The Anodyne Necklace(39)

"You mean she must have known Cora Binns?"

"Oh, yes. Well, I can hardly blame her for not wanting to admit it in the circumstances. Better if she had, though. And I think the main reason was to set her own little plan into action. Blackmail, I suppose. Poor, stupid woman."

For a moment they were both silent. The silvery voices of the children playing splintered the otherwise quiet street. Everyone else was in the pub.

"You say this secretarial agency was somewhere near King's Cross?"

Jury nodded. "Why?"

"I just wondered: where's this Wembley Knotts tube stop?"

"Not far. A few minutes away."

"Could we have a look-in, do you think?"

"Sure. I have to be getting back to Littlebourne, though."

"Yes. Just for a minute." Melrose dropped his cigar in the gutter and looked up at the sign of the Anodyne Necklace. "Sawdust, gaslights, Chamberlen and Cripps. This place could live off chic for the rest of its life."



They had come abreast of their cars. Plant's walking stick must have done its job: the Silver Shadow was unscathed, untouched by either human or Crippses' hands.

But Jury sighed. Across the windscreen of the police car was soaped a large PRAT, followed by a smaller direction to sod off.

Melrose shook his head. "Can't they even teach them to spell in school?"

As Melrose piloted the Rolls with great care down the street, Jury saw the Crippses stop their game and dance along the pavement after it, waving.

Friendly was waving too, but not with his hand.

IV

The black woman was leaning over the small door of her kiosk, practicing impertinence on a family of wizened Orientals, when Jury showed his card and she grudgingly let them through. Of the Orientals she was demanding another thirty pence.

A train pulled out in the distance and wind like a hand pushed at them as they walked through the tunnel. From its other end, amplified by the curve of the tiled walls, came the sound of a guitar and a voice singing some melancholy song about going home, as if he had no hope of ever doing so. Jury had a strange sense of déjà vu. They rounded the curve and Melrose dropped some coins into the open guitar case; without stopping his song, the guitarist nodded his thanks and upped the volume as a reward for generosity.



"They found her here," said Jury, stopping in front of the Evita poster, now further defaced by a long rip from the loose corner down through the center. One glittering arm was upraised; the other was off at the shoulder. Mustached and maimed, Evita still clung to the wall as, in real life, she must have clung to power.

Footsteps echoed near them and two teenage girls came around the corner. They were mirror images of each other-same long hair, deep eye shadow, jeans, gum.

"It's such a public place," said Melrose. "Taking a hell of a chance, this person, attacking her here."

"I think maybe whoever it was had to. Didn't want to be seen in the vicinity of Wembley Knotts and the Anodyne Necklace."

They walked down the steps and out onto the train platform. Giant hoardings lined the wall across the tracks. Crystal-clear gin; a skirt blowing up over a rounded rear end packed neatly into tights; the eyes of an old woman imploring one to give to a home for destitute widows; the even more desolate eyes of a spaniel who would not (according to the RSPCA) last much longer. Jury turned away. The girls were down at the other end of the platform. A couple of boys in leather jackets and old-fashioned ducktail hairdos came through one of the archways. The kids all frisked one another with their eyes.

Jury turned to look at the wall behind him where Melrose Plant was pointing with his walking stick.

At that moment, their thoughts might have been packed together in one mind. Plant had directed his walking stick to a dark spot on the Underground map, one of the largest interchanges on the London tube. "King's Cross St. Pancras."

Each line was a different color, making it simple for even the dimmest passenger to find his way through the maze. Plant's stick traced the narrow red bar which split central London in two. "The River of Blood, wouldn't you say? The Central Line. Blue, Victoria Line; black, Northern; green, District-let's have a look at your map."

Jury drew it from his pocket. The Church of St. Pancras had been drawn at the spot Plant had first pointed out. "He drew this little replica of the necklace directly above the approximate spot where we are now. Wembley Knotts."

"If you shut your eyes a bit it looks like one of Ernestine Craigie's maps."

How many times had he seen that map in the last two days alone? wondered Jury. Riding the tube and looking up at the varnished fingernails of the female pickpocket-and this map right beside it. Repeated endlessly, in every car, at every tube stop. He'd seen the map of the London Underground every day of his life.
 
 

 

"You mean," said Melrose, "Tree hid it here? In a tube station?" He looked around as the first train thundered in, disgorged several passengers, picked up the girls and the boys in leather jackets.

The guitar player walked onto and down the platform carrying his black case. Jury's mind only now absorbed the fact that the music had stopped. The guitarist lit a cigaratte and waited, leaning against the wall.

Jury looked at him and said to Melrose Plant, "You know, if you thought there was a chance, as Tree must have done, of police waiting for you outside or back in your digs, and you had an accomplice on this end-" The rest of the words were lost in the rush of wind as the train picked up speed and pulled into the dark patch of tunnel at the end.

"-you might wrap that necklace up in a pound note and just toss it in the case with the coins. But it sure as hell would have to be someone you trusted."

Jury turned from the map of the Underground to look again at the miserable dog, whose eyes trusted no one. Could he have been dead wrong? It was difficult to believe it was Cyril Macenery. Difficult or not, he was at the hospital, done with Katie O'Brien. "Drop me at the hospital, will you, on your way back to Littlebourne?"

Plant was trying to keep up with him; they were nearly running back through the tunnel now. "Am I going back to Littlebourne?"

"Yes. To keep an eye on Emily Louise Perk. She was the one Katie gave the map to."

"I'd feel," said Melrose, running up the moving stairs behind Jury, "a lot safer if Emily Louise Perk would keep an eye on me."





TWENTY-TWO


I

EMILY Louise Perk was sitting in the Littlebourne police station, her coloring book open before her, and wishing that Superintendent Jury would come back. True, Peter Gere was a policeman, but he was only the village bobby whom she'd seen every day of her life, nearly, and anyway, he was so busy on the telephone and that crackling box of his linked up to the Hertfield police that anyone could have reached in the door, hit her over the head, and bolted without Peter's even knowing.

Emily Louise would almost rather have needles stuck in her fingernails than admit the happenings of the afternoon had made her extremely nervous. She felt she needed police protection. And Peter did not seem too enthusiastic about giving it. Twice he had told her to leave, that he was very busy.

He was telling her again. Clamping one hand over the receiver of the telephone, he said, "Emily, I've got a lot to do; you'd best be off." And before he took his hand away from the receiver to answer the voice on the other end, he added, automatically, "Your mum wants you home. Yes, this is Gere . . . " He turned away.

Why were they always telling her that? You'd think God had pushed a button on that box of Peter's and a huge voice had come over it saying, This is your mummy speaking. Peter knew her mum was in Hertfield; she'd already told him; grown-ups simply never listened, except for a few, like Polly and Superintendent Jury.

She looked at the last picture in her coloring book with distaste. Snow White was patting Dopey on his polished head and wearing a smile that looked dipped in goo. Emily stuck out her tongue at the picture, slapped the book shut, and let her eye rove the room.

What it was drawn to was the map-several copies of it-stuck to Peter's bulletin board with a drawing pin. With every policeman round about having one, the map was hardly a secret anymore.

Peter Gere's back was turned, and she slid off her chair, hastily took down a copy, and went back to her crayons. It would make a wonderful picture, colored. She lined up the stubs of crayon and started in on the grotto, coloring it blue. After working for two or three minutes, she looked at the result, dissatisfied. Because her crayons were so dull, the grotto, river, moat and highway had come out thick and straight. She put her chin in her hands and studied it. What did it remind her of? She frowned. Then, when she saw Peter move to take his coat from the back of the chair, she snatched it up and stuck it in her coloring book and slid down and pretended to be asleep. He would kill her if he knew she'd been at his bulletin board. She had strict orders never to touch it.

"I've got to go Hertfield, Emily, so take yourself home, there's a good girl."

She yawned. "I'm supposed to feed the horses."

"Well, go do it then, though for you to be running around this late . . . " He mumbled something about her mother. "It's gone eight already. What's this in aid of?"

Fatal. When she'd picked up the book the map had slid out.

"Emily! This is police evidence. What do you mean going and using it for coloring?"