The Blue Last

on her, apparently. Alexandra took her on as a child keeper for Maisie. Kitty’s baby, Erin, was the same age as Alexandra’s, a few months old.” He sighed and ran his hand across his hair, roughing it up, as if that would improve the thought process.

Jury sat back. “Tynedale. Of Tynedale Brewery? One of the biggest in the country?”

“Both of them actually owned it. Tynedale and Croft.”

“Francis Croft must have been pretty down to earth if he was part of the Tynedale empire and was still landlord of a pub.”

Smiling, Mickey leaned back in his swivel chair, hands folded on his chest. “He was. He was great, a great person. My dad was a close friend of Francis’s. When I was growing up, Dad talked about him a lot.” Mickey passed over another snapshot.

Jury found himself looking at an airfield, at what appeared to be a fighter plane, Spitfire or maybe a Hawker Hurricane. The pilot, getting into or out of the cockpit, squinted into the sun. “Ralph Herrick, Alexandra’s husband. They’d only been married a little over a year when he died.”

Jury wanted to look away, but looking away would make him feel weak. He thought he expended a lot of energy in pulling back from feelings of weakness. “Active duty? His plane was shot down?”

“No, as a matter of fact, he drowned. He was out of the RAF, doing some sort of work in the Orkney Islands, when it happened. He got the V.C., incidentally. A real hero, that’s what my father told me.”

His head bent over the pictures-seven of them now and showing some anomalous progression of events. Jury studied each in turn. He felt somehow his and his mother’s house in Fulham should have been one of them. Mickey had asked him a question which he only half heard.

“I’m sorry, Mickey. I was-” Jury shrugged. Then he asked, “But how can you remember all this?”

“Some of it I remember because it was told me so convincingly and in such detail by my dad. Dad talked about Francis Croft a lot. I know Francis’s son, Simon, a little; I haven’t seen Oliver Tynedale since I was a kid, though. These snapshots I found among other things in a desk of his. I was going through some papers recently and came across the pictures.” He was back to the snapshots again, pulling out of Jury’s lineup the ones of Alexandra and the baby Maisie and the one of the nursemaid, Kitty Riordin, and her baby, Erin. The poses were very similar, might have been the same adult and same child. He directed Jury to study the arm and hand of each child bending around the neck or down the back of the mothers.

“Look at the faces. They’re both girls, or did I tell you that?”

Jury held the snapshots, one in each hand. He let his eyes travel back and forth. “At this age it’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me they shared the father? Something like that?”

“No, no. Look at the hands, the fingers.” Mickey handed him a magnifying glass.

Jury did so, carefully. “The Herrick baby’s hand looks deformed. A couple of the fingers look disjointed or broken. The Riordin infant’s hand is normal, from what I can see.”

“You see correctly. Here’s another picture, taken after the bombing.” He shoved it across. “Kitty Riordin holding the baby Maisie.”

“The hand’s bandaged. Why?”

Mickey sat back in his swivel chair, hands locked behind his head, rocking slightly.

Enjoying this, thought Jury, with a smile. About to administer the coup de grace. Mickey loved mysteries.

“According to Kitty, they’d had an accident that night. Part of a bombed wall had given way, some of the bricks hit them. Kitty wasn’t hurt, but the baby Maisie’s hand was. Broken in a couple of places. So now both Maisie and Erin had disfigured hands. That’s interesting. My point being: Maisie Tynedale isn’t Maisie Tynedale. She’s Erin Riordin. Before you ask why the nanny would try to pass off her own daughter as the Tynedale baby, Maisie is heiress to the Tynedale millions. She goes by Tynedale, incidentally, not Herrick. Again, before you ask why, if I was heir to millions, I’d go by Mickey Mouse, if I thought it would help.”

Jury sat back, shocked that this was the end of the story, or at least Mickey’s end. “But Mickey, it could have happened. And even if the baby’s mother was killed, surely others could have identified the baby. I mean, they might look much the same to us, but to a mother-but the mother is dead; to the grandfather, then, to Oliver Tynedale?”

Mickey shook his head. “Imagine you’re the granddad. Do you really want to dispute the identity? Or do you want to believe, yes, this is your granddaughter? To say nothing of the fact that Kitty Riordin would be denying her own baby is still alive?”

“But others-”

Mickey shrugged. “What others? No one on Kitty Riordin’s side, there wasn’t anyone. Francis Croft? He’s dead. Brother and sisters? All little kids. There was one Croft girl who was Alexandra’s age, Emily Croft. I expect she could have recognized that the baby wasn’t Maisie, but as she didn’t say anything about it, I assume she didn’t know either.” He shrugged again.

“Kitty Riordin took advantage of the bombing and told whoever made any inquiries her own baby was killed in that bombing and she’d had the Tynedale child with her.”

Mickey nodded, rubbed his hands through his hair. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“You haven’t enough to go on here. What about your forensics report?”

“Couldn’t confirm because the bones were just too small. I need a forensic anthropologist. I’m sure I’m right.”

Shaking his head, Jury sat back and was silent. They were both silent while the longcase clock ticked and the gray day grew a darker gray. Jury said, “This is fascinating, Mickey, but why me? Why did you want to tell it to me? Did you want something from us, I mean the Yard?”

“Yes. I want you to prove it. “

Jury’s laugh was abrupt, less a laugh than a sound of disbelief. “Me? Are you kidding? Even if it could be proven, you’re as good a cop as I am, better probably.”

Mickey’s smile was thin. “Maybe, but I’m a dead cop. Will be in a couple of months, anyway.”

Jury felt as if he’d taken a hard blow to the stomach. “What? Jesus, what’s wrong?”

“Leukemia. Specifically, chronic myelogenous leukemia, or in its cozier abbreviation, CML. It’s not all that common, but it hits people my age-another version of the midlife crisis, perhaps? Unfortunately, there are no symptoms early on; I found out when it was already pretty much too late. It’s very aggressive, very.”

Jury’s mouth was too dry for him to speak, as if words were liquid, a balm denied him at the moment.

“I’ve done the chemo crap, but not the bone marrow transplant, assuming even if I could find a donor. The evidence, shall we say, does not stand up to intense scrutiny. Survival rate is almost nil. Two or three months, the doctors give me, which means around one or two, since they always lie. The thing is, Richie, even if I could find the answer to this in a few weeks, I’m just too bloody tired to do it and my other work as well.”

Irrationally, as people will out of a sense of hopelessness get angry with the person who is making them feel that way, Jury got angry. “Why in hell aren’t you taking the time off? Spend it with Liza and the kids?”

Mickey looked a little disappointed with Jury. “Because I don’t want all that spare time to think about it, that’s why.” He leaned forward across his desk, earnest. “Listen, will you do this? Will you try to find out? It means a lot to me; it sure as hell would to my dad if he were still here.”

Jury tapped the pictures together. “Yes. You don’t want to see the Crofts and Tynedales swindled. May I keep these for a while?” Jury held up the pictures. Mickey nodded and Jury said, “On the other hand”-he paused, wondering if his taking some high moral tone would sound as priggish as he already had-“this woman Maisie, or Erin, has been part of the family for so long and thought to be the man’s granddaughter-”

“You mean wouldn’t it be better to let sleeping dogs lie?”

“Something like that. Imagine finding out Maisie isn’t Maisie after over a half century.” Jury paused. “Anyway, I’ll do what I can.” He stuffed the pictures into an inside coat pocket and rose and so did Mickey. Jury walked around the desk and embraced him. “Anything, any time, Mickey, day or night. I mean it.”

“Thanks, Rich.” Tears stood in Mickey’s eyes. “It means a lot.”

Mickey dying. Mickey dead.

Jury studied the paving stones at his feet as he walked up Ludgate Hill. He walked slowly, almost hesitatingly, thinking it must be like the unsure gait of an aging man. He was too young for this, still, to start thinking of himself as aging, for God’s sakes.