I watch the streetlamp Down below I watch you turn I watch you go—
"Well, well, well," said Macalvie, killing the tape as a low-slung sporty number shrieked past the Ford on this otherwise deserted stretch of road.
Wiggins was thrown back as Macalvie accelerated.
Jury sighed.
The Citrine house was stark white against the sky and a hundred feet or so from a cliff along a solitary stretch of the Cornwall coast. A frozen gullied road was not meant to encourage visitors. Nell Citrine Healey had been the only one who had used it; she must have liked her privacy. It was privacy, Jury thought morosely, that had worked against her.
The rear of the house faced the end of the dirt road. They went in through the kitchen door, unlocked, unbolted.
"Doesn't anyone bother to lock up?" asked Wiggins.
"She probably thought there wasn't anything of value left to take," said Macalvie.
Wiggins looked away.
They stood in the big kitchen with Macalvie looking down at the long oak center table as if he could see the sandwiches—the one half-eaten, the other untouched—and the pills still sitting there. Macalvie pointed to a row of mullioned windows. "Billy wouldn't have heard—"
"No one could have known Mrs. Healey wasn't in the house; that she was outside was mere chance," said Wiggins.
"Of course. So if it was someone known to her, and she had been there, say, in the kitchen, whoever it was could simply have said they didn't want to drive the car any farther down that road. But they wouldn't deliberately announce themselves by coming down that road. So Billy wouldn't have heard anything. Anyone could have walked right in, but it was someone he knew, I'm sure."
Jury leaned back against a Welsh cupboard of wormy chestnut and folded his arms, looking at the kitchen hearth, the chairs pulled up to it. It was the sort of spot that could have seduced anyone into having a cup of tea. "If you could only remember, Macalvie, that you weren't here; that you weren't in this kitchen." He looked out at darkness.
"Then what's your theory?"
"I don't have one."
Wiggins came in from the front room, saying, "They've a piano, a baby grand—Good Lord, sir, shut that door!" His look at Macalvie was severe as he pulled the lapels of his overcoat tightly round his throat.
Macalvie shut the kitchen door.
As he would have recognized the outfitting of the kitchen, Jury would have known this room from Macalvie's descrip-tion. In the center was the writing table where Charles Citrine must have been sitting, talking with the police superintendent. Over there was the window seat where Nell Healey had sat staring out to sea. There were no sheets, no covering, over the furniture. In spite of the rising damp and the passing years, the room still had the look of its occupants having left just minutes before: an open book lay facedown on a coffee table; the pale cushions of an armchair still bore the impression of an occupant; the logs were laid and ready for lighting; sheets of music were stacked on the piano. Until one noticed the spine of the book was cracked, the pages stiff with age; the sheet music yellowed; the piano layered with dust.
Said Wiggins: "They must have taken music pretty seriously to have a grand piano in a house they used only a short time out of the year."
"Billy was supposed to be some kind of musical prodigy. The piano"—Macalvie nodded toward it—"was the father's idea. Healey was a frustrated concert pianist who was probably living out his fantasies of being Rachmaninoff through his kid. My bet is he was a real slave driver. Anyway, the kid didn't use it."
"How do you know?" asked Jury, not terribly surprised by this time at Macalvie's clairvoyance.
"There was no music on the stand; the cover was down; I ran my finger over it. Dusty as hell." Macalvie smiled. "He didn't practice here; she didn't dust. Says something about them, doesn't it, the way they were."
The smile was in place, but it didn't reach his eyes, Jury noticed. Then the smile vanished and he walked over to the french window giving out on a view of waves they could hear but couldn't see.
"She likes you, too, Macalvie." Jury smiled at his friend's back. "You should go and see her. I'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble getting round Sanderson."
There was no answer.
"I'm having a look upstairs. Brian?"
Without turning, Macalvie said, "Billy's room is at the top, the guest room next to it. Toby used that."
While Wiggins visited the guest room, Jury went into Billy Healey's. As had the living room, this one still looked lived in, as if all of his boy's things had been left in just the way he had placed them. Cricket bat lying across a carved walnut chair and a cap hanging on its finial; stacks of magazines and paperback books slipping and sliding along the far wall in a drunken wave; fossils and chipped seashells on the bureau, one especially good specimen lying on a bit of torn paper with the penciled inscription, Chessil Beach, the paper browning round the edges, beginning to look more like parchment. But the focal point of the room was outspread on the faded oriental rug at the foot of the bed—a complicated intertwining of metal tracks, miniature buildings—or pieces of a Monopoly set used for that purpose—and an electric train. He stood looking at it for a few moments chewing his lip. Then he knelt down, unable to resist its lure, and punched the starting button. The slightly rusted engine slowly and laboriously started chugging along the track, entering a mossy tunnel of a papier-mache hillside.
He let it run as he went over to the books against the wall, sat down on the floor, and looked them over. Jury could almost see the years of Billy's life changing with the books. Picture books, the William books, comics. He must have named his dog Gnasher after the one in these old "Beano" strips. Then came Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, nothing by the Brontes—perhaps he got too much of that in Yorkshire —and some poetry. Jury recognized the small paperback of American poetry as the same one that Nell Healey had been holding. He pulled it out, thumbed through it to Robert Frost, noticed as he did so there were a lot of underlinings, marginal notes that surprised him. Apparently, his stepmother had had a decided effect on his reading. He found the one called "Good-bye and Keep Cold," and read it through twice.
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm. How often already you've had to be told, "Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold ..."
Jury put his head in his hand. He went on looking through the book and stopped at a poem of Emily Dickinson, also heavily underscored. His eye was immediately drawn to the line, "It was not frost, for on my skin I felt siroccos crawl ..." The word sirocco was underlined twice and in the margin written in a loopy scrawl, "desert wind, hot."
"I used to have one, but not this good of a one."
Wiggins's voice brought Jury round. "What?"
"Train, sir." Wiggins was kneeling by the track. The engine was going through the tunnel, probably for the dozenth time. Jury had forgotten the train. "It was a contest, it was, to see who could collect the most pieces. I was the only one had a British Rail Pullman car. What sort did you have, sir?"
Jury had risen, still with the book in his hand. "None. What's a 'sirocco,' Wiggins?"
The sergeant looked up from the miniature metal station, frowning. "The band, you mean?"
"No. I mean what is it? What's it mean?"
Wiggins shook his head. "No idea. Funny name, come to think of it. They're usually called things like Kiss of Death, or plays on words like Dire Straits. Good name, that." Wiggins got up. "The guest room's all tidied up. Nothing there that seemed helpful."
"I'll have a look." Jury frowned. "Do you still have that issue—"
Wiggins looked back, standing in the doorway. "Of what, sir?"
"Nothing," said Jury. "Nothing."
It had started to rain steadily during the short drive to Macalvie's cemetery. Macalvie's cemetery: the graveyard that surrounded the disused church appeared to Jury to have little purpose anymore than that which Macalvie had brought to it. It surrounded the church unevenly on three sides.
They
squelched through mud and high grass, stepping, Jury imagined, on graves whose stones had slowly slipped so far beneath the ground that one could barely see them. When they'd nearly reached the wall, Macalvie beamed his torch downward, kneeled, and removed the canvas staked across the grave.
It had been carefully staked out by Dennis Dench. Markers showing the position of the body were still there. The site was clear of vegetation for a foot round the site. There was little else to show that a body had been exhumed from the opening, that it had not been dug for a burial yet to come.
Except (thought Jury) that nobody came here anymore. He squinted through the dark at headstones- leaning at odd angles, nearly hidden by tall grass and weeds. The rain fell steadily.
Wiggins stood at the bottom of the grave staring down, the package that was'Dench's book between his gloved hands like a Bible. He made no move to rewrap the muffler that a sudden wind had disturbed; he said nothing about the weather.
Jury looked up from the gravesite to the old wall, crumbling like the wall round the Citrine house in West Yorkshire. What in heaven's name must have been going through that poor woman's mind in her interminable watching at the gate that listed like these gravestones in that deteriorating wall? What scenarios had she devised for the death of her stepson?
That she was hopeless of ever seeing him again was clear. She was not watching that small frozen orchard waiting for a miraculous reappearance, waiting for the boy to climb down from the tree in which he'd been hiding. It enveloped her like fog, the sense of hopelessness.
In her darkest imaginings of the way he died, could Nell Healey possibly have imagined this?
An owl screeched. They all stood looking down into the excavated grave, filling with rain.
Wiggins did not complain about the weather.
21
Melrose refused to open his eyes when he heard what must have been a mug of tea placed on his bedside table. He shut them more tightly still when the curtains on wooden rungs were slowly pressed back and the window raised. Why on earth did people seem to think one could not move without the morning tea, and that one's private bedroom was Liberty Hall? Nor did he hear the footsteps of the Person recede. The Person must have been standing in the room—the slow breathing seemed to come from the direction of the foot of the bed—staring like a ghoul as he slept. Nothing could be more unnerving except perhaps lying in a trench with the enemy standing over you wondering if you were, indeed, dead.
Finally, he heard skulking steps, the door gently close.
After a few seconds, he opened one eye to sunlight and a fine day and a cow staring at him, ruminatively, through the window.
Melrose threw back the covers and didn't give the cow the satisfaction of knowing he had spotted it.
Major Poges and the Princess were the only ones at the table when he entered the dining room. Ruby had just served Major Poges his boiled egg. The Princess was drinking coffee and sitting several chairs away down the other side of the table. She fluted a good-morning to Melrose.
Ruby, her hair pulled back from sallow skin and a face like a lozenge—mildly palliative—recited a rather extensive menu to Melrose, including mutton chops. Melrose ordered tea, toast, and porridge. Solemnly, Ruby took the order, collected some of the used crockery, and took herself off.
"And bring some more hot water, Ruby," the Major called after her.
One could tell a great deal (Melrose had always liked to think) about the way a person approached his boiled egg. Major Poges did not behead his (as did Agatha), but tapped and tapped the top gently all round with the back of his egg spoon and peeled it.
From her end of the table, the Princess called down, "We're the last. Or you are. It's nearly ten."
"Miss Denholme appears to be very liberal with her mealtimes."
"And her food," said the Princess, whose plate, from what Melrose could see, did not attest to this. It was empty. "She caters to one's tastes." The Princess raised her finely chiseled face to the ceiling and exhaled a stream of smoke. This morning she was dressed in rose wool with one of the Weavers Hall shawls (this one of magenta) gathered about her arms and fastened with something pricey that winked in the sunlight.
"She's also quite a decent person, if a bit on the broody side. When I came here the first time, she was off nursing her sister—Iris, I think her name is. I understand the doctors feared the poor woman would have a miscarriage. I have never had children, myself." Her tone suggested she couldn't understand why anyone would.
"They'd have turned out to be Malcolms, every one." The Major scooped up his egg. "Doesn't come on as the motherly type, not to me. Why'd she take over the child? Doesn't seem to care much about her. As for catering to your tastes," the Major went on as he jammed up a toast round. "What taste? You scarcely eat anything." He turned to Melrose. "She will only eat what is quiet and needn't be cut."
He called down to her: "For God's sakes, come to your usual place and sit down."
Her expression declared that this was the opening for a rejoinder she'd been dying to make. "I am sitting down here, Mr. Plant, because I do like my morning cigarette. And it is beastly manners to smoke whilst others are eating. So I've been told."
Sotto voce, the Major said, "Oh, shut up." Then to the Princess, he called again, "We refuse to sit here and yell. I complained once, once when you were smoking that cheroot. Come back to your usual chair."
"Ah!" she exclaimed, rising. "Thank you so much."
Melrose smiled as she made her languid (and supposedly underfed) way down the table to the chair at the Major's left, which he had risen to hold out for her. The Major's sigh was huge and resigned; he reeked of martyrdom. Her thank you simply breathed of feigned deference, as did her paralytic smile at him as she slid into the magisterial chair.
"Now the one who fascinates me is the Braine woman. She's quite loopy, that one. Did you know she was on her way to Hadrian's Wall? She claims to be in touch with the Emperor Hadrian, which must be difficult as he's been dead for several centuries." The Princess leaned closer to Melrose. "Second sight is what she claims to have. Knew there'd be a murder near here, that's what turned up in her 'magnetic field.' She was 'drawn here' by some irresistible force."
"Second sight so often turns out to be hindsight, I've found," said Melrose. "I imagine she predicts further trouble."
Major Poges looked mildly surprised. "She did. How'd you know?"
"I didn't. But isn't it always safe to predict further trouble? Won't there always be?"
"No wonder Malcolm's the little beast he is. They're off, she says, to meet Hadrian's spirit. Tomorrow. Noonish." She nicked some ash onto a plate. "And people think killers are crazy."
"Is that what they're saying about this woman who killed her husband? I'd imagine there'd be a great deal of speculation there."
"Speculation, yes. The family's very old, very county," said the Major. "I've met them. Well, him. Charles Citrine. Done a bit of shooting with him."
"The Gun, here," said the Princess, nodding toward Poges, "has never brought back anything for our meager table."
"Stop calling me that. Just because a fellow likes an early ramble on the moors and a bit of shooting—"
"His kill-to-cartridge ratio is about one to one thousand."
Melrose smiled. "This Charles Citrine—"
He was interrupted by Ruby's coming in with the tray, setting Melrose's porridge and tea before him and the hot water before the Major. She then set about collecting the dirty dishes as if she were nicking them. For some time she held a goblet before her with an abstracted air, frowning at its blood-red glass, then quickly set it on the tray and picked up a plate with several mutton-chop bones on it and nearly ran from the room.
"Is she always like that?" asked Melrose, plugging a large square of butter into the center of his porridge and watching the melting rivulets trickle off.
"She's a goose. Pay no attention to her," said the Major, digging in the jar of marmalade.
"I h
adn't thought of the porridge," said the Princess, leaning to get a better look at Melrose's bowl.
Major Poges looked up sharply. "Don't give it to her. She's right onto it, Mr. Plant, but don't give it to her." To the Princess he said, "If you want porridge, ask for porridge." He slammed down the marmalade pot.
A delicate ribbon of smoke trailed upward as she said, "One can't keep the kitchen open all day, Major."
"Ha! Then have a boiled egg." He shoved the silver dish toward her.
The Princess reared back slightly, her mouth in a moue.
"If you want to waste your time tapping and cracking and peeling, go ahead. And then one nearly has to carve round the white to get it out as if one were a sculptor. No, thank you. You don't seem to be having such a fine time with yours." She leaned closer to his plate. "Look at all of the tiny bits of shell—"
"You're the laziest damned woman I know." He put down his spoon and snapped his paper open, back half-turned to her. But he wasn't finished with his recital. To Melrose, he said, "Nearly everything is too much trouble for her to eat." Secretively, he leaned toward Melrose as if the Princess weren't there. "Doyou know what she dined on last night? A plate of creamed potatoes, mashed swede, and one forkful of peas. One!" He held up his index finger.
The Princess stuck out her tongue at his back, then rested her chin across the back of her hands in an artfully contrived pose. "One can hardly eat peas after they've left the heap, can one? I'm not about to chase them."
Major Poges nearly buried his face in his crushed paper. "When we were in London once I made the mistake of suggesting we dine at Wheeler's. Is there anyone who thinks Dover sole is hard to eat?"
"Yes. They never fillet anything properly. There's always the odd bone large enough to drive through the heart of Dracula." She sipped her coffee and inhaled deeply.
Melrose wondered if he were to be forever reminded of Vivian's upcoming marriage.
The Princess sighed. "The only implements one needs are a blender and a Cuisinart. That's all I have in my kitchen."
Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent Page 19