Rainbow's End (27 page)

Bea's head came up from her dessert plate and her careful apportioning of chocolate bites. She looked puzzled.

“Mrs. Hamilton's nephew. He was murdered. In the States.”

“That's terrible. You think it's got something to do with how she died?”

Melrose shook his head. “Not directly, no. That matter was cleared up, pretty much. But there are other things related to it.”

“What things?”

“A couple of other deaths, possibly. The police aren't sure.” He wondered if she'd read about the body found at Old Sarum. “Do you read the papers?”

She just looked at him. “Nah. Never learned, me. Sign my name with an X, too.” She slid the fork from her mouth, licking off the bits of chocolate.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to sound so patronizing. What I meant was, have you read the papers recently? About the young woman found dead at Old Sarum?”

That made her stop her chocolate-laden fork in midair. “God, you don't think it's to do with
that
?”

Melrose shrugged. “Don't know.” Perhaps he shouldn't have said anything. He was not sure what he might, and might not, tell these people he was questioning. It was all so nebulous, the relationship so . . . well, impossible, really, that he couldn't imagine he was giving away secrets.

“They didn't say how she died. How did she?”

“I don't know.”

She returned her attention to her final tidbit of mousse. “Don't know much, do you?”

“No. What sorts of things do you paint?”

“Never you mind.” Done, she sighed as she carefully lay her fork across her plate. “That was a treat. I could fancy some brandy.” She looked behind her for the waiter.

“Still life? Landscapes? Big squares of color à la Rothko?”

“Why'd you want to know? You'd only tell Gabe.”

Melrose rolled his eyes. “
Don't
be ridiculous. Do I act like someone who'd grass on you?” He raised two fingers to bring the waiter.

“Dunno, do I?” She regarded the Duchamp with a frown. “I paint in blue.”

“Blue?”

She nodded. “Blue. That's all. Every kind of blue ever invented and some of my own. I got blues you ain't
ever
seen.”

Melrose opened his mouth to comment but could think of nothing to say.

“So when Gabe painted Ash blue, I thought it was some kind of message. Didn't get half mad, did I? I thought maybe he snuck into my digs and nosed around. Nobody noses around my digs.”

Her small face took on a sharp, feral look as if warning Melrose, in case that was what he was thinking of doing.

“I beg your pardon? Painted Ashley Cripps
blue
? You did say that?”

“Yeah. Didn't your CID mate tell you?”

“He forgot.”

“So it was a bet or something stupid. Ash ran around stark—except he was blue. Probably just to shock the Liar.” She smiled serenely when the waiter set down their double cognacs. Two gorgeous snifters, brandy glowing with reflected candlelight. “You are
not
cheap, I'll say that for you. Cheers.”

What
wouldn't
she say for him, he wondered as he smilingly raised his glass and touched hers. “Thank you. Tell me: why are you drawn to the Turners in the Tate?”

“I told you. The light. The way he does light. When I get depressed, I go look. Great stuff, it makes me feel better. But so does this.” She sipped her drink, licked her lips. “What's all these questions about Art, anyway?”

“I just wondered how intense your reaction was to Turner. I wonder—” Melrose frowned slightly, raised his glass to see how her image would be distorted through the liquid—“if Art can kill.”

“You're joking.” She gave a brief, cut-off laugh.

“You believe it can cure.”

“I do?”

“You just said so. Turner takes care of your depression.”

“Bloody hell, that's not exactly kill or cure.”

They drank their brandy; he paid the bill.

 • • • 

A NIMBUS
of yellowish light surrounded the iron sconces set high in the brick wall of the restaurant, turning the misty rain to gauze. It was a light rain, but it could seep into your bones, Melrose knew. As they waited by the curb for a cab, he removed his topcoat and held it over Bea's head, tentlike.

Surprised, she looked up at him. “A real gent, you are!” She laughed. “Now, Gabe, he
hogs
the umbrella.” She threw up her arm, waved her hand. “There's a cab down there.”

But the driver didn't see them. The cab looked to be making a U-turn to head back the way it had come. Suddenly, an ear-piercing whistle made Melrose jump. He looked around to see Bea with her little fingers positioned in the corners of her mouth. A second whistle rent the night. The taxi backed up, headed toward them.

She shrugged at his raised eyebrows. “Learnt that when I was a kid.”

As the cab crawled toward them, its headlamps glowing through the rain, Melrose said, “You'll never need Mace.”

The cab pulled to the curb and he started to hand her into the backseat. She paused and asked, “What about you? Ain't you coming, too?”

He shook his head. “I'm going to walk.”

“Walk? In this muck?”

“I don't get to London much. And I like to walk.”

Uncertainly, she said, “Suit yourself.” Then she held out her hand; her grip was surprisingly firm and strong. “Listen, thanks. That was ever so lovely, and so are you. For a toff. I've been wanting to go there for the longest time. Nobody else at the museum has been.” She revelled in this knowledge.

“Then I'm glad we have.” He scribbled his telephone number in his small notebook and ripped out the page. “Here. If you think of anything, or if Gabe does, just ring me, will you?”

Bea crumpled the bit of paper into her pocket. “I will.”

“Once we sort all of this business out, if we ever do, I'll come back and we'll have dinner here again.”

She smiled broadly. “Right you are. Only next time, you eat a proper meal, hear?”

“Absolutely. Goodnight, Bea.”

In the cab she rolled down the window. “Next time you come, I'll let you see some of my paintings, if you like.”

He leaned down to the window. “I'd like.” He thought, if her painting was like her, it would be interesting. Bea, with her purple hair, her odd language slippages (East End up to West), her clear intelligence, her Turner and Rothko. Her hundred shades of blue.

“Ta,” she said.

He backed away, slapped the cab as if it were a toy car he could control with a key or a remote, one he could send on its way or make come back.

Only, he couldn't.

Her face, receding and white in the dark interior, was pressed against the rear window as her hand made a backward, forward wave like a metronome.

Or it could have been you.

 • • • 

HE DID
walk, too. He would be late home, late to Martha's
boudin blanc
, but over the last hour, he had lost his appetite. Or, rather, lost his urgency to get back to Northants.

So he walked through the wet streets of Bethnal Green while the mist turned to something more trenchant, a businesslike rain, an unsporting, un-English rain that dropped straight down, bulletlike, cold and soaking.

He walked and wondered what was the matter with him that one day's coming up to London should leave him feeling so disoriented, depleted, and alone. And different. He felt different, that was all. And that, old son (Melrose told himself), is likely the reason you should stick to your port and books.

Past dark doorways, an alley or two, he walked. Past a few shops—fishmonger's, greengrocer's, Hovis bakery. It was only nine, and yet the bleak quiet of Bethnal Green was what he'd expect to encounter in the hours after midnight. The still street and shuttered windows, the lowered blind of the greengrocer's, the webbed grate before the jeweler's windows, all of this fairly shouted
absence absence.
The street was swept clean of companionable sounds: no tires hissing past, no dogs or drunks rattling dustbins, no distant cries, cut off. The London night might as well have fallen into step beside him to let him know how alone he was.

Sorry, guv. You're in Bethnal Green, mate, not the bloody country. Not the friendly fireside and the snoring old dog for comfort. Bethnal Green, old son, and don't you forget it. Be wise to stick with what you know and not to go thinkin' too much about it, know what I mean
?

But Melrose kept on walking and the rain let up, returned itself to that gauzy mist, perhaps weary itself with its sudden wrathful turn. He stopped to listen, heard nothing, started up again. He was not sure where he was and he was too sad to care.

He had come to a little cul-de-sac, a blank wall in front of him that was decorated with an ancient poster, an advert for Rountree's cocoa. And that, as had everything else that had happened that day, set the past before his eyes.
You won't escape, guv.

Melrose bowed his head. It was as if by some act of humility he could exorcise sadness and remorse. Yet he did not really know from what source these feelings had sprung. As he looked at the fading,
graffiti-riddled, and peeling poster, a verse from childhood came to mind. He was surprised by it:

A splotch of mud on a Beggarstaff man,

A splotch and that is all.

Yet it blinds the eye of the Cocoa man

On a Bethnal Green dead wall.

Jury sat on the rooftop of the La Fonda Hotel and watched the sun reflect off the western face of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He breathed in the weightless, dry air of New Mexico and watched that band of gold widen and diffuse, turn pink-gold that widened again and deepened to orange and red across the dark mountains.

He was too used to the bleak and often bitter dusks of London, where color was nonexistent and light, pragmatic. Light in London served its utilitarian purpose: being there, outside the window at six or seven a.m. to let him know it was time to get to Victoria Street; or at the other end of the day, its dying telling him he'd better take his torch along.

Jury was sitting on the roof of the La Fonda with Jack Oñate, the Santa Fe policeman, who had told him which mountain range that was, and that there were as many as seventy-three mountain ranges. Oñate had said that when he was a kid he'd had to memorize all of the names in school. But he had forgotten them by now, couldn't recall any of the Northern range, just the Sangre de Cristos out there, the Sandias, the Jemez, the Ortiz—the better-known ones—and maybe a few more.

The fifty-mile-or-so trip from the Albuquerque airport in the hired car had opened Jury's eyes to a wilderness of silvery sage and cottonwood, of land studded with the dark green of piñon and juniper. It might not be the most beautiful landscape he'd ever seen—there were, after all, the Lake District, the Hebrides—but this one was certainly the most unearthly. It didn't look real. He noticed the registration plates of the cars that passed him bore the legend Land of Enchantment. That fit.

Jury and Jack Oñate, along with several other guests braving the February cold to catch the sunset, sat on folding chairs, bottled beer in their hands, gazing out towards the Sangre de Cristos. Jury asked about snow.

“On some of these mountains it never completely melts,” said Jack. “I go camping sometimes up in the San Juans and if you dig under that snow you get ice. Glacier snow, I call it.”

“How far off are they?” asked Jury, squinting at the mountain range.

“I don't know, maybe twenty miles.”

“They look so close.”

“Here, thirty or forty miles looks like walking distance. It's the air, see. The air's so clear.”

For a while they were silent, watching the sunset, and then Jack Oñate, with a back-to-business sigh, slapped open one of the files he'd been carrying in a beaten-up briefcase.

“Angela Hope,” Oñate read from the sheet of paper, the manilla file open across his knee. He took a pull at his beer, set the bottle on the cement roof. “Thirty-two years, five-foot-six, brown eyes, dark brown hair. Angela Hope had an artsy little shop over on Canyon Road, where everyone and his brother has an artsy little shop. She lived some fifteen miles outside of Santa Fe, between here and Española. That's the 753 exchange we called where the people never heard of her. The 473 and 982 exchanges are Santa Fe. But 753, that's Española. Angela and her sister have this isolated little place in several acres of desert. The sister's pretty young. Thirteen, but acts older. Her name's Mary. Then there's a housekeeper, Rosella Ortiz, been with them ever since they came here. She's Indian. Cochise, maybe, or Zuñi.”

“You didn't mention this cousin, Dolores Schell. The one who identified the body.”

“Right. Schell's Pharmacy, that's her. Her dad was the pharmacist and then when he died, Dolores took it over. It's over on Old Pecos Trail.”

“She's a pharmacist.”

Oñate nodded. “Now, the Schells have been here a long time.”

“She married?”

Oñate shook his head. “Lives by herself in a house over in El Dorado. A semi-swank development outside of town. I get the impression
she and Angela weren't all that close.” He shrugged. “Not unusual; I got cousins I ain't even seen.”

“The Schells have been here a long time, but not the Hopes? Where are they from, then?”

“From the East.” Jack Oñate thumbed the papers. “New York. Hmm. New York money, or at least some kind of money. Parents died when their private plane went down.” He retrieved his bottle of beer. “So what do you guys figure?”

“Not much.” Jury shook his head, watched the blue mountains turn grape-dark.