The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  Not a calm book at all.

  There was no one now in the lounge of the inn but them. A couple who had come too late for the dining room had finished up their meal in that part of the long front room reserved for the lounge bar and left. The Old Silent was a warm and friendly pub: copper and brass glinted; dark wood chairs and benches with flowered cushions were set in configurations around tables that invited the sort of comradely talk that had engaged the couple who had just left.

  It was in the saloon bar that Jury was sitting, near the door that led to the public bar through which he heard muted voices. There was no other sound except for the steady ticking of the long-case clock, the occasional spark and sputter of a crumbling log in the fireplace.

  There was no reason that he couldn't have taken his drink and moved into the lounge proper to sit nearer the fire. Indeed, as they were the room's only occupants now, nothing would have been more natural than for him to displace the black cat from the sedan chair with some comment about the way cats always took the best seat in the house.

  But there was something about her that discouraged such an approach; she seemed so totally immersed, not in that book (of which a page hadn't turned) but in some private world, just as she had been in the museum, earlier. When she looked over the edge of the book, up and past him, she might have been reviewing some inner terrain and, frowning, found something wanting in it, something missing.

  Then she would return to Camus, to the same page, holding the book in one hand before her face. Without the coat she seemed thinner. Her hand remained resolutely on the bag planted firmly beside her; the other held the book in such a way it blocked her face. The wrist below the elegant hand-long, tapering fingers-was slightly bony; the gold bracelet had slid halfway down the arm; and the gold band on her finger looked loose.

  She was wearing a silk shantung suit, a narrowly pleated skirt and a short jacket, very plain and (he thought) very expensive. The diffused light of the lamp and fire lent the same pale umber to both suit and hair.

  For another twenty minutes they sat there. When the clock struck eleven, she looked up. Jury could hear, from the public bar, the publican make his final call for Time. She closed her book, set it beside her handbag, and he thought she meant to rise and leave. But she still sat.

  Sounds of the customers from the bar leaving carried in from the small car park; a few of them came out through the lounge.

  Then the headlamps of a car dazzled the window before they were switched off. A door slammed, and Jury heard the approach of footsteps on the walk.

  She sat in that rather stern and spinsterish way she had adopted after putting aside her book-hands folded in her lap and feet planted firmly together.

  A man walked in the door-a man as well- and expensively groomed as she. He was perhaps in his late forties, the sort who looks fit from exercise (the sort Jury never got) and time spent under a sunlamp. He glanced at Jury without interest.

  His attention was concentrated on the woman, who now rose, pushing herself as would an elderly person who has difficulty getting out of a chair. She still held her bag tightly.

  There was no greeting, no handclasp, kiss, or even an exchange of smiles. Her visitor sat down without removing his coat, a dark Chesterfield, which he unbuttoned before he threw his arm across the back of the sofa in a careless, even indolent fashion. The fine features, the cut of his clothes, the grace of movement, bore the stamp of the gentleman. Yet the woman still stood while he sat. If his general demeanor hadn't told Jury that the visitor must be on very intimate terms with her, this failure of social grace surely did. He then said something to her and she sat down with a sadly compliant look.

  It struck Jury as odd that he had been able to observe so closely the physical details of her person, right down to her wedding band, and yet was not close enough to hear the words that passed between them. The man spoke softly but in a rush. To his low current of words, her own contribution was no more than a word tightly wedged in, much like the bag between herself and the chair arm, breaking in whenever her companion showed the slightest sign of stopping the flow; even then, his hand raised up against her own response.

  That what he said was evidently not to her liking was clear from her adamantine look, her glancing away from him to gaze at the fire, and back again as if there was no place, really, for her eyes to travel. The pale coral of her lips took on a golden glaze from the light, and her mouth was set like marble. She looked resolute and unbending.

  Having said his piece or made his argument or whatever it was, he sat back, withdrew a silver case that winked in the firelight, and tapped a cigarette on it before lighting it. After waiting a few moments while she stared into the fire, he leaned forward as if willing her to loosen her resolve, to return her eyes to his face. Eventually, she did so, very slowly.

  He said something and rose, still with that rather insouciant manner coupled with an air of belligerence.

  Her head, gilded by the light, was bent slightly as if she had been bested or beaten in some serious game. Her arms rested on the chair arms, hands dangling, one thumb worrying the gold band and the sapphire ring. It was as if she were considering removing them and putting them in his hand.

  Slowly she pulled her handbag like a dead weight to her lap. She pushed back the leather flap and withdrew what looked like an envelope or a letter. She had taken it out at dinner and returned it to her bag again and again as if this were a magic ritual that must be performed. She stood up with this piece of paper-letter or whatever it was-and said something Jury couldn't hear.

  Still she held the bag before her like a breviary, its leather flap back and dangling, as if the thing were now empty, useless and bereft of a valuable possession.

  He reached over, snatched the letter from her hand, and tossed it in the fire.

  For a moment they regarded one another, still oblivious to any other presence in the room, so intent were they upon whatever business had drawn them together. The man turned and started for the door.

  She stood there, just her profile in light, the rest of her in shadow, like a figure turned to stone by an angry god.

  "Roger."

  It was the first clear word Jury had heard. The man made a halting sort of turn and she reached into the bag, pulled out a gun, and shot him in the chest. He stood staring blindly as if the shot had gone wild. But in the few seconds it took Jury to stand and overturn the table beside him, the man crumpled and fell. She pointed the gun down and shot him again.

  2

  The name of Roger Healey had not registered with Jury when he had heard it in the inn in West Yorkshire. The West Yorkshire policeman who had arrested Healey's wife the night before in the Old Silent had told Jury the man had something to do with art or music-he wasn't sure what-except that he was important. The local detective sergeant from Keighley certainly knew the family was important in these parts, and his ambivalence about arresting one of its members was clear.

  Superintendent Sanderson had no such ambivalence, either about having Jury as the single witness to the murder of Roger Healey, or about having a member of the C.I.D. of the Metropolitan Police on his turf. Sanderson was a tall, rail-thin policeman with a practiced, inconclusive manner that would throw anyone off guard. In the unlikely event Jury's testimony would ever be needed, it would carry far more weight than that of some myopic villager. As of now, Jury could get off his turf and out of the investigation now proceeding with the Yorkshire constabulary.

  Sanderson would have no difficulty proceeding. It wasn't even a case of rounding up suspects, of listening to the regulars in the public bar of the Old Silent give conflicting reports of who did what to whom; and the five people who had rushed in from the bar were clearly relieved that they were straight out of it. They had stood about in horrified silence until police had arrived. It was Jury who had summoned them.

  And it was Jury to whom she had, just as silently, handed over the.22 automatic. No resistance. She hadn't said a word, had sat down
in the same chair, had answered none of his questions, had not looked at him again.

  The inquest was convened the following day merely to establish certain facts, such as the identity of the dead man. The identity of the perpetrator was clear.

  Her name was Nell Healey and Jury had been right about her relationship to the dead man; she was his wife.

  Given the reputation, wealth, and influence of the Citrine family in West Yorkshire, and given her lack of any criminal record, she was released on bail. That, Jury knew, would buy her at least a year of freedom; the case would be unlikely to get to the Crown Court before then, not with all the other stuff on the docket. The only question that had gone unanswered was why she'd done it. But largely it seemed to be the sympathy engendered by her past woes that tipped the scale in her favor.

  It was those woes about which Jury was now reading in the newspaper that lay on his desk at New Scotland Yard. He remembered the Healey-Citrine names. It had happened eight years ago and had struck him as especially dreadful.

  "Really sad, that was," said Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, who'd dug out the clippings, and whose own reading matter was a copy of Time Out. "You wonder, how could anybody do that to a kid?" Wiggins was slowly stirring the spoon in his mug of tea and tapping it against the rim with all of the solemnity of an altar boy perfuming the air with incense.

  Just as religiously, Wiggins opened a fresh packet of Scott's Medicinal Charcoal Biscuits, taking pains that the wrapping wouldn't crackle. It was not often that Jury didn't answer him, but this was one of those times, and it disturbed Wiggins (as if it were his own fault) that the superintendent's mood, usually calm, almost soothing, was going sour over this case, and not Jury's own case, either. Thus, Wiggins felt impelled to talk doggedly on, even though it might be better to shut up. And since he was never one much for epigrammatic or witty turns of phrase, he would trap himself into further cliche-ridden sentiments.

  Jury's mood was as black as the biscuit Wiggins was now crumbling into a cup of water, and, irrationally irritated by his sergeant's pursuit of some elusive and Platonic Idea of health just as he was reading of the kidnapping of one boy and the disappearance of the friend who had been with him. Jury said (rather sharpish, Wiggins thought), "Most people settle for digestives, Wiggins. And they don't have to stew them in water."

  His quick response was triggered less by Jury's tone than by Jury's replying at all. Said Wiggins, brightly, "Oh, but digestives don't really do anything for you, sir. Now, this-"

  Wanting to forestall a lecture on the benefits of charcoal to the digestive tract, Jury said, "I'm sure it does," and smiled to indicate that he'd only been joking, anyway.

  It had happened in Cornwall when Billy Healey and his stepmother, Nell Citrine Healey, had been on holiday, together with a friend of Billy's named Toby Holt.

  Keeping his eye on the newspaper, Jury shook a cigarette from a packet of Players and read Roger Healey's statement to the press. It was formal, almost pedantic, full of catch-phrases of grief and comments about his son's prodigious talent as a pianist, so that one almost got the idea that if the kidnapper didn't see to it he practiced every day, it would be similar to a diabetic going into insulin shock. The usual "we will do anything in our power to see our boy is returned…"; the usual… police are working round the clock"; the usual.

  Except that the stepmother had made no comment at all.

  Jury tried to put himself in the place of a father whose child had been kidnapped. He had never had children, but he had been close enough to several that he could feel at least something of what it must be like to lose one. Certainly, he'd seen enough grief-stricken parents in his work. Some had been silent; some had gone in for marathon talking. But none had given a Hyde Park speech. Jury wasn't being fair, he supposed. After all, Healey was a music critic and columnist used to putting thoughts into words; he was an articulate man, and probably a composed one.

  The photo of Billy himself looked almost out of place amidst this platitudinous talk. In the old shot of Billy Healey, the camera had caught the boy in a moment when he must have been looking toward something at a distance. His chin was raised, his mouth open slightly, his eyes transfixed and somehow puzzled. The angle of light eclipsed a portion of his face, bringing out the other in even bolder relief, accentuating the straight nose, high cheekbone. He was handsome, pale, his hair brownish and silky-looking. He looked, Jury thought, a little other-worldly, unapproachable, and with the intensity of his expression, unassailable. He looked more like his stepmother than his father.

  And of her, there was only the picture in which she was being escorted from the house, and where she must quickly have drawn part of the paisley scarf she wore up over her face. Since her head was also down, the reporters were getting a very poor view. And taking a poor view, given the underlying tone of resentment that Mrs. Roger Healey was unavailable for comment. Her husband had done most of the talking.

  The stepmother was good copy; she'd been the only one present, except for Billy's friend, when the boys had disappeared. Given the rather tasteless litter of photos and snaps this particular newspaper had mustered, it was clear they'd like to keep a story of the kidnapping humming along. There were several old snapshots of Billy, angled down the side of the account, one of him with a couple of schoolmates, very fuzzy. Another of him leaning against a fence with the other boy, Toby Holt. Sitting on a big stone slab in front of them was a small, dark-haired girl, squinting into the camera.

  "And the chief's not too happy, as you can imagine," said Wiggins, following his own train of thought.

  "He never is, not where I'm concerned."

  "Wondering what you were doing in Stanbury, anyway."

  "It's next to Haworth. I'm a big Brontë fan."

  "When you were supposed to be in Leeds."

  Jury looked up. "What is this, a catechism? Baleful mumbles."

  "You might be witness for the Crown," Wiggins went on, relentlessly.

  "Would he rather I'd be witness against? He knows damned well I won't be called as one. Sanderson will give my evidence. It's West Yorkshire's case, not mine."

  Wiggins was making a little sandwich of two black biscuits and something slathered in between.

  "What's that thing?"

  "Charcoal biscuits and a bit of tofu and tahini. I'm a martyr to my digestion, as you know." The whole thing crumbled as he bit down on it; he wiped his mouth with the huge handkerchief tucked into his collar.

  Jury looked up from the files and down at the notes Wiggins had made. "This publisher Healey worked for. Get me in to see him."

  "Sir." Wiggins's hand hesitated over the telephone. "When?"

  "This afternoon. Three, four."

  "It's nearly two." The hand free of the tofu sandwich hovered over the telephone. "I was only thinking."

  "That it's not my case. You're right. Get me in to see this publishing tyro, Martin Smart." Jury smiled.

  Still Wiggins was slowly chewing his sandwich. "The guv'nor's complaining-"

  Guv'nor? Racer? Since when was Wiggins calling him that?

  "-you're waffling on a couple of cases. The Soho one, for example."

  It was a drug-related death, nothing for C.I.D., something the Drug Squad could handle easily. Racer perfectly well knew this. Anything to keep Jury from using his talents in a more attention-grabbing way. Name and picture in paper. Racer hated it.

  "I'm sick, Wiggins."

  Wiggins put on his best bedside manner. "There's no question there, sir. Pale as a ghost you've been looking. You need leave, you do, not another case."

  Jury grinned. "I know. So get me an appointment with Healey's publisher." Jury rose, feeling lighter than he had in weeks.

  "I'm a martyr to my digestion, Wiggins. I'm going to see your guv'nor."

  3

  "Sick leave?"

  Chief Superintendent A. E. Racer made an elaborate display of cupping his ear with his hand as if the ear couldn't quite believe it. "Sickleave?"
/>   Jury knew that for Racer this was, if not the opportunity of a lifetime, at least the best one that had come along that day: here was a chink in the old Jury armor, a rent in the old corduroy jacket, an occasion that called for much more than telling Superintendent Jury a policeman's life was full of grief, since it apparently was. Jury could almost see the tiny guns taking aim in Racer's mind, trying for a salvo that would never go off.

  "You've never applied for sick leave."

  "Perhaps that's why I'm sick."

  " 'Sick leave' is Wiggins's department. He takes it for all of us."

  Request denied. Punch time clock. Wheel to grindstone. There're none of us who couldn't use a bit of a rest, especially me. But you don't see me lying down on the job.

  "Well, he looks sick to me," said Fiona Clingmore, who'd come in to collect two big stacks of paper that she was now balancing on her forearms at the same time her eyes were on the booby-trap box Racer had rigged to catch the cat Cyril.

  Did Racer really think he could outwit Cyril? Fiona had asked this question as she sat filing her nails into glossy claws. Gets worse every day, the chief does.

  "If you want me to bring a note from my doctor, I will."

  "I'm sure Wiggins can rip out a page from one of his prescription pads. Or furnish some Harley Street letterheads. His desk must be littered with them." Racer smiled his razorblade smile and looked at Jury over folded hands, the thumbs making propeller circles round each other.

  Fiona looked from Jury to Racer.

  "He's worn out, he is. You only have to look to see he's dead on his feet, practically."

  Dressed in her usual black, this one the light wool dress with the tightly zipped bodice and pinch-pleated skirt, Fiona looked like she was ready to crash a funeral service, given the seamed stockings and black hood hugging her tarnished gold hair. Whenever he looked at Fiona, Jury thought of old trunks filled with taffeta tea-dance gowns, ribbon-tied letters, the little paper valentines punched from books that were handed round at school…