The Old Silent

fooling with that damned rose and find him, Miss Clingmore. As for you-'Racer pointed his finger, thumb turned in gun-wise, at Jury's chest. ' Youare finished. That's the ugliest bunch of flowers I've ever seen. Who sent it? Keighley police?'

The flowers were, indeed, a strangely unintegrated mess of tiger lilies, white roses, rubbery green leaves, and brown thistlelike things. Jury had no idea what they were. He said nothing, hoping that a Racer-monologue could be hurried along if he didn't respond unless it were absolutely necessary.

'Another call from Sanderson just this afternoon. Again he told me you'd been mucking about-'

In someone else's manor, thought Jury wearily.

'-in their manor.' Racer's head swiveled left to right and back again as he yelled to Fiona that the ball of mange was in here. Fiona was pretentiously looking behind pillows, peering under the couch. Wiggins removed a packet of Fisherman's Friends with stealth. 'You hear it? The bells?' Racer's tone was frantic.

Jury pulled at his earlobe, wondering when Racer would at last slither into a Poeesque black tarn. 'The bells' referred to the four aluminum ones sewn to Cyril's new collar, a collar that the chief superintendent demanded he wear. Fiona had insisted the collar have elastic in it in case Cyril got caught in a tree limb and hanged himself. Do you see any trees in this office. Miss Clingmore? Wait, that's an idea. Have one planted somewhere and let the beast claw his way up it. I'll see to it he never gets down.

What Racer was hearing was not bell-music, but tinkling bottles. Agile as Cyril was, there was no way to work his way through the glass forest of the drinks cabinet without its producing some sound. The collar, of course, had been worked off in a trice every morning after Racer had had a chance to see it was on.

'Just sign this, Jury. In triplicate.' He tapped some of the Yard's business stationery with his Mont Blanc pen.

'Sign what?' Jury asked with innocently raised eyebrows. What was his chief up to now? The paper was blank.

'Your resignation.' Racer showed rather yellowed, dog-like teeth when he smiled his sly smile. 'It can be filled in later.'

Jury checked his watch beneath the flower-cover. Smart's offices closed at five, probably, and he wanted to pay a visit to the Starrdust before he went to the Ritz… after four now… He measured out times. Twenty minutes at least to get to Elizabeth Street (rush hour, too), leaving at best five minutes for one of Racer's Byzantine lectures on the reputation of the Yard and Jury's part in the ruining of it. The commissioner, of course, knew the opposite was true. No, no time.

'All right.' He pulled the blank sheets over, signed the three pages swiftly with a flourish he hoped befitted Mont Blanc. 'Now may I go? The flowers are wilting.' He had, at the same time, seen Fiona backing up to the drinks cabinet where he knew the high heel of her shoe could catch in the latch. Consequently, he kept Racer open-mouthed and blindfolded (so to speak) until he heard a click.

Wiggins was in place at the door to Fiona's outer office and Racer quickly looked round Jury in order to salve his pride by finding some reason to yell at the sergeant. 'And just where do you think you'regoing, dammit?'

Jury looked just in time to see copper fur streaking out the door. Given the speed, he assumed Cyril wouldn't have to go to a detoxification center.

'To the toilet. Sir.'

The two scooted out and Jury followed with his flowers, turning at the door to give his boss a salute. 'I'm always available if you need any help writing that.' He bestowed a blissful smile on Racer and closed the door.

There was a thud, a splintering sound, and another paperweight hit the floor inside

30

Flowers offered carte blanche. They could get you past nearly everyone but Racer, thought Jury, as the receptionist at Smart Publishing House sat with her hand vaguely reaching for the interoffice telephone, dazzled both by Jury and by Jury's huge bouquet of tiger lilies and roses.

Jury just barely stopped at her desk to draw a white rose and put it on her blotter. He now had his foot on the stair. 'I'll just go up, shall I?' This short-circuited the dainty hand and it drew back from the receiver where it cupped itself on her chin. She knew true love when she saw it.

Mavis Crewes didn't. When Jury walked into her rain forest-jungle of an office with the flowers behind his back, she leapt from her chair. 'How dare you-' and her hand reached for her own telephone either to chew out the receptionist or call New Scotland Yard.

Until she saw the massive bouquet that he produced together with an apology she could have taken for anything or everything he'd said, since he didn't want to specify what it was. 'I've also read ten issues of Travelure.' He offered her a smile as blinding as one of Charlie Raine's riffs.

Stopped her in her tracks, that did. 'If you find me a vase, I'll fill it.'

'I, uh. Yes. There's one right here.' She reached round an ivory bookcase and pulled out a tall crystal one etched with a jaguar in a tree. She motioned to a door. 'Powder room,' she said cutely.

Such convenience in the jungle as one's private toilet. For the office, like her home, was done in dark olive- green, a muddy brown, ivory, and flashes of orange. It was painted in a confusing collision of these colors, ornamented with plants and jungle fakery, like the stuffed rabbit-monkey climbing a skinny tree. One wall was a trompe-l'oeil painting of what some artist conceived as a jungle interior. A huge cat was coming right at him.

Another cat, her cat, apparently, merely spat at him. That was all it could raise its lazy head to do. It sat curled in the prime seat-a dark green velvet sofa, displaying itself before brown and ivory cushions laced with orange. Long-haired, probably Himalayan, or some other exotic breed.

He was running water in the vase in her powder room thinking of a pub called the Blue Parrot outside of Long Piddleton where Trevor Sly, the publican, had done his desert-safari look with far less money and no experience. The old film posters of the journeys of Peter O'Toole and Peggy Ashcroft, ill-fated, had struck him as sadly convincing. Then he thought of Hannah Lean…

'What's taking so long?' Mavis called in a singsongish, fluting voice.

Jury looked at himself in the Art Nouveau mirror above the sink and wondered who he was. Racer's offer in triplicate might not be a bad idea. A long-overdue vacation. Another place, another country. Somewhere stark, where the rations were slim and one had to live, like Cyril, by canniness.

Unlike his cup, the vase was overflowing.

As Mavis Crewes, a cigarette in an ivory holder (this ivory was real, he suspected), rabbited on about her travels, her safari adventures, he sat at the other end of the cat's sofa and loathed her. She was shallow, overly precious in her movements, self-absorbed. She was as transparent as Mary Lee's new shoes, made of smoke. And with her dress of the same swirling colors as her office, she could have vanished before his eyes and he'd never know it.

'… absolutely four-star food. The chef was Hungarian. Would you believe it?'

She had apparently been talking about one of her safari trips. 'I assumed people drank from tin bottles and ate army rations.'

That made her whoop with delight, enough to make the insolent cat blink once. 'Good Lord, no. One has one's entire entourage.'

Jury wondered why it was that the ones who were blessed with an 'entourage' were the ones who deserved them least. He thought of Nell Healey in that medieval prison of her father's; he thought of Jenny Kennington, years ago, in a huge and empty dining room where the only color was the sunlight across the varnished floor. Women like this, the ones he would remember, had no entourage; they stood in his mind like statues in snow, yet with money to burn.

'Do you take your cat with you?' He looked at the obviously indulged and spiteful cat. Cyril could stiff it with