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
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
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.”
TWENTY-NINE
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
