The Five Bells and Bladebone (20 page)

“Well, he can’t be out
there
.”

“The hell he can’t. He’s a feline fly.” Racer sat down again, but uneasily, his eyes traveling to the top of the bookcase and meeting only the jaunty smile of the Queen. Jury could almost see the crown glitter.

Still uneasy, Racer looked round once more, then said, “Just keep that friend of yours out of the way. A fine mess he made of things in Hampshire.”

The “fine mess” referred to the occasion when Plant had saved Jury’s life. “He’s a recluse,” said Jury, turning the cigar in his mouth, inebriated with its flavor. “Never leaves the house.”

Racer was up, patrolling the room again. “Superintendent Pratt told me the body was shoved inside a chest that was about to be picked up by the local antiques dealer. Well, for God’s sakes, the killer wasn’t doing much by way of hiding it, was he?” Racer looked down in the wastebasket, shoving his hand round in the trash there. He sighed and started walking again, scoping it as he’d done before, like the captain of a sub, looking out over the close, hard edge of the water and wondering about torpedoes.

The torpedo atop the bookcase quickly withdrew its head.

Jury frowned. “No, not if he or she knew it was to be picked up.”

“You can bet your pension, if you get one, it was the wife. You’d think she’d know, wouldn’t you?” Racer was pulling books from the shelves and looking behind them.

There was a thin, swishing sound, as if the Queen’s skirts had rustled. The frame moved slightly just before Racer wheeled around. “I knew it; he’s in here!” He went to his desk and slapped his hand down on the intercom. “Would the Queen of the Nile get the hell in here and get this ball of mange
out! Permanently out!
”

Fiona entered, face pearlescent and seemingly pore-free. Racer told her to call the effing RSPCA and tell them they were out of business unless they came round with a cage.

Jury looked up to see Cyril’s back rising, quivering like a diver about to take the plunge. All he’d been waiting for was a sure means of egress.

“Well, they won’t come again, will they?” said Fiona.

They had once, three people in extraterrestrial outfits prepared for a rabid cat. It must have seemed rather awesome to them — Scotland Yard calling in the cat-catchers. Cyril, of course, had vanished, in that way cats have of dematerializing, leaving locked-room mysteries in their wake. Fiona had seen him later, outside with the window washer on one of those catwalks, his face against the glass wearing a mashed grin.

Cyril sprang straight to Racer’s desk, scooting across it and sending up papers like a watersplash, then diving to the floor and whizzing from the room. One single motion had done it all, from bookcase to doorsill.

In a flash, Jury saw this maneuver like some comic, cockeyed, and surrealistic version of Simon Lean falling from the secretary. Simon Lean, set up and ready to pounce.

“H
UMOR” WOULD
have been used in its Burtonian sense if one were applying it to Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, who sat in Jury’s office ruminating over a row of medicine bottles with the same intensity of Fiona over her mud pots and nail art.

Jury said hello as he gave his jacket a toss in the general direction of the coattree, where it caught and hung as limply as Wiggins’s head. “You look like a man who’s lost his last Fisherman’s Friend.” The yellow box of throat lozenges sat amongst the bottles. And Wiggins sat there like an epidemic.

Wiggins heaved a sigh and chose a two-toned capsule that he washed down with dark tea. The sergeant had, bottle by bottle, lozenge by lozenge, made a place for himself in Jury’s office. Wiggins’s old mates had chain-smoked away until their office looked like something seen through yellow Victorian fogs: crouched shapes, uncharted movements, faces appearing under lights of desk lamps. Jury had watched Wiggins go from gray to moldy green and offered to share this office with him. Jury smoked, but did not invade the sergeant’s no-smoking area.

“I’ve got that list, sir. There’s about fifteen pubs and I’ve
ticked the most likely.” He reached the clipboard across his desk.

“Thanks,” said Jury through the sweater he was yanking off to accommodate himself to Wiggins’s controlled eighty-degree temperature. He’d be down to his vest in fifteen minutes. “Aren’t you hot?” Jury ran his hand over more than a dozen slips with telephone messages. Two were from Carole-anne; three were from Susan Bredon-Hunt. Over the last year he had been seeing less and less of her; perversely, she had been calling more and more.

Wiggins sat there looking quite comfortable in his brown worsted suit and neatly tied tie. “I’d be glad to turn off the heater-fan, sir.” Martyrdom fit Wiggins as well as a cowl.

“Never mind.” He nodded toward the clipboard and Wiggins’s list. “Which are the likelies?”

“There’s the Golden Heart in Commercial Street. That’s near Christchurch Spitalfields —”

“E-one?”

“Yes, sir. Then there’s the Jack the Ripper, also near Christchurch.”

Jury was tossing the calls from Carole-anne into the trash basket, and said, “Let’s hope it’s not that one; I don’t think I could deal with it. What else?”

“In E-fourteen there’s the Five Bells and Bladebone —”

Jury looked up. “E-fourteen’s Limehouse. What about the church?”

“St. Anne’s Limehouse. There’s something else, here, sir, you might be interested in —”

As Wiggins was handing a file folder across his desk to reach Jury’s outstretched hand, the telephone rang. Wiggins answered, held the receiver to his chest, and said, woefully, “It’s Carole-anne, sir. I think she’s crying.”

That didn’t move Jury deeply. In the extreme circumstances of his brief holiday, she would, naturally, need a surrogate cop to talk to. Carole-anne couldn’t get over the
romance of living two flights up from a police superintendent, especially one over six feet with an “otherworldly” smile (as she put it, and she should know), a smile that remained with her even after he’d gone. In other words (he’d replied), you’re looking for a six-foot-two Cheshire cat.

From the other end of the line came a flood of details foretelling ghastly events to come. Carole-anne was telling him, as “Stars Fell on Alabama” rasped on the old record-player at the Starrdust, that the Hanged Man had turned up at least half-a-dozen times, and she hadn’t much hope for any future walks down the Angel with Jury. Exactly who the mark was here — Jury, Carole-anne, or the Islington monument — he wasn’t sure.

Why was it so difficult to convince Carole-anne that
his
murder (as she put it), having occurred right here on earth, on the night of the first of May or early morning of the second — an occurrence fully accounted for by some confluence of time and space, gravity, the rules of logic, and Greenwich Mean Time (in other words, measurable quantities) — why was it that
his
murder should be dismissed as less certain than
her
murder (as she put it), which had not even happened. But
would
(she claimed) at some time in the future (a future controlled by the stars at some universal way-station, some outpost of the planets not accountable to the laws of physics, much less to forensic medicine). The dead body had come to her in a vision or a dream or her Tarot cards, rather than in a seamy London alley.

“The Hanged Man,” Jury reminded her, “doesn’t mean death, it means life suspended.” He was running his eye over the report on Wiggins’s clipboard, frowning.

“Well, if you don’t care if you see me lying in one of those drawers at the morgue some day with a ticket on my toe . . . !”

“Of course I care, Madame Zostra, but the operative
term here, love, is
someday
. The murder hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t have much evidence to go on except that the cusp of Pluto or something —”

He was having no trouble reading the report as she yammered in his ear that she supposed ordinary police hadn’t the imagination to solve her murder. It sounded like something she’d found in a Kubla Khan-esque vision and oh, how Jury wished that the Gentleman from Porlock who had ruined Coleridge’s poem would show up right that moment in Covent Garden and knock on the door of the Starrdust. Unfortunately, gentlemen from Porlock, like cops, were never around when you needed them. Into her voice now crept the best threat of tears she could muster, given she was competing with the molasses voice of Dinah Shore. Dinah and Carole-anne were at this moment living their little drama. Jury smiled and wished that a whole bucket of stars would rain right down on the red-gold head of Carole-anne Palutski.

“Venus! You’ve not been paying attention
at all!
”

“I have.” Jury held out a file folder for Wiggins to take. Wiggins had been sitting there during all of this, entranced. Carole-anne seemed to be able to fascinate men by remote control. Ever since she’d taken that job, Carole-anne pretty much thought she had an inside track with the cosmos. Appointments with destiny — and it wouldn’t be so bad if she’d only stop making them for Jury, too — were pretty much crowding out everything else on her engagement calendar. Dentists, doctors, and even getting her nails wrapped had been X-d off long ago. Carole-anne’s future was, in a manner of speaking, fully booked. If she’d had as many starts on stage as she had with the stars, she’d be right up there with Dame Peggy Ashcroft.

“Trouble with you is, you don’t believe in Evidence of Things Unseen.”

“True. I’m having a hard enough time with things seen, much less un.”

As “Moonlight Serenade” slid smoothly past in the background, Jury cut off her protesting by telling her gently that the present was all he could handle at the moment and he’d have to ring off.

He did, and turned to Wiggins. “The Town of Ramsgate is one of the pubs on your list. What else do we have on the murder of this Sarah Diver?”

“Nothing but what’s there. It’s Thames Division’s case. They found her on the slipway between the stairs and the bottom of the pub wall. Early this morning, around five. Must have been goddawful damp, I meant being right on the Thames.”

“She wouldn’t have noticed, Wiggins. Come on.” Jury rose to get his jacket and watched Wiggins pocket notebook, capsules, and a packet of evil-looking biscuits.

“T
HEY SAID
it looked like a ship with a tall sail coming right at you,” said Wiggins as he and Jury stopped for a moment after getting out of their car in Three Colt Street to admire the view of St. Anne’s Limehouse. Wiggins sneezed, blew his nose, and continued: “They complained about Hawksmoor’s churches for two hundred years, especially this one. Well, he was ahead of his time, that’s all.” Wiggins held up his hand, squared off between thumb and forefinger, like a painter gauging lines. “Kind of art nouveau-ish, don’t you think?”

Jury didn’t know what to think. He never ceased to wonder where his sergeant managed to pick up such arcana. “I don’t know, except that it’s a lovely church.”

“Better than Christopher Wren,” said Wiggins, sneezing again. And with this verdict on seventeenth-century ecclesiastical architecture, he added that it was beginning to rain and walked on.

The bells just then poured out twelve sonorous notes, perhaps exulting in the knowledge that after two centuries of waiting, someone finally appreciated them.

 • • • 

Behind the bar of the Five Bells and Bladebone stood a middle-aged man with a round face and a cupid’s-bow
smile who bore more resemblance to angel or priest than publican. Actually, he wasn’t, he told Jury. He set the lager on the counter for his customer, who paid for the drinks without speaking and who yawned all the way back to the rear of the pub, to a small enclosure whose walls and ceiling were composed of ancient tea packets. There were a dozen or so customers such as the man sitting at the bar, staring at the optics, smoking, and pretending not to be listening.

“Not the owner here, no,” said Bernard Molloy. “Got a place in Derry, I do. Just filling in for the owner, who’s a bit liverish.”

Wiggins was about to open his mouth to offer advice and succor, Jury knew, and he quickly produced the photo of Simon Lean. “If you haven’t been here long, then perhaps you don’t recognize this man.”