Jerusalem Inn (3 page)

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 been 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 po
lice
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.”

C
ONSTABLE
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?”

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.

“Will you let me know the result of the autopsy?” Jury asked.

After a brief moment of studying Jury's face with a stare
that just missed cracking the cranium and getting to the brain cells, Cullen nodded. Trimm was obviously annoyed.

“As long as you let
me
in on any little secrets. There's the Chief Constable, of course. But I guess he'll go along with it.” Cullen folded his arms, sticking his hands under his armpits. “Last time we got anybody important here was when Jimmy Carter planted that tree on the green with a gold shovel. Then some lads stole it. The tree, not the shovel. So they went and planted another.” Cullen's mouth crumpled into something that vaguely resembled a smile. “Besides that there's just the football and the lock-ins at the locals. You like football? Sunderland's in Division One. Newcastle team's in Two.”

The spark in his eye suggested Death might be the underdog here, like the Newcastle football team.

T
HE
priest had his missal clenched in his hands as he stopped on the snowy walk between the parish house and the church. His lips moved silently, either from a sudden desire to pray or to hold a conversation with a mangy cat that slunk, belly close to the ground, beyond his reach, suspicious of heathen and Christian alike.

“Father? My name's Jury.”

From under steel-rimmed spectacles, the little priest looked up at him, then down at the cat. It was a dirty white, much the color of the priest's thin spray of hair, which stood up on his head like the comb of a cockatoo. The cat was watching the priest, who had taken a cube of cheese from beneath his cassock — taken from a dusty pocket, apparently — which he flung in the cat's direction. The cat snapped it up and then slunk on, weaving around a headstone.

“I don't know where they come from nor where they go,” said the priest, scanning the darkening sky for signs of stray animals or angels. “That one's been around for months. Never know it, it's so distrustful. Mr. Jury, you said?” He held out his hand. “I'm Father Rourke.”

“It's Superintendent, to be exact.” He handed the priest his card.

“Scotland Yard, is it?” Father Rourke's eyebrows fluttered up like tiny wings. After listening to Trimm, his accent sounded determinedly Irish to Jury. County Kerry, he said, when Jury asked. Jury wondered if the blue skies of Kerry had faded from the priest's eyes in the daily wash of innumerable confessions.