The Winds of Change (34 page)

Macalvie looked at the French doors. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll just go out through the gardens. I want to talk to my men in the van.’

Declan nodded. As Macalvie opened the door, Declan said, ‘You’re wrong, Commander. Dead wrong.’

Beaminster and Wiggins were in the van, which was cold. Something had happened to the small portable heater. The bars looked anemic. Wiggins, who looked more dreamy than pale, was on the phone, and nodded by way of hello.

Beaminster, who’d been on the phone himself, laughing at something, quickly put it down, as if laughter, in the service or not of this investigation, was prohibited.

Wiggins hung up and said, ‘I’ve checked every convent, every school within a twenty-five-mile radius of Paris and Florence. No sign of her. One sister’—he looked at his page of notes–’Sister Anne made it quite clear to me they didn’t welcome the intrusion of police as their convent was a sanctuary and did I really think she’d tell me if such a child was there? Didn’t sound very godly to me, if you know what I mean.’

Macalvie sighed and sat down at Swayles’s desk. ‘Keep looking. Go another twenty-five miles out. He knows where she is.’ Macalvie was almost certain of this, but .... almost was a long way from a dead cert. ‘I think if Declan Scott confessed, he’d get a pretty light sentence...’

‘Yes, probably he would.’

‘Viktor Baumann. Lena Banks and Viktor Baumann. If they had my kid I’d kill them myself.’ He looked at Wiggins and added, ‘I hope your guv’nor nails the bastard.

38

Cody parked the car at the curb in front of the Islington house. Jury had offered to put him up overnight–or, rather, Stan Keeler would put him up. Stan had gone to Germany again, ‘where they appreciate us.’ That had made Jury smile. So there was a chink in the old Keeler armor, the only self-pitying thing Jury had ever heard Stan say. Anyway, Stone would be delighted to have someone in the flat. Cody was a dog person.

(Later, after a look at Carole-anne, he made it clear to Jury that he was also a girl person.)

Mrs. Wasserman recognized Jury’s tread and was suddenly there on her steps (the ones to the garden flat), illuminated by a sliver of light from the moon coming from behind a slate-colored cloud. ‘Mr. Jury, Mr. Jury.’ She shook her head sadly as if it were indeed all Mr. Jury’s fault, whatever it was.

‘Mrs. Wasserman. Is something wrong?’

She was looking at Cody. He was clearly wrong, this stranger, until Jury introduced him as Detective Platt of the Devon and Cornwall police.

‘Ah, another policeman! I am glad of that. There can’t be too many. There is a prowler, Superintendent. He was on these steps not ten minutes ago.’

Mrs. Wasserman’s paranoia came in waves, the biggest ones hitting the shore when Jury was absent for more than a day or two.

He was her ballast. There might have been someone here, but it could as easily have been the milkman or the postman or the delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant on Upper Street. Carole-anne was fond of shrimp fried rice.

‘Did you see him at all?’

‘No, of course not; it was too dark, wasn’t it?’

Jury had his little’notebook out and his pen. ‘Anything at all you remember?’

She pinched her lower lip, pleating it. ‘Only that he was tall. And thin.’ Everyone was to Mrs. Wasserman, who was herself short and chubby. She said this, looking at Cody. Cody was indeed a rail. ‘I couldn’t see well. I told you–’

Jury packed notebook and pen away and smiled. ‘Not to worry; if he comes back, we’ll know it. But it might simply have been someone looking for an address.’ Someone, more likely no one.

Carole-anne, who was equally adept at picking up signs of Jury’s return, was rushing down the stairs from her third-floor flat as Jury was trudging up to the first floor. ‘Super!’ she cried, launching herself at him like a missile. If he hadn’t caught her in a hug, she’d have flown down the stairs, headfirst.

‘You lead a complicated life, Mr. Jury,’ Cody said, gazing at Carole-anne as if the sun had risen at midnight.

Carole-anne left Jury’s embrace and might just have flown into Cody’s if he’d had his arms open. Unlocking his door, Jury introduced them, saying, ‘I thought maybe he could stay in Stan’s flat.’

Nominal resident manager, Carole-anne held extra keys to all the flats. There were only Jury, Mrs. Wasserman and Stan Keeler, who was seldom there. So right away, Carole-anne pulled at Cody’s hand and marched him up to the second floor. Jury watched her departing back. How was she dressed tonight? Some vibrant shade of lavender that had never seen the inside of an old lady’s clothes cupboard. Luscious silk top and short, short skirt.

Jury stood catching a sight of this before he turned into his living room and levered himself, like an old arthritis sufferer, into his armchair. He sighed. He had been out of hospital for two months and had to admit to a wistfulness to return, even if it did mean Nurse Bell. He tired too easily now. Too easily for what, for God’s sakes? The center court at Wimbledon? Riding point to point at Newmarket? Poor you.

Clatter on the stairs. It could have been a herd of zebra but was instead Carole-anne returned from orienting Cody to Stan’s place–’Guitar here, piano there, anything else you need?’–to orient Jury to his life. What did she think of Cody? He was someone to go down the pub with, which is what she said.

‘Cody’ll be down in a minute. Thought we’d go to the Angel.’

You?’ She raised her eyebrows in question as she sat down on the sofa.

‘Me?’

‘Oh, pardon me for asking.’ She picked up one of the beauty magazines that she kept on Jury’s coffee table in case she got bored–at least that was always the impression–and sat flicking through it and swinging her foot.

It was the shoes that made the clatter. Why did women wear wooden blocks? It looked as if they’d shopped in a lumberyard instead of a shoe store. Jury looked at the magazine. ‘Why do you bother with those?’

‘To get beauty tips, you know’–here she lifted a handful of copper-colored hair that would have had the fire brigade here if the hair had any more highlights, pointed to her skin, her eyes ‘makeup and clothes, of course.’ She lifted one corner of the lavender skirt.

Jury laughed. ‘Carole-anne, you should be giving tips, not getting them. Coals to Newcastle, that is.’

She looked round the room as if to discover the source of this alien voice, as if the very air were clogged with suspicion. ‘Is that one of your compliments?’

‘Not mine. God’s. How’s work?’

She was still frowning over the Jury compliment. Then she stopped and started flipping through Beauty Secrets, vol. 1,000,000.

‘Andrew’s up on a bit of a high horse.’

This was Andrew Starr, a man not given to high horses; too much patience might have been his problem. He owned a shop in Covent Garden called the Starrdust. It sold horoscopes, magic effects, dreams (all the same, in other words). It was a fascinating little place that catered as much to kids (such as Wiggins) as to grown-ups (Jury tried to think of one).

‘High horsing about what?’

‘You know, that Lady Chalmers, the short one with the loud voice. We can’t even hear our stereo over her. Well, she’s blind deaf, ain’t she ? You know who I mean.’

‘Actually, no.’

‘So she had Andrew do her horoscope, and that’s really complicated at best and near impossible at least if you haven’t got your dates sorted. Anyway, he told her eighty–’

(Andrew did not come cheap.)

‘–and she claimed he’d told her twenty. Twenty poundsl that’s just ridiculous, that’s just cheek, you ask me. For one of his horoscopes. And he gives all of his customers a price list. This one is the most detailed horoscope–’ She made a big circle with her arms, as if embracing sky, planets, stars. ‘And all the work that goes into it, well, he’s a perfectionist–’

Was there an emphasis on the ‘he’s,’ as though she had one of the non-perfectionists seated opposite her?

‘You know, maybe that’s what you need!’ She snapped the magazine shut, having found a topic–Jury–who was even more interesting than the application of eyeliner. ‘If Andrew’d done you one before, I bet you could have avoided getting shot.’
 

Jury just smiled slightly at her brightening eyes. ‘I don’t want to know the future. I don’t want to know what woman–or women, plural–is going to knock me up the side of the head and drag me off to the registry office.’

‘Oh, don’t be daft!’

‘Daft? And why’s that?’

‘You’ll be here until you’re old and crotchety.’

‘I’m already old and crotchety.’

He heard the click click click of a dog’s toes and the quick thump of a pair of feet. In a moment Cody entered with Stone.

‘Nice digs you got here!’ Cody said with more enthusiasm than the digs called for. It was meant, of course, for the digs’ tenants, one tenant in particular. ‘Ready?’ he asked in a general way.

Stone woofed a couple of times. He always seemed to be making sounds through a soft medium, cotton or clouds or something.

He was ready.

‘You coming, then?’ Cody tried to sound as if he wanted Jury to.

Jury shook his head, smiled. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ He looked from Cody to Carole-anne. Not a chance, son.

When they’d gone, he sat for a while. But he grew increasingly restless, staring up at a dark stain on the ceiling, old water damage, he supposed. He reached behind him and picked up a book. He didn’t want the book, but what was beneath it: the autopsy report Phyllis Nancy had sent round to his office.

Where had this child come from? He was occupying his mind with unanswerable questions to avoid reading the report. He pulled the lamp behind him to the right of the table so that it shone on the pages.

The bullet had entered the back between the fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae. The bullet had struck bone, which made the exit wound larger. There were more details, cold and clinical, as they should be. Only they didn’t erase the crime scene from Jury’s mind. The toes of her black patent shoes turned inward in one of those awkward stances little children manage to make graceful.

She was six years old, as nearly as they could put it.

There was no doubt whatever in Johnny Blakeley’s mind that the child had come from Number 13, Hester Street. But Johnny’s mind wasn’t enough to get them a warrant. The law, Jury reflected, seemed to many people to protect the villain, the crook, the killer.

Police had swarmed on that street, gone away, come back, swarmed again. They had knocked on the door of every house, including Number 13, whose occupant was the Mrs. Murchison who was high on Johnny’s list, just under Viktor Baumann. He had given the charge of that house to her. And how would it lead back to Baumann, anyway?

No. That was one thought too many, as someone once said. If he kept trying to see too far into the future, if he asked himself too many questions, he’d be paralyzed. He finished the report; it was basically what Phyllis had said at the scene, here in more detail, but with no surprises. Her eye had traced the bullet on its quick journey, had set forth various other attributes, such as the dehydration and malnourishment (neither life threatening, at least not at this point).

It was only the surface these villains cared about–the bisque doll skin without traces of makeup, the shiny hair. The seductive power of the untouched. Why was innocence such an enticement?

He sat there for what felt like hours and was surprised that only half an hour had passed. It was nine-thirty. He would go to the Yard. Johnny Blakeley might be there; Johnny was known to keep long hours. No wife, kids, mortgage. The married ones envied him.

His desk was a blitz of papers. As if this was the dustbin man’s last dump. Johnny sat, everything about him askew–tie, hair, desk. He was smoking some low-tar faux cigarette whose smoke spiral Jury’s eye followed longingly.

Seeing this, Johnny pushed the pack toward Jury.

‘No thanks, I quit.’

‘Ah. I tell myself several times a day I’ll quit.’

‘Well, don’t.’

‘That bad, is it?’

‘Worse.’

Johnny grinned and then reverted to what they’d been discussing. ‘You don’t stand a chance in hell of getting a warrant, Rich, not even with the shooting death of a child. There’s simply no way to prove she came from that house. I mean, more so than the other houses on that street. Hell, maybe not even that street.’

‘Get a warrant for all of them, then.’

‘I’d like to shake the hand of the judge who’d do that.’

‘So would I.’ Jury laughed. ‘If you haven’t been able to, I certainly couldn’t. No, I didn’t even consider trying to get a search warrant.’

Johnny leaned toward Jury as far as he could with the corner of the desk between them. ‘Rich, you can’t walk in there without one.’

‘You did.’

‘Yeah and I got knocked up the side of the head for it, too. At least I had a little justification: it’s my investigation, has been for some time.’

‘But so it is mine, now, with this child murdered.’
 

Johnny sat back. ‘True.’

They regarded each other.

Johnny said, ‘You’re crazy.’