The Blue Last

by Martha Grimes

  “That one’s more or less a grounding in gardening skills.”

  “Pretty basic, isn’t it?” He turned it so that Jury could see the climbing rose. “Maybe I should try my hand at soil tilling. Enter big turnips in the annual Sidbury garden show. Wait a minute: you said these books were ‘for you,’ meaning me. Why are these books for me?”

  Jury shrugged. “Thought they might be helpful.” Jury took a drink of whiskey. God, it was good here; they must keep the stuff in a vault. He ignored Melrose’s squint. “So, what did you and Trueblood do?”

  “What’d we do? I just told you. We ran all over looking up experts. Count me the leading expert in Renaissance art in Long Piddleton-no, correction-in the Long Pidd area-which takes in Sidbury, Watermeadows and the Blue Parrot. Everything up to Northampton. Perhaps even Northampton!”

  “What was the result of all of this expert consultation? Did they agree that the painting could be an authentic-what’s his name?”

  “Masaccio. No, they didn’t. Just a bunch of wall-sitters, all of them.”

  They sat at Melrose’s favorite table, a small one in the middle of the room and next to one of the oak pillars. When they’d polished off their artichokes with lemon, Jury asked, “You were saying you were expert. On what?”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention? Masaccio and Renaissance art. I want another drink-oh, I’ll just order a bottle of wine.” He gestured to the sommelier, who came to take Melrose’s order.

  “So, go on.” Jury watched with sad longing as two old geezers lit up cigars. He had never smoked cigars, but that made no difference. After all this time without a smoke he would have lit up a cat. He would have dropped a match on Young Higgins, coming now with their steak and kidney pudding, negotiating his way through space and time, unimpeded, but as if he had chosen to cross Piccadilly Circus blindfolded.

  Melrose continued, back on Masaccio, “I have quietly extended my knowledge of the twenties-” The sommelier brought the wine for Melrose’s inspection, uncorked it and poured.

  The scent of steak and kidney pudding wafting around them, Jury said, “Prohibition in the States, I seem to recall. Ah, thanks,” he added to Higgins.

  “Not the 1920s in New York, the 1420s in Florence.” To Young Higgins, he said, “Looks marvelous.” He went on. “I also know something of Masolino, Donatello and Brunelleschi. The perspectival illusion.”

  “Sounds like a magic act.” Jury cut off a big forkful of steak and kidney pudding.

  “It was an invention of Giotto, or at least he discovered it. Perspective can’t really be invented, can it? Brunelleschi and Donatello extended it to architecture. Perspective in a painting. You know what that is, of course.

  The art of making an object appear as three dimensional. It’s not an easy thing to do, actually, applying mathematics to space. Like the barrel vaulting in the Trinity. The ribs diminish in mathematical foreshortening.” Melrose held out his arms and brought the tips of his fingers together, whoosh whoosh. “The art of the vanishing point. The centric point, the vanishing point, this is the point at which all lines meet in the distance. Where it all comes together, where the pattern’s exposed.”

  “It sounds like the solution to one of my cases. The only thing is, by the time you get to it, the vanishing point, it’s gone.”

  “Yes, I expect it is.”

  “There’s a paradox for you.”

  Melrose nodded. “Anyway, Trueblood just stopped listening when the subject veered away from Masaccio and his own painting. I could tell; his eyes filmed over. As are yours, right now.”

  “They are not. I’m extremely interested.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Who’d be interested except someone nutty about Italian art?”

  Jury smiled. “Actually, I do know such a nut.”

  Melrose stopped in the act of eating and looked at Jury for a long moment and then resumed. After concentrating on his glass of wine, he said, “You’re fitting me up.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on. First it’s the gardening stuff, then you’ve had me going on about fifteenth-century Florentine art-”

  “How the devil could I do that? I didn’t even know Florentine art was in the fifteenth century. I didn’t even know it was Florentine, for that matter.”

  “Very funny.” Melrose sighed and put down his fork. “Let me tell you something-” He leaned toward Jury as if he meant to grab his tie. “If you’ve got some notion I can impersonate some leading expert in the field of Italian Renaissance art, forget it. I know next to nothing.” Finished, Melrose sat back and took out his cigarettes, having no mercy on Jury at all.

  “What are you talking about? You’ve just held forth for a half hour on the art of Florence.”

  “Oh, come on. That was a Diane Demorney half hour. The only difference being that Diane takes a half minute to get across her single nugget of knowledge about anything on earth. What you’ve just heard me say is it; it’s all I know.” He flicked his temperamental old Zippo, lit his cigarette and dropped the lighter in his pocket.

  “You know a lot more than you think you know.” Jury watched the thin ribbon of smoke stream upward.

  “I know a lot less than I think I know. Get Trueblood to do it.”

  “He’s too volatile.” Jury sipped his wine. “Take that painting along, then. That would be plausible as a reason for paying a visit. You want Ian Tynedale to look at it.”

  “Ian Tynedale? Is he your authority?”

  “Yes. He’s Tynedale’s son, and Italian Renaissance art’s his particular love.”

  “Richard, I’d never be able to wrench that painting away from Trueblood.”

  Jury drank his wine and thought for a moment. “Okay, then we’ll go to Plan B.”

  “Yes, Plan A was such a hit, I can hardly wait. So tell me.”

  Jury told him.

  “No,” said Melrose. “I’d look stupid.”

  “Well, yes, but when has that ever bothered you?”

  Melrose blew smoke in his face. Jury laughed.

  A meal with Plant was one of the few things that could penetrate the ozone layer that Jury sometimes felt masked his ability to think clearly.

  He thought about this as he walked along the Victoria Embankment, delaying his homeward journey. He could get the Northern Line at Charing Cross. Or he could keep on walking. It was a good way to order his thoughts. Sometimes he would pretend that he was seeing the problem for the first time, had come upon it suddenly, by accident, and heard the story anew. Rarely did this approach to a case turn up fresh ideas, but it occasionally did work. He liked that paradox of the vanishing point. You find the answer, but the answer dissolves before-what?

  In the case of the Tynedales, fresh ideas weren’t surfacing now. He did wonder about Kitty Riordin’s husband. Had he been more or less expunged from her consciousness? All of her energies were directed toward Maisie Tynedale… or Erin Riordin, whichever she was. That smile of Kitty’s, that infernal little smile. He couldn’t let go of it.

  Even this short distance from the Strand, traffic noise dwindled to near nothing and there was a strange stillness. He had passed behind Charing Cross station and Somerset House, and now stopped to look down at the Thames, dark and unmoving, or at least it gave the illusion of being motionless. Yet the middle of this river moved at an incredible speed, he had heard.

  Down below he could see the brief spurt of flame, someone lighting a cigarette. A muffled shout, laughter, disembodied. An undercurrent of voices and sounds curling upward like river mist. He knew Waterloo Bridge was a favorite haunt of the homeless, even with the Thames police at the bridge only a stone’s throw away. But they tolerated it, the police, turned a blind eye as long as everything was cleared out by morning. What a life, thought Jury, to have to take down a shelter every morning and run it up again every night.

  Jury stopped and leaned against the railing to look at Waterloo Bridge and the South Bank brimming over
with lights. It would not have looked that way to Myra before she jumped. It would not have looked that way to Roy either, as he stood in fog thick as fleece and lit a cigarette (Jury was sure of that), and smiled that bittersweet smile, and thought about Myra in her cold Thames grave…

  He thought of Alexandra Tynedale, that benighted young mother, and Liza Haggerty, another benighted mother. Liza had been a very, very good detective. She could read in a crime scene signs and portents that baffled others as if they were hieroglyphics carved on cave walls. Probably, she had known before Mickey that something was wrong. But, then, he guessed most wives had such instincts about husbands. You didn’t need to be a scene of crimes expert to know that.

  Really, he should call her, ask her out for a meal or a drink. It might be a sort of relief to her to talk to somebody on the Job. She was bearing up wonderfully, but what must it cost her to know that she’d be left alone with four kids?

  He would do that.

  Thirty

  Mickey Haggerty leaned against the filing cabinet overflowing with folders and documents. It was the next morning. They were continuing their discussion of Kitty Riordin, begun in the Liberty Bounds.

  “I didn’t get any sense of loyalty toward the Tynedales, which, really, I thought she’d make an effort to project,” said Jury.

  “She’s obsessive. The only subject she’s interested in is Erin Riordin, a.k.a. Maisie Tynedale.” He slammed the drawer he’d been searching through shut and went back to his chair, in which he sat down heavily.

  Jury said, “How long did your dad know Francis Croft?”

  Mickey tilted back in his swivel chair and ran his hands through his hair. “A long time, long as I can remember.” He looked off into space. “Croft was a really good man. So is Oliver Tynedale. Both of them would do anything for a friend, no matter how tough. When I was a kid, Mum was in Scotland once, driving from Ballantrae to Stranraer. She meant to catch the ferry across to Belfast. Just as she was taking the car onto the ferry, she passed out. They got her to a hospital and into the CCU. Dad couldn’t be reached, he was out on some case. But Oliver Tynedale’s name was in her address book, so police got in touch with him. He sent a car for me right away to take me to the Tynedale Brewery airstrip, dragged his pilot out of bed and flew me to Stranraer. If he hadn’t done this, I’d never have seen her alive again. He didn’t leave either; he stayed with me. Oliver knew how to talk to kids. I always thought he should’ve been a teacher or something like that. There’s this way he has-a manner, a tone of voice-that calms you down straightaway. It’s not a quality you see very often. After she died-” Mickey looked down, scraped at his tie. To avoid looking across at Jury. When Mickey finally did, tears stood in his eyes.

  “I can understand your not wanting Kitty Riordin getting away with this, if Tynedale is a man like that,” said Jury. “What else did you find out about her?”

  Mickey pulled the top folder from the pile on his desk, slapped back the cover. “Not much, and not easily. I guess fifty years can do that to a case.” He managed a grin. “Katherine-always been known as Kitty-Shea. When she was eighteen she married Aiden Riordin. He had trouble getting work in Ireland-where it was worse than the North-and came here. I get the impression he was to send for her, but then the war happened. Aiden Riordin got caught up-this part’s interesting-in the British Union of Fascists.”

  “The Blackshirts.”

  “That’s right. Pretty hard to take them seriously.”

  “Hmm. I don’t think I’d rush to judgment there. East London got pretty worked up when Mosley was released. But go on.”

  “There’s not a lot about Kitty Riordin to be going on with. She left Ireland, came here, but not, I think, to find her husband. I think she hoped opportunity was more likely to come her way here than in Killarney. It did.”

  “It did indeed.” Jury paused.

  Disturbed, Mickey rose, tossed down the pencil he’d been fiddling with. “Croft’s murder was an inside job meant to look like an outside job, some unknown intruder. By ‘inside’ I mean either a family member or someone else with access-staff, acquaintances. I mean that it wasn’t some stranger and the motive wasn’t robbery.” Mickey tented his hands, spoke over the tops. “I told you that: Simon Croft thought someone wanted him dead.”

  “You did. ‘Out to get him’ was what you said. Why?”

  “He didn’t know, did he? He wanted me around as some sort of protection.”

  “He didn’t even hazard a guess?”

  “I’m sorry to say I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention. I honestly couldn’t take it seriously. Look: Croft was sixty-three. He had too much money and too much leisure. Apart from this book he was writing, he had little to do.”

  “Yet he was a broker, a very good one, you told me. He probably still had clients. I would imagine that kept him pretty busy. This book he was writing on the war. He used to read bits of it to Oliver Tynedale.”

  Mickey beat a short tattoo with two pencils on the edge of his desk. “He talked about it once or twice. British Fascism was some of it. Sir Oswald Mosley-how did he get to be a sir?-and his followers. Did you know that in 1940 police rounded up German nationals-all the men between sixteen and sixty? As if no female and no man over sixty could possibly be a spy?” Mickey laughed.

  “She dismissed Aiden as a fool.”

  “Yeah, well, our Kitty certainly wouldn’t’ve shot Croft to preserve the honor of the Riordin clan. Who would care if Aiden Riordin was goose-stepping all over Hyde Park?” Mickey winced.

  “Anything wrong? Do you need something?” Jury was already out of his chair.

  Mickey waved a shaky finger in the direction of the water cooler by the door. “Cup o’ that.” He took a vial of pills out of his desk drawer, shook a couple into his hand.

  Jury handed him the paper cup. “I wish they’d fill the damned things with whiskey.” He sat down again as Mickey washed down the pills. Jury wanted to ask him about the pain, but thought such a question would be tasteless or morbid, much like the gathering of people around a smashed car. So he kept the question back.

  Mickey tossed the pills back in the drawer, slammed it shut, letting off a mild amount of steam in the act. He went back to the subject of the manuscript. “But I agree: if somebody went to the trouble of taking the PC, the diskettes, the hard copy-there’s something in it someone doesn’t want broadcast.”

  Mickey had risen again to go to the window. Jury wondered if the getting up and down helped to relieve the pain. The phone rang and he scooped up the receiver. “Haggerty. Yeah… Then do it.” He hung up. “No, I guess not everybody would say ‘publish and be damned.’ ” Mickey frowned.

  “There’s someone you haven’t paid much attention to.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Ralph Herrick. Alexandra’s husband.” Jury sat forward. “Simon could have brought something up in his book connected to him, Herrick. I don’t mean necessarily about him, just something going on. Oliver Tynedale mentioned Bletchley Park. The decoding that was done there. Very hush-hush stuff.”

  “Hmm. I remember Herrick was RAF. Decorated, too. Quite the hero. The Victoria Cross.”

  Jury nodded. “Right. He also was quite brilliant in the reading of codes. He could take one look at a code and see the pattern immediately.”

  “Christ. Most of the time I can’t even look at the alphabet and see a pattern. Now, I do seem to recall that Herrick was one of the Bletchley Park people.”

  Jury nodded, grew thoughtful. “I wish to hell I could see that manuscript.”

  Mickey ran his hand down over his face and said, tiredly, “Maybe this whole case is being looked at wrong. Everything’s there, and the answer with it, but our perspective’s just wrong.”

  “Like a painting.” Jury smiled. “A friend of mine just got back from Florence. He was talking about fifteenth-century Florentine art. An architect named Brunelleschi. ‘Perspective illusion’ was the quality that was revolutionary.”


  “Don’t know the chap. I should spend more time at the Tate.”

  Jury looked at Mickey for a moment and then looked away. “Ian Tynedale is passionate about the art of the Renaissance.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Mickey squeaked back in his swivel chair. “It’s one reason I know the motive for this murder wasn’t robbery. What thief would have left the paintings on the walls? Especially the one near the desk? According to Tynedale, who got it for him, it’s worth a cool quarter of a million.”

  Jury smiled and got up. “Maybe whoever did it wasn’t much of a critic.”

  Thirty-one

  Angus Murphy looked up, suspicious. “Ya got t’ much education fer this job, is wha’ I think.” The gardener wiped his face with a bleached blue handkerchief that made his blue eyes look even more faded. “Why, there I’d go breakin’ ya in and off ya’d go the minute ya saw somthin’ ya’d be more ac-clim-ated to.”

  Angus Murphy was short, wiry, ageless and (Melrose thought) loved impressive words. He had been dropping them in whenever he could with no real care for aptness. His slate blue eyes seemed to be permanently narrowed, as if the eyelids had been loosely stitched.

  “-an’ ya’d be off like a bird, off like greased lightning, off like-” he paused.

  “-a bat out of hell?” Melrose prompted. Angus Murphy was a man who liked his metaphor, no matter how worn. “But actually, Mr. Murphy, it would be very unlikely that would happen, as I’ve reached some détente-” (Melrose spoke this carefully) “-between my brain’s needs and my body’s. I don’t deny I’m well educated. But I’ve reached this point, you see, where the only thing that will satisfy me is getting down on my knees and grubbing around in the soil.”

  The eyes narrowed even more. “What was that ya said? ‘Daysomethin’?”

  “Détente?” Melrose was pleased he’d been right about the impressive words.

  “That’s it. What’s that mean, then?”