‘But if she didn’t, where is she?’
‘Gone to some place like New York or Finland.’ Trueblood’s brow creased. ‘I’ve never really seen the point of Finland.’
Melrose said. ‘All right, let me recapitulate these solutions. One: Hugh is lying; he’s murdered his wife and son and is feigning madness to throw people off the scent.’ Here he nodded toward Joanna, who gave an answering nod.
‘Two: a parallel world into which they’ve vanished. The string theory.’
‘Superstring,’ Trueblood corrected. He had the quickest mind of the lot; he could vacuum up details like crazy.
‘Three: Hugh is indeed insane and the story is a fantasy. Correct, Theo?’
Theo nodded.
‘Four: Hugh’s doing this to Harry as revenge for the affair with Hugh’s wife.’
Diane blew out a jetty of smoke and nodded.
‘What I’d like to hear about is the fracas in the other drawing room,’ said Joanna.
Trueblood said, in the middle of blowing smoke rings, ‘Red herring.’ He blew a little smoke ring through a large one.
They all stared at him. ‘What the devil are you talking about?’ asked Melrose. ‘What red herring?’
‘It was done to draw the attention away from the people in the first drawing room. Where Superintendent Jury and Hugh Gault and Harry What’s-his-name were talking.’
Melrose passed his hand up and down before Trueblood’s face as if he were a hypnotist making certain his patient was deep enough into a trance.
Trueblood went on blowing smoke rings.
Diane adjusted another cigarette in her sleek black holder. She waited while Melrose reached across the table and lit it. Then she turned to Trueblood, who sat there like a cat with a bowl of cream. ‘What we’ve been talking about isn’t ... a .. . story.’ She spaced the three words out in case his sanity or his hearing aid (he didn’t wear one) were performing on a very low frequency.
He said, ‘Of course it is.’
‘No. It happened,’ Joanna broke in. ‘It actually happened!’
‘Then,’ said Trueblood, ‘the red herring was ‘actually’ drawn across the drawing-room door.’
‘My God,’ said Melrose. ‘This is worse than the play within the play theory. The people were performing in a story no one had written.’
‘No,’ said Vivian. ‘It’s worse: in the play within the play, the characters in the play proper are still actors. They’re fictional. In this instance there’s no fiction.’
‘We’re not in it,’ said Trueblood, picking a mite of lint from his Armani silk-suited-sleeve. ‘It’s fiction.’
Melrose gaped. ‘But the fact that we’re not in it doesn’t mean nobody’s in it. This story is about them. It isn’t them in the flesh!’ Trueblood raised his perfect brows. ‘That’s precisely what I’ve been saying.’
Melrose winced. He brought his fist down on the table. ‘The people in the other drawing room are simply the people in the other drawing room.’
Trueblood shrugged neatly. ‘Of course. That’s the red herring part of it. See, we’re supposed to be suspicious of them when there’s nothing really to suspect. Richard Jury, Hugh Gault and Harry Johnson. Look.’ He took a gold pen from his waistcoat pocket and asked Joanna for a leaf from her notebook.
‘You can have the whole thing. It’s got my latest in it and scrap paper will be as good as it gets. I’m afraid.’
Oh, if only Polly Praed had that attitude! thought Melrose. ‘Thanks.’ Trueblood began to mark it up. ‘The play within the play.’ He drew two squares, a large one and inside it, a much smaller one. ‘Now, when the roving band of actors, the players, step out of their roles in the inner play—play two, we’ll call it—and enter the play proper—play one—they’re actors again. During play two the actors become Gertrude, Claudius and whoever happens by during play two. Just as Richard Jury becomes Richard Jury, police superintendent.’
‘Wait wait wait wait wait,’ said Melrose, breathless with objections. ‘It’s not Jury’s story!’
‘Yes, it is. He’s become part of it. He’s become a police superintendent acting as a police superintendent, and consequently he changes the outcome. Anyway, he can’t comment on himself as police superintendent.’
They gawked and gaped. Theo Wrenn Browne, who’d been forced into silence by a total lack of understanding of any of this, but who saw where all the attention was going, said, ‘You know, I think he’s right.’
Diane gave him a look. ‘You don’t think anything, Theo.’ Then to Trueblood: ‘You’re crazy, Marshall. I mean, anyone who’d go to all of that mental effort, well.’
Trueblood went on, tapping his diagram now and then. ‘That mathematician you were talking about—’
‘Gödel?’ Melrose couldn’t understand a word of Gödel.
‘That’s the lad. Remember, sanity cannot comment on itself with respect to being sane or insane, because he has to do it within the system. Gödel says that no validation of our rationality can be accomplished using our rationality. So! Superintendent Jury has been unlucky here. He won’t solve it, you know. He can’t.’
‘Of course he will!’ Melrose slapped his hand on the table. Trueblood dribbled a bit of ash toward the metal tray. ‘Only if fate steps in and takes his side.’ He smiled.
Melrose could hardly remember what the argument was at this point. He shifted ground and said to Vivian: ‘We haven’t heard from you.’
Vivian had turned on the window seat and was looking out through the casement window at the walk edged with purple daphnes. ‘I don’t have a theory yet. I have a question.’
‘Which is?’ said Melrose.
She looked at him, frowning. ‘Why didn’t they take Mungo?’
WHY DIDN’T THEY TAKE MUNGO?
29
It was about time somebody asked that question, Mungo thought. It was all so obvious, so incredibly simple, and if they couldn’t work it out, why was it down to him to make the blind see? He sighed and stretched on the green sofa, belly up. Really relaxed.
Now, here came the cat Schrödinger, the color of thunder, who’d just had a flotilla of shiny little ones that she kept in the bottom drawer of a Queen Anne walnut bureau. The ormolu mounts brought it near enough to the floor to make it convenient. That’s where she’d had them, and that’s where they were staying. Little Mrs. Tobias, cook and cleaner-upper, just flapped her hand at the bottom drawer and said, oh, what difference did it make anyway, as the master hardly ever comes in here.
‘In here’ was the music room across the hall from the living room. The only reason it was called that was because there was a grand piano in it, upon whose keys Schrödinger liked to walk until Mrs. Tobias shooed her off.
Mungo enjoyed the kittens. He liked to take one out of the drawer and cart it about the room and hide it in different places. He had a good time watching Schrödinger look for them.
Well it was just something to do. It wasn’t much different from walking around with a shoe in his mouth.
Mungo rolled over again to find he was staring into the yellow eyes of Schrödinger. You look like an owl. He sent her that message. Where is Elf? She sent him back a question.
Where’s who? He feigned curiosity.
Don’t pretend you don’t know: Elf.
Anything that had to go around all its life with a name like Elf probably deserved his sympathy. But the kitten didn’t get it. Pleased with himself, he let his eyes slew around to the fireplace. There was the coal scuttle, where a tiny, really tiny face rose over its rim, coming up like a dirt diver.
Schrödinger followed the direction of his glance. The cat gave Mungo’s side a good Maw and he yelped. Oh, didn’t she look satisfied! Look at her nose in the air and Elf in her mouth.
Here she came, stalking back through filtered sunlight, and he wondered if it was dinnertime, and hoped he wouldn’t have to put up with yet another smoke-saddled, drink-smeared, wine-sopping gin palace again.
She was
sitting square before his damp nose, holding the pipsqueak like a lump of coal, then dropping the poor thing right on the sofa where it whined and blindly moved. You can see, you black sequin of cat. He sent this message and knocked Elf off the sofa.
He didn’t, frankly, see how any of them managed to live through another dusk, another dawn, another day. I should have been a poet, he thought. I could go on and on and on in my simple-minded measure—
Schrödinger boffed him a good one on the nose, picked up the mewly kitten in her teeth again and slunk off to the bottom drawer.
Mungo played dead, feet frozen up in the air. If the cat was so dumb as to put it back in the same place, then she deserved to have them catnapped. Was that a word, though? Or did it just mean ‘sleep’? Had he been dognapped and for some reason didn’t remember the event? What on earth the bloody point would be he couldn’t imagine.
That Scotland Yard Spotter had been so close! Until he worked it all out Mungo would be lying under chairs in the Old Wine Shades and lumbering along to all of these different eateries.
How, wondered Mungo, could you tell this whole story to the five people in that pub in Northamptonshire, and they’d none of them get it? Except maybe the one who’d asked the question. She was closest.
I said it before; I’ll say it again: it’s not the bloody woods! Bodies buried in the woods, how trite. Now, the girl, the girl was something else again. She and the dreadful Caroline. Another clue that the nice one just might eventually pick up on. He calls himself a spotter?
Maybe people just want to be fooled. That’s why it was so easy to fool them. Maybe it was an escape. We all needed escapes, so why not escape to Tuscany and ask this Torres fellow what’s going on? Would he tell? Does he know? Maybe not. It would certainly make a change, though. San Gimignano What a name! And how that woman tossing back martinis had pronounced it! San Gimmi- yanno! There was a name for you!
He knew all about escapes. He stopped playing dead, bounced off the sofa and walked over to the bureau and its bottom drawer.
Leaving her question up in the air and unexplained, Vivian left the pub for an engagement she also didn’t explain.
What the devil had she meant? ‘Why didn’t they take Mungo?’
They had all sat there and gawked at one another, irritated as the devil that Vivian had gotten away without explaining herself.
And who was she meeting? Who did she have up her sleeve? They all knew one another’s friends because they were one another’s friends. Lord, thought Melrose. It’s not another Count Dracula, is it? That engagement had lasted, what?, five years said Trueblood, five years of their working out ways to scotch that romance.
Joanna Lewes said it was too much for her; she had to leave to get home and finish writing her two chapters for the day. They all agreed Vivian’s statement was indeed too deep, too—
Except Theo Wrenn Browne, who claimed to have a notion as to what she meant, but, of course, wouldn’t say, for it was Vivian’s idea. Then the lying little weasel of a bookseller had made an exit and it was the three of them left to mull it over. They had decided to go to Sidbury for a meal, although Trueblood had wanted to go to the Blue Parrot for laughs and Diane had plumped for London because she’d never been to that marvelous little restaurant Melrose had told them about called Snipers, which she thought sounded made to order for them; they were all such sneaks.
They had another round of drinks. Then it was after eight and too late for London, so they argued about the Blue Parrot and whether to go there as Trevor Sly served the most execrable food in Britain.
But then Trueblood said, ‘Ben Torres. He’s a dark horse in this story, isn’t he?’
‘The story’s full of dark horses.’
But Torres was one whose story no one questioned and it was a bizarre tale in its own right.
San Gimignano, Diane had said again.
‘That’s where that torture museum is, right?’
‘Marshall, you’re the only person in the British Isles who could remember San Gimignano for its museum of antiquated torture artifacts.’
‘But it was fun.’
Melrose stared at him. ‘I think I should have a little talk with Ben Torres; I think I’ll go to San—’ He paused, frowning a bit.
‘Gimignano,’ said Diane, with her flawless pronunciation.
Trueblood sat up. ‘Oh, good. Get me some driving gloves.’
Ben Torres. So finally you hit on the bloody obvious, good for you, Mungo was thinking as he made his way over to the bureau.
Schrödinger was in the kitchen, excavating for cheese or other bits of food, and Mungo was at the bottom drawer taking out Elf. He thought it would be especially irritating to Schrödinger if he kept hiding the same kitten all over the house. He could carry Elf in his mouth probably better even than Schrödinger could. He looked around, taking special note of a large jardiniere by the bay window that held some sticklike little tree, all windblown out of shape, one of those trees the Japanese were so fond of. He trotted over there.
He dumped Elf in the empty space between the potted tree and the jardiniere and ran back to the sofa, pretending to be asleep when Schrödinger slunk in and went to the drawer to count the kittens. She turned and let out a real raspy wail of a cry, like a cat-fighting cry, and then was all over the room, searching for Elf.
Mungo watched this pathetic search, this rooting around in bookshelves, looking in the coal scuttle again (would I choose the same place twice, for heaven’s sake?), jumping up on chairs and nosing under cushions.
He watched and wondered about Ben Torres, why it was taking everyone so long (including even the Spotter, who was really okay and fed him scraps under the table) to get around to Ben Torres.
Schrödinger had her paws over the rim of the jardiniere, but with no way of getting Elf out from that position, so she slid down into it. A lot of noise came out of it, meows and hisses and other cat sounds. Elf could get out by himself only if he scrabbled up into the dirt container that held the tree and from there to the edge of the jardiniere and down to the floor. Mungo was tired of having to do everyone’s thinking for them.
‘I don’t know what she meant,’ said Melrose to Jury, who was on the other end of the phone line.
‘‘Why didn’t they take Mungo?’ Well, if you stop to think—’
‘I’d rather not.’ Melrose held the telephone receiver and picked at a bit of loose velvet on the chair in the hall of Ardry End. ‘I’m finished with thinking.’
‘When did you begin? If you stop to think about it, if Glynnis and Robbie were indeed abducted, it would be absurd to think the abductor would have taken the dog along.’
Melrose said nothing and picked at the velvet. He’d called to let Jury know he was going to Florence.
‘Florence? That’s a lot of trouble to go to.’
‘You know me. Trouble’s my middle name.’
‘Yes, sure.’
‘You don’t need to be sarcastic.’
‘I don’t need to be; I just want to be.’
‘Of course, Ben Torres might not even talk to me about all this.’
‘I don’t see why not. He talked to Harry Johnson. It isn’t as if it’s a secret. All of it is in the past.’
‘Yes, probably.. But who shall I say I am?’
‘Well, you could try Melrose Plant or Lord Ardry.’
‘Funny. But what’s my connection to be with Winterhaus?’
‘You’re helping out a friend, me, Detective Superintendent Richard Jury.’
Melrose frowned. ‘But all of that’s the truth.’
‘Learn to live with it. When do you leave?’
Melrose consulted the longcase clock in the hall. ‘It’s too late to go tonight, so I expect I’ll leave tomorrow morning.’
‘To Florence?’
‘Well, of course to Florence. Do you think San Gimignano has a landing strip or a helicopter pad?’
‘You just want to go to that glove shop again.’
&n
bsp; Melrose sighed deeply. That really annoyed him. Here he was traveling to Italy, to Tuscany, to help solve this riddle and Jury was trivializing his efforts. He said so.
‘No, I’m not. You also want to go to the church to see the Masaccio murals. There’s nothing trivial about Masaccio.’
‘May I remind you if it hadn’t been for Masaccio’s peculiar penchant for solitude, you might never have solved that case? Painful though the case was.’
‘I didn’t solve it. I just got shot. You solved it. You didn’t get shot.’
Melrose thought there might be a compliment buried in there somewhere, but he didn’t care for this juxtaposition of their separate fates. ‘Anyway, you’ll have to give me Torres’s address and phone number.’
‘Address? The man’s lived in San Gimignano for years. I’d bet any of the Sangimiginanesi could tell you in a minute where Ben Torres lives.’
‘The what?’
‘Sangimiginanesi.’
There was a brief silence. ‘Since when did you learn to speak Italian?’
‘I don’t. I’m looking at Time Out Florence. Florence and surroundings. It’s one of those guides written largely for the teenager who wants to find the best DJ place.’
‘Well, you certainly got that San-whatever off rather well. Spell it for me. I have a pencil.’
Jury made some kind of noise. ‘S-a-n-g-i-m-i-g-n-a-n-e-s-i. It’s the people there, as you might say ‘Florentine’ for the ones in Florence.’
‘Yes, ‘Florentine’ I can manage quite nicely. This one, though, I want to run by Diane, who seems to shine at Italian pronunciation. I mean, for someone who says, ‘Let’s all go there and sit around the piazza,’ well. Anyway, what do you want me to find out about Ben Torres?’
‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why you’re going to talk to him. Since this queer story about the house and his mother got to me by way of another person, I wouldn’t be surprised if something got omitted or changed.’
‘Sangimignanorines. How’s that?’
The Old Wine Shades Page 18
