Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (24 page)

"Nowhere particular," said Abby.

He stopped, jamming the crook in the snow, and said, "You really
mean you don't know, correct?"

She regarded him coolly. "You're not lost."

The dog ran, spewing up snow, toward an old drystone wall.

He
felt
lost. "I should have brought an ordnance map." He
watched her tramp on ahead of him, toward the wall and the dog,
brandishing the cosher. For her it was probably a jolly old adventure,
some kind of game. It occurred to him he still didn't know precisely
what their goal was. "Wait up, for heaven's sakes.
What
is
the object of this communion with the moors?"

"I expect you wouldn't like it if you were in a tomb, buried alive."
The blue eyes were looking stormy.

It sounded like one of the Braine woman's inscrutable comments on
Hadrian's troops.

She clicked her tongue, and Stranger started a patrol of the wall.
Wind had caused the snow to drift, and the dog was nosing slowly along,
sniffing. "Here, poke with the crook."

"I take it we're looking for sheep. Good grief, if any were trapped
in there they'd be dead."

"No they wouldn't," she said matter-of-factly. "I expect you don't
know their breath makes airholes—"

"Oh, be quiet." But he did as he was bid and tried to hold on to his
temper. He'd never get anything out of her if he drove her deeper into
silence. The crook met with no resistance; what, he wondered, were
they to do with these entombed sheep, should they find any? Stranger
had reached the end of the wall and turned, panting.

"That's all right, then," she said. "There's another wall yonder."

"So you
do
know where we are."

"More or less." Slogging along, she held the cosher above her head
like a bayonet. There was another wall up there.

Stranger ran alongside of it, raced back, sat down, and at the
clicking of her tongue darted through what was apparently a hole in
the wall.

They approached it. "Well, we can't get through there, obviously."

"It's a cripple hole," she said, disregarding his statement.
Carefully she lay Melrose's stick near the hole, got down and crept
through on her hands and knees.

The last he saw of her was a mittened hand coming back to claim the
cosher and whisk it through the hole. Then there was silence.

He looked at the size of the cripple hole, remembered how big the
black-faced sheep was, and imagined he could get through it, if he
manuevered on his back or his stomach. He called: "I'm much too big for
this cripple hole thing."

No response. His voice was borne away by the wind; he heard its
distant echo, or thought he did. No sound came from the other side of
the wall, not even the bark of the dog. He cupped his hands and let out
with a "hallo, hallo." He whistled as if the dog would come at his
bidding. Who was he fooling? That dog wouldn't pay attention to Attila
the Hun.

He knelt and peered through the cripple hole. No tracks led away
from it, of girl or dog. Blast it all, where was she? Except for wind
soughing through the stand of evergreens over there to the east, the
silence was engulfing, and the clouds appeared lower, the sky chalkier,
the curlews circling in ever-narrower patterns, as if they meant to
settle soon, like vultures. Oh, for heaven's sakes, it was merely an
illusion created by the godforsaken moor.

"I'm heading back!" he shouted irritably as he planted his crook
more firmly in the snow. Why should he continue on this senseless
venture? He'd got precious little information for his trouble, all of
those monosyllabic answers. That bit about the dog Stranger
constituted, for Abby Cable, a parliamentary address. Must have been
two, three sentences. "Well,
good-bye
!"

There was no response although he thought she was prob-ably just the
other side of the wall, doodling in the snow, drawing rough pictures
with his walking stick.

Still. One never knew whom one might meet. He thought of the
black-cloaked figure striding across the moor. Furthermore (he
rationalized, as he tossed the crook through the hole and lay down on
his back, arms outstretched to gain purchase on the stone), they were
probably not too far from the Citrine estate.

God. He flattened out, heaved his way through the cripple hole, to
which the sheep smell and sheep's wool clung. Then he rose and shook
off the snow.

They were directly on the other side of the wall, Stranger working
one end, Abby the other. Melrose walked beside the snowdrift to the
place where she was poking with the cosher.

"Use your crook," she said.

"You heard me calling. Why didn't you answer?" Irritably, he poked
the crook into the drift.

"You said you were going." She shrugged and looked at him, eyes
narrowed as if against something heavenly bright or hellishly
unsightly. "You're still here, aren't you?"

He resisted the temptation to raise the crook. To hear her talk, one
would think she were clairvoyant. What she expected to happen, would.

"I'd sooner talk to the dog. Did you get him as a pup?"

"No."

He sighed, watching Stranger snuffling at the drift of snow. "Well,
how'd
you get him?"

"He came by," was her no-frills answer.

The dog was pawing away, sending up fans of snow.

"I should think a border collie smart enough to round up a hundred
sheep down in a gully would be missed."

Abby appeared to be giving this some thought. In her
flat-as-a-pancake voice she said, "Maybe nobody cared." Then as the dog
kept shoveling away, she added, "He's found one."

The highlight of the morning for Melrose was to be pulling and
yanking a sheep from what must have been its snow tunnel. The ewe
didn't seem the worse for wear as Stranger herded it out of the snow.

"Now, what do we do?"

"We don't do nothing. It does for itself." She turned and tramped up
the moor, headed, probably, for the wall in the distance.

Since he was getting nowhere putting questions to her he hoped would
elicit answers that might deepen into some conversational foray about
her life, about Mrs. Healey, about anything, he decided to be direct,
even if the subject was grisly. He supposed the little wall Abby Cable
had built between herself and the world was as resistant to grisliness
as it was to snowbound animals.

"That's a terrible thing that happened at the Old Silent Inn, isn't
it? It must have upset you quite a bit." If it did there was no sign of
it. Her small face held to its contour of stony silence just as those
distant outcroppings of millstone grit held to the horizon. "Since
she's a friend of yours and your aunt's." He tossed that in because he
wondered, indeed, if the two women had been friendly.

"I don't think so."

"Don't think
what
so?"

"She's a friend of Aunt Ann's." She made that little clicking noise
with her tongue, and Stranger, who had gone so far he showed only as a
dot in snow, turned and ran back.

"Oh? I thought Mrs. Healey came to visit your aunt."

"She came to visit
me
."

The sheer force of her anger hit him like the wind, one of those
winds that "wuthers," that rakes the snow and slants the trees. "Billy
and Toby and me, we were best friends."

Then she turned and tried to run but could do no more than lope
along, shrouded in her heavy garments.

"A dead lamb," she said, when he'd caught up with her. She stood
looking at the small thing, its legs tucked up. For some time she
stared down and, then, in her usual businesslike manner, covered it up
with snow.

"Look, don't you think we've had enough of death and blight for one
morning?"

But she'd already followed the dog down the wall into a wind that
had stiffened enough to bend the stand of pines off to the east. What
an execrable place; what execrable weather. If Cathy Earnshaw had
wanted to be flung out of heaven to get back here, it must be a cold
heaven indeed. Melrose looked upward and thought with longing of the
public house not far from here, surely. Shading his eye with his hand,
he turned from the high moor and looked downward. Was that some pub on
the road where cars, tiny in the distance, were parked like beetles? If
they weren't always stopping for entombed sheep and pathetic dead lambs
they could make it down there in another twenty minutes. Warmth! Light!
Hospitality! Yes, the picture he conjured up was the very shape and
color of good fellowship: the rubicund, accommodating publican; the
hearty regulars round the bar; the dark brew, polished pine, glinting
brass, rosy glow of mullioned windows . . .

Where was she, for God's sakes? The wind sent up coils of snow with
a snakelike hiss. He saw her and the dog Stranger way off at the end of
the wall and was a little surprised at the relief he felt. He called.
No answer.

In the habit by now of following her instructions, he walked toward
the two, aimlessly poking the damned crook into banked-up snow, wishing
almost he could jab some sheep where it really hurt, thinking
Aha
!
when it finally met with resistance. He hunkered down, rather proud of
himself, and started shoveling the snow off with hands that he was sure
were frostbitten beyond saving. He uncovered a patch of dirty pink snow
and black sleeve. He rose very quickly.

The sleeve was frozen stiff, the fingers of the hand jutting out
curled as if the hand had tried to gain purchase on something. Life,
perhaps. He stood there blinking, staring down at the frozen hand much
as Abby had looked at the pathetic body of the lamb.

Hardly aware of what he was doing, he looked for the motorcycle, as
if he might find it, black and shining, leaning against the drystone
wall.

He hadn't seen Ellen;
no one
had seen Ellen since she had
vanished last night down the drive against the backdrop of dark sky and
silver reservoir. . . .

It was an image that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his
life. Furiously, he swept away snow from the arm and the face.

Ann Denholme's eyes were open, the sockets partly filled with snow.
The face looked heavenward, the dark hair he could see gray wi,th
frost, and spiky, looking almost like hair that had whitened overnight
from some dreadful shock. Her coat was stiff as ice, but when he lifted
her arm slightly, the cold wrist was limp.

Melrose looked off to his right, saw that Abby and Stranger were
slowly making their way along the other part of the wall, and started
covering the body.

The snow was mucked about, but he thought or hoped the wind would
hide both his handiwork and the blood scent. He could hardly have the
poor child (for now he so thought of her) discovering the body of her
aunt.

As they neared him, Stranger's head lowered to the bank, sniffing,
sniffing. Melrose pretended to slip and fell down across the body.
Perhaps his own scent would cover hers.

Stranger, he was sure, could smell death.

But although the dog seemed interested in pawing about the place
where Melrose sat, Melrose gave him a few rough pats and tried to turn
him away. Stranger was not about to be turned.

Abby tilted her head and then shook it slowly, giving the Clumsy One
a look of utter disgust, whether at his falling over or at his idiot
attempt to make her dog respond to ordinary commands, he couldn't say.
Abby looked at

Stranger, made some tiny sound in her mouth, and the dog froze in
position.

Both of them stood there within two feet of Ann Denholme's snowy
grave, locked in place like players in that old childhood game of
Statues.

How in the devil was he going to get them out of here? Not only
that, but get either to the inn or the telephone kiosk back there on
the Oakworth Road? He wondered if this was the way she looked at that
lazy shepherd, Mr. Nelli-gan.

Melrose got to his feet and played for time by arranging his
overcoat and shoving his (gangrened, he was sure) fingers through his
stiffened hair. All the while he was rehearsing and rejecting various
ruses. Finally he said, "This is too much for me; we must return to the
Hall." How pompous he sounded.

Not that it made any difference. Abby stood with her crook in one
hand and his cosher in the other, both plunged into the snow like
crutches. The damned dog was going to hypnotize him with that eye of
his. Melrose felt slightly light-headed.

"Well, go on, then,*' said the little cripple with a huge frown.

"Very well." Melrose took one step, then stopped suddenly as if
he'd just remembered something. "Oh, incidentally, I know where
Ethel's hiding place is."
Oneandtwoand-threeandfour
he
counted as he walked away.

On the/our they both shot past him, jammed themselves through the
cripple hole, and took off toward the Oakworth Road, spewing up snow.

"It were a dreadful thing, but there's no way to help you, I can
see," said Mrs. Holt, irritation flickering across her broad features.
"It were painful enough at the time."

Without police dredging it all up again
, her look at Jury
said. Since her eyes, as she sat in the overstuffed chair across from
Jury, were trained not on him but on the ashtray on the table between
them, Jury thought the source of the fleeting look was not the fate of
Toby Holt but the cigarette Jury had stubbed out immediately upon
entering the room. Given the rabbity sniff of her nose, he was sure of
it. Owen Holt, large, square-faced, an unhappy-seeming man, looked not
directly at Jury, but across his shoulder, apparently out of the
window. His eyes were the grayish-blue color of denim and washed out,
like faded jeans.

Mrs. Holt had opened the door of the terraced house in Oakworth,
dressed in a coverall, head turbaned, and holding a rainbow-hued
feather duster and a chamois cloth in a white-gloved hand. Had they not
now been sitting in her grimly tidy parlor, where her husband Owen
seemed himself to be a visitor, Jury might have taken it for a window
display to entice the passersby to snap up the three-piece suite on
hire-purchase. The sofa and two armchairs were covered in a hideous,
multicolored pattern with fringed throw pillows that just missed
matching the blue, pink, and yellow zigzag design. All of this fought
with the old-fashioned sepia-tinted wallpaper covered with tiny
bouquets whose cinched stems trailed fluttery little ribbons. The fake
coals in the unusable fireplace might have been nicked from the same
window.