Vertigo 42 Read online

  Jury took a drink of the pricy whiskey. “Do you think there’s a good possibility that the mother murdered your wife?”

  “It was five years later, I know. A bit long for revenge.”

  “Hamlet managed. Had this woman tried to contact Tess during those five years?”

  “Oh, yes. A number of times.”

  “Then did the Devon police see this Palmer woman as a viable suspect?”

  Tom shook his head. “The chief inspector was convinced Tess’s was an accidental death. Vertigo. Tess was always taking tumbles, catching her high heel on a curb or uneven pavement, miscalculating a step down—that sort of thing. The way she fell down those steps, the way her head hit the base of the urn—all of it appeared evidence of an ­accident.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then Jury said, “Was there something you wanted me to do, Tom?”

  “Yes. When I was talking to Oswald, he said he had a good friend who was a superintendent at New Scotland Yard. That got me thinking . . . Well, I’ll certainly understand if you don’t—” Tom Williamson rubbed again at his wrist at the place where the watch wasn’t.

  Jury wondered what had happened to it. “If I don’t—?”

  “Want to have a word with Commander Macalvie.”

  “You mean try to reopen the case? That would be somewhat—unorthodox, wouldn’t it? Someone in my position interfering with someone in his position?” To say nothing of being highly improper, against every tenet of police procedure, against propriety, and, probably, against the queen. Jury could hardly wait to ring him.

  “Right. Sorry. I know it’s a harebrained idea.” Tom Williamson tossed back the rest of his whiskey.

  “Not at all. I can understand how hard it must be, not knowing.” How many other platitudes had Jury got waiting in the wings? “But, yes, I don’t mind putting a question to Mr. Macalvie. He’s a friend of mine.”

  Tom looked as if he’d just been given the City below them. “That would be extremely kind.”

  “But, listen: if by some miracle police did reinvestigate your wife’s death and found it was murder, what then? What would you do? What could you do?”

  Tom thought for a moment. “Well, I expect I’d better get a solicitor.”

  Jury looked puzzled.

  Tom smiled wryly. “Because I’d be the prime suspect. My wife was a very wealthy woman.” He pulled the empty bottle of Krug out of the bed of ice. “This kind of wealthy.”

  Smiling slightly, Jury said, “If you’re to be the prime suspect, I take it you have an alibi?”

  “I was in London. As a matter of fact I was visiting Oswald.”

  “That should do it.” Jury set down his glass.

  Tom said, suddenly, “Where are you going after this, Superintendent?”

  “Going? Nowhere. Back to my digs. I live in Islington.”

  Tom had his mobile out and said, “Would you pardon me for a moment while I make this call?”

  “Of course.” Jury was happy to be alone here at the top of Tower 42, looking out on a London that at this point was inaccessible to him and he to it. He rose to move closer to the window. Tess Williamson would not have been able to look down on London without being terrified, he supposed.

  Tom Williamson was back, sitting down, picking up his drink. Jury joined him.

  “I canceled a dinner engagement. I wonder if you’d like to have dinner with me? I was thinking of the Zetter in Clerkenwell. It’s close to Islington, so you wouldn’t be too inconvenienced getting home. Do you know it?”

  The Zetter was where he had met Lu Aguilar; she had then been a detective inspector with Islington police. And she was now, after a terrible car wreck and its aftermath of weeks in a coma, back home in Brazil. She had regained consciousness, but the consciousness wasn’t telling her much. Jury was a stranger.

  “Oh, yes. I know it.”

  Jury’s Flat, Islington

  Monday, 10:00 P.M.

  2

  * * *

  Devon?” said Carole-anne Palutski, Jury’s upstairs neighbor who was at the moment downstairs, sitting on his sofa, flipping through the glossy pages of a magazine called Hair Today. She tossed it aside, apparently liking nothing in there better than what she already had.

  “The plan was, you was to go to Northants and visit your chum.” As if she had made the plan.

  Jury was stuffing assorted clothes into a duffel bag and, at the moment, studying a tie, or a selection of ties he had arranged over the top of his easy chair. They all looked alike, in the way all of those hairdos must have looked to Carole-anne. He was only studying the tie because she had insisted he wouldn’t need a tie, not “up in the country, like.”

  “Northampton is not really the country, like.”

  That had preceded the question, “Devon?”

  “I am going to Northants, only for a day or two, and then to Devon. Exeter.”

  Carole-anne was studying Jury far more closely than she was studying Hair Today. “You know Devon’s the other side of England, don’t you? It’s miles.”

  That “miles” rather stunted her grasp of distance; still he was pleased by her rudimentary knowledge of geography. Until now, he thought she couldn’t follow a line anywhere past Clapham Common. Jury said, “From London to Exeter is a hundred and seventy miles.”

  “Like I said.” The magazine had resurfaced in her lap and her head was bent over it, the lamplight showing her hair in all of its flame-throwing glory.

  “Perhaps I’ll take my chum with me.”

  “Him? Lord Ardry as once was?”

  Dear God, where had she picked up this arcane upstairs-downstairs idiom?

  “You don’t think he rides in cars, Lord Ardry, as once was?” Jury spent a moment imagining the 170 miles with Melrose Plant. They’d be stopping at every Little Chef along the way. Plant was as bad as Wiggin—no, worse. “Mr. Plant is a chum of Commander Macalvie, my chum in Exeter.”

  “So you’re all chums together. You and him and the Devon police.”

  “Correct. The Devonshire and Cornwall Constabulary.”

  “Sounds like lead feet.”

  Jury liked that. He’d be sure to tell Macalvie. “Does, doesn’t it?”

  “My guess is he’s trying to get you to join it.”

  Jury stopped pushing a sweater into the bag, startled by her prescience. That had been just what Macalvie had been doing, off and on for some years now.

  Carole-anne decided to lie down on the sofa, shedding her strappy sandals. “Well, you won’t want to leave London.” And me.

  “True. I might not want to leave London.” And you.

  On the little table, the phone rang.

  She said, “It’s probably that Dr. Nancy.”

  He had started for it and stopped. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she rang just before you came in. Didn’t you read your messages?”

  The phone still brr-brr’d.

  Jury leaned over her. “Carole-anne, I’ve been here for an hour. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I’m supposed to be careful and write down messages exactly—”

  Brr-brr.

  “What were you doing in my flat anyway?”

  She tossed the magazine on the floor. “I like that! I told you this morning I’d come in and do you a nice fry-up—”

  “Has anything been fried up?” Dramatically, Jury sniffed.

  Brr.

  He grabbed up the receiver.

  Dead. Damn! Why did he have these inane arguments with Carole-anne?

  “There, now you went and missed your call.” Pleased with the dead phone, she picked up Hair Today.

  Jury fell into the easy chair. And gone tomorrow.

  Lead feet.

  Ardry End

  Tuesday, Noon

/>   3

  * * *

  The first person Richard Jury saw as he got out of his car the following morning was Mr. Blodgett, Melrose Plant’s hermit-in-­residence. On the far side of the grand grounds of Ardry End sat what Melrose Plant insisted upon was a hermitage. Melrose had seen a similar structure, stone and wattle, in the pages of Country Life. In an ad for an ostentatious and overpriced property, a large, eighteenth-century-style house, was this little stone structure on the grounds.

  In the real stone-and-wattle eighteenth century, all the best people had hermits, Melrose had read somewhere, although he was vague on details. But he wanted one expressly for the purpose of the hermit’s moving about, looking wild-eyed and a little dangerous, popping up at windows when his aunt Agatha was inside wolfing down cream teas and sherry. He meant to scare her off.

  The position paid well. Melrose Plant always paid well.

  If there’s one thing you aren’t, Jury had said to him once, it’s a skinflint. Melrose had not taken well to the compliment; he wanted to know the left-out things Jury thought he was.

  In the distance, Mr. Blodgett was waving him over.

  Jury returned the wave and made the longish trek to where Mr. Blodgett stood beside his hermitage.

  Originally Mr. Blodgett had worn a beard and long hair and an unkempt look befitting a hermit. Of late, he had cut both hair and beard and generally smartened himself up. And Jury saw that the hermitage itself had been smartened up, for it appeared to have a new extension. Closer, he could see it was a screen-enclosed room, a sort of sunporch.

  “My Florida room, Mr. Jury,” announced Mr. Blodgett. “Built ’er on me own, I did. Come in, come in, look around.” Mr. Blodgett held wide a screen door.

  The ceiling was a bit low for Jury but would accommodate Mr. Blodgett’s short stature nicely. Jury wondered where in heaven’s name he would have come by the patio furniture, two chairs and a lounge grouped about a glass-topped table. The cushions bore a pattern of coconut palms.

  “Well, Mr. Blodgett, this is very, very pleasant. And you did it all yourself?”

  “Ev’ry bit. Now it’d be nice t’ave a telly, but o’ course, no electric’s laid on out ’ere.”

  “You make do with your oil lamps, then?” There was one centered on the table. “And candles.” A fat one sat on a little metal table, not part of the patio suite, probably. “And you’ve a wood-burning stove inside, right?” Jury nodded toward the hermitage proper.

  Mr. Blodgett nodded as he removed his cap, scratched his head meditatively, and repositioned the cap. Jury was not sure, but he thought the very faded intertwined letters were MU.

  “If you’re a Manchester United fan,” Jury said, smiling, “you really do need a telly.”

  Mr. Blodgett removed his cap then and turned it in his hands, as if addressing the lord of the manor. “Oh, I don’t think Lord Ardry’d look too kindly on electric in the ’ermitage. Well, you can see his point—”

  Jury merely smiled and thought, No, I don’t see his point. Anyone who would engage a hermit in the first place would be able to entertain any wacky idea. Jury was about to speak to this point when he heard a short bark and turned to see the dog Joey barreling toward him, with Melrose Plant (aka Lord Ardry) advancing at a much more leisurely pace.

  “Joey!” he called.

  The dog jumped on him, then got down and circled around him a few times, after which he ran off, not toward Melrose, whom he didn’t seem to give a fig about, but toward the barn where lived Melrose’s horse and goat, Aggrieved and Aghast.

  Jury had found Joey in a Clerkenwell doorway, nearly starved to death. He’d taken him to a vet, then, later to an animal refuge, where he had, still later, claimed him back and taken him to Northamptonshire. The girl in True Friends, named Joelly, had found an old collar with the name JOE engraved on a little metal nameplate. She had so impressed Jury that he thought the dog should be named after her, so they settled on a y being inscribed after the Joe to make “Joey.”

  The dog, she had said, being an Appenzell mountain dog, needed space and air. It was a working dog, one that worked with herds—sheep, goats.

  Jury’s one-bedroom flat was hardly a place of space and air, and he had nothing to herd unless he counted Carole-anne, so he had hit on the idea of taking Joey along to Ardry End and pretending that the dog had just turned up there on his own. “Lost,” a stray, whatever. Joey had immediately made for the barn and the goat. One goat (Jury guessed) was better than none.

  Thus the “lost” dog had to be named. No one at the Jack and Hammer paid any attention to Jury’s protests that “the name’s right on the collar. Joey.”

  “Aggro!” called Melrose. The dog went on about his business.

  “His name’s Joey,” said Jury for the millionth time as they made a swing round the Florida room before returning to the main house.

  Melrose ignored that, as usual. “Glad you got here in time for lunch. It’s Soufflé Day. Come along.” He turned to Blodgett. “Ruthven’ll be bringing yours along in a bit, Mr. Blodgett.”

  “Blodgett gets soufflés?”

  “Of course. I told you. It’s Soufflé Day. I had scrambled egg soufflé for breakfast. Delicious.”

  “What’s for lunch?”

  “Tomato soup soufflé, cheese soufflé, and chocolate soufflé for the pud. Don’t you like soufflés?”

  They had by now reached the drive where Jury’s car was parked.

  “Of course, but how in hell do you make a soup with it?”

  “Can’t imagine. Help with your luggage?”

  “No.” Jury gave him a look and dragged his duffel bag out of the trunk.

  “Are we going camping? Should I get my bedroll?”

  “The Beamo one? Why not?”

  They walked up the wide steps and into Soufflé Day.

  ________

  The tomato soup soufflé had turned out to be a creamy tomato basil with a puff of pinkish baked egg white floating atop it. Then there was the cheese, then the chocolate. Coffee, brandy.

  As they were now walking down the drive, Jury said, “I could do that all over again. What’s for dinner?”

  “Well, at this point in things, Martha runs out of steam, so dinner will be ordinary roast beef or something, but dessert will be a Grand Marnier soufflé.”

  “I’m for it.” Jury stopped, and so did Melrose, toward the end of the drive to look back and see in the distance, Ruthven swanning across the grass, carrying Mr. Blodgett’s soufflé.

  “How does Ruthven feel about waiting on a hermit?”

  “Oh, you know Ruthven, he’s so self-contained he’d happily take on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party if asked.”

  They continued walking, stopping when they got to the Northampton Road, which, although not famous for speeding cars, still remained a proving ground for the odd motorcycle gang who seemed bent on turning it into that twenty-four-hour race at Le Mans.

  “You should get electricity laid on back there.” Jury tilted his head toward the long lawn and the hermitage.

  “What? Blodgett’s supposed to be a hermit. They write religious tracts by candlelight. Next, you’ll say he needs a telly.”

  “He needs a telly.”

  Melrose ignored that and walked on. “So you’re off to Exeter tomorrow? Say hello to Brian Macalvie for me.”

  “I will.” Over lunch, Jury had told Melrose about the death of Tess Williamson. “Her husband wants me to see this house, Laburnum.”

  “A name suggesting poison. Were it mine, I’d change it.”

  “I’m sure you would. You’re always changing names.”

  “Very funny.”

  Jack and Hammer

  Tuesday, 2:00 P.M.

  4

  * * *

  I’ve got it,” said Trueblood. “Agape.”

  “You mean,” said
Joanna Lewes, “a-ga-pe, three syllables, meaning ‘peace and love’? That sort of thing?” She frowned.

  “No, I mean ‘a-gape.’ ” When they all turned judgmental eyes on Trueblood, he said, “For God’s sake, just look at him. He’s been sitting there the whole time with his mouth open.”

  The eyes now turned to the lightly panting dog Diane Demorney had found, inexplicably, on her doorstep. It had indeed been sitting with its mouth open, tongue hanging a bit to the left.

  Vivian Rivington said, “But the dog is not part of Melrose’s household. We don’t have to follow the Ag rule, every name beginning with Ag.”

  “I have an even better idea,” said Richard Jury, settling his pint of Adnams on the table. “We could call him Stanley. Stanley’s the name on his collar.” Indeed it was, right there engraved on a brass nameplate on his brown leather collar. There was also a leather lead now unattached to the collar and draped over Diane’s chair.

  “Stanley! That’s an absurd name for this dog,” said Trueblood. “He’s a Staffordshire terrier.”

  “Marshall’s right,” said Diane. “It doesn’t suit him at all. He’s more of a . . . Tony. What about Tony?”

  “What about the name on his collar?” said Jury.

  “Hm. An-ton-i-o!” said Trueblood in a fake Italian accent. “Not bad.”

  Stanley didn’t bother looking at him. He went on lightly panting.

  Jury said, “Would you like me to tell you what I find most interesting about this insane desire to name lost dogs? You do agree the dog is lost?”

  Melrose sighed. “Is this going to be one of your Socratic arguments where you ask a series of questions that can, by their nature, have only one answer?”

  Jury ignored him and continued. “What is interesting is that no one, not one of you, has made any attempt to find its owner.”

  Diane Demorney, who was drinking her postlunch martini, straight up with a twist, stopped it on its way to her mouth. “I beg your pardon! I most certainly did look for the owner, all round my front steps and down the walk. I went from my door straight down to the road, looked and saw absolutely no one. And, whilst Tony and I were walking, I looked all along the road, both sides—”