The Five Bells and Bladebone

by Martha Grimes

  Why was it so difficult to convince Carole-anne that his murder (as she put it), having occurred right here on earth, on the night of the first of May or early morning of the second — an occurrence fully accounted for by some confluence of time and space, gravity, the rules of logic, and Greenwich Mean Time (in other words, measurable quantities) — why was it that his murder should be dismissed as less certain than her murder (as she put it), which had not even happened. But would (she claimed) at some time in the future (a future controlled by the stars at some universal way-station, some outpost of the planets not accountable to the laws of physics, much less to forensic medicine). The dead body had come to her in a vision or a dream or her Tarot cards, rather than in a seamy London alley.

  “The Hanged Man,” Jury reminded her, “doesn’t mean death, it means life suspended.” He was running his eye over the report on Wiggins’s clipboard, frowning.

  “Well, if you don’t care if you see me lying in one of those drawers at the morgue some day with a ticket on my toe . . . !”

  “Of course I care, Madame Zostra, but the operative term here, love, is someday. The murder hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t have much evidence to go on except that the cusp of Pluto or something —”

  He was having no trouble reading the report as she yammered in his ear that she supposed ordinary police hadn’t the imagination to solve her murder. It sounded like something she’d found in a Kubla Khan-esque vision and oh, how Jury wished that the Gentleman from Porlock who had ruined Coleridge’s poem would show up right that moment in Covent Garden and knock on the door of the Starrdust. Unfortunately, gentlemen from Porlock, like cops, were never around when you needed them. Into her voice now crept the best threat of tears she could muster, given she was competing with the molasses voice of Dinah Shore. Dinah and Carole-anne were at this moment living their little drama. Jury smiled and wished that a whole bucket of stars would rain right down on the red-gold head of Carole-anne Palutski.

  “Venus! You’ve not been paying attention at all!”

  “I have.” Jury held out a file folder for Wiggins to take. Wiggins had been sitting there during all of this, entranced. Carole-anne seemed to be able to fascinate men by remote control. Ever since she’d taken that job, Carole-anne pretty much thought she had an inside track with the cosmos. Appointments with destiny — and it wouldn’t be so bad if she’d only stop making them for Jury, too — were pretty much crowding out everything else on her engagement calendar. Dentists, doctors, and even getting her nails wrapped had been X-d off long ago. Carole-anne’s future was, in a manner of speaking, fully booked. If she’d had as many starts on stage as she had with the stars, she’d be right up there with Dame Peggy Ashcroft.

  “Trouble with you is, you don’t believe in Evidence of Things Unseen.”

  “True. I’m having a hard enough time with things seen, much less un.”

  As “Moonlight Serenade” slid smoothly past in the background, Jury cut off her protesting by telling her gently that the present was all he could handle at the moment and he’d have to ring off.

  He did, and turned to Wiggins. “The Town of Ramsgate is one of the pubs on your list. What else do we have on the murder of this Sarah Diver?”

  “Nothing but what’s there. It’s Thames Division’s case. They found her on the slipway between the stairs and the bottom of the pub wall. Early this morning, around five. Must have been goddawful damp, I meant being right on the Thames.”

  “She wouldn’t have noticed, Wiggins. Come on.” Jury rose to get his jacket and watched Wiggins pocket notebook, capsules, and a packet of evil-looking biscuits.

  Nineteen

  “THEY SAID it looked like a ship with a tall sail coming right at you,” said Wiggins as he and Jury stopped for a moment after getting out of their car in Three Colt Street to admire the view of St. Anne’s Limehouse. Wiggins sneezed, blew his nose, and continued: “They complained about Hawksmoor’s churches for two hundred years, especially this one. Well, he was ahead of his time, that’s all.” Wiggins held up his hand, squared off between thumb and forefinger, like a painter gauging lines. “Kind of art nouveau-ish, don’t you think?”

  Jury didn’t know what to think. He never ceased to wonder where his sergeant managed to pick up such arcana. “I don’t know, except that it’s a lovely church.”

  “Better than Christopher Wren,” said Wiggins, sneezing again. And with this verdict on seventeenth-century ecclesiastical architecture, he added that it was beginning to rain and walked on.

  The bells just then poured out twelve sonorous notes, perhaps exulting in the knowledge that after two centuries of waiting, someone finally appreciated them.

  • • •

  Behind the bar of the Five Bells and Bladebone stood a middle-aged man with a round face and a cupid’s-bow smile who bore more resemblance to angel or priest than publican. Actually, he wasn’t, he told Jury. He set the lager on the counter for his customer, who paid for the drinks without speaking and who yawned all the way back to the rear of the pub, to a small enclosure whose walls and ceiling were composed of ancient tea packets. There were a dozen or so customers such as the man sitting at the bar, staring at the optics, smoking, and pretending not to be listening.

  “Not the owner here, no,” said Bernard Molloy. “Got a place in Derry, I do. Just filling in for the owner, who’s a bit liverish.”

  Wiggins was about to open his mouth to offer advice and succor, Jury knew, and he quickly produced the photo of Simon Lean. “If you haven’t been here long, then perhaps you don’t recognize this man.”

  But Bernard Molloy was still going to adjust his spectacles, and was not about to take any decision lightly. Here was something to savor, to turn this way and that as if the subject’s face would become more familiar by virtue of being turned sideways. “Now, there’s that about him makes me think I’ve seen him —”

  The man at the bar, who had flicked a glance toward the picture, said, “You never seen him, Molloy; all’s you’ve been here is a week, and it’s a good two month since this chappie’s been round.”

  Wiggins, who’d had his notebook ready at the same time he was staring at the beam behind them and what was hanging from it, asked him his name.

  “Jack Krael.”

  “When did you see him last, Mr. Krael?”

  “Like I said, dihn’t I? About two months ago.” He looked at Wiggins out of eyes like bullets.

  “Did he come in often?”

  “Mebbe I saw him three, four times.” He shrugged and slowly rolled the ash from his cigarette into the tin ashtray. “Wouldn’t remember him except he come in with Ruby.”

  “Ruby?” said Jury.

  “Ruby Firth.”

  A man to his right in a checkered cap said, “Don’t she live in Limehouse Road, Jack? Police been creeping about all the morning, ain’t that right, Jack?”

  Jack Krael appeared to have been chosen as spokesman and guru for the Five Bells. He nodded, tossing back his whiskey. “Same as Sadie.” He turned the eyes with black, pinpoint irises, small as currants on Jury. “You must be the fifth, sixth one in here.” He looked at his empty glass. “Funny they’d both be living so close.”

  Jury put some money on the counter and signed Molloy to fill up Krael’s glass.

  “Bushmill’s, Molloy. That Black Bush right over there.” After all, he wasn’t paying for it. “Pore girl.” Krael sighed as if the expression of some sentiment would be thanks enough for the Bushmill’s.

  Mention of the “pore girl” Sadie drew a few others over to the bar to compare, contest, and redesign their separate versions of who was asked what by police. That there might be a second tragedy to add to the first seemed to perk them up.

  A woman who might have been sixty or eighty had slapped through the door to join the congregation. She wore a flat black hat with two plastic daisies stuck in the fraying band and was bundled into so many layers of clothes that it looked as if she’d got dressed without taki
ng off the old outfits before adorning herself in the new. Rummaging about in her massed skirts, she pulled out a dirty sheaf of pamphlets tied with a string and started handing them out.

  “Bit mental, that one is,” whispered a sallow-faced man they called Alf, “been spreadin’ the rumors all over Itchy, she has. Ain’t it enough I can’t go back to Hong Kong because of them rumors. They know all about me. It’s Singapore Airlines that’s doin’ it . . . .” He drifted off, back to his seat in the tea-packet-lined alcove. But he called over his shoulder, “You been spreadin’ the rumors agin, ain’tcha Kath?”

  The daisies bounced as she slammed down her glass. “I got no int’rest in what ya done or ain’t done, Alf. I got better to do then talk about you. Not with the by-election comin’ up.” Her voice was a high whine, and reminded Jury of a bad wheel bearing.

  Wiggins, Jury noticed, backed off from Kath at the mention of what used to be called, and probably still was by some, Itchy Park. It was a public garden adjacent to Christchurch, in high favor with the tramps who enjoyed sleeping under tented newspapers, bottles nestled beside them in brown bags, guarded while they snored.

  “You’ll win for sure, this time, Kath,” said Jack Krael.

  Bernard Molloy’s laugh was cut short by a look from Krael.

  “How long had Sarah Diver been living in Limehouse Road?” asked Jury.

  “Narrow Street. Down there near the Grapes. Said she used to live in one of them council flats —”

  Kath broke in. “That’s the platform I’m runnin’ on. It’s them developers that want to fill in the basin and bulldoze anything that don’t move and mebbe a few things that does.” She shoved her lager glass toward Molloy and gave Jury ten more fliers when he offered to pay.

  Jack said, “She’s right there. You seen them houses at Blythe’s Wharf? Half a million quid them ones cost. Narrow little things all stuck together. People’ll pay it for a look at the Thames.” He shook his head, eyes still staring at the wall. “Couldn’t have earned that in ten lifetimes if I had the job I used to.”

  “What was that, Jack?” asked Jury, motioning to Molloy to fill the glass again.

  Wiggins was staring up at the beam again, and Kath wiped her fist across her mouth and said, “That there’s the bladebone if you was wonderin’. Used to slaughter the pigs and suchlike below.” She stamped on the oak floor and pointed to a sign near the entrance. “Right there’s the history.” Then she sauntered off to hand out more fliers.

  “Waterman,” said Jack Krael. “Worked the bargers off the Isle of Dogs. There ain’t many of us left, is there? Not with jobs, I mean. The ships stop coming, they pull down the warehouses, raze the land, and parcel it off to the rich or some chain hotel. St. Katherine’s Dock, would you look at that now? Big hotel and a yachting marina. Warehouses getting turned into ‘lofts’ so people can look out their windows and see the Pool. They’ll never see what I saw — all of them ships, India, China, the tall red sails, the smell of cochineal — no, they’ll not see that again. Common Market.” He turned to gaze at Jury. “It’s all the Common-bloody-Market, ain’t it? They sit round with their fat cigars burning holes in history.” His gaze went back to the optics. “On the Isle of Dogs they’re putting up a twenty-story building of flats. Probably see a Hilton and a dozen boutiques.”

  “So Sarah Diver came into some money, you think?”

  “Must’ve.”

  Seeing that Jack Krael was probably growing monosyllabic, Jury had Molloy refill the glass.

  Krael nodded his thanks and said, “We call her Sadie here, but I haven’t laid eyes on her in two months. Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize; you’ve been more help than most.”

  Wiggins had come back from reading the sign on the wall. “Butchered them for ships’ crews,” he said, looking up at the bladebone suspended from a beam on small chains. He went on to give the ghastly details much in the way of the person who finds the sight of a motorway pile-up abhorrent, but who always slows down to get a better view. The sergeant stopped in the middle of his bloody discourse to drink a glass of soupy-looking water, its dark turgidity apparently the result of bits of crumbled biscuit.

  “If you can get your mind off the abattoir, I want you to go to Wapping headquarters and talk to whoever’s in charge of this Diver case. I’m going to find Ruby Firth.”

  Any mention of sea, river, or cesspool always brought that pained expression to Wiggins’s face. “You don’t have to swim in it, Wiggins.” Jury hated himself for asking, but he did: “What is that stuff you’re drinking?”

  “Good for all sorts of things, sir. Black biscuit crumbled up. You think these two killings are connected, then?”

  “It would be damned coincidental if they weren’t.” Jury shoved the door open.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Not many,” said Jury as they walked out into a thin veil of rain.

  Twenty

  HER HAIR was stuffed down into the turned-up collar of her raincoat and she wore dark glasses even in the rain. Her movements were decisive — the way she shut the door of the police-issue Cortina; the way she appeared to ignore the driver who was halfway out on the other side; the way she simply walked away.

  As Jury crossed the old and narrow Limehouse Causeway, he could see clearly the boy who got out and followed her. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, thin and rather delicate-looking, but still handsome. A gust of wind tagged his brown hair and, watching him scrape it back, Jury thought he looked familiar. He could not think where he’d seen the boy before.

  The car was about to drive off when Jury reached it. “I’m interested in the Diver case. And I’m looking for a woman named Ruby Firth. That wouldn’t be her, would it?”

  The driver, wearing the uniform of the river police, looked hostile and said nothing.

  “Sorry,” said Jury, pulling out his identification. “I’d like to talk with you.”

  The driver’s expression changed, but not for the better. The old hostility was exchanged for a new one, better suited to the occasion of having headquarters C.I.D. minding the business of Thames Division.

  “Climb in.” He said he was Roy Marsh and the police constable was Ballinger from the Limehouse station. With his head only half-turned and the pretense of a smile, Marsh asked, “Do we need your help?”

  Jury studied the profile and the thread of a scar at the corner of the mouth. The profile turned to the front and Roy Marsh looked at Jury in the rear-view mirror. He had eyes like iodine.

  “No. But I need yours.” Jury took out a fresh twenty-pack of cigarettes and offered them around. Marsh shook his head; Ballinger took one.

  “So what’s your interest in Ruby Firth?” Marsh asked, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Who she’s been palling around with.”

  Abruptly the tapping stopped and Marsh turned in his seat to say, “And what’s that mean?”

  “There was a murder in Northants. A man named Simon Lean.”

  Roy Marsh’s expression shifted. Jury could feel the tautness.

  “Who’s he, then?”

  “You’re asking more questions than you’re answering, Roy. Was that Ruby Firth who got out of your car?”

  Given the look on Roy Marsh’s face now, Jury knew he must have been right about the look on his face a few minutes ago. His interest in the woman, Jury suspected, went beyond the formalities of an official investigation. “Yes,” was his crisp answer.

  “Who’s the lad with her?”

  Marsh did not answer immediately.

  Constable Ballinger, perhaps realizing that the course of the friendship between Marsh and Jury was going downhill fast, broke in. “Name’s Tommy Diver, sir. Sarah Diver’s brother. Come here just to visit and finds that . . . .” Ballinger inclined his head toward Narrow Street, where Jury could just make out a knot of policemen. “The boy was there this morning when we went round to look over the house. Before the clean-up crew. The Diver woman was suppos
ed to have been there to meet him last night, and never did show up. I guess we know why, now. The lad’s bad luck he happened to be on hand to identify the body.” Here Ballinger gave Roy Marsh a quick look. Marsh said nothing, so Ballinger went on. “The brother said it wasn’t her, not the way he remembered her. This one was thinner, her hair not as reddish, no makeup, plain clothes. It’d been some time since he’d seen her.” Ballinger shrugged. “His folks are coming from Gravesend to collect him —”

  Roy Marsh had turned to face Jury and cut off Ballinger. His voice was soft, the kind of soft that sounds like danger, like the muffled tread of footsteps. “We found the body at four-thirty this morning in an old boat covered by a tarp. The slipway by Wapping Old Stairs. We’d been checking the boat to find out who owned it. In the meantime someone’d dumped the corpse in it; it was submerged for a while by the tides.” He turned to face the windscreen.

  Quite a mouthful for Roy Marsh, who now turned the key in the ignition. Ballinger looked nervous. You don’t just brush off C.I.D. superintendents.

  Jury wanted to be gone, anyway. Bad enough that Roy Marsh didn’t like Scotland Yard trampling through his patch, worse that he was probably uncommunicative even in the best of circumstances, worse yet, he seemed to be involved in a personal way.

  Over the engine noise, Marsh said, “You started by asking about Ruby; I thought you were here because of Sadie Diver.”

  “I am now.”

  Jury slammed the door and watched the car take a turn on West India Dock Road that would have earned it a ticket.

  • • •

  “Ruby Firth?”

  She glanced from the warrant card to Jury’s face and back again. “An endless stream,” said Ruby Firth. “Which one are you? Limehouse? Thames Division? Port of London Authority?”

  “Scotland Yard.” He smiled. “Have you been having a rough time of it, then?”