The Horse You Came in On Read online

  “Bobby was batsman, you see, and he had a tricky heart. Fanny was constantly after him to give up his damned sports—the cricket, the polo, the hunt, even—but Bobby wouldn’t hear of it. Trying to keep up with my husband, who was absolutely expert at sport.”

  “So how . . . ?”

  “Bobby had a bad heart, and so, giving one furious bat, he simply keeled over. Then my husband, seeing him go down, dropped the ball and dashed to his rescue. And he tripped.” Lady Cray took a long swallow of champagne. “Ran straight into the wicket! Can you imagine such a freak accident? He fell and hit his head. I was always telling those boys that they’d do better to choose sports that weren’t so damned dangerous. I can tell you, both of us—Fanny and I—were heartbroken. Fanny was deathly ill herself; I wondered then if she had a heart condition.” Her eyes glittered, and she took another long drink from her glass. “But to tell the truth, it might have been just as well they died that way. Dickie would have had a very hard time of it without Bobby. It was funny, really, to watch Bobby try and keep up with my husband. Dickie was Master of Foxhounds, and Bobby could hardly ride.” She sighed. “Accident prone, both of them. There were accidents at polo, at billiards, at the Chichester boat race. Fanny and I knew they’d come to it in the end.”

  The way she rendered the antic histories of the two husbands was to pace before the fireplace, backlit by the jumping flames, brandishing her tulip champagne glass like a dagger so that “come to’t in the end” was absolutely Jacobean. Then Lady Cray heaved a sigh and said, “And of course, with both of them pegging out right there at the match, well, we’d certainly got something in common. We did get along quite well, in spite of her unabashed envy of my title. The Hamiltons had a great deal of money, much more than I, but she loved the British aristocracy. I think she was always in search of her pedigree, corresponding with professors at Oxford and Cambridge and one, even, in America. I don’t know why; it wasn’t the DAR that interested Fanny, it was Burke’s Peerage. I tried to console her by saying the title wasn’t, after all, anything I’d ever earned—I mean, it isn’t exactly the Victoria Cross, is it? We hardly ever earn them, do we? It’s all an accident of birth or marriage, unless you’re in the theater, or something like that. Like Olivier or Peggy Ashcroft—I expect they did earn theirs. Americans love nothing so much as a title, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Thinking of Melrose Plant’s aunt, Jury had to.

  “It was certainly so in Fanny’s case. Oh, Bobby didn’t care for a title; it was cricket he loved.” She hooted. “But there it is again. Cricket! The aristocracy and cricket. Well, it doesn’t even have to be a peerage—any lowly baronetcy will do. As long as it isn’t Irish, of course!”

  Jury laughed.

  “The British peerage! Sometimes I believe Americans think that’s England in a nutshell. I remember when I first met them, it was at Lord’s during the second innings. Fanny was a friend of one of the people I was with; we’d taken a hamper along—you know, cold chicken and white wine—and were having a lovely picnic in the mound stand. She was fascinated that I was ‘Lady’ Cray and almost immediately confided in me that she’d love nothing so much as a title. If only her husband had been born to the purple, she said. I laughed at that. They all think it’s terribly royal, don’t they? Americans are so romantic. Ermine and scarlet and all of us living in places like Woburn Abbey. ‘I do want a title,’ she said, ‘though Bobby doesn’t’—as if they were arguing over duck for dinner!”

  Lady Cray topped up her glass and poured Sergeant Wiggins more tea. Jury declined.

  “Tell me about her nephew’s death.” He knew she’d been avoiding this painful subject with all her chatter about titles and cricket.

  “His name was Philip. He was killed—murdered.”

  “I’m sorry. This was in Philadelphia?”

  “Not in Philadelphia. That’s where he worked. Upper Pennsylvania somewhere. He had a little cabin in the woods, very isolated, and someone just walked in”—she shrugged her shoulders—“and shot him. It happened two months ago.” She shook her head, anticipating Jury’s question. “The police think it must have been robbery. Why, I don’t know. Philip had nothing of value. He’d gone to the cabin for one of his weekends—a friend of his told the police all this—and he might not have been found for some time if this same friend hadn’t got worried when he didn’t come back on the Sunday evening. They had some sort of date.”

  Wiggins looked up from his notebook. “A lady friend, was it?”

  “Yes. Helen, or Heather . . . well, I don’t quite remember. Philip had talked about her once or twice. Fanny flew over, of course. She talked to some sheriff or other in Pennsylvania, where it happened. Sinclair, his name was, I believe. Then she stayed on for a while, went to Texas, or . . .” She paused with a frown of attempted remembrance. “Somewhere out there. Abilene? She brought me this.” Here she retrieved the piece of turquoise from the table and held it up. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Jury agreed. “What about the rest of Philip’s family?”

  “Fanny was his only relative. I should explain that the Calverts—Philip’s father and mother—were both killed when he was a little boy. Plane crash. Fanny wasn’t related by blood, but I can tell you she simply adored him. I’m convinced people really can die of a broken heart. Anyway, she’s dead.”

  Lady Cray looked away, through the window, where a chill breeze scattered and rattled old leaves like copper. “I met Philip; he was here two years ago. And he got on famously with my own nephew, my great-nephew, Andrew.” Lady Cray stopped to handle the turquoise block again, regarding him with her wonderful silvery eyes, whose expression was now full of sadness. “The thing is, Superintendent, I feel I could at least do this for her: carry on with trying to find out what really happened to Philip. She was absolutely devastated by his death. You can’t imagine.”

  Oh, yes I can, thought Jury. He stared at the silver flautist embedded in the turquoise. For something to do, to be able to turn his back on the room, he got up and walked to the tall window that overlooked the cold garden, dripping as if last night’s rain were still trapped here, the trees still raining. He had been sitting on that bench in the Tate where Fanny Hamilton had sat; the portrait of Chatterton swam before his eyes. White skin, red hair. Lying on his narrow bed. He shut his eyes. Some composure returned, he turned with a half-smile to Lady Cray. “And you thought perhaps I . . . ?” He left it as a question.

  “Please. I know it’s asking a lot; I know you’re on holiday. But that also means you aren’t tied up. . . .”

  “Lady Cray, there’s protocol. This killing happened in the United States. Scotland Yard can’t go messing around in the affairs of American sheriffs.”

  “How bloody pompous,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  He smiled. “It’s not really pomposity. I don’t mean to be difficult.”

  “Well, you are being. A few days’ holiday in Philadelphia would make a change, wouldn’t it? Naturally, I’d pay your expenses. First class. Or take Concorde if you like.”

  “That’s not really the point.”

  “Oh, ho-hum, Superintendent.” She patted her mouth with the tips of her fingers, simulating a smile. “You know, when Alex plays poker he uses an expression I like. ‘Calling in markers.’ ” Her smile was bewitching, turning the face of this elderly woman into that of a much younger one.

  “Uh-huh. You getting this, Wiggins? Bribing a police officer?”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Considering all the work I did for you at Castle Howe . . . well.” She smoked, regarding him. “With a great deal of help from Mr. Plant. How is he? Such a clever man.”

  Jury smiled. “Yes. He is. And so I take it, Lady Cray, you’re calling—”

  “Calling in my markers.”

  6

  Staring through the plate glass window of the Starrdust, Wiggins was munching on some vegetarian melange he had bought over at Cranks in Covent Garden, and trying to muscle his way closer
to the window and in between a little boy with spiky hair and a small girl wearing big glasses that dwarfed her face.

  “Would you just look at that, sir?”

  The Starrdust Twins, Joy and Meg, had outdone themselves with this window dressing. It was a replica of Covent Garden Market—not the new one that lay just over the street, with its collection of boutiques, health food restaurants, and space-age neon places, but the nineteenth-century marketplace. Jury felt a wave of nostalgia as he looked at the fruit and vegetable stalls, spilling over with tiny cabbages; at the floral hall and the flower sellers; at the miniature figures of porters balancing baskets on their heads or pushing carts. He could almost feel the bustle, smell the fish and game—two acres of it.

  The Starrdust’s owner was an astrologer and antiquarian; given that the shop dealt only in celestial, astrological, or otherwise otherworldly matters (not the least of which were the fortunes told by Carole-anne Palutski in her silken tent), Jury wondered at this backwards look into London’s history. And while he was wondering, the scene changed from light to dark as the scrim, all but invisible until now, rose on a night scene of little dark streets, a square with a horse-drawn carriage, and gaslights.

  All the children gasped and applauded. This included Wiggins.

  To enter the Starrdust was to step not back in time but out of it, much as if one were walking through a doorway open on nothing else but sheer blue sky and brilliant white clouds in a surrealistic painting. Light flowed and winked from the ceiling-sky, across which spilled a backlit Milky Way and planets which lit up and faded as the hidden lights brightened and dimmed. The shop was long and narrow, and the farther end was in total darkness except for the blue neon sign which spelled out “HorrorScope.” This must be a new sign, one Andrew Starr had made for the Wendy-house-like structure at the rear of the shop, which was the children’s favorite part of the Starrdust. Starr was a man in his late thirties chronologically, but one who seemed never to have grown out of childhood. Perhaps this was why he was the only shopkeeper Jury knew who never tossed unaccompanied kiddies out the door.

  “Super!”

  Out of the darkness walked Carole-anne Palutski, carrying a plate with a huge slice of coconut cake that she forked up as she advanced. “Want some?” She held out a forkful.

  “No thanks, Madame Zostra. You look gorgeous, as always.”

  Madame Zostra, teller of dubious fortunes, lately taken to reading palms when she got bored with the tarot, was in her Pre-Raphaelite phase. The harem days of bare midriffs, gauze trousers, chiffon veils, and tinkling ankle bells had given way to the Spanish influence of mantillas and bejeweled combs; that in turn was dropped in favor of the Arthurian phase and the Guinevere look.

  But now it was Rossetti and Burne-Jones stuff: long, floating gowns, shapeless except for the shape that Carole-anne lent them, which was plenty. After gazing at a few pictures of long-haired ladies reclining on fainting couches and chaise longues—doped up, Jury imagined, with laudanum—she again had changed her look. She had even invested in “scrunching” at Vidal Sassoon (something that she’d also put poor Mrs. Wassermann through, until Jury put a stop to it: he didn’t care for Mrs. Wassermann scrunched). Now she wore her red-gold hair in a waterfall of crinkly waves. No fancy combs, no coronets, thank goodness.

  “So, Super, what’re you doing here?” Her mouth was full of cake, shreds of coconut dusting the air when she spoke. It was a wonder, with the stuff she ate, she kept her figure, but keep it she did.

  “To have my fortune told, of course.”

  “I told it once.”

  In Carole-anne’s galaxy, Jury’s stars seldom shone and never moved. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she saw no relationships with women (except herself and Mrs. Wassermann), no moves or promotions, no trips, no travails. Whenever Jury did venture beyond the limits of Greater London, she told him he was tempting the Fates. And all of the lines in Jury’s hand appeared to be parallel ones, never meeting, never converging, just going back and forth uneventfully, like underground tracks.

  “Things change,” said Jury.

  Casually, she lifted his left hand, dropped it, and said, “Not for you.” She mashed the prongs of her fork down on cake crumbs.

  “That’s my left hand. You said the left was just ‘what you came in with.’ I believe that was your way of putting it.” He held out his right hand.

  She barely tossed the hand a glance. “What you came in with is what you go out with.”

  “I thought maybe this time you might see the trip before I return from it.”

  She frowned. “What trip? You just got back from Yorkshire.”

  By now Wiggins appeared to be next in line for the HorrorScope. Probably shown the kids his warrant card, thought Jury. As Vaughn Monroe’s smooth rendition of “Racing with the Moon” was being scratched to death by a needle in need of changing, Carole-anne grumpily invited Jury into the tent where there were a small table and two big cushions. On one of these sat a huge stuffed Wild Thing animal that Jury had brought back from Long Piddleton. It was understood (at least by Carole-anne) that trips meant presents.

  She moved the stuffed animal and set the cake plate near her crystal ball, used more for checking makeup than calling up her familiar. “How long you going to be gone this time?”

  He smiled. “Can’t you tell?”

  She drew his right hand towards her (having already given the left the cursory glance his birthright deserved) and said, “Well, trips don’t show up in hands, really. Where’re you going?”

  “Northants. Long Piddleton.”

  “Oh, there.” She dropped his hand, obviously relieved. Northamptonshire, by virtue of being the home of Jury’s faithful old friend Melrose Plant, did not qualify as a trip at all. Since there was obviously nothing (given all the times he’d been there in the past) in Long Piddleton to inflame Jury’s mind, there was consequently nothing to disturb Carole-anne’s.

  Stratford-upon-Avon, now, he’d best keep quiet about. This was uncharted territory in the Carole-anne galaxy.

  Jenny Kennington lived in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  • • •

  There had been, several months ago, a bit of an episode in his flat. When he’d come in, Carole-anne had been lounging (and dressed for it, too, in her new pajamas) on his sofa, leafing through a fashion magazine.

  “Who’s JK?” she’d asked.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “JK.” She’d taken a tiny wad of pink paper from the pocket of her cerise lounging pajamas and unfolded it, then refolded it into a small pink square, as she seemed to be considering its message. It was one of those “While You Were Out” sheets from his telephone message pad.

  “Did the lady leave anything but her initials?”

  “Janey? Something like that.”

  “Jenny.” He snapped his fingers. “Hand it over.”

  All of Jury’s lady friends were referred to by Carole-anne by initials only. She had managed to oust SB-slash-H from the lives of the Islington house (which was just as well, Jury had later realized); JH she had been truly remorseful about; JK was an unknown quantity.

  • • •

  He said now to Carole-anne, “I just thought I’d call in and say goodbye.” That had really been Jury’s purpose, hoping the Starrdust’s ambience and Vaughn Monroe would cushion what small blow there was. “And what happened to the nice couple who came to see the first-floor flat?” Jury uncoiled himself from the cushion.

  “Those two?” Her frown was horrible. “You couldn’t have stood those ones overhead, Super.” She leaned closer to her crystal ball and wiped a bit of coconut from the corner of her mouth. “He walked with a walker and she needed two sticks. They’d’ve been clumping back and forth, back and forth all night. Said they never went to bed before one or two. Well, you’d’ve gone stark staring mad, wouldn’t you?”

  “Thanks for watching out for me, love.”

  “No problem, Super.”

  7
r />   Sam Lasko had the same secretary, and age hadn’t mellowed her. She ran by fits and starts, like her typewriter. Lasko wasn’t a nervous type, but his office appeared to be. Lasko wasn’t there; he was out on a case. And his secretary’s tone implied that Jury should be, too, not mooning around here like the last time. Probably she had forgotten: “the last time” Lasko had dropped a case in Jury’s lap. Or maybe that was it; maybe she was afraid other cases might get dropped and Jury would become a permanent fixture in Stratford-upon-Avon. Perhaps she feared change. God knows, he could certainly understand that.

  So she kept on typing, her back stern, her disapproving expression set like cement, until he commented on the color of her cardigan, how pretty it was, how it went with her coloring. The typewriter stopped clicking; her face softened a little. The cardigan was new; he had seen the price tag sticking up over the top of the collar.

  • • •

  The girl who answered the door was probably no more than eight or nine and wore a large apron. Jury’s heart sank. Jenny was always moving; he always seemed to be saying hello and goodbye to her in rooms full of packing crates and boxes. Now he was afraid the girl would tell him, Oh, she’s gone.

  She did.

  “But she’ll be back. She’s only gone to the top of the road, to get an aubergine.”

  He loved the way she said it. But she seemed uncertain as to how to deal with him.

  “I’m an old friend,” he said. He handed her his card and watched her trying not to be impressed by its origins.

  Finally, she said, “Well, I expect it’ll be all right.”

  She had been accompanied, in her visit to the front door, by a rough-looking black cat that was not impressed at all. Jury frowned over the cat: Didn’t he know it? Hadn’t he seen it before?

  The little house was in the old section of Stratford-upon-Avon, off the road that wound around the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the churchyard. He had been here a few years before, that time he was working on Lasko’s case. It had been just before she let the house in order to take an ocean voyage with an aging relation. The woman had since died.