The Old Silent - Страница 3

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She was wearing a silk shantung suit, a narrowly pleated skirt and a short jacket, very plain and (he thought) very expensive. The diffused light of the lamp and fire lent the same pale umber to both suit and hair.

For another twenty minutes they sat there. When the clock struck eleven, she looked up. Jury could hear, from the public bar, the publican make his final call for Time. She closed her book, set it beside her handbag, and he thought she meant to rise and leave. But she still sat.

Sounds of the customers from the bar leaving carried in from the small car park; a few of them came out through the lounge.

Then the headlamps of a car dazzled the window before they were switched off. A door slammed, and Jury heard the approach of footsteps on the walk.

She sat in that rather stern and spinsterish way she had adopted after putting aside her book-hands folded in her lap and feet planted firmly together.

A man walked in the door-a man as well- and expensively groomed as she. He was perhaps in his late forties, the sort who looks fit from exercise (the sort Jury never got) and time spent under a sunlamp. He glanced at Jury without interest.

His attention was concentrated on the woman, who now rose, pushing herself as would an elderly person who has difficulty getting out of a chair. She still held her bag tightly.

There was no greeting, no handclasp, kiss, or even an exchange of smiles. Her visitor sat down without removing his coat, a dark Chesterfield, which he unbuttoned before he threw his arm across the back of the sofa in a careless, even indolent fashion. The fine features, the cut of his clothes, the grace of movement, bore the stamp of the gentleman. Yet the woman still stood while he sat. If his general demeanor hadn't told Jury that the visitor must be on very intimate terms with her, this failure of social grace surely did. He then said something to her and she sat down with a sadly compliant look.

It struck Jury as odd that he had been able to observe so closely the physical details of her person, right down to her wedding band, and yet was not close enough to hear the words that passed between them. The man spoke softly but in a rush. To his low current of words, her own contribution was no more than a word tightly wedged in, much like the bag between herself and the chair arm, breaking in whenever her companion showed the slightest sign of stopping the flow; even then, his hand raised up against her own response.

That what he said was evidently not to her liking was clear from her adamantine look, her glancing away from him to gaze at the fire, and back again as if there was no place, really, for her eyes to travel. The pale coral of her lips took on a golden glaze from the light, and her mouth was set like marble. She looked resolute and unbending.

Having said his piece or made his argument or whatever it was, he sat back, withdrew a silver case that winked in the firelight, and tapped a cigarette on it before lighting it. After waiting a few moments while she stared into the fire, he leaned forward as if willing her to loosen her resolve, to return her eyes to his face. Eventually, she did so, very slowly.

He said something and rose, still with that rather insouciant manner coupled with an air of belligerence.

Her head, gilded by the light, was bent slightly as if she had been bested or beaten in some serious game. Her arms rested on the chair arms, hands dangling, one thumb worrying the gold band and the sapphire ring. It was as if she were considering removing them and putting them in his hand.

Slowly she pulled her handbag like a dead weight to her lap. She pushed back the leather flap and withdrew what looked like an envelope or a letter. She had taken it out at dinner and returned it to her bag again and again as if this were a magic ritual that must be performed. She stood up with this piece of paper-letter or whatever it was-and said something Jury couldn't hear.

Still she held the bag before her like a breviary, its leather flap back and dangling, as if the thing were now empty, useless and bereft of a valuable possession.

He reached over, snatched the letter from her hand, and tossed it in the fire.

For a moment they regarded one another, still oblivious to any other presence in the room, so intent were they upon whatever business had drawn them together. The man turned and started for the door.

She stood there, just her profile in light, the rest of her in shadow, like a figure turned to stone by an angry god.

"Roger."

It was the first clear word Jury had heard. The man made a halting sort of turn and she reached into the bag, pulled out a gun, and shot him in the chest. He stood staring blindly as if the shot had gone wild. But in the few seconds it took Jury to stand and overturn the table beside him, the man crumpled and fell. She pointed the gun down and shot him again.

2

The name of Roger Healey had not registered with Jury when he had heard it in the inn in West Yorkshire. The West Yorkshire policeman who had arrested Healey's wife the night before in the Old Silent had told Jury the man had something to do with art or music-he wasn't sure what-except that he was important. The local detective sergeant from Keighley certainly knew the family was important in these parts, and his ambivalence about arresting one of its members was clear.

Superintendent Sanderson had no such ambivalence, either about having Jury as the single witness to the murder of Roger Healey, or about having a member of the C.I.D. of the Metropolitan Police on his turf. Sanderson was a tall, rail-thin policeman with a practiced, inconclusive manner that would throw anyone off guard. In the unlikely event Jury's testimony would ever be needed, it would carry far more weight than that of some myopic villager. As of now, Jury could get off his turf and out of the investigation now proceeding with the Yorkshire constabulary.

Sanderson would have no difficulty proceeding. It wasn't even a case of rounding up suspects, of listening to the regulars in the public bar of the Old Silent give conflicting reports of who did what to whom; and the five people who had rushed in from the bar were clearly relieved that they were straight out of it. They had stood about in horrified silence until police had arrived. It was Jury who had summoned them.

And it was Jury to whom she had, just as silently, handed over the.22 automatic. No resistance. She hadn't said a word, had sat down in the same chair, had answered none of his questions, had not looked at him again.

The inquest was convened the following day merely to establish certain facts, such as the identity of the dead man. The identity of the perpetrator was clear.

Her name was Nell Healey and Jury had been right about her relationship to the dead man; she was his wife.

Given the reputation, wealth, and influence of the Citrine family in West Yorkshire, and given her lack of any criminal record, she was released on bail. That, Jury knew, would buy her at least a year of freedom; the case would be unlikely to get to the Crown Court before then, not with all the other stuff on the docket. The only question that had gone unanswered was why she'd done it. But largely it seemed to be the sympathy engendered by her past woes that tipped the scale in her favor.

It was those woes about which Jury was now reading in the newspaper that lay on his desk at New Scotland Yard. He remembered the Healey-Citrine names. It had happened eight years ago and had struck him as especially dreadful.

"Really sad, that was," said Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins, who'd dug out the clippings, and whose own reading matter was a copy of Time Out. "You wonder, how could anybody do that to a kid?" Wiggins was slowly stirring the spoon in his mug of tea and tapping it against the rim with all of the solemnity of an altar boy perfuming the air with incense.

Just as religiously, Wiggins opened a fresh packet of Scott's Medicinal Charcoal Biscuits, taking pains that the wrapping wouldn't crackle. It was not often that Jury didn't answer him, but this was one of those times, and it disturbed Wiggins (as if it were his own fault) that the superintendent's mood, usually calm, almost soothing, was going sour over this case, and not Jury's own case, either. Thus, Wiggins felt impelled to talk doggedly on, even though it might be better to shut up. And since he was never one much for epigrammatic or witty turns of phrase, he would trap himself into further cliche-ridden sentiments.

Jury's mood was as black as the biscuit Wiggins was now crumbling into a cup of water, and, irrationally irritated by his sergeant's pursuit of some elusive and Platonic Idea of health just as he was reading of the kidnapping of one boy and the disappearance of the friend who had been with him. Jury said (rather sharpish, Wiggins thought), "Most people settle for digestives, Wiggins. And they don't have to stew them in water."

His quick response was triggered less by Jury's tone than by Jury's replying at all. Said Wiggins, brightly, "Oh, but digestives don't really do anything for you, sir. Now, this-"

Wanting to forestall a lecture on the benefits of charcoal to the digestive tract, Jury said, "I'm sure it does," and smiled to indicate that he'd only been joking, anyway.

It had happened in Cornwall when Billy Healey and his stepmother, Nell Citrine Healey, had been on holiday, together with a friend of Billy's named Toby Holt.

Keeping his eye on the newspaper, Jury shook a cigarette from a packet of Players and read Roger Healey's statement to the press. It was formal, almost pedantic, full of catch-phrases of grief and comments about his son's prodigious talent as a pianist, so that one almost got the idea that if the kidnapper didn't see to it he practiced every day, it would be similar to a diabetic going into insulin shock. The usual "we will do anything in our power to see our boy is returned…"; the usual… police are working round the clock"; the usual.