Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent Page 7

  Melrose was fascinated, not by the book (which could only be appreciated by a blind man), but by its intrepid author and her prodigious imagination: it did not take wings and soar; it just bulldozed everything in its path, spewing up concrete and gravel and clumps of hard earth with no regard at all for the willing suspension of disbelief. Willing or not, Polly couldn't seem to care less:

  Misfortune had been Aubrey's lot ever since the moment in the Gritti Palace when he had first set eyes on the mysterious Orsina Luna. . . .

  Melrose kept his finger as a marker in the manuscript and looked up. The voice-over of his aunt had been sounding all along, rabbiting on about the trip to Harrogate.

  "... a cold luncheon. I think we might take what's left of the Chicken Kiev we're to have for dinner tonight, and perhaps a bottle of muscadet."

  Blackly, Melrose regarded her. "Crubeens, marrow pie, and tripe and onions is what we're having. The chicken's off."

  The last of the maids-of-honor stopped halfway to her mouth. "What are crubeens? Never heard of them."

  "Pig's trotters. Martha does them with an excellent sauce—"

  "Oh, be serious."

  That, unfortunately, was what he was being. The coppery-haired Orsina Luna on the vaporetto had turned his mind quite seriously to thoughts of the coppery-haired Vivian Rivington who soon might be.

  Melrose looked off down the vista. "Let me remind you, Agatha, Vivian isn't married yet." A clap of thunder, a dagger of accompanying lightning obliged Melrose by underscoring this (to Agatha) sinister announcement.

  She fairly jumped, either at the onslaught of noise or the implied threat. /

  Melrose went back to Aubrey, not so easily intimidated.

  . . . Aubrey had thought that his harlequin disguise would have helped him to elude his shadowy pursuers, but he realized, as he neared the Rialto Bridge, that this was not the case. The bell in the campanile sounded its ominous gong. . . .

  Why was it, wondered Melrose, that the bells of St. Rules just made their dissonant metallic clatter rather than bong-ing ominously? Probably because St. Rules overlooked Betty Ball's bakery instead of Saint Mark's Square. As he diligently returned to this dismal chase, the voice of his aunt seeped through:

  ". . . and we decided that the Old Swan is more convenient to the center of things. Besides, it's much nearer the Stray. . . ."

  "Charming place," said Melrose, who didn't know what she was talking about.

  Suppressing the rising feeling of terror, Aubrey pushed his way through the crowd . . .

  "What is keeping Ruthven? Must I sit here all afternoon just to get one or two brandy snaps?"

  "I hope not."

  . . . pushed his way through the Crowd flowing across the bridge. Grotesque masks, powdered and painted faces, costumes of scarlet, orange, blue-licked about like tongues of flame and were reflected grotesquely in the black water of the canal below like some vision of hell. . . .

  "It's so wonderful to have all of those acres of green parkland right in the center of the city; Teddy and I shall be able to walk and talk for hours."

  Talk about a vision of hell, thought Melrose.

  Finally, when they reached the palazzo facing the Grand Canal, the revellers dispersed, flying off in small groups, the trains of the gowns streaming, the capes flowing out. . . .

  Melrose yawned. If he himself felt exhausted from all of this hectic running about and suffocating crush, what must old Aubrey feel? He certainly must be thinking about a place to put his feet up. . . . Ah, there it was, of course. The Gritti Palace. Everyone finally fetched up at the Gritti Palace. He decided to make it a point, if Vivian were really determined to go through with this harebrained marriage and he were invited to the festivities, to look out some ratty old pension and leave the Gritti Palace to Aubrey, who had already passed and made a tortuous journey through "nightmarishly twisting streets" to the Accademia. Here he was in another crush of carnival-revellers.

  He had, thank God, finally escaped. Aubrey ran down the steps where he saw a vaporetto marked for the Lido. It was about to shove off, and he jumped aboard just as the attendant swung the rope to the dock and pushed away.

  Safe.'

  Making his way to the stern, he stopped dead.

  Orsina Luna—mask or no—he was sure it was she whom he had left behind in the palace of the doge.

  As the vaporetto picked up speed, the wind tangled her coppery hair and he looked away. The Grand Canal was a tunnel of darkness. . . .

  Melrose looked up from the page, glad that Agatha had taken herself off in search of cakes and cucumbers. He could not understand how such drivel (pardon me, dear Polly) could touch something in himself. His eye traveled the length of his drawing room, dim and shadowy in the last of the sun, as if it were that Venetian canal that bore Polly's hero along with the copper-haired woman who was going to end up killing the doge in self-defense and marrying Aubrey.

  Well, he was so bored he read the last few pages so that he could give Polly the advantage of some varnished lie about

  her prowess as a mystery writer. She was, really, considerably better than this lot of codswollop demonstrated.

  At least it hadn't yet been published (and Polly probably knew why). Unable to stand it any longer, Melrose flipped the manuscript closed and stuffed it back down between cushion and chair arm, wishing old Aubrey's "sinking feeling" would drop him right in the Grand Canal.

  Unfortunately, as Melrose reached for his sherry he was aware of a hollowness in his stomach as the face of the Signora Orsina Luna with her coppery, wind-tangled hair was suddenly replaced by the face of Vivian Rivington with her coppery, shoulder-length bob.

  ... a sinking feeling was the only way he could describe it.

  Surely such tarnished prose could not call forth something akin to empathy for old Aubrey as he stood poised on the edge of some hectic-

  Oh, for God's sakes, he was beginning to sound like old Aubrey. Or old Polly. Melrose belted back his sherry and slid down in his chair. With both hands he massaged his hair until it stood up in spikes and licks, hoping to work some sense into himself. That was the trouble with all of this maudlin sentiment; it began to suck you in.

  His hand tightened on the leather chair arm as he thought of Aubrey's own hand grasping the metal rail of the vaporetto as he stared into the hazel eyes of the signora . . . No, it was Vivian's that were hazel.

  And then the images of Vivian started flowing past him as if she too had been painted on the pages of a book: Vivian in her twin-set in the Jack and Hammer today; Vivian looking serene and silky in Stratford-upon-Avon; Vivian in a tatty old bathrobe in that country house in Durham; Vivian over tea, over drinks, over dinner-

  His eyes widening as if he'd come upon a houseful of ghosts, Melrose wondered if he had made some dreadful miscalculation. . . .

  "Why on earth are you pulling that long face, Melrose?"

  asked Agatha, who had thumped back into the room carrying her dish of rum balls. "You'd think you lost your last— what's that?"

  The racket made by the brass door knocker was violent enough to make the chandelier shudder.

  "I don't see why these dreadful children can't stick to the village if they must go about playing pranks, nor why you can't have Ruthven stand down there at the driveway entrance and simply turn them away—"

  "Generally, we set out steel-jaw traps," said Melrose, as he heard some commotion and raised voices out in the entrance room and then the deliberate rap, rap, rap of heels across the marble.

  Vivian appeared in the doorway.

  "It's Miss Rivington, sir," Ruthven said with whatever formality he could muster, but as he followed in her wake like a hound brought to heel, the announcement was superfluous.

  Melrose got up quickly, bestowing upon his visitor an absolutely wonderful smile. For once in his life, he believed not in coincidence, but in Destiny. "Vivian!"

  Vivian Rivington stood there in a wet raincoat, her hair a mess of rainsoaked tangles, holdi
ng out a large pasteboard cut-out.

  "Just what in the hell is this?"

  7

  "Wherever you see smokestacks, you know it's shut down," was the cabdriver's brief and bleak commentary on the West Riding mills, once a center of the wool trade. The taxi had dropped him at a car-hire place, and after the sooty valley of Bradford, the monotonous rows of slate rooftops and chimneys marching up and down hills like stairsteps, coming so suddenly upon the open expanse of the moors should have been a grateful escape. Perhaps it was the season; perhaps it was his mood. But Jury saw little to relieve that mood in the endlessness of the moors, the distant hills brown with old bracken and heather, gray with snow and granite.

  The Citrine house sat within its own wood of oak, boxwood trees, and tangled vines on the border of Keighley or Oakworth Moor. It was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The sound of Jury's car lifted pheasant from the dead and nearly knee-high bracken as he drove up the narrow road to the house. He had passed a small stone cottage, perhaps once a caretaker's, but unoccupied now, given the build-up of filmy dirt on its windows. It did not seem the sort of grounds one would bother to "keep up," at any rate. The undergrowth, the dead branches, the moss and vines would simply take over again.

  It was a fitting-enough landscape for such a medieval house, fifteenth, sixteenth century probably. Soot-blackened stone, vaulted porch, ranges of timber windows over archways, a turret at one end and a tower at the other. It was very large and looked very cold. Jury wouldn't have wanted to pay Citrine's heating bills. He wondered if it had been in the family forever; he knew the Citrine money had come from the woolen mills. Well, it was hardly Charles Citrine's fault that synthetics had come along.

  The room into which Jury was led by a woman servant was not a great improvement over the stark medievalism of the facade. It had once been, he imagined, the "great hall," and still retained most of the size and much of the ambience of one. Its vaulted ceiling lent it a strangely cryptlike appearance. Near one end of the room was the large fireplace with a tile surround and copper hood, certainly not the original central hearth. Beyond this was a long entry screen, heavily curtained to cut off drafts and leading, probably, to buttery or dining room and kitchen. The walls were exposed stone sectioned off by wooden beams. Would he find the stone wept moisture if he touched it?

  The furniture was heavy, dark Jacobean. Two baroque and elaborately carved chairs with high backs sat before the fireplace at opposite ends of a long claw-footed refectory table. There were other pieces, a sofa and several easy chairs. On the flagstone floor, oriental carpets were strewn, but their intricate and faded colors did little to add to any overall warmth and life. There were brass and pewter bowls set about full of flowers: mums and Christmas roses. They were sifting their petals onto the surfaces that held them, though, as if they, too, were giving over to the room's wintry look. That relieved this feudalism, but not greatly.

  One thing that did relieve it, though, was an oriel chamber in the right wall, upraised and large enough to contain twin grand pianos. The high-climbing lancet windows that arched about this stagelike little room were beautiful.

  There was music on one of the pianos. The cover of the keys was down over the other.

  Unattended, the fire had burnt low. Why was the room not wanner, in tone if not in temperature? Against the other wall were floor-to-ceiling bookcases in recessed alcoves, and books usually made a room look tenanted, he thought. But these bookshelves seemed to have no arrangement, the books and magazines stacked or merely tossed there without any particular notice, like afterthoughts. Between the shelves was a window seat beneath a high window whose leaded panes should catch the morning sun. He walked over to it and found the view baleful, for it overlooked the downward slope of the moorland hill and the derelict farm, its longhouse, its barns studding the land like empty shells. The only life Jury saw was the black-faced sheep, raising their heads from the bracken.

  Charles Citrine shambled into the room—that was the only way Jury could describe it, the sort of careless, shuffling walk the man affected, hands in pockets of baggy corduroy trousers, and wearing a checked woolen shirt beneath a mud-stained denim jacket. From a distance, he had the look of a man who'd been busy in the barn or mucking out a stable; up closer, Jury could see the lines of worry.

  He did not extend his hand and looked at Jury with some suspicion. "Why are you here, Superintendent?"

  "I thought I could help."

  "I can't see how." This was said flatly, without hostility. "None of this makes any sense. Not Roger's death, not Nell's—oh, hell. You might as well sit down. . . . Would you care for coffee?" Citrine sat back in the dark wood chair that had the look of some mythological beast or bird, the feet taloned, the slanted panels ribbed like wings.

  Jury thanked him but shook his head. He would have expected more reserve from Charles Citrine, if not outright hostility toward himself, the person who had actually witnessed his daughter's crime. Nor did he seem to care anymore that Jury had, after all, no business being here. Given that Nell Citrine had made no move to get away, her own resolute silence regarding the circumstances, and her apparent acceptance of what she had done would have made an actual eyewitness to the crime hardly necessary. Her own refusal to deny anything would even have rendered circumstantial evidence unnecessary.

  Thus Jury's own role was far less vital than it might have been. Perhaps Citrine realized this and that explained his attitude.

  Citrine would have been, in any woman's book, a "catch." In his sixties he projected a vitality, a lustiness, even, missing in men half his age. The earthiness born of the land and the casual air he affected born of his work there (though Jury imagined it was more a gentlemanly meddling into the duties of his laborers) were only enhanced by a veneer of sophistication that had come from handling many types of people. In spite of the tensions of the last few days, he had the manner of one almost untouched by the larger world beyond his doorstep. This blend of sophistication, ease, and innocence could be a potent mixture for any woman. Jury wondered if Mavis Crewes had imbibed it. He couldn't imagine the two of them together; Citrine was far more refined and a great deal cleverer.

  This room did not encourage ease of manner. Yet Citrine seemed at ease in it—how could a man look comfortable in that Jacobean monstrosity of a chair?—and yet at odds with it, too. The room, the feudal, armorial look of the house, seemed less Citrine's proper milieu than would some South Sea island. His face was weather-burned from whatever farming life he led, and the sunburnt look lent a further crispness to the gray hair shot through with gold and a further depth to the eyes, which had the clear tint of unruffled water in some island cove. Roll up his trouser legs and shuck his shoes, and he could be a beachcomber, a Crusoe happily marooned.

  His whole placid presence rubbed Jury's nerves raw.

  "Isn't this somewhat irregular, Superintendent? I mean, given you must be the Crown's witness?" The question was more curious than critical, as he regarded Jury with those calm, aquamarine eyes.

  "I wouldn't serve as witness, since there's no question of the right person's being arrested."

  He looked surprised. "I find that odd. You were the one who saw Nell—who saw it happen." Citrine looked down at the burnt logs, little more than embers.

  "Everything I know I told to the West Yorkshire police. Superintendent Sanderson." Not everything. There was really no way to tell it. She went to the parsonage, a tearoom, a child's museum. But how to explain the nuances: the abstracted air, the hand against the glass case of the toy train. And what, precisely, could he say Roger Healey had said or done to provoke such a tragic outcome? Jury had his impressions, that was all. Attitude, aura, evanescence. Sanderson would tell him, with his dry look, that perhaps the Old Silent's black cat was a familiar? To put away his crystal ball.

  "There was the appearance," Jury went on, "of an argument. Of a rather serious disagreement."

  Citrine had removed a pipe from his jacket pock
et, knocked out the old tobacco into an ashtray, and tamped down fresh. He lit up. A fruity-scenting smoke blossomed, uncurled, and dissipated into the cold air. "Given the outcome, I'd say that was probably true," Citrine said dryly and jammed the pipe back in his mouth.

  Jury knew he was being deliberately misunderstood. He said nothing.

  "I have no idea why this happened. Roger was a devoted husband, a fine man. Spent a lot of time in London, of course, because of his work. And I imagine nothing was quite the same since—" He stopped abruptly.

  "If you're talking about your grandson, I know about that. I'm very sorry, Mr. Citrine. I truly am. I'd simply like to know the reason this happened." He tried to smile. "Throw me out any time you feel like it."

  Charles Citrine smiled slightly too. "Look, we'd all like to know the reason. My daughter won't talk about it. We're not . . . especially close. I think she gets on better with my sister than me. If you want to talk to Irene—" He shrugged. "—go ahead."

  "Where would I find her?"

  "In the tower. My sister is not so much eccentric as the sum of a number of affects. One is that I have relegated her to the tower, with the bats." Citrine smiled sourly.

  Jury's own answering smile was half finished, hanging in air like chill in the room. "And your daughter?"

  "I don't know." He studied Jury. "And I don't think it would be a good idea for you to talk to her. I probably shouldn't be talking to you myself; I doubt her solicitors would like it. Who are, as you can imagine, going round the twist on this one. Nell doesn't—" He stopped to get the dead pipe going again. "—care."

  Jury watched him coax the pipe back into life and saw nothing in the man's expression that would suggest that Citrine believed otherwise. Yet, it couldn't be true, this assessment of his daughter's state of mind. Yes, it was possible that one might give up on one's own life, might despair of one's own future. But that could only come about through caring very deeply about things having gone wrong that were once in some sense right.