The Old Silent

into banked-up snow, wishing almost he could jab some sheep where it really hurt, thinking Aha! when it finally met with resistance. He hunkered down, rather proud of himself, and started shoveling the snow off with hands that he was sure were frostbitten beyond saving. He uncovered a patch of dirty pink snow and black sleeve. He rose very quickly.

The sleeve was frozen stiff, the fingers of the hand jutting out curled as if the hand had tried to gain purchase on something. Life, perhaps. He stood there blinking, staring down at the frozen hand much as Abby had looked at the pathetic body of the lamb.

Hardly aware of what he was doing, he looked for the motorcycle, as if he might find it, black and shining, leaning against the drystone wall.

He hadn't seen Ellen; no one had seen Ellen since she had vanished last night down the drive against the backdrop of dark sky and silver reservoir…

It was an image that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life. Furiously, he swept away snow from the arm and the face.

Ann Denholme's eyes were open, the sockets partly filled with snow. The face looked heavenward, the dark hair he could see gray with frost, and spiky, looking almost like hair that had whitened overnight from some dreadful shock. Her coat was stiff as ice, but when he lifted her arm slightly, the cold wrist was limp.

Melrose looked off to his right, saw that Abby and Stranger were slowly making their way along the other part of the wall, and started covering the body.

The snow was mucked about, but he thought or hoped the wind would hide both his handiwork and the blood scent. He could hardly have the poor child (for now he so thought of her) discovering the body of her aunt.

As they neared him, Stranger's head lowered to the bank, sniffing, sniffing. Melrose pretended to slip and fell down across the body. Perhaps his own scent would cover hers.

Stranger, he was sure, could smell death.

But although the dog seemed interested in pawing about the place where Melrose sat, Melrose gave him a few rough pats and tried to turn him away. Stranger was not about to be turned.

Abby tilted her head and then shook it slowly, giving the Clumsy One a look of utter disgust, whether at his falling over or at his idiot attempt to make her dog respond to ordinary commands, he couldn't say. Abby looked at Stranger, made some tiny sound in her mouth, and the dog froze in position.

Both of them stood there within two feet of Ann Denholme's snowy grave, locked in place like players in that old childhood game of Statues.

How in the devil was he going to get them out of here? Not only that, but get either to the inn or the telephone kiosk back there on the Oakworth Road? He wondered if this was the way she looked at that lazy shepherd, Mr. Nelligan.

Melrose got to his feet and played for time by arranging his overcoat and shoving his (gangrened, he was sure) fingers through his stiffened hair. All the while he was rehearsing and rejecting various ruses. Finally he said, 'This is too much for me; we must return to the Hall.' How pompous he sounded.

Not that it made any difference. Abby stood with her crook in one hand and his cosher in the other, both plunged into the snow like crutches. The damned dog was going to hypnotize him with that eye of his. Melrose felt slightly light-headed.

'Well, go on, then,' said the little cripple with a huge frown.

'Very well.' Melrose took one step, then stopped suddenly as if he'd just remembered something. 'Oh, incidentally, I know where Ethel's hiding place is.' Oneandtwoand-threeandfour he counted as he walked away.

On the four they both shot past him, jammed themselves through the cripple hole, and took off toward the Oakworth Road, spewing up snow.

23

'It were a dreadful thing, but there's no way to help you, I can see,' said Mrs. Holt, irritation flickering across her broad features. 'It were painful enough at the time.'

Without police dredging it all up again, her look at Jury said. Since her eyes, as she sat in the overstuffed chair across from Jury, were trained not on him but on the ashtray on the table between them, Jury thought the source of the fleeting look was not the fate of Toby Holt but the cigarette Jury had stubbed out immediately upon entering the room. Given the rabbity sniff of her nose, he was sure of it. Owen Holt, large, square-faced, an unhappy-seeming man, looked not directly at Jury, but across his shoulder, apparently out of the window. His eyes were the grayish-blue color of denim and washed out, like faded jeans.

Mrs. Holt had opened the door of the terraced house in Oakworth, dressed in a coverall, head turbaned, and holding a rainbow-hued feather duster and a chamois cloth in a white-gloved hand. Had they not now been sitting in her grimly tidy parlor, where her husband Owen seemed himself to be a visitor, Jury might have taken it for a window display to entice the passersby to snap up the three-piece suite on hire-purchase. The sofa and two armchairs were covered in a hideous, multicolored pattern with fringed throw pillows that just missed matching the blue, pink, and yellow zigzag design. All of this fought with the old-fashioned sepia-tinted wallpaper covered with tiny bouquets whose cinched stems trailed fluttery little ribbons. The fake coals in the unusable fireplace might have been nicked from the same window.

But what particularly struck Jury about the Holt parlor wasn't this discordance of paper, paint, and pattern: it was the absence of ornaments and the lack of pictures. There were no mementos, no little groupings of figurines; no framed photographs or bits of embroidery; no books, only a thin stack of magazines lying on the coffee table. In the corner cupboard was china that he doubted had been used in many years. The one hint of frivolity was a glass- and wood-beaded curtain that hung in an alcove at the bottom of the staircase.

'The Social come round,' said Alice Holt, in reluctant response to Jury's question, 'and said they'd got this ever-so-sad case of a little boy that'd been orphaned…'

Her voice trailed off as the hand shot out almost of its own volition to pluck the ashtray from the table. 'And as Owen here'd talked about wouldn't it be nice t'have a bairn round the place…' She rose to dispose of the odious ashes. 'T'other person talks, but who had the care?' she said elliptically and she whisked from the room holding the ashtray at arm's length.

Owen Holt had either got used to his wife's doing the talking, or he was congenitally a silent man. His contribution to this conversation had been spasmodic. But now he said, 'Quiet he were. Meant to adopt him. Never did, officially. But always did think of him as me own.' He was still looking somewhere beyond Jury, still taking in the scene beyond the window.

The long-case clock ticked in its spastic rhythm, a little like Owen Holt's speech, and Jury was quiet. Then he said, 'I'm sorry. It must have been particularly difficult for you, having to…' His mouth formed the word identify but no sound came with it. Identify the body.

Jury's mind clouded. Like a double exposure, the image of Owen Holt looking down at the boy lying in one of those rows of refrigerated compartments pulled out like a big desk drawer was overlaid with the remembrance of himself staring down onto the rubble of the flat that night so long ago, looking at the outstretched arm of his mother, the cupped hand, the black velvet sleeve, his own frenzied attempt to get the plaster and wood away from her, while more kept falling. Her hand seemed to be making just that gesture it so often had, when she held out her arm and motioned for him to come along, now.

As if some fierce photographer kept letting off the flash, the image would come back sharply after all these years when he looked at a woman's arm outstretched just so. What had driven him nearly to distraction was that his mother had been alone.

' 'Twas.' Holt nodded slowly, over and over. 'And Alice. Alice never stopped cleaning since that boy died.'

It shook Jury a little, that his own estimation of Alice Holt had been so superficial. Her husband had wrapped up in that one observation what drove the woman to this frenzy of housekeeping, always trying to keep things straight,