The Blue Last (25 page)

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. I got there in the early afternoon; I wanted to do my Christmas shopping. I stayed overnight, but I didn't get word about Simon's death until the next evening, after I'd returned here. I was simply too exhausted to turn around and go back. My doctor didn't want me going to London in the first place.”

Jury nodded. That was no alibi, at least not so far. “What about your brother's house, Miss Croft? You and your sister have inherited it, I expect.”

She turned her head to gaze out of the window to the sea, and said, mournfully, “Yes. But I doubt either of us will live there. When you get old, Superintendent, you don't feel much like turning your life over yet once again.”

“You'll sell it?”

She gave him a long look, a head-to-feet look. “Are you considering real estate as a night job?”

Jury burst out laughing. He thought it was the first good laugh he'd had since the case started. “Would I make a good one?”

“Oh, probably not. You just seem to worry about the disposal of flats and houses, as if that's a sideline with you.” She laughed herself. “No, we won't sell it. I don't want to lose Simon altogether. As I said, it's the nice thing about money. You can keep things as they were.”

“Not really, though.”

She gave him another long look, this one full of empathy. “Death is always with us, Mr. Jury. Always.” She smiled. “ ‘The fellow in the bright nightgown,' is what W. C. Fields called it. I love that image, but I don't agree with it. There is no bright raiment. Death comes along in the same old clothes, nothing new, nothing different from what we're used to seeing. And we do see him, all the time, and know it, and try not to. I find it comforting that death holds no surprises.” She looked at him, kindly. “Hold on to that notion, Superintendent. In your line of work, you'd do well to hold on.”

Her expression was inscrutable. He felt the need to counter it, he didn't know why.

“‘Death is always with us'—that's a bit of a cliché, isn't it?” He smiled.

“No.” She smiled, too.

T
he Tynedale maid, Rachael, opened the door to admit Jury and a white cat who'd been looking squarely up at him. Jury told the maid he had an appointment to speak to Oliver Tynedale. He was twenty minutes early, he knew. “I'd also like to see Miss Tynedale, if that's possible.” Jury looked down. “I can't answer for the cat.” Rachael giggled and led him down the hall. The cat followed.

She was writing at a desk in a bow window and rose to greet him. “Superintendent Jury.” Her tone was as level as her eyes, neither welcoming; she softened up a little when she saw the cat. “I see you've brought Snowball. She belongs to Mrs. Riordin; she's a strange animal.”

The cat resumed its glaring at Jury. “I know all about strange when it comes to cats, believe me. May I sit down?” He detected a hesitation before Maisie held out her arm to indicate the chair he stood by. The cat saw this and walked back to the door.

“Has something else come up?”

“No.” He did not elaborate, wanting her to do the talking.

“You upset Kitty Riordin, you know.”

“Police have a way of doing that.”

“You wanted to talk about the war and about what happened.”

“Isn't that what police do? Talk about what happened?”

Maisie seemed to be looking at everything in the room except him. Now, she seemed to be studying whatever document was on her desk blotter. “ ‘What happened,' ” she responded to his question, “was Simon being murdered. Not the war, not the Blue Last.” She was trying not to show the extent of her anger.

Jury looked at her speculatively. “How do you know that, Miss Tynedale?”

She looked around the desk as if she couldn't lay her hands on what she wanted. “What happened was an air raid, and the Blue Last took a direct hit. This was fifty-five years ago, right after Christmas, December twenty-ninth. East London was devastated. It was the heaviest raid of the war, some seven hundred bombers. My mother's—Alexandra—and Francis Croft's deaths. That's what
happened.
”

Half a century ago and she still felt the emotional devastation? Jury didn't think so. “You have all of those details right. They must have been told to you time and again. I was a tiny kid then and I remember nothing; at least, nothing right. And as for your mother's death being so long ago, you know perfectly well one death can affect another, no matter how far apart in time.”

“Not in this case. No.”

“You're certainly sure about that. Why?”

She merely shook her head.

She wasn't going to answer, so he said, “You didn't mention the Riordin baby.”

“Erin, too, of course.” Maisie studied her hands. The disjointed fingers seemed still to shame her a little. “I know those bones were discovered.”

“Yes.”

“I don't see what they tell you. I don't see how you'd know they were my mother and Erin Riordin.”

“Many ways. The sex is fairly easy, certainly in the case of the adult. A child that young, well, perhaps not so easy. One has to guess on the basis of other things. The child's skeleton was so near the adult's and there were apparently no other children in the pub . . .” Jury shrugged. “They can go by the composition of the soil, the vegetation—a number of things besides the condition of the bones themselves. Teeth, for instance. Even in infants; the teeth might not have broken through yet but there's maturation below the gum. In the case of your mother and Erin Riordin, there's the bombing itself. Fragments of shells, that sort of thing. Forensic anthropology is quite amazing. You know what can be done with reconstructing a face from the skull, the bone structure.”

She studied her hands, then looked, again, around the desk as if searching for something. She was searching, Jury thought, simply for time.

“I'd like to know more about Mrs. Riordin. You're very fond of her.”

“Certainly. I hate clichés, but she's been like a mother to me.”

Jury wondered why Maisie didn't see the other side, the corollary to that. “How did she come to be employed?”

Maisie reflected. “Well, she had just come over from Dublin—like any number of Irish girls. She was quite young, just a little younger than my mother, Alexandra. My mother went to an agency and found her. Of course, Kitty hadn't told them she had a baby because she knew the agency wouldn't put her on their list. Kitty just hoped whoever interviewed her would be understanding. She was lucky it was Alexandra, who was, from what I've been told, the most understanding person in the world.”

“She was with you for how long before that December raid?” He noted the way in which she referred to “my mother” and “Alexandra,” and not “mum” or “mummy.” Of course, Maisie hadn't really known her mother, but, still . . .

“A little over a year. I guess it was right after I'd been born.”

“Your grandfather liked her?”

“Oh, yes. If it hadn't been for Kitty, I'd be dead.”

“And she more or less lived with and for the family after that.”

“That's so. I've wondered why she didn't marry again. I'm pretty certain she had opportunities.”

“Is the family—are the families—so close it might have been, well, consuming?”

She thought about this. “I think not in a bad way. We're very tightly knit, yes.”

“The trouble with that is, you pull one strand loose and the piece unravels.”

“That metaphor's a bit strained, isn't it? If one of us falls on his face that doesn't mean all of us will.”

“It might. Especially since you don't know which one fell.”

Maisie ran her hand through her black hair, and it dropped back in place just as neatly as it had been. He imagined this to be like the disturbance of the past, as if the placid surface of a lake had been raked by wind and rain, and then returned to glassy smoothness.

He wondered if this was why she hadn't married, because of her ties to the past and the families who constituted it, or for some other, perhaps more mundane reason. Certainly it couldn't be because she hadn't the opportunity. She was too attractive, too intelligent and too rich. The money alone would be an inducement.

She had risen and was leaning against the desk, her ankles crossed, her face turned down. “My father was in the RAF; he was decorated. The Victoria Cross.”

Jury felt himself once again pulled back into something he did not understand. “So was mine. I mean, in the RAF. He was shot down over Dunkirk.”

“I'm sorry.”

It rather surprised Jury that she seemed to mean it. “It was a long time ago.”

She nodded. “I don't like sounding sorry for myself, but I feel really cheated, not only having lost both my mother and father, but having no memories of them either.”

“It would be just another version.”

“ ‘Version'?”

“Of what really happened. Of reality, I suppose I mean. How well do we remember anything? How well do we remember yesterday?”

She smiled for the first time. “That's sophistry, now. Or you find consolation in thinking that.” She had left the desk and now stood by the bow window behind it.

“Oh, I'm unconsoled,” he said. Feeling more tired than he knew he should, he rose and went to the window himself. They stood there. The ground was spongy with morning rain and the beech tree, the one with the wood plank between its thick branches, seemed still to bear the weight of the rain.

Jury watched as the gardener, Mr. Murphy, leaned a hoe or rake against the garden wall and bent over a small plot of some delicate-looking white flower. His hand went to the small of his back as he stood upright. Arthritis, rheumatism, probably. He was too old, Jury thought, to take care of this garden all by himself. He wondered where Gemma Trimm was. Had he been more fanciful (but “fancy” he tried to relegate, like whiskey, to his off hours) he might have supposed his encounter with Gemma was imaginary. She seemed so unrelated to this house, so fairy light.

“What are you thinking? You're smiling.”

“Tell me about the little girl.”

Maisie looked, just for a second, puzzled. Was it possible that Gemma made such tiny inroads on the family consciousness that they really had to stop to think? How could any child living here—much less one as interesting as Gemma Trimm—make so little impression? Further, a child beloved of the patriarch, the man with the money? Did none of them view the child as a threat? How much
was
Tynedale worth? Perhaps so much that a million here or there scarcely scratched the surface.

“She's Granddad's charge.”

An interesting way of putting it. Just as she said it, Gemma appeared at Mr. Murphy's side. It was as if she had physically to appear to remind them all of her existence.

“She has no family? None?” Jury asked. That had a ring of fatalism.

“None I know of. Granddad notified the authorities and tried to find out where she belonged for a good two or three months.”

“Even if he had located her relations, I'm sure he could have made some sort of arrangement to keep her.”

Her smile was wan. “I'm sure you're right. But don't sound so righteous about it.”

“Do I? Sorry, it's just that money makes so many problems go away. Anyone who says it can't buy happiness obviously doesn't have any.”

“My goodness, Superintendent, you never struck me as a cynic.”

“But I'm not.”

Mr. Murphy had wandered beyond their line of vision while Gemma and her doll waited by the flower-bed. He soon returned pushing a wheelbarrow with what looked like a great deal of effort.

“Poor man,” said Maisie. “Angus is too old and too rheumatic for all of this work. But we've tried out several gardeners to help him, and none of them seemed very dedicated to the work and only irritated him to death. The last one, Jenny Gessup, just up and left. Now, I expect I'm going to try again. The agencies send such rubbish. But he really needs someone for the hard work.”

“Really?”

“I
was wondering,” said Oliver Tynedale, lying back among the cushions of his very large bed, “when you were ever going to get around to me.”

“I'm here in a—what? A semiofficial capacity?”

“Well, hell, if you don't know, be sure I don't. I don't know what semi gets you these days.” He reached around to pummel his cushions. “Me, I'm the whole of the Tynedale Brewery.”

“I'm doing this because Michael Haggerty asked me to help. If I tax your patience just toss me out.”

Oliver Tynedale lay back. “Throw out a Scotland Yard superintendent? That sounds like fun. I don't mind talking to you and I'm not as weak as I look.”

“You don't look weak. But they wouldn't let me talk to you when I was here before.”

Oliver waved that aside as nonsense. “Bunch of pansies. Who kept you out? Barkins? Not that nurse because I fired her after twenty-four hours. Last, I hope, in a string of them. I'm stuck in bed right now. Worse luck. Wait a minute, I'll show you—”

Jury was rather surprised with the man's alacrity in getting out of his bed. He was very tall, easily as tall as Jury himself, thin (but hardly emaciated) and didn't walk with a stoop or as if he were in pain. He was into his bathroom and out again, pulling his oxygen equipment on a wheeled, stainless-steel trolley. “Don't you wish you had one of these?”