The Dirty Duck (8 page)

Jury gave her a level look. “It certainly was for Miss Bracegirdle.”

 • • • 

“We'd like you to sign this, please, madam,” said Lasko, who came down a few minutes later. The Scene of Crimes man had left with a suitcase full, presumably, of the effects of Gwendolyn Bracegirdle. “We've sealed off her room, of course.”

“Sealed!” Mrs. Mayberry was indignant. “But I've got people booked into that room.”

Blood running in the streets of Stratford should not interfere with custom.

“Not until we've had time to give that room a much more thorough
going-over.” Lasko pocketed the pen with which she'd signed the release form.

“Isn't that a fine thing, then! What am I supposed to tell them, I'd like to know?”

Mildly, Lasko said, “Why not tell them the last roomer got herself sliced up with a razor?”

 • • • 

The broad steps and the lobby of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre were packed so tightly with playgoers, Jury bet there wasn't an empty seat in the house and that some of the Standing-Room-Onlys had already ferreted out his empty seat and were making for it right now.

Melrose Plant was squashed into a corner of the bar that catered to the Dress Circle crowd.

He handed Jury a cognac and said, “I had the foresight to order the drinks before the curtain went up.”

Jury drank the small portion in one or two swallows. “Curtain's going down. Come on.”

Despite Plant's mumbled complaints about missing the second half of a very good
Hamlet,
it was clear he was only too happy to thread his way through the crowd after Jury, even though he didn't know where they were going, or to whom.

The
Where,
he discovered, was straight Stratford-upon-Avon stuff: the Arden Hotel.

The
Whom
was something else again.

“M
y friends,” said Valentine Honeycutt, his intense look suggesting he would love to number Jury and Plant among them, “call me Val.”

“Mine,” said Melrose, “call me Plant.”

“Oh!”
exclaimed Honeycutt, with a small shiver of excitement. “You go by just a
last
name? You must be hideously important!”

“Hideously,” said Melrose, as he put his silver-knobbed stick across the table by his chair.

Valentine Honeycutt redistributed the folds of the daffodil ascot that bloomed in the
V
of his candy-striped shirt done in pencil-thin lines of green and yellow. His blue linen jacket must have been chosen to complement his sky-blue eyes. All in all, looking at him was like taking a stroll through an Elizabethan knott garden. He crossed one perfectly creased trouser leg over the other in the way of one given to conversing largely through body language. “What can I do for you gentlemen? Care for a smoke?” His hand made an arc with his silver case.

“Mr. Honeycutt,” said Jury, “we've come to inquire about this tour you manage—”

“Honeysuckle Tours, that's right. Sort of a play on my own name and also because our office is in Atlanta, Georgia. Honeysuckle vines and all that. Every June for six weeks it's London, Amsterdam, the English countryside and London again. Stratford's always on the agenda. Americans dote on it. The theatre and all.”

“Six weeks. Sounds expensive.”

“It is.”

“I'm afraid I've some rather bad news for you.”

Honeycutt's whitish-blond eyebrows arched over his innocent blue eyes
as he reared back slightly. He looked a little like an angel who'd stumbled on a hole in his cloud. “Has something happened?”

“Afraid so. To one of your group. A Miss Bracegirdle—”

“Gwendolyn?”

“Yes. A rather serious accident. Miss Bracegirdle's dead.”

“Dead!
Dear God! I know she was complaining about pains in—but you said ‘accident.' ”

“She was murdered.”

Honeycutt seemed pulled by invisible hands from the chintzy chair in which he had arranged himself like a bouquet.
“What?
I don't understand—”

It seemed easy enough to understand to Jury. “What were you doing last night, Mr. Honeycutt?”

Honeycutt was looking from one of them to the other with such seeming lack of comprehension that Jury wondered how the man ever managed a railway guide. “Me? Well, I was at the theatre. Like everyone else, I imagine.”

“With anyone?”

“No. No, I went by myself.
As You Like It.
It was . . .” The voice trailed off.

Jury was afraid for a moment he was going to tell them the story by way of establishing an alibi. “We thought perhaps you might be able to throw some light on Miss Bracegirdle's friends—anyone in Stratford she knew, that sort of thing.”

He found his voice long enough to say, “No. No.”

“How about on the tour itself?”

Honeycutt was smoking with quick little jabs. “Oh, God, this is going to be hell for the tour. Wait until Donnie finds out—that's my partner. In Atlanta.”

Jury wished people would leave off thinking about business. “Whom was she especially friendly with on your tour? Did you know her well yourself?”

That brought a very quick response. “No! I mean, no better than the others.”

“When did you last see her?”

Regaining a bit of his composure, he said, “Well . . . yesterday, I think.”

“You don't keep close tabs on your clientele.”

“Lord, no! Sometimes I don't see them for
days
at a time. Honeysuckle
is not at
all
the usual sort of tour. For one thing, a person must, quite honestly, be just this side of filthy rich to take it—”

Jury interrupted. “Including Miss Bracegirdle?”

Honeycutt had revived enough to give a little snort of laughter.
“Of course
Miss Bracegirdle.”

“But she was staying at a B-and-B. The Diamond Hill Guest House.”

“Oh, that makes no odds. She chose to. That, you see, is another unusual thing about our tour. One thing we do
not
do is book the whole lot into some perfectly dreadful hotel months and months in advance.
Our
clientele choose their own place, with guidance from us. And we, of course, do the scullery-girl drudge-work” (he began to twinkle again) “and arrange the bookings. Old Gwen wanted to get down to the rough-and-tumble, wanted to think she was staying with the plain folks . . . well, you know what I mean. In other words, she didn't want the Hilton—much too American, she said. So we fixed her up at that rather seedy little Bed-and-Breakfast.” He shrugged. “Yet she was quite rich. Millionairess, unless I miss my guess. Oh. Is that too hideously sexist?” He turned the twinkle on Melrose Plant.

“Hideously.”

“Well, all I can say is Gwen had lolly up to her earlobes. One must, as I said. Honeysuckle's nearly as expensive as the QE-Two, believe it or not. We advertise only in
quality
magazines.
Country Life
over here. In the States,
The New Yorker.
Believe me, we're not one of those tarted-up tours where they shove twenty or thirty on a broken-down bus. We have a coach, of course, but a very new one, wide seats and a bar for food and drinks. We offer all sorts of options if one gets tired of being bused about. For example, if one wants to motor from London (or anywhere else) I see to a car rental and make sure the little dear is properly stuffed behind the wheel and point him in the right direction. We have a very
personal
approach, and I think more of my fellowman than to pretend an hotel that has tinned tomato soup for starters is serving
haute cuisine.
We're strictly five-star Michelin when it comes to food.”

Jury smiled. “Because you think more of your fellowman, Mr. Honeycutt?”

“More of four thousand quid, then,” said Honeycutt, returning Jury's smile with a glowing one of his own. “And more of myself than to be always herding this lot on and off old bangers of buses and leading them in and out of museums and galleries, installing them—and me—in roach-ridden hotels where fish and chips constitute the comestibles, or one of those absolutely
ghastly
islands in the Caribbean where the flies revolve but
the fans don't and the only palms are the ones stuck out for tips—no, no, my dear, no thank you. We strive for some balance between dependence and independence for our customers. They are free to spend their time as they like, buying out the shops or spending ten hours over dinner or whatever. The Farradays, for instance—the lovely man is loaded—wouldn't be caught dead without their mod cons and pools and bars—”

“That's another thing. When did you last see the Farraday boy?”

“James Carlton? Umm.” Honeycutt studied Melrose Plant as he set his mind to this problem. “I believe it must have been Sunday or Monday. Monday, yes. Why? Little beggar scarper again?”

“You're not surprised?”

He hooted. “He's
always
wandering off and coming back with his clothes torn as if he'd been doing battle with a school of sharks. He'd win hands down. The daughter, Honey, she's rather a deluxe little piece . . . Farraday hasn't got the
police
looking for James Carlton?”

Jury nodded. “Last time they saw him was at breakfast on Monday morning.”

“It
was
Monday morning, I think. Early on Sheep Street. Well, I didn't take any special note of him; he's always round and about. Ask his sister, Penny. She's the only one he really talks to. In some language of their own,” he added without much interest.

“Had you seen Miss Bracegirdle with anyone, then? What about this George Cholmondeley? As he was unattached—”

“Well, he certainly wasn't attached to Old Gwen, my dears.” He bridled at the suggestion. And then added with a bit of a pout, “Amelia Farraday might have been a bit more his type.”

“Harvey Schoenberg?”

“My, you
have
got us all dead to rights, haven't you?”

Jury smiled. “Just asking. How about Schoenberg? He's also got money, I take it?”

“Has his own computer business. Have you any
idea
how much money there is in computers? Of course, Gwen knew him, but I can't tell you if she was
with
—” Suddenly he seemed to have twigged it: “Look here, Superintendent. You're not suggesting Gwen was done in by one of
our
—?” Immediately he dismissed the notion. “Preposterous.”

“No, I wasn't suggesting anything. Just casting about.” Jury stood, and Melrose Plant gathered up his stick. “But Honeysuckle Tours has some stiff competition.”

With that comment, Honeycutt pretty much wilted on the vine. The yellow ascot withered, the linen jacket drooped. “Oh, dear.”

“Hideous,” said Melrose Plant, when they were on the sidewalk again.

“I agree,” said Jury. “How would you like to go along tomorrow and see the Dews? They're staying at the Hathaway. I want to talk to this George Cholmondeley.”

“Lady Dew,” said Melrose Plant. “Why is it I get stuck with the titled ones?”

Jury smiled. “No less than you deserve. That Honeycutt. Wonder what his partner in Atlanta is like?”

Melrose stopped in the dark street where the little sign of the Falstaff was just visible. “Don't know. But I imagine you could lay them end to end.”

C
hief Superintendent Sir George Flanders, one of Warwickshire's Division Commanders, was a tall man who towered over Lasko, but not over Jury, although he tried. Sir George refused to sit down, refused even to remove his raincoat, as if these indications of impatience might stir his police forces to taking stronger action, might hurry them along toward a solution, even a spurious one. At least that's the impression he gave, standing there glaring at the huge map of Stratford in the incidents room and talking about the American Embassy. He had made it quite clear that nearly twenty-four hours had passed without Lasko's coming up with a solution. It was not a matter he wanted to have to report back to the American consul.

Two matters. “A murder and a missing child,” said the Chief Superintendent for the umpteenth time, as if he might, like Macbeth's witches, exorcise these dreadful occurrences through constant repetition. “A murder and a—”

“There's no reason to think the boy won't turn up. He's run off before. I shouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't walk into the Hilton in the next few hours.” Lasko checked his digital watch as if to make them all stop here until his prediction proved true. “No reason to connect up the two—”

“Of course not,” said Sir George, with a rather dreadful smile at his detective sergeant: “What it might be is
two murders.”
His look was lethal.

Lasko, perhaps in some attempt to match Sir George's own disinclination to undress, was still wearing his bowler hat. It was pushed down over his forehead. “Now it's certainly early days to be—”

“Early days? Tell
that
to the American Embassy. These are
Americans,
man,” he repeated, as if Lasko hadn't got nationalities sorted out. “It is
only by the grace of God and the British press that we've kept the damned thing quiet this long. I shudder to think how the
American
tourists in this town would react—” And he shuddered, as if a demonstration might spur everyone on.

Jury refrained from suggesting that English blood ran just as red and that Americans were no strangers to rape, assault, murder, and kidnapping, although he had to agree that the American press was spot on and fulsomely reporting these events almost before they happened.

As if reading Jury's mind, Sir George swiveled his head—a very handsome gray-haired and -moustached one—around to Jury. “And after I finished with the consul, I was on the phone a goodish time talking to your chief . . . what's his name?”