The Winds of Change (22 page)

Wiggins looked as if he might weep with relief.

‘Over there on the mantel’–Jury pointed to the fireplace-’bring me one of those photos of Elsie, would you?’

Petey walked over to the fireplace, reached up and took one of the pictures, which he then handed to Jury.

‘Thanks.’

‘Aren’t you the clever boy, Petey,’ said his mother. She had a way of addressing the boy as if he were a waltzing pig.

Jury looked down at the face recognizably like her brother’s only better defined. She was not pretty, nor would she catch up to prettiness as an adult. But the poor child should have had the chance, at least. Jury looked squarely into Maeve’s small eyes, which darted away even as he looked. He wanted to catch her in an unguarded moment, but he wondered if that was even possible.

‘You must miss her very much.’

The eyes, prepared with a tear, swept back to his own. ‘Well, of course we do.’

Jury rose, and so did Wiggins, with obvious relief. ‘We’ve taken enough of your time.’

‘Here, though, you’ve not touched your tea.’ The cups remained on the tray.

Jury didn’t bother answering that. ‘You’ve been very helpful, and we appreciate it.’

Petey detected signs of leaving and didn’t like it. ‘Nah nah nah,’ he cried, dragging down Wiggins’s coat.

It was all Wiggins could do to keep from smacking him away.

‘I can’t say much for the mum and dad,’ said Wiggins, as they both climbed into the car. ‘You’d’ve thought they’d do something about that boy, wouldn’t you? Him hanging all over my chair.’

‘I don’t think they really like him, Wiggins. I don’t think they pay much attention to him. Cody Platt was probably right. There’s not much real feeling regarding either of the kids. No, I can’t see William Hardcastle as a man who would go to such lengths to repay the Scotts as to take Flora Baumann.’

They drove back up the steep street through Mevagissey in silence, then through countryside.

‘It leaves us, doesn’t it, pretty much in the same dark with Flora’s case?’ said Wiggins.

Jury was silent for a moment, watching the rain on the windscreen, watching the wipers clear it. Wiggins was driving at a fairly normal speed. Jury found the rain restful. He laid his head against the headrest.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘Hm? Yeah. Fine. You know there’s one thing that hasn’t been mentioned although it’s a perfectly obvious alternative: Did Flora know her?’

‘‘Her’? You think it was a woman, then?’

‘Could be. A woman is far less threatening than a man. And if Flora knew her, well, not threatening at all, perhaps. There was no noise, none at all, according to Mary Scott, who couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.’

‘What if she’d gone farther than that and was ashamed to admit she was careless, that she really hadn’t been watching Flora properly?’

‘You’re right. There’s no way of knowing. But I’m going to assume Mary Scott was telling the troth. She doesn’t sound like a careless mother, not at all. Indeed, given the first marriage to Viktor Baumann, I’d think carelessness is the last thing she’d be guilty of.’

‘All right, then. Flora wouldn’t have raised a fuss when she first encountered this person, but would she have gotten into a car with her?’

‘Unlikely, I suppose, unless the kidnapper had one hell of a convincing story.’

‘But her mum was still in the gardens. Flora wouldn’t have gone away with somebody else.’

‘Unless, as I said, this person could convince her.’

‘Wait, though. An exchange like that would take time. The kidnapper wouldn’t have had the time to convince the little girl of anything, not with Mary Scott likely to turn back and look for Flora.’

‘Also, I keep forgetting Flora was only four years old,’ said Jury.

‘You can’t reason with a four-year-old very easily.’

‘I think she’d have to have been overpowered. Chloroform, something.’

‘Probably.’ After a longish silence, Jury said, ‘I’m going back to London in the morning. You carry on.’

Wiggins took his eyes off the road long enough to miss the dry stone wall they were passing by a few feet. ‘A good idea. You’ve been looking peaky these last couple of days. A rest’ll do you good.’

‘Maybe, but that’s not why I’m going. I’m going to talk to Mary Scott’s mother. And I want to see Viktor Baumann again.’ He tapped the window. ‘There’s a cow up there.’ Jury nodded toward the road.

Wiggins started to brake. ‘What in hell’s a cow doing out this late?’

‘Beats me. I’ll have a word with its mum.’

Seeing the headlights, the cow lumbered off. They drove on.

Wiggins said, later, ‘What’s he like, this Baumann?’

‘Very, very slick.’

‘I don’t know what else to think except either it was the father or someone else who just wanted the girl. Do you think there’s much chance of– Do you think she’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does Commander Macalvie?’

‘No.’

Wiggins sighed. ‘If one of you has to be wrong, I hope it’s you.’ Jury looked out the window at blackness. ‘So do I.’ There was silence for a little while. Jury was thinking about the play. ‘In Goldsmith’s play, the hero–if you can call him that–was so shy around women of society that he couldn’t court them. The squire’s daughter pretended to be a parlor maid. He had no trouble going after her at all in that guise.’

Wiggins looked over at him when he stopped talking. ‘And what, then?’

‘Just that nearly all of Restoration drama turned on mistaken identity. Everything issued from that central point.’

‘You’re thinking of the dead woman?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘But we don’t know who she is; her identity isn’t exactly mistaken, is it?’

Jury looked out at the ragged edge of the anonymous field flying past. ‘No. But it will be.’

Wiggins wondered what he meant and kept on driving.

23

Jury set his mug on a rickety, uneven table and leaned over to inspect the fertilizer bag. ‘‘Turf ‘n’ Grow.’ Odd name.’
 

They were drinking tea in the cottage the next morning.

‘A special kind of fertilizer.’

‘What’s special?’

‘I don’t know. At this garden shop in St. Austell, I just asked for something not generally used around here. So they lugged this stuff out of a back room. He said he very rarely sold it; it’s too expensive. It’s fabulously rich stuff. It’ll grow anything.’

‘Good. Maybe it’ll grow me a brain.’ Jury sat back and reclaimed his mug.

‘I wanted to get something Marcus Warburton wasn’t familiar with. I actually believe he’s convinced I know what I’m doing.’ Melrose rubbed his pale gold hair into a froth. ‘But I’m not sure about Declan Scott. I think he can see through walls; he’s very perceptive.’

‘You’re good at impersonating rarefied intellectuals. I don’t know where you get it.’

Melrose studied Jury and chewed his lip. ‘That wasn’t really a compliment, was it?’

‘That’s why I use you.’

‘I’d rather hear ‘That’s why I pay you.’’

‘Oh, come on. You’re too rich already.’

Melrose sighed and dropped his head against the back of his flowery chair. ‘Sometimes I wish I weren’t.’

‘Rich?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘You’re right; I don’t..’

Jury set his mug on the table and gave Plant’s leg a little prod.

‘Let’s find Lulu.’

The small face at the kitchen window disappeared as Jury and Plant approached along the stone path lined by bright pink rhododendron. March was cold, but these gardens were showing vibrant color.

Jury said, ‘Can these make it through the end of winter?’

‘If the Macmillans have anything to say about it, they’ll make it through the rest of the century. They like a lot of splash. Splash, as if colors were rain and left pools behind.’

Roy came dashing toward them, running in circles, then veering off the path and running a straight line.

‘He’s herding. He thinks we’re sheep. Border collies are very intelligent.’

‘Roy’s not a border collie, for God’s sakes; he’s a mutt.’ Melrose turned at a shout from the bottom of the garden off to the right.

‘That’s Millie Macmillan. I’d better go see what she wants. I’m sure Lulu will be along straightaway, after Roy.’

Melrose left and Jury stood there in the path. Now Roy, with Plant gone, sat dog still, in the ordinary way, tongue lolling. He looked at Jury and yawned. It was as if he could finally relax. Perhaps Plant presented some challenge, some source of sport that Jury lacked. Yet the dog looked expectant, as in a holding pattern, waiting for this man to make his move. Jury looked around for a ball or stick to toss and saw a braided piece of rope, a chew toy, lying in the hedge. He picked it up and when he straightened, a little girl was standing there as if she’d just materialized.

‘Oh. You’ve got to be Lulu.’ He said this with one of his best smiles.

She hitched a strand of straight black hair behind her ear. ‘That’s right.’ She stood gazing at him. ‘That’s Roy.’ She pointed toward the dog. ‘It’s really French, r-o-i, for king, but we just call him Roy.’

‘My name’s Richard.’ Then, with what he thought was quite a good wind-up, he pitched the rope across the hedge. Roy took off like a missile. He was a black and white blur. ‘That’s the fastest dog I’ve ever seen.’

Hands behind her back, Lulu rocked on her heels, as if waiting for something.

Dark hair with a fringe that hid her brow, and her somber blue eyes seemed swamped by the big, unbecoming glasses. But neither the glasses nor the fringe could totally hide the shape of her face, heart shaped and delicate.

There was a white iron bench behind them. Jury sat down and stretched out his legs. ‘Your dog makes me tired just watching him.’

‘I guess you’re a policeman.’ She moved a little closer to the bench.

‘That’s right. How did you know?’

‘Because that’s who keeps coming.’

‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Okay.’ She sat at a slant so she could see his face, which she appeared to be regarding with a lot of interest. ‘I guess you’re here about the murder.’

He nodded. ‘Police have just about reached–well, we’re stumped.’

‘I know.’ She sighed heavily (stagily), shaking her head. ‘It’s really too bad.’ Which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘One of the policemen was here last night, one of the Macs, asking questions. He didn’t know much.’

One of the Macs? Jury did not pursue this.

‘My mum and dad were in a car accident. They both died. I wasn’t there.’

Her voice was smaller, her tone worried as if she had missed something cataclysmic by bare seconds and that the car might have rammed the tree even as she had turned her head away.

There was something inherently frightening about this, almost as if she thought had she been there, had she not turned away, her mother might still be alive.

He looked at her pale face. It was what a child might terribly think: if you fail in your watching of someone (mum, dad), he or she might disappear. But it was more than that; the disappearance could be your fault because you looked away. He felt a hand on his arm.

Lulu said, ‘What’s wrong? What are you thinking about? Did you know her?’

‘The woman who was shot? No.’

‘I thought maybe you did–but that’s silly. If you knew her, then the police would know who she was. Unless you didn’t really know her, that maybe she was someone who looked like...’ Jury listened while she rattled on with this convoluted story of identity like a kid’s mixed-up version of what Macalvie had said.

Finally, she wound down when Roy came over to settle down and watch. He said, ‘I was thinking of my mother.’ He noticed she stopped patting the dog and grew very still. ‘She died when I was two or three or maybe six (Jury being no longer sure after his cousin had talked about it). She was killed by a bomb that dropped in our square in London. In the war they sent us kids out to places in the country because London was so dangerous. So I wasn’t there when it happened.’ He had thought he was, but then the cousin had corrected this memory.

There was a stillness.

‘You weren’t watching.’

He shook his head. Why were children saddled with the burden of magical thinking? He could feel it even now.

‘But you couldn’t have stopped a bomb,’ she said.

‘No, I couldn’t. But sometimes kids believe just thinking something will cause it to happen. Well, we know that’s not so - we know now. But when you’re a child, it gets mixed up in your mind.’

‘I know. Like not watching someone.’

‘That’s right.’ Jury thought for a moment. ‘Once I had a friend named Jimmy Poole who stole geese. They caught Jimmy Poole when he was stealing goose number three.’ Jury smiled. He rather enjoyed that image.

She didn’t. ‘Anyone can steal a goose. They’re not smart like dogs and cats. I just don’t see why a person would bother with a goose.’ There was a silence as she thought over her problem.