The Blue Last Read online

  The Blue Last

  Martha Grimes

  Chief Inspector Michael Haggerty asks Richard Jury to prove brewing magnate Oliver Tynedale's granddaughter is an impostor. Excavation of Tynedale's bombed London pub, the Blue Last, has turned up two skeletons – was the child found his real granddaughter? Meanwhile Melrose Plant reluctantly poses as an under gardener to investigate the nanny who purportedly saved the baby's life.

  Martha Grimes

  The Blue Last

  Book 17 in the Richard Jury series, 2001

  Good-bye, Blue

  Dark hills at evening, in the west Where sunset hovers like a sound Of golden horns that sang to rest Old bones of warriors underground,

  Far now from all the bannered ways Where flash the legions of the sun, You fade-as if the last of days Were fading, and all wars were done.

  “The Dark Hills,”

  E. A. Robinson

  I Remembrance Mile

  One

  “ ‘Poet,’ it says, “ ‘died from stab of rose.’ Must be a thorn that stabbed him. Who do you suppose that is?”

  Richard Jury looked up and across at Sergeant Wiggins. “Rilke. What is that, the crossword? Rilke, if memory serves me.” Memory served up entirely too much. Jury sat reading a forensics report while Detective Sergeant Wiggins, seated at a desk across the room, was stirring up ever more esoteric means of dying. Wiggins was really into death, Jury remarked not for the first time. Or at least into the ills that flesh is heir to. Wiggins was heir to the lot, to hear him talk.

  “Rilke?” said Wiggins. He counted the spaces. “That’d fit all right. You’d be a whiz at crosswords, knowing things like that.” He poured out the tea.

  “That’s the only thing I know like that.”

  Wiggins was spooning in sugar, and, having dumped four teaspoonfuls into his own tea, started in on Jury’s.

  “One,” said Jury, not even looking up from his folder. Tea making in this office had achieved the status of ritual, one so long undertaken that Jury knew where Sergeant Wiggins was at every step. Perhaps it was the spoon clicking against the cup with each teaspoonful that sent out a signal.

  “Was he hemophiliac, then, this Rilke?”

  “Beats me.” Trust Wiggins to put it down to a disorder of blood or bone. A lengthy silence followed, during which Jury did look up to see Wiggins sitting with his hands wrapped around both mugs as he stared out of the window. “Is my mug going to grow little mug legs and walk over here on its own?”

  Wiggins jumped. “Oh, sorry.” He rose and took Jury’s tea to him, saying, when he’d returned to his own desk, “I just can’t think of other blood conditions that would result in death from a rose-thorn prick.”

  Lines of a poem came unbidden to Jury’s mind:

  O Rose, thou ar’t sick.

  The invisible worm…

  William Blake. He wouldn’t mention this to Wiggins. One rose death was enough for one morning.

  Wiggins persisted. “A prick could cause that much blood to flow? I mean, the guy could hardly bleed out from it.” He frowned, drank his tea, kept on frowning. “I should know the answer to that.”

  “Why? That’s what police doctors are for. Call forensics if you’re desperate.”

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm…

  Jury closed the file on skeletal remains and watched the slow-falling snow. Hardly enough to dampen the pavement, much less a ski slope. Well, had he planned on skiing in Islington? He could go to High Wycombe; they had all-season skiing around there. How depressing. In two weeks, Christmas would be here. More depressing. “You going to Manchester for Christmas, Wiggins?”

  “To my sister and her brood, yes. You, sir?”

  “You mean am I going to Newcastle? No.” That he would not go to his cousin (and her brood) filled him with such a delicious ease that he wondered if happiness lay not in doing but in not doing.

  Wiggins appeared to be waiting for Jury to fill him in on his Christmas plans. If Newcastle was out, what then? When Jury didn’t supply something better, Wiggins didn’t delve. He just returned to death and its antidotes, a few bottles and vials of which were arranged on his desk. Wiggins looked them over, hit on the viscous pink liquid and squeezed several drops into a half glass of water, which he then swirled into thinner viscosity.

  He said, “But we’re on rota for Christmas, at least Christmas morning. I won’t get to Manchester until dinnertime, probably.”

  “Hell, just go ahead. I’ll cover for you.”

  Wiggins shook his head. “No, that wouldn’t be fair, sir. No, I’ll be here. Christmas can be hell on wheels for people deciding to bloody up other people. Just give some guy a holiday and he goes for a gun.”

  Jury laughed. “True. Maybe we’ll have time for a bang-up lunch at Danny Wu’s on Christmas Day. He never closes on holidays.” Ruiyi was the best restaurant in Soho.

  Then came silence and snow. Jury thought about a present for Wiggins. Some medical book, one that might define Rilke’s “disease of the blood,” if that’s what it was. A thorn prick. O Rose, thou ar’t sick. He tried to remember the last four lines of this short poem, but couldn’t.

  Wiggins had gone back to the newspaper. “They’re starting to clear the old Greenwich gasworks. To put up the dome, that millennium dome they’re talking about.”

  Jury didn’t want to hear about it or talk about it. Wiggins loved the subject. “That’s years away, Wiggins. Let’s wait and be surprised.”

  Wiggins regarded him narrowly, not knowing what to make of that runic comment.

  Jury got up, pulled on his coat and picked up the folder which held Haggerty’s report. “I’m going to the City; if you need me I’ll be at Snow Hill police station with Mickey Haggerty.”

  “All right.” Wiggins drank his pink stuff and turned toward the window. He said, as Jury was going out the door, “It sounds like something out of a fairy tale, almost.”

  “What does? The millennium dome?”

  “No, no, no. It’s this Rilke fellow. It’s like the princess who pricked her finger spinning, falling asleep forever. Dying from the prick of a rose thorn.” He looked at Jury. “It’s sort of a breathtaking death, isn’t it?”

  “I guess I don’t want to be breathtaken, Wiggins. See you.”

  Two

  The City of London, that square mile which was London’s commercial and financial heart, had never been a hive of industry at the weekend. At the weekend, it was quaintly dead.

  Jury left Tower Hill underground station and stood looking across Lower Thames Street. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this close to the Tower of London. The tourists were snapping pictures, a few with disposable cameras, others with more sophisticated ones. Christmas was in two weeks, a popular time for tourists. He passed an Indian restaurant on Fenchurch Street, and if that was closed he could pretty well bet that everything was.

  But not the Snow Hill station, of course. An unhappy-looking constable was on duty behind the information desk and looked almost grateful that Jury wanted nothing more than a direction to Haggerty’s office. Detective Chief Inspector Haggerty? Through there, down there, his door there. Jury thanked him.

  Haggerty was sitting at his desk, looking at police photographs when Jury walked in. Mickey Haggerty got up and walked around the desk to take Jury’s hand and punch him on the shoulder a couple of times, making it more than a handshake, less than an embrace. Jury hadn’t seen Mickey Haggerty, or his wife Liza, in several years and felt guilty for allowing the friendship to languish. But that wasn’t entirely down to him, was it? Mickey must bear some of the brunt.

  No cop (thought Jury) was more “in place” than Mickey Haggerty. He fit the Job as snugly as a paving stone in a new-la
id path. “Hello, Mickey. It’s been a long time.”

  “Too damned long,” said Mickey, who indicated a chair for Jury before reseating himself. “How’re you keeping, Rich?”

  “Fine.” This sort of exchange would have been banal between most people, but not with Mickey on the other end of it. He genuinely wanted to know. They talked for a minute about Liza and the kids, and then Jury slid the file he’d brought across the desk to Mickey. “Looks like a dig. This is a case you’re working on? Was I supposed to come up with some helpful response? I don’t know much about forensic anthropology-”

  Mickey was shaking his head. “I only wanted you to see the file so you’d have a better idea of what I’m talking about. Yes, it’s a case I’m working on. Me, personally. Say it’s unofficial business. Or say I don’t really want anyone to know about it. It’s personal.” He turned one photograph around. In the center of the rubble were two skeletons.

  At least, Jury made out what he thought were two. “What is this, then, Mickey?”

  “Skeletons recovered from a bomb site.”

  “Bomb site? Where?”

  “Here. In the City. Near Ludgate Circus. If you want to see it, it’s not far from St. Paul’s, on a street called Blackfriars Lane.” Mickey drew a little map and passed it over. “The last bomb site in London.”

  Jury’s eyebrows went up a notch higher, in question.

  “The war. You know. The Second World War?”

  Jury’s smile did not reach his eyes. “I’ve heard of it, yes.”

  Mickey picked up a cigar that had been smoldering in a large blue ashtray to his right. When Mickey exhaled, Jury tracked the smoke. He hadn’t had a cigarette in nearly two years, but his need for one hadn’t abated. It infuriated him. He smiled. “So go on.”

  From another folder, Mickey took another report. “Two skeletons recovered at the site.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “From the anthropology people at the University of London. They took the skeletons to do a study. They were, naturally, interested. For all they knew, these remains could have been ancient remains.”

  “But they weren’t?”

  Mickey shook his head. “Skeletons of a female, early twenties, a baby not more than a few months, probably two or three.”

  “They can fix it that closely? In a baby? But the bones are still forming.”

  “Teeth. They can even fix the development of a fetus by teeth. The teeth form underneath the gums. These were the only skeletons recovered. The bomb site was where a pub once stood; it was demolished in the blitz. That was back in 1940. Specifically, December 29, 1940. The site’s been bought up by a developer. There’s construction going on now.”

  Jury sat back and said nothing. He had never been able to reflect upon the war without considerable pain. But his intense feelings about that time made it, ironically and uncomfortably enough, magnetic.

  Mickey picked up the cigar from the ashtray and smoked. And thought.

  It was one of the things Jury liked about him: he was a meditative man. Like Jury himself, he did not jump to conclusions; yet at the same time, he acted on instinct. Jury knew it was difficult to do both. He recalled sitting in a pub with Mickey when they were working a case nine or ten years ago and not a word passed between them for ten minutes. Mickey reminded Jury of Brian Macalvie; they both drove their crime scene people mad with their extended silences.

  The station house was oddly quiet. They might have been visiting a memorial. “Who found the remains?”

  “Construction crew. They didn’t disturb them.” Mickey turned the photograph of the two skeletons around so Jury could see it. “What’s your off-the-wall guess?”

  “It looks as if the baby’s skeleton was lying close to the adult’s-the mother?”

  “I’ll tell you a little story.” Mickey had opened his desk drawer and taken out a handful of snapshots, old ones in black and white. He took the one off the top and shoved it toward Jury. “This was taken in Dagenham. It was at the beginning of the evacuation, in 1939. Children who were taken by boat to one of the trains bound for the country.” Mickey pushed over two more snapshots. “These were taken in Stepney. Evacuation again. My dad used to talk about the unearthly quiet. All those children and hardly a peep out of them.”

  Jury looked at the band of children, at the gray, unsmiling faces of the mothers.

  “That was the exodus in forty, during the so-called phoney war, when London prepared for war, but nothing really happened.”

  Jury hated talking about the war. And what were all of these pictures in aid of? What was the point?

  Mickey was pushing yet another snapshot toward Jury. “Right here, I think, are the woman and the child who ended up in the rubble. Alexandra Tynedale, twenty-one or -two, and a baby of maybe four months. Not, however, her own baby. The nanny had taken Alexandra’s baby out to get some air.” Mickey spun another photo to Jury’s side of the desk. “This is that baby now: Maisie Tynedale.”

  Jury looked at the photo. She was attractive, early fifties, he guessed, but from calculating the passing years rather than her looks. She could have been forty, judging by the picture. This was a better picture than the others, taken by a camera superior to the one that had taken the snaps. Jury set it down. He now had five pictures lined up before him. “These two of the evacuation-what about them? What’s the story?”

  In answer, Mickey pushed over another snapshot. It showed a young woman, back to the camera, face turned to smile down at a baby whose round little chin was propped on the woman’s shoulder, arm and hand flat against the woman’s back. Jury lined that up in the row, number six, and simply looked the question at Mickey.

  “Kitty, the nanny. Katherine Riordin and baby Erin.”

  Like a card dealer, Mickey flicked another snapshot over. A shot of demolished buildings, red brick blown to bits. A few people were making their way through the rubble. Jury said, “I expect scenes like this must have duplicated themselves thousands of times all over London. I really hate this, Mickey. Both my parents died in this war.”

  “Sorry, Rich. There is something-”

  Jury looked at him thoughtfully. “Something wrong, Mickey?” He thought he actually saw tears forming in the other man’s eyes. Maybe not. “Listen, I’m in no hurry. But where is this?” He held up the shot of the blasted building, the all-but-leveled street.

  “What I was telling you before. That’s the pub-was the pub-owned by Francis Croft. Here’s one taken while it was still standing. The Blue Last, it was called. Those two in front of it are Alexandra Tynedale Herrick and Francis Croft. Christmas lights around the door, so it must have been a very short time either before or after this picture was taken. Francis Croft was the business partner and best friend of a man named Oliver Tynedale, Alexandra’s father. They’d been friends since childhood. Francis is dead, but Oliver is still alive. Amazing, since he must be ninety. They were like brothers, he and Croft.”

  “The nanny’s-Kitty Riordin’s-baby was killed, too; her name was Erin. Kitty was an Irish girl, came over here, as did thousands of poor Irish girls, looking for work and her husband. He’d just walked out on her, apparently. Alexandra took her on as a child keeper for Maisie. Kitty’s baby, Erin, was the same age as Alexandra’s, a few months old.” He sighed and ran his hand across his hair, roughing it up, as if that would improve the thought process.

  Jury sat back. “Tynedale. Of Tynedale Brewery? One of the biggest in the country?”

  “Both of them actually owned it. Tynedale and Croft.”

  “Francis Croft must have been pretty down to earth if he was part of the Tynedale empire and was still landlord of a pub.”

  Smiling, Mickey leaned back in his swivel chair, hands folded on his chest. “He was. He was great, a great person. My dad was a close friend of Francis’s. When I was growing up, Dad talked about him a lot.” Mickey passed over another snapshot.

  Jury found himself looking at an airfield, at what appeared to be
a fighter plane, Spitfire or maybe a Hawker Hurricane. The pilot, getting into or out of the cockpit, squinted into the sun. “Ralph Herrick, Alexandra’s husband. They’d only been married a little over a year when he died.”

  Jury wanted to look away, but looking away would make him feel weak. He thought he expended a lot of energy in pulling back from feelings of weakness. “Active duty? His plane was shot down?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, he drowned. He was out of the RAF, doing some sort of work in the Orkney Islands, when it happened. He got the V.C., incidentally. A real hero, that’s what my father told me.”

  His head bent over the pictures-seven of them now and showing some anomalous progression of events. Jury studied each in turn. He felt somehow his and his mother’s house in Fulham should have been one of them. Mickey had asked him a question which he only half heard.

  “I’m sorry, Mickey. I was-” Jury shrugged. Then he asked, “But how can you remember all this?”

  “Some of it I remember because it was told me so convincingly and in such detail by my dad. Dad talked about Francis Croft a lot. I know Francis’s son, Simon, a little; I haven’t seen Oliver Tynedale since I was a kid, though. These snapshots I found among other things in a desk of his. I was going through some papers recently and came across the pictures.” He was back to the snapshots again, pulling out of Jury’s lineup the ones of Alexandra and the baby Maisie and the one of the nursemaid, Kitty Riordin, and her baby, Erin. The poses were very similar, might have been the same adult and same child. He directed Jury to study the arm and hand of each child bending around the neck or down the back of the mothers.

  “Look at the faces. They’re both girls, or did I tell you that?”

  Jury held the snapshots, one in each hand. He let his eyes travel back and forth. “At this age it’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me they shared the father? Something like that?”