Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  "Might ask Mavis. Mavis Crewes." He leaned back and stared up at the rococo ceiling molding with a frown that suggested he had no idea who'd done the fancy plastering job or why. "Mavis, Mavis, Mavis."

  Martin Smart seemed to have a ritualistic fascination with names. "Who's she, and where?" Jury had his notebook out.

  "Managing editor of Travelure. Isn't that a hell of a name? I wanted to call it Travel, period. Our marketing people—and Mavis, of course—argued there must be a dozen going under that name." He flashed Jury a smile. "Find one. Find one that isn't tarted up with something in the name that's to make you think you're heading for the end of the rainbow. So I suggested calling it Holy Grail. You know, I honestly think they'd have bought it. Anyway, Mavis is good at her job; she's been thirty years in the business. I leave her alone."

  The implication was that he was happy to have Mavis leave him alone. "Is she here today?"

  Again Smart's eyes lifted to the ornamental ceiling as he shook his head. "I told her she could work at home whenever she wanted. Naturally, she travelures a lot of the time. She's big on Africa. Kenya. So forth. Her husband was a safari nut. She lives somewhere near Kensington Gardens. Old Alice can give you the address. Hold it." Smart hit the intercom, got old Alice, and scribbled down the information. "Here." He handed the address to Jury. Then he sat scratching his fingers through his hair, hard, making a spiky, stand-up mess of it. It appeared to be his way of reducing stress, something like Churchill and his ten-minute naps. "Since it's clear that the wife murdered him, why are you here? I don't understand."

  "Just trying to tie up a few loose ends."

  "Having to do with Roger?"

  "Not only Mr. Healey."

  "Pretty soon you're going to say 'routine investigation, sir.' The papers made a big thing out of the kidnapping of those boys all that time ago."

  Jury nodded.

  "Does that tie in?"

  "I don't know."

  "You're a mine of information." Smart washed the sea of papers about for no apparent reason. "You should work on one of these rags we publish."

  "Everyone liked Roger Healey, then?"

  Martin Smart gave Jury a sharp look. "Far as I know. Shouldn't we have done?"

  "Of course. It's just that a person who's universally liked . . ." Jury shrugged.

  "A cynic, too." The trick smile showed itself again. "I know what you mean, but I don't know what you're up to. I wouldn't say universally liked. There's probably a few concert musicians who could have flayed him, I don't know. The thing about his reviews, though, is they weren't laced with stings and arrows. Edgy, sometimes." He started gathering up papers and stacking them neatly, then stopped and dealt them out as if they were playing poker. "Of course, there's Duckworth."

  "Duckworth?"

  "Morry. He's American. Rhythm and blues, straight blues, heavy metal, reggae, New Wave, that stuff. They call it rock and roll."

  "He doesn't—didn't like Roger Healey?"

  "Means little. Duckworth doesn't like anyone. Except me. I found him glued to his earphones in the Village—New York City. Let me tell you, it took a lot to lure him over here. I hate that effing word. I only toss him out because you're clearly determined to find someone who didn't like Roger. Sounds a bit biased, if you don't mind my saying so. But I'm sure the Met has reasons the mind will never know. Here's Duckworth's number." Again, he handed Jury a scrap of paper, torn from a letter from the chairman of the board, Jury noticed when he looked at it. "It's probably a prison cell."

  "The Met appreciates your help. Could I have a look at some old issues of Segue?"

  "Healey's reviews? Of course." Smart hit the intercom again, spoke to his secretary, then leaned back with his hands laced behind his head. "Superintendent, what are you looking for?"

  Jury pocketed his notebook, rose, thanked Martin Smart, and said, "Nothing in particular."

  "You really should work here."

  Jury turned to go, turned back. "Would you mind if my sergeant came round in a day or two to talk to some of your staff?"

  Smart gazed again at the ceiling. "Hell, no. Send the Dirty Squad for all I care. Liven the place up." He screwed up his face. "Why the hell would she kill him?" He looked at Jury. "Maybe they were having a bit of trouble?" His expression was perfectly serious.

  "I expect you could say that." Jury said good-bye.

  Jury could not quite believe the interior of this house off Kensington Gardens, near Rotten Row. From the outside, it was just another narrow, Georgian building, with its yellow door and dolphin-shaped brass knocker.

  But the inside seemed to stretch endlessly and cavernously to this room in which he now sat with Mavis Crewes, a room that seemed part solarium, part enormous floor-to-ceiling aviary full of bird plumage, bird twitter, bird greenery. A tiny, bright eye, opening and closing like a pod, regarded him through the fronds of several palmettos.

  Nor was it the only greenery, for round about the room were set tubs of plants, some treelike and overhanging; some tough and flat-leaved; some feathery and ferny; but all suggesting jungle heat and dust. This was further enhanced by the near-life-sized ceramic leopard looking slant-eyed out of the rubber plants, and by the boar's head, open-mouthed and glaring glassily from the wall to Jury's right. Behind him sat a gun case; his feet were trying to miss contact with the zebra rug beneath the table carved from a tree her last husband had carted back from Nosy-Be. A tree (Mavis Crewes had told him) that wasfady—taboo. Her husband wasn't superstitious.

  He was also dead. Jury wondered from what.

  Jury and Mavis Crewes sat in this solarium, surrounded by strange exotic plants, grass shields, spears, and Ibo masks, drinking coffee and Evian water with a cut-glass carafe of whiskey standing by as a fortifier.

  Jury kept trying to wave away the thin stems of a hanging bougainvillea. The surroundings that he himself found suffocating, Mavis Crewes apparently found soothing and restful. Between little spasms of speech, the breakings off partly the result of talking of Roger Healey's death, but also partly her own natural abruptness. A tiger's eye stone glinted on the hand that fingered a petal here, a leaf there. There was a chunky diamond on the finger of the hand slowly twisting the glass of Evian water that helped in what Jury imagined to be her campaign to stay travel-thin.

  He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped down to forty. The latest fashion (Jury knew from glancing into various Regent Street shops) was the safari look: desert colors or camouflage greens, loose shirts and skirts with low, heavy belts, nothing he could imagine any woman found flattering. She wore a bush jacket over a sand-colored shirt and Hermes boots.

  In this environment, and with her thin, slightly muscular look, all of that fitted Mavis Crewes rather perfectly. Except, of course, that they didn't resemble mourning, something she had brought up at the beginning of their interview. She hadn't anything black, you see, and she hardly thought it the time for a shopping spree, given the death of her "dear, old friend." If she thought mourning clothes appropriate two weeks after his death, she must have meant to imply he had been very dear indeed. With her swept-back, pale blond hair, he wondered if perhaps she knew black didn't show her to any advantage. The eyes he had thought at first to be black were a murky jungle green.

  After the divorce of the first and the death of the second husband, she had stuck her thumb in the pie again and apparently pulled out the biggest plum thus far, Sir Robert Crewes, safari buff, a Knight of the Royal Victoria Order, higher than the OBE her cousin had managed to reel in. Mavis Crewes was very impressed by the title, though knighthoods abounded among civil servants, members of the Royal household, and the foreign service. It was peppered with them probably as a reward for one's going off somewhere (anywhere) to represent the country.

  It was not that Jury doubted that Mavis Crewes's grief was genuine; it was just that he wondered how deeply she felt about anything—-except, perhaps, the
venomous anger for Healey's wife. Although she seemed to refuse to acknowledge her as such: "that woman" was the phrase she used when speaking of Nell Healey.

  "Hard as nails," she said now, still twisting the delicate glass between thumb and forefinger as if it were a stem she might snap. She sighed. "That woman."

  "Tell me about her, Mrs. Crewes."

  "Nell was the second wife." Jury wondered that Mavis Crewes, who had second-wifed it aplenty, could rationalize this. "And not the boy's mother." She threw Jury a basilisk glance.

  "What happened to the mother?"

  "Went off to the Swiss Alps. Had a skiing accident."

  "You think the stepmother couldn't have cared about Billy, then?"

  He had said the wrong thing, or in the wrong tone. She sat back again, arms resting on the arms of the white wicker chair, flexing her fingers. "You sound as if you sympathize with her, Superintendent. That's absolutely astounding. But you couldn't have known her well." She gave him a small, cunning smile, as if they'd reached an agreement. "I'm not sure what your role is in this. What are you investigating? That she killed Roger is not open to question. That she managed to be released until her trial certainly is. Women like Nell Healey always seem to get what they want. She's flint, she's stone."

  Jury hoped his smile would offset his words. "Stone generally meets with hard resistance itself."

  "If you're implying Roger was hard, you've got it all wrong. He was totally devastated. You didn't know the man. You didn't know his warmth, his charm, his—"

  "But you did," said Jury innocently.

  She was smart enough to sidestep that. "They'd nothing in common. He loved travel, new experiences, new . . . sensations. He had an appetite for life. She was content to do nothing but stay in that godforsaken part of York-

  shire. ..." She looked round at the masks and guns as if Tanzania were more accessible.

  "With Billy," said Jury. She flashed him a look. "You've been their guest, I take it."

  "Yes. Several times. Charles Citrine thought of Roger as his own son."

  "Mr. Healey sounds like a paradigmatic husband, father . . . friend." He let that word hang there. "Martin Smart admired him." He tried to smile, found it tough going.

  "Oh, Martin . . ." She forgot the Evian, went for the whiskey decanter, giving Jury a dismissive glance. "Martin seems to think publishing's a sort of game; he sometimes hires the most /^appropriate people—"

  "They certainly looked, from the offices I passed, very old-school-tie-ish."

  "Then you didn't pass Morpeth Duckworth. God. What a vile person. Do you know I caught him in my office one day with a mop and pail. Cleaning."

  Jury wiped his hand across his mouth. "Why?"

  "God knows. Well, he looks like a janitor, doesn't he? He's done it to others, too. Even Martin. Martin finds it excruciatingly funny. I think Duckworth's going through our files. He's American."

  "Oh."

  He heard calfskin whisper as she shifted in the wicker chair, crossing and recrossing her legs. "What are you asking these questions for? What's all this to do with Nell Healey?"

  "I was thinking more of Billy. That case was never solved. I'm sorry." He rose. "You've been very helpful at what must be a terribly painful time."

  That he would leave with so little resistance took her by surprise. "No, no. I'm just on edge." The tan, sinewy hands waved him down again.

  Jury sat, gave her that reassuring smile, said, "How long had the Healeys been married before the boy disappeared?"

  From the murky depths of her eyes came a glint like a spearhead. She ran the hand with the whiskey glass over the folds of her skirt, her head down. "Five or six years," she said vaguely.

  Jury was sure she knew exactly how many years. The five years between six and eleven would have been awfully important for any child, especially a child with a new mother. But as he felt Mavis Crewes was disengaging, was pulling away from his questions now, he did not want to explore the relationship—or her version of it—between the little boy and his stepmother directly.

  "Nell was—is—a Citrine." Impatiently waving away Jury's puzzlement, she went on. "The Citrine family is one of the oldest in the county. Old blood, old money. Charles refused a peerage."

  If you can believe that. The hefting of her neatly plucked eyebrows implied that Jury must himself find this unimaginable. He kept his smile to himself, this time, wishing his friend Melrose Plant could hear this. "Kindly Call Me God" was his acronym for the holders of the KCMG. The OBE was the "Old Boy's End."

  Only the cockatoo, beating a wing and turning round on its stand, reacted to Charles Citrine's crazy behavior as Mavis went on. "Don't misunderstand me, I've nothing against the Citrines. In spite of her. Yes, I expect I do resent that they've enough money and influence to bail her out after the arraignment. They can get her out, but they cannot get her off. No question of that!" She took a tiny black cigar from a silver-chased box and accepted Jury's light before she sat back behind a plume of smoke. "He's really quite a fine person, Charles. He's had a lot to do with improving the quality of life up there. In West Yorkshire, I mean. Gotten subsidies for the mills, created work where others seem to be destroying it—well, that's Thatcherism, isn't it? Charles is very public spirited, has been appealed to again and again to sit for Commons. . . ."

  And she went on at some length about Nell Healey's fa-ther, ending with, "I wrote him a note. I wanted him to know that I sympathize. I thought it appropriate."

  The interview that had begun an hour ago with the appearance of a lover's display of grief seemed fast degenerating into a discussion of unemployment and politics. No. All of this talk suggested to Jury that Charles Citrine's high visibility was for Mavis Crewes something other than as a possible political candidate. She must have been ten years older than Healey. And was probably ten years younger than Citrine.

  "Of course, it's lonely for him, I expect, living in that enormous place with only Irene. Calls herself Rena. Not much company, I shouldn't think, for a man with Charles's intellect. To tell the truth, in the last few years I think the sister has gone quite mad. Well, that sort of thing usually goes downhill, doesn't it?"

  "Not uphill, at any rate. If you're speaking of a psychosis."

  "Charles excepted, I'd say the entire family's round the twist. God knows, Nell's testament to that." Having given over the Evian water to the whiskey now, she poured herself another glass, drank it off, topped it up, restoppered the bottle. "To tell the truth: I wonder if Roger didn't marry her for it. Money, I mean." She looked at Jury as if he might confirm this, since he'd been in the same room with Nell Healey, circumstances notwithstanding.

  "It's not uncommon." His smile was a little icy. "But couldn't he have loved her?"

  She tossed back the whiskey. "What was there to love except money? Oh, she's not unattractive, but . . ."

  Jury gave a slight headshake. Perhaps she really believed it. "What happened to Mr. Citrine's wife? Nell Healey's mother?"

  "Dead." Beneath the tan, there was a rosy flush. "Charles is a widower—" Then she must have seen the implication of this and went hurriedly on to say, "It was probably a blessing that she never lived to see this."

  With that hackneyed sentiment, even the cockatoo screeched.

  6

  The most celebratory activity on New Year's Day had occurred when a sybaritic gang of children from the nearby market town of Sidbury had come to Long Piddleton and somehow gained entrance through the back of the Jack and Hammer, to steal up the stairs to the box room on the first floor. From here they had wriggled out on the beam, dismantled the blue-coated, mechanical Jack, and the lot of them carted the wooden figure back to Sidbury. This had happened three years ago, and it had happened again three nights ago. To hear Dick Scroggs talk, the Sidburyites were only matched by the Newcastle football fans for pure rowdi-ness.

  Marshall Trueblood, dressed no less colorfully than "Jack" himself, was seated at one of the window tables in the Jack and Hammer wit
h his friend Melrose Plant, both of them working away at a large book of cut-outs, and occasionally making sounds of commiseration.

  Scroggs, publican of the Jack and Hammer, was slapping over the pages of his Telegraph and rolling a toothpick round in his mouth as he bent over the saloon bar. He still hadn't recovered from the New Year's night revelries when the "whey-faced gang of roughs" (as Marshall Trueblood described them) had been surprised by police in a frozen field of coarse grass and bracken, just as one of them had touched a match to some dry branches arranged round the mechanical man that was the pub's pride and joy and the most colorful thing in Long Pidd with the possible exception of Marshall Trueblood. The Jack was rescued with its aquamarine trousers barely singed and restored to Dick Scroggs.

  "It's hard enough to have to put up with the childish pranks of our own kiddies," said Trueblood, as he carefully separated a Dracula face from the cardboard surrounding it, "without these rowdies from Sidbury tramping up to the village."

  Melrose Plant did not answer. He was frowning over the task of affixing one of the legs to the cut-out torso, his long, elegant fingers trying to work a tiny tab through a narrow slit. "Haven't you poked out the cape yet? I'm nearly finished."

  "I mean, the whole thing is too silly for words anyway; I don't see why we have to put up with these childish pranks. When the little ninnies come to my door on New Year's Day, I put my hands on their shoulders, turn them about and about and get them all dizzy and watch them go drunk-enly off. They think I'm playing. Good Lord." He put a crease in the chalk-white face where the instructions had said Fold and handed it to Melrose Plant. "Here."

  "Do the cape." Melrose nodded at the big book of punch-out figures.

  Marshall Trueblood had found this cardboard collection of put-together monsters and ghouls at the Wrenn's Nest bookshop ("in a fight to the death with some beastly child," for it was the last one). "Do you think we should be doing this here, in public? I mean, she might just come in." He leaned back and lit a jade-green Sobranie and regarded Melrose through a scrim of smoke.