The Deer Leap (25 page)

Amanda remained seated. “I've no idea what this means.”

“You will,” said Jury in a voice that lifted her from her chair. Then, escorted by Sergeant Wiggins, who, ever the gentleman, offered her a throat lozenge, she marched from the room.

“I'm sick of being dogged by police.” He reddened at his own pun.

“That's too bad. I'd like to hear your story,” Jury repeated, sitting and helping himself to the cigarette box on the table.

“I've told it often enough —”

“I'd like to hear it, Mr. Grimsdale.”

Grimsdale reluctantly told him what had happened the night before, piecemeal. Of course he hadn't aimed the rifle at the child. Although he was quite sure she had something to do with it —

“Carrie Fleet? Probably the only person who wouldn't.”

“She despises me, despises hunting — the whole lot.”

“Please be logical. It's just for that reason she
wouldn't
have harmed those staghounds. But it is very likely you
would
have harmed her.”

Trying to drag a red herring across the path, Grimsdale said, “And it's
illegal,
Superintendent, to go about unstopping earths!”

He took a pull at his brandy.

“What was Mrs. Crowley's relationship with your keeper? Donaldson?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Impatiently, Jury shook his head. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you
mean,
and I resent it.”

“Unfortunately, resentment means sod-all to me.” He smiled.

“There was no . . .
relationship.
Good lord, man, everyone knew Donaldson and —” He stopped.

“ ‘And.' Go on.” Jury smiled inwardly. Plant had used the same trick.

Jury merely wanted to confirm the rumor.

“It would be ungentlemanly of me.”

“That's a shame. Be ungentlemanly. Your keeper and Sally MacBride were having an affair, that it?”

“That was the rumor. I pay no attention to rumors.”

Jury bet. “Whose time do you want to waste, Mr. Grimsdale? Mine or the Hampshire C.I.D.'s?”

Grimsdale waved him back into his chair. “Oh, all right, all right. He had his separate digs in the stable house. That's where they met.”

“Cozy. Anywhere else?”

“How should I know? Listen, you've no right to browbeat —”

“I'm not. But I could. You tried to kill a fifteen-year-old girl.”

Grimsdale shot up.
“And were you there, Superintendent?”

“No. With three witnesses, I hardly needed to be, did I? Now, tell me if you're familiar with the name Lister.”

In the act of lighting a cigarette, Jury nearly dropped the match when Grimsdale said, “Of course.”

“What?”

Moving impatiently in his chair, Grimsdale said, “Can't imagine why you'd be interested. You know the way we name hounds. Use one letter a lot of the time. Lister's one of them. Then there's Laura, Lawrence, Luster —”

“I see. I was thinking of a
person.
A Lord Lister.”

“Person? Oh. No, I never heard the name.”

“Tell me about Amanda Crowley, then.”

“What about her?” His tone was convincingly indifferent. “Been living in Ashdown ten, maybe a dozen years. I don't keep
count.
”

Jury watched his eye travel from stag's head to buck's to birds under glass. He certainly did, of some things. “She has money of her own?”

“I don't know.”

“She doesn't seem to do any work, Mr. Grimsdale. One would assume she has money of her own. An allowance? A trust fund? Something like that?”

Grimsdale leaned forward, brandy glass clutched between his hands. “Are you suggesting I'm a fortune-hunter?”

Jury smiled. “Why not? You hunt everything else.”

 • • • 

“Nothing, sir.” Wiggins flipped through his notes. “She was here this morning because the hunt didn't meet at the Deer Leap, and she rode over to find out what was happening. Been here ever since.”

“How convivial. Breakfast, lunch, and a supper we interrupted.”

“Yes, sir. But given the food in
this
place. . .” Wiggins shuddered. “Never had such stiffish oatmeal, sir, and then —”

“Too bad, Wiggins. The name Lister—?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Claimed it meant nothing to her. Never heard it before.” Wiggins folded the bit of paper and slid a lozenge into his mouth. “Believe me, I watched her responses sharp as a cat.”

“Unfortunately, people can be sharp as cats too. But not to worry. I didn't expect much.” He paused. “In my next report, you can bet what you did last night will be detailed.”

Seldom did Sergeant Wiggins laugh aloud. Now he did. “ ‘Next report,' sir? Do you ever make them?”

“Intermittently. Where're Polly and Plant?”

“At the Deer Leap, for some food. I expect even Maxine could put something together better than what you get here.
As long as she doesn't have to cook it,” he added glumly, and then sighed. “Poor Miss Praed.” Seeing Jury putting on his coat, Wiggins pulled his scarf about his neck.

“Why ‘poor'?”

“Got all scratched up. Trying to get that hulk she calls a cat from running up the Lodge's draperies.”

“Hope he did a good job. On the draperies, not on Polly. She should take a lesson from Carrie Fleet.”

As they let themselves out into the cold dusk, Wiggins said, “That reminds me. Mr. Plant wanted me to tell you. The girl Carrie's dog. It's missing.”

“Bingo?”

“Yes, sir. She wanted, Mr. Plant thought, to see you. Though she didn't say it directly.”

“She wouldn't.”

“D
amn the man! Revenge! You can bet on it!” Regina de la Notre had dropped her languid air and paced about the salon trailing behind her a vermilion coat of Chinese silk and in one hand a bottle of gin, which she used to top up her glass. She had been pacing now for a good ten minutes — back and forth, back and forth, mural to mural — and Jury wondered whether her turns at each wall and the passing of herself in front of the huge mirror might not have been done as much for effect as angry tirade. The bottle of gin didn't quite fit that image.

She went on ranting. Wiggins, notebook out and handkerchief on the little Sheraton table, looked gratefully at his cuppa and unhappily at the gin. They had been there nearly an hour and the bottle had been in more or less constant motion.
Cocktail hour,
she had said when they walked in, inviting one and all to join. Where was Lord Ardry? Charming man. Jury thought he and Miss Praed had gone to the Deer Leap for a meal. How utterly revolting, and who is Miss Praed?

To Jury's questions about Woburn Place it was no, no, no.
No, she had never heard the name Lister; no, she knew nothing about any sort of Alsatian; no, she had never seen Carrie before the meeting at the Silver Vaults, and what in
hell
were all of these questions about? She seemed to blame not Jury, who was asking them, but Wiggins, who was writing down the answers.

All of this was taking place amidst pacing and sweepings of silk with her hand, and interspersed with the continued harangue.
“Grimsdale
— that odious creature — has done something to that terrier of hers, what does she call it?” The Baroness snapped her fingers as if in a fit of forgetfulness and addressed this question to Gillian.

“Bingo.”

Jury thought the look Gillian gave her employer was close to loathing. As if she thought the Baroness might, after all this time, at least remember the name of Carrie's dog. Which, Jury was pretty sure, Regina did. She merely strived for effects.

As now she clutched her fists to her handsome silk coat (one fist still around the neck of the bottle) and exclaimed: “He could actually believe Carrie —
Carrie
— had a hand in those damned dogs of his being poisoned? The creature's round the twist, ought to be put away.” Distractedly, she looked about her like a woman gone quite mad with the news (which Jury was sure she hadn't; it merely made a change) and asked, “Where's Carrie? Where is she?”

“Looking for Bingo, of course. Or in her animal hut, brooding. What would you expect?” said Gillian. She was now standing in front of the mirror, thus blocking Regina's view of herself. Between the twin doors, the twin
trompe l'oeil
murals which again doubled the doors and the view outside, and the mirror facing the mirror on the back wall, Jury felt he had fallen, perhaps like Alice, into a world of reflections.

Regina, by now quite drunk, though carrying it off to a fare-thee-well, ran her hand in a tragic gesture across her forehead. “She must be back for dinner. She knows we dine at eight-thirty.”

Gillian raised her eyes to heaven and shook her head. Her dress tonight was a grayish brown, different from the other only in its style. Had she been asked to play down her own looks in order to enhance Regina's, she couldn't have done a better job. But colorless as the dress was, it was draped across breast and hip in such a way that — like the other — it could hardly hide what lay beneath.

“So your meeting with Carrie Fleet was accidental,” said Jury mildly. The Silver Vaults were famous, well visited. It was possible that anyone in London might have gone there. No particular reason to be suspicious, but all the same . . . Liverpool could not be accounted for in the accent and aristocratic cheekbones of Regina de la Notre.

The Baroness stopped in her tracks and came to look down at him as if he, too, like Grimsdale, must be insane. “I
beg
your pardon? Accidental?” She bent slightly over Jury, who could have filled a shot glass from her breath alone. “Of course not, Superintendent. I traveled from Woburn Place to Eastcheap to Shoreditch to Blackheath to Threadneedle Street to the Old Curiosity Shop to the Silver Vaults. Just
searching,
my dear, for a thirteen-year-old animal-minder.
Good
God!” And she was back to pacing again.

Gillian was trying to look everywhere in the room but at Jury. “Your friend —” and now she paused for a name.

“Lord Ardry,” said Jury, easily.

“Lord Ardry, yes. He was talking with Carrie this morning.” She looked down at her intertwined hands. “I wonder if she told him about the note.”

“What note was that?” Jury shifted uneasily, drank his whiskey.

“It came with the morning post. She said it was just some silly thing from Neahle Meara. I wondered about it; Carrie never gets letters.”

“Never? No one in her past—” He turned to Regina. “Didn't you ever wonder, Baroness —”

“Regina,” she corrected him, throatily, as she studied the mural before her.

“— about Carrie Fleet's past?”

“For God's sake, my dear, she hasn't a past.”

Jury looked at her, bleakly. She was right.

Gillian ran through one of the french doors, calling over her shoulder she was going to look for Carrie.

As Jury got up to follow her, the little maid announced dinner.

“Well, my dear Sergeant, shall we . . . ?”

If there was any more to that question, Jury didn't hear it.

 • • • 

Gillian was standing at the door of the sanctuary, peering into blackness when Jury came up behind her.

“She's not
here,
” Gillian wailed. It was hard to know if her face was wet with rain or tears. “She's
not here!”

Jury put his arm round her and his hand on her satiny hair and held her. “Then she's looking for Bingo —”

“You don't understand, you don't understand, you don't —” And the weeping grew with every repetition. Jury drew her closer, as she kept shaking her head against his coat.

“Gillian. What was in that note? Why're you so upset?”

The silky head kept shaking back and forth, back and forth, like Regina's pacing. “I don't
know.
But something's wrong. Something's
wrong!
Carrie's so disciplined—” And she moved her head from Jury's shoulder to look up at him. “You don't know her. She really
likes
that old devil —”

It was obvious she meant Regina.

“Sorry. I didn't really mean that. But if dinner's at eight, Carrie's
there!”
She was breathing in great, sobbing breaths.
“I know . . . you don't. . . believe me. Jealousy . . . something . . . but oh, where
is
she?”

Jury pulled her back again, head against shoulder. “I'll find her. Right now, I want you to have some brandy and lie down. I'll take you up —”

She seemed not to hear him. He shook her. “Gillian. We can stroll through the maze. Then I'll take you up and tuck you in. Fair enough?”

He thought the bad joke might be lost in the wind and the rain, but she did smile a little. “Fair enough. But no stroll. I'm too done in.”

As they walked away from the arbor, she kept stopping and looking back, so that he had to urge her toward the house.