Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  Jury watched him walk over, look around, take one of the paper plates from the stack and the pen hooked onto her belt. He wrote, handed it to her, almost had to force it on her because she stood there, stiff and wide-eyed.

  He would never, thought Jury, let anyone suffer if he could do something to stop it.

  "Thanks for the beer," said Jury. "Want a lift?"

  They stood looking up at the cold, hard sky. "I'm not going anywhere much. Schmooze around. I like to walk in London."

  "So do I," said Jury.

  29

  When Jury walked into his office at New Scotland Yard, Wiggins was studiously turning the pages of an uninvitingly thick book whose bindings seemed to resist this mild assault upon a volume that had lain dormant for so long.

  "Hullo, Wiggins." Jury stuck his raincoat on a peg and sat down in his chair that creaked as if it had some symbiotic relationship with the old book. Books. Three others, all equally thick, were open and the pages held down by weights that Wiggins had found at his disposal: a small ceramic pot that Jury had noticed him taking spoonsful from to put in his tea; a tin of Sucrets wedged between pages of another; a black biscuit as a bookmark. In the one he was now reading he had marked several different places with Aspergum.

  "What's that? Gray's Anatomy?"

  Wiggins favored him with a crimped smile and went back to his book, marking yet another page with a cylinder that looked like a stick of incense.

  He was so deep in his research that nothing was about to make Wiggins risible.

  Jury pulled his In box over and rifled through the messy collection there as Wiggins looked up politely and said he'd got several reports he must sign and, incidentally, what did the doctor say?

  "Hmm? The usual." Jury signed the two papers marked Urgent and tossed them in his Out box with half the other stuff he knew was red-taping its way past his eyes. Then he swiveled round and stared out of the viewless window and thought about Charlie Raine. "Get hold of that band."

  Surprised, Wiggins looked across his desk. "Band?"

  "Sirocco. They're at the Ritz, aren't they?"

  "Yes."

  "I want to talk to them—to Jiminez."

  Wiggins looked pained. "Not Jim-inez, yhem-/n-ez. Yhem."

  "You sound like you're coughing up. Ring the hotel. Tell him I want to see him. What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. Sir." Wiggins said this with a good deal of snap.

  "You don't have to salute."

  "They have a concert tomorrow."

  "So what? I'm talking about today. And Morpeth Duckworth and Mavis Crewes."

  Wiggins looked puzzled. "What does Sirocco have to do with the others?"

  "Nothing necessarily." He had decided not to tell Wiggins about Charlie Raine. Jury couldn't be certain, after all; and the less Wiggins knew, the less Chief Superintendent Racer would be inclined to beat him to a pulp with his walking stick for mucking about in someone else's manor. God, how he hated that phrase. "I'm just a fan." Jury smiled. "Big time."

  Again, Jury turned away to stare at the blank concrete the window faced on. He thought about the song. He simply hadn't realized what he'd heard. "Yesterday's Rain." He put his head in his hand, looked at the blank gray squares of the building.

  He could not untangle past and present. He could not focus. "Yesterday's sun . . ." His mind went to the flat in the Fulham Road, and his six-year-old life there with his mother. He could climb on a stool and spy through a wormy peephole in his bedroom into the flat next door.

  Jury half-heard Wiggins on the telephone and thought how far from the Ritz he'd been then. He'd had tea there once with his aunt and uncle and been overwhelmed by the luxury of dazzling lights, deep carpets, the dancers moving effortlessly across polished floors.

  But what he thought of most when he heard music was the scratchy record that came through the bedroom wall of the flat next door. "Yesterdays." Not the famous Beatles song, but another one. Whenever he'd heard the old record in the other room play "Yesterdays," he'd quickly jumped out of bed, stood on the stool and squinted through to see the occupant of the other room, a girl perhaps a year older than he named Elicia Deauville.

  Elicia Deauville loved to dance to "Yesterdays." It was either the only tune she liked, or the only record she had (though she never played the other side). Except in these rare and wonderful dancing moments, Elicia Deauville, when she walked down the steps and down the street to the school, looked like an ice-maiden. Her long, tawny hair had been worried into a tight thick braid, then severely twisted into a pinwheel at the back of her head, into which several pins had been plunged like sabers. It was as if the hair were being chastised for its beauty and bounty. Jury wondered if her dreadful caretakers—a brassy, florid man and woman— were truly the parents his mother had assured him they were. His own mother was beautiful and slender and had silky blond hair and eyes the color of his own. He adored her and never doubted what she said, except in this particular instance.

  But Elicia Deauville's true self (he was sure) showed her as something quite other at her bedtime hour (which was also his) when she would wind up an old Victrola and dance to "Yesterdays."

  Wearing only her white nightdress, barefooted and with her waist-length golden-brown hair, she would move swiftly from one end of her bedroom to the other, weaving and bowing like a sapling in the wind, moving backward and forward in a dancing, ballerinalike run that circumscribed less and less space. Her body would move deliriously, her hair floating and falling like blown leaves.

  It was at once an act of total abandonment and a mastery of space that he had never seen repeated. Twenty years later he had seen Margot Fonteyn and thought, You are very, very good, but you are not Elicia Deauville.

  In the middle of the night, he had watched the blitz from behind his blackout curtain chink and seen the great cones of light shoot up, waver against the night sky and thought of Elicia Deauville. Thus he had been watching when the firebomb dropped and reduced half of his block of flats to rubble. The other half, the Deauvilles' half, had remained standing.

  He had found his mother in the living room, or had found, rather, her arm, clad in black velvet, extending from under what had been the plaster of ceilings and walls. The arm was in black, the hand white, upturned in a familiar come here gesture.

  The next day, while he sat on the remaining step outside waiting for his relatives to fetch him, he watched the small collection of cases and bags grow larger next door as the loudly clothed and loud-mouthed Deauville couple, who made him think of crazy patchwork, came and went, depositing their belongings.

  Sitting there, he had taken his small pocket notebook out and written / love you. Richard. That had not looked right and he scrubbed heavily through it as if the same heavens that had opened up and left him without a future would do it again if they saw or heard.

  / will see you yesterday. Neither did that look right, and she might guess he'd been spying on her if he knew about the song. The father stomped out and plunged down a double armful of clothes, and he saw that right on top was the white nightdress that had a tiny pocket.

  Good-bye, Elicia Deauville. He folded it four times and stuffed it into the pocket.

  "He said six."

  "What?" Jury was studying the flame of the match he had struck to light his cigarette. "Said what?"

  Wiggins looked concerned. "Alvaro Jiminez. Six o'clock he said would be all right."

  "Good."

  "You look very white. You should be home in bed. I can work out a program of medication for you that should have you back on your feet if you get bedrest along with it."

  "Thanks, but not now."

  "I think he's right, sir."

  "Who's right? You're getting elliptical."

  "Commander Macalvie."

  "I'm sure he'd agree. Right about what?"

  Wiggins waved his hand over the lot of books, not forgetting to pluck up one of the sticks of Aspergum. "Rotten headache," he said by way of prologue. "The bone fusion. You c
an't absolutely determine age by means of calculating bone fusion."

  Jury leaned across his desk and squinted at Wiggins more in disbelief than because of the white arc of light slicing across his face. "Dennis Dench has a wall full of degrees—"

  Chewing on his gum, Wiggins waved the wall of Dench's cavelike laboratory away. "Bones, sir, except for teeth, are good indicators, but not absolute determiners." He placed his hand on each of his four books in turn. "Here's three authorities who all say the same thing, one who doesn't. But even the one who doesn't allows some margin for error. Another interesting point is, after I had a word with the forensic anthropologist here, is that the bone of the arm can help to determine right- and left-handedness. Now, I'm only saying they can be an indication. Professor Dench didn't mention that." Wiggins removed the clay pot from one of the books, closed it, patted it, and said, "So I called him up and asked what he had in his notes about the arm bones. I asked him specifically if the bone of the right arm was longer than the left. Billy Healey, you remember, was right-handed."

  "As a matter of fact, I didn't remember. Most people are."

  Although Wiggins's flickering glance at his superior was not at all contemptuous, neither did it register approval. "Yes. And Dr. Dench did say that there was a small difference, that the bone of the right arm was a bit longer than the left. And then he immediately said that this would not help much, since the bones were those of a child and not fully developed."

  "You look as if you don't agree."

  Wiggins put his hands behind his head, tilted his chair, and studied the ceiling before he handed down his decision. It was a pose that Jury recognized as one he himself often affected. "What I wonder is, why would he be so quick to try and prove me wrong?"

  Jury rose from his chair and walked over to the small window that gave out onto the cheerless scene of the three other sides of the building and the courtyard below. "Perhaps because he's been at the top of his field for twenty years."

  "We all make mistakes, sir."

  Jury looked up at a patch of white sky. Wiggins, like Death, was the great leveler.

  "What I think, sir, is that his judgment might be clouded, as happens to all of us, you must admit . . ."

  Jury turned, noting the suggestive pause. "Yes?"

  "Well, it could be a blind spot. In this case, Commander Macalvie could be the spot. Dench has known him for ages. They're both experts in their own ways. I don't think Dr. Dench wants Mr. Macalvie coming up with a conclusion that makes more sense than Dench's own. You must admit that's possible."

  Looking down into the small square, Jury nodded. "And you think my blind spot is Billy Healey."

  There was a brief silence. "Well, it's understandable. I think you don't want the boy to have been Billy Healey, that's true."

  It was getting dark, and whatever leftover light there was had drained away from the courtyard down there, the high-walled building blocking it. Jury felt his stomach go queasy, drop. "I don't want it to have been any boy, Wiggins."

  He turned to see Wiggins redden slightly as he dipped a plastic spoon into the small pot of honey mixture. "No, of course not. The thing is this, though." He looked up to make sure that he might be allowed to continue.

  "Go on. You've done a good job. What's that stuff?"

  Wiggins's anodynes were just the ticket for glossing over difficult moments.

  "It's this dry cough. Honey, ginger, and lemon juice and a little water. It's absolutely the only thing that'll stop it." He stirred this remedy up in the ceramic pot. "The thing is that //you think Mr. Macalvie's whole idea about the date of the death, the proximity to the Citrine house, the disused graveyard makes sense, then //the skeleton isn't the Healey boy's, whose is it? It can't be Toby Holt's because he was killed five weeks later in London. So that would mean there'd have to be a third boy somewhere between, say, eleven and fifteen around there, and that's too much of a coincidence, surely."

  "And Macalvie's already checked that ... did you?"

  "Naturally."

  "Nil?"

  "Nil."

  "You rang up Macalvie?"

  "I did."

  "And what's his theory?"

  "The same. He's always thought it was Billy Healey." Wiggins's mouth pursed in his version of a smile. "He seemed a bit pleased that I faced down Professor Dench."

  "Didn't it bother Commander Macalvie that all possibilities have been ruled out?"

  "No."

  " 'First we get to the truth, then sort out what it means.' He said something like that," Jury suggested.

  " 'Shoot first, ask questions later,' I believe his words were."

  "Like any gunslinger."

  Jury had gone back to his desk and sat down heavily, largely oblivious to the stacks of files awaiting his inspection. "Macalvie's wrong."

  Wiggins had been giving exploratory taps to his chest with his fist. Cough gone. But voice tense. "You say that as if you're quite sure."

  Wiggins sat there, waiting, Jury knew, for some explanation of his superior's pigheaded behavior. "We'll talk about it later. This Stanley Keeler—"

  With the injured look that always lay just beneath the surface, Wiggins said, "Stan Keeler. My eardrums will never forget him. I don't know how the landlady sticks it, except she's convinced he's some sort of Polish spy. She's big as a hoarding, nearly. I expect you'd have to be to stand up to all of those tremors."

  "I want to talk to him, too. About Roger Healey."

  "Suit yourself." Wiggins shut the book on osteoanatomy as if he were shutting the door on the case. "But you'll have to wear earplugs."

  "Thought you said he was lying quietly on the floor during your encounter."

  "He had his head on a tire." Wiggins was beginning to prefer elliptical statements, inscrutable answers.

  "He was lying on the floor with his head on a tire?"

  "Thassrigh," said Wiggins, duck-honking into his handkerchief. "With a Labrador. Big."

  "Duckworth. I want to see him too."

  Wiggins asked gravely, "Did you do your research into rock music?"

  "Piles of it. What's this?" He'd just seen a pink telephone message in the Out box. "Riving———" He shut his eyes.

  "Yes, sir. Miss Rivington from Long Piddleton. Where Mr. Plant lives. About an hour ago. Is something wrong?"

  "No." He reached in his billfold, plucked out a ten-pound note, reached it out to Wiggins. "Go get me some flowers." He thought for a moment. "Tiger lilies. Something green and brown. And toss in some white roses. There's a shop down the street."

  "That's a strange combination, sir. I don't know any brown flower. And, anyway, you'd have to wire them . . . sir!" Wiggins rose immediately, seeing his superior's expression.

  Two days. The day after tomorrow. How could he have been so damned stupid as to forget. "Of course I didn't forget, Vivian. How could I have forgotten?"

  "Easily," said Vivian. Her voice sounded forlorn. She quickly picked up its tempo. "I mean, with everything that happened to you. Your picture was in the papers. I expect you have to testify."

  "No, probably not."

  "It won't keep you from seeing me off, then?"

  "Never. Nothing would keep me from seeing you off. I simply wish you weren't going off." He might have opened with a lie, but this was certainly the truth. He was standing with the receiver in his hand, looking up again at the patch of dirty winter sky. And sometimes I think of high windows/ The sun's— Yesterday's sun.

  "What? What did you say?"

  He must have spoken aloud without realizing it. "I was just thinking of a message I wrote a long time ago."

  "What was it?"

  "To a girl who loved to dance to an old Jerome Kern song called 'Yesterdays.' " Jury asked, "Was it always better? Yes-terday, I mean. There've been so many songs written about it."

  Vivian was silent for a moment. "Perhaps it was. Or perhaps it will be," she added sadly. "I'm sorry about the girl."

  "I was only six." He tried to bring so
me lightness to this little confession.

  "Then that's sadder." She paused. "The train leaves at eleven in the morning. The morning after tomorrow." Her tone was tentative, as if she didn't really believe he'd be there. "Victoria. I think."

  Jury smiled. "The Orient Express always leaves from Victoria."

  "Oh. Marshall and I are coming up to London. . . . Where's Melrose? I can't find Melrose."

  Her voice was distant, as if she'd been talking away from the telephone, looking about the room, hoping to find Melrose. Hell, had Melrose Plant forgotten, too?

  "Where is everybody?" She wept into the silence.

  Quickly, Jury said, "Vivian, he's in Haworth. He stopped off there on his way back from Harrogate."

  "For what?"

  "He was tired, I expect. If you'd just driven Agatha over a hundred miles, wouldn't you be?" At least, she laughed at that. "I think his idea was just to stay the week until he had to collect her, rather than drive all the way back again." Before she could reflect on the location of the Old Silent, he went on lying. "Look, I'll ring him up and tell him to call you immediately. I think he said they were having trouble with the telephone service—"

  "That's very good."

  " 'Good*?" He heard the smile in her voice.

  "That tale. Just as long as you're both there, Richard. Tell him he's forgiven."

  "Forgiven—?" But she'd already hung up.

  Eight years, and now she was going off to marry some smirking Italian, and it was the first time he'd heard her call him Richard.

  "A friend gave them to me," said Jury. "Get-well gift." He cradled the massive bunch of flowers Wiggins had brought back and looked deadpan across Chief Superintendent Racer's desk.

  Sergeant Wiggins was perched on the edge of the leather sofa; Fiona (who'd been called in to search for Cyril) was busy pinning a white rose from the bouquet into her plunging neckline, thereby enhancing the cleavage even more. "Still look pale to me, you do."

  Wiggins agreed: "Bedrest, I told him, and proper medication—"