Rainbow's End (3 page)

Entitled to their privacy
, thought Melrose, simply meant she didn't know anything.

“Did you see them?” asked Diane.

“Not . . . pre
cise
ly.”

“Meaning,” said Melrose, “not
im
precisely, either.”

Dick Scroggs was paying no attention to the queenlike wave of Agatha's hand, palm rocking back and forth. He rolled a toothpick in his mouth and kept on reading the
Bald Eagle
. So she shouted, which was her wont anyway. “Shooting sherry over here!”

“Meaning,” continued Melrose, as Scroggs spilled his pint over the paper, “that you haven't really come upon them at all.”

Agatha was arranging the folds of the cape with a self-important air. “Hate to disillusion you, Mr. Trueblood—”

Few things she'd rather do, thought Melrose.

“—but your Week-End Family is
not
from Chelsea.”

Trueblood looked alarmed. “But they
are
from SW3 or -4, aren't they?”

“Or W
I
, that might do,” said Melrose.

Agatha looked pleased with herself to bursting. “I haven't got my drink yet, I notice. Mr. Scroggs—” she turned towards the bar, where Dick was leaning over the newspaper with the toothpick in his mouth—“is ignoring me, as usual.”

Trueblood called to Scroggs. Scroggs looked up, nodded. “So where? Where do they come from?”

As soon as Scroggs plunked down her sherry, she said, “E
II
.”

Trueblood choked. “The East bloody
End
? You've got to be joking.”

“Whitehall or Shoreditch,” said Diane, exhaling a plume of smoke. “Although Shoreditch might be E13.” Diane had once memorized all of the postal district numbers to impress a postal carrier she fancied.

“Good God!” Trueblood clapped his forehead. Then his face lit up. “Wait a tick, you're talking Docklands! Well, that's different. A lot of Chelsea and Sloane Square are moving to there since it's been gentrified.”

“They got it for a song,” said Agatha. “That's what Jenks told me. They're not just anybody, they're some sort of relation.”

Melrose looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Mr.
Jenks
told you that? Mr. Jenks of the zippered lip? Don't make me laugh. You heard something from Mrs. Oilings”—Agatha's weekly char—“so we can discount that because Oilings doesn't know anything either.”

“Oh? Oh,
really
?” asked Agatha, working as much sarcasm into her tone as possible. “I'll have you know that Mrs. Oilings
chars for Mr. Jenks
!” She sat back in triumph. Until she realized she'd been trapped.

Melrose smiled. “Saturday afternoons. When nobody's there.”

Agatha quickly changed the subject. “I can also tell you they like their drink.”

Said Diane, “Who doesn't?”

“How do you know that?” asked Vivian.

“Because one of them spends a great deal of time”—here she raised her voice again, directing her words towards Dick Scroggs—“at the Blue Parrot!”

Scroggs wheeled at the mention of his rival. “What's that, now?” He forgot his newspaper and headed for their table.

Delighted that she had bad news to impart to Dick Scroggs, and
any
news to impart about the new tenants of Watermeadows, Agatha looked pleased as punch.

Scroggs stood, hands on beefy hips. “Since when do you go to the Blue Parrot?”

“I? Don't be ridiculous; I wouldn't be caught dead there. I just happened to notice their car nipping down that dirt road. And the only thing on it is the Blue Parrot.”

“And how,” asked Melrose, “did you know the car was the Watermeadows car?”

“It came out of their drive, didn't it?”

“Did it?”

“Yes. The one that leads down to the Northampton Road.”

“And you followed it.” Vivian looked disapproving.

“I didn't
follow
it. It was ahead of me on the Northampton Road, is all.” Agatha pursed her lips, considering the next detail. “I was driving to Northampton.”

“No, you weren't,” said Melrose. “You never drive to Northampton. You make
me
drive to Northampton when you want to go there. What you were doing was lying in wait down at the bottom of the drive in case anyone drove out.”

“
Spying
? I have better things to do with my time.”

Dick Scroggs said, “Well, I can see how it's going to be, can't I? Them as want can take their business to Trevor Sly, be my guest.” Disgusted, he stomped off back to the bar, where he noisily rattled glasses and bottles.

Melrose called over, “Don't worry, Dick. One taste of Cairo Flame and they'll run for the door with fire shooting out of their ears. I'm still tasting the stuff.”

That Trevor Sly brewed his own beer was hardly a consolation to Dick Scroggs, who had been trying to do exactly that for some time now and hadn't been very successful. He broke a glass and cursed.

Vivian sighed and let her eyes rest on a row of some half-a-dozen white envelopes. She picked one up. “R. JURY,” it read. She dropped it back, shaking her head at Jury's name. “You're even corrupting him. He's getting to be as silly as you.”

Trueblood frowned. “You know, he scarcely gave his list a second thought. Did you notice? He just stood right there and scribbled it out without half thinking.”

Vivian spoke more to the casement window than to the table. “Why does he keep going to Stratford-upon-Avon? He was just
there.
” Her tone was crotchety.

“Friends,” said Melrose. He thought it better not to mention it was
one
friend, and of the female variety. Melrose had never really sorted out the relationship between Vivian and his friend Jury. Something (he suspected) had happened a long time ago, when Jury had first come to Long Piddleton. Now
he
felt crotchety.

Taking up his own line, Trueblood went on: “He didn't spend more than two or three minutes on it.”

“In a hurry,” said Melrose, crossing out “Fiona” and replacing it with “Polly.” That was a good Chelsea-sounding name. “He wanted to get to Exeter.”

“Exeter? I thought he was going to Stratford,” said Vivian.

“Exeter afterward.”

With a note of alarm, Trueblood said, “You don't think perhaps he actually
knows
, do you? I mean, after all, he
is
a CID man. It would be no trick at all just to march into Jenks's and demand to see his files.”

“Don't be stupid,” said Plant. “Jury wouldn't cheat.”

But Trueblood looked apprehensively at the R. J
URY
envelope.

“It would hardly be worth the trouble for only sixty pounds,” said Diane. Ten pounds was the contest fee. Six had paid up. “And the next time you go tooting off to Northampton, Agatha, let me know, would you? There's an off-license there where you could pick up some buffalo-grass vodka for me.”

Agatha, thought Melrose, would sooner get her a buffalo. Agatha loathed Diane Demorney.

“But you never told us, old sweat,” said Trueblood, pencil poised over his list, “what kind of car was it?”

“I didn't notice.”

“Uh-uh,” said Trueblood, slapping his hand down over Agatha's envelope, the one she was surreptitiously reaching for. “No you don't.”

Diane Demorney had apparently been thinking, a task she didn't often engage in. “Exeter. Is it that Exeter Cathedral business? The one he got the phone call about?”

“That's it,” said Melrose, folding his sheet of paper into an envelope.

“It's the Stendhal syndrome,” said Diane, eyes on the plume of lavender smoke rising from her cigarette. “You remember. I told you about Stendhal fainting when he saw great art?”

“Stendhal,” said Melrose, as he rubbed down the flap on his envelope, “never took another shower.”

Richard Jury did not know why, in the short time that had intervened since he last saw her, he thought Elsie would have grown. Perhaps simply because she was a little girl, and children grew magically, grew as beings did in fairy tales, one day small as a pea, and the next, tall as one of those Grecian statues in the garden.

“Hullo, Elsie. Remember me?”

“Oh, yes!” she said, with a great deal of enthusiasm. “You were from Scotland Yard! Are you still?”

It was as if “Scotland Yard” were some summer address, dropped when the season was over. “Am I still? Absolutely. Richard Jury, superintendent, CID.”

Elsie smiled up at him, clearly impressed. She was wearing her apron, a large white one unevenly wrapped so that points of the hemline just missed the floor. From the direction of the kitchen came the most deliciously pungent fumes, redolent with onion and wine and herbs he couldn't identify.

Elsie held the door wide. He imagined she remembered what a fine captive audience he had made on his last visit and probably would do again. “I expect you're busy. Have I come at a bad time?” he asked her seriously.

Taking her cue from that, Elsie tempered her enthusiasm with a sigh. “Oh,
that's
all right. I'm just keeping the stock stirred. It's for the cockle vine. Come on in and sit down.”

Settled in his chair, Jury tried to identify “cockle vine,” but couldn't. Was it some trendy green? Like radicchio? He looked out at the small patio, leaves dripping rain, and thought that, once again, his mind had been drawn to comparisons with Grecian statues because
Jenny Kennington had at one time lived in a huge house with colonnaded walks whose courtyard contained such a statue (though not Grecian), the image of which reclaimed his mind whenever he came into her presence; not her presence, even, but her surroundings.

Smoothing out her apron, Elsie informed him that Lady Kennington was “down the pub.” Like a rather bored young matron, she drew a magazine from the end table and flipped through it casually. Elsie was ten, and looked ten, but wished to adopt the insouciance of bored society. The image was just a little tainted, though, since the magazine she now tossed aside was neither
Majesty
nor
Country Life
but
Chips and Whizzer.
Rearing up, she said with alarm that she'd forgotten to chill the shadow child.

Jury was left to turn this over in his mind, but reached no conclusion, and then she was back. “You went to chill—” He inclined his head to one side, inquisitively.

“The wine. To have with dinner. I had to put it in the chiller.”

Wine. She
had
said—

“Yes, that's right. It's a very good year for shadow child.” Casually, she reclaimed
Chips and Whizzer.
“Lady Kennington is buying a pub. I expect you might know that.”

Jury imagined Elsie suspected he knew nothing of the sort and was pointing out to him that not everyone had the ear of Lady Kennington. “No, as a matter of fact, I didn't. I remember her saying something about opening a restaurant, though. Where is this pub?”

“It's a little way outside of town.”

“What's its name? I might have seen it.”

She pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling. “I expect she'll change the name.”

Meaning that Elsie couldn't remember what it was called.

“Will you be working there?”

“Oh, yes. Probably I'll do the teas.”

Teas? In a pub?

“See, it's going to be a little bit of everything,” said Elsie, spreading her arms to encompass this “everything.” “A restaurant and tea shop and a pub and maybe books.”

“That sounds awfully ambitious.”

“It's got a lot of rooms.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe a gift shop, too.” She thought for another moment. “And a disco. That's my idea.” Here she glanced over at Jury to see how he was taking the news
of this incredible entrepreneurship on the part of Lady Kennington and, of course, Elsie herself.

“Good Lord, Elsie, but you're going to be busy.” The pub venture appeared to be getting out of control, together with Elsie's imagination. All she'd omitted was a supper theatre for the RSC. “Well, if Lady Kennington's trying to see to all of that, I don't expect she'll be back for a year or two.” Jury started to rise.

“Oh, she won't be
that
long. She can't, because she's expecting a call from Mr. . . . Someone.”

Elsie's face screwed up in an effort to remember—unsuccessful, to judge by the frown. “Anyway, he's giving her money to buy the restaurant. She was away to Lincolnshire to visit him. He's rich.”

Jury's heart sank. But that was no concern of Elsie's, who kept on handing out the bad news. “He's to give her heaps of money to buy the pub and a lot more to run it.” Ostentatiously, she consulted her round-faced watch. Jury thought he saw the black ears of Mickey Mouse. “I don't know why she's not back. . . . ”

Feeling suddenly weary, Jury did rise this time. Elsie did not want him to leave and looked crestfallen. “But I expect she'd want to see you.”

He smiled. “Tell her I stopped for a moment. Tell her I'll ring her.”

 • • • 

YEARS BEFORE
, he had taken this same walk and felt much this same disappointment. He'd left Jenny Kennington's house after they'd shared a cigarette, sitting on packing cases before she'd gone off on that voyage. He'd taken this walk along the banks of the Avon between the theatre and the church where Shakespeare was buried. It had been dark then; today it was a late afternoon and everything looked varnished with light. Colors were so muted and pale they seemed almost transparent, the sky with the sheen of an opal, the Avon flowing like smoke. Then the sun broke through its cloud cover, and as if this were a signal, ducks rowed over to the bank where Jury stood, loitered there expecting food. Farther out, a swan was moving along the sun-drenched surface of the river, as if it were gliding through handfuls of sequins.