The Winds of Change

VIKING
 

Published by the Penguin Group
 

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England First published in 2004 by Viking Penguin,
 

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
 

Copyright © Martha Grimes, 2004 All rights reserved
 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from "Year's End" from Ceremony and Other Poems by Richard Wilbur. Copyright 1949 and renewed 1977 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
 

Publisher's Note
 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 

CIP data available
 

ISBN 0-670-03327-8
 

This book is printed on acid-free paper. e Printed in the United States of America Set in Goudy with Bodoni Old Face Designed by Daniel Lagin
 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 

To my brother, Bill 1929-2003
 

We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
 

-"Year's End," Richard Wilbur
 

The Lost Gardens

1

The blood spatter on the little girl’s dress mixed with the pattern of bluebells as if someone had thrown a handful of petals across her back.

Richard Jury was down on one knee in a gutter of a North London street, at the end of a dingy street called Hester Street, looking at the body, the face to one side, not quite believing it. He studied her-the pale hair, the eyes his hand had closed, the caked rivulet of blood that had run from the right side of her mouth, running down and across her neck and soaking the small white collar of the dress with the bluebells. His torch had made out the color. Even the blood could have looked blue in this difficult light. He thought it again - that the blood spots could have been petals.

It all seemed miniaturized as if everything-dress, body, blood were part of some magical tale that reduced proportions, an Alice in Wonderland sort of story, so that at any moment the little girl would wake, the blood draw back into the mouth like a vapor trail and the dark stains on the dress dissipate, leaving only the flowers.

No coat. It was the first day of March and she wore no coat. ‘A runaway, possibly?’ suggested Phyllis Nancy, the police pathologist, who was kneeling beside him.

Jury knew it was a question to which she knew the answer.

‘No, I don’t think so; the dress looks new, that or very well kept, you know, washed and ironed.’ What he was saying was rather ridiculous for who cared if the dress was ironed, but he felt almost as if he had to keep saying things, anything, just as Phyllis had done with her question. To say something, anything, was to hold the poor child’s reality at bay.

‘Yes, you’re right.’ The hem of her own dress was lying in a puddle of rain, and the rain’s detritus. It had rained heavily an hour ago.

Jury pulled the dress out of the muddy water. It was a long green velvet gown. When she had left her car and come toward the scene, she had looked regal in that dress. Emerald earrings, green velvet - she had been paged in the Royal Albert Hall and left immediately.

She had knelt beside him, on both knees, nothing to kneel on except the hard surface of the street itself. Her kneeling took almost the form of supplication. ‘I’ll turn her over. Would you help me?’

He nodded. ‘Sure.’ She did not need help. Jury had seen her manipulate bodies bigger than his own, turn them this way and that as if they were feathers. She didn’t, he supposed, want to see the ragged exit wound and where it had come from, the blood the little girl was lying in. They turned her, weightless. The bullet hole was very small, as if even the bullet had reduced itself to fit the story.

Jury said, ‘Probably a .22, at any rate, small caliber.’

Phyllis Nancy said, ‘Richard, she can’t be more than five or six years old. Who would shoot a child in the back?’

Jury didn’t answer.

Around the two kneeling over the body there were the others: the uniforms cordoning off this part of the road with yellow crime scene tape; the police photographer; the other crime scene people and detectives from homicide; the couple who had been getting into their car when they found the body (she weeping, he with his arm around her); the mortuary van. Blue lights twirling and blinking everywhere. Police had fanned out to knock on every door in Hester Street, searching for someone who had heard or seen anything. Despite all of this activity, there was a strange hush, as if those who were moving were doing it on tiptoe, or talking, keeping it down to almost a whisper. The sort of hush one finds in early morning before the sleeping world becomes the waking one. Moving carefully, as if letting her sleep on.

Jury turned to Dr. Nancy again. ‘Can you estimate, Phyllis?’ It could certainly not have been long. Even rolled halfway into the gutter, this was still a residential street, cars going back and forth or parked in the street, such as the one belonging to the couple.

‘No more than a couple of hours,’ said Phyllis. ‘Probably less, I’d think. She’d’ve been seen.’

‘I know. Really, how could she have been here for more than fifteen minutes without being discovered? In this little white dress?’

White, with bluebells, Jury thought, and blood soaked.

He would never have to see the little girl again unless he chose to, unless he found it necessary. But Phvllis Nancy had no choice; she would have to perform the autopsy; she would have to split the child open. What was that line from Emily Dickinson about splitting a songbird and finding the music?

Phyllis rose. He had never seen Phyllis Nancy lose it, not over the years and all of the dead and mutilated bodies between them; he was afraid he was about to.

He was wrong. When she’d been walking toward the crime scene a little while ago, she’d looked regal in that dress and those emeralds. Now mud splattered and pale, she still looked regal.

She made a sign and the mortuary van pulled closer to the little girl.

‘Split the lark and you’ll find the music.’ That was it, the line from Dickinson. A fanciful idea for an autopsy. Jury looked down at this benighted child.

Bluebells and blood. No music.

2

Wiggins was making tea, not an unusual thing except he was making it noisily: the canister rattling on the shelf, the spoon rattling against the cup, the pint of milk thumped down on the desk, the fresh packet of biscuits impatiently ripped open. He looked distraught. It was as if he were making this small commotion to cover this distress, or to signal it.

Jury had just walked in the door and took this minor commotion as a signal. ‘What’s up, Wiggins? You look as if you’d seen a ghost. That or DCS Racer.’

‘I’ve some bad news, sir.’ He dropped two tea bags into the brown pot and didn’t look at Jury.

The bad news was clearly for Jury. His mind fled immediately to Mrs. Wasserman, in her eighties now, and the only natural candidate for bad news. ‘What?’

Wiggins didn’t answer immediately. ‘Come on, Wiggins. I think I can take it.’

Wiggins snapped off the electric water pot. ‘I’m afraid ... well, it’s your cousin, sir. Your cousin - she died.’

For an insane moment, Jury didn’t know what Wiggins was talking about. He stood there, just inside the door, with that announcement of death seeming to preclude any movement until the cousin flashed in his mind and the world started turning again His cousin up north, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m fixing you a nice cup of tea.’

As if this was not what Wiggins would do, death or no death.

Jury almost smiled at this intrusion of Wigginsland. He sat down, still with his coat on, opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything.

‘It was her husband called, name of - ‘

‘Brendan.’

Wiggins was pouring milk into the mugs. ‘That’s it. He said the funeral’s to be on Saturday.’ To give himself something useful to do, he checked his desk calendar. ‘That’ll be six March.’ He handed Jury his mug of tea.

‘Thanks.’

Probably trying to assess the measure of Jury’s grief, Wiggins said, ‘You didn’t see her very often, did you? I mean all the way up there in Newcastle, well, you couldn’t. But I got the impression you really didn’t know her all that well.’

Jury held the mug in both hands, warming them. ‘I didn’t, no.’ He paused, thinking. ‘It was her dad, my uncle, who took me in finally after my mother died. He was a great person. The cousin’s his daughter. She was never like him, and she’s never really liked me - ‘ Was that true, though? Brendan had gotten the exactly opposite impression, that she did indeed like him and was proud of Jury’s being so high up in New Scotland Yard. He rubbed his forehead. Was he going to have to try to revise memory again?

‘Jealous, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Wiggins, blowing on his mug. ‘Her dad taking you in and all. He must really have cared about you.’

‘He did.’ But his cousin hadn’t, surely. Her talks with Jury were often barbed with sharp remarks and (Jury suspected) lies. He said, ‘The last time I saw her we were looking at pictures, snapshots and so forth, and she completely turned my memories on their heads. Things I thought had happened, hadn’t, not according to her. I honestly don’t know what I can depend on now.’

‘She was winding you up, sounds like.’

‘Maybe. That occurred to me, or that’s what Brendan said. We should be able to depend on our own memories, for God’s sakes.’ He took a long drink of tea and set the mug down on Wiggins’s desk. ‘I’m going out for a bit. I need some air.’

He walked across Broadway to St. James’s Park, which he wandered in for a few minutes and then sat down. He really felt it, her death. He hoped it hadn’t been a bad one. He’d seen too many bad ones-gunshots, knives, the victims occasionally not dead yet and looking up with a look of dread. Jury hadn’t known she was sick.

It was fine for him to say he saw his cousin seldom and that he wasn’t close to her and that, actually, they had never liked each other. That could work in life; it didn’t work in death. But then nothing did, he supposed. Death had a way of kicking out the props, of smashing one’s carefully constructed defenses. Whatever comfortable conclusions he might have reached about Sarah were now as suspect as the events of his childhood. For maybe she hadn’t been lying to him; maybe he had really been but a baby when his mum died instead of the five-year-old kid who had tried to pull her out of the rubble of their bombed building.

How could he possibly have got that wrong? Impossible, surely.