“Mr. Devlin?” said Jury.

He turned, still holding the shock of flowers.

“You’re Robert Devlin?”

“Bobby. What can I do for you?” He submerged the flowers in a tub holding several inches of water.

“My name’s Richard Jury. I’m with Scotland Yard CID.” He held out his ID.

“Oh.” The syllable was weighted with sadness.

He was pale and handsome and so wistful-looking, Jury wanted to clap him on the shoulder and tell him to buck up. Jury had never told anyone to buck up in his life.

Bobby Devlin looked down, up, down again. “It’s Mariah, isn’t it?” He pulled over an old crate and sat down, hard. His face was drawn, his body strained. “Sorry. There were two detectives just here…” He shook his head.

“This must be hard for you. I understand you and Mariah Cox were engaged.”

Bobby nodded. Then, becoming aware that Jury still stood while he sat, Bobby rose and pulled out one of the folding chairs leaning against the side of the stall. He opened it up, set it down for Jury, and sat back down again.

Jury thought it was an uncommonly thoughtful thing to do, in the circumstances. He sat down between daylilies and floribunda roses.

Bobby said, “We were going to get married in the fall, probably, and were going to live in my house. It’s small, but fine for a couple. I bought it because of the gardens. There’s over three acres. The old woman who lived there finally had to go into a nursing home. I felt really sorry for her because she loved the gardens. I told her-” He looked up. “Sorry. I’m talking to fill up space, I guess.”

“Go on. I want to hear it.”

Bobby sat back and relaxed a little. “I told her I loved flowers and plants and all that, that I did it for a living. She asked me if I knew anything about primulas, and I told her I know everything.” He looked at Jury and smiled slightly. “Sounds conceited, but I do know an awful lot. When she took me out to the back, to the gardens, I was stunned by the variety of plants. Camellias dripping over old stone walls, a blue forest of hydrangeas and lavender and bluebells, even a rock garden. You don’t see those much because they take such a lot of work. A huge spread of bright orange poppies. Even some mother-of-pearl poppies-a long sweep of them; it was lustrous.

“The thing was I’d visit her a couple of times a week for a few months, and she said it was such a relief knowing the house would be in my hands. I took flowers to her in the nursing home until she died. It was only a few months later that she died. I felt awful when she did. And I know I’m talking too much, but it keeps me from thinking.” He stopped and regarded Jury.

“Where are you from, Bobby?”

“ County Kerry. When my parents died I came to England. I worked at this and that, finally for a nursery, and then a series of nurseries. The last was in High Wycombe. I seem to have a natural bent for this kind of thing. I seem to speak the language of flowers, if that doesn’t sound too sentimental.”

Looking at all of these glowing colors and green leaves that seemed to want to burst beyond their crate and bucket boundaries, Jury believed it. “Did Mariah share your love of all this?” His gesture took in the stall.

“Yes, very much so. She knew a lot about flowers-” He stopped suddenly. The dead Mariah blotted out memory of the living one.

“You didn’t know anything about a double life that Mariah might have been leading?”

“Double life?” He leaned down to reposition a large pot of hydrangeas and didn’t look at Jury.

“Wouldn’t you describe it that way? She was gone regularly to London and…”

Bobby put his hand on his forehead and pushed back his hair, as if he had a raging headache he couldn’t get rid of. Probably he did. “The woman police found… she’s just not like Mariah.” He shook his head. “Mariah was so… retiring, that’s the word I think of.” He picked a few yellowing leaves from the stem of a lavender rose. “Funny about Edna. I would have known.”

“Mrs. Cox? You mean you could have made the identification?”

He nodded. “I’d have known,” he said again. “I know I just said she wasn’t Mariah; I meant the idea of it. If I’d seen her, without hearing any of this, I’d have known her.”

“Her aunt did know, on some level. It was a case of denial. I expect Mariah looked quite different, with that ginger hair, to allow anyone who didn’t want to believe it, not to believe it.”

Bobby nodded again. “Well, then, maybe I’d have done the same as Edna; I don’t know. Nobody I know wanted to hurt Mariah, but the thing is, it might not be Mariah they wanted dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“You spoke of a double life. It might’ve been the other one-that other self-the one you found. It could be the person who killed her didn’t even know Mariah existed. Because I can’t imagine anyone would want to hurt Mariah. That’s it, plain and simple.” He sat forward, elbows on knees, hands limply clasped, staring at the little bit of pavement not taken up by flower containers. He opened his mouth to say something but said nothing.

He looked helplessly at the big container of blue hydrangeas near his leg, as if their language had finally failed him.

9

Prada, Valentino, Fendi-Jury found himself in DS Cummins’s house holding a whiskey and looking at a wall of shoes, cubbyhole after cubbyhole, designer after designer. In the corner beside this collection was a wooden coatrack holding a short red jacket (hers), a down-to-the-ground black wool coat (hers), and a rather worn-looking raincoat (either hers or his)-and all of them decidedly undesigner.

The shoes, though, would cover a painter’s palette: rose red, blues that ran the gamut from cerulean to sapphire, silver straps of snakeskin, carmine straps of satin. There must have been a hundred pairs.

“It’s an obsession, I expect you could say,” said Chris Cummins with a good-natured laugh at herself.

David Cummins rolled his eyes. “It’s her obsession all right.”

But it can’t be your money, thought Jury. If Mariah Cox’s one pair of Jimmy Choos had been six or seven hundred, what must this collection be worth? DS Cummins couldn’t afford this on his detective sergeant’s salary; perhaps he was independently wealthy. Or she was. That was more likely.

Their modest cottage and its fittings were nowhere in line with Chris Cummins’s shoes. The three-piece suite in front of the tile fireplace in the living room was covered with the rather clammy feel of microsuede. The curtains at the front windows were cotton splashed about with dahlias, gray blue on blue. Stuck about like matchstick displays were specimens of old reed chairs with turned or spindle legs that might have been antiques and possibly valuable.

That had been the front room-parlor (to the husband) or living room (to the wife). Jury detected the south of England in her speech, the north in his. Pretty far north, Newcastle north, possibly. He sounded much like Jury’s cousin by marriage, Brendan. Someone here had money, he thought.

The shoes were in a small sitting room containing a large round table and four maple captain’s chairs. It might have doubled as a dining room, with a wall of shoes in place of a wall of wine. Jury smiled.

“I knew it was Jimmy Choo,” she said, “without seeing the label.”

It was hard for Jury to fault Cummins’s taking a police photograph out of the station, seeing that Chris would never wear any of these shoes to a policeman’s hip-hop, or to tea at the Ritz, or on the Eurostar to Paris. Or skiing in the Alps. Chris was in a wheelchair. In the corner of the room, where those skis might have been leaning against the wall, were crutches instead.

She saw his look, looked herself at the crutches, and said, “I’m afraid I haven’t mastered those. But I will.” Her tone was exceptionally sad, but she quickly short-circuited this by wheeling over to the shoe collection. From her chair, she reached midway up the wall and took down a high-heeled shoe, a glittering nude-colored extravaganza, sequined and peep-toed. “Christian Louboutin. He’s my favorite designer.” It was actually quite beautiful, thought Jury.