The Old Wine Shades Page 5

  ‘But she had a mobile. You said she called the estate agent from her car.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I’m betting a dead battery. Glynn could never remember to power up the phone. The battery was always going dead. She hates mobiles. Probably that’s the reason hers is always running down.’

  ‘I’m with her on that.’

  Now, as if they had just been cued, three men at the bar pulled out their mobiles and proceeded to have three different, but equally loud, conversations.

  ‘Christ,’ muttered Harry. ‘Let’s go to a table.’

  Mungo, who’d been lounging under Harry’s chair, pulled himself out from under and raised his baleful eyes to look into Jury’s own.

  As they took their seats in one of the stalls near the fireplace, Jury said, ‘Mungo has a very soulful look.’

  ‘That’s just for show,’ said Harry.

  ‘But I wonder if he doesn’t really miss Robbie and his mother.’

  ‘I expect he does.’

  Jury looked down at Mungo, whose head was again resting on Jury’s foot. ‘He doesn’t strike me as a one-man dog. Did you take him to that house?’’

  ‘No, I didn’t see how Mungo could help much with picking up a scent that was a year old.’

  ‘They can, you know. They’re quite amazing.’

  Harry nodded and went on. ‘This house seemed implacably cold. It’s the sort of cold that eats into you. I realize it had gone untenanted for a long while, but it still felt unnatural. They’d left the electricity on as they were trying to rent it. But not the heat. The house is too large for a family of three–’

  ‘And a dog.’ Jury felt a brief push.

  Harry smiled. ‘And a dog, yes. The architecture is basically Georgian. Large rooms, high ceilings, Adam moldings and chimneypiece. I told you the place was empty of furnishings except in the drawing room. All of the pieces were antique and looked very pricey: Russian bureau, Regency commode and that gorgeous rug. Very posh. I was surprised the place hadn’t been vandalized. The agent–Mrs. Bathous–had asked the owner to leave the drawing-room furniture, if he would, to give the place a little bit of a lived-in look. Surprisingly, he did. I wouldn’t want those pieces just standing around.’ He remembered something. ‘And Marjorie Bathous didn’t understand the dregs of tea in one of the teacups. She hadn’t put out the teacups. Minton, they were.’

  ‘Now, that’s interesting. Someone had been drinking from one. That’s curious. Would Mrs. Gault have done that? Filled the kettle and measured out tea?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine Glynnis making tea there.’

  ‘It almost sounds staged. The setting, I mean.’

  ‘Staged? By whom? For what reason?’

  ‘I have no idea. How about Glynnis Gault herself?’ There was silence as Harry looked at Jury, mystified. ‘You’re kidding.’

  Jury laughed. ‘That’s supposed to be my line, isn’t it? Doesn’t the scene look staged if you think about it?’

  Harry drank off his glass of wine. ‘What this brings to mind is an analogy I read which compared Gödel’s theorem to the actors in a play within a play, where what an ‘actor’ in the internal play said would be a commentary on his ‘real’ life. The real life in this case being the outside play, the fictive framework.’

  ‘Who is Gödel?’

  ‘A mathematician who formulated a theory called ‘incompleteness.’ The theory of incompleteness. There’s no proof that we know all that we think we know since all that we think we know can’t be formalized, which is the incompleteness proof.’

  Jury thought about this. ‘If he’s a mathematician, wouldn’t that more or less work against logic? I mean mathematics insists on logic, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Absolutely. Gödel wasn’t popular in the mathematics community when they finally worked out what he was saying. We’re not machines; we have intuition. His detractors didn’t like the idea of intuition where mathematics is concerned. Mathematics should be considered as pure logic.’

  Jury took a drink and wished like hell he had a cigarette. ‘Anyway, we were talking about Glynnis Gauh’s staging her own disappearance.’ Jury held up his hand. ‘Not that I think that; it’s just an idea I tossed out.’

  ‘I don’t get it; why would Glynn stage it?’

  ‘Or someone else stage it?’

  ‘It’s monstrous. Why would she want to vanish in that way? And take Robbie with her?’

  Jury felt a push at his shoe. He smiled. ‘And Mungo. It wouldn’t be the first time an unhappy wife kidnapped her child for Some reason. Custody battle it is, usually.’

  ‘Hugh and Glynn were happy; they weren’t thinking about divorce.’

  ‘Not as far as you know.’

  ‘I know both of them very well; you couldn’t be much closer than we were.’

  ‘Then let’s say for the sake of argument, who knew Mrs. Gault was going house hunting besides her husband and the estate agent?’

  Harry Johnson folded his arms on the bar and considered. ‘Their staff, I imagine. Certainly the cook, as she’d be getting dinner. The maid? Well, the cook probably mentioned it to her. ‘Staff’ is probably overdoing it in the Gauhs’ case as there were just those two.’ Jury smiled slightly; for him, that would constitute ‘staff.’ Harry went on. ‘Someone might have known she went to Surrey to look at houses, but exactly where in Surrey, I doubt. You seem to be looking for a killer.’

  ‘An abductor, anyway. Go on about the house.’

  ‘It sits back from the road, very long front garden and the woods around on both sides and the back. I thought it seemed awfully isolated, but that, of course, is what they wanted in a second home–peace and quiet.’

  ‘That’s what people think they want, until they get it. What about Robbie? He’d be at a loss for friends, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Unfortunately, Robbie was pretty lost anyway. You could say Robbie had already been kidnapped.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s what I was going to tell you. Robbie was autistic.’

  ‘What a shame.’

  ‘He didn’t have friends; he didn’t make them very easily. Well, what can you do if you can’t or won’t talk? But he’s a great reader.

  Actually, she might have taken Robbie along so as to see how he liked it. There’s a school in Lark Rise for kids with autism and other speech and I suppose cognitive problems. That was what Glynnis wanted a house there for. She wasn’t looking for a holiday cottage. They would live there during the school year. She didn’t tell Hugh that, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Hugh didn’t like the idea of Robbie’s changing schools. He thought it would be too hard on him, and he had enough on his plate without that. They argued about that quite a bit. I think it was the only thing they did argue about.’

  ‘I see.’ Jury thought about this. ‘The first one, this cottage–’

  ‘Lark Cottage. It was a small, neat-looking house in quite nice gardens. I didn’t talk to the owner.’

  ‘What do you think it was that was so off-putting to Mrs. Gault?’

  ‘Just a little too cute, too quaint. The kind of place tourists would think so typically English.’

  ‘There are entire villages that are that. Did she find Chipping Campden too quaint? Lower Slaughter?’

  Harry laughed. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was Glynnis Gault a bit of a snob?’

  ‘Not at all. Quite the contrary, I’d say. She was accepting of things almost to the point of naiveté. She was wearing a black suit she’d bought from Marks and Spencer when she left the house.’ Harry smiled at the thought.

  ‘Then does this description of Lark Cottage, at least of her reaction to it, strike you as like her?’

  ‘Since you put it that way, no, it doesn’t sound like Glynn.’ He picked up the wine bottle, turned to Jury. ‘Are you saying maybe some other woman actually made the call?’ Harry saw the bottle was empty.

  ‘The telephone call
? No, I don’t think someone else made the call, although it’s always a possibility.’ Jury paused. ‘Do you know of anyone who wished her harm?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Glynn wasn’t a woman to make enemies.’ Harry set the wine bottle down. ‘Look, I’m famished. Care to have dinner?’

  Mungo came out from under the two stools as if the invitation were extended to him.

  ‘Yes. Where?’

  ‘I know a place.’ Harry rose, unhooked his coat from the back of the bar chair. ‘Then I can tell you about my cat.’

  ‘Cat?’

  ‘Her name is Schrödinger.’

  ‘Good name for a cat.’

  ‘I think you’ll like her.’

  SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT

  9

  ‘Schrödinger’s equation–’ Harry began.

  ‘I thought that was your cat’s name.’

  ‘It is. My cat’s named after the physicist Schrödinger.’

  ‘If I were your cat, I’d object.’ Jury felt Mungo twisting around on his feet as if he’d object, too.

  ‘The Schrödinger equation is famous; it might be the greatest contribution to quantum mechanics besides Niels Bohr’s.’ Jury sipped a very good single malt. They had forgone the wine list in favor of whiskey. The Docklands restaurant was crowded with up-and-comers, you could tell, along with the chattering classes.

  ‘Am I going to like this?’

  ‘You’ll love it. There’s a thought experiment in quantum physics–no, a hypothesis–and it’s very interesting: you put a cat in a box along with a vial containing cyanide, together with a radioactive nucleus and a mechanism to trace the decay. Now, the nucleus has to decay; it’s when the nucleus will decay that we don’t know. But when the nucleus decays, it nudges the mechanism that releases the poison. The poison leaks out and kills the cat.’

  ‘I’m notifying PETA.’

  Harry winced. ‘You don’t do it, for God’s sake; you don’t kill the cat. The point is this: you have only probability to go on that the nucleus will decay by a certain time. Nuclear decay is unpredictable. As I said, it will decay, you just don’t know when; and, of course, you might open the box before the nucleus decays. But you don’t know when or if the cat will die. Now, we know that the nucleus hasn’t decayed, and the cat is alive only when we close the lid of the box. You could say that’s our final measurement until we open it again. All we have to go on is wave function–the wave function of the nucleus–’

  ‘What in hell’s that?’ Jury was feeling both relatively drunk and relatively stupid.

  ‘It’s hard to describe exactly. Say this: in classical physics–’

  ‘Einstein,’ put in Jury, feeling better.

  Harry smiled. ‘Good. In classical physics, an electron can be said to have a certain position. But in quantum mechanics, no. The wave function defines an area, say, of probability. An analogy might be that if a highly contagious disease turns up in a segment of the population, the disease control center gets right on it and tries to work out the probability of its recurrence in certain areas. The wave function isn’t an entity, it’s nothing in itself, it describes probability.’ Harry leaned closer as if he were divulging a sexy secret and went on: ‘So what we’ve got, then, is the probability of an electron’s being in a certain place at a certain moment. Only when we’re measuring it can we know not only where it is but if it is. So the cat–’ Jury waved his hands in front of his face as if clearing a space to breathe in. ‘Are you going to tell me the cat’s both alive and dead at the same time?’

  Harry smiled. ‘That’s right.’

  Jury made a blubbery sound with his lips. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. You just don’t understand. The decayed/undecayed nucleus is entangled with the live/dead cat–’

  Mungo stuck his head out and looked, Jury could have sworn, balefully up at him. The dog pulled his head back under the tablecloth.

  Jury laughed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mungo seems to be entangled with your zombie cat! The undead.’

  ‘He can’t stand the cat; he never could.’

  ‘I sympathize.’ Jury lifted the cloth, said this, let it fall.

  ‘To continue: Niels Bohr made it clear that, of course, the cat wasn’t literally dead and alive at the same time, but in the absence of measurement, there’s no reality, which is crucial. There’s no reality without measurement, and to measure, one has to look. So that we can’t speak of the cat as having any reality until we open the box and look.’

  ‘Kick the damn box; that’ll tell you.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘Why do I feel my lecture is falling upon deaf ears?’

  Jury smiled. ‘Well, drunk ears, anyway.’

  The waiter was there now, launching into his list of specials, a litany from which Jury could make out only two or three words that sounded familiar. ‘Salmon’ was one. He ordered it, despite its sauce, its seasonings and other complications. ‘Fillet’ was another.

  Harry ordered that. They both ordered the house salad.

  They returned (all of them, if Jury correctly assessed Mungo’s temperament) to the undead cat in the box. Jury said, ‘You know, you said something back in the pub about an objects’ changing depending upon how we observed it. This Niels Bohr theory: it sounds like that. That we can’t know if a thing exists until we see it. That’s a lot like the tree in the forest falling.’

  ‘Something like it, yes. We can’t comment on the cat’s separate reality until we open the box. No, it’s more that the cat has no separate reality until we see it; that is, can measure it.’

  Harry paused and drank some more whiskey. ‘Going back to Gödel: he was at Princeton with Einstein, who greatly admired him. Einstein couldn’t have admired that many in his field. And he distrusted quantum theory. Anyway, Gödel proved the existence of unprovable arithmetical truths. Propositions both true and unprovable. When the physics community finally worked out what he was saying–and he said it in one well-turned sentence, as I recall-they couldn’t believe it. When he said it, they didn’t really hear it.

  Gödel was a young mathematician. But when they realized, well, as I said, they couldn’t believe it. How could something be both true and unprovable? Truth posits ‘provability,’ doesn’t it?’

  Jury just looked at him, feeling thick as two planks.

  ‘Of course it does. It’s one of the most revolutionary theories in mathematics. The theory of incompleteness is what he called it. The incompleteness proof. A proof that, within a formal system, proves something unprovable.’

  Jury looked up from his salad. ‘That’s paradoxical, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re absolutely right. Remember what’s called the liar’s paradox?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Take the sentence ‘I am a liar.’ That sentence is true only if it’s false. If you say you’re lying, then you’re not, from which it follows that you are, and so on and so on. Of course Gödel is talking about arithmetical proofs. But that an arithmetical proof which should automatically be true–no. Gödel was talking about proving the unprovable. Proving that there were arithmetical truths that were unprovable.’

  Jury wondered how this was possible.

  For a few moments they ate in silence.

  ‘Hugh seems to think she–Glynnis–could be anywhere. It’s like predicting the position of an electron. Until you measure it, it’s nowhere. It doesn’t have a definite position.’

  ‘In the world of Schrödinger’s cat, maybe. But Hugh’s wife isn’t a particle.’

  ‘But that’s the implication, isn’t it?’

  Jury thought about this. ‘This disappearance doesn’t seem real, does it?’

  ‘Perhaps not, but it happened,’ Harry said drily.

  Jury said nothing.

  ‘Hugh wondered a lot about that, I remember. I remember he shook his head and said, ‘It never happened.’’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’
/>
  ‘Perhaps with Hugh it was simply denial.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Harry seemed to be studying something not on his plate but in his mind. ‘Upstairs there were four bedrooms, empty like the rest of the house. There were no outbuildings, no pasture or paddock, just the woods and the grass going down to them. Of course, we paid no attention to our Mr. Jessup’s warning.’ Harry laughed- ‘It’s just too much, isn’t it? Anyway, the wood was quite pleasant with the light falling through the branches.’ Harry looked down at his plate. ‘I don’t know why I noticed.’

  Jury smiled. ‘Because the world keeps turning. We’re made to notice, Harry.’

  ‘There was nothing sinister, nothing menacing there.’

  ‘Why did he say that, then?’

  Harry shook his head a little, as if clearing it. ‘Who?’

  ‘Your visitor, Mr. Jessup.’

  ‘I don’t know, couldn’t even hazard a guess. I assumed he was just a screwball, a character with few social skills; instead of engaging in small talk, he handed out warnings. Thinking on it, though, we thought we would stop to see him and realized we didn’t know where he lived. What he said was, ‘It’s been too many things happened there; the last was a woman and boy disappeared.’ He put his palms together and shot one hand upward, and said, ‘Like smoke, they did.’’

  ‘And he said nothing at all except to warn you you shouldn’t go tramping around in the woods?’

  Harry shook his head, drank the last of his whiskey, left beside his wineglass.

  Jury thought for a moment. ‘Where would Robbie have been when Glynnis was inspecting the house?’

  Harry shrugged and pushed his plate back. ‘I thought about that. He was probably just tagging along with his mum.’

  ‘But perhaps not. You know how kids like to explore a new place. I wonder–’ Jury sat back, let out a breath.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘–if he saw something.’

  ‘Or if Glynnis did.’

  ‘If she did.’ Jury paused. ‘The agent must have shown the house to a number of people if it had been vacant long.’