The Old Silent

squares of the building.

He could not untangle past and present. He could not focus. 'Yesterday's sun…' His mind went to the flat in the Fulham Road, and his six-year-old life there with his mother. He could climb on a stool and spy through a wormy peephole in his bedroom into the flat next door.

Jury half-heard Wiggins on the telephone and thought how far from the Ritz he'd been then. He'd had tea there once with his aunt and uncle and been overwhelmed by the luxury of dazzling lights, deep carpets, the dancers moving effortlessly across polished floors.

But what he thought of most when he heard music was the scratchy record that came through the bedroom wall of the flat next door. 'Yesterdays.' Not the famous Beatles song, but another one. Whenever he'd heard the old record in the other room play 'Yesterdays,' he'd quickly jumped out of bed, stood on the stool and squinted through to see the occupant of the other room, a girl perhaps a year older than he named Elicia Deauville.

Elicia Deauville loved to dance to 'Yesterdays.' It was either the only tune she liked, or the only record she had (though she never played the other side). Except in these rare and wonderful dancing moments, Elicia Deauville, when she walked down the steps and down the street to the school, looked like an ice-maiden. Her long, tawny hair had been worried into a tight thick braid, then severely twisted into a pinwheel at the back of her head, into which several pins had been plunged like sabers. It was as if the hair were being chastised for its beauty and bounty. Jury wondered if her dreadful caretakers-a brassy, florid man and woman- were truly the parents his mother had assured him they were. His own mother was beautiful and slender and had silky blond hair and eyes the color of his own. He adored her and never doubted what she said, except in this particular instance.

But Elicia Deauville's true self (he was sure) showed her as something quite other at her bedtime hour (which was also his) when she would wind up an old Victrola and dance to 'Yesterdays.'

Wearing only her white nightdress, barefooted and with her waist-length golden-brown hair, she would move swiftly from one end of her bedroom to the other, weaving and bowing like a sapling in the wind, moving backward and forward in a dancing, ballerinalike run that circumscribed less and less space. Her body would move deliriously, her hair floating and falling like blown leaves.

It was at once an act of total abandonment and a mastery of space that he had never seen repeated. Twenty years later he had seen Margot Fonteyn and thought, You are very, very good, but you are not Elicia Deauville.

In the middle of the night, he had watched the blitz from behind his blackout curtain chink and seen the great cones of light shoot up, waver against the night sky and thought of Elicia Deauville. Thus he had been watching when the firebomb dropped and reduced half of his block of flats to rubble. The other half, the Deauvilles' half, had remained standing.

He had found his mother in the living room, or had found, rather, her arm, clad in black velvet, extending from under what had been the plaster of ceilings and walls. The arm was in black, the hand white, upturned in a familiar come here gesture.

The next day, while he sat on the remaining step outside waiting for his relatives to fetch him, he watched the small collection of cases and bags grow larger next door as the loudly clothed and loud-mouthed Deauville couple, who made him think of crazy patchwork, came and went, depositing their belongings.

Sitting there, he had taken his small pocket notebook out and written I love you. Richard. That had not looked right and he scrubbed heavily through it as if the same heavens that had opened up and left him without a future would do it again if they saw or heard.

I will see you yesterday. Neither did that look right, and she might guess he'd been spying on her if he knew about the song. The father stomped out and plunged down a double armful of clothes, and he saw that right on top was the white nightdress that had a tiny pocket.

Good-bye, Elicia Deauville. He folded it four times and stuffed it into the pocket.

'He said six.'

'What?' Jury was studying the flame of the match he had struck to light his cigarette. 'Said what?'

Wiggins looked concerned. 'Alvaro Jiminez. Six o'clock he said would be all right.'

'Good.'

'You look very white. You should be home in bed. I can work out a program of medication for you that should have you back on your feet if you get bedrest along with it.'

'Thanks, but not now.'

'I think he's right, sir.'

'Who's right? You're getting elliptical.'

'Commander Macalvie.'

'I'm sure he'd agree. Right about what?'

Wiggins waved his hand over the lot of books, not forgetting to pluck up one of the sticks of Aspergum. 'Rotten headache,' he said by way of prologue. 'The bone fusion. You can't absolutely determine age by means of calculating bone fusion.'

Jury leaned across his desk and squinted at Wiggins more in disbelief than because of the white arc of light slicing across his face. 'Dennis Dench has a wall full of degrees-'

Chewing on his gum, Wiggins waved the wall of Dench's cavelike laboratory away. 'Bones, sir, except for teeth, are good indicators, but not absolute determiners.' He placed his hand on each of his four books in turn. 'Here's three authorities who all say the same thing, one who doesn't. But even the one who doesn't allows some margin for error. Another interesting point is, after I had a word with the forensic anthropologist here, is that the bone of the arm can help to determine right- and left-handedness. Now, I'm only saying they can be an indication. Professor Dench didn't mention that.' Wiggins removed the clay pot from one of the books, closed it, patted it, and said, 'So I called him up and asked what he had in his notes about the arm bones. I asked him specifically if the bone of the right arm was longer than the left. Billy Healey, you remember, was right-handed.'

'As a matter of fact, I didn't remember. Most people are.'

Although Wiggins's flickering glance at his superior was not at all contemptuous, neither did it register approval. 'Yes. And Dr. Dench did say that there was a small difference, that the bone of the right arm was a bit longer than the left. And then he immediately said that this would not help much, since the bones were those of a child and not fully developed.'

'You look as if you don't agree.'

Wiggins put his hands behind his head, tilted his chair, and studied the ceiling before he handed down his decision. It was a pose that Jury recognized as one he himself often affected. 'What I wonder is, why would he be so quick to try and prove me wrong?'

Jury rose from his chair and walked over to the small window that gave out onto the cheerless scene of the three other sides of the building and the courtyard below. 'Perhaps because he's been at the top of his field for twenty years.'

'We all make mistakes, sir.'

Jury looked up at a patch of white sky. Wiggins, like Death, was the great leveler.

'What I think, sir, is that his judgment might be clouded, as happens to all of us, you must admit…'

Jury turned, noting the suggestive pause. 'Yes?'

'Well, it could be a blind spot. In this case, Commander Macalvie could be the spot. Dench has known him for ages. They're both experts in their own ways. I don't think Dr. Dench wants Mr. Macalvie coming up with a conclusion that makes more sense than Dench's own. You must admit that's possible.'

Looking down into the small square, Jury nodded. 'And you think my blind spot is Billy Healey.'

There was a brief silence. 'Well, it's understandable. I think you don't want the boy to have been Billy Healey, that's true.'

It was getting dark, and whatever leftover light there was had drained away from the courtyard down there, the high-walled building blocking it. Jury felt his stomach go queasy, drop. 'I don't want it to have been any boy, Wiggins.'

He turned to see Wiggins redden slightly as he dipped a plastic spoon into the small pot of honey mixture. 'No, of course not. The thing is this, though.' He looked up to make sure that he might be allowed to continue.

'Go on. You've done a good job. What's that stuff?'

Wiggins's anodynes were just the ticket for glossing over difficult moments.

'It's this dry cough. Honey, ginger, and lemon juice and a little water. It's absolutely the only thing that'll stop