Jerusalem Inn (6 page)

Bonaventure School was one of the last places that Jury wanted to see. The stone frontage had been familiar enough to him; the cold corridor leading from the headmistress's office a foretaste of other cold corridors to come, other rooms lined with bunk beds, all in military order.

As she told him with some pride of the small economies she was able to practice to keep down costs, Jury's thoughts were on just such a school as this, in which he had spent several years of his childhood after his mother had been killed by one of the last bombs that fell on Britain; after the uncle who had so kindly taken him in had died.

They were walking down a hallway of institutional beige, off which long rooms debouched to right and left, cheerless
chambers of neatly made beds, corners of gray blankets tucked under in the way of hospitals and barracks. Beige, gray and headmistressy brown, the colorless world of an old daguerreotype.

She whirled him through the rounds: “They've just had their evening meal. Breakfast's at seven. . . . ”

All's right with the world,
he thought grimly.

In one of the rooms sat a boy on his bunk reading a book. He was hurried away by Miss Hargreaves-Brown to evening chapel. Jury's own bed, long ago, had been in a corner — for which he had been grateful, as it allowed him to look at his corner of wall and paint mental pictures on it. Beyond earthly things, adventurous things, wild rhinos and elephants and treks through the bush. He had been going to be a big-game hunter and had wound up a policeman. There weren't too many openings for big-game hunters.

They walked through the washed-out world of Bonaventure, down another corridor, differentiated only from the last by a need of paint, and she was talking about herself: “ . . . extremely difficult place to run. Why just the
heat
 . . . ” Her hands were still folded before her, as if in supplication for funds. “ . . . been teaching at a quite good public school. This post was open and although I was young for it, I convinced them that I was — am — very public spirited. . . . ” Jury made some appropriate comment and wanted a cigarette, even a drink.

 • • • 

“Did you not like Helen Minton, then?” Jury asked, as they sat in more comfortable if slightly worn chairs by a cold fireplace, once again in her office.

Her sandy eyebrow rose. “Like her? I hadn't thought about it one way or the other. Milk?” She had offered him coffee.

“No thanks, just black, please.”

To the teenage girl, the same one who had brought Jury to
the office, the headmistress said, “You may
go
now, Lorraine.”

“M'um,” murmured Lorraine, nodding. But she showed some reluctance to comply with this order, twisting a long strand of hair, gazing hopefully at Jury, waiting for he knew not what, so he smiled that same smile he had bestowed upon her when she had placed the tray between them. That seemed to have been it, for she left them.

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen.
Some
of our children are, admittedly, orphans. Lorraine has been here all of her life. A little backward; we have a hard time teaching her. It's not the first time. Some sad cases, we've had.”

“I can't imagine you've had many happy ones.”

She ignored that. “Some are simply day students. They, of course, go home in the afternoons.”

“You wouldn't know if Helen Minton had any enemies?”

“Why no. I mean, I can't imagine she
would.
Whatever makes you ask that?” With head cocked and eye narrowed, the headmistress asked, “You're not suggesting there was something
unusual
about her death?”

“I would certainly think being found in the bedroom of Washington Old Hall ‘unusual,' wouldn't you?”

“She was ill. It must have been that her heart, at that moment . . . ?” Miss Hargreaves-Brown shrugged.

“How long was she here?”

“Upwards of two months, I believe. Don't think me unappreciative . . . ”

As she undermined the value of whatever small tasks Helen Minton had performed, Jury interrupted: “Did she say nothing else about her illness, or about any part of her life which might . . . well . . . throw some light on her death? You might have known her as well as anyone around here. Helen Minton seemed to be more or less alone.”

“You
knew her, Superintendent?”

“Slightly.”

“Then you've some
personal
interest in all of this.” The headmistress said this is a tone of disapproval, as if police had no business being personal.

Jury agreed, in a way. “Yes.”

She tucked a wisp of hair into the chignon, and said, “I don't know anything else about Helen Minton. She was from London, that's all I know.” As an afterthought, she added, “She was quite attractive. I mean, I suppose some would find her so.” She did not look at Jury as she said this, but drank her coffee.

Perhaps she did not know any more, but Jury still had the feeling she was holding back. She would, however, remain adamant, he knew, in her denial.

“Thanks very much, Miss Hargreaves-Brown. You've been kind, letting me take up your time this way, when I know how valuable your time must be. I'll be going now.”

Lorraine showed him out, lingering in the dark doorway.

 • • • 

As he walked down the long path away from the Bonaventure School he looked toward the gates. There was a buzz and he pulled back the iron gate, which closed behind him.

“Good-bye!”

He turned round. It had come — of course, how could he be so dim? — from the tree. Up there, mostly hidden by the thicket of branches, was the dark little figure like the ghost of childhood.

Jury waved.

“Good-bye and God bless,” said the Tree.

“Good-bye.”

“ . . . and God
bless!”
called back the Tree.

“God bless,” said Jury, before he turned away.

I
N THE
dark, he could barely make out the signs. Jury had turned off the A-
1
onto an arterial road and seemed to have driven for miles with only that waste of a moor to his left. Maybe he'd misunderstood the directions he'd got at the petrol station. Politely, Jury had extricated himself from a replay of the tales of all of those unfortunates who had gone for rambles on the moor and had (the petrol attendant would have him believe) never been heard from again.

The road was narrow, patched with ice, and recently plowed: small cliffs of snow hemmed it in on either side. Up ahead was a sign of life: a man tramping along without either hat or overcoat. Hardy lot up here, thought Jury, stopping to roll down his window. “Do you know a Jerusalem Inn round here?”

The small man's face cracked in a smile. “Why aye . . . atwixt here an' t'chorch, dede aheed, 'tis.”

“You going that way, then?”

“Aye, near there binoo.”

It would be easier to take him than talk to him, Jury thought, as he opened the door. “Hop in.”

The little man scuttled in and smiled at Jury. He hadn't bothered to put in his teeth, and his watery blue eyes were glazed, as if the day had iced them over, but more likely he'd had a few at home before starting out for the pub. His hands were wrapped around what looked like a giant onion, something out of a cheap sci-fi flick. As they headed north, he kept it propped on his knees like a suitcase.

“What's that?” asked Jury.

The man blinked at him. “A leek, mate. Aye, myed a canny job o' it this yeaer; won, aa did. Wowd a doon laest yeaer oney aa hed one o' me bad torns. Bad abed, aa was. Cud do nowt. You be froom t' South?”

Jury smiled. The question was rhetorical. It was not a compliment.

 • • • 

The Jerusalem Inn was a square, stucco building with a sign as plain as the rest of it, a board with the name in wide black letters stuck on the side like an afterthought and lit by a weak overhanging lamp.

Where the custom came from in weather like this, Jury couldn't imagine, but they were there, perhaps a dozen of them, seeming as permanently fixed as the sign.

Dickie (Jury's traveling companion) set his leek and his money on the bar and asked Jury what he was drinking. A lager, Jury said, as the publican approached. He had the rubicund face of an angel or a drinker, skin pulled tightly against the bones.

It was four days before Christmas and the Jerusalem Inn was certainly ready: decorations abounded — old strings of lights, waterfalls of tinsel, dusty rings of holly, and a life-sized creche in the nook beside the fireplace. A desultory game of pool was going on between a thickset fellow dressed largely in tattoos and a leather vest and a wiry, black-haired man with a gold ring in his ear. Fashion, more than sexual persuasion, Jury assumed. To the right of the pool table was a
square table of a video game, which a young man was playing. Beneath a bit of mistletoe, a shark-faced young woman was in the process of kissing a tall, ungainly fellow, and a long process she was making of it. But their performance had to give way to the leek, which had (Jury had finally figured out from Dickie's lengthy blether as they drove along) taken first prize in the yearly leek-growing contest.

Several people came over to clap Dickie on the shoulder.

“An' you'd a won last year, too, Dickie, if you'd oney cleaned it up a bit.” There were drinks set up, and all apparently on Dickie, though Jury thought it should have been the other way round. Jury doubted if Dickie had two pence to rub together most of the time, but he was clearly the soul of generosity. A lack of pence probably went for everybody here.

The Jerusalem Inn, beneath its Christmas finery, was a workingman's pub. It was a relief, in a way, after the waxwork pubs of the West End — the red plush, the converted gaslights, the gold-leafed mirrors, the whole creaky panoply of Victoriana. Nor did it have the countrified collection of pewter and brass and eternal hunting prints hanging above cretonned cushions. There were long benches against the walls, one of them occupied by a trio of silent elders who looked as if they could have taken part in the Nativity scene to their right beside the fireplace.

Around the horseshoe bar in the room's center, the faces reflected, pretty much, their lot — a futureless existence of the dole. Some, Jury was sure, railed against it; others accepted it grimly; and some — the younger ones — took the dole as a way of life, what they'd been born to. Work and the weather provided conversation.

Jury knew that he had been carefully scrutinized (like the leek) by everyone here, yet not an eye had he actually seen turned in his direction. After the leek and the lovers settled themselves down, people went about their business,
conversations undertaken in the hushed tones of pilgrims before the service begins. One crusty character sat with a cane and a dictionary, talking to no one, occasionally
hemming
as he turned a page and tapped his cane on the bare boards. Another man in a hooked anorak sat reading a book, a nervous whippet beside him. The pool players went back to their game.

The publican was hovering with the drink Dickie had bought him, obviously curious about Jury. “You from round here, then?” he finally asked.

“No. London.”

The publican pretended surprise. “I guess you get two blocks from Harrod's, it's like outer space, innit?” He smiled to take the bite out of the joke. Light glinted from his glasses.

“Do you get much custom way out here?”

“Oh, aye. You'd be surprised. There's Spinneyton, that's down the road, where most of them are from. Not much money but the dole; collieries are mostly shut down, wharves at Newcastle mostly empty.” He shook his head philosophically. “Me, I'm from Todcaster. Only had this place six months. Hard to get accepted by this lot. You know, clannish.” He whispered this last, as if London and Todcaster formed a bond between them, and then went down the bar to collect glasses.

As he waited for the publican to finish his business, he walked over to inspect the Nativity scene. The eyes of the three old men slewed around to check his progress. Did he
look
like a cop? Jury wondered. He sighed as he checked out the animals, in a bad state of repair. Among the fake ones — a goat with a missing leg, a lamb without a tail — slept a real terrier with one eye ringed in black, making up, perhaps, for the thin display.

Only two of the Three Kings were there, and they could have done with a fresh paint job. Mary was there, and Joseph.
But there was nothing in the straw they were bending over.

Something tugged at his sleeve, and a small voice said. “I had to give it a wash.”

Jury turned and looked down to see a girl of six or seven staring up at him, her eyes the same clear, almost glassy brown of the doll's she was holding. It was a big doll with painted hair of faded red. It could have passed for either a boy or a girl child. Right now it was clothed in what Jury suspected was one of the little girl's old dresses. The waistline came to the hips and the hem hung over the doll's toes.

Seeing Jury did not comprehend her remark, she inclined her brown head toward the manger. “It was dirty.”

“Oh,” said Jury. He looked at the dress. “Is it a girl, then?”

Looking toward the straw, she frowned, as if considering her error. “Right now it is.” She smoothed the old dress, obviously used to its being a girl and wishing it didn't have to do double duty during the Christmas season.

Through a door at the rear walked a pretty, youngish woman with a tray full of glasses. When she saw the child, she shook her head, came to the creche-side and whispered, “Chrissie! Put the baby Jesus back, lass. How many times must I tell you?” Her hair was the color of her daughter's, but without the luster; her face was a memory of the little girl's.

“I had to give it a wash,” said Chrissie, querulously.