The Stargazey (18 page)

She waited. When Jury didn't continue, she said, “You followed her.”

“I followed you.” He smiled slightly.

Oddly, she didn't mention her neighbor, did not take up the alibi. Was she so sure of her ground she didn't need to?

She said, “Are you certain it wasn't the coat I was supposedly wearing that made you mistake me for—her?”

“No.”

“You're so positive.”

Jury's eyes cut away for a moment, which was a mistake. He felt he was already on the defensive.

She took advantage of this heartbeat of hesitation and said, “You're not, are you?”

“Is this why you wanted to talk to me? To tell me I'm not positive about what I saw?”

“No. But I don't see how what you say happened makes any sense.”

“It doesn't. It's my aim to make sense out of it.”

There was a pause. He watched a band of sallow light play across her hair.

She said, “I didn't kill this woman.”

“Oh, but I didn't say you
did.
You might have had some reason for going there—though it's a strange place to rendezvous after dark. Also, a strange place to be followed to.”

“To be followed to?”

Jury shrugged. “I thought of that as a possibility. Your behavior might suggest someone who's trying to throw someone else off the scent.”

Her short gasp of laughter suggested this was really too outlandish of him. “You've quite an imagination.”

“Not really. I'm quite an unimaginative sod. But pretty obviously, being a detective, I'd want to find reasons for your actions. As I said, why would anyone go to a place like Fulham Palace at night? Not many tourists make their way there, even during the day. It's one of London's best-kept secrets, I've heard.” When she didn't comment, he said, “You live alone? No one to corroborate your story? Your husband?”

“Is dead. Michael died of leukemia. He was only forty.”

“I'm very sorry.”

She went on as if she hadn't heard him. “He was from Norfolk, the Norfolk Broads. He was partly American; his mother was. I thought he might want to come back, but he wanted to die in Paris. He adored Paris.” She smiled at some distant vista. “He could get drunk on Paris. From our window we could look down at night on the streetlamps on the rue Servandoni, and Michael—but I'm rambling. Sorry.” She put her hand on her forehead as if to hold back the memories.

“No. Go on.”

She went on, describing the cafes where they would sit for hours in the boulevard Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel; the walks and flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries; the wet look of the cobblestones of the rue Servandoni and the Ile Saint-Louis; Pont-neuf in the fog; the great avenues of light such as the Champs-Elysées.

The voice had a visceral effect on Jury; it seemed to seep into his muscles and calm him like a drug.

“We lived there for seven years, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Michael had a government post, undersecretary, and we were well provided for after he died. Michael himself, I mean his family, had money, and so we were comfortably off, though by no means rich. If he had to die, I'm only glad he died before what happened to Sophie.” She stopped, looked away. There was nothing to see but the blank wall.

“Sophie?”

She nodded. “Our daughter. She was born soon after we got to Paris. I don't know which of the three of us Michael loved more: me, Sophie, or Paris.” Her smile was a trifle wicked now. “I sometimes think it was Paris. But he adored Sophie.” Again, she fell silent. Jury could hear someone, Chilten probably, talking beyond the door and, now, opening it.

“You said something happened to Sophie. What?”

Kate stood up as the door opened and said, “She vanished.”

She turned towards the woman police constable and Ron Chilten. The policewoman led her out.

 • • • 

“Your timing is impeccable,” said Jury to Chilten, as he looked at the passport Chilten had just handed him. They were standing in the corridor outside the interview room. “Why do these photos always make a person look like a corpse?”

“This one
is
a corpse. Nancy Pastis.”

“Sorry.” He looked at the face, its unsmiling, noncommittal expression; its high brow, with the hair pulled slickly back. He remembered what Plant had said:
Doppelgangers.

Chilten looked at him. “Easy to mistake one for the other. Anyone might.”

“Then I'm not anyone, Ronnie.” Jury flipped from the front to the visa entries. “This only goes back three years: Argentina, France, Denmark, Russia. But it stops nearly a year ago. I mean, according to this, Ms. Pastis hadn't been doing any traveling for ten months.”

“So? Maybe she got tired of it.” He nodded towards the room in which Jury had lately sat with Kate McBride. “Get anything useful out of her?”

Jury shook his head. “Embellishment on what you already know: husband with embassy in Paris; lived in Paris for seven years; had a daughter. Did you know she disappeared?”

Chilten frowned. “She didn't tell me about it. What happened?”

“I was about to find out when you walked in.” The door to the room he had just left was open; he looked at the chair where she had sat, studied the barren, spindly tree beyond the window. “I'll be back.”

A
bored police constable stood guard at the entrance to the elegant old building on Curzon Street. He nodded at Jury's and Wiggins's IDs and told them to go in, that the flat was on the second floor and there was an elevator. It was one of those ancient birdcage elevators, painted gold, that rattled to a stop on the second floor.

There was no crime-scene tape; the flat hadn't been sealed against entry; still, Jury was surprised there was no policeman by Nancy Pastis's door, too.

The flat was a little on the small side, if one were to judge by square footage. Living room, one bedroom, bath, and kitchen. But Jury found that it gave the impression of spaciousness. The ceilings were very high and the molding—painted white, like the walls—was beautiful. Jury and Wiggins started in the living room, two walls of which were given over to floor-to-ceiling bookcases; there was a library ladder for reaching the higher shelves, which were, like the lower ones, full. Books had been stacked in front of the shelves, waiting for a place. Other books would have to leave to accommodate them. These were clearly books that were being read; this wasn't for show.

All the furnishings appeared to be antiques except for a slick-lined off-white sofa and a deep-seated slipcovered armchair, the sofa probably an Italian design but the chair, good old English parlor. Beneath these
pieces was an oriental rug whose background color was a larkspur blue. There was a heavy rolltop desk with a fragile-looking gilt chair—French, Jury imagined—pulled up to it. A bulbous glass-fronted cabinet housed porcelain of Sèvres and Limoges. Everywhere were lamps of varying styles and heights.

The impact of all these different styles was one immediately pleasing to the eye, perhaps because the impression given was that each piece had been chosen separately because the owner liked it, rather than as part of a collection or an attempt to orchestrate the room as a whole. By being artless, the effect was artful, yet nothing a decorator would have achieved.

Paintings crowded the other two walls of the living room, and, while Wiggins went about opening drawers and assessing the small accouterments of a life, Jury indulged himself by gazing at the paintings. As far as he could tell, they were all originals or, at least, superior reproductions. One smallish painting was of the Cornwall coast drenched in light. Jury knew it was Cornwall only because it was titled
St. Ives.
The slant of light gave the little town an unearthly glow and stippled the sea with radiance. The largest painting was quite dazzling, a modern study of an inlet or marina covered with small craft, fishing and sailing boats. Nancy Pastis seemed to prefer seascapes, or at least water; there were lagoons, lakes, ocean views, rivers. Another painting looked like a view of St. Petersburg and its famous river; Jury tried to call up the name. Whatever it was, it was beautiful. The smallest of the paintings was equally dazzling, a miniaturist rendition of a black sand beach and a turquoise sea caught at sunset—or was it sunrise? Jury would never make a painter, he decided, if he couldn't tell the difference. The little painting was alive with light.

He went into the bedroom, a fairly somber room with heavy draperies and bedspread but extremely neat, as the living room was. Wiggins came in behind him and made for the dressing table and the bureau, the chest of drawers.

The kitchen was a wonder of a place, containing probably every modern cooking tool on the market: espresso machine, Cuisinart, pasta maker, copper pots slung on a circular copper bar that hung from the ceiling, and a quite incredible (and shiny) industrial-restaurant-sized
cooker. Eight burners, and you could stuff an ox in the oven. Someone took cooking very seriously here, as seriously as reading and painting.

Of the some dozen cookbooks on a Spanish-tiled counter surface, two were French, one was German. Jury pulled them out, leafed through them long enough to tell they had indeed been handled and that Nancy Pastis spoke more than English. Her passport told them she traveled frequently. Frequently and seriously, he thought.

As he was returning to the living room, he heard voices in the hall, male and female. Wiggins had opened the door upon an elderly lady and the constable Jury assumed Chilten had posted here. Upon seeing Jury, the police constable turned brick-red, a flush that could have had a charcoal fire going.

“Oh. Sorry, sir. I was just . . . I was only gone for five minutes.”

Mildly, Jury reprimanded him. “In five minutes, any sort of riffraff could get in here. As you see.” Jury smiled.

The elderly lady came to his rescue. “It was
entirely
my fault. The constable here was kindly helping me move a table, and I offered him a cup of tea. Are you family? I'm so sorry.”

Jury smiled, wondering how innocent the life a person lived if she could mistake two cops for anything but cops.

Wiggins told her no, not family, and produced his identification. “New Scotland Yard, madam.” The words themselves sounded stiff, but Wiggins always managed to make identifying himself—or them—sound like a neighbor walking his dog. He sounded completely friendly.

Jury (the dog) stepped up and, with a smile, produced his identity card, told the constable to stay by the door, and invited her into the room. “Are you Mrs. Landseer?”

“Vera Landseer, that's right. I live next door.” In her hands was a fine linen handkerchief, which she was kneading.

She was smartly attired in an acid green suit—a color very nearly chartreuse—with a jet brooch pinned to the collar and a strand of real pearls. She had the fine, papery skin of some old people, skin that looks talcumed. She gave off a woodsy perfume scent and her gray hair was exceptionally well styled, probably by Toni and Guy up the street.

“You were a friend of Nancy Pastis. You helped the Fulham police—”

“Yes. I wasn't a real friend, though, I'm afraid.” Vera Landseer's troubled eyes suggested that she should have done better, and now she'd never have the chance. “I've been in her flat two or three times. She invited me in to have tea one afternoon. It's quite beautiful, isn't it? What will happen to all of this? The books, the art?”

Jury shook his head. “I don't really know. When we discover some relation or other, perhaps that person can take care of it.”

Vera Landseer looked past them at the paintings on the far wall. “I always had the queer feeling there wasn't anyone. You know, wasn't any relation. I've no idea why, but there must be a reason for that impression, wouldn't you agree?”

Jury smiled again, nodding. He liked the way her mind worked. “When you had tea with her, you had conversation. Perhaps she said something then.”

She stood quite still to think about this. Then she said, “I mentioned my family as living in Kent. She said hers had been living on the Continent for the last ten years of their lives. So obviously the immediate family was dead. She wasn't married—well, that's fairly obvious too; I mean, given this.” Her arm swept to take in the room. “She talked a little about her travels; I think that particular weekend she'd just got back from”—Vera Landseer pinched her forehead, as if that might bring up the name—“Ireland, Northern Ireland. Armagh, I think she said.” She laid her narrow hand with its tissue-thin skin against her throat and played with the pearls round her neck.

“The flat is extremely neat, especially for being as full of furniture and books as it is,” said Jury. “I've never been in one so—immaculate.”

“Yes. It always was, the few times I've ever seen it. So very orderly.” Vera Landseer fidgeted with the strand of pearls. “Well, I've an engagement. If you'll excuse me?”

Jury held out his card to her. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, Ms. Landseer, I'd be most grateful if you'd give me a call.”

She studied the card and looked at him as if searching for a match or his identity. “Yes. Certainly. Well, good-bye.” And she set off down the hall toward the birdcage elevator.

“I'm glad Vera came in,” said Wiggins. It took him no time at all to get onto a first-name basis with witnesses, victims, and perps. “I'll tell you, it was kind of spooking me.”

“What was?” The gold elevator stuttered to a stop.

“The lack of stuff.”

“ ‘Stuff'?” Jury laughed. “Place is full of ‘stuff.' ”

“No, I mean little personal stuff: the lack of mail, the lack of photos, the lack of snapshots. I know Nancy did a lot of traveling, but a person accumulates things, I know I do. Is there anyone alive who can throw out
everything
he's finished with? There weren't any documents or photos stuck in shoeboxes on the top shelves of closets.”