Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 27

"Because she sounds so boring."

"Boring? What do you mean?"

"Well, if you were Sophie, would you pick out potatoes when there was an organ grinder and a trick cat and dog right outside?"

Melrose frowned and stopped as they rounded the wall on which wisteria would grow in rich profusion in the spring. As Linda raced to the herb garden, his frown deepened.

He stood looking down at the triangular patch identified as lad's-love and the one across from it marked lavender. He asked Linda again if she was certain the body had lain here-he pointed to the lad's-love.

"I've told everybody a thousand times, yes."

"Perhaps, but you haven't told me a thousand."

"I guess you want me to lie down in it again."

"Certainly not. I didn't want you to lie down in it in the first place." Children were such ghouls.

Two things, he decided, had gone wrong for the killer: Jury should not have been on that bus, and Linda should not have been in this garden. He pondered this while watching her go into the ruined greenhouse.

If the body had been hidden in there, why?

To delay discovery. But he kept coming up with why? no matter which road he took.

He sat down on a small stone bench in front of the wisteria vines, thinking about Kate McBride and Sophie and, most of all, Simeon Pitt. Melrose leaned over, arms on knees, and looked at the dark earth at his feet. Under which Simeon Pitt would soon be buried. Melrose truly mourned him. It was so rare to find someone who didn't talk balderdash or berate your ears with inconsequential conversation.

He looked up, didn't see Linda, and rose quickly. He called her. "Linda!"

No answer. "Linda!"

An answer came back. "Wha-at?"

"Nothing." He sat again and continued to think about Pitt. Artists whose armor he'd put a dent in, columnists not so successful as he-but surely not possessed of the large-scale pa.s.sion it would take to kill a man.

"Linda!" he shouted again.

"What?" came the reply again.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

Had he expected any other answer? Did he think she was in there translating Paradise Lost into Slovakian or discovering a billfold full of identification left by the killer?

Pitt had come to some conclusion about the Fabricant Gallery and was about to do something-it must have to do with a future act and not a past one. At least, Melrose was working under that a.s.sumption. It must be those d.a.m.ned white paintings of Rees's.

"Linda!"

"Whaaaaat?"

"I think you should come out of there now." He searched his mind for some greenhouse horror. "There might be snakes. And spiders."

"Okay."

He watched the door. Did he really think she'd appear?

"Linda!" He got up.

"What?"

Oh, for pity's sake! He went to the ruined gla.s.s house and through the door, or what was left of it. She was just standing there, looking at something she held that she quickly made a fist around when she saw him.

"What's that?"

"What?"

"That." He nodded towards her closed hand.

"Nothing."

"No, it isn't."

"It's a secret. Have you got to know everything?" She turned away, but not before looking at him as if he'd gone loopy.

Well, he knew better than to push her for information. "If you found something related to this crime, you realize you're obstructing justice and the police will have you for it," he said, testily and stuffily. "I'll wait for you outside."

In another breathless moment she was out the door, walking right past him. When he just stood there, she turned and said, "Well, come on," as if justice-obstructing were all on his side and the police would know where to look.

34.

When she came to the door of the Redcliffe Gardens flat, Kate looked different, a little younger, more relaxed, and, if possible, more vulnerable. Of course she would be more relaxed, probably relieved as h.e.l.l to be shut of Chilten and the Fulham police station. That would bring the color back to her cheeks, or perhaps it was the rose of the silk blouse she was wearing.

When she had hung up Jury's coat, she led him into her sitting room, which was suffused with the warmth of the fire. The room was pleasantly furnished, very English with its floral prints in slipcovers and curtains. It was on the small side, but generous for one person. There was only one bedroom.

She offered him coffee. "With a shot of brandy, how's that sound?"

"You must be reading my mind."

She hesitated in the doorway. "I doubt that I could."

While she went off to fetch the brandy, Jury stood and looked around. Framed posters in German and French. Jury didn't know if this reflected taste or travel. No photographs, a couple of shelves of books. Quite a CD collection, one of which was already playing. Mozart, he thought, reminding himself for the hundredth time he should know, not guess. He sat down in an armchair, felt the relief in his back. He hadn't known how tired he was until he sat down. He looked across the room at a large painting, some forest scene, he thought, and got up to view it more closely. It was actually of a house. Only part of the house could be seen; the rest was obscured by the woodland in front and mountains rising behind. But what woods and what mountains! The light coming through the trees might have been the painter's idealization of the scene, but perhaps not. Blaen-y-glyn was written on a small bra.s.s plaque at the bottom.

"Beautiful, isn't it? The house and the land-there's a hundred acres of it-are so beautiful it makes you want to weep."

He hadn't heard her come up behind him. "This is the place in the Black Mountains?" When she nodded, he asked, "Why did your husband's uncle make moving in by Christmas a condition of inheritance?"

"I don't know. Perhaps he didn't want the place to go untenanted for a long period of time. Or didn't want it sold. Michael's mother was American, and I think he felt Michael should come home. 'Home' being upstate New York."

"Then why would he leave your husband property in Wales if he wanted you to live in the States?"

"I've no idea. He died not long ago, poor man. The first Thanksgiving after his death we were to sign papers at a solicitor's office at the Inns of Court."

"That's day after tomorrow."

"Yes. Perhaps he wanted to remind Michael of his American origins. He was a little wacky, I expect. Let's sit down."

She had brought coffee and a cut-gla.s.s decanter and two snifters on a black enameled tray painted with a bowl of roses. He accepted a cup from her. He leaned forward, the gla.s.s between his hands, the lush aroma of a superior cognac making him vaguely dizzy. Jury remembered that it was she who had asked him to come here. "Why did you want to see me, Kate?"

Hesitating, she fingered the decanter. "First: are you still so determined to believe you saw me that night?"

Jury didn't answer immediately. Then he said, "Determined isn't the way to put it. It makes it seem I want it to be true. But it's the other way round: I don't want it to be true, and I'd sooner believe you weren't within a mile of the b.l.o.o.d.y place."

She dropped the gla.s.s stopper back into the bottle. The clink reverberated in the still room. She sat down opposite him on the sofa. "You were right."

He was not tempted to say, I know. Instead, he felt that coldness in the pit of his stomach, the way one feels when one hears a diagnosis confirmed, as if he hadn't all along been sure and needed the confirmation. He held his cup in both hands, seeking any fresh source of warmth, and waited.

"There was another"-she looked across at Jury, straight across the distance between them-"another letter. I was to go to Fulham Palace. I was even told to get off the bus at the Fulham Broadway station and walk and then reboard the bus, if I could, or board another. When it got to Fulham Palace Road, I was to get off and-well, the rest is obvious. There was a little map of the grounds and the walled garden. I haven't the least idea why this place was chosen, any more than the other places."

"And when you got there?"

She c.o.c.ked her head and smiled slightly. "You're certainly cool, Superintendent; you don't seem surprised."

"It's Richard, and I'm totally un-cool, and I am surprised. Although the possibility did occur to me that this was another attempt-but go on."

When she said it, her voice was dry, as if she were parched, emotionally. "This woman was just-lying there, in that sable coat. You were right about the coat, too. I was wearing one-mink." She shook her head in both disbelief and wonder that she could have come upon this scene. "That was all. That was absolutely all." Her terrible position in this whole business must have struck her suddenly and terribly, like a blow to the chest, for now there was a burst of tears as she fell back against the sofa.

"Kate." Jury moved to the sofa, laid his arm atop her own outstretched arm, laid his cheek against her hair. It smelled of lavender. "Kate," he said again, the word m.u.f.fled by her hair, and twined his fingers within hers.

When he did this, she twisted around and laid her head on his chest. She said, "There are times I think I can't stand it anymore, being alone."

"I know the feeling."

She moved away from him, and he let her go. She stood up and drank the rest of her cognac. Then she started moving about the room, tidying pillows that didn't need tidying.

He sat back and watched her. "So it wasn't like the others, this meeting place. What about the message itself. Did you keep it?"

"Yes." She moved to the back of the room to a small kneehole desk and slid open a drawer. She came back to the sofa, handed the paper to him, and sat down again. "It's shorter than the others; there's a different-" She looked around, as if words hung in the air from which she might take the right one. "A different tone, I guess you'd say."

It was a half page of white paper, thicker than the ordinary typing or printer paper Jury was used to seeing. The message was brief; Your meeting place is Fulham Palace, the herb garden. Then the time and date and where she was to leave and reboard the bus.

Jury said, "All of the others mentioned Sophie."

She nodded. Her elbow on her knee, her mouth was pressed against her fisted hand.

Jury held the note up to the light. "This wasn't done on a computer; it was typed."

She turned around, read it again. "I didn't notice. How stupid of me. I knew something was different. The whole thing is different."

Jury put it in an envelope and said, "It looks as if you were set up, Kate."

She stared at him, her mouth opening and closing. "But-why, Richard? And how could anyone know about Sophie-I mean about the other places, the meetings in Brussels and Petersburg?"

"Who did you tell?"

"No one. I mean, except for the Paris police, of course."

Now Jury was looking at the map, done on a piece of flimsy paper. It showed the way to the knot garden from the stone pillars. "This map is traced." It looked familiar to him. He folded it and put it in the envelope, too, and put the envelope in his pocket. "Kate, you must have told someone; you could have done that and forgotten, or without meaning to-"

"For G.o.d's sake, Richard, how could I tell someone my child's been kidnapped, without meaning to?"

"Sorry. You're right . . . but what about that awful day when it happened?"

She thought for a moment. "Yes, of course, I asked a lot of people if they'd seen Sophie. I was hysterical."

Jury thought of the priest. "What about Charles Noailles?"

She frowned as she turned to him again. "But that was before it happened, I mean when Michael knew him. And you told me he didn't even know Michael had a daughter."

"His church was right there, near the rue Servandoni. St. Sulpice. You said you could see the spire from your flat. It's a h.e.l.l of a coincidence, don't you think? This person out of your past who knew your husband so well turns up in one of the offices of Fulham Palace. I don't trust coincidences." She said nothing, and he took her silence for sorrow. "I'm sorry, Kate. I'm so sorry."

She came to sit beside him again and he pulled her over, pulled her head down against his chest. "Look, Scotland Yard has tremendous resources. We'll get her back." Jury didn't believe that, but it was an easy lie. It was always an easy lie, and he felt slightly ashamed. He rubbed her back and wished he knew something both true and comforting to say.

"There's something I've been wondering about all week," she said, without moving her position and looking at him. "Why, when you followed me all that way from the pub, didn't you then follow me into the palace grounds? Why didn't you come in?"

Now he turned his mind to this again, this time wondering about what might have happened, what potential tragedy might have been averted-or brought about-if he had done so. Would his presence have rearranged everything? From the dead woman's position, to Kate sitting at that table in the station, down to that vase of roses, the magazines in that rack, the books, the light spilling from beneath a frosted gla.s.s lampshade-would it all have been changed? Over her shoulder he looked almost coldly and clinically around the room, despite the great upheaval in his heart. And he wondered that the room itself didn't fly apart: paintings and posters drop from the walls, books fly from the shelves, lamps overturn. He felt divided and began to see some faint glimmer of an answer to her question in this: that even if he had gone in it would be as if he hadn't, that he could not have left foot- or fingerprints or anything behind to show he had been there. When he finally answered, he imagined the question had already been forgotten.

Because I wasn't invited. But that sounded so strange that he didn't say it. He settled for, "Fate, I guess. It wasn't in the stars."

The awful paradox of something he refused, refusing him.

35.

Is your medical examiner absolutely certain that it was an exit wound?" Melrose asked. They were sitting in the Members' Room having morning coffee.

"Dr. Nancy? No. It's not as easy as you might think to say whether a person was shot in the front or the back. The bullet can tell you what it pa.s.sed through and, often, the order of the pa.s.sing. According to the position of the body in the lavender, and the blood and residue pattern, Nancy Pastis was shot at close range in the chest."

Melrose fell to contemplating the stag over the mantel and wondering about blood sports. "But you've said you believe Linda really did see the body in the lad's-love, so what about that?"