The Old Wine Shades Read online

  ‘Attention! I was hanging on every word.’

  ‘That must have been Harry Johnson whom she saw.’

  They had walked around the house instead of going through it. Getting into the Bentley, Jury said, ‘Try not to drive as if we’re the only car on the road.’

  ‘Why? We are.’ Melrose let out the clutch and backed up.

  Jury said, ‘My guess is she’s gone into that house many times, but is keeping it a secret. Here’s an old deserted house whose past she can freely make up. Make it be romantic, or unhappy or even fearful. Probably she doesn’t want anybody coming around snooping.’

  ‘A child that age I’d think would be terrified of creepy things that go bump in the night—ghosts, ghouls, disembodied hands— that sort of thing.’

  Jury smiled. ‘Not her.’

  ‘Me, you mean, the so-called ghost who looked like me. It was all too transparent.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. You’re tall, light-haired and today you’re wearing that black coat. From any distance, one might think you were Harry Johnson.’

  ‘So he’s been here.’

  ‘Of course. He came in Hugh’s stead right after it happened. I mean right after Mrs. Gault disappeared. Maybe doing a spot of investigation on his own. Then he came back with Hugh. I told you all of this.’

  Jury watched the turning dusk, the trees, the fields, the farms, the richer ones whose crisscrossing white fencing spoke of horses, sleek and handsome racehorses. He thought of Nell Ryder and spoke of her to Melrose. Would he never come to terms with all that?

  ‘Come on, Richard, Nell Ryder wasn’t, well, she wasn’t one of us, or at least not one of me. She operated in a whole different dimension.’

  ‘Strange thing to say.’

  ‘Look, she’d go along with us and our idiot ways until she saw something that needed her attention. In that case, those horses. They spoke, you know, her language. Or she spoke theirs.’

  They drove through Lark Rise, stopped at the estate agency and found it closed. Melrose slipped the key into the slotted box that said KEY RETURN and Jury looked at the shops, a few people in the local butcher’s, the chemist drawing down his security blind. Melrose said, ‘What is he keeping back?’

  ‘Harry Johnson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jury was silent, thinking. Then he said, ‘Perhaps that he was—is—in love with Glynnis Gault. That he would go to the place from which he thought she’d vanished, hoping he’d find some trace, some clue. I think that’s possible.’

  Melrose waved that away. ‘You’re ignoring a more sinister explanation.’

  Jury turned from the chemist’s window to look at Melrose.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What about his burying her on the property and returning, as we know all murderers do, to the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Well, it could have been as you said: he was in love with her. In a fit of jealous rage, he killed her and buried her in the woods. Together with her son.’

  ‘It strikes me as a strange place to do it, on a piece of property that might have tenants at any time and one that they have no connection to.’

  ‘But that’s just it. Who would connect him with the crime? That man’s rigged something; I can just feel it. I can’t understand why you’re not suspicious.’

  ‘Oh, I am.’

  ‘No, you’re sold.’

  Jury laughed. ‘I’m sold?’

  ‘Sold.’ Melrose fumbled a cigarette from a pack and jammed it in his mouth.

  ‘You’re not going to smoke in the car, are you?’

  ‘I’ll open the window.’ He buzzed it down.

  ‘Have you become so slovenly in your smoking you don’t even fill up your cigarette case anymore?’

  ‘I’ve always been slovenly.’

  ‘Haven’t you read about secondhand smoke? It’s as bad—’

  Melrose pounded the steering wheel. ‘I do not want a damned lecture.’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s only a comment.’

  Melrose tossed the cigarette out of the window. ‘I’ll get the evil weed out of sight! Reefer madness threatens to overtake me.’

  ‘You always exaggerate things.’ Jury looked out of the window and up at the dense stars.

  They drove in silence or in whatever version of silence one can on the A3 when Melrose punched the steering wheel again. ‘The dog! That damned Moonglow!—’

  ‘Mungo,’ said Jury.

  ‘Everytime I think I’ve got this mystery sorted, that damned dog turns up!’

  ‘That’s the easiest part of it.’ Jury yawned and slid down in his seat.

  ‘Like Harry Johnson left him for dead, but the dog recovered and found his way back.’

  ‘No, actually I hadn’t thought of that, brilliant deduction that it is. Are we going to have a drink at Boring’s?’

  ‘Yes. I’d sooner be chatted up by Major Champs and Colonel Neame than wonder about Mango.’

  ‘Mungo.’

  20

  ‘Superintendent Jury! Let me get you a drink!’ said Colonel Neame; this was seconded by Major Champs.

  Getting one a drink was the first order of business in Boring’s before anything else could proceed, including death.

  ‘Thank you. I’m waiting for Mr. Plant.’ Or should it be Lord Ardry in here? Would one walk into Boring’s without some sort of title? Some rank? Some number—the second, the third—appended to one’s name? ‘Superintendent’ worked well. ‘Commissioner’ would have worked even better.

  Colonel Neame had given the order to one of the porters and turned now to say, ‘You know, we’ve not yet gotten over that awful business in here a couple of years ago, have we, Champs?’

  The ‘awful business’ was the murder of one of Boring’s distinguished members. A vanished love affair, the death of one’s dog, the end of a war—none could vie with a murder committed veritably under one’s nose. No, nothing like murder as a springboard for nostalgia, a subject for reminiscence.

  Jury’s drink was delivered and he raised it. ‘To the good times, gentlemen.’

  And they answered by raising theirs.

  Melrose appeared, hair damp, looking scrubbed as a three- year-old. He took his usual seat, wondering about having a usual seat. Was he getting as crusty as Champs and Neame? Well, he could think of worse ways of checking out—such as in his own living room across the way from . . .

  ‘We should tell them,’ said Jury, ‘the story.’

  Melrose was surprised.

  ‘It’s not a secret. Go ahead.’ He looked at his watch and drained his glass. ‘I have to be going. I’m meeting Harry Johnson.’ He smiled, looked at Melrose. ‘Chapter four.’

  Nothing, thought Jury, could suit them better, nothing could be more welcome than a story like those bedtime stories that sustain us when we’re children and that we listen to again and again, not bothered by the fact we know what’s coming.

  He thought about this in the cab taking its own sweet time on its way to the City.

  You in a hurry, guv? the driver had asked when Jury climbed in. No, Jury had said; take your time.

  The driver was whistling a little, in a good mood. Larking around, thought Jury, or something good had happened in his life. ‘I bet you get sick of it, don’t you?’ Jury said.

  ‘Wha’s that, guv?’ He was searching in the mirror for Jury’s eyes.

  ‘Having to hurry. People wanting to go faster, faster.’

  The driver slapped the steering wheel. There was a lot of that going on today, for some reason. ‘You best believe that. It’s the whole effing city, inn’t? And I want to tell them, it’ll still be there— office, pub, wife—whether you get there in a minute or an hour.’

  They were driving along the Embankment—the long way round, Jury thought, but didn’t care. Across the Thames were the fairy lights of the National Theater and the Tate Modern. Southwark always looked a little magical at night.

  ‘Now, my girl, Minnie, strange
st thing happened to her; right along here, it was—’

  Jury sat back, thinking this might be the reason for the long way round.

  ‘—said she’d just got outta her car when this punter rushes up to her, scares her half to death and o’ course she thought he was going to mug her, but all he did was ask directions to Scotland Yard. ‘Now that,’’ says Minnie, ‘was a new pickup line if ever I heard one.’

  ‘What he told her was he was being poisoned. So Minnie thought he was nuts, but she stopped there to hear him out. I tell her, ‘Min, you never do things like that, love, never. ‘ She says, ‘But he looked so bad, Da, he looked to be on his uppers.’ So she drives him to St. James’s. And along the way he tells her he’s from Brighton, where he’s in the antiques business and for the last couple months someone’s been slowly poisoning him. That he’s getting sicker and sicker. No, it’s not his imagination, and he’s pretty sure it’s his cousin.

  ‘They get to New Scotland Yard and she pulls up in front of the main door and lets him out, whereas—’

  Jury loved the ‘whereas.’

  ‘—there’s a PC standing there, looks in through the passenger window, says, ‘This isn’t a hotel, miss. Move on.’

  Jury’s cabbie again pounded his steering wheel.

  ‘So then Min, she really wants to know what’s going on inside and finds a parking place and goes in. The guy’s sittin’ there in the waiting area . . .’

  Jury closed his eyes and listened or didn’t listen by turns. He just let the words wash over him, imagining they were all there at Brighton beach—the driver and Min and the chap being poisoned, all watching the shingle to see what might turn up, the tide sliding in and leaving behind tiny shells, sea urchins, sea grass, sand dollars, a fag end, candy wrapper, plastic bottle—the detritus we all drop carelessly behind us like a trail of crumbs. Only we’re not as clever or not as lucky as Hansel and Gretel and we don’t get back. The tide comes in to wash it all away.

  Jury was nearly asleep by the time they got to the City and Martin Lane. He got out, paid the driver, his ghostly companion across the Styx, and said, for he felt it was safe to guess, ‘She—Minnie— never found out the truth of it?’

  The driver shook his head. ‘She got hold of a Brighton paper every week and she’d check the obits until one day nearly two months after it happened, there was this chap’s picture. Well, the poor bugger up and died, right? He was fifty-three, pretty young, depending which side of it you’re on, but the obit didn’t give cause of death.’ He shook his head, took Jury’s cab fare. Jury stepped out of the cab.

  ‘Poor bugger should’a gone to the police.’

  ‘But he did, didn’t he? Look where that got him.’ Jury slapped the top of the cab, and the driver was on his way.

  21

  Trevor, the barman, was happy to suggest something. ‘This’—he held up a bottle of Pinot Blanc—‘is an absolutely glorious wine from Luxembourg, Vin de Paille. Pricey, but worth it.’

  Harry told him to pour. ‘How pricey?’

  ‘This’ll run you forty quid the half bottle.’

  ‘You certainly know how to spend my money, Trev.’

  ‘I certainly do.’ Trevor smiled and poured.

  They were sitting that evening in their same bar chairs, with Mungo parked underneath.

  Jury studied the wine bottle. A 1982. Was that a good year? Maybe for wine, but not for Jury. ‘Hugh Gault. What does his doctor say?’

  ‘That he’s overworked. Of course, the doctor doesn’t tell me anything much as I’m not family.’

  ‘Denial, I’d imagine. Maybe it’s what we all do at some point in our lives—deny. Or dive into work or booze to forget and keep forgetting. Hugh might have committed himself just to escape. He can sign himself out. Maybe he should.’

  ‘You could be right.’

  ‘If he had to slog through one day after another, it might help him; hell, it might even restore him. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  Jury picked at the wine label. ‘He doesn’t believe they’re dead, does he?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. They could be anywhere.’

  Jury wondered if he was to take that literally.

  ‘Einstein distrusted quantum mechanics; he jokingly asked the question ‘Is the moon not there unless I can see it?’’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’ Jury raised his glass.

  ‘No, no. The point is not that it isn’t there, but that we can’t know if it’s there or not.’

  ‘The cat’s alive, the cat’s dead.’

  ‘Exactly. Nothing is real until you can measure it. And the act of measurement is part of the reality it’s measuring. Look.’

  ‘Look’? I’d better or you’ll disappear.’

  Harry laughed. Then he said, ‘Take a blood-pressure reading. The nurse can’t know what it is until she straps that cuff around your arm and pumps. But the resulting pressure is that particular systolic and diastolic only in the act of measurement. Measurement means interaction. There is no way you can measure something without interacting with it. Measurement is not impersonal. It isn’t an objective reality.’

  ‘The cat may be dead or the cat may be alive.’

  ‘You seem to be using this as a mantra.’

  ‘I think it’s a good one. And I’m starving.’

  Harry checked his watch. ‘Dinner?’

  Jury nodded, drank off the last of the wine. ‘We’ve got to drink the rest of this. I mean at forty quid, well . . .’

  Harry laughed. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’

  There wasn’t much left. He divided it between the two glasses, a long swallow each.

  As Harry dropped some notes on the table, Mungo unsettled himself from under Harry’s chair—from under both their chairs, really, for he’d stretched out under the two—and they left the pub.

  They were sitting in a restaurant in Docklands, another dog- friendly one, or so Harry said. Jury wondered if the ‘friendliness’ was occasioned by one big talking point, money, which Harry had clearly slipped the maitre d’. The place was overpopulated with the up-and-comers and their mobiles. Nirvana, some of these places were.

  ‘You were talking about Ben Torres. Go on.’

  Harry drank his water and then his wine. They’d been unadventurous and settled on a Burgundy. ‘According to Ben, his mother told him this person returned several times, always standing at the bottom of the garden at the end of the drive, simply waiting— or watching—she didn’t know. She said she was working up the courage to walk out and ask him what in heaven’s name he was doing—’ Here Harry stopped and pulled out a small sheaf of paper, a few pages folded over. He opened them. ‘This story I have notes on; otherwise, I wouldn’t remember the details.’

  Jury broke off a piece of a baguette. ‘You’re doing pretty well at it.’

  ‘Finally, on the fourth or fifth night of it, not consecutive nights, for there were a few between for as long as a week, but on this night she was about to confront him, she opened the door to find he’d disappeared. Between the time she was inside the house, looking out and going outside, he vanished, he was gone. Couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds, she said.’ He interrupted himself. ‘It sounds as if his mother was actually telling the story. But, of course, it’s Ben’s story.’ He stopped. ‘Is that important?’

  Jury didn’t think he expected an answer. He was asking himself. When Harry stopped and took a roll from the bread basket, Jury thought that that was the end of it, all that Harry knew about the Torreses. He looked around the restaurant, into the shadows of its candlelit corners, as if they might contain the rest of the story. ‘That was the end of it?’

  Chewing, Harry shook his head, held up the pages. ‘Not exactly.’ He looked down at the paper.

  Jury wondered why he felt relieved. ‘What then?’

  ‘It was the end of this man’s midnight vigils on the drive but not the end of his story. Shortly after that, perhaps a week after, one nigh
t the gardener, who lived’—Harry looked down at his notes—- ‘on Laycock Road, was going home. There’s a path through the trees which he always took. About halfway in he heard something, a rustling sound, which he took to be a fox or squirrel. But then he heard a voice, only he couldn’t make out any words. He walked a little way into the trees, nearly stumbling over a man lying there in great distress. The gardener, whose name was’—he turned a page—’Cannon, William Cannon—was extremely frightened, not of the man, but of the situation. He wanted to go for help, but the man caught at his arm. Only just able to talk, he said, ‘Tell them to leave this place.’ The words were so faint, Cannon had to put his ear to the man’s lips. ‘Cannon had been a gunnery sergeant in the war and had seen so much of death, he knew the man would be gone before he could even contact police or medical help.’

  Jury stopped munching. ‘Another story? I think this is number four, or even five.’

  Harry looked puzzled.

  ‘Well, the way I see it, we’ve got a story within a story within a story within a story.’ He was recalling what Melrose had said and was ticking these off on his fingers: ‘There’s the story of Glynnis Gault’s disappearance; there’s Ben Torres’s story; there’s his mother’s story; and now there’s this man Cannon’s story.’ On a cocktail napkin, Jury drew four squares and said, ‘There’s a fifth one somewhere.’ He frowned.

  Harry laughed. ‘I expect you’re right. It gets further and further away from the Gaults, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s not what I was thinking.’ He remembered Melrose Plant’s comments.

  The waiter had materialized before their table and launched into that evening’s specials. Jury ordered the Dover sole because it was a marvel of simplicity, grilled, with butter. Harry ordered a complicated fish, which had to swim through some serpentine recipe on its way to the plate. Chilean sea bass, that was it. The waiter departed to get their salads.

  Jury asked, ‘Are you really so certain that Glynnis did not leave of her own volition?’

  ‘Leave Hugh? No, I’ll stick by that. They really loved each other.’

  It was heartfelt, Jury thought. It was also in the past tense. ‘Then possibly there was some other reason for leaving.’