The Grave Maurice

by Martha Grimes

  Jury was flabbergasted by this literalness. “Strictly speaking, it was Sparky who saved me. If the dog hadn’t gone there, Benny could hardly have followed him, which would have meant that Mr. Plant wouldn’t have followed Benny.”

  “Well, yes, if you look at it that way. The truth of it is”-Wiggins kept plowing the rescue theme-“it was just a colossal piece of luck and a big coincidence.”

  “Luck, maybe. But not coincidence. It was purposeful on their part; they didn’t just happen to be strolling by that dock…” Why was he bothering?

  They continued along the Embankment. Looking down the river, Jury could see the black prospect of Waterloo Bridge. In another three minutes, they were there.

  Jury nodded his head toward the curb. “There’s a spot. Pull over.”

  “It’s a double-yellow line. It’s a loading zone.”

  “What the hell difference does that make? You’re the Filth. Pull over.” Wiggins did, and Jury slammed out of the car and crossed the street.

  “Well, would’ya look who’s here?” said Mags, in a surprisingly friendly way, considering Jury was, as he’d just told Wiggins, the Filth. Possibly this cool attitude toward police might have been owing to the benevolent overlooking by police of Mags’s and the others’ bit of London real estate-the wide concrete slab beneath this end of the bridge. By night, the little group, dispersed during the day to various begging and other posts (they had their routines just as structured as any CEO’s), called this place home. The police allowed them to sleep rough here as long as they vacated the place during the day.

  Mags collected old magazines (which were stacked about her feet now) for no reason other than that they were there. “You lookin’ for young Benny, then?”

  “I am. Is he around or is he across the river?”

  “He was back early, then went-there’s Sparky comin’ along now!”

  Jury looked upward to the Embankment walk, where a yellow balloon appeared to be sailing of its own volition above the wall and saw the white terrier, Sparky, walking, stopping, starting, stopping, with Benny following in his wake. Sparky was the busiest dog Jury had ever seen, and Benny the busiest lad. Benny was twelve and made deliveries for five tradespeople across the river in Southwark.

  They disappeared from view and then were making their way down the steps.

  “Mr. Jury!” Benny called.

  When Sparky saw Jury, he broke out in a rousing chorus of barks and began hurling himself at the air as if the only thing holding him back from his object-Jury? the yellow balloon? the sun?-was gravity.

  “Sparky, sit!” Sparky, an extremely well-trained dog, sat, but it was clearly a stretch of his bonds that he did so. “You okay, are you, Mr. Jury?” asked Benny, looking concerned. “Mebbe a bit wore out, but still like your old self? Of course, you’d be used to that kind o’ thing-you know, gettin’ shot at. Gettin’ beat up, knives coming at you out of the fog, dark alleyways-”

  It was clear that Benny hoped Jury was used to it. “You’re right, but a funny thing is, it never gets any easier to take.”

  “I expect not. Gemma and me and Sparky came to see you in hospital, but this slag of a nurse wouldn’t let us in. Well, I knew they’d not allow Sparky, but he coulda just sat under a chair. And listen: they nearly called the Social on us, seein’ we was two kids out and about without a grown-up.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know, Benny. I’d’ve done something about it if I had.” It was laughable to think that these two children couldn’t take care of themselves. Extremely laughable, considering what they’d been lately put through. “And how are you keeping?”

  “Oh, I’m still doing the rounds, still puttin’ up with old Gyp. But, listen: Mr. Tynedale told me I could live at the Lodge if I wanted. That was quite nice of him, I thought.”

  “He’s a nice man, Mr. Tynedale. And are you going to?”

  “Nah. Anyway, Gemma was pretty prissy about it, tellin’ me all the things I’d have to do, like be careful of my language and take a lot of baths and give Sparky baths all the time. And learn how to bow, and so forth.”

  This litany of rules and regulations sounded to Jury extremely Gemma orchestrated.

  Benny went on. “Do you think maybe Gemma’s jealous, Mr. Jury? I mean, in one way Gemma’d like me to live there, but in another way, she wouldn’t. The way I see it”-Benny stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels a few times-“is Gemma’s been, you know, top dog for a time-”

  Sparky, who’d been looking from Benny to Jury, barked.

  Benny lowered his voice and said from behind his hand, “Sparky don’t-doesn’t-like dog comparisons, Mr. Jury.” In his normal voice he said, “Gemma’s been kind of primo doggereno,” Benny winked, having put one over on Sparky, “and doesn’t fancy any competition, anybody like me taking over. Like reading. She reads to old Mr. Tynedale and she knows I like books. I’m an excellent reader; also, I’m a lot older so I can read harder stuff, too. And I think Mr. Tyndale wants someone who’d look after Gemma, see.”

  “Well, Gemma seems to do pretty well on her own, Benny. She certainly did a great job that night.”

  Benny didn’t like being reminded of “that night” when Gemma went missing because he hadn’t been in on the action; Sparky had, but not Benny. Sparky, thought Jury, smiling, had most definitely been primo doggereno.

  But what Benny said was, “That ain’t-isn’t-no way to live though, Mr. Jury, I mean being on your own.”

  Apparently, Benny didn’t think he himself was. Jury said, “The thing is, you get used to a certain way of-being, and it’s not always a good thing to change it. Take yourself, Benny. You don’t want to change how you’re living. It feels right to you.”

  For that, thought Jury, was really it. It was balance. Balance lay in not deliberately changing things around. There was so much change thrust upon us (he thought of the death of Benny’s mother) that it helped to keep whatever we could unchanged, to keep unchanged whatever was in our power to do so.

  “Benny, I’ve got to go. Let me know what you decide, will you?”

  Benny nodded. “Sparky don’t want all them baths, I can tell you.”

  Jury smiled. “I don’t blame him.”

  Hearing either his name or “bath” or both, Sparky barked.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Cambridgeshire!” said Wiggins, after Jury got back to the car. “But-”

  Jury sighed. “Not you, too, Wiggins. Look, I’m not going there for lessons in dressage; all I want is to ask Arthur Ryder some questions.”

  “But, sir, I think your doctor should-”

  “My doctor has.” Jury thought for a moment. “We’ll stop in at Victoria Street first-”

  Wiggins stared at him as if Jury had spaced out in hospital. “What?” His palms shot out as if keeping Jury the lunatic back. “No. I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go, but not to the Yard!”

  “I only want to see Fiona and Cyril.”

  “Fiona,” Wiggins began as he pulled away from the illegal parking spot, “Fiona is fully aware of the situation. ‘Now you tell Mr. Jury to go straight home’ is what she said. Cyril, well, he keeps himself to himself, but I’m sure he’d agree if he wasn’t a cat.” The car flowed into traffic heading north.

  Jury sighed. “Okay, then I expect we’ll just go on to Cambridgeshire.”

  “I’m glad you’re seeing sense.”

  There were rewards, Wiggins saw, in driving to Cambridge on the A10. Every half hour or so a Little Chef turned up, and they were pulling off into one now.

  As they got out of the car and crunched across some tired gravel, Jury took comfort in the fact that Wiggins took comfort in a thing so common as a Little Chef.

  “I’d sooner it was a Happy Eater, but Little Chefs will do.”

  Jury passed through the door his sergeant held open, saying, “Not much to choose between them, is there?” He made this judgment only because he knew Wiggins would have such a good time refuting it.
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  “Oh, my goodness, there’s no comparison,” Wiggins said as the waitress led them to a booth near the back. “You remember that one”-he went on as they sat down and the waitress put menus on the paper placemats-“just outside of Spalding, wasn’t it? You remember, in Lincolnshire?”

  Not wishing to take a stroll down Happy Eater memory lane, Jury said, “Hm” and picked up his menu. “What’ll I have? Anything looks like haute cuisine after hospital meals.”

  “I’m having one of the specials.”

  “They’re all specials. Maybe some eggs.”

  “You should watch your cholesterol, sir.” Wiggins didn’t simply scan the menu; he analyzed it. “I’ll have the waffle with sausage.”

  “Did you know that the connection between cholesterol in food and in the body has never been proven? An egg cannot deposit its cholesterol into your body. That’s the argument.”

  Wiggins frowned. “That must not be accurate. Look at all the studies that’ve been done on cholesterol.”

  “Yeah. But the scientific community, whatever that might be, has never demonstrated it as an actual fact. It’s only probabilities. Wine, now, and the occasional snort of booze, that absolutely has been shown.”

  Wiggins just looked at him. “Dream on.”

  When the waitress appeared, materializing out of some Little Chef netherworld, Jury ordered fried eggs, fried bread, fried bacon, fried sausage-

  “Well, those things are already fried.” The waitress frowned.

  “Fry them again, then. Skip the tomato.”

  “Tea?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fried?”

  Jury looked at her. “Funny.”

  She shoved her order pad back in her pocket and walked away.

  Wiggins said, mournfully, “And you just out of hospital.”

  “Why do you think I’m having the cardiac arrest platter?” Jury snorted. “I’ve got connections.” He watched the waitress go through to the kitchen. “They don’t have this cabaret at the Happy Eaters, Wiggins.” Realizing that this would initiate further comparisons between the two fast-food chains, Jury quickly followed with, “What’s your feeling about this girl?”

  “Nell Ryder? She must be dead, sir.”

  Jury looked out of the window by their booth at the darkening sky. “I’m not so sure.”

  “But I thought you said-”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Why? Why do you think she’s still alive?”

  Jury pulled a dessert menu from the aluminum holder, seemed to concentrate on it, then shoved it back.

  “Sir?” Wiggins looked troubled.

  “It looks as if whoever did this never planned on asking for a ransom because they never planned on kidnapping Nell. That wasn’t the object. They had to take her.”

  “Why couldn’t it be a kidnapping that just went south? The girl died somehow, maybe they threw her in a trunk and she ran out of air. Something like that. She was dead, so of course they didn’t ask for ransom money.”

  “Why not?” asked Jury.

  “Because Ryder would have demanded some proof she was alive.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. It was worth a shot. It’s happened before.”

  “It just seems so unlikely, what you say, too dodgy.”

  “Life is dodgy.”

  Wiggins rolled his eyes. “And you a policeman, sir. You go on evidence.”

  Then the waitress was there, setting their plates before them along with two mugs of tea.

  Looking at Jury’s fry-up, Wiggins’s thoughts of the vanished girl vanished. “Sir, that food looks lethal.”

  Jury grinned. “This coming from a man who’s about to dig into a plate of waffles and sausage? In the nutrition arena, nobody here wins.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Even in January, its white fences glazed by the sun, Ryder Stud Farm looked rich and verdant. When it came into view round a curve, the house itself was a startling white. Off to the left was a wide pasture in which horses grazed the cold grass. Jury told Wiggins to stop. He got out and walked over to the fence. In another moment, Wiggins came to stand beside him and they both looked at the horses, two of which peeled away from the others, galloped across the meadow and then ran back again to the others.

  It was so fluid, thought Jury, so joyful. He recalled a poem by Philip Larkin, describing exactly what Jury was seeing, retired racehorses running for what looked like pure joy. Jury liked that.

  Then another horse, distant, had turned from the others. Jury shaded his eyes and said, “One of them’s coming our way. Do we have any binoculars?”

  “No. Have we ever had?”

  Jury returned his eyes to the pasture. Distant as the horses were he could see their grace and Jury rested his face in his hands. “Have you ever known anyone who hated horses? I haven’t. Dogs, yes; cats, yes; wolves, foxes, coyotes, cows-but horses?”

  Wiggins said, “I remember a cousin, one of them in Manchester, who went to a riding school, but could never catch on to it. She was always losing control, always taking spills, always the horse would start trotting away. I remember her complaining and complaining, but the thing was, she never blamed the horse. She thought it was her that was the problem, which it was, yes, but you know how people always want to think it’s something else, somebody else, never their own fault.”

  Jury nodded, his chin still propped in his hands. As they stood there, the horse, silvery in the sun, arrived at the fence and stood looking or waiting for them to do something interesting. “We should’ve picked up some sugar cubes in the Little Chef.” He ran his hand down the horse’s face. It seemed amazingly placid.

  “Nice horse,” said Wiggins. “Are they racehorses, then? Thoroughbreds?”

  “Some of them, certainly. I imagine this one is. He looks it. He looks a champion.”

  As if the horse perfectly understood him, it nodded. “Better go,” said Jury. “Ryder might be wondering where we are.”

  They left the fence and recommenced their drive toward the house. They were pulling up to the front door when Wiggins said, “Cows? I never knew anyone to hate cows. Where’d you get that?”

  The man who opened the door of the big white house was not Arthur Ryder. Still, he invited them in. “You’re Superintendent Jury? Arthur told me to be on the lookout.” He smiled. “I’m just a neighbor of Arthur’s. He’s seeing to one of his mares.”

  “Superintendent Jury and Detective Sergeant Wiggins,” said Wiggins, a trifle imperiously. “And you are?”

  “Roy Diamond. I’ve a farm a mile away.”

  Roy Diamond was a tall man-as tall as Jury-in a blue blazer with dull gold buttons imprinted with a figure Jury took to be horse related. Natty dresser. Natty life. He looked like that sort of person-privileged and no doubt rich. He also had that look of almost sinful health, as if he spent most of each day in the open air and probably followed the sun, possibly around the world. Jury made this swift and pleasant journey with him in his mind-Nice, Portofino, Corfu, Aruba, Barbados-in the few seconds it took Diamond to shift his gin and tonic to his left hand and jut out the now-free right. His smile was pleasant and his eyes a blue that could only be called crisp. They snapped.

  Jury shook his hand and hated him. He hated a lot of people these days, he found, except for those in his immediate circle. But he thought he could manage a special dislike of Roy Diamond. He glanced around the living room-at its dark wood, the chintz-covered chairs, a sofa covered in a sturdier material, low lamps softly diffusing light. Fire in the grate. The fallen petals of roses littered a low table behind the sofa. It was one of those rooms you step into and feel at home. No, more than that: feel it must have been, in a forgotten life, your home. Something like that feeling of déjà vu that Plant had mentioned, that flash of recognition.

  “Arthur tells me you’re with New Scotland Yard.”

  “That’s correct,” said Wiggins, who decided to sit down, even if neither of the others would. He took out his notebook. �
�You’re a neighbor, you say?”

  Roy Diamond smiled. “Well, out here, ‘neighbor’ can be miles away. But, yes, I own Highlander Stud. It’s that way.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. He didn’t appear to mind Wiggins’s taking down information about him. “Arthur tells me you’re interested in Nell Ryder. It was a terrible thing that happened to Nell.”

  Jury said, “ ‘Interested in’ isn’t exactly the way I’d put it.” He smiled a chilly smile. “I want to know what happened to her. What do you think?”

  The question, asked of him, seemed to surprise Diamond. “I?”

  “You must have asked yourself that question.”

  “Of course I did.” Diamond moved to a drinks cabinet and sloshed another finger of gin into his drink. “Oh, I’m sorry-would you like-?” He waved a hand over the collection of bottles.

  Jury shook his head. “Medication.”

  “Hm. Yes, I did ask myself. I imagine I thought pretty much the same as everyone else.” He stopped.

  “What did everyone else think?”

  Diamond gave Jury a look arrested somewhere between a half smile and a frown. “I get the feeling you’re baiting me, Superintendent.”

  Wiggins glanced up at Jury to find his expression, as often happened, completely unreadable.

  “I wouldn’t bait you. But what did you think about the girl’s disappearance?”

  “That she was being held for ransom.”

  “Yet I believe Mr. Ryder doesn’t have all that much available cash, no matter how wealthy he might be in terms of his holdings.”

  “That’s right. He’s got some of the best horses in the country. I bring some of my own mares here to be bred to his.” Roy Diamond studied his drink. “By now, I guess she’s dead, though I’d never say that to Arthur.”

  “You think he still holds out hope, then?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  It made Jury vaguely uncomfortable, as if he appeared to be hard-hearted. “I expect so.” Then it struck Jury that Roger, who wasn’t getting a mention, was seen as having the lesser interest in Nell’s fate. Perhaps it was simply because she had lived here with her grandfather.