The Stargazey (5 page)

She could not make out his identity card (she had told him when she met him at the front door) because she hadn't her spectacles. “So if you're the Fulham Flasher, I expect I'm at your mercy. Come in, come in.” The sweeping gesture with the arm and the impatience of the tone suggested Jury had been stubbornly refusing to move from the doorstep all day.

She was a woman in her late seventies with frizzed and flyaway gray hair and small dark eyes, and if she was not exactly fat she was very well padded. Like the house, she herself bore a resemblance to Lady Ardry; Jury hoped it ended with these physical details. This day she wore an amplitude of flower-sprigged black lawn, setting off a long pearl necklace and a dangling pince-nez that she could very well have used to see his card (preferring instead to make the quip), a black lace scarf, and trainers. It was a combination Jury found irresistible.

As she made another sweeping gesture, this time pushing a big ginger cat off a horsehair chair, Jury surprised himself by saying, as he sat down, “My mother loved your movies.”

She had picked up a ball of blue yarn (at which the cat looked greedily) and was winding it when Jury said this. Her smile was one of purest delight. “Well, thank you!”

“She really did. I was a little kid, only three or four, but I can remember how she'd put on her black straw pillbox, poke a hat pin into it, and say, ‘Well, Richie, I'm off to see Mona,' and then set off for a cinema in the Fulham Road. Or maybe down to Leicester Square. She thought you were wonderful, talked about you as if you were family.”

Mona Dresser blinked several times, made a covert swipe at her nose with a lace handkerchief taken from her sleeve, and cleared her throat. “It's very nice of you to tell me that. Back then, yes, that was my heyday. The war and all.” Her eyes looked off towards the portrait of the black-cloaked figure. “My late husband was killed in the war. Dear old Clive.” The handkerchief made its surreptitious appearance again. Then she said, brusquely, “Well, here we're both being nostalgic, and I know you've come about that Fulham Palace business. I expect you want to talk to Linda. And then there's the coat.” She sighed.

“Yes to all three of those, Ms. Dresser.” Jury smiled.

“Mona. After all, your mother thought of me as family.”

The smile she flashed at him told Jury right then and there why his mum and most of England had been besotted with Mona Dresser. She might be old and almost homely, but a lot of younger actors would have killed for such a smile. It tugged at you and reeled you in.

“I can't tell you any more than I did that Fulham policeman—what was his name?”

“Detective Inspector Chilten.”

“What a bossy man. He acted as if he were the real owner of that coat to the point I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd come in wearing it. I can't tell you any more.”

“No, but tell me again. Something, some detail, might have gone missing; things almost always do.”

“I gave it to my stepdaughter, Olivia. How it got from Olivia onto the back of a stranger, I'm sorry, but I've no idea. Have you talked to them, the Fabricants? They live not very far from here in Chelsea. But Olivia's not one of them.” Mona had picked up a sheet of pleated paper, her homemade fan, Jury supposed, as he watched her fluttering it. “She's my husband's daughter by his first wife. Clive's daughter.” She sighed, saying his name. “I wonder if your mother ever saw us together.”

“You mean your husband was an actor?”

She laughed. “Oh, my God, I'm glad Clive didn't hear you say that! Definitely an actor. Quite brilliant, far better than I ever was. We did several plays together. It's how I met him, you see. We did quite a bit of Restoration comedy together.
She Stoops to Conquer
was our favorite. We were wonderful; we were Squire Hardcastle and Mrs. Hardcastle. We toured: Paris, Vienna. We even went to Russia, to Stalingrad. No, it was Volgograd by then. Krushchev renaming things, you know.” She picked up the ball of yarn that the ginger cat had been mauling. “Really, Horace.”

Horace gave her one of those slow-blinking looks that cats do when they want you to feel the full thrust of their indifference. The cat then leapt up on the couch to have a wash.

“But going back to the coat. I should think,” Mona went on, continuing to advise Jury, “you'd be checking into other things. What about her other clothes? Ostensibly, she was wearing something under the coat? Or was she naked? There would be labels, perhaps laundry marks, things like that. It was easy enough to trace the coat, apparently. It had my initials in it: M.D. I was cast in several thrillers—you know, police, detectives, hugger-mugger, and all that.”

Horace made a grab for the yarn and she swatted his head with it. He slid from the couch and made a dignified exit to the rear.

Mona sighed heavily, put her hand on her slanted bosom, said, “Or do you expect the answer to come up and bite you on the nose? I mean, with all of the equipment you people have, all of this sophisticated forensics machinery and all of your experts, it's hard to believe you can't even come up with the poor woman's
name.
Fibers, DNA, fingerprints . . . ” Mona shook her head, as if police incompetence were entirely too much for her.

Jury was about to make a reply when there came a thunderous crash from the dark innards of the house. A crash, remnants of sound, a silence.

Mona hove herself partway off the sofa, then sat back down, heavily. “Oh, why bother investigating? It happens all the time.” Jury rose as if to investigate himself, and she added, “But I expect, you being a detective, it's in your blood. Well, go on, go on.” She flipped her hand at him a few times. “In there's the dining room, and the kitchen's just beyond.” She called to Jury's retreating back as he went through the door, “Why don't you put the kettle on, while you're out there?”

What had caused the racket in the dining room was clear: a wooden screen, quite elaborately carved and painted in a complicated oriental fashion, had fallen over. There was also a mahogany table overturned. The table, however, had not fallen by accident but had been placed so, for behind its top were lined up every doll and figurine imaginable, from big to Lilliputian. The tiny ones might have been kidnapped from one of those little Christmas dioramas: carolers, tiny skaters on a mirror pond, kids on sleds. The table was apparently serving as a protective screen for this assortment of possible refugees; whoever had done this might have attempted to move the screen so that it served a similar purpose. War, no doubt. A Lego set was messed about on the floor and a bridge partly constructed between the table and the bottom rung of a chair over which (he imagined) the refugees would flood. Jury returned the screen to its vertical position but left the table until he received further orders from the front.

The kitchen, by contrast, was neat as a pin. It was large and light, the house's western side being in a better position to catch the afternoon sunlight. There was a big garden out there, too. A bit wild, but Jury liked
such gardens. He picked up an electric kettle, filled it, returned it to its base, and flicked it on. Then he went back to the living room, where Mona Dresser had found her cigarettes and lit one. At times, Jury thought the whole world smoked. He told Mona what his investigation of the dining room had turned up.

She sighed and said, “It's Linda. I'm too old to chase around after her. She's always getting up to things.”

“But where is she?”

“Who knows? She'll appear when it suits her.”

“Inspector Chilten says she's your niece.”

“Does he really? She's my great-grandniece, actually. Her mother died very young and—oh, it's too long a story, and hardly interesting to you. She'll be in here in a minute, acting as if nothing had happened. Just wait, now.”

He was to take this literally, apparently, and sat back, as Mona did, and with no other sound but the quiet ticking of a longcase clock somewhere, they waited.

Within two or three minutes, the little girl came strolling in, preceded by the cat, Horace, both of them looking as if they'd never mauled yarn or furniture in their lives.

Jury imagined it wasn't easy to call up that expression of total witless astonishment on the face of Linda Pink, but call it up he had. She had prepared a persona for her Aunt Mona, but it didn't necessarily encompass this new person.

Her expression changed completely in just the time it took her aunt to turn and say to her, “Linda, what have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

Jury wanted to laugh. The answer, the one shared by all the world's children: nothing,
nada,
no,
non, nein
—a multicultural denial.

“Nothing? With that infernal racket we've been hearing? Here I've had to send this gentleman—who is a
detective,
Linda, and I hope the significance of that is not lost on you—here's a
policeman
come from
Scotland Yard,
gone into the back of the house to investigate, so you'd better look smart or you'll land up in the nick.” Mona gave the girl's ear a little tug.

Leaning over the arm of the sofa, Linda said, “I told that other policeman she was lying in the
lad's-love.
That's where she was, not the
lavender
.” She began the minor gymnastics that children do to take your attention away from substance so you'll concentrate on style. A sort of sleight of hand, it was. Linda crossed her arms above her head and started turning.

Jury watched her for a moment. Then he said, “Humph.”

She stopped in a flurry of turns; she frowned. The high drama of her lad's-love discovery surely rated more than a
humph.
“Well,
I
saw her first. Before
they
did.” Doubtfully, she considered Jury's unchanging expression. Now she had moved to the arm of his chair. “I guess you can't tell the difference between lad's-love and lavender. Either.”

“Sure I can. Lad's-love's good for nervous disorders.” For once, he was grateful for Wiggins's encyclopedic knowledge of herbs. “Lavender's for headaches or muscle pain. Right?”

Linda considered. “Sometimes.”

Jury ignored that qualifier. “But this time of year they both look like bunches of brown stalks and twigs. Even side by side you can hardly tell.”

“
I
can. I go to that herb garden all the time.” She moved closer. “Do you know what bee boles are, then?”

He should have asked when he had the chance. “Still, it was dark, wasn't it?”

Mona was yanking her ball of yarn from the clutches of Horace. She said, “It's no good, Mr. Jury. She
does
know that garden like the palm of her hand. She's always over there at the palace, though I tell her not to after dark. Now, I thought Harry was to take you to that film. The Dalmatian one.”

“He went home.”

“But he was to stay to supper, too.”

“He got irritable.”

Jury mentally rehearsed a few scenarios that accounted for Harry's irritability and wished Mona Dresser hadn't changed the subject.

“But Harry's such a lamb, and he's so patient.”

Now Linda was flapping her forearms so that the elbows met over her face, thereby allowing her to cast looks at Jury that were not designed to
bring him comfort but to gauge the limits of his knowledge and see how he was taking all of this. “Well, he's not. He's . . . really . . . determined . . . ” (the jig she was doing was making her breathless) “and . . . he's . . . stubborn.”

Had she picked up these terms only that morning, or had they been prominent in young Harry's vocabulary?

“Anyway . . . all . . . that . . . noise . . . was . . . Horace's . . . fault.” Her words bounced with her as she skipped from foot to foot.

Both her aunt and Horace looked at her in disbelief. “Horace? Oh, don't be daft; Horace couldn't cause all that racket.”

Now with the villain firmly in mind, Linda disagreed. “He jumped on Harry and made Harry fall against the table, and it turned over. Then he jumped onto the screen and it fell over, too.”

“Stay still.” Mona grabbed at the belt of her overalls. They were light blue, and she wore them over a white T-shirt. She too was wearing trainers, but with no socks.

The kettle screamed and Linda ran from the room, calling back she'd make the tea.

Mona said, “I know it's difficult taking the word of a child, Superintendent, but if she says that's what she saw—” She shrugged.

“Not difficult for me, actually. But then I'm not Fulham police; I didn't discover the body. But let's talk about Linda for a moment. Why didn't she tell anyone? Why didn't she raise a shout when she found this woman? Must have scared her to death.”

“Probably. So there's your answer, isn't it?”

“That she was too frightened to do anything?”

“First of all, she
did
do something; she ran for the caretaker—she knows him, probably thinks he's her friend. But he wasn't around, was he? I mean, he was around, yes, but she couldn't find him. Fulham Palace has only one full-time, and the poor man can't be everywhere at once. When she couldn't find him, she ran home. Here.”

“Why didn't she then tell
you
?”

“I wasn't here either. I was out to dinner. Only the cook was here. You're going to ask, Why didn't she tell
her
? That question I can't answer, Mr. Jury.”

“But you came home. She could have said something then.”

“I'm surprised a man in your line would expect people to behave rationally.” Mona smiled her unforgettable smile to let him know she was not remonstrating, just surprised.

Jury felt somewhat stupid, said so. “I spoke before I thought. You're right, of course. Only Linda would know why she acted in the way she did.”