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

had
made. "This publisher Healey worked for. Get me in to see him."
    "Sir." Wiggins's hand hesitated over the telephone. "When?"
    "This afternoon. Three, four."
    "It's nearly two." The hand free of the tofu sandwich hovered over
the telephone. "I was only thinking."
    "That it's not my case. You're right. Get me in to see this
publishing tyro, Martin Smart." Jury smiled.
    Still Wiggins was slowly chewing his sandwich. "The guv'nor's
complaining—"
    Guv'nor
? Racer? Since when was Wiggins calling him that?
    "—you're waffling on a couple of cases. The Soho one, for example."
    It was a drug-related death, nothing for C.I.D., something the Drug
Squad could handle easily. Racer perfectly well knew this. Anything to
keep Jury from using his talents in a more attention-grabbing way. Name
and picture in paper. Racer hated it.
    "I'm sick, Wiggins."
    Wiggins put on his best bedside manner. "There's no question there,
sir. Pale as a ghost you've been looking. You need leave, you do, not
another case."
    Jury grinned. "I know. So get me an appointment with Healey's
publisher." Jury rose, feeling lighter than he had in weeks.
    "I'm a martyr to my digestion, Wiggins. I'm going to see your
guv'nor."

3
    "Sick leave?"
    Chief Superintendent A. E. Racer made an elaborate display of
cupping his ear with his hand as if the ear couldn't quite believe it. "
Sick
leave?"
    Jury knew that for Racer this was, if not the opportunity of a
lifetime, at least the best one that had come along that day: here was
a chink in the old Jury armor, a rent in the old corduroy jacket, an
occasion that called for much more than telling Superintendent Jury a
policeman's life was full of grief, since it apparently was. Jury could
almost see the tiny guns taking aim in Racer's mind, trying for a salvo
that would never go off.
    "You've
never
applied for sick leave."
    "Perhaps that's why I'm sick."
    " 'Sick leave' is Wiggins's department. He takes it for all of us."
    Request denied. Punch time clock. Wheel to grindstone. There're none
of us who couldn't use a bit of a rest,
especially me. But you
don't see me lying down on the job
.
    "Well, he looks sick to
me
," said Fiona Clingmore, who'd
come in to collect two big stacks of paper that she was now balancing
on her forearms at the same time her eyes were on the booby-trap box
Racer had rigged to catch the cat Cyril.
    Did Racer really think he could outwit Cyril
? Fiona had
asked this question as she sat filing her nails into glossy claws.
Gets
worse every day, the chief does
.
    "If you want me to bring a note from my doctor, I will."
    "I'm sure Wiggins can rip out a page from one of his prescription
pads. Or furnish some Harley Street letterheads. His desk must be
littered with them." Racer smiled his razorblade smile and looked at
Jury over folded hands, the thumbs making propeller circles round each
other.
    Fiona looked from Jury to Racer.
    "He's worn out, he is. You only have to look to see he's dead on his
feet, practically."
    Dressed in her usual black, this one the light wool dress with the
tightly zipped bodice and pinch-pleated skirt, Fiona looked like she
was ready to crash a funeral service, given the seamed stockings and
black hood hugging her tarnished gold hair. Whenever he looked at
Fiona, Jury thought of old trunks filled with taffeta tea-dance gowns,
ribbon-tied letters, the little paper valentines punched from books
that were handed round at school. . . .
    Fiona, for all of her shoulder-shrugging, hip-thrusting brashness,
was a picture of poignance. He'd better stop thinking about her and the
past or pretty soon he'd be walking in his mind down the Fulham Road
hand-in-hand with his mother, perhaps watching the wash go round in the
launderette. A big dose of nostalgia was not what he needed to cure a
big case of depression. Though sitting in Racer's office, looking at
Racer's brilliant invention for trapping the cat Cyril helped to
assuage
that
. It was a small wooden crate with a drop-screen,
activated