Jerusalem Inn (5 page)

She chewed this question over along with her cold beef sandwich, ruminatively. She drank the way she ate, with rather alarming intensity. She was finished with both sandwich and lager while Jury was just getting started. He got up and ordered another of each.

“Only about the villagers in general, no one special.” She was more interested in inspecting her fresh sandwich than in this bit of news.

“Didn't it surprise you, the way she died?”

“Oh, aye, it surprised me. Being found in that bedroom in the Old Hall.”

“Were you a particular friend of hers, Nell?”

That she liked the sound of her name on his lips was clear. She stopped eating and gazed at him. “Well, no. I don't think Helen had particular friends. She didn't talk much about herself.”

“You said something to the police about an argument — a ‘row,' you said, you'd heard coming from her cottage about a week or so ago.”

“Aye. Fairly yelling, the man was —”

“It was a man's voice?”

“Oh, aye. I couldn't hear hers, really. But Helen always was pretty quiet. Had a low voice, soft-like. Well, I went to the window, to look out — it was dark —”

Jury had his notebook out, which seemed to make her slightly nervous, he smiled. “Don't worry; this is just routine.”

She seemed to believe it. “It was after eleven, I know. Tuesday week —”

“Just last week, then.”

She nodded. “Anyway, he walked up the path from her cottage and turned toward the Green.”

“What did he look like?”

She shrugged. “Too dark to see. Sort of tall, I think.” She was looking at Jury as if to make comparisons; she looked
somewhat overlong at him, judging from the blush. “It was blowing up fierce, like today, so he was hunched over. Had on a dark coat and a cap. He had to hold it down against the wind.” Nell was looking at her wristwatch. The black band was frayed.

“Time for just one more drink?” He took advantage of her hesitation to fetch two more drinks and another round of sandwiches. She looked appreciative. “I don't know how you eat like that and look the way you do.” Jury smiled.

Nellie Pond reddened slightly, but was clearly not offended. “Metabolism, I guess. Mum's the same way.”

“Was there anything about the man you saw which looked familiar?”

She shook her head. “I never did see Helen with a man. I never heard her talk about men, except in a friendly way.”

“Didn't that strike you as odd? She was beautiful.”

Nellie was halfway into a sandwich round by now, and looked at Jury again over its rim, wide-eyed. “I never thought of her as —” She shrugged. To each his own tastes. Then she asked, “Did you see her, then?”

“Yes.” A small log sparked and split and rolled from the grate. Jury shoved it back with his foot.

Nellie Pond lowered her voice. “What we heard was she took some pills. An overdose of something.”

Jury neither confirmed nor denied this. “There's going to be an autopsy tomorrow. The exact cause of death hasn't been established. Had she ever been married, do you know?”

The question surprised her. “Helen? Oh, I don't think so. But, then, like I said, Helen didn't talk about herself.” Eating her third sandwich round, she reflected. “There's a person might know something: woman Helen met in Shields. An hotel there, called the Margate. Don't know whyever she'd want to go there.”

Jury took out his notebook. “What was her name — this woman's? Did she tell you?”

Nellie nodded, polishing off her sandwich. “Dunstun — I think. No, wait, I'm a liar. Dunsany, that was it.”

“Ever talk about her family?”

“She hadn't one. Except, I think, this cousin. I think she mentioned he lived in London. Helen was from London. Had a house there. It doesn't take that long, does it, on these high-speed trains they've got? There're businessmen in Durham that whip back and forth like it was nothing. I've never been,” she added wistfully, looking at the crumbs on her plate as if they were her lot in life.

“Aside from this Margate Hotel, did she go about much?”

“Well, I don't know. Durham, of course. Everyone goes there, it's so nice.” She frowned. “Spinneyton. Now that was a bit odd. . . . ”

“Where's that?”

“Not far from Durham. Run-down little place out in nowhere. But she wanted to go to a pub there, she said. And that was funny, as Helen didn't go much to pubs. I mean, whyever would she want to go to this one? Workingman's place. Scruffy. Fights and lock-ins. Jerusalem Inn, it's called.”

A
S IF
showing through frosted or dirt-streaked windows, the lights of Bonaventure School glowed dimly, but in only a few of the downstairs rooms. There was an untenanted air of hush and vacancy about the house and grounds. Jury could see up the dark drive to a mass of square stone beyond high iron gates.

The headmistress, whom he had phoned from the pub after Nellie Pond had left, had not been eager to have routine — meaning, probably, her evening meal — upset.

In the stone pillar of the gate was a bell and a tiny brass plaque that said
Please ring.

“Want to see a trick?”

Jury looked around. The voice cut through the cold air like crystal, but its owner was nowhere to be found. The question was repeated and Jury looked up. Up in that tree, just inside the locked gates. The bare branches were still thick and hid her in the dark. She started down, monkey-wise.

Seven or eight, he would have put her at, as she stood with her fingers wrapped around the iron bars and said, “Well,
do
you?”

Jury thought for a moment. “Sure. If it's a good one.”

The uncertainty of his acceptance seemed to please her. Probably, she had expected No. She would have taken Yes, unimaginative as that reply would have been. But that her trick was being measured off against other unknown and even better tricks made it pleasantly risky.

“It's good.” She closed her eyes and chanted to some wood goblin. In the dim light cast by a single lamp he could see that her lashes were long and pale, like her hair; they rose and fell like moth wings. She had the dirtiest face in living memory. “Now, you close yours.”

“Close
mine?
But if I close my eyes, I shan't see the tricky part.”

She debated. This cynical stranger had no belief in wood goblins. “Then turn your back.”

“All right.” Jury turned and listened to the clatter behind him. “May I turn round now?” he said after a full, unmagical moment.

“No.” She was grunting a bit. “It's a long trick.” Finally, she allowed him to turn. She was standing now outside the gate. The loosened bar was back in place.

He expressed proper astonishment and she smiled. Her teeth were white and even, except for the odd missing lot here and there.

“I can get out when I've a mind. I do, too. No one knows. Are you going to tell?”

“Certainly not,” said Jury.

She nodded. There was a chance for him and the goblins after all. “Ring the bell and they'll let you in.”

Jury did; there was a buzz. She took some pleasure in pushing the gate inwards, refusing his help. Once inside this castle's fastness, she pushed the gate back. From her pocket she pulled a dirty little screw of paper and looked into it. He thought she was counting. Then she held it up to him. “Want one?” It was said with the magnanimous look of one who is
being generous against one's will. “Not the green, though. That's my favorite.”

“You choose.” Carefully, she rolled one jelly baby out of the much-handled packet and into his palm. “The black ones. I don't like them.”

He thanked her as they started the trek to the school. “What's your name?”

“Addie,” she said and ran a few yards, as if ashamed to be caught giving away information.

But she stopped and let him catch her up when he said, “I'll bet you twice as many sweets as are in that bag that I know what Addie stands for.”

She stopped chewing and stared. “You can't. No one
ever
does!”

“Umm. Well, if it's that hard, give me four guesses.” He knew she'd never go along with that.

“Four?
That's too many.” She gave him a look that added,
unreasonable fiend.
“Three.”
Take it or leave it,
the look said now. She was not, apparently, at all concerned with her own end of the bargain.

“Okay. But it's going to be hard.”

“I know. Go ahead.”

“Adelle.”

“No!” She danced away from, backwards.

“Adelaide.”

“No!” She was wringing the neck of the paper screw in her excitement.

“Annabelle.”

Addie squinted up at him. Was he mad? “ ‘Annabelle'? There's not a ‘d' in
that!”

He shrugged. “Stupid of me. I guess you win.”

But Addie was not sure. Her forehead furrowed as she was brought near the edge of supreme sacrifice. But how could one take advantage of such a great nit? Victory was near . . . still . . . “I'll give you one more!” she fluted.

“Another guess? That's decent of you.”

Her decency acknowledged with a tense little nod, she held the sack tight in both hands, wringing its paper neck. Whose neck would be wrung if her own largesse were to be her downfall was anybody's guess. “Adeline.”

Her No rang through the frosty air, all triumph. “It's Ariadne!”

“What a beautiful name.” He remembered a line of poetry — the wind that tangled Ariadne's hair.

Its beauty was bypassed. “When do I get my sweets?”

“Soon as I can get some. Tomorrow, maybe.”

They were at the front door now, which was opened by a girl in her teens, thin with ash blond hair. She started to say something to Jury and saw Addie. “Where you bin? Git yersen in; go on, naow, dee as yer bid,” she added in her thick Geordie accent.

Addie took off round the side of the house, spewing up snow.

Taking her mission quite seriously, the girl said to Jury, “Mistress's waiting.”

 • • • 

Miss Hargreaves-Brown was waiting, that was clear. Her hard-knuckled hands clasped on her well-organized desk, she made it appear she'd been stopping here most of her life, forced to suffer other people's lateness and general inefficiency. When the teenage girl led Jury into her office, she looked long and elaborately at her watch.

Had it not been for Addie, he would have been spot-on half-past six, the time set for their appointment. But thinking of Addie, and looking at Miss Hargreaves-Brown, he fancied it was worth being five minutes late. “Sorry, Miss Brown. I —”

A condescending little smile. “Miss
Hargreaves-Brown,”
she gently corrected him.

He had known, of course, her name, and had deliberately
truncated it to see her reaction. The way she stiffened suggested Jury had been close to ravishing her of her most prized possession: not her maidenhood but her name, what she hoped would be taken as a measure of the genteel and moneyed class. Jury apologized, showed her his identification, offered her a cigarette which she refused, and took the moment to look her over. Miss Hargreaves-Brown was in a limbo between middle and old age, dateless. She could have been a young seventy or an old fifty. He bet the dress she wore — dark wool and silk collar and cuffs — was her best. A lady, he imagined, of slender means. Certainly, her salary for running Bonaventure School couldn't be much. Her accent was not North, but South, and he wondered what
she
was doing in Tyne and Wear.

Everything about her was spare and tucked-up, from the neat chignon to the handkerchief in her sleeve. Jury could almost hear her exhorting her little charges to waste-not-want-not or to remember that cleanliness was next to godliness. He wondered why God should favor clean people.

Jury had told her over the phone why he wanted to see her, and it was to Helen Minton that she now alluded. “Unfortunate woman,” she said, making it sound more like a judgment than a sympathetic response.

“She brought the children things, I understand.” When Miss Hargreaves-Brown nodded, Jury went on: “Did you get to know her well?”

“No. I don't think Helen Minton was the type anyone got to know well, really.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She was — secretive, I thought. Yet
she
asked questions.” Hardly fair, her tone implied.

“What sorts of questions, Miss Hargreaves-Brown?”

“About the school, the children.”

“But as it's an orphanage, that wouldn't be surprising, would it?”

Miss Hargreaves-Brown sat back in her chair as if Jury had given her a body-blow. “Bonaventure is
not
an ‘orphanage,' ” — the word was gristle in her mouth — “but a
school
. It's perfectly true that many, well, most of our children are underprivileged and come from either broken homes or — true — have no parents. We are endowed both privately and by the government. We have proper teachers. Admittedly, we are somewhat understaffed —”

Which probably meant fifty percent up to the mark, Jury thought.

“ — and some of our teachers don't have Cambridge degrees —” As if neither did police, so who was he to question?

“ — and it takes quite a sharp mind to administer, if I do say it myself.” Here she pulled the handkerchief from her silk cuff and patted her upper lip. It was as if Jury were not police, but social services.

“I'm sure it takes a great deal of wisdom and experience, Miss Hargreaves-Brown. Sorry I was misinformed.”

She rose, pushing back her chair. “Perhaps you'd like to see it.”

It was with reluctance that Jury accepted this invitation.

 • • •