Vertigo 42

by Martha Grimes

  “Perfectly all right with me, Superintendent, though I don’t think I can add anything to what I told Sergeant Wiggins. Tea?”

  “That would be nice, as long as you’re serving the crème fraîche tarts.”

  Kenneth was much amused. “You pick up on everything you hear?”

  “No. I just find your friend Austin memorable.”

  Kenneth laughed. “Come through to the kitchen.” With a wide and wind-milling motion of his arm, he motioned for Jury to follow him.

  Jury did. When he saw the kitchen he said, “God, but this looks right out of a Smallbone’s advert.”

  Kenneth filled an electric kettle, spooned tea leaves into a china pot. “No. There are different pieces here. The Aga is the best of the lot. I love it. I always wanted to be a chef. That drives my father crazy.” He moved to the big butcher-block island, where Jury sat on a tall stool, and clattered two cups into saucers. He placed these on a tray, together with a sugar bowl.

  Everything was fine china and everything matched. No mugs from the Burnhams here, Jury thought, wistfully. “I hope you don’t mind covering some of the same ground as you did with Sergeant Wiggins.”

  “Not at all.”

  “It’s about that day at Laburnum—”

  “That’s always been a mystery.”

  “You think so?”

  Kenneth smiled. “Well, so do you, I take it, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Why was everyone doing his job for him?

  The kettle screamed and Kenneth switched it off. He poured water into the waiting teapot and sat down across from Jury. They both looked at the teapot, as if it would steep the faster for being watched.

  “Let’s take this through to the other room. Wait, milk.” Kenneth went to the stainless steel fridge, got out a pint of milk, filled a small jug, and brought it back. “Carry the pot, will you?” He picked up the tray, and they went back to the living room.

  Kenneth poured out the tea and shoved cup and saucer and milk and sugar across to Jury.

  Jury added milk and a lump of sugar from the irregular little lumps that looked sandblasted or excavated from some sugar mine. Probably cost ten times what his regular sugar did. He said, “There’s also the death of Tess Williamson.”

  Kenneth frowned. “Now, that I never considered a mystery. She fell down those stone steps—”

  “That’s one theory.”

  “Oh? There are others?”

  “Yes, or I wouldn’t be here.” Jury tried to keep his tone from being too snarky.

  “I don’t understand. If not an accident, what?”

  “Then the only choices are suicide and murder.”

  Kenneth stared at him, putting his cup back in its saucer, contents undrunk. “Tess a suicide? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why is that?”

  Kenneth picked up the smallest of three small elephants and held it. “Because I don’t want to.”

  Jury liked that answer. He drank his tea. “Did she ever strike you as being unhappy?”

  Kenneth shook his head and ran his thumb over the elephant, back and forth. “No, but then she wouldn’t show that around us, would she? She tried very hard to make us happy.”

  “Did Hilda Palmer ever indicate that she knew something about Tess Williamson?”

  Kenneth’s brief laugh was derisive. “Hilda into one of her little blackmailing schemes? No, she didn’t. But Tess wouldn’t have paid any attention to Hilda Palmer.” He picked up his cup, tasted the tea, set it down again, put his hand on the teapot. “I can’t stand lukewarm tea.” He picked up the pot and went back to the kitchen.

  Jury looked at the little parade of elephants: the more bejeweled small one that Kenneth had put back in its place; the middle one, with its bright green eyes; the plainer large one. It was as if the elephant, as it grew, was shedding topaz skin and emerald eyes. Coming to terms with reality, perhaps. Jury studied the room. It was an expensive room, and he imagined “Pop” had sprung for this lot, fond as he was of the British Raj.

  He felt the room’s charm, but more by way of being held captive than beguiled. The brilliant-winged bird in the painting made him think of the Blue Parrot and Trevor Sly’s poorer, but more painstaking attempt, to make a strange and out-of-reach landscape familiar and close by, with his movie posters and creaking fans and little boxes of camel matches. Jury thought of faces behind fans, figures behind screens, and the skittery sound of beaded curtains. “It’s all appearances,” he heard Dennis Jenkins saying. “No bloody reality.”

  But that, he thought, was a Romantic notion. There was a reality; you just had to scrape for it, like scratching away the imitation jewels on the littlest elephant. He had moved over to the fireplace, where there was only the black grate. He thought of Forster and the Marabar Caves, which the doctor had shown the teacher who later betrayed him.

  All of this reflection took only the five minutes or so that Kenneth Strachey was in the kitchen boiling up water and pouring it over fresh tea leaves.

  Now he was back, offering tea. He had also brought a plate of pistachio biscuits. “Homemade.” Kenneth smiled and poured the tea.

  “I think it’s pretty obvious, myself, that Tess Williamson’s death was no accident, given the forensic details. And if it wasn’t suicide—although I’m not convinced it wasn’t—she must have been murdered. Can you think of any reason for that?”

  “My God, of course not. Except for the Palmers, the mother, who was furious that Tess was acquitted, I can’t think of any reason.”

  “Did she betray someone?” Jury could not have said why he asked this; the linkage was not wholly conscious. The rightness of the question was certainly questionable.

  Except for its effect on Kenneth Strachey. His expression should have been caught in paint or bronze or at least a photograph. It was there and gone in two seconds. Jury could not penetrate it. Only he had an impression of something caving in, which led his mind back to the Marabar Caves and Dr. Aziz. (He wondered how he could suddenly remember the name, the details of this story, much less what Forster’s story had to do with the here and now.)

  But Strachey, if he indeed had been thrown completely off balance, regained it very quickly. He gave a kind of choked laugh. “Good God, Superintendent. You mean her husband? Did she betray him?”

  “No.” Jury had to admire Strachey’s recovery. Most people would have said, “What do you mean?” And Jury didn’t know exactly what he did mean. But he knew it wasn’t Tom Williamson. “No. Not her husband.”

  Strachey frowned. “Hilda Palmer. Hilda was the person set on betrayal.” Strachey had the air of one no longer standing on shifting sands. “As I told Sergeant Wiggins. No one liked Hilda Palmer, including myself.”

  “Me. People are always making that error.” Jury smiled.

  That little foray into grammar threw Strachey completely off guard again, and Jury took advantage of it. “Tell me, which one of you did it?”

  From Strachey’s expression, this time anger, not the other thing, Jury knew Strachey was aware that he might lose control of an interview he had clearly thought he would control. He now looked as if he’d jump up and exit as theatrically as had Austin.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he made light of it. “You’re trying to catch me out, Superintendent. Now, why do you think that one of us shoved Hilda?”

  “Because Tess Williamson didn’t do it.”

  “Well . . . there was that friend, that woman who was more or less keeping an eye on us—”

  Jury shook his head. “Elaine Davies didn’t even know Hilda Palmer.”

  “Again, Hilda’s death was ruled an accident—”

  “No. It was an open verdict. But some of the evidence said Hilda was pushed. I think it was one of you kids who pushed her. Or perhaps more than one of you.”

  It was almost as if a sir
occo had swept across the room and they’d now have to deal with this unexplained drift of sand at their feet.

  There was no more to be gotten out of Kenneth Strachey, and Jury blamed himself for his own missteps at the end of that interview. He left a few minutes later, when Austin returned, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt imprinted with a rococo design of red and black. Jury realized after a second look, the design was a skull. Austin went out to the patio.

  Outside, Jury stood and looked around, rather aimlessly, for he was thinking not of Bloomsbury but of India and the Marabar Caves.

  He could not get that image out of his mind.

  Hyde Park and Cadogan Gardens

  Sunday, 3:00 P.M.

  35

  * * *

  Why had he asked that question about betrayal?

  Why had Kenneth Strachey’s reaction been so anxious? Panic-stricken, really?

  And why did he keep thinking about Forster’s novel and the Marabar Caves?

  It disturbed Jury that the question about betrayal had no source. But of course it had to have a source; he just didn’t know what it was.

  Jury was sitting on a Hyde Park bench, trying to empty his mind and then see what floated to the surface. What came up was the Blue Parrot. Of course, the posters of A Passage to India. But there was more, surely, to the connection than a film poster.

  The Marabar Caves. The woman claiming the good doctor who had befriended her had raped her when they’d visited the caves. He hadn’t, but he was an Indian and she was a white Englishwoman. Who was more likely to be believed? It was a rather wonderful metaphor for colonialism. All of those well-heeled and self-righteous Brits demanding service and servitude.

  His mind returned to Trevor Sly and the Blue Parrot. Stanley. Tess Williamson. The lady in red. Stanley. How could there be any connection among those three things? A shot rang out and killed Stanley’s handler.

  Jury’s mobile jumped around in his pocket. It was Wiggins.

  “I’m still looking for Belle Syms, guv. Syms was her married name. We want her maiden name.”

  “Of course. Get hold of Chief Inspector Brierly and see if he’s got that information. Or, no, better yet, I’ll call the aunt, Blanche Vesta.”

  Wiggins rang off and Jury still sat, thinking. “We all seem to hate our given names, especially girls.” That had been Mundy speaking. Madeline, Mundy; Veronica, Nicki; Arabella . . . Belle?

  Jury pulled out his mobile again, tapped in a number (glad he’d had the presence of mind to put it on his contact list), and when Blanche Vesta answered reintroduced himself and engaged in a few moments of mutual sadness about her niece’s death. And asked if he could see her that evening.

  He thought for a bit and then called Dr. Keener with the same question.

  Then he left the park, walked to Piccadilly, and took a cab to Cadogan Square.

  ____

  Number 11 Cadogan Gardens was quite an opulent little hotel, a lot of velvet, a lot of embossed wallpaper, dark wood, crystal chandeliers. He asked for Andrew Cleary and was shown by a porter into the drawing room.

  Andrew Cleary was seated on one of the many comfortable-looking sofas, reading a paper and drinking tea. Jury walked up to him. “Mr. Cleary?”

  Cleary turned. “Yes? Oh, it’s Superintendent Jury, right?” He rose and shook Jury’s hand. “Let me get some more tea. Or would you like something else, Superintendent?”

  “Tea would be fine.” Jury removed his coat and sat in one of the down-pillowed chairs opposite the sofa.

  Andrew Cleary was a slightly bald, thin man who one could tell had been handsome in his youth. He still had the aquiline nose, the thin, but well-shaped mouth. The light brown eyes, though, had been aged by the puffy skin beneath them, and the skin begun to loosen about the throat. Cleary was probably Tom Williamson’s age, but he looked ten years older.

  “You wanted to talk about Tess Williamson.”

  “I do, yes. Primarily about Laburnum and the children she so often had around her. And the T. S. Eliot poems you gave her.”

  The porter was there and Cleary asked for another pot of tea. He then looked at Jury, puzzled.

  “ ‘La Figlia che Piange,’ in particular.”

  “You speak Italian?” said Cleary.

  “Lord, no. I just speak that.”

  Cleary picked up his cup, took a sip. “Ah, yes. Tess was fascinated by that poem. ‘The double-dealing,’ as she put it.”

  “The poem is all about appearances. The reality was quite something else, wasn’t it? The speaker is interested in the appearance of anguish, not the anguish itself. Yes, I guess you could call that ‘double-dealing.’ ”

  “Interesting. Most people would just take it at face value.”

  “But that is the face value. It’s clearly not a poem about two distraught people parting. He’s giving her directions: stand there; do this; do that. The speaker is telling her how best to project the trauma of a love affair ending. It was he who ended it, but there’s a callous disregard for that ending. The speaker is interested in the woman as some sort of model. He could be a painter. Or a photographer. It’s an artistic experience for him, not an emotional one.”

  Cleary looked impressed. “My word, you’ve really studied that poem. Now, do you think it reflects our relationship? Do you think Tess and I were having an affair?“

  Jury cut him off. “Nothing of the kind, nor do I think your attitude toward her was that of the person speaking in the poem, but—” He stopped talking as the waiter returned with the tea tray, set it down, poured cups for both of them, and left.

  “Tess wasn’t interested in me or any man other than Tom. She told me that she loved him from the moment she saw him.”

  “I believe that,” said Jury as he added some milk and a cube of sugar to his cup. “But I was going to ask, why did this poem interest her so much, since it didn’t really describe anything that related to her?”

  “Betrayal. Tess was fascinated by the idea of betrayal.”

  It came to Jury again, the image of the Marabar Caves. “Was she, then, betrayed?”

  Cleary went on. “Remember Tess of the D’Urbervilles? Tess—the fictional one—was betrayed by Alec d’Urberville and then sought out Angel Clare, who was a young man of very high expectations regarding people and who believed in ultimate goodness. He was, I guess, a secularist. Yet his love for her seemed abstract. It was Tess’s favorite book. Hardy was her favorite author; his novels, his poetry too. There was one she especially liked that pictured a woman looking out to sea. I think it was called ‘The Riddle.’ She was a riddle, Tess; I always felt she was looking over my shoulder, over everyone’s shoulder really, for something that lay just beyond her reach.”

  “What was she looking for?”

  Andrew Cleary shook his head.

  “Do you think it had anything to do with her idea of betrayal?”

  Cleary frowned. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “I mean, something like, oh, one’s giving a child up for adoption. How would she take that?”

  “Well, the circumstances would count—”

  “Why? Can you think of a context for that which wouldn’t be betrayal? Abandoning a cat would be less than abandoning a baby? A cat might mean less than a baby to a person, but aren’t they equal acts of abandonment?”

  “Perhaps so. But by whom was Tess abandoned? Someone like the speaker in the poem?”

  “Or whom did she abandon? Is that who she was looking for?”

  “She wasn’t about to tell me!” rang out Cleary’s answer.

  Sidbury

  Sunday, 7:00 P.M.

  36

  * * *

  Blanche Vesta clapped her hand to her cheek. “Good lord, I should have said!”

  “Don’t blame yourself. There was so much going on—and she was being referr
ed to as ‘Belle,’ which, as you said, was her nickname.”

  Blanche was determinedly apologetic. “Certainly, I do blame myself, withholding such an important bit of information. Arabella never did like her name. Everyone was told to call her ‘Belle’ and if you forgot, she could be quite cheeky.”

  “Is Hastings the family name?”

  “Dad’s name, yes. Oh, I forgot my manners, Mr. Jury. You sit right down by the fire and I’ll fetch you a cup of tea. Water’s nearly on the boil right now.”

  “Please don’t put yourself out, Blanche.”

  “Since when’s a cuppa putting a body out?” She walked away and Jury heard the comforting sounds of a tea ritual: kettle shrieking, cup or mug retrieved from a cupboard, frig opening and closing for milk.

  Jury looked around the room: nothing stylish, nothing pricy. Old photos in round maple frames of cheerless-looking adults and children.

  On another wall, a large poorly wrought painting of a woodland scene, with a not-to-scale deer standing in front of it.

  “Here we are!” called Blanche, so cheerily Jury would have thought she was trying to make up for the grim-looking people in the photographs. She set down an aluminum tray and poured from a teapot covered in tiny pink geraniums into a cup similarly flowered.

  “Sugar?”

  “Just one, thanks.”

  No question arose about milk. Jury accepted the cup, sipped the tea. “You said before that you seldom saw Arabella. So I expect you don’t know much about her friends.”

  Blanche shook her head. But then she stopped. “Wait a tic. Remember, I mentioned a call on her mobile. It was someone calling her—aren’t they dreadful, the way people just stop whatever they’re doing?—and she went to the little foyer there to talk. As if it made any difference to me if it was the bloody queen inviting her to dinner.”

  Jury laughed. “You don’t know who the caller was?”

  “Had to be a man, didn’t it?”