Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent (45 page)

"You should be reviewing for
Juke Blues
. Okay, okay, I get
the point. There's so much noise you couldn't even hear Gilly if she
was standing next to you. So you want reinforcements. Yeah, so go
ahead. What time tonight?"

"Eight."

"Wonderful. That's all of six hours to round up whoever's stupid
enough to buy this act and get them there. Great. Except it isn't Billy
Healey, Jury."

"So what've we lost?"

"Probably our jobs. Not that that means anything."

Jury could almost hear the grin. "Thanks. I'm sending photos of six
people on the wire. One in London, five here. One in particular.
There's a mass exodus to London from West Yorkshire."

The silence lengthened until Jury wondered if Macalvie had rung off.

"And did you tell Nell Healey that you think her son's alive? That
he turned out to be famous, which is what that bastard of a husband
always wanted?"

Jury didn't answer.

"Billy Healey was a
pianist
, Jury, not a guitarist."

For Macalvie, that was pretty weak. "He could play anything put in
his hands, according to several people. And I imagine Charlie plays
keyboard, though he said 'not much.'"

"Like your theory. Psychologically it's lousy, Jury. Here's a kid
who doesn't get in touch with his much-beloved stepmother for eight
years."

"If someone tried to bury you alive, I imagine you wouldn't be too
eager to take a chance on being found."

"So Billy Healey
somehow
becomes a hot, young guitarist
in New York. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous." The phone slammed down.

Jury sat there with the dead receiver knowing Macalvie had serious
doubts about his own theory and thinking of Plant's list.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Jury replaced the receiver and thought of Plant's hot, young, New
York writer.

Poss.

Far from giving the impression of a man^who frequented pubs, Owen
Holt stood just inside the door of the Old Silent, turning his cap in
his hands and looking round him as if he'd wandered onto some foreign
shore where he didn't speak the language. His slight smile when he saw
Jury was uncertain, his expression baffled.

Jury led him to a chair in the lounge bar, saying, "Thanks for
coming so quickly." The man merely nodded and waited. "Sit down; let me
get you a drink."

"Half pint of Guinness'll do for me. Helps me sleep."

Jury watched Owen Holt as he waited for the drinks. He was studying
the room and its unfamiliar furnishings, looking about naively as if
he seldom left his front parlor. For some reason, Holt put Jury in mind
of a stodgy fairy-tale figure: the trusty woodsman, perhaps, or one of
the kind but utterly unimaginative couple who had taken in some waif.
Weren't children in fairy tales so often disenfranchised?

As he set down the drinks, Jury said, "I hope your wife wasn't too
annoyed by my dragging you away."

"Dihn't tell her, did I? Just said I was going along to the Black
Bush to see one of my mates." He took a long, slow drink, wiped his
hand across his mouth and leaned forward. "I expect this is about the
money."

"Yes and no. What I wonder about is why you don't seem to be far
more bitter toward the Citrines. Didn't you feel it was high-handed of
them to make the decision about that ransom money considering it was
your son, too, who was in danger?"

Holt sighed, raised his glass again, put it down. "Police come
to't'house, told us what happened, told us it hardly ever did good to
pay ransom money. Well, whistling down a well with us, anyway, weren't
they? As if we had that kind of money."

"A little over five weeks later you did have some, though," Jury
said, blandly. "You must have wondered why Toby'd gone to London."

"Aye." Holt kept his hands clamped round the glass and didn't meet
Jury's eyes.

Jury leaned forward. "Mr. Holt, you must have wondered even more why
Toby didn't try to get in touch with you for five whole weeks." He
waited. Holt sat there slowly drawing his hands away from his glass and
dropping them in his lap. "Were you absolutely sure that was Toby's
body?"

"Well, you're right there: I couldn't see why Toby never tried to
ring up, at least. Never a word. Never a word. Never a word."

He ignored the last question and kept his eyes on his hands,
kneading the knuckles as if the hands pained him.

Jury tried through sheer will to draw Holt's eyes up to meet his
own. He wanted to see their expression. But the man's head was
resolutely downcast. The silence went on for some moments. "A lot of
children go missing and they're never found. Most, probably. Every day,
every
hour
that goes by reduces the chances they'll ever be
found. Perhaps you thought Toby never would."

Finally Owen Holt looked up and said, with a fleeting smile, "You're
right smart. 'Twarn't Toby. But if you think it were to get the money,
you're wrong."

"Then why, Mr. Holt?"

"Alice." His gaze returned to his half pint, half full. "The pore
woman kept hopin' and hopin'. You'd not think she was that fond of the
lad, but you'd be wrong there. Day after day she'd be cleaning the
kitchen windows. Pretending she was cleaning, when what she was doing
was watching the little path back there that Toby always came up. I sat
there in't'kitchen once and counted six times she washed off the same
little pane." He shook and shook his head. "Eight years. I think it
were the right thing I done." He gave Jury a fleeting smile. "At least
now she just cleans to clean, not to hope."

"I'm sorry."

Owen Holt drew in breath and puffed out his cheeks as if he were the
North Wind in the old story. "What happens to me, now?"

"Nothing."

Holt raised his eyebrows, surprised. "Nothing?"

"Why should it?"

There was silence again. "He's dead, I expect."

The rising inflection made it a question, not a statement. Jury
thought of Dennis Dench and that grave in Cornwall. He could think of
nothing to say to the man as he watched Owen Holt turn his head toward
the Old Silent's window where the panes were black.

The driver of Bronte Taxi, together with George Poges and Melrose
Plant, was attempting to jostle the steamer trunk up onto the top of
the car, since it could not, by any means, be maneuvered inside or
strapped on the boot.

They all sweated as the Princess Rosetta Viacinni di Bela-mante
stood about in her Chanel suit, living up to her name and delivering a
wistful account to Ellen of a past symbolized by each of the faded
stickers on the trunk, emblems of hers and the prince's travels (or
"escapades," as she liked to call them), across several continents. Ah,
Saigon, ah, Kenya, ah, Siena, ah, Orlando.

Ellen just looked at her: "You mean Disneyworld and not Virginia
Woolf, I guess." Over Ellen's arm lay a darkish green gown, given her
by the Princess, who said it was a very rare find, one of her own
favorites, and that Ellen must have it; it suited her and she would see
once she put it on. The Princess had purchased it on that Venetian
street of fashion dreams, the Calle Regina. Designed by an Indian.

Probably, thought Melrose, with some irritation, by a Tibetan monk.
He only wished the Princess would shut up about Venice.

Said George Poges, "Why the devil can't you have
ordinary
cases like the rest of us?" Even in the crisp and icy air he was
perspiring, wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

"I do not advertise makers' wares: no scribbled names on my luggage
afld no swans on my arse, as it were. Can you imagine Madame Vionnet
sticking a logo on a lapel? Vulgarity knows no bounds in this world.
Believe me, that gown" —here she touched her hand to the wilting, dark
thing over Ellen's arm—"is worth half of Venice. But not on everyone."
The Princess put her arm round Ellen's shoulders and kissed her cheek,
not kissing air (in that odious way that some highly sociable women do,
Melrose thought) but firmly.

Major Poges, rather gruffly did the same.

Neither of them, however, felt the need of a physical display of
adieux
with the Braines, who had just come through the door.

Ellen sat, looking disconsolate, on one of the rocks in the
courtyard, smoking.

"I don't see why you refuse to come to London with Richard Jury and
me."

Ignoring this she said, "Charlotte Bronte said all of her books
pained her."

Melrose had been arguing with her at breakfast, before breakfast, at
lunch, after lunch. "She should have written about delicatessens."

Ellen sat mournfully looking at the ground. "That school near
Kirksby Londale—it was probably the model for Lowood School. The
discipline was fierce; Marie Bronte died of consumption when she was
eleven and Eliza died when she was ten a month later." The train of her
thought became apparent to Melrose when she added, "So what's going to
happen to Abby?"

"She's certainly not going to die of consumption. She owns—"

Ellen ground out a cigarette. "A bullet in the back, that's what.
For fu—for Pete's sake! How can you sleazeballs leave her here
alone
?"

"She's not
going
to be alone! How many times do I have to
tell you, Keighley police are protect———"

"Ah, ha! Ha! Ha!" She paused in her dismissal of the Yorkshire
constabulary and asked, "When do you see your Great Friend off, anyway?"

Vivian. It had been great friend this, and great friend that until
the phrase had grown capitals. He told her again. "Tomorrow morning at
eleven o'clock. She's taking the Orient Express to Venice."

"I guess she's got money."

"So do you, if that means anything."

But she wasn't listening; she was holding the gift from the Princess
up before her, trying to mold it to the leather jacket, the cord jeans.
"What do you think?"

Said Melrose, "I'm not sure. Do you
wear
dresses?" He was
still irritated with her for bringing up the Great Friend once again.
Then he looked at her downturned head and felt ashamed. As to the gown,
its purpose and shape seemed fathomless, its color grungy—some
fog-washed shade of green, dark and faded. "Well, perhaps you have to
put it on. She said it takes on the shape of the person who wears it."
The Princess had sounded a bit like Ramona Braine, as if there were
auras hanging about certain gowns that the wrong person daren't meddle
with.

Melrose was so engrossed in his conflict that he scarcely heard the
other car, Jury's car, until it came to a standstill at the side of the
Hall.

Jury got out and walked over to them, and in so doing set up a bit
of a flurry amongst the few ducks that waddled over to the fence.

"We were just talking," said Ellen, "about leaving Abby here and the
rest of you hightailing it to London."

Naturally, she would make it sound as if Melrose had agreed with her.

Instead of reassuring her, Jury asked, "What about you, Ellen?
Aren't you going, too?"

"
Me? I'm
not leaving her
alone
."

Jury looked off toward the barn and back to Ellen.

"Thought you had things to do in London before you went home. Don't
you have a booking on the QE Two?"

She thrust her hands in her jacket pockets and toed through some
gravel. "I can always Concorde it."

"There's a concert tonight. Sirocco. You don't want to miss that, do
you?"

Melrose disliked the form this was taking; it sounded less like an
inquiry than an interrogation. "Come on, Ellen; we can have dinner with
my Great Friend and my Great Aunt and the local antiques dealer. He
alone is worth the trip." Melrose smiled brightly.

"No."

Jury paused. "I don't think Abby is in any present danger here."

"You could've fooled me." Ellen turned away, stuck her fingers in
the mesh wire of the fence, and ignored both of them.

Ethel emerged from the barn carrying a basket, followed by Abby with
her feed bucket.

Ethel had changed her funeral finery for a more workaday gingham
dress, the skirt flaring with starch like a brightly checkered tent
where her jacket ended. The skirt standing out and the pink jacket
ballooned with goose down and her wispy reddish curls the substance of
angel hair made her appear as if she'd lift off and float away,
strewing rose petals from her basket.

By contrast, Abby might as well have worn Wellingtons filled with
lead. Her yellow slicker was inside out, the lining the color of her
eyes, a deep inky blue.

Ethel skipped; Abby trudged. They were followed by Stranger and Tim.
Coming upon this little cluster of people in the courtyard, they
stopped. Stranger tried a creep toward Malcolm, who recoiled slightly,
but the
click
of Abby's tongue brought him back. He sat and
stared round.

There was the noise and confusion that often augments departures,
that seeming desire to get off in a cloud of dust and irrelevant
chatter to avoid the fact of separation, the
you

must come to us next week, next month, next year;
or the
promises that one usually can't eventually keep,
see you next
winter, next Michaelmas holiday;
the hubbub of arranging cases, of
ordering trunks and bags placed just
there;
the handshakes,
the
stiff
smiles. And yet no one actually
leaving
.

Ramona Braine stood awkwardly by the taxi with a perplexed look as
if this weren't in the cards; the Major, about to light a cigar,
stopped in the act; the Princess, having said her adieux, stood, one
hand on hip looking about the little circle with an uncertain smile;
Ellen refusing to meet any of their eyes, leaning against her BMW, a
study in black-on-black; Ruby in her cap behind Mrs. Braithwaite's
shoulder, the two of them in the doorway looking like figures in a
Breughel painting.