Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (7 page)

her prowess as a mystery writer. She was, really,
considerably better than this lot of codswollop demonstrated.

At least it hadn't yet been published (and Polly probably
knew why). Unable to stand it any longer, Melrose flipped the
manuscript closed and stuffed it back down between cushion and chair
arm, wishing old Aubrey's "sinking feeling" would drop him right in
the Grand Canal.

Unfortunately, as Melrose reached for his sherry he was
aware of a hollowness in his stomach as the face of the Signora Orsina
Luna with her coppery, wind-tangled hair was suddenly replaced by the
face of Vivian Rivington with her coppery, shoulder-length bob.

... a sinking feeling was the only way he could describe it.

Surely such tarnished prose could not call forth something
akin to empathy for old Aubrey as he stood poised on the edge of some
hectic-

Oh, for God's sakes, he was beginning to sound like old
Aubrey. Or old Polly. Melrose belted back his sherry and slid down in
his chair. With both hands he massaged his hair until it stood up in
spikes and licks, hoping to work some sense into himself. That was the
trouble with all of this maudlin sentiment; it began to suck you in.

His hand tightened on the leather chair arm as he thought of
Aubrey's own hand grasping the metal rail of the vaporetto as he stared
into the hazel eyes of the signora . . . No, it was Vivian's that were
hazel.

And then the images of Vivian started flowing past him as if
she too had been painted on the pages of a book: Vivian in her twin-set
in the Jack and Hammer today; Vivian looking serene and silky in
Stratford-upon-Avon; Vivian in a tatty old bathrobe in that country
house in Durham; Vivian over tea, over drinks, over dinner-

His eyes widening as if he'd come upon a houseful of ghosts,
Melrose wondered if he had made some dreadful miscalculation. . . .

"Why on earth are you pulling that long face, Melrose?"

asked Agatha, who had thumped back into the room carrying her dish
of rum balls. "You'd think you lost your last— what's
that
?"

The racket made by the brass door knocker was violent enough to make
the chandelier shudder.

"I don't see why these dreadful children can't stick to the village
if they must go about playing pranks, nor why you can't have Ruthven
stand down there at the driveway entrance and simply turn them away—"

"Generally, we set out steel-jaw traps," said Melrose, as he heard
some commotion and raised voices out in the entrance room and then the
deliberate rap, rap, rap of heels across the marble.

Vivian appeared in the doorway.

"It's Miss Rivington, sir," Ruthven said with whatever formality he
could muster, but as he followed in her wake like a hound brought to
heel, the announcement was superfluous.

Melrose got up quickly, bestowing upon his visitor an absolutely
wonderful smile. For once in his life, he believed not in coincidence,
but in Destiny. "Vivian!"

Vivian Rivington stood there in a wet raincoat, her hair a mess of
rainsoaked tangles, holding out a large pasteboard cut-out.

"Just what in the hell is
this
?"

"Wherever you see smokestacks, you know it's shut down," was the
cabdriver's brief and bleak commentary on the West Riding mills, once a
center of the wool trade. The taxi had dropped him at a car-hire place,
and after the sooty valley of Bradford, the monotonous rows of slate
rooftops and chimneys marching up and down hills like stairsteps,
coming so suddenly upon the open expanse of the moors should have been
a grateful escape. Perhaps it was the season; perhaps it was his mood.
But Jury saw little to relieve that mood in the endlessness of the
moors, the distant hills brown with old bracken and heather, gray with
snow and granite.

The Citrine house sat within its own wood of oak, boxwood trees,
and tangled vines on the border of Keighley or Oakworth Moor. It was
hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The sound of
Jury's car lifted pheasant from the dead and nearly knee-high bracken
as he drove up the narrow road to the house. He had passed a small
stone cottage, perhaps once a caretaker's, but unoccupied now, given
the build-up of filmy dirt on its windows. It did not seem the sort of
grounds one would bother to "keep up," at any rate. The undergrowth,
the dead branches, the moss and vines would simply take over again.

It was a fitting-enough landscape for such a medieval house,
fifteenth, sixteenth century probably. Soot-blackened stone, vaulted
porch, ranges of timber windows over archways, a turret at one end and
a tower at the other. It was very large and looked very cold. Jury
wouldn't have wanted to pay Citrine's heating bills. He wondered if it
had been in the family forever; he knew the Citrine money had come from
the woolen mills. Well, it was hardly Charles Citrine's fault that
synthetics had come along.

The room into which Jury was led by a woman servant was not a great
improvement over the stark medievalism of the facade. It had once been,
he imagined, the "great hall," and still retained most of the size and
much of the ambience of one. Its vaulted ceiling lent it a strangely
cryptlike appearance. Near one end of the room was the large fireplace
with a tile surround and copper hood, certainly not the original
central hearth. Beyond this was a long entry screen, heavily curtained
to cut off drafts and leading, probably, to buttery or dining room and
kitchen. The walls were exposed stone sectioned off by wooden beams.
Would he find the stone wept moisture if he touched it?

The furniture was heavy, dark Jacobean. Two baroque and elaborately
carved chairs with high backs sat before the fireplace at opposite ends
of a long claw-footed refectory table. There were other pieces, a sofa
and several easy chairs. On the flagstone floor, oriental carpets were
strewn, but their intricate and faded colors did little to add to any
overall warmth and life. There were brass and pewter bowls set about
full of flowers: mums and Christmas roses. They were sifting their
petals onto the surfaces that held them, though, as if they, too, were
giving over to the room's wintry look. That relieved this feudalism,
but not greatly.

One thing that did relieve it, though, was an oriel chamber in the
right wall, upraised and large enough to contain twin grand pianos. The
high-climbing lancet windows that arched about this stagelike little
room were beautiful.

There was music on one of the pianos. The cover of the keys was down
over the other.

Unattended, the fire had burnt low. Why was the room not wanner, in
tone if not in temperature? Against the other wall were
floor-to-ceiling bookcases in recessed alcoves, and books usually made
a room look tenanted, he thought. But these bookshelves seemed to have
no arrangement, the books and magazines stacked or merely tossed there
without any particular notice, like afterthoughts. Between the shelves
was a window seat beneath a high window whose leaded panes should catch
the morning sun. He walked over to it and found the view baleful, for
it overlooked the downward slope of the moorland hill and the derelict
farm, its longhouse, its barns studding the land like empty shells. The
only life Jury saw was the black-faced sheep, raising their heads from
the bracken.

Charles Citrine shambled into the room—that was the only way Jury
could describe it, the sort of careless, shuffling walk the man
affected, hands in pockets of baggy corduroy trousers, and wearing a
checked woolen shirt beneath a mud-stained denim jacket. From a
distance, he had the look of a man who'd been busy in the barn or
mucking out a stable; up closer, Jury could see the lines of worry.

He did not extend his hand and looked at Jury with some suspicion.
"Why are you here, Superintendent?"

"I thought I could help."

"I can't see how." This was said flatly, without hostility. "None of
this makes any sense. Not Roger's death, not Nell's—oh, hell. You might
as well sit down. . . . Would you care for coffee?" Citrine sat back in
the dark wood chair that had the look of some mythological beast or
bird, the feet taloned, the slanted panels ribbed like wings.

Jury thanked him but shook his head. He would have expected more
reserve from Charles Citrine, if not outright hostility toward himself,
the person who had actually witnessed his daughter's crime. Nor did he
seem to care anymore that Jury had, after all, no business being here.
Given that Nell Citrine had made no move to get away, her own resolute
silence regarding the circumstances, and her apparent acceptance of
what she had done would have made an actual eyewitness to the crime
hardly necessary. Her own refusal to deny anything would even have
rendered circumstantial evidence unnecessary.

Thus Jury's own role was far less vital than it might have been.
Perhaps Citrine realized this and that explained his attitude.

Citrine would have been, in any woman's book, a "catch." In his
sixties he projected a vitality, a lustiness, even, missing in men
half his age. The earthiness born of the land and the casual air he
affected born of his work there (though Jury imagined it was more a
gentlemanly meddling into the duties of his laborers) were only
enhanced by a veneer of sophistication that had come from handling many
types of people. In spite of the tensions of the last few days, he had
the manner of one almost untouched by the larger world beyond his
doorstep. This blend of sophistication, ease, and innocence could be a
potent mixture for any woman. Jury wondered if Mavis Crewes had imbibed
it. He couldn't imagine the two of them together; Citrine was far more
refined and a great deal cleverer.

This room did not encourage ease of manner. Yet Citrine seemed at
ease in it—how could a man look comfortable in that Jacobean
monstrosity of a chair?—and yet at odds with it, too. The room, the
feudal, armorial look of the house, seemed less Citrine's proper milieu
than would some South Sea island. His face was weather-burned from
whatever farming life he led, and the sunburnt look lent a further
crispness to the gray hair shot through with gold and a further depth
to the eyes, which had the clear tint of unruffled water in some
island cove. Roll up his trouser legs and shuck his shoes, and he could
be a beachcomber, a Crusoe happily marooned.

His whole placid presence rubbed Jury's nerves raw.

"Isn't this somewhat irregular, Superintendent? I mean, given you
must be the Crown's witness?" The question was more curious than
critical, as he regarded Jury with those calm, aquamarine eyes.

"I wouldn't serve as witness, since there's no question of the right
person's being arrested."

He looked surprised. "I find that odd. You were the one who saw
Nell—who saw it happen." Citrine looked down at the burnt logs, little
more than embers.

"Everything I know I told to the West Yorkshire police.
Superintendent Sanderson." Not everything. There was really no way to
tell it. She went to the parsonage, a tearoom, a child's museum. But
how to explain the nuances: the abstracted air, the hand against the
glass case of the toy train. And what, precisely, could he say Roger
Healey had said or done to provoke such a tragic outcome? Jury had his
impressions, that was all. Attitude, aura, evanescence. Sanderson
would tell him, with his dry look, that perhaps the Old Silent's black
cat was a familiar? To put away his crystal ball.

"There was the appearance," Jury went on, "of an argument. Of a
rather serious disagreement."

Citrine had removed a pipe from his jacket pocket, knocked out the
old tobacco into an ashtray, and tamped down fresh. He lit up. A
fruity-scenting smoke blossomed, uncurled, and dissipated into the cold
air. "Given the outcome, I'd say that was probably true," Citrine said
dryly and jammed the pipe back in his mouth.

Jury knew he was being deliberately misunderstood. He said nothing.

"I have no idea why this happened. Roger was a devoted husband, a
fine man. Spent a lot of time in London, of course, because of his
work. And I imagine nothing was quite the same since—" He stopped
abruptly.

"If you're talking about your grandson, I know about that. I'm very
sorry, Mr. Citrine. I truly am. I'd simply like to know the reason this
happened." He tried to smile. "Throw me out any time you feel like it."

Charles Citrine smiled slightly too. "Look, we'd
all
like
to know the reason. My daughter won't talk about it. We're not . . .
especially close. I think she gets on better with my sister than me. If
you want to talk to Irene—" He shrugged. "—go ahead."

"Where would I find her?"

"In the tower. My sister is not so much eccentric as the sum of a
number of affects. One is that I have relegated her to the tower, with
the bats." Citrine smiled sourly.

Jury's own answering smile was half finished, hanging in air like
chill in the room. "And your daughter?"

"I don't know." He studied Jury. "And I don't think it would be a
good idea for you to talk to her. I probably shouldn't be talking to
you myself; I doubt her solicitors would like it. Who are, as you can
imagine, going round the twist on this one. Nell doesn't—" He stopped
to get the dead pipe going again. "—care."

Jury watched him coax the pipe back into life and saw nothing in the
man's expression that would suggest that Citrine believed otherwise.
Yet, it couldn't be true, this assessment of his daughter's state of
mind. Yes, it was possible that one might give up on one's own life,
might despair of one's own future. But that could only come about
through caring very deeply about things having gone wrong that were
once in some sense right.

But he was not about to challenge Charles Citrine's statement.
"There's no remorse?"

Reaching over to stab at a log with the poker, Citrine looked up.
"Not a flicker." He might have been talking about the blackened log. He
shook his head slightly, bewildered. "Roger was a very good man, one
of the best. I had great hopes when he married Nell . . ."

One would have thought the father would have put it the other way
round: when Nell married Roger, or, at least, "when
they
married." His statement made Nell Citrine sound like a rather poor
marital prospect. When he paused, staring at the logs that refused to
erupt into flame, Jury prompted him: " 'Great hopes'?"

Absently, he held onto the poker, like a walking stick or cane. Two
or three small blue flames licked their way round the logs. "That he
would steady her."

Steady her? Jury had to smile. "She seems the last person in need of
'steadying.' I've never seen anyone so self-contained."

Citrine leaned the poker against the stone and sat back.
"Impassivity can often seem like containment, can't it?"

The picture of Nell Citrine Healey that was emerging, stroke by
stroke—or was it hint by hint?—was not a pleasant one. Remorseless.
Impassive. Unsteady. "You're making her sound like a sociopath."

He gave a short bark of laughter. "Good Lord, I hope not. No. Do you
know anything about melancholia, Superintendent?"

Jury thought about his own mental state these last months. "Not
much. Except as chronic depression. Is that what you're saying is
causing this apparent lack of empathy with things outside of her?"

"I don't know. I don't think depression would explain it."

"And her mother?"

"Helen was quite—sanguine, really. A lovely woman." He looked away,
dispiritedly.

"This must be very difficult for you." But from the way Charles
Citrine talked with as much equanimity as he did about a situation that
struck Jury as horrific, Jury wondered how difficult it really was. The
man seemed to fit the chair in which he sat admirably, for all that his
casual dress and manner were at odds with it. In the meager firelight,
Jury saw that in the angle between the horned foot and the seat a web
was in the making, a small spider dangled there by its invisible thread.

Citrine nodded, knocked out his pipe on the fireplace fender. "I'm
very fond of Nell; but I must admit she's beyond me. I can't fathom
her feelings, her reasons for this destructive silence." He sat back
again, started fussing with the pipe. Jury wondered why men bothered
with pipes; he wondered if all of the attention pipe-smoking demanded
served as a safety valve, a distraction from human demands. Citrine
said then, with a rather disarming smile Jury imagined endeared him to
a lot of people, "I shouldn't be talking to you at all."

"It can't hurt her, can it, in the circumstances?"

Her father shook his head. "I expect not. Sometimes I wonder if she
ever had very strong feelings for Roger."

"Oh, she must have."

"Because she married him?"

Said Jury dryly, "Because she shot him. You say all of this is
'beyond you,' Mr. Citrine. But you can't have known them both for so
many years and not theorized about the reasons behind her killing her
husband."