The Blue Last

by Martha Grimes

  Forty-three

  “ I have my coat on and money,” said Gemma. From the coat pocket she drew a small, shiny-blue change purse with a zipper and decorated with a bright pink plastic flower. She was sitting with Benny on the wooden plank in the beech tree.

  “I can’t take you to Piccadilly,” he said, feeling guilty. “I’m too-busy.” He was too young, he meant. Not for himself-he could go to Piccadilly and back ten times over. He was too young to take the responsibility of Gemma is what he meant. He’d never get permission. That made him laugh. He was too young to be doing most of the things he was doing. The thing was, Benny wanted to see the windows at Fortnum and Mason, too. “They’re really the best Christmas windows around, is what I’ve heard.” But it did worry him something might happen to her.

  “I know. Don’t you want to see them?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Then let’s.”

  He sighed. “Gemma, they’d never let you go with me, even if we did take a cab there and back.” He’d seen she had a lot of money in that little purse. Enough for cabs, he bet.

  “Then don’t ask.”

  Benny sighed again. He’d been watching Sparky make his way over the ground, stopping at stalks and hedges, sniffing as if he’d never been in this garden before. Now he was going into the greenhouse. He never dug up around flowerbeds; he was very good that way, but sometimes you had to watch him. Mr. Murphy didn’t like dogs much, anyway.

  “Christmas is in only three days.”

  She was picking at a stitch on Richard’s blue trousers. She had cut off some of the excess material and sewn up the sides, which now fanned out and were still too big. Her needlework was not very good. “I sewed this. Do you like it?” She turned Richard slowly around so that his outfit could be viewed front to back.

  “It’s a lot better than that old nightgown. But couldn’t you have used blue thread instead of white?”

  Gemma looked doubtful. “Maybe.” She added, “But I couldn’t find any.” She hadn’t looked.

  “It’s nice.”

  “He needs new clothes for Christmas. He needs a mac.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Gem went on picking at the thread. “Do you think about your mother?” Her voice seemed to shrink.

  Benny was surprised. “Sometimes.”

  She raised her eyes from the trousers and looked right at him.

  It’s awful to have somebody know you’re lying, Benny thought. “Okay, like a lot of the time.” Now his own voice sounded strange; it sounded hollow.

  “I would too if I could remember mine. I don’t know even what she looked like.”

  Benny thought a moment. “Like you. Think of you, only older. You know who you look like? Like Maisie’s mother. Remember? You showed me her picture once.”

  Gemma frowned. “That makes me look like Maisie. I don’t want to.”

  Benny didn’t either. He shook his head. “No, no. Her mother. Mr. Tynedale’s daughter is who you look like. Maisie doesn’t really look like her even if she’s got that dark hair and stuff. Like her face isn’t the same shape. Maisie’s mother’s is heart shaped. So is yours. It’s like a little heart.”

  Gemma put Richard down and felt her face all around. “I don’t think so.”

  “Gem, you can’t feel heart shaped. Just look in a mirror.”

  “Okay,” she said. She looked into Richard’s face for a moment and then said, “I don’t believe in Father Christmas anymore. Of course, I used to.”

  This irritated Benny. “Well, how long ago was ‘used to’? I mean, it couldn’t be very, could it? You’re only nine.”

  “I’m nearly ten. I’m as good as ten right now.”

  “How long ago was it, then? When you believed in Father Christmas?”

  “A long time. When I used to be five.”

  This really irked Benny no end. He didn’t believe in him anymore but he was so much older than she. He’d been looking forward to talking to her about Father Christmas-the kinds of things he got up to and the dwarfs and all. Actually, he’d been looking forward to feeling superior. That was one of the nice things about little kids being around, the way you could feel superior to them. “That’s not much time for believing. I mean, you wouldn’t even have thought much about Father Christmas until you were four, say. So if you stopped at age five-well, it was hardly worth it, believing. You might as well just have gone ahead and disbelieved.” Benny did not know what this fuddled need for accuracy was. Was it because the subject of his mum had arisen and talking about her made him cold and anxious? Yet the need to talk about her was as strong as the fear of talking.

  The way she had lived and died was to him courageous, but to another would be contemptible, which is how the ones under Waterloo Bridge were thought of by other people. Benny had gone out with his mother most days. When one day they had collected scarcely enough for Sparky’s dog food, Benny leaned against his mother and cried. “We got nothing, nothing, nothing.” And she had answered, “Neither does God.” And he had said, “But He doesn’t have a dog.” His mum laughed.

  But that’s the way she always was, not hopeful that things would change, for she knew they wouldn’t, yet not seeming to care that much. He remembered a Selfridges bag walking past them (for they were sitting on the pavement) with three white boxes Benny could see over its rim. His mother said, “She’s just bought three new pairs of shoes. Those boxes are shoe boxes. Now you know what’ll happen to them? They’ll spend their lives in her closet. She’ll wear them a few times and then they’ll sit amongst the other shoes and she’ll buy more.”

  She actually didn’t seem to mind having to beg. It made him furious to think of this, for she had deserved so much better, and in Dublin they’d had so much better.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Gem in a worried way. “You look mad.”

  “I’m not.” But he was. He turned to her and asked, “Do you mind not having anything?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Benny swept his arm out to encircle the house and the grounds. “I mean all this of the Tynedales. Does it bother you none of this is yours? Not even a little bit is yours?”

  Gem’s face, to his horror, began to crumple.

  “I’m sorry, Gem. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  Gem wailed and clamped Richard to her chest.

  Benny put his arm around her, genuinely remorseful that because he didn’t have anything, he didn’t want her to, either, nor did he understand any of this. “I’m really sorry.”

  She went on wailing.

  “Stop that.”

  She stopped; she stopped as though she’d never started and went back to inspecting Richard’s trousers.

  Now Benny was really irritated. “How’d you do that?” For her wailing had certainly been a convincing example of brokenheartedness.

  “Do what?” She was humming now and wiping at Richard’s shirt from where she’d cried on it.

  “You were just crying and yelling to beat the band.”

  “I know I was. I was sad.”

  “Well, obviously, but-” Exasperated, Benny thought, What’s the use?

  Melrose considered the shrub.

  Why Murphy couldn’t just leave it alone he didn’t know. The shrub looked okay to him, boxed as it was inside its yew hedge. There was a whole line of shrubs within hedges, a box parterre he believed it was called. So it was a trifle scraggly and needed a bit of shaping-like one of Polly Praed’s mysteries-still, the shrub presented itself to the world as fairly in line with the others.

  “That shrub there,” Murphy had said, “that shrub’s got desuetude written all over it.” Melrose was glad that Murphy had gone for the day.

  He heard a car rev up and looked behind him to see Kitty Riordin in her little VW making a turn in the gravel drive. She rolled down the window and called to him. “Ambrose! When you’ve finished here, would you just give my bit of garden a weeding? Thank you!” She threw up her
arm in a wave good-bye and rolled off. It was her day for shopping in Oxford Street and Piccadilly.

  Kitty Riordin was a person who ran to schedules, all of her appointments, rendezvous and pleasure hunting neatly written in on her calendar, boxed like the shrubs inside squares he was examining now for a cosmetic fix.

  Melrose studied the ball of shrub and decided to have a cigarette as he looked off at the cottage.

  Forty-four

  Keeper’s Cottage sat about a hundred yards from the Lodge and had been, presumably, a caretaker’s lodge. It was sheltered from view by several large tulip trees and a magnificent larch. In front of the little cottage was a remnant of garden, one clearly not tended by Angus Murphy, nor would it be by Melrose. Now, in winter, it was a haven for cold stalks, brittle-looking stems and sodden leaves.

  He went around to the back and tried the window Gemma had told him about. He raised it easily and dropped down into the kitchen. Nothing interesting here, so he went through to the living room. It was warm and with the signature English cottage ambiance of cretonne, exposed timbers, cuteness and cat. Snowball sat and stared at Melrose. He wondered why he had this effect on animals; they found him as entrancing as a box parterre. They stared; they washed.

  He looked at the pictures on a round table by the window (cutely curtained in a print of flowers and butterflies). There were a number of framed photographs, mostly of the snapshot-by-the-sea variety, showing a younger Kitty Riordin with a younger Maisie Tynedale. At least the child looked like Maisie, here probably ten or twelve. There was also one of (presumably) Maisie as a baby. On the corner of the silver frame dangled a silver bracelet with an engraved heart: M. The bracelet adorned her tiny wrist in the photograph and, looking closely at the hand which lay against Kitty’s breast, he could make out the flaw in the tiny fingers, which would have been, he guessed, prior to the accident during the bombings. He was surprised, though, that the Tynedale fortune hadn’t been able to secure a surgeon to put the flawed little hand to rights.

  He walked up très cute narrow stairs into a bedroom the same size as the room beneath it. Bathroom over the kitchen. Definitely a house for one person, but that said, it seemed comfortable and with the fringe benefit of meals taken at the Lodge.

  Snowball had followed him into the room and regarded him with an expression usually reserved for bus conductors. Melrose told the cat to go away, an order which would have gone down equally well with a bus conductor.

  Melrose wondered if Kitty Riordin would bother hiding incriminating evidence. Or was she confident that so much time had passed, no one would be searching her premises? There was a desk with pigeonholes and writing implements against the front wall between the two windows. The top held shelves for books behind two glass doors. He stood and looked, believing this to be better police procedure than immediately knocking about the room and busying his fingers with poking things about. Having looked without success, he busied his fingers poking through the cubbyholes and little drawers. Nothing. He looked through her bureau drawers. Very neat, nothing there either.

  The cat, who had been creeping about and sniffing as if he had never been in the room before, made a bound to the bed where Melrose was now sitting and another bound to the night table, knocking over a picture. Finding nothing further to maul and hit, Snowball gave up trying to find anything remotely interesting and padded downstairs. Good riddance.

  Melrose picked up the picture of Kitty and another baby and the little bracelet that had dangled (as had the one downstairs) on one corner of the frame. On this one the heart was engraved with the letter E. Melrose sat with this little bracelet and looked to the window where a narrow branch of the tulip tree tapped in the wind. There was nothing surprising in Kitty Riordin’s keeping this memento of babyhood, certainly not the bracelet worn by her own baby, Erin, and not Maisie’s either, although she could have handed it over to Maisie herself or even Oliver. But that was splitting hairs. Only…

  … assuming the child brought back from the walk that night was actually Maisie, how had Kitty come by Erin’s bracelet? Could she have found it in the course of frantically sifting through the rubble of the Blue Last? Surely not. He held it up, swinging it on his finger. It struck him as bloody unlikely but he would have to allow it was possible. The question then was, why? Why would she search for it? Other than as a memento, what purpose would it serve? The bracelet downstairs with the M would indicate the baby was Maisie-not prove it, since anyone can switch a bracelet from one little wrist to another.

  He went back to looking at the photograph. The baby had both of its hands on Kitty’s forearm. He could see the fingers separately and clearly. In some way the picture made Melrose think of Masaccio’s Madonna and Child in the Uffizi. He recalled that the hands of the baby Jesus curled on his mother’s arm, just as Erin’s did here. The plump little hands were perfect and unmarked. This was taken before that awful night, the final night of the Blue Last, when little Maisie’s arm and hand were hit by flying rubble.

  Or was it Erin’s?

  Melrose kept looking from the photograph to the bracelet to the tapping branch of the tulip tree outside. It was almost enough to make him believe that Kitty Riordin knew the pub would be bombed. But not even Kitty Riordin could control the skies.

  He hoped.

  Forty-five

  Gloomy thoughts. But it wouldn’t be the first time a mother had done something like that.

  And it had been, after all, for Erin’s own good.

  Melrose was in his room at Boring’s trying to decide what to change into for dinnr. For God’s sake, he told himself (snippily), you have only six articles to choose from-two jackets, a black cashmere and a greenish wool-silk; two pairs of trousers, one of those being the new black jeans he had bought at the Army-Navy Store for gardening and the other a black wool; two shirts, one white, one a black turtleneck. Still he felt all the indecision of a teenager trying to decide what to wear to the dance.

  He looked his wardrobe over. Black. Now that was an interesting idea. What, he wondered, would be the effect if he pulled on the black jeans-

  (He did.)

  Pulled down the black turtleneck.

  (He did.)

  Then yanking it from its hanger, pulled on the black cashmere jacket.

  He did this too, then stepped back from the long mirror, whipped out a comb and snapped it through his gold-licked hair, cool as John Travolta. He caught the whole effect and smiled. He made a gun of his thumb and index finger, pow.

  Back at you.

  In the Members’ Room, Melrose waved hello to Major Champs and Colonel Neame, but sat down on the other side of the room, after procuring for himself a newspaper from the rack near the desk, one of the twenty or so different papers Boring’s supplied. Melrose could understand keeping Le Monde on the rack, but did anyone in here speak Arabic? Swahili? Cigarette in his mouth, he flicked his Zippo and lowered his face to bathe in shadows and fire. Unfortunately, there was no way to see just what the effect was, but he thought it fitted his black-clothed persona.

  “Cool.”

  Quickly, he turned, nearly dropping the lighter. “Polly!”

  Polly Praed smiled as Melrose jumped up, mouth unhinged. He’d caught the cigarette as it fell.

  Polly ran her eyes from his head to his toes and then back up again. “Way cool.” She plopped down in a leather chair, companion to his own. She said, “I may have to revise my opinion.”

  “What the devil are you doing here in Boring’s?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a stick, Melrose. These places let anybody in nowadays. Light?”

  He lit the cigarette she was waggling in her mouth. She hadn’t changed a jot in these last couple of years. She still had the only amethyst eyes in the world, excepting Elizabeth Taylor’s.

  “But how did you know I’d be here? Sit down, sit down.”

  Polly sat in the wide leather chair opposite him and placed a brown paper parcel she’d been carrying between herself and the arm. />
  “Did you come here to see me or what?”

  “To see my editor.”

  Melrose looked around the room. “He’s here?”

  “No-o. I mean I came to London to see him.”

  “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “It was really hard, like tracking down the Jackal. I called your house.” She blew smoke in his direction. “Ardry End,” she added, as if he might have forgotten.

  “We haven’t seen each other in over two years. Last time was when I came to Littlebourne-”

  “Looking for Jenny Kennington.”

  More smoke. “I wasn’t looking for her for myself.” Was she jealous?

  “Who, then, were you looking for her for?”

  “J-” He caught himself before he said Jury and just in time to substitute “Jenny was wanted by the Shakespeare police.”

  “The what?”

  “Stratford-upon-Avon police.”

  “Why did they want Jenny Kennington?”

  “She was chief suspect in a murder-didn’t you read it in the paper?”

  “Was she convicted?” She sat eagerly forward.

  What shameful hope he saw in her amethyst eyes! “No. She didn’t do it.”

  “Oh.” Hope sinking, she fell back in her chair.

  “Polly!”

  They both looked around to see Richard Jury. Polly’s expression changed immediately from the sardonic to the devotional. Oh, she could treat him, Melrose, all any-old-how, but when it came to Richard Jury, who she ranked with a total eclipse of the sun or a lunar meltdown (sun and moon coming in second and third)-well, that was quite another matter. Her eyes widened, her black curls shivered around as if they were being launched into space.

  Melrose said, “I didn’t know you were coming. Did you leave a message here?”

  “Nope. Didn’t come to see you, actually.” He turned and sketched a salute to Neame and Champs. “I came to have a chat with Colonel Neame, over there.”