The Stargazey (20 page)

Menus were handed them and the waiter pointed out the specials of the day. Jury always took a special, but he still liked to read the menu. Wiggins grew absolutely rapt looking at it; it appeared to be a source of nourishment in itself, or fascination.

“Superintendent!” Danny Wu always brought his own particular ambience with him; he saturated the heavy, smoky air around him with a
cool and silky friendliness that Jury had never been certain was real. He wore tailor-made shirts and designer suits. Jury could usually distinguish an Armani; otherwise, he was uneducated when it came to such clothes. Wiggins had made the point that Danny Wu could make anything, no matter how humble its origins, look like Armani or Stegna but had added they'd never know, since Danny Wu didn't wear things of humble origin.

This was certainly true tonight. His French-cuffed buttercream-colored shirt was worn with an astonishing purple tie and silk square tucked in the pocket; his suit was a deconstructed silk-wool blend of such a chocolate brown that it almost looked black. Jury thought of the sable coat.

“Hello, Danny. Business is booming, as usual. You should expand.”

“Ah! That's as banal an idea as I've heard today.”

Wiggins sniggered behind the menu he was still exhaustively reading. He always read the menu this way, even though it didn't change except for the chef's suggestions of the day.

“Anyway, thanks for the table. That's what I meant, I expect.”

“You're perfectly welcome, as always. Consider this and the many other evenings you've whiled away in here one bribe after another.”

Jury laughed. “Have we been on you about the Limehouse business?”

“Yes,
we
have. You know, what fascinates me is that when you have a murder in Limehouse—or Docklands, as it's called now—you go for a Chinese gentleman such as I. I mean, is Scotland Yard still back there in the days of the opium dens, the easy murders, the fog, the wharves, the rats—”

“I'm ready to order if you are, sir.” Not opium, not rats, would take Wiggins's mind off the menu. He was spreading his napkin in his lap, getting down to the real business at hand.

Danny Wu said, “If I were you, Sergeant, I'd order the crispy-fried whole fish with brown sauce. Especially if your sinuses are playing you up.”

Wiggins hadn't said a word about his sinuses,
yet—

They were halfway through their dinner when Wiggins brought up the priest. “Noailles. I meant to tell you. He's back from Paris.” Wiggins doused his rice with more soy sauce.

“You've got my attention, Wiggins. And?”

“I called again, to see if he was back, asked him if he had seen anything on the Saturday night. No, he said.
But
—” He stopped to fork up some sauce-doused rice.

Jury stared at him, willing him to stop eating. It didn't work. Wiggins was angling his fish off the bone as if he had a rod in his hands. Jury sighed. “
But
?”

“He saw the bit in the paper about a woman helping police with their inquiries. He knew someone of that name in Paris, he said. At least he thought he had. He knew a Michael McBride and thought his wife's name was Kate. Could be a coincidence, of course. Anyway, I told him we'd pop round this evening and see him, and he said fine.”

Jury was about to remonstrate that they could have popped round when they'd been at the Starrdust or, certainly, sitting here eating. But he preferred to act. He got up, unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair, and said, “Come on.”

“
Sir!
We haven't finished our dinner!”

“We can come back. Danny'll still be open. Chop-chop, Wiggins!”

Reluctantly, Wiggins began to get out of his chair. “I'm really not supposed to take exercise right after I eat, sir. It hinders—”

Jury walked around and hooked a finger in Wiggins's collar, bringing them as face-to-face as they were ever likely to get. “I'll carry you all the way to Fulham, if I have to.”

A
lthough it was crowded with dark and heavy furniture—medieval, Jury thought—the room had a vaporous quality, the air infused with a combination of sweet smells, confusing yet familiar. Jury had breathed deeply of it, thinking one doesn't forget, even after long absence, the bitter perfume of the censer, the musky odor of drying flowers, camphor, and candle wax. Jury's absence had been long. When was the last time he'd gone to church? Years ago, and even then it had been in the service of a case he was working on.

It looked as if Father Charles Noailles had gone to some trouble to make the room homelike or, possibly, churchlike. On the wall behind the priest hung a stylized wooden Madonna, her blue cowl rubbed back to the original wood. She was as long and thin as a Modigliani sculpture. Jury was always in awe of the transporting peacefulness in the expression of these figures.

Father Noailles was a tall man in his late forties with a manner practiced to put others at ease. When they arrived, he'd been standing by the window, which gave out onto the wide lawn in the front of the palace. This window overlooked the abundant trees planted there and eastward, towards the walled garden. Beneath the window was a chest, like an old seaman's chest, the wood burnt in some of the seams. For a moment, Jury wondered what seas Noailles might have crossed and what fires he'd
been through. Probably, he'd picked it up for a few quid on the Portobello Road. That's where he could have come by the chest of drawers against the wall, worm-eaten oak that sat on the none-too-level floor. Something white—a book of matches or a squared piece of paper—was fixed under one of the fat round feet of the chest. There was even a narrow iron bed covered with a gray blanket against the same wall. Perhaps the most interesting object was a telescope fixed on its stand, pointed upwards at the window, trained on the sky.

“You really inhabit this office, don't you?” Fearing that sounded smug, Jury added, “I wish my own office were a little more habitable.” He laughed. His office was plenty habitable; Wiggins had seen to that.

And Wiggins gave him a stare, not wanting to take verbal issue, that seemed to say, Well, what do you want? We've got our tea-making kit, and even a small sink, and just about any pill or powder you might need for your headaches or insomnia. Except crabbiness—we haven't got one for that. Wiggins sniffed, as if he had said this aloud and hoped the superintendent would take it to heart.

“I don't actually live here,” said Charles Noailles, “although it looks as if I did. Please sit down, won't you? Here, this chair is good.” He folded a stack of papers and quarterlies into his arms and dumped them on a table against the wall, already full enough to make the stack tilt.

Jury took this seat, old scratched and much-rubbed oxblood leather, worn but comfortable. He sank into it and found it surprisingly comfortable. “You're an astronomer, Father?”

Noailles seemed almost glad of the Scotland Yard intrusion, as if this released him from some wearisome occupation. “Amateur, strictly amateur.”

Wiggins was making a circuit of the room, appraising a chair here, a bisque figure there, looking at this and that (as if he were searching for clues, which he wasn't). Jury knew he was making his way to the telescope, which he thereupon appropriated. He did this with all the stealth of a cat closing on a dish of cream.

“What about you, Sergeant Wiggins,” said Noailles, “are you an amateur stargazer?”

“Oh, yes. When I was younger, you'd never find me far from a telescope.”

Jury contemplated the ceiling for a moment, as if he were in a planetarium, as Wiggins made a brief circuit of the heavens. Finished, Wiggins announced, “There's a lot to be said for it.” His tone was sententious.

“For what?” asked Jury.

“Why, for the night sky, the constellations, the moon—”

“Thank you, Wiggins. You don't have to tell us what's in it. We know at least that much.” With a smile for Noailles, Jury said, “We didn't really come here to look at the stars, Father.” Glancing around at the tiers of books and spilled papers, Jury apologized for interrupting him, as he was obviously very busy.

Noailles held up his hands. “Please, don't apologize. I'd sooner do almost anything than this writing.”

“Are you referring to your book, sir?” Wiggins, true to the Wiggins health regimen, sat down in a hard-backed chair and took out his notebook.

“
Lives of the Bishops,
I'm calling it. The Fulham Palace bishops, that is. It's really a history of the palace. I guess I had the idea that the palace itself would be a good environment to work in. You know—inspirational.”

Jury smiled. “And has it proved to be so?”

“No, of course not. No more and no less than writing on a bench in Montparnasse or Leicester Square. It doesn't really make any difference, does it, what surroundings you're in?”

Sagely, Wiggins nodded. “I've certainly found that to be true.”

Jury blinked, once again wondering about his sergeant's many avocations. “How long have you had this office, Father?”

“Nearly a year. But I'm sure you didn't come here to discuss my writing.”

Jury smiled again. “That's not what I was doing.” Wiggins was opening his mouth to do just that, and Jury cut him off, saying, “You told my sergeant here that you know, or knew, Kate McBride.”

“Possibly. I knew a Michael and Kate McBride in Paris. At least, I knew
him
. Michael was with the British Embassy.”

Jury waited. “Go on.”

“Actually, I met them in Aruba.”

Jury nodded. Noailles was getting off the track, but Jury believed in letting witnesses tell a story as they wanted to.

“It was on one of those magnificent beaches that scalloped the entire island, pinkish-white sand and narrow; it looked like a string of pearls. They were having a brief holiday, and when we discovered we both lived in Paris in the Sixth Arrondissement, we took it as Fate bringing us together, or at least Michael did. Anyway, we got to talking. It was good conversation, you know, the kind that doesn't bother with the standard questions: What do you do? and What do
you
do? That's why, I suppose, when they met me for dinner in the hotel, they might have felt they'd been duped.”

Jury wondered. “Duped?”

“To find out I what I was. I was wearing my collar, see.” He pointed at his neck, where no collar was tonight, as if to initiate the two policemen into the mysterious habits of the priesthood. “I hadn't been, obviously, at the beach.”

“This made a difference to them?”

“Oh, I don't think so. Well, I know it didn't in the case of Michael. But his wife was never a talker to begin with. So I don't know about her.”

“You got to know him but not her?”

“That's right. I don't think Kate was awfully knowable, anyway.”

Jury thought this a queer thing for a priest to say but smiled at his saying it.

“As I said, it was really her husband I knew. My church was in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Saint-Sulpice. They lived near there, had a flat just off the rue de Vaugirard in rue . . . ” Noailles frowned, trying to bring it back.

“The rue Servandoni?”

“Ah, yes.” Noailles registered surprise that the police would know this but said nothing. “That was it. Michael sometimes attended matins, quite early in the morning. He struck me as rather devout.” Noailles paused awhile, scenes of Paris perhaps turning in his mind like pages in a book of photos.

“Yes?” Jury cued him to continue.

“Oh. Sorry. I was just thinking of Saint-Germain. I loved being in Paris. I told you I didn't really know her, I'd only really been together with her when the three of us first met, and after that I'd see her from time to time with Michael.”

“Tell me anything you remember about her. On Aruba, for instance. I imagine that was the longest you were around her?”

“Yes.” Noailles drew his hand over his chin, reflecting. “I do remember that big sun hat she wore. It had an enormous brim. It made an aisle of shade wherever she walked.”

Jury thought he seemed to be taking pleasure in the memory of Kate McBride and wondered. All he said was, “Go on.”

“Honestly, Superintendent, there's nothing to be going on
with
.” His hand made a gesture of waving away smoke. “As I said, she kept herself to herself.” He paused.

“Were you here this past Saturday night?”

Noailles fumbled a bit with his answer. “Yes. I left for Paris on Sunday. I'm here most of the time, really. Most nights or evenings. It was evening, wasn't it, when this woman was murdered?”

“Somewhere between six and around ten. You were here all evening, then?”

“Yes. It was one of the nights I slept here, actually.” Noailles got up, moved about the room, rubbed his shoulders as if they ached.

Jury watched him. “When you saw the photos of the dead woman, were you surprised?”

“You mean, did I think it was Kate? I thought I recognized her, yes.”

Jury said to Wiggins, “Have you got the morgue shot?”

“Oh. Yes, sir.” Wiggins drew a picture from a big raincoat pocket, passed it to Noailles.

He frowned over it. “It does look like Kate McBride . . . but not quite.” His eyes narrowed, as if a squint might help him identify her. But he shook his head. “I never really saw her that much to be sure.” Noailles returned the photo.

“What about the other offices here? Did you see anyone else?”

“No—yes, I did see old Bread. Captain Bread, he calls himself. He was still here. He often is. Rather fanatical about this trust for seamen he runs.”

“Do you know any of the other people who're letting offices?”

“A little. Enough to say good morning, good evening to, yes. But not much more than that.”