Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (33 page)

"Hmm? The usual." Jury signed the two papers marked Urgent and
tossed them in his Out box with half the other stuff he knew was
red-taping its way past his eyes. Then he swiveled round and stared out
of the viewless window and thought about Charlie Raine. "Get hold of
that band."

Surprised, Wiggins looked across his desk. "Band?"

"Sirocco. They're at the Ritz, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"I want to talk to them—to Jiminez."

Wiggins looked pained. "Not
Jim-inez
, yhem-/n-ez.
Yhem
."

"You sound like you're coughing up. Ring the hotel. Tell him I want
to see him. What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Sir." Wiggins said this with a good deal of snap.

"You don't have to salute."

"They have a concert
tomorrow
."

"So what? I'm talking about today. And Morpeth Duckworth and Mavis
Crewes."

Wiggins looked puzzled. "What does Sirocco have to do with the
others?"

"Nothing necessarily." He had decided not to tell Wiggins about
Charlie Raine. Jury couldn't be certain, after all; and the less
Wiggins knew, the less Chief Superintendent Racer would be inclined to
beat him to a pulp with his walking stick for mucking about in someone
else's manor. God, how he hated that phrase. "I'm just a fan." Jury
smiled. "Big time."

Again, Jury turned away to stare at the blank concrete the window
faced on. He thought about the song. He simply hadn't realized what
he'd heard. "Yesterday's Rain." He put his head in his hand, looked at
the blank gray squares of the building.

He could not untangle past and present. He could not focus.
"Yesterday's sun . . ." His mind went to the flat in the Fulham Road,
and his six-year-old life there with his mother. He could climb on a
stool and spy through a wormy peephole in his bedroom into the flat
next door.

Jury half-heard Wiggins on the telephone and thought how far from
the Ritz he'd been then. He'd had tea there once with his aunt and
uncle and been overwhelmed by the luxury of dazzling lights, deep
carpets, the dancers moving effortlessly across polished floors.

But what he thought of most when he heard music was the scratchy
record that came through the bedroom wall of the flat next door.
"Yesterdays." Not the famous Beatles song, but another one. Whenever
he'd heard the old record in the other room play "Yesterdays," he'd
quickly jumped out of bed, stood on the stool and squinted through to
see the occupant of the other room, a girl perhaps a year older than he
named Elicia Deauville.

Elicia Deauville loved to dance to "Yesterdays." It was either the
only tune she liked, or the only record she had (though she never
played the other side). Except in these rare and wonderful dancing
moments, Elicia Deauville, when she walked down the steps and down the
street to the school, looked like an ice-maiden. Her long, tawny hair
had been worried into a tight thick braid, then severely twisted into a
pinwheel at the back of her head, into which several pins had been
plunged like sabers. It was as if the hair were being chastised for its
beauty and bounty. Jury wondered if her dreadful caretakers—a brassy,
florid man and woman— were truly the parents his mother had assured him
they were. His own mother was beautiful and slender and had silky blond
hair and eyes the color of his own. He adored her and never doubted
what she said, except in this particular instance.

But Elicia Deauville's true self (he was sure) showed her as
something quite other at her bedtime hour (which was also his) when she
would wind up an old Victrola and dance to "Yesterdays."

Wearing only her white nightdress, barefooted and with her
waist-length golden-brown hair, she would move swiftly from one end of
her bedroom to the other, weaving and bowing like a sapling in the
wind, moving backward and forward in a dancing, ballerinalike run that
circumscribed less and less space. Her body would move deliriously, her
hair floating and falling like blown leaves.

It was at once an act of total abandonment and a mastery of space
that he had never seen repeated. Twenty years later he had seen Margot
Fonteyn and thought,
You are very, very good, but you are not
Elicia Deauville
.

In the middle of the night, he had watched the blitz from behind his
blackout curtain chink and seen the great cones of light shoot up,
waver against the night sky and thought of Elicia Deauville. Thus he
had been watching when the firebomb dropped and reduced half of his
block of flats to rubble. The other half, the Deauvilles' half, had
remained standing.

He had found his mother in the living room, or had found, rather,
her arm, clad in black velvet, extending from under what had been the
plaster of ceilings and walls. The arm was in black, the hand white,
upturned in a familiar
come here
gesture.

The next day, while he sat on the remaining step outside waiting for
his relatives to fetch him, he watched the small collection of cases
and bags grow larger next door as the loudly clothed and loud-mouthed
Deauville couple, who made him think of crazy patchwork, came and went,
depositing their belongings.

Sitting there, he had taken his small pocket notebook out and
written /
love you. Richard
. That had not looked right and he
scrubbed heavily through it as if the same heavens that had opened up
and left him without a future would do it again if they saw or heard.

/
will see you yesterday
. Neither did that look right, and
she might guess he'd been spying on her if he knew about the song. The
father stomped out and plunged down a double armful of clothes, and he
saw that right on top was the white nightdress that had a tiny pocket.

Good-bye, Elicia Deauville
. He folded it four times and
stuffed it into the pocket.

"He said six."

"What?" Jury was studying the flame of the match he had struck to
light his cigarette. "Said what?"

Wiggins looked concerned. "Alvaro Jiminez. Six o'clock he said would
be all right."

"Good."

"You look very white. You should be home in bed. I can work out a
program of medication for you that should have you back on your feet if
you get bedrest along with it."

"Thanks, but not now."

"I think he's right, sir."

"
Who's
right? You're getting elliptical."

"Commander Macalvie."

"I'm sure he'd agree. Right about what?"

Wiggins waved his hand over the lot of books, not forgetting to
pluck up one of the sticks of Aspergum. "Rotten headache," he said by
way of prologue. "The bone fusion. You can't absolutely determine age
by means of calculating bone fusion."

Jury leaned across his desk and squinted at Wiggins more in
disbelief than because of the white arc of light slicing across his
face. "Dennis Dench has a wall full of degrees—"

Chewing on his gum, Wiggins waved the wall of Dench's cavelike
laboratory away. "Bones, sir, except for teeth, are good indicators,
but not absolute determiners." He placed his hand on each of his four
books in turn. "Here's three authorities who all say the same thing,
one who doesn't. But even the one who doesn't allows some margin for
error. Another interesting point is, after I had a word with the
forensic anthropologist here, is that the bone of the arm can help to
determine right- and left-handedness. Now, I'm only saying they can be
an indication. Professor Dench didn't mention that." Wiggins removed
the clay pot from one of the books, closed it, patted it, and said, "So
I called him up and asked what he had in his notes about the arm bones.
I asked him specifically if the bone of the right arm was longer than
the left. Billy Healey, you remember, was right-handed."

"As a matter of fact, I didn't remember. Most people are."

Although Wiggins's flickering glance at his superior was not at all
contemptuous, neither did it register approval. "Yes. And Dr. Dench did
say that there was a small difference, that the bone of the right arm
was a bit longer than the left. And then he immediately said that this
would not help much, since the bones were those of a child and not
fully developed."

"You look as if you don't agree."

Wiggins put his hands behind his head, tilted his chair, and studied
the ceiling before he handed down his decision. It was a pose that Jury
recognized as one he himself often affected. "What I wonder is, why
would he be so quick to try and prove me wrong?"

Jury rose from his chair and walked over to the small window that
gave out onto the cheerless scene of the three other sides of the
building and the courtyard below. "Perhaps because he's been at the
top of his field for twenty years."

"We all make mistakes, sir."

Jury looked up at a patch of white sky. Wiggins, like Death, was the
great leveler.

"What I think, sir, is that his judgment might be clouded, as
happens to all of us, you must admit . . ."

Jury turned, noting the suggestive pause. "Yes?"

"Well, it could be a blind spot. In this case, Commander Macalvie
could be the spot. Dench has known him for ages. They're both experts
in their own ways. I don't think Dr. Dench wants Mr. Macalvie coming up
with a conclusion that makes more sense than Dench's own. You must
admit that's possible."

Looking down into the small square, Jury nodded. "And you think my
blind spot is Billy Healey."

There was a brief silence. "Well, it's understandable. I think you
don't want the boy to have been Billy Healey, that's true."

It was getting dark, and whatever leftover light there was had
drained away from the courtyard down there, the high-walled building
blocking it. Jury felt his stomach go queasy, drop. "I don't want it to
have been
any
boy, Wiggins."

He turned to see Wiggins redden slightly as he dipped a plastic
spoon into the small pot of honey mixture. "No, of course not. The
thing is this, though." He looked up to make sure that he might be
allowed to continue.

"Go on. You've done a good job. What's that stuff?"

Wiggins's anodynes were just the ticket for glossing over difficult
moments.

"It's this dry cough. Honey, ginger, and lemon juice and a little
water. It's absolutely the only thing that'll stop it." He stirred this
remedy up in the ceramic pot. "The thing is that //you think Mr.
Macalvie's whole idea about the date of the death, the proximity to the
Citrine house, the disused graveyard makes sense, then //the skeleton
isn't the Healey boy's, whose is it? It can't be Toby Holt's because he
was killed five weeks later in London. So that would mean there'd have
to be a
third
boy somewhere between, say, eleven and fifteen
around there, and that's too much of a coincidence, surely."

"And Macalvie's already checked that ... did you?"

"Naturally."

"Nil?"

"Nil."

"You rang up Macalvie?"

"I did."

"And what's his theory?"

"The same. He's always thought it was Billy Healey." Wiggins's mouth
pursed in his version of a smile. "He seemed a bit pleased that I faced
down Professor Dench."

"Didn't it
bother
Commander Macalvie that all
possibilities have been ruled out?"

"No."

" 'First we get to the truth,
then
sort out what it
means.' He said something like that," Jury suggested.

" 'Shoot first, ask questions later,' I believe his words were."

"Like any gunslinger."

Jury had gone back to his desk and sat down heavily, largely
oblivious to the stacks of files awaiting his inspection. "Macalvie's
wrong."

Wiggins had been giving exploratory taps to his chest with his fist.
Cough gone. But voice tense. "You say that as if you're quite sure."

Wiggins sat there, waiting, Jury knew, for some explanation of his
superior's pigheaded behavior. "We'll talk about it later. This Stanley
Keeler—"

With the injured look that always lay just beneath the surface,
Wiggins said, "Stan Keeler. My eardrums will never forget him. I don't
know how the landlady sticks it, except she's convinced he's some sort
of Polish spy. She's big as a hoarding, nearly. I expect you'd have to
be to stand up to all of those tremors."

"I want to talk to him, too. About Roger Healey."

"Suit yourself." Wiggins shut the book on osteoanatomy as if he were
shutting the door on the case. "But you'll have to wear earplugs."

"Thought you said he was lying quietly on the floor during your
encounter."

"He had his head on a tire." Wiggins was beginning to prefer
elliptical statements, inscrutable answers.

"He was lying on the floor with his head on a tire?"

"Thassrigh," said Wiggins, duck-honking into his handkerchief.
"With a Labrador. Big."

"Duckworth. I want to see him too."

Wiggins asked gravely, "Did you do your research into rock music?"

"Piles of it. What's this?" He'd just seen a pink telephone message
in the Out box. "Riving———" He shut his eyes.

"Yes, sir. Miss Rivington from Long Piddleton. Where Mr. Plant
lives. About an hour ago. Is something wrong?"

"No." He reached in his billfold, plucked out a ten-pound note,
reached it out to Wiggins. "Go get me some flowers." He thought for a
moment. "Tiger lilies. Something green and brown. And toss in some
white roses. There's a shop down the street."

"That's a strange combination, sir. I don't know any brown flower.
And, anyway, you'd have to wire them . . . sir!" Wiggins rose
immediately, seeing his superior's expression.

Two days. The day after tomorrow. How could he have been so damned
stupid as to forget. "Of course I didn't forget, Vivian. How could I
have forgotten?"

"Easily," said Vivian. Her voice sounded forlorn. She quickly picked
up its tempo. "I mean, with everything that happened to you. Your
picture was in the papers. I expect you have to testify."