Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (44 page)

The silence meant that he'd caught the superintendent slightly
off-guard, as Jury hoped he would: not that an "apology" meant a damned
thing; it was that Sanderson was gearing up to stomp on Jury's next
words. Now, of course, he had to refute the apology. Jury pushed the
cress off the sandwich and took another mouthful that he didn't want.

"Mr. Jury, your apology is noted and means sod-all to me and my
department. You happen to witness a crime in a jurisdiction you've
nothing at all to do with and you persist in investigating same. All of
this has, as I'm sure you know by now, been reported to your superiors.
You've been getting in our way—"

Not
mucking about in our manor
. Jury wouldn't mind working
for Sanderson.

"—so if I were you, I'd stop chewing in my ear."

Again, Jury smiled. "I was wondering." Jury took a drink of his beer.

Another brief silence. "Wondering what?"

"About that call box—"

Sanderson must have been leaning back in his chair, for the sudden
thump sounded like something hitting the floor. He was probably furious
with himself for having forgotten the original thread of this
conversation. "Listen to me: you know goddamned well that we're not
rubes and that we don't need London to tell us how to lift
fingerprints. That kiosk was gone over so thoroughly it'll probably
need a paint job. We are routinely putting a trace on any prints we
found." He lowered his voice. "But I doubt very much that a killer
would forget to wipe the receiver, the door handle, the entire damned
thing
if he wanted to."

"Except the coins. No way to get to the coins you've slotted into
the box. As long as Telecom doesn't go at it with an axe."

Sanderson was silent.

They hadn't done it; Jury knew it would click into place in
Sanderson's mind much faster than it had in Gilly Thwaite's. It would
probably be one or more of the coins lying on top. The calls had been
made only within the last thirty-six hours.

Jury thought he'd give him breathing time by becoming obnoxious.
"I'm not stupid, Chief Superintendent. I know that the last time you
asked for help was with the Ripper case. That man is brilliant;
Yorkshire police made things so difficult for him he threw up his arms
and went back to London." Jury was depending on Sanderson's being the
professional that Racer wasn't. He'd know what Jury was saying.

He did. "The only prints we have are Nell Healey's, the ones taken
when she was charged."

"There's a brandy decanter that was getting some heavy use at the
Citrine house. I'm sure you could find some reason to take something
from that house. As for prints, I have some others. A package will be
delivered to headquarters this afternoon. Do you want the details?"

"Hell, no." The line went dead.

Jury drank off the dregs of his beer, as he dialed the Holts'
number. Fortunately, it was Owen who answered. Yes, he supposed he
could meet the superintendent at the inn if it was important.

Jury rang off and sat regarding the largely uneaten sandwich and
felt Sergeant Wiggins was looking over his shoulder—
have to keep
your strength up, sir
. He stared down at the table, wondering what
it was he had missed. Some detail, some small detail seemed to have
lodged beneath his consciousness like a figure under thick ice, the
contours of which one couldn't make out. He went back over the
conversation with Sanderson, tried to chip away at it. Nothing would
surface. He sighed and picked up the sandwich and ate it as he looked
at the notes Plant had made in his straight-up-and-down, rather elegant
hand.

The Princess was a "possible"
(Poss.)
. She might have been
in her room since tea with one of her "sick headaches" (as she had
said), but the ermine-lined boots had been missing when Plant had
walked through the hall. George Poges:
verified dinner O.S.I, but
after? Poss
. Ramona Braine:
TL to bed early. Snores
. And
Malcolm, well, highly unlikely, although he had the temperament for
it. By his name was an
X
. Impossible. Same for Mrs.
Braithwaite and Ruby, both ot whom were either in their rooms or the
kitchen. But Jury had to grin at the way the handwriting changed when
it came to Ellen Taylor. One could actually feel the grudging tone in
the hand that had grown stiffer, tighter, almost at the end shriveling
into indecipherability. It must have killed Plant to strike out the
X
and pen in
Poss
. (since Ellen hadn't shown up at Weavers Hall
until long after Abby appeared to have left). But Plant could not
resist the editorializing:
Absolutely ridiculous
!

Jury sat for a few moments thinking of Dench and Ma-calvie. He
dialed the Exeter number.

He picked up on the first ring, interrupted the first ring.
"Macalvie here."

It was amazing. Macalvie managed to be both out and in
simultaneously; Jury knew he seldom hung round his office, yet he
always managed to be at the telephone. He seemed to have doubled
himself in some magical way.

Before Jury could say anything but his name, the receiver was moved
and the commander was yelling at someone. Since Jury could hear a sharp
voice return the thrust, it must have been Gilly Thwaite.

"She's got scissors for a mouth. Yeah, Jury what?"

"She's probably the best person you have. You'll push her so far
she'll put in for a transfer."

A sound between a gargle and a laugh cr.me over the wire. "Are you
kidding
?"

It sounded much like Melrose Plant's
Absolutely ridiculous
!
Jury smiled, and said straightaway, "You're making no allowance at all
that Dennis Dench is right?"

"No. He's wrong."

Jury heard a slight creak and a small thud: Macalvie leaning back
and planting his feet on the desk. Jury could see him there, probably
sitting in his coat. - "You ever heard of W. B. Yeats?" Macalvie asked.
Before Jury could answer, Macalvie put him on Hold to deal with another
call.

Macalvie was an omnivorous reader, a habit picked up from standing
by bookshelves in suspects' homes. It had paid off several times, once
in particular when he'd come across one of Polly Praed's mysteries,
among the tooled-leather volumes of a Greek scholar who was suspected
of having coshed a fellow-academic with an easing knife, but who had
claimed not even to know what an easing knife was. Polly's book was
titled
Murder in the Thatched Barn
. While his D.I. questioned
the professor, who'd done masterful translations of Pliny the Younger,
Macalvie speed-read the first half of the book. He later informed
Melrose Plant that his lady mystery-writing friend didn't have exactly
the wings of Pegasus, indeed must have been writing with horse's
hooves, so turgid was the plot and so asinine the policework. But he
was now a rabid fan, since she'd helped him out, all unknowingly.

"Dear Miss Praed: The rifle you claim to have killed Doris Quick (p.
134) in Sussex would have blown her all the way to Cornwall, fired from
that angle. Enclosed, please find . . ."

Stuff like that. And Polly shot a letter, like the bullet, right
back.

Jury wondered, while Macalvie was giving "instructions" to some poor
forensics clod probably also wed to the God of Inaccuracy, how the
Praed-Macalvie correspondence was going. It was certain, given Polly's
books, she didn't read the material the commander helpfully sent her.

Thus Jury smoked his cigarette and wondered how Yeats had got into
all of this.

" 'A terrible beauty is born,'" said Macalvie. "That Yeats."

"Macalvie, there's only
one
W. B. Yeats."

"True. And what do you know about his bones?"

Jury frowned.
Bones
? A line swam into his mind. " 'The old
rag and bone shop of the heart'?"

"The rag and bone shop is where I work, Jury. No—"

Jury could hear drawers opening and slamming and then a paper
rattling. "I kept this; I tossed it in Dench's face. Now we're talking
about W. B. Yeats, remember? So you can imagine how those bones would
have been gone over to prove they were his."

"Yeats was buried in County Sligo."

"France. In a temporary grave before they could get the bones back
to Ireland. Someone comes along and says the bones were tossed into a
huge paupers' grave and no one really knew if the remains were the
poet's. Naturally, the family went nuts. Who can blame them? My point
is: the expert said that after all that time it would be impossible to
prove they were or weren't W. B. Yeats's bones."

"Meaning Dennis Dench could be wrong."

"He
is
wrong. Too many coincidences,
too many
.
The time frame, the burial place, the dog—the little
dog
,
Jury— the remnants of metal, et cetera, et cetera—"

"Speaking of poetry, Macalvie: when we were at the house in Cornwall
I found a little paperback book in Billy's room. American poetry—Frost,
Whitman, Dickinson, et cetera. Emily Dickinson is one of Nell Healey's
favorite poets. It was a copy of the same book she had in her pocket
when I was talking to her. She sent her copy to Abby Cable, little girl
at Weavers Hall. Nell Healey's very fond of poetry; she used to read it
to Billy and Toby, especially Frost and Dickinson."

"What's all this in aid of?"

"Several poems in this paperback are heavily scored or X'd. One in
particular is interesting:

It was not death for I stood up and all the dead lay down
—"

"Sounds like headquarters-—"

"Listen, Macalvie:

It was not frost, for on my skin I felt siroccos crawl."

Jury stopped and there was a brief silence on Macalvie's end.

"In the margin there's a little notation, 'a
desert wind, hot
.'
" Jury paused. "You know a band called Sirocco?"

"Yes. . . ."

"Have you read the latest
London Weekend
or
Time Out
?"

"I'm fully booked. I have an opening to attend in the Haymarket,
front-row tickets for Derek Jacobi. Then there's Wembley Arena and
Jimmy Page. And I
always
catch Michael Jackson. Hell
no
,
I haven't read them."

"The name of the band used to be Bad News Coming. Then they changed
it; Alvaro Jiminez said they wanted a new identity, or something.
Sirocco was Charlie's idea. It was also Charlie's idea to change the
tour date for the

Odeon. Sirocco was supposed to do a concert in Munich first. Do you
know how hard that is? To rearrange tour dates? The manager went
through hell."

"Why'd they change it? Not that any of this means sod-all because I
know where you're headed and you're wrong."

"No, you don't know where I'm headed, Macalvie. I'll get to that in
a minute. Do you know their tunes? Or do you only listen to Elvis?"

"I've heard a few of their cuts. Weren't we playing one on the way
to Cornwall?"

" 'Yesterday's Rain.'"

"Don't sing to me. The poetry was enough."

"The words wouldn't mean anything to you unless you'd seen a
Magritte painting called 'Empire of Light.' There's a print hanging
in—never mind, only that it was one of Nell Healey's favorite
paintings. The words to that song are extremely resonant of both
Cornwall and that painting."

Macalvie sighed. "At least Denny has a few bones to fool with."

"I talked to Charlie Raine. I went to the Odeon, took him to a pub
for some lunch. He knew about the Healey case—"

"As does half the country."

"The kid's been out of England, Macalvie. With all he's got to do,
why would he be so taken up with this case? He knew every detail. More
than that, he thought I'd come to the Odeon because I knew who he was.
He got the concert date changed because he wanted to be here."

"Um-hmm."

"Meaning?"

"We're back to the Unknown Kid, the third-party solution, or ...
oh, let me guess. Next you're going to tell me the skeleton in that
grave was—"

"Toby Holt."

Macalvie's silence was so total that Jury could hear, from across
the room, the black cat's twitchy little snores coming from the sedan
chair.

"Toby Holt. Brilliant. Aren't you forgetting one crucial piece of
evidence? Toby Holt was run down by a lorry five weeks later. Owen Holt
identified the body."

"Who said he was telling the truth?"

"Why in hell wouWn 7 he?"

"Ten thousand pounds. A trust fund set up for Toby's schooling by
Nell Healey. You didn't know about it; you were taken off the case."
Jury told him what the Holts had said. "You know how the odds go down
every day, every hour a kid is missing that he'll ever be found. It's
not that coldblooded—"

"Just a tad illegal, for Christ's sakes. And how do you know this?"

"I don't, yet. But I think I will after I talk to Owen Holt."

Jury heard a drawer open, slam shut. Macalvie was getting out the
paper cups. "It wasn't your case, Macalvie."

"Obviously. It never got solved."

"The lead guitarist, Charlie Raine." Jury paused. "I think he's
Billy Healey."

In that cat-pad, quiet voice Macalvie used when he was really
disturbed, he said, "Jury. Billy Healey is
dead
."

"I was afraid you'd say that. Listen—"

"No. I'd rather talk to Denny. At least he serves wine."

"Listen: say I'm crazy—"

"No problem."

"Security at those concerts is nil. It's only laid on to keep the
peace. The loudmouths, the beer-guzzlers, the snorters, the ardent
fans. Wiggins has rounded up a few men who aren't on rota."

"Are you telling me you think someone's going to try to off your boy
in the middle of a
concert
with—hell, you've seen too many
Hitchcock films."

Jury was getting impatient, but still kept his voice low. "Come on,
Brian, goddammit, I'm not talking about the London Symphony or the
Royal Albert Hall. This is the Hammersmith Odeon, and these aren't
people who toss on their gowns and tails to make sure they're seen.
These are
fans
. These are people who don't eye the box seats
to see if there's someone they've missed who's wearing a coronet. These
are fans who plunk down ten pounds to see some of the greatest
musicians in the world and they
listen
—"