“We’re from Colorado,” said the lady in tweeds. Her daughter nodded and smiled.
“Vancouver.”
“Berkeley,” said the silver-haired woman, eldest of the party.
“I’m from Minneapolis,” said Susan, “and our airport, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International, is much more-”
“Edinburgh,” said Elizabeth MacPherson-and instantly regretted it. She then had to admit that she was, in fact, an American; she started to explain how she came to be living in Scotland and why her new husband hadn’t come along.
She was still relating all this when a man in a beige leisure suit approached the group, carrying a canvas shoulder bag and a sheaf of typed papers. “Tour?” he said briskly. “South of England mystery tour? I am your guide.”
There was a moment of silence while the assembly took in the sight of their guide. He was a desperately stately five feet, eight inches, with longish blue-black hair that conjured up images of shoe polish in the minds of the beholders. Such a hue did, of course, exist in nature. Innumerable species of crows possessed it without resorting to artifice, and, among homo sapiens, certain bands of Comanches may in their youth rejoice in a similarly stygian shade; but in an aging Englishman whose face sported the crow’s-feet to accompany the crow’s color, the shade suggested hairstyling of a suicidal nature: dyed by his own hand and with a reckless disregard for plausibility. His eyes behind dark-framed glasses were similarly dark, and his expression radiated a confidence and self-esteem that belied his unevenly cut, safety-pinned trousers.
“My name is Rowan Rover,” said the personage.
With an exclamation of surprise Elizabeth held aloft her copy of Death Takes a Holiday. “Yes, I’ll sign it for you later,” said Rowan Rover soothingly. “Now, I’ll just read out the names on my list to make sure that we are all here. Elizabeth MacPherson?”
“Here,” mumbled Elizabeth, chagrined at having been mistaken for a groupie. She wondered if she could arrange for him to sit with Susan on the bus trip to Winchester.
“It may take me a while to learn your names. Ah, only one gentleman, I see. That should be easy.” He beamed at Erik Broadaxe. “Charles Warren, I presume?”
“That’s right, and this is my wife Nancy.”
“Martha Tabram?” The well-dressed woman from Vancouver raised her hand.
“Frances Coles? Alice MacKenzie? Ah, there you are together. Very convenient. Both from California, aren’t you? How lovely. And two Colorado ladies, where are they? Miriam Angel and Emma Smith?”
“We’re mother and daughter,” said Miriam Angel.
“Splendid. No one’s mistaken you for the Judds, have they, dear?” Rowan said under his breath. He had become conversant in country music during the period he referred to as his exile in the academic gulag, by which he meant the state of Wisconsin. “Any more Californians? Kate Conway?”
The pretty young nurse in the red sweater raised her hand.
“And one more-Maud Marsh.” He nodded toward the silver-haired lady from Berkeley. “That’s it, I think.”
“Excuse me. You forgot me.”
Rowan Rover looked up from his list. “Did I? I thought I had read out all the names. You are…”
“Susan Cohen. From Minneapolis.”
Rowan Rover’s smile faded as he stared at the belligerent-looking blonde. He made a show of consulting his list again. “Susan Cohen. It’s here, of course. It’s just that I thought I’d already said it. No, I wouldn’t forget you.”
After a moment’s silence, during which the color grudgingly returned to Rowan Rover’s face, the members of the group picked up their belongings and surged at him with questions.
He held up a hand to forestall the onslaught. “I am told that the tour coach will be waiting for us in the loading zone just outside. Our driver should be there now unless he has been delayed in the interminable traffic that one inevitably encounters on the motorway. I don’t know who thought up the road system out here, but he evidently came from a family not known for precognition, because he certainly didn’t foresee-”
Alice MacKenzie interrupted his tirade. “Do you want us to go outside now?”
“Yes,” said Rowan. “Let us be optimistic.”
“And will there be a sign on the side of the bus that says MURDER TOUR?”
Rowan Rover sighed. “No, madam. Definitely not. We don’t want to be mistaken for the IRA.” He ended further discussion by turning and marching for the glass doors of the exit, while the tour members scrambled behind him, balancing suitcases and handbags as they ran.
Once assembled on the sidewalk outside, Rowan Rover turned and faced his charges. “Ladies,” he intoned, “and Charles.” He nodded toward the lone gentleman in the party. “If you will all stay here, I will attempt to locate the coach.”
With a reassuring wave, Rowan Rover hurried away. Once out of sight of the party, he took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling hands. Susan Cohen. There she was: undeniably real and unavoidably doomed. He had three weeks in which to kill her. Somehow, despite the arrival of a fiscally sound ten-thousand-pound check, the murder scheme had never seemed more than an idle exercise in theory. Until now. Rowan Rover had spent the past few years making a living out of idle murder theories, and this one had seemed little different from the others. “Suppose Florence Maybrick knew that her husband was an arsenic eater,” he would say in one of his crime lectures. “It would be very easy then for her to purchase some arsenic, or even to steal some of his own private stock…” It was great fun to speculate. But he, Rowan Rover, had never had to buy any arsenic. Or to watch the death throes of the subsequent victim. Now, suddenly, he had to move from the theoretical to the practical-and to accomplish the task before ten potential witnesses, all of them avowed crime buffs. Was he mad?
He looked up to find that a large tour coach had pulled up alongside him. “Mr. Rover?” the driver inquired in a working-class twang. “Mystery tour?”
Rowan took a long drag on his cigarette. “Right,” he wheezed. “They’re just around the corner.”
“Climb aboard, then, and we’ll go and get them.”
Rowan Rover hesitated. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Not me, mate. But if you’re ferrying about a load of American ladies, there’s sure to be objections. Regular health nuts, some of them.” He was young and blond and he looked as if he should be running across a rugby field rather than driving a bus. He smiled again as Rowan Rover mounted the steps to the coach. “My name’s Bernard,” he said. “I’m from Kensington.”
“And you know where you’re going, I take it?”
“Complete instructions,” said Bernard. “Not as if it ever changes, though. All the tourists want to go to the same dreary places.”
Rowan Rover smirked. “I think this lot may surprise you.”
“Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today.”
– THOMAS GRAY
CHAPTER 5
WINCHESTER
WHEN ALL THE luggage had been stowed into the undercarriage of the coach, and the travelers had boarded the bus two by two, like Noah’s passengers on an earlier tour, Rowan Rover turned to address the group. First he introduced Bernard, their friendly and experienced coach driver, who would be the final authority on where the bus could and could not go. “England is not all motorways yet,” he reminded them. “Medieval towns were not constructed to accommodate lorries. Some of the rural counties are quite unspoiled. When we get down into the West Country, you will see some narrow lanes that wouldn’t take horses two abreast, much less allow this tin beast an unscathed passage.”