The Dirty Duck Part 1

The Dirty Duck.

Martha Grimes.

To Katherine, and J. Mezzanine.

and in memory of George Roland.

19301983.

I.

STRATFORD.

" 'Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?' "

-As You Like It.

1.

The doors of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre emptied another audience into a mean rain that always seemed to know the minute the performance ended. Tonight's play had been As You Like It, and the faces of the crowd wore that disoriented look that said they hadn't quite got their bearings, as if by some magical permutation the bucolic airiness of the Forest of Arden still glittered out here in the dark and the drizzle.

The crowd fanned out down walks and winding streets and disappeared into parked cars and pubs. The lights around the theatre went out, cutting bright coins from the river, as if a stagehand had thrown a switch in the water.

The Black Swan-or the Dirty Duck, depending upon the prospective patron's approach-was strategically placed across the street from the side of the theatre. Its double-sided sign (flying swan on one side, drunken duck on the other) sometimes resulted in missed rendezvous for strangers to the town who agreed to meet at one and then came upon the other.

Five minutes after the curtain came down, the Dirty Duck was chock-a-block with people getting as drunk as possible before Time was called. The crowd in the room inside overflowed onto the walled terrace outside. Smoke from cigarettes hazed the night like one of London's old yellow fogs. It was summer and the tourist season was in full swing; most of the accents were American.

One of these Americans, Miss Gwendolyn Bracegirdle, who had never had more than an ounce of sweet sherry at a time on the veranda of her huge pink-stuccoed house in Sarasota, Florida, was standing with a friend in a shadowy corner of the terrace getting sloshed.

"Oh, honey, not another! This here's my second-what do they call it?"

"Gin." Her companion laughed.

"Gin!" She giggled. "I definitely couldn't!" But she held her gla.s.s in a way that said she definitely could.

"Just pretend it's a very dry martini."

Miss Bracegirdle giggled again as her gla.s.s was taken from her for a refill. From sweet sherry to martinis was a giant step for Gwendolyn Bracegirdle, if not for all mankind.

Smiling vaguely, she looked around the terrace at the other patrons, but no one smiled back. Gwendolyn Bracegirdle was not the type who would engrave herself on the memories of others, as others did on her memory. (As she had been telling her friend-if there was one thing she knew, it was faces.) Gwendolyn herself was unmemorable-short, pudgy, and permed; the only thing that set her apart tonight was that she was overdressed in beaded brocade. Her glance fell on an elderly angular woman whose damp and lugubrious eye made her think of her mother. She sobered up a little; Mama Bracegirdle did not hold with spiritous liquors, at least none but the ones she herself took for medicinal purposes. Mama had a whole raft of ailments. Right now (given the five-hour time difference) she was probably fanning herself on the porch of the Pink Horror; at least Gwendolyn, now three thousand miles away, and used to daub and wattle and thatch, thought of it as a Pink Horror.

As another cold drink was put into her hand, and her friend smiled at her, Gwendolyn said, "I just don't know how on earth I'll ever find my way back to my room again." A dreary enough room it was, too: top-floor rear with a lumpy bed and a hot-and-cold basin. Bath all the way down the hall. She could have afforded much better, but she had chosen the Diamond Hill Guest House because it seemed so awfully English-y, staying at a Bed-and-Breakfast. Not being catered to like the others on her tour who were living in Americanized luxury at the Hilton and other expensive hotels. Gwendolyn believed firmly in the when-in-Rome theory, not lying back in the Hilton and calling room service just like you did in the States.

"I don't know how I'll get there on my own," she said again, smiling coyly.

"I'll see you get home."

The young girl behind the bar of the Dirty Duck was calling Time.

"Let's have one last one before we leave."

"Another? But I'm hardly into this-well, if you insist . . ."

During her friend's absence she gave herself a quick once-over in her pocket mirror, running her little finger around the outline of her Pa.s.sion Flower lipstick. Seeing the pale lips and rougeless faces of many of the women around her, looking almost ghostly in the hazy darkness, she thought perhaps she had overdone the color.

"Whoo-ee," said Gwendolyn, fanning herself with her hand as the fourth gin appeared in front of her. "These pubs get so crowded. I swear, it's hotter'n back in Sarasota. There's so many British going over there these days. But they go to Miami, I guess, when it's really the West Coast that's nicest. . . . Listen, wasn't that play wonderful? Wouldn't it be just wonderful to have nothing to do all day but live in the Forest of Arden? I can't understand why what's-his-name was so melancholy-"

"Jacques, you mean."

"Um. He reminds me of someone I know back in Sarasota. The actor, I mean. Like I told you, Mama always did say, 'Gwennie, it's absolutely uncanny how you can know faces.' Mama always said I can read faces like the blind." Actually, Mama had never said any such thing; Mama never told her anything nice about herself. Probably why she had this sort of . . . complex. Gwendolyn could feel her face burning, and she quickly changed the subject. "It's too bad I didn't see you before the play started. There was an empty seat next to mine up until intermission when some kid grabbed it. Could you see all right up there in the balcony?" Her companion nodded as the barmaid called Time again. Gwendolyn sighed. "I think it's too bad the pubs have to close up so early the way they do. I mean you're just getting all convivial and you have to stop. . . . Wouldn't it be nice if we could only go for a drive?" That made Gwendolyn think of the old Caddy Mama kept garaged all the time, only taking it out for weddings and funerals. Gwendolyn called it The Iron Maiden. The Caddy even reminded her of Mama, the way she was always dressed in hard-looking gray or black with a metallic sheen to the material, her gray eyes flecked with tiny bands like wheel spokes, her gray hair pulled back in a hubcap bun. Just like that old car.

"Well, we could go for a walk before you go home. I like to walk by the river."

"Why, that would be nice," said Gwendolyn. She emptied her gla.s.s, nearly choking on the harsh taste of the gin Mama considered a ticket to h.e.l.l and gathered up her beaded purse. She felt overdressed in the blue brocade. But if you couldn't dress to go to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, when could you? Some of these people, she thought as the two of them walked out, would wear jeans to a Coronation.

The Dirty Duck emptied in that near-magical way that pubs do. When they close, they close; it's as if suddenly the publican had grown five extra hands with which to whisk gla.s.ses from tables; and on the drinker's end of it, as if that last swallow, that final drop were the only thing keeping him from the dark Angel.

As the two of them crossed the road, the lights were already dimming in the Dirty Duck. They took the unlit path that curved around the bra.s.s-rubbing center and walked on toward the church-a leisurely walk in which they chatted about the play.

When they had circled round behind the Church of the Holy Trinity, her friend paused. "Why're we stopping?" asked Gwendolyn, hoping she knew. She tried to suppress the excitement building inside her, but it rose up much like the hatred had risen thinking of Mama. The dusty pa.s.sion was something she didn't understand and was intensely ashamed of. But after all (she told herself), there was nothing wrong these days with who you got those feelings about. And the shame was part of the excitement, she knew. Her face burned. Well, it was all Mama's fault. If she hadn't kept Gwendolyn garaged up along with the Caddy all these years . . .

Her friend's voice broke into her reflections, with a little laugh. "Sorry, but it must be all of those drinks. There are toilets over there. . . ."

They walked over to the whitewashed, tiny building, much used by tourists during the day, but as black as the path they had walked along at night. The excitement was building inside Gwendolyn all the while.

"I hope you don't mind."

Gwendolyn giggled. "Well, of course not. Only, look. There's a sign says Out of Order-"

About as far as Gwendolyn Bracegirdle had ever got toward experiencing what Shakespeare called the act of darkness was when she'd had to remove the hand of a gentleman friend from her knee. She had realized long ago that she was painfully lacking in s.e.x appeal.

Thus it was to her credit that when she felt herself gently pushed inside the public toilets, and felt hands on her shoulders, felt breath on her neck, and felt, finally, this looseness, as if brocade, bra, slip had suddenly fallen away-it was to her credit that instead of fighting off this affront to her person, she said to herself, The h.e.l.l with it, Mama! I'm about to be ravished!

And when she felt that funny, tickling sensation somewhere around her breast, she almost giggled, thinking, The silly fool's got a feather . . .

The silly fool had a razor.

2.

Willow-laced and sheeted with light, the River Avon flowed from the rose-hued brick theatre to the Church of the Holy Trinity. Ducks slept in the rushes; swans drifted dreamlike along its banks.

One would not have been surprised on such a morning, in such a place, to see Rosalind reading poems tacked to trees, or Jacques brooding beside the riverbank.

Indeed, from a distance, one might have mistaken the lady and gentleman by the river between the old church and the theatre as two characters who had wandered out of a Shakespearean play to this sylvan river to feed the swans.

It was an Arcadian idyll, a reverie, a dream . . .

Almost.

"You've fed my last fairy cake to the swans, Melrose," said the lady who was not Rosalind, poking her face into a white paper bag.

"It was stale," said the gentleman who, although melancholy, was not Jacques. Melrose Plant wondered if the Avon at this point was deep enough to drown in. But why bother? In another five minutes he'd be bored to death, anyway.

"I was saving them for my elevenses," said Lady Agatha Ardry, grumpily.

Melrose looked out over the silver waters of the Avon and sighed. What a pastoral scene it was, fit for a shepherdess or a milkmaid. A shepherdess with violet eyes would suit him to perfection. His thoughts drifted like the crumbs on the water back to Littlebourne and Polly Praed. But he could not imagine Polly carrying a pail of milk.

"We're all having morning coffee at the Cobweb Tea Room. Surely, you'll come down off your high horse and join us," she said, reproachfully.

"No. I thought I'd have my elevenses up on my high horse."

"You really do put yourself forward, Plant, in the most annoying fas.h.i.+on-"

"Putting myself forward is precisely what I'm not doing. To wit, I am not having morning coffee at the Cobweb Tea Room."

"You've not even met them yet."

"That's right."

They were her cousins from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thus far, Melrose had seen them only from a distance. He would go no nearer, no matter how she exhorted him. He had made his own accommodation at the Falstaff Hotel, a very small but charming place on the main street, thus forcing Agatha and the American cousins into other, more touristy quarters. He had seen them on the walk in front of the Hathaway's heavy-handed mock-Tudor, swarming all over the pavement: cousins, second cousins, cousins several-times-removed-a veritable flotilla of cousins had come here on one of those tour buses. Two weeks ago at Ardry End she had waved the letter in his face and insisted that he really must meet them. "Our American cousins, the Randolph Biggets."

"Not mine, I a.s.sure you," Melrose had replied from behind his morning paper.

"By marriage, my dear Plant," Agatha said with a self-satisfied look, as if she'd got him there.

"Not by my marriage. That was my uncle Robert's responsibility, and he has pa.s.sed on."

"Do stop being difficult, Plant."

"I am not being difficult. I did not marry the Randolph Biggets."

"You don't want to meet your own kin?"

"Less than kin and less than kind, to paraphrase Hamlet. Hamlet would have been ever so much happier had he hewn to that rule. But I suppose if Claudius had been named Randolph Bigget, Hamlet might not have had so much trouble killing him whilst he prayed."

As Agatha counted over the various offerings on the tea trolley, she said smugly, "Well, then, the mountain will have to come to Mahomet."

Melrose put down his paper. That sounded ominous. "What do you mean?"

Derobing a pink-frosted fairy cake, she said, "Only that if we can't go there, I shall just have to ask the Biggets to come here. Yes, a visit to the countryside . . . yes, I expect they would like that."

Here? Melrose knew blackmail when he heard it. But he feigned ignorance by saying, "You've only the two rooms in your cottage. I expect, though, that you could put them up at the Jack and Hammer. d.i.c.k Scroggs always has the spare room. Especially since that murder three years ago." He filled in a few more blanks in his crossword puzzle.

"You really do have the most morbid sense of humor, Plant. And with all of these rooms at Ardry End, I should certainly think you could be a bit more hospitable." When he did not reply, she added, "Then if you won't offer them a bed, you must have them round for one of Martha's cream teas."

"They shouldn't be having cream teas. I'm sure they're quite stout enough." Melrose entered oaf in the down line beginning with L.

"Stout? You've never even seen them."

"They sound stout."

Wild horses could not have dragged Melrose to Stratford-upon-Avon in the month of July. But the call from Richard Jury two days before could. Since it was not all that far from Long Piddleton, and since Jury would be there on some sort of routine police business, he had suggested that Plant, if he had no more pressing commitments, motor along.

And motor along he had, Agatha doing the driving from the pa.s.senger's seat, with a cold collation in a wicker basket held firmly on her lap.

"Dear old Stratford," said Agatha now, arms outspread as if she meant to take the town to her bosom.

Melrose watched her cross the street, heading for the Cobweb, where she was to meet her cousins for morning coffee in the darkness of st.u.r.dy beams and tilting floors. The less light, the wobblier the tiny tables, the more the tourists approved. Agatha certainly did, though the state of the table was less important to her than the state of the cake plate. Had she known he was supposed to meet Richard Jury for dinner, Melrose would never have been rid of her.

For not only would she be missing out on Jury, she would be missing out on a free meal.