Jerusalem Inn (2 page)

Jury smiled. “We seem to be all kitted out in much the same way. Hair. Eyes. Cousins. I like your house,” he said, sliding down more comfortably in the deep armchair, smoking.

“How about that whiskey?”

“Marvelous.”

As she was measuring out the drinks with the seriousness of a child who must make no mistakes, she said, “It's not my house, really. I'm only just renting it.” She handed him his glass.

“I'll ask you what they all ask you: what are you doing up here?”

Holding her glass in both hands, she said. “Nothing much. I came into some money, enough to live on pretty well. I'm just visiting. I think this is a beautiful little village, the Old Town. I'm doing some research on the Washington family.”

“Are you a writer?”

“Me? Lord, no. It makes something to do. We get a lot of Americans, of course, though not much of anyone around this time. It's an interesting family: it's from the manor and the village they took their name. And several hundred years later Lawrence built Sulgrave Manor. Have you been in the Old Hall? Of course you couldn't have today: it's closed. You must come back. I've been helping out over there on Thursdays, as their regular person is out temporarily — and I could show you around. . . . ” Her voice trailed away. “But I expect you'll be busy with your cousin, and Christmas.”

He shook his head. “Not that busy.”

“I could show you around,” she repeated. “It's owned by the Trust, you know. My favorite room is the bedroom, upstairs — ” And she looked toward her own ceiling and blushed rather horribly. Quickly, she went on: “There's a
kitchen and sometimes I make people tea, though I expect I'm not supposed to. But there are one or two people who've come back several times — ”

With a straight face (but smiling like hell to himself at her attempt to quick-talk herself out of the bedroom) he said, “After you show me the Old Hall, would you like dinner?”

“Dinner?” She might never have eaten it before, she seemed so surprised at the invitation. And then immensely pleased, her embarrassment forgotten. “Why — yes. That would be nice.” She looked toward another room, inspired. “We could have it here,” she said, arms outspread, as if discovering in Jury's invitation enormous potential.

He laughed. “I certainly wasn't meaning for you to cook. Aren't there any restaurants?”

“Not as good as my cooking,” Helen said quite simply. “All of this talk about dinner is making me ravenous. I made some sandwiches before I went out. Would you like one?”

Jury had had no appetite for days. Suddenly, he was starved. He wondered if it was food they both wanted, too. He smiled. “I would, thanks. Can I get us a refill while you get the sandwiches?”

“Oh, please do. The drinks table is just there. I'll be back straightaway.”

He collected their glasses. Jury glanced around the room that was growing more shadowy with the gathering darkness outside, though it was only four in the afternoon. It was a pleasant room, furniture slipcovered in an old rose print, the fire lit. The fireplace smoked, he noticed. He was sitting close to it and looked above the mantel at a framed print of the Old Hall. The wallpaper for three or four inches all around was the slightest bit lighter.

Helen came back in with a silver tray on which sat a plate of sandwiches and an assortment of condiments. Everything from Branston pickle to horseradish to mustard to pepper sauce.

He laughed, “Good Lord, you do like your sandwiches done up properly.”

“I know. Isn't it awful? I've this terrible weakness for hot food. There's an Indian restaurant in the New Town where we could go.” She spread mustard and horseradish on her beef and topped it off with a bit of pickle. Taking a large bite, she said, “I think I'm probably flammable by now. Want some? It's fresh horseradish. A friend of mine put it up.” She held up the small earthenware pot.

“No, thanks. I like my sandwiches neat, if you don't mind.”

They ate and drank in companionable silence for a few minutes, then she sat back on the couch beside the lamp, tucking one foot up under her skirt. “Where do you work?”

“In Victoria Street.” He had wished the question of his work wouldn't arise right away; it had a way of putting some people off.

“Doing what?”

“Police work. I'm a cop.”

She stared at him and laughed. “Never!” He nodded. Still, she shook her head in disbelief. “But you don't — ”

“ ‘Look like one'? Ah, just wait'll you see me in my shiny blue suit and mac.” She was smiling and still shaking her head, tilted so that the stained glass threw colored rivulets across her face and hair.

“I'll prove it by asking a few astute questions. Ready?”

It was a game and she made herself comfortable for it. “Quite.”

“Okay. Why are you
really
here? Why are you so unhappy? And why'd you take the picture down over the mantel?”

At the first question she had looked sharply away. The third brought her eyes sharply back. “How — ?”

“The fireplace smokes. It's the wallpaper; it's lighter all around the frame. You're not getting through my grilling very well. You look guilty as — ” Jury stopped smiling. He
had certainly not meant to upset her. Her face was flushed now, not with the lamplight's reflection but with her own blood.

All she said was, “You
are
observant.”

“It's my job; it's a weakness. Names, dates, places, faces . . . some I wish I could forget. . . . ”
But not yours,
he would have liked to add. “Look, I'm sorry. I wasn't meaning to pry —”

“No, no. That's all right. As far as being unhappy is concerned —” Her laugh was strained. “It's Christmas, I expect. It depresses me. Terrible isn't it? But I suppose it has that effect on a lot of people. One actually feels
guilty
for not having a family about, as if one had carelessly lost them.” She talked to her glass rather than to Jury. “I suppose we're so obliged to be happy, we feel guilty when we can't —” She shrugged it off.

“Usually I put in a special request for Christmas duty and get through it all that way. You see some of the things I've seen on Christmas and it makes you realize you're not the only one who has a rough time getting through it.”
The old woman, frail and birdlike, who'd hung herself in her closet,
he did not add. “It's therapeutic.”
If you like that sort of therapy.
“If you've no plans for Christmas, have dinner with us. My cousin would love it. Give her something else to speculate about except where her alcoholic husband is and whether her kids will end up punks and dye their hair purple.”

“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.

J
URY
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.

B
Y
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.