Docketful of Poesy Read online

  “I take it for a spin now and then,” Sally said, “to keep the battery alive.”

  It took a few minutes—and I nearly asphyxiated Sally and myself, but I finally got the old car started and drove back to the inn.

  The girl at the desk informed me that Detective Inspector Drummond had phoned while I was out. “Any other messages?” I asked hopefully.

  She shook her head apologetically, reaching for the ringing telephone.

  I told myself that it was silly to fret because Peter hadn’t called me first thing—or left any messages—or appeared to have any burning desire to get together anytime soon. I reminded myself that I could always call him.

  I went upstairs and called Brian instead.

  He was reassuringly happy to hear from me, and invited me to dinner once again—and this time I accepted.

  *****

  “We’ve got a lead on the gunmen,” Brian informed me over carrot, courgette, and dill soup.

  I reached for the salt shaker. “Do you know who they are?”

  We had driven into Kendal for dinner at the Garden House. The hotel restaurant was in the conservatory of an old Georgian house set in two acres of a secluded garden. Though it was still far too chilly to eat on the restaurant patio, the long dining room with its lovely mural and view of the wooded garden was very pretty, very romantic—and not at all crowded at this time of year.

  “They sound like a pair of local bad boys—twins by the names of Barry and Barney February. They were overheard talking at their local by a couple of neighbors.”

  “They actually admitted shooting up the movie set?”

  “They were drunk, and our informant didn’t hear the entire conversation, but what he did hear certainly seems promising. The Februarys have form—criminal records—as long as your arm.”

  I said reluctantly, “Do you know why they want Peter dead? What motive they might have? Is there some reason to believe they’re connected to him?”

  “Other than the obvious connection: they’re all felons?”

  I said, a little irritably, “You know, Peter was never convicted of anything in this country.”

  Before Brian could respond, the waiter appeared. I ordered the trout and Brian opted for the pork fillet. Our soup bowls were removed, our wineglasses replenished.

  Privacy restored, I asked, “Do the Februarys have a motive that you know of?”

  “That’s why we want to talk to them.”

  “So you haven’t arrested them yet?”

  “Not yet. They weren’t at home when we came calling this afternoon.”

  “Do you think someone tipped them off?”

  Brian shook his head. “I doubt it. They’re not popular people. No, they were probably busy going about their business.”

  “Their business? Do they keep regular hours? Or do they actually have day jobs?”

  “Not as you or I would recognize them. They’re the usual bad lot. Barney is just out of stir.” His smile was wry. “I’ll let you know when we have them in custody, shall I?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The rest of the meal passed agreeably enough. I enjoyed Brian’s company—other than when he was complaining about Peter. He laughed as I filled him in on my adventures in movie-making, he listened patiently as I enthused to him about Sara Coleridge and Laetitia Landon and Ann Radcliffe. The evening passed quickly, and before I knew it, it was nine o’clock and Brian was driving me back to the Hound and Harrier.

  “Feel like a drink in the bar?” he asked as we walked into the lobby.

  “Thanks, but I don’t think so,” I said. “We start shooting at the crack of dawn.”

  Which was certainly true, but I couldn’t help but notice—after Brian kissed me good-night on the cheek and departed—the noise level in the bar as I passed on the way to my room. I poked my head in, and as usual, most of the tables seemed to be filled up with members of the Kismet Production Company.

  Mona waved to me from where she sat with several members of the crew. I waved back, but continued on my way upstairs.

  However, once I let myself into my room and stared at the stack of books waiting for me I was seized with a sudden restlessness. I touched up my makeup and hair and went back downstairs and outside, got in the battered Citroen, and headed off to Craddock House.

  The way the Citroen smoked and sputtered, I imagine Peter heard me coming a mile off. I parked beneath the trees next to a silver rental car that I didn’t recognize, and went up the flagstone walk.

  The shop was in darkness but the upstairs lights were shining amiably.

  I rang the bell. The draperies twitched overhead, and then a few moments later the shop lights came on.

  The front door opened, bells tinkling softly. Peter stood before me in faded jeans and a soft heather-hued tailored shirt. The collar of his shirt and a couple of buttons were undone; he looked very relaxed.

  “Hello,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”

  “For what?” He sounded interested, moving aside for me to enter. I moved past him into the shop, glancing at a display of colorful vintage tins, a pair of barley twist candlesticks, my gaze lighting on a Victorian aneroid barometer. The barometer needle rested permanently between Rain and Change. I was glad that I wasn’t a superstitious woman.

  “I noticed the car out front.”

  “Tracy’s here,” he said. I couldn’t read anything in his tone—I was too busy trying to process what I felt at that news.

  “Great minds,” Tracy said from the top of the stairs. I looked up. She was standing in the doorway to Peter’s living quarters, leaning back against the frame, brandy snifter in hand. Her hair was tousled and she was scantily dressed, but since she was always scantily dressed, I didn’t place too much importance on it.

  “Hi!” I said brightly. I’m sure I looked as thrilled to see her as she looked to see me.

  “Just happened to be in the neighborhood?” she inquired.

  “Well, no,” I said.

  I heard something behind me that might have been the whisper of Peter’s laugh, and I started up the stairs.

  Tracy watched me every step of the way. I had to give her credit: she had nerves of steel.

  “How was dinner?” Peter inquired. “I heard you dined out.”

  Indeed? No mystery where he’d heard that. But he knew Brian and I were friends, and I was sure he wasn’t making any more of that than I was of Tracy lounging around his living room at ten o’clock in the evening.

  “It was nice,” I said. “We went to the Garden House in Kendal. Did you know, at one time Alfred Wainwright lived there?”

  “Any relation to Wainewright the Poisoner?” Tracy inquired.

  Now that brought me up short. If I’d thought Tracy could read at all, I’d have expected her literary taste to be confined to Cosmo. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was a contemporary of Byron and a friend of Charles Lamb, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, and many notable others. A talented artist and an infamous murderer, he ended his days in Tasmania where he was transported after murdering his uncle, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and a few other people who got in his way. There were three biographies of Wainewright that I knew of, but I couldn’t imagine Tracy reading any of them.

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “Different spelling for one thing. This Wainwright was famous for his handwritten, hand-drawn pictorial travel guides of the fells.”

  As we reached the landing, Tracy outflanked me by moving back into the flat. She took a chair across from the red leather sofa and stared down at her brandy glass. I sat on the sofa. Peter closed the door to the flat behind us.

  I said to him, “Brian thinks they have a lead on the gunmen.”

  He didn’t seem particularly impressed. “A lead but no arrests?”

  “Not yet. But he’s sure they’ll pick them up tomorrow.” I didn’t want to say more than that in front of Tracy. In fact, Brian would probably have considered even that much too much.

  Tracy said, “I didn�
��t think people in this country were even allowed to own guns.” For the second time in five minutes it occurred to me that Tracy might be brighter than she appeared. I suspected that she was one of those women who felt she would get farther playing dumb and trading off her looks.

  “All automatic, semi-automatic, and hand guns of .22 caliber and above were outlawed over a decade ago,” Peter said. He met my eyes levelly. I didn’t know much about guns but I was willing to bet that the pistol he’d been carrying yesterday was not legal issue.

  “Brandy?” he asked.

  “Yes please.”

  He looked inquiringly at Tracy. She shook her head. He poured a brandy, and brought it to me. There was a rather awkward silence as he sat down on the sofa next to me.

  After a moment Tracy drained her own glass.

  “Well, I guess I should be going. We’ve got an early start tomorrow.” She gave me a long, cool look.

  I met it equably. “See you tomorrow bright and early.”

  Her smile was a little tight, but she covered well. Peter rose to see her out, and I leaned back on the sofa staring around the familiar room. High ceilings, black wooden beams, glossy wooden floors. Even at night it felt bright and open. A beautiful old curio chest functioned as a coffee table. There was an enormous moon-faced grandfather clock against the far wall. A mounted telescope stood before white-framed Georgian windows.

  I knew this room well, and maybe it didn’t make sense, but I felt welcomed here. My tension drained away.

  I heard the jingle of the bells, and the lights in the shop went down. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, and then he was inside the room, his back to me as he closed the door.

  Peter turned slowly to face me. He was smiling.

  I smiled back.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What time is it?” I asked sleepily.

  Peter’s chest shifted beneath my head as he turned to read the clock. “Five-thirty.”

  “Mm. I should probably get up.” But I made no move, and neither did he. It was lovely like this: warm and comfortable in bed together, listening to the soothing sound of the rain on the roof.

  His fingers drifted lazily through my hair. His heart was beating in slow, steady thumps against my ear. I felt boneless, sated, drowsy. In fact, there was nothing I’d have loved better than to permit myself to fall back to sleep.

  Instead, I asked, “Do you know Barney or Barry February?”

  “No.” There was no hesitation in his voice; his heart’s rhythm was calm. “Who are they?”

  “Brian thinks they’re the two men gunning for you.”

  Just for an instant his fingers paused in that absent caress. “I see.”

  “The police are supposed to bring them in for questioning today. If they can find them.”

  “Drummond told you this?”

  I nodded. We hadn’t wasted the night before talking. Oddly enough Tracy might have done me a favor. Not only had her mention of my dinner with Brian bothered Peter just enough to get him past his chivalrous qualms about spending time with me, her presence had apparently reinforced his own weariness with his former lifestyle. Not that he’d exactly said so, but I felt I could safely draw a few deductions from his enthusiasm once we were alone.

  “It sounds like they’re career criminals,” I said. “Ne’er-do-wells.”

  “What else did Drummond tell you?”

  “That was basically it. That they had a lead on these two. But you don’t know them?”

  His head moved in slight negation.

  “Why do you think they came after you?”

  “Grace —” He bit it off, but I could hear the weariness in his tone. “I don’t know. I’ve thought it over. There’s nothing. No reason. Not now.”

  “Not now?” I raised my head and met his eyes—shadowy and blue like the distant mountains.

  He acknowledged, “Once, maybe. I was in a line of work that…encouraged bad behavior. I fell out with people. Made a few enemies, I suppose. But not the kind of enemies who would wait years to come after me—and not for the kinds of things that we fell out over.”

  “What about Catriona?” I asked of his (I personally believed) mentally unbalanced former girlfriend.

  Peter said wryly, “If Cat wanted me dead, she’d kill me herself.”

  “That’s so sweet,” I cooed. “That special bond the two of you still have.”

  He laughed.

  “So you don’t believe there’s anyone in your mysterious past who might want you dead? What about someone from the Istanbul job?”

  Peter’s last job as a jewel thief had been to steal a fabulous Turkish artifact called the Serpent’s Egg from the Topkapi Palace. Though he had succeeded, he and his team had been betrayed by the man who hired them, Gordon Roget. Peter’s team had escaped but he had been taken prisoner and spent fourteen months in a Turkish hellhole of a prison before finally escaping with the help of a corrupt guard. Roget had disappeared with the stone, never to be heard from again.

  But what of the other members of that betrayed team? What if someone who didn’t know the full story blamed Peter? What if someone believed Peter had the stone, that Peter had double-crossed his partners?

  “No,” he said. And there was something in his tone that warned me he was not going to be open to discussing this angle. But when did I let a little thing like infuriating my lover get in the way of my sleuthing?

  “You said there were six of you. Was that counting Roget?”

  After a long moment, he said unwillingly, “Yes.”

  “So discounting you, Cat, and Roget, since he ended up with the stone, that leaves three people who might blame you for —”

  “For what? I’m the one who went to prison.” He sat up, dislodging me, pulled a pillow over and stuffed it behind his back. I sat up, too. We stared at each other. After a moment I slipped my hand into his. He squeezed it, instinctively, but I could feel the restless anger humming in his system. He hated talking about this. And right then he was probably regretting ever telling me anything about his past.

  “Do those three people know that Roget ended up with the Serpent’s Egg? Is it possible that someone believes you have the stone?”

  He opened his mouth to refute this idea, then seemed to consider it. “I don’t know. It’s not like we held a reunion. I escaped, returned to England, and settled here. I never tried to make contact with any one of them again.”

  Not even Catriona—for which she would never forgive him. Ideally.

  “So it’s possible that someone believes you managed to hide the stone. Hayri Kayaci believed it.” Kayaci was the corrupt prison guard who had helped Peter escape; Peter had tricked Kayaci into believing he had hidden the stone before his capture. “They might believe that you recovered it once you escaped. That all this —” I gestured with my free hand, indicating Craddock House and Rogue’s Gallery, and by extension, the quiet, comfortable, gracious existence Peter lived “was purchased with their share of the loot.”

  He frowned, elegant brows drawn together. “Why wait seven years to come after me?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know where you were. It took Catriona nearly that long to hunt you down.”

  “Cat wasn’t in the U.K. for most of that time.”

  I really didn’t want to talk about Catriona—or think about the fact that he knew what she’d been doing during those years. I said, “Is it possible to find out what’s become of those three men?”

  “It’s possible.” He said carefully, “I’m not convinced it would be wise.”

  I looked my inquiry.

  “An ounce of prevention. I’ve taken pains to steer clear of most of my former associates. I have enough problems with the law without resuming my old criminal contacts.”

  “Well, unless you can think of anyone else who might want you out of the way —”

  “Other than Brian Drummond?”

  “Brian?”

  He was smiling but I didn’t have the impression that
he was entirely joking. I glanced beyond him to the clock, and pulled my hand free. “I’m going to be late!”

  I left him, his arms folded behind his head, listening reflectively to the rain brushing against the window.

  *****

  Miles Friedman was more of an optimist than I had imagined, which was why we were all standing in the graveyard at ten o’clock in the morning while rain poured down around us. So far we’d managed to get in all of one hour’s filming before the skies opened up again.

  Several of us had taken shelter beneath the high portico and classical columns of a crypt. Tracy stood behind me listening to Madonna on her iPod. At least, she seemed to be listening to music; I was pretty sure she was listening in on my conversation with Roberta.

  “Did you ask Peter about filming in Rogue’s Gallery?”

  “He declined,” I told her. “I knew he would.”

  “Couldn’t you have pushed a little?”

  “I felt it was pushy enough to ask at all,” I said dryly.

  Her mouth tightened, but she let it go. Instead she pulled her jacket up over her head and left the shelter of the crypt to trot across the grass and graves to where Miles, Pammy, and some of the others stood beneath a tarp awning.

  I glanced at Norton Edam who was leaning against one of the marble columns. He smiled politely—the way people do when they feel like talking but can’t really think of anything to say.

  The tinny music behind me stopped. “So what is it you find so interesting about poetry?” Tracy asked.

  I glanced around, surprised. She said, apparently serious, “You don’t really look like the type. I mean, you look like a teacher, but you don’t look like that.”

  That? What in the world could that be? Did Tracy imagine that female academics were by definition frumps and freaks?

  I said, “Well…poetry wasn’t regarded the way it is today. It wasn’t a special thing that only a few academics and literary types were interested in. Poetry was one of the most common forms of expression in the Romantic period. It was how educated people amused themselves, informed themselves, and communicated with one another. There were dozens of literary journals and periodicals. Poetry was featured regularly in newspapers. Knowing how to write verse was considered a necessary skill. Literate people exchanged poems the way we exchange e-mails now.”