The Stargazey (16 page)

And then he saw the black coat, the pale hair some distance off at the nearest bus stop, with a bus just coming. He could not make it to that stop in time, but if he ran he could get to the one farther up. He broke into a jog and got to the stop just after the bus, which still idled by the curb.

She was not sitting on the lower level, so he hopped up the steps to the upper level and sat down several rows behind her. The only other passengers up here were a group of teenagers in uniforms, late from school, probably.

They meandered through South Ken and Brompton and Knights-bridge; he watched to see if she showed signs of getting up. Harrod's was in this block of buildings; rather, Harrod's
was
this block of buildings. No. The bus joined the procession of buses making their way to Hyde Park and Piccadilly.

Why he hadn't simply gone to the front and sat down beside her and produced his identification, he didn't know. One part of him told the other part, Well, he didn't want to embarrass her. Embarrass how? The teenagers wouldn't care if the conductor came through and announced the next stop was Red Square. It took more than a lone policeman to get their attention.

So, why? He hated to admit that he didn't know, really, what to do. He had grounds for detaining her, for taking her in. Reasonable grounds. She had been at the scene. He went over and over this as the bus made its way around Piccadilly Circus.

She got up.

Jury looked out of the window and saw the bus was traveling up Shaftsbury Avenue, and, after she'd descended the stairs, he did too, waiting halfway down until the bus stopped. He jumped off just as the bus moved away from the curb.

A number of theaters lined one side of Shaftsbury Avenue, so perhaps that was her objective. It was too early for the evening's performance; perhaps she'd come to buy tickets, though in this computerized age it was hard to believe someone would make a trip simply to purchase tickets.

She was on the other side of the street, going through the doors of the Lyric, where an American play had just opened. He didn't enter the lobby but waited just outside the glass doors while she transacted her
business. In a few moments, it was done and she was returning things to her bag; the tickets she inspected as she walked slowly towards the doors beyond which Jury stood, and which she now pushed open, unseeingly, for her eyes were on the tickets.

“Madam.”

She started, took an involuntary step backward, bumped into the door. “What?”

Jury had his identification ready, held it out. “Superintendent Jury, CID. I'm with New Scotland Yard.”

She seemed to be utterly horrified, a reaction Jury had seen more than once, usually on the faces of the innocent. Some of them thought he had come to accuse them; some, that he had come to inform them. In neither case was it a happy meeting.

“If you could just spare me a few moments to talk?” Closer now, he could see that her eyes were hazel, changeable in the changing light. She was wearing makeup this evening, a coppery shade of lipstick, very light brown eyeshadow.

“Talk? I'm sorry, but—why would I—?”

She shook her head, and her pale blond hair, which was not pulled back this time, swirled as if they were dancing and he had just spun her away.

It was different from the dead woman's hair only in the shade of its blondness, its sheer luminosity. Which meant it was altogether different, only it might take a long time looking at it to see that. Jury had been a long time looking.

That disbelieving look he was getting—he could see he was in for a time. “There's an investigation going on, and I was hoping you could help us with our inquiries. I've reason to believe you might be able to.”

“What reason?”

It had started to rain again, or perhaps it had never stopped; it was the sort of rain one gets used to and hardly notices. “Look, there's the St. James pub right over the road. Would you have a drink with me?”

“I didn't know policemen did that—bought drinks for people ‘helping with inquiries.' ” Her smile was a little sly. “You really say that, do you?”

At least he was hearing a hint of humor. “I don't, not usually.”

“You're sure you are a policeman?”

“I'm sure.”

She seemed to be taking the measure of his smile. “All right, then, why not?”

The pub looked invitingly warm and intimate, windows showing bronze light through smoke, the smoke of endless cigarettes.

The St. James was fairly large, with a long oval bar and tables sitting in pools of shadow or, at the rear, actual darkness; Jury took one better lit, then went up to the bar. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, and she seemed calm and unsuspicious. He set the pint of lager and half of Guinness down on the small damp table and, after seating himself, said, “Let's begin with your name.”

This surprised her. “You don't know it?”

“No. I'll explain in a moment.” But the point wasn't his explanation; it was hers.

“It's McBride. Kate.”

“And you live—?” Jury had his small notebook out.

“South Ken. In Redcliffe Gardens. It's on the edge of Fulham. Would you please tell me what this is about?”

“If you've been reading the papers, you know about a woman who was shot in the grounds of Fulham Palace?”

“Yes, I saw something about it. It struck me as strange, bizarre. But what—”

“You frequent a pub in the Fulham Road called the Stargazey?”

She frowned, even more perplexedly. “I've been there, yes. Did this woman—?”

“And do you recall going there on the night in question?” He was retreating behind this stiff formality.

By now, she had her chin planted firmly between her fists, eyes leveled at him as if she had just discovered he was fascinating. “What night
is
in question?”

“The night of November fifteenth. On the Saturday.”

“No.”

“You weren't there, at the pub?”

“No. I mean, I don't recall.”

“It's less than a week ago. Could you try?”

She seemed quite sincerely to be trying as she sat back and squinted at the ceiling. “Let me think. It was the evening a friend of mine called about a dinner party . . . and then I had dinner. . . . Later I had tea with an elderly lady who lives upstairs. . . . Yes, it was Saturday. Last week.”

“But you don't remember going to the pub?”

She shrugged. “I might've. The Stargazey is quite near my flat. It wouldn't have been until later, though.”

“Later?”

“Oh, around ten, I expect.”

“And then?”

“I would have gone home.”

“You didn't board a bus?”

She shook her head. “I didn't, no.”

Jury let a few seconds pass. He said, “Somebody who looks enough like you to be your twin
did
board a bus outside of the Stargazey and ride down the Fulham Road.”

“Then that's who you should be talking to, the someone who looks like me.” She had removed her black coat and adjusted the neck of her pearl-gray suit. Its cut was elegant, Jury thought.

Jury smiled a trifle grimly. “Yes. Well, the point is, it
was
you, Ms. McBride.”

“I shot this woman and then ran off?”

“I hadn't got that far in my mind yet.”

She opened her mouth, but it was as if she'd come only on empty air. Her hand went into her leather bag, felt around, came out with a cigarette case. The hand was slight and fine, thin-skinned, the fingers long and almost delicate. The case was silver, fine too. The great settler and mind-clearer, a smoke. Jury felt an awful longing.

She did not open the case, though. She said, “To be as certain as you are that I was on some Fulham Road bus, you'd need an awfully dependable eyewitness. You have one?”

“Yes. Me.”

The effect of this was to turn her fine ivory complexion chalk white, thin across the bones. It was the first indication that this conversation
was
affecting her. Her posture shifted; she bent slightly, as if she were a
reed in the wind. But her expression didn't shift at all. It was perfectly composed, as fixed as the marble face of a statue.

Jury wondered if she'd trained herself not to react.

“You're mistaken.” She said this flatly, without any inflection.

“Do you own a fur coat? A sable, a mink?”

She laughed. “Good lord, no. Is that what whoever you saw was wearing? It certainly wasn't I, Superintendent. Look,” she said earnestly. “You've simply made a mistake. A glimpse of someone on a bus, or getting on or off a bus; it would be easy enough—”

“It was more than a glimpse. You got off the bus—”

“
She
got off the bus. Why are you so set on discarding the obvious explanation for one so unlikely?”

“Because it isn't unlikely.”

“Then what in God's name is your theory?” She turned the silver case over and over in her hand.

“I don't have a theory. But the fact you were there certainly needs looking into.”

“If I
was
there—which I wasn't—what would it mean? That I shot her because she looked like me?”

“I've no idea what the motive for the shooting was.”

Jury could see in her movements now her intention to leave.

She said, “I expect this is the point at which I say I need a solicitor.”

He said nothing, watching her stow her cigarette case and lighter in the leather bag. As she moved, the light that had fallen across her pale hair spilled like water over the shoulder of her gray silk suit.

She gathered up her coat and said, “Well, I'm leaving, Superintendent. You know where I live. Indeed”—here she held up the ticket she had just purchased—“you know where I'll be this evening. Good night.”

Jury rose as she did. “You might expect we'll be in touch with you. Or the Fulham police will.”

Her look told him nothing that she was thinking, as if he were a blank wall.

Jury watched her move through the crowd and the smoke and watched the door swing shut behind her. He did not know what he'd expected, only that he was hugely disappointed.

He did the only thing he could do: had another drink and watched the smoke weave upwards, collecting over the heads of the people at the bar.

 • • • 

Less than an hour later found Jury at Fulham Police Headquarters.

Ron Chilten would have been surprised by Jury's encounter with this woman, had the Fulham police not turned up the victim's identity just that afternoon. “Nancy Pastis, that's the dead woman's name. We're running it through records.”

“How'd you find her?”

“A little lady by the name of Verna—no, Vera.” Chilten thumbed up a couple of papers. “Vera Landseer lives in the same building and recognized the photo in the paper, or thought she did. Got a flat in Mayfair—Shepherd Market—in the same building as Ms. Pastis's. That's what we've got so far. I've got two of my men going over the flat now. Sharing it with C Division. Milderd, you know him?”

“Slightly.”

Chilten leaned his chair back on two legs, rubbed at the ankle hooked over the other knee. “I'll admit I thought you were wrong about the woman you saw on the bus. At first, remember, you identified the dead woman as the one you followed, so I figured—” Chilten shrugged.

“Now we know there were two of them. Nancy Pastis, Kate McBride.”

“Yes. But the one you saw still could have been the victim. Otherwise, Kate McBride, if it's Kate McBride you saw. . . . Why was she wearing the Pastis woman's coat? Unless there are also two sables in the picture.”

“The McBride woman had to have switched coats.”

Chilten looked down at the darned place in his sock. “Sometimes the most obvious explanation—”

“Don't do the Holmes quote on me.”

Chilten shrugged again. “Okay, but then why take off her coat and dress the dead woman in it?”

“Good question.”

Chilten brought the chair down with a thud. “Jury, eyewitnesses are, more times than not, wrong.”

“I guess I'd know that, having questioned so many wrong ones.”

I
t was the same woman,” said Jury.

At a little after nine o'clock, dinner at Boring's was winding down, or at least the half-dozen diners spotted about at tables seemed to be dozing over their cheese and biscuits.

Jury was drinking coffee and Melrose was drinking a superior whisky and wondering if he was drunk. He and the Fabricants had downed several drinks at the Running Footman that afternoon. Now here he was, listening to Jury claim the dead walked in the Fulham Road. He said it sounded like a genteel version of a John Carpenter film.

“I didn't say the dead walked; pay attention,” Jury said, a bit testily. “She looks like the woman found at Fulham Palace is what I said.”

The two of them were sitting in front of the fire in the same wing chairs Colonel Neame and Major Champs had occupied. Melrose was beginning to feel right at home in Boring's. Crusty, almost; almost giving those mumbled responses of Champs or Neame to Jury and the ancient porter. He upended his glass for the last morsel of whisky, the “moiety” he had instructed Higgins to bring him. What was left now was the very dew this excellent whisky advertised itself as being soft as.

Jury sat back, a little depleted from the day's activity. “At least you haven't told me I'm hallucinating. Which is what Chilten did: ‘This
whole business, it's got right up your nose, Jury.' What a strange metaphor.” He sipped his coffee and pronounced it cold.

Melrose signaled Young Higgins, who steered in their direction and took the order for another whisky and another coffee. Melrose wanted a cigarette badly but felt it would be gracious of him not to light up. It would be, but he took out the cigarettes anyway. Jury had often said he didn't want people abstaining from smoking just because he'd stopped. Said it made him feel like a funeral parlor. All of that suspended animation, that artificial hush, that dying-to-be-gone-before-last-orders.