Jerusalem Inn (10 page)

Jury said, “What you need is a little myrrh.”

Any unfamiliar medication would rivet Wiggins's attention. “Myrrh? I always thought that was some perfume-y thing. You know how allergic I am to perfume.” His tone was reproachful.

Jury knew. Sergeant Wiggins was allergic to just about everything except plaice and chips. “It's used in medicine, too, I think. Or used to be. Good for catarrh. And flu.” Jury hadn't the least idea what it was good for, but it seemed to brighten Wiggins a bit, to think the Wise Men had had the sense to bring along something medicinal. Jury felt Wiggins's
interest in the manger scene was now renewed as he got closer to the window, a little sad perhaps that in there might be some cure, some amulet, some anodyne for whatever ailed him.

“Do you believe all that, sir?” asked Wiggins.

He could have been talking about myrrh or the whole Christian myth. Jury thought of Father Rourke, who spent his life answering questions like that. And he wondered if the window dresser with his magically suspended halos had displayed a certain intuitive sadness by placing the holiday party scene next to the Wise Men, as if it were all one big glitter palace.

When Jury didn't answer, Wiggins added, “It makes you wonder, doesn't it?”

Jury was silent. He felt the loss of something irreplacable, as if a thief had come out of the night, velvet-gloved and softly shod, and taken whatever it was away without Jury's ever having known, and slipped through the square, with its crisscrossed strings of tiny lights.

T
HE
pretty maid who answered the door in Eaton Place was wearing a neat, bottle-green uniform, white-cuffed and polished as the brass knocker. But her eyes were red-rimmed, her face pale, her expression woebegone. The presentation of Jury's card did nothing to help her. Yes, she had heard from the police in Northumbria. Behind them the hallway was wrapped in shadows, its gloom broken only by the dull light from the etched glass of a hanging fixture.

Her name, she said, was Maureen Littleton, and she was housekeeper here. Jury was surprised, given her youth. He apologized for the lateness of the hour and the circumstances that had brought them. It might have been better to assume a manner less sympathetic. Certainly Wiggins's getting out his own handkerchief was no help, bringing the housekeeper dangerously near to tears. Jury stemmed a fresh onslaught by requesting a cup of tea.

“Sergeant Wiggins seems to be coming down with something, and I wouldn't mind a cup myself. Perhaps we could just talk in the kitchen?”

Pressed to perform this routine task, she regained her control. The familiar and warm surroundings of the kitchen downstairs were a help, too.

It was her own parlor in which they sat and Jury had let her go about her tea ceremony without question or comment except for the usual dull chat about the weather and how the kiddies would have the best Christmas gift of all: snow.

The tea steamed as they sat in chairs where a coal fire glowed. They sat at a round table and she poured out tea with the ritual silence that she apparently felt it deserved. In the brighter light, Jury saw she was older than he had at first thought, but some of that might have been the result of the old-fashioned hairdo — dark brown hair rolled up all around like a Gibson girl. No makeup and, of course, the severely cut uniform. It could well have been her version of mourning-dress.

“How long have you been with Miss Minton?”

“Well, it's the Parmengers I've been with. Nearly nineteen years. Helen — Miss Minton — was Mr. Parmenger's charge. I was only a girl. I started out as kitchen maid. It was when Mr. Edward Parmenger was alive. Mr. Frederick's his son. The painter. There were four of us servants then.” From her expression, it might have been another era. “It was when Miss Helen went away to school.”

Wiggins had been about to take out his notebook, but at Jury's brief headshake, put it back and took out a packet of cough drops instead.

“She went away to school. What about Mr. Frederick?”

“Oh, no, sir. He went to school in London.”

Maureen Littleton couldn't have been much older than Helen Minton herself. “She was your employer's ward, I understand.”

Maureen nodded, the steam from her tea mug — Jury and Wiggins had been given proper cups — rising like river-mist, behind which Jury saw the face lock up in sadness again.

“Did you know Miss Minton's parents?”

“Her mother, I did. Not her father, though.”

“Did her uncle seem — fond of her?” Jury watched her look down into her cup, still the loyal servant years after the elder Parmenger's death. Maureen was apparently not a gossip in any circumstances, least of all in these.

“He was a kind of — straitlaced person —”

Read for that, thought Jury,
martinet,
or
termagent.

“ — and didn't show his feelings much, except —”

Jury cued her when she stopped. “ ‘Except'?”

There was a slight shrug of her shoulders as she poured out more tea into Sergeant Wiggins's proffered cup. “Well, he
would
get a bit angry now and then.”

Terrible temper, in other words. But he couldn't get Maureen to go into any details. “Now, Miss Helen. I don't think I ever heard a cross word from her to any of the servants. Not when she was young, and not when she was —” Once again, she had to look away.

“It seems a little strange that the house would be left to Helen Minton rather than his own son.”

Maureen did not find it so. “You see, Mr. Frederick —” She waved her hand as if Mr. Frederick's status, both professional and financial, explained itself. “He has his own place. Smallish, it is. In St. Johns's Wood. Near Keats's house. The poet,” she explained to Jury, helpfully. “It's got good light, he's always saying. He comes here to dine with Miss Helen. And I've heard him talk about — skylights, or something. He's a grand painter, but I don't know much about that sort of thing.”

Maureen was clearly in awe of Mr. Frederick and those other luminaries whose names broke into print for whatever reason. Art, rock groups, movie stars. “They were on good terms, then?”

She seemed simply nonplussed that Jury should think they'd be on anything else. “It'll kill him,” she said simply.

That did surprise Jury. It did not seem to have occurred to Helen Minton herself that her existence, or lack of it, would go far toward killing anybody. “Go on,” he said.

“With what?”

Maureen was nothing if not literal. He smiled at her. It was a smile that had often turned a woman's literal mind into more imaginative channels. And Maureen was as softhearted as the featherweight sponge cake she had served with the tea. Wiggins was working on his second slice.

“Apparently, you think Frederick Parmenger is — was — very fond of his cousin.”

“I do, yes.” She poured herself more tea, and Jury too, and rocked and reminisced. From the time Helen had come there they'd been close as two peas in a pod. Find one, find the other. “Until she went off to school, I mean. He was teaching her to paint, or trying to. She never had the knack, much. But him, he was a genius, even from when he was small. I don't mean I was here then. That's what Mrs. Petit — she was cook — told me. ‘He's a genius.' ”

Whether Maureen or Mrs. Petit understood what it meant didn't seem to matter; the word was enough; it hung, even now, in the air like the smell of good cooking.

“There's lots of pictures of his upstairs. You should see them.”

“I'd like to see the house, if it's not too much trouble.”

Nothing, her look said, would be too much trouble for him. Sitting there, with Jury talking and Wiggins eating his cake, Maureen had relaxed considerably. Nor had it seemed to occur to her as odd that a Superintendent from New Scotland Yard would be inquiring into the death of her mistress. To Maureen, sudden death meant police.

When Jury touched again on the elder Parmenger her face locked up again.

Jury thought he knew the key to that particular door. “You see, Maureen, I knew Helen Minton.”

S
HE
sat up straight. Jury was no longer the policeman in some routine investigation, but like some sailor who'd come from the sea with the remarkable tale that in a foreign port, he'd come upon her long-lost relative. “It was a chance meeting. I didn't know her all that well.”

“Aye, she was that nice, she was.” She fixed Jury with worried eyes. “Why are you asking questions, though?” It had apparently only now occurred to her that a Scotland Yard Superintendent wouldn't be showing up on the doorstep because a woman had died a natural death.

Jury's answer was indirect. “I wanted to know about her relations with her family — her uncle, her cousin. Or anyone who might possibly have had a grudge against her.” This time when Wiggins discreetly produced his notebook, Jury didn't sign him to put it back.

“ ‘Grudge'?” Maureen looked from one to the other, saw they were serious, gave a strained sort of laugh. “It almost sounds like you think she was —” She couldn't get the word out.

Jury did it for her. “Murdered? There's always that possibility, yes.”

“That's daft.” Her little laugh was far less certain than her words. “There was no one that'd wish Helen any harm.” Friendship outweighed formality in her forgetting the “Miss.” “She didn't have enemies; she'd hardly any friends, even. I mean, she didn't go out much, nor have people in.”

“She had her cousin.”

“Mr. Frederick? That's different.”

“Do you know where he is? We haven't been able to turn him up. The Northumbria police would like to talk to him.”

She shook her head. “He's often away. He goes to France
and places like that.” Maureen did not appear to approve of such places.

“When Helen was living here — after her parents died, she got along with Edward Parmenger, did she?”

Maureen didn't answer; she was watching Wiggins scratch away with his pen and quite clearly resented it. Her gaze made Wiggins look up and he laid his notebook aside. Then he said, “Did you make the cake, miss? It's the best I ever ate. I'm careful what I eat, especially sweets.”

Hiding a smile, Jury looked away. As a loyal, plodding, and energetic note-taker, Wiggins was invaluable. Lately, he'd been polishing up his charm.

This time it seemed to work, for Maureen was quite happy to replenish his plate, and with his mouth full, Wiggins took up where Jury had left off: “This Mr. Edward Parmenger — I sort of got the idea he wasn't too fond of the girl. What do you think about that?”

Sergeants didn't bother her as much as superintendents, apparently — at least not those who were having their third helping of her cake — and she answered: “Like I said, he seemed a bit cold towards her. But then he was a hard man, to tell the truth.”

“Like that with everybody, you mean?” asked Wiggins, pressing the tongs of his fork down on cake crumbs.

“No. No, not exactly.”

“Well, then, like what, miss?”

“He didn't like her. Mrs. Petit was always saying how he didn't.”

“That's the cook, is it? Or was?”

“Yes. Mrs. Petit — she's dead now — felt sorry for Miss Helen.”

Jury smoked and stared at the fire and waited for Wiggins to ask the question,
Then why did Parmenger take her in?

“Could I have another cup of tea, do you think?” The sergeant's
desire to charm answers out of witnesses had its limits.

As Maureen poured the last of the pot, Jury asked, “How old was she? Where was this school?”

“In Devon. It was very expensive.” If Edward Parmenger had been a bit tight-fisted with his love, he wasn't with his money, her tone suggested. “About fifteen, I guess. She was there about a year, maybe two. Then Mr. Edward took her out.”

“Why?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. I was only kitchen help then. And though Mrs. Petit talked about things, I never did hear. . . . Well, I never thought it was odd, nor anything.”

Yes, you did,
thought Jury. “You didn't sense some sort of — scandal, maybe?”

“No, sir, I did not!”

Jury had to smile. She was so much younger than the old family retainer — the Mrs. Petit sort, or Melrose Plant's butler, Ruthven. Maureen, he thought, should be walking out, as they used to say, with some young man. She even had
him
thinking in Victorian terms. From the way Wiggins was looking at her, Jury was inclined to think she might make him forget his cornucopia of medicants.

“I'm sure if anything — to put it bluntly, Maureen, if your mistress was murdered, you'd surely want the person brought to justice.” He was using Victorian terms himself.

Her back grew ramrod straight. “It's certain I would. But I can't —”

Jury waited, but Maureen was silent. “It sounds as if Edward Parmenger took Helen in without wanting to. Did he feel some obligation?”

“Well, I should
hope
that if my mum were to die —” The girl crossed herself. “ — someone would take me in. I don't, now, have many relations left. An old auntie in County Clare.” She blushed. The Maureens of this world stuck to
business and didn't get off onto their own problems. She cleared her throat and went on in a softer voice. “I only mean that, yes, it was a sort of obligation.” She turned sad eyes on Jury. “Helen's da, he killed himself, they said. And her mum died later, I guess of a broken heart.”

And the Maureens would also be inclined to romanticize. “So Edward Parmenger took her in, yet didn't seem to like doing it?” Jury leaned over the table, putting his hand on her arm. “Look, Maureen, I know you must feel loyal to the family. But what I'm thinking is that Edward Parmenger farmed out Helen Minton — sent her to that expensive school — because he didn't want her around his own son. They were very close and they were cousins. And she was a lovely girl. Then Helen's father was not a person of very strong character . . . ” He waited, not precisely clamping his hand on her arm, but not easing up on it either. Wiggins was dividing his time between his note-taking and giving Jury uncharacteristic dark looks.