The Old Silent

19

"That's okay, Wiggins, I'll drive," said Macalvie as Wiggins was quickly trying to capture the driver's seat.

Jury got in the passenger's side while Wiggins stowed himself into the rear seat and appeared to be offering up a prayer.

Macalvie twisted round and said, "We can take the A-thirty-eight, but the shortcut across Dartmoor's better. No traffic."

Obviously recalling an earlier drive through sheets of rain and hemmed in by stone walls (no stone of which Macalvie had left unturned), Wiggins brought out his big gun: the vaporizer.

Macalvie gave Wiggins a look of disgust. Jury nodded at the road ahead. "Take the A-thirty-eight."

Macalvie shrugged, tore away from the curb.

When they hit the roundabout, a black Lamborghini with a woman driver dripping jewels and a fox fur cut him off, gave him a finger, and took the car up to ninety as she sped onto the motorway.

"Lady, lady," sighed Macalvie. He yanked the blue light out and shoved it on top of the Ford.

"Brian we're going to Cornwall. You're not-" Jury was tossed against the back of his seat as Macalvie jammed the pedal down.

"Following her, we'll get there a hell of a lot faster." He smiled broadly.

Wiggins had a coughing fit and Jury just shook his head as the Ford closed in on the Lamborghini. "You're not a traffic cop, for Christ's sakes."

"So what? There's never one around when you need one." The Lamborghini finally pulled over. Macalvie braked on the shoulder, got out a ticket book that he kept stashed in the glove box, and said, "This won't take long."

Macalvie, Jury knew, loved being a copper. The possibilities were endless.

Looking through the rear windscreen, Wiggins said, "Do you think he might have been a deprived child, sir?"

"No." Jury was blowing on his hands. "But his parents were."

"There's one old Lambo won't be hitting the highways for six months." He whistled and drifted out into the traffic.

An hour later, they were flying by a brightly lit Little Chef that Wiggins eyed longingly, as if the wind stirred up by the traffic was wafting the aroma of plaice and chips and beans on toast down the motorway through the driver's open window.

Macalvie had been giving Jury the details of the scene, eight years ago, in the house on the Cornwall coast. They were the same details, but Macalvie liked to get everything right at least twice before he moved on. "You should have heard them, Jury-Healey and Citrine-when she refused to pay up. I thought Roger Healey was going to take the poker and let her have it. Daddy wasn't quite so violent, but it looked like a cardiac arrest was imminent. 'Are you insane, Nell? He's my son!or 'My dear God, you've got to. He's like my own grandson.' No one seemed to think Billy Healey was her anything."

Macalvie was trying to honk an old charabanc out of the fast lane, but it kept on rattling right along. Through its dirt-smeared rear window, Jury made out a group of people who looked to be in some sort of costume. Finally, the Ford pulled into the inside lane and Macalvie slowed down, hunching over to have a look. A wide, white banner on the side of the old bus announced the Twyford English Country Dancers. They seemed to be singing; they were certainly clapping in time to something, and sounded drunk as lords.

"I think maybe they got an elephant driving."

The elephant smiled down at the Ford and raised his plastic cup.

"Oh, hell," said Jury.

The blue light went back up on the hood. "You want that horse's arse out here on the highway, Jury? No wonder old people are always getting clobbered on zebra crossings. It's probably your effing C.I.D. running them down." He shouted at the charabanc and waved it to the next exit.

"You must admit, sir," Wiggins said to Jury, as they careened to a halt in the car park, "Mr. Macalvie's right. Can't have this sort of thing on the roads."

The sergeant smiled up at a blue neon sign missing one of its letters: CAF.

To Jury none of the riders looked a day under eighty as they spilled out of the bus, still singing, still clapping, still boozing.

" 'Ello, 'andsome," cried a lavender-haired lady as she grabbed Wiggins's hands and tried to dance him sideways down the car park.

An old man who looked less sturdy than string was squatting down, arms crossed over his chest, doing something that looked more Russian than English. They wore frilled shirts and braces.

Jury smiled and disentangled himself from three wiry ladies determined to drag him into a set as Macalvie was having a fine time with the huge driver with sepia curls who, in the tight trousers that looked from behind like two moons, wasn't having problems with his sexual identity since he clearly didn't care.

Macalvie was shouting like a football coach: "Now you," -he shoved a ticket he'd written into the elephant's jacket pocket-"can dance your little toes and tambourines right in that caff and don't even thinkabout coming out until you can walk a straight line on your bloody hands." He walked over to Jury. "Get that dedicated look off your face, Jury. We'd've had to stop anyway; Wiggins needs his cuppa."

"So here's what happened."

The three were trying to ignore the"'ello, luvs," the waves, the brandishing of paper napkins from the long table with its speckled-blue Formica top on the other side of the cafe.

Three coffees to go was not Sergeant Wiggins's idea of a proper tea-break, to say nothing of a meal; he had time only to snatch a Kit-Kat before they were out in the fog again, slamming the car doors, Macalvie splashing the coffees with a burst of acceleration.

With the divisional commander, there were never any qualifiers: no Ithink's; no a possible theory might be's; no in my opinion's. Jury shook the hot coffee from his hand and let Macalvie go on, despite the fact they'd got halfway across Devon and still no mention of the police photos of the skeleton.

"So here's what happened. Billy Healey goes into the house to make his tea-tea for Billy and Toby consisting of a couple of loaves of bread and ten pots, according to Mum." Macalvie smiled slightly, as if he were one of the family or, at least, a distant relative. "So he's in the kitchen with his dog, Gnasher. He's got the kettle on the hob, he's sawing the bread in slabs, spreading it with an inch of currant jam, milk out for Toby, and butter-" Macalvie veered into the outside lane.

Said Wiggins, looking longingly behind him as another cafe receded in the highway mist, as the car advanced on the turnoff signposted for Ashburton, "It's amazing you remember these things. I mean about the currant jam, and so forth. You might as well have been there."

Macalvie couldn't have agreed more. "Too bad for Devon-Cornwall I wasn't. By the time I managed to get to the house, it was clean. That whole kitchen-not to say the rest of the house-should have been gone over on hands and knees."

"I agree," said Jury. "Go on."

"Nell Healey said even the vitamins were lined up: calcium, C, A, whatever. That was the place I thought she was going to break down. She was always nagging Billy to take calcium because he was violently allergic to milk. And she thought like most kids he was fibbing when he said, sure, he'd taken them. But they were lined up in a row."

They were in Wiggins-territory now-not Ashburton, but allergies. He crossed his arms over the front seat. "It can play hell with a person; I should know."

Jury had lowered the window and was tossing the undrinkable coffee from the paper cup. "You're not allergic to milk, Wiggins." He turned to see Wiggins take a brown bottle from his coat pocket dispensary.

"One-a-Day." He washed the capsule down with his coffee. "It's especially important when you can't stop for a proper meal. Which happens all the time." The tone was dark.

"Yeah. Well, obviously something interrupted Billy Healey's little meal eight years ago," said Macalvie. "Someone walked in and surprised Billy. And the someone got a little surprise himself when Toby came in from wherever he was for his tea."

"He could have been in the kitchen, too."

"No. They took photos." Macalvie's tone was grudging. "The slice of bread with the jam had been half eaten; the bread with the butter hadn't been touched. Neither had the second cup of tea. So Billy starts the tea-making and probably tells Toby, wherever Toby might have been, and within, say, that fifteen or twenty minutes someone comes in the kitchen door. The kitchen was at the back facing the dirt road. It was someone Billy Healey knew."

"That's a hell of an assumption, Macalvie."

"Then you haven't been paying attention-well, what's this, then?"

A sable-brown car flew by in the inside lane. It must have been doing a hundred.

Jury winced. "Macalvie, that's a Jag. It's an XJSC, V-twelve engine. Top of the line. We're in a bottom-line Ford V-eight and you're not going to catch-" Jury's words were lost on the wind as Macalvie hit the accelerator.