The Old Wine Shades (39 page)

‘Rosa Paston. You did know the victim.’

‘Of course. I simply mean that I have no idea what this woman was doing in that house. Or why she pretended to be Glynnis Gault.’

It was with an effort that Jury rose. ‘I’ll be off then.’

‘But you just got here. I’m enjoying your company.’

You would, wouldn’t you?

Harry said, ‘I’ll be going over to the Shades tonight, if you care to join me.’ Harry smiled. ‘Around ninish. You know.’ Harry took a swig of his drink.

Sitting there with the most sublime confidence Jury had ever seen. Not a care in the world, have you, Harry? Jury supposed he’d just have to keep trying. Harry would keep on smiling, but he might let something slip. ‘I might just do that.’

Jury looked at him while Harry finished off his whiskey and, even though he knew there was nothing personal in what Harry was doing, felt oddly betrayed.

‘Good-bye, Harry.’

52

Jury left Belgravia and went to see Johnny Blakeley at West End Central. Johnny headed up the pedophile unit, here where he spent a good three fourths of his time. He was the most dedicated detective Jury had ever known, except for Brian Macalvie, in Devon. Johnny had been suspended once and very nearly twice. He had broken into a run-down house in Earl’s Court where some kids, just teenagers, were using a camcorder to shoot dirty films. It was what they knew, wasn’t it? Their ‘stars’ were three kids between three and seven. No warrant. Johnny had nothing by way of probable cause; he knew he couldn’t make a charge stick, but—what the hell?—he tried charging them with kidnapping and reckless endangerment all the same. Still, Johnny had gotten the little kids to what he hoped was a safe place.

The solicitor for the oldest boy, who had been operating the camcorder, laughed the charges right out the door, along with his client.

The client hadn’t been laughing, though, not in Earl’s Court, not after Johnny smashed the camcorder and started wiping the floor with him. Johnny could scare these amateurs to death. Professionals, too, if he could get them alone long enough.

After Jury told him the story, Johnny looked at him, half smiling. ‘What would I do? Rich, if there’s one person you don’t need advice from it’s me. But you’re right; there’s no way you’ve got probable cause. This is even worse than the Hester Street business, when it comes to getting a warrant. You won’t get one.’

‘Well, it won’t hurt to try. I’m still going to try.’

Johnny was thinking. Then he said, ‘Can you get this man Johnson out of the house? If he lives alone—’ Johnny shrugged.

‘Oh, I can get him out of the house. He’s out of the house this evening. Invited me to have a drink with him, which I’m going to. He’s going to give something away sometime. Me, I’m just going to keep after him. No, the problem is
keeping
him out of the house to give me time to have a look round.’

‘Because if you could, and those kids are there, who’s to know? What’s to prove you were there?’ Again, Johnny shrugged.

‘Harry is anything but stupid. As long as he’s got me in the pub, he knows where I am.’

‘What’s to keep him from disposing of these kids right now?’

‘I don’t think killing them is what he has in mind. I don’t think he’d do that. Otherwise, why bring them to London? If that’s what he intended to do, he could have killed them right there in Surrey. No, I think he wants to scare them into silence. Well, Timmy Radcliffe is silent, anyway. He’s autistic.’

‘Then why bother kidnapping him at all? Unless, of course, the Radcliffe kid might have other means of communicating—’

‘I’ve got a man watching his house.’

Johnny leaned forward, said, as if in confidence, ‘Look, you get him out of the house and I—’

‘No.’ Jury was emphatic. ‘Absolutely not, Johnny. You can’t touch it.’

Johnny sat back.

‘But thanks. Thanks a lot for the offer. I’ll think of something.’ Like what?

‘Listen, on a more cheerful note, Linda—she’s Social Services—told me that the two you especially wanted to stay together have been placed in the same home.’

‘Rosie and Pansy?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’ Johnny dived a hand into his desk drawer and came out with a list of sorts. ‘Yep, they’re in the same place.’

‘Where?’

Johnny was copying off the information onto a page of his notebook. ‘You know I can’t divulge that information.’ He tore off the page where he’d written the address and handed it to Jury. ‘Here.’

Jury took it, smiled. ‘Thanks, Johnny. You’re the salt of the earth.’

Johnny nodded toward the page, saying, ‘The thing is, though, if you turn up at that house, they’re going to know someone leaked the information and maybe complain. Remember, I don’t want to get in bad with Social Services. They trim a lot of corners for me, especially Linda.’

‘That was nice of you and Linda. Tell her I appreciate it.’

Johnny looked back at the paper again. ‘Rosie’s even going to infants’ school.’

‘My lord, that was fast.’

‘Well, it’s a public school, so it’s easier to bend the rules.’ Johnny took back Jury’s notebook page and wrote on it. ‘I think Linda said it was right round the corner from where the family lives, in Chelsea.’

The Piccadilly and Green Park tube stations were equidistant from Hatchards bookshop and Fortnum & Mason. He took the Jubilee Line to Green Park, only one stop but he didn’t feel like walking or taking a car; driving around Piccadilly was merely frustrating. You could troop off to the Outer Hebrides in the time it takes to get around Piccadilly Circus in a car.

Jury had always felt something akin to affection for Fortnum’s, though he couldn’t say why. It was not a venue in which he ordinarily shopped; it was too expensive for a CID man’s pay. But its window decorations employed more imagination and its arrangement of tins and fruit and sweets were given to more artful staging than a West End theater. Look at those pears and plums in their catastrophically expensive produce section! Or on the other side of the floor the fowl and fish, a smoked salmon sliced so thin it fell away in folds, like the skirt of a pink silk gown, transparent slices of cucumber neatly tucked into the folds. And that perfect hell for dieters, the pastry counters. You could eye those little meringue swans filled with strawberry chiffon, or that devilish chocolate mousse dusted with cocoa and frills of more chocolate and make your salivary glands weep. It looked rich enough for a lifetime of desserts. There was a rum cake that leaked its liquor onto the plate, a coconut cake adorned with thin shavings of white chocolate, a lemon tart that glowed as if lit from within.

He had never seen food so hypnotic in his life. He could taste every single thing in those glass cases. From a little whippet of a salesperson, Jury bought one of the meringue swans and a more pedestrian cream doughnut.

As he walked back through Fortnum’s out to the street, he doubted if there was a better pastry shop in Vienna or Paris or heaven. He stopped to eat his cream doughnut and look in Fortnum’s windows, where the mannequins looked electrified either by his looking at them or by their handsome outfits. The designer dresses they’d been clothed in won.

Next he went to Hatchards, a bookshop that leaked learning the way that rum cake had leaked rum. No matter how many customers there were, this bookshop always had a sort of hush to it, as if the air were padded with cotton or clouds. He held this cloud fancy in his mind as he walked down the circular stair to the children’s section. There he looked up the Maurice Sendak books, pulling out
Outside over There
and the one he particularly wanted,
Really Rosie.
He leafed through it . . . well, more read it standing there. Then he put Rosie under his arm and read again about the ice baby in
Outside over There.

Did anyone understand children better than Maurice Sendak? Psychologist? Teacher? Social worker? He sincerely doubted it.

Chelsea was about as far from Hester Street in spirit as it was in distance. In place of seediness and drabness, here was a sort of eloquence, a paean to upper-middle-class values. Snobbish, too, it could be, but he didn’t think that would influence Rosie or Pansy. They’d seen too much awfulness to be impressed by the pretensions of society.

The address Johnny had given him was one of the mews cottages which he stood now regarding. Artfully arranged little dwellings that so pleased foreigners. It was an old stable block: it was funny, really, how there was such cachet in living in a stall that once had housed a horse. But it was so lovely that Rosie and Pansy were living in a dollhouse: ivy, climbing roses, pots of bright zinnias. All of the doors were painted in pastels.

The school, Johnny had said, was near—around the comer— and he came to it in less than five minutes. It was a building of old brick and wide marble stairs. Gathered at the bottom of the stairs were a number of women, parents, probably. Others were getting out of BMWs, Mercedeses and fancy smaller cars. He wondered if Rosie’s new foster mum was among them. The women all looked sleek, whether they were wearing Liberty linen or old jeans.

He looked through the fence at the little playground where the children were now lined up and ready to move, double file, into the school and then out again to their mothers. He looked hard for Rosie among them, but couldn’t find her. With their blue and gray uniforms, the children all bore a curious resemblance to one another. A few had apples and one tiny girl a pear, which she was mashing all over her face, trying to eat it.

‘Sir, are you a parent?’

The young woman seemed to have sprung up before him on the other side of the fence. A teacher. She looked uncertain, yet not wanting to insult him if he were.

‘I? No, no I’m not. I was just looking for—’ But Jury remembered Johnny’s warning and said nothing more.

Her eyebrows raised, but still slightly smiling, as if there were something about him that kept her from thinking the worst.

For which he was grateful. He shifted the books from under his arm, again remembering that he shouldn’t do anything to let the foster parents know that someone had given out their information. He saw her glance move to
Outside over There
and felt the book rendering him harmless. But he heard in his inner ear a kind of cracking or splintering, reminding him (oddly enough) of the other night and Phyllis biting into the glaze of her dessert. As if the ice baby were breaking.

‘Perhaps it’s the wrong school. Yes, it must be. Sorry.’

He could feel her eyes on him as he made his way through the collection of parents and the school bell sounding the end of the day.

53

It was a real plum for Chief Superintendent Racer, a real opportunity to showcase his response to the kind of question (in this case Jury’s) that came along once in a lifetime, and if you couldn’t give it your best shot, well, that was it, mate. Never another chance.

Racer didn’t really have a best shot, though, so all he could do was lard up his response to Jury’s request for a warrant with as much sarcasm as he could muster. ‘A warrant. Ah, yes, a
warrant.
’’
Fake laughter here, while Racer got up and wandered around his desk to lean on the front of it with his arms folded. He said it again: ‘A warrant, a warrant.’

It put Jury in mind of that child’s rhyme: ‘To market, to market.’ The next line just slipped out, under his breath, but not way under: ‘To buy a fresh pig.’

Racer stared. ‘Taking this whole business pretty lightly, aren’t you. Jury? Considering there’s three kids involved?’

‘Two.’ Jury couldn’t resist holding up two fingers.

‘You said three.’

‘No. The third one’s a dog.’

‘Oh, I see! You need to save a
dog
! Well, that’s
different,
Jury! Why didn’t you say that in the first place?’ Here Racer gave an acerbic little smile, as if even the name were an entry in the ironic sweepstakes. ‘Jury, since when do
you
need a warrant? Since when have you ever bothered with a
warrant
? Why, as I recall, you managed to batter your way into that house in Hester Street, you and that cowboy of a policeman from Devon. You did this without being blessed with a warrant. So I expect you’ll find a way into this Belgravia house without a
warrant,
too.’ Racer couldn’t repeat the word often enough to please himself, as it had been part and parcel of Jury’s recent trouble and what had nearly resulted in his being made redundant (not to put too fine a point on it).

Racer would never let it go, Jury knew. ‘These two kids’ lives are at stake, guv.’ He never used this appellation unless he wanted something from Racer, and that was rare. Jury lifted his gaze to the bookcase where the cat Cyril was flattening himself against the top. Waiting.

‘Well, you should have thought of this before you stormed into that Hester Street house,’ Racer said, with his usual illogic. ‘Evidence, Jury! Let’s see some evidence that these children are being held there. Let’s see some evidence of probable cause, if it’s not too much to ask.’ Racer moved around to stand behind his desk with arms braced and hands flat on it so that he could glare at Jury like some Fleet Street publisher letting off steam at one of his reporters.

‘There’s the head of the school who can certainly testify that Timmy’s missing. There’s the little girl Mathilda’s aunt who’ll tell you her niece hasn’t come back, either.’ Neither of these would work as evidence without more time passing, and even then would not implicate Harry Johnson. But Jury put it out there, anyway. ‘And there’s the dog. The maintenance man and probably some of the other children out there in one of their games can testify that the dog ran onto the grounds and up to Timmy. The same dog—’ Jury sighed, walking right into it.