The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Look at the photos. They buried the dog, too."

  Jury's head came up. "I'm not one of your team, Brian. You don't have to wait for me to catch up with you. If you're talking about Billy Healey, he was never found, and Toby Holt was killed by a lorry. This isn't Dunstable races, and I don't care if I win, place, or show. I just want to show up with something when the chips are down-"

  "The chips are always down. Have a drink." He started pouring small measures into cone-shaped cups.

  Wiggins, who ordinarily looked at liquor the same way he looked at lizards, actually drank his down neat, choked, pulled out his lozenge tin.

  "No, thanks," said Jury, waving away the drink. Leaning on the divisional commander's desk, his hands splayed, he said levelly, "Listen to me: you're a chief superintendent, a divisional commander, not Sam Spade-you even call your secretary 'Effie'-and you act like Joe Cairo and the Fat Man are going to come walking through a bead curtain. You run a department, Macalvie; you're not Spade or Marlowe. So stop pulling cards out from behind your ear, okay?"

  Wiggins quickly pulled out his charcoal biscuits, anodyne for anything-digestion, anger-and shoved one toward Jury. Jury took it without thinking, stuck half in his mouth, and chewed the dreadful thing. No wonder Wiggins was almost always sick if this is what he thought would cure him.

  Macalvie sat wide-eyed, feigning wonder… feigning concern… just feigning. "You through?"

  Jury swallowed, choked, and reached for the paper cup Macalvie was taking up. He took a drink and said, "I can only assume, since you didn't tell me anything, and since I'm here on the Nell Healey business, that somehow you've discovered the boy's body. How, I don't know."

  Macalvie looked surprised. "How? I just kept on searching, Jury." Why wouldn't any cop do the same? his expression asked.

  Jury scanned the police photographs of skeletal remains, human and what appeared to be animal, taken from all angles, first lying in the grave, later carefully removed and placed on the ground, out of it. "Nell Healey doesn't appear to know you've found anything."

  Macalvie took his feet off the desk, made a neat stack of the photos and replaced them in the brown envelope, which he handed to Jury. "You want to tell her, Jury?"

  Wiggins coughed, sucked his lozenge noisily, and looked from the one to the other. Macalvie was out of his chair, jamming a tweed cap on his head. "Especially since you don't know the whole story? Come on; we're going to Cornwall."

  Wiggins shoved his lozenge under his tongue, and said, "Well, it'd help if you told us the story." He sneezed. "Sir."

  Jury smiled. "Be sure you leave the window open, Macalvie. You never know when He might call you to fly out of it."

  The window shut with a bang that splintered the old paint at the corners. "You guys are a treat."

  They passed the desk of Macalvie's secretary, whose eyes were bent on an embroidery hoop. "Will I see you again?" she asked, sucking a finger that she seemed to have stabbed with the needle at her boss's appearance. "Or should I just leave up the decorations till next Christmas?" Her face, as chisled as a square-cut diamond, turned to the ceiling molding, round which were festooned more dull and dusty strands of tinsel. "Sergeant Thwaite called to say Telecom is having your service at home disconnected."

  Macalvie's cap was pulled down somewhere in the region of his nose. "I don't have a home; I don't have an office; I don't need a secretary. So long, Effie."

  She seemed to be considering this, as one hand left the hoop to scratch almost meditatively, like a cat, under one armpit. "Then can I take down that bloody tinsel and moth-eaten wreath?"

  Jury smiled at her. "We could all do with a bit of glitter." He looked at the faded gold loopings and smiled even more broadly. "I take it the decorations aren't your idea."

  The hoop was forgotten, lying on her typewriter, a decades-old IBM. Her smile was as wide as the wreath. "His. Every year, he wants the damned stuff up."

  Wiggins made a sound between a giggle and a sneeze as Macalvie's coat disappeared round the door.

  Jane leaned her square chin on her equally square fingernails. "And every year he gives me the same present."

  "Bath salts," said Jury, solemnly.

  "Bath salts," said Jane with an added touch of glamour in her smile. "Crabtree and Evelyn."

  "Good-bye, Jane."

  She brought her fingers to her palm a couple of times in a good-bye wave.

  19

  "That's okay, Wiggins, I'll drive," said Macalvie as Wiggins was quickly trying to capture the driver's seat.

  Jury got in the passenger's side while Wiggins stowed himself into the rear seat and appeared to be offering up a prayer.

  Macalvie twisted round and said, "We can take the A-thirty-eight, but the shortcut across Dartmoor's better. No traffic."

  Obviously recalling an earlier drive through sheets of rain and hemmed in by stone walls (no stone of which Macalvie had left unturned), Wiggins brought out his big gun: the vaporizer.

  Macalvie gave Wiggins a look of disgust. Jury nodded at the road ahead. "Take the A-thirty-eight."

  Macalvie shrugged, tore away from the curb.

  When they hit the roundabout, a black Lamborghini with a woman driver dripping jewels and a fox fur cut him off, gave him a finger, and took the car up to ninety as she sped onto the motorway.

  "Lady, lady," sighed Macalvie. He yanked the blue light out and shoved it on top of the Ford.

  "Brian we're going to Cornwall. You're not-" Jury was tossed against the back of his seat as Macalvie jammed the pedal down.

  "Following her, we'll get there a hell of a lot faster." He smiled broadly.

  Wiggins had a coughing fit and Jury just shook his head as the Ford closed in on the Lamborghini. "You're not a traffic cop, for Christ's sakes."

  "So what? There's never one around when you need one." The Lamborghini finally pulled over. Macalvie braked on the shoulder, got out a ticket book that he kept stashed in the glove box, and said, "This won't take long."

  Macalvie, Jury knew, loved being a copper. The possibilities were endless.

  Looking through the rear windscreen, Wiggins said, "Do you think he might have been a deprived child, sir?"

  "No." Jury was blowing on his hands. "But his parents were."

  "There's one old Lambo won't be hitting the highways for six months." He whistled and drifted out into the traffic.

  An hour later, they were flying by a brightly lit Little Chef that Wiggins eyed longingly, as if the wind stirred up by the traffic was wafting the aroma of plaice and chips and beans on toast down the motorway through the driver's open window.

  Macalvie had been giving Jury the details of the scene, eight years ago, in the house on the Cornwall coast. They were the same details, but Macalvie liked to get everything right at least twice before he moved on. "You should have heard them, Jury-Healey and Citrine-when she refused to pay up. I thought Roger Healey was going to take the poker and let her have it. Daddy wasn't quite so violent, but it looked like a cardiac arrest was imminent. 'Are you insane, Nell? He's my son!or 'My dear God, you've got to. He's like my own grandson.' No one seemed to think Billy Healey was her anything."

  Macalvie was trying to honk an old charabanc out of the fast lane, but it kept on rattling right along. Through its dirt-smeared rear window, Jury made out a group of people who looked to be in some sort of costume. Finally, the Ford pulled into the inside lane and Macalvie slowed down, hunching over to have a look. A wide, white banner on the side of the old bus announced the Twyford English Country Dancers. They seemed to be singing; they were certainly clapping in time to something, and sounded drunk as lords.

  "I think maybe they got an elephant driving."

  The elephant smiled down at the Ford and raised his plastic cup.

  "Oh, hell," said Jury.

  The blue light went back up on the hood. "You want that horse's arse out here on the highway, Jury? No wonder old people are always getting
clobbered on zebra crossings. It's probably your effing C.I.D. running them down." He shouted at the charabanc and waved it to the next exit.

  "You must admit, sir," Wiggins said to Jury, as they careened to a halt in the car park, "Mr. Macalvie's right. Can't have this sort of thing on the roads."

  The sergeant smiled up at a blue neon sign missing one of its letters: CAF.

  To Jury none of the riders looked a day under eighty as they spilled out of the bus, still singing, still clapping, still boozing.

  " 'Ello, 'andsome," cried a lavender-haired lady as she grabbed Wiggins's hands and tried to dance him sideways down the car park.

  An old man who looked less sturdy than string was squatting down, arms crossed over his chest, doing something that looked more Russian than English. They wore frilled shirts and braces.

  Jury smiled and disentangled himself from three wiry ladies determined to drag him into a set as Macalvie was having a fine time with the huge driver with sepia curls who, in the tight trousers that looked from behind like two moons, wasn't having problems with his sexual identity since he clearly didn't care.

  Macalvie was shouting like a football coach: "Now you," -he shoved a ticket he'd written into the elephant's jacket pocket-"can dance your little toes and tambourines right in that caff and don't even thinkabout coming out until you can walk a straight line on your bloody hands." He walked over to Jury. "Get that dedicated look off your face, Jury. We'd've had to stop anyway; Wiggins needs his cuppa."

  "So here's what happened."

  The three were trying to ignore the"'ello, luvs," the waves, the brandishing of paper napkins from the long table with its speckled-blue Formica top on the other side of the cafe.

  Three coffees to go was not Sergeant Wiggins's idea of a proper tea-break, to say nothing of a meal; he had time only to snatch a Kit-Kat before they were out in the fog again, slamming the car doors, Macalvie splashing the coffees with a burst of acceleration.

  With the divisional commander, there were never any qualifiers: no Ithink's; no a possible theory might be's; no in my opinion's. Jury shook the hot coffee from his hand and let Macalvie go on, despite the fact they'd got halfway across Devon and still no mention of the police photos of the skeleton.

  "So here's what happened. Billy Healey goes into the house to make his tea-tea for Billy and Toby consisting of a couple of loaves of bread and ten pots, according to Mum." Macalvie smiled slightly, as if he were one of the family or, at least, a distant relative. "So he's in the kitchen with his dog, Gnasher. He's got the kettle on the hob, he's sawing the bread in slabs, spreading it with an inch of currant jam, milk out for Toby, and butter-" Macalvie veered into the outside lane.

  Said Wiggins, looking longingly behind him as another cafe receded in the highway mist, as the car advanced on the turnoff signposted for Ashburton, "It's amazing you remember these things. I mean about the currant jam, and so forth. You might as well have been there."

  Macalvie couldn't have agreed more. "Too bad for Devon-Cornwall I wasn't. By the time I managed to get to the house, it was clean. That whole kitchen-not to say the rest of the house-should have been gone over on hands and knees."

  "I agree," said Jury. "Go on."

  "Nell Healey said even the vitamins were lined up: calcium, C, A, whatever. That was the place I thought she was going to break down. She was always nagging Billy to take calcium because he was violently allergic to milk. And she thought like most kids he was fibbing when he said, sure, he'd taken them. But they were lined up in a row."

  They were in Wiggins-territory now-not Ashburton, but allergies. He crossed his arms over the front seat. "It can play hell with a person; I should know."

  Jury had lowered the window and was tossing the undrinkable coffee from the paper cup. "You're not allergic to milk, Wiggins." He turned to see Wiggins take a brown bottle from his coat pocket dispensary.

  "One-a-Day." He washed the capsule down with his coffee. "It's especially important when you can't stop for a proper meal. Which happens all the time." The tone was dark.

  "Yeah. Well, obviously something interrupted Billy Healey's little meal eight years ago," said Macalvie. "Someone walked in and surprised Billy. And the someone got a little surprise himself when Toby came in from wherever he was for his tea."

  "He could have been in the kitchen, too."

  "No. They took photos." Macalvie's tone was grudging. "The slice of bread with the jam had been half eaten; the bread with the butter hadn't been touched. Neither had the second cup of tea. So Billy starts the tea-making and probably tells Toby, wherever Toby might have been, and within, say, that fifteen or twenty minutes someone comes in the kitchen door. The kitchen was at the back facing the dirt road. It was someone Billy Healey knew."

  "That's a hell of an assumption, Macalvie."

  "Then you haven't been paying attention-well, what's this, then?"

  A sable-brown car flew by in the inside lane. It must have been doing a hundred.

  Jury winced. "Macalvie, that's a Jag. It's an XJSC, V-twelve engine. Top of the line. We're in a bottom-line Ford V-eight and you're not going to catch-" Jury's words were lost on the wind as Macalvie hit the accelerator.

  20

  1

  The cottage was half-buried in long grass and weeds; the garden looked more in need of harvesting than pruning and surrounded a small, square, cream-washed house that looked as if it were more functional than livable. It only needed a neon sign or big letters to pass for one of the motorway cafes.

  A tall, thin, quarrelsome-looking girl opened the door to Macalvie's fist-pounding. Jury would have thought he was raiding the place rather than visiting it.

  The girl's sallow frown looked cast in bronze and her unfocused brown eyes were set in deep sockets. She had a dishcloth over her shoulder and was lugging a Hoover. She informed them the perfesser was having his evening meal and they could go on back. With the handle of the Hoover she pointed, more or less, to a room at the rear and then went off.

  Dennis Dench was eating quail and salad, washed down with a half bottle of white wine.

  Each tiny bone had been placed in a bone dish, not haphazardly, but rather with attention to the underlying structure of the small fowl. After greeting Macalvie, who made an unconvincing apology for disturbing Dr. Dench's meal, Dench went back to the quail. He did not gnaw at the leg bone, but chewed the slivers of meat carefully.

  He greeted Jury, and, once up, put his napkin down.

  Dennis Dench took one last sip of wine and said, "Hullo, Brian. They're not the Healey boy's remains."

  As they left the dining room, Dench looked back over his narrow, sloping shoulder at Macalvie. "You should know that; I've told you half a dozen times."

  "Oh, sure." It was Macalvie's deadpan tone, the one he used when he wasn't going to argue a point.

  They passed down a cheerlessly white, though well-lit hall toward a door at the end, and Jury paused to look at a large print that supplied about the only color in the house he had seen thus far. It would have to be an O'Keeffe, the one of the cow's skull.

  "Nice, that," said Dennis, coming back to stand by Jury. He fiddled with his thick glasses as if they were an out-of-focus microscope. "Very good." He stepped back a bit, cocked his head, frowned slightly. "Well… as good as a painter could get in that particular line."

  The basement laboratory was no more antiseptic than the rest of the house, although it was considerably more interesting. It had not an O'Keeffe but a Daliesque quality in its display of bones, leathered skin, objects floating in large jars -all less horrific than surreal. There were two skeletons in full bloom, if the bright red carnation between the ribs of one and the daisy chain round the collarbone of the other were an indication.

  Dennis Dench shook his head. "Minerva's always doing that."

  "Minerva?" asked Sergeant Wiggins, who turned from his inspection of a jar.

  "One who let you in. Thinks it's all a bit of a giggle."

  Jury couldn't i
magine the young woman who let them in giggling about much of anything; her skin was the color of the ashy mask contoured over the frame of a skull.

  Plucking a starched white jacket from a hook, Dennis said, "I've told her a dozen times the lab needn't be hoovered, but she still insists the floor needs scrubbing and the 'skellies' dusted. I think she's named them. Naturally, she doesn't touch anything else because I told her I would put her in the tub there,"-he nodded toward something like a washtub-"and then her skelly would be scattered over Salcombe estuary."

  "What are you putting together?" Macalvie nodded toward the long white table with a Formica top where a sandbox rested on one end and, on the other, the threatening tub. Bones protruded from the sandbox, apparently drying; in the tub of viscous liquid, other bones were being divested of remaining flesh. Having pulled on his surgical gloves, Dennis pulled out several smaller bones and plunged them into another bath. The hanging light was dazzling, a false sun. "Jason at the beach?" asked Macalvie, chewing his gum.

  Dennis addressed Jury. "I told him not to drag you all the way here from Exeter."

  "You're well known, Dr. Dench. It's not a lost trip."

  Dennis Dench gave Macalvie a pursed little smile.

  "Call him Denny," said Macalvie, walking over to a cabinet and knocking on it as if he expected someone or -thing in there to open up. "Let's see Billy Healey's skeleton, okay?"

  Having dipped the two bones in the tub, Dench now stood them up in the sand and said, "You can see the skeleton, but it's not Billy Healey's."

  Macalvie was trying to open the cabinet door. "Just because I don't have a degree in osteoanatomy doesn't mean I haven't read up on it. Who the hell built this cabinet? Dr. Caligari?"

  "The skeleton's over here, Brian. You never did have the patience of Job."

  He removed the white cloth from the skeleton of a child that Jury would have guessed to be preadolescent. It was restored except for a few fragments that lay in a neat semicircle beside the leg. Beneath the child's skeleton were the tinier animal bones.