The Horse You Came in On (2 page)

The marvellous boy. Wasn't that what someone had called him? wondered Jury. He was sitting on the same bench, in about the same place, that the dead woman had sat little more than two hours before.

Jury had always thought the life of Chatterton to be one of the saddest lives ever lived. At seventeen, most of the kids Jury had run into were shooting up, or joyriding, or else charging on their parents' Barclaycards. It all depended on whether he was operating in W1, SW4, or EC12.

By the age of seventeen, Thomas Chatterton had dazzled the literary world with his cycle of poems. And Jury doubted very much that anyone had really given a damn that the “Rowley poems” were a deception except for Horace Walpole, who'd been taken in by them, to his embarrassment—everlasting embarrassment, apparently. Despair and death by the age of seventeen. Jury shook his head. A life without visible reward, without money, without enough to eat, and then betrayal by his benefactor. Chatterton hadn't even been guilty of literary theft; he'd orchestrated the entire production, imagined the whole thing. What had he done to deserve such an end?

Jury wondered why he of all people was thinking of life in terms of justice. He looked now at the young woman in the Holman Hunt painting, rising from the knees of the lover who would almost certainly abandon her. Jury was particularly fond of the inscription Hunt had painted on the frame: “As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.”

He passed the Rossetti; the Burne-Jones; Millais's
Ophelia;
the three-part
painting of the hapless end of an unfaithful wife; and the painting, a print of which he held in his hand, of a wife and mother mourning the sailor drowned at sea.
A Hopeless Dawn:
every imaginable shade of gray washed over this painting—the morning light at the window, the waves beyond, the pewter candlestick with its guttered candle, the shadows, the color of the clothes. Their world was one drained of color. He had come back to the point at which he had started his stroll of the Tate, and sat down again on the bench. The death of Chatterton, he supposed, was his favorite. A wall of woe.

He had been on leave for two weeks now, had been to Leeds and decided no, he wouldn't be able to stand permanent removal to Bradford. His next stop would be Stratford-upon-Avon, and after that, Northampton. He was fairly certain Superintendent Pratt would welcome him; provincial CID units were always overworked. And he knew Sammy Lasko of the Warwickshire police would. But of all the men he could imagine working with, the irascible, arrogant, determined Macalvie topped the list. Sitting on the bench in the Tate, he recalled the telephone conversation.

“Exeter? Devon-Cornwall?
Me?”

“Right three times in a row. That's a record even for you, Macalvie.”

“I don't know, Jury. I don't know if you'd fit in. No one else that works here can tell the difference between sexual asphyxiation and strangulation. Pardon?”

This last word was apparently addressed to the owner of the voice that was there with Macalvie, chirruping away in Exeter police headquarters.

“I take it,” said Jury, “Gilly Thwaite just imparted one of those two bits of information to you?”

“One of those two bits, yes. So which is right?”

“I'm not there, for God's sake.” Jury laughed.

“So what?”

“Is this a test?”

“Sure . . . why not? You want a job here, don't you?”

Jury smiled. “Asphyxiation. Plastic bag over head?”

“Right.” Macalvie turned away from the phone again.

Jury heard the already high-pitched voice of Gilly Thwaite—at least, he assumed it was Macalvie's scene-of-crime expert—escalate even more, and then something that sounded like a sideboard falling, and then what sounded like a lot of glass breaking, and then a wail that segued into an awful scream.

“She says hi. Listen, you're hired.”

“I was just guessing.”

“So was I.”

In Exeter, the receiver fell into its cradle. Macalvie's way of saying goodbye.

Jury sighed. If he was tired of London, he must be, as Dr. Johnson had predicted, tired of life.

Chatterton certainly had been.

Jury left the Tate.

“I really think, Mr. Jury,” said Mrs. Wassermann, pressing her anxious fingers hard against her black bag, “that Mr. Moshegeiian is making a mistake allowing Carole-anne to be in charge of renting our first-floor flat.” Her fingers whitened against the black leather, and her face beneath the black hat was pale. Mrs. Wassermann was dressed for one of her rare outings to her cousin's in Bromley. She was about to leave for the Angel tube station. Right now she was in Jury's flat, one of the four in the terraced house, but her eyes were trained on the ceiling—the floor of the first-floor flat in question.

“I wouldn't worry about Carole-anne letting to someone unsuitable, Mrs. Wassermann. You know her—she's fussy.”

Carole-anne Palutski lived on the top floor, in the smallest and cheapest of the flats, made still cheaper by her understanding with the landlord; she'd take the management of the empty flat off his hands for a reduction in rent. Mr. Moshegeiian, a Latvian or Lithuanian, was clever enough to realize that if Carole-anne was showing people round the flat, it was a dead cert it would get rented, especially if the viewer was male. But that aside, he would still have succumbed to the blandishments of Miss Palutski.

“And Mr. Moshegeiian is nobody's fool,” Jury added.

“Slum landlords never are,” Mrs. Wassermann said sweetly.

Jury laughed. “I'd hardly call this place a slum, Mrs. Wassermann.” He inspected a sock he was about to stuff into his bag. Hole you could put an elbow through. He tossed it into the rubbish bin. “And Carole-anne's extremely particular.”
That
was certainly no exaggeration, although “particular” in this case took on a special Carolinian tincture.

“But that's exactly the trouble, Mr. Jury. Now, there was a sweet young couple just the other evening who came to see it. All the way from Wandsworth. They'd just got married and said it was just what they were looking for. But no. Credit rating not up to snuff, she told me.” Mrs. Wassermann looked stricken, as if her own credit rating were snuff-less.

Mrs. Wassermann, who was nobody's fool either, simply wasn't tuned
in to the Palutski wavelength. The Palutski wavelength could zap any male between twenty and sixty within sight of those lapis lazuli eyes. But when it came to sweet young couples, Carole-anne passed them by as if she had a white stick and a dog in harness.

Lately, the empty flat above Jury had become Mrs. Wassermann's nemesis, a vast and empty cityscape that was in danger of being overrun by rats and ruffians. Mrs. Wassermann was here all day, pretty much alone, what with Jury gone and Carole-anne keeping her version of a “steady” (meaning, hours that suited) job in Covent Garden: whatever didn't interfere with her novice acting.

The pressing problem now was that Carole-anne wasn't here at night either, hadn't been for the two weeks of the run of the play in Chiswick in which she'd landed a tiny part. Jury had taken Mrs. Wassermann to the opening night, and he (though not she, who believed Carole-anne could do anything) had been surprised to find that the girl could act. Indeed, the girl was the only thing worth watching in an otherwise dreary production that thrashed about like a fish unwilling to be reeled in. She glittered. Jury had met the director and producer that evening, a silly twit who said the production was headed for the West End. Carole-anne said it was headed for the river.

“You throw away a perfectly good sock,” said Mrs. Wassermann, who had rescued it from the wastepaper basket. “I can darn this with no trouble at all.” She opened her bag and stuffed in the sock. Dolefully, she looked at Jury's suitcase. “And you are going away again.” Her tongue clucked.

“Not for long—only a few days. To visit my friend in Northants.”

“Ah, yes, the earl. Why does he not visit you?”

“Well, when he comes to London, he usually stays at Brown's. You know, in Mayfair.”

Mrs. Wassermann opened and closed the clasp of her bag, growing thoughtful. Then she said, “Just think. Wouldn't it be nice for him if he had, you know, a little pied-à-terre?”

Her eyes were on the ceiling.

“I hear you caught the squeal, sir.” Wiggins looked up from his paperback when Jury walked into their office.

“Caught
what
?” Jury aimed his mac in the general direction of the coatrack and missed again.

Wiggins tilted his book from side to side in a paperback wave. “That's what they say in the States, sir. In these Eighty-seventh Precinct books they're always saying it. It means the ones who're on rota when a crime gets called in. ‘Caught the squeal.' ” Wiggins had clearly grown fond of the phrase. “Eighty-seventh Precinct. They're by Ed McBain.”

“Well, I wish Ed had caught this one. I'm not on rota; I'm on holiday. If you can call it that.”

But the sergeant was not commiserating. He had, after all, just been forced to move into the muster room when the fresh paint was applied here in their office. He was allergic to paint. So it was either the smoke and smells of the muster room or paint fumes. Wiggins's life seemed permanently caught between hell and high water, the devil and the deep blue sea, a rock and a hard place.

“He's very good, sir.”

Jury was opening and closing drawers. “Who?”

“Ed McBain. Very authentic background. It's a relief to read somebody who knows how the police really work instead of these detective-story writers who just make up anything that suits them. You really get a feel for American cops here.”

“I didn't know you read mysteries.” Jury slammed another drawer shut.

“I don't actually, except these ones. I read one and thought it was pretty snappy, so I picked up another.”

The phone rang; Jury yanked it up before it had barely finished its initial
brr-brr
. A few “Yes”es and he dropped the receiver.

“The guvnor?” asked Wiggins, not bothering to look up from his paperback.

Jury winced. “No. Fiona. I caught the squeal.”

Wiggins sniggered and Jury walked out.

 • • • 

Fiona Clingmore lifted her towelled head from her portable steambath and said, “You're supposed to be on leave, you are. Disgraceful.”

“So where is he? I thought he was desperate to see me.”

She shrugged her shoulder to indicate a room out of view. “With the AC. That's where he called from. What you been doing on your holiday?”

Is that what they called it? “Been to eleven films in the last ten days. I thought I'd get it over with all at once.”

“Whyn't you go somewhere sunny and warm? You're the one ought to be having a holiday on the Costa del Sol, not
him
.” Fiona patted some astringent lotion on her face and squinted in her mirror to view the pore damage. “He says he's taking Cyril with him next time he goes to Spain. He saw this animal rights stuff about the disgraceful things they do over there. There was this picture—can you imagine?—where this Spaniard has a cat by one leg and he's swinging him round his head.” Fiona clucked her tongue and shook out her hair. “Well, any man that'd doctor a cat's tuna. . . . Poor defenseless animal.” She took out her sponge bag.

Jury hunched down in the office chair and watched the poor defenseless animal. The cat Cyril was probably working out some equation in thermodynamics that would levitate him to the top of the water cooler. The small ledge was too tiny to hold him, accommodating nothing larger than a paper cup. One sat there beneath the spout. Jury wondered what fate the cat had in mind for Chief Superintendent Racer that involved the water cooler. Cyril wasn't simply sitting there waiting for Fiona to turn the spout and make bubbles rise. After another moment of staring up at the water bottle, he swayed off towards the chief's office.

Fiona sighed. “He'll be at that fax machine again.” She made no move, however, to go in and collect him.

 • • • 

Jury sat down in the chair across the desk from Racer's own swivel chair, occupied now by Cyril, whose head Jury could just see over the desktop. Some of the furniture had been shoved into one corner and covered with dust sheets preparatory to redecoration. In another corner, lengths of ceiling molding were leaning against the wall. It looked like some sort of major overhaul, inconvenient for working, convenient for spending even longer periods of time at one's club.

Cyril's eyes were on the new facsimile machine. Ever since Racer had laced Cyril's tuna with tranquilizers and transported him to one of the
pounds, Jury had imagined reprisals, in one form or another, taking shape in Cyril's mind.

Cyril sat there and Jury sat there, both of them in their separate ways making plans. Jury thought again about the possibility of a unilateral transfer to the provinces and wondered if he should mention it to Racer. Thus far he had mentioned it to no one. He thought again of Macalvie, of Northants and Superintendent Pratt, of the Warwickshire constabulary and Stratford-upon-Avon. He would stop off in Stratford before going on to Northants.

The fax machine beeped twice and then started humming, and Cyril came to quick attention. Now he was on the desk, stalking the machine. Cyril and Jury watched the paper, listened to the machine spit it out inch by inch. Jury leaned over and read. The fax was from the assistant commissioner. He did not read the message, however; Cyril was on it in a flash, sending the paper fluttering to the floor. Then Cyril looked at Jury and slowly blinked, as if the cat were waiting for any suggestions Jury might have with regard to this fax. Jury shrugged.

Cyril slid down from the desk, caught up one corner of the paper in his teeth, and dragged it across the room to the outer office. At the door he paused and appeared to be scanning the room for Fiona, who, Jury saw, was not there. Probably gone to the ladies' with her sponge bag. Jury moved over to the door to watch.