He looked at the awkward lineup of children. It was a relief to see that they were here as he remembered them even if he’d been mistaken about why he was among them. There he was, standing next to the tallest girl. Even though the picture was in black and white, he still knew the tall girl was the one with hair like a torch. It looked unconfined, as if not even the stillness of a photograph could still it. Jury smiled at her, the bane of his small existence. She had turned out to be a still point, this horrific child who teased and taunted him, still had the power to help or hinder. For some reason Jury liked that idea.
“Now, this one’s the best. It’s you and your mum.”
It was not a snapshot, but looked to be more a photographer’s work. It was larger, too. Her arm extended along the back of a settee, the back rising higher on one end. He looked about three or four and was sitting on her left, her left arm encircling him. He looked pleased as punch.
Sarah was talking but her voice seemed to come from a distance, as a sound trying to make its way around some obstruction. He did not comment on this picture. It was quite beautiful, he thought. “May I have this one of the foster care kids? And the one of mum and me?”
She shrugged, falling back to her original pose of indifference. “You can have the lot if you want.” Having produced this revisionist childhood, she was no longer concerned for its proofs.
Jury was tired and was ready to go; he would be relieved to get out. He said he’d a train to catch.
“You’re not stopping for tea? Brendan’ll be back-”
And as if her voice could call up spirits, the door opened just then and Brendan walked in.
“Speak of the devil,” Sarah said.
Brendan brought with him the memory of more than one John Jamison. He was happy as a lark when he saw Jury. “Richard! Where in hell did you drop from?” He gave Jury a comradely punch on the shoulder.
Sarah asked, querulously, “Where’re Jasmine and Christabel? You were to collect them from Raffertys.”
“I went by. They wanted to go to Burger King with the others.”
Jasmine. Christabel. The names she had chosen (certainly Brendan hadn’t) for her children. You could always tell the parents with no confidence. They went for the exotic names, afraid that just plain Mary or Alice wouldn’t set their own kids apart.
“You spent the giro already at Noonan’s, I expect.”
“Oh, leave off, woman.” Brendan drew a folded, grimy bit of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to her. “It ain’t even cashed, lovely. Speaking of Noonan’s, Rich, how about it?”
Jury didn’t much want to go, but this would probably be the least awkward way of making an exit. “Thanks, I could do with a pint.”
Brendan did a little jig-never had Jury known a more ingrained Irish-man than Brendan-and washed his hands in air. “Let’s go, then.”
Jury gave Sarah a look, inviting her along, though he knew she wouldn’t take them up on the invitation.
“Me? Me go? Then who’d look after the baby, I want to know? You haven’t even seen him,” she said to Jury.
“Maybe when we come back.” Jury was not coming back.
“Why does she dislike me so much?” Jury asked Brendan as they stood at the bar of Noonan’s, a noisy pub. There were, of course, some men in here who had jobs, whom the Job Center had actually lined up with employment. For them the pub was the way to escape the tedium of work as it was the way to escape the tedium of not working for the others.
Brendan raised his pint and said, “Hell, man, she doesn’t dislike you, at least not when your back’s turned.” He wiped his handkerchief under his nose. “She’s always bragging on you to friends.” He went on in fluting tones, “ ‘A detective superintendent, that’s right, Scotland Yard, no less.’ ”
Jury smiled. “We were talking about childhood. It seems all my memories were wrong.”
Brendan waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Hell, she was windin’ you up, man, she was takin’ the piss out. She does it to me, does it to the kids. Don’t take it to heart.”
Jury drank his beer and went back over the afternoon. He wondered. He patted the pocket of his coat that held the two pictures.
When Jury walked up the steps of the terraced house in Islington, Mrs. Wasserman, who had the so-called garden flat, came up the stone steps outside her door, hurrying as much as she could. Jury had helped Mrs. Wasserman over the years with “security,” installing locks, inspecting windows and any other way of entering, and anything else that would make her feel more secure. She had been a young girl in the prison camp; she had watched her family die before her eyes, first one, then another. And worse.
“Mrs. Wasserman,” Jury said, retracing his steps, going back down, “is something the matter? It’s late for you to be still up.”
She clutched her bathrobe more closely about her throat. “No, no, many times I’m up till morning. Such a hard time sleeping. Could you come in just a minute, Mr. Jury? One minute and I won’t keep you.”
Jury smiled. “I can make it more than a minute.” He followed her down the steps and into her flat. It was a comfortable flat with good old armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa. A breakfront, some side chairs and tables.
“Would you like something? Whiskey? Coffee? Chai?”
“What?”
“Carole-anne got me some. She says it’s much healthier than other drinks. It’s kind of a mixture of tea and spice.”
“In matters of health, I wouldn’t look to Carole-anne, queen of the breakfast fry-up.”
“Well, what she told me was to drink it for a week and tell her if I felt better. It’s supposed to do wonders, but the taste, Mr. Jury! It’s awful.”
“That explains Nurse Carole-anne’s motive. She wants you to test it so she won’t have to. A cup of plain old English black tea would be fine.”
She left the living room. Jury saw there were a couple of old photograph albums on the coffee table, one of them open. Sitting down on the sofa, he sighed. Pictures, more pictures, old ones.
Mrs. Wasserman returned with two mugs of tea that Jury knew would be sweeter than he liked, but would drink. When she saw Jury turning the pages of the photograph album, she said, “They have been making me feel… well…”
Jury waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “Are these of your family, Mrs. Wasserman?” He knew they must be and was a little surprised he had never seen them before. But she still stood there by the sofa, holding her cup of tea and looking anxiously at the photographs. He said, carefully, “Mrs. Wasserman?”
Hesitating, she said, “Yes. And yet-”
She appeared very distraught. He looked more closely at one picture of a girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, flanked by a middle-aged man and woman who must surely be her mother and father. It was not that he recognized the child as Mrs. Wasserman, but the older woman who looked so much like his Mrs. Wasserman, looks that weren’t yet delineated in the face of the teenage girl.
“This is you as a girl, isn’t it?” He tapped that picture.
Mrs. Wasserman laughed a little and without humor. It was a nervous laugh, an anxious one. “Yes. My mother, the woman must be. The man is my father?”
What she seemed to be doing was asking for Jury’s assurance. “You certainly look like your mother.” He studied the picture, the background, the building in front of which they stood. On the right-hand border he saw the heel of a shoe and a tiny patch of leg. It was a public street and someone had just passed by. He imagined others, not wanting to block the picture taker, were no doubt waiting in the wings to pass. Behind the little family was a sign, the first half obscured by their bodies. It said ANIST and Jury wondered if it was the end of the word tobaccanist. To the right, a couple of stiles of postcards sat alongside a rack of newspapers. Jury squinted.