The Case Has Altered Read online

  “Afraid. Please come.”

  6

  Carole-anne Palutski stood, or rather leaned, in Jury’s doorway, watching him press small bits of colored glass to a box partially covered with turquoise tiles, about the size of the sponge bag in Carole-anne’s hand in which she stored beautifiers to gild the lily.

  She asked, “Is that to hold me after I’m cremated?”

  “Nothing could hold you, love, not even your ashes. No prison, no urn.”

  Carole-anne leaned over a bit to see his face, bent over the box. “Is that one of your compliments?”

  “Are my compliments so different from other people’s?” Jury blew on a bit of sapphire glass, the color of Carole-anne’s eyes, and pushed it down into the wet-clay covering.

  She was silent for a few moments, but then had to ask: “What are you doing?”

  “Sticking these bits to this box.”

  An impatient sigh. “Well, I can see that, can’t I?” She was wrapped up in a Chinese robe, turquoise silk emblazoned with a dragon, in which she’d been trailing around all morning.

  “It’s for a friend,” said Jury.

  “And you a police superintendent. Hard to believe.” She yawned.

  The yawn was fake. She wanted to appear completely indifferent to Jury’s gift for his “friend.” He pressed in a bit of amber. “Me, a police superintendent, haven’t been having much luck policing. Of course, if we got our messages taken down right—”

  Carole-anne kept shifting her position in the doorway, occasionally re-belting her silken robe when it threatened to separate in front. “Still on about that, are we?” She yawned.

  “We are, yes.” Why she didn’t come in he could only assume was because of the brouhaha over the message. Jury had, he supposed—and she insisted—got a trifle “shirty” over the whole thing. Carole-anne feared there might be a bit of shirtiness left over. “ ‘Fungus? Don’t be daft. It’s that house you was at, whyever would I say ‘Fungus’?” She had untangled the message, which turned out to be as much Carole-anne’s as it was Jenny’s. That is to say, most of Carole-anne’s crabbed writing had been what Carole-anne had told Jenny: “So I says to her, ‘Well, he hardly has time for a social life and wouldn’t if I didn’t make him go down the pub and etc.’ ” God only knew what part of Jury’s adventures the “and etc.” would encompass. He had said to Carole-anne that if she kept it up, this bungling of messages taken from Jury’s lady-friends, well, his social life would be “completely rund, Carole-anne, completely rund.”

  So Carole-anne just leaned against the doorframe like the Lady of Shalott. Often, he found her in here, lying on her stomach reading a magazine. He didn’t mind. He rather liked it, as a matter of fact. Better than coming back to a cold grate (if he had a grate, which he didn’t).

  Following up on his supposed failure as a policeman, she said, “Maybe it’s because you spend your time making stuff like that for your friend. Whoever he is.”

  Jury just loved the “he.” “It’s a she.”

  “Is it that JK?”

  It was impossible for her, despite her façade of cool disinterest, to keep the note of anxiety out of her voice.

  “No.”

  No information forthcoming, she sighed, changed her position so that now her arms were behind her back and her back was against the door-jamb. The robe separated around mid-thigh. Her face was upturned, as if looking through the ceiling at goings-on in heaven.

  The pose (for he knew it was one) recalled the painted calendar girls of the forties and fifties—the succulent roundnesses of thigh, breast, and hip. Carole-anne’s, though, were very real. And undated.

  “I wish Stan was here.” She heaved another sigh, looking ceilingward.

  Stan Keeler was her antidote to Jury’s “friend.” He was the tenant who had met Carole-anne’s stiff criteria for letting the flat above Jury: handsome, dark, intense, talented, and independent, the independence meaning that he was free of “friends,” such as the one Jury was pushing colored stones into clay for.

  “As long as he hasn’t got his guitar.”

  This gave Carole-anne an excuse to be accusatory and let off a little of that steam that threatened to erupt over Jury’s jeweled box. “What? Are you saying you don’t like Stan’s playing? Well, I expect you’re just getting old.”

  Jury smiled at a bit of blue stone. “His playing is near-divine, as long as he’s doing it in the Nine-One-Nine and not over my head. When Stan lets loose with a riff it’s a little like being woken by the IRA with Uzis.”

  As if Jury had admitted to disliking both the riffs and Stan himself, Carole-anne said, accusingly, “You’re the one that found him, after all!”

  “He wasn’t lost.” Jury had met Stan Keeler several years before at the club where he played regularly, the Nine-One-Nine. He was a sensational guitarist. “And, as I recall, you’re the one that let out the flat to him.”

  Carole-anne just bulldozed on. “Probably you don’t even like Stone.”

  Stone was Stan Keeler’s dog. “How could I not like Stone? He’s got more sense than both of us put together.”

  Stan was more of an underground, a cult sensation. He wasn’t modest about his talent; at the same time, Stan didn’t appear to be bothered by Fame—whether he had it; whether he didn’t. He was one of the most single-minded people Jury had ever known. Perhaps that was the reason he and Carole-anne were not having a “thing.” At least he didn’t think they were.

  “So what are you going to do with that box when you finish?”

  “Take it to Heathrow. She works there.” She seemed visibly to slump. He really should stop teasing her. “You can come along if you like.”

  “Think I’ll have a cuppa. Want one?” She didn’t wait for his answer but walked across his sitting room back to his tiny kitchen. From there he heard china clatter and water run.

  He had forgotten that Carole-anne was intensely afraid of air terminals. She never flew; she never went near them. Whether the danger was real or imaginary, he wasn’t sure, but he thought, real. She had once told him a story about some people she had seen in an airport—a mother and child, both of them crying bitterly, and Carole-anne had concluded that the little boy was being separated from his mum. And the mum from the boy. It seemed like a forced separation, neither wanting it. The little boy had wiped the tears from his mum’s face. It had made her sick for days, she’d said. Could hardly bring herself to get out of bed, she’d said.

  In Jury’s mind, there wasn’t much doubt that the child was a girl, not a boy, and the girl had been Carole-anne. For she had never said anything about her family except for a few vague references to uncles and cousins. Not Mum and Da. Questions about them she evaded quite expertly, as if she’d had a lot of practice.

  As beautiful and brash as Carole-anne was, for Jury she had become the picture of poignance. He had sometimes caught that look on the faces of witnesses. The moment when the guard comes down. Jury would wait for such moments (hard, of course, to let down the guard if the police were asking questions), for he felt he got some of the most honest answers then. For it was then that the person became real; it was as if they had slipped the reins or yoke that held them back or down.

  Jury was thinking about all of this when he realized Carole-anne’s hand was extending his mug of tea. “Thanks.” Jury sipped it and said, “Listen, how about the Angel? It’s nearly opening time. Time you get dressed it will be. Care to bend your elegant elbow with me?”

  She seemed slightly breathless with the way the tide had turned in her favor. “But—I thought you was going to Heathrow.”

  Jury made an impatient gesture, brushing off Heathrow. “I can go there anytime. No rush.”

  To say that Carole-anne brightened was to put it mildly. She glowed. She absolutely glittered in the stream of sunlight coming through Jury’s window. That copper-colored hair, that rose-tinted skin. Another sun. He remembered Santa Fe and smiled. “You belong in the Southwest, Carole-anne.”
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  She frowned and retied her robe, her tea forgotten. “Torquay, like?”

  Jury laughed. “No. New Mexico, Colorado. That Southwest. You remind me of the sun going down behind the Sandias.”

  Her frown deepened. “Is that one of your compliments, then?”

  The conversation, Jury thought, had come full circle.

  7

  There would be no living with Trueblood now that Richard Jury had given the man the actual assignment of tutoring Plant in antiques. Melrose stood on the step outside the door of Trueblood’s Antiques, waiting for him to answer the knock. There was a little clock-sign, one of those cardboard things you could change the hands of, informing customers exactly what time the proprietor would return. Melrose knew the proprietor hadn’t really gone anywhere; he was in there getting ready for Melrose’s lesson.

  Trueblood loved it all; instructing Melrose was such an occasion for little jokes and jibes, put-downs and deceptions, such as palming off a Louis Quinze armchair as some bit of flotsam he’d picked up in the Portobello Road for a few quid. It was the most fun Trueblood had had since they’d written up Count Franco Giopinno’s memoirs and posted the notebook to Vivian. And since the Week End Man competition had fallen through with the appearance of Miss Fludd at Watermeadows (clearly not a Week End Woman) Trueblood was presently entertaining himself with Melrose’s lessons. That, and the Ardry vs. Crisp affair.

  Lady Ardry was suing Ada Crisp for damages caused by one of her pavement chamber pots and her Jack Russell terrier. Agatha had been spending most of her time in Sidbury with her solicitors—a whole boatload full of them, to hear her talk. Agatha was claiming that Miss Crisp’s bits-and-bobs of furniture sitting on the pavement were both an abomination to look at and dangerous to life and limb. Look what had happened to herself! She had got her foot stuck in one of the chamber pots, and Ada’s Jack Russell had jumped her and nearly taken off the foot at the ankle. “Nearly tore it to shreds,” was Agatha’s recollection of the “accident.”

  While he waited, Melrose turned so that he could see Miss Crisp’s secondhand furniture shop. Ordinarily, the pavement outside of her door was filled with bits and pieces—flowered jugs and porcelain chamber pots, gaily painted bedsteads and wooden chairs, everything old as the hills yet finding a place in the sun as a result of Miss Crisp’s ministrations. But today the pavement was empty. Deserted, almost; almost abject.

  “Your aunt,” Trueblood had exclaimed a few days ago, “is the most litigious mortal I’ve ever seen!” He was referring not only to the chamber pot case, but to the suit against Jurvis the butcher five years before when Agatha’s Morris Minor had managed somehow to get its wheels up on the pavement and knocked down the butcher’s plaster-of-Paris pig. It was the pig’s fault, she had claimed, and had actually won the case because the magistrate must have fallen asleep. He had not been foolish enough, however, to honor her injunction to keep the pig off the sidewalk, there being no cases to cite as precedent. “So the pig still hogs the pavement,” Trueblood was fond of saying to her.

  Anyway, she now had an opportunity to go after Miss Crisp, a pleasant, timid little woman who was in a great state of nerves about all of this. She could not believe (nor could Melrose) that the terrier had actually attacked one of the villagers. In a small way, every dog and cat on Long Piddleton had attacked Agatha, for animals always seem to sniff out people who dislike them. Agatha was suing to have the poor dog “put down.” She was being just as intolerable in this instance as she’d been in going after Jurvis the butcher. Nearly caused the man a total breakdown; now Ada Crisp’s emotional state was even worse.

  All of this went through Melrose’s mind as he waited on Trueblood’s stoop.

  Finally, the door was opened to him. Trueblood’s enthusiastic greeting was followed by “Done your homework?” Whack! went the hand on Melrose’s back, making him stumble into the shop.

  “Oh, cut it out!” said Melrose, moving without haste to the rear of the shop where Trueblood had set out an old student’s desk, even filling up the inkwell and supplying a quill pen.

  The sun was strong for February and would have streamed through the bay window of the shop had it not been blocked by a massive breakfront bookcase and a Georgian console with a gaudily carved and gilded eagle base. Interior lights from porcelain lamps, low-hanging chandeliers, and lighted wall sconces provided a misty and mysteriously lit world of credenzas, tea tables, bureaus and bookcases, fauteuils and davenports, richly carved and polished; huge beveled mirrors and gilt wood. Ada Crisp’s secondhand furniture shop was directly across the street from Trueblood’s Antiques, and to go from the one to the other was like seeing the Cockney wench transformed, midstreet, into the elegant lady of fashion.

  In the back of the shop, the rear door was open on the alley where sat Trueblood’s van, used for deliveries and for transporting stuff he bought at country auctions. Inside the open gate of the van, Melrose could see the scrolled arm of a rosewood sofa and the leg of a table. Trueblood hopped up and pulled the table to the edge.

  “Look at this. Isn’t it gorgeous? A table à la Bourgogne.”

  Melrose studied the elaborate marquetry, stained wood on a fruit ground. It was a handsome table.

  “Beautiful façade and with a surprise inside—” Here he opened the top. “A jack-in-the-box of drawers!”

  Recalling what they had once found inside a secretaire à abbattant, Melrose said, “I don’t much care for your furniture surprises.”

  Trueblood jumped down from the van and they went inside again.

  “Did you call Max Owen, then?” Melrose was almost afraid to hear.

  Trueblood sank down into his desk chair and waved an arm indicating Melrose should sit. “Not at that child’s desk, thank you.” Melrose sat down, already exhausted, in a wing chair. “Did you call him?”

  “Yes. I told him an acquaintance of his had mentioned he wanted to find a table à la Bourgogne. That’s what we were looking at just now.”

  Melrose frowned, “Who told you he wanted one?”

  Trueblood leaned backward in his swivel chair, looking and sounding pained. “No one told me, old sweat. I had to have a reason to call him, didn’t I? We chatted for some time. People in the trade can talk for hours—”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “—and during this conversation he asked me if I knew anything about the table, and what was its provenance, and a few pieces he himself owned. A bonheur-du-jour for one, and when I said, yes, indeed, I did, he asked me if I might have time to go up to Lincolnshire and have a look at his stuff. So I told him I had to go to Barcelona—”

  Melrose frowned. “For what?”

  “Nothing. I’m not going to Barcelona, I just told him that. But that I knew just the person for this appraisal job.”

  Melrose looked at him in alarm. “Listen: I hope you were careful of the background you gave me. I’m not Count-bloody-Dracula, Week End Italian.”

  Trueblood made a noise of disgust. “Of course not. Don’t you trust me?”

  “No.”

  “Never fear. I said you lived in London. You’re an amateur, not a professional, so you’re not necessarily known round Sotheby’s and Christie’s because you keep a very low profile, not being in it for the money but just for the enjoyment. That’s in case he should mention your name when he’s at the auction rooms. But there’d be no reason at all to check up on you, as he’s already checked up on me. I said you will accept recompense only if you can demonstrate to Owen’s satisfaction that the pieces he’s concerned about are genuine or not.” Trueblood sucked in his breath, thinking. “Being a gentleman of leisure, you have plenty of time to invest in this sort of research; it’s a hobby of yours, and you go to the rooms not to buy but to watch others buying. You were the one who first discovered that the Elizabethan livery cupboard Christie’s auctioned five years ago turned out to owe less to Elizabeth than to—”

  “Hold it! I don’t even know what kind of cupboard that is!”
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  Trueblood sighed. “There wasn’t one, old sweat. But is Max Owen going to remember that? How can he remember something that never happened? I mean, that’s the trick of it, isn’t it?”

  Melrose frowned over the logic of this.

  Trueblood reached around to some heavy-looking books he had stacked on his desk, pulled one out, flipped through it. Finding what he wanted, he turned the color plate toward Melrose. “This is the sort of cupboard.” After Melrose had spent some moments studying it, Trueblood snapped the book shut, handed it to Melrose. “Homework.”

  Taking it, Melrose groaned. “I’d have to have months, years to digest what’s in these books. Look how heavy they are. Don’t you have anything for the layman?”

  Ignoring these protests, Trueblood took a small paper from where he’d stashed it under his desk blotter. “It’s not going to be all that hard for you; you can check Theo Wrenn Browne’s shelves, the little shyster. Our friend Jury—clever cop, he is—left this list of pieces Max Owen wanted appraised. His wife pointed them out to Jury, and he jotted them down. There are only five pieces. You can certainly mug up on five pieces.”

  Melrose put up his hand. “I’ve got my own, thanks.”

  “That’s not to say, of course, that by the time you get there—”

  “There’ll be twenty-five. Wonderful. Do you have pictures of all these things in the book?” Glumly, he looked at the list. He felt, actually, somewhat relieved there were only these five. But, as he himself had said, Owen could always spring a suspect Queen Anne sofa or a middling example of a Hepplewhite armchair on him.

  “Probably don’t have pictures of all five of them. Oh, and there’s a rug, too. Ispahan.” Trueblood pulled out another volume and leafed through it.

  Melrose groaned. “I know less about rugs than about furniture.”

  “It’s in here somewhere. Never mind, I’ll dig it out soon enough.” He snapped the book shut. “I’m parched. Come on, let’s have a drink.”