Wiggins pursed his lips. “I don’t honestly believe it’ll work, of course; I was just—”
“Wiggins, I’m not negotiating; get the bloody bowl out of our office.” He smiled. “Out!”
Mustering all of his self-command, Wiggins rose stiffly and moved over to the window, remarking how exposure to the Crippses did seem to coarsen a person.
“Uh-huh. You’ll find out just how much it coarsens a person when I paint you blue and run you stark past Racer’s door.” Jury shrugged out of his coat and sat down again. He looked down. “And be careful of the damned wire!”
But the sergeant was already holding the bowl in one hand and the wire upended in the other and heading for a tiny sink in the corner of the office. He was clearly unhappy about the experiment’s being aborted in this way.
“Never mind, Sergeant. Maybe I can get an electrician to build you a miniature electric chair.”
“Very funny, I’m sure.” Wiggins reseated himself before his own steaming bowl. “Had your lunch?”
“No.”
“Care for some soup? It’s only instant chicken noodle, but it looks quite tasty.”
Soup. Jury frowned over at the bowl. Suddenly, he was reminded of Jenny Kennington and her message—her ostensible message—to Carole-anne. He plucked up the receiver, dialed the Stratford number. He let it ring eleven times before he sighed and gave up.
“No thanks,” he said when Wiggins asked him again.
“Well, it’s about all I can take after that visit to the Crippses. Puts you straight off your food, that place.” He lowered his voice as if White Ellie might be listening. “When I stepped into the kitchen you know what I found?”
Jury was scanning the mess of papers on his desk. He didn’t want to know. “What?”
“The half-loaf had a hole right in the center and when I asked that one—Batty?”
“Petey.”
“—why the bread had this big hole through it, he said, ‘Had to get rid of the mold, dihn’t I?’ ” Wiggins shivered.
Jury laughed. It was a fair imitation of squealing Petey’s voice. He stacked the papers, then flipped through the messages. None from the commissioner. None from an ax-murderer. None from Jenny. Worthless. He shoveled them into a desk drawer. Now his desk was neat. He smiled.
“Did you talk to Lady Cray?”
“No. To her nephew. And the nephew’s fiancée. Turns out Frances Hamilton was on medication for a heart problem.”
“Which is what the pathologist said. Natural causes. You think the coronary was induced by something? Some shock?”
“Macalvie thinks so, with the woman in Exeter. Helen Hawes.”
“But what’s the connection?”
“The American Southwest. The women were both there at the same time.”
Wiggins frowned. “That’s a bit tenuous.”
Jury nodded. But he was thinking about Gabe’s description of Frances Hamilton leaving the Swagger Portrait exhibit so hurriedly. As if she were going to be sick. “Gastric lavage,” Jury said.
“Pardon?”
“To remove poisons from the system, vomiting is induced.” Jury sighed, leaned forward. “Well, I expect it wouldn’t kill me to have a chat with this DCI Rush.”
Wiggins said, after tasting another mouthful of soup, “I was thinking about taking a bit of a holiday myself.”
But the prospect, thought Jury, did not appear to excite him. “You look a little glum, Wiggins.”
“Frankly, sir, with you gone . . . well, I haven’t all that much to do.” He waved his free hand over his desk, cluttered with files. “Paperwork, that’s about the size of it. Stuff nobody else will do.”
He didn’t have to explain that Jury himself was the only detective at New Scotland Yard with much of a demand for Wiggins’s services. Wiggins, Jury had always felt, was underappreciated. His colleagues put Wiggins down as a rather irksome burden, with his pills and nostrums, neglecting to see that the sergeant’s particular eccentricities were the very things that made him valuable. Witnesses were willing to talk to Wiggins; they forgot he was a cop. You don’t much want to discuss the fact you fiddled an extra tuppence from the Social with some ice-eyed policeman flashing a shield, any more than you want to discuss your gimpy knee with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The phone rang and Wiggins plucked it up, listened, said, “I’ll tell him.”
“Tell me what?”
“It’s Fiona again. She’s really upset. The guvnor’s threatened to have Cyril taken away.”
“He’s been threatening that for years.”
Impatiently, Wiggins said, “No, but this time he’s got the cat locked up in a cage and won’t let him out. He told Fiona to call the RSPCA to come and get him. I left a message, did you get it?”
“I’m not here, remember? Yes, I expect it’s in the stuff I tossed out. Thought it was Racer wanted me, not Fiona.” Racer seemed to wait, like a motorcycle cop, for Jury to crash through his speed zone. The radar gun could always pick him up.
Jury put his feet on his desk and asked, “So are you going to Manchester?” Manchester was Wiggins’s only getaway destination.
Grimly, Wiggins nodded.
“Hardly a holiday.” It would be Wiggins’s sister and the sister’s kiddies. Jury knew exactly how that felt. He himself had a sister and nephew and nieces in Newcastle. No more a Provence or Saint Kitts than was Manchester. His colleagues were always prodding Wiggins to take his hols in a sun-drenched or snow-drenched clime. Swim, Wiggins; ski, Wiggins. That was the same as giving him a choice between skin cancer and a broken leg. How fucking patronizing people were, Jury thought, falling in step with Wiggins’s own depression, seeing him alone on some foreign shore or foreign mountaintop.
Jury was up and flicking his jacket from the chair back. “I’m going over to the Starrdust, Wiggins. To see Carole-anne. That is, if Her Glossiness is working today.” Sergeant Wiggins loved the Starr-dust in Covent Garden. “Not official, but you can come, if you like.”
Wiggins sighed. “No, sir. I’ve all this paperwork to do on that Soho restaurateur.”
Or “the Chink-restaurant business,” as Racer always put it. It’d been going on for ages, for years. Jury moved towards the small sink.
“But aren’t you going to do something about Cyril?” Wiggins was anxious.
“Yep.” Jury was studying the wire, following its length to see where it connected up.
• • •
“UZ A ARUH CUH, or iz zat ser Cyuhl?”
Fiona Clingmore’s diction was somewhat impaired by a white hankie pressed to her mouth. On the desk lay a lip outliner, a lipstick, and a mirror, waiting to repair the damage done by tears.
Jury, leaning on the water cooler, said, “Never mind, Fiona. It’ll be all right.”
Fiona wailed, unknotted the handkerchief. “This time he means it. I’m to call the RSPCA.”
“Hullo, Cyril,” Jury said.
The cat Cyril sat inside the wire cage in kingly fashion, tail lapped around his feet. He watched the water cooler; he liked the bubbles made when someone used it; the paper cup, usually full of water, that sat beneath the spigot provided him with a number of possibilities for experiment.
“He’s on a rampage.”
Racer on a rampage. “What else is new?”
Jury walked into Racer’s office.
• • •
“JUST WHAT in hell are you doing here, Jury?” Two minutes later, Chief Superintendent Racer appeared. His eye fell immediately to the dish on the edge of the table. “And what in the hell’s a dish of water doing on my desk?”
“It’s a mousetrap, actually.” Jury placed the coiled cord beside it. He cleared his throat. “Not just a dish of water. Friend of mine invented it. Want to see how it works?”
No mouse, to Jury’s knowledge, had ever been seen; none would want to hang around Cyril. Or Racer, for that matter.
“NO, I do not want to see how it bloody works! Get it out of here.”
“What’s the cord for? Those wires are stripped, for God’s sake.” Racer was leaning across the desk.
Jury shoved the dish back again. He uncoiled the wires. “One end is placed so. . . . ” He demonstrated. “The other you hook up to an electrical source. Voilà—goodbye, mouse.”
Racer blinked, first at the water contraption, then up at Jury. “That’s ridiculous.” He sounded uncertain.
“Mice love water. It’s a little-known fact.” It certainly was. He sat there and watched the wheels in Racer’s mind going around. At least, he supposed there were wheels in Racer’s mind; it was just that they seldom engaged.
Racer’s smile came very slowly. And meanly. He hit the intercom and the weepy voice of Fiona came over it.
“Miss Clingmore, you can cancel that call to the animal catchers. Oh, and when you come back from the tea break Her Majesty has seen fit to grant to every layabout in the government, bring me a pint of milk.” He flicked off the intercom. “So what in hell do you want, man? Thought you were dead.”
“If wishes were horses,” said Jury, walking out.
THIRTEEN
Covent Garden.
Jury got out of the car and stood looking over at the collection of shops that was now Covent Garden. It hadn’t been so long ago that the old vegetable and fruit market had stood in that spot—a dozen or so years, perhaps?—before it had gone, taking its noise and grime and porters and cabbages with it.
When he’d been a lad, living in the Fulham Road, he’d come down here in Saturday dawns to watch them unload the trucks and set up the stalls, to listen to them yell and curse as they ripped the tops from crates and tossed the lettuces about.
Now here were a neatly tiered arrangement of health food and herbal shops; bookshops and boutiques; espresso bars, restaurants, and the inevitable ice-cream emporium. Jury sometimes thought if he saw one more Häagen-Dazs place he’d throw up.
Bound to be a Crabtree and Evelyn in all of this, so he crossed the cobbled courtyard and looked at the directory. Yes, he was right. He stopped to watch three acrobats with painted faces entertaining the crowd and was glad at least that Covent Garden provided a venue for live entertainment, although it tended to be canned and programmed. Searching out the Crabtree and Evelyn store, Jury looked over the rail, down into the well of lower-level shops and a yuppie pub called the Crusted Pipe. As far as split-level malls went, he supposed Covent Garden was rather a nicer one, perhaps with a bit more quaint than most—but it was still a mall.
He found the shop and purchased the potpourri and a silver-lidded jar to keep it in.
His route back across the cobbled yard brought him close to the flower market. But he didn’t stop.
He must stop this reminiscing; he really must.
• • •
THE STARRDUST TWINS, Meg and Joy, were watching the sky. The “sky” in Andrew Starr’s little establishment was the ceiling, which had been recently changed—by Meg and Joy, and they were viewing their handiwork. Behind artificial clouds which hung suspended from a freshly painted and stormy-looking sky, bright yellow lightning flashed. Somewhere, thunder rolled.
Off, on, off, on. Splintered light dashed across the ceiling. Meg applauded; Joy clasped her hands beneath her chin and jumped a little. It worked.
“Heat lightning,” said Meg. Or Joy. Jury tended to confuse them, not that they looked so much alike, but that they were so much alike. They were Andrew Starr’s shop assistants and they were in charge of the window—and in this case, of the ceiling. The Starrdust front window had become a major attraction on this little street, full of mechanical and electrical marvels dreamed up by Meg and Joy and far more entertaining than the Covent Garden performances. Jury had had to wade through a dozen appreciative kids outside, for the window had also changed recently.
Jury gazed up at the splendid ceiling. “It’s wonderful. Where’s Andrew?”
Still with their eyes on the ceiling, they pointed (both of them) toward the shadowy length of the shop. It was a very dark little shop. But that was part of its charm, for what lights there were seemed to swim toward the customers, veiled, misty, and moving.
The curtain of Madame Zostra’s (aka Carole-anne Palutski’s) silken tent was certainly moving, for a woman came racing out of it, slamming into Jury with the roughest of “pardon me”s and a face that looked infused with some of that heat lightning. She parted Meg and Joy as if she were Moses and rushed out of the door.
Carole-anne emerged from the tent and moved right across to the cake being cut up by Joelly, a newly hired stock girl who usually came to work with her three-legged dog. Its name was Joe. On the counter sat the richest-looking chocolate cake Jury had ever seen, with the tallest cap of deep chocolate icing he could imagine. It stood up in licks and spits, and Carole-anne’s index finger was wending its way through a few of the spits.
“Super! Want some Chocolate Sin? That’s what it’s called.”
“No, thanks.” Jury never ceased to wonder how Madame Zostra kept that figure that could send all the traffic in Piccadilly Circus running counterclockwise. “Your client seemed upset.” Carole-anne told fortunes. Sometimes with palms, sometimes with cards, lately with skulls, but never with accuracy.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” She accepted a slab of cake they could have used for the cornerstone at Canary Wharf.
“What’s a shame?”
“Her hubby’s having an affair—” a largish chunk of the cornerstone was forked into her mouth—“whim a tartith li’ seketry—”
It was like listening to Fiona talking to her mashed-up hanky. “Tartish secretary? That what you said?”
Carole-anne nodded.
Jury frowned. “And why was she confessing this to you?”
“Oh, it was me told her, naturally.”
Jury’s frown deepened. “And just where did you come on this nugget?”
“Wavelengths. I’m psychic, you know.”
Don’t comment, a small voice warned. He commented. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know.”
Carole-anne pressed the tines of the fork down into chocolate crumbs. “Oh, yes. Even when I was ever so little, I seemed to be able to see things nobody else could.” She licked the fork.
“You still do.”
The sarcasm went unnoticed. “Well, that’s what I’m telling you. I expect you don’t know anything about the New Age?”
Don’t comment; the voice was more alarmed. Jury knew that to ignore this warning would be to lose himself in the labyrinthine ways of Carole-anne’s circuitous conversational routes. If he pursued this absurd New Age thread, he would only have himself to blame when he ended up staring at the Minotaur. He looked from her lapis lazuli eyes up to the lightning-bolted ceiling and wondered if Zeus would toss one at him. . . . My God! She already had him going in circles. Don’t comment, don’t comment, the voice clattered.
He commented. “What I know about the New Age is that its followers wear their hair long, travel in caravans, and end up in Wiltshire or Sedona, Arizona.” In his mind’s eye, Jury saw the newspaper clipping on the wall of the Rainbow’s End.
The Minotaur had herself another helping of cake. Plop went the slice onto her plate. “See, the New Agers know all about raising your consciousness. We’re all of us a little psychic, if only we practiced. Even you.” She looked him up and down. “More or less.”
“In other words, even I could have told your unfortunate lady her hubby was getting it on with his shorthand typist.”
“No. And one wouldn’t put it like that.”
“Wouldn’t one? Well, one certainly messed up one’s relaying of Lady Kennington’s message.”
“Ohhh.” Disgust. “Are you still on about that? I told you—”
“ ‘Soup’ was the word. Did she tell you—now think carefully—that she was ‘in the soup’?”
Dawn broke. Jury could see from the way her mouth dropped, her fo
rk stopped midair, and her blue eyes shone with sudden light that she really had made an honest mistake. Anyway, he knew Carole-anne well enough to know that if anyone (pretty ladies included) left a message suggesting trouble, she’d make sure to convey it.
“Wait a tick. That is what she said. Gee, Super . . . ” The beautiful eyes looked ceilingward, as if calling on the psychic powers that had temporarily deserted her.
“Never mind.” He smiled at her.
The blue eyes regarded him. Sympathetically, slightly patronizing. “Well, maybe you are.”
“Am what?”
“Psychic.”
A thunderclap made both of them jump. Zeus commenting.
2
INSTEAD OF unpacking and repacking his suitcase (which Jury considered an absurd waste of time) he decided to open the bag and let the contents air. While this airing proceeded in the living room of his flat in Islington, Jury looked at his mail—his bills and circulars—and stared at his telephone, thinking he really must buy an answering machine, much as he hated them. His flat was not a touchstone of technological wizardry: no VCR, stereo, CD player, voice mail, fax machine, or surround sound (unless Carole-anne’s conversations counted). At the moment he didn’t even have a television. It was not a snobbish disdain for what the telly had to offer; it was because he had loaned his set to Carole-anne. He calculated, as he went into his kitchen for coffee, that the loan had taken place about a year ago. Once, when he was up in her second-floor flat, watching some mindless show and drinking beer with her, he had asked her how she got around the TV licensing fee. She’d said she had a “special arrangement” with the installer. This had been in her pre-Starrdust days, so she wasn’t providing free palm readings, and Jury was curious as hell as to how she had hoodwinked the licensing authority.
The kettle whistled (despite his standing there watching it) and he stirred instant coffee into a cup. No matter what brand he used or how strong he made it, instant coffee always tasted watery and metallic.
Back in the living room, he tried ringing Jenny again. Still no answer. He sipped the coffee that tasted of nickels and stared at the telephone, willing it to ring. It didn’t. He sat down and shook out the paper, looking for a follow-up account of the death in Wiltshire. It should have provided the media with a bit of gristle, if not with meat. He was surprised that no columnist had capitalized on the bizarre resting place of the dead woman, hinting, perhaps, at arcane religious rites and sacrificed virgins. Something like that. Here was a column on the inside pages, but not much, and nothing new. Detective Inspector Gordon Rush’s name figured prominently, but his comment was “No comment.”
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