THE fête was a shambles. Fear, confusion, and shock had resulted in trampled shrubberies, trippings over headstones, upset booths, runaway dogs, and screaming children as their parents tried to drag them out of the path of the Hertfield police.
There was, fortunately, no dearth of police. The forensic crew seemed to spill out of the wood. Nathan Riddley had been the first medical man on the scene and had pronounced Ramona Wey very dead indeed. Except for the thin trickle which had run down her arm and caked in a dark ribbon, there was very little blood.
From what Melrose could gather in the general confusion that reigned, the weapon was a small, silver awl-like thing used, back in Victorian days, for punching holes in canvas for needlework.
It had, apparently, come from Sylvia’s Jumble table. It had been donated by Sylvia herself. She was none too pleased, now, with her generosity. The sterling hole-puncher had come home to roost on her doorstep.
Melrose marveled at the nerve of the murderer, killing the woman with the whole Hertfield constabulary back there in the wood. The position of the carriage had effectively masked any maneuver—opening the door, shoving the body in, and covering it with the rug. The murderer had taken advantage of one of the rest periods.
“What godawful nerve,” said Riddley to Carstairs, who had arrived at the scene in nothing flat from Hertfield. “Can’t believe anyone would be that reckless.”
“Or that desperate,” Melrose heard Carstairs say as he walked off.
Melrose was rather enjoying watching the Bodenheims being ground exceeding small in the mills of the Hertfield constabulary. D. I. Carstairs had commandeered Rookswood for questioning, and Miles Bodenheim had had a time of it, trying to herd people like sheep to the public footpaths.
• • •
“Disgraceful,” he said to Melrose as they stood in the hallway of Rookswood. He seemed to think the murder had been done to ruin the festivities. “It’s given Sylvia a sick-headache and Julia is simply overcome with nerves.” Melrose seriously doubted both. “That such a thing could happen in our village—twice, mind you—” (as if Melrose had forgotten the first murder) “and now here’s police simply tramping about our drawing room, and all of those people . . . Ah! There’s the Craigie sisters come in . . . I must speak to them at once . . . Ernestine! Augusta!” He sailed off.
• • •
Most of the visitors to the fête had been questioned briefly by police and been permitted to leave. A handful remained in the drawing room of Rookswood—the Craigies, Mainwaring, the Bodenheims, Polly Praed, and, of course, the children who had made the grisly discovery and their mums, one of whom was being quite vocal. “Disgraceful,” she announced to anyone who would listen, echoing the opinion of Sir Miles. “Disgraceful, I calls it. Here’s little Betty, and her only nine, being questioned by police.” Little Betty’s mother heaved a giant carryall up to her lap and looked as dour as one of the Bodenheim ancestors hanging about in portraits on the walls. Little Betty was a moon-faced child with eyes like brown buttons who enjoyed inspecting the tacky blood on her shoe.
• • •
Sylvia Bodenheim, sick-headache or not, had been brought down from her bed for questioning. Under her eyes were dark smudges, and her complexion had a distinctly greenish cast as she sat wrenching a handkerchief. Melrose thought her reaction was owing less to the object taken from her Jumble table and the consequent tragedy in the wood, than to the tragedy in her drawing room, now overrun with unwanted villagers and, worse, actual strangers.
It was a room filled with ruby velvet, cream brocade and gilt, a room that looked straight out of a decorator’s album of Elegant Country House Drawing Rooms, right down to the portraits and paintings, a combination of awful Bodenheim ancestors and awful views of the Versailles gardens. The room had been chosen by the police because it had the advantage of adjoining Sir Miles’s snuggery, which was the place Inspector Carstairs was using for the questioning of witnesses. A constable stood guard at the door. Thus, the pride of Rookswood had been turned into little more than a railway waiting room, to be sloughed off as passengers moved toward their trains.
Melrose watched as Sylvia moved quickly to admonish one of the three squalid kiddies who had been in the carriage. This one had decided the brocade bellpull would make a nice plaything. Its mum grabbed it back with a Come ’ere, lovey, and a dirty look at Sylvia’s retreating figure.
“Lovey” pretended to bury her face in her mother’s front, but was, instead, sticking out her tongue, either at Melrose or, more likely, Emily Louise beside him. She gladly returned the gesture. This continued until Lovey’s mum gave her a smack and nearly hurled her onto the brocade loveseat.
Around the room, the other Bodenheims registered various attitudes of outrage and ennui; the Craigie sisters sat like stumps against the wall; Miss Pettigrew kneaded her brows as if she were making muffins in her mind. A few villagers, such as Mrs. Pennystevens, who had tended the other booths had been questioned and permitted to leave.
The door opened and Freddie Mainwaring came out of the snug, looking like a pile of ashes, from his gray slacks to his gray face. Next to enter the snug was Derek. It was rather like waiting to be called up before the headmaster.
The star of this occasion, although she took it with as little grace as she usually took anything involving her precious time and presence, was Emily Louise Perk. It was her carriage, after all, her golden horse cropping the woodland grass, and, by implication, her body. She had had her little stint with Detective Inspector Carstairs, and if Melrose felt sorry for anyone, it was Carstairs. Melrose wondered how much information the poor man had got from Emily Louise by using that syrupy “little lady” approach. From what he could gather, Emily knew no more than what had happened after the children had started screaming. Lacking her own mum (for whom many calls had been put in, but none of them effective), she had wedged herself into a gilt armchair beside Melrose and now sat, arms folded across her chest, hunting cap over her eyes.
“Your mother should be here,” said Melrose. “Where is she?”
“At the pictures, I expect.”
“Why wasn’t she at the fête? Everyone else was.”
“Doesn’t like fêtes. Anyway, she isn’t here. Where’s that man from Scotland Yard? He’s supposed to be seeing about things.”
Melrose liked that way of putting it. “He’s in London. I’m sure he’s been contacted, though. What happened?”
“I don’t know, do I? I just heard the nasty Winterbournes screaming and I drove straight back.”
He started to ask her another question when he saw the constable beckon to him.
• • •
That Melrose was in Littlebourne to buy property seemed scarcely a satisfactory answer to Inspector Carstairs, since he had been in no hurry to look the property over. Still, Mainwaring had confirmed that Plant had been to his estate office, so the inspector took the explanation with as much grace as possible, which wasn’t much. “You say you were watching the dead woman as she was walking about.”
This question had been put to him in at least half-a-dozen different ways. “She wasn’t dead then, Inspector.”
“Please don’t be flippant, Mr. Plant. This is a murder investigation.”
They always said that in books, thought Melrose, sighing inwardly. With the blood running down the walls and the bodies sprawled all round, someone invariably mauled in and said, This is a murder investigation. “Sorry. But you seem to be thinking I had some particular reason for keeping this woman under observation.”
“Did you?” Carstairs snapped.
“No. She was someone I’d not seen before and I found her rather remarkable looking.”
“Meaning?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . white and dark and deadly.”
“Why ‘deadly’?”
“I told you, Inspector. It was merely an impression. She was walking about the place, but didn’t seem part of it. As if she hadn’t come for the festivities at all, I suppose—”
“And you saw her at the Jumble table.”
“Yes.”
“Talking to Mrs. Bodenheim.”
“Not precisely ‘talking,’ from what I could observe.” He almost felt sorry for old Sylvia, who had had possession of the silver puncher at just the wrong time.
Carstairs looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Thank you, Mr. Plant, that’ll be all for the moment.”
Melrose stood up and ventured the question, “Has, ah, Superintendent Jury been informed of this new development?”
Carstairs’s look was dark indeed, and Melrose was surprised that he answered at all. “We’re trying to locate him.” He returned to his sheaf of papers.
• • •
Trying to? wondered Melrose, as he looked round at the gilt and brocade, empty now except for the clutch of policemen smoking in a corner and a thin woman with cotton-candy hair sitting stiffly upright in a chair. Trying to? Could a superintendent of the C.I.D. simply slip through a crack?
The hell with it, he thought, reclaiming his stick and his coat. If the Hertfordshire constabulary couldn’t put his finger on Jury, he bet he could.