The Five Bells and Bladebone (21 page)

But Bernard Molloy was still going to adjust his spectacles, and was not about to take any decision lightly. Here was something to savor, to turn this way and that as if the subject’s face would become more familiar by virtue of being turned sideways. “Now, there’s that about him makes me think I’ve seen him —”

The man at the bar, who had flicked a glance toward the picture, said, “You never seen him, Molloy; all’s you’ve been here is a week, and it’s a good two month since this chappie’s been round.”

Wiggins, who’d had his notebook ready at the same time he was staring at the beam behind them and what was hanging from it, asked him his name.

“Jack Krael.”

“When did you see him last, Mr. Krael?”

“Like I said, dihn’t I? About two months ago.” He looked at Wiggins out of eyes like bullets.

“Did he come in often?”

“Mebbe I saw him three, four times.” He shrugged and slowly rolled the ash from his cigarette into the tin ashtray.
“Wouldn’t remember him except he come in with Ruby.”

“Ruby?” said Jury.

“Ruby Firth.”

A man to his right in a checkered cap said, “Don’t she live in Limehouse Road, Jack? Police been creeping about all the morning, ain’t that right, Jack?”

Jack Krael appeared to have been chosen as spokesman and guru for the Five Bells. He nodded, tossing back his whiskey. “Same as Sadie.” He turned the eyes with black, pinpoint irises, small as currants on Jury. “You must be the fifth, sixth one in here.” He looked at his empty glass. “Funny they’d both be living so close.”

Jury put some money on the counter and signed Molloy to fill up Krael’s glass.

“Bushmill’s, Molloy. That Black Bush right over there.” After all, he wasn’t paying for it. “Pore girl.” Krael sighed as if the expression of some sentiment would be thanks enough for the Bushmill’s.

Mention of the “pore girl” Sadie drew a few others over to the bar to compare, contest, and redesign their separate versions of who was asked what by police. That there might be a second tragedy to add to the first seemed to perk them up.

A woman who might have been sixty or eighty had slapped through the door to join the congregation. She wore a flat black hat with two plastic daisies stuck in the fraying band and was bundled into so many layers of clothes that it looked as if she’d got dressed without taking off the old outfits before adorning herself in the new. Rummaging about in her massed skirts, she pulled out a dirty sheaf of pamphlets tied with a string and started handing them out.

“Bit mental, that one is,” whispered a sallow-faced man they called Alf, “been spreadin’ the rumors all over Itchy, she has. Ain’t it enough I can’t go back to Hong Kong because of them rumors. They know all about me. It’s
Singapore Airlines that’s doin’ it . . . .” He drifted off, back to his seat in the tea-packet-lined alcove. But he called over his shoulder, “You been spreadin’ the rumors agin, ain’tcha Kath?”

The daisies bounced as she slammed down her glass. “I got no int’rest in what ya done or ain’t done, Alf. I got better to do then talk about you. Not with the by-election comin’ up.” Her voice was a high whine, and reminded Jury of a bad wheel bearing.

Wiggins, Jury noticed, backed off from Kath at the mention of what used to be called, and probably still was by some, Itchy Park. It was a public garden adjacent to Christchurch, in high favor with the tramps who enjoyed sleeping under tented newspapers, bottles nestled beside them in brown bags, guarded while they snored.

“You’ll win for sure, this time, Kath,” said Jack Krael.

Bernard Molloy’s laugh was cut short by a look from Krael.

“How long had Sarah Diver been living in Limehouse Road?” asked Jury.

“Narrow Street. Down there near the Grapes. Said she used to live in one of them council flats —”

Kath broke in. “That’s the platform I’m runnin’ on. It’s them developers that want to fill in the basin and bulldoze anything that don’t move and mebbe a few things that does.” She shoved her lager glass toward Molloy and gave Jury ten more fliers when he offered to pay.

Jack said, “She’s right there. You seen them houses at Blythe’s Wharf? Half a million quid them ones cost. Narrow little things all stuck together. People’ll pay it for a look at the Thames.” He shook his head, eyes still staring at the wall. “Couldn’t have earned that in ten lifetimes if I had the job I used to.”

“What was that, Jack?” asked Jury, motioning to Molloy to fill the glass again.

Wiggins was staring up at the beam again, and Kath
wiped her fist across her mouth and said, “That there’s the bladebone if you was wonderin’. Used to slaughter the pigs and suchlike below.” She stamped on the oak floor and pointed to a sign near the entrance. “Right there’s the history.” Then she sauntered off to hand out more fliers.

“Waterman,” said Jack Krael. “Worked the bargers off the Isle of Dogs. There ain’t many of us left, is there? Not with jobs, I mean. The ships stop coming, they pull down the warehouses, raze the land, and parcel it off to the rich or some chain hotel. St. Katherine’s Dock, would you look at that now? Big hotel and a yachting marina. Warehouses getting turned into ‘lofts’ so people can look out their windows and see the Pool. They’ll never see what I saw — all of them ships, India, China, the tall red sails, the smell of cochineal — no, they’ll not see that again. Common Market.” He turned to gaze at Jury. “It’s all the Common-bloody-Market, ain’t it? They sit round with their fat cigars burning holes in history.” His gaze went back to the optics. “On the Isle of Dogs they’re putting up a twenty-story building of flats. Probably see a Hilton and a dozen boutiques.”

“So Sarah Diver came into some money, you think?”

“Must’ve.”

Seeing that Jack Krael was probably growing monosyllabic, Jury had Molloy refill the glass.

Krael nodded his thanks and said, “We call her Sadie here, but I haven’t laid eyes on her in two months. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize; you’ve been more help than most.”

Wiggins had come back from reading the sign on the wall. “Butchered them for ships’ crews,” he said, looking up at the bladebone suspended from a beam on small chains. He went on to give the ghastly details much in the way of the person who finds the sight of a motorway pile-up abhorrent, but who always slows down to get a better view. The sergeant stopped in the middle of his bloody discourse to drink a glass of soupy-looking water, its dark
turgidity apparently the result of bits of crumbled biscuit.

“If you can get your mind off the abattoir, I want you to go to Wapping headquarters and talk to whoever’s in charge of this Diver case. I’m going to find Ruby Firth.”

Any mention of sea, river, or cesspool always brought that pained expression to Wiggins’s face. “You don’t have to swim in it, Wiggins.” Jury hated himself for asking, but he did: “What
is
that stuff you’re drinking?”

“Good for all sorts of things, sir. Black biscuit crumbled up. You think these two killings are connected, then?”

“It would be damned coincidental if they weren’t.” Jury shoved the door open.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Not many,” said Jury as they walked out into a thin veil of rain.

H
ER HAIR
was stuffed down into the turned-up collar of her raincoat and she wore dark glasses even in the rain. Her movements were decisive — the way she shut the door of the police-issue Cortina; the way she appeared to ignore the driver who was halfway out on the other side; the way she simply walked away.

As Jury crossed the old and narrow Limehouse Causeway, he could see clearly the boy who got out and followed her. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, thin and rather delicate-looking, but still handsome. A gust of wind tagged his brown hair and, watching him scrape it back, Jury thought he looked familiar. He could not think where he’d seen the boy before.

The car was about to drive off when Jury reached it. “I’m interested in the Diver case. And I’m looking for a woman named Ruby Firth. That wouldn’t be her, would it?”

The driver, wearing the uniform of the river police, looked hostile and said nothing.

“Sorry,” said Jury, pulling out his identification. “I’d like to talk with you.”

The driver’s expression changed, but not for the better. The old hostility was exchanged for a new one, better
suited to the occasion of having headquarters C.I.D. minding the business of Thames Division.

“Climb in.” He said he was Roy Marsh and the police constable was Ballinger from the Limehouse station. With his head only half-turned and the pretense of a smile, Marsh asked, “Do we need your help?”

Jury studied the profile and the thread of a scar at the corner of the mouth. The profile turned to the front and Roy Marsh looked at Jury in the rear-view mirror. He had eyes like iodine.

“No. But I need yours.” Jury took out a fresh twenty-pack of cigarettes and offered them around. Marsh shook his head; Ballinger took one.

“So what’s your interest in Ruby Firth?” Marsh asked, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Who she’s been palling around with.”

Abruptly the tapping stopped and Marsh turned in his seat to say, “And what’s that mean?”

“There was a murder in Northants. A man named Simon Lean.”

Roy Marsh’s expression shifted. Jury could feel the tautness.

“Who’s he, then?”

“You’re asking more questions than you’re answering, Roy. Was that Ruby Firth who got out of your car?”

Given the look on Roy Marsh’s face now, Jury knew he must have been right about the look on his face a few minutes ago. His interest in the woman, Jury suspected, went beyond the formalities of an official investigation. “Yes,” was his crisp answer.

“Who’s the lad with her?”

Marsh did not answer immediately.

Constable Ballinger, perhaps realizing that the course of the friendship between Marsh and Jury was going downhill fast, broke in. “Name’s Tommy Diver, sir. Sarah Diver’s
brother. Come here just to visit and finds that . . . .” Ballinger inclined his head toward Narrow Street, where Jury could just make out a knot of policemen. “The boy was there this morning when we went round to look over the house. Before the clean-up crew. The Diver woman was supposed to have been there to meet him last night, and never did show up. I guess we know why, now. The lad’s bad luck he happened to be on hand to identify the body.” Here Ballinger gave Roy Marsh a quick look. Marsh said nothing, so Ballinger went on. “The brother said it wasn’t her, not the way he remembered her. This one was thinner, her hair not as reddish, no makeup, plain clothes. It’d been some time since he’d seen her.” Ballinger shrugged. “His folks are coming from Gravesend to collect him —”

Roy Marsh had turned to face Jury and cut off Ballinger. His voice was soft, the kind of soft that sounds like danger, like the muffled tread of footsteps. “We found the body at four-thirty this morning in an old boat covered by a tarp. The slipway by Wapping Old Stairs. We’d been checking the boat to find out who owned it. In the meantime someone’d dumped the corpse in it; it was submerged for a while by the tides.” He turned to face the windscreen.

Quite a mouthful for Roy Marsh, who now turned the key in the ignition. Ballinger looked nervous. You don’t just brush off C.I.D. superintendents.

Jury wanted to be gone, anyway. Bad enough that Roy Marsh didn’t like Scotland Yard trampling through his patch, worse that he was probably uncommunicative even in the best of circumstances, worse yet, he seemed to be involved in a personal way.

Over the engine noise, Marsh said, “You started by asking about Ruby; I thought you were here because of Sadie Diver.”

“I am now.”

Jury slammed the door and watched the car take a turn
on West India Dock Road that would have earned it a ticket.

 • • • 

“Ruby Firth?”

She glanced from the warrant card to Jury’s face and back again. “An endless stream,” said Ruby Firth. “Which one are you? Limehouse? Thames Division? Port of London Authority?”

“Scotland Yard.” He smiled. “Have you been having a rough time of it, then?”

Looking bored — a look Jury questioned, in the circumstances — she stepped back from the doorway. Under the raincoat now discarded she wore a straight up-and-down cotton frock whose hem met the tops of her fashionable boots. At first he thought it shapeless; then he noticed the cut. Expensive. She was a little too thin, a little too tall, mouth a little too wide, but she was memorable. Her hair was dark gold and her eyes a smoky carnelian-brown that seemed to be looking at him from behind a curtain of fog.

The room in which they stood was enormous, one of those converted lofts Krael had mentioned, the wide floor as burnished and seemingly endless as a ship’s deck. It did end, though, at a panoramic window that gave its tenant what must have been a pricey view of the Thames. Weak light fell across old lacquer, when she threw a switch that lit two black, needle-thin torchieres with flat, green bands of light like rings around planets. The fireplace itself was wide green-mottled marble, perfectly plain, the mantel without ornament, not even the usual vase of flowers. The only furniture was a rosewood sofa, on which she now sat, and two modern, Italian-looking chairs across from it, separated by a small lake of smoked glass. There was other light, soft and melting into shadows, but whose source Jury couldn’t discern. Hidden illuminations behind moldings, he supposed. She turned on the silk-shaded lamp
beside the sofa, increasing the play of light and shadow that marbled the stark white walls. Jury had a weird sense of a Daliesque landscape of which she was the center, a study in contradictions and distorted realities.