The Case Has Altered (23 page)

“This gentleman's been waiting to see you,” said Miss Just.

As if he'd come to report a cat up a tree. To her chagrin, Lasko actually put on a broad smile and cuffed Jury several times on the shoulder as they went into Lasko's office.

“I expect you're here about your lady friend?” Lasko sat down heavily in a swivel chair that needed oiling. He started creaking it back and forward like a rocker.

“What about this ‘imminent' arrest, Sammy?”

Lasko rubbed at a spot on the toe of his shoe, his foot against the edge of his desk. “That's what I heard.”

“Don't make it sound like a rumor. Is it true? Or just good PR for the Lincolnshire police? Do you know this DCI?” Jury asked.

“Not before this business, no. I've heard about him. He's even more relentless than me.” Sam made another pass at his shoe.

Jury smiled. “Wow.” Then he got serious. “Even if Jenny did have a motive for killing Verna Dunn—and I'm still not convinced she did—how can he ignore absence of motive in the case of Dorcas Reese? Moreover, how can he ignore the possibility there are two killers or that it's a total stranger?”

Lasko spread his arms. “Both connected with Fengate? Anyway, don't ask me, I'm just the baby-sitter.” He wiped his eyes, beginning to water from some allergy. “Fucking pollution. Look, Bannen wouldn't make an arrest unless he was sure he had a case. Because she'd have some flash git of a lawyer getting her out before you could say—” Lasko sneezed, then blew his nose.

“It's total nonsense. The woman was shot with a rifle; how did she get it there?”

Lasko shrugged, opened and closed drawers. “Got it into the car somehow beforehand? Planted it at the scene? Her prints were on it.”

“Everybody's fingerprints were on the damned gun, including the cook's. So were Verna Dunn's.” Jury said it again: “Total nonsense.”

“Is it? How do you know?”

“You just know a person, that's all.”

“Yeah, that's probably what the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper said.”

“Come on, Sammy.” He watched as Sam's other hand started shuffling through files.

“Look, as long as you're here—”

“No,” said Jury, rising.

 • • • 

T
he door of the Ryland Street house opened just as Jury was raising his hand to the brass knocker. Jenny took a step backward. “Richard!”

“Hullo, Jenny.” He saw that she was wearing the brown coat and Liberty scarf she'd worn the first time he'd ever seen her. Ten years. How could so much time have passed with so little to show for it? “Going out? I'll go along with you.” Jenny was elusive. She always had been.

“Only for a walk by the river.” She smiled and started to close the door behind her. Then she said, “Wait a minute; I need something.” She went in, ran up the stairs, then was back.

As they walked along the pavement toward the church and the public park, he wondered if she knew about this imminent arrest and decided she didn't. He told her about having seen Pete Apted; her reaction to this was apprehensive.

“If I need Pete Apted, I must
really
be in trouble. Who's paying him, for heaven's sake?”

Jury looked at the church façade and smiled. “
Pro bono
, as they say.”

“Oh,
certainly.”
Her laugh was rueful.

They passed the church and came to the river, where they stood side by side. Jenny pulled a plastic bag from her pocket and started throwing out bread crumbs to the ducks. The ducks farther out caught on to this and steered toward shore.

It occurred to Jury that Sammy's question was as valid as Apted's had been. How could he be so sure she hadn't done this? Yet, so was his reply that one just knows about some people. What he knew about her was that
she was generous, kind, loyal, and self-effacing. Yet about her past he knew very little, and it surprised him to realize it. She had been married to James Kennington, who had died before Jury met her, and she had been in the process of leaving their big house, Stonington, selling it to raise some capital.

That was all he knew. There was something about Jenny, a whole side that she kept to herself, and it made him uncomfortable. He could not explain this discomfort. Even now she maintained an unnatural calm given the danger she was in. She fed the ducks and swans with a serene disdain for what might be going on around her. It was such a tranquil scene; murder and Lincolnshire seemed far away. She appeared unmoved by her danger, perhaps (he told himself) because she knew herself to be innocent. Nothing then would happen to her.

A bossy swan shoveled his way between a bank of ducks and snatched up a large knob of bread. Jury said, “You're in some danger, you know that.”

“Yes,” she simply said. Now the greedy swan collided with another and started chattering. Jenny shook the bag, loosening up any stray bits, threw them over the water, and shoved the bag back in her pocket. She dusted her hands and said, “May I have a cigarette?”

Automatically, Jury's hand went to his pocket. Ruefully, he smiled. “I quit.”

“Of course. I forgot.” She returned her gaze to the river. “I wish I could.” After a moment's silence, she said, “You want to know what happened, I expect. And you want to know about me and Verna Dunn. What did that Lincolnshire policeman tell you?” Her hands were buried in her big coat pockets, the wind off the water fluttered the edges of the Liberty scarf.

“I'd rather hear your version than Bannen's. According to him, you'd known her for years.”

“Yes. I'll get to that. That night, though, we had an argument after dinner. I wanted to know how she'd have the gall to go to Fengate. She said Max was backing a new play, some sort of ‘vehicle' in which she'd planned a comeback. Well, that might or might not have been true, but I know it wasn't her reason for turning up that weekend. She wanted to
make trouble. That's all. Just trouble.” Jenny shook her head. “I told her to leave him alone. Leave the man alone or I'd tell him what kind of person she really was. That had no effect. After all, she'd been married to him; she knew him better than I did. This was after dinner, Saturday night. The others were having their coffee. I couldn't stand her any longer—all I wanted to do was get away from her, and I didn't want to go back to the house because she'd be there, too. So I simply left her standing there out in front of the house and started walking the public footpath. I walked it for some time, thinking I'd go to the pub and have a drink. Then I heard a church bell sound the hour a long way off and checked my watch and saw it was eleven o'clock. The pub would be closed. So I started back.” Sadly, she looked at the ground. “That's the lot.”

“You didn't hear a car start up? It would have been around ten-twenty or so?”

“Verna's car?” Jenny shook her head. “I was on my way to the pub, I told you. I'd have been over halfway there, too far away to hear a car.”

“The Owens thought the two of you had gone off in it.”

“That's ridiculous. In the midst of a dinner-party two of the guests go larking around in a car?”

“I expect the Owens assumed whatever the argument was about took precedence over good manners. So tell me about Verna Dunn.”

Jenny studied the cold night sky, and said, “I was related to her; we were cousins. . . . ” She looked away, started in again. “We lived together for a time, Verna and her mother with me and my father. Her mother wasn't a bad person, just a little dim. Of course, she couldn't believe what I told her about Verna. Nor could my father. It was just too outlandish to believe. Even as a child she seethed with jealousy. She hated me, but I somehow came to believe it wasn't personal. Verna was relentless in her pursuit of other people's possessions: dolls, pets, money, husbands. She went after all of them. She seemed to be more of a force than a person; she hated most people—perhaps all people, but anyone standing in her way if she wanted something, such as my father's full attention; toward such a person she was remorseless.

“Listen to this—” Here Jenny drew a small leather book with a gold metal clasp from her pocket. It appeared to be one of those diaries with
flimsy pages that girls are fond of keeping. She read: “ ‘Sarah is gone from the barn. I can't stand it, it won't do any good for me to look anymore, only I keep on looking because if I stop I know I'll never see her. I know Verna let her out and did something—' ” Jenny stopped and said, “Sarah was my pony.” She turned to a later part and read: “ ‘I can't find Tom.' Tom was my cat. And there were my doll, my favorite dress, my gold bracelet. I never found them. I never knew what happened to them. No one, not my father and certainly not her mother, believed Verna could have done this. Every time the look on Verna's face was one of pure triumph. It was near unbearable. You see, I never knew what happened to them. Had she killed the animals? Had she just taken them somewhere and left them? Had she given them to people, saying they were strays? Well, it's hard to do that with a pony.” Jenny's smile was rueful. “The trouble was that Verna was so clever about hiding this compulsion to ruin things for people. That's the way it often is with disturbed people; they're so
plausible.
After she'd cheated at some game or other and I told, she would weep copious tears, she'd be the picture of heartbreak—”

Jury said, “That's all dreadful, Jenny. But I can't imagine a prosecutor would take a child's diary seriously as evidence.”

He was surprised by the shrillness of her voice, for Jenny was ordinarily a soft-spoken woman. “You don't think it
stopped
after childhood, do you? That these were just pranks and she finally grew up? When I was twenty-five she broke up my engagement. I really loved him. And I don't know what happened. All I know is that one day he simply wasn't there. Years later, after I married James, I thought I was shut of her. And then she started calling, calling James and making up stories about what hard luck she'd had and getting his sympathy. It was of course far more subtle than I make it sound.” Jenny pulled her scarf away from her hair and held it at both ends. She looked at it as if she wished it were a garrote. “I told James not to talk to her and
never
to let her come to Stonington. I'm not sure he absolutely believed me—who would? You don't.”

“Jenny, that's not true.”

Her smile was bitter and disbelieving, but she continued. “So when I saw her at Fengate, it had been the first time in fifteen years.”

“And yet you didn't let anyone know she was your cousin.” No wonder Bannen thought he had a case.

Jenny tied the scarf round her neck and pushed hair out of her eyes. Rain, more a mist than rain, had come with the wind. “No. I'm not sure why. But, you see, neither did
she.
Why didn't she say, ‘Jenny, my God, after all these years'? I knew she must have planned something. With Max Owen in mind, probably.”

“But she'd divorced him.”

“For Verna, nothing was ever final.” She pulled her coat collar tighter. “Except death.” She paused. “Within a year Max Owen turned round and married his present wife. The point being that Max was then happy. To Verna that would have presented a challenge. She couldn't have him be happy with Grace after being miserable with Verna herself. You know, I doubt Max ever caught onto her. She was masterly at making the other person think his misery was caused by himself, never by her. Nice people like Max tend to take responsibility for misfortune. He'd have had a problem sorting out their life together. He'd have taken most of the blame.”

“I still can't understand why Grace Owen invited her.”

“I don't know. It wouldn't be difficult, if I put my mind to it, to work out the approach Verna would have used.”

“How well do you know Grace?”

“I'd been to Fengate once or twice over the years after Max married Grace, never when he was married to Verna. My husband was a friend of Max, and we went there once just before James died. Max met Grace in Yorkshire when Sotheby's acted as agent for that glamorous auction at Castle Howard. Max was still married to Verna and Grace's husband had died a few years before. The Owens divorced about a year after the Castle Howard auction. And within another year, Max and Grace married. I expect you know she had a son.”

“Yes. He died in a riding accident, something like that, didn't he? Pretty awful.” He did not add that the source of his information about much of this was Melrose Plant.

“Toby was a hemophiliac.”

“That must have been a terrible strain for the Owens. A kid who can't
participate in sports, a mother who has to keep constant vigil because death waits round every corner.”

“Or Verna Dunn.'

Jury frowned. “Meaning?”

“She used to be an occasional visitor at Fengate. That's what she told me, probably to provoke me. I just wonder if this so-called accident happened during one of her visits. No one witnessed it, as far as I know. I wanted to ask Grace, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was afraid of the answer.”

Jury frowned, thinking about Grace Owen. In the silence that followed, he watched the river where the ducks slept now in the rushes, bobbing on ripples the wind stirred up. The ghostly white swans, farther off, coasted. He wondered if they stayed in this part of the Avon the year round. He remembered Bannen talking about the swallows, how their exodus always made him feel strangely hopeless. Jury had been struck by this small confession, for Bannen impressed him as being an intensely private sort of person, even for a police officer. Jury looked at the swans now bathed in moonlight and shared Bannen's feelings.

“One thing that might work in your favor, ironically, is Dorcas Reese. Not only did you have no motive, you weren't even around when it happened.”