The Winds of Change Read Online Free PDF Page A

He couldn’t even get visiting privileges. He’s not one to accept failure. He wants what he wants and he’ll take it if that’s the only way. The police there could well be right.’
    ‘Who did you have dealings with?’
    ‘Macalvie. He was the DCI. Now he’s a commander, I think. He’s tenacious, that’s for sure.’
    Jury smiled. ‘I know him. Tenacity is only the tip of the iceberg. I don’t think he knows what ‘cold case’ means. He never gives up.’
    ‘Cop after my own heart.
    ‘I’ll tell him you said that.’

    ‘Angel Gate,’ said Brian Macalvie, on the phone with Jury. ‘That’s the name of the house. She was found in the gardens.’ He was speaking of the victim, the dead woman they’d found lying on a stone bench in a stone enclosure.
    To Jury the name-Angel Gate-sounded mythical. Gates of ivory, gates of horn.
    ‘We don’t know who she is. She was shot dead on with a .22. Chest. We haven’t found the weapon. By now it’s probably at the bottom of the Ex.’
    Jury made a small noose of the telephone cord. A .22. The little girl in Hester Street was shot with a .22. Not that this meant anything. He was in his flat, sitting in the one comfortable chair in front of the bookcase going over the autopsy report again together with the findings of the Hester Street house canvasing. ‘No leads at all?’
    ‘No. We’re running her fingerprints. DNA won’t help unless we have something to compare it with, obviously.’ He sounded impatient. ‘Declan Scott did see this woman once in the company of his wife. This was in Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. She was also seen by the Angel Gate cook. But that was nearly three years ago.’
    Jury said, ‘Well, then, you do have some sort of ID.’
    ‘Uh-uh, Jury. Scott has no idea why she was with his wife; the cook - who’s no longer there - has no idea who she is, either. All she recalls is that the woman came to see Mary Scott. But neither cook nor Scott can ID her. No one in Brown’s recognizes the face, either.’ Macalvie was silent for a moment. ‘This case needs your chronic melancholia, Jury.’
    Jury moved the receiver from his ear, looked at it and returned it. ‘What in hell are you talking about?’
    ‘About Declan Scott.’
    ‘Goon.’
    lt took Macalvie a few moments to go on. ‘It’s hard to be around Scott for more than fifteen minutes. Have you ever known anyone like that?’
    Jury reached round and pulled a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry from the bookcase, thought for a moment as he thumbed through the preface of the Dickinson book. He said, ‘Thomas Wentworth Higginson.’
    ‘Who the hell’s he?’
    ‘Emily Dickinson’s amanuensis, you could say. Her literary critic, editor publisher-whatever. Anyway, that’s exactly what he said about her, that he could hardly stay in the same room with her for more than fifteen minutes. That she was so intense, so emotionally needy, she overwhelmed him. Not surprising, considering her poetry. What about Declan Scott?’
    ‘The little girl, her name was Flora. She wasn’t his daughter, actually, but you’d never know it to hear him talk about her. About them. The wife died six months after the child disappeared.’
    A double blow. ‘How did she die?’
    ‘Heart, apparently. Scott found her in the garden. A garden within a garden, a sort of secret garden. You know.’
    ‘No, I never had one of those. This is where you found the body this morning?’
    ‘That was in another part of the garden, at the bottom.’
    ‘Still. Coincidence?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Who else is there? In the house?’
    ‘The only other full-time person is the housekeeper. A Rebecca Owen, the cook and housekeeper, but even she doesn’t sleep there. He lives alone. There’s little connection at all, he says, between him and the dead woman. He didn’t really know her.’
    ‘The words ‘little’ and ‘really’ strike me as the operative terms. He did have some connection, right?’
    ‘I told