“ ‘Poet,’ it says, “ ‘died from stab of rose.’ Must be a thorn that stabbed him. Who do you suppose that is?”
Richard Jury looked up and across at Sergeant Wiggins. “Rilke. What is that, the crossword? Rilke, if memory serves me.” Memory served up entirely too much. Jury sat reading a forensics report while Detective Sergeant Wiggins, seated at a desk across the room, was stirring up ever more esoteric means of dying. Wiggins was really into death, Jury remarked not for the first time. Or at least into the ills that flesh is heir to. Wiggins was heir to the lot, to hear him talk.
“Rilke?” said Wiggins. He counted the spaces. “That’d fit all right. You’d be a whiz at crosswords, knowing things like that.” He poured out the tea.
“That’s the only thing I know like that.”
Wiggins was spooning in sugar, and, having dumped four teaspoonfuls into his own tea, started in on Jury’s.
“One,” said Jury, not even looking up from his folder. Tea making in this office had achieved the status of ritual, one so long undertaken that Jury knew where Sergeant Wiggins was at every step. Perhaps it was the spoon clicking against the cup with each teaspoonful that sent out a signal.
“Was he hemophiliac, then, this Rilke?”
“Beats me.” Trust Wiggins to put it down to a disorder of blood or bone. A lengthy silence followed, during which Jury did look up to see Wiggins sitting with his hands wrapped around both mugs as he stared out of the window. “Is my mug going to grow little mug legs and walk over here on its own?”
Wiggins jumped. “Oh, sorry.” He rose and took Jury’s tea to him, saying, when he’d returned to his own desk, “I just can’t think of other blood conditions that would result in death from a rose-thorn prick.”
Lines of a poem came unbidden to Jury’s mind:
O Rose, thou ar’t sick.
The invisible worm…
William Blake. He wouldn’t mention this to Wiggins. One rose death was enough for one morning.
Wiggins persisted. “A prick could cause that much blood to flow? I mean, the guy could hardly bleed out from it.” He frowned, drank his tea, kept on frowning. “I should know the answer to that.”
“Why? That’s what police doctors are for. Call forensics if you’re desperate.”
That flies in the night
In the howling storm…
Jury closed the file on skeletal remains and watched the slow-falling snow. Hardly enough to dampen the pavement, much less a ski slope. Well, had he planned on skiing in Islington? He could go to High Wycombe; they had all-season skiing around there. How depressing. In two weeks, Christmas would be here. More depressing. “You going to Manchester for Christmas, Wiggins?”
“To my sister and her brood, yes. You, sir?”
“You mean am I going to Newcastle? No.” That he would not go to his cousin (and her brood) filled him with such a delicious ease that he wondered if happiness lay not in doing but in not doing.
Wiggins appeared to be waiting for Jury to fill him in on his Christmas plans. If Newcastle was out, what then? When Jury didn’t supply something better, Wiggins didn’t delve. He just returned to death and its antidotes, a few bottles and vials of which were arranged on his desk. Wiggins looked them over, hit on the viscous pink liquid and squeezed several drops into a half glass of water, which he then swirled into thinner viscosity.
He said, “But we’re on rota for Christmas, at least Christmas morning. I won’t get to Manchester until dinnertime, probably.”
“Hell, just go ahead. I’ll cover for you.”
Wiggins shook his head. “No, that wouldn’t be fair, sir. No, I’ll be here. Christmas can be hell on wheels for people deciding to bloody up other people. Just give some guy a holiday and he goes for a gun.”
Jury laughed. “True. Maybe we’ll have time for a bang-up lunch at Danny Wu’s on Christmas Day. He never closes on holidays.” Ruiyi was the best restaurant in Soho.
Then came silence and snow. Jury thought about a present for Wiggins. Some medical book, one that might define Rilke’s “disease of the blood,” if that’s what it was. A thorn prick. O Rose, thou ar’t sick. He tried to remember the last four lines of this short poem, but couldn’t.
Wiggins had gone back to the newspaper. “They’re starting to clear the old Greenwich gasworks. To put up the dome, that millennium dome they’re talking about.”
Jury didn’t want to hear about it or talk about it. Wiggins loved the subject. “That’s years away, Wiggins. Let’s wait and be surprised.”
Wiggins regarded him narrowly, not knowing what to make of that runic comment.
Jury got up, pulled on his coat and picked up the folder which held Haggerty’s report. “I’m going to the City; if you need me I’ll be at Snow Hill police station with Mickey Haggerty.”
“All right.” Wiggins drank his pink stuff and turned toward the window. He said, as Jury was going out the door, “It sounds like something out of a fairy tale, almost.”
“What does? The millennium dome?”
“No, no, no. It’s this Rilke fellow. It’s like the princess who pricked her finger spinning, falling asleep forever. Dying from the prick of a rose thorn.” He looked at Jury. “It’s sort of a breathtaking death, isn’t it?”
“I guess I don’t want to be breathtaken, Wiggins. See you.”
The City of London, that square mile which was London’s commercial and financial heart, had never been a hive of industry at the weekend. At the weekend, it was quaintly dead.
Jury left Tower Hill underground station and stood looking across Lower Thames Street. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this close to the Tower of London. The tourists were snapping pictures, a few with disposable cameras, others with more sophisticated ones. Christmas was in two weeks, a popular time for tourists. He passed an Indian restaurant on Fenchurch Street, and if that was closed he could pretty well bet that everything was.
But not the Snow Hill station, of course. An unhappy-looking constable was on duty behind the information desk and looked almost grateful that Jury wanted nothing more than a direction to Haggerty’s office. Detective Chief Inspector Haggerty? Through there, down there, his door there. Jury thanked him.
Haggerty was sitting at his desk, looking at police photographs when Jury walked in. Mickey Haggerty got up and walked around the desk to take Jury’s hand and punch him on the shoulder a couple of times, making it more than a handshake, less than an embrace. Jury hadn’t seen Mickey Haggerty, or his wife Liza, in several years and felt guilty for allowing the friendship to languish. But that wasn’t entirely down to him, was it? Mickey must bear some of the brunt.
No cop (thought Jury) was more “in place” than Mickey Haggerty. He fit the Job as snugly as a paving stone in a new-laid path. “Hello, Mickey. It’s been a long time.”
“Too damned long,” said Mickey, who indicated a chair for Jury before reseating himself. “How’re you keeping, Rich?”
“Fine.” This sort of exchange would have been banal between most people, but not with Mickey on the other end of it. He genuinely wanted to know. They talked for a minute about Liza and the kids, and then Jury slid the file he’d brought across the desk to Mickey. “Looks like a dig. This is a case you’re working on? Was I supposed to come up with some helpful response? I don’t know much about forensic anthropology-”
Mickey was shaking his head. “I only wanted you to see the file so you’d have a better idea of what I’m talking about. Yes, it’s a case I’m working on. Me, personally. Say it’s unofficial business. Or say I don’t really want anyone to know about it. It’s personal.” He turned one photograph around. In the center of the rubble were two skeletons.
At least, Jury made out what he thought were two. “What is this, then, Mickey?”
“Skeletons recovered from a bomb site.”
“Bomb site? Where?”
“Here. In the City. Near Ludgate Circus. If you want to see it, it’s not far from St. Paul’s, on a street called Blackfriars Lane.” Mickey drew a little map and passed it over. “The last bomb site in London.”
Jury’s eyebrows went up a notch higher, in question.
“The war. You know. The Second World War?”
Jury’s smile did not reach his eyes. “I’ve heard of it, yes.”
Mickey picked up a cigar that had been smoldering in a large blue ashtray to his right. When Mickey exhaled, Jury tracked the smoke. He hadn’t had a cigarette in nearly two years, but his need for one hadn’t abated. It infuriated him. He smiled. “So go on.”
From another folder, Mickey took another report. “Two skeletons recovered at the site.”
“What are you reading?”
“From the anthropology people at the University of London. They took the skeletons to do a study. They were, naturally, interested. For all they knew, these remains could have been ancient remains.”
“But they weren’t?”
Mickey shook his head. “Skeletons of a female, early twenties, a baby not more than a few months, probably two or three.”
“They can fix it that closely? In a baby? But the bones are still forming.”
“Teeth. They can even fix the development of a fetus by teeth. The teeth form underneath the gums. These were the only skeletons recovered. The bomb site was where a pub once stood; it was demolished in the blitz. That was back in 1940. Specifically, December 29, 1940. The site’s been bought up by a developer. There’s construction going on now.”
Jury sat back and said nothing. He had never been able to reflect upon the war without considerable pain. But his intense feelings about that time made it, ironically and uncomfortably enough, magnetic.
Mickey picked up the cigar from the ashtray and smoked. And thought.
It was one of the things Jury liked about him: he was a meditative man. Like Jury himself, he did not jump to conclusions; yet at the same time, he acted on instinct. Jury knew it was difficult to do both. He recalled sitting in a pub with Mickey when they were working a case nine or ten years ago and not a word passed between them for ten minutes. Mickey reminded Jury of Brian Macalvie; they both drove their crime scene people mad with their extended silences.
The station house was oddly quiet. They might have been visiting a memorial. “Who found the remains?”
“Construction crew. They didn’t disturb them.” Mickey turned the photograph of the two skeletons around so Jury could see it. “What’s your off-the-wall guess?”
“It looks as if the baby’s skeleton was lying close to the adult’s-the mother?”
“I’ll tell you a little story.” Mickey had opened his desk drawer and taken out a handful of snapshots, old ones in black and white. He took the one off the top and shoved it toward Jury. “This was taken in Dagenham. It was at the beginning of the evacuation, in 1939. Children who were taken by boat to one of the trains bound for the country.” Mickey pushed over two more snapshots. “These were taken in Stepney. Evacuation again. My dad used to talk about the unearthly quiet. All those children and hardly a peep out of them.”
Jury looked at the band of children, at the gray, unsmiling faces of the mothers.
“That was the exodus in forty, during the so-called phoney war, when London prepared for war, but nothing really happened.”
Jury hated talking about the war. And what were all of these pictures in aid of? What was the point?
Mickey was pushing yet another snapshot toward Jury. “Right here, I think, are the woman and the child who ended up in the rubble. Alexandra Tynedale, twenty-one or -two, and a baby of maybe four months. Not, however, her own baby. The nanny had taken Alexandra’s baby out to get some air.” Mickey spun another photo to Jury’s side of the desk. “This is that baby now: Maisie Tynedale.”
Jury looked at the photo. She was attractive, early fifties, he guessed, but from calculating the passing years rather than her looks. She could have been forty, judging by the picture. This was a better picture than the others, taken by a camera superior to the one that had taken the snaps. Jury set it down. He now had five pictures lined up before him. “These two of the evacuation-what about them? What’s the story?”
In answer, Mickey pushed over another snapshot. It showed a young woman, back to the camera, face turned to smile down at a baby whose round little chin was propped on the woman’s shoulder, arm and hand flat against the woman’s back. Jury lined that up in the row, number six, and simply looked the question at Mickey.
“Kitty, the nanny. Katherine Riordin and baby Erin.”
Like a card dealer, Mickey flicked another snapshot over. A shot of demolished buildings, red brick blown to bits. A few people were making their way through the rubble. Jury said, “I expect scenes like this must have duplicated themselves thousands of times all over London. I really hate this, Mickey. Both my parents died in this war.”
“Sorry, Rich. There is something-”
Jury looked at him thoughtfully. “Something wrong, Mickey?” He thought he actually saw tears forming in the other man’s eyes. Maybe not. “Listen, I’m in no hurry. But where is this?” He held up the shot of the blasted building, the all-but-leveled street.
“What I was telling you before. That’s the pub-was the pub-owned by Francis Croft. Here’s one taken while it was still standing. The Blue Last, it was called. Those two in front of it are Alexandra Tynedale Herrick and Francis Croft. Christmas lights around the door, so it must have been a very short time either before or after this picture was taken. Francis Croft was the business partner and best friend of a man named Oliver Tynedale, Alexandra’s father. They’d been friends since childhood. Francis is dead, but Oliver is still alive. Amazing, since he must be ninety. They were like brothers, he and Croft.”
“The nanny’s-Kitty Riordin’s-baby was killed, too; her name was Erin. Kitty was an Irish girl, came over here, as did thousands of poor Irish girls, looking for work and her husband. He’d just walked out on her, apparently. Alexandra took her on as a child keeper for Maisie. Kitty’s baby, Erin, was the same age as Alexandra’s, a few months old.” He sighed and ran his hand across his hair, roughing it up, as if that would improve the thought process.
Jury sat back. “Tynedale. Of Tynedale Brewery? One of the biggest in the country?”
“Both of them actually owned it. Tynedale and Croft.”
“Francis Croft must have been pretty down to earth if he was part of the Tynedale empire and was still landlord of a pub.”
Smiling, Mickey leaned back in his swivel chair, hands folded on his chest. “He was. He was great, a great person. My dad was a close friend of Francis’s. When I was growing up, Dad talked about him a lot.” Mickey passed over another snapshot.
Jury found himself looking at an airfield, at what appeared to be a fighter plane, Spitfire or maybe a Hawker Hurricane. The pilot, getting into or out of the cockpit, squinted into the sun. “Ralph Herrick, Alexandra’s husband. They’d only been married a little over a year when he died.”
Jury wanted to look away, but looking away would make him feel weak. He thought he expended a lot of energy in pulling back from feelings of weakness. “Active duty? His plane was shot down?”
“No, as a matter of fact, he drowned. He was out of the RAF, doing some sort of work in the Orkney Islands, when it happened. He got the V.C., incidentally. A real hero, that’s what my father told me.”
His head bent over the pictures-seven of them now and showing some anomalous progression of events. Jury studied each in turn. He felt somehow his and his mother’s house in Fulham should have been one of them. Mickey had asked him a question which he only half heard.
“I’m sorry, Mickey. I was-” Jury shrugged. Then he asked, “But how can you remember all this?”
“Some of it I remember because it was told me so convincingly and in such detail by my dad. Dad talked about Francis Croft a lot. I know Francis’s son, Simon, a little; I haven’t seen Oliver Tynedale since I was a kid, though. These snapshots I found among other things in a desk of his. I was going through some papers recently and came across the pictures.” He was back to the snapshots again, pulling out of Jury’s lineup the ones of Alexandra and the baby Maisie and the one of the nursemaid, Kitty Riordin, and her baby, Erin. The poses were very similar, might have been the same adult and same child. He directed Jury to study the arm and hand of each child bending around the neck or down the back of the mothers.
“Look at the faces. They’re both girls, or did I tell you that?”
Jury held the snapshots, one in each hand. He let his eyes travel back and forth. “At this age it’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me they shared the father? Something like that?”
“No, no. Look at the hands, the fingers.” Mickey handed him a magnifying glass.
Jury did so, carefully. “The Herrick baby’s hand looks deformed. A couple of the fingers look disjointed or broken. The Riordin infant’s hand is normal, from what I can see.”
“You see correctly. Here’s another picture, taken after the bombing.” He shoved it across. “Kitty Riordin holding the baby Maisie.”
“The hand’s bandaged. Why?”
Mickey sat back in his swivel chair, hands locked behind his head, rocking slightly.
Enjoying this, thought Jury, with a smile. About to administer the coup de grâce. Mickey loved mysteries.
“According to Kitty, they’d had an accident that night. Part of a bombed wall had given way, some of the bricks hit them. Kitty wasn’t hurt, but the baby Maisie’s hand was. Broken in a couple of places. So now both Maisie and Erin had disfigured hands. That’s interesting. My point being: Maisie Tynedale isn’t Maisie Tynedale. She’s Erin Riordin. Before you ask why the nanny would try to pass off her own daughter as the Tynedale baby, Maisie is heiress to the Tynedale millions. She goes by Tynedale, incidentally, not Herrick. Again, before you ask why, if I was heir to millions, I’d go by Mickey Mouse, if I thought it would help.”
Jury sat back, shocked that this was the end of the story, or at least Mickey’s end. “But Mickey, it could have happened. And even if the baby’s mother was killed, surely others could have identified the baby. I mean, they might look much the same to us, but to a mother-but the mother is dead; to the grandfather, then, to Oliver Tynedale?”
Mickey shook his head. “Imagine you’re the granddad. Do you really want to dispute the identity? Or do you want to believe, yes, this is your granddaughter? To say nothing of the fact that Kitty Riordin would be denying her own baby is still alive?”
“But others-”
Mickey shrugged. “What others? No one on Kitty Riordin’s side, there wasn’t anyone. Francis Croft? He’s dead. Brother and sisters? All little kids. There was one Croft girl who was Alexandra’s age, Emily Croft. I expect she could have recognized that the baby wasn’t Maisie, but as she didn’t say anything about it, I assume she didn’t know either.” He shrugged again.
“Kitty Riordin took advantage of the bombing and told whoever made any inquiries her own baby was killed in that bombing and she’d had the Tynedale child with her.”
Mickey nodded, rubbed his hands through his hair. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“You haven’t enough to go on here. What about your forensics report?”
“Couldn’t confirm because the bones were just too small. I need a forensic anthropologist. I’m sure I’m right.”
Shaking his head, Jury sat back and was silent. They were both silent while the longcase clock ticked and the gray day grew a darker gray. Jury said, “This is fascinating, Mickey, but why me? Why did you want to tell it to me? Did you want something from us, I mean the Yard?”
“Yes. I want you to prove it. “
Jury’s laugh was abrupt, less a laugh than a sound of disbelief. “Me? Are you kidding? Even if it could be proven, you’re as good a cop as I am, better probably.”
Mickey’s smile was thin. “Maybe, but I’m a dead cop. Will be in a couple of months, anyway.”
Jury felt as if he’d taken a hard blow to the stomach. “What? Jesus, what’s wrong?”
“Leukemia. Specifically, chronic myelogenous leukemia, or in its cozier abbreviation, CML. It’s not all that common, but it hits people my age-another version of the midlife crisis, perhaps? Unfortunately, there are no symptoms early on; I found out when it was already pretty much too late. It’s very aggressive, very.”
Jury’s mouth was too dry for him to speak, as if words were liquid, a balm denied him at the moment.
“I’ve done the chemo crap, but not the bone marrow transplant, assuming even if I could find a donor. The evidence, shall we say, does not stand up to intense scrutiny. Survival rate is almost nil. Two or three months, the doctors give me, which means around one or two, since they always lie. The thing is, Richie, even if I could find the answer to this in a few weeks, I’m just too bloody tired to do it and my other work as well.”
Irrationally, as people will out of a sense of hopelessness get angry with the person who is making them feel that way, Jury got angry. “Why in hell aren’t you taking the time off? Spend it with Liza and the kids?”
Mickey looked a little disappointed with Jury. “Because I don’t want all that spare time to think about it, that’s why.” He leaned forward across his desk, earnest. “Listen, will you do this? Will you try to find out? It means a lot to me; it sure as hell would to my dad if he were still here.”
Jury tapped the pictures together. “Yes. You don’t want to see the Crofts and Tynedales swindled. May I keep these for a while?” Jury held up the pictures. Mickey nodded and Jury said, “On the other hand”-he paused, wondering if his taking some high moral tone would sound as priggish as he already had-“this woman Maisie, or Erin, has been part of the family for so long and thought to be the man’s granddaughter-”
“You mean wouldn’t it be better to let sleeping dogs lie?”
“Something like that. Imagine finding out Maisie isn’t Maisie after over a half century.” Jury paused. “Anyway, I’ll do what I can.” He stuffed the pictures into an inside coat pocket and rose and so did Mickey. Jury walked around the desk and embraced him. “Anything, any time, Mickey, day or night. I mean it.”
“Thanks, Rich.” Tears stood in Mickey’s eyes. “It means a lot.”
Mickey dying. Mickey dead.
Jury studied the paving stones at his feet as he walked up Ludgate Hill. He walked slowly, almost hesitatingly, thinking it must be like the unsure gait of an aging man. He was too young for this, still, to start thinking of himself as aging, for God’s sakes.
No one occupied these buildings on the weekend except for the City’s caretakers-police, fire brigade, hospital-and the emptiness was partly responsible for this mood.
Then he realized what it reminded him of: a no-man’s-land. Though he had no firsthand knowledge of that area in battle of neutral territory which marked neither advance nor retreat and was claimed by neither side. His father had known, though; his father had talked about it. No, it had been his mother’s account, such a vivid account it seemed to have been his father’s.
I thought it was the work of my own memory. Mickey had said that.
Near St. Paul’s Churchyard he looked for Blackfriars Lane and the construction site. He came upon it almost by chance, given the convolutions of the narrow streets. Material hadn’t been thrown up yet to shroud it, and the cranes and bulldozers and other equipment sat about in the cratered ground like prehistoric Tinkertoys.
He felt he wanted to gather his few memories about him like a coat or a blanket. He wondered how reliable his memory was, or anyone’s memory, come to that.
You could never get what dying was like across to someone else, no matter how intimate the relationship or how sensitive the couple-no matter how able, how willing, how articulate-the sick person is the only one who could possibly know, who could take the measure of it, limn the page, see the borderland.
Maybe it was like walking a beat at two A.M. in a depopulated City. Maybe it was like this and maybe it wasn’t. How would he know? The only one who knew was Mickey himself. No wonder the man looked ill.
And what was the admission to this museum of ravaged portraiture? Nothing. Until dying yourself, you couldn’t get in. Nothing, nada, nil.
He looked down at the place where the Blue Last had once stood and tried to reconstruct it as he did with any crime scene. The customers in the pub, the extra pints bolstering them, Dutch courage, camaraderie.
Jury had no trouble envisioning a building collapsing around him; what he couldn’t imagine is how it had missed him and yet buried his mother. Yet it happened all the time.
And the girl Kitty, stumbling past the matchstick remains of buildings. Half a house sheared off here, another one there, so that you could see in the odd still-standing other half, doorless rooms, a staircase open to view as if it were a dollhouse. But also, at any corner turning, there would be a building left untouched, undamaged as if for pure spite. This would lend the girl hope that the pub had been lucky and had also escaped.
Only it hadn’t, and Kitty set about making her own luck.
On Ludgate Hill, Jury stopped in front of a restaurant that advertised its cappuccino bar. He stood outside dumbly looking in, thinking about Mickey. Would finding out what had happened and to whom, whether the Tynedale granddaughter was who she claimed to be, make Mickey feel connected to earth again?
He walked into the restaurant, deserted except for the help and one woman with dark hair and cold eyes sitting at a table by the window. Jury took a seat at the counter-or bar, he supposed, depending on what you’d come in for. In front of the huge mirror were glass shelves with as good an assortment of liquor as he’d find at any pub.
A pretty waitress with large, dark, soulful-looking eyes came to where he was sitting and took his order for coffee, plain and black. Who did she remind him of? Someone, some actress? Who? She brought the coffee and he sipped it, strong as lye and black as sin, and thought about the morning again. Had it been anyone but Mickey-no. If it had been asked of him in different circumstances by Mickey or anyone else he would have said no. He did not want to dwell on the war again.
“Coffee too strong?” asked the soulful waitress, as if it were all her fault.
“A little, yes.” He broke out a smile to replace what must have been his black-coffee expression.
“It hasn’t been sitting. I mean, it’s fresh, just made.” She shrugged slightly. “Our coffee, it’s just that way.” She gazed at the miscreant cup.
“I could put in some hot water.” Her expression picked up a smidgen of hope.
“No. I’ll tell you what, though. Get me a shot of that.” He pointed to a shelf holding the liquor bottles. “That Glen Grant.”
She took the bottle from the shelf and pulled a shot glass from beneath the bar and poured. “That should liven it up,” she said, pushing the shot glass toward him.
Jury poured it in the cup, sipped, and declared it much improved. Then he asked, “Is it always as empty as this at the weekends?” The only other customer was the icy-eyed brunette. She was smoking what Jury fancied to be the last cigarette in the world.
“Yes, it’s because people don’t live around here, you know. I mean, except for Docklands, but that’s not really the City.”
“If it isn’t, it’s becoming so. All those new condos.”
The brunette made a sign and the waitress moved off toward her table.
Jury took the envelope out of his pocket and spread the pictures, one by one, on the bar. He positioned them as nearly as he could in chronological order: the pub, the au pair, Kitty Riordin, the young woman Alex. He smiled. That was who the waitress reminded him of! He looked at Alexandra Herrick with her baby, Maisie, then at the fighter plane and the sun-blinded young pilot. He stopped, thinking about his father. He had also been RAF, could have piloted that Spitfire, could have been a friend of Ralph Herrick. The faces themselves meant nothing; Jury could not recall his father’s face-how old had he been? But the plane, he could always see the plane spinning toward earth. He had not actually seen it, of course; but in his mind he saw it thus, and there was no one or nothing to correct this vision.
After his mother died, there was the Social, always eager to swoop down and claim another kid. It must have claimed him some time for there was that period in the orphanage. Good Hope, it was called. Funny he’d remember that detail and have lost so many others. First, a kindly uncle had taken him in. He had died and then came Good Hope. Somehow, he had got in his head he was there for five or six years, but now when he tried to call up that period, he wasn’t at all sure-five or six months, it could have been. He saw a row of single beds, the sheets so taut a kid could bounce on them. But he wasn’t bouncing, only sitting on his own bed in a corner. He tried to remember if his feet had reached to the floor; that might have told him how old he was. How long had he been there?
He thought of his cousin in Newcastle, the daughter of the pleasant aunt and uncle, a girl who hadn’t liked him coming into the household. Could his cousin, a bitter woman now, a bitter child then, have put the six years in his head? He could call her and ask; he could even go to Newcastle to try to get some information from her. The husband, a Tyne-and-Wear man, had fallen victim to the North’s unspeakable unemployment rate (the “joke shop” is what they called the employment office), and his cousin had for some obscure reason thought it was in part Jury’s fault, he being a superintendent at New Scotland Yard. Why should Richard be successful and her Bert not?
He signed to the waitress by making a circle over the shot glass with his finger, then over the coffee cup. The coffee was surprisingly good with a jigger of whiskey, but then what wasn’t?
His cousin had four kids, a toddler and the others teenagers by now, he guessed; it had been years since he’d seen her. The last time, that had been Christmas, too. He had not wanted to see her, and not because she herself would heap her troubles on his shoulders, but because she was the last relation he had on earth and he hated being reminded of that fact. He envied Wiggins his sister in Manchester.
The waitress came along the bar with fresh coffee and fresh whiskey. She seemed pleased that Jury was stopping here, that her ministrations had succeeded in some small way. Jury smiled at her, wanting her to think so. When actually the whiskey, as whiskey usually does, merely opened him up to sadder ruminations, to cold little scenes of childhood.
He saw himself seated at a large dinner table with eight or ten other children and the old lady from Oxfordshire (or was it Devon?) at its head, admonishing all of them to eat like little ladies and gentlemen. She had just said grace and while hearing it, Jury had stared down at a plate of pale sausage and sauerkraut which made the bile rise in his throat as it always did when he looked at this once-a-week meal. He would be sick if he ate it.
“Richard’s not eating, Richard’s not eating, missus-”
Who was taunting him?
“Not eating, not eating,” the voice went on fluting, and then the whole table picked it up-“Richard’s not eating, not eating.” And a violent rapping of spoons grew in volume before the old lady brought her hand down to silence them (and it had taken her a long time to do it) and she herself commanded him to eat. Who was she? Not the aunt, who with his uncle had taken him in after his mother was killed when their block was bombed… No… Jury’s head and shoulders had barely cleared the table at the old lady’s. So he must have been very young.
His eye fell on the middle snapshot of the evacuation. All of those children. He saw his child’s face there, looking over the shoulder of an unknown woman, carting him away.
It was he and two or three other boys and a girl-he recalled her vivid hair-she was older than the others, nine or ten perhaps, and she seemed to be the leader. They were trooping across a field. He could not read the signs posted all around but the skull and crossbones on one of them told him the place was dangerous. The girl had told them all the signs were danger signs, DANGER was what they said. The field was full of unexploded bombs, she said.
“We’re going to the sea!” she said.
It was there, in the distance, the grim gray sea and low cliffs. So it couldn’t have been Oxfordshire, it must have been the West Country-Devon or Dorset, Cornwall maybe. He hung back, stopped on the inside of a listing fence made of wire and wood, fallen down in one long section. It was meant to keep people out of this danger zone, but they had walked right over it. He stood there, small and stocky as they yelled back: “Richard’s a scaredy cat!”
He wondered why his mother had left him in such a place. Everywhere was dangerous-the stubbly fields, the sea, the long table where they ate, the gray sausages, the games. The redheaded girl.
Secretly he must have envied her. She did not seem afraid of anything, not the field of bombs, not the old lady whose house it was. “Dried up old prune!” was what she had called the old lady. The redheaded girl filled him with dread. Dread.
So did the old lady’s parlor, for there were photographs of dead servicemen all around. He knew some of them were dead for around two of the frames she had draped black velvet and in front of a few had placed little candles. He spent long times studying the faces of these men, who were all in uniform, all young. Of the others, the ones who must have still been alive, he wondered if one was his father. There was at least one who could have been, for he wore the uniform of an RAF pilot. Maybe his mother had brought it here to be placed where Richard could see it whenever he wanted.
The hellion, the redheaded girl, had told them about the photographs, making them sit as she picked up one after the other and told them who the subject was. When she came to the one who might have been his father, he slid from his chair and told them all who the fighter pilot was. They laughed and laughed.
“Then he’s dead! Pilots die a lot more because it’s more dangerous!”
Richard shouted that he was not. He still flew his plane.
“It went down-” Her hand made a spiral toward the floor.
Richard was beside himself. He could no more have controlled the spasms of rage that overtook him than he could have manned that Hurricane. He went for her. The old lady was summoned by shouting voices. The girl was screaming and the old lady came diving at the two tangled bodies, ripping Richard away and all but flinging him into the cold fireplace.
“What’s going on here? What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” the redheaded girl had said. “Playing is all.”
At least, he thought now (for he could not then, probably), there had been some code of honor at work. They might have warred among themselves, but it was still them against the old lady. He had lain in bed heaving with sobs and anger. Later, he had crept down to the parlor, grabbed up the photograph of the flier that might have been his father and carried it up to his small room. He had stood looking out of his dormer window at the black sky, littered with stars that he imagined exploding and turning to silver rubble and wondered if his father’s plane was up there now. He remembered that spiral motion of the redheaded girl’s hand, diving toward the floor. But that wouldn’t happen to his father. God holds certain people up by strings and he was sure his father was one.
Jury had not thought of all this in a long time. It was Mickey and his pictures bringing it to mind again; it was the mystery. He picked up the snapshot of the fighter squadron and remembered that downward spiral of her hand. He wondered what had happened to her, the girl with the hellfire hair.
He felt a feathery touch on his cheek and looked up. The waitress had touched his face with a napkin or perhaps her own handkerchief.
“It’s just the one tear.” She held out the handkerchief, smiling uncertainly.
He smiled back. “I’m not crying, am I?”
She raised the bottle of Glen Grant she’d brought with the coffeepot, and he nodded and held up the shot glass, then pushed over his cup. “Thanks.”
Inclining her head slightly toward the counter, she said, “I guess it’s the sad pictures. They look like old ones, those snapshots.”
“They are.” He turned the one of Alexandra Tynedale and her baby so that the waitress could see it. “I was trying to think who you reminded me of.” He tapped the snapshot. “Her.”
The waitress smiled. “People are always telling me I look like Vivien Leigh. She was that actress a long time ago. I’ve only seen pictures of her; I never saw her movies. Do you remember her? Was she that beautiful?” She was blushing because she hadn’t meant to say she herself was beautiful.
“Oh, I remember her. And, yes, she was that beautiful. Like you.”
The girl’s color deepened even more. “Oh…” She flapped her hand, waving the compliment away. Then she asked, “Was she a friend of yours?” She nodded toward the snapshots.
“No. They’re not my pictures.”
The hell they’re not.
Jury drained the coffee cup in one go, put more than enough money on the counter and turned to leave. The cold-eyed brunette was still there, putting another cigarette between her lips. So the one before had been the next-to-the-last cigarette in the world.
This one was the last.
The dog Stone preceded Carole-anne Palutski into Jury’s room and lay down in front of Jury’s easy chair and fell asleep. Dogs amazed Jury.
Not as much as Carole-anne Palutski amazed him, though. She stood in the doorway, dressed in a short dress of burning blue. Standing in her vibrant rays, Jury thought he ought to be wearing sunscreen. Wordlessly, he held the door wider. She entered.
He did not know why she had hesitated on his doorsill, since she immediately plopped herself down on his sofa. Invisible strings seemed to pull and tug Carole-anne from place to place, as if even space wanted a taste of her.
“It’s Saturday night and I don’t expect you’d like to go down to the Nine-One-Nine?”
This was Stan Keeler’s regular gig when he was home. The flat directly overhead was home. “Don’t be so defeatist. When did Stan come back?”
“Last night. You weren’t here,” she added, accusingly.
The second-floor flat had been empty for years as a result of Carole-anne’s managerial skills. She had convinced the landlord that he should put its letting in her hands in order to keep out the riffraff, the riffraff being females, married couples and all men who failed to meet her standards. So there was silence overhead until Stan Keeler had come along with his guitar and his dog Stone, a caramel-colored Labrador now draped across Jury’s feet, dreaming of empty fields-
Which brought Jury back to the present, or, rather, to the past. Carole-anne reminded him a little of the redheaded girl, though Carole-anne’s hair had more gold mixed in with the red. And she hadn’t a mean bone in her gorgeous body.
She put her feet up on the paper- and magazine-strewn coffee table. Picking up a copy of Time Out, she started flicking through it and yawned as she said, “Am I to take ‘I-shouldn’t-be-defeatist’ as a yes?”
He loved her feigned indifference. “Yes.”
“Good. Elevenish?” The Nine-One-Nine never really got going until just before midnight. Then she was frowning over Time Out. “I don’t see why you buy this, seeing you never go anywhere.”
“But I do. I go many wheres. You just don’t happen to be with me when I go.” Resting his head against the back of his chair, he was aware of her narrow scrutiny. A secret life? she’d be thinking. That’s what worried her.
“Like where?”
“To the City, for example, which is where I was today. To visit an old friend, hit the pubs, the coffee shops. All over. Found a nice waitress, really pretty.” She was looking at him avidly. Jury smiled. Carole-anne sometimes seemed unsure but what Jury might just vanish before her turquoise eyes. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I get up to. Even though you see no life beyond these four walls for me”-Carole-anne had a job at the Starrdust in Covent Garden, telling fortunes. Costumes like a chorus girl-“I do have quite an eventful life.” He went on to tell her some wild tale about a case he’d just wrapped up, exaggerating his own Scarlet Pimpernel role in the proceedings. From the wide-eyed way she was looking at him, he wouldn’t be surprised if he was becoming to her more myth than man.
“What waitress?” she said.
Sunday and Jury could not shake off the depression over Mickey Haggerty’s fate. Fate, doom. Terminal disease. Interminable sorrow. He tried to put himself in Mickey’s shoes, but he couldn’t. He lacked the imagination.
At the moment it was his own shoe, dangling from his hand, that he was now putting on as he sat on the edge of his sofa, its worn material resplendent in the slant of sunlight coming through his window.
Above him, Stone barked once. Stone was not profligate with his barks. That meant Stan was up and in a few minutes the guitar would start warming up. This was not an unpleasant prospect for Stan was careful to tailor his tunes to the time of day. Nothing raucous on a late Sunday morning.
Music. Carole-anne was sure to follow.
There came a rat-a-tat-tat on his door. He opened it. Carole-anne said good morning and entered, wearing a blindingly bright coral-colored dress that, together with the sunlight, set her red hair and the room afire. She plunked herself down on the sofa from which he had just risen and removed one of her sandals.
Jury was holding his other shoe and wondered if in this symmetry there was some oblique, symbolic message. No. Carole-anne had a pedicure in mind. She was unscrewing a bottle of hot-pink nail polish.
“You look like the coral reef off Key West, an endangered species.”
“Is that a compliment, then? Or are you saying I look like crumbled rocks?”
Jury had seated himself in his easy chair and said, “I don’t think any of our conservationists would call a coral reef or you crumbled rocks.”
Her toes planted against the edge of his coffee table, she applied the nail polish in little dabs to her toes, observed Jury’s shoe lacing up and asked, “You going out? It’s Sunday.”
“Sunday is a going-out day. Maybe the most of the entire week. People veritably live in pubs from noon to night.”
Her chin on her upraised knee, she asked, “You going to the Angel, then?”
“Nope.”
“Then where?”
Jury stopped his lacing to take in the mellow music coming through the ceiling. He sighed. “He’s great.”
“Stan? We’re going to the Angel.” She had taken down one foot and put up the other. “Where’re you going?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Well, you were looking pretty hangdog yesterday when you came home.”
“No kidding?” Jury wondered if there was any breakfast stuff in his frig and wished for the zillionth time he had a cigarette.
“So where were you? I mean besides where the waitress was?”
He smiled. “Around.”
She paused in her polish application and looked at him. “Then you need a little hair of the dog like.”
He gave a short laugh. “I’m not hung over, though I admit I tried hard enough to wind up with one last night.”
“I don’t mean booze.” Her head bent again, she worked on her little toenail. “I mean you should go back around.”
“Back around?”
“Back around the City, back where you were yesterday.” She examined her bare foot, the freshly painted nails. “Except,” she added, “that coffee place. Too much caffeine is bad for a person.”
Plus other things, Jury thought, with a smile.
Perhaps she was right, even though it was strange advice coming from Carole-anne, who usually saved her prognostications, anything that hinted of Jury’s future, for the Starrdust, where she told fortunes by way of a crystal ball. Or rather by way of her blue-green eyes. Andrew Starr loved it; it was unusual to have men patronize the Starrdust, given its main purpose was the casting of astrological charts, and men didn’t want to be seen as believing in astrology. But now there were men aplenty.
Sunday was a good day for an undisturbed walk about the City. He wondered if Mickey was in his office, if he spent weekends there instead of at home where his mortality would be constantly mirrored in the faces of his family. Even if Mickey could forget for five minutes, they couldn’t, at least not for the same five minutes.
Jury supposed it was another price, ironic in being exacted, that the seriously ill had to pay: people didn’t really want to be around them and for precisely the same reason they should. They were afraid of their own dying; they didn’t want to be reminded. Beneath that obvious cowardice, though, were other, more complicated reasons. He would probably see enough of Mickey, anyway; there would be questions, problems, things to report.
Jury had left the train at Holborn underground and walked along High Holborn, stopping to regard Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He called to mind the poet Chidiock Tichbourne, who was trapped in the net of a conspiracy to murder Queen Elizabeth. Though utterly innocent of anything, he was executed. Jury had always thought that poem he composed had one of the saddest refrains he’d ever come across. “And now I live and now my life is done.” Chidiock Tichbourne had been seventeen when he wrote that, seventeen when he was executed. Seventeen.
He had brought Mickey’s snapshots with him. He did not know why. Occasionally, he would take out one or the other, stare at it for a few moments and wonder if Mickey was right. And wonder also why the solving of this puzzle meant so much to him. “There’s not enough time.” There never is, thought Jury. Of course he knew why he’d brought the pictures along; the mystery was locked inside them.
He walked along Holborn Viaduct into Newgate Street, past St. Paul’s and into Cheapside, which he had always liked and which he would have liked to traverse back in the seventeenth century when it was a huge, bustling market. He loved it for its Londonness. He liked the way that each guild had its own area: bakers in Bread Street, fishmongers in Friday Street, dairymen in Milk Street, which is where he had stopped now. He thought he might fancy a drink in the pub before him called the Hole in the Wall. On this bit of land had once been one of those prisons called counters, where the poor wretches could acquire “accommodation” according to their ability to pay. Since some weren’t poor, they got the best. But the poorest were stuck in the darkest dungeon, where the fetid air could turn to fresh only by the admission of fresh air entering through a hole in the wall. It was here also that the prisoners begged food of passersby. If there had ever been a more corrupt system than the prison system, Jury was hard put to think of one. He decided he didn’t fancy a drink after all but to go into Bread Street.
He stopped again near the corner of Cheapside. Here, if his modicum of geography served him right, was almost hallowed ground for here had stood the Mermaid Tavern until the Great Fire of 1666. He stood looking at the building here now and envisioning what had gone before, until the one peeled away and the Mermaid emerged (not, perhaps true to itself, but wasn’t the shell of one public house pretty much like another?). In his mind’s eye he entered to find it smokier, rowdier and filled with more raucous laughter and louder screams for beer than could be witnessed at his pub in Islington, the Angel. There were no women, nary a one, except for the barmaid, her breasts spilling out of her loosely laced shift.
And since his imaginings landed him in the first part of the seventeenth century-there they sat, ranged around a table, men more sagacious, less bemused than any others he could name: Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, Walter Raleigh (who had founded this “club”) and in a shadowy corner Dr. Johnson, the only one standing in case he wanted to make a quick exit and the only one as yet unborn.
Jury thought it remarkable that all of these icons of literature could be gathered in the same room, sitting around the same table. He wanted to know what they thought. So he told them the story in the photos. None of them but only half attended to him for they laughed and quipped all the while (Webster asking, “Is this, then, what the Peelers have come to? If you lit all the lamps in London could this man find his feet?”)
“You know what it sounds like?” said Webster.
“I do indeed, Mr. Webster,” said Beaumont. “Sounds like someone’s stolen my plot of The Changeling.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Shakespeare. “It’s a tale told by an idiot, et cetera, et cetera.” He banged his tankard on the table and yelled for ale through the smoke and coal-dusted air.
Ben Jonson called for “a cup o’ Canary wine, now, Megs!”
The buxom barmaid waved her hand. “My point is,” said Jury, “should I believe it?”
All seven of them sat transfixed by the idiocy of this question. Then they found it wonderfully risible.
Megs had come, laces dancing, and answered him: “If it’s belief as concerns you, sir, you just step across the street to St. Mary-le-Bow.”
“Ah, but they might come along and burn him for high treason,” yelled Fletcher.
Jury stuck to his guns, for here was more sagacity than he would meet in his lifetime: “Is it true?”
Unborn or not, Samuel Johnson couldn’t keep still. “The man’s dying, you fool; why would he waste his time talking about this impersonation if it hadn’t occurred or something else occurred enough like it to ribbon the tale round with such finery as would secure your aid. He needs your help, man, though I must say, help from you is about as necessary as t’was Chesterton’s.”
Jury did not know what he meant; Dr. Johnson did not enlighten him, but faded back into the shadows again.
Jury thought: yet there’s something in the advice he should pay attention to but, in the way of elusive clues, he could not see what.
“You’re all intuitionists.”
They regarded one another with a raised eyebrow, a questioning glance, a finger pointed in Jury’s direction.
Refusing to give up, Jury said, “Intuit. Go on.”
Donne, who had joined less in the raillery around the table, cleared his throat and said, “You undertake to help this man because you feel his story is yours.”
“Yes. No. I wasn’t posing as someone else. Not that part of the story.”
Donne waved this away, saying, “That’s merely the pièce de résistance to engage your interest; it’s merely a corner turned in the real mystery and is insignificant.”
“But it’s the whole mystery. It’s the one question to be answered.”
“It is crucial only if you’re not looking around.”
“Looking around? Looking around for what? Pardon me, but you’re talking in riddles.”
“Riddles!” said Beaumont. “It’s you who’re hearing them; he’s not talking them.”
“You’re too insistent, Mr. Jury,” said Webster, “on your own notion of mystery. Probably because you’re one of these detective types such as our so-called writers in Grubb Street write about, composers of temporary poems and bad detective novels,” said Fletcher.
“The thing is, Mr. Jury, you already know that part of it. What you’d call the solution, the answer, the conclusion, call it what you will. But that’s the chaff; that’s what’s left behind in the dust. A kills B. You strive to discover A’s identity. You do and bring him in.”
“It’s not that simple-”
“Of course it is,” said Webster. “A hundred hacks in Grubb Street right this moment are writing their detective tales-”
“Century! Century!” bellowed Dr. Johnson. “There are no detective stories until E. A. Poe!”
“You’re past it, mate,” said Fletcher to Jury.
“Can’t see the woods for the trees,” said Beaumont, adding, “who said that, anyway?”
Fuck you two, Jury thought. Couple of pricks. “Thank you, Mr. Donne and Dr. Johnson. I know you’re trying to help. Unlike some others I could name.” He cast a baleful look at Beaumont and Fletcher, then asked, “Just what did you guys write?” Jury was pleased to see the pink flush across their faces.
“T’is Pity She’s a Whore,” called out Ben Jonson. “Megs, Megs! We’re talking about you! More wine! An excellent play! Ran six months in the Duchess.”
Dr. Johnson turned to bang his head against one of the tavern’s stout beams. “Century, you idiot! That theater wasn’t even built for several hundred years!”
Ben Jonson was engaged in tweaking the good Megs’s bottom, and said, “Yes, you’re right.”
“Of course,” said Shakespeare, “one wonders about Sam back there. You’re not the one to talk, Sam, for what are you doing here?”
Only silence inhabited the shadows for some moments. Then Samuel Johnson said, “Patrolling. One has to patrol. One has to oversee the literary scene. I wouldn’t mind it except for this blockhead who keeps following me.”
Then Jury watched the scene dissolve and turned his feet in the direction of Ludgate Hill. Could one feel both elated and deflated simultaneously? Apparently one could, he told himself, ruefully. It was only minutes to Ludgate and then to the cramped little streets that hemmed in the construction site. He stood looking at the blank face of it for some moments before taking out Mickey’s picture of the Blue Last.
It showed a three-storied building, much like the houses around it, gabled, dormer-windowed and with a door painted darker than the rest of the structure. It was the Christmas four or five days before the bombs fell. The Christmas decorations-the strings of lights that ran across the edge of the roof and around the downstairs windows-struck Jury as awfully sad. In front of the pub stood a man, Francis Croft, and Oliver Tynedale’s daughter, Alexandra. They stood smiling and slightly blinded by the winter sunlight. In just a few days their lives, and the lives of all the families of whoever was unlucky enough to be in the pub-all would be horribly and irrevocably changed.
Alexandra Herrick, even in this faint and awkward likeness, could be seen to be beautiful, though you had to imagine her coloring, which Jury had no trouble doing. The baby would probably be beautiful also. Here, she was wrapped in a blanket. Then he looked at the one of the baby looking over Alexandra’s shoulder.
Jury studied the picture of Kitty Riordin holding her own baby, Erin, wearing a little cap also looking over her mother’s shoulder. How could what Mickey believed be possible? How could one child be substituted for another and no one know? If he himself had seen both children and then had been asked to identify one or the other-? He doubted if he could. But the mothers would know. That, of course, was Mickey’s point. If Kitty said the baby she had taken out in the stroller was Maisie Tynedale Herrick, who would contradict her? Who would want to? In Maisie’s case there was a grandfather, uncles, aunts-an entire roster of people who would want Maisie alive far more than they’d care if Erin was. It would take the most hardened cynic-this was war, after all-to pose such a devastating question to Kitty Riordin, a woman whose own child had very probably died inside the Blue Last, buried under the debris-no. Mickey was right to be suspicious; it could well have been, still could be, an imposture.
But the alternative was equally possible: Alexandra’s baby, Maisie, really was Maisie, and Mickey was wrong. Jury stood looking at the blank face of an office building before him, which served as a kind of screen on which he could project his thoughts.
London in the dreadful last months of 1940. He had heard people who’d been here then say that if you could hear that searing whistle, the bomb had already missed you and gone down somewhere else. In the spring of that year, people were calling it the phoney war. Men and women in their seventies now, talking about the blackouts, how you couldn’t go anywhere after dark because you couldn’t see. “Always stumbling over the goddamned sandbags, picking your way through the dark, in a block of terraced houses, going up a path and trying to open the wrong door.” One man said he almost welcomed a storm so people could navigate by lightning flashes. No light, no torches, no headlamps-the blackness was like a cave, “like wandering about in a bloody cave, it was.” Jury thought he heard his uncle’s voice saying this. It’s what he himself must have felt in the months after their own flat in the Fulham Road had taken a direct hit. Seeing his mum lying under a ton of rubble.
But had it happened? Had he been there? Was this the reason he hadn’t wanted to be forced back in time, was it that he had begun to question his own memory?
Despite his earlier thoughts about his cousin, he now had the urge to ring her in Newcastle, see what she remembered. Better yet, he would go there. Only, he warned himself, she would not treat memory kindly; she was likely to remember what would make him unhappy, what sad, and even embellish on the sadness of it.
For he knew, if he knew anything, it had been and would be sad.
Benny Keegan and his dog Sparky climbed the cement steps and crossed to the other side of the Embankment to get the bus to take them across Waterloo Bridge to the South Bank.
Benny made deliveries for several small merchants in Southwark. He knew he couldn’t compete with the swift, helmeted bicycle messengers, but then speed wasn’t everything (he’d told his prospective employers). “Sparky adds a bit of fun to your customers’ day.” Benny (and Sparky) had been hired by the five shops he’d solicited, three of them because Sparky did indeed put a bit of fun in the day. The other two, newsagent and butcher, had agreed to give him a try because Benny (and Sparky) worked cheap. That had been a year ago.
So there were Mr. Siptick, the newsagent; the butcher, Mr. Gyp; the two young men at Delphinium, the flower shop, who reminded Benny of flowers themselves, tall, thin, pastel-colored flowers; the greengrocer, Mr. Smith; and Miss Penforwarden, who owned the Moonraker Bookshop.
These five shops were all handily within a few blocks so that Benny could go from one to the other, making out a schedule for deliveries as he went. He would do this once in the morning and again in the afternoon, to see if any other deliveries had been added. He was very efficient and his way of handling his business worked quite smoothly.
He wouldn’t have exchanged his day of irregular work for a regular job for anything (not that he had the opportunity to, as he was only twelve).
During the time between deliveries, and there was always some time, he could stop and have a rest and a look around the shops he served. His favorite was the Moonraker. Waiting for Miss Penforwarden to make up her delivery orders, he could take down a book and read. Sparky would sit and not bother anything, not even the Moonraker’s cat, who tried everything in its power to get Sparky to chase it. Sparky didn’t. Benny did not know where Sparky had learned such discipline, unless he’d been part of a circus or magic act before Benny had found him that day, nosing through a dustbin. All Benny had ever taught Sparky was how to carry things in his mouth. Newspapers and magazines were easy. But Sparky could even be trusted by the Delphinium owners to carry flowers. To the cone of vibrantly pink paper wrapped around the flowers, they would attach a string handle by which Sparky could carry the bouquet remarkably ably. Sparky loved flowers. Whenever they stopped at Delphinium, Sparky would make a circuit of the wide, cool room, stopping to sniff each kind of flower, bunched in its tall metal holder. The bluebells were his favorite, even though they made him sneeze sometimes. The Delphinium owners would often give Benny, at the end of the day, whatever flowers they thought wouldn’t sit well overnight. They said for him to take them to his mum. Benny said he would and thanked them and went off.
He only wished he didn’t have to make up so many stories about his mum and her daily dealings. How she was really an actress, but had to do waitress work to make money until she got her big break. The trouble with making up a story was that you had to remember to stick with it and flesh it out with all kinds of detail, such as where his mum waited on tables. Lyon’s Corner House, oh that closed, did it? Well, I meant when it was still open. Right now she waits tables in the food hall at Harrods; no, I know they don’t have tables, just counter work, I mean. It was such a strain.
When there was time in the Moonraker, Benny would sit on the library ladder and read David Copperfield, his favorite book. It was because David was worse off than Benny that he liked it. Benny felt lucky there was no Mr. Murdstone in his own life to make him miserable. Of course, the other side of that was there was no Peggotty to help Benny over a misery, so maybe life evened itself out pretty much, the same terms for him and for David.
But it still made him sit there thinking, his chin in his cupped hand, elbow on knee, for long periods. Was it better to have no enemies, even if it meant no friends, or have both? This was not an easy question. Anyway, he really couldn’t say he had no friends for there were the people he lived with, and the people he delivered to, who were very friendly toward Benny and Sparky. As for his employers, it was only Mr. Siptick and Mr. Gyp who could stand in for Mr. Murdstone. Mr. Siptick was forever going on about the things he did wrong and Mr. Gyp was always asking pointed questions about Benny’s mum (his dad being dead, which was true) and ending up with asking “You sure you got a mum, Benny Keegan?” -he’d ask with his wheezing kind of laughter-“or should I go call the Social?”
This froze Benny’s insides, not only for himself, but also for Sparky. And Sparky even took a couple of steps backward when Mr. Gyp mentioned the Social. But for all the icy fear that replaced the blood running through his veins, Benny was canny enough to keep his expression noncommittal when he answered, “Well, you could do, but when they came to the house to take me away, Mum, she’d be pretty mad and I wouldn’t work here no more. Anymore,” he’d corrected himself. A lot of reading in the Moonraker had vastly improved his speech. The thing was, Mr. Siptick and Mr. Gyp, neither of them wanted to lose Benny, for Benny worked for much less-and did a better job-than anyone else they could have found.
This morning Mr. Siptick, wearing his same old green jacket with his name, SIPTICK, on the pocket, rolled up a copy of Gardener’s World and handed it to Benny. “Just you mind that mutt don’t slobber all over it.” Mr. Siptick said this every day.
“His name’s Sparky and did anyone ever complain about slobbering?”
Benny also answered this way every day. Sparky could carry two papers at once, since Benny put them in a thin, brown bag to make it easier for him to keep them together.
Mr. Siptick waved a dismissive hand and settled down on his stool to count his money out for the day. “Well, go on, go on!”
“You forgot the Toblerone for old Mrs Ely.”
“For pity’s sake, boy, just pick one up, candy’s right in front of you!”
Benny took a Toblerone from one of the candy boxes lined up on a rack. “Okay, I’m off.”
Mr. Siptick made no answer.
On Monday morning, which this was, his usual deliveries were one, Daily Telegraph to the butcher, Mr. Gyp; two, sausages and racing form to Brian Ely; three, Telegraph, Times and Guardian to the boys at Delphinium (Benny thought they used all these papers to cut flowers over); four, Times to the Moonraker; and five, if Miss Penforwarden was sending books along, Benny’s favorite stop was a big house called Tynedale Lodge.
It was convenient to go next to the butcher’s for that way he could pick up the sausages for Brian Ely when he dropped off Mr. Gyp’s paper. Sparky always knew when they were going to Mr. Gyp’s for he seemed to droop. Sparky was some kind of terrier, Sealyham, maybe. Sparky looked just like Snowy, the white dog in Tin-Tin, with his oblong white-tufted face. Neither of them could stand Mr. Gyp. In his usual sharp-tongued way, he started complaining about lateness when Benny and Sparky were hardly in the door.
“I can’t help it if Mr. Siptick makes me late.”
“You just mind your tongue, Master Keegan. And that there dog, too. I don’t want him gettin’ his teeth into these sausages for the Elys.”
As if Sparky didn’t know better. Benny handed Sparky two more papers he’d been carrying under his arm, and he himself carried the sausage. He said the same thing and got the same reply.
“Well, I’m off.”
Nothing.
Brian Ely was a stocky man with a head like a bullet, which was close to his shoulders, so that he seemed to be perpetually shrugging. He wore loud suits with wide lapels.
“Ah! Sausages! Have these for our tea, we will. Paper’s here, Mum!” he shouted back over his shoulder. Benny couldn’t decipher the tremulous reply. He wondered why old Mrs. Ely didn’t die. She always seemed in the process, what with her lack of breath and always having to hang on to things-chair backs, stair rails, coatracks, people-to keep herself upright. She was worn down to nothing but a bag of bones. It was a wonder.
Brian Ely exclaimed over the racing form as if he didn’t get it nearly every morning. “The form! Good lad. He took the brown bag from Sparky’s mouth, removed the racing form. He shook it open. “What d’you like in the ninth at Doncaster?” He looked down at Sparky, who seemed to be thinking it over.
“See you, Mr. Ely. Oh, and here’s your mum’s Toblerone.” He handed that over and then raised his voice. “’Bye, Mrs. Ely!” he shouted. He wished he’d just gone ahead and left, for now he saw Mrs. Ely making her breathless way toward them from the rear parlor.
“C’m on, Ma, no need to exert yourself.”
There was a wooden rod all along the wall of the hallway, attached there just so old Mrs. Ely could hold herself up. “Just… wan’… pa…” she said, or tried to. The rest was lost in her gathering in enough breath even to get that across. She stopped, holding on with both hands and breathed asthmatically. Her face was bloodless, but that appeared to be its natural color. Benny wondered if she would drop dead there and then, but he supposed not, as she’d done this many times before. She was always falling down, too.
Brian Ely just shook his head and heaved a sigh as he refolded the racing form. He went a few paces down the hall to where his mum was gasping for breath, handed her the racing form and she then turned to make her breathless way back.
“Got no patience, has Mum. No, she’s got to have that form first thing and don’t even like me reading it first.”
Benny asked, “Why don’t I bring two, then? You could each have your own copy.”
Brian Ely laughed. “Oh, I thought of that. But she’d just think I was hiding something. Ever so suspicious. Well, she’s a good old mum fer all that. I’ll say it if I must-she can really pick ’em. Would ’ave made a good tout, she would.”
After the door closed on them, Benny just stood there until Sparky gave him a nudge. They both trotted on to the Moonraker.
It was four steps down, each step bearing a gold-painted moon in its different phases. Sybil Penforwarden had hired a painter to do that. Inside the walls were brownish-red brick. On two sides of the room were arched openings, forming what looked like four separate chambers filled with shelves of books.
The bell rasped at the opening of the door and brought Miss Penforwarden from the shadows of the back shelves into the shadows of the front ones. Benny looked around, then called, “ Morning, Miss Penforwarden.” The little shop was ill lit, but that was one of the reasons Benny liked it. There were dim wall sconces against the brick and an old metal shade hung from the ceiling, throwing a swooning kind of yellow light over the books. This light made his eyelids heavy. He always thought there was something stranded about the shop, something alien and other-worldly. Maybe it was just the name.
Miss Penforwarden came out from the rear of the shop, cheerful as ever. “Benny, I’m so glad you came round this morning. I’m getting up a parcel of books to go to the Lodge. Can you take them?”
Of course he could, as she well knew. Yet she always acted as if Benny’s appearances here were a stroke of wonderful luck, something that happened erratically, even though he’d been coming for a year like clockwork. She liked to allude to his “larger” life, as if there were important things going on in it and the Moonraker was merely a blip on the screen.
“You just find a seat and I’ll be back in two shakes.”
“Okay,” he said. She’d be back in many more shakes than just two. He headed toward the shelf of books nearest the window, Sparky at his heels. He loved the room and the alcoves in which were floor lamps situated over easy chairs, in case a customer needed more light to have a quiet read. The chintz slipcovers were faded and threadbare, which made them all that much more comfortable and less apt to bother Miss Penforwarden, the bother of children’s sticky hands or dirty shoes. There was the children’s corner in the back that held a table and small chairs, stuffed animals, blocks, puzzles. Yet Benny had never seen a child back there; the few who came gravitated to the front room.
Miss Penforwarden had told Benny the room originally must have been a wine cellar for the house (now sectioned off into small flats). Benny said the only other purpose it could have served was as a dungeon. He liked this dungeon notion. He had never been to the Tower of London or any of the great houses and castles that might have harbored a dungeon, so dungeon life was fair game. What he really had to worry about more than being thrown in a dungeon was thinking up explanations of why he wasn’t in school. First, he considered illness, like a heart murmur he’d had since a baby, but then somebody had said working the way he did, wouldn’t that put more strain on a heart than just sitting in a schoolroom? Then he had said it was his asthma and had given a few voluntary wheezy coughs to demonstrate. But it was mostly Mr. Gyp who bothered him this way and he tried to ignore it.
Benny pulled down David Copperfield and looked for the place he’d marked with a toothpick. He didn’t think Miss Penforwarden would mind.
But his thoughts trailed across the page. He was thinking of that “larger” life Miss Penforwarden liked to refer to, the one he didn’t have. He wasn’t sure he even wanted one. For he liked routine, the sort of action that would go with a “smaller” life: the blue dawn over Waterloo Bridge, his morning tea and thick bread and making his deliveries. But a “larger” life was the kind of life he imagined for the inhabitants of Tynedale Lodge, though he couldn’t clothe it in any particular activity. Tennis, perhaps?
Dancing? Swordplay with masks on? A mysterious life. He was curious about it, but as he never went anywhere except for the garden and kitchen when he delivered things, he supposed he would never know. Certainly, it would include countless relations and friends. He hadn’t any relations and the nearest he had to friends were the people within his delivery route and his mates where he lived.
David Copperfield still open in his hands, he leaned his head against the other Dickens books and thought about his mum. She had liked her routines, too. Selfridges had been on Thursdays. Harrods, Monday; Harvey Nick’s, Tuesday. He had argued that people knew right away they were Irish, for that’s what so many of the Irishwomen did, keeping a baby with them or a child. And these people didn’t like the Irish. Begging mortified Benny. Whenever some passerby dropped coins in his upturned cap, Benny looked away. But at least his mother didn’t walk on the pavement holding his hand and stopping first one woman, then another. That’s what so many of them did. His mum would tell him, when he asked about their present awful state, that she was so sorry things had gone to the bad for them.
Da died, he would say, as if he were explaining things to her. But she didn’t seem to like to speak of his father because it pained her so much.
She’d talk about their old home in County Clare. Ah, beautiful it was! But never mind; we’ll get back there when things improve, so.
Benny looked down at the pages of David Copperfield. It was something about Steerforth. Benny thought about David’s mum, how pretty she was. And so had his own been. Prettier, he bet. Images of County Clare floated in his mind: the rough coast and the sea, the great smooth rocks worn down by the waves’ onslaught, and fierce weather, the kind that met Steerforth and David when they went to visit Peggotty.
Good books, his mum had said, will always keep you in good stead. Good books, Bernie, are important. Read as much as you can.
His name was really Bernard, but he had so much trouble getting his tongue around that r when he was tiny, it came out “Benny.” As names you start out with will stick, so had his.
“Here we are, dear,” said Miss Penforwarden, who had come with the tied-up parcel. There was also a small book, which she tied with string so Sparky could carry it. “It’s for young Gemma,” said Miss Penforwarden.
It wasn’t wrapped, so Benny could see the title: Name Your Cat. “She’s not even got a cat.”
Benny and Sparky left with the books.
Gemma was already at the back gate when Benny and Sparky got there, as usual holding the doll dressed in its “baptismal clothes”(Gemma called them), a bonnet and a biscuit-colored and dingy dress, its length covering the feet and trailing down. This doll remained nameless; she could not decide. Last time, she had been through the Qs and must now be up to the Rs.
The gate creaked back and he entered the rear garden of the Lodge. The top of the gate was higher than Gemma’s head. She was nine and the butler, Barkins, was always telling her she was too old for dolls. Benny had said that’s ridiculous, you can never be too old for something you really liked.
Benny asked, “What’d you want this cat book for?” Sparky had dropped it at her feet and himself trotted off, over to the pond, which he seemed partial to. Probably to watch the big goldfish.
“I mean,” Benny continued, as she leafed through it, “the only cat around here is Snowball and she’s got a name. And she’s Mrs. Riordin’s cat, anyway.”
“It’s what she had at the Moonraker. It’s the only book on names. I’m into the Rs. There’s Ruth, Renee, Rita, Renata-”
“Renata? That’s not a name.”
“It is, too. I saw it on a book cover. It’s the person who wrote the book. Then there’s Roberta, which I don’t like at all-”
“You don’t like any of them; you never do. Next comes the Ss. You could name her Sparky.”
Gemma looked at him, shaking her head. “I’m not naming her after a dog.”
Benny was practical; Gemma wasn’t; she seemed to live in Never-Never Land, or at least went straight there the minute she saw Benny. That was actually what she called the great gray pile of stone that was Tynedale Lodge: Neverland.
“Let’s go sit in the tree.”
They were still by the gate. Benny said, “Mr. Barkins doesn’t like me hanging around.”
Gemma sighed. She was always being put out by Benny. “Well, this doll-” she thrust the doll in its grimy, trailing dress toward him “-doesn’t like being unbaptized, but it is.”
Benny tried to make a connection between the two things but couldn’t. “Miss Penforwarden sent some more books.”
“I know. Let’s open them.”
“No.” He followed her to the beech tree, which was her favorite place to sit. It was enormous, sending out roots that themselves looked prehistoric. Gemma had wedged a board in between the trunk and a thick branch. It was roomy enough for both of them and near the ground. If they straddled the board, they could each lean against the trunk and the branch.
She set the doll between them and reached for the parcel. “Let’s see.”
“Gemma!” He wheeled the parcel upward.
“I need to see if they’re about poisoning.”
He forgot and let the parcel down. She grabbed it.
“What are you talking about?”
“I told you somebody tried to poison me.” Humming a scrap of a song, she carefully undid the string. She looked at him out of eyes like agate. The green swam in them.
Benny fell back against the trunk. “Not that again! Why’d anyone want to?”
Matter-of-factly, she said. “For my money.” She had removed the brown paper and picked up one of the books.
“What money? You don’t have any money! I tried to borrow fifty P from you a couple weeks ago and you said you didn’t even have that.”
“Not to loan out, I didn’t.” She was looking through one of the books.
Benny gave up and looked across the lawn at the “baptismal pool”; Sparky was still there, peering over the edge.
Gemma said, “There’s nothing much in this one except a lot of rubbishy gardens.”
Benny leaned forward and she turned the book so he could see it. He was looking at queerly sculpted garden topiaries. He frowned. “That’s Italy somewhere.”
“Italy. Oh.” She looked around, thinking. “Wasn’t that where this family kept poisoning each other?”
Benny reflected. “I don’t know. Med-something? It’s like ‘medicine.’ Gemma, why do you always think somebody’s trying to murder you? First it was shooting. You thought you were being shot at.”
“I was being. They missed.” She turned a page. Another garden.
“Then after that, it was somebody trying to smother you.”
“Yes.” She opened the second book. “Look.” Holding the book open in front of her face so that only her eyes were visible peering over the brown calfskin binding, she tapped at the page.
Benny leaned closer. The illustration was an outline of a human form showing a map of arteries and veins. The direction of the blood flow was indicated by arrows. He frowned. “So?”
“It could show a person how the poison gets in your blood and travels around and where it travels.”
Benny took it and looked at the spine. “It’s just a medical book.”
She looked up at the sky, as if the cloud formations held an answer. “But it’s got poisons in it. A list of them. Look and see.”
“No. Gemma, be sensible. You’re too young to have somebody want to kill you. And don’t tell me again it’s your money.”
Incensed, she said, “I am not too young. Even babies get murdered.”
“But that’s different. That’s because-” For the life of him he couldn’t think of one good reason. Then he hit on one. “They make too much noise or they’re always crying and the parents go daft listening to them. And it’s-ah-impulse, that’s what. It’s not-” What was the word? She was looking at him as if maybe he’d finally come up with something that would save her. It made Benny feel terrible; she really believed what she was telling him. If no amount of reasoning could dislodge this notion from her mind, Benny thought he would go at it from a different angle. “We’ll have to narrow down who’s doing this. It’s only one person we’re looking for, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t think it’s more than one?”
She scratched her ear and said, “I guess not. Only-” She put her thumbs on the eyes of her doll as if to shut them against the sight of something awful.
“Only what?”
“I don’t know. It could be two people working together.”
“But why would you think that instead of just one?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m only saying you should keep an open mind.”
His mind was so open talking about this you could have landed a plane on it. “Let’s just take them one by one. For a start.”
“Well, all I know is, it’s somebody there.” She glanced around at the Lodge and stuck out her tongue.
Benny knew Gemma didn’t much like the inside of the place, or some of the people who lived in it. Most of her time was spent outside-in the gardens and the greenhouse, or with the gardener, Mr. Murphy, as he was tending the beds and the hedges. Benny thought he was a bit sharpish.
“Let’s start with the ones you don’t like.”
“I don’t like any of them except Mr. Tynedale, but he’s sick. He stays in bed.”
“You like Rachael.”
“Well, I’m not talking about staff, like Mrs. MacLeish and Rachael. They’re all right, I guess.”
Benny wondered how much that was a part of all this murder business. None of the people in the Lodge, except for Mr. Tynedale, seemed to care about Gemma.
“What about Mrs. Riordin?” She occupied the small gatehouse.
The mere mention of the name made Gemma hug herself and fake retching noises. Then she wiped at the doll’s skirt as if vomit had dirtied it. “No, she doesn’t want me dead, exactly. She needs me alive to torture.” Katherine Riordin occupied what was once a gatehouse called Keeper’s Cottage.
Oliver Tynedale was the one person Gemma did like; she spent time with him every day, carrying up cups of tea and reading to him. They told each other stories, his true, hers invented. Gemma was imaginative (the murder plots being proof of that) and good at making up stories. She remembered these stories, too, and told them to Benny sometimes. She had a remarkable memory, the kind of memory that might be thought of as “inconvenient” by some people who preferred forgetting.
Benny had picked up this term from Mr. Siptick, who was talking about a customer who had claimed to have paid his bill when (Mr. Siptick said) he hadn’t, as a man with a “convenient” memory.
Sparky moved from the pool over to where the gardener, Angus Murphy, had just come around the side of the house, shearing the hawthorn hedge. Mr. Murphy (as far as Sparky was concerned), although not himself a flower, partook of their scents and possibly even their colors and contours, as if embedded in Mr. Murphy’s physical self.
At least, that’s how Sparky smelled it.
Flower vapor drifted out and around Mr. Murphy, and at his ankles, where Sparky stopped, were the smell of peat and moss, snail, worm, grub.
“Hi, Mr. Murphy!” Gemma called across the garden. Mr. Murphy turned, raised his shears and waved them in reply. No one fit the category of old middle age as well as Mr. Murphy with his faded ginger hair fast going gray, blue eyes also faded and a back slightly twisted with arthritis that prevented him reaching any higher than the top of the hawthorn hedge, which left the quarter mile of privet and yew hedges unshorn. Or had, that is, until Mr. Tynedale had hired an assistant to do such work as required a strong back and tall enough to do this shearing. There were also the two swan-shaped topiaries on either side of the big front gate. Mr. Murphy could not stand his new assistant, who hadn’t lasted long. Mr. Murphy was always complaining about his “trendy” ways.
Here now he’s one that’s always talking “design” and keeps wanting to pull up my dahlias and phlox to plant red kinpholias and some electric blue. Wants to pull up my roses and put in something “shaggier.” If you can believe it. Shaggy, that’s the new thing and I says to ’im, just you leave my roses alone, m’lad. And he says at least let’s get in some driftwood. Driftwood? Are you daft? I says to ’im. Don’t tell me he ain’t a little Nellie, way he floats around here with his Hermès secateurs. Cost him over two hundred quid, he says. He’s plain daft. Hermès, no less.
That undergardener had been replaced by a girl whom Mr. Murphy had liked better, but only fractionally, as he found her too young and “summat silly.” She had left, too, but of her own accord. She had simply stopped showing up. So Mr. Murphy was on his own again and might have preferred it that way.
“Maybe,” said Benny, watching Sparky move along the hedge with Mr. Murphy, “maybe it was that girl gardener. She left all of a sudden.”
Gemma fell back against the tree trunk. “Jenny? Why would she want to murder me?”
Benny sighed. She was so illogical. “I don’t think anyone wants to murder you-”
“There’s Maisie Tynedale. She hates me.”
Maisie was Mr. Tynedale’s granddaughter. She had never married, had always lived in Tynedale Lodge. “What reason would she have?”
“If I’m not allowed to say ‘money,’ I don’t know. She was in an air raid when she was a baby, Mrs. MacLeish said. A bomb hit the building and exploded it to bits. Mrs. Riordin’s baby got blown up.” Gemma expanded. “Everybody got blown up. Everything was dust and all these body parts.
Bodies were all in pieces. Hands sticking up through the rubble you could pull one out and no body was attached to it.”
“I don’t think Mrs. MacLeish told you all that.”
“Yes, she did. I can’t get it out of my system. It was a pub and there were eyeballs in beer glasses.”
“That’s ridiculous. How could an eyeball fly out of your face and land on its own inside a pint glass?”
She lay her doll down again and leaned back against her branch and swung her feet. “I’m only saying what she told me.”
“She didn’t tell you that. Anyway, let’s not talk about it; it’s nothing to do with the family wanting you dead.” He watched Gemma wipe her doll’s face with a white tissue. “Mr. Tynedale, he’ll probably leave you a trust, maybe.” Benny’s knowledge of trusts was a little thin, as it was about most things financially elaborate. “Aren’t you glad for that? It might pay you back for having to put up with someone like Mrs. Riordin.”
“I know what I’d do with some money if I had it right now.”
“What?”
“Hire a detective.” She looked at her name-starved doll for a moment, and held it up so Benny could see it. “Rhonda?”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” said Fiona Clingmore, trying unsuccessfully to pull down a black skirt that had too far to stretch to cover her knees.
“I expect you to take a hatchet to him, Miss Clingmore.” Racer was standing, still looking stupidly around his office for the cat Cyril, who had pawed a sapphire shirt stud from the little velvet box on the desk and made off with it.
Jury sat on the sidelines with the file Racer had told him to bring: Danny Wu, with whom, Jury thought, Chief Superintendent Racer was obsessed. The obsession paid off royally for Jury and Wiggins, as it gave them a good excuse to eat at his Soho restaurant.
“You should never have left that velvet box there and gone off for lunch,” said Fiona, in that annoying hindsight way people had.
Racer was attending some black-tie function and needed his shirt studs (“all of them,” he’d said).
“Sapphires? Don’t you think that to be a bit, well, showy?” This unpopular opinion was offered (precisely because it was unpopular) by the human equivalent (in Racer’s eyes) of the cat Cyril; that is, the police detective Jury. “You don’t want to outshine the chief constable, do you?”
Chief Superintendent Racer’s face reddened to an alarming degree, and he, near desperate with rage, as if he feared there wasn’t enough to be portioned out among the three of them (Cyril, Fiona, Jury), seemed to swell like a balloon.
The ladder which Racer was climbing had been furnished by one of the maintenance crew who had asked if he wanted a picture hung and would he like maintenance to do it?
“No!” Racer said, as if he meant to nullify the entire visible world in the manner of John Ruskin. Abashed, the maintenance man had left. (Jury had missed this opening chapter in the cat fracas; Fiona had reported it in fulsome detail.)
Racer had been positioning the ladder against the wall, climbing up and looking in the small well made to accommodate the recessed lighting, a well that could also accommodate cat-sized objects. There was a row of tiny lights just beneath the ceiling around all the walls. The lights were hidden by a strip of molding (cat height, if the cat was lying down).
As Racer looked right and left up there, Jury did not bother telling him that Cyril could easily slip right round the corner and be hidden by the recess on the other wall that Racer had given the all-clear to. Enjoying life immensely on this Monday morning, relieved of his Sunday depression for a while, Jury looked up, not at the recessed lighting but at the ceiling fixture, an iron rod ending in two light bulbs which were covered by a chic copper shade, inverted like a large bowl. This was a perfect place for a cat-nap, as Jury was bearing witness to, if that bit of paw over the edge was any proof.
Racer descended the ladder, disgusted. His back was to the paw. “I’m setting the trap again.” He dusted his hands. “The next time that bloody ball of mange appears will be the last time, do you hear me, Miss Clingmore?”
The caramel-colored paw drew in. Nap disturbed. Jury sighed, envious of such sangfroid.
Dragging the ladder, Racer went to the outer office, picked up the phone when it rang on Fiona’s desk and barked into it. Cyril sat up in the copper shade, measuring distances. He was so fast and so agile that had he been a villain, police never would have caught him. As if auditioning for the Royal Ballet, Cyril leaped, a graceful curve in air to make a four-point landing on Racer’s desk. While Racer barked, Cyril washed. Then hearing the phone slam down, and other microscopic moves and sounds that announced the chief superintendent’s return, Cyril streaked off the desk and oozed underneath it.
“The hell with it,” said Racer. “Here. Open this and set that trap.” Racer sent a tin of sardines sailing to his desk in an arc. Then, in a matador move Cyril would have appreciated, Racer swirled his coat from the rack and around his shoulders. “Oh, Wiggins wants you,” he said to Jury, tilting his head toward the phone. “That was him.” He walked out, calling “lunch” over his shoulder.
Cyril squirmed out from beneath the desk, and, from a sitting position, made another four-point landing atop the desk. He moved over to the can of sardines.
Lunch?
Jury walked through the door of his own office, laughing.
“Sir-” Wiggins began.
“You missed it, Wiggins, too bad.”
“Sir, you just got a call-”
Wiping a few tears of laughter away, he said, “A call about what?”
“A shooting. It was from that DCI Haggerty you went to see.” Wiggins looked at his tablet. “The name will be familiar to you, he said. A Simon Croft. He’s been shot; he’s dead.”
A cold breeze fought its way past the shuddering windowpanes and touched Jury’s face. He felt thrust into the midst of events he could not control. What the source of this feeling was he didn’t know.
“You know him, sir? I mean this Croft person, the victim?”
Jury nodded. It was easier than explaining. “Where did he call from?”
“Croft’s house. It’s in the City, big house on the Thames. Here.” Wiggins ripped the page from his notebook. “He said he’d like you to come if you possibly can.”
Jury looked at the notes. “There’s a problem I’m helping him with. I’ll go. You have the number so that you can reach me?”
Wiggins nodded. Jury left.
A few people were still hanging about, wide-eyed and thrilled, on the other side of the yellow crime scene tape, watching the police van slide out of the forecourt of the Croft house and make its way, signals flashing, along the Embankment.
Jury thought Simon Croft must have had quite a bit of money to live in this large house backing onto the Thames. Behind the house was a short pier jutting out over the river; fifty or sixty feet beyond it was a boat, anchored. How had the owner ever got the London Port Authority to permit a private boat to anchor there? The Thames was still a working river, after all. The boat looked as if it were drifting there in a gray mist.
Mickey Haggerty waited in what Jury supposed was the library, considering the books and the dark wood paneling. Bookshelves lined the walls, except for the wall behind the table, in which a bow window looked out over the river. Jury could see the boat through this window. There was a large walnut writing table inset with dark-green leather. Simon Croft’s body had fallen forward across this green leather. Blood had pooled on the desk, dripped down onto the floor beside his chair. His left arm was reaching out and beside his hand lay a 9mm automatic.
“It was the cook who found Croft when she came this morning-” Mickey had come up beside him and was flipping over a page in his notebook “-at ten A.M. I’ll tell you…”
But whatever it was remained untold; Mickey just shook his head. Jury said, “You look tired out, Mickey.”
“It’s the bloody medication.”
Jury put his hand on Mickey’s shoulder; he looked pale and exhausted.
Mickey shoved the handkerchief he’d used to wipe his forehead back in his pocket. “I got the call an hour ago. His cook rang the station. Mrs. MacLeish.”
“Where is she now?”
“At the station, answering some questions. She wanted to get away from here. She’s really the Tynedale cook, but comes over here to cook for Croft a couple of days each week.”
“Croft lived here alone?”
Mickey nodded. “He was a broker, very successful. Had his own small-what’s called boutique-firm. One of the few that didn’t get swallowed up by the banks in the eighties. Croft stayed independent. Smart man. He was writing a book about the Second World War. I think he was using the Blue Last as a symbol for the loss of the real Britain, which ‘real’ I think he equated with ale and beer. A slow erosion of the British spirit.”
Jury smiled. “That’s always been the sentimental view.”
“How cynical. Listen, I want a word with the doctor.”
This person had been talking to one of the crime scene officers. Mickey asked him how soon he could do the autopsy.
“Late this afternoon or tomorrow morning, early.”
“Early? I’d appreciate that.”
The doctor smiled fractionally. What Jury remembered about the way Mickey worked was that he never pushed people already pushed to the limit for favors. He often got favors as a consequence.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” said the doctor. “He died somewhere between midnight and four or five A.M.; the rigor’s fairly well established. Body temp and room temp don’t suggest anything delayed or sped up the decomposition. Still, you know how hard it is to fix the time of death. I’ll know better when I do the autopsy. And of course you know it’s no suicide. Whoever tried to make it look like one knows sod all about ballistics.”
“I figured. Thanks.” He nodded to the doctor. Then he said to Jury, “According to this Mrs. MacLeish, Croft was working on a book. He had a laptop and a manuscript and also a card index, notes for the book, which she said was always sitting on the desk. The manuscript sat on that table by the printer.” He paused. “Don’t printers have memory? Anyway, someone, presumably the shooter, nicked all that stuff. At the moment, that’s all I know that was taken.”
“You said before you knew him a little.”
“That’s right-I’ve got to sit down for a minute.” They moved to an armchair in front of an elaborate stereo system. “Not well,” Mickey repeated, again taking out his handkerchief and wiping what looked like cold perspiration from his forehead. “Croft knew me because-you remember? I told you his father, Francis, and my dad were such good friends. Simon there-” Mickey nodded toward the body of Simon Croft “-knew I was in the Job, so asked me if I’d just come by once in a while because he thought someone was trying to get at him. That’s how he put it, ‘get at me.’ But he couldn’t or wouldn’t say who or why. To tell the truth, he struck me as more than a little paranoid. Anyway, I did it; I’ve come by here maybe five or six times.” Mickey shook his head. “Obviously, I was wrong. Someone was trying to get at him. Someone did. It makes me feel bad, Rich, really bad. I should’ve taken it more seriously.” He shook his head. “Look over here.”
Mickey rose and Jury moved with him to the raised window behind the desk where Mickey pointed out chipped paint along the sill and obvious gashes on the outside that looked made by a knife. “Whoever did this is a real amateur. We’re supposed to think it was a break-in. But look at the way the marks go. It was done from inside, not out. Like I said, a real amateur.” Mickey moved to talk to the police photographer, and Jury looked at the CDs spread out across the table on which the stereo sat. Without touching them, he let his eyes stray over them. Simon Croft was not so careful about their arrangement as he was about his books. There must have been a dozen or more CDs out of their cases. Jury smiled. Vera Lynn, Jo Stafford, Tommy Dorsey’s band. All of the music was popular in the Second World War. “We’ll Meet Again,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” He’d been too little to take them in when they first came out, but later, yes, he remembered. “Yesterday,” yes, he certainly recalled that. But wasn’t that song much later? In his mind’s eye he saw again Elicia Deauville dancing by herself in her white nightgown. She was eight years old. Eight or nine? Given all the activity behind him in the room, it surprised him how well he could mute the sounds to an incomprehensible cloud of talk, and hear “Yesterday.” And see Elicia Deauville through that hole in the wall. It was her hair that was so astonishing. It was tawny, but several shades of it-taffy to gold to copper, amazing hair. He thought she had lived next door to them on the Fulham Road, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Had it happened? Was he there?
Mickey was beside him. “It’s meant to look like a robbery-” Mickey shoved at the glass slivers with the toe of his shoe “-yet the only thing of any value missing is a Sony laptop. The watch he was wearing was worth more than that. Not a Rolex, that other one that costs as much as a small car. You know?”
“Piaget?”
“That’s the guy. See those pictures?” Mickey pointed out a small painting propped against the books on one shelf. “Bonnard. That one-” he indicated another on the top shelf, ultramarine water, yellow so heavy it looked like the weight of the sun “-Hopper, no not Hopper-the other one-Hockney, that’s it. David Hockney. Those two paintings are easily transported. Who in hell would rob the room and leave those behind?”
“Did they take anything besides the computer? Computer-related stuff? Diskettes?”
Mickey called to one of the crime scene officers. “Johnny? Did you find any computer diskettes?”
“No,” said Johnny. “Not used, but there were some new ones, that’s all, sealed.”
Jury scanned the desk, the shelves. “No manuscript? No notes? Didn’t you say he was writing a book about the Second World War?”
“You think he turned up something someone didn’t want turned up?”
“Don’t you? Everything associated with the writing of it appears to be gone. And that’s all that’s gone. The man must have had hard copy, some, at least. A historical event calls for research; research calls for notes. You saw him-when? A couple of weeks ago?”
“The computer was on; I didn’t pay much attention to whether he was writing from notes.” Mickey looked around the room as if either determined or desperate. “Maybe when they go over the house-”
“The killer could have done that, easily, at his leisure. Assuming this was someone who knew Simon Croft lived here alone, no staff except for the Tynedale cook, who didn’t, in any case, live here. The last time you saw him, you said-are you okay? Mickey?”
Haggerty had grown very pale. He swayed slightly. “Let me just sit for a minute.” As he sat in one of the wing chairs, he took out his handkerchief, damp by now, and wiped his forehead, beaded with cold perspiration. “I’ve got to go over to talk to the family.” He said that and folded the handkerchief.
“Uh-uh,” said Jury. “You go the hell home. Leave the family to me.”
“I can’t-”
“The hell you can’t. I’ll get the initial stuff out of the way; you can talk to them later.”
Sotto voce, Mickey said, “Look, keep this under your hat, Rich, will you? I mean, me being sick.”
Jury said, “Of course, I will. You know I will. Does the family know about Simon Croft yet?”
Mickey nodded. “Two of my people went over there, sergeant and WPC. They told them I’d be talking to them this morning.” Mickey checked his watch, shook his wrist. “Damn thing.”
“Get yourself a Piaget. Give me the details and I’ll go over there now.”
Mickey did so.
Ian Tynedale was an intelligent, good-looking man in his late fifties or early sixties. At least Jury assumed that age, given he was a young child when his sister Alexandra was killed. He sat forward on the dining-room chair, elbows on knees. His eyes were red rimmed.
“It wasn’t suicide, if that’s what the gun being there implies,” Ian said. Pulling himself together, he sat back and took out a cigar case and dragged a pewter ashtray closer.
“You’re sure of that?” said Jury.
“Never been surer. Not Simon.” He thought for a moment. “Was it robbery? Were any of the paintings missing?”
“I don’t think so, but of course we couldn’t be sure. You’re familiar with his paintings?”
“Yes, I got a few of them for him at auction. Art’s my life. Italian Renaissance art, to be specific. I’m pretty passionate about that. There was one painting worth a quarter of a million on the wall behind the desk.”
“I think I recall seeing that.” Jury paused. “Mr. Croft was actually no relation, was he?”
“No. The two families have always been exceptionally close. Simon’s father, Francis, and mine knew each other from a very early age. They were boyhood friends, then they were business partners. They were quite remarkable, really. They were every bit as close as blood brothers. Maybe you could say the same for Simon and me. It’s a very close family. Living out of each other’s pockets, you could say.”
“Francis Croft owned a pub in the forties called the Blue Last?”
That surprised Ian. “Yes. How’d you know that?”
Jury smiled. “I’m a policeman.”
“Funny old thing to bring up, though. That pub’s been gone for more than half a century. Bombed during the war. Maisie-that’s Alexandra’s daughter-was a baby then. They were at the Blue Last when it happened. Rather, Alex was; Maisie, fortunately for her, was out with the au pair, Katherine Riordin. Kitty, we call her. She survived because Kitty had taken her out in a stroller. Not the best time for a stroll, you might say, but there were long, long lulls between the bombings and it was pretty safe for the most part. The bombings, of course, were mostly at night. You can’t keep yourself cooped up all of the time, can you? It was a pity, and perhaps ironic that Kitty’s own baby was killed in the blast that took out the Blue Last.”
“I understand she lives here with the family.”
Ian motioned with his head. “That’s right. In the gatehouse. Keeper’s Cottage we call it. You passed it in the drive. ‘Gatehouse’ seems a bit pretentious.”
“And she’s lived here ever since that time?” If Ian was curious about this interest in Kitty Riordin, he didn’t show it.
Ian nodded. “You can imagine how grateful my father was that the baby was all right. Her own baby-Kitty’s-was in the pub at the time. The wrong time. So was Alex.” Turning his cigar around and around as if it aided thought, he said, “That was a terrible loss, you know.”
“Your sister, you mean?”
He nodded. “Alex was… there was something about her…” He paused, as if searching for the right word and sighed, as if he couldn’t find it. “She was young when she married a chap in the RAF named Ralph Herrick. She was only twenty or twenty-one, I think, when Maisie was born.”
Jury changed the subject. “Was Simon Croft wealthy? He was a banker, wasn’t he?”
“Broker. There’s a difference. He was very well off. He inherited a great deal of money when his father died.”
“He himself had done well?”
“Absolutely. He was a brilliant broker. Thing is, though, the whole climate of banking and brokering changed in the eighties. Until fifteen years ago, the City was run on-you could say-gentlemanly standards. I don’t mean more honest, more scrupulous, or nicer, I mean clubbier-you know, much like a gentlemen’s club. They simply weren’t up to American and international methods of management. It was as if the City was run by Old Etonians. So when things changed, most of these people were left out in the smoke. Not Simon, though. He was one of those with a boutique sort of business and he saw it coming. He stayed independent and afterward was heavily courted by the big banks-God, why am I going on about money? He’s dead. I can’t really take it in.”
“Who will inherit this money?”
“Inherit? Oh, all of us, probably. More, of course, to Emily and Marie-France. They’re Simon’s sisters. Emily lives in Brighton in one of those ‘assisted-living’ homes. She has a bit of heart trouble, I think. Simon was married years ago but it lasted only a few years. No children, sad to say. Haven’t seen her in twenty years. I think she went off to Australia or Africa with a new husband.” He tapped ash from his cigar into the ashtray and looked up at Jury as he did it, smiling slightly. “You think one of us did it, is that it? For the swag?”
“The thought had crossed my mind. That’s the way it so often plays out. For the record, where were you in the early hours of the morning?”
“Asleep in bed. Alone, no one to vouch for me.” Ian smiled as if the notion of his shooting Simon Croft were so unlikely it hardly bore discussing.
“Mr. Croft had no enemies you know of? Any fellow brokers? Bankers? Businessmen? Anyone holding a grudge?”
Ian shook his head. “Nary a one, Superintendent, not to my knowledge. Christ…” Turning in the dining-room chair, he looked away.
“Yes?” Jury prompted him.
Ian shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. It’s still sinking in.” He put the heels of his palms against his eyes and pressed.
Jury said nothing for a few moments, and then decided on something that might not be so volatile a subject. “Apparently, Mr. Croft was writing a book. What do you know about that?”
Ian turned to face Jury, looking a little surprised. “That’s important?”
“Given that all traces of it seem to have vanished, yes, I expect it is important. His computer was taken along with the manuscript and ostensibly any notes he’d made. That’s why we’re wondering about it.”
Ian frowned, looked at the cigar turned to ash that he’d left in the ashtray. “He didn’t say much about it. Might have talked to Dad about it, though. Dad’s been keeping to his bed lately. He’s taking this very hard, Superintendent. Simon was like a son to him. Trite sounding, but it’s true. I hope you don’t have to question him today.”
“Not if you think I shouldn’t. I can come back.”
“I appreciate that; it’s so tough for him-” He knocked the worm of ash into the tray.
Marie-France Muir, Simon’s sister, sat at the head of the table in the chair Ian Tynedale had just vacated. Jury was on her right. The romance of her name was almost borne out by the melancholy air, the pale, nearly translucent complexion, the fine, forlorn gray eyes.
For Marie-France, the appearance, he was fairly sure, was the reality. That what one saw was what one got. So, looked at that way-her unmade-up face, her literal answers-it might be honesty at its most banal, but honesty nonetheless. He should at least be as direct in his questions.
“Have you any idea why this happened to your brother?”
She was silent, as if she were trying to formulate a difficult answer. “No.”
Jury waited a moment, but saw she wasn’t about to embroider on this no. “Did he have enemies or was he in financial straits? Anything like that?”
“Financial straits? I think not.” Her smile was sad and her voice sounded as if it had been scoured, raspy and uneven. “Enemies? I didn’t know all of my brother’s acquaintances, but I don’t see why he should have had. He was quite a decent person.”
“Your father used to run a pub during the war called the Blue Last-”
He surprised a real smile from her. “Oh, yes, I remember it. I remember it well. The Blue Last. Simon and I used to love playing there. Heavens-” She rested her forehead in her hand as if she might be going to weep, but she didn’t. “It’s been over fifty years.” She pushed a strand of hair back into a rather careless chignon with a slightly flushed cheek and a bashful look, as if flirting with memory. “We had so much fun back then. Simon was around ten and I was two years older and Em-Emily, my sister-must have been in her teens.” Her eyebrows drew together in puzzlement. “Actually, Emily was much nearer Alex’s age than she was mine. Yes, she must have been seventeen or eighteen when Alex died.” She went on, smiling once more, saying, “We always thought the pub a great adventure. Alexandra always loved it, too. But that was in the years before the war came and ruined it all. Yes, my father Francis had the Blue Last for-it must have been fifteen years. He didn’t, of course, need to run it, I mean, he had no financial need of it. Tynedale Brewery owned several.”
“Your father was killed in the blast, also?”
“Yes. And our mother had died two years before that. Had it not been for Oliver, we would have been-well, orphans.” She smiled slightly, as if the thought of their being orphans almost amused her. “The Blue Last. It was a lark, such a lark before the war.” Her voice seemed to unwind with these words and, like the clock on the mantel, stop. She was looking out of the window, as if on the other side of it she saw larks flighting. She looked profoundly sad.
Jury felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking she was all surface.
She went on. “I really loved that pub. It was endlessly exciting. The people, the talk, the ‘crack,’ as they say. That we owned it, that was part of it, like the scullery maid finding she owns the castle.”
The metaphor surprised Jury, both that she had drawn it and that it had been drawn at all. He smiled. “Scullery maid. Is that how you saw yourself at home?”
Her answer was oblique. “But the Blue Last was home. I mean, of course, we had another house. The one that Simon occupies-I mean, occupied-” She turned away.
Jury was silent.
Looking down at her hands, she said, “It sounds awful, but-” A flush spread upward from her neck. Again she took refuge in the light beyond the window.
He waited for more, but she remained silent, as if, done with memories of the Blue Last, there was nothing to speak of, not even her brother’s murder. It was as if the loss of the Blue Last had enervated her.
Why was this hard to understand? There was a sense of a particular place that haunted us all, wasn’t there? A place to which we ascribed the power to confer happiness. An image deeply etched in the mind that had fled and taken something of us with it. Strange we should put so much stock in childhood, a time when we were vulnerable, unprotected and at the mercy of those we hoped would have mercy. Yet that time, that childhood seemed to rise above the lurking danger and present itself as the most seductive, longed-for, unassailable thing in our lives.
“You said you got on so well then.”
“What?” Marie-France turned blank, gray eyes to him.
“You said you and your brother and sister got on so well back then.”
“We did, yes. Sometimes we got to stay all night at the pub, as there was a large flat above. Alexandra and Ian did, too. And Alexandra did after she was married. She seemed to like it even more than Tynedale Lodge. I think I was jealous of her; she was so beautiful. And then she married this dashing RAF pilot-did you ever see the film Waterloo Bridge?”
“Yes.” Jury smiled. “One of the great romances in film history.” (That’s who it was, he thought, Viven Leigh; that’s who Alexandra looked like, and the waitress in the cappuccino bar.) Jury smiled.
“Kitty used to say that’s just how they were, that Alexandra and Ralph were like Myra and Roy. Kitty-she was the au pair, or nanny, I suppose. I remember how it irritated me that Alex really did resemble Vivien Leigh with her smooth dark hair and ivory complexion and dark eyes. And the cheekbones.” She shook her head. “ ‘A silly comparison,’ I once heard Alex tell her. ‘Vivien was a prostitute and that’s why she didn’t marry Robert Taylor. And that’s why she jumped from the bridge. I don’t think I’ll have to do that,’ Alex said.”
Jury said, “Alexandra doesn’t sound like an incurable romantic.” He smiled. “She sounds more the practical type.” He drew the envelope from an inside pocket where he carried Mickey’s snapshots. He removed the one of Alexandra and Francis Croft and set it before Marie-France.
Surprised, she picked it up “Where did you ever… it’s the Blue Last. That’s my father and Alexandra. Where did you get it?”
Jury noticed she identified the pub before she did the people. “One of the CID men in the City.” He found the one of Katherine Riordin and her baby.
“It’s Kitty and Erin… wait, no, it’s Maisie.” She drew the snapshot close to her eyes. “No, it is Erin. All babies tend to look alike, don’t you think?”
Jury smiled again. “I’m sure the mothers would disagree with you. So Kitty Riordin stayed on with the Tynedales here.”
“Oliver kept her on after Alex was killed. And Erin, poor thing. God, but that was awful. Awful. Both Oliver and Kitty lost their child. I don’t know who was more heartbroken.”
“And Alexandra’s husband?”
It was as though Marie-France were trying to recollect him. “Oh, of course. Ralph was devastated.”
Had he really been, or was she simply mouthing a platitude? Ralph Herrick didn’t seem to be a person remembered for anything but his looks and the RAF. But, then, they’d been married such a little while.
Marie-France went on: “Ralph was killed in the war.” She dredged up memory. “Yes, that’s right. During the war. He’d left the RAF. Actually, he was awarded the Victoria Cross. Yes. How could I have forgotten that? He had something to do with those code breakers… Anyway, he drowned. Somewhere in Scotland.”
“You live exactly where, Mrs. Muir?”
“In Belgravia, in Chapel Street.”
“Is that where you were early this morning?”
“Mm?” She seemed distracted by the past. “Oh. Yes, of course, I’m always there mornings. I live alone.”
“No maid? Cook?”
“No, none. It’s quite a small house and I prefer not to have to be bumping into other people.”
Jury pushed back his chair and Marie-France rose as he did. “Thanks very much, Mrs. Muir. And if you could just give me your sister’s address-?”
They were standing at the door and she nodded, sadly. Must have been a beauty back then, he thought. Another one I completely misjudged. So much for police intuition.
When Maisie Tynedale entered the room elegantly suited in black, and sat down, Jury felt a sense of disquietude and thought it had been very poor judgment on his part to talk to the others first, but, then, Mickey had already planted an idea in his mind which had neither been reinforced nor dispelled by the others.
His eye traveled to the portrait and back to her, trying to limn in the features of Alexandra Tynedale on Maisie. Maisie followed his line of vision. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Disappointingly unbeautiful.” She smiled.
So did Jury. “Not at all. I was merely wondering if you looked like your mother.”
Maisie looked again at the portrait. “Her coloring, her hair, possibly her mouth, but definitely not the eyes; the eyes are what count.”
In this case it was the coloring that did it. Black hair, falling straight just below the ears; ivory skin, a heightened color on the lips and cheekbones. A person who had no reason to suspect she wasn’t Alexandra Herrick’s daughter would think straightaway Maisie was her daughter.
The thing was, though, hair and coloring could always be altered, and hers had been. The black hair was not her natural color, and rouge had been artfully applied. But even so, she could still be Alexandra’s daughter, wanting to look more like her.
“What about your father? Is there a picture of him?”
“He’s around.” Her eyes turned to the serving table and the photographs there. “My grandfather might have him. He shifts photographs around-have you spoken to him?”
Jury shook his head. “No. He’s quite ill, I understand.”
“He’ll be crippled by Simon’s death. You know, we might as well all be brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. The two families are that close. Simon might as well have been Oliver’s son. I know Ian always thought of him as a brother.”
“I’ve got the impression all of you find the friendship of Francis Croft and Oliver Tynedale rather astonishing.”
“Unusual, at least. How it could go on like that, how it could go on since they were boys. Yes, perhaps ‘astonishing’ is the right word.”
“Your relationship with-” Jury consulted his notebook as if searching for the name which he perfectly well knew “-Katherine Riordin goes back a long way, too.”
“Kitty. Yes, I suppose you know about that night the Blue Last was bombed.”
Jury nodded.
“Well, Kitty just stayed on.”
And stayed. But, then, a lot of old nannies, family retainers, stayed on with their employers for a long time. And never having met the woman, Jury decided to drop that particular line of inquiry.
But Maisie continued. “Granddad gave her the cottage so she would feel more independent-”
“Which she isn’t; she’s completely dependent upon your family.”
Maisie grew somewhat defensive. “That sounds a little hostile.”
Jury raised his eyebrows. “I don’t mean it to. I’m stating facts, at least, as I know them. The source of Mrs. Riordin’s income could be important.”
“What are you hinting-?”
“Noth-”
“-that she murdered Simon for an inheritance?”
“That hadn’t crossed my mind. Why would Simon Croft leave money to your old nursemaid?”
Angry, she started to rise.
“No-” Jury put out his hand. “Please stay seated. I have more questions.”
Reluctantly and with mouth compressed, she sat back, arms folded in a somewhat combative stance. He noticed the deformity of the hand, then, a skewing of the index and middle fingers, a dislocation of the thumb. He recalled the snapshot of the baby Maisie, her tiny hand on her mother’s neck.
“You appear to be protective of Katherine Riordin.”
“She saved my life; yes, I suppose I am.”
Jury doodled on a fresh page of his small notebook. Doodles were the only thing in the notebook aside from a few telephone numbers and addresses. Wiggins saw to notes; he was the most thorough note taker around. Jury himself was afraid of impeding, muffling, the flow of speech. He didn’t like tapes either.
“Why is it,” he asked, eyes on his notebook, “everyone I’ve talked to makes it sound as if Mrs. Riordin rushed into that bombed building and pulled you out? Coincidence saved your life, not Katherine Riordin. She happened to have taken you out in a pram. That hardly makes her a heroine. It was also coincidence-of the worst kind, I imagine, to her-that she had taken you and not her own child.”
Maisie sat back, looking stunned, almost despairing that someone would not see Kitty Riordin as a heroine. Why, he wondered, was this so important to her? He could understand it if Maisie was really Erin Riordin and Kitty was indeed Erin’s real mother. Or could it be that the story of that night of the Blue Last’s destruction had taken on mythic proportions of salvation, self-sacrifice and heroism? Maisie caught up in that period of her life, the baby who had lost mother and father and could have lost her own life without Kitty Riordin’s intervention. Jury wondered if Oliver Tynedale was caught up in the same myth.
“Where were you between midnight and eight A.M.?”
“Across the river shooting Simon, perhaps?”
He smiled. “We have to ask everyone that question.”
“We’re all suspects? I’m a suspect? What on earth would be my reason? I don’t stand to gain by his death. I’ve got enough right now for a dozen people.”
Jury closed up his notebook and pocketed it. “I doubt the motive had to do with money. I expect everyone here has enough for a dozen people.”
“Then why? Why did someone shoot Simon?”
Jury just looked at her and repeated it: “Where were you early this morning?”
He wanted, after all of this sitting-still talk, to move about and told the butler, Barkins, that he was going to have a walk in the garden and that that was where he was to be found in case Detective Chief Inspector Haggerty called.
It was early afternoon. He left the dining room through a set of French doors to a terrace and a walk that stretched along the side of the house, the house being much deeper than it looked from the front. The walk was flanked on its outer side by a series of columns. It was, actually, a covered colonnade, along the length of which these white pillars caught the mellow light of the sun. Jury had never been of the peripatetic school; he was very poor at thinking while he walked; what he was good at was smoking and he was dying for a cigarette. A year and nine months and two weeks-Good lord, and you’re still dying for a smoke.
Across the grass at a distance of some twenty feet stood a line of cypresses along a garden path inside the high stone wall. This tree-lined path ran parallel to the white columns, and between them was the statue of a child reaching her hand down to a duck. He heard voices and saw, between the pillars and the trees, somebody walking there, as he was doing. No, just the one voice was what he heard. He could not make out the words. The cypress trees, themselves like gray columns, were set in counterpoint to these white pillars, so that they appeared, as he walked, in the space between the pillars. Thus between cypresses and pillars, he caught the barest glimpse of the person he had determined was a little girl.
Perhaps it was talk of Waterloo Bridge that caused Jury to keep walking and looking over at the child between the line of trees, enjoying the cinematic effect of all this. It was as if he were watching a shuttle weaving a tapestry, a picture of a garden. All of its discrete elements-the white columns, the cypresses, the girl, the statue, himself-coming together, locking into one another to form this picture. Jury liked this; it was something like the feeling he got when a solution to what had seemed an impenetrable mystery finally locked into place.
He had come to the end of the covered walk marked by two wide, shallow steps, going down to a pool or pond, in the center of which a maiden was pouring water from a jug. When he saw the little girl (why had no one mentioned her? A grandchild? A great-grandchild?) emerge from the line of trees, Jury crouched down and pretended to be tying his shoelace. He did not want her intimidated by six feet two of police. His head was down, examining this shoe as if it were as fascinating as the tapestry he had just woven in his mind.
She stopped and was watching.
Raising his head and, in a taken-by-surprise tone, he called to her, “Oh, hullo. I’m just trying to get this lace-do yours ever break?”
In response, she took a few steps closer and raised her shoe, which was a buckled sandal, and shook her head. Her sandals were not winterproof, but she did wear white socks with them. The rest of her was covered in a sprigged muslin dress (too long) and a heavy green coat-sweater the color of her eyes.
Pretending finally to have fixed the lace, he said, “You’re smart to wear shoes without laces.” He saw now that what she had been talking to all along in her walk was a doll, oddly clothed in a lace-fringed bonnet and a dress also too long, which flowed over the doll’s feet. When she stepped even closer (though not within handshaking distance) he took in her burnished black hair, pearlescent skin, dark green eyes. He did not know if Vivien Leigh had green eyes. If she didn’t, poor Vivien.
“This garden is lovely, even in winter. I imagine you spend a lot of time here.”
She nodded. Solemn and beautiful. Who did she belong to? With her black hair and translucent skin, of course she resembled Alexandra Tynedale. “My name’s Richard Jury, incidentally.” There was no name response from her. He said, “Your doll is all covered up. Is she cold?”
The little girl shook her head. “She always wears this; it’s her baptismal clothes. I saw one once.” Her look at Jury was slightly challenging as if he might contest the kind of clothes worn to a baptism.
He assumed she meant she’d seen a baptism. “I never have.”
This was a comfort as now he couldn’t dispute the details she offered. “They pour water on your head. It’s like they do in beauty shops except in baptisms they don’t have soap and you don’t wash your hair. It just gets rinsed.”
This was a place of metaphor, certainly. Jury smiled. “So is your doll baptized, then?”
“Not until I find a name. I’ve been looking for a long time. I’m all the way to the Rs right now. I just can’t decide. I’m thinking about Rebecca.” She glanced at him to see if he was thinking about that, too.
Jury said, “Could we sit down over there?” He motioned to a white bench enclosed on two sides by vine-covered lattice.
“Okay.”
They settled on the bench-the three of them, the doll sitting between-and Jury said, “Are you sure your doll is a girl?”
Gemma looked at him wide-eyed. “What?” It had been wearing this dress when she found it. No matter what she told others, she believed the dress meant it was a girl.
Jury shrugged. “I was just wondering why you’re having a hard time finding a girl’s name. Maybe it’s really a boy and doesn’t want to walk around with a girl’s name. I wouldn’t either.”
She had often wondered on this subject, but never knew whom to ask. Turning away a little, she lifted the doll’s christening dress and looked. Then she turned it so Jury could see. But said nothing.
Jury said, “Oh, you’re in luck. It could be either a boy or girl, you have your choice. Not many people do. You’ve got the evidence right there in case anyone disputes it.”
Gemma thought this wondrous.
“Speaking of names, you haven’t told me yours.”
“Gemma Trimm.”
“You live here, Gemma?”
“I’m Mr. Tynedale’s ward. A ward is different from being adopted. I’m not related to anybody; I’m kind of left over. Mr. Tynedale’s sick, and he likes me to read to him. I do that every day, nearly. I read The Old Curiosity Shop and I’m a lot like Little Nell, he says. But I don’t think so. She’s kind of sappy.”
“You’re young to be reading complicated books like that. Even adults sometimes find it hard to read Charles Dickens.”
“I’m nine.” She seemed pleased with herself, being able to read what adults couldn’t. “I skip the hard parts, but it doesn’t hurt because he wrote so many pages about everything.”
“He did, that’s true.” After a few moments’ contemplation of Gemma and Dickens, Jury said, “I’m here because of Simon Croft. Did you hear what happened to him?”
“Yes. He’s dead. He got shot.” She pulled the bonnet down over the doll’s head, hiding the eyes. “What did he do? It must’ve been bad to make somebody shoot him.”
“We don’t know yet. I’m a detective, incidentally, and I intend to find out.”
Her look was one of utter astonishment. “You are? Did Benny send you?”
“Benny? No, he didn’t. Is he a friend?”
“My best one. He argues a lot, though. If you’re a detective, you should work out who’s trying to kill me.”
“Kill you? Why do you think that?”
“Because they already tried a bunch of times. Once was in the greenhouse.” She pointed to it. “They tried to shoot me when I was thinking about planting something in a pot. Mr. Murphy takes care of the garden.
Next time when I was asleep in my room somebody tried to choke me and smother me. Next time it was trying to poison me and Mrs. MacLeish nearly quit because she was afraid they blamed her cooking.”
Jury did not shock easily. But this compendium of crime, delivered by such a small person, in such a matter-of-fact tone, shocked him, although he doubted it had all happened. He could appreciate the melodrama in all of this. Take a child with apparently no family and put her down in the midst of one who wasn’t hers and perhaps indifferent (except for the elderly Oliver), and it would not be surprising that she might concoct this story of these attempts on her life. Still… “Tell me more about these incidents, Gemma. I mean, give me more details.”
“I was in the greenhouse, like I said. I was looking at the cuttings Mr. Murphy had in there. I was wondering when he’d plant the snowdrop bulbs. Those over there.” She pointed at the drift of snowdrops he’d noticed before, white petals with a green spot positioned with such regularity in each petal they looked painted. “They’re called Tryms. Like my name, only it’s spelled different. They’re very unusual. I planted one in a pot and looked around for the Day-Gro. I was holding my doll in my other hand, that’s when I heard the glass shatter and felt something whiz by me. I thought maybe somebody threw a rock. That’s that time.
“The second time I was in bed asleep so I can’t tell you more than I did. Something woke me up; I guess it was because I couldn’t breathe. I yanked open a window and stuck my head out. They got a doctor and they called the police again. I saw a film with a murderer in it who used to put pillows over his victims’ faces.” Gemma stopped to move her doll to a sitting position and then went on for a fascinated Jury.
“The third time I was eating spotted Dick that Mrs. MacLeish made with custard sauce. I got really sick and the doctor had to come again and said I was lucky I threw up and got rid of it. I said it was poisoned, but he didn’t think it was. That’s all.” She sat back and picked up the doll again.
Jury was winded, as if he’d been doing all the talking. “That must have been terribly frightening.”
Her silence as she looked at him suggested any fool could see that.
“The police came, did they?”
She nodded energetically.
“And did they find any bullet casings?”
“I guess that’s what you call it. It was outside on the ground. Or maybe stuck in a tree.”
“Are you sure the shooter was aiming at you, though?”
“You mean maybe they were trying to shoot the Trym bulbs?” This was said with more acidity than a nine-year-old could usually muster.
“No. I mean, what about the gardener?”
“He wasn’t there. Anyway, why would anybody want to kill him?”
“Why would anybody want to kill you?”
“I just don’t know, Mickey,” Jury said. “I certainly think it’s possible.”
They were in Mickey’s office and Mickey wanted to get out of it. He was up and pulling on his coat. “Pub?”
“Liberty Bounds?”
“Nah. Too far. Let’s walk, then, find a coffee.”
Jury said, “I know the perfect place. I’ve got kind of a crush on a waitress there.” It would give him more material to irritate Carole-anne with, too.
Mickey smiled. “Okay, we’re out of here.”
The cappuccino-bar-restaurant was barely three blocks from headquarters. There were more customers this morning than there had been at the weekend, but the place was large and still two-thirds empty.
The pretty waitress had taken their order, lattè for Jury, house coffee and a fruit Danish for Mickey; she had been sincerely glad to see Jury again, almost as if she’d worried about his getting safely home on Saturday.
Mickey watched her walk away and smiled. “You’ve got good taste, Richie; if I weren’t a happily married man-” He held his hands out, palm upward. Then he said, “When I felt better yesterday afternoon I sent Johnny and a uniform over to pick up Kitty Riordin. Just for some friendly questioning. I didn’t want to go to Tynedale Lodge; I thought the two of us might be too much ‘police presence,’ if you know what I mean.”
“You’ve talked to her before, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. Anyway, she didn’t overdo it as far as Simon Croft was concerned. She found it ‘regrettable.’ She’d known him for a long time, ever since he was a kid, but at the same time felt she didn’t really know him. ‘He was never terribly outgoing. He had his secrets.’ ”
Jury told Mickey what he’d learned yesterday from his talk with family members. “Marie-France Muir and her memories of the Blue Last-she seems to feel it was home. She loved the place. I got the feeling she thought of that pub as a living, breathing organism. But I suppose you can never attach too much importance to a place. It filled you up when you had it, left you empty when it was gone. We’re all orphans when it comes to that.” He thought of Gemma. Left over.
“We’re all orphans anyway. You are, I am, so’s Liza.” Mickey mused. “I was lucky when it came to foster parents. It’s hard to remember they weren’t my own flesh and blood. Liza was lucky, too.” He looked at Jury. “You weren’t.” He sighed. “Had a good time, though, the three of us, didn’t we?”
“We did indeed.” Jury had forgotten that-that all of them were orphans. He wondered if that was one thing they had in common.
Mickey raised his coffee cup, half in salute and half to summon the waitress.
“Did anyone mention Gemma Trimm?”
“I don’t remember anyone named Trimm,” said Mickey, puzzled.
“I guess that’s the point, Mickey. No one said a word about her. She’s old Oliver Tynedale’s ward. She’s nine. I found her walking in the garden.” Jury told Mickey Gemma’s story.
“She was making it up, I hope.”
“Not all of it, anyway. Police found a bullet casing after it had gone through the greenhouse.”
“Thanks,” Mickey said to the waitress who refilled his cup and set down his pastry. She asked Jury if he’d like another lattè.
“Just pour me some of that, thanks.”
She did, and smiled at him, and walked away.
“I’d say she’s the one that’s got the crush,” Mickey said, absently. He leaned across the table, over his folded arms. “We can’t clutter this case up with threats that don’t exist, Rich.”
“Every case is cluttered until you sort it. And stuff like this girl has to be sorted. You’re much too meticulous a cop to ignore Gemma’s story.”
Mickey took a bite of the pastry and said, around a mouthful of crumbs, “Okay, okay. I guess I’m just in a hurry. What could the motive be for killing this little girl? Who is she? She’s a ward, which keeps the Social at just beyond breathing distance. What’s her history?”
“I don’t know because I haven’t talked to Oliver Tynedale. I expect he might be the only one who does.”
Mickey frowned over his cup. “You don’t think she’s actually related to Oliver Tynedale, do you?”
“I thought about that. She could be. Her resemblance to Alexandra Tynedale is marked.”
“But not to Maisie. It couldn’t be.”
Jury laughed. “You’re pretty certain of that. But I tend to agree. There’s something about Maisie-”
“Hell, yeah, there’s something about her. Like not being Alexandra and Ralph Herrick’s daughter. That’s something.”
“Odd, how she’s got the black hair, the dark eyes… and yet. She doesn’t look like Vivien Leigh. Gemma does, in miniature.”
“Like Liza.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember you used to tell her that. People think she looks like Vivien Leigh or else Claire Bloom.”
Jury frowned. “Vivien Leigh and Claire Bloom don’t look anything alike. Our waitress looks like Vivien Leigh, in case you didn’t notice.”
Mickey turned around and looked at her. From across the room, she smiled at him. Or them. “She looks like Claire Bloom.”
“Hell, she does.”
This bickering went on.
Finally, Mickey asked, “When will you talk to dear old nanny Kitty? A.k.a. Maisie’s real mother?”
“Today. You talked to her. How did she strike you?”
“As the mother of an impostor.”
“That was your objective assessment, was it?”
Mickey’s hand squeezed Jury’s shoulder. “That’s what you’re here for-objectivity.” He removed his hand and shrugged. “You’ll see.”
A laugh caught in Jury’s throat. “I’ll see? You mean I’ll agree that Maisie is really Erin Riordin and that Kitty Riordin is her mother? Mickey, all you’ve got to go on are those old snapshots-”
“And instinct. You said yourself my instincts are good.”
“I did? I’ll bet the instinct here is just a by-product of those pictures. Mickey, what if I don’t agree with you? What if I find out Maisie Tynedale really is who she says she is?”
“Then I’ll drop it.”
Jury flinched, surprised. It was true he wanted Mickey to be open to this possibility, but he wasn’t sure he wanted Mickey to put so much faith in his, Jury’s, ability.
“Look, Rich, you’re the best cop I know. You’re certainly the best with witnesses. Look at how much you got out of these people that I didn’t. I didn’t know this little Gemma Trimm even existed, for Christ’s sake.”
“I only found her by chance, by luck. I was outside, walking.”
“Still…” Mickey sighed.
“How is Liza?” She was Mickey’s wife when Jury met her. Liza had been with the Met herself, detective sergeant, and a very good one. She’d gotten pregnant and given up the Job.
“Wonderful. Liza knows what it is, what it’s like. She knows. It’s almost like she can read my mind; her intuition is almost magical. She knows what this is like, too.” Mickey fisted his hand and made light hammering blows against his chest. “And she doesn’t go on about my smoking. People do, my mates do, as if stopping the fags would save my life. They’ve given me a new painkiller which is an improvement on the other.”
Jury would have thought the doctors at least could eliminate pain, if nothing else. “Do you get a lot of pain?”
“Some.” Mickey swirled the dregs of his coffee.
Some, of course, meant a lot. As if, as if.
“Nothing’s gonna stop this. It’s everywhere now, in blood and bone.”
“I’m sorry, Mickey. I really am.” Jury felt it, too. What a loss it was going to be. What on earth would Liza and the children do without him? “How are the kids with all this?”
“They’re great. I’m proud of them, too.”
One of Mickey’s children was grown and married and gone to another country. Then there were the twins, a boy and a girl who’d lived after a car crash had killed both their parents, Mickey and Liza’s daughter and son-in-law. That had happened two years ago. Jury supposed the twins were no more than six or seven now. In addition, there were two others, one in her late teens, a boy readying himself for university. Mickey had too many responsibilities.
“Peter is going to Oxford next year. I’m really happy about that.”
Although you couldn’t easily tell it, Mickey had read literature there. He loved poetry, was always pulling out a line here and there.
“Beth, she’s already talking about London University. Clara and Toby-the twins-are in public school.” He moved his gaze from whatever lay outside the window to Jury. “Liza will probably go back to the Met; well, she’ll have to do something because my bloody pension sure won’t do it. Not as far as Oxford goes, that’s certain. I don’t like being forced to think about all this, know what I mean? Of course, I’d think about it anyway, but in the abstract, kind of. I’d think but I wouldn’t have to feel everything ending.” He pushed his cup away. “I really need a drink.” He barked out a laugh. “Well, at least I can stop worrying about whether I have a drinking problem. ‘Drinking problem.’ I love that euphemism. That last round I did with the chemo they thought might have stopped it. I went into remission for a while. I thought I might even have it licked. I didn’t.
“There’s a chilling side effect to this cancer. People don’t want to be around it; they feel they should do something but don’t know what the something is. They steer clear; they cross the street, metaphorically, and maybe even literally. It amazes me that my mates, my colleagues, who’ve seen every form of violent death, who walk with it every day-they can’t take this.”
“Because it’s a lot closer to home, Mickey. Because they’re your mates, your friends.”
Mickey looked at him, smiling. “You’re my friend, too, Rich, but you’re here. I love this fragment:
The world and his mother go reeling and jiggling forever
In answer to something that troubles the blood and the bone.
Written on the wall of an Irish pub, that was. The three of us should’ve been there together.”
The expression in Mickey’s eyes when he said this was so utterly confident of Jury’s friendship, Jury knew he would do whatever it took to help him.
Keeper’s Cottage was small but comfortable. Jury was standing in the living room beyond which he saw a kitchen; upstairs (he guessed) would be one large bedroom and a bath, not en suite.
Kitty Riordin invited him to sit down and offered to get him tea. He thanked her but declined.
A table at Jury’s elbow held several silver-framed pictures, together with a few pieces of milky blue glass. The pictures were of the Tynedale family, the largest of Maisie herself.
“You’re here about Simon Croft.” It wasn’t a question. Her expression went from soft to sober. “I was… I couldn’t quite take it in.” Her hand clenched and pressed against her breast in a gesture that was very much like Mickey’s had been. As if she were in mourning, she was dressed in black; around the collar of the dress was a bit of ocher ruffle, which softened the effect. The dress was old-fashioned, as was she herself, a cameo of a person.
She said, “It’s unbelievable that anyone could have murdered him.”
“Then you know of no one he’d had a falling out with?”
With an impatient gesture, she waved this away. “I’ve been with the family for over fifty years, Superintendent. Of course, I don’t know everything about their private lives-well, obviously I don’t.”
“How often did you see Simon Croft?”
“Not often. When he came here, sometimes.”
“And did he come regularly?”
“Hm. He’s very fond of Oliver Tynedale.”
“Who would inherit Mr. Croft’s money?”
Almost before the words were out, she laughed. “Oh, good lord, Superintendent. I hope you’re not looking for the murderer there?”
Jury smiled. “I often do. Nothing speaks louder than money, certainly not conscience.”
“In this case, you’d be wasting your time. Everyone in the family has money.”
“What about Maisie?”
Somehow she hadn’t expected this, Jury thought. She flinched. “Maisie has money from her mother. She inherited also from Francis Croft.”
“Does it work that way with these two families? The Tynedales and the Crofts bequeath money not only to the immediate family, but to the other family, too?”
“Yes. After all, they don’t think of themselves as ‘other.’ ”
“Then Simon Croft would have left Maisie and Ian money?”
Exasperated with his seeming obtuseness, she shook her head. “Francis Croft left Alexandra a small fortune, which of course went to Maisie upon her mother’s death. He was as fond of Alexandra as her own father was. I expect my point is, again, that if Simon Croft were murdered for money, it wouldn’t be a member of the family who did it.”
“But upon the death of Oliver Tynedale, Maisie will be a wealthy woman-”
“She’s already a wealthy woman, Superintendent. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Ah, yes. So you indicated. What about you, Mrs. Riordin?”
Kitty Riordin cocked her head. “Did I murder him, do you mean?”
Jury shrugged. “Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. Would Simon Croft have left you any money?”
“I seriously doubt it. But I expect we’ll know one way or the other when his will is read and you can come and arrest me.”
Jury smiled. “Bargain. Actually, what I really meant was, how about your own history? Your husband?”
“My husband, Aiden, was a very silly man. He walked out on me- us-so that he could cavort with the Blackshirts. Oswald Mosley’s followers. How utterly absurd.”
“A lot of people don’t think so. If Hitler had indeed invaded Britain, he would have wanted someone here in place. Who better as a puppet dictator than Mosley?”
“Perhaps you’re right. Anyway, I came over to look for Aiden, found him, took what little money he had with an absolutely clean conscience and never heard from him again.”
“You don’t like foolish people, do you?”
“Do you?”
Jury laughed. “I expect not. I think I’m just trying to make a point about you, Mrs. Riordin. You’re a very competent person. When you came back with Maisie after the bombing and found the Blue Last was smoking rubble, did you search for them? Erin and Alexandra. And Francis Croft?” Jury sat forward, closer to her.
“Of course I did, as well as I could, as well as they’d let me. But the wardens kept me back. I went back, though; I went back.”
Jury regarded her, her look of determination. Then his eyes shifted to the photographs on the small table, to a small one of, he presumed, the baby Erin and Kitty. Then to a larger one of Alexandra and baby Maisie. How beautiful Alexandra was! But also, how pretty Kitty Riordin had been. He was surprised that another man hadn’t snapped her up. But it was wartime and a lot of things that should otherwise have happened, didn’t. Over the corner of Maisie’s silver frame, a little silver bracelet dangled. Jury picked it up.
“Identity bracelets,” said Kitty, smiling. “A bit of a lark, that was. The two were scarcely a week or two apart in age-of course you can’t see that in the photographs. Alexandra had the bracelets made up. The other one’s upstairs.” She picked up the small photograph of Erin, wiped the glass with her sleeve, smiled down at it, returned it to the table.
Jury found the smile extremely disconcerting. Someone kinder than he might have simply described what prompted it as “bittersweet.” What he had trouble with was that she could have smiled at all. She then picked up the one of Maisie and Alexandra, moving the bracelet to the table. “She was beautiful, so. Maisie looks like her, don’t you think?”
It wasn’t really a question put to Jury. He said nothing. But, yes, Alexandra was beautiful. No one would deny that. Jury wondered.
“She was bowled over by that flier of hers-handsome and a hero. Poor boy. They’d only been married a little over a year when he died.”
“How did he die?” Jury knew one answer to this. He wondered if it would be confirmed.
“Drowned, I think. He’d been out of the RAF for a bit. Got the Victoria Cross. He was somewhere in Scotland, I don’t know why.”
“Did you know him?”
“I met him. It was just that one time when he was at the Lodge.”
“Did you go back and forth with Alexandra? It sounds as if she lived in both places.”
“She did, so. I would sometimes go with her to the pub. Of course, I had my own place here. Mr. Tynedale is that generous.” She shook her head as if in awe of such generosity. She picked up the small photograph of Erin. “Both our daughters were sweet as lambs.”
But only one, thought Jury, was filthy rich.
Marshall Trueblood gave the saintly figure depicted in the painting an affectionate pat. The painting was propped on the fourth chair at the table in the window embrasure of the Jack and Hammer, the other two chairs taken up by Melrose Plant and Diane Demorney. The pub and all of Long Piddleton were in the festive mood occasioned by this pre-Christmas week. Up and down the High Street, shops and houses were festooned with wreaths and ribbons. Outside Jurvis the Butcher’s, the plaster pig wore a red stocking cap and a spray of holly. The mechanical Jack above the pub wore a tunic of red velvet and little bells around the wrist holding the hammer that made simulated strikes at the big clock. A scraggly pine sat beside the fireplace; winking white lights dripped from its branches.
“You came across it where?” asked Melrose.
“That antique shop, Jasperson’s, in Swinton Barrow. You know, the town that’s awash in antiques and art.”
Diane Demorney ran her lacquered nail around her martini glass and looked at Trueblood as if he’d just spilled the last gin in the bottle-in other words, with horrified disbelief. “Marshall, you’re telling us that you paid two thousand for this painting and it’s only part of a-what’d you call it?”
“A polyptych.”
“It’s from some church in Pizza, did you say?”
“Pisa,” said Melrose, who had rested his chin on his fists and was studying the red-cloaked figure in the painting. The panel was quite high, but also quite narrow, giving credence to the belief that there might originally have been another figure beside this one, which is what the dealer had told Trueblood, apparently. “This is St. Who?”
Trueblood pursed his lips and gave the picture a squint-eyed look, as if such facial exertion were needed to pin down St. Who’s identity. “Julian. Or Nicholas? Jerome? Perhaps St. John the Baptist. Nicholas, I think. Nicholas is one of the missing pieces. Or panels, I should say.”
“Marshall,” said Melrose, patiently, “just what are the chances that this panel was actually painted by Masaccio? One million to one, maybe? And if it is, no one in his right mind would be selling it for two thousand quid.”
“I like the red cloak,” said Diane. “I saw one just like it in Sloane Street. Givenchy, I think. But I still don’t understand. You’re telling us that this piece is only part of a poly something. Why would you bother with only part of it? It’s like buying the Mona Lisa’s ear, or something.”
“It isn’t at all. Triptychs and polyptychs were common back then. We’re talking about the Italian Renaissance, remember-”
Diane looked as if she’d as soon be talking about how many hamsters would fit in a vodka bottle.
“-They served as altarpieces, which the Pisa one undoubtedly is. Sometimes they were taken apart for one reason or another and carted about and the various parts went missing,” he explained, rather lamely. “Well, it was a lot of information to process, see. I have to study up on Masaccio.”
“If you had all the panels or whatever they are, it would make a nice fire screen, wouldn’t it?” said Diane as she signaled Dick Scroggs for another martini.
“How does this dealer know parts are missing if he’s never seen the entire polyptych?”
“Vasari says so.”
“Who?” asked Diane.
“Vasari, Vasari. He chronicled fifteenth-century painters and sculptors.”
Diane screwed a fresh cigarette into her ebony holder, saying, “So you spend two thousand on part of a painting, on the say-so of some Italian we don’t even know? Two thousand would buy a perfectly serviceable Lacroix.” She tapped the front of her black suit jacket to indicate one of these perfectly serviceable Lacroix.
“Life is not all Lacroix, Lacroix, Lacroix, Diane.”
“No, part of it’s Armani, Armani, Armani.” Here she reached over and tapped Trueblood’s silk wool jacket. “What d’you think, Melrose? Have you ever heard of any of these people and their paintings?”
“Mm… I’ve heard of Vasari and Masaccio. I don’t know much about Italian Renaissance art, to tell the truth.” He leaned back against the window. He had the window seat today, so sat on cushions. They took turns with this seat as it was quite comfortable and you could see people coming along the street whom you wanted to avoid, such as his aunt, Lady Ardry. “What I can’t work out is, if this is really a Masaccio, why would this Swinton gallery be selling it? You’d think they’d be shopping it about to the Tate or the National Gallery. It would be a museum piece.”
Diane blew out a ribbon of smoke. “Aren’t there tests they do on paintings that tell if the paint and so forth were actually in use at the time-what century did you say this was?”
“The 1420s, to be exact.”
Melrose said, “I assume the owner of the gallery would have done that, surely.”
“He did. But there are more sophisticated tests yet, she said-”
“Who’s ‘she’?”
“A woman named Eccleston. She manages the place when Jasperson’s not there. She’s very knowledgeable.”
Melrose frowned. “Jasperson. I think I dealt with him once. Seemed honest enough. But then the man’s been in business a long time. He wouldn’t be hawking forgeries.” Melrose had been holding the painting up. “Tell Jury to get the fraud squad on it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no fraud here; the gallery isn’t guaranteeing it’s a Masaccio. If it was I think I’d assume it was a fake.”
“Can you show it to somebody else? I mean some expert on that period?”
“Of course. There’s one in London, and we can go there tomorrow.”
Melrose raised an eyebrow. “ ‘We?’ ”
“You and I.”
“What makes you think I’m going to London?”
“Oh, come on, Melrose. You’ll want to go to London before we go to Florence.”
“Florence?” Both eyebrows shot up.
Benny Keegan was sweeping out the Moonraker Bookshop as a favor he sometimes did for Miss Penforwarden when the arthritis which had started to deform her hands made them painfully stiff.
Benny was whistling when the bell rang and a tall man, a stranger, entered. He had to stoop to clear the lintel. He smiled at Benny, a really nice, friendly smile that had not seemed pulled out and put on just because Benny was a kid. Benny returned the smile and opened his mouth to say he’d go fetch Miss Penforwarden, when the tall man asked him if he was Benny Keegan.
Benny frowned. Why would anyone want him, Benny? Mother o’ God, the Social! He turned around and called to the back room, “Hey, Ben, some one t’ see ya.”
Also interested in the stranger, the dog Sparky left its cushioned bench in a window and hurried over to stand by Benny. Then Benny turned back, hoping he was giving the impression of not caring tuppence for this man’s presence. He said, “ ’Course, he coulda gone down the shops.” He took a duster from his hip pocket and applied it to Miss Penforwarden’s desk. A stack of books sat there, the topmost being Interpretation of Dreams, which Benny didn’t think he’d like, but maybe Gemma would.
“Okay,” said the man, “suppose we start with your name, then.”
“Me? Well-” a glance at the books “-it’s, ah, Sigmund-Sid, for short.” Another glance at the books “-Austen.”
“Sid Austen. It’s nice to meet you. Tell me, the dog-is he yours or Benny’s?”
Sparky was looking from the man to his master as if seeking some lesson in what they were saying. Sparky gave one of his barely discernible barks.
“Oh, him. He’s just the shop dog. Always have ’em in bookshops, them or cats, if you never noticed.”
The voice of Miss Penforwarden preceded her into the main room. “Benny, would you just-oh!”
Benny shut his eyes. Cover blown, fuck it. He went to help her with the stack of books she was carrying.
“Thank you, dear.” Then she said to the tall man, “May I help you?”
“No, thanks. I was just speaking to young Sid, here.”
Miss Penforwarden looked confused. “Benny?”
Jury held out his warrant card. “I’m Richard Jury. Detective superintendent, New Scotland Yard.”
“Here, let me see that, then,” said Benny, trying to cover up his embarrassment. “I didn’t know you was-were-a copper, ah, policeman. Should ’ave showed me this.” He handed it back to Jury.
Jury had known this was Benny; he’d been described-so had the dog-by the owners of Delphinium, the flower shop. The two young men, gay as a couple of maypoles and just as thin, one in a pale yellow shirt and the other in pale pink reminded Jury of calla lilies.
“Benny? Why on earth…” The one named Tommy Peake had pressed his long fingers against his mouth, like the image on the old war poster en-joining everyone to avoid any talk of troop activities.
Basil Rice (in the yellow shirt) had said, “Why, Benny’ll be at Smith’s, won’t he?”
“No. Benny goes to the Moonraker about this time. That’s a bookshop just along the street,” he said to Jury.
“I take it the Keegan boy does a lot of odd jobs?”
Basil nodded. “And very good he is at them. Everyone says so.”
“Where does he live?” asked Jury.
This question seemed to bring Basil and Tommy up short. Tommy said, “Now you mention it, why, I don’t think we’ve ever known, have we?”
Basil shook his head, frowning, as if they should have known.
“The newsagent didn’t know either. No one seems to know where he lives or what his phone number is, if he has one.”
“No, Benny’s not on the phone. Look, I do hope our Benny isn’t in trouble.”
Jury shook his head. “No. Thanks.” He turned toward the door.
Happily, Tommy said, “Just you remember, Benny’s clever. He’s shifty.”
“I’m shiftier. Good day, gentlemen.”
When Benny asked to see Jury’s ID again, Miss Penforwarden said, “Benny, he’s a Scotland Yard superintendent.”
“You can’t be too careful, Miss Penforwarden, not these days. The thing is, why would a detective want to talk to me?” His eyes widened, not with awe, but anxiety. They’ve found out, that’s what. They found our place, mine and Sparky’s. Benny looked down at Sparky, who was looking up at him as if absorbing this bad news and wanting to show support. He banged his tail on the floor several times.
“Maybe we could talk somewhere, Benny.”
Miss Penforwarden, eyes fixed on Jury as if he were a rock star, made no move to leave.
Looking for means of controlling this situation, Benny said to her, “I think maybe he needs to talk to me in private, Miss Penforwarden.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, I’m so sorry. Yes, well, you go right ahead. I’ll just pop back to my room and if you need anything… perhaps, Superintendent, you’d care for tea?”
Jury said, “That’s kind of you, but I’ve had my quota.”
“Then I’ll just go along to wrap some books.” She left.
“There’s a couple chairs right back here.” Benny led Jury to the armchair by the window and pulled up a straight-back chair for himself. “It’s okay that Sparky’s here, I guess?”
Soberly, Jury nodded. “He looks as if he can be trusted.”
“Hear that, Sparky?”
Sparky made no sound; he was concentrating on Jury.
Jury said, “I’ve talked to several people you work for-the florists, the newsagent-I mean, in trying to find you. They all know your schedule, so you must be very dependable.”
“I am. It’s what you gotta be, right? I mean I guess you’re dependable or you’d never catch anybody.”
Jury could tell Benny was pleased and trying not to look it. When he, Jury, was this age, he remembered how important it was to appear cool and detached. When you were on your own, you needed to seem in control, otherwise things could start coming apart fast. The glue that held them together could too easily dissolve. And Jury was pretty certain this boy was on his own and didn’t want people knowing it. He thus skirted the issue of where Benny lived. Jury felt a moment of melancholy. He remembered what being alone was like. He had never had the courage to strike out on his own, at least not until he was older-sixteen, maybe. But there hadn’t been much choice, had there? The only relation remaining then was his cousin, the one who lived up in Newcastle now. She had grudgingly offered to have him come live with her when he was young, and he had refused, with thanks that he felt she never deserved.
What lay beneath this calm exterior was desolation. It was an emotion no kid should have to feel-not Benny, not Gemma, not himself back then. Yet he wondered if it wasn’t the legacy of childhood. At some point in the game, you would come to it, no matter how you were raised, no matter if you had a big family around you, desolation was inevitable, it ran beneath everything, the always-available unbearably adult emotion that clung to one’s still-breathing body like drowned clothes.
A curtain shifted, spinning light across the windowpane and the faded blue of the rolled arms of the easy chair where Benny sat, his light blue eyes fixing Jury with unchildlike patience.
“Benny, you make deliveries for Miss Penforwarden sometimes to Tynedale Lodge?”
“That’s right-hey, wait a tic. That’s why you’re here! It’s about that Mr. Croft that got murdered!” How stupid he’d been, thought Benny, thinking this police superintendent came about him. “He was shot to death over in his house on the Thames. I saw it a few times, me and Sparky delivered some books to him. And Sparky likes to have a look round there at night…” Benny stopped, looked off.
“He does? But then you must live near the river, right?”
“Oh, not too far, I guess. Sparky, he just likes a bit of a wander nights.”
Sparky looked from one to the other, seeming ready to contravene any unfavorable account.
Jury didn’t push for the address. Benny didn’t want to give it out, clearly.
“Had you been to Simon Croft’s lately? Within, say, the last month or two?”
Benny shook his head. “The last time I think was September.”
“Was he, well, friendly?”
“Him? Sure. Why?”
“Nothing. Listen: tell me about Gemma Trimm. I just met her yesterday and she mentioned you.”
“Oh, aye.” Benny sat up straighter. “Talked about me, did she?”
Jury smiled. “She did, yes. She thought that you’d sent me.”
His mouth gaped. He seemed at a loss for words. “Me send you?”
“She needed a policeman, she said. She said somebody was trying to kill her.”
Dramatically, Benny slapped his hand to his forehead. “Gem’s not going on about that with you, is she?”
“I thought you might know something about all of this. Do you?”
“Yeah, I do: I know it’s her imagination, is what I know.”
“What else do you know about her?”
Jury thought from the way the boy wouldn’t meet his eyes that Benny was a little ashamed of not knowing more about Gemma.
“All I know about Gem is, she’s what you call a ward of old Mr. Tynedale. Kind of like being adopted, only it isn’t. Mr. Tynedale really likes Gemma.”
“The others don’t?”
“It’s more that they don’t pay any attention to her. Like she’s invisible.”
“You don’t think that’s her imagination, too?”
Benny shook his head. “No, because that’s even what Mr. Murphy says. He’s head gardener. ‘Like she’s invisible, pore gurl.’ That’s what he said. Cook likes her; so does the maid. And Mr. Murphy, of course. Gem goes up to Mr. Tynedale’s room-he’s sick, see, and keeps pretty much to his bed. She reads to him, reads a lot. Gem’s only nine, but she’s a good reader. She could read this stuff-” he extended his arms to take in the bookshelves “-as good as I could, and I’m pretty good.”
“Does she ever talk about her parents?”
Benny shook his head. “No, never. Sad, that.”
Benny, thought Jury, probably knew a lot about sadness. “None of them so much as mentioned her.” Jury looked around at the shadowy walls, the dull yellow of the wall sconces. This was a very restful little place.
Benny spread his hands. “Like I said, because she’s invisible.”
“I hope not.” Jury sat back, thinking, resting his eyes on the dog Sparky, who had been lying motionless beside Benny’s chair. Sparky, feeling eyes on him, looked up at Jury. Jury thought of the cat Cyril and wondered, not for the first time, if animals weren’t really the superior species.
Benny looked down at Sparky, too, and then at Jury. “I don’t know where she ever got this harebrained idea.”
“Your dog?”
“No, of course not. And he’s not a she.”
“Sorry.”
“I mean Gem. About somebody trying to kill her. She even has them doing it different ways.”
“I know: shooting, smothering, poisoning.”
“Well, it’s daft. I mean, I guess she could be, a little. Then I wonder if maybe it’s something she saw or maybe something that did happen to someone and she made all this up from scraps.”
Jury thought “Sigmund” mightn’t have been a bad name, after all, for Benny.
“Or maybe,” Benny went on, “being ignored or being invisible, well, being shot at or poisoned is just the opposite. You know, the most attention getting.”
“That’s a very smart diagnosis, Benny, except you’re forgetting another possibility.”
“What?”
“Maybe it’s true.”
He wanted to talk to Mickey and thought they must be on the same wavelength when Mickey called and suggested a drink and maybe dinner.
“Liza and I were kicking around the idea of drinks and a meal at the Liberty Bounds, you’ve been there; it’s near the Tower Hill tube station. They’ve got good food.”
Liza. Back then, years ago, he’d had feelings for Liza that crossed the borders of friendship. But she was married to Mickey, so… Jury said, “I haven’t seen her in years, Mickey. As I remember, she was very indulgent when it came to cop talk.”
“Hell, yes. You’ve forgotten she was one? Let’s meet at seven, seven-fifteen? That sound all right?”
“Definitely.”
Jury left the Tower Hill station and arrived at the Liberty Bounds at twenty to seven. He had a pint at the bar, drank that down, then ordered another and carried it over to a table in a window. It was the table in the window that made him think of the Jack and Hammer, though this pub was ten times larger. He pictured them there in Long Pidd: Melrose, Trueblood, Diane, Vivian-
It was while he was thinking of Vivian that he had raised his eyes to the door and seen them walk in-Mickey and Liza Haggerty.
He had forgotten how Liza Haggerty looked. He waved them over and thought his expression must have been rather sappy for Mickey laughed.
“What’s wrong, Richie? You drunk? Or have you forgotten Liza?”
“No way I could forget Liza.” Jury smiled. He also blushed.
So did Liza.
“Waterloo Bridge,” said Jury.
Liza laughed. “What?”
“Ever since someone brought that film up, I’ve been seeing that actress everywhere.”
“Richard.” She laughed and shrugged her coat off.
Jury shook his head. “I’d forgotten how pretty you were, Liza.”
“Oh, don’t let that worry you. He forgets all the time.” She tilted her head in Mickey’s direction. “I’ll have a martini, straight up, with a twist. And tell them I don’t want watered gin, either.” This last she called to Mickey’s departing back.
“Lord, but it’s good to see you both again,” said Jury.
“Yes.” That was all she said, but there was conviction in the word. “Friends shouldn’t lose touch, should they?” Liza’a smile stopped just short of glorious. It must have taken a hell of a lot of courage to smile like that. Serious now, she said, “Mickey told you?”
He nodded. “I’m-” Looking at her, he simply couldn’t say more.
Liza gave him the most sorrowful look he’d ever seen. “I try not to think about it. Having been on the Job once makes it a little easier. I mean, we deal with death so much. We haven’t spent so much time ignoring it; we’ve had to come to grips with it-” It was hollow talk and she knew it.
Mickey was back with the round of drinks.
Liza raised hers as if she were going to toast them, and said, “Don’t they know what a martini glass is?” She shook the stubby whiskey glass. “And there’s ice in it. Mickey? Now why’d you let him do that?”
Mickey threw up his hands in surrender. “I told him, baby, I really did. Just be glad he didn’t use the sweet stuff.”
She took a sip. “I’d say this was three parts vermouth to one part vermouth.”
Jury laughed. “You should have drinks with a friend of mine in Northamptonshire; she was born with a bottle of vodka in one hand and two olives on a stick in the other.”
Mickey said, “Not to change the subject-”
“But you will.”
Mickey smiled and looked at Jury. “You talked to Kitty Riordin. What do you think? Am I right?”
“I agree she could’ve done it.” Jury still hadn’t gotten over the way the woman had smiled, looking at her baby’s picture.
“What I wonder is, does Erin know about all this?”
“You mean Maisie. I don’t know.” Suddenly, he looked at Mickey and laughed. “Hell, Mickey, you sound more interested in this alleged imposture than in the murder itself.”
“Forget ‘alleged.’ You don’t see any connection?”
“With the murder of Simon Croft? Not at the moment.”
“Then maybe money wasn’t the motive.”
“That kind of money? Moneyed money? I’d say it’s always a motive. Few other motives could touch it. The Tynedale inheritance would be one hell of a motive.”
Liza said, “Mickey told me about this case. She would have to be the Medea of all mothers to carry this off for half a century. Now, would someone get me a real martini?” She pushed her glass toward them.
Jury smiled and took her glass and went to the bar, where he stood as the bartender poured a frugal measure of gin. He thought about his walk on Sunday. It had taken him past the site of the old Bridewell Prison, supposedly a “house of correction” for beggars, thieves and harlots. He tried to imagine the hopeless horrible life there. Bridewell was a scandal. The Bridewell orphans-what a way to begin a life. Orphans. He looked back at the table. Then the drinks came.
“Here we go,” Jury said, setting down the drinks. “Is this my fourth? Or my fifth?”
“Well, it’s only my second, so hand it over.” She took a sip, got up.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll be right back.”
“Croft found out,” said Mickey.
Jury laughed. “You don’t even speculate, do you?”
“Of course I speculate. Sometimes.”
Liza was back holding a stemmed glass. “It just took a little bit of convincing. It’s a trick I picked up in my former line of work. I offered to shoot him.” She tossed a couple of bags of crisps on the table.
Mickey, Jury thought, was obsessing. Jury tried to get him off the subject, but Mickey managed to slide back to it. Jury wondered if being obsessed with Kitty Riordin kept him from obsession with his own condition.
Liza, though, knew how to get him off the tangent: she brought up some old cases either he or she or both had worked. Fairly soon all three of them were laughing and ordering up more drinks. “Remember-” Liza began “-that bank job?”
“I didn’t do bank jobs, babe.”
“No, no, no. That bank job where the perp ran out with a satchel of money right into several cops and surrendered and it turned out to be the cast of The Bill?” The three laughed until they choked.
Remember? Remember? They swapped stories for nearly an hour, drank and ate vinegar crisps. Mickey laughed so hard he got one up his nose. Liza sat between them with a hand on each of their arms and once, laughing, got her head down so low a strand of black hair trailed through her martini.
Jury thought how much alike Liza and Mickey were, and yet they weren’t in any way competitive.
Liza went on about the time Mickey thought she was the perp in a theft and locked her outside.
Jury was laughing. “Liza, if you’re ever available, remember-” He realized what he’d said, and could not unsay it. They both sat smiling but the smiles were wooden. It was only a moment, and Jury got up, nearly toppling his chair in the process. He moved between tables, heading in the direction of the men’s room. He did not go in. Instead he leaned against the wall opposite, giving himself a mental lashing. Poor Mickey, poor Liza. He felt as if he’d poured the black night, like ink, across their table. He held this position for a century or two, then he felt a light hand on his arm.
“Richard,” said Liza. “Never mind. Come on back.”
He looked at her and saw her smile was real and bright. She tugged. “Come on!”
Jury followed her back to the table, where they resumed their stories and laughter and got pleasantly, wittily, winningly drunk.
“You’ve got to come with us, Superintendent.”
It was Marshall Trueblood’s voice coming over the wire to Jury, who was sitting in his office at New Scotland Yard, chucking a memo from DCS Racer into his OUT box and pulling out the file on Danny Wu. When Marshall Trueblood was talking, you could do things like this, for listening only to every other word in Trueblood’s conversation sometimes made more sense than paying close attention.
“Why,” asked Jury, “do I ‘got to’? I seem to recall that trip you and Plant took to Venice, where you also said I’d ‘got to.’ But why you need my actual physical presence is a total mystery to me since you have no trouble at all making me up. For example, how I intended once to marry an alcoholic woman with four crazy kids, two in Borstal.”
There was a pause, then Trueblood said, “Not Borstal-”
Jury brought his feet off his desk with a frustrated thud. “Trueblood, these were not real people. And you made up that sob story to keep Vivian from marrying Franco Gioppino. Well, Vivian’s left Count Dracula, or he left her and marched right out of Long Pidd with some transparent story about his mum getting sick.”
“Yes, yes, yes, but she still hasn’t broken it off officially.”
“Meaning what the hell? That still doesn’t explain Florence.”
Jury took one of the papers from the Wu file. Danny Wu had never been indicted, much less convicted, for any of the various things he was charged with. He held the page up to the light as if looking for a watermark. He could scarcely believe it: Danny Wu was being investigated in a case involving some stolen art. That was as hard to believe as this phone call. “Is Melrose Plant part of this scheme? Where are you calling from?”
“The Jack and Hammer. It’s Diane’s new cell phone we’re using.”
“The real reason,” said Melrose Plant, who was now in possession of the cell phone, “he’s going to Florence is to get a painting authenticated. I think he wants you along as security. A goon.”
“He’s got that right, but why in hell does he have to go to Italy? Aren’t there people here in England who do that sort of thing? Sotheby’s? Christie’s?”
“Oh, he’s going to one in London, yes. I told him to call the fraud squad. Heh heh.”
“The Fine Arts and Antiques Division, you mean.” He heard a scuffle at the Long Pidd end, or at least a scuffle of voices. Trueblood returned. “I see no point in advertising this picture. It could easily be stolen.”
Jury was reading the details of the alleged art theft. “I know just the man for the job.”
“What?”
“Never mind. So what’s this painting, anyway?”
“A Masaccio.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was a famous Florentine painter, a pupil of Masolino.”
“That’s two down; want to go for three?” Jury put the Wu file on his desk and leaned over it.
“The Renaissance.”
“Yes, I have heard of that.”
“We have to-” There was another scuffle around the telephone in Long Piddleton, then a female voice said: “Superintendent, I’m glad I caught you before you engaged in any idiotic plan that involves travel abroad.” Diane Demorney warned him off. “Your stars are in direct opposition to one another. Scorpios have to be careful when this happens.”
“I’m not a Scorpio.” Jury didn’t really know this. But neither did Diane. Direct opposition?
One-beat pause on Diane’s part. “Yes, I know. What I meant was that a Scorpio is going to figure prominently in your horoscope.”
Diane Demorney could make the quickest recoveries of anyone Jury knew. “I’ll bear that in mind. Now put Plant back on, love.”
She didn’t. She said, “You know what they say, ‘See Florence and die.’ ”
“Actually, what they say is, ‘See Rome and die.’ ”
“Well, it makes no difference, since you’d be dead, anyway.”
Jury heard the rasp of a cigarette lighter. “True.”
Plant came on. Jury asked, “What in hell is this call? One of those family round-robin things we used to get when we were away at school?”
Melrose Plant’s voice seemed to shrug. “I never got one. Of course, that might have been because-”
Jury squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a few soft blows with the receiver. “Has there been an epidemic of the literalism virus there?”
“Huh?”
Jury slapped another page of the Wu file over. “I can’t go to Florence.”
“When did you last have a vacation?”
Jury’s eyes strayed to several travel brochures Wiggins had left on his desk. “Last week. I hopped over to Vegas to perform with the Cirque du Soleil. I was diving from the rafters onto a water-covered stage.”
A real silence ensued this time. They seemed to be passing the phone around again. When Melrose came on again, Jury asked, “Do you remember being evacuated during the war?”
“Good lord, that’s a bit of a change of subject. Evacuated to where? This is the kind of place people got evacuated to. Anyway, no. I wasn’t born yet,” said Melrose.
“So you don’t remember?”
“That generally is the case with the unborn. Why?”
Jury was looking at the snapshot of Kitty Riordin holding the baby Maisie (if she was Maisie). “I’m just trying to sort the identity of someone born then. Whether the mother of this baby is one woman’s or another’s.”
“Offer to cut it in half. It worked for Solomon.”
“I knew you’d help.” Jury was looking now at the snapshot of Alexandra and Francis Croft. “Do you know what a screen memory is?”
“Yes, a recollection of Agatha walking through the door as she did just now. That’s a scream memory if ever there was one.”
“Not ‘scream,’ ‘screen.’ ”
“Screen? Oh. Isn’t that a Freudian concept? The idea being one throws up an image to mask another image too painful to be let into consciousness. Is this about the women and the unfortunate babe?”
“No, not really.” It’s more about me. “Look, I’ve got to be going-”
“You picked just the time. Agatha is heading for the telephone.”
“Right. Are you really going to Florence?”
“Yes, of course. As Diane says, see Florence and die.”
“Right. ’Bye.”
“Richard! Richard! Come away from there, love; it’s too dangerous!”
The street was barely recognizable, almost leveled, flattened, not a building remaining. Small fires burned all across this expanse of concrete and rubble, as if fallen stars had ignited.
“Richard!”
His mother’s voice. He should have left. But there were too many fascinating things out here, the dusk festooned with tiny winking lights. She still called. He still stayed, rooting through broken concrete, through rubble…
His mother called again…
Had that street, that building, that voice been a screen memory? But for what? The memory of finding his mother under all of that rubble, that was what should have been screened, shouldn’t it?
“Sir?”
Jury looked up from the snapshots and the file at Wiggins, who was setting newspapers down on his desk.
“You all right? You look kind of squiffy.”
“Squiffy? What’s that? Where’ve you been all morning, anyway?”
“Collecting these old newspapers you asked for.” Wiggins’s frown suggested his superior might be totally out of it.
“Oh. Sorry. I forgot.” He sorted through Danny Wu’s file again, closed it and tapped his chin. “Want some lunch? I mean something beyond that row of black biscuits, oat cakes, rye crisp and whatever liquid refreshment you added eye of newt to?” Jury nodded toward a glass of dark green stuff.
Wiggins looked hurt.
Jury smiled. “I was thinking of lunch at Ruiyi.”
The frown disappeared and Wiggins’s face lit up. There were few places he’d want to visit more than Danny Wu’s restaurant, an idea shared with a great many Londoners. Ruiyi was the best Chinese restaurant in Soho, and generally one of the best in London. There was always a line. For all of his health nuttiness, Wiggins really perked right up in the presence of MSG, at least Danny’s MSG.
While Jury was up and donning his coat, Wiggins crumbled half a black biscuit into his thickish, green, anodyne drink.
Telling himself not to ask, Jury asked, “What’s that?”
“Kava Kava, very good for relaxation, calming down. I should take some along to Ruiyi.” He shook his arms into his coat. “Danny Wu might like it. You know how these Asian gentlemen are about calm, peace, that sort of thing.”
“And tiger bone. This particular Asian gentleman would jettison calm, peace of mind and levitation for a Michelin two-star and a fast car any day.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, sir.” Wiggins laughed and followed Jury out the door.
“You don’t have to. I just did.”
Struck by the literalism virus.
Wiggins drove smooth as foam on a Guinness, turning from Victoria Street into Grosvenor Place toward Piccadilly. He asked Jury about Mickey Haggerty, whom Wiggins had known, too. Jury told him.
“My God, chronic myelogenous, that’s the worst kind of leukemia. It’s so aggressive, gets into the bones. There must be something they can do.”
“Mickey says not…”
“But-his wife, his kids. He’s got five, hasn’t he? How will they ever manage? I hope he has insurance. With five children-”
“Four. His oldest daughter died in that car crash, if you remember. And I have an idea he doesn’t have much insurance; I think he probably had to spend everything he made. One son’s supposed to be going to Oxford; there’s also a teenage daughter and two grand-children they’ve been taking care of since their parents were killed in the crash.”
“That’s a hell of a lot to have on your platter in any circumstances, but in these…” Wiggins could only shake his head. He added, “Wasn’t his wife with City police too?”
“No, with the Met. Detective sergeant, I think.”
“Move!” Wiggins shouted. Driving exerted a nonsalubrious effect on Wiggins. In front of them, an old-age pensioner whose gray head barely cleared the driver’s seat (so that the Volvo appeared unoccupied) was dithering about trying to decide on which exit to take from Piccadilly Circus. The ordinarily sanguine Sergeant Wiggins showed hidden springs of aggressiveness and hostility behind the wheel.
Finally, the Volvo turned off toward Leicester Square and proceeded to gum things up there, nearly plowing into a wave of pedestrians who (to do the old driver justice) couldn’t care less about the flashing red NO WALK indicator up there attempting to stop them. Wiggins turned off into Shaftesbury Avenue.
Ruiyi was on a heavily trafficked corner in Soho. Wiggins pulled into a handicapped parking spot, switched off the engine and rooted through the glove compartment. He pulled out a handicapped sign and stuck it on the rearview mirror.
“Where’d you get that?” Jury asked as they got out of the car.
Wiggins sniggered. “I am a policeman, after all.”
“Yes, and as one, you can pretty much park wherever you want to, anyway.”
The line was long and out the door of the restaurant. “Bugger all,” muttered Wiggins.
Jury shoved around Ruiyi’s patrons, followed by Wiggins, catching a few black looks, a few snarls and a temper tantrum from a man (who’d had the benefit of several pints before lunch) who had “a mind to signal that copper right across the street.” Upon which, Jury broke out his ID and shoved it up to the fellow’s face, saying, “I am the copper right across the street, mate.”
Through the door, Wiggins said, “We shouldn’t be doing this, sir, stealing a march on all of these people-”
Jury bestowed his own black look on the sergeant as they moved up undeterred.
The elderly waiter who always showed them to a table had been about to seat the couple at the head of the line. But seeing Jury and Wiggins, he held out one arm to bar the couple from stepping up and with the other arm hastened Jury and Wiggins to the only vacant table.
Jury sniggered (as had Wiggins, a few minutes ago) when he heard the couple demand to see the manager. As the manager was Danny Wu, a precious lot of good it would do them to complain about “those two” getting the table they should have had.
Wiggins opened the menu and sighed. It was the same copious list of offerings as always. It was tall and narrow and eight pages long. Wiggins always read it with the reverence a Hasidic Jew might read the Talmud. He listened to the specials the elderly waiter recited and couldn’t make up his mind. The waiter shuffled off to get the tea.
“Is this business or pleasure, sir? Is Danny Wu in more trouble?”
Jury shook out his red napkin and said, “Danny’s always in the same amount of trouble: up to his chest, but not his chin, leaving him plenty of room to maneuver. Haven’t you taken a look at his file?”
“Not since he came under suspicion when that murder occurred in Limehouse. D’ya think he might have Mafia connections?”
“He’s got connections to the Triads, to Whitehall, to Downing Street and most certainly to Victoria Street. I’m not suggesting he belongs to the Mafia or that he freelances for them.”
“You said Victoria Street: but that’s us.”
“ ‘Us’ is right. Not specifically you and me, but someone.”
“How do you-?”
A brown little nut of an old waitress set down tea in a burnt sienna clay pot and two little cups, into which she poured out molten amber.
“How do you work that out, sir?” Wiggins spooned two well-rounded teaspoons of sugar into his tiny cup.
“Have you ever seen this restaurant closed? I mean closed down?”
Wiggins’s brow furrowed as he sipped his tea. “Never, to my knowledge.”
“All anyone would have to do is shriek because a mouse skittered over her shoe and Public Health would come along and slap a CLOSED sign on the door. The obvious way to get Danny to ‘help with our inquiries’ would be to put him out of business. You wouldn’t even need the mouse; all you’d need is a bent Public Health inspector. Cheers.” Jury drank his tea.
Danny Wu was suddenly, almost magically, at their table, dressed with the usual elegance.
“Stegna?” asked Wiggins.
“Right,” said Danny. “How is it you are so conversant with Italian design?”
“From observing mine,” said Jury. “Oxfam.”
Danny laughed and said, “You’re a man clothes do not make, Superintendent.”
“Is that a compliment?” Jury smiled, remembering that this was a Carole-anne question: Is that one of your compliments, then?
Wiggins said, “I like to have a walk along Upper Sloane Street, pop into Harvey Nick’s occasionally.”
With a raised eyebrow, Jury said, “Harvey Nick’s, is it? Well, you’ve certainly picked up the Upper Sloane Street lingo, even if you haven’t picked up Hugo Boss or Ferragamo.”
Danny made his recommendations from that day’s specials-Crispy Fish with brown sauce and Jeweled Duck. Wiggins took one, Jury the other. Danny relayed the order in rapid-fire Cantonese to the little woman who’d brought the tea. To Jury exchanges in that language always suggested a show-down, as if the participants had whipped out Uzis and fired away. Danny turned back to them, asked, “Is this visit business or pleasure?”
“Both, you could say. I’m interested in the alleged theft of paintings in the Duncan collection. Formerly, I should say, in his collection. And the consequent murder of the chauffeur driving the limo used to transport the paintings. This occurred in Wapping near the Town of Ramsgate. Wapping Old Stairs is where the chauffeur was found by Thames police.”
“How do you know whoever stopped this limousine was after the paintings?”
“For the simple reason that they were gone.”
Danny shrugged, the barest movement of his Stegna-clad shoulders. “That could have been a mere cover. Maybe they were after the chauffeur.”
At that point steaming, silver-domed dishes were delivered to the table. Danny quickly lifted each dome and checked the contents, then, in another dialect blitz, sent back the duck.
“Is it time for me to complain about police harassment?” asked Danny, in his impeccable English
“It’s been time for a long time. Trouble is, my guv’nor likes you for the murder of that pimp in Limehouse last year.”
“Ah! So he’s the mastermind behind all this.”
“Not all. But some. What did you send the Jeweled Duck back for?”
“Diamonds were paste. You’ll pardon me?”
He was off across the room to the couple who’d complained when Jury and Wiggins had preempted their table. Even though they had by now been seated and were tucking into an array of dishes, they were still angry. After Danny said a few words, they smiled and went back to their dinners. Danny had no doubt said their meal was on the house.
The last time Jury had been to Newcastle was several years before (he hated to think how many) when he’d worked a case in Durham. Old Washington. Jerusalem Inn. Stop while you’re ahead. Each name hit him with its little hammer blow as he stepped from the train down to the platform. Today there weren’t many passengers. He thought he would go in the station buffet and have a drink. He knew he was fortifying himself and disliked the idea. But he did it anyway.
For years he had been sending his cousin sums of money, which did little to endear him to her. She would hate to be in some way dependent upon him; he, after all, had once been the interloper; he had been the charity case.
Brendan, her husband, really did exert himself to get a job. And it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t had work in over a year. Jury knew this. Jury had gone with him once to the joke shop to look at their scant offerings. Brendan told him he was always checking with the agencies, too, never passed one, with its job “opportunities,” the cards taped up in the window announcing jobs that seemed to dissolve once you put your foot across the sill. Brendan had worked for maybe one year out of the last five. He was a nice bloke, Brendan was, who managed to hold on to a sense of humor. He loved Jury to visit for it was someone to go to the pub with, someone with money. Jury was glad to pay for the drinks for he knew Brendan genuinely liked him. Jury, after all, was “family,” which meant he was someone Brendan could be honest with.
In the station buffet, Jury got his pint refilled.
Even leaving off how high ranking he was in the police, the ones sitting in this buffet would envy him every day of their bloody lives. Imagine that one at the bar eating a sausage roll, think how he would like having digs in London where he could come and go as he wanted, not a wife who keeps letting him know what a failure he is, and no screaming kids. Imagine being able to lock the door, or go down to the pub, money and then some, to come back on his own or with someone…
Jury smiled (sure), finished his pint and left.
His cousin’s flat was located in a big red-brick house. Above the landing outside the front door were affixed six mailboxes, one for each of the flats the renovation had squeezed from its formerly spacious interior. Brendan and Sarah occupied one of the two flats on the top floor, three flights up. There was no lift. The stairs were dark except for the landing between the first and second. Every time Jury had been here, he had replaced one or more burned-out bulbs that were supposed to light the landings. It was dangerous, he’d told her, for she could make a misstep, fall and break something.
“I live by missteps,” she’d replied. It had made Jury smile, that way of putting it.
He had hoped it would be Brendan answering the door, but Brendan was out, “Looking,” Sarah said. “Come on in.”
“At least be glad he’s looking. Most aren’t.” Jury removed his coat and let it fall on a nubby-textured dark green chair.
Sarah had picked up a pale blue pillow from a blue armchair. The pillow was embroidered iris and she stood clutching it to her breasts as if some attack were imminent. But she was always like this with him. Sarah was full of these defensive gestures. She was a tightly wound woman who must be by now in her early sixties, yet for all of the strain and stress life caused her, not looking that old. If time, like acid, had scored deep grooves around her nose and mouth, she was still blessed with a sort of silky hair that even in turning gray was the soft color of autumn smoke.
“Want a beer?”
It was what she was drinking, but Jury had had too much already. His stomach was sour, more from stress than beer, he thought, but he still didn’t want any. “I’d really love some tea.”
Rising, she said (in that baiting way of hers), “My, my. You’re turning down a beer?” as if drink were a particular problem with him. Then she turned toward the kitchen, a bit of which he could spy from where he sat: the white countertop, the Aga cooker of which she was very proud.
It always began that way, some deprecating remark made in her attempt to undermine him. Though he wondered if it wasn’t really Brendan she was addressing, Brendan whose drinking was the problem. Jury sat down in the blue armchair, one of a pair and both the worse for wear. He retrieved the embroidered pillow she had tossed down and ran his thumb over its delicate embroidery and wondered if she’d done it.
He leaned back, feeling absurdly weary and knew the cause lay in coming here. But it wasn’t Sarah herself, no, it was how she stirred up a host of complex emotions about his past. His discomfort was fueled by fear. Sarah had had the upper hand-she had held every hand-when they were kids: she was older, and she belonged. That he was afraid of her struck him as ludicrous; he was ashamed of the feeling. But the fear was very old, as old as childhood.
He was being handed a mug of tea. He sat up (feeling much like an invalid). “Thanks.”
Inexplicably, she shrugged, perhaps saying, So what? I’d do it for the dustbin men. Then she sat down on the matching blue armchair with a bottle of Adnams and a cigarette. When Jury didn’t drag out his own pack, she offered him her Silk Cut. When he shook his head, she said, “Don’t tell me! You’ve stopped!”
“Right.”
Throwing back her head, she said, “Please, God, not another one. I hope you’re not about to go self-righteous on me and start lecturing.”
Jury half smiled. “Hardly. I’m in much too weak a position to do that. I could start back any day.”
There was a moment of silence as she languidly smoked, drawing in deeply, exhaling tiny smoke rings, smoking in silence. Jury would bet that Newcastle had one of the highest smoking rates in the country.
“Where are the kids?”
“Birthday party. Except the little one, Georgie, he’s asleep. My niece’s boy, Ruth’s? You remember her? When he wakes up you can see him. You never have done and he’s eighteen months.” Her mouth tight, she shook her head as if Jury were himself eighteen months old and more hopeless than Ruth’s Georgie. “So, Richard. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
Sarah seemed unable to say anything to him without that bite, that begrudging air.
“Had to come here on police business,” he lied, “and just wanted to see you. I’m sorry it’s been so long. No excuse except the same old thing: busy on the Job.” He paused, wondering how to commence. He knew that what made all of this so painful was that he would be trying to get information from someone who wouldn’t want to give it to him, who wouldn’t want to help him remember. Being able to fill in gaps in Jury’s memory would be a source of power for her, to give or to withhold. It was hard to believe she could still resent his childhood self. But, he reminded himself, it was also himself now, the life he had examined in the station buffet.
“Remember when we were kids?”
She raised her eyebrows in question. “Remember what?”
“Oh, I guess just… you know. Nothing specific.” When she offered nothing, just sat there smoking and drinking, he didn’t know how to go on. His chair faced a west-looking window and the sun in its descent edged the clouds in white gold. “I was just thinking about my mother. And the war. You remember the house in the Fulham Road was demolished. I can still hear the bombs; I can still hear the one that hit the house.”
She frowned. “The house was hit by a bomb but you weren’t there. This was one of those ‘nuisance’ raids, in 1944, I think. Well, that’s life, you get through the blitz, through the worst of it and then get killed in the last one that never even made a difference.” She shook her head at the irony of it.
Jury was stunned. “But I always thought I was there. I mean I remember… you know, being there.” The blackout, his mother buried under rubble. He couldn’t process this new information.
“You really are bloody fucked up, Richard. Maybe you need a shrink.” She smiled slightly, as if finding an inroad into Jury’s mind, a place where she might play about, play with facts, with memories, pleased her.
“The house in Fulham. I keep seeing Mum… under all that plaster and boards.” And he couldn’t do anything about it.
Inconceivably, she started laughing.
He was furious. “What in the bloody hell’s so funny, Sarah?”
The laughter was for the most part faked. “It’s just so… dramatic, the way you see it. Like a film.” She liked this analysis. “Really, it is. Just like a war film. Mrs. Miniver or one of those.”
He could scarcely believe all of this. How could he walk around all of his life, these few memories indelibly fixed in his head, and discover they were false, bogus, his own invention? How? But then he’d been free to make them up; no one had ever said anything to contradict them. If he had asked his uncle, a very kind man, then he would have told him. But of course most adults would steer clear of bringing up such a subject involuntarily.
She stubbed out her cigarette, finished off her Adnams and got up. “You wait just a minute.” She left the room and he could hear her moving about and swearing, as if someone were in the other room with her.
He half rose to see if she was all right, but she was back now with a white shoe box. Between the dark brown sofa and the blue armchairs was a round table which she hauled over to stand between them. She pulled her chair around to face his across the table.
Pictures, thought Jury. More pictures. She slid the top from the box and he felt a surge of adrenaline clamp him to his chair with a hard swift hand. If they were different, these pictures, from what he remembered, he didn’t want to know. He just didn’t. He had lived for too many years with these images of life and death in the Fulham Road. “She was wearing black.”
Sarah was sorting through snapshots, pulling out one here and there. Either he hadn’t said it aloud or she hadn’t heard him say it: she was wearing black.
As she put down the pictures, fanned out like a poker hand, and tapped one snapshot, square and poorly lit, taken perhaps with one of those boxy Brownie cameras. “This is all of us, except your dad. He was in Germany.”
Jury saw a group of four adults, a toddler and a girl of perhaps seven or eight. “This is you, isn’t it? Am I in this?”
“Don’t be daft, of course you are; you’re the little one. Here’s your dad.” She handed him a picture of a man in uniform, a flier. “You know he was RAF?”
“Yes, of course.” He felt defensive because she knew more than he. And how had she come to be the depository for memories? “Wasn’t his plane-a Spitfire-shot down?”
“You got that right, at least.”
As if memory’s fallibility were all down to him. “I remember being evacuated; I remember being in Devon or Dorset somewhere as a kid with a lot of other kids.”
“That wasn’t the war. You weren’t evacuated; you were in foster care with some others.”
Jury looked at her, frowning. “Foster care?”
“You don’t recall that woman, that awful Mrs. Simkin? Wasn’t she the one, though? Jesus, it must’ve been half a dozen she was getting a government stipend for. They took two away from her, and you were one of them.” Her fingers rooted in the shoe box again. “Look.” She pulled another snapshot from the box and handed it to Jury.
He looked at the awkward lineup of children. It was a relief to see that they were here as he remembered them even if he’d been mistaken about why he was among them. There he was, standing next to the tallest girl. Even though the picture was in black and white, he still knew the tall girl was the one with hair like a torch. It looked unconfined, as if not even the stillness of a photograph could still it. Jury smiled at her, the bane of his small existence. She had turned out to be a still point, this horrific child who teased and taunted him, still had the power to help or hinder. For some reason Jury liked that idea.
“Now, this one’s the best. It’s you and your mum.”
It was not a snapshot, but looked to be more a photographer’s work. It was larger, too. Her arm extended along the back of a settee, the back rising higher on one end. He looked about three or four and was sitting on her left, her left arm encircling him. He looked pleased as punch.
Sarah was talking but her voice seemed to come from a distance, as a sound trying to make its way around some obstruction. He did not comment on this picture. It was quite beautiful, he thought. “May I have this one of the foster care kids? And the one of mum and me?”
She shrugged, falling back to her original pose of indifference. “You can have the lot if you want.” Having produced this revisionist childhood, she was no longer concerned for its proofs.
Jury was tired and was ready to go; he would be relieved to get out. He said he’d a train to catch.
“You’re not stopping for tea? Brendan’ll be back-”
And as if her voice could call up spirits, the door opened just then and Brendan walked in.
“Speak of the devil,” Sarah said.
Brendan brought with him the memory of more than one John Jamison. He was happy as a lark when he saw Jury. “Richard! Where in hell did you drop from?” He gave Jury a comradely punch on the shoulder.
Sarah asked, querulously, “Where’re Jasmine and Christabel? You were to collect them from Raffertys.”
“I went by. They wanted to go to Burger King with the others.”
Jasmine. Christabel. The names she had chosen (certainly Brendan hadn’t) for her children. You could always tell the parents with no confidence. They went for the exotic names, afraid that just plain Mary or Alice wouldn’t set their own kids apart.
“You spent the giro already at Noonan’s, I expect.”
“Oh, leave off, woman.” Brendan drew a folded, grimy bit of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to her. “It ain’t even cashed, lovely. Speaking of Noonan’s, Rich, how about it?”
Jury didn’t much want to go, but this would probably be the least awkward way of making an exit. “Thanks, I could do with a pint.”
Brendan did a little jig-never had Jury known a more ingrained Irish-man than Brendan-and washed his hands in air. “Let’s go, then.”
Jury gave Sarah a look, inviting her along, though he knew she wouldn’t take them up on the invitation.
“Me? Me go? Then who’d look after the baby, I want to know? You haven’t even seen him,” she said to Jury.
“Maybe when we come back.” Jury was not coming back.
“Why does she dislike me so much?” Jury asked Brendan as they stood at the bar of Noonan’s, a noisy pub. There were, of course, some men in here who had jobs, whom the Job Center had actually lined up with employment. For them the pub was the way to escape the tedium of work as it was the way to escape the tedium of not working for the others.
Brendan raised his pint and said, “Hell, man, she doesn’t dislike you, at least not when your back’s turned.” He wiped his handkerchief under his nose. “She’s always bragging on you to friends.” He went on in fluting tones, “ ‘A detective superintendent, that’s right, Scotland Yard, no less.’ ”
Jury smiled. “We were talking about childhood. It seems all my memories were wrong.”
Brendan waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Hell, she was windin’ you up, man, she was takin’ the piss out. She does it to me, does it to the kids. Don’t take it to heart.”
Jury drank his beer and went back over the afternoon. He wondered. He patted the pocket of his coat that held the two pictures.
When Jury walked up the steps of the terraced house in Islington, Mrs. Wasserman, who had the so-called garden flat, came up the stone steps outside her door, hurrying as much as she could. Jury had helped Mrs. Wasserman over the years with “security,” installing locks, inspecting windows and any other way of entering, and anything else that would make her feel more secure. She had been a young girl in the prison camp; she had watched her family die before her eyes, first one, then another. And worse.
“Mrs. Wasserman,” Jury said, retracing his steps, going back down, “is something the matter? It’s late for you to be still up.”
She clutched her bathrobe more closely about her throat. “No, no, many times I’m up till morning. Such a hard time sleeping. Could you come in just a minute, Mr. Jury? One minute and I won’t keep you.”
Jury smiled. “I can make it more than a minute.” He followed her down the steps and into her flat. It was a comfortable flat with good old armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa. A breakfront, some side chairs and tables.
“Would you like something? Whiskey? Coffee? Chai?”
“What?”
“Carole-anne got me some. She says it’s much healthier than other drinks. It’s kind of a mixture of tea and spice.”
“In matters of health, I wouldn’t look to Carole-anne, queen of the breakfast fry-up.”
“Well, what she told me was to drink it for a week and tell her if I felt better. It’s supposed to do wonders, but the taste, Mr. Jury! It’s awful.”
“That explains Nurse Carole-anne’s motive. She wants you to test it so she won’t have to. A cup of plain old English black tea would be fine.”
She left the living room. Jury saw there were a couple of old photograph albums on the coffee table, one of them open. Sitting down on the sofa, he sighed. Pictures, more pictures, old ones.
Mrs. Wasserman returned with two mugs of tea that Jury knew would be sweeter than he liked, but would drink. When she saw Jury turning the pages of the photograph album, she said, “They have been making me feel… well…”
Jury waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “Are these of your family, Mrs. Wasserman?” He knew they must be and was a little surprised he had never seen them before. But she still stood there by the sofa, holding her cup of tea and looking anxiously at the photographs. He said, carefully, “Mrs. Wasserman?”
Hesitating, she said, “Yes. And yet-”
She appeared very distraught. He looked more closely at one picture of a girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, flanked by a middle-aged man and woman who must surely be her mother and father. It was not that he recognized the child as Mrs. Wasserman, but the older woman who looked so much like his Mrs. Wasserman, looks that weren’t yet delineated in the face of the teenage girl.
“This is you as a girl, isn’t it?” He tapped that picture.
Mrs. Wasserman laughed a little and without humor. It was a nervous laugh, an anxious one. “Yes. My mother, the woman must be. The man is my father?”
What she seemed to be doing was asking for Jury’s assurance. “You certainly look like your mother.” He studied the picture, the background, the building in front of which they stood. On the right-hand border he saw the heel of a shoe and a tiny patch of leg. It was a public street and someone had just passed by. He imagined others, not wanting to block the picture taker, were no doubt waiting in the wings to pass. Behind the little family was a sign, the first half obscured by their bodies. It said ANIST and Jury wondered if it was the end of the word tobaccanist. To the right, a couple of stiles of postcards sat alongside a rack of newspapers. Jury squinted.
“Mrs. Wasserman, do you have a magnifying glass?”
Now that somebody was doing something about her problem (whatever that might be, Jury wasn’t sure yet) she was eager to do what she could. “Yes, yes.” She hurried over to the breakfront, opened a drawer, took out a large glass. This she handed to Jury.
Jury held it close to the picture. What he wanted to see was the date on the name of the newspaper. It looked like “Berlin” something. He could even see the date: November 9, 1938. The date had a familiar ring. Unfortunately, the headline of the paper was obscured.
Looking abstracted, she sat down on the edge of a chair with a rosewood frame.
“You lived in Berlin, didn’t you? Your father-” And then he remembered, her father had died as a result of one of those terrifying and random sweeps of the SS.
She frowned and looked away. “Yes, for a while. It must have been then.” She nodded toward the photograph, the snapshot. Yet the snapshot apparently wasn’t nudging memory further and perhaps that’s what bothered her.
He took out the snapshot of the children in the charge of the awful Mrs. Simkin and handed it to her.
She put her spectacles back on, looked and smiled. “But is this you, Mr. Jury? And your friends?”
“I think so, Mrs. Wasserman.” He wanted her to know that a failure of memory wasn’t hers alone. “Some things we can never be sure of, I guess.” Jury rose and said good night.
Walking upstairs, he thought of it: November 9, 1938. Kristallnacht. That was it. That was when her father was taken away, never to be seen again.
The loss of memory, he thought, can be fortuitous.
Later, in bed, hands folded behind his head, the pictures of his mother and the foster-care children tilted against the bedside lamp, Jury thought: it never ends. It might stretch around a corner or across the country or into death, but it never ended, this bond between parents and children.
All the way from Northampton to the M1, and off at Newport Pagnel for a ploughman’s and a beer, then back to the M1 and around road works that kept them crawling at fifteen miles per hour, to Toddington and another stop at a Trusthouse Forte, and back on the M1 again, past the Luton exits and the suggestion (quickly shot down) that they get off at Haysendon to see the wild fowl park, and on to St. Alban’s, finally hitting the North Circular road and the A41 that would take them to the center of London, or would have done if they hadn’t got off onto the A-nothing and taken a wrong turn at Hornsley and wandered all around Finchley and Hornsley and Crouch End-all this way Melrose had listened to Trueblood’s lecture on the Italian Renaissance and art-not only the art of Masaccio, but also all of Masaccio’s friends and teachers and trainers-Masolino, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and branching off (much as they had at Toddington) onto side trips to Siena, Pisa and Lucca, and back to Florence and Michaelangelo and Mannerism, to Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral (and was that after or before he’d lost the competition for the Baptistery doors?), and the Baptistery’s south doors, done by Pisano in panels depicting the eight cardinal virtues (none of which were being catered for during this trip) through the ridiculous conflicts of Guelphs and Ghibellines, to the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi and Leonardo, back through Giotto and the invention of space in perspective to that witty little restaurant just off the Ponte Vecchio, whose name he had forgotten (unfortunately, forgetting nothing else)-
– So that when Trueblood at last squealed to a stop in front of Boring’s, Melrose felt he’d been hit by a stun gun.
“I’m off to Ellie Ickley’s. We’re dining at Fisole. She adores Florence, she lived there for ten years and all but ate it alive! You’re absolutely welcome to join.”
“Thanks, but I’m dining with Jury.”
Trueblood revved up the engine, gave him a wave and shot off down the street.
Melrose entered Boring’s with his brain churned to butter. Even so, he reckoned that what he’d been given was the larger picture, brush stroke by heavy brush stroke. Imagine the two of them, Trueblood and Ickley, able to dole out details of Brunelleschi’s construction of the dome, tile after tile, brick after brick, herringboned in place to be self-supporting. Melrose felt anything but self-supporting. Dinner, bookended by Florence enthusiasts, by Firenze fanatics. He’d be squashed to pesto sauce, stuffed into tortellini, grated with pecorino. At least if Trueblood was running around Florence on his own, Melrose would be spared an hour or two of the contribution of Giorgio Vasari to art (Giorgio Armani being quite another matter).
Boring’s, Melrose was happy to see, had recovered from the shock of the murder of one of its members a year ago and had returned to its usual state of somnolence. Even the fly on the parchment lampshade, whose subdued golden light reflected off the polished mahogany of the convoluted staircase which scrolled around and around to a final landing Melrose could not see, and for all he knew, went through the ceiling and up to the heavens in a Boring’s meditation on Brunelleschi’s dome, the fly on the lampshade on the desk seemed incapable of movement and would sleep through any swatting.
It was irresistible, this sense of moving through a bed of treacle, and he felt his eyelids go heavy. He shook his head to clear it. For all he was aware of it, he might have been standing here for hours. Boring’s ran on its own time, Greenwich Mean not even in the equation. Probably, Melrose thought, Boring’s was at the heart of the modern mad science of chaos theory.
When still no one had come to attend to him, he wondered if his feet stuck in this treacle could propel him into the Members’ Room and there find both whiskey and assistance. And if he was going to fall asleep, he might as well do it in front of a crackling fire, drink in hand, seated in a comfortable, worn leather chair.
Trueblood had come to collect him at such a grisly gray morning hour, Melrose hadn’t even had time to read his newspaper. This was a ritual undertaken only to see if the world was still up, not to see what it was doing. Yet here were issues of all the dailies and Melrose had no desire to look at a single one. He felt rather than heard a person behind him. He turned to see Boring’s porter, Young Higgins. Young Higgins was not young, and Melrose declined assistance with his bag. In what was a genuine if somewhat atonal sort of greeting, Young Higgins told Melrose how glad he was to see him at Boring’s once again, and asked if he required anything. Melrose said he’d come down later for a drink, thanked Young Higgins and carried his own bag up the wide, softly carpeted stair.
The level of activity in the Members’ Room at seven P.M. had increased incrementally with preprandial conversations, the good mood induced both by whiskey and the knowledge that dinner would soon be served. There were a half dozen members sitting here, drinking or snoozing, and Melrose waved to Colonel Neame, who was always in the same chair by the fire, usually with his friend Major Champs.
Richard Jury and Melrose Plant were drinking a very fine malt whiskey, with their own conversation nose-diving into inconsequentiality: both were betting what would be on the menu. Melrose slapped down a five-pound note and said, “Starter: Windsor soup.”
Jury frowned. “Five pounds? Don’t be daft. I’m a public servant; I can’t afford to lose fifteen pounds, which is what it’d come to with three courses. Anyway, I was going to say Windsor soup, too.” He dug in his pocket for change, his lips moving silently, figuring. “One pound seventy, that’s closer.”
Melrose groaned and made to tear his hair when a young porter told him there was a call for him and could he take it in reception? Melrose excused himself. As Melrose walked out of the room Jury got up and went across to where Colonel Neame was sitting by the fire.
It was Trueblood on the phone, fixing the time for their drive to Heathrow. “Not that early, for God’s sakes.”
“Well, you know what it’s like with security these days.”
They argued and settled on a time. “How is Miss Ickley? What does she think of the alleged Masaccio?”
“Hasn’t made up her mind yet.”
Melrose rang off and returned to the Members’ Room where Jury had ordered seconds for them.
Jury said, “Okay, we’re still on starters. I’ll let you have the soup and I’ll take prawn cocktail… no, no… I’ll say avocado stuffed with Stilton.”
“Stuffed with Stilton? That’s rather elaborate for Boring’s.”
“Well, avocado like that’s all the rage in London at the moment.”
“Main course: Dover sole.”
Jury said, “I hope it is. I love Dover sole. But I’ll say… spring lamb. No, it isn’t spring yet, so just make it lamb.”
Melrose frowned. “A lamb is always a lamb, isn’t it? So it’s still spring lamb. Anyway, I’m changing mine. I’m saying jugged hare.”
“Jugged hare? Do they do that here? That’s sort of an acquired taste, isn’t it?”
Melrose swept his arm around the room. “What else have we to do here but acquire tastes?”
Jury grunted. “Anyway, you’re not supposed to switch from the thing you name first.”
“Good god! You’re such a stickler for rules. And anyway, when did we ever make up rules?”
“I probably wouldn’t like jugged hare. When I see a bunch of animal rights activists I get depressed. I think of Carrie Fleet. Remember?”
“How could I ever forget?”
They drank in silence for a few moments, both remembering Carrie Fleet, both on the edge of a monumental sadness. Melrose jerked around when the young porter (really young, a Dickensian youth with ginger hair) came to announce that dinner was being served and would they care for another whiskey? Both declined, Melrose saying they’d have wine with dinner.
It was a beautiful room-high windows, crown moldings, dark wood polished to such mirror smoothness you could almost see your reflection in it. Ceiling fans turned decorously overhead, a central chandelier tossed beads of light across the tables and chairs.
The sommelier twisted his key and went into a mild ecstasy when Melrose chose a Pinot Noir of clearly exciting (and expensive) vintage. Then he departed and soon Young Higgins settled before each of them the first course: avocado stuffed with Stilton and baked.
Astonished, Melrose asked Jury if this was some new fad.
“I told you, it’s very popular at the moment. Remember, I’m one pound seventy into your fiver. We forgot dessert. I’m betting treacle pudding. No, tart.”
“Gooseberry… no, I’ll say some sort of sponge roll.”
Said Jury, looking around the room, “I can think of worse places to spend one’s twilight years than here at Boring’s.”
“Your head on a spike at Tower Bridge, perhaps. You wouldn’t stand it here, not you. Now, I’m the perfect candidate for retirement.”
Jury made a blubbery, dismissive sound with his lips and waved away Plant’s candidacy.
“But I am. Just look at me, look at my life. I’m retired now. I can nip off to Firenze any time I take a fancy to do so. That was Trueblood on the phone.” When Jury looked blank, Melrose said, “That phone call I got. Are you engaged in short-term memory loss?”
“Long term, actually.” Jury looked off toward the black windowpanes.
“How so?”
The sommelier was there with the wine, which he presented for Melrose’s inspection. Melrose approved, and the cork was removed and Melrose declined the tasting of it, telling the sommelier to pour it. He looked slightly shocked, poured and left.
“Why do they do that? You know, show you the label? Would one be suspicious that it was really a bottle of plonk they were foisting off on their guests?”
“Show. Ritual.” They ate in silence for a few minutes.
Young Higgins was back, removing their avocado and announcing that the lamb would arrive in just a few moments.
Jury shrugged and raised his hands, smiling, while Melrose sat staring. He calculated. “That’s three pounds forty you owe me.”
“Let’s go to Vegas while your luck is running. Now, what were we talking about?”
“Memory loss. You recall when we were sitting here November a year ago?”
“Certainly, I do.”
“We were talking about the war. The Second World War, I mean.”
Melrose nodded, hardly shifting his attention at all to the plate of lamb and silver dishes of peas and potatoes Young Higgins now placed before him. “I remember. You said you’d been evacuated, your-cousin, is it?-up in Newcastle told you about it.”
Jury nodded. “But she said I wasn’t in the Fulham Road house when my mother died. And I was younger, too. Maybe no more than two or three. I’d much rather she died with me there.”
“Well, I wouldn’t, old chap. Because had you been, probably you wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I can understand your feeling, though.”
They ate in companionable silence, passing the silver dish of vegetables back and forth, drinking more wine.
Then Melrose said, “How about her memory, your cousin’s?”
Jury looked up from his plate, which he hadn’t touched much. “You mean hers could be faulty?”
“Of course.”
“She’s years older than I. She’d remember better.” Jury smiled. “Her husband, Brendan, thought she was winding me up. She doesn’t really like me.”
“Is she vicious?”
“Vicious… that might be too strong a word.”
“Okay, give me a weaker one.”
As Young Higgins came to clear their plates away, Jury said, “Resentful, maybe, of me getting so much attention from my uncle. It was my uncle who took me in. My aunt was kind, but not really too keen. And after he died, she didn’t feel she could keep me on, not with three of her own. The other two are dead now.”
Young Higgins cleared his throat and said, “Your treacle tart will be up in a moment. Would you care to have coffee in the Members’ Room?”
Melrose said, yes, they would and stared at Jury as Young Higgins moved off. “You win it all.”
Jury smiled and shrugged.
Back in the Members’ Room, in the same seats they had occupied, Jury said, “The thing is, she had pictures-snapshots, you know-of me and these other kids. They were kids I remember, too. But that was several years later, in Devon. They were foster children this woman was drawing stipends for-”
“Instead of the kids being the evacuees you thought you’d been among?”
“Yes.”
“Pictures may tell part of the truth but not necessarily all of it.”
A log split and fell, sparking. The flames sputtered, became no more than live coal and leaped once again into flame. He said, “Lately, that’s what I seem to be dealing with-pictures. Memories. Neither being completely reliable as a reconstruction of the past. I have a friend, a DCI in the City police, who showed me some pictures.” He told Melrose about Mickey’s suspicions.
“Why doesn’t he investigate this himself? I know you’re awfully good, but it seems odd bringing Scotland Yard into it.”
“It does, yes. We’re old friends, we go back a long way.”
“Still-”
“He’s dying.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“His father was a regular at the Blue Last. He knew the owner, Francis Croft, quite well. Oliver Tynedale and Francis Croft were like brothers. It’s impressive that they’d remain that close to each other and stay friends for that long, and also be in business together.”
“I can’t imagine anything that could sour a friendship quicker than a business relationship. Who was at the helm?”
“Tynedale, I expect. The business seemed to fall roughly between the public relations end and the financial end. I imagine the line between them was pretty much blurred.”
“So Francis Croft died and his own fortune got divided among his children?”
“Actually, no. That’s another unusual thing. Some of it went to Tynedale’s children, as some of Tynedale’s will go to Croft’s. They really are like one extended family.”
“Which sounds as if it complicates things.”
“Yes.” Jury watched the fire over the edge of his glass of cognac.
“Let’s just say that, unlike his father, Simon Croft was crooked. Say he embezzled funds, and a major stockholder found out and-” Melrose mimicked a pistol with his thumb and forefinger. “Except you don’t think so, do you?”
“It’s more that Mickey doesn’t think so.”
“He’s convinced it’s a member of the family.”
Jury answered obliquely. “The thing is, Tynedale is very sick; murdering him would be, well, superfluous for an heir of his. His granddaughter, Maisie, will probably get the lion’s share. The fortune would then be split-not necessarily equally-among the remaining Tynedale and Croft children-Ian, Simon, Marie-France-oh, and there’s Simon’s sister, Emily. She’s living in Brighton in one of those assisted-living places.”
“Hmm. If the motive’s getting a larger share of the inheritance, why would the killer choose Simon Croft over the granddaughter? You’ve just said she’ll undoubtedly get more than the others.”
“Depends, I suppose, on how much more,” Jury said.
“Isn’t it equally likely there’s another motive for shooting Simon Croft? What if he knew about this imposture?”
“Which points to the Riordin woman, or, of course, Maisie. She might know, she might not. Anyway, they’re the ones who wouldn’t want Oliver finding out Maisie isn’t Maisie. To wait fifty years for the payoff shows a hell of an emotional investment on the part of Kitty Riordin. To have that snatched away now-” Jury shrugged.
“Perhaps Simon Croft’s killing isn’t connected to the identity of Maisie Tynedale. DCI Haggerty could be dead wrong.”
A porter came on hushed feet to deposit two more cognacs. Jury insisted on paying for this round and slapped down Melrose’s five-pound note.
“Oh, thanks,” said Melrose. “You’re too generous.”
“I know.” Jury swirled the cognac, sniffed it and drank. “Another thing that bothers me is this little girl who’s Tynedale’s ward. Gemma Trimm her name is. She claims someone’s tried three times to kill her.”
Melrose sat up. “My god. But do you believe her?”
“They found a bullet casing. Southwark police certainly believe there was a shooting; they seemed to put it down to a rash of robberies, that, or some young punk proving how cool he is. As to the choking and poisoning, well, I’m not so sure.”
“And what would be the motive in this case?”
“I’ve no idea. Her presence in that house is mysterious. She seems to be largely ignored except by staff and Oliver Tynedale, who apparently dotes on her.”
“Is she a dotable little thing?”
Jury smiled. “Oh, my, yes. Extremely dotable-an earnest child. They say nothing about her. I came upon her quite by accident outside, walking.”
“They say nothing about her?”
“I questioned all of them, except for Oliver Tynedale, and no one so much as mentioned Gemma.”
“That’s damned strange. If the old man is so fond of her you’d think the others would be discounting her all over the place. His ward, you say?”
Jury nodded. “According to her friend Benny.”
“God, don’t bring anyone else into this tale. I’m back with the cook and the gardener as it is.”
“Benny’s extremely resourceful. He has four or five shops in the main street he runs errands for. He’s the local messenger service. You know, if the bookshop wants a delivery made, he does it. Same for florists, same for butcher and newsagent. What I admire is his ability to fend off questions about home and family. I don’t blame him. A lot of people I’d rather not show my ID to, either.”
Melrose laughed, sliding down in his chair. “You sound like you’re the same age as this boy.” He kept laughing, stopped and said, “Maybe that’s the secret.”
“What secret?”
“You’re so good with children. They seem immediately to sense a kindred spirit in you.” He sighed. “Whereas with me, it’s sensing an unkindred one.”
“That’s not true-” The doomed lament of the longcase clock gave the half hour. “Christ, ten-thirty already. I’ve got to go.” Jury drank off his cognac and rose.
They were moving toward the door when Colonel Neame called out to Jury, “My dear chap, did you like the avocado and Stilton?”
Jury nodded and waved.
The colonel again called out, “I’d hated to have steered you wrong on that.”
At the door, Melrose stopped dead. “I don’t believe it. That you’d stoop so low…”
Jury grinned. “That’s why they call us the Filth.”
Mr. Gyp handed the freshly wrapped packets over the counter to Benny, saying, “Here’s chops and chine. Just you mind you get that up to the Lodge this morning as Mrs. MacLeish wants to get ’em stuffed and on their way.”
Benny really hated meat deliveries and especially Mr. Gyp’s as Gyp liked to talk about the cut-up meat as if something about it still lived: “get ’em on their way.” It was as if the poor pig was going off on a trip.
Mr. Gyp was always inviting Benny back to the abattoir and when Benny said no thanks, Gyp told him he hadn’t the stomach for life if he couldn’t make himself look it in the face.
“All of life ain’t an abattoir, Mr. Gyp. Not all of it.”
“You’ll learn, young Bernard. And your dog.” Benny didn’t like the way Mr. Gyp said this, sort of sinister like. He was always looking at Sparky, as if taking measurements in his mind. Probably more to make Benny uncomfortable than for any humane reason, Gyp would give him, occasionally, some leftover chops or a bit of mince and often a bone for Sparky. Gyp would slyly hand over a damp, blood-smeared packet of things for Benny to take to his “family.” Was it a big one? It must be for all the meat they eat, said Gyp. He was always trying to get Benny to tell him where he lived.
Benny had heard noises coming from the back that would send him flying from the shop, out to the curb where he’d sit with his head on his knees, dizzy. He might have fainted with the horror of it if he hadn’t got out. He swore he’d quit, but he didn’t. It wasn’t because he needed the money. It was because of the way Gyp asked him about his family, asked him why he wasn’t in school. Benny told him he was getting home schooling. Mr. Gyp said he ought to be in a proper school and maybe he, Gyp, should do his duty and “call the Social.” Benny didn’t know whether he would or not, but he was afraid to take the chance. Funny, but none of the others he worked for ever went on the way Gyp did. Not even Mr. Siptick, who was bad enough. But with the others, there’d only been some friendly questions asked and answered and then forgotten.
Benny didn’t have a large family, but what he had-Nancy and the rest of them-were all under Waterloo Bridge.
Before Benny’s mother died she’d told him if anything ever happened to her, not to hang around, for if the Social got wind of him, they’d slap him in an orphanage. Never mind about her, she said, just grab up Sparky and run for it. Get to the bridge.
But of course Benny couldn’t do it. When his mum died on the pavement outside Selfridges, he’d stood there waiting for her to come back. A crowd gathered and one of them summoned a constable who’d been strolling and enjoying a rare sunny day in June. It was this officer who collected Benny and took him along to the station to see what could be done for him. Never let the Social get you in its clutches, love.
But the Social had, in the form of a Miss Magenta who had stood looking at Benny there in the station, measuring him up with her eyes (the way Gyp did later). You could tell she loved her job, even if she didn’t love the children who made it possible. For she didn’t care about him; he sensed this, but he didn’t take it personally. She’d have been this way around any kid, with her cheap shiny smile and her cold pebble eyes.
While the constable was making out some sort of report, Miss Magenta was tidying Benny up. She’d been to the water fountain down the hall and was wiping his face with a damp handkerchief.
Disconsolate, but holding fast to Sparky’s thin rope he used for a lead, Benny looked around and saw an elderly lady, rather thin and gray-haired, but still pretty and so richly dressed the effect was stunning. She was sitting on a bench against the wall, waiting for someone or something, and was watching the social worker washing Benny’s face with the wet handkerchief. Benny knew what his mum had meant by getting in the “clutches” of someone, for he was definitely in Miss Magenta’s. Her small hand on his shoulder felt like an armored mitten.
Her other hand kept washing his face. She said, “Cleanliness is next to-”
“Dog turds,” Benny interrupted.
She rocked back on her heels, then collected herself and once again applied the damp handkerchief to his chin.
But the old lady, Benny noticed, was laughing, and it made him feel better, as if there were someone else in this chilly room who could share his feelings. He watched her open her purse, take out what looked to be bills and then sit there, seemingly waiting.
When Miss Magenta went once again to the fountain for a good soak of cleanliness, this lady moved with surprising speed to put her back between the fountain and Benny. She stuffed some bills in his cardigan pocket and whispered, “I’ll create a diversion; as soon as I’ve got their attention, run like hell.”
“Who is that woman?” asked Miss Magenta in a rather dangerous tone, as if, once the Social got you, you were no longer free to have chance encounters. Nothing from here on in would be left to chance.
The richly dressed lady called to her, “He reminds me of my greatgrandson. I’m Irene Albright.”
As Miss Magenta was finally putting the damp handkerchief away, there came a loud moan and Irene Albright fell in a heap on the floor. The constable, the desk sergeant, Miss Magenta and two or three others rushed to her aid. Benny was alone with the door only a few steps behind him. He backed up carefully with Sparky, and they were out on the pavement, where they both turned and ran like hell.
When Benny and Sparky got to the Lodge with the packets of chops and chine, Gemma was sitting on the bench with her doll, waiting. Mrs. MacLeish, the cook, had mentioned a delivery that morning and Gemma had come, as always, to wait by the gate. She took the meat and started off to the kitchen, calling over her shoulder she’d come straight back.
Benny climbed up onto the board wedged between the branches of a silver beech and waited. True to her word, Gemma was back before a minute had passed. Breathlessly, she asked, “What’s chin? I’m not eating something’s chin.” She climbed up and sat down across from Benny in the tree seat.
“It ain’t-isn’t-‘chin’; it’s ‘c-h-i-n-e’; it’s some part of the pig, it’s between his shoulder blades… I think I’ll stop eating meat. I can’t stand it that pig is slaughtered just so we can have pork chops and chine. And I can’t hardly stand Mr. Gyp anymore.”
“I hate him. He’s covered with blood. I wonder if butchers hate animals. I wonder if that’s why they get to be butchers.”
Snowball, Katherine Riordin’s cat, had come along to annoy Sparky. Snowball hissed.
“Gyp doesn’t like Sparky. I can tell that.”
Gem shook out her black hair so that it caught a flash of sunlight. “I’m not going to eat meat anymore.” She said this as if Benny hadn’t said it first. “A policeman was here yesterday.”
“He’s the same one that came to the bookshop.”
“He didn’t have a uniform on. It was probably his day off.”
“He’s a detective. They don’t wear uniforms.”
“Well, he didn’t have a gun either.”
“They don’t carry guns.” Benny wasn’t sure this was true, but he said it as if he were. He took this line with most things he said for uncertainty never got you anywhere.
Gem was removing the doll’s bonnet and studying its head. “But if there’s a fight, they could get killed if they don’t have guns.”
“Police think carrying a gun only makes things worse, it makes the criminals more likely to shoot.” That, he thought, was a really good idea. Maybe he’d read it somewhere.
“If he doesn’t have a gun, how can he fight back if someone tries to shoot me again?”
Benny looked up through the breeze-shivered leaves of this big tree and thought further: this detective from New Scotland Yard hadn’t simply dismissed the danger Gem was in. Benny frowned, concentrating on that. But Gemma-why Gemma? Why would someone want to get rid of her? Was it because old Mr. Tynedale liked her so much? Someone was afraid he would give away most of his money to Gemma?
“Are you thinking?” Gemma climbed down. “I’m going in to get some holy water and a towel. I’ll be right back.”
Benny grunted, only half hearing. Sparky followed Gem. He seemed to want to protect her.
Could Gemma know something she didn’t know was important, and someone had to make sure she never realized it and told? Or maybe she owned something important… Benny sat up straight, recalling a film he had seen (and he hadn’t seen many) and looked at the unnamed doll. His eyes widened; maybe the doll wasn’t hollow inside. Maybe someone had opened it up to stash jewels or drugs or something and then sewn it up again. Its torso was of firmly stuffed material, even though its head and limbs were hard plastic. He took the doll up, bareheaded without its bonnet, and prodded and prodded; he put it against his ear and shook it.
“What are you doing to Richard? Put him down!” Gem dropped the towel she was carrying and climbed up to the seat and took the doll.
Benny stared from her to the doll. “Richard? Richard?”
“I ran across it when I was doing the Rs.” She leaned the doll against her shoulder and patted his back because it had been manhandled so outrageously.
Benny leaned toward her. “The Rs were things like Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca. Richard is a boy’s name!”
“I know. It is a boy. I’d never name a girl Richard. We were all wrong, you see.” Gem was not about to take the wrongness on her own shoulders.
“She can’t be a boy. Not after all this time!” Benny sloughed himself off the tree and paced around. Sparky woofed. It was too infuriating! What a thing for her to pull! He said, “Look how she’s dressed, how she’s been dressed all this time, in that long female dress!”
Reasonably, Gemma said, “It’s christening clothes. It can be either one. Look-” she raised the doll’s dress, pointed to the placidly empty space between its legs. “See? Nothing.”
Benny blushed furiously. Oh, she looked so smug.
Waterloo Bridge rose out of the fog lying across the Thames, a sleeker, more stream-lined and diminished version of what it had been during the war. Benny had never seen the old Waterloo Bridge, but Mags had shown him pictures of it in old magazines. Still, it was quite a sight, rising with the lights of the South Bank behind it, and overhead, crowds of stars and an iridescent moon. He stood looking at the starry bridge until Sparky nudged his shoe, nudging him out of his daydreams so as to set about distributing what was in the packet from Mr. Gyp.
That was the way Benny saw Waterloo Bridge, when, after dark, he came back to his makeshift life on the Embankment. It was always dark now in December when he finished work. Often he stayed to help at the Moonraker, for Miss Penforwarden was often behindhand with her work: things like sending out notices of new books she’d acquired to customers on her mailing list. There were a lot of books to be posted to people on that list, names kept on cards in one of those round Rolodex files.
It surprised Benny how much work she had to do, and how uncomplaining she was about it. Aside from dithery looks here and there for something she’d set down and Now where is it? Pencil, Miss Penforwarden? Behind your ear. Glasses? In your hair. This amused her more than anything else, and Benny thought that this was because she didn’t get angry with herself, didn’t put herself down like most people (including Benny) were inclined to do. Benny resolved to be like that himself, as he considered it a real virtue.
Miss Penforwarden wanted to pay Benny for the extra time he put in, but Benny absolutely refused, for he was happy to do it. So in place of pay, she invited him and Sparky to have supper with her on those evenings. He gladly accepted. Dinner with Miss Penforwarden came a couple of nights a week and had got to be a regular event.
Miss Penforwarden talked a lot about the past, about her husband, dead now; about her son, dead, too; about her lovely dog Raven, also dead. Benny felt awful about Miss Penforwarden’s misfortunes; it seemed more than one person should be asked to bear. But her life was not presented as a tale of woe, and was all the more woeful for not being. It was matter-of-fact, even humorous; it was the way his own mother had been, keeping always at the forefront what was essential. As literally with her last breath she warned Benny about the National Handbag and managed a laugh.
Benny thought Sparky and he were very lucky; still, he reminded himself they gave as good as they got. As far as Benny knew, they were the only ones here camping under the bridge who actually worked for a living. Not that some of the others wouldn’t, given half a chance, but a lot of them used drugs and drank themselves to sleep, where he could understand they’d sooner be than awake. Wakefulness for them provided no ease.
The ones who were clear enough in the head, begged. Benny did not look down on this because his own mother had been forced to beg. Before, they had had a nice life, for Benny recalled a solid house with lots of rooms where he had lived with his mother. She had cooked for this wealthy family. Only, one day saw them not so wealthy; the man of the house had gone bankrupt and staff had been let go. It’s through no fault of your own, Mary; we’ve just got to tighten up. Bankrupt. A funny word to him as a little boy. Had the bank erupted? He pictured pound notes flying up and outward, falling again like volcanic ash.
Sparky always got first pick from the package and always chose the beef bone, but still he whiffed them all: chops, bones. He took his bone and trotted off to wherever he gnawed it or buried it, saving it, maybe, for a rainy day.
Here under the bridge was the place to be on rainy days, all right. For the most part they were not friendly people, and Benny could hardly blame them. Twice Benny was robbed before he decided to bank his earnings. He had set up a savings account at NatWest and he now had quite a bit of money in it. He would never have been accepted under the bridge, never, if he hadn’t stopped here with his mother for the last few months of her life, so they had got used to Benny. When his mother died, several of them had been very kind and offered him food and gin. Mags, wrapped in bunched and knotted shawls, had held him and rocked him, saying, “Poor lad, poor lad.” It had been and would always be as far as Benny was concerned the worst day of his life.
And, of course, he was also liked for the occasional packets from the butcher. They could cook the chops over a small fire. The bones did well in a watery soup. There was never enough to go around, of course, but still, it helped.
He had a pallet to sleep on. He had got blankets from the Lodge when he found Mrs. MacLeish was going to donate them to Oxfam. He had explained to her that the RSPCA was always looking for blankets and stuff, and that he put in time there as a volunteer; she was perfectly amenable to having the blankets go there (and also told him what a good child he was to be so concerned about the poor animals).
Benny found the Sergeant reading a book with the aid of his flashlight. He had an old terrier that would sit and bark, but in a friendly manner, at Sparky. Sparky woofed back, also in a friendly manner, and Benny imagined it was by way of having a conversation.
“Ah! Young Bernard. What’ve we today?”
Benny handed him the paper-wrapped chops. The Sergeant would then distribute them according to “rank,” his term, meaning only to whoever was left out last time. Benny preferred not to do the handing out. They knew he brought it, and they certainly appreciated it (and thanked him), but it was better if the Sergeant handed it out himself.
“And is it Mr. Gyp we have to thank for all this?”
It always was, but the Sergeant always said this, making a ritual of handing over the goods.
“The generous Gyp.” The Sergeant winked.
For both of them knew that Gyp was not a generous man.
Tonight, Benny watched the Sergeant walk to the enclosure beneath the bridge, and clutched his cap in his hand. In a rusted oil drum they’d got a fire going with newspapers, cardboard boxes, twigs and maybe some skinny branches they’d picked up in Hyde Park or Green Park. Sometimes the air smelled of pine, and he could imagine himself in the freedom of the north woods somewhere, maybe in the Alps or even in the northern United States.
No one here seemed to have the name he was born with, but instead had exchanged it for a name that better suited. “Mags” was not short for Margaret or Megan, but for “magazines,” which Mags had collected over time and trundled around in her stolen Safeway shopping cart. About the cart she said, “You’ll not see many more of these in future. Now, they lock ’em up. What bloody nonsense. Why, what I got here-” she put her hand on the metal cart “-it’s gonna be a collector’s item! When I went to Safeway awhile back, here they’d fitted the line of carts with this fancy locking thingamajig where you bung in a pound coin-a whole pound, can you bloody believe it?-and then get your pound back at the end at customer service. Don’t think I didn’t call the store manager over and gave him what-for. Like what if a person’s not got a pound coin on him and was I expected to go wait in line just to get a fiver changed? Had one, too. I keep a fiver by me so’s they don’t think I’m homeless. Disgraceful! I said. ‘I call lockin’ up the carts a bloody disgrace! I know there’s thieving, but to put your shopper through all this foolery just because a few of these carts gets nicked!’ I went on and you bet the women standing there and heard this, they were with me all the way and started in complainin’ and gettin’ quite shirty with him. He wanted to throw me out, but with all them women, well, he couldn’t very well. So what he did was smile his smarmy smile and plug a pound in the slot and Bob’s your uncle, I had me cart. I strolled round the produce with it and then when I didn’t see him, I just wheeled it out the door.”
“Benny,” Mags had gone on, “one thing you always want to do is stay on the offensive. This is the best life lesson you’ll learn. For the second you turn defensive, they’ll be circling like vultures, for they know you’re dead! Act as if you know you’re right. Like, if the Bill comes stickin’ its nose in when you’re jimmying a lock off a lock-up garage, stand your ground, stand your ground, and say you lost your key. When they ask you who you bloody are, you hand ’em a card, any card that you carry around-you should always carry some business cards, don’t matter whose. Write a phone number on the back. ‘Sorry, officer (you ijit), I recently had the number changed.’ That kind of thing throws the Bill. They ain’t total ijits and you might not get away with it, but I ’ave more ’n once. It just throws ’em. I could tell you stories, young Ben-”
That was Mags. Benny had no idea what the Sergeant’s birth name was. It was the Sergeant who kept watch over the place under the bridge to make sure it got cleared up every morning or the Bill would have something to say. (Thames police had a station just by Waterloo Bridge, too.) Benny didn’t know where the Sergeant stashed the blankets and pallet. But the Sergeant had said that as Benny was working all day and bringing food back for them, the least they could do for him and Sparky was take care of his stuff. Benny could have afforded a bed-sit somewhere nearer his job in Southwark. People were always putting up little cards in Mr. Siptick’s window advertising bed-sits and rooms for rent. The problem wasn’t money, but age. What landlady would rent to a twelve-year-old boy (and his dog)? What would happen, and he knew it would happen, was the Social. His mum had warned him and so had Mags. For Benny the Social had horns and cloven feet.
Benny loved the Victoria Embankment, Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge beyond it, and up the other way was Blackfriars, and the Thames in the early morning layered in mist. He liked to watch the river and think about the stories the Sergeant was always telling him about the old docks and warehouses, Wapping and Stepney, Whitechapel and Limehouse. All the ships, maybe five hundred of them, coming up the Thames from Gravesend, when the Thames was a real working river. It still was, but now, not much muscle or sinew-too many boats carrying tourists back and forth.
Occasionally, a sunset could be so intense that it looked as if London were burning. Great flares of orange and red that seemed impossible to have ignited over a city so vastly gray, and often dreary, Benny thought, if you didn’t look underneath.
There was always underneath. You couldn’t take things at face value. He thought of his mother, Mary. Underneath her head scarf and wool shawl, his mother was never a beggar. She had lost everything in one fell swoop-Benny’s father, and his pay, and she having no skills to work going had lost their little house in County Clare. But there had been those fortunate few years when she had worked as cook for the bankrupt family, but that too had gone. It was a terrible thing about coming finally to the streets; it was a long slide that you’d thought you’d stopped once, twice, three times; that you thought you’d got a handle on, and then only to find you’d slid farther down until your bum at last connected with cement.
He could see each of them now with his chop on the end of a stick holding it over the fire, and the Sergeant on his way back. He wore a long, heavy brown coat that had all of its buttons still. He was very proud that it didn’t look seedy. It was all he had, the Sergeant had told Benny, from the old life in National Service. “Mucked about in the military police, me, in the war. Be surprised what you learn as an MP. Proper job I had of it, sorting out who done what to who. But it seems I’ve a mind for that sort of thing.”
They had sat down to look out over the river. Benny said, “I met a policeman a couple days ago. A detective from Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland Yard? Now that’s something, that is. What did he want?”
Benny told him about the murder. “He wanted to know about Gem, too.”
“That poor little girl someone wants her out of the way? Never did hear of such a thing. Terrible.”
“The thing is, I always took it that Gem was making it up. You know, so people’d pay attention to her. She hasn’t got a proper family, I mean, no mum or dad, sisters, brothers-she hasn’t got anyone.”
“It’s a puzzle, young Ben, it surely is.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I wonder… now, I had experience as an MP with a young soldier who was, uh, messing around with the captain’s wife. I finally twigged it, but what he done, see, was parade a good-looking German tart-ahem, I mean a woman-around just to put us off the scent. With a girl that looked like her, why bother with the wife? What I’m sayin’ is, could the business with young Gemma be a distraction?”
Benny frowned. “Distraction? But from what?”
The Sergeant shrugged, wetting cigarette paper with the tip of his tongue. “How about that murder?”
“Yes, but… trying to kill Gem, all that happened before the murder.”
“Still…”
They were silent for a few moments as the Sergeant smoked his cigarette. Benny looked through the dark out over the river to the lights on the far side. “Still, I wish that detective’d come back.”
The Sergeant pinched the end of his cigarette before lighting it. “You can bank on that, young Ben. The Bill always comes back.”