“I don’t want to know what you stop at. Actually, this involves putting on clothes.” He’d been unwrapping the parcels, and when she saw the sable she shot up from the sofa. “And there’s some money in it for you, Carole-anne.”
With her eyes glued on that sable, she said, “There’s some positions I don’t do, and no ropes and tie-ups —”
“Shut up!” He knew she talked like that just to get a reaction. Carole-anne Palutski probably hadn’t gotten many reactions that didn’t have a tab on them. It came to him with a small shock, that thought. For a brief moment, his command had penetrated the Glo Dee Vine mask, and he saw what Mrs. Wasserman saw, however misled her vision of it. Carole-anne looked innocent.
He thought of Carrie Fleet and his blood ran cold.
“Work, love.”
• • •
A half-hour later he was tapping his coded knock on Mrs. Wasserman’s door, and he had to admit, he didn’t think he’d have recognized Carole-anne Palutski himself.
Of course, she looked gorgeous, as he’d known she would. Though the dress was draped, there was still that tiny strain across the bust, but the rest of it hung in such gentle undulations that the body underneath was plainly not advertising. Jury thought of Gillian Kendall and tried to brush that thought away. But it was the paint job that was a marvel. Nothing flamboyant, she had gone at that makeup case with the eye of a surgeon. Outliner like a scalpel, lip-liner incised. Blusher like the real thing. Absolutely perfect. To top it, she looked ten years older than the ages she’d been doling out.
• • •
“French?” she squealed, on their way downstairs. “You crazy?” But her eyes and hands were all for that sable cape.
• • •
“Mr. Jury! What a surprise!”
It was. Mrs. Wasserman stared at Carole-anne with squinty eyes, eyes trying to adjust themselves to a totally different light. “How do you —?”
“Hey, babe,” said Carole-anne, chewing inexorably away at the gum Jury told her she’d have to park beneath a bench or behind her ear.
“Carole-anne?”
Carole-anne was pleased at the shock of recognition. “One and,” she said. “Come for the lesson. Only French I know is bonjour.”
Mrs. Wasserman smiled. “You pronounce it that way, dear, they will think you are Japanese.”
Carole-anne giggled. “You’re a right caution sometimes.” Then, from her queenly height (fortunately, she’d had the right shoes) she deigned to look at Jury. “He thinks I can learn to talk like a frog in ten minutes.”
“Right now you talk like a frog, dear. But French, you do not sound.”
Carole-anne giggled again. They must have been getting on like a house on fire.
Mrs. Wasserman fluted, “Bonjour, monsieur. II y a long-temps, Georges.” Arms folded, she looked hard at Carole-anne. “Repeat, please.”
Carole-anne had parked the gum. She repeated.
“Again.”
Again.
“ ‘Il faut que je m’en aille.’ Repeat.”
Carole-anne did so.
“Again. Three times.”
Three times.
After a few more phrases and few more repeats, the lesson was over.
“Thanks, Mrs. W.,” called Carole-anne, as the bolt shot home behind them in the basement flat.
Jury had reckoned on an hour. A phrase here and there. It had taken only fifteen minutes.
No wonder Carole-anne wanted to be an actress.
Twenty-four
Jury had parked the police car illegally near the Charing Cross Station, and Carole-anne reminded him he’d get a ticket. He handed her a card.
“A bloody baroness. Wherever did you get this? Is this me, then?”
“For the next hour. Then the coach turns back to a pumpkin.”
“You call this a coach, Super?”
He helped her out of her side of the Ford and watched, as they walked the two blocks down the narrow street, the looks of the men. And of the women, too. But the men tended to stop dead. Some of them were wearing bowlers.
Carole-anne could have stopped a beer lorry in the middle of the Ml. She didn’t even seem to notice the effect she was having. Then Jury noticed her lips were moving. Probably in the silent gutturals of the r’s that Mrs. Wasserman had so easily rolled from her throat.
• • •
In the marble foyer of the Regency, which was an unpretentious-looking, narrow building with only a brass plaque to bear witness to its name, a name that could be singled out by the select — which certainly didn’t include C.S. Racer, but miracles would happen. On its opposite wall outside was one of those little blue plaques which announced that a famous writer had written his classic novel on these premises. (A page of it, perhaps, thought Jury.)
There was, in the foyer, one of those old-fashioned sedan chairs in which now dozed the doorman. But he came to right swiftly when the door whished shut behind them.
Carole-anne whispered, “Bleedin’ morgue, it reminds me of.”
“Quiet,” said Jury, wondering if this could possibly work.
• • •
He felt almost remorseful for underestimating Carole-anne’s powers of persuasion. He certainly hadn’t underestimated the effect she had on the young man in white gloves behind the rosewood desk. At her Bonjour, monsieur, and its accompanying smile, the pen with which he’d been filling in something in a daybook stopped in midair.
“Ah, my’ah Anglais, ees not, you know, perfect.” Here came a tiny, deprecating shrug, as she handed him her card.
The bow dipped his head nearly to the counter. “Madame.” Meltingly he looked into her sapphire eyes. “If I could be of service.” Jury might as well have taken his place among the palm fronds and the marble statuary. If any question arose, he was to be her uncle.
“Mon ami, I weesh to speak with my old, ah, friend, Georges Dupres. He ees, how you say, manager?”
The young man — at least young, Jury thought, for the high-powered job of assistant manager at the Regency — seemed at a loss. “Madame! Please forgive me, but. . .” And then he flew off into a torrent of French as Carole-anne arranged her décolletage more winningly over the counter and looked sad.
What in the hell the fellow was saying, Jury didn’t know, and was afraid this would dish it right here —
No. Carole-anne put her hand, in what might have been a forgiving gesture, on his arm. Jury was sure her eyes were silvered over with tears, given the way the assistant manager looked at her. She shook her head, she sighed, she said, turning to Jury, “Mon oncle.”
And then she went to sit on a damask dais, removing from her small bag a lacy handkerchief.
Mon oncle went over to her, smiling sweetly, patting her on the shoulder, and saying, “What the hell are you doing?” It was out of earshot — though lord knew the way he stared at the new Baroness Regina de la Notre, the assistant manager might have had far-reaching antennae.
Through her brimming eyes, Carole-anne smiled soulfully up at Jury and said, “Why bother with George-bloody-Dupres? Not with this other one locked up.”
She rose, she turned, she waved a sad farewell and, to Jury’s amazement, started toward the door.
The assistant manager might have been wearing electric shoes, the way he sprang from behind the desk and grabbed her arm. Then let his hand fall, aware that he might have contaminated a guest of the Regency. “If there is some way I can be of assistance, madame?” Oh, the look of hope.
“How kind of you,” said the baroness, throatily. And then mumbling, “. . . il fait un temps . . .” Carole-anne shook her head, probably wondering how to use up her short supply of French phrases.
“Anything, madame.”
As if it were but a sudden inspiration, she snapped her leather-gloved fingers, and drew from her purse the picture of the servant and the dog. Jury didn’t think there was much chance of the assistant’s going back eight years but what the hell?
The man could barely take his
eyes from Carole-anne long enough to glance at the picture. He shook his head and said he was sorry, but. . .
“Ah, ees the, how you say, livery of the Regency. Uniform. She was maid? Waitress? Non?” Carole-anne flipped the snapshot over. Amy Lister.
To Jury’s surprise, the penny dropped. It was gratitude more than surprise that registered in the assistant manager’s face. He remembered. He even allowed himself a chuckle. “Of course. The Listers.” Then he looked like a chicken with its head in the wringer. He’d got the Listers straight, but. . . “It wasn’t the maid you were wanting? You’re right, that is our livery, but I’ve never seen the maid. Only the dog, the Alsatian. It was always with the Listers. That’s what I remember.”
Carole-anne gave him such a lovely look as she shook her glowing, chignoned head, that he started rattling on about the Listers. He stopped rattling when he saw her drop her head in her hand —
For Christ’s sake, Jury wanted to shout. He’s telling me what I want to know. What are you on about —?
Again, Carole-anne put her smooth little hand on his arm. “Ah, mon ami...”
She was going to do that stupid phrase to death. He felt like trampling on her tongue. He stood there, instead, her smiling oncle.
“. . . eet ees the Baron Lister I look for —”
Oh, bloody hell! The silly little twit was so much into her role she didn’t even know why she was there anymore.
The manager looked confused, sad, displeased with himself for not being able to produce the Baron Lister. “I’m most dreadfully sorry. Far as I know, there was never a Baron Lister. Would Lord Lister do?”
Lord Lister. Address, Carole-anne.
Her smile was small, sad. She raised her gorgeous face to the heavens and said, “Si.”
Si? Oh, wonderful.
Blushingly, she changed it. “Oui. Myself, mon ami, I travel so much, I sometimes forget which country I am in.” A batting of thick eyelashes went with this.
Jury envisioned the coast of Spain. Ocean. Shoving the Baroness Carole-anne right into it. Inwardly, he laughed at himself. What he really wanted was to see Carole-anne in a bikini. What the hell was she doing now?
She had handed the assistant manager a tiny address book. He was writing in it, sending up furtive looks to those jewellike eyes. He nearly clicked his heels as he handed it back. “Ma’am!”
Jury felt if he didn’t sit down he’d fall down at this breathless leavetaking. How’d she got his name?
“Henri. Mon ami. . .”
I’d rather talk to Racer.
“. . . Vous serez toujours dans mon souvenir.”
Henry swayed and as she called over, flutingly again, to Oncle Ricardo, Jury again imagined the Costa del Sol. But Uncle Ricardo, having done nothing at all, merely smiled, and said, together with the baroness, “Bonjour, mon ami.”
• • •
It was all of that thinking of Sunny Spain that had left him sun-mad, he knew. She sat there, gibbering away in the car and jouncing her gorgeously stockinged leg, and poking him in the ribs.
“So how’d I do, then, Super? We got the goods, right?”
“We did, mon amie.”
• • •
Mrs. Wasserman was peeking through her heavy curtains. Jury wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been watching out ever since they’d left.
Carole-anne scooted from the car and down the stairs to the basement flat, Jury following.
“Bonjour, madame,” said Carole-anne, unwinding her sable cape with a bullfighter’s expertise and dropping it on a convenient chair. “ ’Ello, Mrs. W. Lemme get these bleedin’ heels off. I could drop where I stand.”
Mrs. Wasserman clasped her hands together, looking at her star pupil. “You did well, Carole-anne?”
“Perfectemente. Right, Super?”
“Perfectemente.”
Carole-anne, shoes off — and apparently dress coming off, before Jury stopped her — said innocently, “But I thought you had to get this stuff back to the false-face store.” She stopped in the middle of unzipping.
“Later, Carole-anne. Right now I have to get myself into Lord Lister’s good graces and back to Hampshire.”
“You was to take me to din-dins, Super,” she said, pouting.
Mrs. Wasserman gave him a look that might have been scathing, but she snatched it away.
“I’ll take you to din-dins when I get back. Keep the gear”— Jury was writing on the back of one of his cards — “and tomorrow, love, go to this chap. Adios, señora, señorita.”
He could hear the gaggle of voices as he ran up the steps. “. . . a bloody the-at-rical person. ’Ere now, Mrs. W. Is he pulling my leg?”
“Never would Mr. Jury do that . . . but he might like to . . . .”
Their mixed laughter could be heard even as Jury got into his car, smiling. It was the first time he’d heard Mrs. Wasserman return to her girlish, giggling youth. Bless your heart, mon amie, thought Jury, pulling away from the curb.
Before he went to Woburn Place he called New Scotland Yard and got a run-down on Lord Lister: Aubrey Lister, granted a life peerage in 1970, chairman of the board of one of London’s most powerful dailies until he retired ten years ago.
And Jury sat at a red light, engine idling, thinking his brain was too as he looked up the road marker on the side of a building.
Fleet Street.
Some part of Carrie’s mind had unearthed, like a fox’s covert, that scrap of memory. Though she must have no idea why she’d chosen a name that everyone in London connected with the world of newspapers.
Jury put his head on his overlapped hands on the steering wheel while the Mercedes behind him got very impatient.
Twenty-five
The house in Woburn Place looked as if it had remained unchanged through decades of Listers, kept to its original brass fittings, its stained-glass fanlight, newel post, rosewood table in the entrance-room sitting on a Belgian carpet so silky it reflected the dim light. The room’s only concession to the present was converted gaslight, frosted tulip lampshades, the fixtures within now electrified.
The maid who admitted Jury was dressed in starched pearl-gray and a lace cap. It was to her he had shown his warrant card — just routine, of course, he’d said. He’d like a word with Lord Lister. The maid had been well trained to register no surprise. Vagrant, Minister, Scotland Yard — whoever appeared on the stoop at Woburn Place would be dealt with calmly. Still, looking up at Jury she had to adjust both her expression and her Victorian cap. “Have you a personal card, sir?” She smiled.
“Sorry. Of course.” Jury dropped one of his cards on the salver on the marble table. She nodded. “Shan’t be a moment, sir.”
Whatever the maid’s origins — the fens, the North, Manchester, Brighton — traces of that accent had been overridden by the West End. She had gone into a double-doored room on his left, carefully pulling them shut behind her.
In a moment she reappeared. It was almost a smile of relief she gave him, while telling him that Lord Lister would see him now.
• • •
If it was merely a conferred, a life peerage, one would never have known it from the demeanor and bearing of Lord Lister. No matter he was a smallish man, thin and drawn and in his seventies, his confidence spread, like the fan of sunlight coming through the high windows behind him. And he was, as all powerful men would have you think, a simple man.
“How interesting, Superintendent. Haven’t a dog’s notion why you’re here, but it makes a change. Tea?”
He did not wait upon Jury’s acquiescence. Lord Lister pressed a button on one side of the marble mantelpiece.
“Thank you. I could use it.” He doubted Aubrey Lister was a man who wasted his time over small talk. “It’s about this snapshot, sir.” Jury took the snap, creased by now, from his pocket and handed it over. “Nothing that’s a police matter, maybe. Only, I’m interested.”
Lord Lister, who had reseated himself on a sofa covered in watered silk, too
k out a spectacle case and said, “Not a police matter.” He smiled over his spectacles. “Yet here you are, Superintendent.”
Jury smiled. “We lead other lives, Lord Lister.”
Jury had caught the old man before he’d barely glanced at the picture. His tone was kind, but he said, “Then we should not lead them on police time, should we?” The corners of his mouth twitched.
Jury was glad he was enjoying himself. He did not want to upset this man, living here alone as he did — if one discounted a plethora of servants belowstairs. But he especially did not want to upset him on the errand on which he had come.
“I’m sorry. I do not recognize this picture. Should I?”
“Not necessarily. I was hoping you would.” Jury immediately put out his hand for the snap, pretty sure the snapshot would be withdrawn. And that his lordship would look at it more keenly.
“Turn it over,” said Jury.
Lord Lister adjusted his spectacles as if that might clear the cobwebs from his mind. “ ‘Amy Lister.’ ” He looked up, his glance around the room leaving out Jury, falling on the mantelpiece and a small collection of gold-framed pictures. Then at Jury. “You’ve found Carolyn?”
“Sir?” All Jury could do now was play the innocent.
“My granddaughter, Carolyn. Amy was Carolyn’s dog. This is Carolyn’s Alsatian. And the woman —” He shrugged. “A servant of some kind. What do you know about Carolyn?”
“I’m not sure I know anything.”
Lord Lister tapped the snapshot. “Then how’d you come by this?”
The tea was delivered by the amiable, if starched, maid. The maid poured, asking Jury how much sugar he desired.
“A couple named Brindle found a little girl years ago in a wooded area on Hampstead Heath, dazed. They’d gone there for a picnic. She didn’t seem to know how she’d got there, who she was. All she had was a small purse containing a few pence and this picture. And a very bad head wound.”
Lord Lister was clearly shocked. “We supposed she’d been abducted. You’re suggesting someone tried to kill her?”
“I don’t know.”
Lister looked again at the snapshot. “I wonder why the person responsible didn’t take the picture?”
The Deer Leap Page 14