The Old Silent

smile Jury imagined endeared him to a lot of people, 'I shouldn't be talking to you at all.'

'It can't hurt her, can it, in the circumstances?'

Her father shook his head. 'I expect not. Sometimes I wonder if she ever had very strong feelings for Roger.'

'Oh, she must have.'

'Because she married him?'

Said Jury dryly, 'Because she shot him. You say all of this is 'beyond you,' Mr. Citrine. But you can't have known them both for so many years and not theorized about the reasons behind her killing her husband.'

He had got his pipe going again and the smoke curled away in a cold draft that touched Jury's neck, probably from the rattling pane at the end of the room. 'Well, there was Billy, Roger's son. Do you know about that?'

Jury nodded. 'And the Holt boy. Still, that was a long time ago.'

'Yes. The poor Holts. But he was adopted, I think.'

Roger's son. And Toby, but he was adopted. Blood ran very thick and water very thin around here. 'To a mother, it could have been yesterday.'

'The real mother died in an accident when Billy was a baby. Nell was his stepmother.'

There it was again.

Why was everyone so determined to point this out? That Nell Healey could only have some diluted measure of a real mother's feelings, the water that could never be as thick as blood? 'Let's assume that it did have to do with that kidnapping eight years ago-' Citrine started to object, but Jury forestalled this. 'We're just speculating. What could have happened that might have built up over those years in your daughter's mind?'

'You mean, that the ransom wasn't paid?'

Jury waited.

'Surely, if she wanted revenge because we refused-' Citrine made a helpless gesture.

'By 'we,' you mean Roger Healey and you.'

'We were only taking the advice of the police, Superintendent.'

As Citrine shifted in his chair, Jury's eye was drawn to the tiny spider that plummeted, from its fluttering contact with the leg, nearly to the floor on its silky life line. Jury had never before known a family of such shaky relationships. Blood bonds seemed absent, or appeared tenuous at best. At worst, easily broken.

Citrine didn't know, of course, that Jury was aware it was Nell Healey's money, and Nell who had refused to pay up. The only ones who knew this, as far as Charles Citrine was aware, were himself, Roger Healey, Nell, the Lloyd's banker, and the superintendent in charge. The police sergeant Citrine may even have forgotten: Brian Macalvie

8

On the other side of the winch, a passageway through the main gate used to give easier access to foot passengers, Jury found the small door to the tower. Above the door on an ironwork standard was a bell from which a string dangled. He pulled it; the bell jangled; in a moment he heard a buzzing sound. Jury looked uncertainly at the door for a while, unable to place the source of the sound. Silence. He pulled the bell cord again, and again there was the same buzz. Then assuming there was some setup here like the security system in a London townhouse comprised of flats, he pulled at the big iron ring. The door opened.

It opened on near-total darkness. The weak light from lamp niches cast Jury's shadow in grotesque, fun-house shapes as he moved upward and around on the stone steps. Thank God, he thought, he didn't suffer from vertigo, or halfway up he'd've been a goner. Round and round he went, stopping once to loosen his tie. He studiously avoided letting his gaze drift to the steps as he felt, rather than saw, something scuttle down them.

Irene Citrine certainly valued her privacy if not her friendships. He was, hard put to imagine her girlfriends giggling up these cold steps to tea and bread and butter sandwiches.

A slant of light suddenly broke across the steps, and from round the bend he heard a voice flute a greeting. 'Sorry about the stairs and the security system,' said Irene Citrine, who more or less filled, in silhouette, the door at the top, 'but you never know who's mucking about out on those damned moors, do you?' She took Jury's hand in a hearty grip and more or less hoisted his six-feet-two frame through the door.

Irene Citrine-who introduced herself as Rena-told him Saint Charles had hit the intercom to tell her Jury was coming and to try to control herself.

'Of course, a little gunplay in the local is small potatoes to the Moors Murders and the Yorkshire Ripper. Still.' As if he were going to protest, she held up her hand and said, 'Sorry, sorry. I'm not all that cold-blooded. Poor Nell is in one hell of a spot, but we'll get round it somehow. Care for a drink?' She swept, in her hibiscus-patterned muumuu, to the other end of the room toward what appeared to be an old pulpit.

Jury took a moment to catch his breath and survey the lighting arrangements. Although a couple of floorlamps splayed cones of light near a sofa, Rena Citrine favored cresset lamps with floating wicks and fat tapers. There were several of these positioned on iron spikes attached to brackets. The oil lamps, though, were lit, and their shadows reached long fingers across the thick oak table.

Against one wall was a medieval bench strewn with brightly colored cushions that didn't do anything toward making it look more sittable. On the facing wall was a fireplace with a joggled lintel and a cornice elaborately carved with a little row of heads, none of them looking less than unspeakably insane. Old lancet windows through which lozenges of light burrowed were inset around the octagonal walls.

A scarred satinwood writing table dominated the room: covering it were papers, manuscripts, stacks of books, a typewriter, an Apple II personal computer with an enormously long cord snaking across the room to some source of electricity Jury couldn't see; ashtrays, each holding a partially smoked cigarette as if each smoke had claimed its own ashtray grave; a welter of bottles; several canvases in oil leaning against the wall; stacks of books, largely popular novels. On the top shelf leaned little framed photos, snapshots of her travels, apparently.

Jury leaned closer to look at the photos; Rena Citrine on a white sand beach in a bikini (there must have been more under that muumuu than one could guess); Rena on some sort of fishing boat; Rena and another woman holding between them a huge fish; several more of Rena in cafes and a club that looked, with its palm fronds, wicker, and partly black combo, like something in the Caribbean. She was crushed between a man and the woman in the fish-picture, all wearing those overly gay, false smiles one does for club photographers. Hung on both sides of the fireplace and on the wall were posters of the warm sands and sunlit seas that must have been the sources of these pictures. Barbados. Bimini.

Just looking at them made Jury feel colder here in this tower. These pictures against the backdrop of this dark medievalism made him wonder if he were in the presence of some apocalyptic cultural collision.

'How about a Tequila Sunrise?'

Jury's head moved round from the pictures. 'A what?'

Rena Citrine was busy with a silver cocktail shaker. 'What'd Charles give you? A glass of cold tea or did he hobble to the well for water?' She rattled the shaker from one side to another.

Jury smiled. 'He offered me coffee, actually.'

'But did it materialize?'

'I didn't want any.'

The liquid from the shaker gurgled into a couple of fluted cocktail glasses. Both of these she brought round from behind the pulpit that served as drinks cabinet and handed one to Jury. The drink was a cloudy pinkish lavender. He sipped; he choked.

She gave his back a good thwack. Rena was stronger than she looked, with those angular shoulders and slim arms.

'Straight from Barbados, this lot is. You can't beat their rum.'

'I wouldn't want to,' he said.

Irene Citrine scooped some papers from one bench and more or less shoved him down on it; then she went round to the other side of the table and sat on the opposite bench, clearing some more papers from the table before her. Through eyes that were tearing from the rum, he looked at her, sitting with her pointy chin resting on her laced hands, staring at him from amber eyes whose irises were wedge shaped, cat's eyes. She had narrow shoulders,