The Dirty Duck (15 page)

He was glad he wasn't standing in the way of the look that shot between Vivian and Jury.

“I'll be damned—” Jury muttered, rising as she started toward their table, smiling and looking wonderful in nothing but jeans and a white silk blouse, the dark man in tow.

She held out her hand. “Inspector Jury, for heaven's sakes—”

“Miss Rivington. This is certainly a surprise.”

How banal, thought Melrose, relieved nonetheless. If they had never got beyond
Inspector
and
Miss,
what the hell was he worried about? Or was all this formality and everyone's not knowing what to do with their hands or say next merely for the sake of the Count of Monte Cristo behind her?

“I'm sorry, I—” Vivian turned to the swarthy fellow with the aquiline face, who stood with European gravity, hands in pockets of blazer, thumbs out, bending politely toward them. “Franco Giapinno, my, ah—Inspector Richard Jury and Lord—I mean, and Melrose Plant.”

She blushed, the old familiar Vivian, like a child who'd forgotten lines in a play. There were murmurs of
pleased-to-meet-you
and small, guttural Italian utterances from Vivian and Giapinno, to whom Melrose took an immediate dislike.

“Why is it a surprise?” asked Vivian of Jury. “Didn't Melrose tell you I was here—?”

Her voice trailed off as Jury leveled a look at Melrose that would have stopped a stampede of buffalo.

“No,” was all he said.

Melrose felt wedged between their looks. “Well, it isn't ‘Inspector,' anyway, Vivian,” he said heartily. “It's ‘Superintendent' now.”

“It certainly should be,” she said with that sincerity that had always made even her most banal comments glow. “Franco and I, ah, are . . .”

Where she dropped it, Franco seemed only too happy to pick it up. “Engaged.” With a disgustingly proprietorial gesture, Franco put his arm round her waist.

Everybody smiled.

Jury refused Giapinno's invitation to join them for luncheon. “Sorry, but I'm just on my way to London. The car's outside.”

“Oh,” said Vivian, weighting the syllable with sadness. “It's about . . . I heard there'd been a murder in Stratford . . . Is that it—?”

“That's it,” said Jury, rather overcrisply.

The silly good-byes were like the silly hellos. Vivian and the Italian moved off. At least, thought Melrose, there hadn't been an invitation to the wedding.

There was a long silence as the two of them stood there. Melrose studied the floorboards, almost afraid to look at Jury, who was fumbling through the lighting of a cigarette.

Jury finally spoke through a haze of smoke rising upwards.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world—she had to walk into mine.”

“It strikes a man as dead
As a great reckoning in a little room.”

—As You Like It

D
etective Chief Superintendent Racer slapped shut the folder and glared across his desk at Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, who, being totally innocent of any prior involvement with this case, was therefore the most likely target for Racer's acrimony.

Wiggins did what he always did in difficult circumstances—blew his nose.

“Sorry to drag you out of sickbay, Sergeant,” said Racer with mock-solicitousness.

With Wiggins, the sarcasm fell wide. Jury sat there thinking that Wiggin's long survival was owing to his ability to take everything literally. “Quite all right, sir. It's just this allergy. The pollen count this week has been fearful—”

Racer's face, already spongy-red from too many brandies for lunch at his club, grew redder with suppressed rage. Not suppressed for long, however. “I don't give a bloody damn about the pollen count. I'm not a bee. And put that damned packet away!”

Some men went for their guns under stress, some for their cigarettes. Wiggins went for his cough drops. He had just been stripping the cellophane from a fresh box. “Sorry, sir.”

Jury yawned and continued to look out of the window of Racer's office at the sludgy gray sky above New Scotland Yard, at the small square of the Thames beyond the embankment. Racer insisted on a room with a view. All the better, thought Jury, if he decided to throw himself out the window some day. Racer's voice droned on at Wiggins, and Jury waited. He knew the Chief Superintendent was merely prepping for the real operation of dissecting Jury: pulling on the rubber gloves, lining up the knives, the
scalpels, the forceps. Racer had missed his true calling with the Met. He should have been a medical examiner.

Having finished with Wiggins, who looked a bit pale (but then, Wiggins always did), Racer rocked back in his leather swivel chair, picked a bit of lint from his exquisitely tailored suit, adjusted the miniature carnation in his buttonhole, and turned his thin-bladed smile on Jury.

“The Slasher,” he said, looking at Jury as if The Slasher sat before him in all of his bloody glory. “It's really remarkable,
Superintendent,”
(Racer had never forgiven Jury his promotion last year) “that you happen to go to Stratford-upon-Avon and manage to come back with two murders and one missing person to your credit.” Jury might have been a collector, the way Racer put it. He rose from his chair to take his usual few turns about the room and added magnanimously,
“Not
that I can hold you personally responsible for this lunatic's activities—”

“Thank you,” said Jury.

A pause.
“Superintendent
Jury, sarcasm is both unprofessional and unprofitable.” He stood behind them, feeling perhaps a psychological advantage in talking to the backs of their heads. Wiggins, Jury noted out of the corner of his eye, took the opportunity to open his box of cough drops very quietly.

“However,” Racer went on, “it's not enough, is it, that you insist on
involving
yourself in a case that rightly belongs to the Warwickshire constabulary—did
they
ask for assistance from us? No indeed, they did not! Leaving
me
to smooth over things and soft-soap the Chief Constable—”

Soft-soap? Racer? A bowl of acid in the eyes would be more like it. Padding behind them, a tiger without teeth, Racer droned on.

 • • • 

Metaphorically in his death throes, Chief Superintendent Racer still refused to die. Jury's colleagues at New Scotland Yard had all been looking forward to Racer's retirement last year. But it hadn't occurred; Racer was still slouching toward it as if it were terminal. Having been so sure the Chief Superintendent was on his way out, they had rallied round the coffin (again, metaphorically speaking) only to find the corpse had scarpered and been resuscitated at its desk on Monday, Savile Row trousers knife-creased, buttonhole boutonniered.

 • • • 

“—not enough, oh, no!
Then
instead of quietly
leaving
it all to the Stratford boys, you
bring the whole lot to London!
Why, Jury?
To London! To London!—”

“To buy a fresh pig.” Jury couldn't help himself sometimes.

Silence. The padding stopped. Wiggins shot Jury a glance and then stared straight ahead, sucking stealthily on his cough drop.

Leaning over Jury's shoulder, breathing the effluvium of his brandy-and-sodas into Jury's face, Racer said, “What was that, lad?”

“Nothing. Sir.”

The padding resumed. “Ever since you made superintendent, Jury—” Jury wished he'd kept his mouth shut. Now he'd deflected the lecture into even saltier streams of vituperation, for now Racer could get on Jury's roller-coaster career. “You got
up,
lad. You can just as easily go
down
. . . .”

Hell, at this rate they'd be here all afternoon.

Fortunately, Racer's secretary interrupted by walking in and dumping some papers on his desk. Fiona Clingmore was dressed today in what should have been a negligee, but was apparently a summer dress. It was black and layered with ruffles all down the front, the layers being the only thing that kept Fiona from absolutely showing through. She stood now, one hand leaning on the desk, the other on her outslung hip, scarlet fingernails drumming, and giving them all the benefit of her décolletage. Fiona had topped forty a couple of years ago, Jury knew, but she was going down fighting.

“
Miss
Clingmore,” said Racer. “I would appreciate your knocking, if you don't mind. And get that mangy cat out of here.”

“Sorry,” she said, wetting her finger and replastering a curl against her cheek. “You're to sign these straightaway. The A.C. wants them.” She flounced out, forgetting the cat, but not forgetting to give Jury a wink. He was fond of Fiona and her increasingly bravura performances. He winked back.

The cat snaked its way round their several legs and immediately leapt to Racer's desk, where it sat, solid as a paperweight.

Racer shoved it off, uttering expletives that cats were apparently privy to, and sat down. “Now what the hell's this group you've got staying at Brown's? Are they implicated?”

“I don't know,” said Jury. “I only know that the two who were murdered in Stratford and the missing boy were all on this same tour.”

Racer snorted. “And did you tell the press that, Jury? They've been running up and down the M-40 like lemmings.”

“I don't talk to the press. I leave that to you.”

“Well,
somebody
damn well talked! Probably those bloody swedes in Stratford.”

Jury shifted impatiently in his chair, reaching down to pet the cat, who
apparently shared their feelings about Racer. “I think it would be best if Sergeant Wiggins and I were permitted to get on with it before there's another murder,” he said calmly.

“Another murder? What do you mean by that?”

“That the murderer isn't through yet. The message hasn't been fully delivered.”

Racer's eyebrows knotted. “Explain that, will you?”

“Well, you've seen those lines of poetry. Two lines left with the Bracegirdle woman's body; two with the Farraday girl's. In that one stanza he's got three lines to go.” And to send Racer's blood pressure up a bit, Jury added, “Then he can start a new stanza, of course.”

The idea of a string of murders as long as a string of pearls or a twelve-stanza poem apparently could even make Racer see reason.

“You think there's going to be another murder.” He looked from Jury to Wiggins and back again. “Then why the hell are you two sitting here wasting my time? Get the lead out.”

T
hought
I didn't know what she was doing, didn't she?
Amelia Blue Farraday stood outside one of Soho's more popular strip joints, looking at the lifesized posters.
It's where she'd of wound up, place like this,
thought Amelia, looking perhaps longer than she actually needed to in order to placate the devils of lust and degradation walking the streets—

“ 'Ello, love.”

“Just lookin'?”

The questions came from a lanky fellow with slicked-back hair and his chunky friend standing next to him cracking his knuckles. “Show you a good time, we could.”

Amelia looked them over. Back in Georgia you stepped on this kind when it slithered across your shoe. Amelia did not bother to answer. Nor did she bother to try and walk around them; that would be like giving place. She simply reached out, pushed the two apart, and walked on down Soho Street.

Just as well she's dead,
thought Amelia.
Just as well. She'd've let those two crumbs take her for all she was worth.
And with that unrepentant and unremorseful thought, Amelia stopped before another giant hoarding outside a cheap movie house.
I'd of seen her plastered on posters all up and down Second Avenue. Good God, that child would stop at nothing. . . .

Bored with lemonade and beer on the veranda, bored with James C.'s clumsy lovemaking, Amelia had taken up with what she called “casuals”—just the first man who came along. But she'd done it for
pleasure,
not
money
—though of course there'd been the little gift here and there—not like Honey Belle, out there
selling
herself, no better'n a common whore.
Honey Belle'd turned out just like her old man, that no-good, two-timing bastard that thought he was God's gift.

The seedy-looking crowd flowed around her as she did her drumroll walk on through Soho, and she knew some of the jostling wasn't accidental. She tossed her yellow hair—she still wore it long, no matter that little runt of a beautician told her, Sweetie, it adds years to you. Her hair'd always been white-blond and her crowning glory. No little London fag hairdresser was going to fool with it. Toss it up on top of her head and put combs in it and she looked like a queen.

Amelia was bored with the strip joints and the blue-movie houses and the cheap Chink restaurants. It was just that she was damned if she'd sit through even one more play with those fools on Honeysuckle Tours and equally damned if she'd be chained to her room at that snooty hotel. White gloves and bowing and scraping. She was glad James C. had money but she was no snob. Glad he had money, but oh, the dear lord, if only he hadn't got those two kids. Not even
his
kids, that's what Amelia couldn't understand. Vaguely, she wondered where the boy had gone off to. Wished he'd stay away. She knew they both hated her guts but she could care less. She had James C. and the money and if they thought they could do her out of that, they were crazy. . . .

It looked like a whole wall of males walking toward her now—four of them, leering already, even before they got a good look. One big collective leer, and an assortment of obscenities, uttered in that guttural Cockney or whatever it was, that made them swallow their syllables (“. . . look a' the knobs o' tha' 'un, Jake. . . . Ooooo . . .”). They hardly had the time to get even this much out before Amelia's bosom plowed right through them, with a little help from an elbow in the ribs. She didn't bother to look back when the tone of the remarks changed; she was used to it. The whole exchange barely registered; she went on with her interior monologue regarding Honey Belle. . . .