Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (5 page)

He was also dead. Jury wondered from what.

Jury and Mavis Crewes sat in this solarium, surrounded by strange
exotic plants, grass shields, spears, and Ibo masks, drinking coffee
and Evian water with a cut-glass carafe of whiskey standing by as a
fortifier.

Jury kept trying to wave away the thin stems of a hanging
bougainvillea. The surroundings that he himself found suffocating,
Mavis Crewes apparently found soothing and restful. Between little
spasms of speech, the breakings off partly the result of talking of
Roger Healey's death, but also partly her own natural abruptness. A
tiger's eye stone glinted on the hand that fingered a petal here, a
leaf there. There was a chunky diamond on the finger of the hand slowly
twisting the glass of Evian water that helped in what Jury imagined to
be her campaign to stay travel-thin.

He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her
fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped
down to forty. The latest fashion (Jury knew from glancing into various
Regent Street shops) was the safari look: desert colors or camouflage
greens, loose shirts and skirts with low, heavy belts, nothing he could
imagine any woman found flattering. She wore a bush jacket over a
sand-colored shirt and Hermes boots.

In this environment, and with her thin, slightly muscular look, all
of that fitted Mavis Crewes rather perfectly. Except, of course, that
they didn't resemble mourning, something she had brought up at the
beginning of their interview. She hadn't anything black, you see, and
she hardly thought it the time for a shopping spree, given the death of
her "dear, old friend." If she thought mourning clothes appropriate two
weeks after his death, she must have meant to imply he had been very
dear indeed. With her swept-back, pale blond hair, he wondered if
perhaps she knew black didn't show her to any advantage. The eyes he
had thought at first to be black were a murky jungle green.

After the divorce of the first and the death of the second husband,
she had stuck her thumb in the pie again and apparently pulled out the
biggest plum thus far, Sir Robert Crewes, safari buff, a Knight of the
Royal Victoria Order, higher than the OBE her cousin had managed to
reel in. Mavis Crewes was very impressed by the title, though
knighthoods abounded among civil servants, members of the Royal
household, and the foreign service. It was peppered with them probably
as a reward for one's going off somewhere (anywhere) to represent the
country.

It was not that Jury doubted that Mavis Crewes's grief was genuine;
it was just that he wondered how deeply she felt about
anything—-except, perhaps, the venomous anger for Healey's wife.
Although she seemed to refuse to acknowledge her as such: "that woman"
was the phrase she used when speaking of Nell Healey.

"Hard as nails," she said now, still twisting the delicate glass
between thumb and forefinger as if it were a stem she might snap. She
sighed. "That woman."

"Tell me about her, Mrs. Crewes."

"Nell was the second wife." Jury wondered that Mavis Crewes, who had
second-wifed it aplenty, could rationalize this. "And not the boy's
mother." She threw Jury a basilisk glance.

"What happened to the mother?"

"Went off to the Swiss Alps. Had a skiing accident."

"You think the stepmother couldn't have cared about Billy, then?"

He had said the wrong thing, or in the wrong tone. She sat back
again, arms resting on the arms of the white wicker chair, flexing her
fingers. "You sound as if you sympathize with her, Superintendent.
That's absolutely astounding. But you couldn't have known her well."
She gave him a small, cunning smile, as if they'd reached an agreement.
"I'm not sure what your role is in this. What are you investigating?
That she killed Roger is not open to question. That she managed to be
released until her trial certainly
is
. Women like Nell Healey
always seem to get what they want. She's flint, she's stone."

Jury hoped his smile would offset his words. "Stone generally meets
with hard resistance itself."

"If you're implying
Roger
was hard, you've got it all
wrong. He was totally devastated. You didn't know the man. You didn't
know his warmth, his charm, his—"

"But you did," said Jury innocently.

She was smart enough to sidestep that. "They'd nothing in common. He
loved travel, new experiences, new . . . sensations. He had an appetite
for life. She was content to do nothing but stay in that godforsaken
part of
York-

shire
. ..." She looked round at the masks and guns as if
Tanzania were more accessible.

"With Billy," said Jury. She flashed him a look. "You've been their
guest, I take it."

"Yes. Several times. Charles Citrine thought of Roger as his own
son."

"Mr. Healey sounds like a paradigmatic husband, father . . .
friend." He let that word hang there. "Martin Smart admired him." He
tried to smile, found it tough going.

"Oh,
Martin .
. ." She forgot the Evian, went for the
whiskey decanter, giving Jury a dismissive glance. "Martin seems to
think publishing's a sort of game; he sometimes hires the most
/^appropriate people—"

"They certainly looked, from the offices I passed, very
old-school-tie-ish."

"Then you didn't pass Morpeth Duckworth. God. What a vile person. Do
you know I caught him in my office one day with a mop and pail.
Cleaning."

Jury wiped his hand across his mouth. "Why?"

"God
knows
. Well, he looks like a janitor, doesn't he?
He's done it to others, too. Even Martin. Martin finds it
excruciatingly funny. I think Duckworth's going through our files.
He's American."

"Oh."

He heard calfskin whisper as she shifted in the wicker chair,
crossing and recrossing her legs. "What are you asking these questions
for? What's all this to do with Nell Healey?"

"I was thinking more of Billy. That case was never solved. I'm
sorry." He rose. "You've been very helpful at what must be a terribly
painful time."

That he would leave with so little resistance took her by surprise.
"No, no. I'm just on edge." The tan, sinewy hands waved him down again.

Jury sat, gave her that reassuring smile, said, "How long had the
Healeys been married before the boy disappeared?"

From the murky depths of her eyes came a glint like a spearhead. She
ran the hand with the whiskey glass over the folds of her skirt, her
head down. "Five or six years," she said vaguely.

Jury was sure she knew exactly how many years. The five years
between six and eleven would have been awfully important for any
child, especially a child with a new mother. But as he felt Mavis
Crewes was disengaging, was pulling away from his questions now, he did
not want to explore the relationship—or her version of it—between the
little boy and his stepmother directly.

"Nell was—is—a Citrine." Impatiently waving away Jury's puzzlement,
she went on. "The Citrine family is one of the oldest in the county.
Old blood, old money. Charles
refused
a peerage."

If you can believe that
. The hefting of her neatly plucked
eyebrows implied that Jury must himself find this unimaginable. He
kept his smile to himself, this time, wishing his friend Melrose Plant
could hear this. "Kindly Call Me God" was his acronym for the holders
of the KCMG. The OBE was the "Old Boy's End."

Only the cockatoo, beating a wing and turning round on its stand,
reacted to Charles Citrine's crazy behavior as Mavis went on. "Don't
misunderstand me, I've nothing against the Citrines. In spite of
her
.
Yes, I expect I do resent that they've enough money and influence to
bail her out after the arraignment. They can get her out, but they
cannot get her off. No question of that!" She took a tiny black cigar
from a silver-chased box and accepted Jury's light before she sat back
behind a plume of smoke. "He's really quite a fine person, Charles.
He's had a lot to do with improving the quality of life up there. In
West Yorkshire, I mean. Gotten subsidies for the mills, created work
where others seem to be destroying it—well, that's Thatcherism, isn't
it? Charles is very public spirited, has been appealed to again and
again to sit for Commons. . . ."

And she went on at some length about Nell Healey's fa-ther, ending
with, "I wrote him a note. I wanted him to know that I sympathize. I
thought it appropriate."

The interview that had begun an hour ago with the appearance of a
lover's display of grief seemed fast degenerating into a discussion of
unemployment and politics. No. All of this talk suggested to Jury that
Charles Citrine's high visibility was for Mavis Crewes something other
than as a possible political candidate. She must have been ten years
older than Healey. And was probably ten years younger than Citrine.

"Of course, it's lonely for him, I expect, living in that enormous
place with only Irene. Calls herself Rena. Not much company, I
shouldn't think, for a man with Charles's intellect. To tell the truth,
in the last few years I think the sister has gone quite mad. Well, that
sort of thing usually goes downhill, doesn't it?"

"Not uphill, at any rate. If you're speaking of a psychosis."

"Charles excepted, I'd say the entire family's round the twist. God
knows,
Nell's
testament to
that
." Having given over
the Evian water to the whiskey now, she poured herself another glass,
drank it off, topped it up, restoppered the bottle. "To tell the truth:
I wonder if Roger didn't marry her for it. Money, I mean." She looked
at Jury as if he might confirm this, since he'd been in the same room
with Nell Healey, circumstances notwithstanding.

"It's not uncommon." His smile was a little icy. "But couldn't he
have loved her?"

She tossed back the whiskey. "What was there to love except money?
Oh, she's not
unattractive
, but . . ."

Jury gave a slight headshake. Perhaps she really believed it. "What
happened to Mr. Citrine's wife? Nell Healey's mother?"

"Dead." Beneath the tan, there was a rosy flush. "Charles is a
widower—" Then she must have seen the implication of this and went
hurriedly on to say, "It was probably a blessing that she never lived
to see this."

With that hackneyed sentiment, even the cockatoo screeched.

The most celebratory activity on New Year's Day had occurred when a
sybaritic gang of children from the nearby market town of Sidbury had
come to Long Piddleton and somehow gained entrance through the back of
the Jack and Hammer, to steal up the stairs to the box room on the
first floor. From here they had wriggled out on the beam, dismantled
the blue-coated, mechanical Jack, and the lot of them carted the wooden
figure back to Sidbury. This had happened three years ago, and it had
happened again three nights ago. To hear Dick Scroggs talk, the
Sidburyites were only matched by the Newcastle football fans for pure
rowdi-ness.

Marshall Trueblood, dressed no less colorfully than "Jack" himself,
was seated at one of the window tables in the Jack and Hammer with his
friend Melrose Plant, both of them working away at a large book of
cut-outs, and occasionally making sounds of commiseration.

Scroggs, publican of the Jack and Hammer, was slapping over the
pages of his
Telegraph
and rolling a toothpick round in his
mouth as he bent over the saloon bar. He still hadn't recovered from
the New Year's night revelries when the "whey-faced gang of roughs" (as
Marshall Trueblood described them) had been surprised by police in a
frozen field of coarse grass and bracken, just as one of them had
touched a match to some dry branches arranged round the mechanical man
that was the pub's pride and joy and the most colorful thing in Long
Pidd with the possible exception of Marshall Trueblood. The Jack was
rescued with its aquamarine trousers barely singed and restored to
Dick Scroggs.

"It's hard enough to have to put up with the childish pranks of our
own
kiddies," said Trueblood, as he carefully separated a Dracula face from
the cardboard surrounding it, "without these rowdies from Sidbury
tramping up to the village."

Melrose Plant did not answer. He was frowning over the task of
affixing one of the legs to the cut-out torso, his long, elegant
fingers trying to work a tiny tab through a narrow slit. "Haven't you
poked out the cape yet? I'm nearly finished."

"I mean, the whole thing is too silly for words anyway; I don't see
why we have to put up with these childish pranks. When the little
ninnies come to
my
door on New Year's Day, I put my hands on
their shoulders, turn them about and about and get them all dizzy and
watch them go drunk-enly off. They think I'm playing. Good Lord." He
put a crease in the chalk-white face where the instructions had said
Fold
and handed it to Melrose Plant. "Here."

"Do the cape." Melrose nodded at the big book of punch-out figures.

Marshall Trueblood had found this cardboard collection of
put-together monsters and ghouls at the Wrenn's Nest bookshop ("in a
fight to the death with some beastly child," for it was the last one).
"Do you think we should be doing this here, in public? I mean, she
might just come in." He leaned back and lit a jade-green Sobranie and
regarded Melrose through a scrim of smoke.

"She won't come in; she's busy packing," said Melrose, who had
successfully attached both of the legs to the torso and was picking up
the face. "Or, I should say, staring at her trunks and then at the
wall. I'm thirsty." He called over his shoulder to Dick Scroggs for
another round.

"I can't really believe she means to do it, can you?"

"She's been engaged to him for four years; I imagine she's beginning
to feel rather self-conscious. Have you got the boat?"

"Right here, old sweat." Trueblood leaned a small, canoe-shaped boat
against his pint glass. He had found it in a lot of goods acquired at
an antiques auction. It had been painted pale blue and bits fixed to
the ends so that it looked like a gondola. He had punched out a rat to
put in it, which he placed temporarily in the tin ashtray. "Dick!
Another round, if you please!"

Dick Scroggs apparently didn't, for he kept his eyes on the
newspaper. Finally he gave in to the calls from the public bar on the
other side and went round the bar to lavish his attention on the dart
players.

"Oh, hell," said Trueblood. "Must we wait on ourselves? That she's
been engaged to him, old trout," he continued as he poked out the
red-lined cape, "has nothing to do with her marrying him."

Melrose picked up their glasses and went to the bar as Dick came
round the other side. "Two more, Dick." As Dick set the glasses beneath
the pulls, Melrose turned the paper round. Dick had been in the process
of cutting the article about the murder in West Yorkshire from it. He
possessed a small, hook-billed instrument for the purpose of sawing
odds and ends from papers and magazines. Melrose wondered if he was
tracking Jury's career for him, pasting up articles in a scrapbook.

As he released the beer pulls and they stood watching the foam rise
on the pints of Old Peculier, Dick observed, "Seems a pity, dunnit? You
wonder what'd ever make a woman kill her husband that way." He drew a
knife across the cap of foam and placed the glasses on the counter. He
was, of course, dying to know if Melrose had been talking to Jury about
the case. "Well, I expect the poor woman'd never be quite right in the
head with her boy being kidnapped and all. You read about that, I
expect?" Perhaps this salacious morsel had escaped Melrose's attention.

"I did indeed. Well, one certainly can't complain in this case that
the police are never around when you need them. Thank you, Dick." He
took their drinks and returned to the table, stopped dead as he saw a
figure pass by the window behind Marshall Trueblood. "Oh, hell! Here
she comes!" The figure disappeared momentarily and they heard the door
to the pub open. "Quick! Here!" Melrose shoved the cut-out book and
canoe toward Trueblood and slapped his
Times
over the
cardboard Dracula.

Whispered his friend, "Don't give it to
me
, damn all. . .
." Trueblood hurriedly shoved the canoe-gondola behind him and the torn
pieces into the book and waved it wildly around before sitting on it.

"Hullo, Vivian; thought you were home counting lira," said Melrose
pleasantly.

Vivian Rivington looked more as if she'd been counting the days of
her life and finding them numbered. Coppery strands of hair had come
undone from the loosely braided knot and she blew them from her
forehead as she sat dewn, exhausted. "There's just too much to do, is
all. May I have a sherry?" She was looking at Trueblood.

"Of course," said Melrose, giving her a blinding smile and returning
to his crossword.

"Well?" she looked from one to the other and then toward the bar,
empty except for Mrs. Withersby, who had propped her mop in the pail,
and was administering to herself from the optics. "Must I get it
myself, then?"

"Dick will be back in a moment. You look beautiful, Vivian."
Actually, Melrose thought the mustard-colored twin-set was rather
abominable. It drained the color from her ordinarily pearly skin and
fought with the coppery hair.

Vivian looked down, as if checking to see if this was herself, and
frowned at him. "I do?"

"Absolutely," put in Trueblood. "Very fetching indeed."

"Well, if I'm so damned fetching, will one of you get me my drink?"

Trueblood twisted on the window seat a bit and said,

"You know that dreadful estate agent—Haggerty? Is that his name?—has
been asking if you intend to sell your cottage. They are
so
pushy, these people. Of course, proper Elizabethan is rare these days.
There's so much of the mucked-up stuff. But I honestly
hope
you're not going to sell, Viv-viv. Though you have indicated that's
what you intended from time to time."

She flushed. "I haven't even
left
yet. I'm not leaving for
ten
days
."

"Ah! Here's Dick back again!
Scroggs
! Will you kindly see
to your customers? Miss Rivington will have her usual."

Dick stuck a cigarette behind his ear and called over, "Tio Pepe's
off, miss. Got a nice bottle of port; Graham's 'eighty-two."

"Anything," called Vivian crossly.

"Pushy, as I was saying. Lord, they're after your house before
you're even cold in your grave— Whoops! Sorry!" Trueblood held up his
hands in mock horror at his gaffe.

Vivian looked at both of them in disgust.

"How're we going?" Melrose put in, keeping his elbow on the
newspaper when he saw her eye stray in that direction.

"
We
? I'm taking the train," she said, fingering the piece
of white cardboard with the rat's picture. She frowned. "What's this?"

"Nothing," said Trueblood. "People do not ordinarily refer to the
Orient Express as 'taking the train.'"

She said nothing.

Melrose knew how she hated to be identified with the lavish
life-style of those who thought it was the best revenge.

"That's certainly the way we're traveling," said Trueblood, who
moved a fraction of an inch to allow Dick Scroggs to set their drinks
on the table.

"That looks," said Vivian, squinting at the rat in the ashtray,
"like it came from a book of cut-outs, or something."

Trueblood removed the little cardboard rat dexterously from her
fingers, saying, "Plenty of those in the canals, Viv-viv."

As she gave him a murderous look, Dick Scroggs beamed at her and
said, "Well, now, Miss Rivington. I expect you're pretty excited, ain't
you? Not too long before you leave, is it?"

"Nearly two weeks!"

Dick's smile remained unaffected by her snappish tone. "Not to
worry. Pass quicker'n it takes Mrs. Withersby to drink up a pint."

"It's ridiculous," said Trueblood. "A
winter
wedding in
Venice. Ye gods. We've been trying to talk her into putting it off
until spring."

She looked hopefully toward Melrose. "But I've already put it off
several times."

"So what?" said Melrose. "He has plenty of time."

Now she looked suspicious. "Is that a double entendre?"

"I wonder," said Dick Scroggs, getting into the spirit of things,
"you don't have the wedding in Long Pidd." Expansively, he waved the
hand holding the tray. "A proper reception I could do for you, miss."

". . . very kind," murmured Vivian, trailing a wet circle with her
port glass. "But it's impossible, Dick." The sad note of exile was
already sounding in her tone.

"They don't travel well," said Trueblood. "The Giopinno family is
quite averse to traveling."

Vivian's sudden eruption of temper nearly pulled her from her chair
and sent Dick Scroggs scuttling back to the safety of his bar. "You
know nothing whatever about the Giopin-nos!" She glared at Trueblood,
then at Melrose.

Taking care to keep his elbow positioned on the
Times
, he
turned to her and said, "We don't?"

"No, you don't. You make it all up. You've conjured up an entire
family out of whole cloth. You've manufactured their history to the
point where you can't separate fantasy from reality. As a matter of
fact"—her tone suggested a final judgment—"you both live in a fantasy
world!" This pronouncement seemed to please her.

"Oh?" Seeing the direction of Vivian's gaze, he shot the hand that
had just lifted the glass of stout over the newspaper.

With her fingertips pressed against the edge of the table as if she
meant to push herself away from their fatuous company, Vivian lectured
them in a schoolmistressy voice. "You sit around in here before lunch
and dinner doing nothing but making up stories—"

"Well, I wouldn't say that, Viv—" There was a slipping, rustling
sound as Trueblood tried to recross his legs.

"—about France's family. His mother is
not
fat with a
black mustache. She does
not
, to quote you—" Her tone to
Melrose was scathing. "—'despite her ascendancy to this high station,
still cook spaghetti carbonara and squid fry-ups for her five brothers
twice a week.' Franco's mother is small, a bit rawboned, wears
sleeveless dresses and speaks four languages. . . ."

As she continued to set him straight about the Countess Giopinno,
Melrose studied her fingertips: the nails looked bitten; a little
morsel of skin jutted up from the cuticle round the thumbnail. This all
struck Melrose as oddly poignant and he wanted to put his own hand
over-hers.

"—
not
have 'seven cousins who work the bellows and make
little glass horses for tourists to Murano';
or
'six uncles
with an unflagging devotion to the Communist party'—"

"Your memory is prodigious, dear Vivian," said Melrose, noting that
the slight upward tilt to the corners of her mouth lent her, no matter
how angry she was, a helplessly pleasant air.

She ignored this. "As for
you
—" The movement of her head
toward Trueblood was so sudden she might have given herself a good case
of whiplash, and the timbre of her voice, during her recital, had grown
reedy, giving the impression now of a child chastising her dolls
gathered round the nursery tea table. "—he does
not
have a
younger sister who 'climbed over a convent wall and set about
disgracing the family name by running off with a traveling circus';
nor
an older sister who 'auditioned for the mad dwarf in that du Maurier
film.' And as for the maternal grandmother's midnight sprees—" Vivian
gritted her teeth and set them straight on this branch of the family
tree.

Melrose fought a yawn and saw that Trueblood was wearing the vacant
expression of the stupid, the insane, or the man whose thoughts are
miles away. He wasn't really listening either.

"My goodness, Vivian, did we say all that?"

"Ev-er-y sin-gle word."

Trueblood pursed his lips. "It was Richard Jury who mentioned the
dwarf—"

Down
came her fist on the table, jumping the rat from the
ashtray. "Richard
Jury
has better things to do than sit
around fantasizing all day!" she shouted.