The Old Silent - Страница 4

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Except that the stepmother had made no comment at all.

Jury tried to put himself in the place of a father whose child had been kidnapped. He had never had children, but he had been close enough to several that he could feel at least something of what it must be like to lose one. Certainly, he'd seen enough grief-stricken parents in his work. Some had been silent; some had gone in for marathon talking. But none had given a Hyde Park speech. Jury wasn't being fair, he supposed. After all, Healey was a music critic and columnist used to putting thoughts into words; he was an articulate man, and probably a composed one.

The photo of Billy himself looked almost out of place amidst this platitudinous talk. In the old shot of Billy Healey, the camera had caught the boy in a moment when he must have been looking toward something at a distance. His chin was raised, his mouth open slightly, his eyes transfixed and somehow puzzled. The angle of light eclipsed a portion of his face, bringing out the other in even bolder relief, accentuating the straight nose, high cheekbone. He was handsome, pale, his hair brownish and silky-looking. He looked, Jury thought, a little other-worldly, unapproachable, and with the intensity of his expression, unassailable. He looked more like his stepmother than his father.

And of her, there was only the picture in which she was being escorted from the house, and where she must quickly have drawn part of the paisley scarf she wore up over her face. Since her head was also down, the reporters were getting a very poor view. And taking a poor view, given the underlying tone of resentment that Mrs. Roger Healey was unavailable for comment. Her husband had done most of the talking.

The stepmother was good copy; she'd been the only one present, except for Billy's friend, when the boys had disappeared. Given the rather tasteless litter of photos and snaps this particular newspaper had mustered, it was clear they'd like to keep a story of the kidnapping humming along. There were several old snapshots of Billy, angled down the side of the account, one of him with a couple of schoolmates, very fuzzy. Another of him leaning against a fence with the other boy, Toby Holt. Sitting on a big stone slab in front of them was a small, dark-haired girl, squinting into the camera.

"And the chief's not too happy, as you can imagine," said Wiggins, following his own train of thought.

"He never is, not where I'm concerned."

"Wondering what you were doing in Stanbury, anyway."

"It's next to Haworth. I'm a big Brontë fan."

"When you were supposed to be in Leeds."

Jury looked up. "What is this, a catechism? Baleful mumbles."

"You might be witness for the Crown," Wiggins went on, relentlessly.

"Would he rather I'd be witness against? He knows damned well I won't be called as one. Sanderson will give my evidence. It's West Yorkshire's case, not mine."

Wiggins was making a little sandwich of two black biscuits and something slathered in between.

"What's that thing?"

"Charcoal biscuits and a bit of tofu and tahini. I'm a martyr to my digestion, as you know." The whole thing crumbled as he bit down on it; he wiped his mouth with the huge handkerchief tucked into his collar.

Jury looked up from the files and down at the notes Wiggins had made. "This publisher Healey worked for. Get me in to see him."

"Sir." Wiggins's hand hesitated over the telephone. "When?"

"This afternoon. Three, four."

"It's nearly two." The hand free of the tofu sandwich hovered over the telephone. "I was only thinking."

"That it's not my case. You're right. Get me in to see this publishing tyro, Martin Smart." Jury smiled.

Still Wiggins was slowly chewing his sandwich. "The guv'nor's complaining-"

Guv'nor? Racer? Since when was Wiggins calling him that?

"-you're waffling on a couple of cases. The Soho one, for example."

It was a drug-related death, nothing for C.I.D., something the Drug Squad could handle easily. Racer perfectly well knew this. Anything to keep Jury from using his talents in a more attention-grabbing way. Name and picture in paper. Racer hated it.

"I'm sick, Wiggins."

Wiggins put on his best bedside manner. "There's no question there, sir. Pale as a ghost you've been looking. You need leave, you do, not another case."

Jury grinned. "I know. So get me an appointment with Healey's publisher." Jury rose, feeling lighter than he had in weeks.

"I'm a martyr to my digestion, Wiggins. I'm going to see your guv'nor."

3

"Sick leave?"

Chief Superintendent A. E. Racer made an elaborate display of cupping his ear with his hand as if the ear couldn't quite believe it. "Sickleave?"

Jury knew that for Racer this was, if not the opportunity of a lifetime, at least the best one that had come along that day: here was a chink in the old Jury armor, a rent in the old corduroy jacket, an occasion that called for much more than telling Superintendent Jury a policeman's life was full of grief, since it apparently was. Jury could almost see the tiny guns taking aim in Racer's mind, trying for a salvo that would never go off.

"You've never applied for sick leave."

"Perhaps that's why I'm sick."

" 'Sick leave' is Wiggins's department. He takes it for all of us."

Request denied. Punch time clock. Wheel to grindstone. There're none of us who couldn't use a bit of a rest, especially me. But you don't see me lying down on the job.

"Well, he looks sick to me," said Fiona Clingmore, who'd come in to collect two big stacks of paper that she was now balancing on her forearms at the same time her eyes were on the booby-trap box Racer had rigged to catch the cat Cyril.

Did Racer really think he could outwit Cyril? Fiona had asked this question as she sat filing her nails into glossy claws. Gets worse every day, the chief does.

"If you want me to bring a note from my doctor, I will."

"I'm sure Wiggins can rip out a page from one of his prescription pads. Or furnish some Harley Street letterheads. His desk must be littered with them." Racer smiled his razorblade smile and looked at Jury over folded hands, the thumbs making propeller circles round each other.

Fiona looked from Jury to Racer.

"He's worn out, he is. You only have to look to see he's dead on his feet, practically."

Dressed in her usual black, this one the light wool dress with the tightly zipped bodice and pinch-pleated skirt, Fiona looked like she was ready to crash a funeral service, given the seamed stockings and black hood hugging her tarnished gold hair. Whenever he looked at Fiona, Jury thought of old trunks filled with taffeta tea-dance gowns, ribbon-tied letters, the little paper valentines punched from books that were handed round at school…

Fiona, for all of her shoulder-shrugging, hip-thrusting brashness, was a picture of poignance. He'd better stop thinking about her and the past or pretty soon he'd be walking in his mind down the Fulham Road hand-in-hand with his mother, perhaps watching the wash go round in the launderette. A big dose of nostalgia was not what he needed to cure a big case of depression. Though sitting in Racer's office, looking at Racer's brilliant invention for trapping the cat Cyril helped to assuage that. It was a small wooden crate with a drop-screen, activated by pressure of foot or paw, whence the hinges would fold and the screen fall back, covering the box. Inside was a tin of sardines. Racer said he'd got this idea from old films he remembered about hunters and Hottentots (or some other aborigine) where the Hottentots were always falling through holes covered with vegetation into nets that quickly tightened.

He forgot that Cyril-the cat that had wandered into the halls of Scotland Yard seemingly out of nowhere-was not a Hottentot. Jury and Fiona marveled at the pure idiocy of the sardine box-trap. True, the screen banged shut. But all Cyril had to do was nose it open when he had dined on his tin of sardines. Thus Racer must have had some vague plan that he would catch Cyril at it, that he would return from his club and find claws scrabbling at the screen. If Racer and Cyril (Fiona had said) ever met, it would be in Hell. And it would be (Jury had said) a brief meeting indeed, since Cyril could walk through flames without singeing his burnished copper fur. Houdini (they had both agreed) would have got free faster from that underwater escape if he'd had Cyril with him.

Fiona had two dozen sardine tins in the filing cabinet, which she was constantly using to replace the ones that Cyril ate. Cyril loved the box; it was a second home. Sluggish from his meal, he would sometimes nap on the can and Fiona would have to drag him out before Racer returned. Jury told her not to worry; Cyril could scent Racer's approach from vast distances. The cat could hear him, smell him, even see him when Racer was pushing open the glass door of New Scotland Yard. They did not want Racer to think his contraption wasn't working, or his inventiveness might take a nose-dive and he'd revert to some other means of disposal, like painting the carpet with poison.

Yes, thought Jury, the depression was lifting, as he saw Fiona's eye rove the room in search of the cat Cyril. He was missing, and Jury knew where he was, though Racer hadn't twigged it. Jury screened his eyes with his hand in a posture of sickliness that allowed him to look at the bottom of the bookcase that Racer had converted into a drinks cabinet. Tiny tinklings of glass emerged from it. Racer could cup his ears all he wanted, but he was getting deaf.

The cabinet was fitted with doors easily opened by hitching a finger (or paw) in the handle. Unfortunately, Racer would walk by occasionally and kick the door shut. He had commissioned Fiona to get a lock and key, grumbling (Fiona'd told Jury) about the char being at the booze bin again. ("That's what he calls it, imagine? Common, ain't it?" she'd added, tossing down her nail file and picking up the buffer.)