Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent by Martha Grimes

the
last of the sun, as if it were that Venetian canal that bore Polly's
hero along with the copper-haired woman who was going to end up killing
the doge in self-defense and marrying Aubrey.
    Well, he was so bored he read the last few pages so that he could
give Polly the advantage of some varnished lie about
    her prowess as a mystery writer. She was, really,
considerably better than this lot of codswollop demonstrated.
    At least it hadn't yet been published (and Polly probably
knew why). Unable to stand it any longer, Melrose flipped the
manuscript closed and stuffed it back down between cushion and chair
arm, wishing old Aubrey's "sinking feeling" would drop him right in
the Grand Canal.
    Unfortunately, as Melrose reached for his sherry he was
aware of a hollowness in his stomach as the face of the Signora Orsina
Luna with her coppery, wind-tangled hair was suddenly replaced by the
face of Vivian Rivington with her coppery, shoulder-length bob.
    ... a sinking feeling was the only way he could describe it.
    Surely such tarnished prose could not call forth something
akin to empathy for old Aubrey as he stood poised on the edge of some
hectic-
    Oh, for God's sakes, he was beginning to sound like old
Aubrey. Or old Polly. Melrose belted back his sherry and slid down in
his chair. With both hands he massaged his hair until it stood up in
spikes and licks, hoping to work some sense into himself. That was the
trouble with all of this maudlin sentiment; it began to suck you in.
    His hand tightened on the leather chair arm as he thought of
Aubrey's own hand grasping the metal rail of the vaporetto as he stared
into the hazel eyes of the signora . . . No, it was Vivian's that were
hazel.
    And then the images of Vivian started flowing past him as if
she too had been painted on the pages of a book: Vivian in her twin-set
in the Jack and Hammer today; Vivian looking serene and silky in
Stratford-upon-Avon; Vivian in a tatty old bathrobe in that country
house in Durham; Vivian over tea, over drinks, over dinner-
    His eyes widening as if he'd come upon a houseful of ghosts,
Melrose wondered if he had made some dreadful miscalculation. . . .
    "Why on earth are you pulling that long face, Melrose?"
    asked Agatha, who had thumped back into the room carrying her dish
of rum balls. "You'd think you lost your last— what's
that
?"
    The racket made by the brass door knocker was violent enough to make
the chandelier shudder.
    "I don't see why these dreadful children can't stick to the village
if they must go about playing pranks, nor why you can't have Ruthven
stand down there at the driveway entrance and simply turn them away—"
    "Generally, we set out steel-jaw traps," said Melrose, as he heard
some commotion and raised voices out in the entrance room and then the
deliberate rap, rap, rap of heels across the marble.
    Vivian appeared in the doorway.
    "It's Miss Rivington, sir," Ruthven said with whatever formality he
could muster, but as he followed in her wake like a hound brought to
heel, the announcement was superfluous.
    Melrose got up quickly, bestowing upon his visitor an absolutely
wonderful smile. For once in his life, he believed not in coincidence,
but in Destiny. "Vivian!"
    Vivian Rivington stood there in a wet raincoat, her hair a mess of
rainsoaked tangles, holding out a large pasteboard cut-out.
    "Just what in the hell is
this
?"

7
    "Wherever you see smokestacks, you know it's shut down," was the
cabdriver's brief and bleak commentary on the West Riding mills, once a
center of the wool trade. The taxi had dropped him at a car-hire place,
and after the sooty valley of Bradford, the monotonous rows of slate
rooftops and chimneys marching up and down hills like stairsteps,
coming so suddenly upon the open expanse of the moors should have been
a grateful escape. Perhaps it was the season; perhaps it was his mood.
But Jury saw little to relieve that mood in the endlessness of the
moors, the distant hills brown with old bracken and