The Stargazey (4 page)

“Ronnie, not Roy.”

Jury smiled. He'd done that deliberately. “Sorry.” He waited.

“If you wanna come to Fulham this afternoon, you can have a dekko at your mise-en-scène. Meet me at the palace gates.” He added a salting of sarcasm. “You must know where it is.”

“The herb garden. It says she was found there, in a patch of lavender.” Jury frowned at the ironic benignity of the scene. The mise-en-scène. He smiled.

“Yeah, well, Linda Pink might give you an argument there.”

Chilten gave information the way others did blood, a drop at a time. Jury stopped himself from asking the obvious question—Who's Linda Pink?—and, instead, said smoothly, “We'll see you in an hour, Roy, and thanks.” He hung up and muttered, “Linda-bloody-Pink.”

Wiggins raised his eyebrows. “Who's Linda Pink?”

“We may never know.” Jury sat back, allowing himself, if only for a few moments, to be stunned, to be enveloped in sadness. “I should have gone in.”

“Pardon me, sir? Gone in where?”

Jury didn't answer. Instead, he rose. “Come on, Wiggins. Chop-chop.”

With great and grave reluctance, Wiggins stood too, downed whatever the putrid stuff was in the glass, and asked, “Are you sure, sir? Aren't you afraid I'll lock horns again, me?”

Jury shoved his arms in his raincoat. “Never. You'd never make the same mistake twice.”

T
he thing about Detective Inspector Ronald Chilten was this: He loved to cloak mystery in mystery. If there was no mystery to hand, Chilten stirred up an atmosphere, an ambience—indeed, his own little mise-en-scène—that would keep the other person in suspense. He could do it over a three-car pileup or the color of a hair ribbon found at the scene or the number and nature of the books a teenager was carrying home from school when he was mugged. If he could keep you in suspense when there was no real suspense to be had, God knows he could do it over a body found in the Fulham Palace grounds. Jury had begun grinding his teeth ever since the telephone call less than an hour ago. He called upon his store of seemingly bottomless patience, reminding himself that Chilten was a very good cop.

That their destination was an herb garden had a most salutary effect on Sergeant Wiggins, washing away, as one of his tinctures literally might, all of that “locked-horns” business and rendering him an agreeable companion.

The three policemen—Jury, Wiggins, and DI Ronald Chilten—were walking through the grounds of Fulham Palace. They passed a boundary of holm oak trees and a silver lime; passed cedar, chestnut, maple, walnut, an enormous California redwood—a world of trees Jury couldn't put names to. It was Chilten who pointed them out, which surprised Jury, as he wouldn't have expected the man to have a horticultural or
aesthetic bent. “Beautiful prospect, isn't it?” he said, stopping to gaze upwards at the tiered branches of a holm oak. “It's a wonder more people don't know about these grounds, considering how much we love our gardens. There must be more different kinds of trees in these few acres than anywhere else in the British Isles.”

They continued walking, Jury looking back at the rather severe Georgian facade of the palace, recalling from some garbled history he had heard as a boy that all bishops at one time were said to live in “palaces,” so the term was merely a euphemism for “house.” “When did they stop using it as a residence?”

“The bishops? Seventies, maybe.”

“But it's being used.”

“The borough rents it out as offices.”

“Fulham does?”

“Hammersmith and Fulham, yeah.” They had reached a brick wall that Jury assumed must enclose the gardens. Chilten said something to one of two uniformed policeman who appeared to be on guard. They nodded.

With a curt nod toward an indentation in the brick wall, Wiggins said, “Bee bole.”

Jury waited for further comment, but the sergeant said nothing. Wiggins and Chilten, thought Jury, should get on like a house afire.

What was most vivid was the enormous quiet of the place. London might have been dissolving around them; no traffic noises, no shouts and cries reached the little herb garden, walled in within the outer wall of the rest of the gardens.

Jury looked at the brown vines, imagining the spring when veils of wisteria would shiver in the breeze, undulating along the long fence to their left. On their right was a ruined greenhouse, a vinery, a grape arbor, given the look of the hardy vines that still ran within it, now with its roof caved in. It was a pity, Jury thought, that a place like this couldn't get funded by the government when one saw so much money wasted. The old story.

In the center of this walled garden was a large tear-shaped bed, sectioned off into small allotments for various herbs, now dry and
overgrown. It was shaped like an eighteenth-century knot garden. There were patches of thyme, rosemary, lavender, and a dozen others, which he could tell apart only with the help of the museum map.

Wiggins looked down at the weedy, brown, and blighted winter aspect of the garden as if he were visiting the graves of the dead. He made his mournful way around the center plot, bound round by the bright yellow
POLICE DO NOT CROSS
tape, which was used to keep a murder site in as pristine condition as humanly possible.

Wiggins was in his element, not because this was police work but because it was herb work. “Feverfew, that stuff is.” He pointed to the first section within the plot. “I don't believe I've ever seen that, I mean outside the shelves of my homeopathic medicine shop.”

The wreckage of the
Titanic
wouldn't have called forth greater awe. Jury consulted the map. “Lavender.” He nodded toward a section beside the feverfew. “That where you found her?” He watched Chilten pause to take out a pack of Chiclets.

Chilten held the pause long enough to put the gum in his mouth and crunch it around, as if even the Chiclet was part and parcel of the overall mystery. Finally, he nodded. “That's it. Face up in the lavender.” He stepped back, backed up to the wisteria vines. “From about here, we figure, given the trajectory.” He moved back to the lavender patch. “She was found Saturday night before midnight. That's when the
caretaker
said he saw her. But you saw her as early as nine, nine-thirty.”

Jury waited. Nothing. “Who found her? The caretaker?”

Another piece of gum went into Chilten's mouth. He chewed. “Uh-huh. Or he reported it to Fulham HQ, anyway, says
he
found her around midnight.”

It was Wiggins who helped out, filling in. “You mean, it sounds like the caretaker
didn't
actually find her?”

“Well, he did and he didn't.” Chilten smiled slightly as he went on chewing.

Jury wanted to chew nails.

“Did and didn't, sir? What's that mean?”

“It was Linda Pink the caretaker said actually
found
her.”

Ah, thought Jury. Finally got around to Linda Pink. In name only. He sighed. “Look, Ron. You know we don't know who Linda Pink is, so why not enlighten us?” Having to ask the direct question, that was the price you paid for getting information out of Chilten.

“Oh. Didn't I tell you? Linda Pink lives out there, along Bishops Park Road. She comes over here all the time, according to the caretaker. Day and night. Miss Pink found the body,
she
says, around seven-thirty, seven-forty-five. But she didn't tell anybody about it. Not until this morning, when she found the caretaker in the porter's lodge having a cuppa. Said she saw in the paper about finding the woman in the herb garden. My guess is, she probably wouldn't have said anything even then, except she wanted to be disputatious.” Chilten slid Jury a look. He stopped talking, studied the crime-scene tape.

Jury waited. He was good at waiting.

It was Wiggins who couldn't stand it. “Disputatious? I don't understand.”

“Linda Pink claims she found her in the lad's-love, not the lavender. But the caretaker is sure it was the lavender.”

Jury frowned. “Lad's-love? What—”

Wiggins helped. “It's an herb for nervous problems.”

“Never mind what it's for. Where?” He looked down at the patch of lavender.

“Right here,” said Chilten, shoving the toe of his brown shoe into a wild and weedy dry patch that looked just like the patches on either side of it. “That's lad's-love.” He shrugged. “Hard to tell the difference.”

“Then,” said Jury, “it's simple, isn't it? The caretaker would know one patch of herbs from another. Miss Pink is mistaken.”

“Yeah?” Chilten lit a cigarette. He still chewed his gum. “Tell that to Miss Pink.”

“You don't mind if I talk to her?”

“Delighted. She's ten.”

Jury blinked, looked at Wiggins, who looked rueful. And as if mood were an herb indicator, he looked round for it, the rue. “Ron. This dead woman was found by a
kid
?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Chilten trebled the sound, and with obvious pleasure, as he exhaled a thin stream of smoke and watched Jury's expression.

For once, Jury didn't give a bloody damn if someone else got to smoke and he didn't. As Chilten puffed away, Jury said, with mock sweetness, “Whenever you're ready, Ron.”

“Oh? Thought I told you: Linda lives over on Bishops Park Road”—he watched Wiggins taking notes; gave him the number, added—“with her aunt. Great-aunt, rather. It's the aunt who owns the place, obviously. Name of Dresser.” He gave out a few more details (gratis), and Wiggins parked his pencil inside his small notebook. “And that fur coat, you might be surprised to hear.”

There was a definite period after “to hear.” No pause, no cough, sneeze, or sudden interruption by Chilten's pager or cell phone. “To hear
what,
damn it?” Jury tried not to come down too heavily on the “damn it.”

Chilten raised his eyebrows. “I didn't tell you? The coat was Mona Dresser's.”

Jury's mouth opened, shut. “You're talking about this Linda Pink's
aunt
?”

“
Mmm
-hmm.” Another cigarette was popped from his pack. “It's a long story, Jury.”

Jury set his teeth, managed a synthetic smile. “I'm in the long-story business, Ronnie.”

Wiggins's mood was becoming infected by all of this having to hang upon Chilten's answers. “I expect you could brief it up for us, Mr. Chilten,” he said, a bit sharpish, as he got out his notebook, preparatory to being briefed.

“Okay. The fur coat belonged originally to Ms. Dresser. She passed it along to her stepdaughter, Olivia, who later sold it through one of those—what d'ya call 'em?—ah, consignment shops. How it got out of the shop onto the back of the dead woman, that's anybody's guess.”

“But we're not,” said Wiggins, seeing Chilten was through, “in the anybody's-guess business. Do you think we could see the body?”

“Let's go.” Chilten looked from Jury to Wiggins as if they'd been holding him up, stopping here.

 • • • 

I
t had always astonished Jury how medical examiners, attendants—all those who worked there—could give the impression they felt completely at home in a police morgue. Perhaps they did, and why not? It was theirs, and they liked it. He understood that a postmortem might present a challenge to a medical examiner, but the debonair way in which MEs could tick off body organs and their condition made him blink. The Fulham doctor, a woman, named them almost fondly, as she might have done the dolls lined up on her bed when she was little.

He hadn't been present at this postmortem where Chilten had done the honors. Fortunately, Sergeant Wiggins hadn't been, either. As far as Jury could remember, Wiggins had attended a postmortem once and once only. Had it been that fateful event that started the sergeant on his supposed long decline into quirky health?

The room was cold and coldly fitted out: white enamel paint, stainless steel, glare of lights. The attendant had, following Chilten's earlier call, removed the body to one of the stainless-steel tables, draped in a sheet. He pulled it back at Chilten's nod.

A dead face does not look like a living one. That might be an obvious statement, but most people ignored it. A dead face is one from which all attachment has flown.

Jury looked, nodded, said yes, that was the woman, and the attendant started to cover her face. Jury stayed his hand, pulled the sheet back. For a lengthy period that had Chilten shuffling his feet, Jury looked down at her: the long neck, blond hair escaping the clip that held it, the now strangely complexioned face, the very emptiness of which could of course be playing tricks. But he didn't think so. Perhaps it was the nose.

Jury shook his head. “It's not her.”

As he drew the covering back over her face, the attendant clearly didn't care one way or another if it was “her.”

But Chilten rocked back on his heels. “What? Your description—blond,
beautiful, height, weight, Fulham Palace,
sable coat.
Jesus. How can it not be her?”

Jury looked at Chilten. “I don't know.”

What bothered Jury almost more than the dead woman's not being the one they thought she must be was the relief he felt that the woman on the morgue slab was not, indeed, her.

T
he only dark parlor Jury had seen that could compete with Mona Dresser's was Melrose's aunt's. Mona Dresser's house, though much larger than Lady Ardry's, gave the impression of cocoonlike dimensions, the result of little light and a lot of stuffing—in furniture, cushions, birds, and the odd beast that had seen the ministrations of a taxidermist. (Somebody loved to hunt, thought Jury.) Even had the long velvet curtains puddling the floor been all the way open, the large room would still have been ill-lit, for the house was poorly situated to catch the sun. Several lamps of ruby glass and stained glass burned low, and the fire in the grate had simmered down to ashy coals. There were two oil portraits on opposite walls, one of Mona Dresser herself (looking remarkably as she did now) and one of an imposing-looking man in a long black cloak. There was a hush to everything that reminded him of the quiet around Fulham Palace but made him think even more of the quiet that pervades a theater just before the curtain rises. Yes, it was all quite theatrical. Yet he didn't assume this was an effect striven for by Mona Dresser herself.