The Blue Last (35 page)

“Yes. You're the policeman.”

“That's right. Richard Jury.”

With some gravity she said, lifting up the doll, “His name's Richard, too. You can sit down if you want.”

“Thanks.” Jury sat down and picked up the doll from where she had lain it. He looked at it for some time.

“Does he look okay?” said Gemma. “I know his pants are way too big.”

She sounded anxious about the doll's transformation from supposed female to supposed male. “Oh, yes, he's fine. I was just thinking—”

Gemma's eyes, wide and dark, seemed to implore him not to think about the doll, or at least not too much.

“—thinking how nice it must be to be a doll.”

Her expression changed to simple curiosity. “Why?”

“Well, you can be pretty much anything you want to be.”

Curiosity changed to doubt. “No, he can't. Not if I don't want him to be.”

Jury made no comment. This apparently made her more anxious still and she edged closer to him. He said, “That's true, in a way, but remember: you don't know everything about him. Only some things.”

This giving the doll a life of its own didn't sit well with her. Her frown was deep as she lay her hand on the doll's chest, very near Jury's fingers.

“Remember how you thought this doll was a girl?”

Gemma rushed in to say, “He can be
either.
”

“Yes, but you didn't really know that then.”

Her mouth worked with possible answers to this charge, but she came up with nothing.

“All I'm saying is, you might want Richard here to have some sort of identification.” Jury took out his and showed her. “Like this.”

The thought seemed to fill her with wonder. “You mean Richard's a
policeman
?”

“Could be, but I'm only guessing. Plain clothes, of course. A detective, more likely.”

Full of this idea, especially since she'd already thought of it, Gemma studied Jury's ID. “How can he get one?”

“I expect I could fit him up with one from Scotland Yard.”

Gemma looked thoroughly bowled over by this. She took the doll Richard back and looked him over carefully to see if there might be any flaws in his detective persona.

“Of course,” Jury went on, “he might want to ask you questions.”

“Like what?” She looked sharply at Jury.

“I don't know.” He shrugged.

There was a period of silence while Gemma looked off in the distance, thinking. “I bet he wants to know about when I was in the greenhouse and somebody shot at me. They missed.”

“Yes, I remember you told me that. It must have been frightening.”

“It was. I'm still scared about it because that's not all!
”

There was a silence. Gemma studied the doll. Finally she whispered to Jury, “Isn't he going to ask me what else?”

“I think he did. You just didn't hear him.”

“Oh. Well, the rest is someone came in my bedroom and tried to smother me!”

There was another silence.

She said, “He's not a very good detective.”

“He hasn't been at it very long.”

“Well, he should ask me if I was asleep when it happened.”

Jury held the doll to his ear and nodded. “That's what he's asking.” Then Jury made a point of looking around at the lattice work, at the beech tree and at Melrose Plant, down at the other end with Angus Murphy, both of them dumping buckets of something onto the ground. “Richard has to keep his voice low because you don't know who might hear. Look down there.” Jury nodded in the direction of the two gardeners.

“That's only Ambrose. He's okay. He's the new gardener,” said Gemma, her voice low. “He's pretty nice but he argues a lot. His eyes are really green.”

Ambrose?
“Hmm. You're sure they're not just green contact lenses? He could be in disguise.”

Gemma's mouth crimped up like an old lady's at a particularly juicy piece of gossip. “I thought there was something funny about him when he wouldn't baptize Richard.”

Jury made a sound meant to dismiss the gardener's expertise. Then he said, “But about your being asleep—”

“It woke me up! Would it wake you up if somebody was choking you?”

“Fast.”

She dropped Richard (who Jury moved quickly enough to catch) and turned her hands so that she could encircle her neck. She stuck her tongue out and made choking noises.

“Terrible!” said Jury. “I wonder you could get the hands off you.”

Gemma missed a beat or two and said, “Oh, they just went away.”

“But then how about being smothered?”

Suddenly recalling this important detail, she said, “That's right, the hands came back and picked up a pillow and smothered me. I only just managed to bump the pillow off.”

“Thank God. You must be strong.”

Uninterested in her strength and the subject of smothering, she gave a shrug and said, “I guess.”

There came another silence which she broke finally by saying in a fluting voice, “Well? Well? Isn't Richard going to ask?”

Jury scratched his ear and looked at Richard (who looked supremely indifferent). He was thoughtful while Gemma started jumping as if she could hardly wait to tell the rest of her story. “You mean, what happened next?”

“Yes!” She took Richard from Jury's hands and looked at him gravely. “I was almost poisoned.”

“I remember that. And the cook very nearly quit.”

“Benny told me about the way this family in Italy used to poison each other. The Medicines. They'd keep poison in all sorts of places, like in a ring. And when the victim was about to drink, they'd click open the ring and dump the poison in. That's what happened.”

“To you?” When she nodded, Jury said, “The poison was in a ring someone was wearing?”

Emphatically, Gemma nodded.

“But you don't know who?”

This time she shook her head, just as emphatically, sending her hair swinging like leaves in the wind. She had finished and was now rearranging Richard's neckerchief.

“That's really some story.” Jury brought out his small notebook and the stub of a pencil he kept telling himself to throw away. “Here.”

She frowned. “What's that for?”

“For your statement. That's what it's called, a statement. What you do now is write down whatever happened. Didn't Richard tell you about this?”

Her mouth gaped.
“No!”

“Then he's very lax. Witnesses always have to write their stories down, make their statements.”

“But I've already
stated
!”

“Yes, to me. But it has to be written down, if that's what actually happened.”

Gemma looked horrified. “It'll take
days
to write it. Months! I don't write very good.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. Scotland Yard sees all sorts of writing.”

Gemma gave Richard a sharp rap against the lattice. “Nobody ever told me, not those police who came, they never told me.”

Jury sighed. “That's too bad; they should've taken your statement.”

She was clearly angry with Richard and gave him back to Jury. She stood there, arms folded, looking at the notebook Jury held, and the pencil. “You said, ‘whatever happened.' ”

“That's right. We'd hardly need a statement of what
didn't
happen.”

Gemma scratched her elbows. “Well, maybe some of it didn't. Some of it could've been—you know—like a bad dream. Like the choking part. It
did
wake me up, I mean I thought it did, but maybe I was dreaming it all and got mixed up.”

“Hmm.” Jury grew thoughtful again. “That's certainly possible.”

“And the smothering part, too. It was as if it'd happened. It felt real.”

“If it was a dream, well, of course, you wouldn't need to put it in a statement.”

With her hands on his knees for support, she jigged on one leg, then the other, kicking her feet back.

“What about the poison, then? Could you have dreamed that, too?”

She shook her head. Dark leaves swirled as she bounced from one foot to another. “I was . . . just . . . thinking about what Benny told me . . . so much . . . I must've . . . thought it . . . happened.”

“Well, yes, I can see that.”

She stopped, a sober look on her face. “But the shooting really did happen.”

“Yes, there's proof of that. You said you went to the greenhouse. Tell me, did Jenny Gessup ever go out there?”

“Sometimes she did, but she's gone.” Hence, scarcely worth the breath to talk about.

“Was Richard with you in the greenhouse?” Jury gave the doll a pat.

“Yes, except he wasn't Richard yet. He was—Ruth or Rebecca or Rachael or Rose or Rhonda . . .” She shrugged.

Richard's tenure on earth as a girl still gave Gemma trouble. Jury was glad the litany of names ended.

She said, “If it'd been Richard, then he could have caught whoever did it.”

“That's right. You turned the light on when you went in?”

Clasping Richard to her chest, she said, “I had to
see,
didn't I? I only turned one on, anyway.”

“What happened then?”

“I heard a kind of crack, then the window broke and glass scattered everywhere. Then it was like a mosquito
whrr'd
past me. I got down.”

“That was smart.”

The corners of her mouth stretched down, indicating exasperation at being questioned yet again. “I guess I have to write a statement about being shot at.”

Jury was looking off across the garden, where Melrose was dumping another bucket into the flowerbed. Mulch, maybe. “You know what? If you tell this to—what's your new gardener's name?”

“Ambrose.” Looking in the same direction, she squinted.

“Tell Ambrose and he can write it down. As soon as he's finished his garden chores, of course.”

Although this arrangement was preferable to writing herself, there were still reservations. “He'll just argue about every little thing.”

“He can't. He wasn't here, after all. He didn't witness it.”

“He'll still say I saw it the wrong way round.”

Jury didn't know what to make of this little conundrum. “I'll tell him just to write down what you say and not argue about it.”

Gemma murmured, “He won't pay any attention.”

 

 

 

“If you think I'm going to carry buckets until you sort all this, well—”

They were standing near the greenhouse. “You're doing the job so well I'd say you were a natural—
ow!
”

Melrose had just dropped a bucket of fertilizer on Jury's foot. “Oh, sorry about that.”

Jury rubbed at his ankle. “Sure. Now, what did Angus Murphy have to say about this Jenny Gessup?”

“Unreliable, useless, uninterested, or, as he put it, in a state of desuetude.”

“Funny word to be using.”

“Isn't it? He says she didn't have the strength for some of the jobs, such as carrying buckets for hours on end. This—” Melrose said of the bucket on the ground “—must be the dozenth today.”

“What's in it?”

“Who cares? Fertilizer, I expect.”

“Listen: I want you to write down the account of the shooting Gemma's going to tell you.”

“What?
What?
That would be one of the labors of Hercules, I suppose you know. And if she's told you already, why—”

“Because sometimes details turn up with repetition. You know that. She might mention something left out of what she told me.”

Melrose frowned. “What about the poisoning and the choking?”

“That didn't happen. I suspected that. The shooting clearly did. Being shot at gave her bad dreams, and the choking, smothering business was only that. A dream. The poisoning didn't happen either; it was the result of someone's talking about poisoning in general.”

“But that still leaves the question, why shoot her?”

“No, it doesn't, not if that was the only attempt made.”

“Sorry, I don't follow.”

“Gemma might not have been the target. People assumed she was because of these other two fictionalized attempts. If they hadn't occurred, police would have brought up the other possibility: it wasn't Gemma.”

“Then . . . who and why?”

“One of two things might have happened: it could have been a prearranged meeting in the greenhouse between the shooter and his or her target—just to get the person out of the house probably. Or the shooter saw someone in the greenhouse, thought the person was the target, took the opportunity and got a gun. An impulse. As I said, those are just possibilities. But it wasn't necessarily Gemma the shooter was after.”

“Good lord, you're not suggesting it was old Angus Murphy?”

“No. He's still around after several months. Had it been Murphy he'd most likely be dead by now. My guess is Jenny Gessup, who I'm going to see as soon as I can gather up Wiggins.”

Melrose bent, cursing, to pick up the bucket. “The antiques appraiser was chicken feed to this.”

“With that attitude, you'll never make first base at the Chelsea Flower Show.” Jury turned to leave. “And don't forget to take down that statement.”

Melrose called to Jury's swift departure, “All she'll do is argue.”