The Old Wine Shades Page 14

  ‘You know about it, don’t you?’ He rose with Jury’s mug.

  Jury bit his tongue as Wiggins set the mug of tea down on the desk. Returning then to his chair, he sat back and said, ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have to be a physicist to know about it. For example, I’m not in the 87th precinct, but I know all about that.’ To refresh Jury’s memory on that score, he held up his Ed McBain novel.

  ‘No one’s in the 87th precinct, not Carrera, not Meyer, not even Ed McBain’s in the 87th precinct. It’s fiction.’

  ‘I was just making a point.’

  What point? It’d be easier singing with whales.

  ‘Enlighten me,’ Wiggins said, as he sat with his tea and his smug little smile. ‘

  Why were these people being so bloody condescending? You’d think their lives were fraught with theories that they were constantly sorting through as if their minds were blackboards chalked up with elegant equations. Jury said:

  (You’re going to hate yourself, mate!)

  ‘String theory reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics.’ That didn’t sound right. ‘String theory holds that there are ten dimensions, nine in space, one—’

  Wiggins interrupted. ‘Well, see, that’s where this theory is all wrong. There’re three dimensions, or four, if you count in time. So this theory is off by six.’ Complacently, he sipped his tea.

  (Told you.) Jury leaned across his desk as far as he could. ‘It’s theory, for God’s sake; that’s what theories are. It’s a hypothesis.’

  ‘A guess, you mean.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s a very crude way of defining ‘hypothesis.’ A theory is something waiting to be proved.’

  Wiggins snickered. ‘It’s in for a long wait, then.’

  Damnit, had everyone except him suddenly grown brains? When his phone rang, jolting him. Jury clutched at it as if it were a parachute and found Fiona on the line telling him CS Racer wanted to see him. ‘He’s not in a bad mood for once.’

  ‘That must mean he’s been given the enviable job of relieving me of my warrant card and booting me out on the street.’

  She snickered, much as Wiggins had done. ‘He ain’t in that good a mood.’

  Jury hitched his jacket from the back of his swivel chair. Here, at least, was someone for whom brains were never an issue. He gave Wiggins a dirty look and left his office.

  It was merely an interim report on the progress of the investigation as no decision had yet been reached with regard to Jury’s case; however, Racer took advantage of the process with yet another lecture on playing by the rules, team work, and not setting himself up to play the hero. It was this ‘hero’ appellation which was causing the trouble: Jury and Detective Sergeant Cody Platt, who had gone into the house with him, were cast as heroes for saving the ten little girls. At least, that’s how the media were playing it.

  While Racer rambled on (now he was up and walking) Jury frowned over string theory. Superstring. How did a physicist wrap his brain around the idea of a particle so small you would have to describe it as billions and billions of times smaller than the next thing up the list? An atom, maybe. Billions. Jury couldn’t even think of it in terms of hundreds. How could someone like Hugh Gault use billions as if he were working clay? It must be something like those little Russian matryoshkas where you took out a smaller and smaller and smaller doll on into infinity until there came one so tiny you couldn’t even see it. He thought about quarks. Charm quarks. He smiled and looked at Racer. Could there be charmless quarks, too? Why not?

  ‘Jury! What the devil are you squinting over? What’re you thinking about?’

  ‘Quarks—I mean quacks. Yes, I was just wondering if that doctor I was ordered to go to isn’t one. A quack.’ He smiled. Jury remembered that a police psychologist had been recommended, a recommendation he hadn’t followed up on.

  Racer enjoyed having any profession poor mouthed as long as he wasn’t of it. ‘You keep going to that doctor, lad. Make it look good.’

  It was assumed that the experience in the Hester Street house must have been traumatic. It hadn’t been traumatic. If anything, it had been liberating.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Jury’s gaze was now fixed on the cat Cyril, who had been resting in the shallow curve of molding that hid the indirect lighting, little lights that traveled all around the ceiling. Cyril was sitting up, taking his victim’s measure; that would be CS Racer, of course, who was pacing back and forth. Cyril had lately enjoyed leaping not on him but flying straight over Racer’s head and down. Cyril was revving up, but the door to the office needed to be open in order to escape. ‘Is that all? Sir?’

  ‘What? Yes, yes.’ Racer waved him out.

  Jury opened the door and Cyril, in an amazing display of aeronautics, flew directly in front of Racer, landed and made for the door and lickety-split slid right under Fiona’s desk as a furious Racer marched into the outer office.

  ‘Where is he? Where is that mangy animal? I’ll kill him!’ Racer looked wildly around the room, missing the tip of a tail sticking out from under the desk.

  Cyril, Jury thought, was getting a mite careless. ‘He must’ve disappeared into the ninth dimension.’ Jury, like Wiggins and Fiona before him, snickered.

  ‘You’d best keep on with that doctor, quack or not.’ Racer disappeared down the hall.

  The cat Cyril popped out and up onto Fiona’s desk and started in washing. The paw he had wetted raised, he looked at Jury as if he might be interested in more dimensions on which to operate— ‘What do you know about Schrödinger’s cat, Cyril?’

  —and wasn’t and, indifferent, washed the paw down over his face.

  Jury had a couple of hours before meeting Harry Johnson at the Old Wine Shades, so he took a cab to Boring’s.

  Preprandial sherry and whiskey were in full swing when Jury entered the Members’ Room. Melrose was sitting with Colonel Neame and Major Champs in the same chairs they had occupied before, looking as if they’d never left and were just as glad of it.

  ‘Superintendent! How delightful; let’s find a porter.’

  Rarely did a Boring’s porter need to be found. One or another seemed always to be nipping by and now took the order for Jury’s coffee.

  ‘We’ve been working on your little problem, Superintendent.’ There were so many little problems, Jury asked them which one. He had tossed his coat over the back of the sofa and sat down. ‘Come up with anything?’

  Colonel Neame drew a folded sheet of stationery from his jacket pocket. ‘We have a question.’

  ‘Fire away,’ said Jury as the porter set his coffee on the table beside the sofa. Jury wished that he had had the comforting cup in his hand when Racer was jabbering at him.

  Colonel Neame looked at Major Champs and was waved on. ‘Very well, now in this map’—here he unfolded the paper and wiped his hand over it. The Boring’s crest was at the top—’here’s the village. Lark Rise, was it?’ It was represented by an assortment of little squares round a larger square. Probably, the little ones were meant to represent the buildings grouped round the square. ‘Ten or so miles on, you say, is the cottage that this Mrs. Gault stopped at—Lark Cottage. The agent received a call from the Gault woman, who said she thought the house was a bit too quaint. The second house was a half mile up the road, here’—he had drawn a larger square, with a long drive. ‘The agent didn’t hear from her on that score. We presume she went inside—’

  ‘No,’ said Melrose. ‘We know she went inside. There was a witness.’

  ‘Forgot that, yes. The child playing at the bottom of the garden. Anyway, next she called round at the Swan.’ He had drawn a square outfitted with a pub sign. He stopped and then went on. ‘Here’s our question: How do we know that’s the proper order? Why couldn’t she at first have gone to the Swan? She might have called round there before looking at property. Then to look at the two properties, she’d be driving in the opposite direction, first coming to Winterhaus, then to Lark Cottage. The agent assumed Mrs. Gault was referring to Lark Cott
age when she called; that would be natural, considering the location, because it was in that order one would come to them if driving from Lark Rise.’ Colonel Neame sat back.

  Major Champs harrumphed a few times, pulling himself together to come in where Colonel Neame broke off. ‘Well, we know she and the boy had tea with the Shoesmiths—odd name, that, doesn’t sound quite, you know, British.’ He paused, apparently wrapped up in thoughts about the name.

  Melrose kept the story on track. ‘Look at how pleased they were that we happened along,’ he said to Jury. ‘Well, it could be that the Shoesmiths were the last people to see Mrs. Gault and her son alive.’

  That rather sinister statement hung in the air. Jury remembered the plain, pleasant owners of Lark Cottage and smiled. The notion of the Shoesmiths’ doing away with Glynnis Gault and her son was a bit more than he could contemplate.

  Major Champs said, ‘One wonders, you know, if something might have happened there. What sort of people are these Shoesmiths?’ Again, he frowned over the name. ‘Don’t strike me as quite the ticket.’

  ‘This comment she made to the estate agent,’ said Colonel Neame, ‘that the house was a little over the top—that depends what your ‘top’ is, I expect.’

  Melrose said, ‘That cottage is quite isolated, especially for an elderly couple.’

  ‘What are we proposing here?’ asked Jury. ‘That the Shoe- smiths added a little laudanum to the tea and then dragged the two of them out to the woods? That doesn’t seem very likely. Couldn’t this easily be cleared up by checking on the different times Glynnis Gault had appeared at Lark Cottage and at the pub, in addition to the time of her call to Marjorie Bathous at Forester’s?’

  All of them, Melrose included, stared at him as if he were some mischievous kid who’d stuck pins in their balloon. Jury, the spoiler.

  Melrose said, ‘It’s just a different tack to take.’

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right.’ Jury signaled one of the porters and asked for a telephone.

  ‘Don’t you have a mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s always running down. I hate mobiles. They should be outlawed except in cases of emergency.’

  ‘You’re a policeman. What you get is emergency. If you’d had one back in December, it would have come in devilishly handy.’

  Jury nodded. ‘You’re certainly right there.’ He had dialed and now said to the ghost at the other end, ‘Wiggins, I need you to do something. A couple in Surrey named Shoesmith, first names Maeve and Robert, near the village of Lark Rise. Nose around and see if you come up with anything, will you? Thanks.’ He hung up.

  The three of them looked pleased now Scotland Yard was taking them seriously.

  Which it wasn’t. But Jury went on: ‘There are other possibilities. Mrs. Gault and her son could have lunched at the pub, then gone back to Lark Cottage and then to Winterhaus. There was a woman who saw them, we understand, saw Glynnis Gault standing beside her car, the boy presumably inside. If we could pin down a time there that would help in fixing the last place she was seen. That and the time they were at Lark Cottage—’

  ‘And how do we fix the time if the Shoesmiths are lying?’ asked Melrose.

  ‘You’re determined they were up to something, is that it?’

  ‘No. I’m just allowing for the possibility.’

  What was Plant doing, aligning himself with these two? They were perfectly amiable, of course, and Colonel Neame was by no means stupid. (Major Champs’s mental prowess, Jury wouldn’t swear to, however.) It was as if they made a trio who shared the same ideas and insights. There Melrose sat, smoking one of Champs’s cigars and giving Jury the same steely look that Colonel Neame was giving him, the only difference being the color of it: Colonel Neame’s gaze was steel gray and Plant’s, steel green.

  ‘All right, we’ll definitely take that into account.’ Jury shook his head, set down his coffee cup and listened to the grim bong of Boring’s at noon. The longcase clock seemed to call to all of them here in this plague room to bring out their dead. Looking around, he thought there might be a couple of possibles. He slapped his chair arms and rose. ‘Gentlemen, good seeing you and thanks for the drink. I’d stay but I have a luncheon engagement.’

  ‘Power lunch?’ asked Melrose.

  ‘No. Pub lunch. That’s about as powerful as I ever get.’

  All three, he noticed, were squinting at him, suspicious. Plant’s look was squintier than the other two. Then Melrose sat back, puffing on his cigar, eyes still narrowed. This put Jury in mind not of a stinking rich, titled, estate owner but more of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

  ‘Something funny?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Jury.

  24

  Trevor’s place had been taken by another barman, older, bar towel thrown over his shoulder, guttural North London accent. Jury wondered where Trevor was; perhaps this was his day off. He also wondered if this other one had Trevor’s knowledge of wine. He doubted it. Few would.

  Jury was early for his meeting with Harry and had a drink at the bar, a little worried about his midday drinking. He rarely did it, if, for no other reason, he hadn’t the time.

  There were more customers in the afternoon than in the evening. It was popular for stockbrokers, money managers, clerk typists. Somewhere he’d read that this pub was the only one left after the Great Fire, so it went back to the 1600s: that was in itself quite an accomplishment. The walls were covered in dark wood panels and featured advertisements of various wines and pictures of old London scenes. He wondered if any of the framed documents hanging on the walls attested to its history.

  The place was crowded. Smoke hung in the air like a dropped ceiling. It really irritated Jury that inhaling secondhand smoke was just as unhealthy as firsthand. That was maddening, the smokers getting the pleasure of it while the ones who had suffered (and were still, if he was any measure of it, suffering) through kicking the habit—well, they might as well not have. He toyed with temptation for a while.

  He dropped that way of thinking by going over what they’d said in Boring’s. He should talk to the agent again. Perhaps she could be more precise about that phone call coming in from Glynnis Gault.

  But Jury was quite sure the most obvious explanation was the right one in this case.

  ‘Having lunch?’

  Jury looked around to see Harry Johnson, wearing a different coat, camel hair this time, and just as expensive looking. ‘No, just this.’

  ‘They’ve a very good restaurant here upstairs.’

  Jury tapped the glass and then looked down. ‘Where’s Mungo?’

  Harry laughed. ‘In the car. I’m on a yellow line, so we’d better go, if you’re ready. Sorry about lunch.’

  Jury nodded, left the glass half full and decided he wasn’t really a midday drinker. He couldn’t stand the thought of kicking one more habit.

  Mungo positioned himself with his head out of the window.

  ‘Why do dogs do that?’

  ‘I don’t know; maybe they’re just breezing.’

  Breezing. It reminded Jury of the Ryders and horse racing. And Nell. What a bloody waste, oh, what a waste, he thought, as they maneuvered around a BMW, out for a lunchtime stroll on Upper Thames Street, and sped along the Embankment.

  The Stoddard Clinic was Gothic and fiercely gated, stone lions atop the gray stone columns on either side. Cars had to stop and use the intercom embedded in one of the pillars. Harry pressed the button and a voice mixed with static asked his business.

  ‘I’m here to visit Mr. Gault. Hugh Gault. My name’s Johnson.’ There was a silence except for the electronic stutter.

  ‘Yessir, you Mr. Harry Johnson, then?’

  ‘I am.’

  The gate pulled open and they drove in. The building, like the gate, was somewhat daunting. If this was a clinic principally for stressed-out people who had just a little too much on their platter its demeanor was overkill. Decidedly medieval, with stone battlements around the roof and no chairs on the wid
e sweep of grass. No people in chairs on the grass either, although it was quite a pleasant day. It was all gray stone with a bell tower.

  Jury said as they parked under a massive oak tree, ‘This strikes me as looking more like another sort of facility, you know, the sort that doesn’t look kindly upon your signing yourself out and going home. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do. But it’s not quite as forbidding as you think.’

  Jury nodded as they got out of the car, Harry petting Mungo and telling him they’d be back soon. Mungo made some throaty sounds, not, Jury was sure, to say he’d miss them, but because he thought freedom was at hand.

  They walked around a smallish white bus with the name STODDARD painted on the sides—not CLINIC—perhaps to indicate that this place had been around for a long time and didn’t need to be identified.

  Harry said, ‘I had another friend here a while back and she did leave. Her therapy was successful. Hugh’s not a prisoner. Listen: sometimes Hugh wants to talk about what happened and sometimes not. At least he doesn’t always bring the subject up. I let him take the lead on that score. You can imagine . . .’

  Jury nodded, but certainly couldn’t imagine. Nor could he imagine living with it, something like that hanging over his head.

  Stoddard was quite as imposing inside as out. Inside, though, it had warmth as opposed to its cold exterior. The warmth came from its fireplaces, its flowered bronze wallpaper, its polished mahogany banisters. There appeared to be two drawing, or reception, rooms where one could wait, to the left and right of the large entry hall. A woman and two men were standing in the center of the room on the right, laughing. Jury wondered if one was the patient the others had come to see, and thought the group was a little boisterous. The woman bent to stroke the head of an Irish wolfhound, a dog that had always struck Jury as faintly ridiculous, though he couldn’t say why.

  When they walked in, Harry was greeted heartily by a nurse, whom he addressed by name—Mary, or Merle—and who walked to the receptionist’s table with him, chatting. The receptionist, a bit of a fashion plate, with her elegant suit and bobbed black hair that edged her face like a helmet, appeared to be just as congenial as the nurse. Harry must have visited Hugh Gault often enough to have stirred up friendly feelings in the staff.