The Old Wine Shades Read online

  ‘What did they find at the second house?’

  ‘Nothing. The ground was so hard where the car might have pulled up that they couldn’t get an impression of any tires at all, not just Glynn’s. Hugh was beside himself, of course, and convinced it could only have been a kidnapping. I thought so too, except there was no ransom demand.’

  Jury thought of the Flora Scott case, so recently resolved. ‘Is there some reason there might have been one? I mean, are the Gaults wealthy?’

  ‘Not wealthy, but very comfortable. She inherited a little when her mother died. Hugh’s a professor at London University. Physics.’

  ‘So your friend Hugh would not appear to have a motive?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Harry sounded irritated. ‘Anyway, he was in London; any number of people could testify to that.’

  ‘Yes, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop him paying someone to do it. And if so, you bet he’d have witnesses, a raft of witnesses.’

  ‘That’s exactly what the police said.’ Harry looked at Jury.

  Jury laughed. ‘I’m a big fan of the Bill and–what’s that other one?–anyway, I watch them all the time on the telly.’

  ‘But you don’t know Hugh.’

  ‘You’re quite right. What happened then?’

  ‘Then came the private investigator.’

  ‘Who found nothing?’

  Harry nodded. ‘And during this time, we drove to Lark Rise, to Forester and Flynn, where we picked up the keys to the empty house. They do that, these agents in the country, since the listings are some distance from each other. I’d say that’s just asking for trouble.’

  For Glynnis Gauh, it had been, Jury didn’t say. ‘Then Mrs. Gauh did go in the house?’

  ‘The agent didn’t know. If she didn’t like the exterior, she probably didn’t bother with the inside.’

  ‘Then your Glynnis is one woman in a million.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Would any woman with a key to a strange house in her hand not use it? I’m sorry if that sounds patronizing. Perhaps I should say ‘anyone.’ It’s just that I’ve found houses and what they contain to be far more interesting to women than to men.’

  ‘You think she went inside?’

  Jury nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The rooms were large, with very high ceilings, and the drawing room or living room was furnished with what looked like quite valuable antiques. There was a Russian bureau inlaid with silver, a Turkish rug of huge proportions and deep reds and blues. There were tea things set out, a silver tea service and cups and saucers and so forth.’

  ‘You mean in the way of Miss Havisham in Dickens? Didn’t she keep everything regarding her near wedding exactly as it had been for years?’

  Harry had lit a cigarette and was now exhaling. ‘No, I don’t mean that.’ He seemed mildly annoyed that Jury was using fictional metaphor. He went on:

  ‘The house sits about two hundred feet from the road. All of the front was overgrown–grass, hedgerow, shrubberies, very large trees front and back–a wood, actually at the edge of the gardens behind the house, all of it almost luxurious in its wildness. But it certainly wasn’t anyone’s idea of a country cottage. Hugh said he couldn’t understand why the agent had even had it on her list of possible properties for Glynnis to see or that Glynnis would even bother going inside. It was quite an imposing place, but much too large.’

  ‘Well, I imagine she’s not the first agent to show a client unsuitable property. Could it be someone was waiting for Mrs. Gault? What about the boy? And Mungo, here–’

  They both looked down. Mungo looked up, again eying one and then the other. The look, thought Jury, did not appear to be yearning, but more bafflement or at least puzzlement.

  ‘Had he or she or they really planned on taking all three?’

  ‘Perhaps they had to; they could hardly let the boy go,’ said Harry.

  ‘But they did Mungo.’

  Harry rolled his eyes. ‘I expect they thought Mungo wasn’t about to write up a report on what happened.’

  ‘But an abduction doesn’t seem very likely with whatever was going on in the house, anyway. So you don’t know that there’s any connection between the house and Glynnis and Robbie Gauh’s disappearance. It could be simply a coincidence.’

  Harry studied his drink.

  ‘Who owns the house?’

  ‘A man named Ben Torres. Benjamin della Torres, actually.’

  ‘Sounds aristocratic.’

  Harry shook his head, picked up his glass.

  ‘Also sounds Spanish.’

  ‘Italian. He lives near Florence.’

  ‘You know a lot about this.’

  Harry nodded. ‘‘I had to, given everything that happened.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘What I’m telling you.’ Harry smiled and looked at his watch.

  ‘Look, it’s nearly nine. Would you like to get a meal? I know a terrific restaurant.’

  Jury looked at his own watch, astonished that he’d been talking to Harry Johnson for upward of two hours. ‘Why not? It’s a good idea. What about Mungo?’

  They both rose to put on their coats (Harry, cashmere; Jury, anything but). When Mungo saw this, he too got to his feet, tail wagging.

  ‘Oh, Mungo’s welcome to join us. I’ll just ring the place to tell them we’re coming.’ He pulled a cell phone from his coat pocket and turned away from Jury to make the call.

  Jury knelt down and scratched around Mungo’s ears. He wondered what the poor dog had been through. He wondered how an animal could have such a sense of direction to make a trip from God knows where back home. He wondered if ‘home’ meant more to animals than it did to humans.

  Harry flipped his cell phone closed. ‘Done. You’ll like this place.’ Then he smiled down at Mungo. ‘Incredible dog. I just don’t know what to make of him.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know what to make of any of this, actually.’

  2

  ‘The house itself–it’s named Winterhaus, incidentally–I don’t know where that German bit came from. I wanted to know more about the house itself. It struck me as a place that would serve as a setting for something.’

  They were seated now in one of those pleasant restaurants where the food and the service clearly took precedence over the packaging: no terribly modern blue Lucite or smoked-glass room dividers or etched wall sconces; no sumptuous, sinuous leather and bright white linens. Just a comfortable arrangement of tables far enough apart that you didn’t feel the people at the next table were elbowing in on your conversation. Harry Johnson was obviously a long-standing diner here for the maitre d’ knew him by name and treated him as a valued customer.

  They had ordered, or, rather, Harry had suggested the waiter order for them, just as he had told the sommelier to choose the wine.

  ‘‘Something’?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what I mean. Melodramatic. An old man was passing in the road as we left the drive, a villager I supposed. We stopped to ask about the Swan, the nearby pub, and he told us it was down the road, then offered a bit of advice at the same time. His name was Jessup, he said, and he lived around there. He gave us a warning about ‘that house’ and said we should avoid the woods. If you can imagine.’ Harry laughed.

  ‘Did you find anything dire in the woods?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the owner? What did he have to say?’

  ‘He lives in San Gimignano, one of those little hill towns in Tuscany, one of the casa torre. It’s full of towers.’

  ‘You’ve seen the town, then?’

  ‘Yes. Well, we were looking for any clue at all. Hugh clearly wasn’t up to it and so I undertook to go. The man wouldn’t come to England–why should he? He’d put the house in the hands of an agent, so let her dammed well deal with it.’

  ‘But couldn’t this have been handled by telephone? Going to Italy seems a little extreme.’

  ‘Is going to Italy ever really extreme? And I�
��d never been there.’

  Jury laughed. ‘I see what you mean. Go on.’

  ‘The thing, the interesting thing is, regarding your point about the telephone is that he didn’t want to discuss it over the phone. If I wanted to come to him, I was welcome.’

  The waiter was there with their salads, mostly new and trendy greens and Stilton cheese and walnuts in a citrusy dressing.

  Harry went on. ‘Two days later I turned up on his doorstep. We had drinks, we had dinner at a little trattoria. I’d never eaten a cappesante like that before.’

  ‘I’ve never eaten it at all. Go on.’

  Harry smiled. ‘His story–and, incidentally, he didn’t know my reason for wanting to hear it; all he knew was that I was interested in the house and wanted to know its history, as the estate agent knew sod-all about it. She didn’t know much, Ben Torres told me, because he hadn’t told her much; it didn’t strike him as necessary to do so. But if I wanted to know before I leased the property, he was happy to tell me. I was presenting myself, of course, as a prospective tenant, or, rather, not presenting myself as anything else. I think he enjoyed the fact that I’d come all the way to Italy just to talk about this house. Torres’s father was Italian; mother, British.’

  ‘He was raised in England and lived there until he was in his twenties. Hated it–so drab, wet and cold, and the people not especially warmhearted.’

  ‘His parents were divorced, his father in Italy, and that meant excursions to Italy a number of times to see his father, who lived in Siena. Winterhaus, the one that Glynnis Gauh went to see, was in his mother’s family.’

  ‘The last time he said he’d been at this property in Surrey was when he gave the listing to an agency two years before. Ben Torres said to me, ‘Let me tell you a story. The place belonged to my mother’s family. My mother died when she was barely forty, in London. It was completely unexpected. She hadn’t been at all ill. I was sixteen. My father was living here at the time. They were divorced, had been for years. It surprised me they’d ever come together-they were so different. Sometimes I think that’s what marriage is: a reconciliation of differences, and sometimes it succeeds. Not a grand vision, is it?’

  ‘‘At any rate, my mother–her name was Nina–had always liked that house in Surrey; she’d been a child there and found it mysterious. But then most children find mystery in things adults wouldn’t give a toss for. More than once someone had made my mother an offer for the house–and if you saw it, you’d know it’s quite a lovely site, even if it hasn’t been properly kept up. But my mother wouldn’t sell it, and not because she’d lived there as a child but because of something that had happened there and that she felt responsible for. I mean not that she’d done anything but that she didn’t want to subject some stranger to the unhappy aspect of the house.’’

  Jury lowered his fork. ‘‘Unhappy aspect’?’

  But Harry Johnson merely raised his hand to ward off questions.

  ‘Torres went on: ‘I myself was eight years old when she told me about it. Well, I’d kept after her and after her to explain what she meant. Finally one night, as she was tucking me into bed and was about to read me a story. She had the most beautiful voice. But I didn’t want to be read a story, I wanted her to tell me one.’ ..... All right, Benjy, I’ll tell you a story.’

  ‘She closed the book and set it aside. And she told me this story then and Lord knows how many times since, as I was always asking for it.’

  .... ‘A stranger was standing out there at the bottom of the garden. At first I thought he must be making a delivery or was perhaps an acquaintence of our father’s. But he did not move from the end of the path. He was not a vagrant, that was clear from his overcoat and his hat.’

  .... ‘And his bowler hat.’

  ‘I said, ‘You left it out.’’

  ‘I would often interrupt in this way to ensure all of the details were included and even such commonplaces as weather and light, the slant of the sun, the turning leaves–all of these details had to be absolutely accurate, by that I mean always the same, before I would allow her to proceed.’’

  Harry Johnson paused to have a sip of wine. Their dinners appeared as if by magic. Jury had ordered his dish because he wondered if its stunningly complicated name would turn out to be a simple dish. Whatever it was, it was good.

  This ‘stranger’ (Jury thought) would be the harbinger of bad news or would himself be the bad news. He would die, Jury was sure. ‘He was murdered, right?’

  Harry opened his eyes wide with astonishment. ‘You’re jumping the gun. Ben Torres would have your head on a platter for that.’ Harry laughed.

  ‘Go on with the story. The stranger.’ (Who will, he added to himself, be murdered.)

  ‘Ben Torres said, ‘My mother made the correction about the hat. Then she continued:

  ‘‘He stopped there at the end of the path for some time. I don’t know why I didn’t go out and ask him who he was and what he wanted. I was afraid, a little afraid. I tried to read my book–I’d been sitting in the window seat reading, but I couldn’t and when a slant of sun fell across the page, I looked again and he was gone. It was close to dusk. I was so relieved not to have to wonder if he would be there after dark and if he was going to try to get in the house. He was gone, thank heaven. But three days later he appeared again. At the end of the path in the same spot. I–’ .... Then she stopped and I said, ‘‘You told yourself you had to do something.’’

  ..... Yes. The thing is we were there by ourselves. You were only eight. ‘‘

  ‘Then Ben Torres, in telling me, became agitated, as if he still felt his mother’s uncertainty and fear. ‘‘So my mother did call the police station.’’

  .... ‘But what am I to tell them? Simply that a man had on two occasions stood just at the end of the garden path? Why would the police bother to investigate that? Still, I made the call, Benjy, and was surprised that they were so polite.’ ....

  ‘England’s finest,’ put in Jury and received a withering look from Harry Johnson.

  ‘Ben Torres went on: ‘The mystery of the stranger captivated more than frightened me, but, then, I was not easily frightened. My mother knew this. Still, she did not tell me the rest of it.’’ Harry stopped to take another drink of wine.

  Jury said, ‘Stop long enough to eat. This meal is definitely worth it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve eaten it many times. It’s delicious.’

  Jury liked that filling up on memory. His thoughts turned to that painting, The Butterfly Eaters, that he’d seen in Newcastle at the Baltic. Dining on illusion.

  Harry continued. ‘He said: ‘It was my father who told me the rest, years later. The house, my father said, had a sad history, a dismal history.’

  ‘‘This is what that detective told your mother: There was a family who lived there, who had leased it, named Overdean. They lived there with their son, seven-year-old Basil. The boy and his mother were murdered in their beds one night. The father himself wasn’t touched. ‘‘

  ‘In such cases as this,’ Harry went on to say, ‘the crime always points first to a family member–in this case the father, who hadn’t been touched despite the viciousness of the attack. There was no motive anyone knew of and his fingerprints were not on the knife; they’d been stabbed repeatedly. The knife appeared not to belong to the house. But all of that could be explained by the prosecution. Well, you know what police and lawyers are like–’

  ‘I do indeed.’

  ‘–in the absence’ of any counterevidence, they could just say the father had wiped the knife clean of his fingerprints and could easily have brought another knife into the house–’

  Jury interrupted again. ‘And then hung around in bed while his wife was being murdered. Please.’ The waiter had come to clear away their dishes. Jury’s plate was wiped clean.

  ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’

  ‘He was convicted?’

  Harry nodded. ‘The judge in this case seemed dubious about his gu
ilt. He sentenced him not to life but to twenty years. He only had to serve ten; his behavior in prison was perfect. I think it was very flimsy evidence.’

  ‘It was certainly circumstantial. I’m surprised the defense wasn’t able to drive a wedge of doubt into it.’

  The waiter returned with the dessert, a crême brûlée infused with lavender and glazed on top. ‘And what about the stranger? Mr. Torres hasn’t explained him yet.’

  ‘Listen first to what his mother said about the house: ‘She told me once, ‘Benjy, houses are more than wood and stone and plaster. Houses breathe, too. I think they bear the imprint of all the people who’ve lived in them. ‘‘

  ‘Including Mrs. Overdean and her son? That doesn’t strike me as very good storytelling, not to a little kid.’

  ‘I’m only repeating what Ben Torres told me. ‘And the silent stranger in the bowler hat?’ I asked my father.’

  ..... Your mother didn’t know. Perhaps it was the father come back.’’

  ‘Dead or alive?’ asked Jury.

  Harry laughed. ‘Alive, I believe he said. It wouldn’t be so surprising for him to come back to the house where everything had gone wrong, where he’d lost–’ Suddenly, Harry stopped.

  ‘Where he’d lost everything, you were about to say. Like your friend Hugh Gauh. Except in his case, there seems no rational explanation for his wife and son’s disappearance.’ Jury looked down when Mungo stuck his head out from the curtain of the tablecloth.

  • ‘And his dog’s.’

  Harry signaled to the waiter for coffee. ‘I asked Ben Torres, ‘What about the stranger? Did your mother think he must be Overdean?’ Ben laughed. ‘I hardly think so. He would have been a bit too old, wouldn’t you say? Overdean would have been long dead.

  No, that’s quite impossible unless, of course, one believes in ghosts.’’

  ‘And do you? Did Nina Torres?’ Jury asked.

  Their waiter filled their cups with coffee and set the silverplated pot on the table. Harry shook his head. ‘I can speak with certainty only for myself. No, not for a minute. Mrs. Torres, though, sounded as if she might have. Hugh? Before this happened, I would say definitely not. But now he’s searching for any explanation at all.