‘Sir, are you a parent?’
The young woman seemed to have sprung up before him on the other side of the fence. A teacher. She looked uncertain, yet not wanting to insult him if he were.
‘I? No, no I’m not. I was just looking for—’ But Jury remembered Johnny’s warning and said nothing more.
Her eyebrows raised, but still slightly smiling, as if there were something about him that kept her from thinking the worst.
For which he was grateful. He shifted the books from under his arm, again remembering that he shouldn’t do anything to let the foster parents know that someone had given out their information. He saw her glance move to Outside over There and felt the book rendering him harmless. But he heard in his inner ear a kind of cracking or splintering, reminding him (oddly enough) of the other night and Phyllis biting into the glaze of her dessert. As if the ice baby were breaking.
‘Perhaps it’s the wrong school. Yes, it must be. Sorry.’
He could feel her eyes on him as he made his way through the collection of parents and the school bell sounding the end of the day.
53
It was a real plum for Chief Superintendent Racer, a real opportunity to showcase his response to the kind of question (in this case Jury’s) that came along once in a lifetime, and if you couldn’t give it your best shot, well, that was it, mate. Never another chance.
Racer didn’t really have a best shot, though, so all he could do was lard up his response to Jury’s request for a warrant with as much sarcasm as he could muster. ‘A warrant. Ah, yes, a warrant.’’ Fake laughter here, while Racer got up and wandered around his desk to lean on the front of it with his arms folded. He said it again: ‘A warrant, a warrant.’
It put Jury in mind of that child’s rhyme: ‘To market, to market.’ The next line just slipped out, under his breath, but not way under: ‘To buy a fresh pig.’
Racer stared. ‘Taking this whole business pretty lightly, aren’t you. Jury? Considering there’s three kids involved?’
‘Two.’ Jury couldn’t resist holding up two fingers.
‘You said three.’
‘No. The third one’s a dog.’
‘Oh, I see! You need to save a dog! Well, that’s different, Jury! Why didn’t you say that in the first place?’ Here Racer gave an acerbic little smile, as if even the name were an entry in the ironic sweepstakes. ‘Jury, since when do you need a warrant? Since when have you ever bothered with a warrant? Why, as I recall, you managed to batter your way into that house in Hester Street, you and that cowboy of a policeman from Devon. You did this without being blessed with a warrant. So I expect you’ll find a way into this Belgravia house without a warrant, too.’ Racer couldn’t repeat the word often enough to please himself, as it had been part and parcel of Jury’s recent trouble and what had nearly resulted in his being made redundant (not to put too fine a point on it).
Racer would never let it go, Jury knew. ‘These two kids’ lives are at stake, guv.’ He never used this appellation unless he wanted something from Racer, and that was rare. Jury lifted his gaze to the bookcase where the cat Cyril was flattening himself against the top. Waiting.
‘Well, you should have thought of this before you stormed into that Hester Street house,’ Racer said, with his usual illogic. ‘Evidence, Jury! Let’s see some evidence that these children are being held there. Let’s see some evidence of probable cause, if it’s not too much to ask.’ Racer moved around to stand behind his desk with arms braced and hands flat on it so that he could glare at Jury like some Fleet Street publisher letting off steam at one of his reporters.
‘There’s the head of the school who can certainly testify that Timmy’s missing. There’s the little girl Mathilda’s aunt who’ll tell you her niece hasn’t come back, either.’ Neither of these would work as evidence without more time passing, and even then would not implicate Harry Johnson. But Jury put it out there, anyway. ‘And there’s the dog. The maintenance man and probably some of the other children out there in one of their games can testify that the dog ran onto the grounds and up to Timmy. The same dog—’ Jury sighed, walking right into it.
Like a pitcher winding up for the pitch of the year. Racer worked up his expression into such a fulsome display of scorn he could hardly find words to match it, so settled on one. ‘A dog. A dog. You’re asking for a warrant with the doings of a dog as evidence. Oh, well’—Racer flung out his arms in mock acceptance of this idea—’in that case, we see no problem in issuing said warrant.’ Racer got his face up close to Jury’s: ‘Now you listen to this, laddie. You’re not to go within a thousand yards of this Harry Johnson’s house.’ He trotted out police harassment. ‘So, far from getting a warrant, you’ll get a hell of a lot more than a slap on the wrist this time around. It’s no use pleading exigent circumstances that your hotshot barrister used to get you out of the mess you were in. There’s not even the whiff of the exigent circumstances you managed last time around. No, that won’t fly again!’
Speaking of flight, Cyril gathered himself together and took aim.
As the cat came down. Jury got up. Cyril dived toward Racer’s desk in a graceful arc and made a three-point landing on Racer’s shoulder. Yes, the guv’nor yelled at that!
Fiona came in through the door that Cyril ran out of.
Jury smiled. You wouldn’t catch Cyril sticking at a warrant.
Jury was in his office, feet up on his desk, leaning back in his swivel chair, hearing only snatches of Wiggins’s views on the evils of robotics. It was a subject Jury had not, ‘funnily enough’ (he told Wiggins), thought of as a terrible threat.
He was irked with himself for letting Harry Johnson know that he, Jury, was certain that Tim and Tilda were somewhere in that house. That was an unbelievably stupid thing for him to have done. This might only precipitate some action on Harry’s part sooner, rather than later.
Wiggins had shifted his peroration to cloning. ‘They’re cloning animals and not just sheep, but family pets. Dogs and cats.’
Since Jury was big on dogs these days, Wiggins’s voice filtered through. The world, thought Jury, could use another Mungo. Many, many Mungos.
Wiggins went on. ‘What’s happening here is like that business of freezing yourself, so when medicine comes up with a cure for what killed you, you can come back. It’s like nobody really dies.’
‘Doesn’t it strike you as ghastly, Wiggins? DCS Racer coming back when we thought we were finally rid of—’ Jury stopped suddenly. He brought his chair forward with a thud. He sat thinking for a minute while his smile broadened. He looked at his watch. It had just gone 4:00.
What the hell? It might just work. If it didn’t, nothing lost. Jury rose and unhooked his coat from the stand. ‘If you need me. I’ll be at Boring’s.’
‘You be careful, sir, you never . . .’
Wiggins’s voice trailed after him down the hall. What was he to be careful of? Was it the Day of the Robots or the Night of the Clones?
54
Jury made a stop at Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road. It was out of his way, but Foyles was the biggest bookshop in London. Waterstone’s might outdo it for square footage but Foyles had the most exhaustive inventory. He told the clerk (were they called that anymore?) what he wanted and was directed to the third floor.
It was a bookshop one could literally get lost in, which Jury thought was to its credit. It put him in mind of a small dusty shop in a London by-lane, which had grown bigger and bigger like a child’s Lego structure. He found what he thought would do, paid for it and left.
With his book in hand, he stood outside of Foyles looking up and down Tottenham Court Road, but did not see what he wanted. A #10 bus was coming along, and he thought a better vantage point to see the shops would be gained, and more quickly, by looking out of a bus window. When it came to a wheezing stop, he climbed aboard. Less than three minutes later, he saw the little shop called Pigtails (how he loved that name!) down a side street and got off at the next
stop.
Pigtails. What whimsical mind had thought that one up? Jury walked through the door with its tinkly little bell and stood there for an unbothered minute—the receptionist having left her post—and thought he knew why women favored these places. Pigtails was calming, like a sanctuary, even with all of the hair blowing and chattering.
‘Do something for you, love?’ said the receptionist, a plump girl with a hairdo that struck Jury as old-fashioned, the way the hair bobbed about her face in dark ringlets.
‘Oh. Yes, you can.’ He took out his ID and surprised her to death. ‘We’re needing one of your stylists for an important job.’ Round-eyed, she looked at him. ‘Which one?’
‘The stylist? Doesn’t make any difference. The job won’t take more than an hour or two. And of course we’ll pay twice the usual tariff.’ He smiled. How could Pigtails lose?
The receptionist looked around the shop. Jury noticed there was a kind of uniform, not ‘in design or cut, but in color. This was a coppery color, a brownish red. They were all wearing it in some guise or other. There were nine or ten stylists. ‘Lucy’s free, I think.’ She raised her hand and spoke the name.
Putting down her magazine, Lucy did not walk so much as drift toward them like a pile of russet leaves. She had golden-gingerish hair that matched her dress, worn long to her shoulders, pale, pale skin, luminous light brown eyes. Her whole person, as she came languidly toward him, seemed weightless, insubstantial, like an etherialized Carole-anne. Lucy was quite beautiful.
Jury told them what was needed. He needed to have a job done; it was an important police matter. He repeated that he would pay twice the usual cost of the service. But as circumstances prevented this person’s coming to Pigtails, well, Pigtails would have to go to him. Would she?
Lucy and the ringleted receptionist exchanged glances. Yes, she would. What exactly did he want in terms of color? Jury told her an ordinary brown and Lucy smiled. From some list in her head, Lucy ran down all of the brown possibilities. Jury settled on one and she said just a tick, she’d be right back. Then she drifted away.
Back she came in five minutes with her long loose hair caught in her coat collar and carrying a tote-bag.
Jury had in the meantime gotten a cab, which now waited at the curb, meter quietly ticking over. He gave the address and they sailed off, if ‘sailing’ was any kind of metaphor for threading a car into London traffic. But that’s how it felt to Jury, caught up in this little fantasy.
Lucy’s smile matched his smile, as if she were in on the joke.
Although he was terribly troubled by the fate of these two little children, he still could smile over his plan. He loved it, a love undiminished by knowing Melrose Plant would hate it.
‘No,’ said Melrose, rattling his Daily Telegraph back in front of his face and picking up his drink.
Melrose had driven up to London just that afternoon, and had been here barely an hour when Jury walked into the Members’ Room. Melrose wanted only to relax with his paper and his afternoon drink, but that wasn’t the reason for his refusal. He was refusing because it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard of, an opinion he was happy to share with Jury.
‘Here’s a book to read,’ said Jury, handing Melrose his purchase from Foyles. ‘You don’t have to read the whole thing, obviously, but just pick out a few salient points and make yourself very familiar with them. It’s got pictures, too.’
His paper lowered, Melrose saw that Jury had paid no attention to the no and nor would he. Jury was intent upon this harebrained scheme, the harebrained part to be performed by Melrose. He pointed out that Jury was not the one who was expected to carry out this plan. Oh, no. As usual, that would be Melrose’s job. ‘It took me a week to learn about flowering mead and enameling and that was just gardening. How in the devil do you expect me to master this’—here Melrose held up the book in a wobbly way—‘in an afternoon?’ Then he held up his glass in the same way for Young Higgins to get him another drink.
‘Do what Diane Demorney does. Diane’s so-called intellectual prowess is based on nothing more than her picking out some all-but-unknown fact about a subject and then finding out everything she can about it. You remember the Stendhal syndrome thing. She knows nothing at all about his books, but she knows everything about his fainting while looking at art. It’s a brilliant idea, despite Diane’s being anything but brilliant.’
‘I was considering going into dinner in a few hours.’
‘You don’t have time for dinner. I’ll have dinner and bring you something back.’
‘What an excellent plan! If you think I’m skipping dinner for this, you’re crazier than I thought. And that was pretty crazy.’ Melrose sighed. ‘You know this will never work. It’s completely outrageous.’
‘You seem to forget. Harry Johnson is insane. So that gives us an edge.’
‘Who’s that person you parked out in the lobby? What’s she all about?’
‘That’s Lucy. She’s from Pigtails.’
Melrose shook his head hard to see if he could clear it. ‘Pigtails? Pigtails?’
‘Right. Wait here. I’ll just get her.’
Wait here? Where the devil did he think Melrose could go? Grumpily, he, waited, polishing his eyeglasses. Without them, he looked across the room to where Jury was coming with someone in tow when Melrose could describe only as, well, gossamer—the airy clothes, the diaphanous skin, the gauzy veil of hair. Good lord. He hoped some of this would be rectified when he put on his glasses.
Which he did, in a hurry.
No, that’s pretty much what she looked like. He stood up.
‘This is Lucy from Pigtails.’ Jury grinned.
She could have been Shirley from Sheepshom or Betty from Cowbell as far as Melrose was concerned.
‘Hello, Lucy. How long will this take?’
As if he cared.
55
One of the narrow windows in the basement didn’t shut properly. Through this window Mungo had watched Harry force Timmy and Tilda down into the basement. That is, when he realized Harry was taking them down to the basement, he’d practically flown out the rear door and through the garden to this window. He could not make out exactly what was going on because the window was grimy, but he knew it wasn’t good. There was a lot of shuffling about, as if the children were trying to get free. But they didn’t scream or shout because their mouths were taped.
When things were still again, and Harry had left the basement, Mungo went back through his dog door into the kitchen and sat wondering how to get into it. He had stayed by the basement door for a long time, part of it taken up by listening to Harry and the Spotter talking in the living room. The Spotter had left some time ago.
By now, it had gone from light to dark, day to night. He was outside again. Mungo had never been good at opening things—doors, trunks, cabinets—with his paws. He could pry things open with his nose sometimes, but this window was nearly even with the ground and he couldn’t get his nose into the opening. He turned in circles and whined, something he rarely did.
When Shöe appeared around the corner of the house, he whined harder and butted the window, whined and hit the window again. Shöe stalked over, not trusting Mungo, but she was curious. She crept to the window and peered in. It was pitch dark in the basement so that she had a hard time making out the children. Had she not been blessed with cat’s eyes, she never would have seen them.
Shöe sat back and watched Mungo circling and whining and hitting the window. She yawned, enjoying the fact that he wanted something from her that she could either grant or refuse. She started washing a paw, which really got Mungo mad. Now he was bouncing against the window, back and forth.
He wanted to help the kids down there. Well, now, that was different. She belly-crept close to the window, as if she had to make herself invisible, something she was used to doing. The window was open enough for her to get her paw round it and pull.
They couldn’t speak because their mouths were pulled shut by si
lver duct tape. They couldn’t use their hands to tear it off because the hands were tied behind their backs. He had also made them put on these thin latex gloves. They could, however, move around, as Harry hadn’t tied their feet. But he had looped the two of them together so that one couldn’t move without the other.
When they heard the commotion outside, the two of them looked at each other. At least, he had removed the blindfolds. Shortly before they got to this house, he had pulled over and parked and put more stuff in their eyes. This time he had also blindfolded them, even though their vision was still cloudy. She supposed it was to make sure they’d have no chance of seeing what they passed—streets, buildings, lights—where they were in the city. It was quite definitely the city; you didn’t have to see out the windows to know that.
But down here in the dark, he’d removed the blindfolds. After a while, whatever he’d put in their eyes had finally worn off. They could see now, and they moved together to the window, to stand beneath it in time to see a branch being pushed between the window and the sill.
They looked wildly at each other and would have cheered or, at least smiled, except for the tight tape over their mouths. Somebody was out there trying to help them, trying to fix a way out. They couldn’t shout; they couldn’t clap their hands; but they could jump up and down as long as they jumped together. They kept falling against each other, then scrambling up again. But they were so buoyed by their feelings of relief they went on trying. And they both grunted uh uhh uhhh as loud as they could.
Something—a snout?—was working its way now into the Windows’s opening. Mungo! Timmy and Tilda jumped again and fell again, jumped and fell.
Mungo shoved his head between window and sill, then his body. He dropped down. The basement floor was a little farther down than he’d have liked, but it didn’t hurt much as he’d fallen on something that wasn’t, at least, cement hard. Indeed, he dropped gracefully, considering the difficult angle of the window and sill.
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