"It makes sense." Jury stopped. "Are you looking for something?"
Melrose had bent down to peer under the dashboard.
"Me? No."
Jury sat back. "Emotional blackmail, though, would work with the guilty minister in your book. But it certainly wouldn't work with Healey."
"There're other ways of keeping someone on a string. And telling the wife would make for a very heavy piece of rope."
"And then she kills him? Nell Healey knew what he was like. He must have been incredibly smooth, incredibly plausible with others. But she wouldn't have killed him because of his affairs with other women."
"But if she found out Abby was his daughter—?"
Jury shook his head.
"Then why?" Melrose was running his hand under the dashboard.
"It's beginning to look—what in the hell are you doing?"
"Doesn't this car have a tape deck?"
Jury shut his eyes. "Judas priest."
"Not them. Ellen found a copy of Rock V Roll Animal But there's something wrong with Malcolm's stereo."
Jury reached round to the back seat and shucked the Sony to Melrose. "Here. I'm going over to the Citrine house."
Melrose slid out of the car and shut the door. He opened the cassette player, took out the tape, inspected it. "Who's this?"
Jury took it. "Coltrane. Good-bye." Jury put the car in gear, started driving slowly.
Melrose did a little run, hand on the sill. "You wouldn't have the earphones to this, would you?"
Jury braked and nearly sent him to the ground. "Here!" He tossed them out the window and the car lurched forward, stopped, and he called back, "Did you ring up Vivian?"
"Vivian? Of course I rang Vivian."
As the Volvo drove off, Melrose plugged in the earphones and walked in the Hall to ring Vivian.
35
"I can find my way," Jury said to the silent servant who had just opened the heavy door on the depressing sight of the cold entrance room and the dim hall that reached away from it into darkness. "Don't bother announcing me."
Carefully folding his coat over her arm, she looked at him doubtfully. Jury merely smiled and waited. As unused as she apparently was to requests either to or not to announce, she shuffled off with his coat.
In the Great Hall a fire blazed in the hearth and the brasserie. But only in these two pockets did the room seem warm, for the rest was still cold, like stepping from the heat of the sun into the shadows. In the shadow of the archway Jury now stood.
Given the positions of Charles and Rena Citrine in the magisterial chairs at the end of the long table, they might have been facing off for an argument. Yet their low voices, their ignorance of the presence of another person might have brought them together not as enemies but as conspirators. It might have been his imagination but his sense of their relationship, seeing them thus, was turned around.
When he said good morning, their heads turned together. It wasn't long, though, before Charles Citrine was on his feet and displaying as much hostility as he probably ever let show. Jury expected he prized that cool, shambling manner of his above all else.
It must have taken steely control to limit his anger at Jury's appearance to a mere "Just what are you doing here?"
"Trying to help your daughter."
Citrine slumped back in his chair and said nothing.
His sister looked from him to Jury. "And do you think we're not? " Her smile was a trifle arch.
"I don't know, do I?"
Citrine shot him a vitriolic glance.
"Charles . . ." Rena leaned forward a bit.
Jury would never have pictured Rena Citrine as a peacemaker. Certainly not for the brother she had so often referred to as "Saint Charles." But the circumstances here were rather more serious than what part of the house she felt she had been permitted to occupy.
She said to him, gesturing toward the heavy walnut chair positioned several feet in front of the brasserie, "You needn't stand, Superintendent." The brandy decanter that she and her brother had been sharing she lifted, as invitation to join them. Jury shook his head. The glasses from which they drank were cut glass, heavily pointed. The decanter itself looked like old pressed glass, smooth. She shoved it across the table toward Charles, who poured a half inch into his glass. The lines round his mouth had deepened since Jury had seen him, as heavily cut as the glass in his hand.
Jury said, "Ann Denholme got a telephone call before she set out across Keighley Moor. Doubtful it was a friend since the housekeeper says Miss Denholme barely said a word. Might have been a message from the milk-float man about a delivery. Might have been Nelligan about stray sheep. Might have been anyone." Jury watched a large log roll down, split, send up sparks. He did not bother watching their faces, for they had heard all of this before.
As Charles Citrine wearily reminded him. "But more likely someone from this house. We've been through this again and again with police from Wakefield and that detective, Sanderson."
"What you think," said Rena, "is that someone in this house lured poor Ann Denholme to her death. Given we're rather short on family at the moment, the suspects are few. And I don't expect you think our servant was the gun-wielder." Her arm went toward Charles as she gestured for the decanter. For just past eleven in the morning, the decanter appeared to have done quite a bit of traveling. But neither of them seemed in the least drunk.
"And Mrs. Healey, of course," said Jury mildly.
Citrine dropped his head in his hands. But his sister turned, as he had done earlier, and flashed Jury a look of rage. "Don't be absurd. You don't believe that for a minute!" Her glass went down with a thump.
In the same mild tone, Jury said, "Anyone could have made both of those calls to Ann Denholme and to Abby from a public call box."
Rena picked up her glass again without replying.
"Except we know it wasn't the milk-float man. Abby lived to talk about it."
Neither of them said a word, nor did they look at one another.
Finally, having cleared his throat perhaps to see if his voice was in working order, Charles said, "The same person?"
"Would you imagine two people were playing the game?"
Charles shook his head. Rena looked stonily across at him, seeing him or not seeing him, Jury had no idea. She finally said, "In the case of Ann Denholme, there might have been a number of candidates. Men."
Citrine's voice rose a notch, a cautionary notch. "Rena."
For a moment there was silence, and then she got up to stand before the fire, hands thrust into the large pockets of her quilted skirt. It was a patchwork of squares and crescents, satins and silks and wools, a kaleidoscope of greens and blues and golds that shimmered in the firelight. With her heel, she kicked angrily at the log that had fallen, sending up yet more blue flame, and gold sparks that made her red hair glimmer with silvery highlights, her amber eyes take on a reddish glow.
This square of the cheerless hall seemed to flame up around him; the brasserie behind, the sparking logs before, Rena in her flaming crescent colors. Jury looked at her, at her fiery pose, and knew that the slapdash, comic role as the madwoman in the tower, the outcast, the prodigal was illusory.
And he saw it:
Not the bits and pieces, not that last part of dark, leafy tree, not the scalloped edge of pale blue sky, nor the symmetry of the little windows, dark or lit. It was not the beautifully framed square of the Magritte print, but the light cast by the streetlamp in Abby's picture. In that he saw it.
36
"She's German."
Ellen was tinkering with the BMW; it had taken less of a battering than one would have thought possible. "German? Who's German?" She was squinting up at him over her shoulder.
Although she was holding a spanner in her raised hand he answered her. "Caroline. She's his 'Germanic Queen.' "
The seat of the bike must have been very strong; he was surprised the leather didn't split when she smashed the spanner down on it. "Will you stop wi
th that fucking tape! I wish I'd never mentioned Lou Reed."
"They met in Berlin. This whole round of songs is about their relationship." The earphones went up again. Unfortunately they didn't cut out her voice.
"Who cares where they fucking met? " She started wheeling round and round, reminding him of Abby. Goading Ellen was almost as much fun as goading Agatha.
"You look really fucking stupid with those earphones on," she shouted.
"It that all you think about?" he asked mildly.
She stopped her dervish-turn two feet from him and looked at him suspiciously. "Is what?"
Melrose reached out his hand, shoved the fingers in the neck of her black jersey, and pulled her to him. As he kissed her, harder than he'd ever kissed anyone, she made a strangling sound—perhaps, one part of his mind told him, be-cause his fingers were looping the neck of the jersey too tightly. Still with his mouth on hers, he let the jersey go, put his hand instead on the back of her head; her hair was softer than it looked, given the tangled and crinkly style. After a certain amount of pounding her fists against his heavy sweater, she went limp. That part of his mind into which blood was still pouring (all the rest was going off in different directions) thought that perhaps she was dead. Strangled. He went on kissing her.
But he must have let her go at some point because she was standing back, getting her breath, and muttering. He seemed to see this through a filament as if there were a wavering, clear waterfall between them. Or possibly he was getting cataracts.
Ellen wandered drunkenly over to her BMW and lay across the leather seat, still mumbling.
"Are you being sick?" asked Melrose. "Did we stop too soon?"
She raised herself and wheeled on him. "No! My Lord, I have never been kissed like that—"
"That's because you've manacled yourself to Manhattan men. They're all dolts who spend their lives chasing the elusive shadow of success instead of women—"
Her hands, like headphones, leapt to her head. "Shut up shut up shut up. I wasn't complimenting you. My God, I was nearly raped by an earl."
"Is that the trouble then, I mean the 'nearly' part?"
Her hands dropped away. She stared at him. "What conceit How does any woman manage around you? Why don't they tear off their earlobes, or something?"
Melrose thought of Vivian, leaving tomorrow. She hadn't wasted time on Manhattan men. Only Italian, he thought woefully. He was floundering. He didn't know what was happening to him. He was listening to the bedroom scene where Caroline had cut her wrists, and he felt like weeping. But he came round in a minute as if he'd just had a fever-flash and saw Ellen looking at him with real concern.
"Ellen, you're too smart, too young, too much wanting to be another Bronte. Get out of this place; you'll die of illusion." Melrose restationed his earphones. "Let's go to Berlin."
"I don't know what you're talking about." It was hopelessness rather than dismissal in her tone. "I have deadlines to meet."
Melrose shrugged. "Let's go to New York, then, and meet them. Stop talking. I think another clue about Caroline just went missing." He pressed the 'phones to his head.
Calmly, Ellen went back to adjusting the lugs on her BMW wheel.
37
The WPC brought her into the wood-paneled room that might have been the library of a home, except for the lack of books and that it was furnished only with a long table and a chair at either end. Jury turned from the barred window where he'd been staring out at a snow-threatening sky only a shade lighter than the room itself. No burning logs, no turkey carpets relieved its unblemished paint. The room was clean in that way of places that few people stop at. Jury shut his eyes and opened them again, childishly surprised that the scene hadn't changed. That in its place there wasn't a tall tree, a weak slant of sunlight, a rotting gate.
Nell Healey herself was dressed in a square-necked prison dress, and looked like a figure in a tintype, where the faces take on the tincture of the amorphous, steely gray edging. Because of their unsmiling complicity with the camera, the faces seem all to look the same.
She was looking at him, waiting. Neither of them sat down. It was not a room to linger in, to look over the photograph album, to reminisce about the past. They stood nearly the width of the room apart.
"It's nice of you to come."
Her voice was threadbare, unraveling. She coughed slightly.
He rejected the usual openings—I hope you're not catching cold; I've just seen your father, your aunt; are they treating you well. Perhaps her own silences were infecting him.
He began to see the uselessness of that sort of talk. So he said, "I was talking to Commander Macalvie. You remember him, I know. There's probably no way he can avoid testifying."
Was that all? Her vague smile was a little dismissive. "With the Lloyd's banker dead and the superintendent in charge, you mean that he's the only one left who knows about the ransom."
"Knowing him, I don't think the prosecution will relish the testimony, even though they might think they're pulling a plum from the Christmas pudding. They'll be wrong."
She frowned. "Won't this have got him in trouble? To say nothing of you. I know Father called the Wakefield headquarters—"
"I'm always in trouble. At least with my chief."
"Commander Macalvie is very convincing."
"Very."
"And is he usually right?"
"Nearly always." You tell her, Jury. Go ahead. The shots of the boy's skeleton passed before his eyes. "Nearly," Jury repeated. He felt ill. The temptation to show her the magazine, to tell her about the lunch with Charlie, was strong. But he didn't; he couldn't. Partly, it was Macalvie, but partly something else. He couldn't pin down the something else.
"Is that what you came here to tell me?"
"No. I want you to tell me what happened."
Is that all? her little smile said. She had turned her head toward the window. Did she care there were bars? He doubted it. She was no more prisoner in here than she'd been that afternoon a week ago, standing and searching the crippled orchard.
"Friend of mine," said Jury, "was talking about the Greeks. Medea, Jocasta, Clytemnestra. You remember the tale of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon? I mean the whole of it? Agamemnon has always been considered the husband betrayed and murdered."
She seemed amused in his telling of this tale. "And that's true. Are you drawing an analogy with me? Does your friend think I'm as evil as Clytemnestra, then?"
"He was talking about Ann Denholme."
Her expression changed very swiftly, became impassive.
"You knew Abby was her daughter. You also knew Roger was her father. I'm not sure how, but you knew."
She actually smiled. "I murdered him in a fit of jealous rage. Is that it?"
"No. You murdered him because you thought he murdered your son. And not for the reason Agamemnon nearly sacrificed Iphigenia. In that case, it was a sacrifice demanded by the gods. Fortunately, the gods gave him a last-minute reprieve. In this case, there were no gods to appease. And no reprieve. Healey wanted the money."
Her mouth slightly open, she watched his face.
Nell just avoided stumbling as she took a step toward the nearby chair and put her hand on its back. She was too careful to stumble, too controlled to lean.
"Commander Macalvie always thought that you suspected something, that you came to that decision not to pay up with extraordinary swiftness and decisiveness. The kidnapper had to have been someone Billy would have gone with willingly; there wasn't a sound, not even from the dog. You never thought they were taken by force. But who would have believed you, given your husband's near-unimpeachable reputation and your own 'highly susceptible nervous condition'? Obviously, not even your own father. And I wonder who put that idea in his head? You're the only one in that family whose nerves are about as strong as nerves can get. There was no way you could be absolutely certain it was Roger who was behind the kidnapping, but that suspicion together with Commander Macalvie's advice made up your mind.
"You were fairly certain if you paid up, you'd never see Billy again. Or Toby. And you'd never be able to prove it," Jury added. "But if something went wrong, and Roger failed, Billy would be able to identify him. That must have occurred to you."
"Roger never failed," was her bleak response. "If he wanted something."
"Then why did you wait all of these years?"
She looked down at her hands. "It might sound—frivolous. But one reason was that Billy and Toby had been declared 'officially' dead. In that, there was something dreadfully final."
When she stopped, Jury prompted her. "You said 'one reason.' Was there another?"
"Oh, yes. It's the reason I met Roger at the Old Silent. He wrote to me from London, said he wanted to talk about Billy, and he thought it would 'be pleasant' to have dinner at the Old Silent." She raised her eyes. "Absolutely nothing incriminating in such a letter; he phrased it carefully."
"The letter that went into the fire?"
She nodded. "Obviously, he did not want to have dinner. What he wanted was a million pounds." She turned her head to look at the barred window. "In return for information about Billy. He thought he knew, you see, what had happened."
Jury frowned. "But surely the man wasn't reckless enough to admit—"
"Oh, no." With that she rose.
He looked at her for a long moment and said, "You were never, then, one-hundred-percent sure."
"Oh, no." Folding her arms across her breast she half-smiled. "But what would you do to a father who would extort money for information about the disappearance of his own son?"
They stood there with the pale sun throwing shadows of the bars across the table that separated them.
Jury didn't need to answer.
38
Marshall Trueblood was overjoyed.
Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent Page 34
