The Five Bells and Bladebone (19 page)

“Thought you had,” he nodded toward the line-up on the table, “ — with that stuff.”

The sergeant leaned closer. “Formal identification. I’m sorry. It’s usually done by family. Husband, parents . . .”

“There’s no one. There’s our aunt and uncle. Mulholland’s their name,” he added, when he saw the notebook come out. “We live in Gravesend.” He glared at Roy Marsh. “You haven’t told me what happened.” He still couldn’t believe anything
had
happened to Sadie, but he might as well go along with this mistake. After all, he’d talked to her only a week ago, hadn’t he? Tommy dragged his jeans from where he’d thrown them on the sofa bed and pulled his boots from under it.

Roy Marsh paused. “The body was found on a slipway by Wapping Old Stairs. But we can’t be sure it’s your sister, yet,” he added quickly.

“Drowned?”

Again, Roy hesitated. “No.” He hesitated, looked at Ballinger. “Stabbed.”

Tommy dropped the boot he’d been about to pull on.

“We found her two hours ago.”

“Then it happened last night?”

Roy Marsh shook his head. “The night before.”

“Took you long enough.” Trying to hedge the raw feeling in his throat that could only mean tears, he took solace in anger.

Constable Ballinger asked, “Do you carry her photo, lad? Snapshot, something like that?”

Mutely, Tommy drew out his wallet, showed them a small, rather cheap portrait-shot of Sadie in a low-cut dress, hair piled high on her head.

“Looks a bit different, sir,” said Constable Ballinger.

Tommy stood up. He felt a surge of relief.
Maybe it’s not Sadie
.

 • • • 

A tiny knot of the curious had gathered across the street to stare at the police car and the van just pulling up, out of which several men climbed with equipment that might have given passers-by hope that the BBC was doing a special on Limehouse, had the van not borne the insignia of the Metropolitan Police. Except for the action here, the street was deserted and depressing, still basically warehouses, the wide slabs of doors interspersed with little waterfront properties and bulldozed earth. Exorbitantly expensive, the houses still managed to look untenanted and poorly groomed, as if the spirit of the older Limehouse had triumphed. The wrought-iron streetlamps looked out of place here.

Sergeant Roy Marsh was giving his instructions to the crew who’d just appeared, and Constable Ballinger was herding Tommy into the other car.

It was then Tommy saw her, standing outside of her house, wearing her raincoat. In the confusion and shock of the last hour, he’d forgotten her. Then when she started walking toward them, her huge sack of a handbag slung over her shoulder, he felt almost the same rush of relief he had a few moments ago, when he thought maybe the sergeant had got it all wrong, that it wasn’t Sadie who’d died, but someone else.

She put her hand on his shoulder and looked past Tommy at Marsh. “Hello, Roy.”

The sergeant looked at her, not very happily. “Ruby.”

“I think I’ll go along. I think I should go with him.”

“None of your affair, is it?” His stiff smile was not helped by the scar.

“I think so. I think you could probably use all the help you can get.” And as if she didn’t notice the flicker of pain
in his face, she went on. “After all, you’re going to be questioning the neighbors. Why not me? Why not now?”

Roy Marsh was standing by the open rear door. “Second sight, haven’t you, Ruby?” He was having a hard time of getting a cutting edge into his voice.

“Clairvoyant. I can take a missing woman, a police car, and her brother being led out and put them together and work out that you might be going to the station house.”

Ballinger, in the front seat, did a good job of pretending not to hear any of this, pretending that a strange woman could just keep the door of the back seat open that the sergeant had meant to close, and could also just angle herself in and slide across it.

With Ruby sitting beside him, staring straight ahead, and the door being slammed, Tommy was wondering too.

 • • • 

The hair was brown, the face bereft of makeup, plain as ashes, barren as sand. He had been going to shake his head —
no, that’s not Sadie
— when some tiny ball of memory rolling round in his empty mind made him nod. It was a long-ago image of Sadie’s face, right after a heavy rain, when she was drenched and her face clean and pale-looking. But that was years ago. The image formed brightly like a match and then went out.

It had been too long. It looked like her — the white, unsmiling face, glazed over like ice. And yet also the face of someone completely alien, whom he’d never known and never cared about.

He turned away. Roy Marsh had a hand on his shoulder and seemed to be urging him to take another look.

He didn’t want another look. “It’s not Sadie.”

Marsh nodded to the mortuary attendant, who dropped the covering back in place.

Tommy pulled away from the sergeant, walked out the door and down the hall to where Ruby was sitting, waiting. He sat down hard on the wooden bench, locked his arms
across his chest, and stared at the grim, police-ocher-painted wall. Ruby, he was glad, asked him nothing, said nothing, until Roy Marsh came out.

“How well did you know her?”

“I’m not sure I did. I saw a woman answering that description in the Five Bells or the Grapes, and coming from Narrow Street. But not recently. Who knows?” Ruby stood up. “Let’s get it over, shall we?”

 • • • 

It wasn’t until she came back, looked down at him, and said, “I just don’t know, Tommy,” that he wondered if he’d been fooling himself. He looked down at the snapshot he was as good as hiding in his cupped hands, almost for fear the sergeant or someone would snatch it from him. He’d been waiting for some affirmation from the world beyond the glass bell he felt he was floating in. And now was out of, because it broke.

F
IONA
C
LINGMORE
sat at her desk wearing a mask of brown goo that hid everything but her eyes and lips, turning the pages of
Harrods
magazine with a wetted fingertip.

“Hullo, Fiona, you could have been Al Jolson’s understudy,” said Jury. Fiona jumped, slapped shut the magazine, and glared at Jury for his unexpected and unfortuitous entrance into Racer’s office at New Scotland Yard. The glare was effective, considering the contrast between the dark green irises, the white eyeballs, and the rest of her face. Her hair, recently cut and silvered, was pushed back by a green band, forcing the usual bright blond curls into gold and silver spikes.

Jury sat down and returned the hard stare with a bright smile. “Well, maybe not Jolson. But you’d knock ’em dead in the Piccadilly station on New Year’s Eve.”

After her initial shock, Fiona regained her usual cool, calmly drew a cigarette from a pack on her desk, and leaned back in her secretary’s chair. No mad dash to the Ladies for Fiona to scrub the stuff off.

The cat Cyril, who’d been nosing at the mudpack pot, shot Jury the same sparky glance Fiona had, as if he resented the intrusion into this new and fascinating look into the world of cosmetic technology. Cyril was no slouch,
either, when it came to grooming. His coat had the sheen and shimmer of copper from his constant polishing; it was sprigged here and there with threads of white turned silvery by the morning sun. It was a strange copy of Fiona’s own hairdo. Cyril had become Chief Superintendent Racer’s nemesis, ever since someone had found him padding through the halls of New Scotland Yard and had handed him over to Fiona Clingmore. Because Cyril could dodge, parlay, and outwit Racer in the chief’s devising of all sorts of exotic deaths for the cat, Cyril had become more than a mascot; he’d become chic, trendy, a sort of Platonic Idea of Cat.

“And might one ask what happened to your hols?” Fiona exhaled a thin stream of smoke; she was a study in iron control as she pretended not to notice that talking made the mud crack. “Might one ask what you’re doing here?” Not even a finger strayed to the green band working its way up, making the spikes even spikier.

“One might. We had a little trouble in Northants.” Jury nodded toward Racer’s door. “He can’t be at his club this early; it’s not even ten.”

Fiona was holding out her hand, inspecting the nail art. A tiny fake emerald glittered in the sunlight. “Out on a case, he is. Even took Al with him.”

Jury smiled. “Poor Wiggins.”

Fiona tried to look bored — difficult in the circumstances, all the while crossing and recrossing her legs so that Jury could get a good view of the rhinestone insets on the black hose. Since she knew she could hardly seduce Jury with a mudpack, she was bringing whatever other bodily components she could into play: skirt above knees, one arm hooked over the back of her chair nearly strangling the black ebony buttons of her blouse.

“What’s all this artistry for, Fiona? Racer retiring, or something?”

“Heavy date.” She winked.

“I should have known. Too bad, thought you’d like a drink over at the Feathers.” He hated himself the moment he’d said it. He knew there was probably no date, and he’d meant only to make her feel better. Now she’d missed a chance with Jury. He could sense the disappointment. Quickly, he said, “Make him wait, then. Come on, one drink . . .”

Footsteps pounding down the hall made the three of them look toward the outer office door. Cyril had his ears flattened back, so it could only be Racer.

“Start typing,” said Jury, forgetting that would be a rather ineffective diversion, in view of the mudpacked face. “I’ll wait inside wearing a pained look.”

 • • • 

When Jury opened the door to Racer’s sanctuary, Cyril slid between his feet, streaked snakelike across a carpet the color of his own fur, and was scaling the bookcase set back against the wall to the left of Racer’s large desk. His claws were like pinions digging into forensic science, the Commissioner’s Report to the Queen, and several other dusty tomes. A government-issue copy of the portrait of the Queen was balanced atop the bookcase, its nail having come out of the wall. Cyril was now sitting behind it, in the dark shadow between wall and painting, waiting.

 • • • 

“What’re
you
doing back here?” asked Chief Superintendent Racer, removing his linen jacket and settling into his leather swivel chair. “Supposed to be on holiday. God knows we get few enough of
those!
” A heavy sigh suggested Racer had been shackled to his desk for years, a fact not borne out by the Antigua tan covering his vein-shot cheeks. Already this year he had three times found sunnier byways than Victoria Street, and from the BA ticket-folder stuck in the corner of his blotter, it looked as if he was due for a return trip. Racer was using his office here as a VIP lounge between flights, it seemed.

“Are you off again, then? To the Caribbean?” Jury stretched out his legs, prepared to give him fifteen minutes for the check-in lecture.

“What? How did
you
know? Cleopatra out there been talking again?”

“Of course not,” said Jury, who got most of his information from Fiona, her mouth being considerably more fluent than her typewriter. He nodded toward the BA envelope. “That.”

Racer grabbed it up, stuffed it in his desk drawer, and said, “One whale of a detective, aren’t you?”

“One whale.” Jury stifled a yawn as Racer started the ritual lecture about a policeman’s life being full of grief . . . .

He glanced up at the Queen’s portrait. The frame was moving. Jury watched Cyril’s glossy head ease itself out from behind the picture to study the bald pate of Racer’s own head. He might have been hiding behind the Queen’s skirts, the way the head and forepaws drew in, slid out, drew in again as Racer rambled on. Having worked out that Her Majesty was giving him carte blanche, or diplomatic immunity, or something, he lay down flat, paws dangling over the edge of the bookcase, waiting, daredevil-wise.

“. . . and to stop sticking your nose into the business of provincial police, Jury!”

“The body nearly fell on me,” said Jury calmly, at the same time helping himself to one of the Havana cigars Racer had been smuggling in from Antigua.

“Next time prop it up and get the hell out! And you’ve probably deputized that damned earl or duke or whatever he is — doesn’t he live in that village? — to do your leg-work for you. A policeman’s life is bad enough without his using private citizens as partners.”

“Sergeant Wiggins is my partner; I came back to get him.” He glanced up at the bookcase. Jury could see Cyril was going to sneeze, from the jerky sidewise motion of his
head. When he did, Jury crackled the cellophane wrapping from the cigar.

Racer’s head shot up. “What’s that?”

“Sorry.” He tossed the cellophane into the ashtray.

But Racer had too long been competing with Cyril to fall for the cellophane ruse. “He’s in here. That is definitely the sound of that cat.”

Jury looked all round the floor. “No he isn’t. Sir.”

“Don’t be so goddamned dim; he’s smarter than that.” Squinting, Racer started scoping the ceiling, then got up and stuck his head out the window.