Benny sighed. She was so illogical. “I don’t think anyone wants to murder you-”
“There’s Maisie Tynedale. She hates me.”
Maisie was Mr. Tynedale’s granddaughter. She had never married, had always lived in Tynedale Lodge. “What reason would she have?”
“If I’m not allowed to say ‘money,’ I don’t know. She was in an air raid when she was a baby, Mrs. MacLeish said. A bomb hit the building and exploded it to bits. Mrs. Riordin’s baby got blown up.” Gemma expanded. “Everybody got blown up. Everything was dust and all these body parts.
Bodies were all in pieces. Hands sticking up through the rubble you could pull one out and no body was attached to it.”
“I don’t think Mrs. MacLeish told you all that.”
“Yes, she did. I can’t get it out of my system. It was a pub and there were eyeballs in beer glasses.”
“That’s ridiculous. How could an eyeball fly out of your face and land on its own inside a pint glass?”
She lay her doll down again and leaned back against her branch and swung her feet. “I’m only saying what she told me.”
“She didn’t tell you that. Anyway, let’s not talk about it; it’s nothing to do with the family wanting you dead.” He watched Gemma wipe her doll’s face with a white tissue. “Mr. Tynedale, he’ll probably leave you a trust, maybe.” Benny’s knowledge of trusts was a little thin, as it was about most things financially elaborate. “Aren’t you glad for that? It might pay you back for having to put up with someone like Mrs. Riordin.”
“I know what I’d do with some money if I had it right now.”
“What?”
“Hire a detective.” She looked at her name-starved doll for a moment, and held it up so Benny could see it. “Rhonda?”
Nine
“I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” said Fiona Clingmore, trying unsuccessfully to pull down a black skirt that had too far to stretch to cover her knees.
“I expect you to take a hatchet to him, Miss Clingmore.” Racer was standing, still looking stupidly around his office for the cat Cyril, who had pawed a sapphire shirt stud from the little velvet box on the desk and made off with it.
Jury sat on the sidelines with the file Racer had told him to bring: Danny Wu, with whom, Jury thought, Chief Superintendent Racer was obsessed. The obsession paid off royally for Jury and Wiggins, as it gave them a good excuse to eat at his Soho restaurant.
“You should never have left that velvet box there and gone off for lunch,” said Fiona, in that annoying hindsight way people had.
Racer was attending some black-tie function and needed his shirt studs (“all of them,” he’d said).
“Sapphires? Don’t you think that to be a bit, well, showy?” This unpopular opinion was offered (precisely because it was unpopular) by the human equivalent (in Racer’s eyes) of the cat Cyril; that is, the police detective Jury. “You don’t want to outshine the chief constable, do you?”
Chief Superintendent Racer’s face reddened to an alarming degree, and he, near desperate with rage, as if he feared there wasn’t enough to be portioned out among the three of them (Cyril, Fiona, Jury), seemed to swell like a balloon.
The ladder which Racer was climbing had been furnished by one of the maintenance crew who had asked if he wanted a picture hung and would he like maintenance to do it?
“No!” Racer said, as if he meant to nullify the entire visible world in the manner of John Ruskin. Abashed, the maintenance man had left. (Jury had missed this opening chapter in the cat fracas; Fiona had reported it in fulsome detail.)
Racer had been positioning the ladder against the wall, climbing up and looking in the small well made to accommodate the recessed lighting, a well that could also accommodate cat-sized objects. There was a row of tiny lights just beneath the ceiling around all the walls. The lights were hidden by a strip of molding (cat height, if the cat was lying down).
As Racer looked right and left up there, Jury did not bother telling him that Cyril could easily slip right round the corner and be hidden by the recess on the other wall that Racer had given the all-clear to. Enjoying life immensely on this Monday morning, relieved of his Sunday depression for a while, Jury looked up, not at the recessed lighting but at the ceiling fixture, an iron rod ending in two light bulbs which were covered by a chic copper shade, inverted like a large bowl. This was a perfect place for a cat-nap, as Jury was bearing witness to, if that bit of paw over the edge was any proof.
Racer descended the ladder, disgusted. His back was to the paw. “I’m setting the trap again.” He dusted his hands. “The next time that bloody ball of mange appears will be the last time, do you hear me, Miss Clingmore?”
The caramel-colored paw drew in. Nap disturbed. Jury sighed, envious of such sangfroid.
Dragging the ladder, Racer went to the outer office, picked up the phone when it rang on Fiona’s desk and barked into it. Cyril sat up in the copper shade, measuring distances. He was so fast and so agile that had he been a villain, police never would have caught him. As if auditioning for the Royal Ballet, Cyril leaped, a graceful curve in air to make a four-point landing on Racer’s desk. While Racer barked, Cyril washed. Then hearing the phone slam down, and other microscopic moves and sounds that announced the chief superintendent’s return, Cyril streaked off the desk and oozed underneath it.
“The hell with it,” said Racer. “Here. Open this and set that trap.” Racer sent a tin of sardines sailing to his desk in an arc. Then, in a matador move Cyril would have appreciated, Racer swirled his coat from the rack and around his shoulders. “Oh, Wiggins wants you,” he said to Jury, tilting his head toward the phone. “That was him.” He walked out, calling “lunch” over his shoulder.
Cyril squirmed out from beneath the desk, and, from a sitting position, made another four-point landing atop the desk. He moved over to the can of sardines.
Lunch?
Jury walked through the door of his own office, laughing.
“Sir-” Wiggins began.
“You missed it, Wiggins, too bad.”
“Sir, you just got a call-”
Wiping a few tears of laughter away, he said, “A call about what?”
“A shooting. It was from that DCI Haggerty you went to see.” Wiggins looked at his tablet. “The name will be familiar to you, he said. A Simon Croft. He’s been shot; he’s dead.”
A cold breeze fought its way past the shuddering windowpanes and touched Jury’s face. He felt thrust into the midst of events he could not control. What the source of this feeling was he didn’t know.
“You know him, sir? I mean this Croft person, the victim?”
Jury nodded. It was easier than explaining. “Where did he call from?”
“Croft’s house. It’s in the City, big house on the Thames. Here.” Wiggins ripped the page from his notebook. “He said he’d like you to come if you possibly can.”
Jury looked at the notes. “There’s a problem I’m helping him with. I’ll go. You have the number so that you can reach me?”
Wiggins nodded. Jury left.
Ten
A few people were still hanging about, wide-eyed and thrilled, on the other side of the yellow crime scene tape, watching the police van slide out of the forecourt of the Croft house and make its way, signals flashing, along the Embankment.
Jury thought Simon Croft must have had quite a bit of money to live in this large house backing onto the Thames. Behind the house was a short pier jutting out over the river; fifty or sixty feet beyond it was a boat, anchored. How had the owner ever got the London Port Authority to permit a private boat to anchor there? The Thames was still a working river, after all. The boat looked as if it were drifting there in a gray mist.