The Winds of Change (10 page)

There were some with just Mary and Flora taken in the gardens of Heligan. Jury recognized the giant rhododendron. There were several with Declan and Flora. There was one larger one of Declan and a woman who was not his wife. It was taken in the street; behind them was the ornate art nouveau curve of one of the entrances to the Paris metro. He held it up. ‘Paris. Who’s this?’

Declan looked surprised. ‘Oh. That’s Georgina. A friend of mine. Georgina Fox.’

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, she’s gorgeous.’ She was. Tall, slender, with an airy blondness that seemed almost transparent. Jury wouldn’t mind having such a ‘friend’ himself. He smiled. ‘Good friend, right?’

Declan laughed. He was embarrassed. ‘That was a year after Mary died. I was still - anyway, I wanted to get away, so I went to Paris for a while.’ He took the picture from Jury. ‘Georgina. She was really - breathtaking, don’t you think?’

It was as if Declan wanted Jury to reassure him he hadn’t been a rotter for taking up with Georgina Fox after his wife had died. My God, who would blame him? ‘I’d certainly fall for her. What man wouldn’t?’

‘It didn’t last long. A few weeks.’

Jury looked up. ‘Have you got any more of Flora?’

Declan laughed. ‘Oh, I have plenty.’ He went back to the sideboard again. He pulled out a handful and passed them to Jury.

Flora at different times in her life. The baby, the two-, three and four-year-old. Jury liked the way she stood in a couple of these, straight as a soldier at the entrance to that path he had just walked, the trees like sentinels, the white crosses. This (he thought she thought) is how you stand when you’re posing for a picture. She wore a pale ruffled dress whose hem didn’t reach her knees.

Declan sat, his elbow on a knee, chin in hand, watching the pictures move through Jury’s hands as if they might spring to life again under the eyes of a stranger, a new person. ‘Mary used to call her ‘Fleur’ mostly to tease Flora.’ He smiled. ‘She hated ‘Fleur.’’’ As if it were a new idea, he said, ‘You know, Flora was very down to earth, unpretentious - if you can say that about a four-year-old child.’ He sat back. ‘When I’m walking in London - anywhere, any town or city-and pass children on the pavement, I look at them and think how uncorrupted their world is and I grow appalled at what they’ll have to face in a few years’ time, what they’ll come to know: drugs, pimps, charlatans, fools - the whole illicit world - and I have to stop to draw breath I’m so afraid and so appalled. How in God’s name can they handle it? How can they shoulder the world?’

‘Maybe mum and dad are there to take the weight.’

Declan retrieved the photos, saying, ‘Some don’t have a mum. Some don’t have either. What then?’

‘They deal with it.’

‘They shouldn’t have to.’

‘I know’, said Jury. He did.

At that moment, the same woman who had opened the door to Jury came unceremoniously to the doorway, pardoned herself and said, ‘Dinner will be ready in ten minutes, Mr. Scott.’

‘Good. Thanks, Rebecca. Mr. Jury will be joining me -’ He turned to Jury. ‘You will, won’t you? I can guarantee it’ll be worth it.’

‘You bet.’

She nodded and left.

The subject of his wife was one Declan Scott would never tire of. Thus, over a consomme, Jury asked him how they’d met.

‘Quite by accident. In a pub in Belgravia. After she got away from Viktor she was living with her mother - Alice Miers, a lovely woman - in Belgravia. Alice has a house there, small but very nice.’

Small house. Big price. These people knew how to live, didn’t they?

‘I still see Alice when I go up to London. I take – took - Flora, too.’ His voice trailed away. He held up the fluted glass into which the Chardonnay had been poured. ‘These glasses are from Prague. Mary loved glass. I don’t much care; I’m more interested in what’s in it.’

‘What’s in it is very good stuff,’ said Jury.

Rebecca served the lobster with an excellent sauce (which leaned heavily on the same Chardonnay) and then withdrew.

Jury asked, ‘How good a look did you actually get of this woman in Brown’s?’

Startled, Declan looked up from the food that had been transferred from serving platter to plate and said, ‘A fairly good one as I was trying to make out who she was. You think I might be wrong? I mean, in identifying her?’

Jury hadn’t actually thought this through, but realized it could be true. He said so. ‘It just occurred to me; it was just a thought. It’s been three years since you saw her.’

‘That’s true. I don’t know why she stuck in my mind. She wasn’t attractive. But then if she wasn’t the same woman, there’d be no connection between this murdered woman and Mary.’

‘Even so, there still might be. It’s the fact it happened here, on your property. And there’s Flora, too. That could be a connection.’

Declan had been reaching for his glass and his hand stopped midair. Flora added to Mary, both losses must suddenly have washed over him. Mary, dying at such a young age, and Flora, a child whose last minutes - whose last months, possibly - might have been agony with no one to come to her aid - that must be unbearable.

Jury once again felt the weight of Declan Scott’s despair. The air was heavy with it, and Jury felt as if he must do something. Perhaps that was what Macalvie couldn’t tolerate. ‘I’m sorry’ was all he could think to say.

Looking down, Declan shook his head and held out the palm of his hand as if resisting apologies or perhaps merely asking for time. Two seconds, three. ‘It’s all right. I guess I still can’t deal with it.’

‘Why should you be able to deal with it?’

He smiled slightly but bitterly. ‘You’re right. Why should I?’ Declan nodded and once again reached for his wineglass. ‘But as for this woman, yes, I’m quite sure it was the same woman. And remember, Dora Stout saw her, too. Dora was cook here for many years.’

‘I know. We’ve met. I saw her in South Petherwin.’

‘Dora left because it’d become too much of a job for her; also, Rebecca Owen had come. She’d been with Mary for some time when Mary was married to Baumann. There’s no love lost there, I can tell you. Rebecca didn’t like him.’

Jury thought about this. ‘Dora Stout didn’t get a very good look at her, but from what she said it could certainly have been the dead woman. You know the thing most memorable about her? Her extreme plainness. That’s a funny thing to remember; one would think it would be utterly forgettable. I don’t know why it isn’t. Did Dora resent Mrs. Owen coming?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Indeed, I think she was glad of it; she wouldn’t have wanted to leave Mary in the lurch.’ He stopped talking when Rebecca Owen came to clear the plates away. Jury told her it was delicious.

She thanked him and said that ‘the pud’ would be up in a minute. Then she pushed through the swinging door.

Declan laughed. ‘‘The pud.’ I love it.’

She reappeared with tall, delicate glasses filled with custard, which she set before them, and then moved over to the sideboard to fuss with the accoutrements of coffee.

‘What is this English predeliction for custard, Superintendent? You ever noticed it?’

‘Of course. I’m a detective, after all.’ Jury had taken a spoonful and added, ‘But this isn’t just any old custard.’

Rebecca said, ‘It’s sabayon. I’m afraid I put in too much Marsala wine.’

‘Is there such a thing as too much wine?’ said Jury.

She smiled and asked Declan, ‘Should I serve coffee now or will you wait?’

‘Oh, bring it on, Rebecca, please.’ He said to Jury, ‘Like some port?’

Jury shook his head. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t eat or drink one more thing.’

‘Then that’s all. We’re fine.’

She poured coffee for them and went back again through the swinging door.

Jury said, ‘It galls me to say it, but I’d better root out the chap who brought me here. Or someone in that incidents room planted on your land. They’ll collect me and drag me back to Launceston.’

‘Why do that? Stay here. As you can see we’re not overbooked for the night.’

Jury was tired. And tomorrow was Friday and that meant getting back to London and then to Newcastle on Saturday.

He did not spend too much time thinking about the professionalism (rather, the lack of it) of accepting the hospitality of a witness or suspect. He was dead tired. Or perhaps the tiredness was the weight of Declan Scott’s sadness that had come to rest on Jury’s shoulders like a yoke. In any event, he accepted the offer of a room for the night and thanked him. He would call Cody to pick him up at Angel Gate instead of the White Hart in Launceston.

Jury looked out of the bedroom window at the night and thought Declan Scott did not discard the past easily. The countless reminders of what he had lost did not cripple him. Perhaps he was one of those people for whom reminiscence was an anodyne rather than anguish. He took comfort in having about him whatever she had touched or heard or worn or drunk from. Would someone think Scott of a morbid turn of mind, living in this house full of ghosts?

Jury didn’t. If the past was pretty much all you had, why would you want to discard it? Jury tried to picture him with a new flat and new friends. For there, he thought, was the illusion: to believe that one could start all over again and build a new life on the ruins of the old one. No wonder he had fallen for the beautiful Georgina Fox. But what are you supposed to use for building materials when all you have is burned wood and broken plaster?

The room had been cold, but the fire that had been laid and lit in the big fireplace soon drew the dampness and chill from the air. He thought of this later, in his room whose long window looked Out over the woods in front and the avenue or what used to be now vanishing beneath leaves, grasses, ferns and beleaguered hedges. He thought of the white crosses. He must ask Declan Scott what they meant.

He was tired enough that he was sure he could fall into a black mine of sleep, but he didn’t. He lay for a long time with eyes shut, eyes open, letting scenes he had fashioned of the lives of Mary and Flora and Declan Scott unreel like a film in his mind.

And the mystery woman. The reel stuck on the mystery woman, the dead woman lying on the stone bench. A statement, a message, perhaps even a warning. But he had no idea what that could mean and while he was trying to make sense of it, he slept.

11

The next morning they went out through French doors that opened onto the terrace and walked down the steps, not in the best repair, to the path and the bronze sculpture of the little boys. The path ran all the way from the stone steps to the rear of the garden.

‘Temperamentally, I suppose I’d rather leave things as they are.’

‘Then why change it? It’s a massive amount of work.’

‘Because Mary wanted the gardens restored.’ Declan answered, as if this should explain everything, not just a wild acre or two. ‘I’ve commissioned Warburton and the Macmillans - that’s the father down there’ - he gestured toward a short, squarish figure digging in one of the beds midway along - ‘to bring the place back to life, its old life. That’s what Mary wanted. Those steps we just went down -?’ Declan looked over his shoulder.

‘From the terraces, you mean?’

‘Yes. They’re a little mossy and slippery now. But those steps were once turf covered. It was cut to fit. They were covered with grass. Perhaps it’s ridiculous, but I’d like that.’

Jury looked behind him at the steps, four of them on each terrace. ‘What you could do is just get some sod, couldn’t you? The kind builders use to cover up bare land around new houses?’

‘No, my landscape chap told me it takes a particular kind. I need someone with, as he put it, ‘an intimate knowledge of turf.’ You wouldn’t happen to have it? Or know someone who does? Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone with so esoteric a bent.’

Jury smiled. ‘You seem to enjoy the refurbishment, though.’

‘Hm. Here we are,’ Declan said as they came upon a man in a gray coverall, flat leather cap and garden gloves so stiff they could have stood by themselves with the boots in some corner. ‘Mr. Macmillan, this is Mr. Jury, a friend of mine.’ He turned to Jury. ‘The Macmillans are the most sought-after gardeners in Cornwall. And Cornwall, being as it is full of gardens, that’s saying something.’

Macmillan bathed in this compliment as if he’d expected no less a one. Waving his hand over the area immediately surrounding the fountain, four beds bisected by narrow paths, he said, ‘What we’re plannin’ on doin’ here, Mr. Scott, is take it all down to seed and - if you want me to follow the old plan to the letter - emphasis indicating he would rather do anything but, for he stopped long enough for Declan to allow him some freedom, which Declan didn’t - ‘we’ll put in the tulips, just as before, but ah would like t’ try t’ break out the breeder tulips, an’ ah can tell you the colors would be most astonish in’ an’ well worth the effort.’

Declan said, quite seriously, ‘All right, Mr. Macmillan, I’ll follow your greater wisdom here.’

Macmillan blinked his sandy lashes, and his tan eyes looked happier. ‘And as for the begonias, ah would strongly suggest Dragon Wing if we can get enough heat in your glass house; we could have flowers this year if that was the case.’

Declan looked over at two small glass buildings at the side of the wall, strangely unobtrusive. ‘I don’t know; that is, I don’t know about the heat. We’ll talk about that later.’