Help the Poor Struggler (3 page)

Jury tried to drag his mind from the man whose son was dead and the son himself, to say, “No more plaice and chips, Wiggins? Hard to imagine.”

Wiggins considered. “I think I'd still eat fish. But not flesh, sir.”

“No more missionaries, that it?”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.” Jury smiled bleakly. “There's Judge Jeffries restaurant just down the road. You hungry? Nothing like eating under the eye of the Hanging Judge.” Jury looked at the pheasant.

Man, beast, bird. Life is cheap.

And he knew just how cheap when they got back to Wynfield, where the Dorset police had its headquarters.

“There's been another one,” said Inspector Neal, looking a little grayer than when Jury had last seen him. “In Wynchcoombe. Another boy: name, Davey White. Choirboy.” Neal's voice broke and he did not look at all pleased that his theory was probably being proved correct. At the same time he looked slightly relieved, and guilty for the relief. “Not ours, though. This is the Devon-Cornwall constabulary's manor. Wynchcoombe's in Dartmoor.” He was interrupted by the telephone — a call, apparently, from his superior, for he kept nodding. “Yes, yes, yes. We've got every man on it we can spare  . . . yes, I
know
the town's in a panic . . .” After more from the other end, Neal hung up, shaking his head.

Jury said nothing except, “How far's Wynchcoombe, then?”

Neal looked a little surprised. “Forty miles, about.”

A police constable — a pleasant-looking young man — showed Jury the map on the wall. “You'll want to go to headquarters first, I expect. That's just outside Exeter —”

“Why do I want to go there? What's the quickest way to Wynchcoombe?”

“Well, I was just thinking you'd want to check with headquarters. Sir,” he added weakly.

“It'd only waste time.”

Neal was making a fuss over some papers on his desk seemingly in desperate need of rearrangement. “That's Divisional Commander Macalvie's patch, Mr. Jury.”

“I don't much care if it's Dirty Harry Callahan's. We've got a boy murdered in Dorchester and now another one in Wynchcoombe. So I'd like to get there as soon as possible. The divisional commander will understand.”

The constable just looked at Jury. Then he said, “I worked with him once. Right cock-up I made of something and —” He pulled back the corners of his mouth. In a distorted voice he said, “I loss ta teeth. Crowns, these are.”

Jury picked up the map the constable had marked the route on as Wiggins leaned closer and peered at his teeth. “I only wish I had your dentist.”

T
HE
silver chalice lay on the floor of the choir vestry, staining it darker with the wine that had been mixed with water now mixed with blood. Before the Scene of Crimes man had come, no one could touch it. After he had finished with it, no one wanted to. The lab crew of the Devon-Cornwall constabulary seemed to be avoiding it, superstitiously. As for the pictures, the police photographer had apologized to the curate for the little bursts of light in Wynchcoombe Church.

Police, both uniformed branch and CID, were all over the church, searching the chancel aisles, the nave, the main vestry. Wiggins and several others were outside going over the Green, on which the church fronted, and the deserted church walk, leading to the vestry doors on the other side.

Dr. Sanford, the local practitioner, had finished up his examination and said the boy had probably been dead around ten hours. The curate couldn't believe that the boy could have been there all that time and no one found him until three or four hours ago.

It had surprised Jury, too, who was standing down by the altar with TDC Coogan. He looked up at the altar, his mind a
blank. Wynchcoombe had a beautiful church here. Even with its high spire, it appeared smaller on the outside than inside. The chancel and nave together measured over a hundred feet.

He could think of nothing to say to Betty Coogan, who was crying. She couldn't help herself, she said; she'd known Davey and his granddad, the vicar of Wynchcoombe Church. “Whoever'd want to do this to Davey White?”

In any other circumstances, Policewoman Coogan would have been a gift with her red hair and good legs. But not now.

It was the expression on the clear face of Davey White that had struck Jury most — a look not of terror but more of impish surprise, the mouth slightly open, smiling even, as if he'd thought it had been rather a wizard trick, this being struck without warning. Now here he lay, ten years old, another schoolboy, dead two days after Simon Riley.

Betty Coogan was talking about the boy in Dorchester, blowing her nose with Jury's handkerchief, voicing the opinion of the Dorset police: they had a psychopathic killer on their hands. Jury was more inclined to agree than he had been before, but he still withheld judgment. The method was the same. Simple. A knife in the back.

The fingerprint man came up to Jury and Coogan. “Where in hell's Macalvie?”

She shook her head, another bout of tears threatening. “In Exeter, on that robbery case. I tried to get him. Well, they must have got him by now —”

The print expert mumbled. “Ought to be here —”

He was. Divisional Commander — or Detective Chief Superintendent — Brian Macalvie came through the heavy oak doors of Wynchcoombe Church like the icy Dartmoor wind he brought with him. And he didn't tiptoe down the aisle.

The look he gave his TDC Betty Coogan did nothing at all to steady her. She seemed to sway a little, and Jury put his hand under her arm.

Chief Superintendent Macalvie looked briefly up at the altar and slightingly at them and said to Jury, “Who the hell are you?”

Jury took out his warrant card; Macalvie glanced at it and then at TDC Coogan (having dismissed Jury and all the credentials that went with him), saying, “You knew where I was. Why the bloody hell didn't you get to me sooner?”

She simply lowered her head.

“Where're you hiding the body, Betts? Might I have a wee look?”

There was a Scot's burr, probably put on when he felt like it. Macalvie's accent seemed to have got stuck somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. But the Scotch ancestry reigned at the moment: accent, coppery hair, blue eyes like tiny blowtorches. Jury could understand why Betty Coogan didn't snap back.

Still with head lowered, she said, “He's in the choir vestry.”

 • • • 

Macalvie stood in the vestry, still with hands jammed in trouser pockets, holding back his raincoat — which was the way he had come in. “By now, fifty percent of anything I could use has washed down the Dart.” It sounded as if he were privy to some invisible world of evidence from which mere, mortal cops (the Jurys of the world) were excluded. Macalvie had been standing and looking down at the body, looking round the vestry, looking out the vestry door. He was standing now at the door, still with his hands in his pockets, just like anyone who might have been speculating on a sudden change of weather.

To his back, a CID sergeant named Kendall said, “Nothing's been touched, sir. Except for Dr. Sanford's examination of the body.”

“That's like saying an archaeologist left the digs as neat as my gran's front parlor,” said Macalvie to the mist and the vestry walk lost in it.

Jury saw Dr. Sanford look at Macalvie with a wild sort of anger — at the man standing there communing with the trees. The doctor opened his mouth, but shut it again.

Constable Coogan, cheeks burning, decided to fight fire. “You'd think anyone else just
looking
at the crime scene before you got there erases clues —”

Macalvie turned those blowtorch eyes on her. “It does.”

He nodded at the chalice. “What's that doing in the choir vestry?” Macalvie was down on one knee now, looking at the body of Davey White.

Dr. Sanford was an avuncular man who must have had an extensive National Health list of patients, as Wynchcoombe was an extensive parish. His smile — his first mistake — was condescending: “I assure you, Chief Superintendent, that the boy
wasn't
brained with the chalice. He was stabbed.”

Macalvie favored Dr. Sanford with the same look he'd shot at TDC Coogan. “I didn't say he
wasn't
brained', did I? I'm a simple, literal man. I asked a simple, literal question.” He turned back to the body.

No one answered his question, so Dr. Sanford filled in the silence. “He's been dead, I'd judge, since about six o'clock this morning. Of course —”

“It could have been earlier or later.” Macalvie finished the comment for him. “Not even you can tell the exact time of death. Not even me.”

Dr. Sanford controlled himself and went on: “There's rigor, but the lividity —”

“You think it's hypostasis.”

“Of course.” Sanford continued his discourse on the blood's having drained and the darker patches of skin showing where the body had been in contact with the floor.

Macalvie, still with his eyes on Davey White's body, held out his hand as if he weren't paying any more attention to Sanford than a pew or a prayer-cushion. “Give me your scalpel.”

Dr. Sanford was clearly shocked; his tone was frosty: “And did you intend to perform the autopsy here and now? You
do
have a pathologist —” He stopped and looked extremely uneasy. He might just as well not have been there at all, given the lack of response. Still, the doctor plowed the furrow: “I really don't think —”

Macalvie's hand was still outstretched. Jury imagined that when Macalvie was thinking himself, he didn't want those thoughts lost in the crossfire of underlings — TDCs, doctors, or even Scotland Yard.

Dr. Sanford reopened his bag and produced a scalpel.

Macalvie made a tiny incision in the center of one of the purplish stains and a bit of blood oozed and trickled. He returned the scalpel, pulled down the boy's vest, and said nothing.

Again, as if it were necessary to fill up silences Macalvie left in his wake, Sergeant Kendall said, “The curate couldn't understand how the lad could have been lying here for all that time —”

“Because the kid
wasn't
lying here all that time. That's a bruise, not hypostasis.” He ignored Sanford and addressed himself to Jury, figuring, perhaps, since one nitwit had got it wrong, he wanted to hear if the other one would. It was the second time he'd spoken to Jury; Wiggins, he'd managed to neglect altogether. “What do you think?”

“I think you're right,” said Jury. “He probably wasn't killed here and certainly hasn't been lying here for ten hours.”

Macalvie continued to stare at Jury, but said nothing. Then he turned to his fingerprint man and indicated the silver chalice that had been carefully dusted and photographed. “You through with that?”

“Sir.” He nearly clicked his heels and handed over the chalice.

In spite of its already having had a thorough going-over,
Macalvie handled it with a handkerchief, holding it up to the light as if he were administering the sacraments.

Betty Coogan, completely unnerved by her divisional commander and (Jury supposed) sometime-lover, asked, “You think he was killed somewhere else and brought here? But why? That doesn't make sense.”

“Really?” said Macalvie in his loquacious way.

Jury shook his head. “That's taking a hell of a chance, unless the murderer was making a point. The chalice wouldn't be in the choir vestry except for someone's wanting to smear it in the boy's blood. An act of desecration.”

Macalvie nearly forgot himself and smiled. “Okay, let's go and have a talk with his dad.”

“Grandfather. Davey's own father is dead,” said Wiggins, sliding a cough drop into his mouth.

“Okay, grandfather.” Macalvie held out his hand as he had for the doctor's scalpel. “Mind giving me one of those? I'm trying to quit smoking.”

“Good,” said Wiggins, promptly letting a few Fisherman's Friends drop into Macalvie's palm. “You won't regret it.”

Although the housekeeper was weeping when she opened the door, the Reverend Linley White's eyes were as dry as his voice.

Wiggins had been dispatched to get what he could out of the housekeeper (which, if nothing else, would be a cup of tea), and Jury and Macalvie were seated in two ladderback chairs on the other side of Mr. White's large desk. Even with one less policeman in the room, the vicar appeared to think the ratio of two to one was unfair, though God was supposedly his ally. He could tell them absolutely nothing that would throw light on this “sad affair” — a favorite summing up, apparently; he used it several times.

“Sure, you can throw some light on things,” said Macalvie, pleasantly. “Such as why you didn't like him.”

The vicar was vehement in his denial of this charge, especially coming, as it did, before he could find a persona to fit it. “David has been living here for just a little over a year. My son and his wife, Mary” — the
Mary
called up someone he'd sooner forget, apparently —“died in a motorcycle accident and shortly after that, her aunt simply dropped David — quite literally — on my doorstep. It was supposed to be for a few days. I've not laid eyes on the woman since. I don't know why I was surprised.” Under a gray cliff of eyebrow, the vicar's eyes burned with un-Christian-like feeling.

Jury wondered if, in the vicar's fight against feeling for Mary, he had won the battle but lost the war. The Reverend White could — as he went on to do — call Davey's mother “pig-track Irish,” but Jury saw the tattered flag of emotion in all of this, and thought it probably sexual.

Macalvie said, “So you didn't like Mary. Either.”

“Now listen, Superintendent —”