As Jury was walking down the Citrine driveway to his car, hoping for a hot bath, a good meal, and a pretty waitress at the Old Silent, he saw her.
At least, he thought it must be Nell Healey. It was at a distance, and down a torturously winding path screened by trees; but he was sure he had seen a woman moving beyond him.
Jury stepped from the drive to the footpath that wound erratically between pines and spiny-branched elms. No wind stirred. It was as if there had been no storm. The wood at dusk was drearier even than it had seemed earlier that afternoon, as desolate and unhappy a scene as could be.
Wretched was the word that came to mind. Oak-galls clung to barks and branches; the skeletal remains of birches lined the gray sky. Jury looked back at the dark slab of the gatehouse, its squints for windows through which no light would show. Drab and eyeless, it looked almost pernicious. Along the path were the stiff remains of wagwort and flea-bane; sodden leaved and congealed between the roots of tree trunks; moss climbed around lichen-slippery stones.
He wondered if there were places that could infect the mind, abrade the heart, corrode the spirit. Why would anyone choose, as she certainly had, to live in such cold chambers, such a severe landscape, which he doubted was much improved by the coming of spring.
She was standing beside an elm. Standing, not leaning, apparently looking down to the end of the path where a useless gate listed. Useless, because the tiers of stone on either side had nearly disappeared. In this wall that no longer defined any boundary, the gate was redundant.
"Mrs. Healey?"
Although her back was to him, she would have heard his approach over stone shards and fallen twigs. There was no response. But he thought in the moments that followed that her gaze was turned inward, that the wood, path, gate-the entire landscape-was lost on her.
Before he could repeat the name, she swerved a little, looked round at him. "Oh. Hello." She did not pretend that she couldn't remember him, or imagine why she'd be meeting him on this path.
She was holding, incongruously, a handful of leaves rescued from autumn like a small bouquet, as if, having set out to pick some winter flower, this was all she could find. Her skin had a gauzy sheen to it, like her hair. He thought at first the face was made paler by a lack of rouge and eyeshadow; then he knew that what he had taken in the Old Silent for the pallor of illness was not that at all. Her skin had the pellucid look of a child's; her hair was not ash-blond, but streaked here and there with lighter glints and reddish strands; it was variegated, like her eyes. Though the look she gave him was glancing, like cold light on cold water, frozen in the prismatic irises were bits of color like the leaves she held: mottled gold and green and brown with a silvery bloom. Even her clothes were the same colors-dark green sweater hooked round her shoulders, gold silk blouse, brown trousers. It was an autumnal look. In some sort of alchemy, she had absorbed what colors remained. Or, chameleon-wise, was trying to blend in and hide there.
After a moment or two in which she looked from the path to him and back toward the falling-down gate, she said, "I wasn't meaning to be avoiding-" She stopped and expelled a long sigh.
"Avoiding me?" Jury laughed a little. "I'd hate to try to find you if you meant to be elusive."
Her gaze went back to the path and gate.
Jury looked down it. "Were you waiting for someone?"
That earned him a flicker of honest interest. "Waiting?" She smiled slightly. "No."
Either she gave the impression of one always just on the point of speaking, or he was so used to people rattling on about their lives that he was uneasy, waiting himself upon her silence. "You seem so intent," he added limply, "upon that prospect." He looked down the path.
Her smile was very slight. "I have none of those," she said, ambiguously and almost irrelevantly. "A useless gate, isn't it? I expect this place was surrounded by a medieval wall. Perhaps that was what was called a clair-voyee…"
He moved closer, to a position that would have commanded more attention, if that were possible. She continued in her odd way both to note his presence and to ignore it.
"Mrs. Healey-"
"Nell." Her smile was almost convincing. "We were in close enough contact I think you can call me by my first name." Now, she looked away again, this time at the surrounding elms and birches. "I wonder why you're back."
It was a statement only; she did not seem interested in Jury's reasons. He had the feeling that things were done with, finished, for her. There was no trace of hostility in her tone, and none of hope, either. She looked down at the path, as if studying the groupings of pebbles, leaves, and roots. She seemed deep in thought, but it was not her surroundings that engaged her attention, and not him. She appeared not to care how he answered.
"The reason I'm 'back,' as you put it, is that I hoped you might tell me why you killed your husband."
She opened her mouth as if to reply. He waited for something; there was nothing. Somewhere, he heard the soft thunk of a pinecone. Her profile was to him; her arms folded across her breast, hands resting in the crooks of her elbows.
This fixated pose and refusal to talk did not strike Jury as obduracy. She was not being stubborn. Indeed, she once again opened her mouth as if she meant to answer, then closed it as before.
"Your father says it must have been revenge."
After a few moments, she said only, "Does he?" and pulled her sweater closer. Her voice broke between the two syllables.
Did she sense that she was not smooth enough, not plausible enough to go along with that lie?
"But that doesn't surprise you; that must be the line your solicitors are taking-that and temporary insanity."
A feverish color rose from her neck to her face, mottling the cool skin. But her reaction seemed to stem from something other than embarrassment. The corners of her mouth twitched.
Jury wanted to shake her out of this nunlike placidity and calm acceptance of her fate. And he wondered that she didn't appear angry, or, at least, unnerved, by his appearance. She did not seem even to question it. He went on: "After eight years, that'd be a hell of a difficult case to make -even for someone as clever as Sir Michael."
After a few moments, all she said was, "I expect so."
It was such a flat-out statement and carried such a note of conviction that she mightn't have cared at all what happened to her. Her hands were locked behind her; her eyes fixed fast on the end of the path. Jury looked toward the gate, the clair-voyee, and beyond it. There was a bitter little orchard of pollarded trees with shrunken trunks, pencil-thin branches, bony limbs jutting out. In summer, though, it would be different, the trees inviting a child to climb them for the fruit.
"Did your son play there?"
"Yes." It took her some time to add: "With Toby."
It was odd, how she gave only the first name, as if she had an implicit knowledge he'd know Toby.
"Toby Holt."
Nell drew the sweater more closely together and nodded. "They were good friends, which is strange given Billy was twelve and Toby was nearly sixteen. At fifteen, well…" She didn't finish. "I actually think he admired Billy. Of course, Billy seemed older, probably because of his music. He was a wizard, he could play anything, really. Poor Toby. No matter how he tried he could hardly make music with a comb. And Abby, they both actually put up with Abby. She was only three. How is she? And the Holts. Have you talked with the Holts? I wonder how they're getting on without him."
Shaking her head, she looked at the ground. Looked and kept shaking her head as if all of this were a puzzle, a mystery beyond her poor powers to comprehend. And strange her wondering how the Holts "were taking it," as if his death had occurred only last week.
There was no question, apparently, that he would see Abby, would see the Holts. He was sure that at that moment she did not even register his presence as a policeman, or perhaps not at all. She was talking, he thought, to herself. At least, she was talking.
Jury was certain that she could see the ghost of Billy Healey beyond the broken walls, climbing a tree. And when he looked round at her again, she seemed to have taken on the aspects of the orchard; she seemed to have shrunken, grown thinner, turned in upon herself. Her clear complexion, even, had developed tiny lines, like crazed porcelain. She had brought a small book of poetry out from her pocket, and her fingers, skeletal-looking to his eye now, turned it round and round.
"It looks,"-here she nodded toward the rows of smallish trees-"as if it were freezing to death. But it's only resting. What would be dangerous and deadly is a rush of unseasonable warmth." She paused. "I only know that because of a poem about someone's looking at his orchard and saying to it, 'Good-bye and keep cold.' "
"You seem to find that comforting." A chilly wind sprang up, making a few leaves skitter about with a tinny sound, blowing her hair loose from the mooring of its tortoiseshell comb and whipping a few strands across her face. She pulled them back, like a veil, from her mouth and chin and re-pinned the hair.
"Do you like poetry?" asked Jury.
"Yes." His eyes were on the hands combing back the hair, repinning it. She looked extremely young. "I do because you can trust the language of it. I hate talking."
Jury smiled. "That's abundantly clear. It's the only clear thing about you." If he was expecting this to draw her out, he was wrong. She took her own line.
"Words are like gauze. Semitransparent, easily torn, always frayed." It was a delicate smile, as if it had to be tested. She seemed pleased that she'd said what she meant.
"You're probably right, but it's all we've got, and not many of us are poets. I guarantee Queen's Counsel won't be at all poetic when he gets you in the dock." He moved round in front of her to force her to look at him. "Look, don't you think this silence of yours, this not liking to talk, is a conceit you have that there's some buried truth you might dig up if you could find the perfect words to do it? That the world is deaf and dumb, so there's no sense trying to get through to it?"
He knew the minute the words were out of his mouth he'd said exactly the wrong thing, yet he couldn't help himself. She made him angry. When she turned her face to the path again, he said, "I'm sorry. I have no business talking to you at all, much less… chastising you." He smiled a little; he must have fallen into the trap of trying to find the right word and he'd picked one that sounded strange and tasted strange, like sea water. "I'm just sure that there's more to it. Perhaps you've told your solicitors; perhaps the last thing you'd do is talk to me. But I don't think you told them any more than you're telling me. I know there's some other reason you shot your husband."
The silence lengthened like the shadows across the walk. It had grown nearly dark while they were standing here. The purple sky was bisected by a dim band of gold. Drawing her arms up against her breasts, she made a little bridge of her interlaced fingers and rested her chin on them. She had only a small repertoire of movements; they were close and parsimonious, like her words. Since Jury had been talking to her she had moved no farther than the length of his arm. "Why?" was all she said.
He hesitated. He said something else: "You appeared too self-contained for a woman bent on revenge."
She brought her arms down, the hands still interlaced before her. She frowned. "You must be able to see a lot in a few seconds."
"It wasn't just those few seconds. In the dining room, remember, we were both there at the same time."
Slowly, she shook her head. "I was reading a book, that's all."
"Some book. I always leaf through Camus when I want cheering up."
She did not reply to that, but looked up at the purple-black sky and watched two curlews wheeling and making their odd, mulish noise.
"And earlier, in the Brontë museum."
Frowning, she said, "I didn't see you."
"I know. You were much too absorbed, and not in the old manuscripts and ledgers. I also saw you in the toy museum."
The frown deepened as she looked away and then back. "You werefollowing me." Jury nodded. "Why?"
"I don't know."
She seemed more amused by this than annoyed as she shook her head again, very slowly. "But you said nothing."
And he said nothing now, partly because he was breaking his own code and ashamed of that; partly because the more she talked, the less he did. It was as though there was a small allotment of words, not enough for two people at once. It was his turn to look away, toward the gate and the trees beyond.
"I don't understand." It was as if she didn't much care whether she did or not.
Finally, he said what he hadn't said before, what he knew he shouldn't say, unless he said it to Queen's Counsel. It would then remove any hope-remote as hope was-of Nell Healey's acquittal. "I know you're lying. You and your father. So was your husband."
This brought her head round sharply, a look of honest wonder on her face, eyes wide. In the faded light, the glimmer of different colors could not be seen. The irises seemed to have melded into a goldish-green. "Lying about what?"
"About your motive. Even if you haven't said it, you haven't unsaidit. Revenge because Roger Healey, or both of them, took the advice of the Cornwall constabulary and refused to pay the ransom for Billy. And what about your father? Do you intend to kill him, too, out of revenge?" Jury said it mildly.
No response; she became even stiller.
"Your husband didn't have that kind of money. You did. Although the others acted as if it were their money, you were the one who had to sign the check, so to speak. And you didn't; you wouldn't."
Her folded hands came up again to her mouth and her eyes were squeezed shut, as if in this posture she might hold back whatever threatened to come out: tears, words, feelings. Finally, her body went slack again and she asked dully, "How do you know this? The superintendent-" Quickly she stopped, probably aware she was confessing.
"Goodall promised Charles Citrine that the report would be slightly altered? It would make no difference to police which one of you decided, after all."
"The sergeant-" she said, looking at him again with astonishment. "It was the sergeant who told you." Pulling her sweater closer-it was much too cold now for just a sweater, but Jury doubted she noticed it that much-she said, "I remember him very clearly. His name was Mac-something…"
"Macalvie. He's not a sergeant any longer. He's very high up, a divisional commander. Same as a chief superintendent."
"Then you're high up, too."
Jury smiled. "Not like Macalvie. God isn't higher up than Macalvie."
It amazed Jury that she was actually smiling. Not only because she hadn't before, except for a tentative one, but that she could smile over Brian Macalvie. "You don't hate him? For giving that advice so bluntly."
That she might be expected to hate him seemed to puzzle her. "Why should I? I didn't have to take it. And the advice was pretty much what police had been giving all along; the other officer was saying the same thing in a most unconvincing way. The sergeant had a great deal of force and intensity; he was probably placing himself at risk, too. I got the feeling he was absolutely sure he was right."
Jury smiled. "He'd be the first to agree."
"He didn't seem conceited."
"Oh, conceit has nothing to do with it. He's just very much in touch with his own talents-and they're considerable, believe me. That you didn't get Billy back doesn't mean he was wrong. But you must have thought sometimes that if you'd paid that ransom…"
She moved away from him and seemed to be concentrating on the black bark of an oak. "It's all over. But it was over before; I haven't much of a case, as you said."
Jury walked to the tree, leaned his hand against it. "I don't think our knowing will make any difference."
She frowned up at him. "He'll be subpoenaed, and you're-"
"The official police report said the 'family' refused to pay the ransom. The point is: Macalvie-and I-might be more interested in justice being served. But you-" Jury shrugged. "-I'm not sure you're interested in it that much. You give me the impression of someone who's carried out a very difficult task, at last, and damn the consequences."
Since he had moved into her line of vision there and was big enough and close enough to eclipse her view, she had to look at him. She stared at his sweater, his raincoat, and avoided his eyes. "You think I'm cold-blooded." Her expression was sad.
"No. 'Remote' isn't 'cold-blooded.'"
She stood looking at the twisted trees, saying nothing, drawing the silence round her as she did her cardigan.
"Good-bye, Mrs. Healey."
"Good-bye."
He had taken a few steps down the path when he heard her say, "And keep cold."