The Old Silent

3

"Sick leave?"

Chief Superintendent A. E. Racer made an elaborate display of cupping his ear with his hand as if the ear couldn't quite believe it. "Sickleave?"

Jury knew that for Racer this was, if not the opportunity of a lifetime, at least the best one that had come along that day: here was a chink in the old Jury armor, a rent in the old corduroy jacket, an occasion that called for much more than telling Superintendent Jury a policeman's life was full of grief, since it apparently was. Jury could almost see the tiny guns taking aim in Racer's mind, trying for a salvo that would never go off.

"You've never applied for sick leave."

"Perhaps that's why I'm sick."

" 'Sick leave' is Wiggins's department. He takes it for all of us."

Request denied. Punch time clock. Wheel to grindstone. There're none of us who couldn't use a bit of a rest, especially me. But you don't see me lying down on the job.

"Well, he looks sick to me," said Fiona Clingmore, who'd come in to collect two big stacks of paper that she was now balancing on her forearms at the same time her eyes were on the booby-trap box Racer had rigged to catch the cat Cyril.

Did Racer really think he could outwit Cyril? Fiona had asked this question as she sat filing her nails into glossy claws. Gets worse every day, the chief does.

"If you want me to bring a note from my doctor, I will."

"I'm sure Wiggins can rip out a page from one of his prescription pads. Or furnish some Harley Street letterheads. His desk must be littered with them." Racer smiled his razorblade smile and looked at Jury over folded hands, the thumbs making propeller circles round each other.

Fiona looked from Jury to Racer.

"He's worn out, he is. You only have to look to see he's dead on his feet, practically."

Dressed in her usual black, this one the light wool dress with the tightly zipped bodice and pinch-pleated skirt, Fiona looked like she was ready to crash a funeral service, given the seamed stockings and black hood hugging her tarnished gold hair. Whenever he looked at Fiona, Jury thought of old trunks filled with taffeta tea-dance gowns, ribbon-tied letters, the little paper valentines punched from books that were handed round at school…

Fiona, for all of her shoulder-shrugging, hip-thrusting brashness, was a picture of poignance. He'd better stop thinking about her and the past or pretty soon he'd be walking in his mind down the Fulham Road hand-in-hand with his mother, perhaps watching the wash go round in the launderette. A big dose of nostalgia was not what he needed to cure a big case of depression. Though sitting in Racer's office, looking at Racer's brilliant invention for trapping the cat Cyril helped to assuage that. It was a small wooden crate with a drop-screen, activated by pressure of foot or paw, whence the hinges would fold and the screen fall back, covering the box. Inside was a tin of sardines. Racer said he'd got this idea from old films he remembered about hunters and Hottentots (or some other aborigine) where the Hottentots were always falling through holes covered with vegetation into nets that quickly tightened.

He forgot that Cyril-the cat that had wandered into the halls of Scotland Yard seemingly out of nowhere-was not a Hottentot. Jury and Fiona marveled at the pure idiocy of the sardine box-trap. True, the screen banged shut. But all Cyril had to do was nose it open when he had dined on his tin of sardines. Thus Racer must have had some vague plan that he would catch Cyril at it, that he would return from his club and find claws scrabbling at the screen. If Racer and Cyril (Fiona had said) ever met, it would be in Hell. And it would be (Jury had said) a brief meeting indeed, since Cyril could walk through flames without singeing his burnished copper fur. Houdini (they had both agreed) would have got free faster from that underwater escape if he'd had Cyril with him.

Fiona had two dozen sardine tins in the filing cabinet, which she was constantly using to replace the ones that Cyril ate. Cyril loved the box; it was a second home. Sluggish from his meal, he would sometimes nap on the can and Fiona would have to drag him out before Racer returned. Jury told her not to worry; Cyril could scent Racer's approach from vast distances. The cat could hear him, smell him, even see him when Racer was pushing open the glass door of New Scotland Yard. They did not want Racer to think his contraption wasn't working, or his inventiveness might take a nose-dive and he'd revert to some other means of disposal, like painting the carpet with poison.

Yes, thought Jury, the depression was lifting, as he saw Fiona's eye rove the room in search of the cat Cyril. He was missing, and Jury knew where he was, though Racer hadn't twigged it. Jury screened his eyes with his hand in a posture of sickliness that allowed him to look at the bottom of the bookcase that Racer had converted into a drinks cabinet. Tiny tinklings of glass emerged from it. Racer could cup his ears all he wanted, but he was getting deaf.

The cabinet was fitted with doors easily opened by hitching a finger (or paw) in the handle. Unfortunately, Racer would walk by occasionally and kick the door shut. He had commissioned Fiona to get a lock and key, grumbling (Fiona'd told Jury) about the char being at the booze bin again. ("That's what he calls it, imagine? Common, ain't it?" she'd added, tossing down her nail file and picking up the buffer.)

Inside the cabinet were two or three bottles each of Remy, Tanqueray, Black Bush and aged Scotch, fallen off backs of vans (according to Fiona): gifts from villains that Racer had done little favors for. There was a miniature replica of a beer keg with a spout and a small cup for catching the whiskey. Right at eye level, if you were a cat. Cyril often wandered from the inner to the outer office in a weaving, wondering way.

"He'll get sick," Fiona had said after one of the booze bin jaunts.

"Cyril? You know he's only doing it to drive Racer crazy."

"Maybe he should have a liver test."

"If you want my opinion," said Fiona, nodding toward her beloved (now sick) superintendent, "a couple of weeks off-"

"No, I do not want your opinion, Miss Clingmore. I cannot recall the last time-if ever there was one-that I wanted your opinion." He was still twirling his thumbs, looking from his secretary to his superintendent with that got you both on the run, haven't I? expression.

Fiona pursed her bright red lips and said, hefting the pile of papers, "So you want me to shred this lot, I expect." She quietly chewed her gum and regarded him, poker-faced.

Racer's already alcohol-mottled face flushed a rosier red. "Shred? I do not shred papers."

"No? What about all them-those-letters to the commissioner last year. You surely didn't tell me to file-"

"Take those papers and your jeweled talons," (Fiona was deeply into nail art) "out of here. And see if that cat's roaming the halls and walking across the forensics lab tables. Do you hear me?"

With the weight of the papers, she still managed an indifferent shrug. "Well, I still say anyone that's not had sick leave in fifteen years deserves more consideration." Turning to go, she added, "I'll just take these to the shredder." Fiona exited to the tiny tinkle of glass on glass.

Wiggins was still holding a copy of Time Out in one hand and with the other pouring a dollop of vinegar into a glass of water to which he then added a spoonful of honey.

Jury just shook his head. That Wiggins had got to the point where he could measure his medications without even looking up from his reading was proof of a practiced hand indeed. "I'm not talking Fisherman's Friends and charcoal biscuits, I'm talking sick, Wiggins." Jury was yanking open the drawer of a filing cabinet. "The real thing, official sickdom, sicko, down-for-the-count." Jury took one of the forms from the drawer on his sergeant's desk. "Something only a week or two in the country can fix. The damned things have enough copies, don't they?" Jury fingered the multicolored form.

Wiggins stopped tapping his honeyed spoon against the glass and looked from Time Out to the form to Jury, frowning. "I don't understand, sir."

"Two weeks off, flat on my back. More or less." Jury scratched his head over the wording of a question. When was this illness first evidenced? He felt like answering, My first meeting with Chief Superintendent A. E. Racer…. He glanced over at Wiggins's desk. The sergeant was slightly pale. It was, Jury supposed, one thing to be medicating oneself for a sore throat with honey and vinegar while still at one's desk; it was quite another to have illness stamped with the imprimatur of officialdom.

Jury scratched away, half-conscious of the sergeant's rather ragged breathing. Practicing for the doctor himself, perhaps? He looked up; Wiggins was looking at Jury sadly. Across the corner of the entertainment magazine he held was a banner saying, The Last Wind Blows. Whatever that meant. The cover showed the face of a young man, head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open. Round his neck was a strap holding a sleek white guitar. Across the picture of the guitarist was written SIROCCO, the white cursive letters streaming across the cover as if wind were blowing the letters away. "I need a different climate. Warm. Sand, sea, warm breezes."

Wiggins said, "My doctor suggested just that a while back. A year or two ago."

Jury smiled at the fact that now Wiggins sounded somewhat envious. "Whatare you putting down, sir? Not that you don't need time off-"

Jury nodded toward the magazine. "Or Time Out. Nervous collapse, how about that? He certainly looks as if he might have one."

Wiggins flipped the magazine over, looked at the cover, said, "Well, apparently he thinks he is. 'The Last Wind Blows.' It's his last concert."

"Whose?" Jury looked up. Where had he seen the face?

"Charlie Raine's. He's lead guitarist for this rock group, Sirocco. Surely you've heard of them."

That was it. Posters tacked up around London. "Last concert? God, he looks like he just started his last form in public school."

"A shame, isn't it?"

Jury penned in another answer to another inane question. "A publicity stunt, more likely."

"I don't know, sir. Actually, when you think of it, success is pretty hard on a person."

Putting aside his pen, Jury said, "We should know."

"What sea and what sands are you going to?" His smile was like the last tiny sliver of waning moon.

"Yorkshire."

The magazine fell to the desk; the pen dropped. They had been across the North Yorkshire moors years ago. It was not the high point in Sergeant Wiggins's career.

"West Yorkshire, Wiggins. Wanner."

Wiggins gave him a sickly smile.

Jury rose, stretched, and got out a cigarette. He went round to Wiggins's desk and added, looking down at the picture of the young singer, "And maybe awhile in Cornwall. Don't you have a day or two of leave coming up?" Jury nodded at the form. "Why don't you take it?"

Wiggins took fright momentarily. "I expect you could call that sea and sand," he said with an unusual turn of mild humor.

Jury lit a cigarette, looked at the face on Time Out.

"Heathrow was flooded with fans. They had enough police for a terrorist attack. Carole-anne was probably there," said Wiggins.

"Living Hell seems to be her group."

"Oh, that's hard to believe. They're passe."

Sergeant Wiggins often surprised him with a knowledge of unusual or arcane subjects, totally unrelated to his work.

"She's been poring over maps and timetables for a week now in her spare time."

"Is she taking a trip, then? I'll miss her."

Wiggins could move quickly from speculation to a fait accompli. And then, Jury realized, so could he. He shoved the form to one side, drumming his fingers impatiently. "What about the Devon-Cornwall constabulary? What did Superintendent-what was his name?"

"Goodall, sir. He's passed away, sir." Wiggins looked into his glass as if it were the funeral wine. "Last year it was. I got a chief detective inspector, though."

"What did he say?"

Wiggins took a large swallow from his glass of honey-vinegar elixir before answering. "Nothing very helpful; he seemed reluctant to go into it. That it had been over eight years, after all. Couldn't dredge up the details off the top of his mind."

"No one's asking for the top of his mind." Jury leaned back, looked up at the ceiling molding. A spider was swinging precariously from a thread of its broken web. "They must have a fairly thick dossier on that kidnapping; even I remembered the essentials, and I wasn't in Cornwall. Couldn't he take the trouble to have one of his lackeys open the files?"

"He was at home, sir. In Penzance. Said I'd got him in from his garden. Staking up some ornamental trees, or something, that a storm had-"

"Swell." Jury thought for a moment. "It's the Devon-Cornwall constabulary." He reached for the telephone. "Maybe Macalvie knows something."