Dust

by Martha Grimes

  Gloomily, Wiggins drank his coffee. “Roderick talked about his father. Sir Oswald. You know him.”

  “I do. He’s the only reason we’re here. What did Roderick say?”

  “A lot about Sir Oswald’s time at Bletchley Park. He said as a boy—he’d have been eight or nine then—that he loved knowing his dad was working on breaking codes, all very hush-hush. And this gave him a great boost in prestige around his mates. You know, the war was a giant playground for kids. Sounds weird, but there it is. They loved poking around in bombed-out buildings before they got chased off by wardens. Roderick described it as a wizard adventure. Hope and glory. All of that.”

  “That from Roderick? I’m surprised. He didn’t sound as if he had a lot of play in him. I can see how kids might take the devastation that way. But what rather surprises me is that Roderick seems proud of his father. That doesn’t fit with the picture Sir Oswald painted. There was a rift between the two. Roderick seldom goes to see him.”

  “Ah, that, I bet, would have coincided with Olivia coming on the scene. Olivia clearly doesn’t like Oswald. Nor he her. She pretty much puts the damper on the father-son relationship.” Wiggins pushed back his plate and crossed his arms on the table. “I think Olivia’s one of those people who doesn’t like other people having relationships she’s not a part of or doesn’t control. She couldn’t control Billy Maples. He and young Malcolm were apparently close. And she dislikes Malcolm intensely. Probably as much for that reason as for him being a pain in the arse.”

  “Money doesn’t seem to be a motive, for which we might be grateful. According to their solicitor, he never made a will, which means he died intestate. It’s too bad. It means it will go to his father, who surely doesn’t need it. Maybe some to Sir Oswald. But Malcolm’s too distant a relation to get anything. And Karl Brunner gets nothing because he isn’t related.”

  “There’s another part of Olivia Maples that sets my teeth on edge.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think she uses people,” Wiggins said. “I’m sure she used Billy, or tried to.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t let her. And that infuriated her.”

  “Enough to kill him?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t work it out.” Jury studied his coffee. “It’s that Klimt.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “The Sacred Fount!” exclaimed Melrose Plant, dropping into Jury’s lap the book he’d gone upstairs to get, displacing the book Jury had been looking through.

  Wiggins was in the kitchen, talking with Mrs. Jessup, though the talk might have revolved more around afternoon tea than it did her former employer.

  Jury looked at the book. “That again.”

  “But you’re the one who told me about it.”

  “I didn’t plan on its dogging my footsteps forever. Actually, it was Kurt Brunner who told me.”

  “I’m fascinated, really. Olivia Maples and the vampire theme.”

  “Frankly, I can’t imagine it in Olivia Maples or useful to Henry James.” Jury looked at the bookshelves for a moment. “This is the writer who could peel the poses of social convention like an onion? The writer who could pack an entire moral universe into a look exchanged over dinner? The writer who could make rising from a chair the dead giveaway of an intimate relationship? The writer—”

  “I’m impressed!”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I didn’t know you were so conversant with the work of Henry James,” said Melrose.

  “I’m not. I was just reading this book while you were upstairs rooting around for this one.” He held up The Sacred Fount. He turned it over in his hands. “But do you think that’s the case here? I never knew Billy; I have to depend on what people say about him. Malcolm certainly was terrifically fond of Billy.”

  “Malcolm? Who’s Malcolm?”

  “Malcolm Mott, Billy’s cousin, by marriage. Says they were best friends. Dislikes Olivia intensely. Olivia seems to be the trouble in that family. She’s not that much older than Billy Maples, ten years perhaps.”

  “There they are again! The Brissendens.”

  Jury’s smile was more ironic than good-natured. “You know, this ‘sacred fount’ stuff is drivel.”

  Melrose caught his breath, looking around the room as if the ghosts of every well-known Jamesian biographer and critic had heard and were now crowding in. “Drivel? Henry James—dear God—is drivel?” Melrose cushioned his forehead with his hand as if a migraine were on the horizon.

  “Don’t be so dramatic, for God’s sakes. I didn’t mean James; I meant this exchanging of youth and age. James didn’t mean that—”

  “Oh, you bet he did!” Melrose slapped his hands against his chair arms, rising and going to the window where he stood and wished he had a pocket watch to snap shut or pince-nez to twirl. “You’d be surprised at what James got up to in his stories.”

  Jury sighed, looking at Melrose in his velvet smoking jacket, and wondering if he was going to be sod-all use in this case.

  “For instance,” Melrose went on, “have you ever read ‘The Jolly Corner’?” He returned to his chair.

  “No. The only things I’ve read are Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of theScrew, twenty-five pages of The Ambassadors, and several short stories, which were pretty good. Sinister, even.”

  Melrose said, “You’re right. In ‘The Jolly Corner’ the narrator meets his own ghost—or rather, the ghost of a past he hadn’t chosen. Brydon, he’s the narrator—”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Melrose paused. He’d forgotten. He searched the preceding conversation and remembered: “You said James couldn’t possibly have meant that youth and age could be exchanged, one for the other, Grace Brissenden’s age for her husband’s youth.”

  “That’s right. He didn’t mean vampirism any more than Kafka meant a great big bug. It’s only a metaphor.”

  “No, no, no, no. Unless you look at metaphor in a very special way. Neither was Kafka’s bug a metaphor. Gregor really was that. Look”—Melrose shoved a little chocolate dish and a pen around—“let’s put you here, and the bug next to you.”

  “No, we’ll put you here and the bug next to you.”

  “It’s impossible to have a literary conversation with you.”

  “Don’t I know it. And on a different note, why are you wearing that smoking jacket and fiddling with that cigarette holder?” Beyond the blank window the light was changing.

  “What’s the matter with it?” Melrose spread his hands on the smoking jacket, looking down.

  “Nothing. It’s a handsome ensemble. Listen: I think you should pop round to the Mapleses’ place tomorrow and see what you can find out.”

  “Pop round? One doesn’t just drop in.”

  “Well, then, get yourself invited. I have a feeling the lady of the house has a real passion for a title. There’s one thing I specifically want you to do: there are two paintings in that house, a Klimt and a Soutine. How much do you know about art?”

  “A little more than how ants colonize. In other words, nothing.”

  “You couldn’t tell an original from a reproduction?”

  “Of course not, if it’s a halfway decent one. That’s the point, isn’t it? Who’s going to hang a reproduction that looks fake?”

  “Okay. When you go there, look at the Klimt in the entry hall and the Soutine in the living room. The Klimt is bolted to the wall—”

  “I shouldn’t wonder! My God, there’s a fortune there; can you imagine?”

  “That’s the whole little mystery. They’re reproductions, Roderick Maples told me. But according to Malcolm—”

  “Malcolm again.”

  “Billy told him they were originals.”

  “Then why—”

  “I don’t know. The Soutine, which is much smaller, is hanging beside the fireplace mantel. I want you to look at the back and see if there’s any identifying mark.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant! I just walk over to the wall and sa
y, ‘I think I’ll have this’? And yank it off. That should get me invited back. What do you think I’ll find?”

  “I don’t know. But I believe there’s some connection between those paintings and the generosity Billy Maples showed to artists and that gallery.”

  “I’ll try.” Melrose got up. “Let’s creak along to dinner, shall we? I’m feeling rather burdened by all of this.”

  Jury rose. “So was Malcolm.”

  “What?” Melrose was getting the coats.

  “Go to see them.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  What did he expect if he was going to pub hop with Plant but a sizable headache in the morning?

  Jury tossed down a couple of aspirin with his orange juice, followed by tea so strong the cup could have walked to the telephone by itself.

  Jury held the cup and went to answer it.

  “We need to talk,” said DI Aguilar.

  “Good morning. You always say that and we always wind up not talking.”

  She sighed. “I don’t always, and we do.”

  Jury smiled. It sounded like Carole-anne: the tone, the injured pride, the syntax.

  “Can you meet me?”

  “Sure. In Piccadilly Circus.”

  A brief silence her end. “Is it my fault if you can’t be alone in the same room with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes. Come down to headquarters. Tolpuddle Street.”

  “I know where—”

  But she had already hung up.

  She led him into one of the interrogation rooms, which made him think he knew what suspects felt, and she closed the door behind them. Noncommitally, she looked at him and opened up a file.

  “This is your doctor’s report—”

  “Technically, Dr. Nancy isn’t my doctor.”

  She looked at him as one might at a deliberately obdurate child. “Please. Ballistics says the shot was fired from three to four feet away. There’s very little tattooing. The path of the bullet and the angle of the gun suggest the shooter was probably about the victim’s height.”

  “‘Probably’ is the important word there.”

  “I was just thinking…. You talked to Kurt Brunner?”

  “I did. Two days ago, in Rye.”

  “What conclusions did you draw? I mean, do you still think he’s the one who did it?”

  “I don’t know. I have to talk to him again. But there is the fact that Kurt would hardly have made an appointment to see Billy.”

  “You said that before. But it could just have been that Brunner said, ‘I’ll see you at the Zetter later.’ That’s not what you’d call an appointment.”

  “Maybe not. Going back to the jacket, though. Billy wouldn’t have kept it on to eat probably. But if he removed it and then put it back on to meet whoever was coming, it wouldn’t have been Brunner, would it? Billy wouldn’t have made that formal gesture for Brunner.”

  “The thing is, Brunner would probably be too tall to hold the gun at the angle described here.”

  “Again, the ‘probably’ is important. I’ll talk to Phyllis.”

  Lu looked down at the pages again. “She’s very thorough. I expect she’s quite a good pathologist.”

  “She is.”

  Keeping her eyes on the papers she was gathering back up, Lu said, “Have you known her a long time?”

  “Yes.” Jury waited.

  “She’s very attractive.” Still not looking at Jury, she tapped the papers on the table, evening them up.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Is she a very good friend—oh, it’s none of my business, anyway.”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  “What?” Her eyes widened. Clearly not the response she’d expected.

  “Why isn’t it your business?”

  “Well…it just isn’t. I mean, am I her business?”

  “I don’t know; I’ll ask her.”

  “No! I mean, I don’t care. I just thought if she’s my business, I might be her business, if you know what I mean.”

  Jury was biting the inside of his cheek to keep his face straight. “No, I don’t know what you mean. Do you even know what you mean?”

  Her look was fierce. “Oh, don’t get smart.” Face flushed, she picked up the folder and sailed out of the room, dark hair flying, leaving him stranded.

  When she was out of earshot, he nearly choked with laughter.

  THIRTY

  As Melrose came to the end of the long drive to the Maples estate, he noticed a boy standing by the riotous bed of tulips just breaking free from the hold winter had on them. A terrierlike dog stood at the boy’s feet. Melrose braked and got out of the car. The boy and dog stood and watched.

  How old was he? Eleven? Nine? Three? One could no longer tell about children, childhood seeming to bypass many of them as they wore the same designer clothes as their mums and dads, went to the same chic places, smoked the same pot, leaving them, the children, by the time they were into their twenties and thirties, with nowhere new to go, nothing new to do.

  These two stood still as statues, and Melrose, upon getting out of his car, called out a cheery hello. Neither replied by word or bark. Could they be mute? There had been a lot happening after the death of Billy Maples. First that detective, Chilten; then Jury; and now himself. Least of all himself. He turned away from the silent two and went up the steps to the door.

  The maid let him in and asked him to wait as she went to fetch Mrs. Maples, who, she was sure, would be down in half a minute. If it was only going to take her half a minute, why wasn’t she present when he arrived? For he was spot-on time.

  But the time here would not be wasted as it would give him an opportunity to look closely at the painting that had caught his eye the moment he’d stepped inside. It was dazzling and it was, in all of its shower of golden glory, unmistakenly a Klimt. There was the dark-haired beauty at its center wrapped in a garment that was difficult to separate from its background—all of those bright, spangly colors. The painting was big and was indeed bolted to the wall. He looked at it from a distance and up close. But who was he to judge whether or not it was the original or a reproduction? That portrait of James in Lamb House. Were someone to tell him yes, that’s the original John Singer Sargent, how would he know it wasn’t?

  Well, there was nothing to be gained by merely observing it.

  Olivia Maples was a good-looking brunette in her forties with skin that looked untouched by anything but dew. She was wearing a dark blue cashmere dress the color of her eyes. He bet she had a closet full of things the color of her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry, Lord Ardry, to keep you waiting,” she said as she came into the living room to which the maid had finally led him as part of his house tour.

  No, you’re not. He smiled, took the outstretched hand. “Perfectly all right.”

  “My husband will be down in a minute. Shall we have tea? Or something stronger?”

  “Oh, stronger, by all means.”

  She smiled and moved to a table between two long windows. The table held quite an array of bottles and decanters. These people took their drinking seriously. “Whiskey? Vodka? Perhaps a martini. I make quite good ones.”

  I’ll bet you do. Melrose was stumped by her manner, which revealed nothing of her feelings about the murder of her stepson. “Whiskey is fine.”

  For a few moments she poured and measured and Melrose heard the gentle clink of bottles and glasses.

  She brought him his drink and then took a seat at the other end of the sofa, turned so that she could see him. She sipped her drink—vodka or gin; one of the famous martinis, perhaps—and regarded him over its bowl. Slightly flirty? He couldn’t assess it. She said, “We do appreciate your taking up Billy’s lease. It will save us so much trouble. The National Trust was very understanding, but it does need someone in the place until the new tenants are ready.”

  “My pleasure. Anyway, I’ve always meant to visit Lamb House, never got around to it; one doesn’t.�
� Whatever that meant. “I’m very sorry about your son. You have enough to contend with without having to manage a piece of property.”

  “Billy was my stepson, actually. I don’t mean I didn’t feel—” She let that hang. “We both were of course shattered by it.” She sipped her drink.

  Olivia was clearly not shattered. That did not mean she felt nothing, naturally. He just wondered what constituted the something she did feel. She was hard to see into. Her flawless face, dressed down, no doubt because of what had happened, was opaque.

  He said, “It’s very pleasant, Lamb House.” Now a completely natural question: “Why did your stepson want to live there?”

  She leaned back against the arm of the sofa. “Billy was never one to confide in others.”

  Yet he had, to that priest Jury mentioned. And why would a simple explanation of his move be a confidence? Billy had hardly undertaken some hush-hush mission. Everyone knew where he was.

  Melrose wondered about the boy’s life and wondered why he had thought of Billy just now as “the boy.” He felt a weight of sadness in it, in Billy’s story. “Perhaps your stepson was a great admirer of Henry James.”

  “I expect so. Kurt Brunner is an admirer, I know that.”

  It was then the door opened to admit Roderick Maples. Melrose got up and took the man’s outstretched hand as Olivia made the unnecessary introduction.

  “I was just telling Lord Ardry,” she said, “that he’s taken a load off our shoulders.”

  “Indeed.” Roderick gave him a curt nod, not at all uncivil, but as if the man could not animate his face enough for a sign of welcome. “Thank you.” Roderick was not given to the hyperbole of his wife. He went to the drinks table, poured himself some whiskey, drank it down, then poured another.

  Olivia watched and made no comment.

  Melrose used the few moments by looking around for the Soutine painting. Ah, there it was, just to the right of the fireplace.

  Roderick sank into a chair. He was tall and despite his age rather handsome in a worn-satchel way.