The Old Wine Shades Read online

  A man had come down the wide staircase and was standing in the hall looking from one room to the other. Jury wondered if this was Hugh Gault; the poor fellow looked utterly overwhelmed. A nurse came from around the reception desk and, smiling, led him into the other room, where everyone made a fuss over him, including the wolfhound, who nearly knocked him down.

  So this must be Hugh Gault, walking into the twin of that drawing room now. He was tall and a little thin, but by no means looking as if his ‘condition’ were responsible for the thinness. He greeted Harry, was introduced to Jury and sank down in one of the deep armchairs near the fire. Harry and Jury sat opposite in matching chairs. The room was dimly lit, which was pleasant. Some member of the staff apparently believed in ambient lighting. Jury wondered why. A better impression made? A softness conducive to more tender care? For whatever reason, it was extremely pleasant, even restful. These surroundings, with the flames leaping in the fireplace, looked quite glamorous, more the mise-on-scène of an expensive country hotel. Perhaps such appointments were considered therapeutic. Jury bet it cost a bundle.

  ‘A detective superintendent? My word!’ Hugh Gault nodded in Harry’s direction. ‘Are we going to have to alibi each other? Me, I’ve been right here for eight months. Plenty of witnesses. Harry, on the other hand, I can’t account for. He could be here, there, everywhere.’

  ‘Just a particle,’ said Jury, smiling. ‘That can’t be identified because it can’t be measured.’

  Hugh tossed his head back and laughed. ‘That’s one of the best descriptions of Harry I’ve heard. You’re interested in quantum theory?’

  ‘The little, the very little I know about it, yes, I’d say so.’

  Harry asked, ‘How’s the book going, Hugh?’

  ‘Still stumbling along. It might be easier if you’d give me back my damned notes.’ This was said not in anger, or even annoyance, but with good humor. To Jury he said, ‘Tell me, Superintendent, just how far along are you with proving this criminal conspiracy of ours:

  ‘Me? Not far. I’m stuck back there with Schrödinger’s cat.’

  ‘Ah! Good for you!’

  ‘Maybe. I’m not sure how good it is for the cat.’

  Again, Hugh laughed. ‘You’re a quick study, Superintendent.’

  ‘No, I really don’t understand the quantum world.’

  ‘Well, just remember that whatever governs behavior in our daily experience is wasted in the quantum world. Schrödinger’s wavefunction was one of the revolutionary insights in quantum physics. Wavefunction.’

  Jury smiled at the way Hugh Gault rolled this around in his mouth like a delicious chocolate or single-malt whiskey. ‘It’s a mathematical quantity. You have to solve Schrödinger’s equation to get it.’

  ‘Schrödinger’s cat. Alive and dead at the same—’

  Hugh looked away and was silent. He looked back at Jury. ‘Sorry. I’ve taken a couple of blows and it’s—’ He sighed. ‘I miss my wife. I miss my son.’

  Jury could see how the ambiguity—no, more than ambiguity— of the cat might strike him as an analogy in this way. They were silent for a few moments, and then Harry stepped in to fill the vacuum. ‘You know, I can see how quantum theory might have a certain appeal to a detective. Things change as you look at them. So how does one measure? One thing becomes two things. Dead and alive simultaneously. Schrödinger was certainly pointing out one of the sticking points in superposition theory.’

  ‘Superposition? What’s that?’ asked Jury.

  Back on track, Hugh said. ‘Take this: you’ve tossed pebbles into water, haven’t you? And the result is concentric circles spreading out. Now throw another pebble in near the first one. Same thing: circles spreading out. But now the overlapping of those two configurations makes for a third configuration. And now you have a section of those circles being two things at once and, consequently, creating a third design. Superposition. You look skeptical, Superintendent.’

  ‘No, actually, I look dumb.’

  Both of them laughed. Hugh said, ‘Schrödinger’s cat. Simultaneously alive and dead. It’s the overlapping. You see, what’s true on the microscopic level is in conflict with what we observe with our own eyes. The macroscopic level. The level of cats, for instance. The cat is tangled up with the decaying nucleus, and when the nucleus decays, the poison is released and the cat dies instantly.’ Hugh smiled. ‘Remember, as soon as you look you alter the outcome. ‘An aspect of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is that the act of observation will ultimately affect the thing being observed.’

  Jury did not take this in. He was instead trying to track down something, something that Harry had said in the pub, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Schrödinger’s cat. What Harry had said didn’t seem to fit. Jury frowned. What was it?

  ‘. . . the incompleteness theory.’

  Jury shook his head as if to clear it. ‘I’m sorry. What were you saying:

  ‘Gödel. His theory of incompleteness. A proposition can be both true and unprovable.’

  ‘Oh. That.’

  Hugh laughed. ‘Not to worry. The brilliant mathematicians were lost. After all, that upsets the whole notion that mathematics is a gloriously closed system, provable from within its own borders. You can understand that: how can a proposition be true and yet be unprovable. And yet Gödel had worked out a proof of this.’

  Jury sat forward, his whole face in a frown. ‘You’re saying this Gödel proved the unprovable.’

  Hugh smiled. ‘That’s right. It appears to be a sort of double think, doesn’t it? Gödel supported and subverted his theory. It was a work of art, really; it was pure genius. His solution lay in numbering. Gödel’s numbering. But let’s not get into that.’

  ‘Let’s not,’ said Jury. ‘Let’s get back to superstrings.’

  Hugh’s smile was open and warm, the sort that could coax a smile out of anyone around him. ‘Good.’

  ‘How can you work with something that’s a billion times smaller than the nucleus of the atom? Isn’t that the size of one of your strings?’

  ‘Close enough. It’s actually a billion billion.’ Hugh held up two fingers.

  ‘It gets to the point, doesn’t it, where you’re back to zero?’ Hugh sat back. This is how he copes, thought Jury, how Hugh Gault coped with the vanishing of his wife and son, by entering an abstract world.

  ‘There is no zero,’ said Hugh. ‘A string is the last stop. And remember, what we’re talking about is energy. Vibrating energy. The string is absolutely the last stop. The buck stops there.’ Hugh relaxed, as if, now he had explained this, it was safe to do so.

  ‘How can that be? I can’t get my mind round it. You’re talking about something indivisible.’

  ‘Of course you can’t imagine it. But you can work it out by way of logic.’ Hugh looked at him with something like doubt. ‘Why are you interested in this. Superintendent? I wonder that you would be since it’s so abstract. You deal in facts, in proofs. You don’t even like circumstantial evidence as proof, and that evidence at least is concrete. As you said—a billion billion—no wonder you can’t get your mind around it.’

  Jury thought Hugh seemed eminently sane. But then there had been no question of his sanity. He had come here because he couldn’t cope with the rug’s being pulled out from under his life.

  Jury wondered if he himself would be able to. Probably not, not living with all this uncertainty. But he went along, trying to hold up his end. ‘Abstraction doesn’t run counter to facts, though. I mean, for example, say A refers to a fingerprint on a gun and B refers to the fingerprint of a suspect. The fingerprints on the gun, the ones of the suspect, hence the matter of who the shooter is—C—we can determine that the suspect is the shooter. Now, those fingerprints are salient facts. But to get from A and B to C, I have to make a leap— not a big one, but still a leap. That’s an abstraction, that leap.’

  ‘Not exactly what we’re talking about,’ said Harry.

  ‘No?’ Jury looked at him.


  ‘Harry,’ said Hugh with a laugh, ‘thinks we’re never talking about what we’re talking about. He thinks it’s double speak. We don’t think alike, you know; we disagree on some basic points. That’s why he absconded with my notes.’ Hugh smiled. ‘To see if he could understand.’

  Harry looked amused. ‘I understand, all right.’

  Jury wondered if they were competing and what they were competing about. It had occurred to Jury that Glynnis Gault might be part of it. It was obvious that Harry cared about her, but cared how much?

  ‘No, actually, Harry disagrees with himself here. His idols are Bohr and Gödel. But Gödel didn’t trust quantum theory any more than Einstein trusted it.’

  ‘All right, but how does all of this actually impinge upon your lives? If I say fingerprint A and fingerprint B are identical, I can also say C is the shooter. But I don’t see how, for example, the theory of incompleteness translates into anything you’d be dealing with in your lives.’

  ‘I think that’s what Harry meant when he said your definition of abstraction wasn’t what we were talking about.’

  ‘Well, how many kinds of abstraction are there?’

  ‘Mathematics is abstraction; numbers are abstract, fingerprints aren’t,’ said Hugh.

  Harry said, ‘That’s not really an accurate description. I’m talking now about Gödel. Or Hamlet. Remember the play within the play of the traveling theatrical group? The actors in the ‘play’ being performed took on the characters, put on the masks of Hamlet’s family. They poisoned the king in their skit as Claudius had poisoned the king in actuality, or, rather, in the play proper. It became self-referential. Actors commenting on the actions of their ‘real’ counterparts.’

  And Jury thought of Harry’s story becoming a story within a story within a story. Had he been left knowing as little about the ‘real’ events as he did about the uncertainty principle or the incompleteness theory?

  In a way, it made him smile, without knowing quite what he was smiling about. Probably about that damned cat.

  25

  It suited Jury down to the ground to have this rest of the afternoon free to drive to Surrey and call in at the Swan in his unofficial capacity. Even in the absence of an official crime scene, he supposed the Swan’s regulars would be pleased to see him, he having stirred their interest in this crime—if it was a crime. They had probably spent a fair amount of time talking about him and Melrose Plant and their appearance in the pub. And there was the woman who had seen Glynnis Gault. She would be able to tell him something.

  He was driving through Slough when he suddenly felt saddened for some reason and was so caught up in this feeling that he drove the roundabout twice outside of an industrial park, of which Slough had many. It was a gray town, concrete and glass. Can one really imagine anyone reminiscing about ‘dear old Slough’?

  Jury smiled and then the smile vanished as he stopped at a zebra crossing to let an elderly woman with a string bag full of groceries cross. He could even see the Weetabix and half loaf sticking out of the carryall and thought, yes, he could imagine her saying it.

  Some driver behind him was honking. The woman, who appeared arthritic, was only halfway across the road, but to the driver behind him halfway was good enough. Jury waited until she reached the curb, sending the car behind him into a honking frenzy. Jury smiled and drove on.

  He pulled into one of the parking spaces outside Forester and Flynn and went in. The two young agents were on their way out, probably for lunch together, leaving Marjorie Bathous to hold the fort.

  She looked up from writing the particulars of a newly listed house, surprised. ‘It’s Inspector—Jury? Is that right?’

  They were all ‘inspectors,’ weren’t they? ‘Close enough, Mrs. Bathous.’ Once again he showed her his ID. ‘I wonder if I could have another look at Winterhaus.’ It occurred to him then that he might revisit the neighbors. ‘And talk to the Shoesmiths, if they’re available?’

  Marjorie Bathous was already spinning her Rolodex. ‘I’m sure that wouldn’t be a problem. They were quite thrilled about your visit the other day.’ She smiled at him as she waited for the phone to be picked up on the other end. One of the Shoesmiths answered and after settling on a time she hung up. ‘They’d be delighted; they can see you after you leave here. Now, about Winterhaus.’ She was opening and closing drawers. ‘Here we are.’ She handed him the key. ‘You don’t mind going on your own? I could accompany you. I haven’t a client to see until six—?’ She was dimpling, her smile was so wide.

  ‘Not at all, Mrs. Bathous—’

  ‘Marj is what everyone calls me.’ The dimples again. ‘Well. . . are you, is Scotland Yard investigating that old business?’ She apparently realized this subject called for gravitas, not dimples. ‘It’s quite peculiar, isn’t it?’

  Jury rose. ‘It is, yes. Thanks very much.’ He held up the key. ‘I’ll get this back to you.’ He said this with a promising smile. As he opened the door she was waving to him across the room.

  He would see them first, the Shoesmiths, which would prevent their being elaborately ready with tea. Maeve Shoesmith was definitely a full tea sort of hostess.

  ‘It’s the Bill, Maeve!’ bellowed Bob Shoesmith. ‘Better hide the swag!’ He laughed enthusiastically at his little joke.

  Maeve came quickly from wherever she’d been—kitchen, probably. She slapped at Bob’s arm in a playful manner. ‘Aren’t you awful! Come in, come in. Just walk through to the back parlor. You don’t mind, do you? We’ve an electric heater and it’s quite nice and snug. Here we are.’

  Jury thanked her and looked the room over, not noticeably different from the front room. The tea was here, waiting. A seedcake and some Carr’s biscuits sat on the tray with the pot and mugs. Maeve Shoesmith was an uncanny judge of time.

  ‘Your friend isn’t with you today,’ she said, pointing out the obvious as she poured’milk into three mugs. No cups and saucers today, for this was informal and friendly. ‘Has he found a house or is he still considering?’’

  ‘Still considering. Thank you,’ Jury said when she handed him a mug. ‘He was quite pleased with this one. He’s gone back to report to his aunt on what he’s found.’ But he didn’t want to raise their hopes. ‘There’s the distance from the town to consider. An elderly person might be nervous without a hospital or at least a doctor’s surgery close by. I mean, if she’s on her own, which she is. Very independent.’

  Bob nodded sagely. ‘There is that to consider, so. Still, you can’t find a better deal than Lark Cottage, I’d say.’ Bob Shoesmith pounded on the whitewashed wall his chair was nearest to, as if the wall’s not crumbling under the blow of his fist should be proof to the aunt she’d be wise to snap the cottage up. ‘Solid as a rock. And no damp, either. Dry as a bone—’

  Jury interrupted this threatened flood of house details and cliches. ‘I was thinking about your meeting with Mrs. Gault.’

  ‘Yes, that was odd.’ Maeve furrowed her brow at the oddity of it. ‘Never did know what happened there, did we, Bob?’

  Jury drank his tea, which was too citrus enhanced for his taste. (Even Wiggins, who never found a tea he didn’t like, had commented on tea producers adding flowery bits and fruits and spices to tea: ‘It’s got to the point you almost have to ask for black tea anymore, what with this decaffeinated, herbal fashion,’ Wiggins had said.) ‘Did Mrs. Gault actually say she was on her way to view Winterhaus?’

  They looked at each other. Then Bob, brow creased, said, ‘Now I’d have to think on that. I mean she did talk about the house . . .

  Maeve?’

  ‘You mean was she going to see it or had she already been? The house ‘farther on’ is what she said. We must have been the first as we’re on the way to Winterhaus. I recall she said it was rather large, but then she would’ve known that from the particulars they give you about a house, the photo and all.’

  ‘Her son stayed outside?’

  ‘He did, yes. Played with the dog
,’ said Maeve.

  ‘Big kind of dog.’

  ‘I’d say medium sized.’

  They were going to make sure the details here were accurate. ‘Flop-eared,’ she said. ‘The boy was tossing him sticks.’

  Jury said, ‘I’d been assuming Mrs. Gault stopped here, then went along to the bigger house and then to the Swan. But if the order was reversed, the pub would have been her first stop.’

  Bob’s brow creased again. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘To you? I’d say yes. If you were the last people to see her alive.’

  Bob blanched at that and sat back. ‘Well, we couldn’t’ve been, could we? There’d have been whoever was around when she did a flit.’

  Maeve’s anxiety over Jury’s comment dissolved in the reasoning of her husband. She rocked and added to the drama, ‘Another man, that’s what. She probably ran off with him.’

  Jury smiled. ‘Quite possibly. What time did she leave?’

  Bob frowned in thought. Maeve said, ‘It’d gone two, half two, actually. And if she wanted to go, she’d better nip round there soon. We don’t keep London hours here, and just as well, I always say. All the crime.’

  Jury liked that blanket comment, its lack of boundaries. ‘You can fix it at around two-thirty? You’ve got a remarkable memory,’ Jury said, ‘considering this was last year.’

  ‘I only remember because when she said something about the Swan, I remarked, well, it’d be closing in half an hour. That fixed the time in my mind.’

  ‘I wish there were more witnesses like you.’ Jury smiled.

  She bathed in this display of approval. ‘Well, now.’ She tittered.

  ‘Then that would mean this was the first place she stopped.’ Jury set down his mug. ‘Then Winterhaus, then the pub.’

  ‘Glad we got that straightened out!’ said Bob. ‘No, we wouldn’t have liked being the last place, I do assure you.’ He laughed. ‘What did all of you talk about?’