The Old Silent

going under that name.' He flashed Jury a smile. 'Find one. Find one that isn't tarted up with something in the name that's to make you think you're heading for the end of the rainbow. So I suggested calling it Holy Grail. You know, I honestly think they'd have bought it. Anyway, Mavis is good at her job; she's been thirty years in the business. I leave her alone.'

The implication was that he was happy to have Mavis leave himalone. 'Is she here today?'

Again Smart's eyes lifted to the ornamental ceiling as he shook his head. 'I told her she could work at home whenever she wanted. Naturally, she travelures a lot of the time. She's big on Africa. Kenya. So forth. Her husband was a safari nut. She lives somewhere near Kensington Gardens. Old Alice can give you the address. Hold it.' Smart hit the intercom, got old Alice, and scribbled down the information. 'Here.' He handed the address to Jury. Then he sat scratching his fingers through his hair, hard, making a spiky, stand-up mess of it. It appeared to be his way of reducing stress, something like Churchill and his ten-minute naps. 'Since it's clear that the wife murdered him, why are you here? I don't understand.'

'Just trying to tie up a few loose ends.'

'Having to do with Roger?'

'Not only Mr. Healey.'

'Pretty soon you're going to say 'routine investigation, sir.' The papers made a big thing out of the kidnapping of those boys all that time ago.'

Jury nodded.

'Does that tie in?'

'I don't know.'

'You're a mine of information.' Smart washed the sea of papers about for no apparent reason. 'You should work on one of these rags we publish.'

'Everyone liked Roger Healey, then?'

Martin Smart gave Jury a sharp look. 'Far as I know. Shouldn't we have done?'

'Of course. It's just that a person who's universally liked…' Jury shrugged.

'A cynic, too.' The trick smile showed itself again. 'I know what you mean, but I don't know what you're up to. I wouldn't say universallyliked. There's probably a few concert musicians who could have flayed him, I don't know. The thing about his reviews, though, is they weren't laced with stings and arrows. Edgy, sometimes.' He started gathering up papers and stacking them neatly, then stopped and dealt them out as if they were playing poker. 'Of course, there's Duckworth.'

'Duckworth?'

'Morry. He's American. Rhythm and blues, straight blues, heavy metal, reggae, New Wave, that stuff. They call it rock and roll.'

'He doesn't-didn't like Roger Healey?'

'Means little. Duckworth doesn't like anyone. Except me. I found him glued to his earphones in the Village-New York City. Let me tell you, it took a lot to lure him over here. I hate that effing word. I only toss him out because you're clearly determined to find someonewho didn't like Roger. Sounds a bit biased, if you don't mind my saying so. But I'm sure the Met has reasons the mind will never know. Here's Duckworth's number.' Again, he handed Jury a scrap of paper, torn from a letter from the chairman of the board, Jury noticed when he looked at it. 'It's probably a prison cell.'

'The Met appreciates your help. Could I have a look at some old issues of Segue?'

'Healey's reviews? Of course.' Smart hit the intercom again, spoke to his secretary, then leaned back with his hands laced behind his head. 'Superintendent, what are you looking for?'

Jury pocketed his notebook, rose, thanked Martin Smart, and said, 'Nothing in particular.'

'You really should work here.'

Jury turned to go, turned back. 'Would you mind if my sergeant came round in a day or two to talk to some of your staff?'

Smart gazed again at the ceiling. 'Hell, no. Send the Dirty Squad for all I care. Liven the place up.' He screwed up his face. 'Why the hell would she kill him?' He looked at Jury. 'Maybe they were having a bit of trouble?' His expression was perfectly serious.

'I expect you could say that.' Jury said good-bye.

***

Jury could not quite believe the interior of this house off Kensington Gardens, near Rotten Row. From the outside, it was just another narrow, Georgian building, with its yellow door and dolphin-shaped brass knocker.

But the inside seemed to stretch endlessly and cavernously to this room in which he now sat with Mavis Crewes, a room that seemed part solarium, part enormous floor-to-ceiling aviary full of bird plumage, bird twitter, bird greenery. A tiny, bright eye, opening and closing like a pod, regarded him through the fronds of several palmettos.

Nor was it the only greenery, for round about the room were set tubs of plants, some treelike and overhanging; some tough and flat-leaved; some feathery and ferny; but all suggesting jungle heat and dust. This was further enhanced by the near-life-sized ceramic leopard looking slant-eyed out of the rubber plants, and by the boar's head, open-mouthed and glaring glassily from the wall to Jury's right. Behind him sat a gun case; his feet were trying to miss contact with the zebra rug beneath the table carved from a tree her last husband had carted back from Nosy- Be. A tree (Mavis Crewes had told him) that wasfady-taboo. Her husband wasn't superstitious.

He was also dead. Jury wondered from what.

Jury and Mavis Crewes sat in this solarium, surrounded by strange exotic plants, grass shields, spears, and Ibo masks, drinking coffee and Evian water with a cut-glass carafe of whiskey standing by as a fortifier.

Jury kept trying to wave away the thin stems of a hanging bougainvillea. The surroundings that he himself found suffocating, Mavis Crewes apparently found soothing and restful. Between little spasms of speech, the breakings off partly the result of talking of Roger Healey's death, but also partly her own natural abruptness. A tiger's eye stone glinted on the hand that fingered a petal here, a leaf there. There was a chunky diamond on the finger of the hand slowly twisting the glass of Evian water that helped in what Jury imagined to be her campaign to stay travel-thin.

He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped down to forty. The latest fashion (Jury knew from glancing into various Regent Street shops) was the safari look: desert colors or camouflage greens, loose shirts and skirts with low, heavy belts, nothing he could imagine any woman found flattering. She wore a bush jacket over a sand-colored shirt and Hermes boots.

In this environment, and with her thin, slightly muscular look, all of that fitted Mavis Crewes rather perfectly. Except, of course, that they didn't resemble mourning, something she had brought up at the beginning of their interview. She hadn't anything black, you see, and she hardly thought it the time for a shopping spree, given the death of her 'dear, old friend.' If she thought mourning clothes appropriate two weeks after his death, she must have meant to imply he had been very dear indeed. With her swept-back, pale blond hair, he wondered if perhaps she knew black didn't show her to any advantage. The eyes he had thought at first to be black were a murky jungle green.

After the divorce of the first and the death of the second husband, she had stuck her thumb in the pie again and apparently pulled out the biggest plum thus far, Sir Robert Crewes, safari buff, a Knight of the Royal Victoria Order, higher than the OBE her cousin had managed to reel in. Mavis Crewes was very impressed by the title, though knighthoods abounded among civil servants, members of the Royal household, and the foreign service. It was peppered with them probably as a reward for one's going off somewhere (anywhere) to represent the country.

It was not that Jury doubted that Mavis Crewes's grief was genuine; it was just that he wondered how deeply she felt about anything-except, perhaps, the venomous anger for Healey's wife. Although she seemed to refuse to acknowledge her as such: 'that woman' was the phrase she used when speaking of Nell Healey.