The Stargazey (40 page)

Bea squinted up at him.
Beazy?

Outside, Melrose stopped for a moment and leaned against a shop-front. He took out his handkerchief, surprised that he'd been furiously perspiring. “Ye gods.”

“That dog wasn't dying. I could have missed it.”

Melrose gave her a look. “Oh, certainly. Anyway, you were sublime.
Sub-lime
. I just wanted to grab you!”

She sidled up to him. “Well, give old Beazy a kiss, there's a good lad.” He did. They were leaning against the wall, locked together, until they both had to stop for air. “We'll miss Bingham's,” said Melrose.

“I've better art at my place.”

“I'll be a monkey's.” He kissed her again.

S
he's been moping about ever since she got home from school.”

Jury tried to picture Linda “moping about” and couldn't quite manage it. He smiled.

“I don't know what she wants to see you about, Superintendent.”

Mona Dresser waved him into the living room.

It was, as before, a pleasantly disheveled room. Like a none-too-young demimondaine, the room tried to keep itself up but never quite managed. Pieces of clothing, scarves, silk throws were tossed across all available surfaces. Still, it gave Jury a pleasant shock to find the room exactly as he'd left it. Not even the shadows on the walls had shifted. Before he sat down in the chair he'd occupied before, he picked a silk scarf and a handbag from the seat.

“Oh, just toss those things aside, Superintendent. We're not very good housekeepers here, as you already know.”

Jury smiled. That he “already knew” apparently released Mona Dresser from the bother of citing particulars. “Where's Linda, then?”

“She wants you to go to the palace with her. Don't ask me why.”

“Okay, I won't. But I will ask you one or two questions.”

“Of course.”

“There's been another murder. It's been in the papers, so I expect you've read—”

“Simeon Pitt, you mean. I knew him.”

“You did?”

“Not terribly well, but he must've stood in for whoever covered the theater for a short while. Or perhaps it was just the one occasion.
She Stoops to Conquer
, the one we took on tour, you know.”

“The one you took to St. Petersburg.”

“Yes. Petersburg was only one of the cities.”

“Why would he have been covering a play touring the Continent?”

“I don't know. Some loony idea his paper had. He was quite generous in his praise, and I don't think people realized this—I mean, the sort of person he really was. I thanked him for that review; I got to know him a little, in the way of things. He did
not
set out to savage paintings or plays—well, he could hardly have savaged Goldsmith, could he? He was not trying to sell himself or prove how clever he was.” She sighed. “So if you're going to ask me, did rage drive me to kill the poor man—” Mona reached for the shell cigarette box.

“No, I actually didn't hit on you as the killer.”

She wiggled her eyebrows at him as she struck a match to light her cigarette faster than he could reach over with the table lighter. “You don't think I've got the balls to walk into that men's club and stick a knife in someone?”

“I don't think you're foolish enough to do it.” Jury smiled. “It's taking one hell of a chance.”

Concentrating, she bunched her lips around her cigarette, turned it, said, “So it must be someone who enjoys that—taking chances, I mean. Have you anyone on your list with a flare for melodrama? I mean, other than me?” She smiled broadly.

 • • • 

She was waiting for him by the stone pillars, and he had to credit her with a serious intention in this meeting, for he felt she would otherwise have been waiting in the little building that dispensed tea, biscuits, and ice cream.

“Hello, Linda,” he said, and, matching her serious turn, kept the smile out of his face and voice. “You wanted to see me?”

She had a hard rubber ball that looked as if dogs had been chewing it, which she tossed and caught, tossed and caught. “I found something in the herb garden. Come on!”

She led him through the grounds, keeping her silence and tossing her ball, led him into the walled garden and thence to the herb garden. In the ruined greenhouse she plucked an object from the worn sill. “I left it here because I know you're not supposed to move stuff. It's this necklace.” It was a locket, corroded with age. “I sprang it open. Look.”

It had been pried open, and the little monochrome portraits inside of two children, a girl and a boy, in Victorian dress seemed to shrink within the tiny frames. A circle of glass still covered the boy's face; the girl's was stuck to the metal through the glue of time. They both looked serious and sad, as children always seemed to in those old days. Maybe they still do.

“It's probably her children.”

Jury shook his head. “No, they can't be. This locket's been here for decades, Linda. It's nearly green from oxidizing.”

Linda looked at him carefully, inspecting him almost, as if a mark would appear on his skin betokening a break in the chain of truth. Jury wondered whether she wanted to believe or didn't want to believe the children were those of the woman she'd found dead. He didn't know. Did she look relieved? He didn't know that, either.

Then she spun away like a pile of leaves, with the chewed-up ball, which she started bouncing. But it was too damaged to bounce, so she tossed it up in the air. She was gearing up for something, Jury thought.

“I found it when I was here with that man that knows you.”

Jury frowned. “You mean Mr. Plant?”

“We went on the tour. He didn't know anything about the palace at all.”

“Neither do most people. It's one of London's secrets, they say.”

“Well, it'll stay that way if they don't get a tour person who knows more.” She caught the ball, threw it up again.

Jury smiled. “In a couple of years, you can apply for the job.”

Compliments were of no interest to her at the moment. “He made me lie down in that lad's-love where the body was.”

“Mr. Plant made you do that?” Jury doubted it.

“Almost. He would've if I didn't do it anyway.” The ball landed on Jury's leg.

“Ah. But you did.”

“I guess you think I'm wrong too.”

“No, I don't think you're wrong, Linda. I just can't explain it, that's all.”

There was a silence. “If I'm the only person that knows it, I guess somebody'll come and get me like he said they got Sophie.”

Jury was totally surprised. “Sophie? Where did you hear about her?”

Linda told him what Melrose had said. “I'm not as dumb as Sophie, though. So I'll get away.”

This was the issue, then. That she'd be stolen away, kidnapped like unhappy Sophie.

Jury knelt down in front of her, grabbed her hands down from the air. “Linda,
nobody
—understand,
nobody
—is going to get you. We won't let them. I won't. And remember: You might have been the only person
at first
who knew the woman was moved, but all the police know it now. So somebody would have to steal all of us away and that would be a job, wouldn't it? The whole Fulham police force and part of Scotland Yard, and one person trying to manage all of them. Can you picture it?”

First Linda looked serious, then her mouth twitched, then she started to laugh. Jury let go of her hands, and she clapped both of them across her mouth.

Jury got up, and her eyes followed him. Then he remembered what she had said and asked, “Why was Sophie dumb?”

“She acted really stupid.” Linda went back and picked up the locket again. “If it was me and there was an organ grinder and a trick dog and cat right outside I wouldn't pick out potatoes. I'd be out there. Even you would, I bet.”

Jury smiled. He had for some reason been permitted to join the legion of children.

“What'd she look like?”

“Who?”

“Sophie.” She held up the locket. “Are you sure this isn't her?”

“I'm sure. It's much too old. Much. Those pictures go back to Queen Victoria.” Jury blew on his hands. The temperature must have dropped
fifteen degrees. He turned his collar up. “I think we'd better be getting back. It's cold and getting dark.”

Linda looked down at the locket again. “Maybe it was Queen Victoria's children.” Doubtfully, she looked at him. But he did not need to confirm or deny it. It was a shot, her expression said, fallen wide. She ran off down the path, turned, and called back to him. “Well, it was
somebody's
children!”

Her voice rang out frostily, and Jury was aware both of her anxiety and his own and a coming rain.

 • • • 

After getting Linda back to Bishops Park Road, Jury caught a bus along Fulham Palace Road. He felt (absurdly) as if the increase in Linda's cheerfulness had been proportionate to a decrease in his own.

He could not explain this; he knew only that the gathering dusk had gathered him into it, and he felt, as he watched the shoppers and the people going home from work, a steady erosion of spirit.

He sat on the top deck, looking down, and when a double-decker came from the other direction, he could look straight across where a man sat alone, in a coat much like his own and with a weary expression he imagined was also much like his own. It gave him the eerie feeling of seeing himself as he had been riding almost two weeks ago on that other bus.

Before any of this had happened. And he almost expected, after the bus had pulled out from another stop, that the feet and the voices moving clumsily up the half-circle of stair would turn out to belong to the American and her friend. He would have welcomed the loud, brash American right now; she might have prevented him from thinking.

He thought about Linda, and about Sophie. As the bus stopped and started and passengers clambered up and down the stairs, Jury thought about travel.
Zurich, Brussels, Paris, St. Petersburg. Petersburg. Peter
. He got off the bus two stops before the Stargazey. He wanted to walk, needed, now that the train of thought had been started, to end it, conclude it.

Walking along, he realized that today, in America, it was Thanksgiving.

 • • • 

When he sat down at the bar, not as crowded as before, everyone home, he supposed, having dinner, he took comfort in the rows of bottles, in their gleam and shine. It simply made him feel that care was being taken.

Kitty came down the bar, running her cloth along the inner edge as she did. She missed no chance to beautify. The bar shimmered in the reflection of the overhead lights. “Hel-lo! Back again, are you?”

Jury nodded, asked for a whisky. “It's getting cold as hell, Kitty.”

“It's been pretty warm for November, so I guess we've been lucky so far.” As she took down the whisky and set up a glass for him, she rubbed at the bottle.

Jury smiled. “Pour me a double.”

She did. “One of those days, is it?”

He sat there quietly, not making conversation, and she seemed to tune in to this mood. She started picking bottles from the shelves, giving them a careful rubdown. There were only a half dozen others at the bar and they were well along in their drinks, nursing them. Jury looked up at the pillar—he was sitting in the same place—at the postcards there. He thought about the one he'd sent to Plant. Forgot to ask him about the recipe. He downed his drink. Still, he didn't leave. But he didn't want another drink. He sat that way for a moment, watching Kitty give that extra bit of polish to the Sapphire gin bottle.

“Kitty.”

She turned, smiling. “Want another?”

He shook his head. “Do you have children?”

“Me? Why, yes.” She looked around as if searching for their pictures. “Two, I have. Boy and a girl.”

“What do they look like?”

It surprised her that anyone would ask, much less a Scotland Yard superintendent.

Alfie and Annie, her children, got described in almost interminable detail.

Jury put more than enough money on the bar and said, “That's what I thought.”

Her look, as he walked to the door, was puzzled.

T
he following morning found Jury sitting in his office, thinking about what Kitty had said and watching the clock, as if surcease of trouble would come from pushing back the hour he was to appear in Redcliffe Gardens. Depressed by this line of thought, Jury fell to deciphering a message that Wiggins had taken down, a message from Carole-anne.

It was actually a message Melrose Plant had left at Jury's digs, where Carole-anne often answered the telephone. Carole-anne would never be mistaken for Mercury, and Jury would sooner read a message washed up in a bottle on a beach.

L
OOK UP FUTONS IN
F
ODOR
. O
R MAYBE
H
ARVEY
N
ICHOLS
.

Jury stared at the wall. Harvey Nichols? Did they sell futons?

Then the phone had rung and dragged him back through the looking-glass.

It turned out to be Ron Chilten. He wasn't looking for Chilten to further rend the fragile fabric of his beliefs.

“Argentina,” said Chilten, and waited.

Although something would clearly lead away from “Argentina,” nothing had led up to it, and Jury really was not up to a Chilten cliffhanger this morning. He shut his eyes tightly, cursed under his breath, said, “I've heard of the place, yes.”

“How about the Muerte del Sol? Familiar to you?”

The next time he saw Chilten he just might make
muerte
more familiar to
him
. “I'll tell you something, Ron; we could probably save time if you'd just tell me, straight out; see if I can take it.”