“They covered all that pretty thoroughly,” said Wiggins, “when they took Valerie Hobbs into custody. Certainly went over it for prints.”
“I know,” said Jury. “I’ve seen the results. But I’m especially interested in the bed. They lifted prints from the bed frame and the head. But since it’s an old brass bed, it has metal bars. I don’t think they lifted any from the bars. It’s those I’m interested in, not just the single print, either; there should be an entire set”-Jury’s fingers moved as if they were locking around a bar-“and I think you’ll find them.”
That had been an hour ago.
Jury wished he had a cigarette; all he had was a pack of gum. He was standing with his back against the wall again (and recognizing the aptness of that metaphor), listening to Roy Diamond smoothly answering the questions of Barry Greene. Where was the man’s lawyer? Hadn’t Diamond said he wouldn’t answer any more questions without the solicitor’s being present? The man was so sure he could sidestep any trap that the police might set that he kept right on going.
“Billy Finn doesn’t know anything. He’s my best jockey. What has he allegedly done?”
“Allegedly,” said Greene, “abducted Nell Ryder twenty months ago and dropped her off at Hobbs stud.”
Diamond snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”
Jury excused himself.
Roy Diamond said again he would answer no more questions.
Detective Sergeant Styles, marginally less frosty toward Jury given the events of that afternoon, in response to Jury’s asking if he could speak to Billy Finn, turned up his hands and said, “If Greene says yes, be my guest. I’m getting sod-all from him. I’m going for a cuppa, me.” He left.
Jury had watched Billy Finn when they brought him in on the heels of Roy Diamond. He’d heard Billy being questioned. He did not himself think Billy had been the one to take Nell from the stable that May night.
Since he had no cigarettes, Jury offered Billy Finn a stick of gum. Billy took it.
“Look, Billy, no one in bloody hell could remember where he was on a night in May twenty months ago. I’m not setting any store by an alibi. The reason for pulling you in is that shirt, the silks, the colors of Diamond’s stables. Your silks being what Nell Ryder took a knife to.”
Billy half rose in protest. Jury waved him down. “I know-there are a half dozen jockeys who might have worn those colors over the time they rode for Diamond. It’s not necessarily the shirt itself. It’s the pattern, Billy. The diamond pattern that sent Nell ballistic. That must be what she remembered, what suddenly came into her mind. Now, there were two things she was sure of: that the person who took her was small and that he took her by way of those walls. You’re a flat racer, aren’t you, Billy?”
Billy nodded, intrigued in spite of himself, Jury’s manner having enough of a calming effect that he could forget why he was there long enough to be interested in the story.
“I think what we’re looking for is a jump jockey. Those walls aren’t easy; I don’t think a rider would choose those walls to get himself over unless he knew he was a damned good jumper.
“Strictly speaking, of course, the fellow doesn’t even have to be someone who rides for Diamond. It just seems more likely that it would be. To narrow it down even more, someone who is enough of a low-life to abduct a girl for pay, or someone who’s into Roy Diamond for a lot. Someone who owes him. You know what I mean.”
Billy nodded, chewing the gum furiously. “There’s a guy, a jockey, Trevor-what’s his last name? Trevor-bloody damn-he rode Dusty Answer in the Grand National last year. Trevor Gwyne, that’s it, Trevor Gwyne. Never did like him. He’s known for trying to unseat other riders; I think he was up before the Jockey Club a couple times and got suspended for a year. Anyway, I know Gwyne’s a gambler and I know Roy’s bailed him out a couple times. For big money. You may want to talk to him, right?”
Jury had been sitting on the table, close to Billy, and got up. “Absolutely. Thanks, Billy.”
“Listen, do I get to leave? Tonight, I mean?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I’ll have a word.”
At that, Billy almost relaxed.
Jury left the room and saw Wiggins coming down the hall. When he saw Jury, he waved whatever he was holding in his hand. “You were right.”
“In here, Wiggins.” They went into an empty room furnished like the others with table and folding chairs. Wiggins put down the fingerprint cards. “You were right; they hadn’t tried to lift prints from the metal bars. Here, these are Roy Diamond’s prints, and the configuration pretty obviously shows he grabbed on to the bar. Well, you can see here-” Wiggins pointed them out, though they needed no pointing, the prints of four fingers, the fourth, the pinky, slightly smudged. One under the other, clearly indicating the hand had been wrapped round the bar. The second shot was from a slightly different angle.
“They’re his, all right.”
There was no thumb print, but that was probably because the thumb would have overlapped the index finger when the hand wrapped the bar.
“This is good, Wiggins, very good.”
Barry Greene was coming out of the room where Roy Diamond still sat, telling the constable to go in. He then walked to where Jury stood. “Right bastard, that one is.”
Jury showed him the photos.
“Excellent. Of course you know what his solicitor will make of this lot.”
“Well, he’s not here yet and Diamond is so bloody sure of himself-it’s worth a try.”
They entered the room again and Greene told the PC he could leave. Then Greene spread the photos in front of Diamond. “It would appear, Roy, that you’d been getting up to something in this bed. Nell Ryder’s bed, I mean. But you remember, you must. In the throes of passion you grabbed on to the bars, apparently.”
Roy Diamond looked at the fingerprint cards and his complexion changed to mottled red, which slowly leaked out, leaving his face almost sheet white.
Gotcha! thought Jury.
Roy opened his mouth to say something just as the door seemed to spring open in its hurry to indulge the hand that pushed it.
A voice behind Jury said, “That’s all, folks. One more word and I’ll do my Woody Woodpecker impersonation.”
Roy Diamond’s solicitor came through the door looking as accommodating as razor wire.
Jury knew that voice. He turned to its source. It was Charly Moss. No!
Yes. “Superintendent Richard Jury! See? I remember.” The hand she held out to shake his was crisp and cold.
He took it in his warmer one. “Hello, Charly.”
“It’s been a long time. It’s been since that trial in Lincolnshire. Remember?”
As if he could forget.
But she looked at him as if he must have. “So.” Charly Moss slung her briefcase on the table, perhaps announcing her confidence in the knowledge that whatever she had was better than whatever they had. “Now.” She literally rolled up the sleeves of her copper-brown sweater, the exact shade of her hair. “How much to-and-froing has been going on here since my client requested an attorney?”
Greene said, “Very little.”
“That’s good. That means there’ll be very little which will be inadmissible as evidence, right?” She looked down. “Ah! Fingerprints! How unappreciated they will be.”
“But they’re-”
“Be quiet, Roy.” She gestured toward the pictures, cocked her head with a “please explain” expression.
“Your client,” said Barry Greene, “is being accused of kidnapping, rape and murder-just to name a few things.” He tapped one of the photos. “These belong to the rape charge.”
“I see.” Charly, who was still standing, bent over the picture. “Hm. The fatal bed, is that it?”
Jury said, trying to control his anger, “She would have found it so.” He shoved the photo of a dead Nell Ryder directly under her eyes and looked stonily at Charly Moss.
“This is terrible. The poor girl,” C
harly said, looking downcast.
Jury knew there was no reason to question her sincerity, but sincerity didn’t mix with the evidence in the case.
“Only, it doesn’t mean that Mr. Diamond here shared the bed. At least not with Nell Ryder. I can give you a couple of alternatives off the top of my head: he was in the bed at some point, perhaps by himself, perhaps with”-Charly pressed on the briefcase’s silver catches and it opened like a trap sprung. She pulled out a notebook and ran her finger down one page-“with the attractive Valerie Hobbs-”
Charly Moss had not breezed in unprepared.
“-or he could have been looking for something that dropped behind the mattress or the bed, reaching down-” She held one arm up, hand grabbing at an imaginary bar. “I could go on…”
Please don’t, thought Jury. A cold finger touched his spine.
Charly looked from Greene to Jury. “Is this your evidence, then?”
“Thus far, yes.” Greene said coolly. “We’re still gathering it. We have witnesses to this shooting, of course.”
“Of course. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to speak to my client.” She smiled.
Jury had been a sucker for that smile the first time he’d met her. One of his favorite memories was of Charly and Melrose sitting on stools in that pub in Lincoln singing a drunken duet. He himself hadn’t been in a good mood.
“I’ll be talking to you, then,” said Greene.
Jury said nothing.
Outside, Greene asked about her. He said, “She seemed to make you nervous, and I suspect that’s hard to do. Have you seen her in action, then?”
“To tell the truth, Barry, it’s not Charly Moss that worries me-not that she’s not capable of blindsiding us. What worries me is who she’s briefing.”
Barry Greene frowned: “The barrister, you mean?” Jury nodded.
Melrose was at first delighted. “Charly Moss! How-” The smile faded. “Oh, God. She’s not briefing Pete Apted, is she?”
They were sitting in the Bentley; Jury slid down in the seat. “I was afraid to ask.”
“It could be someone else, you know. It could be she’s taking this on her own. More and more solicitors are doing that these days. She’s certainly good enough.”
Jury shook his head.
“But look at it another way: you don’t know Apted would take the case. Indeed, you don’t even know she’ll recommend it. Lawyers aren’t all without conscience.”
“They aren’t?”
Melrose laughed and aimed the Bentley into the night traffic.
SIXTY-ONE
They buried her next to Maurice in a small churchyard a mile from the stud farm. Very few people attended beyond the family-George Davison, Neil Epp and several stable lads.
The funeral took place five days after Maurice’s and a week after Nell died, the delay caused by the autopsy required in the case of a violent death, or an unexplained death or a death by misadventure. Nell’s had certainly been by misadventure. Jury couldn’t abide the thought of the Ryder family having to wait longer than that, as if they would for days be staring down into an unfilled grave, existing in that limbo of grief that has no end in sight. The end of grief would always be out of sight, but at least the ritual would help to confine it.
The problem was that the police pathologist simply had too much on his plate to do the postmortem immediately. Jury asked Barry Greene if he could possibly allow him to bring in someone he knew from the MPD and Greene got that permission for him.
When Jury rang Dr. Nancy and explained the problem, he said, “Listen, I know it’s what you hear once a day-it’s too hard on the deceased’s relations to have to wait…”
“You’re right there, except I hear it twice a day.” She paused. Then she said, “With good cause.” She paused again. “I can be there tomorrow afternoon, say around four. Okay?”
“I can’t thank you enough-”
“It’s all right, Richard. I’m not all that busy.”
Which he knew was a total lie.
“But you can buy me a drink after.”
“Phyllis, I’ll buy you the pub.”
“Oh, good. I can quit my day job.”
Dr. Nancy arrived exactly when she said she would-four p.m. the next day. Phyllis Nancy was legendary for (among other things, such as her fiery hair) her promptness, a quality hard to find in the Met, simply because time couldn’t be dealt out the way it could in other walks of life. If Dr. Nancy said four, she was there by four. In the field of police work, understandably chaotic, she offered a sense of respite, even of sanctuary. She had once told Jury that years before she had shown up an hour late at a crime scene. The detective in charge had told her, when she was apologizing, “Hell, that’s all right, Doc. The dead can wait.” She had told him, “How would you know?”
They gathered-Jury, Barry Greene and Phyllis Nancy-in the cool room 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 R
yder.
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.”
The Grave Maurice Page 35