Martha Grimes - The Old Silent

Jury gave a slight headshake. Perhaps she really believed it. "What happened to Mr. Citrine's wife? Nell Healey's mother?"

"Dead." Beneath the tan, there was a rosy flush. "Charles is a widower-" Then she must have seen the implication of this and went hurriedly on to say, "It was probably a blessing that she never lived to see this."

With that hackneyed sentiment, even the cockatoo screeched.

The most celebratory activity on New Year's Day had occurred when a sybaritic gang of children from the nearby market town of Sidbury had come to Long Piddleton and somehow gained entrance through the back of the Jack and Hammer, to steal up the stairs to the box room on the first floor. From here they had wriggled out on the beam, dismantled the blue-coated, mechanical Jack, and the lot of them carted the wooden figure back to Sidbury. This had happened three years ago, and it had happened again three nights ago. To hear Dick Scroggs talk, the Sidburyites were only matched by the Newcastle football fans for pure rowdiness.

Marshall Trueblood, dressed no less colorfully than "Jack" himself, was seated at one of the window tables in the Jack and Hammer with his friend Melrose Plant, both of them working away at a large book of cut-outs, and occasionally making sounds of commiseration.

Scroggs, publican of the Jack and Hammer, was slapping over the pages of his Telegraph and rolling a toothpick round in his mouth as he bent over the saloon bar. He still hadn't recovered from the New Year's night revelries when the "whey-faced gang of roughs," (as Marshall Trueblood described them) had been surprised by police in a frozen field of coarse grass and bracken, just as one of them had touched a match to some dry branches arranged round the mechanical man that was the pub's pride and joy and the most colorful thing in Long Pidd with the possible exception of Marshall Trueblood. The Jack was rescued with its aquamarine trousers barely singed and restored to Dick Scroggs.

"It's hard enough to have to put up with the childish pranks of our own kiddies," said Trueblood, as he carefully separated a Dracula face from the cardboard surrounding it, "without these rowdies from Sidbury tramping up to the village."

Melrose Plant did not answer. He was frowning over the task of affixing one of the legs to the cut-out torso, his long, elegant fingers trying to work a tiny tab through a narrow slit. "Haven't you poked out the cape yet? I'm nearly finished."

"I mean, the whole thing is too silly for words anyway; I don't see why we have to put up with these childish pranks. When the little ninnies come to my door on New Year's Day, I put my hands on their shoulders, turn them about and about and get them all dizzy and watch them go drunkenly off. They think I'm playing. Good Lord." He put a crease in the chalk-white face where the instructions had said Fold and handed it to Melrose Plant. "Here."

"Do the cape." Melrose nodded at the big book of punch-out figures.

Marshall Trueblood had found this cardboard collection of put-together monsters and ghouls at the Wrenn's Nest bookshop ("in a fight to the death with some beastly child," for it was the last one). "Do you think we should be doing this here, in public? I mean, she might just come in." He leaned back and lit a jade-green Sobranie and regarded Melrose through a scrim of smoke.

"She won't come in; she's busy packing," said Melrose, who had successfully attached both of the legs to the torso and was picking up the face. "Or, I should say, staring at her trunks and then at the wall. I'm thirsty." He called over his shoulder to Dick Scroggs for another round.

"I can't really believe she means to do it, can you?"

"She's been engaged to him for four years; I imagine she's beginning to feel rather self-conscious. Have you got the boat?"

"Right here, old sweat." Trueblood leaned a small, canoe-shaped boat against his pint glass. He had found it in a lot of goods acquired at an antiques auction. It had been painted pale blue and bits fixed to the ends so that it looked like a gondola. He had punched out a rat to put in it, which he placed temporarily in the tin ashtray. "Dick! Another round, if you please!"

Dick Scroggs apparently didn't, for he kept his eyes on the newspaper. Finally he gave in to the calls from the public bar on the other side and went round the bar to lavish his attention on the dart players.

"Oh, hell," said Trueblood. "Must we wait on ourselves? That she's been engaged to him, old trout," he continued as he poked out the red-lined cape, "has nothing to do with her marrying him."

Melrose picked up their glasses and went to the bar as Dick came round the other side. "Two more, Dick." As Dick set the glasses beneath the pulls, Melrose turned the paper round. Dick had been in the process of cutting the article about the murder in West Yorkshire from it. He possessed a small, hook-billed instrument for the purpose of sawing odds and ends from papers and magazines. Melrose wondered if he was tracking Jury's career for him, pasting up articles in a scrapbook.

As he released the beer pulls and they stood watching the foam rise on the pints of Old Peculier, Dick observed, "Seems a pity, dunnit? You wonder what'd ever make a woman kill her husband that way." He drew a knife across the cap of foam and placed the glasses on the counter. He was, of course, dying to know if Melrose had been talking to Jury about the case. "Well, I expect the poor woman'd never be quite right in the head with her boy being kidnapped and all. You read about that, I expect?" Perhaps this salacious morsel had escaped Melrose's attention.

"I did indeed. Well, one certainly can't complain in this case that the police are never around when you need them. Thank you, Dick." He took their drinks and returned to the table, stopped dead as he saw a figure pass by the window behind Marshall Trueblood. "Oh, hell! Here she comes!" The figure disappeared momentarily and they heard the door to the pub open. "Quick! Here!" Melrose shoved the cut-out book and canoe toward Trueblood and slapped his Times over the cardboard Dracula.

Whispered his friend, "Don't give it to me , damn all…"Trueblood hurriedly shoved the canoe-gondola behind him and the torn pieces into the book and waved it wildly around before sitting on it.

"Hullo, Vivian; thought you were home counting lira," said Melrose pleasantly.

Vivian Rivington looked more as if she'd been counting the days of her life and finding them numbered. Coppery strands of hair had come undone from the loosely braided knot and she blew them from her forehead as she sat dewn, exhausted. "There's just too much to do, is all. May I have a sherry?" She was looking at Trueblood.

"Of course," said Melrose, giving her a blinding smile and returning to his crossword.

"Well?" she looked from one to the other and then toward the bar, empty except for Mrs. Withersby, who had propped her mop in the pail, and was administering to herself from the optics. "Must I get it myself, then?"

"Dick will be back in a moment. You look beautiful, Vivian." Actually, Melrose thought the mustard-colored twin-set was rather abominable. It drained the color from her ordinarily pearly skin and fought with the coppery hair.

Vivian looked down, as if checking to see if this was herself, and frowned at him. "I do?"

"Absolutely," put in Trueblood. "Very fetching indeed."

"Well, if I'm so damned fetching, will one of you get me my drink?"

Trueblood twisted on the window seat a bit and said,

"You know that dreadful estate agent-Haggerty? Is that his name?-has been asking if you intend to sell your cottage. They are so pushy, these people. Of course, proper Elizabethan is rare these days. There's so much of the mucked-up stuff. But I honestly hope you're not going to sell, Viv-viv. Though you have indicated that's what you intended from time to time."