The Old Wine Shades (19 page)

Jury sat there, chewing the inside of the corner of his mouth.

Furiously.

23

Jury was still chewing at that corner of his mouth the next morning, sitting at his desk and watching Wiggins soaking tea bags in their blue earthenware mugs, a gift from his cousin in Manchester. Chewing and debating whether he should run this string theory by Wiggins. It would be a kind of test, wouldn’t it, if the two least theoretically inclined people he had ever known—Wiggins and Carole-anne—were to agree that Hugh Gault’s story was a pack of lies?

Of course, no matter what, he knew Wiggins’s answer would be based on a trail of non sequiturs. He told himself
not
to ask Wiggins. The temptation, as usual, was too strong. ‘Wiggins, do you know anything about superstring theory? It’s a theory in physics.’ Wiggins was stirring his and Jury’s tea and thinking about it. ‘For God’s sake, Wiggins, do you have to think about whether you
know
superstring theory or not?’

‘Well, I could have known and then forgot.’ Delicately Wiggins tapped a spoon against the mug he had been sugaring up. Four sugars for him, one for Jury.

With his foot, Jury slammed shut the bottom drawer on which he’d been resting his feet. Sometimes you just had to do something physical, like beating up the furniture. ‘It was a
rhetorical
question, Wiggins. Of course you don’t know about it; you’d almost have to be a physicist yourself to know about it.’

‘You know about it, don’t you?’ He rose with Jury’s mug.

Jury bit his tongue as Wiggins set the mug of tea down on the desk. Returning then to his chair, he sat back and said, ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have to be a physicist to know about it. For example, I’m not in the 87th precinct, but I know all about that.’ To refresh Jury’s memory on that score, he held up his Ed McBain novel.

‘No one’s in the 87th precinct, not Carrera, not Meyer, not even Ed
McBain
’s in the 87th precinct. It’s
fiction.’

‘I was just making a point.’

What point? It’d be easier singing with whales.

‘Enlighten me,’ Wiggins said, as he sat with his tea and his smug little smile. ‘

Why were these people being so bloody condescending? You’d think their lives were fraught with theories that they were constantly sorting through as if their minds were blackboards chalked up with elegant equations. Jury said:

(You’re going to hate yourself, mate!)

‘String theory reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics.’ That didn’t sound right. ‘String theory holds that there are ten dimensions, nine in space, one—’

Wiggins interrupted. ‘Well, see, that’s where this theory is all wrong. There’re three dimensions, or four, if you count in time. So this theory is off by six.’ Complacently, he sipped his tea.

(Told you.) Jury leaned across his desk as far as he could. ‘It’s
theory,
for God’s sake; that’s what theories are. It’s a hypothesis.’

‘A guess, you mean.’

‘Yes, but that’s a very crude way of defining ‘hypothesis.’ A theory is something waiting to be proved.’

Wiggins snickered. ‘It’s in for a long wait, then.’

Damnit, had everyone except him suddenly grown brains? When his phone rang, jolting him. Jury clutched at it as if it were a parachute and found Fiona on the line telling him CS Racer wanted to see him. ‘He’s not in a bad mood for once.’

‘That must mean he’s been given the enviable job of relieving me of my warrant card and booting me out on the street.’

She snickered, much as Wiggins had done. ‘He ain’t in that good a mood.’

Jury hitched his jacket from the back of his swivel chair. Here, at least, was someone for whom brains were never an issue. He gave Wiggins a dirty look and left his office.

It was merely an interim report on the progress of the investigation as no decision had yet been reached with regard to Jury’s case; however, Racer took advantage of the process with yet another lecture on playing by the rules, team work, and not setting himself up to play the hero. It was this ‘hero’ appellation which was causing the trouble: Jury and Detective Sergeant Cody Platt, who had gone into the house with him, were cast as heroes for saving the ten little girls. At least, that’s how the media were playing it.

While Racer rambled on (now he was up and walking) Jury frowned over string theory. Superstring. How did a physicist wrap his brain around the idea of a particle so small you would have to describe it as billions and
billions
of times smaller than the next thing up the list? An atom, maybe.
Billions.
Jury couldn’t even think of it in terms of hundreds. How could someone like Hugh Gault use
billions
as if he were working clay? It must be something like those little Russian matryoshkas where you took out a smaller and smaller and smaller doll on into infinity until there came one so tiny you couldn’t even see it. He thought about quarks. Charm quarks. He smiled and looked at Racer. Could there be charmless quarks, too? Why not?

‘Jury! What the devil are you squinting over? What’re you thinking about?’

‘Quarks—I mean quacks. Yes, I was just wondering if that doctor I was ordered to go to isn’t one. A quack.’ He smiled. Jury remembered that a police psychologist had been recommended, a recommendation he hadn’t followed up on.

Racer enjoyed having any profession poor mouthed as long as he wasn’t of it. ‘You keep going to that doctor, lad. Make it look good.’

It was assumed that the experience in the Hester Street house must have been traumatic. It hadn’t been traumatic. If anything, it had been liberating.

‘Yes, sir.’ Jury’s gaze was now fixed on the cat Cyril, who had been resting in the shallow curve of molding that hid the indirect lighting, little lights that traveled all around the ceiling. Cyril was sitting up, taking his victim’s measure; that would be CS Racer, of course, who was pacing back and forth. Cyril had lately enjoyed leaping not on him but flying straight over Racer’s head and down. Cyril was revving up, but the door to the office needed to be open in order to escape. ‘Is that all? Sir?’

‘What? Yes, yes.’ Racer waved him out.

Jury opened the door and Cyril, in an amazing display of aeronautics, flew directly in front of Racer, landed and made for the door and lickety-split slid right under Fiona’s desk as a furious Racer marched into the outer office.

‘Where is he? Where is that mangy animal? I’ll kill him!’ Racer looked wildly around the room, missing the tip of a tail sticking out from under the desk.

Cyril, Jury thought, was getting a mite careless. ‘He must’ve disappeared into the ninth dimension.’ Jury, like Wiggins and Fiona before him, snickered.

‘You’d best keep on with that doctor, quack or not.’ Racer disappeared down the hall.

The cat Cyril popped out and up onto Fiona’s desk and started in washing. The paw he had wetted raised, he looked at Jury as if he might be interested in more dimensions on which to operate— ‘What do you know about Schrödinger’s cat, Cyril?’

—and wasn’t and, indifferent, washed the paw down over his face.

Jury had a couple of hours before meeting Harry Johnson at the Old Wine Shades, so he took a cab to Boring’s.

Preprandial sherry and whiskey were in full swing when Jury entered the Members’ Room. Melrose was sitting with Colonel Neame and Major Champs in the same chairs they had occupied before, looking as if they’d never left and were just as glad of it.

‘Superintendent! How delightful; let’s find a porter.’

Rarely did a Boring’s porter need to be found. One or another seemed always to be nipping by and now took the order for Jury’s coffee.

‘We’ve been working on your little problem, Superintendent.’ There were so many little problems, Jury asked them which one. He had tossed his coat over the back of the sofa and sat down. ‘Come up with anything?’

Colonel Neame drew a folded sheet of stationery from his jacket pocket. ‘We have a question.’

‘Fire away,’ said Jury as the porter set his coffee on the table beside the sofa. Jury wished that he had had the comforting cup in his hand when Racer was jabbering at him.

Colonel Neame looked at Major Champs and was waved on. ‘Very well, now in this map’—here he unfolded the paper and wiped his hand over it. The Boring’s crest was at the top—’here’s the village. Lark Rise, was it?’ It was represented by an assortment of little squares round a larger square. Probably, the little ones were meant to represent the buildings grouped round the square. ‘Ten or so miles on, you say, is the cottage that this Mrs. Gault stopped at—Lark Cottage. The agent received a call from the Gault woman, who said she thought the house was a bit too quaint. The second house was a half mile up the road, here’—he had drawn a larger square, with a long drive. ‘The agent didn’t hear from her on that score. We presume she went inside—’

‘No,’ said Melrose. ‘We know she went inside. There was a witness.’

‘Forgot that, yes. The child playing at the bottom of the garden. Anyway, next she called round at the Swan.’ He had drawn a square outfitted with a pub sign. He stopped and then went on. ‘Here’s our question: How do we know that’s the proper order? Why couldn’t she at first have gone to the Swan? She might have called round there before looking at property. Then to look at the two properties, she’d be driving in the opposite direction, first coming to Winterhaus, then to Lark Cottage. The agent assumed Mrs. Gault was referring to Lark Cottage when she called; that would be natural, considering the location, because it was in that order one would come to them if driving from Lark Rise.’ Colonel Neame sat back.

Major Champs harrumphed a few times, pulling himself together to come in where Colonel Neame broke off. ‘Well, we know she and the boy had tea with the Shoesmiths—odd name, that, doesn’t sound quite, you know, British.’ He paused, apparently wrapped up in thoughts about the name.

Melrose kept the story on track. ‘Look at how pleased they were that we happened along,’ he said to Jury. ‘Well, it could be that the Shoesmiths were the last people to see Mrs. Gault and her son alive.’

That rather sinister statement hung in the air. Jury remembered the plain, pleasant owners of Lark Cottage and smiled. The notion of the Shoesmiths’ doing away with Glynnis Gault and her son was a bit more than he could contemplate.

Major Champs said, ‘One wonders, you know, if something might have happened there. What sort of people are these Shoesmiths?’ Again, he frowned over the name. ‘Don’t strike me as quite the ticket.’

‘This comment she made to the estate agent,’ said Colonel Neame, ‘that the house was a little over the top—that depends what your ‘top’ is, I expect.’

Melrose said, ‘That cottage is quite isolated, especially for an elderly couple.’

‘What are we proposing here?’ asked Jury. ‘That the Shoe- smiths added a little laudanum to the tea and then dragged the two of them out to the woods? That doesn’t seem very likely. Couldn’t this easily be cleared up by checking on the different times Glynnis Gault had appeared at Lark Cottage and at the pub, in addition to the time of her call to Marjorie Bathous at Forester’s?’

All of them, Melrose included, stared at him as if he were some mischievous kid who’d stuck pins in their balloon. Jury, the spoiler.

Melrose said, ‘It’s just a different tack to take.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right.’ Jury signaled one of the porters and asked for a telephone.

‘Don’t you have a mobile phone?’

‘Yes, but it’s always running down. I hate mobiles. They should be outlawed except in cases of emergency.’

‘You’re a
policeman.
What you get
is
emergency. If you’d had one back in December, it would have come in devilishly handy.’
 

Jury nodded. ‘You’re certainly right there.’ He had dialed and now said to the ghost at the other end, ‘Wiggins, I need you to do something. A couple in Surrey named Shoesmith, first names Maeve and Robert, near the village of Lark Rise. Nose around and see if you come up with anything, will you? Thanks.’ He hung up.

The three of them looked pleased now Scotland Yard was taking them seriously.

Which it wasn’t. But Jury went on: ‘There are other possibilities. Mrs. Gault and her son could have lunched at the pub, then gone back to Lark Cottage and then to Winterhaus. There was a woman who saw them, we understand, saw Glynnis Gault standing beside her car, the boy presumably inside. If we could pin down a time there that would help in fixing the last place she was seen. That and the time they were at Lark Cottage—’

‘And how do we fix the time if the Shoesmiths are
lying
?’ asked Melrose.