The Old Silent

Charlie returned the uneaten portion of his sandwich to the plate, looking at it as if it were an obscure memory, some detail from the past he couldn't fit in. Then he reached into his jeans pocket and brought out some coins, got up, headed for the jukebox.

He hung there for a while, hands splayed on glass front, looking down. By the time he came back to the table, a voice both rich and ragged had started singing, Iwas born… by a little old river...' The born was sustained in some time warp of the singer's imagination; it was a thrilling voice.

'Otis Redding,' said Charlie. He sat back, tilting his chair, looking past Jury at nothing. Then he said, 'His plane went down over Wisconsin; only twenty-six, he was.'

'How old are you? Twenty, twenty-one?'

'Twenty-three. Why?'

'Because you're quitting.' Jury didn't expect any answer but the same one Charlie had given Jiminez.

He was surprised, then, when Charlie shoved his plate back and said, 'I've gone as far as I want to go.' He shifted sideways on the bench, put one grimy Reebok up, and laid his arm across his knee. The pose was listless; he was looking over toward either the redhead or the jukebox. The girl was still washing up, still watching them, still frowning slightly. 'Think she'll twig it?' He slipped a cigarette from Jury's pack, thumbed the tip of a match into flame, and inhaled deeply. 'Like Otis: 'too hard living, afraid to die.''He turned with a grim smile to look at Jury, said nothing, studied his cigarette, went on smoking.

'You're at the top, and you don't want it, when you must have worked like hell to get there. You must have practiced until your fingers bled.' Jury was looking at the hand holding the cigarette, the fingers hatched with tiny marks.

Charlie said nothing.

'And then what?' asked Jury.

He shrugged. 'Go home for a bit.'

'To Leeds?'

'To Leeds. Find a regular gig.' He looked over at Jury, his eyes narrowed against the scrim of smoke. 'Dusty answers, right?'

This time, Jury didn't comment.

'I gotta go, man.'

The British accent had taken on the edge of the American and the idiom he'd been used to hearing for several years. 'Who plays keyboard?' asked Jury.

That surprised Charlie at least enough to make him stop counting out pounds and pence. 'Caton Rivers. Why?'

'Just wondered. Do you ever play keyboard, then?'

He stacked up the pound coins, the ten- and fivepence ones, and beckoned to the redhead. 'No, not much.' He zipped up his jacket, started gathering his gear together.

'Nell Healey won't get off with a lecture, you know. It took all the weight of the Citrine-Healey name-not to mention money-to keep her out of custody after she killed her husband. Now-'

He froze. 'She probably had one hell of a good reason for killing him.' The waitress, eyes glued to him, swept the money off the table. But Charlie didn't even see her. 'And it'll be God knows how long before the trial.'

Jury got up. 'I'm going to Haworth tomorrow. Want a lift to Leeds?'

'Sirocco's got a concert tomorrow night. Remember?'

'I remember.'

'You coming?'

'I hope so. Perhaps I can talk Mary Lee into a couple of tickets.'

Charlie reached into his back pocket. 'I'm sure you could, but here.' He handed Jury two tickets. 'Friend of mine can't make it.'

Jury smiled. 'I'll be mugged on the way back to the Yard. They're that hard to come by.'

Charlie Raine ran his hand through his long hair. 'Look-' Then his eye went past Jury to the bar. Jury followed his gaze and saw the redhead, the expression on her face, standing there, her feet together, holding the money with a sadly knowing look. 'Hold this, will you.'

Jury watched him walk over, look around, take one of the paper plates from the stack and the pen hooked onto her belt. He wrote, handed it to her, almost had to force it on her because she stood there, stiff and wide- eyed.

He would never, thought Jury, let anyone suffer if he could do something to stop it.

'Thanks for the beer,' said Jury. 'Want a lift?'

They stood looking up at the cold, hard sky. 'I'm not going anywhere much. Schmooze around. I like to walk in London.'

'So do I,' said Jury.

29

When Jury walked into his office at New Scotland Yard, Wiggins was studiously turning the pages of an uninvitingly thick book whose bindings seemed to resist this mild assault upon a volume that had lain dormant for so long.

'Hullo, Wiggins.' Jury stuck his raincoat on a peg and sat down in his chair that creaked as if it had some symbiotic relationship with the old book. Books. Three others, all equally thick, were open and the pages held down by weights that Wiggins had found at his disposal: a small ceramic pot that Jury had noticed him taking spoonsful from to put in his tea; a tin of Sucrets wedged between pages of another; a black biscuit as a bookmark. In the one he was now reading he had marked several different places with Aspergum.

'What's that? Gray's Anatomy?'

Wiggins favored him with a crimped smile and went back to his book, marking yet another page with a cylinder that looked like a stick of incense.

He was so deep in his research that nothing was about to make Wiggins risible.

Jury pulled his In box over and rifled through the messy collection there as Wiggins looked up politely and said he'd got several reports he must sign and, incidentally, what did the doctor say?

'Hmm? The usual.' Jury signed the two papers marked Urgent and tossed them in his Out box with half the other stuff he knew was red-taping its way past his eyes. Then he swiveled round and stared out of the viewless window and thought about Charlie Raine. 'Get hold of that band.'

Surprised, Wiggins looked across his desk. 'Band?'

'Sirocco. They're at the Ritz, aren't they?'

'Yes.'

'I want to talk to them-to Jiminez.'

Wiggins looked pained. 'Not Jim-inez, yhem-in-ez. Yhem.'

'You sound like you're coughing up. Ring the hotel. Tell him I want to see him. What's wrong?'

'Nothing. Sir.' Wiggins said this with a good deal of snap.

'You don't have to salute.'

'They have a concert tomorrow.'

'So what? I'm talking about today. And Morpeth Duckworth and Mavis Crewes.'

Wiggins looked puzzled. 'What does Sirocco have to do with the others?'

'Nothing necessarily.' He had decided not to tell Wiggins about Charlie Raine. Jury couldn't be certain, after all; and the less Wiggins knew, the less Chief Superintendent Racer would be inclined to beat him to a pulp with his walking stick for mucking about in someone else's manor. God, how he hated that phrase. 'I'm just a fan.' Jury smiled. 'Big time.'

Again, Jury turned away to stare at the blank concrete the window faced on. He thought about the song. He simply hadn't realized what he'd heard. 'Yesterday's Rain.' He put his head in his hand, looked at the blank gray