Benny asked with some anxiety, “Do I have to go down the nick and talk to some yob?”
“Just this yob at the moment.”
Sparky sat at their feet, looking from one to the other, reminding Jury of Harry Johnson’s dog, Mungo. How is it that he knew what were probably the three smartest dogs in London—Sparky, Mungo, and Stone? How often did he think of getting one for himself?
“I’m just wondering if you’ve remembered anything else about the crime scene.” Jury imagined Benny would like it thus referred to.
“I been thinkin’ on it and can’t come up with nothing, Mr. Jury. There must’ve been somebody else there.”
“And it was somebody he knew.”
Benny nodded and leaned back on his elbows. “But Gil, now, he didn’t see anybody else when he took up the dinner, or he’d’ve said.”
“This mystery person mightn’t have arrived yet, or if he was there, he—”
“Or she, don’t forget.”
“You’re right. Or she could have gone out on the patio.”
“That’s where Gil said Billy Maples was when he took up the dinner. Supposing it could of been somebody else—the killer? And maybe he was still there?”
“I don’t see how he could have been. You were in the room and out on the patio yourself. He couldn’t have been in the bathroom, either, as you put Sparky in there.”
Benny hadn’t, as one of the room service staff might have, given a yell and run for it. Benny had instead shown quite a bit of self-command, in addition to curiosity, and had examined the body and the room. He only hoped the boy hadn’t shown more interest in it than was good for him.
“Have you noticed anybody hanging about, Benny?”
“Hangin’ about? No. What’d’ya mean?”
“Nothing, really.”
Benny pulled a battered chew toy from his pocket and offered it to Sparky, who looked at it and let it lie. It was as if Sparky knew there were graver issues at hand and he wasn’t to be diverted by anything as trivial as a toy. Sparky even took a step backward to put a distance between himself and the worn twist of rope.
Jury looked at him and said, “You want to quit your Southwark gig and work for the Yard?”
Even in the dark, Jury could sense the blush.
“Ah, go on, Mr. Jury.”
TWELVE
As Jury remembered it, the garden was walled and very quiet. Very private.
He sat by a window on the 9:18 train to Rye, watching a line of oasthouses as the train trundled through the Kent countryside. He was thinking about Lamb House.
Across from him sat a boy of ten or eleven, reading something difficult, to judge from the deep frown. Jury could not see the title of the book, a textbook, perhaps, as it had no dust jacket. Why were all textbooks so lacking in verve and color? The boy looked up from the book and the frown disappeared, replaced by a smile, as if he recognized that this man sitting across from him had once had to deal with lusterless books, too.
He reminded Jury of someone. A face not unhandsome, clear pale eyes and skin. Chestnut brown hair. Himself. They had lived here, in Kent or Sussex, after his mum had died. He had come to live with his uncle and aunt and that single cousin, his old childhood nemesis who had died so recently. Sarah had died in March.
The train pulled into the station. Both he and the boy rose and left.
Rye sat along that line of coast that supported Brighton and Hastings to the west and Dover to the east. Rye had been part of the Confederation of the Cinque Ports, but was no more. Instead of the water eroding the land, it had pulled back from it, leaving an expanse of sand and mud and shale. The town itself was known to be one of the most charming of English villages: cobblestones, tight little houses, the famous Mermaid Street and tavern that had been the haunt of pirates.
Lamb House sat at the end of one of these narrow cobbled streets, a modest brick establishment that gave no clue as to the beautiful garden behind it, nor of one of the writers who had lived here.
A plump and pleasant woman answered the door and admitted him. Housekeeper, probably. She showed him into a sitting room and excused herself, saying that Mr. Brunner was on the phone and would be along in a minute or two.
When she’d left, Jury wandered into the dining room, where windows gave out onto the garden he remembered. He turned back to the book—no, journal—on the dining room table, opened to a page so the James pilgrim could read it. Jury did so. What astonished him in this writing was the lack of corrections; James wrote with the same exacting use of language, the same tone, the same nuance as in his finished books. Only here and there was a word or phrase excised and replaced by another. What might have served as a first draft for James, a lesser writer would be happy to call the final copy.
The man who walked in as he was reading was tall and light haired and good-looking with a square jaw and a slender nose. Although he was probably in his fifties, he looked a decade younger.
Jury extended his hand. “Richard Jury. We spoke on the telephone?”
“Kurt Brunner. You’re here about Billy.” The voice seemed to pitch into a different register, as if they were on a ship blasted by a wave.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brunner.”
He recovered himself and led Jury back to the sitting room. It was quite attractive in its unlived-in way. But Lamb House was, after all, a little museum of sorts, or at least its ground floor was. The tenant would be responsible for keeping it spotless and prepared for visitors for a good part of the year. The sign outside had given Wednesdays and Saturdays as the public days.
And this room, certainly, was meticulously cared for: the books on those shelves lovingly dusted, the brilliants of that candlestick holder on the mantel carefully polished. The crystal was touched by the darting, uncertain sunlight that came and went as the two of them sat there in what seemed more than silence, a hush.
“I’m sorry about Billy Maples. And I’m sorry you’re being bothered again by police. I was asked to help out on the case since I knew one of the witnesses and also a family member.” Jury paused. “You were with Billy for several years, I understand.”
“I was, yes.” Brunner looked away, looked off toward the window through which light came and went swiftly. “For about five years. In London and also here.”
There was no question about the effect of Billy Maples’s death on Kurt Brunner. The man looked and sounded desolate. But he kept it up. There was little left of a German accent and none of the idiom; perhaps he’d consciously tried to drill them out of his speech.
“You weren’t at the family estate, then?”
Brunner shook his head. “Billy didn’t care for the house.”
“Yet he had grown up there. It was his childhood home.”
“Yes, but he didn’t get on very well with his family. He didn’t like the place. I think perhaps it was why he’d have such mood swings.” He frowned slightly.
Jury thought about this. “But you can’t really say?”
Brunner shook his head.
Jury said, “What were your duties? I mean, in what capacity did you work for him?”
“He wanted, for lack of a better term, an administrative assistant; he needed someone to keep things sorted.”
“‘Things’?”
“He had many interests. Sometimes they’d conflict. I’m speaking on a very simple level here—I mean conflicts of time or meetings.”
Jury thought about this, then said, “From what I’ve heard, your employer was very generous. Where did that come from?”
Kurt Brunner’s eyebrows rose, puzzled. “I’m not sure what you mean, Superintendent.”
“I’m not quite sure either. He made hefty contributions to this gallery in Clerkenwell, and gave a good deal of money to artists. And then there’s this”—Jury looked up at the ceiling—“this literary landscape. Not just any writer, but Henry James, no less.” Jury frowned, thinking. “I haven’t read much, but there’s something about his writing that’s so…herm
etic. If that makes any sense.”
“James had a very active social life. Traveled widely. Was a worldly man. He wasn’t a recluse, if that’s what you mean.”
“So I’ve heard, but…can’t you do all that and still remain, well, sealed?”
Brunner’s expression became serious. “You think Billy lived that sort of life?”
“I don’t know; I’m merely tossing it out.” Jury thought of Father Martin and Our Most Holy Redeemer Church. “Was he of a religious bent? Perhaps he’d been saved.”
Kurt Brunner just looked at him. “From what?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?” Jury smiled. “I expect from his formerly wastrel ways.” Jury thought somehow he might have offended Kurt Brunner. He wanted to revive Brunner’s earlier mood and brought the subject down to a more literal level. “You handled his finances and kept his calendar and were his friend?”
“I like to think so, I mean, that I was his friend.”
“You must have given his murder a lot of thought.”
Brunner nodded. “I certainly have. And I’ve no idea why it happened.”
“Did he have enemies?”
“Enemies.” Brunner frowned, as if the word had little connection with his dead friend. “None I knew of.”
Jury leaned his head in the palm of his hand, elbow braced on the arm of his chair. Prepared to be patient. “You must have tried to sort it out—what caused someone to shoot Billy Maples.”
Kurt Brunner leaned toward Jury. “As I said before, yes. Yes, I have. I’ve thought of little else, Superintendent.”
“I’m sure. But this is what I mean. You must have thought of certain possibilities—people, places, situations—before discarding them. I expect that’s what I’m looking for: the discards.”
“That would be irresponsible of me, wouldn’t it? Merely to toss out names like bread to a swan?”
Jury grinned. “First time I’ve been likened to a swan. Let’s call it more free association than accusation or irresponsibility on your part. I’m merely trying to put together a picture of your employer, what he was really like. Who better to come to than you?”
“But look: I’m betraying no confidences.”
Jury sighed. Still, he was happy to hear there were things to betray.
Brunner grew thoughtful but said nothing.
Neither did Jury. He sat, patient as a hawk. He had all day, all evening, if it came to it. While he waited he thought about Henry James. That notebook, the pages with so few alterations. To get it so right the first time around. What genius always to have access to such elegant language, such perfect prose. It was genius enough that he wound up with it in the book’s final form. But to begin with it, to dictate it! No wonder they called him the Master.
As if coming in on his wavelength, Brunner said, “Have you read many of James’s novels?” He had moved toward one of the bookcases.
Jury shook his head. “Three, I think.”
“This one makes use of the vampire theme.” Brunner held up a slender volume.
Jury couldn’t help it—he laughed. “Henry James writing about vampires?”
Brunner fixed him with a quirky smile. “It depends on how you interpret them.” He sat down again.
“Vampires.”
Brunner nodded, the slightly deprecating smile in place.
Jury understood the smile: living here as he did, Brunner might feel he had access to the mind of Henry James. But Jury wanted access to the mind of Billy Maples. Perhaps Brunner meant to suggest that the one was the other. “Vampires. I find that really hard to believe.”
Brunner hitched his chair a bit closer. He was a man of great intensity, realized Jury. “The Sacred Fount isn’t one of his most popular novels, perhaps because it’s rather obscure.”
“All of James is ‘obscure’ from my point of view. But then I’ve not read that much.”
“Oh, but The Sacred Fount is even more so.” Kurt Brunner smiled and reached for a silver cigarette box, took a cigarette from it, offered the box to Jury, who shook his head. Brunner went on: “I don’t ordinarily smoke in here. Could we go into the garden?”
They rose and passed out through the French doors into the walled garden. It was just as Jury remembered it. How strange, he thought, that something as inconsequential as another man’s garden would stick with him for so long.
Brunner lit his cigarette. Jury watched the match—its strike, its small bloom of flame, its progress to the tip of the cigarette. It was rather excruciating. He coughed.
“Sorry. Does the smoke bother you?”
“No, no. You were talking about this vampire business.”
“Yes. In the book an older wife has drained her younger husband of his youth, or a large measure of it. One of the partners flourishes as the other one sickens.”
“And that’s the vampire theme?”
“That’s the vampire theme.”
Jury shook his head, smiled. “I have a hard time imagining James writing about it.”
“He wrote The Turn of the Screw, remember.”
“Yes. That’s one of the ones I read. How does this pertain to Billy Maples?”
“His stepmother, Olivia. They didn’t get on. That’s putting it mildly. They had terrible arguments. He hated going there. He’d always swear never again. But Olivia claimed to need him, to miss him and would set about manipulating him to come back. He would go for a few days. It would take him a day to recover. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he’d say. ‘She grows more brilliant, even younger, when I’m there, but me, I’m completely done in, feel ten years older. Fagged.’ Well, it’s as if one of them had to pay the price for the other.”
“Utterly ghoulish.” Jury thought how banal that remark was. “Are you suggesting that his stepmother is in some way responsible for Billy’s death?”
Kurl Brunner shrugged. “You’re forgetting what it is you asked for: any person that came to mind on my way to ‘I have no idea who did it.’ You were looking for the discards is how you put it.”
Jury shook his head. “This woman doesn’t sound as if she can be so easily discarded.”
Brunner nodded. “I agree. But I’d have no idea at all as to how she might have been involved. I don’t know how to answer your question.”
“A detective named Chilten has spoken to the parents. He’ll want to know where they were two nights ago.”
“Well, you see, ‘they’ probably don’t come into it much. Billy’s father, from what I can gather, is fond of his son, but not very able to show it.”
“And you? Where were you?”
“In London, at the flat in Sloane Street. I’d just come back from Berlin. So, no, I don’t have an alibi.” Brunner smiled uncertainly.
“Do you own a gun?”
Brunner shook his head. “They asked me that, too, the detectives from, where? Islington police station? Indeed they asked me a lot of things.”
Jury opened his mouth to speak when the phone rang. Brunner excused himself, put out his cigarette. Wanting to spend more time in the house, Jury followed him inside.
While Brunner was engaged with the call, Jury moved about the sitting room, grateful for the silence. Not that he’d minded the talk, or Brunner’s voice, for none of that had disturbed it. Their voices had intruded upon the mood of the house about as much as a layer of dust. There was no dust, of course. The place had to be kept up. For some peculiar reason, Jury would have liked to turn a book spine toward him and blow dust from its surface. He did not know why he felt this; perhaps it had to do with letting things lie.
He picked up a book of short stories, looked at the contents page and found the story Oswald Maples had mentioned: “The Figure in the Carpet.”
He held on to it as he looked over the shelves of books and wondered if they had been Billy Maples’s or the property of the National Trust. Probably the Trust’s.
For some reason, he was reminded of his dead cousin and how she had given him a version of his childhood t
hat he remembered completely differently. He had been five or six—or so he thought—when his mother had been killed in the air raid.
“No, you were only a baby, and, no, you weren’t there when it happened,” she’d said.
It had been highly charged, that apparently mistaken memory of his dead mother in the ruins of their house, and unless his cousin had been lying (“she would, you know,” her husband, Brendan, had said, with a laugh), he had got it all wrong. But the feelings of desolation and devastation, that he had got right.
Kurt Brunner returned with the information that it had been the National Trust that’d called. “They need a tenant; they want me to stay on for two or three weeks until the couple who are to take up the tenancy, who were in line for it, can make their plans and get themselves sorted.”
“Well, at least it means you won’t have to reorganize your own for a while.”
“Oh, I don’t want it!”
“The tenancy? But I should think you wouldn’t want to be cut free straightaway,” said Jury, surprised.
“That’s just what I do want. To be cut free. It’s no work, really. If there was a salary attached, I’d call it a sinecure.” He smiled. “And there are not that many visitors.”
“It doesn’t attract the masses, does it?”
“More than you’d think, but fewer than James deserves.” Brunner smiled. “It’s too isolated for anyone other than those who absolutely want to see it.”
Idly, Jury turned the thin pages of the book of short stories he held. “It would be treated with a kind of, well, reverence, I’d think.”
Brunner folded his arms across his chest. “Yes, we all pretty much hold our breath here.”
Jury smiled. It was a good way of putting it. He thought of the undisturbed dust and his wish to blow it away.
“So, they look to me to find someone else; it’s as if I’d betrayed them by turning down their offer. Almost as if Billy had betrayed them by getting himself killed.”
“What will you do, then?”
“Go back to London. Stay in the flat. I think I need a large dose of London life at this point. Rye can be claustrophobic.” He took out a card and made a note. “Here’s the address and telephone in case you need to get in touch with me.”
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