Jack Price worked a little pile of ash into a pyramid. “I knew, yes.”
“And didn’t tell Chief Inspector Bannen. Why is that?”
“Because Jenny didn’t, that’s why. I mean didn’t tell him.” Price continued to sculpt his ash-pyramid. “If she didn’t want anyone to know—” He shrugged.
Jack Price, at this moment, appeared to know more about Jenny than Jury did. “Didn’t the whole thing strike you as distinctly odd? Here are two women who are related—not friends, certainly, but cousins—and they keep it a secret?”
“It struck me as odd, yes. For Jenny, it did. Jenny’s a very candid person. But for Verna? That sort of charade was typical of Verna. The woman loved secrets, mystery. . . . ”
“What about Max Owen?”
“What about him?”
Impatiently, Jury said, “Surely he knew the two women were related.”
Price shook his head. “No, I don’t believe he did. Jenny steered very clear of Verna. I don’t think she’d seen Verna Dunn in ten or fifteen years. She read about her in the Arts section of the Sunday Times, knew Verna had married—and then divorced—Max, but that was years ago. She was completely taken aback to find Verna here that weekend.”
“How do you know?”
Price looked puzzled. “I don’t—”
“Lady Kennington must have done a masterly job of hiding her feelings. No surprise registered. Nothing was said. She displayed lack of surprise, from what I hear, as if she’d never seen the woman before. So how do you know?”
Price said, simply, “Oh. She told me.”
Jury knew he was irrationally angered by all of this. “And when was that? That she told you?”
“We were having drinks, cocktails, before dinner. We were off from the others, chatting.”
“I can’t understand anyone’s withholding information like that from police. Not her, not you.”
“I’ve already said that since she didn’t acknowledge Verna, I certainly wasn’t going to give the show away. I told you that I have a great deal of affection for Jenny—”
“No, actually, you didn’t. You knew her well?”
Price shrugged. “Depends what you mean. In a friendly way, certainly. I’ve seen her half-a-dozen times, I expect. I knew her husband, James.”
Some moments ticked by until Jury broke this uncomfortable silence (uncomfortable for him alone, he was sure) by bringing up Dorcas Reese. “Did you perhaps know her better than you said?”
“Superintendent, you seem to be taking this rather personally, if you don’t mind my saying—”
Jury could barely keep from saying “I do.” He said instead, “Only as a policeman. You people are obstructing our investigation, you know.”
Wiggins turned a page of his notebook and looked at Jury. He wasn’t used to hearing such pronouncements from the superintendent. Much too cool, was the superintendent, too clever to “stoop” to such procedural maneuvering, though he was right. That sort of thing put witnesses off.
Price asked, “Did I know Dorcas ‘better’? Are you going to allow yourself to be taken in by all of this twaddle? A bunch of yobs sitting round in a pub or little old ladies round their teapot, talking a lot of nonsense? I walked Dorcas back to Fengate sometimes. After all, we both lived there.”
“Dorcas told several people she was pregnant. Did she tell you?”
“Dorcas did not confide in me; anyway, according to the Lincs police, she wasn’t.”
“Why would she say she was?”
“I have no idea. I assure you, I was not the suspect father.”
“Julie says she fancied you. But Julie doesn’t, let me add, believe you’re the man responsible.”
“Bless her heart.” He raised his glass in Julie’s direction. “Look, I dislike saying unkind things about a girl who’s dead, but Dorcas wasn’t exactly a knockout.”
“So everyone seems to agree.” Jury thought for a moment about this, then said, “You usually take the public footpath, do you?”
Price nodded. “Always. Makes a nice walk before and after. It gives me a couple of miles’ walk, the only exercise I’m likely to get, every day. The thing is, though, that a lot of people take the path, even Max and Grace. It’s a pleasant walk. So if you’re asking whether I took it the night Dorcas was murdered, the answer’s yes.”
“Your only connection with Dorcas was seeing her at Fengate and here in the pub, then?”
“And I scarcely saw her at all at the house.”
Softly, yet in a tone like lead, he said, “You knew Jennifer Kennington had a motive.”
“To kill Verna?” Price snorted with laughter. “Didn’t everyone? She was a bitch, a vicious, conniving woman, and we’re better off without her, Superintendent.”
“But general dislike doesn’t usually add up to a specific motive. And there’s the question of opportunity, too. Lady Kennington had both motive and opportunity, apparently.”
“Perhaps.” Price continued calmly to smoke. “But if that’s so, well . . . maybe she did it. What do they say?” He dribbled ash onto the pyramid and it broke apart. “If it walks like a duck—”
“Don’t say it.” Jury got up. “Thanks. Perhaps I’ll see you later.”
Price gave Jury a mock-salute. “I’ll keep myself available, Mr. Jury.”
Jury returned the salute, but his expression was grim. As he and Wiggins started toward the door, Jury said, “I want you to go to Fengate, Wiggins. See what you can find out, probably the servants would be a good starting point. Take the car; I’ll meet you there.”
“Seeing it isn’t our case, sir—” Wiggins’s tone registered discomfort with what was clearly not proper police procedure.
“Don’t worry. They’re extremely cooperative people. They certainly have been with me. Take the car. I’ll meet you there in an hour or two.”
“What about you, sir? Where are you going?”
“I’m going to take a walk,” said Jury.
21
It was that ambiguous hour in the afternoon before dark, before dusk even, when the fens seemed to smoke beneath a layer of marsh gas. In the west the sky was an icy transparency, the early-risen moon was colorless as mist.
Out from under the roof of the Case Has Altered and the branches of old birch and one young oak showing its first green leaves, Jury stepped onto the public footpath. At this point it was muddy and lined on either side with buckthorn and sallow; it stretched before him across straight-furrowed fields to the left and the waterlogged pasture to his right. Across the field light itself was like water filling the furrowed grass. He wondered how near a river was—the Welland, the Ouse—and if its banks still overflowed. He wondered further if these flooded pastures showed him what the ancient marshlands had been like. No clouds, no wind. A vast emptiness. Except for Jury’s footsteps, there was a complete absence of movement, as if he were the only sign of life in a becalmed universe. He might have been in a boat drifting without sails or rudder, without breezes. Then suddenly a tempest of birds blew upward from distant scrub or water. He felt as if he were setting off on a journey whose destination was not a shoreline glimmering with lights, but the edge of a continent shrouded in fog. Jury could not shake free from the notion of a painful foreshadowing of unhappy events. Looking up at the blank white sky and the limitless fields beyond, he felt all of this strongly.
The path was straight as a die and he wondered if it had once been a drove used by fenmen who cropped the sedge. He had been trudging for perhaps a quarter of a mile before he saw what could have been Wyndham Fen off to the left. In all of this flatness, it looked as landscapes do in dreams, appearing suddenly and inexplicably.
He was wondering about Jack Price. And what he was wondering was whether his relationship with Jenny was more than either one of them—Jenny or Jack—had acknowledged. It told against her, he thought, more than anything else, that she had failed to disclose to the Lincolnshire police (failed to tell him, even) the nature of her relati
onship to Verna Dunn and about having known Jack Price. She would not keep such secrets from Pete Apted, that was certain. The evidence against her was circumstantial, true, but circumstantial had been known to convict defendants before.
He left this part of the public footpath and veered off to walk the roundabout way to the Visitors’ Center. From there he took the boardwalk to the dike nearest the building where the body of Dorcas Reese had been found. Jury had seen it before, but still he stood in an almost reverent silence, prompted not only by the end of Dorcas Reese, but also by the place itself. What a poignant setting for murder, he thought, looking down at the quiet water, the marsh violets and yellow bladder-wort that blossomed above the water, the rush grass and marsh fern. He heard the reeds clicking at a little distance and saw a heron flapping upward, disturbed, perhaps by himself. Jury walked back along the boardwalk.
Like some ossified, prehistoric beast, stranded after the flood waters receded, the rusty white police caravan—the temporary incident room—sat at a little distance from the Visitors’ Center. Its small squares of window glowed with a greenish light. He headed for it, through the reeds and grasses, past a willow holt where a gull swayed atop a willow pole and whistled away at his approach. Somewhere an owl cried. The water of the dikes lay dark gray and motionless as lead. None of it was congruent with the bright yellow crime scene tape that stretched around this part of the fen. There were of course no visitors today. He imagined anyone coming would have been turned back by police up nearer the A17.
The greenish glow was coming from several computer screens, left on, ready for action. Inside, the van was blue with smoke. Bannen liked cigars. He was sitting alone punching up data on his screen.
“Ah. I had an idea I’d see you again, soon.”
It was a smile that Jury couldn’t read, not before, and not now. Bannen would have made a superior poker player; he always seemed to have something in the hole.
Here, Jury bet Bannen had plenty. Perhaps not; perhaps it was just a Bannen bluff. Jury nodded, smiled slightly, pulled over one of the folding chairs. “Sam Lasko tells me you’re about to make an arrest.”
“That’s not precisely what I told him, however—” Bannen took the cigar from his mouth, scrutinized the end, relit it, looked at Jury.
“ ‘Not precisely?’ I wonder what that means.” Jury got the impression from Bannen’s direct gaze that he could have wondered till he was blue in the face and he wouldn’t find out. He leaned his chair back on two legs, tried not to sound agitated, and said, “You’ll have to forgive my prying”—he should not engage in childish sarcasm with this Lincs policeman, he knew—“but she’s a friend.”
“Yes, you told me. It now sounds as if she’s a very good friend.” The word seemed to relegate any judgment of Jury’s to a dustheap of poor deduction.
“Very good. But friend or no friend, you have sod-all to hold her.”
Bannen sighed. “Well, we’ll just have to leave that up to the Crown Prosecution Service.” Bannen moved his hand across several files and papers on his desk as if his magician’s fingers would turn them all into visible proof of what he had to hold Jenny Kennington. “Mr. Jury.” He cleared his throat. “Her motive was very strong; her opportunity—her ‘window of opportunity’ as it is currently described—excellent. She had access to the rifle that was used. To top it all, she lied. About several things. As I’m sure you’ve by now discovered. I hope you’ve found her a good lawyer.”
Jury wondered about the “several” lies. He knew of only one. “Tell me: Why would Lady Kennington kill the Dunn woman now? Fifteen or so years after she’d last seen her. Fifteen years after the injury was done—injuries, I should say. Verna Dunn apparently inflicted a good many, and not only on Jenny Kennington.”
Bannen’s voice was mild. “Who says it was for an injury done fifteen years ago?”
The legs of Jury’s chair hit the floor, hard. “What recent damage had she done?”
Bannen wasn’t about to answer Jury’s questions. He shrugged. “If there were nothing, no motivation, then why didn’t Jennifer Kennington admit that she knew her all of those years ago? That they were, indeed, related?”
“That isn’t so important—”
“It isn’t? I wonder what Oedipus would say to that.”
“Why didn’t Jack Price say he’d known Lady Kennington? I’m merely pointing out there could be perfectly innocent reasons for not announcing that you knew someone in the past.”
“Hmm. But then Jack Price didn’t kill Verna Dunn.” Bannen smiled a quick, false smile. “There seem to be a number of people Lady Kennington didn’t want to acknowledge knowing.”
Jury ignored the circular reasoning Bannen had used with relation to Jack Price. Bannen knew he was doing it. “Two. Not ‘a number.’ ”
Bannen shook his head, implying disbelief that the superintendent could really be as thick as two planks. He ran his hand back over his thinning hair. “If Jennifer Kennington had gone back into the house and, say, bolted up to her room because she was angry or whatever, I’d say that was understandable behavior. Instead, she leaves the Dunn woman standing in the wood and, leaving her host and his guests, sets off for the local, some distance away. Then, after walking for ten or fifteen minutes, realizes that the Case would have already called for last orders and would be closing. She turns and retraces her steps to Fengate.” Bannen sat back in his swivel chair. “Now, does that sound like plausible behavior—for an innocent person, I mean?”
“Then why haven’t you charged her?”
Bannen rocked in his chair a bit, undisturbed by the question. “I’m showing remarkable restraint. I’m making allowances.”
Jury shook his head. “I doubt it.” Jury inclined his head to one side, gesturing in the direction of the boardwalk and canals. “What about Dorcas Reese? Are you saying Jenny did that too?”
Bannen’s smile was maddeningly enigmatic. “Yes.”
Jury felt a real chill. He had expected uncertainty here. “But why? What possible motive—”
Bannen sighed. “Dorcas Reese presented a danger to her.”
“Listen to me: yesterday I talked to Jenny Kennington. In Stratford. She said something strange: that she wondered if Verna Dunn was nearby when Grace Owen’s son met with his accident.”
Bannen frowned at his computer screen, as if it had failed to bring up an explanation of this sudden switching of subjects. “If you’re suggesting that Grace Owen held Verna Dunn responsible for her son’s death”—Bannen rolled the cigar in his mouth—“why on earth would she choose an occasion to shoot her when others, strangers, were present? It would surely be more sensible to go to London, to go to Verna Dunn’s house, than wait for her to come to Fengate. That just doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course, it doesn’t. Not if the murder was premeditated. Grace Owen might only have just found out that weekend. How many occasions were there, after all, when she was in the presence of the ex-Mrs. Owen?”
There was a silence. Then Bannen said, “Lady Kennington’s comment about the son was merely speculation.”
“It would certainly be simple enough to find out.” Jury rose. “I have a feeling you know more about this than I do.”
Bannen laughed. “I certainly hope so, Mr. Jury. Because you know—to use your own words—sod-all.”
Part III
The Red Last
22
Jury looked for some moments at the house a short distance away on a rise of ground. “Toad Hall” Plant had said Parker called it. A whimsical man. Jury wondered if Linus Parker felt an affinity for animal-things, child-things. And how he’d react to an unannounced and unofficial visit from Scotland Yard. Given what Melrose Plant had said, probably with grace.
It was no member of the staff who opened the door, that was clear. In spite of the white apron that fell nearly to the ground (Parker, he knew, loved to cook), this tall man with the mustache and thinning hair would never be taken for anything other than one of
the upper class. Something in the bearing, in the barely perceptible cocksureness of the way he held his head.
“Mr. Parker? Major Parker?”
Parker nodded and with a smile slightly ironic, said, “Believe me, ‘Mr.’ will do, and plain ‘Parker’ is better. That’s what people call me. You the Scotland Yard chap?”
Jury stopped in the act of getting out his small wallet that held his ID. Surprised, he said, “How did you—”
“Know? Ah, news travels like lightning in these parts. Come on in.” Parker stepped back from the door and gestured for Jury to pass through it. Parker removed his apron, tossed it over a bronze bust, and then took Jury’s coat. With more care he deposited the coat over the arm of a rather ostentatious chair, Louis Quinze, perhaps, which was the only Louis Jury could remember. “This way, Mr.—ah, I wasn’t told your name, however.”
“Richard Jury. I’m with the CID.”
They arrived in a large yet cozy room, its hominess owing no doubt to a big, wild fire raging in an enormous fireplace. The fire and the crammed-in furniture. Jury had never seen such an eclectic mix—Art Nouveau jostling Chinese lacquer; worthy American-looking pine and oak in tables and trestles; several periods of one Louis or another—it was quite overwhelming, more so than Fengate, overflowing with objets d’art, many of which looked to be of museum quality, but none of which seemed to go together. Yet all were well cared for—no table, no silver or copper unpolished. Paintings, mostly unhung, were scattered about, leaning against mahogany sideboards and blanket chests; two weathervanes, horse and stag, tilted against the far wall; urns and cast-iron animals sat about; commodes inlaid with mother-of-pearl sat beside a marquetry table; a jade head and an ivory horse graced the mantel of the fireplace together with a number of small bronze pieces.
Jury and Parker sat on facing faded velvet love seats with a cobbler’s bench that served as coffee table between them. A cut-glass tumbler with a finger of whiskey in it sat there beside the book, which was open and face down.
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