Mungo crawled under the bar stool, went down with his paws over his eyes.
Is a dog a lot of trouble?
35
The bloody traffic light had decided its changing days were over. Jury sat behind the wheel, waiting.
I’ve ‘ad enough o’ you lot, thinking I’ll go red-yellow green at a moment’s notice just t’ please you. Well, see ’ow you like sittin’ ‘ere for several minutes…
Jury hit the steering wheel. Was he going insane? Imagining what was rattling through the head of a traffic light? Next it’d be British Telecom over there in that forlorn-looking telephone box, trying to get a message across to him-
Which made him think of Mungo and Schrödinger…
Finally the light changed (reluctantly?), and he turned onto Upper Street. No, there was no doubt in his mind that those two had been trying to tell him something. It didn’t surprise him that Mungo had done this, but the black cat?
The black cat.
That cat seemed to be getting along famously with Mungo. They were like conspirators.
Frowning, he pulled up in front of his building, got out and locked the car, and took the steps two at a time. He didn’t feel up to a conversation with Mrs. Wassermann tonight and hoped she wasn’t looking for him through the window of her basement flat.
He watched the moon through the window of his flat and thought about it.
The black cat wasn’t Schrödinger.
Schrödinger and Mungo didn’t get along, according to Harry, and that black cat and Mungo were getting along so well, they seemed to be on the same wavelength.
That cat wasn’t Harry’s cat.
All right, so the cat was a stray. Ridiculous. Harry Johnson taking in a stray cat? And pigs might fly.
Jury knew where he was going with this. Harry had been in Chesham; Harry had been in the Black Cat. And Harry would steal a blind beggar blinder, if it served his purpose.
What was his purpose? What in the world would Harry want with Dora’s cat?
His first impulse was to drive to Belgravia and make Harry turn over the cat. How could he-or why would he refuse to-let the cat go if it wasn’t his cat?
In the middle of this thought there was a knock. He said, “Come in,” and Carole-anne appeared in his doorway like a vision, red gold hair glowing as if the moon hung behind her. The light actually came from the wall sconce in the hallway. It was hard enough dealing with Carole-anne when the light was off, much less on.
“Well, come on. We’ve a date, remember?”
Jury did not, and his expression showed it.
She sighed deeply, still in the lit-up doorway. She checked the small circlet of a watch on her wrist. “It’s nearly gone ten. It’s not very flattering you forgot.”
“I agree. If I had forgotten. But I didn’t forget. We don’t have a date.”
“Yes, we do. Down to the Mucky Duck.”
“I didn’t forget we had a date to go to the Mucky Duck, either.” He bit back a smile. “You’ve stooped to this, have you? Manufacturing dates. And get out of the doorway, will you? The glow hurts my eyes.” He shaded them.
Frowning, she moved into the room.
The view from there was pretty good, too. A sea green or sea blue dress, depending on the way she moved. A mouth of pearly coral lipstick that seemed to have been kissed by that same sea. Long, very thin silver earrings, which darted with shivery little colors as the light hit them.
“Making it up, honestly.” She sank down on his sofa and drew a little mirror from her purse, looked in it, saw nothing apparently, snapped it shut, and said, “Friend of yours called.” She pointed at Jury’s phone as if the friend were trapped inside.
“And…?”
“What?”
“Who was the friend?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” She had taken a nail file from her bag and sat filing away.
“Actually, yes. As you were the one who took the message.”
“Oh. Someone named… Fiona?… No… Felicia?…”
“Phyllis?”
“Could’ve been. You ready?” File back in purse, she was up and dusting off a self that needed no dusting.
“Did Phyllis want me to call her?” Of all the forensic pathologists, medical examiners, or coroners in the British Isles, Dr. Phyllis Nancy was the one Jury would always choose. She was the most able, the most accommodating, the most dependable. If Phyllis said she would have the results of an autopsy back to him at a certain time, it was always there, spot-on. Greenwich could have set the clock by her.
Jury had unhooked his jacket from a chair and was shoving his arms into it, the Mucky Duck clearly his destination one way or the other.
“Not really.”
He collected his keys. “Not really, but then what aspect of unreality was she interested in?”
“Just something about dinner. Or lunch.” Carole-anne yawned. It was all the same to her. “Maybe you were supposed to have a meal with her? Or not. Anyway, she was just reminding you of whatever it is. I couldn’t make it out.”
They were on their way downstairs now, Carole-anne wearing, he was almost certain, her party pair of Manolo Blahniks. This heel wasn’t chunky, as was the heel on the pair in Chris Cummins’s collection.
“She sounded,” added Carole-anne in her assessment of Phyllis’s call, “just as flighty as you do.”
The Mucky Duck always lived up to its name (though not the “duck” part), sodden with beer and smoke.
Every man she passed eyeballed Carole-anne, probably hoping Jury was her father. She sat down at a table and asked for a pint of Bass.
“Half-pint is more ladylike,” he said, secretly applauding her refusal to participate in the gender issue.
“Half-pint’ll get dumped over your head, too.”
“You know, you really are crabby tonight,” said Jury.
“You’d be too if you had to spend most of it reminding someone they had a date with you.” The little mirror came out again and she was inspecting her face for forgotten flaws.
Might as well inspect Rossetti’s Beatrice, which she greatly resembled. The compact shut. “You still here?”
“I don’t want to forget what you look like while I’m gone.”
Her eyebrows squiggled. She had a lively frown.
As he left the table, Jury could have sworn six men got up to move on it. When he quickly turned, he could also have sworn they all sat back down again.
Probably just his imagination. But he kept his eye on her off and on while he waited for the barman to take the order.
He returned and set the two pints on the table and then sat himself down.
He folded his arms and leaned toward her. “Now that we’re on our date, what shall we talk about?”
Carole-anne took a ladylike sip of her beer and said, “Who’s Phyllis?”
36
Wiggins had been here before; he already knew his way around the kitchen and seemed to have made himself invaluable to Myra Brewer. Wiggins had the touch: that’s what Jury had been trying to tell him.
It was the next morning, and they were visiting Myra Brewer.
“We’re out of biscuits,” called Wiggins.
We. Jury loved it.
“Yes, but there’s Choc-o-lots fresh. The ones with marshmallow.”
“Found them.”
Then there was the sound of water running, a kettle being filled. This attention to tea in the midst of death didn’t bother Jury, nor did it make Myra Brewer less sympathetic. For it was clear she missed Kate Banks greatly and was very much affected by her death and the manner of it.
So tea, especially with Wiggins on the job, was an antidote as good as any Jury could ever muster. He thought sometimes it was the rituals that got us through.
Jury sat in a heather gray, rough-textured chair in the small flat in St. Bride Street, barely two blocks from Mr. Banerjee’s corner store. Myra Brewer, Kate Banks’s godmother, lived on the second floor and had trouble, she’d said, with stairs, stairs shamefully inadequate, for the handrail to the first flight had been broken and never mended. She was in her eighties and not “spry,” as she’d told Jury, an understatement if ever he’d heard one.