The Five Bells and Bladebone (16 page)

 • • • 

“It’s Darrington’s old house,” said Melrose, as they turned the corner. “Perhaps there are ghostly emanations, an aura, left by Oliver. Considering that he didn’t bother writing his own books, I’d at least give Joanna the Mad credit for
hers
. As she said to me once: ‘
Steal?
From whom? Who in the hell else would write this crap?’ ”

Jury was beginning to like her already. “What possible reason would she have had for meeting Simon Lean at the Blue Parrot?”

They were now on the outskirts — if Long Pidd could be said to have them — and Melrose said, “Walk more briskly. Plague Alley’s just across the way.”

“What of it? Agatha’s laid up with a bad sprain.”

“Even if she were, which she isn’t, she’d follow us till her legs turned to stumps.”

Before them lay the Sidbury Road, running white between the darkening fields, past a run-down inn placed back from the road.

“What’s happened to the Cock and Bottle?” asked Jury. A weather-worn sign sat propped against a rusted pole.

“After the body was found on the road, they weren’t doing very much business.”

“That was six years ago.”

“People have long memories.” They were walking up what seemed an endless gravel drive to Joanna’s house as Melrose discoursed on the latest Onions. “The killer, or somebody, had to take the stuff out of the trunk — old wedding gown and silk shawls and the usual things one finds in trunks — so that he could stuff the body in.” They had come to the front door at last, and Melrose picked up and let fall the huge knocker. “Well, it simply reminded me of Trueblood’s
secrétaire à abattant
. The books would either have been there, stacked on the floor, or old Theo might have done the stacking himself. Either way, he was in that summerhouse.”

J
OANNA
L
EWES
pulled open her front door, holding a sheaf of manuscript pages in one arm and a good thousand-page best-seller that Melrose recognized as the one in the window of the Wrenn’s Nest.

She peered out at them, trying to push her tinted glasses back on her nose with both arms full. “Just making comparisons,” she said.

Whether she meant of the two books or the two visitors, Melrose couldn’t say. Before he met her a year or so ago, Melrose had envisioned a writer of romances as being rather plump and peachy, a once-pretty housewife going to seed. But Joanna Lewes was blade-thin and running to gray rather than fat, although he didn’t suppose she was more than fifty. Nor was she really unattractive, just a little thin and worn, like one of Theo Wrenn Browne’s antique volumes in need of rebinding. Everything about her was no-nonsense, including her attitude to her books, which were (she often said) utter nonsense.

This was what she was saying now in answer to Jury’s questions about her writing, but saying it lengthily as they passed from doorway to hall to study. The library, the former owner used to call it; the only difference in it was that now it looked used. Columns of books and magazines
and crooked stacks of paper stood against the walls, and the desk was covered with manuscripts and gimcracks such as a kitchen-frog that should have been holding a scouring pad, but whose gaping mouth was instead doing service as an ashtray. A nearly empty liter of Ribena dripped stickily amongst the mess like a statue in a leaf-choked pond.

She still held on to the manuscript pages as she offered them a seat and herself perched on the fireplace fender. Melrose wished Jury would stop asking her questions about the writing life, as if he meant to take up the quill himself. Standing there as if he had all the time in the world, completely foreign to murder or other nasty business, he remarked on her apparent productivity.

He was getting, thought Melrose, the answer he deserved — one that would stretch from here to Victoria Street and back. For a woman who could be determinedly cryptic, when Joanna the Mad got going, she traveled far and fast.

“Of course, I have difficulty keeping my pseudonyms straight. Ramona de la Mer is for the more exotic settings — Barbados, Montego Bay, Hong Kong, the Himalayas —”

Melrose tried to envision the couple on the cover of one of her books he had picked up tracking through a bunch of mountain goats in search of a guru.

“— Then there’s Robin Carnaby; in those the heroines are nurses or doing good work out in the Australian Bush; or well-bred shopgirls whose families have been ruined by something. The other two, Victoria Plum and Damson Duke, I got from jam jars. They’re nice for Englishy settings. Ruined castles, country manor houses, et cetera. That’s one of the ones I’m writing now: the heroine, Valerie, is an innocent — rich, of course — transplanted American who meets a mysterious — richer, of course — stranger on a plane. A collision, one might say, between two cultures. Although I doubt Henry James would agree, not when it comes to Matt and Valerie —”

Melrose wondered why Jury didn’t fall where he stood. He himself slid down in his seat and studied the style.

“How do you manage? Do you ever get your writing-names mixed up?”

“Of course. Once I had Ramona de la Mer writing a hospital exposé where a gorgeous lady doctor of nymphomaniacal inclinations — that was for the publisher who likes them randy — falls in love with a patient. But when I came to the end and realized this was a Ramona book and not a Robin, I simply turned the patient into a handsome Barbadian, stuck in some sand, and that took care of that. Naturally, I don’t have time to visit any of these exotic places I write about, but after all, one can see a long white beach quite as easily as a long white corridor, can’t one? I am actually working now on an entire new line of Heather Quicks —
that
is the name of the
heroine
. You see, I realized how much less work it would be to keep the same heroine and simply change the plot. Well, a little bit. Although my heroines are largely interchangeable, still this would relieve me of having constantly to go back and see what color hair, eyes, et cetera, each has. A new heroine means different bra sizes or bikinis. One needs a good memory for exposed flesh, but then I have my guidelines to refer to. And also one has to invent boring histories for them — families, friends, background, all of that filler stuff. Now with
one
heroine carried from book to book to book, I’d need only think up some dreadful problem for each story. I’m having her live in the Fens or the Norfolk Broads or Romney Marsh — some sort of place where the possibility of mysterious strangers turning up is increased tenfold.” She stared at Jury over the top of her pale rouge-colored glasses and said, “Like
you
, Superintendent! Ah. Now
there’s
a hero made to order. Why don’t you sit down?”

Jury smiled his thanks, pushed aside a Navajo blanket lying across the back of a wing chair of tired leather, tossed an apple core in the coal scuttle (already filling up with
them), and sat down. Then, before another verbal onslaught, he said, “What about Simon Lean?”

A drawn bow could not have tightened more quickly. The question had stopped her cold, stopped all of them — Joanna, Ramona, Robin, Victoria, Damson, and Heather — dead in their tracks. “Oh. Oh,” was all she said, looking vaguely round the room, so recently peopled with leftovers from a Pirandello set, and finding it uncomfortably empty. “Absolutely frightful,” she went on, tucking a wisp of straying hair back into the bun at her neck.

“Did you know him well?” asked Jury, his face resting against his hand. Casual, almost sleepy he looked.

“Simon? Well, no. No, of course not —”

“But at least well enough to call him by his first name.” Jury smiled, as if to say, No harm meant.

Now she was busy tucking up her hair again, the pages on her lap sliding to the floor. Melrose reached to pick them up and she murmured her thanks. “Well, I expect it’s because his name’s on everybody’s lips; I mean, I scarcely knew the man at all.”

Jury’s smile broadened. “You know, everyone I’ve talked to just barely knew him, it seems. Except for Miss Demorney.”

The expression on her face shifted, but she said nothing. “It’s just that Watermeadows isn’t really
in
Long Pidd, you see. They’ve not much reason to come here. As for me, I stick close to my typewriter. An occasional drink at the Jack and Hammer is my social life.” As if inspired by this talk of socializing she said, “Wouldn’t you all like a sherry?” Without waiting for an answer she went to a drinks cabinet and returned with a decanter and three glasses.

“Invent something, Miss Lewes.”

Frowning, she looked up from her pouring. “What?”

“With all of your imagination, just make up a tale in which a corpse is found in a trunk or a closet or, of course, a fall-front desk.”

In spite of herself, she seemed fascinated, standing there clutching the sherry decanter and forgetting to give them some. “Something by Ramona, Robin, Victoria, or Damson Duke?”

“Oh, I’d much prefer Heather Quick as heroine.”

“Heather discovering a body.” She sat down heavily, decanter on one knee, glasses on another. “She could walk across the moor —”

“Fens,” said Melrose.

“Or broads. Or marsh. That would be best, I think. I’ve never been to Norfolk or even East Anglia, but that makes no odds. She could be squelching across —”

“Umm. No, tell it like you’d
write
it. Not ‘she,’ ‘Heather.’ ” Jury offered cigarettes around. Realizing she hadn’t poured their drinks, she did so, in quite a good balancing act. Probably like juggling her various writing names, thought Melrose, taking his sherry.

Joanna was clearly considering Heather’s dilemma as she bolted back one glass of sherry, poured another, and stood up, sherry decanter in hand.

“Let’s see, now: ‘Heather pulled off her wellies; it had been a beastly tramp across the marsh. She looked round the cottage, the fine old cottage out here in the middle of nowhere, and checked her watch. Ten o’clock. Hadn’t David said ten? She was irritated — no, she was bloody
mad
. Had she ever been able to depend on him?’ ” Joanna sat down on the fender again, and with her eyes closed, continued. “ ‘Tears began to spill from her sea-green eyes. Angry with herself, she brushed at them, looked at the port bottle, and poured herself a small one. Surely, just
one
wouldn’t hurt . . . .’ ” In her apparent delight that she might have found a new wrinkle in her plot, Joanna smiled slightly and rose, swinging the decanter to punctuate her thoughts. “ ‘Damn David!’ . . . No, let’s call him Jasper—”

Just don’t call him Melrose, thought Melrose, holding
his glass toward the tick-tocking decanter. How on earth could Jury look so engrossed?

“ ‘Damn Jasper! How long could she let this affair go on? How long would she let him keep taking advantage of her? The promises he’d made . . . Heather’s eyes, used to looking out on the world calm and cool as the slate-gray ocean —’ ”

“Sea-green.”

“What?” She came out of her coma long enough to blink at Melrose.

“You said her eyes were sea-green before.” Melrose supposed she would describe his own eyes as “sparkling like emeralds.” Melrose smiled, avoiding Jury’s black stare.

Joanna laughed. “Oh, well, I do have trouble with eyes, hair, and extraneous details like that.”

“Mr. Plant perhaps doesn’t realize,” said Jury, “that distracting comments like that play hell with the flow of creativity.”

Melrose saw Jury look at Joanna with real slate-gray eyes, but very changeable gray. At the moment they looked storm-gray.

“Ah, but you do, Mr. Jury.”

“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking of writing my memoirs.” He held up his hand when Joanna looked, open-mouthed, about to remark on this. “We’ll talk about that some other time. Let’s get back to Heather.”

“Heather. All right, she’s drinking her port, furious with David —”

Melrose bit his tongue. Did Polly Praed work like this?

“ ‘Heather refused to sit here, waiting. Let him think she simply hadn’t come at all. She pulled on her wellies and buckled her Burberry.’ ”

Thank God she’s leaving; perhaps we can too.

“ ‘She would simply go walk back across the beastly marsh to the pub . . . the inn where she’d booked a room, knowing
in the back of her mind that this might happen, that Jasper wouldn’t be here. The inn she had disliked immediately; the owner sounded like a gossiping wretch who would go tell the world about her —’ ”

Who’s to tell? wondered Melrose.

“ ‘It was then that she saw the stain on the carpet. And when she looked more closely, she realized that it was a trickle leading away from the . . . cupboard.’ No . . . . ‘As she was pulling on her wellies she saw a dark line snaking across the rug from the cupboard.
Blood
. In horror, her slim hands flew to her mouth. The door that had been slightly askew looked
as if it was opening!
’ ”

In spite of himself, Melrose was edging forward in his chair, and was absolutely astonished when he heard Jury’s calm voice asking,

“Were you in love with Simon Lean, Miss Lewes?”

 • • • 

The rug at her feet was thick enough so that the decanter did not break when it slid from Joanna’s grasp. It rolled back and forth for a moment and stopped dead. A thin line of sherry oozed across the rug. She looked down at it blindly, then looked from Jury to Melrose and back again.