The Old Wine Shades (16 page)

‘No. That’s not going to fix things.’ She was quite certain on this point. And in the intensity with which she delivered this news,

she didn’t seem to realize she was punching out the bear’s eyes. She breathed a world-weary sigh.

Melrose dropped his head in his hands and briefly considered punching out his own eyes. Didn’t Jury
get
it? He was a detective, after all.

She said, ‘You don’t understand. This is my favorite spot and I’m not letting people who don’t even
live
here keep me away.’ Over the heart-littered shirt, she was buttoning up a moth-eaten little cardigan.

‘That’s very brave,’ said Jury.

‘No, it isn’t. I just don’t have anywhere else to go.’

The melancholy of that announcement made even Melrose sad. To have to inhabit a ghost world because there was no other place for you.

Jury looked up at the oyster-colored unpromising sky. ‘Do you come here in winter too?’

‘Yes, I like it when it’s snowing.’

‘It would be beautiful then.’

She followed his gaze and both sat staring upward.

Now both their attentions were elsewhere, maybe he could take that spade from that bucket and bury Bruno.

In another minute or so the sky began to deepen toward night. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, springing up from the porch. ‘Aunt Brenda doesn’t let me be out when it starts turning dark.’

‘We’ll drive you home,’ said Jury.

She seemed to take fright at the very suggestion. ‘No. I’ll go my regular way.’ She pointed. ‘Along the path through the trees.’ Melrose, delighted to be leaving, said, ‘I can imagine what auntie would say if she appeared with two strange men.’

‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ she called, having started for the path to escape people tinkering with her ritual.

Jury echoed her good-bye as she was swallowed by the trees. ‘Well, that went well!’

They started their own trek back to the car and Jury said, ‘You know, if you’d pay more attention instead of needlessly arguing every little point—’

‘Attention! I was hanging on every word.’

‘That must have been Harry Johnson whom she saw.’

They had walked around the house instead of going through it. Getting into the Bentley, Jury said, ‘Try not to drive as if we’re the only car on the road.’

‘Why? We are.’ Melrose let out the clutch and backed up.

Jury said, ‘My guess is she’s gone into that house many times, but is keeping it a secret. Here’s an old deserted house whose past she can freely make up. Make it be romantic, or unhappy or even fearful. Probably she doesn’t want anybody coming around snooping.’

‘A child that age I’d think would be terrified of creepy things that go bump in the night—ghosts, ghouls, disembodied hands— that sort of thing.’

Jury smiled. ‘Not her.’

‘Me, you mean, the so-called ghost who looked like me. It was all too transparent.’

‘I’m not so sure. You’re tall, light-haired and today you’re wearing that black coat. From any distance, one might think you were Harry Johnson.’

‘So
he’s
been here.’

‘Of course. He came in Hugh’s stead right after it happened. I mean right after Mrs. Gault disappeared. Maybe doing a spot of investigation on his own. Then he came back with Hugh. I told you all of this.’

Jury watched the turning dusk, the trees, the fields, the farms, the richer ones whose crisscrossing white fencing spoke of horses, sleek and handsome racehorses. He thought of Nell Ryder and spoke of her to Melrose. Would he never come to terms with all that?

‘Come on, Richard, Nell Ryder wasn’t, well, she wasn’t one of us, or at least not one of
me.
She operated in a whole different dimension.’

‘Strange thing to say.’

‘Look, she’d go along with us and our idiot ways until she saw something that needed her attention. In that case, those horses. They spoke, you know, her language. Or she spoke theirs.’

They drove through Lark Rise, stopped at the estate agency and found it closed. Melrose slipped the key into the slotted box that said
KEY RETURN
and Jury looked at the shops, a few people in the local butcher’s, the chemist drawing down his security blind. Melrose said, ‘What is he keeping back?’

‘Harry Johnson?’

‘Yes.’

Jury was silent, thinking. Then he said, ‘Perhaps that he was—is—in love with Glynnis Gault. That he would go to the place from which he thought she’d vanished, hoping he’d find some trace, some clue. I think that’s possible.’

Melrose waved that away. ‘You’re ignoring a more sinister explanation.’

Jury turned from the chemist’s window to look at Melrose.

‘Such as?’

‘What about his burying her on the property and returning, as we know all murderers do, to the scene of the crime?’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Well, it could have been as you said: he was in love with her. In a fit of jealous rage, he killed her and buried her in the woods. Together with her son.’

‘It strikes me as a strange place to do it, on a piece of property that might have tenants at any time and one that they have no connection to.’

‘But that’s just it. Who would connect him with the crime? That man’s rigged something; I can just feel it. I can’t understand why you’re not suspicious.’

‘Oh, I am.’

‘No, you’re sold.’

Jury laughed. ‘I’m
sold?’

‘Sold.’ Melrose fumbled a cigarette from a pack and jammed it in his mouth.

‘You’re not going to smoke in the car, are you?’

‘I’ll open the window.’ He buzzed it down.

‘Have you become so slovenly in your smoking you don’t even fill up your cigarette case anymore?’

‘I’ve always been slovenly.’

‘Haven’t you read about secondhand smoke? It’s as bad—’
 

Melrose pounded the steering wheel. ‘I do
not
want a damned
lecture.
’

‘It isn’t. It’s only a comment.’

Melrose tossed the cigarette out of the window. ‘I’ll get the evil weed out of sight! Reefer madness threatens to overtake me.’

‘You always exaggerate things.’ Jury looked out of the window and up at the dense stars.

They drove in silence or in whatever version of silence one can on the A3 when Melrose punched the steering wheel again. ‘The dog! That damned Moonglow!—’

‘Mungo,’ said Jury.

‘Everytime I think I’ve got this mystery sorted, that damned dog turns up!’

‘That’s the easiest part of it.’ Jury yawned and slid down in his seat.

‘Like Harry Johnson left him for dead, but the dog recovered and found his way back.’

‘No, actually I hadn’t thought of that, brilliant deduction that it is. Are we going to have a drink at Boring’s?’

‘Yes. I’d sooner be chatted up by Major Champs and Colonel Neame than wonder about Mango.’

‘Mungo.’

20

‘Superintendent Jury! Let me get you a drink!’ said Colonel Neame; this was seconded by Major Champs.

Getting one a drink was the first order of business in Boring’s before anything else could proceed, including death.

‘Thank you. I’m waiting for Mr. Plant.’ Or should it be Lord Ardry in here? Would one walk into Boring’s without some sort of title? Some rank? Some number—the second, the third—appended to one’s name? ‘Superintendent’ worked well. ‘Commissioner’ would have worked even better.

Colonel Neame had given the order to one of the porters and turned now to say, ‘You know, we’ve not yet gotten over that awful business in here a couple of years ago, have we, Champs?’

The ‘awful business’ was the murder of one of Boring’s distinguished members. A vanished love affair, the death of one’s dog, the end of a war—none could vie with a murder committed veritably under one’s nose. No, nothing like murder as a springboard for nostalgia, a subject for reminiscence.

Jury’s drink was delivered and he raised it. ‘To the good times, gentlemen.’

And they answered by raising theirs.

Melrose appeared, hair damp, looking scrubbed as a three- year-old. He took his usual seat, wondering about having a usual seat. Was he getting as crusty as Champs and Neame? Well, he could think of worse ways of checking out—such as in his own living room across the way from . . .

‘We should tell them,’ said Jury, ‘the story.’

Melrose was surprised.

‘It’s not a secret. Go ahead.’ He looked at his watch and drained his glass. ‘I have to be going. I’m meeting Harry Johnson.’ He smiled, looked at Melrose. ‘Chapter four.’

Nothing, thought Jury, could suit them better, nothing could be more welcome than a story like those bedtime stories that sustain us when we’re children and that we listen to again and again, not bothered by the fact we know what’s coming.

He thought about this in the cab taking its own sweet time on its way to the City.

You in a hurry, guv? the driver had asked when Jury climbed in. No, Jury had said; take your time.

The driver was whistling a little, in a good mood. Larking around, thought Jury, or something good had happened in his life. ‘I bet you get sick of it, don’t you?’ Jury said.

‘Wha’s that, guv?’ He was searching in the mirror for Jury’s eyes.

‘Having to hurry. People wanting to go faster, faster.’

The driver slapped the steering wheel. There was a lot of that going on today, for some reason. ‘You best believe
that.
It’s the whole effing city, inn’t? And I want to tell them, it’ll still be there— office, pub, wife—whether you get there in a minute or an hour.’

They were driving along the Embankment—the long way round, Jury thought, but didn’t care. Across the Thames were the fairy lights of the National Theater and the Tate Modern. Southwark always looked a little magical at night.

‘Now, my girl, Minnie, strangest thing happened to her; right along here, it was—’

Jury sat back, thinking this might be the reason for the long way round.

‘—said she’d just got outta her car when this punter rushes up to her, scares her half to death and o’ course she thought he was going to mug her, but all he did was ask directions to Scotland Yard. ‘Now
that,’’
says Minnie, ‘was a new pickup line if ever I heard one.’

‘What he told her was he was being poisoned. So Minnie thought he was nuts, but she stopped there to hear him out. I tell her, ‘Min, you never do things like that, love,
never.
‘ She says, ‘But he looked so bad, Da, he looked to be on his uppers.’ So she drives him to St. James’s. And along the way he tells her he’s from Brighton, where he’s in the antiques business and for the last couple months someone’s been slowly poisoning him. That he’s getting sicker and sicker. No, it’s not his imagination, and he’s pretty sure it’s his cousin.

‘They get to New Scotland Yard and she pulls up in front of the main door and lets him out, whereas—’

Jury loved the ‘whereas.’

‘—there’s a PC standing there, looks in through the passenger window, says, ‘This isn’t a hotel, miss. Move on.’

Jury’s cabbie again pounded his steering wheel.

‘So then Min, she really wants to know what’s going on inside and finds a parking place and goes in. The guy’s sittin’ there in the waiting area . . .’

Jury closed his eyes and listened or didn’t listen by turns. He just let the words wash over him, imagining they were all there at Brighton beach—the driver and Min and the chap being poisoned, all watching the shingle to see what might turn up, the tide sliding in and leaving behind tiny shells, sea urchins, sea grass, sand dollars, a fag end, candy wrapper, plastic bottle—the detritus we all drop carelessly behind us like a trail of crumbs. Only we’re not as clever or not as lucky as Hansel and Gretel and we don’t get back. The tide comes in to wash it all away.

Jury was nearly asleep by the time they got to the City and Martin Lane. He got out, paid the driver, his ghostly companion across the Styx, and said, for he felt it was safe to guess, ‘She—Minnie— never found out the truth of it?’