The Stargazey (7 page)

She gave no sign of resenting this. “I didn't want to advertise a sable coat in the
Times.
I'd've got more for it, but we also might have got more than we bargained for.”

“Libby thinks someone might have called and come round, feigning interest, to get inside a house where people could afford sable coats and
have themselves a quick look round to see what else we could afford. She didn't want to take the chance.” He gave a little bark of laughter, dismissing Olivia's concern.

“She's right. There'd have been more than a chance, too. Almost a certainty.”

Olivia's face flushed with something like pleasure that someone was defending her. She took a sip of her whisky, asked them if they wanted more.

“Aye, aye,” said Seb, holding out his glass.

“More water?” she asked Jury.

“No, I'm fine, thanks.” He drew the police photograph out of his pocket and handed it to Sebastian. “Do you recognize her?”

Sebastian looked at it, shook his head. Olivia turned from the drinks cabinet and, still holding the decanter of whisky, came to look over his shoulder. “Never seen her before,” said Sebastian, handing back the picture.

“Mrs. Inge?” Jury looked at Olivia.

She turned and shook her head too. “No. I've never seen her.”

“We went all over this with that other detective. And why would Scotland Yard be investigating it anyway?”

Jury smiled. “We're just part of the Metropolitan Police Force. I know you've been over this ground, perhaps more than once. I guess I'm hoping—in the retelling, something surprising often turns up—”

He was stopped by the entrance of a young girl that caused Olivia a startled moment, which was soon smoothed over and an introduction made. “This is Seb's daughter, Pansy.”

Pansy Fabricant could conveniently be grouped among surprising things that might just “turn up.” She was the most worldly-looking child (if child was the word) he had ever seen. It wasn't simply that she looked older; it was that she looked at Jury out of eyes that seemed to be, but probably weren't, lit by experience. If not by now, definitely later. Her hair was long and lit up, as if it might ignite and send off sparks; it wasn't precisely blond but seemed more a color intrinsic to Pansy herself, as if it had come into being with her. She was wearing an ice-blue dress with a currently fashionable empire waist, made of some shimmery material that flashed when the light hit it. It went with the hair.

She gave Jury a murmured “hello” and a small smile. The smile stayed in place as she stood beside the arm of the sofa, hovering over her father without his actually claiming her attention. He leaned back his head and looked up at her, placing a hand on her forearm. In this gesture it was clear to Jury that Pansy had her father under control. The arm was braced against the back of the sofa, her head bent slightly towards her shoulder. In this pose she looked at Jury in the way an appraiser might study a picture, assessing its worth.

Worth for what? he wondered, reminded himself that Pansy was—what? Mona Dresser had told him fourteen. Or was it thirteen?

There was nothing at all in her face that expressed discomfort upon finding a detective in their midst. Jury thought her chief venture in life lay in making others react to her. God knows she was good-looking enough for a child (and one had to keep reminding oneself of the fact) to cause a reaction without further effort. But Pansy was willing to make that effort in the gaze she had turned on Jury. Pansy wanted more than mere attention; she wanted intrigue and secret-sharing; she might even have wanted tragedy, as long as it wasn't hers.

He looked beyond the French window into a wintry twilight. The temperature inside seemed to have dropped, and what had been pale sunlight was now like a skin of ice spilling across the rug. He could make out the formulaic neatness of the knot garden: the pond, the box hedge. From deep in the garden, a flock of starlings flew upwards, forming a wing of darkness. This awakened in Jury an old panic that rose in him like the flighting birds. The room had become oppressive in its silence.

He wished Wiggins were here to ladle out some common sense as anodyne to Jury's overactive imagination. And all these thoughts had passed through his mind in scarcely more than the time between the raising of her father's glass of whisky and the setting it down again. Now, Jury simply picked up the photograph and handed it to her.

Sebastian started to say, “Pansy wouldn't know—” A look from Jury stopped him. He shrugged.

He could not tell from her face whether there was recognition or not; her apparent desire for drama made her hold the picture a few seconds
too long for someone who was looking at a perfect stranger. Something slick in the expression, practiced and artful, avoided committing her to one line or another of response. Finally, she shook her head.

Olivia asked to see the photo again and, when she had it, said, “She was extremely pretty.” She looked up at Jury, as if to see whether he shared her sadness over the waste of this pretty woman.

He did, or thought he did. Whoever was responsible for Pansy's self-centeredness, it wasn't her aunt. Olivia, he thought, would be generous with her solicitude and her sympathy. And whatever else she was, she was genuinely trying to help. “I wonder if Nick or Ralph—?”

“
Rafe,
” said Pansy, coolly. She was studying her nails. “It's Rafe, not Ralph.”

Jury was a little surprised that when she finally contributed something, it was a banal something, since she had been putting so much effort into the appearance of sophistication.

Olivia smiled at this upbraiding. “Oh, that's always seemed a bit affected to me.”

“That's how he prefers it, Aunt Olivia. It's
his
name, after all.” She told Jury that Rafe was a painter and was having a show at the Fabricant Gallery. “It's very experimental, his work, isn't it, Daddy?” Her pronunciation of the name was precise to the point of edginess.

“Very. You should visit the gallery, Superintendent. Rafe's done some terrific stuff. Abstract, minimalist. Do you like that sort?” Seb's smile was condescending.

“I'm still trying to figure out the Impressionists.” Jury's smile was genuine.

Pansy, sensing she had lost control of the room, was walking about it now, trying various venues at which to come to rest: the fireplace, the long windows that faced the street, a satinwood inlaid side chair beneath an interesting still life of a musical instrument Jury couldn't name.

“Nick and Ralph, excuse me”—Olivia gave the name the preferred pronunciation—“went over to this shop in the Brompton Road to collect the money. The shop keeps thirty percent. That seems only right, since they've got the work of selling the clothes.”

“Nick's going there—that won't tell you anything, Libby,” said Seb unhelpfully, as he rattled the melted-down ice cubes in his glass.

“We don't know what will or won't help,” said Olivia tartly. “I expect if the police only investigated what they were sure of, fewer murders would be solved.”

“Fewer are,” said Seb, good-naturedly enough.

Jury was about to laugh as they turned towards the sound of the tires of another car pulling up on the gravel. (Three cars, at least, for the Fabricant family.) A door slammed, then another. Voices, laughter.

“It must be Nick and Ilona,” said Olivia.

The French doors opened again, and the man whom Jury presumed to be Sebastian's brother—or half brother, he supposed—stepped into the living room.

“Here's the other half of the gallery,” said Sebastian. “Nicholas is the social side; me, I'm the business side, the buying end.” This seemed to put brother Nicholas on a decidedly lower plane, but that was probably where Seb thought he belonged.

Pansy, who had been moving about, came to rest beside Nick; she lifted his arm and draped it over her shoulder possessively. He gave the shoulder a little squeeze.

Nicholas Fabricant was younger than Sebastian, by some ten years, and handsomer. His face had the straight classic lines one finds on old coins. His streaked blond hair was cut short at the sides but long on top, and straight, so that it had a way of falling charmingly across his forehead and eyes, causing him often to scrape it back. The heavy Aran sweater and rumpled gray slacks added to the youthful look.

No one else about to bother, Olivia again did the introducing, adding, “Superintendent Jury is here about that woman found dead at Fulham Palace.”

Nicholas smiled, shrugged. “Police have already—”

Jury finished for him. “—been here. Yes, I know.”

He passed the police photo to Nicholas, who gave it a glancing look, shook his head. “Never seen her.”

“Would you mind looking at it more closely, Mr. Fabricant?”

He looked. His verdict was the same: no. Nick handed it back.

Seb asked, “Where's Ilona? Did she come with you?”

“She went round by the front door. She's talking to Hedda—”

This was cut off by the door's opening again and another of the Fabricants walking in.

“Hello, Mum,” said Seb, getting up and taking advantage of the movement to go to the cabinet and fix himself another drink. Jury rose also; rather, he felt pulled from his chair: The woman did not look like anyone's mum. She was outrageously beautiful, the thirty-years-older version of the woman in the painting in the foyer. But the passing years had barely scratched her surface. She must have been in her seventies if she was Seb's mother, but her carriage hadn't in it a hint of the bent posture that often comes with advancing years. She was very tall and slim. He knew now where Pansy had got her unusual pale hair. Her grandmother's shimmered white-gold, the color of the pale sunlight that had recently escaped him but that now shone again across the floor. No wonder the men in the family were so damned good-looking. Yet Olivia, whose mother she wasn't, shared something of that high-cheekboned look. Ilona's lipstick was blatantly young and red, a color startling against her ivory skin. She wore a long-sleeved black dress, one sleeve caped, with the end of the cape slanting up across the breast, its end caught near the shoulder. It was fastened by a massive diamond pin. One didn't have to inspect it closely to see it wasn't costume jewelry.

She said, “Don't call me by that absurd appellation, please.” She said this dismissively, not looking at Sebastian but at Jury. She had a pronounced Eastern European accent. Russian, she must be, recalling what both Mona Dresser and Olivia had said.

“Police again, eh? I am Ilona Kuraukov. Mum.” Her slight smile was ironic. “I use my first husband's name; meaning no disrespect to Nikolai's father. I feel . . . ”

But whatever she felt, she wasn't saying. She still had not sat down and apparently did not intend to. Standing up was perhaps one of the ways she exerted her matriarchal authority.

With three generations of Fabricants before him, Jury felt oddly vulnerable, unshielded, disarmed. Ilona was especially disarming. Notorious for it, he'd bet.

She looked round the room, at all of them. “Are we all here now?” It was as if Jury, or she herself, had with some effort rounded up the Fabricants. And it did seem almost as if the meetings were staged, one character entering at a time, saying a line or two. Was it good theater? her ironic smile asked.

As Olivia had done, Ilona took some time studying the photograph of the dead woman. First she held it nearly at arm's length (to accommodate her imperfect eyesight), then resorted to a pair of small gold-rimmed spectacles, which she perched on the end of her nose. (It was the nose that Nicholas had been fortunate enough to inherit.) “Almost.” She handed the photo back to Jury.

“I'm sorry, Madame Kuraukov. Almost?”

“Well, I
almost
recognize her. But I don't.” She shrugged, held out her palms.

“What is it that looks familiar?”

“That is the problem. I don't know, Inspector.”

Jury pocketed the photo, smiled. “It's Superintendent, actually.” Ordinarily, he didn't bother to correct the mistake, realizing that “inspector” was merely a generic term to most people, covering any policeman who wasn't “constable.” But the Fabricants were too damned blasé and condescending to allow him to let the demotion stand.

“Ah,” said Ilona, inclining her head in lack of apology. He doubted she apologized for very much. “Did you see Mona Dresser? You would, of course, the coat having belonged to her. It is a lovely coat. I know Russian sable. I own one.”

Olivia turned to Nicholas. “Nicholas, you remember going to collect the money for the sable coat? The shop in the Old Brompton Road?”

“Yes, of course.” He looked at Jury. “Why?”

“I thought the shop assistant, or whoever you talked to, might have said something that would help us find her, something that might identify the buyer,” Jury said.

“It might have been a different person,” said Olivia.

Jury nodded. “Did the shop assistant say anything, Mr. Fabricant?”

Nick gave the impression he was thinking this over. “No. Except she did remark on how quickly it sold. They hadn't had it very long; it had been in the window only a day. Surprising, she said, considering how much money was involved.” He scraped back the hair that had fallen across his forehead.

“You didn't tell me that, Nicholas,” said Olivia.

He shrugged. “Didn't think it was important.”

“Nikolai,” Pansy said, rising again to the challenge of names, “not Nicholas.”

Jury thought Pansy might even have called him “Superintendent,” given half a chance.

Sebastian said, “Nick likes to claim his Russian provenance, you could say.”

“Like the coat,” said Ilona Kuraukov.

Nicholas looked embarrassed. “Oh, it's only a joke.”

Ilona raised her eyebrows theatrically. “I don't thank you for
that,
my dear!” She said to Jury, at the same time fixing a cigarette into a long ebony holder, “You know, Superintendent Jury, this business of the sable—it's a very slender thread you've got hold of.”