The Winds of Change by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes [Grimes, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780670033270
Amazon: B0022W8PAQ
Publisher: Viking Books
Published: 2004-08-18T23:00:00+00:00

24

Alice Miers sat in the living room of her fine house in Belgravia looking intently, even squinting, through her narrow reading glasses at the photograph, then handed it back to Richard Jury with a shake of her head. ‘I don’t know, Superintendent; I’ve never to my knowledge seen her before.’ Jury took back the photo. He had always wondered what that qualifying ‘to my knowledge’ meant. It suggested to him a hesitancy, as if the person being questioned felt some outside agency, some broader ‘knowledge’ would explain it.

‘You’re sure?’

‘No. But only because I’m not absolutely sure of anything.’ She smiled.

Jury’s smile answered her own, except that his wasn’t wan.

‘She has something to do with my daughter?’

‘It would appear so.’

‘Declan doesn’t have any idea?’

‘No. She might have come out of the past.’

‘That’s reasonable.’ She sat chin in hand, looking wide eyed.

Again he smiled. She was having a joke at his expense, but he hardly cared. He told her the circumstances surrounding this dead woman’s appearance.

Alice Miers sat back. ‘It’s not strange that Mary might have come across an old acquaintance, but it certainly is strange she would have lied to Declan. Roedean. That’s such an idiotic lie. Too easy to check, as you already know.’

‘To credit your daughter with some sense, though, she’d have no reason to believe anyone would check. Not her husband, certainly.

He’s a man with a great respect for privacy. And she wouldn’t be anticipating any investigation. So ‘old school chum’ would seem to be an easy explanation.’

‘You’re right about Declan. It’s one of his great qualities. And he has many of those.’ She sat back, hands folded in her lap. ‘Perhaps because of that, he’s a person one shouldn’t want to practice subterfuge upon.’ She turned her face toward the window and the garden beyond it. ‘Our own lives appear to us as so discontinuous-one thing ends, another begins, it’s broken off and something else comes along–marriage, divorce, remarriage, a child.., death.’ Here she paused and looked at the fire. ‘And nothing seems to run through it. But with family, something does run through it, something does cohere. A family is ballast.’

‘But if you don’t get along with other members of it?’ She rolled her eyes, fine gray eyes set deep in her head, making the cheekbones even more pronounced. ‘You’re not going to say ‘dysfunctional’? We used to say ‘unhappy.’ Tolstoy certainly did.

But none of those good old words are invited to the party anymore.

They’re vague, abstract. But ‘dysfunctional’ is so concrete, isn’t it? It sounds like something gone wrong in a car’s electrical system, or a hangover. When applied to such a protean concept as family, though, it means nothing more than: ‘unhappy.’ At any rate, my harangue here means simply that family is important. It astonishes me that people expect the members of a family to get along and when they don’t get along, they’ve let us down. I always think of a family as being greater than the sum of its parts. Something runs through it, as I said, like the pattern in this carpet.

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