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Newsome’s reply. “Why don’t you just come back and make the Chief Superintendent happy, eh?”
    â€œMy appearance has never made him happy. Okay. I was coming up to London anyway tomorrow. I’ll catch an early train.” Hornsby, who had taken in every word, Jury was sure, while shining the same glass several times over, informed him there was a fast one from Newcastle at 8:30.
    Jury told Newsome he’d take the 8:30 and hung up.
    Nell Hornsby was polishing glasses and watching Robbie, who was having a turn at the pool table, playing by himself. “Awful sad, that boy. Mum dead, dad gone off. He was at the Bonaventure School.”
    â€œBonaventure?” Jury turned to look at Robbie.
    â€œThat place in old Washington. They call it a school. More of an orphanage, I call it. When he turned sixteen he had to leave. They can’t stay there after that. Figure the kids can earn their keep. That’s a laugh, when even the men can’t in these parts.”
    â€œWhat’s his name? Robbie what?”
    â€œRobin Lyte.”
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    Robbie looked up from the worn green of the pool table when Jury came over with a couple of half-pints and a handful of ten-p pieces. “I’m not much good at pool.” He nodded toward the video game. “How about Pac-Man?”
    The struggle to reply must have been Sisyphean. The boy’s eyes closed, as if lack of visual contact with the world wouldproduce verbal contact. His neck twisted with the effort of getting out a Yes and adding a Thanks to it.
    They played in a silence broken only by Robbie’s chuckles every time he won, which he always did.
    Jury did not produce the snapshot of Helen Minton, feeling he couldn’t force memory. If there were something helpful locked in Robin Lyte’s brain, Jury would have to find some other key.
    â€œYou went to Bonaventure School, didn’t you?” Robbie’s face was turned down to the ghosts waiting to gobble another ten-p and nodded. “Didn’t like it much, I bet.” The boy looked up from the little maze of lights and shook his head. He looked, about the eyes, injured, as if the smudged skin were trying to heal from a blow. Jury shoved more coins in the slot with a force that rocked the table. “I don’t blame you. I went to a place like that. Iron cots, bad food, cold corridors. Four years of it. It was after my mother died.”
    Ignoring the pulsing ghost inviting them to play, Robbie took out his old wallet and the picture. “Mu-u-ther.”
    The young woman, with blond hair that looked freshly permed, was smiling a trifle pertly, arms linked with two other young womenfriends. Robbie pointed her out carefully as the one in the middle.
    â€œShe was pretty.” Jury handed the picture back, looked down at the ghost, and said, “Mine was too.”
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    Nell Hornsby called Time and Jury took the glasses up to the bar.
    â€œMight sound daft,” she said, “but sometimes I think the lad’s the happiest of the lot.” She drank off her brandy.
    â€œYou couldn’t prove it by me,” said Jury, before he walked out the door.

II
PUB STOP

SIX
1
    I T WAS noon at the Jack and Hammer, and the mechanical smith outside on the high crossbeam began its simulated strikes with a forge hammer. The wooden Jack looked quite fresh in his newly painted trousers of blue and his coat of aquamarine that matched the rather brilliant shade recently slapped on between beams and casement windows by Dick Scroggs, the publican. On Long Piddleton’s High Street, already a colorful collection of crammed-together shops and cottages, the Jack and Hammer glowed in winter sunlight.
    Things were no less colorful inside where a woman and two men were sitting at a table near a healthily burning hearth. Two of them, taken together, were worth millions, and the other sold antiques to