The Corpse of St James's (21 page)

‘Would it do any good if I were to speak to him? Along the lines of letting the police do their job, two wrongs don't make a right, and so on?'

‘I doubt it. He'd be very polite and agree with all you said, and go ahead and do what he thought he had to. He seems quite a nice young man. I liked him. But there's a core of steel, it seems to me. I doubt he's easily swayed.'

‘Well, then, we just have to make sure the police get to our villain before Bert does.'

‘Yes, well, as Mrs Beeton is reputed to have said, first you have to catch your hare.'

The next few days were tedious in the extreme. Oh, they should have been interesting. Alan and I, sometimes in company with Watson, interviewed the palace footmen on the list Jemima had supplied, and then other men from Bert's list. My taste for beer was sated to the point that I took to ordering tonic instead. Some of the men admitted to seeing Melissa as she stormed through the palace. One of the footmen even said he had talked to her briefly, telling her she'd better get back to her mum in a hurry or be in real trouble. None admitted to any further relationship with her. Well, they wouldn't have, but it seemed to both Alan and me that they were telling the truth.

So there set in a period of waiting, something I'm never very good at. Alan and I went home to Sherebury, where we were greeted with varying degrees of indifference by the cats. Watson was happy to be home, but then Watson is nearly always happy. As long as Alan and I are around, his paradise is complete.

I was fidgety. I wanted to be doing something, but there seemed to be nothing to do. I had run out of ideas. So I puttered around the house, driving Alan and myself to distraction. Occasionally, I varied the programme by going into the garden to drive Bob crazy. He was busy setting out annuals and trying to deal with the yellowing foliage of the daffodils.

‘Why don't you just cut it off? It's really ugly now that it's not nice and green.'

‘You don't want to cut it off. Has to stay till it's brown. Feeds the bulbs. You could braid it if you want. Some people do.'

His tone of voice told me exactly what he thought of people who wasted their time braiding daffodils, and incidentally of people who wasted their gardeners' time with silly questions.

I went back to annoying Alan.

Meanwhile, the police machine had been grinding on, putting out public appeals, trying to find evidence that Jonathan had been in or near St James's Park at the relevant times on Tuesday, the eighth of May. They had found a number of witnesses who claimed they had seen a man of Jonathan's description ‘acting very strange' that evening. None of those strange men had been limping, however, or carrying a cane, so Jonathan had not yet had to appear in a line-up, or ‘identification parade' as they rather grandly call the procedure in England. Carstairs et al knew that something like ninety-nine percent of the responses they got from the general public were so much eyewash, but they had to go through the drill, if for no other reason than that the media, predictably, were giving them hell. ‘NO LEADS YET IN ST JAMES'S MURDER!' screamed the headlines in the tabloids. The respectable papers,
The Times
and
Telegraph
and
Guardian
, were more discreet but equally censorious, along the lines of ‘It has now been nearly two weeks since the discovery of the body of a young woman in St James's Park, and the police appear no nearer . . .' Under the circumstances, I thought Carstairs was to be commended for not clapping Jonathan straight into jail and having done with it.

I said as much to Alan, who grunted and retreated deeper into the crossword puzzle. He was hating this, I knew; hating having to be sidelined, exasperated with Jonathan for putting him in this position, and annoyed with me for my relative freedom to poke my nose in.

The trouble was, I could think of no useful venue for said poking. If only some new information would surface! Surely the police, with all their resources, ought to come up with something. Then I reminded myself that even if they did, I would be told nothing about it. We were well and truly stuck.

We tended, during those days, to talk a lot about the weather.

It was a Sunday afternoon when a new idea finally emerged. Alan and I had been to church at the Cathedral, had lunched at the Rose and Crown, our favourite pub, and were back home pretending to enjoy the lovely weather and our garden, now that Bob had worked his miracles and it was in full bloom. The phone rang.

‘I'll get it,' we said in unison, trying to spring to our feet. At our age, springing is not our best act. Alan, leaner and fitter, beat me by a length, but then held the phone out to me. ‘For you.'

‘Who?'

‘Don't know. He didn't say.'

I took the phone. ‘Robert Hathaway here. Or Bert Higgins, if you prefer.'

‘Yes, Bert. I'm very glad to hear from you. I've been hoping you might think of someone else to question. We don't seem to be getting anywhere.'

‘No. And you may be disappointed in this idea, as well. I've not come up with any more names, only the faintest hint of an idea.'

‘That's a great deal more than we have here. Tell me.'

‘I found this out quite by accident. And it may have nothing to do with Melissa, but I thought perhaps I should pass it along.'

I was gripping the phone so hard my hand threatened to lock up. ‘
Bert
.' I tried hard to keep my impatience out of my voice.

‘All right, yes, I'm getting to it. You see, I happen to know one of the chaps who deal with the palace tours. That is, he isn't a guide, you understand, but he helps deal with the punters, especially the group tours, which can get a trifle unruly, especially when children are involved.'

Children. Might there eventually be a point to this rambling discourse?

‘He gets especially nervous when school groups visit, as I'm sure you can imagine. All those fragile treasures . . . well, you can see what even one careless or exuberant child might do.'

I didn't trust myself to speak. I was near meltdown point.

‘So there's a chap he brings in to help the regular guides with the children.'

‘A teacher?'

‘No. Well, that is, I suppose he teaches some art classes, but he's actually a sort of consultant. An artist himself, you know.'

‘Bert, I don't know, and I wish you'd tell me what this person has to do with anything!'

‘I'm trying to. He – his name is Anthony Jarvis – makes part of his living by supervising school groups on palace tours. He knows a lot about the Royal Collection. I think he'd like to be a curator, but there hasn't been an opening. He's an artist, as I said, a painter, but quite frankly he's better at talking about art than doing it, if you know what I mean.'

He stopped. I gripped the phone even harder. ‘What
do
you mean, Bert?'

‘Oh, haven't I said? It's a bit tricky, you see, because the chap, not the one who works at the palace, but the other one, Jarvis, is someone I used to know rather well, and even though . . . well, I still wouldn't want to embarrass him, or make his life difficult, or anything of that sort.'

‘Robert Higgins Hathaway, if you don't tell me immediately what you're stalling about, I'm going to make
your
life difficult!'

‘He was there that day, the day that Melissa did her little walkabout in the palace. There was a school group doing the tour, and Jarvis was with them. The chap at the palace happened to mention it to me, and I just thought—'

‘And you say you know this guide – assistant – whatever he is?' I interrupted.

‘Used to. He lived in Brighton when I did. That's how I got to know him.'

‘I . . . see.' I didn't, actually, or not very clearly. ‘Then he's roughly your age?'

‘Roughly. Looks quite a lot younger, though.'

There was a pause.

‘Bert,' I said, my voice weary, ‘you're going to either have to tell me the story or forget about it. Half-hints are no use at all.'

A gusty sigh came down the line. ‘You're right. I had hoped . . . but you're right.' Another sigh. ‘This is difficult for me.'

I waited. I found I was clenching my teeth. I unclenched them.

‘You see, I fancied him. He has a baby-face, and he's so . . . or at least he was, a few years ago. We used to see each other now and again, just casually, and I had high hopes that one day . . . but I haven't seen him since . . .' Pause. I thought I heard Bert swallow.

‘I had moved to London by then, but I still went to Brighton now and then. The antiques trade had pretty well dried up there by that time, but I still had some connections, and I could sometimes pick up a good deal. So this one evening I popped into a pub, one of my old haunts, and there he was.'

‘A gay pub?' I thought I saw where this was going.

‘Well, it was when I lived there. So when I saw him, as beautiful as ever, sitting alone at the bar, I was sure this was my chance. I sat down beside him and began to . . . try to renew the acquaintance.'

‘And then he broke your heart, and now you're trying to get revenge. Really, Bert!'

‘No, it wasn't that way at all. The fact is, I'd made a mistake. He wasn't interested. The pub had changed ownership, and character, since the last time I'd been in and . . . he was very nice about telling me he didn't play on my team. I . . . I found the whole experience humiliating.'

‘I can see how you might. But, Bert, what possible connection might this have to Melissa's murder?'

‘I don't know. It's just that I used to know him, and he's from the same part of the world as our family, and . . . well . . . he was there on the day Melissa was roaming about the palace, and he is, or at least was, extremely nice-looking, and . . . oh, I said it was only the tiniest of possibilities. Forget it.'

‘You're right. It's a slim lead. But as it's the only one we have, or the only one I have, I'll see if it goes anywhere. What was his name, again?'

‘Anthony Jarvis.'

‘Why does no one ever have a peculiar name? I could probably find an Aloysius Jacobowicz, but Anthony Jarvis! Do you have an address or phone number?'

‘I'm afraid not. But I can find out the name of the school he was shepherding. I don't think he's in Brighton any more. I haven't kept track of him, for obvious reasons.'

‘Yes. Well, I'll follow up, and let you know.' I clicked off the phone.

‘Anything?' Alan asked, eyebrows raised.

‘Probably not. Just Bert's attempt to salve his conscience about Melissa, along with a little spite about a guy who rejected him.' I gave him the details. ‘There's not much we can do about it until Bert gets back with the name of the school, or we can figure out some other way to trace this person.'

‘Not much
you
can do,' Alan corrected. ‘I can turn the name over to Carstairs. He can track the fellow down in the blink of an eye.'

‘Oh. Oh, yes, I suppose you have to do that.'

‘You know perfectly well I have to do that.'

I bit my lip. ‘What will he do with it?'

‘Put it into the hopper along with everything else. Solving a case is like making sausages, Dorothy. You collect all the information you can, sort it out, grind it up, and hope it comes out in some recognizable form.'

‘But it's such a tenuous connection. Will he even think it worth pursuing? Especially since he thinks Jonathan did it.'

‘You're not thinking, Dorothy. What he does with the information is his business. It need have no effect on what you do with it. True, if there's anything to be learned from this Jarvis fellow, Carstairs and Co may get there first. But you may ask questions that don't occur to the official investigators. You almost always do.'

And if there was a hint of resignation mixed with the affection in his voice, I decided to ignore it.

Alan made his rather depressing call to Carstairs, and I settled down, with ill grace, for more waiting. Fortunately, this time the wait was a matter of hours rather than days. Bert called back before bedtime with the name, address and phone number of the school whose pupils Anthony Jarvis had shown around the palace. ‘And they weren't exactly children. Sixth-formers from St Cuthbert's College.'

I remembered that ‘college', in the English sense, means what an American would call ‘high school', and that ‘sixth-formers' were between sixteen and nineteen, in their last year or two of school before going on to university, if they did well in their examinations and could afford it.

I thanked Bert and passed the information on to Alan. ‘Now what?'

He considered. ‘In view of the fact that the Met almost certainly have this information already, I think what you want to do is move as quickly as possible. You have a much better chance of getting information from Mr Jarvis if you can find him before the police do. The headmaster would probably have his address and phone number, but a schoolmaster keeps early hours, as a rule, so I wouldn't try to phone him tonight.'

‘I suppose he lives at the school. At least, it is a boarding school, isn't it?'

‘I don't know, my dear. St Cuthbert's College is new to me, and at any rate schools have changed so much since my day, I have no idea what they're up to.'

The changes had, I perceived, not been for the better, at least not in Alan's eyes. I decided the subject was not a happy one, and moved on. ‘Well, I want to talk to him. Or better yet, see him. He might be able to tell me some things about this Jarvis person, and people talk more freely in person. Do you think, if we got an early start in the morning . . .?'

He sighed. ‘You realize, Dorothy, that while I'll be glad to drive you anywhere you want to go, at any time you choose, I can't take any part in your activities. I've been quite definitely warned off.'