The Stargazey (13 page)

There were perhaps a half dozen elderly men sitting around in what might have been a post-luncheon haze. The only sounds were the crackling of the flames and of newspaper pages being turned. He could not see all of these gentlemen, only, in some cases, a shoe or a shoulder around the back of a chair and a hand holding a paper. These were the men who, had they not had money and privilege to call their own, would have wound up in one of those lodges or manor houses adapted to the comfort of “retired gentlefolk.” Growing old is hell, Melrose thought. He wondered if their daughters or sons or family members in hope of inheritance ever visited them. Of course, he knew he was really wondering if anyone would visit him if he found himself in the same way.

Thus, feeling comfortably sorry for himself, Melrose selected a wing chair beside the fireplace on the other side of which two old gentlemen dozed. He wondered if smoking was permitted. He reflected that the last couple of decades of giving over to no-smoking rooms would have had precious little effect upon Boring's, if indeed Boring's had ever heard there were such rooms. Without another thought, Melrose took out his cigarette case from which he removed a cigarette, closed the case with a satisfied little
click,
and lighted it with his old Zippo.

He signaled to a white-jacked young man, presumably another porter—Young Higgins, perhaps?—and the boy moved immediately to his side. Question asked and answered as to what Melrose would like. He'd like a double whisky.

This transaction awakened the two old members who were seated on the other side of the fireplace, both of whom looked to be in their late seventies or even their eighties, both dressed in tweeds and stiff white collars, one possessed of a monocle, which dropped from his eye as he came huffing awake; the other having a little pocket watch that he took out, checked, and absently wound as his gaze fastened on Melrose's face.

Melrose said, almost gaily, “Afternoon.”

One of them leaned forward a bit, making guttural sounds: “Uh . . . wuh . . . eh. . . . ”

Talk, Melrose reflected, was not something entered into lightly at Boring's. One had to warm up first.

The other one did not attempt speech but looked out from under his wild white eyebrows with blistering blue eyes, their intensity perhaps arising merely from the fact they were set in a face lined and furrowed and old.

Melrose carried on for all three of them as he put out his hand. “Name's Plant . . . Lord Ardry, actually. How'ja do?”

Ready, apparently, to join in, the white-browed one said, “Ah . . . yes. Well . . . I'm Major Champs”—he leaned forward and adjusted his eyeglasses, probably to get a better grip on Melrose—“and this is Colonel Neame.” He gestured toward his friend. “That's
Champs
with a soft
Ch
if you don't mind. New, aren't you?” asked the major, winding his pocket watch. “Don't recall ever seeing you in here before.”

“I am. This was my father's club, you see.” Melrose hadn't the least idea of what they were supposed to see from this announcement, but they apparently did, for they both made sounds of affirmation and understanding.

“And where from?”

“Northants, actually. Little village outside of Northampton.”

“Really? What'd'ya think of that, Neame?”

Colonel Neame made some
oh-ho-ho
sounds—simulating laughter, perhaps?—and started in making digging gestures with his arms. Melrose watched this and wondered what it meant. Nothing, probably.

“Northants! Northampton hasn't much to recommend it as a city.”

Melrose smiled. “It's a cut above Sheffield, let's give it that.”

Major Champs gave a braying laugh and slapped the colonel on the arm. “Hear that, Joss?”

People must really be hurting for humor around here, if they thought that remark was funny.

After Champs quieted down, Melrose asked, “Well, gentlemen, may I offer you another of what you're drinking?” An empty glass sat before each of them.

They were back to their indecipherable
uhs, nums,
and
ehs,
sprinkled here and there with a
dashed, don't mind, good, trouble,
during which Melrose signaled Young Higgins again, and he came like a shot. Melrose certainly couldn't give the service bad marks. He ordered another round and the porter dashed off.

“Tell me, gentlemen, would you recommend the food here?”

Again, they lost Melrose in their labyrinthine answer, comparing notes on the lack of success of the leg of lamb on the night previous but finally arriving at a compromise. Said the major, “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Soup's good, though.”

“Windsor soup . . . quite tasty,” added Colonel Neame. “Yes, I did miss a spot of good Windsor soup when things got rough.”

Melrose wondered if
major
and
colonel
were literal ranks meaning wartime service or were figures of speech, complimentary tags indicating their stations in life. Rather like life peerages bestowed by the monarchy in gratitude for having done (in many cases) sod-all. He sometimes thought it a pity the United States hadn't the practice of parceling out peerages instead of taking the sometimes ruinous course of doling out high government offices to make good on campaign promises. So much better a baronet than a booby.

No, these two old men were probably the real thing, but whether they were the right real thing remained to be seen. Was the
major
one of those “scarlet majors at the base” of Siegfried Sassoon? Or had he seen action? “So, gentlemen, where did you see service?” Military men usually liked recounting their experiences.

Muttering several unintelligible phrases before he actually launched into conversation, Major Champs said, “Colonel Neame here was one of the Dam Busters; you remember them, don't you? No, before your time, I expect. Crackerjack outfit, that was, eh, Joss? Looked in the jaws of death every day, every hour. Good men.” He regarded Colonel Neame, who did not reply but positioned his monocle in his eye socket and seemed to look at Melrose as if wondering if he was a worthy repository of this account. Then the monocle came out again and dangled near his lap, as he looked down and laced his fingers.

Major Champs continued. “I was with the Eighth in Africa with Montgomery, you know. At El Alamein. Later on, at Arnhem, trying to secure a bridge—”

“A bridge too far,' ” said Melrose. This was making him feel a little ashamed, as the nearest he had ever come to dying was death-by-ennui over tea with Agatha.

“Right. Right.” Major Champs shook his white head. “Yes, that was something.”

But his tone suggested it was something best forgotten.

He went on, and all the while he was talking, Neame fiddled with his monocle, taking it out, putting it in. Once having positioned it in the eye socket, Neame would scowl, as if he'd been forced to look at a scene especially foul, whence he would lift an eyebrow and the monocle would drop out again. Then he would look down, lacing and unlacing his fingers, as Champs went on about the skirmishes, the strategies, the gains and the losses.

Melrose listened to Major Champs and watched Colonel Neame and felt even more abashed that he had seen nothing of the landscape Neame was painting. Dunkirk. Anzio. Arnhem. Nagasaki. And Melrose's only contribution had been that puerile remark about “a bridge too far.”

“. . . and after Joss here got the Victoria Cross—”

Melrose just slid down farther in his wing chair. My God. The Victoria Cross.

“—he was mustered out and went to Bletchley Park. You know about the work they were doing there.”

It was Melrose who was muttering now. Bletchley, Bletchley. It was on the tip of his tongue.

“Decrypters. Code breakers. Breaking the Germans' Enigma code. Oh, my, that was something! They say it shortened the war by at least a year. Can you imagine how many lives were saved?”

Melrose asked, “Is your background mathematics, then, Colonel?”

Neame nodded. “Umm.”

“He was teaching at Oxford in ‘thirty-nine. Joined up right away. As did I. After V-E Day I found myself in Burma. The war wasn't over for
us. They said it would be another year or more. But Hiroshima happened. And that was the end”—Champs looked at Melrose out of those burning blue eyes—“of war as romance.”

Joss Neame laughed heartily. “War as romance. Oh, Christ.
War as romance!
Right you are there.”

Y
ou saw her all the way down the Fulham Road?” Melrose put down his spoon. They were eating Windsor soup in Boring's dining room.

Jury nodded. “All the way to the gates of the palace grounds.” He looked round the softly lit, walnut-paneled dining room. “I followed her.” Jury had already filled Melrose Plant in, but he lingered over this.

Melrose cocked his head, waiting.

Jury sighed. “Yes, I know it sounds weird.” He looked at his soup, no longer hungry.

“Did I say it sounded weird? Go on.”

To have something to do, Jury spooned up some of the dark brown soup. It matched the dining room, he thought. He also thought—for the hundredth time—that he couldn't explain himself. So he tried to. “I . . . expect I was fascinated by her behavior. Or her looks, don't forget her looks. That sable coat. What”—he looked up from the soup to his friend—“was she doing, anyway, getting on and off the bus? And why was she going into the palace grounds at that time?”

“And you worked out that—”

“I haven't worked out a bloody thing, except the woman they found wasn't the woman I saw.”

“You don't know—”

“I don't know the identity of either woman. Chilten, of course, thinks I'm wrong; thinks, probably, that I'd make a lousy witness.” Jury smiled.

Melrose said, “Perhaps you didn't want to.”

Jury frowned. “Didn't want to know?”

Melrose gave a slight shrug and bent his head to his soup.

They sat in silence, soup finished, until their dinners appeared, carried forth by a waiter so old his skin looked translucent. This was (Melrose had been surprised to discover) Young Higgins, and not the fleet-footed porter who had served him in the Members' Room. The old waiter set their plates before them. Lamb and a silver dish of new potatoes, carrots, peas.

“You win the lamb round.”

They had flipped a coin. Melrose had guessed some kind of chop. Yes, the menu was pretty much what the major had predicted. Thinking of him and Colonel Neame, Melrose diverted the talk from Fulham to the war. “Were you evacuated? I mean, you were a child, and they did evacuate children, didn't they?”

“I was very small,” answered Jury thoughtfully. “I was taken with some cousins to the country. Cheshire, it might have been. Warwickshire, somewhere around there. The cousin who lives now in Newcastle, she was older than I and remembers more. She's told me all sorts of stories about the family we had to live with, how crowded together we were, how tough it was. But we managed; we had to.”

Melrose was not sure he was up to this, another set of wartime reminiscences, another recounting of stoicism. He had ultimately been so saddened by Major Champs and Colonel Neame he had gone up to his room to lie on the bed and stare up at the ceiling.

“We'd nothing to play with, no toys, so we were left purely to our imaginations. . . . ”

Maybe it was worse than combat: kiddies making do with playing in the rubble and using broken broom handles as rugby sticks. Tales of doughty tots confusing enemy ships by flashing mirrors from the shore or putting shortwave radios out of commission. Melrose shook himself free of these fantasies. But Jury was merely talking about his little cousins
and how they cared sod-all for the war effort; still, it brought out something good in them.

“. . . What we did was—”

Best friend or not, if you tell me a story of hope and glory, I'll turn my bowl over on your head.

“Are you listening to me?”

Melrose jerked himself free of his meditation on war. “What? Of course, every word.”

“Uh-huh. Well, let's get to what I want you to do. I want you to go to this gallery and say a lot of shrewd things.”

“Pardon me, but you always seem to think I'm shrewd about things I am not shrewd about. Painting is one of them.”

Jury went on as if Melrose hadn't spoken. “The owners are two brothers named Sebastian and Nicholas Fabricant. ‘Nikolai' is actually what he's put on his card. His mother's Russian, and that's really his birth name. The painter's Ralph Rees but uses our other pronunciation, Rafe.”

“Oh, dear. That is the correct British way, I suppose. Have you seen his work?”

“No. I wonder if they have some more rolls.” Jury craned his neck. “Where'd our waiter go?”

“To get triple-bypass surgery, probably. Why haven't you been to this gallery?”

“Too much police presence, especially since there's not anything at all to link these people to the dead woman other than Mona Dresser and her fur coat. Precious little, hardly enough to warrant police harassment. No, I don't want these people on their guard.”

“What makes you think they'll be
off
their guard around me? I walk in and look over the paintings and then ask them about the night of November fifteenth?”

“Not like that, no. Not until you get to know them better.”

Melrose was suspicious. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they'll probably invite you out for a drink. After you buy a painting or two.”

“
Buy
? You mean not only am I to put myself in harm's way, I'm to pay for the privilege? How clever of you to think this up.”

Jury shrugged. “How else will you have an excuse to hang around? If you buy something, then they'll be happy to see you come back and will—I'd lay my pittance of a wage on it—invite you for a drink, even to dinner, even to dinner at their house. Then you'll be able to have a look at all of them.”