Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  But he was not about to challenge Charles Citrine's statement. "There's no remorse?"

  Reaching over to stab at a log with the poker, Citrine looked up. "Not a flicker." He might have been talking about the blackened log. He shook his head slightly, bewildered. "Roger was a very good man, one of the best. I had great hopes when he married Nell . . ."

  One would have thought the father would have put it the other way round: when Nell married Roger, or, at least, "when they married." His statement made Nell Citrine sound like a rather poor marital prospect. When he paused, staring at the logs that refused to erupt into flame, Jury prompted him: " 'Great hopes'?"

  Absently, he held onto the poker, like a walking stick or cane. Two or three small blue flames licked their way round the logs. "That he would steady her."

  Steady her? Jury had to smile. "She seems the last person in need of 'steadying.' I've never seen anyone so self-contained."

  Citrine leaned the poker against the stone and sat back. "Impassivity can often seem like containment, can't it?"

  The picture of Nell Citrine Healey that was emerging, stroke by stroke—or was it hint by hint?—was not a pleasant one. Remorseless. Impassive. Unsteady. "You're making her sound like a sociopath."

  He gave a short bark of laughter. "Good Lord, I hope not. No. Do you know anything about melancholia, Superintendent?"

  Jury thought about his own mental state these last months. "Not much. Except as chronic depression. Is that what you're saying is causing this apparent lack of empathy with things outside of her?"

  "I don't know. I don't think depression would explain it."

  "And her mother?"

  "Helen was quite—sanguine, really. A lovely woman." He looked away, dispiritedly.

  "This must be very difficult for you." But from the way Charles Citrine talked with as much equanimity as he did about a situation that struck Jury as horrific, Jury wondered how difficult it really was. The man seemed to fit the chair in which he sat admirably, for all that his casual dress and manner were at odds with it. In the meager firelight, Jury saw that in the angle between the horned foot and the seat a web was in the making, a small spider dangled there by its invisible thread.

  Citrine nodded, knocked out his pipe on the fireplace fender. "I'm very fond of Nell; but I must admit she's beyond me. I can't fathom her feelings, her reasons for this destructive silence." He sat back again, started fussing with the pipe. Jury wondered why men bothered with pipes; he wondered if all of the attention pipe-smoking demanded served as a safety valve, a distraction from human demands. Citrine said then, with a rather disarming smile Jury imagined endeared him to a lot of people, "I shouldn't be talking to you at all."

  "It can't hurt her, can it, in the circumstances?"

  Her father shook his head. "I expect not. Sometimes I wonder if she ever had very strong feelings for Roger."

  "Oh, she must have."

  "Because she married him?"

  Said Jury dryly, "Because she shot him. You say all of this is 'beyond you,' Mr. Citrine. But you can't have known them both for so many years and not theorized about the reasons behind her killing her husband."

  He had got his pipe going again and the smoke curled away in a cold draft that touched Jury's neck, probably from the rattling pane at the end of the room. "Well, there was Billy, Roger's son. Do you know about that?"

  Jury nodded. "And the Holt boy. Still, that was a long time ago."

  "Yes. The poor Holts. But he was adopted, I think."

  Roger's son. And Toby, but he was adopted. Blood ran very thick and water very thin around here. "To a mother, it could have been yesterday."

  "The real mother died in an accident when Billy was a baby. Nell was his stepmother."

  There it was again.

  Why was everyone so determined to point this out? That Nell Healey could only have some diluted measure of a real mother's feelings, the water that could never be as thick as blood? "Let's assume that it did have to do with that kidnapping eight years ago—" Citrine started to object, but Jury forestalled this. "We're just speculating. What could have happened that might have built up over those years in your daughter's mind?"

  "You mean, that the ransom wasn't paid?"

  Jury waited.

  "Surely, if she wanted revenge because we refused—" Citrine made a helpless gesture.

  "By 'we,' you mean Roger Healey and you."

  "We were only taking the advice of the police, Superintendent."

  As Citrine shifted in his chair, Jury's eye was drawn to the tiny spider that plummeted, from its fluttering contact with the leg, nearly to the floor on its silky life line. Jury had never before known a family of such shaky relationships. Blood bonds seemed absent, or appeared tenuous at best. At worst, easily broken.

  Citrine didn't know, of course, that Jury was aware it was Nell Healey's money, and Nell who had refused to pay up. The only ones who knew this, as far as Charles Citrine was aware, were himself, Roger Healey, Nell, the Lloyd's banker, and the superintendent in charge. The police sergeant Citrine may even have forgotten: Brian Macalvie.

  8

  On the other side of the winch, a passageway through the main gate used to give easier access to foot passengers, Jury found the small door to the tower. Above the door on an ironwork standard was a bell from which a string dangled. He pulled it; the bell jangled; in a moment he heard a buzzing sound. Jury looked uncertainly at the door for a while, unable to place the source of the sound. Silence. He pulled the bell cord again, and again there was the same buzz. Then assuming there was some setup here like the security system in a London townhouse comprised of flats, he pulled at the big iron ring. The door opened.

  It opened on near-total darkness. The weak light from lamp niches cast Jury's shadow in grotesque, fun-house shapes as he moved upward and around on the stone steps. Thank God, he thought, he didn't suffer from vertigo, or halfway up he'd've been a goner. Round and round he went, stopping once to loosen his tie. He studiously avoided letting his gaze drift to the steps as he felt, rather than saw, something scuttle down them.

  Irene Citrine certainly valued her privacy if not her friendships. He was, hard put to imagine her girlfriends giggling up these cold steps to tea and bread and butter sandwiches.

  A slant of light suddenly broke across the steps, and from round the bend he heard a voice flute a greeting. "Sorry about the stairs and the security system," said Irene Citrine, who more or less filled, in silhouette, the door at the top, "but you never know who's mucking about out on those damned moors, do you?" She took Jury's hand in a hearty grip and more or less hoisted his six-feet-two frame through the door.

  Irene Citrine—who introduced herself as Rena—told him Saint Charles had hit the intercom to tell her Jury was coming and to try to control herself.

  "Of course, a little gunplay in the local is small potatoes to the Moors Murders and the Yorkshire Ripper. Still." As if he were going to protest, she held up her hand and said, "Sorry, sorry. I'm not all that cold-blooded. Poor Nell is in one hell of a spot, but we'll get round it somehow. Care for a drink?" She swept, in her hibiscus-patterned muumuu, to the other end of the room toward what appeared to be an old pulpit.

  Jury took a moment to catch his breath and survey the lighting arrangements. Although a couple of floorlamps splayed cones of light near a sofa, Rena Citrine favored cresset lamps with floating wicks and fat tapers. There were several of these positioned on iron spikes attached to brackets. The oil lamps, though, were lit, and their shadows reached long fingers across the thick oak table.

  Against one wall was a medieval bench strewn with brightly colored cushions that didn't do anything toward making it look more sittable. On the facing wall was a fireplace with a joggled lintel and a cornice elaborately carved with a little row of heads, none of them looking less than unspeakably insane. Old lancet windows through which lozenges of light burrowed were inset around the octagonal walls.

  A scarred satinwood writing table
dominated the room: covering it were papers, manuscripts, stacks of books, a typewriter, an Apple II personal computer with an enormously long cord snaking across the room to some source of electricity Jury couldn't see; ashtrays, each holding a partially smoked cigarette as if each smoke had claimed its own ashtray grave; a welter of bottles; several canvases in oil leaning against the wall; stacks of books, largely popular novels. On the top shelf leaned little framed photos, snapshots of her travels, apparently.

  Jury leaned closer to look at the photos; Rena Citrine on a white sand beach in a bikini (there must have been more under that muumuu than one could guess); Rena on some sort of fishing boat; Rena and another woman holding between them a huge fish; several more of Rena in cafes and a club that looked, with its palm fronds, wicker, and partly black combo, like something in the Caribbean. She was crushed between a man and the woman in the fish-picture, all wearing those overly gay, false smiles one does for club photographers. Hung on both sides of the fireplace and on the wall were posters of the warm sands and sunlit seas that must have been the sources of these pictures. Barbados. Bimini.

  Just looking at them made Jury feel colder here in this tower. These pictures against the backdrop of this dark medievalism made him wonder if he were in the presence of some apocalyptic cultural collision.

  "How about a Tequila Sunrise?"

  Jury's head moved round from the pictures. "A what?"

  Rena Citrine was busy with a silver cocktail shaker. "What'd Charles give you? A glass of cold tea or did he hobble to the well for water?" She rattled the shaker from one side to another.

  Jury smiled. "He offered me coffee, actually."

  "But did it materialize?"

  "I didn't want any."

  The liquid from the shaker gurgled into a couple of fluted cocktail glasses. Both of these she brought round from behind the pulpit that served as drinks cabinet and handed one to Jury. The drink was a cloudy pinkish lavender. He sipped; he choked.

  She gave his back a good thwack. Rena was stronger than she looked, with those angular shoulders and slim arms.

  "Straight from Barbados, this lot is. You can't beat their rum."

  "I wouldn't want to," he said.

  Irene Citrine scooped some papers from one bench and more or less shoved him down on it; then she went round to the other side of the table and sat on the opposite bench, clearing some more papers from the table before her. Through eyes that were tearing from the rum, he looked at her, sitting with her pointy chin resting on her laced hands, staring at him from amber eyes whose irises were wedge shaped, cat's eyes. She had narrow shoulders, their slope increased by the tentlike dress. Her hair was a vibrant red that fell from a center part to her shoulders and seemed to have a life of its own, the way it sprang up and out as if it were plugged into an electrical socket. It was sprigged with gray, and because of the fanciful play of light it looked caught up in a loose net of silver.

  "Cheers!"

  Jury took the sticky, fluted glass, sipped at a liquid the color of which only Sergeant Wiggins could love, and choked again. His throat was on fire.

  "You get used to it. I've been into rum ever since Archie —my late husband—and I went beachcombing in Barbados. Do you like my posters?"

  Jury nodded. "Is that your husband sitting in the club, there?"

  "Him? No, that was just a couple we met in Bimini. My favorite place. Spent two months there. Archie was camera-shy. Also cash-shy. A fact that Charles never lets me forget. He probably didn't tell you I was married, did he?"

  "No," said Jury, his eye resting on the blue and mauve poster of Atlantic waters breaking on the beaches of Bimini. The sunset matched the drink, which he shoved a little way from him in case it was combustible.

  "He wouldn't. He refuses to acknowledge a Citrine would run off with a fortune-hunting American." She raised her glass again. "To Archie Littlejohn, God rest him."

  "I'm sorry."

  "About what?"

  "Well, that you lost him."

  "Lost me would be more like it. Last time I saw Archie was three years ago when he took out a deep-sea fishing boat off Bimini. There went my last thousand quid. My part of Daddy's money. Dear Daddy was very Victorian and thought women couldn't be trusted with the stuff; so Charles got the lion's share. I have to admit Charles did work for much of his; still, he's one of those lucky people that money just seems to stick to. So ... Archie floated away and I decided to come back to the old homestead. Well, I was dead broke, wasn't I? We'd spent all my money." She looked round the tower happily. "It suits me. I do a lot of reading, walking, go grouse- and pheasant-shooting with Charles, largely because it irritates him so much I'm a better shot than he is. But, mostly, I have my painting to keep me busy."

  Jury squinted over his shoulder at one of the canvases. Cutting across its dark surface was the merest splinter of light. "Not much light for painting."

  She shrugged. "Well, my work gains a lot in visual impact in the dark. You won't believe this, but I've actually sold some."

  True, Jury found it hard to believe, but he said, "That's grand."

  "They don't think so after they get them home and see them in daylight."

  Jury looked up at the boarded-over hole in the roof of the turret. "Are you building yourself a skylight, or something?"

  She squinted upwards. "That's my passive solar heating. Happened a couple of weeks ago. Some firm was supposed to come fix it." Three Tequila Sunrises had made her, apparently, quite tolerant of the indifference of the contractor. "I get the odd bat or two."

  She was picking up the thick candlestick to light another cigarette.

  When she leaned across the table toward Jury, the tops of her rounded breasts were thrust against the neckline of the muumuu, in the candlelight white as the hibiscus, and the gold wedges of her eyes flickered. Jury wondered if she knew that her Archie might not have married her for her money after all. "What happened?"

  "Helen. Our family weren't exactly poor, the Citrines. But I'm talking about what they take to National Westminster in an armored car. Real money." Rena sat back, turned the stem of her drink slowly, looked a little sad. "I liked Helen. She was wooly-headed, extremely pretty, silly, but a good person. Left me a handsome bequest which I managed to run through with the speed of light. All the rest went to Nell. My saintly brother Charles has Daddy's money. Am I supposed to be talking to you?" The "supposed" came out with a bit of a slur along with the smile.

  "Superintendent Sanderson wouldn't think so." Jury returned the smile.

  "You're better looking than he is."

  "So are you." Jury raised his glass as if in toast to her looks, but really to keep her from frothing more of the flammable cocktail into it. "There're only the three of you here now, is that right?"

  "Except for the odd servant or two. I seldom venture downstairs except for dinner. That's always good for a laugh. The aperitif, a few acid smiles handed round; first course, trumped-up laughter; main course, squabble; and for afters, silence."

  "False smiles, fights, and silence. Doesn't sound too inviting."

  "That's when we're having fun. Or were, I should say. Roger—" She looked away, past the fireplace and the posters toward the narrow window. Then she took a cigarette from a little tray, struck a wooden match across the underside of the table, and said, ". . . provided some amuse-ment." Her tone was wry. "He was the essence of a Ralph Lauren advert. Polo. The cologne, not the sport. Although I could certainly imagine him playing it."

  "Then you don't agree with your brother?"

  "I never agree with my brother, if only on principle. You mean about Roger?"

  "Mr. Citrine talked about him as a fine man. Devoted father, husband."

  Rena wiped some ash from the table to the floor. "Oh, 'fine.' Whatever that means in Charles's lexicon. Roger was charming—handsome, witty, sophisticated, talented. And shallow. I don't know much about music but I'd be willing to bet he failed as a musician because there was nothing behind the technica
l razzle-dazzle. I mean, doesn't one need a soul or something to be a great musician? Even Billy had more substance. He was a nice enough child if a bit lazy. Sweet, charming—well, that was probably in his genes—but he didn't really apply himself. Unfortunately, he wasn't all that crazy about being a prodigy, which Roger didn't like at all. He could be a real tyrant." She smoked and studied the shifting shadows thrown by the candles. "Not nice to speak of Roger that way, perhaps, after what he'd been through with Billy and that other child, Toby. God. What a decision to have to make ..."

  "What would you have done?"

  "Paid up, of course. But then I never take anyone's advice." Her face hardened. "What a bastard."

  Jury frowned. "Roger Healey on his own didn't have the money to pay that ransom."

  "It might have been Citrine money, but the father, certainly, would have the say. If he didn't insist, then—" She shrugged.

  "You don't know the statistics on—"

  "I don't care about the effing statistics, Superintendent. Poor Nell hadn't nearly as much say, had she? She was 'only the stepmother.' Well, she was a better mother than most I've seen. There's something about Nell that just reaches out to kiddies. Toby Holt adored her; he did little jobs round the place for which she overpaid him." Rena smiled. "She'd read to them for hours, tell them stories, read poetry, play the piano. She even tried to give Toby piano lessons. But he hadn't any talent." She lit another cigarette from the tallow beside her.

  "You think that's why your niece killed her husband."

  "She waited a bloody long time to do it, then." She punctuated this by thumping the candlestick back on the table. "Roger might not have been the devoted husband Saint Charles makes him out to be."

  "Meaning?"

  "Talked to anyone Roger worked with? There's a woman named Mavis Crewes. She's visited here two or three times. Edits one of the magazines, pretended she wanted to do a travel piece on this part of the country. Loved our house. So feudal. Talk to her."