The Old Wine Shades (32 page)

Jury could sense the very air in Surrey coming to attention.

‘Just a moment, sir.’

Jury heard Delaney bellow across the station room to someone else. Then he turned back to the phone. ‘Not here, sir.’

‘Would you see if you can get hold of him and tell him to call me. It’s urgent.’ Jury gave his home number.

‘Get on that right away, sir.’

Jury hung up and took another pull at his beer. Carole-anne was now fully reclined on the sofa, the offending clogs off and on the floor. He said, ‘What’s urgent is that the Surrey police found a dead woman in a house there.’

‘Pardon?’ wide-eyed she asked.

‘Come on, you heard me say ‘urgent.’

‘I wasn’t listening.’ Intrigued, she sat up. ‘Who is it? Where?’

‘The who is unknown. The where is a house called Winter- haus.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Yes, oh, that. Aren’t you going to say ‘I told you so’? You said a body would turn up. ‘There’s always a body,’ is what you said. But here’s the corker: the woman was indeed the one who the estate agent knew as Glynnis Gault. The same one a couple of other people identified as the Gault woman. Only, she isn’t. When I walked into the clinic to see Hugh Gault, his wife was there. Mrs. Gault. Glynnis.’

Carole-anne was interested enough to stop playing with her hair. She drew it back and twisted it, but it fell forward again. ‘Then he’s wrong.’

Jury was confused. ‘Who’s wrong?’

‘Hugh. He’s wrong about the ten dimensions. His wife didn’t go into one, like we thought—’

Jury loved the ‘we.’

‘—still, I haven’t found my earring. So maybe he’s not wrong. You sure you don’t want to go to the Angel?’

Jury blinked at the maze of her thought. No, he wouldn’t go to the Angel. He’d like to be sandblasted, though.

42

The next morning. Jury and Tom Dryer were on their way to Belgravia, Wiggins driving at the moment along the King’s Road toward Sloane Square. Dryer was in back, Jury in front, turned toward him, his arm across the back of the seat.

‘I’m assuming that Harry Johnson will know that I know the dead woman is not Glynnis Gault. Assuming, that is, that he knows the real Glynnis is back from Provence.’

Dryer was hanging on to the strap as if uneasy that Wiggins would forget another zebra crossing was really for the sake of the pedestrian. ‘I imagine so, well, depending.’ He interrupted himself to say, ‘Sergeant, those three old ladies are not on skates.’ He was speaking of Wiggins’s attempt to nose the car forward as the ladies tried to negotiate round it. This was near the Safeway and the old ladies had carryalls full of groceries. As soon as they’d crossed, the car jumped forward and continued down the King’s Road.

Jury looked at Dryer speculatively. ‘Depending? Depending on what?’

Wiggins, living up to Dryer’s expectations, sprang across an intersection outside of Peter Jones, forcing back several shoppers who had unwisely set foot on the crossing.

‘Wiggins, watch it, for God’s sake.’

Tom Dryer, when he talked to Jury late last night, had thanked him for calling. Jury had said, ‘Well, it
is
your case, Tom.’ He also said that Dryer should have been with him at the clinic, but Jury thought it was going to be nothing other than a routine identification. Hardly routine for Hugh Gault, of course, but that Hugh would take one look at the police photos and say, yes, that’s Glynnis.

‘I can talk to the Gaults whilst I’m in London,’ said Dryer. ‘No harm done.’

Jury was, actually, glad that Dryer had not been there; he had felt like an utter fool, given the reaction of the Gaults. ‘They didn’t see how Harry could possibly have done what he did.’

‘Oh? Well, we’ve heard that before. Although, admittedly, the whole story is a little unbelievable.’

Jury looked at him, but Dryer’s expression was bland.

Wiggins drove round the square and pulled up in front of one of the handsome redbrick houses, this one with a couple of stone lions gracing the steps. ‘This is it, sir.’

‘Stay with the car, Wiggins.’

Wiggins nodded. Jury got out of the front seat, and Dryer out of the back. Together they went up the steps, past the brooding lions. Jury rang the bell.

The door opened a few moments later and Mungo sat there in such a determined way, the dog might have opened it himself and would or would not grant leave to enter. But then a small woman appeared at the edge of the door, almost peeking around it, very unsure of taking this liberty. A housekeeper or maid or cook or char, Jury supposed. She was far more diffident than Mungo. Jury announced himself and Dryer and then reached down to ruffle Mungo’s neck. They followed the little woman into a drawing room.

He could have slugged Harry Johnson, who rose with a smile, having discarded his reading glasses and newspaper and coffee cup. ‘Delighted to see you. Superintendent.’ He held out his hand to Dryer when Jury introduced them.

‘Chief Inspector.’ Smiling, he shook Dryer’s hand. ‘Surrey police? What can I do for you? Would you like coffee?’ He reached his hand to the silver pot, nestled, together with cream and sugar, in folds of snowy linen.

They both declined.

Jury said, ‘This isn’t a social call, Harry.’

Harry waved them into dark leather club chairs, raising his eyebrows and extracting a cigarette from a silver box. He offered the box to Dryer, who declined.

Mungo sat, raising one foot, then another, as if he couldn’t wait to chase something.

‘I saw Hugh Gault after I left the Old Wine Shades, Harry. Funny, but his wife, far from being dead, was actually there with him, very much alive and just returned.’

‘Ah! She’s back from Aix, then. She’s been gone for months.’ Jury didn’t like his matter-of-fact tone.

‘She doesn’t bear much resemblance to the dead woman, especially insofar as she’s
alive,
you could say.’

Harry put the cigarette in his mouth and picked up a heavy table lighter.

‘Chief Inspector Dryer would love to hear your story, Harry. I told him it’s a corker. I myself was, admittedly, rapt.’

Harry flicked the lighter into flame, lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and said, as he exhaled, ‘What story?’

43

Jury stared. He felt, oddly enough, as he had felt that night in the Old Wine Shades when Harry Johnson had begun his strange story. Because now, he bet, there was to be another story.

‘You know, Harry.’ Jury hated such a weak rejoinder, hut he kept it up. ‘Beginning with the alleged disappearance of Glynnis Gault and her son—’

Mungo was gazing upward at Jury.

‘—and her dog.’

Or some future event.

Jury could have hit him for that sad little head shake Harry was giving. He never stopped smiling. ‘Superintendent, Glynnis Gault is very much with us as you yourself just told me.’

Jury plowed on. ‘Hugh Gault, a man who lost everything— wife, son, even his dog. ‘The dog came back’ is what you said at the beginning.’ Jury inched his foot toward Mungo. ‘This dog, Harry.’

‘Mungo is my dog, yes; he’s been here all along. You say ‘the dog came back’?’ His smile widened, as if to say, Oh, this is rich! ‘That’s fascinating. That is, I admit, one hell of a beginning to a story. Only I never told it.’ Harry turned his blue eyes on Tom Dryer and shrugged.

What worried Jury at the moment was that Tom Dryer was looking not at Harry, but at
him.
He felt ridiculous
—’The dog came back
’ . . . for God’s sake! ‘Are you going to tell us now you’ve never been to a house in Surrey called Winterhaus?’

Mungo, sitting at Jury’s feet, plopped, muzzle down, head resting between paws like a man throwing his hands against his ears, desperate not to hear what was coming next.

‘I expect I
am
going to tell you that. Superintendent. Are you sure you won’t have coffee?’ He held up the silver-plated pot by way of invitation.

Jury’s hand made an involuntary fist. He ignored the coffee offer. ‘The estate agent, Marjorie Bathous—’

As Harry looked a question at him, Jury realized that Marjorie Bathous had never seen Harry Johnson. She had seen only the woman calling herself Glynnis Gault. Indeed, who
had
seen Harry Johnson?

‘What about Ben Torres?’ Jury asked. At least
there
was someone who Harry couldn’t deny knowing. Although Torres, according to Melrose Plant, had not actually named him, they could get confirmation one way or the other. No, wait. Jury delivered himself another little jolt. Ben Torres had told Melrose Plant exactly
nothing
to prop up this convoluted story. He had known Harry Johnson
in a minor way.
But the point was, he had known him before Harry had gone to Italy.

‘Ben? Yes, I did visit Ben. He lives in San Gimignano. Near Florence,’ he added, as if Jury probably hadn’t done his homework and Harry meant to help out.

‘And you saw him during the past year. Coincidentally, you went all the way to Italy. That certainly was going to a lot of trouble.’

‘Is Italy ever a lot of trouble, Superintendent?’ Harry’s mouth twitched as if trying not to smile in the face of this paranoid police superintendent. ‘I’m not sure what you mean by ‘coincidentally,’ though.’

Yes, you do. ‘That this trip to Florence was coincident with this unknown woman’s going to Winterhaus.’

‘I do know that Ben has a house over here, but not where. We hardly talked about his house; we talked about quantum mechanics.’ Harry had stubbed out his earlier cigarette; now he lit another with the heavy table lighter.

‘You took me to see Hugh Gault. He says you know a great deal about the subject—quantum theory and Niels Bohr and, of course, Schrödinger’s cat.’

Dryer spoke at last. ‘Whose cat? I’m coming in in the middle of things here.’

Harry laughed. ‘It’s a theory that tells us that since we can’t know an outcome until we look in the box and see the cat, speculation is idle.’

Dryer gave him a bfeak smile. ‘Sorry I asked.’

Harry smiled. ‘It does sound strange, I know.’

Mungo got up and, nails clicking on the smooth floorboards, walked to the sofa and slid underneath. Again, he was like a person staving off bad news.

Tom Dryer cleared his throat and said, ‘We don’t want to lose sight of the victim in this case, a woman who indeed was calling herself Glynnis Gault. This woman’—here he took the police photographs out of the envelope he was carrying and handed them across to Harry.

Harry took his glasses up from the silver tray and put them on. He looked at the pictures carefully before handing them back to Dryer. ‘No, I don’t know her.’

Dryer said, ‘She was seen by the estate agent, by an elderly couple in a cottage that the Gault woman was also viewing, by a woman who saw her standing by her car, and by a little girl who’d seen all three—woman, boy, dog’—Dryer looked at the sofa—’a description fitting your dog.’

‘What little girl?’

He was surprised, thought Jury. It’s the first time something had surprised him.

‘Just a child who likes to play in the grounds there.’

‘Ah. Well, as far as the dog is concerned, he’s a hound, part bloodhound, Chief Inspector. They all look very much alike, though coloring of course would differ. You could arrange one of those identification parades and I’d be happy to bring Mungo along.’ Hearing this, Mungo reappeared, or part of him did.

Why had Harry included Mungo in his plan? After all, it
was
damned peculiar that a dog looking like Harry’s dog should be seen with Glynnis Gault’s impostor. And then Jury thought he knew why: to drive his story into such an avenue of absurdity that it would be hard to imagine anyone believing it. Anyone in this case being the present company of Chief Inspector Dryer.

Mungo had slipped out from under the sofa to walk about, to pace almost. Back and forth, back and forth, as if this were all too much.

I tried to tell him, don’t say I didn’t try.
Mungo skated on the slippery beechwood floor and was tempted to go across to the music room to calm down. Only Shöe was sitting in the bottom bureau drawers, keeping watch over Elf and the others.

Tom Dryer said, ‘Yes, I expect it would be difficult to swear to it that the dog with the woman was indeed your dog. Of course, there’s always DNA, isn’t there?’ He gave Harry a little purse-lipped smile.

But Harry only smiled back. ‘Yes, there is that, if you could collect any of it from your crime scene.’ Then he nodded toward the envelope. ‘Let me see those photographs again, will you?’

Dryer reached the envelope over an abyss of very dark rug. There were several of these, interesting colors and designs, lying on the floor, sometimes overlapping.

Harry took up his reading glasses and fitted the pliable stems around his ears and took out the police photos of the dead woman. What was he up to now?

Dryer said, with a seemingly casual interest in the whole thing. ‘Isn’t this another coincidence, though?’

Harry looked with raised eyebrows at Dryer.

‘I mean,’ said Dryer, ‘here is a lady going by the name of Glynnis Gault, the Mrs. Gault you do know. It’s a little hard to believe that the woman in those photos didn’t know any of you, that she wasn’t acting in some capacity for the Gaults—or you or—let me rephrase it: that she had no connection with any of you. Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?’