Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (35 page)

"Good, though not so good as I—in most departments." Pursing her
lips, she exhaled a plume of smoke. Then her face changed.

Now she realized it. Her body went slack, her expression hard, both
showing her years. For a moment she stood there before she sent the
vase smashing to the floor.

Taffy reared back and spat and jumped off the sofa. Jury rose,
stepped over water and shards of glass, and grabbed Mavis round the
waist in a- gesture that in better circumstances could have been one
of the furious lover.

He cupped her chin in his hand, bringing her closer. "I'm sorry; I
don't like tricks. You could easily have told me what sort of man
Healey was, for God's sakes. I expect you'll be what is described as a
hostile witness. I
am
sorry." He felt it, felt he had used
her. But he tried to smile, to cool her rage, probably making it worse.

As he had imagined Cyril doing, she flashed her nails across his
face, fortunately not connecting except at the chin line. Jury let her
go. .

She was screaming at him, but choked with rage. "You're a
superintendent
of police
. When I tell your superiors,
whoever they are, you'll be out of a job."

"Racer. Chief Superintendent Racer." Jury had drawn out his
handkerchief, was wiping the blood from his chin. "But I don't think
I'm the safari type, Mavis. I need a cold climate, someplace that lets
you think. No abundance, just short rations, that forces you to use
your wits to survive."

it's so cold in Alaska

That line from the song Melrose Plant liked so much sprang to his
mind and he smiled. "Like Alaska."

HEAVENLY SPECTACULAR

COMING 15 JANUARY

The usual mobile of planets turning on their invisible strings had
been moved to one side, apparently in preparation for the "Heavenly
Spectacular."

But if this wasn't already it, Jury stood in wonder at what more
could be added come fifteen January. Already the window was attracting
passersby, and a line of children solemn as sparrows on a fence were at
the forefront.

The familiar figure of a tiny Merlin in his cape and starry coned
hat had been replaced by a diminutive prince on a white horse, bearing
a standard, moving slowly out on a little electrical track, stopping,
then returning to the dark woodland setting from which he had emerged.

A vast sigh rose from a band of urchins who had muscled in to the
front, hair spiky with the wet. From a little crystal castle in the
opposite corner came a spun-glass princess, her gown ballooning icily
and covering the track on which she ran. Their meeting was more
symbolic than actual. The two figures did not touch, but stopped
instead a hair's breadth apart, as close as the wonders of the
electrician or the track could manage. Each returned to seclusion.

Then a drift of snow lifted, flew about and resettled in another
part of the windowfront. There must have been a snow machine somewhere.
What looked like laser lights, tiny beams in misty rainbow colors,
circled the skies, beaming on Pluto and Venus, then back to cast a
rainbow slick across the little snowdrifts.

And this little world of its own was yet to receive further
elaboration. It seemed spectacular enough to Jury right now.

Wiggins whispered, "Will we be around the fifteenth, sir?"

Jury said, "Couldn't miss it, could we?"

As they went in the door, Wiggins stopped sneezing and put his
handkerchief away. The Starrdust was the only place that Wiggins could
go where things weren't catching.

The Stardust twins, Meg and Joy, were the ones who were arranging
something behind the velvet curtain, whispering and giggling.

When they saw who it was, they got up quickly, brushed off their
black cord jeans, straightened their silver and gold braces on their
shoulders. Their shirts were white satin.

"Hello."

"Hello. Were you wanting Andrew? He's with a customer."

As Wiggins looked up at the winking lights of the planetarium
ceiling, Jury squinted back into the dark length of the shop. Most of
the lighting was supplied by muted wall-sconces with quarter-moon
shades or tall, thin, lumieres with tops like ringed planets.

Andrew Starr, a dealer in antiquarian books leaning largely toward
astrology, looked up from his desk and waved. His customer was a heavy
woman draped in a cape of Russian mink and a necklace of Russian amber.

"I was looking to have my fortune read," said Jury. "Who did the
window?"

"We did," said Meg, somewhat breathlessly. "Joy's quite
mechanical-minded.''

Jury looked at Joy, surprised. Between the two of them, he wouldn't
have thought they could open a lock with a key.

"But Meg thought it up," said Joy graciously. "And Andrew told us
we could spend what we liked," she said proudly.

Andrew Starr would be amply rewarded, Jury knew. Hiring Joy and Meg
and, especially, Carole-anne had doubled his holiday trade as it was.

As several of the urchins issued from the little hut called
Horror-Scope, Jury said, "Well, Andrew'd better be good to you because
if Selfridge's gets a look at that window, Goodbye, Meg and Joy."

They looked pained at this implication of possible disloyalty on
their part. The Starrdust was home, after all.

The same could be said for Carole-anne Palutski now coming toward
them with a plate of cake. Since Madame Zostra had got this plummy job,
the universe was her home.

"Tea's up, kids," she said.

Carole-anne Palutski was dressed in her harem outfit: red pantaloons
shot through with gold thread; a short, lapis-lazuli-blue blouse the
color of her eyes and bound in gold; and a flowing, filmy sleeveless
coat. Had she not been wearing the gold lame turban, Jury imagined the
Princess would have put the pattern down to unrestrained Lacroix.

"I have an acquaintance who'd love your color genre."

Carole-anne's face came up from the heavy slice of Black Forest cake
she was scooping into her mouth with far more enthusiasm than she put
in the look she gave Jury. "You finally decided to come back. Well . .
." Her sigh was heavier than the cake, a scapegoat sigh. "So who's this
woman?"

"The Princess Rosetta Viacinni di Belamante." Jury shut his little
notebook. "I didn't say it was a woman."

"Is she on the phone?"

"No idea."

"I can hardly wait to see you trying to look it up." With the back
of her fork she was pressing up chocolate crumbs.

"The Princess is probably seventy."

Carole-anne shrugged a filmy gold shoulder. "So when'd
that
ever stop you?" Implying Jury had his own private harem of elderly
ladies. She'd put down her plate and was putting some more records on
the old phonograph. "And I don't expect S-B-slash-H would much like
that." Susan Bredon-Hunt was still making telephone contact with Jury;
her unspeakable name was dropped in a litter of initials like the stars
now falling on Alabama in the music coming from the phonograph.

Only terrestrial music was permitted in the Starrdust. Pennies
falling down from or stairways leading up to heavens, stars whole or
trailing dust, moons of any color. Perry Como had got his foot in the
door because if his true love had asked him for the moon he'd "go and
get it." Suns, moons, stare—the cosmos. If it were unearthly, Andrew
and his ensemble team were into it.

Meg and Joy, Andrew's sales assistants, were naturals. They must
have come from the Milky Way, W.17, with their pretty, star-crazed
faces. Now they were giggling with Wiggins in the Horror-Scope.

Jury took Carole-anne's arm and guided her to the tent where she
played her Madame Zostra role. Starr himself was a serious astrologer
with a shrewd eye for the commercial, and Carole-anne had caught the
fever; her fever, however, was born not of real interest in the signs
of the Zodiac or the rings of Saturn; it had more to do with running
Jury's life, and the lives of those who crossed her own star-crossed
path, such as Mrs. Wassermann. Fortunately, she eschewed Andrew's
complicated horoscopes: why should she learn all that, when the
Daily
Mirror
provided quite adequate ones? Vidal Sassoon had probably
turned up in the column the past Tuesday.

The tent was a drapery of gauzy stuff hung over several rods
protruding from the wall, the material pulled back on the outside like
a curtain. Carole-anne and Jury sat opposite one another on huge
cushions. On a stool in one corner sat the big stuffed monster-thing
Jury had brought back to her last year from Long Piddleton. The black
coned hat with the gold quarter moon was not part of its original
outfit; it seemed to suit him, though.

After checking her lipstick in a crystal ball that sat on a
spidery-legged gold stand—smudging her lips together, drawing them
tight to look at her teeth-—she picked up her Tarot pack and fanned it
out over the black cloth. "Pick one."

"Not after the last time."

"Suit yourself." She shrugged, cleared a place and upended the
Hanged Man and the Hermit, crossing them carefully with Isis. They
stood.

"You look a little pale, Carole-anne; something wrong?"

Quickly, she checked her color in the crystal ball and said, "No.
Except I'm overworked."

"You'd have less to do if you'd stop getting Mrs. Wassermann
scrunched. Leave her looks alone. I like them."

"She needs a bit of a change. You didn't hear her complaining, did
you?" Worrisome little lines appeared on her pristine forehead.

Jury smiled. "No. But give it a rest, will you? One more Sassoon
treatment and her hair'll look like Romney Marsh or the Norfolk Broads."

No wonder Carole-anne looked tired. Building a house of cards from
the Tarot deck probably was tiring. "We thought you were about to take
a trip, what with all of those maps and train schedules and so forth.
Mrs. Wassermann told me a few days ago you were making for Victoria
Station."

"Oh,
that
." She positioned three other cards delicately
above the first ones. "It was just an idea."

Jury waited while "Moonlight Serenade" ran through its final bars.
How different music was then, he thought, and thought about Elicia
Deauville. "What idea?" he asked finally.

"That band. You wouldn't know about them. Sirocco. See, I thought
they might be coming across from Ireland." As if he had laughed at her,
she said defensively, "They were
in
Ireland. That's because
of their drummer, I expect, Wes Whelan."

Jury was silent. "Wouldn't it make more sense they'd
fly
to
Heathrow
than take a ferry from Dublin or Cork. Or
Belfast
?"

What had supplanted the Glenn Miller record was "Yesterday's Rain."
He turned his head, listened for a few moments to this music she
pretended to ignore by humming herself an entirely different tune. "Or
are you talking only about Sirocco's lead guitarist."

The house of cards wobbled. "I'm surprised you ever heard of him."

"That was my magazine you nicked. I read the article. Sometimes he
does travel alone. But it was very unlikely. Wouldn't it have made more
sense for you to go to Heath———"

"I don't go to airports," she broke in, hastily.

"You mean you're afraid of flying?"

Impatiently, she shook her red-gold hair, shining in the reflections
from the starry ceiling fixtures. "No. I just don't like things you see
there." She put her hands on her hips and said angrily, "Didn't you
ever
notice
? You must have done when you were at Heathrow
with your machine gun when that bomb went off."

This seemed to have little relationship to whatever really bothered
her. "Are you afraid of getting caught in crossfire? Anyway, I didn't
carry a 'machine gun.' "

"Well." As if that unraveled the whole mystery, she fixed the last
card in place. "Don't breathe on it, for heaven's sakes."

Then glumly she said, "It's like airports are the last stopping
place. People leaving. It's like the last . . . trench. People dying in
each other's arms." She was staring at him through two squares made by
the cards. "Before some of them go to the line of fire."

What, Jury wondered, was this preoccupation with metaphors of war?
Perhaps her talks with Mrs. Wassermann, who had had dreadful
experiences in Poland during what she called the Big War (the one she
shared with Jury), except Mrs. Wassermann wouldn't have talked about
this to Car-ole-anne. It had been too bleak.

She was telling him a story. ". . . this little girl, no, boy. His
mum was holding him and they were both crying. It was there at the
gate, and then other people, probably the gramps, an old man with a lot
of medals on his chest, they were standing around looking terrible. The
little boy was maybe three or four. And he was crying like it was the
end of the world. So was his mum. Well, it
must
have been his
mum." She ran a finger under the bottom cards and the house tumbled
airily down as if resisting the pull of gravity. "The little boy had
his face nearly up against his mum's and what really . . . what was so
awful was he took his hand and even though he was hysterical he was
wiping her face, wiping the tears away with his hand. Maybe it was
because if she was crying, too, that meant it was real."

She stopped suddenly, the "real" hanging there, not drop-ping at the
end. It was as if there were much more but she had neither breath nor
strength.

Jury said nothing. There seemed nothing he could say. He thought of
the loss of Elicia Deauville, for some reason. And he thought of all
the crazy stories (that he secretly loved) Carole-anne had told to
explain her apparent lack of family. That she was found inside a trunk
at Victoria; that she'd been chloroformed on a train—all out of stories
she had read or heard about. Except for the one about amnesia. Getting
hit by a golf ball at St. Andrews was definitely her own invention.