Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 22

"Because of the applause. People see it and applaud. Or so I've heard. Hemingway lived there. In Key West."

"Had to live somewhere, I expect." She took the wrapping from the sausages. There was a half loaf, a carton of orange juice, six eggs.

Jury was starving. "G.o.d, I could do with a cuppa."

"Well, I can't make it boil any faster, now, can I?"

"Blow on it."

As if answering a command, the kettle whistled. Carole-anne poured hot water into his chipped teapot, emptied it, then measured in some loose leaves.

"Tea bags are quicker."

She just looked at him. Then she put a bit of b.u.t.ter and oil in the frying pan and turned up the flame.

"It must be ready." He looked longingly at the tea.

"Oh, for heaven's sakes. It ain't even wet hardly. You're in a mood this morning. And if you think I'm about to do this every morning, you're barking up the wrong tree, you."

Stone lifted his head from his bone; he did not like dog metaphors. "And what tree should I be"-Jury regarded Stone-"bellowing up?"

"Where's my ap.r.o.n?" Carole-anne always kept one hanging on a hook in Jury's kitchen.

It made him smile; he found it touching. "Hmm? Can't imagine. In the wash, perhaps?"

"Wash? What would you know about that? I don't think I've once in my life seen you in the launderette. Mrs. W does that for you." She smoothed her hands over her dress. "I don't want to dirty this. It's new."

"It's nice." Did Carole-anne ever look anything but?

"An Armani knockdown."

Jury frowned. If there was one designer he knew, it was Armani. It came from hanging about Marshall Trueblood. "Armani doesn't do yellow, does he?"

"It was probably after he'd been to Key West."

"Ha." Jury opened a cupboard where Mrs. Wa.s.sermann liked to stack dishtowels and found the ap.r.o.n, neatly folded, among them. It was a fussy, flowered thing with flounces and ruffles. He shook it out and put the bib over Carole-anne's head.

"Thanks, Super. Tie it, will you?" She shot out her arms like a child.

The sensation of such close proximity to Carole-anne, so close he could smell her hair, its faint scent of citrus, was far from unpleasant. Too quickly, he stepped back, and overturned the milk jug. Fortunately, it was not full, and Carole-anne swung around, grabbed up some paper towels, and started mopping. "I've got it, not to worry." Wiping the counter, she looked up at him. "You look knackered, Super. You ought to have a bit of a lie-down."

"A bit of a sit-down's what I'll have. Ah. Ta, very much." Carole-anne had poured tea into a mug already replete with milk and two sugars. It was nice having someone around who knew how you took your tea. That had never occurred to him before. He blinked at a sudden dazzlement of sun streaming now though his kitchen window and onto her hair. Real sun, this time, but no brighter.

"You okay?" She frowned slightly, looking up from the sausages she was turning with a fork.

"Huh? Yeah. Right. I'll go sit with Stone."

Stone was neither asleep nor awake, lying with his head on his bone in a sort of suspended dog state. Jury sat down in his favorite chair, which was itself half suspended between offering some support and none, its springs sorely tested over the years.

He drank his tea, looking towards the window but not through it. He felt he had stepped back as one might from one of those thresholds painted by Magritte, where nothing lies beyond the open door but the tall blue sky or bottomless sea-unknown, unending blue.

Sausages spit in grease. Was there any smell more seductive than the smell of sausages? Well, yes, perhaps that smell of citrus that had sent him back into the milk jug.

Stone must have smelled it too, for he woofed as if the sausage smell had penetrated his suspended state and found it wanting. He rose up and shook himself, then went into the kitchen to watch Carole-anne.

Within the shelter of this sun-and-sausage-besotted milieu, Jury closed his eyes and willed himself not to think, which only had the effect of speeding up the thought process, images of the past week cascading through his mind as if a film had been fast-forwarded.

He did not want to think about Kate McBride, about the Fabricants, about lad's-love and lavender, about Linda Pink.

No. He smiled. No, he didn't mind thinking about Linda Pink at all. It was beginning to seem the answer to this whole conundrum rested on his and Linda's shoulders. They were the only defectors from the party line. She had stuck to her story and Jury had stuck to his, though there was a sense of foreboding, something like the apprehension he'd felt on the bus when he'd seen Kate McBride.

He rested his head on the back of the chair, closed his eyes, followed her movements in his mind. He had almost forgotten he was here in his digs and not on a Fulham Road bus, when he felt a hovering over him.

"Super. Were you asleep?" She held out a plate with his breakfast on it. "Here."

He took it. "Wonderful. This looks wonderful. These sausages are a perfect brown. Can I have a napkin? You should be a chef."

She handed him a paper napkin and, with her own plate in hand, sat down on the sofa.

"Why do you have more sausages than I do?" Even so, he handed one down to Stone, who took it with surprising delicacy.

Without looking up from hers, she said, "Because I been out jogging already this morning, as usual. I need a lot of fuel."

Jury nearly spilled his sausages when he laughed. "Carole-anne, if there's one thing you do not need, it's fuel. You're combustible enough. Jogging? Jogging as always? Since when did you ever jog? Since when did you ever exercise at all?"

Carole-anne inspected a sausage for the most succulent bite. "Of course you don't see me; you never do any yourself, so how could you? There's a new gym opened up just last week in Islington High Street. Thinking of joining, me. Wouldn't hurt you to do the same."

"Yes, I can just see me whiling away the odd hour on a treadmill. Thanks, but no thanks."

"Well, it's a hedge against losing your looks. I mean, you might be handsome right now but who knows how you'll look in another five years."

Jury was surprised. "Me? Handsome? Right now? Good lord, I'm flattered."

"Well, don't be. Just do something to keep yourself up."

"I do do something. I spend my off-hours at the Angel."

Jury heard a clattering on the staircase and saw Stone jerk his head up, then his whole self. He walked over to the door and sat looking at it. He even barked once. Stone never barked. Stone barking was almost Stone out of control.

Carole-anne bounced up from the sofa. "It's Stan."

Stone's earlier woofing had probably been the Lab's reaction to Stan coming up from the Angel underground stop. Were both Stone and Carole-anne blessed with second sight he himself had been denied? Probably. He was having enough trouble with first sight. Nor did he especially like the enthusiasm Carole-anne had displayed in nearly dropping her plate and rushing to open the door.

It was indeed Stan Keeler. All five-eleven, molten-eyed, guitar-carrying, talented bit of him. Stan Keeler had enough intensity for ten men, and Jury sometimes wished he'd riff some of it Jury's way.

After roughing up Stone's fur, kissing Carole-anne on the cheek (Jury took note that it was only the cheek, for he had often wondered if Carole-anne and Keeler had a thing going) Stan saluted Jury as if he were the commander of this base. "Yo, RJ. Thanks for looking after Stone here."

Stan always said that, even though he'd never made the request. It was just his inner laser beaming out his comings and goings. He never told C-A or RJ when and where he was going. It seemed to dribble back to the other three flats in the form of postcards and sometimes telegrams. (Jury didn't know of anyone who sent telegrams anymore. He thought it quite poignant of Mr. Guitar to trouble to do it.) Stan was simply a nice guy, unusual for one who was such a cult figure. Jury only wished he weren't quite so d.a.m.ned magical.

"Where were you in Germany?"

"Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin. Clubs, real small places. For some reason I'm popular there."

Jury laughed. "You're popular everywhere. You were a big hit in Prague, my sergeant told me. How long are you in London this time?"

"I got some gigs I promised to play at the Nine-One-Nine. I haven't seen the guys in a month." The guys were the three other musicians in Stan's little group. Sometimes they went with him, sometimes not. "I'm going over there after I drop my stuff. Stone, want to go for a walk?"

The word had Stone banging his tail on Jury's wooden floorboards like a beaver.

"How about you, C-A? Want to go with us? Watch me practice?"

Jury loved the idea of that group's "practicing." As if they needed it.

Both Carole-anne and Stone were up and nearly out the door. Carole-anne turned and said, "See you, Super."

Stan saluted again. "Talk to you later, RJ."

They left and Jury felt a void, despite sunlight, despite sausages.

27.

He tried to fool himself into believing it might jog his memory, taking another Fulham bus. He would have liked to tell himself that what he was doing was looking for clues. But he knew that was a lie. What he wanted was to relive it. It was a journey he wanted to retake, a night he wanted to reinhabit, though for the life of him he couldn't say why. Last Sat.u.r.day night's ride certainly hadn't been a happy one; far from it, for his thoughts had been doleful, morose. He felt he was watching one of those desk calendars you see in films, where time is disposed of by the fluttering over of pages, the days gone by in seconds, a year gone in a minute.

Jury had boarded a number 14 a short distance from the South Kensington underground and the Brompton Road. He had gotten off at the stop in front of the hospital across the road from the Stargazey.

The pub was more crowded, heavier with smoke than before, but then pubs tended to get that way on Sundays, there being little else people could think of to do. Kitty was there this time. He sat on the same stool at the far end of the bar where she was doing the washing up, rinsing sudsy gla.s.ses, and, with a slight frown, studying them for prints that had escaped the soap and water. So intent was she on this, she didn't notice him sitting down.

"You'd make a good fingerprint expert, Kitty. It is Kitty, isn't it?"

"Oh, h.e.l.lo!" She said this with real enthusiasm, as if finally she'd recognized a friendly face in an otherwise hostile crowd.

"Quite a mob today."

She sighed. "Always is on Sundays. People just don't know how to fill up a day when they're not in their offices. Sad, that." Then she blushed as if suddenly aware she'd just numbered Jury among this sad lot. "What'd you like?" She wiped her hands.

"Nothing to drink, thanks. Just some information. And I never introduced myself." He showed Kitty his ID. "I'm Richard Jury."

Her eyes widened. "Scotland Yard, is it?"

"It is." He had not picked up before that Kitty was Irish and wondered how he could have missed that lilt, wondered at this musical turn of speech from a country of unending troubles, as if inflection of speech were born of joy or woe. Jury took the police photos from a brown envelope-one of the murdered woman, the other of the woman he'd followed. But he did not lay them side by side, feeling that would be too suggestive.

"Do you recognize this woman?" He turned the photo of the victim to face her.

Kitty braced her hands on the bar, squinted as if she could better call up some deeply entrenched memory, and said, "Looks like one of our customers, though she was never a regular. Comes in-" Kitty stared at him. "You mean she's dead? What happened?" Again, she looked at the photo. "She always seemed a bit-I dunno-a bit sad, as if she had the weight o' the world on her shoulders." Kitty closed her eyes, as if visualizing the world's weight. "She'd come in sometimes for a drink, other times to use the phone. She wasn't on the telephone, see. And she paid the fella owns the place for her calls. She never talked long. I'll tell you, my sister can talk-"

"When was the last time you saw her, Kitty?"

She frowned in concentration. "A week ago, ten days, maybe. I only work part-time, so you might want to ask someone else."

"I have." He put the second photo on the bar. "What about her?"

Kitty looked from the photo to Jury and back again, puzzled. "But it's the same one, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

Kitty brought the photo closer to her eyes, squinted again. "Well . . . perhaps she is different. The shape of the face, maybe."

"You couldn't say if both of them had come in here."

"Only if they'd come in at the same time, probably. Or if I'd been looking for two different women." Kitty drew the dishtowel from over her shoulder, started wiping gla.s.ses. "I dunno. You sure it's not the same person, one alive, one dead?"

This time he was the only one waiting at the bus stop. He let one bus go by, feeling absurd as he did so. He let it pa.s.s him up because it was one of the newer buses, fare paid as you boarded, single-decker. He was waiting for a double-decker. He waited for a quarter of an hour. Stupid.

Night seemed to come on earlier, more swiftly, with each pa.s.sing day. It had been dead dark by half-five and it was half-six by now. Jury turned up his jacket collar and dug his hands into the pockets. He turned and looked down the street to Redcliffe Gardens. He had called Chilten, and Chilten had told him Kate had been released, or soon would be. Jury wondered if she was at home by now, having a cup of tea with old Mrs. Laidlaw.

When a double-decker finally pulled up, Jury swung onto the platform, nodded to the conductor, and climbed the stairs. This time there were only four other pa.s.sengers, sitting in the rear of the bus. He took the seat in the front that looked out over the street that swam in the reflected lights of shops and cafes, still damp with a late-afternoon rain.

The bus stopped at the corner where the flower vendor kept his big selection, a carpet of bright flowers. As the bus pulled away from the curb, Jury heard steps ascending and women's voices hurried and excited. They settled behind him. Jury wouldn't have been surprised to find it was the American lady and her friend, still talking about Thanksgiving.

When they pulled up across from the Fulham Broadway underground station, he had such an eerie sense of last Sat.u.r.day night's reinventing itself that he looked down to see if a woman in a sable coat was descending from the bus.

He sat back, with an uneasy feeling he had been keeping at bay throughout the day. Why was he so certain he had seen Kate McBride and not the woman who lay dead in the herb garden? When the others, the conductor and the several people who had been seated near the door that night, had said, Yes, that's her, the woman who'd got on and off the bus.

He told himself it was because he had seen Kate McBride over a much longer period of time; he had (and they hadn't) been watching her ever since she'd boarded the bus, until he himself had left it and followed her. He had seen her, off and on, over a period of time the others hadn't. And he was convinced that what had drawn the others' attention, and held it, was the fabulous sable coat and not the woman herself. Not her face. Though they claimed to be making the identification on the basis of her face. But it was really the coat, wasn't it?

Jury believed they were wrong, or, more accurately, he'd believed it then. Now he was wavering. Pondering this, he almost missed the stop at Fulham Palace Road and had to go down the steps quickly and swing off the bus after it had started. The conductor admonished him, leaning from the platform to shout that people got their legs broken that way.

Jury waved back to him and walked up Fulham Palace Road to Bishops Avenue, then on to the grounds of Fulham Palace.

It was almost seven when he got to the palace entrance. It started to rain like a movie rain; veils of it, thunder claps, lightning close by. He hoped he'd make it to the courtyard and Noailles's room before the rain came.

What had he expected Charles Noailles to say, other than what he did say?

"I've no idea what you're talking about, Superintendent."

"You're quite sure," said Jury, who was seated in the same run-down leather chair. "You have no connection-no family connection-with this chteau outside of Aix-en-Provence?"

Noailles was standing against the wall, fingering a compa.s.s. He half laughed. "As I said. No."