The Old Wine Shades (11 page)

‘And whilst he was doing that, his mum takes out a map.’ Harry nodded.

‘Did you notice the roads that crossed the one you were on?’

‘Actually, the wood’–roughly, Harry sketched a tangle of trees, rounded masses–’they might very well have been part of the Winterhaus estate.’

‘The agent didn’t give you a plan or a property survey?’

‘No. The trees began at some distance from the rear of the house. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that was all Winterhaus property. Does it make a difference?’

‘A difference who owned the woods? It might to an adult who’d keep clear of someone else’s property. But it wouldn’t mean anything to a child. I was thinking of that Wendy house.’ Harry shook his head. ‘A child would hardly venture onto this property and into the Wendy house situated as it was.’

‘As of now, you can’t really be sure Mrs. Gault was actually there. I wonder why she didn’t call the estate agent after seeing it. She called about the cottage. She was like that, was she? Very definite about things? Decisive?’

‘Yes, I’d say she was. I never gave it much thought before. But, yes, Glynn was quite firm in her opinions, though I wouldn’t call her opinionated.’

Jury drank his tea and wondered. As far as not giving much thought to it was concerned, Jury had an idea Harry Johnson had given a great deal of thought to Glynnis Gault. ‘So she has tea with the couple in the cottage, isn’t too keen on their house, probably isn’t too keen on them and calls Marjorie Bathous to tell her. But Mrs. Gault could simply have waited until she’d returned to Lark Rise. You’re not sure if she called the agent about Winterhaus.’

‘You’re suggesting they never got there?’

‘That’s always been a possibility, hasn’t it? There’s nothing conclusive about Winterhaus, except that it sounds like a hell of an interesting property with a strange history.’ Jury was thinking about Ben Torres.

‘Glynn would have liked the air of mystery. Even liked the sinister, the ominous atmosphere.’

‘The agent would have gone through the house. What did she say about the furnished drawing room?’

‘Remember, she’d asked Torres to do that to better show off the house. At least one room looked lived in.’

Jury looked around the restaurant. The other diners seemed long since gone. ‘It looks like we’re shutting down the place.’ He caught the waiter’s attention. The waiter came up to their table with the bill and Jury quickly put his hand on it before Harry Johnson could take it. ‘My turn, surely.’

Harry smiled and put away his money clip. ‘Very nice. Thanks.’

‘The bill probably isn’t a third of the one in the Docklands place, so don’t feel too thankful.’ Jury put down some bills and included an oversized tip.

They got up and headed for the door. Jury noticed the sitar music had still played for as long as they were at their table. Now it stopped. That the place would keep the music on as long as there were diners seemed to him a very civilized thing to do. It was the quietest restaurant he’d ever eaten in. The Raj. He would have to remember it.

Outside, Jury looked around at the quiet streets, felt the night air, cold for March. He smiled. ‘Is that all? Is that the end?’ Harry laughed. ‘By no means. You remember I told you it didn’t end. It just reaches a point where I stop, when I’ve told you all I can.’ He pulled on his leather gloves, the color and texture of the crême brûlée they had had for dessert. ‘You know, you should really see that house.’

‘I might very well do that. Is the same agent handling it?’

‘I think so. Anyway, it would be the same estate agency. It’s Forester and Flynn. They’re on the main street of the village. Lark Rise.’

‘I wonder what effect all of this had on the leasing of the house.’

‘Not much, I shouldn’t think,’ said Harry. ‘It’s not as if there’d been a murder there.’

Jury looked away, then looked speculatively at Harry.

‘What? Do you think there was? Christ, I can’t begin to get my mind around that possibility.’ Harry shook his head and looked down at Mungo, who was swishing his tail on the pavement and looking from one to the other. ‘Good old dog, what do you know that we don’t?’ To Jury he said, ‘How in hell could Mungo here have got to Chelsea from effing Surrey?’

‘Maybe Mungo didn’t. Maybe he got there from Piccadilly or Sloane Street or West Ham. Why are we assuming that whatever happened, happened in Surrey? How do you know that Glynnis Gauh and Robbie and Mungo didn’t return to London?’

‘But... Mungo’s been gone for months. How could he be that near home and not show himself before now?’

‘In a dozen ways. Someone could have found him on the Heath or in Green Park or wherever and taken him in. They might have put up flyers, tried to find the owner; or the RSPCA could have taken him in and eventually found a caretaker. He could have been dropped off in Chelsea. Although I’m not sure but what that raises another set of questions: the first would be another why. But this is the wildest speculation we’re engaged in.’ Jury was trying to flag down a cab, all of which seemed committed to their ample, empty selves and chugged on by. ‘And maybe the answer is so glaringly obvious we’ll wonder we could have missed it.’

‘I’d be happy to drive you home.’

Jury shook his head. ‘No, you’d be going out of your way. I live in Islington. It’s late. I don’t mind a cab.’

A cab finally pulled up to the curb and Jury stuck his head in to tell the driver he was going to Islington. ‘It’s been, as always, fascinating.’

‘How about tomorrow evening?’

‘Tomorrow evening?’ Jury frowned a little. ‘I don’t think I can make that; but what about the next evening?’

‘Night after tomorrow, then? Old Wine Shades?’ Jury nodded, climbed into the cab and gave directions to his street. The cab swept on. Jury looked out of the cab’s rear window to see Harry and Mungo growing smaller in the distance and looking strangely lonely.

Or was that just me? he wondered.

14

It’s none of my business–’

(Meaning, yes, it was.)

‘Except I just don’t understand–’

(Meaning, it was beyond the understanding even of Tony Blair.) ‘Why you’d ever want to go to dinner night after night with somebody you hardly know at all instead of staying home like you usually do. I mean, if you want to go down the pub, well, there’s the Mucky Pup hardly a fifteen-minute walk away.’ Carole-anne shrugged and went on flipping through the pages of some beauty magazine, stopping now and then, looking (she had informed Jury earlier) for a new hairdo.

To think any model’s hair in those glossy pages could look better than Carole-anne’s beautifully unkempt, easy-come, easy-go, ginger-gold hair was ludicrous. Jury said, ‘He’s telling me a fascinating story and it’s taking a long time to do it.’

‘It sounds like what’s-her-name? Who was going to get beheaded if she didn’t keep the king interested?’

‘Scheherazade.’

Carole-anne sat on the sofa in Jury’s one-bedroom flat that looked out on the street and its oblong of park. Carole-anne’s was on the third floor, and in between, on the second, was a flat of doubtful provenance, as it appeared to belong not so much to Stan Keeler as to Stan’s dog Stone. Jury thought he heard Stone walking about up there.

Carole-anne wet her finger and applied it to a page, looking at it and then turning the magazine round to face Jury. The photo showed a ridiculous ‘do,’ the model’s hair short and standing up in spikes.

‘Hm. Sure, if you want your head to look like the Statue of Liberty’s crown.’

‘Very funny. I just was thinking something short and neat.’
 

‘Stay out of hair-cutting emporiums. There’s no way to improve on what you’ve got.’

Narrowly, she looked at him, suspicious of his compliment.

Then satisfied Jury had spoken honestly, she let the magazine lie in her lap and picked up another Jury-bashing topic. ‘What’s going on about your job, then?’

‘I’ll be called in probably next week and my fingers whacked by the assistant commissioner and then made to stand in a corner.’ He drank his tea from the teacup resting precariously on the arm of his chair.

‘So are you still suspended?’

‘I’m not exactly on suspension. It’s something else, some rarefied version of suspension while there’s an inquiry. My guess is that our PR people–I’m assuming we must have one or more-think public opinion is so much in my favor suspension might be bad for the Met’s image. To tell the truth, I’m rather enjoying my freedom.’

Carole-anne sat forward so suddenly the magazine slipped from her lap and her turquoise blouse slipped off one shoulder. That went well. Jury smiled.

‘Are you saying you might just up and bloody quit?’ Here was a possibility far worse than all the storytelling dinners in London! It could mean that Jury was free, free to shake the dust of Islington off his shoes and go anywhere at all, live anywhere at all.

‘Only if my two thousand shares of IBM and Microsoft split. Until that happy day, I’ll be stopping here, as usual.’

Relieved, she fell back against the sofa and took up her favorite I-told-you-so topic. ‘I told you, remember? That you shouldn’t be going into that house without a warrant! I was sitting right here when I told you and Cody that.’

‘Actually, you were standing over there’–he nodded his head to indicate the kitchen doorway–’with a spatula in hand and a plate of sausages when you told me.’ He smiled. Clearly, no loss-of-memory disease had hit him yet.

Wearily she sighed. ‘Look what it’s come to.’

He waited a tick for her to tell him what it had come to, but she must have found it too bloody obvious to say. Apparently it had to do with Jury’s getting sloshed every night in the Old Wine Shades with a stranger.

‘I had to go into that house, warrant or no.’

‘No, you didn’t. You ought to’ve used Correct Police Procedure.’

He heard the capitals sounding in what had become her favorite phrase of late. ‘I had to.’ Why did no one except for DI Johnny Blakely and Melrose Plant understand this? ‘I didn’t have a choice.’

‘Well, you’re always telling me how a person has to go along with the system–’

Jury had never told her that in his life.

‘–or otherwise we might just as well slip back into the Dark Ages.’

‘We have done anyway.’

‘Don’t be daft. Now you’re saying that Correct Police Procedure-’

Apparently, her all-time favorite.

‘–might just as well pack it in.’

Jury slid down in his chair and looked ceiling-ward. Pacing, back and forth, a tiny clicking of dog nails. ‘Why aren’t you carting Stone around? Why is the poor dog wandering around up there all by himself?’

‘I just was up there with him when you came in. I’ve got to take him out.’ She checked her watch. ‘Mucky Pup’s still open. Fancy a drink?’

Despite the fact that he thought he and Harry Johnson had just drunk London dry, he said, ‘Good idea. We can take Stone with us.’ The caramel-colored Lab accompanied them to Upper Street, stopping as they walked along every once in a while to investigate some tree or plant as if he were picking up clues, but finally finding nothing in the neighborhood much worth his notice. While they walked, Jury talked about Mungo.

‘Well, fancy that!’ Carole-anne was completely rocked by that intrepid hound’s finding his way back to Chelsea all on his own.

Jury didn’t believe he had, but it sounded good.

Jury said, ‘Do you think if someone took Stone and dumped him somewhere else that he’d find his way back?’

‘You do, don’t you?’

‘Oh, thanks.’

15

Sergeant Wiggins was stirring his morning tea, not with a spoon, but with a long thin object that could have been a twig, a root or a finger dropped off by forensics.

Jury was training himself not to ask, and not succeeding, except he managed to get round a direct ‘What is it?’ by making a comment. As now: ‘Yes, I’ll have a cup, but I want a spoon to stir it, a proper spoon, and not that thing you’re using.’

This of course was tantamount to ‘What is it?’ since Wiggins would have to explain. ‘It’s vanilla bean, isn’t it?’

‘What? Why in hell would you be stirring tea with it?’

‘It’s been found to be good for the digestive tract.’ Jury had draped his jacket, an elderly brown tweed, over the back of his chair and was rolling up his sleeves as if preparing to dive into a sea of casework. ‘Wiggins, your digestive tract has probably gone home to its mother. Does nothing stop in your stomach before it barrels right into your intestines? You’ve got enough digestive aids–black biscuits, herbs, roots and leaves–to rid an entire nursing home of irritable bowel syndrome.’

Wiggins’s sigh was long-suffering. ‘You seem a bit out of sorts today, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘Considering I might be out of work tomorrow, yes, I do mind you saying.’ Jury was opening and shutting drawers, looking for nothing unless it be Divine Intervention or at least Divine Explanation for his troubles.

‘You exaggerate so much. Dr. Nancy called about that Soho Shooting.’

Jury smiled. ‘Did she want me to call her?’