The girl adjusted the rifle across her back, held in a sling she had made from a leather belt. She needed to keep her hands free and the sling made it less tiring. She had taken the gun from the mudroom where they parked their guns like umbrellas. They were careless; they didn’t always lock them up, which she knew was breaking the law. She’d taken the rifle over a month ago on the night she’d finally decided to get out.
No surveillance is constant; no one’s guard is always up. They didn’t seem to have learned this: that the brief moments in which one walks to the other end of the barn or path or court, the careless absence for a cigarette or a coffee and, of course, the overconfidence that lets you relax your vigil and leave the torch forgotten on a chair. Any of those things would result in failure, would permit the jewels to be snatched, the safe cracked, the horse gone. Those things, plus faulty reasoning; that after the first horse was stolen, the belief that the thieves wouldn’t come again, at least not again so soon.
But they had come the very next night, before there was time for the owner in the big rambling house to draw breath, much less to get surveillance in place. Now there were two guards, one to watch over the Thoroughbreds, one to guard the barns where the mares were kept. It had taken the owner a while, taken the third theft to alert everyone to the possibility that the Thoroughbreds weren’t the target. That wasn’t as dumb as it sounded since these mares would be of no value to anyone.
From the deep shadows of an empty stall, she watched the guard, an overweight, cigarette-puffing man who paid less attention than he should have. She’d been watching for an hour, waiting for him to leave his post. He did. He rose from his stool outside the stall, yawned, scratched his lower back. She knew his habits by now. He was a smoker and, as there was a rule against smoking here in the barn, he had gone down to the end and stepped just outside. He took the torch with him in case the lights should fail; they’d had a way of doing that lately.
She was dressed in black-black jeans, black wind-breaker, gloves, boots, everything. Around her head she wore a dark scarf to hide her pale hair, so pale it was almost the color of the moon and might glimmer if it wasn’t covered. In this costume, she couldn’t have found herself in the dark. That thought was rueful.
She had been coming here also on nights besides the ones in which she took the mares; she needed to study the effects of the surveillance, the habits of the two guards. It was almost easier with the two of them because they kept each other occupied. They liked to talk, to joke around. This was funny. Instead of increasing the watch over the horses, the owner had actually diminished it.
One guard for each barn, but not one for each end. The thinking would be that it wasn’t a diamond necklace the thieves were after, but horses, and a horse moving about made noise.
That’s why it had taken her ten months, working with them nearly every day, to get the mares used to her and her touch, and different touches sent different directions to them. The important thing was to get them to move silently. They were so unused to moving at all and even the small amount of freedom Nell had bartered for did little to make them active, for most of them couldn’t recall what freedom was like. There was little recollection, though, as nearly all of them had been foals of mares held in the same captivity, and they had been among the few chosen to take the place of the mares that died. That was how it worked. That was probably the way hell worked, too. So for ten months, during the time she was allowed to unfasten the rubber cups and take them for exercise, she had tried to school them in backing out of their stalls in silence and to move in silence. They were given only three signs to learn: her hand on the muzzle meant silence when they moved around; a touch on the right shoulder meant a turn to the right; on the left shoulder, to the left. It did not take the horses long to get used to these signals; the hard thing was that there were sixty horses to teach it to. But she managed with most of them.
It didn’t matter if the men-the stable lads, the groom, the trainer, Mr. Mackay-who worked there saw her with the mares because they’d have no idea there was a grim plan behind her quiet treatment. Mr. Mackay and Kenny, the head stable lad, thought her exercising these horses was ridiculous and liked to tell her so. Nell thought Mr. Mackay should never have been let within a hundred miles of a horse. If she saw him take that whip to Aqueduct, she’d kill him. Her horse was not mistreated, was treated fairly well, actually, because they used him for stud. But she wondered why, since Aqueduct’s real name obviously couldn’t be put down in the book.
What surprised Nell was that, apparently, no one employed here talked about the mares off the premises. At least Bosworth, the assistant trainer, had told her it was worth their jobs talking about it.
“How in hell,” Bosworth said, “you talked that woman into letting you take care of those mares I can’t imagine.” He seemed to enjoy it, though.
“I bargained.”
“You bargained?” Bosworth laughed. “Well, Val Hobbs is the one holding the cards. What in hell did you have to call her hand?”
“My freedom.”
He looked astonished. “Freedom? Love, the last I saw you didn’t have any more freedom than those benighted mares do.”
“But I could get out of here without much effort. No matter how much all of you are supposed to be watching me. After a year and a half-well, you can’t watch all the time. She knows that. I could run.”
Bosworth thought this over. “Guess you could at that. Surprised you haven’t.”
“That’s what I bargained with-not running.”
“And she believed that?”
“Why not? It’s true.” At least it had been for nearly twenty months.
It had taken her weeks to make the stables habitable. How had the mares stood it? Horses were fastidious creatures, like cats. They had stood it because they had had no choice. The smell was almost overpowering, or would have been to anyone who had never mucked out a stable. This was much worse. And mucking out was done on a daily basis, often twice a day, even more. It was done for the comfort and health of the horses, not to make the environment more pleasant for the humans; it was done as part of their care. The floor was cement rather than earth, not a good standing for a horse, but easier to clean, and still they often stood in their own feces.
On that morning she had first found them, Nell walked up the line of narrow stalls. There was barely room for a person to squeeze in next to the horse, to shove in between the horse and the insubstantial wooden partitions on both sides, shoulder high to the horse. There were two rows, fifteen horses in a row in these constricting stalls, thirty altogether and thirty in the barn beside this one. A rope was attached to the rear leg of each mare and when she peered into the shadows of each stall, she saw another rope anchoring one of the front legs-opposite rear and front legs, which meant the horse couldn’t move more than a few inches forward or backward. Each mare had a rubber cup attached to its hind quarters. Nell crouched, keeping to one side, and looked at the hose that led from the cup to a container. The cup and hose were there to gather urine. Urine, for God’s sake.
The horses weren’t important in themselves; they were important in foaling, or, rather, in staying pregnant. If a mare had a hard time doing this, she was taken away. Nell didn’t ask what happened to these horses. The little that she knew was bad enough. So they were kept for the urine that collected under them in plastic bags. She didn’t understand that, either.
“Why are they kept like this? Why don’t they get any exercise?” she had asked Mr. Mackay. It was hard standing up to him; he took as blame any question you put to him. He was the meanest man she’d ever come across. He was in charge of the stable lads and was no nicer to them. The lads, though, had the huge advantage of knowing these people and knowing why they were here. And getting paid for it.
“You ask too many questions.”
She had also asked her questions of Bosworth, the assistant trainer, who she’d discovered over a period of time did not like this place and did not like the people who ran it. Consequently, he was more likely to be sympathetic to any criticism of them or questioning of the rules.
“Exercise? They’re only here to pee and stay pregnant, the sorry beasts.”
It was known that Bosworth was father to two dreadful boys who were in and out of the nick and, therefore, did sympathize with anyone forced to bring another creature into the world and have to put up with him.
The only exercise the mares ever got was when they were led into the breeding arena. Led there and back. As far as she could tell, that was their life, as Bosworth had said it was. Some of them, such as Belle and Jenny, looked exhausted. They were the oldest, the ones who had foaled most, and she despaired that they were undoubtedly looking death in the eye.
On those mornings or afternoons Mackay was off out of sight of the house she led each one out, one at a time, to a bit of pasture that was hidden from view by a tall, boxy hedge. They stood, the mares did. They stood and watched her in perfect silence.
“You don’t have to just stand there, Belle. You can walk around, you can even run around.”
But Belle didn’t move. Like the others, she was too wedded to her little space. And that, Nell realized, was how she herself had felt until they’d finally permitted her to go outside. Belle du Jour. Nell had named them all. So that she could remember the names, she’d drawn a diagram of the stalls and set down the name of the mare who occupied each of them. Marie had been the first she’d taken. Marie was one of the mares at the rear where the big doorway opened on to the stand of birches and was more secluded than the front. Anyway, the guards stood at the front. She had named the mares either with names or words she especially liked. She felt that these good names would make the mares feel good for something other than foaling. All of this was before she’d made her bargain with Mrs. Hobbs. Had she been caught letting them out, she’d get hell. Later on she got hell for giving them water. (“No bloody water, you hear me? They’re only allowed a certain amount, at certain times,” Valerie Hobbs had said, tensely.)
Yet she was never caught letting the horses out for a few minutes. Since only she was interested in the mares, only she went to the stables, except of course when one of them foaled.
At first she thought the foals must be the object. She knew Aqueduct was being used to cover several mares, and that must be why they’d wanted him. But it wasn’t the foals that were important, she discovered. Most of the time they were taken away, two, maybe three at a time, a big horsebox backed up to the barn and the foals loaded in. For the poor mares, the foals were the only particle of real life they experienced, the only hint that they were not machines. Once in a while, though, a foal was left with its mother, left until it could take her place and live the same life from foal to yearling to its first visit to the breeding arena, and the whole thing start all over again.
Yet the farm did have outstanding Thoroughbreds who’d won big purses. So why were they not the ones used for stud? Again, Bosworth had told her. “Because they’re not worth it, these mares. They’re not here for their bloodlines. I told you: it’s the urine.”
“Is it illegal, what they’re doing?”
At that, he laughed. “ ‘Illegal’ wouldn’t stop her.” He looked off to the house.
“She’s not a bad woman,” said Nell, who felt a reluctant kinship with Valerie Hobbs, or perhaps it was an odd empathy-the woman’s scatterbrained and uneasy alliance with the business end of things. (“If I didn’t have an accountant, I’d never turn a profit.”) And perhaps because Nell detected in Valerie Hobbs a heart that had taken a terrible beating and a trustworthiness she simply couldn’t explain. Why should Nell trust her?
Nell held out a colored folder. “What’s this?”
Bosworth brought his glasses down from their station on top of his head and looked and turned the thing over, front to back, in his hands. He shrugged. “Probably has to do with those mares.” He shrugged. “Where’d you get it?”
This time Nell shrugged. “I just found it.” She could feel Bosworth looking at her.
“Sure,” he said.
There was a room off the kitchen that Valerie kept locked. Nell had noticed the closed door a number of times and wondered what was in the room. This morning, the key had been left in the door. Valerie was absentminded; she was always looking for keys, wallets, even her Wellies. Nell turned it, went in and saw nothing spectacular, even particularly interesting. Indeed, it looked much like her granddad’s office, only smaller. There were photos tacked on the wall (horses, mostly), a largish desk, breeder’s books. Nell leafed through one, looked to see how Go for the Gold was performing (very well), returned that to its place and moved to the desk, awash in papers: bank accounts, articles downloaded from the PC on the desk, bills, stationery and printed literature-folders, brochures-such as the ones she’d picked up.
The one she had shown Bosworth dealt with a drug which would offset many of the problems and symptoms of menopause. It pictured a woman looking supremely happy, ostensibly because she didn’t have to worry about hot flashes, not if she took this drug. The company was an American one: Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. The drug was Premarin. Premarin. Mare’s urine. Pregnant mare’s urine.
Nell ran her finger along a row of dark-green ledgers, yanked one out, not knowing whether it would be helpful. It wasn’t-nothing but rows of expenditures on feed and equipment, money paid out to vets, farriers, trainers, stable lads. Routine accounts. She put it back, pulled out another. This one was a record of the mares-their dates of acquisition, many of them having been here for as long as four years. Four years of living like this. Recorded also were histories of pregnancies, foals born, foals removed for slaughter, rates of “production” of urine. Mares whose production was low or who were too difficult to impregnate also were sent to slaughter.
She forgot she shouldn’t be in this room; she forgot the room itself as she stared at nothing, the room, its furnishings, photos, windows replaced by the memory of that big horse van pulled up to the farthest barn and as she watched three foals and one mare were loaded onto it. They were going to slaughter because the stud farm had no use for them. That’s all. Was there someone here rotten enough to do all of this? Yes, and he had walked up those attic steps a dozen times.
It was then, right then that she knew she’d have to do something, but had no idea how to do it.
Her opportunity had come when this farm and two others some miles away received threats. The letters had directed them to pay fifty thousand pounds or horses would be harmed. She had waited until the third night after the letter had appeared. That night she had stolen one of the mares, Marie, whose heart had not been destroyed by her imprisonment and who was only too glad to gallop, when the terrain permitted, away to the new place.
Then she returned before dawn, “woke up” the following morning and expressed her own shock and puzzlement that the horse thieves would have taken one of the mares instead of the far more valuable Thoroughbreds. Go for the Gold, or Prime Time, for instance. They put it down to stupidity, almost relieved that the thieves knew nothing about racing or horses.
The next night she repeated her mare theft by taking Domino. In Domino’s case, she stopped every twenty or thirty minutes to let the mare rest or drink from the little stream. It took her four hours to make the three-mile trek.
They questioned now the motive for taking the horses. She had listened to them the next morning trying to work it all out. Maybe it was animal activists who were behind this. Maybe asking for money was just a cover-up.
Whatever it was, thought Nell, no one ever followed up on the threats; no horses were harmed.
But tonight, after taking Stardust and Aqueduct, she could not go back; Aqueduct’s absence would tell them it was Nell doing this, even if nothing else would. Until now, most of the blame had been put at the feet of animal-rights groups. It could only be animal activists they were sure. On six different nights over the past month, she had taken six mares, three like Jenny, who was having a hard time conceiving and whom she was certain would be put down because of it. They might think she simply took the opportunity to run away, but that she’d had nothing to do with the horses that had gone missing. She would still try to save the other mares, but knew she couldn’t manage more than a very few this way. When she was out of here, she would find another way.
When she reckoned the guards were deep enough into their story or joke, she moved very slowly down the row of stalls to where the circuit breaker was located. She flipped a switch. The lights fluttered and died.
No one came. She had done this before on an erratic basis so that when she actually needed the dark no one would be suspicious of the lights going out and would conclude there was something wrong with the connections; faulty wiring is what they put it down to. The lights were supposed to be on at night to fool the mares into thinking it was spring as if conception was more likely in April.
No one would come to fix the lights, because they always came on by themselves (or so it seemed) in a matter of minutes. The two guards were embroiled in their stories and smokes and when the barn went dark, one guard got up and looked, swore and flashed his torch around, but in another ten seconds was back to talking and smoking.
Nell carefully pressed in between Stardust and the side of her stall, laid a hand on her muzzle. When the mare uttered a small sound, Nell did it again and Stardust went quiet. Then she took the small boning knife from her pocket and cut first through the front rope, then the one that held the right rear ankle. The horse remained perfectly still as if the imprint of Nell’s hand on her muzzle remained.
To Nell, the stillness was no miracle, nor was it even strange. Stardust responded perfectly because that’s what she’d been taught to do. Very slowly she backed Stardust out, put her hand on the mare’s left shoulder to turn her, then slowly walked her out into the night.
It was the barn that had told Nell where she was and she could hardly believe it; it nearly paralyzed her to think that all of this time she had been only a few miles from home.
She and Stardust had to stop halfway there so that the mare could rest for an hour; the place was too far to travel in one go, too hard on the horse. From Hobbs’s barn that afternoon she had taken hay and oats. She had slung the oats in a sack behind her over the blanket and tied up half a bale of hay, which she’d tied with a rope to the saddle. It was enough to keep the horses going for a couple of days and nights.
Two outlying barns, for years unused, stood nearly a half mile from the other Ryder Stud buildings, which was one reason why her granddad had stopped using it. Also, the barn was unnecessary when he started trimming back on stock and land.
Nell did not believe in luck, certainly not in the good kind, certainly not her own. But she did believe in fate. She did believe a person was led to something, although it was often hard to tell what finding it meant, or what was meant for you to do there. It was a necessary belief; it kept her going. When she’d come upon Ryder land and the empty barn on that first night, it had deepened her belief in fate-not in luck, not in guidance and not in God. Fate was different; fate was the thinking through and the working out of a pattern already laid down. You had to believe in something, she thought, even if it’s a cold, impersonal and imperious something.
The Ryder stables would be a source of bulk food and maybe some bran or barley. Where she would get her own food, after the supplies she’d taken from the house, she wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t worried about it. There were other things to worry about.
She remembered hanging her head, as if this absence from home were her own fault. She had stood beside the tired mare whose neck was bent, cropping at black grass in the dark and wondered what heavy hand was stopping her. It wasn’t as if she’d run away, and yet it felt like it, it really did. In the place she was taken to, it hadn’t been mere physical boundaries that had kept her from running; she had become inured to those. No, it was more an irrational notion that she shouldn’t be free; this had become entrenched in her mind, strong as her mind was. She had relearned the limits of freedom.
But she did know, didn’t she, what kept her in this now self-imposed exile? Even though she wasn’t responsible, except, perhaps, for having a pretty arse. She put it that way, crudely and sarcastically, hoping she could diminish the awfulness of the rape. The footsteps on the stairs, the opening door, the dark and then being pushed down, turned over and forced to lie flat on her stomach. Always, he came at her from behind. Every time. A dozen times. She had seen him once, but no more than a glance grazing his face. She believed she knew him. It was a belief unsustained by memory because her memory, her conscious awareness of him had been wiped out. But she also believed that the memory could be triggered by something and then she’d know. Until then she never wanted to speak of it; it was something she would have to settle for herself, probably, if at all.
And she’d learned the limits also the first time she’d seen the mares in those two barns. When she walked down the line, rubbing each of them on the rump or flank, she saw a number of them were pregnant. Yes, some of them were unmistakably in foal.
The stillness was eerie, unnatural. Fugitive sounds-a tiny rustle of hay, the soft movement of a tail flicking- were all. Nell thought these horses projected a resignation unlike any she had ever witnessed.
She studied the stalls. The panels separating the mares were thin. Where the panels on each side came together with the dividing wall, they squared off a little platform that she might be able to sit on if there was any way to climb up there. Nell did not know why she wanted to do this; for some reason she felt it was important. Maybe once she got up there, she’d know.
She found an old crate against the wall that she pulled to the entrance of the stall and got up by standing on it and letting her arms power her the rest of the way. Then she sat down, legs dangling. “All right,” she said. She could touch the heads of the two horses in front and if she turned around, the two horses behind her. Maybe that’s why she’d wanted to get up here; up here she could reach them. From here she could see down the rows in both directions. She turned her head and saw they were looking at her. I wonder if they think I’m something else to be drained of fluids. On the ceiling, fluorescent lights stuttered and shimmered. It was day, but the lights were on and she wondered if this was to extend daylight or spring to confuse the mares into foaling in the dead of winter.
Nell looked toward the end of the barn and, seeing no one about, began to hum a few bars of her favorite song, and then to sing in a voice barely over a whisper. “Love walked right in-” She went on with what she could remember of it.
If she balanced carefully, she could lean back on the narrow ledge of the panel. She looked at the light, which threw a veil of sickly white over the horses. It might as well have been a layer of frost covering everything-the barn, the mares and her, even the stillness, even the singing.
She had this recurrent nightmare: a vast track of sand, an endless sweep of dunes, some ridged and shadowed like steps that a moment later would be swept away and another bit of geography would form in the sand. Along the horizon she saw a chain of what she took to be camels until her dream eye, coming closer, told her they were mares. There were no stalls, but still the mares were chained. But to what? There was only the sand. Yet they couldn’t move. They stood exposed to sun and wind, a black line across the farthest dune.
And the awful silence, except for the wind, the subtle shifts in the sand, the wind rearranging the dunes.
Every time she had awakened from this dream, she recognized the peculiar amalgam of shame and remorse was caused not by what she had done, but by what she hadn’t. She dropped her head on her raised knees. Sixty mares: there was no way in the world she could get all of them out, or even most of them. No matter who the people there thought was responsible, they would still have increased security. But she depended upon their thinking: if it was she who had taken the mares, why hadn’t she taken her own horse, Aqueduct? That was why she’d left him for last: it might be the one thing that would throw them off the track.
Her head stayed down and she shook it back and forth against her knees when an image was too painful. Don’t go there, don’t go there. One thought struck her as incongruous: did they miss her? Despite wanting to blow the place to kingdom come and kill every last one of them-face-to-face, so that she could see the cold fear in their eyes-despite this she wondered, did they miss her? It was all too complicated, too hard to grasp, an emotional thicket, tangled and barbed.
In this dream tonight something had brushed against her face that wasn’t the wind. There was nothing else there. She awoke in the deep dark rubbing her face, and saw Charlie, the little foal that she had brought along with its mother, looking around the open barn door. Charlie had been inspecting her and apparently hadn’t decided whether she was trustworthy.
She fell back against her straw pillow, glad to have been awakened and thought about the dream again, for every time she had it she would go to sleep one person and wake up another, her sense of herself subtly changed, as was the surface of the desert in the dream. What clung to her nearly sunken consciousness was that there was something she had to do.
I’ve done enough.
No, you haven’t. Somebody else? Perhaps. But you? No.
“Oh, who says?” she had yelled one night at the stars, scaring the horses, who started whinnying and snorting. She had gone into the barn and from one horse to another, offering each lumps of sugar, a stroke on the cheek and an apology.
Tonight a soft whinny came from the barn. The mother Daisy probably looking for Charlie. The foal trotted back to the stall.
They had grown so used to being tethered; it was difficult now for them to move around. They were anchored here by ghost chains, as the amputee still feels a ghost leg. A limb there and not there.
Again she thought of the dream and the chains in the sand. But you couldn’t chain anything to sand. She wondered if she herself was that line of dark horses on the horizon, that she felt chained even though she had not been, literally. This had not come about merely as a result of her forced imprisonment in that gabled room under the eaves. “When can I go home?”
There was no answer.
She had felt herself to be a much younger self, more vulnerable, less aware, one who had regressed. Her passivity, while it had lasted, was a means of self-protection, a mildness that would appease these people and would convince them she wouldn’t try anything.
From the window of her room she could see the courtyard and stables, three long lines of them. This had shown her it was a stud farm, like Ryder’s, only slightly larger. But down below there was little activity, which she found strange. Only Aqueduct (and why had they wanted him?) and a few other horses were led from their stalls to the exercise ring. She would watch from her window for hours, interrupted only by a tray brought in by a girl who’d been told not to speak to her. But the girl, Fanny, having told her she was not to speak, continued speaking (feeling, apparently, that she had already broken the rule when she opened her mouth). Fanny was trying to earn enough money to go to America. This was the girl’s single wish. She had an aunt who lived in Chicago.
“Do you take care of the horses ever?”
“Oh, no,” Fanny answered. “It’s got to be done just right.”
“What has to be?”
Fanny shrugged.
A little while after she’d been here, Nell realized she would have to stop acting fifteen and be herself again, with every ounce of self-control and resourcefulness she could muster. She would never find a way out of this place if she couldn’t convince them it was safe for them to give her a little freedom. The “When can I go home?” part of her would have to go and that other part of her, cool and in command, would have to reassert itself. It did not actually take a lot of effort; it had come over her quite naturally. Sometimes she wondered about this.
This composure and self-command might have been induced by the horses, the way she knew a person had to handle them. One had to be calm, consistent, efficient and dependable. You couldn’t be a certain way one day and a different way the next.
Hadn’t she said something like that a couple of years ago to Vernon Rice? Being around horses, she had said, “gives a person poise.”
Vernon Rice. She wondered what he was doing right now (except making money, of course). He had just walked in when I was currying Samarkand. A total stranger, a stepbrother.
Nell looked again at the white patches of stars and felt comforted.
He just walked in.
Aqueduct needed to run. She could feel his frustrated energy through her legs on his flanks and see it in the way he shook his mane and looked ahead as if the world were a row of hurdles he knew he could jump. She knew he wanted to jump that string of walls that zigzagged across the fields for almost half a mile. They called them Hadrian’s walls. It was the way she’d been taken that night, and the man who’d taken her had been a very good rider because some of those walls were dangerously high. She’d never been able to jump all of them. But Aqueduct could; Aqueduct loved the walls.
At two a.m., an hour when no one would be out, she rode the horse to the main buildings of her grandfather’s farm. It took a half hour, so she wasn’t surprised that the outlying barn in which she’d stabled the mares was no longer used.
They could have galloped along this road between the barn and the main Ryder property, but Nell wanted to save Aqueduct’s energy for the training course. She wanted things to appear to be back to normal, or at least to have the illusion of normality, the comfort of the familiar, no matter how small.
It was lovely in this wood in winter; it always had been along this old road, no matter what the season or the hour. Iridescent with frost or thin coatings of ice, the small twigs broke and fell. But Aqueduct, never a skittish horse, did not start or stop. With the moon itself like ice, as hard and bright as she could remember, the scene was a landscape of dreams. But we’re always dreaming, she thought, images floating upward when the mind is off guard. There’s always a dream going on down there, some part of the mind that didn’t care what was going on up here. She pushed a low-hanging branch out of the way, ducked under it, came out on the narrowing path to the stables and house. Her mares needed hay; she planned on hooking a bale of it onto the saddle if it would hold, maybe half on each side. She could walk beside the horse if the load seemed too heavy.
When they neared the barn, she hesitated, pulling back on the reins. They would remember Aqueduct-Samarkand and Beautiful Dreamer and Criminal Type. She thought they would remember.
“Come on, Duck,” said Nell as she slipped down from the saddle. She walked the horse to the first row of stalls, afraid almost to look, afraid she would see unfamiliar faces in every stall, improbable, in the relatively short time she’d been gone, yet she felt that time to be fatal, to be her fault, as if her absence had been deliberate, as if she had forgotten them and, having forgotten, had nullified them. Such a fancy was arrogant, she supposed, as if her absence could make such a difference, as if it were a magic act, that she could throw up a veil that would make them disappear at will.
But the horses were here and if they weren’t sure of her, they knew Aqueduct soon enough. It had always made her feel good to watch horses greeting one another. Aqueduct stopped at a stall and then went on to the next as if looking for someone. In the frozen stillness the only sounds were the soft nickerings. The horses were far enough from the house that no one would hear.
Yet it was like walking back into a past that no longer belonged to her, as if she’d mislaid it, left it deliberately behind and could no longer lay claim to it. She had forfeited it by not coming back. You wake up one morning and everything’s changed. Or you go along thinking you can take a step back to find the ground is gone behind you. You get careless and profligate with your time and your feelings, and then find out it’s too late.
Two years ago she would have said that she was happy; what she now knew was that happiness was irrelevant.
She stopped at each of the stalls, Samarkand’s and Beautiful Dreamer’s, and Criminal Type’s and Fool’s Money’s (where she thought of Vern and smiled), stroking the neck of each, getting in return what she hoped were (but wasn’t sure of) signs of recognition. Of course they must remember in some small way, some instinctive way. She could not be romantic or sentimental about it. She found the hay, small bundles of it.
In the tack room, she took her favorite saddle from the bench, thinking it wonderful the saddle was still there, as if everything connected to her then, her absence could have rendered nugatory. Then she took the too large one from Aqueduct’s back, adjusted her own saddle on him, then secured the hay to it. She hoisted herself up once more and walked Aqueduct across the horse yard, away from the barn and along the bridle path past the house. The house was at some distance; she stopped and gazed at it.
It was not that she could not imagine her father’s sadness, and her grandfather’s, and Maurice’s-somehow especially Maurice’s-desolation. But she couldn’t return yet, not quite yet.
They reached the training course and she leaned down and opened the gate. When they walked onto the track, a feeling of exhilaration washed over her, and she felt it in her horse, too. She wished that Maurice were here with his stopwatch, measuring time not by seconds but by halves of seconds. Split seconds, photo finishes. Faster than drawing breath. But he wasn’t.
Aqueduct shook his head and lowered it; she could feel the tension bulk his shoulders. She had rarely done this; racing was more Maurice’s job, not his job, but his pleasure. They had jockeys for this. She untied the hay and let it drop to the ground. She rose slightly in the saddle, leaned forward, hugged the horse’s flanks with her legs, gathered the reins and in the dead dark whispered, “Go, Duck!”
The horse leaped forward so quickly she thought he’d leave her behind. Then she forgot everything but the horse, the reins and the rushing air; it blew over her like a cowel. Nothing she’d ever felt had been this fast, at least nothing she’d felt a part of. The track was a mile long. It was around the second turn that she saw something lying in their path but it was too late to stop. Three seconds after she’d seen it, Aqueduct jumped it as if it were a low hurdle.
Black-haired and black-coated, the woman lying on her side looked as if she’d been thrown down, a rider thrown from her horse. Nell squatted down and took out the penlight she always carried. Its light accentuated the woman’s porcelain skin, so perfect that it reminded Nell of pictures she’d seen of geisha-flawless faces covered with white powder. On her left hand was a gold wedding band; her hands were too soft, her nails too manicured to belong to a woman who spent much time around horses.
Nell could assimilate these details not because she was unmindful of the woman’s death itself, but because noticing details had been much of what kept her alive for the past two years and eventually permitted her to escape. She had developed a lot of the objectivity and emotional insularity of a detective or reporter. She stood, heart thudding, wanting to get up on Aqueduct and gallop away.
She didn’t know much about fixing the time of death, little about rigor mortis, but she did know it came and then passed. This woman seemed completely relaxed, so that could mean she was killed either very recently or some hours before. Killed how? Nell ran the small light over the form and saw nothing. Had she been stabbed? Shot? Strangled? And it had to have been in the last eight hours because there was invariably someone at the track at five or six o’clock, Maurice or an exercise boy, someone. Probably she had died in the early-morning darkness. Nell looked at apt Aqueduct. “I should tell them. I should do something.” The horse’s head appeared to nod. “I can’t go to the farm, Duck.” She looked away. Then she looked down. Expressionless, the face of the woman whom she didn’t know was still beautiful.
Who was she?
In the time she’d been gone and after they had given up on her, anything could have happened. Her father might even have married again, needing someone, not to take her place, but to fill a lack. But that hardly explained this. Again she felt that urge to go to the house… No. It would all be too difficult, too painful for them to understand. A tear rolled down her face as she went on looking at the woman lying at her feet. She brushed it off.
A call box. There was one a little down the road from there, and the road itself wasn’t far. “Come on then, Duck.”
She saw the call box and clicked her tongue, moving the horse along at a canter. No cars, no houses along here, and she was grateful for that. She pulled Aqueduct onto the grassy verge and jumped down. She opened the glasspaneled door and slipped in, wondering if one had to have coins even to call emergency. No, thank God. When she heard the voice of the policewoman, Nell told her in a rush about the dead woman and her location. Questions tumbled from the policewoman’s lips, and in the midst of them, Nell apologized and hung up. Cambridgeshire police could certainly find the body.
Fifteen minutes later, as Aqueduct jumped the lowest of Hadrian’s walls, she heard the sirens; looking over her shoulder, she thought she saw the turning blue lights, eerie through the predawn mist, turning on the top of the police car. Aqueduct’s breath steamed in the cold damp air as Nell tossed the bag of feed over his back and tied the hay to the saddle again. She figured she’d have five minutes to get into the covering line of trees.
She could hear nothing now, not at this distance. None of it-the dead woman, the call box, the ghostly blue lights-none of it seemed to have any relation to her.
The police would be wondering who had made the call, but she had nothing to tell them, no idea of who the woman was. Yet the woman made her uncomfortable for some reason, tugged at her memory as if some deep spot in her mind had been disturbed. But by what? It had something to do with her family-her dad, her granddad, Maurice, Vernon.
This tug at memory made Nell wonder about the horses. Did they “remember” in the way of human remembrance? Or did they live only in the moment? But such thoughts only dragged her back to the mares she hadn’t saved. Not that she ever really thought she could save them all… Or had she? She tried to work out some other way of getting them away from the farm.
Despite her disappointment in herself, she applauded herself on one score: acting. She must really have been hellishly convincing to get them to let her help with the mares. She laid her forearm across her eyes, thinking of them lined up in those narrow stalls. It’s almost worse, she thought, than if I’d done nothing. That thought made her feel like both a traitor and a coward. Had she thought she could save them all?
Two unmarked police vehicles were angled in the courtyard when Melrose arrived in his Bentley the following morning. He assumed they were police from the light sitting atop one of the cars. He also thought the two men might be plainclothes detectives.
The civilian standing there talking to them clearly needed a coat (for it was beastly cold this morning). He was probably in his late sixties or early seventies, and Melrose supposed he was Arthur Ryder, with whom he had an appointment. Ryder stood with his arms crossed, hands in his armpits, warming them, and looking down at the ground.
Since police detectives don’t usually turn up for no good reason, something dire had happened; Melrose then saw what the something dire was: men carrying a stretcher out of a wooded area, then around the corner of the barn and heading for an ambulance he hadn’t noticed because it was parked on the other side of the house and had just now backed up a few feet.
Had Jury been strangely prescient about all of this? Melrose thought he should, in the circumstances, be politely unobtrusive and come back at a later date. Ha! The hell with that idea…
So he leaned against his car and lit a cigarette and waited. The detectives turned their heads and seemed to search his person with their eyes. It was then that Ryder looked up, a man sparing himself whatever lay before him as long as he possibly could. Finally, he shook the detectives’ hands and nodded, then walked across the horse yard to Melrose.
“Mr. Plant? I’m Arthur Ryder.” For such a big man his voice was surprisingly soft.
Melrose took the hand he offered and said, “Mr. Ryder.”
“Look,” said Ryder, “I should have called you to postpone our meeting. We’ve had a bit of trouble here.”
When there was no hint of Arthur Ryder’s elaborating on “a bit,” Melrose said, “I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too serious.” Which it clearly was, given the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance.
“About as serious as things get, I think. There’s this woman who was murdered.”
Melrose had already concluded that. “Good Lord. I hope it wasn’t a member of your own family.”
“No. A stranger. Never saw her before in my life.”
“Good Lord,” Melrose said again. “Well, then, I expect you’d rather not talk business-?”
“No, that’s all right. Wait here until I finish with these policemen. They’re calling in police from the city. Cambridge, I mean. Apparently, it’s better handled by them.”
Looking toward the horse stalls, Melrose said, “Would it be all right if I had a look at your horses?”
“Go on. I’ll meet you there in a minute.”
The ambulance pulled away. Melrose watched it down the long white-fenced drive. This certainly put another spin on the whole Ryder Stud Farm question. Melrose looked toward the place from which he’d seen the men carrying the stretcher through the trees and made out, in the distance, what might have been yellow crime-scene tape lifted slightly in the wind. He was sorely tempted to walk there, but thought it would appear too intrusive. Instead, he went off to the stalls.
He approached the first horse box trying to recall if the book had said you should or should not look a horse directly in the eye. Here he was, some people’s idea of a country squire, and he didn’t know the first thing about the country.
A small bronze sign on the stall door read SAMARKAND. The horse was a handsome specimen, not precisely light gray, very pale. Dawn, that was it, or twilight. The horse was busy chewing. Not busy, perhaps, for he was chewing too slowly for that, but he seemed to be more interested in Melrose-
(Novice.)
– than he was in food. Melrose-
(Toff.)
– always seemed to excite no more than a soigné attitude in animals, a sort of “And you’re here because…?” response. He had often seen their shoulders (if they had any) move in what he would swear was a shrug. The next horse was glossy and as black as soot.
“Wonderful horse,” said a voice behind Melrose.
Arthur Ryder had come up behind him and was running his hand down the black muzzle. “Criminal Type. He’s twelve now, but he can still outrun most of them. Brilliant horse. One of my son’s favorites. He was a jockey.”
“Yes, I’ve seen him race.” Whoa! That might lead him into troubled waters. It did.
“Where?”
Melrose appeared to be recollecting, his mind flowing with all the races over the years he’d seen with Dan Ryder on a horse. “Well, there was-”
“Cheltenham Gold Cup? That was a great race, wasn’t it?”
“It was. Your son was a great jockey.”
Arthur Ryder had pulled something from his back pocket and then stuffed it back into the pocket again. It was a bit of wood. He said, “Look, I’m feeling too disoriented to talk business at the moment. Come on into the house. What I need is a stiff drink.”
Melrose hesitated. “I can come back, Mr. Ryder-”
But Arthur shook his head. “Not at all, not at all. Maybe a stranger’s the best sort of person to have around at a time like this. There’s no one here right now but me.”
Melrose followed him into the rambling white house.
They sat in Arthur’s office, a room overflowing with magazines, books, newspapers; a desk strewn with papers, ledgers bound in leather and other paraphernalia of record keeping. It was the sort of room one felt comfortable walking into, even more comfortable (despite the circumstances) having a drink in the morning with the person whose room it was.
Arthur Ryder was turning his glass back and forth in both hands. “Obviously, I’m glad it isn’t anyone I know. Poor woman. But I’m completely mystified. My training track, for God’s sake!”
“What did the police say?”
“The same thing. They think it must be someone who doesn’t wish me well.” His tone had an edge to it.
Melrose did not want to sound like the police. He was uncertain what pose to strike. “Is that feasible?”
“A bit far-fetched, but yes. You know the thing is it’s not as if she were my own family yet… I feel a curious responsibility for her. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
Melrose nodded and sipped his whiskey and wondered. The question was rhetorical, anyway.
The telephone interrupted them.
“Excuse me.” Arthur went to his desk, snatched up the phone. “Vernon! Have you heard about… yes. Yes.”
As Arthur went about explaining to the caller what had happened, Melrose moved to a wall, its length divided by a wooden molding. Above the molding, covering the wall, were small and large photographs and snapshots, all of them of horses, some with jockeys on them. He had looked at a multitude of horses in various books. Matching up the remembered ones to these pictures was a great deal harder than matching up faces. But this one, Samarkand, he knew because of his unusual pale, moonlike shading. He stood perfectly posed in the winner’s circle at some racecourse that Melrose didn’t know. But then he didn’t know any of them, did he? Melrose had had the sense to find a picture of Arthur Ryder’s son from an old newspaper. All of these horses looked terribly famous: the way they stood, the way they looked only tolerably interested in the goings-on, the way they seemed above it all. For they were famous and fame knows only itself. This seemed particularly true in the look of the soot-black horse, Criminal Type.
“Sorry about that,” said Arthur. “My stepson.”
Melrose smiled and sat down. He wanted to get Ryder back to the thoughts he was having before the telephone call, but didn’t know how to reintroduce the subject. Instead, he tapped the photograph of horse and jockey: “This is your son, isn’t it?” In silks and that headgear, it was hard to tell one jockey from another.
Arthur looked and looked away, nodded briefly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Ah-” Arthur waved the sentiment away, impatient with himself, not with Melrose. He picked up the whiskey decanter. “Have another.” He splashed some more in both glasses.
Melrose said, “Your son was one of the great jockeys from what I’ve heard. He’s been ranked up there with Piggot and that American, Shoemaker.”
“He wasn’t as good as either. Has any jockey ever been?” This time Arthur smiled, a brief flash, like light striking water, gone in an instant. He unpinned one of the larger photos and turned it so Melrose could see it. “Grand National, this was, twelve years ago. They broke the record by one and a half seconds. Odd, you never know how long a second can be until you see it in something like this. Danny was only in his thirties when he died. His son? Maurice?” -he said this as if Melrose had known Maurice and possibly forgotten the boy-“always wanted to be a jockey like his father. But then he shot up to five nine a couple of years ago and hasn’t stopped yet. Now he’s sixteen and nearly six feet tall.”
For a moment Arthur was silent and Melrose did not want to disturb any fragile and ephemeral thought process, causing the images to fly apart like the colored bits in a kaleidoscope. He wanted to keep Ryder’s train of thought intact and hoped the other man wouldn’t suddenly recall why Melrose Plant was there and want to get down to business. Melrose thought probably the murder of this unknown woman had simply turned Ryder’s world temporarily upside down so that practical matters would be for a little while in abeyance.
Arthur Ryder looked sadly down at his already-empty glass as if finding the contents had fled, along with his dead son, his lost grandchild-
– whom he had yet to mention.
Instead, he said, “You pay a heavy price for success, don’t you? Yet that’s the reason you want success in the first place. So you can stop having to pay a heavy price. Ironic. You’d have enough capital, enough reputation that now things can be a bit of a lark. What I had here forty years ago was a small house, this room we’re sitting in part of it, some livestock-cows and pigs-and three horses. I caught the racing bug-well, at least the horse bug-after I went with a friend to Newmarket auction. My God, but weren’t they beautiful, those Thoroughbreds!” He picked another photo from the shelf behind him and handed it to Melrose. “This was the progeny of one of those first horses. Gold Rush was his name. And this was Golden Boy. I almost put him in a claims race, but thank God I didn’t. Some trainer would have claimed him in an eye blink. So little by little I built the place. And that’s the price, see. When Gold Rush won his first race I was beside myself with joy; it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me since my boys were born. Yet the way I felt then has been less and less duplicated by wins worth far higher stakes and with far more fame. Winning becomes everything. You get a taste, you want every dish in the kitchen.”
“But it has to be that way, doesn’t it, if you want to get to the top or be the best? And to try to do it, that’s admirable. You’re right, of course, that you pay a price. But there’s a price either way.”
“Hm. Yes, that’s true. Hm.”
Melrose was going to ask him a direct question about the girl, when Arthur said, “I had a granddaughter-‘have,’ I mean-I catch myself using the past tense, which disturbs me.” He reflected on this.
Melrose had to prompt him. “What happened to her?” “She vanished.”
Vanished. It was a word to chill the air between them. It was a word that so evoked light flying into darkness that Melrose felt the loss of this girl was, for Arthur Ryder, a total eclipse.
“She was taken.”
That’s how Arthur began his story.
“She was kidnapped, you could say, though there was never any contact with whoever did it and no ransom demand. Nothing. Ever. Which technically makes it an abduction, according to the police, and further puts it outside the scope of a long-lasting investigation. Of course, the police looked first at the people who work here, or did at that time. I’ve had to let several people go. It happened at night. Of course detectives checked out everybody who had some connection with the farm here. Whoever took Nell also took Aqueduct. He was one of my most valuable stallions. In terms of breeding, probably the most valuable.”
The papers hadn’t named the horse, to keep some piece of information out of public view so that the police could ignore false leads. “Then do you think the true object of this theft was the horse?”
Ryder nodded. “I can’t think of why they’d take Nell if ransom wasn’t a factor. But Aqueduct, there’s an extremely valuable four-year-old, worth at least three million, even more when I sell seasons.”
“Seasons?”
Arthur looked at him, a little puzzled. “You know, at stud. I could get as much as a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand for one season, whoever owns the season brings his mare to breed. I don’t like to go over fifty seasons; it’s too hard on the stallion.”
Melrose (who cursed himself for giving away the fact he didn’t know the meaning of a common practice) totted up the “seasons” figure. Lord. In one year the horse could bring in six or seven million quid. Valuable, you bet.
“Without Aqueduct, I was in financial trouble. Big trouble. The breeders who were due to put their mares at stud and had paid for the privilege naturally wanted their money back. A few accepted other stallions, but wanted additional seasons to compensate.” He shrugged, as if going on were too depressing. “In the two years’ time, I haven’t recouped.”
“You’ve thought about the motive’s being someone wanting to put you out of business?”
He nodded. “I have, yes. The police suggested that. But I honestly couldn’t think who then and can’t now. It’s such a total mystery, the whole thing.”
“But whoever did it couldn’t himself enter your horse in a race. There are methods of identification-”
“Yes. But anyone intent on taking a horse would certainly have worked out some way of getting rid of particulars of identification.”
“Still… well, if you ever saw the horse yourself, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
He smiled. “Not necessarily, I’m afraid.” He picked a silver-framed photograph from his desk and handed it to Melrose. “But she would. You can bet she would. Nell.”
Melrose looked at a face he could only describe as luminous. In this photo she could not have been more than fourteen, fifteen at most, if it was taken right before she disappeared. He found this remarkable, devastating. She was smiling or laughing at something the camera couldn’t see. Strands of her sheer, pale hair blew across her face and shoulder. One hand was raised to pull the hair away. She was wearing a denim jacket over a white T-shirt, and on her it was haute couture. How had this child managed to get this way? Her father was handsome, certainly, but for Nell Ryder it was more than mere looks. He couldn’t explain it. It was a kind of-poise, a sangfroid even. He felt a sense of loss of such immediacy, such a feeling of déjà vu, he was baffled. In all probability he would never see her, never hear her, never watch her ride a horse.
“She fit a horse like a kidskin glove,” said Arthur, as if following the line of his visitor’s thoughts. “She knew horses, she really did.” He shook his head and replaced the photograph carefully.
Melrose cleared his throat. “She’s beautiful.”
Ryder looked at him. “To say the least.”
The very least.
“I’ll let George Davison show you the horse. I need to talk to my stepson again.”
AQUEDUCT
The little sign was there, but the horse was not.
“We don’t put any other horse in this stall. Superstitious, maybe, but there it is. Never knew a horse like him,” said George Davison. “So high bred and low-down good-natured. That horse never had a mean bone in his body. Like Nell Ryder herself.”
The horse, Melrose noted, came before the girl, at least in the trainer’s mind. “Do you think what happened will affect the stable, Mr. Davison?”
“Naturally.” Any fool could see that, his look said. But apparently not this particular fool. “We lost enough income to-”
“No, Mr. Davison, I don’t mean the horse being stolen. I mean last night. The murdered woman.”
“Oh, her?” Davison shrugged. “Funny old business, that. But I don’t see how it’s anything to do with us.” They were walking down the row of horse stalls.
“It seems so strange. What could this woman have been doing?”
“Someone just dumped her, maybe.”
“Possibly. Very odd, though, if that’s the case. You mentioned Nell Ryder. Her grandfather told me about her. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard.”
“He hasn’t been the same since. This place hasn’t, either. You think he’d be selling off stock otherwise?” He shook his head. “That little girl just disappearing into the night…” He shook his head again.
Melrose knew he shouldn’t appear overly curious, yet wouldn’t anyone, hearing such a story?
Davison was stopping the two of them at nearly every stall and giving Melrose a lowdown on each horse that Melrose could have done without. (“Stalwart, beautiful jumper, by Forward, out of Mr. Don; Gingerbread Man, progeny of Ginger Biscuit and Seaward-”
“What do you think happened?”
Davison said, “That girl, she was a gypsy, you ask me.” He was looking in at a roan named Bobolink and rocking a bit on his heels.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she pretty much did what she wanted. You know, independent.”
Melrose smiled. “ ‘Gypsy’ usually suggests someone unsettled or a traveler. Is that what you mean?”
Davison shrugged, not so much out of indifference as uncertainty about what he did mean. “Maybe. She was kind of a puzzle.”
But the girl in the photograph had looked not at all like a puzzle but perfectly straightforward.
“I liked her, though; you had to like her. Here we are; here’s Aggrieved.”
They stopped in front of a stall at the far end. Melrose smiled. “Aggrieved.”
“Course you can change the name if you want-”
Not in a million years, thought Melrose.
“-only he’s got a good track record and the name means something, you know.”
“No, I won’t change it.”
The horse was the color of polished mahogany. He shone with good health and good breeding.
“Aggrieved was a great two-year-old. Won twelve of fourteen starts. Yeah, one of the most promising I’ve ever come across and lived up to the promise all around. The next year he won fourteen out of eighteen starts. But I don’t expect you mean to race him. He’s eleven now. Go on and look him over.” Davison unlatched the stable door and the horse stepped back, shook out his mane.
“Oh, I don’t need to do that. I’m sure any horse from this farm is as he’s represented.” The fear of discovery made him pompous.
Davison looked at Melrose as if he must be completely mad. But all he said, and said it mildly, was, “Best you look.”
Hell, thought Melrose, trying to dredge up what he could from his reading about what to look for as Davison went into the stall and led the horse out.
Melrose walked around Aggrieved, sizing him up with a few hms and humphs and favorable nods trying to recall one thing-ah! The legs! He knelt down and ran a hand up and down the foreleg. But were the legs supposed to be hot or cold? He did this with the other foreleg, but steered clear of the hind legs. “Good bones,” he said.
“Best check the teeth.”
Oh, God. And the prayer paid off, for Davison did the honors of getting the mouth open with both hands.
Melrose looked, squinting. “They look fine,” he said. “He appears to be absolutely fine to me.”
That Melrose himself appeared that way to Aggrieved was a whole other thing. The horse had simply closed his eyes against whatever this person was doing. They knew,
Melrose was convinced, they knew, all right. They could ferret out lies.
“I’ll just tack ’im up for you. Then you can put ’im through his paces.”
Oh, great; oh, wonderful. You couldn’t get me on that horse with a crane.
Davison started off for the tack room, turned and came back. “Damn it all! We can’t use our course. That tape’s up, that police tape.”
Melrose tried not to laugh. How low had he sunk that he’d be grateful for a murder if it saved him from massive embarrassment. He blushed. “Oh, I’m sure the horse is all right. I’m not in my riding clothes, either.” He did laugh then, in a silly way.
Davison scratched his head. “You think he’ll suit, then?”
“Absolutely. I can leave him here, can’t I, until I get a-something to move him in?” Horse box? Trailer?
“Trailer? Of course.” Davison ran his hand down the horse’s flank. “And that way”-he said to Melrose-“you’ll be able to see how he performs when you come back!”
“Right.” Between now and never, he could read fifteen books by Dick Francis and work out how you do it.
“You’re a good ol’ boy,” said the trainer to the horse.
The good ol’ boy opened his eyes, looked from Davison to Melrose and drew his top lip back over his fine teeth. He looked almost exactly like Humphrey Bogart in one of the actor’s more considering moments, moments with a gun in his hand.
“That your car there, the Bentley?”
It was the only one parked in the turnaround, so who else’s could it be? “Yes, it is.”
“Mr. Plant!” called Arthur Ryder, coming toward them. “I’m really sorry, but so much has been going on…
George has taken care of things, though. Best trainer in the country. Do you like Aggrieved?” Arthur also ran his hand down the horse’s flank. “I love this horse, always have.” The horse seemed to lean into him, as if calmed by Arthur’s company. “So he’s all right, is he?”
“More than all right.”
Arthur nodded. “Good. Would you want to leave him here until you get transport?” There was the distant ringing of a phone. “Sorry, again. I’ll be back straightaway. I’ve been on the phone with the Cambridge police. That’s them ringing back probably. Maurice can help you if you need something.” This was called back over Ryder’s shoulder.
Maurice was walking toward them. He had an intensity that bordered on the savage. He was handsome, with looks that apparently came from the jockey in the photographs who Melrose had virtually committed to memory, so that he’d recognize any pictures here of Dan Ryder. Again, though, Melrose understood the nature of resemblance, how it could be counterfeited in an expression of face and voice, gesture and movement. Attributes the camera could not always catch.
Melrose bet the boy’s looks would be devastating to girls-the nearly black hair, the pale skin, a romantic figure one might meet up with in an Arthurian tale, knights or chevaliers. A poet, a Rupert Brooke profile. Heroes. What was that line Jury had quoted more than once from Virgil? Agnosco… flammae? That would be Maurice’s effect on women. There was something in his looks that would remind them of something lost. Someone, somewhere, some time. The face one couldn’t quite place, but that shouldn’t have been let go.
Nell. Maurice. They were only a year apart. Together they could probably cut a path through the romantic world worthy of Dido and Aeneas. She looked as if she could easily match the boy’s intensity. He wondered what the difference was between them. He did not know why he wondered this.
Melrose thought all of this in the short time he watched Maurice coming. He imagined Maurice thinking that here was the stud farm in financial difficulty and here was this rich, no doubt self-satisfied aristocrat come with all of his money and knowing sod-all about horses to take away one that Maurice had known all of Aggrieved’s life, a horse now to be used by the toff’s family only to have all his fleetness bred out of him.
Ah, if only the boy knew! Aggrieved would be living the life of Reilly! Momaday finally had something useful to do (from Melrose’s point of view if not Momaday’s), cleaning out the old stable on the property. Melrose’s father had been quite adept at the art of dressage, an interest Melrose had not inherited. For which he was grateful.
The boy looked if not exactly sad, then serious. It was the look of a mourner at a wake, where life was going on with laughter and song and which he couldn’t understand.
“Mr. Plant? Granddad said you came to have a look at Aggrieved.” He glanced from Melrose over to the stable. “You’re buying him, then?”
“Yes. He’s a beautiful horse.”
Maurice looked at him as if that might be the expected and banal answer from one who knew nothing about Thoroughbred horses, or any other horses, probably.
Melrose cast about for a way to get on the subject of Nell Ryder. He didn’t have to.
“Everybody loves this horse. Especially Nell. She’s my cousin; you probably heard about her.”
“Yes, your grandfather told me about her.”
Maurice nodded. “Nell-”
The name broke off and drifted, like a spar from a wreckage. He still had a hand on Aggrieved’s rump.
Melrose helped him out: “She was very good with horses, at coaxing them to do what she wanted, wasn’t she?”
Maurice looked at him almost as if wondering why and from where Melrose had learned this. He seemed both to want to and not want to speak of her. “She was brilliant; even George said she’d make a first-rate trainer.” Now Aggrieved was back in his stall and Maurice began to inspect the mixture of oats and bran in the hanging manger. “I hope you have other horses.”
“Well, not exactly yet.”
Maurice looked pained. “You know horses are very social animals. They’ve got to have others around them. Even if it’s just a pig or a goat.” He looked at Melrose for confirmation, suspicious of the munificence of the Ardry End barnyard.
Having not told the big lie, Melrose felt comfortable with a lot of little ones. “I have a lot of land and a lot of good pasture. I have a pig in a sty, a goat in the barn, a swan in the pond (an aunt in the drawing room) and ducks in the lake.” He felt as if he were playing some variation of Cluedo. “Believe me, Maurice, this horse will get the best of care.”
“Stable has to be mucked out every day. I expect you know that.” Maurice didn’t sound as if he believed it, though.
Indeed, Melrose found him far more suspicious than his grandfather Arthur had been or even George Davison. “Absolutely. I’ve got a really good stable lad.” The thought of Momaday as a “lad” made him want to laugh. “Tell you what, Maurice; I’ll take some Polaroid shots and send them to you straightaway (with Aggrieved holding up a copy of that day’s newspaper). How’s that?”
Maurice’s face lightened up considerably. “I wish you would. See, that way I can have a picture in my mind of where he is and what he’s doing and feel I’m watching him.”
Melrose found this almost heartbreakingly sad. “I will. And I’ll ring you or write to you or both. And you’re always welcome to visit him.”
The boy seemed far easier in his mind and now quite friendly. “It’s really hard for me, selling off the horses.”
“Oh, but surely only a few?”
“Yes, but still… Granddad really has to do it when he’s low on funds. Some of the staff has been let go, a few of the lads and one trainer. We’ve got fewer entries in high-stakes races, too.”
Arthur Ryder came out of the house and was walking toward them. “You’re leaving him for now, right?” He looked off toward the stables; then he put a hand on Maurice’s shoulder. “This boy knows more than I do about these horses.”
As most kids will do when their elders get to extolling their many virtues, Maurice blushed and moved from under his granddad’s grip. He said, “I’ve got to see to Dreamer; he’s got a cold or something. Maybe we should call the vet. So long, Mr. Plant, and don’t forget, will you?” He held out his hand.
The grip was firm. “I certainly won’t.” As Maurice trotted in the direction of the stables, Melrose said, “He’s very capable, isn’t he? He certainly is fond of these horses.”
“Hm. I hope to God this business hasn’t upset him too much. Did he say anything?” Before Melrose could answer, he went on, “It could have reminded him-” Then Arthur looked away and then back.
Melrose remembered that it was the second time some statement of remembrance had been interrupted. “No, he didn’t.”
“I keep looking over my shoulder.”
Melrose raised his eyebrows in a question.
“Looking for the next thing.”
“I expect it happened last night.”
“No. That was the last thing. I mean the next thing.”
“A horse? You bought a horse? What in hell are you going to do with a horse?”
Jury had fanned The Daughter of Time face-down on his sheet when Melrose entered the hospital room.
Melrose said, “Well, that’s hardly the attitude I would have hoped for, considering all the trouble and expense I went to.”
Jury wrenched himself farther up in his bed, wincing. “I appreciate that. I’m sorry. It’s just lying here all day listening to Hannibal’s dire predictions that’s making me testy.”
“Oh? I was thinking how you were getting to look like Sergeant Wiggins more and more: sheet pulled up to your neck, Josephine Tey splayed on your chest.”
“I thought the idea was you were going to pretend you were an interested buyer, not that you would actually buy one.”
“Yes, well, I thought buying would put me in Ryder’s good graces more than simply browsing. Arthur Ryder seemed so grateful-”
“How much?”
Melrose shrugged. “Not much considering this Thoroughbred’s record.”
“How much?”
“What does it matter? A lot. But see, he’s trying to avoid syndicating his horses.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Selling off shares. You know, sort of like a time-sharing scheme. Anyway, I’ve never had a horse.”
“I’ve never had a camel, either, but I’m not going out and buying one.”
Melrose sighed.
“Tell me more about this incident.”
“You detectives certainly don’t suffer from a lack of hyperbole.”
“Not if you can see it on a CAT scan. Go on.”
“I’ve told you absolutely everything that happened.”
Jury had closed his eyes and was shaking his head slowly. “As Proust would say, ‘N’allez pas trop vite.’ ”
Melrose stared. “ ‘As Proust would say’? Are you kidding? Since when did you become Proustian? Or even speak French?”
“I don’t. It’s just that one phrase and bonjour and bon nuit and phrases like that I know. I learned it because I think it should be engraved on my forehead. It means-”
“I know what it means. I’ve had my schoolroom French. You speak it quite well. ‘Do not go by too quickly,’ or ‘Go slowly’ or ‘Be precise.’ Something like that. I agree, it’s excellent advice, considering all we miss if we go too quickly.”
“So. There are a hundred details you’ve omitted. Exactly how was the body positioned?”
“I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t have left that out if I did. We were not all ranged around the body sipping tea.”
“All right. What was the reaction of these people?”
“Well, confusion, consternation-”
“Same for everyone?”
“No. The trainer, George Davison, seemed utterly indifferent. There was no fear on anyone’s part.”
“That’s odd.”
Melrose frowned. “Not if she was a stranger.”
“She wasn’t, was she?”
Melrose raised his eyebrows, waiting for more.
“Can you honestly believe that chummy shot a perfect stranger in the middle of the Ryder training track?”
“Then Arthur Ryder is lying? Or his grandson or George Davison?”
“Not necessarily. There are several explanations. One: this could be someone they might have known without knowing they knew her.”
“Oh, well, that’s clear enough.”
Jury ignored him. “Someone met for a short time at a race meeting, say, someone important for some reason, but forgotten. The identity is still unknown or at least was this morning when you were there. It could’ve been someone they knew of, but wouldn’t recognize.”
Melrose thought for a moment. “Daniel Ryder’s second wife. No one knows her because he never came back to England.”
Jury nodded. “There’s a possibility right there. I assume she wasn’t shot out of the saddle.”
“I doubt it; she wasn’t dressed for riding.”
“What caliber gun was it?”
“No one told me.”
“Never mind. Ballistics will turn up the range and angle and a dozen other things about the bullet.”
“Why would the shooter shoot her there?”
Jury said, “I expect she could have been dumped-well, there’s no use speculating when we don’t have any of the crime scene details. I’d like to know what happened to the person who made the call.”
Melrose sat back and studied the white ceiling. “Well, I’m stumped. Maybe Vernon Rice will illuminate the scene. I’m going to see him”-Melrose looked at his watch-“now.” Melrose got up.
“What about the girl, Nell? What did you find out?”
“Nothing new about her disappearance. I saw pictures of her. There’s something about her. It’s not often you run into a girl in her teens who makes you think you’ve been there before.”
Jury frowned. “Been where?”
“Wherever she’s been. She gives déjà vu a whole new meaning.”
Vernon. Rice had both the sort of charm that could Vernon Rice had both the sort of charm that could sell you time shares in Pompeii and, at the same time, some inbred faith that Pompeii was still a going concern. In other words, he could get you to buy, but it was an honest sell.
He spoke to Melrose as if he’d known him all his life, ushering him in with a wave of his arm and telling him that Arthur-whom Vernon called “Art”-had called to tell him Melrose was coming.
The room that Melrose stepped into was glass and angles, and sloping chairs with graceful legs that looked uncomfortable yet were anything but. The wide gray rug leveling off to white softened the contours of the furniture. The room was a throwback to some earlier period, despite its high-end German designer look. It didn’t surprise Melrose to hear Vernon Rice say he was “shaking up a bunch of Manhattans” in a silver-plated cocktail shaker. Melrose hadn’t seen one of those since his parents’ parties. The Ryders were no strangers to the midday drink, that was sure. He wondered if they were alcoholics. He wondered-more to the point-if he was.
Then he remembered that Vernon Rice was not a blood relation, although his looks suggested otherwise. He could have been Maurice’s father or Dan Ryder’s brother, for he looked as if he inherited the family’s striking good looks.
“Manhattan,” said Melrose. “That’s an old thirties favorite, isn’t it?” Melrose had seated himself in a burnt-orange chair with sloping arms and rounded back.
“Definitely is,” said Vernon. He had the shaker doing a little mamba in his hands, a little added flourish before pouring the drink into two stemmed glasses. The glasses held maraschino cherries speared by plastic swizzle sticks, each topped with a grass-skirted hula dancer. It was the best-tempered drink Melrose had ever had, he thought, a combination of shaker, whiskey, hula-hula girl and Vernon Rice.
“Don’t tell anyone,” said Vernon, “because it sounds macabre, but I’ve always wanted to live in the States in the thirties.”
“But that was the Depression. Did you also want to live in Spain during the Inquisition?”
Vernon laughed. “No. But imagine watching the market collapse like that.”
“Oh, fun. Somehow I don’t think the men poised on windowsills would share your enthusiasm.”
“I don’t mean to sound cold-blooded, and God only knows I’d’ve grabbed a few coattails before they’d flown out the window, but it just makes me wonder if I could have done something.”
“I doubt it, though I think you’d deserve a medal for trying. But the forces at work at that time, they were inexorable. God couldn’t have stopped it.”
Unconvinced, Vernon brought the shaker around. “Don’t be so sure. Is anything really ‘inexorable’?”
Vernon went on to detail causes and cures, cures he might have implemented, spoken of in an argot of finance that Melrose didn’t understand at all. He looked at his glass. Where had this second drink come from? Or third? While Vernon talked on, the detached part of Melrose’s mind marveled. Vernon was not a vain person; he probably didn’t have the time to admire himself and his dazzling notions. For Melrose realized they really were dazzling, even though he couldn’t understand most of what he was saying.
Vernon plunked down his glass. “Let’s have lunch. I know a terrific place.”
“Sniper’s? That’s a restaurant? Strange name.”
“I love the place. It’s all done up in camouflaging. Good time to go, too, because it’s always so bloody crowded during the lunch hour.”
Melrose had been astonished to find it was nearly three when they left the flat. The Depression stopped when Vernon realized he couldn’t make Melrose understand what he meant by short falls and zero floors. But Vernon had managed to chug through this Depression tunnel and come out into clean sunlit air, leaving Melrose to think there was nothing that Vernon Rice wouldn’t try.
They were walking on Thames Street, out in the cold, glassy air, when Melrose asked him, “Is there anything you wouldn’t take a whack at?”
Vernon stopped on the pavement, looking thoughtful.
Melrose laughed. “If you really have to think about it, the answer’s no. Given sufficient challenge, you’d try anything.”
Vernon smiled and they walked on down Thames Street.
Sniper’s would not be easy to find if you didn’t know exactly where it was down a dozen steps in a terraced building that bore no sign, charged with a sort of secrecy that would hardly pay off for a restaurant. Yet it certainly wasn’t hurting for business. The arrangement, if not the actual ambience, made him think of the Nine-One-Nine, the gig of Stan Keeler, Jury’s guitarist friend.
Sniper’s really was a bit like a jungle. Light was murky, the plant life enormous. On either side of the foyer was a big aquarium whose neon-bright and startled fish swam in quick jabs as if searching for a way out.
The hostess, not meant to be part of the decor as she was dressed in simple, businesslike black, smiled at Vernon in a way that suggested he was a welcome addition to the maneuvers. She led them along a path through the black-green equatorial room. The size of the plants and their position between tables gave the illusion of concealment. The webbed netting and vines on the ceiling contributed to this, and recessed lighting was so artfully placed among the plants it diffused light into a mellow glow around them. Yet something kept the decor from a cloying cuteness. It was relaxing despite its metaphorical implications.
“Great place for a murder, isn’t it?”
Melrose dropped back into the real world, delighted that Vernon had brought the matter up. “I seem to have dropped in on your stepfather at just the wrong time.”
“Or the right one.” Vernon smiled.
Melrose fumbled his silver around and wondered if Vernon Rice could read his mind and retreated momentarily behind the menu, filled with exotic-sounding dishes scattered among the ones he’d heard described as “soul food” and “comfort food” and very American: meat loaf and mashed potatoes, hot roast beef sandwiches. There were, of course, filets and fish, such as Dover sole, grilled, broiled, cooked however you wanted it. So why was he homesick for food he had never had at home? Once more forgetting murder-which at the moment struck him as quaintly dull or else an anachronism-he asked this question of Vernon.
“I mean, we never had meat loaf. It’s American food, anyway. Why would I be homesick for American food?”
“Maybe,” said Vernon, eyes still on his menu, “it’s not the food.”
“Well… but what about the place?”
“Maybe it’s not the place.”
Melrose protested. “But if it’s neither, why? I don’t get it.”
“Jung probably would. Collective unconscious or something.”
“Meat loaf in the collective unconscious? Why doesn’t that sound right?” Just then Melrose realized he was speaking in very personal terms. To how many people had he ever confessed homesickness?
Was this Rice’s secret? Was he himself so honest and so engaging he made you want to come clean? In this way he reminded Melrose of Richard Jury. It was the gift. He thought about this and thought he’d like to see them together, outcharming each other. For it was charm, a whole vat of it. He smiled, thinking of James Joyce.
“Why are you smiling?”
“James Joyce and Samuel Beckett could sit in a room and say nothing to each other for endless periods. I’ve always thought that was as good as companionship gets.”
“I agree.” Vernon frowned, considering. “Want to try it?”
Melrose laughed out loud. “Do I want to try it? Sit here for a half an hour saying nothing? If I’d walked in with a guillotine, would you want to try that, too? And don’t pretend to think about it.”
Vernon laughed as the waiter, dressed in an olive drab T-shirt and black jeans, came to take their order. Grilled sea bass. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes.
“Tell me about your plans for Aggrieved. He’s a wonderful horse, incidentally.”
Sorry that the talk of the murder had made a detour back to the horse, Melrose said, “He was talking about the business end, syndicating one or two of his horses.”
“Right. It’s the best thing he could do, but he doesn’t want to. He seems to look at that as filthy lucre, you know.”
“Well, he also told me the idea of selling ‘seasons,’ which he apparently does.”
Vemon nodded. “He does, but not enough. Says he doesn’t want his stallions overtaxed.”
“An interesting way of putting it. Anyway, I thought perhaps you could help me do this for Aggrieved. Sell seasons.”
“Why? You don’t strike me as in need of capital. Not with what you paid for that horse.”
Melrose didn’t comment on his need, rightly assessed by Rice. “Aggrieved has a very famous bloodline. I should think it would be easy.”
Vernon shook his head. “Not really, not if you don’t have a working stud farm. See, when an owner buys what we call seasons, in this instance for Aggrieved, and if something happens to the horse, he’d expect to be switched to another equally valuable horse or have his money back. I think you’d be better off waiting. If you did it now, not understanding what’s involved, you’d just be buying yourself a headache. Believe me. Ryder’s business is a tricky one. Worse than farming in its unpredictability. When you acquire other horses, it would be best to stable them with a reliable stud farm and a reliable trainer. That’s what most owners do.”
Melrose opened his mouth to argue, as if he really were serious about this horse business, realized he wasn’t and closed his mouth. One could be convinced at times one’s lies were the truth.
The waiter was setting down their plates and Melrose bathed his face in the fragrant steam rising from his meat loaf. “I’ll give it some thought.” Then, as if suddenly recalling it, he said, “I got there just as the woman’s body was loaded into the ambulance. Murder has a way of making other subjects irrelevant.”
“Well, this one’s as peculiar as hell. Cambridge police want me up there this evening to have a look at the body, see if I know her. From Arthur’s description, she doesn’t sound familiar. I admit I’m curious as hell.” He shrugged. “But my car’s in the shop. I’ll rent a car, I suppose.”
Melrose could hardly believe his luck! “Cambridge isn’t far. I could easily run you there.”
Vernon laughed. “You kidding? That’s damned nice of you.”
“Not at all, not at all.” Melrose refilled their glasses with a very good Brunello, saying, “And I confess, like you, I’m curious. I’ve never been on the spot when somebody’s been murdered and that she was found lying in the middle of the racecourse was really, well, weird; it couldn’t have been an accident.”
“Hardly. When Arthur called to tell me, before the words ‘body on the course’ were spoken, I froze. I thought it might be Nellie.” Vernon stopped eating and stared out over the tables and the plants, transfixed.
“The granddaughter?”
Vernon looked at Melrose absently, as if trying to place him, and said, “Nearly two years ago she was kidnapped or abducted, according to the police.” He turned his eyes on his plate, but didn’t raise his fork.
“My God, but your family is not the luckiest around. Mr. Ryder told me a little about that kidnapping; he said there was never a ransom demand.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a very strange story.”
Vernon nodded. “They also took one of Arthur’s great Thoroughbreds, a horse named Aqueduct. We assume Nellie saw or heard them-she was in the stable herself, you see, looking after a sick horse-and they took her to keep her quiet.”
“Why take this particular horse, Aqueduct?”
“Aqueduct’s a valuable ’chaser. But they couldn’t have raced him under some fictitious name, unless they’d gone to a lot of trouble to make sure he wasn’t recognized. Even then, George Davison-the trainer-would have known. George could have told from the horse’s performance. He’s amazing that way. Aqueduct could have been stolen for breeding purposes. His progeny have certainly measured up, won a lot of top races. But this wouldn’t explain it because they couldn’t put down Aqueduct as the sire.”
Vernon had given up all pretense of eating now and was sitting back with his wineglass in his hand. He kept raising it and replacing it on the table, untouched. He seemed to have given up the pretense of drinking, too. “So-?”
Melrose took his last bite of meat loaf, sorry to see it go, and pushed his clean-as-a-whistle plate away. “To do something to the whole stable? To all of the Thoroughbreds? Or to do something to your stepfather? The only person who saw what happened was the granddaughter. Everything else is speculation, an attempt at reconstruction. For all anyone knows they could have come for completely different reasons than you think.”
“I suppose you’re right. But you have to start somewhere, and we started with what went missing. Aqueduct. Nellie.”
“That’s reasonable.”
For the first time that afternoon, Vernon looked defeated. “She’s not dead.”
“Even after twenty months?”
“Even so. She’s not dead.”
“You seem so sure.”
“I am.” He returned to his cold plate then and cut off a bit of his cold fish, chewed it, swallowed. “I hardly knew her.”
That, thought Melrose, was the first indication of self-deception. He had known her, all right, just as Melrose felt he himself knew her after nothing but seeing her picture.
Vernon cut off another bite and chewed it. He looked as if he were eating ashes.
He had been sitting in the Bentley for twenty minutes parked on a double-yellow line, wondering how he could get a look at the body and how he could get past the policeman in reception. Not being a relative or a witness himself, it would be impossible. He had been there, though, in the aftermath, when the stretcher had come out of the woods. And he had been seen to be there by the detectives.
Melrose got out of the car and leaned against it, quietly smoking. He looked around for a call box and didn’t see one. Jury might have some ideas about all of this if he could get him on the telephone. By now, Hannibal surely must have returned his telephone privileges. Why did Jury put up with it?
There was a pub down the street and of course they’d have a telephone. He searched his person and then his car for paper to write on. All he salvaged from the glove compartment was a theater program for Cats. Cats? When in God’s name had he ever seen Cats? He wouldn’t see Cats if someone threatened to swing him like one. Then why was he looking at this theater program as if he had? He frowned. What was he thinking?
Melrose slammed the car door, stood with his arms on top of the car and his head bent, hoping to come up with some clever approach to Cambridge police. When he stopped banging his head and looked over the top of the car, he saw two children standing on the pavement licking iced lollies and staring at him. What were they doing out after dark? They were apparently waiting for him to do his next number.
“Just look at yourselves. Are you auditioning for Cirque du Soleil?”
They neither spoke nor gave up their places on the pavement. They waited. The inherent pleasure of watching a grown-up being a total idiot seemingly had a stronger pull than running from that grown-up idiot. Melrose walked around to the pavement. “You haven’t seen Cats, have you? And then planted the evidence in my car?” He produced the program.
But they just went on looking and licking. What was it about him that made children look at him as if their dog had suddenly started talking? Melrose threw up his hands, turned away and started toward the pub down the street. The need to look back was too strong and he did. Now they were leaning, backs against his car, licking their ices and staring at the park.
The Cricketer’s Arms was the familiar world of smoke and beer. He told the bartender he’d have a pint of whatever was on tap and went to the telephone. He pinged coins into the slots, thinking he should probably get one of those cell phones, but he despised them. The whole earth had turned into a public call box.
Hannibal answered.
Melrose couldn’t believe she was actually screening Jury’s calls. He put on his best North London voice and said, “Is Mr. Joo-ry there, love?”
When she said the superintendent wasn’t to be disturbed, Melrose raised his voice a disturbed notch. “It’s his auntie Agatha; I’m ever so worried since I found out about that ’orrible business. Can’t I just speak to ’im fer a moment?”
Melrose could hear Jury arguing with her in the background. Then finally his voice came over the line, “Aunt Agatha!”
“Has she gone?” Melrose asked on his end.
“No,” Jury answered.
“Well, can’t you get her out of your room?”
“You’re kidding. Aunt Agatha,” he quickly added.
Jury enjoyed this sort of thing, Melrose was sure; it must have been similar to the intractability of witnesses and to intractable circumstance. “Listen. I need you to do something. I’m in Cambridge. I’ve driven Vernon Rice here because the police wanted him to have a look at the body, see if he knows-or knew-her. I imagine they also wanted to ask him more questions since he’s still there and it’s been forty-five minutes. I want to see the body myself. Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”
“So how can I? I’m not family or friend or anything that would get me a ticket in.”
“Simple. I’ll just tell them you might have recognized her. Okay, Hannibal’s gone, so I can speak freely.”
“Thank God. Only I didn’t see the woman. How could I recognize her?”
“You said you were very near the stretcher as they brought it by, moving it toward the ambulance.”
“Yes, I was, but-”
“That’s good enough.”
“How can it be?”
A huge sigh from Jury. “I’m not helping you out in a criminal act, for God’s sake. All you want is to view a dead body. Where are you?”
“Pub down the street.”
“Go back to the station. I’ll call Cambridge right away. I’ve a good friend there. Greene’s his name in case someone asks. Detective chief inspector, he is.”
Melrose drank off most of the pint waiting for him at the bar, bought a packet of vinegar crisps and ate them while walking back down the road. He had nearly finished them when he realized a dead body might best be seen on an empty stomach.
Nothing of that nature occurred, however. As a young woman police constable led him on and off the elevator and down a corridor to the morgue, his stomach was perfectly fine. And it wasn’t as if he’d never seen a body before. Last year in Cornwall, for instance. But that was a case of the very recently dead, when they looked exactly the same as they always had. Except for the blood and the bullet holes. But the blood had been hidden by the thick dark rug, and the bullet wounds were invisible, at least from where he stood.
In the long corridor, he hung back. This episode had turned suddenly serious on him. In his mind’s eye he saw the face of Nell Ryder and marveled at Vernon Rice’s conviction that she could not be dead. And he had this irrational fear that he would look down at this dead woman and he would see Nell Ryder. It was as if the others who had seen this woman-her grandfather, Maurice, even the trainer, Davison-had blinded themselves to the face they saw.
Why was he doing this? Why? The photograph had looked alive, as if it had captured Nell, and the old superstition was true about the camera’s catching the soul of its subject.
He had been walking slowly, and now stopped dead. With a conviction to rival Rice’s own, he was sure that she was dead. His throat felt constricted.
“Coming, sir?” The pleasant WPC turned toward him and smiled.
Melrose picked up his pace. “Sorry.”
“That’s all right. Most people walk more slowly here. Is it a family member you’ve come to-sorry, you don’t know yet, do you?”
“No.”
They had stopped for a moment. They started walking again.
“It’s right here, sir. See, there’s a panel they’ll slide back, and you just look through that pane of glass.”
Melrose did not respond; he merely waited. The panel slid back and he was looking at the woman lying on the gurney. His eyes widened in astonishment.
“Is it who you thought?”
“No.”
“You don’t recognize her, then?”
“Yes. I do.”
Sitting in one of the interview rooms, he had told the detective inspector working the case as much as he could about the woman at the bar in the Grave Maurice.
Unfortunately (Melrose told the detective), he hadn’t paid much attention to the other woman, so couldn’t help them there.
“Did she appear to know Dr. Ryder personally?”
“It’s hard to say. She certainly knew about him. She knew about his niece, Nell Ryder.”
“You think, then, this woman knew the family, or at least one of them intimately.”
“I rather doubt the intimacy since none of them even knows this woman.” Or say they don’t, Melrose didn’t add.
“Or say they don’t,” the detective did add.
“They wanted to know if I owned a weapon. A.22, to be more precise. I told them no, but they wanted permission to search my flat, anyway.” Vernon told Melrose this on the way back to London. “Who the hell is she?”
Melrose was watching the rain-slick road, now dark. “When did Dan Ryder die?”
“A little over two years ago.”
“Before Nell disappeared.”
Vernon turned in his seat to stare. “You think that comes into it?”
“Merely a thought. It’s just that you’ve now had three terrible events occur in a short time. It’s possible all three are connected, don’t you think?”
Vernon shook his head. “Possible, but unlikely.”
Up ahead Melrose spotted the carnival red of a Little Chef, the black-and-white-checked trousers of its familiar logo. An icon of childhood. He would devil his parents to stop at every one. Even as a child he realized this was completely unreasonable, to expect them to keep stopping. But it was merely a step in a plan: for then he was almost certain they’d stop at every third one, and that made at least two stops per longish trip, often three. Melrose thought himself pretty cagy, even as a child, really good at working a room.
“Great, I could use some food,” Vernon said.
Without knowing it, Melrose had pulled off the road and into the Little Chef’s car park. He laughed. He must have gone on autopilot. “Did you like these places when you were a kid?”
They were climbing out of the car and Vernon slammed his door with a flourish. “Hell, yes. Little Chefs and Happy Eaters, though they were clones of Little Chefs. Let’s go.”
They walked toward what Melrose thought were impossibly lighted-up windows.
The tables, counter, mirrors were so cleanly bright they might have been scrubbed between each load of customers. The waitresses and waiters were as clean as nurses and doctors who had just scrubbed in. It was like having the hygienic benefits of an OR without the mortal consequences.
Melrose slid across the cool plastic bench in the long booth and grabbed the menu.
“Beans on toast,” Vernon said, barely glancing at the offerings.
Melrose ordered everything fried-eggs, sausages, bread, chips and a tomato.
Vernon said, “You wouldn’t catch me eating beans on toast at home.” The waitress set down their coffee, smiled her clean smile and left.
“Of course not. It’s what you eat at Little Chef. I know a detective sergeant who likes Little Chef but doesn’t appear to connect it to childhood. He’s not nostalgic so he loves it for its own sake.”
“A Little Chef purist.”
“Right.”
“Arthur likes to tell me I never grew up. I say, How would you know, you didn’t even know me then? and he says I don’t have to; I know you now.” Vernon laughed.
Melrose smiled. “You two get on very well together.”
“Oh, sure. He pays absolutely no attention to me when it comes to investing, though. He could be tripling his income if he’d listen to me.”
They were silent for a few moments, fiddling with menus that hadn’t been plucked immediately from their hands. Melrose asked, “Was there some trouble between the family and Dan Ryder?”
“Arthur was pretty much fed up. And I don’t think Dan and Roger ever really got along, despite being brothers. Totally different sorts. Roger is cautious; Danny was reckless, really reckless. He was always raising the bar. You know, to see how high he could jump-I mean, literally as well as figuratively. He took too many chances. His first wife, Marybeth, left him because of that, though she wasn’t much of a treat to begin with. Danny was an addicted gambler. He died owing a ton of money to the wrong people, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reason he left England. These are the kind of people who don’t forgive debts for sentimental reasons like death. The kind who manage to get back at the family if that’s the only way they can collect.”
“So did these people move on Arthur?”
Vernon nodded. “I paid off a lot of it to keep Arthur from knowing how much it was.”
“That was certainly decent of you.”
“Not really. It was just sitting around.”
Melrose smiled. “I doubt you’d leave money sitting around for very long.”
“Well, I had some stocks that weren’t earning their keep. I hated the picture of Arthur’s discovering his son was selling the farm, metaphorically speaking.”
“Did you know Dan?”
“Not very well. I met him once or twice when Ma and Arthur were, you know, getting together. I saw him at the races. He was brilliant, I’ll say that. This was before they got married. I was pretty old-thirty-two-”
Melrose liked that definition of “pretty old.”
“-and had my business in the City. So I didn’t get up to Cambridge very often. Not that I was giving it a pass, not at all. I liked it there. I liked Arthur and-the others.”
He didn’t want to single out Nell, apparently. “But you seem to get up there quite a bit lately.”
Vernon looked down at his beans on toast. “Well, I should, don’t you think? Arthur’s suffered some terrible losses. Danny, Ma, Nellie…” His voice trailed off.
“Your mother was not a younger woman, was she?” Melrose cut off a piece of fried bread.
Vernon laughed. “No. They were contemporaries. Arthur never had a midlife crisis. My mother was a great person-very outgoing and at the same time private. They were married for only two years when she died.” His eyes still on the plate he added, “I really miss her, Mum.” He fell quiet.
Nodding at the untouched plate, Melrose asked, “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Vernon sighed. “I didn’t really want to eat this; I just wanted to look at it. Do you ever do that?”
Melrose thought Vernon looked hopeful that he wasn’t crazy all by himself. “Oh, yes. Well, I eat at least a token bite when I feel that way. He held up the triangle of bread he’d been working on. He wondered how much of childhood Vernon still inhabited and also wondered how much emptiness could be appeased just by looking. As Vernon took a token bite of beans, Melrose said, “You said in the restaurant you didn’t know Nell Ryder very well. How old was she when you met her?”
“Fifteen. It was only a few months before she disappeared.”
“She’d be seventeen now.”
Vernon fooled with his fork and nodded.
“I saw pictures of Nell. She seemed-I don’t know-airy, ethereal, not quite of this world. Which is hard to do in one of those Barbour coats and muddy boots.” Melrose ate his sausage. “That’s not a good description of her, though. She looked like someone with a purpose. Someone dedicated, but to what I don’t know.”
“Horses, for one thing.” Vernon paused. “To tell the truth, I can’t think of another thing.” He cut off a wedge of toast. “What you might be seeing in her is poise, a person poised on the edge of something and who manages to keep her balance.” Vernon’s eyebrows inched upward as if asking Melrose to confirm this.
Melrose nodded.
Vernon went on. “When I met her I took her to be some years older. I told her this and she said it was from being around horses all her life; it gives you poise and confidence. If you don’t have it, they may allow you to ride them, or feed them, or brush them down, but eventually they turn their backs. She wants to be a trainer. Davison thinks she’s a natural.”
“Is the investigation ongoing?”
“No. But I’ve got a private investigator. He’s still looking.”
“After nearly two years?” Melrose raised an eyebrow.
“After ten, if it’s necessary.”
Melrose felt slightly abashed. He thought for a minute and then asked, “Was there a set time in the evening for seeing to the horses?”
“Yes, of course. Evening stables and then Davison goes around again before he leaves at night.”
“Which means that everyone knew when things were battened down for the night and no one around?”
“You’re suggesting that the person would have been either one of us or someone else who knew the schedule?”
Melrose paused. “Not exactly.” He paused again. “Just a thought.” Vernon Rice didn’t appear to question Melrose’s extended interest in the Ryders’ misfortunes, but, of course, the body lying in the Cambridge police station pretty much took care of Melrose’s motive.
“This private investigator you’ve been paying for all this time-”
“Leon Stone?”
“What is he continuing to do?”
“He hasn’t got a fresh lead, but at least he’s looking; the police aren’t. Not that I blame them. An abduction unsolved after nearly two years? The case isn’t closed, but it’s certainly resting. They think she’s dead.”
He said this so matter-of-factly, Melrose would have thought he was indifferent to the case. “Why are you so certain she’s not?”
“It’s something you know, that’s all.” Vernon shook his head.
Melrose said, “There’ve been no demands. There should be, if not money, for something. Surely.”
“Unless she went to save someone else.”
“But that would mean she herself was valuable to them.”
Again, Vernon shook his head. He shoved his plate away.
For a few moments they sat in silence as Melrose ate and Vernon looked bereft. Melrose was thinking. “Tell me: are there any high-stakes races coming up?”
“Yes. There always are. Here, elsewhere. It’s not the purse of these races-although they can pay a lot-it’s the boost they do to the reputation of the stud farm. Any horse that wins the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe or the American ones such as the Derby or, God willing, the Triple Crown-those races are pure gold when it comes to breeding. But such races are run every year.”
“Would Aqueduct have qualified?”
“Yes, but as I said before, he couldn’t be entered as Aqueduct himself.”
“But he could win registered as Bozo the Clown.” Melrose paused. “Have you considered that someone wanted Nell dead? That she had enemies?”
“Leon Stone considered it.”
“An idea you jettisoned?”
Vernon nodded. “In that case stealing the horse was simply a smoke screen? Something like that?”
“Something like that, yes. What runs counter to that idea is that they’ve never found her body. The thoroughness of police when it comes to searches like that is legendary. The woods behind the house would literally have not a leaf unturned. Still, it’s a theory in the running. Did someone gain from her death?”
“But no death has been reported. So what would be gained?”
“Something in the future? Anyway, if Ryder is having financial troubles, I expect he wouldn’t be leaving a fortune to anyone.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. In terms of liquid assets, he hasn’t a great deal. In terms of assets, period, he’s got a lot. He’s just not using the potential. He could, of course, sell the farm and realize a big profit. Anderson’s been wanting to buy him out for years. But it would be far more valuable to keep Ryder Stud and simply syndicate the horses. And increase the breeding shares. Samarkand has sired a number of foals who’ve gone on to win in the six figures. In other words, Arthur could be making enough to pay Danny’s gambling debts several times over. What he’s resisting most is syndication. With a horse, for instance, like Criminal Type, say he sold off twenty shares-keeping another dozen for himself-at, say, fifty thousand a share, which would be low for that horse. There’s a cool million just for the shares sold on one horse. He’s got several that good or better. And that’s not counting the shares in breeding rights. I’ve been trying to talk him into this for years, but here’s where profit loses out to sentiment.” Vernon smiled.
“Somehow in his mind, he sees Criminal Type cut up into twenty pieces? Literally?”
Vernon was now eating his beans and toast, which must be stone-cold by now, with enthusiasm. “Exactly. Arthur can bring himself to selling breeding rights only by selling very few. Less than any other owner around. Can you imagine the profit from a horse like Criminal Type, whose progeny thus far have already won stakes races to the tune of eight or nine million? Ten colts, averaging, say, half a million apiece? And that’s only up to now.”
“A horse such as Aqueduct would be worth a fortune, then, theoretically?”
The waitress was hovering, pouring a small waterfall of hot coffee into their cups. Melrose noticed a paler circle of skin where a wedding band had once been and wondered why she’d taken it off.
Vernon shook his head. “As I said, no one else could run him or breed him under the Aqueduct name.” Vernon drew a crumpled pack of cigarettes from an inner pocket, together with a lighter. It could easily have been traded for a share in Aqueduct. It was platinum. As Melrose took a cigarette and leaned over so Vernon could light it, he wondered just how much money the man had.
“Do Little Chefs have a no-smoking section?”
“It’s not this one, wherever it is,” Vernon said.
“Back to square one,” said Melrose early the next morning as he sat in Jury’s hospital room. “Abducted. Horse hijacked. Square one.” “Considering you actually witnessed this woman whom nobody knows talking to someone in the Grave Maurice, I’d hardly say we’re back to square one. You might be the only person who has a line on her. You said she was talking about Nell Ryder?”
Melrose nodded. “Now, of course, I’m sorry I didn’t listen more closely.”
“Hindsight. Even so, we’ve learned a fair amount about how things were and are with members of the Ryder family, that the jockey didn’t get along with them, especially with his father; that Arthur had borne with him to the limits of his ability, probably because his son’s one virtue was that Dan Ryder could ride a horse into hell and both come back unsinged.”
Melrose noticed again the sheet drawn up to Jury’s neck and his look of supreme self-satisfaction. On his bedside table, occupying a position beneath The Daughter of Time, lay a report sent to him by Cambridgeshire police.
Jury reached for it. “Aqueduct’s stall was down at the far end. The girl was with him. It was dark, the only illumination coming from dim lights at either end. She may or may not have seen whoever was there. But that doesn’t make any difference if he thought she saw him. Arthur Ryder told you the stall was always locked, that Davison did that last thing before he left?”
“That’s right.”
“And the lock wasn’t forced, so the person must have had a key. Either that or someone left the door unlocked.”
“You mean someone in the family?”
“Or in the employ of the family.”
Melrose didn’t like to think this. “I think that’s an assumption.”
“Maybe, but I’m holed up here. I can only go by what I’m told.”
There was that self-satisfied little smile again. Jury was now staring placidly at the ceiling. Wiggins, more and more. “How he got to the house is anybody’s guess. Could have walked, could have been dropped off-which would mean more than one person was involved in all this…”
“If he got there that way, he could have retraced his steps with the girl, probably a gun at her head-”
“He was either prevented from doing that or he took the course of action he’d planned all along: get the girl, get the horse. And don’t forget, Nell Ryder was-is-supposed to be an excellent horsewoman.”
“But none of this explains her twenty-month absence.”
Jury was looking at the police report. “It would if she’s dead, and she probably is.”
Melrose’s heart gave a lurch. He didn’t want to hear that from Jury; Jury was too often right. But then he hadn’t actually talked to these people, except for Dr. Ryder.
“The one I haven’t heard anything much about is Maurice.” As if awakening to the question, he asked, “Why is that?”
“You’re right; there’s been little if anything said of him. I don’t know why. The boy’s name rarely comes up. I think his grandfather is very fond of him. I spoke to him-Maurice-the night the woman was found on the track.”
“His mother left him cold and his father’s dead-that strikes me as warranting a mention. And where is the mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did she walk out on him-the boy, not the husband? Dan Ryder was a gambler, a womanizer, no kind of father and irresponsible-except when it came to racing and horses. Where’s your horse, incidentally?”
“At Ryder’s. I have to do another Cambridgeshire run. That’ll be the third one in twenty-four hours.”
“Good. This time take this boy Maurice aside and see what he has to say about all of this. See if you can get him talking about his father and mother. And does he know anything about his father’s second wife?”
“That I doubt. No one seems to have a clue about her.” Melrose was looking from bed to door. “Where’s Hannibal? I’ve been here for nearly a half hour and haven’t seen her.”
“Ah! I’ve a new nurse, or at least part of one. Her name’s Chrissie. Then there’s another one who relieves her occasionally.”
“A new nurse! Is she prettier than Hannibal?”
“Even you’re prettier than Hannibal. But Chrissie, oh, yes, very pretty. It’s rather nice, this. Having your food brought and your bed changed and all you have to do is sit and look, and give this a punch”-he held up the buzzer positioned beside him-“if you want anything. I could get quite used to it, living like you.”
“Like me? And where do you get that idea?”
Jury laughed. “Food prepared, linens changed. And don’t deny you have those bellpulls all over the house. Pull it and Ruthven comes on the double.” He held up the buzzer by way of analogy.
“It’s not the same at all.”
Jury settled back against his pillows again. “It is, too. Except for the horse.”
Maurice Ryder liked to talk about one thing-Thoroughbred horses-which made Melrose wonder what blew back in the wind of his riding. Melrose had declined the offer to race Aggrieved-now peacefully chomping some vegetation unearthed beneath a springy layer of frost and ice (grass? acorns? truffles?)-after Maurice had ridden him around the track to give Melrose an idea of what the horse could do. Aggrieved could do considerably more than Melrose could do, that was certain. He had never seen Aggrieved on the racecourse, but he wouldn’t want to see himself up on an animal that could even come close to Samarkand. How must he have raced as a two- or three-year-old, then? Racing past the stands he would have been a copper blur.
Maurice had taken Samarkand twice around the track and was going by again at full tilt, lifting the collar of Melrose’s coat where he leaned against the post and rail fence. This horse was fast. Melrose was in charge of the stopwatch, which he thought was a lot of fun and promised himself he’d buy one as soon as he could. Samarkand had gone a mile at 1:44:36. (“Pretty good,” said Maurice.) Melrose didn’t know; he just like pressing the stopwatch button. It was more fun even than Jury’s buzzer. Maurice had told him that he wouldn’t take Aggrieved to the top of his form because he hadn’t been really put through his paces for a while.
Melrose raised his binoculars once again looking to the far side and thought how wedded, how welded, really, horse and rider appeared. The boy was meant for this, thought Melrose. The racing gene must have come down from his father; what a misfortune the height gene hadn’t followed suit. At sixteen Maurice was but a shade under six feet and was possibly looking at even another growth spurt. It was Dan Ryder who had this rogue gene for the rest of the Ryders were tall.
“It’s not the height so much as the weight,” Maurice had told him. “Jockeys eat what would be a starvation diet for me; I wouldn’t even be able to get up on a horse, much less ride one. You’d be surprised the energy it takes.”
“If not a jockey, what? Do you want to be a trainer?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll inherit this place, won’t you? You can do whatever you like. You and your cousin, Nell-”
Couldn’t he have been a little more skillful? It was clear that this topic wasn’t merely sore; it was bleeding. He wished Jury was here. He handled such questions with a deftness Melrose couldn’t duplicate.
For a minute Maurice hadn’t answered, just flaked the thin ice from the root of the tree where they stood. “If she ever comes back.”
The boy hadn’t commented further. But it would certainly not be intrusive or suspicious to bring up the woman who’d been shot. Melrose had, after all, been a virtual witness to murder. Naturally, he’d be curious.
After Maurice dismounted and tossed a blanket over Samarkand, who strolled over to where Aggrieved was still bent on his hapless quest for food, Maurice leaned against the fence beside Melrose.
“That was a bizarre business the other night. No one knows yet who she is.” Since Vernon Rice would undoubtedly tell Arthur Ryder about the trip to Cambridge police headquarters, Melrose filled Maurice in on what had happened there.
“You knew her?”
“No, I didn’t know her. I’d merely seen her once in the pub near the hospital. A friend of mine is-well, never mind.” He’d better not bring that friendship up for the moment. “I just happened to be sitting near her when she was talking to someone.”
Maurice looked away, frowning. Melrose wondered if he’d been a total chump bringing this up. He’d better have left it to come out in another way. “Didn’t your father send you a photo? A snapshot of his new wife?”
“No, nothing.” His look at Melrose now, although not outright antagonistic, was still not outright friendly. “Are you saying that’s who she was?”
“I have no idea who the woman was. It struck me that it’s a possibility. If you think about it, you’d wonder how anyone without any connection to the Ryder farm would end up shot dead on your track.”
Maurice was silent, gathering twigs as if he meant to break the place up inch by inch. “Say it was her-Dad’s wife-why would she come back here now?”
“Money. That’s generally a safe bet.”
Maurice frowned. “From Ryder Stud? From Granddad? Why would she expect any?”
“I don’t know. There might be some unfinished legal business. His will, perhaps; something like that.”
“But Dad died over two years ago. Why wouldn’t she have come then?”
“That’s a good question. Perhaps it’s something she only recently found out about.” Melrose paused. “Your mother. Where is she now?”
A pall seemed to settle over them, Maurice lifting his face toward the blank white sky. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t keep in touch?”
“No.”
Maurice executed in the single syllable an intensely complicated move, something such as his father must have done in threading his horse through the thicket of competing horses, taking it to the finish line. “Your father got custody?”
Maurice’s voice was strangely lacking in expression when he said, “I don’t think there was a big battle between them over it.”
It was a sad pronouncement. “But I imagine you’d much rather be here than anywhere else.”
The boy nodded and snapped a twig as if it were an icicle. “Things change.”
With that rather inscrutable comment, they got up and went to their horses.
They got Aggrieved-a patient animal, considering what it did for a living-into the trailer, and Melrose said good-bye to Arthur Ryder and Maurice, saying he would surely see them again shortly.
Of that, he was certain.
Mr. Momaday would keep Aggrieved’s stall mucked out, and the rest of the small barn which he had managed to lather into excellent condition, making minor repairs to doors and posts. He had done as Melrose had instructed-he had gone to a saddlery in Sidbury for supplies. The hay net was up, the salt lick affixed to the wall, maize and bran and roots and fruits sitting about in tubs.
Melrose told Momaday that he would do morning stables and he, Melrose, would do evening. He wasn’t absolutely clear as to what that involved; he just liked the sound of “evening stables.” He pictured it as a Stubbs painting, or else one of the Romantics’ featuring a thatched-roof cottage and a lot of heavily leafed trees.
Momaday instructed Melrose that it was only the one horse, so “stables”-plural-wasn’t it.
“You want to call it ‘evening stable’? Think about that. Does it sound quite right? I prefer the plural and it’s my stables, so don’t argue. Furthermore, Momaday, you cannot go around here with your gun shooting at anything that moves.”
Momaday’s insubordinate mumbles were somewhat mitigated by the fact he’d never killed anything.
Ruthven and Martha were by turns hugely impressed and hugely perplexed by the horse’s presence, the presence being quite imposing. Aggrieved was a handsome horse, with his glowing reddish-brown coat and black mane. Martha made tiny clucks and cooing sounds as she would have done had Melrose brought round a bird or a baby. Ruthven went on about the color, Momaday saying the horse was chestnut, Ruthven saying he knew a bay when he saw one, Melrose not knowing the difference. Ruthven went on to inform the little group, stiff as the starched collar he wore, that Melrose had been an excellent horseman in his younger days.
“Younger days?”
“When you were five or six, m’lord.”
“My God, Ruthven, I wouldn’t even have fit on this horse then.”
“I’m thinking of your old pony.”
“Ruthven, somehow I don’t think ‘excellent horseman’ is an accurate description of a kid on a pony.”
Momaday thought this was rich and juggled laughter around, largely through indrawn snorts and said, “Prob’ly fell off that, too.” Snort, snort.
“What? Too? Where do you get ‘too’?”
“Ah, ya remember that big gray over to your friend’s house? Climbed up one side and fell right over t’other.” A succession of snorty breaths accompanied this nugget.
Melrose had, at the time when this happened, thought it a good joke; Momaday thought it a better one and told everyone who crossed his path about it. No matter how self-deprecating Melrose could be, Momaday could deprecate him even more. Momaday intuited that his boss would never fire him, and he was right. Melrose had never fired anyone. He had wanted to, he had tried to. But an image of the ex-servant and present wretch filled his field of vision, calling up a picture of this poor devil fighting his way through snowdrifts with nothing but a dry loaf to nibble on before complete snow blindness felled him where he stood. This person would have a faithful dog struggling beside him and when the old ex-retainer froze the dog would sit atop the snowy grave until it, too, froze. It was like that.
Melrose thanked his staff (for what, he wasn’t sure) and told Momaday to lead Aggrieved (whose patience was monumental) to his stall. As they walked away, he heard the undertones of man talking to horse, with a lot of snorty laughter, possibly on both sides.
He waited for Momaday to leave the barn and go about whatever his business was. Melrose was eager to saddle up his horse and walk it around. He realized he was giving Aggrieved short shrift, a horse that the trainer Davison had said could beat “anything on any track-slow or fast, turf, muddy, dry.” “Determined” is what Davison had called Aggrieved. “Determined.”
The horse was chomping away, his nose near the hay net. Melrose wondered about all the other stuff, the succulents and barley and so forth. He wondered how they were to be fed. He picked a nice apple from a bucket and tentatively held it. He was still trying to remember about looking at a horse straight on. He moved to the horse’s side and held the apple out, nearly under Aggrieved’s nose. The horse muzzled it up and chomped. Really, he was so easy-going in the benign setting of this stable that it was hard to picture him in the competitive world of racing.
Melrose looked about to see if Momaday was lurking, then took out his book Riding for Beginners. The “beginner” didn’t bother him; it was the cartoon figure of a very young girl, in jodhpurs and riding jacket, with her sappy smile, who was to put him through his paces. My Lord, were there no adult beginners? Did all beginning occur around age seven? By the time this child got to be his age she’d have won the Olympic Gold for dressage twice over. Her name was Cindy Lou. She was from Kentucky (naturally). But he supposed riding was the same, here or in the States.
Cindy Lou showed him how to get the bit in a horse’s mouth, and having done that successfully, Melrose led Aggrieved out of his stall so that he could saddle up. Ah, he liked the ring of it! “Saddle up.” It put him in mind of old American Westerns, which he had, actually, never seen. But one still knew the drill and the climate and the tone. Of course, he had seen High Noon, but that was much more than just a Western. As he was fastening the strap beneath the horse to secure the saddle, he replaced the image of Cindy Lou with Gary Cooper. He would like to adopt Gary Cooper’s elegant insouciance, his shy forbearance, to wit, his persona. That, of course, could only come with practice.
Melrose looked outside again to make certain no one was about, that Ruthven, for instance, wouldn’t come rushing up with a pot of tea and a carrot. Then he positioned a large wooden box by the horse’s side. Left foot in stirrup; hoist and swing right leg over. Those were the instructions from wall-eyed Cindy Lou, who, he was sure, could get to be a pain. Okay, he was ready: one two three hoist and there he was sitting in the saddle! Actually up on one of the country’s premier racehorses and sitting! Oh why hadn’t they all been here to see this smooth-as-silk move?
Melrose shook the reins a little and they were out of the barn and walking through the grounds, which were extensive. Next, through the woods, by way of the public footpath. Aggrieved walked and Melrose swayed. The horse, he thought, was taking in the sun-dappled scenery, for his head moved up, down and around.
A narrow road ran between Ardry End and Watermeadows, a vast Italianate estate, gorgeously decayed, where lived the charming Flora Fludd. He would have a good reason to wind up over there at Watermeadows, now he could ride. Melrose gently pulled back on the reins, amazed again that the horse responded to his fingers. He considered a canter along this narrow road. He thumbed the book to see what the annoying Cindy Lou had to say. She warned against such a move, her palm held flat out like a white mollusk. It would be undertaking too much too soon. She advised at most a short trot and reminded him that one must fix one’s seat in the saddle and rise, fall, rise, fall to the rhythm of the horse.
Melrose tried to do all of this as Aggrieved trotted along, sure he was going up when he should be going down. Finally, he thought he had the hang of it. They trotted on for some twenty minutes and came to the main Northampton Road, which he had no intention of riding on, then turned back toward the house and the stable, outside of which he meant to slide off the horse’s back smooth as silk, but in pulling his left foot from the stirrup, caught it and fell to the ground.
Hell’s bells! There they all were, watching, especially Momaday. Ruthven walked toward him.
“You’re all right, m’lord?” he asked as Melrose righted himself.
“Oh, yes, just not one of my best moves.”
“Lady Ardry is here, in a state of high dudgeon, it appears. She insists on seeing you immediately.”
“Ruthven, why is it different from any other time? She always insists. Oh, very well.” He handed the horse over to Momaday.
Ruthven always enjoyed Agatha being in a “state,” not only because he liked seeing her upset but because it kept her from carping about the offerings on the tea table, one of which she was stuffing in just as Melrose walked into the drawing room.
Around a mouthful of scone, she accused him of something or other, but what it was, Melrose couldn’t make out except the tag end:
“… to have done it!”
“Done what, Agatha?” He was engaged in thanking whatever gods that happened to be hanging about Ardry End that she hadn’t witnessed his fall from the horse.
She was glaring as if from every corner of the room as she buttered up another scone. He poured himself a lovely cup of Darjeeling, plunked in a sugar cube and a dollop of milk, selected a moist-looking piece of cake and sat down, wishing that Aggrieved was here, hay and all, to be taking tea with him instead of Agatha. Perhaps the Sidbury Feed Store could construct a scone net, which could be hung from the Georgian ceiling molding.
He asked her again. “Done what?”
“Oh, you needn’t play the innocent with me, Plant. It’s all over the paper!”
Melrose frowned. How on earth could the Sidbury paper have gotten news of his acquisition of a racehorse? More important, why would the paper think it news at all? This rag Diane Demorney wrote for would now, in January, just be catching up with the flower show. But here was Agatha opening it, turning it for Melrose to see and tapping the offending piece with her finger.
Melrose left his chair to lean over and see it. Of course, it had nothing to do with Cambridge, how could it? The newspaper was interested only in what went on in its own backyard. He plucked it from Agatha’s hands and read:
HUNT SUPPORTERS FOIL ANIMAL-RIGHTS GROUP
There on the front page was a picture of himself, Diane and Trueblood, in one of their careless moments (he would have said), but then all of their moments were pretty careless. They gave the impression they were attacking (or counterattacking) some of the animal protesters, when the three were about as aware of animal-welfare issues as the annual rainfall in Papua New Guinea. True, Melrose would never kick a cat (though he wouldn’t answer for Diane if it got between her and the martini pitcher), but insofar as the whole movement was concerned they were totally uninformed. Yet here they were, in that moment when Melrose had quickly put out his arm to support a young woman with a sign who just then had caught her foot and was falling toward him; and Diane, raising her stiletto heel to shake out a stone; and Trueblood holding his camera above his head to keep it out of harm’s way.
What a wonderful photo op! He must send a crate of succulents round to the Sidbury photographer. What an image for misconstruction!
“It makes me out to look the proper fool, Plant! You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
Oh, indeed, he was aware. He kept a straight face as he sat down and sipped his cooling tea. Here was a moment to relish! Should he try to work out how this made Agatha out to be a fool-not that that was ever too difficult-or just play it?
Play it. “The point is, Agatha, if you must take up a cause, you also must be aware that there’ll be a backlash from the anti-cause (was that a word?).”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Melrose.”
“Okay.” Melrose was eyeing the ruins of the tiered plate, looking for a pastry that had escaped Agatha’s ravaging. She had a way of biting off and putting back when she was especially irritated, taking it all out on the scones and seedcake. He did find an Eccles cake without tooth marks.
“I’ve always thought it shameful, shameful, the way you neglect Mindy, here!”
Mindy-here was flopped on the hearth in her usual position, soaking up heat.
“How do you work that out, Agatha?”
“She gets no exercise! Do I ever see you out with that dog on a lead?”
“No, but that’s only because you’re over here having tea during dog-leading time.”
Agatha, he saw, was actually waving that half-buttered scone around instead of eating it. She must really be on the boil! He said, “I can’t help but think we strayed from the subject, since I really don’t believe the animal-liberation people are trying to get us to walk Siberian tigers.”
“You know nothing about it!” Realizing she had a scone in her hand that could as easily be in her mouth, she put it in and munched. Then having resurrected her weak argument, she said, “You surely must see the idiocy if not the inhumanity of a pack of hounds running down a poor little fox!”
“Yes, it is idiotic. Oscar Wilde said so and I agree. But that particular idiocy is a wholly different argument and not the one you’re trying to make. As far as I’m concerned the entire hunting issue is a smoke screen for a class war.” He didn’t know if he believed that or not, but it was as good an argument as any. “Why choose a thing that is least abusive-certainly ‘least’ in terms of numbers-to make an issue of? If the welfare of animals was really at the heart of yesterday’s masquerade, then why not spend one’s time and energy on ridding the earth of far more brutal practices-slaughtering seals, mowing down wolves and deer from a helicopter, obliterating animal habitat, tracking and shooting the Siberian tiger in order to grind its bones for medicinal purposes”-which had for Melrose a terrible mythic ring to it-“so what it really comes down to isn’t the welfare of the fox, but of the pink- and black- and tweed-coated citizens of the upper classes whom we would like to unseat.”
Agatha’s attention, hard to keep in the best of circumstances, had strayed and was riveted on the long window off to her left. “A horse just passed that window!”
“Momaday’s walking it.”
Hopeless.
The Sidbury paper was open on the table in the Jack and Hammer, the table’s four occupants having a good old laugh.
“How droll,” said Diane Demorney, in her Noel Coward mood, her cigarette dripping ash over the paper and coming dangerously close to the martini glass. Diane was dressed in conventional and nondroll black, one by that Asian designer she’d been favoring lately (Issy? Icky? Mickey?) “We three mistaken for animal activists. They’ve obviously never come up against my cat. All I was doing”-she tapped the picture with her cigarette holder-“was shaking a stone from my shoe.”
“What’ll we do for an encore?” said Trueblood.
“Wear mink and walk down Oxford Street,” said Vivian. “I wish I’d been there.”
“We did invite you, old girl,” said Trueblood. “We should join the hunt. Must be someplace we could rent a horse.”
“Look no farther than my back garden. I have a horse stabled there.”
He might as well have said he had a 747 hangered there, for the looks he got. He smiled.
“What on earth for? You don’t ride, do you?” said the scandalized Trueblood.
“How amusing.” Coming from Diane, this was high praise indeed.
“My riding isn’t all that good, but I plan on racing it. It’s a Thoroughbred.” Melrose felt quite smug.
Diane said, “Remember Whirlaway? That is, remember reading about him, it being long before our time? Whirlaway was owned by Calumet Farm, that racing empire that was ruined by greed and mismanagement.”
Another Diane nugget.
“I can sympathize with greed, but why anyone would want to engage in a thing that needs management, I can’t imagine.” She seemed to be brooding over her drink.
Vivian asked, “But where are you going to race him, Melrose?”
“Well…” He should have given this more thought. Newmarket? That was in Cambridgeshire. “Newmarket, possibly. I’m going to have to get advice from the Ryder trainer.”
“You know, Melrose,” Diane said, screwing another cigarette into her black holder, “you could have a nice little horse enterprise yourself with all of that land of yours.”
“I could plant cotton, too, but I’m not going to.”
“Don’t be a stick. Imagine what fun it would be for all of us. You’ve enough land there for an honest-to-God racecourse.”
“And put up stands and have a few turf accountants around and a full bar?”
“Certainly, a bar. The rest is optional.”
“Diane,” said Vivian, “if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were serious.”
“Of course I’m serious.” She returned her look to Melrose. “Or-”
“ ‘Or’?”
“Is-what’d you say your horse’s name is?”
“Aggrieved.”
“You can rename it. Thunderbolt-there’s a good name.”
“Why on earth would I do that? Aggrieved is a high-stakes winner.”
She waggled her cigarette holder at him. “For heaven’s sake, Melrose, you don’t want people knowing that; you don’t want to give the whole bloody thing away. The idea is to get odds of say fifty to one and make a packet of money.”
“If the odds were like that, old fish,” said Trueblood, “hardly anyone would bet on him and who’d do the payout?”
“Whoever is used to doing it. I don’t know; I’ve never been much of a gambler. I mean except in the London clubs, such as they are.” She shrugged and sat back. “What you could do then is join the National Hunt.”
“No, I could not. I don’t ride-” Recalling what he felt had been a very encouraging canter, well, almost a canter that morning, he added, “I mean I don’t ride that well…”
Trueblood leaned forward. “But it’d be a great follow-up to this!” Trueblood tapped his knuckles on the paper. “I mean, it’d drive Agatha mad and the other so-called animal-rights person, that snake, Theo Wrenn Browne.”
“Him?” said Vivian, surprised. “Since when has he ever liked animals at all? He’s always kicking at Ada Crisp’s dog and if anyone in the village tries to go into that bookshop with his pet, Theo drives them out. He hates animals.” Then to Melrose: “How’s Richard? Is he better?”
“He is indeed.”
“Ah! Richard Jury!” said Diane. “Is he recovered?”
“Recovered, at least enough to leave the hospital tomorrow. He’s coming here to rest up.”
Diane actually spilled a few drops of her drink, bringing the glass down on the table in martini applause. “Wonderful!”
“He said he might have to spend a night in Islington to give his two doting neighbors a chance to take care of him.”
“Everybody wants a piece of him,” said Trueblood, signaling to Dick Scroggs for refills.
“How true,” said Diane.
“You’d devour him where he stands,” said Trueblood.
“He’s highly devourable,” said Diane.
Even had she not taken an oath to succor her fellow-man, Chrissie King would have done it anyway, and she stood in the door to Jury’s room wishing she could.
“Chrissie, would you mind pounding some life into these pillows?”
“Oh… of course! Sorry, I was… my mind was wandering…” She rushed to the bed as if he’d called for artificial respiration. (Didn’t she just wish!) She pulled and padded and resettled the pillows.
“Thanks, Chrissie. You pulled duty tonight instead of Miss Brown?”
She nodded. Actually, she bought the duty for twenty pounds in addition to picking up Sara Brown’s duty tomorrow afternoon with a churlish patient Nurse Brown especially disliked.
“Can’t say I’m sorry. I expect it must be a waste of time for you to have to tend to someone like me who’s really okay now.”
Chrissie’s words rushed out as if in advance of the voice to utter them. “Oh, but you’re not all that okay. I mean it’s not you’re really sick or anything. But with what you’ve been through…” Her head tilted nearly to her own shoulder as she looked at him.
Jury hid a smile. Chrissie wanted him unrecovered, too, just as Hannibal did, for wholly different reasons. “Dr. Ryder seems to think I am; he needs the bed. God knows, he needs this private room. So he’s tossing me out tomorrow afternoon. I hope I’m not spoiling an evening out for you. You must have boyfriends to spare.”
What, Chrissie wondered, were they? Boyfriends?
She had a way of shaking and nodding her head at the same time that intrigued Jury. “No? Yes?” He tried to mimic the head shaking by way of keeping her company. He wasn’t flirting with her; at least, he didn’t mean to be. Rather, he was attuning himself to her. It was a way he had-born with it or developed it-from years of questioning suspects, in those cases to discomfit them, in Chrissie’s case to comfort.
Jury was aware that he insinuated himself into the lives of witnesses and suspects, but that really was the only way of going about it. It was the only way to see the skull beneath the skin. He had to admit he encouraged the attachment people had to him. It might have been something like transference, that psychiatric tool. But the psychiatrist was trained to remain uninvolved, like a target transfixed to a spot while the rifle sought to pick him out of the shadows.
That image of gunplay brought the whole awful incident on the dock back to him. Poor Mickey.
“Is something wrong?” asked Chrissie. “Shall I get Dr. Ryder?”
“No, no. I’m just tired, a little.”
“Then I’ll leave,” she said sadly.
“No, don’t. It’s me I’m tired of. All of this self-involvement. I’m not tired of you. Listen: pull up a chair, will you? Tell me about yourself.”
Even had there been screams for her attention all up and down the corridor beyond the door, Chrissie King would have pulled up a chair.
The next day, Jury was dressed and packed and sitting with Wiggins waiting for his doctor.
“Hannibal,” said Wiggins, “has given me this list of medications and instructions and what to do if certain things occur, you know, like falling off a cliff or running from stampeding elephants.”
Jury laughed. Wiggins seldom made jokes in this way. Roger Ryder walked in with, unfortunately, Hannibal, who for some reason attached herself to Wiggins.
Dr. Ryder said, “Superintendent, you’re good as new. How do you feel?”
“Better than as good as.”
“All you need to do is watch that bandage-” He pointed to Jury’s midsection. “And don’t do any rowing, will you?”
“I’ll make an effort to resist.”
Ryder smiled. “Don’t make an effort, either.”
Laughter? They looked over to see Hannibal in a near fit of laughter. What was it, Jury wondered, about Sergeant Wiggins that had this effect on others? He was hardly a bon vivant. But he seemed to reverse a natural inclination in others-turn sour sweet, make water run backward, find some hidden spring. Jury smiled. Wiggins would have made a swell dowser.
Jury took Ryder’s arm and led him out of earshot. “There’s something I really would like to do. I’d like to look for your daughter.”
Ryder looked at him, too stunned to speak.
“I’ve been thinking about her, her disappearance, ever since you told me about it. In hospital, you’ve little to do but think. I know it’s been nearly two years and you might rather not have this wound reopened-” Jury hated the cliché, but it didn’t bother Roger Ryder.
“It’s never closed, Mr. Jury.” He paused. “You think there’s some hope Nell is still alive, then?”
Hope was certainly reborn in the father, to judge from his expression. “I think so. The facts here just don’t make it sound like the kidnapping or abduction we’re used to seeing. I’d need to talk to people-to your father, to the others at the stud farm. If you could let him know I’m coming…”
“Absolutely. When do you think you’d feel like it?”
“Right now.”
Roger Ryder rocked back on his heels. “Oh, no, Superintendent, I couldn’t let you. I couldn’t agree to spending your first day out of hospital-”
“I’m fine, Doctor.”
“But… this sort of thing, it’s exhausting, you know.”
Jury didn’t know if he was talking about an inquiry or being in hospital. “It’s no exertion, really. My sergeant could simply drive me and I’d ask a few questions.”
“But-”
“Look, I could go back to my flat straightaway and spend the entire afternoon having to answer a lot of questions about the way I feel, and be visited every fifteen minutes to make sure I really do feel all right. Or I could go to your farm and ask a few questions. Now, which of those alternatives sounds more likely to promote a quick recovery?”
“But-”
But Roger was smiling.
“Waterloo Bridge,” said Jury.
“Waterloo Bridge?”
“Wiggins, can’t I say anything without you saying it back?”
Wiggins actually looked as if he were considering this. Jury shook his head, and again said, “Waterloo Bridge. It’s right down there.” He pointed in an indeterminate direction. “If we leave right now, we may be able to get away from the curb by dinnertime.”
Clearly against his better judgment, Wiggins pulled away from the curb with a lot of engine noise and a jerk that pulled Jury forward in his seat. “Is it that lad you want to see?”
“Benny Keegan. Yes.”
“Why’s that, sir?” The car idled at a zebra crossing, waiting on several pensioners tottering across it with their string and plastic bags full of groceries. One in particular was finding it hard going. “It’s that zimmer bar holding her back,” complained Wiggins.
“I’d be happy to wait while you kick it out from under her.”
Wiggins slid Jury a look.
“Why do I want to see Benny? Because he saved my life. Isn’t that enough?”
“Strictly speaking,” said Wiggins, bringing the car to rapid life again, “it was Mr. Plant that did that. He’s the one that got the ambulance.”
Jury was flabbergasted by this literalness. “Strictly speaking, it was Sparky who saved me. If the dog hadn’t gone there, Benny could hardly have followed him, which would have meant that Mr. Plant wouldn’t have followed Benny.”
“Well, yes, if you look at it that way. The truth of it is”-Wiggins kept plowing the rescue theme-“it was just a colossal piece of luck and a big coincidence.”
“Luck, maybe. But not coincidence. It was purposeful on their part; they didn’t just happen to be strolling by that dock…” Why was he bothering?
They continued along the Embankment. Looking down the river, Jury could see the black prospect of Waterloo Bridge. In another three minutes, they were there.
Jury nodded his head toward the curb. “There’s a spot. Pull over.”
“It’s a double-yellow line. It’s a loading zone.”
“What the hell difference does that make? You’re the Filth. Pull over.” Wiggins did, and Jury slammed out of the car and crossed the street.
“Well, would’ya look who’s here?” said Mags, in a surprisingly friendly way, considering Jury was, as he’d just told Wiggins, the Filth. Possibly this cool attitude toward police might have been owing to the benevolent overlooking by police of Mags’s and the others’ bit of London real estate-the wide concrete slab beneath this end of the bridge. By night, the little group, dispersed during the day to various begging and other posts (they had their routines just as structured as any CEO’s), called this place home. The police allowed them to sleep rough here as long as they vacated the place during the day.
Mags collected old magazines (which were stacked about her feet now) for no reason other than that they were there. “You lookin’ for young Benny, then?”
“I am. Is he around or is he across the river?”
“He was back early, then went-there’s Sparky comin’ along now!”
Jury looked upward to the Embankment walk, where a yellow balloon appeared to be sailing of its own volition above the wall and saw the white terrier, Sparky, walking, stopping, starting, stopping, with Benny following in his wake. Sparky was the busiest dog Jury had ever seen, and Benny the busiest lad. Benny was twelve and made deliveries for five tradespeople across the river in Southwark.
They disappeared from view and then were making their way down the steps.
“Mr. Jury!” Benny called.
When Sparky saw Jury, he broke out in a rousing chorus of barks and began hurling himself at the air as if the only thing holding him back from his object-Jury? the yellow balloon? the sun?-was gravity.
“Sparky, sit!” Sparky, an extremely well-trained dog, sat, but it was clearly a stretch of his bonds that he did so. “You okay, are you, Mr. Jury?” asked Benny, looking concerned. “Mebbe a bit wore out, but still like your old self? Of course, you’d be used to that kind o’ thing-you know, gettin’ shot at. Gettin’ beat up, knives coming at you out of the fog, dark alleyways-”
It was clear that Benny hoped Jury was used to it. “You’re right, but a funny thing is, it never gets any easier to take.”
“I expect not. Gemma and me and Sparky came to see you in hospital, but this slag of a nurse wouldn’t let us in. Well, I knew they’d not allow Sparky, but he coulda just sat under a chair. And listen: they nearly called the Social on us, seein’ we was two kids out and about without a grown-up.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know, Benny. I’d’ve done something about it if I had.” It was laughable to think that these two children couldn’t take care of themselves. Extremely laughable, considering what they’d been lately put through. “And how are you keeping?”
“Oh, I’m still doing the rounds, still puttin’ up with old Gyp. But, listen: Mr. Tynedale told me I could live at the Lodge if I wanted. That was quite nice of him, I thought.”
“He’s a nice man, Mr. Tynedale. And are you going to?”
“Nah. Anyway, Gemma was pretty prissy about it, tellin’ me all the things I’d have to do, like be careful of my language and take a lot of baths and give Sparky baths all the time. And learn how to bow, and so forth.”
This litany of rules and regulations sounded to Jury extremely Gemma orchestrated.
Benny went on. “Do you think maybe Gemma’s jealous, Mr. Jury? I mean, in one way Gemma’d like me to live there, but in another way, she wouldn’t. The way I see it”-Benny stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels a few times-“is Gemma’s been, you know, top dog for a time-”
Sparky, who’d been looking from Benny to Jury, barked.
Benny lowered his voice and said from behind his hand, “Sparky don’t-doesn’t-like dog comparisons, Mr. Jury.” In his normal voice he said, “Gemma’s been kind of primo doggereno,” Benny winked, having put one over on Sparky, “and doesn’t fancy any competition, anybody like me taking over. Like reading. She reads to old Mr. Tynedale and she knows I like books. I’m an excellent reader; also, I’m a lot older so I can read harder stuff, too. And I think Mr. Tyndale wants someone who’d look after Gemma, see.”
“Well, Gemma seems to do pretty well on her own, Benny. She certainly did a great job that night.”
Benny didn’t like being reminded of “that night” when Gemma went missing because he hadn’t been in on the action; Sparky had, but not Benny. Sparky, thought Jury, smiling, had most definitely been primo doggereno.
But what Benny said was, “That ain’t-isn’t-no way to live though, Mr. Jury, I mean being on your own.”
Apparently, Benny didn’t think he himself was. Jury said, “The thing is, you get used to a certain way of-being, and it’s not always a good thing to change it. Take yourself, Benny. You don’t want to change how you’re living. It feels right to you.”
For that, thought Jury, was really it. It was balance. Balance lay in not deliberately changing things around. There was so much change thrust upon us (he thought of the death of Benny’s mother) that it helped to keep whatever we could unchanged, to keep unchanged whatever was in our power to do so.
“Benny, I’ve got to go. Let me know what you decide, will you?”
Benny nodded. “Sparky don’t want all them baths, I can tell you.”
Jury smiled. “I don’t blame him.”
Hearing either his name or “bath” or both, Sparky barked.
“Cambridgeshire!” said Wiggins, after Jury got back to the car. “But-”
Jury sighed. “Not you, too, Wiggins. Look, I’m not going there for lessons in dressage; all I want is to ask Arthur Ryder some questions.”
“But, sir, I think your doctor should-”
“My doctor has.” Jury thought for a moment. “We’ll stop in at Victoria Street first-”
Wiggins stared at him as if Jury had spaced out in hospital. “What?” His palms shot out as if keeping Jury the lunatic back. “No. I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go, but not to the Yard!”
“I only want to see Fiona and Cyril.”
“Fiona,” Wiggins began as he pulled away from the illegal parking spot, “Fiona is fully aware of the situation. ‘Now you tell Mr. Jury to go straight home’ is what she said. Cyril, well, he keeps himself to himself, but I’m sure he’d agree if he wasn’t a cat.” The car flowed into traffic heading north.
Jury sighed. “Okay, then I expect we’ll just go on to Cambridgeshire.”
“I’m glad you’re seeing sense.”
There were rewards, Wiggins saw, in driving to Cambridge on the A10. Every half hour or so a Little Chef turned up, and they were pulling off into one now.
As they got out of the car and crunched across some tired gravel, Jury took comfort in the fact that Wiggins took comfort in a thing so common as a Little Chef.
“I’d sooner it was a Happy Eater, but Little Chefs will do.”
Jury passed through the door his sergeant held open, saying, “Not much to choose between them, is there?” He made this judgment only because he knew Wiggins would have such a good time refuting it.
“Oh, my goodness, there’s no comparison,” Wiggins said as the waitress led them to a booth near the back. “You remember that one”-he went on as they sat down and the waitress put menus on the paper placemats-“just outside of Spalding, wasn’t it? You remember, in Lincolnshire?”
Not wishing to take a stroll down Happy Eater memory lane, Jury said, “Hm” and picked up his menu. “What’ll I have? Anything looks like haute cuisine after hospital meals.”
“I’m having one of the specials.”
“They’re all specials. Maybe some eggs.”
“You should watch your cholesterol, sir.” Wiggins didn’t simply scan the menu; he analyzed it. “I’ll have the waffle with sausage.”
“Did you know that the connection between cholesterol in food and in the body has never been proven? An egg cannot deposit its cholesterol into your body. That’s the argument.”
Wiggins frowned. “That must not be accurate. Look at all the studies that’ve been done on cholesterol.”
“Yeah. But the scientific community, whatever that might be, has never demonstrated it as an actual fact. It’s only probabilities. Wine, now, and the occasional snort of booze, that absolutely has been shown.”
Wiggins just looked at him. “Dream on.”
When the waitress appeared, materializing out of some Little Chef netherworld, Jury ordered fried eggs, fried bread, fried bacon, fried sausage-
“Well, those things are already fried.” The waitress frowned.
“Fry them again, then. Skip the tomato.”
“Tea?”
“Of course.”
“Fried?”
Jury looked at her. “Funny.”
She shoved her order pad back in her pocket and walked away.
Wiggins said, mournfully, “And you just out of hospital.”
“Why do you think I’m having the cardiac arrest platter?” Jury snorted. “I’ve got connections.” He watched the waitress go through to the kitchen. “They don’t have this cabaret at the Happy Eaters, Wiggins.” Realizing that this would initiate further comparisons between the two fast-food chains, Jury quickly followed with, “What’s your feeling about this girl?”
“Nell Ryder? She must be dead, sir.”
Jury looked out of the window by their booth at the darkening sky. “I’m not so sure.”
“But I thought you said-”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why? Why do you think she’s still alive?”
Jury pulled a dessert menu from the aluminum holder, seemed to concentrate on it, then shoved it back.
“Sir?” Wiggins looked troubled.
“It looks as if whoever did this never planned on asking for a ransom because they never planned on kidnapping Nell. That wasn’t the object. They had to take her.”
“Why couldn’t it be a kidnapping that just went south? The girl died somehow, maybe they threw her in a trunk and she ran out of air. Something like that. She was dead, so of course they didn’t ask for ransom money.”
“Why not?” asked Jury.
“Because Ryder would have demanded some proof she was alive.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It was worth a shot. It’s happened before.”
“It just seems so unlikely, what you say, too dodgy.”
“Life is dodgy.”
Wiggins rolled his eyes. “And you a policeman, sir. You go on evidence.”
Then the waitress was there, setting their plates before them along with two mugs of tea.
Looking at Jury’s fry-up, Wiggins’s thoughts of the vanished girl vanished. “Sir, that food looks lethal.”
Jury grinned. “This coming from a man who’s about to dig into a plate of waffles and sausage? In the nutrition arena, nobody here wins.”
Even in January, its white fences glazed by the sun, Ryder Stud Farm looked rich and verdant. When it came into view round a curve, the house itself was a startling white. Off to the left was a wide pasture in which horses grazed the cold grass. Jury told Wiggins to stop. He got out and walked over to the fence. In another moment, Wiggins came to stand beside him and they both looked at the horses, two of which peeled away from the others, galloped across the meadow and then ran back again to the others.
It was so fluid, thought Jury, so joyful. He recalled a poem by Philip Larkin, describing exactly what Jury was seeing, retired racehorses running for what looked like pure joy. Jury liked that.
Then another horse, distant, had turned from the others. Jury shaded his eyes and said, “One of them’s coming our way. Do we have any binoculars?”
“No. Have we ever had?”
Jury returned his eyes to the pasture. Distant as the horses were he could see their grace and Jury rested his face in his hands. “Have you ever known anyone who hated horses? I haven’t. Dogs, yes; cats, yes; wolves, foxes, coyotes, cows-but horses?”
Wiggins said, “I remember a cousin, one of them in Manchester, who went to a riding school, but could never catch on to it. She was always losing control, always taking spills, always the horse would start trotting away. I remember her complaining and complaining, but the thing was, she never blamed the horse. She thought it was her that was the problem, which it was, yes, but you know how people always want to think it’s something else, somebody else, never their own fault.”
Jury nodded, his chin still propped in his hands. As they stood there, the horse, silvery in the sun, arrived at the fence and stood looking or waiting for them to do something interesting. “We should’ve picked up some sugar cubes in the Little Chef.” He ran his hand down the horse’s face. It seemed amazingly placid.
“Nice horse,” said Wiggins. “Are they racehorses, then? Thoroughbreds?”
“Some of them, certainly. I imagine this one is. He looks it. He looks a champion.”
As if the horse perfectly understood him, it nodded. “Better go,” said Jury. “Ryder might be wondering where we are.”
They left the fence and recommenced their drive toward the house. They were pulling up to the front door when Wiggins said, “Cows? I never knew anyone to hate cows. Where’d you get that?”
The man who opened the door of the big white house was not Arthur Ryder. Still, he invited them in. “You’re Superintendent Jury? Arthur told me to be on the lookout.” He smiled. “I’m just a neighbor of Arthur’s. He’s seeing to one of his mares.”
“Superintendent Jury and Detective Sergeant Wiggins,” said Wiggins, a trifle imperiously. “And you are?”
“Roy Diamond. I’ve a farm a mile away.”
Roy Diamond was a tall man-as tall as Jury-in a blue blazer with dull gold buttons imprinted with a figure Jury took to be horse related. Natty dresser. Natty life. He looked like that sort of person-privileged and no doubt rich. He also had that look of almost sinful health, as if he spent most of each day in the open air and probably followed the sun, possibly around the world. Jury made this swift and pleasant journey with him in his mind-Nice, Portofino, Corfu, Aruba, Barbados-in the few seconds it took Diamond to shift his gin and tonic to his left hand and jut out the now-free right. His smile was pleasant and his eyes a blue that could only be called crisp. They snapped.
Jury shook his hand and hated him. He hated a lot of people these days, he found, except for those in his immediate circle. But he thought he could manage a special dislike of Roy Diamond. He glanced around the living room-at its dark wood, the chintz-covered chairs, a sofa covered in a sturdier material, low lamps softly diffusing light. Fire in the grate. The fallen petals of roses littered a low table behind the sofa. It was one of those rooms you step into and feel at home. No, more than that: feel it must have been, in a forgotten life, your home. Something like that feeling of déjà vu that Plant had mentioned, that flash of recognition.
“Arthur tells me you’re with New Scotland Yard.”
“That’s correct,” said Wiggins, who decided to sit down, even if neither of the others would. He took out his notebook. “You’re a neighbor, you say?”
Roy Diamond smiled. “Well, out here, ‘neighbor’ can be miles away. But, yes, I own Highlander Stud. It’s that way.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. He didn’t appear to mind Wiggins’s taking down information about him. “Arthur tells me you’re interested in Nell Ryder. It was a terrible thing that happened to Nell.”
Jury said, “ ‘Interested in’ isn’t exactly the way I’d put it.” He smiled a chilly smile. “I want to know what happened to her. What do you think?”
The question, asked of him, seemed to surprise Diamond. “I?”
“You must have asked yourself that question.”
“Of course I did.” Diamond moved to a drinks cabinet and sloshed another finger of gin into his drink. “Oh, I’m sorry-would you like-?” He waved a hand over the collection of bottles.
Jury shook his head. “Medication.”
“Hm. Yes, I did ask myself. I imagine I thought pretty much the same as everyone else.” He stopped.
“What did everyone else think?”
Diamond gave Jury a look arrested somewhere between a half smile and a frown. “I get the feeling you’re baiting me, Superintendent.”
Wiggins glanced up at Jury to find his expression, as often happened, completely unreadable.
“I wouldn’t bait you. But what did you think about the girl’s disappearance?”
“That she was being held for ransom.”
“Yet I believe Mr. Ryder doesn’t have all that much available cash, no matter how wealthy he might be in terms of his holdings.”
“That’s right. He’s got some of the best horses in the country. I bring some of my own mares here to be bred to his.” Roy Diamond studied his drink. “By now, I guess she’s dead, though I’d never say that to Arthur.”
“You think he still holds out hope, then?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
It made Jury vaguely uncomfortable, as if he appeared to be hard-hearted. “I expect so.” Then it struck Jury that Roger, who wasn’t getting a mention, was seen as having the lesser interest in Nell’s fate. Perhaps it was simply because she had lived here with her grandfather.
“Have you any children, Mr. Diamond?”
“I did once. She’s dead.” Roy Diamond’s confidence seemed to be draining away, as age might drain the brisk-ness from one’s step. “Oz,” he said, more to himself than the other two. He looked up. “It was Dorothy’s favorite book, The Wizard of Oz-you know, because of her name.”
Somewhat ashamed of his tone thus far, Jury said, “I’m really sorry, Mr. Diamond.”
Diamond shrugged, put his drink on the table. “I’ve got to be getting back to the farm. Would you tell Arthur I’ll see him soon?”
Jury nodded, shook his hand. Roy Diamond turned to Wiggins, who was still seated, and shook his hand also. “Good-bye.” He turned by the door. “And good luck.”
Arthur Ryder, who entered a moment later, was a man who, like Roy Diamond, obviously spent most of his time in the open air. The difference was Ryder did it with his sleeves rolled up. He seemed a little uncomfortable bound by his own four walls. The discomfort didn’t stem from a police presence in his living room; he was genuinely pleased Jury and Wiggins had come. After they were all seated, he said, “This is really kind of you, Superintendent.”
“Not at all. When you’re in hospital you look for things to engage you. Your missing granddaughter engaged me. I’d like to help. Since I’m not on duty, I’ve plenty of time.”
Ryder opened his mouth to respond when another man came into the room holding a pot of coffee. “This is Vernon Rice, my stepson. When my son called me, I called Vernon and asked him to come. Vern has his own investment firm in the City.” Arthur Ryder seemed rather proud of this.
Vernon Rice was an extremely good-looking man with hair just about the burnished brown of the bay in the pasture. His eyes, although gray, were so bright they looked startled. They gave gray a whole new meaning. He held the pot aloft and looked a question at Jury and Wiggins. Jury declined; Wiggins accepted. Wishing it were tea instead, thought Jury.
As he poured the coffee into cups already sitting on a tray, Rice said, “I’ve still got a private investigator looking. I know it’s been over a year and a half, but you never can tell.” He handed Wiggins a cup and set the cream and sugar by him.
Jury smiled. He bet Vernon Rice could pin down the very day the girl had gone missing. He also had the impression that Rice was a “never-can-tell” person. Meaning he operated on faith. Strange for a man in his line of work.
“There was also a horse taken?”
“Aqueduct.”
“Could he carry two people and still jump stone walls and fences?”
“He’s a ’chaser. He’s won the Grand National twice.”
Vernon smiled. “He could jump rooftops if he had to.”
“Nell could ride him?”
“On a flat course, like the wind.” As if the image was fixed permanently in his mind, Vernon looked toward the window.
But Jury’s image of this agile girl was blank; he couldn’t put a face to it. Wiggins had distilled what coverage there had been in the papers, but hadn’t produced a picture. “Have you a picture, Mr. Ryder? I’d like to see her.”
Arthur Ryder rose, saying, “I’ve got a wall full. Come and see.”
“Could Sergeant Wiggins have a word with your staff? The trainer? Anyone else around?”
“Absolutely. But let him finish his coffee.”
The look that Wiggins now trained on Jury made Jury wish to God he had a camera. It was almost clubby-Wiggins and his horsey friends.
Arthur Ryder said, “Vernon can show you the photos; I’ll take Sergeant Wiggins along to talk to George Davison. He’s my trainer.” Wiggins, having drained his cup (to the lees), went off with Ryder.
Vernon led Jury into the large office, where an entire wall of photographs and snapshots dominated the rest of the room-photos of horses and, almost as adjuncts or afterthoughts, humans.
Except for one human who could never be an afterthought-a girl with flaxen hair, strands of it blowing across her face as she leaned her head against her horse’s neck. It wasn’t that she was beautiful; it was that she seemed so present, so here among them. She was always with a horse in these pictures. If a horse was not directly involved, one or more were present as a backdrop. The largest picture was a real stunner. This horse was the one Jury and Wiggins had met down the drive by the fence. Here, Nell Ryder stood a little in the forefront, the reins tangled in her fingers, and looking at the camera dead on. Jury felt it. No wonder Plant couldn’t describe her. She was essence, all residue left back in the bottom of the bottle, a girl decanted.
His expression must have betrayed something for he caught Vernon Rice watching him. When Jury looked his way, Vernon smiled.
“Nellie has a lot of presence, hasn’t she? I saw it the first time I looked at her.”
It was almost, Jury thought, as if Vernon were coming to his rescue, letting Jury know that Nell Ryder had that effect on everyone.
Arthur Ryder had come in the back office door to stand beside Jury. He sighed. “Ah, yes, Nell. She was really-I miss her.” His thought, unfinished, stumbled up against loss.
Still slightly mesmerized by the face, Jury said, “Describe her.” Yet he thought one of the qualities that made Nell Ryder arresting was that she was indescribable, that anyone would stumble trying to do it, as had her grandfather. “What’s she like, I mean, beyond the photographs? How long ago was this one taken?” Jury inclined his head toward the one he’d just been looking at.
“Two years ago. Just before-” Arthur Ryder stopped to clear his throat. “She was fifteen.”
Jury found it hard to believe she was anywhere in her teens; the eyes that looked out from the photograph had too much wisdom in them. He knew he was projecting, reading something much too complicated into Nell’s eyes; she was a young girl, really. Just a girl.
“Fifteen,” Arthur said. “Seventeen, now. Her birthday was-is-just this week.”
“Next week, Granddad.” They all turned. Jury thought this had to be Maurice Ryder who’d come in from the outside through the office door. “Her birthday’s next week.” And who, his look said, are these gate crashers at the party?
His grandfather said, “Maurice, come on in.”
He was already in, his expression said.
Arthur Ryder introduced them.
If any more gravitas was needed, Maurice Ryder supplied it. He looked, Jury thought, oddly sunk. It was as if the worst that could happen had happened: the coup de grace, the final blow: his cousin’s disappearance.
Jury looked from him to the picture. They were close to the same age, but she looked so much older, as if the adult awareness that had grown in Nell by leaps and bounds had been arrested in Maurice, a dark-haired, handsome boy with a pale face and a starved look fed by misfortune. They did look alike, a family-resemblance sort of likeness. But it wasn’t the resemblance Jury was interested in; it was the difference. Maurice looked from the picture to Jury, almost as if he were jealous of Jury’s looking. But where Maurice (he bet) was obsessed, Nell looked focused. There was a world of difference between the two. Yet he didn’t really know what Nell’s qualities were.
“When did you last see her, Maurice?”
As if he really had to think about it, Maurice was slow to answer. “Evening stables.”
Meaning, probably, that Maurice had seen her last. Jury thought Maurice would always want to be last: the last person to see her would leave his face imprinted on her mind.
“Where did you see her?”
Maurice inclined his head backward a little. “In the stables. She’d carried out her sleeping bag.”
“Could you show me?”
“Okay.” He turned to the door.
The stall Nell Ryder had been sleeping in was empty, as if it had been kept that way in case she should return with Aqueduct in the middle of the night and need it. It was as large as a small room. Several others down the line were occupied; Jury recognized a couple of the horses sticking their heads out as the ones in the field where he and Wiggins had stopped. Gingerly, Jury put out his hand, and the horse with the silvery mane nudged it.
“Looking for treats,” said Maurice, smiling for the first time.
“What a gorgeous horse.”
“Samarkand. He is, yes; knows it, too.”
Jury would have been willing to ascribe certain human traits to animals, but vanity wasn’t one of them. Anyway, it was just a way of talking for Maurice.
“Sam’s my favorite. Nell, she’d never say who hers was; I think she didn’t want to hurt the other horses’ feelings.”
That made Jury smile. “She sounds like a sensitive person.”
“Oh, she was-is, I mean.”
It must have gotten harder and harder to rescue the present from the past, Jury thought. “This is a wonderful place to grow up. Or did you?”
“More or less. I came with my dad a lot and spent summers here and holidays, so yes, I guess I did grow up here.”
“You and Nell.”
Maurice didn’t answer beyond a nod of his head. Then he said, “After my aunt, Nell’s mum, died, Uncle Roger tried to keep her with him in London. But his schedule got so fierce he just couldn’t do it. Middle of the night emergencies, that sort of thing.”
“What about your parents?”
For some reason, Maurice felt his father should be defended; he did not feel that way about his mother. “They got divorced. You know what mum said to me? She didn’t want to put me through a long custody battle, so it would be better all around if I came to live with Granddad.” He gave Jury a wry little smile.
“What about your father?”
“He got custody by default. Not that he didn’t want it”-Maurice added quickly-“my dad’s a champion, or was, I mean. A great jockey. Finally, he took off for Paris and got married again. Then there was the accident that killed him. It was on a racecourse near Paris, when his horse slammed into a fence.”
“And his wife?”
“We never met her, his new wife.”
“Did you ever want to be a jockey, then, like your father?”
“I always wanted to be a jockey. He was one of the greatest, you know. He’s in the jockeys’ hall of fame. But after I grew four inches like all at once, I gave up on that. I’ll tell you who’d make a good jockey.”
“Who?”
“Nell. She’d be awesome.”
“That good on a horse, is she?”
“Yes. Nell had-has-”
(The present rescued again.)
“-an instinct. She just knows what’s going on with them.
And she always says anyone could if they’d just take the trouble. But that’s not true. Not even George has that way about him. He knows it, too. He likes to say that Nell is really a horse, zipped up in girl costume.”
Jury laughed. “Some costume, Maurice, if that’s what it is.”
Maurice looked at him and smiled for the second time. “You can say that again.”
On their way back to the house, he saw Wiggins with two men, a wiry young man and a short stocky one. The older man Jury presumed to be Davison.
Wiggins introduced them as Neil Epp, head groom, and George Davison.
“You’re the trainer, Mr. Davison.”
“That’s it.” George Davison was one of those men who appeared to be all business. No time for messing about when there was work to be done. This police business might or might not be messing about.
The horse whose bridle Neil Epp was hanging on to was as black as the bottom of a mine. Black and sleek. Jury nodded to him. “And who’s this?” he asked, looking at the horse.
Looking as proud as if he’d invented him on the spot, Davison said, “Criminal Type.”
Jury smiled, liking the name. He ran his hand down the horse’s neck. “Beautiful. I bet he’s won a few for you.”
“Indeed he has, despite the extra weight he always has to carry.”
“Why’s that?”
“To even the chances. Only time I ever lost me temper with the Jockey Club it was over that weight allowance in the Derby year before last, when Dan was up on him. Would’ve been, I mean. They said Criminal Type’d have to carry another fifteen pounds. Bloody unfair. So I scratched ’im.”
Jury knew George Davison could talk all day about his horses to anyone who served as a listening post. It was almost by way of talking to himself.
“Your people going to get anywhere with regards to young Nell?” said Neil Epp. “Been two years, it has,” he said, as if none of them knew it.
This earned him a sweltering look from Davison, who was no doubt a proponent of the less-said department.
“I certainly hope so, Mr. Epp. We’ll try. Wiggins?”
“I’ve got it all, sir.” Wiggins flapped his notebook.
They set off for the house. Jury felt he had to see those pictures again.
“I want to fix her in my mind,” he said to Arthur Ryder and Vernon Rice.
The four of them took up positions again in front of the wall of photographs. Jury was almost convinced of the truth of that old superstition about the camera’s catching the soul of its subject, which then resided in the photograph. Melrose Plant had said, “She gives déjà vu a whole new meaning.” Jury said, “It’s strange. I get the feeling I’ve seen her before.”
“That’s a common reaction, you know, from just about anyone who sees these photos,” Vernon Rice said. “It’s that she looks familiar, that a person already knows her. You do get what I mean?”
Jury got it.
Brand-new clothes. Same old dream.
H e shouldn’t have gone, that’s what Dr. Ryder kept telling him, his first day out of bed, but he wouldn’t listen, though I tried to reason with him, just out of hospital and insisting on going to Cambridgeshire, of course he’d fall asleep in the car, didn’t surprise me, tired as he was.
Wiggins went on in this way for a good while after delivering Jury to Ardry End and the ministrations of everyone there, barely awake enough to receive enthusiastic greetings not only from Melrose Plant but also from Ruthven and his wife, Martha, who had cooked what she mistakenly thought to be Jury’s favorite meal-roast beef and potatoes-when actually the meal that won the gold was one of Carole-anne’s fry-ups in its greasy symmetry of egg, bacon, sausage and fried bread (the Little Chef version was merely a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave) and during which Momaday had presented his sorry self to go on and on about Aggrieved and how he’d be “whipping that horse into shape, never you mind, good as won the 2000 right now,” and Martha (of all people!) telling Momaday the horse was too old for the 2000, and (following a brief argument on that score), Ruthven at last leading Jury up to his favorite room and watching him fall across the bed as if he’d been bludgeoned-all of this leaving Melrose feeling the evening hadn’t so much as ended as collapsed around him, compressing and elongating like a bellows or in a wind tunnel with some Proustian crazy.
When Jury walked into the dining room the following morning, time had been restored to its familiar sequential meanderings. Melrose Plant was reading at the table, munching toast. “Have I held things up?” Jury asked.
Melrose merely looked at him and chewed. “The others have gone on ahead. They’re hoping to reach the summit before dark.”
Jury rubbed his hands, looking at the silver domes, smelling the sausage-drenched air. “I take it that’s a no. I haven’t held things up?”
“Suit yourself. As long as it isn’t after eleven a.m. Nothing around here we can do to hold anything up-”
“Why do I have the feeling”-said Jury, setting a silver dome to one side and sniffing syrupy pancakes-“that my question will keep you going for some time, whereas another person might simply have answered, ‘Not at all, not at all’?”
“Well, that’s simple enough. This hypothetical person isn’t busy scaling Everest. So of course he or she’d say ‘Not at all, not at all.’ ”
Jury spooned eggs and a small pile of mushrooms onto his plate, then forked up sausages (a largish number), speared a tomato and sat down. “I told you.”
“Told me what? Did you know that Forego girthed seventy-seven inches?”
“That question makes me feel like I’m having breakfast with Wiggins, who asks things like, ‘Do you know that kava-kava, if made up into a poultice, is good for boils?’ ” Jury ate his sausage.
“And your answer was-?”
“Very funny. Is that a word? ‘Girthed’?”
“It’s a horse word. You’ve got to know something about them, of course.”
“I do. Pass the salt.”
“Are we a trifle testy this morning?”
“I am. I don’t know about you.”
Melrose took a look in the teapot and rang for Ruthven. “There’s just too damned much to learn about horse racing. So I’m taking a page from Diane’s book.”
“There’s only one page in Diane’s book.” Jury nibbled another sausage. He hated to see the sausage go so soon. “Take it, and there won’t be any book.”
“Anyway, I’m doing what she does and concentrating on just a few horses and a couple of races. I love their names. Spectacular Bid-isn’t that wonderful?” He paused and thought about the name and was surprised when Ruthven suddenly appeared at his side.
“Sir?” he said, inquiringly, and to Jury, “Superintendent, and how are you this morning?”
“Fine, Ruthven. Tell Martha this is a great breakfast.”
“We could use some more tea,” said Melrose. “Hot water’s gone, too.” Ruthven returned to the kitchen. “They like you more than they like me.”
“Everyone wants to stay on the good side of the Bill.”
“So, using Diane’s method, I think I can manage to learn enough. She makes you think she knows a lot more than she does.”
“No, Diane makes me think she knows a lot less than she does.”
“I don’t mean us. I mean other people, strangers, who don’t know her methods. There’s no question she helped me out on that gardening business.”
Jury had risen and returned to the buffet, looking under domes. “Where’re the mushrooms? They were right here-”
“That’s right. They were right there until you scraped the sauté pan clean with your little spoon.”
“Could you just ask Martha-?”
“For you Martha would slaughter a hog.”
And here she came with the teapot and a steaming silver dish, replacement for the one Jury was hanging around right now. “Mushrooms! I knew you’d be wanting more o’ my mushrooms!”
“You’re a lifesaver, Martha. That’s just what I was asking for.”
Pleased as punch, Martha walked out leaving Jury to spoon up the mushrooms.
“You’ve said nothing about the Ryders yet.”
“I know.” Jury brought his plate back to the table. “It’s not for lack of thinking about them.” He fell silent, turning his fork over and back and over again.
“Yes? Well? Think about them out loud then.”
Jury sat back. “Vernon Rice was there, too.”
“Ah! So you got them all at once.”
“I got them all at once, yes.” He picked up his teacup and held it out for a refill. “Also a chap who owns Highlander Stud named Roy Diamond.”
“I didn’t meet him.” Melrose felt irrationally cheated. “And? What did you think of them? There seems to be an undercurrent here that I can’t plumb.” Melrose poured the tea and, when Jury didn’t answer, said, “What?”
“Vernon Rice-” Jury heard an acerbity in his tone that he had wanted to keep out of it.
“It already sounds as if you don’t much like him. I do.”
“I know you do. But you spent a long time with him and by himself. I mean, out from under the Ryder Stud influence.”
“ ‘Influence’?” Melrose gave a short bark of laughter. “Rice doesn’t strike me as the type to be influenced by anyone.” Melrose thought for a moment. “Unless you mean Nell Ryder?”
“Of course.”
“But that isn’t exactly ‘under the influence of.’ That’s more that he simply cares about her.”
“Try ‘loves.’ ”
“Yes, I suppose-”
“As ‘in’ with.”
“Are you saying-? But look here, she was only fifteen.”
“Poe’s cousin was only fourteen.”
Melrose gave that laugh again. “Ye gods, that’s Poe.”
“His behavior was aberrant, you mean?”
Melrose scratched his neck, confused with feeling. “No, I expect not. I mean, back in Poe’s time it wasn’t all that unusual to marry a young girl. Virginia, her name was.” It came back to Melrose in a little flood of what he supposed was Proustian involuntary memory. Baltimore-Poe’s house, the little rooms, and the passion of the curator in defending Poe against his detractors, the plagiarized manuscript, the vulgarity of its perpetrator.
“You look unhappy.”
“The curator of the Poe house recited the end of a poem, something about a cloud that took the form ‘of a demon in my view.’ Melrose gave a self-conscious shrug. “I was just remembering…”
“No wonder,” said Jury.
“You were in Ryder’s office, weren’t you? You saw the photos. Weren’t you struck?”
“I was definitely struck.” Jury drank his tea.
Melrose nodded. Then he said, “Aren’t you finished? I want you to see my horse.”
“That sounds a treat,” said Jury, shoveling in some more mushrooms.
“There’s nothing to it,” Melrose said suavely.
“Of course, there’s something to it,” said Jury, “and I haven’t got it.”
“But he likes you. I can tell.”
“Now just how do you make that out?”
“Look, he’s trying to nudge you.”
“To get another apple, that’s why.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t give him any more. He might get sick.”
Just then Momaday lurched up behind them. He was wearing the long cowboy coat Melrose had given him for Christmas, thereby feeding Momaday’s image of himself as hunter, rancher, rustler, sheriff and a lot of other things that fit the myth of the Old West that Momaday wasn’t. But it had him slapping that rifle into play, aiming and shooting and if he hit anything it was by sheer accident-that same Momaday had come up behind the two and barked an order: “Don’t you be feedin’ that horse apples!”
Both Melrose and Jury jumped as if they’d been found out by Aunt Polly and exchanged a look.
“Just one.”
“One, that’s right.”
They had taken turns and fed him four.
Melrose changed the subject. “I was just telling Superintendent Jury here that he should get up on Aggrieved and go for a ride.”
Momaday made a lengthy snuffling noise, his version of a laugh, and within and around this said to Jury, “Oh, you shoulda been here t’other day to see Mr. Plant, here (none of that ‘Lord Ardry’ and ‘m’ lord’ nonsense from Momaday, never fear!) up on Aggrieved and trying to dismount”-snuffle, snuffle-“and t’ fall clear off t’ other side!” Laughing fit to kill, Momaday walked off, gun broken over his arm.
Jury looked at Melrose. “Nothing to it, right?”
“You ate seven sausages. I counted. You ate more sausages than Aggrieved ate apples.”
They were strolling through the village. Jury stopped in front of Betty Ball’s bakery, where he expressed an interest in the pumpkin muffins on display in the bakery’s window.
“Seven sausages. You couldn’t possibly eat a muffin. They’re left over from Halloween, anyway.”
Jury reached in his coat pocket and drew out an amber vile containing some white pills. “Dimerin and sausages, the doctor’s orders.”
“Well, you don’t need a muffin.” He pulled on Jury’s coat.
They crossed the narrow bridge that spanned the equally small and narrow river and Jury stopped and regarded the small green and its pond. It was as if the scene were miniaturized, like the miniature Bourton-on-the-Water where a Lilliputian copy of the village itself was kept on display. He looked off to the left at the largest house in the village. Vivian Rivington’s. If he took his emotional temperature, his Vivian temperature right now, he wondered what it would read. But you can’t do that, can you? For the real indicator is that surprise appearance, that sudden turning and seeing a woman walk through a door, or seeing her sitting on that bench. It’s the only thing that makes the mercury spike, the only gauge. He could still see her as he’d done the first time when she’d appeared before him, recall her embarrassed look, her fingers fussing with the hem of a brown jumper. What in God’s name was he up to, always falling in love at first sight?
There was only a ruff of snow round the pond like a collar of icing on a cake. It would soon melt away. Back then the entire green had been carpeted in snow.
“What are you doing?” said Melrose. “By the time we get to the Jack and Hammer it’ll be closed again. We don’t keep London hours here. Well, maybe we could, but Dick Scroggs won’t keep them.”
They started walking again. “I was just thinking about the first time I came here.”
“Few things are more dangerous than that.”
They were walking along Long Piddleton’s main street now. “What do you mean, dangerous?” asked Jury.
“We make these minute revisions, look at it from a slightly different angle: that pond, that bench there or not, whatever it was that made it more desirable, its loss more bitter. Memory’s plague causes unnecessary suffering.”
Jury stopped short. “What in hell are you talking about? When did you start finding memory so finely nuanced?”
Melrose pursed his lips. “Since I saw it might get us from the green to the Jack and Hammer without your stopping and gawking every two minutes. And”-he spread his arms-“here we are!”
And here they were, too, still having misgivings about Jury’s survival, so that to see him walk in was a real thrill.
“I quite liked that other case,” said Diane to Jury, “except, of course, for that shooting at the end of it. Anyway, I’m not one to talk. I hit Melrose’s vodka. His last bottle, I might add.”
Melrose asked Jury, “Can I tell them about the vanished girl?”
“Go ahead. It’s not a Scotland Yard matter. It isn’t really a case.”
“Okay.” He turned to an audience already turned to him as if he had brought a lifesaving draft. “This all happened when I was in the Grave Maurice-”
“Where’s that?” asked Trueblood.
“A pub across the street from the Royal London Hospital.”
“Ah, that’s where Superintendent Jury was,” said Diane. “I remember sending a wreath of roses.”
“Are you going to keep interrupting?”
No one spoke.
Melrose told them about the vanished girl.
At the end of this brief account, Vivian Rivington, with Agatha behind her, appeared in the sun-splashed doorway of the Jack and Hammer like a ray of hope, a thing Jury had given up on, lying on that dock in the dark. He could still see the stars in that implacable night sky. He smiled. It was hard to give up on Vivian. He wondered if her Italian count was gone for good.
“Richard!”
Her look was a mixture of wonder and relief. Perhaps she wouldn’t believe he was alive until she saw him. “Hello, Vivian.” He went to meet her and gave her a kiss on the cheek that she didn’t seem to know what to do with. Then, suddenly, she threw her arms around him. He returned this heartfelt hug.
Diana, seeing her glass was empty, handed it off to Dick for another.
Trueblood then raised his. “To your long and happy life, Superintendent.”
Diane said, “I could have warned you that night was fraught with danger.”
“Oh, it was fraught all right. So why didn’t you? Warn me, I mean?”
“You didn’t ask me, did you?”
Jury laughed. “I guess I didn’t.”
“The stars! The stars!” proclaimed Agatha, as if she were finished with their wastrel ways.
“How are you, Lady Ardry?” Jury reached his hand across the table to clasp hers.
Put out by Melrose’s adamant direction that she was not to turn up at Ardry End this morning, she waggled her finger at Jury. “You cheated me out of my morning coffee, Superintendent.”
“So here you are having your morning whiskey,” said Melrose.
She tried to numb him with a look and, as usual, failed.
Eagerly, Joanna said to Jury, “Tell us, tell us! This boy and his dog-”
Jury smiled. “It should be the dog and his boy. That’s one damned smart dog. I was lying there for what was probably only a few minutes, but felt a lifetime-”
Agatha butted in to stall the story, annoyed she hadn’t heard this account before the others over morning coffee. “And did your whole life pass before you?”
“No,” he lied, not wanting to talk about it.
Joanna leaned toward Jury. “What was it like, nearly dying?”
Jury wanted to say terrifying; he had wanted to be terrified. Instead, what he had felt was the lure of the dark. He wondered how it was that inconsequential things came back to one at such moments. Because, he reasoned, they weren’t inconsequential. He looked up to see five pairs of eyes, expectant.
“Terrified,” he said.
“This case you’re working on,” said Diane.
“It’s not a case. It’s not my case, certainly.”
“Never mind. I’ve got a theory.”
“Oh, good,” said Melrose. “Scotland Yard can go back to bed.”
Diane plowed on. “This girl that’s gone missing probably went off with her boyfriend, who’d told her they’d get married and when he just up and left her, she was too ashamed to go back home. It’s not the leaving that’s significant. It’s the not coming back.”
They all looked at her. Trueblood said, “Diane, that’s one of the most Victorian scenarios I’ve ever heard.”
“It sounds,” said Joanna, “like one of mine.”
“At this point,” said Jury, “it’s as good as any other.” He smiled at her.
“Then what’s your theory?” asked Diane. “White slavery?”
Trueblood said, “Aren’t we ignoring the most obvious explanation? She’s dead. It’s the only thing that makes sense. There was no ransom demand because she’s dead, maybe an accident, something the abductors didn’t intend-” He shrugged away the rest of the scene.
“She’s not dead.” Jury said it before he could stop himself.
Several pairs of eyes regarded him.
“How is it,” asked Melrose, “you’re so sure of that?” Jury picked up his beer. He didn’t answer.
“I like your idea of recuperating,” said Melrose.
“I’m not doing the driving. I’m just sitting here, enjoying the scenery.”
“We’re on the M1. There isn’t any scenery.”
Jury slid a few inches down in his seat. “I love this car.”
“You can’t have it.”
“While I’m talking to Vernon Rice, where are you going to be?”
“Oh, I’ll ‘hang’ as they say in the Grave Maurice. Unless you want me to come with you?” His tone was hopeful.
“No. You’ve already talked to him. Both of us would be intimidating. Anyway, he doesn’t know you know me.”
“Of course he does. He’s Roger Ryder’s stepbrother.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know we have any working relationship. As far as Rice is concerned, you’re just some aristocratic oddball.”
“Thanks. Just remember, I had lunch with him. I mean we had quite a good conversation going.” He shook his head. “I just don’t get it that you don’t like him.”
“I didn’t say that. Did I say that?”
“Oh, don’t be as thick as two posts. You know you don’t like him. But there’s one thing you have in common.”
“What?”
“You don’t believe Nell Ryder’s dead.”
Jury sat on Vernon Rice’s sofa and understood what Melrose had meant. It was slimmed-down, pared-down luxury. The furniture was Italian or German or both, the colors muted, the lines clean. The chair he sat in, although its angles had looked forbidding, was superbly comfortable. He decided he preferred his own ramshackle flat with its Early Oxfam appointments, which was just as well, since he wasn’t getting this one.
Of course it overlooked the Thames, one of those breath-taking views estate agents were always advertising that usually turned out to be a small slice of the river if you held your head in a certain way. But this view answered all of the demands of “breathtaking.” Right now the descending sun turned the pocked surface of the Thames to hammered gold.
Jury’s dislike (he had lied to Melrose) of Vernon Rice only increased in these sumptuous surroundings (childish, but he didn’t care; he let it increase), these proofs of the man’s success. “Thank you,” he murmured as Rice handed him an espresso.
“You sure you wouldn’t like a drink? I’ve got some really good whiskey.”
Jury thought, I’ll bet. I’ll bet it’s a million years old. “Oh, no thanks. Coffee’s fine.”
“Something wrong, Superintendent? You look a little, uh, disgruntled.” Vernon smiled.
So did Jury, trying to beat him to it, not succeeding. “Sorry, but I guess it’s just spillover from the hospital. Too much nursing.”
“Too much shooting, maybe.”
Jury looked at him and could detect nothing but empathy. “That’s nearer the mark, yes.”
“It sounds as if it were more than just a close call.”
“How do you-?”
“The dailies, Mr. Jury. The newspapers were full of it.
Don’t tell me they weren’t all over you in hospital the moment you woke up.”
“They weren’t. That must have been Dr. Ryder’s doing.”
Jury could remember very little of the first day-and possibly of the second or third. All he wanted was sleep, from which he awoke at one point to see Carole-anne framed in the window lighted by the sun, her red-gold hair on fire, and thought he was in heaven.
Insofar as police, hospital personnel and visitors went he had shut down his mind. It was as simple as that. He wanted no more than the sketchiest outline, the bare bones of what had happened. He wanted none of that pas trop vite Proustian precision. Leave out as much as possible, otherwise, he was afraid he’d tank.
“But of course they didn’t know the rest of the story-”
(Was Vernon Rice a mind reader now?)
“-the papers never do; they make up what they want.”
For the first time, more so even than in hospital, Jury felt like an invalid. His hand had shaken slightly returning his empty cup to the table. But not slight enough to prevent Rice from seeing it.
Jury said, “I want to talk to you about Nell Ryder’s disappearance. I couldn’t make out when I was at the farm whether you said you believed she was still alive because of her grandfather’s feelings, or if you really-”
“Believe it? I believe it, yes.”
Jury could sense Rice’s desperation. He wanted everyone who’d known Nell Ryder to believe it; he wanted someone else’s confirmation.
“What do you think of her father?”
“Roger’s a good father, I know, even though he does have to spend most of his time in London. He goes to the farm almost every weekend, Arthur says.”
“And his brother?”
“Danny was much different. He was a great jockey, but in other ways-” Vernon shrugged. “He had his addictions-gambling, women-not drink or drugs, though, which was probably because he had to keep his weight in line and his mind clear. But women-lots of women. I know a couple of husbands who weren’t too happy with him. I think he broke up a marriage here and there. It’s strange, you know, because you can’t tell that just looking at his picture. But I’ll tell you, one blink, a woman would be all over him.”
“Did you know any of these women?”
“No-yes. I forgot the one I did some investing for. Sara… Sara-Hunt. Actually, she’s some distant relation of the Ryders. I drove her out to Arthur’s one Sunday. Wait a minute and I can give you her address. I don’t know that she was actually involved with Dan.” He shrugged. “Still, I always got the impression that for a woman, to see Danny race was to be involved.”
Jury sat forward. “I’d like the telephone number if you have it.”
While Vernon was fiddling with an address book, Jury said, “What about his niece, Nell? She’s certainly beautiful. Would he have tried something on there?”
Vernon’s eyes hardened, changing from a foggy gray to granite. “No. Someone would have killed him. And one thing I can credit Danny with is that he wouldn’t have hurt any member of his family.”
“And Nell? How did she feel about him?”
“Danny was great with horses, had a special relationship with them. I heard that he never used a whip, not even as a directional signal. Times I thought he could ride a horse through hell and not get burned. Well”-Vernon spread his hands-“that’s all Nell needed to know. She liked him.” Vernon paused. “He was one hell of a jockey; some said he was up there with Lester Piggot.” Vernon shook his head, studied the mantel where a few framed pictures were lined up. “I really feel for Maurice; Maurice idolized Danny, poor lad. He’d have done anything for Danny.”
“I talked to Maurice when I was at the farm. He seems to be-as the Irish love of euphemism has it-destroyed by Nell Ryder’s disappearance.”
“He’ll never get used to it. Maurice tends to blame himself when things go wrong.”
“He thinks what happened to Nell is partly his responsibility?”
“Believe it. He’s never said so in so many words, but I bet he does. Maurice has taken on his shoulders the sins of the father. I never know whether to hit him or weep. Not only that, he wanted to be another Danny-omitting, of course, the X-rated bits.”
“But he’s too big. What a disappointment for him.”
“Yes. Add to that, though, that Nellie isn’t. She’s the right size. And it wouldn’t surprise me if she wanted to be one, too, but never said so because of Maurice. She’s like that.”
Vernon retrieved Jury’s empty cup and his own and went to stand by the window as if he’d forgotten already why he was there. Then he came out of his trance and went to the espresso machine.
“She appears to evoke very strong feelings in people, and in some cases, just from her photos.” Jury knew she had in him, also in Melrose Plant.
Vernon rubbed the side of his head. “That’s because she’s so intense, so-I don’t know, focused, maybe-that when she looks at you, it’s about you; she hasn’t a dozen other scenarios crowding her mind. Only you. I doubt there’s a man or woman or child who wouldn’t respond to that.”
“Certainly you have.”
“Oh, yes. The first time I saw Nellie was only a few months before she disappeared. She was fifteen. She was in one of the horse stalls, filling the feed basket and singing under her breath in case-she told me later-anyone was around; she didn’t want them to hear her. She was always singing in that whispery way so no one would hear. No one but the horses. She turned and smiled a little. Anyone else would’ve said, ‘Oh! Who are you!’ She just said ‘Hello.’ ”
“For a young girl, she sounds pretty composed.”
“That’s just what I said to her. I said she had a lot of poise. She said it was probably because of the horses.”
Jury smiled. “She was good with horses, wasn’t she?”
Vernon nodded. “Davison-the trainer?-has always been impressed with her. Thinks she’d make a great trainer.”
“She was in the stall with Aqueduct because he was sick, is that right?”
Vernon nodded. “It was around dinnertime that Maurice told her he thought the horse might be suffering from stable cough.”
“Did she often stay with horses like that?”
“As often as a horse gets sick. Arthur has a couple of vets on call, so anything that looks like trouble they can nip in the bud.”
“Hm.” Jury sat thinking. “I get the impression Nell was very self-disciplined.”
“Extremely.”
“All right. How then might she react to being kidnapped?”
The question took Vernon by surprise. “You mean, would the discipline kick in?”
“That’s what I mean. Would she be cool?”
“Cool. I think she’d be up for that. She’d be able to bring that off, yes.”
Jury smiled. “ ‘Fear wearing black.’ Definition of cool. Maybe it’s also the definition of courage. Would she be courageous?”
“Yes. Depending on what was at stake.”
“If something wasn’t at stake, you wouldn’t need courage.”
Light had been steadily lessening while Jury was talking to Vernon Rice, as if a door were closing on it. He looked at the line of pictures over the fireplace. He could see from where he sat that they were all of the Ryder family. “You’ve never been married?”
“No. Should I be?”
Jury laughed. “No, it just surprises me.”
“Why?”
“Women like a man who’d go to a lot of trouble for them. Obviously, you would. It’s romantic, among other things. I’m just surprised you haven’t been snagged.”
Vernon smiled. “I’m not all that easily snagged, Superintendent.”
“I can see that.”
“I was engaged once, a few years ago. I decided it wouldn’t work.”
“Why? I’m interested.”
“I just didn’t love her enough.” Vernon rinsed out his and Jury’s cups, saying, “I don’t know about you, but I’m switching to whiskey. Want some?”
“Thanks. Just soda it up a lot.”
“Worried about your drinking? You can always visit SayWhen.” Vernon told him about it.
Jury laughed. “Great idea. But that’s not my reason. It’s because I’m taking some sort of medication.”
Vernon was at the drinks table uncapping what looked to Jury like a fifth of Glenfiddich. “What kind of medication?”
“Dimerin, I think it is.”
“Oh, that stuff. It won’t hurt. You could mix it with engine oil and it wouldn’t do a thing to you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I own thirty-three percent of the company. I got in on their IPO. I don’t do that sort of thing blindfolded. I really find out about their product. This particular corporation’s stock is going to split soon-”
Jury smiled. “Save me the details of corporate finance. It’s all lost on me.” That sounded properly stuffy. Or superior. Why was Rice bringing out the worst in him? Or perhaps it was himself, bringing out the worst.
“Poor you. It’s really very entertaining.”
“Entertaining? That’s what you do it for?”
“No. I do it for the money.”
Jury laughed and took a sip of the whiskey. It was very mellow. “Let’s get back to love. You said you didn’t love her enough. How did you know in the end that you didn’t?”
For a moment Vernon merely stared at his glass. Then he slid down on the sofa and looked up at the ceiling. “Because when she went away I didn’t miss her. Because I could stand having her out of my sight; because I didn’t want to touch her every time I saw her; because I didn’t have the urge to buy her flowers every time I passed a flower stall; because I didn’t look for her around every corner; because she wasn’t in my head every time I looked up from a market report; because she didn’t make me feel stoned-and didn’t make me feel glad I wasn’t; she didn’t fire up my imagination; she didn’t make me forget the gloom of the past, as the song goes. Because she didn’t make me almost wish she’d disappear so I could find her.”
That hung in the air while Vernon studied the diamond facets of the glass he seemed to have been committing to memory as one would a woman’s face, which, in all likelihood, one would never see again. “It was like that.”
Jury hardly knew what to say. “It was?”
“Yeah. Really adolescent. Not what you’d call real love, I guess.”
Jury looked at him. “If it isn’t, maybe it ought to be.” Jury drained his glass. “I appreciate your time. I’ve got to go.” He rose.
Vernon went to the door with him. “You’ll find her.”
It wasn’t a question.
Jury never made promises about the outcome of a case, and this one surely would end badly, if it ended at all. That’s what worried him, that it never would. “I’ll try.”
It wasn’t an answer.
“I’m going to Wales,” Jury said, taking a stool beside Melrose in the Grave Maurice.
“Wales? Why on earth?”
“There’s a woman there who knew Dan Ryder. I want to talk to her.” When the turbaned barkeeper stopped in front of him, Jury ordered whatever was on tap. Then he said to Melrose, “I see what you mean about him.”
“What do I mean?”
“About Vernon Rice. He’s one of the most likable men I’ve ever met.”
“Told you.”
Jury turned and smiled at Plant. “That only makes me that much more suspicious.”
It was a gloomy day, even by January’s standards. Ver-It was a gloomy day, even by January’s standards. Vernon matched it well. He had just returned the receiver to its cradle and was standing before the big office window with its view of St. Paul’s, or at least of its spire. Too many buildings were crowding into the City and ruining some of London’s views. He couldn’t turn his thoughts to that for very long or to much else. He hadn’t liked the conversation with Leon Stone.
“With nothing new by way of either evidence or information, I’ve run up against a blank wall.” Pause. “Vernon, I know it’s hard for you to hear, but I honestly think Nell Ryder’s dead.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“That’s wishful thinking on your part.”
“No, it isn’t. Wishful thinking is thinking you can sell ten thousand shares of British Telecom short and make a killing. That’s wishful thinking.”
Leon Stone sighed. “I hate to keep taking your money.”
“First time I ever heard anyone say that.” Vernon had laughed, not joyfully. Then he’d hung up.
He wanted Leon Stone to believe at least in part that Nell was still alive. Arthur didn’t, not anymore, Vernon was sure. He stood at the window and went back over her disappearance again. The trouble with this was it was the same old track; he wished his mind would derail, shake itself up a bit.
That police superintendent, Jury, was the only new thing that had entered the picture. Seemed pretty smart, maybe he’d come up with something. Vernon swiveled his chair around and sat down in it, back on track, going over it all again. Do not sit here brooding, for God’s sake. Do not brood.
“Want a ploughman’s?” Samantha put her head around the door.
The door was always open, but she seemed to like this sort of hugger-mugger approach.
He looked around. “No thanks.”
“I’m bringing something back for Daph and Bobby. You sure?”
“I’m sure. You know it’s raining like hell.”
“It’s always raining like hell. See you later.”
He supposed she was leaving; he couldn’t hear her; the carpet was so thick in the outer office you could deploy an elephant herd and not hear it.
“Bye,” he said to something as he looked at his TV screens, market reports on CNN and the BBC. He muted the sound and spent a few minutes watching the ticker tape. Then he got up, reached for his laptop, looked at what was there, from the laptop to the desktop, not much happening.
“Vernon.”
Vernon looked over his shoulder and froze. He dropped the laptop and felt the pain only as some vague reminder you couldn’t drop heavy objects on your foot and not feel it.
“Vernon,” said Nell, “I need your help.”