The Blue Last (37 page)

“Where to, sir?” Wiggins had started the car.

“The village. I'd like a few words with the trustworthy grocer and the florists.” After a few moments of driving, Jury said, “Rather remarkable you knowing that poem. Written by—” Jury snapped his fingers “—one of those poets with three names.”

“Sir? Walter Savage Landor.”

“Ah. Anyway, it's not the best known poem. How do you come to know it?”

“Jenny was my sister's name.”

Again, he surprised Jury. “But I didn't know you had two sisters. I've heard you speak of only one, the one in Manchester.”

“I don't have the other anymore. She died.”

Never had an announcement of death been uttered with such restraint. “I'm sorry, Wiggins, really.” He felt the inadequacy of such a statement. “Awhile back, was this?”

“Twenty-two years. This Christmas.”

Jury felt doubly inadequate. “She died on Christmas Day?”

“Yes, sir. We were all in the parlor, around the tree, opening our presents, when Jenny said she felt sick and went upstairs to lie down. Mum went up with her and then Mum came down, saying she had a high temperature. You can imagine how eager a doctor would be to come out on Christmas Day. One did, though. It was meningitis and she died at midnight.”

“My God, Wiggins. How awful. Was she younger than you?”

Wiggins nodded. He said nothing else.

“
T
hat's the shop, right up there.”

When they pulled up, Mr. Smith was weighing potatoes for a customer, a tall woman with shrapnel eyes which she kept trained on the scales. Jury wondered if any shopkeeper had ever got away with giving her bad weight. The grocer spun the brown sack around to close it and exchanged the potatoes for coin. The woman took herself off, casting suspicious glances at Jury and Wiggins.

“Mr. Smith?” Jury took out his identification.

“Oh, my! Scotland Yard. My, my.” He wasn't displeased. “This must be about Mr. Croft. I had City police with me just yesterday. My. Well, just who owns this case, anyway, you might ask.”

“Technically, the City police. That's where the victim lived—and died. But there was a lot of spillover—” Jury left the explanation hanging. “Could we have a word with you, Mr. Smith?”

“Of course, of course. I'll just have my girl down to keep an eye on the place. Come along.”

The three of them went inside where the grocer opened a door at the bottom of some steps and yelled upward for “Pru” to come on down. “Make it snappy now, girl!”

Pru, a stout, sullen girl in carpet slippers, could no more make it snappy than fly to the moon.
Slap slap
the slippers sounded on the stair. When Pru finally emerged from the staircase and saw Jury, she lightened up a bit. One hand went to her hair and the other to the bottom of her rust-colored jumper, arranging both more satisfactorily.

“ 'Lo” was all she said, tongue wetting her lips, but it was clear she wanted to speak volumes of clever repartee. Her eyes slid off Wiggins like water over stone and wended their way back to Jury.

Her father told her, “You take care of customers here while I talk to these detectives.”

Pru's skin pinked up beneath a plump face full of freckles. “Wha's it about, then? You done somethin' you oughtn't, Dad?” Even her smile was pudgy.

“Never you mind.”

Like a manservant escorting his visitors to an audience with royalty, Mr. Smith extended his arm and briefly bowed. “This way, gentlemen, back to my office.”

The office consisted of a desk and four chairs, old black leatherette with aluminum arms and legs. There was a strong smell of cabbage and damp wood.

Mr. Smith pulled two chairs around. Not until he himself was seated behind his desk did he ask, “Now, gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

“I don't want to waste your time (
meaning mine,
Jury thought), so I'll tell you what I understand. You continued to deliver groceries to Simon Croft even after he took up residence across the river. That's quite a lot of trouble to go to for a pound of potatoes.”

Even as Jury spoke, Mr. Smith was shutting his eyes against the thickheadedness of Scotland Yard. With a superior little smile playing about his lips, he said, “That's how much you know, Superintendent, as to the ways of Mr. Croft—or any of the clans, the Crofts and the Tynedales.”

“Well, then, enlighten me.”

Mr. Smith was glad to do so. He sat forward. “Mr. Simon Croft was one of the people who hate changing anything at all. Even where he gets his groceries. Why, he even laughed about it. ‘You'd think I'd grow up, wouldn't you, Mr. Smith?' See, he even had the Tynedale Lodge cook come twice a week and do for him. Mrs. MacLeish, she is. She'd cook up several days' dinners at once. He was that attached to the Lodge.”

“Then why did he move?” asked Wiggins, who had his notebook out and was frowning to beat the band. “Why did he leave Tynedale Lodge?”

“He wanted to be nearer the City. That's what he told Mrs. MacLeish. It's where he worked.”

Not satisfied with this reason, Wiggins wrote it down, nonetheless.

Jury asked, “How often did you make these deliveries, Mr. Smith?”

“Once a week, dependable as clockwork. And other times if he needed more for dinner guests or drink parties, though I'm sure there weren't many of those. And he'd get Partridges to cater for him, too.”

“Mrs. MacLeish must have talked about him to you.”

“Mrs. Mac's never been one to gossip about her employers, and I admire that.”

“So do I,” said Jury, smiling wryly, “but it's not much help to us now. Both of you must have remarked on Mr. Croft's life—as they say—‘style.' ” He did not want to put ideas in the grocer's mind, nor words in his mouth.

Mr. Smith's chin was resting in his hand, his elbow on the desk. Narrowly, he regarded Jury, as if gauging his trustworthiness. “I recall being there in the kitchen with Mrs. Mac when she had to go to the front door and tell that Maisie Tynedale that Mr. Croft couldn't see her as he wasn't feeling well, but it wasn't so, for he was in his library working away.”

Mr. Smith set about recalling. “It must've been back the end of October—no, hold on a minute, beginning of November, that's it, for I recall talking about Guy Fawkes and fireworks and wondering if we'd see them along the river there. Around the time that somebody was shootin' away up at the Lodge. Well, it was all over the manor, wasn't it? Nasty, these kids are today, some of 'em. Everyone was talkin' about it, the Daffs was all over it.”

“Daffs?”

“The toy boys, the daffodils, the two that own that flower shop across the street. You talked with them?”

“Briefly, yes.”

“Well, Mr. Croft got his flowers from them to the day he died—pardon that, it's just the expression. Very particular he was about his flowers.”

“Mr. Peake and Mr. Rice?”

“Aye, that's them. Now they might be able to tell you somethin' I don't know.” From his expression it was fairly clear Mr. Smith didn't think this even remotely possible. Then he stretched back in his chair and ran his hands over his bald pate in quick succession. “As I recall now the Daffs made a delivery just before the man was murdered.” He smiled and waited for the next question.

“You've been most helpful, Mr. Smith.” Jury rose and Wiggins stowed his notebook in his inside coat pocket and rose also.

Mr. Smith, however, remained seated, apparently prepared to stop there and answer questions through eternity.

“Mr. Smith?” Jury gently brought him back to his greengrocer business.

“Huh? Oh, sorry. Yes, I'll just see you out.”

Pru seemed as reluctant to see them go as did her father.

 

 

 

Outside, Wiggins said, “A person might be suspicious of someone being that willing to answer questions.”

“Why so cynical?” asked Jury, intent on jaywalking and looking for an opening between a removal van barreling down the road and two Volvos coming from different directions. “There are still a few people who find this an opportunity for a good gossip and couldn't care less if you're police or the Queen Mother. Come on—” They made a dive toward the opposite pavement.

The shop DELPHINIUM was as colorful outside as in. The sign that stretched along one side of the building was decorated with flowers, mushrooms and little green people Jury took for wood sprites or aliens.

Inside, the smell was simply heavenly, the mingled scents of lavender, jasmine and roses. Odysseus could not have fared better among the lotus eaters. Jugs and tall aluminum flower holders sat on the floor and they had to negotiate down an aisle lined with camellia plants to reach the back of the shop. Tommy Peake and Basil Rice were well-dressed men who could have been nearly any age at all. They were arranging roses and oriental lilies in what looked like a cut-glass crystal vase and another of plain crystal, clear but for a ribbon of amethyst that wound vinelike around it.

“Mr. Peake, Mr. Rice, you may remember I stopped in a couple of days ago?” Jury introduced Sergeant Wiggins. One florist tucked a pale strand of hair behind his ear and the other tried to find seating for the two detectives. Both were rather thrilled. Jury told them not to bother, that they wouldn't mind standing at all, that they would probably swoon anyway from the delicious scents in here.

“I wanted to talk to you about Simon Croft.”

Basil slapped his hand to his forehead.

Jury pegged him as the more histrionic of the two. “You made fairly regular deliveries to Mr. Croft in the City.”

“We can guess,” said Peake, “who told you
that.
That old gossip, Smith—” He nodded toward the greengrocer's shop.

Basil showed more sympathy for the victim. “That poor, poor man. What a dreadful thing to have happen.”

Tommy Peake said, astutely, “But you're from New Scotland Yard. Why would you be investigating this?”

“The City police have jurisdiction, of course. My part in this is a bit complicated.”

Basil asked if he might be allowed to continue arranging flowers as “Miss Bosley wants this
tout de suite,
and you know what she's like!”

Jury smiled and said he didn't, really. It occurred to him that Basil lived in a world where everybody knew everybody else. Basil flipped his hand and waved away police ignorance as if the Bosleys had often roamed the corridors of Scotland Yard and meeting up with Miss Bosley was merely a matter of time.

“What's interesting is Mr. Croft continued to use your services even though there are plenty of florists on the other side of the river. He lived not far from Covent Garden.”

“We
are
quite good at this business,” said Basil.

Tommy shook his head. “Oh, we're good, but that isn't the reason. Simon was one of those people who hate change.”

Sententiously, Wiggins said, “But we all have to resign ourselves to it, don't we?”

Tommy looked at Wiggins. “You're talking about age and infirmity. Death. Yes, but there are things you can control. Such as where you get your bloody bouquets.” His smile, Jury thought, shimmered.

“Did Simon Croft have a standing order with you?”

Tommy nodded. “There were also times he wanted something particular. Otherwise, his instruction was to make up whatever we thought looked good and just take it along. But there were times he just hankered for a particular flower, you know?”

Jury could not remember the last time he'd even seen a bouquet, much less hankered for one. “When was the last time you made a delivery?”

Tommy pursed his lips and remembered. “That was just the week before he was shot.” He shivered slightly. “Got as far as the front door with 'em. That cook—the one who works at the Lodge and, I guess, went to Simon's house, too—she's the one took the flowers in.”

He seemed disgruntled; they both did. “Ordinarily he had you in?”

“Well, of course!” said Basil. “Usually made a real
fuss
over them. Right, Tommy?”

Wiggins said, “So you knew Simon Croft quite well?”

Basil backpedaled “Not all that well, no.”

“You were on a first-name basis with him?”

“Oh, we're on a first-name basis with
everybody.
”

“Not with us, you aren't,” said Wiggins. “Sir?”

Jury hid a smile. “I think that'll be all, for now.”

As they started toward the door, Jury said, “You're on a roll, Wiggins.” He stopped and turned. “Do you deliver to Islington, Mr. Peake?”

“We can do.”

Retracing his steps, Jury walked back to the counter. He looked at the cut glass, at the crystal with its ribbon of amethyst. “I'm afraid my policeman's moiety doesn't run to this.” He tapped the crystal vase.

“These—? Oh, good lord, Superintendent, don't think we furnish vases like these. No, they belong to customers who bring them in each time for an arrangement. Particular, they are. What we usually do is furnish a glass vase and we can also do a very nice arrangement tied with twine. Or a box, of course. What sort of flowers have you in mind?”

Jury scratched his neck and looked at the cold behind the glass doors. “One is an elderly woman—”

“Lavender,” said Tommy and looked at Basil.

“And heather. And perhaps two of those roses—” He pointed to roses of an exquisite shade of lavender. “That'll do for her, trust me. Perfect.”