Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes [Grimes, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

"It were a dreadful thing, but there's no way to help you, I can see," said Mrs. Holt, irritation flickering across her broad features. "It were painful enough at the time."

Without police dredging it all up again, her look at Jury said. Since her eyes, as she sat in the overstuffed chair across from Jury, were trained not on him but on the ashtray on the table between them, Jury thought the source of the fleeting look was not the fate of Toby Holt but the cigarette Jury had stubbed out immediately upon entering the room. Given the rabbity sniff of her nose, he was sure of it. Owen Holt, large, square-faced, an unhappy-seeming man, looked not directly at Jury, but across his shoulder, apparently out of the window. His eyes were the grayish-blue color of denim and washed out, like faded jeans.

Mrs. Holt had opened the door of the terraced house in Oakworth, dressed in a coverall, head turbaned, and holding a rainbow-hued feather duster and a chamois cloth in a white-gloved hand. Had they not now been sitting in her grimly tidy parlor, where her husband Owen seemed himself to be a visitor, Jury might have taken it for a window display to entice the passersby to snap up the three-piece suite on hire-purchase. The sofa and two armchairs were covered in a hideous, multicolored pattern with fringed throw pillows that just missed matching the blue, pink, and yellow zigzag design. All of this fought with the old-fashioned sepia-tinted wallpaper covered with tiny bouquets whose cinched stems trailed fluttery little ribbons. The fake coals in the unusable fireplace might have been nicked from the same window.

But what particularly struck Jury about the Holt parlor wasn't this discordance of paper, paint, and pattern: it was the absence of ornaments and the lack of pictures. There were no mementos, no little groupings of figurines; no framed photographs or bits of embroidery; no books, only a thin stack of magazines lying on the coffee table. In the corner cupboard was china that he doubted had been used in many years. The one hint of frivolity was a glass- and wood-beaded curtain that hung in an alcove at the bottom of the staircase.

"The Social come round," said Alice Holt, in reluctant response to Jury's question, "and said they'd got this ever-so-sad case of a little boy that'd been orphaned . . ."

Her voice trailed off as the hand shot out almost of its own volition to pluck the ashtray from the table. "And as Owen here'd talked about wouldn't it be nice't'have a bairn round the place . . ." She rose to dispose of the odious ashes. "T'other person talks, but who had the care?" she said elliptically and she whisked from the room holding the ashtray at arm's length.

Owen Holt had either got used to his wife's doing the talking, or he was congenitally a silent man. His contribution to this conversation had been spasmodic. But now he said, "Quiet he were.

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