The Grave Maurice (32 page)

Bramwell gave him one of those
hmph
-y gestures of his square jaw, narrowed his eyes and took out his stubby pipe (tobacco also having been supplied) and generally did little to project hermitlike subservience. “Not much o' a job, is it, mate? And when do them cameras start rollin'? I ain't seen hide nor hair o' Russell Crowe.”

Well, it had been rather an outlandish lie that a major production company was making Ardry End the scene of a blockbuster film, but Bramwell was driving him nuts with his constant demands to know just what he was doing here, and he bet it was something to do with drugs, and there was no entertainment. He had quite a list of complaints.

“The production company's been held up by, oh, the star. Crowe is finishing another picture.”

“Them film people's too coddled all their lives. Not like me, no, I've 'ad it plenty rough, me.”

Bramwell appeared to be roping him in to hear the story of the hermit's life. He was tamping down tobacco preliminary to setting things afire.

“Mr. Bramwell, I've got things to do.”

Bramwell made a dismissive, blubbery sound with his lips: “
You?
You're one of them titled that's been waited on hand and foot all yer life, like Russell-bloody-Crowe, on'y ya ain't as good-lookin'.” He scratched behind his ear. “Now what's the name of that foxy blond-headed woman he goes wiff—?”

“Why don't I get you a subscription to
Entertainment Weekly
? Only now—”

Bramwell, guided by voices Melrose was not privy to, was off on another avenue of conversation, this about a childhood on the dole, and some female whom Bramwell referred to as “My Doris”—wife? sister? cousin?—who had wretchedly died during some routine operation, which explained his detestation of doctors and hospitals. “Now, my Doris had nuffin' wrong wiff 'er—”

Melrose, who had always been too much the gentleman to shut up anyone, was relieved to see Ruthven coming along the path with the cordless telephone.

“It's a Mr. Rice, sir.”

“So, how's things, mate?” Bramwell said to Ruthven, whose face seemed to crinkle in the disturbance of a dozen responses he, too, was too much of a gentleman's gentleman to make.

Phone in hand, Melrose started to walk back to the house. “Vernon! How are you?” Then he stood stock-still at the news. “She came
back
? She just—
walked in
?” Melrose started walking again as he listened to the story of the previous night and the trip to Cambridge. He entered the study by way of the French window, sat down in the nearest chair. Vernon said he had tried the superintendent's number a couple of times, but he didn't appear to be in.

“His idea of ‘recuperation' isn't most people's. I left him in London. He said he was going to Wales. You told him about some woman in Dan Ryder's life?”

“I did, yes.”

“What about Nell's family?”

“She wants to wait until tomorrow to go there.”

“But—”

“I know. But she's got her reasons, even if I don't know what they are. She's—remarkable. She's—prodigious.”

Melrose smiled at that. “You always knew that.”

“I always did, yes.”

Melrose thought for a moment. “You know, there's something particularly interesting about all this.”

“What's that?”

“Well, could she feel, I don't know, guilty for some reason? Ashamed? Something she apparently doesn't feel around you?”

“I thought of that. I expect because I'm not really family; I'm not as important to her, so my judgment wouldn't mean as much—?”

Melrose heard the question in those words. “Just the other way round, I'd say. And as for judgment, she knew you wouldn't judge her.”

The silence hummed.

“I
don't see why,” said Carole-anne Palutski, seated on Jury's sofa that evening, “you want to do your recuperating
there
and not
here.
Why'd you want to go to Northants, anyway? Not even to mention
Wales.
”

Jury dropped his shoe on the floor and rested his foot on the dog Stone's back. Stone woofed. “Because I needed to see somebody.”

“In
Wales?
” As if nobody ever saw anybody in Wales. “Don't be daft. We don't know anyone there.”

We
don't? Jury shook his head. “I've been many, many places in my long and illustrious career as a detective; you'd be amazed at the people I've run into that you don't know anything about. For instance, there's the family Cripps: White Ellie, Ash the Flash . . .” Jury went on in mind-numbing detail about the Crippses and a number of other witnesses, suspects, people helping with inquiries, all over the British Isles.

Carole-anne sat coiling a strand of copper blond hair round her finger all through this peroration, watching him. “What's she look like?”

“Who?”

“This woman in Wales.”

After she'd taken the description of the woman in Wales up to her flat to brood about, Jury sat for a while, more tired, he knew, than he cared to admit. He let his eyes trail round the room, making comparisons with Rice's penthouse flat and Plant's near-stately home. That his own flat was sadly diminished by such a comparison didn't bother him at all. In the course of this little trip round his room, he noticed a picture that he had all but forgotten hung beside the window, as one will forget what is always there to look at. It showed half a dozen horses at a white fence, in a representation eerily similar to the scene he and Wiggins had encountered on that first visit to Ryder Stud. Not for the first time, he thought how things all have a way of coming to bear.

He sighed and then looked at the short list of calls Carole-anne had plucked from his answering machine, since the damned thing never worked properly for him. These were probably not all of the messages; they were the ones selected by Carole-anne, those of which she approved and out of which she fashioned her short list, as if the messages were competing for the Booker Prize. The other messages were still there for Jury to unspool if he could work out the machinations of the machine, a devil's device, as far as he was concerned.

In Carole-anne's often indecipherable writing were listed calls from Vernon Rice, Wiggins, DCS Racer, Rice again, Melrose Plant, Wiggins again. He started with Vernon Rice.

“It's Richard Jury—”

He was out of his chair like a shot, narrowly missing crushing Stone when he heard about Nell Ryder. He sat down again. “You mean she simply turned up in your office?” Jury levered on his shoe. “I'll be there inside of a half hour, depending how fast I can get a cab.”

He wedged his foot into his other shoe, telling the dog, Stone, “He did tell me that, Stone. ‘She'll just walk in,' that's what he said. And damned if she didn't just walk in.”

J
ury looked at her for a long time, longer than was necessary for a simple introduction. The pictures on the wall of her grandfather's study had not lied. He found it hard to wrench his eyes away, and “wrench” was just what he felt he was doing. This introduction took place in the course of seconds, but it felt like as many minutes, in which he had taken and dropped her hand and felt as if he were stuck in an afterglow the cause of which he had missed.

She was wearing dark designer jeans and a white silk blouse. For a girl of seventeen, she wore elegance well. But what she looked like—that she was extremely pretty—was almost beside the point. That wasn't what held Jury, although he imagined many men would mistake this more mysterious quality for physical beauty. Rarely had Jury been unable to pin down a witness or suspect, to tease out what made the other person tick. But here he was, and would be, at sea.

Light from a low-glowing lamp behind her fretted her hair, the way light striking the surface of water filters down and diffuses. He had the eerie feeling he was looking at a scene underwater.

It surprised him when she apologized. “I'm sorry. I've put you to a lot of trouble.”

“It was no trouble.”

“I think it was. You've been in hospital. Vern told me.”

Vernon was pouring whiskey into a cut glass tumbler, looking ruefully at the empty bottle. He handed Jury the glass and said, “I'll go down to Oddbins for some more. Nell,” he said, “go ahead and tell all. The superintendent needs to hear it.”

“But I've already told you every—”

Vernon shook his head, eyes closed. “He doesn't want it from me, he wants it from you. It's not just what's said; it's the way it's said. Right?” He was shrugging into an anorak.

“He's right,” said Jury. “Except I don't want to put you through—”

Vernon said with a smile and a wave of his hand, “It seems to me it's what Nell's put
us
through, even though she wasn't responsible. Nell.”

Vernon Rice seemed to have a lot of influence. But that didn't surprise Jury, given it was to him she chose to come. She nodded. He said he'd be back in a few minutes.

Jury asked her about what had taken her out to the stables the night she was abducted. “I've been told,” he said, “but I'd like to hear it from you.”

“Aqueduct. Maurice told me he seemed sick. Stable cough, he said. It's not unusual for a horse to get it. So I took my sleeping bag and went out to stay with him. I sometimes did that with a sick horse, though I didn't really see any signs of stable cough. Still, better safe than sorry.” She smiled.

“Tell me what happened, Nell.”

She told the story unemotionally. It was as if emotion, at least in this instance, had been burned out of her. At the end of it, Jury sat silent for a few moments, then asked, “Were you treated well—or, at least, decently?”

There was a hesitation so brief that no one, not even Vernon, would have picked up on it except for a person trained to notice brief hesitations. Jury looked at Nell; she looked away. There was a silence she was not going to fill. He didn't probe, at least for now. Instead, he said, “And you couldn't leave because of the horses. The mares.”

She nodded; she shrugged.

“You didn't think your grandfather would do something to get the horses out of there?”

“They aren't, you see, doing anything illegal, so the authorities wouldn't be able to shut them down. What they'd have done—Dad and Granddad, I mean—would have been to take their guns and find this place and shoot the lot of them.”

Her voice was near strident, almost to the point of desperation.
That was it,
he thought. That was what the child in her had wanted, what every child in danger prays for, no,
expects:
the protector to show up and “shoot the lot of them.” Only, the protector doesn't turn up. So you find yourself in a position where there's nothing to fall back on. Her mother had died; her father lived in London, too busy for her a lot of the time; that left her grandfather.

“You seem to feel—”

The look she turned on him seemed to implore him to explain herself to her.

“To feel guilty. Why?”

“If I was able to get away, I should have gone home. And I was able to.”

“They failed you; why should you go home?”

That startled her; it startled her, but at the same time made her utter a small, relieved sigh. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, balanced there, as if the suspense of this line of thought were a high-wire act. Then she laughed, but the sound was tight. “There was nothing any of them could do, though.”

“That might be literally true, but that's not how you felt. They should have been looking for you—”

“They
were.
”

“But they stopped.”

For a moment she said nothing, then, “It was only reasonable to stop.”

“Vernon Rice didn't stop.”

She dropped her head and seemed to be studying, as he had, the wavelike pattern in the carpet, a stormy gray growing fainter in color but the wave growing wider. “And you think that's why I stayed away. That I was so spiteful—”

The notion of spite here was ludicrous. “
Spiteful?
That's the last thing I'd think. No, I'm only looking for connections, for reasons.”

“Reasons. You think I'm lying to myself. You think the real reason I stayed there for all that time was for some sort of revenge. That my family couldn't keep me safe. You don't believe it was the horses.”

There was in what she said some deep truth that connected her with the mares. But Jury blamed himself for stating it so clumsily that she'd misunderstood. “On the contrary, I think the horses were absolutely the reason. By ‘connections' and ‘reasons,' I mean, how is it that you feel such compassion that you stayed when you could have left, and why were you willing to put yourself at risk again and again by going back, when you could simply have stopped? That first time, you could have taken Aqueduct and just ridden off. But you went back. Every time you went back it was more dangerous. You even went back to your room, your bed.”

“After the fourth mare I waited. So I needed to stay with the mares I had and take care of them. It was nearly three weeks between stealing the fourth one and the fifth, then the sixth. And after that, I just stayed in the barn. It was on Granddad's property and we once used it, but not anymore.”

“You couldn't have been far from there all along. How far was it?”

“I'm not sure; driving, I think it would be less than two miles.”

“And you didn't know this Hobbs woman? I mean, before.”