“Did Billy want to write himself?”
“No, or at least I don’t think so.”
“I’m assuming you knew him well.”
“As much as anybody did. Perhaps better.”
“That implies that he was unknowable, eh? A bit of a mystery.”
Kurt stopped on the pavement and so Melrose did, too, and he became aware that their footsteps had been all there was to hear.
“Oh, everyone’s that,” said Brunner.
“That sounds…you sound like one of James’s characters. You know, his characters sound to me as if they’re always pausing to catch breath.”
Kurt Brunner laughed. “I’ll have to watch it. Perhaps anyone who lives in that house for a while begins to sound like a page out of James. Even Mrs. Jessup might come off sounding like the malevolent Miss Jessel one of these days.”
“Good lord, I hope not!”
They had reached Lion Street and were soon to come to St. Mary’s Church. “Was Billy—”
Melrose stopped.
“What?”
“I never knew him and yet I call him Billy.”
“Everyone did,” Brunner said, sadly.
Melrose smiled. “Everyone did, but why?”
“I never thought about it. But what had you been about to ask?”
“I don’t remember.”
They walked on.
TWENTY-FIVE
Malcolm Mott was standing in the front garden with his dog, Waldo, when the car came up the long drive.
Who’s this lot, then? he wondered.
The car pulled up. The men, driver and passenger, got out. The driver, thinner and shorter than the other one, called over. “Afternoon, young man.”
Young man. How smarmy. Malcolm didn’t respond. The passenger, the taller and smarter-looking one, didn’t address Malcolm at all. He merely looked at him. This annoyed Malcolm as it made placing him in the scheme of failed adults difficult. The tall man folded his arms and leaned against the car as if he could stop there all day.
The driver had come up to him now, smiling and showing Malcolm some sort of identification. “We’re from New Scotland Yard CID. I’m Detective Sergeant Wiggins and that gentleman”—he turned to the other one—“is Superintendent Richard Jury.”
Blimey!
To keep the excitement out of his face, he reached down and picked up Waldo, who clearly didn’t want to be carried. Malcolm chewed his gum more ferociously. He was having a really hard time holding himself in check. Not only because this was Scotland Yard come to visit, but because they must be here about Billy.
Malcolm clutched Waldo tighter. He was holding off thoughts about Billy. When that other policeman had come, Malcolm had just gone out to the back garden and started scaling the wall, tying his dog to the end of the rope for a kind of balance.
Now the taller one was standing in front of him.
“You’re Malcolm.”
And was a mind reader. This was bad. This person could be dangerous. Malcolm mustered his most ferocious look. He clapped his eyebrows together and gave the both of them a thunderous stare. Rain clouds gathering, ice shards spitting, lightning bolting—lightning bolting? Malcolm frowned, but at himself this time; that didn’t sound right. Lightning ripping, lightning stabbing, lightning…Malcolm was writing a book, and he meant it to be terrifying. A lot of weather was in it.
“Are your mum and dad here, young Malcolm?” asked the thin one.
Malcolm wanted to just haul off and hit him. Young Malcolm. He stared at them. He hoped Waldo was staring, too.
“Malcolm,” said the one who claimed to be a Sergeant Wiggins, “we’re here about Billy Maples. Your cousin?”
As if he’d forgotten. Malcolm grew rigid with a kind of cold rage. No one talked to him about Billy.
“I expect a good friend.” The tall one smiled.
Fucking mind reader! Malcolm turned and stomped away.
Jury watched him disappear around the corner of the house.
“You’d think,” said Wiggins, “he’d be interested in Scotland Yard, wouldn’t you?”
“He is.”
The door was opened by a maid in black. She was thin, young, and unhappy looking.
When Jury identified himself and Wiggins and said he was expected, she whispered for them to step inside and went off on softly soled shoes to inform her employers.
There was the sort of hush that hangs over a place when everyone who’d lived there had gone. The silence of abandonment. The paintings, the bronze statue of the child bent over her cat, the statues in niches along the wall: all of these gave the impression of a sadness that might disperse if they could just find themselves somewhere else. If they could just go.
While Wiggins examined the bronze statue, Jury looked at a large painting—nearly four by six feet it had to be—by an artist he knew but whose name escaped him, a name by virtue of being nearly all consonants, hard to remember and hard to say: Klp, Klt, no—Klimt, that was it. Jury frowned. But a Klimt would be worth a small fortune, wouldn’t it? He looked at the frame. Perhaps that was why it was bolted to the wall; it would certainly discourage theft. The background was all gold, a membrane of gold against which the gown of the figure fidgeted in arithmetical shapes: triangles, squares, rectangles, bars, and circles. They were like bits of paper that flash around in a cage ready for the winning ticket to be drawn. Gold and copper squares, bars of black, slivers of gray and green tossed helter-skelter at the canvas. They formed, when the eye brought them under control, a bright gown on the figure of the black-haired woman before dissolving into the thin layer of gold one finds occasionally on an elaborate Indian dessert, edible and strange.
The maid came out of the room she had stepped into and motioned for them to come along.
Roderick Maples was the only other occupant of the room. He stood before a dying fire, poker in hand, with which he apparently had been rousting the flames. He bore as little resemblance to Sir Oswald Maples as a son could to a father—but why was Jury looking for resemblance? Jury remembered that Oswald was not the man’s actual father. His rangy body, his flint gray eyes, his demeanor—unsmiling and unwelcoming.
“I fail to see, Mr., ah, Jury, is it?”
Roderick Maples knew of course it was Mr. Jury and also knew Mr. Jury was a CID superintendent. Jury didn’t really begrudge the man his defenses. He said, “It is. With Detective Sergeant Wiggins.”
“I fail to see why it’s necessary to send yet more police here about my son’s death.”
He said this stonily and looked as if he had all the malleable warmth of the poker that he had returned to the fireplace tools suspended from an antique brass holder.
Jury said, “May we sit down?”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Sit anywhere,” he said.
Jury wanted to laugh. The man made the room sound like a restaurant in its slack period. They sat down, Jury in a gray watered silk chair, facing Roderick and the fireplace. Beside the marble mantel hung another small painting by an artist Jury wasn’t familiar with, though it reminded him of a van Gogh. Something about the brush work.
Wiggins had taken a seat on an acid green chair. Roderick Maples remained standing before the marble fireplace in the manner of one who meant to make an early exit.
Roderick said, “I can tell you only what I told the other one—”
Annoyed, Wiggins interjected, “We assume you mean Detective Sergeant Chilten?”
Maples gave a frigid little nod. “I can tell you only that.”
“Then tell us,” said Jury.
“The last time I saw my son was over a week ago when I went up to London to visit him at his Sloane Street flat.”
“What was that about?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What did you want to see him about?” Jury said.
Roderick clasped his hands behind his back as if warming them before the fire, which had all but gone out. “That has nothing at all to do with his death.”
“Perhaps it does, though. If it was important enough to pay him a visit.”
Roderick flinched and his expression grew stonier. “You officers—”
“Detectives, actually. CID.”
“—appear to think that one’s life must be an open book set before you.”
Jury smiled at the accurate description. “That’s about right, Mr. Maples. So, again, what did you go up to London to see your son about?”
“The matter of his trust fund. Billy was utterly profligate with money. I wanted to know why.”
“What was the trust fund? I mean, who left it to him?”
“His mother, my first wife. Actually, there were two. The other came from his grandfather.”
“Sir Oswald Maples?”
“No, not my father, his other grandfather. His name was Ames. James Ames. His wife is still alive, lives in Fulham, is it? Chelsea, perhaps.”
“So you confronted your son. How did he react?”
“To say that it was his money and he’d spend it as he liked. The young have no sense of responsibility.”
Wiggins said, “Your son was in his thirties. Not really one of ‘the young’ as you put it.”
Roderick tented his fingers and looked at them from the posture of the long-suffering.
Jury said, “I understand your son gave large amounts of money to help artists. His friends, the art gallery he supported. He was, according to others, very generous.”
“He was mercurial, I know that.” Roderick crossed to the silver tray that held the soda siphon and splashed more soda into his glass.
“In what way, sir?” asked Wiggins.
“Well, very moody. He spent little time here. To tell the truth, we didn’t get on so well together. But I already said that, didn’t I? But he did appear to like his grandfather. He lives in Chelsea.”
Jury said, “I know him, Sir Oswald Maples.”
Roderick looked at Jury in surprise. “My father? You mean you’ve already talked to him?”
“I have, but what I meant is that I knew him before all this. He was very helpful in a case I worked on last year. He was at Bletchley Park, as you know, of course. He must have a first-rate mind to have been involved in all of that code breaking.”
“Yes. Yes, Dad’s quite brilliant, really.”
This seemed to be said in an affectionate way, which surprised Jury. “It was he who asked me to investigate your son’s murder. The other detectives who were here were from Islington police.”
“Yes. The one in charge was a woman. Rather aggressive, I thought, but extremely perceptive. I believe she could read my mind.”
You don’t know the half of it. Jury cleared his throat.
Roderick laughed a little, then abruptly stopped. “Not the most comfortable state of affairs, I mean, if you’re talking to the police.” He laughed again.
Jury warmed to him a little.
Roderick had been standing with his back to the fireplace during this exchange. “I think Dad knew Billy better than I did.”
In this Jury detected a hint of regret, sadness even. “He said Billy came to see him often.”
“Yes. More than I did, certainly. I’ve been very derelict on that score. I would imagine that if anyone knew anything it would be my father.”
“I don’t believe he knows any more than you do, Mr. Maples.” Jury wasn’t altogether sure why he said this. It was some attempt at solace, maybe, as a parent rather hates to think he’s the last to know what’s going on in his child’s life. “We hoped to speak with Mrs. Maples. Is she about?”
“Upstairs. It’s all been hard for her to take.”
As he made no move to get her, Jury said, “Could we see her? It’s important.”
Distractedly, Roderick looked at Jury, said, “Oh. Oh, yes. I’ll tell her to come down.”
The woman who entered the room was a good dozen years younger than her husband, which didn’t make her young—say, early to midforties. Her dress was a green so dark it was almost black. Black for mourning is what Jury had first thought it was. The neckline of the dress was a sort of drape fastened at the shoulder with an amethyst brooch. Her good looks were authoritative.
“Mrs. Maples.” Jury had risen. “I’m terribly sorry but we’ve come about your stepson.”
She nodded and took the mate of the chair Jury sat on. “My stepson, but he was like a son.”
Roderick’s expression suggested otherwise, but what other?
She sounded, Jury thought, sincere when she said this. “Would you say you knew Billy well?”
“Better than Roddy, I think.” She offered her husband a fleeting smile, but whether it was by way of apology or needling, it was hard to say. And Jury didn’t believe her for a minute.
Roderick sat down. Apparently, he preferred to take her answers that way.
Jury wondered if the money that had furnished this handsome room was his or hers or even the first wife’s, Billy’s real mother’s. Perhaps Roderick had been lucky in marrying two wealthy women.
“And how well is that, madame?” asked Wiggins with some acerbity. His patience didn’t cover people being clever.
Her glance slid off Wiggins; her answer was for Jury. “I knew Billy quite well.”
“If that’s so, have you some insight into what happened?”
She sat back. “No. There I’m as much in the dark as the rest of you.” The way her look traveled around the small circle of people in the room suggested that even her ignorance could compete favorably with theirs. “I doubt anyone knows what happened.”
“The murderer does.” Wiggins, again, a smile tilting on his face.
Jury said, “Then you don’t know if Billy had enemies?”
She did not immediately dismiss this. “Well, there were one or two.”
Roderick stepped in. “What are you saying, Olivia? The boy never made enemies.”
“Don’t be silly, Roddy. Everyone has an enemy. I’m thinking of the woman in London, whom he’d been seeing for some time. He broke up with her. Dumped her, you could say.”
“Ridiculous,” said Roderick. “She’d hardly have gone to a Clerkenwell hotel and shot him.”
Jury smiled inwardly. The Ritz, perhaps; Brown’s or the Connaught. Mayfair, but not Clerkenwell. He said, “The thing is, Mrs. Maples, the scene itself is strange. He checked into this trendy Clerkenwell hotel, the Zetter. Then after his visit to the Melville Gallery, he stopped in at a club called Dust. He then went back to the Zetter and ordered a meal be sent up. Coffee for two to be delivered later. He was expecting someone to join him.”
She asked, “Couldn’t he have met someone at the gallery who joined him later, or at this club?”
Roderick said, “But then why didn’t this person simply go back with him to the hotel?”
“A good question. Who,” Jury said to Olivia Maples, “was the second person. You said one or two possible enemies.”
She plucked at the brooch on her shoulder, straightening it. “I was thinking of Kurt Brunner.”
“Brunner? His assistant?”
“Or whatever he is. Was. I have never trusted him.”
Wiggins asked, “Why is that, Mrs. Maples?”
“I’m not sure he always had Billy’s best interests at heart.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Olivia. Kurt’s perfectly okay.”
Anger sparked in her eyes. “Why would a man as worldly as Kurt find it rewarding to be at the beck and call of a rich young man who never worked a day in his life?”
“That’s not true.”
Olivia shook her head, ostensibly at Roderick’s thickheadedness—or at his perennial blind spot, his son. She turned back to Jury. “Would you like something? Whiskey? Tea?”
Jury knew the mention of tea would bring Wiggins to full alert, so he said, “Tea would be welcome, thanks.”
Wiggins, who’d been looking gloomy, beamed. “It would, yes.”
Olivia rose. “I’ll just tell Margaret to fetch it.” She left the room.
Roderick watched her go.
Jury said, “I’ve been looking at that painting by the mantel. Whose is it?”
“That? That’s a Soutine. That and the Klimt in the entry—did you see it?”
“Absolutely. It’s remarkable. But very valuable, isn’t it?”
Roderick smiled a little purse-lipped smile. “I wish it were. It’s not the original. Nor is this one. But they’re remarkably good reproductions.” They both studied the Soutine. It looked stormy with its thick-branched bending trees in the foreground. Behind them was a sturdy, crenellated house. “Schloss Moser. Austria, I think.”
Roderick sat forward and brought the subject back. “Superintendent, my wife’s suspicions of Brunner are completely unfounded. I think Billy was better for his association with Kurt Brunner.”
“Better than what?”
Roderick grimaced and shrugged, as if he could shrug it away: “Billy could be a holy terror.”
Olivia was back on the heels of that comment. “Billy a holy terror? Stop exaggerating, Roderick.” To Wiggins, she said, “Tea will be just a moment.” Then picking up the comment about her stepson, said, “He could be moody at times, that’s all. Usually Billy was a lamb.”
They were probably both right. Jury would come back to that.
“You said you questioned Brunner’s influence. What exactly was his field before he came to work for Billy?”
Olivia shrugged, finished with the matter.
Roderick said, “He was a teacher. Taught at a public school in Berlin? Or at least the German equivalent of public school.”
Wiggins, who’d been glancing at the door through which the tea would make its entrance, was rewarded. There was the rattle of a tea tray carried by Margaret. She set it down. Olivia thanked her and set about pouring.
Jury accepted the cup from Olivia together with whatever combination of sugar and milk she’d added.
“He taught European history, he said,” Roderick went on. “What he seemed really interested in was the Russian dynasties. Czar Nicholas, that period. He was fascinated by Rasputin.”
Wiggins said, “Wasn’t Rasputin the one that got shot, poisoned, stabbed, and still didn’t die?”
Dust Page 14
