‘It’s better not being either.’ Jury took out the cell phone and punched in the number. ‘Wait ten minutes and come in.’ He snapped the phone shut.
Going down the stairs, Pansy and Rosie were putting on a show, Pansy looking desperate and holding her arms across her stomach, Rosie doing a good job of pretend weeping. He wanted to applaud them both.
It made Mrs. Murchison, standing at the bottom of the stairs, smile. She gave Rosie a little slap on her bottom, saying, ‘Now go on with you, girl. You’re all right.’
The two, without so much as another look at Jury, pulled the table out, slid the door back and went into their prison room.
Mrs. Murchison said, ‘That’s over the half hour, so I’ll have to charge you for the whole hour.’ She beamed as he drew out his wallet, brought out two fifty-pound notes. Then she added, in a whisper, ‘But I expect it was worth it.’
Years in the job had taught Jury incredible self-mastery. Otherwise, he would have killed her where she stood. He handed over the hundred. It was the transaction; he wanted money to change hands. If this ever had a flaming chance of coming to court. Then his years of self-mastery melted away like the ice baby. He flipped his ID open, shoved it close to her face.
‘What? Police?’ She backed away. ‘You can’t walk into a person’s house like this. Where’s your warrant? You never showed me any warrant–’
He slammed her up against the wall. ‘This is my warrant!’ She flailed, arms going everywhere.
‘Wait till my solicitor–I’ll be screaming police brutality, you just wait!’
The little girls, each with her blanket, were filing out of the back room with looks that ranged from joy to utter disbelief. When they saw Jury with his forearm cutting across Murchison’s throat, they stopped dead.
Jury let her go.
‘Eddie!’ she yelled.
The girls were dithering, beginning to laugh.
Jury looked around to see a thin man snaking round the other side of the staircase, apparently come from the kitchen. He was pointing a .45 at him. ‘Okay, mate. Back off.’
Jury dropped his arm and stepped back. The girls on that side of the staircase backed off, too. Jury could understand why: Eddie was one of the meanest-looking men he had ever seen, with a long pocked face, testament to an old battle with acne, and a nose and mouth that looked thin and sharp as knives.
‘You okay, Murch?’
Murch was better than okay. With renewed fervor and a few tugs at dress and corset, she strided in in medias res: ‘Coming in here without a warrant, just you wait, when Mr. Baum–’ She stopped, realizing she had named him. ‘We’ll have your badge and your job and don’t be surprised when we drag you and the whole Metropolitan Police Force into court! Here you are, giving all them a bad name!’
Jury smiled. ‘Maybe, but it was worth it.’
Eddie let fly with a little invective of his own, happy in the knowledge that he had the only gun.
Only he hadn’t.
What Jury had taken for a shadow deep in the stairwell wasn’t a shadow. Cody? Had he had the prescience to go around-A gun fired and Eddie looked surprised and started to turn when another shot caught him in the turn and he slithered to the floor, a strand of blood snaking down his chin.
Mrs. Murchison yelled. The little girls moved forward in a wave.
Samantha stood there behind Eddie with the gun at her side looking at Jury not with her earlier cold detachment, but helplessly involved.
Mrs. Murchison made the mistake of opening her mouth.
‘You! Wait till he gets ahold of you! You’ll be sorry–’ The gun came up again but this time the shot was thwarted by ten little girls swarming between Mrs. Murchison and Samantha.
They yelled, sang her name jumping up and down like the wild things in the book. ‘Samantha, Samantha, Samantha!’ She had saved them all; she had saved the day. Some were weeping with joy.
Jury moved through them to take the gun from Samantha’s hand. Her face, skin the color of porcelain, looked crazed, as if it might come apart at any moment. He put his arm around her, her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Samantha. Everything will be all right now. Look, you’ve saved all of us.’
The ring of the bell had changed to a relentless pounding on the door. Pansy went to open it. She seemed near gleeful that a stranger stood there.
Cody walked in. ‘What the hell, guv? What the hell’s been going on?’
He was immediately surrounded by little girls, two of them swinging on his hands.
Jury didn’t answer the question; he saw that Mrs. Murchison was edging into the lounge, which she could very quickly lock.
The telephone was in there. ‘Cody!’ He nodded toward her.
Cody made a lunge that had them both on the parlor floor. The kids whooped and hollered as if it was the most fun they’d had in years. It probably was. Cody got up, yanked her up without a care for ripping the silk and shoved her against the wall in the same lock that Jury had had on her a few minutes ago.
The kids started in again, this time with ‘Cody, Cody, Cody, Cody.’ Another savior. How many saviors were there and all at once? There seemed to be no limit to freedom. They were swinging their blankets in the air like small matadors.
‘Hey, guv?’
‘What?’ said Jury, who was bundling Samantha into his coat.
She was clearly in shock.
‘Should I restrain her?’
‘Of course.’
‘No cuffs, no rope, okay.’ He shrugged and delivered a right to the Murchison chin that sent her down the wall like Eddie, only still alive. Worse luck. Cody beamed.
The girls shouted. Better and better. What other delights were in store? Rosie was jumping up and down like a cork.
With Murchison ‘restrained,’ Cody said hello to the girls and held out his arms. They fairly flew at him, but he was strong and they couldn’t get past.
Jury smiled. Cody Platt, snooker player, copper, catcher in the rye.
40
Chief Superintendent Racer was all over it: his nemesis, Richard Jury, like Richard the Second and Richard Nixon before him had been, so to speak, relieved of their command, that is, suspended, so was Jury to be just about any day now, pending further investigation.
Jury was in Racer’s outer office with Fiona. He was studying the cat Cyril–definitely not a quick study–and said, ‘He likens it to a deposition or a dethronement, doesn’t he?’
‘Hasn’t been in this good a humor since he made chief,’ said Fiona. ‘‘Flagrant abuse of police protocol,’ indeed!’ That was from some memo or other that had crossed her desk. She had said it so many times, she had memorized it. ‘Shocking, that is. Absolutely shocking! Makes me sick, it does.’ To indicate the scope of her shock and sickness, Fiona zipped up her sponge bag without even applying powder and blush. All she had done was to skim on a little lipstick, merely tipping her hat to beauty. The bag she shoved into a lower drawer. ‘And you can tell how upset Cyril is.’ Actually, Jury couldn’t. Cyril was at the moment engaged in his morning toilette, second only to Fiona’s in time consumed.
It was as if he were licking each ginger hair into cat-dander resplendence. Dander, he had once told Fiona, was in the saliva, not the fur. He had no idea how he knew this, never having owned a cat or a dog. He felt suddenly bereft, as if they had all up and died on him.
‘I think I’ll get a dog–I mean, if I’m going to be home a lot.’ Cyril stopped in his labors and looked up sharply.
Fiona whispered, ‘Why’d you have to go and say that in front of Cyril? You know how he is.’
No one knew how Cyril was. Cyril was too smart by half, smarter than Racer, but then that only took half. The decision to park Jury by the side of an unmapped road had been taken with amazing swiftness. Well, there wasn’t much doubt he’d done what he’d done. In any event, he played his own role up in this grievous ‘flagrant abuse of police power’ and played Cody Platt’s role down.
Jury had
said he didn’t see why there had to be an investigation at all, as he was willing to admit to his part in bringing the Murchison woman and her cohort Eddie Noon to their knees. Literally.
But someone had to put his imprimatur upon the affair. Someone had to set the seal.
Jury worried about Cody, for he was of course part of it, though not as big a part. But as far as Jury was concerned it had been worth it. He knew Cody felt so too, perhaps even more than Jury did. The most worrisome thing was whether they could drag Baumann into court. Whether Murchison would give him up. Or indeed what would be admissible in Irene Murchison’s case, considering the ‘premises’ had been unlawfully ‘breached.’ That stuff had been going on for years; a little girl had been shot who had run from the house. There was probable cause for the police to enter the house, Jury thought, not, however, unwarranted.
As of now Jury sat unsuspended, here with Fiona, enjoying the click of computer keys, the snap of a compact (she having second thoughts about her shock and sickness) and Cyril washing.
He was about to submerge himself into Yeats’s ‘cold companionable streams’ when Racer came through the door.
‘For someone who’s about to be suspended, you’re spending a lot of time on your backside around here looking happy.’
‘I can’t seem to tear myself away.’
‘Ha! Well, enjoy it while you can, Jury–’this realm, this plot, this blah blah blah.’’
‘‘This England.’ You’re certainly up on your Shakespeare.’ Racer continued to treat Jury’s possible suspension like a dethronement, as if Jury were handing over his crown to Bolingbroke. He gestured with his arm like a theater usher, hurrying Jury into his aisle seat. Jury hesitated for two seconds, giving the cat Cyril his chance to get in and get on with it. What really kept Cyril going was not Jury’s smile or Fiona’s sponge bag or tins of sardines, but Chief Superintendent Racer’s ongoing attempts to trap him with elaborate, Rube Goldberg cartoon inventions. It would be for a human something like watching the Pyramids being built, stone by stone, just for you. Yes, Cyril’s was a bracing life, a life lived on the edge—quite literally, as one of his favorite perches was the molding around the tiny recessed lights Racer had had installed when his office was remodeled as Harry’s Bar and Grill. Jury saw the tip of a ginger tail twitching up there (no one knew how he managed to get up there in the first place) while Cyril plotted and looked down to see what Racer had planned for him.
‘The Cornwall business. It’s of no more interest to us, so stay out of it.’
‘Oh, but it is of interest. Viktor Baumann’s involved there, too.’
‘If you’re talking about these children, that’s part of Organized Crime, that’s SO1, the pedophilia unit. Isn’t that your friend Blakeley’s case? Over in West Central? Before you stuck your oar in?’
‘My oar was little Alice Smith, the child shot in the back. That’s my case, if you remember. This is all down to Viktor Baumann. God knows what else he’s been getting up to. I’m just hoping he doesn’t have more houses like that one. The Devon and Cornwall police think he might have abducted his daughter three years ago–’
Racer interrupted. ‘That’s nothing to do with us. You closed the Alice Smith case. The child was shot by one of the other girls. The same girl who murdered the pimp’–he fussed a manila folder around until he came to it–’Eddie Noon. Got charges as long as your arm. This girl’s pretty good at shooting people in the back, isn’t she?’
Jury winced. Was the man laughing over this? Racer, for the moment, sobered up. ‘God, but what’s it coming to, kids killing kids?’
‘She probably saved my life.’ What was going to happen to Samantha? Anything’d be better than what it was before. Just to be rid of her, just to be rid of her... Samantha had repeated it like a litany. She had actually smiled.
Unable to fix on an appropriate response to Jury’s saved life, Racer mumbled something and put the folder in his out box. ‘So we’re shut of this, Jury.’
‘No, we aren’t. Part of it’s still open–as I’ve been saying–’
‘That part is Devon and Cornwall police. As for you, my lad, pending further inquiry–’
He was a broken record. Jury stopped listening and watched Cyril, who had maneuvered himself around the room in the catsize space (it might as well have been purpose built) between the wall and the outer edge of molding. He was now sitting in his favorite spot over Racer’s desk. This was the spot from which he’d made many three-point landings onto various parts of the desk. He sat now washing his paw and waiting his moment.
How many ways could Jury say it? The man had cloth ears.
‘As I’ve said–sir–the missing–’ or dead, Jury didn’t add ‘—child is Viktor Baumann’s daughter. She was four years old. One of the reasons I went into that house was to see if he was keeping her there.’
‘What? The man’s own child?’ Racer washed at the air with his hands, palms out as if to keep Jury and Jury’s sick ideas at bay.
‘It goes on.’
‘In the States it goes on. Not here.’
This earth, this realm, this England.
Sure.
Johnny Blakeley was still stationed at West End Central where part of the pedophilia unit was housed. It was there that Irene Murchison had been taken. She’d been in one of the interrogation rooms off and on over the last thirty-six hours. They could hold her on a score of charges; she was ‘garbage,’ Johnny said. What Johnny was after was an admission that the whole setup was Viktor Baumann’s.
‘Hell of a setup it is, too,’ Johnny was telling Jury an hour later over drinks in the Crown. ‘Viktor’s friends–well, she didn’t tell me precisely that, but it’s obvious, isn’t it? ‘Very particular gentlemen.’ Her words. The woman talks like she just stepped out of a Galsworthy novel, which is not, I hasten to add, her real milieu.’
‘These ‘gentlemen’–meaning ‘customers’? I’m thick today, as I just left Racer’s office.’
Johnny snickered. ‘It’s Viktor’s mates, isn’t it? The ring. I want some names, man. How can this woman be willing to take the fall for this, Richard?’
‘Women have been doing it for centuries.’
‘Hell, she’s got to be twenty years older than him.’ Jury shrugged. ‘She’s a pivotal character in his life; she sees the whole thing runs smoothly; she keeps the girls in line.’ More like scared into submission. Jury could not forget the deathly quiet when he looked into that room. The unearthly silence. No child should be frightened into silence. ‘She’s not doing this against her better judgment, remember. She likes it. She likes it a lot.’ Jury drank off his lager.
Johnny signed to the barman, held up two fingers. The barman nodded. ‘She’s not giving him up, Rich,’ he said again.
‘She admitted’ she knew him, though.’ Jury was watching a desultory game of snooker between one man covered in tattoos and another who had a musician’s fingers. The musician lobbed the green ball into a pocket. Smatttering of applause. He thought of Wiggins and Cody Platt. He said, ‘I didn’t screw everything up for you, Johnny, did I?’
The barman knifed foam off Johnny’s Guinness. ‘My God, no,’ Johnny said. ‘What you and that Cornwall cowboy did was pretty much what I’ve been trying to work out how to do for months. Well, now we’re sorted.’ Johnny smiled broadly, lifted his pint as if in a toast.
Cowboy. Jury smiled, as he lifted his.
When Jury walked into the lab, Phyllis Nancy was speaking into a mike suspended above the table in the middle of the room. A stream of blood ran from the body along a depression around the table and dripped into a chrome bucket. The cold blue light that emanated from a source he couldn’t identify gave the place the look and feel of an outer space experience. She might have been an alien of higher intelligence performing an autopsy on an earthling.
Her hands were covered in blood, but her white coat was as clean as glare ice. He wondered how she managed that trick. But then he remembered that Phyllis kne
w the parameters of everything, the limits, the boundaries. There was an element of magic in this. Or perhaps it was something not at all magical. Jury (and a number of others) knew that the sight of blood made her sick. Forget med school–nearly everyone there went a little woozy on his or her first encounter with a diced-up body. Only, they got over it.
Phyllis hadn’t. When she started out, she said as soon as she made the first cut she would have to make for the toilet and throw up.
After that she could manage the rest of the autopsy. Soon, she could get through half of the autopsy before she had to throw up, and then nearly all of it until the nausea hit her. Now (she had told Jury) it didn’t happen until after she had finished. ‘It’s incredible improvement, considering; one day I’ll have tapered off until the nausea has stopped altogether.’
Jury had laughed. ‘You make it sound like giving up smoking.’ She considered this. ‘No, smoking is much harder to give up.’ It was all a great joke; Phyllis thought so, too. A coroner who couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
‘Why are you in this business, then? It’s like Hannibal being afraid of walls or Nelson afraid of water. It’s so hard on you, Phyllis.’
‘Not really. Just a few moments of discomfort. And a little embarrassment, granted.’
‘You take it all so calmly.’
‘But so do you when you find a body in the street, like little Alice Smith, facedown in her own blood. You have at least to give the appearance of calm.’
Right now, she looked up from the table. He could still tell her eyes were green behind the plastic protective glasses both she and her assistants wore.
‘Richard!’
‘Hello, Phyllis.’ He nodded toward the table. ‘Is this one of your all-nighters?’
‘Not now it isn’t. I assume you have something in mind.’ He smiled. ‘I do. Dinner. I know you don’t eat before an autopsy.’
She stripped off the gloves and discarded the mask in one fluid motion, then said to her assistant, ‘You can finish up.’ It was that about Phyllis which made him smile just thinking of it. She could always make you think she’d been waiting for you.
The Winds of Change Page 28