Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 13

Phyllida Laidlaw invited them into her kitchen at the Redcliffe Gardens mansion house, saying, "I've just put the kettle on, so we can have tea in a few moments." The smile on the ninety-year-old face was dreamy, as if Jury and Wiggins had walked into her fantasy.

Wiggins sat himself down on a wooden chair and lost no time in dispensing advice. "Maybe you should look into those new electric kettles. Plastic, mine is, and it boils the water three times faster."

"Really? But I don't like plastic. And the metal ones are so expensive."

Jury, hoping to force Wiggins off the information highway, said, "Mrs. Laidlaw, you know Kate McBride?"

"Oh, my, yes. The other policemen asked me about her. They could have told you and saved you all the trouble. But I don't mean I'm not delighted to have your company." The kettle screamed, as if to give the lie to Wiggins's "three times faster" comment.

Wiggins put a hand on her shoulder when she started to get up and said he'd fix the tea.

"I'm afraid I've only tea bags-there, in that tin box. And the sugar's in the cupboard. Milk in the fridge." That crucial step taken, she folded her hands in her lap and looked at Jury from wash-blue eyes, indicating he could get on with whatever trivial thing he was there for.

"Mrs. McBride had tea with you on the Sat.u.r.day night. Do you recall what time it was that she was here?"

"Well, it was just before Homicide."

"I beg your pardon?"

Wiggins filled him in as he doused tea bags with water. "Remember? I told you about it. You haven't seen it. We just started getting it over here. It's real, like."

"Oh, it certainly is-only one spoonful for me, thank you. They've got such interesting characters. That wonderful black lieutenant."

Wiggins set down the three mugs for them. "G."

Both Jury and Mrs. Laidlaw looked at him.

"G, that's what they call the lieutenant."

"We don't have biscuits," said Mrs. Laidlaw reproachfully.

"Right. I'll have 'em in a tic." As if he'd stocked the cupboards himself, he drew out a package of Rich Tea Biscuits, put some on a plate.

"And that's how you're determining the time, Mrs. Laidlaw?"

She looked at him as if he were throwing spanners in the works, interrupting sense with senselessness. Wiggins stirred his tea and looked at him in much the same way.

Jury cleared his throat. "Kate McBride, Mrs. Laidlaw. She was here while this television program-"

"Homicide."

"Homicide."

They said it simultaneously, Mrs. Laidlaw looking pleased as punch that at least one of England's finest was keeping up with daily events.

"Right. So when did Mrs. McBride leave?" Jury's eyes were searching the room.

"Oh, nine-twenty-ish. Just before nine-thirty. I'd missed most of Homicide by then-"

"I missed it too."

Jury glared. Wiggins shut up.

"-so I just watched this silly quiz program I can't tell you the first thing about, so if I have to account for my time, well . . . " She raised her hands and shrugged slightly. Her smile was almost beatific.

Jury smiled too. "No, your movements seem quite believable. There's just one thing I'm wondering about. When Mrs. McBride visited, did you have tea here in the kitchen?"

"Yes. I always do have it in here."

"I notice you don't wear a wrist.w.a.tch, and I don't see a clock. How did you know your program was on?"

"She had one. A wrist.w.a.tch, I mean. That's how I knew it was after nine. She told me."

When the WPC brought her into the interview room at Fulham HQ, Jury was sitting at the table still wearing his raincoat. That, he supposed, gave the impression of a man who wasn't going to stop here for very long. He didn't know whether or not it was the impression he wanted to give. He only knew that Kate McBride threw him.

She looked exactly the same as when he had seen her on Shaftsbury Avenue in the St. James-same suit, same hairstyle-but she would, of course, since Chilten had picked her up last night, had waited outside her flat in a car until she returned. Chilten had, of course, already questioned her, together with another of his men, and had her testimony on tape. She had not requested a solicitor be present. She had been so certain of her immediate release that she hadn't felt she needed one.

Kate McBride sat down on one of the uncomfortable folding chairs opposite Jury and said, "I appreciate your coming."

The voice was the same, too. It didn't waver; it was not tight with anxiety; it gave none of the signs of anything but confidence that all of this was some dreadful mistake, easily cleared up if she could simply tell the right person where the mistake lay. Jury was, apparently, the right person.

He did not remark on her "appreciation." He inclined his head slightly in response. Then he asked, "Why did you want to see me?"

Kate McBride didn't answer immediately. She spent a few moments taking in the room that he'd have thought would be, by now, quite familiar to her. It was hardly a place one would want to commit to memory, anyway. Then she said, "Would you tell me what you saw-what you thought you saw-on that Sat.u.r.day night?"

"I did tell you."

"You saw me in the Fulham Road boarding a bus. The one you were on."

"Yes."

"And?"

If she thought his going over it again would help, he would comply. "About ten minutes later, at the Fulham Broadway tube station, you got off and started walking. Perhaps because of the traffic tie-ups; you may have thought you could get where you were going more quickly on foot. The bus was in stop-go traffic for another ten minutes, at least, because of the daytime roadworks. Later, when the bus stopped opposite a pub called the Rat-and-something, you reboarded. At Fulham Palace Road, you got off and headed for Fulham Palace."

She waited. When Jury didn't continue, she said, "You followed her."

"I followed you." He smiled slightly.

Oddly, she didn't mention her neighbor, did not take up the alibi. Was she so sure of her ground she didn't need to?

She said, "Are you certain it wasn't the coat I was supposedly wearing that made you mistake me for-her?"

"No."

"You're so positive."

Jury's eyes cut away for a moment, which was a mistake. He felt he was already on the defensive.

She took advantage of this heartbeat of hesitation and said, "You're not, are you?"

"Is this why you wanted to talk to me? To tell me I'm not positive about what I saw?"

"No. But I don't see how what you say happened makes any sense."

"It doesn't. It's my aim to make sense out of it."

There was a pause. He watched a band of sallow light play across her hair.

She said, "I didn't kill this woman."

"Oh, but I didn't say you did. You might have had some reason for going there-though it's a strange place to rendezvous after dark. Also, a strange place to be followed to."

"To be followed to?"

Jury shrugged. "I thought of that as a possibility. Your behavior might suggest someone who's trying to throw someone else off the scent."

Her short gasp of laughter suggested this was really too outlandish of him. "You've quite an imagination."

"Not really. I'm quite an unimaginative sod. But pretty obviously, being a detective, I'd want to find reasons for your actions. As I said, why would anyone go to a place like Fulham Palace at night? Not many tourists make their way there, even during the day. It's one of London's best-kept secrets, I've heard." When she didn't comment, he said, "You live alone? No one to corroborate your story? Your husband?"

"Is dead. Michael died of leukemia. He was only forty."

"I'm very sorry."

She went on as if she hadn't heard him. "He was from Norfolk, the Norfolk Broads. He was partly American; his mother was. I thought he might want to come back, but he wanted to die in Paris. He adored Paris." She smiled at some distant vista. "He could get drunk on Paris. From our window we could look down at night on the streetlamps on the rue Servandoni, and Michael-but I'm rambling. Sorry." She put her hand on her forehead as if to hold back the memories.

"No. Go on."

She went on, describing the cafes where they would sit for hours in the boulevard Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel; the walks and flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries; the wet look of the cobblestones of the rue Servandoni and the Ile Saint-Louis; Pont-neuf in the fog; the great avenues of light such as the Champs-Elysees.

The voice had a visceral effect on Jury; it seemed to seep into his muscles and calm him like a drug.

"We lived there for seven years, in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Michael had a government post, undersecretary, and we were well provided for after he died. Michael himself, I mean his family, had money, and so we were comfortably off, though by no means rich. If he had to die, I'm only glad he died before what happened to Sophie." She stopped, looked away. There was nothing to see but the blank wall.

"Sophie?"

She nodded. "Our daughter. She was born soon after we got to Paris. I don't know which of the three of us Michael loved more: me, Sophie, or Paris." Her smile was a trifle wicked now. "I sometimes think it was Paris. But he adored Sophie." Again, she fell silent. Jury could hear someone, Chilten probably, talking beyond the door and, now, opening it.

"You said something happened to Sophie. What?"

Kate stood up as the door opened and said, "She vanished."

She turned towards the woman police constable and Ron Chilten. The policewoman led her out.

"Your timing is impeccable," said Jury to Chilten, as he looked at the pa.s.sport Chilten had just handed him. They were standing in the corridor outside the interview room. "Why do these photos always make a person look like a corpse?"

"This one is a corpse. Nancy Pastis."

"Sorry." He looked at the face, its unsmiling, noncommittal expression; its high brow, with the hair pulled slickly back. He remembered what Plant had said: Doppelgangers.

Chilten looked at him. "Easy to mistake one for the other. Anyone might."

"Then I'm not anyone, Ronnie." Jury flipped from the front to the visa entries. "This only goes back three years: Argentina, France, Denmark, Russia. But it stops nearly a year ago. I mean, according to this, Ms. Pastis hadn't been doing any traveling for ten months."

"So? Maybe she got tired of it." He nodded towards the room in which Jury had lately sat with Kate McBride. "Get anything useful out of her?"

Jury shook his head. "Embellishment on what you already know: husband with emba.s.sy in Paris; lived in Paris for seven years; had a daughter. Did you know she disappeared?"

Chilten frowned. "She didn't tell me about it. What happened?"

"I was about to find out when you walked in." The door to the room he had just left was open; he looked at the chair where she had sat, studied the barren, spindly tree beyond the window. "I'll be back."

17.

A bored police constable stood guard at the entrance to the elegant old building on Curzon Street. He nodded at Jury's and Wiggins's IDs and told them to go in, that the flat was on the second floor and there was an elevator. It was one of those ancient birdcage elevators, painted gold, that rattled to a stop on the second floor.

There was no crime-scene tape; the flat hadn't been sealed against entry; still, Jury was surprised there was no policeman by Nancy Pastis's door, too.

The flat was a little on the small side, if one were to judge by square footage. Living room, one bedroom, bath, and kitchen. But Jury found that it gave the impression of s.p.a.ciousness. The ceilings were very high and the molding-painted white, like the walls-was beautiful. Jury and Wiggins started in the living room, two walls of which were given over to floor-to-ceiling bookcases; there was a library ladder for reaching the higher shelves, which were, like the lower ones, full. Books had been stacked in front of the shelves, waiting for a place. Other books would have to leave to accommodate them. These were clearly books that were being read; this wasn't for show.

All the furnishings appeared to be antiques except for a slick-lined off-white sofa and a deep-seated slipcovered armchair, the sofa probably an Italian design but the chair, good old English parlor. Beneath these pieces was an oriental rug whose background color was a larkspur blue. There was a heavy rolltop desk with a fragile-looking gilt chair-French, Jury imagined-pulled up to it. A bulbous gla.s.s-fronted cabinet housed porcelain of Sevres and Limoges. Everywhere were lamps of varying styles and heights.

The impact of all these different styles was one immediately pleasing to the eye, perhaps because the impression given was that each piece had been chosen separately because the owner liked it, rather than as part of a collection or an attempt to orchestrate the room as a whole. By being artless, the effect was artful, yet nothing a decorator would have achieved.

Paintings crowded the other two walls of the living room, and, while Wiggins went about opening drawers and a.s.sessing the small accouterments of a life, Jury indulged himself by gazing at the paintings. As far as he could tell, they were all originals or, at least, superior reproductions. One smallish painting was of the Cornwall coast drenched in light. Jury knew it was Cornwall only because it was t.i.tled St. Ives. The slant of light gave the little town an unearthly glow and stippled the sea with radiance. The largest painting was quite dazzling, a modern study of an inlet or marina covered with small craft, fishing and sailing boats. Nancy Pastis seemed to prefer seascapes, or at least water; there were lagoons, lakes, ocean views, rivers. Another painting looked like a view of St. Petersburg and its famous river; Jury tried to call up the name. Whatever it was, it was beautiful. The smallest of the paintings was equally dazzling, a miniaturist rendition of a black sand beach and a turquoise sea caught at sunset-or was it sunrise? Jury would never make a painter, he decided, if he couldn't tell the difference. The little painting was alive with light.

He went into the bedroom, a fairly somber room with heavy draperies and bedspread but extremely neat, as the living room was. Wiggins came in behind him and made for the dressing table and the bureau, the chest of drawers.

The kitchen was a wonder of a place, containing probably every modern cooking tool on the market: espresso machine, Cuisinart, pasta maker, copper pots slung on a circular copper bar that hung from the ceiling, and a quite incredible (and shiny) industrial-restaurant-sized cooker. Eight burners, and you could stuff an ox in the oven. Someone took cooking very seriously here, as seriously as reading and painting.

Of the some dozen cookbooks on a Spanish-tiled counter surface, two were French, one was German. Jury pulled them out, leafed through them long enough to tell they had indeed been handled and that Nancy Pastis spoke more than English. Her pa.s.sport told them she traveled frequently. Frequently and seriously, he thought.

As he was returning to the living room, he heard voices in the hall, male and female. Wiggins had opened the door upon an elderly lady and the constable Jury a.s.sumed Chilten had posted here. Upon seeing Jury, the police constable turned brick-red, a flush that could have had a charcoal fire going.

"Oh. Sorry, sir. I was just . . . I was only gone for five minutes."