I Am the Only Running Footman (20 page)

“I just dropped in to see if you'd like something from Brighton,” Jury said when she came in from the kitchen. Over her navy blue dress she was wearing an apron. Her hair was pulled back from her face and wound in a coil as neat and tight as a clockspring.

“Ah! Mr. Jury, I'm glad you're having a little holiday. Just wait, there is something I have for you.”

“Not a holiday, Mrs. Wassermann,” he called after her. “I only wish it were.”

While he waited, he looked around the flat; with the sun
warming the windowpanes and tossing coins of light on the brightly patterned rug she'd brought from Poland, it looked much different from the dark room with the drawn drapes and armored door. But Jury could understand her fears; Mrs. Wassermann had reached her sixties by various escape routes — back alleys, tunnels, blockaded roads, barbed-wire fences. That was when she was young, in what she always called the Big War. It was something they shared, despite the difference in their ages — the loss of her family, the loss of his.

She came in carrying a small parcel tied up with string. “For your trip, I made this. Sandwiches. Breast of turkey, the very best, and a cheese and pickle.”

He thanked her and took the parcel. “Keep an eye on Carole-anne, will you? Maybe you could have her down for tea. Maybe you could take her to your Bingo night. She might not show it, but I think she gets lonely.”

“Such a sweet child, Mr. Jury.” They were walking up the three steps to the pavement. “Isn't it nice about her new job?”

Jury was suspicious. He didn't think Carole-anne could have told Mrs. Wassermann yet about Starrdust. And God knows she would never have mentioned the job she'd meant to take at the Q.T. Club. “New job?”

“You know, in the all-night launderette. Carole-anne said she was to work the late shift and wouldn't be home until the wee hours. Well, I told her she must be careful and to take a taxi.”

“The launderette. Yes, I'd forgotten about that.”

“So much better than her old job.”

The old job was at King Arthur's as a topless dancer. “Yes, much better.”

“At the library.”

Jury studied the pavement at his feet, then looked up when
the front door opened and the Librarian came out in her skintight jeans and fake-fur jacket. “Much as she likes books, it just didn't pay enough, I expect.”

“Ah, so hard it is to find work these days. And at the launderette she gets to wash her clothes free.”

“Hi, Mrs. W!” Carole-anne called gaily.

“Hello, dear,” said Mrs. Wassermann. “Don't you look lovely!”

“Thanks, Mrs. W. On my way to see about a job.” She was looking everywhere but at Jury, up and down the street, at the sky, checking for snow, rain, sun — anything but Jury's expression.

“Hello, dear,” said Jury with a mock-sweetness he seldom indulged in. “When you get through with the turban and stars, you can do my laundry.”

Carole-anne squinted up at him, slack-mouthed, as if she weren't sure about this unclean stranger on their doorstep. Her creamy forehead puckered; her raindrop earrings stirred. “Huh? Well, I gotta go. Ta.” She blew a kiss and hitched her bag over her shoulder.

They watched her go down the street. First one, then another of the male residents coming the other way did an about-face when she passed. Across the way, a small man in a bowler latched his gate and did a quick-step, following up the other two. The postman moved a little more spryly about his duties, stuffing letters any old way through the slots of doors along Carole-anne's route.

“Well, Mrs. Wassermann, there goes the neighborhood,” said Jury, with a smile.

“B
RIGHTON
is known for the brilliancy of its air,” said Jury, looking out over the gunmetal water toward a horizon lost in fog.

Eyes squinted nearly shut in case of sea-spray, Wiggins gave his long scarf one more turn around his neck and looked as if he couldn't care a pence for brilliancy.

Jury flicked away his cigarette and took a deep breath.

“It's not healthy, sir.”

“Breathing?”

“The sea air,” said Wiggins, adding instructively, “no matter what people say, any doctor can tell you it's not healthy.” He then brought out his Fisherman's Friends, a staple in his portable pharmacy ever since the cold, damp days of Dorset. He pushed the packet at Jury. “These'll help a bad throat.”

“I haven't got one, Wiggins.”

“You will,” said the sergeant almost merrily. He put one in Jury's hand.

Wiggins, thought Jury, would have taken shock treatments
to ward off flu. “Mind over matter” was not a phrase in the Wiggins lexicon. “There's Paul Swann, or I think it must be.” Jury pointed over the railing, down the shingle beach. “Near the Palace Pier.”

The char had told Jury that Mr. Swann was not in, that he'd gone down to the beach, to the Palace Pier. Yesterday, it'd been the Royal Pavilion, she said. “Did the east portico. Last week he did the main entrance. He's doing it all, see, inside too,” she added, as if Swann did floors.

•  •  •

Paul Swann sat on a canvas stool, looking far down the strand toward the West Pier. Sketchbook and paints sat at his feet, a watercolor rested on the easel before him. He was a man of indeterminate age with a thin face and watery blue eyes.

After Jury introduced himself, Swann suggested they sit on a nearby bench within sight of his painting. An interview in the open air, brilliant though it might be, only made Wiggins cough.

Paul Swann said sympathetically, “Not sick are you, Mr. Wiggins?”

“Not yet, thank you.” Wiggins shrugged down into his topcoat.

As they sat down on the bench, Swann said, in answer to Jury's question about David Marr, “I don't really see David that often, so I'm afraid I can't be of much help to you there, Superintendent. Very nice chap, though,” he said hurriedly and intently, as if he were concerned that his lack of intimacy with Marr might be construed as his handing him over to police.

“You were in the Running Footman that night, Mr. Swann, weren't you?”

“That's right, I was. Been thinking about it too, trying to remember exactly when he left, what Ivy did, those details.” He shook his head. “But I wasn't absolutely sober and I
wasn't really paying attention. I think she collected her coat and left just as time was called.”

“She said nothing to you?”

“No, nothing.”

Wiggins came up out of his shivery cocoon long enough to ask, “How well did you know this Ivy Childess, Mr. Swann?” Turtle-wise, his neck drew back inside his scarf to receive the answer.

“There was a drinks party at the house in Knightsbridge. I went round with David, who had the Childess girl in tow.” He stopped and looked up at the sky. “Would you just pardon me a moment.” Swann walked across the shingle to collect his easel and palette. “Hope you don't mind. There's just a touch to put to this before the light fades.” He continued his assessment of Ivy Childess. “What on earth David saw in that little chit is beyond me. I know that he is not a stupid man, nor a lascivious one — oh, Ivy was quite plump and juicy — and that all of his wild drinking and so forth is merely flinging grit in the eyes.” As if flicking a bit of that grit away, he touched the brush, dipped in pale, pale yellow, to the picture of the West Pier.

“Why would he want to fling it, Mr. Swann?”

“I don't know. We all have things to hide, Superintendent. Including the sort of person we really are.”

Jury smiled. “Difficult to do with you. I've seen your portraits of the Winslows.”

Swann looked up from his painting, smiling. “I'd say that's quite a compliment. Well, I am very good at portraiture, but I will only paint certain people. I'd be a rich man if I took on every commission I was offered; I turn most of them down. I find most people much too shallow or simpering or narcissistic to want to bother with.”

“But not the Winslows?”

He smiled. “No, most definitely not the Winslows.” Arms folded across his chest, he kept his eye on his watercolor, so
intently that he might have been expecting the pier to move, the fog to shift. “That was the only time I'd seen Hugh Winslow, at that party in Knightsbridge. He's the wild card, isn't he?”

Jury looked at him. “Wild card?”

“Doesn't carry the Winslow stamp. I wanted Hugh in that portrait; I thought it would round it out. But when I met him, or when I watched him with the others — especially Marion and Edward — I realized it wouldn't have done. There's this interesting chemistry amongst them, Mr. Jury. Perhaps you've noticed —?”

“Definitely.”

Swann, almost as if he were reworking the Winslow portrait, leaned forward, and applied a faint wash of the pale yellow. “That's it, I think. Anyway, when the three of them are together, they become more than the sum of their parts. They
are
a painting, Mr. Jury. They absolutely
are.
I'm sorry I can't help you out in a more practical way — time David went to the Running Footman, time he returned, et cetera, but I just don't know. As for Ivy Childess, it was only on that one evening, and not much of that. I only stayed for half an hour or so. Hate cocktail parties. Much rather go down to the Shepherd Tavern for drinks. I do hope it's not going to go badly for David; I honestly can't see him killing that girl.” He shrugged and looked truly sad that he couldn't help out either Jury or David Marr.

“There's another painting there, Mr. Swann, a portrait you probably did?”

“Yes, Rose and Phoebe. Rose Winslow walked out on Edward. You can imagine,” he added shaking his head.

It was as though any such behavior on the part of one of them would cause the others to close ranks completely. Jury thought of Hugh Winslow. “Did you hear any talk of another man, someone who perhaps, well, lured Rose Winslow away?”

Paul Swann stared at him, and then he laughed. “Lure
Rose?
Good God, I should certainly think it would be the other way round. Poor Ned.”

“Did David Marr ever mention her?”

“Yes. He disliked her. Well, she wasn't very likable, you see.”

His voice slightly muffled, Wiggins said, “Seems strange they'd keep her picture about, in the circumstances.”

“It's because of Phoebe,” said Swann. “It's really all they've got left of Phoebe.”

Jury looked at the watercolor, the strange milky light of the fog he'd captured that blanketed the pier. “Did you ever hear Marr mention a woman named Sheila Broome at all?”

“Broome? No, never.”

“Well, it was just a long shot, Mr. Swann. Thanks.”

Wiggins had been studying the watercolor and said, “You know, that's good. That yellow you just put on. Changes the whole thing, really. Makes it look like it's floating.”

“Ah, that's just it, Mr. Wiggins. Thank you. You've a grand eye. Do you dabble in the paint pots too?”

“Just a bit,” said Wiggins, without a pause. “Sunday painter, that sort of thing.”

Jury looked out to sea. Whenever Wiggins found himself in the presence of art, literature, music, a new persona evolved out of the fog, a form taking shape right before Jury's eyes. At any rate, with Swann's speaking to him like a brother, Wiggins had begun to unwind the labyrinthine scarf.

And to include Paul Swann in the elite group of those Wiggins would like to save from certain death. “Care for one, Mr. Swann?”

Paul Swann thanked him and held up the amber lozenge in the fading light. “That is a truly remarkable color.”

“I've always thought so, Mr. Swann,” he said innocently, holding up its mate in the same way.

Jury scuffed at the broken shells at his feet and was rather
sorry his own inartistic eye could identify nothing much but tan beach and gray water. The conversation had switched to literature.

“Sometimes I wonder if Coleridge's dream about Kubla Khan was inspired by George the Fourth and his plans for the Pavilion. The renovation had been going on for ten years when he wrote ‘Kubla Khan.' ” Paul Swann smiled. “ ‘His flashing eyes, his floating hair.' Can you think of a better candidate for him than the Prince Regent who ‘fed on honeydew and drank the milk of paradise'?”

“I never thought of it exactly that way,” said Wiggins.

Jury shook his head. If he ever thought of it any way, it was news to Jury.

“And Mrs. Fitzherbert, the only woman he ever loved, according to George, might have also been the perfect candidate for the poor woman ‘wailing for her demon-lover.' ” Paul Swann sighed and gathered up his paints and sketches and brushes. “Love, love, hmm. I suppose I don't truly qualify as an artist, never having known the turbulence of heartrending passion. But to tell the truth, seeing all the misery it causes, I just thought I'd give it a miss.” He grinned. “I imagine the
crime passionnel
keeps you in work. Do you think this is one, this case?”

Jury said, sadly, “There's certainly enough passion to go round, Mr. Swann.”

•  •  •

Swann left them and they walked down the Promenade, past the pub, what looked like changing rooms, a video place where chairs and tables were set up outside for people wanting coffee and soft drinks.

•  •  •

Next door, a fellow was busy slapping paint on the facade of a little museum of antique slot machines, called the Old Penny Palace. He laid down his brush and went inside. Wiggins
studied the poster describing some of the machines on display and said, “Look at this, will you?” He pointed to a strength-tester. “Haven't seen one of those since I was a kid. Good for the circulation.” He raised his arm, tried to make a muscle. “And over there. Tell your fortune, that does. One of those booths where you pick up a phone and a voice tells you your future.”