The Winds of Change (27 page)

Jury was reminded again of the Blue Last. Sometimes he wondered if he’d be thinking about it on his deathbed, as if there were something he’d failed to do that would have made it turn out differently. Of course there was. Of course there wasn’t. Solutions don’t present themselves any sooner because it would save a vast amount of tears and bloodshed.

‘This reminds me of that boy,’ said Denny, ‘we found buried along the coast. ‘We had a problem with that identification, didn’t we?’
       
.

‘You did, I didnt’’said Macalvie, generously.

It was true, though, that he and Dench had disagreed totally about those bones, and Macalvie had been right.

Dench went to his computer. ‘Hand me that folder.’ Macalvie did so.

‘Now look.’ Dench placed the snapshot of Lena Banks below a video camera that digitized the image and transferred it to the computer screen. From the folder he took one of the police photos of the woman who’d been shot. He transferred that to the screen, wiped out the right side of the face and the left side of Lena Banks’s and after adjusting the focal to enlarge the snapshot, moved the half face of one to the half of the other.

‘Bingo! Same woman. And to make it even better–’ The computer generated an image of Lena Banks’s abundant hair on the other half of the image, replacing her poorly cut and drab hairdo. ‘It’s always amazed me that such superficial things as hairstyle and makeup can change a face so dramatically. But bones-the cheekbones of both, the mandibles–I should have seen it immediately. Look at those cheekbones. I’ve been looking at skulls too long. Where does this leave you?’

‘Ahead, I hope. And back to Viktor Baumann.’

‘Who’s he?’ Dench had returned his gaze to manipulating the images on the computer screen.

‘Her lover, for one thing. He was Mary Scott’s first husband and it very much looks like something has changed now.’

Dench was now sliding the snapshot under a viewer and didn’t seem too interested in the context of these pictures.

While Denny Dench fooled with his computer, Jury walked around the lab. He imagined the two photos that concerned them at the moment were fairly boring to Dench no matter how fine the cheekbones.

He went back to the child’s skeleton from the construction site in Sidmouth. He felt a wave of sadness wash over him, standing there, looking down at the boy’s articulated bones, wondering how old he’d been. Ten? Twelve? The skeleton seemed so small and thin and insubstantial one might wonder how it supported a boy who rode a bike, played football. Jury tried to see through the eyes of this lad: being seduced from the playground or pavement with a promise of something sweet, new, shiny, and then having it slowly dawn on you that you might never ever go back, that you might never see your parents or your house again. How long could a child hold out hope? One moment you’re standing in a garden, the next you’re being dragged into a car or into the bushes or an alley, your voice muffled by the rough hands of a total stranger. And the next moment? A gun, a knife, a dirty mattress on a concrete floor? For if this boy had lived, if he’d been found by the police or anyone, and been returned as flesh and blood to his home, he would never again entirely belong to it. No, a person abducts a child and something of the child stays behind. How could it not? The child would always be bound to the devil who did it.

Jury stood staring down at the skeleton. ‘The Child Thief.’

‘What?’ asked Denny Dench.

‘Nothing.’

31

It was late, nearly eleven, when Macalvie pulled the car to the curb in front of the White Hart Hotel.
 

‘We’ve got time for one glass before the booze is shut down.’

Around closing time pubs always seemed to get more crowded, only because they got noisier and more anxious. The open-all hours London law seemed not to have reached all the pubs in the provinces. The White Hart was serving last orders to a lively clientele.

For a few minutes Jury and Macalvie drank in silence. Jury turned around on the bar stool with his pint in his hands and looked the room over. He liked the way pubs combined the ordinary old stuff, such as hunting prints, with the crasser new stuff of jukeboxes. He remembered years ago, at a pub in Dartmoor, Macalvie putting his foot through one that had been playing some old song he couldn’t bear hearing. Loss. Loss and guilt.
 

‘Plant told me,’ Jury said it without intending to. ‘Something happened to you in Scotland. He didn’t tell me what.’

Macalvie nodded. ‘It did.’

Jury watched a man feeding the jukebox.

Macalvie pushed his pint around on the bar, making wet circles. ‘That was in Kircudbright. You know, that place in Dumfriesshire that artists love. I was living with a woman who had a six-year-old daughter. She was snatched right out of her bed, out of our house. This was payback for what happened in a drug bust we made in Glasgow when the villain’s twelve-year-old daughter was shot in crossfire. I didn’t shoot her, but I was heading up the unit. I’d run up against the father several times, so he held me responsible. I got instructions to go to an old house in the Fleet Valley. I did. I found Cassie sitting at a table, a cereal bowl and a plate of toast before her. She was shot in the head. Her body was still warm; it couldn’t have happened more than five or ten minutes before I got there. You see, the milk was still cold.’ He stopped. ‘How do you deal with something like that?’

‘The way you’re dealing. The way you collared the person who killed those two poor kids near Lamorna. Trying to nail the villain who took Flora–’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You will. That s how you deal with it. There’s no other way I can see.’

Another silence. Then Macalvie said, ‘It’s these little kids. It’s what happens to them. They haven’t done a damned thing. They’re innocent. Why should they have to pay for what we do? They can’t stand up for themselves; some of them are so little they can’t even speak yet.’ He closed his eyes. ‘What I do, what I try to do, is put myself in that place, in their place, you know? Feel what they must feel. Terror. Like that.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t go there, Macalvie.’

Macalvie looked down at the dregs of his drink. ‘Neither should they.’

There was a silence while both of them stared in the mirror, but not at themselves and not at each other.

Jury said, ‘When I was in Newcastle I saw a painting called The Butterfly Eaters.’

Macalvie turned.

‘It shows a family seated and standing round a dinner table set in tall grass or mire. Each has a butterfly, either on his plate or holding it up in the air. Their eyes are dark and shadowed, all the same, staring out of the painting.’ Jury took a sip of his lager. ‘What does the painter mean? They’re trying to steal beauty for themselves, but they can’t? Are they dining on illusion, falling for something unreal?’

Silence again.

‘Why are you bringing up this painting?’

‘It just seems relevant. As if that’s what we’re doing, trying to dine on butterflies, falling for illusions.’

‘You mean that we can’t see past them?’

‘Past them or through them. Yes.’

They were silent again, drinking.

Macalvie said, ‘What about Declan Scott?’

‘Oh, he’s fallen further than we have.’

A streak of light shone under Wiggins’s door. Why was he still up? ‘Chesty’ was the reason given. He lay there under the white sheet with his book splayed across his chest, answering Jury’s question.

‘The temperature in here might be comfortable for camels, Wiggins, but not for humans. No wonder you’re ‘chesty.’’ Jury yawned and sat down on the end of the bed.

‘How was London? What happened?’

Jury told him. ‘Not only is Lena Banks Georgina, but she’s also our mystery woman. She’s our dead lady. It was Lena Banks who was murdered.’

Wiggins was stunned. ‘So now we know who she is, who has a motive?’

‘Everyone.’ Jury yawned again.

‘Pardon?’

‘I’ll explain tomorrow, or do you plan on sticking to your bed?’

‘I should be up and about.’

‘Good.’ Jury lifted the book from the turned-down sheet over Wiggins’s chest. ‘Another Eighty-seventh Precinct novel?’

‘It’s an early one. I find it’s best to go back to the beginning and get to know the characters.’

Jury had thumbed to the page that listed all of the books in the series. ‘Christ, he’s written hundreds of them. To work your way up from the beginning you’d have to be born again.’ Looking at Wiggins’s pale, reproachful face and soulful eyes, he thought maybe he already was.

‘It doesn’t hurt to understand the way the police over there work.’

‘With all due respect to Mr. McBain’s cop shop, we’re not over there. We’re over here.’

Wiggins said, sententiously, ‘A narrow mind never got a person anywhere.’

‘It would have helped Hamlet no end. Why is it, Wiggins,
 
when you come down with something, you get preachy?’

‘I hardly think I preach. I guess it’s that I have more time to think. It would do you good, you know.’

‘What? To think?’ Jury was half sitting, half lying on the bed, shoulders against the footboard, one more of Wiggins’s remarks away from sleep.

‘No, of course not. You think quite enough. No, it wouldn’t hurt you to relax. And maybe to read more. It’s calming. A good book has a warmth to it.’

He had his hands crossed over Ed McBain in an almost holy manner.

‘The last book I read was Emily Dickinson. She’s anything but calming. I think she spent her entire life dying.’

Wiggins frowned. ‘Then why did she bother?’

‘With what?’

‘Writing poems. I mean, why upset yourself?’

Jury searched around for a good answer to this and found none.

But, as Wiggins had just said, Why bother? ‘Did you read Emily Dickinson in school? I seem to remember doing it.’

‘No. We hadn’t time for things like that. The impractical things.’

‘She created a persona, a pose so that she could say what she wanted to say. A favorite pose was the innocent, uninoculated child.’

‘You mean who hadn’t got its shots?’

Jury had developed the art of not processing a lot of Wiggins’s remarks. ‘It’s the child asking questions or being unaware. ‘Will there ever be a morning?’ Like that. Children can ask what adults don’t dare to because we don’t want to admit we’re scared and we don’t really want to hear the answers.’

‘Well, not us. We’re first of all policemen and of course we want to hear the answers. At least, I certainly do.’ Implying that Jury might not be up to snuff when it came to truths’ being spoken.

‘The world is seen as that much more dangerous a place.’ Jury was now lying across the bottom of the bed (Wiggins having had to move his feet, which he hadn’t wanted to do), his head propped in his hand. ‘‘If I shouldn’t be alive/When the Robins come,/Give the one in Red Cravat,/A Memorial crumb.’ God, but that’s sad.

It’s what I mean: she’s always dying.’

‘You’ve developed a markedly morbid turn of mind since that shooting–’

Perhaps I have, thought Jury. Impractical Emily.

The phone’s persistent ringing Jury mistook for the lark Emily Dickinson suggested splitting open to find its music. Instead of the usual brr-brring, the phone warbled.

Clumsily his hand searched out the receiver and lifted it.

‘Yeah?’

‘Up, up, up, Jury.’

‘Hullo, Macalvie. What time is it? Four a.m.?’

‘No, nine. I’ve been talking to Wiggins.’

‘He’s up this morning?’

‘Of course. The only layabout is you. Me, I’ve been up for hours. I don’t begrudge you a little extra sleep.’

‘Decent of you.’

‘Get dressed. I’ll treat you to breakfast.’ Macalvie hung up as Jury was shoving his shirt into his pants.

A shining plate of bacon and eggs was just being set down at the table in the corner when Jury walked into the lounge.

‘They do breakfast here ? I’m surprised.’

‘They do for Devon and Cornwall police. Probably think it’s wise.’ Macalvie plucked a piece of toast from the porcelain rack.

‘Tell me this: why is it we can build a bloody tunnel under the Channel, but we can’t serve hot toast?’

Jury bit into a piece of bacon. ‘I can’t work out why I’m always hungry. Starving.’

‘You been eating?’

Jury thought of last night’s cheese and biscuits. ‘No, not really.’

‘There’s a valuable clue.’

Macalvie held up the toast rack and looked around for the girl.

‘If I believed in curses–and maybe I do–Declan Scott is under one.’

The girl had returned to the bar and now Macalvie, having got her attention, was stabbing a finger at the toast rack. She scuffed over in her thick-soled shoes.

‘Hot toast, love. The way you do that is the second it pops up, you grab it and bring it in immediately. That’s the reason it’s called ‘toast.’’

She stood with her hands on her hips, her wad of gum working from back to front and round to the other side. Wordlessly, she took the rack.