The Dirty Duck (22 page)

Bored with the afternoon's takings and leavings, he had a drink himself and then walked down the hall to the gents. As he did so, he happened to look into the empty room to the left of the toilets and wondered why the missus had left on the dim overhead light. He reached in to switch it off. His eyes bulged.

All twelve stone of him fainted dead away.

B
efore Wiggins had brought the police car to a stop, Jury had the door open and one foot on the curb, already lined with cars from R Division. Several uniformed policemen had cordoned off the spot, keeping back the knot of people who always seemed to gather for state occasions, accidents, and murders.

“Back here, Superintendent,” said the sergeant who had, he said, been the one to put in the call.

The wall of divisional police were creating more of a traffic hazard inside than were the curious, outside. Jury was introduced to Detective Inspector Hatch of R Division, who led him down the dimly lit corridor to a room on the left.

 • • • 

Jury had been so certain of what he would find that he had spent the drive across the Southwark Bridge steeling himself against visions of her mutilated body. He could not, at first, take in the fact that the victim was not Penny Farraday.

The body in the chair, arms dangling and head thrown back from the brutal blows to the face, was the body of Harvey Schoenberg. The pulpy mess that had once been Schoenberg's eyes made Jury think that in some Oedipal fury, Harvey had turned a sword upon himself. And what appeared to Jury as almost the saddest note in this Grand Guignol of blood-soaked clothes was that some of the blood had run down the blind-eyed screen of Harvey's little computer.

The police doctor was shutting up his bag. “Hello, Superintendent. As you can see, it wasn't too difficult to determine the cause of death. The throat partially slit—funny, almost like an afterthought—the other thing
went straight through to the brain. Interesting how the killer came by this weapon.” The doctor held out a handkerchief-covered hand on which rested a dagger. “Rather medieval, wouldn't you say?”

“Elizabethan,” answered Jury.

The doctor looked both surprised and mildly amused. “I must say you fellows are certainly up on weaponry.” He lapped the handkerchief over the dagger. “He's been dead under two hours. No sign of rigor at all.” The doctor was putting on his raincoat. “Hope you'll forgive me; I've done all I can here, and I just missed the second act of a very good Webster.
The White Devil.”

The yellow, metal-shaded light overhead cast gloomy shadows across the table. “Those revenge tragedies are all alike.”

Surprised, the doctor said, “I wouldn't say that.”

“It's something he said.”

The doctor turned to look again at the body of Harvey Schoenberg. “You knew him, then? Well, I suppose that makes your job much easier.”

“Much.” Jury wasn't smiling.

 • • • 

No one in the pub, according to DI Hatch, had seen the murdered man come in.

“He must have come in by way of the alley and the garden. The owner remembers seeing him in here yesterday with another man. Says he was asking questions about some old tavern, the Rose. Said it used to be around here. He”—Hatch gestured toward the chair that had lately held the body of Harvey Schoenberg—“must have come in after the eleven o'clock opening, given what the doc said. We need to find that other man, the one he was with—”

“I know the other man.”

Hatch looked at Jury as if the superintendent had second sight. “So. Last of all,” said DI Hatch, handing over the scrap of paper, “this.”

Even as his hand reached out for it, Jury knew what it was:

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

“Reads like a damned suicide note. Obviously not suicide though. What's it mean? Any idea?”

“It's the end of a poem.”

At least Jury hoped it was the end.

“Because I wanted to see Southwark Cathedral,” said Penny Farraday, who appeared to be having no trouble facing down an extremely irritated CID superintendent.

After Jury had told her about Harvey Schoenberg, she had gone into her room and slammed the door, stayed for a few minutes, and then returned, her face slightly mottled, all trace of tears scrubbed away.

Still, she said nothing about Harvey Schoenberg. The argument was over her own wanderings over London. “I mean—shiiiiit!—we ain't
prisoners
 . . . we ain't been
arrested—”

“Southwark Cathedral,” said Jury. “When did you suddenly develop this religious streak?”

Penny slumped on the sofa beside Melrose Plant, whose refusal to glitter when they had finally met had not helped her attitude. “Since old Harvey—well, look, I'm sorry he's—anyway, since he told me the story about it.” She grabbed up a pillow and punched it a few times and then stuffed it behind her back, as if her fury were aimed at the furniture itself.

“A story. If you want to hear a story,
I'll
tell you a story. I'll toss you in the nick and tell you a very
long
story about why I don't want you walking round London
on your own.
There's plenty of blokes up alleyways with plenty of fascinating stories for little girls—”

“I
ain't
no little girl—”

Jury merely overrode her objection by raising his voice: “And most especially, I don't want you going anywhere with
anyone
connected with this tour! Is that clear?”

She lowered her eyes and lapsed into grim silence.

Jury repeated his question:
“Is that clear, Penny?”

Sharply her head came up as she yelled at him,
“You
ain't my daddy!”

The face seemed blistered with anger. But the tone was not truly heartfelt.

 • • • 

“What story?” asked Melrose, after Jury had left the room to go to Scotland Yard.

Peevishly, she said, “It don't matter. God, that's four of us been killed now. And then there's Jimmy! Whatever
did
happen to Jimmy?” Again she picked up the down pillow and held it against herself like soft armor. “I try and tell myself, it ain't nothing but he just run off. But you
know
it's got to be more'n that.”

To keep her from dwelling on this morbid possibility, and also because he was curious, Melrose insisted she tell him Harvey's story.

“Oh, it was just about this girl, Mary Overs. She had this daddy named
John Overs who ran the ferry over the River Thames and got rich because he was the only one with a ferryboat. But he was real cheap and
mean.”
Biting round her thumbnail, Penny scrunched down farther into her corner of the sofa, as if sinking into the very depths of meanness herself. She kicked off her loafers. “This John, he was so cheap he kept Mary hid away because he didn't want no boys seeing her. She was so beautiful, see, any boy saw her'd fall in love with her like that.” Penny snapped her fingers. “If they fell in love, that'd mean they'd want to get married and old John, he'd have to pay a dowry.”

Melrose felt the way she squinted at him was to see if he fully understood how heartless this exacting of dowries was.

She continued. “Her daddy, John, decided to pretend he was dead for a day just so he could save the cost of feeding her servants. That's how cheap he was. But what happened was, they were so happy he was dead, they broke into the food and liquor and had a swell time, right there around his corpse. Or what they thought was his corpse. Then John rose up in his shroud to stop them, and, of course, they thought it must be the devil doing it and they run John straight through with a sword.” Penny made a sudden thrusting motion. “Then Mary was free and when her lover was galloping to see her, his horse turned over and he broke his neck. Poor Mary was so heartbroken she turned a nun and started this priory, St. Mary Overies—”

“Which later became Southwark Cathedral.”

Penny looked up at him, surprised. “How'd you know that?”

Melrose shrugged. “I'm a schoolteacher.”

Her surprise turned to something resembling disgust, as she said,
“Schoolteacher!
How can you be an earl and be a schoolteacher?”

“I'm not an earl,” said Melrose, absently. He was turning over the details of the account Jury had given him of the murder of Harvey Schoenberg, and thinking that it was more than strange; it didn't add up.

“Not an
earl?”
Penny was indignant. “But
he
told me—” She pointed toward the door through which Jury (that liar) had recently walked.

“Sorry. I gave up my title under an act of Parliament passed in 1963. The Impoverished Earls Act, we could call it.”

His smile was directed at a (for a change) nearly speechless Penny. She could but get out the single word: “Why?”

“Because.”

“ ‘Because'—that ain't no answer. You don't just give up being a—” But Melrose was thinking of his earlier conversation with Harvey. “ ‘When surgeons were barbers,' ” he said, reflectively. “Southwark . . .”

Penny had apparently grown as sick of Southwark Cathedral as had Melrose of his earldom. “Then that means your wife can't be—what? An earless?”

“Countess.”

Disgust was written all over her face now. “You mean to tell me—Godamighty!—that you gave up your wife being a
countess,
too?” Penny toed her loafer and punched at the silken pillow. “How selfish can you get?”

Melrose picked up his walking stick, preparatory to leaving, and sighted down it. “Well, since I have no wife, it makes no odds, does it?”

At this, she bit her lip, and finally said, “Well, I can damn well tell you this: if somebody I was in love with was to die, I sure wouldn't be a
nun
over him!”

Thus they sat there for another moment or two in semi-companionable silence, reflecting on the loss of Harvey Schoenberg, the peerage, and the possible repercussions in the state of West Virginia.

I
t was not so much the brown eyes, untidy mustache, and weariness of posture that distinguished Jonathan Schoenberg from his brother—for the resemblance between them was clear—as it was the coldness of manner. Harvey's effervescence was completely lacking in the elder brother, like champagne gone flat.

They found him in the British Museum, where Jonathan Schoenberg's shoulders seemed weighed down with the dust of the antiquities around him.

“Dead.” It might have been their surroundings—sarcophagi, Egyptian busts—that gave the word such a hollow sound when Schoenberg said it. The man seemed at a loss for some appropriate response. The stoop of the shoulders deepened, but neither the eyes nor the voice betrayed any particular emotion. “I can't believe it. I just saw him this morning—” He shook his head.

“You left Brown's Hotel together?”

Jonathan Schoenberg nodded. “He was going to Southwark, no, Deptford. He had this obsession about Christopher Marlowe.”

“Yes. We know. Look, perhaps we could go down to the Museum café and talk.” The coldness of his surroundings was beginning to bear down on Jury. He could almost see his breath.

 • • • 

Schoenberg sat with his cup of coffee and loosened the knitted tie he was wearing. It looked expensive, as did the suit, though Jonathan Schoenberg did nothing to show them off. It was as if the weight of the man's mind, which Jury judged to be formidable, bore down on the body, like a weight
on shoulders, tie, cuffs of trousers. Beside him, poor Harvey would have looked almost spiffy.

“You're a scholar, Mr. Schoenberg. Was there anything at all in your brother's research that someone might have been interested in?”

“Interested—?” Schoenberg laughed briefly. “My God, Superintendent, it was a perfectly absurd theory. What are you suggesting? That someone killed him for it?” Schoenberg studied his hands, laced across his knees. His tone was so dismissive of the notion, that the man did not appear to feel it needed the reinforcement of a look at either Jury or Wiggins.

“Your brother had no enemies, insofar as you know?”

“Certainly not enough for
that.
But it's hard to imagine Harvey's really incurring anyone's rancor.” He smiled slightly.

It was a smile, nonetheless. “Any hard feelings between the two of you?”

Schoenberg seemed amazed. He almost laughed. “Why would I harbor hard feelings about
Harvey?”

Apparently, Schoenberg's coldness was grating on Wiggins, too, who pushed the cough drop on which he was sucking to the rear of his mouth and said, “We don't know, do we? That's why we're asking.”

Jonathan Schoenberg seemed disinclined even to acknowledge Wiggins's existence, probably in the same way he would have ignored the presence of a younger, less perceptive colleague. Thus, he still addressed Jury. “Very well. Yes, Harvey appeared to be jealous. I was the one with the brains; I was the one favored by our parents; I was the one who got most of whatever was handed around. Harvey expended a great deal of energy in trying to prove himself, and I'm quite sure this whole
idée fixe
about Marlowe and Shakespeare was part of that.” This was announced without much interest in Harvey's theory or in Harvey himself. Schoenberg spoke tonelessly as he examined the dun-colored walls, the lackluster fittings.

Perhaps that's what academic life did to one, thought Jury.

“Did you see your brother often, Mr. Schoenberg?”

Jonathan shook his head. “Seldom.”

“But you don't live that far apart.”

“True.”

“Still, you met in London.”