The road was narrow, patched with ice, and recently plowed: small cliffs of snow hemmed it in on either side. Up ahead was a sign of life: a man tramping along without either hat or overcoat. Hardy lot up here, thought Jury, stopping to roll down his window. “Do you know a Jerusalem Inn round here?”
The small man’s face cracked in a smile. “Why aye . . . atwixt here an’ t’chorch, dede aheed, ’tis.”
“You going that way, then?”
“Aye, near there binoo.”
It would be easier to take him than talk to him, Jury thought, as he opened the door. “Hop in.”
The little man scuttled in and smiled at Jury. He hadn’t bothered to put in his teeth, and his watery blue eyes were glazed, as if the day had iced them over, but more likely he’d had a few at home before starting out for the pub. His hands were wrapped around what looked like a giant onion, something out of a cheap sci-fi flick. As they headed north, he kept it propped on his knees like a suitcase.
“What’s that?” asked Jury.
The man blinked at him. “A leek, mate. Aye, myed a canny job o’ it this yeaer; won, aa did. Wowd a doon laest yeaer oney aa hed one o’ me bad torns. Bad abed, aa was. Cud do nowt. You be froom t’ South?”
Jury smiled. The question was rhetorical. It was not a compliment.
• • •
The Jerusalem Inn was a square, stucco building with a sign as plain as the rest of it, a board with the name in wide black letters stuck on the side like an afterthought and lit by a weak overhanging lamp.
Where the custom came from in weather like this, Jury couldn’t imagine, but they were there, perhaps a dozen of them, seeming as permanently fixed as the sign.
Dickie (Jury’s traveling companion) set his leek and his money on the bar and asked Jury what he was drinking. A lager, Jury said, as the publican approached. He had the rubicund face of an angel or a drinker, skin pulled tightly against the bones.
It was four days before Christmas and the Jerusalem Inn was certainly ready: decorations abounded — old strings of lights, waterfalls of tinsel, dusty rings of holly, and a life-sized creche in the nook beside the fireplace. A desultory game of pool was going on between a thickset fellow dressed largely in tattoos and a leather vest and a wiry, black-haired man with a gold ring in his ear. Fashion, more than sexual persuasion, Jury assumed. To the right of the pool table was a square table of a video game, which a young man was playing. Beneath a bit of mistletoe, a shark-faced young woman was in the process of kissing a tall, ungainly fellow, and a long process she was making of it. But their performance had to give way to the leek, which had (Jury had finally figured out from Dickie’s lengthy blether as they drove along) taken first prize in the yearly leek-growing contest.
Several people came over to clap Dickie on the shoulder.
“An’ you’d a won last year, too, Dickie, if you’d oney cleaned it up a bit.” There were drinks set up, and all apparently on Dickie, though Jury thought it should have been the other way round. Jury doubted if Dickie had two pence to rub together most of the time, but he was clearly the soul of generosity. A lack of pence probably went for everybody here.
The Jerusalem Inn, beneath its Christmas finery, was a workingman’s pub. It was a relief, in a way, after the waxwork pubs of the West End — the red plush, the converted gaslights, the gold-leafed mirrors, the whole creaky panoply of Victoriana. Nor did it have the countrified collection of pewter and brass and eternal hunting prints hanging above cretonned cushions. There were long benches against the walls, one of them occupied by a trio of silent elders who looked as if they could have taken part in the Nativity scene to their right beside the fireplace.
Around the horseshoe bar in the room’s center, the faces reflected, pretty much, their lot — a futureless existence of the dole. Some, Jury was sure, railed against it; others accepted it grimly; and some — the younger ones — took the dole as a way of life, what they’d been born to. Work and the weather provided conversation.
Jury knew that he had been carefully scrutinized (like the leek) by everyone here, yet not an eye had he actually seen turned in his direction. After the leek and the lovers settled themselves down, people went about their business, conversations undertaken in the hushed tones of pilgrims before the service begins. One crusty character sat with a cane and a dictionary, talking to no one, occasionally hemming as he turned a page and tapped his cane on the bare boards. Another man in a hooked anorak sat reading a book, a nervous whippet beside him. The pool players went back to their game.
The publican was hovering with the drink Dickie had bought him, obviously curious about Jury. “You from round here, then?” he finally asked.
“No. London.”
The publican pretended surprise. “I guess you get two blocks from Harrod’s, it’s like outer space, innit?” He smiled to take the bite out of the joke. Light glinted from his glasses.
“Do you get much custom way out here?”
“Oh, aye. You’d be surprised. There’s Spinneyton, that’s down the road, where most of them are from. Not much money but the dole; collieries are mostly shut down, wharves at Newcastle mostly empty.” He shook his head philosophically. “Me, I’m from Todcaster. Only had this place six months. Hard to get accepted by this lot. You know, clannish.” He whispered this last, as if London and Todcaster formed a bond between them, and then went down the bar to collect glasses.
As he waited for the publican to finish his business, he walked over to inspect the Nativity scene. The eyes of the three old men slewed around to check his progress. Did he look like a cop? Jury wondered. He sighed as he checked out the animals, in a bad state of repair. Among the fake ones — a goat with a missing leg, a lamb without a tail — slept a real terrier with one eye ringed in black, making up, perhaps, for the thin display.
Only two of the Three Kings were there, and they could have done with a fresh paint job. Mary was there, and Joseph. But there was nothing in the straw they were bending over.
Something tugged at his sleeve, and a small voice said. “I had to give it a wash.”
Jury turned and looked down to see a girl of six or seven staring up at him, her eyes the same clear, almost glassy brown of the doll’s she was holding. It was a big doll with painted hair of faded red. It could have passed for either a boy or a girl child. Right now it was clothed in what Jury suspected was one of the little girl’s old dresses. The waistline came to the hips and the hem hung over the doll’s toes.
Seeing Jury did not comprehend her remark, she inclined her brown head toward the manger. “It was dirty.”
“Oh,” said Jury. He looked at the dress. “Is it a girl, then?”
Looking toward the straw, she frowned, as if considering her error. “Right now it is.” She smoothed the old dress, obviously used to its being a girl and wishing it didn’t have to do double duty during the Christmas season.
Through a door at the rear walked a pretty, youngish woman with a tray full of glasses. When she saw the child, she shook her head, came to the creche-side and whispered, “Chrissie! Put the baby Jesus back, lass. How many times must I tell you?” Her hair was the color of her daughter’s, but without the luster; her face was a memory of the little girl’s.
“I had to give it a wash,” said Chrissie, querulously.
“Put it back.” The woman looked at Jury, adults in league, shook her head, and sighed, “Bairns.” Then she moved behind the bar and started shelving the glasses.
Sadly, Chrissie undid the dress, making sure she kept the doll turned away from Jury so that he couldn’t, presumably, see it naked. Having undressed it, she climbed over the rope meant to protect the ensemble within, replaced the baby, and climbed back again. The whole scene now met with her frowning disapproval. “It looks dumb.” Her pudgy arms were folded, old-woman-wise, across her chest.
“Well,” Jury considered.
Since he didn’t agree straightaway, she said, even more decisively, “It looks ugly without its
clothes.”
Jury drank his lager and said, “It doesn’t look like the baby Jesus, I agree. What happened to the other one?”
“It got broke in the fight. They’re always fighting in here. Smushed.” She made some sort of wet sound, obviously enjoying the noise. “So they made me put in Alice. It’s a girl.” Covertly, she looked at Jury to see whether he would contradict her.
“That’s too bad. But I expect you’ll get her back again after Christmas.” She nodded. Jury went on: “The thing is, Jesus wouldn’t be wearing a dress.”
She scratched her elbows. “He wore sheets. I’ve seen pictures.”
“That’s when he was older. Swaddling clothes, that’s what you need.”
“What?” It was the most harebrained thing she’d ever heard of.
“Swaddling clothes. Old rags, I’d say, would do it. If you’ve got an old piece of cloth your mum doesn’t need, you could tear it up and kind of wrap strips around Alice.” He pointed his glass toward the chipped and broken actors in this drama behind the rope. “They were poor. They’d nothing better to dress him in.”
Chrissie looked down at her own dress, faded and sprigged and, like her doll’s, too big for her, an obvious hand-me-down. “They come to the right place, then.” She turned and ran through the door, probably to search for the swaddling clothes.
• • •
Jury bought the publican — Hornsby was his name — a drink by way of softening him up before he showed him his I.D. and the snapshot of Helen Minton.
Having settled Hornsby in more of a mood for a chinwag, the man turned out to have nothing much to say. He scratched his neck and shook his head. “Never seen her, man — uh, Superintendent.” Hornsby showed the picture to his wife. Mrs. Hornsby drew her long hair behind her ear, as if that somehow might help her eyesight, and squinted at the face in the picture, half-lost in the shadow of a tree. Mrs. Hornsby was clearly not a woman to jump to conclusions, which could have meant she had a mind that had to pull its load slowly like a yoked ox, or else she was a very careful thinker.
She looked around the inn at each of the patrons, as if some clue would assert itself in their separate presences. Indeed, she did seem to be trying to fish for some memory as she looked from the three old regulars to Helen’s picture, and from the pool table to the picture, and from the Nativity scene to the picture. She bit her lip and Jury was sure she was going to confirm her husband’s words, but she didn’t. “She was in here Tuesday week, let’s see, must of been eight, nine o’clock. She asked for a Newcastle Brown Ale and I kind of laughed and asked her did she know how strong it was, and then she laughed and said, Yes, she’d had it before. I knew she wasn’t from round here, because of the way she talked — talked like you, see — I thought probably from London. I liked the way she stood at the bar and didn’t seem to mind the Jerusalem’s not the Ritz. Then she watched the pool for a while and Clive” — here she inclined her head toward what must have been a room in the back — “bought her another drink. She talked to the bairn a bit, Chrissie —” Mrs. Hornsby’s face split in a smile that vied for brilliance with the tinsel hanging above her. “ — and then she bought Clive a drink. I don’t think she wanted the third one; she hardly touched it, but she knew it was the thing to do. Well, a woman doesn’t have to, but she did, and I liked that. She talked to Robbie” — and here she looked toward the tall young man Jury had noticed at the video game machine. “Robbie’s kind of — simple.” It seemed to pain Mrs. Hornsby to say it. “But he’d do anything to help a person. We give him a room here, and a bit of money to keep the place clean.” She frowned. “Sorry it’s all I remember about her.”
Jury stared at her and her husband patted her on the shoulder and said, “Canny lass is Nell. Never misses a trick.”
“If every witness were like you, Mrs. Hornsby, we’d have London cleaned up in no time.”
Mrs. Hornsby blushed furiously and tried to drag her eyes away from Jury but found, apparently, that there were worse things to look at in this world. She smiled her transforming smile again. Jury bought her a drink.
“Clive might know something.” She pointed toward the door her daughter had just run through. “There’s a match going on in the back room. He’s playing. And Marie probably talked to her; Marie usually does with anyone new. Cadges fags and tells them her hard life.”
Marie turned out to be the shark-faced woman, not bad looking, but the sort who made you want to take your money off the counter. You couldn’t blame them, he supposed, for gathering around. Anything to break up the monotony of pool and darts and workless days. Even police business was better than the joke-shop, as long as the business didn’t interfere with their lock-ins. Jury bet most of them were falling-down alcoholics. Drink was all they had and the dole money paid for it.
“She was living in Washington, she said.” Marie accepted a cigarette with alacrity and leaned partially against the bar and partially against Jury. For a drink, Jury imagined she could come up with something of questionable reliability. He bought her a Carlsberg, but it didn’t loosen her memory.
Jury disengaged himself from the tangle of regulars and went over to the video game and sat down opposite Robbie, whose slack face he thought bore the traces of malleable handsomeness, the puttylike quality of looks not fully formed, wavering on the other side of the table like a reflection in water. “You’re Robbie?” The boy smiled. He seemed to be in his late teens or his early twenties. The eyes were dull, but the manner very friendly. Jury showed him the picture and Robbie ran his hands through his brown hair, dull like his eyes, as if this were some sort of test he had to pass. “You remember this woman?”
His answer was a stuttered, “Yu-uh-es.” And he nodded his head up and down several times, apparently pleased that he could remember.
“What did she talk to you about?” After a moment during which his eyes roved the room, not in the purposeful way of Nell Hornsby’s, but in the painful manner of one who can’t do what is expected of him, Jury tried to jog his memory, but gently. “I just wondered if she mentioned her name, or something. Or why she was here. No one else seems able to remember much.”
That was an obvious relief to Robbie. He looked down at the screen, watching the colored ghosts whiz out, followed by Pac-Man.
“Want to play?” asked Jury, fishing some coins out of his pocket.
Robby nodded. “Aa — ’m not ver-r-r-y g-good,” he said, despondently.
“Me either.”
Robbie chased Jury all over the board, ate up all of his ghosts, and was generally beating hell out of him, when Hornsby called across the room that the Superintendent was wanted on the telephone.
• • •
When he heard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Newsome on the other end of it, Jury was sorry he’d told the Northumbria station where they could reach him.
• • •
Not that he had anything against Newsome, a disarmingly laconic man, but he didn’t care for the DAC’s message. “Look, I’m not criticizing. But Racer’s kicking up a fuss because you’re supposed to be on vacation up there and now here’s the Chief Constable calling up wondering why Scotland Yard . . . you know what I mean.”
“I cleared it with Cullen.”
He could almost hear the shrug in Newsome’s reply. “Why don’t you just come back and make the Chief Superintendent happy, eh?”
“My appearance has never made him happy. Okay. I was coming up to London anyway tomorrow. I’ll catch an early train.” Hornsby, who had taken in every word, Jury was sure, while shining the same glass several times over, informed him there was a fast one from Newcastle at 8:30.
Jury told Newsome he’d take the 8:30 and hung up.
Nell Hornsby was polishing glasses and watching Robbie, who was having a turn at the pool table, playing by himself. “Awful sad, that boy. Mum dead, dad gone off. He was at the Bonaventure School.”
“Bonaventure?” Jury turned to look at Robbie.
“That plac
e in old Washington. They call it a school. More of an orphanage, I call it. When he turned sixteen he had to leave. They can’t stay there after that. Figure the kids can earn their keep. That’s a laugh, when even the men can’t in these parts.”
“What’s his name? Robbie what?”
“Robin Lyte.”
• • •
Robbie looked up from the worn green of the pool table when Jury came over with a couple of half-pints and a handful of ten-p pieces. “I’m not much good at pool.” He nodded toward the video game. “How about Pac-Man?”
The struggle to reply must have been Sisyphean. The boy’s eyes closed, as if lack of visual contact with the world would produce verbal contact. His neck twisted with the effort of getting out a Yes and adding a Thanks to it.
They played in a silence broken only by Robbie’s chuckles every time he won, which he always did.
Jury did not produce the snapshot of Helen Minton, feeling he couldn’t force memory. If there were something helpful locked in Robin Lyte’s brain, Jury would have to find some other key.
“You went to Bonaventure School, didn’t you?” Robbie’s face was turned down to the ghosts waiting to gobble another ten-p and nodded. “Didn’t like it much, I bet.” The boy looked up from the little maze of lights and shook his head. He looked, about the eyes, injured, as if the smudged skin were trying to heal from a blow. Jury shoved more coins in the slot with a force that rocked the table. “I don’t blame you. I went to a place like that. Iron cots, bad food, cold corridors. Four years of it. It was after my mother died.”
Ignoring the pulsing ghost inviting them to play, Robbie took out his old wallet and the picture. “Mu-u-ther.”
The young woman, with blond hair that looked freshly permed, was smiling a trifle pertly, arms linked with two other young womenfriends. Robbie pointed her out carefully as the one in the middle.
“She was pretty.” Jury handed the picture back, looked down at the ghost, and said, “Mine was too.”
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