The Old Wine Shades

by Martha Grimes

  ‘I keep going back to square one,’ said Jury. ‘If they left of their own accord—Glynnis and Robbie—they would have taken Mungo. But if they were abducted, it’s unlikely the villain would have taken the dog too, isn’t it?’ Again, he heard Vivian’s, Why didn’t they take Mungo?

  He told Harry about Vivian’s question.

  Harry said, ‘They did take him, though, didn’t they? But he came back.’

  Jury felt the whip of Mungo’s tail and looked under his bar chair. Mungo came out from under it and turned a wide-eyed look on Harry and then on Jury. Back and forth.

  Harry smiled, ‘Talk about a look of devotion.’

  To Jury, it looked less like devotion and more like disbelief.

  ‘If only you could talk, boy,’ said Harry, reaching down to ruffle his neck.

  But Mungo avoided this by sliding under Jury’s chair, where he put his paw over his eyes.

  Their second round came, and Harry went on. ‘It sounds absurd, I guess, but having tried everything within reason, I decided to go beyond it and organize a visit to Surrey with someone who dealt in the paranormal.’

  ‘A psychic?’ Jury set his replenished glass down. He’d meant to drink, but hadn’t, now that they were dealing with other worlds.

  ‘Psychic, medium, whatever they call themselves. I was almost ready to go in a tent and spend time with a fortune-teller.’

  ‘And she—or he—went to the house?’

  ‘Yes. A Mrs. Chase from Putney. She was the picture of everyone’s favorite auntie. Sweet face, gray hair, well-padded figure. I felt if she dabbled in the occult, the occult must be more down to earth than I’d ever given it credit for. Well, she stopped before the French door and stared out. I asked if there was something out there, or someone, but she said nothing, nor answered except to say, ‘It’s extremely cold in here.’

  ‘Then we walked back to the furnished drawing room. She stood in the middle of it, looking around. ‘This is not your house, is it, Mr. Johnson?’

  ‘No, it belongs to a man named Torres.’

  ‘Of whom you spoke before. Where is Mr. Torres?’

  ‘In Italy,’ I said, ‘near Florence.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to him, yes.’

  ‘Did he tell you why he no longer lives here?’

  ‘Too many unhappy memories.

  ‘‘I shouldn’t wonder. You don’t feel it, do you?’

  ‘What?

  ‘The atmosphere.’

  ‘She seemed to turn from comfortable nanny figure into someone measured and exact. Hardly the medium dished out to us by the telly. I didn’t expect Mrs. Chase to be struck by great waves of emotion, and she wasn’t.

  ‘She asked me, ‘Now, why am I here? I mean, what is it I should be looking for?’

  ‘It was then I told her about Glynnis and Robbie. She was not one for hasty answers, certainly. For some moments she thought about this.’

  ‘They were here, certainly.’

  ‘And then?

  ‘She looked at me for a while without saying a word. Then she said, ‘I don’t see the boy as clearly. Robbie? Is that his name?’

  ‘I nodded; I couldn’t believe what she was implying. ‘You’re suggesting that they met someone here?’

  ‘Well, you could put it that way.’

  ‘‘Could—?’ I didn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Mrs. Chase, this doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘At that, it was her turn to stare. ‘Mr. Johnson, you didn’t hire me to make sense. Quite the contrary, I think. She was murdered in this room.’ Mrs. Chase directed her attention to his feet. ‘You’re standing on the spot where her body lay.’

  ‘I stepped back, horrified. I couldn’t take this in; I couldn’t assimilate it.’

  ‘Did you believe her?’ asked Jury.

  ‘After another minute of blank fear, no, I didn’t. I believed she was merely earning her five hundred quid.’

  ‘Lord, that’s steep for a pleasant drive in the country. The trouble is with so-called psychics, their doubtful visions are difficult to disprove.’ Jury added, ‘As if I’ve ever known one.’

  Harry laughed. ‘As to proof, well, if indeed Glynn’s body was to be found—’

  He said this very quickly as if any stumbling or hesitation over the words would turn what he said to fact.

  ‘You didn’t report this to the police, then?’

  Harry snorted. ‘Not bloody likely, I didn’t. Tell the police a psychic says Glynnis Gault has been murdered?’

  ‘And you didn’t go over the grounds yourself?’

  ‘All right, I did. Looking for freshly turned earth, for a grave, I did. I was ninety-nine percent sure this Chase woman was making it all up.’

  ‘Or, possibly, was telling the truth, but mistaken about what it was. There’s always that.’

  Harry nodded. ‘There was that minuscule one percent. Always that small chance—and, anyway, looking for a grave there would probably be useless as the killer would have buried the body someplace else, don’t you think?’

  ‘Possibly, yes.’ Jury leaned his arm on the bar, his head propped by his hand. ‘It seems to me you’re giving more than one percent credence to Mrs. Chase’s theory, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I meant, at the time, I didn’t believe her. But when I thought about it later I thought it was possible that someone could have followed Glynn from London, or at least known where she was going.’

  Jury smiled. ‘That puts Marjorie Bathous and Forester and Flynn in the frame.’

  ‘That I don’t believe I was thinking of a person out of her past, an old enemy, an old lover, an old acquaintance—someone to whom she was a threat, someone who wanted revenge.’

  ‘So this Mrs. Chase might have been truly capable of calling up that image?’

  ‘Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time a psychic has made some discovery like that. I’d have to accept, obviously, that she is a psychic,’ said Harry.

  ‘That, or a good actress.’

  Harry had been staring at his drink; now he turned quickly to look a question at Jury.

  ‘Let’s say either she herself was involved in the killing or someone hired her to tell you what she did.’

  Harry frowned. ‘What an elaborate ruse.’

  Jury drank off his wine and motioned to Trevor, who came down the bar with the napkin-wrapped bottle. Jury nodded to him and turned back to Harry. ‘Not necessarily elaborate. Say it was a job the killer didn’t want associated with London. He chose this obscure house in Surrey that she was going to view. The Chase woman is hired to feed you this story, which further removes it from reality, and Glynnis and Robbie vanishing would shore up her so-called vision—’

  ‘Wait a minute, though. How could anyone be sure that I’d contact this Mrs. Chase? I didn’t know her.’

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘A woman who knew someone who knew about his wife and son wrote to Hugh. He showed me the letter. She said—the letter writer—that Mrs. Chase had found her missing daughter.’

  ‘Then that letter itself could have been a plant. It would have been easy enough for someone else to write.’

  ‘It gets more and more complicated. The thing is, what on earth had Hugh to lose? Just a few quid.’

  ‘I don’t agree. Hugh had a little more than money to lose. He had peace of mind to lose, hope to lose. But even if that’s beside the point, well, what was the point? What was to be gained by introducing a psychic into the awful business? If Glynnis and Robbie—and she saw nothing of him—were murdered, why call attention to it? This was a month later. Anyone would probably think the wife had done a runner to get away from the husband, or to meet Mr. X, a lover, so why draw attention to it when it had died down?’ Jury paused. ‘Unless—’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless something was going to happen.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Jury was thinking of what Melrose had said. Some future event. ‘Well . . . assum
ing that someone had indeed murdered Mrs. Gault, he or she or they had gotten away with it up to this point. But there might be a future event that would again call attention to it. Just as an example: What if work was to be done on the grounds? Excavation of some sort, digging around and digging up the body?’

  ‘What good would it do the killer to have Mrs. Chase make her disclosure? A body would still be found.’

  ‘Yes, but now Mrs. Chase gets credit for preempting the discovery. If she knows there’s a body, maybe she knows where the killer is.’

  ‘You mean she might direct the search away from the real killer? That sounds like the killer would be taking too much of a chance.’

  ‘It does. But remember, this would now be a crime that’s nearly a year old when the police come to it. Anyway, all of this is posited on a future event; we have no idea what that might be, or if it even will be. I doubt it’s the digging up of Glynnis Gault’s body.’ Jury couldn’t help but think of Carole-anne’s prediction of several nights ago: ‘A body’ll turn up. A body always does.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s eight o’clock already? I have to go. I’m having dinner with our police pathologist.’ Jury was stuffing an arm into his coat.

  ‘That sounds a rare treat. Do you talk shop over the oysters?’ Harry was straightening the collar of his black cashmere.

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ said Jury, buttoning the coat. ‘If Trevor finds your body in here beneath the bottles, it’ll be me that killed you for that cashmere coat.’

  Harry laughed and unwound the dog lead and gave a little tug and a tck tck sound, urging Mungo out from beneath Jury’s bar chair.

  He said, ‘Ah! I forgot to tell you. As Mrs. Chase was leaving Winterhaus, she turned to me and asked, ‘What about the dog?’

  ‘Frankly, I was floored.’

  33

  Mungo lay in his favorite spot—under the sofa in the music room, directly across from the living room. He didn’t know why there was a music room. No one played the piano; it sat in a bay window, unused. He was tired of watching Schrödinger—whose nickname was Shöe—trying to get a fish to stop by batting the side of the aquarium with her paw.

  He wanted to think. He wanted to think about the Scotland Yard Spotter who was beginning to be a big disappointment. The Spotter was playing dumb, surely. If he was really dumb, how could he hold down his job?

  Mungo rolled onto his back and stared up at the muslin underside of the sofa, which got very boring, so he squeezed out from under it and saw that the cat must have grown tired of the fish always swimming beyond her grasp, for he thought he now heard her moving around the kitchen. Yes, there went the cheeseboard onto the tiles.

  He trotted to the bottom drawer of the walnut bureau and saw this tangle of kittens sleeping all over one another. Elf was at the bottom of the pile, so he figured he’d be doing the kitten a favor by pushing away the ones on top and pulling Elf out. Of course, they were all hissing mad as they’d been having a nice sleep until he came along.

  Mungo carried Elf around, looking for a likely hiding place. He’d used practically everywhere that could be a hiding spot in the music room. From the kitchen came the sound of something else thudding on the floor. He wondered if Shöe was at the cupboards again. He carried Elf across to the living room.

  There were cubbyholes in the top of the desk where Harry kept papers. Mungo wondered if one of them was big enough to hold Elf. He climbed up in three stages: first, onto a footstool; second, up to the desk chair; third, up to the desk itself. He looked all over the surface, and at the cubbyholes and at the little desk drawers. For a closer measurement of kitten to cubbyhole, he let Elf down; Elf shivered and mewled, but Mungo didn’t care as he saw something that made his brain come to attention.

  It was a folder or brochure—actually there were several—of the place that Harry and the Spotter had gone into, leaving him sitting in the car. There were pictures of the front and the sides and the grounds and the feebly old.

  He picked up one copy of the brochure and held it in his teeth as he clambered down the same way he’d got up. Then he crawled under a velvet love seat to think, not bothering with Elf. None too soon did he get under it, either, for he heard Shöe padding back. She’d obviously seen Elf up on the desk. The cat jumped up in one graceful swoop, and then all Mungo heard was a big meee-oww roiling around with a tiny mee-ow. And they were together again. Shoe carrying Elf back to the music room and the drawer.

  Having this folder and making good use of it were two different things. He remembered being in the car and yapping himself nearly to death when Harry and the Spotter had gotten out. Fat lot of good that barking had done him. He lay there and thought some more, and thought of nothing that would help, so he slid out from under the love seat and went back to the music room, where Elf was just getting comfortable. Carrying the kitten around sometimes helped him think. Schrödinger had taken herself off to the kitchen. He deposited Elf in quite a good hiding place, then sat for a moment thinking about the brochure, which he had dropped when he picked up Elf.

  If he tried to carry it to the pub, Harry would think it was just a piece of paper getting slobbered all over and take it and toss it in the trash. Mungo thought: Wasn’t there one of those black Uniforms walking around this street? Didn’t he get together with . . . wait a minute. There were cars of them. Turning blue lights and long drawn-out cries that reminded him of Shöe and the kittens. Hadn’t the Spotter got out of one of these cars one evening? They were all part of the same club. They all must club around together.

  They knew one another! They told each other things!

  In another minute he was bounding to the kitchen with the brochure between his teeth and with Shöe hissing at him, he pushed himself through his dog door. Outside now, he ran around the side of the house to the pavement, then stopped and looked up and down the street. No Uniform.

  Where were the Uniforms when you needed them?

  Ah! At the bottom of the street one was rounding a corner.

  Mungo dashed along the pavement, brochure firmly clamped in his jaws as he tried not to slobber all over it.

  It was the friendly one, the one who even called him by name.

  ‘Hey, Mingo!’

  More or less. Mungo overlooked the error and dropped the folder at his feet.

  ‘What we got here, mate?’

  Mungo lowered his standards and barked.

  The Uniform was down on his haunches, looking at Mungo, whose own eyes bored into the Uniform’s. He picked up the brochure. ‘Stoddard Clinic, it says. What’s that?’ Still hunched down, the Uniform opened the folder, looked front to back, at each shot of the clinic and shrugged. ‘You got me, mate. What’s going on here?’

  Oh, God! Why were people so thick, so backward? If the cases had been reversed, he’d be in one of those blue-lighted cars careering around corners to that pub to give the Spotter this clue.

  Now here came another Uniform, waved across the street by the first one. They wasted time (‘Hullo, Kyle; Mac, how ya been keepin’? How’s Greta and the little ones?’ Blah blah blah.) Then the second Uniform, Kyle, was studying the brochure of the Stoddard Clinic, even reading bits of it aloud.

  ‘An oasis in the middle of Fulham . . . !’

  This called for laughs and comments, such as ‘SW 7 has an oasis? News to me, how ‘bout you, Mac?’

  Oh, how funny. Mungo allowed himself an angry bark.

  ‘It’s a clinic,’ said the first Uniform.

  Mungo wanted to lie down with his paws over his eyes. These are the people London looks to for protection? It’s a clinic.

  Now they were both hunkering down to ask questions. ‘Somebody you know there, boy?’ asked Kyle.

  Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes! Mungo tried to bore into these men’s minds with a look like an electric drill.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Mac, shaking his head.

  The pub the pub the pub the pub.

  ‘What d’ya suppose? Somebody we’re supposed to go and see?’


  Mungo was nearly dancing now.

  The Spotter the Spotter the Spotter.

  Mac looked over his shoulder down the street. ‘Maybe Mingo’s house? Maybe there’s trouble?’

  ‘Let’s check it out.’ Kyle talked into a little black thing on his shoulder. ‘Okay, Bruno.’

  ‘No, his name’s Mingo,’ said Mac.

  ‘Okay, Mingo, lead the way.’

  Mungo was staying here until hell froze over.

  ‘He’s only just sittin’ there,’ said Kyle.

  ‘Okay, boy—’ Mac was reaching out an arm.

  Mungo could tell Mac was about to pick him up. No way. He started trotting toward the house.

  The three moved up the marble steps and Kyle raised the brass dolphin knocker.

  Who did they think was going to answer? Mungo wondered. Shöe?

  But the door opened. Ah! He’d forgotten Mrs. Tobias! She was the shape of an apple, her cheeks nearly as bright red.

  ‘Mungo!’

  The Uniforms identified themselves, saying the dog appeared distraught and was everything okay at the house? Was it as it should be?

  ‘Well, now, I only just arrived, but everything looks all right. Still, you might as well come in and ‘ave a look round.’ She stood back from the door and the Uniforms filed in.

  Mungo followed, as there was precious little else to do.

  The Uniforms looked round the music room as if they were shopping—picking up one object after another, setting it down, as Mrs. Tobias watched from the hall.

  Mungo was plopped down in the hall in a fugue state, head on paws.

  From a corner of the music room came Kyle’s voice. ‘Here, now, what’s this kitten doin’ in the piano?’

  34

  What do you know about psychics?’

  Dr. Phyllis Nancy put down her butter knife and said, ‘Not nearly as much as they know about me.’

  Jury laughed. Returning to his question, he added, ‘Would you believe one?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I mean, would it be possible for you to believe one?’