Melrose’s face, brought his raised knee around and shoved it into Roy Diamond’s front, pushing out what sounded-
“Wiggins,” said Jury.
Wiggins took the ballast of his knee away and Roy slid down the wall.
Jury grabbed Roy by his shirt collar and pulled him back to his feet. He slammed Roy against the wall.
“Sir-” said Wiggins.
“You had your turn,” Jury said over his shoulder. Then he shoved his face into Roy’s. They could have breathed with each other’s breath. “Now, you listen to me, you hopeless piece of shit-”
“Sir-”
“-it would take me one second to crush you a lot harder than that horse.” To demonstrate, Jury pulled Roy’s head away from the wall and slammed it back hard enough to crack plaster. “I’m an off-duty cop and this is a personal dispute, see, and it would take no effort at all for me to drop you where you stand-”
Wiggins gripped Jury’s arm. “
Jury shook off Wiggins’s hand and continued what he was saying in a sibilant whisper as he shoved the muzzle of Roy’s gun against his temple. “My sergeant here is worried about police procedure, but me, I don’t give a flying fuck for procedure.” He pulled Roy away from the wall again and banged him back again. “Do you know what keeps me from blowing you away,
“Which charge?” Wiggins called to Jury’s retreating back.
“Resisting arrest.”
As Jury walked out of the house, he heard the double note of a police vehicle in the distance. Someone had had the presence of mind, probably Melrose Plant, to call Cambridge.
The others seemed to have scattered to the winds, as if they crewed a little boat that was rudderless or no longer anchored. Melrose Plant leaned against a tree, smoking and looking at Jury. Danny Ryder leaned against his car. When Jury walked up to him, all Danny could do was shake his head and say, “Christ, but I’m sorry. Sara told me about Maurice this morning; I jumped in my car and drove without stopping. When I got to Dad’s, Neil Epp told me what had happened, how all of you had raced over here. I knew it was bad news. I knew it had to be this fucker, Diamond, you were looking for.” He ran the side of his hand over his eyes. “One minute, two-if I could’ve made it a minute sooner-”
“It’s always a minute, Danny. There was nothing you could do. But you saved Vernon Rice from blowing that bastard’s bloody head off.”
Then he walked over to the course where Arthur and Roger Ryder were leaning against the fence, staring at the ground where a dozen feet away, Vernon was still holding Nell. The depth of their despair was so awful it paralyzed them; they seemed unable to go to where Nell was. Jury couldn’t think of a thing to say. Not a word. He searched his mind for some words of consolation and couldn’t find one. What bloody good was language when it failed you at every important juncture? Looking over at Aqueduct, who stood stock-still by the fence, he thought,
He walked over to where Nell lay and knelt down and put his hand on Vernon’s shoulder. Vernon looked at him out of eyes that looked gutted by fire.
The sirens were close now, and there was more than one.
Vernon swallowed hard. “All she tried to say was, ‘Remember.’ ”
That, thought Jury, was the word.
SIXTY
Still with his coat on, Jury stood against the wall in one of the interview rooms of the Cambridge station, looking at Roy Diamond. DCI Greene sat at the table across from Diamond.
“Six witnesses. We have you for both murder and attempted murder. You’ll never talk your way out of this; it just won’t happen.”
Diamond had regained his cool manner, and said, “If that’s the case, why are we talking?”
Greene tipped his chair back, looked at Jury. He had told Jury he was welcome to sit in on the questioning of Roy Diamond. Diamond’s smooth manner grated on Jury’s nerves, but he said nothing.
“I can tell you one thing, Inspector,” said Diamond. “I’m putting in a complaint to the chief constable about being roughed up.” He nodded his head toward Jury.
“Pity,” said Greene, tonelessly.
“And the commissioner,” Diamond added, “is a friend of mine.”
Jury thought that if the bastard was playing the friends-in-high-places card, Diamond wasn’t as sure of his “self-defense” defense as he wanted them to think. He came away from the wall and moved closer to the table. Diamond inadvertently tilted backward.
“Why are we talking? That was your question, wasn’t it?” Jury put his hands on the table, leaned toward Diamond and said, in a voice he managed to keep soft, “We’re talking because we want to know the rest of it.”
Roy Diamond’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “All I know is what I’ve already told you. All I know is what happened two hours ago: Nell Ryder jumped her horse over the fence at my training track and launched herself at me. That horse came toward me like an express train.
Jury’s laugh was a bark. Of course, Diamond’s solicitor would take that tack, unless he flew a kite of diminished responsibility.
Greene said, “We’ve got Billy Finn in another room, Roy. We’ll have the motive sorted, no sweat.”
Diamond said, “Well, you can ascribe any motive you want to what I’ve
“There will be,” said Jury. “And another thing, what about this sideline of yours, the mares Valerie Hobbs kept on her farm? That
“Yes. The operation is not illegal, as you very well know. Those mares belong to me, Superintendent. They’re my property.”
“Not any longer, they’re not. You’ll be compensated, not to worry. But I’d really like to know where you were going with this. Because it’s my understanding an American pharmaceutical company named Wyeth has a patent on this mare’s-urine estrogen drug.”
“They won’t have it forever. The patent is going to run out some time around the turn of the century, 2001 or 2. No, my operation is by way of being experimental. I want to see if a drug can be produced that doesn’t have to go through a hundred steps to get that end product. Be cheaper to market it.”
“How? How are you-or were you-going to see this?”
“I’ve several chemists working for me. I’ve a small plant in the Marquesas. It’s temporary, of course. But I have three chemists, an accountant, an investment banker and a lawyer
