The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  As they walked across the stone courtyard, Melrose looked in through the mullioned window of the dining room where, at one end of the long table, were seated the Princess and Major Poges; at the other end, the Braines. Yet the panes were cloudy and the window so ivy-clad that the faces and forms bathed in the dull gold and rose light were broken into wavering squares-a blur of turquoise, a wedge of dark wool, a glint of a lavender sleeve. Having seen them in action, Melrose found it odd seeing them in this ornamental light. They seemed to dissolve and reform in the fragmented patterns of a kaleidoscope. Around the table, fluttering and disappearing and returning was the maid, Ruby, in a crisp white apron. Ann Denholme appeared in one of the panes and then fell away.

  "… and only twenty-nine, and I'm a millionaire. Can you believe that?"

  "Why not?"

  "I'm too young, goddammit," she said, kicking a stone back toward the pile.

  They had come to her "bike," which took Melrose utterly by surprise. He was expecting some fancy ten-speed; what he was looking at was a BMW approximately the size of a baby elephant. "You mean you ride this?"

  She sighed, lit another cigarette, and shook her head. "No, I walk it on a leash." Then she went on about early fame as she looked up at a night sky as smooth and black as onyx and just a few cold stars that looked eons apart and probably were. The moon was full and bright and luminous. From here the dining room window looked as illusory as a cascade of rainbow water. From the barn, whose outlines melted into the sky, came a series of hectic barks, and a dog came out of the darkness into a patch of moonlit ground. It was the border collie he'd seen earlier. The dog looked a bit too sharp for Melrose's taste; he preferred his own dog, Mindy. ("Your Ralph Lauren dog," said Trueblood, "countrified, under all that tangled nap, true gentrification.")

  From behind the fence, in the chicken-duck enclave came an occasional warm cluck. It had been an eventful day for the wildlife, thought Melrose. Tomorrow they'd probably want to visit the Tower of London. Closer now, the dog barked again.

  "I believe we're witness to the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime."

  But Ellen was still immersed in disturbed dreams of her own success as she lit a cigarette with a Zippo and clicked it shut. "I'm a millionaire." She cast a sidewise glance at Melrose to see if he was properly impressed. "In pounds," she added. "On one book," she added, taking no chances.

  "That is astonishing. What's the book? Was it your first?"

  "My second." Ellen appeared to want to bury the first. She leaned back against the bike, ankles crossed, a model's pose. "It's about New York City: Sauvage Savant it's called. It's very hot in L.A., too, incidentally. But, naturally, if you're a hot writer, it's always going to be New York, isn't it?"

  "Sauvage Savant," Melrose repeated. What a pretentious title. That must be the price one pays for being a hot, young New York writer. With what he thought was a with-it little grin, he said, "I expect there are a lot of 'literary savages' in your city?"

  "Say again?"

  "I'm referring to the title."

  "It's a deli in Queens."

  The collie, who had stationed himself a few feet away, cocked his head, in a wondering way. Melrose was trying to sort out the various New York boroughs. He could not position Queens on his mental map. "I see."

  He was quite sure the dog knew he was lying, given its expression. It was absolutely still but fully alert. Its silence was impressive; its stare, rather harrowing. If it couldn't read minds, it could probably read lips.

  "What happened was, the owner's French, and the sign painter is his cousin, French, too. Don't ask me what they're doing in Queens. Francois-I call him Frankie-wanted a clever Frenchy sign. It was supposed to be 'sausage' but his cousin just couldn't make the connection. Who could? A knowledgeable sausage on your rye with mayo? Frankie's a real horse's ass, which is why I like him. He knows I'm really the rage in New York, and he's expecting me to turn his deli into one of those clubby places, you know, like the Algonquin, where Dorothy Parker hung out. It was really when I hit it big that he worked up this 'savant' business. He parts his hair in the middle and wears an apron up to his armpits and has a straight mustache I think he just inks in with a ballpoint. Well, there's not much going in Queens by way of published writers; and I'm not Dorothy Parker."

  He was a little taken aback by this modest assessment of her own writing skill. "Who is?"

  As she pulled the strap of her helmet tight, she said, "See, I wanted to do something different; I couldn't stand one more book about Manhattan. I will personally vomit outside Doubleday if I see a window display of one more book about Manhattan. I'm doing all the others: it's to be a sort of trilogy, no, a quartet, I guess…" She pondered this as she studied the night sky.

  Why was the dog looking up there too? Melrose wondered. Had the collie and Ellen some affinity?

  "The Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens. Maybe I'll toss in the Jersey shore."

  "That's not New York." Melrose touched the collie's paw with his cane, to see if he could get a reaction. He didn't.

  "Who can tell anymore?"

  Melrose shifted his walking stick from one hand to another, thinking of this exotic city, so huge that part of it was an island surrounded by other islands and boroughs, each a kind of city in itself. He was wondering if perhaps he shouldn't take some sort of inventory of himself: was he spending too much time with his port and paper before the fireplace? Shuffling about his village until he would drop dead of a stroke across Miss Crisp's chamber pots? Or in Agatha's cottage in Plague Alley…? Pull yourself together, he told himself. Then he smiled. It was time to rewrite his will. He did this every half-dozen years or so to drive Agatha to distraction. He was holding back that wonderful nugget involving primogeniture until she got totally out of hand-

  "You all right?" asked Ellen, whose gloved hands were rubbing the handlebars. The noise of the engine ripped through the frosty air. "Your face looks funny." She squinted. "You've got great eyes, incidentally. Really green."

  Melrose knew his eyes were green. But great? He opened his mouth to thank her-

  "Like scarab beetles."

  He closed his mouth. As she gunned the accelerator again, he said, "I'd be happy to offer you a lift,"-he pointed toward the Bentley, moonraked and glimmering, with the reservoir shining off in the distance-"only I'm not going into the village. I'm meeting a friend at a place down the road."

  "Was it the inn I passed?"

  "Probably; it's called the Old Silent."

  "Well, maybe I could get a bite there."

  Melrose cursed himself for mentioning the inn. "Ah, I… don't think so. It's more or less off limits; it's a crime scene, you see."

  The noise stopped. "Say again?"

  He wished he hadn't said once.

  "So how come you're going there? If it's closed to the public?"

  "I, ah, I'm only meeting someone."

  "What happened? What crime?"

  "A man was killed there a couple of days ago."

  "Killed? You mean murdered, don't you?" She frowned, as if the culprit stood here in the moonlight before her.

  "Well, yes, I expect you could say that." He had the lunatic notion he was including the collie in his answers. The dog's ears had pricked up; he certainly looked as eager for details as did the girl.

  She shook her head, muttering some imprecation to the skies or the gods. "Jeeeezzz. Well, you're obviously not going to talk." Suddenly, her head swung round. "You're a cop, aren't you?"

  "No, absolutely not-"

  "Hell, all this time I've been hanging around talking to the cops."

  The collie yapped when the motor roared again.

  "Look, I'm not-"

  "Stranger!"

  The call came from the direction of the barn; Melrose looked around quickly to see the dull glow of a lamp, one of those ancient oil lamps, upraised, casting only a blur of light along the ground.

  He could not have been more astonished if suddenly a highwa
yman, masked and cloaked, had stopped Melrose's coach. There was no threat in this voice: it was clearly pitched enough to cut through the noise of the motor Ellen kept revving up.

  As the dog whipped round and streaked like a swimmer through the ground mist toward the lamp, she asked,"Who is that?"

  "A little girl. Her name is Abigail, I believe."

  "She lives here?"

  Melrose nodded. His eye followed the lamp that looked disembodied, hanging on an invisible arm.

  Ellen kicked the motorcycle into action, said See you, and streaked away much as had the dog, each going in the opposite direction.

  He watched her down the drive until she and her BMW were swallowed up by the corridor of trees. Through their trunks he could see a skin of moonlight on the reservoir.

  Then he turned his head toward the black, ivy-latticed window, wondering, in a momentary surge of anxiety, if he'd imagined the fuzzy gold-lit interior, the patches of color, the underwater movements. But no, of course not: it was lit, though the silver and turquoise were gone and the only movement came from the maid. He could see the black patch of her dress moving from pane to pane, as lights went out, one after another and it, too, grew darker. And then the moon, like the interior lights, suddenly went out, behind a cloud, as if Ruby had thrown a switch.

  Melrose lit a cigarette, more he thought to see the flame spurt up than because he needed a smoke.

  As he got in the car and quickly flicked on the headlamps, he heard the voice again-Stranger-and the crisp bark of that dog.

  16

  The Old Silent sat just off the Stanbury road, surrounded by moorland. Across the blackened heath dry-stone walls ran off to remote hills marked by low witch-shaped and wind-blasted trees. Melrose had never seen a gaunter landscape by day or by night. Coming upon the inn over a dip in the road, he thought it wore the truncated, free-floating look of the courtyard he had just left.

  When he pulled into the car park, he saw the Old Silent in a more normal light: a well-tended, whitewashed and black-timbered building with a courtyard for tables in better weather. Closed for the twenty-four hours following its unlikely venue as a crime scene, it had now, he imagined, gained in celebrity for that same reason. The car park was choked at nearly ten o'clock. He saw through the amber-lit windows the customers crowding the public bar.

  Inside was warmth and a quick return to normality after the scene he had left. Melrose took his drink through to a lounge with a fine stone fireplace over which hung a painting of the inn and in front of which sat one of those high-backed sedan chairs. A porter's chair. He had always wanted to hold court in one and waited for the black cat, the chair's present occupant, to move. The cat had other ideas.

  While he waited for Jury, he moved about the lounge and looked above flickering lights and little shaded lamps at pictures and brass ornaments and an account of the origin of the Old Silent's name. Melrose sighed. It was one of those Bonnie Prince Charlie tales. The inn was yet another of those historic places that had offered Charlie refuge and (in this case) the "silence" of the locals. Given all the stopovers the Young Pretender had made, Melrose wondered how he ever got to his destination. He'd certainly clocked up a lot of traveling time. Melrose closed his eyes and imagined the prince traveling with Agatha. The Old Silent would have gone nameless…

  "You always sleep on your feet?"

  He knew it was Jury, but he didn't open his eyes. "I was thinking of Agatha." He felt the hand clasp on his shoulder.

  "No wonder."

  They had studied the menu and decided upon Pike in a Blanket.

  "Because I am enamored of the name," said Melrose Plant to Richard Jury. "I picture the pike," continued Melrose, "tucked in a little woolly square with a safety pin."

  Over a plate of oxtail soup Melrose finished telling Jury the events of the day, and was surprised that in the telling of it, all of those events had indeed taken place in one day. "To think that only this morning I was having coffee in Harrogate with Agatha and friend. Of course, Agatha does have a certain lunar quality. Distant howlings in the woods behind Ardry End…"

  "This soup is great," said Jury, smacking the pepper shaker all around it.

  " 'This soup is great,'" repeated Melrose with a sigh. "The only person I know who has a more poetical turn of mind than you is Divisional Commander Macalvie. I expect while you were hanging round the Citrine place and I was being vastly entertained at Weavers Hall, Macalvie solved at least three cases."

  "Four," said Jury, holding up his fingers. "One battery, one murder, two break-ins. I'm going to Cornwall; I want to have a look round the Citrine property."

  "You think the answer is there?"

  "I think the question is there."

  "You sound like Gertrude Stein. Policework is surely more straightforward than that."

  "Straightforward?" Jury shook his head. "I only mean I have the feeling the wrong questions are being asked. But that's nothing new. You said this George Porges-"

  "Poges."

  "If Major Poges likes to walk, why don't you walk with him? Might learn something." Jury looked up from his bread roll.

  "Because it's exercise. I don't mind the sort of exercise that's a means to an end, such as cycling along to the Jack and Hammer; I just dislike the sort that appears to be an end in itself. I saw today, running along the Pennine way, a jogger. This one was in flaming red, neonred. Now, I ask you: three of the gloomiest minds in literature, bless them, set their accounts of despair, desolation, broken hearts, on these moors. Bleak as mines, barren, rocky. How dare someone in flaming red jog across them? She was probably carrying a piece of natural grain bread and a bottle of Perrier for weights. So what do you do, Richard? Running? Racquetball? Ten laps round Nelson's column?"

  "Nothing. Of course, I think about it-"

  Melrose pointed a finger at him. "Ah! You see, we both follow in the true tradition. We are men who think about exercise. That, Jury, is a lost way of life. Even Trueblood has a rowing machine in his den."

  "That's just to get a rise out of you; Trueblood's not so stupid he'd use the damned thing." Jury looked round. "Where's that fish in blankets? I can hardly wait."

  "But I can see," continued Melrose, his thoughts on Long Piddleton, "that it's moving in. Oh, we have no joggers yet; but I had a look-in at the post office stores. Where I used to see Weetabix I now see fruit-almond-coconut-pasha-wheat-germ cereal. It's the hound at our heels-all of this jogging and eating goat's milk cheese-when one could have a succulent piece of Stilton and a glass of Cockburn's port-it's all part of upward mobility. If I have to be mobile, I want it to be lateral."

  "So do I," said Jury. "Here comes our waitress."

  She set their plates before them. The "blanket" turned out to be parchment. Steam had ballooned its glazed surface and the waitress held her sharp shears over Melrose's portion. The waitress Sally slit the crisp steam-filled parchment and released an aromatic mix of wine and herbs and garlic and (Sally whispered) a bit of brandy. It would have cleared the nostrils of even the most intractable sinus sufferer.

  "This would keep your sergeant out of doctors' offices for the next ten years," said Melrose.

  "It smells absolutely wonderful, Sally," said Jury, with an equally wonderful smile.

  She turned quickly and rushed off, the kitchen door swinging shut behind her.

  "Nell Healey was a friend of this Ann Denholme?" asked Jury, after a few moments of solemn eating.

  "I'm only telling you what Major Poges and the Princess said. Perhaps they got it from the moribund Ruby, I don't know. Or perhaps Ann Denholme mentioned it; I would imagine all of the publicity would have had the whole of Weavers Hall talking." Melrose raised a spoonful of the fish liquor to his mouth. "The only thing this lacks is a soupcon of Old Peculier. It's rather good; it's rather pleasant to have your before-dinner sherry, your dinner, your after-dinner brandy all wrapped up in parchment. Saves a great deal of time."

  Jury had nearly finished his meal. "Go on about the
Hall."

  "It's like a minstrel show. 'Tamara,' pardon me, Tamaw-a,' what a pseudonym. From New Yawk." He put down his spoon. "Except…"

  "Except what?"

  Melrose shrugged. "The place is eerie…" He started to say something else, didn't know what he wanted to say, and shrugged again. "I don't know. 'Eerie' is the wrong word. I don't know the right one. Uncanny? No." There was a return of the anxiety Melrose had felt when he had stood in the courtyard lighting a cigarette for the sake of the flame.

  "Don't worry about the right word. What was the feeling?" Jury pushed his plate away.

  "Must you look so intense? I've given you a running account of the last three fun-filled hours at Weavers Hall." Melrose described the scene.

  "The details might not be as important as their effect on you."

  "You, a superintendent of police saying details might not be important? You want feelings?"

  "Why don't you just say the first thing that comes to mind?"

  "Tristesse," said Melrose. "Obscure," he added. "A gulf, a sadness, an obsessive sadness."

  Jury pushed back his plate, folded his arms, and thought of Nell Healey.

  "You know Nell Healey actually shot her husband," said Melrose. "It's not a question of innocence or guilt."

  "It's a question of motive."

  "But do you honestly think knowing that will save her?" Melrose frowned.

  "Yes."

  Melrose took out his cigar case. "Sounds to me as if she doesn't want to be saved. What if she feels so guilty about not paying the ransom for this boy that she no longer cares what happens to her?"

  "Then she'd have killed herself, not her husband, who was, according to Macalvie, absolutely beside himself when she refused to pay. Roger Healey was far from being a pauper; he was well off, but he didn't have that kind of money. Not big money. Neither does Charles Citrine. And the money wasn't the only question, either; it was the rotten dilemma of what would be in Billy Healey's best interests." Jury took a cigar from Plant's case. "Then, of course, Billy was Roger's son; he was only Nell's stepson."

  Melrose paused in the act of lighting their cigars."'Only'? Good grief, you're one of those espousers of the theory that blood is thicker than water?"