He almost laughed. “Richard Jury.”
This did not satisfy the eyebrows, which stayed up.
“Superintendent, New Scotland Yard CID.”
Still not satisfied, but she did use words. “And how do you come to be at our crime scene, Superintendent?”
Chilten—who was enjoying the little contretemps enormously, as Jury had known he would—offered: “The kid, Benny Keegan, called him. Benny found the body.”
She nodded. “Who’ve we got here?”
One of the crime scene technicians handed her a wallet. “His name’s Billy Maples.”
She looked through it, at the driver’s license, the credit cards, whatever bits and bobs were stuffed in it, then took out the license and handed the wallet to Ron.
DI Aguilar then turned to Benny, who, with Sparky, had been hovering by Phyllis. “You’re Benny,” she said.
“Yes, sir—uh—mu’m.”
“And you?” She was addressing Sparky.
“His name’s Sparky.” Phyllis said this. “And I’m Doctor Phyllis Nancy. Pathologist.”
Get over it. That’s what Jury heard Phyllis saying.
“And has the dog given up anything useful?”
Benny’s eyes narrowed. “On’y his dinner. We been here for a goodish hour, y’know.” Then he repeated what he’d told Jury and Ron Chilten.
Lu Aguilar thanked him quite simply. “You can go, Benny, but I may want to talk to you later. And I’ll expect you to keep mum about all this.”
Jury could imagine how mum Benny would keep once he got back to his friends and cohorts beneath Waterloo Bridge. “Mum” would take a dive straight into the Thames.
But the boy nodded obediently.
Phyllis said, “Come on, Benny; I’ll give you a ride home. You and Sparky.” She turned to Aguilar. Although Phyllis’s tone was frosty, her hair seemed to be on fire. “You’ll have your own pathologist. I’ve told DS Chilten my findings.”
He’d seen her hair spark before. He’d never seen it go up in flames. Her smile could have followed. Phyllis did not wait to be excused. She said to Jury, “I’ll see you tomorrow, I expect.”
“I expect so.” He felt quietly uncomfortable about his private life leaking into his public one. Then felt immediately remorseful for the thought. If there was anyone who respected privacy and knew the need to keep one’s work separate, it was Phyllis.
They left with Sparky.
Ron filled DI Aguilar in on what had been discovered up to that point.
“So where was the dinner companion?”
“Coffee companion, more, who might have been the murderer.”
He nodded toward Snow, who was sitting on a side chair. “That’s the waiter, Gilbert Snow, the one that brought up the dinner. Then Benny Keegan brings up coffee at ten-ten.” Chilten looked at his notes.
“Call him over,” she said, nodding toward the waiter.
Ron did.
She could, reflected Jury, have walked over to Snow.
The old waiter repeated to DI Aguilar the same story he had told Jury. Then he asked her if he could leave.
“Been a long day, I’m not up to this kind of thing.” He pounded his chest softly. “Dodgy heart, like.”
She smiled at him, nodded. He left.
Ron was talking. “I guess what I’m wondering is, if Maples was murdered between dinner and coffee, where was the shooter when Benny came along? I mean, could he still have been here?”
“If they’re all telling the truth,” said DI Aguilar, before turning to exchange words with the two crime scene technicians who had yet to leave. “Anything?”
“Things, yes, but nothing to nail down, m’um. We’re through here. I mean except for Connie. He’s in the bathroom putting the drain back together.”
Aguilar nodded and watched them go. They moved quietly, as if to keep from disturbing the air around her, as if it too might be needed for future examination. Then she turned back to Jury and Chilten.
Chilten frowned. “By they, you mean—?”
“The two room service waiters and the desk clerk,” said Aguilar.
Chilten flipped through his notes and it seemed to take forever.
“Okay. Snow brings up the food at nine, he said.” Ron stopped to indicate the remnants of the supper. “Hamburger, chips, whatever that salad is.”
“House salad,” said Aguilar. She’d picked up the room service menu, which she now opened and pointed to.
Jury smiled. Perhaps it was Aguilar’s moment of domesticity that made him smile.
Chilten went on: “Say Gilbert Snow left about nine, Maples had about fifteen minutes of eating, maybe more, when whoever he was to meet gets here. Presumably our shooter. Then Benny shows up at ten and finds the body. Desk clerk puts Maples coming in around eight-thirty. There’s confirmation between the two of them. I don’t think they could be lying.”
“The chef would have to be lying too,” Jury said. “Or whoever prepared this food. It’s only a burger but I still think it was carefully arranged, with all of those little china pots of condiments.” Mustard, relish, and ketchup had been laid on with a heavy hand.
Aguilar smiled. Or smirked. “Why’s that? It could have been anyone. Snow himself. It’s only a burger and chips.”
Jury shook his head.
Aguilar nodded. “Check with the kitchen, Ron. The restaurant here is supposed to be really hot, so the superintendent is probably right about the painstaking presentation. And bag this stuff.”
“The meal? Why?” asked Ron.
“Why not? You never know.” She turned to Jury.
“You’re afraid that Benny might have walked in on the killer? That he might still have been here?”
“Possibly.”
She said, “But the boy wouldn’t have stood around, surely. When he saw the body he ran out.”
“No. He called me. From here. Benny’s not exactly the type of lad to run.” Jury looked around the room. “The killer might have thought Benny had seen something, if he was still here, and that’s a big if. Our shooter might have forgotten something—but this is useless speculation.”
“That’s it, m’um,” said the technician who must’ve been Connie, coming out of the bathroom.
Chilten nodded. “If you don’t need me, I’m off.” He stuck a cigarette in his mouth, not lighting it. “You need a lift?”
“No, thanks, Ron,” said Jury. “I think I’ll walk for a while. Helps me think.”
“I’ll take him,” said Aguilar, looking at neither of them and dismissing Jury’s comment about walking. The ones remaining now were the two who were about to move the body into a body bag.
Ron Chilten gave Jury a brief salute and left the room, together with Connie. Conrad, probably.
What Aguilar was doing was having a long look at the food on the table. With a ballpoint pen she raised the uneaten half of the hamburger, let it drop. She looked at the potatoes, poked the salad. “I’ll bet that mayonnaise is homemade.”
The scene-of-crime fellows were still waiting for a signal to proceed, but she was still taken up with the food. “I’m surprised he got a burger and chips. I’m surprised he could get it, to tell the truth. Looking at what’s on the menu.” She shook her head. “Everything’s half eaten.”
“I noticed.”
She nodded and gave him a long, considering look.
But he knew it was a thought, not him, she was considering. “Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“No. He was interrupted.”
“But—” She frowned, made a foray again with the pen. Then she shrugged, and they moved out onto the patio. She looked down at the body and the two technicians looked inquiringly at her. She nodded. They zipped up the bag, moved it to a stretcher, and bore it away.
“Billy,” she said as if tasting the name for the first time. “That’s how he signed the card downstairs. Not William or Bill.” She was poking the ballpoint in a large ashtray that held coins, matches, and a room
card. She slipped the pen through a matchbook cover and raised it. “Dust. It’s that club over the road there.” She tilted her head and made as if to look out over the dark balcony. “He’d been there, according to the desk clerk.”
“Tonight?”
She nodded. “After a gallery show he went to and before he came back here for his late supper.”
Ah. Here was another reason to hate her: that she’d been more efficient than he himself. The first reason was her beauty.
Lu Aguilar started to walk around the room, trailing her long fingers over the backs of the chairs, inspecting the old books the hotel provided, looking at paintings, less like a detective seeking evidence than a woman sizing up a property to see if it pleased her. Then she was back to stand beside him. “He met someone here, or was to, who might not necessarily have been his killer.”
Jury shook his head. “I’d think that’s exactly whom he met: someone he’d mistakenly thought to be his friend. He’d ordered coffee for two. What makes you think there was a third party?”
She didn’t answer that; instead she raised the pen on which the matchbook swung like a little gate in a wind.
“Let’s go.”
“There?”
“Dust. Come on.”
FOUR
He knew better than to try to buy her a drink. Probably a stickler for procedure. If she’d been there with the authority to do it, she’d have tossed him out on his arse after that Hester Street business.
“Whiskey, rocks.” She ordered this up from the Adonis of a barman. She turned to Jury, raised her eyebrows. “You?”
So much for the stickler. “The same. No ice. You like ice in it? I thought that was largely an American perversion.”
“I do. Where have you been? Ice is in.”
He put his fingers in a bowl of mixed nuts and palmed a few into his mouth. The barman slid two chunky glasses toward them. When Aguilar went for the bag slung across her chair, Jury put his hand on her arm and shook his head.
“Let me.” He pulled out his wallet. The barman named a sum that would renovate the Tower and Jury slapped down a bill.
She raised her glass. “Just like a real date. Thanks.”
Of course the tone was sardonic, but he still smiled.
She drew Billy Maples’s driver’s license from her coat pocket. “Have you seen him in here?”
The barman glanced at it, shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Have you been here all evening?”
He nodded. “Came on at six o’clock.”
As far as Jury was concerned, the barman was the type who routinely lied to the police. Just second nature. “What’s your name?”
“Matt.”
It would be. Jury took the license and shoved it up to his face. “He comes here a lot. Suppose we look again.”
Matt glanced from Jury to Aguilar and back. “You the police?” When Jury nodded, Matt went on. “What’s he done? What do you want him for.”
“Nothing,” said Aguilar. “He’s dead.”
Matt’s quick eyes went back from Aguilar to Jury as if he knew what dead meant in this case. “He was murdered?”
“Why do you think that?”
Now he regained some of his former insouciance. “Come on, you’re police. You wouldn’t be doing this for some bloke who went into cardiac arrest.”
“The Zetter, across the road, I’m sure you know it, says he had been in here earlier. So who else was working here? I mean besides you and the general rave-ups?” She inclined her head toward the group—guitars, drums, keyboard—making something that wasn’t exactly music.
“You could try Ty Haigh. He’s one of the guys at the bar out there, where you came in. He might know him.” Matt looked down at the license, still lying on the bar.
Aguilar rolled off her bar stool.
Straight-faced, Jury asked, “You want to dance?”
That earned him a look he wouldn’t soon forget. He spread his hands. “You’re the one who said it was a date.”
“Yeah, that’s Billy Maples,” said Ty Haigh, whose muscular arms were on display in a sleeveless vest, “and he’s a friend. I’ve known him for a year or so.” He was working on a champagne bottle, loosening the wire from around the cork. “Why?” He smiled broadly, which made his face even handsomer.
Jury wondered if looks were one of the top criteria for working here.
Ty added, “He’s not in trouble, is he?”
Aguilar pocketed the license and said, “No. He’s out of trouble now.”
“Meaning?” Ty had stopped smiling.
Jury hated that swift change in a look, always did, and cut it short. “I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
“Christ.” Ty breathed this out.
“You knew him well?” asked Jury.
Ty nodded vaguely and then seemed to want to take it back, that or he really wasn’t sure about how well he knew Billy Maples. He said, “I’m an artist. This job buys canvas and paint, not much else. The gallery, the one near Smithfield Market, it’s called Melville Gallery. They had the showing today; they’ve shown my work. That’s how I met him, Billy. He donates a lot of money to it; he’s—he was—a very generous fellow. You could always count on Billy. God.” He propped his elbows on the bar, leaned his head into his hands. “I can’t believe it.” Jury thought he might be going to cry, but he looked up at them, dry eyed.
“He had money, then?” said Aguilar.
Ty nodded. “Family money, I gathered. He certainly seemed to. Didn’t work or anything.”
Aguilar had her notebook out and a pen uncapped. A fountain pen. Jury hadn’t seen one in years.
She said, “Where do they live, his family?”
“In…Kent? No, East Sussex, I think. Somewhere in East Sussex, not far from the coast.”
“What do you know about them, except that they’re rich?”
“Next to nothing. He never talked about them, didn’t much like them is what I thought. Except his grandfather, who he seemed really fond of. And I think there was a grandmother he liked. Not a couple, I mean one on his father’s side, one on his mother’s.”
“Do they live in Sussex?”
“No. London. The grandfather lives in Chelsea, I think. So did Billy. Near Sloane Square. He didn’t really talk much about himself. We talked about art, mostly.” Ty laughed and then abruptly stopped, apparently thinking it the wrong time for laughter. “He didn’t know all that much, though.”
“He had a flat in Sloane Street is our information.”
“Right.” Ty looked off across the room, oddly silent in this part of the club. “The war.”
“What?” said Jury.
“The Second World War. Billy was fascinated by that period. He was always going off to the War Museum, that place in Lambeth? It had something to do with his granddad—the war did, I mean. He was some kind of code expert?”
Jury stared at him. “Wait. The grandfather: he wouldn’t be Sir Oswald Maples, would he?”
Ty thought. “I don’t remember Billy ever saying. He just referred to him as granddad. Said he had an important job during the war, breaking codes, or something.”
“Who is this?” DI Aguilar asked Jury.
“Sir Oswald Maples played a significant part in codes and ciphers. He was at Bletchley.”
Ty looked blank. “What’s that?”
Were we ever really this young? wondered Jury.
Aguilar said, “They were code breakers, weren’t they? Top secret stuff. Bletchley Park was where they gathered.”
Jury nodded.
“And you know him? This Oswald Maples?”
Again, Jury nodded.
“Good,” said Aguilar. To Ty she said, “We’ll probably want to talk to you again. Give me a number.”
He did, together with a Clerkenwell address. “The place is getting too rich for my blood,” he added.
She capped her pen, stowed it and the notebook in her bag. Smiled. “Move to Wandsworth. That’ll thin
your blood out.”
Ty laughed and again abruptly stopped.
Aguilar and Jury headed out the door.
“Car’s over there,” she said. “In St. John.”
They walked along Clerkenwell Road.
Clerkenwell was becoming more trendy with each passing day, more upscale, more of a draw to the young professionals. It was just on the boundary of the City, where he had of late been spending a lot of his time. It was also one part of Islington, where he spent less time, though Islington was home.
“We’ll need to see his flat tomorrow.”
“Maples’s? We? I was under the impression I was intruding.”
“You are. But it turns out you know everyone. What choice do I have?”
Was she trying not to smile? Jury said, “God, but it’s a bitch, isn’t it, to have to ask Scotland Yard CID for help?”
“I didn’t say I needed help; I said you know everyone. It saves time if you do the interviewing of the grandfather.”
She had stopped by a gray Fiat, a car that Jury had always thought a joke. “You live in Islington, correct?”
He was mildly surprised. “Yes, but how did you know?”
“I know a lot about you. Have you forgotten? You were splashed all over the news not long ago. Get in.”
They took St. John Street to Islington High Street and Upper Street, made a few right turns and came to his street.
“Right here.”
She pulled up, braked, and before Jury could say thanks or good night, she was out of the car.
He watched her walk around to the pavement, stand for a moment looking in at him. When he didn’t get out, she threw out her arms in a fine gesture of impatience.
Jury got out of the car, puzzled. “What?”
“You’ve got the keys.” She turned and walked up the front steps.
When he stopped being stunned, or pretending to himself he was, he followed and unlocked the front door.
“Which floor?”
“The next.”
“Thank God. I’m too tired to climb more than one flight.”
Jury smiled as they walked up that flight. He had the impression she’d have climbed to the top floor, if need be.
Dust Page 3
