The Old Silent

appearing, disappearing as incline and uprise dictated. There were at least three, possibly four motorcycles scattered round the moor.

'Police!' exclaimed Melrose, wanting to tear the ragged shirt from his body and wave it like someone marooned. 'Police! At least, thank God, I can get a ride back with someone who knows how-'

The crash was deafening, splintering. That was to the left; off to the right he saw what looked like a black shape wheeling in the air, coming down with a ground-shaking thud.

A little flame darted up from the match Ellen was using to light her cigarette, which she then casually smoked, leaning against her BMW, looking at him with a question stamped on her grimy face. She shrugged. 'Two outta three.'

Melrose shrugged his shoulders and his sleeve fell off.

Thus they trudged on beneath the icy moon, fragments of argument trailing back to the dogs as the three up front got farther away…

'Three of us? On that?' Melrose's question was lost in the distance.

'… the basket,' Ellen shouted.

'… not me. I'm not sitting…' Abby's voice proclaimed.

'I'll sit in the basket.' Melrose limped along.

Stranger and Tim trotted on behind them on bloody feet and lame legs, looking longingly behind them at the mob of sheep who now were dispersing, searching out browse in slightly new territory.

They turned more or less nose-to-nose, looking at one another, both yawning and shaking themselves.

The ways of sheep were difficult, sometimes inscrutable.

The ways of man, impossible.

33

The Nine-One-Nine was a cellar walk-down where nothing at the moment was moving but the smoke from the bored-looking customers' cigarettes and cigars. At the farther end of the long, cavelike room was a cleared-out space with a small stage filled with amps, drums, a couple of microphones, and a keyboard. Blue lights suspended from a crossbeam were trained on the stage from which the band had departed.

Jury doubted any casuals could have found the place, thus it must have been the regulars who stood and sat about in varying stages of ennui, a curiously epicene crowd. Women with slick-backed dark hair, men with brassy curls and rings in their ears signifying (Jury bet) nothing. They stood in the aisle; they sat at the bar. In this room architecturally bland, the only hat-tipping to affluence was the very long, copper-topped bar behind which were shelved yards of bottles with optics in front. The smoke swirled, drifted, thinned, clouded above the tables, and the benches sat like church pews against the left-hand wall.

Besides this demode crowd there were still some working-class men who sat in tightly knit little groups like clenched fists, hard knuckles grasping their pints.

The customers all looked like they belonged here because they didn't belong anyplace else. Jury remembered a cafe in Berlin that had looked this way: musty, furzy, with the odd gummy smell of resin and old cigars.

Jury could have picked Stan Keeler out of this haze of smoke and thirties' film backdrop even without Morpeth Duckworth's description. There was something about the man at the center table, about his posture and manner, about the several people who sat there, that told Jury who he was. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, jeans, and low boots, his feet parked on one of the chairs, the rest of him slumped in another. There were two women and a man at his table. One of the hero-worshipping women had hair the color of port that nearly drowned her shoulders; the other was a hermetically sealed blonde who looked as if she hadn't moved a muscle in days, as if her mouth would crack and her cheekbones splinter beneath the makeup if she smiled. Leaning against the wall was another woman-tall, serpentinian, smoke curling upward from her cigarette to dissipate into the rest of the smoky scrim. Her hair and black dress looked as if they'd been done with the same shears: both were layered and slashed. Her eyes were nearly shut, weighted with kohl liner and deep shadow sunken in a powder-white face.

As Jury wedged his way through a tight knot of customers, the leather-vested fellow with a sunburst guitar was arguing, leaning forward toward Keeler like a man trying to shoulder into a tree that wouldn't give: '… can you say that git can play blues? He's heavy-metal and a Bach/baroque freak that couldn't do a twelve-bar boogie if his life depended on it.' As he spoke he was slapping the guitar up to his knee and doing a wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa wumpa progression that earned him a tiny rustle of applause and an urging on to play more. Someone called him Dickie. Dickie didn't notice or didn't care. 'So the dumb git's fast-' His fingers slid down the neck to pick the strings at what sounded to Jury like lightning speed, and there was more between-tables applause. 'So he's fast? You're fast; I'm fast; and I know a blues baseline when I hear one. He's got nothing to do with that kinda thing. Come on, admit it, Stan.'

Stan Keeler just sat there staring at him.

'Either you or me could blow him off the stage. Why don't you admit I'm right?'

'Because, number one, you don't know shit, and number two, you don't know it in Swedish.'

Dickie swore under his breath, grabbed up his guitar, and did one of those rolling-thunder John Wayne walks back to the stage at the end of the room. As Jury came up to the table he saw the black Labrador, face on paws and apparently asleep. He seemed happy to be propping up a black guitar case, the neck of which lay across his back as if it were another dog.

'You're Stan Keeler?' said Jury, watching the heads of the girls swivel to gaze up at him. The redhead smiled. The blonde couldn't seem to make it. The one against the wall lowered her lids even more.

Stan Keeler looked at him and Jury knew the meaning of burning eyes. They reminded Jury of brandy just as someone touched a flame to it. The indolent expression beneath the black curly hair was given the lie by those eyes that could have singed Jury where he stood and by the luminous, childlike skin. He was in some way the apotheosis of the gaunt woman behind him; he had the coloring and intensity that she had tried to find in the pots on the dressing table. The high-cheekboned face looked a little emaciated under the tight, dark curls. And the expression on Stan Keeler's face seemed completely passive.

He said in a tone-dead voice: 'I'm thirty-two, live in a bed-sit in Clapham. It sucks. Black Orchid's next club date is two weeks hence. I was born in Chiswick; my mum still lives there. My favorite food is jellied eels. I stopped doing drugs when I fell off the stage three years ago. I got a landlady with a nose you could hang your pants on. She sucks. The reason I don't move is because most of London sucks. I smoke some, drink some. That's all. Print it. Good-bye.'

'I hardly said hello.'

'Hello. Good-bye. Bugger back to Fleet Street. You're from New Dimensions, right?'

'Wrong. I'm from the C.I.D.' Jury showed him his warrant card.

Stan Keeler's expression still didn't change as he flicked his eyes over the card and his cigarette at the ashtray. At the same time he took his boots off the chair, motioning Jury to sit, he turned to the redhead and blonde and said, 'Go away.' He said nothing to the domino leaning against the wall; Jury had the impression she wasn't interested anyway.

The two girls rose as a team and moved their blank eyes off through the customers toward the end of the room. Dickie seemed to be tuning up; a sallow-faced youth with long crimped hair was fooling with the drums; a gaunt-looking black man was sitting with an instrument case by his side.

Stan Keeler crossed one low boot over the other knee and rubbed at it with fingers that looked agile enough to catch butterflies without dusting a wing. He looked almost pleased. 'I belt my old lady and they send round the C.I.D.? She deserved it.' He scratched his hair into an even greater tangle of curls. 'The only guy she missed in Clapham was the flasher on the common and I ain't sure he's telling the truth.'

'Your old lady? I was afraid you meant your mum.'

'Mum lives in Chiswick. I managed to shock just about everyone except her. God knows I tried. It makes no