Jury had risen and returned to the buffet, looking under domes. “Where’re the mushrooms? They were right here-”
“That’s right. They were right there until you scraped the sauté pan clean with your little spoon.”
“Could you just ask Martha-?”
“For you Martha would slaughter a hog.”
And here she came with the teapot and a steaming silver dish, replacement for the one Jury was hanging around right now. “Mushrooms! I knew you’d be wanting more o’ my mushrooms!”
“You’re a lifesaver, Martha. That’s just what I was asking for.”
Pleased as punch, Martha walked out leaving Jury to spoon up the mushrooms.
“You’ve said nothing about the Ryders yet.”
“I know.” Jury brought his plate back to the table. “It’s not for lack of thinking about them.” He fell silent, turning his fork over and back and over again.
“Yes? Well? Think about them out loud then.”
Jury sat back. “Vernon Rice was there, too.”
“Ah! So you got them all at once.”
“I got them all at once, yes.” He picked up his teacup and held it out for a refill. “Also a chap who owns Highlander Stud named Roy Diamond.”
“I didn’t meet him.” Melrose felt irrationally cheated. “And? What did you think of them? There seems to be an undercurrent here that I can’t plumb.” Melrose poured the tea and, when Jury didn’t answer, said, “What?”
“Vernon Rice-” Jury heard an acerbity in his tone that he had wanted to keep out of it.
“It already sounds as if you don’t much like him. I do.”
“I know you do. But you spent a long time with him and by himself. I mean, out from under the Ryder Stud influence.”
“ ‘Influence’?” Melrose gave a short bark of laughter. “Rice doesn’t strike me as the type to be influenced by anyone.” Melrose thought for a moment. “Unless you mean Nell Ryder?”
“Of course.”
“But that isn’t exactly ‘under the influence of.’ That’s more that he simply cares about her.”
“Try ‘loves.’ ”
“Yes, I suppose-”
“As ‘in’ with.”
“Are you saying-? But look here, she was only fifteen.”
“Poe’s cousin was only fourteen.”
Melrose gave that laugh again. “Ye gods, that’s Poe.”
“His behavior was aberrant, you mean?”
Melrose scratched his neck, confused with feeling. “No, I expect not. I mean, back in Poe’s time it wasn’t all that unusual to marry a young girl. Virginia, her name was.” It came back to Melrose in a little flood of what he supposed was Proustian involuntary memory. Baltimore-Poe’s house, the little rooms, and the passion of the curator in defending Poe against his detractors, the plagiarized manuscript, the vulgarity of its perpetrator.
“You look unhappy.”
“The curator of the Poe house recited the end of a poem, something about a cloud that took the form ‘of a demon in my view.’ Melrose gave a self-conscious shrug. “I was just remembering…”
“No wonder,” said Jury.
“You were in Ryder’s office, weren’t you? You saw the photos. Weren’t you struck?”
“I was definitely struck.” Jury drank his tea.
Melrose nodded. Then he said, “Aren’t you finished? I want you to see my horse.”
“That sounds a treat,” said Jury, shoveling in some more mushrooms.
“There’s nothing to it,” Melrose said suavely.
“Of course, there’s something to it,” said Jury, “and I haven’t got it.”
“But he likes you. I can tell.”
“Now just how do you make that out?”
“Look, he’s trying to nudge you.”
“To get another apple, that’s why.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t give him any more. He might get sick.”
Just then Momaday lurched up behind them. He was wearing the long cowboy coat Melrose had given him for Christmas, thereby feeding Momaday’s image of himself as hunter, rancher, rustler, sheriff and a lot of other things that fit the myth of the Old West that Momaday wasn’t. But it had him slapping that rifle into play, aiming and shooting and if he hit anything it was by sheer accident-that same Momaday had come up behind the two and barked an order: “Don’t you be feedin’ that horse apples!”
Both Melrose and Jury jumped as if they’d been found out by Aunt Polly and exchanged a look.
“Just one.”
“One, that’s right.”
They had taken turns and fed him four.
Melrose changed the subject. “I was just telling Superintendent Jury here that he should get up on Aggrieved and go for a ride.”
Momaday made a lengthy snuffling noise, his version of a laugh, and within and around this said to Jury, “Oh, you shoulda been here t’other day to see Mr. Plant, here (none of that ‘Lord Ardry’ and ‘m’ lord’ nonsense from Momaday, never fear!) up on Aggrieved and trying to dismount”-snuffle, snuffle-“and t’ fall clear off t’ other side!” Laughing fit to kill, Momaday walked off, gun broken over his arm.
Jury looked at Melrose. “Nothing to it, right?”
THIRTY-ONE
“You ate seven sausages. I counted. You ate more sausages than Aggrieved ate apples.”
They were strolling through the village. Jury stopped in front of Betty Ball’s bakery, where he expressed an interest in the pumpkin muffins on display in the bakery’s window.
“Seven sausages. You couldn’t possibly eat a muffin. They’re left over from Halloween, anyway.”
Jury reached in his coat pocket and drew out an amber vile containing some white pills. “Dimerin and sausages, the doctor’s orders.”
“Well, you don’t need a muffin.” He pulled on Jury’s coat.
They crossed the narrow bridge that spanned the equally small and narrow river and Jury stopped and regarded the small green and its pond. It was as if the scene were miniaturized, like the miniature Bourton-on-the-Water where a Lilliputian copy of the village itself was kept on display. He looked off to the left at the largest house in the village. Vivian Rivington’s. If he took his emotional temperature, his Vivian temperature right now, he wondered what it would read. But you can’t do that, can you? For the real indicator is that surprise appearance, that sudden turning and seeing a woman walk through a door, or seeing her sitting on that bench. It’s the only thing that makes the mercury spike, the only gauge. He could still see her as he’d done the first time when she’d appeared before him, recall her embarrassed look, her fingers fussing with the hem of a brown jumper. What in God’s name was he up to, always falling in love at first sight?
There was only a ruff of snow round the pond like a collar of icing on a cake. It would soon melt away. Back then the entire green had been carpeted in snow.
“What are you doing?” said Melrose. “By the time we get to the Jack and Hammer it’ll be closed again. We don’t keep London hours here. Well, maybe we could, but Dick Scroggs won’t keep them.”
They started walking again. “I was just thinking about the first time I came here.”
“Few things are more dangerous than that.”
They were walking along Long Piddleton’s main street now. “What do you mean, dangerous?” asked Jury.
“We make these minute revisions, look at it from a slightly different angle: that pond, that bench there or not, whatever it was that made it more desirable, its loss more bitter. Memory’s plague causes unnecessary suffering.”
Jury stopped short. “What in hell are you talking about? When did you start finding memory so finely nuanced?”
Melrose pursed his lips. “Since I saw it might get us from the green to the Jack and Hammer without your stopping and gawking every two minutes. And”-he spread his arms-“here we are!”
And here they were, too, still having misgivings about Jury’s survival, so that to see him walk in was a real
thrill.
“I quite liked that other case,” said Diane to Jury, “except, of course, for that shooting at the end of it. Anyway, I’m not one to talk. I hit Melrose’s vodka. His last bottle, I might add.”
Melrose asked Jury, “Can I tell them about the vanished girl?”
“Go ahead. It’s not a Scotland Yard matter. It isn’t really a case.”
“Okay.” He turned to an audience already turned to him as if he had brought a lifesaving draft. “This all happened when I was in the Grave Maurice-”
“Where’s that?” asked Trueblood.
“A pub across the street from the Royal London Hospital.”
“Ah, that’s where Superintendent Jury was,” said Diane. “I remember sending a wreath of roses.”
“Are you going to keep interrupting?”
No one spoke.
Melrose told them about the vanished girl.
At the end of this brief account, Vivian Rivington, with Agatha behind her, appeared in the sun-splashed doorway of the Jack and Hammer like a ray of hope, a thing Jury had given up on, lying on that dock in the dark. He could still see the stars in that implacable night sky. He smiled. It was hard to give up on Vivian. He wondered if her Italian count was gone for good.
“Richard!”
Her look was a mixture of wonder and relief. Perhaps she wouldn’t believe he was alive until she saw him. “Hello, Vivian.” He went to meet her and gave her a kiss on the cheek that she didn’t seem to know what to do with. Then, suddenly, she threw her arms around him. He returned this heartfelt hug.
Diana, seeing her glass was empty, handed it off to Dick for another.
Trueblood then raised his. “To your long and happy life, Superintendent.”
Diane said, “I could have warned you that night was fraught with danger.”
“Oh, it was fraught all right. So why didn’t you? Warn me, I mean?”
“You didn’t ask me, did you?”
Jury laughed. “I guess I didn’t.”
“The stars! The stars!” proclaimed Agatha, as if she were finished with their wastrel ways.
“How are you, Lady Ardry?” Jury reached his hand across the table to clasp hers.
Put out by Melrose’s adamant direction that she was not to turn up at Ardry End this morning, she waggled her finger at Jury. “You cheated me out of my morning coffee, Superintendent.”
“So here you are having your morning whiskey,” said Melrose.
She tried to numb him with a look and, as usual, failed.
Eagerly, Joanna said to Jury, “Tell us, tell us! This boy and his dog-”
Jury smiled. “It should be the dog and his boy. That’s one damned smart dog. I was lying there for what was probably only a few minutes, but felt a lifetime-”
Agatha butted in to stall the story, annoyed she hadn’t heard this account before the others over morning coffee. “And did your whole life pass before you?”
“No,” he lied, not wanting to talk about it.
Joanna leaned toward Jury. “What was it like, nearly dying?”
Jury wanted to say terrifying; he had wanted to be terrified. Instead, what he had felt was the lure of the dark. He wondered how it was that inconsequential things came back to one at such moments. Because, he reasoned, they weren’t inconsequential. He looked up to see five pairs of eyes, expectant.
“Terrified,” he said.
“This case you’re working on,” said Diane.
“It’s not a case. It’s not my case, certainly.”
“Never mind. I’ve got a theory.”
“Oh, good,” said Melrose. “Scotland Yard can go back to bed.”
Diane plowed on. “This girl that’s gone missing probably went off with her boyfriend, who’d told her they’d get married and when he just up and left her, she was too ashamed to go back home. It’s not the leaving that’s significant. It’s the not coming back.”
They all looked at her. Trueblood said, “Diane, that’s one of the most Victorian scenarios I’ve ever heard.”
“It sounds,” said Joanna, “like one of mine.”
“At this point,” said Jury, “it’s as good as any other.” He smiled at her.
“Then what’s your theory?” asked Diane. “White slavery?”
Trueblood said, “Aren’t we ignoring the most obvious explanation? She’s dead. It’s the only thing that makes sense. There was no ransom demand because she’s dead, maybe an accident, something the abductors didn’t intend-” He shrugged away the rest of the scene.
“She’s not dead.” Jury said it before he could stop himself.
Several pairs of eyes regarded him.
“How is it,” asked Melrose, “you’re so sure of that?” Jury picked up his beer. He didn’t answer.
“I like your idea of recuperating,” said Melrose.
“I’m not doing the driving. I’m just sitting here, enjoying the scenery.”
“We’re on the M1. There isn’t any scenery.”
Jury slid a few inches down in his seat. “I love this car.”
“You can’t have it.”
“While I’m talking to Vernon Rice, where are you going to be?”
“Oh, I’ll ‘hang’ as they say in the Grave Maurice. Unless you want me to come with you?” His tone was hopeful.
“No. You’ve already talked to him. Both of us would be intimidating. Anyway, he doesn’t know you know me.”
“Of course he does. He’s Roger Ryder’s stepbrother.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know we have any working relationship. As far as Rice is concerned, you’re just some aristocratic oddball.”
“Thanks. Just remember, I had lunch with him. I mean we had quite a good conversation going.” He shook his head. “I just don’t get it that you don’t like him.”
“I didn’t say that. Did I say that?”
“Oh, don’t be as thick as two posts. You know you don’t like him. But there’s one thing you have in common.”
“What?”
“You don’t believe Nell Ryder’s dead.”
THIRTY-TWO
Jury sat on Vernon Rice’s sofa and understood what Melrose had meant. It was slimmed-down, pared-down luxury. The furniture was Italian or German or both, the colors muted, the lines clean. The chair he sat in, although its angles had looked forbidding, was superbly comfortable. He decided he preferred his own ramshackle flat with its Early Oxfam appointments, which was just as well, since he wasn’t getting this one.
Of course it overlooked the Thames, one of those breath-taking views estate agents were always advertising that usually turned out to be a small slice of the river if you held your head in a certain way. But this view answered all of the demands of “breathtaking.” Right now the descending sun turned the pocked surface of the Thames to hammered gold.
Jury’s dislike (he had lied to Melrose) of Vernon Rice only increased in these sumptuous surroundings (childish, but he didn’t care; he let it increase), these proofs of the man’s success. “Thank you,” he murmured as Rice handed him an espresso.
“You sure you wouldn’t like a drink? I’ve got some really good whiskey.”
Jury thought, I’ll bet. I’ll bet it’s a million years old. “Oh, no thanks. Coffee’s fine.”
“Something wrong, Superintendent? You look a little, uh, disgruntled.” Vernon smiled.
So did Jury, trying to beat him to it, not succeeding. “Sorry, but I guess it’s just spillover from the hospital. Too much nursing.”
“Too much shooting, maybe.”
Jury looked at him and could detect nothing but empathy. “That’s nearer the mark, yes.”
“It sounds as if it were more than just a close call.”
“How do you-?”
“The dailies, Mr. Jury. The newspapers were full of it.
Don’t tell me they weren’t all over you in hospital the moment you woke up.”
“They weren’t. That must have been Dr. Ryder’s doing.”
&n
bsp; Jury could remember very little of the first day-and possibly of the second or third. All he wanted was sleep, from which he awoke at one point to see Carole-anne framed in the window lighted by the sun, her red-gold hair on fire, and thought he was in heaven.
Insofar as police, hospital personnel and visitors went he had shut down his mind. It was as simple as that. He wanted no more than the sketchiest outline, the bare bones of what had happened. He wanted none of that pas trop vite Proustian precision. Leave out as much as possible, otherwise, he was afraid he’d tank.
“But of course they didn’t know the rest of the story-”
(Was Vernon Rice a mind reader now?)
“-the papers never do; they make up what they want.”
For the first time, more so even than in hospital, Jury felt like an invalid. His hand had shaken slightly returning his empty cup to the table. But not slight enough to prevent Rice from seeing it.
Jury said, “I want to talk to you about Nell Ryder’s disappearance. I couldn’t make out when I was at the farm whether you said you believed she was still alive because of her grandfather’s feelings, or if you really-”
“Believe it? I believe it, yes.”
Jury could sense Rice’s desperation. He wanted everyone who’d known Nell Ryder to believe it; he wanted someone else’s confirmation.
“What do you think of her father?”
“Roger’s a good father, I know, even though he does have to spend most of his time in London. He goes to the farm almost every weekend, Arthur says.”
“And his brother?”
“Danny was much different. He was a great jockey, but in other ways-” Vernon shrugged. “He had his addictions-gambling, women-not drink or drugs, though, which was probably because he had to keep his weight in line and his mind clear. But women-lots of women. I know a couple of husbands who weren’t too happy with him. I think he broke up a marriage here and there. It’s strange, you know, because you can’t tell that just looking at his picture. But I’ll tell you, one blink, a woman would be all over him.”
“Did you know any of these women?”
“No-yes. I forgot the one I did some investing for. Sara… Sara-Hunt. Actually, she’s some distant relation of the Ryders. I drove her out to Arthur’s one Sunday. Wait a minute and I can give you her address. I don’t know that she was actually involved with Dan.” He shrugged. “Still, I always got the impression that for a woman, to see Danny race was to be involved.”
The Grave Maurice Page 18