Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent by Martha Grimes Page A

heather, gray with
snow and granite.
    The Citrine house sat within its own wood of oak, boxwood trees,
and tangled vines on the border of Keighley or Oakworth Moor. It was
hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The sound of
Jury's car lifted pheasant from the dead and nearly knee-high bracken
as he drove up the narrow road to the house. He had passed a small
stone cottage, perhaps once a caretaker's, but unoccupied now, given
the build-up of filmy dirt on its windows. It did not seem the sort of
grounds one would bother to "keep up," at any rate. The undergrowth,
the dead branches, the moss and vines would simply take over again.
    It was a fitting-enough landscape for such a medieval house,
fifteenth, sixteenth century probably. Soot-blackened stone, vaulted
porch, ranges of timber windows over archways, a turret at one end and
a tower at the other. It was very large and looked very cold. Jury
wouldn't have wanted to pay Citrine's heating bills. He wondered if it
had been in the family forever; he knew the Citrine money had come from
the woolen mills. Well, it was hardly Charles Citrine's fault that
synthetics had come along.
    The room into which Jury was led by a woman servant was not a great
improvement over the stark medievalism of the facade. It had once been,
he imagined, the "great hall," and still retained most of the size and
much of the ambience of one. Its vaulted ceiling lent it a strangely
cryptlike appearance. Near one end of the room was the large fireplace
with a tile surround and copper hood, certainly not the original
central hearth. Beyond this was a long entry screen, heavily curtained
to cut off drafts and leading, probably, to buttery or dining room and
kitchen. The walls were exposed stone sectioned off by wooden beams.
Would he find the stone wept moisture if he touched it?
    The furniture was heavy, dark Jacobean. Two baroque and elaborately
carved chairs with high backs sat before the fireplace at opposite ends
of a long claw-footed refectory table. There were other pieces, a sofa
and several easy chairs. On the flagstone floor, oriental carpets were
strewn, but their intricate and faded colors did little to add to any
overall warmth and life. There were brass and pewter bowls set about
full of flowers: mums and Christmas roses. They were sifting their
petals onto the surfaces that held them, though, as if they, too, were
giving over to the room's wintry look. That relieved this feudalism,
but not greatly.
    One thing that did relieve it, though, was an oriel chamber in the
right wall, upraised and large enough to contain twin grand pianos. The
high-climbing lancet windows that arched about this stagelike little
room were beautiful.
    There was music on one of the pianos. The cover of the keys was down
over the other.
    Unattended, the fire had burnt low. Why was the room not wanner, in
tone if not in temperature? Against the other wall were
floor-to-ceiling bookcases in recessed alcoves, and books usually made
a room look tenanted, he thought. But these bookshelves seemed to have
no arrangement, the books and magazines stacked or merely tossed there
without any particular notice, like afterthoughts. Between the shelves
was a window seat beneath a high window whose leaded panes should catch
the morning sun. He walked over to it and found the view baleful, for
it overlooked the downward slope of the moorland hill and the derelict
farm, its longhouse, its barns studding the land like empty shells. The
only life Jury saw was the black-faced sheep, raising their heads from
the bracken.
    Charles Citrine shambled into the room—that was the only way Jury
could describe it, the sort of careless, shuffling walk the man
affected, hands in pockets of baggy corduroy trousers, and wearing a
checked woolen shirt beneath a mud-stained denim jacket. From a
distance, he had the look of a man who'd been busy in the barn or
mucking out a stable; up closer, Jury could see the lines of worry.
    He did not extend