The Five Bells and Bladebone (32 page)

Melrose simply refused to mention Richard Jury or he’d be here until the sun went down. Actually, it was so dark in
the house anyway, with the creepers grasping the lead of the mullioned windows, that the sun might never have risen. “In Simon Lean’s pocket,” he said quickly. “Which
one
of these women, Agatha?”

“Both.”

Oh, hell. He should have guessed. “You mean they’re the
same
person?”

She sighed with impatience and spoke slowly enough so that even her nitwit nephew could understand. “This looks a bit more like her . . . .” She tapped the picture Jury had taken from Watermeadows. “But in this one she’s wearing the same necklace.”

“What necklace?”

Agatha pointed to the pearls round the throat of the young woman with high-piled hair. “She was wearing it that day in Tibbet’s. The pearls. They’re very good ones, too. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s jewelry.”

That was certainly true, thought Melrose, looking at his mother’s silver brooch on her bosom.

S
HE WAS STANDING
on the other side of the dry pools, wearing the same oversized sweater, her hands behind her. If it hadn’t been for the clothes — outsized sweater and overlong skirt — she could have been one of the ornamental statues.

She was watching him closely as he walked from the stone steps across the grass, making no secret of her interest in his approach. There was no pretense of being out here to inspect the concrete, to see if there were further signs of erosion; or of some intention to cut flowers for the table.

“You’re back,” she said, when he had circumvented the pool.

“That’s what your grandmother said.” He looked up at a sky of the pale blue transparency of whey. “I wonder if that’s really what Penelope said to Odysseus. ‘You’re back.’ ”

She did not respond except to offer him a slightly puzzled smile. Why had he said it, anyway? To catch her out? To see if this was the educated, presumably well-read woman who had lived at Watermeadows all these years?

Then she said: “More questions, I suppose. Inspector MacAllister was here yesterday with Superintendent Pratt.
It’s perfectly clear they neither of them believe me. They think I killed Simon. Shall we walk?” When she turned, he did not, and she said, “Or are you going to stare the truth out of me?”

He smiled slightly. “I wish I could.”

That brought her around again, hands shoved deep in the pockets of the sweater like weights that would drag her down. “You think I’m lying.”

“Yes. I think you’re lying.”

Her fingers pushed back strands of hair that wind whipped in her face. She started to walk away, stopped, said: “About what?”

“Your feelings about your husband, for one thing.”

She walked back to him, and even in her step there was a kind of fury. In her eyes, a tiny flare-up of gold like a struck match. “Are you saying you don’t believe I was about to divorce him?”

“Something like that.”

“Why on earth
not?
Was I to put up forever with his infidelity?”

“No. But why had you put up with it for years?”

“People have their breaking point.”

“You didn’t — don’t — seem at all broken.”

“Then I’d have small motive for killing my husband. I mean, if I weren’t insanely jealous.”

He looked at her for a while, feeling the envelope with the pictures sweat in his hand. “You’ve got it the wrong way round, haven’t you? Insane jealousy often ends just that way — in a vengeful killing.”

She had been turned from him, her profile hard against the background of a distant stone wall; now she turned back. “You think I killed him, too. It’s obvious that’s what Superintendent Pratt thinks.”

“It’s become a bit more complicated than that.”

“What do you mean?”

There was no place to sit down here. Jury said, “You
were right; I think we should walk and find someplace to sit down.”

“The summerhouse —”

“No.”

“I thought you might like tea —”

“Your grandmother was kind enough to give me that.” As they circled the second of the drained pools, Jury suddenly remembered that tea of two days ago. It was he who had made it, brought it in. She did not drink hers. She did not, literally, touch it. Of course, that gloominess of mind of which she spoke would explain wanting to be catered for. She had asked him if he would fix it; she had asked him to make his own drink. Had she not wanted to leave her fingerprints on the cup?

“I found the woman your husband was seeing.” He waited, but she said nothing. They were sitting on the same wooden bench in the secluded garden where he had been just over an hour before. “She lives in Limehouse. Well-off, a decorator. She’s done up one of those warehouse lofts that cost a mint.” Still, she said nothing. “Aren’t you interested?”

She leaned back, looked up at a sky that had hardened and darkened to slate and said, “It just doesn’t seem to make much difference anymore. Is she especially pretty?”

Jury smiled, looking at her flawless profile. “You’re more beautiful.”

Then she said to him, the thin crust of ice that had been informing her answers broken, “So I might be a killer, but at least a good-looking one.” There was more hopelessness than rancor in her tone.

“There’s something else; something more important. The other woman he was seeing —”

“ 
‘Other’
? My God, he must have lost count. Diane Demorney would make a third. Who is this ‘other’?”

From the envelope he drew the pictures, handed her first the one that was least contorted, a shot that had concentrated
on the face and upper torso where no blood had seeped through. Even he, who had looked at it a dozen times before, still felt that shock of recognition. Carefully, he watched her face. Her look was at first merely puzzled, and then she registered astonishment. Shaking her head, closing her eyes as though she’d drive this vision of her own corpse away, she said, “What is this?
Who
is this?”

“You’ve never seen her before?”

The eyes hardened, flashed metallically. “May I see the others?”

She outreached the gloved hand and Jury put the worst of the lot in it. Not too bad, perhaps, compared with the corpses he’d seen so soaked in their own blood that their clothes melded to their bodies. But there was blood seeping through the blouse, spreading across the shoulders like the double-pattern of a Rorschach figure. She said nothing and returned it, looked at the two others, again said nothing. Her sigh was shuddery, broken.

“Her name is Sarah Diver. Lived in Limehouse.”

She put her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. “Did he kill her?”

“No, we don’t think so.”

Jury followed her movements as she rose and moved about the garden. Her face was screened from his eyes by the shadows cast by the greenery. “When did you mention the divorce? How long ago, I mean?”

“I don’t remember. A few months ago, perhaps. Two or three.”

“He may have met her about that time: two months ago.” There was no answer. “You’re not stupid; if you’d divorced him, he’d have been straight out in the cold. Men in that position often choose desperate remedies. Very desperate, in this case, considering what he’d lose. But also extremely well thought out.” Still she said nothing. “You said he was mad enough to kill you.”

“You can’t be suggesting that —?”

“What?”

“This woman was to impersonate me? That’s impossible.”

“It’s perfectly possible, if you stop to think about it. Who had she to convince, after all, but Lady Summerston, Crick, your part-time help. And there would be a scattering of friends, if it came down to it.”

Absently, she had plucked a rose from one of the overhanging vines and turned it in her fingers. “No. Simon couldn’t have thought up such a plan. He couldn’t even keep bridge scores.”

“When a fortune is at stake, ingenuity has a way of increasing by leaps and bounds. But it wasn’t just greed; there’d also have been the motive of revenge. He was pretty much despised in this house.”

“That’s not true! He was treated perfectly kindly.”

Jury could not help a laugh at this, contorted by anger. “Oh, ‘kindly.’ One could say the same thing about Charlotte Stant. Exiled, but with perfect kindness. Or, you could say like Prince Amerigo. Kept, with perfect kindness.”

The remarkable thing about her was her control over responses. She had the actress’s gift of feeling something through, of gauging what was appropriate and yet keeping her face as clear as water, devoid of expression. The eye did not falter, no small muscle tensed in the cheek.

“Exiled by and kept by Maggie Verver. Your favorite book, Mrs. Lean. Your grandmother and I were talking about it.”

“
The Golden Bowl,
you mean.” She looked off, and then said the perfect thing: “It’s been too long since I’ve read it. Your interpretation threw me for a moment.” She half smiled and took another few moments to add to it. “My own feelings about Maggie Verver are perhaps not as cynical.”

If Jury had regarded his cases as battles of wits, he would have taken some perverse delight in her ingenuity. Her response was admirable. He said: “Perhaps the Prince was the one who, in the end, wasn’t dissembling.”

“This is total nonsense.” She started away down the path. “If you think Simon was somehow the one who wasn’t dissembling — well . . .” She raised her hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

“I was more interested, I expect, in the collusion. She was the alleged victim, Maggie. Don’t you think so?”

Forcefully, she retraced her steps along the path. “And so was I, is that what you mean? At least I agree there, if what you say is true, except I’m not sure I care for the ‘alleged’ part. The victim of my husband, the victim of police. You’re standing here telling me that Simon Lean and his mistress — or
one
of them —” The comment was etched in acid. “—meant to murder me. Now that would take an enormous amount of planning; it would involve switching identities. Not an easy thing to do, if one thinks of all the paraphernalia, the baggage we carry about to establish it in the first place. There would be witnesses. There would be, for example, handwriting. Not to mention fingerprints. All that has to be done is to compare the prints of the dead woman —”

Quickly, she turned, absorbing herself in gazing at a robin that had lit on the bowl of the statue. The fabric was crumbling; she had said too much. A normal reaction would have been confusion, almost stuttering confusion, a not knowing what to say, an inability to get beyond the blind horror of even the suggestion that one’s husband and lady-friend had plotted one’s cold-blooded murder. She would hardly have approached it as an exercise in policework.

So she attempted to curtail further discussion. “It’s rubbish. It wouldn’t have worked.”

“You’re fond of your grandfather’s collection of antique metal soldiers, aren’t you?”

She looked at him for a moment. “Yes, I am. What on earth’s
that
to do with it?”

He drew the carefully wrapped soldier from his pocket. “Recognize this?”

She held it clumsily in the gardening glove. “It’s part of the display in Eleanor’s sitting room. Why’ve you got it?”

“A better question is: Why was it in Sadie Diver’s rooms?”

On the outstretched glove, she handed it back, regarding it as one might an artifact from a dead past, something that ought to have been buried in the tomb with the deceased.

“Can’t you make the connection? An object from Watermeadows taken to a flat in Limehouse. For what reason? Other than to have something there — together with a few other carefully chosen pieces — with Hannah Lean’s fingerprints on it.”

She looked at him queerly. “Stop talking about me in the third person. As if I’m not here. I’ve had enough, Superintendent, in the last two days to do me a lifetime. And this new theory —” She shrugged it off in disdain. “I’ll say what I said before: it wouldn’t have worked.”

“But it did, didn’t it?”

He had surprised her into an expression that told him she took his meaning, immediately. Instead of total disbelief there was total comprehension.

 • • • 

In the cavernous kitchen, Crick was working over a copper double-boiler, tricked out in a white apron. He was, he said, making the junket for Lady Summerston’s supper. On the counter were a container of milk and some Burgess’s rennet essence.

“I’ve got the guest list right here for you, sir, the addresses, too.” He wiped his hands down his apron and scrutinized the list. “Now this Mrs. Brill, she’s moved to Clacton. Awful place, I think, but she wanted the sea air,
she said.” He looked at Jury. “Gouty, she is. I’ve never held with sea air if you’ve got a lung condition —”

Jury smiled. He did not honestly expect to get from these scattered friends of Lady Summerston any useful information; still, it had to be done. “Thank you, Crick.” Jury pocketed the list. “Tell me, have you a set of dishes or dinnerware with gold edging?”

“The Royal Doulton? Or the Staffordshire? Then there’s the Belleek.”

“The set with gold edging.”

Crick tried not to appear surprised. “They
all
have gold edging, sir.”