to get things back to their proper place, to keep her mind swept clean of the detritus of the past as she swept her parlor clean of the dust of the present. And again, he thought of the rubble.
Alice Holt returned, took her seat, picked up the feather duster like a defensive weapon, and went on. 'It were only to be for a little while. While things got sorted out for the child. With Owen and the arthritis he'd had to leave the mill. We'd got trooble enough without another mouth to feed.' She was staring at the particular place on the coffee table from which Jury had picked up his notebook and pen. 'Of course there's the orphanage. But…' Furtively she reached over and polished the end of the coffee table where the notebook had lain.
Jury's throat tightened, remembering the bleak corridors of Good Hope, where he had spent six years of his life. But, at least, he could remember the faces of his dead parents. That had been more than many had, more than Toby Holt had.
'So we had the lad for all his life,' Alice was saying as she traced the base of a lamp with a white-gloved finger and squinted at the tip.
'A short life it was,' said Owen.
It was as though she eclipsed the life altogether by ignoring her husband's comment. Instead she shifted to the Citrines. 'You don't find
Jury interrupted what promised to be a litany of complaints. 'I take it Toby and Billy Healey were great friends.'
'The best,' said Owen.
'Better Toby'd never seen any of that lot. She put ideas in his head. A bad influence, she were.'
Owen Holt waved her comment away, smiling with forbearance.
'What sort of ideas?'
'Musical, she told him he was, like her own boy.' With the multihued duster, she pointed. 'Why, I'd like to know? Toby was tone-deaf if ever a child was. It were Billy that could play piano and anything else handed him.'
An unexpected chuckle came from Owen Holt. 'That was just to make Toby feel good. But he did try.'
'Pigheaded.'
The phrase might have been meant to define Toby, Owen, or even Jury himself, since she was glaring at him.
Studying Jury with suspicion, eyebrows scissored together, she said, 'You're from Scotland Yard in London. What's Scotland Yard to do with that Healey person getting killed in the Old Silent Inn? We got our own police. Only time I ever remember Scotland Yard coming up here was about that Peter Sutcliffe.' Alice Holt seemed to think Jury was mounting a police investigation as mammoth as the Yorkshire Ripper case.
'Nothing like that,' he said vaguely.
She started fussing with a small stack of magazines, already neatly stacked. 'All I know is what I told police back then. It's the Citrines you should be asking. Cold-blooded lot. It weren't enough they wouldn't pay the ransom for their own boy; they got Toby killed, too.' She stopped in the act of running the glove round the grooves of a piecrust table.
' 'Twasn't their fault, Alice.'
'No? If he'd not gone on that trip with her he'd be alive today!'
'Very attached to Mrs. Healey was Toby,' said Owen, seemingly unaware that he might be fueling his wife's jealousy of that attachment. 'Do you know he even tried to plant a garden in that grit soil. Determined lad. And Mr. Citrine's been good to us, letting me work when I can hardly hold a rake.'
'Conscience money, that's all-'
'Be quiet,' Owen Holt snapped in what Jury thought was an uncharacteristic display of bad temper. He stared down at his crippled hands.
Jury looked round the room again. The large television, the fridge he'd got a glimpse of earlier, the good china (albeit unused): knowing what he did about the generosity of the welfare state didn't necessarily mean the Holts had other income, but there seemed an abundance for a man who hadn't been able to work for several years except at odd jobs on the Citrine estate… then he remembered Nell Healey's comment that she'd done what she could. 'I'm sure they must have felt responsible for what happened. I can understand an annuity of some sort after what you'd been through-'
Alice Holt sat up straight. 'We don't accept charity. It was Toby's-'
'Alice!' Again, Owen Holt warned her off.
'Well, I can't see what's wrong with it.' She said to Jury, 'It was just ten thousand she set up for a trust fund for the boy's education. After two weeks, and Toby missing, and-'
Here, she raised her eyes to stare at the ceiling, not, he thought, at the rooms above but to keep the tears from falling. '-dead. She changed it over. The trust I mean. Told us to use it for ourselves…'
Owen Holt merely shook his head. 'Police aren't interested in all that.' He looked belligerently at Jury now. 'It's our affair, that.'
Sharply, his wife looked at him. 'You drank near half of it away.' She seemed to think Jury now was her ally. 'Drink and gambling, that's a fine thing. Up there at the Black Bush, with that lot you played cards with. Not one of them with two pence to rub together and freeloaded off you.'
Holt started rocking his chair as he shook his head again. 'I told you a dozen times, 'twas because I just went kind of crazy over the boy being gone. You don't see me doing it no more, do you?'
'No.' Alice Holt sat back, putting down the duster and dragging off the white glove, which she held clenched in her hand, like a flag of truce. 'No, I expect you don't.' Defeat, not over an argument lost, but of a life, was heavy in her voice.
Owen Holt turned his head again listlessly to gaze out of the window, and Jury wondered for a moment what the pose reminded him of. Nell Healey came back to him, standing and gazing at the orchard.
Like her, Owen Holt might have expected Toby to materialize out there working in the gritty soil, managing finally to make a few flowers grow.
24
Jury forgot the dead telephone receiver in his hand.
He had been staring for some moments now through the small squares of glass in his door of the call box, some of them fretted with frost and six of them cracked in one way or another. He had counted them.
When he left the Holts it had been drizzling. Twenty minutes later it was raining. It had started just as he had got into the kiosk. The cracks and the rain distorted the cobbled street and stone wall opposite, the figures running through the rain under newspapers.
The message at the Old Silent had directed him to call Melrose Plant, who had told him what had happened.
As he listened, Jury wondered if it were he, if it were his own blurred eyesight that was causing the squares of glass to waver.
He was furious with himself now, after Plant had rung off, for not asking for more particulars. His hand was latched, still, in the handle of the door of the call box, as if he had just closed it, as if he had just been going to make the call.
At least he had managed to stop his fast-moving thoughts, broken and running like the figures in the rain, long enough to compliment Melrose in getting the little girl out of there, away from what would have been a terrible trauma.
Abby, Melrose had said, could handle trauma considerably better than he himself.
Jury hung up the receiver. Two murders in four days. He hoped Nell Healey had an alibi.
He passed more than a dozen police cars angled along the Oakworth Road at this end, some of them with two tires in the ditch like abandoned vehicles.
Even though it was hours since Melrose Plant had called the local police station, there were still two cars with blue lights turning, in the car park of the inn a good mile from the point where the others had stopped.
