Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 32

Jury was totally surprised. "Sophie? Where did you hear about her?"

Linda told him what Melrose had said. "I'm not as dumb as Sophie, though. So I'll get away."

This was the issue, then. That she'd be stolen away, kidnapped like unhappy Sophie.

Jury knelt down in front of her, grabbed her hands down from the air. "Linda, n.o.body-understand, n.o.body-is going to get you. We won't let them. I won't. And remember: You might have been the only person at first who knew the woman was moved, but all the police know it now. So somebody would have to steal all of us away and that would be a job, wouldn't it? The whole Fulham police force and part of Scotland Yard, and one person trying to manage all of them. Can you picture it?"

First Linda looked serious, then her mouth twitched, then she started to laugh. Jury let go of her hands, and she clapped both of them across her mouth.

Jury got up, and her eyes followed him. Then he remembered what she had said and asked, "Why was Sophie dumb?"

"She acted really stupid." Linda went back and picked up the locket again. "If it was me and there was an organ grinder and a trick dog and cat right outside I wouldn't pick out potatoes. I'd be out there. Even you would, I bet."

Jury smiled. He had for some reason been permitted to join the legion of children.

"What'd she look like?"

"Who?"

"Sophie." She held up the locket. "Are you sure this isn't her?"

"I'm sure. It's much too old. Much. Those pictures go back to Queen Victoria." Jury blew on his hands. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees. He turned his collar up. "I think we'd better be getting back. It's cold and getting dark."

Linda looked down at the locket again. "Maybe it was Queen Victoria's children." Doubtfully, she looked at him. But he did not need to confirm or deny it. It was a shot, her expression said, fallen wide. She ran off down the path, turned, and called back to him. "Well, it was somebody's children!"

Her voice rang out frostily, and Jury was aware both of her anxiety and his own and a coming rain.

After getting Linda back to Bishops Park Road, Jury caught a bus along Fulham Palace Road. He felt (absurdly) as if the increase in Linda's cheerfulness had been proportionate to a decrease in his own.

He could not explain this; he knew only that the gathering dusk had gathered him into it, and he felt, as he watched the shoppers and the people going home from work, a steady erosion of spirit.

He sat on the top deck, looking down, and when a double-decker came from the other direction, he could look straight across where a man sat alone, in a coat much like his own and with a weary expression he imagined was also much like his own. It gave him the eerie feeling of seeing himself as he had been riding almost two weeks ago on that other bus.

Before any of this had happened. And he almost expected, after the bus had pulled out from another stop, that the feet and the voices moving clumsily up the half-circle of stair would turn out to belong to the American and her friend. He would have welcomed the loud, brash American right now; she might have prevented him from thinking.

He thought about Linda, and about Sophie. As the bus stopped and started and pa.s.sengers clambered up and down the stairs, Jury thought about travel. Zurich, Brussels, Paris, St. Petersburg. Petersburg. Peter. He got off the bus two stops before the Stargazey. He wanted to walk, needed, now that the train of thought had been started, to end it, conclude it.

Walking along, he realized that today, in America, it was Thanksgiving.

When he sat down at the bar, not as crowded as before, everyone home, he supposed, having dinner, he took comfort in the rows of bottles, in their gleam and shine. It simply made him feel that care was being taken.

Kitty came down the bar, running her cloth along the inner edge as she did. She missed no chance to beautify. The bar shimmered in the reflection of the overhead lights. "Hel-lo! Back again, are you?"

Jury nodded, asked for a whisky. "It's getting cold as h.e.l.l, Kitty."

"It's been pretty warm for November, so I guess we've been lucky so far." As she took down the whisky and set up a gla.s.s for him, she rubbed at the bottle.

Jury smiled. "Pour me a double."

She did. "One of those days, is it?"

He sat there quietly, not making conversation, and she seemed to tune in to this mood. She started picking bottles from the shelves, giving them a careful rubdown. There were only a half dozen others at the bar and they were well along in their drinks, nursing them. Jury looked up at the pillar-he was sitting in the same place-at the postcards there. He thought about the one he'd sent to Plant. Forgot to ask him about the recipe. He downed his drink. Still, he didn't leave. But he didn't want another drink. He sat that way for a moment, watching Kitty give that extra bit of polish to the Sapphire gin bottle.

"Kitty."

She turned, smiling. "Want another?"

He shook his head. "Do you have children?"

"Me? Why, yes." She looked around as if searching for their pictures. "Two, I have. Boy and a girl."

"What do they look like?"

It surprised her that anyone would ask, much less a Scotland Yard superintendent.

Alfie and Annie, her children, got described in almost interminable detail.

Jury put more than enough money on the bar and said, "That's what I thought."

Her look, as he walked to the door, was puzzled.

43.

The following morning found Jury sitting in his office, thinking about what Kitty had said and watching the clock, as if surcease of trouble would come from pushing back the hour he was to appear in Redcliffe Gardens. Depressed by this line of thought, Jury fell to deciphering a message that Wiggins had taken down, a message from Carole-anne.

It was actually a message Melrose Plant had left at Jury's digs, where Carole-anne often answered the telephone. Carole-anne would never be mistaken for Mercury, and Jury would sooner read a message washed up in a bottle on a beach.

LOOK UP FUTONS IN FODOR. OR MAYBE HARVEY NICHOLS.

Jury stared at the wall. Harvey Nichols? Did they sell futons?

Then the phone had rung and dragged him back through the looking-gla.s.s.

It turned out to be Ron Chilten. He wasn't looking for Chilten to further rend the fragile fabric of his beliefs.

"Argentina," said Chilten, and waited.

Although something would clearly lead away from "Argentina," nothing had led up to it, and Jury really was not up to a Chilten cliffhanger this morning. He shut his eyes tightly, cursed under his breath, said, "I've heard of the place, yes."

"How about the Muerte del Sol? Familiar to you?"

The next time he saw Chilten he just might make muerte more familiar to him. "I'll tell you something, Ron; we could probably save time if you'd just tell me, straight out; see if I can take it."

"Muerte del Sol, if you recall, is-or was-that guerrilla bunch that split off from the military, say, four years ago, and a year later, when it tried for a coup, went down because its leader, name of"-Chilten rattled through papers-"Juan Ascension, got murdered. a.s.sa.s.sinated, it went round. By somebody with a sniper's rifle and a steady hand."

Jury waited. "This lesson in South American politics is interesting but, unfortunately, lost on me. What the h.e.l.l's it got to do with-"

"Patience, patience, I'm just filling you in."

"That's swell, but filling me in on what, exactly?" Jury watched the slow rhythm of Wiggins's measuring out some kind of orange glop from a squat bottle. He'd sooner drink that than listen to Chilten.

"What we were talking about, Ricardo. You've forgotten already? Pa.s.sports, other pa.s.sports."

Jury sat back, interested in the context. "Nancy Pastis went to Argentina, you mean?"

"Or, say, Justine Cordova? Another dead baby, Jury. Who applies for a pa.s.sport six years ago. Just as I hit the Argentina police, surprise, surprise, I discover they're coming at her from another end, been trying to get a lead on her for years."

Jury swallowed as if he were indeed swallowing orange glop. "Nancy Pastis, you're saying? This Cordova woman is also-was also Nancy Pastis."

"Um. Yes and no."

Jury could almost hear Chilten smiling. "Then how, Ron?"

Unfortunately, this only begat another stop on the Chilten questionnaire. "Remember reading about the killing of that British executive, worked, I think, for IBM? Couple of years ago in Moscow?"

"No."

"Another dead kid, apparently, was in Russia-just like Nancy Pastis-this one named Amanda Walker, Irish la.s.s. Irish dead la.s.s, I mean."

Chilten paused and Jury prompted him. "Go on."

"Now we're up to dead child number three: Eve Fellowes. Eve was in France when a Frenchman named Jules Pointier was killed, another sniper's bullet."

"Wait a minute, Ron. Even if Nancy Pastis was traveling in those countries, the other three you've named would be using the pa.s.sports named, not the Nancy Pastis pa.s.sport."

"Jury." Chilten paused. "The point is all these targets were murdered by dead kids. I mean, don't you think that's kind of strange?"

Jury said nothing, sat there staring at nothing.

So Chilten said it again. "They were all a.s.sa.s.sinated by dead people. And who's to say that this woman with at least three fake pa.s.sports-three names-might not have gone in at other times as Nancy Pastis?"

"What about the Papua New Guinea entry?"

"Nothing there. Maybe Nancy was just taking a holiday from murder. h.e.l.l, she earned it."

"If there's a connection."

"It sure as h.e.l.l cranks up the motive, doesn't it? Imagine the heat with half a dozen police forces on your sorry a.r.s.e."

"I missed a beat, there."

"Oh, I thought you were with me. Dana. You know, the one n.o.body's been able to fit a face to. The one they think pulled off the theft of that Chagall in St. Petersburg. The thief, the professional a.s.sa.s.sin. Dana."

44.

Melrose opened that eye that was not crushed into the several goose-down pillows and looked toward the window. He hoped he was looking at day, not dawn. He'd finally got back to Long Piddleton at 2 A.M. and had convinced himself he'd hardly had a wink of sleep until he remembered he'd woken himself up several times during the night, snoring.

With one side of his face pushed against his pillows, only one ear was available to him for hearing what sounded like laughter floating up the staircase. He frowned. He recognized that laughter: Trueblood. True-blood's cackle cutting across Ruthven's rumble. What in G.o.d's name had they to laugh about this early, and why was Trueblood at Ardry End?

He was afraid he was about to find out when he heard ascending footsteps and then a pounding on his door.

"Melrose!" Trueblood yelled.

"Go away."

"Come on, old trout. Things to do!"

"I don't want to do things. Go away."

Far from going away, Trueblood opened the door and walked in. "Thought you'd lapsed into a coma." He pulled a walnut side chair over to the bed, regarded the chair's worn and intricately embroidered seat before he sat down, and said, "Nice piece, this; you should get it recovered. This burled wood looks-"

Melrose did turn over then. "Do I have to have a lecture on burled wood first thing this morning? I'd sooner duel. It's dawn, after all." He turned his back again and closed his eyes.

He heard a match strike. "It's not dawn. Cigarette?"

"No, thank you. I'm not one who has to smoke first thing in the morning."

"It's afternoon. Get garbed."

Hearing it was afternoon, Melrose felt less sleepy. "Where's my tea?"

"One of those who can't move without your cuppa? I'll tell Ruthven."

Ruthven, however, needn't be told. He was already at the door, which was open. He sailed into the room, silver tray before him like a ship's figurehead. From the squat silver pot, a ribbon of steam issued and threaded its way past Melrose's nose. "Ah!" said Melrose, as Ruthven poured.

Bowing slightly to Trueblood, as if they hadn't been hooting down there in the hall for G.o.d knows how long, Ruthven asked, "Sugar, sir?"

"Oh, about fifteen lumps, thanks," said Trueblood.

"Sir," Ruthven answered, beginning to measure it out.

"Just kidding, Ruthven. Two's fine."