“Thank you.” He didn’t bother telling Kurt Brunner that police had already been to the flat. Glancing at the book in his hands, Jury said, “I don’t imagine one is permitted to borrow books? I’d like to read one or two of these.”
“Oh, take it, by all means. It’s actually mine.”
“Thanks. I’ll get it back to you. When do you leave?”
“In two or three days, I expect.”
“So Billy’s housekeeper—she’ll need to find other work?”
“Mrs. Jessup? She’s the cook. If the new tenant is willing to employ her, then she’d stay.” With an unconvincing try at jocularity, Brunner said, “I don’t expect you know anyone who enjoys a crabbed and hermitlike life? Some James fanatic or other?”
Jury slipped the card into his wallet. “I certainly know someone who leads a crabbed life. As far as Henry James is concerned, I believe he holds contests.”
“Contests?” Brunner was puzzled.
“Something like that.” Jury held out his hand. “Good-bye, Mr. Brunner, and thanks very much.”
He walked to the station in the rain, wondering if other writers’ houses left one feeling this way. He felt drenched, not by the rain, which was light and fitful, but by Henry James, as the train sailed through Kent and passed another line of oasthouses.
He spent the journey reading “The Figure in the Carpet.” It made him wonder about Billy Maples, but he couldn’t work out why it did. It was that feeling that had overtaken him in Lamb House. Perhaps it was Billy’s protean nature that prompted this feeling. Generous to a fault, apparently. A Londoner, and young, and yet he settles in a small village and takes on the tenancy of Lamb House, the tenancy of which includes the maintenance of the house and short tours for visitors.
Jury pulled out his small notebook and some coins when he saw the tea trolley rolling up the aisle. He handed over a five-pound note for a cup of tea and a Cadbury biscuit and told the attendant to keep the change. After the server had given Jury profuse thanks, the trolley rolled on.
What had been the attraction of Lamb House? To saddle one’s self with the job of conducting visitors through its rooms surely bespeaks a commitment to books—and to this man’s books.
Why had Billy gone to the hotel in Clerkenwell? Why had he gone to Our Most Holy Redeemer? Why to Dust?
Dust.
The movement of the train lulled him into a doze. He dreamed about blood snaking down the aisle of his car, and the friendly tea-trolley attendant morphing into Dracula.
THIRTEEN
“Did he tell you anything helpful?” asked Ron Chilten on the phone when Jury told him about that day’s trip to Rye.
“He did. Have the parents identified Billy Maples’s body yet?” “The father did. He took it hard. I didn’t want to ask him a lot of questions right then, so I drove to Sussex and put the questions there. Mum’s actually stepmum, a looker, but a bit of an iceberg. All I got out of them was they couldn’t imagine Billy being involved with anyone who’d do him this harm.”
Jury turned at the sound of a thud against his door. “Hold on while I get the door, Ron—”
It was Stone, Stan Keeler’s dog. Jury looked up the staircase and called to Carole-anne. No Carole-anne. He wondered how Stone had gotten out of Keeler’s flat.
Stone, possibly the calmest and most self-contained dog Jury had ever known—except for Harry Johnson’s Mungo—walked in and quietly settled himself by Jury’s chair. Jury plucked a fake bone from under the sofa table and tossed it to Stone, who caught it in his teeth. “Good move,” said Jury.
“Why? What’d I—”
“Not you, Ron. I was going to say that Billy Maples wasn’t your stereotypical playboy. Not with his taking up the tenancy of Lamb House.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the picture I got from Malcolm.”
Jury waited. No enlightenment. “Who is Malcolm?”
“Oh, I didn’t say? He’s a nephew of Roderick’s. He’s a little villain, Malcolm is. He’s the kind that ties firecrackers to a dog’s tail.”
“He’s a kid?”
“Well, yes. You think Roderick was doing it?”
“Roderick?”
“You know, the father.”
“So is your best source of information a kid?”
“Not really. His specialty is climbing brick walls. Like the one behind the house. Don’t ask me. He’s probably ten but he says he’s twelve. He lies a lot.”
“Just what we need in an informant.”
“Hell, there’s your Benny Keegan. He’s thirteen but you seem to think he’s a font of information.”
Jury thought of The Sacred Fount. He wondered about this vampire theme. “Benny doesn’t tie stuff to his dog’s tail. Benny’s very grown-up. Does this Malcolm live with the Maples family full time?”
“Yeah. If he could, he’d have Roderick tied to a chair while he built a fire under it. Last I saw of Malcolm he was in the garden rappelling a brick wall with Waldo at the other end of the rope. Kind of hanging there.”
“Waldo?”
“That’s the one. At the end of the rope.”
“Ron, who is Waldo?”
“The dog. The cook finally came out and put a stop to it. I’ll say this, though. Malcolm knows something, but he’s not giving it up.” Ron heaved a tired sigh. “I’m not a bloody inch closer to solving this.”
“It happened only two nights ago, Ron.”
“You know as well as I do, it’s the first twenty-four that are crucial. There’s no will, incidentally. Lu talked to the solicitor the family’s been using for years.”
“That’s too bad. He died intestate.”
“Yeah, a mess, but it pretty much removes money as a motive, except maybe the parents, and they seem to have plenty as it is. Have you talked to young Benny since?”
“Yes, last night.”
“You know where he lives? I couldn’t pry it out of him. I was getting ready to have him up on obstruction of justice.”
Jury laughed. “Yes, I know where he lives. No, I’m not telling.”
FOURTEEN
“No,” said Melrose Plant.
“Oh, come on. It’s right up your street. You’re titled and bored.”
“Actually, I’m neither. I sent my title to the moon—as you well know—and how can I be bored with you there hatching plots that only a nutter would involve himself in?”
“Well, you do involve yourself. You went along with Niels Bohr. Like, what are you doing right this minute?”
“Like, I’m reading.”
Jury heard on his end of the phone a rather artificial crackling of paper. “What?”
There was a brief silence. “Hermit News.”
Jury stopped doodling dogs. “I beg your pardon?”
“Hermit News.”
Jury waited. It was like talking to Chilten. “Do you think you could fill me in on that?”
“On what?”
“I’m going to leap through this receiver and kill you.”
Melrose sighed. “It’s Mr. Blodgett’s small newspaper. I got him a subscription.”
Jury waited. Nothing. “You’re probably lying since I can no more believe there’s a Hermit News any more than I could Love Nest in the CID. But just to give you the benefit of the doubt, I’m asking, why would hermits want a newspaper? I mean, doesn’t that somehow go against the very essence of hermithood? I mean, if they’re reading newspapers why not just go for The Times?”
There was a brief (and refreshing) silence as Melrose yawned. “Because it doesn’t have this hermit news in it.”
“Did you know Henry James had a vampire theme?”
“Had a vampire?”
“Not had a vampire, a vampire theme. Haven’t you read The Sacred Fount?”
“No.”
“Well, read it before you go there.”
“I’m not going there. Here’s an interesting little column on the rise of goat farming around Northampton.”
“I’ve
never seen a goat in Northampton.”
“Not in. I said around.”
“In or around, I’ve never seen one.”
“You most certainly have.”
Jury was doodling on a pad he kept by the phone in his flat for apparently that purpose, as he never wrote anything on it. “Oh, you mean your goat.”
“Well, don’t sound so dismissive. He’s a goat after all.”
“Astound.”
“No, his name’s Aghast. The horse is Aggrieved.”
Jury drew horns on the goat he’d just made. “God, I hope you don’t get a bunch of chickens. I’d be hearing names like Annoyed, Announced, Anesthetized—”
“Oh, please. Who’d ever name a chicken Anesthetized?”
“I’m talking to him.” Jury frowned. “Let’s get back to Lamb House. You’d have your own cook”—probably a lie—“and butler, too.” A definite lie.
“I’ve already got my own cook and butler. And hermit, don’t forget. I bet there’s no hermit there.”
Jury balled up the notepaper and aimed it toward the wastebasket. “You can be your own hermit. Lamb House strikes me as a bit of a hermitage.”
“Good, then I can install Mr. Blodgett.”
“Mr. Blodgett. He’d make a great installation at the Tate Modern.” Mr. Blodgett was the elderly man Melrose had taken on as hermit. He was disheveled and wild-looking, although in truth a mild and sweet-dispositioned man. His main purpose was to keep Melrose’s aunt away from Ardry End. His success in this quarter had been spotty. But that was no surprise.
“Anyway,” said Melrose. “What’s the point?”
“Of what?”
“My God! You can’t even keep your mind on your own idea!”
“Oh, yes. The point is you’d find things out.” Jury was doodling a hermit.
“What things?”
“I don’t know, do I? That’s why I want you there.”
A huge sigh. “This is the Met? The Old Bill? The rozzers?”
“The Filth.”
“The Filth. Wot’s protectin’ us from crime and chaos? No wonder you’re the darling of Internal Affairs. You can be as vague as fog.”
“Oh, they don’t mind me anymore. Anyway, I’ll have to be pushing off one of these years. Mandatory retirement, you know. I’ve never understood that rule. Cutting us off when we’re at peak performance.”
Melrose feigned uproarious laughter.
“So that means you’ll do it.” Jury stuck a pole in his hermit’s hand and hung up.
FIFTEEN
Church doors always seemed to thud instead of simply closing.
Jury rarely heard the thud, as he so rarely visited churches.
When he did, he preferred a country church, usually empty and giving the impression of sanctuary. Churches were no more sanctuaries than pubs or train stations. They were simply quieter.
He had walked around the row of pews on the left side and was standing looking into the little lady chapel, with its statue of Mary. These chapels always seemed even quieter than the rest of the church. He wondered if silence gathered in some places: a wood in deep winter; a dock where a boat moored in still water; an abandoned farmhouse.
The world at large was against silence, which made it all the more restful and the more necessary when one came upon it. He stood looking at Mary and thinking of the priest. Father Martin, he bet, had been with someone he shouldn’t have, or in some place he shouldn’t have been. But that this had anything to do with the murder was doubtful. There was no reason to connect the two, except via the most tenuous connection with Billy Maples. Nothing.
He could not say how long he’d been standing there, looking at the figure of Mary, when the voice behind him made him flinch.
“Superintendent.”
Jury turned, smiled at Father Martin, who did indeed look good. But Jury supposed if he himself put on those black clothes and bright white collar, he’d look good, too. Spirituality clung to those clothes. Why did he doubt what the man had—or hadn’t—told him?
“Father Martin,” said Jury. Turning away from the chapel, he felt the emptiness, felt the sheer, unstoppable fall from some dizzying height.
“Shall we sit down for a moment?” Father Martin took one of the little chairs in the chapel and motioned for Jury to do the same. “How is your investigation going?”
“Not speedily. I can say that.”
“But it only happened—what? Two days ago,” said the priest.
“In that amount of time, God had nearly half the world up and running.”
Father Martin laughed. It rang out in an astonishing way; the acoustics here must have been hellishly good. He’d like to hear the choir.
“So,” said Jury, “all that tells me is I’m not God.”
“But he doesn’t have your forensic people, either.”
“He doesn’t need them.”
Father Martin smiled and asked, “How can I help?”
“If you remember, you said you’d think for a bit about Billy Maples. Did you?”
Right now, the priest looked like one of those handsome, pale lads one sees walking with others in the grounds of a prep or public school, on their way to morning prayers or evening chapel, talking or even larking about. Right now, in the flicker of candlelight, this boy’s face was full of shadows.
Father Martin sat back. “I saw him two or three times. The first was during an evening service. The next time was for confession. This was the reason I told you I needed to think about it, you see.”
Jury didn’t. “You mean in the confessional?”
The priest nodded. “He came into the church. When I came through from the sacristy he was sitting in one of the pews up front. He came up to me and asked if I’d hear his confession. It wasn’t the hour for confession, but he seemed distraught, so I agreed, of course.”
Jury waited. “And you’re going to say you cannot divulge the contents.”
A slight smile. “I expect so.”
“Despite his having been murdered.”
Father Martin looked at the floor. “Even so, I can’t see what possible connection there could be between that and what he said in confession.”
Surely, the man was not that stupid or disingenuous. “You’re not supposed to see it, Father. I am. I get paid to see it.” Even if I don’t know what “it” is. He thought again of Oswald’s talking about James’s figure in the carpet. “And that still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me this yesterday, when we first spoke.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you because—”
He was thinking again. Witnesses who told the truth didn’t have to think about it, normally.
“Because, since I knew I wouldn’t be telling you what he—what Billy—said in the confessional, I didn’t see how it would help you at all to know”—the priest shrugged—“that he’d said it in the confessional.”
“You know perfectly well it could make a difference, Father. A man is murdered in a hotel not far from here, a man who felt a need to confess. Dot, dot, dot. Now try and connect those dots, will you? Murder, dot; confession, dot dot; murder related to what was confessed, dot dot dot.”
“I’m sorry. But if I told you nothing was said during that confession that would have anything to do with your investigation?”
“I’d say you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Father Martin was silent.
“Tell me about his state of mind.”
“Unhappy, certainly.”
“I was told Billy had dramatic mood swings, perhaps what we used to call manic depression.”
“It’s possible. I would of course see him in the depressive side of that. People don’t generally want our help if they’re manic.” He gave Jury a weak smile.
“No. But you might be oversimplifying there.” There were too damned many ways of looking at a problem to see an answer clearly.
“How do you mean?”
“A person torn between faith and doubt,
say, wouldn’t necessarily be unhappy.”
The priest shook his head. “I think that would be the greatest unhappiness of all.”
Jury felt the man so self-satisfied he wanted to shout: Shut it, will you? These clerics with their preordained solutions. Instead he said, “If you’re considering the biggest question of all, happiness doesn’t even come into it, does it?”
“It sounds as if you’ve given the matter some thought.”
“No, I’ve given it no thought at all. Thanks for your time. I’ve got to be going.”
Jury rose and was halfway up the aisle when he turned and asked, “What about the third time?”
Father Martin looked puzzled. “The third time?”
“You said you’d seen him two or three times. When was the third?”
The priest frowned, thinking. “Oh, that would have been another time he came to church. Morning matins, I think.”
“He wasn’t a Catholic.”
“For some, that doesn’t keep them away.”
SIXTEEN
All of this having been said about Lamb House—and contrary to his refusal to go—Melrose immediately began to ready himself, if not in the sense of packing up the Bentley, then of trying on, like traveling clothes, various attitudes. The mere mention of Henry James did this to him, especially after that Henry James contest they had all begun in the Jack and Hammer, having been inspired by that ridiculous con man who’d turned up calling himself Lambert Strether.
And if there was ever a Lady Watermouth, she sat now opposite him on the sofa, stuffing in currant scones buttered, jammed, and double creamed. Nothing was left to the imagination on his aunt’s plate.
Melrose put aside his Hermit News, wondering where Mr. Blodgett had gotten to. It was high time he showed up as unkempt hermit, wild-eyed and shock-headed and raised-fisted, to rattle her and send her running. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Mr. Blodgett was as nice an old soul as Melrose had ever met, and it was hard for him to play the madman, no matter how much he was paid, and he was paid plenty.
Dust Page 8
