The Old Silent

35

"I can find my way," Jury said to the silent servant who had just opened the heavy door on the depressing sight of the cold entrance room and the dim hall that reached away from it into darkness. "Don't bother announcing me."

Carefully folding his coat over her arm, she looked at him doubtfully. Jury merely smiled and waited. As unused as she apparently was to requests either to or not to announce, she shuffled off with his coat.

In the Great Hall a fire blazed in the hearth and the brasserie. But only in these two pockets did the room seem warm, for the rest was still cold, like stepping from the heat of the sun into the shadows. In the shadow of the archway Jury now stood.

Given the positions of Charles and Rena Citrine in the magisterial chairs at the end of the long table, they might have been facing off for an argument. Yet their low voices, their ignorance of the presence of another person might have brought them together not as enemies but as conspirators. It might have been his imagination but his sense of their relationship, seeing them thus, was turned around.

When he said good morning, their heads turned together. It wasn't long, though, before Charles Citrine was on his feet and displaying as much hostility as he probably ever let show. Jury expected he prized that cool, shambling manner of his above all else.

It must have taken steely control to limit his anger at Jury's appearance to a mere, "Just what are you doing here?"

"Trying to help your daughter."

Citrine slumped back in his chair and said nothing.

His sister looked from him to Jury. "And do you think we're not? " Her smile was a trifle arch.

"I don't know, do I?"

Citrine shot him a vitriolic glance.

"Charles…" Rena leaned forward a bit.

Jury would never have pictured Rena Citrine as a peacemaker. Certainly not for the brother she had so often referred to as "Saint Charles." But the circumstances here were rather more serious than what part of the house she felt she had been permitted to occupy.

She said to him, gesturing toward the heavy walnut chair positioned several feet in front of the brasserie, "You needn't stand, Superintendent." The brandy decanter that she and her brother had been sharing she lifted, as invitation to join them. Jury shook his head. The glasses from which they drank were cut glass, heavily pointed. The decanter itself looked like old pressed glass, smooth. She shoved it across the table toward Charles, who poured a half inch into his glass. The lines round his mouth had deepened since Jury had seen him, as heavily cut as the glass in his hand.

Jury said, "Ann Denholme got a telephone call before she set out across Keighley Moor. Doubtful it was a friend since the housekeeper says Miss Denholme barely said a word. Might have been a message from the milk-float man about a delivery. Might have been Nelligan about stray sheep. Might have been anyone." Jury watched a large log roll down, split, send up sparks. He did not bother watching their faces, for they had heard all of this before.

As Charles Citrine wearily reminded him. "But more likely someone from this house. We've been through this again and again with police from Wakefield and that detective, Sanderson."

"What you think," said Rena, "is that someone in this house lured poor Ann Denholme to her death. Given we're rather short on family at the moment, the suspects are few. And I don't expect you think our servant was the gun-wielder." Her arm went toward Charles as she gestured for the decanter. For just past eleven in the morning, the decanter appeared to have done quite a bit of traveling. But neither of them seemed in the least drunk.

"And Mrs. Healey, of course," said Jury mildly.

Citrine dropped his head in his hands. But his sister turned, as he had done earlier, and flashed Jury a look of rage. "Don't be absurd. You don't believe that for a minute!" Her glass went down with a thump.

In the same mild tone, Jury said, "Anyone could have made both of those calls to Ann Denholme and to Abby from a public call box."

Rena picked up her glass again without replying.

"Except we know it wasn't the milk-float man. Abby lived to talk about it."

Neither of them said a word, nor did they look at one another.

Finally, having cleared his throat perhaps to see if his voice was in working order, Charles said, "The same person?"

"Would you imagine two people were playing the game?"

Charles shook his head. Rena looked stonily across at him, seeing him or not seeing him, Jury had no idea. She finally said, "In the case of Ann Denholme, there might have been a number of candidates. Men."

Citrine's voice rose a notch, a cautionary notch. "Rena."

For a moment there was silence, and then she got up to stand before the fire, hands thrust into the large pockets of her quilted skirt. It was a patchwork of squares and crescents, satins and silks and wools, a kaleidoscope of greens and blues and golds that shimmered in the firelight. With her heel, she kicked angrily at the log that had fallen, sending up yet more blue flame, and gold sparks that made her red hair glimmer with silvery highlights, her amber eyes take on a reddish glow.

This square of the cheerless hall seemed to flame up around him; the brasserie behind, the sparking logs before, Rena in her flaming crescent colors. Jury looked at her, at her fiery pose, and knew that the slapdash, comic role as the madwoman in the tower, the outcast, the prodigal was illusory.

And he saw it:

Not the bits and pieces, not that last part of dark, leafy tree, not the scalloped edge of pale blue sky, nor the symmetry of the little windows, dark or lit. It was not the beautifully framed square of the Magritte print, but the light cast by the streetlamp in Abby's picture. In that he saw it.