She seemed on good terms with Freddie. "Did Mr. Mainwaring seem, well, to be pushing this idea?"
" ‘Pushing-'? I don't know what you mean." But she was quick enough to figure out what he meant. "Are you suggesting that Freddie Mainwaring knew the girl in some other way?"
"It's possible."
She looked at him, considering. As the sunlight died, her gray eyes darkened. "You seem to be saying he had something to do with her death."
"It's a coincidence, at the very least."
Smiling slightly, she shook her head. "I seriously doubt he was involved. Freddie's much too shrewd to go about murdering women. I'm sure he'd get what he wanted more easily than that."
"As with Ramona Wey, for instance?" She merely cocked her head at that and made no comment. "Your late husband had some business dealings with her." She nodded. "Antique jewelry." She nodded again, giving him the awfully uncomfortable impression she was looking straight into his mind. "Lady Kennington, I'd really like to get some information about the theft of that emerald necklace a year ago."
That did seem to surprise her. "What's that got to do with it?"
"Trevor Tree, you remember, was run down by a car after he was released by police. That necklace has never turned up. And it must be somewhere."
Her hand went to her throat as if the mention of it had triggered some tactile response. "Yes, I suppose it does. John was extravagant about jewelry. It was some sort of obsession with him. Stonington was mortgaged up to the hilt to indulge it. You'd think he'd have been wise enough to insure that necklace, after all that, wouldn't you? But he said insurance for jewelry cost the earth. Can you imagine such reasoning? You know, I think John-my husband-had a sort of gambler's nature. Self-destructive."
"So you have to sell up in order to pay for that. You don't seem very bitter about it."
She seemed puzzled, as if bitterness had nothing to do with it, as if it were an alien emotion. "I'd have sold up, anyway. I should have done, a long time ago." She looked off. "I've never much liked jewelry, myself."
The woman, he thought, was a master of understatement; she made that emerald sound like something from Woolworth's. "It was a very rare sort of emerald, I understand. Egyptian?"
"Yes. John was especially interested in Egyptology. It was a carved stone. It was carved with a crow, and beneath that what appeared to be a crab, or something. The carvings were supposed to ward off ‘disturbance, dreams, and stupidity.' " Her smile was fleeting. "It didn't. I'm no smarter than before. And my dreams"-she clasped her hands behind her and looked off-"are just as bad."
"And the case Lord Kennington kept this jewelry in? Has that been sold too?"
"No. It's in the next room." Once again he followed her to a door on the other side of the room.
The immensity of this next room gave Jury a shock, both its size and its emptiness. Here, the furniture was also gone. At one end of the room-dining room, it must have been once-was a phalanx of French windows facing the courtyard, showing once again the mournful statue in different terms. They were now in another wing of the house, the one he had seen before with a walk screened by tall columns. He felt as though he were seeing the statue through round bars. There was nothing in the room except for heavy green drapes at the windows and a glass-topped display case shoved into a corner by the marble fireplace. This strange circumnavigation of the house-with only that stone statue as some sort of compass point-disoriented Jury. As he bent down over the display case, empty now, he asked, "Did you like Trevor Tree?" He looked up at her.
"I didn't mind him, I suppose. I wasn't that often around him. We were not on intimate terms." There was a flicker of temper-or was it really humor?-in response to his unasked question.
"What happened that night, Lady Kennington?"
Again, that fleeting smile. "I'd rather not be called that, really. Just Jenny Kennington. John kept the family name, said it was much easier. He was a very sensible man in some ways. I don't think I did very well as a Lady."
Jury looked at her for a moment. "I imagine you did fine. Tell me about the night the necklace was stolen."
She told him exactly the same story Carstairs had. "Of course, when we found Trevor had gone, we knew. And we wouldn't have known so soon if our cook hadn't got up so early."
"I see. There were a few other pieces of jewelry that had gone missing over the time Trevor Tree worked for your husband-apparently also taken by him. Would you remember them if you saw them again?"
"Oh, yes. There was a cameo brooch. It was unusual and quite beautiful. Then there was a small diamond, in what they call a European cut. Not a brilliant and not really valuable. And a gold ring, coiled like a serpent. I liked it." Quickly, she looked up at him. "You're not going to tell me you've found those things, are you?"
Jury shook his head. "No, but I think possibly Cora Binns knew Trevor Tree. I even think she might have been wearing a ring-perhaps the one you described-taken from Lord Kennington's collection. Maybe he took the stuff just to see how much he could get away with. What sort of person was he, from your point of view?"
"Terribly shrewd. But that's rather obvious, the way he had the whole thing planned out."
"How did your husband meet him?"
"At Sotheby's. Or was it Christie's? John had dealings with both. That's probably how Trevor knew about this emerald. John was looking for a secretary and this Tree was recommended as very reliable. He was an employee at one of those places. Of course, he was very knowledgeable. Had to be, didn't he? John trusted him." She shrugged. "Maybe it was the gambler's instinct coming out again. Why should he have trusted him? I thought Trevor was too shrewd by half, frankly."
The sun had come out again and shown in wide bands across the polished floor like light on water. He could see her eyes were silvery, even though they were standing a great distance apart, he by the case, she by the windows. She pulled the long sleeves of her sweater down, the metallic thread in the loose knit glinting like chain mail. "I'm awfully cold," she said. "I'd like a cup of tea. Would you?"
"I wouldn't mind," he said.
"I'll just get it then." She walked across the expanse of oak floor and through a door at the far end. It closed behind her.
He missed her the moment she walked out of the room.
SEVENTEEN
"WHY are you making that dog purple?"
"Because I like purple." Emily Louise did not look up from her coloring book.
The Bold Blue Boy was empty, save for Melrose and Emily Louise, which was not surprising, as it was barely nine o'clock.
Looking at the bizarre colors in her farmyard scene, and from there to the map, Melrose was reminded of Miss Craigie's dreadful slide-show presentation. Something rankled. He felt he should be able to dredge it up from his unconscious.
"Do you know the Misses Craigie?"
"Yes. Ernestine's the one that's always doing boring things with birds. She goes into the woods with those binoculars and stands about." Intent upon coloring a gaggle of geese pink, she wetted the crayon with her tongue.
"Don't chew on crayons. You'll get Crayola poisoning." Melrose looked down at the map, smoothed out on the table before him. All of those lines running and crisscrossing. Lord, would he be forced to ask Ernestine for a repeat performance of the migratory patterns of the Crackle? Wasn't there just so much the human organism could stand in the pursuit of clues? His eyes slid over to Emily's coloring book. Unable to stop himself, he said, "Those geese are pink."
"Yes. They're quite lovely." She fluted this, throwing down her crayon and holding up her artwork. A barnyard scene of rainbow animals. Except, Melrose noted, for the horse. The horse was good old horsey-brown. This irritated him almost beyond endurance. "All of the other animals are totally ridiculous colors and the horse is brown."
"Of course it's brown. Horses are brown, some of them. Anyway, it's supposed to be Shandy."
He refused to discuss it. "Might I have a piece of paper from that book?"
She stopped in the process of outlining a crow she had left out. It was going to be lemon yellow. Suspiciously, she looked at Melrose. "Well . . . " She leafed through her book, came upon a picture of a Cinderella-like young lady about to have her tiny foot shoved into a glass slipper by a young man with a page-boy. "Here. You can color this one if you want. I don't like it, anyway."
"Color? I don't want to color, for heaven's sake. I want the back to draw some lines on."
"You mean tear it out?" Sacrilege.
"I'll buy you another book!"
She looked down at the prince holding the foot and back at Melrose. "All right. He looks stupid, anyway." Carefully she folded, creased, and tore the page from her book.
"Thank you," said Melrose frostily. He then took a red crayon and drew a line across the back of the picture. This he crossed at an angle with a blue crayon.
Emily was interested. "What are you doing?"
"The migratory patterns of the Great Speckled Crackle."
Forgetting her lemon crow, she clamped her chin between her hands and watched as Melrose bisected the red line with a green one, swooping upwards. In a moment lines were going every which way. "That's not it," he said.