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

it together. He only wished he
could say the same for their trainers. And the fingerprint team. And
foren-sics. 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