"He doesn't-didn't like Roger Healey?"
"Means little. Duckworth doesn't like anyone. Except me. I found him glued to his earphones in the Village-New York City. Let me tell you, it took a lot to lure him over here. I hate that effing word. I only toss him out because you're clearly determined to find someonewho didn't like Roger. Sounds a bit biased, if you don't mind my saying so. But I'm sure the Met has reasons the mind will never know. Here's Duckworth's number." Again, he handed Jury a scrap of paper, torn from a letter from the chairman of the board, Jury noticed when he looked at it. "It's probably a prison cell."
"The Met appreciates your help. Could I have a look at some old issues of Segue?"
"Healey's reviews? Of course." Smart hit the intercom again, spoke to his secretary, then leaned back with his hands laced behind his head. "Superintendent, what are you looking for?"
Jury pocketed his notebook, rose, thanked Martin Smart, and said, "Nothing in particular."
"You really should work here."
Jury turned to go, turned back. "Would you mind if my sergeant came round in a day or two to talk to some of your staff?"
Smart gazed again at the ceiling. "Hell, no. Send the Dirty Squad for all I care. Liven the place up." He screwed up his face. "Why the hell would she kill him?" He looked at Jury. "Maybe they were having a bit of trouble?" His expression was perfectly serious.
"I expect you could say that." Jury said good-bye.
***
Jury could not quite believe the interior of this house off Kensington Gardens, near Rotten Row. From the outside, it was just another narrow, Georgian building, with its yellow door and dolphin-shaped brass knocker.
But the inside seemed to stretch endlessly and cavernously to this room in which he now sat with Mavis Crewes, a room that seemed part solarium, part enormous floor-to-ceiling aviary full of bird plumage, bird twitter, bird greenery. A tiny, bright eye, opening and closing like a pod, regarded him through the fronds of several palmettos.
Nor was it the only greenery, for round about the room were set tubs of plants, some treelike and overhanging; some tough and flat-leaved; some feathery and ferny; but all suggesting jungle heat and dust. This was further enhanced by the near-life-sized ceramic leopard looking slant-eyed out of the rubber plants, and by the boar's head, open-mouthed and glaring glassily from the wall to Jury's right. Behind him sat a gun case; his feet were trying to miss contact with the zebra rug beneath the table carved from a tree her last husband had carted back from Nosy-Be. A tree (Mavis Crewes had told him) that wasfady-taboo. Her husband wasn't superstitious.
He was also dead. Jury wondered from what.
Jury and Mavis Crewes sat in this solarium, surrounded by strange exotic plants, grass shields, spears, and Ibo masks, drinking coffee and Evian water with a cut-glass carafe of whiskey standing by as a fortifier.
Jury kept trying to wave away the thin stems of a hanging bougainvillea. The surroundings that he himself found suffocating, Mavis Crewes apparently found soothing and restful. Between little spasms of speech, the breakings off partly the result of talking of Roger Healey's death, but also partly her own natural abruptness. A tiger's eye stone glinted on the hand that fingered a petal here, a leaf there. There was a chunky diamond on the finger of the hand slowly twisting the glass of Evian water that helped in what Jury imagined to be her campaign to stay travel-thin.
He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped down to forty. The latest fashion (Jury knew from glancing into various Regent Street shops) was the safari look: desert colors or camouflage greens, loose shirts and skirts with low, heavy belts, nothing he could imagine any woman found flattering. She wore a bush jacket over a sand-colored shirt and Hermes boots.
In this environment, and with her thin, slightly muscular look, all of that fitted Mavis Crewes rather perfectly. Except, of course, that they didn't resemble mourning, something she had brought up at the beginning of their interview. She hadn't anything black, you see, and she hardly thought it the time for a shopping spree, given the death of her "dear, old friend." If she thought mourning clothes appropriate two weeks after his death, she must have meant to imply he had been very dear indeed. With her swept-back, pale blond hair, he wondered if perhaps she knew black didn't show her to any advantage. The eyes he had thought at first to be black were a murky jungle green.
After the divorce of the first and the death of the second husband, she had stuck her thumb in the pie again and apparently pulled out the biggest plum thus far, Sir Robert Crewes, safari buff, a Knight of the Royal Victoria Order, higher than the OBE her cousin had managed to reel in. Mavis Crewes was very impressed by the title, though knighthoods abounded among civil servants, members of the Royal household, and the foreign service. It was peppered with them probably as a reward for one's going off somewhere (anywhere) to represent the country.
It was not that Jury doubted that Mavis Crewes's grief was genuine; it was just that he wondered how deeply she felt about anything-except, perhaps, the venomous anger for Healey's wife. Although she seemed to refuse to acknowledge her as such: "that woman" was the phrase she used when speaking of Nell Healey.
"Hard as nails," she said now, still twisting the delicate glass between thumb and forefinger as if it were a stem she might snap. She sighed. "That woman."
"Tell me about her, Mrs. Crewes."
"Nell was the second wife." Jury wondered that Mavis Crewes, who had second-wifed it aplenty, could rationalize this. "And not the boy's mother." She threw Jury a basilisk glance.
"What happened to the mother?"
"Went off to the Swiss Alps. Had a skiing accident."
"You think the stepmother couldn't have cared about Billy, then?"
He had said the wrong thing, or in the wrong tone. She sat back again, arms resting on the arms of the white wicker chair, flexing her fingers. "You sound as if you sympathize with her, Superintendent. That's absolutely astounding. But you couldn't have known her well." She gave him a small, cunning smile, as if they'd reached an agreement. "I'm not sure what your role is in this. What are you investigating? That she killed Roger is not open to question. That she managed to be released until her trial certainly is. Women like Nell Healey always seem to get what they want. She's flint, she's stone."
Jury hoped his smile would offset his words. "Stone generally meets with hard resistance itself."
"If you're implying Roger was hard, you've got it all wrong. He was totally devastated. You didn't know the man. You didn't know his warmth, his charm, his-"
"But you did," said Jury innocently.
She was smart enough to sidestep that. "They'd nothing in common. He loved travel, new experiences, new… sensations. He had an appetite for life. She was content to do nothing but stay in that godforsaken part of Yorkshire…" She looked round at the masks and guns as if Tanzania were more accessible.
"With Billy," said Jury. She flashed him a look. "You've been their guest, I take it."
"Yes. Several times. Charles Citrine thought of Roger as his own son."
"Mr. Healey sounds like a paradigmatic husband, father… friend." He let that word hang there. "Martin Smart admired him." He tried to smile, found it tough going.
"Oh, Martin..." She forgot the Evian, went for the whiskey decanter, giving Jury a dismissive glance. "Martin seems to think publishing's a sort of game; he sometimes hires the most inappropriate people-"
"They certainly looked, from the offices I passed, very old-school-tie-ish."
"Then you didn't pass Morpeth Duckworth. God. What a vile person. Do you know I caught him in my office one day with a mop and pail. Cleaning."
Jury wiped his hand across his mouth. "Why?"
"God knows. Well, he looks like a janitor, doesn't he? He's done it to others, too. Even Martin. Martin finds it excruciatingly funny. I think Duckworth's going through our files. He's American."
"Oh."
He heard calfskin whisper as she shifted in the wicker chair, crossing and recrossing her legs. "What are you asking these questions for? What's all this to do with Nell Healey?"
"I was thinking more of Billy. That case was never solved. I'm sorry." He rose. "You've been very helpful at what must be a terribly painful time."
That he would leave with so little resistance took her by surprise. "No, no. I'm just on edge." The tan, sinewy hands waved him down again.
Jury sat, gave her that reassuring smile, said, "How long had the Healeys been married before the boy disappeared?"
From the murky depths of her eyes came a glint like a spearhead. She ran the hand with the whiskey glass over the folds of her skirt, her head down. "Five or six years," she said vaguely.
Jury was sure she knew exactly how many years. The five years between six and eleven would have been awfully important for any child, especially a child with a new mother. But as he felt Mavis Crewes was disengaging, was pulling away from his questions now, he did not want to explore the relationship-or her version of it-between the little boy and his stepmother directly.
"Nell was-is-a Citrine." Impatiently waving away Jury's puzzlement, she went on. "The Citrine family is one of the oldest in the county. Old blood, old money. Charles refused a peerage."
If you can believe that. The hefting of her neatly plucked eyebrows implied that Jury must himself find this unimaginable. He kept his smile to himself, this time, wishing his friend Melrose Plant could hear this. "Kindly Call Me God" was his acronym for the holders of the KCMG. The OBE was the "Old Boy's End."
Only the cockatoo, beating a wing and turning round on its stand, reacted to Charles Citrine's crazy behavior as Mavis went on. "Don't misunderstand me, I've nothing against the Citrines. In spite of her. Yes, I expect I do resent that they've enough money and influence to bail her out after the arraignment. They can get her out, but they cannot get her off. No question of that!" She took a tiny black cigar from a silver-chased box and accepted Jury's light before she sat back behind a plume of smoke. "He's really quite a fine person, Charles. He's had a lot to do with improving the quality of life up there. In West Yorkshire, I mean. Gotten subsidies for the mills, created work where others seem to be destroying it-well, that's Thatcherism, isn't it? Charles is very public spirited, has been appealed to again and again to sit for Commons…"
And she went on at some length about Nell Healey's father, ending with, "I wrote him a note. I wanted him to know that I sympathize. I thought it appropriate."
The interview that had begun an hour ago with the appearance of a lover's display of grief seemed fast degenerating into a discussion of unemployment and politics. No. All of this talk suggested to Jury that Charles Citrine's high visibility was for Mavis Crewes something other than as a possible political candidate. She must have been ten years older than Healey. And was probably ten years younger than Citrine.
"Of course, it's lonely for him, I expect, living in that enormous place with only Irene. Calls herself Rena. Not much company, I shouldn't think, for a man with Charles's intellect. To tell the truth, in the last few years I think the sister has gone quite mad. Well, that sort of thing usually goes downhill, doesn't it?"
"Not uphill, at any rate. If you're speaking of a psychosis."
"Charles excepted, I'd say the entire family's round the twist. God knows, Nell's testament to that." Having given over the Evian water to the whiskey now, she poured herself another glass, drank it off, topped it up, restoppered the bottle. "To tell the truth: I wonder if Roger didn't marry her for it. Money, I mean." She looked at Jury as if he might confirm this, since he'd been in the same room with Nell Healey, circumstances notwithstanding.
"It's not uncommon." His smile was a little icy. "But couldn't he have loved her?"
She tossed back the whiskey. "What was there to love except money? Oh, she's not unattractive, but…"
Jury gave a slight headshake. Perhaps she really believed it. "What happened to Mr. Citrine's wife? Nell Healey's mother?"
"Dead." Beneath the tan, there was a rosy flush. "Charles is a widower-" Then she must have seen the implication of this and went hurriedly on to say, "It was probably a blessing that she never lived to see this."
With that hackneyed sentiment, even the cockatoo screeched.
6
The most celebratory activity on New Year's Day had occurred when a sybaritic gang of children from the nearby market town of Sidbury had come to Long Piddleton and somehow gained entrance through the back of the Jack and Hammer, to steal up the stairs to the box room on the first floor. From here they had wriggled out on the beam, dismantled the blue-coated, mechanical Jack, and the lot of them carted the wooden figure back to Sidbury. This had happened three years ago, and it had happened again three nights ago. To hear Dick Scroggs talk, the Sidburyites were only matched by the Newcastle football fans for pure rowdiness.
Marshall Trueblood, dressed no less colorfully than "Jack" himself, was seated at one of the window tables in the Jack and Hammer with his friend Melrose Plant, both of them working away at a large book of cut-outs, and occasionally making sounds of commiseration.
Scroggs, publican of the Jack and Hammer, was slapping over the pages of his Telegraph and rolling a toothpick round in his mouth as he bent over the saloon bar. He still hadn't recovered from the New Year's night revelries when the "whey-faced gang of roughs," (as Marshall Trueblood described them) had been surprised by police in a frozen field of coarse grass and bracken, just as one of them had touched a match to some dry branches arranged round the mechanical man that was the pub's pride and joy and the most colorful thing in Long Pidd with the possible exception of Marshall Trueblood. The Jack was rescued with its aquamarine trousers barely singed and restored to Dick Scroggs.
"It's hard enough to have to put up with the childish pranks of our ownkiddies," said Trueblood, as he carefully separated a Dracula face from the cardboard surrounding it, "without these rowdies from Sidbury tramping up to the village."
Melrose Plant did not answer. He was frowning over the task of affixing one of the legs to the cut-out torso, his long, elegant fingers trying to work a tiny tab through a narrow slit. "Haven't you poked out the cape yet? I'm nearly finished."
"I mean, the whole thing is too silly for words anyway; I don't see why we have to put up with these childish pranks. When the little ninnies come to my door on New Year's Day, I put my hands on their shoulders, turn them about and about and get them all dizzy and watch them go drunkenly off. They think I'm playing. Good Lord." He put a crease in the chalk-white face where the instructions had said Foldand handed it to Melrose Plant. "Here."
"Do the cape." Melrose nodded at the big book of punch-out figures.
Marshall Trueblood had found this cardboard collection of put-together monsters and ghouls at the Wrenn's Nest bookshop ("in a fight to the death with some beastly child," for it was the last one). "Do you think we should be doing this here, in public? I mean, she might just come in." He leaned back and lit a jade-green Sobranie and regarded Melrose through a scrim of smoke.
"She won't come in; she's busy packing," said Melrose, who had successfully attached both of the legs to the torso and was picking up the face. "Or, I should say, staring at her trunks and then at the wall. I'm thirsty." He called over his shoulder to Dick Scroggs for another round.
"I can't really believe she means to do it, can you?"
"She's been engaged to him for four years; I imagine she's beginning to feel rather self-conscious. Have you got the boat?"
"Right here, old sweat." Trueblood leaned a small, canoe-shaped boat against his pint glass. He had found it in a lot of goods acquired at an antiques auction. It had been painted pale blue and bits fixed to the ends so that it looked like a gondola. He had punched out a rat to put in it, which he placed temporarily in the tin ashtray. "Dick! Another round, if you please!"
Dick Scroggs apparently didn't, for he kept his eyes on the newspaper. Finally he gave
in to the calls from the public bar on the other side and went round the bar to lavish his attention on the dart players.
"Oh, hell," said Trueblood. "Must we wait on ourselves? That she's been engaged to him, old trout," he continued as he poked out the red-lined cape, "has nothing to do with her marrying him."
Melrose picked up their glasses and went to the bar as Dick came round the other side. "Two more, Dick." As Dick set the glasses beneath the pulls, Melrose turned the paper round. Dick had been in the process of cutting the article about the murder in West Yorkshire from it. He possessed a small, hook-billed instrument for the purpose of sawing odds and ends from papers and magazines. Melrose wondered if he was tracking Jury's career for him, pasting up articles in a scrapbook.
As he released the beer pulls and they stood watching the foam rise on the pints of Old Peculier, Dick observed, "Seems a pity, dunnit? You wonder what'd ever make a woman kill her husband that way." He drew a knife across the cap of foam and placed the glasses on the counter. He was, of course, dying to know if Melrose had been talking to Jury about the case. "Well, I expect the poor woman'd never be quite right in the head with her boy being kidnapped and all. You read about that, I expect?" Perhaps this salacious morsel had escaped Melrose's attention.
"I did indeed. Well, one certainly can't complain in this case that the police are never around when you need them. Thank you, Dick." He took their drinks and returned to the table, stopped dead as he saw a figure pass by the window behind Marshall Trueblood. "Oh, hell! Here she comes!" The figure disappeared momentarily and they heard the door to the pub open. "Quick! Here!" Melrose shoved the cut-out book and canoe toward Trueblood and slapped his Times over the cardboard Dracula.
Whispered his friend, "Don't give it to me, damn all…"Trueblood hurriedly shoved the canoe-gondola behind him and the torn pieces into the book and waved it wildly around before sitting on it.
"Hullo, Vivian; thought you were home counting lira," said Melrose pleasantly.
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