The Case Has Altered (50 page)

Parker laughed. “Probably I am.”

Jury's look at Parker was speculative. “Could Dorcas have said anything at all that might have seemed—again, irrelevant, but indeed might not be?”

“Well, you can't put it that way, old boy.” Parker laughed. “If it seemed irrelevant, I wouldn't know, would I?”

“No, of course not. Just tell me anything she said you wondered about.” Jury leaned forward. “The thing is, if we knew who this man is, we just might know who killed her. I keep thinking of what she said:
‘I shouldn't have listened. I ought not to have done it.'
Listened to whom? Done what? Was she talking about her pregnancy? Suppose she told the man she was pregnant—”

“But she wasn't.”

“That makes no difference, as long as she thought she was. The so-called father would have believed her, finally. Dorcas would have convinced him if he'd had any doubt. She was determined.”

“And finding out, he'd have got rid of her?” Parker rubbed at his temple again with the pipe. “That just doesn't strike me as much of a motive. Not these days, not when everything is so accepted. Hardly any kind of behavior fazes us anymore. Unmarried mothers would hardly qualify. I don't know why Dorcas chose me as her confidant in all of this. But then I didn't know why she'd ask me to make a cook of her, either. I hope you believe me; I had no relationship at all with Dorcas; I have no idea why she told me she was pregnant. She blurted it out one day. She was quite upset.”

“Could it have been you she ‘shouldn't have listened' to?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Did you give her any advice at all when she told you she was pregnant? Thought she was, I mean.”

Parker shook his head sadly, removed his glasses, and set them on the table, and fell to contemplating the silver smallwork there. Picked up and set down again the snuffbox, mull, salt trencher. He said, “I don't give advice, I'm not good at it. I'm uncomfortable in the face of crisis, which is probably why I'm alone, why I live here alone.” His eyes swept the room, played over the elegant mismatched pieces—the Oriental cabinet near the mahogany étagère, a Venetian mirror above a Georgian kneehole desk, the Russian rosewood, the eighteenth-century pine cabinets.

“Perhaps she told you because you give the impression you can be trusted.” Jury got to his feet.

Parker rose, retrieved his glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, and put the glasses on again, looping the metal around his ears.

Jury stared at him. The glasses looked much like the ones old Tomas had put on to see down the bar to where Maddy sat.
“You'd 'ave t'be blind.”
Jury felt dazed. Dazzled with the clarity of it. He repeated to Parker, “I have to go, sorry.”

He did not have to go; he needed to be away so that he could think.

 • • • 

H
e stood on the footpath, stopped in the purple dusk, going over it. It had to be Peter Emery. Peter was the one man who wouldn't be put off by Dorcas's looks, and who would be taken by her voice, reading to him. Jury stopped at the sound of an early owl, listened to small rustling movements coming from the hawthorn, then walked awhile on the footpath.

Dorcas had thought she was going to marry him. Deluded girl. What stood between them were years of calcified emotion. Bitterness at his blindness. He was a hundred years older than Dorcas Reese, if emotional journeying were the yardstick of age. He might have had a fling with Dorcas, if that quaint word explained it, but together with her for the rest of his life? Jury didn't think so.

He drew in a deep breath and stood motionless, listening, hearing the blessed nothing, thinking how Wyndham Fen was beautiful in its restoration—for that was what it was; it had been reclaimed in much the same way Max Owen or Parker might have restored a piece of furniture. And what he wished for—even though he knew it was romantic nonsense—was
to step back in time and see the whole shire like this, when the old fen tigers had wrested their living from it. Or even before that—imagine how this whole countryside must have been when there were only islands: Ely, Ramsey, Whittlesey, March. Cities and towns surrounded by water, when it was bog and reed-bed and little else. Romantic, for there were also the rivers breaking banks from the raging streams and rivers, the merciless water. “. . . .
And even the weariest river,/Winds somewhere safe to sea
. . . . ” He heard Parker reading that poem by Swinburne.

Jury sighed. He was only thinking these thoughts to avoid thinking others. Jenny was innocent, and now he knew it.
“You'll never be sure,”
she'd said. But now he was and now it was too late because neither one of them had voiced their fears. They had held one another at bay; they couldn't depend on one another. They hadn't trusted one another, not even in the very simple way that Dorcas had trusted Parker. “ . . .
And even the weariest river,/Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

That glimmer of an idea suddenly became a glare. It spread out before him like water flooding the fen. It was as if it weren't really himself, Jury, who was doing the thinking, but some force doing it for him.

He could not act alone. He would have to ring Lincoln HQ; he would have to speak to Bannen and do whatever Bannen said to do. He turned and started the walk back to the footpath and to Parker's, feeling extremely sad.

 • • • 

A
ha! Gave more thought to that ragout, did you?” Parker opened the door wide, and gestured for Jury to come in with the hand that held a glass of wine.

Jury smiled. “Actually, what I need is your telephone. I have to call Lincoln.” Parker led him to a small room that looked pleasantly worn with constant use. His library, judging from books not only on floor-to-ceiling shelves, but sitting stacked on the floor and spilling from surfaces. Parker turned to leave and Jury stopped him. “Would you have a map of this area? Maybe an ordnance map?”

“Oh, yes, I've a hundred of the damned things.” Parker pulled some maps from one of the shelves. “What part of the county did you want?”

“Here, this area—the Wash.”

Parker gave him a speculative, raised eyebrow and sifted through the maps. “Here you are.” He handed the map to Jury. “You've an idea, have you?”

“First in a long time, I can tell you.” He smiled. “Swinburne helped.”

“Did he?” Parker laughed. “Swinburne does get one through some tight spots, I've found. We're having an excellent Medoc.” He raised his wineglass. “Want some now?”

“Later, thanks.”

“Ah! You will be staying. Good, take your time.”

Jury shoved papers and magazines out of the way and spread the map over the large desk. As he studied all of those fen-waterways—there were so many of them, wide and narrow, cross-hatching the land—he traced the flow of the river Welland, which, he saw, coursed through Spalding and the land nearby. All the way to the Wash.

 • • • 

W
hat?
You're, well, one hesitates to say ‘mad,' ” said Arthur Bannen from his office at Lincoln headquarters. “One hesitates, but one will. You're mad, Mr. Jury.” Bannen laughed a humorless laugh.

“I don't think so. If you stop to consider it, knowing Emery, it's perfectly reasonable. He grew up knowing the waterways.”

“Peter Emery is
blind
, man. Now, it's quite possible a blind man could garrote a person. But a shot in the heart? Apparently on the first go?”

“But I didn't say he shot her.”

Bannen sat in Lincoln in dead silence as Jury explained himself. Then he said, “Maybe you aren't completely mad after all. It'll take us an hour to get there. And you're to do nothing
until
we get there.”

It was bluff-anger, Jury knew, coming from Bannen's wounded pride. Of course, the man was thinking he should have known it; he'd grown up around these ditches, drains, canals—all of this water. He had seen, as well as Jury had, that punt leaning against the cottage. “You can depend upon it, Chief Inspector, I don't
want
to do anything.” Jury hung up, feeling a wrench at the thought of Zel. And then as if the name were some magical incantation, he turned at the sound of a demanding voice.

“You've
got
to stay for supper! I cooked a lot of it.”

It was Zel. She was holding a wooden spoon and wearing one of Parker's
rondeaux
, even though it was as long as two yards of good ale and had to be folded several times to keep her from tripping. The back corners made a train when she walked.

“Zel! What are you doing here?” Then he remembered she was coming to “do” dessert. There were few times in his life when he'd been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Zel, safely here at Toad Hall.

Parker, wearing his own
rondeau
and waving a carving knife about like a scimitar, said, “We mean business around here, Superintendent. You have got to stay!”

Jury laughed. “I hope you don't need that knife to cut the lamb.”

“Wait ‘til you taste my dessert! It's chocolate soufflé!” As she turned, Jury thought that Dorcas Reese would have absolutely had to learn to cook, for she could hardly let a ten-year-old child show her up. Zel ran across the marble tiles, racing back to the kitchen, her apron hem flying, and streaming behind her, her incendiary hair.

Rapunzel
, thought Jury. Had to be.

T
he two men, Jury and Bannen, stood on the saltings near some inlets whimsically named “The Cots.” Near the place where the body of Verna Dunn had been found, they looked out over the Wash, its silt and sand, at the waters that were part of the North Sea. Bannen had parked his police car near Fosdyke Bridge. They had trudged the rest of the way, for reasons obscure to both of them. They would have said, if asked, that it was a crime scene. It pulls one back.

Bannen said, “Desolate place, isn't it? Or peaceful, I suppose, depending on your turn of mind.”

“For God's sake, tell me how he discovered it was Verna Dunn? After all these years?”

“Yes. Well, she made a little slip. Naturally, she went to the cottage when she was at Fengate that weekend. Verna Dunn could never leave anything alone. Emery said they were sitting there talking about wetland shooting, and whether Peter had tried the steel shot in place of lead—you know, the whole business of poisoning the water with lead—and, naturally, the dreadful accident came up. Verna Dunn made a stupid slip. She told Peter he shouldn't have been wearing that ‘dark Barbour jacket' because another wildfowler wouldn't be able to see him. The thing is, he'd just acquired that jacket, only the day before. It was new. There was no way she could have seen it unless she'd been there. I thought that ‘accident' rather peculiar; I mean, no one coming forward to admit responsibility.”

Jury shook his head. “She hated him that much because he dropped her?”

“The Verna Dunns of this world don't take to being dumped. No. Well, thank the lord that's over,” Bannen went on. “And I'm glad I was wrong, you know. About Jennifer Kennington.”

“I wondered sometimes if you really believed she was guilty.” Jury looked up at the hazy sky. He wondered if there was going to be a storm.

“It was very hard connecting her with the murder of Dorcas Reese, certainly.” Bannen shook his head. “If she'd only told the truth. If she'd been straight about things. If she hadn't lied, I doubt very much if I'd have charged her.” He scraped his thumbnail over his chin, across the unshaven whiskers. Strange how the dead silence of this place augmented the sand-papery rasp.

Jury said, “I suppose you can't really blame her for not wanting it known that she'd stayed here an extra day because of Jack Price.” But Jury did blame her. In part, he blamed her as Bannen blamed her, for running out on the truth, for not sticking. And she had confided in Jack Price, not Jury.
Oh, get over it, man
.

“She never has said just
what
their relationship was. One assumes—” Bannen stopped abruptly.

It was nice of him, Jury thought, to consider Jury's feelings. He said it for Bannen. “One assumes they were lovers, I suppose.”

“Is it just part of her nature, this secretiveness? It certainly worked against her. It wasn't difficult to turn up the place in Sutterton where they stayed Tuesday night.”

“I think it's part of her nature, yes,” Jury said, grimly. “It could be she learned at an early age not to tell things because she was always in danger of Verna's taking away anything she valued.” He turned up his coat collar and shoved his ungloved hands deeper into his pockets. “But that's mere amateur analysis. And it wouldn't explain her behavior. I'm not sure what would.”

Bannen seemed to be untroubled by the bitter winds, the North Sea air. His arms held back his dark brown topcoat, as if he were warming himself before a fire. “I'm not at all glad to know Peter Emery's guilty, I don't mind telling you. It's the little girl, Zel. What will happen to her? I hate foster care.”

“Oh, I don't think that's going to be a problem.”

“No?”

Jury smiled. “No. She and Linus Parker are quite matey. I'm sure Parker can take care of the Social.”

Bannen smiled, considering this. “You know, she'd be better off with him, anyway. The burden of having to live alone with a blind man, well, that's rough for a child.”

They were silent for a while, thinking their separate thoughts. Jury's were gloomy ones. The landscape matched them.

Bannen turned to look behind them, back up the narrow channel that the Welland had become at this point in its travels. “They put the punt boat in a stream near Wyndham Fen and from there used streams and canals until they got to the Welland.”