The Stargazey (3 page)

When he looked up he saw the woman who worked behind the bar remove a bottle of whisky and wipe it and then return it to the shelf. She did the same thing with the next bottle, wiping it carefully and returning it to its place. Apparently, she would do this all along the length of the shelves until stopped by somebody wanting a drink, or the telephone, or something else claiming her attention. Jury watched this for some moments, her taking such great care in her handling of the bottles, especially the cognac, the Rémy Martin. She smiled as she did this, and Jury smiled, watching. It seemed such a loving wiping-down of the bottles, and she seemed to take such pride in her handiwork. She appeared to be a gentle person, one who would not turn men's heads but who was softly pretty.

He was sitting at the end of the bar by one of the wooden pillars where a few postcards were tacked up, one of which he peered at closely. Half of the front pictured a pub called the Stargazey, although not this
one. He read the small print. It was in Cornwall, one of those little perpendicular villages that let you slide down to the sea but make it hell to walk up. Maybe he'd been there and seen the name. On the other half of the card was depicted a strange-looking fish pie, perhaps the pub's specialty.

“Can I ask you something, love?” Jury said to the woman dusting the bottles.

She turned with a questioning smile.

“Do you sell these postcards here? I'd really like to have one of these.” He pointed to the card he'd been examining.

She squinted at it and said, “We did do, yes. Just let me have a look here. . . .” She opened first one drawer and then another, beneath the bar, and triumphantly held up the card. “It's the last one, aren't you the lucky winner!”

It was Jury's first real smile that day; she was so uncommonly delighted with this humble treasure. Too easily made glad, thought Jury. Wasn't that what the Duke of Ferrara had said of his ill-fated duchess?

“Here.” She slid it across the bar. “You just have it.”

“Thank you, but I'd be glad to pay—”

“No. I can't remember anyone ever asking for one before. Most people don't notice little things like this. You miss a lot in life if you don't notice little things.” She returned to her task (though, for her, bottle-wiping seemed more a vocation) and took down and ran the cloth over a bottle of Sapphire gin.

Jury said, “I don't think I've ever seen any pub take so much trouble over its stock, either.”

She blushed. “Oh, me. I guess it's just silly—and he sure don't like it.” Here she shot a glance toward the bartender or manager or owner. “But these bottles I think are quite lovely, standing there against the glass. Just look at this one.” She held up the gin bottle for Jury's examination. “Did you ever see such a blue? It's so pretty—”

“Kitty, come along here,” called the bartender.

Kitty blushed, returned the Sapphire gin to its place, and breathed good-bye to Jury.

He drank off his pint, took a pen from an inside pocket, and wrote on the message side of the card,
Ten pounds says you can't find the recipe.
He supposed that sound deep in his throat was a chortle, or a chuckle.

Jury put some money on the bar to pay for his last pint and left the pub. Outside he looked for a pillar-box, couldn't find one, and was about to cross the street when he saw the number 14 bus that would be heading for the South Ken tube stop coming along a short distance off on the pub side of the street. He hurried along and joined the short queue. The bus pulled in and he boarded. When he sat down, he looked at the card again, laughed again. That was the second one of the day.

He looked out of the window, viewing again the places he'd viewed on his way to the pub. What he wanted to do, of course, was to go in the other direction to Fulham Palace. It was almost a need, a yearning whose source he couldn't put a finger on. He felt caught up in the drift of the tides or the pull of the moon (neither of which, he reminded himself, were currently present). Still, there was a feeling of inevitability, of fate.

He hated thinking in these terms, given he didn't at all believe in any sort of preordained scheme of things. Nevertheless, just for the hell of it, he searched around in Stan's paper, finally found the horoscope column. His horoscope importuned him to “refuse to be drawn in, no matter how alluring the prospect.”

Hell. Okay, he'd refused, hadn't he? He hadn't gone back. She wasn't his business.

That was Sunday.

S
ergeant Alfred Wiggins was talking (nasally), not as if he'd caught a cold but as if he'd invented them. His comments were cold-proprietary: “They seem to take me different than other people: like yourself now, you can shake them right off, go about your business, they don't hang round you”—as if colds didn't fancy Jury—“like they do me. This one”—Wiggins swiped a tissue back and forth under his nose for emphasis—“it's been sent to plague me, it being November, and as you know, ‘A cold in November will last through December'; they're hell to get rid of.”

Surely, he just made that up about December, thought Jury, but he refused to be sucked into Wiggins's versifying, which was a lot worse than Wiggins's prose. Over the cold- and flu-ridden years, Wiggins's drone had become, on the other hand, almost soothing, a counterpoint of woodwind to the brassy trumpeting of Chief Superintendent Racer and his ill-tempered dispatches, one of which Jury was now drowsing over, flipped back in his swivel rocker, arms crossed over his chest. Without looking up from the memo, he asked, “Seen a doctor, Wiggins?” and yawned.

Wiggins put on an almost hurt expression. “You don't find me running to them with every little ache and pain. Not like some.”

The sergeant's look seemed to suggest Jury was a raging hypochondriac, always hauling himself off to doctors and emergency rooms. Yet
Jury couldn't even recall the last time he'd been to one. He let this pass and concentrated on the little bottles Wiggins had lined up on his desk, the tops of which he was unscrewing. He extracted a dropper from some clear liquid, leaned back, and brought it to his eyes.

“You missed.”

Wiggins batted his eyelids a few times to distribute whatever it was and frowned. “Missed?”

“You got them in your eyes instead of your nose.”

“Very funny, ha-ha. They're eyedrops, obviously.”

Wiggins always thought his ha-ha's were a big put-down. To make up for his ha-ha remark, Jury asked, “Listen: how's Nurse—or Miss—Lilly-white?” He'd forgotten the first name of Wiggins's lady friend. He didn't know why he'd been under the impression the love of Lillywhite should have cured Wiggins, since no mortal hand could possibly do that.

“Fine, just fine. Went off to Portugal to see a friend.”

As Wiggins didn't seem at all put out by this, Jury assumed the friend was a female. He set aside the memo and went back to reading that morning's newspaper, which he'd taken from Stan Keeler's doorstep after going in and feeding Stone, who, he knew, would later be collected by Mrs. Wassermann and taken to her basement apartment.

Suddenly, he brought his chair down, hard. An item on an inside page had caught him unawares: Hammersmith and Fulham police force were asking anyone who might have been in the vicinity of Fulham Palace on the Saturday night between the hours of six and midnight to come forward with whatever information they might have regarding a woman found shot at Fulham Palace.

“What's the matter, sir? Look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I have.” Jury did not think he'd ever have to answer the request for “anybody who has any information regarding.” He dialed the number given for the Fulham police.

It was clear the police wanted somebody to identify her. Difficult in the absence of a picture or any details that might single her out. Except—at least for Jury—the detail of the fur coat. The coat and where she'd been found: Fulham Palace.

When a policeman came on the line, he told him why he was calling and asked for the investigating officer. The police constable said he could take down the details first. Jury told him what his own role had been—not without some embarrassment—ending with, “I didn't go in.”

“You followed her all that way and then dropped her.” It was not even a question, more of a judgment.

Jury squeezed his eyes shut as if light were the source of his discomfort. “Listen, I'd suggest that you not take such a hostile attitude if you want people to cooperate.”

The constable was glib. “Surely you understand that we have to screen out—”

Jury cut him off. “What's your name?”

“Chance.”

Jury hated to take advantage of that. He switched to: “Who's in charge of this case?”

“Detective Inspector Ronald Chilten.”

“Well, put me through to him.” Chilten. The name sounded familiar. After various connecting noises, Jury was asked to hold. He put his hand over the receiver and asked Wiggins, “You remember a Chilten with Hammersmith and Fulham? Didn't we work together on something?”

Wiggins stopped stirring his small cauldron long enough to reach for his Rolodex. “Fulham, Fulham. Here it is. Chilten, Ron. That was that nasty case, the domestic out in the North Road.”

“All domestics are nasty. Now I remember him. Shrewd fellow.”

“ ‘Too shrewd by half,' I believe is what you said. ‘Likes to keep you hanging' is also what you said.”

Jury definitely remembered the “keep you hanging” part of Chilten's nature. He went back to the phone and a voice that held some authority and answered to Detective Inspector Chilten's name. “I've got some—” It was only then that Jury realized how absurd his information would sound. Too late now. “I don't know if you remember that case we worked on—”

“Sure I remember.”

“It's about this Fulham Palace thing.” Jury paused. Chilten waited, not helping. “You identified her yet?”

Chilten let Jury wait for an answer, as Jury knew he would. “No. No handbag, no identifying marks—nothing much to put in the paper except some morgue shots, which I might just do if I can't shake anything loose.”

“She was shot—the gun found?”

“No.”

“What range?”

“Over six feet, under twelve. Close, you know, there's the residue pattern.”

“You're putting time of death between six and midnight?”

There was another silence. Chilten had a habit of keeping a direct answer back or making an obscure comment that forced you to ask a question. “We're hoping to shave some more time off that when the pathologist finishes.”

“I can shave some off for you. Make it after nine, not six. I saw her outside of Fulham Palace.” Jury thought he heard something overturn or hit the floor. A great thud. For a change, he had surprised Chilten.

“
Saw her
? You know this woman, then?”

“No. I only saw her walking along the Fulham Road.”

“Tell me.”

Jury did. From the time he picked her out, boarding the bus outside of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, to his following her on Bishops Avenue to the gates.

“Why did you stop there if you were shadowing her? Why didn't you go in?”

Jury sighed. He'd dreaded the inevitable question. “I wasn't ‘shadowing' her. And I don't know why I didn't go in.”

There was a lengthy silence. Chilten was good at deploying silences. Jury felt like hitting him.

Finally, Chilten merely asked, “What were you doing on a number fourteen bus?”

Exasperated that now his own movements would be under scrutiny, he said, “That's not important. I mean, not relevant.” He sighed, thinking of how often he'd heard a suspect being questioned say that.

Chilten seemed to be questioning Jury's evaluation of relevance. Then he said, “Are we sure we've got the same woman?” Chilten was eating as he talked; Jury recognized the sound, having listened so many times to Sergeant Wiggins medicating himself with black biscuits on the other end of a phone. As if reading his mind, Chilten said, “Didn't have any breakfast so I got a couple jam doughnuts. So how do we know?”

“I'll describe her: Very pale blonde, somewhere around five-seven, five-eight, as best I could judge. Very good-looking, hardly any makeup, maybe none. Then there was the coat. Long and dark—mink, if I had to guess.”

“Sable. Okay, it's probably the same one. Traffic must've been weird if you could keep her in view all the way to Fulham Palace Road. That's a hell of a walk.”

“As I said, she reboarded and rode.”

Chilten chewed awhile. “This is very weird behavior.”

Jury didn't know whether he was talking about Jury's or the woman's. Both, probably. He gave Chilten a moment to digest this information, along with his jam doughnut. Jury was hoping for an invitation; met with Chilten's silence on that point, Jury invited himself. “Look, I'm not trying to muck up your turf, but I would really like to have a look at the mise-en-scène.”

“Holy Christ. What the hell's that?”

Jury blushed, glad Chilten wasn't there to see it. For some reason, he had hesitated over saying “murder scene” and had used the fancy phrase instead. Yes, it sounded affected. “I might be able to help; I mean, I might be able to add something. Or not.” Jury shrugged, as if Chilten were present to see how he tossed this off.

“I seem to remember locking horns with you a few years back, in one of your I'm-not-trying-to-muck-up-your-turf moods.”

Jury gave a short bark of laughter. “Lock horns?
Me
? You must be thinking about my sergeant. His name's Wiggins.” Jury looked across at Wiggins, who, hearing his name, stopped his ablutions and stared. Jury gave Wiggins a can-I-help-this-unreasoning-goon? shrug. So what do you say, Roy?”