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
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 deja 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.
THIRTY
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.”
