The Stargazey (36 page)

“Uh-huh. Then she didn't live far from the Fabricant Gallery and might even have bought something there?”

“She did.”

“She
did?
And did they wine her and dine her, as they did me?”

“No. They don't treat everybody as they did you.”

“I have a certain magnetic charm.”

“Oh, it's not that. It's because you bought one of Rees's paintings. They must be pretty hard to unload. Not to mention two by Bea. You purchased three paintings at one clip.” Jury sipped the strong coffee. “They knew Nancy Pastis. Nicholas recalled her, finally. Frankly, I can't imagine forgetting anyone who buys in there, the prices, my God. Month's salary, it'd cost me.”

“The only connection between your Kate McBride and the Fabricants and Nancy Pastis
and
Mona Dresser is the very tenuous one of a sable coat that keeps getting passed around. . . . Wait a minute! That coat! What about
that?
If Ms. McBride was wearing it, how in hell did it turn up on Ms. Pastis?”

“It didn't.”

“Didn't?
Didn't?”

Jury shook his head. “There were—are—two coats.”

Melrose slid his stool back from the bar as if this proximity to impossible coincidence were too much to take. He held up his hands, palms out, to push it away. “Oh, no, oh, no. That both of these women were wearing Russian sable—oh, please.”

“They weren't. Kate McBride's is mink. Maybe someone who knew fur could have told the difference in the dark; me, I wouldn't know the difference in the light. My only experience with fur is what these protesters paint on their placards. Or what my tongue feels like after a night at the Angel.”

“Then it was the Pastis woman who was wearing Mona Dresser's coat?”

“Yes. Presumably came by it through this consignment shop.”

“Then what happened after Kate McBride got to Fulham Palace? Who was the contact?”

“No one. What she found was a dead body, and it scared the hell out of her. Not just because the woman was dead, but because she looked like Kate herself and was wearing fur.”

Melrose frowned. “Then is it possible this is a case of mistaken identity?”

“Yes. But I think she was being set up for the murder.”

Melrose picked up his coffee, held it as if toasting someone or something. After a few moments, he said, “There are all of these people—the Fabricant clan, Ralph, the late Simeon Pitt, Mona Dresser, McBride, and Pastis—and not a blessed thing do they have in common. The fur coat connects Pastis and Mona Dresser and Olivia Inge. But not the Fabricants. The brothers are connected to Nancy Pastis by virtue of the painting she bought. But they've nothing to do with Kate McBride. Simeon Pitt is connected to the Fabricant Gallery because of his past reviews of openings, perhaps to Ralph, though he was gone from the art scene before Ralph came along—or there would have been a review I'd love to have read!” Melrose felt a sudden onslaught of sorrow and stopped. He drank his beer in silence.

“You really liked him, didn't you?”

Melrose cleared his throat. “I did.” He turned to look at Jury. “When I think about Pitt, I have two reactions, sadness and rage. It simply makes me furious that a man can't sit in the peace and quiet of his own club chair and be safe. It enrages me that a killer can just walk in off the street and put a knife in you. In him.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

After another moment of silence, Melrose asked, “Could I have a look at this Pastis woman's flat?”

“I don't see why not. Something particular you're looking for?”

“No. I'd just like to see if I can hit on something that connects all of them. At this point, nothing I can see does.” He set down his cup.

“Yes, there is.” Jury looked across at the chair where Simeon Pitt had last sat.

“What?”

“St. Petersburg.”

T
he police had removed the yellow crime-scene tape and Boring's was back in business—if one could call catering for Colonel Neame and Major Champs and two old fellows Melrose didn't recall having seen before, snoozing over their books and papers, “business.” There had been the mutual exchange of clumsily framed condolences from Neame and Champs. It was as if Melrose were the last of the Pitts. Perhaps it was morbid sitting here across from Pitt's empty chair, sitting beside the one Jury had just vacated, but Melrose still sat.

Not a single living soul
, Simeon Pitt had said, about his lack of intimate companions. He had said it as if he'd won a victory, as if being unencumbered with family, and even friends, were a height all should aspire to. Yes, Simeon Pitt had been the most self-reliant person Melrose had ever known.

St. Petersburg. They had all been there.

The Hermitage.

Pitt had read the item to him about this stolen painting. What was it? What was it named? Melrose looked at the table between the two club chairs for the paper Pitt had been quoting from. It had been cleared away, yesterday's paper being an anachronism in a men's club where the chief order of business was the daily paper. Melrose looked around for a porter. He gestured to Young Higgins, who had reverted from the lively
raconteur persona brought on by murder back to his snail-paced self. When Higgins arrived, Melrose asked him if Monday's
Times
and
Telegraph
were still around somewhere and to please bring him coffee also.

Higgins found the
Telegraph
, expressing consternation that he couldn't find the
Times
. He went off to get the coffee.

Melrose scoured the paper. Here was the article about Oake Holyoake, which had been the mise-en-scène for the murder of some fool in a tux and a Beamer, he who had stopped in the village church (for what reason Melrose couldn't even guess at) and gotten shot for his troubles. The vicar had been far more intent upon talking about his quoins and tiles than about somebody dropping dead in the chancel. The villagers were more interested in promotion than in murder. In Oake Holyoake the Saint Valentine's Day massacre would have gone unnoticed except as an advertisement for garage space.

Melrose went to the arts section. Here it was, the bit Simeon Pitt had read him: the painting stolen from the Hermitage, cut from its frame so smoothly and quickly one would have supposed the frame had never held it.
Wingless, Wingless Angels
, it was called. The only Chagall in the museum.

St. Petersburg. How many incarnations had it had? Leningrad, Stalingrad. For nearly three-quarters of a century, caught in the grip of Lenin and Stalin.

Pitt's friend, Jay. Had he talked to him finally? Trying to trace this person would be impossible. Perhaps Jury could set the British Telecom dogs on the heels of Boring's outgoing calls or could himself run down everyone Pitt knew, but the task seemed daunting.

Young Higgins, coming up behind him, made him jump.

“Done with Monday, are you, sir? Ready for Wednesday?”

Neither, Melrose wanted to tell him, as he looked at his dead friend's chair. He asked Higgins to bring him a telephone. He felt the need to talk to Bea Slocum, which surprised him, since he rarely felt it as a need to share his thoughts with others.

Perhaps he should think about that when he had time to think about it.

The phone in her flat rang ten, a dozen times before he put down the receiver. Bea hadn't an answering machine. Good girl. Long buried were
those images of black telephones in empty houses, ringing hopefully and going unanswered. Oh, it was all so easy now! Horribly easy, and together with the ease came the emptiness, as it very often does. No more anticipation, no dreaming on the event, no ring of telephones echoing down hallways. Melrose sighed. It was, perhaps, melancholy, but it was at least a fantasy, and fantasy was getting buried under efficiency these days.

Melrose called the Museum of Childhood and was told she'd just left. “Said she was going to some church sale where her friends live. E Five or Six, I think she said.”

Melrose thanked the woman and replaced the receiver. This must be the church White Ellie had been talking about, the one where Ashley and his friend flogged their wares. Or somebody's wares.

Later, he might try to find her. Right now, he intended to venture forth to Shepherd Market. He hove himself from his chair and informed Young Higgins that he wouldn't be having lunch.

 • • • 

J
ury had sent the page bearing the message to Kate McBride to the Ful-ham headquarters right after he'd passed the context of its turning up to Ron Chilten. There was little chance that the paper itself would be traceable. Chilten said he would have her picked up again. Jury had asked him to what end, after she'd told them what she'd seen?

“Because she just told you she was there, man.”

“As far as you were concerned, she was there before.”

“You mean as far as
you
were, Jury.”

“Hindsight would save us all, Ron. You still treated her as if she were there.”

The first time she had given them nothing. Chilten had questioned her on the assumption she'd been at Fulham Palace on that fatal Saturday night. They had assumed she was present and therefore a suspect—the only suspect they had.

He sat at his desk, restlessly turning pages, deep in Kate McBride's past. He brooded. What bothered him was not her admission, finally (for he hadn't needed to be told), but the hell she must have been put through and was still going through. (And in this respect he had put in a
call to the Paris police even before he had called Chilten, had made his inquiry, had been told finally—after a half hour of being switched back and forth—that all records housed in that particular part of the building had been destroyed in a fire, as Kate had said. The case was utterly cold; they sounded neither hopeful of a successful outcome nor enthusiastic.)

Jury could not remember a case that had dead-ended at so many places, as in a stroll through a maze, one is sent off through another green channel and then another until one is stopped again.

The rattle of the
Daily Mirror's
pages kept pace with Jury's thoughts, like dead leaves skidding across the cobbles of some little street in Paris. He thought it again—that none of this disturbing business about Kate was the cause of his present dark mood. What disturbed him really was what he himself, had he been in Kate's shoes, and little Sophie been
his
child, what he would finally have done. He'd have killed for her.

And that, in the end, was the blank green hedge he was left to face.

H
e did not know what he expected to find or even what he was looking for. But Melrose was sure he had never seen so many exotic pieces collected in so small a space. He picked up a Chinese jade horse from a sofa table inlaid with turquoise with jade and jet in its center.

The objects here spoke not only of money but of travel. Melrose doubted anyone would find that warrior's spear or that
makishi
mask at Harrods. Both were hanging on the wall to the right of the fireplace. If she had been to someplace like Zambia (probably the origin of the mask), then she had traveled widely.

Melrose started to look at other artifacts with an eye to their origins. He could not assign a provenance to the rug beneath his feet; that she could have obtained at Harrods, but it would have cost her. In the glass-fronted cabinet against the wall was a collection of porcelain and jade figurines that looked as if they would furnish the owner with income for the rest of her life. On the other side of the fireplace was a Russian triptych icon featuring several saints, who looked grimly out from under emblazoned haloes.

Everywhere there were photographs, not of people but of places. Here were a cluster of snapshots of a tropical place, black sand suggesting Tahiti. Others of groups of natives, three wearing elaborate masks, probably Polynesian. Another was of a wide river, with two figures as black
silhouettes against a sun that cut a wide swath on the water, making its surface appear to be smoking. Melrose could almost hear the oars
whish
and the water break and the wind comb the palm fronds.

Still wearing his coat, Melrose sat down on the sofa, running his hand over the supple leather. It looked old but was probably just distressed. Nevertheless, it was as fluid as velvet.

He got up to look at the wall of paintings. Jury was right; she must have loved art to have arranged so many across one wall. His eye trailed over a row of paintings of various periods and styles and stopped at a gorgeous rendering of a city muffled in snow. Russia, or perhaps Czechoslovakia. The onion domes floated above the snow-laden buildings, glowing like pearls. Framed in dark wood against a darker matting, the ice and snow seemed to rush out at him and he felt an actual chill. He looked at the bottom to see what was written there:
Nevsky Prospekt
. St. Petersburg.

Jury was right; it seemed to be everywhere.

He was assailed by the strong fragrance of vetiver. It smelled like ashes; it would be difficult to describe to someone else how the smell of ashes could be so seductive.

“Oh, hello.”

He jumped when he heard the voice behind him, coming from the open doorway. The woman who stood there was holding a bag full of groceries that looked much too heavy for her. She was one of those elderly ladies who reminded him of paper valentines, the old kind one comes across in antique shops: hearts glued to doilies, lacy, gold-fringed, and faded.

Melrose immediately stepped to the doorway and took the heavy burden of groceries from her. “Let me help with this.”

“Oh. Well, thank you. I only live just next door.” She looked around the hall. “Where's Constable Beane gone?”

“I don't know; I saw the policeman outside, that's all.”