The Stargazey (42 page)

Melrose was silent for a moment. “D'you mind if we just wait before I tell you that? I'd rather have a specialist looking at it first. Right away, because—”
because Seb or one of them might discover the missing painting
, he didn't add. “So if you know someone as close as Northampton—”

“Good as done, old sweat. I'll call soon as I get back to the shop.” There was a bright beep and everyone looked around, including Melrose. “It's just this.” Trueblood had reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a pager. He checked the number, returned the thing to his pocket.

“You? You got a pager too? Diane has one of those.”

“Right, old sweat. You should get one. It's loads of fun. Diane and I page each other all the time. Our office numbers, of course; that's where we're busiest.”

“Busy? Diane Demorney, busy?”

“Well, it's that newspaper job.”

“For God's sake, it's not like she's hauling a camera around in Algeria. I mean, how many Milky Way emergencies can there be? Here, give me your number. I've got hers.” Melrose extracted his address book. “I'm going to call her up and drive her crazy.”

“All you have to do, see, is call the number and then it shows up on the pager and she rings you back immediately . . . more or less. Diane doesn't do anything immediately.”

“I
know
how it works.”

“You should get one. Withersby has one.”

“Withers
has one? Oh, please.” He looked across the room where Mrs. Withersby was leaning on her mop, talking with Sally's mum, drinking her espresso with her little finger hooked out. “You might as well give a pager to the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

Trueblood snorted a laugh. “You should get one.”

Melrose snorted back to indicate his disdain of such frippery. “Over my dead body.”

R
ichard! I thought you were coming hours ago.” There was no recrimination in Kate's tone, only concern and surprise.

“Got held up. I often do. The job, as we say, the job.” He looked round the living room. “This room”—he turned to face her with a smile—“doesn't suit you.”

Her look was puzzled. “You never criticized it before.”

“I'm not criticizing it. I never really looked at it before.”

Across the back of the sofa she had tossed the jacket of her gray suit, the one she had been wearing when she'd been “detained.” He lifted it off, read the label: “Max Mara. Very handsome, very Upper Sloane Street.” He replaced it. “Max Mara and this room don't go together.”

Now she really seemed disturbed. “What on earth's wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, tossing his coat across the sofa. “There's some good news, really.” He looked at her for a long and sinking moment as if something within him were slowly falling away, descending to the riverbed, seeking bottom.

“Good news? Well, go on, tell me. Fulham police are not going to take me in again? That would be very good news.”

“It's not that, no. I was just talking to an Inspector LeGrande in Paris. Despite the records having burned up, we've got a fresh lead on Sophie. But he's not really clear as to what she looked like. What did she look like?”

Kate sat back with an involuntary shake of the head. It was the silence, that fractional pause, that got to him even before the answer. “Oh.” Kate shrugged. “She was blond. Like me.”

As she rose from the sofa and started for a small bureau that held the whisky and sherry, Jury thought of Kitty, the stream of details about her kids. He did not think that “Oh, blond” and a shrug were part and parcel of a mother's lexicon.

“There are no pictures of her here. Is the memory too painful?” He turned on the sofa. “The entire story was a lie, wasn't it?”

Ice cubes tinkled into glasses. When she didn't answer, he went on. “It was a brilliant fabrication, but it lacked a couple of things. You never described her—how she looked, what she wore, what she was like—and yet you could go into the most minute detail about your surroundings: Fauchon's, the organ grinder, the animals. The second thing—which I had pointed out to me—was that a little kid wouldn't act the way Sophie was acting. I should have realized all of this when Charles Noailles said that Michael McBride had never mentioned a daughter. He was close to Noailles. It would be almost impossible not to say something about a daughter he was ‘besotted with.' That's how you put it, wasn't it?”

“You're fantasizing. Why on earth would I make all of that up?” She walked over and put the glass of whisky in his hand.

But he did not turn to face her; he wished he would never have to again because she would have taken on the same hard lines as had the furniture, the silver, the china. He would be seeing someone else. “Very good reasons, I should think. Most important, I was the only one who could place you at the crime scene. Everybody else thought I was wrong, given the two of you look so much alike. It was to gain my sympathy, to make me want to believe you. Besides that, all of that convoluted story with its meetings and its queer directions to foreign places—well, in case you didn't get me to cave in, and you finally had to admit I was right, then you'd have a reason for going to Fulham Palace. It would have been one more weird meeting demanded by your persecutors. You even explained the absence of any record of Sophie's ‘abduction' with a fire, a fire that really did happen. And if right now you showed me Kate McBride's passport, I'd find she'd been to Zurich, Belgium, and
St. Petersburg at just the times you said you were there. Even that eventuality you covered. The only slip was your calling it ‘Peter.' Only someone intimate with the city would call it that.”

Jury stood up as he said this, drank some more of the whisky that was bringing him no relief at all, and turned to face her. As he did so he heard a familiar metallic
snick
. The gun surprised him no more than he was surprised to see she looked like a different woman. It was a big handgun, a Walther, and she held it professionally, one hand propping the wrist, as if she knew how to use it, as indeed she had.

Many times, he imagined. “This is her flat, isn't it? Kate McBride's? The one in Mayfair, as I was about to say, suits you far better. Why did you kill her?”

Her smile was a mere movement of the lips, not a smile; it didn't touch the voice, the eyes. The laugh was short and breathless. “Why? For someone as clever as you, I should think it obvious.”

“I'm not that clever, clearly.”

“I wanted an identity. Not one cooked up with phony passports and licenses, but one that honestly
existed
. I happened on that pub by accident a few months ago. Someone there took me for Kate McBride. It was then I began to get the idea. I watched her for a long time, where she went, what she did, how she looked. I got into her flat, looked around, found her life in journals and letters. Everything I needed to know. I saw Mrs. Laidlaw once when I was locking the door. She thought I was Kate, too.” She smiled again. The gun didn't waver. “That house in Wales. I would have loved to live there; I really would.”

“How did you know about it?”

“The silly woman used the telephone in the pub. I was sitting right there. It's amazing how much information people give away without one's even asking for it. And that property is of course why I had to make her disappear right away. She was setting up an appointment. If
she'd
gone to the solicitor,
I
couldn't very well turn up and be Kate, could I? I'm tired; I've got enough money for several lifetimes; I want to stop, live in Great Britain, be just another Brit.”

“You can hardly be that. You can never be just another anything. You're not even Nancy Pastis.”

“That was my second reason for killing her. I wanted to get rid of Nancy. That's what made it a little complicated. I could, of course, have just left, after that little girl found the body. But since nothing happened and she showed no sign of doing anything, I simply followed my original plan and went back. Mrs. Laidlaw is a sweet old thing, but not very sharp.”

“You wanted Nancy Pastis's body identified. Why didn't you leave the passport with it?”

“Come on, Richard. Your police are smarter than that. It would have looked planted.”

“Noailles,” he said, puzzled. “You didn't even know him. How—”

“Of course I didn't know him. You were the one who brought him up, remember? You told me about him. I said that the information people give away is quite amazing.”

“And you even managed to make me suspicious of him. That cock-and-bull story about the Château Noailles. God, I'm stupid.”

“Oh, there is a Château Noailles near Aix-en-Provence. I try to stay as close to the truth as I can. And you're far from stupid, Richard. I think your trouble is you look at glass and see diamonds. Too many facets, too many layers, too many possibilities. Too many to act. The Hamlet syndrome, maybe?”

“Nancy Pastis, I take it, was not just another Brit? Who are you?”

She shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

“Simeon Pitt was murdered two days after Fulham police let you go. My friend—” He stopped himself. The less said about Melrose Plant, the better. “What have you to do with the Fabricants?”

She said nothing; she had moved one hand to put on her Max Mara suit jacket, switched the gun to the other as she gathered up her coat. The gun had never left him, nor did it as she moved over to the desk, opened the top drawer, collected papers, and stuffed them in her deep coat pocket. A few more steps and she hitched her bag over her shoulder.

Jury felt a strange calm; he couldn't understand this. The adrenaline should be pumping like crazy. “You could answer the question.”

“Was there one?”

“Simeon Pitt.”

“I didn't know him.”

“Did you kill him? Because whoever the hell did it is just too damned bloody cool.”

“There was only one question. I answered it.”

“You're going to shoot me; I won't be able to tell anyone.”

“What makes you think I'd shoot you, Richard?”

“Somehow it's the impression I've been getting,” Jury said dryly. Literally, dryly. His mouth felt as if it had never known saliva.

She smiled. “I don't think I could. You're too—” She glanced away for a moment, almost as if looking at him were painful.

“You're not going to shoot me?” Jury couldn't help it; he laughed. “My God, you put something in that drink, didn't you?”

“Nothing much. Just enough to keep you quiet for a few hours. It'll hit you hard, fast. Wait.”

“Someone who takes the kind of chances you take, love, is bound to be brought down.”

“Then it should be by you, don't you think?”

For some reason, the voice of Carole-anne came to him:
Is that one of your compliments, then?

He smiled, had to sit down before he fell. “Is that a compliment?”

Her hand was on the doorknob, the gun lowered, but fractionally. “Perhaps. I don't give many.”

“You wouldn't have much bloody chance to. To walk into a men's club, simply pull out a stiletto, and stab one of the members. You must be handsomely paid, Kate.”

“I don't do it for the money, not anymore.”

“What then?”

“For the rush.”

She was gone.

It hit him. Hard.

M
elrose was considering getting out a knife and attacking the top layer himself—sandpaper, Rees had said. His curiosity was killing him. But the damage he might inflict made him too nervous to try. He wished he hadn't given Ruthven and Martha the evening off; he had no one to cajole or complain to. He couldn't get hold of Richard Jury—talk about somebody who should have a pager. Remembering Diane's, he leafed through his little address book and found the number and dialed. When he'd called her from London, he'd told her he was hiring a car, and she had sympathized with him for having to drive a cheaper Mercedes.

The doorbell sounded its soothing treble note, and Melrose would almost have been glad to see Agatha at the moment. Indeed, he opened the door with the expectation he'd see her and took an involuntary (and he imagined unfriendly) step back when he saw the woman standing there.

She smiled. “Mr. Plant?” She removed her wallet from her purse and held it out so that he could see—he supposed—some identification. “I'm Posy.”

While he stood there staring, she smiled and cocked her head, as if waiting for the penny to drop.

Light dawned. “Oh, Trueblood! I completely forgot he told me he knew someone who could help me with a painting.”

She nodded. “Mr. Trueblood rang me up.”

“Come in, come in! You're from Northampton, then?”

“That's right. No, thanks, I'll keep my coat on—I've been getting chills all day. Hope it's not flu. What an absolutely gorgeous house.” She stood in the center of the big marble hallway, turning slowly around. “You have some lovely paintings here. Is that a Stubbs?” She nodded toward a study of mares and foals.

Melrose wasn't even sure. “More or less. Listen, the painting I want you to look at, it's in here, in the living room.” He showed her the way. “What I need isn't precisely art restoration, but more getting the top layer off.”

“That's quite a tricky operation. There are solvents, of course, but one has to be quite a good technician to do that.”

Melrose had moved to the armoire, behind which he'd set the painting. “Are you?”

“Good? Oh, yes.” She laughed.

He smiled and pulled out the painting, which he lugged over to a wooden settee against which he leaned it. “I don't think it's a case for solvents.”