Rainbow's End (4 page)

He stood there watching the swan, thinking how he had almost been inclined to pump Elsie for information about Mr. Someone. (“Are they very good friends?”) He had resisted because he might
learn what he didn't want to know. (“Oh,
yes, really
, the best of friends.”) Or else he'd have to suffer the consequences of Elsie's imagination and watch this chap emerge from the shadows rich, handsome, smart, and a connoisseur of cockle vines and shadow children. He sighed and told himself he was being ridiculous.

He knew Jenny Kennington to be a very serious person, nothing arch about her, nothing glib or manipulative. If the man were someone important to her, she'd have mentioned him. Surely. And just as surely, Jury should have told her he was coming.

A ray of sunlight smote the river. That archaic word was the only one that properly described it, for he saw it as a violent strike, a sword on armor, light so strong it turned the swan an incandescent white. Watching the swan on the fiery water, he thought of an old poem about a girl walking through a fair, and the narrator watching her move about, and watching her make her way home—

. . . with one star awake,

As the swan in the evening glides over the lake.

Jury found this inexpressibly sad, though he did not know why.

From his wallet he drew a snapshot. It showed a girl of eleven or twelve, whose name was Jip and who lived in Baltimore with an aunt. What was her real name? Not just her last, but her first. All he knew was “Jip.”

Like the orphan lines of poetry, she was a girl without a context. In this photo she stood in a sober, unsmiling pose, squinting into the light that cast her and everything around her in deep shadow. A shadow child.

He was as parched for a cup of tea as ever Sergeant Wiggins would be.

Jury stopped in the little restaurant directly across from the cathedral and sat down at a table in the window where he could drink his tea and munch a Chelsea bun and gaze across the cathedral yard. There, blue-uniformed schoolchildren, probably students at the cathedral school, were all walking in procession along the pavement that encircled Exeter Cathedral. They were all dressed in navy blue blazers, white shirts, ties. A couple of dozen children of varying heights and ages.

It was a sight Jury had seen often, and was often affected by. He could see them walking, skipping, turning, long hair floating behind some of the girls, and knew they were laughing as they crossed the yard, though he could hear none of it. His job did not allow for much sentimentalism, yet, he could not help seeing himself in that collection of children, for all of their separate personalities, and he could not suppress the nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm him, watching the little band filing double-breasted through the church enclosure.

It had not been a part of his own childhood; probably it would have been had either of his parents survived the war. His father had been a wing leader in the RAF, flying a long-range mission over Munich. In that respite after his father had been shot down and before his mother had been killed, he had not yet been quite of school age.

Still, he had sat and watched them go by, the kids in uniforms, the ones walking down the Fulham Road in dark green, walking past his block of flats. They had seemed so chummy and clubby and ages older than he.

He remembered sitting there on the lower steps outside of his flat where he had lived with his mother, just the two of them now, sitting outside while his mother, inside, sewed.

His mother had done a great deal of sewing and managed to earn their living doing it, and he could still hear the comments of her “ladies” as they bustled down the steps into the Fulham Road, comments that told him she must be a very good seamstress indeed. Some of her clients were rich; most of them were stout—figures that needed the drape and fall of dark materials, cleverly designed. His mother favored black, even for herself, though she was thin, not stout, and young and pretty. And she always seemed to him to be wearing that bracelet of pins, a soft mound with straight pins sticking out of it on a ribbon tied round her wrist. It made him think of a porcupine's back.

He had sat on the steps in the mornings eating his toast, in the afternoons drinking lemonade, watching the schoolchildren troop by, making their way to the Boswell School up on the corner. This world of the Boswell School seemed to him enchanted and its students forming a magic circle he could not enter, not if he didn't have one of those uniforms.

“Mum, when can I go to school? Go on, Mum,” he would demand, as if it were his mother's stubbornness and not the educational system which prevented his entrance into the magic circle of the Boswell School.

Then another long holiday, and back again they trooped, the dark green uniforms. The time between holidays seemed like years to his six-year-old mind, and it was hard for him to believe that when the next long holiday was over, it wouldn't be time for him to go to school. Time stretched and stretched like the strand of taffy his mother would loop over the doorknob for him to pull. As thin and narrow as it got, it would never give up, but stretched still farther. That was his Time. Between Whitsun and some time in July he thought surely he must have aged years and grown inches.

“Mum, when can I? Mum, go on!”

It was especially painful to him, having to sit out the day (or so it seemed to him) on the steps watching, since his heart's desire, Elicia Deauville, who lived in the flat next door, at seven and a half had joined the procession in her own new hunter's green uniform. Elicia would fly past him, tumbling down the steps with an almost disdainful toss of her long, thick hair; yet, she would smile slightly, as if even she
had a hard time keeping up the pose the green uniform seemed to demand.

Later, he would pick up the pin-quills from the faded turkey carpet upon which his mother kneeled before the dressmaker's dummy, fixing a hem. While he pushed the pins into the porcupine bracelet, he hit on a clever (he thought) notion: his mother could make him a uniform.

And in this uniform he might be able to steal quietly into the procession passing the steps, simply meld with the others, and no one would know.

“Make me a uniform, Mum!”

The trouble was (his mother had said), the headmaster might ask him what twelve times eighty-two is, and what would he say?

To this, he had no answer.

Or the headmaster might ask him, How do you spell “agape”?

He had never even heard the word, much less knew how to spell it. It, or much of anything else.

“What's ‘agape,' Mum?”

His mother had turned from the hem, smiling and giving him a peck on the cheek. True love, that's what it is.

It had only been a little while after that that the bomb had fallen late at night and brought the ceiling and walls with it, covering his mother in rubble and beams.

Across the Exeter Cathedral yard, the last of the dark blue uniforms rounded the corner, the last but for the one girl, hair flying, running as fast as she could to catch up, and who looked, to Jury's overtired mind, all the world like Elicia Deauville.

“Go on, Mum!”

“Were you wanting more tea, then, sir?”

Jury blinked several times, blinking up reality, and finding the face of the young waitress. “What? Oh. No, thanks, I'm just leaving. If you could give me my bill . . . ” His voice trailed off, as if uncertain of the propriety of this request.

She wrote on her small book, ripped off the ticket, smiled at him.

Jury left the tea rooms.

 • • • 

THERE WERE
sixty-four cities in England, which meant there were sixty-four cathedrals. And yet he could name fewer than half a dozen—Exeter, Ely, Salisbury, Lincoln. He stood in the nave of Exeter
Cathedral, gazing up at the clerestory, the elaborate vaulting, the intricate designs of the ceiling bosses, and wondered if any of those sixty-three other cathedrals could be more capacious, more massive.

Jury was early, and so he thought he'd take advantage of the taped tour of the rondels. These tapestry cushions—the rondels—extended for the entire length of the cathedral nave, and it was to hear a bit of the story of their making that Jury had paid his one pound for a tape recorder. He was bending over the cushion depicting the Great Fire of London, started, as the embroidered words read, by “a spark from a baker's oven.” He stood marvelling at the intricate stitching. . . .

“Took you long enough, Jury.”

Jury nearly dropped the little tape recorder when he heard the voice behind his back. Brian Macalvie stood there, hands in trouser pockets, holding back his mackintosh. Several of the supplicants, seated or praying in their chairs, looked up at him. Something about Macalvie drew people's eyes to him.

As God (Jury assumed) looked down, a slant of sunlight pierced the rose window behind them as if its only purpose were to halo Macalvie's copper hair. Macalvie didn't need the trimmings. “Sorry, Macalvie. I had to make a stop along the way to live my life.”

Macalvie was already leafing through a spiral notebook. “That shouldn't have taken long.” He thumbed the pages. “The body was found almost exactly at the spot where you're standing, did you know that?”

“Only you are blessed with second sight, Macalvie. No, I didn't.”

“The woman, Helen Hawes, but always called Nell by friends, was seventy-two. At first, she appeared to be in some pain and then just keeled over. Very sudden. According to witnesses, she seemed to get very sick, retching, clutching herself, and then—” Macalvie shrugged. “That was a week ago end of January, when you were diddling around in the States.”

“Thanks.”

“Not many people here, it was just before closing, and not many tourists this time of year anyway.”

Macalvie's eyes scanned the jottings in the notebook, but Jury knew he was not reading, he was reciting. He carried all of this information in his head; therefore, he was searching for something else.

He continued: “Nell Hawes lived in Exeter, an unexceptional elderly woman, reported as being quiet and very pleasant, lived by
herself and was—as I told you on the phone—one of the tapisters who worked on the rondels.”

“We haven't seen each other in two years, Macalvie. Aren't you going to say hello?”

“Hello. According to her friends, Nell Hawes hadn't been ailing, not to their knowledge, they were under the impression she had a bit of trouble with her heart. Nothing severe. Otherwise, her health had always been good for a woman of her age—”

“Which would be even more reason to think she died of natural causes, which she undoubtedly did,” said Jury, dryly.

Macalvie paid him no attention. “There were probably half a dozen pilgrims moving down the nave around here, studying the rondels, with those headsets”—he glanced at Jury's earphones—“and when she fell down they said they assumed she'd fainted. Witnesses”—his finger now was acting as a bookmark in the place in the small notebook he'd been searching for—“all said the same thing. Nil. Nobody saw anything, nobody'd noticed her until she dropped on the floor there before these cushions.” With his free hand, the one not holding the notebook, Macalvie folded a stick of gum into his mouth and continued: “Nell Hawes lived in a small but mortgage-free cottage over in Lucky Lane. That's near the river. Didn't have friends or family outside of Devon, except for a couple of cousins who live up in the Lake District. Her address book looks newish, has a few phone numbers in New Mexico, and that's all.” Here he opened the notebook to the notation he'd been looking for, and read: “Silver Heron, Canyon Road, Santa Fe. And another reference to ‘Coyote Village' that I'm getting nowhere with. Anyway, seems Nell Hawes had made a trip there in November. Her fellow tapisters say she would take a trip maybe every two or three years, usually in winter. Not so many tourists.”

“You contacted that address?”

“I did. I mean, I tried. Nobody there. According to the cops, who checked it out, the owner was away, they thought maybe out of the country. Come with me.” Macalvie moved down the nave toward a long table where three women, all with gray hair and looking much alike, were bent over embroidery frames. These women, Macalvie told him, were tapisters. They made vestments, chasubles, maniples, stoles; they belonged to a guild of needleworkers who together had worked on the rondels. They appeared to be on quite good terms with Commander
Macalvie (who could manage to ingratiate himself if it was necessary), for they smiled and nodded as he introduced Jury.

“Look how intricate,” said Macalvie, bending himself over the embroidery. “Must be a dozen different patterns of stitches in that background.” Macalvie picked up a skein of colored threads, let it fall through his fingers. “Try and see the colors apart from each other and it won't work. Rainbow mechanics.”

“Two dozen,” said one of the women, whose clear complexion shone even more under this police influence.

They moved away from the table and Jury asked, impatiently, “Didn't you tell me the pathologist put this woman's death down as a coronary?”

“A lot of things can look like a coronary.”

“Including a coronary.” Jury shook his head. “Macalvie, what are you getting at?”

By way of answer, Macalvie said, “Wiltshire police have a weird case on their hands. Did you read about it? Body of a woman was found at Old Sarum.”

“I haven't seen a paper.” Actually, that was not accurate. Jury had seen several; he just couldn't concentrate on them. Jenny Kennington's face kept floating in front of the print. “Old Sarum? Strange place to find her.”

“Glad you think so.”

“What happened?”

“Coronary.” Macalvie cut him a look. “Sound familiar?”

Jury looked up toward the vaulted ceiling. “Certainly does. How many cases of death by coronary occlusion or some such heart condition did we have last month alone?”