Jerusalem Inn (28 page)

Melrose took the twin of the chair opposite, lit their cigarettes, and watched her toy with hers more than smoke it.

“Stuck up here . . . feel like I'm in prison, I do. When do you suppose they'll let
all
of us go? There's George gone off to London to one of his meetings and left me here. . . . ” Above the well-shod foot Susan Assington was nervously swinging, Melrose thought he recognized one of those plain little Laura Ashley dresses, probably in the hundred-pound range, a dress designed to make its wearer look simple and countrified, as if she'd just come in from milking silver-plated cows. Susan was definitely not the milkmaid type.

“Did you know her well?”

“Who?” She flicked cigarette ash into the cold grate.

The woman really was featherbrained, or doing a good job of pretending to be in the face of a bloody murder.

“Beatrice Sleight.”

“Oh,” she said, as if the murdered woman were of no more account than one of the Onions pigeons. “Well, we saw her round and about. Proper bitch is all I've got to say, though George didn't seem to think there was any harm in her. ‘No harm?' I says to him. ‘Look at those books she writes.' Well, of course,
I
don't read trash like that,” she added quickly.

From the music room came the cacophonous sound of a piano being disemboweled by Tommy Whittaker.

Susan Assington held a hand heavy with emeralds to her forehead. “Oh, I
do
wish that boy'd stop it. Why his aunt ever
thinks he's musical, I don't know.” She was flipping through a glossy fashion magazine and held it out to Melrose as if he might be her hairdresser. “What do you think of this do?”

Patiently, Melrose took out his spectacles and studied the “do.” The model's hair stood up on end and with her darkly outlined eyes, Melrose assumed she'd either come upon the Thing from Spinney Moor or else was It. “Not for you, Lady Assington. The way you're wearing it now is much more becoming.”

Delicately, she ran her hair over the smooth, dark helmet of hair, and said, “You oughtn't to wear glasses. You've got smashing eyes. Green,” she added helpfully, in case he'd forgotten.

Melrose thanked her and pocketed his glasses. Haut coiffure forgotten, Susan had levered herself a bit forward in her chair, displaying embellishments beside her glossy hair, and was looking into the eyes she admired. “Funny you being a bachelor.” Hematology and murder seemed to be going the way of all flesh.

“Not really. Just haven't got around to marriage, I expect.” He listened to Tommy going down the scales at the same rate as Susan's Hampstead accent. Trying to work the conversation back to murder, he said, “I'd think you of all people would appreciate what's happened.” That got him a puzzled frown. “You were saying at dinner that all of us here together at a country house party seemed ripe for a murder.”

“Well, I was only teasing, wasn't I?” she said with some fright.

“Of course, of course.” Melrose's tone was soothing. “How did you happen to meet Beatrice Sleight?”

“You sound like police,” she said, surprising Melrose that she could come anywhere near the mark. But her tone was casual. “At one of those autograph-signings. In a bookstore. George thought it'd be fun to go along and get her to sign one of her books. He knew her, you see. In a casual way.”

“A casual way” was how Sir George had put it to the Northumbria police. His wife seemed to accept this rote description without qualification. “But it's Grace Seaingham, isn't it, they meant to kill?” she said, glancing at Melrose with surprising sharpness. “You know where you usually start looking when there's that sort of trouble — the husband.”

“The Seainghams strike me as a very well matched couple, very fond of one another.”

“Can't always go by looks, can you?” said Susan. “What I don't understand is, they act like it was one of
us.
When it's obvious it was just someone trying to break in or just some tramp and Beatrice must have seen them, or something.” She flung down her fashion magazine, having exhausted every new gown and “do” before she got up to leave.

Susan Assington could certainly fly in the teeth of the evidence. Melrose decided to break the news gently. “Well, that would seem to be rather unlikely because of the snow.” She actually managed to appear bewildered. Melrose embroidered: “We've been snowed in, you see.”

She looked at him as if he were a bit dim. “That doesn't mean everyone else's been snowed
out,
does it?”

“D
O BE
dummy, Melrose,” said Lady Ardry, slapping down a card as Melrose wandered into the games room. Agatha, Lady St. Leger, and Vivian were having what looked like a game of three-handed bridge. “We don't expect you to do anything. You've never been good at cards.”

Noticing a copy of Debrett's lying on the table beside Agatha, he thought perhaps they should have been playing at Patience and Peers. “Your invitation to join the party is irresistible, Agatha, but no thank you. Anyway, if you're playing three-handed, you don't
have
a dummy.”

“We could,” said Vivian with that gritty little smile she'd lately affected. She scooped up a trick.

“You seem to be taking the events of last evening with iron self-control. I applaud you.”

Under her dusting of rouge and powder, Lady St. Leger blushed a bit, as if they'd been caught out like bad children. “It's just to take our minds off the whole — nasty business.”

When he entered, she had been taking her mind off the nasty business by extolling the virtues of the marquetries of Miln and Abbisferd over the earldom of Dunleith, a bait to which his aunt now rose.

“Perfectly
hideous
places,” said Agatha, sitting in close proximity to the tea table. “Monkeys climbing all over the cars — if you're not going to play, why must you be about, Melrose, whilst we're trying to concentrate?”

Monkeys?
wondered Melrose. “I thought I'd left my book in here. I'm merely waiting for Superintendent Jury.” He picked a cue from the rack and walked about the table to get a better look at Agatha's hand. He'd played cards with her before.

Cards fanned out against her bosom, the expression on her face made it clear she would rather he do his waiting elsewhere. “It's not for me to say, of course,” she said, slapping a trump on Vivian's king, and sweeping in the trick, “but why should Jury be here? What's the death of Beatrice Sleight got to do with Scotland Yard?” She grimaced as Elizabeth St. Leger led with a diamond. “After all, it's not as though the Northumbria police asked for his help, is it?” Vivian a deuce of clubs. “I don't see —”

“What did you mean, ‘monkeys'?” asked Melrose.

“What are you talking about?” Agatha was suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing and drew a handkerchief from her long sleeve, whereupon Melrose noticed, sighting along his cue, that a king of hearts quietly landed in her lap. Agatha coughed gently, replaced the handkerchief, and said, “We
were merely speaking of the rather resourceful ways in which some of the peerage were keeping up their estates.” She slapped the king of hearts over the absent fourth's queen. “Of course, a place as small as Ardry End doesn't present the problems of an estate as large as Meares Hall.”

It was the first time Melrose had ever heard
her
call Ardry End “small.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Melrose, fascinated with his aunt's shuffling of the deck. At least two cards had thus far come off the bottom. “It's not so big as Spinney Abbey, but —”

“That's scarcely a comparison!” She fanned out her cards, looked them over, and led with a jack of diamonds. Then, apparently remembering that she, as well as her nephew, had some vested interest in the family seat, said, “Still, Ardry End is one of the finest smallish manor houses in the country. And it might be added, we needn't keep it up by selling tickets to coach parties and having grubby-fingered children make free with the lawns and gardens.”

Melrose refrained from pointing out
she
needn't keep it up at all, since it wasn't hers. He was more interested in what would be the final disposal of the ace in her lap.

Elizabeth St. Leger was not to be baited, however. She merely played her card and said, “You are very fortunate, then. Most of us” (Melrose smiled, knowing that Agatha would never be included in that “us”) “really must do something to defray expenses. And I rather like it, somehow. I like people enjoying the gardens; I really am quite a gardener myself . . . is that
another
ace, Agatha?”

Agatha didn't answer this direct question, but said, “Oh, we've fine gardens, too. But we enjoy them only
ourselves.
It's such a pity that the peerage has had to
stoop
so. Just look at Woburn Abbey. Chockablock with tea tents and antiques people and all manner of trade. And Bath.” Lady St. Leger played her last trump — a five of clubs. “That's where the
monkeys are,” she said to Melrose, “at Longleat. And lions and so forth. The place is a
zoo.
” While she was addressing Melrose, she had another brief coughing fit and trumped the five with a jack. “But of course I sympathize,” added Agatha.

That should make news, thought Melrose. . . .

“There are times when one must take desperate remedies for the sake of one's good name. Melrose would agree, I'm sure.”

“Most certainly,” said Melrose, watching Agatha sweep the last trick from the table before she reached for the cake-plate.

 • • • 

Elizabeth St. Leger had either grown tired of cards altogether or of her friend's playing of them and had now seated herself by the fire in the drawing room, at work on her embroidery.

Melrose, waiting for Jury to call, did not even try to hide his astonishment when Agatha drew from a workbasket — one she had probably scrounged from her hostess — an embroidery hoop.

“You, Agatha? I've never seen you do embroidery.”

“Certainly I do. But then you have never asked, have you?” she said with typical Agatha-logic, accompanied by a typical Agatha-sigh. “I'm doing your Christmas present, if you must know.”

That was even more astonishing. His aunt had not, in living memory, ever given him a gift. She had, instead, given him excuses. He came to look over her shoulder. There had been little stitching done, and that was crude at best. “It looks like a mouse.”

Stabbing her needle through the cream background, she said, “Don't be silly. It's a unicorn.”

“It looks like the ear of a mouse to me.”

“It's a unicorn's
horn.”

“Well, anyway, why are you embroidering unicorns?”

“
If
you must know and spoil the surprise —”

There would be no earthly way to keep her from spoiling it for him, since she had, he knew, every intention of impressing Lady St. Leger with her intricate handiwork. She started to speak, but Melrose forestalled her.

“No, no, Agatha. I'd much rather it be a surprise,” and he frustrated her by turning the topic of conversation to the first thing his eye fell upon — one of the bowls of Christmas roses. “These are lovely flowers,” he said, now addressing Elizabeth St. Leger, the gardener among them. “It's nice to have white flowers at Christmas.” He did not know why, particularly, but it kept the subject off Agatha's embroidery.

“Aren't they?” said Lady St. Leger. She looked at the bowl of flowers.
“Helleborus niger,
the black hellebore. Strange name for a pinkish-white flower. I suppose it's because of the root. That's black and extremely poisonous.” She snipped a dark green thread with her scissors. “Sweet of Susan to bring them, all those flowers. She doesn't strike me at all as the sort who would think of it, frankly.”

Sweet of Susan, yes. Melrose stared at the flowers, and came back from his reflections when Elizabeth St. Leger put her hands to her ears and said, “Oh, dear. He's started up again.” She looked at Melrose. “I don't suppose you could distract him from his music for a while, could you, Mr. Plant? I'm sure everyone would appreciate it greatly. I know I would.”

Melrose thought for a moment and then said, with a smile. “I'd be delighted if he'd go with me into Durham, now the roads are open.”

Lady St. Leger threaded another needle and said, “Where did Superintendent Jury take him this morning? All I could get out of Tom was something about routine police business. And are we permitted to leave? I mean with police everywhere —”

Not exactly true. There were only two constables outside
still going over the snow around the chapel. He was glad she'd asked the second question so that he could avoid the first. “We're not under house arrest, Lady St. Leger. I'm sure we're free to leave. So long as we don't leave the country, I guess.” He had moved again behind Agatha to watch her progress on the unrecognizable unicorn.

“Durham?” said Agatha. “Why do you want to go there?”

Safe in the knowledge that Agatha would much rather sit here cozily with her great friend than visit a great cathedral, Melrose said, “Because it's beautiful. I want to see the cathedral.”

“Very well,” she said, as if he needed her permission. “I shall sit here and work on this. It's taking a great deal of time.” He was expected no doubt to thank her for the time she would spend in place of the money she wouldn't. He didn't, and she went on. “If you must know, I'm doing the Caverness coat-of-arms.”

He blinked. “Christmas is tomorrow, dear Aunt. You expect to have an entire coat-of-arms finished by then?”

“Given the difficulty, I should think you wouldn't mind waiting. ‘Two lions ermine, one unicorn armed and unglued.' ”