Dust

by Martha Grimes

  He unlocked his door, stood back, and held out an arm to usher her in. He told himself he still didn’t know exactly what she was doing here or what she wanted.

  Except to drop her coat on his old faded sofa and say, “Thanks, yes, I will have that drink.”

  He stood there as if he were the visitor and she the tenant of his flat and looked at her for a long moment.

  She didn’t move her eyes from his face. Indeed, she seemed to be charting it as if it might reveal a destination. “You can get me a drink. And in the circumstances, you can call me Lu.”

  “God, thanks. But I don’t have any ice, Lu.”

  “Hell. Now we’ll have to make up something else to do.” She took a step toward him, her dark eyes never leaving his face.

  Why this pretense of surprise? He was not surprised; he’d just been shoving it aside. From the moment she’d walked into that first room, he’d known in some dimly lit part of his head that this was going to happen.

  He pulled her to him and their lips dissolved into a kiss. It was long, infinite, the horizon gone. There should have been another word for kiss. Had he pulled her down to her knees, to the rug, or she him? Did he shove her down on the floor, or she him? They were rolling over, pushing at clothes, trying to unwrap each other, trapped in some cocoon, trying to pull apart to do it, but only tangling more.

  Then he did pull her up and into the bedroom and down onto the bed.

  They separated, finally. They lay there hardly breathing, as if the breath had been knocked out of them.

  Eventually, he said, “How are we going to be able to work together?”

  “We aren’t. You’re off the case.”

  “No, I’m not. You need me.”

  “Yes. But this way.” She slid on top of him and it was like slipping into the sea.

  Held together again they rolled across and off the bed, he hitting his head on the nightstand and not noticing, she twisting her foot in something, blanket or rug—not noticing—and then pulling themselves by some act of levitation up and onto the bed. It was turmoil, like grabbing at air and finding flesh.

  “This,” she said, “is too frightening. I thought we were finished.”

  “We’ll never be finished.” He reached for her, but she pulled away.

  “I’m leaving. Right now. I’ll find the door.”

  She gathered up her clothes, a delicate trail of them, laid out almost by design—bra, panties, skirt, sweater, coat—dressed as she went and went out the door.

  He heard it close.

  He lay there, unable to move. Had he been the one who’d had to leave, he didn’t know if he could. What was it? It wasn’t love, it was something else. He thought of those hurricanes that battered the coast of Florida every summer.

  This wasn’t the purple light of a summer night in Spain. It was a hurricane.

  FIVE

  Forensic had already been over it, but Jury wanted to see Billy Maples’s flat for himself. There were other things besides forensic evidence that might go a step toward understanding Billy’s life.

  It was in a building with few flats and a caged lift; it was handsome and undoubtedly pricey. In this area, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Belgravia, you’d be looking at half a million quid, he bet. It had not one but two en suite bedrooms, one with a small sitting room, the other with a connecting den or study.

  “I’ll take this side,” said Ron. “You go there.”

  Jury smiled. Under the aegis of DI Aguilar, Ron was in charge here.

  The study was generous in size, bookshelves across one wall and the overflow caught in neat stacks on the floor in front of the lower shelf.

  The books weren’t there to fill out the decor, either. Jury pulled out and examined several; they were much thumbed and marked. Billy Maples liked to read. It was the sort of room that anyone who liked to read longed for: deep cushioned chairs, including one of dark supple leather with a matching footrest. A floor lamp, a glass-topped side table.

  From what Jury could tell, Billy favored the nineteenth century, a lot of it American—Melville, Hawthorne, and a surprising number of novels by Henry James.

  One shelf was taken up with books about the Second World War, reflecting his interest in Sir Oswald’s life, ostensibly. Assuming Oswald Maples was his grandfather.

  There were two paintings, both showing the tortured influence of someone like Francis Bacon. The dull, boxed-in form of a man one could hardly distinguish from the thick woods around him. For torture, Jury preferred Munch.

  There was a desk, not large, with a leather swivel chair. He went round to the front and started pulling out drawers. He sat down and looked at a small silver-framed photograph of Billy and another man. They looked as if they’d been skiing or involved in some other winter sport. A lot of snow, a mountain.

  Ron came in carrying some letters. “Fellow that Maples lived with.” He waved the envelopes and sat down.

  Jury waited. Ron did not expand upon his information. Jury said, “I’m with you so far. What about him?”

  “Well”—Ron looked down at the letters—“I’d say he’s German.”

  “And does he have a name? German or otherwise?” Blood from a stone.

  “Kurt Brunner. At least that’s the name on these.” He looked down at the envelopes. “Berlin. Kurt Brunner. Maples’s ‘partner,’ as they say?”

  Jury turned the photo around so that Ron could see it. “Maybe, maybe not. This chap’s a lot older than Billy Maples.”

  Ron shrugged. “When’s that ever made a difference? Father figure, maybe? That can get seriously sexual.”

  “Sometimes a father figure is only a father figure.” Karl Brunner, though, didn’t really look the type. He was older, but in very good shape and with a handsome face.

  “Could be.”

  “What about the weapon, the gun?”

  “We haven’t found it. Probably a .38, possibly a Luger. German?” Ron squiggled his eyebrows up and down.

  Jury leaned back in the swivel chair, turned it right and left, left and right, kept doing it as he thought. “Why did Billy Maples take a room at the Zetter, which is—how far from here?”

  Ron scratched the back of his neck. It looked inflamed. “Could take you over a half hour in rush hour. This gallery is near Smithfield Market and that’s not far from the Zetter. Half hour, maybe, no more.”

  “So why did he stay at the Zetter?”

  “Because he had the three hundred quid to do it. He had money, all right, a trust fund. Maybe he stayed at the Zetter because he wanted to be near the club? Dust?”

  “He was in it. Why would he have to be near it? He was meeting someone, and if so, we could conjecture that it was someone he didn’t want to meet in his own flat.”

  Ron shook his head. “I wouldn’t draw that conclusion. He wants to do all this: go to gallery, to Dust, to meeting someone at the hotel—so he picks a place right there. The Zetter. The best solution,” he said, showing some teeth, “is the easier one.”

  Jury snorted. “Back at me, right? Maybe it’s as you say.” Jury rose. “I’ve got to go, Ron. I’ve got to tell his grandfather before the Telegraph does. Let me know if you come up with anything here.”

  SIX

  Jury stood in front of the mews house off Cadogan Square with his finger on the bell, hoping he was wrong though fairly certain he wasn’t. This was not owing to his powers of deduction but to a very simple notion: how many men named Maples who had “worked on codes” and done it at Bletchley Park could there be?

  Just one.

  This time Jury hoped for the housekeeper, anything to delay telling Oswald Maples this sad news. Right now, Jury sincerely wished Lu Aguilar had taken him off the case; if he and Aguilar had a grain of sense between them, he would be off the case, he wouldn’t be within twenty miles of the Islington police. Emotional involvement with the detective in charge—is that what he was calling it this morning? How could anything so violently physical be talked away as “emotional involve
ment”?

  Then he thought of Phyllis and his throat went dry.

  “Superintendent!”

  Smiling, Sir Oswald Maples had answered the door himself, walking with the help of a single cane. Most of the time he needed two. If that’s what accounted for the smile, probably a good day.

  It was about to turn bad.

  “Is something wrong, Mr. Jury?”

  Yes, Jury wanted to say, I am fucking up my life and your grandson was murdered last night. “Sir Oswald,” he said as he tried to work some sense into the day. He knew he looked grim and the grimness was all for himself, he was ashamed to say. “I need to talk to you.” A peculiar way of putting it.

  “Of course. Come in, come in.” With a little difficulty, Oswald Maples moved aside to allow Jury to pass into the tiny foyer. “It can’t be all that bad, Superintendent.” Oswald gave a short laugh.

  Jury opened his mouth to make some rejoinder and didn’t. They went into the living room. Jury sat down and Oswald sat across from him on a blue sofa. Beneath their feet was a handsome Turkish carpet, swimming with muted blues, reds, and greens.

  Jury said, “There was a young man murdered last night in Clerkenwell. I think—we think—he may have been related to you, may be your grandson.” He let that rest for a moment.

  Maples had picked up his cane, holding it in front of him, both hands on the knob at the top. He sat forward and bent his head over his hands. He was silent.

  “His name was Billy Maples.”

  In the deep silence that sometimes attends bad news, Sir Oswald waited, as if another piece of news might cancel out what he’d just heard. None was forthcoming. “Make us a drink, man.” He leaned heavily on his cane, his head bent, studying the carpet.

  Jury splashed some brandy into a balloon glass and handed it to him. “I’m sorry; I’m truly sorry.” He felt hopelessly inadequate. He sat down opposite Oswald on a chair covered in the same blue as the sofa.

  Maples said nothing for a few moments, just sat looking at the brandy in his glass and finally drank it in one go. Then he placed the glass on the antique side table carefully, as if it, and not he, needed the care. He cleared his throat. “All right, tell me.”

  Jury did. Every detail.

  Oswald sat back. “I’ll spare you a few questions, Superintendent. First, I can’t think of anyone at all who could possibly want to do this to Billy, but then, I didn’t know his friends—or his enemies, though I can’t imagine Billy having enemies. But I do, did, know Billy. He had a quixotic nature and he was very intense, given to moods. He had trouble with his parents because of that, since they’re not.”

  Jury smiled slightly.

  “You know what I mean; you yourself are intense. Don’t give me that look, of course you are. So you know what it’s like to deal with superficial people. I’m only saying they didn’t understand Billy. And nor did I. But I understood him better. The thing is he was quite unpredictable. Like his mum.” Oswald smiled. The smile looked hurt.

  “Your daughter?”

  “No, no. My son, Roderick’s, first wife, Mary. She died.” The smile vanished. “I was very fond of her. So was Billy. He was a child when she died. She set up a trust fund for him; that’s what he lives on. Mary’s own mother, Billy’s maternal grandmother, also lives in London, but I seldom see her.” He held up the cane in explanation. “Her name is Rose Ames, and she does occasionally come to see me. A very nice woman. My own wife has been dead for seven years. So has Rose’s husband, his other grandfather. Been dead, I mean.” He stopped. He went on. “Roderick—my son—is a good enough man, but rather stuffy. And his second wife, Olivia, is quite a bit younger, forty, I think. She’s beautiful in the way porcelain is beautiful, but she does drain one. I think she tried to drain Billy. Not Roderick, though. He seems impervious to emotional abuse. Perhaps he was abused as a child; perhaps those around him were cold, especially his father. I don’t know.”

  Jury knew Sir Oswald was tired and that he should go, but he didn’t follow what the man had just said. “His father? I don’t understand. I thought Roderick was your son.”

  “Adopted. After the war. He was mine. Have you talked to him and Olivia? Have you talked to Kurt Brunner? That’s your man, Superintendent. He and Billy were very close. He’s still in Rye, I think.”

  “Rye?”

  “Yes, that’s where they’ve been living for the last eight or nine months. Lamb House. I mean there and his Chelsea flat.”

  “But that’s National Trust property. That’s the home of Henry James.”

  “I know. Billy took over the tenancy. Billy was extremely fond of James’s writing, and I expect he thought it would be a lark. He’d read somewhere that the Trust was looking for someone. So he applied. He would have met their fussy high standards.” He looked at the floor, drew his cane around the elaborate design at his feet. “But then Billy would have met anyone’s standards, I think.”

  For some reason this was the most sorrowful thing Oswald Maples had said. Jury offered, “Detectives from Islington are going to see your son and his wife today. In East Sussex. But Kurt Brunner—”

  “Billy’s assistant, or secretary, or plain friend. Talk to him. It’s not your case?” There was disappointment in his tone.

  “I’m officially helping out. I intend to help a lot.” He smiled.

  “Thank you for sending yourself here, Superintendent. I appreciate it.”

  “Not at all.” Jury rose. “I’ll be going, but I’ll probably want to talk to you later on. No, don’t get up. I’ll see myself out.”

  Oswald Maples looked grateful, whether because he wouldn’t have to hoist himself off the sofa or because Jury would be back, he didn’t know.

  “Do you read James?” he mused, not looking for an answer, but sitting there, tracing the rug’s complicated red and blue pattern with the tip of his cane. “There’s a story of his called ‘The Figure in the Carpet.’ It’s about a writer who has this bittersweet awareness that no critic who has written about his books has ever understood the most important thing in them, his ‘little trick,’ which he describes as being a figure in a Persian carpet. It blends in so well that it becomes invisible although it’s perfectly distinct, if you can see it.” Sir Oswald looked up at Jury. “I hope you don’t have that problem, Superintendent, with Billy’s murder. You must come up against it all the time, that transparent figure, the one that you want so much to see and yet can only see through.” Oswald smiled bleakly. “You’ll have to forgive me this little lecture. It’s just that I do hope you catch him.”

  Jury looked down at him, and nodded, and left.

  For what could he say? What could anyone?

  SEVEN

  “You’re coming down with something,” said Wiggins the next morning as he waited for the kettle to boil.

  “No,” said Jury, who felt he was coming down with everything, settling into his office chair. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Looks as if you didn’t sleep much this year. Your eyes look like something on the ocean floor. You need a cuppa. Be ready in a minute. Oh, the guv’nor wants to see you.” Wiggins was concentrating now on peeling what looked like bits of bark off what looked like a root. Or, thought Jury, it could be a branch from the rare jingoborah tree.

  Don’t ask, Jury told himself. He had to bite his tongue.

  The kettle was on the boil and Wiggins pulled out the hot plate plug, poured water into two mugs whose tea bags tumbled upward to the top. Aside from the mugs and the root, the surface of Sergeant Wiggins’s desk was as uncluttered and clear as an ice floe.

  “Fiona rang at eight-thirty. Says he wants to see you the minute you come in,” Wiggins added, as he waited for the tea bags to leach color into the water.

  “That minute, alas, is lost to us forever.”

  Wiggins chortled.

  “And did he give us a clue as to why he was so anxious to see me?”

  “No.”

  Eight-thirty. Jury was surprised D
CS Racer was even in the office. Unless he’d been sleeping rough after a rave and couldn’t make it home. Talking to Racer was no way to start off a day. Jury picked up the phone and rang Fiona Clingmore, Racer’s secretary of many years (and who still looked just as she had looked when she first came here). “I’m here,” he said. “You can inform your boss the games can begin.”

  “Took your time, din’t you?” she said and hung up.

  “I expect,” said Wiggins, “it’s about the Harry Johnson debacle.” He spooned sugar into one of the mugs, what looked like a never-ending stream of it.

  “Debacle? I’d hardly call it that. Anyway, it wasn’t my case. That’s Surrey police. Detective Inspector Dryer. We are not reaching back into the mists of time on this; it only happened a little over two weeks ago.”

  “I’d say if it wasn’t for you, those two kids might be dead.”

  “Wrong. Wrong. Mungo saved them.” Jury unhitched his jacket from the back of his chair and got up.

  “Mungo’s a dog.”

  He grabbed his mug of tea. “Don’t I know it.”

  “The assistant commissioner wants to know why you’re ignoring his order to lay off Harry Johnson,” said Racer, the guv’nor and chief superintendent.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did Harry make a complaint?”

  Racer said nothing, probably because he didn’t know. Jury asked, “Why doesn’t the AC tell Detective Inspector Dryer to lay off? It’s Surrey police’s case, not mine.”

  “Exactly, Jury. Not yours.”

  Jury drank his tea and kept his face empty, an expression he never had any trouble with in here, where emptiness was the dish du jour.

  Racer went on ignoring Tom Dryer’s role in the Surrey case. “There’s not a shred of evidence that says Harry Johnson is guilty of abducting those children.”

  Jury said nothing, just watched the cat Cyril, who had materialized out of one of his nowheres and was now down on the carpet behind Racer, stalking between bookcase and drinks cupboard. Cyril had learned how to open the drinks cupboard. As far as Jury knew Cyril wasn’t after a drink.