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Authors: Martha Grimes

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Traditional

The Old Wine Shades (6 page)

BOOK: The Old Wine Shades
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‘Do you take Mungo with you everywhere?’ asked Jury as he pulled out one of the tall bar chairs.

‘No, not really. Except in this case I’m hoping the dog might, you know, come across with information or something.’ Harry raised his glass. ‘This wine is very good. Puligny Montrachet. What are you drinking?’

Jury nodded toward the glass of wine. ‘Some of that would be fine.’

Harry Johnson raised a hand to the barman, who nodded. It was still Trev, but tonight he was joined by two others behind the bar. A much bigger crowd.

Jury said, ‘With all the wine on offer here, I still didn’t realize we were in a wine bar.’

Harry smiled. ‘The proprietor prefers wine tavern. It avoids all of the connotations of wine bar, the Hooray Henrys, the young business tycoons, dressed in power suits, pinstripes, mobiles glued to their ears and drinking wine out of a cardboard box.’

Trevor set a glass before Jury as Jury said to Harry, ‘You know wine.’

Harry said, ‘No, Trevor knows wine.’

Trevor poured and said, ‘I’d say all the rest of the ‘66s are history. But this one is superb.’

Jury tasted it. Trevor waited with what struck Jury as a winey grin.

‘Delicious,’ he said.

Trevor nodded and went down the bar to serve other customers.

‘You were talking about Hugh Gault. How did you come to know him?’

‘Through mutual interests. Hugh’s a physicist at London University. I’m a physicist, too. I read math and physics at university, but I don’t work at it; I mean, I don’t teach it. We’re interested in quantum mathematics and string theory.’

‘Ah. That explains a great deal.’

Harry nodded, missing the irony, and said, ‘I should say superstring theory.’

Jury expected him to add something that Jury could acknowledge, at least enough to trip over. When he didn’t, Jury said, ‘That clears up any lingering doubts.’

Harry looked at him and laughed. ‘Sorry. Hugh and I like to argue. Einstein mistrusted quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr–you’ve heard of him?’

‘You’d be surprised how little.’ Jury smiled.

‘Quantum mechanics. The difference–if a difference is ever easy to explain, but I’ll take a shot at it–is between determinism and indeterminism. Do you believe in fate?’

‘Fate.’ Jury thought about this for a moment, quite seriously. ‘I don’t think so, but–’

‘Newton’s mechanics?’

‘Funny how long it’s been since I dwelt on it.’

‘All I mean to say is that Newton believed if you knew everything in the present–every particle, no matter how many this meant–then you could predict the future. Quantum mechanics disagrees. You play snooker?’

‘My God, you do dance around, don’t you?’

‘It’s an analogy. If you feed everything into a computer, such as how hard you hit the ball, the angle of the cue, it would still be impossible to tell how each ball would respond to a collision. If there was some tiny alteration, like a bit of dust on one of the balls, it would throw everything out of whack.’

‘You know, I seem to recall something about chaos theory. The butterfly effect?’

Harry looked surprised. ‘You’re a natural!’

Jury felt absurdly pleased with himself. This surprised him, since he didn’t ordinarily try to impress people. Why should he want to impress Harry Johnson? Or perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he just wanted to keep up his end of the conversation before it turned into a monologue.

‘Newton’s universe was a clockwork universe. Determinism. Fate, in a sense. Not, however, that at noon tomorrow you’ll meet the woman of your dreams.’

Jury shrugged. ‘Then what good is it?’

Harry smiled. ‘The quantum world is not deterministic. You can’t predict an outcome because you can’t know both the position and the momentum of something at the same time. There’s a measurement problem. Things change as you look at them. More specifically, when does the wave become the particle?’

Jury raised his glass, a signal to Trev, and shook his head at Harry. ‘Hocus-pocus?’

‘Okay, I’ll stop.’ But he didn’t. ‘Gravity and electromagnetic force were a thorn in Einstein’s side’–he turned to look at Jury-’but not in yours, I bet.’

Jury laughed and got wine up his nose. ‘You could say that.’

‘It’s quite fascinating that you can measure, for example, a subatomic particle by its momentum or you can measure it by its position, but not both simultaneously. Niels Bohr described wave and particle as the two aspects of a single reality. An unknowable reality.’

‘Unknowable? Then how does it influence what I do or who I am?’

Harry smiled. ‘You seem to have a grasp of the abstract. You haven’t said what it is you do.’

Jury debated, decided to tell him. ‘I’m a policeman, actually. Detective superintendent, to be precise. New Scotland Yard CID.’ Harry’s mouth literally dropped open. ‘Never!’

Jury smiled, rather glad he was responsible for that astonished look.

‘I’ll be damned. Well, then, you’re just the person to hear this story. Maybe you’ll come up with some explanation.’

‘I doubt it, but continue. You were talking about Hugh Gault.’

‘Yes. And the house. I drove there.’

‘Hugh Gault didn’t go with you?’

‘No. As I said before, Hugh was afraid that Glynn and the boy might call, or even turn up, and he wouldn’t be there.’

‘When was this?’

‘The next afternoon. The thing was, there’d been no time set for the two of them to return. She’d told their cook that if they weren’t home by dinnertime, the day before, Mr. Gault should just go ahead without them. So there was no reason to get worried until that night, later. Glynnis hadn’t called, though, and that disturbed Hugh. She was always so good about letting him know.’

‘But she had a mobile. You said she called the estate agent from her car.’

Harry shook his head. ‘I’m betting a dead battery. Glynn could never remember to power up the phone. The battery was always going dead. She hates mobiles. Probably that’s the reason hers is always running down.’

‘I’m with her on that.’

Now, as if they had just been cued, three men at the bar pulled out their mobiles and proceeded to have three different, but equally loud, conversations.

‘Christ,’ muttered Harry. ‘Let’s go to a table.’

Mungo, who’d been lounging under Harry’s chair, pulled himself out from under and raised his baleful eyes to look into Jury’s own.

As they took their seats in one of the stalls near the fireplace, Jury said, ‘Mungo has a very soulful look.’

‘That’s just for show,’ said Harry.

‘But I wonder if he doesn’t really miss Robbie and his mother.’

‘I expect he does.’

Jury looked down at Mungo, whose head was again resting on Jury’s foot. ‘He doesn’t strike me as a one-man dog. Did you take him to that house?’’

‘No, I didn’t see how Mungo could help much with picking up a scent that was a year old.’

‘They can, you know. They’re quite amazing.’

Harry nodded and went on. ‘This house seemed implacably cold. It’s the sort of cold that eats into you. I realize it had gone untenanted for a long while, but it still felt unnatural. They’d left the electricity on as they were trying to rent it. But not the heat. The house is too large for a family of three–’

‘And a dog.’ Jury felt a brief push.

Harry smiled. ‘And a dog, yes. The architecture is basically Georgian. Large rooms, high ceilings, Adam moldings and chimneypiece. I told you the place was empty of furnishings except in the drawing room. All of the pieces were antique and looked very pricey: Russian bureau, Regency commode and that gorgeous rug. Very posh. I was surprised the place hadn’t been vandalized. The agent–Mrs. Bathous–had asked the owner to leave the drawing-room furniture, if he would, to give the place a little bit of a lived-in look. Surprisingly, he did. I wouldn’t want those pieces just standing around.’ He remembered something. ‘And Marjorie Bathous didn’t understand the dregs of tea in one of the teacups. She hadn’t put out the teacups. Minton, they were.’

‘Now, that’s interesting. Someone had been drinking from one. That’s curious. Would Mrs. Gault have done that? Filled the kettle and measured out tea?’

Harry shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine Glynnis making tea there.’

‘It almost sounds staged. The setting, I mean.’

‘Staged? By whom? For what reason?’

‘I have no idea. How about Glynnis Gault herself?’ There was silence as Harry looked at Jury, mystified. ‘You’re kidding.’

Jury laughed. ‘That’s supposed to be my line, isn’t it? Doesn’t the scene look staged if you think about it?’

Harry drank off his glass of wine. ‘What this brings to mind is an analogy I read which compared Gödel’s theorem to the actors in a play within a play, where what an ‘actor’ in the internal play said would be a commentary on his ‘real’ life. The real life in this case being the outside play, the fictive framework.’

‘Who is Gödel?’

‘A mathematician who formulated a theory called ‘incompleteness.’ The theory of incompleteness. There’s no proof that we know all that we think we know since all that we think we know can’t be formalized, which is the incompleteness proof.’

Jury thought about this. ‘If he’s a mathematician, wouldn’t that more or less work against logic? I mean mathematics insists on logic, doesn’t it?’

‘Absolutely. Gödel wasn’t popular in the mathematics community when they finally worked out what he was saying. We’re not machines; we have intuition. His detractors didn’t like the idea of intuition where mathematics is concerned. Mathematics should be considered as pure logic.’

Jury took a drink and wished like hell he had a cigarette. ‘Anyway, we were talking about Glynnis Gauh’s staging her own disappearance.’ Jury held up his hand. ‘Not that I think that; it’s just an idea I tossed out.’

‘I don’t get it; why would Glynn stage it?’

‘Or someone else stage it?’

‘It’s monstrous. Why would she want to vanish in that way? And take Robbie with her?’

Jury felt a push at his shoe. He smiled. ‘And Mungo. It wouldn’t be the first time an unhappy wife kidnapped her child for Some reason. Custody battle it is, usually.’

‘Hugh and Glynn were happy; they weren’t thinking about divorce.’

‘Not as far as you know.’

‘I know both of them very well; you couldn’t be much closer than we were.’

‘Then let’s say for the sake of argument, who knew Mrs. Gault was going house hunting besides her husband and the estate agent?’

Harry Johnson folded his arms on the bar and considered. ‘Their staff, I imagine. Certainly the cook, as she’d be getting dinner. The maid? Well, the cook probably mentioned it to her. ‘Staff’ is probably overdoing it in the Gauhs’ case as there were just those two.’ Jury smiled slightly; for him, that would constitute ‘staff.’ Harry went on. ‘Someone might have known she went to Surrey to look at houses, but exactly where in Surrey, I doubt. You seem to be looking for a killer.’

‘An abductor, anyway. Go on about the house.’

‘It sits back from the road, very long front garden and the woods around on both sides and the back. I thought it seemed awfully isolated, but that, of course, is what they wanted in a second home–peace and quiet.’

‘That’s what people think they want, until they get it. What about Robbie? He’d be at a loss for friends, wouldn’t he?’

‘Unfortunately, Robbie was pretty lost anyway. You could say Robbie had already been kidnapped.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s what I was going to tell you. Robbie was autistic.’

‘What a shame.’

‘He didn’t have friends; he didn’t make them very easily. Well, what can you do if you can’t or won’t talk? But he’s a great reader.

Actually, she might have taken Robbie along so as to see how he liked it. There’s a school in Lark Rise for kids with autism and other speech and I suppose cognitive problems. That was what Glynnis wanted a house there for. She wasn’t looking for a holiday cottage. They would live there during the school year. She didn’t tell Hugh that, though.’

‘Why not?’

‘Hugh didn’t like the idea of Robbie’s changing schools. He thought it would be too hard on him, and he had enough on his plate without that. They argued about that quite a bit. I think it was the only thing they did argue about.’

‘I see.’ Jury thought about this. ‘The first one, this cottage–’

‘Lark Cottage. It was a small, neat-looking house in quite nice gardens. I didn’t talk to the owner.’

‘What do you think it was that was so off-putting to Mrs. Gault?’

‘Just a little too cute, too quaint. The kind of place tourists would think so typically English.’

‘There are entire villages that are that. Did she find Chipping Campden too quaint? Lower Slaughter?’

Harry laughed. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Was Glynnis Gault a bit of a snob?’

‘Not at all. Quite the contrary, I’d say. She was accepting of things almost to the point of naiveté. She was wearing a black suit she’d bought from Marks and Spencer when she left the house.’ Harry smiled at the thought.

BOOK: The Old Wine Shades
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