The Black Cat

by Martha Grimes

  “I’d say she got the best of the bargain, David.”

  That Jury’s saying this pleased DS Cummins no end was very clear.

  They sat in the car awhile, a no-parking zone in front of the station. Jury asked him if he’d lived all of his life in London. Was that why it seemed home to him?

  “No. Northumberland’s where I was born. We moved to the south, first to Portsmouth, then to Hastings. Mum loved the coast. Bit of a gypsy she was, liked moving. Hastings, Brighton, Bexhill-on-Sea, and back again. Drove poor Dad crazy.” Cummins laughed, apparently in tune with the craziness.

  “What kind of work did he do?”

  “Greengrocer. Funny, isn’t it? Back then I’d have done anything to get away from aubergines and apples. Now, I’m not so sure.”

  “You made the move from London because of Chris, then?”

  Without answering directly, David said, “Well, you have to make small sacrifices, don’t you? Like giving up my pack-a-day habit.”

  Jury gave a short laugh. “That’s no small sacrifice. I know; I stopped three years ago myself.”

  David said after a pause, “I’m afraid I haven’t done it yet. You know, the odd fag out behind the dustbins? Did you use any of the crutches—I mean, like those holders that let you down gradually? Or nicotine patches?”

  “No. I always figured it was more than nicotine.”

  “Me, I’m waiting for a Stoli patch. Or a Guinness one. Something that’ll really do me some good.”

  Jury laughed.

  David went on, apparently fond of the subject. “It’s hard for a woman, I mean, another person, a nonsmoker, to be around a guy who smokes. I guess a kiss doesn’t taste right; it tastes of cigarettes.”

  Jury smiled. It sounded like a song by Cole Porter: Your lips taste of cigarettes ... He said, “How romantic we once were about smoking. Remember Now, Voyager? Paul Henreid lighting up the two cigarettes? One for him, one for Bette Davis?” He looked at Cummins, assessing his age. “You probably weren’t born yet.”

  “I’m no kid; I’m thirty-seven. But I’ve seen that film all right. It’s great, except in the end. She could have had him; why didn’t she take him?”

  Jury thought but couldn’t remember. “Well, as I remember it had a pretty grandiose moral tone. Most films did back then. Probably it had to do with honor.”

  “Bugger honor,” said David with a grim smile.

  10

  Fifteen minutes later, Jury was on the Metropolitan Line train bound for London and talking on his mobile to Wiggins.

  “Somebody’s been spending a lot of money on Mariah Cox,” said Jury. “There’s got to be a well-heeled man in this mix somewhere.” He hadn’t meant the pun. “I’ve just been introduced to a world of shoes, Wiggins. By DS Cummins’s wife, Chris.”

  “Shoes.” Wiggins said it contemplatively rather than with curiosity. “You mean the Jimmy Choos?”

  “His and others. I had no idea there were so many gorgeous women’s shoes.”

  “Some are rather extreme.”

  Jury heard the sound of metal on metal. Spoon on kettle? No, Wiggins had gone off spoons. “Extreme? Which designer are you thinking of?”

  Wiggins was silent for a few seconds. “Well, Jimmy Choo, for instance.”

  Slowly, Jury shook his head. “As I was saying, some man’s been very generous with Mariah Cox.” Too bad she hadn’t just stuck to Bobby Devlin, he thought. “Or men.”

  “A bit sexist of you, guv.” Before Jury could scathingly reply to that, Wiggins told him to hold on. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  The train lurched for a moment, forcing the whey-faced child across the aisle back in her seat. She was probably eleven or twelve, and her empty brown eyes fastened on Jury like leeches. She should have been wearing a sign round her neck: “Nobody home.” Jury stared back at her. He wasn’t in the mood. “Wiggins? You there?”

  No answer. The girl was chewing bubble gum and blew a big bubble right toward him, probably in lieu of sticking out her tongue.

  The train shuddered to a stop at Rickmansworth. Wiggins came back from whatever expedition he’d been on. “I’ve liaised with all the divisional people. Talked to vice in case she’s a pro—”

  “Bit sexist of you, isn’t it?” He smiled, and the smile accidentally took in the bubble-gum-blowing child, who stopped blowing and did stick out her tongue. “Anyway, I’m bound for London, going back to my flat. It’s gone seven, Wiggins; why are you still at the Yard? Go home.”

  “Right, guv. I’m off. And you be sure and check your messages.” There came a snuffling laugh.

  Ha-ha, thought Jury as the train finally pulled away, heading into the City.

  In the doorway of the small living room of Jury’s Islington flat, Carole-anne Palutski, upstairs neighbor, stood rubbing her eyes as if he’d just dragged her down here from a deep sleep. The fact that she was dressed not in pj’s and bathrobe but for a night on the tiles undercut the sleepy winsomeness. Her dress was a sapphire blue that matched her eyes; the neckline, low enough to sink a ship, was studded about with tiny bits of something flashy. In oilcloth and gum boots, Carole-anne would look sumptuous; the dress was gilding the lily. And in place of gum boots, she was wearing strappy sandals. They seemed to be the only thing on the streets these days.

  Jury had called her in.

  “Sit down, sweetheart. I want to read you something.”

  Daintily, she yawned and took her time arranging herself on his sofa. He thought of the gorgeous drift of hydrangeas in Bobby Devlin’s flower stall. Gorgeousness, however, was not about to get her off. Jury unfolded the by now heavily creased scrap of paper and read phonetically: “ ‘S.W. c’d sed high w. ds rep. w’mn mss in Chess. Thought U should know.’”

  Carole-anne just blinked at him. Then she said, “ ‘Thought you should know’ what? The first part’s gibberish. The way you read it, nobody’d know what it means.”

  “That’s the way it’s written.”

  “Don’t be daft. Here, give it to me—” She reached out her hand. Her eyes, beneath eyebrows that fairly twinkled, scanned the scrap of paper. In a tone one might use for the recently comatose, she read, “ ‘Sergeant Wiggins called, said High Wycombe DS’—detective sergeant that means, I’d think you’d know that, at least—‘reported woman missing in Chesham. Et cetera.’ Perfectly clear.”

  “Of course it is to you. You wrote it. Let’s begin with ‘S.W.’ Now how am I supposed to know who that is?”

  Adjusting a couple of pearly bangles round her arm, she said with more than a little impatience, “Well, how many S.W.’s do you know, anyway? ”

  Hopeless, but Jury soldiered on: “The odd thing is you took the trouble to spell out ‘Thought U should know,’ but what I ought to know is written in code.”

  She rooted in her blue satin clutch and came out with a nail file. “The idea was this—”

  No, it wasn’t; there’d been no idea until she’d had these few moments to come up with one. “If by some chance a person—an unauthorized person—”

  (That was good.)

  “—were to get in here looking for classified information—”

  “Like Jason Bourne, you mean.”

  “Him I don’t know, but, okay, there’s an example. If Jason were to get in here, he’d make straight for your personal phone book and message pad. He’d know all your business.”

  She seemed satisfied with that explanation, so he said, “Why did you leave it on the fridge door?”

  There was a pause as she filed away at a troublesome bit of nail. “Well, I took the added precaution of taking it off the message pad; see, no one would think, with the other stuff on the fridge, that there’s an important message they’d want to read.”

  “Brilliant.” He sat there looking at her looking smug. Then he said smoothly, “You forgot something.”

  That raised her eyebrows. “Such as what?”

  “The impression.” Pleased with her confusion, he got up and went
to the phone table, returning with the message pad. “See this?” He tapped the blank page on which there was a faint image of penciled words. “Right there. Spies always do that; they look at the imprint left on the page underneath.”

  “They do?” The news did not bother her.

  “Absolutely. Jason would have this sussed out in five seconds.” Carole-anne sighed, dropped her nail file into her bag, clicked the bag shut, and rose. “And you said no one could understand it.” Then, in a swirl of sapphire and scent, she sashayed out of the room.

  Jury listened to her strappy sandals tapping down the steps, got up, and, accompanied by his sturdy six-year-old self, stomped to his door and yelled down the stairs: “I’m not bloody Jason Bourne, am I?”

  11

  The little girl standing uninvited by his table in the window was the untidiest Melrose had ever seen. More of a scrap than a girl, as if she were among the leavings of material cut away from a gown, a ragged piece, mere oddment. Her doe-colored eyes, large and clouded with tears either past or to come, were fastened on him as if he were expected to do something.

  What could he do? He was only a middle-aged man—granted a rich one, he reminded himself, in case she wanted a house of her own in the Highlands or Belgravia so she could get away from this pub and her parents (of whom he’d seen no sign). So in what way could he serve this child who got left behind when Charles Dickens shut the book? She got tossed out of his pages, left to wander the narrow streets ofChesham, to pop in and out of pubs with a sign on her back: “Waif.”

  He had, amid these reflections, gone on reading—or pretending to—while the little Dickens revenant eyed him. Well, he should at least be nice enough to say, “Hi there,” or, “And you’re staring at me because ... ?” No, that didn’t set the right tone. How about, “My name is Melrose Plant, and you are ... ?” But he was saved from coming up with something when she said:

  “My cat was murdered.”

  That dropped his Times down! Surely it was not the child who had spoken. Surely it was the old woman at the corner table with the racing form, whose hand crept toward her half-pint. Or the old, rough-looking fellow with his equally rough-looking dog at one of the side tables.

  “She got murdered or kidnapped.”

  He was forced to acknowledge her. “Well, that’s rum, isn’t it? You mean your cat died, is that it?”

  A shake of her mousy brown head. “Murdered.”

  “That’s really bad. How did it happen?”

  She was full of the details, and having scored a listener, she said, “Maybe Sally took her to the cat hospital and they—” Here, she made a gesture of a hand with a needle plunging into flesh. The small finger came down hard on Melrose’s jacket sleeve. “That’s what.” She stepped back.

  The Black Cat, in Chesham, was short on customers save for he himself and the horse-betting woman and the surly man and dog, but then it had just gone eleven a.m. He had been finding this lack of custom supremely restful—this lack of complication—until the little girl dropped her cat on the table.

  “Well, but that’s not really murder,” Melrose said loftily.

  “If it happened to you, you’d say it was.”

  He frowned, looking for reason where there likely was none. “Was the cat sick?”

  “Yes. I’m sick, too. You’re probably sick. Everything’s sick. Everybody is sick, but we don’t get murdered for it.”

  That was on a lofty philosophical level Melrose didn’t choose to ascend to. “The thing is—”

  “She didn’t want to die. She looked and looked at me and her eyes said it. She didn’t want to.”

  This was getting to be a bit tangled. “So it did happen at the cat hospital.”

  Again she shook her head. “No. That was another time. Whoever killed her should go to jail and so should Sally.”

  “For how long?” That was an intelligent question.

  “Forever. That’s how long Morris will be gone. I have her picture. Here—” From a pocket of her too-long skirt she pulled out a snapshot, much creased, and handed it over.

  The cat was bunched up on a table outside in the garden. The eyes, caught in the glare, were like white flames in the black face. The cat was all black. Of course, he thought, the pub cat, the Black Cat.

  “Anyway, that’s not the only way it could’ve been done. And don’t forget the ‘kidnapped’ part, either.”

  There was no end to the cat’s dreadful fate.

  “Why would someone kidnap your cat?”

  “Kidnapped or murdered.” Her eyes looked feverish with this knowledge of thievery and murder.

  Melrose hoped his smile wasn’t too superior. “As for the murder, what you really mean is your cat was in an accident. Car ran into him or something?”

  Again the pained eye squinch, the head shake. “No, I mean murdered.” She was holding a soft stuffed animal, an unidentified primate of some sort, and now squashed it as if to demonstrate what mischief a pair of strangling hands might get up to. “Just like that lady they found.” Her head tilted back. “Out there.”

  Ah! That explained it. She was extrapolating, extending the murder horizon to take in her cat. Just what a child might do. “But why would someone intentionally murder your cat?”

  “Maybe because Morris saw what happened. I want a policeman.” She stopped kneading her stuffed animal and dropped her sad eyes. “He got away.”

  Melrose was having difficulty following her constant shift of gears. “But then the cat must be alive somewhere.” No letup of the staring eyes. “When did this happen?”

  “Last night. Morris must’ve seen what happened on Saturday night and the murderer took her.”

  “Morris is a female?” He frowned.

  The cat’s gender was clearly not the point here. More was expected of this grown man. When she looked at him, Melrose knew just how one must have felt trying to get by the Sphinx without knowing the answer to that damned riddle.

  Looking not a little Sphinx-like herself, she walked off to the bar and then behind it. Melrose watched her, or, rather, the top of her head, as she was too short to be seen on the other side. She rummaged, moved along, and rummaged some more until she found what she wanted; whereupon she marched back and solemnly handed over a chunky, cheap mobile phone. “I can’t get anybody else to do it. Call the police.”

  Just then a band of sunlight struck the door now opening, as if God had tossed down this spear of light to make sure men would listen to the little girl, God’s minister for Truth and Justice.

  Melrose smiled and put down the phone. To the child he said, “It seems you’ve come to the right place.”

  12

  Fate rarely returns from holiday. Coincidence seldom lives up to its name, but today, they did. Richard Jury walked in.

  “Over here,” Melrose called, as if the pub were teeming with customers and he were looking over a sea of faces.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Jury. Then to the girl, “Hello.” He stood there, very tall, looking down at her, very small, and closed the gap between them. “I like that monkey. I used to have one, but mine was blue.” He removed his coat and sat down. “My name’s Richard.”

  With hardly a blink, she took in the blue monkey, as if all monkeys were blue, save for hers, which earned it a doubtful look. “My name’s Dora. Do you have a cat?” She moved closer.

  “No, but there’s one where I work.”

  Melrose was a bit miffed. She hadn’t asked him if he had a cat. He did have a goat. “I have quite a good goat. Her name’s Aghast.”

  They both looked at Melrose. What was he doing here?

  Then away. Jury said, “I’ll bet you have a cat. I saw one go by when I came in. A black cat in a huge hurry.”

  “That’s not Morris. Sally wants me to think it is, but it’s not.”

  “Did something happen to Morris?”

  “Yes. I need a policeman.”

  “I’m a policeman.”

  Her mouth dropped open.
She suddenly looked alight, as if a bulb inside her had switched on.

  “So sit down here”—Jury pulled out a chair—“and tell me about it.”

  Dora was only too pleased to wrench herself up beside him, holding tight to the monkey.

  It was a long story, longer than the one she had told Melrose, to whom she’d told only the salient facts. Salient fact, actually: Morris was either kidnapped or murdered.

  With Jury, she was not so stingy. Children seldom were. Melrose checked his watch occasionally, in case the Ancient Mariner wanted to know the time.

  She got round to Morris’s replacement. “Anyone could tell that one’s not Morris. Morris loves to lie and nap. The other one just runs around all the time.”

  At that moment, the outside door opened and several customers walked in. Then the blond woman, Sally Hawkins, whom Jury had talked to on the Monday night, emerged from an arched opening and went behind the bar. The customers all looked at each other as if they were wondering what beer was, while Dora continued to talk about her missing cat, Morris, and insisting the black cat who’d just crisscrossed the pub was not the real Morris.

  “It’s a fake.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Melrose, “seems like a perfectly serviceable black cat.”

  Both Jury and Dora stared at him.

  “Can you find him?” Her small face was a study in worry.

  Jury appeared to be considering this. He said, “I think so.” Then, seeing Melrose tapping his watch, said, “I’d like a beer.”

  “I’ll get it,” Dora chimed. “What kind?”

  Jury inclined his head toward Melrose’s pint. “Whatever he’s drinking.”

  “Guinness,” said Melrose.

  Dora flew to the bar.

  The black cat, Morris Two, who’d come back in from the nowhere he seemed to inhabit, flew after her.

  “Are we still going to Bletchley Park?” asked Melrose. This had been the reason for their meeting here.

  “I don’t see why not. It’s only a half hour away. We can take the A5.” It was Sir Oswald Maples that had got Jury interested in the code-breaking machines. “We can leave when we’re done here.”