Help the Poor Struggler

by Martha Grimes

  “Beth insisted on getting that Q.C. in London to call you people —”

  “It’s just as well one of us knows someone in high places.” She turned to Jury. “Leonard Matching, Q.C. He’s to stand for Parliament in Brixton.” From the vague reports Jury had got of mealymouthed Matching, he doubted very much if Brixton would stand for him. The only reason Jury and Wiggins were here was that an assistant commissioner was a personal friend and had handed the request down the line to Chief Superintendent Racer, who had wasted no time in deploying Jury to the provinces. Too bad (Jury imagined Racer thinking) it was only a hundred and sixty-odd miles from London and the old market town of Dorchester rather than Belfast. Jury could just guess how much Inspector Neal enjoyed having his authority presumed upon, but Neal was too much of a gentleman to make Jury’s life hell. Many would have.

  “. . . and not two decent relations to rub together,” Beth Riley was saying in a shocking display of acrimony. The child was dead. What had family connections to do with it?

  “All right, all right, pet,” said Riley, in some attempt to shush her. Though why the father should have to minister to the totally unfeeling stepmother, Jury couldn’t say. Indeed, he couldn’t see the two of them together at all, if it came to that. She lost no chance to remind him of her superior education, and Jury simply let her get it out of her system as his eye traveled the room. Over the fireplace were photographs that might bear out her claim, for all its coldness. There was even one of those mahogany coats-of-arms that tourists seemed forever gathering in the race for their roots; there were also framed documents, one with a seal.

  “I’m sorry to intrude upon your grief,” said Jury to Mrs. Riley. His tone was icy. “But there are a few questions.”

  Beth Riley sat back, said nothing, left the question-and-answer period up to her husband. Simon had been (she reminded Jury) Albert’s son.

  “Had you remembered anything at all since you talked to Inspector Neal, Mr. Riley? About your son’s friends . . . or enemies?” Predictably, Riley disclaimed any enemies — how could a lad of twelve have enemies? It was true the Dorset police had established to their satisfaction that Simon Riley had neither. He was not popular with his schoolmates, but neither was he hated. Nor did anyone seriously believe a schoolboy would be carrying the sort of knife around Dorchester that had inflicted the wound.

  Inspector Neal had looked almost unhappier than the father himself when Neal had said psychopath. What else could it be? You know what that means, Superintendent. Child-killer. In Dorchester?

  I wouldn’t like it much in London, either, Jury had thought.

  “ . . . psychopath.” Albert Riley echoed the word of Inspector Neal. He was wiping his eyes with a much-used handkerchief. Jury’s feeling about Riley had changed when he realized that the man probably did have to work to keep from crumbling. Certainly, he was getting no support from his wife.

  But with Neal’s and Riley’s verdict upon who killed Simon, Jury did not agree. The single wound in the boy’s back was clean, neat, quick — not the multiple stab-wounds one might have expected from a person who was out for blood or boys. There had been no molesting of the body. This was all Jury had to go on, but he still thought the murder was probably premeditated and that it was Simon — not just any child — the killer had been tracking. According to Neal’s report, Simon’s mates — though not close ones — hadn’t known he stopped in that alley to smoke fags and look at dirty pictures. Thinking of it that way, the wrong questions were perhaps being asked. Certainly, it was possible the boy had an “enemy.” It was also possible that the Rileys themselves had.

  He did not pose that question at the moment. All he said to Riley was that he wasn’t convinced the boy’s death was the work of a deranged mind.

  Riley looked utterly astonished. “What other reason could there be? You sound like you think someone wanted to — murder Simon.”

  “I could think of half a dozen, Mr. Riley. They could all be wrong, of course.” Jury allowed Mrs. Riley to give him another shot of Jameson’s, more to keep her in a comradely mood than because he wanted a drink. Beth seemed actually curious about other reasons. She perked up a bit. Jury found her curiosity and perkiness as depressing as the gray weight of the sky beyond the window. “One is that someone actually meant to kill your son — I’m sorry,” he added, when Riley flinched at the suggestion. Jury took a sip of the whiskey under the approving eye of Beth Riley. Approving what? That the law drank on duty? Or that someone had meant to kill her stepson? “Another is that Simon might have known something that someone didn’t want him to know. Seen something that someone hadn’t wanted him to see. Simon could have had knowledge he didn’t even know he had, too. The thing is that he was in an alley that none of his schoolmates seemed to know about. It’s not on his way home from school. And school had been out over an hour, if the medical examiner fixed the time correctly. Somewhere between five and perhaps eight o’clock. It might make one think that someone had been, possibly, following him —”

  Riley was into his third whiskey, drinking with blind eyes, the handkerchief wadded against his face. “He could have been dragged there —”

  Jury was already shaking his head. “No. There’d be — signs, if that were the case.” Bloodstains, marks — Jury didn’t elaborate.

  The Rileys exchanged glances, but shook their heads.

  “Could he have been meeting someone?”

  They looked blank.

  “Kids get up to things —”

  Riley was out of his chair like a shot. Wasn’t it enough the boy was dead? Did police have to go about ruining his character, too? Even Beth got in on this scene. She mightn’t have missed Simon, but the family name was something else again.

  Jury rose and apologized for intruding upon them, as he took another look at the pictures, the memorabilia over the fireplace. Beth as a young girl, Beth as a young woman. Nothing of Riley that he could see. Wiggins stood beside him, notebook clapped shut, pocketing his pen, taking out his lozenges.

  February was hell this close to the sea. Dorchester was ten miles from it, but that was close enough for Wiggins.

  • • •

  They stopped outside and Jury lit a cigarette. “We wouldn’t have got any more out of them. And the boy’s funeral is tomorrow. Leave it for now.”

  The queue of shoppers had disappeared, but Jury saw in the faces of passersby more fear than curiosity. They walked at the edge of the pavement, as if coming nearer the scene of such a tragedy might contaminate them, might spread danger to their own children.

  The Closed sign hung a little askew. Wiggins was studying a brace of pheasant, feet trussed up, heads dangling down. “No need to cause more suffering.” Jury thought he was referring to the Rileys, until he added, “That’s why I’ve been thinking of going vegetarian.”

  Jury tried to drag his mind from the man whose son was dead and the son himself, to say, “No more plaice and chips, Wiggins? Hard to imagine.”

  Wiggins considered. “I think I’d still eat fish. But not flesh, sir.”

  “No more missionaries, that it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind.” Jury smiled bleakly. “There’s Judge Jeffries restaurant just down the road. You hungry? Nothing like eating under the eye of the Hanging Judge.” Jury looked at the pheasant.

  Man, beast, bird. Life is cheap.

  II

  And he knew just how cheap when they got back to Wynfield, where the Dorset police had its headquarters.

  “There’s been another one,” said Inspector Neal, looking a little grayer than when Jury had last seen him. “In Wynchcoombe. Another boy: name, Davey White. Choirboy.” Neal’s voice broke and he did not look at all pleased that his theory was probably being proved correct. At the same time he looked slightly relieved, and guilty for the relief. “Not ours, though. This is the Devon-Cornwall constabulary’s manor. Wynchcoombe’s in Dartmoor.” He was interrupted by the telephone — a call, apparently, from h
is superior, for he kept nodding. “Yes, yes, yes. We’ve got every man on it we can spare . . . yes, I know the town’s in a panic . . .” After more from the other end, Neal hung up, shaking his head.

  Jury said nothing except, “How far’s Wynchcoombe, then?”

  Neal looked a little surprised. “Forty miles, about.”

  A police constable — a pleasant-looking young man — showed Jury the map on the wall. “You’ll want to go to headquarters first, I expect. That’s just outside Exeter —”

  “Why do I want to go there? What’s the quickest way to Wynchcoombe?”

  “Well, I was just thinking you’d want to check with headquarters. Sir,” he added weakly.

  “It’d only waste time.”

  Neal was making a fuss over some papers on his desk seemingly in desperate need of rearrangement. “That’s Divisional Commander Macalvie’s patch, Mr. Jury.”

  “I don’t much care if it’s Dirty Harry Callahan’s. We’ve got a boy murdered in Dorchester and now another one in Wynchcoombe. So I’d like to get there as soon as possible. The divisional commander will understand.”

  The constable just looked at Jury. Then he said, “I worked with him once. Right cock-up I made of something and —” He pulled back the corners of his mouth. In a distorted voice he said, “I loss ta teeth. Crowns, these are.”

  Jury picked up the map the constable had marked the route on as Wiggins leaned closer and peered at his teeth. “I only wish I had your dentist.”

  II

  The Church in the Moor

  THREE

  THE silver chalice lay on the floor of the choir vestry, staining it darker with the wine that had been mixed with water now mixed with blood. Before the Scene of Crimes man had come, no one could touch it. After he had finished with it, no one wanted to. The lab crew of the Devon-Cornwall constabulary seemed to be avoiding it, superstitiously. As for the pictures, the police photographer had apologized to the curate for the little bursts of light in Wynchcoombe Church.

  Police, both uniformed branch and CID, were all over the church, searching the chancel aisles, the nave, the main vestry. Wiggins and several others were outside going over the Green, on which the church fronted, and the deserted church walk, leading to the vestry doors on the other side.

  Dr. Sanford, the local practitioner, had finished up his examination and said the boy had probably been dead around ten hours. The curate couldn’t believe that the boy could have been there all that time and no one found him until three or four hours ago.

  It had surprised Jury, too, who was standing down by the altar with TDC Coogan. He looked up at the altar, his mind a blank. Wynchcoombe had a beautiful church here. Even with its high spire, it appeared smaller on the outside than inside. The chancel and nave together measured over a hundred feet.

  He could think of nothing to say to Betty Coogan, who was crying. She couldn’t help herself, she said; she’d known Davey and his granddad, the vicar of Wynchcoombe Church. “Whoever’d want to do this to Davey White?”

  In any other circumstances, Policewoman Coogan would have been a gift with her red hair and good legs. But not now.

  It was the expression on the clear face of Davey White that had struck Jury most — a look not of terror but more of impish surprise, the mouth slightly open, smiling even, as if he’d thought it had been rather a wizard trick, this being struck without warning. Now here he lay, ten years old, another schoolboy, dead two days after Simon Riley.

  Betty Coogan was talking about the boy in Dorchester, blowing her nose with Jury’s handkerchief, voicing the opinion of the Dorset police: they had a psychopathic killer on their hands. Jury was more inclined to agree than he had been before, but he still withheld judgment. The method was the same. Simple. A knife in the back.

  The fingerprint man came up to Jury and Coogan. “Where in hell’s Macalvie?”

  She shook her head, another bout of tears threatening. “In Exeter, on that robbery case. I tried to get him. Well, they must have got him by now —”

  The print expert mumbled. “Ought to be here —”

  He was. Divisional Commander — or Detective Chief Superintendent — Brian Macalvie came through the heavy oak doors of Wynchcoombe Church like the icy Dartmoor wind he brought with him. And he didn’t tiptoe down the aisle.

  The look he gave his TDC Betty Coogan did nothing at all to steady her. She seemed to sway a little, and Jury put his hand under her arm.

  Chief Superintendent Macalvie looked briefly up at the altar and slightingly at them and said to Jury, “Who the hell are you?”

  Jury took out his warrant card; Macalvie glanced at it and then at TDC Coogan (having dismissed Jury and all the credentials that went with him), saying, “You knew where I was. Why the bloody hell didn’t you get to me sooner?”

  She simply lowered her head.

  “Where’re you hiding the body, Betts? Might I have a wee look?”

  There was a Scot’s burr, probably put on when he felt like it. Macalvie’s accent seemed to have got stuck somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. But the Scotch ancestry reigned at the moment: accent, coppery hair, blue eyes like tiny blowtorches. Jury could understand why Betty Coogan didn’t snap back.

  Still with head lowered, she said, “He’s in the choir vestry.”

  • • •

  Macalvie stood in the vestry, still with hands jammed in trouser pockets, holding back his raincoat — which was the way he had come in. “By now, fifty percent of anything I could use has washed down the Dart.” It sounded as if he were privy to some invisible world of evidence from which mere, mortal cops (the Jurys of the world) were excluded. Macalvie had been standing and looking down at the body, looking round the vestry, looking out the vestry door. He was standing now at the door, still with his hands in his pockets, just like anyone who might have been speculating on a sudden change of weather.

  To his back, a CID sergeant named Kendall said, “Nothing’s been touched, sir. Except for Dr. Sanford’s examination of the body.”

  “That’s like saying an archaeologist left the digs as neat as my gran’s front parlor,” said Macalvie to the mist and the vestry walk lost in it.

  Jury saw Dr. Sanford look at Macalvie with a wild sort of anger — at the man standing there communing with the trees. The doctor opened his mouth, but shut it again.

  Constable Coogan, cheeks burning, decided to fight fire. “You’d think anyone else just looking at the crime scene before you got there erases clues —”

  Macalvie turned those blowtorch eyes on her. “It does.”

  He nodded at the chalice. “What’s that doing in the choir vestry?” Macalvie was down on one knee now, looking at the body of Davey White.

  Dr. Sanford was an avuncular man who must have had an extensive National Health list of patients, as Wynchcoombe was an extensive parish. His smile — his first mistake — was condescending: “I assure you, Chief Superintendent, that the boy wasn’t brained with the chalice. He was stabbed.”

  Macalvie favored Dr. Sanford with the same look he’d shot at TDC Coogan. “I didn’t say he wasn’t brained’, did I? I’m a simple, literal man. I asked a simple, literal question.” He turned back to the body.

  No one answered his question, so Dr. Sanford filled in the silence. “He’s been dead, I’d judge, since about six o’clock this morning. Of course —”

  “It could have been earlier or later.” Macalvie finished the comment for him. “Not even you can tell the exact time of death. Not even me.”

  Dr. Sanford controlled himself and went on: “There’s rigor, but the lividity —”

  “You think it’s hypostasis.”

  “Of course.” Sanford continued his discourse on the blood’s having drained and the darker patches of skin showing where the body had been in contact with the floor.

  Macalvie, still with his eyes on Davey White’s body, held out his hand as if he weren’t paying any more attention to Sanford than a pew or a prayer-cushion. “Give m
e your scalpel.”

  Dr. Sanford was clearly shocked; his tone was frosty: “And did you intend to perform the autopsy here and now? You do have a pathologist —” He stopped and looked extremely uneasy. He might just as well not have been there at all, given the lack of response. Still, the doctor plowed the furrow: “I really don’t think —”

  Macalvie’s hand was still outstretched. Jury imagined that when Macalvie was thinking himself, he didn’t want those thoughts lost in the crossfire of underlings — TDCs, doctors, or even Scotland Yard.

  Dr. Sanford reopened his bag and produced a scalpel.

  Macalvie made a tiny incision in the center of one of the purplish stains and a bit of blood oozed and trickled. He returned the scalpel, pulled down the boy’s vest, and said nothing.

  Again, as if it were necessary to fill up silences Macalvie left in his wake, Sergeant Kendall said, “The curate couldn’t understand how the lad could have been lying here for all that time —”

  “Because the kid wasn’t lying here all that time. That’s a bruise, not hypostasis.” He ignored Sanford and addressed himself to Jury, figuring, perhaps, since one nitwit had got it wrong, he wanted to hear if the other one would. It was the second time he’d spoken to Jury; Wiggins, he’d managed to neglect altogether. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right,” said Jury. “He probably wasn’t killed here and certainly hasn’t been lying here for ten hours.”

  Macalvie continued to stare at Jury, but said nothing. Then he turned to his fingerprint man and indicated the silver chalice that had been carefully dusted and photographed. “You through with that?”

  “Sir.” He nearly clicked his heels and handed over the chalice.

  In spite of its already having had a thorough going-over, Macalvie handled it with a handkerchief, holding it up to the light as if he were administering the sacraments.