Help the Poor Struggler (4 page)

“Chief.” It must have been almost unconscious. Malcalvie wasn't even looking at White; his eyes were raking over the room as they had been doing ever since he sat down.

“Chief
Superintendent. This has been one of the worst experiences of my life.”

Macalvie looked at him then. “What was the other one?”

“Pardon?”

“It must have been pretty bad if your grandson's murder is only one of them. I can't believe there were more than two. So what I gather is, since you hated the mother, you didn't much care for sight of Davey around the house. Constant reminder, right?” He had just stuck a Fisherman's Friend in his mouth and was sucking at it.

Color drained from the vicar's face until it matched the shade of the bisque statuette on his desk.
“Certainly
I was fond of David. What are you trying to say?”

“I never
try
to say anything. I just say it. So was his mother the only reason you didn't like Davey?”

The vicar was half out of his chair now. “You persist in this judgment —”

“Judgments I leave up to God. Sit down. He was killed sometime early this morning. Five, six. Why would he have been out at that hour and in Wynchcoombe Wood?”

Mr. White was astonished. “But he was killed in the
church!”

Macalvie shook his head. “He was
put
in the church. Probably at that hour there was nobody about. And barely light. But would no one have been in the church this morning? A char? Anyone?”

The vicar shook his head. “Not necessarily. And no reason for anyone to go into the choir vestry.”

“You don't keep a very sharp eye on your grandson, do you?”

Jury interrupted, much to Macalvie's displeasure. “Why would Davey have been out that early?”

Mr. White colored, smarting still under the bite of Macalvie's comment, probably, Jury thought, because it was true.

“Davey was a bit odd —”

Macalvie's impatient sigh told him how much he believed that excuse.

“I
only
mean that he occasionally liked to get out of the house before breakfast, before school, and go to the woods to, as he said, just ‘think about things.' He hadn't many school chums . . .” The vicar's voice trailed away under Macalvie's blue gaze.

Jury was himself thinking about Simon Riley. “Thinking about things” could have meant smoking the odd cigarette. Or just getting away. Another lonely boy, perhaps, in a cold house. But he didn't voice his opinion.

Macalvie did. “Must have had a great life, your Davey. Didn't you worry about him, out in the dark or the dawn,
alone in the wood?” He had got up to prowl the room and was now looking over the vicar's bookcases.

“Nothing's ever happened in Wynchcoombe Wood.”

Macalvie raised his eyes from an old volume. “Something has now. And didn't you read about that kid in Dorchester, Mr. White?” he asked casually.

For the first time, the Reverend Linley White looked frightened. “I did. You're not saying there's a psychopathic killer loose?”

Macalvie's answer was another question. “Can you think of anyone who hated your grandson?”

“No. Absolutely not,” he snapped.

“How about someone who might hate you?”

This time, the vicar had to stop and think.

What Wiggins had learned from the housekeeper verified the information they had got from the vicar. Except the housekeeper did wonder why Davey hadn't come back for his breakfast and his schoolbooks. Wiggins read his notes, and they were, as usual, thorough. Jury told him to go along to Wynchcoombe Wood. Macalvie cadged a few Fisherman's Friends and told Wiggins he wanted Kendall and his men to comb that vestry walk inch-by-inch. Davey could have stumbled, fallen, been dragged. That might account for the bruises.

Wiggins put away his notebook. “Yes, sir. You having an incidents room set up, sir?”

His yes was grudging. “Tell Kendall to get a portable unit and stick it in the middle of the damned Green.” He nodded toward the clutch of villagers standing in front of the George and the tea room. Even from this distance, they seemed to pull back a bit, as if from fear, or, perhaps, the divisional commander's eye. “No, Wiggins,” said Macalvie wearily, as
the sergeant wrote it down. “Put it in that parking lot —” Macalvie nodded off to the right and a large lot, probably meant for the cars and caravans of summer tourists. “And tell Kendall to keep it staffed with the few men from headquarters who won't be stumbling all over their own feet. Much less mine.”

The church had been cordoned off; now, perhaps to disengage themselves from the scene of the tragedy (or from Macalvie's stare), several of the villagers repaired to the pub, there to overhaul their former estimate of life in sleepy little Wynchcoombe.

“Pretty place,” said Macalvie, qualifying it with, “if you like this sort of village.”

It was indeed a pretty place, with its stone cottages huddled around the Green and the spire of Wynchcoombe Church rising above it. An enviable peal of bells told them it was six.

“I need a drink,” said Macalvie.

“The George?” Its sign claimed it to be a fourteenth-century coaching inn.

He grunted. “You kidding? With all the regulars in there having a crack about what happened? There's a pub a couple miles away I go to when I feel especially masochistic. How Freddie — you'll love Freddie — gets any custom on that stretch of road beats me.”

Macalvie looked off across a ground mist just beginning to rise. “It's not far from a village called Clerihew Marsh. I want to tell you a story, Jury.”

H
ELP
the Poor Struggler was the pub's full name, a wretched box of a building on a desolate stretch of road, whose ocher paint had dulled to the color of bracken from the smoke of its chimney pots. Its sign swung on an iron post over its door and the windows were so dirty they were opaque. The building listed from either dry rot or rising damp. Only the desolation of pub and traveler alike would tempt one to join the other.

There was no car park. What custom the pub got had to pull up by the side of the road. Two cars were there when Macalvie and Jury pulled in.

 • • • 

Brian Macalvie was now pursuing, with what Jury supposed was the customary Macalvie charm, a line of questioning directed at an arthritic, elderly woman who was swabbing down the bar. The “saloon” side was separated from the “public” side only by gentlemen's agreement. The public bar off to the left had most of the action: pool table, video game, Art Deco jukebox that was pummeling the customers with Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog.”

 • • • 

“Where's Sam Waterhouse, Freddie?” Macalvie didn't so much ask for as demand an answer.

“I don't naw nort,” said Freddie. “Y'm mazed as a brish stick, Mac. D'yuh niver quit?” She was wall-eyed, wattle-armed, and skinny, and with her stubby gray hair sitting in a lick on her head, she reminded Jury even more of a rooster. He guessed her sexual identity had been scratching with the chickens long enough to get lost.

“I never quit, Freddie. You treated Sam like you were his auld mum, the dear Lord help him.”

“Ha! Yu'm a get vule, Mac, the divil hisself. Cider hisses when yu zwallers it.”

“Hell,
this
cider'd hiss on a stone. You're thick as two boards and your right hand hasn't seen your left in forty years,” said Macalvie, picking up his cider and moving to a table.

Freddie grinned at Jury. “What c'n I do ver 'ee, me anzum?”

Jury grinned back. “I'll try the cider. You're only young once.”

 • • • 

“It was the stupidist arrest the Devon-Cornwall cops ever made.” Macalvie was talking about the Rose Mulvanney case. “Here's this nineteen-year-old kid, Sam, who's living in Clerihew Marsh and indulging in fantasies, maybe about Cozy Rosie. Rose Mulvanney could start breathing heavy over anything in pants. In the U.S. she'd freak out in a cornfield over the scarecrows.”

From what Macalvie had told Jury during their drive to the pub, it was certain the divisional commander's heart was in America — his mother was Irish-American — even if his body was in Devon. Obsessive as he was about police work, still he took his vacation every year and went to New York. His speech was littered with the old-fashioned, hard-boiled speech of a Bogart movie:
dames, broads
— that sort of thing.

“How do you know all this stuff about Rose Mulvanney?”

“Through extremely delicate questions put to the inhabitants of Clerihew Marsh,” said Macalvie. “Like, did Rose screw around —”

“I'm sure that's the way you put it.” Jury took a drink of cider and could believe in the sizzling throat of the devil.

“Be careful, Freddie makes it herself. My questions to the villagers were more disgustingly discreet. But what turned up when I collared the milkman and the old broad that runs the post office stores was that Rose Mulvanney, a couple of days before she died, started taking more milk and buying more bread.
This
even though her kid Mary was away on a school trip. The extra groceries went on for maybe five days. Now, she sure as hell wasn't doing that for Sammy Waterhouse. He lived right there in Clerihew Marsh.”

“You're saying someone else was living with her?”

“Of course.”

Jury tried not to smile. Macalvie was nothing if not certain of Macalvie. “I agree it's a possibility.”

“Good. I can go on living.” He popped another Fisherman's Friend into his mouth.

“So, assuming the Devon-Cornwall police picked on Waterhouse — why? Months went by before they arrested him, you said.”

“It's expensive to mount a murder investigation; you know that. They wanted to get him a hell of a lot earlier, except I kept tossing spanners in the works, like trying to convince the effing Devon police that Sam Waterhouse couldn't have moved in with Rose.”

“Aren't you making a lot out of extra bread and milk?”

“No. Rose wasn't buying bread for the church bazaar.”

“There must have been evidence against Waterhouse. What was it?”

“That he was always mooning around Rose. He was
nineteen,
for God's sakes.” Macalvie shoved the ashtray to the
end of the table. “And the dame next door said she'd heard them having a king-sized row a few nights before Rose died. She saw Sam coming out of the house in a right blaze.”

“And Waterhouse — what did he say?”

“He didn't deny it. He was furious Rose had been ‘leading him on' and he really thought she cared. Told him she had another boyfriend, stuff like that.”

“What did forensics turn up?”

“Their hands. They just shrugged. Of
course
there were prints. All over. Sam had admitted to being in the house. But on the knife? No. He'd have wiped that clean, said my learned superior. So I said to him, Then why didn't he wipe everything
else
clean he'd touched? And after the elimination prints — the two daughters and a couple of friends in Clerihew — there were still two sets left over. Could have been anybody, and certainly could have been the guy who did the job, if he'd been living there for a few days.”

“The girls? The daughters? Where were they?”

“The fifteen-year-old was off on a school trip. The little one must have been in the house, except for the odd night or two she was sent to play with a little chum from her school.”

“But that means she must have seen the man at some point — assuming you're right.”

Macalvie's look sliced up Jury as good as any knife. Could there be any doubt about a Macalvie theory? “That's true. All she had to do was say, ‘No, it wasn't Sammy.' And believe me, she would have if she could; she was crazy about Sam. Both girls were. He was very nice to them. So she could have said it wasn't him and maybe identify who it
was.
Only Teresa never spoke another word.” Macalvie turned to stare into the inglenook fireplace, as if he too might never speak another word, a rare silence for him, Jury thought.

In the public bar off to the left, Freddie had muscled an anti-Elvis fan away from the jukebox to feed in her own coins. “Jailhouse Rock” made way for “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

Jury saw Macalvie glance toward the jukebox and thought perhaps he was going to answer the question put by Elvis — and, for that matter, by Freddie, who was singing along: “D'ya miss me tooo-night?” in her cups and out of key. Macalvie snatched up both of their pints, saying, “It wouldn't be so bloody bad if Freddie'd shut up.” He walked over to the bar, had his brief quarrel with her — their standard means of communication, Jury imagined — and was back and picking up the story of the Mulvanney family. He chronicled their lives as if he'd been a relation. The details he'd picked up during the investigation.

“It still seems like pretty shabby evidence,” said Jury.

Macalvie drank his cider. “Oh, of course the prosecution had their witness. No, not someone who saw it. Just a friend of Sammy's.”

“Friend? Doesn't sound like much of one.”

“Ah, but in the interests of Justice, we must all do our bit. He was a student at Exeter, too. Law. Claimed Sam Waterhouse had said several times he'd kill her. Good old George, standing right there in the box saying Sam came in that night with what looked like blood on his clothes. Liar.”

“What was Waterhouse's answer?”

“That if he ever said it, it was only a manner of speaking. And the blood came from cutting himself in the lab. Terrific. The prosecution made mincemeat of Sam.”

Whether from the aftereffects of cider or the present effects of Elvis, Freddie was still singing along: