Melrose was back in the room, saying, “Macalvie called.” He handed Jury a note. “He asked me why the hell you aren’t in Exeter. Tom’s there.”
“He always wants to know why I’m not in Exeter. He’s probably holding Tom prisoner.”
“But this one is your case too, isn’t it?”
“Only by accident.”
Vernon said, “What is the case, Superintendent? Or should I not ask?”
Given Jury had told him at least that part of it involving Sydney, he didn’t blame him for asking, but said, “Another piece of the puzzle. Forgive me if I can’t tell you the whole of it. It’s an ongoing investigation.” To Melrose he said, “Isn’t it enough that Brownell’s there? Why would he need me?”
Melrose shrugged. “How would I know?”
“That’s my grandfather,” said Sydney. “That case will get solved, never fear.”
Melrose and Jury exchanged a surprised glance. It was the first time they’d heard Sydney mention him, much less compliment him.
“Your grandfather?” said Vernon.
“Thomas Brownell. One of the Metropolitan police’s greatest detectives.” Sydney looked at the window where Mr. Blodgett was leading Aggrieved back to the barn.
“I’ve heard of him. It’s Sir Thomas, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Sydney, still gazing at the window and looking as if she thought titles should be conferred on horses, not humans.
“Then I expect I’d better call him,” said Jury, rising.
“Of course,” said Melrose. “But Ruthven can bring the phone in here.”
“No, no. I’ll call from the living room.”
“Macalvie,” said Jury, as soon as he himself was out of earshot. “What’s going on?”
“If you were here, you’d know.”
“Well, I’m not, so I don’t.”
“Moira Quinn. She worked with an agency when she lived in London. Battersea. She …” Macalvie’s voice trailed off, or, rather, was directed not at the phone but at one of his team with whom he was obviously annoyed. “No, for Lord’s sake. Where in hell’s Gilly Thwaite? Get her in here, will you?”
Then back to Jury. “Moira got jobs through this agency—Malraux Agency, high-class agency that handles basically French workers and only the best housekeepers, maids, cooks, cleaners—back when you could get people through agencies. When housecleaning meant something.”
“It’s never meant anything to me.”
“Back when staff meant something.”
“Ditto. Except for Melrose Plant’s.”
“The good old days—”
“How would you know? You’ve always lived in a rented flat, same as me.”
“Could we get off the class system, Jury?”
“You’re the one who was on it. Go ahead with Moira’s agency work.”
“It’s the same one Manon Vinet was listed with. Not surprising, I suppose, as they both ended up at Summerplace.”
“So what about Flora Flood’s uncle? We’ve seen sod all of him. He seemed strangely absent from a niece who could be in a hell of a lot of trouble.” When Macalvie said nothing, Jury went on: “I expect I should talk to Frank Flood and Lady Summerston.”
“At least.”
“Do you mean there are others I should talk to? Or that’s the least I can do for you?”
“Probably both. I leave that to you. ’Bye.”
“Hold on a minute. About Daisy Brownell: from what I’ve heard, she certainly didn’t sound suicidal.”
Macalvie was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “Let me tell you about Daisy Brownell. I had a friend. ‘Had’ because she’s dead now. Died when she was in her early forties from some kind of aggressive cancer. Lived in Penzance. She had a twenty-year-old daughter who’d been in an automobile accident and was in hospital in a coma. The accident happened when the girl was nineteen and she’d been in a coma for ten months. No hope, obviously, of coming out of it. They lived on St. Mary’s. Her mother, my friend, Annie, went to the hospital in Penzance every day, every day and talked to her and read books to her. For ten damned months. Until she died. Annie died, I mean–the mother. From the cancer. But a couple of weeks before she died, I was telling Daisy Brownell this story. Daisy was appalled by the sadness of it. She asked me, the next day, if she could go and see Annie. Was she too sick to have visitors? I said no, but why? I mean Daisy didn’t know her, after all. Daisy said she just wanted to talk to her about something.
“And here’s the ‘something.’ Daisy thought Annie would have the terrible burden not only of her own death, but of her daughter’s abandonment because Annie wouldn’t be able to go to the hospital ever again. Her girl would be left alone. So Daisy said not to worry, she’d go in Annie’s place. Annie told me before she died she couldn’t believe that a perfect stranger would do this for a person. That doctors told her her daughter, after all, was unreachable and that, of course, it made no difference whether she, Annie, was in the hospital room with her or not. Daisy told her not to believe that, that her daughter was alive and therefore reachable and if she could be reached, Daisy would try to do it.
“So, every day, every day, Jury, for the next three months, Daisy Brownell got on a Skybus or the ferry and went to Penzance and talked to and read to Annie’s girl. To me, that’s mind-boggling. Did this until, finally, the poor girl died. Now, does that sound like a woman who’d kill herself?”
“No, I guess not.”
“When Daisy died, I didn’t go into headquarters for three days. Just couldn’t do it.”
That was certainly testament to something.
“If Daisy Brownell has your back, you don’t need anything else. She’d do anything for you.”
Jury noticed he was using the present tense.
And then Macalvie rang off.
22
The room, like the rest of the house, was narrow and uncluttered, its furniture strategically placed. Chairs sat on either side of the electric fireplace, each with its own little table holding, now, a drink for each guest and a coffee table sat between them. On it sat a stack of magazines and on the magazines a box of chocolates. Jury leaned toward it. Rive Gauche.
“I expect I must seem rather indifferent to Flora, I mean, not being there for her.”
But Frank Flood gave no reason as to why he hadn’t been there.
“No. At least, it’s not my job to gauge indifference. But I am curious as to where she manages to get the money to retain such a legal team as she has. There’s no better firm than Treadwell’s in all of London.”
“Oh, that’d be Eleanor paying for that. Flora was like a daughter to them. I expect that’s why I’ve not, you know, always been there myself.”
“Police were baffled about motive until they learned that Flora’s accident happened when her husband was driving. The car crashed into an embankment.”
“It was no accident.”
“That’s what DCI Brierly told me. But why would her husband have tried to kill her? And in such a way that he could have been killed or at least seriously injured himself?”
“Something she knew about him or at least whoever he was working for.”
“You think Flora knew something? From what I understand about Tony Servino, I think it very hard to know anything he couldn’t take care of without resorting to engineering a car accident.”
“What if it wasn’t all that clear? I mean, what if it was something she didn’t know she knew, wasn’t aware she knew, but which could come out later?”
Jury laughed slightly. “Mr. Flood, you’re getting further and further from the obvious explanation: a genuine accident. You really want this to be about Servino.”
“But it is, isn’t it?”
“Not really. It’s about motive: Did Flora really have a motive to shoot him? She was the one with the gun, remember. Not he. And the gun was one of yours.”
“There was motive, all right. He was very abusive.”
“That would have to
be an awful lot of abuse to warrant someone using a gun. Anyway, he didn’t need to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“It seems to me that Servino depended on his wits. How many times did you actually see him mistreating Flora?”
Frank Flood thought for an unproductive minute. “The thing is, you know what addicts, what alcoholics are like.” Frank turned his glass around in his hands.
Since he was now into his third whisky, Jury wondered if this was projection at work. “Actually, I don’t. It’s too complex.”
“Generally speaking.”
“That’s what I mean: there is no ‘general’ when it comes to addiction, although AA has to work with that concept or nobody would join.”
“Why do you defend him?”
“Because I want to know why you accuse him.”
“I’m not the only one,” said Frank. “There’s Eleanor Summerston for another.”
Jury wanted to laugh. There’s half London for the other. “But there’s also Gerald Summerston, from what I’ve heard. He liked Tony Servino.”
“Oh, Gerald.” Flood shrugged the man away.
“Why so dismissive?”
“Gerald Summerston liked people who broke things.”
“A good metaphor, if I understood how it applied to Summerston. To hear his wife talk, he was anything but an iconoclast.”
“Did Eleanor really know him?”
The question was rhetorical, since he was not really asking Jury.
Flood went on. “She certainly seemed not to know how much of an eye he had for other women.” He glanced at Jury.
“Was it common knowledge, then?”
“No, not at all. But I think sex was an obsession with him.” Frank looked at the box. “As chocolate is for me.”
Jury raised the box a little, set it down.
“Ah, yes. Manon’s. Only for Gerald, it wasn’t the chocolates; it was the chocolatier.”
Jury was surprised. “You’re talking about the woman found on Bryher?”
“Yes, of course. She had a shop in Paris, that shop.” He nodded toward the box. “I’ve been wondering why she came back here, now.”
“Did you know her at all, Mr. Flood?”
Frank shook his head. “Only by way of what Gerald told me, and that not much. Except it was evident he was obsessed with her.”
“Enough to leave his wife?”
“Oh, yes. But I don’t think he would have. He wouldn’t have thought he’d have to.”
Jury raised his eyebrows in question.
“Gerald thought he could keep everything going at once.” Here he made a gesture of tossing, each hand going up and down, as if throwing plates in the air. He smiled. “The kind of man who was not about to give up something he didn’t absolutely have to. Not women, not money.”
“But he had both.”
Frank Flood smiled. “As I said.”
On that ambiguous note, Jury left.
23
But had Frank Flood told that to the Devon-Cornwall constabulary?
“No,” Frank had said, “it honestly didn’t occur to me.”
Jury reflected on this possible affair as he drove toward Belgravia and the Summerston house.
What had Manon Vinet been doing in the UK and on Bryher?
It was a variation of this question he asked Lady Summerston after Crick had ushered her into the too-elaborately done drawing room—too much silk and sheer stuff at high windows, too much flounce and flourish on low ottomans and pillows, too much of everything except when it came to Lady Summerston herself, who kept to fine linen and lightweight wool. She was underdone and elegant.
Wearing a spruce-green linen suit, Lady Summerston was handing out cups of tea and talking about her late husband. Had been for the last ten minutes over their first cups, talking about his everlasting consideration for the men under him in Korea, and his heroic action in the saving of them (“You know, of course, about his Conspicuous Gallantry award”); and about his helping two of the servants’ children into Oxbridge, one for each school; and about his establishing a foundling hospital in North London.
That was news to Jury. “Foundling hospital?”
“A little place he bought and funded for infants and small children who had been abandoned or were otherwise alone. Gerald was extraordinarily kind,” she said. “It’s called the Summerston Foundling Hospital. In Bayswater. We read this op-ed piece in the Times several years before he died about these abandoned children Social Services found in a house in North London, alone, their parents seeming to have walked out and left them. It was truly pathetic, the state of these children.” She paused and put her hand to her head as if thinking about these children’s misery, and then went on. “Gerald staffed it with very capable people: two doctors, several nurses, matron and so forth. He went to great lengths. He was really the soul of kindness. It’s still there, still operating; a cousin of his took it over.”
“Bayswater?”
“Yes. It’s on Bayswater Road.”
Jury had taken out his notebook and made a note of this, and then said, “I was wondering, Lady Summerston, about your husband’s relationship with Flora’s husband—the man shot at Watermeadows.”
She looked perplexed, or tried to, Jury thought.
He said, “Frank Flood hinted that you didn’t like Servino, but that your husband did.”
She waved her hand over the tea service, as if waving away Frank Flood. “I have no idea what he’s talking about, except that of course Flora and her husband had dinner here a few times.”
Jury smiled slightly. “Well, I expect that’s something of what Frank Flood is talking about.” In addition to the elaborate tea service, on the table sat a box of chocolates, the same brand of chocolates he’d seen at Flood’s. He commented on this. “Both you and Mr. Flood like the same chocolates.”
“Oh, those. Actually, it was one of my late husband’s few indulgences. He loved these chocolates; he found them in Paris and started a sort of running account. They come every so often. I still get them and give some to Frank.” She poured the tea.
“From Paris? That reminds me: when your husband was ill, you used this Malraux Agency that handles, almost exclusively, French servants or at least applicants who are very experienced, have served for long periods of time in one or more posts and come highly recommended. Of course, given the agency’s fees, I expect that anyone they send out is both experienced and highly recommended.”
“You seem to have researched the Malraux Agency rather thoroughly.” Her smile was a bit sour.
Jury matched it. “As I should.”
“She was just a nurse, Mr. Jury.”
“She was just murdered, Lady Summerston.”
Eleanor Summerston’s response missed being a brief laugh. “Yes. I’m sorry. So I expect you’d want to know as much as possible about her.”
“I would. One thing I wonder about is why you chose an employment firm that handles French staff almost exclusively.”
“It’s because of my late husband’s experience in hospital. He’d been wounded in the war and was for some reason deployed to a hospital in Paris. He had several different nurses dancing attendance on him, I imagine.”
Her eyes and voice sparkled as she imagined. “Gerald was very attractive to women. As a matter of fact I had to get rid of two different maids because they were showing entirely too much interest in him.”
“And did he encourage the interest?”
Jury expected a flat No! so was surprised when she said, “Well, I will admit that Gerald loved women. I don’t think he could help himself but to flirt a little. Like any man. After all.”
Not “any man,” thought Jury. A lot of men could avoid a flirtation with a housemaid. After all.
“To answer your question about the agency, the nurse Gerald particularly liked at the hospital in Paris was from the south of France. Aix-en-Provence? Gerald said she was especially good.”
“In what way?�
�
“Attentive without being cloying; smart without being showy; elegant even in her nurse’s uniform. Gerald especially like elegance in a woman.” Lady Summerston sat up even straighter. “He asked her if her training had included some of these attributes—you know, the kind of attention, not plumping pillows every time she was in the room, for instance. She told him yes, it had. So when it came to hiring a nurse, he asked me to interview ones from this agency.”
Jury thought this account so elaborate and contrived it was probably a lie. Why that vast detail to justify using a certain agency?
But he shifted the subject back to Servino.
“Did Gerald have any business dealings with Servino?”
“You keep wanting to tie my husband to Flora’s husband. Why?”
“They’re already tied, Lady Summerston, given the way that Servino visited him.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Yes, she did. He could tell in the way she quickly picked up her cup and just as quickly drank. Lady Summerston was not ordinarily a person who made hasty movements.
“My husband led an exemplary life. And he was the very soul of kindness,” she said again.
Soul of kindness he might have been. But exemplary lives did not require a defense, as in that statement she had just made.
What had gone down in Paris? Jury wondered.
“This nurse in the Paris hospital. Did your husband come to know her?”
“What do you mean?”
Given the way her eyes shifted to the silver pot, which she only just then seemed to contemplate raising again, Jury guessed that she knew very well what he meant.
“Only that she seemed to have impressed him enough that he might have seen her again, outside of the hospital.”
“I hardly think so, or I expect Gerald would have mentioned it.” Pot forgotten, replaced.
Jury tried it on again. “What I was really thinking is that she herself might have tried to see him. You said they were all probably dancing attendance on your husband. He didn’t even need to try—”
That was a little better. “Of course, that’s possible. But again, he would have mentioned it.”
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