Two borders of black tulips in a carpet of silver-white dead nettle led to the door of the summerhouse. Jury looked behind him, back toward the main house. Little of that baroque villa could be seen — only the upper part, where Lady Summerston had been sitting on her balcony.
The Northants police had cordoned off the cottage and the surrounding garden with white tape and a constable had positioned himself in a chair at the door. Sergeant Burn, one of the uniformed branch, had an intimidating build and a granite face. He acknowledged Jury’s presence, but looked suspiciously at Hannah Lean.
“I’m sure your lab technicians have covered every inch of the place, Sergeant. I’d like to have a look.”
Burn nodded and resat himself by the door, unrolling a
Private Eye
magazine from his back pocket and picking up his mug of tea.
• • •
It was small, almost diminutive, like an architect’s model of a larger house. At the opposite end of the living room, which was furnished in country English, were french doors that faced the lake. Off to the left, through the angled opening of a door, Jury could just see the foot of a four-poster, large enough to take up most of what space there
was. The kitchen he imagined was the sort where two people would have been constantly bumping into one another. Sergeant Burn had apparently been making his afternoon tea.
On one side of the fireplace with its marble overmantel was a sofa, on the other, two matching lounge chairs, all of them covered in a faded, flowery chintz in a rather fussy design of peonies and nasturtiums crawling up a latticework of pale blue striping. To one side of the french windows sat a small table nearly overwhelmed by the four highbacked antique chairs of carved mahogany.
If two people enjoyed living out of each other’s pockets, it would be a pleasant arrangement — and with the right companion, the right woman (he thought), wonderfully cozy. From what he’d heard of Simon Lean, he doubted he went in much for coziness, and apparently hadn’t found the right woman. Jury looked at Hannah and wondered why. That combination of adolescent dreaminess and hard-mindedness was very fetching. What a word. He hadn’t used that one in years.
Here Simon Lean had come for five years, his eye forced to look on the splendor of the villa-like house in the midst of acres of fabulous, romantic gardens and pools, wondering, no doubt, when he would be up there as lord of the manor. It was more a place for overnight guests, or a place to isolate oneself. Or the perfect setting for a rendezvous, and his wife seemed to have been suggesting just that. The french doors opening onto the pier and the lake expanded the room and the view in an extraordinary way.
Hannah stood quite still, her eyes fixed on the corner by the french doors where it was clear the
secrétaire
had stood. The bloodstained carpet was still crushed with its weight. Beside the empty space were two piles of books. Jury hunkered down to have a look. They would have had to be removed to make space for the body. He looked up at her:
the empty square of carpet seemed to affect her suddenly more than any of their walk or talk had done and she shivered and hugged herself.
Jury said: “It looks like Burn has helped himself to tea. How about us?” She turned toward the kitchen, turned back, and smiled weakly. “Would you mind getting it?” Her look was helpless. “But you don’t know where things are —”
“I’m a detective, remember?”
It was the first truly spontaneous smile he’d seen, and it was radiant. It illuminated her face like the sun going down over the rim of the lake, turning it to a slick of fire.
The kettle stood on the cooker where the constable had left it, and Jury went about heating the water. Mugs were in the last cupboard he opened; Burn had left out the sugar and tea. When the water was ready he heated the pot, tossed it out, put in the tea. When he walked back into the sitting room, she was studying a sketch on the mantelpiece beside a small, double-framed photograph of her husband and of the two of them together.
Again, that nervous mannerism of pushing up her sweater sleeves. “I was beginning to feel, well, panicky. In just two minutes.” Her laugh was strained as she thanked him for the mug of tea.
He looked at her, said nothing for a moment, and then picked up the sketch. It was rough, the sort of preliminary thing an artist does for a portrait. “The painting at the top of the stairs?”
She nodded. “I don’t care for it.”
“Funny. I think it’s beautiful.”
“Then I doubt it looks much like me.” It was a flat statement; she was not the type to fish for compliments. “It’s too bizarre to be believed. Did someone know that fall-front desk was going to be removed to Trueblood’s Antiques? Why would someone . . . hide him in there?”
“The killer might have wanted to make things difficult for Mr. Trueblood.”
She seemed to be turning that thought over. “Do you really believe that?”
“It’s possible.”
Seated now on the sofa beside the fireplace, she had her back to him. He could not see her expression and went round to sit on the facing sofa. “Did you know the arrangements for the pickup?”
“Is that one of the questions you want to see if I’ll answer the same way twice?”
Jury said nothing.
Carefully, she put down the mug. “What did Eleanor say? Her memory’s none too good, you know.” She paused. “Yes, I knew the
secrétaire
was to be collected either today or tomorrow.”
Jury held his cup with both hands, not drinking from it, watching her intently. “You said your husband went to London —”
“He often did,” she said quickly.
“— sometime around nine, was it?” Her nod was puppet-like. “And did you see him off?”
The smile she gave him was as bitter as a smile could be. “ ‘See him off.’ What a pretty picture. The devoted wife, getting a kiss, waving from the doorway —”
“Oh, you needn’t embroider.” Jury’s smile wasn’t as chilly as hers. “I meant, simply, did you see him go? Out the door? Across to the stable-yard down the drive?”
“I saw him leave, yes. I was still sitting at the dinner table and he’d gone into the hall and collected his coat and gloves. Yes, he went out the door. As I was having my second coffee, I heard the car going down the drive. As I told you before.” The look in her eyes was steely.
“Where was Crick?”
That seemed to disconcert her. She looked about confusedly.
“I — well, he wasn’t serving me coffee, if that’s what you mean. He was upstairs with Eleanor. Serving
her
coffee.”
“That was usual?”
With a sigh, she sat back. “
Everything
that happens is ‘usual.’ Her dinner is taken up to her at eight-fifteen; her coffee at nine. They chat for a while; the routine never changes.” Abruptly, she rose, went to the mantelpiece, and opened the silver cigarette box. Empty.
Jury took out his own. “Here, have one of mine.” He got up and lit hers, then his own. “You don’t like her, do you? Lady Summerston?”
She closed her eyes, exhaled a long stream of smoke as if she’d been dying for a cigarette all this time, and said, “It’s the other way round: she doesn’t like
me
. Somehow I think she resents me being alive when my mother is dead.”
As she smoked her cigarette with quick little jabs, the tears ran down her face carelessly, as if they were standing in the rain. No sound came from her, no attempt to wipe them away or hide them.
Jury put his hands on her shoulders, pushed her down gently to the sofa again. He himself remained standing, hands in pockets after tossing the cigarette into the grate. “That’s not at all the impression I got from your grandmother. If anything —” Jury stopped. He was saying too much.
“ ‘If anything’?”
What he thought was
She was trying to protect you
. What he said was “It wasn’t especially kind of me to bring you here, to the summerhouse, but I frankly wanted to see —”
“My reactions.” She set down her mug of cold tea and rose.
That she knew this so clearly made him feel — guilty. He wondered if Hannah Lean didn’t have this effect on most of the people she knew. It was, he suddenly saw, a dangerous quality to have. It put people off; it made people
want to throw up their hands, figuratively speaking, and let her be. He said, “We understand each other, then.” The smile he had meant to be genuine felt false even to him.
“No. No, I don’t think we understand each other. I thought we did, but not now.” She was walking toward the door, where Sergeant Burn was making a fuss with his chair, assuring the visitors he was fully awake. There she turned and said, “You haven’t given thought to the fact that this morning my husband was murdered. I’ve been questioned by the Northampton police and now you drag me here to see my reactions. My reaction is that the police, number one, have decided I’m the prime suspect — because, I assume, I’m the wife deceived. My reaction, number two, is that both the Northants and the London C.I.D. are goddamned sadists.” She picked the framed snapshots from the mantel and let them fall on the tiled hearth. The glass shivered like a broken windshield. “Good-bye, Superintendent.”
He looked from her departing back to the small photograph. Hannah and Simon Lean, smiles fixed on their faces that gave no clue as to how they felt about one another. Why had she broken it? Perhaps to symbolize the wounds this inquiry was causing her? In any event, it hardly seemed a gesture of affection toward her late husband.
He cleaned up the bits of broken glass and deposited them in the dustbin in the kitchen and pocketed the photographs. Then he stood looking down at the cold grate. Perfumed blue paper.
Why would Simon Lean have waited to burn it?
• • •
“Sir!” said Sergeant Burn, quickly rising and rolling up the
Private Eye
, which he jammed in his back pocket.
Jury smiled. “At ease, Sergeant. Where’re the men who were here twenty minutes ago? Have they gone back to Northampton?”
Burn pointed to the left-hand path that followed the stream going in the opposite direction from which he’d come. “Inspector MacAllister and two others said they were going to have another look at where the car was parked. The Jaguar,” Burn added with a note of truculence.
• • •
“They’re fresh tracks,” MacAllister told Jury with much the same truculence, snapping shut his notebook as if Jury were looking over his shoulder. He gave out his information snappily, too — as little as possible and testing the current of every reply to Jury’s questions. “New radials, cost a hundred apiece, I’ll bet. They would do, with the money this lot’s got.”
As if he’d said too much there, he snapped his mouth shut as he had done the notebook.
“So it looks as if, when Lean came back from London, he parked the car here.”
MacAllister tried looking down his nose; since Jury was nearly six-three and the inspector was five-eight, it presented a logistical problem. “Of course. This is where his car
was
.” Scotland Yard couldn’t put two and two together. “The ground’s a muck-up of tracks. One of them’s Mrs. Lean’s mini.”
“Oh?”
“They’re old ones. That car hasn’t parked here in some time. Most of them are the Jag’s and the odd lot here and there, could be anybody. If you’re checking the odometer — ” Jury was walking away up the road slightly to where the Jaguar was parked. “— I’ve already done. He kept a logbook.”
Jury had no doubt there’d be a record. The book in which Simon Lean noted mileage was in the pocket on the inside of the driver’s door. He took out a tiny torch, got in, shoved the seat back away from the steering wheel, and ran the torch down over the book. The mileage checked with the approximate mileage between Northampton and
Victoria Street. Seventy-five minutes to Euston station by train. In this car, even less if you were an intrepid driver. Jury added on a bit for the traffic, the extra distance to the E-14 postal district. Limehouse was a possibility. The other London entries covered the same number of miles, and had been made at regular intervals.
“Find anything we didn’t?” asked MacAllister, looking up from the cast the two policemen were taking of one of the treads.
Jury smiled. “Well, I don’t know. Who drove the Jag up the road?” Jury nodded to where the car sat about a hundred feet away.
MacAllister’s face reflected the suspicion of a man being led into a trap. “I did. Nothing wrong with that; it’d got a thorough going-over, especially the passenger seat, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Why would I be thinking that?”
“Why? Evidence he had a lady with him. We found hairs, fibers, the usual, but that stuff’s been sent along to the lab.”
Jury lit a cigarette, offered one to MacAllister, who hesitated, then shook his head, as if even that would put him under some obligation. “Why do you think Lean left the car here? I mean, instead of going to the main house.”
“So no one’d know what time he came back, possibly. Or just because he liked to sleep in the summerhouse. According to his wife, he often did. Liked to get away from them, she said.” Given that MacAllister disliked saying any more than was necessary where Jury was concerned, Jury was surprised when the inspector added: “No love lost is my guess. And that wife — widow — cold as hoarfrost.”
Jury asked, “You didn’t move the driver’s seat?”
Perhaps from self-consciousness of his shortness, his
no
was snapped out. Then MacAllister knelt on the ground again and said, “Of course, she probably killed him, so no
wonder she’s not shedding tears, right? You’d think she’d try to fake it, though, wouldn’t you?”
• • •
The voice might have been coming from the marble maiden in the fountain. It said, “I’m sorry,” as Jury was getting into his car.
Hannah Lean came through a thin opening in the high yew hedge, looking about in that undecided way of hers, as if it hadn’t been herself indeed who had said it.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about apologies. Not in these circumstances.”
It was as if he’d thrown it back in her face, the apology. Once again, her face took on that glazed look, one of the things about her that had probably caused MacAllister to judge her. “You mean because you’ve all decided I killed Simon. In cases like this it’s usually the wife or the husband, isn’t it?”