Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (43 page)

"Who
cares
where they fucking
met
? " She started
wheeling round and round, reminding him of Abby. Goading Ellen was
almost as much fun as goading Agatha.

"You look really fucking stupid with those earphones on," she
shouted.

"It that all you think about?" he asked mildly.

She stopped her dervish-turn two feet from him and looked at him
suspiciously. "Is what?"

Melrose reached out his hand, shoved the fingers in the neck of her
black jersey, and pulled her to him. As he kissed her, harder than he'd
ever kissed anyone, she made a strangling sound—perhaps, one part of
his mind told him, be-cause his fingers were looping the neck of the
jersey too tightly. Still with his mouth on hers, he let the jersey go,
put his hand instead on the back of her head; her hair was softer than
it looked, given the tangled and crinkly style. After a certain amount
of pounding her fists against his heavy sweater, she went limp. That
part of his mind into which blood was still pouring (all the rest was
going off in different directions) thought that perhaps she was dead.
Strangled. He went on kissing her.

But he must have let her go at some point because she was standing
back, getting her breath, and muttering. He seemed to see this through
a filament as if there were a wavering, clear waterfall between them.
Or possibly he was getting cataracts.

Ellen wandered drunkenly over to her BMW and lay across the leather
seat, still mumbling.

"Are you being sick?" asked Melrose. "Did we stop too soon?"

She raised herself and wheeled on him. "
No
! My Lord, I have
never
been kissed like that—"

"That's because you've manacled yourself to Manhattan men. They're
all dolts who spend their lives chasing the elusive shadow of success
instead of women—"

Her hands, like headphones, leapt to her head. "Shut up shut up shut
up. I wasn't
complimenting
you. My God, I was nearly raped by
an earl."

"Is that the trouble then, I mean the 'nearly' part?"

Her hands dropped away. She stared at him. "What
conceit
How does any woman
manage
around you? Why don't they tear off
their earlobes, or something?"

Melrose thought of Vivian, leaving tomorrow. She hadn't wasted time
on Manhattan men. Only Italian, he thought woefully. He was
floundering. He didn't know what was happening to him. He was listening
to the bedroom scene where Caroline had cut her wrists, and he felt
like weeping. But he came round in a minute as if he'd just had a
fever-flash and saw Ellen looking at him with real concern.

"Ellen, you're too smart, too young, too much wanting to be another
Bronte. Get out of this place; you'll die of illusion." Melrose
restationed his earphones. "Let's go to Berlin."

"I don't know what you're talking about." It was hopelessness
rather than dismissal in her tone. "I have deadlines to meet."

Melrose shrugged. "Let's go to New York, then, and meet them. Stop
talking. I think another clue about Caroline just went missing." He
pressed the 'phones to his head.

Calmly, Ellen went back to adjusting the lugs on her BMW wheel.

The WPC brought her into the wood-paneled room that might have been
the library of a home, except for the lack of books and that it was
furnished only with a long table and a chair at either end. Jury turned
from the barred window where he'd been staring out at a
snow-threatening sky only a shade lighter than the room itself. No
burning logs, no turkey carpets relieved its unblemished paint. The
room was clean in that way of places that few people stop at. Jury shut
his eyes and opened them again, childishly surprised that the scene
hadn't changed. That in its place there wasn't a tall tree, a weak
slant of sunlight, a rotting gate.

Nell Healey herself was dressed in a square-necked prison dress, and
looked like a figure in a tintype, where the faces take on the tincture
of the amorphous, steely gray edging. Because of their unsmiling
complicity with the camera, the faces seem all to look the same.

She was looking at him, waiting. Neither of them sat down. It was
not a room to linger in, to look over the photograph album, to
reminisce about the past. They stood nearly the width of the room apart.

"It's nice of you to come."

Her voice was threadbare, unraveling. She coughed slightly.

He rejected the usual openings—I hope you're not catching cold;
I've just seen your father, your aunt; are they treating you well.
Perhaps her own silences were infecting him.

He began to see the uselessness of that sort of talk. So he said, "I
was talking to Commander Macalvie. You remember him, I know. There's
probably no way he can avoid testifying."

Was that all? Her vague smile was a little dismissive. "With the
Lloyd's banker dead
and
the superintendent in charge, you
mean that he's the only one left who knows about the ransom."

"Knowing him, I don't think the prosecution will relish the
testimony, even though they might think they're pulling a plum from the
Christmas pudding. They'll be wrong."

She frowned. "Won't this have got him in trouble? To say nothing of
you. I know Father called the Wakefield headquarters—"

"I'm always in trouble. At least with my chief."

"Commander Macalvie is very convincing."

"Very."

"And is he usually right?"

"Nearly always."
You tell her, Jury. Go ahead
. The shots
of the boy's skeleton passed before his eyes. "Nearly," Jury repeated.
He felt ill. The temptation to show her the magazine, to tell her
about the lunch with Charlie, was strong. But he didn't; he couldn't.
Partly, it was Macalvie, but partly something else. He couldn't pin
down the something else.

"Is that what you came here to tell me?"

"No. I want you to tell me what happened."

Is
that
all? her little smile said. She had turned her
head toward the window. Did she care there were bars? He doubted it.
She was no more prisoner in here than she'd been that afternoon a week
ago, standing and searching the crippled orchard.

"Friend of mine," said Jury, "was talking about the Greeks. Medea,
Jocasta, Clytemnestra. You remember the tale of Clytemnestra and
Agamemnon? I mean the whole of it? Agamemnon has always been considered
the husband betrayed and murdered."

She seemed amused in his telling of this tale. "And that's true. Are
you drawing an analogy with me? Does your friend think I'm as evil as
Clytemnestra, then?"

"He was talking about Ann Denholme."

Her expression changed very swiftly, became impassive.

"You knew Abby was her daughter. You also knew Roger was her father.
I'm not sure how, but you knew."

She actually smiled. "I murdered him in a fit of jealous rage. Is
that it?"

"No. You murdered him because you thought he murdered your son. And
not for the reason Agamemnon nearly sacrificed Iphigenia. In that case,
it was a sacrifice demanded by the gods. Fortunately, the gods gave
him a last-minute reprieve. In this case, there were no gods to
appease. And no reprieve. Healey wanted the money."

Her mouth slightly open, she watched his face.

Nell just avoided stumbling as she took a step toward the nearby
chair and put her hand on its back. She was too careful to stumble, too
controlled to lean.

"Commander Macalvie always thought that you suspected something,
that you came to that decision not to pay up with extraordinary
swiftness and decisiveness. The kidnapper had to have been someone
Billy would have gone with willingly; there wasn't a sound, not even
from the dog. You never thought they were taken by force. But who would
have believed you, given your husband's near-unimpeachable reputation
and your own 'highly susceptible nervous condition'? Obviously, not
even your own father. And I wonder who put that idea in his head?
You're the only one
in
that family whose nerves are about as
strong as nerves can get. There was no way you could be absolutely
certain it was Roger who was behind the kidnapping, but that suspicion
together with Commander Macalvie's advice made up your mind.

"You were fairly certain if you paid up, you'd never see Billy
again. Or Toby. And you'd never be able to prove it," Jury added. "But
if something went wrong, and Roger failed, Billy would be able to
identify him. That must have occurred to you."

"Roger never failed," was her bleak response. "If he wanted
something."

"Then why did you wait all of these years?"

She looked down at her hands. "It might sound—frivolous. But one
reason was that Billy and Toby had been declared 'officially' dead. In
that, there was something dreadfully final."

When she stopped, Jury prompted her. "You said 'one reason.' Was
there another?"

"Oh, yes. It's the reason I met Roger at the Old Silent. He wrote to
me from London, said he wanted to talk about Billy, and he thought it
would 'be pleasant' to have dinner at the Old Silent." She raised her
eyes. "Absolutely nothing incriminating in such a letter; he phrased it
carefully."

"The letter that went into the fire?"

She nodded. "Obviously, he did not want to have dinner. What he
wanted was a million pounds." She turned her head to look at the barred
window. "In return for information about Billy. He thought he knew,
you see, what had happened."

Jury frowned. "But surely the man wasn't reckless enough to admit—"

"Oh, no." With that she rose.

He looked at her for a long moment and said, "You were never, then,
one-hundred-percent sure."

"Oh, no." Folding her arms across her breast she half-smiled. "But
what would you do to a father who would extort money for information
about the disappearance of his own son?"

They stood there with the pale sun throwing shadows of the bars
across the table that separated them.

Jury didn't need to answer.

Marshall Trueblood was overjoyed.

He told Melrose over the telephone that all was well with Viv, that
she'd forgiven them, that they were to consider themselves reinvited to
the wedding. There were, oh, a few little stipulations. . . . They were
to promise they would not put into operation one or two of the plans
that had apparently been hatching in "those chicken coops you and
Melrose call your 'minds.' "
That's the way she put it. She's
merely polishing up a few ripostes for that epicene count she's
intending to let drag her to an early grave. . .
.

What plan? What was she talking about? They had hatched so many
between the two of them, Melrose couldn't remember them all.

Vivian had apparently overheard that whispered conversation about
"bricks" and "wine cellar,"
and, of course, since the wedding is
during Carnivale, she put two and two together. I told her not to be
silly, that I'd have to be a lunatic to try walling up Franco
—"/
rest
my case." That's what she said
: "/
rest my case
."

. . . Dior, or Saint Laurent. The gown she's considering buying
in London. I told her to wait until she got to Italy and go for an
Utrillo. Now I, of course, shall have a right rave up in the Armani
shop. You should get rid of those knobbly old tweeds and try Giorgio.
Ah, his elegance, his understatement.

Understatement? Not when Trueblood got through with Giorgio.

Must they talk about
clothes
, for God's sakes? Melrose
felt he'd been wardrobed to death this afternoon, listening to the
Princess, who, with the Major (still spit-polishing his boots), was now
waiting with her steamer trunk for the Ha-worth cab. Now how the devil
was she to get that thing on the train in Leeds? She'd been trying all
through breakfast to get Ellen into a perfectly
divine
frock
that Ellen said would make her look as shapely as a tree trunk as she
dropped Mrs. Gaskill's life of Charlotte Bronte on the table and pulled
on her black leather jacket.

Melrose had helped a rosy-smiling Ruby take out the dishes and
cutlery and had carefully arranged napkins round the two egg cups,
dropped them in his pockets, and started toward the door. He stopped,
pictured Jury's questioning look, and sighed. He went back to the
table and wrapped Mrs. Gaskill in his handkerchief.

In the Old Silent there was a better-than-average lunch-time crowd
in the dining room. Jury walked through the lounge and saloon bar and
asked the proprietor for a pint of Abbott's, a cheese sandwich, and the
use of the telephone.

Sitting near the fire were a young man and woman with a distinctly
newlywed look about them paying no attention to Jury.

Jury was halfway through his drink, thinking again about that
argument between Macalvie and Gilly Thwaite in the forensics lab. His
call to Bradford station having gone through the hands and ears of
three policemen, before Chief Superintendent Sanderson decided to pick
up. "What is it, Superintendent?" Sanderson asked edgily, making it
clear he didn't want to know the answer.

The young waitress put Jury's sandwich before him—a slab of cheddar
between slices of richly grained bread, the platter nicely done up with
cress and tomato. He thanked her.

"For what?" asked Sanderson.

"Nothing. The waitress. I'm at the Old Silent having a sandwich."

"Unfortunately I haven't time for lunch. We could sit here and have
a meal together. Why're you calling, Mr. Jury?"

"About the telephone kiosk along the Oakworth Road. About a mile
from the Grouse—"

Roughly, Sanderson cut in. "I know where it is. And so do my
forensics people. Next question?"

Jury smiled as he bit into the end of the sandwich. Very good, but
he wasn't really hungry. Sanderson certainly didn't dawdle along with
preliminaries. "None. I wanted to apologize."