Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (25 page)

But what particularly struck Jury about the Holt parlor wasn't this
discordance of paper, paint, and pattern: it was the absence of
ornaments and the lack of pictures. There were no mementos, no little
groupings of figurines; no framed photographs or bits of embroidery; no
books, only a thin stack of magazines lying on the coffee table. In the
corner cupboard was china that he doubted had been used in many years.
The one hint of frivolity was a glass- and wood-beaded curtain that
hung in an alcove at the bottom of the staircase.

"The Social come round," said Alice Holt, in reluctant response to
Jury's question, "and said they'd got this ever-so-sad case of a little
boy that'd been orphaned . . ."

Her voice trailed off as the hand shot out almost of its own
volition to pluck the ashtray from the table. "And as Owen here'd
talked about wouldn't it be nice't'have a bairn round the place . . ."
She rose to dispose of the odious ashes. "T'other person talks, but who
had the care?" she said elliptically and she whisked from the room
holding the ashtray at arm's length.

Owen Holt had either got used to his wife's doing the talking, or he
was congenitally a silent man. His contribution to this conversation
had been spasmodic. But now he said, "Quiet he were. Meant to adopt
him. Never did, officially. But always did think of him as me own." He
was still looking somewhere beyond Jury, still taking in the scene
beyond the window.

The long-case clock ticked in its spastic rhythm, a little like Owen
Holt's speech, and Jury was quiet. Then he said, "I'm sorry. It must
have been particularly difficult for you, having to . . ." His mouth
formed the word
identify
but no sound came with it.
Identify
the body
.

Jury's mind clouded. Like a double exposure, the image of Owen Holt
looking down at the boy lying in one of those rows of refrigerated
compartments pulled out like a big desk drawer was overlaid with the
remembrance of himself staring down onto the rubble of the flat that
night so long ago, looking at the outstretched arm of his mother, the
cupped hand, the black velvet sleeve, his own frenzied attempt to get
the plaster and wood away from her, while more kept falling. Her hand
seemed to be making just that gesture it so often had, when she held
out her arm and motioned for him to
come along, now
.

As if some fierce photographer kept letting off the flash, the image
would come back sharply after all these years when he looked at a
woman's arm outstretched just so. What had driven him nearly to
distraction was that his mother had been alone.

" 'Twas." Holt nodded slowly, over and over. "And Alice. Alice
never stopped cleaning since that boy died."

It shook Jury a little, that his own estimation of Alice Holt had
been so superficial. Her husband had wrapped up in that one observation
what drove the woman to this frenzy of housekeeping, always trying to
keep things straight, to get things back to their proper place, to keep
her mind swept clean of the detritus of the past as she swept her
parlor clean of the dust of the present. And again, he thought of the
rubble.

Alice Holt returned, took her seat, picked up the feather duster
like a defensive weapon, and went on. "It were only to be for a little
while. While things got sorted out for the child. With Owen and the
arthritis he'd had to leave the mill. We'd got trooble enough without
another mouth to feed." She was staring at the particular place on the
coffee table from which Jury had picked up his notebook and pen. "Of
course there's the orphanage. But . . ." Furtively she reached over and
polished the end of the coffee table where the notebook had lain.

Jury's throat tightened, remembering the bleak corridors of Good
Hope, where he had spent six years of his life. But, at least, he could
remember the faces of his dead parents. That had been more than many
had, more than Toby Holt had.

"So we had the lad for all his life," Alice was saying as she traced
the base of a lamp with a white-gloved finger and squinted at the tip.

"A short life it was," said Owen.

It was as though she eclipsed the life altogether by ignoring her
husband's comment. Instead she shifted to the Citrines. "You don't
find
them
taking in poor children.
Them
that have
the money—"

Jury interrupted what promised to be a litany of complaints. "I
take it Toby and Billy Healey were great friends."

"The best," said Owen.

"Better Toby'd never seen any of that lot. She put ideas in his
head. A bad influence, she were."

Owen Holt waved her comment away, smiling with forbearance.

"What sort of ideas?"

"Musical, she told him he was, like her own boy." With the multihued
duster, she pointed. "Why, I'd like to know? Toby was tone-deaf if ever
a child was. It were Billy that could play piano and anything else
handed him."

An unexpected chuckle came from Owen Holt. "That was just to make
Toby feel good. But he did try."

"Pigheaded."

The phrase might have been meant to define Toby, Owen, or even Jury
himself, since she was glaring at him.

Studying Jury with suspicion, eyebrows scissored together, she
said, "You're from Scotland Yard in London. What's Scotland Yard to do
with that Healey person getting killed in the Old Silent Inn? We got
our own police. Only time I ever remember Scotland Yard coming up here
was about that Peter Sutcliffe." Alice Holt seemed to think Jury was
mounting a police investigation as mammoth as the Yorkshire Ripper case.

"Nothing like that," he said vaguely.

She started fussing with a small stack of magazines, already neatly
stacked. "All I know is what I told police back then. It's the Citrines
you should be asking. Cold-blooded lot. It weren't enough they wouldn't
pay the ransom for their own boy; they got Toby killed, too." She
stopped in the act of running the glove round the grooves of a piecrust
table.

" 'Twasn't their fault, Alice."

"No? If he'd not gone on that trip with her he'd be alive today!"

"Very attached to Mrs. Healey was Toby," said Owen, seemingly
unaware that he might be fueling his wife's jealousy of that
attachment. "Do you know he even tried to plant a garden in that grit
soil. Determined lad. And Mr. Citrine's been good to us, letting me
work when I can hardly hold a rake."

"Conscience money, that's all—"

"Be quiet," Owen Holt snapped in what Jury thought was an
uncharacteristic display of bad temper. He stared down at his crippled
hands.

Jury looked round the room again. The large television, the fridge
he'd got a glimpse of earlier, the good china (albeit unused): knowing
what he did about the generosity of the welfare state didn't
necessarily mean the Holts had other income, but there seemed an
abundance for a man who hadn't been able to work for several years
except at odd jobs on the Citrine estate . . . then he remembered Nell
Healey's comment that she'd done what she could. "I'm sure they must
have felt responsible for what happened. I can understand an annuity of
some sort after what you'd been through—"

Alice Holt sat up straight. "We don't accept charity. It was Toby's—"

"Alice!" Again, Owen Holt warned her off.

"Well, I can't see what's wrong with it." She said to Jury, "It was
just ten thousand she set up for a trust fund for the boy's education.
After two weeks, and Toby missing, and—"

Here, she raised her eyes to stare at the ceiling, not, he thought,
at the rooms above but to keep the tears from falling. "—dead. She
changed it over. The trust I mean. Told us to use it for ourselves. . .
."

Owen Holt merely shook his head. "Police aren't interested in all
that." He looked belligerently at Jury now. "It's our affair, that."

Sharply, his wife looked at him. "You drank near half of it away."
She seemed to think Jury now was her ally. "Drink and gambling, that's
a fine thing. Up there at the Black Bush, with that lot you played
cards with. Not one of them with two pence to rub together and
freeloaded off you."

Holt started rocking his chair as he shook his head again. "I told
you a dozen times, 'twas because I just went kind of crazy over the boy
being gone. You don't see me doing it no more, do you?"

"No." Alice Holt sat back, putting down the duster and dragging off
the white glove, which she held clenched in her hand, like a flag of
truce. "No, I expect you don't." Defeat, not over an argument lost, but
of a life, was heavy in her voice.

Owen Holt turned his head again listlessly to gaze out of the
window, and Jury wondered for a moment what the pose reminded him of.
Nell Healey came back to him, standing and gazing at the orchard.

Like her, Owen Holt might have expected Toby to materialize out
there working in the gritty soil, managing finally to make a few flowers grow.

Jury forgot the dead telephone receiver in his hand.

He had been staring for some moments now through the small squares
of glass in his door of the call box, some of them fretted with frost
and six of them cracked in one way or another. He had counted them.

When he left the Holts it had been drizzling. Twenty minutes later
it was raining. It had started just as he had got into the kiosk. The
cracks and the rain distorted the cobbled street and stone wall
opposite, the figures running through the rain under newspapers.

The message at the Old Silent had directed him to call Melrose
Plant, who had told him what had happened.

As he listened, Jury wondered if it were he, if it were his own
blurred eyesight that was causing the squares of glass to waver.

He was furious with himself now, after Plant had rung off, for not
asking for more particulars. His hand was latched, still, in the handle
of the door of the call box, as if he had just closed it, as if he had
just been going to make the call.

At least he had managed to stop his fast-moving thoughts, broken and
running like the figures in the rain, long enough to compliment Melrose
in getting the little girl out of there, away from what would have been
a terrible trauma.

Abby, Melrose had said, could handle trauma considerably better
than he himself.

* * *

Jury hung up the receiver. Two murders in four days. He hoped Nell
Healey had an alibi.

He passed more than a dozen police cars angled along the Oakworth
Road at this end, some of them with two tires in the ditch like
abandoned vehicles.

Even though it was hours since Melrose Plant had called the local
police station, there were still two cars with blue lights turning, in
the car park of the inn a good mile from the point where the others had
stopped.

"Look who's here," said Superintendent Sanderson mildly without
turning his face from the snow-covered moor before him.

"I'm on holiday, remember?"

"Ah. Well, January
is
a popular month for holidaymakers
here in Yorkshire. Almost as popular as the Lake District." Sanderson
was making a bellows of his cheeks, trying to suck some life into a
cold cigar.

There must have been two dozen of Sanderson's men in the distance,
which meant there were more of them farther away whom Jury couldn't see.

And this was five hours later.

Jury stood there, looking off in the same direction. "Isn't the
Citrine house somewhere over there?"

"About a mile from here, as the crow flies, and as you know."

"I don't expect another murder on her doorstep—if I can put it that
way—is going to help her."

Sanderson took the cigar from his mouth and said, "You can put it
any way you want, Superintendent." He looked at Jury and smiled grimly.

Jury persisted. "Mrs. Healey barely escaped jail after her husband's
murder. The Citrines knew Ann Denholme and so did Roger Healey, I
imagine." He drew his eyes from the moor and turned them on Sanderson.
"You'll have her in custody within twenty-four hours." He made no
attempt to keep the rancor out of his tone as he turned to leave. He
was surprised to hear Sanderson say, "Very probably." At least, thought
Jury, watching the man drop his dead cigar into the dirty snow,
Sanderson wasn't smiling.

Melrose Plant frowned at the wire fence and wished the ducks would
stop waddling up every time he came out into the forecourt. He was
standing by Jury's car, looking over at the police constable who'd been
left behind by Keighley police.

"Try and remember as much as you can," said Jury. "Sanderson
certainly isn't talking to me." He was looking down at the ordnance map
Plant had brought out from his jacket pocket. "By that wall there,"
said Melrose. "About twenty feet from the cripple hole."

"How much could you tell about the condition of the body?" asked
Jury.

Melrose was standing shivering in only a cashmere sweater, hugging
his arms about his chest. "My knowledge of the state of rigor mortis is
pretty much limited to when Agatha stops talking. It begins around the
jaw, doesn't it?"

Jury nodded. "Top to bottom. It couldn't have passed off; that would
take upwards of thirty hours. More, in the cold, probably."

"The wrist was limp. So she musn't have been out there all that
long. The last person who saw her was Ruby, on her way to bed last
night, about eleven. Ruby thought it odd she wasn't about at breakfast
this morning."

"Telephone calls?"

"For her?"

"Or made by her, last night, this morning." When Melrose shook his
head, Jury said, "Then I'd calculate she was shot sometime this
morning, fairly early. It would take the rigor somewhere around twelve
or fifteen hours in this cold. It's unlikely she'd go out in the middle
of the night along the moor." Jury looked up at one of the windows.
"Who's that?"