“Listen—” He looked at his watch. “Have dinner with us—Rebecca and me.” He started to get up.
Jury rose too. “You mean you walk in with a perfect stranger and it doesn’t bother her?”
David was getting into his coat. “No, we’re like that. We think pretty much alike.” He reached down and shoved the mustard and ketchup together. “Entangled.”
Jury moved the pot and bottle apart again. “Then it makes no difference, right? Isn’t that entanglement?”
David laughed. “I wish you’d come and teach my course sometime.”
Everyone seemed to have left Covent Garden, as if the terror of which David had spoken hung above it, and all beauty fled.
“I’m looking at Uranus. Hard to see it without binoculars and an astronomical chart. But this’ll do.” He reached inside his coat and swung out an instrument anchored to a leather strap over his shoulder.
Jury said, “We’ve got people over here who do that with Uzis.”
“We’ve got people over there, and more of them. It’s a telescope.” He unclipped the brass and leather object and rolled it out. “Now, hold this to your eye and try and aim it toward Uranus. You’ll see a greenish-bluish planet, or should.”
Jury did so. “Wow!” His visit to the Starrdust planetarium showed him far more of the solar system than he was seeing now, but the sky through an instrument he was himself controlling seemed far more wondrous. “I see the greenish glow. What causes that?”
“Methane cloud. The ice giant, they called it. Uranus has many moons and moonlets. The Romantics had no idea, did they? ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.’ Keats didn’t know that behind his bright star hung hundreds just as bright, and behind them hundreds more still.
“All of that remoteness. It’s a vastness I can’t cope with. The rings of Saturn are over a hundred and fifty thousand miles in diameter, and yet no thicker than the Houses of Parliament. The void, the waste, the black blackness. After hours of looking I feel annihilated, obliterated, crushed. It’s a kind of horror, all of that space. At the beginning of class every semester I tell my students, ‘If you’ve come here for solace, go back. If you’ve come for consolation, you won’t get it.’”
“Well, there I disagree.”
“You think there is solace up there for those kids?”
“No. I think there might be down here for your students: you.”
David looked surprised, but thanked him.
As they walked, David said, “Andromeda is around two and a half million light-years away. The bad news is it’s hurtling toward the Milky Way. Which means toward us. It’ll take four billion years for it to reach Earth.”
“And that’s a ‘hurtle’?”
“In galactic terms. The good news is we’ll have time for dinner with Rebecca. Come on, let’s grab a cab somewhere.”
They picked one up near Leicester Square, and David directed the driver to the Goring Hotel. They were driving by the Hippodrome.
“That casino. How late is it open?”
“Into the next century. I’m not sure it ever closes. You’ve been there?”
“No, but I want to go. I’m addicted to cards. Blackjack. You call it Twenty-one, I think.”
“That can get expensive.”
David shrugged. “I can afford it.”
Jury laughed. “Fact you’re staying at the Goring suggests that.”
“I like to apply physics to cards. Heisenberg, Gödel.”
“How does that work?”
David laughed. “Well, it doesn’t, not seriously. I like to call it a system, though. I win most of the time. Got barred from Caesars in Atlantic City.”
“What happened?”
“Won too often. That’ll do it.” He laughed again.
* * *
As they made it into Belgravia, it started to rain. Wind blew the small trees along the Mall. The taxi turned into Beeston Place and pulled up in front of the hotel. The cab idled in the driveway; the doorman opened the door.
“Rebecca! What’s she doing standing out here?”
Jury looked past him to see an ethereal figure, backlit from the Goring’s many chandeliers, standing with an umbrella, but little else to protect the wispy white dress that was blowing in the wind and rain. Her long straight hair shone in the half-light. She was so pale and blond she might have been transparent. She waved.
David thrust a fifty-pound note toward the driver and hastened to the door, yanking his coat off as he went. Jury was right behind him.
“My God, Beck, it’s raining, and you without your coat—” He tossed his about her shoulders.
“I’m okay. Who’s this?” Her smile was warm.
“Sorry, Richard, for dashing away like that. Superintendent Richard Jury, my wife, Rebecca.”
The hand she put out to him was white and cold, but firm. “How do you do? Superintendent. That sounds like police. Are you?”
Her accent had been Americanized, but it was still strongly Brit. “All of them,” said Jury. “The whole damned lot. Your husband wants you out of the cold. So let’s go inside.”
“He’s bossy. Sounds like you are too.” She laughed as the three of them went into the lobby.
“That’s why we make a good pair,” said David.
“No, a good three,” said Rebecca. “You’ve got to have the bossee for it to work.”
And as she laughed and all but flung David’s coat back at him Jury felt the truth of it: they made a good three.
In the Goring’s handsome gold-and-white dining room, Jury and David ate beef Wellington; Rebecca had the lobster omelet. They talked about Columbia; Connecticut; the tree house; Rebecca’s mother, Claire Howard. The Chelsea flat they had given over was in a little house in Clarence Mews.
Now they were talking about the proofs of dark matter.
“I thought dark matter was invisible,” said Jury.
“It is. We know it’s there. We know it makes up over ninety percent of the universe. We can’t see it, but we know it’s there because of gravitational pull; we know it through inference. The way you solve your cases.”
Jury was about to drink, but instead put down his glass. “‘Inference’? Not reason and rationality?”
“It’s not a puzzle.”
“But it is. I have to take bits and pieces from various places and sources and cement them together.”
“There is no cement, Superintendent. That’s an illusion. If the bits appear to be clinging, that’s because they’re attracted—like electrons and protons—but they could just as easily fly apart. No, you’re finding answers by leaps of faith.”
Jury laughed. “Tell that to Sherlock.”
“Oh, he was the greatest demonstrator of the leap of faith. Wasn’t that really the substance of his famous dictum: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
“That sounds like logic. Rationality, reason. To an inevitable conclusion.”
David shook his head. “I don’t think it is. There’s too much left out and too much left over. How many improbables might be lying around to answer as the truth? What’s the ‘impossible’? And unfortunately the line appears in one of the worst detective stories, ‘The Sign of the Four.’ Consider how Holmes figures out what Watson has been doing before appearing in Baker Street: He tells Watson that he must have gone to the post office to send a telegram. How does Sherlock work this out? On the sole of Watson’s shoe is a little bit of orange earth or dirt and as they have been digging up the pavement around the post office, Watson must have stepped in it, he must have gone to the post office. Now, he knows Watson hadn’t written a letter and that the drawer in his desk has an ample supply of postcards and stamps; hence, he didn’t go to mail a letter. QED. Watson’s mission must have been to send a telegram.”
“Well,” said Rebecca, her pointy chin resting on the little bridge of her clasped hands, “that’s a perfectly fair piece of deduction.”
“And that’s deduction,” Jury insisted.
“No, no. It’s observation. But what I’m saying is that what he saw was organic. He saw it all at once; not in bits and pieces.”
“He inferred it from bits and pieces.”
“No. Look at it from an artist’s point of view. Did Michelangelo see the figure of David in the marble in bits and pieces? No, it was in there, an entity he was trying to carve his way around. And is that the way van Gogh worked? Bits and pieces? He painted his bedroom at Arles by first noticing his yellow bed and then adding sticks of furniture, paintings, bedclothes and so forth?”
“Those are poor examples. They were looking at something already there.”
“Oh, you mean the way Monet was looking at his water lilies?”
Rebecca sighed. “Oh, do shut up, David, and get another bottle of wine.”
Jury laughed. “Yes, get another bottle. And the dessert menu, while you’re at it.”
David signaled the waiter, who came without seeming to hurry, although it took him only five seconds to cross to their table. “Sir?”
“Another bottle—” He tapped the wine cooler. “Or perhaps something else with dessert. Whatever dessert might be.”
“I can recommend the chocolate ganache or the coconut and honey gateau. And perhaps a muscat to accompany?” said the waiter.
David nodded and the waiter swanned off.
“Why are cakes over here called ‘gateaux’?”
“Because it sounds better,” said Jury.
“David, why don’t you not talk about solving the CID’s crimes and instead write a monograph on the art of murder?”
“I didn’t say murder was an art. It isn’t. I’m saying it’s detection that’s an art.”
A couple of weeks before, Wiggins had dragged in a murder board and Jury had dragged it out again. Wiggins had objected: “Sir, it’s a great help in getting the details all together so you can see everything at once.” He had done the usual: tacked up small photos and newspaper pictures and articles; victims, “persons of interest,” their habits, their histories.
“No, it’s not a help; it just shows things in pieces,” Jury had said to Wiggins. “But they’re the same pieces I have filed in my mind, Wiggins. As do you.”
“But it, like, pulls them all together.”
“That’s an illusion, Sergeant.” And he suddenly realized he had said exactly the same thing to Wiggins that David had said to him just now. “There is no cement, Superintendent.”
David broke into these thoughts. “Why are you smiling, Richard?”
“What you were saying about art and detection: I think you’re right.”
In mock horror, Rebecca threw up her hands. “Oh please, Superintendent, don’t encourage him. He’s already too …” She was looking for a word.
“Too what?” David said. “Arrogant?”
“You’re not arrogant. You’re just too—certain.”
He laughed. “Beck, that’s the last thing I am. I was merely suggesting Richard try a perspective that’s more, say, artistic. Draw some stuff.”
“‘Draw some stuff’? Is that what you actually said?”
“Sure. Art frees up the mind.”
“What I have at my disposal in my office is a box of crayons.”
“Nothing wrong with crayons. You could also get some colored pencils.”
“Thanks for not suggesting I work in oils.”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
“I love the way you’re still telling a Scotland Yard superintendent how to solve crimes,” said Rebecca.
Jury, puzzled by the Saturday engagement David had mentioned in the White Lion, asked him what they were doing the next day, Friday.
“We’re going to this club in the City tomorrow night—the Artemis Club. Do you know it?”
“Not being a whiz at the gambling tables, I’ve never been there. Read about it, though. Isn’t it hard to get in? Weirdly difficult?”
Rebecca laughed. “That’s why he wants to go so much. He wrote to them months ago from the States.”
Jury said, “It’s an art gallery, too, isn’t it?”
David nodded. “A pretty good collection. I stopped in for a few minutes yesterday. Bought this.” He pulled a small velvet box from his pocket, opened it. The blue stone was bezel-set in a scrollwork band of white gold.
“But that’s beautiful, David.”
Jury thought it interesting that she did not reach for the ring and try it on. She did not assume it was for her.
“It’s for Mom,” he said. “Even though she doesn’t really fancy jewelry, I think she’ll like this. It’s tanzanite.”
“She’ll love it. What a beautiful blue.”
They ate their gateau and drank their wine and talked more about the art of detection until they found they were the last guests and decided to leave.
The doorman outside was getting Jury a taxi when David said, “Look, just in case … I mean, if anything happens to me, could you give this to my mother?”
Jury cut across that. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’m going to see you on Saturday.”
“I know, but just in case—” He looked so young, so earnest. “Would you see my mom gets this?”
Jury frowned deeply, but took the little velvet box. “But—”
“Because if something happens, she’ll come here, almost certainly, and—” David looked at the box, touched it. “This will make her feel better.”
“David, that’s so—” Frightening, he didn’t add.
“Could you come here to the hotel around eight on Saturday evening?”
From danger back to safety. “You bet. Let me give you my number in case you need to reach me.” On his card he wrote his home number, not his mobile, as it was always out of juice.
They said good night, David apologizing to the patient doorman, who looked as if he hadn’t a duty in the world except to wait on David Moffit.
Maybe Jury wasn’t the only one so affected.
Islington, London
Nov. 2, Saturday morning
7
Jury was so deep into these thoughts about his dinner with the Moffits two nights earlier that Jenkins had to say “Hello” three times before Jury answered.
“Dennis, sorry. It’s Richard—”
“—Jury! How the hell are you?”
“I just read the paper.”
“This Artemis Club baffler. Is that insane or what? From the information we’ve gathered so far, it appears the guy’s a Kenyan. Lives in Nairobi. Police there contacted us only this morning. Name’s … hold on a minute—” Dennis was roughing up some file. “Name’s—pardon the pronunciation—Bushiri Banerjee. He must have flown from Dubai with a different passport as there was no Banerjee on the Emirates flight between Dubai and Nairobi.”
“Why in hell would he fly to Dubai and then to Nairobi?”
“Because he didn’t have any choice. There aren’t any direct overnight flights. I don’t think he’d have wanted to while away the night at a London hotel waiting for us to put out an all-points.”
Jury sat like a stone by the phone table. “The victim. I met him. Them.”
“What?”
“David Moffit. I met him in Covent Garden Thursday afternoon.”
“You knew him?”
“Only that one day.” Jury told him about the Starrdust, going on for drinks and dinner. “He was afraid he was being watched.”
“Jesus! What can you tell me about him? He’s an American, so I rang up the embassy. All I know is they were at the Goring. Must be loaded.”
“His family is. Connecticut. Has the embassy contacted his mother? His father’s dead, but his mother—” It pained Jury even to think about her. It pained him to think she would be finding out about her dead son from some embassy official. “Find out what they’ve done about his mother and let me know, will you?” Jury paused. “I can tell you the wife’s mother is living in the Moffits’ flat in Chelsea. Something like Clarence Mews. I’m going to call her if you don’t mind. I want to talk to her, too.”
“Fine.”
“What about the driver? Did you get anything else from him?”
“I talked to him for over an hour. Robbie Parsons. That was one hell of a ride! I have to hand it to him: the guy’s both brave and resourceful. He was astonished when the shooter finally asked to be dropped at Waterloo.” Dennis paused. “He said there was something really strange about this guy—”
Jury gave a litttle snort. “Indeed. I’d say shooting two people and then climbing into their cab was decidedly strange.”
“No, I don’t mean that. When the shooter finally got out at Waterloo, he handed over a hundred quid, said to Parsons, ‘Keep the change. You’re a good driver.’ Then he took off.”
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 5