The Winds of Change (21 page)

‘‘Because I don’t know any more than that. It’s just the Child Thief.’ That’s what I mean.’ He paused. ‘No wonder I hate talking to kids.’

Melrose knew it wasn’t for that reason. ‘Lulu’s not one of your ordinary children.’

‘There are no ordinary children.’ Macalvie turned to Jury.

‘What do you think?’

‘About Lulu? I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her.’

‘You could get something out of her, I bet.’

Jury drained his pint, set it down. ‘I don’t know if you can talk to kids if your purpose is to get something out of them.’ He shrugged.

‘Maybe you can’t talk to anyone if that’s your purpose.’ He looked round the table to see all of them looking at him, perplexed. ‘Sorry.’ He added, ‘I’m going over there in the morning. I’ll talk to her.’ He felt vaguely ashamed, without knowing why. He picked up his pint, remembered it was empty and got up. ‘I’m in the chair; who wants another? Before Wiggins and I toddle along to Mevagissey.’ Wiggins looked up, surprised, and none too happy. ‘Sir?’

‘A family by the name of Hardcastle. The mum said they’d be happy to see us.’

Wiggins looked with something akin to longing at the other room with the billiard table.

‘I’m sorry we can’t take it with us, Wiggins.’

Melrose said, ‘Well, I’ve got to get back to my digs or I’ll never rouse myself in the morning. I wish I had Ruthven here.’

‘Yeah, that’d help your case,’ said Macalvie. ‘A gardener with his valet.’

‘It’ll take forever,’ said Melrose. ‘All I have is this rented car, made for midgets. Good night.’

Jury and Macalvie said good night to him. Jury set down his pint and asked Cody for the keys to the Ford.

Macalvie asked himm to hang on for a minute.

Cody gave the keys to Wiggins and they both rose and announced they were going to finish their game. They returned to the snooker table.

‘What?’

Macalvie said, ‘Do you think it’s possible this woman can’t be traced because she actually wasn’t this woman?’

Jury looked down into his empty glass. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think.’

‘Maybe she was masquerading as somebody else and that’s why it’s been such a damned problem identifying her. Look, we’ve circulated this morgue shot; we’ve run everything we could possibly run. The pathologist has found nada as far as the body is concerned. But if she doesn’t look like that in real life? Except for staff at Brown’s Hotel–assuming Scott’s story is true–who might recognize her as the woman with Mary Scott, and when she was here, well, what if all the rest of the time she looked entirely different?’

‘Why would she have disguised herself to present herself to Mary Scott?’ said Jury.

‘I don’t know. Unless...’

‘What?’

‘Unless the disguise wasn’t necesarily for Mary. Maybe it was for Declan.’

22

The car was pointed toward Mevagissey. ‘Pointed’ was the right word, since Wiggins had found a road thin as a string and was driving as if the car were a missile. It was still raining.

‘Try to miss that wagon up ahead, will you, especially the two people in it?’
 

‘I see it, sir.’ Wiggins sighed in exasperation. ‘Of course I see it.’ He cut the wheel and raced past it, never caring what could have been coming toward them, and thank God nothing was.

‘I’ve never known you to drive like a maniac, Wiggins.’

‘It’s probably getting out of London, all that filth, and breathing clean air and feeling freer, you know.’

‘You’ll certainly be feeling deader.’

The rain poured. Wiggins drove.

‘We’re coming into Mevagissey, I think.’

Which was, Jury was sorry to see, at the bottom of this impossibly narrow road. The sign at the top suggested one park in one of the car parks at the top. Fortunately, there were lights, lights coming from tearooms and small souvenir shops. It was now dead dark.

Wiggins started down.

Jury said, ‘You’ve noticed this road is walled on each side?’

He pointed left and right like a flight attendant pointing out exits. Of which they’d none. ‘They’re very unforgiving, these stone walls.’

‘Haven’t hit anything yet,’ Wiggins said in a chirrupy voice.

‘You’re a police detective, and you’re satisfied with the logic of that statement? Is it your recent association with demons or with Cody Platt that’s opened up this devil-may-care side of you?’

‘I’d hardly say that, sir.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m saying it.’

Jury shined a small torch on the map of the town and directed Wiggins to the left, then the right, then the left again and they ascended another street.

‘Seems to be all cliffside.’ Wiggins urged the car on, as if it were an unyielding donkey.

‘Doesn’t it just?’

It was dead dark. Jury preferred not to look out of the passenger’s window.

‘Strange how the night just shuts down so quick,’ said Wiggins.

‘Quick as a coffin lid.’

The road finally straightened out.

‘What else did Cody tell you about the Hardcastles?’

‘They’re lower middle class, that the death of the girl Elsie is probably the most that’s ever happened to them.’

‘It would be, wouldn’t it? The loss of a child would be the most that happened to anyone. Certainly to Mary Scott. To Declan Scott, too, even though Flora wasn’t his.’ Jury was checking numbers and names on the houses.

‘Yes. I didn’t put it right. Cody meant that he thought the parents were pretty much making a meal of it. It sounds terrible put that way; he meant that he didn’t believe all of the histrionics. They–or the mum, at least–were overplaying their hand.’

Jury frowned. ‘That’s interesting.’

‘She seemed to Cody to be delighted to have the attention of the police.’

‘It’s nice to be wanted, isn’t it? Here it is. On the left there.’ There was space for another car on the concrete apron next to the little sign that said HARDCASTLE HAVEN.

‘Hardcastle. Wasn’t that the name of a character in one of those Restoration comedies?’ said Jury, opening the car door and getting out. He looked at the pebble dashing of the front of the house, its dim porch light barely showing in the darkness. ‘She Stoops to Conquer, that’s it. Goldsmith, I think.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The play. Early-eighteenth-century stuff. Restoration comedy. That’s it.’

They were walking by way of a path made up of evenly spaced circles of stone. The path looked fake. ‘What are their first names ?’

‘Hers is Maeve; his is William. Then there’s the remaining child, Peter, who’s around twelve. Mental, he is.’

Jury was about to correct Wiggins when the door opened and there was Maeve (Jury assumed) in a bright flowered dress, a whole garden of flowers against a light blue background that looked a bit too summery for March. She had a pasty complexion and a quick bright little Cupid’s bow mouth, full of talk, Jury was sure.

‘Are you the men from Scotland Yard, then?’ She asked this even as Jury and Wiggins were getting out their warrant cards.

‘William! They’re here!’

It sounded so much what one might call out, announcing relations who’d turned up for a celebration or an eagerly anticipated sporting evening.

He called back the answer: ‘Well, bring ‘em in, love!’

‘Come on in. Just go on through–that’s right–to the back parlor.’

In the wavering watery light cast by wall sconces and the street lamp in the rain slipping through the open door, the hallway made Jury think of a rainy alley.

With William in the back parlor was a sodden-faced lad with the small, closely set eyes and puttylike countenance of a child cursed by Down syndrome.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Maeve. ‘Our Petey’s made tea!’ Petey did not respond to this and Jury imagined his connection with tea making had to do with putting the sugar on the tray, no more. Petey immediately attached himself to Sergeant Wiggins, going to stand close by his chair and planting a hand on Wiggins’s arm. Wiggins did not want to appear to be shaking off the hand, but shake it off he did under cover of reaching for something – his notebook, his pen – in a side pocket of his coat, which he still wore. He did not return forearm to chair arm, either, seeing Petey was still fixed to the spot.

His mother chimed, ‘Now, Petey, that gentleman’s a police officer and he could arrest you if you don’t behave.’ She thought that quite amusing.

Nobody else did.

Said William Hardcastle, ‘It’s three and a half years since that woman run down our Elsie. Now they’re sendin’ Scotland Yard around. Bit late in the day, I’d say.’ He pinched ash from his cigarette, smoked down to a stub. He looked uncomfortable in his clothes, as if donning a fresh white shirt was too much of an effort.

He’d sooner be in his vest, as usual, for sitting around drinking a cup of tea and watching the telly.

Jury had not removed his coat. He could see Macalvie’s point here. Wiggins, though, now took his off as an act of self-defense and draped it across the arm of the chair where Petey stood to form a kind of barrier between them. The child was undeterred. His hand crept along the coat.

‘This is in relation to a new case, Mr. Hardcastle. You’ve probably heard about the murder of a woman on the Scotts’ estate.’ He wished immediately he could call back that word, with its suggestions of wealth and privilege and (to William Hardcastle) indolence and lack of moral fiber.

Hardcastle said, sententiously, ‘What goes around comes around, I says to meself when I read about that.’ He stabbed a forefinger at Jury.

It wearied Jury to hear such claptrap cliché. ‘What do you mean? That Mr. Scott somehow deserves misfortune?’

‘It’s a curse, I say. Those people are cursed.’

Soberly, Jury said, ‘I expect Declan Scott would agree, considering he’s lost both his wife and daughter. And now there’s the murder of a stranger on his property.’

With another finger pointing, Hardcastle said, ‘Where there’s smoke, remember? And I can tell you we didn’t appreciate you lot comin’ round hintin’ maybe I’d somethin’ to do with that little girl’s disappearance. Right, Maeve?’

Was it a signal for tears? Maeve didn’t actually shed any, but she was quick with her handkerchief, pressing it hard against her eyes. ‘Our poor Elsie. Dreadful. Criminal that was. And that Scott woman gets off with no more’n a slap on the wrist. That’s what money’ll do for you. You can run a child down in the street and nothing happens to you. Criminal.’

‘El-suh,’ said Petey, trying a word on for size, it made no difference what word. ‘El-suh.’

‘Poor Petey feels it more’n us, I shouldn’t wonder.’ Petey smiled broadly at the room before returning his gaze to Wiggins.

The room seemed to be misting over with cheap emotion.

‘Given the disappearance of Flora Baumann occurred not very long after your daughter was killed, I think it reasonable you might have come under suspicion, Mr. Hardcastle. Anyone in your position would, and they were considering all possibilities. Of course, I can understand your dismay.’ And other shibboleths, thought Jury, falling into the cliché rut.

‘I expect you can imagine how my William felt,’ Maeve opined, ‘with him as much as accused of making off with that little girl?’

‘What,’ said Mr. Hardcastle, ‘was I supposed to be doing all those months after our Elsie was run down? Was I supposed to be plotting my revenge on the Scotts?’

‘I doubt anyone would blame you if you had been.’ Jury’s tone was so mild and conciliatory, Hardcastle was having a difficult time holding on to his anger. He lit a fresh cigarette. Jury looked around. It would appear the Hardcastles were not having financial difficulties. ‘That’s some telly you have there.’ It was mammoth, at least a thousand quid, that’d set them back. The car parked on the concrete standing beside the police Ford was a BMW.

These were not Bimmer people. The furniture was well worn, but then Maeve and William would not bother changing anything that required a total redecoration. They’d go for the flash stuff, if they had a windfall; they’d spend it on showy things—cars, TVs.

And Jury didn’t doubt there had been a windfall, most likely from Declan Scott. That would have done a lot to lessen their resentment of Mary Scott’s being let off so easily.

‘The conditions,’ Jury could not help pointing out, ‘were all against Mrs. Scott that night: traffic light not functioning properly; the dark; the rain; Elsie’s black clothes.’

‘Drink, that’s what I’d put it down to,’ said Maeve. ‘There was that pub down the way.’

Even patience-on-a-monument Wiggins winced at this. ‘There’s always a pub down the way.’ He was leaning to the far side of the armchair. Petey had his thick arms folded across the overcoat.

‘Petey,’ said Jury, ‘come over here and do something for me, would you? There’s something I’d like to see.’

Petey looked wide eyed and doubtful that there’d be anything better to see than Sergeant Wiggins.

‘Come on.’ Jury made a beckoning motion with his hand.

Petey finally gave up his position by the chair and went to Jury.