The Grave Maurice

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.”

FORTY-THREE

Jury 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.”