Vertigo 42
Page 32
Jury returned to Phyllis.
Phyllis picked up her glass. Her other hand lay against the shoulder of the black dress. Her nails were a deep pink, that unusual pink Carole-anne had been applying to her own nails. This surprised Jury into saying, “Hotsie-Tot—.” Almost saying. His mind swerved. It was like dropping his hands from the wheel of a car or a boat and having the thing jerk away out of control and then grabbing it back. “My God, Phyllis—” He rose suddenly.
“Richard, what’s the matter?”
“It just came to me.” He yanked out his mobile. Dead, all the power eaten up with the last call. “Hell.”
She opened her small purse and pulled out hers and handed it to him.
“Thanks. Pardon me again for just a minute.” He hurried over to the small reception area and put in a call to Wiggins.
When Wiggins answered, Jury told him what he wanted and where to get it. “First thing in the morning, Wiggins. Thanks.”
Heading back to the table, he saw one of the waiters with another cooler and another bottle of champagne. Closer, he saw it was a Krug. The other kind, vintage.
“Compliments of Mr. Williamson, sir. Should I pour?”
There were also two fresh glasses.
“Pour, by all means.”
The waiter did so, saying, “I’ll have your smoked salmon in just a few minutes.” He moved away.
“Do you think you’ll remain stationary for at least ten minutes. I am your date. Remember me?”
“I remember you, all right.” Jury raised his glass. “Thank God for the girls.”
____
One of the girls was waiting for him when he got back, very late, to his flat in Islington. For once, he was glad he hadn’t talked Phyllis into coming with him when Carole-anne turned up in the doorway he had come through only two minutes before.
“Wow!” he said, seeing the orange-and-hot-pink outfit so winningly displayed. “Hotsie-Totsie!”
“It is, isn’t it?” She gave a twirl so that he could take in all of the angles. “I love it. How do I look?”
“Juicy. As if you didn’t know.”
“I couldn’t believe you actually went and got this for me.” Her look was a little chagrined.
“Not bad. For a man.”
She sat down on his sofa and smoothed out the skirt. It was exactly the color of her nail polish. “Delivered this evening right to my door. What service! But I don’t think she was a regular delivery person.”
“She?”
“Tawny-haired, really pretty. I mean, a raving beauty.”
Consider it done. She’d done it herself. He smiled. “Glad you like it.”
Carole-anne crossed her legs, swung her strappy sandal, and said, “So who was she?”
Bloomsbury
Sunday, 11:00 A.M.
64
* * *
Kenneth Strachey looked even more displeased today than he had the day before at the sight of Jury and Wiggins on his doorstep. “Gentlemen, this is beginning to amount to harassment.”
“Really?” said Jury. “But we haven’t said anything yet.”
“The case against me is closed, Superintend—what are you doing?”
“Coming in.” Jury and Wiggins crowded past Strachey. It was the load each carried that made the crossing difficult.
Strachey stared at the plastic-bagged clothing. “You picked up your cleaning on the way here?”
“No, sir,” said Wiggins. “We picked up yours.” He deposited his load of garments on the sofa and relieved Jury of his, which he tossed on a chair. He separated the plastic covering from the garments and then the garments themselves. The black jacquard dress with the deep pink lining was nestled between a fawn corduroy jacket and a suit of windowpane plaid.
Kenneth stiffened. “Where did this come from?”
“As I said, we picked it up for you,” said Wiggins, smiling insincerely. “Your cleaner is open on Sunday.”
“I mean, the dress. It doesn’t belong here.” He shrugged. “That cleaner’s always mixing things up. Obviously, he got someone else’s cleaning in with ours.” Kenneth poured himself more tea from the pot on the coffee table and sat down on the sofa.
“Nice try, Mr. Strachey. But you may remember I was here when you were holding this bundle of clothes and told me your dry cleaner was only open until three on Sunday. I saw this garment, or a bit of it, and assumed it was some fancy jacket, dinner or smoking. As to where the dress originally came from? It came from Alexander McQueen in Bond Street, same place the little purse came from. Since the dress is now here, one might assume you bought it—”
Strachey’s smug expression lasted only until Jury added, “Or had Austin buy it.”
“Someone calling my name?” fluted Austin, entering from the rose-bedecked patio, brushing at his shirt. “It’s started to rain. Police again? How devastatingly wonder— Oh, my God!” He had by now taken in the dress. “Kenneth—?” He was looking from Jury to Wiggins to Kenneth a little wildly.
“Never mind, Austin,” said Kenneth.
Jury said, “You yourself got the red Givenchy in Paris because you knew it would be simple for police to trace it in London, if it ever came to that. You didn’t think it would come to it, though, since you didn’t think we’d connect you with Belle Syms.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; if I’d wanted Arabella to wear a certain dress, I’d’ve had her go round and try it on, surely.”
“Surely not. Not in this case. You’d have needed to try it on yourself first, to see if you could get away with it. That’s the reason you wanted two very memorable dresses. If one didn’t work, the other would. “So on one of Austin’s visits to Alexander McQueen, you had him pick out a dress—”
Kenneth shook his head. “Absolutely not! Austin had nothing to do with this dress—”
“Oh, but I think he did, Mr. Strachey. You certainly wouldn’t have chosen it.”
“Why not?” said Kenneth, walking straight into an admission of guilt.
Jury smiled. “All you have to do is look at it. It’s gorgeous; the material is exquisite. But it’s what’s called a pencil dress. It would fit like the paper on your wall. It might have fit Belle Syms—”
“It would have.”
“But not you, Kenneth, and you were the one the dress had to fit. It was clever, sending the dress to the cleaners instead of trying to dispose of it in some other way. It could have stayed there for a long time. As for the shoes, you must have practiced a good deal to be able to manage those heels. At the tower, you put on Belle’s other low-heeled ones in order to carry the body. You’ve got slender hands; probably slender feet. And I recall Austin commenting on how well you played the part of Lady Bracknell in Earnest.” Jury paused. “Come on, Kenneth, make it easy on yourself and just tell us the rest of the story.”
“Make it easy for you, I think you mean.”
“It’s already easy for me; we have a genius of an artist at the Yard. All I have to do is get him to put makeup and a black wig on your picture and show it around to the places you visited in Sidbury. Believe me, we’ll have an ID within an hour. And if not easy for yourself, how about Austin? You don’t want to incriminate him, do you? Right now he’s an accessory and he’s looking at serious prison time.” Hearing a gasp from the direction of the fireplace where Austin was huddled in the chair by the plaster figure wearing the fez, Jury looked at Wiggins, nodded his head toward Austin. “Have a word, Wiggins.”
Wiggins led Austin out on the patio to have that word.
Jury looked at Kenneth, who was no longer drinking tea, and who was staring at the floor. “Here’s what I think: I think Zack Syms, who was looking for Belle’s aunt, got in your way, or his dog did. Syms lost Stanley on Monday night. We know this because the dog turned up at the house of a friend of mine. Syms was very attached to Stanle
y and wouldn’t give up looking for him. Possibly, the man or the dog saw you at the tower—”
Wiggins and Austin came back to the living room, Austin looking bloodless, drained of strength. When Kenneth saw him, he sat back and with a seeming sense of relief, began talking:
“That damnable dog came racing out of the shadows toward the tower and I just escaped getting its teeth clamped round my leg. I kicked at it, but it went on barking. It was wearing a collar, and the collar had a lead attached. This really worried me because there must have been a person on the other end of that lead. But where? I saw, heard nobody. It struck me that someone should have been calling for the dog. Not a sound. Not a glimmer of the dog’s owner. The cottage was still dark, no one there, apparently, so I thought it unlikely the dog belonged to whoever lived there.
“I managed to get to my car, and the dog gave up. I drove back to the Sun and Moon, gathered up Arabella’s stuff from the room, shoved a hundred pounds under the brass bell, and left. I was back in Bloomsbury by four A.M. Austin sleeps like the dead. I couldn’t, so at six A.M., I tossed on my robe and was making coffee when he appeared and obviously had no idea I’d been gone half the night.” Kenneth’s smile was almost fond.
“But then you went back, and more than once.”
“Every day—until I found him.”
Jury interrupted. “What happened at the Blue Parrot?”
Kenneth frowned. “The which?”
“A pub just off the Northampton Road where Mr. Syms was seen that Tuesday afternoon.”
“Oh, that place: I picked up his car on the Old Post Road and followed him. He kept stopping and getting out and looking round. He went back to that pub twice. Made following pretty hard. The second time I took a shot at him when he was getting into his car. I’m a bad shot, not at all like Pop. It’s his gun.”
“Too bad for you,” said Wiggins, which earned him a look from Jury.
“Early Saturday morning I got back to the village, drove around it for over an hour before I saw his car pulled up and parked on a side street near the alley behind those shops. The guy started running and disappeared into the alley. I pulled over, got out of the car. There was no one else about; the shops were still closed. He was in the middle of the alley, down with the dog, hugging him for dear life . . .”
The expression on his face said that he had no idea how a bond could exist between man and animal. “Didn’t you ever have a dog, then?” Jury said.
“Me? No.” Kenneth gave him a black look, gave all of them black looks, including Austin, who’d been trying to shrink small between the black plaster boy in the fez and the fireplace.
“I shot at them, didn’t I? Both of them. Two shots that did nothing but nick the alley wall, but that got this guy up on his feet and the dog running toward me. I shot at the dog and missed, but turned him back; my last shot was at the guy, whose back was to me for that moment. The shot took him down. Naturally, I wanted to get closer to make sure he was dead, but with the dog there, I could see that was impossible. The gun was a .38 with only five shots and I’d used them. I ran.”
“For one who’d so carefully thought things through at the beginning, this was extremely reckless behavior—tracking Zack Syms down and shooting him.”
“Perhaps. But I could control the beginning; I couldn’t control the end.”
Austin was sitting with his head in his hands. He might have been silently weeping.
“As for Tess, you have no evidence for my killing Tess Williamson.”
“As you yourself said, it’s like dominoes, Kenneth,” said Jury. “Knock over one and the others follow in its wake. We’ve pretty much covered your murder of Tess; whether you admit to it or not, I know you did it. What reason would there have been for killing Belle Syms other than that she knew something extremely incriminating? You admitted you’d been to Laburnum the day Tess died; you knew about the letter. That’s established. Only, you didn’t put that letter under the door, she did, in the little time left before you killed her. Of course you killed her. You didn’t see Tom Williamson.”
For some odd reason Kenneth took this as a question rather than a statement and answered it with a shake of his head.
“So we’re arresting you, Mr. Strachey, for the murders of Arabella Hastings, Zachariah Syms, and Tess Williamson. Wiggins—” Jury nodded toward Kenneth Strachey.
“Right, guv.” Wiggins took the handcuffs he’d had under his belt and walked behind Strachey, handcuffing him as he read him his rights. He looked toward Austin, raised a silent question with Jury.
Jury nodded. “Mr. Smythe, you’ll come along with us, okay? You’d probably be very helpful.”
Kenneth Strachey offered no resistance. Austin rose from his chair and went to join them.
Seeing Austin’s distress, Jury said, “We know you had nothing to do with any of this, Mr. Smythe . . .” Closer now, Jury could see that parading down along the three buttons of Austin’s T-shirt was a placket covered with a design of tiny skulls. Jury smiled. “. . . Except perhaps for your fondness for Alexander McQueen.”
Then, as if ushering Kenneth and Austin into a formal dining room rather than the rainy day, Jury swept out his arm.
“Shall we?”
They left in the wake of the air stirred by that sweeping gesture.
Acknowledgments
* * *
My deepest thanks go to:
RSPCA Chief Inspectorate Officer Kevin Degenhard
Dr. Elizabeth Martin
Debra LaPrevotte, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI
About the Author
* * *
Bestselling author Martha Grimes is the author of more than thirty books, including twenty-two Richard Jury mysteries. She is also the author of Double Double, a dual memoir of alcoholism written with her son. The winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award, Grimes lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Martha-Grimes
ALSO BY MARTHA GRIMES
RICHARD JURY SERIES
The Man with a Load of Mischief
The Old Fox Deceiv’d
The Anodyne Necklace
The Dirty Duck
Jerusalem Inn
Help the Poor Struggler
The Deer Leap
I Am the Only Running Footman
The Five Bells and Bladebone
The Old Silent
The Old Contemptibles
The Horse You Came in On
Rainbow’s End
The Case Has Altered
The Stargazey
The Lamorna Wink
The Blue Last
The Grave Maurice
The Winds of Change
The Old Wine Shades
Dust
The Black Cat
ANDI OLIVER SERIES
Biting the Moon
Dakota
EMMA GRAHAM SERIES
Hotel Paradise
Cold Flat Junction
Belle Ruin
Fadeaway Girl
NOVELS, SHORT STORIES, AND POETRY
Send Bygraves
The End of the Pier
The Train Now Departing
Foul Matter
The Way of All Fish
MEMOIR
Double, Double
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