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.
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.
EIGHTEEN
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.
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.
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-
– than he was in food. Melrose-
– always seemed to excite no more than a soigne attitude in animals, a
