Vertigo 42

by Martha Grimes

  Somebody else had done it for her.

  Knightsbridge

  Tuesday, 11:00 A.M.

  43

  * * *

  She’s having her elevenses,” said the woman who oversaw the Armani collection.

  Jury had always liked “elevenses”—the break one had to honor, much like a special dispensation from the Church. Jury checked his watch to find indeed it was 11:20 to be exact.

  “Could you tell me where she’s having it?”

  “She likes the pastry shop just opposite Harrods.” The woman pointed as if through the many-walled, huge store.

  “Thanks. And if she returns before I find her, would you kindly tell her I need to speak with her?” Jury handed the woman a card.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Jury thanked her again and made his way through the Harrods throng, like an exodus into another world.

  ____

  It was the same pastry shop where Jury had enjoyed a cup of coffee and a doughnut the week before. Mundy Brewster was sitting at a little table against the wall with a cup of tea and a small plate holding half of a custard doughnut.

  “Hello, Mundy,” said Jury, pulling out the one other chair. He put the file he was carrying on the table.

  “Mr. Jury! You found me!”

  As if she’d been lost. Jury suddenly thought of Stanley.

  “Right. I’ve talked to Kenneth Strachey and John McAllister since I saw you.”

  “You found Johnny!”

  As if he too had been lost and Jury had accomplished some incredible feat in finding him

  “I did. In Hackney.”

  Mundy shook her head. “I can’t think why he lives there.”

  “He gives me the impression of one who doesn’t care where he lives.”

  Mundy reflected for a moment. “He seems to have a need almost for deprivation.”

  “I wonder why.”

  She shrugged. “He’s got a lot of empathy. Even when he was little, he had all of this empathy for living things. Hilda used it to torture him. Once she took a bird and killed it. She really did wring the bird’s neck, standing in front of Johnny.”

  “What a delightful child. I’m not surprised somebody killed her.”

  Mundy’s eyes widened. “You don’t believe it was an accident?”

  “No. Have you read the papers recently?”

  She shook her head. “Haven’t had the time, really.”

  Jury took the two newspaper articles from the folder and placed them before her. “This.”

  She bent over them, first retrieving her glasses from her bag. Wire-rimmed, round.

  For some reason Jury found this endearing—glasses instead of contact lenses. “Recognize her?”

  She looked up. “Should I? I don’t.”

  “Arabella Hastings.”

  She stared at the pictures, then at Jury. “My God! But it says here, ‘Belle Syms.’ ”

  “She changed it. Remember what you said: none of us liked our names?”

  “I can hardly believe this.”

  Jury produced the other photo. “Her aunt took this when Arabella went to see her.”

  Mundy tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Arabella. All got up like a dog’s dinner.” She bit her lip. “Sorry, that wasn’t nice; I simply meant she’s dressed to the nines.”

  “Apparently she had a hot date.”

  “Can’t imagine that, either. I mean, Arabella was always so withdrawn and shy, she had a hard time even engaging with us.”

  “I wonder what you think of her clothes.”

  “They’re good. That’s certainly a designer dress, and I’d guess the shoes are too. But—”

  “Givenchy and Jimmy Choo. We’ve canvassed London—Harrods, Liberty’s, Harvey Nichols, and the Givenchy salon, of course; none of the people in any of those places have sold it. Can you think of any other place that sells Givenchy?”

  She frowned. “No, but I can research it for you. Fortnum’s doesn’t, I know . . .”

  “Well, if you find anyplace let me know. I’ve a friend who’s fashion conscious and claims the dress, shoes, and nail polish weren’t meant to go together. What do you think?”

  “I agree.” She picked it up and brought it closer to her eyes. “The nails are gorgeous—though I don’t care for that kind of thing—but the color isn’t right with all of that red. And she shouldn’t be wearing red shoes, either.”

  “My friend thinks she must have been going to wear another dress, not that one.”

  “Very possibly. So why didn’t she?”

  Jury shrugged. “That I don’t know. But there certainly might have been two dresses.” Jury frowned.

  Mundy said, “I think that dress and shoes would have made it hard to recognize Arabella, even if I’d seen her last week. I haven’t seen her since Tess Williamson’s funeral. Seventeen years ago.” She stopped and looked at him, puzzled. “This happened in Northamptonshire, yet it’s your case?”

  “Technically, no. But I think it means something in the larger view: the Laburnum business and Tess Williamson’s death.”

  “If it wasn’t an accident . . .”

  “It was something else. Suicide or homicide. Or rather homicide made to look like an accident, I believe.”

  “You think Tess’s death is related to Arabella’s?”

  “I do.”

  “No, it must be a coincidence that one of us—you don’t really think it was one of us kids that killed her?”

  “It’s certainly a possibility. Given Arabella was murdered.”

  Mundy thought for a moment. “Do you think it was something Arabella did? I mean do you think it’s revenge?”

  “No, I have the feeling that Arabella knew something about the man who killed her and had threatened to tell what she knew. She might have been using the knowledge for leverage.”

  “You think it was the man she was with here?” She turned the newspaper round so that he could see the small picture of the Sun and Moon Hotel in case he’d forgotten where “here” was.

  “Yes, I do. There’s also the strong possibility he had help from another woman.”

  Mundy sat back in silence. Then she said, “Was Tom Williamson ever a suspect?”

  “In his wife’s death? Of course he was. It’s always the spouse who’s under suspicion, especially when there’s money involved. Tess was rich; Tom wasn’t. He inherited everything. But he was in London at the time of her death. But homicide wasn’t a popular theory. Especially since Tess had vertigo and those steps were rather a challenge. At least that’s the way it appeared.”

  “So why has that changed?”

  “Because it would be difficult to kill oneself by accidentally falling down a flight of steps.”

  “In crime fiction it happens all the time. Someone pulls a wire across a top step, the victim stumbles over it and goes down.”

  “True, but there’d be more momentum in that situation. It would be more like a straight dive down the steps. It would still be hard, though. In any event, there’d be bodily injuries from a person’s trying to break the fall and stop herself in an accident.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill Tess Williamson?”

  Once again, Jury had a sudden image of the Marabar Caves. “Betrayal?”

  Hackney, Plaistow Street

  Tuesday, 12:30 P.M.

  44

  * * *

  Plaistow Street was not improved by the light of day. Boarded-up buildings, cafés with steamy windows, newsagents, aimless knots of boys and men passing around something drinkable or smokeable who had nothing else to do.

  Jury walked into the building where security was always on the mend. He walked from the anteroom through the glass door and passed the lift. No kids were grouped there this time, but the OUT OF ORD
ER sign was in place. He wondered if it simply meant what it said. He guessed the lifts were often not working in earnest.

  He took the stairs.

  ____

  “Dr. McAllister, sorry for the short notice. But it’s important.”

  John McAllister stood aside and gestured Jury in. “I imagine a lot of your job is short notice. Come on in. What’s this about?”

  “I have something I want you to read.” Jury had drawn the letter from an inside pocket of his jacket. “It’s a letter Tess Williamson wrote to her husband before she died Tuesday, June 17.”

  John looked shocked as he took the letter but didn’t open it immediately. His look at Jury was speculative. “I don’t understand. If it’s to Tom, why should I—?”

  Seeing the look on Jury’s face, he didn’t finish; he opened the folded pages and read the first of them. Then he sat down and read the rest. It was a long time before he spoke. He folded the pages and put them back in the envelope, saying, “Where, after all these years, did you find this?”

  “She’d slipped it under the door of his office, you know, where he kept his ships-in-bottles, thinking he’d find it within a few days. It went under the rug.”

  John McAllister looked rather wildly around the room, stopped, bent his head. Shook it. “I can hardly believe it.”

  “I know. But her story about you, that’s all true?”

  He nodded. “It’s what happened, yes.”

  Jury was somewhat taken aback. “So you hadn’t forgotten?”

  John took off the black-framed glasses, misted over. “Forgotten? Hardly.” He wiped the glasses, put them back on. “ ‘Those inappropriate, black-framed glasses . . .’ ”

  Jury had never heard her voice, but in his head he heard it now. “I was only thinking of buried memory. You know, something brought on by great trauma. She ordered you to forget.”

  “She did, yes. Then you think she did throw herself down those stairs. Deliberately.”

  Jury didn’t answer this. Instead, he said, “You knew this all of these years, and yet you remained silent. Why?”

  “Because she wanted me to.”

  “Yes, when you were just a little boy—”

  John shook his head. “After that. She knew it would ruin my life. Which it would have.”

  He said this so matter-of-factly, Jury was astonished. “But when it happened, she made a decision on the spot, suddenly, rashly—”

  “You mean she wasn’t aware of the implications of her taking the blame?” said John.

  “Exactly. She couldn’t at the time have known—”

  “But she could. She thought at lightning speed. She would have made a brilliant surgeon.”

  “She could hardly have known Tom might have to resign.“

  “Yes, she could. But even if we say she made a rash decision, it was hardly irrevocable. Ten minutes, ten hours, ten days later, she could have told the police what really happened—”

  “As could you.”

  McAllister looked disappointed in Jury. He walked over to the table where he kept the whiskey, put an inch in two glasses, walked back and handed one to Jury. “Look, Superintendent. Right now, at this point in time we could go round the stations of the cross of selfishness and find me at every one. But as to Tess: Tess was making an adult’s decision. I was only capable of a kid’s decision, which wasn’t even deciding. Tess told me what to do, no, it was more that she ordered me to do it: to blot it out, to run. ‘This didn’t happen, Mackey.’ She clutched my shoulders and looked at me with those hypnotic eyes. You’ve no idea the effect she could have on others. Or maybe that was my ten-year-old self’s wishful thinking.”

  McAllister held Jury’s gaze with his own hypnotic brown eyes. “She said, ‘You weren’t here, Mackey, you had nothing to do with this. No matter who asks you, you don’t know anything about it. Promise me . . . promise’—she shook me—‘. . . that you’ll forget it, that you believe you had nothing to do with it.’ And I promised. I was terrified of what I’d done; I didn’t realize I’d hit Hilda so hard it would push her into that pool and she’d die. And here was Tess, just taking the fear away. Do you know what it’s like to feel completely weightless? To be borne up as if by water? ‘Let the deep, deep sea hold you up.’ Joseph Conrad said something like that: that if you fall into the sea, don’t flail, just submit. ‘Let the deep, deep sea hold you up.’

  “Tess was the deep blue sea. She held me up. Without her, I’d have drowned. I said it before: without her, I’d be nothing.”

  Jury looked at the drink in his hand, feeling himself at sea and helpless. He swallowed the whiskey, felt it burn his throat, and he thought he knew why alcoholics drank: a moment of clarity. It was so obvious, so crystal clear: “She wanted Tom to know.”

  John looked at him doubtfully and more than a little worried. “But that’s exactly what Tess didn’t want; she wanted to take the blame—”

  “She’s been dead for seventeen years. Tom Williamson has had to suffer not only that, but the unknown—”

  “If you mean by ‘unknown’ that Tom wasn’t sure she was innocent—”

  Jury shook his head. “No. He knows she didn’t do it.”

  John tapped the letter. “Then what purpose would be served by letting him read this? Would this be the truth of the affair? That Tess was willing to place him, Tom, in jeopardy in order to save me? It would surely make him miserable.”

  “By your own reasoning, I’d have to show him this letter. You did nothing, you said, kept silent, you said, ‘because she wanted you to.’ That was true, no matter the consequences; she was willing to bear them. By the same token, she wanted Tom Williamson to know what happened. Just as she wanted to save you from what would have been an appalling outcome right then, some years after that, she wanted her husband to know. Our conjectures have nothing to do with it. She wanted him to know.”

  “You’re going to give him the letter.”

  “Actually, I thought you would.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because you should. You should first tell him what happened. Then he could read this.”

  “Superintendent, I realize you think I should do penance—”

  “No, I don’t, Dr. McAllister. You’ve been doing penance for years, in Africa. You’re doing penance by living in Hackney. You want to serve time among the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, the misbegotten. To me, that’s crystal clear. I just think it would be more—I don’t know—humane, that’s all. A letter written seventeen years ago from his dead wife is going to be very hard for Tom Williamson. It was hard for you; imagine how hard for him. I think it would make it easier if you were to tell him beforehand what happened. Then he could read the letter.”

  Jury went on. “I’ll tell you something else. You said before you supposed Tess did throw herself down the stairs. No, she didn’t. I think she was murdered.”

  John sat down again, suddenly. “My God. Please don’t tell me you think I—”

  “You? No I don’t think that at all.”

  He had his head in his hands.

  “I don’t know if you’ve seen this in the papers, but do you remember Arabella Hastings?”

  “Arabella? Yes, of course. She was one of us at Laburnum that day. What about the papers?”

  “She called herself ‘Belle,’ and her married name was ‘Syms.’ She was divorced. She was murdered in a little place near Northampton.”

  “What? What are you telling me. First, Tess; then, Arabella? Murdered?”

  “Arabella Hastings was thrown from the top of a tower. You haven’t read about that? The tabloids of course were all over it. Very dramatic.” Jury wondered at that for a moment, at the drama. “Let me change the subject a little. Tell me anything you can about the children present that day at Laburnum.”

  “I thought I’d told you all I know.�
�

  “You answered my questions. But now I’m asking about your interaction with one another. Arabella Hastings was murdered, after all.”

  “You think that involves the rest of us?”

  “Absolutely. Were any of you ever at Laburnum on other occasions? By yourselves?”

  “Yes, I was. So was Mundy. So was Kenneth. I don’t know about Arabella and Veronica.”

  “Was Tess’s attachment to you something the others resented?” Jury settled back for a no.

  He got a yes. “Kenneth was jealous as hell. It pleased me, that, since he was so adored by the girls.”

  “Not by Mundy,” said Jury.

  “No, perhaps not. But Kenneth adored Tess. He seemed—consumed by her.”

  Jury sat forward, hands laced between knees. “That’s a powerful word. How did he treat you, then, seeing she preferred you?”

  “Oh, Ken was cool. He wouldn’t have let it show by being nasty to me. No, he treated me very well.”

  “And Tess was how toward Kenneth?”

  “Perfectly nice, as she was with all of us.”

  “I understand Arabella doted on Kenneth. Did he have any interest in her?”

  “None. Arabella wasn’t cute or pretty and nor did she have much personality. But I think the main thing that put one off was her neediness. I hate that word, needy, but I can’t think of another. She clung to him. She was like a limpet. The more he tried to brush her off, the harder she clung.”

  Jury set down his glass. “There’s another thing. Going back to those laburnum seeds, you knew how many it was safe to eat. The fact that you were sick pretty much saved you from suspicion. Right?”

  “Yes, I expect so.”

  “And you knew traces of the poison had to be in your stomach when it was pumped out. For someone in such danger, you were thinking pretty clearly. It wasn’t foolproof, of course, but it was a pretty good alibi, that toxic illness. It got you off the hook for Hilda’s death.” Jury rose. The letter was lying on the table beside John, who was not looking at it and nor at Jury.