The Knowledge_A Richard Jury Mystery

by Martha Grimes

  “And they just send anyone upstairs who walks in and says they need a cop?”

  “No, they do not. They get a detective to come down from ‘upstairs.’”

  “And that happened to be you. Ha.” The “ha” sent this piece of information into the deductive hinterland where it belonged. “There’s a new gym opened in Islington. Called the KO.”

  “That’s in the Times?”

  “No, it’s in Essex Road.” She lowered the paper and looked him up and down as he stood in the kitchen doorway with his mug refilled. “You never took my advice and joined a gym.”

  “That is correct.” He drank his tea.

  “You need exercise. You’ll lose what looks are left.” She went back to her paper, turned another page.

  “I’m glad there’s any left at all.”

  As she resettled herself, the front page of the paper fell away and Jury could see the inside page and nearly dropped his mug of tea. His mind shouted, No! His mouth went so dry he couldn’t seem to move his tongue to shout it aloud. In two steps he was at the couch and grabbing at that page.

  Carole-anne looked up in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

  Jury stared at the photo of David Moffit. Then on the other side of the printed column at his beautiful wife, Rebecca. The headline read: Couple Shot Outside Trendy London Club.

  Jury dropped the page and fell into his easy chair. He put his head in his hands.

  Carole-anne had quickly retrieved the page of the newspaper and said, “Oh, my God. He was in the Starrdust on Thursday. Did you know him?”

  Jury didn’t answer.

  Carole-anne read the brief account aloud:

  “The prestigious Artemis Club in the City of London was the scene of a double murder when Americans Rebecca and David Moffit were shot down in the courtyard as they exited a cab.

  The gunman ‘came out of nowhere,’ to quote one of the customers, ‘got into the same cab and drove off.’ City of London Police, led by Detective Chief Inspector Dennis Jenkins, came to the scene when they got the emergency call. Dr. Moffit was a physics professor at Columbia University in New York, where the couple lived.”

  She looked over at Jury. “Super—?”

  “I met him at the Starrdust.”

  Her frown turned to surprise. “That handsome guy! I told him his fortune!” She had the grace not to add, “I warned him.”

  The only bit of good news in all of this was that it was Dennis Jenkins who’d got the case. Jenkins was a good friend. Jury got up and moved to the telephone.

  “I’ve got to make a call.” He dialed the Snow Hill station and asked for DCI Jenkins.

  When Carole-anne saw how he looked, she walked over and put her hand on his arm, and made to leave. Jury’s phone calls she ordinarily took as part of her domain, but not this time. “I’m sorry, Super. If you need anything, you know where I am.”

  As he waited for Jenkins to come on the line, Jury sat staring at a rubbed spot on his carpet, hardly aware that a tear had run down his face until he saw the drop fall on the worn place. He was thinking of two days before, remembering the Starrdust and David Moffit.

  SPOOKY ACTION

  Covent Garden, London

  Oct. 31, Thursday afternoon

  6

  “Would you look at that, sir?” said Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins.

  As if Jury were blind to this shopwindow with its assortment of miniature ghosts, ghouls and graves, more than one of which had been disturbed by a skeleton or moldering body pushing its way out of the ground. The ghosts and ghouls were equally active, some on the ground, some in the trees, a few flying about a church spire. The lighting was key, professionally done by means of tiny LEDs that moved within the scene, spotlighting whichever figure was performing from one moment to another.

  Wiggins went on, brave companion and guide in the country of the blind, reporting back to his boss, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury, New Scotland Yard CID, on the action in the window: “See there, that zombie on the left, he’s about to pour—there it goes!—that tiny bucket of blood all over the top-hatted man strolling along the path. Got him! Covered in it, he is.”

  Jury was about to punch him, when Wiggins quickly pointed out the Frankensteinian figure coming out from behind a tree. As Wiggins stood giggling, Jury said, “Good. Now if you’d just hand me my cane, Wiggins, I could tap my way into the shop.”

  These two were not the whole of the audience for this little Hallows Eve extravaganza, for they were surrounded by kids of varying ages. The shop was the Starrdust, one of the most popular venues in Covent Garden. Jury was very fond of its owner, Andrew Starr.

  “Cane, sir?” Wiggins then lost interest immediately, turning again to the action in the window. “I just don’t see how they do it.”

  “They” were the shop assistants, Meg and Joy, who, with the help of Andrew Starr’s electrical engineer, had been “dressing” the windows of the Starrdust for years, paying particular attention to the night sky, the constellations, the planets. Andrew Starr made as sure as Copernicus would have done that they got that part right. Andrew was a much admired and respected astrologer. He made up horoscopes for some very important Londoners who had been consulting him for years; Andrew was also canny enough to see the drawing power of Meg and Joy, who didn’t take it seriously at all. Hence the unfolding drama of miniature goblins and buckets of blood. Andrew knew the value of entertainment.

  The shop was a mecca for adults and children alike who’d had a bellyful of the “real world” and were only too happy to walk through the door of an unreal one where the source of music was an old phonograph that played only songs that referenced the heavens. Hoagy Carmichael’s twangy rendition of “Stardust” was pretty much the theme. Dinah Shore’s velvety version of “Stars Fell on Alabama,” or Nat King Cole smoothing out “Moon River.” The interior was only a few amps brighter than the shop windows, albeit lit well enough to see the goods for sale: books, periodicals, vintage editions of volumes on astronomy, Freemasonry, alchemy; collections of children’s books and stuffed Maurice Sendak “Wild Things”; music boxes and fancily dressed dolls. Although the room was small, Andrew had installed a number of library shelves, among which several customers were currently roaming and reading. One of these was a tall, very handsome man who had propped himself against the end of a thick shelf, holding a hideously thick old book and watching the proceedings closely.

  And then there were the various internal structures, such as the yellow-framed hut called the “Horrorscope” whose so-called “horrors” were far more Maurice Sendak than Wes Craven. Wiggins spent a good deal of time in this little place, which always emitted shouts of laughter. (He was in there now, having headed for it the moment they walked into the Starrdust.) Not the least of the attractions was the silver tent that housed Madame Zostra (“famous clairvoyant”), a.k.a. Carole-anne Palutski, Jury’s upstairs neighbor in Islington. Businessmen spent a lot of lunch hours getting their fortunes told by Madame Zostra. She was not in her tent at the moment.

  Andrew Starr was standing with arms folded looking up at the domed ceiling. This was Jury’s favorite spot. In this shop given over to heavenly effects, the biggest of all was this section of ceiling that had been turned into a small planetarium. Its constellations, its stars and planets, revolved continuously, parts lighting up, other parts receding into darkness, new parts—right now, Jupiter—lighting. It was another miracle of engineering and invention. Right now Meg (or Joy—Jury couldn’t tell them apart) was up on a tall ladder having shiny things handed to her by Joy (or Meg). He called them the Starrdust twins, they looked so alike. They wore shiny things in their hair and gold or silver suspenders on their designer jeans.

  “Hello, Andrew,” said Jury, moving to stand beside him. “You rearranging the planets?”

  “Superintendent! Didn’t see you come in.”

  The ceiling-sky’s movement had momentarily stopped and Meg or Joy appeared to be making a planetary adjustment,
moving one of the tiny objects a mite to the left.

  “You know how many millions of miles you just moved Uranus, don’t you?”

  This voice had come not from Andrew but from the tall man at the bookcase behind them. In a good-natured tone, he added, “Better shove it closer to Saturn or we might all be out of jobs by morning.”

  Both Meg and Joy giggled. “But it’s only just a bit,” said Meg, as if they had been at the Creation and were here now only to help out whatever gods needed them.

  “A bit from your vantage point could be a hundred thousand light-years up there on your ceiling. And Lord knows how far you’ve moved it from Saturn.”

  “Only Saturn is way over there,” said Meg, pointing to some indefinable position.

  “Remember nonlocality,” said the man at the bookcase. “What we could be seeing is spooky action at a distance.”

  Andrew laughed. “I like that.” He turned and gestured to the man at the bookshelf. “David, come on over here. I want you to meet someone.” When the tall stranger walked over, Andrew said, “This is Richard Jury, Scotland Yard CID.” Then to Jury, “David Moffit, from America. He teaches at Columbia University, and he teaches astronomy, if you can believe that coincidence.” Andrew sounded pleased as Punch, as if he’d personally arranged the teaching post.

  “Wow!” said David Moffit. “A Scotland Yard detective! The Met!”

  Jury’s hand was shaken in the firmest grip he’d ever encountered. He felt a jolt. He had no idea why, since the fellow didn’t remind him of anyone he’d ever known, yet Jury felt he knew him. David Moffit simply had presence. It wasn’t because the man was so good-looking, or so affable. He simply was a commanding presence one rarely came across, a stranger with whom one felt an immediate bond.

  “If you’re an astronomer, you’ve come to the right place, then,” said Jury. “You’re a friend of Andrew?”

  “I am now,” said David, with a smile that Carole-anne Palutski would crawl on hands and knees to witness. “I just discovered the place by accident, walking round Covent Garden.”

  “Had your fortune told by Madame Zostra yet?”

  He didn’t see Carole-anne, but she’d never have missed a chance to get this guy into her tent.

  “Where is she, incidentally?” he asked Andrew.

  “Out getting cakes and things for tea.”

  David said, “You mean the red-haired beauty? Told me I was in extreme danger—”

  “That’d be the one. And told you to come back, or it could go worse for you?”

  “Right. Does she have any psychic powers?”

  “Well, she knows whenever I’ve lined up a date for the evening.”

  David laughed. Andrew had moved off to help a customer at the counter. “But I wonder,” David went on, “how she knew I liked to gamble.”

  “Because you said something. She was using cards, wasn’t she? The tarot sometimes; sometimes just an ordinary deck. So you said something she picked up on. Simple.”

  As they walked out from under the planetarium, Meg and Joy called out good-bye and David turned to wave and smile. Then he said, more seriously, “Superintendent, I wonder if you’d have the time to go somewhere and maybe have a drink? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “If I have time to hang around the Starrdust, I expect I have the time for a drink. Something wrong?”

  “Yes.” David Moffit didn’t embellish. He just stopped talking and looked worried.

  “Let’s get at least to the fringe of Covent Garden. It’s a bit too fey these days. The White Lion’s not far. Let me go and alert my sergeant that I’m going with you.” Jury made for the Horrorscope to tell Wiggins.

  The White Lion was situated on a corner, its facade black and gold, its interior dark wood and old framed mirrors. David picked out a table by a window as Jury went to the bar to get a couple of pints of Guinness.

  He returned, set them down and said, “What’s wrong, David?”

  “I think I’m being followed. No, maybe ‘watched’ more accurately describes it.”

  Jury frowned. “Go on.”

  “Rebecca—my wife—and I got to London less than a week ago. For the last twenty-four hours, I’ve felt I’m being … I don’t know, but when I leave the hotel, I feel something like a physical presence behind me. I turn and see no one, nothing suspicious. Today I escaped into the Starrdust. A kind of sanctuary.” He shrugged and looked embarrassed. “I feel something terrible is going to happen.”

  “Any reason you should feel in danger? I take it you don’t know anyone in London you’d regard as wanting to harm you?”

  “No.” David turned his pint, hardly drunk, by the handle. “Only—”

  “What?”

  David grew thoughtful. Then he said, as if in sudden inspiration. “Look, could we talk sometime on Saturday? I’ll know more then.”

  Jury was completely puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘more’?”

  “I feel really dumb talking about this when all I can do is guess at it. We’re leaving on Sunday to go back to the States.”

  Jury thought for a moment. “Why did you come to London, David?”

  “So Rebecca could visit her mother. Rebecca’s British—well, now she’s both. We have a flat in Chelsea, but we’re staying at a hotel so Claire, her mom, can use the flat. She likes to come to London. She lives in … High Wycombe, is that the name?”

  “Yes. That’s not far from London. It’s pretty generous of you to give up your own flat to your mother-in-law.”

  David didn’t seem to hear that. “We were going to stay another week, but I feel this danger’s real. So I changed the return to Sunday. Rebecca’s fine with that.”

  “Where do you live in the U.S.?”

  “New York. My family home is in Connecticut. My mom’s there. Dad’s dead, worse luck.”

  He looked extremely unhappy when he said this.

  “You’re how old?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  Jury was surprised. He looked twenty-eight.

  David noted the expression and smiled. “My mom says I haven’t aged since I was twenty.”

  Jury was surprised to find his own guess seconded by this unknown ally, David’s mother.

  “Looking so young presents problems. I had to do a hell of a lot of talking to get the post at Columbia. I think looking young is the only reason my students listen to me.”

  Jury was sure that wasn’t true. “You really teach astronomy?”

  “Not exactly, although Andrew Starr likes that part of it. I’m an astrophysicist.”

  “How does ‘astro’ differ from the rest of it?”

  “It’s a branch of astronomy. The physics of the universe. The nature of heavenly bodies—stars, planets. The light they emit.”

  “Not string theory? Not the Uncertainty Principle? Not Heisenberg’s equation?”

  It was David Moffit’s turn to look surprised. “Good Lord, Superintendent, I don’t hear that question very often from strangers. You’re into physics?”

  “Actually, that’s a good way of putting it. I have an acquaintance—” he wasn’t going to call Harry Johnson a ‘friend’—“who’s a physicist. It’s just very—intriguing, I guess. But if you’re teaching this at Columbia, you must have a PhD, so it’s not ‘mister,’ right? You’re Doctor Moffit.”

  David shrugged. “A PhD, yes.” He paused. “You know, I’ve always been enthralled by the stars. Seriously, I spend a lot of time looking at the night sky. When I was a kid, my dad built me a tree house with a glass roof way at the top of a huge maple behind our house. I could see the sky through the roof. A lot of nights, I’d sleep there.” He looked upward as if the glass roof might be there. “It’s still there, the tree house.”

  “And do you still sleep there?” Jury smiled.

  David nodded. “I do. There are some things you never get over.” He looked at Jury. “Childhood is one of them.”

  Jury felt his throat tighten and took a drink of b
eer. “You’ve got that right.”

  “From your expression, I’d guess you didn’t have a tree house.”

  “You’ve got that right too.” Jury told him about his own mother and father. “I was only a baby. I think it was the last bomb ever to hit London that got my mother. I grew up for some years in an orphanage.”

  “Christ, but I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to my mom. I really love her.”

  It was such a clear, plain declaration that Jury couldn’t respond. How often did one hear a child say something like that? He thought he had never seen any face so musing, any expression so wistful. He watched David rub at his eyes. Tiredness or tears, Jury couldn’t tell. He felt he should bring him back to the present and asked what courses he taught at Columbia.

  “Well, the graduate course is called ‘Night Sky.’”

  “Simple name. Mightn’t your students infer from that simplicity that the night sky itself is simple? From the Milky Way to Andromeda to—where else is there?”

  David laughed. “Many elsewheres. Many. Trillions of galaxies. Think of the distances between them, think of all that space—two and a half million light-years between our own Milky Way and the nearest galaxy, Andromeda. That’s what the students don’t understand. That all that distance, all that space, is really terrifying, even nightmarish.”

  “Not beautiful, then?”

  “Oh, of course it’s beautiful, but it’s also terrifying.”

  Jury said, “So should I know what the bloody hell ‘spooky action’—what was the rest of it?”

  “Spooky action at a distance. Scientists have been debating this for decades. It’s a way of talking about nonlocality. Einstein didn’t believe in nonlocality. He had a huge argument going with Niels Bohr about it.”

  “That clears things up. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about except it must have to do with quantum mechanics.”

  “If you know that you know more than anyone else in this pub, I’d venture to say. Nonlocality is a theory that says two particles—” Here David placed the mustard pot next to the plastic bottle of ketchup. “—these two particles can know about each other no matter how far apart, no matter if they’re separated by billions of light-years. This is in direct contradiction to Einstein’s idea of locality, which insists that an object is influenced only by its immediate surroundings. He said it was impossible that one could influence the other no matter how far apart mustard and ketchup were. Nonlocality means the two are ‘entangled’; thus, they act in concert.” Here David shoved the two containers to opposite ends of the table. “That these two things would act together no matter how far apart was what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’