The Old Silent

16

The Old Silent sat just off the Stanbury road, surrounded by moorland. Across the blackened heath dry-stone walls ran off to remote hills marked by low witch-shaped and wind-blasted trees. Melrose had never seen a gaunter landscape by day or by night. Coming upon the inn over a dip in the road, he thought it wore the truncated, free- floating look of the courtyard he had just left.

When he pulled into the car park, he saw the Old Silent in a more normal light: a well-tended, whitewashed and black-timbered building with a courtyard for tables in better weather. Closed for the twenty-four hours following its unlikely venue as a crime scene, it had now, he imagined, gained in celebrity for that same reason. The car park was choked at nearly ten o'clock. He saw through the amber-lit windows the customers crowding the public bar.

Inside was warmth and a quick return to normality after the scene he had left. Melrose took his drink through to a lounge with a fine stone fireplace over which hung a painting of the inn and in front of which sat one of those high-backed sedan chairs. A porter's chair. He had always wanted to hold court in one and waited for the black cat, the chair's present occupant, to move. The cat had other ideas.

While he waited for Jury, he moved about the lounge and looked above flickering lights and little shaded lamps at pictures and brass ornaments and an account of the origin of the Old Silent's name. Melrose sighed. It was one of those Bonnie Prince Charlie tales. The inn was yet another of those historic places that had offered Charlie refuge and (in this case) the 'silence' of the locals. Given all the stopovers the Young Pretender had made, Melrose wondered how he ever got to his destination. He'd certainly clocked up a lot of traveling time. Melrose closed his eyes and imagined the prince traveling with Agatha. The Old Silent would have gone nameless…

'You always sleep on your feet?'

He knew it was Jury, but he didn't open his eyes. 'I was thinking of Agatha.' He felt the hand clasp on his shoulder.

'No wonder.'

They had studied the menu and decided upon Pike in a Blanket.

'Because I am enamored of the name,' said Melrose Plant to Richard Jury. 'I picture the pike,' continued Melrose, 'tucked in a little woolly square with a safety pin.'

Over a plate of oxtail soup Melrose finished telling Jury the events of the day, and was surprised that in the telling of it, all of those events had indeed taken place in one day. 'To think that only this morning I was having coffee in Harrogate with Agatha and friend. Of course, Agatha does have a certain lunar quality. Distant howlings in the woods behind Ardry End…'

'This soup is great,' said Jury, smacking the pepper shaker all around it.

' 'This soup is great,'' repeated Melrose with a sigh. 'The only person I know who has a more poetical turn of mind than you is Divisional Commander Macalvie. I expect while you were hanging round the Citrine place and I was being vastly entertained at Weavers Hall, Macalvie solved at least three cases.'

'Four,' said Jury, holding up his fingers. 'One battery, one murder, two break-ins. I'm going to Cornwall; I want to have a look round the Citrine property.'

'You think the answer is there?'

'I think the question is there.'

'You sound like Gertrude Stein. Policework is surely more straightforward than that.'

'Straightforward?' Jury shook his head. 'I only mean I have the feeling the wrong questions are being asked. But that's nothing new. You said this George Porges-'

'Poges.'

'If Major Poges likes to walk, why don't you walk with him? Might learn something.' Jury looked up from his bread roll.

'Because it's exercise. I don't mind the sort of exercise that's a means to an end, such as cycling along to the Jack and Hammer; I just dislike the sort that appears to be an end in itself. I saw today, running along the Pennine way, a jogger. This one was in flaming red, neonred. Now, I ask you: three of the gloomiest minds in literature, bless them, set their accounts of despair, desolation, broken hearts, on these moors. Bleak as mines, barren, rocky. How dare someone in flaming red jog across them? She was probably carrying a piece of natural grain bread and a bottle of Perrier for weights. So what do you do, Richard? Running? Racquetball? Ten laps round Nelson's column?'

'Nothing. Of course, I think about it-'

Melrose pointed a finger at him. 'Ah! You see, we both follow in the true tradition. We are men who think about exercise. That, Jury, is a lost way of life. Even Trueblood has a rowing machine in his den.'

'That's just to get a rise out of you; Trueblood's not so stupid he'd use the damned thing.' Jury looked round. 'Where's that fish in blankets? I can hardly wait.'

'But I can see,' continued Melrose, his thoughts on Long Piddleton, 'that it's moving in. Oh, we have no joggers yet; but I had a look-in at the post office stores. Where I used to see Weetabix I now see fruit-almond- coconut-pasha-wheat-germ cereal. It's the hound at our heels-all of this jogging and eating goat's milk cheese- when one could have a succulent piece of Stilton and a glass of Cockburn's port-it's all part of upward mobility. If I have to be mobile, I want it to be lateral.'

'So do I,' said Jury. 'Here comes our waitress.'

She set their plates before them. The 'blanket' turned out to be parchment. Steam had ballooned its glazed surface and the waitress held her sharp shears over Melrose's portion. The waitress Sally slit the crisp steam-filled parchment and released an aromatic mix of wine and herbs and garlic and (Sally whispered) a bit of brandy. It would have cleared the nostrils of even the most intractable sinus sufferer.

'This would keep your sergeant out of doctors' offices for the next ten years,' said Melrose.

'It smells absolutely wonderful, Sally,' said Jury, with an equally wonderful smile.

She turned quickly and rushed off, the kitchen door swinging shut behind her.

'Nell Healey was a friend of this Ann Denholme?' asked Jury, after a few moments of solemn eating.

'I'm only telling you what Major Poges and the Princess said. Perhaps they got it from the moribund Ruby, I don't know. Or perhaps Ann Denholme mentioned it; I would imagine all of the publicity would have had the whole of Weavers Hall talking.' Melrose raised a spoonful of the fish liquor to his mouth. 'The only thing this lacks is a soupcon of Old Peculier. It's rather good; it's rather pleasant to have your before-dinner sherry, your dinner, your after-dinner brandy all wrapped up in parchment. Saves a great deal of time.'

Jury had nearly finished his meal. 'Go on about the Hall.'

'It's like a minstrel show. 'Tamara,' pardon me, Tamaw-a,' what a pseudonym. From New Yawk.' He put down his spoon. 'Except…'

'Except what?'

Melrose shrugged. 'The place is eerie…' He started to say something else, didn't know what he wanted to say, and shrugged again. 'I don't know. 'Eerie' is the wrong word. I don't know the right one. Uncanny? No.' There was a return of the anxiety Melrose had felt when he had stood in the courtyard lighting a cigarette for the sake of the flame.

'Don't worry about the right word. What was the feeling?' Jury pushed his plate away.

'Must you look so intense? I've given you a running account of the last three fun-filled hours at Weavers Hall.' Melrose described the scene.

'The details might not be as important as their effect on you.'

'You, a superintendent of police saying details might not be important? You want feelings?'

'Why don't you just say the first thing that comes to mind?'

'Tristesse,' said Melrose. 'Obscure,' he added. 'A gulf, a sadness, an obsessive sadness.'

Jury pushed back his plate, folded his arms, and thought of Nell Healey.