The Case Has Altered (31 page)

Charly Moss was frowning. “Unless she was shot elsewhere and the body transported—no, the Lincs police, the medical examiner, could have told that from the postmortem.” Charly shook her head. “Where is Jennifer Kennington now? In Stratford? Has she actually been arrested yet?”

“I don't know.”

Charly looked at her watch as if it would notify her of the passage of those moments. “She'd be in Stratford-upon-Avon otherwise?”

“Yes. Look”—Jury slid forward in his chair—“based on what we've told you. What do you think?”

He liked the fact that Charly Moss did not answer questions immediately; she needed to think things through. Now she said, “I'd say that the case against her is circumstantial, pretty speculative. There's no hard evidence. The rifle is problematic, certainly. Anyone could have taken it, brought it back. Yet. The man in charge, this Lincoln chief inspector—”

“Bannen.”

She nodded. “Mr. Bannen might have a number of unplayed cards. He's not obliged to let you see them; he's not even obliged to talk to you. But you know that. Give me his number and hers. Does she know you're retaining me?”

“She knows about Pete Apted, yes. I mean, she knows I've talked to him. But not you.”

Charly tapped her pencil against her teeth. “Isn't this up to her? She might not want me as instructing solicitor.”

“I think she will.”

“She's luckier than most, having a detective superintendent on her side.” Charly looked at Melrose. “And an antiques appraiser, of course.” She beat a little drum-roll with pencil and pen.

Melrose's smile was slightly artificial. He inclined his head, nodding.

She said, “Speaking of retaining—this will cost her a bundle. I hope someone has enough money.”

With that, Jury turned to Melrose, gestured elaborately.

You'll know
, Jury had said.

“I have enough.”

 • • • 

S
o that was it. You just wanted me along to make assurances that I'd mortgage off Ardry End.” The damp February wind was channeled by the Inns of Court and drove a spike of cold across their faces.

“Nope,” said Jury. “I wanted to make sure you knew what you're paying for.” He smiled.

“And there was never any doubt I'd pay?”

“Of course not. Do you think I would ever doubt your generosity?” Jury's smile widened.

Melrose sighed and turned up the velvet collar of his chesterfield. “I'm going back to Brown's. What about it? Do you want some breakfast?” He checked his watch. “It's only eleven.”

“Why not? I mean, if you have enough money.”

“Oh, ha.”

Melrose hailed a taxi.

 • • • 

B
rown's Hotel was one of the finer London hotels, identifiable by a discreet bronze plaque on its brick front. Inside, it was just as quietly stated and decorous, rather self-consciously so. It did not shout
LOOK AT ME
! but it certainly murmured it. The flocked wallpaper, the rich velvets, the heavily curtained high windows in the room where the hotel served its popular afternoon tea.

Plant and Jury were in the dining room, uncrowded at this late hour, eating their eggs and bacon in comfortable silence. Jury's butter knife scraped across his crisp toast. Melrose was cutting his toast up into fingers.

Jury frowned. “What're you doing?”

“Making soldiers.”

“Good lord.”

Melrose didn't care. His three-minute egg had been topped, and when he had finished cutting up the oblongs, he dipped one in.

“A grown man,” said Jury, shaking his head.

“I always eat my eggs and toast this way.”

“Maturity generally has us grown-ups halving our toast.”

“Maturity curdles in my aunt's company. One feels one is right back with Nurse at the nursery tea.”

“Well, I wouldn't know. I hadn't much experience of nursery teas as a
kid.” He had finished his own bacon and was looking at Plant's. “You going to eat that bacon?”

Melrose shoved the plate toward him. “Help yourself.”

“Nurse Jury wants some more.” Jury's fork stabbed the last of the bacon. “Thanks.”

Melrose looked around the room and saw that several other candidates for lung disease were lighting up cigarettes. “We're in the smoking section. Doesn't that bother you?”

“No.” Jury was piling blackcurrant jelly on his last piece of toast. “I asked for it.”

Melrose's cigarettes were out and he was fishing for his lighter. “That's extremely generous of you. Requesting it for my sake.”

“It's not generosity. It's superiority.” Jury flashed a smile with jelly on it. “What'd you think of her?”

“Our hard-headed lady lawyer?”

“Chauvinist.” Jury permitted himself to lean into the smoke gently rising from Plant's cigarette.

Melrose smiled. “Sorry. I thought she knew what she was doing. She's smart.” He smoked.

Jury finished the bacon. “Bannen knows something relating to Dorcas Reese's death. Relating, I mean, to Jenny. He gave me the impression he was pretty certain Jenny had also killed Dorcas Reese.”

Melrose sat back, startled. “That's bad news.”

“Yes.”

“But the good news is, nobody concerned has an alibi, except for Max Owen, perhaps. Plenty of time for any of them to get to the Wash and back.” Melrose poked his finger through a smoke ring and watched the smoke, pale blue in the noon light, disperse. “Verna Dunn was last seen with Jenny Kennington a little after ten
P.M
. The car was heard starting up between quarter after and ten-thirty—”

Jury said, “Could it have been another car? Say, Max Owen's, that night? And later, someone drove Verna's car to the point where her body was found?”

Melrose snorted. “Shouldn't one go with the obvious explanation?”

“All right, I'm floundering.”

“That's okay. You deserve the occasional flounder.”

“Thanks.” Jury looked at his watch. “Hell, I guess I have to get back to Victoria Street. What are you going to do? Back to Long Pidd?”

“I expect so. What's the next step in all of this?”

“The next step, I'm afraid, is that Chief Inspector Bannen will arrest Jenny.”

Melrose said, “Getting back to Price, though. You say he was an old friend of Jenny's?”

“I'm afraid that tells more against Jenny than against Price. Another lie. Anyway, he has no motive.”

“Not one we know of. We've only recently realized Grace Owen had a motive. That is, if she thought Verna Dunn had harmed her son.”

Jury said, “I keep running these events through my mind: the fight, the car, the footpath, the Wash, the body . . . They don't compute. Something's wrong. Out of place.” He shook his head.

The dining room was emptying out, the last couple but for Plant and Jury rising and carrying their cigarettes curled in their fingers like diamonds. Jury sighed and longed for just one Silk Cut. He said, “Don't you think that someone who really cared for you would confide in you?”

Melrose pushed his bread plate toward Jury with the tip of his finger. “Have a soldier.”

J
ury had managed to set aside the Lincolnshire gloom, only to be overtaken, this afternoon, by the Victoria Street gloom. The breakfast with Plant had helped to raise his spirits a little. Not for long.

Not when he'd just got off the phone with Sam Lasko who'd been decent enough to let him know that not five minutes ago, they'd brought Jenny Kennington into the station.

“Waiting for Bannen to get back and tell me when his people are coming to escort her to Lincoln,” Lasko said.

“Back from where?”

“Scotland.” He tried to cheer Jury up by telling him he didn't really think Bannen had all that much of a case. “Or he wouldn't be lollygagging around by Loch Ness, would he?”

Jury couldn't help but smile at this image. He stopped smiling. “All that much of or not, it's enough of a case to take her into custody.” Jury told Lasko about Charly Moss while he doodled tiny cats. “Of course, that search of her house doesn't make Stratford police look good.” Jury pulled over a pad, started doodling Lasko's eyeglasses.

“What search?”

“You know. That unwarranted search you and Plant made of her house.”

Lasko was silent, thinking. Then he said, “I wasn't searching the
property
, Jury. I was searching for
her. Nothing
was removed from the premises.”

Jury smiled. “Oh? Plant says you were rummaging around upstairs. Expect to find her under the bed?”

“Very funny. I was looking for clues as to her whereabouts.”

“Suit yourself. 'Bye, Sammy.” Jury hung up, smiling over his doodles, decided he shouldn't quit police work to go to art school. He sighed, tore up the paper. Slapped open an old file.

“It's good you've got her lawyered up, sir. A good move.”

“Got her
what?”

“Lawyered up. It's how they say it in the States.”

“Sounds like something they would. Me, I'm completely Racered-up. Soho, again.”

Wiggins was irate. “He hasn't got you back on that, has he? That Dan Wu business? You know that's a case for Drugs, not us.”

“Well, Mr. Wu has recently branched out into dumping bodies in the Thames. Pardon me,
allegedly
dumping bodies in the Thames.” Jury slapped the file shut, tidied up the photographs, and dropped them in another file. He sat there staring at the gray rain-streaked window. Where had the sun gone? Where the sun always goes, he imagined.

Wiggins said, “You did everything you could, sir.”

“No, I didn't. I'm missing something. And Bannen knows what the something is.”

I
've told Theo Wrenn Browne that if he persists in this harebrained scheme to close down Ada's shop, he can look forward to a life of persecution that will make the Spanish Inquisition look like a weekend in Brighton.” Marshall Trueblood pursed his lips and reconsidered. “I'll tell him he'll wind up in some dank little cellar by the sea selling old copies of
Playboy
and French postcards, wearing vests with holes in them and brown cardigans.”

“I get the picture,” said Melrose. They were sitting in the window embrasure of the Jack and Hammer. “Except isn't it really Agatha's scheme? She's the one bringing the complaint before the magistrate.”

“Browne's behind it all; she's merely his puppet. It's him wants to get hold of that secondhand furniture shop so he can expand his bookshop. Let's have another.” Trueblood rose and gathered in their pints.

A shadow fell across the window-table and Melrose looked round to see his aunt outside the pub, tap tap tapping her ringed finger against the leaded glass pane. Blocked by the tight fit of the leaded seams (or a sympathetic God), whatever she was saying out there on the pavement couldn't penetrate, became sounds even more impenetrable by the mechanical Jack above her, out on the end of the beam, bonging—or pretending to—the hour. Melrose enjoyed her fruitless talk and started in mouthing words of his own. He found it restful, lips moving without the companion-sounds issuing from the larynx. Talk without the responsibility for it, which was just his aunt's line of country. It was rather like clicking the “mute” button on the telly's remote and watching the butterfly
movements of lips without having to hear the idiotic dialogue. She walked away, crossed the street.

“I see the bandage is off,” Melrose said to Trueblood, back with refills. “Does that mean the ankle isn't even broken? I thought there were X-rays. For God's sake, has she found a doctor who can't read an X-ray? Where's her case, then? I still can't understand why this Pink fellow would entertain such a case for a moment. The man must be mad.” It irritated Melrose nearly to death that such a blatantly spurious case could even be argued.

“Pink-Bryce or Bryce-Pink,” said Trueblood, plucking an emerald green Sobranie from the black box. He offered the box to Melrose, who declined and took out his own case. Expertly, Trueblood struck up a kitchen match by rubbing it against his thumbnail. He had lately taught himself this trick and was fond of doing it. He inhaled deeply and exhaled a series of little smoke rings. “You know, you're disturbingly idealistic. You appear to believe that the Law and the Truth have some tenuous connection.”

“Admittedly, I do.” He saw Agatha now across the street talking to Theo Wrenn Browne. “Cooking things up,” he was sure; getting their infernal stories straight.

“Now, that's where you're wrong, old sweat. A trial has nothing to do with Truth and everything to do with Argument. Had Socrates been a barrister, he'd have won every single case:

“ ‘You, therefore think, Alcibiades, that because the tires of Euthyphro's Jaguar convertible exactly match the tread marks on the victim's back, that the Jaguar ran him down?'

“ ‘I do, Socrates.'

“ ‘And that the defendant—the driver of the Jaguar convertible—had been guilty of robbing the victim, raping his wife, destroying his reputation, and blowing up his yacht?'

“ ‘That, Socrates, has been proved.'

“ ‘And that therefore these acts constitute motive on the part of the driver of the Jaguar convertible—?' ”

“For heaven's sakes,” said Melrose, “you don't have to keep saying ‘convertible.' ”

“Yes, I do. Socrates was nothing if not absolutely precise: ‘
And you think that these acts,' blah-blah-blah-what I said before—‘constitute motive?'

“ ‘It would appear so, Socrates.'