Martha Grimes - The Blue Last

“Not if you think I shouldn’t. I can come back.”

“I appreciate that; it’s so tough for him-” He knocked the worm of ash into the tray.

Marie-France Muir, Simon’s sister, sat at the head of the table in the chair Ian Tynedale had just vacated. Jury was on her right. The romance of her name was almost borne out by the melancholy air, the pale, nearly translucent complexion, the fine, forlorn gray eyes.

For Marie-France, the appearance, he was fairly sure, was the reality. That what one saw was what one got. So, looked at that way-her unmade-up face, her literal answers-it might be honesty at its most banal, but honesty nonetheless. He should at least be as direct in his questions.

“Have you any idea why this happened to your brother?”

She was silent, as if she were trying to formulate a difficult answer. “No.”

Jury waited a moment, but saw she wasn’t about to embroider on this no. “Did he have enemies or was he in financial straits? Anything like that?”

“Financial straits? I think not.” Her smile was sad and her voice sounded as if it had been scoured, raspy and uneven. “Enemies? I didn’t know all of my brother’s acquaintances, but I don’t see why he should have had. He was quite a decent person.”

“Your father used to run a pub during the war called the Blue Last-”

He surprised a real smile from her. “Oh, yes, I remember it. I remember it well. The Blue Last. Simon and I used to love playing there. Heavens-” She rested her forehead in her hand as if she might be going to weep, but she didn’t. “It’s been over fifty years.” She pushed a strand of hair back into a rather careless chignon with a slightly flushed cheek and a bashful look, as if flirting with memory. “We had so much fun back then. Simon was around ten and I was two years older and Em-Emily, my sister-must have been in her teens.” Her eyebrows drew together in puzzlement. “Actually, Emily was much nearer Alex’s age than she was mine. Yes, she must have been seventeen or eighteen when Alex died.” She went on, smiling once more, saying, “We always thought the pub a great adventure. Alexandra always loved it, too. But that was in the years before the war came and ruined it all. Yes, my father Francis had the Blue Last for-it must have been fifteen years. He didn’t, of course, need to run it, I mean, he had no financial need of it. Tynedale Brewery owned several.”

“Your father was killed in the blast, also?”

“Yes. And our mother had died two years before that. Had it not been for Oliver, we would have been-well, orphans.” She smiled slightly, as if the thought of their being orphans almost amused her. “The Blue Last. It was a lark, such a lark before the war.” Her voice seemed to unwind with these words and, like the clock on the mantel, stop. She was looking out of the window, as if on the other side of it she saw larks flighting. She looked profoundly sad.

Jury felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking she was all surface.

She went on. “I really loved that pub. It was endlessly exciting. The people, the talk, the ‘crack,’ as they say. That we owned it, that was part of it, like the scullery maid finding she owns the castle.”

The metaphor surprised Jury, both that she had drawn it and that it had been drawn at all. He smiled. “Scullery maid. Is that how you saw yourself at home?”

Her answer was oblique. “But the Blue Last was home. I mean, of course, we had another house. The one that Simon occupies-I mean, occupied-” She turned away.

Jury was silent.

Looking down at her hands, she said, “It sounds awful, but-” A flush spread upward from her neck. Again she took refuge in the light beyond the window.

He waited for more, but she remained silent, as if, done with memories of the Blue Last, there was nothing to speak of, not even her brother’s murder. It was as if the loss of the Blue Last had enervated her.

Why was this hard to understand? There was a sense of a particular place that haunted us all, wasn’t there? A place to which we ascribed the power to confer happiness. An image deeply etched in the mind that had fled and taken something of us with it. Strange we should put so much stock in childhood, a time when we were vulnerable, unprotected and at the mercy of those we hoped would have mercy. Yet that time, that childhood seemed to rise above the lurking danger and present itself as the most seductive, longed-for, unassailable thing in our lives.

“You said you got on so well then.”

“What?” Marie-France turned blank, gray eyes to him.

“You said you and your brother and sister got on so well back then.”

“We did, yes. Sometimes we got to stay all night at the pub, as there was a large flat above. Alexandra and Ian did, too. And Alexandra did after she was married. She seemed to like it even more than Tynedale Lodge. I think I was jealous of her; she was so beautiful. And then she married this dashing RAF pilot-did you ever see the film Waterloo Bridge ?”

“Yes.” Jury smiled. “One of the great romances in film history.” ( That’s who it was, he thought, Viven Leigh; that’s who Alexandra looked like, and the waitress in the cappuccino bar.) Jury smiled.

“Kitty used to say that’s just how they were, that Alexandra and Ralph were like Myra and Roy. Kitty-she was the au pair, or nanny, I suppose. I remember how it irritated me that Alex really did resemble Vivien Leigh with her smooth dark hair and ivory complexion and dark eyes. And the cheekbones.” She shook her head. “ ‘A silly comparison,’ I once heard Alex tell her. ‘Vivien was a prostitute and that’s why she didn’t marry Robert Taylor. And that’s why she jumped from the bridge. I don’t think I’ll have to do that,’ Alex said.”

Jury said, “Alexandra doesn’t sound like an incurable romantic.” He smiled. “She sounds more the practical type.” He drew the envelope from an inside pocket where he carried Mickey’s snapshots. He removed the one of Alexandra and Francis Croft and set it before Marie-France.

Surprised, she picked it up “Where did you ever… it’s the Blue Last. That’s my father and Alexandra. Where did you get it?”

Jury noticed she identified the pub before she did the people. “One of the CID men in the City.” He found the one of Katherine Riordin and her baby.

“It’s Kitty and Erin… wait, no, it’s Maisie.” She drew the snapshot close to her eyes. “No, it is Erin. All babies tend to look alike, don’t you think?”

Jury smiled again. “I’m sure the mothers would disagree with you. So Kitty Riordin stayed on with the Tynedales here.”

“Oliver kept her on after Alex was killed. And Erin, poor thing. God, but that was awful. Awful. Both Oliver and Kitty lost their child. I don’t know who was more heartbroken.”

“And Alexandra’s husband?”

It was as though Marie-France were trying to recollect him. “Oh, of course. Ralph was devastated.”

Had he really been, or was she simply mouthing a platitude? Ralph Herrick didn’t seem to be a person remembered for anything but his looks and the RAF. But, then, they’d been married such a little while.

Marie-France went on: “Ralph was killed in the war.” She dredged up memory. “Yes, that’s right. During the war. He’d left the RAF. Actually, he was awarded the Victoria Cross. Yes. How could I have forgotten that? He had something to do with those code breakers… Anyway, he drowned. Somewhere in Scotland.”

“You live exactly where, Mrs. Muir?”

“In Belgravia, in Chapel Street.”

“Is that where you were early this morning?”

“Mm?” She seemed distracted by the past. “Oh. Yes, of course, I’m always there mornings. I live alone.”