“All of the people,” Jury interrupted, smiling, remembering his early-morning walk.
“Right. And Sedona—the place Angela really loved—well, that’s far worse as far as Mary’s concerned. ‘Why would certain parts of the earth be more powerful than others?’ We were arguing about ‘vortexes’ one day. The three of us were talking about Sedona and about stone circles—Avebury, Stonehenge, the ley lines. Mary reads a lot; I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t read more than Angela herself. But if someone she cared about was really interested in a subject, Mary would go and read a book about it so she could join in the conversation. Christ, she must drive her teachers crazy, what little she sees of them. Plays hooky a lot, is my guess.” Anders tilted his head, regarding the new relationship he’d made between the corn husk and the pumpkin flan. “Anyway, this one day in the shop, we were all drinking chamomile tea or something equally revolting, when Angela brought up Avebury and ley lines. It wasn’t long before her trip.” Anders paused, looked sad, picked up his wineglass and held it. “Angela talking about ley lines. Mary said, ‘You might as well believe in UFOs.’ Angela said that was different. It ticked Angela off, listening to her.”
“A woman getting angry with a thirteen-year-old because of the kid’s beliefs? That’s a little irrational.”
“Some thirteen-year-old!”
The nervousness in Nils Anders’s laugh made Jury look up quickly, but Anders was looking down again at his plate.
Deep into his own thoughts, Nils said, “I wish she were ten years older.” He avoided Jury’s eyes.
Jury could tell the man was deeply distressed by this admission, and said, “So do I, so what?” Anders then looked over at him, surprised. Jury went on: “I just spent—how long? Seven or eight hours with this kid and it felt more like seven or eight years. There’s something extremely complex and even disturbing about her. I know exactly what you mean by ‘burning away extraneous stuff.’ Maybe it’s from having grown up with no parents and being thrown back on her own resources; maybe it’s from sitting in the desert, thinking; maybe it’s from watching a lot of phonies do a lot of phony things. I don’t know. But Mary Dark Hope does not strike one—certainly not me—as your typical pubescent kid.”
Anders’s look was a little less strained. He gave a brief laugh. “I was beginning to feel like a pederast.”
“What we feel is one thing; what we do is another.” Jury looked out over the packed dining room, and reflected for a few moments. He went on, “You know, a few weeks ago I was in Baltimore. It happened to be around the date of Edgar Poe’s birthday. Now, if we were living back in his day in the nineteenth century no one would really think twice about a relationship between a thirteen-year-old girl and a grown man. But today? There’d be an uproar about child abuse. Very sensitive area, as it should be. What would have happened in this decade to E. A. Poe and Virginia? They’d never have had a chance. Poe would have been locked away.” Jury added, with a force of sadness that took him by surprise, “and ‘Annabel Lee’ would never have been written.”
Anders was still pushing his food, surely cold by now, around his plate.
“Nils,” Jury said, “why don’t you eat that, instead of trying to penetrate the mystery of the relationship between the spinach and the corn husk.”
Anders smiled wanly and scooped up some beans, leaving Jury to think, uncomfortably, about his own fleeting reaction, quickly repressed, to Mary Dark Hope as they sat drinking cappuccino yesterday. Hoping to relieve some of Anders’s obvious guilt, he said again, “Sexually disturbing, no doubt about it.”
Behind Jury, a woman’s voice said, “Anyone I know? Or are you talking about the tortillas?”
The voice made Anders look up, turned Jury around.
“Hello, Clare,” said Nils, not very enthusiastically.
It was one of the dance-hall actresses that Jury had seen several hours before. She stood there smiling, the smile glimmering like the green silk dress she was wearing—smile, teeth, dress, hair—all with a sheen that caused a number of diners to turn and stare. Jury imagined she was used to being stared at.
Jury was introduced again and said hello. Clare glimmered at both of them yet again, then tossed the drift of dark red hair clear of her shoulder in a gesture Jury had always disliked. So coy, so clearly meant to display breasts and neckline. Then she moved off through the webbing of tables towards an escort who was stuck waiting for her.
“Definitely not jailbait,” said Jury, his eyes following her before turning them back to his companion.
Nils Anders was poking at the cold corn husk.
He hadn’t noticed.
THIRTY-SIX
Melrose had been in the company of Divisional Commander Macalvie several times before: in Brighton; on Dartmoor; at the Hammersmith Odeon. And he found Macalvie’s company—like the sea air, the slanting moor rains, the thunderous applause—bracing, to say the least.
Certainly, it must be for the person now in his office, a woman, from the sound of it.
As if reading his thoughts, Macalvie’s secretary cocked her head towards the inner office. “Inspector Thwaite. She’ll be out in a minute.” Under her breath, she added, somewhat mysteriously, “She usually is.”
Thwaite. Melrose thought he recalled Jury’s having talked about her . . . yes, Gilly Thwaite. One of the few people on the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary Macalvie respects. Feels affection for. Love, possibly.
Well, the course of it was certainly not running smooth, then, for the female voice rising in arpeggiated imitation of a diva was in the throes of something other than aria.
“. . . her bloody ske—” And the voice took another dive.
Far more pleasant than Sam Lasko’s secretary, the woman with whom Melrose shared the tiny outer office just smiled and shook her head as if any visitor to Exeter headquarters knew what Macalvie and/or this woman with whom he was closeted were like. She rolled her eyes.
Macalvie appeared to be talking about bones, a skeleton.
“Vertebrae match . . . X-ray twenty years ago. . . . It’s her!”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it bloody is. Perfect ma—”
“. . . do you explain this?”
Melrose heard a clink, a clatter, tiny, but distinct. Jingle of coins on hard surface, it sounded like. The aria ended, and now there was a cut-off wail, like a snatch of music he’d once heard on an old blues-jazz record, then a brief staccato exchange, followed by another aborted wail . . . this one seemingly of outrage. The woman who stalked out, paler (Melrose guessed) than when she’d walked (or stalked) in, was more intelligent-looking than she was pretty; but had an intensity and a vitality (even at this apparent low ebb in her crime-scene career) that more than made up for physical beauty. Yet, Melrose adjusted even that judgment as she passed before him, for she had a very graceful carriage and a headful of bobbish dark curls that softened the unflattering horn-rimmed glasses; she wore a bright coral lipstick, which made Melrose irrationally happy, seeing she hadn’t permitted her femininity to be deflowered (so to speak) by the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, of which Brian Macalvie was divisional commander and chief superintendent—either or both.
As Inspector Thwaite made her exit, the secretary nodded and smiled at Melrose, inclined her head toward the door, and said he could go in.
Brian Macalvie smiled broadly and extended his hand. They had always got on extremely well, which surprised Melrose, for Macalvie was not the sort of policeman who took easily to amateurs. Well, he didn’t really take easily to professionals either, so Melrose’s amateur standing had nothing to do with it. Macalvie was still wearing his coat; Melrose recalled that he had always worn his coat—and it looked familiar, down to the little tear in the elbow—as if Macalvie had just come in or were just on his way out. All of his life, coming in, going out. No one could match Macalvie for intensity, not even Inspector Thwaite. Copper hair, neon-blue eyes, Macalvie seemed to exist within a magnetic field.
<
br /> Right now, Macalvie was sticking a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and patting down his pockets for a light as if he were frisking himself for a gun; finally, he snatched a little box of matches out from under a batch of papers before he recalled himself to social niceties and offered Melrose the pack.
“No thanks.” Melrose was looking at the several coins that had been shoved aside in the process, wondering what clue they’d offered in Gilly Thwaite’s case. He was also eyeing the overflowing ashtray, big as a luncheon plate. Probably, it was a plate. “Cut down, have you?”
Macalvie looked at the plate too. “Those? Those are Jury’s.”
“Jury stopped smoking.”
Macalvie smiled cynically and rolled his eyes to suggest “a lot you know,” then, apparently deciding Jury hadn’t actually been in the office long enough to cause such a butt buildup, added another smoker to the pile. “And a lot are Gilly Thwaite’s. She just left.”
“No, they’re not.”
In the midst of bringing round the pot to fill two cups with muddy-looking coffee, Macalvie’s brows shot up in question. “Who says?”
“I says. She wears lipstick.”
“Ha! Aren’t we the little sleuth?”
“ ‘Little’ is the definitive word. If that coffee’s for me, no thanks. I passed some roadworks chaps filling potholes who could use it for filler.”
“Yeah, it is pretty revolting.” Macalvie peered into the pot and returned it to the burner behind him. Then he was washing the papers all over his desk, found what he wanted, shied it over to Melrose. “Jury sent this.”
The stapled photocopied pages fluttered onto Melrose’s side of the desk. He picked them up and read through the notes Jury had sent, detailed sketches of the people he’d seen and talked to, what they’d said, what they hadn’t. After a while, Melrose removed his glasses and said, “Mary Dark Hope. She sounds interesting.”
“The kid sister. But it wasn’t the sister who identified the body, according to my nemesis, DCI Rush. It was the cousin.” Macalvie frowned, as if the thought troubled him. “Mary Hope’s thirteen; Rush—or could be the cousin—decided it would be too traumatic for the kid to undertake the trip and make the identification.” Macalvie nodded towards the photocopied report. “Though it sure as hell doesn’t sound as if this particular thirteen-year-old is easily traumatized.”
Melrose read; Macalvie thought.
“Coyote Village turns out to be part of the Anasazi ruins in—” Melrose looked at the notes again—“in Mesa Verde.”
Macalvie unbuttoned the single button of the corduroy jacket he was wearing beneath his mackintosh. His concession to settling in for a while. He said, “That makes it a dead cert that one of them—Frances Hamilton or Helen Hawes, or both—talked with Angela Hope.”
“Why so?”
“Because this particular ruin isn’t on the must-see list. Its designation is really a number—no, not the number in the address book,” he added when Plant looked hopeful—“so for anyone to write it down, to make a note of it, well, the person would have to hear it from someone. The Hope sisters went there quite often. Why Nell Hawes would write it down—” Macalvie shrugged, upended his palms.
“Do you know Hawes was the one who wrote it in?”
“Handwriting analysis shows that the Coyote Village entry and the number were written by a different hand from the one that made the neat, pencilled entries. If it was Hamilton’s address book, then it’s probable she was the one to make those. It’s a little more difficult to tell whether two different people wrote in the number and the name. It was Nell Hawes who brought it back here. So it’s clear it was temporarily in her possession. So Hamilton might have handed it to her at some point to make at least one of those entries.”
“Does it make any difference, really, which of them wrote down the information?”
“I won’t know that, I expect, until I know what the number means.”
“What about Angela Hope?”
Macalvie lifted his eyebrows in question.
“She might have written it, you know, the way people will if they’re giving you an address, or directions, or pointing out something.”
“This is all rather tenuous.”
“You’re just like your pal.”
Which pal was this, now?
“Jury kept using that same word when he was here. Tenuous.’ The relationship between these three women is pret-ty ten-u-ous, Macalvie.’ ”
Melrose smiled. Seldom had he known the divisional commander to waste time in self-congratulation, but right now he was looking smug.
But the expression was fleeting, gone in an instant, as Macalvie asked, “You find anything in London?”
“I haven’t come up with much. Well, I haven’t come up with anything, at least nothing definitive, except—” Melrose paused and frowned.
“I love the ‘except’s. So go on.”
“Only impressions. Do you think Frances Hamilton might have died from a different cause than the other two women?” He waited for Macalvie to disagree. He didn’t. “She might really have died of natural causes, I mean, not precipitated by any outside agency. When I was talking to Lady Cray, you know, the friend with whom the Hamilton woman lived, there was another picture that emerged, different from my original impression that Frances was a shallow, silly woman. Even Lady Cray claimed she’d done Fanny Hamilton an injustice by giving the superintendent this impression. I think Hamilton might have been a woman of very strong feelings and without an outlet for them, without a confidante. She had no family except for her nephew in America, and to him she was devoted. She really loved Philip Calvert. She went to the States, went to the cabin where he was killed, talked to the police there in Pennsylvania. Jury told me that in the police report there was, of course, a description and photos—that sort of thing of the body in situ—and though I imagine she’d never have been shown any photos, still she would have heard just how and where he’d died. If Fanny Hamilton wasn’t strong, if she had a bad heart—” Melrose sighed—“I’d have thought it could have killed her. That painting of the boy Chatterton, stretched out on his narrow bed. How could that not have brought to mind the image of Philip, stretched out on his own in that cabin?
“On that day that she visited the Tate, she stayed for some time. Beatrice Slocum said she saw Ms. Hamilton after she—Beatrice—left the Clore Gallery: that’s where they keep the Turners. Bea especially likes the Turners. It’s the light. But I expect light is crucial for all paintings, isn’t it?” Imprinted on Melrose’s eyes was the spectral diffusion of that golden, misty light in Turner’s paintings of Venice, so that when he transferred his gaze to the gray rectangle of office window, he almost expected to see it, that spectral gold. “Art,” he went on, “is not always balm for the soul. It can be, perhaps, like an overdose. Of poignance, not poison.”
Melrose was suddenly self-conscious. Macalvie hadn’t moved, but had just sat there watching him through half-closed eyes. “You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you all right. I just don’t think you’re talking about Frances Hamilton.”
Melrose said nothing and Macalvie just went on looking at him, so that finally, either unnerved or embarrassed, he returned his gaze to the window at Macalvie’s back and the sky that had changed in hue from pale gray to pewter. He sat there looking at this sky, wondering if even crimes, like problems, are solved (although “solved” was probably the wrong word) because they come within the compass of one’s own individual life. Because ultimately there was nothing there that was unfamiliar or unknown. Perhaps that was what he had felt following, more or less, in Fanny Hamilton’s footsteps, walking through the exhibits at the Tate. The Turners, the Pre-Raphaelites. Chatterton. He could not explain it though, to Macalvie, since he could not explain it to himself.
What surprised him, when he came out of this slight reverie of sky gazing, was that Macalvie was sitting in exactly the same position, and still looking at him. Macalvie was t
he most energetic of men (witness that unshed coat!) whose impatience was legendary. Yet, Melrose could hear Jury talking about him, about the way Macalvie could stand immobile, taking in a crime scene, so long that it drove his team to distraction, including Gilly Thwaite, who was actually the crime-scene expert. So “impatience” was not the right word either, or was appropriate only to describe him when he was dealing with incompetents and fools—too often for people’s comfort, Melrose imagined. It made him smile.
The smile apparently released Macalvie too from whatever he himself had been observing and he was fanning out some nine or ten snapshots, turning them towards Melrose. “He sent these, too. Jury did. Snaps he took inside the Silver Heron, Angela Hope’s shop.”
Melrose looked at each of them, carefully. Half of them were close-ups of silverwork—finished or partially finished pieces: bracelets, pendants—resting on what appeared to be her worktable; or close-ups of display cases which housed turquoise and silver. There were close-up shots of three pieces that looked much like Lady Cray’s turquoise block. Hardly any doubt who had done that piece of work. Two more of shelves in the shop and one of two armchairs with a table between them that would have appeared inviting to custumers.
“No Rolodex on the customers, he says; apparently, Angela wasn’t into keeping mailing lists to promote her wares. Well, we know approximately when they might have got together. But it would be nice to know precisely. It’s pretty certain about Mrs. Hamilton and Angela Hope having met. I’d like to be certain about Nell Hawes, though. Look at this.”
Macalvie tossed Melrose several pages of a technical report that looked like the results of an electrocardiogram: jagged lines, lines of varying lengths running down the pages. Macalvie told him it was a chromograph of Angela Hope’s blood.
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