Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (20 page)

Macalvie was trying to honk an old charabanc out of the fast lane,
but it kept on rattling right along. Through its dirt-smeared rear
window, Jury made out a group of people who looked to be in some sort
of costume. Finally, the Ford pulled into the inside lane and Macalvie
slowed down, hunching over to have a look. A wide, white banner on the
side of the old bus announced the Twyford English Country Dancers. They
seemed to be singing; they were certainly clapping in time to
something, and sounded drunk as lords.

"I think maybe they got an elephant driving."

The elephant smiled down at the Ford and raised his plastic cup.

"Oh, hell," said Jury.

The blue light went back up on the hood. "You want that horse's arse
out here on the
highway
, Jury? No wonder old people are
always getting clobbered on zebra crossings. It's probably your effing
C.I.D. running them down." He shouted at the charabanc and waved it to
the next exit.

"You must admit, sir," Wiggins said to Jury, as they careened to a
halt in the car park, "Mr. Macalvie's right. Can't have this sort of
thing on the roads."

The sergeant smiled up at a blue neon sign missing one of its
letters: CAR

To Jury none of the riders looked a day under eighty as they spilled
out of the bus, still singing, still clapping, still boozing.

" 'Ello, 'andsome," cried a lavender-haired lady as she grabbed
Wiggins's hands and tried to dance him sideways down the car park.

An old man who looked less sturdy than string was squatting down,
arms crossed over his chest, doing something that looked more Russian
than English. They wore frilled shirts and braces.

Jury smiled and disentangled himself from three wiry ladies
determined to drag him into a set as Macalvie was having a fine time
with the huge driver with sepia curls who, in the tight trousers that
looked from behind like two moons, wasn't having problems with his
sexual identity since he clearly didn't care.

Macalvie was shouting like a football coach: "Now you" —he shoved a
ticket he'd written into the elephant's jacket pocket—"can dance your
little toes and tambourines right in that caff and don't even
think
about coming out until you can walk a straight line on your bloody
hands
."
He walked over to Jury. "Get that dedicated look off your face, Jury.
We'd've had to stop anyway; Wiggins needs his cuppa."

"So here's what happened."

The three were trying to ignore the " '
ello, luvs
," the
waves, the brandishing of paper napkins from the long table with its
speckled-blue Formica top on the other side of the cafe.

Three coffees to go was not Sergeant Wiggins's idea of a proper
tea-break, to say nothing of a meal; he had time only to snatch a
Kit-Kat before they were out in the fog again, slamming the car doors,
Macalvie splashing the coffees with a burst of acceleration.

With the divisional commander, there were never any qualifiers: no /
think's;
no
a possible theory might
fee's; no
in
my opinion's
. Jury shook the hot coffee from his hand and let
Macalvie go on, despite the fact they'd got halfway across Devon and
still no mention of the police photos of the skeleton.

"So here's what happened. Billy Healey goes into the house to make
his tea—tea for Billy and Toby consisting of a couple of loaves of
bread and ten pots, according to Mum." Macalvie smiled slightly, as if
he were one of the family or, at least, a distant relative. "So he's in
the kitchen with his dog, Gnasher. He's got the kettle on the hob, he's
sawing the bread in slabs, spreading it with an inch of currant jam,
milk out for Toby, and butter—" Macalvie veered into the outside lane.

Said Wiggins, looking longingly behind him as another cafe receded
in the highway mist, as the car advanced on the turnoff signposted for
Ashburton, "It's amazing you remember these things. I mean about the
currant jam, and so forth. You might as well have been there."

Macalvie couldn't have agreed more. "Too bad for

Devon-Cornwall I wasn't. By the time I managed to get to the
house, it was clean. That whole kitchen-not to say the rest of the
house-should have been gone over on hands and knees."

"I agree," said Jury. "Go on."

"Nell Healey said even the vitamins were lined up: calcium,
C, A, whatever. That was the place I thought she was going to break
down. She was always nagging Billy to take calcium because he was
violently allergic to milk. And she thought like most kids he was
fibbing when he said, sure, he'd taken them. But they were lined up in
a row."

They were in Wiggins-territory now-not Ashburton, but
allergies. He crossed his arms over the front seat. "It can play hell
with a person; I should know."

Jury had lowered the window and was tossing the un-drinkable
coffee from the paper cup. "You're not allergic to milk, Wiggins." He
turned to see Wiggins take a brown bottle from his coat pocket
dispensary.

"One-a-Day." He washed the capsule down with his coffee.
"It's especially important when you can't stop for a proper meal. Which
happens all the time." The tone was dark.

"Yeah. Well, obviously something interrupted Billy Healey's
little meal eight years ago," said Macalvie. "Someone walked in and
surprised Billy. And the someone got a little surprise himself when
Toby came in from wherever he was for his tea."

"He could have been in the kitchen, too."

"No. They took photos." Macalvie's tone was grudging. "The
slice of bread with the jam had been half eaten; the bread with the
butter hadn't been touched. Neither had the second cup of tea. So Billy
starts the tea-making and probably tells Toby, wherever Toby might
have been, and within, say, that fifteen or twenty minutes someone
comes in the kitchen door. The kitchen was at the back facing the dirt
road. It was someone Billy Healey knew."

"That's a hell of an assumption, Macalvie."

"Then you haven't been paying attention—well, what's this, then?"

A sable-brown car flew by in the inside lane. It must have been
doing a hundred.

Jury winced. "Macalvie, that's a Jag. It's an XJSC, V-twelve engine.
Top of the line. We're in a bottom-line Ford V-eight and you're not
going to catch—" Jury's words were lost on the wind as Macalvie hit the
accelerator.

The cottage was half-buried in long grass and weeds; the
garden looked more in need of harvesting than pruning and surrounded a
small, square, cream-washed house that looked as if it were more
functional than livable. It only needed a neon sign or big letters to
pass for one of the motorway cafes.

A tall, thin, quarrelsome-looking girl opened the door to
Macalvie's fist-pounding. Jury would have thought he was raiding the
place rather than visiting it.

The girl's sallow frown looked cast in bronze and her
unfocused brown eyes were set in deep sockets. She had a dishcloth over
her shoulder and was lugging a Hoover. She informed them the
perfesser
was having his evening meal and they could go on back. With the handle
of the Hoover she pointed, more or less, to a room at the rear and then
went off.

Dennis Dench was eating quail and salad, washed down with a
half bottle of white wine.

Each tiny bone had been placed in a bone dish, not
haphazardly, but rather with attention to the underlying structure of
the small fowl. After greeting Macalvie, who made an unconvincing
apology for disturbing Dr. Dench's meal, Dench went back to the quail.
He did not gnaw at the leg bone, but chewed the slivers of meat
carefully.

He greeted Jury, and, once up, put his napkin down.

Dennis Dench took one last sip of wine and said, "Hullo, Brian.
They're not the Healey boy's remains."

As they left the dining room, Dench looked back over his narrow,
sloping shoulder at Macalvie. "You should know that; I've told you half
a dozen times."

"Oh, sure." It was Macalvie's deadpan tone, the one he used when he
wasn't going to argue a point.

They passed down a cheerlessly white, though well-lit hall toward a
door at the end, and Jury paused to look at a large print that supplied
about the only color in the house he had seen thus far. It would have
to be an O'Keeffe, the one of the cow's skull.

"Nice, that," said Dennis, coming back to stand by Jury. He fiddled
with his thick glasses as if they were an out-of-focus microscope.
"Very good." He stepped back a bit, cocked his head, frowned slightly.
"Well ... as good as a painter could get in that particular line."

The basement laboratory was no more antiseptic than the rest of the
house, although it was considerably more interesting. It had not an
O'Keeffe but a Daliesque quality in its display of bones, leathered
skin, objects floating in large jars —all less horrific than surreal.
There were two skeletons in full bloom, if the bright red carnation
between the ribs of one and the daisy chain round the collarbone of the
other were an indication.

Dennis Dench shook his head. "Minerva's always doing that."

"Minerva?" asked Sergeant Wiggins, who turned from his inspection of
a jar.

"One who let you in. Thinks it's all a bit of a giggle."

Jury couldn't imagine the young woman who let them in giggling about
much of anything; her skin was the color of the ashy mask contoured
over the frame of a skull.

Plucking a starched white jacket from a hook, Dennis said, "I've
told her a dozen times the lab needn't be hoovered, but she still
insists the floor needs scrubbing and the 'skellies' dusted. I think
she's named them. Naturally, she doesn't touch anything else because I
told her I would put her in the tub there"—he nodded toward something
like a washtub—"and then her skelly would be scattered over Salcombe
estuary."

"What are you putting together?" Macalvie nodded toward the long
white table with a Formica top where a sandbox rested on one end and,
on the other, the threatening tub. Bones protruded from the sandbox,
apparently drying; in the tub of viscous liquid, other bones were being
divested of remaining flesh. Having pulled on his surgical gloves,
Dennis pulled out several smaller bones and plunged them into another
bath. The hanging light was dazzling, a false sun. "Jason at the
beach?" asked Macalvie, chewing his gum.

Dennis addressed Jury. "I told him not to drag you all the way here
from Exeter."

"You're well known, Dr. Dench. It's not a lost trip."

Dennis Dench gave Macalvie a pursed little smile.

"Call him Denny," said Macalvie, walking over to a cabinet and
knocking on it as if he expected someone or -thing in there to open up.
"Let's see Billy Healey's skeleton, okay?"

Having dipped the two bones in the tub, Dench now stood them up in
the sand and said, "You can see the skeleton, but it's not Billy
Healey's."

Macalvie was trying to open the cabinet door. "Just because I don't
have a degree in osteoanatomy doesn't mean I haven't read up on it. Who
the hell built this cabinet? Dr. Caligari?"

"The skeleton's over here, Brian. You never did have the patience of
Job."

He removed the white cloth from the skeleton of a child that Jury
would have guessed to be preadolescent. It was restored except for a
few fragments that lay in a neat semicircle beside the leg. Beneath
the child's skeleton were the tinier animal bones.

Macalvie stood, hands in pockets holding back his rain-coat. He
nodded toward the bone fragments. "You can't jigsaw those in?"

"Wouldn't be worth it. There's probably been warpage anyway. They
wouldn't tell you anything more."

Wiggins, having had his fill of pickled things in jars and the range
of photographs tacked on the wall, came over to have a look. Running
his hands over his rib cage, he said, "Seems everything's there." He
might have been making comparisons. "What's the most difficult thing to
determine, Professor? From the skeletal remains?"

Macalvie snapped, "Age."

Dennis Dench looked away, pained. "How many times do we have to have
this argument, Brian? Age in a child is the
easiest
thing to
determine. You know perfectly well—from what you've
told
me
you'd read—complete epiphyseal fusion in a skeleton is found only in
adults." He turned to Wiggins and Jury: "In this case, it was fairly
easy. It's a skeleton of a subpubic male Caucasian of between fourteen
and, I'd say, sixteen. The Healey boy was only twelve."

Macalvie shook and shook his head. "Don't tell me you can cut it
that close."

"The devil I can't; except for some environmental variants, bone
fusion can be traced in a growing child with exactitude from year to
year."

Macalvie said, generously, "Okay, even if I give you that—"

"And what about the odontologist's report? Everything points to this
as the skeleton of a boy older than Billy Healey."

Jury said, "You mentioned environmental variants. That would include
malnutrition, wouldn't it?"

Dennis frowned. "No sign of that here, though. You're referring to
the Healey boy's allergy to milk products?"

"I understand Billy Healey had to take heavy doses of vitamins and
calcium. . . . There was some doubt as to whether he took all he was
supposed to."

Answering for Dennis, Macalvie said: "No actual signs of
malnutrition, but that doesn't exclude the bones as being those of the
Healey kid."

"Brian, I hate to remind you: I've written three books on the
subject."

"I know. I've read them." He was standing in front of Dench's desk
running his finger over bindings. Quickly he pulled one out, flipped
through it, found the column he wanted, and said, "I quote:
'Ossification centers are often difficult to recognize and sometimes
lost in an immature specimen.'" As Dennis raised his eyes to the
ceiling, Ma-calvie flipped the pages again. "Here you've got a case of
a youngster whose height could be determined only within
three
inches
. That's a hell of a variable, three whole inches."