The Old Silent

' 'Ello, 'andsome,' cried a lavender-haired lady as she grabbed Wiggins's hands and tried to dance him sideways down the car park.

An old man who looked less sturdy than string was squatting down, arms crossed over his chest, doing something that looked more Russian than English. They wore frilled shirts and braces.

Jury smiled and disentangled himself from three wiry ladies determined to drag him into a set as Macalvie was having a fine time with the huge driver with sepia curls who, in the tight trousers that looked from behind like two moons, wasn't having problems with his sexual identity since he clearly didn't care.

Macalvie was shouting like a football coach: 'Now you,' -he shoved a ticket he'd written into the elephant's jacket pocket-'can dance your little toes and tambourines right in that caff and don't even thinkabout coming out until you can walk a straight line on your bloody hands.' He walked over to Jury. 'Get that dedicated look off your face, Jury. We'd've had to stop anyway; Wiggins needs his cuppa.'

'So here's what happened.'

The three were trying to ignore the''ello, luvs,' the waves, the brandishing of paper napkins from the long table with its speckled-blue Formica top on the other side of the cafe.

Three coffees to go was not Sergeant Wiggins's idea of a proper tea-break, to say nothing of a meal; he had time only to snatch a Kit-Kat before they were out in the fog again, slamming the car doors, Macalvie splashing the coffees with a burst of acceleration.

With the divisional commander, there were never any qualifiers: no Ithink's; no a possible theory might be's; no in my opinion's. Jury shook the hot coffee from his hand and let Macalvie go on, despite the fact they'd got halfway across Devon and still no mention of the police photos of the skeleton.

'So here's what happened. Billy Healey goes into the house to make his tea-tea for Billy and Toby consisting of a couple of loaves of bread and ten pots, according to Mum.' Macalvie smiled slightly, as if he were one of the family or, at least, a distant relative. 'So he's in the kitchen with his dog, Gnasher. He's got the kettle on the hob, he's sawing the bread in slabs, spreading it with an inch of currant jam, milk out for Toby, and butter-' Macalvie veered into the outside lane.

Said Wiggins, looking longingly behind him as another cafe receded in the highway mist, as the car advanced on the turnoff signposted for Ashburton, 'It's amazing you remember these things. I mean about the currant jam, and so forth. You might as well have been there.'

Macalvie couldn't have agreed more. 'Too bad for Devon-Cornwall I wasn't. By the time I managed to get to the house, it was clean. That whole kitchen-not to say the rest of the house-should have been gone over on hands and knees.'

'I agree,' said Jury. 'Go on.'

'Nell Healey said even the vitamins were lined up: calcium, C, A, whatever. That was the place I thought she was going to break down. She was always nagging Billy to take calcium because he was violently allergic to milk. And she thought like most kids he was fibbing when he said, sure, he'd taken them. But they were lined up in a row.'

They were in Wiggins-territory now-not Ashburton, but allergies. He crossed his arms over the front seat. 'It can play hell with a person; I should know.'

Jury had lowered the window and was tossing the undrinkable coffee from the paper cup. 'You're not allergic to milk, Wiggins.' He turned to see Wiggins take a brown bottle from his coat pocket dispensary.

'One-a-Day.' He washed the capsule down with his coffee. 'It's especially important when you can't stop for a proper meal. Which happens all the time.' The tone was dark.

'Yeah. Well, obviously something interrupted Billy Healey's little meal eight years ago,' said Macalvie. 'Someone walked in and surprised Billy. And the someone got a little surprise himself when Toby came in from wherever he was for his tea.'

'He could have been in the kitchen, too.'

'No. They took photos.' Macalvie's tone was grudging. 'The slice of bread with the jam had been half eaten; the bread with the butter hadn't been touched. Neither had the second cup of tea. So Billy starts the tea-making and probably tells Toby, wherever Toby might have been, and within, say, that fifteen or twenty minutes someone comes in the kitchen door. The kitchen was at the back facing the dirt road. It was someone Billy Healey knew.'

'That's a hell of an assumption, Macalvie.'

'Then you haven't been paying attention-well, what's this, then?'

A sable-brown car flew by in the inside lane. It must have been doing a hundred.

Jury winced. 'Macalvie, that's a Jag. It's an XJSC, V-twelve engine. Top of the line. We're in a bottom-line Ford V-eight and you're not going to catch-' Jury's words were lost on the wind as Macalvie hit the accelerator.

20

1

The cottage was half-buried in long grass and weeds; the garden looked more in need of harvesting than pruning and surrounded a small, square, cream-washed house that looked as if it were more functional than livable. It only needed a neon sign or big letters to pass for one of the motorway cafes.

A tall, thin, quarrelsome-looking girl opened the door to Macalvie's fist-pounding. Jury would have thought he was raiding the place rather than visiting it.

The girl's sallow frown looked cast in bronze and her unfocused brown eyes were set in deep sockets. She had a dishcloth over her shoulder and was lugging a Hoover. She informed them the perfesser was having his evening meal and they could go on back. With the handle of the Hoover she pointed, more or less, to a room at the rear and then went off.

Dennis Dench was eating quail and salad, washed down with a half bottle of white wine.

Each tiny bone had been placed in a bone dish, not haphazardly, but rather with attention to the underlying structure of the small fowl. After greeting Macalvie, who made an unconvincing apology for disturbing Dr. Dench's meal, Dench went back to the quail. He did not gnaw at the leg bone, but chewed the slivers of meat carefully.

He greeted Jury, and, once up, put his napkin down.

Dennis Dench took one last sip of wine and said, 'Hullo, Brian. They're not the Healey boy's remains.'

As they left the dining room, Dench looked back over his narrow, sloping shoulder at Macalvie. 'You should know that; I've told you half a dozen times.'

'Oh, sure.' It was Macalvie's deadpan tone, the one he used when he wasn't going to argue a point.

They passed down a cheerlessly white, though well-lit hall toward a door at the end, and Jury paused to look at a large print that supplied about the only color in the house he had seen thus far. It would have to be an O'Keeffe, the one of the cow's skull.

'Nice, that,' said Dennis, coming back to stand by Jury. He fiddled with his thick glasses as if they were an out-of-focus microscope. 'Very good.' He stepped back a bit, cocked his head, frowned slightly. 'Well… as good as a painter could get in that particular line.'

The basement laboratory was no more antiseptic than the rest of the house, although it was considerably more interesting. It had not an O'Keeffe but a Daliesque quality in its display of bones, leathered skin, objects floating in large jars -all less horrific than surreal. There were two skeletons in full bloom, if the bright red carnation between the ribs of one and the daisy chain round the collarbone of the other were an indication.