The Old Silent

Heaven.'

'And Page's guitar. That bow work is cosmic, cosmic. I don't go at all for the noodlers, Edward, Yngwie, those guys.'

Noodlers?

'Oh, I can't agree with you there, not at all. You can't call them just speed freaks. Yngwie's got progressions as classical as they come,' said Wiggins.

Yngwie? Edward? Were all fans on a first-name basis with their idols? 'What about Charlie?' asked Jury.

Again, Macalvie twisted round. 'Charlie who?'

Jury sighed. 'Raine. Don't you keep up with the current scene?'

'You talking about that group that's in London? I've got something here.'

To Jury's dismay he took his hand off the wheel to scrabble amongst his tapes, slid one in. A voice, clear as the frozen night, was in the middle of a song.

… sky

was blue above

the trees

but only for a while

It sounded to Jury as if it were going the way of Elvis's bright summer day. The light gave way to darkness, summer to winter, stone walls to the ravages of time, cliffs to the lashing of waves. It reminded Jury, in some way, of the clair-voyee.

I watch the streetlamp

Down below

I watch you turn

I watch you go-

'Well, well, well,' said Macalvie, killing the tape as a low-slung sporty number shrieked past the Ford on this otherwise deserted stretch of road.

Wiggins was thrown back as Macalvie accelerated.

Jury sighed.

3

The Citrine house was stark white against the sky and a hundred feet or so from a cliff along a solitary stretch of the Cornwall coast. A frozen gullied road was not meant to encourage visitors. Nell Citrine Healey had been the only one who had used it; she must have liked her privacy. It was privacy, Jury thought morosely, that had worked against her.

The rear of the house faced the end of the dirt road. They went in through the kitchen door, unlocked, unbolted.

'Doesn't anyone bother to lock up?' asked Wiggins.

'She probably thought there wasn't anything of value left to take,' said Macalvie.

Wiggins looked away.

They stood in the big kitchen with Macalvie looking down at the long oak center table as if he could see the sandwiches-the one half-eaten, the other untouched-and the pills still sitting there. Macalvie pointed to a row of mullioned windows. 'Billy wouldn't have heard-'

'No one could have known Mrs. Healey wasn't in the house; that she was outside was mere chance,' said Wiggins.

'Of course. So if it was someone known to her, and she hadbeen there, say, in the kitchen, whoever it was could simply have said they didn't want to drive the car any farther down that road. But they wouldn't deliberately announce themselves by coming down that road. So Billy wouldn't have heard anything. Anyone could have walked right in, but it was someone he knew, I'm sure.'

Jury leaned back against a Welsh cupboard of wormy chestnut and folded his arms, looking at the kitchen hearth, the chairs pulled up to it. It was the sort of spot that could have seduced anyone into having a cup of tea. 'If you could only remember, Macalvie, that you weren't here; that you weren't in this kitchen.' He looked out at darkness.

'Then what's your theory?'

'I don't have one.'

Wiggins came in from the front room, saying, 'They've a piano, a baby grand-Good Lord, sir, shut that door!' His look at Macalvie was severe as he pulled the lapels of his overcoat tightly round his throat.

Macalvie shut the kitchen door.

As he would have recognized the outfitting of the kitchen, Jury would have known this room from Macalvie's description. In the center was the writing table where Charles Citrine must have been sitting, talking with the police superintendent. Over there was the window seat where Nell Healey had sat staring out to sea. There were no sheets, no covering, over the furniture. In spite of the rising damp and the passing years, the room still had the look of its occupants having left just minutes before: an open book lay facedown on a coffee table; the pale cushions of an armchair still bore the impression of an occupant; the logs were laid and ready for lighting; sheets of music were stacked on the piano. Until one noticed the spine of the book was cracked, the pages stiff with age; the sheet music yellowed; the piano layered with dust.

Said Wiggins: 'They must have taken music pretty seriously to have a grand piano in a house they used only a short time out of the year.'

'Billy was supposed to be some kind of musical prodigy. The piano,'-Macalvie nodded toward it-'was the father's idea. Healey was a frustrated concert pianist who was probably living out his fantasies of being Rachmaninoff through his kid. My bet is he was a real slave driver. Anyway, the kid didn't use it.'

'How do you know?' asked Jury, not terribly surprised by this time at Macalvie's clairvoyance.

'There was no music on the stand; the cover was down; I ran my finger over it. Dusty as hell.' Macalvie smiled. 'He didn't practice here; she didn't dust. Says something about them, doesn't it, the way they were.'

The smile was in place, but it didn't reach his eyes, Jury noticed. Then the smile vanished and he walked over to the french window giving out on a view of waves they could hear but couldn't see.

'She likes you, too, Macalvie.' Jury smiled at his friend's back. 'You should go and see her. I'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble getting round Sanderson.'

There was no answer.

'I'm having a look upstairs. Brian?'

Without turning, Macalvie said, 'Billy's room is at the top, the guest room next to it. Toby used that.'

While Wiggins visited the guest room, Jury went into Billy Healey's. As had the living room, this one still looked lived in, as if all of his boy's things had been left in just the way he had placed them. Cricket bat lying across a carved walnut chair and a cap hanging on its finial; stacks of magazines and paperback books slipping and sliding along the far wall in a drunken wave; fossils and chipped seashells on the bureau, one especially good specimen lying on a bit of torn paper with the penciled inscription, Chessil Beach, the paper browning round the edges, beginning to look more like parchment. But the focal point of the room was outspread on the faded oriental rug at the foot of the bed-a complicated intertwining of metal tracks, miniature buildings-or pieces of a Monopoly set used for that purpose-and an electric train. He stood looking at it for a few moments chewing his lip. Then he knelt down, unable to resist its lure, and punched the starting button. The slightly rusted engine slowly and laboriously started chugging along the track, entering a mossy tunnel of a papier-mache hillside.