The Blue Last (7 page)

“I mean,” Benny continued, as she leafed through it, “the only cat around here is Snowball and she's got a name. And she's Mrs. Riordin's cat, anyway.”

“It's what she had at the Moonraker. It's the only book on names. I'm into the
R
s. There's Ruth, Renee, Rita, Renata—”

“Renata? That's not a name.”

“It is, too. I saw it on a book cover. It's the person who wrote the book. Then there's Roberta, which I don't like at all—”

“You don't like any of them; you never do. Next comes the
S
s. You could name her Sparky.”

Gemma looked at him, shaking her head. “I'm not naming her after a
dog.
”

Benny was practical; Gemma wasn't; she seemed to live in Never-Never Land, or at least went straight there the minute she saw Benny. That was actually what she called the great gray pile of stone that was Tynedale Lodge: Neverland.

“Let's go sit in the tree.”

They were still by the gate. Benny said, “Mr. Barkins doesn't like me hanging around.”

Gemma sighed. She was always being put out by Benny. “Well, this doll—” she thrust the doll in its grimy, trailing dress toward him “—doesn't like being unbaptized, but it is.”

Benny tried to make a connection between the two things but couldn't. “Miss Penforwarden sent some more books.”

“I know. Let's open them.”

“No.” He followed her to the beech tree, which was her favorite place to sit. It was enormous, sending out roots that themselves looked prehistoric. Gemma had wedged a board in between the trunk and a thick branch. It was roomy enough for both of them and near the ground. If they straddled the board, they could each lean against the trunk and the branch.

She set the doll between them and reached for the parcel. “Let's see.”

“Gemma!” He wheeled the parcel upward.

“I need to see if they're about poisoning.”

He forgot and let the parcel down. She grabbed it.

“What are you talking about?”

“I told you somebody tried to poison me.” Humming a scrap of a song, she carefully undid the string. She looked at him out of eyes like agate. The green swam in them.

Benny fell back against the trunk. “Not
that
again! Why'd anyone want to?”

Matter-of-factly, she said. “For my money.” She had removed the brown paper and picked up one of the books.

“What money? You don't have any money! I tried to borrow fifty P from you a couple weeks ago and you said you didn't even have that.”

“Not to loan out, I didn't.” She was looking through one of the books.

Benny gave up and looked across the lawn at the “baptismal pool”; Sparky was still there, peering over the edge.

Gemma said, “There's nothing much in this one except a lot of rubbishy gardens.”

Benny leaned forward and she turned the book so he could see it. He was looking at queerly sculpted garden topiaries. He frowned. “That's Italy somewhere.”

“Italy. Oh.” She looked around, thinking. “Wasn't that where this family kept poisoning each other?”

Benny reflected. “I don't know. Med-something? It's like ‘medicine.' Gemma, why do you always think somebody's trying to murder you? First it was shooting. You thought you were being shot at.”

“I was being. They missed.” She turned a page. Another garden.

“Then after that, it was somebody trying to smother you.”

“Yes.” She opened the second book. “Look.” Holding the book open in front of her face so that only her eyes were visible peering over the brown calfskin binding, she tapped at the page.

Benny leaned closer. The illustration was an outline of a human form showing a map of arteries and veins. The direction of the blood flow was indicated by arrows. He frowned. “So?”

“It could show a person how the poison gets in your blood and travels around and where it travels.”

Benny took it and looked at the spine. “It's just a medical book.”

She looked up at the sky, as if the cloud formations held an answer. “But it's got poisons in it. A list of them. Look and see.”

“No. Gemma, be sensible. You're too young to have somebody want to kill you. And don't tell me again it's your money.”

Incensed, she said, “I am
not
too young. Even babies get murdered.”

“But that's different. That's because—” For the life of him he couldn't think of one good reason. Then he hit on one. “They make too much noise or they're always crying and the parents go daft listening to them. And it's—ah—
impulse,
that's what. It's not—” What was the word? She was looking at him as if maybe he'd finally come up with something that would save her. It made Benny feel terrible; she really believed what she was telling him. If no amount of reasoning could dislodge this notion from her mind, Benny thought he would go at it from a different angle. “We'll have to narrow down who's doing this. It's only one person we're looking for, isn't it? I mean, you don't think it's more than one?”

She scratched her ear and said, “I guess not. Only—” She put her thumbs on the eyes of her doll as if to shut them against the sight of something awful.

“Only what?”

“I don't know. It could be two people working together.”

“But why would you think that instead of just one?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. I'm only saying you should keep an open mind.”

His mind was so open talking about this you could have landed a plane on it. “Let's just take them one by one. For a start.”

“Well, all I know is, it's somebody there.” She glanced around at the Lodge and stuck out her tongue.

Benny knew Gemma didn't much like the inside of the place, or some of the people who lived in it. Most of her time was spent outside—in the gardens and the greenhouse, or with the gardener, Mr. Murphy, as he was tending the beds and the hedges. Benny thought he was a bit sharpish.

“Let's start with the ones you don't like.”

“I don't like any of them except Mr. Tynedale, but he's sick. He stays in bed.”

“You like Rachael.”

“Well, I'm not talking about staff, like Mrs. MacLeish and Rachael. They're all
right,
I guess.”

Benny wondered how much that was a part of all this murder business. None of the people in the Lodge, except for Mr. Tynedale, seemed to care about Gemma.

“What about Mrs. Riordin?” She occupied the small gatehouse.

The mere mention of the name made Gemma hug herself and fake retching noises. Then she wiped at the doll's skirt as if vomit had dirtied it. “No, she doesn't want me dead, exactly. She needs me alive to torture.” Katherine Riordin occupied what was once a gatehouse called Keeper's Cottage.

Oliver Tynedale was the one person Gemma did like; she spent time with him every day, carrying up cups of tea and reading to him. They told each other stories, his true, hers invented. Gemma was imaginative (the murder plots being proof of that) and good at making up stories. She remembered these stories, too, and told them to Benny sometimes. She had a remarkable memory, the kind of memory that might be thought of as “inconvenient” by some people who preferred forgetting.

Benny had picked up this term from Mr. Siptick, who was talking about a customer who had claimed to have paid his bill when (Mr. Siptick said) he hadn't, as a man with a “convenient” memory.

Sparky moved from the pool over to where the gardener, Angus Murphy, had just come around the side of the house, shearing the hawthorn hedge. Mr. Murphy (as far as Sparky was concerned), although not himself a flower, partook of their scents and possibly even their colors and contours, as if embedded in Mr. Murphy's physical self.

At least, that's how Sparky smelled it.

Flower vapor drifted out and around Mr. Murphy, and at his ankles, where Sparky stopped, were the smell of peat and moss, snail, worm, grub.

“Hi, Mr. Murphy!” Gemma called across the garden. Mr. Murphy turned, raised his shears and waved them in reply. No one fit the category of old middle age as well as Mr. Murphy with his faded ginger hair fast going gray, blue eyes also faded and a back slightly twisted with arthritis that prevented him reaching any higher than the top of the hawthorn hedge, which left the quarter mile of privet and yew hedges unshorn. Or had, that is, until Mr. Tynedale had hired an assistant to do such work as required a strong back and tall enough to do this shearing. There were also the two swan-shaped topiaries on either side of the big front gate. Mr. Murphy could not stand his new assistant, who hadn't lasted long. Mr. Murphy was always complaining about his “trendy” ways.

That undergardener had been replaced by a girl whom Mr. Murphy had liked better, but only fractionally, as he found her too young and “summat silly.” She had left, too, but of her own accord. She had simply stopped showing up. So Mr. Murphy was on his own again and might have preferred it that way.

“Maybe,” said Benny, watching Sparky move along the hedge with Mr. Murphy, “maybe it was that girl gardener. She left all of a sudden.”

Gemma fell back against the tree trunk. “Jenny? Why would she want to murder me?”

Benny sighed. She was so illogical. “I don't think
anyone
wants to murder you—”

“There's Maisie Tynedale. She hates me.”

Maisie was Mr. Tynedale's granddaughter. She had never married, had always lived in Tynedale Lodge. “What reason would she have?”

“If I'm not allowed to say ‘money,' I don't know. She was in an air raid when she was a baby, Mrs. MacLeish said. A bomb hit the building and exploded it to bits. Mrs. Riordin's baby got blown up.” Gemma expanded. “Everybody got blown up. Everything was dust and all these body parts.

Bodies were all in pieces. Hands sticking up through the rubble you could pull one out and no body was attached to it.”

“I don't think Mrs. MacLeish told you all that.”

“Yes, she did. I can't get it out of my system. It was a pub and there were eyeballs in beer glasses.”

“That's ridiculous. How could an eyeball fly out of your face and land on its own inside a pint glass?”

She lay her doll down again and leaned back against her branch and swung her feet. “I'm only saying what she told me.”

“She didn't tell you that. Anyway, let's not talk about it; it's nothing to do with the family wanting you dead.” He watched Gemma wipe her doll's face with a white tissue. “Mr. Tynedale, he'll probably leave you a trust, maybe.” Benny's knowledge of trusts was a little thin, as it was about most things financially elaborate. “Aren't you glad for that? It might pay you back for having to put up with someone like Mrs. Riordin.”

“I know what I'd do with some money if I had it right now.”

“What?”

“Hire a detective.” She looked at her name-starved doll for a moment, and held it up so Benny could see it. “Rhonda?”

“I
don't know what you expect me to do about it,” said Fiona Clingmore, trying unsuccessfully to pull down a black skirt that had too far to stretch to cover her knees.

“I expect you to take a
hatchet
to him, Miss Clingmore.” Racer was standing, still looking stupidly around his office for the cat Cyril, who had pawed a sapphire shirt stud from the little velvet box on the desk and made off with it.

Jury sat on the sidelines with the file Racer had told him to bring: Danny Wu, with whom, Jury thought, Chief Superintendent Racer was obsessed. The obsession paid off royally for Jury and Wiggins, as it gave them a good excuse to eat at his Soho restaurant.

“You should never have left that velvet box there and gone off for lunch,” said Fiona, in that annoying hindsight way people had.

Racer was attending some black-tie function and needed his shirt studs (“all of them,” he'd said).

“Sapphires? Don't you think that to be a bit, well, showy?” This unpopular opinion was offered (precisely because it was unpopular) by the human equivalent (in Racer's eyes) of the cat Cyril; that is, the police detective Jury. “You don't want to outshine the chief constable, do you?”

Chief Superintendent Racer's face reddened to an alarming degree, and he, near desperate with rage, as if he feared there wasn't enough to be portioned out among the three of them (Cyril, Fiona, Jury), seemed to swell like a balloon.

The ladder which Racer was climbing had been furnished by one of the maintenance crew who had asked if he wanted a picture hung and would he like maintenance to do it?

“No!” Racer said, as if he meant to nullify the entire visible world in the manner of John Ruskin. Abashed, the maintenance man had left. (Jury had missed this opening chapter in the cat fracas; Fiona had reported it in fulsome detail.)

Racer had been positioning the ladder against the wall, climbing up and looking in the small well made to accommodate the recessed lighting, a well that could also accommodate cat-sized objects. There was a row of tiny lights just beneath the ceiling around all the walls. The lights were hidden by a strip of molding (cat height, if the cat was lying down).