The narrow house in the street in Mayfair was flanked by a jeweler and an art dealer, both of them so pricey that each shop window displayed only a single piece: a sapphire necklace that seemed to float above its crystal display pole; and, in the art dealer's, a single painting in a heavy gilt frame suspended by nearly invisible wires. Mayfair itself seemed suspended in some dimension that escaped the pull of gravity.
Inside the offices of Smart Publishing, Jury found another dimension of light and muted sound-sylvan music piping from hidden speakers that went well with walls painted watery yellow; the rooms, the hallway were relieved only by an off-white that shaded into the pale color. It had the look of meringue, possibly conceived by the editor of the cookery column.
From what Jury could tell in the reception room where he sat thumbing through Segue, there were two other magazines-a glossy one called Travelure, and an artier number called New Renascence. He loved that title. It was devoted to, or divided between, haunts and habitats of the moneyed. Interiors filled with marble, mauve curtains, Kirman carpets, and gloved servants; al fresco scenes by sun-beaded pools; acres of landscaped gardens and deep-shadowed paths through cypress and lacy willows, made for trysts and meditations. A world, in other words, that existed nowhere except between the covers of New Renascence.
Segue was by far the most serious of the three, in addition to being the most expensive, the richest and glossiest. No tales of the buskers' lot here, Jury was sure. On the cover was a serious-looking, serious-minded cellist against a backdrop of blue velvet. Jury was trying to place the name, but giving up because he knew he'd never really heard of the cellist, when the receptionist walked in with a cup of coffee. Bone china, not plastic.
She stopped short and asked him his business. He told her he had an appointment to see Mr. Martin Smart. When that failed to budge her, he added (after shoving his warrant card forward), or anyone else who just happened to know Roger Healey-did she, for instance? That sent her quickly to her desk, where the china cup and saucer rattled as she picked up the interoffice phone.
Having got the okay, she said, in a high, strident voice that detracted from a soft, mellow body, that she would take him to Mr. Smart. Three flights up, and they hadn't a lift.
He followed her from staircase to staircase. Her hips swayed nicely beneath the gray silk dress whose shadows shimmered and dissolved as she moved. Otherwise, everything about her seemed to come to points: the tips of her breasts and the tips of her shoes; her chin, her tilted eyes, the wing shape made stronger by artful application of kohl liner; her glimmering hairdo of shellacked, highlighted spikes. She reminded Jury of a small, rocky promontory. As he followed down the hall of the top floor, he felt a pang; it was poignant in a way; for she now reminded him of a thirteen-year-old getting herself up in an older sister's garb, who would have been excessively pretty had she not tried to be glamorous.
She stood at the doorway of Mr. Smart's office, which was empty of Mr. Smart, and said, "He'll be here in just a minute."
Jury nodded. "Thanks." When Jury smiled at her, she smiled herself, but uncertainly, and kept her hand on the porcelain doorknob, swinging the door slightly back and forth, biting her lip, perhaps thinking she might linger there herself for the moment of Mr. Smart's absence. She had very small white teeth. Definitely thirteen, he decided, even though she was thirty.
Jury seated himself in a pricey-looking leather chair that seemed, in its softness, to fold around him. The dark green walls stenciled in old gold beneath an old gold molding, the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the library steps, the mahogany escritoire that housed a wet-bar, the massive desk, the Italian leather furniture all struck Jury as expecting the imminent return of the CEO. The desk itself was piled with papers and magazines, all artfully arranged in stand-and-deliver stacks. Jury craned his neck to look at the wet-bar. No cat in there; Mr. Smart had settled instead for Courvoisier and hand-cut crystal. The whole office looked hand-cut. Indeed it was the most bespoken-appearing room Jury had ever seen-everything measured, trimmed, and cut to precise tastes.
Jury turned and half rose when one of the personnel (the only one not dressed to the nines that Jury had seen in these offices) stalked in, leaving in his wake a trail of papers, plunked the rest on the desk, and turned to leave, nodding to Jury.
At least Jury thought he had turned to leave. Instead he folded his arms under sweaty armpits and asked Jury what he wanted, in an abstracted and rather unfriendly tone. But before Jury could answer, he'd navigated the lake of the desk, sat down, and reduced everything on it to a shambles within five seconds.
Martin Smart made annoyed clicking sounds with his tongue, murmured he wished to hell she'd leave his stuff alone, how was he supposed to find a goddamn thing? The ordered desk files became a swimming mass. Apparently satisfied, he stuffed a cold-looking, rather shredded stump of cigar in his mouth, folded his arms, and sent papers aflutter as his arms clamped down on them. He said to Jury, "Something I can do for you? Oh, don't bother with that."
Jury had bent in his chair to pick up a few of the orphaned papers that Smart had left in his wake.
"I can find them easier if they're down there. What can I do for you?" he repeated, round his cold cigar. He seemed to be running his hands underneath the papers searching for matches, gave it up, opened a drawer, peered in, gave that up, and asked Jury if he'd like a drink.
"No, thanks. Like a light?"
Smart yanked the cigar from his mouth, looked at its unpleasant condition, shrugged and said, "Why bother?" He put it down on the papers. "You're a superintendent, right?"
"Right."
Mr. Smart pursed his lips and shook his head in wonder. "How'd you get that high? Wha'd'ya have to do to get way up there?"
He sounded genuinely interested, as if he were either doing a bio on Jury or thinking of applying for a job with the C.I.D.
"It's not the rarefied air you might imagine. Chief superintendent, assistants to commissioner, and the commissioner himself. They're all above me. No one's above you."
Martin Smart seemed to like this analogy. He smiled broadly. "Wrong. You're forgetting the readers." He squinted, leaned over his mess of papers, and said, "Superintendent Jury. Jury, Jury, Jury." He tapped a staccato beat with his index fingers. "Where've I heard that name? Oh, hell. You were the one at that place up in West Yorkshire when-"
"Roger Healey was shot." Jury couldn't somehow bring himself to say murdered.
Smart clapped his hand to his forehead. He made a quick turn in his leather swivel chair, rolled it over to the green-curtained window bay, sat like a patient in a wheelchair staring out from his hospital prison, then turned and inched the chair back. "Roger." He found a cigarette and a silver-brushed lighter that had managed to go missing under a cover of old Segue copies. "Hell."
"You were close to him, were you?"
"Not exactly. He wasn't a staffer; he was a contributor. But absolutely one of the best. First rate. A few times he'd bring in a piece and we'd talk. A nice man. A really nice man. Old Alice out there,"-he poked his cigarette toward the hall-"had a real thing for him. All the women did. Well, he was nice to them, wasn't he? Bring round flowers and candy." He knocked some ash from his cigarette with the tip of his little finger. "A damned bloody shame, that was. No one can figure it out."
"Did you ever meet Mrs. Healey?"
"Never did, no."
"Any of your staff know Roger Healey? Aside from the flowers and candy?" Jury smiled to take the bite from his tone.
"Might ask Mavis. Mavis Crewes." He leaned back and stared up at the rococo ceiling molding with a frown that suggested he had no idea who'd done the fancy plastering job or why. "Mavis, Mavis, Mavis."
Martin Smart seemed to have a ritualistic fascination with names. "Who's she, and where?" Jury had his notebook out.
"Managing editor of Travelure. Isn't that a hell of a name? I wanted to call it Travel, period. Our marketing people-and Mavis, of course-argued there must be a dozen going under that name." He flashed Jury a smile. "Find one. Find one that isn't tarted up with something in the name that's to make you think you're heading for the end of the rainbow. So I suggested calling it Holy Grail. You know, I honestly think they'd have bought it. Anyway, Mavis is good at her job; she's been thirty years in the business. I leave her alone."
The implication was that he was happy to have Mavis leave himalone. "Is she here today?"
Again Smart's eyes lifted to the ornamental ceiling as he shook his head. "I told her she could work at home whenever she wanted. Naturally, she travelures a lot of the time. She's big on Africa. Kenya. So forth. Her husband was a safari nut. She lives somewhere near Kensington Gardens. Old Alice can give you the address. Hold it." Smart hit the intercom, got old Alice, and scribbled down the information. "Here." He handed the address to Jury. Then he sat scratching his fingers through his hair, hard, making a spiky, stand-up mess of it. It appeared to be his way of reducing stress, something like Churchill and his ten-minute naps. "Since it's clear that the wife murdered him, why are you here? I don't understand."
"Just trying to tie up a few loose ends."
"Having to do with Roger?"
"Not only Mr. Healey."
"Pretty soon you're going to say 'routine investigation, sir.' The papers made a big thing out of the kidnapping of those boys all that time ago."
Jury nodded.
"Does that tie in?"
"I don't know."
"You're a mine of information." Smart washed the sea of papers about for no apparent reason. "You should work on one of these rags we publish."
"Everyone liked Roger Healey, then?"
Martin Smart gave Jury a sharp look. "Far as I know. Shouldn't we have done?"
"Of course. It's just that a person who's universally liked…" Jury shrugged.
"A cynic, too." The trick smile showed itself again. "I know what you mean, but I don't know what you're up to. I wouldn't say universallyliked. There's probably a few concert musicians who could have flayed him, I don't know. The thing about his reviews, though, is they weren't laced with stings and arrows. Edgy, sometimes." He started gathering up papers and stacking them neatly, then stopped and dealt them out as if they were playing poker. "Of course, there's Duckworth."
"Duckworth?"
"Morry. He's American. Rhythm and blues, straight blues, heavy metal, reggae, New Wave, that stuff. They call it rock and roll."
"He doesn't-didn't like Roger Healey?"
"Means little. Duckworth doesn't like anyone. Except me. I found him glued to his earphones in the Village-New York City. Let me tell you, it took a lot to lure him over here. I hate that effing word. I only toss him out because you're clearly determined to find someonewho didn't like Roger. Sounds a bit biased, if you don't mind my saying so. But I'm sure the Met has reasons the mind will never know. Here's Duckworth's number." Again, he handed Jury a scrap of paper, torn from a letter from the chairman of the board, Jury noticed when he looked at it. "It's probably a prison cell."
"The Met appreciates your help. Could I have a look at some old issues of Segue?"
"Healey's reviews? Of course." Smart hit the intercom again, spoke to his secretary, then leaned back with his hands laced behind his head. "Superintendent, what are you looking for?"
Jury pocketed his notebook, rose, thanked Martin Smart, and said, "Nothing in particular."
"You really should work here."
Jury turned to go, turned back. "Would you mind if my sergeant came round in a day or two to talk to some of your staff?"
Smart gazed again at the ceiling. "Hell, no. Send the Dirty Squad for all I care. Liven the place up." He screwed up his face. "Why the hell would she kill him?" He looked at Jury. "Maybe they were having a bit of trouble?" His expression was perfectly serious.
"I expect you could say that." Jury said good-bye.
Jury could not quite believe the interior of this house off Kensington Gardens, near Rotten Row. From the outside, it was just another narrow, Georgian building, with its yellow door and dolphin-shaped brass knocker.
But the inside seemed to stretch endlessly and cavernously to this room in which he now sat with Mavis Crewes, a room that seemed part solarium, part enormous floor-to-ceiling aviary full of bird plumage, bird twitter, bird greenery. A tiny, bright eye, opening and closing like a pod, regarded him through the fronds of several palmettos.
Nor was it the only greenery, for round about the room were set tubs of plants, some treelike and overhanging; some tough and flat-leaved; some feathery and ferny; but all suggesting jungle heat and dust. This was further enhanced by the near-life-sized ceramic leopard looking slant-eyed out of the rubber plants, and by the boar's head, open-mouthed and glaring glassily from the wall to Jury's right. Behind him sat a gun case; his feet were trying to miss contact with the zebra rug beneath the table carved from a tree her last husband had carted back from Nosy-Be. A tree (Mavis Crewes had told him) that wasfady-taboo. Her husband wasn't superstitious.
He was also dead. Jury wondered from what.
Jury and Mavis Crewes sat in this solarium, surrounded by strange exotic plants, grass shields, spears, and Ibo masks, drinking coffee and Evian water with a cut-glass carafe of whiskey standing by as a fortifier.
Jury kept trying to wave away the thin stems of a hanging bougainvillea. The surroundings that he himself found suffocating, Mavis Crewes apparently found soothing and restful. Between little spasms of speech, the breakings off partly the result of talking of Roger Healey's death, but also partly her own natural abruptness. A tiger's eye stone glinted on the hand that fingered a petal here, a leaf there. There was a chunky diamond on the finger of the hand slowly twisting the glass of Evian water that helped in what Jury imagined to be her campaign to stay travel-thin.
He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped down to forty. The latest fashion (Jury knew from glancing into various Regent Street shops) was the safari look: desert colors or camouflage greens, loose shirts and skirts with low, heavy belts, nothing he could imagine any woman found flattering. She wore a bush jacket over a sand-colored shirt and Hermes boots.
In this environment, and with her thin, slightly muscular look, all of that fitted Mavis Crewes rather perfectly. Except, of course, that they didn't resemble mourning, something she had brought up at the beginning of their interview. She hadn't anything black, you see, and she hardly thought it the time for a shopping spree, given the death of her "dear, old friend." If she thought mourning clothes appropriate two weeks after his death, she must have meant to imply he had been very dear indeed. With her swept-back, pale blond hair, he wondered if perhaps she knew black didn't show her to any advantage. The eyes he had thought at first to be black were a murky jungle green.
After the divorce of the first and the death of the second husband, she had stuck her thumb in the pie again and apparently pulled out the biggest plum thus far, Sir Robert Crewes, safari buff, a Knight of the Royal Victoria Order, higher than the OBE her cousin had managed to reel in. Mavis Crewes was very impressed by the title, though knighthoods abounded among civil servants, members of the Royal household, and the foreign service. It was peppered with them probably as a reward for one's going off somewhere (anywhere) to represent the country.
It was not that Jury doubted that Mavis Crewes's grief was genuine; it was just that he wondered how deeply she felt about anything-except, perhaps, the venomous anger for Healey's wife. Although she seemed to refuse to acknowledge her as such: "that woman" was the phrase she used when speaking of Nell Healey.
"Hard as nails," she said now, still twisting the delicate glass between thumb and forefinger as if it were a stem she might snap. She sighed. "That woman."
"Tell me about her, Mrs. Crewes."
"Nell was the second wife." Jury wondered that Mavis Crewes, who had second-wifed it aplenty, could rationalize this. "And not the boy's mother." She threw Jury a basilisk glance.
"What happened to the mother?"
"Went off to the Swiss Alps. Had a skiing accident."
"You think the stepmother couldn't have cared about Billy, then?"
He had said the wrong thing, or in the wrong tone. She sat back again, arms resting on the arms of the white wicker chair, flexing her fingers. "You sound as if you sympathize with her, Superintendent. That's absolutely astounding. But you couldn't have known her well." She gave him a small, cunning smile, as if they'd reached an agreement. "I'm not sure what your role is in this. What are you investigating? That she killed Roger is not open to question. That she managed to be released until her trial certainly is. Women like Nell Healey always seem to get what they want. She's flint, she's stone."
Jury hoped his smile would offset his words. "Stone generally meets with hard resistance itself."
"If you're implying Roger was hard, you've got it all wrong. He was totally devastated. You didn't know the man. You didn't know his warmth, his charm, his-"
"But you did," said Jury innocently.
She was smart enough to sidestep that. "They'd nothing in common. He loved travel, new experiences, new… sensations. He had an appetite for life. She was content to do nothing but stay in that godforsaken part of Yorkshire…" She looked round at the masks and guns as if Tanzania were more accessible.
"With Billy," said Jury. She flashed him a look. "You've been their guest, I take it."
"Yes. Several times. Charles Citrine thought of Roger as his own son."
"Mr. Healey sounds like a paradigmatic husband, father… friend." He let that word hang there. "Martin Smart admired him." He tried to smile, found it tough going.
"Oh, Martin..." She forgot the Evian, went for the whiskey decanter, giving Jury a dismissive glance. "Martin seems to think publishing's a sort of game; he sometimes hires the most inappropriate people-"
"They certainly looked, from the offices I passed, very old-school-tie-ish."
"Then you didn't pass Morpeth Duckworth. God. What a vile person. Do you know I caught him in my office one day with a mop and pail. Cleaning."
Jury wiped his hand across his mouth. "Why?"
"God knows. Well, he looks like a janitor, doesn't he? He's done it to others, too. Even Martin. Martin finds it excruciatingly funny. I think Duckworth's going through our files. He's American."
"Oh."
He heard calfskin whisper as she shifted in the wicker chair, crossing and recrossing her legs. "What are you asking these questions for? What's all this to do with Nell Healey?"
"I was thinking more of Billy. That case was never solved. I'm sorry." He rose. "You've been very helpful at what must be a terribly painful time."
That he would leave with so little resistance took her by surprise. "No, no. I'm just on edge." The tan, sinewy hands waved him down again.
Jury sat, gave her that reassuring smile, said, "How long had the Healeys been married before the boy disappeared?"
From the murky depths of her eyes came a glint like a spearhead. She ran the hand with the whiskey glass over the folds of her skirt, her head down. "Five or six years," she said vaguely.
Jury was sure she knew exactly how many years. The five years between six and eleven would have been awfully important for any child, especially a child with a new mother. But as he felt Mavis Crewes was disengaging, was pulling away from his questions now, he did not want to explore the relationship-or her version of it-between the little boy and his stepmother directly.
"Nell was-is-a Citrine." Impatiently waving away Jury's puzzlement, she went on. "The Citrine family is one of the oldest in the county. Old blood, old money. Charles refused a peerage."
If you can believe that. The hefting of her neatly plucked eyebrows implied that Jury must himself find this unimaginable. He kept his smile to himself, this time, wishing his friend Melrose Plant could hear this. "Kindly Call Me God" was his acronym for the holders of the KCMG. The OBE was the "Old Boy's End."
Only the cockatoo, beating a wing and turning round on its stand, reacted to Charles Citrine's crazy behavior as Mavis went on. "Don't misunderstand me, I've nothing against the Citrines. In spite of her. Yes, I expect I do resent that they've enough money and influence to bail her out after the arraignment. They can get her out, but they cannot get her off. No question of that!" She took a tiny black cigar from a silver-chased box and accepted Jury's light before she sat back behind a plume of smoke. "He's really quite a fine person, Charles. He's had a lot to do with improving the quality of life up there. In West Yorkshire, I mean. Gotten subsidies for the mills, created work where others seem to be destroying it-well, that's Thatcherism, isn't it? Charles is very public spirited, has been appealed to again and again to sit for Commons…"
And she went on at some length about Nell Healey's father, ending with, "I wrote him a note. I wanted him to know that I sympathize. I thought it appropriate."
The interview that had begun an hour ago with the appearance of a lover's display of grief seemed fast degenerating into a discussion of unemployment and politics. No. All of this talk suggested to Jury that Charles Citrine's high visibility was for Mavis Crewes something other than as a possible political candidate. She must have been ten years older than Healey. And was probably ten years younger than Citrine.
"Of course, it's lonely for him, I expect, living in that enormous place with only Irene. Calls herself Rena. Not much company, I shouldn't think, for a man with Charles's intellect. To tell the truth, in the last few years I think the sister has gone quite mad. Well, that sort of thing usually goes downhill, doesn't it?"
"Not uphill, at any rate. If you're speaking of a psychosis."
"Charles excepted, I'd say the entire family's round the twist. God knows, Nell's testament to that." Having given over the Evian water to the whiskey now, she poured herself another glass, drank it off, topped it up, restoppered the bottle. "To tell the truth: I wonder if Roger didn't marry her for it. Money, I mean." She looked at Jury as if he might confirm this, since he'd been in the same room with Nell Healey, circumstances notwithstanding.
"It's not uncommon." His smile was a little icy. "But couldn't he have loved her?"
She tossed back the whiskey. "What was there to love except money? Oh, she's not unattractive, but…"
Jury gave a slight headshake. Perhaps she really believed it. "What happened to Mr. Citrine's wife? Nell Healey's mother?"
"Dead." Beneath the tan, there was a rosy flush. "Charles is a widower-" Then she must have seen the implication of this and went hurriedly on to say, "It was probably a blessing that she never lived to see this."
With that hackneyed sentiment, even the cockatoo screeched.