The Winds of Change (28 page)

Macalvie raised his mug of coffee in both hands, then lowered it. ‘What was her purpose in talking to Mary Scott? The only reason I can see is Flora again. Baumann thinks Mary knows something, or they both do, Mary and Declan. Or it could be Lena Banks acting on her own.’

Jury shook his head. ‘No. Going against Baumann could be hazardous.’ Jury stopped for a moment. ‘She might have had information. She might have found out something about Flora.’

‘What, though? That she was dead?’

‘Would she have made the trip for that reason? Incidentally, one of the detectives in the pedophilia unit has been following Viktor Baumann’s doings for a long time.’

‘That makes me love the guy even less. ‘Following’ how? What’s he been up to? Internet porn?’

‘No. Worse than that, I mean really worse, he keeps a house in North London, set up precisely for this reason. We think that’s where the little girl came from who was shot in the street a week ago.’

‘Christ. And you can’t link him to the shooting? Or the house?’

Jury shook his head. ‘So far, no physical evidence.’ They were silent, thinking. Then Macalvie said, ‘Lena Banks comes to Angel Gate, but not to talk to Declan Scott.’

‘If we can go by what he says. But it’s possible she contacted him and said ‘Meet me outside.’ Or he contacted her, same message.’

‘With intent?’

‘I don’t know. You still don’t have the murder weapon,’ said Jury.

‘It’s also possible she didn’t come for the same reason as she did the first time. I’d say she knew where Flora was–say, in a convent in Italy–and she’s willing to trade this information for a great deal of money.’
 

‘After three years of Flora’s being gone? Three years ago she told what to Mary Scott? What was the reason for meeting her in Brown’s Hotel in London?’

‘Then maybe it was to get information.’

Macalvie pushed his barely touched plate to the side. ‘There’s one person I don’t think I’ve paid enough attention to: Alice Miers.’

‘I talked to her. Nice woman.’

‘She knew about Viktor Baumann.’

‘Oh, she knew more than just ‘about’ him; she had firsthand knowledge, and, like the others, hated the man.’

‘She has no alibi for the time in question. She says her doctor doesn’t want her traveling.’

‘Is it likely she’d have shot Lena Banks and left Declan to face the police? She loves him.’

Just then the girl was back with the hot toast. She plunked the toast rack on the table.

Jury took a piece, eyed Macalvie’s bacon. ‘You going to eat that?’

32

And what,’ asked Melrose, in no hurry to hear the answer, ‘don’t you like about the way I’m doing this?’ He was addressing Lulu, who stood near the pond with Roy beside her, questioning the design of the little patch of ground that she had already taken issue with more than once. ‘We don’t plant flowers so early in March.’

Melrose was kneeling over a square of grass between boxed hedge and the white bench. ‘Maybe you don’t, but I do and so does Mr. Macmillan and I’d presume so do most other gardeners.’ Since he didn’t know what he was doing anyway, he hardly needed to haggle over when he was doing it. He was engaged in planting a sample of his specialty just to see how it looked. He had chosen to do this in the little interior garden, as it had a nice patch of grass that he had already cut for a smooth surface. He had Trueblood’s big book beside him as a design reference, and he had made a drawing. It was to this that Lulu was pointing now.

‘Those little squares need to be closer together. And the grass is too high to see the flowers.’

Roy barked once. Melrose had to admire his closely guarded barks. I’m a slave with too many masters. Even Roy is getting in on it. He used his trowel to dig up a bit more earth. He was doing all of this for show; he thought it was time he got his hands dirty.

With his gloves on and his canvas hat he thought he looked pretty much the part.

‘You could do some snowdrops or those other things.’ She pointed to the ones growing by the hedgerow.

‘Those are aconites and, behind them, hellebores. We don’t need any more. They wouldn’t look right in any event.’ Lulu was now sitting on the grass in one of those impossible reverse-yoga positions that not even the Buddha could master. Her legs and feet jutted outward, hands grasping ankles. ‘You’d be a smash in the circus.’

Lulu did not reply to this, relegating the remark to the conversational quicksand in which Melrose was generally sunk. ‘You need more colors. You can’t have only bluish pansies. See–’ Here she held up the page from Trueblood’s prodigious book, which showed an enameled pin of a bird in flight nearly collapsing with color from all of the bits and bobs of porcelain. ‘See these bits; they’re all different colors, green and yellow and red and blue sprinkled about.’

‘Really? Me, I’d like to be sprinkled about with gin, whiskey and rum.’

Into the quicksand. Thunk, suck.

‘Anyway, that’s a brooch you’re looking at. It’s jewelry.’ Roy, present during all this, was lying flat, head on paws, eye trained on Melrose and trowel. Perhaps Roy thought all of this spade work was about digging up his store of bones.

‘Roy doesn’t mind if it’s all blue.’

Roy gave a bark that broke off in the dead middle. Really stingy or not wanting to waste the other half of a good bark on Melrose. Now, however, the bark came just before the calling of Lulu’s name. ‘Ah! Your aunt wants you.’

But Lulu didn’t look around. She chewed her lip as she looked at the questionable blue flowers. His garden design was lying beside him, one he believed to be pretty decent, as he had been guided by Warburton’s intricately architectural design of the whole works.

Her aunt, having given up on Lulu to come get the tray, walked toward them with the tea mugs. She did not seem too perturbed by her niece’s lack of response. She was a good-natured woman, and very patient.

‘Here we are, Mr. Plant. I thought you might need some tea. It’s nippy out here. Lulu, you shouldn’t bother Mr. Plant.’

‘I’m not. I’m helping.’

Roy panted heavily, probably to indicate the extent to which he was helping also.

Melrose called on his own good-natured self—the smaller part of body and soul–and said, ‘She’s keeping me company. Roy, too.’ Rebecca Owen wrapped her cardigan tighter round her. It was an unbecoming russet color. ‘That’s very nice of you. There’s not much around for Lulu to do.’ She shoved her fists into the cardigan pockets.

Not much to do? Was the woman blind? Lulu was doing everything. ‘I see what you mean. There are no children round at all for her to play with.’ Excepting me, of course.

Lulu said, ‘There used to be Flora.’ She was squatting, examining Melrose’s tiny flowers.

Her aunt caught her breath, as if this was a dangerous subject for anyone to broach.

Melrose was delighted; he’d been trying to work around to the subject of Flora. ‘Yes. That’s a tragedy.’

‘Indeed it was.’

‘We used to play all the time,’ said Lulu.

That, thought Melrose, must be wishful remembrance, from what he’d heard.

‘When she came to our house for tea,’ Lulu went on, ‘she was really pretty. She was prettier than–’

Rebecca Owen stepped on this. ‘Let’s not talk about her, Lulu.

It makes us all feel terrible.’

It didn’t make Melrose feel terrible, nor did it Lulu.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ she said and walked off back to the house.

Lulu immediately started in on something else: the murder site. ‘Over there–’ .She pointed in a direction beyond the small garden to the larger. ‘That was where this lady was murdered.’

‘I guess you must have been pretty scared when you heard about it.’

She ignored this. ‘Mr. Macmillan found her. There was lots of blood.’

Children were such ghouls. ‘I don’t know about that.’ He didn’t have to. She went on. ‘She was shot right here.’ She pointed in the region of her heart.

Melrose tamped down another set of tiny blue flowers. ‘It’s very strange. Very terrible.’

‘Probably someone followed her here.’

He was somewhat surprised by this theorizing. She appeared to have given it some thought. Of course, any child would want to explain it to herself since the grown-ups didn’t seem to be doing a slap-up job of it. ‘That could be right, but the question would still remain, why here? Why at Angel Gate?’

‘Maybe to talk to Mr. Scott.’ She pulled at a small clump of weeds.

‘If she was visiting, wouldn’t she have just gone to the front door?’

‘Not if it was a secret.’

‘You mean she didn’t want anyone to know they were meeting? But look here. There’s only Mr. Scott living here.’
 

She had picked up an acorn and was batting it up in the air with her palm. ‘There’s us!’ she gaily called out. ‘And he has guests sometimes.’

That wasn’t much of a reason. Scott would know if he was or wasn’t playing host. Then it occurred to Melrose: cell phones.

Those damned contraptions! But of course they’d be handy for a sudden meeting or an assignation or stealth. Hello, darling. Look out over the terrace; here I am!

‘Well, did he have guests?’

Lulu was still jumping the acorn up and down. ‘Mr. Warburton was staying. We were playing Cluedo.’

‘You and Mr. Warburton?’

‘And Mr. Scott. And that lady. I was Niece Rhoda.’

‘What lady?’ She must mean Pat Quint.

Lulu shrugged.

Yes, ‘that lady’ was too much competition for Lulu. He wondered how much competition Flora had been.

‘It was right before tea. We like to play games, me and Mr. Scott. We play cards sometimes.’

This sounded so much like what she’d said about Flora and herself. We used to play all the time. Melrose was suddenly swamped with sadness for this child who had been left high and dry when it came to playmates and had to entertain herself. And these adults were all she knew. Not even school chums, it seemed, visited here.

‘Well, then, you must be quite fond of Mr. Scott.’ She studied the ground and gave a nod so small he wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t been looking for it. It was as if she needed to keep how much she liked Declan Scott a secret. Then she said, ‘He’s protecting me. You know. From the Child Thief.’ Melrose thought for a moment. He knew there was no point in simply pooh-poohing what she said. ‘The Child Thief didn’t come here, though. Flora vanished from the Lost Gardens.’

He was suddenly struck by what he’d just said, by the dimension of fantasy in it.

Vanished from the Lost Gardens...

By its Alice in Wonderland-ish nature. He couldn’t work out what he meant by this. What did he mean?

She was looking at him now, curling a strand of hair whose straight ends her fingers couldn’t quite wind. Waiting for him to banish the Child Thief to perdition. Perhaps he should never have mentioned Flora, should have left the name unspoken.

She said, ‘Maybe he likes gardens.’

‘No. He likes places he can get into and out of easily. This house and grounds are walled. Just look at them!’ He extended his arms, taking in the whole garden, the whole world if he could have done.

‘I’ve looked.’ Her tone was acerbic. Message: You fool.

The impenetrability of the gardens where they were now was a lie. The Child Thief, like any dark creature–under the bed, in the closet, creaking overhead in the attic–could walk through walls.

Melrose said, ‘Well, one thing’s clear: if he ever tried to get in here, Roy would chase him until he dropped.’ This mightn’t have been the best time to make this point as the dog was stretched out in the sun, napping.

Lulu looked at Roy, dubiously.

‘The Child Thief’s probably not afraid of dogs anyway.’ Another dubious look at the napping dog.

‘Anyway, as you said, Mr. Scott will protect you.’

‘What if he’s not here that time?’

Melrose slapped his palms against his chest. ‘Then I’ll protect you.’

Lulu looked at Melrose far more dubiously than she ever had at Roy.

33

Rebecca Owen was talking about Lulu.

Melrose had returned the tray to the kitchen for this express purpose: to get her talking, preferably about Mary Scott, but if she wanted to talk about Lulu, let her talk. They were having another cup of tea. He laughed. ‘Believe me, I can see she’s very imaginative. What’s this obsession with the Child Thief?’

‘Oh, she’s been on about that to you? You mustn’t pay any attention to her, Mr. Plant. The things she goes on about!’
 

‘The Child Thief might be a more complicated concept than we think.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m not sure.’ He picked up his teacup, set it down. ‘It makes me uncomfortable.’

Rebecca laughed and rose with the empty biscuit plate. ‘I expect Lulu loves that.’

‘What?’

‘To make you uncomfortable.’

Melrose felt a sudden coldness around him; he watched as she put the plate in the sink. ‘It must make you feel really down that both Mrs. Scott and Flora are gone.’