Jerusalem Inn (11 page)

She sighed, started to poke the fire up, couldn't reach the log with the poker, not with Jury holding her arm, and gave up. “He was Mr. Edward's younger brother and drank too much and gambled. And he worked for Mr. Edward and — how do you say it — ‘cooked the books.' ”

Wiggins asked, “So what you're saying's that Miss Minton's Uncle Edward was kind of taking it out on her?”

“It looked that way. And, too, he really liked his sister-in-law. Well, who wouldn't? Helen — I mean, Miss Helen, was like her. Looked like her, too. She was a quiet sort. And it just killed Helen's mother when it all came out about her husband, and there was Mr. Edward threatening to go to law and —” Maureen spread her hands, hopelessly.

Jury said, “So when it ended so tragically, maybe he was salving his conscience by taking in Helen. But he didn't want her about. So he sent her away to school.” It wasn't enough, Jury thought.

Seeing her face turn away, Jury felt sorry for her. It was as if some invisible hands had loosened the collar at her throat, the pins in her hair — it had probably been happening all the way through this interview and Jury had only just noticed — for the years dropped away together with the formality. A strand of dark hair now drooped about her cheek, the comb had come loose in the back. Looking into the firelight, she said, “Ah, the pore girl.”

“He wanted his son Frederick out of harm's way.”

She shook her head wearily. “I'm being that honest with you. I don't know.”

It might not have been enough for Jury, but he knew it was quite enough for Maureen Littleton. He got up. Wiggins did so too, reluctantly. Besides looking at Maureen, he had been toasting his feet and forgotten his pad and pen. “Thanks, Maureen. You've helped a great deal. We can see ourselves out.”

Immediately, the hair, the white collar, and the set of the mouth got tucked properly in place. The uniform was straightened and a
Certainly not, sir,
although unspoken, hung in the air.

 • • • 

It was a beautiful house, the shadows in the dimly lit hall hanging like the dark velvet draperies at the high windows in the drawing room they passed before reaching the front door. There was a fire ablaze in there too, and Jury saw the small head of a dachshund rise, its nose testing the air for unfamiliar smells.

“It's hers,” said Maureen. They walked into the room, and the little dog clambered up heavily, as if its weight or its sorrow were too much for its legs. It had been lying on a scrap of rug by the fire and in front of a leather wing chair. “It won't leave that place. I try taking it down to my parlor to get it to lie there by the fire. But as soon as I'm not watching, it'll just struggle up the stairs and come back. She always sat here
after dinner. My, but she did set store by that old dog.” Maureen looked at the dachshund helplessly. “He's nearly blind. He's going to die soon.” She said it with the certainty of a doctor pronouncing sentence.

 • • • 

They stood on the front stoop in the dark, Maureen with her arms wrapped around her uncloaked arms, Wiggins telling her to get back inside before she caught her death, Jury looking off across the street at the blank frontage of the Church of Scotland. It was cream-washed and in the night seemed sickly in its moonlit square. He almost resented its lack of ornament. No embroidery, no stenciling of stained glass, just this sickroom pallor. Surely, he thought, with perverse annoyance, the God of the Scots could do better than that. Presbyterians, he thought, and then wondered with some shame if he were right. Were all Scots Presbyterians? Oughtn't he to know? He was furious with himself because he thought any police Superintendent ought at least to know that. He sure as hell didn't know anything else that was coming in very useful. It was a point that he felt he had to settle right now and Wiggins knew all that sort of stuff. “Wiggins!”

Sergeant Wiggins turned, startled, from Maureen, with whom he had (Jury had heard their conversation filtered through his own anger) been discussing Christmas dinners. “Sir?”

“Nothing.”

Wiggins resumed his talk with Maureen. “Well, of course, we police never know. But if I'm here Christmas . . . it'd be nice. I'm not a fancy eater, I should tell you. . . . ”

Jury wondered who was inviting whom to a meal, and he smiled a little, his annoyance with God somewhat assuaged.

“ . . . plaice and chips, that's the ticket with me,” continued Wiggins. “I know it sounds awful dull, but —”

“And mushy peas,” said Maureen, brightly.

Jury still kept his eye on the church, their debate over the
relative merits of whole versus mushy peas again falling away like grace.
Just one lousy stained-glass window, is that too much? Do You have to take it
all
away? How do You expect people to believe in that pale, sick-looking blank front?
Before he realized he was saying it, and still with his back to them, he said, “She was like a sister to you.”

The conversation stopped. He heard the intake of Maureen's breath, and turned, even more ashamed. He hadn't meant to say it aloud. It had been in his mind all the while they had talked. Both girls the same age, servant and orphan, pretty and kind and serious. And, he was sure, lonely. “Sorry,” said Jury, feeling completely inadequate, turning back to look at the Church of Scotland with renewed anger.
See what You've done!

He felt Maureen's hand, delicate as the snow drifting down, on his arm, and all of Ireland lodged in her voice now. “It's the truth you're saying; she was. But I swear I don't know what happened. If you're right, and someone did — this awful thing, well, I like to think I'm a good Catholic, but I don't think I'd wait for God to take vengeance. No, I don't know but what I'd kill the killer meself. And that's the truth.”

Jury stood staring at the Church of Scotland and thinking things over and growing the more angry because his anger was subsiding. But not his sadness. This doorstep reminded him too much of that other one down the path from the village green in Washington.

“Who the hell,” he said, clearing his throat, “eats mushy peas?”

“O
F COURSE
, I don't celebrate Christmas,” said Mrs. Wasserman, as she poured Jury another cup of strong coffee. “You know me . . . ” And she smiled and shrugged as if her own religion had been bought by caprice during a day's shopping. “But that doesn't mean I don't give presents to others, you know, who
do
observe it.”

They were sitting in Mrs. Wasserman's basement flat drinking coffee and eating cake. He was tired after the long visit to Eaton Place; still, he had not been sorry when she had noticed him coming up the walk. Jury did not want to go up the two flights to his empty flat. Maybe he should adopt Cyril before Racer threw the cat out of the window some day; Mrs. Wasserman would love feeding him, as she did Jury, whenever she got the chance.

She had been astonished to find him back, for he had told her he was spending the holiday with his cousin in Newcastle. Astonished and pleased. She depended on Jury for protection. Bolts, locks, chains, bars — many of which he'd helped her install — were no match for a Scotland Yard Superintendent living above you, sitting across from you.

For some moments she had been rocking away, talking about the Christmas season; now she leaned toward him, dropping her voice to a whisper, as if the bolts and bars could keep out not only muggers, but Jehovah: “To tell the truth, I like your Christmas.” Jury might have been the one who had thought up the holiday. “All the decorations, the colored lights, to see the Prince turning on the lights of the big tree . . . And Selfridge's! Have you seen the
windows?”
Jury shook his head. “You should see the windows, I know you're busy, but you should take a minute. They've done the whole Christmas story, one window to the next, and you walk around the outside and there it is. The Wise Men and everything.”

Jury smiled. “They have the Wise Men in Peter Jones. They're really getting around.”

Mrs. Wasserman dismissed Peter Jones with a wave of her hand. “Ah! That store . . . Just because it's in Sloane Square . . . No, no. You've got to see Selfridge's.
Such
windows, Mr. Jury.”

He thought of the Wise Men and Maureen and the Church of Scotland.

“Excuse me, but you look a little down. It's this work you do. Here, have some more cake.”

He shook his head, smiling slightly. “I guess it is the work. Sorry.”

“Sorry? To
me
you apologize?” In mock-horror, she spread her fingers across her large, black-clad bosom. Her hair was as black as the dress and drawn back as it always was into a bun, so tightly pinned he thought it must make her head ache. “To me he apologizes,” she said to the empty chair beside Jury, as to a third visitor. She poured more coffee. “After all you've done for me, you don't apologize for being down, no.”

“Thanks. But I haven't really done that much. Just helped
out with putting in some window grilles and a deadbolt lock.”

She replaced the coffee pot and addressed the invisible visitor again. “Just a lock, he says.” Mrs. Wasserman smiled and shook her head sadly, as if Jury were simpleminded. “You have helped me considerable, ever since you came here. Wasn't I afraid even to go on the Underground?” She sipped her coffee. “And one day you'll find Him, I know,” she said, complacently, brushing cake crumbs from her broad lap.

With the talk of decorated windows, it took Jury a moment to sort out the Him, and realize it wasn't God she hoped he would find, but her relentless pursuer, the man who she claimed for years had been following her. Jury knew there was no such man.

But he was real to Mrs. Wasserman, some image burned into her brain from the Old War — that's the way she spoke of the Second World War — in the way people do, making distinctions between what was real and meaningful and what was now, today, merely trendy. Vietnam, to Mrs. Wasserman, was a stupid, wasteful skirmish.
None of them got their heads screwed on,
she had said of America, of all of those responsible. But it wasn't the Old War. In Jury she felt she had a confederate, despite the difference in their ages. He had been six, she had been a young woman during the Old War. What she had been forced to endure — she had been in Poland then — he had never asked and she had not told him, nothing beyond a few pictures from her album, but those certainly not of the war. Pictures of the family, and no details. Whatever the source of the Pursuer, he was something that had rooted in her mind and thrived on darkness, like the plant there in the corner that seldom saw light. She kept the curtains drawn, the chains fastened, the bolt thrown.

And it was an enormous consolation to Mrs. Wasserman that Jury appeared to believe her, and had always taken
down the description on the times when she had seen Him. There had been many times. The description fit every third man Jury saw walking down the street.

She was talking now — again to the invisible occupant of the third chair — about how the Superintendent never gave himself credit. How she had been scared to death even to leave the flat before he had come to live two flights up.

That was true. Before he had walked with her to Camden Passage, to the markets and to the Underground, she had done little more than scuttle once a week to the nearest shops to buy her food.

Yet, despite the fact she watched for Jury through a chink in the curtain, and always knew when he was in and when not, Mrs. Wasserman had a delicacy, a respect for his privacy. Never once had she imposed upon his privacy — as had his cousin, his mates, with that
what you need's a wife,
or a girl, a dog, a cat, a something.

“ . . . in a way, it's depressing.” She was still talking about the holiday. “So much glitter, so much gold.” She shrugged. “Is it true more people commit suicide?”

Jury nodded. “It's true.”

She drained her cup. “Well, that's so sad. Too much to expect we'll be happy. Being a Christian, it must be hard.”

It was more of a question than a statement, and because she thought she had said something in bad taste she looked away.

Jury smiled. “I don't know if I am one. I haven't been to church since — I can't remember.”

“We could go,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

She was already on her feet. “Come on. For a few minutes, it won't hurt you. St. Stephens is just up the street.”

Jury couldn't believe his ears. “But, Mrs. Wasserman. I mean — are you allowed?”

In supplication, she addressed herself to the empty chair,
arms outstretched. “ ‘Allowed,' he asks. Am I allowed? And who's to stop me, I'd like to know — the police?” She laughed and laughed, feeling this was very rich indeed. As she was pinning on her hat, letting him help her into her coat, she said, “Mr. Jury. After what I've been through in the Old War, after what you've been through in the police? We don't split hairs, do we?”

T
HE
telephone woke Jury the next morning. As he reached for it, he saw it wasn't morning at all, but nearly noon. It couldn't be, he thought; his old alarm clock must have stopped at midnight. He picked it up and tried to shake some sense into it, but it went on dependably ticking away, all unmindful of its owner's having missed the morning train to Newcastle.

“Damn,” he swore softly into the receiver, on the other end of which happened to be the shell-like ear of Chief Superintendent Racer.

“It's bad enough you sleeping to noon, Jury,” snapped Racer, “without swearing at your superiors.”

“I was talking to my alarm clock.”

There was a brief silence as Racer (Jury knew) tried to sharpen some dull sword in his mind for a perfect riposte.