65
Jury found him, not surprisingly, in the garden on the narrow path screened by masses of tulips and foxglove. He heard the snip of the shears and saw the floppy hat. The sun was hot on Jury’s head. The willow and Japanese maple spilled sunlight across the path.
“Hello, Bobby.”
Bobby was standing near a canvas of creeping phlox so variously tinted in watercolors that it might have been painted by one of the Impressionists. He was immersing an armful of purple tulips in a bucket of water. He rose from his kneeling position. “Mr. Jury.” He took off his hat and wiped his arm across his forehead and smiled bleakly. “I’m just cutting some flowers for the church.” He paused. “A funeral.” Again, he paused. “Will police ever release Mariah’s body for burial?”
Jury could tell from the look-a drowned look, as if Bobby himself had been plunged into water like the stems of the cut nowers-that any news would be bad news. Jury hoped this wasn’t. “Very soon, I expect. Look, we’re fairly certain we’ve got the person who murdered Mariah, Bobby. Not much of a consolation for you, but at least something.”
Absently, Bobby clicked the garden shears. “Who?”
“It’ll be public soon enough.” He went on to tell him about the double murder, Chris Cummins and Rose Moss.
Bobby sat down hard on the white iron bench. “Good God.” He looked up at Jury as if trying to assess his presence. Real or not?
Jury sat beside him. “Not that it makes it easier to understand, but Rose Moss was obsessed with Mariah. Well, that pretty much goes without saying.”
“Are you saying Mariah was gay?” He frowned in disbelief. “That’s not-”
Jury shook his head. “Gay? No. The affair-if it can even be called that-was probably very brief and for Mariah, probably an experiment, or just something she was curious about. And there’s only Rose Moss’s account, so how much is true, how much wishful thinking, I don’t know. Anyway, Mariah knew in a short while, sex with another woman just didn’t appeal to her. I know you thought Mariah was very retiring, but-”
Bobby was shaking his head. “Not that way. She was good at sex, she was very good, a lot better than me. It was as if she had some old knowledge of it. I don’t know how to say it.” He scratched his head. “As if it came naturally. Not from a lot of experience of it, but as if she were discovering it as she went along, almost as if inspired her or something.” He laughed abruptly. “Talk about wishful thinking.”
“I don’t think it is, Bobby, not where you were concerned. She was giving up that life. She wanted to be with you.”
Bobby smiled ruefully, pinched a dry leaf from the stem of a daisy near the bench. “You’re saying that to make me feel better.”
“I’m not. She really loved you. It’s what got her killed.” Jury was sorry he’d said that, for it sounded brutal when he’d meant to be consoling. “I’m sorry. That sounded as if you were at fault.”
“No it doesn’t. I’m glad you told me. I really didn’t know if Mariah loved me, because there was always something held back. I knew there was more to her than what she was letting me see. I knew all of those weekend absences had to do with something other than visiting some old school chum or working an extra job. I knew there was more than that.”
They sat for a few moments in the generous light and silence of the garden where Bobby Devlin seemed completely at home. Jury thought there was solace here, his gaze traveling up the path with its deep borders of dianthus and lavender and roses, the soft air pungent with their perfume; at the drifts of snowdrops, cornflowers, and poppies, at life illimitable.
“It bloody sucks, doesn’t it, life?” Bobby eventually said, his voice verging on tears.
Jury wasn’t about to tell his companion beside him on the bench that he was a fortunate man. “It bloody does,” he said. Then, as if to appease some god of the garden, added, “Sometimes.”
66
“So what,” asked Jury, “were you doing in Slough?”
“Trying to get out of it,” said Melrose.
They were tromping along the old road that led to the Man with a Load of Mischief, which sat atop a gentle hill that overlooked the village of Long Piddleton. They were looking for Melrose’s dog, Mindy, who often came up here to sleep in the courtyard. Joey was walking beside Jury, occasionally rushing at some small rustling in the undergrowth.
Melrose went on: “Haven’t you noticed the motorways all mass together there? There’s the M4, the M40, the M25-”
“M25’s the Ring Road.”
Melrose stopped. “Thank you. I know it’s the Ring Road.”
“Why were you going back to London, anyway? You’d done all that. And I will say done a fair job, too.”
“A ‘fair’ job, is that all I get?”
“A fairly good one, then.”
Melrose stopped again. “Don’t knock yourself out with the approval. Has it occurred to you that I get all the rum jobs? The fools’ errands? You, on the other hand, get the glamour stuff. You get to shoot up half of London-”
“I don’t carry a gun, as you know. I can’t imagine what you might have forgotten that was worth a trip all the way back to Boring’s.”
Melrose sighed. “What difference does it make?” He turned to clap at the dog.
“Aggro,” said Jury, then repeated it, in case Melrose was missing the annoyance in his voice. “Aggro. What a bloody awful name.”
Melrose shook his head. “No it isn’t. It fits with the names of my horse and my goat.”
How could he say that without strangling?
Melrose continued: “Listen, just be glad Theo Wrenn-Browne didn’t get to name him. He was all for Aardvark.”
Jury winced.
“I pointed out the word ‘Aardvark” didn’t have the ‘g’ sound, so that was out.”
“Really? The only reason you stood against Aardvark was because it lacks a ‘g’?”
“Aggrieved, Aghast, Aggro. Horse, goat, dog. It’s brilliant.”
Jury rolled his eyes at the empty air. A waste of time rolling them at Melrose Plant. “His name’s Joey,” he said for the umpteenth time.
For the umpteenth time, Melrose ignored it.
Jury sighed. “Anything decided in the Jack and Hammer will end in tears.”
Joey (aka Aggro) was trotting along beside Jury, who stopped every once in a while to rub the dog’s head. Every time he did this, Joey would make a sound in his throat and bounce up toward Jury’s hand.
Melrose picked up a long stick and was brandishing it at nothing in particular. It was the time of day in which everything-trees, road, hedgerows-looked burnished. “The idea was that neither of these women had any connection with their victims.” They’d been discussing the case. “But Chris Cummins did know Stacy Storm; she knew her as the librarian.”
“True,” said Jury. Only she didn’t know before she appeared that night at the pub that Stacy Storm was Mariah Cox. If she had, she might not have gone through with it. It gave her a bad scare to find out who the woman she’d murdered really was.”
“Good Lord, it must be hard on her husband. Hard in any circumstances, but for a policeman…? Is she in the nick right now?”
“Yes. But not for long, I expect. She’ll be arraigned, and then who knows? What’s worse for David Cummins is that the woman Chris Cummins arranged to have shot was the love of his life. He’d lost her a long time ago. Now, he lost her again.”
“That’s terrible.” Melrose tossed out a stick for Joey to chase, but the dog didn’t. He walked amiably along by Jury’s side.
“I don’t know why he likes you more than me,” Melrose said.
“Because I don’t call him Aggro.” Jury wondered if Joey remembered the dark doorway where he had found him and the mince he’d bought and tried to feed him, and Dr. Kavitz, and Joely at the animal hospital.
It had been on that night after Jury had left St. Bart’s Hospital, after he’d seen Lu. The night he’d actually talked to her. There had been no talking yesterday.