“You think Rose Moss was someone she knew?”
“Well, it must’ve been a school chum, maybe. Mariah wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine, I shouldn’t think. But you’ve talked to the girl; what did this Moss girl say? Did she recognize Mariah?”
“She knew her by Stacy Storm, you see. And when I told her the real name, she didn’t say she knew your niece.”
Edna Cox leaned her head on her hand, fisted round a handkerchief. A tear tracked slowly down her face. “My Mariah making up such a name. It’s a sad name, isn’t it? It’s so false. It’s so falsely like a film star, isn’t it? My Mariah.”
Understandable that she’d settled on the name instead of the whole charade. Denial, he supposed, our last refuge. “Why do you think Mariah went to such trouble to appear, well, plain, when she was clearly so striking?”
Or was the striking one, the escort, the real Mariah?
Was either identity real? Neither?
Edna Cox shook her head. “She was prettier as a child; she seemed to grow into plainness somehow. Even then, she was fairly quiet and uncomplaining, not a lot of energy. This other self of hers-I don’t know where that came from.”
“You’d have had no reason to think it, but is it possible she was suffering a mental illness, what’s thought of as a personality dissociation? You know-where the sick person splits into one or more other selves?”
The aunt frowned. “Oh, no. At least there’s no history at all of that kind of thing in the family.”
Jury nodded. If it were some sort of personality split, what would it mean to this case? It was certainly not one of Mariah’s selves that had killed the other two women. Mariah had been the first one to die.
Jury rose, thanked Edna Cox, and offered to do for her anything he could, which, they both knew, was nothing. Still, the offer. “I’ll be going back to London. You have my card? You know where to reach me. Please do, if you need me.”
She took some comfort in this and said good-bye.
45
Dr. Phyllis Nancy peeled off the skin-thin green gloves and dropped them into the gutter of the table where Deirdre Small lay, shrunken in death, hollowed out, deflated.
“I wanted another look at the bullet wounds, the trajectory of the bullet. Your suspect, the client she was meeting-if he is a suspect…” Phyllis looked at her notes.
Jury nodded. “Nicholas Maze. DI Jenkins doesn’t think he did it.”
“Then Jenkins is probably right. Maze, I believe, is very tall; the victim was quite short. The trajectory would have been different-”
“Even at close range?”
She nodded. “It would still make a difference.”
Jury looked at the face of Deirdre Small, wiped clean of all expression, and knew the expressions that had once played over it: it would have been a game face, a face put on to meet the demands of her world. Because of her background, her job, her small structure, she must have conceded a lot. More, he bet, than the intelligent and beautiful Kate Banks or the ambiguous Mariah Cox.
Three of you, he thought. Dead for no reason, died for nothing, killed because you were an inconvenience in some way, murdered because of someone’s greed, or rage, or fear, or guilt. How do you connect? How were you alike?
He looked up, nodded back to the body of Deirdre Small. “What did she tell you, Phyllis?”
“Not nearly as much,” said Dr. Nancy with a little smile, “as she told you. Dinner?”
He nodded. She took off her apron, went to collect her things, and they left the morgue.
“The neurologists,” said Phyllis, “aren’t very hopeful. But I expect that comes as no surprise.”
Jury studied his crispy fish, something Wiggins liked to order, but not he. It looked like a puzzle.
Phyllis was studying him. Did he himself look like a puzzle? He was stalling for a reply to the neurologists’ prognoses. He could think of nothing.
“You’re at a loss.” She tilted her head. “There was never anything you could do, Richard. There’s nothing now.”
He shook his head. “I know. It’s not so much what I could do as what I could feel. Should feel.” He looked up from his fish, then back again. He wasn’t very hungry.
“Ambivalence is-”
“It’s more than that. Or less than.” Jury leaned back and took in the room, crowded as always. Here the crowding didn’t bother him; the customers, perfect strangers, seemed familiar. In the familiar din and chatter, there was privacy. He caught sight of Danny Wu, bending over a table, being solicitous of the couple there. Danny could work a room as well as any politician. He smiled. “This place is comforting.”
“It is, yes. It’s one of those home places, a place that’s a stand-in for home, whatever that might mean. For me, there’s a chemist’s near my flat. It’s a little sort of run-down place, but I like to go in it. There’s even an armchair. I sit in it and read labels.”
“Phyllis-” He laughed, more delighted than surprised. This woman was so accomplished. Also beautiful, also rich. The source of her money was a mystery to him.
“For some people it’s a certain kind of shop, for some, book-stores-it doesn’t have to be a place, anyway-what we think of as home. For an artist it might be paint; for a writer, words.” She sighed and cut off a bite of fish.
“I was at the hospital this morning,” she continued. “One of her doctors is a good friend and he told me. It’s still possible she’ll come out of it, Richard. This makes it difficult to decide-well, Lu’s uncle was there.”
Jury waited.
“He’s the closest relation she has or, at least, according to him.”
“You saw him?”
She nodded. “Yes, he was there with Dr. McEvoy. My friend.”
“Lu told me a little about him, the uncle. She was very fond of him. Other than that, she never talked about her life.” He picked up the chopsticks, moved them awkwardly. “Now, what’s left of it?”
“I’m really sorry, Richard.”
She was, too.
It wasn’t, thought Jury, one of Phyllis’s “home places,” the hospital, but he thought the nursing staff made an effort to keep it from being absolutely foreign.
A grandmotherly looking nurse, small and rotund, whose uniform badge gave her name as Mae Whittey, came round from behind the nurses’ station to tell him Ms. Aguilar had been moved earlier that day and that she would take him to her room. He did not want to know to what section, for he was afraid of the answer. It might be the Hopeless Ward.
Nurse Mae Whittey’s crepe-soled shoes made gasping little sucks at the floor as she walked. She told him that one of the rooms they passed was being “refurbished,” hence the thick plastic across the doorless doorway. The heavy plastic put Jury in mind of one of those temporary tents thrown up at an archaeological dig.
“Mind those tools,” she said, indicating a bucket and equipment left lying against the wall. Her role seemed less nurse and more guide through an excavation, seeing to it that Jury didn’t put a foot wrong.
Their steps echoed in the soundless corridor. He didn’t understand the silence, given many of the doors to the rooms were halfway open.
“Here you are,” she said, but it was apparently “Here we are,” for she went in with him.
And as if she were a member of their tiny family, she stood beside him to look down at the still form of Lu Aguilar, as composed as an effigy in a church. Yet Nurse Whittey’s presence was oddly unobtrusive. Jury had to admit to himself he was even grateful for it. He remembered the heavy weight of aloneness he had felt two months ago, back in March, when his cousin Sarah had died up in Newcastle. He had walked around London for several hours, unable to settle on a park bench or a coffee bar or in his thoughts. There was an orphaned quality to loneliness.