The Old Wine Shades (20 page)

‘You’re determined they were up to something, is that it?’

‘No. I’m just allowing for the possibility.’

What was Plant doing, aligning himself with these two? They were perfectly amiable, of course, and Colonel Neame was by no means stupid. (Major Champs’s mental prowess, Jury wouldn’t swear to, however.) It was as if they made a trio who shared the same ideas and insights. There Melrose sat, smoking one of Champs’s cigars and giving Jury the same steely look that Colonel Neame was giving him, the only difference being the color of it: Colonel Neame’s gaze was steel gray and Plant’s, steel green.

‘All right, we’ll definitely take that into account.’ Jury shook his head, set down his coffee cup and listened to the grim bong of Boring’s at noon. The longcase clock seemed to call to all of them here in this plague room to bring out their dead. Looking around, he thought there might be a couple of possibles. He slapped his chair arms and rose. ‘Gentlemen, good seeing you and thanks for the drink. I’d stay but I have a luncheon engagement.’

‘Power lunch?’ asked Melrose.

‘No. Pub lunch. That’s about as powerful as I ever get.’

All three, he noticed, were squinting at him, suspicious. Plant’s look was squintier than the other two. Then Melrose sat back, puffing on his cigar, eyes still narrowed. This put Jury in mind not of a stinking rich, titled, estate owner but more of Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca.

‘Something funny?’

‘Not at all,’ said Jury.

24

Trevor’s place had been taken by another barman, older, bar towel thrown over his shoulder, guttural North London accent. Jury wondered where Trevor was; perhaps this was his day off. He also wondered if this other one had Trevor’s knowledge of wine. He doubted it. Few would.

Jury was early for his meeting with Harry and had a drink at the bar, a little worried about his midday drinking. He rarely did it, if, for no other reason, he hadn’t the time.

There were more customers in the afternoon than in the evening. It was popular for stockbrokers, money managers, clerk typists. Somewhere he’d read that this pub was the only one left after the Great Fire, so it went back to the 1600s: that was in itself quite an accomplishment. The walls were covered in dark wood panels and featured advertisements of various wines and pictures of old London scenes. He wondered if any of the framed documents hanging on the walls attested to its history.

The place was crowded. Smoke hung in the air like a dropped ceiling. It really irritated Jury that inhaling secondhand smoke was just as unhealthy as firsthand. That was maddening, the smokers getting the pleasure of it while the ones who had suffered (and were still, if he was any measure of it, suffering) through kicking the habit—well, they might as well not have. He toyed with temptation for a while.

He dropped that way of thinking by going over what they’d said in Boring’s. He should talk to the agent again. Perhaps she could be more precise about that phone call coming in from Glynnis Gault.

But Jury was quite sure the most obvious explanation was the right one in this case.

‘Having lunch?’

Jury looked around to see Harry Johnson, wearing a different coat, camel hair this time, and just as expensive looking. ‘No, just this.’

‘They’ve a very good restaurant here upstairs.’

Jury tapped the glass and then looked down. ‘Where’s Mungo?’

Harry laughed. ‘In the car. I’m on a yellow line, so we’d better go, if you’re ready. Sorry about lunch.’

Jury nodded, left the glass half full and decided he wasn’t really a midday drinker. He couldn’t stand the thought of kicking one more habit.

Mungo positioned himself with his head out of the window.

‘Why do dogs do that?’

‘I don’t know; maybe they’re just breezing.’

Breezing.
It reminded Jury of the Ryders and horse racing. And Nell. What a bloody waste, oh, what a waste, he thought, as they maneuvered around a BMW, out for a lunchtime stroll on Upper Thames Street, and sped along the Embankment.

The Stoddard Clinic was Gothic and fiercely gated, stone lions atop the gray stone columns on either side. Cars had to stop and use the intercom embedded in one of the pillars. Harry pressed the button and a voice mixed with static asked his business.

‘I’m here to visit Mr. Gault. Hugh Gault. My name’s Johnson.’ There was a silence except for the electronic stutter.

‘Yessir, you Mr. Harry Johnson, then?’

‘I am.’

The gate pulled open and they drove in. The building, like the gate, was somewhat daunting. If this was a clinic principally for stressed-out people who had just a little too much on their platter its demeanor was overkill. Decidedly medieval, with stone battlements around the roof and no chairs on the wide sweep of grass. No people in chairs on the grass either, although it was quite a pleasant day. It was all gray stone with a bell tower.

Jury said as they parked under a massive oak tree, ‘This strikes me as looking more like another sort of facility, you know, the sort that doesn’t look kindly upon your signing yourself out and going home. If you know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I do. But it’s not quite as forbidding as you think.’

Jury nodded as they got out of the car, Harry petting Mungo and telling him they’d be back soon. Mungo made some throaty sounds, not, Jury was sure, to say he’d miss them, but because he thought freedom was at hand.

They walked around a smallish white bus with the name STODDARD painted on the sides—not CLINIC—perhaps to indicate that this place had been around for a long time and didn’t need to be identified.

Harry said, ‘I had another friend here a while back and she did leave. Her therapy was successful. Hugh’s not a prisoner. Listen: sometimes Hugh wants to talk about what happened and sometimes not. At least he doesn’t always bring the subject up. I let him take the lead on that score. You can imagine . . .’

Jury nodded, but certainly couldn’t imagine. Nor could he imagine living with it, something like that hanging over his head.

Stoddard was quite as imposing inside as out. Inside, though, it had warmth as opposed to its cold exterior. The warmth came from its fireplaces, its flowered bronze wallpaper, its polished mahogany banisters. There appeared to be two drawing, or reception, rooms where one could wait, to the left and right of the large entry hall. A woman and two men were standing in the center of the room on the right, laughing. Jury wondered if one was the patient the others had come to see, and thought the group was a little boisterous. The woman bent to stroke the head of an Irish wolfhound, a dog that had always struck Jury as faintly ridiculous, though he couldn’t say why.

When they walked in, Harry was greeted heartily by a nurse, whom he addressed by name—Mary, or Merle—and who walked to the receptionist’s table with him, chatting. The receptionist, a bit of a fashion plate, with her elegant suit and bobbed black hair that edged her face like a helmet, appeared to be just as congenial as the nurse. Harry must have visited Hugh Gault often enough to have stirred up friendly feelings in the staff.

A man had come down the wide staircase and was standing in the hall looking from one room to the other. Jury wondered if this was Hugh Gault; the poor fellow looked utterly overwhelmed. A nurse came from around the reception desk and, smiling, led him into the other room, where everyone made a fuss over him, including the wolfhound, who nearly knocked him down.

So
this
must be Hugh Gault, walking into the twin of that drawing room now. He was tall and a little thin, but by no means looking as if his ‘condition’ were responsible for the thinness. He greeted Harry, was introduced to Jury and sank down in one of the deep armchairs near the fire. Harry and Jury sat opposite in matching chairs. The room was dimly lit, which was pleasant. Some member of the staff apparently believed in ambient lighting. Jury wondered why. A better impression made? A softness conducive to more tender care? For whatever reason, it was extremely pleasant, even restful. These surroundings, with the flames leaping in the fireplace, looked quite glamorous, more the mise-on-scène of an expensive country hotel. Perhaps such appointments were considered therapeutic. Jury bet it cost a bundle.

‘A detective
superintendent
? My word!’ Hugh Gault nodded in Harry’s direction. ‘Are we going to have to alibi each other? Me, I’ve been right here for eight months. Plenty of witnesses. Harry, on the other hand, I can’t account for. He could be here, there, everywhere.’

‘Just a particle,’ said Jury, smiling. ‘That can’t be identified because it can’t be measured.’

Hugh tossed his head back and laughed. ‘That’s one of the best descriptions of Harry I’ve heard. You’re interested in quantum theory?’

‘The little, the
very
little I know about it, yes, I’d say so.’

Harry asked, ‘How’s the book going, Hugh?’

‘Still stumbling along. It might be easier if you’d give me back my damned notes.’ This was said not in anger, or even annoyance, but with good humor. To Jury he said, ‘Tell me, Superintendent, just how far along are you with proving this criminal conspiracy of ours:

‘Me? Not far. I’m stuck back there with Schrödinger’s cat.’

‘Ah! Good for you!’

‘Maybe. I’m not sure how good it is for the cat.’

Again, Hugh laughed. ‘You’re a quick study, Superintendent.’

‘No, I really don’t understand the quantum world.’

‘Well, just remember that whatever governs behavior in our daily experience is wasted in the quantum world. Schrödinger’s wavefunction was one of the revolutionary insights in quantum physics. Wavefunction.’

Jury smiled at the way Hugh Gault rolled this around in his mouth like a delicious chocolate or single-malt whiskey. ‘It’s a mathematical quantity. You have to solve Schrödinger’s equation to get it.’

‘Schrödinger’s cat. Alive and dead at the same—’

Hugh looked away and was silent. He looked back at Jury. ‘Sorry. I’ve taken a couple of blows and it’s—’ He sighed. ‘I miss my wife. I miss my son.’

Jury could see how the ambiguity—no, more than ambiguity— of the cat might strike him as an analogy in this way. They were silent for a few moments, and then Harry stepped in to fill the vacuum. ‘You know, I can see how quantum theory might have a certain appeal to a detective. Things change as you look at them. So how does one measure? One thing becomes two things. Dead and alive simultaneously. Schrödinger was certainly pointing out one of the sticking points in superposition theory.’

‘Superposition? What’s that?’ asked Jury.

Back on track, Hugh said. ‘Take this: you’ve tossed pebbles into water, haven’t you? And the result is concentric circles spreading out. Now throw another pebble in near the first one. Same thing: circles spreading out. But now the overlapping of those two configurations makes for a
third
configuration. And now you have a section of those circles being two things at once and, consequently, creating a
third
design. Superposition. You look skeptical, Superintendent.’

‘No, actually, I look dumb.’

Both of them laughed. Hugh said, ‘Schrödinger’s cat. Simultaneously alive and dead. It’s the overlapping. You see, what’s true on the microscopic level is in conflict with what we observe with our own eyes. The macroscopic level. The level of cats, for instance. The cat is tangled up with the decaying nucleus, and when the nucleus decays, the poison is released and the cat dies instantly.’ Hugh smiled. ‘Remember, as soon as you look you alter the outcome. ‘An aspect of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is that the act of observation will ultimately affect the thing being observed.’

Jury did not take this in. He was instead trying to track down something, something that Harry had said in the pub, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Schr
ö
dinger’s cat.
What Harry had said didn’t seem to fit. Jury frowned. What was it?

‘. . . the incompleteness theory.’

Jury shook his head as if to clear it. ‘I’m sorry. What were you saying:

‘Gödel. His theory of incompleteness. A proposition can be both true and unprovable.’

‘Oh. That.’

Hugh laughed. ‘Not to worry. The brilliant mathematicians were lost. After all, that upsets the whole notion that mathematics is a gloriously closed system, provable from within its own borders. You can understand that: how can a proposition be
true
and yet be
unprovable.
And yet Gödel had worked out a proof of this.’