Now she was off to the city of Nairobi and into the mystery of Africa, which Patty believed was a complete mystery in and of itself (and not just because she was lost in it).
She had jumped off the bus at a stop in the center of town, taking her leave of a mass of people, each of whom thought she belonged to one of the others—no surprise, the way she beamed and laughed and said her few words in guidebook Swahili to everyone. Patty was walking through the streets looking purposeful, looking in charge, not looking at all like a little girl who had lost her way.
Which was what she felt like, and it was one of the few times in her life she’d ever felt it. What? Where? When? Who? She didn’t bother with the Why did this happen? There was never an answer to that. But How will I get out of here? What is the best route to take? Those were pragmatic questions. People looked at her with a fair amount of interest. Though she wondered where she was, she was afraid to stop and look round for too long, afraid someone would try to take her over.
It was dark, very dark. It was a new darkness. The lights of London had always hidden the darkness from her, and she wondered a little about that. The vast dark of Africa hung over cheetahs and lions moving stealthily through tall grass, hunting their prey. The vast darkness of London hung over dips and tarts prowling the streets.
Her white sweater seemed to glimmer as the dark hand of a man in a black cape-like garment stopped her. She looked up, surprised, fearing some public official.
“My child, allow me to assist you. You seem very determined to get where you are going, but also uncertain.” He said this in perfectly articulated English. He wore a boxy black hat, fez-like.
She wondered if he was a Kenyan priest or something. She couldn’t think what to say or how to pretend what her destination was.
“Let me get you a drink of lemonade, perhaps? And we can talk a bit.”
Talk. She shook the African darkness from her head—the cheetah, the whispering grass—and prepared to tell her usual string of lies. “I’m meeting my uncle. I just flew in from London.”
They had entered a café and walked out again to one of the little round tables where customers sat. While she said this, he was setting down two tall glasses of lemonade that looked quite delicious. As he sat himself down, looking surprised, he said, “He did not arrange to meet you at the airport?” His tone stood between astonishment and outrage.
“You must understand—” Patty had always found phrases like this put people on the defensive, which is why she used them. “—that he can’t drive now, as his eyesight is so bad.” Idiot, she thought to herself, there were always taxis that her “uncle” could have arranged for. “And his little village is so isolated, cab drivers can’t find it.” She sipped her lemonade through a straw.
He was frowning. “Where is this village?”
“Way way out in the bush.” Oh God, that sounded like Australia. Or was there bush everywhere? Maybe there was bush along the Marylebone Road.
“What is its name?”
“Mozam—bimbe.” She almost said “Mozambique” before she realized there was a country of that name.
“I don’t believe—”
“It’s way far into south Africa.”
“But that’s another country. South Africa.”
What? Why wasn’t there a south of Africa? There was a south of England, a south of France … Looking at the priest’s doubting face, she guessed not. “I didn’t mean South Africa, only in the south. My uncle told me to come to this street we’re in.” Patty looked up the street as far as she could see, at the various signs. One looked like the outline of a half-moon with a sprinkling of stars, but she couldn’t read the name. “He told me there’s a little restaurant or café called the Moon something. His old and dear friend Édouard would meet me.”
“The Starry Night, you mean?”
“Isn’t that a famous painting?” Wow! She had certainly pulled that out of her ear. Was this holy man trying to trick her? She nodded.
He nodded up the street. “It’s along here. But why did this Édouard not meet you at the airport?”
“Because … Oh! There … I see him …” Patty pointed toward the neon moon sign.
“Then perhaps we should walk there.”
Hell. “Absolutely,” she said, with fake enthusiasm. Several doorways and a knotted crowd of pedestrians later, she spotted the Starry Night and was eyeballing an old man hunched over a Zimmer walker coming out of it, heading for one of the sidewalk tables. He was awkwardly resting his mug of coffee or whatever it was against the Zimmer.
“There he is! Mr. Édouard! Thank you so much for the lemonade, I’ve got to run.” She broke away from the tall man of some-God-or-other and threaded her way through the crowd. When she looked back, just before she reached “Édouard,” she saw the tall man in black still following, but not very quickly.
So here she was nearly falling over his walker, the old guy looking at her in alarm. Apologizing, she knew this must be a split-second decision: help him sit down at the table and join him, manufacture conversation until the priest was upon them, or run before the priest knew what was happening.
In doubt, run. Run, Patty, run!
Wasn’t there a movie called that? Long before her time, but another old guy camped under Waterloo Bridge had talked about it. Not with her name, of course, but some other name, some girl with ginger hair—Lola! That was it. Run, Lola, Run! And boy could she run! Patty had the strange feeling that Lola was standing right beside her, nudging her out of the chair.
Run!
Patty ran.
London, Artemis Club
Nov. 2, Saturday afternoon
11
If one could ignore City Police—the forensics team still managing to swarm all over the semicircular drive on this cold Saturday afternoon—the exterior of the Artemis Club would have appeared unimpressive, which was probably what Leonard Zane meant it to be. Jury thought that it might be its very stolidness—its sturdy Georgian facade—was striking, considering the shifty, sharklike propensities of its business. The building’s yellow stone had a Cotswold glow in the rush of slanting light where the sun broke through cloud cover.
The interior, though, was something else again. To his left was a beautiful room that probably served many purposes: sitting; waiting; reading a book from its floor-to-ceiling bookcases; enjoying the warmth of a huge fireplace surrounded by a green leather fender at one end of the room; having tea at that table beside a window, as a well-heeled couple were now doing; relaxing on down-cushioned sofas or in armchairs covered in a muted pink-and-blue silky material, all with cushions aplenty. The walls were papered in soft grayish blue. At the other end of the room was a mahogany door with a small brass plaque Jury couldn’t read. It might have said Office.
On the right was a formal dining room, full of white linen, brown leather chairs and at the long windows brown velvet curtains, their ends puddling on the floor. The wallpaper here was ivory with thin brown stripes. Bronze wall sconces gave off a misty light through smoked glass shades. Art deco, squared and arched. He wondered why they were lit at midday, and noticed they weren’t electric but gas, and turned very low. When the flames jumped higher at night he bet the effect was one of shadow and mystery.
The third room was the casino itself. It was the same size as the dining room, but made to look larger by partially mirrored walls in which crystal chandeliers reflected endlessly. Half of each wall was mirrored, including the wall against which the bar stood. The rest of the wall surface was covered in what looked like cream brocade. Sunlight coming through the long window at the rear was reflected in the chandeliers, casting tiny flakes of light across the tables.
Maggie Benn checked the time on her mobile. “We’d better go up to the gallery. Mr. Zane is waiting.”
As they ascended the curved, highly polished staircase, Jury said, “I could live the rest of my life in any one of these rooms. Who was your decorator?”
“Decorator?” Maggie rais
ed questioning eyebrows as if Jury had alluded to some arcane profession she’d never heard of. “Oh, Mr. Zane tried one but they couldn’t agree on anything. When he described the decor he wanted, the decorator said, ‘No, no, no, much too busy.’ The decorator brought in swatches and bits and bobs of what he wanted and Mr. Zane said, ‘No, no, no, much too boring.’ Mr. Zane got rid of him and did all this busy stuff himself.” She laughed. “He’s got an eye.”
“My word, I would say he certainly does. This place is spectacular.”
She blushed a bit. “Thank you. Everyone seems to like it.”
“Everyone should. But I have an idea ‘everyone’ does not get in here. Am I right?”
“We are a little bit selective, true. And we have a cap on the number of patrons we allow each evening. Also, a routine for arrival. It’s pretty strict, but we don’t want a glut of cars pulling up all at the same time—” But she stopped her comments on the stringent rules as they reached the top of the staircase.
“How many tables do you have in the casino?”
“Only twenty. Right now, nineteen: poker, twenty-one, roulette, craps, baccarat—the usual.”
Jury was not sure what “the usual” was.
“We have two twenty-one tables, but at the moment there’s only one. We’re looking for a croupier. Hard to find really good dealers, you know, quick fingers. Looks matter, too.”
Jury bet they did.
“No chance for me, then.”
“Really, Superintendent.”
He enjoyed watching her face as she spoke, not for its expressiveness, but for its total lack of it. The face was, actually, rather plain, squarish. Good bones, though. He imagined the face would be quite a canvas for a professional makeup artist. She wore no makeup other than a bit of lipstick. Her dress was equally artless. Her hair, very dark and quite glossy, was pulled away from her face so smoothly and tightly it looked as if it might hurt. What surprised him, in this extremely well-appointed, trendy, glamorous place, was her total lack of glamour.
“And of course, someone who can play by the house rules—or feel the weight of Mr. Zane’s displeasure.”
As they reached the top of the beautiful half-circle of staircase to the gallery, he began to feel the weight of the man’s displeasure himself.
Yet Leonard Zane didn’t register any displeasure at all upon seeing this detective on his doorsill. Quite the contrary: he seemed pleased.
Maggie Benn introduced him. “Leo, this is Detective Superintendent Richard Jury. New Scotland Yard CID.”
Jury said, “I should carry you around instead of a card.” He smiled as she blushed. Jury held out his hand. “Mr. Zane.”
“Leonard, please. Although I won’t call you Richard.”
“Good.” Jury was surprised by the sincere note of welcome in his tone and wondered if the pretense of sincerity wasn’t stock-in-trade for Leonard Zane. Or part of it.
Instead of registering uncertainty, Leonard Zane simply laughed. “Superintendent Jury, please sit down. Have some coffee and a scone.”
A matching silver pot and plate sat on the other side of Zane’s desk, a long table of what looked like zebrawood. Jury wasn’t much on woods. There were some prints lying on it, nothing else—no pens, blotter, landline phones. Jury moved along the wall of paintings, some forty or fifty uncrowded oils and watercolors, prints and pastels. It was an eclectic mix of works showing the influence of many schools. Impressionism, German expressionism, a poor reproduction of Rothko, a good Roy Lichtenstein. He was struck particularly by a naturalistic painting of a black woman seated outside before a fire of sticks and small branches, warming her hands, while behind her in the brush and half hidden by a baobab and a stunted acacia were a cheetah and a lion, their eyes fixed on her. The woman in her bright orange-and-red headdress gave no sign of awareness of their presence. As he repassed the paintings to return to the desk, he saw two long glass-topped display cases that appeared to hold jewelry.
He was about to comment, when Leonard Zane said, “I’m sorry about all this,” nodding toward the window and the driveway below.
“It was hardly your fault, Mr. Zane.”
Reflecting on this, frowning, Leonard Zane said, “I wonder.”
“You do?”
“What I mean is, this casino-gallery combo—”
“Sounds like a sandwich.”
Zane laughed. “Speaking of food, you didn’t say if you wanted that coffee.”
“Coffee, fine. Your place looks a bit like a restaurant. And that dining room downstairs—”
“It’s my chef. He’s terrific. He should be at La Gavroche or somewhere like that. I’m holding him back.”
Since he was unfamiliar with La Gavroche, Jury knew he’d fare no better with the “somewheres.”
Zane ran his storm-gray eyes over Jury’s face as he poured the coffee and pushed the small silver tray holding cream and sugar toward him, together with the silver plate holding the scones. “You’re strange for a Scotland Yard superintendent.”
“You’re not the first to say it.” Jury added nothing to the coffee.
“Do you always engage in banter on a murder inquiry?”
“Always. So let’s banter about why you’re so delighted to see me.” He stretched out his legs.
Zane’s expression altered. But no more than it would have done over his tailor missing a stitch. “Perhaps you think I’m playing you.”
Jury smiled, picked up his cup. “Are you?”
“No.”
Still holding his cup, Jury rose and walked over to one of the glass cases. He was looking down at a necklace that would have bought him his Islington flat. “What are these stones?”
“You’re not familiar with tanzanite?”
Jury shook his head. “Another gap in my general knowledge.”
“You might not find it at a jeweler’s because it’s not very popular. People don’t realize how rare it is, and becoming rarer. I have a mine in Tanzania, one of many of the small mines there.”
“A mine? You mine tanzanite?”
Zane laughed. “The Merelani Hills, near Kilimanjaro. It’s the only place in the world it’s mined. There are a number of grades—their value is based on hue, tone and saturation.” Zane pointed to a line of stones—and it was a line: some dozen examples of tanzanite ranging from one hardly bigger than a pinhead to the last, many-faceted, nearly the size of a ten-pence coin. “You can probably differentiate if you look more closely.” He took a small ring of keys from his pocket, slid them around until he had the one he wanted and unlocked the case, taking out three rings of different cuts and set in a varying number of diamonds. “Never mind the diamonds, just look at the tanzanite. You see the difference?”
Jury pointed to one toward the middle. “This one seems to have more of a green cast.”
“Which would lessen its value. But the end ones, you see the difference in the depth of the blue?”
Jury shook his head. “Can’t say I do. They’re both bluer than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s the saturation. That’s the most important thing to measure. This one—” He plucked up the one less invested in diamonds. “—is very unusual, a really fine stone. Much deeper saturation than the other.” He set the pieces down.
Jury bent over a ring with a stone that appeared to be the largest in the tanzanite display. “How many carats is this, Mr. Zane?”
“Twelve. Nice, isn’t it?” He angled back the glass top and removed it. “Cushion-cut. A lot of diamond work that’s hard to see unless you’re up close. The designer does very refined work.” He picked up the velvet box. “Eight thousand pounds, this one.”
Jury whistled. “Is this the priciest piece you have?”
“No. There’s a necklace in the other case—” Zane nodded toward the rear. “—with a fifty-thousand price tag. But of course one has to consider the settings: platinum and diamonds.”
Jury frowned. “Aren’t you afraid of theft?”
&nb
sp; “Our security system is pretty good.”
“The couple who were shot, Mr. and Mrs. Moffit. Did you know them?”
“I didn’t. They were Americans.”
“Right.” Jury raised his cup. “This is delicious coffee. But you knew of them. Or at least of him.”
Zane didn’t bother denying this. “It’s true you can’t just walk in here and go to the casino. We have pretty strict rules.”
“I can imagine.”
Zane sounded more amused than annoyed when he said, “Superintendent, there’s something about my operation here that you clearly don’t like.”
“That’s true. Two people were shot in your driveway.”
“Yes. Getting back to the rules, though. We have a waiting list a mile long. And we do check up on the people on it.”
“So you knew who was coming Friday evening?”
Zane nodded his head. “Yes. A few were interested in art. So they came to the gallery.”
“But you didn’t know Dr. Moffit?”
“He was a doctor?”
“A PhD in physics. He was a well-regarded physicist. And a gambler. But I’m sure you must have known that, if you ‘check up’ on your guests. Apparently he was interested in applying quantum mechanics to gambling. I think he was barred from one casino.”
Zane looked away, growing thoughtful. “I’m going to ask Maggie why that didn’t turn up in the check. She does the vetting. What was he doing? Card-counting?”
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 8