Rainbow's End (6 page)

“
Our
investigation?”

“Of course,
our
. You said you wanted to transfer. So we can work this case together. You'd be on probation, naturally.”

“I don't think I want a transfer that badly.” Jury smiled. “I go much more for the obvious than you do. I'm Rush-ian, you might say.”

“The hell you are. But you're damned grumpy. You must be hungry. I know I am. Come on, I know a pub that's got good food a few miles away.”

The black monolithic figures that were the Wiltshire policemen were melting away into the shadows down the bank and seemed to have forgotten the two other, alien policemen.

“Where's the pub?”

“Steeple Langford. Rainbow's End.”

Jury smiled. “So will it be there, or not?”

“The pub?”

“The pot of gold.”

Rainbow's End was a quiet pub that had once had the advantage of traffic now diverted onto the A36. It backed onto a wide river that flowed through the Langfords, twin hamlets some twenty miles from Salisbury. It must have done a lot of dinner business, for the newish-looking dining room was surprisingly large.

But Macalvie and Jury were in the older, much smaller saloon bar: brick and wood; handsome, upholstered Queen Anne chairs set around small tables; plenty of glass, gilt, and tulip-shaped wall sconces. Jury was reading a framed newspaper article (in which the pub got a mention, hence the framing) about New Agers trekking through the Langfords, leaving their philosophy (if one could call it that) and remnants of belongings along the way. New Agers. Jury felt strange, time-warped, having just come from Old Sarum and with the pub's being so near to Stonehenge.

“Fifteen million pounds to turn the landscape into what it looked like in 2000
B.C
.,” said Macalvie. “Now, is there anything in that that strikes you as just a little wacky?” He was complaining about the expensive and extensive plans the National Trust and English Heritage had for revamping Stonehenge and putting in a new tourist center.

Jury smiled. “It does, yes.”

“I mean, what in hell did the landscape
look
like in 2000 or 3000
B.C
.? Neolithic man we're talking about. How do these architects know?” Macalvie brooded, studying his nearly empty pint of lager.

They had moved to the dining room where they ordered the river trout and another pint of lager.

After a moment, Macalvie said, “The hard thing is going to be to get Rush to check for poisons. And get the body in London exhumed.”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“You know what I'm talking about. Give me the bread.”

Jury absently handed a wicker basket to him. “Actually, I don't. Poison?”

Macalvie answered obliquely by saying, “You can bet my lady's going to get a going over. At least I control that much.”

“And what poison are you looking for?”

Macalvie was examining his empty glass as if he were going to dust it for prints.

“You didn't answer my question. You don't know the answer, that's why. So it shouldn't take more than a millennium or two to identify this suspect poison.” Jury's smile wasn't very sincere. “You know how difficult it is if you don't know what poison you're looking for.”

“I can eliminate, or the path guy can, obvious poisons. Tox testing can eliminate a lot more. A comprehensive serum and urine analysis will either turn up what it was or else eliminate hundreds of poisons.”

Jury was getting impatient. “I don't get it, Macalvie. Here's a tourist who has an accident and ends up at the bottom of a well. The fall killed her. Why're you making something else of it?” But Jury knew why, although to give Macalvie a connection between Angela Hope and Helen Hawes was apparently to grant him an even more tenuous connection to Frances Hamilton. “If you're trying to account for the sickness before this Hope woman died, maybe it was simply food poisoning.”

“Possible. But not very likely unless they all took tea together.”

This begging the question irritated Jury. “You're already
assuming
the same thing killed all of them.”

Almost innocently, Macalvie looked at him. “Of course.”

Jury shook his head, turned toward the windows of the pub overlooking the river, becalmed in the evening sun. Jury watched the water, the chequered light coming through the trees. Near the opposite bank, a swan buried its head beneath its wing, drifting. And he thought about Stratford and Jenny.

Macalvie frowned at his own thoughts, his eyes following the direction of Jury's own, out where a smoking mist hung along the riverbank.

Light gathered over the river, still and still gliding, glanced and darted through the dark branches as if the sun, in its slow descent, had fallen suddenly, then caught itself and now fanned out in a golden silt
of light. Jury watched the swan, stationary as a paper cutout pasted against the water. Death seemed far away.

“What are you getting at?” Jury asked it again.

“Deep time,” said Macalvie.

Jury looked at him as the waitress set down their dinners, told them to be careful of the plates. They were hot. “What's ‘deep time'?”

“The kind of time you think of when you see Old Sarum or Stonehenge. That kind of time. Deep time.”

“Well, that explains it.” Jury separated his fish from the bone.

“Like trying to think in terms of light-years. We can't do it.”

Jury watched him over the plate of succulent trout. Macalvie seemed to be tasting his thoughts, his words, and not his dinner. “Think of the king's yard, Jury.”

“I would if I knew what it was. Your fish is getting cold.”

“The king's yard was the measurement between the end of the king's nose and the tip of his finger. Right?” He raked his fish off the bone.

“If you say so.” The trout was delicious.

“If you think of this measurement in terms of ‘deep time,' our civilization would disappear in a single fingernail filing.” He prodded his fish with his fork.

“Then let's hope the king doesn't get a manicure.”

Macalvie gave him a dark look. “I'm serious.” Ignoring his plate, he gazed at the river. “Movement in time is deceptive, Jury. Because we're in the wrong time frame. You know how I feel? As if I'm accelerating at a hundred per and holding in my hand one of those time-release photos of . . . I don't know . . . the petals of a flower opening slowly as I watch. It's jarring. Did you ever think there might be two worlds moving along, side by side, but at different times?”

Jury smiled. “Only when I'm with you, Macalvie.”

“Very funny. Stonehenge, Sarum, Avebury—they make me feel that. Everything we do now is speeded up so much, the time release working in the opposite way.” Macalvie separated the long bone from the fish, looked at it. “I like the patience of science, the way they can repeat experiments ad infinitum. Like Denny Dench.” Dench was a forensic anthropologist.

Jury thought it was probably the fishbone that reminded him. The only time Jury had met this brilliant forensics man, Dench had been lining up the bones of a quail he'd been eating.

“What do you think is the most potent motive for murder, Jury? Love? Greed?”

“Revenge.” Jury was surprised that his answer was so emphatic. “The Greeks knew that.”

The two of them sat now in silence, turned toward the window and the river beyond. The rim of the sun, vapor-orange, showed just at the edge of the trees. The sky was nearly purple. “It's rainbow mechanics,” said Macalvie after a time. “There appear to be colors, separate bows of color, but they really just bleed into one another. If they're there at all.” He kept looking out of the window, at the sky. “She was only thirty. At least if you live to fifty or sixty you've had a chance to work things out. Not that you've taken advantage of it, but at least you had the chance. You had a proper go.”

“A proper go,” thought Jury, watching the swan under the dripping boughs on the other side of the river seem to drift, propelled by the motion of the water. “ ‘Fondly I watched her move here and move there . . . ' ”

Macalvie raised an eyebrow in question.

Jury hadn't even realized he'd said it aloud. “It's an old poem, or an old song.” He turned again to the evening sky, the river.

“And then she went homeward with one star awake,

As the swan in the evening drifts over the lake.”

From a state of equanimity, Jury was plunged without warning into a terrible sadness. He tried to counteract it by saying, “I'll talk to Lady Cray again. And A Division.”

“I knew you'd see reason, Jury.”

Funnels of yellow dust blew out from the rear wheels of the Bentley as Melrose Plant and Marshall Trueblood made their bumpy way across the wasteland that lay between the Northampton Road and the Blue Parrot pub.

“I've wondered who in hell would come here but us. It's a good mile off the main road and nothing but dry fields. Is that wheat? It looks burnt.”

“That's the point,” said Melrose. “Sly does everything he can to create the illusion you're trekking across hot sands and thinking, ‘God, I'm thirsty,' when you really aren't. Sells more beer that way.”

The Blue Parrot was an undistinguished-looking square building out in the middle of nowhere that no one would even find had Trevor Sly not had the foresight to put a large and gaudy sign out on the Northampton Road. The pub was painted bright blue, in honor of its name, and over it hung another gaudy sign, a smaller version of the one by the road, this one depicting a veiled lady with bejeweled forehead and a couple of rough turbanned types. They must all have just de-cameled, for their mounts were tethered to a post. One could just make out, through the painted open door, a belly dancer doing her stuff in the sign's den of iniquity.

Since Melrose had last been here, a whole new little desert scene had been enacted to embellish the Moroccan image. There had never been grass around the Blue Parrot, but there had been a brownish stubble enclosing a dry stone fountain. The fountain was, of course, still dry, but was now surrounded by sand, as was the pub itself. And on an iron post-perch above one window swung an anomalous blue-green painted bird with a yellow beak that could have been anything from a blue hawk to a blue vulture. It swung gently in a freshening breeze.

“Rain? Do I smell rain?” asked Marshall, with a dry, parched little cough.

“Not here, you don't.”

The orangish yellow light splashed around outside by the setting sun stopped short at the door. Directly inside, it was dark as pitch.

“I can't see! I'm blind!” yelled Trueblood, clutching at Melrose's sleeve.

“Oh, shut up.” Melrose pushed aside the beaded curtain (also new) that had been hung here to make a little alcove of the entrance. On the other side of this curtain, gray light filtered through slat-shuttered windows. Ceiling fans whirred softly; the fronds of potted palms drooped; and tendrils of smoke appeared to be swirling around the ceiling, forming, dissipating, re-forming.

“Is something burning?” Trueblood sniffed the air.

“Be careful of the camel.”

Trueblood, in his so-called blindness, had nearly toppled the large camel cutout that was used to display the menu for the day. And the menu looked similar to the ones Melrose had seen when he was here with Jury two years ago. How could Trevor Sly keep serving the same food month after month, year after year, given the food was (supposedly) some sort of Middle Eastern stuff, Lebanese, perhaps. Melrose could see how a Happy Eater might serve up the same egg, beans, and chips for a zillion years, but how long could you keep cooking up Kibbi Bi-Saniyyi? And then Melrose remembered that all of the main dishes bore a surprising resemblance to one another and also to minced beef.

“What the hell's Kifta Mishwi?” Trueblood was leaning over, squinting at the blackboard menu.

“Same as Kibbi Bi-Saniyyi.”

“That's a help.”

Trueblood continued to study the hump of the camel, part of the chalky blackboard, as Melrose looked around the room, eyes having adjusted to a darkness that he didn't remember. There hadn't been shutters before, that was it. Melrose threaded his way between tables and chairs that looked much too delicate for hordes of Riffs and opened one of the shutters to let in more light.

Otherwise, the Blue Parrot was all as he remembered it: little tin camels on each table, with mustard-pot howdahs standing beside Branston pickle and catsup. The green-glowing palm-tree lamps were new, however. So were the slot machines. He wandered over to the
three machines and saw that the winning combinations weren't (as was usual) cherries and bells, oranges and lemons; they were sand dunes and turbans, palm trees and (once again) camels. Where on earth had Trevor Sly managed to secure
those
specimens?

Posters of exotic locales—pyramids, burning sands, shadowy courtyards, dusty doorways full of olive-eyed children looking earnest—all lined the walls. Scattered in amongst them were old film posters; there was
Casablanca
, naturally; there was the dark camel train plodding along from A
Passage to India
; and the real train along which strode Lawrence of Arabia—or, rather, Peter O'Toole as Lawrence. Plant wondered what milieu Trevor Sly had in mind for the Blue Parrot: it could have been an outpost in Arabia, Calcutta, L.A., or Las Vegas, from the look of it.

Customers might have got the idea that the owner himself hailed from some far-flung, romantic place, some distant sand dune, and that he would be a swarthy man with a ring in his ear and a knife in his teeth. However, he was none of this.

Trevor Sly (from Todcaster) slipped like a shadow through another beaded curtain, which separated the long, polished bar from the back—the kitchen and his own private rooms. He was tall and thin,
stretched
thin, he looked, as pale as pulled taffy. He carried his thin hands before him, limp appendages that he liked to wash together when he talked, and now he was talking, had started even before the curtain tinkled together behind him.