Vertigo 42

by Martha Grimes

  Elaine looked a little dumbfounded. “No, I didn’t see anything after the game started up. Before that they were, you know, quarreling a little about who’d do this and who’d do that. Well, I turned away for my book . . . I just know that was going on, the game, I mean.”

  “But you didn’t actually see them? Didn’t see the kids hiding.”

  Uncomfortably, she shifted, uncrossed, recrossed her legs. Jury heard the silk whisper. “But obviously that’s what they were doing. Victor—Veronica said she’d counted nearly to a hundred; the others said where they’d hidden—”

  “You’re going by what the children said. They mightn’t have been in the front, where you were, at all after a few moments.”

  “You mean you think they were lying?”

  Jury looked into the firelight. The flames hadn’t changed since they’d been sitting there. He supposed it must be a gas insert. He turned back to her. “That’s not really my point. My point is, if you didn’t know, if you didn’t see where they were, then who saw where you were?”

  That made the mouth, which had been ready to smile, turn down. “What are you implying? That I’m lying?”

  “I’m not really implying. I’m asking. Are you?”

  The well-wrought mask cracked. “That’s ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!” She started to rise.

  “Please sit down, Mrs. Davies. This is a reasonable question for a policeman. You didn’t see the children after the game started. As far as you really know, they could all have run round to the back of the house. That would leave you there alone for some moments. You yourself could have run round to the back. I’m not saying you did; I’m merely saying that the only people whose whereabouts were certain were the girl, Hilda Palmer, dead at the bottom of that pool, and Tess Williamson, down there with her.”

  But she did not continue to sit. “I think perhaps you should leave. I’ve cooperated as well as I could.”

  That she didn’t have to cooperate at all apparently didn’t occur to her. It wasn’t a police interview; she wasn’t a material witness. It had all happened twenty-two years ago.

  Jury rose. He smiled, brilliantly. “I apologize. Perhaps I didn’t put it very well. I appreciate your time, Mrs. Davies.”

  Thawing a bit, she murmured a few words as she walked him to the door, which she didn’t slam. Her good-bye was almost cordial.

  Walking down the iron steps, across the courtyard and past the stilled fountain he again wondered about Elaine and Tess’s friendship.

  If Tess hadn’t told her anything about Andrew Cleary, why then had she told her about Dr. Smiley?

  Belgrave Square and Snow Hill Police Station

  Thursday, 7:00 P.M.

  22

  * * *

  He wanted to sit down for a while and decided to follow the woman who had a key to the square. Only the buildings surrounding Belgrave Square—mostly embassies—were permitted to use it, but he didn’t think anyone would throw him out. It was empty except for the woman who’d unlocked the gate, and she was merely crossing it to the road on the other side.

  “What’re you doing?” Jury was on his mobile. He wondered if that seemingly aimless question that everyone asked from time to time wasn’t aimless at all, but was an appeal for connection.

  What’re you doing?

  “Studying my library card,” said Melrose, unbothered by the apparent pointlessness of Jury’s opening.

  “Your library card?”

  “Yes. I like the row of stamped dates. They’re like stacks of little numbers. Those rubber stamping things librarians use, packed with dates. It seems to me it’d be awfully easy to get a date wrong. This book is late. But they probably don’t do that anymore in London, or anyplace except in tiny villages. It’s all getting computerized, now, isn’t it?”

  Sitting on his bench in this green square, Jury thought he should go along with Plant’s meditation on his card, given Melrose and Trueblood and the Jack and Hammer lot had saved the librarian’s job, and quite possibly the library itself. He watched a couple of dusty-looking pigeons wrangle over a bit of something on the path. The washed-out blue of the sky above had faded further into pewter.

  Jury half-heard Melrose’s voice going on about Long Piddleton’s little library, and when the voice paused, he said, “I’m resuming my interrupted visit, if you don’t mind. Thought I’d come tomorrow.”

  “Excellent! Everyone has been vastly busy with this case of the lady in red. You can hear all the theories!”

  “How wonderful.” Jury shut his eyes. There was another silence, a longer one.

  Melrose said, “What’re you doing?”

  ____

  Detective Inspector Dennis Jenkins was one of the smartest cops Jury knew, capable of intuitive leaps that others considered merely random guesswork. The thing was, Jenkins lived to think.

  The subject Jury wanted him to think about was vertigo.

  “You wouldn’t be talking about that woman who was thrown from that folly in Northamptonshire, would you. And don’t you have a friend who lives around there?”

  “He didn’t do it.” Jury smiled. “Remember, we were talking about Alfred Hitchcock?”

  “Vertigo. I was mesmerized.”

  “But why?”

  “Why was I mesmerized?”

  “No. Why did you think it was murder?”

  “Dressed like that? In that dress and those spiky heels? We’re back in Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo–land.”

  Whose shoes had played a big part in Jury’s last case; it had also been Jenkins’s case, in part.

  Dennis went on. “I’d say drugged and carried up to the top, or dead and carried up to the top. Chucked over.” He made a dropping gesture with his arms. “What was the postmortem result?”

  “I haven’t talked to the DCI in charge of the case, so I’m only guessing a broken neck. Belle Syms was her name. It happened very late Monday night or Tuesday morning. But she was seen in a restaurant, then in the Sidbury Arms—that’s a hotel there—between nine-thirty and ten. Later, back at her own hotel, the Sun and Moon. So that narrows time of death considerably.”

  Jenkins tossed down the pencil he’d been chewing on and said, “Why was she there in the first place? I mean, in that area? There wasn’t much in the paper about background, only ‘Woman Falls to Her Death in Northants Village,’ et cetera.”

  “According to hotel staff, the boyfriend had suddenly to go to London on business. The barman, also the owner of the Sun and Moon, said the woman was ‘in a right temper,’ had a drink at the bar, asked about a place to eat. He said the two of them were dressed to the nines.”

  Dennis was looking at Jury, or not so much “looking” as fixing him in place, staring out of his light gray eyes. Jury knew the slightly out-of-focus look wasn’t really meant for him but was Dennis thinking. Then he suddenly got up, unhooked his jacket from his chair, said, “Come on, let’s get a coffee.” He raised and lowered the paper cup containing cold tea and said, “This tea tastes like piss.”

  Jury followed him out of the office and out of Snow Hill station.

  ____

  It was the same Café Nero they’d stopped in before when they were both working the murder of a woman near St. Bart’s Hospital.

  Trolling a spoon through the foam of his cappuccino, Dennis said, “This is all so much like Vertigo, or at least looks to be—”

  Jury inhaled some foam and set down his cup. “You know that film very well. I recall you said you thought the Jimmy Stewart character was flawed.”

  Jenkins shook his head abruptly. “What was flawed was the vertigo angle. Killing this woman, Madeleine—”

  “The chap’s wife that Stewart is obsessed with?”

  “Right. The success of the crime depends on Stewart’s vertigo. If he could make it to the top of the chapel, that little pl
an would have been in ruins. If he’d made it to the top he’d have seen both Kim, who’s been impersonating the wife Madeleine, and Madeleine herself. Right?” He didn’t wait for Jury to verify the rightness. “But instead, Jimmy, who never gets to the top, sees a woman falling past a chapel window and thinks, it’s Kim. He doesn’t get to the top because he suffers from vertigo. The flaw, I think, is depending on a psychological illness; it’s extremely chancy for the writer, in this case Hitchcock. It’s great theater, but it’s hardly airtight plotting.”

  “But Hitchcock makes it appear inevitable. The viewer doesn’t doubt for a minute that this man’s vertigo is completely believable as the reason for his failure.”

  Dennis nodded. “Because he’s Hitchcock.”

  They drank their coffee.

  Then Dennis said, “It’s all about appearances. Sometimes that’s what I think life is: all appearance. No reality.”

  The Old Wine Shades, the City

  Thursday, 9:00 P.M.

  23

  * * *

  You must have a new murder on your hands and you’re looking for the guilty party. And here he sits.”

  “No, I can’t tie you to this one, Harry.”

  “Oh, too bad. You’re sure?”

  “It happened too long ago. Although there’s certainly a similarity of setting: large country house, gardens, woods, the victims both pretty women—”

  “I’m sorry if I’m dense. But similarity to exactly what?” Harry motioned Trevor, the barman, over.

  “Finished with this one, Mr. Johnson?”

  “How’s the ’72 L’Ennui?”

  Trevor frowned. “Pardon me, sir?”

  Jury smiled. “He’s being funny, Trevor.”

  “I’m being funny, Trevor. I leave the selection up to you.”

  Trevor moved off with a satisfied smile.

  “I’ve just been talking with a friend, a detective with City police. I brought up Hitchcock, Vertigo. One of this detective’s favorites. He says it’s all appearances. That life is appearance, no reality.”

  “Smart man. I didn’t know the Filth were such philosophers.”

  Harry Johnson loved referring to the police as “the Filth,” still a popular appellation in certain quarters.

  Exactly what it was that propelled Jury toward The Old Wine Shades, where they were now sitting at the bar, he had never worked out. It wasn’t the superb wine; it might have been the sparring. Jury still thought it was because he would, at some point, catch Harry Johnson out. But he knew, in some part of his mind, he would never “catch out” Harry. Harry was too clever by half to be “caught out.”

  So when Jury got him in the end, it would not be because Harry made a mistake, but because of chance or luck or maybe a third party—whoever that could possibly be. It might (for instance) happen that the new tenants of that house in Suffolk would find something incriminating.

  Harry, he thought, was smarter than he himself. But Harry, unlike Jury, was without conscience. And that made him dumber.

  “You think DI Jenkins’s point about appearances is an acceptable assessment of life, then?”

  “No,” said Harry. “There is no acceptable assessment. He’s smart, this guy, because he actually thinks about appearance and reality.” He held up his glass to the dim light reflecting in the mirror behind the bar and drank.

  Jury drank his London Porter. Delicious.

  “What was he referring to?” asked Harry.

  “Vertigo.”

  “Ah. The ultimate imposture. Kim Novak. Hitchcock must have enjoyed the hell out of making that film; it let him indulge his own obsessions. You’re interested in this because—?”

  “A case. The victim had vertigo.” He was thinking of Tess Williamson.

  “Did she jump or was she pushed from that tower?”

  Jury frowned. “Not that case. But how did you know—?”

  “My sixth sense.” With a smile just one degree short of contempt, he pulled a section of the Sun from his dark blue blazer and slapped it on the bar. “A sixth sense and an uncanny ability to read.” This tabloid featured a story on the “folly-death,” as the newspaper termed it. It was a two-page spread featuring a picture of the tower and Tower Cottage. Owen Archer probably wasn’t happy.

  Harry called to Trevor and crooked his finger. The knowledgeable barman came down the bar. “Mr. Johnson?”

  “I hate to ruin your evening, but I think this bottle is corked.”

  Trevor sniffed it, shook his head. “Not corked, but certainly off.” He poured a bit into a glass and tasted it. “Refermented, maybe?”

  Harry said, “It does taste a bit fizzy, yes.”

  Jury waited until the two of them had gotten everything out of their systems about this wine debacle.

  “Sorry about that, Mr. Johnson,” Trevor finally said. “I’ll bring you another.” Trevor walked off with the offending bottle of burgundy.

  Jury said, tapping the paper. “This isn’t my case.”

  “Not officially.” Harry flicked a glance over the print. “It belongs to Northampton CID. But as you’ve a friend who lives nearby, I’m sure you’ve adopted it. Obviously she was pushed or forced to take a flyer off the top of that tower.”

  “ ‘Obviously’?”

  Harry sighed. “Obviously, or the CID, including you, would not be on the case. You would not be on the case had the death been accidental, a laughable conclusion, in any event.” Harry went on, “Later it seems she was seen in both the Sun and Moon Hotel, where she was staying, and in Sidbury.” Harry smiled. “That’s the Kim Novak part. Which is why you’re here. To pick my brain.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Harry.”

  Harry was lighting a cigarette, snapping the lighter shut and exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “You can be absolutely infantile, Superintendent. Are you then just here to have a friendly drink with me?”

  Trevor came along with another bottle and turned the label to Harry. “Nice Côtes du Rhône, not awfully pricey.”

  Price meaning little to Harry, he merely nodded. “Go ahead and pour, Trev.”

  Trevor poured a small measure into a fresh glass; Harry did the usual swirl, sniff, and taste, but not making a production of it and said, “Fine.”

  As Trevor poured the wine, Harry nodded toward Jury. “Give him a glass.”

  Trevor was doubtful. “He’s drinking Porter, sir.”

  As if Jury weren’t present. “No thanks. I’ll stick with this.” He rolled the beer in the glass, sniffed it. “Lovely, tobacco-y scent.” He sipped it. “Sweet beginning, notes of chocolate and poppy, rich, warm finish. It has Guinness on the run.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Trevor. “Almost makes me feel like having one myself.”

  “I see your time in here hasn’t been wasted.” As Trevor walked off, Harry went on, “The point is whether this woman later seen was the same woman who checked into the hotel earlier with this chap. The woman was seen later that night at four—four—different times. That does seem overdoing it. And what happened to this boyfriend, anyway? As far as I can see, a better question is not who this second woman is, but why she’s supplying the man with an alibi, at the same time, putting herself at risk. This man could have gone to London or anywhere and provided himself with a dozen eyewitnesses. But she was there, and all she has is the persona of the victim.”

  “A question I asked myself.”

  Harry did not appear interested in what Jury had asked himself. He went on, “So what you have are three people: one, the victim, two, the one posing as the victim, three, the killer.”

  “Numbers two and three could both be involved in the killing. The man and the woman who checked into the Sun and Moon.”

  “You’re making assumptions.”

  “They were seen to check in,” said Jury.

 
“Yes, but one of your assumptions is that the man was the killer. How do you know it wasn’t the lady herself who killed the other woman, then pretended to be her, the murdered woman? The man might simply have left the scene as she herself said he did. Back to London.”

  Jury drank his beer. He said, “Somehow, that doesn’t seem plausible: that a third party—the man—had nothing to do with it. And how would she have lugged the body up to the tower?”

  “There are probably a dozen ways that could have happened.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “But I’m not being. You’re the one who brought up Hitchcock. You’ve got it on your mind. You even brought it up with your friend in the City police. It’s by way of being a minor obsession.”

  “Ridiculous.” Jury was uncomfortably unconvinced that it was, however.

  “Not really. Of course you’re missing one important element in Vertigo: a witness. The James Stewart character was set up to be a witness. And you don’t have one.”

  Ardry End

  Friday, 6:30 A.M.

  24

  * * *

  Jury woke the next morning at Ardry End in a four-poster hung with fabulously rich-looking material in heavy folds. The mattress was thick enough to keep the princess from feeling a sack of rocks; the pillows were down. He thought after the drive from London and a wine-soaked near-midnight supper, he would be completely knackered. Instead, he felt he’d been asleep for twenty-four hours.

  The fire in the fireplace had been lit. It was very early; he was looking between folds of bed curtains to the window beyond which, in the dawnish-looking sky, a pale sliver of moon was still visible.

  He could, he knew, get early morning tea merely by pressing a button inlaid on the side table.

  My God, what a life. He thought What a life every time he visited Melrose Plant’s ancestral home because each time the sheer sumptuousness of it hit him with another small shock.