The Anodyne Necklace

by Martha Grimes

  TWENTY

  I

  SLIPPING through a crack would have been an appropriate description for finding oneself in the salvage depot of the Crippses’ front room, where Jury was at the moment as far removed from gilt and brocade as one could be who had not actually hit another galaxy.

  • • •

  He had made two other stops first, however, upon returning to London. One had been on the other side of Chief Superintendent Racer’s desk.

  The question at New Scotland Yard was not whether the chief superintendent was mad, but whether he had gone madder. If Racer would not give way to God, he certainly would have had to give way to the commissioner, who had, along with everyone else, wondered when Racer would go down for the last time.

  Jury was about the only one left who would listen to him with something resembling patience, a response not motivated so much by altruism as by curiosity: he wondered how often Racer could bob up again before the waves finally sucked him under. Although Racer seemed to think the collapse of the Empire was imminent with his resignation, he also believed it would rise again out of the ashes of his memorable accomplishments. He had just expended some few moments outlining one of his early cases to Jury in filigree detail, a case which bore, as far as Jury was concerned, little resemblance to the one he was now working on.

  He said so. “I don’t see how that’s relevant, sir.”

  Racer, who had got up, apparently to twitch his Savile Row lapels into smoother place, sat down again. He shook his head, a bit sadly.

  “Do you know the difference between you and Sherlock Holmes, Jury?” Racer was having a go at the game map, which Jury had produced for his inspection.

  Jury pretended to think this question over seriously before answering, “I could think of quite a few differences, yes.”

  Racer shook his head violently. Even when Jury agreed with him, Racer assumed he was disagreeing. Once a mug, always a mug, the look leveled at Jury said. “Imaginative grasp!” Racer grabbed for a fistful of air. “You’re a plodder, Jury. Always have been.”

  “You’ve always accused me of being a corner-cutter before.”

  “You’re that, too,” said Racer crisply. Would Moses have taken back one of the Commandments even if the good Lord had come along with an eleventh that punched holes in the first ten? He looked up from the map. “So you’ve got the Hertfordshire police turning over every stick and stone in this godforsaken wood looking for a necklace?” Racer shoved the cat Cyril off his desk. The cat had been discovered one day walking through the halls of New Scotland Yard; no one knew how it had got in. But it had seemed determined on reporting something. Jury considered the cat had an ulterior motive in attaching itself to Chief Superintendent Racer, probably because Racer couldn’t stand it. It liked to sit on Racer’s desk with its tail wrapped around its legs like an ornament, part of a matched desk set.

  Now it sat the same way on the floor, waiting its chance.

  “The necklace,” said Jury, “is only part of it. They’re out there searching for clues to the murder of Cora Binns. What would you have me do, sir?”

  It was apparently just such an opening that Racer had been waiting for. “What would I have you do?” He smiled slightly and shoved himself back from his desk to get up and walk about the room. He could not resist talking down to Jury, literally as well as figuratively. “To sum up: what we have here is: One, a bundle of anonymous letters; Two, a girl coshed on the head in a tube station; Three, another woman murdered in a wood outside this one-eyed village; Four, a necklace worth a king’s ransom stolen by a small-time dip a year ago—”

  “I wouldn’t call Trevor Tree a small-time anything—”

  Racer ignored the interruption. “ . . . And, Five, this damned map thing. Diagram, game plan. Whatever the hell you call it. So we are dealing with several disparate elements.” Racer had stopped somewhere behind Jury’s chair. The cat Cyril flicked its ear, as if warning Jury.

  “Disparate elements,” he repeated, fond of the phrase. “You have lined up these particular ducks, Jury, and simply assumed they all belong in the same row, right? But . . . ”

  Was Racer going to take him back to square one? Apparently.

  “ . . . But what if they don’t? Isn’t it just possible that this O’Brien girl’s case has nothing to do with the rest—?”

  “They do and she does,” said Jury, bored with this catechism. Coming into Racer’s office was more and more like walking into a confessional with a divvy priest on the other side of the grille. Jury watched the cat Cyril plotting his next assault on the desk. He was slinking round the corner. As Racer droned on about the disparate elements, Cyril made a four-point landing on the desk and started washing.

  “ . . . and what does forensics have to say about this?” Racer was back at his desk now, holding up the map.

  “Nothing yet. They’re sending round a report.”

  Racer shoved Cyril off the desk as he switched on the intercom and asked Fiona Clingmore if the report had come up on the Littlebourne case. “Well, bring it in, for God’s sakes, girl!”

  Fiona entered, all in her own good time. She cracked her wad of gum at her boss as she put a folder in front of him, at the same time giving Jury one of her high-voltage smiles. She was wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked black dress which strained across the bosom. It was held together by what seemed a hundred little jet buttons and tiny loops running down the front. Almost together, that is. Two or three of the buttons had popped their moorings disclosing a bit of black lace beneath. Jury watched Racer’s eye travel the length of the button-row. Then he tossed the folder over to Jury. “Nothing here we didn’t know before. If you two are through making eyes at one another, get out. And take this moth-eaten cat with you! I’m busy!”

  All three were happy enough to leave. Only the cat Cyril would make it a point to come back.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later found Jury at the hospital, where the pretty, cross little nurse was at her station writing up reports on a clipboard. She nodded to Jury, curtly. When he asked for Sergeant Wiggins, she said, “I think he’s down to the canteen. He asked me for some tea, but after all, I don’t have time to be forever getting tea, do I?”

  “Sorry we’re upsetting routine, and you don’t have to get him tea, of course not. Nor diagnose his ailments.” With an entire hospital at his disposal, it would be hard to believe Wiggins hadn’t tried to take advantage of it.

  Her mouth twitched up; she was trying not to smile. But the starched bosom heaved a bit. Starched women had never intimidated Jury; he figured it would always come out in the wash. She clasped her clipboard to her breast as if to keep everything under control and said, “It’s all right, I expect. It’s just having police all over makes me nervous. As if something horrible were going to happen.”

  “That’s not doing a thing for my ego.” He smiled and tapped the clipboard. “Katie O’Brien’s report in there?”

  She nodded, flicking over pages and turning it toward him. “There’s been no change. You keep seeming to think there will be.” She looked sad.

  “Oh, you know the police. Eternal optimists. Anyone been in to see her?”

  “Her mother, this morning. And her music teacher.”

  Macenery? Jury was surprised. So he’d finally worked up the nerve. “When?”

  “He’s there now, I think.” She nodded toward the corridor behind her.

  • • •

  The room was empty, though there were signs of Sergeant Wiggins’s recent occupancy—a bottle of nose drops and a box of cough drops.

  Jury went over to the window. Across the Fulham Road the pub was shut up. A gust of wind ruffled the scalloped edge of the greengrocer’s striped awning. A woman, scarved and huddled against the wind, dragged a shopping cart across the road. Sunday or not, the launderette lights were on, and he could see someone turning the pages of a magazine.

  He turned from the window and looked at the still form of Katie O�
�Brien. It startled him afresh, the thought of the mangled brain inside this perfect body. She lay, hands still clasped on the white sheet, legs outstretched, a perfect sculpture, something one might find on a medieval tomb. She only lacked a little dog at her feet.

  Jury switched on the tape recorder, and the tinny voice of the old music-hall singer scraped through the room with “Roses of Picardy.”

  • • •

  They were sitting together in the canteen, Sergeant Wiggins and Cyril Macenery. Jury punched the button of the coffee machine and got in return a stream of muddy-looking stuff and took it over to their table.

  Wiggins started in immediately apologizing for having left the room. Sometimes Jury thought he was his sergeant’s conscience. “It was my head. Killing me, it was, sir. I should’ve brought a thermos of tea. The nurse doesn’t seem to like me much.”

  “Us,” Jury corrected him. “The whole M.P.D. is what she doesn’t like. Nothing personal. Hello, Mr. Macenery. I’m glad you decided to visit.”

  Macenery’s blue eyes glinted for a moment before he looked away. “There doesn’t seem much they can do for her, does there?”

  The three of them looked down at their several flimsy cups of machine-brewed tea and coffee.

  “Her mother was in this morning,” said Wiggins. “She talked to her. That’s supposed to help, the nurse told me. She talked to her about what was going on in the village. There’s a church fête going on today. And about her school chums, and how school would soon be starting. . . . ” Wiggins’s voice trailed off. Seldom a man to comment on emotional rather than physical distress, he added, “Depressing, isn’t it?”

  These remarks were made, these questions asked without their really looking at one another, as if each were addressing some invisible fourth sitting at the other end of the table, some person who could come up with answers that none of them could.

  Finally, Macenery rose. “I guess I’ll go back to her room for a minute.”

  Jury hesitated. “Okay.”

  As Macenery left the room, Wiggins started to get up. “Did you want me to—?”

  Jury put his arm on the sergeant’s sleeve, pulled him down again. “No.” Jury was thinking of what Riddley had said. Irreversible. This chilling thought crossed his mind—of Katie O’Brien never waking, or waking with a brain so damaged that even death might be preferable. “In a minute. I wanted to tell you I had one of my talks with our D.C.S. Superintendent Racer seemed to feel I’m spending too much time in Littlebourne, in London, everywhere. That’s what comes of reporting in.”

  Wiggins smiled bleakly. “Better you than me.”

  “Yes. At any rate, he thinks we should have this tidied up in another day or so, or he might have to put someone else on the case.” Jury smiled.

  Wiggins, who Jury thought might have had his mouth washed out with soap once too often as a child, was seldom given to obscenities. He muttered one now.

  “He lined up all the—what he likes to call ‘disparate elements’—like dominoes and wonders why I can’t tip one and have all the others fall neatly on top. So let’s see how they do fall.” Jury moved the salt and pepper shaker, two empty cups, and a napkin holder into a row. “The first one, the letters, weren’t important in themselves. What they did do was to take everybody’s mind off Katie O’Brien. There was scarcely a person I talked to who wasn’t surprised when I brought up her name. Of course, there’d been a murder by then, but her mother made a point when she said the letters made people forget. The attention of the Hertfield police was directed elsewhere. Domino number two—” Jury overturned another cup. “The murder of Cora Binns. I think she met up with the murderer who saw a ring or rings on her hand that would bring the whole business back to the Kennington emerald. Something he or she’d been looking for for upwards of a year and must have felt close to finding.”

  “But don’t you think it’s strange, a bit of almost too-bad luck, that the person she’d meet by accident would be the murderer? It’s odd nobody else in Littlebourne saw her, isn’t it?”

  Jury thought for a moment. “No. I don’t think so.” Wiggins frowned, but Jury went on. “Whoever tried to kill Katie and succeeded in killing Cora Binns was afraid the police would start snooping around again. And what if they found the map? Katie obviously found it somehow. Was she going to the police? We don’t know. That takes care of domino number three. Number four—” Jury overturned the other cup. “—The mutilated hand. I can only think there of instant rigor. Maybe he could have broken the fingers, but with Ernestine Craigie’s little hatchet so easy to hand—” Jury shrugged.

  “It seems Miss Craigie has more to do with this business than’s good for her.”

  “She your favorite suspect, then?”

  “A tough old bird. Excuse me. No pun intended.” Wiggins turned over the pepper shaker. “Well, then, you’ve done it, sir. The dominoes. All except for the napkin holder. The murderer—right?”

  Jury looked at it. “Right.” He started to turn it over, then set it upright. “There’s one person all of this fits like a glove.”

  Wiggins was astonished. “You mean you know? Well, for God’s sakes, why—?”

  “I think I know.” Jury got up heavily.

  “You don’t look too happy about it.”

  Jury wasn’t happy about it, not at all. “I don’t have any evidence, Wiggins. Not a shred, not a hope, unless we can catch someone dead to rights. Which probably means finding that necklace.” He pulled the map from his pocket, folded in half like an open book, and stood it against the napkin holder. “Trevor Tree’s mate, accomplice, or whatever must now know where that necklace is. And is going to trample anyone who gets in the way. I hope no one else does.”

  As they rose to leave, Wiggins swept some of the spilled salt into his hand and tossed it over his shoulder. “You never know, sir.”

  • • •

  When they were halfway down the long, cool corridor, Jury knew why the cross nurse was steaming toward them, skirts crackling, clipboard anchored against her bosom. It was the music.

  If Jury had a tin ear—and in this case, even he was stopped dead—Wiggins didn’t. Music was one of his passions; he certainly had few enough of them. “My God, that’s beautiful.”

  Apparently, some of the patients felt the same way. They stood in open doorways, sat in wheelchairs, leaned on canes. Cyril Macenery was playing the violin—Katie’s favorite song, “Roses of Picardy.” It had seemed to Jury, up to then, a quaint old song; now it was unearthly.

  And the nurse was not so much cross as worried: “Really, I don’t know whatever Matron will do.” She shook her head; her white cap bobbed. “I just don’t know. I suppose he picked up her violin and started playing. . . . ”

  She had the authority to stop Macenery, of course; only, she hadn’t. She was probably as much beguiled by the wonderful sound of that music in this white, dead corridor as anyone else. Jury’s estimate of what lay behind her starched exterior seemed to have been pretty accurate, after all. He clicked his pen and wrote on a notebook page, tore it off, and handed it to her. “I realize it’s your patch and not mine. But if you have the M.P.D. behind you, maybe that would help. Tell Matron—if she comes along—the C.I.D. thought it would be a good idea. And nobody’s complained.” Jury looked down the corridor. One or two of the women seemed to be mouthing the words or dancing in their heads. The nurse took Jury’s note. Apologetically, she said, “I’ll have to stop him soon.”

  “I know. Sergeant Wiggins will take care of it.”

  “But not,” said the nurse, looking up at Jury with one of the starriest looks he’d ever seen, “until the song’s finished.” She smiled.

  • • •

  Thus, when the call came through from Scotland Yard to the hospital, Jury had left for the East End.

  And now, Ash Cripps, dressed in a faded bathrobe and rolling a cigar in his mouth—plucked from the box Jury had had the foresight to bring with him—was strolling about the parlor, one
hand holding the map Jury had handed him, the other with a bottle of White Shield. He was being none too careful about the sediment in the bottom as he took a pull from it. He set the bottle on a mantel over a fake fireplace which would glow, in colder weather, with fake coals. Bits of paper and a tin ashtray full of old butts cascaded from the mantel. He shoved them with his foot into the tiny fireplace.

  The Crippses’ children were half in the kitchen eating mash and half outside having a war with sticks and the tops of dustbins.

  Ash continued his map-study and his stroll. He wore his old robe like the robes of state, the cord dragging the cabbage-rose carpet. They were waiting for White Ellie to get back from the launderette with his trousers.

  “Aye, it does look like something Trevor could of thought up.” He scratched his head. “Only it don’t make no sense.”

  “Do they usually? I thought the whole idea of Wizards was to confuse and mislead.”

  “Yeah, only . . . look.” Ash was rummaging through the drawers of an old bureau, stopping now and then to yell through the door to the kitchen at the little bleeders to stop screaming. Finally, he slammed the door, dampening the noise only slightly.

  He handed Jury a map. “This is one Trevor did a couple years ago. Make-believe village where there was supposed to be treasure stashed. Turned up in the blacksmith’s shop.” The village was intricately drawn, with all of the shops, the church, an inn, farms and barns in the outlying areas. Trees looked like cotton fluff. There were a pond and a lake. It was like an aerial view, very neat and tidy. “He could make up adventures that’d ’ave us going for months.”

  Certainly, the two maps bore a marked similarity; the art work seemed identical.

  “I seen others he did, like one of the Necklace itself. That was a town adventure. Trevor ’ad it all down, just like the pub looks—table and chairs and so forth. Then there was the castle ruins one ’e did. That was good. Good on giant rats and ruins was Trevor.” He poked Jury’s diagram. “That’s what I say, this one’s odd. It don’t look like anyplace real. I mean, even real unreal.”