Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (42 page)

"That's Ethel." He smiled.

Her mouth hooked up at the corners, but she quickly stopped the grin
that threatened. Grinning was not on, not at Buster's funeral. "The
earl was there when I got Buster." When Jury looked puzzled, she said,
"At Loving Kindness. The vet's. He had his cat but I don't know what he
did with it."

The notion of Melrose Plant wrestling a cat into the vet's made Jury
smile. It had to have been a stray. The only animal that Plant had ever
bothered to develop a rapport with was his old dog, Mindy.

"I'm sure the cat wasn't his," said Jury. "He must have found it by
the road, or somewhere."

"Oh." Abby rocked a bit harder, absorbing this new information. The
earl wasn't a heartless wretch who'd dump his cat and never go back.
"Anyway, he's pretty smart." The corners of her mouth hooked up in a
smug little grin. "He found Ethel's hiding place." She gave Jury a
look. "And he's not a policeman, either."

"Where was it?"

"Over behind the medicine bottles. It was just another bottle that
had a Present from Brighton written on it."

"Incredible. How did he know?"

She shrugged. "I don't know, except he told her he knew, and right
away she looked over there."

Holding back a smile, Jury studied the runners of the rocking chair,
moving fast as a swing. After a few moments, he said, "I'm sorry you
had to go out on the moor again this morning. It must have been hard."

"Not as hard as the first time," she said with a wonderful note of
ye
ne sais quoi
.

"Do you mind talking about it?"

With a pretense of world-weariness not even the Princess could have
matched, Abby told him. About the phone call, the voice muffled,
coughing, saying something about Stranger and Mr. Nelligan's sheep. She
told Jury about the whole dreadful experience.

He asked her nothing further; there was no sense in mak-ing her
repeat answers she'd already had to give a dozen times over. Jury said,
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't here."

He followed her gaze to the bulletin board, where Ethel was
carefully pinning blue ribbons up. "It doesn't matter. I had Stranger
and Tim. And sheep."

In that, there wasn't a hint of accusation, not a shred of irony. It
was a statement of fact: this is the way the world is.

Jury sat there watching her eat her cake, feeling her
disappointment.

"Her daughter." Jury shook his head as he jammed in the Volvo's
cigarette lighter.

"Everyone who saw them
did
think Ann Denholme was Abby's
mother. That's the irony." In the passenger seat, Melrose was fiddling
with the radio. The doors on both sides were open, the car sitting in
the drive where Jury had left it.

"Finding Trevor Cable wasn't hard. Wiggins said he sounded like a
nice fellow, said he was helpful, if 'a bit croupy,' to quote my
sergeant. It wasn't he who wanted to get rid of Abby. That row with
Trevor Cable Mrs. Braith-waite overheard was Ann Denholme's demanding
Abby come back here."

"She wanted her back so Abby could live in a barn?" Melrose shook
his head. "I feel as cold right now as I think I'll ever feel." He
gazed through the thin, drifting rain toward the barn from which they
had just come. "Medea would have won the Mum-of-the-Year award compared
with Ann Denholme. Jocasta would be an absolute
plum
. And
Clytemnestra, good grief, a veritable
heroine
. People seem to
forget that Agamemnon did offer up their daughter on that dismal island
to appease the gods. Wouldn't you think they'd have got tired of all
that patricide, matricide, infanticide, and incest? And isn't anyone
going to tell Abby? Wouldn't it be better if she were undeceived?"

"Wouldn't it only mean her having to work through yet another
deception?"

"What about the uncle? Trevor Cable? Sounds as if he wants her back."

"Would she
go
back? If you thought your real father had
given you up, would you want him back?"

Melrose replaced the car's radio handset, sat back, said nothing for
a while. Then, "But she's only a little girl, Richard. She has to have
someone
."

"By that you mean some blood relation. Since when was blood really
thicker than water? I've yet to hear relations who really cared
ever
utter those words. Which is why it's a cliche, I expect."

Melrose opened the glove box. "Superintendent Sanderson will think
it provides Nell Healey with one hell of a motive for murdering Ann
Denholme if Roger was the father."

Jury slumped down in his seat. "I smell money in all of this."

"I smell
The Scarlet Letter
."

"Ann Denholme didn't strike me as a martyr. Far from it. She struck
me much more as a blackmailer."

"What I meant was, in this case it's little Pearl who suffers. I'm
talking about Abby as a constant reminder to Healey. Ann was flaunting
her would be my guess." Melrose closed the glove box. "Perhaps
something happened with the 'arrangement.' Perhaps the original idea
was that if Ann got rid of Abby, Healey would divorce his wife and
marry her. Something like that. But she must have been a very foolish
woman to let it go on for over ten years."

"It makes sense." Jury stopped. "Are you looking for something?"

Melrose had bent down to peer under the dashboard.

"Me? No."

Jury sat back. "Emotional blackmail, though, would work with the
guilty minister in your book. But it certainly wouldn't work with
Healey."

"There're other ways of keeping someone on a string. And telling the
wife would make for a very heavy piece of rope."

"And then she kills him? Nell Healey knew what he was like. He must
have been incredibly smooth, incredibly plausible with others. But she
wouldn't have killed him because of his affairs with other women."

"But if she found out Abby was his daughter—?"

Jury shook his head.

"Then why?" Melrose was running his hand under the dashboard.

"It's beginning to look—what in the
hell
are you doing?"

"Doesn't this car have a tape deck?"

Jury shut his eyes. "Judas
priest
."

"Not them. Ellen found a copy of
Rock
V
Roll Animal
But there's something wrong with Malcolm's stereo."

Jury reached round to the back seat and shucked the Sony to Melrose.
"Here. I'm going over to the Citrine house."

Melrose slid out of the car and shut the door. He opened the
cassette player, took out the tape, inspected it. "Who's this?"

Jury took it. "Coltrane. Good-bye." Jury put the car in gear,
started driving slowly.

Melrose did a little run, hand on the sill. "You wouldn't have the
earphones to this, would you?"

Jury braked and nearly sent him to the ground. "
Here
!" He
tossed them out the window and the car lurched forward, stopped, and
he called back, "Did you ring up Vivian?"

"Vivian? Of
course
I rang Vivian."

As the Volvo drove off, Melrose plugged in the earphones and walked
in the Hall to ring Vivian.

"I can find my way," Jury said to the silent servant who had just
opened the heavy door on the depressing sight of the cold entrance room
and the dim hall that reached away from it into darkness. "Don't bother
announcing me."

Carefully folding his coat over her arm, she looked at him
doubtfully. Jury merely smiled and waited. As unused as she apparently
was to requests either to or not to announce, she shuffled off with his
coat.

In the Great Hall a fire blazed in the hearth and the brasserie.
But only in these two pockets did the room seem warm, for the rest was
still cold, like stepping from the heat of the sun into the shadows. In
the shadow of the archway Jury now stood.

Given the positions of Charles and Rena Citrine in the magisterial
chairs at the end of the long table, they might have been facing off
for an argument. Yet their low voices, their ignorance of the presence
of another person might have brought them together not as enemies but
as conspirators. It might have been his imagination but his sense of
their relationship, seeing them thus, was turned around.

When he said
good morning
, their heads turned together. It
wasn't long, though, before Charles Citrine was on his feet and
displaying as much hostility as he probably ever let show. Jury
expected he prized that cool, shambling manner of his above all else.

It must have taken steely control to limit his anger at Jury's
appearance to a mere "Just what are you doing here?"

"Trying to help your daughter."

Citrine slumped back in his chair and said nothing.

His sister looked from him to Jury. "And do you think we're
not
?
" Her smile was a trifle arch.

"I don't know, do I?"

Citrine shot him a vitriolic glance.

"Charles . . ." Rena leaned forward a bit.

Jury would never have pictured Rena Citrine as a peacemaker.
Certainly not for the brother she had so often referred to as "Saint
Charles." But the circumstances here were rather more serious than what
part of the house she felt she had been permitted to occupy.

She said to him, gesturing toward the heavy walnut chair positioned
several feet in front of the brasserie, "You needn't stand,
Superintendent." The brandy decanter that she and her brother had been
sharing she lifted, as invitation to join them. Jury shook his head.
The glasses from which they drank were cut glass, heavily pointed. The
decanter itself looked like old pressed glass, smooth. She shoved it
across the table toward Charles, who poured a half inch into his glass.
The lines round his mouth had deepened since Jury had seen him, as
heavily cut as the glass in his hand.

Jury said, "Ann Denholme got a telephone call before she set out
across Keighley Moor. Doubtful it was a friend since the housekeeper
says Miss Denholme barely said a word. Might have been a message from
the milk-float man about a delivery. Might have been Nelligan about
stray sheep. Might have been anyone." Jury watched a large log roll
down, split, send up sparks. He did not bother watching their faces,
for they had heard all of this before.

As Charles Citrine wearily reminded him. "But more likely someone
from this house. We've been through this again and again with police
from Wakefield and that detective, Sanderson."

"What you think," said Rena, "is that someone in this house lured
poor Ann Denholme to her death. Given we're rather short on family at
the moment, the suspects are few. And I don't expect you think our
servant was the gun-wielder." Her arm went toward Charles as she
gestured for the decanter. For just past eleven in the morning, the
decanter appeared to have done quite a bit of traveling. But neither
of them seemed in the least drunk.

"And Mrs. Healey, of course," said Jury mildly.

Citrine dropped his head in his hands. But his sister turned, as he
had done earlier, and flashed Jury a look of rage. "Don't be absurd.
You don't believe that for a minute!" Her glass went down with a thump.

In the same mild tone, Jury said, "Anyone could have made both of
those calls to Ann Denholme and to Abby from a public call box."

Rena picked up her glass again without replying.

"Except we know it wasn't the milk-float man. Abby lived to talk
about it."

Neither of them said a word, nor did they look at one another.

Finally, having cleared his throat perhaps to see if his voice was
in working order, Charles said, "The same person?"

"Would you imagine two people were playing the game?"

Charles shook his head. Rena looked stonily across at him, seeing
him or not seeing him, Jury had no idea. She finally said, "In the case
of Ann Denholme, there might have been a number of candidates. Men."

Citrine's voice rose a notch, a cautionary notch. "Rena."

For a moment there was silence, and then she got up to stand before
the fire, hands thrust into the large pockets of her quilted skirt. It
was a patchwork of squares and crescents, satins and silks and wools,
a kaleidoscope of greens and blues and golds that shimmered in the
firelight. With her heel, she kicked angrily at the log that had
fallen, sending up yet more blue flame, and gold sparks that made her
red hair glimmer with silvery highlights, her amber eyes take on a
reddish glow.

This square of the cheerless hall seemed to flame up around him; the
brasserie behind, the sparking logs before, Rena in her flaming
crescent colors. Jury looked at her, at her fiery pose, and knew that
the slapdash, comic role as the madwoman in the tower, the outcast, the
prodigal was illusory.

And he saw it:

Not the bits and pieces, not that last part of dark, leafy tree, not
the scalloped edge of pale blue sky, nor the symmetry of the little
windows, dark or lit. It was not the beautifully framed square of the
Magritte print, but the light cast by the streetlamp in Abby's picture.
In that he saw it.

"She's German."

Ellen was tinkering with the
BMW;
it had taken
less of a battering than one would have thought possible. "German?
Who's
German?" She was squinting up at him over her shoulder.

Although she was holding a spanner in her raised hand he answered
her. "Caroline. She's his 'Germanic Queen.' "

The seat of the bike must have been very strong; he was surprised
the leather didn't split when she smashed the spanner down on it. "Will
you
stop
with that fucking tape! I wish I'd never mentioned
Lou Reed."

"They met in Berlin. This whole round of songs is about their
relationship." The earphones went up again. Unfortunately they didn't
cut out her voice.