Read The Five Bells and Bladebone for Free Online Page B

one considered the principal employment of the inhabitants) with just the sort of mild historical interest that moneyed tourists loved to get their hands on and sink the kind of cash into that would have renovated Manderley.
    Thus, Lady Ardry, fifteen minutes after her nephew’s and the superintendent’s arrival in her front parlor, was filling him in quick stroke by quick stroke on the new inhabitants of Long Piddleton, while Melrose, putting on his gold-rimmed spectacles, was scrutinizing the eclectic furnishings of the cottage. He came here only on duty visits — such as the one today — or whenever some small, valued bit of his personal junk had gone missing. There was such an overflow of bits and bobs that any little thing from Ardry End could have gone missing for decades. Shewas living, Melrose had often told her, in a time capsule.
    One would never have known it was spring sitting inside this cottage where a shadowy, winterlike darkness seemed to swallow up people and furnishings alike. Objects winked at him out of the gloom — the glass-eyed owl on the mantelpiece, the stuffed parrot glued to its perch by the door to the pantry, the pair of caged parakeets that Melrose assumed were alive, but he wasn’t sure. The room had that deathly, airless stillness of a Hitchcockian landscape before the sudden onslaught of beaks and wings.
    The woman who had come in to “do” for Agatha since the accident had materialized out of the shadows to bring them a plate of cakes and biscuits. Mrs. Oilings was one of the Withersby clan, and liked to work about as much as the rest of them. She could hold her own, however, in any gossip competition, which probably explained her presence here now. Agatha, being unable to get round the village on her own, could always send Mrs. Oilings to pick up greengroceries, meats, library books, and rumors.
    “. . . the Demorney woman’s living in the Bicester-Strachans’ house and has completely redone it in some inappropriate modern — Melrose, do be careful of that!”
    He intended to be, since the jade Buddha belonged to him. His mother had been fond of smiling Buddhas.
    “. . . and those books Joanna the Mad writes. Of course, she makes a tidy fortune, but then who wouldn’t?”
    “You wouldn’t,” said Melrose yawning. “I wouldn’t. Joanna Lewes makes no bones about art; she’s perfectly honest in saying that she writes to a formula and the formula was never any good to begin with.”
    Jury bit into a ladyfinger, looked at it dubiously, and said, “She sounds interesting.”
    “Well, she isn’t. Stop fidgeting with that figurine and pour the sherry,” she said to Melrose. Turning from her lackey-nephew to Jury, she said, “I would do morning coffee for you, Superintendent, but as you see —” Her tonewas long-suffering as she tapped the cast on her ankle with her cane. “You do know how this came to happen, I expect. Mr. Jurvis —”
    “He knows,” said Melrose, to avoid the long story of the accident between her secondhand Austin, Mr. Jurvis’s plaster pig, and Betty Ball’s bicycle. No one had seen this accident since Betty Ball had been in Miss Crisp’s shop at the time and Jurvis was back in his frozen-food locker. The plaster pig that graced Jurvis’s butcher shop was, according to Agatha, “the perpetrator” in this criminal affair, since it had been put right in the center of the pavement. The bicycle was also at fault as it had been left leaning against the shop front so that Agatha’s right front wheel had grazed it as she had run the car up over the curb. All of this she had explained to Constable Pluck, adding that the pig had really been the cause of the damage to the bicycle, since it had fallen directly onto its rear wheel.
    Thus the unmanned bicycle and the inert pig had divided the blame between them and Agatha was suing for damages, having got Constable Pluck on her side. Melrose said, “I saw Pluck leaving Plague Alley yesterday.”