The Stargazey (35 page)

“Beautiful, isn't it? The house and the land—there's a hundred acres of it—are so beautiful it makes you want to weep.”

He hadn't heard her come up behind him. “This is the place in the Black Mountains?” When she nodded, he asked, “Why did your husband's uncle make moving in by Christmas a condition of inheritance?”

“I don't know. Perhaps he didn't want the place to go untenanted for a long period of time. Or didn't want it sold. Michael's mother was American, and I think he felt Michael should come home. ‘Home' being upstate New York.”

“Then why would he leave your husband property in Wales if he wanted you to live in the States?”

“I've no idea. He died not long ago, poor man. The first Thanksgiving after his death we were to sign papers at a solicitor's office at the Inns of Court.”

“That's day after tomorrow.”

“Yes. Perhaps he wanted to remind Michael of his American origins. He was a little wacky, I expect. Let's sit down.”

She had brought coffee and a cut-glass decanter and two snifters on a black enameled tray painted with a bowl of roses. He accepted a cup from her. He leaned forward, the glass between his hands, the lush aroma of a superior cognac making him vaguely dizzy. Jury remembered that it was she who had asked him to come here. “Why did you want to see me, Kate?”

Hesitating, she fingered the decanter. “First: are you still so determined to believe you saw me that night?”

Jury didn't answer immediately. Then he said, “Determined isn't the way to put it. It makes it seem I want it to be true. But it's the other way round: I
don't
want it to be true, and I'd sooner believe you weren't within a mile of the bloody place.”

She dropped the glass stopper back into the bottle. The clink reverberated in the still room. She sat down opposite him on the sofa. “You were right.”

He was not tempted to say, I know. Instead, he felt that coldness in the pit of his stomach, the way one feels when one hears a diagnosis confirmed, as if he hadn't all along been sure and needed the confirmation. He held his cup in both hands, seeking any fresh source of warmth, and waited.

“There was another”—she looked across at Jury, straight across the distance between them—“another letter. I was to go to Fulham Palace. I was even told to get off the bus at the Fulham Broadway station and walk and then reboard the bus, if I could, or board another. When it got to Fulham Palace Road, I was to get off and—well, the rest is obvious. There was a little map of the grounds and the walled garden. I haven't the least idea why this place was chosen, any more than the other places.”

“And when you got there?”

She cocked her head and smiled slightly. “You're certainly cool, Superintendent; you don't seem surprised.”

“It's Richard, and I'm totally un-cool, and I am surprised. Although the possibility did occur to me that this was another attempt—but go on.”

When she said it, her voice was dry, as if she were parched, emotionally. “This woman was just—lying there, in that sable coat. You were right about the coat, too. I was wearing one—mink.” She shook her head in both disbelief and wonder that she could have come upon this scene. “That was all. That was absolutely
all.”
Her terrible position in this whole business must have struck her suddenly and terribly, like a blow to the chest, for now there was a burst of tears as she fell back against the sofa.

“Kate.” Jury moved to the sofa, laid his arm atop her own outstretched arm, laid his cheek against her hair. It smelled of lavender. “Kate,” he said again, the word muffled by her hair, and twined his fingers within hers.

When he did this, she twisted around and laid her head on his chest. She said, “There are times I think I can't stand it anymore, being alone.”

“I know the feeling.”

She moved away from him, and he let her go. She stood up and drank the rest of her cognac. Then she started moving about the room, tidying pillows that didn't need tidying.

He sat back and watched her. “So it wasn't like the others, this meeting place. What about the message itself. Did you keep it?”

“Yes.” She moved to the back of the room to a small kneehole desk and slid open a drawer. She came back to the sofa, handed the paper to him, and sat down again. “It's shorter than the others; there's a different—” She looked around, as if words hung in the air from which she might take the right one. “A different tone, I guess you'd say.”

It was a half page of white paper, thicker than the ordinary typing or printer paper Jury was used to seeing. The message was brief;
Your meeting place is Fulham Palace, the herb garden.
Then the time and date and where she was to leave and reboard the bus.

Jury said, “All of the others mentioned Sophie.”

She nodded. Her elbow on her knee, her mouth was pressed against her fisted hand.

Jury held the note up to the light. “This wasn't done on a computer; it was typed.”

She turned around, read it again. “I didn't notice. How stupid of me. I knew something was different. The whole thing is different.”

Jury put it in an envelope and said, “It looks as if you were set up, Kate.”

She stared at him, her mouth opening and closing. “But—
why
, Richard? And how could anyone know about Sophie—I mean about the other places, the meetings in Brussels and Petersburg?”

“Who did you tell?”

“No one. I mean, except for the Paris police, of course.”

Now Jury was looking at the map, done on a piece of flimsy paper. It showed the way to the knot garden from the stone pillars. “This map is traced.” It looked familiar to him. He folded it and put it in the envelope, too, and put the envelope in his pocket. “Kate, you must have told someone; you could have done that and forgotten, or without meaning to—”

“For God's sake, Richard, how could I tell someone my child's been kidnapped, without meaning to?”

“Sorry. You're right . . . but what about that awful day when it happened?”

She thought for a moment. “Yes, of course, I asked a lot of people if they'd seen Sophie. I was hysterical.”

Jury thought of the priest. “What about Charles Noailles?”

She frowned as she turned to him again. “But that was before it happened, I mean when Michael knew him. And you told me he didn't even know Michael had a daughter.”

“His church was right there, near the rue Servandoni. St. Sulpice. You said you could see the spire from your flat. It's a hell of a coincidence, don't you think? This person out of your past who knew your husband so well turns up in one of the offices of Fulham Palace. I don't trust coincidences.” She said nothing, and he took her silence for sorrow. “I'm sorry, Kate. I'm so sorry.”

She came to sit beside him again and he pulled her over, pulled her head down against his chest. “Look, Scotland Yard has tremendous resources. We'll get her back.” Jury didn't believe that, but it was an easy lie. It was always an easy lie, and he felt slightly ashamed. He rubbed her back and wished he knew something both true and comforting to say.

“There's something I've been wondering about all week,” she said, without moving her position and looking at him. “Why, when you followed me all that way from the pub, didn't you then follow me into the palace grounds? Why didn't you come in?”

Now he turned his mind to this again, this time wondering about what might have happened, what potential tragedy might have been averted—or brought about—if he had done so. Would his presence have rearranged everything? From the dead woman's position, to Kate sitting at that table in the station, down to that vase of roses, the magazines in that rack, the books, the light spilling from beneath a frosted glass lampshade—would it all have been changed? Over her shoulder he looked almost coldly and clinically around the room, despite the great upheaval in his heart. And he wondered that the room itself didn't fly apart: paintings and posters drop from the walls, books fly from the shelves, lamps overturn. He felt divided and began to see some faint glimmer of an
answer to her question in this: that even if he had gone in it would be as if he hadn't, that he could not have left foot- or fingerprints or anything behind to show he had been there. When he finally answered, he imagined the question had already been forgotten.

Because I wasn't invited.
But that sounded so strange that he didn't say it. He settled for, “Fate, I guess. It wasn't in the stars.”

The awful paradox of something he refused, refusing him.

I
s your medical examiner absolutely certain that it was an exit wound?” Melrose asked. They were sitting in the Members' Room having morning coffee.

“Dr. Nancy? No. It's not as easy as you might think to say whether a person was shot in the front or the back. The bullet can tell you what it passed through and, often, the order of the passing. According to the position of the body in the lavender, and the blood and residue pattern, Nancy Pastis was shot at close range in the chest.”

Melrose fell to contemplating the stag over the mantel and wondering about blood sports. “But you've said you believe Linda really
did
see the body in the lad's-love, so what about that?”

“You know what-about-that. The killer moved the body.”

“Yes, yes,” said Melrose, irritated that Jury wasn't reading his mind, “but why?”

“My assumption is, to hide it. But you're trying to get at something. Why don't you just tell me? Want another coffee?”

“I suppose so.”

“Don't do it on my account.” Jury motioned to the porter.

“It's not really a theory, not anything so grand as all that. I'm just wondering if the body was moved to suggest the bullet's coming from
another direction. Such as the palace itself.” Melrose was pleased with himself. Sounded rather good, that.

“Ah. Are you thinking of the priest, Noailles?”

Melrose frowned. “Well, yes. Kate McBride knew him, didn't you say?”

“I did. But I'm not sure what you're getting at. Did Nancy Pastis know him? Anyway, according to him, it was Michael McBride, not his wife, that he knew.”

“But there's got to be some connection with the Pastis woman. Both of them showing up in the unlikely venue of Fulham Palace at night—that's a bit of a stretch, you must admit.”

“You think it's something to do with Noailles.”

“I didn't know until now that Pastis was shot at close range. I thought she might have been shot from a distance, you know, such as from the palace.”

“I considered that when I was in Noailles's room. You can't see the herb garden from his window. Even assuming he had a rifle with a scope.” Jury smiled. “Sorry.”

Melrose sighed. “Here I've been doing all this thinking. . . . ”

“You need the practice.”

“Oh, ha. If I do well enough, are you going to hand me a metal badge and a six-shooter?”

“Maybe.”

“Then let's move on to another point. The conductor of the Fulham Road bus and several others mistakenly identified the woman they saw. If the person on the bus was actually this Pastis woman—”

“She wasn't. It was Kate McBride.”

“You're still so sure?”

“I saw her that night, remember? I mean, over a long period of time.” Jury shrugged, trying to play it off. “And, also, she told me.”

“Told you? When? Why?” Melrose tossed down his napkin as if it were a glove inviting Jury to duel. “I'll be a monkey's. After all that denying and denying. . . . Why didn't she admit it before?”

“Because it puts her at the scene of the crime, a place none of us wants to be put.” Jury spooned sugar into his cup, glad Wiggins wasn't
here to remind him of his teeth. “We've found no one else who was there. It looks bad, don't you see?”

“Of course I can see. I can see this case is getting away from yours truly. What made her tell you, finally?”

Jury smiled. “To clear her conscience, something like that.”

“Something like that, indeed!” Melrose picked up one of the biscuits that had been served with the coffee, studied it as if a runic message might be imprinted there, and said, “You said,
I saw her
, meaning that you'd never believed she
wasn't
there. You always knew it was she. Correct?”

“I suppose so.”

Melrose put down the biscuit, having learned all he could from it. “She knew you knew it and wouldn't stop knowing it.” His look at Jury was prodigious.
“That
was why she admitted it, old bean, old Super.” Melrose could claim at least that point.

Jury didn't want him to claim it. “What difference does it make?”

“What difference? The difference is whether you're being manipulated or not.”

“I think her reason makes sense. Now she's a suspect, after all. A role no one wants to play.”

“You don't say
she's a suspect
with anything like conviction. All right, why in God's name was she going to Fulham Palace at night? Was it to see this priest? The chap she claims not to know very well?”

Jury shook his head. “To meet someone. Someone who didn't turn up.” He told Melrose about the note.

“You mean another aborted meeting?” When Jury nodded, Melrose asked, “But why in hell didn't she tell the police or you this before?”

“She didn't think we'd believe her.”

Melrose ran his hand over his forehead. “Ye gods, everything seems to be getting more mucked up than cleared up. And it's almost back to square one with the victim—Nancy Pastis.”

“Not quite. Her flat's in Shepherd Market—in Mayfair—pricey flat and walls full of pricey paintings.”