Jury ignored the comment. “And the Whittaker boy — he was with Plant. . . . Why are you shaking your head?”
“Ten minutes, that’s why. Ten minutes when he skied on ahead and your friend wasn’t with him.”
“Well, Roy, if you can tell me how a man wearing skis could get into that gun room, arrange for his victim to be conveniently waiting on the walk wearing someone else’s cloak, shoot her, put the gun back, and then fall all over her still with skis on . . . ” Jury left the sentence unfinished.
Trimm finished it for him. “Means nowt.”
4
IT WAS nearly six but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Jury stood in the mysterious purple light of dawn looking down at the place where the body of Beatrice Sleight had lately lain, only the deep imprints of the shoes of Cullen’s men to bare witness to what had happened. He walked the short distance to the chapel and pushed open the heavy door.
• • •
The draught blew the tiny candle flames, snuffing out one or two of them. He thought of Grace Seaingham coming here every morning, every night, like someone keeping an assignation.
Jury sat down and studied the plaster figure of the Virgin and thought that somehow Grace Seaingham had taken on that pellucid look in the way that one takes on the look of another human being one is used to being around.
He thought of Father Rourke’s paradigmatic square. What the priest had described was a net of belief of such intricate weave that Jury couldn’t begin to understand it. Was it all supposed to be such a mystery? Wasn’t it supposed to be simple? Contradictions, the priest had said, opposites. From his back pocket he drew out the cover torn from the journal on which Father Rourke had drawn his square, that square which was universal enough to account for everything. He looked at the H in one corner. He added to two other corners a D and an R. Helen, Robin, Danny. He thought of the pert, blond young woman in Robbie’s picture who bore no resemblance to him; of the Bonaventure School that took children who had nowhere else to go.
She had given him the only name she knew to give him, since he wasn’t hers to begin with, Jury was sure.
He looked at the square. It was the fourth corner he wondered about now: the murderer?
• • •
How long he sat there he didn’t know, but when he finally walked out of the chapel it was light. In the near distance, out there across the long sweep of snow and the broken wall, there was one thin strand of pale gold and the snow looked a deep lavender as the light crawled slowly across it.
5
“GET up,” said Jury, preemptorily, handing Melrose Plant a cup of tea.
Pushing himself up from his pillows, Melrose looked about him like a victim of snowblindness. “Up? What are you talking about. I only just got down. My God.” He turned his head toward the windows. “Dawn. It’s only dawn.” He sipped the tea. “This stuff’s cold. Cold tea at dawn. Is the firing squad ready?”
“You’ve been spoiled by Ruthven with his scones and hot tubs. Come on. We’re going to the Jerusalem Inn.”
Plant sank back, trying to burrow into the pillows. “You’re mad. I always suspected it. Snooker at dawn, is that it? Right round the twist you are. Don’t you realize you and those two you brought along from the Spanish Inquisition kept us up until nearly five, and now it can’t be more than six. Besides that, you bring me cold tea. And I’m paralyzed.”
“Only from the mouth down. Come on. It’s after seven.”
“I am not getting out of this bed without my tea.” Melrose pushed himself up, leaned over and yanked the tapestry bell-pull. “I shall have a fresh pot. Then I shall consider rising. Anyway, how is it your mind’s working after everything that happened last night? What’d old Vivian have to say, anyway? I hope they supply toast with my tea.”
Jury smiled. The question about Vivian was slotted into the conversation like a man sticking coins in a machine and walking away hoping he’d hit the jackpot.
“ ‘Old’ Vivian? She’s a good ten years younger than either of us.”
Testily, Plant said, “Well, but I’ve known her for a hundred years. Don’t you wonder why she’s not married to the ‘odious Italian,’ as Agatha calls him? You met him in Stratford. The one with fangs.”
“Yes.” There was no point in rushing Melrose Plant, who would lie there like a boulder until he’d had his tea.
“You’re a fount of curiosity, aren’t you? She won’t tell me. I don’t think she’s going to marry him.”
A knock on the door brought a pretty between-stairs maid with a tray. Seeing two of them where she expected one, she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I’ll just get another cup.”
Jury moved away from the french window and took the tray and smiled at her. “Don’t trouble yourself. Mr. Plant doesn’t need one.”
The girl looked up at him — it was a distance — and she couldn’t seem to help her hand straying up to her white cap. She smiled. “Very well, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Said Melrose Plant, after she’d scuttled away, “Funny. Give me my tray.”
“Sure. And ten minutes to drink your damned tea.” Jury picked a slice of toast from the silver rack and munched it, leaning against the window.
Having drunk his tea in testy, morose silence, Plant put down his cup and looked at Jury. “Jerusalem Inn. Is that what you said? For Lord’s sakes, it doesn’t open until eleven.”
“I know. But Robbie’ll be there. He cleans the place.”
“Robbie? Robbie who?”
“Robin Lyte, the one Helen Minton must have been looking for. I think he was her son. Well, it must have been a shock, mustn’t it?” Jury looked across the snow to the chapel and still wondered about the fourth letter.
TWENTY
1
THE little village of Spinneyton, perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, was sleeping in; not a soul did they see save for one grimy child building an equally grimy snowman that listed sadly in front of a falling-down terraced house, as if trying to match the house’s bout with gravity.
Spinney Moor was desolate and veiled in mist, remnants of which floated away and across the road leaving rents in the diaphanous cloth of the fog.
Looking at this bleakness, Tommy shivered and said, “I’m glad to come along, but what good will my talking to Robbie do?”
“Well, you said you were teaching him the game, and I imagine he trusts you. Maybe he remembers more than he thinks he does. Maybe he’ll tell you,” said Jury.
“I doubt it. Poor Robbie . . . ” Once more he looked out at the moor, and said, “Looks haunted, doesn’t it?”
“Probably is,” said Melrose, sleepily, from the back seat.
“Still as the grave,” said Tommy.
“The village is probably empty because they’ve all gone down in the peat bogs. Bloated corpses will rise from the bogs, stalk about greenly and strangle us all in our sleep. As long as they get Agatha, I won’t complain.”
“You’re in a jolly old mood, aren’t you?” said Jury, as he braked in the courtyard of the Jerusalem. A slant of sunlight dazzled the snow that was lying so neatly on roof and eaves they looked iced like a wedding cake. Frost shone like separate stars on the mullioned panes, behind which Robbie’s face appeared, distorted by the wavering old glass into something gargoyle-like. When Jury knocked, the face disappeared for some time before he finally opened the door.
“Hullo, Robbie,” said Jury. “I know it’s not opening hours yet, but we need to talk with the Hornsbys. Police business, see.” Jury showed him his warrant card and said to the slightly scared look, “Just routine stuff, Robbie.”
The brown hair, which the boy shoved up from his forehead, the pale brown eyes, the face, which before Jury had seen nothing in, perhaps because it was malleable, like putty — in it now Jury thought (or did he merely imagine it?) traces of Helen, like a face floating under water.
Nell Hornsby appeared through the curtained alcove at the rear of the bar. “Well, hullo! Something wrong?”
“Nothing w
rong, no. I just wondered if I could have a word with you.”
“Aye. I’ll just be getting Chrissie’s porridge.” She disappeared through the curtain.
Robbie — big, rawboned, clumsy —went on slowly sweeping. Robin . . . a common alias for the criminal, the outcast, the disenfranchised. Jury saw his face brighten up a bit when Tommy said something to him about playing a frame.
Lighting a cigar, Melrose said, “What’s the connection? I mean between this gangly lad and . . . everything else? What’s the connection between your Helen Minton and all of it?”
“Frederick Parmenger, for one thing.”
“Parmenger? Why?”
“I think he’s Robbie’s father. According to a servant who’s been with the Parmengers for years, Edward Parmenger went wild over Helen’s pregnancy. He must have known, you see. And he didn’t like the idea of his son and Helen —”
“That’s not surprising. At their age, and in the circumstances. One does tend to bridle a bit when one finds one’s charge in a family way.”
“If one had a way of seeing everything in a totally Victorian way. But this isn’t the turn of the century we’re talking about. And why then — I mean, later on — this attack of conscience where Edward leaves Helen the house, instead of leaving it to his own son? First he wants to get rid of Helen; next, he pulls her back. I think it’s pretty strange.”
Nell came back to the bar. “There now. What are you wanting?”
“Old Peculier,” said Melrose, slapping down a pound note on the slick surface.
She looked confused. “It’s not opening time yet; afraid I can’t give you drink . . . that is, unless —” She looked at Jury.
“I’ll turn a blind eye to the licensing laws.” She drew off the dark ale for Melrose.
“Tell me about Robbie.”
She stopped suddenly in the act of wiping dripping foam from the glass. “Robbie? What about him?”
Jury smiled, offered her a cigarette. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.”
The smile seemed to stop her briefly in the act of lighting up, and she colored a little. “Aye. Well, he started working for us, for his keep. His meals, I mean, and some pocket money. Poor boy. Came here when he left school, like I told you. And he’s such a good lad. So we took him in. He lives with us, now.”
“Bonaventure School?”
“Aye.”
“There’s a Robert Lyte buried in the cemetery of the Catholic church in Washington. Could that have been some relation?”
Early as it was, Nell Hornsby didn’t say no to a drink. As she turned to the optics, she said, “Robert? Well, it could be. I don’t know. But why’re you so on to Robbie? Done something wrong? Not him, I can’t believe it.”
“No, of course not.”
• • •
Melrose, the Old Peculier having coaxed him into a better humor, let Jury have his talk with Nell Hornsby as he himself wandered into the cold back room to watch Tommy Whittaker and Robbie. Robbie held his cue stick with much of the same awkwardness as he had held his broom, but with a great deal more delight. Tommy made a safety shot, leaving a long shot on the red for Robbie. Not too easy; not too hard. Robbie missed.
Tommy was too good a player not to lose sight of everything else, and that meant Robbie, at least for the moment. He potted the red with just enough topspin to bring it back in a perfect position to pot the black.
Melrose was concentrating on Tommy’s play, when a voice at his elbow said, “He should just hit the black one.”
He looked off and around and could not find the source of the voice until he looked down. The owner was holding a doll almost as big as she was. A child. He bounced a glance with plenty of reverse spin off the little girl, hoping she’d go away.
Not only did she not go away, she insisted upon her point. “Why doesn’t he just hit the black one, instead of doing it with that white one, if that’s the one he wants to get rid of?” She frowned at Melrose, as if he were responsible for this ridiculous going-the-long-way-round.
Melrose considered. She couldn’t be more than five or six and here she was with her huge dumb doll, rewriting the rules. “Because” — acid dripped from the syllable — “there are rules. Run along, now, and dress your doll.”
“She is dressed,” said the little girl, who apparently took his comment as an invitation to join him and slid herself up on the bench, adding, inscrutably, “or he is.” Her look at the doll was doubtful.
He tried to watch Tommy’s play, but could only revile himself for adding that comment about the doll. She had scouted out interest; she would take full advantage of it.
“Her dress is pretty, isn’t it?”
Despite the sweetness of the voice and the bare glimpse he had got of luminous eyes, Melrose was not falling for her. He kept his eyes on Tommy’s cue stick — Robbie had stood back, forgotten like a broken-armed statue in a formal garden — and refrained from answering.
“The swaddling clothes underneath make him bunchy.”
If he could stand Agatha’s non sequiturs, Melrose thought, he could certainly deal with this smaller and, admittedly, far more attractive version. “I am confused,” he admitted freely, lighting another cigar, hoping nicotine would deliver him from a brain swimming in the currents of early-morning Old Peculier. “I thought the doll was a girl-child.”
“She is,” said Jury, who had come in from his talk with Nell and with a pint of her best bitter. He sat down on the hard bench, thus pressing the little girl closer to Melrose. “Her name’s Alice.”
“Tell me, Alice. Why is there this confusion about your doll?”
The brown eyes regarded him with total disgust: “Not me! Her!” She shoved the doll in his face and then added in her cryptic way: “Or him. I’m Chrissie.”
Making a break of 147 would have been nothing compared with understanding Chrissie. Her mother really should tell her the difference between the sexes, he thought, settling back to watch the Wunderkind run a break up to fifty before he seemed to realize he had forgotten his friend, Robbie. Tom missed an easy shot (quite deliberately) and then stood back so Robbie could have a go. Robbie missed an easier. They were now lighting up cigarettes from the packet Tommy had cadged from Jury. They were talking, or, at least, Tom was having a sort of one-sided chat with his friend.
“Whatever do you expect to learn?” asked Melrose of Jury, as Chrissie began removing her doll’s dress with no regard for modesty.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how much he remembers about Danielle Lyte. She died years ago, according to a friend of Helen Minton’s.”
The doll, Melrose saw, was wrapped in what looked like torn-up strips of sheeting. Probably she meant it to be underclothes. Chrissie set about neatening the strips.
“I still don’t see the connection with the murders. Even supposing he is the son of —” Melrose looked down at Chrissie, always operating under the assumption that children heard everything and filed it away to blackmail you with at some later date, and said, circumspectly, “ — you know, those two. Assuming he is,” — Melrose’s head inclined toward Robbie — “why would she have to die for it?”
“Maybe she was just bad,” said Chrissie.
He knew she had been sitting there absorbing every word. “When I want your opinion, I shall ask for it,” said Melrose, pretending not to notice the small tongue suddenly stuck out in his direction. Her limpid brown gaze turned to Jury. “I guess I’ll have to put him back.”
Jury nodded. “You really ought. Mary and Joseph probably miss him.”
Mary and Joseph? Melrose refused to have anything to do with this runic conversation. Chrissie took up the doll and pushed past Jury and ran out of the room.
“I’ve got to go to Newcastle Station to collect Wiggins. Care to come along?”
“Sergeant Wiggins! Up here in the frozen North? Does he realize what he’s headed for?”
“Afraid so, yes.”
Tommy came up to their table a
nd handed Melrose a cue stick from the rack. “Why don’t you have a go? You might stand a chance.”
“Thank you very much,” said Melrose, icily, taking the stick and going over to the table.
“He doesn’t really remember much about his mother. She died when he was pretty young, he’s not even sure how young. He has a picture —”
“I’ve seen it.”
“He’s very vague about it all.” Tommy looked sad and sighted down his cue. “I suppose I should consider myself lucky.” His tone was doubtful, though.
“It’s not a case of ‘should,’ is it?”
“The trouble is I’m the last Marquess of Meares, unless I get married and have children. I think Aunt Betsy’s already got her eyes on the daughter of a duke — one of them. It doesn’t make any difference; they all look like trolls. But I shouldn’t complain. No one tells me what to do except for Aunt Betsy and fourteen solicitors.” There was no irony in his tone. “So you might say I’ve plenty of freedom to do what I want.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like you’ve got all that much.”
He defended his aunt: “You can’t blame her. I’m already disgracing the family name at St. Jude’s Grange by failing everything except Mesopotamia, which doesn’t come up all that often, anyway. I cut tutorials to play snooker and I’m hoping if they think I’m stupid, they’ll let me off. Otherwise, I’m sunk. It’ll be Christ Church College — that’s where people like me end up —”
Jury laughed. “You make it sound like the high-security lock-up outside Durham.”
Tom balanced the cue stick on the palm of his hand. Perfect control. “Oxford is such a gritty old town. All they have is bookstores and haberdasheries where they sell scarves with the school colors and I’ll probably be expected to try for a rowing Blue. I loathe rowing. There isn’t a pool hall in the whole damned place. I’ve looked.”
“You’re going to drop that stick if you’re not careful.” Jury pocketed his cigarettes and checked the time.
“Me? I don’t drop things. Do you know Aunt Betsy’s told the butler to keep the billiard room stuff locked up? The way some people would lock up the liquor if they had a flaming drunk in the family.”
Jerusalem Inn Page 19