even bothering with the
please
or the
ladies and gentlemen
to announce the closing hour.

Considering the lack of variety of ladies and gentlemen, all but one of whom were gathered at a table in a small bay window, Dick might be forgiven his abruptness.

Marshall Trueblood, who lent what variety there was, glanced at his watch and called back to Dick, “Isn't it a bit early, old sweat? It's only just gone ten. Since when did you start locking up before the half-hour? Let's have another round, anyway.” Marshall Trueblood nodded in the direction of Mrs. Withersby, asleep by the fire. A pistol shot wouldn't have bestirred her faster than a shot of gin.

“Of course,
you
needn't worry,” said Lady Ardry to her nephew, Melrose Plant.

Melrose Plant lowered his crossword puzzle and raised his eyebrows. The comment had come, unhooked to previous
conversation, a tail without a dog. She had been rustling the financial pages of the London
Times,
having put by the
Telegraph.

Lady Ardry's presence here at this latish hour was testimony to all that the dregs of the beer, of the day, and most probably of the autumn had been reached. She could generally be counted on to turn up here or at Ardry End throughout the day, but she had always stoutly announced that for her, morning was at seven. She was no layabout, like others. Always in bed by ten.

“About what needn't I worry, dear aunt?” He did not wait upon her answer: the comment had been loaded, he was sure.

“Funds, Plant, funds. Investments. Money. About which you needn't worry, not with
your
inheritance.”

He did not bother to answer. That the seventh Earl of Caverness, his father, had not left at least one wing of Ardry End to his sister-in-law Agatha would forever put Melrose Plant in the company of rogues and bounders. Nor did she seem to recall that Melrose's father had left her provision in the form of a cottage in Plague Alley and an annual allowance. She must have been squirreling it away, though, considering the high teas she consumed at Ardry End, family seat of the Caverness line.

“I want something safe for one. Something that will allow me capital gains should I decide to sell. Something that will not fluctuate with rising and falling markets. Something absolutely stable.” She drank her shooting sherry. “I'm considering precious metals. What do you suggest?”

“The Holy Grail,” said Melrose.

“Antiques, old trout,” suggested Marshall Trueblood, Long Piddleton's single dealer in them. “I've a fine jade dragon, Ming Dynasty — give a century, take a century — that I'll let go cheap — to you.” He flashed her a smile and lit up a pink Sobranie. As usual the cigarette was an extension of the costume. Trueblood was wearing a safari jacket, a flamingo
neckerchief and a chartreuse shirt. On the table was a panama hat. In October. Left over from Guy Fawkes Day, perhaps. Melrose calculated that Trueblood could clear the jungle just by stepping out of the bush.

“You could buy my house,” said Vivian Rivington to Agatha.

“That
old falling-down place? You've left it go too long, Vivian.”

Trueblood snorted. “Falling down? It's the handsomest cottage in Long Pidd, and you know it.” He turned to Vivian. “But really Viv-viv, you do keep putting it up for grabs and then taking it off the market.”

Melrose could not stand this absurd chatter over his aunt's “investment potential” a second longer. The only thing Agatha would ever invest was time — a large part of it spent before her nephew's fireplace consuming tea and cakes. He slapped his checkbook open, uncapped a thin gold pen. “What do you want for it, Vivian?”