The Blue Last

by Martha Grimes

  Jury waited a moment, but saw she wasn’t about to embroider on this no. “Did he have enemies or was he in financial straits? Anything like that?”

  “Financial straits? I think not.” Her smile was sad and her voice sounded as if it had been scoured, raspy and uneven. “Enemies? I didn’t know all of my brother’s acquaintances, but I don’t see why he should have had. He was quite a decent person.”

  “Your father used to run a pub during the war called the Blue Last-”

  He surprised a real smile from her. “Oh, yes, I remember it. I remember it well. The Blue Last. Simon and I used to love playing there. Heavens-” She rested her forehead in her hand as if she might be going to weep, but she didn’t. “It’s been over fifty years.” She pushed a strand of hair back into a rather careless chignon with a slightly flushed cheek and a bashful look, as if flirting with memory. “We had so much fun back then. Simon was around ten and I was two years older and Em-Emily, my sister-must have been in her teens.” Her eyebrows drew together in puzzlement. “Actually, Emily was much nearer Alex’s age than she was mine. Yes, she must have been seventeen or eighteen when Alex died.” She went on, smiling once more, saying, “We always thought the pub a great adventure. Alexandra always loved it, too. But that was in the years before the war came and ruined it all. Yes, my father Francis had the Blue Last for-it must have been fifteen years. He didn’t, of course, need to run it, I mean, he had no financial need of it. Tynedale Brewery owned several.”

  “Your father was killed in the blast, also?”

  “Yes. And our mother had died two years before that. Had it not been for Oliver, we would have been-well, orphans.” She smiled slightly, as if the thought of their being orphans almost amused her. “The Blue Last. It was a lark, such a lark before the war.” Her voice seemed to unwind with these words and, like the clock on the mantel, stop. She was looking out of the window, as if on the other side of it she saw larks flighting. She looked profoundly sad.

  Jury felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking she was all surface.

  She went on. “I really loved that pub. It was endlessly exciting. The people, the talk, the ‘crack,’ as they say. That we owned it, that was part of it, like the scullery maid finding she owns the castle.”

  The metaphor surprised Jury, both that she had drawn it and that it had been drawn at all. He smiled. “Scullery maid. Is that how you saw yourself at home?”

  Her answer was oblique. “But the Blue Last was home. I mean, of course, we had another house. The one that Simon occupies-I mean, occupied-” She turned away.

  Jury was silent.

  Looking down at her hands, she said, “It sounds awful, but-” A flush spread upward from her neck. Again she took refuge in the light beyond the window.

  He waited for more, but she remained silent, as if, done with memories of the Blue Last, there was nothing to speak of, not even her brother’s murder. It was as if the loss of the Blue Last had enervated her.

  Why was this hard to understand? There was a sense of a particular place that haunted us all, wasn’t there? A place to which we ascribed the power to confer happiness. An image deeply etched in the mind that had fled and taken something of us with it. Strange we should put so much stock in childhood, a time when we were vulnerable, unprotected and at the mercy of those we hoped would have mercy. Yet that time, that childhood seemed to rise above the lurking danger and present itself as the most seductive, longed-for, unassailable thing in our lives.

  “You said you got on so well then.”

  “What?” Marie-France turned blank, gray eyes to him.

  “You said you and your brother and sister got on so well back then.”

  “We did, yes. Sometimes we got to stay all night at the pub, as there was a large flat above. Alexandra and Ian did, too. And Alexandra did after she was married. She seemed to like it even more than Tynedale Lodge. I think I was jealous of her; she was so beautiful. And then she married this dashing RAF pilot-did you ever see the film Waterloo Bridge?”

  “Yes.” Jury smiled. “One of the great romances in film history.” (That’s who it was, he thought, Viven Leigh; that’s who Alexandra looked like, and the waitress in the cappuccino bar.) Jury smiled.

  “Kitty used to say that’s just how they were, that Alexandra and Ralph were like Myra and Roy. Kitty-she was the au pair, or nanny, I suppose. I remember how it irritated me that Alex really did resemble Vivien Leigh with her smooth dark hair and ivory complexion and dark eyes. And the cheekbones.” She shook her head. “ ‘A silly comparison,’ I once heard Alex tell her. ‘Vivien was a prostitute and that’s why she didn’t marry Robert Taylor. And that’s why she jumped from the bridge. I don’t think I’ll have to do that,’ Alex said.”

  Jury said, “Alexandra doesn’t sound like an incurable romantic.” He smiled. “She sounds more the practical type.” He drew the envelope from an inside pocket where he carried Mickey’s snapshots. He removed the one of Alexandra and Francis Croft and set it before Marie-France.

  Surprised, she picked it up “Where did you ever… it’s the Blue Last. That’s my father and Alexandra. Where did you get it?”

  Jury noticed she identified the pub before she did the people. “One of the CID men in the City.” He found the one of Katherine Riordin and her baby.

  “It’s Kitty and Erin… wait, no, it’s Maisie.” She drew the snapshot close to her eyes. “No, it is Erin. All babies tend to look alike, don’t you think?”

  Jury smiled again. “I’m sure the mothers would disagree with you. So Kitty Riordin stayed on with the Tynedales here.”

  “Oliver kept her on after Alex was killed. And Erin, poor thing. God, but that was awful. Awful. Both Oliver and Kitty lost their child. I don’t know who was more heartbroken.”

  “And Alexandra’s husband?”

  It was as though Marie-France were trying to recollect him. “Oh, of course. Ralph was devastated.”

  Had he really been, or was she simply mouthing a platitude? Ralph Herrick didn’t seem to be a person remembered for anything but his looks and the RAF. But, then, they’d been married such a little while.

  Marie-France went on: “Ralph was killed in the war.” She dredged up memory. “Yes, that’s right. During the war. He’d left the RAF. Actually, he was awarded the Victoria Cross. Yes. How could I have forgotten that? He had something to do with those code breakers… Anyway, he drowned. Somewhere in Scotland.”

  “You live exactly where, Mrs. Muir?”

  “In Belgravia, in Chapel Street.”

  “Is that where you were early this morning?”

  “Mm?” She seemed distracted by the past. “Oh. Yes, of course, I’m always there mornings. I live alone.”

  “No maid? Cook?”

  “No, none. It’s quite a small house and I prefer not to have to be bumping into other people.”

  Jury pushed back his chair and Marie-France rose as he did. “Thanks very much, Mrs. Muir. And if you could just give me your sister’s address-?”

  They were standing at the door and she nodded, sadly. Must have been a beauty back then, he thought. Another one I completely misjudged. So much for police intuition.

  When Maisie Tynedale entered the room elegantly suited in black, and sat down, Jury felt a sense of disquietude and thought it had been very poor judgment on his part to talk to the others first, but, then, Mickey had already planted an idea in his mind which had neither been reinforced nor dispelled by the others.

  His eye traveled to the portrait and back to her, trying to limn in the features of Alexandra Tynedale on Maisie. Maisie followed his line of vision. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Disappointingly unbeautiful.” She smiled.

  So did Jury. “Not at all. I was merely wondering if you looked like your mother.”

  Maisie looked again at the portrait. “Her coloring, her hair, possibly her mouth, but definitely not the eyes; the eyes are what count.”

  In this case it was the coloring that did it. Blac
k hair, falling straight just below the ears; ivory skin, a heightened color on the lips and cheekbones. A person who had no reason to suspect she wasn’t Alexandra Herrick’s daughter would think straightaway Maisie was her daughter.

  The thing was, though, hair and coloring could always be altered, and hers had been. The black hair was not her natural color, and rouge had been artfully applied. But even so, she could still be Alexandra’s daughter, wanting to look more like her.

  “What about your father? Is there a picture of him?”

  “He’s around.” Her eyes turned to the serving table and the photographs there. “My grandfather might have him. He shifts photographs around-have you spoken to him?”

  Jury shook his head. “No. He’s quite ill, I understand.”

  “He’ll be crippled by Simon’s death. You know, we might as well all be brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. The two families are that close. Simon might as well have been Oliver’s son. I know Ian always thought of him as a brother.”

  “I’ve got the impression all of you find the friendship of Francis Croft and Oliver Tynedale rather astonishing.”

  “Unusual, at least. How it could go on like that, how it could go on since they were boys. Yes, perhaps ‘astonishing’ is the right word.”

  “Your relationship with-” Jury consulted his notebook as if searching for the name which he perfectly well knew “-Katherine Riordin goes back a long way, too.”

  “Kitty. Yes, I suppose you know about that night the Blue Last was bombed.”

  Jury nodded.

  “Well, Kitty just stayed on.”

  And stayed. But, then, a lot of old nannies, family retainers, stayed on with their employers for a long time. And never having met the woman, Jury decided to drop that particular line of inquiry.

  But Maisie continued. “Granddad gave her the cottage so she would feel more independent-”

  “Which she isn’t; she’s completely dependent upon your family.”

  Maisie grew somewhat defensive. “That sounds a little hostile.”

  Jury raised his eyebrows. “I don’t mean it to. I’m stating facts, at least, as I know them. The source of Mrs. Riordin’s income could be important.”

  “What are you hinting-?”

  “Noth-”

  “-that she murdered Simon for an inheritance?”

  “That hadn’t crossed my mind. Why would Simon Croft leave money to your old nursemaid?”

  Angry, she started to rise.

  “No-” Jury put out his hand. “Please stay seated. I have more questions.”

  Reluctantly and with mouth compressed, she sat back, arms folded in a somewhat combative stance. He noticed the deformity of the hand, then, a skewing of the index and middle fingers, a dislocation of the thumb. He recalled the snapshot of the baby Maisie, her tiny hand on her mother’s neck.

  “You appear to be protective of Katherine Riordin.”

  “She saved my life; yes, I suppose I am.”

  Jury doodled on a fresh page of his small notebook. Doodles were the only thing in the notebook aside from a few telephone numbers and addresses. Wiggins saw to notes; he was the most thorough note taker around. Jury himself was afraid of impeding, muffling, the flow of speech. He didn’t like tapes either.

  “Why is it,” he asked, eyes on his notebook, “everyone I’ve talked to makes it sound as if Mrs. Riordin rushed into that bombed building and pulled you out? Coincidence saved your life, not Katherine Riordin. She happened to have taken you out in a pram. That hardly makes her a heroine. It was also coincidence-of the worst kind, I imagine, to her-that she had taken you and not her own child.”

  Maisie sat back, looking stunned, almost despairing that someone would not see Kitty Riordin as a heroine. Why, he wondered, was this so important to her? He could understand it if Maisie was really Erin Riordin and Kitty was indeed Erin’s real mother. Or could it be that the story of that night of the Blue Last’s destruction had taken on mythic proportions of salvation, self-sacrifice and heroism? Maisie caught up in that period of her life, the baby who had lost mother and father and could have lost her own life without Kitty Riordin’s intervention. Jury wondered if Oliver Tynedale was caught up in the same myth.

  “Where were you between midnight and eight A.M.?”

  “Across the river shooting Simon, perhaps?”

  He smiled. “We have to ask everyone that question.”

  “We’re all suspects? I’m a suspect? What on earth would be my reason? I don’t stand to gain by his death. I’ve got enough right now for a dozen people.”

  Jury closed up his notebook and pocketed it. “I doubt the motive had to do with money. I expect everyone here has enough for a dozen people.”

  “Then why? Why did someone shoot Simon?”

  Jury just looked at her and repeated it: “Where were you early this morning?”

  Twelve

  He wanted, after all of this sitting-still talk, to move about and told the butler, Barkins, that he was going to have a walk in the garden and that that was where he was to be found in case Detective Chief Inspector Haggerty called.

  It was early afternoon. He left the dining room through a set of French doors to a terrace and a walk that stretched along the side of the house, the house being much deeper than it looked from the front. The walk was flanked on its outer side by a series of columns. It was, actually, a covered colonnade, along the length of which these white pillars caught the mellow light of the sun. Jury had never been of the peripatetic school; he was very poor at thinking while he walked; what he was good at was smoking and he was dying for a cigarette. A year and nine months and two weeks-Good lord, and you’re still dying for a smoke.

  Across the grass at a distance of some twenty feet stood a line of cypresses along a garden path inside the high stone wall. This tree-lined path ran parallel to the white columns, and between them was the statue of a child reaching her hand down to a duck. He heard voices and saw, between the pillars and the trees, somebody walking there, as he was doing. No, just the one voice was what he heard. He could not make out the words. The cypress trees, themselves like gray columns, were set in counterpoint to these white pillars, so that they appeared, as he walked, in the space between the pillars. Thus between cypresses and pillars, he caught the barest glimpse of the person he had determined was a little girl.

  Perhaps it was talk of Waterloo Bridge that caused Jury to keep walking and looking over at the child between the line of trees, enjoying the cinematic effect of all this. It was as if he were watching a shuttle weaving a tapestry, a picture of a garden. All of its discrete elements-the white columns, the cypresses, the girl, the statue, himself-coming together, locking into one another to form this picture. Jury liked this; it was something like the feeling he got when a solution to what had seemed an impenetrable mystery finally locked into place.

  He had come to the end of the covered walk marked by two wide, shallow steps, going down to a pool or pond, in the center of which a maiden was pouring water from a jug. When he saw the little girl (why had no one mentioned her? A grandchild? A great-grandchild?) emerge from the line of trees, Jury crouched down and pretended to be tying his shoelace. He did not want her intimidated by six feet two of police. His head was down, examining this shoe as if it were as fascinating as the tapestry he had just woven in his mind.

  She stopped and was watching.

  Raising his head and, in a taken-by-surprise tone, he called to her, “Oh, hullo. I’m just trying to get this lace-do yours ever break?”

  In response, she took a few steps closer and raised her shoe, which was a buckled sandal, and shook her head. Her sandals were not winterproof, but she did wear white socks with them. The rest of her was covered in a sprigged muslin dress (too long) and a heavy green coat-sweater the color of her eyes.

  Pretending finally to have fixed the lace, he said, “You’re smart to wear shoes without laces.” He saw now that what she had been talking to all along in her walk was a doll,
oddly clothed in a lace-fringed bonnet and a dress also too long, which flowed over the doll’s feet. When she stepped even closer (though not within handshaking distance) he took in her burnished black hair, pearlescent skin, dark green eyes. He did not know if Vivien Leigh had green eyes. If she didn’t, poor Vivien.

  “This garden is lovely, even in winter. I imagine you spend a lot of time here.”

  She nodded. Solemn and beautiful. Who did she belong to? With her black hair and translucent skin, of course she resembled Alexandra Tynedale. “My name’s Richard Jury, incidentally.” There was no name response from her. He said, “Your doll is all covered up. Is she cold?”

  The little girl shook her head. “She always wears this; it’s her baptismal clothes. I saw one once.” Her look at Jury was slightly challenging as if he might contest the kind of clothes worn to a baptism.

  He assumed she meant she’d seen a baptism. “I never have.”

  This was a comfort as now he couldn’t dispute the details she offered. “They pour water on your head. It’s like they do in beauty shops except in baptisms they don’t have soap and you don’t wash your hair. It just gets rinsed.”

  This was a place of metaphor, certainly. Jury smiled. “So is your doll baptized, then?”

  “Not until I find a name. I’ve been looking for a long time. I’m all the way to the Rs right now. I just can’t decide. I’m thinking about Rebecca.” She glanced at him to see if he was thinking about that, too.

  Jury said, “Could we sit down over there?” He motioned to a white bench enclosed on two sides by vine-covered lattice.

  “Okay.”

  They settled on the bench-the three of them, the doll sitting between-and Jury said, “Are you sure your doll is a girl?”

  Gemma looked at him wide-eyed. “What?” It had been wearing this dress when she found it. No matter what she told others, she believed the dress meant it was a girl.

  Jury shrugged. “I was just wondering why you’re having a hard time finding a girl’s name. Maybe it’s really a boy and doesn’t want to walk around with a girl’s name. I wouldn’t either.”