The Five Bells and Bladebone (23 page)

W
APPING
O
LD
S
TAIRS
was a double set of steps, the ancient part now little more than a downward slope of lichen-green, mossy stone, through which one could just make out the outlines of steps going down. The other set was newer and usable. The slipway lay in the cavernous declivity formed by the two high walls, one of them the high side of a waterfront pub called the Town of Ramsgate. The manager of the pub wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the street’s being cordoned off by police; yet, he might have been enthusiastic about the murder, since there wouldn’t be standing room inside once the curious were permitted to shoulder up to the bar and ask questions.

Unfortunately, few questions could be answered, since the pub had closed at eleven and no one had seen or heard anything that was very helpful to the Thames police, over a dozen of whom were now fanning out up and down Wapping High Street. Several hours previously, there had been several dozen.

From his vantage point on Wapping Old Stairs, Wiggins was looking over at the water-markings left on the side of the pub. He asked Roy Marsh a question about the tides. Jury was standing beside Marsh, both of them trying to keep their purchase on the slanting slipway between the
steps and the tall side of the Town of Ramsgate. There wasn’t much room here, barely enough for the dinghy in which the corpse had been found.

“If it hadn’t been moored, the tide would have dragged it out.”

Wiggins turned an anxious face in the direction of the water nearly close enough to seep into his shoes. He took three steps back and up the stairs.

“Where’d the boat come from?”

“Don’t know. It’s in bad shape; someone could simply have left it here just to get rid of it. It’s moored at the launch at headquarters. We’re checking, but I have an idea we won’t be getting far on that one. She was under a tarp. She died from the stab wounds.”

Jury was hunched down looking at the chalked outline of the boat, the chalk itself partially washed away, the pinioned string loosened slightly from the wet.

Roy Marsh looked up the narrow conduit of stairsteps to the street. “In dead dark, and with the pub closed, it would be a secluded place, wouldn’t it? If she’d been walking along up there” — he nodded toward the street — “anyone could have dragged her down these steps.”

“Do you really think it was a stranger?” Jury was looking out across the Thames, watching a speedboat zip by, leaving smaller, quieter craft bobbing in its wake, people out after the rain, enjoying the mild weather. Small pleasure-craft dotted the water. Again he thought of what it must have been once — the black hulls of ships, the russet sails nearly blocking out the sight of Southwark. Now, on the other side of the river, the dark horizon of the Surrey docks rose against an orange-streaked sky.

“Why wouldn’t it be a stranger? Seems obvious.”

Jury could hear the belligerence, could feel the sergeant’s eyes boring into him. His answer was oblique: “The way the body was left. Why leave it in a secured boat? Why not let it slide into the water?”

When Marsh opened his mouth, probably to reject the theory that Sadie Diver was killed by someone who knew her, Jury went on: “Perhaps someone wanted her to come here, a half-hour walk from Limehouse —”

“Twenty minutes. You think they wanted to get her away from her own neighborhood because it would be harder to connect her up with that flat in Limehouse?”

Wiggins spoke from his stand on the stairs. “With identification on her?” He’d apparently been listening rather than simply inspecting the steps for slime. Now he said to Jury, “Can’t have it both ways, can you, sir?”

 • • • 

In the sanitized glare of the white-tiled room, the mortuary attendant pulled back the sheet from the corpse.

Jury stood, looking down at the face as still as garden statuary, for a long enough time that Wiggins frowned and said, “Something wrong, sir?”

He looked at Wiggins, then at the attendant, feeling he had to fix both of their faces in his mind. He felt as he had when he was a boy, when the carousel starts going fast and then faster and faces and forms stream together so that one has to watch closely to sort them out. Finally, the whole circle of faces might as well be one.

There was dead silence for one whole minute, in which the attendant wasn’t quite sure what to do, and in which Wiggins took the small photo Jury handed him and looked at it for a moment. “This is Simon Lean, right?”

Jury nodded.

Wiggins looked at it again, frowned, looked back at the dead face of the woman on the mortuary table. “And her?” He frowned. “Sadie Diver?”

“Hannah Lean. His wife. But she seems to be back in Northants, Wiggins, very much alive.” Jury nodded to the attendant to cover up the body.

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Neither do I.” He looked down at the snapshot, one of the two he’d taken from Watermeadows. “I wondered why Tommy Diver looked so familiar.”

 • • • 

He needed a place to think.

A church, he supposed, was as good a place as any for that, as he turned off the Commercial Road into Three Colt Street where the Five Bells was shut up tight in that blind way pubs have of looking in the few hours between the afternoon closing and the evening opening hours. He parked the car at the side of St. Anne’s and got out.

Both street and churchyard were deserted. He walked round to the western side, up the several flights of fanlike steps, across the vestibule, into the entryway. The body was a rectangle, the vestibules at the other end were rectangles within this larger one. The Ionic columns, the galleries surrounding the large hall were remarkable in their simplicity. He thought of the architect who had not been considered “correct” in the mind of the day. Simplicity where one would have expected the ornate. Jury knew nothing about church architecture. He knew only that he could use a little simplicity.

The moment the door closed behind him with a thud, the hollowness enveloped him. Not St. Anne’s, but his own. It was the reason he avoided churches.

He sat down in one of the pews at the rear, took a missal from the rack, opened it and closed it, put it back. He was unable to think of anything but the young woman at Watermeadows. Only now the face was superimposed over the one lying in the mortuary.

He looked down the nave toward the altar with a sense akin to fear, though it wasn’t that exactly, rising like bile in his throat. The wave of anxiety he felt seemed less related to the possible danger at Watermeadows than it did to the
fact that such a deception could be practiced, and done so well, so convincingly. He looked down the nave into the deep pool of shadow that surrounded the altar.

For him to take it so personally was unprofessional, but he couldn’t seem to help it. He had been gulled, and perhaps he felt some special acrimony because to dupe a Scotland Yard superintendent might be considered as some sort of acid test. Yet there had been no reason, none whatever, for the suspicions he had right now to have entered his mind at Watermeadows yesterday.

The double, the doppelganger, except in this case it was not the ghostly presence of the dead haunting the living. He was afraid it was, in some strange sense, the other way round.

H
E MADE A NOTE
of the estate agent’s name beneath the “For Sale, Freehold” sign. The house was probably advertised as an extremely desirable waterfront property; Sadie Diver’s flat, however, was nothing more than a glorified bed-sitting-room, its glory emanating largely from its having an actual kitchen. In this case, the kitchen was little more than an alcove with a heavy curtain on rungs in lieu of a door. A narrow window looked out on cracked earth and building lots. At a considerable distance and with no way to get to it was the Thames. The advert, Jury imagined, would contain the usual hyperbole — “enchanting view of the Thames,” “recently renovated,” and so forth.

A fridge, a cooker, a white enamel sink and drainboard constituted the fixtures. Above the sink was a hanging dishrack that held three plates of varying sizes, two cups, three glasses, and some cutlery. Even though forensics had given the place a complete turnout, Jury still took the precaution of touching no more than he had to. He opened the cupboard door by wedging his penknife under the chrome knob and pulling. What was on the shelves was sparse: more plates, cups, glasses. In one corner were several plates that matched, all with a fine gold band. The good stuff, presumably, for entertaining.

Jury walked through the sitting room, where the only thing that was out of place was the pulled-out sofa bed and crumpled covers, and into the bathroom. It was small but quite modern, with yellow and white tiles, their monotony broken by the occasional one with a painted bird. Yellow fittings, low
W.C.
, stall shower. There was even a small airing cupboard. Again with his knife he pried open the medicine cabinet above the sink to find the few bottles there very neatly arranged on a single glass shelf. He looked at the drain in the sink, then in the shower. The one in the shower was covered with a removable aluminum trap to catch hair. With the tip of thumb and forefinger he carefully removed it, looked at it closely, returned it. He shook his head.

He stood now in the center of the sitting room and looked around slowly: the rumpled bedclothes, the pillows on the floor beside Tommy’s small suitcase. A set of bookshelves stood against the wall across from the sofa. The few books were thrillers and picture books of London. Magazines were neatly stacked on another shelf. The two issues of
Country Life
were months old, gathering dust in this otherwise spotless room.

A glass-fronted curio cabinet stood against the opposite wall. In it were a blue crystal bird, a brass box that looked Indian, a white-robed Bedouin warrior on a horse that reared on its hind legs. Brandishing a rifle with a bayonet, he was a perfect metal miniature. Jury opened the glass door, reached in, and then drew his hand back. Remembering the Safe-T-Loc bags he’d seen in the kitchen, he went to get one, came back, and picked up the horse by hooking his knife beneath the legs. He dropped it into the plastic bag, pinched it together, put it in his pocket. He peeled off another from the container and carefully dropped in the crystal bird.

Jury rang Wapping headquarters and got their print expert. Yes, they’d lifted the victim’s prints from the
crockery, a few from the woodwork. There were elimination prints —

“Whose?”

“Delivery boy’s, neighbor down the street, brother’s.” There were others they hadn’t matched up, quite a few. Latents, partials —

“Did you dust the stuff in the cabinet? An Arab soldier on a horse and a couple editions of
Country Life
?”

The print man was alternately whistling between his teeth and repeating “Arab, Arab,” and then said, “Two partials, not the victim’s. Magazines . . . several. Not the victim’s.”

There was a silence, and Jury said: “Just how many prints of the victim
did
you find?”

“Take a little research. But, as I remember, damned few. To tell the truth, the place might almost have been unlived in.”

“That’s what I thought. Did you lift any from the bottles in the medicine cabinet? Also, there was a small stack of gold-rimmed plates in the kitchen cupboard. Were the partials good enough to get a make?”

“Yes and no.”

“Meaning?” Jury could almost visualize the man’s grin, having his little joke.

“Nothing. Isn’t it always yes and no?”

Jury hung up, but not before telling the print expert that forensics needed to go over the place again.

He sat down on the edge of the bed for a moment, opened his notebook, closed it. Sadie Diver seemed to be passing before Jury’s line of vision much like a figure at the end of a long passageway between buildings, someone who had suddenly appeared from nowhere and gone back to it. The notion, he tried to tell himself, was absurd. She had a history: a brother, an aunt and uncle, a flat, a job. He checked his notebook again. Place called Streaks in Tottenham Court Road.

He took the package from his pocket, held it up to the light and looked at the robed figure, the flashing legs of the horse. Hannah Lean’s favorite.

Lady Summerston had said something like that.