The Stargazey (30 page)

“When was the last time you saw her, Kitty?”

She frowned in concentration. “A week ago, ten days, maybe. I only work part-time, so you might want to ask someone else.”

“I have.” He put the second photo on the bar. “What about her?”

Kitty looked from the photo to Jury and back again, puzzled. “But it's the same one, isn't it?”

“Is it?”

Kitty brought the photo closer to her eyes, squinted again. “Well . . . perhaps she
is
different. The shape of the face, maybe.”

“You couldn't say if
both
of them had come in here.”

“Only if they'd come in at the same time, probably. Or if I'd been looking for two different women.” Kitty drew the dishtowel from over her shoulder, started wiping glasses. “I dunno. You sure it's not the same person, one alive, one dead?”

 • • • 

This time he was the only one waiting at the bus stop. He let one bus go by, feeling absurd as he did so. He let it pass him up because it was one of the newer buses, fare paid as you boarded, single-decker. He was waiting for a double-decker. He waited for a quarter of an hour. Stupid.

Night seemed to come on earlier, more swiftly, with each passing day. It had been dead dark by half-five and it was half-six by now. Jury turned up his jacket collar and dug his hands into the pockets. He turned and looked down the street to Redcliffe Gardens. He had called Chilten, and Chilten had told him Kate had been released, or soon would be. Jury wondered if she was at home by now, having a cup of tea with old Mrs. Laidlaw.

When a double-decker finally pulled up, Jury swung onto the platform, nodded to the conductor, and climbed the stairs. This time there were only four other passengers, sitting in the rear of the bus. He took the seat in the front that looked out over the street that swam in the reflected lights of shops and cafes, still damp with a late-afternoon rain.

The bus stopped at the corner where the flower vendor kept his big selection, a carpet of bright flowers. As the bus pulled away from the curb, Jury heard steps ascending and women's voices hurried and excited. They settled behind him. Jury wouldn't have been surprised to find it was the American lady and her friend, still talking about Thanksgiving.

When they pulled up across from the Fulham Broadway underground station, he had such an eerie sense of last Saturday night's reinventing itself that he looked down to see if a woman in a sable coat was descending from the bus.

He sat back, with an uneasy feeling he had been keeping at bay throughout the day. Why was he so certain he had seen Kate McBride and not the woman who lay dead in the herb garden? When the others, the conductor and the several people who had been seated near the door that night, had said, Yes, that's her, the woman who'd got on and off the bus.

He told himself it was because he had seen Kate McBride over a much longer period of time; he had (and they hadn't) been watching her ever since she'd boarded the bus, until he himself had left it and followed her. He had seen her, off and on, over a period of time the others hadn't. And he was convinced that what had drawn the others' attention, and held it, was the fabulous sable coat and not the woman herself. Not her face. Though they claimed to be making the identification on the basis of her face. But it was really the coat, wasn't it?

Jury believed they were wrong, or, more accurately, he'd believed it then. Now he was wavering. Pondering this, he almost missed the stop at Fulham Palace Road and had to go down the steps quickly and swing off the bus after it had started. The conductor admonished him, leaning from the platform to shout that people got their legs broken that way.

Jury waved back to him and walked up Fulham Palace Road to Bishops Avenue, then on to the grounds of Fulham Palace.

It was almost seven when he got to the palace entrance. It started to rain like a movie rain; veils of it, thunder claps, lightning close by. He hoped he'd make it to the courtyard and Noailles's room before the rain came.

 • • • 

What had he expected Charles Noailles to say, other than what he did say?

“I've no idea what you're talking about, Superintendent.”

“You're quite sure,” said Jury, who was seated in the same run-down leather chair. “You have no connection—no family connection—with this château outside of Aix-en-Provence?”

Noailles was standing against the wall, fingering a compass. He half laughed. “As I said. No.”

“Did Michael McBride talk to you about this book he was writing?”

Noailles shook his head. “He didn't mention it, no.”

“Would he have?”

“Would—?” Now the priest did laugh. “I'm not a mind reader, Superintendent.”

“No, of course not. I'm asking if you think he felt that close to you, if you were on intimate enough terms, that he might've told you about something rather explosive, an exposé of sorts, that he mightn't have mentioned to anyone else.”

He thought this over, putting his hand against the window ledge, still holding the compass in his other hand. “Yes, I honestly think he would. Although he told me next to nothing about his private life, his wife, his daughter—I wasn't even aware he had a child. It just didn't come up, which might seem strange.”

Jury told him, briefly, about Sophie's abduction. “Of course, none of this started until after McBride died.”

“That's one of the worst stories I think I've ever heard, Superintendent.”

Jury felt him to be sincere. He got up. “Thanks for seeing me, Father. I'll be in touch.” He turned at the door and asked, “What
did
you and Michael McBride talk about?”

“God.”

“For me, that's two dead ends in one day. Good-bye.”

He breathed air made even colder by the rain, the storm having passed over this particular place by now. He looked up at the night sky, at the barely visible stars, wondering again why he had come here. He hadn't expected the priest to be of much help. There was nothing new to see; nothing was going to reveal itself in the next lightning flash. The only answer he could give himself was that he felt a sense of attachment, as if something or someone were reaching out to claim him. He leaned against the stone pillar and listened to the storm already changing its random course and gathering strength elsewhere.

One alive, one dead. You sure they're not the same person?

Why did that bother him?

He stepped back from the entrance. The feeling, of the place having some claim on him, he had felt before in other places and circumstances
just as strange. What it felt like was the undertow of homesickness. What was it, a sense of loss? Of what, he didn't know, only that it was something he missed.

Jury stood there in the silence, these feelings beginning to pass away like the rain. And oddly enough, painful as they were, he didn't want them to. I'm losing it, he thought; it was as if over a telephone line one heard the voice waver and get farther and farther away and finally fade out.

What he seemed to want was to get into the experience, inside it, but was kept—by what he preferred to think of as chance (the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice, the gamble) but what he feared was really his own cowardice—out.

S
imeon Pitt and Melrose Plant had been sitting in two of Boring's old cowhide club chairs, reading their papers, when Pitt drew Plant's attention to an item regarding the Fabricant Gallery's
Siberian Snow
paintings.

“Alleged
paintings, I mean.” Pitt directed this comment not at Melrose but at the article. “I can't imagine Sebastian Fabricant believes the stuff is art. Fabricant's always been a decent gallery. Dependable, you know, and not completely over-the-moon with their prices, either. And they've discovered more than one artist, like this Slocum. Strong influence of Turner there, but I expect that's obvious.” Simeon Pitt adjusted his spectacles and shook his newspaper.

“Turner is her favorite painter.”

“It's the light, the light. Listen to this, would you? Here's Jonathan Betts: ‘The daring series on show at the Fabricant Gallery in Mayfair, Ralph Rees's
Siberian Snow
, is worth a visit, if you haven't already'—
blah blah blah blah;
get on with it, you idiot—'a group of paintings reminiscent of the minimalism of Robert Ryman or Newman's abstract expressionism.' What's he talking about—abstract expressionism? The man's hardly forty and in his dotage. It takes him so long to make a point he could have been a barrister.” Pitt shook the paper again, as if he might loosen the print in so doing, and continued. “ ‘It takes considerable nerve for an artist to retain the passionate blankness of a scene—' The what of
a
what?”
Pitt stared at Melrose. “Have you ever been struck by ‘passionate blankness,' Mr. Plant?”

“Yes, once, but I soon recovered.”

Pitt tittered and continued. “ ‘—blankness of a scene and offer such nuances of color, such metonymy of line, such purity of space.' ” Pitt crackled the paper together in the middle. “If I didn't know the man had less humor in him than a bull around a red cape, I'd say he's writing all of this tongue-in-cheek. Fabricant must have friends at the paper.”

“You people can be bought?”

“You're joking, of course. I've known a food critic the price of whose column was a decent meal, and a theater critic persuaded with a third-row-aisle seat.”

“Ah.” Melrose sighed. “How disappointing.”

“Why? Do you need somebody to tell you what to like?”

Melrose smiled. “Oh, I've already someone to do that!” He spent a moment thinking about Agatha. “But you yourself, Mr. Pitt, are—or were—doing the same thing.”

Pitt wobbled a reproving finger in Melrose's face. “Wrong. Wrong. I was telling you what
I
like. Long as I could pick up my check at week's end I didn't give a damn
what you
liked. Where's that old waiter? I need a drink.”

“Higgins? Right over there with Colonel Neame.”

“Let's get him over here; I'd like a whisky. As I remember, you owe me one.”

Melrose caught the waiter's eye and motioned him over. “I do indeed.”

Pitt was smoothing out his paper. “I'm so deep into this bilgewater, I could be going down with the
Titanic.”
Pitt read silently, mouthing words, disturbed only by Higgins's creeping up between their chairs, unseen.

“Mr. Pitt, what will you have?”

“Whisky and soda.”

When the old porter had slipped away like smoke, Pitt continued with his review. “ ‘One cannot conceive of any recent painting more daring than the flamboyant
Siberian Snow.'
Oh, for God's sake! Daring? Flamboyant?” Pitt dashed his paper to the floor.

Melrose rather envied Simeon Pitt. The man so enjoyed his own company. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Melrose.

“Here's daring!” Pitt retrieved his paper. “Here's flamboyance, if that's what you're after!” Pitt was pointing a finger at Melrose as if the latter had challenged him to a flamboyance contest. The finger then took a dive to the bottom of the page. “The thief who cut this painting clean out of the frame and made off with it!”

Where had Melrose heard about this before?

“Here's an article on the Hermitage.” Pitt waved the arts page. “Don't you remember? It created quite a stir last February, everybody was talking about it.” He read: “ ‘—the audacious theft of a recently acquired painting by Marc Chagall,
Wingless, Wingless Angels
, which has yet to be recovered. This is a double loss, as the painting was the only Chagall in the museum—' which is strange, isn't it, considering he's Russian for God's sake; don't they support their own artists?”

Oh, yes. Agatha. No wonder he hadn't remembered. It was so rare anything Agatha said would bear the fruit of further conversation. “Is this the Hermitage painting?”

Pitt nodded. He clearly enjoyed the theft of a painting more than he did the review of one. “This thief, they say, can appear and disappear like Higgins back there.” He returned to the paper. “Goes by the name of Dana. Hmph! Is that a first name? Last name? Man? Woman?” Pitt shrugged. “ ‘Wanted in'—by God—'Argentina, Spain, Cyprus, and Cairo for grand larceny and assassination—' note they put the larceny first, ha. Assassination's apparently his or her forte. Theft is a sideline.” Pitt lowered the paper and heaved a sigh. “Wouldn't it be pleasant to be anonymous like that? Roving the world, picking up work locally as it comes your way for whoever'll pay the tariff? A few francs here, a few yen there, a couple of pesos, a hatful of rubles.”

“Oh, I don't know. Assassination, that could be a tricky business.”

“Hm. Wonder how much you have to pay him. Or her. Be nifty to think it's a woman doing it. But she could only get in here on Ladies' Day!” Pitt laughed uproariously.

“How do they know it's this particular person? And as you said, it could be a woman? Dana's a pretty unisex name, isn't it? There's Richard Henry Dana, the writer. There are several film actors, both women and men, whose first name is Dana.”

Pitt grunted. “As to its being one person, it seems the crimes have his—or her—signature all over them.” His eye fell on another piece. “Now here's something interesting. . . . Ah, thank you, sir!”

Melrose placed money on the silver tray from which the waiter had removed two whiskies and a syphon.

Young Higgins smiled his signature wintry smile, thanked Melrose, and drifted off.

Pitt returned to his plundering of the news and what he had been about to report before the porter's appearance. “Listen: All Souls Church, located in Oake Holyoake, Cornwall—' ” He frowned. “Where the hell's that? Never heard of it. Well, it's Cornwall, after all. That's so much another country I'm sure there are dozens of little places nobody's heard of. Anyway: