Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  "Like your theory. Psychologically it's lousy, Jury. Here's a kid who doesn't get in touch with his much-beloved stepmother for eight years."

  "If someone tried to bury you alive, I imagine you wouldn't be too eager to take a chance on being found."

  "So Billy Healey somehow becomes a hot, young guitarist in New York. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous." The phone slammed down.

  Jury sat there with the dead receiver knowing Macalvie had serious doubts about his own theory and thinking of Plant's list.

  Absolutely ridiculous.

  Jury replaced the receiver and thought of Plant's hot, young, New York writer.

  Poss.

  Far from giving the impression of a man^who frequented pubs, Owen Holt stood just inside the door of the Old Silent, turning his cap in his hands and looking round him as if he'd wandered onto some foreign shore where he didn't speak the language. His slight smile when he saw Jury was uncertain, his expression baffled.

  Jury led him to a chair in the lounge bar, saying, "Thanks for coming so quickly." The man merely nodded and waited. "Sit down; let me get you a drink."

  "Half pint of Guinness'll do for me. Helps me sleep."

  Jury watched Owen Holt as he waited for the drinks. He was studying the room and its unfamiliar furnishings, looking about naively as if he seldom left his front parlor. For some reason, Holt put Jury in mind of a stodgy fairy-tale figure: the trusty woodsman, perhaps, or one of the kind but utterly unimaginative couple who had taken in some waif. Weren't children in fairy tales so often disenfranchised?

  As he set down the drinks, Jury said, "I hope your wife wasn't too annoyed by my dragging you away."

  "Dihn't tell her, did I? Just said I was going along to the Black Bush to see one of my mates." He took a long, slow drink, wiped his hand across his mouth and leaned forward. "I expect this is about the money."

  "Yes and no. What I wonder about is why you don't seem to be far more bitter toward the Citrines. Didn't you feel it was high-handed of them to make the decision about that ransom money considering it was your son, too, who was in danger?"

  Holt sighed, raised his glass again, put it down. "Police come to't'house, told us what happened, told us it hardly ever did good to pay ransom money. Well, whistling down a well with us, anyway, weren't they? As if we had that kind of money."

  "A little over five weeks later you did have some, though," Jury said, blandly. "You must have wondered why Toby'd gone to London."

  "Aye." Holt kept his hands clamped round the glass and didn't meet Jury's eyes.

  Jury leaned forward. "Mr. Holt, you must have wondered even more why Toby didn't try to get in touch with you for five whole weeks." He waited. Holt sat there slowly drawing his hands away from his glass and dropping them in his lap. "Were you absolutely sure that was Toby's body?"

  "Well, you're right there: I couldn't see why Toby never tried to ring up, at least. Never a word. Never a word. Never a word."

  He ignored the last question and kept his eyes on his hands, kneading the knuckles as if the hands pained him.

  Jury tried through sheer will to draw Holt's eyes up to meet his own. He wanted to see their expression. But the man's head was resolutely downcast. The silence went on for some moments. "A lot of children go missing and they're never found. Most, probably. Every day, every hour that goes by reduces the chances they'll ever be found. Perhaps you thought Toby never would."

  Finally Owen Holt looked up and said, with a fleeting smile, "You're right smart. 'Twarn't Toby. But if you think it were to get the money, you're wrong."

  "Then why, Mr. Holt?"

  "Alice." His gaze returned to his half pint, half full. "The pore woman kept hopin' and hopin'. You'd not think she was that fond of the lad, but you'd be wrong there. Day after day she'd be cleaning the kitchen windows. Pretending she was cleaning, when what she was doing was watching the little path back there that Toby always came up. I sat there in't'kitchen once and counted six times she washed off the same little pane." He shook and shook his head. "Eight years. I think it were the right thing I done." He gave Jury a fleeting smile. "At least now she just cleans to clean, not to hope."

  "I'm sorry."

  Owen Holt drew in breath and puffed out his cheeks as if he were the North Wind in the old story. "What happens to me, now?"

  "Nothing."

  Holt raised his eyebrows, surprised. "Nothing?"

  "Why should it?"

  There was silence again. "He's dead, I expect."

  The rising inflection made it a question, not a statement. Jury thought of Dennis Dench and that grave in Cornwall. He could think of nothing to say to the man as he watched Owen Holt turn his head toward the Old Silent's window where the panes were black.

  39

  The driver of Bronte Taxi, together with George Poges and Melrose Plant, was attempting to jostle the steamer trunk up onto the top of the car, since it could not, by any means, be maneuvered inside or strapped on the boot.

  They all sweated as the Princess Rosetta Viacinni di Bela-mante stood about in her Chanel suit, living up to her name and delivering a wistful account to Ellen of a past symbolized by each of the faded stickers on the trunk, emblems of hers and the prince's travels (or "escapades," as she liked to call them), across several continents. Ah, Saigon, ah, Kenya, ah, Siena, ah, Orlando.

  Ellen just looked at her: "You mean Disneyworld and not Virginia Woolf, I guess." Over Ellen's arm lay a darkish green gown, given her by the Princess, who said it was a very rare find, one of her own favorites, and that Ellen must have it; it suited her and she would see once she put it on. The Princess had purchased it on that Venetian street of fashion dreams, the Calle Regina. Designed by an Indian.

  Probably, thought Melrose, with some irritation, by a Tibetan monk. He only wished the Princess would shut up about Venice.

  Said George Poges, "Why the devil can't you have ordinary cases like the rest of us?" Even in the crisp and icy air he was perspiring, wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

  "I do not advertise makers' wares: no scribbled names on my luggage afld no swans on my arse, as it were. Can you imagine Madame Vionnet sticking a logo on a lapel? Vulgarity knows no bounds in this world. Believe me, that gown" —here she touched her hand to the wilting, dark thing over Ellen's arm—"is worth half of Venice. But not on everyone." The Princess put her arm round Ellen's shoulders and kissed her cheek, not kissing air (in that odious way that some highly sociable women do, Melrose thought) but firmly.

  Major Poges, rather gruffly did the same.

  Neither of them, however, felt the need of a physical display of adieux with the Braines, who had just come through the door.

  Ellen sat, looking disconsolate, on one of the rocks in the courtyard, smoking.

  "I don't see why you refuse to come to London with Richard Jury and me."

  Ignoring this she said, "Charlotte Bronte said all of her books pained her."

  Melrose had been arguing with her at breakfast, before breakfast, at lunch, after lunch. "She should have written about delicatessens."

  Ellen sat mournfully looking at the ground. "That school near Kirksby Londale—it was probably the model for Lowood School. The discipline was fierce; Marie Bronte died of consumption when she was eleven and Eliza died when she was ten a month later." The train of her thought became apparent to Melrose when she added, "So what's going to happen to Abby?"

  "She's certainly not going to die of consumption. She owns—"

  Ellen ground out a cigarette. "A bullet in the back, that's what. For fu—for Pete's sake! How can you sleazeballs leave her here alone?"

  "She's not going to be alone! How many times do I have to tell you, Keighley police are protect———"

  "Ah, ha! Ha! Ha!" She paused in her dismissal of the Yorkshire constabulary and asked, "When do you see your Great Friend off, anyway?"

  Vivian. It had been great friend this, and great friend that until the phrase had grown capitals. He told her agai
n. "Tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock. She's taking the Orient Express to Venice."

  "I guess she's got money."

  "So do you, if that means anything."

  But she wasn't listening; she was holding the gift from the Princess up before her, trying to mold it to the leather jacket, the cord jeans. "What do you think?"

  Said Melrose, "I'm not sure. Do you wear dresses?" He was still irritated with her for bringing up the Great Friend once again. Then he looked at her downturned head and felt ashamed. As to the gown, its purpose and shape seemed fathomless, its color grungy—some fog-washed shade of green, dark and faded. "Well, perhaps you have to put it on. She said it takes on the shape of the person who wears it." The Princess had sounded a bit like Ramona Braine, as if there were auras hanging about certain gowns that the wrong person daren't meddle with.

  Melrose was so engrossed in his conflict that he scarcely heard the other car, Jury's car, until it came to a standstill at the side of the Hall.

  Jury got out and walked over to them, and in so doing set up a bit of a flurry amongst the few ducks that waddled over to the fence.

  "We were just talking," said Ellen, "about leaving Abby here and the rest of you hightailing it to London."

  Naturally, she would make it sound as if Melrose had agreed with her.

  Instead of reassuring her, Jury asked, "What about you, Ellen? Aren't you going, too?"

  "Me? I'm not leaving her alone."

  Jury looked off toward the barn and back to Ellen.

  "Thought you had things to do in London before you went home. Don't you have a booking on the QE Two?"

  She thrust her hands in her jacket pockets and toed through some gravel. "I can always Concorde it."

  "There's a concert tonight. Sirocco. You don't want to miss that, do you?"

  Melrose disliked the form this was taking; it sounded less like an inquiry than an interrogation. "Come on, Ellen; we can have dinner with my Great Friend and my Great Aunt and the local antiques dealer. He alone is worth the trip." Melrose smiled brightly.

  "No."

  Jury paused. "I don't think Abby is in any present danger here."

  "You could've fooled me." Ellen turned away, stuck her fingers in the mesh wire of the fence, and ignored both of them.

  Ethel emerged from the barn carrying a basket, followed by Abby with her feed bucket.

  Ethel had changed her funeral finery for a more workaday gingham dress, the skirt flaring with starch like a brightly checkered tent where her jacket ended. The skirt standing out and the pink jacket ballooned with goose down and her wispy reddish curls the substance of angel hair made her appear as if she'd lift off and float away, strewing rose petals from her basket.

  By contrast, Abby might as well have worn Wellingtons filled with lead. Her yellow slicker was inside out, the lining the color of her eyes, a deep inky blue.

  Ethel skipped; Abby trudged. They were followed by Stranger and Tim. Coming upon this little cluster of people in the courtyard, they stopped. Stranger tried a creep toward Malcolm, who recoiled slightly, but the click of Abby's tongue brought him back. He sat and stared round.

  There was the noise and confusion that often augments departures, that seeming desire to get off in a cloud of dust and irrelevant chatter to avoid the fact of separation, the you

  must come to us next week, next month, next year; or the promises that one usually can't eventually keep, see you next winter, next Michaelmas holiday; the hubbub of arranging cases, of ordering trunks and bags placed just there; the handshakes, the stiff smiles. And yet no one actually leaving.

  Ramona Braine stood awkwardly by the taxi with a perplexed look as if this weren't in the cards; the Major, about to light a cigar, stopped in the act; the Princess, having said her adieux, stood, one hand on hip looking about the little circle with an uncertain smile; Ellen refusing to meet any of their eyes, leaning against her BMW, a study in black-on-black; Ruby in her cap behind Mrs. Braithwaite's shoulder, the two of them in the doorway looking like figures in a Breughel painting.

  They made, this small gathering drawn together in outrageous circumstances, a sort of closed circle.

  The dog Stranger sat close to the center, eyeing each of them as if he'd managed to catch and hold them, by transfixing them with his hypnotic eye.

  It was Abby who broke the ring; she walked over to a spot not quite within Jury's reach, and put out her hand. Abby, with her black hair unevenly cut around a face pale as a moonbeam, and those navy blue eyes, reached out a hand that lay for a moment in Jury's like a white moth.

  Then she walked over to Melrose, again extended her hand and looked up at him gravely.

  It was the Deep Blue Good-bye.

  Part Four: LIKE ALASKA

  40

  Jury was glad he'd seen the theater empty before he saw it packed. The crowd that had flowed from the Underground tunnel and jumped the iron railings in the slanting rain, diamond-splinters in the reflection of the bright marquee, were jammed in the lobby and packed upstairs where the bar was open.

  Jostled by the line in front of the poster and T-shirt concession, Jury looked up at the huge oval, peopleless yesterday, tonight thronged with faces peering over the railing and above them the flashy chandelier that tossed tiny squares of light across some of the faces and hands. He wished he were here just for the show. It was wonderful, this climate of expectancy; the ring of faces looked down as if from a height where they breathed headier air. And from the boozy appearance of some of them, the air up there was decidedly winey. They talked, laughed, giggled, yelled down at their mates below, for it seemed in that magical way thai certain occasions afforded, they were all mates.

  Mary Lee was in her element down here and secured behind her window, where she could, given the line of hopefuls waiting for no-shows, dispense with infinite largesse what tickets there were to be had. For the begging, Jury imagined. Mary Lee was dressed in purple silky stuff, blue shadow with gold glitter on her eyelids.

  Wiggins had asked Jury why her shoe was sitting behind the window on the ticket counter.

  It had always been a wonder to Jury and Carole-anne—no matter how packed the crowd, how large the room—that Carole-anne could always be seen across or through it, as if people instinctively moved back a little to allow a clearer view of Miss Palutski, this evening wearing her Chinese stop-light-red dress over which she'd tossed a short little silver-sequined coat that gave off fire and glitter like the domed chandelier. To give off fire and glitter though, Carole-anne only needed that flaming red-gold hair, those blue eyes.

  "Super!" She threw up her hand, jumped up a bit, and seemed oblivious to the synchronized turn of male heads. Carole-anne, oddly enough, was not really vain. If you look like that (thought Jury, pushing his way through the crowd), vanity is redundant.

  He searched the people crushed against her for Andrew Starr or one of the dozen or so males Jury would sometimes pass on the steps of his digs.

  A couple of feet away he heard his name. It was a breathless Mrs. Wassermann, who had just, apparently, beat her way from the concession line. Mrs. Wassermann held up a T-shirt. Sirocco was scrawled across the front in silver, and a picture of the members of the band was outlined in a square on the back. "I do not know if it will fit, Mr. Jury. It seems small." She held it up to him.

  Mrs. Wassermann also looked once again almost like Mrs. Wassermann. It had been impossible to get the scrunch completely out, but the hair had been combed back, frizz only round the face; she was dressed in one of her well-tailored, comfortably familiar dark dresses, with her silver brooch.

  Jury thanked her for the T-shirt, looked at Carole-anne, and bent down and kissed her. This drew an appreciative little round of applause from a few itinerant musicians (perhaps hoping some Sirocco magic would rub off on their gig bags).

  "Wait outside the front door when this is over; there's someone I want you to meet."

  "Meet? Who?"

  "It's a man . . . musician-type."
<
br />   Carole-anne tried not to seem pleased by either the kiss or the mystery and pulled Mrs. Wassermann along.

  In the bun at the nape of her neck were two hot pink, sequined Spanish combs.

  With the crowd shoving round him toward the sets of double doors, Jury felt a tap on his shoulder.

  "If you must send me on another mission, make it Lourdes," said Melrose Plant, who had his cosher under his arm and was peeling off leather gloves supple enough for a surgeon. "First of all, Trueblood blackmailed me into going on one of his London shopping sprees, and I can only thank God it was Upper Sloane Street and not Harrods; he insisted I buy this." Melrose shook out the lapels of a new overcoat.

  "You look like Armani himself. Did you get our man?"

  As Melrose wedged himself between a girl with rainbow hair and a leather-jacketed one who ogled his coat and reminded him a little of Ellen, he said, "Yes, but I had to leave my Rolex behind."

  Over his shoulder, Jury said, "You don't wear a Rolex."

  "I bought one for the occasion. Traded it off for this on the way out." He held up a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses. "I think she's running a pawnshop."

  Jury pulled him over to one side of the stalls and let the crowd stream by, making for their seats.

  "Where's Sergeant Wiggins?" asked Plant.

  "Up there." He nodded toward the balcony. "Projection room."

  "You've been seeing too many reruns—uh!" His stomach was prodded by the elbow of a boozy fan. "—of The Man-churian Candidate. God!" The heel of a boot had just crunched down on his shoe.

  "Probably," said Jury, checking the Exit signs and the double doors at the rear. Five men, that was all he could muster, one at the stage door, one in front, one operating as a scalper, the other two inside. It was hardly mounting a battalion. The two huge spotlights on each end of the circle suddenly switched on and started crisscrossing the stage, which sent up cheers from the audience.

  Plant had raised his voice at the next onslaught from a couple of punches on the shoulder. "For God's sakes, you could get killed in here just from standing about."