She gave him quite a nasty kick. “I won’t have a dog in my kitchen!”
“Why?” said Malcolm. “He ain’t done nuffin’.”
Ah! That paean to the excellent British public school!
Melrose watched as Malcolm handily picked up a little cake square waiting to be iced. Malcolm stuck his finger in the bowl and iced it himself.
Bravo! Bravo! Melrose wanted to applaud.
Mrs. Jessup was revving from zero to eighty in fifteen seconds, her face growing mottled as a house in flames.
Malcolm saw this and smiled. Then he looked at the pastry table, stood back, cake in hand, and in a carefully calibrated move led Minnie one better: in a little jump and with his foot striking its edge, upturned the whole table, everything, including the too pink leg of lamb, and sent it clattering to the floor.
It made the most godawful noise!
In the seconds it took her to scream out, “No! No! Dora! Janie! You old devil!” she had picked up the knife and would have been on Malcolm in a flash had the table not been between them, and had not both Melrose and Waldo launched themselves at her (Waldo beating out Melrose by a nose).
What struck Melrose as most dramatic in all of this was not the action, but the voice yelling “Dora! Janie! You old devil!” For what he heard was another voice, the voice of the governess, yelling “Peter Quint, you devil!”
Henry James still lived in the Lamb House kitchen.
The National Trust would make a meal of it, if they were smart.
FIFTY-TWO
Local police took Annie Jessup to the station where they waited for London to come and collect her, London in this case being Richard Jury and Ron Chilten. A Sussex WPC had accompanied Mrs. Jessup to her home to pick up a few things she would need while she was in London. They didn’t know how long that would be. It was all very easy, Mrs. Jessup making no demur, saying nothing.
It was much the same nothing her brother had said that morning in Islington. They appeared to share some belief, almost superstitious, that there was safety in silence.
Sitting now across the table in one of the rooms of the station in Cinque Port Street, Jury assured her that safety did not lie in silence; indeed silence could sink her.
“Because if you don’t help us out here, Annie, you’ll be certainly looking at a charge of accessory to murder, even if you didn’t pull the trigger.” Jury said this while leaning over the table. “We know what happened. Your being silent as the grave is only going to make it harder.”
She sat there with her big imitation leather purse pushed like a breastplate against herself, arms folded across it, looking as stern as if she’d just taken on the three of them as staff and was regretting it. She looked at them as if they were raw country people whom she’d have to whip into shape.
Jury leaned back, as incensed by this woman as he had been by Gilbert Snow. They truly seemed to think they were exempt from the ordinary rules of behavior.
“Wiggins.” Jury nodded for him to tell it.
“It was that ‘doomed voyage.’ Remember you were telling me about it and that you had two sisters who drowned. There were instances of bigger children pushing the younger, littler ones away from the lifeboats, pushing them into the sea and even pushing out children who’d already managed to climb in. That’s what happened to Janie and Dora, isn’t it? They got pushed out of the raft. Horrible, it must’ve been, completely ruthless. But these were children, after all, and you shouldn’t, in the circumstances, have held them to such exacting standards.”
Jury could see the steam rising in Annie Jessup. She had to fight with herself to hold her tongue. Wiggins couldn’t have taken a better tack than to minimize the children’s behavior in this dreadful voyage.
“You’ll be accessory to murder, you realize that,” said Jury. “Gilbert was the shooter, but you’re the one who stashed the gun in Kurt Brunner’s desk. Not a smart move, really. For you, it was easy to get into the Sloane Street flat; you’d been there several times before, probably had your own key.”
She simply stared at him. He’d never felt in such a witchy presence before. He rose. So did Wiggins. “Sergeant Chilten will take you to London,” said Jury.
They left.
“They’re both going to do themselves in with this not talking,” he said to Ron. “Tell your boss she might have more success in getting something out of the woman, given she’s a woman, too.”
“My boss,” said Chilten, “isn’t really going to like that reasoning, but I’ll tell her.”
Jury smiled. “I have to call her anyway. Got your mobile on you?”
“You’re worse than a guy who’s always filching cigarettes.” Ron handed Jury his phone. He said, “Look, I’m not getting all this. Who’s the guilty party here?”
Jury was pushing numbers with his thumb. “There’s only one person it could’ve been. You’ve got a photo and a negative…You can’t get them to match up. Jury had imagined Harry Johnson saying this. He’d been right. The two things that were off by a fraction were two different attempts to evacuate children: the Kindertransport and the ship City of Benares. Children from Germany, children from England.
Jury walked away. When she finally came on the phone, he told her what had happened and told her what he wanted her to do.
Without argument or exclamation, she said she’d get right on it and hung up.
Jury handed the phone back to Ron Chilten, who was talking to Sergeant Wiggins.
He folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “You going to take the kid home?” Ron looked over at the two—Melrose and Malcolm—waiting on a bench.
“Which one do you mean?”
Wiggins snorted. “Considering they just took care of half this case for you, you could show more appreciation.” Wiggins loving it that Jury was giving someone else a hard time.
“You’re right, Wiggins. Let’s go.”
“Maybe I’m just thick, but who was it?” asked Melrose as they stood beside the car.
Jury was holding Waldo, whose attempt to pee on the leg of the woman police constable was quickly squelched. “Who was what?”
Wiggins had unlocked the car and Jury tossed Waldo in.
“Hey, watchit!” said Malcolm. “Waldo’s delicate.”
Waldo? Delicate? “It’s all that rappelling you make him do.”
“You know,” said Melrose, climbing in the backseat with Malcolm, “perfectly damned well who! The one in the raft, the child who shoved out the others.”
Jury, in the passenger seat beside Wiggins, turned to look into the back. “Think about it—”
“No, I don’t want to think about it, I want you to tell me.”
Jury was shaking his head. “No, no. Think about it. There’s only one person who fills the bill. Only one.” He turned around again, and to Wiggins said, “Don’t tell him, Wiggins.”
Wiggins hadn’t planned on it, since Wiggins was trying to work it out for himself.
It was Malcolm who pointed out the Happy Eater ahead, drowning in its own light. He’d missed the promised dinner at Lamb House, but accepted Melrose’s apology as he could understand getting Billy’s killer took precedence.
However, he had limits. He had not had dinner and the Happy Eater was approaching.
Jury told him he was in luck because Sergeant Wiggins was driving and he’d never passed up a Happy Eater in his life.
They parked and piled out of the car and into the cheerful environs of the same Happy Eater Jury and Wiggins had stopped at just a few days ago on their way to Rye.
To Jury it seemed like an eternity.
They sat with coffees and teas before them, Malcolm insisting on coffee.
“God bless Minnie Babcock,” said Melrose. “I just don’t want to be around when He does. It was the table going over—”
“Who’s Minnie Babcock? I’m the one who did that,” said Malcolm, handing down a piece of a roll to Waldo underneath the table.
Patiently, Melrose said, “Yes, you d
id; you also did it better.”
“Right,” said Malcolm.
“Don’t be modest.”
Wiggins said, “It made her think of the life raft her sisters got shoved off by somebody.” Pointedly, he looked at Jury. Jury did not respond. “I was telling you about that doomed voyage thing, but you were only interested in the Kindertransport and paid no attention.”
Lord, how sanctimonious Wiggins could sound! “Again, I feel the reproof, Wiggins.”
Wiggins was mining that reply for sarcasm.
“Seriously,” Jury added. He meant it.
The same waitress brought them their food: eggs and chips, eggs and sausage and chips, beans on toast, a mountain of toasted tea cakes, and one enormous hamburger. Malcolm was having the hamburger.
Jury said, “I don’t think I ever want to see another hamburger.”
“Well, when the Happy Eaters close,” said Wiggins, “and the Burger Kings take over, you’ll be seeing a lot more of them.”
Malcolm stared. “What’d’ya mean they’re closing?” He put down his hamburger.
Wiggins told him the story of the planned takeover. Malcolm was scandalized. “They can’t do that!”
For the remainder of the meal these two hearts that beat as one paid no attention to their late-night companions.
Roderick Maples was waiting by a window and came immediately when their car pulled up. He seemed genuinely glad to see Malcolm, who had, in all of this, acquired a kind of luster.
However, he would not take all the credit. “Waldo did his part, too! He rushed her! Splaaat!”
Waldo took this as a direction and ran around the pillars and raised his leg to one.
“If I could have a word, Mr. Maples,” said Jury.
“Of course.”
They went into the living room.
Yes, the Klimt and the Soutine paintings had been kept by friends of his father’s. He had remained in touch with the family. The son, who had been Roderick’s age then, upon finding out who they really belonged to now, crated them up, and sent them to Sussex.
“And you know how your father came by them?”
Roderick didn’t answer this question; instead he asked, “How do you come to know all of this?”
“Billy knew.” Perhaps he shouldn’t have said that; there was nothing to be gained except to see Roderick’s stricken look.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Maples. We’ll be going. Malcolm really helped us.”
“I’m glad of that.” Roderick stood and shook hands. “We should pay more attention to the boy.”
“Yes, you should.”
Jury put out his hand to Malcolm. “Thanks, Malcolm. You were brilliant.”
Malcolm took Jury’s hand. He looked as if he’d just been released from a black hole or a mine shaft into the bright air, despite the darkness of the night.
“Thanks to you, too,” he said. He picked Waldo up and went inside.
At the same time, in London, DI Aguilar was knocking on a door. A light went on in the hallway and the door opened.
“Mrs. Ames? Rose Ames? You may remember me…”
FIFTY-THREE
The call came as she was switching off the overhead lights. The fluorescent buzz stopped and they flickered out, sometimes together, sometimes separately. She liked this phenomenon, as if the lighting in the morgue were standing up for itself, somehow showing off its regenerative powers, showing it was not dead yet.
She was always the last to leave; she was the last to wipe down one of the stainless steel tables; she wanted the room left spotlessly clean, feeling it was the least they could do for the dead.
For her, the dead were fully dead only if forgotten. After she had collected coat, purse, scarf, extra shoes, she said good night to the bank of stainless steel enclosures. She always did this, said good night, sometimes reciting a little Dylan Thomas, or a little Shakespeare, only a line or two, sometimes singing a few bars of a song. And always the snatch of words or song had the phrase “good night” in it.
The call came as she went out the door, a little after midnight. She sighed. There was always something, something terrible. It amazed her that anyone lived past ten years old. She fished her mobile out of her purse, walked toward the car, alone in the lot.
“Dr. Nancy,” she said, then listened and stopped in her tracks. “Oh my God, no. I’ll be there in five minutes.” Five minutes didn’t allow much time to get from St. James’s to Islington.
She ran to her car and peeled out of the area. She went through three red lights, didn’t give way to traffic in roundabouts, flew past other cars, leaning on her horn.
When she got to Upper Street, it wasn’t hard to find the site of the accident. Ambushed by lights—red, blue, and white—she stopped, left the engine running, nearly fell out of the car, and shoved her way through the layers of the curious, who were ogling the wreck. She joined the paramedics and the ambulance.
“Lateral impact,” one of the officers told her. “He’s dead.” He nodded toward a Hillman. “She isn’t. Yet. Over there.”
It was, thought Phyllis, a miracle that Lu Aguilar was still breathing, given the massive trauma. Compound fractures in both legs, bits of bone showing through the lacerations. Her chest? A collapsed lung? Other things—hard to say. The paramedics had done everything necessary, everything they could do.
Lu’s breathing was ragged but at least she was still doing it.
And she was conscious and disoriented and full of fright. Phyllis could tell from her eyes. Phyllis got down on her knees.
Carefully, she slipped her arm under Lu’s neck, bent down, said in a low voice, “It’s all right, love. It’s going to be all right, you’ll be fine. Listen: I’m the best doctor in London.”
Amazingly, Lu managed a little smile, one corner of her mouth rising a fraction. And some of the fear seemed to drain away. Phyllis wiped her hand over Lu’s forehead, pushing back the hair that wanted to veil her face. Phyllis looked up at the medics and nodded. She held Lu’s hand as she was moved to a stretcher.
It had started to rain. She looked around for somebody she knew, saw no one. She pulled out her mobile, hit Richard Jury’s number. It rang and rang. Damn him! Couldn’t he keep charged? His flat wasn’t far from Upper Street. She went to her car, saw someone had switched off the engine for her, shut the door. It would be harder maneuvering the car through all of this clotted traffic, these people. Now the rain was coming down hard.
Phyllis pulled her coat collar closer and simply ran.
Richard Jury had deposited Melrose Plant at Boring’s, had a nightcap with him, and then driven to his house. It was after midnight and he’d been home less than fifteen minutes, just missed the heavy rain that was now pummeling his windows as if spoiling for a fight.
He heard a clatter on the stairs. Carole-anne probably, running from the rain. Carole-anne for certain when he heard the knock. She had a hard time passing his door without knocking. He opened the door.
“Phyllis!”
He had never seen anyone so wet, so ragged from rain, so breathless from moving through it.
“There’s been an accident,” she said. “Lu Aguilar—no, wait, she’s not dead, but she’s hurt. Tried to call but your mobile was off.” She took a deep breath and propped herself up against the door frame.
“I ran all the way.”
Dust Page 29