The Case Has Altered (30 page)

“Years back, I remember seeing her here. Just the one time. She certainly is a lady, in every sense of the word.” Annie sighed and shook her head. “I can tell you that if Miss Dunn suspected
her
and Mr. Jack was . . . well, she wouldn't like it, that's sure.”

“I wasn't suggesting—” But he supposed he was. It was like all the rest
of it that he didn't know about Jenny. He didn't want any confirmation from Annie Suggins.

There was laughter from the table. Suggins was slapping his knee.

“No, I didn't know,” he said, as if Annie had asked. It was only her countenance that looked the question. He recovered as quickly as he could, feeling horribly vulnerable and hating the feeling.

Suggins hovered with a fresh pot of tea. Jury shook his head. “Did you tell this to the Lincolnshire police?”

Annie sniffed. “No, I did not. I was told quite smartly it wasn't my opinions that was wanted, only what I knew for a fact.” Curtly, she nodded, as if she'd fulfilled her role with the Lincs police quite as they wanted. “I'm not by nature a gossip; I told you because you asked for my help.”

Much of what she'd said, though, actually was “fact.” She'd seen Jenny Kennington here years ago and in the company of Jack Price. Jury placed his cup, undrunk, on the hearthstones. The fireplace had not offered the needed sanctuary. “Thanks, Annie. I appreciate it.”

Annie leaned forward and, in a companionable gesture, placed her hand on his arm. “I didn't like the way the police was going on to Burt, there—” She leaned her head in the direction of the table, where Wiggins appeared to be conducting some very unofficial business with another biscuit in hand. “That rifle that Burt's used all along for squirrels and rabbits, like they thought maybe Burt himself shot her, which is too silly to bear thinking about. Well, I'm not about to help them out any more'n needs be. I don't mind tellin' you, I took umbrage, I really did.” She sat back, rocked fiercely. “Far as I'm concerned, what they asked, I answered, and no more. Asked and answered, that was how it went.”

Asked and answered
.

 • • • 

B
etween the beef and the biscuits, find out any more, Wiggins?”

“Afraid not, sir. Well, you said before that as we're not officially on this case, I wasn't to be my usual relentless self.” Wiggins was warming up the engine between yawns.

It was the first time in the last hour Jury had felt like laughing. “What about the rifle? Who else used it?”

“Nearly everybody, over the years.”

“I'm talking about recently.”

“Suggins had to allow as how he couldn't be sure. I didn't say, ‘Of course you couldn't, seeing you're tippling most of the time.' But that's what it adds up to, isn't it? The rifle's always there in the mudroom that anyone can get to. Suggins would never know who'd been in and out. You can get to that mudroom from either inside or outside. Anyone could've reached in and taken it, then returned it. What about fingerprints?”

“Hard on a gun stock. Although there are absolutely no rules about latent fingerprints. Probably, they came away with something, but I doubt it was conclusive. Unless—” Jury slipped down in the passenger seat. God, he was tired. “—Bannen knows but isn't telling me.” They started down the drive. Jury closed his eyes and kept them closed for several miles.

He opened them as one surprised out of sleep. They had left the Case Has Altered behind and were coming up on the bright orange sign of a Happy Eater. Jury said, “It occurs to me: maybe there's a lot Chief Inspector Bannen isn't telling me because he wants me to tell
him
something. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me before that he's using me.”

“Oh, I don't think he'd do that, sir.”

“That's what you're supposed to think, Wiggins. No, we're not stopping.”

Like a second sun, the bright orange sign faded from view.

R
ichard Jury and Melrose Plant, having been shown into the solicitor's office by a plump little receptionist, stopped dead.

Their surprise must have shown on their faces, for Charly Moss uttered an expletive they couldn't quite catch. Then, “
Why
doesn't he tell people?”

“You're a woman,” said Jury.

She had risen from her office chair and now stood, arms stretched out as if doing a fitting at a dressmaker's. “It would seem so, yes. Sometimes I think he does it just for the fun of it.”

“Pete Apted, you mean?”

Jury and Plant took the two hard chairs she gestured toward.

“Pete Apted, yes.” Quickly, she picked up a near-to-overflowing glass ashtray, and banged it against the metal wastebasket, hard, as if it were resisting being emptied. When she set it back on her desk, Jury saw black ashes still clinging to its center, ashes from last week, last month, perhaps last year, hardened on the glass. (Take a bootscraper to get that lot off, thought Jury.) Then she reached for her pack of cigarettes, looked at them from under lowered eyelashes—neither a coy nor a coquettish glance, but a shamefaced one. She offered the cigarettes around, saying, “I don't suppose . . . ?” The invitation to share in Silk Cuts plunder trailed off weakly. Hopeless that anyone else in the whole world smoked these days.

Melrose Plant came to her rescue and took one. “You suppose wrongly.” He pulled out his lighter and reached across the table. “Only the sissies have stopped.”

“He means me, Sissy Number One.”

Plant's smile was, well,
dapper
. That was the only way to describe it—it went with silk cravats and spats. Right now he was inhaling smoke as if it were a vintage wine.

“Women solicitors aren't uncommon these days.”

“Ones named ‘Charly' are. I mean, if you're set for a man, you sort of have to readjust your expectations. And sometimes I honestly believe there are people who don't trust me—clients, I mean—don't trust me as a brief because I'm a woman and because of
this.
” She waggled the cigarette. “It's come to be as bad as a bottle of whiskey and a dirty shot glass on the desk.”

“I'd trust the judgment of anyone Pete Apted recommended,” said Jury. Her smile was ingenuous. Jury thought that she didn't have the sort of looks that would hit you all at once, on impact, looks that bowled you over. Her hair was drawn back (with tendrils escaping) and hooked with a tortoiseshell barrette. It was an unexciting brown, until light hit it, as did this morning sun's streaking suddenly through the window. As her eyes that appeared light brown turned to copper as bright as pennies in another shaft of light. Most of her lipstick was nibbled away, leaving the outline. It matched the burnt-orange silk blouse. She wore a hunter green tweed suit. The colors of fall. An autumn woman. He thought that the more one saw of her, the more one would come to think her extremely pretty.

“Then tell me,” she said, “what this is all about.”

Perhaps he'd been invited along to light Charly Moss's cigarette, thought Melrose Plant, who wasn't listening very attentively to Jury's recitation of the facts. He knew it all. His instructions from Jury were to sit quietly until Jury signed him to speak.

“Like my dog Mindy, you mean? And what do I bark out when you tell me to speak?”

“Oh, you'll know.”

He sat there watching Charly Moss take notes—she was taking them rapidly, slapping back sheets of the yellow pad as if tossing the paper out of her way.

Jury stopped talking.

She stopped writing. She said, “Hmph!” Then she left her chair to turn and look out of the window behind the desk, in much the same posture
Apted had assumed. Her arms were folded across her chest, her back to them. “Hmph!” she said again. She turned back and leaned against the window, frowning. Her head rested against a sunny pane and Jury could see the red in her brown hair.

Charly asked, “How well do you know her, Mr. Jury?”

Jury did not like the question. That
frisson
of fear raced through him again. He didn't (he knew) know Jenny as well as people would be likely to suppose. “Pretty well,” was all he could think to say.

She was back in her chair now, leaning across her desk. “Well enough she'd confide in you?”

“Yes—”

No
. That was what her look said. “But she didn't, Mr. Jury.” Jury's face flushed.

“Do you think she'd tell me the truth?”

“If you don't think she told
me
it, then how can I say?” He hated this defensive posture.

“Perhaps she did tell you the truth. But she delayed it, certainly. It would be impossible for me to work up a defense if Jennifer Kennington were holding back, that's all.” Then she turned her attention to Melrose. “You were in her house in Stratford with the local police? Detective Inspector”—she consulted her notes—“Lasko?”

Guiltily, Melrose said, “Me? Well, yes, and the one policeman, that was all.” As if only “one” policeman would make the whole visit informal.

Charly tipped her legal pad toward her and wrote again. “With a search warrant?”

Melrose slid down in his chair. Why was
he
feeling guilty? He wasn't the Stratford-upon-Avon police. Yet, why hadn't that occurred to him the day Lasko got him to go along to Ryland Street? He said to the solicitor: “Well . . . uh . . . I expect I can't say?” Yes, he could. He remembered Lasko's words to the cat.

Her look was severe. “That's illegal, Mr. Plant. You do know it's illegal, don't you?”

Defensively, he said, “Hell's bells, it wasn't my idea.” Huffily, he added, “I was there only because I was
asked
to look for Lady Kennington. By
Superintendent Jury, here. No one knew where she was, including Stratford police.”

She looked from Plant to Jury and back again, as if they were in cahoots. Back to Plant. “Was anything found? Anything taken?” She returned her gaze to the legal pad and wrote furiously.

“
I
certainly took nothing.”

“Detective Chief Inspector Lasko?”

Melrose had been so busy that day looking for signs of where Jenny might have gone, he wasn't paying strict attention to Lasko. He simply remembered him clumping about upstairs. Had he taken anything? Melrose shrugged, smiling foolishly.

“Because anything taken from that house won't be admitted as evidence.”

Good God, what about the silence he was supposed to be sitting in? He wasn't supposed to say anything until Jury told him to. And here was Jury himself with raised eyebrows, apparently wondering why he hadn't been told about his and Lasko's visit to Ryland Street. “I'm being grilled,” said Melrose, assuming this would elicit from this lady solicitor blushes and apologies.

“Get used to it” was what she said. “Obviously, I'll have to get in touch with Chief Inspector Lasko. Now, this other woman, Dorcas Reese.” She looked up over their heads, staring at the air or the wall for so long, Melrose turned to see if someone had come stealthily into the room, gliding silently across the rug. The rug (which Melrose decided was not Tibetan, not Karistan, and worth two hundred, three, maybe, tops) was the only thing in the office that might have been called a bit of a luxury. The desk looked like police-issue gray, the filing cabinets, ditto. Everything was battered and used, right down to the dark smudges on the edge of the desk, her side. Cigarette burns. This redeemed her slightly. She too was human.

No, she wasn't. Right now her burnished copper eyes were narrowed at both of them. “The barmaid, this Julie Rough, told you the Reese girl had ‘a bun in the oven'—?”

Jury shook his head. “The M.E. said she wasn't pregnant.” He inclined his head toward Melrose. “Mr. Plant was there when DCI Bannen brought that news.”

Charly Moss turned her sharp eyes on Melrose.

“Well, good lord,
I'm
not the alleged father. It's just a bit of information I picked up from the Owens. Mr. Bannen was not interrogating me.”
Unlike some others
, he hoped the message to her read.

Charly Moss leaned toward them over crossed arms. “If she honestly believed she was pregnant, the same questions would apply about her feelings, her attitude. How was she? How did she act?” Charly chewed at her bottom lip, erasing more lipstick.

Jury shook his head. “Normally, from what I hear, with pleasure or excitement, at least for a while. I think it would have meant she quite definitely had a man on a short lead. At the same time, I was told Dorcas was considering an abortion, but seemed
willingly
considering it.”

Charly looked down at her pad, brushing a stray wisp of brown hair behind her ear. “A great deal of attention has been focused on Verna Dunn, but very little on Dorcas Reese. It's as if she's merely a supporting player. It's quite possible she was killed by a different hand, let's say, for instance, the father of the baby, who might not have cared for the ‘short lead.' Say he didn't want it, or didn't want it known. A man already married or prominent or both. Or anyone who didn't want this baby. A vengeful wife, perhaps? But I find it interesting the murder of Dorcas Reese takes a back seat to the Dunn woman's murder. Class? Who cares about a maid? Or something else?”

Jury opened his mouth to answer, but she hadn't really been asking.

“Grace Owen says she went to bed at eleven. No way of knowing whether that's true. Still, she'd have had to take a car if she did indeed go to the Wash; her husband, someone, would have heard a car leave. And there was only the one car, one set of tread marks.”

“A car could have been left, say, in Fosdyke village, and the rest of the way taken on foot.”