The Grave Maurice

could have seen each other.”

“You’re convinced she was.”

“Absolutely. You should have seen her reaction when I asked her about him. She had to leave the room.” Jury thought about Sara alone in that magnificent, desolate house in its setting of ruined gardens and broken statuary and felt a kind of longing he could not attach to any particular place in his own experience. Whatever it was, he felt a pull to go back. What seduced him? The woman? The house? The past?

Melrose went on. “From what we know about him, any halfway decent- looking woman who’d admit to so much as an acquaintance with Dan Ryder might as well go whole hog and admit to an affair.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to be thought of as one among many.”

“Unless-”

“Unless what? There you go again.”

Jury picked up his fork again and ran the tines through the slightly congealed raspberry confit. “There I go, yes.” He put down the fork. “I think perhaps I need to make another trip to Cardiff tomorrow.”

“Wales again?” Melrose sighed. “That means you’ll have to go to London. I’ll drive you.”

“Thanks.”

FORTY-SIX

Jury felt, when he’d sat down in the same seat he’d occupied on his return trip to London two days ago, that he might have found the answer to time travel, that he really was going back in time, but that to be able to do that was a sentimental fantasy; to want to do it was a failure of nerve, although he could not say expressly how or why. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be getting into one of those dreary discussions with himself that usually ended with part of him irritated and part of him smug and all of him losing.

He wondered about the lad with the CD player and earphones and when the train pulled into the station where the boy had got off, Jury looked for him on the platform. He wanted to repeat the process without knowing why and wondered if it was no more (and no less, of course) than that desire to have the past back again, which plagued him generally.

Yet, in this case, the meeting was not past-or at least not yet-but in the future. But he felt far more ambivalent this time than he had in his previous encounter with Sara Hunt. And he felt the future could be a wrenching disappointment.

Jury lay his head back against the seat and wished for the return of the lad with the earphones and Door Jam.

When she opened the door this time, she seemed more at ease, thinking (Jury supposed) anything bad that might happen would have happened in their first meeting. He wondered why, since the police generally didn’t have to come around twice unless there was a problem.

“I guess I feel flattered that you think I’m worth seeing again.”

“Oh, I think you’re worth seeing many agains.”

“Many agains.” She laughed. “I like that.”

They were standing in the large, square black-and-white marble entryway. She looked, he thought, quite beautiful in her plain skirt and sweater, the skirt long and black, the sweater cropped and a little boxy, a dusty blue, cashmere, probably. Brown eyes, toffee-colored hair, a color you felt you had to touch as well as see to know for certain. He restrained himself.

“I hope I’m not being too intrusive.”

“In seeing me? Lord, no, you can imagine the number of visitors I get out here.”

He smiled. “Actually, I can’t.”

“My point exactly.” She hung his coat on the coatrack. They walked into the living room, grown no warmer in its outer reaches than before. A pool of warmth collected around the chairs and sofa in front of the fireplace, some invisible boundary around them.

“You’re timing’s perfect. I’ve just made tea.”

As he had on the train, he sat again in the chair he had sat in last time and she sat again on the sofa. While she poured the tea, his eye canvassed the room, took in its feeling of emptiness largely owing to the sparse furnishings and the huge cast-iron Gothic window, cheated again of light by the tree outside.

“It’s so large and so isolated,” he said, “you must get lonely at times.” Yes, that was properly banal.

Perhaps because of the banality, her look was a little condescending. Probably, he deserved it. “I don’t think loneliness has much to do with size and isolation, really.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, please, Superintendent. Not again. You’re baiting me.”

This surprised him, for he hadn’t been. He was saving his baiting for later. At the moment, he was perfectly serious. “Why would I do that?”

She set down her cup. “Because of something you’d seen or heard when you were here last. You want something; I don’t know what. Information, I expect.”

She sounded quite matter-of-fact and undisturbed by all of this; she sounded, in a word, innocent, unconnected to anything involving the Ryders. He heard a tiny sharp snap and looked up. She had bitten into a crisp biscuit and was smiling at him around its edge.

“Yes, I do want to tell you something. Two things. One is that the Ryder girl, Nell, is back.”

Sara looked wide-eyed and said, “But that’s wonderful! What happened? Did someone bring her back?”

Jury told her a pared-down version of Nell’s return, an edited version, for he did not know what did or didn’t apply to her, if anything.

“Her father must be ecstatic. I can’t imagine, I really can’t, having something like that happen to a child.” She plunked another lump of sugar in her tea, as if the sweetness of the girl’s return called for some additional sweetness on her part. “What’s the second thing?”

“The woman found dead on that training track has turned out to be Dan Ryder’s second wife.”

She had raised her teacup, and it stopped and hovered at her mouth as her eyes widened. “But that’s-well, it’s damned strange, isn’t it? What did they think she was doing there? I mean-” She replaced the cup in the saucer, carefully. “It was one of the Ryders, then?”

“I don’t know.”

They drank their tea and looked at the fire in silence. Jury’s eye went to the silver-framed picture of the man who was probably her ex-husband. He rose, walked over to the kneehole desk and picked up the picture. “This your husband?”

“Ex-husband.”

“Then you didn’t part on such acrimonious terms after all. I mean-” He held it up.

She had turned her gaze to the big window and whatever she could see through the tree beyond it.

Nothing but a blank wall, thought Jury. “-to keep his photograph