Jury nodded. “It does. Did you know her?”
“No. Wales is a long way from Cambridgeshire. I’m one of the Ryders merely by dint of an aunt once removed. I’m some kind of stepcousin.”
“Obviously, you like racing.”
“Yes. I go whenever I get the chance. A friend invited me to the Cheltenham Gold Cup.”
He thought for a moment. “Then you didn’t have any interaction with Dan Ryder? That seems strange given you know these races so well.”
She laughed. “That’s the point: I went to see the Derby, not Dan Ryder. I recall it so well because it was so dramatic. I didn’t know Dan, as I said before. Twice.”
Jury smiled. “Sorry.”
She made to rise. “Would you like some coffee, Superintendent?”
“I would. Thanks.” It was less a desire for coffee than it was to have her leave the room so he could look around.
The room’s emanations-oh, surely, that had been his imagination?-coupled perhaps with the size of the house and its empty lower rooms-disturbed him. Or perhaps she did. Well, he knew she did, that was the pathetic truth. But what had her eyes been trained on during that look over his shoulder? He crossed to the sofa and sat where she had sat. There was nothing behind his now-imaginary shoulder but the high Gothic window, out of which he could see a figure draped in cloth, the stone folds of which hid her almost entirely. He went to this window and looked out on a sadly neglected garden, which no amount of nurturing sun or rain would restore to what it had been.
Houses such as this troubled Jury. Not because of their being neglected, but because of the presence of the past. What must it be like to be the last member of a family who had once lived here? Why did she live here alone? Wales was always touted as a land of great natural beauty. Why, then, did the distant mountains, the rocky land, the deserted garden strike Jury as harrowed and precipitate? Whoever found beauty here must like her beauty dangerous. He was still looking out at the mountains beyond and the blank day when he heard her footsteps advancing, and, turning, almost expected to see not Sara, but someone else.
Over the tray with the coffee service, she gave him a fleeting smile, one fled in an instant along with his rational self. He felt enveloped by pure feeling. The sensation passed and he was sorry to see it go.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, no. Here, let me help you with that.”
She had stopped with the heavy silver tray carrying a sadly tarnished silver coffeepot and china cups. But before he reached her, she set it down on a side table. “That’s all right; it’s lighter than it looks.” She poured strong black coffee into a cup. “Cream? Sugar?” she asked.
“Neither.”
“Black is the only way to drink coffee, I think.”
“And strong,” he said, taking the cup she held out. He sat down again as she reclaimed her seat on the sofa.
She said, “I read about the death of that woman on the Ryder course. That is so strange. Arthur Ryder’s an unlucky man.”
“I doubt luck has much to do with it. Did you have any idea at all about that shooting?”
“I? Why, no. I told you I barely know the Ryders.”
Jury sat back with his cup. “But you know his stepson, Vernon Rice.”
Surprisingly, she smiled. “Ah, yes. I do know him, yes. He handled some investments for me.”
“You like him, to judge from your smile.”
She laughed. “It’s just that he was so utterly friendly. He was beguiling, really. And the investments paid off handsomely.”
“You trust Vernon Rice?”
She looked bewildered. “Yes, of course.”
Jury smiled. “That ‘of course’ implies that anyone would.”
“What are you saying? Vernon is some sort of con man?”
“No, not at all.”
They were silent for a moment, drinking their coffee, aware of each other’s presence. Then Jury said, “Dan Ryder was, as I understand it, quite a ladies’ man.” He felt the phrase to be old-fashioned and a little silly now.
She looked up from her coffee. “I don’t-” She stopped. “I don’t know if he was.”
“I understand he had a number of affairs and broke up more than one marriage.” Jury rose and moved again to the fireplace, where he picked up the snapshot of the winner’s circle at Newmarket races. “Very charismatic, from what I’ve heard. Do you think so?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“But you found him attractive?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m just curious.” He laughed a little. “As a man, I mean. I wonder what exactly a woman finds attractive.” He looked at her, holding her glance, which he suspected wanted to run away. “I’ve seen photographs of him at the Ryder place and he doesn’t strike me as all that, well, alluring, you could say. What exactly did you respond to? Or perhaps it wasn’t his looks. His manner? His touch?”
She sat for a few moments, her face expressionless. Then she said, “But then, you’re a man, aren’t you?” Suddenly she rose, looking stricken and pale, as if she’d just received a report of a death. Picking up the silver cream pitcher, she said, “I think this cream has gone off. Excuse me.”
Jury watched her leave. But we don’t use cream.
He took his cup and returned to the window and its view of the distant mountains.
When she returned with the cream, she had clearly collected herself. “I was about to go for a walk when you came. Would you mind? I mean, we could talk while walking, couldn’t we?”
As she stood there with the little cream jug that no one had needed, Jury felt her anxiety and would almost have taken back what he’d asked her. She was still in love with Danny Ryder and desperate to keep the attachment hidden.
They gathered up coats, he helping her on with hers, and left the house. A walk had not been her aim. Getting rid of him probably had been. If she’d lied about her involvement with Ryder, she might have lied about other things.
Still, he could feel her need not to drag him from whatever corner of her mind she’d banished him to. What surprised Jury was that she still harbored these feelings after several years. Then he thought, how banal. Feelings, he well knew, could last a lifetime. Anyone who thought time healed all wounds must have sustained only the most minor lacerations.
Their walk in the grounds led them around the dry pool, filled now with shriveled leaves. In the center was a stone figure, a woman pouring what perhaps in a warmer month would be water, a circle of fish with incongruous, open mouths below her.
“Like a lot of things here,” she said, “the fountain doesn’t work.” Her glance canvassed the desolate gardens. “I’m not truly neglectful; I get some boys in from the village to care for it in the spring.”
“I didn’t think you were-neglectful, I mean.”
She turned, her hand bunching the collar of her coat more closely around the neck. “Then what? What in the world do you think I am, for you obviously have reservations about me?”
“Amorous.”
Her hand dropped away from her collar. She laughed. “Whatever makes you say that?”
“That’s why you live here alone, isn’t it? In exile, you could say. Better that than a broken heart. Too much feeling, that’s what keeps you here.”
It was as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard. Her mouth opened, closed again.
“Much safer,” he added. “Much.” He looked into her brown eyes and a thread of green outlining the iris. Then at her soft mouth. He started walking again.
But she just stood.
He turned round and smiled. “Come on; it’s too cold for standing still.” He held out his hand, which was warm. She walked a few paces and put her own, which was cold, in his.
“Is this peculiar talk about my amorousness-is it to trick me into something? Some admission of guilt?”
“Of what?” He stopped and looked at her.
She laughed. “Oh, I see, no trickery involved in this di
scussion.”
“No.”
“You must be very good at getting suspects to confide in you.”
“Not particularly. How long have you lived here?”
She hesitated, wondering, probably, if the question was loaded. “Since my divorce four years ago.”
“It must have been painful then to drive you here.”
Again she stopped and looked up at him, slowly shaking her head. “You really are clever. You could just ask me why I divorced my husband. I found his temper impossible to take, eventually. The divorce was acrimonious, to say the least. He liked cars, to race fast cars. I always thought that was a little, I don’t know, adolescent.”
“That’s too bad. It’s too bad about the way things start out and the way they end up.”
They were walking by the disconcerting statue of the woman draped in folds of granite cloth. One could see nothing of the figure but an arm extended.
“Why did the sculptor hide all of her body except for that arm? Why is she so totally draped?” Jury asked.
“I don’t know. My parents-or grandparents-put her there.”
“Why do we assume the figure is a woman?”
“Yes, you’re right. But no one has ever thought that it wasn’t.”
“It could as easily be, oh, Judas, suffering from the remorse of betrayal.”
For a minute she was silent, watching the statue as if she expected the figure to turn its face to her and explain. “Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to imagine a man in that state.”
“Come on! Are you suggesting men don’t suffer that much?”
“It’s been my experience they don’t.”
They were walking again, this time to the rear of the house. “Your experience, then, must be limited to rather shallow men.”
She nodded. “I think that might be the case.”
“Was your husband?”
They were walking around the ruins of the old garden, now primula-sick and celandine-choked. The garden had once been meticulously laid out, paths crossing and bisecting the plants and trees. He could see the blueprint.
“It isn’t,” she said, “Sissinghurst, is it?”
“Oh, but that’s such an institutional garden. In the spring when those ‘boys from town’ come, after that it will be much prettier because it’s more private. I’ve never really been bowled over by those stately home gardens.”
“My father tried to start a vineyard, if you can imagine. Like the marquess of Bute? It didn’t work. Something about the soil’s lacking lime, or loam. I don’t know. But I have a hard time imagining Welsh wine, don’t you?”
He laughed. “Yes. I wonder what he’d have called it.”
They came round again in sight of the statue, which could be seen from their point on the path. “What would make you that unhappy?” said Sara.
He looked at the heavily draped figure. The burden of statuesque grief disturbed him and he looked away. He said, “Same thing that made her, I’d say.”
High above them, from the bare branches of a hazelnut, a crow careened off, circled once, then again before it wheeled away through the darkening sky.
Jury asked, “Do you ever feel a presence-I don’t know how else to say it-in this house?”
“Ghosts, you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean.”
“Let me tell you something: my parents were very much interested in the spirit world. They called in a medium, a rather famous and well-respected one. When she fell into her trance, she remarked on a presence-yes, that was her word-and she described it as being full of longing, of yearning. As she was leaving, my mother and father asked about this presence or ghost. They said they’d never seen it or felt it. I was standing there as she drew on a black cape. She smiled ever so slightly and answered, ‘You wouldn’t.’ ”
“Ah! I like that story.”
“You can imagine how much attention I paid to her.” Jury paused. “Maybe you should have.”
Her look, when he said this, was not at him, but behind him. She smiled and said, “Because of the presence.”
“And other things.”
They were walking now down some stone steps to what looked like a sunken garden. “I’ve often wondered,” Jury said, stopping to look directly at her, “about the roots of obsession.”
“And I am supposed to tell you? You think I know?”
“Possibly, yes.”
The strained smile did not leave her lips. “Why on earth do you think that? Tell me, for I’d really like to know.”
“Say a hunch.”
“A hunch. Is that the way you solve your cases, Superintendent?”
At this point Jury felt he knew her well enough to let her drift away onto another topic.
“I’m confused,” she said. “Just what exactly are you investigating? The murder of the woman found at Ryder Stud?”
The question was merely a cover for anxiety or even panic. He didn’t answer.
He cupped her elbow with his hand and said, “Let’s walk.”
“But you’re not here officially. It’s not your case, you said.”
“That’s right.”
“Then why, good Lord, are you here?”
“Because it disturbs me. Greatly. Not knowing if the girl’s dead or alive.”
“I should think that of course she’s dead. She’s been missing for nearly two years.”
She had pulled a cigarette out from a pack in her coat pocket and Jury stopped to light it. They were standing by a small formal garden and a square pool, dry, as was everything else. The garden backed up against a limestone retaining wall.
“This must have been beautiful once,” Jury said. He looked off beyond the pool, where a dark wooden doorway stood at the end of a path lined with beeches. “What’s behind the door?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve never tried it?”
“I tried it, but it’s hopelessly stuck. That doesn’t bother me, though. It adds a bit of mystery to the place.” She looked at him. “Oh, go on and try it; it won’t budge, but I can see you want to. It’s your job, after all, to clear up mysteries.”
He left her standing by the pool and walked down the path. The door was very heavy and black with age, the handle and hinges rusted nearly through. They didn’t look as if they could hold anything together. Jury put his shoulder to the door, but there wasn’t so much as a micro-inch moved. Nothing gave, nothing cracked. He tried again, twice.
She called to him, “Didn’t I tell you?”
He made his way back to where she stood. She said, “It would take a battering ram to unhinge that door.”
“It’s already unhinged. It’s not the hinges that are holding it.”
“Then what?”
Jury shrugged. He watched her grind out her cigarette on one of the pond’s abutments and put the stub in her pocket.
“You’re determined to leave this place as it is, aren’t you?”
“That sounds like an accusation. Why do you say that?”
“Well, aside from the general malaise of the grounds-grounds you won’t tend or have tended only erratically- there’s the way you put out that cigarette. Practically anyone else would have dropped it on the ground and crushed it. But you even put the butt in your pocket.”
Wide-eyed, she shook her head slowly. “Are you always finding big things inside small ones?”
They were rounding the other side of the house when she said, “I must say it’s good of you to give over your time to a case that’s not even yours.”
“I’m on leave; it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sure it matters a great deal to them.” She paused. “But I can’t really understand Vernon Rice mentioning me.”
“He thought you might know more about Dan Ryder. I’m having the devil’s own time pulling together a picture of him. Family members are often mistaken about one another.”
“I see. Look, why don’t you stay for dinner? It’s lamb.”
&nbs
p; Jury smiled. “Thanks, but I’ll need to be getting back to London. A drink would be nice, though.”
She gave him a whiskey and excused herself to look into how the lamb was doing and to fix up some sort of drink food.
He sat with his whiskey, sipping it and looking round the room. The air stirred. To throw off (but should he?) the weight of this feeling, he rose and began a circuit of the room. He stopped to look again at the pictures on the mantel and touched the lusters on one of the candleholders, which started up a glassy tinkle. He moved past sideboard and chest to a kneehole desk in the corner. French, he thought, because of its delicacy. The lightness and airiness of French furniture always made him feel he could pick it up with two fingers. The sides and front were inlaid with a delicate design of birds and flowers; the writing surface was of green hide. Beside a pen holder sat a mirrored picture frame, the subject here a dark-haired man, squinting slightly against too-strong light. Around his neck was a striped scarf and what looked like goggles. And that was a clue to who he was: Sara Hunt’s ex-husband.
Jury looked at the picture, wondering why she would keep a photograph prominently displayed of a husband she had divorced, certainly not on the best of terms. He slipped out the dark brown moiré backing and removed first a piece of flimsy cardboard needed to keep the picture in place, and then another photograph.
Dan Ryder. Hardly difficult to recognize from seeing the wall of photographs in his father’s office. What occurred to Jury at that moment was not that Sara had been lying to him-he knew she’d been lying-but that the act of hiding the picture behind another picture was so adolescent it made him smile. A rather ill-concealed trick that anyone could sort out. Or was it? Was it instead a sign that she was determined to keep him, that she wouldn’t be budged? He replaced both photos and the backing and set the frame, carefully, where it had been. There was a small key with a tassel inserted in the single desk drawer. He turned it, pulled the drawer out and found, among the pencils and papers, more snapshots. There were a few of Sara herself, a few more, no doubt taken at the same racecourses as the pictures on the mantel, showing Sara standing in the background of the winner’s circle. Dan Ryder was up on Criminal Type in two of them. At the bottom was a four-by-six enlargement of Dan by himself. He took this one, one of Sara and one of the winner’s circle and slipped them in his pocket when he heard her approaching footsteps and her voice, already apologizing.
The Grave Maurice Page 21