There had been a great deal of speculation about the cat’s appearance in the halls of New Scotland Yard. It was generally thought that Cyril had discovered the tunnel originally meant for theatergoers to a theater that never materialized and where the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police now sat, owing to some misadventure over cash flow or architectural fault or need. In any event, the cat Cyril had been seen prowling the halls as if his antennae were searching out (like some medium’s familiar) the office of Chief Superintendent Racer. With Racer, Cyril enjoyed a slightly different symbiotic relation from the one with Fiona; and in Racer’s case, it was doubtful that the relation was of benefit to both. But it certainly seemed to go down a treat with Cyril, who could outwit and outmaneuver Chief Superintendent Racer any day.
It was testimony to Cyril’s staying power that he had been hanging around Racer’s office for upwards of a year (maybe even two), which was more than could be said of any member of the Met — uniformed, CID, or civilian. Except for Superintendent Jury, whose staying power (and, Jury suspected, slight masochistic streak) matched Cyril’s. Fiona, of course, was made of such steely stuff she could have walked under falling ladders or falling bombs and still remained upright. Only such a woman could have stood it as Racer’s secretary. She was constantly being told to get the mangy rat-catcher out from under Racer’s eyes and feet or he’d fire her and kill Cyril. Fiona paid far more attention to refurbishing her eye makeup than she did to the exhortations of her boss. Racer himself had often tossed Cyril out in the hall. But Cyril always returned, like Melville’s Bartleby, to sit on a convenient sill and stare from a window at the blind brick wall of another part of the Yard.
Thus both Fiona and Cyril were engaged in their prelunch ablutions when Jury walked into Racer’s outer office. “Hullo, Fiona. Hullo, Cyril,” said Jury.
Fiona returned the greeting while running her little finger around the corners of her mouth; Cyril’s tail twitched. He always appeared happy to see Jury, perhaps out of admiration for a soul-brother, one who could stick it.
“You’re early, for once,” said Fiona, snapping her mirrored compact shut with a little click. Jury often wondered where she came by these pre-Second World War memorabilia: he hadn’t seen a woman with one of those Art Deco compacts since he was a kid. Fiona herself was like an artifact: she had been and still was, in her way, pretty. Pretty like the old photos of movie starlets with cupid-bow mouths and upswept blond hairdos used to be. Jury suspected that Fiona’s own yellow curls came from the bottle, neat. That there were some silver threads amongst the gold Fiona had attributed to a good job of frosting at her salon. “He’s still at his club,” she added.
Jury yawned and scrunched down in his chair. “White’s? Boodles? The Turf?”
Fiona laughed and rested her newly primed face on her overlapped hands. “You think one of them would let him in?” She checked a gold circlet of a watch — also from prehistoric digs — and said, “Been gone two hours, so he ought to be popping in any minute.”
“Thanks, I’ll wait in his office — give him a fright, maybe.” He winked at Fiona, who then asked him if he’d eaten yet. It was as much a ritual when Jury was there as the revamping of her face. Jury made his excuses. A policeman’s life is full of grief, he told her. It was Racer’s cautionary phrase that covered everything from being first on the rota to finding a mass-murderer in your closet.
He noticed as he stood up she was taking out her bottle of nail varnish — a Dracula-like deep purple, almost black. Fiona favored black. All of her outfits — sheer summer frocks, winter wools — were black. Maybe she wanted to be sure she was ready for Racer’s funeral.
The cat Cyril, seeing his chance, followed Jury into Racer’s sanctum sanctorum and plumped himself in the chief’s swivel chair. Jury sat in the chair directly across from Cyril and the broad expanse of Racer’s empty desk. If there was one thing the chief superintendent believed in, it was delegating authority. Seldom did Jury see folders, notepads, papers — the usual junk — defiling his chief’s desk. Jury looked at Cyril, whose head alone could be seen over the top of the desk, and said, “What was it, sir, you wished to see me about? Oh? Yes . . . well, sorry. A policeman’s life —”
He hadn’t got the end of the old Racer shibboleth out before his chief’s spongy step came up behind him. “Talking to yourself again, Jury?” Racer hung his Savile Row overcoat on a coatrack and walked around to his swivel chair. Cyril had slipped like syrup from Racer’s chair and was now under the desk to study (Jury was sure) the best avenue of attack.
Racer went on: “Well, it certainly can’t be from overwork, lad. Obviously, you haven’t been doing much on the Dorchester case or you’d have reported in, now wouldn’t you? Not to say anything of the two others murdered! I do not like the Commissioner breathing down my neck, Jury. So what have you got to report. Meaning: what progress have you made?”
Jury told him as much as he felt was necessary for Racer to get the Commissioner off his back. It was, as always, too little for Racer. He would only have been satisfied with Jury’s actually producing the murderer right there, in his office.
“That’s all, Jury?”
“Afraid so.”
“As far as I’m concerned — what the hell’s that?” Racer was looking under his desk. He punched the intercom and demanded Fiona’s presence to get the beast out from under his desk. “This ball of mange has used up eight of its nine lives, Miss Clingmore! Swear to God,” he muttered, leveling a glance at Jury that suggested Jury might have used up nine-out-of-nine.
Fiona swayed into the office and collected Cyril. Fiona was certainly in no danger of using up her lives. The black-patent-leather belt she wore to nip in her waist sent the flesh undulating up and undulating down. Racer’s eyes always seemed undecided on which direction to take.
“So go on,” said Racer, when Fiona had left.
“Nothing much to be going on with. Sir.” Jury always hesitated a little before the sir.
And Racer always noticed it. Thus Jury was in for the “ever-since-you-made-superintendent” lecture, one that Racer must have practiced in his sleep, so refined had it become, so ornamental — like intaglio figurines around a priceless vase. There was always something new to comment on, regarding the skill of the artisan.
Jury yawned.
“Where the hell’s Wiggins? What’s he been up to, except contaminating the Dorset police?”
Jury made no comment other than to say Sergeant Wiggins was in Devon.
“You do realize, don’t you, how this psycho has hit the press? Three kids dead, Jury, three.” He held up his fingers in case Jury didn’t understand the word itself. “And you can’t nail one of these suspects?”
“Not on the evidence we have now, no. I want to see the Ashcroft solicitor.”
“Then get the hell out and go and see him. I’ve got enough work to do as it is.” The pristine condition of his desk did not attest to this.
II
“Robert Ashcroft? But I’ve known him as long as I’ve known — knew — his brother James.” He got up from his chair to pace several yards of cushioned carpet.
Mr. Mack, Jury decided, was solicitor to more than one moneyed family, given his surroundings: thick carpet, good prints on the walls, mahogany furniture, including the desk that shimmered like a small dark lake beneath its coats of beeswax. Its principal ornament was an elegant bronze cat, probably some pricey Egyptian artifact.
What interested Jury was that Mack did not simply reject the idea of imposture out of hand. Perhaps he was simply a very cautious fellow who would see all of the facets of an argument, no matter how prismatic.
His pacing was interrupted by the entrance of his secretary bearing a number of documents. His glance strayed up to Jury occasionally, as if he were turning the idea over as he turned the pages before him, signing each with a flourish.
The young lady who was Mack’s secretary was the antithesis of Fiona Clingmore. One could tell her dress was e
xpensive, not by its showiness but by the cut of the cloth. She was herself — hair, skin, nails — as polished as the desk itself.
But she lacked that certain something — that nice seamy presence which was the Fiona brio. Indeed, Jury wondered, as he watched the solicitor signing papers, if, in his realm of Ideas, Plato wouldn’t have plumped for Racer, Fiona and Cyril, instead of Mack, Miss Chivers and the bronze cat.
Mr. Mack recapped his pen and Miss Chivers gathered up the papers and slid softly out, hazarding another look at Jury as she left. He smiled. She blushed.
Mack returned to the question of the Ashcroft identity. “No, it’s improbable, Mr. Jury, that this Robert Ashcroft is not the real one. As you say, there was no one in the household who had known him, and the relations were all distant ones — but, no. When the will was probated, we certainly asked for Robert’s bona fides — indeed, we did that of everyone. Victoria Gray, for example.”
“I wasn’t aware she came into a part of the Ashcroft fortune.”
“She certainly did. Not much as an outright legacy, but a very substantial legatee were something to happen to Jessica. Very substantial. And insofar as Robert himself is concerned, I’m quite satisfied.” He had resumed his seat and rested his chin on the tips of his fingers, prayerfully.
“What about other bequests? Any other substantial ones?”
“Yes. There was one to a church. And also to his wife’s former nurse, Elizabeth. She was a cousin of Lady Ashcroft’s.” He ran a finger over the bronze cat. “Not a very pleasant person, as I recall.” A heave of shoulders here. After all, solicitors can’t be choosers. “But the thing is, you see, none of these were outright bequests. I didn’t care for it, but there it was. All of the money went to Jessica.”
“You mean, that as long as Jessica Ashcroft is alive, no one gets anything?”
Mr. Mack shook his head. “James Ashcroft wanted everything to go to Jessie. She can, of course, when she comes of age, honor those bequests immediately. Until that time, Robert is executor of the will and receives a fair allowance —”
“What’s ‘fair’?”
“I believe in the neighborhood of five thousand pounds a year.”
Jury shook his head. “That’d be a slum for Ashcroft. It certainly wouldn’t do much by way of supporting his habit. No, no, Mr. Mack —” The solicitor’s eyes had widened. “— not drugs. Motorcars. Vintage, classic, antique.”
“Ah, yes. Well, Robert has access to Jessica’s money, you see. All he need do is apply to me. If I think the expense suitable, I let him have it. You’re quite right, those cars of his are pricey. But a drop in the bucket when we’re talking millions of pounds. James and Robert were extremely close. Even when Robert went to Australia, they wrote to one another regularly. Those letters, you see, were paramount in establishing authenticity. Why are you suspicious of Robert Ashcroft, anyway?”
“No reason, except for the convenient arrangement of the household. Even the relations who came to the funeral hadn’t seen him in a long time, if at all.”
“Yes, that’s true. When that much money and property’s at stake, odd lots of relations come crawling out of the woodwork, some of them hoping to break a will unfair to them. Claiming what they consider their ‘fair share,’ or claiming the one who gets the lion’s share isn’t really the lion.” Mr. Mack allowed himself a little purse-lipped smile.
“So the brother James more or less allowed Robert carte blanche?”
Mack frowned. “Yes. And I frankly don’t approve of open-ended arrangements like that. Messy.” He squared a cigarette box and adjusted the alignment of the bronze cat. “But James had the devil’s own trust in Robert.” There was another fussy little smile. “Not the best way of putting it, perhaps. But the other relations, by blood or by marriage, were rather a sorry lot. So far as I could see, they had absolutely no claim on the money, not to say upon James’s affections. But he was — I advised him to do so — smart enough to leave small sums to the ones whom he felt would be the troublemakers.”
“I’d like to see a copy of that will, Mr. Mack.”
Mr. Mack rocked back in his chair. “Is that really necessary?”
Jury smiled. “I’d like to see it, necessary or not. The will’s been probated. Public property now.”
“Hmm. Very well. Miss Chivers can make you up a copy.” He punched his intercom and gave his secretary directions.
“And I’d also like to see those letters.”
“The ones from James? Well, Robert has them, of course.” Mr. Mack frowned. “Are you suggesting an analysis of the handwriting?”
“Something like that, yes.” Jury thought, really, that the Ashcroft solicitors would have done it themselves. He rose to go. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Mack.”
On the way out he collected the copy of the Ashcroft will and another appraising glance from Miss Chivers.
• • •
Mr. Mack’s office was in The City. Jury made his way to the Aldgate tube stop, wondering what was bothering him. Something he’d seen? Something he’d heard? James Ashcroft’s will was thick. There was a great deal of property. The will had been signed by Ashcroft, witnessed by Mack and two other solicitors. One of the names was George Thorne.
George Thorne. Again.
Jury changed at Baker Street to get the Northern line and, as he waited for his train, looked over the tiled wall of the platform, where the profile of Sherlock Holmes had been wonderfully contrived during the station’s renovation. It was a hard act to follow.
III
“So sad it is,” said Mrs. Wasserman, who lived alone in the basement flat of the building in Islington. Jury’s own flat was on the second floor, but he had stopped off to see how she was doing. To admit him, she had had to throw two bolts, release a chain, and turn the deadlock. There were grilles over her windows, too. Mrs. Wasserman could have slept with ease in the middle of the Brixton riots. But Mrs. Wasserman was never at ease, except when the superintendent was around who mercifully (for her) lived upstairs.
They were eating her homemade strudel and drinking coffee and she was talking about the case Jury was on. “I know you don’t discuss,” she said, “but it frightens me to death to see these children —” Unable to bring it out, she stopped, shook her head, drank her coffee. “I know you don’t say, of course you can’t, but this person, he must be crazy.” And she made a tiny circle round her ear to demonstrate craziness.
“I expect so, Mrs. Wasserman. We don’t know the motive.”
“Motive? Who says motive? Crazies don’t have them, Mr. Jury.” Her smile was slight and forgiving, as if she couldn’t expect this novice policeman to know everything, could she?
Indeed she was right on that count. “Psychotics do have motives, even if the motives are irrational and obscure. Or displaced.”
“What is that, displaced?” She was suspicious of psychoanalytic jargon.
“Just that the killer’s actual object isn’t the person he kills.”
She thought this over, chewing her strudel. “What a hideous waste of time.” Mournfully, she glanced up at him. “The papers, Mr. Jury, are full of it.”
Jury knew about the papers. And he also knew he had described, without consciously meaning to, Mrs. Wasserman’s own phobia. How old had she been during the Second World War? Fifteen, sixteen perhaps. Whatever horrors she had suffered then had gone underground, submerged in her mind, but bonded to that scrap of memory she could stand — the Stranger who followed her, whose step behind her she could pick out of a hundred footsteps, whose description Jury had taken down in his notebook time and time again, knowing there was no such person. And it was Jury who had helped her with the locks, the chains, the bolts. Mrs. Wasserman could have written the book on agoraphobia.
Jury looked at her windows, grilles and shutters. He looked at her door, locked and bolted. “You bolt the door —” He really hadn’t meant to say it aloud.
“Pardon? Of course I bolt the door.” Her large breasts sho
ok with laughter. “You, of all people! You helped me with the bolts.” Then she grew concerned. “It’s sleep you need, Mr. Jury. You never get enough. Sometimes it is not until two or three in the morning you get in.”
Jury only half-heard her. His eye was still fixed on that impregnable door. “But what, exactly, does it keep out?”
She seemed puzzled, suspicious even — in the way one is suspicious that a dear friend might be going off the rails. “Why, Him, of course. As you know.”
And she went back calmly to eating her strudel.
TWENTY-TWO
IT was five miles on the other side of Dorchester, in Winterbourne Abbas, that it hit him — what had seemed insignificant at the time. Jury pulled into a petrol station, asked for a phone and was told there was one in the Little Chef next door.
The restaurant was almost antiseptically clean, right down to the starched uniforms of the waitresses. Jury asked for a coffee, said he’d be back in a moment. He put in a call to the Devon-Cornwall headquarters and was told that the divisional commander was in Wynchcoombe.
It was TDC Coogan in the mobile unit there who told Jury (testily, he thought) that Macalvie had taken Sergeant Wiggins and gone to the Poor Struggler to make “inquiries.” Jury smiled. Although Betty Coogan didn’t believe it, Macalvie probably was doing just that. She gave him the number.
• • •
Jury could hear Elvis Presley in the background singing “Hound Dog” after someone answered the telephone at the Poor Struggler. Not Freddie, probably the regular who happened to be nearest the phone.
“Don’t know him, mate. Mac-who?”
Jury could almost hear the phone being wrenched from the other’s hand, along with a brief exchange that had Macalvie working the old Macalvie charm, complete with expletives. “Macalvie here.” And he turned away to shout to Freddie to turn the damned music down or he’d have her license. “Macalvie,” he said again.
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