The Winds of Change (8 page)

‘Denial, I suppose. Still, you seemed to feel you knew her.’

‘Yes.’ He fiddled with the menu, removing it from its chrome fixture. ‘She didn’t talk only about Flora; she talked a lot about herself, too, and Declan Scott, how he really loved Flora. He wanted to adopt her, but the father - this Baumann-more or less told Scott to F-off.’ He repositioned the menu in its holder.

‘Viktor Baumann?’

‘You know about him?’

Jury nodded. ‘A colleague, a DI with the pedophilia unit’s been after him for some time.’

‘What must it be like, to lose both your wife and your daughter? Declan Scott must have felt bankrupt.’

‘It’s Fitzgerald who said that, wasn’t it? The point at which one stops feeling because his feelings are spent. Emotionally bankrupt, that’s how he described his characters. I don’t believe it; there’s always an account that you can draw on. Always. I’m not sure whether that’s a blessing, though. Having despair be just around the corner.’

Cody looked down at his uninviting empty cup and was silent for some moments. Finally, he said, ‘Maybe I should have got something to eat.’ He looked at Jury as if assessing whether the superintendent would fall in with this plan.

Jury almost laughed at the level of concentration Cody was applying to this matter. ‘Go ahead. I’m not in any hurry.’

The waitress wandered over - wandering between tables and chairs was the only way to put it - and Jury noticed for the first time the ring on her finger. It was a diamond cut to its last facet, so tiny one might have thought the jeweler was splitting the atom. ‘I like your ring,’ he said. ‘I like the setting, too. It’s beautiful.’

Her blush was almost feverish. ‘I only just got it last night.’

She stretched her arm out for them to admire it from afar. ‘If I seem a bit dim, well, you know ... ‘ But her dimness went unembroidered with explanation.

‘Not dim. Merely distracted, and you should be. Now, my friend here wants to order something else.’

‘Beans on toast, I think.’ What else? Jury smiled.

‘And more tea?’ she asked, sunnily. As if the mere prospect of another cup were cause for celebration. Cody nodded and she thanked him. Then she was off, to stumble and nearly fall when one in a row of high chairs caught her foot.

Jury watched her cut a swath of near accidents across the room, then turned to Cody and said, ‘What was Flora like? Was she a smart kid? Sweet?’

Cody’s clear eyes grew troubled, like troubled water, a disturbance beneath their surface. ‘Oh, she was smart all right.’ He smiled. ‘But I don’t know as you’d call her sweet. She was kind of stubborn.’

‘She was four years old. ‘Stubborn’ goes with the territory.’

The waitress was setting down his plate of beans and toast with a flourish and a
‘Ta-dah
!’ She had apparently traded distraction for entertainment. Cody thanked her and she walked off, much more steady on her feet, like a sailor who’d finally learned the trick of it.

Jury watched Cody fork up the beans. So he did have his little indulgences. ‘You don’t smoke. Do you drink?’

‘No. I stopped that too.’ Cody shoved up his glasses and leaned toward Jury and said with an intense whisper. ‘I’m an alcoholic and believe me, it’s hell, pure and simple. Never a day goes by I don’t want it. It’s sheer hell.’

The corners of Jury’s mouth wanted to creep upward, but he pulled them down.

Inwardly, he smiled. Cody redeemed.

9

Jury liked Detective Sergeant Platt, but he didn’t want Cody with him when he visited the Angel Gate gardens any more than he had in the Heligan gardens. He wanted silence; he wanted to absorb whatever there might be in its sunken history, for he knew even without seeing the place where the body had lain that its history was going to hold some key to the solution. This was not his intuition, and it certainly wasn’t a brilliant deduction. It was simple: either someone had wanted to make a ‘statement’ (that overused concept!) by killing this woman here-thus the ‘here’ was significant-or else the killer had little choice but to do it here, which might mean the killer probably had been in the house or the gardens to begin with.

It was okay with Cody if Jury wanted to walk about on his own.

‘I need to get some things done anyway. Over there’ - he pointed to the white caravan off in the distance - ‘is our incidents room. We could have set up inside the house but the boss didn’t want to do that.’ He turned to Jury. ‘And he told me to assist you in any way I can.’

‘You have done and I’ll tell him that.’ Jury thought for a moment. ‘You know how he is about a crime scene - doesn’t want anyone breathing on it?’

‘Oh, everyone knows how he is.’ Cody smiled.
 

So did Jury. ‘I’m worse.’

This was by no means true, but it acted as sufficient reason for Jury’s wanting to go to the bottom of the garden alone and also made Platt feel relieved that he wouldn’t have to run a Macalvie-style endurance test.

Cody had walked him from the front of the house around to the rear. He told Jury there’d been so many police about that it was hardly necessary to seek Declan Scott’s permission; he wouldn’t think anything of it if yet one more copper invaded his grounds. Then Cody left by way of a small door in the garden wall with black grillwork in the shape of an angel. Jury watched him disappear as if it were a magical effect; he couldn’t help but think again of Alice in Wonderland. The gardens, the little door, the sudden disappearance as if Cody had fallen through it. He had disappearance on the mind, he supposed, but he still wondered what fictive element there was in all this, what childhood story.

The garden wall was a faded red brick like the house itself. It was lined by broad herbaceous borders. Two or three acres were undergoing restoration; that was clear from the parts torn up and from other sections freshly planted. It was nothing like Heligan, but still a big project. It had the look of a job being directed by a landscape designer or garden architect, laid out in squares and triangles and bisected by flagged paths and studded with the occasional piece of sculpture. In the middle of the garden was a fountain, a bronze rendering of two little boys with buckets, trying to douse each other with water. One was high above the other, so the one below would have gotten a thorough dousing. It made him smile; it seemed such a whimsical piece for gardens so formally landscaped. Yet it kept to a sort of unkempt wildness; there were masses of rhododendrons in pink and white, and several with large leaves and lemon-yellow flowers. It was very early March, but he imagined that the Cornwall climate could sustain early blooming. The rhododendrons enclosed a small area that Jury thought might be a garden within a garden, perhaps the secret garden Macalvie mentioned.

Mounds of box grew around the perimeter and edged the paths. Much of the area was torn up; still, there were plantings of luminous colors-buttercup, a green-needled, red-flowered plant that Jury couldn’t identify, and a sheet of bluebells in the rhododendron garden. He thought of the little girl in Hester Street.

Jury observed all of this from the terrace, which was really the first terrace in three sloping downward; they were balustraded terraces with central steps leading down to the pool and the bronze boys. Still it was not immense, and because it was walled it seemed almost intimate. He walked down the steps and across and past the bronze boys with buckets to the bottom of the garden.

Yellow police tape served as a strange counterpoint to the tied-off plots that had been undergoing planting. And it was strange how the few steps down to the covered recess were so reminiscent of the grotto in the Lost Gardens. Jury crouched to go under the tape and went into the cold little room to see the stone bench on which the body had been found.

He looked back along the path which, in its middle part, curved around the sculpture of the boys. This covered niche was perfectly visible from the back of the house, although across a two acre distance, but still not so far as to block a view. But since the shooting had happened after dark, whether it was visible in daylight hardly mattered.

Why had this woman come for the second time? Mary Scott was dead, so who was she meeting? It must have been for that purpose, so the someone must have a connection to the house, whether living in it or not. A strange meeting spot, in any event.

Jury walked back along the path, looking at the windows, having no sense of being watched. He walked around to the front of the house, where he saw an old man bent over a wheelbarrow into which he was throwing whatever he had uprooted from whatever bit of earth he was clearing.

A Sisyphean task the old man had before him, given the general state of the land in front of the house. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years, and yet new shoots were still breaking through the earth, such as that iris forcing its way up through weeds. It must have been very hardy stock to begin with, hardy or so entrenched it couldn’t be stopped by time or inattention or carelessness. Beside a dry pool a miasma of pink climbing roses covered a trellis, nearly closing off the flaking benches where the occupants had once sat to enjoy the perfumed air.

The arthritic-looking gardener (for Jury assumed him to be one) with his wheelbarrow couldn’t have gotten this lot into shape in a million years. Jury supposed he was an old retainer, kept on so that he might feel useful, thus keeping at bay the end of his declining years. But he also might have been there as some sort of evidence of the past, the unchanging, changeless past.

The land here was thickly wooded. The branches of the trees on either side of what once had been a laburnum tunnel, or an avenue of chestnuts and laburnums and sycamores and oaks tangled together in so dense a canopy that the light of the afternoon sun could barely break their cover. It was inviting, at least to Jury, who liked his paths well shuttered. He walked for a short distance along this path, the path itself nearly obscured by rutted earth, tall grasses, weeds and fallen branches. Every once in a while he passed a tree whose trunk had been whitewashed with an X and Jury wondered if these trees were to be cut down, clearing the way a little. He picked at the whitewashed bark and found the paint to be old and flaking. Whoever had started the process of resurrecting this once-pretty path had forgotten it or decided not to bother.

And the avenue would have been pretty, inviting a stroll in fragrant air, the source of which Jury couldn’t determine. He supposed it was a combination of scents. He turned and walked back, seeing the path as it once was. Jury had a divining eye, an eye trained to see outlines or patterns no longer adhered to but still there, like footprints in soft earth. The white crosses, the air of mystery and the tantalizing wish to find out what lay at the end of the path and if these trees were doomed. It was odd that the gardens behind the house were to be completely overhauled by some garden architect while the front of the house was, apparently, to be left untouched, seen to by the silent, elderly gardener. Declan Scott, he thought, must want to hang on to the past, or to his origins, or to keep whatever he could from changing.

A thankless job, Mr. Scott, a thankless job.

10

The door was opened by a woman of late middle age whose good looks were now fading and who appeared to be doing little to stop the progress. She wore no make up except for a dab of lipstick and a boxy haircut that didn’t serve her strong, squarish face. Had it not been for the white calf-length apron that bound her more like a winding sheet than an apron, Jury would have assumed she was a relation or friend of the owner rather than a member of staff. Indeed ‘staff,’ as he understood it, had been considerably reduced; the cook was standing in for a butler or valet, who once would have been a necessary adjunct to the house in its heyday of cars and carriages, when there was a full complement of valets, cooks, housemaids. There must once have been such staff, considering the size of the place and its obvious elegance, even though it might now not be ‘kept up’ the way it once had been, very much like the woman who stood here now.

After he had identified himself - unnecessarily, for she knew who he was - the woman said she would let Mr. Scott know he was here and walked off. He waited.

To the left and right were long halls. She wore shoes with a medium heel, and Jury could hear the tap of her heels as she walked down the hall to his right and turned a corner. They were opulent, these halls, marble floored. Without her footsteps, they were also silent. He stood there hearing only the note of a thrush outside, and then he walked around the foyer. Furnishings, antique and valuable, if somewhat worn. There was a certain seediness to that wall hanging of a stalwart military figure, helmeted and upon a horse. Coin-size pieces of the velvet fabric of the tall furry helmet and of the horse’s mane had rubbed off, as if the war had gone on too long, and soldier and horse were both fading. It hung above a secretaire of mahogany and stained maple and gilt, flecks of gold missing, some of the stain worn away. Nothing here wasted or wrecked, just suffering from the slow onslaught of time.

She returned and led Jury across the foyer and along that same hall, where she stopped by the door of a large room, a library, apparently. Books lined three walls, the fourth occupied by a brownish-gold marble fireplace. A fire had been lit, fairly recently to judge from the size of the logs. She told him Mr. Scott would be here in a moment. This was accompanied by a rather tight little smile, enough of one for politeness’ sake. His first impression was that she was hostile and trying to hide it, natural enough, he thought, with police invading the household.