The Old Wine Shades

by Martha Grimes

  Bob said, ‘Something to do with school, wasn’t it?’

  Maeve nodded. ‘Lark Rise Special School. It’s a school especially for kids with disabilities, like, oh, what was it now?’

  ‘Autism? Autistic?’ said Jury.

  ‘That’s it. Lark Rise apparently specializes in that sort of thing. Her little boy’—Maeve leaned forward, voice lowered as if somehow not to jinx the lad by mention of it—’he was autistic. I took him out a biscuit and a cup of tea. He smiled and nodded, but didn’t say anything.’

  ‘She was going to try to enter him in this school, was that it?’ Maeve nodded. ‘I don’t think she meant the house to be a weekend house, do you. Bob? I think she meant them to live there while school was in session, maybe take their Christmas hols in the London house. That’s my impression.’

  Jury thanked them for the tea, saying, ‘I’m afraid I really must be getting back there myself. Thanks so much; you’ve both been very helpful.’

  As they accompanied him to the door, Bob said, ‘You were asking about that dog. I’ll say this, that was one smart old dog, from what I could make out. Looked like he might’ve been kin to things the rest of us aren’t.’ Bob laughed.

  ‘I’m with you there, Mr. Shoesmith.’ They shook hands.

  26

  The plain blank face of Winterhaus faced him. Jury left the car, unlocked the door with a big key that seemed more suited to some nightmare of vaults and crypts and went inside.

  Echoes, also. As he walked from the wide hall into whatever room it had been—music? dining? morning room? Yes, a morning room quite possibly was it. Although upon reflection, Jury wasn’t sure what the purpose of such a room was. But with the French window opening onto the terrace, it would be pleasant to sit in here, looking out into the rainy morning. So he decided upon that as the room’s function.

  It induced in him a reverie as it had done before, some mild hypnotic state in which he felt he was unable to move, or didn’t want to move. He thought about Hugh Gault, wondering whether he found comfort in such stasis. He thought, probably, Hugh did. Winterhaus seemed not to have stirred up anything in Melrose, whom Jury would have thought to be far more susceptible to its atmosphere, the more fanciful of the two, more imaginative, more impressionable. He thought it an irony that he. Jury, dealing as he did in facts and figures rather than magic and spells, would be the one more susceptible. He felt the weight of the past pressing down on him, but it was his past, not the house’s. Like a camera he seemed to be projecting images onto the blank screen of the wall, some of them real, most of them fanciful.

  Disturbed by this, he moved a little to the left, where the French window gave him at least a present vista to gaze across. There was movement some distance away. Jury saw the little girl he and Plant had met, and he walked out and across the long sweep of lawn, along to the Wendy house.

  Two dolls, one prettily dressed and one plainly, were in her hands. As he drew up, the plainly dressed gave the pretty one a fist right in the face. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’ He sat down on the wide stump Melrose had taken before as his chair. Jury nodded toward her Inuit doll, the one that had landed the fist in the other one’s face. What did she call it? Not Ugly. ‘Oogli there knows how to punch. Who’s she beating up on?’

  ‘Caroline.’ She turned the one in the frilly pink dress so he could see exactly how things stood between her and prissy Caroline. ‘Is Caroline anyone in particular?’

  ‘She’s my cousin and I have to live with her. I even have to sleep in the same room.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Jury, frowning.

  Which she appreciated. ‘

  ‘Ugh!’ is right! I have to go to bed with Caroline and get up with Caroline and eat breakfast with Caroline. Caroline’s everywhere.’

  Caroline sounded more like God than a girl.

  ‘So that’s why I sneak off and come here. If Caroline ever found this place I’d have to kill her, I guess.’ This happy prospect called forth a smile. ‘But she won’t because it’s too far away and you have to go through woods and she’s too lazy. She gets all the fancy dresses’—attention drawn to the pink dress again—’and I get the plain clothes.’ She held the doll close to Jury’s face for his scrutiny. Then she stepped back to give Jury a better look at her old jeans, an ankle’s length too short, her white T-shirt and brown cardigan.

  ‘But girls don’t wear fancy dresses like that anymore. Caroline’s completely unfashionable. Girls all dress like you do.’

  This stumped her. She looked down at herself. ‘They’re trying to look awful?’ She was thinking. ‘Maybe they all have Carolines.’ This was so true, Jury had to laugh. In a moment, she did, too. ‘But what about your mum?’

  ‘I told you before. She’s my aunt. Aunt Brenda. I told you when you were here with your friend.’

  She had, that’s right. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  ‘Dead. I don’t know where my dad is. He never came back for me.

  The corners of her mouth dragged down and the plain doll gave the other one another wallop.

  Jury tried to draw the talk away from dad. ‘Is that when you came to live with your aunt?’

  Vigorously she nodded. ‘Caroline gets to go to parties. I don’t. She’s got friends, I don’t, and gets to invite them to the house to play.’

  ‘At least that takes her attention away from you for a while.’ She rolled her eyes at him as if he ought to know better. ‘No, it does not! All of them make fun of me then.’

  ‘That’s awful, but’—Jury was back to the half-full glass again—’if Caroline spends most of her time trying to make you feel bad, doesn’t it occur to you she’s terribly jealous?’

  The surprise in her face showed that it never had. ‘What do you mean?’ Here, she came with both dolls to sit beside him on the stump.

  This was definitely a sit-down topic.

  ‘I mean, if a person’s dead set against another person so that she has to belittle her all the time, usually it means the first person covets what the second one has.’

  ‘Covets?’ Her eyebrows were a tiny scroll of puzzlement. ‘Wants, wants to own, like one might want to own someone else’s jewelry or clothes or house.’ Jury looked around at the monochromatic March landscape, almost artful in its blending of whites and grays and browns into a uniform backdrop for this Georgian house and its wood, dense and still.

  ‘Remember the day last year the woman and her little boy were here?’

  She pulled down the doll’s dress and nodded.

  ‘The boy—what was he like?’

  ‘He was nice. I wish he’d come back. I wouldn’t want them to actually live here, though. Because then I couldn’t come here myself whenever I wanted to.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘I come here a lot. I’nTnot supposed to.’

  Jury lowered his own voice in keeping with the solemnity of that confession. ‘Did you ‘ever see anybody else here? I mean besides the boy and his mum? And the man on the terrace?’

  She nodded. ‘The lady who I think must take care of the house.’

  Marjorie Bathous. ‘The agent?’

  ‘Probably.’ She nodded and picked at a broken button on Oogli’s coat. ‘She comes and moves things around on the tea tray and changes the paintings sometimes, and sometimes moves a chair from one place to another. I can’t imagine why.’

  She didn’t realize she was admitting to spending a lot of time inside the house. Jury smiled. ‘Probably just wants to feel people live here. Estate agents must think of some of their listings as their own homes.’ He wondered if that was true; it struck him as poignant. Then he said, ‘Do you have tea inside sometimes, then?’

  She hesitated, probably wondering if he could be trusted. ‘Well... I guess sometimes I do.’

  ‘Well, keep a sharp lookout for people around here, will you? I may need some more information.’

  She really smiled now. ‘I can keep a lookout, all right. From up there.’ She pointed to an elm tree with
its entanglement of lower branches, offering a leg up to anyone who wished to climb it. Its moss- draped branches and thick leaves gave ample cover, too. It was higher than most of the other trees, maples and oaks.

  ‘I like to climb it,’ she said, simply. Then, ‘I guess I have to go now.’

  ‘I do, too. It’s been nice talking to you.’ And it suddenly oc-

  curred to Jury that he didn’t know her name. ‘You didn’t tell us your name. What is it?’

  ‘Tilda. It’s really Mathilda, but I’m called Tilda.’

  ‘How do you get home, Tilda?’

  She inclined her head. ‘I go through the woods.’

  There once was a road through the woods.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Matter? Nothing. I just thought of a line of poetry, for some reason.’

  ‘I guess it’s sad.’

  He nodded. ‘I guess so, too.’

  27

  The regulars in the Swan remembered Jury. He was their entertainment, their bit of cabaret come back for an encore.

  ‘Oh-oh,’ said one of them. ‘This is getting serious, mates. Clive, better hide that boatload you got from Belfast.’

  ‘Get on with it, Reggie,’ said the barman. ‘Pretty soon you’ll be stitchin’ me up for that shipment what come for you the other night.’

  Jury suffered this forced humor with a smile. ‘I’m not here about your gun running, Clive. I’m looking for someone who remembers seeing this woman, whom all of you, having gone temporarily blind, know sod-all about.’ Holding the photo, Jury stretched his arm out to scope it around. ‘With her son and her dog, too.’

  Clive peered at the photo, as if he meant to be helpful. He shrugged. ‘Dunno, mate.’

  ‘Somebody must’ve noticed her.’

  A woman of late middle age set her empty glass on the bar and said, ‘That would be me, I believe.’

  Clive said, ‘Myra—’

  ‘Lady Easedale to you, you whiskey-diluting toad.’

  Jury turned. He was looking into faded blue eyes. Her expression was wonderful, as if she couldn’t do enough for you. She looked at the photo Jury carried with him of Glynnis Gault. ‘I saw her, at least I think it was she. There was a boy with her, a child, and, I think, a dog.’

  ‘That’s quite definitely Mrs. Gault. What are you drinking?’ He smiled at her.

  The barman threw the bar towel over his shoulder. ‘Ask her what she ain’t. If you can pour it, she’ll drink it. Diluted, ha! Amount you drink, Myra, it better be.’ That drew some snickering up and down the bar as Clive stationed a glass under one of the optics where it stood like a good soldier.

  ‘Never mind them. Come join me at my table.’

  ‘I will.’ He ordered a Foster’s for himself before he followed Myra to a table in the corner. ‘Lady Easedale? Your husband was, what? Duke? Viscount? Honorable?’

  ‘Duke of dreams, Lord Love-a-duck. The Honorable Nothing. My husband went over to Ireland and bought himself a title. You can do the same here, but there’s a lot more red tape. Well, you’d know. About titles, I mean.’

  ‘Red tape, too.’

  ‘I don’t call myself that; it’s so pretentious, don’t you think? Myra Easedale, that’s who I am.’ She held out her hand.

  Jury took it. ‘Richard Jury, detective superintendent with Scotland Yard. I’m happy to meet you.’

  ‘Now’—she said, dispensing with introductions, even taking as matter-of-fact the news that she was talking to a policeman. She leaned closer to him—’about this woman. I didn’t make anything of it until you came round the other day, asking. Or Clive said you did. The people in here, well, they’re not as unreliable as one might think at first. So I did wonder.’

  Clive was setting down their drinks. ‘He’s not missing persons, Myra; he’s CID. Homicides, that kind o’ thing.’

  ‘Oh, and a lot you know about ‘that kind o’ thing.’

  ‘

  Clive shrugged and walked back to the bar.

  ‘Idiot,’ she murmured. ‘I heard the story from Marjorie Bathous—she’s the estate agent—who said the woman had never brought back the key. Later she tried the number she’d got from the woman and nobody answered. For several days she kept trying. No answer.’

  ‘Mrs. Bathous didn’t call the police?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. Well, some people are awfully skittish about the police. I expect Marjorie Bathous thought Mrs. Gault would come back eventually. You see, people think that house is peculiar anyway. There were those who got a kick out of saying maybe that house swallowed them up. People are such ghouls, aren’t they? The thing about that place is it’s huge, it’s isolated and it’s vacant. Been vacant for some time. Was rented out some years ago, I recall. Well, most people don’t want to rent a place out here in the sticks and not close to a mainline train.’

  ‘Getting back to when you saw Mrs. Gault—’

  She reared back an inch or two, feigning shock. ‘My, you are relentless, aren’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘When I saw her I was driving along this road, the one running by the Swan and the houses farther along. I’d come from Lark Rise, been doing a spot of shopping. When I was just coming up on Winterhaus, I saw her car and her standing beside it, reading a map. I stopped and asked her if I could help with directions and she said no, she was fine. So I drove on. The car was just opposite the Winterhaus driveway.’

  ‘What time was this?’ Jury had taken out his small leather notebook.

  ‘Oh ... I’d say threeish, some time between three and four, in any case. Whether she was going to visit the house or had already done that and left, I couldn’t say.’ Myra took a sip of her whiskey and looked doubtful.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It seemed an odd thing to be doing, stopping there to read a map. It just struck me later as strange. It’s such a small point, though, I shrugged it off.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, there was the driveway to the house—I mean you could hardly not see it from where she was standing. If she wanted to take out a map, why not stop in the driveway? She’d either be going into it or coming out of it, the same thing would apply, wouldn’t it? Why not, in either case, stop somewhere along the driveway instead of leaving the driveway and pulling up across the road and getting out.’ She waved her own words away, as if their triviality embarrassed her. ‘It’s such a small thing.’

  Jury smiled and raised his glass as if in a toast. ‘It’s just such small things that could mean success or failure in solving a case. You’d make one hell of a witness.’ It’s the same thing he’d said to Maeve Shoesmith.

  She looked quite pleased by that compliment.

  Jury asked, ‘And what did you think about her stopping where she did?’ He saw her glass was nearly empty and signaled to Clive.

  ‘Perhaps that she’d stopped to let the dog—or even the boy for that matter—out to, you know, relieve himself. But that presented the same problem. I suppose the boy might have said, just at the moment of leaving the drive, ‘Mum, I’ve got to go!’ But that seems most unlikely, doesn’t it? Why leave the privacy of the property— there are so many trees and hedges there—to do something you don’t want to be seen doing?’ Again she seemed to wave the words away. ‘I do wish I’d been nosier and pulled my car up behind hers and seen—well, hindsight would save us all. Most of us, that is.’ She looked up at Clive, who stood with the bar towel draped over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s it to be, Myra, me old girl?’ He smiled broadly.

  ‘Two more,’ said Jury.

  ‘Better watch your step there, Inspector; she’ll have you for breakfast.’ Clive whistled his way off with the empties.

  ‘Daft,’ said Myra.

  ‘Let me ask you, if the car had been on the drive, would you have seen it?’

  ‘I might have glimpsed it. The thing is, there’s a heavy screen of hedge and tree there, so I’d only have caught a glimpse if I’d seen it at all.�
� She sat back and studied Jury’s face. ‘Are you saying she wanted to be seen?’

  ‘It does look like it.’

  Myra just looked at him, frowning slightly. ‘The way it all happened, you’d think she wanted a witness.’

  Jury nodded. ‘But witness to what?’

  The woman who came to the door was angular, but still nice-looking in her way, if her way hadn’t been a surliness of expression, as if she were always gearing up for distasteful news.

  ‘Mrs. Hastings? Brenda Hastings?’ Jury showed her his ID. ‘My name is Jury; I’m with Scotland Yard CID.’

  Brenda Hastings’s expression turned fearful. ‘What? What about? Has something happened to Caroline?’

  ‘No, nothing at all like that.’

  She breathed a sigh of relief, and Jury waited a beat for her to ask about Mathilda. She didn’t, at least not until Jury’s prompt. ‘You have a niece, Tilda?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes. Mathilda. We call her Tilda. Why? Is she in trouble?’

  Interesting, Jury thought, that whereas Caroline might be in danger, Mathilda could only be in trouble. That was as far as her concern could take her.

  ‘No, but she might—’ Jury stopped. Why give away the little girl’s secret. He had almost said she might be in danger, going to those woods, endangered possibly by some person who had come to Winterhaus. Endangered by a lack of supervision. Lack of interest; lack of love. He wondered what had happened to her parents. Why was he always running into motherless children? He knew what it felt like; he knew it went on forever. He knew it colored his responses to people. Look at him: barely in the door and he was already prepared to dislike Brenda Hastings. ‘It’s not either of the children I’ve come about.’

  She brushed a pile of yellow hair back from her face—not blond, but yellow, harsh and yet faded, whatever shine had been there long since gone.

  ‘It’s really just information I’m after.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Jury nodded toward the uninviting parlor of this fussy little house. ‘May I sit down?’