The Old Wine Shades Read online

  ‘The thing is, if leaving was in her mind, why in God’s name would she take Robbie?’

  ‘Or Mungo.’ Jury smiled as he felt the dog plop against his shoe. He looked under the table. Mungo returned his gaze. Jury thought he looked bored.

  ‘Glynn wasn’t like that—to walk out and take their son without any warning. She’d never have done that.’

  Past tense again. A bread bearer was back with another big, flat basket of rolls and baguettes. Jury took a roll, wondering if Mungo liked rolls. He broke off a lump and slipped his hand under the white tablecloth. There was snuffling and a quiet chomp.

  ‘How was Robbie? How was he treated at home?’

  Harry looked completely at sea. ‘You’re not suggesting—you think Robbie was mistreated?’

  The waiter had made a quick return and was setting down their salads.

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. It was a question.’ Jury cut off a bite of endive. ‘The thing is, you’re determined that Glynnis Gault wouldn’t take off because she was unhappy in her marriage. You’re sure she wouldn’t have disappeared of her own accord. Given, just for the sake of argument, she did disappear of her own volition, then what made her do it? She didn’t want to leave her husband, so why did she? Robbie was okay, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, insofar as I know.’ Harry frowned at his salad. Pears and walnuts. ‘Did I order this?’

  ‘Yep.’ Jury had ordered the house salad.

  ‘I must be drunk.’ Harry cut off a little bit of Stilton and topped off a bite of pear.

  A couple dressed in Ferragamo blue and Armani gray glided into the chairs held for them by two waiters, who hovered for a few moments. Jury wondered who they were. Or what. The woman was wearing three rings on one hand. They were big enough to serve as brass knuckles, which would help when she got mugged.

  The sommelier was back with a bottle of white, presenting it for Harry’s inspection. Harry nodded. He and the sommelier exchanged a few words in French as the wine was uncorked, then poured. The sommelier then strolled next door where he had a lengthy conversation, again in French, with the handsome couple. The man spoke his French in a loud voice as if to signal to those near him that he did indeed speak it. Harry, on the other hand, had spoken it softly and far more swiftly and clearly did not mean to advertise his expertise.

  Harry said, ‘The only thing I’ve ever heard them argue over was school. Well, I told you that. It’s the reason Glynnis wanted a house near Lark Rise. That school is supposed to be very good. Autism can take a number of different forms; with Robbie, it was simply not talking, or speaking only minimally. Robbie had been doing just middling well at his current school, but Hugh didn’t like the idea of uprooting him. It’s what they argued about.’

  ‘Then Robbie wasn’t given to fits of temper, excitability, violence?’

  ‘No. Glynnis couldn’t tell how he felt about school; she assumed he did only marginally well because he didn’t like it, or wasn’t interested or something like that. In any case, it wouldn’t be cause for separation.’

  ‘Well, it certainly wouldn’t explain what happened. Far from it. But he was okay with this excursion to Surrey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jury still hadn’t told Harry he’d been to the house, but he didn’t know why. He asked, ‘Did you take Mungo?’

  ‘Mungo was gone, remember?’

  ‘Ah. Of course. So you haven’t been there recently?’

  ‘No.’ Harry shook his head, seemed to be giving his salad some thought.

  ‘Do you think the dog could pick up some scent? I wonder if a retriever or a bloodhound could pick up something after a year.’

  ‘Well, Mungo isn’t a bloodhound, that’s certain. I’m not sure what he is. With those ears, though, he’s certainly got hound genes. Hugh got him from a shelter.’

  ‘Good for him; he doesn’t regard dogs as a status symbol.’ Harry pulled up the tablecloth and looked, made some sort of click click noise.

  Totally meaningless, Jury supposed, to an animal.

  ‘Definitely not a status symbol.’ Harry laughed. ‘Glynn was never concerned with status, either. The right people, the right frock, the right address.’

  ‘She sounds nice; she sounds very likable.’

  ‘Oh, she was, she was.’

  ‘You keep using the past tense. Have you given up, Harry?’

  ‘No. It’s just that she’s been gone so long now, she seems at such a distance.’

  ‘And Hugh? You said he didn’t believe they were dead.’

  ‘Hugh thinks they’re lost.’

  Jury frowned. ‘Lost? You mean amnesia? She’s somewhere she doesn’t know and can’t find her way back?’

  Harry drank his coffee and said, ‘No. Lost in another dimension.’

  Jury sat back. ‘What are you talking about? Or what’s he? Is he really crazy, then?’

  ‘No. He’s a physicist. We only sound crazy. Hugh’s main interest is string theory. Well, I told you that.’ He stopped and took another bite of his salad.

  Jury stared. ‘Well, go on.’

  ‘It’s a difficult concept to understand. String theorists argue that there are more dimensions than we experience. It’s not four— three spatial and one time; it’s ten—nine spacial, one time.’

  ‘Ten dimensions?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Jury looked around—right, left, up, down. ‘Where are they?’ Harry laughed. ‘Where are they? Crumpled up, perhaps. So small you can’t see them.’

  Jury gave him a look as he went on eating.

  ‘Don’t look at me, old man. I’m merely the messenger. However, if one believes, along with Einstein and Gödel, that time simply isn’t real, that the past hasn’t passed, it’s not too difficult to accept.’

  Jury considered. ‘So there’s no T. S. Eliot stuff—’

  ‘What particular stuff do you have in mind?’ Harry smiled.

  Jury shrugged. ‘You know, the present and the past’—Jury inscribed a circle in air—’meet in the future—something like that. It’s a circle. No, that sounds like Zen Buddhism.’

  ‘I don’t know Eliot that well . . .’

  ‘Neither do I, obviously.’ He speared a grape tomato from his salad.

  ‘Gödel believed time is an illusion, in much the same way. Everything that happens—past, present, future—is laid out. Imagine tossing a box of puzzle pieces across the floor, turning them over, looking at them. They’re all there without any relevance to past, present or future. . . . That, of course, is a terrible oversimplification.’

  ‘Don’t not do it on my account.’

  ‘No one paid much attention to his incompleteness theory at first because they simply didn’t understand what they’d heard when he delivered this as a paper at one of the conventions.’

  ‘Time! Here comes the fish.’

  Harry looked round to where the waiter—it always seemed to be a different one—was settling a tray on a stand. He whisked away their salads and put the sole and sea bass in their place. Harry’s fish did not look as complicated as it had sounded, and the Dover sole was perfect.

  ‘Incompleteness—’

  Jury raised his hand, palm out. ‘Not yet. I’m still back there with the jigsaw puzzle. Look, if there’s no time division, no past, present, future, then, if that’s the case, someone could simply walk in from the past.’

  ‘The past doesn’t exist—I mean as ‘past.’ Look at the idea of time travel. If one can indeed go back to a point in one’s past, then that’s to say the past is a fiction. But if you can rocket around in space, then you could do the same with time. Why not? The reference is spacetime. Einstein, again.’

  ‘So Glynnis and Robbie Gault may just turn up at some point?’

  ‘Why not? It’s amazing how physics and mathematics can free up our thinking, isn’t it? The idea of ten dimensions is a whole school of thought. It’s not just Hugh.’

  ‘But it’s theoretical; it has no application to our da
y-to-day existence.’

  ‘Hugh would argue with you on that point. I’m sure. You don’t think it’s possible.’

  ‘How can I think one way or the other? How does all this relate to our actual living? We still bumble along using just the four dimensions. I’m sorry to be such a Luddite, but if it doesn’t impact upon our four-dimensional selves—?’ He shrugged.

  ‘It would impact to hell and gone if you suspected your wife and son disappeared onto another plane of reality.’

  ‘There’s a flaw in that reasoning.’ Jury smiled, then said, ‘Look, you don’t think Hugh’s gone just a little off the rails?’

  ‘A little. I’m not saying I agree with him; I’m merely answering your question as to what Hugh thinks. Given there’s been no explanation for what happened to Glynn and Robbie, and given Hugh’s discipline—physics—from his point of view it’s not crazy.’

  They ate for a while in silence.

  Jury felt Mungo shifting around, either his paw or his head landing on Jury’s shoe. He smiled. ‘What about Mungo? Mungo didn’t go into one of those rogue dimensions with them. Why? I should think it would be all of them or none of them. How does Hugh explain that?’

  Harry smiled. ‘That’s a good point about the dog. No, Hugh didn’t mention the dog.’

  Jury wanted to laugh. ‘A ‘good point’? A better point might be that Hugh is into denial in a major way, don’t you think?’

  ‘Denial, maybe. He certainly sounds rational.’

  ‘I’m not saying he isn’t, as you point out, string theory—’

  ‘It would explain, you know, a lot.’

  ‘Hell, if it would only explain itself, I’d be happy.’

  ‘Why don’t you come with me and meet him? I’m going to the Stoddard Clinic tomorrow.’

  Jury looked at him. ‘So there really is a Hugh?’

  ‘Of course, there’s a Hugh.’ Harry laughed. ‘You still think I’m winding you up?’

  22

  Well, I don’t see why you’re having a meal with this person night after night,’ said Carole-anne, examining another lock of her ginger-gold hair.

  Since it wasn’t a female person, her annoyance level didn’t hit the gong when she brought down the mallet.

  ‘Because he’s interesting.’ Jury smiled. Carole-anne, who, far from being asleep when Jury came in, was in beautiful disarray on his sofa in peacock-blue lounging pajamas and matching robe. She was doing inventory on her hair for signs of gray, she had said.

  ‘I’m interesting too, but I don’t see us out every night having a meal.’

  ‘No, but you do see us in every night looking for gray hairs.’

  ‘You’ve got some. But you needn’t worry; you’re a man. Gray looks distinguished on a man; on a woman it just looks old.’ Her old self sighed, then went back to pulling locks of hair around to assess the damage.

  He had suggested she use a mirror but she didn’t want to; she didn’t want to see too much at one time.

  She went on: ‘I don’t understand why you’ve been suspended.’

  ‘I haven’t been, exactly. I’ve been told to keep a low profile. Not blaze about working on cases.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you so? Didn’t I tell you not to go into that house without a warrant?’

  ‘More than once. Many more than once.’

  ‘Did you have to turn in your badge and gun? That’s what happens on the telly.’

  ‘The telly’s more interesting. I don’t carry a gun.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned you should get a medal, saving those poor little girls. Everybody agrees on that.’

  ‘Everybody’ not to be taken as literal, since in this case it referred to Carole-anne and Mrs. Wasserman. ‘My superiors appear to disagree with you on that point.’

  ‘That bunch of old stuffed shirts.’

  Jury loved that, Police—including the chief constable—as stuffed shirts. ‘Do you want to hear this story?’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Were you the template for attention deficit disorder?’ Carole-anne gave him one of her pouty looks, which meant she either did or didn’t understand him. ‘Go on with your story, then,’ she said with an even deeper sigh, as if she were a long-suffering nurse to a ward full of babbling octogenarians.

  ‘Okay. I met Harry Johnson in a pub in the City called the Old Wine Shades—’

  ‘Is it nice? I hardly ever get into the City.’

  ‘Do you or do you not want to hear this?’

  ‘I said I did.’

  ‘Then don’t interrupt. Harry Johnson told me of a friend of his . . .’ And Jury capsulized the tale of the Gaults all the way through the tenth dimension. Carole-anne would tilt her head one way and then the other as if performing an exercise in thinking.

  Jury stopped. ‘That’s some story, isn’t it?’ He waited for the zillion questions she’d ask.

  She didn’t. ‘Well, you can bet he’s lying.’

  Jury frowned. ‘Harry, you mean?’

  ‘No, that other one—Hugh?—He’s lying through his teeth.’

  He had expected Carole-anne to be entertained by this tale, not to supply a fresh directive. His (or Harry’s) rather good story, he felt, was being brushed aside. First Wiggins, now, Carole-anne. ‘You mean, lying about the ten dimensions?’

  ‘No. That’s easy enough to work out.’

  Easy? This so startled him that he shifted his feet from the coffee table to the floor and leaned forward, possibly with the intention of shaking it out of her. Easy enough?

  ‘He’s lying about everything else,’ she said.

  Jury was puzzled. What was she making of this? ‘What else?’ She gave him a quirky smile. ‘You must have caught it from me, ha ha—attention disorder. He’s lying about everything but those ten dimensions.’

  Jury was open-mouthed. His words staggered. ‘But. . . his wife did go looking at this property, did meet up with the agent, did go to Winterhaus and even her son did play with a little girl there. All of that happened; there are witnesses to it.’

  Carole-anne tossed back a tendril as if telling it to go to hell. (The devil would be delighted.) ‘Yes, but it happened because Hugh made it happen, see. I would think you, even though you’re suspended, would see right through all that, smart detective that you are. Hugh murdered her—and maybe his boy too—and then set about with his mad act later, babbling about these ten dimensions and that superstrand theory of his.’

  ‘Superstring theory.’ Jury just sat there with his eyes glazing over. He had expected a hundred breathless questions, and he chock full of a hundred dazzling answers. He had not expected her to trot out a solution. Especially one that he himself hadn’t considered. He shook his head, trying to clear it. ‘Hugh is in a psychiatric clinic. I’m going to see him tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. Then you can talk to him and judge for yourself. Anybody can pretend to be crazy.’ She stretched.

  ‘It’s been nine months and police haven’t found a body.’

  ‘Well, like you said, they aren’t really looking, are they? They think she just did a flit. A body’ll turn up. A body always does.’ Jury sat there, his mind in just as much disorder as Carole-anne’s hair. Of course, she was wrong, but it annoyed him that he couldn’t immediately say why. Motive, what about that? ‘Why did he do it?’

  ‘I don’t know the man, do I? Probably he fancies some young girl and the wife refused to give him a divorce. He buries the wife somewhere and then puts on this big act about trying to find her and being desperate and going bonkers. Then he comes out with this string bean theory. And after all, who knew she was going to look at this property? Him, of course. He knew she’d be there and the house was empty.’ Carole-anne shrugged.

  ‘Before, you said that the ten dimensions were the easy part of it.’

  She slipped her feet back into her ornate slippers. The tops were littered with gold and silver embroidery and fake gems. They must have come from Ali Baba’s cave in the Portobello Road. ‘It�
��s been my experience that I’m always losing things, like an earring. I’ll take it off so’s to answer the phone. Then look for it one minute later and it’s nowhere to be found. Nowhere. And it never does turn up. So there must be some place for it to go unless it grew little earring feet and walked out on its own.’

  ‘It’s obviously in your room.’

  ‘Then go up there and find it, Super.’ Here she punched her finger toward the ceiling several times.

  ‘It probably just got wedged between a cushion and the arm of the chair.’

  Rising, preparatory to leaving, Carole-anne looked down at him and punched the finger toward the ceiling again. ‘I’m saying there must be a Lost and Found somewhere with our lost stuff in it. Maybe God runs a pawn shop, who knows? It’s gone to the tenth dimension. Ta.’

  Jury sat there, chewing the inside of the corner of his mouth.

  Furiously.

  23

  Jury was still chewing at that corner of his mouth the next morning, sitting at his desk and watching Wiggins soaking tea bags in their blue earthenware mugs, a gift from his cousin in Manchester. Chewing and debating whether he should run this string theory by Wiggins. It would be a kind of test, wouldn’t it, if the two least theoretically inclined people he had ever known—Wiggins and Carole-anne—were to agree that Hugh Gault’s story was a pack of lies?

  Of course, no matter what, he knew Wiggins’s answer would be based on a trail of non sequiturs. He told himself not to ask Wiggins. The temptation, as usual, was too strong. ‘Wiggins, do you know anything about superstring theory? It’s a theory in physics.’ Wiggins was stirring his and Jury’s tea and thinking about it. ‘For God’s sake, Wiggins, do you have to think about whether you know superstring theory or not?’

  ‘Well, I could have known and then forgot.’ Delicately Wiggins tapped a spoon against the mug he had been sugaring up. Four sugars for him, one for Jury.

  With his foot, Jury slammed shut the bottom drawer on which he’d been resting his feet. Sometimes you just had to do something physical, like beating up the furniture. ‘It was a rhetorical question, Wiggins. Of course you don’t know about it; you’d almost have to be a physicist yourself to know about it.’