Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 1

Richard Jury.

The Stargazey.

Martha Grimes.

To Travis and Kent and Roanoke-stargazers all.

April 25, 1998.

Far in the pillared dark.

Thrush music went-.

Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in.

I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.

-ROBERT FROST.

FROM "COME IN"

PROLOGUE.

St. Petersburg.

February.

The snow looked blue in the dusk, its fresh fall an untrodden path leading into the dense fog that shrouded the Palace Square and the Alexander Column. Ice encased the tall trees on the edge of Nevsky Prospekt, along which cars picked their way, braving the winter gloom. Snow falling on snow m.u.f.fled the shuddering gunfire sounds of the Neva's ice surface splitting and cracking, as the wide river fought itself free of January's thick ice. From this height, she could see St. Petersburg's snow-topped roofs, the drums and domes of St. Isaac's, the ice-sheathed bridges. She loved St. Petersburg's bridges almost as much as London's. Between the time she had entered and left the museum, it had snowed again. A layer of ice as thin as lace had crackled delicately underfoot as she'd walked across the flat roof of the restaurant.

At least the blade-sharp wind had stopped, thank G.o.d. Like pendant smoke, her breath hung before her, as if it were crystallizing in the frigid air. Her hands were frozen in gloves that were as thin as her breath, more like a layer of black ice than leather. Anything heavier would have made it impossible to handle the rifle.

The rifle was fitted with a telescopic lens and a night scope. She had used it many times but hadn't expected to use it this evening. This evening she had to improvise, something she disliked doing, not because she hadn't the wit for it but because planning should always be impeccable, and hers was usually flawless.

But this afternoon there had been a flaw. She had made certain the rest room was empty but had forgotten the janitress, who came in while she was standing at the sink dismantling the walker. It was this woman for whom she was now waiting. She had watched them all, the staff, and the building, for weeks. She had recognized the cleaning woman when she'd come into the rest room with her rags and bucket. But tonight schedules were upset because no one had been allowed to leave until the police had asked their questions.

Since her Russian was bad and her French was excellent, she had presented her French papers. Her fabricated ident.i.ty-Cybil Odeon, Paris, 6e Arrond., blvd. St.-Germain-was one of several. What were the Petersburg police to do but wave off this old, half-deaf French pensioner who couldn't get around without a walker? And who hadn't been clear about what had happened because her gla.s.ses were so thick-lensed that her eyes looked drowned behind them, strands of hair trapped in the stems like seaweed.

The staff had been trickling out, one, two at a time. No sign yet of the cleaning lady. She jammed her hands down in her sheepskin-lined pockets, just to warm them for a moment; otherwise she wouldn't be able to hold the gun. Now she picked it up again, sighted down its barrel at the statues on the parapets of the Winter Palace. She moved the rifle a little to the left until she saw the Alexander Column. The angel on its top floated on icy wings. The column itself was perfectly balanced, supported by its own weight. She had read this somewhere and liked it. Supported by its own weight: a study in splendid isolation.

That was how she felt now. She would have preferred the isolation not be a freezing one, but personal discomfort bothered her only insofar as it kept her from performing. She had trained herself to withstand any discomfort that could come along, discomforts of either body or mind. The mind was more difficult, being limitless. She raised her eyes for a moment to look up at the stars. In the course of her studies, she had read that what fueled the stars was the merging of atoms. Fusion science. What fascinated her was the notion that the amount of energy in was the amount of energy out. There was an equation: Q=1. And this, she had to imagine, was perfect balance, like that of the Alexander Column. Perfect balance was what she was after; it was all she was after. She wanted to get to that point where nothing resonated, where the past could not pretend to shape itself into the present, where planes had clear, sharp edges to which nothing clung. People didn't come into it; they weren't part of the equation. What relations.h.i.+ps she'd had had been brief and in her control, though her partners didn't seem aware of this. It was astonis.h.i.+ng how easily people were hoodwinked, how easily-even eagerly-led.

Q=1. She would have made a good physicist if she hadn't been deflected in her studies and instead become a killer.

People were trickling out, one by one, finally released from being questioned-by museum security, by state security, by city police, probably none of whom had coordinated efforts with the others. There seemed no end to the permutations of police authority sent to plague the Russian citizen. One could scarcely blame police, though, considering what had just gone missing. A few men, a few women, all leaving through the main entrance only to be stopped again by the guards standing outside of the entrance doors.

She sighted the distant doors of the museum through the scope. The cleaning staff came out this way. In the lavatory, the janitress's glance had swept over her-the old French lady with the walker-without seeming to register. It was hard to tell with these Russians, with their decades of training emotions not to reach their faces. She had always admired that trait. If she knew the Russian temperament, the janitress would need to think about what she'd seen. Probably, she would not have rushed into the room where police were questioning people. The woman would leave, go back to the flat she no doubt shared with a dozen others, and start thinking about it.

It was too cold to keep to one position; she had to put the gun down, to blow on her hands, to stomp her feet, to pivot her head on her neck, and, in doing so, to look again at the darkened sky. Night fell, weighted with stars. She felt a great affinity with the stars, with their detachment, their distant, icy indifference.

Again she retrieved the rifle, sighted through the scope. The door opened; the old janitress appeared, carrying a bag and wound about in a black scarf as close as a shroud. She got the woman in her crosshairs and squeezed the trigger and felt the rush. It was her reward, the rush. Like a black bird, the woman fell into the powdery snow, sending up puffs like white exhaust. She stood up, looking off towards the scene. It was snowing again. Through it, she watched the tiny crowd collect, the guards at the museum doors, the few people within the grounds. She imagined them distraught, imagined them with arms flung up and out, the tiny black figures rus.h.i.+ng through snowflakes falling slowly, dreamily, rus.h.i.+ng toward the fallen woman as if drawn there by enchantment. Death woke in her long-slumbering scenes of a childhood she could not place-snow, fields, mountains-which sank again as quickly as they'd arisen.

She dismantled the rifle, as she had the walker, and put the stock in her backpack, the barrel in the long case. She retraced her steps across the crackling ice, left the roof, and descended the several flights back to the restaurant.

She returned to the table she had left twenty minutes before. The room had grown noisy, filling up in this early dinner hour. Her vodka gla.s.s had been refilled; she had asked the waiter to do this before she'd left the table. He had smiled hugely, nodded.

When he returned to her table, he nodded towards the case across the other chair and asked her if she played the flute in the Philharmonic. No, she smiled and said, the oboe. Then she ordered bream stuffed with kasha and, for dessert, blinicki with jam.

When he'd gone off, she looked at the oboe case a little sadly and wished she were more musically inclined.

1.

London.

November.

Sat.u.r.day night. It was not a night to be spending alone, riding a bus. When he was a teenager at the comprehensive, Sat.u.r.day night without a girl, without a date, without at least your mates to raise h.e.l.l with, Sat.u.r.day night alone would have been shameful. One wouldn't want to be seen alone on a Sat.u.r.day night. . . . Who are you kidding? That was never your life, Jury, not yours.

There had been an errand to run in South Kensington, and he had taken the underground from Islington. Once out of the South Ken station, he had boarded a Fulham Road bus. It had been a long time since he'd seen this part of London, though it was where he'd lived for part of his childhood, that part he could still call "childhood." It had been a long time since he'd been on any bus at all. The conductor gave him one of those vaguely suspicious looks that conductors are trained up on, and Jury took the short flight of steps to the upper deck more quickly than was advisable for even agile youth, and he was a long way from that now. Up there the only other pa.s.sengers were a boy and girl who couldn't keep their hands off each other; an old lady sleeping, chin on chest; and a dark-haired man in a tuxedo. Strange way for him to travel. Jury wondered where the party was. He was almost glad for his circ.u.mscribed life-no black-tie dinners, no champagne picnics at Ascot. No, for him it was work, home, the local.

Little shops lined both sides of the Fulham Road, expensive little shops, like the sw.a.n.k kitchen outfitters, Smallbone. Who, he wondered, had a Smallbone kitchen? He had never seen one. Fusty little electrical shops, an Oddbins, then the inevitable espres...o...b..r that appeared to be replacing the caffs. Sad, that. High-priced grocers, high-windowed dress shops, windows blank but for one or two oddly angled and headless mannequins in mushroom-colored, loose-waisted clothes. A brace of antique shops, small and elegant, their facades looking as if they'd been stamped on Roman coins.

Jury had wanted to sit right in the front row where the wide window gave an un.o.bstructed view of the street, as if one were hanging over it in midair. But those seats had been commandeered by a couple of teenagers with fade haircuts and a boom box, mercifully turned down. He had taken a seat near the back, wanting to distance himself.

He had always liked the street at night. When he was a uniform, he'd always chosen late duty. He had liked walking past shut-up shops, peering down dimly lit alleys. Perhaps night was just a good place to hide-any alley, any doorway.

For several years now, he'd been thinking of leaving London or transferring to one of the provincial police forces, such as Exeter. Macalvie would love to have him in Exeter. Or Yorks.h.i.+re, up there in the snowy North Yorks.h.i.+re moors. Or Stratford-upon-Avon. Sam Lasko would like nothing better. As it was, Jury worked often enough on Lasko's cases. Stratford. That made him wonder where Jenny Kennington was. She had left months ago, after her trial. He was still trying to understand what had gone wrong between him and Jenny, why there had been that mutual lack of trust. He had been so certain, at one time, they'd stick. He wondered, as he had before, about his problems with women. Well, one could hardly refer to death as a "problem." Jane Holdsworth . . . Helen Minton . . . Molly Singer . . . Nell Healey. He should have been able to rescue Nell, at least. . . . Rescue. That was an odd way of thinking about it. Not only odd but arrogant. Hadn't Jenny described him as a man who wanted "to pull women from burning buildings"?

He looked out the window at a small clutch of people standing in front of a shop that sold furs. Or would do, if the demonstrators would get away from the door. What were they doing here at night when the place was closed? They carried placards with terrible pictures on them of animals imprisoned in lab cages or caught in leg-hold traps. (Jury thought those traps had been outlawed.) People had to walk around the group and could not avoid the signs.

The bus left the animal activists behind.

He was thinking his life was like this bus ride, then thinking, How mawkish, how maudlin. But it was the aimlessness of the ride; he didn't even know where it was going. Putney, probably; it was a number 14. At the next stop it pulled in behind another 14 and there was a bus in front of that one, too. He couldn't see the number, though. There was a fair queue of people; they'd been waiting a long time. He wondered at that law of bus scheduling that had three identical buses piling up at a stop. Why did it happen? You waited for d.a.m.ned ever, and then along came three. Sergeant Wiggins would probably have an answer. He did to most things, though seldom a convincing one. Jury smiled.

Pa.s.sengers came clattering up the stairs, and two of them rustled their packages into the seat behind him. Two women, one apparently American, for she was going on at length to her British friend about Thanksgiving. Would she be home in time to make all of the preparations? She spoke of her far-reaching family-the relatives who always came from out of state to join her immediate family, which sounded huge to begin with. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, children, babies. Last Thanksgiving (she told her friend, whose contribution to this was an occasional "Uhm," "My," "You don't say?"), they'd had twenty-three people at the table. She described the dinner-the turkey, the vegetables, the breads, pies, cakes-and it sounded to Jury like something going on in a medieval banquet hall.

The woman seemed besotted with the holiday. Why? Why would anyone want to prepare such an enormous meal for so many people? His idea of a holiday was to go to sleep, to read, to go to the Angel and have an extra pint. Several extra pints. Her voice rose and fell amidst the flotsam of other voices, the subdued conversation, the blanketed noises coming from the Fulham Road. He wished she would be quiet. He was tired of her. He imagined her friend was too.

Jury closed his eyes, rested his chin on the palm of his hand. Finally, the two women rose, the American making a big fuss over gathering up her parcels and umbrella. Still talking, she followed her friend down the stairs to the lower deck.

He was sitting on the left and could see the pa.s.sengers get off. It was the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital stop and he was momentarily distracted, wondering if this was the hospital in which he was born. There were a dozen or so people getting off, most of them women, so that he could only guess at which the American was. The tall one, he decided, the one with the most parcels and with a very couture look about her-well-tailored coat, shoes in the new heavy-heeled style. Yes, he decided, it was definitely she; she turned to a small, dowdy woman and talked to her as they walked along.

Finished with the American, Jury glanced across the road where several people were coming out of a pub called the Stargazey. He liked the name and thought he'd seen it before. He wondered if there was more than one Stargazey. The bus still idled at the stop, a minute early in its schedule perhaps, while Jury watched a blond woman in a sumptuously sleek dark fur coat crossing the road. He lost sight of her and then regained it when she came from around the front of the bus and boarded. In the fleeting seconds he had taken an impression of her; she was very blond, attractive. He hadn't gotten a good enough look at her face to tell just how attractive. The bus hove itself away from the curb, trundling along the Fulham Road.

An airy scent of perfume floated past him, and he looked up to see the blond woman taking a seat several rows up. He was delighted that he could sit here and stare at her, even if it was only at her back. But occasionally, within the next eight or ten minutes, she would turn to look out and down and he caught a glimpse of her profile. Shoulder-length hair pulled back, so light you could see the moon through it, a profile with that fragility which only the very fair-skinned seem to achieve. They rode that way for perhaps ten minutes, he studying her back, her hair, her profile when she turned it to the window.

Just before the bus stopped opposite the Fulham Broadway underground station, she rose and swayed as she walked up the aisle. He wanted to look her full in the face, but in the way that people do who feel they'll be found out, he didn't risk even a glance. She walked on by.

He thought she might be going into the station, but she didn't; she simply walked on in the direction the bus was headed. Would have headed, had it not been for the snarl of cars and buses where two princ.i.p.al arteries came together, and neither of them big enough to accommodate the traffic. The bus wasn't making any progress. It was one of those inevitable traffic tie-ups where the flow of cars, lorries, and buses vied with roadworks to see which could create greater havoc. One could walk faster, which was probably why the woman in the fur coat had left the bus.

The bus pulled away again and found an untrafficked stretch of road, which it shot down for two blocks while she fell behind. Jury strained to watch her, but a Sainsbury lorry eclipsed his view. Then she came into view again, having gained the time the bus had lost stopping for a red light, a zebra crossing, and another traffic snarl. Her hair, shoulder-length and abundant, was fastened at her neck with a silver clip that glittered above the dark pelts of the coat. Where on earth could a woman like this, wearing a coat like that, be walking? She should have been pa.s.sing below him in a Jaguar or BMW, together, perhaps, with the man in the tux. Then the bus sped away for another fifty yards, pa.s.sing a pub called the Sporting Rat and a few cafes, all trying for the Paris left-bank look, all with cafe chairs and tables set about on the pavement, even in November. The blond woman caught up again when the bus had to stop at a zebra crossing for two very old people, one with a walker, the other, looking as if he should have one, doing his best to a.s.sist her. Probably man and wife, probably had been for a hundred years. Jury wondered about that; it must surely be like a second skin, must surely be like an attachment that had always existed.

Jury watched the progress of the woman in the fur coat, thinking, in a rather romantic way, of the bus as the boat that follows the long-distance swimmer, keeping a little away but there in case of crisis, cramp, or potential drowning.

At the next stop, the romancing couple across the aisle rose and clattered down the stairs, followed by the man in the tux. The party must be here. Jury could see them jump off before the bus had stopped completely, could see the conductor hanging on to the pole, looking up and down. He was surprised, then, to see her board the bus again, across from a pub called the Rat and Parrot-Fulham seemed big on rats. She was preceded by a mother and a surly-looking child, the boy straining back against the mother's hand. The mum took his arm and shook it as if he were a piece of clothing she was trying to get the wrinkles out of. The boy bellowed. The bus pulled out into much thinner traffic.

She did not come up to the top deck.

He watched pa.s.sengers get off at the next two stops. Then, at the third-Fulham Palace Road-he saw her get off again.

Jury rose quickly and maneuvered, bus-drunk, down the semicircle of steps, wondering why more people didn't go hurtling down them, given the sudden stops and starts. Then he jumped off in the same way he'd disapproved of the others doing it.

It took him less than a minute to get to the street she'd turned in on, called Bishops Avenue. It surprised him to find he was going in the direction of Fulham Palace. It was past nine and had been dark for several hours. It surprised him far more, though, that he was following her. He kept well behind her, walking past some tennis courts, part of a park complex.

She stopped in front of the high iron gates that were the entrance to the palace grounds, diaphanous light from a nearby lamp silvering the dark fur.

Falling back, he stopped too. What on earth was she doing here? (What on earth was he?) He would have thought the palace grounds closed at this hour, yet he saw her go in through the gates, which were still open. When he covered the twenty or thirty feet to the entrance, she was gone. He could see nothing but murky blackness beyond. The lamp pooled weak light on the ground. For some moments, Jury stood, wondering why he didn't walk in. But he didn't. He just stood there. Like a great twit. He knew it was always much safer to decry one's actions than it was to understand them. At any rate, he stood there beneath the lamp, decrying.

That she and her mission were absolutely none of his business was not, he was sure, what stopped him. It certainly hadn't stopped him from coming this far. What, then? He paced back and forth before the black mouth of the iron entrance to the palace grounds.

Jury was dying for a cigarette, but he hadn't smoked for nearly a year now (ten months, anyway). Smokers these days had to huddle in the entrances of office buildings, exposed to wind and rain, taking furtive jabs at their cigarettes, the outcasts, the cast-outs. Society would not share its office with them. Jury did not need society to cast him out, only Sergeant Wiggins.

He then suddenly realized that what he felt was just that: cast out. But from what and by whom?

2.

The next day was Sunday, and Jury decided to catch up on his life. He opened his bills, glanced at them, tossed them in the desk drawer. There was one personal letter, this from Melrose Plant, which he set aside for later reading. Then he opened the Sunday paper he'd nicked from in front of Stan Keeler's door upstairs. Stan wasn't there; he often wasn't. Carole-anne and Mrs. Wa.s.sermann fed Stan's dog, Stone, and Jury took him for walks, or Carole-anne did. Occasionally, they took Stone for a walk together.

He finished the paper, along with a cup of tea and some toast.

Having thus caught up on his life in Islington, he thought he'd go out. He would go to a museum, the Tate, perhaps. Museums were what one "did" on a Sunday, at least before the pubs opened. He hesitated. One part of himself cautioned the other part against doing the Tate; better to go somewhere else-the V and A, perhaps, or to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. But he still wound up taking a bus along the Embankment, getting off at the Tate, and trudging up the wide white stairs, all the while telling himself this might not be a good idea.

Stopping off in the Tate Gallery had, in the quite recent past, had rather dramatic consequences. Early in the year, in January, he had wound up in the States, in Baltimore. A short while later, a couple of weeks, he had wound up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Tate was a chancy venue, especially the gallery housing the pre-Raphaelites.

Which is where he went, of course, and stood in front of the Chatterton painting, where he always ended up standing (wondering if the painting was sentimental, not caring if it was), and let the memories take hold. Perhaps he thought there was the possibility of exorcism in all of this. Maybe, but he didn't know.

He spoke to no one for the whole day, beyond the mere request for a pint of this, a half pint of that. Jury rarely went pub-crawling, usually confining himself to the Angel, in Islington, or one of the places in St. James's near New Scotland Yard.

Almost without conscious intent, he worked his way, via bus and tube, to the Fulham Road. It ran parallel to the King's Road, and if he stayed on this last bus (the number 14), which went to Putney Bridge, he would be at Fulham Palace again. No, he would not do this, he told himself, and left the bus at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for the pub on the corner. It was a compromise move, he decided. He had kept himself from going to Fulham Palace.

Under its black and gold sign, the Stargazey looked quite promising and not in the least scruffy. Before he went in for a pint, he stopped at a newsagent's and bought a fresh Sunday paper to take back for Stan, in case Stan were suddenly to return, which he often did. The pub was handsome, well appointed. He was not sure whether this was actually Chelsea or Fulham and decided it must be right on the border. Fulham had come a long way over the last thirty years towards gentrification. It was no longer "foul Fulham" (as a friend of his on the force had christened it). It seemed almost flowery, somehow; it seemed blooming. Certainly it had all the indicators that it was an area where the chattering cla.s.ses would flourish: property values zinging upwards, cappuccino bars, pricey boutiques and antiques, fancy grocers who "dressed" their windows in arrangements of fruit and foie gras.

Islington had gone the same way, only sooner. The terraced house where he had a flat would probably bring at least a quarter million pounds these days. It seemed to be a prime topic of conversation in the Angel, property values, and those people with their cell phones were probably estate agents. They walked up and down outside of the pub, cell phones glued to their ears, the "pavement prancers."

But at the same time, areas in a long slide downwards had slid more. The fabric of life for many was still worn thin. The divergence between upper and lower became more noticeable; the fraying of a seam had become a rip, and Tony Blair would do sod-all to st.i.tch it up. He sighed, opened Stan's fresh paper, and read the sections he hadn't read in his flat.

The pub was crowded and smoky and filled with the familiar air of Sunday desperation. Sundays had less structure. The paper, the pub; that was about it. Jury shoved his gla.s.s to the back of the bar, caught the bartender's eye, and signaled for a refill. Then he slit the envelope of Melrose Plant's letter. Two pages in Plant's elegant script on thick, creamy paper that took the ink so beautifully the pages looked engraved. Old stationery, which still bore a crest and his old t.i.tles. The crest was left, but the t.i.tles were x'd out. Jury laughed all the way through it. The usual "nothing" was happening in Northants, but if there were ever a man who, like Nature, could fill a vacuum, it was Melrose Plant. He could fill in a black hole; he could void a universal void. Jury laughed again and returned the letter to his pocket. He would answer it when he got back to his flat.

When he looked up he saw the woman who worked behind the bar remove a bottle of whisky and wipe it and then return it to the shelf. She did the same thing with the next bottle, wiping it carefully and returning it to its place. Apparently, she would do this all along the length of the shelves until stopped by somebody wanting a drink, or the telephone, or something else claiming her attention. Jury watched this for some moments, her taking such great care in her handling of the bottles, especially the cognac, the Remy Martin. She smiled as she did this, and Jury smiled, watching. It seemed such a loving wiping-down of the bottles, and she seemed to take such pride in her handiwork. She appeared to be a gentle person, one who would not turn men's heads but who was softly pretty.

He was sitting at the end of the bar by one of the wooden pillars where a few postcards were tacked up, one of which he peered at closely. Half of the front pictured a pub called the Stargazey, although not this one. He read the small print. It was in Cornwall, one of those little perpendicular villages that let you slide down to the sea but make it h.e.l.l to walk up. Maybe he'd been there and seen the name. On the other half of the card was depicted a strange-looking fish pie, perhaps the pub's specialty.

"Can I ask you something, love?" Jury said to the woman dusting the bottles.

She turned with a questioning smile.

"Do you sell these postcards here? I'd really like to have one of these." He pointed to the card he'd been examining.

She squinted at it and said, "We did do, yes. Just let me have a look here. . . ." She opened first one drawer and then another, beneath the bar, and triumphantly held up the card. "It's the last one, aren't you the lucky winner!"

It was Jury's first real smile that day; she was so uncommonly delighted with this humble treasure. Too easily made glad, thought Jury. Wasn't that what the Duke of Ferrara had said of his ill-fated d.u.c.h.ess?

"Here." She slid it across the bar. "You just have it."

"Thank you, but I'd be glad to pay-"

"No. I can't remember anyone ever asking for one before. Most people don't notice little things like this. You miss a lot in life if you don't notice little things." She returned to her task (though, for her, bottle-wiping seemed more a vocation) and took down and ran the cloth over a bottle of Sapphire gin.

Jury said, "I don't think I've ever seen any pub take so much trouble over its stock, either."

She blushed. "Oh, me. I guess it's just silly-and he sure don't like it." Here she shot a glance toward the bartender or manager or owner. "But these bottles I think are quite lovely, standing there against the gla.s.s. Just look at this one." She held up the gin bottle for Jury's examination. "Did you ever see such a blue? It's so pretty-"

"Kitty, come along here," called the bartender.