The Five Bells and Bladebone (24 page)

“I
THOUGHT YOU WORKED
in pairs,” said Ruby Firth, as she opened the door to him for the second time that day. “Proper police procedure isn’t being observed,” she added wryly, taking up her same position on the sofa, where she must have been working under the dim light of the table lamp. The loft was even more shadowy now at dusk. The planet-ringed top of the torchieres gave off their unearthly, green glow. Beside the basket of material samples, bindings, and braid, lay her outsized horn-rimmed glasses.

Given the velvet gown, the three-inch heels, it was hard to believe that the “citified Laura Ashley” had really been plying her needle when he knocked. “Are you used to police, then?”

Ruby had picked up a small silk shade that she was in the process of mending. Her expression didn’t change as she regarded him over the tops of the horn-rims. At the moment she looked like an inquisitive teacher. “I have a feeling that question is double-edged.” With her teeth, she snapped a thread, then picked up a bit of apricot braid. “I’ve had police for breakfast, lunch, and now apparently for the evening meal. Sorry, but I’ve a gallery opening to go to. Champagne and nibbles. I don’t know about the
quality of the paintings, but I do know the quality of the decor. I did it.”

“Sorry. It’s necessary. Where’s Tom?”

“Gone over to Pennyfields to eat Chinese. I thought perhaps getting out would cheer him up; to tell the truth, if I’d had to listen to that harmonica much longer I’d’ve screamed. Does he have to play such doleful music?”

“Just having his sister murdered, I expect he’d feel doleful.”

She said nothing to that except, “Well, at least ‘Waltzing Matilda’ has stopped for a while. I was getting pretty tired of it.” Her look was the usual uncompromising stare. “Tired of police, too. I’ve told everything I know twice over.”

Jury shrugged. “You may think so, but things sometimes go missing. It’s hard to remember every detail first time around. I want to talk with Tommy, too.”

“Then you can just catch him up. I gave him some money to go to the Ruby Dragon. At least it’s brighter than most.” Her eyes were still on the shade, as she drew up a bit of the braid to make a kind of pleat.

Jury couldn’t put his finger on it, what he didn’t like about Ruby Firth. She had held out a hand to Tommy Diver, true, but he wondered how long it would be before the hand would drop away and close on something she fancied more at the moment, the way it reached for the gin and tonic now. Was it a mask of irony she wore, or would the mask drop away like the hand to reveal beneath it another mask? Something cold touched him, the spread of the shadow he had felt in the church, perhaps.

He wondered if Ruby Firth were capable of commitment. He wondered about her casual response to the death of Simon Lean. Almost impossible to tell if it was real or faked. Roy Marsh, on the other hand, couldn’t conceal his feelings about her. Now, as she held the shade at arm’s
length, considering her handiwork, he might as well not have been in the room.

Her look at him, when he mentioned Roy Marsh’s name, was defensive. Impatiently, she said, “I’ve known him for years. What on earth does that have to do with the case?”

It was as if knowing him for years dismissed Marsh from notice as a man. “Did he know Sadie Diver?”

“He could have done.” She shrugged. “Ask him.”

“I’m asking you. I think you know.”

She had taken an oblong of puce satin from the box. Jury doubted this needlework had to be done then and there. Ruby Firth would have to be a cold woman indeed if a bit of satin and braid could take her mind off murder, especially a murder in which two men with whom she’d been intimate were involved. “I expect he could have seen her. After all, Narrow Street’s only just down from here a bit. And we did go into the Five Bells.”

“Men apparently liked her, at least that’s the impression I got in the pub.”

Her eyes came up to meet his, looking mildly amused. “If you’re suggesting he threw me over, well, men don’t usually do that, Superintendent.” This was punctuated by the sound of satin ripping. Yet he heard in that defiant statement some other emotion, something edgy, nerves frayed like the length of cloth she’d just torn and now folded into the workbasket.

“I must get to the opening.” She shoved the basket aside and rose. In that sculptured black-and-green gown she looked slim as the torchiere before which she stood.

Surely, she wasn’t so naïve as to think she could dismiss him as she had his questions about Roy Marsh. But Jury let it go, and let her go, too. “Sorry to have kept you. You will, of course, make yourself available. Wapping police will want to talk further with you.” He rose to go. “Where’s that restaurant, then?”

“In Pennyfields. Turn right and it’s just at the bottom . . . . Superintendent?”

Jury had his hand on the doorknob. “Yes?”

“Will he be going back to Gravesend tonight? Or tomorrow?”

“Tommy? I expect his aunt and uncle will collect him quite soon. I’m not sure precisely when. Can’t you —” Jury then felt in her an unease, a posture, much like the one she’d taken before the thin floorlamp, that threatened to crumble. The rest of his reply —
stand it for one more night?
— stuck in his throat, as his anger started to crumble, too. He managed a smile that he didn’t feel. “
On the Beach,
” he said. She looked puzzled. “ ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was the theme song. That might be why you think it’s so unhappy.” She didn’t understand, apparently. “But I expect you’re too young to remember that. Thirty years ago, that must be. Ava Gardner was in it.” Jury didn’t know why he was standing in this doorway, rattling on about an antique film, except that he sensed that she needed support. Almost as if she had met his thought, taken it literally, she swayed slightly, clumsily, as if the high heel of her shoe had caught on an invisible rug.

He went on, for he knew she was leaning on the sound of his voice. “It was just that the nuclear cloud hadn’t reached Australia yet. It was the last safe place on earth — for a while.” He could sense the conflict. If he had pressed his question about Roy Marsh, he might have discharged the tension and gotten an answer. Or it might have worked the other way; he might have tossed away any chance he had of gaining her confidence. He felt, though both of them stood on the firm polished planks of the floor, that they were like voyagers on a pitching vessel.

“I always thought it was a hell of a sad song, too, since they all had to die in the end. Good-night, Ruby.”

When he glanced back through the door he was closing behind him, she had not moved an inch. She still stood as
elegantly stiff and dark as the dim lamp that cast its faint green shadow across her hair.

 • • • 

Jury found him behind a mountain of chicken fried rice.

Pennyfields was strung with Chinese restaurants, as was much of Limehouse, most of them very good, none of them fancy. The Ruby Dragon was the most ornate of the lot. A few gold-and-red-trimmed paper palaces and pagodas hung from the ceiling, turning gently in the small breeze stirred by the door’s opening; a mural depicting a slant-eyed and strangely bearded dragon was painted a gummy red that reminded Jury of dried blood; there were rice-paper partitions and black lacquered screens. Still, he could judge from the clientele that the Ruby Dragon was a family restaurant, catering for the locals just like the others in Limehouse. The menu dependable, the service unsmiling, the food good.

Tommy had, apparently, already eaten his way through a phalanx of appetizers; there were the remains of spring rolls, wonton soup, and shrimp balls. Jury asked for tea.

“Here, eat some of this,” said Tommy, shoving the dish toward him.

“Thanks, no.” Jury smiled as Tommy looked round him at this banquet rather guiltily. “There’s no Chinese places near where we live. Not even a take-away.” Unhappily, he shoved his rice about. “I guess you came to take me back.”

“ ‘Back’? You sound like an escapee. No, I just wanted to talk with you some more. Ruby told me you were here.”

“She gave me the money. It was nice of her; I guess she got tired of me hanging round.” Apologetically, he touched the harmonica sticking out of his shirt pocket. “I don’t know that many songs. My favorite’s ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and one I wrote myself. It gets on people’s nerves.” He sighed. Then he smiled. “It sure gets on Sid’s nerves. He’s always on about me playing it down in the engine room.” His head leaning against his fisted hand and turning the
fork over and over in the other, he seemed to forget about the rare treat of Chinese food. “But they — Aunt Glad and Uncle John — say I got to take at least two ‘O’ levels. What good’s that stuff if you just want to work on boats? They keep telling me how Sadie got this real good education at the Little Sisters of Charity; what good’s that ever done her —?”

He looked across at Jury in fright. Suddenly, he must have remembered that his sister’s education would never be thrown up to him again.

 • • • 

He hadn’t seen her since the convent days, Tommy told him, as they stood at the gate of St. Anne’s. “It was really a lark, seeing Sadie with her head all wrapped up in that black scarf. They shaved it off. Her hair, I mean. They’re bald, nuns are. Terrible, I think.” The look he shot Jury was just a tiny bit defiant, as if he were willing to argue the point.

“I don’t think they are, though. Bald, I mean. And if your sister was a novitiate, well, they’d have let her hair alone. Cut it just a bit perhaps.” Roy Marsh had given him what information the Thames police had collected. That the girl had entered a convent struck Jury as out of character. The picture he had of her was of a rather brassy, even pushy, and not unselfish person.

“Seems wrong to me, anyway. There’s a lot about the church seems wrong.” He glanced at Jury to see how he was taking these increasingly heretical judgments. When Jury didn’t rise to the bait, he seemed relieved and immediately lost interest in the right and the wrong of it.

The unsmiling waiter set down a high-piled metal dish of sweet-and-sour pork in its glaze of bright orange sauce as Tommy told Jury stories about his childhood — long past, he seemed to think — when Sadie had been his best, sometimes his only, companion. There were Wendy-houses, picnics in secret, dark caves, playing truant from
school . . . indeed all of the things that one reads of in the idyllic descriptions of books or sees on the telly — the sort of childhood no one ever really had, or if one had, would not remember clearly through a haze of eternal summer.

Jury thought he understood why Tommy had been so quick to say that the victim wasn’t his sister: he had never really had the relationship with her he was now inventing. The difference in age would have been only one factor, really. It would have been possible, he supposed, for a certain kind of seventeen-year-old girl to indulge a small brother in the way Tommy imagined, but he doubted Sadie Diver was that sort of sister. That she had gone for months, years, without trying to communicate (except to send him the snapshot) and then had only done so (and probably regretted it) in her new economic circumstances as a way, probably, to get the message to the Mulhollands that she was better off than they would ever be.

“So Sadie wasn’t exactly nunlike, right, Tommy? Not the quiet and contemplative life for her, hmm?”

He was already halfway through his mountain of rice, spooning the pork and pineapple on it for good measure. “Her? Don’t make me laugh. Sadie quiet and . . . whatever . . .”

“What gave her that religious turn, all of a sudden?”

“Aunt Glad and Uncle John gave it. They thought she was, you know . . . kind of wild. It was just for a year.”

“You have to be fairly smart to enter one. There are exams you have to pass. It’s not for tearaways.”

Tommy smiled over his teacup. “Sadie could be anything. It’s my thinking she did it just to get them out of her hair. Or what was left of her hair,” he added darkly.

That patina of breeding, of reserve, of nunlike calm was something Sadie Diver could have acquired. It sounded as if she were sharp and resilient. From the report Roy Marsh had given him, the Mulhollands were pretty resilient themselves.
Hard as hard cheese,
had been his impression.
He’d said the lad hadn’t seemed too happy after he’d talked to them, either.

Tommy was going on with a tale of Sadie playing nurse to the four dogs and three cats, as a bit of a plan evolved in Jury’s mind. Since Tommy too would have to “keep himself available,” as he’d told Ruby Firth . . . why not? The boy had come up to London with such candlelit hopes, all of them sputtered out now because this girl round whom he had spun a lot of dreams had been murdered. Why, on top of this, should he have to go back so soon to a house where tea and sympathy would be absent? At least, at the Ruby Dragon, you could get the tea. He looked at the harmonica sticking up from the pocket of the jacket that hung across the lad’s thin shoulders like an old life he couldn’t slough off.

Jury checked his watch and took out some bills. “Come on, if you’re through, and I’ll take you along to the pub. I’ve got to meet my sergeant there.”

“Me, sir? But they won’t let me in, I don’t think. Under age.”

“We’ll manage it.”

The way the pale face lit up reminded Jury of the rice-paper screens. Light came and went behind them, transforming imprints almost magically. He nodded.

Jury added: “Since you’ve got to keep yourself available for police, I was thinking it might be better for you to stay in London at least tonight. Also, I may need you to go to Northamptonshire.”

Northants or China, it made no odds to Tommy Diver. Just as long as it wasn’t Gravesend. “Yes,
sir
. Stay at Ruby’s, you mean?”

“No, I was thinking of somewhere else you might like better. Friend of mine has a flat.”

“Is it a policeman, then?”

“I’m sure she thinks she is.”