The Old Wine Shades (5 page)

From where Jury was sitting, it glittered in the lamplight. ‘That is a situation wherein the police find an emergency, say inside a house, husband battering wife and kids, something like that, a situation in which there is no time to get a warrant.’

Carole-anne looked over at him, eyes wide. ‘Well, for heaven’s sake, that’s just what you found.’

‘Not precisely. See, the circumstances were known by vice. A colleague of mine had been trying to get into that house for months.’

‘You didn’t know that.’

Jury raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s what Pete Apted said.’ Did he have, sitting across from him, a budding barrister? Good lord. Carole-anne arguing a case in court. The thought made him dizzy.

She waved the law away. Jury caught a glimpse of silvery bits, as if her hand were trailing stars. Carole-anne did not need body art; her body was already art.

‘If the law’s going to be that finicky, there’s some of us never will be able to do what we think’s right.’

That from Carole-anne amounted to a philosophical position.

‘Yes, the law does tend to get picky at times.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ve been meaning to call Charly Moss.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Not a–’ But he caught himself before he said, ‘Not a man, a woman.’ He smiled. ‘Charly’s a solicitor. One used by the able Mr. Apted.’ No use telling the truth. He’d be in for a merciless grilling.

She was finished, apparently. She held out her hands, the shocking pink nails studded with a selection of silvery things.

‘What d’you think?’

‘Frankenstein’s fingers?’

She threw a pillow at him.

6

As Wiggins stirred and stirred his tea, Jury told him the story of the Gauhs’ disappearance. Then, as in some religious ritual, Wiggins tapped the spoon three times on the edge of his mug.

‘It’s the strangest story I’ve ever heard. But why did this Harry Johnson tell you it?’

‘We were sitting in the Old Wine Shades, that’s a wine bar in the City, talking about narrative in dreams. I said that we always dream a story.’

Wiggins shook his head. ‘No, I don’t dream a story. I dream in symbols. Usually I can’t say what they mean.’ That settled, Wiggins sat back and sipped his tea.

‘You dream in symbols, yes, but the symbols take place in narrative form. Like this: let’s say your symbol is a villain. There’s your villain. Next, a victim. There’s your victim. Then a pool of blood.

You don’t switch from one to the other without making the connection: the villain goes up to the victim and knifes her or shoots her and there’s the pool of blood. Pool of blood being an effect. It’s connected. They’re all connected.’

Wiggins thought about this, but gave no sign of agreeing.

Jury went on. ‘We’re always waiting for a story, that we ourselves were a story.’

Wiggins looked puzzled. ‘What does that mean?’

‘That I’d had four pints.’

Wiggins smiled. ‘All right. Now what about this Harry Johnson? How much had he had?’

‘Whiskey, only two.’

‘Are you sure he didn’t sit by you deliberately.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Maybe because he knew who you were.’

Jury frowned. ‘He didn’t follow me in; I’d had three drinks by the time he sat down.’

‘Maybe he saw you through the glass.’

‘Oh, please. Does anyone look at a pub through the window? No, you just go in.’

‘Then he went in and he recognized you.’

‘Wiggins, this is almost as improbable as the disappearance of Glynnis Gauh and her son. In any event, what did he expect to gain by telling me?’

‘That you’d investigate; that you might find them.’

‘If that’s the case, why all this pretense?’

‘Johnson might have thought it not such a good idea to intrude on a detective superintendent having a quiet pint.’

Jury shook his head.

‘Well, sir, you didn’t tell him who you were; think about that.’ Jury tilted his chair back, crossing his arms over his chest.

‘Okay. I’ve thought. What?’

Wiggins’s sigh was slightly exaggerated. ‘For the same reason. If he knew who you were it would probably change the whole complexion of the meeting.’

Jury chewed the inside of his cheek, annoyed not so much at Wiggins but at himself. He must be getting crusty; he was gearing up for redundancy, that’s what.

‘Mr. Plant called, sir.’

Jury came off the dole and back to the working-stiff world. ‘Did he? Good. What did he want?’

‘Just to tell you he’d be coming up to London this afternoon. And staying at his club’–Wiggins checked his notes—‘Boring’s. He says he’s having dinner with someone this evening and could you get together with him tomorrow?’

‘Excellent. It’s just as well as I’m having dinner with’—he caught himself before he said ‘Harry Johnson’–’someone too.’

‘Isn’t Boring’s one of those men’s clubs that still won’t admit women?’

‘Boring’s will admit them on a certain day, but then they just try to stare the women down.’

Wiggins was dipping another chamomile tea bag into his mug.

‘Don’t you think that’s a bit reactionary not to let women join?’

‘No. It’s a men’s club. Let women go off and make a club of their own.’

‘There’s the Women’s Institute, I guess.’

Jury shook his head. ‘That’s not the same thing at all. That’s an organization whose purpose is to concern itself with social issues. It’s not a physical place where you can dodder around and drop in a leather club chair and have your glass of port and newspaper by a fire.’ Boring’s was so pleasant, Jury thought he might join when they tossed him out of here.

7

Melrose Plant was standing in a late-afternoon shaft of sunlight, in which drifted a somnolent white moth. He had not recognized the little man at reception, but he didn’t want to inquire after Buddings, afraid at what might have transpired there. But he told himself that at Boring’s, the porters never seemed to die.

The Members’ Room was exactly as he remembered it. Well, why wouldn’t it be? He’d been here last year, hadn’t he? He sat down in the same club chair he had occupied before and looked into what he could believe was the same fire. Nothing changed, time stopped; end of story.

‘No,’ said Polly Praed, as they sipped wine and spooned up soup in Boring’s dining room. ‘One dies. That’s the end of the story.’ Melrose shook his head. ‘Wrong. ‘Change’ is an experience in life. Death isn’t.’

‘You’re just doing semantics.’ She spooned up her mushroom soup.

Polly was certainly evidence of time’s not changing. Same amethyst eyes, same unruly dark corkscrew curls, same ghastly mustard-colored suit. He had once told her that color played havoc with her pink-tinged porcelain skin. She had been unimpressed with Melrose’s opinion of her clothes or anything else. Now, if it had been Richard Jury who had told her this, you’d never see her again in mustard-colored clothes.

‘What are you writing now?’ Right away, he cursed himself for bringing the subject up since he hadn’t read her last two books. She churned them out nearly as fast as Joanna Lewes, Long Piddleton’s local author. Polly wrote mysteries–good old traditional manor house, suspects-round-the-dinner-table-in-a-snowstorm-mysteries.

Melrose hated them.

‘The Monday Corpses. That’s my latest.’

She really should do something about her titles. ‘Is this a series of Monday murders? Or will there be Tuesday corpses? Wednesday?’

Polly frowned as Young Higgins removed their soup bowls.

Her tone disappointed, she said, ‘You could tell it’s to be days of the week, then?’

Only a dimwit couldn’t. ‘Monday being a day of the week, yes. You’ve got corpses you associate with a day of the week: Monday. I assumed there’d be a bunch turning up–corpses, that is—on subsequent days. Either that or subsequent Mondays. ‘Isn’t that how your detective will find them?’ Drat. Why had he asked? Now she aimed her eyes at the plate of lamb Young Higgins had set before her, Higgins himself having to lean briefly on the table for support and covering the action by pretending to get Polly’s plate in line with the basket of rolls that were sending forth a warm rosemary scent.

‘Are you all right, Higgins?’ asked Melrose. ‘You seem just a bit pale.’

The porter stiffened his posture. ‘Quite all right, Lord Ardry. Thank you for inquiring.’ And he shuffled off.

‘Poor fellow looked as if he might have a stroke.’ Polly watched Young Higgins out of sight. Her eyes were wide.

Then she leaned across the table and whispered, ‘Suppose somebody’s poisoning him?’

Melrose looked at the ceiling. ‘My dear Polly, that is the most lame-brained idea I think I’ve ever heard.’

Undaunted, she went on: ‘No, but hear me out.’

‘Have I a choice?’

‘No. Look around you at the other diners.’

Melrose did so. What he saw was a surfeit of aged and aging gentlemen with their big white napkins stuck in their collars and looking like so many dark-robed babies. ‘All right, I’ve looked.’

‘Wouldn’t it be super if–’

‘Polly, no one says ‘super’ anymore, if they ever did outside of P. G. Wodehouse.’

‘But wouldn’t it be if one of them were a poisoner? Who’d even suspect one of them?’

‘I would, as you’ve just pointed it out as a possibility.’ Melrose buttered his roll.

But Polly ignored that, too. Polly was just super at bending things to suit her fancy. The popular term was ‘denial,’ he supposed, but he never said it. He hated jargon.

She said, ‘Look, here’s what–’

‘Here’s what what?’

‘One of these old men could be Higgins’s brother, who’s trying to poison him, oh, say over Higgins’s having inherited, I don’t know.’

‘You really don’t.’

‘Did you like my last book?’

Melrose feigned great concentration; since he hadn’t read it, no amount of concentration would bring it to mind. ‘That would be the one where the protagonist–a well-drawn character, incidentally. Your protagonist is actually, well, quite finely nuanced.’ Polly was pleased. ‘Yes, I thought his turning out to be the killer was quite a good stroke.’

‘You had me completely baffled!’

‘Thanks. And what did you think of the black Lab?’ She laughed.

The what? ‘Oh, the dog! Absolutely brilliant dog!’ Polly was laughing at her own ingenuity. ‘That scene where he was chasing the tennis ball?’

‘Hysterical, wonderful. How many writers would ever think of that?’

‘Dog in the Manger. I liked that title, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. There’s a marvelous ambiguity in that title.’

‘What?’

‘Mmm?’

‘What ambiguity?’

Caught out. Why did he have to embellish? ‘The uncertainty, the inability to distinguish what is actually being said, the whole–’ Melrose shrugged. ‘You know.’

She frowned. ‘He’s just a dog.’

They ate in blessed (at least for Melrose) silence.

Then Polly asked, ‘Did you like the one before that one?’ Oh, lord. Now Melrose frowned, as if thinking up a liking for it.

‘Were you surprised by the identity of the killer? I mean, that it wasn’t Blake?’

‘Blake certainly had me going for a while. Polly, I must confess that I didn’t quite finish that one. What happened was that Ruthven was returning books to our library and packed yours up with the others. It was quite a parcel. I didn’t even really know until I got back from Scotland–’ That would distract her.

‘What were you doing in Scotland?’

‘Spot of fishing on the–name of river, name name name!–on the Ayr.’

‘Where’s the Ayr? I never heard of it.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It’s in County Ayr.’ That made sense.

‘I didn’t know you fished. I never heard you even mention it.’

‘Would one? I mean fishing is not all that newsworthy and I don’t see you that often. The Ayr is specially good for trout.’

‘Oh.’ Another brief silence.

‘My books–.’ She sighed and ate her roll. ‘Well, I can be a dreadful bore about them.’

To Melrose the expression was so immeasurably sad, like a child whose crayon drawing isn’t understood, that he reached across the table and put his hand over hers. ‘Polly, you are never boring.’

‘Thank you. Sometimes I think I would like to write nonfiction crime. A real case. Remember the body in the telephone booth?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘And remember the little typist who came to Littlebourne and was murdered and her fingers chopped off?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And remember that art critic was murdered right out there in the Members’ Room?’

‘I do indeed.’

Polly sighed. ‘Those were the days.’

8

When Jury walked into the Old Wine Shades that evening at 7:00, Harry Johnson was already having a drink at the bar and Mungo was under the chair.