Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (9 page)

Rena Citrine smiled slightly. "She didn't."

"But after what happened, they must have been ... estranged."

"They were probably
that
from the beginning."

"Why, then, didn't they divorce?"

"Roger was hardly here anyhow, and
he
certainly wouldn't
divorce the Citrine millions."

"But she—?"

"I expect because of Billy."

Jury frowned. "Billy's gone."

"Perhaps she thinks he might come back."

Jury looked away. "I hope not."

It was supposed to have been only a drop-off.

Something in the manner of an agent like Smiley casually leaving his
rolled-up newspaper containing the coded message from Control that
would forestall the blowing up of the Kew Gardens Flower Show.

Or, thought Melrose, metaphors escalating in violence as the car
made the turnoff to Harrogate, like an Israeli or an IRA henchman
tossing an attache case of gelignite out the passenger door without
even slowing down.

Unfortunately, Agatha's position in the passenger seat was far more
like a steamer trunk than an attache case, and his carefully planned
and simple drop-off
{"Good-bye, dear aunt . . . ah, here's a lad
to help you with your bags
..."
Thunk! Cases on sidewalk, car
picks up speed .
. .) had been completely dished as he'd loaded up
the Bentley with her stuff. Why hadn't she just tied a strap round the
cottage in Plague Alley and dragged it to the car? Trunk, portmanteau,
valise, four hatboxes, makeup case, overnight case (why? when she must
be planning on spending a decade), and picnic basket more befitted
Lord Kitchener's arrival in Pretoria than a two-week holiday in
Harrogate. A few servants in mufti, a whole sweating band of Boers
might not have been sufficient to assist Agatha with her "things."

Would she never stop talking?

He was determined not to answer.

All the way from Northampton, it had been Vivian-this and
Vivian-that; Franco-this and Franco-that; the frock she was having
fashioned for her by the Northampton dressmaker, though clearly she
should
have gone to London and would have done had Melrose not so stubbornly
refused to visit his bespoke tailor in Jermyn Street . . .

(Where Melrose hadn't been in years, the place dark as a vault and
the tailor withered to the size of his own thimble.) . . . and what
rags
did he intend to wear to the wedding, then? And whether the Giopinnos
would be snobs, the canals fouled, the hotel touristy, the church
drafty, the pigeons dirty . . .

(The Pope Polish . . .)

... the pasta endless, the Italian men pinching her relentlessly .
. .

He was afraid he'd bloodied the inside of his lip when his mouth
clamped tighter on that one.

But largely Agatha's was a running commentary on the Events of Last
Night, as she had managed to extrapolate one little practical joke into
a Roman orgy:

". . . the utter
childishness
of it all! I'd think the two
of you might as well have joined the kiddies invading Scroggs's place .
. . oh, ho, Trueblood! Oh, I can understand that
person
doing
such a thing . . . always has been a sneak . . ."

Thus could Agatha rewrite Trueblood's personal history to fit a
single act . . .

"But
you
, Plant! And Earl of Caverness, fifth Viscount
Ardry . . ."

He refused to speak. She'd have the titles whizzing by the Bentley
like an eerie flank of motorcyclists. Was that, please God, the
Harrogate turnoff? Yes. I'll start attending services.

". . . your dear mother, Lady Marjorie. I simply can't imagine what
got into you, I truly can't. Creeping about the poor girl's property,
hiding in the shrubberies, knocking at her door. It leaves me
speechless."

It would take Jack Nicholson with an axe knocking on her door to do
that, he thought, lip buttoned, eyes on the

wide, tree-lined street that led toward the center of
Harro-gate.

"One of these days I'll find the two of you up in a tree,
hammering boards together. Grown men.
Grown
men. And poor,
dear Vivian with so much to do-"

Vivian had become poor and dear and wonderful only since
she'd actually set a wedding date, thought Melrose blackly, taking his
eye from the road for just that second that caused him to swerve to
avoid hitting an old lady in one of those electrified wheelchairs that
she obviously thought gave her the right to cross against the light,
any light- probably have whizzed past the burning bush-look at her go!

"My heavens! You very nearly hit that poor old cripple in
the
wheelchair
."

In the rearview mirror, he saw the poor cripple was giving
him the finger as she bumped herself up on the curb. He said nothing.

". . . thoughtless. What if the Oilings woman puts an item
in the
Bald Eagle
? Have you ever thought of that?"

The only way Mrs. Oilings, Long Pidd's gossip-cum-char,
would know is if Agatha had told her this morning. Mrs. Oilings had
refused to help with the luggage as she'd been busy leaning on her mop
and catching up on last-minute items. They were driving near the Stray,
that wonderful two-hundred-acre common replete with gardens, walks, and
streams.

"I can see it now-" Here Agatha drew with thumb and
forefinger an imaginary banner-space in air: "
Earl of Caver-ness
and Local Antiques Dealer Take Part in New Year Festivities
.
'Said Miss Vivian Rivington, long-time resident of Long Piddleton who
is about to wed the Count Franco Gio-pinno, "It was tacked to my door.
Of course, I thought it must be the children . . ."'"

He pretended the Jermyn Street tailor had stitched his lips
together, fighting his desire to yell
shut up
! Imagine, two
blissful weeks without one of the Talking Heads.

As he spotted the sign that pointed them toward the Old Swan Hotel,
she said, "You've done it this time, Melrose." Agatha smacked her lips
in satisfaction. "She'll never speak to you again."

If only he could get the same result by doing something to
her
door.

They had turned up the wet gravel drive, the trees sodden with the
weight of old rain, the air raw, threatening snow. The Old Swan was a
Harrogate landmark, located near the famous Baths, and large enough for
the Kitchener troops, its floors going up and up. It was at this hotel
that Agatha Christie had reputedly stayed during her remarkable
disappearance. Agatha disappearing. Lightning, unfortunately, didn't
strike twice, he thought, as he braked and spat up gravel.

"This is it, Plant. We're here!"

She said it as if Melrose had suddenly had a fit of hysterical
blindness and would zip straight past the entrance at eighty per.
Agatha left the disposal of her luggage to her nephew and the hotel
staff and marched up the steps.

Mentally, he gave himself a pat on the back. He'd won!

Two hundred miles and he hadn't uttered a word. Such grim
determination would have earned him a knighthood had he not already
thrown away an earldom! Four hours, and she'd elicited no response from
him no matter how much needling, how much baiting. Melrose imagined
what the poor bears must have suffered before bear-baiting was made
illegal, chained to stumps and set upon by dogs. As he followed in the
wake of Agatha's "things"—the trunks, the cases, the reticules,
portmanteaus—Melrose noticed the bellhop carrying the hatboxes wore
the insolent and sinister expression of Robert Montgomery in
Night
Must Fall
.

Really, old man, he thought. Was there a secret spring of violence
in him waiting to be tapped? Axes, snarling dogs, heads in boxes?

As Agatha took to reeducating the desk clerks as to the running of
the hotel, and attending to the matter of her room's location
("overlooking the gardens, of course . . ."), Melrose plucked a little
pamphlet from those set out for visitors. The Harrogate hydros were, of
course, famous. He was fascinated by the item on the Countess of
Buckingham pitching a tent near one of the wells apparently to get the
chalybeate waters before anyone else could. People flowed in, like the
waters themselves, in carts and gigs to take these malodorous waters. .
. .

Good heavens, Melrose thought, Harrogate was the perfect milieu for
Wiggins. Jury's sergeant would be the first to agree that the more
offensive the sulfur, the greater its potency and the better the cure.

He looked up and down the long hall, where windows displayed the
latest finery to be bought at great expense from the local swank shops.
In the enormous and handsome dining room, waiters were moving about
putting final touches to napkins and crystal. To his left was a large
sitting room that served as bar and a place for tea. Here the
tea-drinkers sat about like sticks, what few there were: three couples
and one single lady, all middle-aged, looking as if they were caught in
some holding pattern between life and death.

One could feel the history of Harrogate pressing heavily in, looking
round the Old Swan, sitting here in the cold and sodden January of
Yorkshire's West Riding.

God! Would he stop thinking about
Death in Venice
?
Melrose shut his eyes tightly to make the vision go away, himself
like Prufrock in white flannel trousers strolling along the beach—

"Over here! Yoo-hoo! Melrose, dear! Melrose!"

The fluting voice broke up a vision, like pebbles dashed in water,
of himself dying in a canvas deck chair by a bathhouse. He looked
about, baffled, and then heard the bellowing voice of Agatha behind
him answering the other:

"Teddy! Teddy, dear!"

Hell's bells
! he thought. He'd been mentally basking in the
Italian sun when he should have been making his get-away. Now he was
stuck, that was all there was to it, as Agatha trumpeted by him toward
the table where sat the single lady. He was, after all, a gentleman,
and could hardly walk out without saying hello . . .

Or could he? Not walk out, of course, but continue his vow of
silence? If he could manage to keep his mouth shut for two hundred
miles, surely he could play the game for another half hour. He checked
his watch as he walked toward the two women. One-half hour, chair to
door, the acid test. Could he make a comparative stranger believe that
he'd actually taken part in their exchange without saying anything?

"Hel-/o, Melrose!" Teddy extended her heavily veined and beringed
hand.

With what he hoped was a debonair smile, rather than shaking the
hand, he barely grazed the fingers with his lips.

Teddy's tiny black eyes, being lent the glint of shadow and kohl
liner, glittered like sequins.

Melrose sat as his aunt said, "Well, practicing for the Continent,
are you, Plant? But you'll never scrub off that old moth-eaten
country-tweedy look. . . ."

He smiled, choking the desire to ask her if she'd any more
adjectives on hand, but merely crossed his unbespoken-tai-lored
gray-worsted-trousered legs, plucked an apple green napkin from the
blush pink tablecloth, and sat back while Agatha told Teddy that they
were all off to Italy soon.

As they greeted each other, kissing air, and then sat gabbling
away, Melrose wondered both how he was to order tea without opening his
mouth (here came the waiter) and if this was the same woman whom they'd
visited in York.
That
Teddy (Althea, he believed, was her
name) had been a heavy, squarely built woman with a frieze of bright
orange hair so lacquered that a North Sea gale couldn't've dislodged a
wisp of it.
This
Teddy looked a bit gaunt and had given up
the henna, apparently, for her bluey-black hair was done in some
hairdresser's idiot version of a '20s style, a lot of little
wet-looking ringlets like a bunch of mashed grapes.

And she was no longer plain old Mrs. Stubbs, but had snagged—good
Lord, were they that common?—a nobleman somewhere in the South of
France. De la Roche was her name now. Were there so many loose princes,
counts, crackpot kings wandering round that they were ripe for the
taking? Which line of thought quite naturally only led him back to
Count Dracula Giopinno and that Vivian had shouted at him and Marshall
Trueblood she'd be bloody damned if she'd let them come to her wedding—

Slam
went the door of her cottage. He chewed his lip.
Marshall had a plan for taking the Orient Express.

"Well, good Lord, Melrose! Absolutely everyone disguises himself
on the Orient Express. You should see them trooping about Victoria
Station."

"Sir?"

Melrose was jolted now from Vivian's doorstep, where he was
determined to stand until he molted, by the white-jacketed waiter. He
was nearly surprised into a reply of some sort. He merely returned the
waiter's smile and got the result he wanted.

"Tea for three, sir?"

After all, waiters in places like the Old Swan were trained to
anticipate one's needs. Melrose nodded. He'd really have loved to have
been challenged with a menu in Greek, or something. No, that wouldn't
be a challenge. All he'd have to do was point.

The waiter returned his nod and said, "The set tea, ma-dame? Or
would you prefer sandwiches? Buttered toast—?"

Melrose was absolutely enjoying the small challenge this could
present, until the waiter said, "Madame?" Hell, "Madame" would fill up
the whole thirty minutes—now twenty-two—just ordering.

"—tarts, of course. Have you watercress sandwiches? Yes, we'll have
those with the cucumber ones, too—"

Teddy put in: "Oh, you must try the anchovy toast, dear. It's quite
delectable."

"Sir," said the waiter, and swanned away as if Melrose had given him
the complete order.

Checking his watch, he raised his time-frame to forty-five minutes,
all told, which left, as of now, thirty-one minutes in which he
intended to make them believe he had talked when he hadn't.

The
Times
crossword in under fifteen minutes seemed dull
by comparison. When he thought about it further, he realized actors
could do this very thing: Bogart only needed to narrow his lips, Cagney
to grit his teeth, Gielgud to raise his eyebrows, and Gable—hell, did
anyone remember a
word
he'd ever said except "I don't give a
damn"? Of course not.