A friend of mine. And look what the friendship bought her.

“And she wondered what you wanted the gun for-”

“I said to take care of somebody. That was stupid; I should’ve made up something. Chris wasn’t happy about that. It was Chris told me what to do. See, Deirdre had told me about her date with this creepy guy, at least I thought he was, and meeting him at St. Paul’s. So I went along there a little before nine. And she was there. I waited for the bells and then shot. That was smart, wasn’t it?” Again, her self-satisfied smile seemed to want him to note her artfulness.

“It was,” said Jury, feeling forlorn.

“And I left the gun. I thought it would be traced back to Dee, and since it was the same gun that killed Kate, well, police would think DeeDee Small had done it. Killed Kate and then shot herself. That wasn’t bad thinking, was it?”

“No. Very clever. Except the site of the bullet wound made it difficult for her to have turned the gun on herself.” The plan had backfired, he didn’t say, in more ways than one.

“Oh.” She sighed. “I wanted to go to Chesham, you know, make up some excuse to see the boyfriend, just to see what sort of person Stacy preferred to me. But, of course, I had to stay right away from Chesham and Chris.” She frowned and asked, as if it were strange, as if she’d only just thought of it, “How’d you know it was me?”

“Shoes.”

Her frown deepened as she looked down at her big slippers, as if they might be the ones that shopped her.

All of them, really, he thought. All of that fascination with Jimmy Choo and Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik. “Red soles.”

Rosie seemed amazed that this copper would know Louboutin. “You mean the ones I was wearing on our date?”

Our date. Rosie seemed to retreat further and further from the world of a grown-up here and now into a past of dates and furry slippers. It must be difficult for her to integrate the persona of the sultry woman in Cigar. She was, he thought sadly, crumbling right before his eyes.

“It was your comment about Manolo Blahnik, remember? Did I think you rushed out in your Manolos and shot Kate Banks? The only person who could have told you about that supposed heel mark is Chris Cummins. She’s the only person besides the police who knew.”

“That wasn’t very smart of me.” Again, she was studying her feet.

“How did you two communicate?”

“With those toss-away mobile things.” She looked up at him then, as if he might not know. “You can’t trace calls on them.”

He nodded. “Rosie…” Her face looked small and pinched. “You’re going to have to come along with me.” Jury felt even more forlorn. He shouldn’t feel this way. She had shot two people in cold blood.

And yet it hadn’t been cold, had it? For her, probably even more than for Chris Cummins, it was all a parlor game, and his being here was the last move in it. What she said next confirmed this notion.

“I guess so. I guess I lost.” She got up. “I have to change my clothes.”

He knew he shouldn’t let her out of his sight, but he did. It was a terraced house, a second-floor flat, with no means of egress except for the door, unless she meant to throw herself out a bedroom window. He doubted she would do that.

While she was gone, Jury looked around the room, whose details now he better understood: the row of Beatrix Potter figures on the shelf of the arched bookcase, the Paddington Bear lamp, the display of shells-the accoutrements of childhood. With its high ceiling, long windows, arched shelves, the room had the bones of sophistication, but she had drawn over it the skin of naïveté.

When she walked back in, she was once again the woman who’d surprised him in Cigar. Her outfit, a blue shawl-necked sweater and straight black skirt, was not as clingy as the dress she’d worn, but it was still potent. She had applied makeup, not too much, and had traded the slippers for dark-brown-and-black-ribboned shoes with skyscraper heels.

She swung the strap of a small handbag up to her shoulder. It matched the shoes. “Whose shoes, Rosie?”

“Valentino. You like them?” She held out a foot as if he were about to fit it with a glass slipper.

“I certainly do.”

“Okay, let’s go,” she said to him.

Once through the door, she locked it. She preceded him along the narrow hall that led to the top of the stairs. At one point she stumbled, the skyscraper heels proving too much even for her, but she righted herself and went on, a girl dying to be grown up, stumbling in her mother’s high-heeled shoes.

65

Jury found him, not surprisingly, in the garden on the narrow path screened by masses of tulips and foxglove. He heard the snip of the shears and saw the floppy hat. The sun was hot on Jury’s head. The willow and Japanese maple spilled sunlight across the path.

“Hello, Bobby.”

Bobby was standing near a canvas of creeping phlox so variously tinted in watercolors that it might have been painted by one of the Impressionists. He was immersing an armful of purple tulips in a bucket of water. He rose from his kneeling position. “Mr. Jury.” He took off his hat and wiped his arm across his forehead and smiled bleakly. “I’m just cutting some flowers for the church.” He paused. “A funeral.” Again, he paused. “Will police ever release Mariah’s body for burial?”

Jury could tell from the look-a drowned look, as if Bobby himself had been plunged into water like the stems of the cut nowers-that any news would be bad news. Jury hoped this wasn’t. “Very soon, I expect. Look, we’re fairly certain we’ve got the person who murdered Mariah, Bobby. Not much of a consolation for you, but at least something.”

Absently, Bobby clicked the garden shears. “Who?”

“It’ll be public soon enough.” He went on to tell him about the double murder, Chris Cummins and Rose Moss.

Bobby sat down hard on the white iron bench. “Good God.” He looked up at Jury as if trying to assess his presence. Real or not?

Jury sat beside him. “Not that it makes it easier to understand, but Rose Moss was obsessed with Mariah. Well, that pretty much goes without saying.”

“Are you saying Mariah was gay?” He frowned in disbelief. “That’s not-”

Jury shook his head. “Gay? No. The affair-if it can even be called that-was probably very brief and for Mariah, probably an experiment, or just something she was curious about. And there’s only Rose Moss’s account, so how much is true, how much wishful thinking, I don’t know. Anyway, Mariah knew in a short while, sex with another woman just didn’t appeal to her. I know you thought Mariah was very retiring, but-”

Bobby was shaking his head. “Not that way. She was good at sex, she was very good, a lot better than me. It was as if she had some old knowledge of it. I don’t know how to say it.” He scratched his head. “As if it came naturally. Not from a lot of experience of it, but as if she were discovering it as she went along, almost as if inspired her or something.” He laughed abruptly. “Talk about wishful thinking.”

“I don’t think it is, Bobby, not where you were concerned. She was giving up that life. She wanted to be with you.”

Bobby smiled ruefully, pinched a dry leaf from the stem of a daisy near the bench. “You’re saying that to make me feel better.”

“I’m not. She really loved you. It’s what got her killed.” Jury was sorry he’d said that, for it sounded brutal when he’d meant to be consoling. “I’m sorry. That sounded as if you were at fault.”

“No it doesn’t. I’m glad you told me. I really didn’t know if Mariah loved me, because there was always something held back. I knew there was more to her than what she was letting me see. I knew all of those weekend absences had to do with something other than visiting some old school chum or working an extra job. I knew there was more than that.”

They sat for a few moments in the generous light and silence of the garden where Bobby Devlin seemed completely at home. Jury thought there was solace here, his gaze traveling up the path with its deep borders of dianthus and lavender and roses, the soft air pungent with their perfume; at the drifts of snowdrops, cornflowers, and poppies, at life illimitable.