Vertigo 42

by Martha Grimes

  “Stomp on this lot, is that it?” Wiggins had the package open and the biscuits transferred.

  “Right.” Kenneth pulled a long circle of marble out of a drawer, plunked that in front of Wiggins.

  Wiggins couldn’t have said whether it was a small Corinthian column or a rolling pin. He looked around, still trying to take Kenneth Strachey’s intention in.

  “Get your skates on, Wiggins,” Kenneth said, over his shoulder. “This the way you stand around a crime scene, is it? Mouth open, wondering what to do with the knife?”

  Wiggins started crushing. They were chocolate digestives, and he began enjoying his role as sous chef. “The knife’s the job of forensic. Nothing to do with me.”

  Kenneth snickered, butter melted, pan on table. He started a whirlwind of activity over the mixing bowl, cracking, whipping. “Okay, that looks okay. Take a dab of butter and rub it round this.” A spring-form pan emerged magically. “Then pour the crumbs in and then the melted butter. Good man. Finished in a breeze. Mix it up good, there, then pat it all down and around.”

  “I think I get the picture. This is the crust.”

  “So you do know your way round a crime scene after all!” Whipping up a storm. “God, I could do with a lemon-drop martini.”

  “No way. We’ve got enough on our platter.” Wiggins was pressing the crumb mixture round the sides of the pan. “Tell me this, when do you do your writing?”

  “When I’m drinking my martini and eating my cheesecake. For God’s sake, haven’t you finished there?”

  “Just about. Now I know how those idiots feel on the telly when Gordon Ramsay’s around. Done!”

  Kenneth grabbed the pan, poured in the makings of the cake, spun it around while he kept a spoon on the go, smoothing a perfect circle. He grabbed it up, went to the Aga, opened a door, and slid it in. “Excellent. Forty minutes that’ll take.” Back to the fridge, and opening the door, he glanced in, pulled out a dish of raspberries. More tea?”

  “I wouldn’t say no. Thanks.” It was his third cup. Same fill-up on sugar. “Have you always lived in Bloomsbury, then?”

  “Half of my life. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. It’s got everything, part of museum mile, the Renoir Cinema, King’s Cross St. Pancras, so if you get the urge to toot off to Paris, the Eurostar’s only a stone’s throw. And of course, Bloomsbury’s where all of them lived, the literary greats—Virginia Woolf, the Bells, and my great-great-great cousin—”

  “That’d be Lytton Strachey, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would. At least that’s what Pa claims. Of course he wants me to pick up the cudgel. As if I could. You know his work? Eminent Victorians, that’s the main one.”

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  “But me, I want to be a chef. Pa is appalled to think that’s my ambition.”

  Wiggins smiled. “Well, it’s not exactly up to Pa, is it?”

  “Isn’t it? You see this kitchen? You don’t think this came from a journalistic spree, do you? My parents are wealthy. My grandmother was even wealthier. I have a trust fund. My father’s the executor.”

  “Uh. That throws a spanner in the works, I expect.”

  “It does, indeed. Did you always want to be a policeman?”

  “God, no. I happened on to policing by accident, almost. In school, I went on a tour of a police academy and thought it looked like interesting work, then forgot about it for years, then a friend of mine joined the force in Manchester—where I’m from—and one thing led to another, and here I am. It’s not like police work is in my blood, or anything. My father worked in an office all his life. He thought I was being frivolous. That was his word: frivolous.”

  Strachey laughed. “Does he still think so?”

  “Probably. So, would you say writing is in your blood?”

  “You mean because my pa claims to be in the Strachey line? No. Actually, that’s not my blood. I think Pa’s just forgotten that.”

  Wiggins tried to make sense of that.

  “Anyway, I’m writing a long piece for a small journal right now on the Foundling Hospital. It’s in Bloomsbury. You ever been there? Of course, it’s a museum now. The history is fascinating though.”

  “What was it a hospital for?”

  “Deserted children.”

  They talked about the hospital for a few minutes, and about foundlings—Strachey seemed to have a whole raft of them in his head, beginning with seventeenth-century revenge tragedies like The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling. Until some twenty-five minutes later, Wiggins looked at the kitchen clock. He had completely forgotten. Lunch with Jury. Soho. The big clock stood at one-forty-five. “God, I’m late, sir. I’ll have to leave.”

  “What? Now? Before the cheesecake. Another ten minutes—?”

  “Another ten minutes and my boss will have my head.”

  They both got up, Wiggins apologizing, thanking him as they walked to the front door.

  There they shook hands. Then Kenneth Strachey said, smiling as he leaned against the doorjamb, “I’m truly sorry you have to leave, Sergeant. There’s just one thing I’m curious about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did you come?”

  Ruiya, Soho

  Thursday, 2:40 P.M.

  18

  * * *

  Jury waited for Wiggins to embellish.

  When he realized his wait would be in vain, he said, “That’s it? The sum total of your talk with Kenneth Strachey? You tell me Strachey remembered they were playing hide-and-seek. Then there was ‘the most awful row’ and they all ran around to the back and there was Hilda dead at the bottom of the pool. That’s it?” Jury went mercilessly on. “Wiggins, my dog Joey knows that much.”

  The menu lowered. “I didn’t know you had a dog, sir. That’s really—”

  Jury shut his eyes. “The dog’s not the point.”

  Wiggins, who had arrived at Ruiya forty minutes late, raised the tall menu so as not to be stared at by his superior. He replied, “That’s pretty much it, yes, sir; that’s about all Kenneth Strachey had to say.” It wouldn’t even have been that if Kenneth Strachey hadn’t reminded Wiggins that he must have had a reason for visiting in the first place.

  So by the time Wiggins had asked him one or two hurried questions, which Kenneth had answered, the cheesecake was, of course, done. Wiggins couldn’t be allowed to leave at that point—“For God’s sakes, Detective, you helped make it!” Kenneth’s hand hooked over his shoulder again, as it had done when Wiggins had first come, and they retraced their steps back to the kitchen. And that had accounted for twenty of the late minutes. They each had had two helpings.

  Relentlessly, Jury kept on: “You were at Strachey’s for at least an hour. No, at the very least, an hour and fifteen minutes. At least. Unless you were lollygagging all over Bloomsbury with the ghost of Leonard Woolf.”

  Wiggins’s snort showed how much he valued that bit of commentary. “Really, sir.” He paused. “I’ll have the crispy fish.”

  “I know. You always have the crispy fish. What were you doing all that time?”

  Having made his luncheon selection, Wiggins could no longer—logically—pretend to study the menu. He moved his cutlery around, which didn’t take up much of the reporting-on-Strachey slack, given there was only a set of chopsticks to reposition. He said, “Well, I’m sorry to say it, as I don’t imagine you’ll think it was time well spent, but”—here he glanced at Jury—“but I did pop into the Foundling Museum.” He coughed behind his fist.

  Ordinarily, Jury’s eyes were a calm, even a warm, gray, but when he got massively irritated, the eyes could go as cold as chrome. “The Foundling Museum. What in bloody hell is that?”

  Seeing his chance, Wiggins took his superior’s question as literal interest and answered it. He spoke steadily for three minutes, which is forever in liar’s language.
But, of course, his commentary on the museum itself wasn’t a lie at all; he was merely embroidering upon what Kenneth Strachey had told him. And the three minutes of embroidery gave him time to work out a reason for the museum visit.

  “Since Kenneth Strachey is writing a series of pieces about it, I thought it might tell me something—” Wiggins went wandering around the liar’s maze. A way out . . . Ah! “Like, why is he so interested in that place? I mean interested enough to write a series of articles on it?” He’d almost forgotten that detail. He wandered on and finally saw a gap in the maze. It was almost eagerly that he went on: “See, I thought you’d want my impressions, sir, I mean, since you already had the basic facts and Strachey added nothing in that department.”

  Jury had been watching him closely all through this disquisition, and when Wiggins finally screeched to a halt, his boss was still staring at him. Then he slowly smiled and the smile widened and widened again.

  Wiggins wanted to think he had safely left the maze, but then he recalled that line from Shakespeare Jury loved: “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” In his mind, he could hear Jury repeating it. Again and again. Then Wiggins remembered he had found out something: “I did find out Kenneth Strachey was in London the night Belle Syms was murdered. His housemate Austin was there.” He had found out Kenneth’s whereabouts during the first helping of cheesecake; he had found out about Austin during the second.

  “When in London? The entire night?”

  Wiggins cleared his throat. “Well, I didn’t get all the details, but . . .” He looked away. Then he looked up at the approach of Ruiya’s owner. “Here comes Danny Wu!” He was so delighted to see Danny that he was half-out of his chair.

  “Sergeant Wiggins; Superintendent Jury. What a pleasure. It’s been awhile.”

  “At least a week, Danny. The menu hasn’t changed.”

  “The menu never changes,” said the impeccably tailored owner. He was wearing dead-black—a finely spun wool silk with a stripe so razor thin it could have been an optical illusion. His tie and pocket handkerchief were the pale yellow of jonquils. All Jury could think of, looking at that black suit and yellow tie was Black Narcissus. The yellow presented an astonishing contrast that Melrose Plant would have passed up and Marshall Trueblood would have taken a step further. These were the three best-dressed men that Jury had ever seen.

  If he himself could have afforded such suits, he wondered how he’d look. He imagined viewing himself in the long mirror of Plant’s bespoke tailor, engaged in the elegant process of a final fitting. How did he look?

  Like a cop.

  Danny, had he not been a superb restaurateur, would have made a superb photographer’s model as a second career; or, as a third career, a superb criminal, which Jury was inclined to believe was Danny’s first career, though Jury had never been able to work out what criminal activity he might be engaged in. He did not have form, but he had had a dead man on his doorstep, which, quite naturally, had raised suspicion.

  Not (for Jury) the suspicion entertained by Chief Superintendent Racer (Jury’s superior), which was that Danny Wu was the drug lord of Docklands, an allegation Jury had thought absurd at the time and still did. But Danny was so—what Jury’s uncle had called—“plausible.” Meaning completely, disarmingly believable. It was not a compliment. “A man you’d not for a moment doubt.” His uncle would smile broadly and wink. “Sucker.”

  “Where do you get your clothes, Danny?” Jury was back to that.

  “Off a hanger in my cupboard.”

  Jury smiled. “Wish I had your tailor. Or anyone’s.”

  “You don’t need a tailor, Superintendent. You’re a man clothes could never compete with; they’d always lose.”

  Jury was stunned. So he picked on Wiggins’s astonishment. “So? By your look, I’d say you utterly disagree?”

  “What? No, no . . . Well, it’s an inscrutable thing to say, is all,” said Wiggins.

  “I’m an Oriental, Sergeant. That’s what we do.”

  Jury laughed.

  In his mind’s eye, his uncle winked.

  “Crispy fish,” said Wiggins, after blowing in and out his cheeks.

  “Me too.” This got him another astonished look from Wiggins. Jury never ate crispy fish.

  Jury was irritated with himself for picking on Wiggins. “I may even have dessert. Toffee bananas. Your favorite, right?” Jury smiled.

  Wiggins smiled back, pasty-faced. He had, after all, already had dessert. Two helpings. But he supposed he’d have to go along or someone might become suspicious.

  Though how in God’s name his boss could have any idea what he’d been doing at Kenneth Strachey’s (except nothing), Wiggins couldn’t imagine. They ate their crispy fish.

  But Jury could pick out lies like a lion sorting out the weakest in a herd of fleeing wildebeest.

  “What’s wrong?” said Jury, nodding toward Wiggins’s all-but-­untouched dessert. “This stuff is delicious.” Jury crunched down through deep-fried warm caramel crust to cool banana.

  Again, Wiggins blew out his cheeks. “Dunno. I seem a bit off today.”

  “I bet I know why.”

  Wiggins looked alarmed.

  “Strachey stuffed you full of tea—”

  Wiggins smiled a bit, relaxed.

  “—while you were asking him probing questions for over an hour.”

  Jury smiled, implausibly. He was the other kind, the kind you could count on.

  A Walk through Piccadilly

  Thursday, 3:30 P.M.

  19

  * * *

  Ruiya was one of those near-cultish restaurants, best-kept-secret restaurants, a small unpretentious, incredibly successful, line-all-the-way-to-Charing Cross places. Located in Soho, bounded by Piccadilly, Shaftsbury Avenue, Tottenham Court Road, and Charing Cross—in other words, in the heart of the middle of London. And that explained why Jury was, at the moment, in the heart of London.

  Jury had left Wiggins with the friendly threat that he himself might have a word with Kenneth Strachey, alarming his sergeant into protests that he, Wiggins, would be good to do any follow-up interviews . . . Jury knowing that he had spent the time with Strachey drinking tea and having a chin-wag and doing God-what-knows else. Jury was, of course, stereotyping the Bloomsbury idea. Really, just how much time had Virginia Woolf spent drinking tea? She didn’t write To the Lighthouse with a biscuit in one hand and a teacup in the other, sitting with crossed ankles round the cake- and cress-laden tea table.

  He kicked off a sheet of the Telegraph that had blown his way down Shaftsbury Avenue. He passed by the Apollo, the Prince Edward, this theater and that theater and their offerings he would never see, as if he existed in some parallel London universe of empty Palladiums.

  Along Dean Street on the other side of Shaftsbury was the Groucho Club, the cleverly named private club where the creative world went for embalming. Publishing people, writers, media people, film and TV people. Too clever by half. If the Metropolitan Police wanted their own club, would they bother to think up a name for it so profoundly (and phonily) self-deprecating as Groucho Marx’s joke?

  Not that police were short on ego—God, no. Think of a room full of DCIs, chief constables, a few assistant commissioners. They had their share of egos in the Met. But they were egos with guns. They had legs.

  The Groucho Club had been started as an alternative to the stuffy men’s clubs in London. As far as Jury was concerned, anywhere that required a potential member to have two sponsors, two okays for membership, was stuffy enough. White’s, Boodle’s, and Melrose Plant’s club, Boring’s, struck him as supremely unstuffy. Its members were more sleepy than stuffy. All they wanted was to be left alone with their whiskies, their fireplaces, their food, papers, and smokes.

  Jury made his way around Piccadilly Circus where pigeons and people shared the statue at its center
in just about equal measure. He continued along the cleaner sweep of the Haymarket and its slightly more pretentiously pillared theaters. It occurred to him in London, theaters were everywhere. Here, Covent Garden, Aldwych, the Strand—nearly anywhere you set your foot.

  Perhaps he should take Phyllis Nancy to a theater. Take Phyllis Nancy on a West End theater date? Ridiculous. Take Carole-anne. Even more ridiculous. She’d want a bucket of popcorn. No, it was really he himself who struck himself as ridiculous. Why? Couldn’t the Met go to the theater? Couldn’t they appreciate Judi Dench as much as anybody?

  He stopped in front of the theater where, good lord, Anything Goes was playing. Mundy Brewster was right; they were still doing it. A surge of people were coming out of the doors, matinee-goers wandering about blinking in the London light, as if they too had been inhabiting an alternate planet.

  Space-Time. Wasn’t that Einstein’s concept? A kind of cube? He was walking toward Trafalgar Square, contemplating Space-Time. Quantum mechanics. No, that wasn’t Einstein. Einstein hadn’t given sod-all about quantum mechanics. According to Harry Johnson, that s.o.b. Harry, who had a sea of money and no profession except murdering women and drinking wine.

  He stopped suddenly, throwing two elderly ladies off course.

  They sulked past him.

  Jury checked his watch. 4:00 P.M. Early for The Old Wine Shades, Harry’s favorite hangout. Quantum mechanics, mathematics. He wondered if Harry knew anything about codes and the Enigma machine—

  He stopped dead again, this time nearly stepping on a poodle who yapped less than his owner.

  You great twit! he thought, not of the poodle, but of himself. You haven’t talked to Oswald Maples about Tom Williamson’s case, and here you are wandering all over Piccadilly . . .

  Jury pulled out his mobile. Dead again. Hell.