“River. And the cadaver was washed over by the tide, that’s all. So is that your best guess, thirty hours?”
Willie Cooper selected a saw from the tray, shook his head, put it back. He was chewing gum furiously, smiling all the while. “When did you ever know me to guess, R.J.?” He paused, angling his head like a carpenter taking measurements. “I don’t feel like the skull-work right now. Let’s just slit her for openers.” When Jury didn’t smile, Cooper said, “Not a bad pun; so what’s with you tonight? Have dinner with a sword-swallower, or something? Would you get the fucking tape over here, you bloody idiot? This one’s run out.”
The request was not directed at Jury but at a Pakistani attendant. Despite the words, the tone was perfectly good-natured. The attendant was at the table in two steps with a fresh tape.
Cooper took an instrument from his tray and drew a smart line from sternum to pubis. He then lay back the folds of flesh and looked over the organs with all the enthusiasm of a shopper who can’t make up his mind given so much on the sale table. He removed them one by one — liver, pancreas, kidneys — telling the tape about the condition of each. “Heavy smoker. Lung looks emphysematous, just the bare beginnings. Liver: slightly jaundiced, no scars.” Each of the organs was bagged separately and carefully labeled by the attendant. That was one reason Jury liked Cooper’s work; he didn’t send a slop-bucket of organs to headquarters. Some doctors did just that.
The further he got into his work, the more momentum the gum-chewing picked up. “Get me that report, Ivor.” That’s what he called all of his assistants. The Pakistani was off and back again with a sheet of paper. “Okay, an elliptical puncture wound half an inch long. You said the victim in Northants was killed with a sword stick?”
“Dagger-cane.”
Willie Cooper was dumping entrails and what he liked to call “trash organs” back into the corpse. “Well, these wounds weren’t made by one. Though it’s possible more than one knife was involved.” He pointed to an elliptical wound. “Could even be double-edged, that one. This other’s cleaner, slightly narrower.” He stopped, lit a cigarette. “Flick-knife, I’d say. Maybe a knife-fight.” He smoked as intensely as he chewed, in quick little jabs. “Amazing, isn’t it. This is supposed to be such an exact science. The things we can’t tell for sure. Like rigor. Everything depends on knowing the conditions. In her case” — he looked down at the corpse — “we pretty much know them, that’s why I said thirty hours, give an hour, take an hour.”
Jury smiled. “Pathologists do guess.”
“Just like you, R.J.” He had put out his cigarette and picked up a small saw. “It’s the sound I don’t like. No matter how many I’ve sawed, I just can’t seem to get used to the grating.” To the mortuary attendant he said, “Sew her up in a few minutes. I need a rest.”
Willie Cooper hoisted himself up onto the table beside the corpse, half-sitting, half-standing. Jury marveled at the little scene. Smoothing her hand, Cooper might have been the abstracted lover, lost in a brown study that the girl on the bed asleep couldn’t share. “See this?” He spread the fingers. “The slashes on the index finger and thumb tell you she was fending off an attack. So what about this Northants stiff?”
“He was murdered, according to the medical examiner there, between nine and midnight. What I’m wondering is this: could it be give an hour, take an hour either way?”
“That depends entirely on conditions, Jury, as you effing well know. Give me the details.”
Jury told him about the secrétaire, the delivery to the antiques shop, the discovery.
Willie Cooper looked down at the body on the table, laughed slightly, shook his head, as if they shared a joke to which the superintendent was not privy. “What you’re getting at is could the same person have stiffed the Northants chap and my girl here? Sure.”
“You don’t get what I mean: could she have been killed before him?”
He looked doubtfully at the frozen face on the table, turned his head this way and that, as if adjusting the light for a camera angle, and said, “That would put Sadie’s death earlier, your chap’s later. Hm. You’re working against the evidence, R.J., for what it’s worth. The flow of air in that desk-thing would have speeded up the rigor; the cold river water would have slowed hers down.” He nodded toward the body. “But that makes no odds, since we can allow for that.” His eyes had a sheen to them like glassy splinters when he squinted up at Jury. Willie Cooper didn’t balk at going against the evidence, since he often found evidence inconclusive. “It’s as much an art as a science, isn’t it.” He held up the saw. “This is still all we have to get to the brain. What theory are you playing round with, R.J.? Do you think someone killed Sadie here and then killed him?”
“Let’s say it’s a possibility.”
“But why?”
“Because she might not be Sadie.”
• • •
Across the little park in Islington where he was locking up the car, Jury looked at the house converted into flats. The other houses in the terrace were dark, except for the flickering bluish light of tellies here and there, casting shadows on walls like Plato’s cave.
But not his house; no, it was carnival time, apparently, there. Everyone’s flat was lit (including his own, even though he was out here). And the everyone included only three people. However, since Carole-anne was one of them, Jury added on another dozen. Which would have accounted for the music, the singing, the stomping.
It was when he let himself into his own flat — no key necessary; Carole-anne had already been there and collected his stereo — that he realized the Hippodrome was right above him, in the empty flat.
One of the neighbors must have been watching for his return, for the phone rang before he could toss his keys on the desk. Yes, it was Mrs. Burgess from the house next door. Since he was a policeman, he was the neighborhood ear. When it came down to noises in his own house, his ear got a truly good workout. He merely listened and murmured while he fixed himself a sturdy drink of whiskey, put down the receiver and shut his eyes, while the distant cricket-chirp of Mrs. Burgess’s voice went on. Occasionally, he plucked the receiver from the sofa cushion and sympathized. After fifteen minutes of the Burgess voice threading through the blast upstairs, Jury told her (for the dozenth time) how difficult it was for her, but the place was swarming with cops, which accounted for the noise. They were making a drug bust, only they’d got the wrong house and it was as well she’d be up because they’d be over —
Click went the receiver on her end. He shoved his own telephone under the couch as if it were a bad dog, and stretched out on the sofa, mercifully long. Was there a piano up there? Someone was certainly playing hell-for-leather. It was a rugless hardwood floor, and he could hear voices raised in a surge of patriotism seldom heard. If it was up to that bunch, England would definitely be saved.
Mrs. Wassermann, Carole-anne, and Tommy. Three people sounding like three dozen.
He lay there perfectly relaxed, his drink balanced on his stomach, and, unlike his neighbor, enjoying every minute of it. Sleep, by comparison, seemed drab, almost unwholesome. He kept trying to get up, to go upstairs and join them, but his mind was too weighted down with thoughts of Watermeadows.
The death of Hannah Lean would take Sadie Diver straight out of this poor Limehouse world and into a garden paradise, where the only thing that stood between her and enough money to buy half the county was Lady Summerston.
When he felt himself tighten up again, he took a large slug of his drink and tried to empty his mind.
It was helped by the slacking of ragtime upstairs. There was a silence, and into that silence poured the mournful harmonica. Feet scraped across the floor, slow dancing to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda.”
Jury slept.
Twenty-seven
STREAKS was a hairdressing salon just off the Tottenham Court Road, a glass door with a big chrome handle located under a mock-chrome awning with the name trailing wisps of silver behind it
, making Jury wonder if it was absolutely de rigueur that one leave the emporium with a multicolored hairdo.
“ ’Ello, love,” said the young woman behind the kidney-shaped chrome counter. Her hennaed hair licked upward, bluey strands interspersing the brassy orange, in a caricature of hell-fire. Looking Jury up and down, she said they might be able to fit him in before their next customer, who was due in at ten but was always late. Indeed, she could do him herself.
Jury smiled, said he hadn’t come to be “done,” and showed her his identification. “I’d like some information about one of your employees. Her name’s Sarah, or Sadie, Diver.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know her, do I?” She smiled as if that settled the point, her heart-shaped face cupped in her two hands. “You’d look absolutely smashing with just a bit of Firebrand, just a rinse, you know.”
“That what you’ve got on yours?”
“This? Oh, this is old; must have done this two weeks ago. No, Firebrand’s more browny.”
“My hair’s already brown.”
“Highlights, love, highlights.” She was certainly making a feast of running her eyes over Jury’s head.
“I’ll make a note of it. In the meantime, where’s the manager?”
“That’d be Carlos,” she answered, pouting. She indicated a youngish man sitting at one of the stations in a plum-colored chair. “Jeannine’s just giving him a trim.”
“Give him my card.”
Sighing, she slipped from her chrome stool and made her way to the rear of the shop. The decor ran to chrome, plum upholstery, and mirrors — not the necessary ones above the long rows of stations, but mirrors that served no purpose. In the middle of the room was a round, mirrored floor, sunken and surrounded by big, glossy plants. Jury walked past space-age domes under two of which sat middle-aged women sprouting green and pink hair-rollers. Their eyes were riveted to fashion magazines.
Jeannine was an angel-faced blonde who turned upon Jury sky-blue eyes of cosmic emptiness and a quaintly ‘forties hairdo: blond curls bunched over her forehead, the longer hair pulled back by two combs. She wore a white leotard and a short, pleated, plum-colored skirt.
Carlos was also dressed in white, with a plum tank top under a loose Miami Vice-type coat. They looked more like skaters than hairdressers; at any moment they could have swung themselves onto the mirror-pool for a competition. He nodded in friendly fashion at Jury. “Just be a tick. You’ve got wonderful hair; I haven’t seen just that shade of chestnut in simply years.”
Jeannine was snipping away and going on about her “lady.” “I mean, you just have to come out and tell them, don’t you, when they want a ‘do’ that’d only look good on someone my age?” Here she turned again to Jury, empty eyed, smiling a smile that looked left over from some time she’d forgotten. He had never heard a voice so lacking in inflection. She talked as if she were reading cue cards. “So I said she’d be better off copying Maggie’s hair than Fergie’s.” A frown stitched her creamy forehead.
Carlos laughed, turning his bronzed face this way and that, as if he couldn’t get too much of his reflection. “That’ll do. And don’t forget Mrs. Durbin gets a hot-oil treatment. Her hair stands up like she’d got her finger in a socket. Sorry, Superintendent. Donna said you were asking about a Betty Someone.”
“Sadie. Sadie Diver.”
“Oh, yes. Donna wasn’t here then; she wouldn’t have known her. Sadie left about two months ago.”
“For what reason?”
Carlos shrugged. “Didn’t give one except to say it was personal.”
Jury showed him the snap of Sadie Diver, the other of Hannah and Simon Lean. “This her?”
Carlos studied the two. “This is.” He held up the picture of Sadie. “Dreadful cut. Looks like a pile of mushrooms.” He paused over the picture of Hannah. “Hmm.” He covered the hair as well as he could with his hand. “Must say I’m not sure . . . just a tick.” He spun round on the ball of his foot and walked halfway round the glossy island.
In a moment he was back with a thick album. “I keep these so that my ladies can see what miracles I can work with just a decent haircut.” He pulled a snapshot out and, with a small pair of scissors from his jacket pocket, deftly cut round the face in it. Then he positioned the shoulder-length, razor-cut hair — a geometric and angular cut with a bang slashed from the forehead at a guillotine-angle. “That’s her.” He showed Jury the change in Hannah Lean’s appearance. “A kohl liner and some blush would help, of course.” Then he frowned. “Why’re you asking?”
“Routine.”
Carlos raised his eyebrows; Jury smiled. “Where was she apprenticed, then? You’d have papers, her application, and so forth.”
“Hell’s bells.” It came out with a sigh. Carlos dropped his voice a register. “I’ll just tell you flat out and hope I won’t have my license taken away. I was in a dreadful bind during the holidays, so when Sadie walked in off the street, demonstrated an amazing expertise, I just hired her spot on.” His look at Jury was anxious.
“Not to worry. Have you got the canceled checks?”
“Checks? I pay the girls cash whenever I can.”
Jury pocketed his notebook. “Tell me, did you get the impression Sadie Diver was smart? Intelligent?”
He paused. “More like a sponge. She hardly talked about herself, never got into the sort of tête-à-tête Jeannine there does with her customers. She was popular, see; a great listener.”
“Could you give me a list of her customers?”
“Donna can work one up. She had eight or nine regulars. But I doubt they know anything. What has happened?”
“Just say an accident.”
There was a long pause. “Hell’s bells.”
“Yes,” said Jury.
Carlos kept staring at him, and finally asked, “Who cuts your hair?”
PART III
When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey.
Twenty-eight
“THEY’VE GONE and set a date for that trial,” said Dick Scroggs, his eyes glued to the Bald Eagle.
“What?” Melrose surfaced from Polly’s thriller, which sat propped against the latest Booker Prize winner that he had just purchased at the Wrenn’s Nest. He had thought at first that Theo Wrenn Brown, who had stood staring at him, white-faced and tight-lipped, would refuse even to sell the book to him. But Theo was not one to stand on principle where money was concerned. He accepted the ten-pound note, but not the small change of Melrose’s conversation. He refused to speak, thereby letting Melrose know how traitors were treated in the Wrenn’s Nest.
“The pig, m’lord. Your aunt and that poor Jurvis across the way.” Where Scroggs’s sentiments lay was perfectly clear. “Betty Ball’s smart to stay straight out of it. If she can, I mean. Probably be suborned for a witness.”
“Subpoenaed?” Scroggs, thought Melrose, would make a fine addition to Polly’s new book. If Dorothy L. Sayers had known as little about bell-ringing as Polly did about the legal system, the belfry would have been an acoustical horror. Polly’s courtroom certainly was. The barristers did nothing but yell, “M’lud! My learned friend, here . . .” and then blather out some nonsense that wouldn’t have hung a horsethief.
Scroggs was still reading and airing his views. He snapped his paper smartly, and went on. “But of course there’s some that can afford sharpish solicitors to get them off.”
“It’s only a small claims matter, Dick.”
Scroggs rattled the Bald Eagle, turning it toward Melrose. “Well, it says here that Major Eustace-Hobson’s to hand down the decision.”
“That idiot?” Major Eustace-Hobson would have been right at home in The Nine Barristers.
“Only an idiot’d have this case, if you take my meaning.”
“It’s clear, yes.”
“Not to worry, m’lord. Every family’s got one.”
Melrose held his book up in front of his face.
“Just thank the Lord the superintendent’s ba
ck.”
Melrose lowered the book. “He is? Where’d you see him?”
“Over to Pluck’s place.” The villagers always referred to the police station that way. It sounded like a pet shop or a disco. Pluck did run it like a halfway house. People dropping in for a cuppa, asking his advice, taking him biscuits and cakes and so forth. If it weren’t for the blue-and-white sign sticking out from the door, Melrose would have thought it was a tea-room. “At the station, he is. There’s his Rover I saw queued up there with that Superintendent Pratt’s and half the county police.” Scroggs had left the bar for the window that faced the High Street.
“Let me know when he comes out, will you?”
Since the eyes and ears of Long Piddleton was “on the mend” with a sprained ankle, someone else had to keep track of things. Scroggs seemed perfectly happy to fill Agatha’s shoes in this way. He leaned against the frame and stared out at a green and gold May morning, stained like the glass that spelled out “Hardy’s Crown.”
• • •
Superintendent Charles Pratt was staring at Richard Jury in astonishment. The arms he had raised in protest now dropped wearily to either side of Constable Pluck’s swivel chair as he sat back and planted his feet on the desk. He shook his head.
It was his detective inspector, John MacAllister, who gave voice to that protest. If a sneering sort of laugh could be called that. Pratt shot him a warning look.
Jury himself was sitting, half-leaning on the windowsill. The silence that followed his comments remained unbroken until MacAllister said, “It’s crazy.”
The Five Bells and Bladebone Page 20