I Am the Only Running Footman (2 page)

Quickly, they fell about their business — literally fell, going down on hands and knees, searching every inch of ground for prints, tracks, fibers, anything.

“Name's Sheila Broome,” said a uniformed constable, who'd searched the backpack. “Lived in Exeter —”

Macalvie bent down to pick up a tiny clip, a bit of white paper adhering to the end. “Roach clip. So she was standing here, smoking grass. Or they were. Killers don't usually stand around toking with their victims. Maybe it's close to home; a boyfriend, maybe.”

The constable almost pitied the boyfriend as he looked at his chief.

“Get an incidents room out here,” said Macalvie, walking away from the angry white glare of the camera flash.

D
ECEMBER

R
ICHARD
Jury had to reach across Susan Bredon-Hunt, at the same time trying to disengage himself from the long arms that always grew more tangled and vinelike when telephones rang.

She was definitely a phone-clinger. She marched her fingers up and down his chest, drew circles round his ear, dusted his face with her lashes as if she were taking prints, and generally made clever-telephone repartee impossible.

Fortunately, no clever repartee was needed. Chief Superintendent Racer, having been routed out of his bed, was determined to bounce Jury from his. “Four rings, Jury! What the hell were you doing?”

It was just as well the question was rhetorical, since Susan Bredon-Hunt's lips were brushing across his face. He raised his hand, but it was like trying to push cobwebs away. Bits and pieces of her clung everywhere.

“— hate to disturb you,” said Racer, whose sarcasm poked at him like Susan Bredon-Hunt's finger. “Could you crawl out of bed and get yourself over to Mayfair?”

Crawl out was what he had to do in order to get past Susan
Bredon-Hunt. Finally, sitting on the edge of the bed, he said, “Where in Mayfair?”

“Charles Street. Berkeley Square. Hays Mews.” Racer barked the names out like a BritRail conductor. “Woman's been murdered.” The receiver on the other end crashed down.

Jury apologized to Susan and was into his clothes in fifteen seconds.

“Just like
that!”
She snapped her fingers. “You leave just like that!”

He was tired. “That's how people get killed, love. Just like that.”

When he bent to kiss her, she turned her face away.

Jury collected his coat and car keys and left.

•  •  •

Police cars had converged, angling toward the curb in Charles Street and up on the pavement outside of the pub. Beneath the lamplit sign of I Am the Only Running Footman, Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins was writing in his notebook, asking questions of the short, plump woman who had found the body.

The whirring domed lights of the last two cars to careen up in front of the pub cast blue ribbons on the wet pavement, blue shadows across the faces of Wiggins and the woman. She had been walking her dog in the square late that night, and she and it were extremely upset, she said. The Alsatian sniffed Wiggins's feet and yawned.

Jury assured her that when she was taken to the police station she would be kept no longer than absolutely necessary, that any call she wished to make could be made, that they greatly appreciated her help, that she had done something not everyone would by calling for police. This calmed her and she was answering Wiggins's questions now. Up and down the short street and around the corner, uniformed policemen
were asking their own questions of the residents of Hays Mews who had come out from their trendy little houses to stand in the drizzle. Screens had been placed at the end of the mews to keep the curious from satisfying much of their curiosity.

While the medical examiner was dictating findings to a tape recorder, Jury stood and looked at the young woman's body lying face down on the street, light hair fanned out, legs jackknifed. Wiggins had come up beside him.

“Through with that?” Jury asked of the fingerprint man and pointing to the small black purse whose strap was still hitched over her shoulder, tangling with her long scarf. The man nodded to Jury and Jury nodded to Wiggins. The M.E. looked over at Jury with annoyance. She didn't like questions crossing the comments she was tossing like a knife-thrower over her shoulder at her assistant. Jury looked at her sharp gray eyes and smiled brightly. She grunted.

“Ivy Childess,” said Wiggins, holding up the identification he had taken from the dead woman's purse and which he held with a handkerchief. “Address is ninety-two Church Street, Bayswater. That's about all, sir, besides checkbook, bank card, some change. With that little bit of money, she might just have been having a drink in the pub, wouldn't you say?” He returned the license to the purse and snapped it shut.

“Might have been,” said Jury, as he waited for the M.E. to finish. He knew she hated any interference.

Having brought his handkerchief into play with the purse, Wiggins used it to blow his nose. “It's this damned wet. Know I'm coming down with something. Flat on my back I'll be.” His tone was pensive.

“Ivy Childess certainly is.” The rain fell, steadily and tenaciously, but the medical examiner seemed not to notice it at
all. Crisis-as-usual had worn her pretty face as smooth as stone under water.

“No marks I can see except for the neck. Strangled with her own scarf. Some women never learn.”

Jury smiled slightly. Dr. Phyllis Nancy had a way of examining things for sexual bias, even dead bodies. Jury wanted to tell her that such bias in police work had pretty much gone the way of all flesh, male or female. But Dr. Nancy seemed as committed to her defensiveness as she was to her job.

“When can you do the autopsy, Phyllis?”

No one called her Phyllis. That's why Jury did.

“You wait your turn, Superintendent. I've got a schedule, too.”

“I know. I'd just appreciate it if maybe you'd move this nearer the top. We know how she was killed and it looks pretty routine —”

Routine
was not a word Phyllis Nancy liked. And his comment was, as Jury knew it would be, an opportunity for her to give a little lecture, something she seldom got a chance to do, especially around police superintendents. “The woman's still got skin, hair, fingertips, liver, pancreas, bones, tissue. Even a heart.”

“So do you, Phyllis.” He smiled at her. Jury had come upon Dr. Nancy once, window-shopping on New Bond Street, standing outside Dickins and Jones, ogling the elaborate display of bridal and bridesmaids' gowns. He had waited until she'd walked on to catch her up and invite her for a drink. Phyllis Nancy would hate to have been caught mooning over the Dickins and Jones window-wedding: bride, groom, lace, flowers. He turned from her to give directions to a police inspector. The street would have to be covered inch by inch. Then he turned back to Dr. Nancy. “Whenever you can, Phyllis. Thanks.”

She turned away to hide a smile. The whole thing was a little ritual. If he patronized her, man to woman, he knew she got a kick out of it. Under all of that expertise and armor was a very nice person who liked to have lunches out, go to movies, buy nice clothes. She collected her bag and her assistant, said she'd get round to the autopsy as soon as she could, got in a car, streaked away through the rain.

I
T
was a well-tended terraced house on a residential street dotted with estate agents' signs and a depressing similarity of facades that was not at its best in the early morning light. Next door was one of the houses for sale, unlived in from the condition of the garden, where a small climbing rose struggled for position between clumps of weeds and rusted bicycle wheels. The porches and doorframes of several of the houses had been painted in strong, riotous colors, but the dull light returned them to anonymity again, reds and blues barely distinguishable, looking caked and dried to the color of old blood.

The Childess house had kept to a bottle-brown for the small fence and the door, which looked the color originally chosen, one more in keeping with what the street was originally intended for — a sensible lower-middle-class bastion of British sobriety.

The woman who opened the door at Jury's knock wore a flannel bathrobe the color of the trim and a piece of toweling
round her head either to hide the curlers there or to ease the strain when she slept. Her look at him was as taut as the door-chain.

“Mrs. Childess?” He brought his warrant card near the inch of open space. “Could we speak to you, please?”

He had seen that look many times, confusion outstripped by fear. It astonished him sometimes, the way in which otherwise imperceptive and even dull minds could in some circumstances make a leap of certainty to the worst possible conclusion. The woman knew that he had come about the girl, but had immediately buried that knowledge.

Behind her a voice full of sleep said, “Who is it, Irene?”

Into that uncertain silence between the question put by the thin-faced husband and her reply to it, Jury dropped his request to come in. The door closed and the latch scraped back.

As they entered, Wiggins touched his fingers to his hat. That part of Jury's mind that permitted escape into minutiae reminded him to buy a hat; he hated hats. He introduced himself and his sergeant to the couple, and the man, whom she had addressed as Trevor, blinked and started apologizing for the lapsed road tax sticker.

“It's not about that, Mr. Childess. I'm afraid that something's happened to your daughter. She was found in Berkeley Square. She was dead.” There was no way to prepare anyone for this, no way to soften the blow; Jury had always felt stretching it out with words like “accident” only added to the agony. If you saw the crash was inevitable, if the lorry was bearing down on you, you shouldn't have to stare at the headlamps too long. “I'm terribly sorry.”

Neither the mother nor the father said,
That's impossible,
or
That couldn't have happened,
or otherwise tried to hold the knowledge at bay. Maybe it was the heavy note of finality in his voice; maybe it was the empathy. Mrs. Childess's veined hands flew to her mouth, and she shook her head,
tears spattering like rain. Her husband stared; his arm came up automatically to fall across her shoulders.

When finally they had sat down in a small parlor too full of Ivy Childess for much comfort, Jury waited for a few moments while she tried to combat another rush of tears. Wiggins, who always had a fresh supply of handkerchiefs somewhere about him, pushed one into her hands. Jury asked a few routine questions about Ivy in as dry a tone as possible without being curt. Too much sympathy was often worse than none at all. When the father finally asked what had happened and where, Jury put it as briefly and kindly as possible. “There didn't seem to have been much of a struggle and she must have died very quickly.”

“But who could possibly have wanted to — do that to our Ivy?” Mrs. Childess said, addressing her husband as if he might have some secret store of knowledge about Ivy. “I don't understand. I just don't understand.” She leaned her face against her husband's thin chest.

“That's why we're here, Mrs. Childess; that's what we want to find out. If you could bear with us a bit . . .” He nodded to Wiggins, who sat back and opened his notebook. “Could you tell us anything about her friends? Men, especially.”

Trevor Childess looked startled. “Well, yes. There was one named Marr. Ivy said as how she was kind of engaged to him. Marr. Yes, I'm sure that's the name, wasn't it, Irene? David Marr, she said. Bit of a catch that was—” And he smiled briefly before he realized that the catch would never be landed.

“How long had your daughter known him?”

The question seemed to make Childess uncomfortable; he shifted in his chair and studied his hands when he answered. “Well, we didn't really know him, I suppose.” That apparently sounded very odd even to his own ears, and he looked at the drawn face of his wife for direction.

Jury didn't think she'd heard her husband. The flow of tears had stopped, but the handkerchief was still wadded against her mouth and her arm was across her stomach, holding herself like something broken.

“Never did get round to coming here,” said the father, “though Ivy kept saying she'd bring him to tea one day.”

The father glanced quickly around the room and Jury saw what he saw: a parlor, well tended like the yard, neat and orderly, but plain if not actually shabby. The suite of furniture, probably purchased on hire-purchase, armchairs and a sofa covered with an afghan probably crocheted by his wife or a relative in colors that should brighten the place but only increased its anonymity.

To avoid heaping even more distress on the man's platter — inconsequential but still humiliating — Jury offered him a cigarette, lit one himself, and got up to walk about the parlor. He nodded to Wiggins to continue the questioning.

Several of his colleagues at headquarters had asked Jury why, given his position, he did not avail himself of a detective inspector for an assistant. Jury asked them why he should, told them the sergeant had saved his life at least twice. That was the truth, but it wasn't the reason. Jury respected Wiggins, for Wiggins felt a strong bond with those who were often labeled as underdogs. Sergeant Wiggins's presence was soothing; he gave witnesses the impression somehow that he was one of them, had come amongst them with his notebook and pen; his economical, even parsimonious gestures; his long silences and sympathetic stares (often not related to the problem at hand); not to mention his roster of maledictions that nudged awake the sleeping hypochondria in everyone; his ability to scale the Metropolitan Police down to the pleasant bobby on the corner. In an old morality play, Wiggins would have been the shepherd come to bear witness. And he always had a spare handkerchief.