‘I wanted to get something Marcus Warburton wasn’t familiar with. I actually believe he’s convinced I know what I’m doing.’ Melrose rubbed his pale gold hair into a froth. ‘But I’m not sure about Declan Scott. I think he can see through walls; he’s very perceptive.’
‘You’re good at impersonating rarefied intellectuals. I don’t know where you get it.’
Melrose studied Jury and chewed his lip. ‘That wasn’t really a compliment, was it?’
‘That’s why I use you.’
‘I’d rather hear ‘That’s why I pay you.’’
‘Oh, come on. You’re too rich already.’
Melrose sighed and dropped his head against the back of his flowery chair. ‘Sometimes I wish I weren’t.’
‘Rich?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘You’re right; I don’t..’
Jury set his mug on the table and gave Plant’s leg a little prod.
‘Let’s find Lulu.’
The small face at the kitchen window disappeared as Jury and Plant approached along the stone path lined by bright pink rhododendron. March was cold, but these gardens were showing vibrant color.
Jury said, ‘Can these make it through the end of winter?’
‘If the Macmillans have anything to say about it, they’ll make it through the rest of the century. They like a lot of splash. Splash, as if colors were rain and left pools behind.’
Roy came dashing toward them, running in circles, then veering off the path and running a straight line.
‘He’s herding. He thinks we’re sheep. Border collies are very intelligent.’
‘Roy’s not a border collie, for God’s sakes; he’s a mutt.’ Melrose turned at a shout from the bottom of the garden off to the right.
‘That’s Millie Macmillan. I’d better go see what she wants. I’m sure Lulu will be along straightaway, after Roy.’
Melrose left and Jury stood there in the path. Now Roy, with Plant gone, sat dog still, in the ordinary way, tongue lolling. He looked at Jury and yawned. It was as if he could finally relax. Perhaps Plant presented some challenge, some source of sport that Jury lacked. Yet the dog looked expectant, as in a holding pattern, waiting for this man to make his move. Jury looked around for a ball or stick to toss and saw a braided piece of rope, a chew toy, lying in the hedge. He picked it up and when he straightened, a little girl was standing there as if she’d just materialized.
‘Oh. You’ve got to be Lulu.’ He said this with one of his best smiles.
She hitched a strand of straight black hair behind her ear. ‘That’s right.’ She stood gazing at him. ‘That’s Roy.’ She pointed toward the dog. ‘It’s really French, r-o-i, for king, but we just call him Roy.’
‘My name’s Richard.’ Then, with what he thought was quite a good wind-up, he pitched the rope across the hedge. Roy took off like a missile. He was a black and white blur. ‘That’s the fastest dog I’ve ever seen.’
Hands behind her back, Lulu rocked on her heels, as if waiting for something.
Dark hair with a fringe that hid her brow, and her somber blue eyes seemed swamped by the big, unbecoming glasses. But neither the glasses nor the fringe could totally hide the shape of her face, heart shaped and delicate.
There was a white iron bench behind them. Jury sat down and stretched out his legs. ‘Your dog makes me tired just watching him.’
‘I guess you’re a policeman.’ She moved a little closer to the bench.
‘That’s right. How did you know?’
‘Because that’s who keeps coming.’
‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘Okay.’ She sat at a slant so she could see his face, which she appeared to be regarding with a lot of interest. ‘I guess you’re here about the murder.’
He nodded. ‘Police have just about reached–well, we’re stumped.’
‘I know.’ She sighed heavily (stagily), shaking her head. ‘It’s really too bad.’ Which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘One of the policemen was here last night, one of the Macs, asking questions. He didn’t know much.’
One of the Macs? Jury did not pursue this.
‘My mum and dad were in a car accident. They both died. I wasn’t there.’
Her voice was smaller, her tone worried as if she had missed something cataclysmic by bare seconds and that the car might have rammed the tree even as she had turned her head away.
There was something inherently frightening about this, almost as if she thought had she been there, had she not turned away, her mother might still be alive.
He looked at her pale face. It was what a child might terribly think: if you fail in your watching of someone (mum, dad), he or she might disappear. But it was more than that; the disappearance could be your fault because you looked away. He felt a hand on his arm.
Lulu said, ‘What’s wrong? What are you thinking about? Did you know her?’
‘The woman who was shot? No.’
‘I thought maybe you did–but that’s silly. If you knew her, then the police would know who she was. Unless you didn’t really know her, that maybe she was someone who looked like...’ Jury listened while she rattled on with this convoluted story of identity like a kid’s mixed-up version of what Macalvie had said.
Finally, she wound down when Roy came over to settle down and watch. He said, ‘I was thinking of my mother.’ He noticed she stopped patting the dog and grew very still. ‘She died when I was two or three or maybe six (Jury being no longer sure after his cousin had talked about it). She was killed by a bomb that dropped in our square in London. In the war they sent us kids out to places in the country because London was so dangerous. So I wasn’t there when it happened.’ He had thought he was, but then the cousin had corrected this memory.
There was a stillness.
‘You weren’t watching.’
He shook his head. Why were children saddled with the burden of magical thinking? He could feel it even now.
‘But you couldn’t have stopped a bomb,’ she said.
‘No, I couldn’t. But sometimes kids believe just thinking something will cause it to happen. Well, we know that’s not so - we know now. But when you’re a child, it gets mixed up in your mind.’
‘I know. Like not watching someone.’
‘That’s right.’ Jury thought for a moment. ‘Once I had a friend named Jimmy Poole who stole geese. They caught Jimmy Poole when he was stealing goose number three.’ Jury smiled. He rather enjoyed that image.
She didn’t. ‘Anyone can steal a goose. They’re not smart like dogs and cats. I just don’t see why a person would bother with a goose.’ There was a silence as she thought over her problem.
‘Anyway, it’s not nearly as bad as stealing children.’
‘Children? No, of course not, but I don’t know anybody who would go around stealing children.’
‘I do.’ Her voice grew smaller again as if it were trying to squeeze itself into a tiny place. ‘It’s who took Flora. It’s the Child Thief.’ She turned her head slowly to look Jury in the eye. ‘He only takes children.’
Jury frowned. ‘Are you afraid he could take you?’ She looked at Roy and then reached down to pet him. It was a way of keeping her face hidden. ‘I don’t know. I think he takes only pretty ones.’
Jury closed his eyes against the sadness of that stratagem.
When he opened them she was turned to him, adjusting her glasses, brushing the fringe up out of her eyes. These two movements he knew were meant to give him a better look at her face, to judge the danger she might be in.
Not much of a choice for him: if you’re pretty you get stolen; if you aren’t.., well, where’s the consolation in that? He turned this over. ‘If you keep the glasses ‘on at all times and let the fringe hide your eyes, you’ll probably’ be safe.’
When the implications of this came clear, she nodded. She even smiled a little.
Jury asked, ‘But this Child Thief. What does he do wi
th the children he steals?’
‘He takes them home and.., either he locks them up in the cellar where the rats are, or he shoves them in the attic that’s always dark or sometimes he chains them to a post in the back garden and they have to stand in the snow.’ She paused. ‘Or he lets them live in the house and even gives them their own room. But then he doesn’t talk to them, and if they talk to him’–she looked at Jury again–’he doesn’t answer.’
Her skirt had been twisted more tightly than Roy’s bit of rope. ‘And she has to go all her life never talking to anyone. Never.’ Jury noticed it had changed from ‘them’ to ‘she.’ It was the silent treatment that she would have to endure if the Child Thief got her.
She felt guilty. Jury was sure, but about what? Had she done something to Flora in those visits Mary Scott had paid to Little Comfort? Had she told someone about their visits to Heligan? ‘Did you like Flora?’
‘Kind of. A bit.’ She slid farther down on the bench, her legs out.
Jury waited.
‘There were times I couldn’t stand her.’
‘Times I can’t stand him, either.’ Jury nodded toward the path along which Melrose Plant was approaching.
Lulu giggled. It was an authentic child-delighted giggle. Her eyes sparked; she covered her mouth with her hand. ‘But he’s your friend.’ Here was a testing of the friendship waters in general.
‘Well? Do friends like each other all of the time?’ She shook her head vigorously, swinging her lank hair. Jury wondered why her aunt didn’t have something done to it so that it set off her face to more advantage.
Melrose stood there, looking from one to the other. ‘You two have been sitting here doing nothing while I’ve been bedding and weeding–and so forth.’
‘No, you haven’t. You’ve been talking to the Macmillan girl,’ said Jury.
‘Lulu!’ Rebecca Owen’s voice came from the door of the kitchen. She was motioning for Lulu to come in.
Lulu looked less than pleased. ‘I’m supposed to go in for lunch.’ With little enthusiasm, she got up; she said good-bye.
Watching her run off, Melrose said, ‘Where does she get her energy?’
‘She didn’t get it from me.’ Jury slapped the bench and got up.
‘I’m off to London. I need to talk to Viktor Baumann again. Viktor’s got his finger in a lot of pies, I think.’
‘I can barely keep a finger in one. Couldn’t we have found a ruse for my being here that’s better than a turf expert?’
‘I expect I could’ve. That’s just what came to mind.’
Melrose gave him a look. ‘Richard, that’s not the first thing that comes to anybody’s mind.’
‘When they think of you it is.’
24
Alice Miers sat in the living room of her fine house in Belgravia looking intently, even squinting, through her narrow reading glasses at the photograph, then handed it back to Richard Jury with a shake of her head. ‘I don’t know, Superintendent; I’ve never to my knowledge seen her before.’ Jury took back the photo. He had always wondered what that qualifying ‘to my knowledge’ meant. It suggested to him a hesitancy, as if the person being questioned felt some outside agency, some broader ‘knowledge’ would explain it.
‘You’re sure?’
‘No. But only because I’m not absolutely sure of anything.’ She smiled.
Jury’s smile answered her own, except that his wasn’t wan.
‘She has something to do with my daughter?’
‘It would appear so.’
‘Declan doesn’t have any idea?’
‘No. She might have come out of the past.’
‘That’s reasonable.’ She sat chin in hand, looking wide eyed.
Again he smiled. She was having a joke at his expense, but he hardly cared. He told her the circumstances surrounding this dead woman’s appearance.
Alice Miers sat back. ‘It’s not strange that Mary might have come across an old acquaintance, but it certainly is strange she would have lied to Declan. Roedean. That’s such an idiotic lie. Too easy to check, as you already know.’
‘To credit your daughter with some sense, though, she’d have no reason to believe anyone would check. Not her husband, certainly.
He’s a man with a great respect for privacy. And she wouldn’t be anticipating any investigation. So ‘old school chum’ would seem to be an easy explanation.’
‘You’re right about Declan. It’s one of his great qualities. And he has many of those.’ She sat back, hands folded in her lap. ‘Perhaps because of that, he’s a person one shouldn’t want to practice subterfuge upon.’ She turned her face toward the window and the garden beyond it. ‘Our own lives appear to us as so discontinuous-one thing ends, another begins, it’s broken off and something else comes along–marriage, divorce, remarriage, a child.., death.’ Here she paused and looked at the fire. ‘And nothing seems to run through it. But with family, something does run through it, something does cohere. A family is ballast.’
‘But if you don’t get along with other members of it?’ She rolled her eyes, fine gray eyes set deep in her head, making the cheekbones even more pronounced. ‘You’re not going to say ‘dysfunctional’? We used to say ‘unhappy.’ Tolstoy certainly did.
But none of those good old words are invited to the party anymore.
They’re vague, abstract. But ‘dysfunctional’ is so concrete, isn’t it? It sounds like something gone wrong in a car’s electrical system, or a hangover. When applied to such a protean concept as family, though, it means nothing more than: ‘unhappy.’ At any rate, my harangue here means simply that family is important. It astonishes me that people expect the members of a family to get along and when they don’t get along, they’ve let us down. I always think of a family as being greater than the sum of its parts. Something runs through it, as I said, like the pattern in this carpet.’ Here she looked down and traced its feathery green fronds with her shoe.
Jury rested his head against the back of his chair. ‘Wouldn’t some say that what runs through the family is simply blood?’
‘Perhaps. But Declan isn’t a blood relative, and I feel tied to him.’ She rose. ‘No, don’t get up; I’m just going to get the coffee. You’ll have some?’
‘I certainly will.’
She smiled and left the room.
In her absence Jury rose and walked around. Across from the fireplace was a wall of photographs. When he saw such incontrovertible evidence of what she’d been talking about–family–it left him feeling bereft again, for there had been no family other than his cousin in Yorkshire, and no photos other than the two he’d taken away with him of his mother and father. Here was Alice with dozens, each framed and in its place, all up and probably in some kind of order. There were many pictures of her daughter Mary and of Mary and Declan. Then came half a dozen with Flora taken with several different people. He sighed. Incontrovertible evidence, true. But what Alice Miers had forgotten was that some people had families, but some people didn’t.
The house was narrow, but deep. At the other end French doors led out to a garden that looked green now with winter plants.
Beside the fireplace a longcase clock decorated in green and gold chinoiserie had been furnishing a soft tick of background music.
Over the pale marble mantel hung a large oval mirror. He looked at himself thinking he looked pretty much as usual,
Alice returned carrying a humble black tin tray that held a Thermos of coffee, mugs, sugar and milk. Jury rather liked this presentation, liked it more than a silver coffee service, which made him feel he must learn the art of drinking all over again. They reseated themselves.
‘Why are you smiling? Do not laugh at my Thermos. Either don’t or go and get a tea cozy. They’re next to worthless.’ She held the jug aloft. ‘Milk? Sugar?’
‘Yes, thanks, a lot of both.’ He leaned forward to take the mug.
He said, ‘Look, I know this is a painful subject, but you must have given a lot of
thought to what happened to your granddaughter.’ She held his eyes as if glancing away might make him vanish, much in the way of what he thought Lulu feared, and she’d be left with only the Thermos for comfort. ‘Yes. I thought about it. I think about it. All the time.’
‘This woman’s murder is tied to Flora’s disappearance, at least I think so.’
The police photo was still lying on the table, beside the tray.
Alice picked it up again. ‘She doesn’t look the type to be leaving broken hearts in her wake. But perhaps that’s shallow. Just because she wasn’t pretty.’ She shrugged. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’
‘To say the least. What do you make of Mary’s secrecy?’
‘Well, certainly she didn’t want Declan to know something and perhaps that ‘something’ caused this woman’s murder. Or was related to it somehow.’
‘She visited Angel Gate, too. The cook, Dora Stout, saw her. Caught a glimpse, anyway.’
Alice was yet more surprised. ‘I didn’t know that. And did she tell Declan?’
Jury shook his head. ‘No. He found out only when Mrs. Stout told the Devon and Cornwall police.’
Shaking her head, she looked again at the pattern in the carpet. ‘That makes me feel extremely sad. Here’s Declan, probably the most trustworthy and generous hearted of anyone I know, and whatever it was, that was kept from him. This woman turns up a second time and Declan still didn’t know about her?’
Jury changed course. ‘Did you see your granddaughter often?’
‘Not as often as I’d’ve liked. I can’t travel; doctor’s orders. I did, of course, when Flora...’ Her voice trailed off, came back. ‘Mary and Declan were very good about bringing Flora to me. Declan still is. I mean.., was.’
‘You knew Rebecca Owen, didn’t you, when she was working for your daughter and Viktor Baumann?’
‘She’s a grand person; she really is. I thought it was lucky she was there when Mary was married to him. Rebecca seemed to give Mary some strength, something like that. With Viktor, one would need it.’ Alice sipped from her mug.
‘Not the most popular person in this account.’
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