Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 2

The wreckage of the t.i.tanic wouldn't have called forth greater awe. Jury consulted the map. "Lavender." He nodded toward a section beside the feverfew. "That where you found her?" He watched Chilten pause to take out a pack of Chiclets.

Chilten held the pause long enough to put the gum in his mouth and crunch it around, as if even the Chiclet was part and parcel of the overall mystery. Finally, he nodded. "That's it. Face up in the lavender." He stepped back, backed up to the wisteria vines. "From about here, we figure, given the trajectory." He moved back to the lavender patch. "She was found Sat.u.r.day night before midnight. That's when the caretaker said he saw her. But you saw her as early as nine, nine-thirty."

Jury waited. Nothing. "Who found her? The caretaker?"

Another piece of gum went into Chilten's mouth. He chewed. "Uh-huh. Or he reported it to Fulham HQ, anyway, says he found her around midnight."

It was Wiggins who helped out, filling in. "You mean, it sounds like the caretaker didn't actually find her?"

"Well, he did and he didn't." Chilten smiled slightly as he went on chewing.

Jury wanted to chew nails.

"Did and didn't, sir? What's that mean?"

"It was Linda Pink the caretaker said actually found her."

Ah, thought Jury. Finally got around to Linda Pink. In name only. He sighed. "Look, Ron. You know we don't know who Linda Pink is, so why not enlighten us?" Having to ask the direct question, that was the price you paid for getting information out of Chilten.

"Oh. Didn't I tell you? Linda Pink lives out there, along Bishops Park Road. She comes over here all the time, according to the caretaker. Day and night. Miss Pink found the body, she says, around seven-thirty, seven-forty-five. But she didn't tell anybody about it. Not until this morning, when she found the caretaker in the porter's lodge having a cuppa. Said she saw in the paper about finding the woman in the herb garden. My guess is, she probably wouldn't have said anything even then, except she wanted to be disputatious." Chilten slid Jury a look. He stopped talking, studied the crime-scene tape.

Jury waited. He was good at waiting.

It was Wiggins who couldn't stand it. "Disputatious? I don't understand."

"Linda Pink claims she found her in the lad's-love, not the lavender. But the caretaker is sure it was the lavender."

Jury frowned. "Lad's-love? What-"

Wiggins helped. "It's an herb for nervous problems."

"Never mind what it's for. Where?" He looked down at the patch of lavender.

"Right here," said Chilten, shoving the toe of his brown shoe into a wild and weedy dry patch that looked just like the patches on either side of it. "That's lad's-love." He shrugged. "Hard to tell the difference."

"Then," said Jury, "it's simple, isn't it? The caretaker would know one patch of herbs from another. Miss Pink is mistaken."

"Yeah?" Chilten lit a cigarette. He still chewed his gum. "Tell that to Miss Pink."

"You don't mind if I talk to her?"

"Delighted. She's ten."

Jury blinked, looked at Wiggins, who looked rueful. And as if mood were an herb indicator, he looked round for it, the rue. "Ron. This dead woman was found by a kid?"

"Mmm-hmm." Chilten trebled the sound, and with obvious pleasure, as he exhaled a thin stream of smoke and watched Jury's expression.

For once, Jury didn't give a b.l.o.o.d.y d.a.m.n if someone else got to smoke and he didn't. As Chilten puffed away, Jury said, with mock sweetness, "Whenever you're ready, Ron."

"Oh? Thought I told you: Linda lives over on Bishops Park Road"-he watched Wiggins taking notes; gave him the number, added-"with her aunt. Great-aunt, rather. It's the aunt who owns the place, obviously. Name of Dresser." He gave out a few more details (gratis), and Wiggins parked his pencil inside his small notebook. "And that fur coat, you might be surprised to hear."

There was a definite period after "to hear." No pause, no cough, sneeze, or sudden interruption by Chilten's pager or cell phone. "To hear what, d.a.m.n it?" Jury tried not to come down too heavily on the "d.a.m.n it."

Chilten raised his eyebrows. "I didn't tell you? The coat was Mona Dresser's."

Jury's mouth opened, shut. "You're talking about this Linda Pink's aunt?"

"Mmm-hmm." Another cigarette was popped from his pack. "It's a long story, Jury."

Jury set his teeth, managed a synthetic smile. "I'm in the long-story business, Ronnie."

Wiggins's mood was becoming infected by all of this having to hang upon Chilten's answers. "I expect you could brief it up for us, Mr. Chilten," he said, a bit sharpish, as he got out his notebook, preparatory to being briefed.

"Okay. The fur coat belonged originally to Ms. Dresser. She pa.s.sed it along to her stepdaughter, Olivia, who later sold it through one of those-what d'ya call 'em?-ah, consignment shops. How it got out of the shop onto the back of the dead woman, that's anybody's guess."

"But we're not," said Wiggins, seeing Chilten was through, "in the anybody's-guess business. Do you think we could see the body?"

"Let's go." Chilten looked from Jury to Wiggins as if they'd been holding him up, stopping here.

It had always astonished Jury how medical examiners, attendants-all those who worked there-could give the impression they felt completely at home in a police morgue. Perhaps they did, and why not? It was theirs, and they liked it. He understood that a postmortem might present a challenge to a medical examiner, but the debonair way in which MEs could tick off body organs and their condition made him blink. The Fulham doctor, a woman, named them almost fondly, as she might have done the dolls lined up on her bed when she was little.

He hadn't been present at this postmortem where Chilten had done the honors. Fortunately, Sergeant Wiggins hadn't been, either. As far as Jury could remember, Wiggins had attended a postmortem once and once only. Had it been that fateful event that started the sergeant on his supposed long decline into quirky health?

The room was cold and coldly fitted out: white enamel paint, stainless steel, glare of lights. The attendant had, following Chilten's earlier call, removed the body to one of the stainless-steel tables, draped in a sheet. He pulled it back at Chilten's nod.

A dead face does not look like a living one. That might be an obvious statement, but most people ignored it. A dead face is one from which all attachment has flown.

Jury looked, nodded, said yes, that was the woman, and the attendant started to cover her face. Jury stayed his hand, pulled the sheet back. For a lengthy period that had Chilten shuffling his feet, Jury looked down at her: the long neck, blond hair escaping the clip that held it, the now strangely complexioned face, the very emptiness of which could of course be playing tricks. But he didn't think so. Perhaps it was the nose.

Jury shook his head. "It's not her."

As he drew the covering back over her face, the attendant clearly didn't care one way or another if it was "her."

But Chilten rocked back on his heels. "What? Your description-blond, beautiful, height, weight, Fulham Palace, sable coat. Jesus. How can it not be her?"

Jury looked at Chilten. "I don't know."

What bothered Jury almost more than the dead woman's not being the one they thought she must be was the relief he felt that the woman on the morgue slab was not, indeed, her.

5.

The only dark parlor Jury had seen that could compete with Mona Dresser's was Melrose's aunt's. Mona Dresser's house, though much larger than Lady Ardry's, gave the impression of coc.o.o.nlike dimensions, the result of little light and a lot of stuffing-in furniture, cushions, birds, and the odd beast that had seen the ministrations of a taxidermist. (Somebody loved to hunt, thought Jury.) Even had the long velvet curtains puddling the floor been all the way open, the large room would still have been ill-lit, for the house was poorly situated to catch the sun. Several lamps of ruby gla.s.s and stained gla.s.s burned low, and the fire in the grate had simmered down to ashy coals. There were two oil portraits on opposite walls, one of Mona Dresser herself (looking remarkably as she did now) and one of an imposing-looking man in a long black cloak. There was a hush to everything that reminded him of the quiet around Fulham Palace but made him think even more of the quiet that pervades a theater just before the curtain rises. Yes, it was all quite theatrical. Yet he didn't a.s.sume this was an effect striven for by Mona Dresser herself.

She could not make out his ident.i.ty card (she had told him when she met him at the front door) because she hadn't her spectacles. "So if you're the Fulham Flasher, I expect I'm at your mercy. Come in, come in." The sweeping gesture with the arm and the impatience of the tone suggested Jury had been stubbornly refusing to move from the doorstep all day.

She was a woman in her late seventies with frizzed and flyaway gray hair and small dark eyes, and if she was not exactly fat she was very well padded. Like the house, she herself bore a resemblance to Lady Ardry; Jury hoped it ended with these physical details. This day she wore an amplitude of flower-sprigged black lawn, setting off a long pearl necklace and a dangling pince-nez that she could very well have used to see his card (preferring instead to make the quip), a black lace scarf, and trainers. It was a combination Jury found irresistible.

As she made another sweeping gesture, this time pushing a big ginger cat off a horsehair chair, Jury surprised himself by saying, as he sat down, "My mother loved your movies."

She had picked up a ball of blue yarn (at which the cat looked greedily) and was winding it when Jury said this. Her smile was one of purest delight. "Well, thank you!"

"She really did. I was a little kid, only three or four, but I can remember how she'd put on her black straw pillbox, poke a hat pin into it, and say, 'Well, Richie, I'm off to see Mona,' and then set off for a cinema in the Fulham Road. Or maybe down to Leicester Square. She thought you were wonderful, talked about you as if you were family."

Mona Dresser blinked several times, made a covert swipe at her nose with a lace handkerchief taken from her sleeve, and cleared her throat. "It's very nice of you to tell me that. Back then, yes, that was my heyday. The war and all." Her eyes looked off towards the portrait of the black-cloaked figure. "My late husband was killed in the war. Dear old Clive." The handkerchief made its surrept.i.tious appearance again. Then she said, brusquely, "Well, here we're both being nostalgic, and I know you've come about that Fulham Palace business. I expect you want to talk to Linda. And then there's the coat." She sighed.

"Yes to all three of those, Ms. Dresser." Jury smiled.

"Mona. After all, your mother thought of me as family."

The smile she flashed at him told Jury right then and there why his mum and most of England had been besotted with Mona Dresser. She might be old and almost homely, but a lot of younger actors would have killed for such a smile. It tugged at you and reeled you in.

"I can't tell you any more than I did that Fulham policeman-what was his name?"

"Detective Inspector Chilten."

"What a bossy man. He acted as if he were the real owner of that coat to the point I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd come in wearing it. I can't tell you any more."

"No, but tell me again. Something, some detail, might have gone missing; things almost always do."

"I gave it to my stepdaughter, Olivia. How it got from Olivia onto the back of a stranger, I'm sorry, but I've no idea. Have you talked to them, the Fabricants? They live not very far from here in Chelsea. But Olivia's not one of them." Mona had picked up a sheet of pleated paper, her homemade fan, Jury supposed, as he watched her fluttering it. "She's my husband's daughter by his first wife. Clive's daughter." She sighed, saying his name. "I wonder if your mother ever saw us together."

"You mean your husband was an actor?"

She laughed. "Oh, my G.o.d, I'm glad Clive didn't hear you say that! Definitely an actor. Quite brilliant, far better than I ever was. We did several plays together. It's how I met him, you see. We did quite a bit of Restoration comedy together. She Stoops to Conquer was our favorite. We were wonderful; we were Squire Hardcastle and Mrs. Hardcastle. We toured: Paris, Vienna. We even went to Russia, to Stalingrad. No, it was Volgograd by then. Krushchev renaming things, you know." She picked up the ball of yarn that the ginger cat had been mauling. "Really, Horace."

Horace gave her one of those slow-blinking looks that cats do when they want you to feel the full thrust of their indifference. The cat then leapt up on the couch to have a wash.

"But going back to the coat. I should think," Mona went on, continuing to advise Jury, "you'd be checking into other things. What about her other clothes? Ostensibly, she was wearing something under the coat? Or was she naked? There would be labels, perhaps laundry marks, things like that. It was easy enough to trace the coat, apparently. It had my initials in it: M.D. I was cast in several thrillers-you know, police, detectives, hugger-mugger, and all that."

Horace made a grab for the yarn and she swatted his head with it. He slid from the couch and made a dignified exit to the rear.

Mona sighed heavily, put her hand on her slanted bosom, said, "Or do you expect the answer to come up and bite you on the nose? I mean, with all of the equipment you people have, all of this sophisticated forensics machinery and all of your experts, it's hard to believe you can't even come up with the poor woman's name. Fibers, DNA, fingerprints . . . " Mona shook her head, as if police incompetence were entirely too much for her.

Jury was about to make a reply when there came a thunderous crash from the dark innards of the house. A crash, remnants of sound, a silence.

Mona hove herself partway off the sofa, then sat back down, heavily. "Oh, why bother investigating? It happens all the time." Jury rose as if to investigate himself, and she added, "But I expect, you being a detective, it's in your blood. Well, go on, go on." She flipped her hand at him a few times. "In there's the dining room, and the kitchen's just beyond." She called to Jury's retreating back as he went through the door, "Why don't you put the kettle on, while you're out there?"

What had caused the racket in the dining room was clear: a wooden screen, quite elaborately carved and painted in a complicated oriental fashion, had fallen over. There was also a mahogany table overturned. The table, however, had not fallen by accident but had been placed so, for behind its top were lined up every doll and figurine imaginable, from big to Lilliputian. The tiny ones might have been kidnapped from one of those little Christmas dioramas: carolers, tiny skaters on a mirror pond, kids on sleds. The table was apparently serving as a protective screen for this a.s.sortment of possible refugees; whoever had done this might have attempted to move the screen so that it served a similar purpose. War, no doubt. A Lego set was messed about on the floor and a bridge partly constructed between the table and the bottom rung of a chair over which (he imagined) the refugees would flood. Jury returned the screen to its vertical position but left the table until he received further orders from the front.

The kitchen, by contrast, was neat as a pin. It was large and light, the house's western side being in a better position to catch the afternoon sunlight. There was a big garden out there, too. A bit wild, but Jury liked such gardens. He picked up an electric kettle, filled it, returned it to its base, and flicked it on. Then he went back to the living room, where Mona Dresser had found her cigarettes and lit one. At times, Jury thought the whole world smoked. He told Mona what his investigation of the dining room had turned up.

She sighed and said, "It's Linda. I'm too old to chase around after her. She's always getting up to things."

"But where is she?"

"Who knows? She'll appear when it suits her."

"Inspector Chilten says she's your niece."

"Does he really? She's my great-grandniece, actually. Her mother died very young and-oh, it's too long a story, and hardly interesting to you. She'll be in here in a minute, acting as if nothing had happened. Just wait, now."

He was to take this literally, apparently, and sat back, as Mona did, and with no other sound but the quiet ticking of a longcase clock somewhere, they waited.

Within two or three minutes, the little girl came strolling in, preceded by the cat, Horace, both of them looking as if they'd never mauled yarn or furniture in their lives.

Jury imagined it wasn't easy to call up that expression of total witless astonishment on the face of Linda Pink, but call it up he had. She had prepared a persona for her Aunt Mona, but it didn't necessarily encompa.s.s this new person.

Her expression changed completely in just the time it took her aunt to turn and say to her, "Linda, what have you been doing?"

"Nothing."

Jury wanted to laugh. The answer, the one shared by all the world's children: nothing, nada, no, non, nein-a multicultural denial.

"Nothing? With that infernal racket we've been hearing? Here I've had to send this gentleman-who is a detective, Linda, and I hope the significance of that is not lost on you-here's a policeman come from Scotland Yard, gone into the back of the house to investigate, so you'd better look smart or you'll land up in the nick." Mona gave the girl's ear a little tug.

Leaning over the arm of the sofa, Linda said, "I told that other policeman she was lying in the lad's-love. That's where she was, not the lavender." She began the minor gymnastics that children do to take your attention away from substance so you'll concentrate on style. A sort of sleight of hand, it was. Linda crossed her arms above her head and started turning.

Jury watched her for a moment. Then he said, "Humph."

She stopped in a flurry of turns; she frowned. The high drama of her lad's-love discovery surely rated more than a humph. "Well, I saw her first. Before they did." Doubtfully, she considered Jury's unchanging expression. Now she had moved to the arm of his chair. "I guess you can't tell the difference between lad's-love and lavender. Either."

"Sure I can. Lad's-love's good for nervous disorders." For once, he was grateful for Wiggins's encyclopedic knowledge of herbs. "Lavender's for headaches or muscle pain. Right?"

Linda considered. "Sometimes."

Jury ignored that qualifier. "But this time of year they both look like bunches of brown stalks and twigs. Even side by side you can hardly tell."

"I can. I go to that herb garden all the time." She moved closer. "Do you know what bee boles are, then?"

He should have asked when he had the chance. "Still, it was dark, wasn't it?"

Mona was yanking her ball of yarn from the clutches of Horace. She said, "It's no good, Mr. Jury. She does know that garden like the palm of her hand. She's always over there at the palace, though I tell her not to after dark. Now, I thought Harry was to take you to that film. The Dalmatian one."

"He went home."

"But he was to stay to supper, too."

"He got irritable."

Jury mentally rehea.r.s.ed a few scenarios that accounted for Harry's irritability and wished Mona Dresser hadn't changed the subject.