The Grave Maurice

with its permanent smell of blood that couldn’t be washed or mopped away, where a mortician stood over the plastic-sheeted body of Nell Ryder. Wearing a lab coat and a plastic apron, Dr. Nancy looked down and shook her head. “Poor child. What a dreadful waste.” Then she turned on the recording device supplied her into which she would speak her findings.

DCI Greene stayed; Jury left. He had observed a number of postmortems before, but they couldn’t have paid or promised him enough to stay and watch this one. He waited outside in the silent corridor. It was less than an hour later when Phyllis Nancy called him back. Barry Greene smiled ruefully and looked a bit bilious and left. Dr. Nancy told Jury she’d found nothing that would come as a surprise. One bullet had entered the abdomen, gone through the liver, ricocheted off the pelvic bone, gone through the stomach, hit a vertebra and lodged in an abdominal muscle. The course of the second bullet was less complicated; it had entered the chest wall, gone through the lung, nicked the esophagus and gone out the back.

“She would have died instantly,” she said. “The bullet-.38 caliber, but you know that-messed up everything in its path.”

Jury said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Richard.” She seemed to think a greater show of concern was necessary and went on. “The trajectory was upward. The girl was on a horse, you said, and moving, which might account for the erratic path of the bullet. Was the horse running, or something?”

“No. Not at that point.”

“But she was moving.”

“Yes.”

“Jumping off?”

“Yes.”

Phyllis Nancy frowned. “I wouldn’t think a movement to the side-you know, as happens when one dismounts-would account for the path of the shot.”

“Nell didn’t exactly dismount. She pretty much vaulted over the horse’s head.”

“But that would have put her directly in the path of the bullet and given the shooter a straight-on target.”

“If she hadn’t done, the bullet would have hit the horse, probably killed him.”

Dr. Nancy just looked at him.

“His name is Aqueduct.”

It sounded so much like an introduction, Phyllis smiled. “Aqueduct is one lucky horse.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Taking off her apron, much like any woman who’d finished up in the kitchen, she said, “Where’s this pub you’re buying me? I’d like to hear the half of it.”

They walked down the street to the Cricketer’s Arms.

Jury told her the all of it.

They had watched the coffin lowered into the ground beneath a sky that should have looked like lead, heavy enough to fall and kill; instead it was a piercing, traitorous blue. When the short service was over, people dispersed, wandered off in different directions to their cars.

Wiggins said he’d wait in the car for him, then changed his mind and decided to go in for the cup of tea Arthur Ryder had insisted he have. Jury saw Vernon Rice head in the direction of the meadow, probably to oversee the mares.

Jury started to follow him, but stopped at the stables when he saw Danny Ryder.

Danny was standing by Beautiful Dreamer’s stall. “I went to see Sara. She’s not in a good way.”

“I wouldn’t be either, Danny, if I were looking at a twenty-year sentence.”

There had been a plea bargain. Crime passionale had been put forth briefly by the defense and just as briefly considered. Second-degree murder had been found to be slightly more acceptable, and it had in this case carried a twenty-year price tag. It was a gift, considering the shooting of Simone Ryder had been a perfectly cold-blooded and planned-however briefly-murder.

“Remind me to get her lawyer if I ever go that route,” Danny said, with an acidic laugh.

Jury smiled slightly. They had moved down the line to Criminal Type’s stall. Jury wondered if the horses, in Danny’s line of work, provided a comfort. “What route are you going to go, short of that?”

Since the insurance firm hadn’t had to pay out the whopping sum, he hadn’t been charged with fraud. “What with me being alive, and all.” Danny’s solicitor had come up with a partial amnesia (“First time I ever heard that one”) and the firm was perfectly happy to let it lie.

He said to Jury, “What in hell Simone was visiting Dad for, I can’t imagine. But that’s where she was going when she left the pub, to hire a car and go to Cambridgeshire, and she hoped she could find the stud farm. There were so many, weren’t there? So Sara said she wouldn’t mind seeing Arthur Ryder, too. It had been so long. And she knew where the place was.”

Jury asked, “Was it the same gun, the same.22 you were making a display of?”

“Sorry about that, but yes.” He looked sheepish. “There’s an old road, just before you get to the main drive, and strangers sometimes think it is, then find it dead-ends on the field not far from the training track.”

“Leaving out the question, Why would Sara kill her? Why would Sara kill her there?”

“Well, she couldn’t do it in the Grave Maurice, could she? Anyway, I expect she shot her on the track out of pure malice. Malice, I mean, toward the Ryders. They snubbed her, she claimed. Sara is extremely sensitive to that sort of thing. In other words, she’s completely paranoid. And she thought it was a message to me-you know, since I died at the Auteuil racetrack.”

“Simone-could Simone have been going there to introduce herself? They’d never met.”

“Could be. Except she wasn’t known for her family feeling. There were times I thought she forgot I wasn’t dead.” Danny turned to Jury and looked him squarely, if sadly, in the eye. “Nell dies and I’m by way of being resurrected. Not much of a swap, is it?”

“You tried to save her life, Danny.”

“Tried to just doesn’t cut it, does it?”

It sounded, oddly, like something Nell herself might say. That one could never do enough.

“It does if that’s as close as you can get.”

Danny sighed. “I’ll go in and see Dad and Rog. They’ve had their share of shocks in the last two weeks, I’d say.” He paused. “You asked me what I planned to do next. Well, I mean to get back into racing if I can convince the Board and the Jockey Club I’ve just come out of a two-year-long coma. Maybe I can borrow the ‘partial amnesia’ defense. The last two years haven’t been happy ones. Except for the time I was in the States.” He smiled. “I couldn’t hang around Paris very easily and didn’t much care to go to Dubai. But I’d always wanted to go to Kentucky, Florida-the Derby, the Preakness-the Triple Crown. I love racing over there.” The smile evaporated.

“I’m truly sorry about Maurice, Danny. I really am.”