To my awesome grandson, Scott Holland
(who could pass this test with
one hand on the wheel).
Also by Martha Grimes
Richard Jury series
The Man with a Load of Mischief
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
The Anodyne Necklace
The Dirty Duck
Jerusalem Inn
Help the Poor Struggler
The Deer Leap
I Am the Only Running Footman
The Five Bells and Bladebone
The Old Silent
The Old Contemptibles
The Horse You Came in On
Rainbow’s End
The Case Has Altered
The Stargazey
The Lamorna Wink
The Blue Last
The Grave Maurice
The Winds of Change
The Old Wine Shades
Dust
The Black Cat
Vertigo 42
Andi Oliver series
Biting the Moon
Dakota
Emma Graham series
Hotel Paradise
Cold Flat Junction
Belle Ruin
Fadeaway Girl
Other novels, short stories, and poetry
Send Bygraves
The End of the Pier
The Train Now Departing
Foul Matter
The Way of All Fish
Memoir
Double Double
MARTHA
GRIMES
THE
KNOWLEDGE
A RICHARD JURY MYSTERY
Copyright © 2018 by Martha Grimes
Cover design by Daniel Rembert
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Text design by Norman E. Tuttle at Alpha Design & Composition
This book is set in 12 pt. Arno Pro by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: April 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2801-0
eISBN 978-0-8021-4625-0
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Also by Martha Grimes
Title Page
Copyright
Black Cabs
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Spooky Action
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Razorbite
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Heart of Dimness
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
The Blue Deer See
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Oceana
Chapter Fifty-Three
Back Cover
BLACK CABS
London
Nov. 1, Friday night
1
He was a dead man and he knew it.
As soon as he ceased to be of any use to this bastard, the guy would shoot him.
So Robbie Parsons had to keep on being of use.
He was glad he’d earned his green badge; he was grateful for all of those months of routing and rerouting himself around London that had qualified him to drive a black cab.
Robbie had maps in his mind. He would entertain himself, while cruising around looking for a fare, by setting destinations involving landmarks he would have to either pass or not pass in the course of getting to a certain location. Maps in his mind, so no matter where this black guy told him to go (and he’d told him nothing thus far), Robbie knew how to take the longest way round without raising suspicions. The guy behind him wasn’t a Londoner, but then most Londoners knew sod all about London, anyway. He was a South African, or Nigerian, or Kenyan—from Africa, not from one of the islands.
Robbie knew this because he’d been driving every sort of person around for thirty-five years. Still, he wasn’t clever enough to sift through all of the countries in Africa to pin down which one this guy came from. Ordinarily, bits of small talk in the back would float up—a passenger mentioning Cape Town or Nairobi or Victoria Falls, something like that—but his passenger tonight was not interested in small talk. The silence loomed. Robbie had never known silence so heavy.
But then he’d never known silence with a gun in it.
It had been less than an hour ago that he’d been driving down Ebury Street, poking around in Belgravia and turning into Beeston Place where sat the Goring Hotel. He’d seen the doorman looking for a taxi, and past the doorman, the couple he was apparently getting one for, while trying to shield them with a huge umbrella. Not easy in this rain.
They were a very handsome pair. Robbie pulled up in front of the Goring and the doorman yanked open the door and ushered in the woman, who was truly beautiful, hair as pale as moonlight, face like a pearl enhanced by her whitish-pink dress. The man was tall and dark and wore a dinner jacket beneath a black cashmere coat. He shoved himself into the cab, shaking the lapels of his coat to get the rain off, b
ut careful not to get it on the woman.
Robbie slid the glass panel open, said over his shoulder, “Your destination, sir?”
“It’s a club in the City. I was told it’s on a hard-to-find street.”
Isn’t it all to the uninitiated?
“The name of the club, sir?”
“The Artemis. A casino?”
“Very exclusive club, sir, one of the best in London. You’re lucky to be getting into it. The waiting list is a year long.”
She said, “Why would anyone wait a whole year to get into a casino?” and then laughed.
“I see your point, madam.”
The man said, “They have all kinds of rules. You have to arrive at an appointed time and you really have to dress for it. Rather strange just to do a spot of gambling.”
Robbie melted into the traffic heading toward Knightsbridge. “I think the Artemis considers itself as more than a casino. I’ve heard about those rules. They don’t want too many people there at any one time and don’t want a lot of cars crowding the driveway.”
“I hope there’s no secret handshake involved,” she said, “because we don’t know it.”
Robbie laughed as he lifted his hand to the panel, thinking it would’ve been easier for Eurydice to find her way back from the Underworld if she’d just flagged down a black cab instead of waiting around for Orpheus. Strange to think of this couple in those terms. Orpheus, right down into the Underworld to bring her back. Robbie just had the feeling this man would do it, for her.
The man tapped on the panel and Robbie opened it again.
“You can find this place with just the name?”
“I can, sir, yes.”
“You don’t have a GPS, though.”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “No, sir. We don’t need those.”
“That’s astonishing. Cab drivers in Manhattan—you’ve got to be able to tell them the nearest cross street to your destination. Once I asked the driver to take me to the Waldorf and he’d said, in that grumpy way New York drivers talk, ‘Whatsa cross street?’ Can you beat that?”
The woman said, “I’ve always been amazed at how you drivers know this city.”
Robbie was amazed at her amazement. Her accent said she was a Brit, but his was American, definitely. What kind of service were Americans used to? New York. How could you drive around a city and know it so little? What fun was that, to be a stranger in your own hometown?
Now, having driven away from the Artemis Club, the black cab was in Old Broad Street in the City. The bloke in the back with a gun in his hand.
Robbie tried to be cool. It wasn’t easy. “If you could tell me your destination—?”
“When I need to tell you, I will. Drive.”
All right, then. He’d drive to some congested area in the West End—Charing Cross or Piccadilly—hoping that might give him an opportunity.
The quickest route would be to go around Bank and head down Walbrook to Upper Thames Street. Then to the Embankment. A route he had no intention of taking. This guy wouldn’t know the difference. Wherever Robbie was going, he wasn’t going in a hurry.
At this hour on a Friday night the closest most congested area would be Piccadilly—from Green Park past the Ritz to Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue with its theaters—so he decided to head in that direction. But first he snaked around and came out on the A40, which he drove along to Holborn Viaduct. In another few minutes he made a right into Snow Hill.
There he slowed down a bit as he looked around for police cars, but all he saw of police presence was a couple of uniforms coming out of the Snow Hill station. All of the police in the City should have been alerted by now. Carefully, he switched his bright lights on and off, on and off, and saw the coppers stop and turn and recede into the distance. The radio was out of commission, of course. The man had seen to that.
“That was a police station back there.”
“Yes, sir, there’s three thousand of them in London. Hard not to come on one.”
The guy moved to one of the jump seats just behind Robbie, stuck the gun through the open panel again and said, “Try.”
Robbie said nothing. He heard the weight shift back to the passenger seat.
“Where are you headed?” the man asked.
“West End.”
“Why?”
“As you haven’t given me an address, I’m just driving. As you said.”
The man merely grunted.
Jesus, thought Robbie.
Twenty minutes before, Robbie had pulled into the half-moon driveway of the Artemis Club and up to the front door, quite free of other vehicles. You’d have thought the Artemis never had customers, from the lack of cars. That was undoubtedly because patrons were told when they could come and also because attendants took the cars and drove them to whatever car park the club paid for.
Robbie had braked and was sliding open the glass panel when he was surprised to see an overweight woman in orange coming up the drive, her car possibly having been commandeered by one of the attendants. She was huffing up to the front door.
“Is this it?” said the beautiful wife.
“Yes, it is. You’d never know, would you?”
“Very sedate,” she said, as her husband got out and went round to open the door for her. He paid Robbie with a little “keep the change” wave, and it was some change—it was a huge tip. The two of them, looking rich and handsome, stood for a moment as the lady in orange was about to go in the door.
“Oh, I’m freez—” the wife started to say.
But it was the moment that froze. Robbie heard an unfamiliar crack and the husband stumbled before he fell straight down, right on his face. A few seconds later, another crack, and the woman fell beside him. At first perfectly still, she then slowly stretched her arm toward her fallen husband. And then, dead still. Those beautiful people; that beautiful woman: her pale skin and Grace Kelly hair, all blending in with the diaphanous dress—Robbie thought, when he’d seen her in the Goring’s driveway, she was so white and lightweight, so insubstantial that she could have been blown away by the wind and the rain, transparent and spectral.
A ghost, that’s what she’d looked like.
Now fallen, a ghost was what she was.
Robbie was completely befuddled; he shoved open his door, started to get out, when a large shadow fell across his path and he was pushed back behind the wheel, as, simultaneously, the intruder’s other hand put the radio out of commission by bringing the gun down on it like a hammer.
The man yanked open the passenger door and piled in.
“Drive,” said a deep voice.
That, mate, thought Robbie, as if the words were a broadax breaking through a frozen lake of fear, could be your first mistake.
From Snow Hill he drove to the Embankment, followed that into West End, took Grosvenor Road, turned into Chelsea Bridge Road and up to Sloane Square. On this side of the square there was a taxi rank.
When he saw a police car pulled up at the corner of the King’s Road he considered speeding up or even broadsiding it or running up on the curb. But then not only would he likely be dead, so would the driver of the other car.
Sloane Street was wide and handsome and undisturbed, not a glutted part of London. From where the police car was stopped, he skirted the square to the side that held the rank.
“This Mayfair?”
“Sloane Square. Chelsea, one side; Belgravia, the other. That’s the King’s Road up there.”
His passenger said nothing.
There were half a dozen taxis lined up at the rank, which surprised him as it was a wet Friday night, one of those times when people fought over cabs.
He drove past the line as slowly as he could without giving rise to suspicion. As he passed the taxis, Robbie switched on the FOR HIRE part of his sign, then switched it off again. He did this twice more as he looked out of the passenger’s window to see if he knew any of the drivers. He recognized Brendan Small, if not an actual friend, a good
acquaintance; he also thought he knew another driver—James somebody, couldn’t think of his last name. But he didn’t think they’d spotted him. He knew he couldn’t go round the square again, so he had to depend on this single try.
He glanced in his side-view mirror and saw that Brendan was out of his cab, standing by the driver’s door and apparently staring in the direction of the King’s Road, which Robbie had just entered. Past Peter Jones, past a bus stop where several people, clearly tired of waiting for the number 22 or number 19, were trying to flag down a cab.
He killed the FOR HIRE sign, but that didn’t seem to deter them. One or two watched the back of his retreating cab with a “How dare you?” look. Taking umbrage, Londoners were so good at that.
Something caught Robbie’s attention in the mirror. There was a light winking two cars behind him. It was a black cab and the FOR HIRE sign was going on and off. Brendan! You old bugger, you, you’re answering my signal. Then he saw that behind Brendan another cab was turning his sign on and off. And behind that, there was yet another cab. No wonder the people at the bus stop were going crazy: it wasn’t just Robbie, but also three other cabs with their signs lit up refusing to stop when people tried flagging them down.
How long would they follow? All he could do was consider his next move—getting from the King’s Road to South Ken, then Mayfair around the Green Park Tube station and the Ritz. When the fellow behind him suddenly said, “All right, all right!”—as if Robbie had been arguing with him all along—Robbie jumped.
“We’ve been long enough driving that nobody could be following—”
Not unless you consider three black cabs nobody.
“Greenwich.”
Greenwich, bloody hell. With its long lonely stretches of cavernous parkland, its scattering of terraced houses and empty playgrounds. “An address, sir?”
“You’ll get that when we get to Greenwich.”
Bugger all.
He wondered if London cabbies were as good as he thought they were, which was the best in Europe. Best in the world, even. Forget America; we’re clearly beyond that. Ask the passenger for a cross street? Don’t make me larf.
Robbie thought about all of the thousands of miles he and the other knowledge boys had to drive around London on their mopeds learning not just every street within a six-mile radius, but all of the theaters, like the ones on Shaftesbury Avenue, and in proper order, no, let’s not forget that; every bloody point of interest, every memorial, every monument—all of it etched on the mind. He could have crosshatched a sheet of paper with streets, monuments, restaurants and sports venues without referring to an outside source.
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 1