Free The Five Bells and Bladebone by Martha Grimes Page A

before the enemy closed in.
    To Jury it was an environment he had come to dread more than any other, though he was not sure why: the ghostly elegance, the remnants of beauty, the fragmented past.
     • • • 
    Crick returned to say that Lady Summerston would see him now.
    Like the rest of him, Crick’s voice was thin and reedy. As he led Jury to her room, he spoke of Lady Summerston as a rather frail person, “bit of a heart problem there, sir,” who seldom left her room. Nothing terribly serious, you understand, but that was the way it was when one got older, continued Crick, exempting himself — he whose wafer-thin lips, sunken eyes, and dewlaps would surely have made him, in the physical sense, at least, fit company for the lady he so devotedly served.
    He told Jury all of this while preceding him up the broad sweep of staircase. As they labored upward, he murmured about “this business, this business,” without actually directly referring to the murder of Mr. Lean. “This business” was quite naturally taking its toll on her ladyship, what with police here with their questions and taking over the old summerhouse. The formality of his dress — theold, black cutaway and starched collar — did not in the least reflect his manner, for Crick was as chatty as could be, although his breathing was growing raspier toward the top. He was, indeed, quite voluble about the murder and quite voluble in his own assessment of Mr. Lean, “with all due respect,” of which, Jury decided, there was little. During their alpine climb (would they never reach the top?), Jury pretty much decided it was Upstart Simon, and that Crick, for one, wouldn’t miss him and wouldn’t miss the furniture . . . . “That appallingly poor example of eighteenth-century secrétaire à abattant .”
    They had acquired the heady heights of the upper floor and Jury was glad that Trueblood hadn’t heard him.
     • • • 
    Jury congratulated Crick on negotiating this stairway several times a day and with a tray in his hands. Crick told him then that there was a lift, but that he disliked this newfangled technology and that a bit of exercise did wonders to keep us all in the pink, didn’t it? The contraption (as he called it, pointing down the hall) with its old ironwork cage, gilt-painted, hardly seemed much of a technological advance. Near the top of the stair in a shadowy enclosure was a portrait of a young woman with dark hair and eyes, sitting on a bench in the grounds of Watermeadows. It was Mrs. Lean, said Crick, done ten years ago, but she never seemed to change.
    Down the dark hall they walked. A quick rat-tat on the door at the end was answered from inside. “Come!”
     • • • 
    Lady Summerston’s room, or suite of rooms (for he was shown into a sitting room), was a clutter of Victoriana, completely out of keeping in both size and ambience with the rest of the big house.
    She herself was sitting outside, on the balcony, which overlooked the rear gardens and the crescent of lake that showed in the distance.
    “Superintendent!” she said gaily, looking up from a huge leatherbound book in which she’d been pasting stamps. On the chair beside her were several other albums, probably containing photographs, and a double deck of cards. She had, it would seem, enough hobbies to keep her going through many an afternoon on the balcony, for the balcony had an oddly lived-in look, despite its openness to the elements.
    Her voice, when she fluted his rank, was as gay as if she had been waiting for him all the day long, and made it appear that the death of her granddaughter’s husband was an event that made a change in an otherwise routine day of looking over albums or playing solitaire. She was positioning a stamp in her book and bringing her fist down on it with a force that could have cracked the glass-topped table. Another dozen or more stamps had been dropped like confetti from a japanned box on the table before her,