him. âWho?â
âHelen Hawes. Of course, you donât want to drag her in when you talk to Rush, or heâll know Iâm trying to get information.â
âIâm not dragging her in, because Iâm not talking to Rush.â
Macalvie plowed on as if Jury hadnât spoken. âThe fact that Nell Hawes and your lady might both have died from the same cause. Probably you shouldnât mention that.â
âSheâs not my lady, sheâs A Divisionâs lady.â
âWould you mind filling me in on the details? All I know now is what I scraped together from newspapers and the Yardâs information office. She keeled over, sitting on a bench in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate, landed on some citizen sitting beside her.â
âThen you know it all.â
Macalvie looked truly amazed. âHow the hell could I know it all ? I wasnât there, much less was I first on the scene.â
It was Macalvieâs firm belief that if anyone got to a crime scene before he did, ninety percent of the usable evidence would blow off into the stratosphere. Jury smiled. âOkay, Iâll describe it all in relentless detail. Remember, though, I wasnât first on the scene. The gallery was full of people.â
âMeaning they tramped all over everything.â Macalvie looked disgusted and shoved another stick of gum in his mouth. Why was the world up and about when somebody got killed?
âI was in the Tateâs shop, the gift shop, when the commotion started. When I asked the guard, he told me a woman had suddenly died. They called West End Central; I just happened to be there and got there first.â
âStroke of luck.â
âNot mine.â
âA Divisionâs, I meant.â
âGood Lord! Is that a compliment?â As Macalvie looked off noncommittally toward the tower ruins at the other end of the bailey, Jury went on. âThe womanâFrances Hamilton was her nameâwho had been sitting on one of the benches in the Pre-Raphaelite collection suddenly fell to one side. The young lady beside her thought she was either being pushy or had fallen asleep, something like thatâunfortunately, the girl was more interested in touching up her boyfriend than in the woman beside her. She wasnât paying any attention to Frances Hamilton. Neither of them was until Mrs. Hamilton fell on her. No one saw anything out of the ordinary, from what I could see and hear. Remember, I wasnât doing the questioning. Only the observing, after A Division and the ambulance got there. Coronary occlusion. Or a stroke.â
âWhich?â
Oh, hell, thought Jury. âThe pathologist wasnât one hundred percent sure which. But she was on nitroglycerin, that was clear.â
Macalvieâs eyes burned into Juryâs. âCoronary occlusion, stroke. Vague, but theyâre still two different things, Jury.â
âNo kidding?â
âGo on.â
âWith what? Thatâs it.â
âThatâs what you call ârelentless detailâ? What pictures?â
Jury looked at him.
âWhat painting or paintings was she looking at?â
It had occurred to Jury, too, how much the painting she had been sitting in front of might have reminded her of her nephew. â The Death of Chatterton. The Henry Wallis painting.â
âGreat picture. But how do you know she was looking at it?â
âI donât. Do you think itâs important?â
âJury, I donât know whatâs important. Nell Hawes dropped over dead in front of some embroidered cushions. That doesnât mean looking at them killed her. And it doesnât mean it didnât , either.â
âThe painting on one side was Holman Hunt. A man and his mistress at a piano. Sad . . . â Jury shook himself free of this memory. âThe other side, I donât recall. Fanny Hamilton might not even have been paying