Vertigo 42

by Martha Grimes

  “She said, ‘I know. Your name is John McAllister. Mine’s Tess Williamson. Do you mind if I call you Mackey?’

  “I shook my head so hard I must have looked like a dog shaking off water. I nearly cried I was so happy that someone wanted to call me Mackey. She told me she was having a party at her house and would I like to come? I had no idea how she knew my guardians, nor did I care. I just said yes.

  “So she took me by the hand and said, ‘Then come on, Mackey.’ ”

  He went on to tell Jury of his introduction to the Williamsons’ house in Knightsbridge and how he met the others—Mundy and Kenneth, Arabella and Veronica and Hilda Palmer. How, in the next two years, Tess supported him, championed him, encouraged him to do great things. She realized his potential, even at his young age, and was determined he would become, well, what he had become. Although Dr. McAllister didn’t put it that way at all.

  He told Jury that when Tess was accused of the murder of Hilda Palmer all of them knew it was a lie. No matter what police said, no matter what evidence was turned up, they knew it was impossible. The hand of God would more likely have come down and pushed Hilda Palmer into that dry pool than the hand of Tess Williamson.

  The evidence had turned out to be completely circumstantial and spurious. And she wasn’t indicted and all five of the children went crazy with joy.

  And except for Mundy Brewster’s mother, who had some sense, the others—the Stracheys, the Lewises, the Hastingses, Mrs. D’Sousa—none of them would allow their children to see Tess.

  “ ‘Tainted’ or other things equally stupid was what they said. ‘You just can’t be sure about her’ was what they said. And of course the Palmers, or at least Mrs. Palmer, would never give up thinking Tess had shoved Hilda into that pool.

  “The day she died—that was the darkest day of my life. It was like my parents dying all over again. The funeral. Mundy had a Morris Minor. She was sixteen or seventeen by then; she could drive. We all arranged to meet, even Veronica got away from her mum. Mundy picked us all up and we went. Nothing would have kept me from going. I had to say good-bye, you know, properly.”

  Silence fell. Jury finished his coffee. He could think of nothing to say and finally rose to leave.

  “Thanks, John. I’ll see myself out.”

  He did. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned at McAllister’s voice.

  “Without her,” he said, “I’d be nothing.”

  ____

  Across the hall, the fight appeared to have been stalled or stopped.

  But there was a new noise that Jury couldn’t place. He couldn’t determine the source, the direction from which it was coming. It sounded like growling and then whining. He thought at first the sounds were coming through the broken window at the end of the hall.

  As he walked toward the stairs, he reached the lift with its OUT OF ORDER sign. The growls and whines were coming from the lift shaft. The floor indicator stood now on number four. He was on three. He pressed the down button and waited. The sounds were not loud, but chilling—the scuffle and whine—as the lift passed his floor without stopping.

  Jury made for the stairs at a run.

  The kids were still in place on the ground floor. They didn’t see him coming, not at first, because their attention was totally fixed on the floor indicator. They were watching the lift descend. They were clearly excited. And then one heard Jury approaching and said something quickly to the others.

  Jury had his ID out and yelled, “Police, hold it right there!“

  They broke like a covey of quail, banged through the door, flew out into the street. By the time he reached the street, they were gone off in different directions.

  He went back to the lift whose doors had opened on carnage: two dogs, one dead—or nearly. It moved its rear legs as it lay on the lift floor as if it were running or trying desperately to. It was torn and bloody, one ear bitten off. Jury thought the other, bigger dog, the victor, he supposed, would charge at him as he took off his coat, but the dog merely sat, staring glassy-eyed past the lift door.

  Jury put his coat over the downed dog and called emergency and told the operator he wanted the Met’s Animal Control Unit and then the RSPCA. Then he got out McAllister’s number, called him upstairs. “Do you keep any medical supplies around your flat?”

  “Yes. What’s wrong?”

  Jury told him there’d been a dogfight in the lift. “I’m on the ground floor.”

  “Bloody hell. Not again? I’ll be right there.”

  Again?

  Jury had thrown his coat over the downed dog because he thought he saw him shiver. The other dog growled deep in his throat but did nothing. They were both pit bulls, unfairly matched, to say nothing about being illegally kept. The one whose breath was so shallow it didn’t even raise the surface of the coat was much smaller. He wondered who would bet on the smaller of the two to win this fight.

  The big pit bull still stared out at nothing and seemed transfixed. He too was streaked with blood.

  “Jesus,” said John McAllister, setting down a bag like any G.P.’s except it was oxblood tan, not black. It opened like a drawbridge. McAllister very carefully put his fingers on the dog’s neck. “Still alive, but just barely.” He got out bandages, ointment. With a hypodermic he drew something from a small tube, flicked the needle, and inserted it under the dog’s skin. “Anesthetic. This guy must be in some pain.”

  “There were five kids standing here when I came in—”

  “I know. I’ve seen them.”

  “You said ‘not again.’ You mean this has happened before?”

  “Lift dogfights.” He was swabbing one of the cuts across the dog’s side. “I keep reporting them. But the RSPCA can’t seem to do anything without seeing it actually happening.” He shook his head. “What a bloody awful racket.”

  “That one doesn’t look too hot, either.” Jury nodded toward the other, bigger dog, who was lying down now, next to the one McAllister was treating. He held the dog’s neck with his hand. It was covered with blood.

  Jury rose, leaned against the wall, turned, and stood there, as if facing the wall were somehow a child’s penitential pose, as if he were himself one of the kids responsible for this.

  “Sorry, Superintendent,” said John McAllister. As if he were echoing the thought.

  Headlights were hurled across the big glass door. Car doors slammed. People, four of them, rushed in: two from the Met, two others presumably from the RSPCA. A stocky man and his equally stocky female partner.

  Jury produced his ID, told them about the fight in the lift. They nodded, apparently used to it. The first man spoke to McAllister, said “Good,” gathered up the badly wounded dog, handed Jury the coat. The woman managed to get a harness round the other, this dog not really protesting, and led him out. The man followed with the smaller dog.

  They watched the van pull out from the curb and drive away. They stood in silence for a minute. Then Jury said, “There’s a pub down there that interests me. I’m not sure why. But it smacks of lawlessness.”

  McAllister laughed. “Three Tuns? I know what you mean.”

  “Care to go along for a drink? I feel the need of one.” He checked his watch. “It’s only eight.”

  “Good idea. I’ll get my coat.” He picked up the pigskin bag.

  “Someone‘s going to have to clean that up.” Jury nodded toward the lift. “Who’s the building super?”

  “Man named Moggs.”

  “If you have a number, I’ll call him.”

  “I’ll get it.” McAllister went toward the stairs.

  Jury looked into the lift again. It had its complement of graffiti; there’d been some attempt to wash it off, unsuccessful. He was about to take out the wedge so that the door could close, thought better of it, and left it there. He retaped the OUT OF ORDER sign to the door, wondering if the
re were signs on each floor. Looking at the streaks of blood, the bit of flesh that he decided was the torn ear of the losing dog, he guessed that the people in this building were no strangers to violence. Still, someone who passed this scene might be appalled.

  John McAllister was back, wearing a dark Burberry and carrying a piece of rug or carpet. “It’s left over from the living room I had recarpeted awhile back.” He placed it over the floor of the lift. It no longer looked like the site of a massacre.

  ____

  As they walked the two blocks to the pub, Jury said, “What do you do in Kenya?”

  McAllister turned up the collar of the pricy raincoat. “Medicine and research.”

  “Madeline Brewster told me you were with Médecins sans Frontières.”

  “I wasn’t with them, but something like it called DOCS, meaning ‘doctors on call.’ Mostly though I just work by myself with several small villages. Most of the diseases are common and preventable. All they need is vaccination, for the most part. The grinding poverty is pitiful.”

  “You travel and work at your own expense?”

  “I have money; Tess Williamson left me quite a lot, so I can afford it. But sometimes I wonder if what I see in Africa has desensitized me to stuff like that.” He turned his head to nod back at his building.

  “No,” said Jury. “It hasn’t.”

  ____

  McAllister opened the door of the pub onto a raucous scene that was more of a brawl than a group of people gathered in a public house for drinks and chat. There were twice as many customers now as there had been at Jury’s first visit, a few couples with kids small enough to have bypassed their bedtimes; the men at the bar seemed to be clinging to it rather than merely standing.

  When the two of them walked in, that fog of silence that Jury had experienced before descended again. Talk simply stopped; movement was stayed. They were all glancing and glancing away, as if they’d seen and hadn’t seen Jury and McAllister walk in.

  “I’ve wondered,” said John McAllister, amusement in his voice, “if a certain kind of person always knows when a cop turns up.”

  Talk resumed, but not in the brassy way it had been going forward; the customers were moving around, but warily. The two men’s presence had damped things down and only their absence would bring back the original noise level.

  McAllister found a small table in the window. Jury said, “What’ll you have?”

  John said, “Bitter,” and pulled some notes from a pocket of his raincoat.

  “No way, Doctor. Drinks are on Queen and Country.”

  As Jury passed up to the bar, eyes followed him; the low-key conversation stopped. It was like being in the middle of some pantomime. He ordered two pints of the pub’s best bitter, put down the money, and when the drinks were drawn, carried them back to the table.

  He set down the pints, pulled up his chair, and said, “Can you tell me anything else about the other kids who were at Laburnum? You must’ve known them rather well.”

  “Except for Mundy, not really.” He shrugged. “I only knew Hilda as someone who liked to pick on me. That’s the only side of her I ever saw.”

  “Maybe that’s the only side she had. I have yet to hear anyone speak well of her.”

  “Hilda liked to hold people hostage. Her forte was gathering information and threatening to use it.”

  “What did she know about you?”

  “Nothing. There was nothing to know. With me it was just continuous needling. I was a small kid, the runt of them; I wasn’t clever, like Kenneth. I wasn’t good-looking like Mundy or talented like Veronica, or wonderfully devious like Arabella.” He smiled. “If you can call deviousness a virtue.”

  “Devious? That sounds like Hilda Palmer.”

  McAllister shook his head. “Arabella was very different. She wasn’t out to hurt anyone. Hurt was Hilda’s work ethic.” He took a small drink of beer.

  “Veronica D’Sousa I haven’t talked to; my sergeant was doing that this afternoon. We haven’t yet found Arabella Hastings. What were the feelings between the five of you—I’m leaving out Hilda, since everyone seemed to dislike her. I take it the rest of you weren’t fast friends.”

  “No. Nothing so simple as that. I liked Ken, at the same time I envied him his social ease. I had a crush on Mundy. I think she had a crush on Kenneth. But then so did Veronica.”

  “Mundy didn’t have a crush on Kenneth Strachey. She had one on you.”

  “Never.” He laughed.

  “She did, trust me. You said Veronica was clever.”

  John nodded. “She was quite a gifted mimic. She’d do screamingly funny impressions of some of the teachers. I remember her mother. Very domineering. That may be why Veronica never married.”

  “It occurs to me that all of you are in your thirties, but none of you ever married, except for Arabella Hastings.”

  “You’re right about the rest of us, as far as I know. It’s odd, especially when it comes to Mundy. You’d think she’d have been snapped up long ago.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want to be.” Thick as two plants, thought Jury, smiling to himself. Bad as Melrose Plant.

  “What? Oh. I’m guilty of typical male stereotyping. All women want to marry.” He thought for a moment.

  “My sergeant spoke to Kenneth Strachey, found him very personable. He lives with another chap, in the theater or wishing he were. So here’s more stereotyping: Did you think Strachey’s gay?”

  McAllister made wet circles with his glass. He’d drunk very little of its contents. “You probably think I’m comatose, but I never thought about it one way or another.”

  Jury smiled. “Not comatose. Just uninterested.” Jury watched as a man, short and paunchy, got out of his chair and started toward the toilets, then stopped and went to the bar.

  “We’ve been sitting here for over a half-hour and no one has gone back there to that alcove where the phone and the toilets are located. This place is crowded. And the crowd has been putting away a lot of beer.”

  John turned his head, looked toward the “Gents” and “Ladies.” Then looked back at Jury. “What do you mean?”

  Jury got up. “Be back in a minute.” He started away, then turned back to the table. “Have your mobile with you?”

  “Sure. You want to use it?”

  Jury shook his head. “I want the number.” John gave it to him, and Jury tapped it into his own mobile. “Sit tight.” He walked back to the alcove and went through the wooden beaded curtain. The men’s room was on the left. He knew it was empty but knocked for show, in case anyone out in the pub was watching him. And he was fairly sure a lot of them were. He walked a few feet toward the telephone on the back wall. There he found a staircase. He went down six steps, where the stairs turned and continued on to the bottom. Here, a man with big biceps wearing a black T-shirt that said ARSENAL was tilted back in a chair. There was a door beside him.

  He looked up at Jury, chewed his gum more thoughtfully, and said, “You lookin’ for somethin,’ mate?”

  “Just curious. What’s through there?” Jury nodded toward the door.

  “Private party.” As if he had something to grin about, Arsenal grinned. He had a mouthful of bad teeth.

  “Private party? Not anymore.” Jury reached for his ID and his mobile. “It just turned public.”

  The supercilious grin turned humorless. Arsenal took a step back, probably thinking that Jury was reaching for a gun.

  Jury nodded toward the door. “Open it.” He spoke into his mobile. “John, come down here. There’s a staircase next to the Gents.” He snapped the phone shut.

  One minute later John McAllister was down the steps.

  Jury nodded at him. “This is DS McAllister—”

  John flashed an ID at Arsenal, who barely looked at it.

  “Now, open up, Aladdin.”
>
  His back still to the wall, no doubt so he could keep an eye on them, the big man reached toward the knob and pushed the door open.

  There was so much smoke the room could have been on fire. But the smoke was only a canopy from endless cigarettes, cigars, and, no doubt, weed.

  Jury didn’t know what he’d been expecting to find, but not this; and then he wondered why not this? For it was the natural progression from the lift dogfight.

  A dogfight as one ordinarily saw or imagined it: a lot of booze, blood, money, and drugs. Some looked up when the two of them came into the room, but as the fight was in progress, the shouts of encouragement to the two dogs in the pit went on unabated. The pit was perhaps fourteen or fifteen feet wide, with wooden walls. The dogs looked to be some version of American pit bull terriers or Staffies; given their entanglement at the moment, it was hard to tell.

  What astonished Jury was that all of the noise was coming from the persons in attendance and practically none from the dogs themselves. Both of them looked to be losing, given the bloody cuts on them. Neither looked as if he wanted to be here, although they both had probably been starved, or worked on a treadmill until they were exhausted, or otherwise “trained” for the fight. Jury had a hard time wrapping his mind around this scene. He yelled into the crowd “Call it off!” He got onto his mobile to call the Met.

  John McAllister shouted “This is over!” as if he’d been enforcing the Animal Welfare Act every day of his life. There were two teenagers near him, both wearing black cords and T-shirts, arms swamped with tats. The bulb in a metal shade hanging over the pit swayed and picked up the glint of knives. There was a blurry movement of an arm coming up and just as suddenly dropping at the sound of McAllister’s voice.

  “Drop it!” He had a .22 cradled in his hands. The knives were dropped.

  When neither of the handlers made a move toward the dogs, John grabbed up one of the breaking sticks about a foot long and an inch in diameter. He jumped into the pit and was about to force it into the jaws of the dog when one of the handlers came up behind him. John turned fast with the stick and landed it on the man’s neck. Then he wedged it into the mouth of the dog that had his teeth clamped on the other dog and drove him back.