The Stargazey (26 page)

They went inside and entered a room overseen by a pleasant-looking woman to whom (obviously) Linda was no stranger. She sat overseeing the guides, cards, booklets, and maps and greeted Linda as if she were family:
Hel-lo, dear, is this a friend of yours
?

Melrose should have brought along his hoop and stick. He wondered if the discovery of a body in the knot garden out there somewhere had put a damper on business. Increased it, probably. He asked her.

The lady seemed at one remove from them, as if she had one foot in the museum and one in a better world altogether.
Oh, for a day or two. But you know how things are so soon forgotten, how transitory and
ephemeral they are.
And she went on with this sort of talk until Melrose wondered if the ghosts of all the bishops of London were using her as a sounding board. But she seemed content enough and looked on everything around her (including Time, including them), speaking of the comings and goings of seasons and people as if she had already left this vale of tears and found a vista far finer. Melrose thanked her and tightly folded a twenty-pound bill into a small square and pushed it down in the Fulham Palace fund collection box.

Outside again, their walk took them by trees of every imaginable sort. He wouldn't have known any of them except for the giant oak and—in a generic way only—the pines, if he hadn't had the botanical garden tree map. They passed cedars, oaks, several kinds of maple, a giant redwood, and a sweet gum, and off on the other side were probably a dozen others.

“It's around here,” Linda said, walking backwards.

“There must be forty or fifty different kinds of trees,” Melrose said.

“There are. Come on.”

The tree question put to bed, he followed her inside a large walled garden, which looked now, in November, unkempt, stiff and stale, heavy with brush. The knot garden that figured so prominently in this odd case was before them. To its left was a long quarter-moon-shaped fence with wisteria vine climbing its entire length and breadth. The fragrance must be, in the spring, simply heavenly, especially overlain as it would be with the infusion of scent coming from the herb garden. On the right was a glass house that had, he supposed, been a greenhouse but was now fallen into a state of total decay, glass broken, walls listing or collapsing. No wonder there was a fund for raising money. There was also a vinery, the old vines looking as hard and old and unyielding as hemp.

The garden itself was a fish shape, pointed at either end, widest in the middle. Where the fish's head might have been was an herb called feverfew. (Melrose had never heard of it and made a mental note to speak to Sergeant Wiggins.) At the other end, the tail end, was a triangular patch of thyme. He held the drawing out, noticing how the various patches of herbs on the one side were repeated both in shape and kind on the other. There were two patches of each herb. Top and bottom, end and end,
were mirror images of each other. He was brought out of contemplating the mechanics of the design by Linda.

“Look!”

He looked across a circular patch of tansy and saw her lying in brown brush. He walked around and asked her what the devil she was doing.

“I'm being her, the dead body.” She lay with arms outstretched and face up.

“You shouldn't be lying in the—” He consulted the herb map.

“Lad's-love. Wait,” she said. “Her eyes were open. Like this.” Linda opened hers wide, ghoulishly.

“You have a brilliant future ahead of you as a scene-of-crimes expert.”

“They said it was the lavender patch, but it wasn't.”

Melrose kneeled down and looked at the patch of lad's-love. “Look, the police are usually very exact, they take pictures and measurements and just about everything. Could you have made a mistake?”

“No.” She brushed a few twiglets and dead leaves from her hair.

“I'm going in there for a moment.” He nodded towards the vinery.

He walked around inside the decaying glass house—or, at least, as much of an “inside” as it had, for what there was now was almost completely exposed to the weather. There was a bothy and a small building that had served as a potting shed. He moved through shards of pottery, pieces of glass. He stood turning over half of a clay pot, knowing he wouldn't find anything, for the Fulham police would have scoured the place thoroughly.

The trouble with the Fulham police was that they were trusting no one but their own findings. Understandable, he supposed; they certainly weren't trusting the report of a ten-year-old.

Still. If she'd gone close enough to see that the eyes were open, if she'd been that free of confusion, Melrose was willing to believe she knew just where the body had lain and when it had lain there.

I
t didn't surprise Melrose that the Crippses weren't on the phone, or, on second thought, it did. Ashley Cripps by now should have figured out a way to ambush the neighbors' telephone service, as he had done their electric. He was very good with wires. But perhaps it would take climbing up a pole, and Ash wasn't one to exert himself.

Melrose had tried the Museum of Childhood, where Bea Slocum worked, and been told that Saturday was her half day. If Bea had a telephone in her Bethnal Green flat, it wasn't listed. The next stop in his search for her was the Cripps family—though “family” in this case was not to be taken as the unit social services had in mind—as Bea was some kind of distant cousin and (if her painting was any indication) had a fondness for Catchcoach Street.

At the moment, Melrose was in a sandwich bar in Canary Wharf, seated on a stool and staring at the Thames, which appeared to be standing still, in tune perhaps with Melrose's own mental state. (He was big on the pathetic fallacy; he took his sympathy where he could find it.) He had considered eating one of the tautly wrapped sandwiches perched behind the glass but decided tea was all he wanted. Anyway, why would one of these doughty office workers want sun-dried tomato in with his cheddar? This was apparently nouveau-plowman's fare.

So his tea was getting cold as he thought about his visit to Fulham Palace. He had thought a wander about the rejuvenated Docklands might revive his flagging mental processes, but no ideas had come. Nor had the Thames budged an inch. He wondered what Wordsworth had gotten so excited about. He left the sandwich bar and searched out a newsagent's and sweet shop to fill up his pockets with bags of candy.

 • • • 

The Cripps kiddies were in the front “garden” (a euphemism in this case), rampant as moles or gophers, even in the near-dark. Or perhaps especially so, since the habits of the Crippses might best be relegated to the dark. Moles and gophers, though, at least spent a lot of their time underground.

Stopping on the pavement some yards from the house, he watched them at their ghastly games. More than one was taking place. Given there were seven of them, there were enough kids to go around.

The baby pram had been placed near the front door and then forgotten by Mum, leaving the baby to its fate. Two of the kiddies, boy and girl, were rocking it—not by way of appeasing the baby (who was letting out a high, thin wail) but as a way of competing to see which side could topple the carriage first. Any non-Crippsians would have checked to see the pram was empty before embarking on such foolishness. The Crippses, however, would check to see it was full.

Melrose had forgotten most of their names (a mercy to himself), but he recalled that one of the girls was Amy and one Alice. He believed it was Alice on the pram, competing with her brother. It amazed Melrose that any baby could survive in the Cripps family. But, just look, six of them certainly had—seven, counting the baby. So far.

Another boy of five or six, twin of one of the girls, was easy to recognize as Piddlin' Pete. Right now he had his pants down and was pissing into the plastic birdbath. His sister Amy (or Alice) acted in counterpoint. Her favorite trick was to hold up her skirt and let anyone interested know that she wasn't wearing knickers. Another boy was tied to a tree, while the oldest of them marched round it with a flaming torch, throwing off eerie shadows in the encroaching dark. Good lord, what was all of that newspaper and kindling bunched at his feet?

The position of the carriage was becoming more and more precarious, and the baby's howl more frightening, which naturally made the two Crippses on it laugh all the louder. Melrose threw caution to the winds (though he made sure he had the candy spills before advancing) and walked towards the house.

It was the oldest one, as stout and pugnacious as his da, and with the Crippses' signature sandy hair and eyelashes and whey-colored skin, who saw Melrose first. He dropped the torch (fortunately not on the kindling, but into one of the many holes in the earth) and set up a yell. They all stopped what they were doing (except for the one tied to the tree) and stared.

“Elroy!
Elroy!
” He turned towards the house and yelled even louder, “ ‘Ey, Mum, Elroy's here!”

Then they all rushed him, all except Piddlin' Pete, who grabbed at his crotch, not in the way small boys sometimes do, betokening anxiety, but with the clear intention of pointing his sprig of a penis towards the visitor.

“
Whatcha got, Elroy?” “Give us some sweets, Elroy, go on!” “I ain't got n't'un underneath, see?” “Go on, Elroy, gi' us them sweets!
”

Melrose drew out the little bags and began dispensing them, negotiating for information. “Tell me, is Bea Slocum here?”

Having secured for himself the largest bag, full of lemon sherbets, the oldest, toughest one could afford to dispense with the formalities of welcome. “Mebbe she is, mebbe she ain't. Who wants t'know?”

“Me, obviously.”

Having whisked the last little white bag, this one containing Gummy Bears, from Melrose's hand, Piddlin' Pete was now marching about singing, “Bea, Bea, pee, pee, pee.”

“I shouldn't try it, were I you. Not if you want to live to see another urinal.” It occurred to Melrose that lack of a urinal held no horror for Piddlin' Pete. Obviously, he had inherited this obsession with his private parts from his father, Ashley, long known in police circles as Ash the Flash.

Then the door was thrown open and White Ellie filled it with her huge, slack, aproned self, waving a spatula. “Look ‘oo's ‘ere! I was tellin' Ash t'other day, ‘I do wish that Melrose'd not be makin' it so long
between visits.' Put that skirt down, gurl!” This was directed at Alice (or Amy).

Melrose said, passing through the door, “Just call me Elroy.”

White Ellie chuckled richly as she shoved the pram through and picked up the baby, out of harm's way for another few minutes. “Robespierre, ‘ere, remember ‘im?”

“I certainly do,” he said, regarding the calm, un-Crippsian little face of the baby—bigger, fatter—he recalled having rocked in his arms. The Cripps household had a strange effect on people, at least on him it did.

As the six kiddies steamed into the parlor, White Ellie barked useless commands as to how they should comport themselves. Then she dumped the baby back into the pram, gave it a motherly jiggle as she squinched up her eyes in some sort of baby greeting, and turned back towards the kitchen. “I'm just doin' Ashley's tea; he'll be back soon, I expect. Bea's in there. I expect you remember Bea?”

Beatrice Slocum sat slumped all the way down on her spine on the sprung, cabbage-rose-covered sofa, watching a huge battered television. After loudly announcing to Bea that Elroy was here again, the kids settled in front of the telly and declared a time-out to eat their sweets. This deceptive calm would last only for two minutes, so Melrose hoped he could keep her attention.

“Well, I'll be a monkey's,” said Bea. “Look who's ‘ere. There been another murder, then?” At which she fixed her attention on the telly again.

Or pretended to. Melrose thought her try at indifference was taking some effort, for the ho-hum did not reach her eyes, which were ordinarily a cool green, lighter than his own, less dense, registering more delight when she was pleased. It was the delight she was unable to keep out of them now, even as one of the kiddies was pummeling the other with a sofa pillow, enough to revive all of their energy. Pillows were being tossed and pulled, which inspired them, somehow, to start marching in a ring and chanting.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, there has been another one.”

Bea had witnessed the death of a woman in the Tate Gallery; she had been questioned by Jury and then by Melrose over a pleasant dinner in
a French restaurant. He had been hoping she'd forget the murder, remember the dinner.

“Bloody ‘ell!” she exclaimed. “So I expect you and that mate of yours'll be at me and at me.” False yawn.

“Why should we? You weren't there this time. But you still might be able to help.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn't ever want to miss a chance to do that, would I?” She reached out the TV remote and clicked through the channels, which the goblin gang on the floor loudly protested, even though they hadn't been watching.

“I thought perhaps we could have dinner again. We could dine at my club.”

“Your
wot
?”

She'd got so much of North London into that syllable she might have been practicing. Bea's accent went up and down, like Alice's skirt.

“Stuffy old men's club? Not bloody likely, me.” She slumped farther down in the sofa. “Anyway, those places don't admit women.”

“All that's changed.”

“Not for the likes of me, I'll bet.” She said this smugly, as if nonadmittance at his club would be a point of pride.

It amused Melrose that she took satisfaction in this. “Perhaps not the way you're got up right now—”

Bea tossed the remote control aside and looked at him in open-mouthed astonishment that he would take exception to her costume, then turned her gaze to her combat boots and cutoff jeans. She pinched up a bit of the black turtleneck top. “I'm stylish, me. I saw in the
Telegraph
t'other day a picture of a runway model wearing almost exactly the same thing, except her boots had studs and she had on a rhinestone belt. And great, dripping rhinestone earrings. Far as I'm concerned, that just cheapens a person.” While delivering this flash from the world of fashion, she had pulled a copy of
Elle
from somewhere in the laundry beside her, wet a finger, and turned one of its slick pages.