The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries)

by Martha Grimes

  Ruthven returned from the cellar, bottle of Louis Royer firmly in hand, and held it out for Melrose’s approval. Ruthven set down two balloon glasses.

  “Well, this, Ruthven, has been a treat—to see the willingness of all hands to be on deck. Only, how did it all start?”

  Ruthven had just poured cognac into Jury’s glass and set the bottle on the table. “You are a caution, m’lord.” He smiled broadly and took himself off with a little mumbled laughter at his master’s sense of humor.

  When the door swayed shut behind Ruthven, Melrose said, “But how did it?”

  “We were talking about who—Vivian would rather marry, you or me.” Jury’s laugh was much like Ruthven’s. “We were going to the Jack and Hammer to put it to a vote.”

  “Right,” said Melrose.

  “Vote?” said Jury, as they were tumbling around when the Bentley must have hit another galaxy, since the car could handle anything in this current world. “I’m not one of your nameless dogs!”

  “We’ll see.”

  When they walked into the Jack and Hammer, Dick Scroggs gave Jury a hearty hello and drew two pints, which he then came to set on the table around which were gathered Diane, Joanna, Trueblood and Vivian.

  Four pairs of eyes stared at Melrose when he had the effrontery to ask the question. “So which of us would you choose, Vivian? Him—” Melrose cast a dismissive glance at Jury—“or me?”

  Vivian answered, “Choose? What makes you think either one of you is such a treat?”

  New Scotland Yard, London

  Nov. 14, Thursday, and later

  51

  Chief Inspector Kato Kione called Jury to inform him that the Tanzanian police had Benjamin Buhari in custody and that he had gone with them willingly and, just as willingly, agreed to return to London and stand trial.

  “The judge says no further legal proceedings are necessary regarding extradition in either Kenya or Tanzania and Inspector Buhari will be in London within the week. We can be pretty fast in these matters when we want to be.”

  Three days later, Jury was sitting in one of the interrogation rooms when Buhari was brought in by Wiggins and the Kenyan police officer who had accompanied the transfer to London.

  Jury rose. “Inspector Buhari.” He held out his hand.

  Registering some surprise, Buhari shook it. There were no handcuffs. He sat down at the table and Jury nodded to Wiggins and the Kenyan policeman, who then left.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Buhari. I have a few questions.”

  Buhari gave a crumpled smile.

  It was almost childlike, that smile, almost charming.

  Almost. Jury kept a tight hold on his feelings as he said, “We have your daughter here: Marguerite Banado.”

  “She didn’t—”

  “I assure you, Inspector, she did. Even if you wanted to keep her out of this, you couldn’t. We know what happened, at least the versions of these two women involved in the conspiracy to murder the Moffits.”

  “Isn’t ‘conspiracy’ a bit of an exaggeration?”

  “No. Your daughter and her friend, this woman—” Jury shoved a picture of Claire Howard across the table. “—conspired to kill the Moffits. Marguerite Banado was obsessed with David Moffit and had been long before he came to London.”

  Buhari interrupted. “It was the other way around. He was stalking her; about two years ago, she found she was pregnant. This man insisted she have an abortion and said he would marry her if she complied. After she did, he dropped her.”

  “That’s a pack of lies, Mr. Buhari.”

  Buhari started to protest, but soon gave it up. “Since this man and his wife are dead, I was clearly meant to kill them. I have no choice but to believe you.” He paused. “What did my daughter say?”

  “That she had persuaded you to do the shooting. That she had arranged with a friend of hers to drive you from Waterloo to Heathrow. She has a lot of friends in helpful positions,” Jury added acidly. “What happened to the gun?”

  “I left it with the driver. I assume he returned it to Marguerite.” Buhari dropped his head. “Yes. It was not until I had returned to Nairobi that I discovered what had really happened.” He looked up and out of the tiny window at the dusky sky. “I can’t begin to express the remorse that I felt.” He shook his head. “It was unthinkable.”

  Jury leaned into the table, trying to close the distance. “What was to me unthinkable is that it ever could have happened. You’re a policeman, for God’s sake. You shot this gun without examining the ammunition? Without making sure at least the cartridges were nonlethal.”

  “Not exactly. It was loaded with forty-five-caliber ACP Glasers when I left London. Nonlethal. And when I picked up the gun that night before I shot it, Marguerite pulled out the magazine, took one bullet out and showed me it was a nonlethal round. The other seven were obviously real.”

  “And the chambered one was clearly one of the lethal bullets. My God.”

  “You can still fault me for not looking just before I shot, but I swear to God I didn’t suspect for a moment that my daughter would ask me to murder these people. Granted, she easily convinced me that he had done her a terrible wrong and she just wanted to scare him. Them. Of course I refused initially. But she also convinced me that if I didn’t do it, she would. We argued for hours.” Buhari paused. “Did she give you any other reasons?”

  Jury had the taped interview. He did not want to play it. To discover now, after everything else, the complete contempt in which his daughter held him would simply be too much for the man to bear. It was almost too much for Jury. “Only that she felt you owed her something because you had given her up to your brother and sister-in-law. That had clearly been very painful for her.” Pain had not been the predominant emotion in Marguerite’s emotional repertoire. “Your daughter tricked you, Mr. Buhari. I’m sorry.”

  “I appreciate that, Superintendent Jury. Although I’m surprised there’s room for empathy regarding my role in this. Marguerite had a powerful hold on me. I always felt guilty for abandoning her.”

  “But you didn’t—”

  “To her, it was abandonment. She was only eight years old. My work kept me away from home so much, and with her mother gone, I really felt my brother and his wife could do a better job of giving her a feeling of family than I could on my own. They had no children and had always wanted one and loved Marguerite. It seemed a perfect solution.”

  “Strikes me it was. And don’t think the reason for her actions is that alleged abandonment by her mother and father. A psychologist might have a field day with the events in her life, but I think the effect of your having her live with your brother was minimal. It became really a club to beat you with. Marguerite is basically a manipulative, self-regarding, obsessive woman. You should face that, Mr. Buhari. But the passport; you implicated your brother by using his passport.”

  “Yes, that was bad of me, but I knew he was going to be in Nairobi, where there’d be witnesses to his presence, and I also knew I could get rid of the page with the visas. So his innocence would be clear. I used my own passport to go from Dubai to Nairobi.”

  Jury reached into his pocket and took out a card. “You’ll need a good defense. This is the best.” Jury pushed Pete Apted’s card across the table.

  “Thank you. But why are you helping me? The man I shot was a friend of yours.”

  Jury got up. “Because he’d want me to. You were set up, Mr. Buhari. I don’t like that.”

  Maggie Benn and Claire Howard were indicted for the murders of David and Rebecca Moffit.

  It had taken Pete Apted no more than a remarkable (even for him) twenty-four hours to get a judgment of no case to answer in the matter of Leonard Zane’s role in the tanzanite smuggling.

  Jury put in for a week’s holiday.

  “For what reason?” Racer had demanded.

  “For the reason that I haven’t had one in several years. Except, of course, when I was shot.” Racer would have considered that time o
ff a holiday.

  But he got it. Jury received additional advice from several quarters.

  Melrose said, “You know, Richard, in the 1880s they managed to produce the transatlantic cable; it was a nifty invention—”

  Wiggins told him he was crazy; Carole-anne interrupted her manicure long enough to say, “Suit yourself.” Phyllis Nancy said, “Good for you. It’s exactly the right thing to do.”

  But that was Phyllis.

  The Knowledge, London

  52

  In the Knowledge Robbie Parsons held center stage with his story of Scotland Yard’s arrest of two people in London and a related arrest by the Nairobi police of another, in Kenya.

  “Kenya? That’s him, ain’t it? The bastard that shanghaied your cab?” said Ray Rich.

  “Along with Rob,” added Clive Rowbotham, as if that point needed to be made.

  “The very one,” said Robbie.

  “Hold on,” said Reg Keene. “What about those others you said got arrested in London? Who are they? Where do they fit in?”

  “Sorry, no names, mate,” said Robbie, as if he had names to divulge, which he hadn’t. He picked up his pint of best bitter and took a couple of swallows.

  “Who’s your source, then?” said Clive.

  “Well, I can hardly name him, can I?”

  “Wait,” said Reg Keene again. “Is this the guy you wanted to bring here to the pub?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Wasn’t he a detective inspector?”

  “Nope.”

  “Sergeant?”

  “No.”

  “A chief inspector, maybe?”

  “Higher.”

  “Higher than a chief inspector? My God, must be the bloody commissioner,” said Minnie Huff, who had a long-standing relationship with the Metropolitan Police, uniform branch.

  Ray Rich said, “Wait. I picked up a guy in Broadway the other night. He was Scotland Yard. Really tall, seemed smart, a detective.”

  Robbie did not want Richard Jury claimed by somebody else. “You don’t know ranks? You don’t know somebody higher than a detective inspector except the commissioner? Detective superintendent, that’s what.”

  “Yeah,” said Ray, as if he knew. “That’s who I picked up, a detective superintendent.”

  “How d’ya know he was?”

  “He told me.”

  “Told you?”

  “Well, he shoved his warrant card at me. Wanted to come here. Ha ha.”

  Robbie put in, “He’s a good friend of that bloke that came here with Patty Haigh.”

  Who was now back from her Paris jaunt and was talking to Aero on her mobile, she inside and Aero outside Terminal 3.

  “It’s Rooster wants to know,” said Aero. “This guy they want’s kind of stubby, you know, squat and black, probably from Tanzania. I heard him talking on his mobile to somebody. Anyway, Rooster wants him spotted because—”

  “No,” said Patty Haigh. “No Kenya, no Botswana, no Nairobi, no South Africa, no Tanzania, no—”

  “No shit” Aero laughed.

  “I’m sticking to the EU,” said Patty.

  * * *

  There were perhaps a dozen regulars and as many casuals—the haphazard clientele who poked their faces in at random and arbitrary times. The regulars, like Robbie, were happy to have the casuals swell their ranks, for these cabbies gave them a better idea of what London was teeming with on any given day.

  They were not snobs and they didn’t treat the Knowledge like one of those clubs up West. Most of them, naturally, had their badges, but a badge was not a condition of belonging; the only requirement for getting into the pub was that one drove a cab or was in training to drive. Hence, some youngsters, some of the uninitiated, were granted a kind of “temporary membership,” as long as they were on the path to taking “the knowledge.” These unproven ones were usually brought to the pub by seasoned drivers.

  Almost all of them had been asked to drive a fare to the Knowledge. The drivers were sure that each person who asked it thought he was a real slyboots: asking a cab driver to take you to a place meant exclusively for cab drivers.

  “Not got an address, ’ave you?”

  “Of course I don’t have an address! Nobody knows where it is!”

  “Hmm. Well, that would include me, too.”

  Every so often one or another cabbie would try to get someone—friend or relation, someone stellar, someone deserving—into the Knowledge, but always got a thumbs-down. “Stellar” was still not enough.

  Robbie thought it had been stellar of Richard Jury to throw that little party for the kids, but he knew better than to try to get him temporary membership in the Knowledge. Even though Robbie had a hand to play and it was a winner. He was the one who’d driven Kenya over half of London.

  The only exception to this ironclad rule had been that Lord Melrose or Lord Ardry bloke and that of course had been because of Patty Haigh. He had saved her life; that had got him through the door, but not really “in.” Even if he wanted to there was simply no way he could find the place on his own; there was no route he could remember, because there hadn’t been a “route” in the first place. His drive in the black cab had been as random as Robbie’s conveyance of the Kenyan bastard.

  Billy Burnsides, a popular cabbie, had once come close to being ostracized because he had nearly got his ninety-year-old grandfather into the pub, and would have, too, had Cliff Nugent and Clive Rowbotham not been leaving just as Billy and Gramps appeared in the lane leading to the front door. They stopped Billy and his granddad cold.

  “We don’t care if it’s the bleeding prime minister, Billy. You bloody well know the rules!”

  Billy had argued that Grandpa Burnsides had dementia and couldn’t find his own arse, much less the Knowledge, and would have forgotten the whole encounter by daybreak. Even though he suffered from dementia, somehow the fog of his brain had been lifted upon hearing about Billy’s pub, and he pled to go to it.

  Grandpa Burnsides had stood, short and thin and shivery, looking as if he had no idea where he was or whom he was with, and Cliff and Clive had turned both of them around and marched them back to Billy’s cab, Billy pleading all the while, saying it was his grandpa’s birthday treat, coming to the Knowledge, and Cliff saying that if he didn’t know where the hell he was, what difference could coming here or not make?

  Billy had a dozen arguments on the go, like plates in the air, and all of them as toothless as his grandfather, who was wearing his flat cap backward and yelling, “Fire!” and managing, slippery as butter, to get out of Cliff’s and Clive’s grip, and heading back to the lamplight of the Knowledge. Cliff and Clive herded him back to the cab.

  “You see, you see! You see how much it means to him,” said Billy.

  “For God’s sake, he don’t know where the fuck he is or who we are or who you are.”

  Billy said, “If he don’t know, how can he tell anybody else?”

  This irrational argument had continued for another five minutes, with the old man breaking free of the others and going back down the weed-covered lane to the pub. Back and forth, pulled like toffee, until Clive and Cliff finally stowed him in the cab, shoving Billy into the driver’s seat, slamming doors and yelling good night.

  And there were tales of bribes, threatened boycotts (How would that work? they wondered), and more than one arrest vowed by some frustrated cop or other who’d laid a bet he could find the place.

  Goddamn it! The bloody place had to be somewhere!

  But the bloody place just went on being nowhere.

  Which was why, on this particular evening around ten P.M., pints were halted halfway to mouths and cigarettes left burning fingers when a total stranger walked in and had the gall to ask, “Cab to the West End?”

  Bloody effrontery! Or some form of that thought flashed into the minds of the thirty or so drivers enjoying their usual seclusion and anonymity.

  The stranger was fairly tall, fairly young, and appeared t
o be outfitted like a mountaineer or rock climber with his tools and ropes and many-pocketed vest. He moved to the bar as if he were already in the West End at the Salisbury. He ordered a pint of best bitter, then looked around and smiled as if he were welcome.

  “Nice pub,” he had the further gall to say.

  The cabbies looked at one another at a total loss.

  Finally, Clive Rowbotham said, “Bloody ’ell, how’d ya’ find this place?”

  “How? I’m a mapmaker.”

  “Christ, boyo,” said Reed Keane, “You look like you couldn’t find your own dick, much less the Knowledge.”

  The fellow laughed. “The name’s Brian Moore. Glad to meet you.”

  But the hand thrust out toward Clive went unshaken. Meet who? Clive Rowbotham was quite famous for his willingness to carve places out with his fists at the slightest provocation. Or even without it.

  Brian Moore was unoffended. He shoved thumb and forefinger into one of his many pockets and pulled out a card, which he handed to the man nearest him, Brendan Small, one of the drivers who’d followed Robbie on that fateful night. Moore’s expression was bland and forgiving of everyone on God’s green earth.

  Which was to Robbie massively irritating. He did not want this arsehole’s well-meaningness or approval. All he wanted was to know how he’d had found the pub, so he could slam the door before a lot of other arseholes found it and came flooding though the door. “The thing is, Brian, nobody finds this place.”

  “Sure. That’s why we wanted to find it.”

  Robbie looked around for the rest of the ‘we’ and, barely glancing at the card in Brendan’s hand, said, “Soho office? Giggle? What the fuck’s that? A strip joint?”

  Brian laughed again as if laughter were his calling card. “Not Giggle, for God’s sake. Google. I’m from Google, mate. Google Earth.”