The Grave Maurice

so. Considering what you two think fun.” Vivian was still smarting over the Franco Giappino incident, when their combined cunning (a force to reckon with) had got him out of Long Piddleton. No one had ever told Vivian what ruse had accomplished this.

So that’s what they had done. They’d come up with Bramwell. People willing to hire out as ornamental hermits were not too thick on the ground. Mr. Bramwell had turned up with two suitcases and a chip on his shoulder as if his last stint as a hermit had left him with a bad taste in his mouth.

Today, Melrose gave him a cheery “Hullo, there, Mr. Bramwell. How are you keeping?”

“How’d you be keepin’ if it was you sleepin’ on moss?” Short and stocky, Mr. Bramwell was somewhat more aggressive a person than Melrose would have preferred in a hermit, but Diane had insisted beggars can’t be choosers when it came to hermits and she and Trueblood had had a hard enough time convincing the applicants that this was indeed a serious offer and their employer would indeed pay the king’s ransom stipulated.

Artificially, Melrose laughed. “Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it? We’ve put in a very nice cot for you and plenty of warm blankets.”

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.

FORTY-TWO

“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