“That’s awfully nice of you. But, I mean, I’m a stranger. I couldn’t intrude on family —”
“Come on, now. You’re not going to go all Father Christmasy-sentimental on me, are you? After what you just said?”
They both laughed.
“Speaking of him, I’ve got to get some Christmas boxes ready for the school. Bonaventure School. It calls itself a school but it’s really more of an orphanage.”
“You’re doing your share of charity work, certainly.”
Quickly, she put in: “Oh, don’t give me any credit for that. It fills up time.” Vaguely, she looked over his shoulder at the window where snow hissed against the glass.
And why, Jury wondered, would she need to fill up time? His question about her happiness had gone unanswered. Reluctantly, he put down his glass and got to his feet. “I expect my cousin is wondering where I’ve got to. I’d better be going.”
She walked with him to the door. When she opened it, he saw snow blown by wind ruffling high hedges and bowing small trees. It was mixing again with rain.
Helen pulled her sweater sleeves over her hands and wound her arms about her waist.
“You’d better go back inside,” said Jury, turning up his jacket collar. The wind knifed through suede and sweater.
But she seemed not to notice her own discomfort, saying: “You’re not dressed for this weather. Haven’t you an overcoat?”
“It’s in the car.”
Having walked beside him to the gate, she looked up and down the street for the car. “Where?”
There was suspicion in her tone, as if he might be intending to hoof it to Newcastle, dressed as he was. He smiled in the gloom at her standing there, feet planted firmly together in dark shoes with button straps. She was wearing lisle stockings and looked old-fashioned, like a woman one sees in Art Nouveau posters.
“The car’s in front of the pub. And you’re getting wet.” He remembered the moment in the cemetery. “What’s causing the dizziness?”
Wind whipped her hair. “It’s probably just some side effect of medicine. It’s nothing, really. A very minor heart thing. You’d better go.” Shoving a strand of hair from her mouth, she asked anxiously, “Will you be back?”
A gust of snow had pulled at her sweater collar and he reached up and drew it together, drawing her, at the same time, a little closer. “Now, you know I’ll be back.”
They looked at one another for a moment before she smiled and said, “Yes, I expect you will.” Through the gloom, she ran back up the walk and inside, waving to him from the door before she closed it.
Jury stopped there on the pavement for a minute or two, shoulders hunched into his jacket. It was the damned wind, cold as hell. A light switched on inside the house; he saw her at the window. The mullioned panes, the rain, broke her face into watery squares like a dream-image.
He waved again and started off for his car realizing that the depression had lifted like the nasty sparrow flying from his shoulder. The snow was up over his shoes but he scarcely noticed it. The roads would be hell, but he hardly cared. Jury started to whistle.
Yet he felt uneasy. The farther away he got from her cottage, the more the feeling grew.
That was when he first thought it: that a meeting in a graveyard was not the best way to begin an attachment. The sparrow fluttered near him, but he shook it off. The next time he saw her, he would certainly find out why she was unhappy.
The next time he saw her she was dead.
TWO
1
JURY didn’t have to listen to his cousin to know that Newcastle, that all of Tyne and Wear, spelled frustration, poverty, unemployment, the dole — a depressed and depressing place to be, although that’s all she talked about on his first evening in the walk-up flat, she sitting there knitting wool as drab as her hair and eyes, occasionally pushing back stitches to look out at the slow fall of snow through which Brendan would never make his way home, slipping and sliding after drinking up the dole money. Brendan was her out-of-work husband, a bold-eyed Irishman, the only one Jury had ever met without a hint of humor to him.
Not much to be humorous about, of course: The joke-shop, we call it, his cousin had gone on, talking about the unemployment office, with all of its little cards detailing jobs that had somehow magically been filled just the moment the out-of-worker inquired about them. One ad for a job to work down the mine last week, and over a thousand applicants. . . . The government got them up here, you know, all those factories, by promising them subsidies for a couple of years. Then they go pull the rug out from under you. Brendan was one who had slipped on the rug. Not his fault.
And Jury believed it, really. It was just that he had never liked his cousin much. Jury’s infrequent visits, his telephone calls, his little presents of money when she was on the emotional skids — all were done out of affection and respect for her father, the uncle who had taken him in after his mother had died. He didn’t like his cousin because she had always lived beyond the fringes of reality, in that child’s never-never land where slippers were glass, or if merely shoes, then the elves should come in at night to stitch them up.
God knew, she told Jury, the kiddies needed shoes. Here a sidelong glance at Cousin Richard, and shoes went down on his mental list of Christmas gifts.
The kids, however, were bored by shoes, and knew a soft touch when they saw one; they could sniff out the promise of presents like a whiff of North Sea air. So they put up with shoes the next morning in order to get to the real stuff: a doll, the Jedi ensemble, coloring books and sweets and a huge lunch. The kids, who were a lot better out of their mother’s way than in it, all had absurdly fanciful names like Jasmine and Christabel, the sorts of names you give your kids when you don’t have enough confidence they can get by with being just plain old Marys and Johns. They all got on fairly well, considering the crowded stores, the littlest one’s exploring instincts, and the oldest one’s determination to live down her name — Chastity: she picked up looks as if she were picking sailors off ships.
He wasn’t sorry that afternoon as he drove over the Tyne Bridge — that gateway to Geordie-town — to see Newcastle in his rearview mirror — a great gray stone mass of rococo roofs, elaborate chimneys, deserted wharves — piled up on the bank behind him and receding farther and farther into the distance as he drove toward Washington.
2
BY the time Jury came in sight of the Green, two police cars from the Northumbria station had beat him to it: they were parked inside the gates in the court reserved for those who had some official connection with the Old Hall. Apparently, police did at the moment. The moment he saw them, Jury stopped the car and left it where it stood next to the Green.
Bunched outside the gates were a group of villagers excited enough about this development that some had forgotten their coats, in spite of the snow. Their sweatered arms wrapped around them, they speculated and waited.
Jury shoved his way up to the gate and flicked his I.D. at a constable who tried to bar his way. The constable’s apology was lost in the winds, with the name of the sergeant inside.
• • •
It was Detective Sergeant Roy Cullen, and the wad of gum he was talking around was no help in understanding him, mixed as it was with Cullen’s Sunderland accent. He introduced Jury to Detective Constable Trimm, who with no gum had an even thicker accent.
When he walked in, Cullen had been coming down a flight of stairs, and Trimm had been talking to a black-haired woman with a handkerchief pressed against her mouth. He wasn’t getting much from her except headshakes.
“Victim’s name was —” Cullen consulted his notebook “ — Helen Minton.” He raised his eyes. “Upstairs. What’s the matter, man, y’look . . . the M.E. isn’t come yet. Don’t touch —”
Jury didn’t wait to hear how he looked or what he shouldn’t touch. It was a short staircase, one turning; it felt endless.
• • •
The bed she lay on in that room which had b
een her favorite was covered in brocade. Her brown hair, the red highlighted by the two flickering candlesticks, had fallen across her face. Her legs were half on, half off the bed, one arm thrust up toward the headboard, one over her waist, the hand dangling down. On the floor directly beneath the hand was a small vial, some of its capsules spilled on the floor. The rope that ordinarily stretched across the room to keep visitors at a safe distance had been moved. Jury went closer to the bed. The bed itself was interesting: its headboard was paneled, with a hiding place for pistols, in case the sleeper feared to be taken by surprise. The hinged lid of the foot was a receptacle for rifles.
He looked at the pills on the floor: the medicine, perhaps, she thought was having unpleasant side effects.
Jury felt a cold draft as the old panes rattled; had the mock-candles not been fixed with tiny, wavering electric lights, one might have thought they had gusted in the wind, as her hair looked wind-blown, lying in strands across her face, partly obscuring it. With his finger he drew the hair back. How long had she been dead? Not very; the skin was cool, but not cold. Death had heightened the pallor, made her face whiter against the dark spread and the reddish brown hair.
Wake up. Blindly irrational, he told himself mistakes had been made before. Maybe now. Snow drove against the panes, piling up on the sills. Seeing her lying here in this room full of history, this mysterious and dramatic setting, he could not get over the notion that it was just a stage-set mockery of death. She would open her eyes and smile and plant her feet on solid ground. Get up, that part of his mind ordered her.
But the dead don’t rise, despite the season.
• • •
The woman downstairs, the one with black hair and wadded handkerchief, had been joined by a heavyset man in a sheepskin coat who by throwing his weight around was trying to give the impression of not being afraid. Americans from Texas, he was saying.
“Lissen, all’s we know is we come in to see the house. Nobody on board to sell tickets, well, we didn’t think nothin’ a that. So we just wandered around, and then Sue-ann here —” his hard-knuckled hand was clamped on her shoulder, whether steadying her or himself was hard to say “ — she went upstairs. Then the screamin’ started. Sue-ann said —”
Jury knew this wasn’t his case and he shouldn’t get in Cullen’s way. He asked Cullen, a tall, laconic man, if he could put a few questions to the couple. Cullen nodded, his expression impossible to read. “Perhaps your wife would just tell us herself, Mr. —?”
“Magruder. J. C. Magruder of Texas.” Texans, his posture suggested, were all big and square-shouldered. He proceeded to square his. “We been here now near an hour, Sue-ann and me —”
“Sorry. Mrs. Magruder?”
Sue-ann Magruder dragged the handkerchief away from her face as if she were removing her only source of oxygen, and yet without having disturbed her careful makeup job. Only a few tiny dots of mascara showed on the white linen. Jury had seen enough hysterical women to know she was ready for another bout in the ring at the sound of the bell. “I imagine it looked, when you saw the room, well, almost unreal.”
That’s what Sue-ann said, and went on to explain: “She was so still, so still, I thought maybe it was a . . . mannequin, or something. . . . Well! Where was everybody?” At the threat of another spurt of tears, Constable Trimm looked at Jury with ice in his eye and said, “We’ve owt better t’dae thin this. Gae back doon t’the station and get a statement —”
Magruder interrupted. “Station! We ain’t goin’ to no police station, mister. Look, all’s we are is tourists. We ain’t got nothin’ to do with this. We been up to Edinburgh and just thought it’d maybe be interestin’ to see where old George’s folks was born —”
“Ya’re a bit off there,” said Cullen, trying perhaps to defuse the man’s objections with a history lecture. “It was his great-great-grandfather born here. Now, we won’t keep you long, sir, that’s a promise. Just a formality. Constable.” Cullen snapped his head in the direction of the couple and Trimm went about gathering Sue-ann’s purse and coat — and Sue-ann herself — together. An approaching ambulance, with no consideration for Sue-ann’s delicate senses, bleated through the streets. Jury heard it split up slushy ice as it stopped outside the gates. Reluctantly and somewhat vocally, Magruder departed with Trimm, mumbling about the American consulate.
Cullen turned his attention to Jury. “Scotland Yard’s interested in this woman?”
“Not Scotland Yard. Me. I’m sorry if I seem to be intruding on your patch. You can toss me out anytime.” Jury smiled. “You look like you’re about to.”
In truth, Cullen didn’t look anything of the kind. His stock in trade was making sure no one knew what he was thinking; he just stood there chewing gum, one of those cops whom people tended to underrate and who Jury bet was smart as hell. But now Cullen was in a bind: on the one hand it was his patch and no one had invited this rabbit Jury into it; but on the other — Cullen said it, overcasually: “And why’re you interested? Something parsonal, is it?”
“I knew her.”
Cullen’s face didn’t change, but he chewed the gum a little faster. Jury knew the sergeant could see a trade-off coming. “I’ll be a monkey’s,” he said without expression. “How well? When’s the last time you saw her?”
Jury studied the walls, frowning as if he were concentrating very hard, trying to get his mind to bring up that vital fact. He said nothing. The crew from the ambulance and the medical examiner came through the door and were motioned upstairs by Cullen.
Cullen stuffed his notebook into his pocket, waved Jury on, and said, “Ah, come on to the station, then, when we’re through here. I’ll give you a cup of coffee; you look knackered, man.”
3
CONSTABLE Trimm was dealing with the Magruders at the Northumbria police station — a big, square, spanking new building of concrete and glass built in the environs of an equally new shopping center with a euphemistic name and a swarm of shoppers, parking lots and cars. Jury couldn’t understand what sort of custom could have supported its load of shops, big and small. To see it here bang up against the vast network of motorways and all of this but a mile from the Old Town’s village Green made Jury think of a dinosaur feeding on a leaf.
Sue-ann was still getting heavy mileage out of her hankie. Her husband appeared to have wilted a little, once inside the station.
A constable walked in and put the vial of pills on Cullen’s desk. Cullen held it up to the light, rattling the pills, then looked down at the report. “Fibrillation. Cardiac arrhythmia. This stuff controls heart rhythm.” He looked at Jury. “What was the matter with her heart?”
Jury shrugged. “She said the medicine was having unpleasant side effects.”
“It did that, all right.”
If it was meant as a small joke, Cullen wasn’t smiling.
“The medication was supposed to control the heartbeat, not set it off.”
Cullen read the page before him, tossed it aside, and said, “Maybe an overdose —”
“No.”
About to fold another stick of gum into his mouth, Cullen stopped. “And how d’ya know that?”
“Given the date on the bottle and the directions, she was supposed to take them only when needed. Hardly any missing.”
“Not suicide, then, that what you’re saying?”
“I knew that, anyway.”
Cullen’s eyebrows did a little dance of mock-surprise. “You people in London have second sight?”
“No. We hear voices.” He was losing his cool; he couldn’t help it. But it was stupid to get smart with Cullen. He smiled. “I knew it because I was supposed to meet her there, at the Old Hall. We were going to dinner later. Anyway, if it was suicide, why the hell choose that public place?”
Working on his fresh gum, Cullen sat back and put his feet up on his desk. “Well, we’ll know more after the autopsy. She’d not been dead long. A few hours at most. How long did you know her, then?”
&n
bsp; Jury knew if he told Cullen he’d only met Helen Minton yesterday, what information he had to give would be considered negligible at best. “A long time,” he said.
He felt he wasn’t lying.
• • •
And he had heard enough from Helen Minton about her life — that the only remaining “family” was an artist cousin; that she was up here doing “research” on the Washingtons; that she did charity work for this school — to make it sound as if he’d known her for years.
“The orphanage,” said Cullen.
During the time they had been talking, Cullen was accumulating a neat little dossier — his men bringing him first this, then that report — on Helen Minton. Jury would have liked to see it, but didn’t ask. What he did want, he said, was to work on the case with Cullen.
Cullen grunted. It was probably a gesture of sympathy. He picked up the phone on its first ring. He listened, said, “Aye,” put down the receiver. “Nothing to work on, much; even the neighbor — name’s Nellie Pond, the local librarian — didn’t know her except she’d rented that house a couple months ago. According to this —” he went on, holding up a report “ — the Pond woman says she heard a fight going on at the Minton cottage about a week ago.”
“I see. Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few people a few questions. Okay?”
Cullen’s gum-chewing changed into another rhythm, a slower one, as he regarded Jury with suspicion, a look that suggested Jury might be holding out on him. “What people? What questions?”
Jury smiled. “When I find the people then I’ll think up the questions.”
The gum-chewing resumed its former rhythm as Trimm walked into the room and said, “They knew nowt enough t’put in yer eye, the Magruders. He’s a clot-heed, if iver —” Trimm stopped, trying to hide his surprise — or disgruntlement — at finding that Scotland Yard had still got its big foot in the door of the Northumbria station. He had a round face, with quick, dark, and darting eyes like minnows in a fish-bowl. Trimm, Jury thought, was not quite up to the mark in the brains department. Cullen was.
Jerusalem Inn Page 2
