The Blue Last (28 page)

“She dismissed Aiden as a fool.”

“Yeah, well, our Kitty certainly wouldn't've shot Croft to preserve the honor of the Riordin clan. Who would care if Aiden Riordin was goose-stepping all over Hyde Park?” Mickey winced.

“Anything wrong? Do you need something?” Jury was already out of his chair.

Mickey waved a shaky finger in the direction of the water cooler by the door. “Cup o' that.” He took a vial of pills out of his desk drawer, shook a couple into his hand.

Jury handed him the paper cup. “I wish they'd fill the damned things with whiskey.” He sat down again as Mickey washed down the pills. Jury wanted to ask him about the pain, but thought such a question would be tasteless or morbid, much like the gathering of people around a smashed car. So he kept the question back.

Mickey tossed the pills back in the drawer, slammed it shut, letting off a mild amount of steam in the act. He went back to the subject of the manuscript. “But I agree: if somebody went to the trouble of taking the PC, the diskettes, the hard copy—there's something in it someone doesn't want broadcast.”

Mickey had risen again to go to the window. Jury wondered if the getting up and down helped to relieve the pain. The phone rang and he scooped up the receiver. “Haggerty. Yeah . . . Then do it.” He hung up. “No, I guess not everybody would say ‘publish and be damned.' ” Mickey frowned.

“There's someone you haven't paid much attention to.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Ralph Herrick. Alexandra's husband.” Jury sat forward. “Simon could have brought something up in his book connected to him, Herrick. I don't mean necessarily about him, just something going on. Oliver Tynedale mentioned Bletchley Park. The decoding that was done there. Very hush-hush stuff.”

“Hmm. I remember Herrick was RAF. Decorated, too. Quite the hero. The Victoria Cross.”

Jury nodded. “Right. He also was quite brilliant in the reading of codes. He could take one look at a code and see the pattern immediately.”

“Christ. Most of the time I can't even look at the alphabet and see a pattern. Now, I do seem to recall that Herrick was one of the Bletchley Park people.”

Jury nodded, grew thoughtful. “I wish to hell I could see that manuscript.”

Mickey ran his hand down over his face and said, tiredly, “Maybe this whole case is being looked at wrong. Everything's there, and the answer with it, but our perspective's just wrong.”

“Like a painting.” Jury smiled. “A friend of mine just got back from Florence. He was talking about fifteenth-century Florentine art. An architect named Brunelleschi. ‘Perspective illusion' was the quality that was revolutionary.”

“Don't know the chap. I should spend more time at the Tate.”

Jury looked at Mickey for a moment and then looked away. “Ian Tynedale is passionate about the art of the Renaissance.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mickey squeaked back in his swivel chair. “It's one reason I know the motive for this murder wasn't robbery. What thief would have left the paintings on the walls? Especially the one near the desk? According to Tynedale, who got it for him, it's worth a cool quarter of a million.”

Jury smiled and got up. “Maybe whoever did it wasn't much of a critic.”

A
ngus Murphy looked up, suspicious. “Ya got t' much education fer this job, is wha' I think.” The gardener wiped his face with a bleached blue handkerchief that made his blue eyes look even more faded. “Why, there I'd go breakin' ya in and off ya'd go the minute ya saw somthin' ya'd be more ac-clim-ated to.”

Angus Murphy was short, wiry, ageless and (Melrose thought) loved impressive words. He had been dropping them in whenever he could with no real care for aptness. His slate blue eyes seemed to be permanently narrowed, as if the eyelids had been loosely stitched.

“—an' ya'd be off like a bird, off like greased lightning, off like—” he paused.

“—a bat out of hell?” Melrose prompted. Angus Murphy was a man who liked his metaphor, no matter how worn. “But actually, Mr. Murphy, it would be very unlikely that would happen, as I've reached some
détente
—” (Melrose spoke this carefully) “—between my brain's needs and my body's. I don't deny I'm well educated. But I've reached this point, you see, where the only thing that will satisfy me is getting down on my knees and grubbing around in the soil.”

The eyes narrowed even more. “What was that ya said? ‘Daysomethin'?”

“Détente?”
Melrose was pleased he'd been right about the impressive words.

“That's it. What's that mean, then?”

“It means things at war with one another have reached some point of relaxation.”

“Ah!” said Murphy, nodding sagely, and then working it around in his mouth for a moment.

They were standing by an ornamental pond in the rear garden of Tynedale Lodge, following Melrose's interview with the butler, Mr. Barkins. Melrose found it hard to keep from dropping the “mister” and calling him “Barkins.” He had had the foresight to bring a flat cap so that he could turn it around in his hands, occasionally squashing it, to make himself appear humble. He thought it was pretty rum that this oaf of a Barkins should have the privilege of hiring and firing staff. But Barkins clearly loved it, loved exerting what small measure of power he had in the household. As far as the new gardener, Ambrose Plant, was concerned, Barkins only thought he had the power. Oliver Tynedale was the one who had it after Jury had called him to explain what he wanted.

In the big, slightly chilly kitchen, Melrose had finally been invited to sit down and have a cup of coffee—elevenses, a brief respite from toil Melrose knew about only through the incessant visits of Agatha to Ardry End. Otherwise, he couldn't tell a respite of toil from a tenner, nor, really, could his “staff,” a generalization he hesitated to use since, except for Martha, his cook, the only others were his butler, Ruthven, and his groundskeeper, Mr. Momaday. Ruthven did indeed work, but he didn't toil. He carried out his duties as smoothly as an Olympic skater. On the other hand, Momaday was completely hopeless, walking all over the land with a shotgun broken over his arm, looking for something to shoot.

Melrose had thought about all of this in preparation for his morning interview with Ian Tynedale, which he thought was far more congenial than the one with Barkins. He'd be the first to admit he was lazy, but he didn't care. Right now he was having his coffee at the long table where he supposed meals were taken by staff and he'd be one of them.

Sitting at the bottom of the table as Barkins was grilling the candidate for undergardener was a beautiful child with midnight black hair and skin so translucent one could almost see through it. She was eating a piece of bread and butter and keeping a close watch on Melrose. He wondered if this was the little girl named Gemma Trimm. No one had bothered telling him.

Barkins wondered how it was that if Mr. Plant had had as much experience as he'd said, he'd never been head gardener. Because, Mr. Plant had responded, he didn't like administrative work. Barkins thought that an odd answer, but went to the phone and called the numbers given him, the recommendations Melrose had supplied. After a few minutes he was back, saying both of the previous employers had been most satisfied with his work. They were, of course, Marshall Trueblood and Diane Demorney.

“They were indeed effusive, Mr. Plant.”

Then Barkins asked him the usual boring questions as to why Mr. Plant had left these two satisfied employers. Mr. Plant had wanted to move to London, et cetera, et cetera.

The little girl had finished sizing him up (reaching her conclusions far faster than the butler) and had gathered up her strange doll and gone outside.

Barkins thought he would do with having a trial run for a week or two. Melrose had reacted with proper humility.

 

 

 

Which is why he was standing by the pond, at either end of which he had pointed out the gardener's still-thriving hakonechloa and Rubrum grasses, the Rubrum's sprays of delicate flowers still going strong in December. Then there was that New Zealand grass with its drooping flowerheads at the far end, over there. Melrose made much of these grasses, they being about the only thing he knew. “Hakonechloa” he had learned—as he had a few other gardening nuggets of wisdom—from Diane Demorney.

“Point out,” Diane had told him in the Jack and Hammer, “that hakonechloa is a must-have for every snob around who knows nothing at all about gardening—I certainly don't, nor do I want to—point out that the name is simply on everybody's lips.”

“But . . . what is it?”

“Some sort of grassy thing.”

“Well, but what does it look like?”

“Melrose, don't be simple. How should I know? If it's a grass, I expect it's green. Tallish.” Her hand measured off air. “Look: when you don't know a damned thing about a subject, you rattle off one or two esoteric bits that hardly anyone knows—”

“Well, hakonechloa won't do, then. You said it was on everybody's lips.”

“But people don't
know
it's on everybody's lips, do they? One or two bits and then learn the Latin—I think it's Latin—names for this or that and toss them in occasionally.”

“You mean even if I've got the names wrong?”

Diane looked over her shoulder to the bar where Dick Scroggs stood reading the paper. She gave him the queen's wave, meaning two more drinks. To Melrose she said, “I expect it
will
be wrong, but who cares, as long as it's Latin.”

“But a gardener might know.”

Diane sighed deeply. “Even if he does, you just finesse whatever you're looking at for something that doesn't grow around there—a palm tree or something.”

“Diane, how could I mistake a plant or a flower for a palm tree?”

“Then say something that grows around a palm tree—at the base of it. He won't know what you're talking about.”

“That'll make two of us.” But Melrose had to admit he was enamored of the Demorney grasp of one-upmanship. “Okay—” He read from one of the three-by-five cards on which he was taking notes.

(“
Notes!
Lord,” Diane had said with a shiver.)

At first, Melrose had done what he thought to be the sensible thing, and gone to the little library, where he'd pulled down a book, slogged through it for a while and realized facts without color, without conversation, without nuance, were boring and hard to absorb. He had only two days before he returned to London, and knew what he needed was a crash course. He needed the gestalt of gardening—watching someone do it, hearing someone speak of it. To this end he had gone in search of Alice Broadstairs, who, along with Lavinia Vine, competed at the annual Sidbury Flower Show. The trouble with this approach, Melrose should have known, was that Miss Broadstairs was
such
a gardening enthusiast, she rattled on and on about her roses and orchids, covering entirely too much ground (literal and metaphoric), so that Melrose was bombarded by facts he couldn't assimilate, and, more important, that would probably do him no good. He took notes, though, for among all of this fall of blossom was the odd bit that would help: a rose called Midsummer Beauty that was still brilliant in December; the Mahonia japonica, that he could remember because it rhymed; and Diane's hakonechloa. He came, in other words, to realize that knowledge was style: it's not what you know, it's how you know it. Diane was the person for this, and she would be having lunch (the two olives) at the Jack and Hammer.

She had said, “Do something with mistletoe. Christmas is just around the corner, unfortunately.” Diane could only make it through the holiday season with a breakfast of eggnog.

“ ‘Do something'? I'm not
decorating
the garden.”

“I mean, look up one or two kinds of mistletoe and trot them out if you're looking at a bush.”

“Doesn't mistletoe grow on trees?”

Diane tapped her stirrer with its marinated olive gently on the rim of her glass. “I have no idea. Find out what kind, then.”

Melrose made a note on his card. “What if this house doesn't have the kind mistletoe grows on?”

Diane rolled her eyes and ate her olive, after which she said, “Then you ask him
why
this kind of tree isn't in the garden.” Languidly, she fixed a cigarette into her black holder. “You're usually inventive. One must be able to turn things to one's advantage. How was Florence?”

“Magnificent, absolutely magnificent.” Somehow, this galloping trip that had irritated him to death (except, of course, at the end) had turned in his mind to something gorgeous and fragile. “My favorite place was San Gimignano.” Not only did Melrose pronounce this correctly, but he managed to sound like a native when he blended that second “i” with the “y.” He had practiced a lot.

“Say that again.”

“San
Gim-i'yan-o.
”

“How fascinating. I love Italian names. ‘San Gimignano.' Hmm.”

It annoyed Melrose that she pronounced it exactly right without any practice at all. For some reason, Diane was good at things like that.

“San Gimignano (he liked saying it) is about twenty miles outside of Florence. It's like suddenly finding yourself back in the Middle Ages. The town's famous for its towers. Once there were hundreds of them, so many you could walk across town on the rooftops.”

“I can hardly walk across town on the pavements.”

“I imagine this ‘tower' business was a kind of ego thing. Oh, the towers permitted fortification—you know, pouring boiling oil down on your enemy—but I bet the whole idea got out of hand and everyone tried building a tower taller than his neighbor's, so they just kept building taller towers.”