“Then why do it?”
“What—?” She seemed surprised. “I’ve been packing some of Rebecca’s things. Hard to live here with all of these signs … you know what I mean.”
He didn’t help her. “But you don’t actually ‘live’ here, do you, Mrs. Howard? Haven’t you a house in High Wycombe?”
“Well, yes. How did—?”
Since she didn’t finish the question, he supposed she had worked out that the police had ways of knowing such details in investigations.
She went on: “The family house, of course. Some of those Christmas shots were taken there. Drafty old place. I can’t afford to keep it up, never could. Now I’ll be spending much more time in London.” She sighed. “Look, I know you need to ask questions. So go right ahead. It won’t be any easier for me to answer them tomorrow or next week or even next year.” She set down her drink and put her hand to her face.
The gesture was so poignant that Jury couldn’t help but empathize.
“How can I help you, Superintendent?”
Jury said, “Well, perhaps you can speculate as to why anyone would want to kill your daughter.”
Shocked, she flinched. “But—surely it was David who was the target? He was a gambler, and I assumed he’d made enemies—”
“He was a physicist.” Jury felt he should defend the man’s reputation since she seemed willing to impugn it.
She accepted this correction with grace. “He was, yes. David was a highly intellectual, talented man with a very original mind. I just wish he hadn’t dragged Rebecca along with him.”
“You mean here?”
“I mean everywhere.”
“She could have refused, Mrs. Howard.”
“Not easily. He was also a very domineering man.”
That didn’t at all fit the man Jury had met. Certainly not the implied attitude toward his wife, whom he clearly adored. “You daughter came to London often?”
“Many times. That’s why they bought this flat.”
“Has she friends here?”
Again, Claire Howard looked perplexed. “You do seem to want to make this about her, Superintendent.”
“It’s not that I want to, I just want to avoid assuming anything about a case. The point is—” Jury shoved his glass aside to lean toward her. “Why would this man shoot her if he was the target?”
“She was a witness.”
Jury shook his head. “He didn’t shoot the cab driver.”
“Then you’re saying he really meant to murder both David and my daughter. But why?”
Jury pulled his glass back. “Was Rebecca familiar with her husband’s business affairs?”
“He was a teacher, that’s all his business was.” She sipped her whisky.
Claire Howard didn’t like David Moffit, thought Jury. And he found this very strange, unless there was a particular reason for it. “A full professor at Columbia. I expect—” He’d been about to say a very good one.
“Yes. Well.” Dismissing the professorship, she picked up her glass and this time didn’t sip, but drank most of the contents in two gulps.
“Is there anything they might have done, the two of them, that would make both of them targets?”
She did not take umbrage at the suggestion that her daughter was being linked to her gambling son-in-law in something despicable. Instead, she said, “If it had happened in the States, why in heaven’s name would someone shoot them down in London?”
“True. But it’s surprising the lengths a person might go to for revenge, or to keep himself out of it. I don’t mean to make too much of this. It’s just that the killer, the shooter, wanted to kill them both. One of them, either David or Rebecca, was not a decision made at the moment. He wouldn’t need to kill the other one. I think this man was hired—or otherwise enlisted—by someone who told him to kill both of the Moffits.”
She was thinking deeply, judging from her frown. “Look, David was a gambler who spent a lot of money doing it, and, as I said, probably making enemies. He won a lot.”
“Are you suggesting some connection to organized crime?”
She laughed. “David? You’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven too many times. I don’t think David was in debt to a casino. He was too clever for that.”
Jury smiled. “Cleverness and gambling generally don’t go hand in hand.”
“You don’t understand. David was rich. His family has a fortune. We’re talking about a lot of money, very old money. And why are you ignoring the obvious?”
“Am—”
She didn’t wait for his answer. “Superintendent, David, for all of his faults, was a brilliant man. He didn’t have debts; he had a system. He literally broke the bank in an Atlantic City casino and was barred. So he learned to use his system to make modest winnings and even lose at times. I guess he was one of those rare gamblers who could actually control the arena, as it were; I mean walk away.”
Glancing at the small painting leaning against the wall, he said, “You’ve been to the Artemis Club gallery, have you?”
Quickly, she looked around. “That? That’s something Rebecca must have picked up.”
“Then she’d been there before?” Jury found that strange, since no one there remembered her.
“I expect she got it at some gallery or other.”
Jury rose and moved over to the picture, bent down to study it. “It’s a Masego Abasi.” This painting too showed a woman by a lagoon. It might have been a smaller study for the one in the Zane Gallery. Only in this one, there was a lion but no other animal. “Abasi is a Kenyan artist. Had your daughter been to Nairobi?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, the owner of the Artemis Club has exclusive rights to show his paintings. So perhaps she or David might have been there.”
“I don’t know. She never mentioned it. I’ve never been to the Artemis Club, myself.”
“Since this is apparently going to be packed away, I wonder if you’d be willing to loan it to me for a short while. I’ll write you a receipt. The police take good care of things. I’ll return it to you in a day or two.” He had taken out his notebook and was already making out a receipt for the picture.
She frowned. “But why would you want it?”
“Just to show it to the owner of the Zane Gallery, find out its provenance.”
“Well … I expect that’s all right. I’ll get some wrapping paper.” She was soon in the kitchen, securing it.
He thanked her, placing the painting on the coffee table. He wrapped it and asked if she had some tape or string.
Again, she went into the kitchen, returned with a roll of Sellotape.
He said, “I have another request.” He nodded toward the album. “Could I have some of those loose snapshots? It would help in the investigation.”
“I can’t think why.” She shrugged and moved to the table on which it lay. She turned the pages and finally stopped, pulling out the picture of Rebecca and two or three others. “I can’t stand to be without this one.” She held up the one of Rebecca. “Here. Take what you want.”
Having finished taping up the painting, he took the album. He went to the center of the album, scooped out a number of the snapshots. “Thanks so much for this.”
She breathed more easily, glanced at her watch and said, “I’m so sorry, I’ve a theater date with an old friend that’s been planned for weeks and I don’t want to disappoint.”
“Of course not. On a Sunday, though? I didn’t know the West End was open for business.” He had pocketed the small pictures and now picked up the wrapped painting.
“A few are. This one’s in Piccadilly. Jersey Boys.”
Jury blinked. “I’ll help you get a cab.”
“I expect in the circumstances you must think my going to the theater is rather crass. But my friend has had a very hard time of it too, and I—” She shrugged.
“No explanation necessary.” He helped her on with her coat, his never having come off, and they left the hou
se, he with the painting under his arm. Plenty of cabs on Upper Sloane Street, but he saw one and hailed it before they got there.
She smiled as he held the door for her. “Thank you so much. If you’ve any more questions, I’ll be glad to help out.”
He slammed the door, then looked at the cab as it drove away, and remembered: In the circumstances you must think my going to the theater is rather crass.
Maybe not if she’d been going to see Hamlet or even Harold Pinter. But Jersey Boys?
RAZORBITE
New Scotland Yard and the City
Nov. 4, Monday morning
16
“Have a look at these, Wiggins.” Jury dropped the pictures he’d taken from the album on Wiggins’s desk. “See if you can get forensics to blow up the one of the gallery. I want to see the paintings on the walls if possible. I want to find out where it is.”
Which ones hadn’t she wanted him to see again? Was it the one of mother and daughter on a settee with the man leaning over the back of it? The one in the unidentified gallery? The one of Claire arm in arm with the couple in the Caymans?
At the time appointed for Marshall Trueblood’s “interview” on Monday, Jury met him in front of the Artemis Club, Jury having come by Ford, Trueblood by Porsche—one he had acquired at an auto auction. He parked it in the driveway, not quite beside and yet not unbeside Zane’s Lotus Elan.
When Jury walked up to him, Trueblood said, “Hope that’s okay, sport.”
“And I hope this new job isn’t going to have you talking like Gatsby.”
“What? Did you get hold of Melrose? Is he going to do the Kenya gig?”
“Why is every job a gig these days?” said Jury, as they walked through the front door.
Trueblood whistled. “Quite a setup.” He looked around at the warm furnishings of the library and the brown velvet cushions of the dining-room chairs, the oil-rubbed mahogany staircase, the mirror-sparkle of the casino.
“It’s quite exclusive,” said Jury.
“I hope so. Who wants to work in a rubbishy place?”
Jury smiled. “You two should get on.”
When it came to pure presentation, Marshall Trueblood was a match for any man, including Leonard Zane.
Marshall wore a navy-blue merino wool with a navy shadow pinstripe from a tailor in Venice (“The same as runs up your Count Dracula’s capes,” he had later said to Vivian); he had kept the shirt and tie out of competition (off-white and subdued blue) as if even here he was practicing his gambling skills.
Jury hoped his performance would match his presentation.
He introduced Trueblood to Zane, and when they moved from the office out to the tables, he said to Trueblood, sotto voce, “Are you really skilled at this sort of thing? Or were your abilities merely honed sitting around the Jack and Hammer playing poker?”
“I’m very good at it. I was taught by a master.”
“Really? Who?”
“Me.”
Zane emptied a large bag of chips on the felt and said, “Let’s see how fast you can count.”
Count? Trueblood smiled as his two companions watched the chips fairly vaporize before coming to stand in neat stacks of five, ten, twenty, fifty and a hundred pounds.
Marshall Trueblood had grown up in a seaside town on the south coast where boardwalk slot machines were not supposed to be used by little boys, but somehow the boys managed to use them. Surveillance was not that good at the Dolphin Arcade and the Seahorse and the Brass Horseshoe.
Still, it wasn’t the slot machines when he was six or the flight simulators when he was eight but a game of his own which he invented when he was ten, then took to his public school and made so popular that he had a waiting list to play a year long. The game was popular not just because the winnings were so high but because it was so dangerous, and Marshall was a master at it. Every kid wanted to be him.
The game consisted of dumping a large pile of single-edged razor blades on a table, much as Leonard Zane had dumped the poker chips, and seeing who could collect the most without getting nicked. If you drew blood (yours or a classmate’s) you were out of the game.
He called it Razorbite.
Trueblood was the “house” and everyone else played against him. The celebrity, the honor, the glory that attached to a boy who could beat Trueblood was enticement only the most sensible twelve-year-olds could resist. And how many of those were there?
Cricket, football, tennis—St. Eglantine having excellent teams in all of those—couldn’t come close to Razorbite in attracting St. Eglantine’s students.
All of the chemists in the area sold out of razor blades, as did the local Sainsbury’s. Medicine cabinets at home were denuded of blades, fathers unable to understand where the ones recently purchased had gone.
To play the game took a lot of practice and a lot of nerve. There were levels of increasing difficulty, depending on the skill of the competitors. But even at its lowest level (razor blades spread on the concrete surface of the school’s rear drive) it was very difficult and the boys were always getting cut. Thus one of the unfortunate results was that the masters began to notice a lot of sticking plasters in their classes.
Boys from every form participated. There was an entrance fee of fifty pence for every game played, and the boys were eliminated one by one until there were six left, then four, then two. The entry fee climbed as the number of players decreased. If a player couldn’t come up with the three- or five-pound fee when it got down to six and four contestants, Trueblood extended credit. He was at the end carrying chits around amounting to over two hundred pounds, but every debt was settled. There was a lot of honor riding on this game, far more than on the school code regarding cheating.
The second-best player was Conleith Murdock, which came as a surprise to the others, as Murdock was a thin, introspective lower-sixth-former, uninterested in sports and completely uncompetitive in any other area—girls, grades, grub—and was almost apologetic about his mastery of Razorbite, but, at the same time, obviously gratified to be the next best to Marshall Trueblood. Connie’s family was relatively poor, his parents using every penny they could scrape together to keep their son at St. Eg’s. Conleith wound up with a debt to Trueblood of over a hundred pounds. He paid this off by winning at poker in the back room of a local pub. He was as adept at poker as he was at Razorbite.
The game was played in odd venues at odd hours and with odd excuses (in case a chairwoman or a master got suspicious). When fewer than eight boys were battling it out, they took over the infirmary and played on the “cadaver table” (as they called the metal examination table). The surface was a killer because it was so smooth. Hoskins and Stewart (fifth-formers and inseparable friends) were especially good on the metal table, but not as good as Murdock.
Even tougher than the cadaver table was glass. Since they couldn’t find a mirror big enough, Hoskins and Stewart, who were very friendly with the school nurse, would feign some sort of illness just as she was leaving the infirmary and get permission to go in and administer to themselves, an absolutely unheard-of rule breaker, but Hoskins and Stewart were, separately, extremely charming and, together, magnetic, irresistible. The room had a mirrored door, which they unhinged with screwdrivers and carted off to one of the boys’ rooms and laid on the floor. It made the game especially difficult, not just because of the smooth surface, but because the blades were doubled in the mirror, which made grabbing them even harder.
Then there were the tennis courts, three of them a distance from the main building, for St. Eg’s had extensive grounds. They were also in a lightly forested area, and the far one was almost invisible because of the surrounding trees and shrubs.
The courts had a nice hard clay surface.
Saint Eglantine’s tennis team had never come up to any sort of snuff that would compete with other schools because few of the lads were any good or even interested in becoming so. Consequently, the sports master, Mr. Atkins, was pleased when Trueblood came to him id
ly swinging a racket and telling him there were a number of boys, eight to be exact, who were interested in getting themselves up to par and maybe reinstituting competition with Broadsniffer, a school Trueblood knew Mr. Adkins hated. “Only, as none of us are very good—” A lie, since Hoskins and Carruthers were very good. “—we wonder if we could just get out there and hit the ball around without people watching, since we’d be kind of, you know, embarrassed. In our spare time, of course. At no expense to your precious time, coach.” Of which the master had precious little. He was delighted by this student-resourcefulness.
So two of them, or even four, would play their inexpert game on the first and second courts while the others, four or six, played Razorbite on the third and almost invisible court.
This went on for two months before Mr. Adkins asked Trueblood if any of them showed any promise, whereupon Hoskins and Carruthers were trotted out and slammed the ball to hell and gone for three sets.
The coach marveled. But as for the “team” itself, well, that never came into play.
The game had one detractor: a boy named Rupert Thorne, a lower-sixth, two years older and two inches shorter than the others, a pudgy unpopular lad whose chubby fingers could make no headway at all with razors. He couldn’t even manage to pick up a single blade on the first, second or even fifth try, and was doomed to either watch or leave.
Trueblood, a decent chap even as a boy, had tried to improve Rupert’s skills by getting him to practice with marbles and matches. But Rupert could not pick up anything in a single swift motion.
During one of these training sessions, Rupert told Trueblood of a dream he’d had: “It was all about Razorbite. Hoskins came equipped with a huge razor that he used like a hatchet to threaten the rest of us. Then we rounded up all of the masters and made them compete against each other …”
The dream rambled on as Rupert Thorne failed to pick up marbles and matches, not only because of his awful clumsiness, but because he couldn’t concentrate.
“You can’t focus, Thorne, that’s your main problem.”
The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries) Page 12