The Old Silent

23

"It were a dreadful thing, but there's no way to help you, I can see," said Mrs. Holt, irritation flickering across her broad features. "It were painful enough at the time."

Without police dredging it all up again, her look at Jury said. Since her eyes, as she sat in the overstuffed chair across from Jury, were trained not on him but on the ashtray on the table between them, Jury thought the source of the fleeting look was not the fate of Toby Holt but the cigarette Jury had stubbed out immediately upon entering the room. Given the rabbity sniff of her nose, he was sure of it. Owen Holt, large, square-faced, an unhappy-seeming man, looked not directly at Jury, but across his shoulder, apparently out of the window. His eyes were the grayish-blue color of denim and washed out, like faded jeans.

Mrs. Holt had opened the door of the terraced house in Oakworth, dressed in a coverall, head turbaned, and holding a rainbow-hued feather duster and a chamois cloth in a white-gloved hand. Had they not now been sitting in her grimly tidy parlor, where her husband Owen seemed himself to be a visitor, Jury might have taken it for a window display to entice the passersby to snap up the three-piece suite on hire-purchase. The sofa and two armchairs were covered in a hideous, multicolored pattern with fringed throw pillows that just missed matching the blue, pink, and yellow zigzag design. All of this fought with the old-fashioned sepia-tinted wallpaper covered with tiny bouquets whose cinched stems trailed fluttery little ribbons. The fake coals in the unusable fireplace might have been nicked from the same window.

But what particularly struck Jury about the Holt parlor wasn't this discordance of paper, paint, and pattern: it was the absence of ornaments and the lack of pictures. There were no mementos, no little groupings of figurines; no framed photographs or bits of embroidery; no books, only a thin stack of magazines lying on the coffee table. In the corner cupboard was china that he doubted had been used in many years. The one hint of frivolity was a glass- and wood-beaded curtain that hung in an alcove at the bottom of the staircase.

"The Social come round," said Alice Holt, in reluctant response to Jury's question, "and said they'd got this ever-so-sad case of a little boy that'd been orphaned…"

Her voice trailed off as the hand shot out almost of its own volition to pluck the ashtray from the table. "And as Owen here'd talked about wouldn't it be nice t'have a bairn round the place…" She rose to dispose of the odious ashes. "T'other person talks, but who had the care?" she said elliptically and she whisked from the room holding the ashtray at arm's length.

Owen Holt had either got used to his wife's doing the talking, or he was congenitally a silent man. His contribution to this conversation had been spasmodic. But now he said, "Quiet he were. Meant to adopt him. Never did, officially. But always did think of him as me own." He was still looking somewhere beyond Jury, still taking in the scene beyond the window.

The long-case clock ticked in its spastic rhythm, a little like Owen Holt's speech, and Jury was quiet. Then he said, "I'm sorry. It must have been particularly difficult for you, having to…" His mouth formed the word identify but no sound came with it. Identify the body.

Jury's mind clouded. Like a double exposure, the image of Owen Holt looking down at the boy lying in one of those rows of refrigerated compartments pulled out like a big desk drawer was overlaid with the remembrance of himself staring down onto the rubble of the flat that night so long ago, looking at the outstretched arm of his mother, the cupped hand, the black velvet sleeve, his own frenzied attempt to get the plaster and wood away from her, while more kept falling. Her hand seemed to be making just that gesture it so often had, when she held out her arm and motioned for him to come along, now.

As if some fierce photographer kept letting off the flash, the image would come back sharply after all these years when he looked at a woman's arm outstretched just so. What had driven him nearly to distraction was that his mother had been alone.

" 'Twas." Holt nodded slowly, over and over. "And Alice. Alice never stopped cleaning since that boy died."

It shook Jury a little, that his own estimation of Alice Holt had been so superficial. Her husband had wrapped up in that one observation what drove the woman to this frenzy of housekeeping, always trying to keep things straight, to get things back to their proper place, to keep her mind swept clean of the detritus of the past as she swept her parlor clean of the dust of the present. And again, he thought of the rubble.

Alice Holt returned, took her seat, picked up the feather duster like a defensive weapon, and went on. "It were only to be for a little while. While things got sorted out for the child. With Owen and the arthritis he'd had to leave the mill. We'd got trooble enough without another mouth to feed." She was staring at the particular place on the coffee table from which Jury had picked up his notebook and pen. "Of course there's the orphanage. But…" Furtively she reached over and polished the end of the coffee table where the notebook had lain.

Jury's throat tightened, remembering the bleak corridors of Good Hope, where he had spent six years of his life. But, at least, he could remember the faces of his dead parents. That had been more than many had, more than Toby Holt had.

"So we had the lad for all his life," Alice was saying as she traced the base of a lamp with a white-gloved finger and squinted at the tip.

"A short life it was," said Owen.

It was as though she eclipsed the life altogether by ignoring her husband's comment. Instead she shifted to the Citrines. "You don't find them taking in poor children. Them that have the money-"

Jury interrupted what promised to be a litany of complaints. "I take it Toby and Billy Healey were great friends."

"The best," said Owen.

"Better Toby'd never seen any of that lot. She put ideas in his head. A bad influence, she were."

Owen Holt waved her comment away, smiling with forbearance.

"What sort of ideas?"

"Musical, she told him he was, like her own boy." With the multihued duster, she pointed. "Why, I'd like to know? Toby was tone-deaf if ever a child was. It were Billy that could play piano and anything else handed him."

An unexpected chuckle came from Owen Holt. "That was just to make Toby feel good. But he did try."

"Pigheaded."

The phrase might have been meant to define Toby, Owen, or even Jury himself, since she was glaring at him.

Studying Jury with suspicion, eyebrows scissored together, she said, "You're from Scotland Yard in London. What's Scotland Yard to do with that Healey person getting killed in the Old Silent Inn? We got our own police. Only time I ever remember Scotland Yard coming up here was about that Peter Sutcliffe." Alice Holt seemed to think Jury was mounting a police investigation as mammoth as the Yorkshire Ripper case.

"Nothing like that," he said vaguely.

She started fussing with a small stack of magazines, already neatly stacked. "All I know is what I told police back then. It's the Citrines you should be asking. Cold-blooded lot. It weren't enough they wouldn't pay the ransom for their own boy; they got Toby killed, too." She stopped in the act of running the glove round the grooves of a piecrust table.

" 'Twasn't their fault, Alice."

"No? If he'd not gone on that trip with her he'd be alive today!"

"Very attached to Mrs. Healey was Toby," said Owen, seemingly unaware that he might be fueling his wife's jealousy of that attachment. "Do you know he even tried to plant a garden in that grit soil. Determined lad. And Mr. Citrine's been good to us, letting me work when I can hardly hold a rake."

"Conscience money, that's all-"

"Be quiet," Owen Holt snapped in what Jury thought was an uncharacteristic display of bad temper. He stared down at his crippled hands.

Jury looked round the room again. The large television, the fridge he'd got a glimpse of earlier, the good china (albeit unused): knowing what he did about the generosity of the welfare state didn't necessarily mean the Holts had other income, but there seemed an abundance for a man who hadn't been able to work for several years except at odd jobs on the Citrine estate… then he remembered Nell Healey's comment that she'd done what she could. "I'm sure they must have felt responsible for what happened. I can understand an annuity of some sort after what you'd been through-"

Alice Holt sat up straight. "We don't accept charity. It was Toby's-"

"Alice!" Again, Owen Holt warned her off.

"Well, I can't see what's wrong with it." She said to Jury, "It was just ten thousand she set up for a trust fund for the boy's education. After two weeks, and Toby missing, and-"

Here, she raised her eyes to stare at the ceiling, not, he thought, at the rooms above but to keep the tears from falling. "-dead. She changed it over. The trust I mean. Told us to use it for ourselves…"

Owen Holt merely shook his head. "Police aren't interested in all that." He looked belligerently at Jury now. "It's our affair, that."

Sharply, his wife looked at him. "You drank near half of it away." She seemed to think Jury now was her ally. "Drink and gambling, that's a fine thing. Up there at the Black Bush, with that lot you played cards with. Not one of them with two pence to rub together and freeloaded off you."

Holt started rocking his chair as he shook his head again. "I told you a dozen times, 'twas because I just went kind of crazy over the boy being gone. You don't see me doing it no more, do you?"

"No." Alice Holt sat back, putting down the duster and dragging off the white glove, which she held clenched in her hand, like a flag of truce. "No, I expect you don't." Defeat, not over an argument lost, but of a life, was heavy in her voice.

Owen Holt turned his head again listlessly to gaze out of the window, and Jury wondered for a moment what the pose reminded him of. Nell Healey came back to him, standing and gazing at the orchard.

Like her, Owen Holt might have expected Toby to materialize out there working in the gritty soil, managing finally to make a few flowers grow.