The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  But she did at least rise up on her knees and clasp her hands beneath her chin in a prayerful pose.

  Looking up at the heavens, she thought, Oh, why not? and started to give thanks to Jane's, Helen's, and Charlotte's God. But then she lowered her fisted hands to her hips, and called up,

  "It was my idea!"

  She dropped back, trying to fold herself like an accordion, arms tight round her legs, but still watching the sheep running straight at her-

  Oh, no!

  11

  The bike roared on through the underpinning of ground mist, nearly spilling Melrose as Ellen jumped a frozen stream as if it were an obstacle in a steeplechase.

  They had zigzagged between drystone walls searching for the one Melrose remembered. Once the bike had skidded in loose dirt and toppled them both by a melting snowbank. She drove the BMW in ever-widening circles and through corkscrew turns at the ends of packed-down lanes.

  After the second spill that had Ellen aiming mild obscenities at the BMW that seemed to sputter and grind in some sort of metallic rhythm, Melrose tried to work a boulder out of his shoe and mud off his jacket. Ellen had fanned out the ordnance map she used for her Brontë turns, paying him little attention, holding the map in front of her headlamp as she revved the engine, dying to get going again.

  When Melrose had hoisted himself behind her, she tossed the map back at him and came down so hard on the pedal the bike bucked around now like an unbroken horse.

  He took time out from worrying over Abby to remind himself that in spite of that incredible look of purpose, that intensity of eye, that frost that sparkled her hair, she was intractable, as grimy as his gardener, and probably in flagrante delicto with her BMW.

  "Over there!" Melrose yelled, seeing the distant light of Nelligan's gypsy caravan.

  "Where?"

  "Straight on. Run along that wall-"

  It came out as a wail, lost, but she careened the bike down the slope of the hill and another onrush of wind smacked him in the face.

  Melrose unlocked his eyes to look across her shoulder as best he could. "Down there," he shouted, seeing the opening in the wall. His hand shading his eyes, he saw the hulk of what he thought might be a dead sheep until it moved sluggishly. "Don't hit that-"

  She didn't. They didn't sail through the opening as much as they didover it. He was half-turned to look back through the rubble at the hindquarters of the moonlighting sheep and was, therefore, totally unprepared for the sudden braking of the bike.

  Ellen said, "What the hell-" as the BMW careened into a whirling dervish-dance, tossing Melrose into the rocky furze. "-is that?" she added, bringing the bike out of its spin and stopping with a thud. Her black-clad arm pointed ahead. She rose from the bike, using the pedals like stirrups.

  Melrose struggled up from the broken rocks and rime-hard heather to inspect his ripped up trouser leg and the additional damage done to his sleeve, which was hanging by little more than threads.

  "Well, look!" Ellen called back at him.

  "Sheep! Don't you know sheep when you see them? I think my ankle's broken."

  Her voice was high and frenzied now. "I think I'll go back to Queens."

  Melrose dragged himself onto the BMW, which was clearly raring to go, and said, "Stop complaining. Go!" And he slapped the fender.

  Less than a minute later, the BMW slid to a stop a few feet from the herd, and Melrose thought he'd swung free of it until his bootlace caught in the wheel spokes, landing him facedown.

  "Hell's bells," he mumbled, reaching up to wipe away what felt like a lacework of blood. Ellen, naturally, had managed to land on her feet and was waving him furiously on.

  To where? There were sheep everywhere, two hundred or so, he judged, as he hobbled along. There was Ethel's dog, Tim, throwing himself at one of them that was about to bolt. The Kuvasc's teeth were clamped in the thick wool of the leg. He ran, negligent of the ankle that was killing him, round to the other side, where Ellen looped back and forth, running like a border collie, only aimlessly.

  Melrose saw Stranger standing taut as a bow, giving an old ewe the eye. Rising from the bleats and the awful smell of wet wool came a voice from in there somewhere.

  "Get me out of here!"

  The voice was familiar, both in sound and tone. Demanding, irascible.

  "It's her, it's Abby!" Ellen was jumping up and down trying to get a view.

  In absolute wonderment, Melrose worked his way to the back of the low wall. A dozen sheep were standing in some sort of hypnotic trance and Melrose muscled them out of the way to get to the wall, where he reached over, dragged Abby up on her feet, and bounced her over the backs of the sheep.

  She was a mess, standing there black in both body and mind, saying to Melrose, "I could have died out here. And Stranger's foot's bleeding… give me a piece of your shirt."

  "I hardly have any left," said Melrose, ripping a strip from the shredded end. "Here!"

  Abby reached down and bound up Stranger's foot as best she could. Then she rose, wheeled away from them, beating the mud and bits of grit from her waterproof and shawl. As both of them stood there staring from her to the sheep, she wheeled round again, saying: "Oh, leave them, just leave them," as if the bumping, bleating mob were a big load of dirty dishes. "It's Mr. Nelligan's sheep; he'll find them and maybe it'll teach him a lesson."

  Ellen pulled her bike upright and rolled it beside her, as Abby lost no time straightening both of them out on who and whatsaved whom in this rescue mission. She began with herself, went on in great detail about Stranger and Tim, and then praised the sheep for their part. Man did not come into it.

  They walked on, followed at a distance by the two tired dogs, while Melrose said he'd go to Harrogate before he'd go back to Weavers Hall if it meant hurtles through fiery hoops, dives across abysses, plummets through the air with Ellen as driver.

  "I'd sooner crawl," he announced. "You must be the world's worst."

  Just then they heard the distant sputter of engines and saw, across the far field, ghostly lights bobbing, appearing, disappearing as incline and uprise dictated. There were at least three, possibly four motorcycles scattered round the moor.

  "Police!" exclaimed Melrose, wanting to tear the ragged shirt from his body and wave it like someone marooned. "Police! At least, thank God, I can get a ride back with someone who knows how-"

  The crash was deafening, splintering. That was to the left; off to the right he saw what looked like a black shape wheeling in the air, coming down with a ground-shaking thud.

  A little flame darted up from the match Ellen was using to light her cigarette, which she then casually smoked, leaning against her BMW, looking at him with a question stamped on her grimy face. She shrugged. "Two outta three."

  Melrose shrugged his shoulders and his sleeve fell off.

  Thus they trudged on beneath the icy moon, fragments of argument trailing back to the dogs as the three up front got farther away…

  "Three of us? On that?" Melrose's question was lost in the distance.

  "… the basket," Ellen shouted.

  "… not me. I'm not sitting…" Abby's voice proclaimed.

  "I'll sit in the basket." Melrose limped along.

  Stranger and Tim trotted on behind them on bloody feet and lame legs, looking longingly behind them at the mob of sheep who now were dispersing, searching out browse in slightly new territory.

  They turned more or less nose-to-nose, looking at one another, both yawning and shaking themselves.

  The ways of sheep were difficult, sometimes inscrutable.

  The ways of man, impossible.

  33

  The Nine-One-Nine was a cellar walk-down where nothing at the moment was moving but the smoke from the bored-looking customers' cigarettes and cigars. At the farther end of the long, cavelike room was a cleared-out space with a small stage filled with amps, drums, a couple of microphones, and a keyboard. Blue lights suspended from a crossbeam were trained on the stage from which the
band had departed.

  Jury doubted any casuals could have found the place, thus it must have been the regulars who stood and sat about in varying stages of ennui, a curiously epicene crowd. Women with slick-backed dark hair, men with brassy curls and rings in their ears signifying (Jury bet) nothing. They stood in the aisle; they sat at the bar. In this room architecturally bland, the only hat-tipping to affluence was the very long, copper-topped bar behind which were shelved yards of bottles with optics in front. The smoke swirled, drifted, thinned, clouded above the tables, and the benches sat like church pews against the left-hand wall.

  Besides this demode crowd there were still some working-class men who sat in tightly knit little groups like clenched fists, hard knuckles grasping their pints.

  The customers all looked like they belonged here because they didn't belong anyplace else. Jury remembered a cafe in Berlin that had looked this way: musty, furzy, with the odd gummy smell of resin and old cigars.

  Jury could have picked Stan Keeler out of this haze of smoke and thirties' film backdrop even without Morpeth Duckworth's description. There was something about the man at the center table, about his posture and manner, about the several people who sat there, that told Jury who he was. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, jeans, and low boots, his feet parked on one of the chairs, the rest of him slumped in another. There were two women and a man at his table. One of the hero-worshipping women had hair the color of port that nearly drowned her shoulders; the other was a hermetically sealed blonde who looked as if she hadn't moved a muscle in days, as if her mouth would crack and her cheekbones splinter beneath the makeup if she smiled. Leaning against the wall was another woman-tall, serpentinian, smoke curling upward from her cigarette to dissipate into the rest of the smoky scrim. Her hair and black dress looked as if they'd been done with the same shears: both were layered and slashed. Her eyes were nearly shut, weighted with kohl liner and deep shadow sunken in a powder-white face.

  As Jury wedged his way through a tight knot of customers, the leather-vested fellow with a sunburst guitar was arguing, leaning forward toward Keeler like a man trying to shoulder into a tree that wouldn't give: "… can you say that git can play blues? He's heavy-metal and a Bach/baroque freak that couldn't do a twelve-bar boogie if his life depended on it." As he spoke he was slapping the guitar up to his knee and doing a wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa progression that earned him a tiny rustle of applause and an urging on to play more. Someone called him Dickie. Dickie didn't notice or didn't care. "So the dumb git's fast-" His fingers slid down the neck to pick the strings at what sounded to Jury like lightning speed, and there was more between-tables applause. "So he's fast? You're fast; I'm fast; and I know a blues baseline when I hear one. He's got nothing to do with that kinda thing. Come on, admit it, Stan."

  Stan Keeler just sat there staring at him.

  "Either you or me could blow him off the stage. Why don't you admit I'm right?"

  "Because, number one, you don't know shit, and number two, you don't know it in Swedish."

  Dickie swore under his breath, grabbed up his guitar, and did one of those rolling-thunder John Wayne walks back to the stage at the end of the room. As Jury came up to the table he saw the black Labrador, face on paws and apparently asleep. He seemed happy to be propping up a black guitar case, the neck of which lay across his back as if it were another dog.

  "You're Stan Keeler?" said Jury, watching the heads of the girls swivel to gaze up at him. The redhead smiled. The blonde couldn't seem to make it. The one against the wall lowered her lids even more.

  Stan Keeler looked at him and Jury knew the meaning of burning eyes. They reminded Jury of brandy just as someone touched a flame to it. The indolent expression beneath the black curly hair was given the lie by those eyes that could have singed Jury where he stood and by the luminous, childlike skin. He was in some way the apotheosis of the gaunt woman behind him; he had the coloring and intensity that she had tried to find in the pots on the dressing table. The high-cheekboned face looked a little emaciated under the tight, dark curls. And the expression on Stan Keeler's face seemed completely passive.

  He said in a tone-dead voice: "I'm thirty-two, live in a bed-sit in Clapham. It sucks. Black Orchid's next club date is two weeks hence. I was born in Chiswick; my mum still lives there. My favorite food is jellied eels. I stopped doing drugs when I fell off the stage three years ago. I got a landlady with a nose you could hang your pants on. She sucks. The reason I don't move is because most of London sucks. I smoke some, drink some. That's all. Print it. Good-bye."

  "I hardly said hello."

  "Hello. Good-bye. Bugger back to Fleet Street. You're from New Dimensions, right?"

  "Wrong. I'm from the C.I.D." Jury showed him his warrant card.

  Stan Keeler's expression still didn't change as he flicked his eyes over the card and his cigarette at the ashtray. At the same time he took his boots off the chair, motioning Jury to sit, he turned to the redhead and blonde and said, "Go away." He said nothing to the domino leaning against the wall; Jury had the impression she wasn't interested anyway.

  The two girls rose as a team and moved their blank eyes off through the customers toward the end of the room. Dickie seemed to be tuning up; a sallow-faced youth with long crimped hair was fooling with the drums; a gaunt-looking black man was sitting with an instrument case by his side.

  Stan Keeler crossed one low boot over the other knee and rubbed at it with fingers that looked agile enough to catch butterflies without dusting a wing. He looked almost pleased. "I belt my old lady and they send round the C.I.D.? She deserved it." He scratched his hair into an even greater tangle of curls. "The only guy she missed in Clapham was the flasher on the common and I ain't sure he's telling the truth."

  "Your old lady? I was afraid you meant your mum."

  "Mum lives in Chiswick. I managed to shock just about everyone except her. God knows I tried. It makes no difference if I go double platinum or what. She just says, 'Stanley, you been to mass?'" His voice was a high-pitched squeal. "So what kind of shit you're laying down here? You mad at me because I messed up Delia?"

  "Not particularly."

  "You guys are sadists. Hey." He snapped his fingers. "I already talked to your friend. He was cool." Stan laughed, choked on smoke, and wiped away some spittle. "Your friend got by Nose. She thinks she's protecting me from the press. It's got nothing to do with my band; it's because she thinks I'm a Pole. An agent provocateur, or something. She saw me in this newspaper photo with Lech Walesa."

  "What were you doing in a photo with Walesa?" Stan looked disgusted, searching Jury's face for signs of intelligent life, apparently. "What the hell would I be in a picture with Walesa for? Do I play Gdansk? It was just some cretin who looked like me. I told Mum this story and she told me Lech goes to mass all the time, and why ain't I more like him? Want a beer? If you drink bottled, I can send Stone. Hey, Stone, man-"He raised his bottle of Abbott's and the Labrador rose, yawning. Keeler held up one finger. The dog burrowed off through the crowd. "He can only get one at a time." He sounded apologetic.

  "I can only drink one at a time. Look, Mr. Keeler-"

  "Call me Stanislaw. Nose does. Wanna go to Brixton? There's a pub there I play at for free some nights. They're in kind of deep shit, and I help the manager out."

  "You're very humane."

  "No humanity to it. I'm trying to get it on with his wife."

  "Sorry. Brixton's out. I want some information." Two other women had more or less oozed into the empty chairs. They looked like twins. Stan told them to get lost. "You knew Roger Healey, the music critic."

  "I didn't know him and I wouldn't call him a critic."

  "According to my sergeant, you did." Jury heard Dickie run something by the microphone and the band started up. "Healey didn't seem to care for your music very much. As a matter of fact, the reviews I read made it sound like a vendetta. Why would he be devoting a column to you, anyway. Segue's pop, jazz, rock critic is Morpeth Duc
kworth."

  "You been talking to Rubber Ducky?" His head was turned to watch the band and his eyes squeezed in pain at the high whine of the slide guitar. "Oh, we have certainly got a double platinum."

  The customers were beginning to wake up and inch nearer the stage. Stone was back with a bottle clamped in his jaws and Stan took it and snapped the cap off with an opener on his keychain. The dog lay back down again. Stan shoved the Abbott's toward Jury.

  "Again, why?"

  "Huh?"

  "Roger Healey. Why was he trying to get at you?"

  "I expect because he was coming on to my old lady."

  "Are you saying Healey was having an affair with your wife?"

  "Aren't you old-fashioned? I never said she was my wife." He was searching out a butt in the littered tin ashtray. Jury tossed his own packet on the table, but Stan said, "Thanks, but new ones don't taste as schmuzzy." He found half a cigarette and lit it. "Deli's not my wife, though I think she might be several other guys'. She said, no, she wasn't screwing Healey, but Deli couldn't open her mouth without lying. She even lied about the weather. Pathological, right?"

  "Deli who?"

  Stan's eyes were on the group bathed in blue light. He didn't answer.

  "Mr. Keeler?"

  His fingers were beating a rhythmic tattoo on the table.

  "Deli's last name?" asked Jury patiently.

  "I never asked. Dickie's getting better; he must've cleaned the moss off that slide."

  "Sounds great to me, but we won't stick around for it. Come on." Jury rose and the lady whom one of the customers had called Karla turned her head slowly to stare at him. People didn't order her boy around, it seemed.

  "Come where, for God's sake?"

  "New Scotland Yard. You can't seem to keep your mind on answers here."

  "You're a real happening guy."

  "That's me."

  "Look, I don't know if it's her real name." Stan motioned him to sit back down. Karla looked off into the unfiltered air again. "She said it was Magloire. Delia Magloire. No one knew how to say it right, so we just called her Deli MacGee."