Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (40 page)

"Well,
look
!" Ellen called back at him.

"Sheep! Don't you know
sheep
when you see them? I think my
ankle's broken."

Her voice was high and frenzied now. "I think I'll go back to
Queens."

Melrose dragged himself onto the BMW, which was clearly raring to
go, and said, "Stop complaining. Go!" And he slapped the fender.

Less than a minute later, the BMW slid to a stop a few feet from the
herd, and Melrose thought he'd swung free of it until his bootlace
caught in the wheel spokes, landing him facedown.

"Hell's bells," he mumbled, reaching up to wipe away what felt like
a lacework of blood. Ellen, naturally, had managed to land on her feet
and was waving him furiously on.

To where? There were sheep everywhere, two hundred or so, he judged,
as he hobbled along. There was Ethel's dog, Tim, throwing himself at
one of them that was about to bolt. The Kuvasc's teeth were clamped in
the thick wool of the leg. He ran, negligent of the ankle that was
killing him, round to the other side, where Ellen looped back and
forth, running like a border collie, only aimlessly.

Melrose saw Stranger standing taut as a bow, giving an old ewe the
eye. Rising from the bleats and the awful smell of wet wool came a
voice from in there somewhere.

"Get me
out
of here!"

The voice was familiar, both in sound and tone. Demanding,
irascible.

"It's her, it's Abby!" Ellen was jumping up and down trying to get a
view.

In absolute wonderment, Melrose worked his way to the back of the
low wall. A dozen sheep were standing in some sort of hypnotic trance
and Melrose muscled them out of the way to get to the wall, where he
reached over, dragged Abby up on her feet, and bounced her over the
backs of the sheep.

She was a mess, standing there black in both body and mind, saying
to Melrose, "I could have
died
out here. And Stranger's
foot's bleeding . . . give me a piece of your shirt."

"I hardly have any left," said Melrose, ripping a strip from the
shredded end. "Here!"

Abby reached down and bound up Stranger's foot as best she could.
Then she rose, wheeled away from them, beating the mud and bits of grit
from her waterproof and shawl. As both of them stood there staring from
her to the sheep, she wheeled round again, saying: "Oh, leave them,
just
leave
them," as if the bumping, bleating mob were a big
load of dirty dishes. "It's Mr. Nelligan's sheep; he'll find them and
maybe it'll teach him a lesson."

Ellen pulled her bike upright and rolled it beside her, as Abby lost
no time straightening both of them out on
who
and
what
saved
whom
in this rescue mission. She began with herself,
went on in great detail about Stranger and Tim, and then praised the
sheep for their part. Man did not come into it.

They walked on, followed at a distance by the two tired dogs, while
Melrose said he'd go to Harrogate before he'd go back to Weavers Hall
if it meant hurtles through fiery hoops, dives across abysses, plummets
through the air with Ellen as driver.

"I'd sooner crawl," he announced. "You must be the world's worst."

Just then they heard the distant sputter of engines and saw, across
the far field, ghostly lights bobbing, appearing, disappearing as
incline and uprise dictated. There were at least three, possibly four
motorcycles scattered round the moor.

"Police!" exclaimed Melrose, wanting to tear the ragged shirt from
his body and wave it like someone marooned. "Police! At least, thank
God, I can get a ride back with someone who knows how—"

The crash was deafening, splintering. That was to the left; off to
the right he saw what looked like a black shape wheeling in the air,
coming down with a ground-shaking thud.

A little flame darted up from the match Ellen was using to light her
cigarette, which she then casually smoked, leaning against her BMW,
looking at him with a question stamped on her grimy face. She shrugged.
"Two outta three."

Melrose shrugged his shoulders and his sleeve fell off.

Thus they trudged on beneath the icy moon, fragments of argument
trailing back to the dogs as the three up front got farther away. . . .

"
Three
of us? On
that
?" Melrose's question was
lost in the distance.

". . . the basket," Ellen shouted.

". . . not
me
. I'm not sitting . . ." Abby's voice
proclaimed.

"
I'll
sit in the basket." Melrose limped along.

Stranger and Tim trotted on behind them on bloody feet and lame
legs, looking longingly behind them at the mob of sheep who now were
dispersing, searching out browse in slightly new territory.

They turned more or less nose-to-nose, looking at one another, both
yawning and shaking themselves.

The ways of sheep were difficult, sometimes inscrutable.

The ways of man, impossible.

The Nine-One-Nine was a cellar walk-down where nothing at the moment
was moving but the smoke from the bored-looking customers' cigarettes
and cigars. At the farther end of the long, cavelike room was a
cleared-out space with a small stage filled with amps, drums, a couple
of microphones, and a keyboard. Blue lights suspended from a
crossbeam were trained on the stage from which the band had departed.

Jury doubted any casuals could have found the place, thus it must
have been the regulars who stood and sat about in varying stages of
ennui, a curiously epicene crowd. Women with slick-backed dark hair,
men with brassy curls and rings in their ears signifying (Jury bet)
nothing. They stood in the aisle; they sat at the bar. In this room
architecturally bland, the only hat-tipping to affluence was the very
long, copper-topped bar behind which were shelved yards of bottles with
optics in front. The smoke swirled, drifted, thinned, clouded above the
tables, and the benches sat like church pews against the left-hand wall.

Besides this demode crowd there were still some working-class men
who sat in tightly knit little groups like clenched fists, hard
knuckles grasping their pints.

The customers all looked like they belonged here because they didn't
belong anyplace else. Jury remembered a cafe in Berlin that had looked
this way: musty, furzy, with the odd gummy smell of resin and old
cigars.

Jury could have picked Stan Keeler out of this haze of smoke and
thirties' film backdrop even without Morpeth Duckworth's description.
There was something about the man at the center table, about his
posture and manner, about the several people who sat there, that told
Jury who he was. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, jeans, and low
boots, his feet parked on one of the chairs, the rest of him slumped in
another. There were two women and a man at his table. One of the
hero-worshipping women had hair the color of port that nearly drowned
her shoulders; the other was a hermetically sealed blonde who looked as
if she hadn't moved a muscle in days, as if her mouth would crack and
her cheekbones splinter beneath the makeup if she smiled. Leaning
against the wall was another woman—tall, serpen-tinian, smoke curling
upward from her cigarette to dissipate into the rest of the smoky
scrim. Her hair and black dress looked as if they'd been done with the
same shears: both were layered and slashed. Her eyes were nearly shut,
weighted with kohl liner and deep shadow sunken in a powder-white face.

As Jury wedged his way through a tight knot of customers, the
leather-vested fellow with a sunburst guitar was arguing, leaning
forward toward Keeler like a man trying to shoulder into a tree that
wouldn't give: ". . . can you say that git can play blues? He's
heavy-metal and a Bach/baroque freak that couldn't do a twelve-bar
boogie if his life depended on it." As he spoke he was slapping the
guitar up to his knee and doing a
wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa
progression that earned him a tiny rustle of applause and an urging on
to play more. Someone called him Dickie. Dickie didn't notice or didn't
care. "So the dumb git's fast—" His fingers slid down the neck to pick
the strings at what sounded to Jury like lightning speed, and there was
more between-tables applause. "So he's fast? You're fast; I'm fast; and
I know a blues baseline when I hear one. He's got nothing to do with
that kinda thing. Come on, admit it, Stan."

Stan Keeler just sat there staring at him.

"Either you or me could blow him off the stage. Why don't you admit
I'm right?"

"Because, number one, you don't know shit, and number two, you don't
know it in Swedish."

Dickie swore under his breath, grabbed up his guitar, and did one of
those rolling-thunder John Wayne walks back to the stage at the end of
the room. As Jury came up to the table he saw the black Labrador, face
on paws and apparently asleep. He seemed happy to be propping up a
black guitar case, the neck of which lay across his back as if it were
another dog.

"You're Stan Keeler?" said Jury, watching the heads of the girls
swivel to gaze up at him. The redhead smiled. The blonde couldn't seem
to make it. The one against the wall lowered her lids even more.

Stan Keeler looked at him and Jury knew the meaning of burning eyes.
They reminded Jury of brandy just as someone touched a flame to it. The
indolent expression beneath the black curly hair was given the lie by
those eyes that could have singed Jury where he stood and by the
luminous, childlike skin. He was in some way the apotheosis of the
gaunt woman behind him; he had the coloring and intensity that she had
tried to find in the pots on the dressing table. The high-cheekboned
face looked a little emaciated under the tight, dark curls. And the
expression on Stan Keeler's face seemed completely passive.

He said in a tone-dead voice: "I'm thirty-two, live in a bed-sit in
Clapham. It sucks. Black Orchid's next club date is two weeks hence. I
was born in Chiswick; my mum still lives there. My favorite food is
jellied eels. I stopped doing drugs when I fell off the stage three
years ago. I got a landlady with a nose you could hang your pants on.
She sucks. The reason I don't move is because most of London sucks. I
smoke some, drink some. That's all. Print it. Good-bye."

"I hardly said hello."

"Hello. Good-bye. Bugger back to Fleet Street. You're from
New
Dimensions
, right?"

"Wrong. I'm from the C.I.D." Jury showed him his warrant card.

Stan Keeler's expression still didn't change as he flicked his eyes
over the card and his cigarette at the ashtray. At the same time he
took his boots off the chair, motioning Jury to sit, he turned to the
redhead and blonde and said, "Go away." He said nothing to the domino
leaning against the wall; Jury had the impression she wasn't interested
anyway.

The two girls rose as a team and moved their blank eyes off through
the customers toward the end of the room. Dickie seemed to be tuning
up; a sallow-faced youth with long crimped hair was fooling with the
drums; a gaunt-looking black man was sitting with an instrument case
by his side.

Stan Keeler crossed one low boot over the other knee and rubbed at
it with fingers that looked agile enough to catch butterflies without
dusting a wing. He looked almost pleased. "I belt my old lady and they
send round the C.I.D.? She deserved it." He scratched his hair into an
even greater tangle of curls. "The only guy she missed in Clapham was
the flasher on the common and I ain't sure he's telling the truth."

"Your old lady? I was afraid you meant your mum."

"Mum lives in Chiswick. I managed to shock just about everyone
except her. God knows I tried. It makes no difference if I go double
platinum or what. She just says, 'Stanley, you been to mass?'" His
voice was a high-pitched squeal. "So what kind of shit you're laying
down here? You mad at me because I messed up Delia?"

"Not particularly."

"You guys are sadists. Hey." He snapped his fingers. "I already
talked to your friend. He was cool." Stan laughed, choked on smoke, and
wiped away some spittle. "Your friend got by Nose. She thinks she's
protecting me from the press. It's got nothing to do with my band; it's
because she thinks I'm a Pole. An
agent provocateur
, or
something. She saw me in this newspaper photo with Lech Walesa."

"What were you doing in a photo with Walesa?" Stan looked disgusted,
searching Jury's face for signs of intelligent life, apparently. "What
the hell would I be in a picture with Walesa for? Do I play Gdansk? It
was just some cretin who looked like me. I told Mum this story and she
told me Lech goes to mass all the time, and why ain't I more like him?
Want a beer? If you drink bottled, I can send Stone. Hey, Stone, man—"
He raised his bottle of Abbott's and the Labrador rose, yawning. Keeler
held up one finger. The dog burrowed off through the crowd. "He can
only get one at a time." He sounded apologetic.

"I can only drink one at a time. Look, Mr. Keeler—"

"Call me Stanislaw. Nose does. Wanna go to Brixton? There's a pub
there I play at for free some nights. They're in kind of deep shit, and
I help the manager out."

"You're very humane."

"No humanity to it. I'm trying to get it on with his wife."

"Sorry. Brixton's out. I want some information." Two other women had
more or less oozed into the empty chairs. They looked like twins. Stan
told them to get lost. "You knew Roger Healey, the music critic."

"I didn't know him and I wouldn't call him a critic."

"According to my sergeant, you did." Jury heard Dickie run something
by the microphone and the band started up. "Healey didn't seem to care
for your music very much. As a matter of fact, the reviews I read made
it sound like a vendetta. Why would he be devoting a column to you,
anyway.
Segue's
pop, jazz, rock critic is Morpeth Duckworth."