The Five Bells and Bladebone (28 page)

“That what you’ve got on yours?”

“This? Oh, this is old; must have done this two weeks ago. No, Firebrand’s more browny.”

“My hair’s already brown.”

“Highlights, love, highlights.” She was certainly making a feast of running her eyes over Jury’s head.

“I’ll make a note of it. In the meantime, where’s the manager?”

“That’d be Carlos,” she answered, pouting. She indicated a youngish man sitting at one of the stations in a plum-colored chair. “Jeannine’s just giving him a trim.”

“Give him my card.”

Sighing, she slipped from her chrome stool and made her way to the rear of the shop. The decor ran to chrome, plum upholstery, and mirrors — not the necessary ones above the long rows of stations, but mirrors that served no purpose. In the middle of the room was a round, mirrored floor, sunken and surrounded by big, glossy plants. Jury walked past space-age domes under two of which sat middle-aged women sprouting green and pink hair-rollers. Their eyes were riveted to fashion magazines.

Jeannine was an angel-faced blonde who turned upon Jury sky-blue eyes of cosmic emptiness and a quaintly ‘forties hairdo: blond curls bunched over her forehead, the longer hair pulled back by two combs. She wore a white leotard and a short, pleated, plum-colored skirt.

Carlos was also dressed in white, with a plum tank top under a loose
Miami Vice-
type coat. They looked more like skaters than hairdressers; at any moment they could have swung themselves onto the mirror-pool for a competition. He nodded in friendly fashion at Jury. “Just be a tick. You’ve got wonderful hair; I haven’t seen just that shade of chestnut in simply
years
.”

Jeannine was snipping away and going on about her “lady.” “I mean, you just have to come out and
tell
them, don’t you, when they want a ‘do’ that’d only look good on someone my age?” Here she turned again to Jury, empty
eyed, smiling a smile that looked left over from some time she’d forgotten. He had never heard a voice so lacking in inflection. She talked as if she were reading cue cards. “So I said she’d be better off copying Maggie’s hair than Fergie’s.” A frown stitched her creamy forehead.

Carlos laughed, turning his bronzed face this way and that, as if he couldn’t get too much of his reflection. “That’ll do. And don’t forget Mrs. Durbin gets a hot-oil treatment. Her hair stands up like she’d got her finger in a socket. Sorry, Superintendent. Donna said you were asking about a Betty Someone.”

“Sadie. Sadie Diver.”

“Oh, yes. Donna wasn’t here then; she wouldn’t have known her. Sadie left about two months ago.”

“For what reason?”

Carlos shrugged. “Didn’t give one except to say it was personal.”

Jury showed him the snap of Sadie Diver, the other of Hannah and Simon Lean. “This her?”

Carlos studied the two. “This is.” He held up the picture of Sadie. “Dreadful cut. Looks like a pile of mushrooms.” He paused over the picture of Hannah. “Hmm.” He covered the hair as well as he could with his hand. “Must say I’m not sure . . . just a tick.” He spun round on the ball of his foot and walked halfway round the glossy island.

In a moment he was back with a thick album. “I keep these so that my ladies can see what miracles I can work with just a decent haircut.” He pulled a snapshot out and, with a small pair of scissors from his jacket pocket, deftly cut round the face in it. Then he positioned the shoulder-length, razor-cut hair — a geometric and angular cut with a bang slashed from the forehead at a guillotine-angle. “That’s her.” He showed Jury the change in Hannah Lean’s appearance. “A kohl liner and some blush would help, of course.” Then he frowned. “Why’re you asking?”

“Routine.”

Carlos raised his eyebrows; Jury smiled. “Where was she apprenticed, then? You’d have papers, her application, and so forth.”

“Hell’s bells.” It came out with a sigh. Carlos dropped his voice a register. “I’ll just tell you flat out and hope I won’t have my license taken away. I was in a dreadful bind during the holidays, so when Sadie walked in off the street, demonstrated an amazing expertise, I just hired her spot on.” His look at Jury was anxious.

“Not to worry. Have you got the canceled checks?”

“Checks? I pay the girls cash whenever I can.”

Jury pocketed his notebook. “Tell me, did you get the impression Sadie Diver was smart? Intelligent?”

He paused. “More like a sponge. She hardly talked about herself, never got into the sort of tête-à-tête Jeannine there does with her customers. She was popular, see; a great listener.”

“Could you give me a list of her customers?”

“Donna can work one up. She had eight or nine regulars. But I doubt they know anything. What
has
happened?”

“Just say an accident.”

There was a long pause. “Hell’s bells.”

“Yes,” said Jury.

Carlos kept staring at him, and finally asked, “Who cuts your hair?”

“T
HEY’VE GONE
and set a date for that trial,” said Dick Scroggs, his eyes glued to the
Bald Eagle
.

“What?” Melrose surfaced from Polly’s thriller, which sat propped against the latest Booker Prize winner that he had just purchased at the Wrenn’s Nest. He had thought at first that Theo Wrenn Brown, who had stood staring at him, white-faced and tight-lipped, would refuse even to sell the book to him. But Theo was not one to stand on principle where money was concerned. He accepted the ten-pound note, but not the small change of Melrose’s conversation. He refused to speak, thereby letting Melrose know how traitors were treated in the Wrenn’s Nest.

“The pig, m’lord. Your aunt and that
poor
Jurvis across the way.” Where Scroggs’s sentiments lay was perfectly clear. “Betty Ball’s smart to stay straight out of it. If she can, I mean. Probably be suborned for a witness.”

“Subpoenaed?” Scroggs, thought Melrose, would make a fine addition to Polly’s new book. If Dorothy L. Sayers had known as little about bell-ringing as Polly did about the legal system, the belfry would have been an acoustical horror. Polly’s courtroom certainly was. The barristers did nothing but yell, “M’lud! My learned friend, here . . .” and
then blather out some nonsense that wouldn’t have hung a horsethief.

Scroggs was still reading and airing his views. He snapped his paper smartly, and went on. “But of course there’s some that can afford sharpish solicitors to get them off.”

“It’s only a small claims matter, Dick.”

Scroggs rattled the
Bald Eagle,
turning it toward Melrose. “Well, it says here that Major Eustace-Hobson’s to hand down the decision.”

“That idiot?” Major Eustace-Hobson would have been right at home in
The Nine Barristers
.

“Only an idiot’d have this case, if you take my meaning.”

“It’s clear, yes.”

“Not to worry, m’lord. Every family’s got one.”

Melrose held his book up in front of his face.

“Just thank the Lord the superintendent’s back.”

Melrose lowered the book. “He is? Where’d you see him?”

“Over to Pluck’s place.” The villagers always referred to the police station that way. It sounded like a pet shop or a disco. Pluck did run it like a halfway house. People dropping in for a cuppa, asking his advice, taking him biscuits and cakes and so forth. If it weren’t for the blue-and-white sign sticking out from the door, Melrose would have thought it was a tea-room. “At the station, he is. There’s his Rover I saw queued up there with that Superintendent Pratt’s and half the county police.” Scroggs had left the bar for the window that faced the High Street.

“Let me know when he comes out, will you?”

Since the eyes and ears of Long Piddleton was “on the mend” with a sprained ankle, someone else had to keep track of things. Scroggs seemed perfectly happy to fill Agatha’s shoes in this way. He leaned against the frame
and stared out at a green and gold May morning, stained like the glass that spelled out “Hardy’s Crown.”

 • • • 

Superintendent Charles Pratt was staring at Richard Jury in astonishment. The arms he had raised in protest now dropped wearily to either side of Constable Pluck’s swivel chair as he sat back and planted his feet on the desk. He shook his head.

It was his detective inspector, John MacAllister, who gave voice to that protest. If a sneering sort of laugh could be called that. Pratt shot him a warning look.

Jury himself was sitting, half-leaning on the windowsill. The silence that followed his comments remained unbroken until MacAllister said, “It’s crazy.”

“John!” Pratt swung his legs from the table.

John MacAllister merely shrugged, kept flipping through a thick wad of papers in a manila folder.

Arrogance was a dangerous flaw in a policeman’s character, unless it was wedded to genius, as it was in the case of Jury’s friend Macalvie (who’d be the first to agree).

“Let’s say,” said Pratt, placing his chin on his laced fingers, “it sounds highly improbable. If I can be frank —”

Jury smiled. “It sounds impossible.”

As Jury had just echoed MacAllister’s opinion, the inspector said, “You’re damned right.”

Pratt, like Jury, an affable man, had his limits. Insulting a Scotland Yard C.I.D. man was one that MacAllister kept pushing. “John, take Pluck or Greene and see if you can get anything else out of Mr. Browne. Chop, chop, John.”

With a savage look at Jury, John MacAllister left.

“What has he said so far? Theo Browne, I mean.”

“Nothing. Claims the book is his; Trueblood claims Browne nicked it from Watermeadows. I asked Trueblood why he hadn’t taken the book with him, it being so ‘priceless, priceless,’ as he keeps wailing about it —”

Jury smiled. “And what did he say?”

“That Lady Summerston insisted she’d keep it until he’d paid for the lot. Said she’d make sure it was under lock and key, and it was, except Crick put it in that writing-desk or
secrétaire
with the other books.”

“Lady Summerston’s the sort who wants to appear to drive hard bargains, likes to do deals, thinking that’s what her husband would do. I expect she thought if that book had been sitting round in plain sight for years, it would be safe enough to lock it up in that
secrétaire,
” said Jury.

“And she can’t say for certain if that’s
her
book, not since Browne rebound it. Though I believe Mr. Plant: the chances of two of those turning up in one village are pretty slim.”

“Slim as my theory?” Jury smiled.

Pratt looked at the photos again. “I will certainly allow the similarity is striking.” He shook his head. “How could she get away with it —”

“They.”

“Yes. Well, he’s dead, isn’t he? And I thought I’d enough on my platter with
that
.”

Jury handed Pratt a paper from the file. “Copies of the cards in Sadie Diver’s handbag.”

Pratt looked at the double line of impressions. “NatWest Bankcard, Barclaycard — what are these?”

“Library book tickets. If you want to take out a book, you hand one over, collect it when you get your book.”

“Surprisingly enough, I
do
read, Richard. Even been inside a library in my time.” He held up the four small cards. “But she mustn’t be much of a reader, if she has the tickets and not the books.”

“I doubt that’s the reason she had them. It could be just another way of establishing the murdered woman’s identity. Like the credit card. Sadie wasn’t a one to use credit, either, according to her brother, Tommy. All of these within the last two months, Charles.”

Pratt looked at the specimen page that showed the backs of the plastic cards. “Unsigned. Still, there’d be signature cards if we needed exemplar writing.”

“Maybe. I think the credit card business is pretty lax. You sign something, send it back. Anyone could have signed.”

“Well, then, the signature wouldn’t be that of
either
Sadie Diver or Hannah Lean.”

Jury left the window to sit in the cozy chair Pluck reserved for his visitors. “Documents experts can pick up similarities and differences. That means a subjective judgment. I know one especially brilliant. And sometimes he can’t tell.” Jury thought of Willie Cooper’s comment about art and science.