Rainbow's End

by Martha Grimes

  “To Wiltshire? I don’t—”

  Impatiently, Macalvie cut him off. “To Santa Fe, for God’s sakes.”

  Jury just stared at him.

  “Somebody’s got to go. I can’t, too big a caseload.”

  “You could reduce your caseload by staying out of New Mexico. Stick to Devon and Cornwall. No, I’m not going to Santa Fe.”

  Macalvie said nothing, just stood there in silent contemplation of the rondel depicting the murder of Thomas à Becket. For some reason, Jury felt he had to justify himself. “It’s pure coincidence, Macalvie. You’ve got nothing but an address in Ms. Hawes’s book there and the other woman’s an American—I assume—happens to live in Santa Fe. What? You think somebody killed her? Druids?”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  Shaking his head as if refusing, Jury still followed him up the nave.

  He knew he wasn’t going to like this.

  FIVE

  Macalvie pulled into the little car park on the other side of the short wooden bridge leading to the inner bailey of Old Sarum’s medieval castle. Four other cars belonging to the Wiltshire police were already there.

  “Old Sarum. A hill fort in the Iron Age,” said Macalvie, as they crossed the bridge over the moat. “The original Salisbury. Hard to believe.”

  “Humbling experience, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe for you.” Across the entrance near the ticket kiosk, crimescene tape marked off the area, that gaily colored tape the police used, a sunny yellow strand of it undulating in the wind, following a course up and around the stone remains of what had been the Bishop’s Palace.

  A hard knot of uniformed police stood up on the ramparts, turning as Macalvie approached. He showed them his identification. One of them addressed him as “Commander,” and with respect, although he was clearly puzzled, given the county Macalvie was “Commander” in. It wasn’t Wiltshire.

  “I asked Rush if this was okay,” said Macalvie, cheerfully neglecting to elaborate on Chief Inspector Rush’s reply. “This is Superintendent Jury, Scotland Yard CID.”

  That certainly came as a surprise to them. But they merely nodded when Macalvie said he wanted to have a look at this privy where the body was found.

  “ ‘Garderobe,’ it’s called,” one of Rush’s men corrected him with a nicety of diction Macalvie couldn’t care less about. His eyes were pale as ice and no warmer in expression.

  “Down there, Commander,” said another, more helpful. He nodded toward a deep stone well some fifteen or twenty feet downhill. Macalvie and Jury moved carefully down the footworn path. It required a bit of balancing to avoid sliding. They found themselves looking down into a deep well-like enclosure. Macalvie stared down into the privy for some time, and with almost as much concentration and intensity as he would have given it had the body been in situ.

  Jury had patience with people, but Macalvie had patience with evidence. He could look at something, turn it over for uncommonly long periods of time. Despite his irascibility and what his colleagues took for arrogance, his cut-dead attitude with anyone who got in his way, Jury knew his judgment was unerring, and his tenacity nearly legendary.

  But his patience with crime-scene particulars was, at the moment, getting Jury down. Jury did not want to be dragged into this. “Exactly what theory are you constructing?”

  “I’m not. I’m merely noting.”

  “When you start noting, I start getting nervous.” When Macalvie didn’t answer, just shaved him a look, Jury said, “You don’t have enough evidence to construct a theory, Macalvie. And God knows Rush isn’t going to share any evidence he might have with you. So what do you have to go on?” The question was rhetorical, since Macalvie had been constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing theories all during the three-hour drive from Exeter. “You know she’s an American, thirty, from New Mexico.”

  “Santa Fe. Her name is—was—Angela Hope.” He looked into a dark blue distance.

  “I don’t think you’re paying attention to me.”

  “I’m not.” Macalvie was looking south, toward the city of Salisbury. The modern Salisbury.

  And to the west, where the blue was beginning to fade, was a vat of dark gold.

  He squinted into the sun. “All Rush would tell me was her identity. The other bits I got from someone who owed me a favor. According to the ME, Angela Hope was very sick before she died. Vomitus traces. What’s that suggest to you?”

  “Nothing. For God’s sake, her neck was broken, among other things. Reason enough to die.”

  “You’re just like Rush, you know that?” Macalvie sighed. “Well, he wouldn’t tell me any more.”

  “If you were Rush, you wouldn’t want some other cop messing around your manor.”

  “He would do you, though.”

  Jury’s frown was puzzled. “Would do me what?”

  “Share the information. He talked to Angela’s cousin. I’d like to know what transpired, as they say.”

  The cousin had come from New Mexico to identify the remains. “Wiltshire police haven’t asked for any help from Scotland Yard,” said Jury.

  “No. But Scotland Yard could ask for help from the Wiltshire police.” Macalvie was down on one knee, sighting along the footpath to the edge of the garderobe. Jury tried to ignore the thought pushing to the surface. “Help for what?”

  “Your lady in the Tate.”

  Astonished, Jury started to move away, turned back. “Macalvie. What reasonable cause is there to connect an American breaking her neck at Old Sarum and a Brit pegging out in a London gallery?”

  Macalvie was still inspecting the path. “You left one out, Jury.”

  Jury stared at him. “Who?”

  “Helen Hawes. Of course, you don’t want to drag her in when you talk to Rush, or he’ll know I’m trying to get information.”

  “I’m not dragging her in, because I’m not talking to Rush.”

  Macalvie plowed on as if Jury hadn’t spoken. “The fact that Nell Hawes and your lady might both have died from the same cause. Probably you shouldn’t mention that.”

  “She’s not my lady, she’s A Division’s lady.”

  “Would you mind filling me in on the details? All I know now is what I scraped together from newspapers and the Yard’s information office. She keeled over, sitting on a bench in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate, landed on some citizen sitting beside her.”

  “Then you know it all.”

  Macalvie looked truly amazed. “How the hell could I know it all? I wasn’t there, much less was I first on the scene.”

  It was Macalvie’s firm belief that if anyone got to a crime scene before he did, ninety percent of the usable evidence would blow off into the stratosphere. Jury smiled. “Okay, I’ll describe it all in relentless detail. Remember, though, I wasn’t first on the scene. The gallery was full of people.”

  “Meaning they tramped all over everything.” Macalvie looked disgusted and shoved another stick of gum in his mouth. Why was the world up and about when somebody got killed?

  “I was in the Tate’s shop, the gift shop, when the commotion started. When I asked the guard, he told me a woman had suddenly died. They called West End Central; I just happened to be there and got there first.”

  “Stroke of luck.”

  “Not mine.”

  “A Division’s, I meant.”

  “Good Lord! Is that a compliment?” As Macalvie looked off noncommittally toward the tower ruins at the other end of the bailey, Jury went on. “The woman—Frances Hamilton was her name—who had been sitting on one of the benches in the Pre-Raphaelite collection suddenly fell to one side. The young lady beside her thought she was either being pushy or had fallen asleep, something like that—unfortunately, the girl was more interested in touching up her boyfriend than in the woman beside her. She wasn’t paying any attention to Frances Hamilton. Neither of them was until Mrs. Hamilton fell on her. No one saw anything out of the ordinary, from what I could see and hear. Remember, I was
n’t doing the questioning. Only the observing, after A Division and the ambulance got there. Coronary occlusion. Or a stroke.”

  “Which?”

  Oh, hell, thought Jury. “The pathologist wasn’t one hundred percent sure which. But she was on nitroglycerin, that was clear.”

  Macalvie’s eyes burned into Jury’s. “Coronary occlusion, stroke. Vague, but they’re still two different things, Jury.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Go on.”

  “With what? That’s it.”

  “That’s what you call ‘relentless detail’? What pictures?”

  Jury looked at him.

  “What painting or paintings was she looking at?”

  It had occurred to Jury, too, how much the painting she had been sitting in front of might have reminded her of her nephew. “The Death of Chatterton. The Henry Wallis painting.”

  “Great picture. But how do you know she was looking at it?”

  “I don’t. Do you think it’s important?”

  “Jury, I don’t know what’s important. Nell Hawes dropped over dead in front of some embroidered cushions. That doesn’t mean looking at them killed her. And it doesn’t mean it didn’t, either.”

  “The painting on one side was Holman Hunt. A man and his mistress at a piano. Sad . . . ” Jury shook himself free of this memory. “The other side, I don’t recall. Fanny Hamilton might not even have been paying any attention to the art when she died. She could have sat down to rest, period.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  When Macalvie appeared to be agreeing, Jury knew he wasn’t. “I expect the police closed the file on that one. The only reason I was in on it at all was because of a friend. A favor for a friend. Lady Cray. This Frances Hamilton had just lost her nephew. He was murdered in Philadelphia. Outside of Philadelphia.”

  “You told me. That’s what you went over there for.”

  “Frances Hamilton had gone to the States to see if she could help the police. She’d been back a couple of months when this happened, I mean, when she died.”

  They stood there in silence and the pale light of late afternoon. The three policemen, ranged about the garderobe, looked, in their dark uniforms, like narrow black monoliths.

  “What part of the States?” asked Macalvie.

  The question seemed to have no underpinning. “What do you mean?”

  “Your—pardon me—” Macalvie clamped his hands to his chest—“I mean, A Division’s lady. You said she’d been to the States. What states, exactly? Only Pennsylvania?”

  “Pennsylvania. Maryland.”

  “Nowhere else?” Macalvie had stooped down to pick up a stone or a bit of flint. He was studying it.

  An image surfaced in Jury’s mind; he let it sink again. “Macalvie, I swear to God you’re building this case just like those masons who had to raise the lintels at Stonehenge.”

  “Did she go anywhere else?”

  Another mental nudge. Jury felt uncomfortable. In his mind’s eye he watched Lady Cray’s hand turn the block of turquoise with the silver band, the silver flautist. He’s called . . . What? Jury tried to dredge up the name. Lady Cray had been holding it the way one does a talisman, an amulet, an artifact from which one draws strength.

  In like manner, Macalvie was turning his bit of flint. “You remembered something.” It was not a question.

  “Nothing important.” He’s called Kokepelli.

  “Something unimportant, then.”

  “Stop trying to read my mind.”

  Macalvie smiled. “But you’re so transparent, Jury.”

  Jury walked off a few paces to stand and look down into the garderobe. The fall had broken her neck. The fall, surely, had killed her.

  “The point is, Jury: what do you have to lose? Time, maybe; but we’re losing that anyway.”

  “I hate chasing will-o’-the-wisps.”

  Behind him, Macalvie laughed. “You do it all the time.”

  Jury couldn’t help but smile, then. “I still have no good reason to break into Rush’s investigation. Racer’d have me for breakfast. The commissioner would finish me off at dinner.”

  “But you wouldn’t be breaking into his investigation. You’d just be trying to illuminate our investigation. Hell, let Rush do his own investigating. Save me the footwork. Anyway, you don’t give a flying fuck for Racer. Or the commissioner. Don’t try to kid me.”

  “Our investigation?”

  “Of course, our. You said you wanted to transfer. So we can work this case together. You’d be on probation, naturally.”

  “I don’t think I want a transfer that badly.” Jury smiled. “I go much more for the obvious than you do. I’m Rush-ian, you might say.”

  “The hell you are. But you’re damned grumpy. You must be hungry. I know I am. Come on, I know a pub that’s got good food a few miles away.”

  The black monolithic figures that were the Wiltshire policemen were melting away into the shadows down the bank and seemed to have forgotten the two other, alien policemen.

  “Where’s the pub?”

  “Steeple Langford. Rainbow’s End.”

  Jury smiled. “So will it be there, or not?”

  “The pub?”

  “The pot of gold.”

  SIX

  Rainbow’s End was a quiet pub that had once had the advantage of traffic now diverted onto the A36. It backed onto a wide river that flowed through the Langfords, twin hamlets some twenty miles from Salisbury. It must have done a lot of dinner business, for the newish-looking dining room was surprisingly large.

  But Macalvie and Jury were in the older, much smaller saloon bar: brick and wood; handsome, upholstered Queen Anne chairs set around small tables; plenty of glass, gilt, and tulip-shaped wall sconces. Jury was reading a framed newspaper article (in which the pub got a mention, hence the framing) about New Agers trekking through the Langfords, leaving their philosophy (if one could call it that) and remnants of belongings along the way. New Agers. Jury felt strange, time-warped, having just come from Old Sarum and with the pub’s being so near to Stonehenge.

  “Fifteen million pounds to turn the landscape into what it looked like in 2000 B.C.,” said Macalvie. “Now, is there anything in that that strikes you as just a little wacky?” He was complaining about the expensive and extensive plans the National Trust and English Heritage had for revamping Stonehenge and putting in a new tourist center.

  Jury smiled. “It does, yes.”

  “I mean, what in hell did the landscape look like in 2000 or 3000 B.C.? Neolithic man we’re talking about. How do these architects know?” Macalvie brooded, studying his nearly empty pint of lager.

  They had moved to the dining room where they ordered the river trout and another pint of lager.

  After a moment, Macalvie said, “The hard thing is going to be to get Rush to check for poisons. And get the body in London exhumed.”

  “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Give me the bread.”

  Jury absently handed a wicker basket to him. “Actually, I don’t. Poison?”

  Macalvie answered obliquely by saying, “You can bet my lady’s going to get a going over. At least I control that much.”

  “And what poison are you looking for?”

  Macalvie was examining his empty glass as if he were going to dust it for prints.

  “You didn’t answer my question. You don’t know the answer, that’s why. So it shouldn’t take more than a millennium or two to identify this suspect poison.” Jury’s smile wasn’t very sincere. “You know how difficult it is if you don’t know what poison you’re looking for.”

  “I can eliminate, or the path guy can, obvious poisons. Tox testing can eliminate a lot more. A comprehensive serum and urine analysis will either turn up what it was or else eliminate hundreds of poisons.”

  Jury was getting impatient. “I don’t get it, Macalvie. Here’s a tourist who has an accident and ends up at the bottom of a well. The
fall killed her. Why’re you making something else of it?” But Jury knew why, although to give Macalvie a connection between Angela Hope and Helen Hawes was apparently to grant him an even more tenuous connection to Frances Hamilton. “If you’re trying to account for the sickness before this Hope woman died, maybe it was simply food poisoning.”

  “Possible. But not very likely unless they all took tea together.”

  This begging the question irritated Jury. “You’re already assuming the same thing killed all of them.”

  Almost innocently, Macalvie looked at him. “Of course.”

  Jury shook his head, turned toward the windows of the pub overlooking the river, becalmed in the evening sun. Jury watched the water, the chequered light coming through the trees. Near the opposite bank, a swan buried its head beneath its wing, drifting. And he thought about Stratford and Jenny.

  Macalvie frowned at his own thoughts, his eyes following the direction of Jury’s own, out where a smoking mist hung along the riverbank.

  Light gathered over the river, still and still gliding, glanced and darted through the dark branches as if the sun, in its slow descent, had fallen suddenly, then caught itself and now fanned out in a golden silt of light. Jury watched the swan, stationary as a paper cutout pasted against the water. Death seemed far away.

  “What are you getting at?” Jury asked it again.

  “Deep time,” said Macalvie.

  Jury looked at him as the waitress set down their dinners, told them to be careful of the plates. They were hot. “What’s ‘deep time’?”

  “The kind of time you think of when you see Old Sarum or Stonehenge. That kind of time. Deep time.”

  “Well, that explains it.” Jury separated his fish from the bone.

  “Like trying to think in terms of light-years. We can’t do it.”

  Jury watched him over the plate of succulent trout. Macalvie seemed to be tasting his thoughts, his words, and not his dinner. “Think of the king’s yard, Jury.”