Jerusalem Inn (7 page)

“Put it back.” The woman looked at Jury, adults in league, shook her head, and sighed, “Bairns.” Then she moved behind the bar and started shelving the glasses.

Sadly, Chrissie undid the dress, making sure she kept the doll turned away from Jury so that he couldn't, presumably, see it naked. Having undressed it, she climbed over the rope meant to protect the ensemble within, replaced the baby, and climbed back again. The whole scene now met with her frowning disapproval. “It looks dumb.” Her pudgy arms were folded, old-woman-wise, across her chest.

“Well,” Jury considered.

Since he didn't agree straightaway, she said, even more decisively, “It looks ugly without its clothes.”

Jury drank his lager and said, “It doesn't look like the baby Jesus, I agree. What happened to the other one?”

“It got broke in the fight. They're always fighting in here. Smushed.” She made some sort of wet sound, obviously enjoying the noise. “So they made me put in Alice. It's a girl.” Covertly, she looked at Jury to see whether he would contradict her.

“That's too bad. But I expect you'll get her back again after Christmas.” She nodded. Jury went on: “The thing is, Jesus wouldn't be wearing a dress.”

She scratched her elbows. “He wore sheets. I've seen pictures.”

“That's when he was older. Swaddling clothes, that's what you need.”

“What?”
It was the most harebrained thing she'd ever heard of.

“Swaddling clothes. Old rags, I'd say, would do it. If you've got an old piece of cloth your mum doesn't need, you could tear it up and kind of wrap strips around Alice.” He pointed his glass toward the chipped and broken actors in this drama behind the rope. “They were poor. They'd nothing better to dress him in.”

Chrissie looked down at her own dress, faded and sprigged and, like her doll's, too big for her, an obvious hand-me-down. “They come to the right place, then.” She turned and ran through the door, probably to search for the swaddling clothes.

 • • • 

Jury bought the publican — Hornsby was his name — a drink by way of softening him up before he showed him his I.D. and the snapshot of Helen Minton.

Having settled Hornsby in more of a mood for a chinwag,
the man turned out to have nothing much to say. He scratched his neck and shook his head. “Never seen her, man — uh, Superintendent.” Hornsby showed the picture to his wife. Mrs. Hornsby drew her long hair behind her ear, as if that somehow might help her eyesight, and squinted at the face in the picture, half-lost in the shadow of a tree. Mrs. Hornsby was clearly not a woman to jump to conclusions, which could have meant she had a mind that had to pull its load slowly like a yoked ox, or else she was a very careful thinker.

She looked around the inn at each of the patrons, as if some clue would assert itself in their separate presences. Indeed, she did seem to be trying to fish for some memory as she looked from the three old regulars to Helen's picture, and from the pool table to the picture, and from the Nativity scene to the picture. She bit her lip and Jury was sure she was going to confirm her husband's words, but she didn't. “She was in here Tuesday week, let's see, must of been eight, nine o'clock. She asked for a Newcastle Brown Ale and I kind of laughed and asked her did she know how strong it was, and then
she
laughed and said, Yes, she'd had it before. I knew she wasn't from round here, because of the way she talked — talked like you, see — I thought probably from London. I liked the way she stood at the bar and didn't seem to mind the Jerusalem's not the Ritz. Then she watched the pool for a while and Clive” — here she inclined her head toward what must have been a room in the back — “bought her another drink. She talked to the bairn a bit, Chrissie —” Mrs. Hornsby's face split in a smile that vied for brilliance with the tinsel hanging above her. “ — and then she bought Clive a drink. I don't think she wanted the third one; she hardly touched it, but she knew it was the thing to do. Well, a woman doesn't have to, but she did, and I liked that. She talked to Robbie” — and here she looked toward the tall young man Jury had noticed at the video game machine.
“Robbie's kind of — simple.” It seemed to pain Mrs. Hornsby to say it. “But he'd do anything to help a person. We give him a room here, and a bit of money to keep the place clean.” She frowned. “Sorry it's all I remember about her.”

Jury stared at her and her husband patted her on the shoulder and said, “Canny lass is Nell. Never misses a trick.”

“If every witness were like you, Mrs. Hornsby, we'd have London cleaned up in no time.”

Mrs. Hornsby blushed furiously and tried to drag her eyes away from Jury but found, apparently, that there were worse things to look at in this world. She smiled her transforming smile again. Jury bought her a drink.

“Clive might know something.” She pointed toward the door her daughter had just run through. “There's a match going on in the back room. He's playing. And Marie probably talked to her; Marie usually does with anyone new. Cadges fags and tells them her hard life.”

Marie turned out to be the shark-faced woman, not bad looking, but the sort who made you want to take your money off the counter. You couldn't blame them, he supposed, for gathering around. Anything to break up the monotony of pool and darts and workless days. Even police business was better than the joke-shop, as long as the business didn't interfere with their lock-ins. Jury bet most of them were falling-down alcoholics. Drink was all they had and the dole money paid for it.

“She was living in Washington, she said.” Marie accepted a cigarette with alacrity and leaned partially against the bar and partially against Jury. For a drink, Jury imagined she could come up with something of questionable reliability. He bought her a Carlsberg, but it didn't loosen her memory.

Jury disengaged himself from the tangle of regulars and went over to the video game and sat down opposite Robbie, whose slack face he thought bore the traces of malleable
handsomeness, the puttylike quality of looks not fully formed, wavering on the other side of the table like a reflection in water. “You're Robbie?” The boy smiled. He seemed to be in his late teens or his early twenties. The eyes were dull, but the manner very friendly. Jury showed him the picture and Robbie ran his hands through his brown hair, dull like his eyes, as if this were some sort of test he had to pass. “You remember this woman?”

His answer was a stuttered, “Yu-uh-es.” And he nodded his head up and down several times, apparently pleased that he could remember.

“What did she talk to you about?” After a moment during which his eyes roved the room, not in the purposeful way of Nell Hornsby's, but in the painful manner of one who can't do what is expected of him, Jury tried to jog his memory, but gently. “I just wondered if she mentioned her name, or something. Or why she was here. No one else seems able to remember much.”

That was an obvious relief to Robbie. He looked down at the screen, watching the colored ghosts whiz out, followed by Pac-Man.

“Want to play?” asked Jury, fishing some coins out of his pocket.

Robby nodded. “Aa — 'm not ver-r-r-y g-good,” he said, despondently.

“Me either.”

Robbie chased Jury all over the board, ate up all of his ghosts, and was generally beating hell out of him, when Hornsby called across the room that the Superintendent was wanted on the telephone.

 • • • 

When he heard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Newsome on the other end of it, Jury was sorry he'd told the Northumbria station where they could reach him.

 • • • 

Not that he had anything against Newsome, a disarmingly laconic man, but he didn't care for the DAC's message. “Look, I'm not criticizing. But Racer's kicking up a fuss because you're supposed to be on vacation up there and now here's the Chief Constable calling up wondering why Scotland Yard . . . you know what I mean.”

“I cleared it with Cullen.”

He could almost hear the shrug in Newsome's reply. “Why don't you just come back and make the Chief Superintendent happy, eh?”

“My appearance has never made him happy. Okay. I was coming up to London anyway tomorrow. I'll catch an early train.” Hornsby, who had taken in every word, Jury was sure, while shining the same glass several times over, informed him there was a fast one from Newcastle at 8:30.

Jury told Newsome he'd take the 8:30 and hung up.

Nell Hornsby was polishing glasses and watching Robbie, who was having a turn at the pool table, playing by himself. “Awful sad, that boy. Mum dead, dad gone off. He was at the Bonaventure School.”

“Bonaventure?” Jury turned to look at Robbie.

“That place in old Washington. They call it a school. More of an orphanage, I call it. When he turned sixteen he had to leave. They can't stay there after that. Figure the kids can earn their keep. That's a laugh, when even the men can't in these parts.”

“What's his name? Robbie what?”

“Robin Lyte.”

 • • • 

Robbie looked up from the worn green of the pool table when Jury came over with a couple of half-pints and a handful of ten-p pieces. “I'm not much good at pool.” He nodded toward the video game. “How about Pac-Man?”

The struggle to reply must have been Sisyphean. The boy's eyes closed, as if lack of visual contact with the world would
produce verbal contact. His neck twisted with the effort of getting out a
Yes
and adding a
Thanks
to it.

They played in a silence broken only by Robbie's chuckles every time he won, which he always did.

Jury did not produce the snapshot of Helen Minton, feeling he couldn't force memory. If there were something helpful locked in Robin Lyte's brain, Jury would have to find some other key.

“You went to Bonaventure School, didn't you?” Robbie's face was turned down to the ghosts waiting to gobble another ten-p and nodded. “Didn't like it much, I bet.” The boy looked up from the little maze of lights and shook his head. He looked, about the eyes, injured, as if the smudged skin were trying to heal from a blow. Jury shoved more coins in the slot with a force that rocked the table. “I don't blame you. I went to a place like that. Iron cots, bad food, cold corridors. Four years of it. It was after my mother died.”

Ignoring the pulsing ghost inviting them to play, Robbie took out his old wallet and the picture. “Mu-u-ther.”

The young woman, with blond hair that looked freshly permed, was smiling a trifle pertly, arms linked with two other young womenfriends. Robbie pointed her out carefully as the one in the middle.

“She was pretty.” Jury handed the picture back, looked down at the ghost, and said, “Mine was too.”

 • • • 

Nell Hornsby called Time and Jury took the glasses up to the bar.

“Might sound daft,” she said, “but sometimes I think the lad's the happiest of the lot.” She drank off her brandy.

“You couldn't prove it by me,” said Jury, before he walked out the door.

I
T WAS
noon at the Jack and Hammer, and the mechanical smith outside on the high crossbeam began its simulated strikes with a forge hammer. The wooden Jack looked quite fresh in his newly painted trousers of blue and his coat of aquamarine that matched the rather brilliant shade recently slapped on between beams and casement windows by Dick Scroggs, the publican. On Long Piddleton's High Street, already a colorful collection of crammed-together shops and cottages, the Jack and Hammer glowed in winter sunlight.

Things were no less colorful inside where a woman and two men were sitting at a table near a healthily burning hearth. Two of them, taken together, were worth millions, and the other sold antiques to tourists, which amounted to the same thing. This one in particular, with his lavender ascot and jade green Sobranie, was a perfect match for Jack outside, although not as wooden. No less colorful (metaphorically speaking) was the old woman by the fireplace, tippling her gin and mumbling her gums, who sometimes charred for Dick Scroggs, and sometimes didn't. When she didn't, she talked to the stone hearth cat and drank her wages.

“Do you think Scroggs will ever finish tarting this place up?” asked Marshall Trueblood, who owned the antiques shop next door. He looked round at the polished brass and pewter and recently added gamebird prints and plugged another Balkan Sobranie — pink, this time — into a long cigarette holder.

Melrose Plant thought the question ill-advised, considering the source, but was too polite to say so. Plant had always considered Trueblood more of an event than a person. He kept on with his
Times
crossword, occasionally stopping to lift his pint of Old Peculier.

“Oh, I don't know. I rather like it,” said Vivian Rivington. “It used to be such a grotty old place. Since the Load of Mischief closed, it's rather nice having —”

Marshall Trueblood shut his eyes in pain. “
Do
stop being so full of bonhomie, darling. I find it quite tiring. Good lord, here's old Scroggs parting his hair in the middle and slapping it down with some odious hair tonic. And he's even doing
meals.
” He sipped his Campari and lime.

“Well, I like it, anyway. It's somewhere to go for a meal if one doesn't feel like cooking —”

Trueblood dribbled ash into a tin tray. “If one wants a
meal
, darling, one goes to London.”

“You're such a snob,” said Vivian, matter-of-factly.

“Well,
someone
has to be one. Look at Melrose sitting there, who
should
be, and yet is so disgustingly egalitarian. Being a gentleman, darling” — this “darling” addressed to Melrose — “went out with Empire —”