“Of course it’s all right. But why?”
Melrose shook his head. “I don’t know. Just a thought. Do you suppose I could have copies of these to take along?” He held up the photos.
“Sure. I’ll have them made when I get to the Yard tonight and see you get copies in the morning.” Jury turned. “Oh, hullo, William.”
William Warboys was standing at his elbow, looking intent. As though the sudden appearance of his master signaled an ambush, Osmond made a dive for Melrose’s foot.
Melrose winced. “Good Lord, can’t you keep this hound on a lead?” He moved his foot in an are, trying to dislodge Osmond.
Ignoring this, William said, “I worked out who killed Weldon.”
“Weldon? Who killed Osmond would make a more satisfactory mystery.”
“It was Sidney.”
“Sidney? Sidney? I thought Sidney was Weldon’s best friend.”
“Well, he must not be, or he wouldn’t have killed him,” said William, reasonably. He then turned to Jury. “Want to go out back?”
“And what’s out back?” asked Jury.
“Graves. It’s a kind of cemetery. When something dies around here, I bury it.” William looked down at his notebook. “It’s where I get my inspiration.”
Said Melrose, “It’s where all of you get your inspiration.”
17
MACALVIE sat with his feet on Jury’s desk, his arms straitjacketed across his chest. His eyes shifted from watching Wiggins doctor his tea to the screen of a tiny portable television set, where an Oriental was detailing the joys of acupuncture. Wiggins kept the set in a filing cabinet and brought it out at noon every day for the acupuncture report.
“You’d think someone would’ve seen or heard something,” said Wiggins, depositing two seltzer tablets into his mug and watching the bubbles sprout over its puce-colored surface.
“Someone did.” Macalvie frowned. “What the hell’s that, Wiggins? It looks like something’s erupting in there.” His hand went out for the folder that Jury had just discarded on his desk.
“This headache’s fierce; it could turn migraine on me.” Wiggins sipped his tea.
Macalvie grunted. “You make it sound like a rabid dog. There are two dozen houses in Hays Mews. Someone’s not talking.”
“Did you get hold of Andrew Starr, Wiggins?”
“Yes, sir. Said we’d go round to his place late this afternoon.”
Macalvie’s hat was down but the blue eyes glowed under the brim. “You’d think twice about having me go to Covent Garden, I figure.”
Jury’s smile was blinding. “Not twice. Once. You’re welcome to talk to him once I’ve finished.”
“Thanks. What about this friend of Marr’s? Paul Swann?”
“Haven’t talked to him yet. He’s in Brighton.”
Wiggins shivered. “At this time of year.” He shook his head slowly.
“You can take off your coat, Macalvie. You won’t be contaminated by the local police.”
Macalvie undid two buttons. His eye wandered back to the TV, where the squirrel-like gibbering of the Oriental had been replaced by the news at twelve-twenty. Another terrorist attack at the Rome airport; a child drowned in the River Dart; an old man mugged. “Maybe there are things worse than murder,” he said.
“Maybe, but I doubt it.”
“Dante says —”
Jury looked up, startled. “Dante? You read Dante?” Jury opened another folder from the stack. “I never thought you had time to sit down and read a book.”
“I wasn’t sitting. An old guy was beaten up in his library. I was going through the books. He — Dante, I mean — puts it below murder: ‘Betrayal of friends and benefactors.’ Below murder, Jury.” Macalvie took his feet from the desk, held out his hand for a Fisherman’s Friend.
Wiggins was ripping open a package. “Getting a cold, sir?”
“No. I stopped smoking.”
“Good. How long?”
Macalvie checked his watch. “Half-hour ago.” He picked up a discarded folder. “What about this one? Says he was letting himself into his flat between eleven-thirty and midnight at that end of Charles Street.”
“The pub closed at eleven.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she was killed at eleven.”
“She wouldn’t have been hanging round in Hays Mews for an hour.”
Macalvie shrugged and tossed the folder on the desk. “No one can fix the time of death that closely. Although your pathologist didn’t appreciate my telling her —”
Jury rubbed his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing up in licks. He sighed. “Macalvie, stop prowling the corridors, will you? Leave forensics alone.”
Macalvie changed the subject. “This guy David Marr doesn’t have any kind of an alibi. The servants were gone, the machine could have picked up the call. The sister’s lying.”
“Occasionally someone tells the truth, Macalvie.”
Macalvie didn’t look convinced. He ran his thumb down the stack of folders. “Someone knows something.” He rewrapped his arms across his chest.
“What about Sheila Broome? Does someone know something there?”
“Of course.”
Jury looked at him. “Nothing’s turned up in ten months.”
“Something will.”
Jury picked up the telephone. “Jury here.” The call was from Constable Whicker, on duty in the lobby.
“There’s a lad down here, says his name is Colin Rees, says he may have something about the alleged murder in Hays Mews, sir.”
Jury could have told it was Whicker from the way he qualified everything. Where Constable Whicker was concerned, “fact” was a relative term, and he always relayed information with caution signs pointing to it as if Fleet Street might be listening.
“Have someone bring him up, Constable.”
Constable Whicker turned away from the telephone and there was a murmured exchange. “He appears not to want to, sir.”
“Okay. I’ll come down.” He hung up and said to Macalvie, “There’s a kid down in the lobby about the Hays Mews murder.”
Macalvie shoved back his hat and smiled.
• • •
Two lads. The older of them, Colin Rees, eleven or twelve with faded blond hair the color of Horlicks and eyes like pebbles, small and gray. He carried a cap in his hands that looked several sizes too big for him, which he kept mashing together and pulling apart as if it were an accordion. He had the thin, tense look of a child used to being pinched in the playground.
“You’re Colin Rees?”
“Colly, yes, sir.” The boy shook Jury’s outstretched hand. He was thin, with legs like spindles and fingers like dry twigs.
“I’m Superintendent Jury. This is divisional Commander Macalvie.” The boy nodded at Macalvie with the solemnity of an acolyte. “This here’s my brother, Jimmy. Say hello, Jimmy.”
That Jimmy, who was a stubbier version of Colly, wasn’t going to say “hello” was made clear by the head turned to the floor as if the eyes meant to drill a hole through the divisional commander’s shoes.
Colly Rees shrugged. “Jimmy never did talk much before Uncle Bub got after him about that lady and now he don’t talk at all. Uncle Bub said we was to stay straight out of it. Well, he’s not a proper uncle, he ain’t, but —”
“Let’s sit down, Colly. Jimmy?”
Jimmy stood like a stump, his eyes on Macalvie’s shoes.
Colly, sitting half-on, half-off one of the leather benches that lined the lobby wall, said to Jury, pumping up his lungs for another go, “What happened was, Jimmy and me was inside the pub —”
“What were you and Jimmy doing inside?” asked Wiggins, looking a little fretful at the possibility of a violation of the licensing laws.
“Oh, well, we was just waiting in the kitchen. For Uncle Bub. He kind of caretakes the place and he was closing up. Me and Jimmy’d come from the fillums down in Curzon Street.”
Jury looked up at M
acalvie, whose silence was being bought at the price of a stare that could have nailed Colly Rees to the wall. “Go on, then,” he said to Colly.
“It was Jimmy saw her. He was standing on a bench, looking out through the window at the rain.”
“Saw who?”
“This lady, sir. Well, that’s what Jimmy says. Now me, I was near the side door that was still open. And I heard someone running. It must have been the same lady, sir.” He was crushing his hat up into a ball in his earnestness.
“You heard her. You didn’t see her?”
Colly Rees shook his head impatiently and twisted his cap. “It was Jimmy done the seeing. Well, see, we neither of us dihn’t think nothing of it, just somebody running in the rain. It was only after we was watching the telly and heard the news about that lady getting —” Colly jerked his scarf about his neck. Wiggins winced.
“Okay. Go on, Colly.”
“Nothing to be going on with, except it was a lady.”
“Jimmy?” said Jury to the little one’s back. Jimmy Rees hadn’t moved an inch since he’d taken up his station by Macalvie’s shoes. And Macalvie, thought Jury, was making the supreme sacrifice: he hadn’t cuffed, slugged, or shouted at him.
Colly said: “Oh, you won’t get nothing outta Jimmy, sir. Acts like he’s deaf as a post when he wants to.”
“Didn’t he describe this lady?”
“No. ‘The rainlady’ he calls her.” He looked at his brother, whose head bobbed slightly like an apple on a branch, perhaps by way of confirmation.
Jury looked at Macalvie and back at Colly. “It was raining. Is that what he means?”
“I don’t know, sir, do I? Whenever I ask him all he says is, ‘ ’Twas the rainlady.’ He frowned at Jimmy’s back, as if this runic message better not pop out inside the walls of New Scotland Yard. “And Aunt Nettie she talked to him something fierce about telling stories, and give him a box round the ears, and give Uncle Bub one, too, for letting us stop in that pub. Said she’d do us both proper if we was to say anything about that night.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Aunt Nettie, Colly —”
“I don’t guess you would. She ain’t your aunt, is she? But she says she won’t let us watch the telly or have no sweets. Jimmy just loves the telly, that’s why he don’t talk much. He’d as soon let everybody else do it. I asked him and asked him, dihn’t I? And that’s all he says. ‘ ’Twas the rainlady.’ ”
Macalvie pried his eyes from the downturned head of Jimmy Rees and beamed them on his older brother. “You said you heard running footsteps. How’d you know it was a woman?”
“Well, I guess it had to be, dihn’t it, if Jimmy here saw a lady?” he said reasonably.
“That’s not what I asked: I asked what you heard.”
“She was running, sir. I mean, ‘it,’ ” he added as a quick qualification. “ ‘It’ was running, sir.”
Macalvie bestowed upon Colly a smile like splintered wood. “I mean, how could you tell she or he was running?”
With his tongue he made a clicking sound against the roof of his mouth: “It was them high heels. I never did know a man to wear them.”
“Running?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Walking fast, maybe.”
“Running.”
“Walking.”
Wiggins looked from Macalvie to first one boy and then the other. “Sir, does it make that much difference?”
Macalvie glared. “You decide if it’s the truth first. You decide if it makes a difference second.” He turned back to Colly. “Let’s say it was a woman,” he graciously allowed. “You wouldn’t have heard the tap of the heels; the heels wouldn’t have hit the ground if she’d been running. So she was walking fast.”
“Either way, she might have seen something, Macalvie.” Jury turned to Colly. “Okay, Colly, it was certainly brave of you to come here. Both you and Jimmy.”
Jimmy did not respond to pronouncements on heroism. He kept his eyes on the shoes.
“Sergeant Wiggins here can take you home. Where do you live?”
“Near Wapping Old Stairs, sir.”
Macalvie was tearing open another pack of gum. “I can do it,” he said.
“You?”
“Sure. Maybe get some sweets, some ice cream along the way. What do you say, kids?”
Colly said Jimmy liked chocolate flake; Jimmy did not confirm this.
Jury smiled and shook his head. There were moments when kids were just not going to open up — maybe later, but not now, chewing gum and chocolate flake notwithstanding. “Decent of you, Macalvie.”
“No problem. Maybe we can have a little talk about this lady.”
As if the voice were coming out of the floor and transmitted by the divisional commander’s shoes, Jimmy said, “ ’Twas the rainlady.”
PART IV
Stardust Melody
18
THE house in Knightsbridge faced one of those small green parks surrounded by a wrought-iron fence whose gate could only be unlocked with a key. There was no one else up and down the street and no traffic. Jury often marveled at the silence of such neighborhoods; even traffic kept its distance. Several blocks away cars and buses moved along Sloane Street. Jury looked at the cars parked in front of the house: a white Lotus Elan, dropped, really, like a blossom between the long, black Jaguar and the sable brown Mercedes. As he waited, an elderly woman with two Labradors unlatched the gate of the park and went in.
He looked above the door, at the stained glass and the pediment into which had been carved a coat of arms, now faded. The woman who opened the door, probably a housekeeper, was short and curt. If she was surprised at seeing Jury’s warrant card, she hid it well.
• • •
Hugh Winslow was a tall, spare man somewhere in his middle sixties who probably kept in shape by regular exercise on tennis and squash courts. His eyes were very blue in the sunlamp-tan of his face, the skin tight over the cheekbones, the complexion like parchment. The body relaxed when he settled into the deep armchair in which he had been, apparently, reading; his manner was that of a man who had solved all of his problems some time back, and he looked at Jury as if whatever had brought police to his door was either inconsequential or a mistake altogether.
“What can I do for you, Superintendent? Would you care for a drink?” He started to get up.
“No, thanks. I’d just like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Winslow, having to do with a young lady who was murdered four nights ago near a pub called I Am the Only Running Footman. Do you know it?”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“Your brother-in-law frequented it.”
“I’ve visited David a few times in Shepherd Market, but I’ve not been to that pub —” He broke off.
“I didn’t say Shepherd Market.”
Winslow fumbled for both cigarettes and words. “I was simply assuming—”
“I see. Perhaps you’ve talked with your wife or your brother-in-law?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
You should have thought of that before I did, thought Jury. “David Marr was, so far as anyone knows, the last person to see Ivy Childess alive. He’s in a spot. I wondered if you could tell me anything about him.”
“David and I see very little of one another, Superintendent. He comes here infrequently, usually when Ned is here.”
“Your son.”
“Yes.”
“And are you on good terms with him?”
Hugh Winslow’s answer was oblique. “He used to stay here when he came to London. Now he’s taken rooms in Belgravia.”
“But how do you get on?”
“Not very well. He’s excessively fond of his mother, though. They both are, Ned and David.” His smile was strained.
“What do you mean, ‘excessively’?”
Hugh Winslow stubbed out the cigarette and poured himself a whiskey. “I simply meant ‘extremely,’ that’s all. It’s not unnatural, especially where Marion is concerned
. She’s the sort of woman who calls up strong feelings in men.”
“In you, Mr. Winslow?”
He looked at Jury over the rim of his glass. “I don’t see what this has to do with — Miss Childess.”
Jury smiled. “Humor me.”
Winslow sighed. “Marion and I are somewhat — estranged. We have been ever since our daughter died.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter, Mr. Winslow.”
“Yes.” He got up and started to wander about the room aimlessly, poking up the fire, moving to the high window. Jury was reminded of Marion Winslow. “It happened just out there,” he said, nodding toward the street. “The man responsible wasn’t sentenced — it wasn’t, I suppose, his fault. He seemed, actually, a decent chap. Wells, or something, was his name.”
“Miles Wells. I’ve checked the accident report. Ten o’clock at night, wasn’t it?”
Abstractedly, Hugh nodded, continued his own train of thought. “Yes, I suppose so. It’s difficult being thought perfect, you know; that’s the way they seemed to think about Phoebe. It must have left her very little room to breathe. Like other children, she had a temper. She was only a little girl, not a holy icon. But everything seemed to change, with that.”
“Until her death, you and your wife were quite happy, were you?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“Yet, there were other women, Mr. Winslow.”
Hugh Winslow had returned to his chair by the fire. It was a dark leather wing chair, and again Jury was reminded of that meeting with his wife. An odd feeling, like déjà vu.
Hugh’s smile was a little chilly. “Well, that’s true. You might not understand it, but Marion is about the most perfect woman I’ve ever known —”
“And it was difficult for you to live with perfection.”
He nodded. “But if it’s David you’ve come about, you’d be better off asking Marion.” He started to pour himself another drink.
I Am the Only Running Footman Page 12