The Deer Leap (18 page)

“The maid? Yeah, why not.” Flossie left and returned with a snapshot. It had curled at the edges, not very clear, apparently taken on a rainy day. There was a young woman, in a dress and cape that might well have been a “uniform,” trying to restrain a blur of an Alsatian that seemed much more interested in the nearby gaslight than in her. Her head was back; she was laughing at this trial.

“Amy Lister,” said Flossie.

“You knew her?”

Flossie shook her head. “It's on the back.”

Jury turned the picture over. The name was printed there.

Brindle said it again: “Smart girl, is Flossie.”

“Why didn't Carrie take this picture with her?”

Flossie shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe after all these years she forgot it was there. The purse lining was ripped and the snap was in between it and the outside.”

She lit a cigarette, tossed the match more or less in the direction of an ashtray, and said through the rising spiral of smoke, “See that lamp? The one the dog's trying to piss on? Well, I knew where that was. It's one of the last gaslights left in England. Off the Embankment it is. And then I got t' thinking.” She paused, perhaps to demonstrate that particular power. “See, I used t' work at the Regency Hotel. I waitressed there. That gaslight, it's near the Embankment and right down that narrow street from the Regency.” Her eyes grew misty. “The tips you could make. I mean, that Regency! You had to be nearly rich as the Queen—” She pointed her cigarette at the snapshot. “I didn't know her, but that Amy Lister's wearing a maid's uniform from the Regency. You got the money, you could get one of them maids or the porter t' walk your dog. Now, I says t' meself, what's this Carrie Fleet doing with this snap?”

“And you tried to trace Amy Lister?”

Here she gave her husband a smart slap. “Joe here did. Worse luck.”

“You went to the Regency?” Jury was looking down at the young laughing woman. A nice person, he thought. Out there on pavements sleek with rain, getting wet herself—well, if Flossie was right, the payment might have been worth it. “Didn't find her?”

For the first time, Joe seemed to come back to the real world. “You don't know sod-all, Super. And you being Scotland Yard.” He leaned toward Jury, his ale-laden breath spanning the distance between them. “I took some money, not much — well, we're on the dole, ain't we —”

Jury looked at the video recorder. “I'm sure.”

“—and gave twenty quid
— twenty
— to the old coot worked the desk, white gloves and black tie, think the help was all going to a bleedin' ball. Anyway, I paid him to give me the dope on the maid in that picture.” Brindle appeared to delight in holding Jury hostage to suspense, for he took the moment to uncap another bottle, light another cigar, blow a smoke-ring.

“Turns out, he couldn't remember her name was Lister, but he did her face. Said far as he knew, she went into service in Chelsea, so I goes
there.
Right proper little bit of sleuthing, 'ey?”

“Depends. What'd you find out?”

Brindle waved the question away with a figure eight of cigar smoke. “Nothing, yet. She'd left, no notice.” Furrows of simulated thoughtfulness crossed his brow. “But I ain't stupid. I'll find her.”

“That'd be the day.” The voice, almost ethereal, as if it inhabited no human form, came from the couch. Jury hadn't noticed the snoring had stopped.

The Brindle daughter had turned. Her eyes looked, through the smoky light, directly into Jury's. “She fed the cat, she did. And she never asked for nothing, and she never tried to put herself in between me and them. Not that there's much between. But Carrie never tried.”

The girl — he didn't know her name. She was still lying, but leaning on one elbow. A change had come over the room, as if a tomb had opened, the voice of one long dead frightening the living. Directly at Jury she looked, and he saw, to his surprise, she was very pretty. Buried as she had been under coverlets and blankets, he had merely imagined some greasy-haired child, dull and inarticulate.

“I thought about it a long time, that snap,” she said, nodding toward it.
“Him,
” — and with a deprecating nod of her head, she motioned toward Joe Brindle — “he never did sort it out. Come back from this Chelsea place, no, couldn't remember no Amy working for them.”

Brindle lowered his head.

The look the girl gave Jury was near pleading. “How could they remember? It wasn't the maid. Amy was the dog.”

The girl lay back, flung her arm over her eyes, and said nothing more.

T
hrough the open door of Chief Superintendent Racer's office, Jury could just glimpse the cat Cyril — only his head, since he was sitting in Racer's leather desk chair — carefully washing his paw. The usual mists and drizzle of October had given way to a sunlit afternoon, the light of which beamed through the chief's window and spangled Cyril's coppery fur.

Cyril, unlike his keeper, savior, or whatever one might call Racer's secretary, seemed concerned only that cleanliness, not beauty would get him through those pearly gates. Fiona Clingmore was far more convinced that the art of nail-varnishing was the heavenly priority. More to the nails she was holding up for inspection than to Jury, she said, “He's out.”

Jury nodded toward the Racer's door. “Obviously. The Met has been left in better paws than Racer's. When's he coming back?”

That Racer came back at all was a mystery to the Metropolitan Police. At least twice a year there were rumors of the chief's imminent departure, which never materialized. There were even worse rumors that he would be kicked upstairs to
an assistant commissionership. Fortunately for the safety of Greater London, the kick never landed.

“He's at his club. Been gone since eleven, so I dunno.” Her eyes squinted. She inspected her index finger. A flaw. Carefully, she just touched the tiny brush to the nail. Satisfied, she recapped the bottle and waved her fingers in air to dry them. Now she could concentrate on smiling at Jury.

“You wield a mean brush, Fiona. Matisse wouldn't have stood a chance.”

“Had your lunch?” It was a ritual question. Jury always had some excuse. Not that he didn't like Fiona; indeed, she fascinated him in many ways. Right now she rested her elbows on the desk and let the fingers hang down, nails purplish-black like talons. Her lipstick was the same color, which rather washed out her already pale skin. The silvery strands in her blond hair she put down to frosting. Nails dry, she now stood up and took the opportunity to display a laddered stocking, which she turned and presented for Jury's inspection. “And I just bought them.” Her half-turned, hand-on-hip position also showed the curve of the hip-hugging black skirt and the beruffled blouse, sheer black like the slightly laddered stocking. Just a tiny one at the ankle that she held up in case his eyes had gone bad in the last three days. Jury loved the way Fiona tried for the demimondaine and only ended up seeming old-fashioned. He could imagine her carefully washing out her undies at night, before rolling up her hair and creaming her face. Suddenly, he felt sad.

He hadn't time for lunch, he told her. She accepted this, as always, with grace.

“He's in a right temper,” she said, nodding her blond curls toward Racer's office. “And seeing that cat there won't help it along.
Cyril!”
There would be hell to pay if Racer found Cyril sitting in his own kingly perch. “He says he's going to garrote him.”

Cyril paid no attention to commands or to threats on
whichever of his lives he was enjoying. Racer had nearly got him one day with a letter-opener.

“Cyril knows what he's doing. Did the Hampshire police call?”

“Well, they didn't
complain.
I listened on the extension. Of course, he'll say they did.” Fiona ran a blank page in her typewriter and called for Cyril again, who just kept washing. She checked her tiny bejeweled watch. “Been down at that club two hours now —”

The subject under discussion just that moment walked in, the tiny red lines on his face rather like the laddered stocking, red turning to blue nearer the nose. Jury guessed about three doubles. And brandy to follow. Savile Row-suited and boutonniered, Racer looked more as if he should have been in a window of Burberry's than in a New Scotland Yard doorway.

“It's Superintendent Jury. Well. I haven't interrupted your little Hampshire holiday, have I?”

Fiona, her face expressionless, was banging her newly painted nails on the typewriter.

“Got those letters done, Miss Clingmore?” he asked smoothly.

“Nearly done,” said Fiona, equally smoothly. “Just the finishing touch here and there.”

“Well get the here and there into my office quick, girl!” He snapped each syllable out as if he were shooting rubber bands. “Come on, Jury!”

The cat Cyril had slipped like cream from the chair and now lay in wait in the corner under the desk.

As soon as Racer planted his feet there, Cyril slid himself around the knife-pleated trousers, then whipped out and whizzed toward the door Jury had been careful to leave open a few inches.

A few expletives and a paperweight followed Cyril on his way.

“Miss Clingmore! Throw that beast out of the window!”

The Cyril-ritual always ended on this note.

As did the Jury-ritual end on one much the same, except that paperweights and letter-openers were not for him. No fate was mean enough for Jury. Being roasted on a turning spit would probably have been the chief's choice, largely because he thought Jury, rather than Cyril, might be sitting in that leather chair one day.

That Jury would rather sit on a curbstone in a blinding snowstorm did not occur to Racer. Naturally, anyone with Jury's rank
had
to be after the chief's job.

“The Hampshire police are raising holy hell, Jury. Just how did you manage to slip this one over on me?” He did not stay for an answer, but turned on the mental tape that had detailed Jury's egregious errors and derelictions of duty over the years.

“They seem to welcome my presence, actually. Sir.”

Racer always noticed the infinitesimal pause and glared at him. “You're larking about in Hampshire investigating a couple of accidental deaths —”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?
Even Wiggins can tell the difference between accident and murder. I think.”

“I'd like twenty-four hours. That's all. You can surely do without me for twenty-four hours.”

That would put him in a bind, thought Jury. Racer had a way of reminding him the Met could do without Jury forever. Into the brief silence where Racer must have battled with this problem, Jury jumped. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor. After all, you have
influence
.” The flower girl on the steps of St. Paul's couldn't have plied her wares so well.

“Certainly I do. Would I have got where I am — ?” Then seeing the weevil in the boll of his career, Racer rushed on. “What sort of favor?”

“You lunch at the Regency rather often . . . ?” Rather seldom, Jury knew.

But it worked enough to make the chief superintendent smile his thin-as-a-penny smile. He flicked his lapel, as if a crumb of some privileged repast and all its perks still clung to his garments. “When I've the time. Why?”

“Know anyone named Lister?”

To cover up his obvious lack of knowledge, Racer asked Jury what made him think this Lister would get into the Regency? “You know what sort of place it is. Not just
money
gets you in. Privilege, that's the ticket. And as far as getting information out of the management goes, forget it. Manager'd be on the phone to the A.C. unless ten guests had just been knifed over their Rémy. Or Armagnac.”

One thing Racer knew was brandy.

One thing Jury
didn't
know was the name of the manager. Which was what he wanted to know. Jury didn't give sod-all about the manager's calling the assistant commissioner. He just didn't want him or her calling Lister. And given his plan, he certainly hoped it was a man. Too much tradition at the Regency, he was sure, for a woman in that job. “One of the best in London, he is,” said Jury, hoping Racer would rise to the bait.

He did. “You mean Dupres?”

“Umm.”

“Just how do you know Dupres? Been nosing about?”

No. You just told me. “Heard his name somewhere.”

“Georges doesn't deal with People.”

Thanks for the first name, thought Jury.

“There's an assistant for that.”

“I should imagine. Now, about that twenty-four hours —”

Racer waved his hand. “Hampshire can have you. I've got work to do.”

Jury left. As he walked out, the cat Cyril slipped in, gliding noiselessly and almost invisibly across the copper carpet.