Martha Grimes: The Old Silent

"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."

The question wasn't whether Divisional Commander Macalvie knew something but whether he knew everything , a conviction that his Scene-of-Crimes expert assumed he held, and that she was in the process of challenging.

Since Gilly Thwaite was a woman, and Macalvie's lack of tolerance was legendary, none of her colleagues at the Devon headquarters had expected her to last five minutes in the bracing presence of Brian Macalvie.

But Macalvie's suffering others to live had nothing to do with sex, age, creed, species. He had no end of tolerance as long as nobody made a mistake in the job. And he was fond of saying that he understood and sympathized with the possibility of human error. If the monkey could really type Hamlet , he'd take the monkey on a case with him any day before ninety percent of his colleagues.

He couldn't understand (which is to say, he didn't give a bloody damn) why people found him difficult to work with. Occasionally, someone who'd actually got a transfer (requests for them had become routine) would burst into his office and tell him off. One had actually accepted a demotion to Kirkcudbright and told Macalvie Scotland was hardly far enough away from him; he'd asked for Mars. Macalvie was part Scot himself, and had just sat there, chewing his gum, warming his hands under his armpits, his copper hair glimmering in a slant of sun and the acetylene torches of his blue eyes turned down a bit from boredom, and replied that the sergeant was lucky it was Scotland because he'd forgot to do up his fly, and in Kirkcudbright maybe he could wear a kilt.

Not everyone on the force hated Macalvie; the police dogs loved him. They knew a cop with a good nose. The dogs belonged to the ten percent of the population Macalvie thought had it together. He only wished he could say the same for their trainers. And the fingerprint team. And forensics. And especially for the police doctors. At this point Macalvie had read so many books on pathology he could have earned a degree.

So ten percent-well, seven on an especially bad day- comprised that part of the population Macalvie thought might possibly know what they were doing. Gilly Thwaite was one, although one would be hard put to know why from the dialogue going on between them when Jury's call came through.

"You're not the pathologist, Chief Superintendent." Gilly Thwaite only tossed him a title, like a bone, when she was being sarcastic.

Actually, he didn't care what he was called, except when he was being sarcastic. He said, "Thank God I'm not that one. The last time he opened his murder bag I thought I saw a hammer and a spanner. He'd make a better plumber." He shoved the diagram she'd slapped on his desk aside and went back to the same deep immersion in the newspaper she'd chortled about when she came in." You? Reading on the job ?"

This he had ignored and he tried to ignore her now. Her argument was perfectly intelligent; it was just wrong. The item in the Telegraph was sending up his blood pressure.

Still, she mashed her finger at the diagram, a drawing of the trajectory a bullet might have made from entrance to exit wound. "The entrance wound is here , see, here . The bullet couldn't possibly have lodged there -"

He regarded her over the edge of the paper. "The bullet could've glanced off one of the ribs."

"Macalvie, you can't go into court and say our own pathologist is wrong."

"Not going to. I'm going to say he's not a pathologist, he's a plumber."

Gilly Thwaite was shaking her head rapidly; her ordinarily tight brown curls had got longer because she hadn't had time to cut her hair.

"Your hair is turning to snakes, Medusa."

She pounded her fist on his desk so hard the telephone jumped as it rang and she squealed in frustration.

He snatched it up. Anything for a reprieve. "Macalvie," he said.

"My God, Macalvie, are you sticking a pig?"

"Hullo, Jury. No, just Gilly Thwaite. Get out, will you?"

"I just got here," said Jury.

"Her." Silence. "I shut my eyes. She's still here. Go get a haircut." Back to Jury. "I was just reading about it."

Although he was slightly startled by Macalvie's mind-reading, he didn't question it. "Roger Healey, you mean."

"Why else would you be calling, unless you too have some inane theory on the trajectory of a bullet through human organs. She's still here. I've been teaching her about ribs. How every body has them, and there's a heart, and lungs. I think she's ready for her first term of pre-med. I'm flattered. The case was in the less-than-expert hands of Superintendent Goodall of our Cornwall constabulary."

"The chief inspector Wiggins talked to said the case was closed; he said he couldn't remember much about it."

"Billy Healey was walking along a public footpath with his mum-correction, stepmum , which it seemed to make a big difference to some minds-walking along this footpath about four hundred yards below their house on the coast, an isolated house-"

Jury nodded to Wiggins quickly to pick up the extension. Wiggins did, very quietly, getting out his notebook at the same time.

"-near Polperro. That's about thirty, forty miles from Plymouth-Wiggins. How's January treating you?"

As if that were a cue, Wiggins sneezed and said hello, himself. "How'd you know I was here?" Wiggins smiled at this little magic act of the divisional commander's.

"Nobody breathes like you, Wiggins. It's an especially uplifting sound. Shall I start again?"

Said Jury, "I think I can remember those details. I'll try hard."

"Let's hope so. Anyway, it was around four, maybe a little after, and they were walking. Nell Healey-that's the stepmother-said that they'd been walking the path so that Billy could look for bird eggs. They usually did this in the afternoon, she said, even though they never found any, but it was a fantasy both of them seemed to get a kick out of. Anyway, Billy said he was going in to fix some sandwiches for him and Toby. Toby was indoors."

"The way his stepmother put it, Billy ran and walked by turns over the ground back to the house and would turn and wave every so often." He paused and Jury heard some rustling of papers and what sounded like the click of Macalvie's cigarette lighter.

Wiggins frowned. "Thought you'd given that up, Superintendent."

"I wish you'd join my forensics team, Wiggins. They can't see their own shoes much less through telephones."

"You know what your doctor-"

"Wiggins." Jury gave him a look.

"Oh, sorry, sir. Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Macalvie. He'd just gone back to the house for the sandwiches."

Macalvie continued. "He didn't come back."

There was a pause and an uncharacteristic clearing of his throat, as if something had lodged there. One might have thought the divisional commander was getting emotional.

Wiggins didn't take it this way: "How many packs a day are you up to by now?"

"Into thin air, you'd think. She waited and finally went back to the house. Thought he'd got caught up in some game with Toby, couldn't find either of them, and then thought maybe he was doing the hide-and-seek bit with her. So for a while she wasn't anxious. And, of course, it's not like losing sight of your kid in the middle of Oxford Street or Petticoat Lane. Then she looked outside, everywhere, and then she called the police. Do you want all this detail or just the highlights?"

"I'm amazed you remember all this detail. It wasn't even your case."