‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Jury breathed. ‘Don’t forget your mobile.’
‘I don’t have—’ But Jury had already hung up.
Mungo sat up on the sofa watching Schrödinger dash from chair to table to bookshelf, trying to find the source of the mewling.
She missed the Trilby hat left on a table; Mungo had nosed up the brim and shoved Elf under it and now it was moving around. The moving Trilby. Mungo sighed.
30
Melrose had booked a room in the same little hotel he and Trueblood had stayed in during their frenzied trip to Florence the year before. He loved this hotel, which occupied the upper floors of an old building and was reached by way of a cool marble staircase bathed in shadows. He had not discerned who or what occupied the ground floor. Probably no one did. The air was as undisturbed as it had been then.
The hotel was a refuge; when something moved here, it moved in padded silence. He thought the personnel, receptionist, waiters, manager went about in slippers instead of shoes. The floor was marble, but not the tap of a heel was to be heard. He had even asked for the same room; the management actually remembered it. Well, it hadn’t been so long, only a few months since he had been here; still, there was so much for the Florentines to think about—the David, the Duomo, the gold, the gloves—that Melrose was quite astounded he himself was worth remembering. No, it was probably crazy Trueblood they remembered, walking around in a trance with his Masaccio panels—or at least what he’d hoped were.
The little hotel was on a tiny cobbled street, but what wasn’t once you left the center and the San Marco palazzo? It wasn’t much of a walk to the Ponte Vecchio and that was where he headed when he went out.
The Arno, fretted with sunlight, moved so slowly it seemed almost still. The bridge was lined with little shops, mostly jewelers’ and goldsmiths’. It was so pleasant to walk on old stone, to look at old gold, to breathe old air.
The glove shop at the other end of the bridge was as crowded this time as it had been the last; one could barely get to the counter or catch the attention of a shop assistant. These gloves were made of such creamy leather and in such misty or lustrous colors, the shop might as well have been selling rainbows and sunsets.
The spare little woman whose head didn’t reach much higher than Melrose’s elbow had no compunction about shoving it and the rest of Melrose out of the way, an unsuccessful effort that released a spate of Italian which could only be a string of invective.
Hundreds, even thousands, of pairs of gloves in plastic sleeves were nestled in little niches built all over the wall like an enormous letter box. Hot colors, cold colors, pale colors, bright colors—colors one doesn’t see anywhere else except in sea or sunrise. The blues could be anywhere between the blue of the Aegean and the shadows cast on a snowy winter’s day.
As he stood, contemplating this deluge of gloves sorted by color and size across the wall, the crowd had magically thinned out and he was actually being offered assistance. He asked to see the rose, the peacock blue, the sea blue, the winter blue. He purchased twelve pairs, enough to pay his hotel bill, and still felt he’d the best of the bargain. He watched the woman wrap his gloves; he loved the way the French and Italians did this, so carefully and prettily as if every purchase were a present.
One pair he asked to be left unwrapped, not to wear but just to feel its buttery softness. He left the shop.
Melrose walked back across the Ponte Vecchio, stopping every now and then to look at the Amo and its still passage. He held the gloves against his face, feeling comforted, and thought random thoughts of home.
31
As if the hilltop town in Tuscany was a fortress (and it probably had been), San Gimignano was surrounded by gated walls and graced by tower houses. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the gates would have been closed and guarded in the night and the streets tied off with chains and the people under curfew. At least, Melrose imagined it had been that way. Feudal families built these towers, and probably all competed for the tallest tower. He imagined an early morning in winter, seeing the towers poking through smoke or fog, the whole little town floating above the hill it stood on.
Melrose parked his bee-sized car in the car park and undertook the uphill journey into the center of San Gimignano, if it could be said to have a center. This hike he was making could easily take the place of dueling at dawn, the winner the one who got to the top first.
He stopped in a little trattoria on the Via San Mateo for some acqua minerale. He drank a lot of it as it was one thing he could pronounce correctly. ‘Acqua minerale’ he more or less flung out and was served without the waiter’s asking him, with furrowed brow, to repeat himself. He left and continued his walk on the cobbled street to the landmark torture museum and past it and then looked for the house number that had been furnished by the trattoria waiters after they had a brief argument over Signore della Torres’s house.
Ben Torres looked very English. He was dressed in flannel and a blue linen shirt, a man of medium height, with dark hair, long nose and eyes the blue of his shirt. He (blessedly) sounded English, too. His English was impeccable. Well, he was English, wasn’t he?
It was just that one tended to think anyone who lived long in another country would assume its speech, its dress, its manner.
‘Mr. Plant—?’
Melrose nodded and followed Ben Torres into a living room or library. Offered a drink, Melrose automatically said acqua minerale before he remembered Torres was English and then quickly changed the water to whiskey.
Torres laughed. ‘You know, I think I can identify an alcoholic as the one who asks for acqua minerale!’
‘Well, this one doesn’t.’ Melrose held the chunky glass and looked round the room. It really was a sort of dream house for bibliophiles. There were books everywhere, on the shelves, on the floor, on the window seat, on the desk, where a few lay open, staggered across one another, as though Torres had been consulting them. They lay beside a computer.
‘Odd to see that in a place like San Gimignano.’ Ben Torres said of the computer. ‘Strikes a discordant note, I think.’
‘Not if you’re using it.’
Ben Torres smiled. ‘You wanted to see me about the house in Surrey?’
‘I’ve told your estate agent that I’d like to rent it. I’d actually like to buy the leasehold. The agent said no, that you weren’t interested in selling it. But as I was in Florence, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to come round and see you.’
‘Well, the agent is correct there. I could let you have it on a longish lease, four or five years, but I don’t want to sell. Winterhaus is my childhood home; it’s been in the family for nearly a century; I couldn’t let it go.’ He paused and regarded his glass of whiskey, held up to the late-morning light. ‘Do you know anything about the house?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘It’s a provocative place.’ Ben Torres’s smile was slightly lopsided as if he meant to call the smile back. ‘Things happen.’
Melrose smiled too. ‘They usually do. The agent told me the house had been vacant for some time.’
‘It’s quite isolated. When I was a child I thought the place pretty spooky. All of that dark interior, those haunted woods.’
‘Haunted?’
‘Well, as children do, you know, assign malevolence to certain places, I did that to the woods around the house. It’s a good candidate for creepiness, don’t you think? I had too much imagination and a place it could run wild.’
Was Ben Torres on to him? After all, people who wanted to rent a property didn’t ordinarily go to another country to discuss it with the owner.
He tried a different tack to pry the story out of him that Torres’s mother had told him. ‘Does your family live in England?’
‘They’re dead, unfortunately.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes. My father and mother died only a few months apart. They were divorced, anyway.’
‘Did they share yo
ur feeling about the house? Its provocative nature?’
Ben Torres was thoughtful. ‘I think my mother might have. But she was highly imaginative, too.’
Go on. Go on about the frightening figure on the path who scared her. Melrose realized—he had what he could only call a small epiphany—he wanted to hear it not just because he wanted to find out something to help them solve this strange case, but also to hear it because it was all such a damned good story. He was fascinated. ‘So they didn’t see the woodland ghost? No lurking apparitions?’ He wondered how close to the figure on the path he could take this without giving away his reason for coming.
‘No ghosts or apparitions that I heard about. My mother did have a vivid imagination, though.’ He smiled and took a swallow of whiskey and didn’t go on.
Melrose felt an urge to swat him. ‘How did that manifest itself?’ What a wooden question.
Ben Torres didn’t seem to mind. ‘She didn’t want me playing in the woods, I know that.’ He laughed as if pleased by this.
It’s not the woods. It’s not the woods!
Melrose looked quickly around. Where had that message come from?
‘But didn’t tell me why.’
Hell. Torres had come up with a psychic for a mother and then dropped it. ‘Was there some sort of history of strange events in that house?’
‘Not that I ever heard about. People are like that, aren’t they? The isolated house, the banished garden, the deep woods. It’s a kind of a mainstay of Victorian literature, isn’t it? My mother was a romantic, I expect.’ He raised his glass. ‘Another?’
Melrose nodded, wishing his host wouldn’t start and stop the way he was inclined to do.
Torres turned from the drinks table and said, ‘Do I detect in you a man who wants to believe a house is haunted?’
Melrose lurched a bit in his chair, then laughed a bit artificially. What he wanted was the rest of the mother’s story. ‘Lord, I hope not. Was that what your mother wanted?’
Torres handed him his drink and sat down again. The drink was still a frugal finger. Torres wasn’t cheap; perhaps he preferred small drinks to show himself he didn’t drink much. It was hardly past noon. ‘I don’t know, honestly, what my mother wanted.’
There was just an edge to the statement, an edge of disappointment? Anger? But, of course, he stopped again, dropping the subject.
‘When I was looking at the house, there was a child there, I mean, outside, at the bottom of the gardens, playing in a sort of Wendy house, I guess it’s called.’
‘You must mean Tilda. Yes, she lives nearby. When I was last there, I saw her. I’m sure she’s behind the tea in the cups that so puzzled the estate agent. I didn’t tell her, anyway.’
That answered one spectral question. Except they already knew this.
Melrose wished he’d get around to telling this story of the figure on the path that Torres had told Harry Johnson.
But there was a difference between him and Harry Johnson. Harry had come on a mission, to discover anything he could about the house as if the history might explain the awful business of Glynnis Gault’s disappearance. He was standing in for poor Hugh Gault. Whereas Melrose himself had come only to ask if the house might be for sale. He had taken the wrong tack but, then, what other could he take?
‘How about lunch?’ asked Ben Torres. ‘The trattoria on the Via San Mateo is quite good. You probably passed it on your way up the hill.’
Melrose agreed and they set off.
‘I have a friend,’ said Melrose, ‘who’s crazy about the torture museum.’ Melrose inclined his head in that direction as they passed.
Ben Torres laughed. ‘That’s wonderful. Someone whose memory of San Gimignano is fixed on that museum. It’s rather mad; or perhaps the person whose collection it is, is mad.’
‘Be an interesting spot for a murder.’
Torres cocked his head at Melrose. ‘You’re interested in murder?’
‘Not beyond, you know, the usual.’ He was thinking of the gardener, and the man William Cannon, who had died in the Winterhaus woods so long ago. ‘Any in yours?’
‘My what?’
‘Your past.’
They entered the trattoria, where Ben Torres was greeted in such a happy way, one would have thought he ate there every lunchtime. Perhaps he did. He certainly had no need of the menu, just ordered the calamari and suggested Melrose have it, too. He felt it would be ungracious to order something else. He knew at some point in his life he’d be trapped into eating calamari.
But when it came he found it was quite delicious. Done with currants, or something, and the garlic was so transparent it looked shaved. Tomatoes, olives and couscous completed the dish.
‘I wish I could have my cook do this dish, I really do.’ Melrose was thinking mainly of setting a big plate of it—perhaps just the calamari—in front of Agatha when next she came to dinner, which he hoped would not be soon.
‘Odd, but someone else was visiting me months ago and we talked about the house. Winterhaus. Someone I had known in a minor way. But I don’t think he was interested in leasing it. . . .’ Torres’s voice trailed off and he drank some wine.
Harry Johnson. Go on go on go on! And then it suddenly occurred to Melrose that he was being a total dunce. That of course Ben Torres would not tell him the story his mother had told him, Ben. He’d want to lease the house, not turn people away, and a recounting of Winterhaus’s strange history would be unlikely to attract a prospective customer. Well, nothing to be done about it now. They ate their lunch and drank their wine (which was superb) and talked for another hour, until Melrose left, stomach full, hands pretty empty.
He visited the Duomo; he strolled around the Uffizi; he went to the Accademia, or rather, sat in the piazza where he looked at Michelangelo’s David, or rather the copy of it; they’d taken the real one away, which got Lou Reed’s voice going in his mind.
They’ve taken her children away
Because they said she was not a good mother. . .
He sat in the piazza, stirring and stirring his tiny cup of espresso, and wondering why he was stirring, since he’d added nothing to it. He plunked in the mite of lemon peel. He stirred and gazed solemnly at the copy of the David and wondered how long it took to clean up a piece of sculpture. Lou Reed went on, singing about this benighted, drug-raddled woman. There it was: his highly developed aesthetic sense. Lou and Michelangelo.
The figure is not created but discovered. Michelangelo believed he was freeing the figure-imprisoned in the slab of marble. Melrose liked that idea.
He stirred and went over his mental list, wondering if he had forgotten anyone. Vivian, Joanna, Trueblood, Agatha . . .
Mrs. Withersby!
He had forgotten Dick’s char. Well, he’d just have to go back, wouldn’t he? What a lovely prospect.
He stopped stirring and drank off his thimble of coffee, then rose and headed back over the bridge to the glove shop.
‘Nothing,’ Melrose said to Jury the next morning, with the telephone receiver in one hand and his jammed-up croissant in the other. One of the staff had brought the phone into the little breakfast room for him. ‘Not a damned thing more than Harry Johnson already told you; indeed, there was a good deal less. I also got the impression there was much more, but that he didn’t want to talk about it. But, then, could that simply have been me with my preconceived ideas?’
Yes.
Melrose looked around. Where had that answer come from? ‘Did you say something?’
‘Me? No, I’m simply enjoying the silence of a transatlantic telephone call.’
‘Very funny. ‘You won’t solve it, you know.’ I’m quoting Marshall Trueblood. ‘Not unless fate steps in and takes your side.’’
‘I’m sure he’s right. Maybe this is too tall an order even for the stepping-in of fate. But how did Ben Torres strike you? Harry Johnson thought the man extremely agitated, even paranoid.’
‘Well, he didn’t impress me as a man ready
for the Stoddard Clinic. He seemed pretty calm. But then, of course, it’s been almost a year since Johnson spoke with him, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m leaving this afternoon on the late side. I’ll be back in London around seven or eight.’
‘You’re stopping in Boring’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘At least the Florence trip wasn’t a trip wasted.’
‘Why not? I didn’t get anything out of Ben Torres.’
‘No, but you got the gloves.’
32
‘The same, Mr. Johnson?’
Harry nodded. ‘No hope of my venturing into the unknown, Trev.’
Trevor smiled and looked at Jury. ‘You, sir?’
‘Let me have a glass of red. Maybe that one I had before?’ Trevor looked pained at that ‘glass of red’ appellation. ‘That was a Pinot Noir, sir. An ‘81.’
‘Oh. Well, it was quite good.’
Trevor shook his head and went to fetch it.
‘Okay, go on,’ said Jury. Under his chair, Mungo’s warm nose seemed to be whiffing at Jury’s ankle.
Harry nodded. ‘I could think of nothing else to do; the options had pretty much got down to zero. What was it Sherlock Holmes said? After you’ve eliminated the impossible, you take what’s left, no matter how improbable? But nothing was left.’
‘Something was. Because there had to be. She—they—didn’t vanish into thin air. Or another dimension, no matter what Hugh Gault wants to think,’ said Jury.
‘You’re right. You see, I honestly thought the house, Winterhaus, had something to do with it. That sounds spooky, but that’s what I thought. I couldn’t find evidence that it was the last place she’d been, but it appeared to be the last place she was seen, by the woman in the Swan who saw her by the roadside.’
It occurred to Jury then, the business of the key. ‘If nothing had happened to her, wouldn’t Glynnis have seen the agent when she returned the key?’
‘There’s a kind of letter-box thing at the agency to one side of the door that people can use to hand back a key. Probably that’s what Glynnis did. In any event, Marjorie Bathous hadn’t seen her. And the key wasn’t returned to the agency.’
The Old Wine Shades Page 19
