Help the Poor Struggler (6 page)

“It had crossed my mind. That ‘other boyfriend' she had —”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“She never mentioned any names?”

Sam Waterhouse closed his eyes in pain. “Don't you think I'd have damned well
said
if I knew of anyone else? I looked at her diary; I went through her desk. All that got me was a shadowy snapshot of some man. I asked her who it was and she said her uncle.” Sam shrugged.

“Well, we didn't find anything like that. Uncle must have taken diary, photos, and papers.”

Sam's eyes glittered with anger. “Look, all of this has been said and said again.” His face took on the look of the chronic loser. “For God's sakes, haven't you had any murders in Devon in the last nineteen years so you want to hook these up with the Mulvanney case?” Macalvie shook his head. “Then why here and why now?”

“Revenge, Sam. At least, that's what the papers —”

Sam Waterhouse shook his head. “I don't know what you're talking about. You've got a psychopath on your hands —”

“I don't think so. At least not in the sense you mean — that there's no connection between the kids' murders.”

Freddie stomped in with a steaming plate of mutton, boiled potatoes and vegetables. She plunked it down in front of Sam and gave Macalvie an evil look as if he'd been the prison cook. Sam went at the food with a vengeance.

Macalvie went on: “You've been out walking the moor for four days? Why?”

“Because I've been in the nick for nineteen years and wanted to see a little open space. As soon I'm finished with this meal, you can slap the cuffs on me. I'll go quietly, Commander.”

“Well, arresting you's not what I had in mind. You staying here?”

“Probably. Freddie's been like a mother to me.”

Macalvie feigned surprise. “A mother? She's not even female. What I was really waiting for was to talk to you. You could be helpful.”

Waterhouse leaned back in his chair and laughed: it was a transforming laugh; Jury could see in his face the nineteen-year-old student of medicine. “Help the Devon-Cornwall constabulary? I think I'd go back to Princetown first.” That incandescent look of youth fell away like a falling star. “Even if I
would
‘help,' I couldn't. I don't know any more now than I did then. And I didn't know anything then.”

“How do you know?”

Sam looked up from his plate. “Meaning what?”

“You might know something that you didn't connect with Rose's murder, or you might know something you don't know —”

“I had nineteen years to think it over. Case closed.”

“Let's say I just reopened it.”

A
NGELA
Thorne had been told by her parents never to stay out after dark, never to miss her tea, never to walk along the Cobb, never to play along the shingle beach when the tide was coming in. Angela Thorne was presently engaged in doing them all, attended only by her dog, Mickey.

Dark had come by five o'clock, and she was still out in it two hours later. Some of that time had been spent wandering aimlessly in the well-tended gardens above the Marine Parade. A further half-hour she'd spent going up and down several little flights of steps along the Parade and moving backward toward the stone wall to beat the running tide.

She was presently breaking another injunction by walking along the dark arm of the Cobb that made a safe harbor for the little fishing boats, creaking out there in the wind and the water.

Mickey puffed along behind her. He was a terrier and too fat because Angela kept feeding him scraps of food from her plate, disgusting things like mashed swede or blood pudding or skate that always looked to her like the clipped wing of some big bird. All Mickey was supposed to eat was dried dog
food. He was old, and her parents were afraid he'd have a heart attack.

She was tired of her parents and she hated her school. She hated nearly everything. Probably, it was because she wasn't pretty, and having to wear this long braid and hard shells of glasses. No one else at school had to wear thick glasses. Her classmates teased her constantly.

Angela stopped far out on the Cobb to look back at the lights of Lyme Regis along the Marine Parade. She had never seen Lyme at night from this distance. She liked that unearthly glow of the lamps. The little town seemed light-lifted above the black sea.

She wished it would fall in and drown. Angela didn't like Lyme, either.

The tattoo of Mickey's paws scraping stone continued as Angela walked on. Mickey loved the sea. When the tide was out, he'd tear away from her like a bit of white cloth in the wind and chase the ruffs of waves as if he'd never felt freedom before, as if he were having the time of his life.

She took off her cape and threw it over the little girl. Better to freeze than have to look at the blood-soaked dress of the body on the black rocks. The small dog was hysterical — running to nose at the cape, then back to Molly, going dog-crazy.

Standing on the high-piled rocks at the end of the Cobb, Molly Singer felt removed from the scene, a dream figure, looking down; a nonparticipant, the prying eye of some god.

In the seamless merging of sea and sky she could find no horizon. There was a chalky moon, and the sky was hammered with stars. And a distance off were the lights along the Parade.

Back and forth ran the dog. She would have to do something
about the dog. Molly had a vision of the little girl and her dog, walking out along the Cobb, two dark silhouettes against the darker outline of the seawall.

She would have to get the dog back to shore. She was freezing, but at least she couldn't see the body now, which was the important thing.

Holding on to the dog, which struggled in her arms, she picked her way over the rocks and back to the seawall. On one of the dogtags was the name of its cottage.

She found Cobble Cottage and left the dog there, inside the gate.

Molly stood on the deserted Marine Parade, her own rented cottage at her back, the cold forgotten as she leaned against the railing where seaweed was tied like scarves, thrown up by the tide. The wooden groins along the shingle kept the sand from shifting. It would be nice if the mind could build itself such a protective wall.

She looked along the Cobb to the pile of rocks from which she had come.

All she could think of was the line from Jane Austen.
The young people were all wild to see Lyme.

E
LEVEN
it might have been, but the manager of the White Lion didn't argue about the licensing laws any more than had Freddie's customers — though here it worked in reverse. The manager reopened the bar and smiled conspiratorially after Jury and Wiggins booked rooms. “Residents only,” he said.

Wiggins, probably in some attempt to stay the awful effects of sea air, went straight to bed. It was the weather that had forced Jury and Wiggins to stop on the way back from Wynchcoombe. Rain and sleet that finally turned to hail. Each time a rock-sized chunk hit the windscreen, Wiggins veered. Jury imagined he was taking it personally, the weather. Weather and seasons were judged only in reference to Wiggins's health: spring brought allergies; autumn, a bleak prognosis of pneumonia; winter (the killer season), colds and fevers and flu. Driving along the Dorchester Road, Jury knew what was going on in his sergeant's mind, though mind-reading wasn't necessary: Wiggins was always pleased to open his Pandora's box of physical complaints and enlighten Jury as to which one had just flown by.

Before that could happen, Jury pointed out the turn to Lyme Regis.

Wiggins wasn't any too happy about sea-frets, either.

 • • • 

Jury got his pint, asked for the phone, and called headquarters in Wynchcoombe to let them know where he was. On his way back to the bar, he noticed a thin, elderly woman in a floppy hat watching a television as antiquated as she was.

Jury was slotting ten-p pieces into a stupid video game when she passed behind him, saying, “You can put money in that thing all night and you won't get any back. It's rigged.” She went up to the bar and knocked on it with her knuckles for service.

“Thanks for the advice,” said Jury, smiling. “Buy you a drink?”

“I wouldn't mind.”

The manager, coming from an inner room, didn't seem surprised to see her.

“You a resident, then?” asked Jury.

“Off and on.” She was wearing spectacles with sunglasses attached on tiny hinges. Why she needed the sunglasses in the murky light of the saloon bar, Jury couldn't imagine. She flipped them up and squinted at Jury as if he were light that hurt her eyes. “What's your name?”

“Richard Jury.”

She snapped the brown-tinted glasses down again. “Hazel Wing,” she said. The manager had already set up a pint of Guinness for Hazel Wing. Jury bought a drink for the manager, too.

Hazel Wing raised her glass and said, “Here's to getting through another one.”

“Another what?” asked Jury.

“Day.” Up went the sunglasses again and she squinted. This time, probably, to see if he was a little on the dim side.

“I'll drink to that, certainly.”

“What do you do, if I may be so bold?”

“I'm a cop.”

This news did not seem to surprise her. She said, “Oh. I sort of thought so.”

“Why? Do I look like one?”

“No. You're better-looking. I just supposed it was about the little girl.”

He felt himself go cold. “What do you mean?”

“That girl that's gone missing. Don't know her. Young. Got all of Lyme in a panic. You know. After that boy in Dorchester.” Hazel Wing, who seemed the sort to chop off emotions as she did her sentences, still allowed herself a shudder. “Kids. Parents keeping them in. Dorchester's not far.”

And neither was Wynchcoombe. “Excuse me.” Jury put down his pint and made for the telephone again.

 • • • 

He stared in silence at the telephone in the lobby of the hotel. Constable Green, in the Lyme police station, had finally to ask if Jury had got the message. “Yes. Don't move her.” He hung up while the constable was assuring him no one would touch her.

“Bad news,” said Hazel Wing. It was a statement, not a question. News came only in one way to her.

“What's the quickest way to the Cobb Arms?”

“Walking or driving?”

“Whichever's faster.”

Hazel Wing evaluated Jury's six-feet-two and decided, for him, walking. “Straight down the hill and right on the Marine Parade. That pub's at the other end. Ten minutes. If you're in a hurry.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Good luck,” she said, the words unconvincing. Luck, like news, was seldom good.

The little girl under the cape was lying as if she'd been stuffed like a small sack in the crevice of the rock.

“Hold the torch over here, will you?” Jury knelt down and picked the seaweed from her icy cheek. He knew he shouldn't have touched her at all before the doctor or Scene of Crimes expert got there, but he felt he had to get that stuff off her face. Bladder wrack. He remembered it from a seaside town he had gone to as a boy. It was the stuff that would pop if you squeezed it. A wave collapsed against the rocks, spewing foam in their faces. The wet rocks made standing difficult.

“Do you suppose she came out here,” asked Constable Green on a hopeful note, “to get the dog and then was trapped by the waves . . . ?”

“No,” said Jury. “It was a knife.”

When Jury and Green got back to the Lyme Regis police station, Chief Superintendent Macalvie had been there for a quarter of an hour and ticking off every minute of it like a bomb.

Throughout Green's explanation of the anonymous telephone call and his finding the body, Macalvie sat in a chair tilted against the wall, sucking on a sourball. “So where's the body?”

“Hospital,” said Green. “We got the local doctor —”

“Did he see her before she was moved?”

Green retreated into monosyllables. “Yes.”

“About this woman, Molly Singer —” Macalvie was waiting for Green to embroider upon his description. Green didn't, so Macalvie went on. “Correct me if I'm wrong: you know the cape belongs to the Singer woman, you have a suspicion
it was this woman who left the mutt at the Thornes' cottage, and you also suspect she was the one who rang up, and yet with all of this, you haven't brought her in for questioning.”

“We went to her cottage, sir.” Green looked from Jury to Macalvie, uncertain as to who had jurisdiction here: Dorset, Devon, or Scotland Yard? “But you don't know Molly Singer, sir —”

“Obviously I don't know her, Green. She isn't here, is she?” Macalvie looked around the room. Then he said to Wiggins, who had been dragged from under his eiderdown quilt around two
A.M
., “Give me one of those Fisherman's things, will you?”

Wiggins did so. He was presently trying to fend off something terminal, in a chair drawn up to a single-bar electric fire, where his feet competed with a large ginger cat snugly curled there.

Macalvie went on. “Because if she
was
here, then maybe the three of us could have a nice chin-wag and figure out what the hell she was doing on the end of the Cobb tonight.”

Constable Green kept his expression as flat as the side of a slag heap and answered: “The Singer woman has lived in that cottage facing the Parade for nearly a year. No one in Lyme really knows her. She doesn't chat up the neighbors. She isn't friendly. She doesn't go out, except I've seen her sometimes at night, walking my beat. You might say she's eccentric —”

Jury interrupted. “You might say she's phobic, from what you told me earlier. Doesn't go out to the shops; doesn't mix with people at all . . .”