simply too exhausted to turn around and go back. My doctor didn’t want me going to London in the first place.”
Jury nodded. That was no alibi, at least not so far. “What about your brother’s house, Miss Croft? You and your sister have inherited it, I expect.”
She turned her head to gaze out of the window to the sea, and said, mournfully, “Yes. But I doubt either of us will live there. When you get old, Superintendent, you don’t feel much like turning your life over yet once again.”
“You’ll sell it?”
She gave him a long look, a head-to-feet look. “Are you considering real estate as a night job?”
Jury burst out laughing. He thought it was the first good laugh he’d had since the case started. “Would I make a good one?”
“Oh, probably not. You just seem to worry about the disposal of flats and houses, as if that’s a sideline with you.” She laughed herself. “No, we won’t sell it. I don’t want to lose Simon altogether. As I said, it’s the nice thing about money. You can keep things as they were.”
“Not really, though.”
She gave him another long look, this one full of empathy. “Death is always with us, Mr. Jury. Always.” She smiled. “ ‘The fellow in the bright nightgown,’ is what W. C. Fields called it. I love that image, but I don’t agree with it. There is no bright raiment. Death comes along in the same old clothes, nothing new, nothing different from what we’re used to seeing. And we do see him, all the time, and know it, and try not to. I find it comforting that death holds no surprises.” She looked at him, kindly. “Hold on to that notion, Superintendent. In your line of work, you’d do well to hold on.”
Her expression was inscrutable. He felt the need to counter it, he didn’t know why.
“‘Death is always with us’-that’s a bit of a cliche, isn’t it?” He smiled.
“No.” She smiled, too.
Twenty-seven
The Tynedale maid, Rachael, opened the door to admit Jury and a white cat who’d been looking squarely up at him. Jury told the maid he had an appointment to speak to Oliver Tynedale. He was twenty minutes early, he knew. “I’d also like to see Miss Tynedale, if that’s possible.” Jury looked down. “I can’t answer for the cat.” Rachael giggled and led him down the hall. The cat followed.
She was writing at a desk in a bow window and rose to greet him. “Superintendent Jury.” Her tone was as level as her eyes, neither welcoming; she softened up a little when she saw the cat. “I see you’ve brought Snowball. She belongs to Mrs. Riordin; she’s a strange animal.”
The cat resumed its glaring at Jury. “I know all about strange when it comes to cats, believe me. May I sit down?” He detected a hesitation before Maisie held out her arm to indicate the chair he stood by. The cat saw this and walked back to the door.
“Has something else come up?”
“No.” He did not elaborate, wanting her to do the talking.
“You upset Kitty Riordin, you know.”
“Police have a way of doing that.”
“You wanted to talk about the war and about what happened.”
“Isn’t that what police do? Talk about what happened?”
Maisie seemed to be looking at everything in the room except him. Now, she seemed to be studying whatever document was on her desk blotter. “ ‘What happened,’ ” she responded to his question, “was Simon being murdered. Not the war, not the Blue Last.” She was trying not to show the extent of her anger.
Jury looked at her speculatively. “How do you know that, Miss Tynedale?”
She looked around the desk as if she couldn’t lay her hands on what she wanted. “What happened was an air raid, and the Blue Last took a direct hit. This was fifty-five years ago, right after Christmas, December twenty-ninth. East London was devastated. It was the heaviest raid of the war, some seven hundred bombers. My mother’s- Alexandra-and Francis Croft’s deaths. That’s what
Half a century ago and she still felt the emotional devastation? Jury didn’t think so. “You have all of those details right. They must have been told to you time and again. I was a tiny kid then and I remember nothing; at least, nothing right. And as for your mother’s death being so long ago, you know perfectly well one death can affect another, no matter how far apart in time.”
“Not in this case. No.”
“You’re certainly sure about that. Why?”
She merely shook her head.
She wasn’t going to answer, so he said, “You didn’t mention the Riordin baby.”
“Erin, too, of course.” Maisie studied her hands. The disjointed fingers seemed still to shame her a little. “I know those bones were discovered.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see what they tell you. I don’t see how you’d know they were my mother and Erin Riordin.”
“Many ways. The sex is fairly easy, certainly in the case of the adult. A child that young, well, perhaps not so easy. One has to guess on the basis of other things. The child’s skeleton was so near the adult’s and there were apparently no other children in the pub…” Jury shrugged. “They can go by the composition of the soil, the vegetation-a number of things besides the condition of the bones themselves. Teeth, for instance. Even in infants; the teeth might not have broken through yet but there’s maturation below the gum. In the case of your mother and Erin Riordin, there’s the bombing itself. Fragments of shells, that sort of thing. Forensic anthropology is quite amazing. You know what can be done with reconstructing a face from the skull, the bone structure.”
She studied her hands, then looked, again, around the desk as if searching for something. She was searching, Jury thought, simply for time.
“I’d like to know more about Mrs. Riordin. You’re very fond of her.”
“Certainly. I hate cliches, but she’s been like a mother to me.”
Jury wondered why Maisie didn’t see the other side, the corollary to that. “How did she come to be employed?”
Maisie reflected. “Well, she had just come over from Dublin-like any number of Irish girls. She was quite young, just a little younger than my mother, Alexandra. My mother went to an agency and found her. Of course, Kitty hadn’t told them she had a baby because she knew the agency wouldn’t put her on their list. Kitty just hoped whoever interviewed her would be understanding. She was lucky it was Alexandra, who was, from what I’ve been told, the most understanding person in the world.”
“She was with you for how long before that December raid?” He noted the way in which she referred to “my mother” and “Alexandra,” and not “mum” or “mummy.” Of course, Maisie hadn’t really known her mother, but, still…
“A little over a year. I guess it was right after I’d been born.”
“Your grandfather liked her?”
“Oh, yes. If it hadn’t been for Kitty, I’d be dead.”
“And she more or less lived with and for the family after that.”
“That’s so. I’ve wondered why she didn’t marry again. I’m pretty certain she had opportunities.”
“Is the family-are the families-so close it might have been, well, consuming?”
She thought about this. “I think not in a bad way. We’re very tightly knit, yes.”
“The trouble with that is, you pull one strand loose and the piece unravels.”
“That metaphor’s a bit strained, isn’t it? If one of us falls on his face that doesn’t mean all of us will.”
“It might. Especially since you don’t know which one fell.”
Maisie ran her hand through her black hair, and it dropped back in place just as neatly as it had been. He imagined this to be like the disturbance of the past, as if the placid surface of a lake had been raked by wind and rain, and then returned to glassy smoothness.
He wondered if this was why she hadn’t married, because of her ties to the past and the families who
