I wondered whether Jane Portelaine had heard about Jason’s demise. She’d certainly dismissed him at the funeral, but that didn’t necessarily represent her true feelings. Was she disengaging from him for my benefit? Possibly. Her denial of friendship with Jason certainly hadn’t held water with me. Their relationship, on whatever level it was conducted, was blatantly self-evident during the weekend at Ainsworth Manor.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” I said softly to myself as I rearranged the pillow beneath my head. Then I sat straight up. Wapping Wall. Yes, I knew it from reading Dickens, but I’d also been made aware of it more recently-in the past day or two, in fact.
I turned on the light and went through my purse until I found Jimmy Biggers’s business card. Sure enough, his office was located on Wapping Wall.
I returned to bed and, after my going through a series of relaxation exercises, beginning with my toes and ending with my eyes, sleep finally arrived.
Chapter Thirteen
I’d no sooner gotten up and dressed when the phone rang again. “Mornin’, Jess. Seth. Sleep well?”
“Good morning, Seth,” I replied, my head still foggy from lack of sleep.
“Mort and I are gettin’ ready to see the town. Thought you’d like to have breakfast with us.”
“Seth, I…”
“You all right, Jess?”
“Yes, but I was up very late last night. Something has developed that I must take care of this morning.”
“That so? Can we be of help?”
“No, I don’t think so, but thank you for offering.” Then, without thinking, I proceeded to tell him about Jason Harris’s murder, and Maria Giacona sleeping in my living room.
“That sounds mighty serious, Jess. We’ll be right up.”
“No, Seth, I-”
“No arguments, Jessica Fletcher.” He hung up.
I went to the living room and wakened Maria. “You’ll have to get up now, Maria. Two male friends of mine are on their way here.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, and I hastily put the bed linens back in order and folded up the couch. It had no sooner snapped into place when there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and Seth and Morton walked in. Seth was dressed in a handsome tan poplin suit and wore his walking shoes. Mort was in his Cabot Cove sheriff’s uniform. He had changed shirts, however. Last night it was tan; this morning it was blue.
“I really don’t know what you can do,” I said. “Ms. Giacona is in the bathroom, and I intend to escort her to the police station.”
“Jessica, I know you are a woman who has traveled the world, and who feels very comfortable with crime, but there is no substitute for a professional talking to a fellow professional,” Mort Metzger said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“If there is any trip to be made to the London police, I will make it with you. After all, I am a law enforcement officer. I speak their language. Trust me, Jessica. It’s a good thing I’m here.” Seth glanced at him and frowned. “That we’re here,” Morton added.
After Maria had finished getting dressed, I introduced her to my friends from Maine, and the four of us went downstairs for breakfast. Seth insisted upon putting the check on his room tab. When he saw the amount, and calculated pounds to U.S. dollars, he remarked, “I could feed a family of four for a month back in Cabot Cove for this money.”
“Hotel breakfast,” I said lightly. “Come on, let’s go.”
Like all London cab drivers, ours this morning was steeped in the history of the city. He pointed out to us the National Museum of Labour History, which, he said, memorialized the strivings of common men and women for a better life. He also pointed to a fascinating church, St. Paul ’s Shadwell, that had been built to minister to sea captains, including Captain Cook.
“Everything’s so old,” Morton Metzger said, his tan Stetson pulled down low over his eyes as he peered through the taxi’s window.
Eventually, after our mini-tour of the Wapping district of London, we pulled up in front of the Metropolitan Special Constabulary, Thames Division, established in 1798 and responsible for patrolling fifty-four miles of the river with its thirty-three police boats.
I looked at Maria. “Are you up to this?” I asked.
She’d been extremely quiet the whole morning, saying virtually nothing. She looked at me with those huge brown eyes and forced a smile onto her pretty lips. “Yes, I suppose I have to be.”
A sergeant at the front desk asked who we were.
“My name is Jessica Fletcher, and these are my friends,” I said. “This young lady was a close personal friend of someone you found in the river last night, a young man by the name of Jason Harris.”
The sergeant licked his thumb and turned pages in a book. “Yes, he’s in the book. What’s your business?”
“Well,” I said, “this young lady, whose name is Maria Giacona, received the phone call at Mr. Harris’s flat last night. They were… well, they were very close, and we felt that you would probably want her to personally identify the body.”
The sergeant glanced down at the page in front of him, looked up, and said, “That’s already been done.”
“It has?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who, might I ask, identified the body?”
“Not for me to say.”
“Sergeant, is there a detective or an inspector with whom we could speak about this matter?”
“Any of you family?” the sergeant asked. He was a slight man with thin black hair; a wavy scar on his upper lip formed a horizontal S over his mouth.
“No, no family, but someone who was very close to the deceased. Please, Sergeant, can’t you show a little consideration for this young woman who has lost a loved one?”
He looked at each of us, then punched a button on a telephone console. “Inspector, there’s four people out here inquiring about the floater last night.” He listened to what the person on the other end of the line said, then hung up. “Okay, you can go back and see Inspector Bobby Half, down the hall, third door to the left.”
Three of us started toward the corridor, but Mort Metzger lingered. He put his hand across the desk and said, “Sheriff Metzger, Cabot Cove, Maine. Here on official business.”
The desk sergeant looked at Metzger’s hat, then his uniform. Morton’s hand continued to dangle over the desk. The S above the sergeant’s mouth wiggled. He limply shook Mort’s hand.
“Come on, Mort,” Seth said impatiently.
Unlike the desk sergeant, the inspector was a big man. He had the rugged, leathery look of a commercial fisherman, which, I reasoned, resulted from having spent his career squinting against the sun’s reflection off the water of the Thames. His hands were hamlike, calloused, and covered with scratches, nails grimy. His face was round, like a Halloween pumpkin, all the features barely protruding from the surface.
I went through my introduction again. This time, however, Morton insisted upon injecting himself into the middle of things. “Sheriff Metzger, Cabot Cove,” he said, shooting his hand at Inspector Half.
“That so?” Half said. “Where might Cabot Cove be?”
“ Maine, Inspector,” I quickly said, moving to put myself between them. I told him of Maria’s relationship with Jason Harris and expressed surprise that the body had already been identified. I asked by whom.
“His half brother, stepbrother, something like that. Came in a few hours after we dragged him out of the river.”