Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent Read Online Free PDF

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 swing-ing 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."

4
    The question wasn't whether Divisional Commander Ma-calvie 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