The Man with a Load of Mischief (2 page)

An odd place for one murder to occur, much less two.

 • • • 

“If you could just tell me what happened, sir, the circumstances in which the body was found,” said Superintendent Charles Pratt of the Northamptonshire constabulary, who had been in Long Piddleton just yesterday.

Melrose Plant explained, while Constable Pluck stood by eagerly taking notes. Pluck was thin to the point of emaciation, but he had a cherubic, rosy face, made even rosier by winter's bite, so that he looked like an apple on a stick. But he was a good man, if a bit of a gossip.

“And you say, so far as you know, this Ainsley chap was a stranger hereabouts. Like the other —” Pratt consulted his own notebook, then slapped it shut — “William Small.”

“As far as I know, yes,” said Melrose Plant.

Superintendent Pratt cocked his head and looked at Plant out of mild, blue eyes that seemed innocent, but that were, Melrose was sure, anything but. “Then you've reason to believe these men weren't strangers, sir?”

Melrose raised an eyebrow. “Well, naturally, Superintendent. Haven't you?”

 • • • 

“I'll have a whisky, Dick — neat, if you please.”

Pratt having left and taken his lab crew, Melrose Plant and Dick Scroggs were alone once more in the Jack and Hammer.

“And have one yourself, Dick.”

“Don't mind if I do,” said Dick Scroggs. “It's a right old mess, init?” Several hours had elapsed, but Dick was still white, having watched closely the examination by the pathologist and the removal of the body, wrapped in a polyethylene sheet. The superintendent had left Pluck to see to the sealing off of the victim's room. There, they had been shocked to discover the murderer had added the further grotesque touch of placing the mechanical figure “Jack” in the victim's bed.

It was no wonder that Dick Scroggs was still trembly as he plucked up the 50p piece Melrose Plant had dropped on the bar. They studied their glasses for a moment, each alone with his thoughts.

Alone, that is, except for Mrs. Withersby, one of the many
whom Pratt had questioned, who charred for Scroggs sometimes to get her drinking money. At the moment she was sitting on her favorite stool, spitting into the fire that had not been extinguished in a hundred years.

Now, seeing that the hard stuff was exchanging hands, she hove herself up from her stool and shuffled over, carpet slippers slapping the floor. Cigarette butt and spittle vied for position in the corner of her mouth. She removed the one between thumb and finger and wiped the other with the back of her wrist. She said — or shouted, rather — “His lordship buyin'?”

Dick raised a questioning eyebrow at Melrose Plant.

“Certainly,” said Melrose, placing a pound note on the bar. “Nothing is too good for the woman with whom I danced all night in Brighton.”

Dick was setting up a half-pint when Mrs. Withersby changed her tune: “Gin! I'll have me a gin, not that cat-lap.” Then down she sat at the bar beside her benefactor, her faded yellowish hair standing up all around her head like a fright wig. She watched closely for her full measure as Dick poured. “If'n you'd add a pinch of dried mole's body to that there gin, wouldn't none of us have the ague.”

Mole's body? wondered Plant, taking out his slim, gold cigarette case and extracting a cigarette.

“Or mebbe it was the malaria fever. Me mum always kept a bit of dried mole about. Drink it in gin nine mornin's runnin' and you'd be fit as a fiddle.”

Or under the table, thought Melrose, offering his case to Mrs. Withersby. “And did you answer Superintendent Pratt's questions truthfully, madam?”

Her arthritic fingers grabbed up two of the cigarettes, one of which she planted in her mouth, the other in her checkered-gingham dress pocket. “Truthful? A'course I answered truthful,” she said with a falsetto whine. “It's more'n I can say for the Fairy o' the Glen next door.” She hooked her thumb in the direction of Trueblood's Antiques. The sexual persuasion of its proprietor had long been under discussion in the village.

“Don't go casting irresponsible aspersions about, now,” said
Plant, who had just purchased the cure for ague and malaria she now raised to her warty lips. He lit her cigarette for her and was rewarded with a stream of smoke blown in his face.

Then she leaned closer, her tobacco-beer-gin breath roiling over him like a sea fret. “Now we got this crazed murderer runnin' about, doin' in us innercent folk.” She snorted. “Oney this ain't no human hand. It's the divil hisself, mark me. I knew there'd be a death the day that bird fell down yer chimbley, Dick Scroggs. And we ain't had no watchin' at the porch on St. Mark's Eve for five years. The dead will walk! Mark my words! The dead will walk!” She nearly fell off her stool in her excitement, and Melrose thought the dead might be walking past them right now. But she quieted down when she regarded her now-empty glass, which no one was paying any attention to. Slyly, she said, “And how's yer dear auntie, m'lord? Gen'rous to a fault, is she. Always buys me a drink, friendly-like.” Melrose signaled to Scroggs to refill the glass. Having secured her gin, she went on. “Lives simple-like, not givin' herself airs, and comes round every year with them Christmas baskets —”

For which Melrose paid. As she continued to extoll his aunt's virtues, Melrose studied their reflections in the mirror and wondered which was the toad and which the fairy princess. He was about to tuck into his pickled egg when Dick broke into a fit of violent coughing, for which Mrs. Withersby had her remedy ready: “Tell yer missus to fix up a bit of roast mouse. Me mum always had a bit of roast mouse for the whoopin' cough.”

Melrose looked at the egg lolling on the plate and decided he wasn't so hungry, after all. He paid up his bill — their bill — and bade farewell politely to Mrs. Withersby — Long Piddleton's village apothecary, village drunk, and village oracle.

“T
hese murders,” said the vicar, “put me in mind of The Ostrich, in Colnbrook.” He bit into his fat rascal, and crumbs cascaded down his dark suit-front.

Around a mouthful of fairy cake, Lady Agatha Ardry said, “Far as I'm concerned, we've probably another Ripper amongst us.”

“Jack the Ripper, dear Aunt,” said Melrose Plant, “only fancied women. Of dubious virtue.”

Lady Ardry finished her fairy cake and dusted her hands. “Perhaps this one's queer.” She surveyed the tea table. “You've taken the last of the fat rascals, Denzil.” She eyed the vicar accusingly.

Outside the mullioned panes of the vicarage, a fine English rain drifted its delicate veil across the churchyard. The Church of St. Rules and its vicarage sat on a hump of earth not quite a hill, directly behind and above the village square. It was on the other side of the bridge which ended the High Street, and a more sedate temperament reigned here. The square was enclosed
by Tudor buildings, thatched roofs and pantiled roofs, all snug and wedged together.

Melrose disliked coming to tea at the vicarage, especially when his aunt was invited. The vicar's housekeeper was never at her best in the food department. Her baked goods would have helped in the Battle of Britain had the country run out of bullets and bombs. Melrose scanned the tiered cake plate, looking for something digestible: the rock cakes lived up to their name; the Maids of Honor looked left over from Victoria's wedding; the Bath buns must have walked. He had been listening to his aunt and the vicar rehash these two murders for nearly two hours, and he was horribly hungry. He reached out with some trepidation for a brandy snap. Politely, he inquired of the vicar, “You mentioned The Ostrich?”

Thus encouraged, Denzil Smith went on eagerly. “Yes. You see, when the proprietor came across a traveler with a good bit of money, he would book him into the room with a bed set over a trapdoor.” The vicar paused to select a stale-looking bun from the plate. “When the unfortunate and unwary guest was sleeping soundly the trapdoor sprang open, and he fell into a cauldron of boiling water.”

“Are you suggesting that Matchett and Scroggs are disposing of their own guests, Vicar?” Lady Ardry sat there in the library, solid and square and gray as a cement block, her stubby legs crossed and her pudgy fingers busy with her second Eccles cake.

“No, no,” said the vicar.

“It's obviously a psychotic madman,” said Lady Ardry.

Plant let the redundancy pass, but asked, “What makes you so sure the murderer is psychotic, Agatha?”

“Are you barmy? To shove a body up on that beam outside the pub? Why, it must be twenty feet up. Whoever would stick a body up there?”

“King Kong?” suggested Melrose, running the brandy snap under his nose like the cork of an old wine.

“You seem to be taking this horrible business rather lightly, Melrose,” said the Reverend Denzil Smith.

“Don't expect compassion from Melrose,” put in his aunt righteously, as she sank back into the huge Victorian armchair.
“Living in that enormous house all alone, no one but that Ruthven person to do for you — it's no wonder you're antisocial.”

And yet here he was at tea, being terribly social. Melrose sighed. His aunt always could fly in the teeth of the evidence. Cautiously he bit into the brandy snap and wished he hadn't.

“Well?” said Lady Ardry.

Melrose raised his eyebrows. “ ‘Well' what?”

She made brief forays toward their cups with the Spode pot, then plunked it down. “I should think you'd have more to say than that about these murders. After all, you were there with Scroggs.” This clearly rankled. She added slyly: “It was Dick Scroggs who actually found him, though. So, of course, you didn't get the awful shock
I
did when I went down to that cellar and saw this Small actually
dangling
out of that beer thing —”

“You didn't find him. The Murch girl did.” Melrose ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth. The cream had a decidedly metallic taste. But a pellet of poison would be better than listening to Agatha. “Are you sure the cream in these brandy snaps hasn't gone off? They taste strange.” He returned the confection to his saucer and wondered how long he had before they sent round the van.

“There was a similar case back in — let's see — was it 1892? Woman named Betty Radcliffe, landlady at The Bell. That's in Norfolk. Murdered by her lover, I believe, the gardener.”

Denzil Smith was not a particularly pious man, but he was a curious one, which made him excellent company for Lady Agatha Ardry. They were dependent on one another in the mindless way of two gibbons dedicated to picking fleas off one another's fur. He was the village repository of old scraps of history, both village and extravillage, a walking book of memorabilia.

Looking around, Melrose thought the vicarage the perfect milieu for Denzil Smith. It was dark; it was as dusty as the waxen fruits that sat under glass globes. A stuffed owl, spread-winged, was stuck on the mantel. The thick-armed chairs and couch had incongruous animal feet sticking out from under their chintz dresses, so that Melrose had the feeling he had come to tea with the Three Bears. Clematis and bindweed roved freely
along the windows. He wondered how it would feel to be strangled by a bindweed. No worse, surely, than the rock cakes. That reminded him of the murder of William Small: strangled with a length of wire used to wrap around the cork of a champagne bottle.

Lady Ardry was talking about the expected visit from Scotland Yard. “The Northants police are calling in the Yard. Pluck told me. Wonder who they'll put on the case.”

Melrose Plant yawned. “Old Swinnerton, probably.”

She sat up suddenly, her glasses perched on top of her frizzy gray head like the goggles of a racing driver. “Swinnerton? You know them?”

He was sorry he had made up the name — wasn't there always a Swinnerton? — for now she would worry it like a dog an old rag. Because Melrose had been born to his title (unlike his aunt, who had merely married one), she seemed prepared to believe he knew everyone from the Prime Minister on down. He diverted her attention by saying, “I don't know why they need Scotland Yard here, when they have you, Agatha.”

His aunt simpered, and passed him the awful cakes, his reward for recognizing genius. “I do spin intriguing plots, don't I?”

Long Piddleton had lately begun to attract artists and writers, and Lady Ardry, who had lived here for many years, fancied herself a writer of mysteries, having taken up the cudgel after the passing of the great lady of detective fiction. She did nothing with the cudgel, Melrose observed, except wave it. He had never seen any finished product; he assumed she regarded her writing in the light of a well-beloved child, a kind of fairy sprite who darts prettily about the yard but never knocks to have its dinner fixed. Never, to his knowledge, had she finished one of her “intriguing plots.”

Hitting her fist into her hand, Agatha said, “Scotland Yard'll want to talk to me straightaway, of course —”

“I'll be off, then,” said Plant, dreading the resumption of his aunt's recitation of her role in these murders, which he'd heard several times before. He rose and bowed slightly.

“I should think you'd be a bit more excited,” said Agatha. “Of
course, it was Scroggs who actually found
your
body.” She didn't want to allow Melrose a larger part than she absolutely had to.

“More precisely, it was a Jack Russell. The Yard will question it first, no doubt. Good day, Agatha.”

As the vicar walked Plant through the Gothic arch of the library and to the front door, Lady Ardry's voice trailed after him — around corners, down the hall. “Your facetiousness in the face of this terrible business hardly becomes you, Melrose.” Then louder: “But it's what I might have expected.” Louder, still: “Remember you're taking us to Matchett's for dinner this evening. Pick me up at nine.”