The Blue Last (4 page)

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

T
he 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.

S
unday 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.

P
erhaps 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.