Rainbow's End (56 page)

“Nor can I,” said Miles. “You keep yourself bunged up in that tiny place of yours day in, day out. As for Lady Kennington—!”

Polly still had her eyes on Jury, and they had turned a much darker shade of violet. A stormy color that made Jury think of a thunderous sky over the last violet light across the mountains. Knowing Polly, it was thunder all right. “She's at Stonington,” Polly snapped.

“Stonington! What on earth is the woman doing at
Stonington
? Good Lord, she's not thinking of letting—well, she can't be thinking of buying. Poor as a churchmouse now Lord Kennington's gone. Sylvia always says, ‘Proud persons are soonest brought down.' Certainly true in her case. What can you expect, the woman's got no talent, no profession—” Miles thrashed a hedge with his walking stick.

“You could ask Freddie Mainwaring, he's still estate agent for it. She must've been to see him. Do you want to go to the Magic Muffin? I was just on my way—”

Jury opened his mouth to refuse, gently, but Miles Bodenheim answered for him. “Ho ho! Miss Pettigrew's probably got nothing but aubergine today, awful things. But I have a few minutes to spare, might as well spare them there as anywhere!”

“I'm in a bit of a hurry, Polly.”

Disappointment seemed to weigh her down. But she perked up a little as she asked, “What'd she do? Melrose said police wanted her for something.”

“What?” Miles walked back the few steps he had walked off (assuming everyone was following him to the Magic Muffin), eyes round. “The Kennington woman? Police after her? I'm not surprised, nor will Sylvia be. Now, Superintendent, how do you account for that?” He was pleased as punch.

“I don't.” Jury gave Polly a salute and walked off towards his car.

NO BENTLEY
, no Silver Ghost stood without or within the high, gray walls of Stonington.

Indeed, no sign of life whatever, no cat, mole, mouse. Nothing.

Jury walked up the wide steps and lifted a heavy door knocker in the shape of a fish, copper once, greenish-gray now, oxidized by the weather. The pressure caused the door, unlocked, to open a fraction, and he placed his hand against it, shoved it farther. He was being careful, he thought, as if he might walk in on something.

But the door ushered him into greater silence, a wider emptiness, almost, than he'd met in the drive and the grounds. He stopped in the entrance hall, bigger than most rooms, black-and-white checkered marble underfoot, green marble commodes against both walls, white marble sculpture of a woman by the curving staircase. It was an abominable reproduction of what had been an abominable original, graceless and unlovely, of a figure with arm extended that Jenny (who hated it) had used to drape her coat over. Her hat she had removed from her head to the head of the statue. At least I get some use of it, she'd said. There was no coat there now, nor hat, either.

But there were voices, faint in some distance Jury couldn't get the direction of. He walked into the first room off the marble hall, a small study with a french door, open an inch or two, and it was through this opening the voices came. He could not see their owners. He walked into the next room. The rooms all around the house were interlocking, joined each to each by a doorway, and one could move from one to another, always with the courtyard in view. The architect must have planned this, a home resembling a convent.

This room was enormous, a dining room, he thought. He remembered all those years ago standing in it with Jenny (and it had been just as empty of furnishing then as now, for she was moving away). She and Melrose Plant were outside now in the courtyard, talking. Or looking at the house; she was pointing to the first floor, to something up there. He laughed.

Had Jury seen them from the study, where he could have walked through the french windows to the courtyard, probably he would have done so. But there was no such door here in the dining room, so he proceeded to the room beyond, a drawing room. Here he stopped and watched them again, from this slightly different vantage point. And then he went on, into the long gallery. This ran the entire length of the east side of the house, and was empty of portraits. He could see rectangles of the deep red wall covering faded around where they had hung. Along the length of the gallery were three french doors, and he could have exited through any of them.

But he didn't. He stood there watching Melrose and Jenny, still talking, still absorbed. Neither noticed him, or any reflection of him.

Jury continued walking thus, through one room after another, not knowing what the various rooms were, for none had furnishings to identify them, except for the big library, with its floor-to-ceiling shelves, its huge fireplace. Finally, he had circuited the entire house and was in the last room, a little place off the marble entrance hall. He stopped here and saw now Jenny's back, Melrose Plant's face. The face looked happy. Jury had no idea why he had done this, why he had engaged in this voyeuristic performance, and felt a little ashamed. And then not ashamed, because he was, after all, in full view of his audience of two. Or was he himself the audience, an audience of one?

He stepped through the glass door here, out onto the walk that ran around the courtyard.

Oddly, it was Jenny who sensed his presence, even though her back was to him, and they must have been thirty or forty feet away. Plant didn't even see him. She turned.

“Richard!”

For a moment he was cheered; she all but sang out his name; she all but clapped with a sort of childlike delight. He did not know he'd been so irrationally annoyed until he ceased to be. Then Plant called out, too, and waved.

Jury walked up to them, and he could not help the rising anger. At both of them. He glared at Plant. “ ‘She is found,' is she?”

Jenny looked from one to the other, uncomprehending.

And Plant looked sheepish. Unfortunately, Plant looking sheepish, with that tilted smile on his face, was also Plant looking charming. “Sorry about that,” he said, with an appealing shrug.

Nothing else. He didn't ask about the case, about the trip, about Macalvie, about Wiggins. About sod all. Jury said, icily, “Sam Lasko—of the Stratford-upon-Avon police department, if you recall—”

Her hands flew to her face. “Oh, God. We should have rung him immediately.” She was looking at Melrose.

We
should have, should we?

Melrose said, “I did. This morning. I told him you were here. I thought I told you I told him . . . ”

And then Jury studied the sky as they had a tiny little argument about who told who what. He thought of the night before, his conversation—if you could call it that—with Sammy Lasko. And his worry. “Well, no need to worry.” He tried on a little heartiness, but it rang so false, he returned to grumpiness. “You shouldn't have left, Jenny.” She looked at him, seriously troubled. It was impossible to tell the source of the trouble, though. Then, trying to regain a bit of distance, he said, “I'll be off, then. My desk is piled high, what with being gone for five days.”

“But you must stay, Richard,” she said.

Melrose agreed, and with unmistakable sincerity. “We're just going off to have some lunch. There's a place between here and Horndean—”

Jury shook his head, managed a smile. “Back to London. A policeman's life, as my guvnor likes to say, is full of grief.”

His guvnor, for once, was right.

RAGGED
, torn, tattered, and bearing little resemblance to its original self, the stuffed coyote was once again being hauled into Racer's office by the cat Cyril.

The abuse was not, however, being meted out by Cyril (who, according to Fiona, loved the coyote), but by Chief Superintendent Racer. Again, according to Fiona.

“Said he was going to rip it to shreds and tear its heart out—the coyote's, pre-
sum
-ably—if he found it in his office again. Tried throwing
it away, but unless you throw it out the window, I told him, you know Cyril'll just get it out of the wastebasket.” Fiona whisked an emery board across her nails.

Jury listened to it rasping, wondered if he was going to spend half of his life watching women refurbish themselves. Between Fiona and Carole-anne, it seemed likely.

Fiona held up her filed fingernails and went on. “It's that little Velero tab on the back: can't think what it's for, can you? Anyway, he—” she gave an unenthusiastic nod in the direction of Racer's office—“come back from his club yesterday all in an uproar. Said he'd been the laughingstock when his friends asked him why he was wearing a coyote on the back of his coat.” She blew on her nails. “Can you imagine? So I says to him, Well, whyn't you toss it in the dustbin along the pavement, or something? ‘Oh, no.
Oh
, no,' he says, with ever such a mean smile. So you just know he's got something evil in mind.” Fiona sighed.

Jury watched Cyril through the open door. He'd jumped up on Racer's desk, coyote still firmly in mouth, and seemed debating a problem. He set the coyote on the fax machine and looked from one to the other. “Maybe Racer's got something evil in mind, but Cyril's got something eviler.” Jury smiled at her and left.

 • • • 

“I'M TAKING IT
easy first day back, of course,” said Wiggins, stirring a powdered something into his glass of beef tea. “Not wanting to relapse.” He smiled weakly.

Jury was sitting before his decidedly un-stacked-up desk with his feet on an open file drawer. “True. You don't want to activate some dormant electrical charge.”

Wiggins finished stirring, tapped the spoon gently against his cup, and sat back, sipping with a satisfied sigh. “I'll say this, sir. The way you and Mr. Macalvie worked all that out was quite brilliant. Quite.”

“No brilliance at my end,” said Jury. Gloomily, he sat.

Wiggins frowned. “Shouldn't wear your overcoat inside. Just inviting a chill, you are, when you go out.”

“Which is now.” Jury rose slowly. Ever since he'd driven back from Littlebourne, he'd felt slow, lumbrous.

“You just got here not a half-hour ago. Where're you going now, sir?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere” turned out to be Salisbury and Old Sarum.

His car did not drive him (for that's how Jury felt, as if he'd punched in cruise control) to Northamptonshire or Stratford-upon-Avon (she wouldn't be there anyway, would she?), or any other vaguely formulated destination, such as police HQ in Exeter, where he might be expected to go.

So it was night when Jury finally pulled into the empty car park at Old Sarum, and for a few moments sat there wondering how he could have driven for a couple of boring motorway hours to a place that, number one, was closed; number two, he couldn't see anyway, as it was eight o'clock and dark. A total and depressing winter dark.

As he got out of the car and slammed the door he saw that there was, after all, one other car down there at the end. Probably a couple of kids, touching each other up, which made him think of Bea and Gabe, and that made him think of his own lost youth, a loss occurring, he estimated, about one hundred years ago. He crossed the wooden bridge.

Jury stood on the ridge of the hill looking down into formless black depths—the Bishop's Palace if his memory served him right. He did not know how long he had stood there, looking blindly around, when he heard something off to his left.

A voice. He squinted. A tiny light. A voice smoking a cigarette, some dark amorphous form trudging toward him, the devil, no doubt, risen out of the ancient stone. Oh, for God's sake, he told himself, disgusted with his self-dramatization. The voice (which actually belonged to an ordinary human being) and the red coal end of the cigarette drew closer.

“You police?”

“No.” The denial came quite spontaneously to Jury's lips. He wondered why. “You security?”

They could see each other clearly enough now. They were both smiling. Sheepishly, perhaps. A lark hanging about when the place was closed to visitors.

“Thing is,” said the other man, “they just took away their Crime Scene—Do Not Cross tape. The coppers, I mean.” His breath came frosty cold as he dropped the cigarette to the ground.

Jury watched the cataract of silver sparks before it was ground out underheel. “Something happened, did it?”

“Dead lady. American. I was the one found her, to tell the truth.” He tried to keep the satisfaction out of his voice, but couldn't. “Down there.” Here he pointed off toward the stone ruin of the Bishop's Palace. “See, I work for the Trust couple of days a week. So I was here. Only one here, as a matter of fact. Down there she was, in one of the latrines. Garderobes, they used to call 'em. Fancy name for privy. Let's sit down a bit. Over there's a bench.”

They walked a few feet, sat down. Trevor Hastings introduced himself; so did Richard Jury. Glad to make each other's acquaintance.

And then in the way of sealing a pact, rather like some antiquated ritual of secret handshakes or pricking thumbs and drawing blood, Trev offered Jury his pack of cigarettes.

Jury looked at the glimmering white pack—what were they, Marlboros? Silk Cuts? As if it made a difference. It could have been a pack of corn husks, and he'd still feel like reaching for them. “I stopped, Trevor. Thanks just the same.”

“Stopped? Good lad. I been trying to do that for years.”

Jury smiled. “I've only been stopped for a week, so don't give me too much credit.”

“I ration 'em.” He lit up.

“To what? One every three minutes?”

Trev laughed and that made him cough. “Sound like the wife, you do. I get out of the house just to have a quiet smoke, sometimes, not have 'er nattering on. You married?”

“No.”

Trev grunted. “How'd you stop, then?”