The Five Bells and Bladebone (34 page)

They had just passed the summerhouse, when Jury saw the figure in the distance standing at the lake’s edge, looking out over the water. She had turned as if they had called to her and then started toward them, across the lawn and between banks of japonica. She stopped quite suddenly, perhaps a dozen feet away.

 • • • 

Even though Jury knew the element of surprise was important, he had sat with Tommy, the car pulled into the lay-by, uncertain. Important, yes, but Jury couldn’t do it — have Tommy run into her completely unprepared. Bad enough he’d had to identify the body in Wapping. To find his sister resurrected here at Watermeadows would undo whatever good had been done in the last twenty-four hours. Tommy had actually looked pleased with himself in the Five Bells, even more so in the Starrdust. He had begun, Jury thought, to turn his sister back into a memory, which was really all he’d had in the first place.

Thus, Jury had told him that here at Watermeadows was a woman who looked very much like his sister.

Tommy had taken in Jury’s meaning instantly, the expression on his face one of mingled hope and despair.

“Whatever’d Sadie be doing in a place like this?” He had half-risen from the car seat, looked out the window at the wide lawns, gardens, and pools, and shaken his head. “That’s daft.” Tommy was having none of it.

“Probably. But have a close look, anyway, okay? Then we’ll go have a visit with Lady Summerston.” Jury tried to make it sound as if that were the object of the trip. “I think you’ll like Lady Summerston. She owns all of this, incidentally.”

After a long silence, Tommy asked: “How old’s that Carole-anne, anyway?”

The studied indifference of his tone was almost painful to hear. Jury had just glanced at him, and seeing Tommy’s face looked hot as a burning coal, tried to laugh it off: “That’s a secret between Carole-anne, the registry office, and God. My best guess is twenty-two or -three. She changes it like her costumes. Whatever fits the occasion she wears.”

Tommy’s yawn was as false as his world-weary tone when he said, “Lots older than me, I guess.”

As if he hadn’t known it all along. Jury could feel the surreptitious look Tommy was giving him, and he kept his eyes on the windscreen. “Mmm. Funny thing about age. In ten years you won’t really notice the difference.”

That
had been a stupid thing to say. Ten
days
at Tommy’s age already seemed like ten years. So Jury was talking about their meeting out there in infinity somewhere.

“She really likes you.” The barest hint of emphasis on that
you,
the Competition.

“I’m old enough to be her father, easily.”

Despondently, Tommy said, “But like you said, ten years from now it won’t make any difference. Time just expands all over the place, or whatever.”

Angry with himself, Jury addressed himself in his thoughts:
You great nit, why don’t you just stop trying to console him?
But no, nitdom won out. “Oh, no. To narrow
that
gap, why that’d be twenty years, twenty at least. Can you
imagine Carole-anne waiting around for twenty years?” He smiled.

Tommy pushed the door open on his side. He said, quite soberly and sensibly, “No, and I can’t see her waiting around for ten, neither.”

Nit
. Jury sighed.

 • • • 

Tommy looked at the woman now, his eyes narrow and squinting, like someone surfacing after the twilight sleep of an operation, trying to place the fuzzed image of the face before him. “Sadie?”

It was the look on
her
face that struck Jury, that spasm of recognition, instantly recalled, and another fitted into place. She had passed her hand across her eyes in the way that Carole-anne had done yesterday in the Starrdust. Jury felt his stomach tighten with anxiety. Not a fear of being lost in space, but that it was, like the Starrdust’s ceiling, a fake one of jazz and glitter; a throwaway, dispensable universe.

“Superintendent,” she said. It had looked like an effort to drag her eyes from Tommy Diver.

“This is Tommy Diver.” He did not complete the introduction.

“I’m Hannah Lean.” She put out her hand, her face now vacant.

Tommy barely touched the fingers before his arm fell away like lead. “You look just like my sister.” His voice was bitter, his face parched with anger.

He walked away down the path.

 • • • 

Jury let him go, knowing Tommy would stop when he was out of her line of vision.

For a moment they merely studied each other; then she said, “I suppose that was clever of you, but it means nothing.”

“No? You recognized him.”

Pushing up the sleeve of the old sweater, that nervous mannerism Jury was quite sure had been one of Hannah Lean’s, she turned her face and looked across the sheet of water. Gray in a gray afternoon. Then she turned back. “The boy looks very much like my grandfather at that age. It startled me.”

He said nothing, just turned to go.

“Give it up, Superintendent.”

He turned back. “You’re Sadie Diver, aren’t you?”

Her face was perfectly still. After a moment she said, “That’s ridiculous. I’m Hannah Lean.”

Jury’s stomach tightened again. “This is a hell of a thing to do to that kid. He’s only sixteen.” Now he did walk off.

And she called after him, “Ah, but who’s doing it, Superintendent?”

 • • • 

He heard the harmonica, its sound soft and diffident coming from the garden in which he sat earlier that day, while the white cat stalked through the groundcover.

The white cat was there again, or still there, curled by the statue of the nymph with the water-filled basket. Tommy was sitting on the opposite side, his knees drawn up, playing. When he saw Jury, he stopped, slapped the harmonica several times against his hand, and pocketed it.

He did not get up, just sat there with his arms wrapped round his knees, and said, “I expect that’s why you brought me to Northants, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely, no.”

“Well, she didn’t recognize me, did she?”

Jury said only, “What about you? Did you recognize her?”

With a great deal of agitation, Tommy pulled up a clump of grass, which grew long in this garden, and let the blades flutter off. The white cat opened an eye, yawned, continued its doze. “She wouldn’t pretend not to
know
me. That’s not like Sadie.”

There was no real conviction in his voice. Jury was afraid the dream-world, like the blades of grass, was being borne away. “No. I expect it’s not,” was the only weak answer he could give to this.

As they walked on toward the house, her words kept running through his mind:
But who’s doing it, Superintendent?

 • • • 

Crick led Jury and Tommy in their long climb up the staircase, down the hall, through the door of Lady Summerston’s room. He announced them formally, and she turned in her seat on the balcony, peering into the somber shades of her sitting room.

“Superintendent! You’ve cleared things up by now, I hope.” On the chair beside her were the usual albums — the stamps, the photos — and the usual game of solitaire was in progress. “I refuse to have some dark column of a police constable standing outside my doorway, nor do I see any need of it. It’s all very mysterious, and I hope you’ve come to explain yourself. Who’s this?”

When Tommy Diver stepped from the shadowy room onto the balcony, she blinked, narrowed her eyes in much the same way as he had done himself. She put on her glasses. But all she said was, “You know, you remind me of someone.”

The picture of the someone sat there on the table before her and even Jury could see the resemblance between Tommy and Gerald Summerston. Fortunately (he thought), she did not make the connection. Jury had always wondered if the old really do remember their youth much more clearly than the young remember yesterday. Perhaps so, but Eleanor Summerston’s memories were shored up by the albums and, like the pictures there, turning sepia-brown with age.

Tommy’s smile was the first genuine one Jury had seen
since they’d left Ardry End. “Did you like them, then? Whoever I remind you of?”

The glasses now dangling from the narrow grosgrain ribbon, she said, “Oh, I’m sure I did. Do you like cards?” When he pulled out a chair and sat right down, she seemed to grow festive. “Let’s have tea. Or beer. Young people like it; I never have.”

Jury was standing, looking out over the dried pools toward the lake. She stood there in the same spot, gazing across the water. The sun came out briefly, fuzzed her outline, veined the lake like shattered glass. It was May, but it was winter light.

Tommy was saying that he’d like some tea; Lady Summerston decided that cakes would be nice. He scooped up the cards she shoved toward him, riffled the two halves of the deck, and slotted them together. Handling the cards lent him an air of authority.

“I’ll just have Crick bring up the tray.” She blew into the old intercom and placed the order. “Now! What shall we play? You don’t happen to know poker, do you?”

It was the right question. Jury saw the glint in Tommy’s eye. “Learnt it when I was a kid.”

He slapped the deck down for her cut.

Jury walked back into the sitting room.

 • • • 

In the dark corner atop the bureau the antique soldiers stood, bayonets and rifles ready, prepared for action. He wondered what Hannah Lean’s childhood had been like. Could it really have been happy, with the parents both dead? The face looking out from the portrait at the top of the stairs looked studious. Had she been so as a child? Enjoyed her lessons? Read books . . . ?

That made him think of the bookshop, the little girl with the Sendak book and the baby made of ice. The strange little figures in hooded cloaks scrambling through
the window, leaving the changeling, taking the real baby.

And it was then that he realized where he’d gone wrong: it was all symbolic, all psychological, that story about the girl and her baby sister. There never had been an ice-baby, after all. Deep in her mind the older child had made it up. The baby was there all along.

Crick had come with the tea tray and gone again, his coming and going barely noticed by Jury, like the laughter on the balcony which seemed so far away. “Raise you ten,” Jury heard Tommy say. Ten pence or ten pounds? The money Sadie had sent him.

Another puzzle-piece fell into place. Sadie might have been too careful to send a check, and it appeared to have been a largish sum. Jury walked out to the balcony.

“Tommy, how did your sister send you that money?”

Tommy looked up from his cards, surprised. “Recorded delivery. I expect she didn’t want the money getting lost. Why?”

Jury left in search of a phone.

 • • • 

Wiggins had his mouth full of one of the cakes donated to keep up Constable Pluck’s strength. Immediately, he started talking about Long Piddleton’s being just the sort of place he wouldn’t mind transferring to. If he could just get his sinuses used to the country air.

Jury interrupted and told him about the letter. “At least we
know
it’d be Sadie Diver’s signature. Probably, she didn’t even think about it or if she did, she certainly wouldn’t have told Simon Lean that her brother was coming up to visit her.”

“It’s half-five, sir. I’ll get onto it straightaway, but the post offices will be closed.”

“I’m not asking you to post a letter, Wiggins.”

“Sir!” said Wiggins, as smartly as he could, given the cake in his mouth.

“H
ANNAH?
”

From the bench in the secluded garden, the one where he and Tommy had sat and talked, she turned her head to look at Jury. This time she was not able to draw the veil over her expression, which was simply shock, and so she quickly turned to look down at the wicker basket on her lap. It contained several cuttings of japonica.

“Mind if I sit down?”

Her reply to that was, “So you’re giving me back my name. Thank you.”

Jury sat beside her, watching her. “Oh, I don’t believe you really want to thank me. Not just before you might have been charged for your own murder. Charged as Sadie Diver. Wouldn’t that have made the Northants constabulary look bloody silly? Imagine the publicity when the last of an old and distinguished family is found to be an imposter who’s murdered the real granddaughter
and
her own lover. They’d have a right meal of that, the media.”

Her hands worked in her lap. The voice that answered was flat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. God knows, I have no desire for publicity.”

Jury offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. “Not ordinarily. But in this case I think it would have helped the
whole charade along. When the case came to trial — which was what you wanted — publicity would have helped.”

She sat, holding the basket of cuttings, as still as the statue at the end of the garden. Jury thought she must have wished she could turn to stone at that moment. “Probably you don’t want to hear my scenario, but I’ll tell you anyway: Simon left the house that night, but not to go to London. He was to meet Diane Demorney at the summerhouse later —”