The Grave Maurice

THIRTY-FOUR

They stood staring at each other for some moments. They stood staring at each other for some moments. Vernon was afraid to move in case the image shattered. But no lightning spiked, no thunder boomed, and he moved so quickly toward her he could not remember crossing the room. The cold rain saturating her clothes became his cold rain.

“Nellie.” Arms around her, Vernon said it again.

As if in getting him wet, she realized she herself was soaking wet, she asked Vernon if there was anything around that she could wear. Her wet clothes had been discarded and she had wrapped herself up in Vernon’s bath-robe; Samantha, having returned with the food Vernon didn’t eat, had then been dispatched to buy Nell new clothes-jeans, shirt and wool jacket. And boots. Hers would never dry in time. “In time for what?” Nell asked.

“Dinner.”

In between the wet clothes and the dry ones, Nell told Vernon the story.

He listened for half an hour, interrupting the flow of her talk only once to get her a blanket because she had shivered. He kept clothes and blankets in his office because he sometimes slept there.

With the blanket tucked about her, she went on. “I should have run away after Valerie finally let me out of my room.”

“This is the Hobbs woman?”

Nell nodded. “I should have left them; I should have run.”

“Nell”-he put a hand on her arm-“forget ‘should.’ You did what you thought was right. That’s enough. Go on.”

She told him about the imprisoned mares. “It’s-I can’t think of any words to describe it. But I suppose just stating the facts describes it, doesn’t it?”

Vernon asked, “This guy who grabbed you in the barn that night-why did he? Do you know?”

Nell looked toward the window, thinking. She did not want to turn his attention to the man and the pitch-black room. She knew it would overwhelm the rest. “I don’t know, I honestly don’t. The first thing he did was to spray something in my eyes. I couldn’t see.”

“You couldn’t identify him, then?”

She shook her head. “I know he was short and wiry from having to sit in front of him. He could’ve been a jockey, for that matter. He was certainly a good rider. As far as I know, I didn’t see him again. I don’t think he was one of the men who worked for Valerie Hobbs.”

Vernon looked at her. “It was you,” said Vernon. “The anonymous tip to the police.”

“Yes. Who was that woman? I never saw her before.”

“Neither had anyone else. She was Dan Ryder’s wife. Widow, I mean. Police traced her back to Paris.”

“That’s-” She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do we. Arthur’d never seen her. Have you called him? Does he know you’re back? Does your father?”

“No. Not yet. Please don’t tell anyone.”

Her look was so beseeching he wouldn’t have told whatever she didn’t want told to whomever she didn’t want it told.

“Do you have any idea how much they… sorry.” He realized he’d be laying a guilt trip on her. “Of course you have.”

“It’ll only be another few days. We can get the mares out, can’t we?”

“One way or another. Yes, I can certainly try. Valerie Hobbs. That’s the owner, as far as you could tell?”

“I’m not sure; I think she was. There were a number of others, men. I didn’t get to talk much to them. I mean, they weren’t supposed to talk to me. One of them did; he was pretty nice. Bosworth.”

Vernon was up and pacing from sofa to window. The rain had stopped: the dome of St. Paul’s seemed to shine, rain washed or light washed.

Nell went on. “I don’t think this Valerie Hobbs was the-what do you call it?-instigator.”

He turned and smiled. “The perp? Perpetrator?”

“Yes. I think she was in someone else’s pay.”

“The bastard who grabbed you?”

She shook her head. The one who’d abducted her was not the one who’d paid repeated visits to her room in the night. “I never saw him again.”

Vernon sat down beside her. “Nell, can you think of any reason someone would think you’re a danger to them?”

“Not beyond his assuming I saw him-”

Samantha walked in with several Fortnum’s boxes. She set them beside Nell, saying, “It’s the only dependable place to shop.”

Nell thanked Samantha, thanked both of them, for going to all this trouble.

“Trouble?” said Vernon. “Is there a woman alive who’d rather type than shop? She enjoyed doing it.”

Samantha stuck out her tongue. She enjoyed doing that, too.

The boxes open, Nell pulled out a white silk shirt, Calvin Klein jeans, a blue and brown Harris tweed jacket and a black velvet skirt. Nell pronounced them all beautiful. “I’ll get dressed.”

“Good. We’ll go to dinner.”

Samantha asked, “Where, Aubergine? Did you make a reservation?”

“No, but I’ve got the maître d’ in a hedge fund that’s making him enough money he can retire. He’s thirty-one, so he’s pleased.” To Nell he said, “Had you planned on overnight digs? You can stay with me. I’ve got three bedrooms and I’m your stepbrother.” He smiled.

“Oh, my,” said Samantha. “I can see a clever defense attorney mounting that as an argument against the possibility of sexual misconduct.” She said to Nell, “Listen, don’t worry on that score. He’s about as romantic as a rise in interest rates.”

“You’d know, would you?”

Samantha laughed, said good night and headed for the door. Vernon watched her go, smiling. She really was worth her weight in gold securities.

THIRTY-FIVE

Vernon poured himself a finger of whiskey and went over to the mirror, waiting for Nell. In the time she’d been here, a gloomy afternoon had changed to an iridescent evening. The lights of streets and buildings and houses glittered; St. Paul’s dome was bathed in moonlight, and he wondered, How could a day that started as woefully as this one end up the way it had?

“Everything fits,” said Nell behind him, adjusting items that needed none, buttoning a button on the Harris tweed jacket and then unbuttoning it, the same with the white silk blouse. “Even the shoes.” She held up a foot. She smiled. Actually, she beamed.

To Vernon she looked not only happy but also gorgeous. “Perfect” was all he said.

“I’ll bet this is a good restaurant.”

“Would I take you anywhere else?”

“No. But there’s probably a dress code.” She looked unsophisticated and uncertain.

“They always hand me a tie at the door. Listen, if the cut of that coat can’t get you in, we don’t want to go. Come on.”

The maître d’ at Aubergine raised no question of coat or tie. He wouldn’t consider questioning Vernon Rice; Vernon was too good a customer and too big a tipper. They were sitting in a quiet corner while Nell read the menu.

“Oh, God, I just realized I haven’t had a decent meal in weeks!” She put her hands to her face as if ashamed to admit it.

“Then you’re in luck. The food here is unbelievably decent. I expect you’re a vegetarian?”

“Well, yes, I guess I am.”

“They do something with mushrooms here that’s just short of psychedelic.”

“Order for me, will you?”

He ordered for both of them, looked at the wine list, asked for a wine which made the sommelier extremely happy. Then Vernon shoved his silverware around and leaned on the table. “Okay, now, continue talking.”

Nell did, through a first course of a vegetable pate, a second course of green salad and a third course of the heavenly mushroom dish. She talked little about herself, a lot about the mares. “She had this literature-pamphlets, folders, estrogen studies. I read about all of this. An American firm has had the patent on a drug called Premarin forever. It takes hundreds of thousands of horses to meet its quota.” Her fork, like a tiny silver plane, appeared to be writing in air. “The way these mares are roped means they can’t move more than a couple of inches any way. They can’t lie down. Nine and ten months pregnant and they can’t lie down. Imagine that kind of imprisonment for a horse, tied so they can’t move. Horses are meant to run free. They only got the little bit of exercise I talked Valerie Hobbs into letting me give them.”

“But what’s this Hobbs woman expect to get out of urine collected from only sixty mares? And I’m also curious about how she could have kept this going for several years with no one-I mean the animal-rights people-finding out about it? What about the people who work at that stud? They don’t talk about it? I mean on the outside?”

Nell shook her head. “They must not. One reason is they’re not really interested; they don’t care. Another could be they want to keep their jobs.”

Vernon listened, taking her in all over again, like a climate once visited and never forgotten.

He pushed his plate aside and leaned toward her. “You want to rescue these mares more, I imagine, than you want to see this Hobbs woman behind bars.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, I do. She didn’t treat me badly. Why?”

“Because you’ve got a bargaining chip. Sixty horses in return for keeping Ms. Hobbs out of the nick.”

She thought about that. “But that wouldn’t be up to us, would it? My abduction’s a police matter.”

Vernon liked that “us.” “Not entirely, but what you have to say about her will go a long way. She’ll put up the ignorance defense: ‘I never did know who this girl was or that she was kidnapped-’ You know.”

“Is it possible she really didn’t? That it’s the truth?”

“I suppose it’s possible she wasn’t the one who’d orchestrated the kidnapping, but she had to have known something. I can imagine the hell they caught for letting you get away. Although she seemed to have relaxed the rules on that to the point of-” He paused. “I could talk to Hobbs. She, and, possibly, the others who work there, they’re easily bought, is my guess. I could buy the horses out of the stables.”

“There are fifty-four there now, Vern.”

He ignored that. “Could Arthur keep them?”

“I think so. I’ve had the ones I took in an empty barn and I know there’s at least one more empty barn. It might mean building another. But the land-well, it’s certainly big enough. I could personally watch over them.”

Vernon had put his fork down a while ago. The duck, which he had shoved to one side, was, as always, perfect; he just wasn’t hungry.

She looked at his abandoned plate. “Aren’t you going to eat that?”

“You’re a vegetarian.” He smiled.

THIRTY-SIX

They stayed up most of the night, talking and not talking, their silences comfortable. Vernon had tried once again to get her to tell Arthur and her father that she was here and all right and would be home soon. Vernon pictured their response: joy, pure and unalloyed with the anger they certainly could have felt because she hadn’t told them before, hadn’t said she had been living on Ryder property for three weeks. For that was three weeks of grief they could have been spared. Vernon said as much.

Nell protested: “I can’t. I want to get those mares out of there first. Do you really think Dad or Granddad would be concerned over the fate of a bunch of horses they had no connection to? I mean, in all of their relief to get me back?”

“Probably not, no.” Vernon wondered if there wasn’t something else preventing her, some completely irrational shame over being taken in the first place and then not immediately trying to escape. He couldn’t pin it down. He swirled the brandy in his snifter, watching it lap the glass. “Okay. I understand that, Nell, but how would telling your father or grandfather jeopardize that, if you could convince them those mares are important to you?”

“For one thing, they wouldn’t be thinking up ways to get them out, which is what is needed and is what you’re doing. Dad wouldn’t do that; he and Granddad would have Cambridge police at Hobbs’s doorstep before you could turn around.”

“Yet… isn’t it police we want?”

“In the time it took to get a warrant, Valerie Hobbs could kill the horses. If she hasn’t done it already. I don’t think she has, though; it was just a threat.”

“What was?”

“Killing the horses. I made a bargain: I wouldn’t run if she’d let me take care of the mares.”

“My God.” Vernon turned away, angry with such recklessness, or was it such devotion to something he didn’t understand. “You could have gotten away long before you did.”

She sat back and looked at him. “Believe me, I’ve given myself more hell than you or anyone else could on that score. Look, I know it was awful of me not to go home. But, in a sense, I was home. I have been home for three weeks.”

It wasn’t as if she were denying her family for her own sake. Even as obsessive as she was about these mares, it wasn’t her own welfare she was concerned with. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I won’t keep pushing it.”

“Thank you. And there’s something else I’d like to do. I’d like to put them out of business.”

“The Hobbs woman will be out of business.”

“It’s not illegal, the operation she’s running.”

“No, but it is illegal to conspire with kidnappers. Put who out of business?”

“The pharmaceutical company that produces this hormone drug.” She reached into a pocket of the coat tossed over the back of the leather sofa and pulled out several folders, which she then tossed on the table between them. “At least, I’d like to do them some damage.”

Vernon looked at her. He would have laughed had she not looked so implacably serious. He picked up the folder picturing a sweetly posed mare and her foal. “You want to put it out of business-that’s what you’re saying? Nellie, Wyeth-Ayerst is a major pharmaceutical company in the States. It’s huge.”

“All the more reason, isn’t it? You’re a shareholder. You tried to get Dad and Granddad to invest. You said they should do ‘before the stock split.’ ”

Vernon was openmouthed. “How in hell can you remember that?”

“Because-” Because I always listened to what you said, because you were important to me, because I was always glad when you came to the farm.

There was a shift in her expression, a look not at all implacable, that Vernon could not read and wished he could, as if, like a horse, she had slipped her reins and could now run free, as if whatever drove her had stopped driving her for two seconds, and in that brief time, he felt he had her; had her worked out, clocked her pace, seen her colors. In the next second, the look was gone. It was amazing what could wash over a person in the blink of an eye. “Nellie, I’m a shareholder, but even if I dumped all of my stock tomorrow, it wouldn’t hurt Wyeth that much.”

“Oh, I know that. But you’re what they call a player; you have influence-”

Vernon tried out a self-deprecating laugh, but she didn’t break stride.

“-in the market.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Vernon held up one protesting hand. “You mean you want me to manipulate this company’s financial picture-”

She nodded. “They’re the only ones who produce this stuff.”

“Oh. Do you want me to put British Telecom out of business at the same time?”

She just gave him a look.

Vernon sat back. “Even if I could do this, which I certainly doubt”-(but the prospect of such a trick excited him, that is, would, if such a manipulation was not illegal, which it was; he was doing this in a vacuum, or doing it theoretically. But it wasn’t theoretical, that was the trouble-“even if I could, you do realize that the drug wouldn’t be the only thing that you could say good-bye to. We’d be saying good-bye to God knows how many jobs.”

Nell looked away from him and out the window to the lightening sky. Not light but its adumbration in the faint lines of buildings showing through the darkness. “I know.”

“But you don’t care?”

She turned back to look at him. “No.” She held up the folder. “Listen to me, Vern. Listen: the foals are slaughtered since there’s no use for them, to keep women more comfortable during menopause. To help avoid hot flashes, Vernon. What in the bloody hell is the matter with us?”

She was relentless. He frowned. She could even be ruthless.

Nell smiled. “This is something you could do; you’re reckless, Vernon.”

Actually, he wasn’t; he only appeared to be because he would undertake tasks that would find most people running for cover.

“I’m sorry to lay all this at your doorstep. You haven’t been living with it for nearly two years like I have. If you had done, if you had had all that time to think about it…” Her tone was rueful. “I’m sorry.”

“Not on my account.” He looked at the window, at the frosty light and the spire of St. Paul’s spiking the early-morning mist that shrouded it. “I’ll give this some thought. In the meantime-” He drank off his whiskey and made a face. “Why doesn’t this stuff taste as good at six a.m. as if does at six p.m.? Come on, your room’s at the end of the hall.”

She got up. He put his hands on her shoulders; they felt fragile, despite her being a girl toughened by sun and wind and hard work. It was that look of hers, a look at once solid and ethereal. He was for a moment afraid. You couldn’t keep jumping through hoops of fire without getting burned. But the fear subsided when she yawned like any ordinary up-all-night child.

Only Nell wasn’t ordinary, despite these glimpses of that other girl, the one he had seen before in that swift two seconds.

And who was she?

THIRTY-SEVEN

The house looked marble cold and cavernous, more the crumbling remains of a house of banished royalty than a home. She lived alone, or that was the impression Jury had gotten when he talked to her on the telephone.

The raised voice Jury heard on the other side of a partly open window appeared to be remonstrating with something not human-a dog or cat. If it was a cat, the cat would remain unregenerate. Used to the cat Cyril in DCS Racer’s office, Jury knew as much as anyone about the persistence of cats. He rang and heard footsteps.

Sara Hunt blushed, whether from having to deal with a stranger and a policeman or because she’d been caught red-handed lecturing a cat, Jury didn’t know. Over her shoulder he could see the big ginger-colored cat who paused in his blameless paw washing long enough to fix his eyes on Jury. The cat had exceptionally green eyes (rather the color of Melrose Plant’s) and a precarious seat on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. One could tell the cat was hopelessly its own master and would get through any talking down with no other feeling than boredom.

Sara Hunt said immediately after she opened the door, as if in defense of her remonstrating with her cat, “He’s just made a mess of my papers. He’s shoved them on the floor and they weren’t all that organized to begin with.” Vexed, she looked at Jury. “I’m sorry. You’re Superintendent Jury?”

“New Scotland Yard.” He held out his ID.

Apparently she thought she was supposed to appropriate it for she didn’t return it after taking a good look. She held the door wider and said, “They’ve come for you, Henry! Hear that, Henry?” She flung this over her shoulder. The cat went on washing. She turned back to Jury. “Hopeless. Oh, do come in.” He followed her through the large entrance hall. The cat jumped off the newel post and made its way, haughtily, toward the rear of the house.

Sara Hunt stood aside as Jury entered a living room, which would also have been cold had it not been for the fire burning in the grate. Above the fireplace were framed etchings, probably of the area, if not of these actual grounds, a great many moss- and ivy-clad crumbling walls, romantic and fantastic. Out of an enormous Gothic window, its view partly obscured by a huge oak, he could see just such a wall.

“Here,” she said, “let me take your coat.”

“I will if you give it back.” He nodded at the ID still clutched in her hand.

“What?”

“I’ll need that. How else will I know who I am?” He smiled.

So did she and her smile was broad. “I’m sorry.” She handed it back. “Do you really need to prove it? Wouldn’t anybody let you in? Any woman, anyway?”

“Thanks.” He did not respond to this flirty attempt to ingratiate herself to the police. He sat down in the armchair she indicated, covered like the sofa and other chairs in an Oriental print-birds, green stems, bamboo-much faded. He felt the need to restore, or right, the balance between them.

She seemed extremely composed and was probably one of those witnesses who could take over an interrogation and wind up doing most of it. Yet she didn’t really seem to see herself in that role as she sat with her hands neatly folded on her knees, smiling slightly, waiting. He was, after all, trained to take over; unfortunately, she seemed just as well trained to derail any conversation she did not like. He intuited this.

“You’d make,” he said, “a hell of a good double agent.”

Her eyes widened and he saw they were a soft, ambiguous brown. Why “ambiguous”? He didn’t know.

“I would?”

“Oh, definitely.”

Her hair was a sort of toffee color, a tarnished gold, as if it were waiting for the light now streaking the window behind her to provide the highlights.

“I’m taking that as a compliment.”

Jury laughed. “Why? Agents are deceitful and slippery.”

“Because that’s the way you meant it. They’re also very clever. That’s something I’m not. I’ve always lacked that-cleverness.”

“Why do I doubt that?”

“No, but it’s true.” She smiled again. “So you’ve come to recruit me for an undercover job.” The smile broadened as if she really meant it.

Jury couldn’t tell. He was almost relieved to see the upper two teeth just a shade crooked, but then he thought there was something of childhood in that crookedness and that, too, might be deceptive. “Actually, I’ve come to ask you some questions.”

“About what?” She settled back in her chair.

“You knew Dan Ryder, the jockey?”

At that moment, a presence up to this point absent, something veiled and ghostlike, entered the room, and Jury sat forward and just resisted the impulse to reach out for it. Yet her expression hadn’t changed. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Something had entered to change it, and it hadn’t changed at all.

“I didn’t really know Dan Ryder; I met him a few times. It was at-” She looked at the mantel, Jury presumed at the silver-framed pictures sitting there between two old brass candleholders. She rose and crossed to it and picked one picture up, which she handed to Jury. “That was Newmarket races. He’s up on Criminal Type-or at least that’s what I thought-and that’s Arthur Ryder holding the reins. And the trainer, I forget his name. I’m in the background, there.” She tapped the glass.

“Who introduced you?”

“Arthur did. I’m a very distant relation. Then I saw him-Dan Ryder, I mean-again when he won again. It was Cheltenham Racecourse, then again at Doncaster. The Derby at Epsom was brilliant. Lucky Me won carrying 129 pounds. Halfway round he slammed into the fence and I was sure Danny was going down. But he righted himself and won by three lengths in 1:11:36. Yes, he was quite something.”

Danny? Jury waited, but she said nothing more and replaced the picture. “That was all, just those three times?”

She smiled. “Isn’t it enough for you?”

Definitely a derailer. “For me, possibly. As for you, it depends.”

“On what? I’m in the dark, Superintendent. Why are you asking about Dan Ryder? He’s dead. He died somewhere else, not in the UK. France, it might have been. A racing accident.”

“Auteuil racetrack, near Paris.”

She turned her look to the room, and Jury had a most unnerving response to it. He could have sworn she was looking at somebody or something he couldn’t see. The feeling passed, but left him disturbed.

She said, “This must have something to do with Arthur Ryder’s granddaughter. Her disappearance.”

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 discussion.”

“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.”

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.

“I’m sorry it took so long.” She set down a large plate of raw vegetables and some sort of dip. The kind of food that Jury hated.

Smiling, he said, “Not at all,” and picked up a celery stick.

“You’re welcome to stay for dinner, you know.”

Jury thanked her again and again said he’d have to get back to London.

She looked disappointed, and he wondered what ground, between them, they had struck. It was no longer, certainly, a slippery slope. He watched her face, its expressiveness. She’d never have made a good liar. Her face would give it all away.

“You’re staring, Superintendent.”

“Hm. Make that Richard. I’m not here in my official capacity.”

“All right, Richard, and you’re still staring.” She smiled.

That smile, he reminded himself, could be trouble. “I’m still turning it over in my mind.”

“Turning what over?”

“The nature of obsession.”

She sighed and dipped a piece of cauliflower and sighed again. “You’re tenacious.”

Again he felt that stir of air. What was it? He looked behind him.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing. So you think we’re all capable of it?”

She frowned a question.

“Obsessive behavior.”

“I know you are.”

“Oh?”

“You’re obsessive about obsession.”

He laughed and picked up his drink. “What do you understand by ‘obsessive’?”

She thought for a minute. “I suppose loving or wanting someone too much, I mean to the extent he or she, well, takes over.” She shrugged.

“Are you familiar with the feeling?” He smiled, trying to defuse the question of any danger she might see in it.

Impatiently, she swept her hand through the air like a necromancer who wanted to be rid of the room. “No. At least… well, how would I know if you can’t define it?” She shrugged. “Anyway, I thought I knew.”

“What?”

“Obsession is love-we are talking about love, aren’t we?-love carried to an extreme. Love in extremis if that’s really a term.”

“I don’t think it is. It’s more like love turned inside out.”

She thought about this. “Well, then, loving someone too much.”

“You can never love someone too much.”

She sat back with a lurch. “My God, but you’re romantic!”

“Perhaps, but that’s irrelevant. It’s the very nature of love that it can’t be too much; it protects you even from yourself; it patrols its own ramparts, has its own spyglass.”

“I suppose I mean the sort of feeling that has you always thinking about the other person, always wanting to be with him, wanting to know everything about him, where he is, what he’s doing, where he’s going…” She shrugged. Her list ended weakly.

Jury liked Vernon Rice’s list much better than Sara Hunt’s.

THIRTY-EIGHT

“T urn here and go down that old road,” said Nell, pointing the way.

They hadn’t passed the stud farm or at least not any part Vernon could see. “None of this looks familiar, Nellie.”

“I know. It’s the land behind our farm. I mean, it’s our land but a distance from the main buildings. It’s a good half mile from the farm proper. Granddad decided not to use this part a few years back. I’d nearly forgotten it was here. If I believed in luck or deliverance, I’d say luck led me to it. But I don’t believe in luck. Not the good kind.”

Vernon suppressed a smile. “What do you believe in?” His BMW smoothed over the deep ruts in this unused road.

She seemed to be giving this serious thought. “Not much,” she said.

They came to a clearing, what looked to him like an exercise ring, now harboring dead leaves and hedges. From the barn on the other side of the old ring came muffled sounds that he thought must be Nell’s horses. Standing in the main doorway was a chestnut foal. It turned back into the shadowy dark.

Vernon smiled. He had always found foals irresistible-well, at least when he could get his head out of market shares and start-ups long enough to look. “How old’s the foal?”

“Three months. His name’s Charlie. He’s Daisy’s foal. I had to get him out before they came again with the truck that takes them to be sold or slaughtered. Out of the country. He’s a male, see. Of no use at all to them. Come on; they must be hungry.”

Vernon was carrying two bags of seed and a bale of meadow hay, and Nell was carrying a sack of oats and another of bran. “It was really nice of you to stop so we could buy supplies. Mostly, I’ve been taking stuff from the farm. I expect that’s stealing, but I don’t think Granddad would mind.”

“Not if he knew you were the one doing it, that’s certain.”

They were trudging across the rain-drenched land. “You always were nice. You have no idea how much Granddad likes you. More, I sometimes think, than he likes Dad. Certainly more than Uncle Danny, whom he thought a great jockey but not a nice person. It really hurt him to think that about his own son.”

“I doubt he’s as fond of me as you think. You should hear him talk to me.”

“You don’t get it. You’re the only one he does talk to that way. I remember him saying once, ‘You can always depend on that nut Vern.’ ”

“Oh, thanks.” Vernon laughed.

They had reached the barn and gone in. Nell moved down the row of stalls, forking the hay into racks. She stumbled and nearly went down and Vernon took the pitchfork from her. “You’re too tired to do this. You looked like you could have used a week’s sleep when you showed up. Last night certainly didn’t make up for it.”

Nell thought: But it did. It made up for a dozen things; it made up for being by myself for two years; it made up for being the only company these horses ever had; it made up for being in limbo for so long; it made up for things you’ll never know and, because of that, never understand. She said none of this; what she said was, “Last night didn’t tire me out; it made me feel better.”

“Glad of it,” he said, pouring oats into one of the buckets. The horse, Daisy, didn’t seem to mind his presence. Beyond a few shakes of her mane and a bit of stamping she seemed perfectly relaxed.

Nell stood back, rocking a little on her heels, enjoying watching him fork hay into the racks, getting more on the floor than in the rack, trying to keep a distance between himself and the mild-mannered mares.

When it was done, Vernon said, “Backbreaking. My Lord, Nellie, I hope this isn’t what you were doing as Lady Hobbs’s indentured servant.” He waved her toward him. “Come on, let’s eat. I’m starved.”

He got the hamper out of the back, and the horse blanket, which he shook out on the ground. He set the hamper down and took out the provisions, one provision being a bottle of a very good burgundy. Bobby was a wine expert, not because he drank it, which he hardly ever did, but because he traded in it. Bobby was an authority on anything he traded in. So was Daphne.

“I can’t believe you went to all this trouble,” said Nell, unwrapping a chunk of Cheshire cheese and a slab of cheddar.

Vernon was uncorking the wine. “Me? No, it was Bobby who went to the trouble.”

“Well, it wasn’t Bobby who thought of it, and it’s so nice. A picnic in January.”

He drew the cork from the bottle, saying, “You deserve a lot more than a picnic in January.”

Unbidden, the thought flew into her mind. No, I don’t. She had not expunged the sight of that musty attic room from her thoughts. No matter how much it receded, as if it were an image in a rearview mirror, it still caught up with her whenever her guard was down-hot, sweaty, implacably vile. She had been little more than contraband in that house. And following fast on the heels of the image was the question: Had it happened at all? It was like looking through fog.

When she looked up, she saw Vernon watching her. His clear gray eyes were sharp, like diamonds.

“Nellie, what else? There’s something else?”

She lowered her eyes to the cheese she still held and shrugged. “No?”

He laughed. “You tell me.”

She felt herself slip away and was afraid, when that happened, as it had many times before, that she was losing her mind. Vernon wouldn’t press her for an answer, she knew. She felt that tightness in her throat that was the advent of tears. Don’t cry, she commanded herself. If you do, it will all tumble out. If that happens, you cannot go back; he will cut you loose. Absurd! She knew it was absurd.

When she looked up, she saw Vernon still watching her. He did not look away. Slowly, he chewed a sandwich.

Blushing, she said this much: “I just wonder sometimes if I’m crazy, if I’m round the bend, as they say.”

“Why?” He poured wine and handed her a plastic glass.

Nell looked off into blankness, saw trees, hedges, barn as items arranged on a picture postcard. “I feel sometimes as if things weren’t real. As if I were seeing pictures of things, as if the scene weren’t really there.”

Vernon drank some wine, said, “Maybe it’s me.” “You?” She was astonished he’d think this. “Vernon, you’re the only real thing here!” Grabbing back that sentiment, she added, “Along with the horses, of course.”

He laughed. “That’s a compliment, for sure, to be as real to you as the horses.”

Nell relaxed. The danger had been circumvented, and they ate and drank in one of those blessed silences, broken only by the sounds coming from the barn.

He said, “Listen, I’ll bargain with you. I’ll take on Wyeth Labs if you’ll tell your dad and Arthur you’re back.”

“But-”

Vernon shook his head, hard. “No. No ‘buts,’ Nellie. You’ll do it, and the sooner, the better. Like today.”

Adrenaline sluiced through her veins. She said nothing.

“You shouldn’t mind now because we’re going to get those mares away from Hobbs’s place.” But that, Vernon thought, wasn’t the all of it; the horses were only part of it. She was ashamed; he could sense it. She was ashamed to go back and it wasn’t because she could have done it sooner. No, the shame was something else, and it was probably accompanied by these periods of disorientation she was talking about because she wanted to get rid of it, to have the shame out of her head and her life. But he would get nowhere by questioning her, even if he had a mind to; it would simply drive that part of her back into hiding.

“All right, I’ll go back. But not today, Vern, please not today. I need to get myself ready for it, you know, psyched up.” She picked up a smoked salmon sandwich, looked at it as if it might hold a clue to something she’d forgotten and took a bite.

They went on with their picnic, Nell turning to listen to the mares, any little sounds of impatience or distress. “They need some exercise, some freedom. What I do is, I take turns riding them and the others look for graze, pretty hard to find in January, but they always find something. I don’t ride Daisy because she needs to stay near Charlie. And of course, Aqueduct has to be ridden; he’s used to hard riding. At least he was once.”

Vernon asked, “Why did they take Aqueduct?”

Nell was inspecting another sandwich. “Aqueduct’s a ’chaser. He can jump over almost anything. Hadrian’s walls, you know. Then I’d guess they wanted a horse who’d been successful at stud. I don’t know.” She looked at Vernon as she finished off her mystery sandwich and smiled. “You can ride with me. You can ride, that I know. You used to chase me, remember?”

It was abysmally sad, the way she spoke of this, as if her childhood had been swallowed up by her experience and her adolescence shattered like glass. “Caught you, too,” he said.

“Never.” She grinned.

“Bet?” He held up a chocolate hazelnut tart.

“I can have the whole thing if I win?”

“Most of it.”

She got up from the blanket. “You can ride Aqueduct and I’ll ride one of the mares.”

“Those poor horses are in pretty bad shape. And how could they beat Aqueduct?”

“Oh, I wonder.”

“The sinister implication being not if I’m riding him?” They walked toward the barn. “You have enough tack?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bits? Bridles? Saddles?”

“Yes.”

Inside the barn, Nell went into a stall that held a beautiful bay. “This one, I think, might be one of those French saddle horses. They’re especially good jumpers. And she’s had three weeks to build up some strength. Her name’s Lili.”

Vernon was leaning against the half door, arms crossed over the top of it. “Why would you want a jumper?”

“Only because Aqueduct is. It evens things out.”

“Why? Are we doing any jumping?”

“No, but you never know.”

“Then the answer’s not no, it’s ‘maybe.’ ”

She laughed. “You really don’t want to compete, do you?”

“No, but we won’t let that stop us.”

Nell was fitting a bit into the mare’s mouth. Over her arm was a saddle.

“All of this gear has gone unused for God knows how long,” said Vernon. “But it looks shiny new.”

“I’ve been cleaning it, polishing it up.”

She had led the mare out of the stable by now. Aqueduct was already out, eating oats from the bucket Vernon had left there. He was chewing solemnly and looking at Vernon.

(God.)

Aqueduct snorted.

THIRTY-NINE

The kid with the purple hair (hadn’t that punk style gone out of punk fashion yet?) and wearing outsized earphones on the other side of the aisle was entranced by whatever he was listening to, his eyes closed, his fingers rapping on the small table on which sat his CD player. Music-though strictly speaking, it was likely not even music-leaked out around the earphones, trying to escape itself probably.

The scene reminded Jury of a similar one in Stratford-upon-Avon a few years back, and similarly having to do with trains and platforms, in which another lad with dyed hair and a boom box was playing (incredibly enough) a song sung by a French chanteuse, in heartbreaking accents of a love gone wrong and to which she was bidding her painful adieu. It was the only word he recognized in addition to amour and j’amais. But love songs being universally translatable along lines of hello and good-bye, usually the latter, Jury understood her sentiments perfectly. Yes, that was exactly how it felt; God only knew he’d felt it often enough. That time had been a bad one for Jury. He had lost someone he felt he couldn’t afford to. It had been January then, too. Or March? Did this music presage another loss? Was the lad some winter angel appointed to appear in Jury’s life when things were coming undone?

What was it this time, though? Or perhaps it was simply a cumulative process of undoing, a little unraveling here, a little there. Life sometimes seemed so fragile and weightless; it would blow away if he breathed on it.

But what was blowing away? What was wrong? Aside from the fact he seemed destined to listen to another man’s music.

The boy adjusted his earphones and the music spiked. Some group. Heavy thrumming. Jury would never be able to identify them; he couldn’t even recognize the groups of his own youth, much less the current ones.

An attendant came through trundling a well-stocked trolley: sandwiches, tea, coffee, soft drinks, crisps. Everything about the trains now was shipshape and Bristol fashion, clean as a newborn babe. Hell, you could change a baby on the floor without fear of germs. He bought some tea and a cheese salad sandwich he didn’t want.

He went back to his ruminations over this day spent in the company of the charming Sara Hunt and the almost-otherworldliness of the faded gardens, the crumbling stone, the unpolished silverplate, the rose pattern of the slipcovered chairs worn to liquidity-everything in need of tending.

Jury tried to reweave the unraveling tapestry. Living in that big house was, he thought, a rather Victorian notion, a woman mourning the death of her beloved. Wouldn’t it have been easier merely to put the pictures away instead of hiding them behind others? But that was the point, he reminded himself. She was stubborn; she would not give in; she would chance it. He leaned his head against the cold glass and watched the frosty pastures and fences pass. The fields looked antediluvian, left over, dead, nothing growing, nothing grown. A strange image. Jury closed his eyes, went back to Dan Ryder and Sara. The thing was, why should she even hide the fact they’d been lovers? She must have been aware he was the consummate bed hopper. It was public knowledge-well, at least the public who lived with one foot in the racing world. Dan Ryder slept around; Dan Ryder was-to use a Victorian appellation-a bounder. It could be pride on her part, of course; that might make sense of the end of the affair, of being dumped, but did not explain its beginning. There would have been no reason to keep quiet over that.

Jury realized he was basing this on intuition rather than hard evidence. No matter; intuition had eventually brought in the hard evidence.

The London train slowed and stopped at a station Jury could not pronounce, and the boy removed the headphones and darted out to a kiosk on the platform. Jury watched him buy a candy bar and a packet of cigarettes. The kiosk fellow carefully smoothed out the bill the lad had handed him, reached round to the cartons displayed in the back and handed over the cigarettes.

The boy had forgotten to turn off the CD player and the headset squawked with antimusic before segueing into the next piece, but still kept to its slightly tinny, raspy tone. He caught some of the words; it was a love song, surprisingly. Jury thought about Nell’s singing to the horses. What had it been? “Love Walked In”?

Love at first sight: it was a concept Jury had no trouble believing in. He had never understood it, how one person (such as he) could react with such certainty to another (such as he had to several women he’d known).

One look-as the song said-was all it had taken to fall for Vivian Rivington. That was years back. Helen Minton, Nell Healy, Jane Holdsworth-same thing. He had never really understood why so much of psychology refuted such an immediate attachment as shallow, banal, sentimental, romantic and adolescent. (He also thought that adolescence came in for too much of a bad rap.) Jury believed that love could of course come about along those lines that most people approved-that of knowing a person for some time before discovering one was in love. It struck Jury as dreary, rather like buying a car and not having to make payments on it for a year or two.

The boy had jumped aboard just in time, just as the train was moving. He plunked down the cigarettes and adjusted his headphones. Jury could put up with the hair, the rap, the noise, but not with the smoke. The lad made no move to light up, he was happy to see. He felt oddly depressed, a depression that seemed against his better judgment, as if he had a choice in the matter. He decided it was probably a hangover from Mickey Haggerty’s case-not that he needed any self-induced punishment from that quarter.

Jury closed his eyes and tried to put himself in Sara’s place vis-a‘-vis Dan Ryder. If reports were true, Dan Ryder had as much charisma as the Thoroughbreds he rode: all the glamor of a Samarkand, all the cunning of a Criminal Type.

The needle stuck. The record replayed that thought: Criminal Type. The needle stayed in that mental groove for a moment and then let it go. He could not build upon it to flesh out the man.

Another little galvanic burst of music came from the headphones as the boy dropped them on the table and left his seat to hip-hop down the aisle, still hearing the music in his head. The music rattled in the headphones enough to move them, although that was probably a movement of the train’s making the headset inch across the table.

And now the lad was back and clamping the headset on.

Oblivion. A kind of oblivion, thought Jury, and who was he to deny someone else his road to oblivion to transport him to a better world or connect him with this one? Yet this one Jury thought to be infinitely superior to the one we imagine, imagination being full of such flashiness that we mistake it for light and color. There was far more flash than genius in our imagined worlds.

When the train finally approached the edge of London and slowed on the outskirts, the boy rose, his trip apparently over.

“Hey, man,” said Jury, not at all sure that this word was still in the teenage lexicon. When the boy turned toward him, surprised, Jury said, “I like your music.”

The lad smiled, seeming pleased to get a compliment out of some middle-aged stiff, something he wasn’t used to. “You like Door Jam?”

Jury nodded. “The best.”

“Cool!” the boy said, slapping his hand against Jury’s palm in that handshake that always looked like a prelude to arm wrestling.

“Way cool,” said Jury.

FORTY

“Of course you can do it,” Nell said, sitting atop her mare. “Of course you can. That’s Aqueduct you’re up on, remember?”

Vernon remembered. Aqueduct took no prisoners. He was mounted on the horse now, feeling less and less in command of the situation. “He’s got my number. Look at the way he’s turning his head and leering.”

True, the horse was turning his head and trying to look at Vernon.

“I don’t remember you being so diffident around horses.”

“ ‘Diffident’-good word. Better than ‘coward.’ ”

Aqueduct was shaking himself as if Vernon were a big, annoying fly. “He’s trying to get me off, just wait…”

Nell laughed; her horse whinnied. The whinny sounded amazingly like laughter.

“Anyway, the weight’s off. You should be giving me another ten or twelve pounds, at least.” As if Aqueduct actually needed it.

“I don’t have any weights. Don’t be such a stickler.”

She was moving back, positioning her horse to face the first wall, which was quite low. “Come on, starting gate.”

“Hold it, hold it. You said we weren’t jumping!”

“I lied. Vern, you’re a very good rider. Remember when we used to chase anything that moved around the pasture? Rabbits, foxes?”

Remember? Could he have forgotten? There had come to him, over the last two years, a recurrent dream that Nell had been up on Samarkand, a talented horse, but no ’chaser, about to jump Hadrian’s walls. She had taken the first three with perfect grace, but the horse had shied at the fourth. At that point, as if this were a flat race, the flag had dropped and when it was raised, the horse was cropping grass between the walls and Nell had disappeared.

Vernon-and it would have surprised anyone who knew him-was superstitious. He believed in portents and prophecies, although he hated to admit it. And this dream had come out of Nell’s disappearance. Only, he had dreamed it again just last night. The flag was dropped and she was gone. What worried Vernon was that he was the person with the flag. It was absurd for him to think that her disappearance had been somehow his fault. But he had set in motion a thought that plagued him. It was clear what it stemmed from: he was thirty-six and she was seventeen. All the same-

“That horse is no jumper, Nellie.”

She flicked Lili’s reins and turned the mare aside, saying, “Well, I admit we’ve been practicing a little.”

Aqueduct jerked the reins and turned in a circle.

“Cut it out!” said Vernon, who’d never ridden the horse before. “What in hell’s he doing?”

Nell laughed. “He’s a ’chaser, Vern. He wants to jump. With or without you, he’s going over that wall.”

“Hell. Okay, okay.”

He positioned himself beside her, both horses about forty feet from the first low wall. They flicked their reins and galloped toward it. Vernon was paying more attention to Nell’s horse than to his own, now sailing over the wall. Aqueduct didn’t need him to do it.

Lili did need Nell, though. Nell’s hands, legs, tongue. Vernon had never seen the horse she couldn’t get something out of. The horse made a graceful slide over the wall, though not with many inches to spare.

“Keep going!” yelled Nell.

Aqueduct seemed to want to keep Nell in view and slowed a little, but his what-the-hell? instincts sped him up again. It certainly wasn’t Vernon’s guidance that had the horse leaping four feet above the ground and sailing over the second wall. Vernon reined him in, thinking it was obvious Aqueduct had only just gotten started and aimed like an arrow at the third, even higher wall.

“Come on, Vern. You can do it. You’re on Aqueduct,” she yelled, coming up on the third wall.

“You can do it, you mean. You’ve done it!”

“Of course I haven’t. Where’d you get that-oh, you mean my vanishing act over Hadrian’s walls? You don’t think my kidnapper would trust me with the reins, do you?”

“I thought that might have been one reason he took you. Because you’re such a good horsewoman.”

She smiled. “Thanks very much, but I have a lot of trouble with a couple of those walls.”

“Then he must have been good.”

“I expect he was.” Nell thought for a moment. “He might have been a jockey.” She closed her eyes. “He felt like the right size for it. I think sometimes I could recognize everything by touch.” Her eyes opened. “Don’t you?”

Vernon glanced at her and bent to rub Aqueduct’s neck. He thought for a moment, then asked, “Do you have a cell phone? I forgot mine.” First time in his life, probably.

“Vern, do I look as if I had a cell phone?”

Still up on Aqueduct, Vernon craned his neck, looking around as if he expected to find a public call box on the land.

Nell asked, “Why? Who are you so eager to call?”

“Richard Jury.” He ran his thumb across his bottom lip, abstracted.

“Who’s Richard Jury?”

“Sorry, I meant to tell you about him. He’s a detective, a superintendent, Scotland Yard.”

“That’s pretty high up, isn’t it? For him to be taking an interest in where I am? I mean, especially after all this time?”

“It’s not official; I mean, he’s not doing it in any official capacity. He was in hospital and your dad’s patient. Roger talked about you-well, seeing who he was, I can understand.” He looked around again. “Look, I’d like to get back to London-”

Nell brought Lili’s head around; the horse was looking at a particularly attractive patch of vegetation. “Seeing as there are no telephones anywhere else.”

“You’re coming with me.”

Her eyebrows raised. “That’s an order?”

“Uh-huh. Are you going to do anything else with the mares?”

“Just bring them out for a walk round.”

While she went to tend to the horses, Vernon rode Aqueduct to the old horse ring. He was glad he’d come to the farm occasionally to ride. He began at a gentle gallop, went around once at a canter and then he got the horse up to speed.

They blitzed the hard-packed earth. It was utterly exhilarating. He thought of nothing but speed and wind. Nothing else, not even money, not even Nell.

FORTY-ONE

Melrose was standing by the horse stall, presently horseless, wondering what Momaday was doing with Aggrieved. He was doing something, certainly, un-caring of Melrose’s explicit instruction that he was not to take the horse out. Momaday’s very touch put a blight on a thing.

I’m going to fire him, Melrose thought. Then he thought, No. I’ll get Ruthven to fire him. He knows how to do these things. Who was he kidding? No one ever got fired at Ardry End. His father, of course, left “all of that domestic nonsense” up to Melrose’s mother, who couldn’t even fire a mouse. Indeed, Melrose had come upon her one day, kneeling by a hole in the study baseboard, shoving something into the hole. Embarrassed she’d been caught out, she blushed and said, “It’s just a bit of cheese. I don’t think they eat properly.”

As Melrose had been six at the time, and already thought his mother a glorious person, her glory was thus made even more manifest. He grabbed her hand and told her she was nice and he’d never tell. Momaday was her polar opposite.

Melrose tramped over sodden ground to the hermitage to see how his new employee was doing. He had hired Bramwell to occupy the hermitage because he thought it might be a way to thwart Agatha, who had taken to spending some time tramping to the horse stall and participating in close colloquy with Momaday (who, heretofore, she wouldn’t give the time of day to) about the care and feeding of the horse. If he couldn’t bar her from the house, he at least wanted her off the land. God knows what the two of them would think up with regard to the fate of Aggrieved.

The hermitage was left over probably from the last couple of centuries and as it was a distance from the house and pretty much hidden by trees, he had forgotten its existence. How he could have forgotten it for two minutes running, he couldn’t imagine, not with a skull and MEMENTO MORI carved on the lintel. He could hardly wait to show Richard Jury! A great place to stuff a body and he was close to stuffing Mr. Bramwell’s into it.

Right now, Mr. Bramwell, hermit-in-residence, was out of his den-a substantial grotto, made of stones, tree limbs and moss, surprisingly warm and snug in winter, though Bramwell was constantly complaining about the lack of heat and light and had been since his arrival several days ago.

All of this hermit business had come about when he’d been talking about the eighteenth-century notion of hermits living on one’s property. Landowners, wanting to be thought both richer and more worldly-wise than they actually were, and certainly more fashionable, often were on the lookout for a hermit. There were, of course, rules to be followed: never set foot off the property, never shave or cut the beard.

“You should get one-an ornamental hermit,” Diane had said. “That’s a marvelous idea. I daresay one would put Agatha off her feed.” She waved her empty martini glass toward the bar and Dick Scroggs. He took his time.

“Withersby!” said Trueblood. “A perfect candidate.”

“She’s a woman: hermits were men,” said Melrose. “Hired by the landed gentry to give the impression of bucolic idleness, or whatever.”

Scroggs came with his small and ice-cold jug of vodka and an eye blink of vermouth and poured this into Diane’s glass, popping in an olive on a toothpick. “You know, I could find you one,” said Diane. “Put an ad in my paper.” “Her” paper because she wrote the astrology column, to everyone’s great amusement “That’s what they did back then. Advertised.”

“Why do I find this proposal hard to believe?” said Vivian.

Diane shrugged. “Lack of imagination?”

Trueblood said, “It’s a great idea. Diane and I can interview the applicants.” He nodded from Melrose to Diane. “I think it would be great fun.”

“Oh, really?” said Vivian, swirling her sherry round in her glass. “Perhaps so. Considering what you two think fun.” Vivian was still smarting over the Franco Giappino incident, when their combined cunning (a force to reckon with) had got him out of Long Piddleton. No one had ever told Vivian what ruse had accomplished this.

So that’s what they had done. They’d come up with Bramwell. People willing to hire out as ornamental hermits were not too thick on the ground. Mr. Bramwell had turned up with two suitcases and a chip on his shoulder as if his last stint as a hermit had left him with a bad taste in his mouth.

Today, Melrose gave him a cheery “Hullo, there, Mr. Bramwell. How are you keeping?”

“How’d you be keepin’ if it was you sleepin’ on moss?” Short and stocky, Mr. Bramwell was somewhat more aggressive a person than Melrose would have preferred in a hermit, but Diane had insisted beggars can’t be choosers when it came to hermits and she and Trueblood had had a hard enough time convincing the applicants that this was indeed a serious offer and their employer would indeed pay the king’s ransom stipulated.

Artificially, Melrose laughed. “Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it? We’ve put in a very nice cot for you and plenty of warm blankets.”

Bramwell gave him one of those hmph-y gestures of his square jaw, narrowed his eyes and took out his stubby pipe (tobacco also having been supplied) and generally did little to project hermitlike subservience. “Not much o’ a job, is it, mate? And when do them cameras start rollin’? I ain’t seen hide nor hair o’ Russell Crowe.”

Well, it had been rather an outlandish lie that a major production company was making Ardry End the scene of a blockbuster film, but Bramwell was driving him nuts with his constant demands to know just what he was doing here, and he bet it was something to do with drugs, and there was no entertainment. He had quite a list of complaints.

“The production company’s been held up by, oh, the star. Crowe is finishing another picture.”

“Them film people’s too coddled all their lives. Not like me, no, I’ve ’ad it plenty rough, me.”

Bramwell appeared to be roping him in to hear the story of the hermit’s life. He was tamping down tobacco preliminary to setting things afire.

“Mr. Bramwell, I’ve got things to do.”

Bramwell made a dismissive, blubbery sound with his lips: “You? You’re one of them titled that’s been waited on hand and foot all yer life, like Russell-bloody-Crowe, on’y ya ain’t as good-lookin’.” He scratched behind his ear. “Now what’s the name of that foxy blond-headed woman he goes wiff-?”

“Why don’t I get you a subscription to Entertainment Weekly? Only now-”

Bramwell, guided by voices Melrose was not privy to, was off on another avenue of conversation, this about a childhood on the dole, and some female whom Bramwell referred to as “My Doris”-wife? sister? cousin?-who had wretchedly died during some routine operation, which explained his detestation of doctors and hospitals. “Now, my Doris had nuffin’ wrong wiff ’er-”

Melrose, who had always been too much the gentleman to shut up anyone, was relieved to see Ruthven coming along the path with the cordless telephone.

“It’s a Mr. Rice, sir.”

“So, how’s things, mate?” Bramwell said to Ruthven, whose face seemed to crinkle in the disturbance of a dozen responses he, too, was too much of a gentleman’s gentleman to make.

Phone in hand, Melrose started to walk back to the house. “Vernon! How are you?” Then he stood stock-still at the news. “She came back? She just-walked in?” Melrose started walking again as he listened to the story of the previous night and the trip to Cambridge. He entered the study by way of the French window, sat down in the nearest chair. Vernon said he had tried the superintendent’s number a couple of times, but he didn’t appear to be in.

“His idea of ‘recuperation’ isn’t most people’s. I left him in London. He said he was going to Wales. You told him about some woman in Dan Ryder’s life?”

“I did, yes.”

“What about Nell’s family?”

“She wants to wait until tomorrow to go there.”

“But-”

“I know. But she’s got her reasons, even if I don’t know what they are. She’s-remarkable. She’s-prodigious.”

Melrose smiled at that. “You always knew that.”

“I always did, yes.”

Melrose thought for a moment. “You know, there’s something particularly interesting about all this.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, could she feel, I don’t know, guilty for some reason? Ashamed? Something she apparently doesn’t feel around you?”

“I thought of that. I expect because I’m not really family; I’m not as important to her, so my judgment wouldn’t mean as much-?”

Melrose heard the question in those words. “Just the other way round, I’d say. And as for judgment, she knew you wouldn’t judge her.”

The silence hummed.

FORTY-TWO

“I don’t see why,” said Carole-anne Palutski, seated on Jury’s sofa that evening, “you want to do your recuperating there and not here. Why’d you want to go to Northants, anyway? Not even to mention Wales.”

Jury dropped his shoe on the floor and rested his foot on the dog Stone’s back. Stone woofed. “Because I needed to see somebody.”

“In Wales?” As if nobody ever saw anybody in Wales. “Don’t be daft. We don’t know anyone there.”

We don’t? Jury shook his head. “I’ve been many, many places in my long and illustrious career as a detective; you’d be amazed at the people I’ve run into that you don’t know anything about. For instance, there’s the family Cripps: White Ellie, Ash the Flash…” Jury went on in mind-numbing detail about the Crippses and a number of other witnesses, suspects, people helping with inquiries, all over the British Isles.

Carole-anne sat coiling a strand of copper blond hair round her finger all through this peroration, watching him. “What’s she look like?”

“Who?”

“This woman in Wales.”

After she’d taken the description of the woman in Wales up to her flat to brood about, Jury sat for a while, more tired, he knew, than he cared to admit. He let his eyes trail round the room, making comparisons with Rice’s penthouse flat and Plant’s near-stately home. That his own flat was sadly diminished by such a comparison didn’t bother him at all. In the course of this little trip round his room, he noticed a picture that he had all but forgotten hung beside the window, as one will forget what is always there to look at. It showed half a dozen horses at a white fence, in a representation eerily similar to the scene he and Wiggins had encountered on that first visit to Ryder Stud. Not for the first time, he thought how things all have a way of coming to bear.

He sighed and then looked at the short list of calls Carole-anne had plucked from his answering machine, since the damned thing never worked properly for him. These were probably not all of the messages; they were the ones selected by Carole-anne, those of which she approved and out of which she fashioned her short list, as if the messages were competing for the Booker Prize. The other messages were still there for Jury to unspool if he could work out the machinations of the machine, a devil’s device, as far as he was concerned.

In Carole-anne’s often indecipherable writing were listed calls from Vernon Rice, Wiggins, DCS Racer, Rice again, Melrose Plant, Wiggins again. He started with Vernon Rice.

“It’s Richard Jury-”

He was out of his chair like a shot, narrowly missing crushing Stone when he heard about Nell Ryder. He sat down again. “You mean she simply turned up in your office?” Jury levered on his shoe. “I’ll be there inside of a half hour, depending how fast I can get a cab.”

He wedged his foot into his other shoe, telling the dog, Stone, “He did tell me that, Stone. ‘She’ll just walk in,’ that’s what he said. And damned if she didn’t just walk in.”

FORTY-THREE

Jury looked at her for a long time, longer than was necessary for a simple introduction. The pictures on the wall of her grandfather’s study had not lied. He found it hard to wrench his eyes away, and “wrench” was just what he felt he was doing. This introduction took place in the course of seconds, but it felt like as many minutes, in which he had taken and dropped her hand and felt as if he were stuck in an afterglow the cause of which he had missed.

She was wearing dark designer jeans and a white silk blouse. For a girl of seventeen, she wore elegance well. But what she looked like-that she was extremely pretty-was almost beside the point. That wasn’t what held Jury, although he imagined many men would mistake this more mysterious quality for physical beauty. Rarely had Jury been unable to pin down a witness or suspect, to tease out what made the other person tick. But here he was, and would be, at sea.

Light from a low-glowing lamp behind her fretted her hair, the way light striking the surface of water filters down and diffuses. He had the eerie feeling he was looking at a scene underwater.

It surprised him when she apologized. “I’m sorry. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”

“It was no trouble.”

“I think it was. You’ve been in hospital. Vern told me.”

Vernon was pouring whiskey into a cut glass tumbler, looking ruefully at the empty bottle. He handed Jury the glass and said, “I’ll go down to Oddbins for some more. Nell,” he said, “go ahead and tell all. The superintendent needs to hear it.”

“But I’ve already told you every-”

Vernon shook his head, eyes closed. “He doesn’t want it from me, he wants it from you. It’s not just what’s said; it’s the way it’s said. Right?” He was shrugging into an anorak.

“He’s right,” said Jury. “Except I don’t want to put you through-”

Vernon said with a smile and a wave of his hand, “It seems to me it’s what Nell’s put us through, even though she wasn’t responsible. Nell.”

Vernon Rice seemed to have a lot of influence. But that didn’t surprise Jury, given it was to him she chose to come. She nodded. He said he’d be back in a few minutes.

Jury asked her about what had taken her out to the stables the night she was abducted. “I’ve been told,” he said, “but I’d like to hear it from you.”

“Aqueduct. Maurice told me he seemed sick. Stable cough, he said. It’s not unusual for a horse to get it. So I took my sleeping bag and went out to stay with him. I sometimes did that with a sick horse, though I didn’t really see any signs of stable cough. Still, better safe than sorry.” She smiled.

“Tell me what happened, Nell.”

She told the story unemotionally. It was as if emotion, at least in this instance, had been burned out of her. At the end of it, Jury sat silent for a few moments, then asked, “Were you treated well-or, at least, decently?”

There was a hesitation so brief that no one, not even Vernon, would have picked up on it except for a person trained to notice brief hesitations. Jury looked at Nell; she looked away. There was a silence she was not going to fill. He didn’t probe, at least for now. Instead, he said, “And you couldn’t leave because of the horses. The mares.”

She nodded; she shrugged.

“You didn’t think your grandfather would do something to get the horses out of there?”

“They aren’t, you see, doing anything illegal, so the authorities wouldn’t be able to shut them down. What they’d have done-Dad and Granddad, I mean-would have been to take their guns and find this place and shoot the lot of them.”

Her voice was near strident, almost to the point of desperation. That was it, he thought. That was what the child in her had wanted, what every child in danger prays for, no, expects: the protector to show up and “shoot the lot of them.” Only, the protector doesn’t turn up. So you find yourself in a position where there’s nothing to fall back on. Her mother had died; her father lived in London, too busy for her a lot of the time; that left her grandfather.

“You seem to feel-”

The look she turned on him seemed to implore him to explain herself to her.

“To feel guilty. Why?”

“If I was able to get away, I should have gone home. And I was able to.”

“They failed you; why should you go home?”

That startled her; it startled her, but at the same time made her utter a small, relieved sigh. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, balanced there, as if the suspense of this line of thought were a high-wire act. Then she laughed, but the sound was tight. “There was nothing any of them could do, though.”

“That might be literally true, but that’s not how you felt. They should have been looking for you-”

“They were.”

“But they stopped.”

For a moment she said nothing, then, “It was only reasonable to stop.”

“Vernon Rice didn’t stop.”

She dropped her head and seemed to be studying, as he had, the wavelike pattern in the carpet, a stormy gray growing fainter in color but the wave growing wider. “And you think that’s why I stayed away. That I was so spiteful-”

The notion of spite here was ludicrous. “Spiteful? That’s the last thing I’d think. No, I’m only looking for connections, for reasons.”

“Reasons. You think I’m lying to myself. You think the real reason I stayed there for all that time was for some sort of revenge. That my family couldn’t keep me safe. You don’t believe it was the horses.”

There was in what she said some deep truth that connected her with the mares. But Jury blamed himself for stating it so clumsily that she’d misunderstood. “On the contrary, I think the horses were absolutely the reason. By ‘connections’ and ‘reasons,’ I mean, how is it that you feel such compassion that you stayed when you could have left, and why were you willing to put yourself at risk again and again by going back, when you could simply have stopped? That first time, you could have taken Aqueduct and just ridden off. But you went back. Every time you went back it was more dangerous. You even went back to your room, your bed.”

“After the fourth mare I waited. So I needed to stay with the mares I had and take care of them. It was nearly three weeks between stealing the fourth one and the fifth, then the sixth. And after that, I just stayed in the barn. It was on Granddad’s property and we once used it, but not anymore.”

“You couldn’t have been far from there all along. How far was it?”

“I’m not sure; driving, I think it would be less than two miles.”

“And you didn’t know this Hobbs woman? I mean, before.”

She shook her head. “The farms are so far apart that unless you do business with one-” She shrugged and studied the rug again; it seemed to be the repository for their unspoken, perhaps unbidden, thoughts. “Being that close, all of this time…”

“But you still feel guilty.”

“Yes.” She looked up. “For the ones I left behind.”

Jury looked at her across this small sea of gray rug, at the pattern of barely distinguishable waves, by some illusion washing toward her, lapping at her feet. He felt a cold knot in his stomach, as if he had waded out into freezing water to reach her, but couldn’t. “The ones you left,” he said. For some people there was always something more to do, something more to save. “Did you think you could get all of those mares out?”

She nodded. “Maybe, at first. If I was clever enough. Brave enough.” Her smile was weak, as if she should never have expected to be either.

Astonished, Jury just looked at her. What she had already done was not enough to show her that she was both brave and clever. He hardly knew what to say in the face of such self-abnegation. He reverted to practical questions.

“This fellow who abducted you-would you know him if you saw him again?”

“I don’t think so, not to see him. Maybe if I felt him-”

She stopped so suddenly, Jury was suspicious. He thought of her former hesitation. “Nell, what else happened?” He knew the moment she looked at him and then didn’t look at him. Rather, she looked everywhere in the room, except at him. “This fellow, the one who abducted you, did he do anything else?”

She bent her head as if she couldn’t get it down far enough, far enough away from him. “It wasn’t him.”

Jury waited.

“Another one. Another man, but I only saw his face once, and not well. That’s because he came at night and made sure the room was always dark. He made me lie on my stomach and went at me that way. I never saw anything except his hands on either side of my face.” As if her listener might need this demonstrated, she put her own hands by her face, palms flat and turned inward. “Just his hands.” She seemed not to know what to do with them now.

Jury leaned over and took her hands in his. “This is part of the reason you feel you can’t go back.”

She was crying as she nodded. She said, “I didn’t fight it after the second time. To fight him off meant only that it would last longer.”

Jury moved to the sofa and put his arms around her. “None of this was your fault, Nell. None of it.”

“But you won’t tell anyone. Please don’t tell anyone. Vernon would kill him if he ever saw him.”

“No, I won’t.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her where she still had her face buried in his chest. She reached out a hand, took it. Interesting she’d chosen Vernon, and not her father or grandfather, to kill the bastard. Jury thought: And if I ever see him. I’ll kill him.

She had apparently made herself presentable enough to sit back. “If Mum hadn’t died-”

The if stayed unfinished. The if was always unfinished, wasn’t it? And death was no excuse for abandonment. It never had been, never would be. Such is our complete unreason when it comes to loss.

Was it the shutout, Jury wondered, that had evoked in her this love of creatures that could communicate only through signs and gestures? Was it herself she saw in these helpless mares and because of that was determined to do what her mother never could? Nor, when it came to it, her father or even her grandfather, though they were far better than her mother. They had at least stuck.

Nell went on. “She was a terrific horsewoman, Mum. Maybe that’s where I got the ability.”

That and a few other things, thought Jury, looking at the rug again. Loneliness, and an abiding rootlessness, an incurable homesickness. When Mum went, she took home with her.

“Mr. Jury.”

His head snapped up.

“What’re you thinking? I mean, you look so sad.”

“Oh. I was just remembering my own childhood. My own mum. I didn’t have a horse.”

“That’s too bad. You should’ve.”

He smiled. It was as if humankind were divided between the horse owners and the horseless, as if horses could take the place of missing parents.

Her expression was completely serious and concerned. “You’re going to Ryder Stud tomorrow?”

Her face clouded over a little. “Yes.” Then she surprised him by saying, “You could go with us. Would you?”

“Well… yes, if you want. I’d be glad to.”

They both turned at the sound of the door’s opening. Vernon came in with a large carryall that clinked.

“Sorry it took so long.”

“That Oddbins chap must have been giving you a detailed account of the slopes of Burgundy and Muligny.”

“Nope. I just ran into a pal of mine and we had a drink.” He set the bag on the floor beside the drinks cabinet.

Jury didn’t believe Vernon had met a pal. He had stayed away for this half hour to give Nell room to talk more freely.

“You both look like you could use a drink.” He held up a bottle of whiskey and one of red wine. “Okay? Interested?” They nodded and Vernon set about fixing the drinks.

“Tell me about the place,” said Jury.

“It was ordinary enough. Not as much land as we have.

The mares were kept in stalls some distance from the main building.” She described the barns, the narrow stalls, the way the urine was collected, the way the mares were tethered so they couldn’t move more than a few inches. All of this as if limning a picture he’d better not forget. But she said little about the rest of the farm. Her room, the kitchen, the locked office. “It was where I found out about this operation.”

Handing her a drink that looked to Jury as if it were right down Wiggins’s alley-a brightly colored club soda-Vernon asked: “That’s where you got the stuff you showed me?”

“Yes. Once I had a chance to look through her books. There were stud books. But what I was mainly interested in was the mares. Wait a minute.” She rose and went down the hall to her bedroom.

Jury took the moments to tell Rice what she’d said about going to the farm the next day. “What do you think? Is it okay?”

“Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we could-”

Nell was back with one of the Premarin folders and the snapshots and handed them to Jury. “That’s Valerie Hobbs, there.”

Jury looked at the two snapshots of the woman holding the reins of a horse and the third shot of what he presumed were the mares. He picked up the folder.

“It seems so benign, doesn’t it, when you read about it in there?”

Jury read about the drug. “I notice they don’t show you any horse farms, do they? What would women do if they knew about the way these mares are treated?”

Nell said, “Some would stop taking it-no, I imagine a lot of women would stop. Some would just go on. Like they go on wearing fur. I don’t blame them, really, even though it’s selfish and inhumane. There are so many things that make a person’s life hellish. I expect it’s hard to let go of any sort of comfort.”

“This is terrible,” he said, putting the folder on the table. “But you found nothing else?”

“I didn’t know what to look for, specifically. There was the book in which she kept an accounting of the mares and the amount of urine they produced, and breeding of each one.”

Jury held up one of the snapshots of Valerie Hobbs. “Do you mind if I keep this for a while?”

Nell shook her head. “No, take it.”

He pocketed the photo, then said, “About that night and those walls-”

“Hadrian’s walls is what we call them.” She seemed to like this and smiled in an almost sunny way.

Jury returned the smile. “What about the stable lads, the trainers? I’m just looking for whoever would be a good enough rider to jump those walls.”

“A jumper, a steeplechase jockey, could do it. He was small enough, I think, to be a jockey. With the right horse, maybe even Maurice could do it.”

“Maurice? I didn’t know he excelled as a rider.”

“That’s because he never talks about it. He always wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps and of course he’s not that good. He was well over five feet when I-left; maybe he’s grown since I saw him. Anyway, for Maurice, if he can’t be as good as his father, well, he doesn’t want to be anything. I’ve always tried to get him over that but I never could.”

Jury studied her for a while, then rose. “I should be getting back to my digs. What time are we leaving?”

Nell waited for Vernon. He said, “Ten o’clock all right for you?”

“Couldn’t be better.” He turned to Nell. “Thanks for talking to me.” He turned to go and Vernon said, “I’ll see you to the door.”

Outside the flat, Vernon said, “You know what I think?

I think it’d go down much better for Arthur and Roger if they didn’t know Nell had sought me out first. So couldn’t we just say we found her?”

Jury thought for a moment. “Say you found her. I agree with you. Make something up, and tell her what you’re going to say.” Looking at Vernon, he smiled. “You know for someone who spends his time shoving money around, you’re a sensitive chap. But why she wants me along, God only knows.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Vernon smiled.

As if God knew.

FORTY-FOUR

It was Arthur Ryder who opened the door, surprised to see the two of them there in tandem. “Vernon!” He kept his face straight. “Have you got a warrant?”

“Ask him,” said Vernon. “He’s the Filth, not me.” Arthur shook Jury’s hand. “I expect you know already about the woman who was shot? Simone Ryder?”

Jury nodded. “I heard, yes.”

Arthur Ryder shook his head. “I don’t know if that makes the whole thing less or more mystifying.” He looked from one to the other. “It makes me anxious just to ask, but-have you got news?” They were still standing by the open door and as he said this, he was looking past them at Vernon’s silver BMW. “One of your people, Superintendent? Doesn’t he get to come in from the cold?”

“No,” said Vernon. “Look, Arthur, we do have news-”

“Christ!” The single syllable nearly broke in two, sounding both anxious and sorrowful. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

This reaction interested Jury. Vernon Rice would never have thought that. He’d always believed Nell was alive. He’d always known it.

“No, Arthur. She’s not dead. She’s alive.”

“You mean you’ve seen her? What-?” Then he was off the sofa and almost throwing himself across the room as if he meant to reach the door by the shortest way possible. He flung it open.

“Art!” called Vernon.

When Nell saw him, she sprang from the car and ran around it, ran toward him. When they met in the center of the courtyard she jumped up and tried to wind herself around him.

Vernon watched and sighed. “She bloody well didn’t do that when she met up with me again.”

Jury couldn’t help himself; he cuffed him one up the side of the head, laughing.

“What? What?”

Arthur and Nell, both laughing, both crying, reached the door.

“I just can’t believe it,” he said, releasing her from the grip of his arm. “Where’d you find her? How did you find her?” This was directed at Jury, naturally assuming it was police work.

“Don’t give me any credit for it. It was Vernon.”

“Pure luck. I was coming back from Cambridge, Art, and some instinct took me down that old road that leads to the compound you don’t use anymore. The horse barn, the exercise ring-”

“That’s where you were?” he said to Nell.

“Not for the last two years, Granddad, no. Only a few-days.”

Jury thought Vernon was right in not letting Arthur know Nell had sought him out in London. Vernon, being Vernon, didn’t take this as Nell’s preference for him, but just that he was the one who could be of the most help. And why he failed to conclude that the person who can help is the preferred person, Jury damned well couldn’t work out.

Arthur still held her hand, as if reluctant to lose physical contact, as if she might disappear if he didn’t hold on. “I’ve got to call Roger. Or have you?” he asked Vernon. “Have you seen Roger?”

Vernon shook his head. “This is the first place we came. Where’s Maurice? We need to tell him, too.”

“Don’t know,” said Arthur, absently. “Outside, probably the stable.”

“I’ll look for him,” said Jury. He wanted to talk to Maurice alone.

Outside, Jury found one of the stable lads, who pointed him off in the direction of the training track. He found it on the other side of a stand of oaks and elms, the path running through the trees. When he got to the track he saw that the crime-scene tape was down, but whether removed by Cambridge police or Maurice himself, Jury didn’t know.

Out there, blowing into the straight on the other side were Maurice and a horse Jury recognized as Samarkand. If that horse was running at this breakneck speed at his age Jury would love to have seen him as a three-year-old. He must not have touched the ground; he must have been wind.

And Maurice himself, bent in half over the horse’s neck, would have made one hell of a jockey. Continuing to grow as he had must have been bitterly disappointing to him. Jury wondered if Maurice hated his body. He filed that question away for future consideration.

Maurice saw Jury as he came out of the second turn and pounded on past. He then stood up in his saddle and slowed Samarkand, rode the horse from the track and dismounted.

“Maurice.” Jury held out his hand.

Maurice shook hands with him, tossing his head to get the dark hair off his forehead and out of his eyes. Jury thought it a gesture something like Samarkand’s shaking out his mane. “You must have been frustrated watching yourself get taller and taller. It took you out of the race.”

“I guess I was. Why are you here? Has something happened?” Anxiety raised his voice a notch.

Another five minutes of not knowing wouldn’t hurt him. “You told me you weren’t much of a rider. You were being modest.” Jury smiled. “You know, I’m still wondering about Aqueduct-” Jury paused and looked at him.

“Wondering what?”

“That night. Just how sick the horse was. You recall telling your grandfather he-Aqueduct-had a bad cough-what you called, I think, stable cough?”

“That’s right. It’s like an allergy; it could be a reaction to hay or straw.”

“And you told Nell this, too.”

Maurice nodded.

“Knowing Nell would stay with the horse, as she often did.”

Maurice said nothing. His normally pale complexion paled even more.

Jury waited, but Maurice wasn’t going to say any more. “Nell said she didn’t see any signs of it.”

Maurice started to answer this charge, but then did a double take. His eyes widened. “She said? What’re you talking about?”

“Nell’s come back. She’s up at the house.” Jury started to say something else, but Maurice jumped up on Samarkand (to the horse’s apparent dismay) and was off. Walking to the house from this spot would have taken three minutes, maybe four. But Maurice must have found even three or four minutes too long. That was going to be some reunion! Jury wanted to see it, yet he stayed here by the track.

Scene of the crime.

FORTY-FIVE

“Owning that horse”-said Agatha as she marmaladed a scone-“will permit you to join the hunt.”

Melrose set aside his book, took a sip of tea and said, “Agatha, if there is one thing not on my short list, believe me, it’s joining the hunt.”

Having made quick work of the scone, she dusted her fingers. “You should; you should do more as befits your social standing here.” She scanned the cake plate as she lifted her teacup.

“And why should I engage in something befitting my social standing when around here, there is no society?”

“Oh, stop being whimsical, Plant, it doesn’t-”

Melrose saw her glance toward a window, openmouthed, and heard the scream: “Aaaa-rrrr-aaaaah.”

“Good lord, Agatha! What’s the matter?”

She was pointing at the long window on the south side of the living room. Melrose looked just in time to see the unkempt hair of Mr. Bramwell disappearing from view. Well, about time he earned his pike, or whatever hermits scratched around to get. Melrose could hardly contain himself, seeing Agatha’s reaction, which was even more than he could have hoped for had there been rehearsals. Her face was chalk white; her eyes stared. Nor had she dropped her finger, for she was unable to move.

“Oh, come on, Agatha. It’s only the hermit.” He reclaimed his book as if nothing had happened.

“The what? What on earth are you talking about? Have you gone mad? Have you gone zany?”

That was a nice word, thought Melrose. “Don’t you remember the book I was reading the other day? We were talking about ornamental hermits”-this was better than he’d expected for now she was gathering up her things (and his, if that little jade horse was any proof)-“ornamental hermits were a lot like ornamental shrubs-”

“That’s it, Plant! I’m done! Finished! Finished with you and your crazy ways.” Hefting her voluminous carryall, she rose. “Completely round the twist, that’s where you’ve gone.” She repointed her finger at the window. “That creature has apparently been permitted the freedom of your grounds. You surely don’t think this place is safe with him running about. Probably a sexual deviant to boot.”

“I don’t know, but I’ll ask.”

“Oh! And to think all of the time I’ve given over to seeing that Ardry End runs smoothly. It’s either your hermit or me!”

Melrose slipped down in his chair and stared at the ceiling, considering a dozen rejoinders and discarding each in turn as not quite worthy of the occasion. Life offers few such delicious moments, moments that taste like his father’s hundred-year-old port, stashed in the cellar, must taste like. He decided no, nothing made of words was up to it. An answer to “either your hermit or me” should be fashioned out of jewellike words, words spilled across the table like a velvet sackful of rubies.

He settled for “We’ve a contract. And hermits have a union, you know, just like bus conductors. So-?” Melrose shrugged slightly, his eyes brilliant, at least he felt they must be brilliant for he certainly felt brilliant. He saw that in all of her consternation, she was still holding on to the jade horse.

“Very well. You shan’t see me again anytime soon.”

“No, but I hope I’ll see that little jade horse.”

Melrose stood drinks for Diane and Trueblood later in the Jack and Hammer, rewarding them for the trouble they’d gone to. “It couldn’t have been fun, interviewing a lot of men like Bramwell.”

“Oh, it wasn’t bad at all, sport. Helped me sharpen my investigator’s prowess, my detective’s instincts.” Trueblood lit up one of his sunset-colored cigarettes and said, “For instance, the one who wanted to know what newspaper he’d be getting was a definite no. I mean, I don’t think a person who reads the Times is to be trusted as a hermit, do you? And the one who wanted to know what pubs were in the area, same thing. Got rid of that lot in a quick hurry. Then there were demands for days off, nights off, even half days and early closings. ‘Well, you’re not going to be running a hermit shop,’ I told them. ‘You’re not going to be selling bloody hermit souvenirs.’ ‘Awright, mate, exactly wot does this ’ermit fella do, then?’ I immediately stepped on anyone who asked what the duties were. Quite amazing some of them. You’d almost think”-Trueblood knocked off the ash that had been teetering on his coral cigarette-“that they’d never seen a hermit before.”

“They never have,” said Diane, running a finger above the rim of her glass as a signal to Dick Scroggs.

Melrose said, “The thing now is-how do I get rid of him?”

“Why, you just tell him his talents are no longer needed.”

“Fire him, you mean.”

“Yes, or just, you know, make him redundant. Tell him the war’s over.”

Diane arched an eyebrow. “Just tell him you’re finished. You don’t have to elaborate or explain yourself.”

“Isn’t it obvious I can’t fire people? Momaday’s living proof of that.”

“Well, yes, but Momaday’s ostensibly being useful. Or at least he’s in a potentially useful line of work as grounds-keeper,” said Diane.

“Wait! Wait!” Trueblood jumped up, nearly overturning everyone’s drink. “I’ve got it!”

Diane clutched her martini with both hands to avert further disaster. “Stronzo!” Diane liked to trot out an Italian expression once in a while since Melrose had come back from Florence. She didn’t speak Italian, but her accent was impeccable. It annoyed him to death.

“The answer to getting rid of Bramwell: Theo Wrenn Browne is the answer. His shop. You’ve seen that CURRENTLY HIRING sign he just hung in the window, as if he were some corporate chain, like Waterstones? If we play our cards right, Theo could be coaxed into hiring Bramwell.”

Melrose frowned, turned this over, then smiled. “Excellent! How?”

“There’s only one way to do that, old trout.” Trueblood now lit up a jade-green cigarette. “Make Browne believe I want to hire Bramwell. He’ll be all over him then.”

“This ’ere milk’s gone off, mate,” said Bramwell to Melrose, raising the jug from the breakfast tray Martha had fixed for him.

This person was being waited on hand and foot. Melrose ignored the milk and said, “Mr. Bramwell, you really aren’t suited to the hermit life.”

“I coulda tol’ you that from the beginnin’. But t’pay’s good.”

“I’ve found you a far superior job. Of course, you’d have to be interviewed for it.”

“Wot’s it pay? I gotta collect me dole money, don’t forget.”

Melrose pushed a hanging vine out of his face. He wasn’t interested in discussing government fiddles. “I don’t know precisely what it pays, but at least as good as this job, I’d think.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“Well, it’s gotta be better’n sleepin’ rough in this lot.” He waved his arm around the hermitage.

“If you live in Sidbury you could easily commute. There’s a bus between Sidbury and Little Blunt.” Melrose had never seen this bus (he’d never seen Little Blunt, either), but he’d heard about it, as one might a distant star beyond one’s galaxy. He took out a small notebook (the one that looked much like Jury’s except Melrose’s was all leather and Jury’s was all plastic), wrote the address of the Wrenn’s Nest, tore it off and handed it to Bramwell. “You can see Mr. Browne tomorrow-and one suggestion: don’t call him ‘mate’; he’s not as good-humored as I am.”

Bramwell made a wheezy noise meant to sound like the end of hysterical laughter.

“Never mind, just don’t. Tomorrow afternoon. But first you’ll want to stop in the antique shop and have a word with Mr. Trueblood.” If Theo didn’t see Bramwell go into Trueblood’s shop, he would certainly see the both of them go into the Jack and Hammer together. Browne stood at his window half the day just to see what was going on.

Bramwell’s face was contorted with confusion. “Why the bloody ’ell do I want t’see ’m for? Or ’is shop?”

“Because he has a position open, too, and you might want to compare the two.”

“I don’t know nuffin about bleedin’ antiques.”

No, and you don’t know nuffin about hermits, either. “Just talk to him, will you? He’s right across from the Wrenn’s Nest. I’m sure he’d take you to the pub next door for a drink.” That, thought Melrose, was a brilliant stroke!

Bramwell thought so, too, apparently, for his frown un-pleated. “Yeah, well, I guess. Anyway, it’s time for me lunch.” He started to shove the tea tray at Melrose just as a cab drove up and stopped before the front door of Ardry End. It was too far to actually recognize the face of the man who got out, but he was tall.

Jury! About time, too. Melrose started off across the grass at a trot.

“ ’Ey? Wot about me lunch, then?”

Melrose threw the answer back over his shoulder. “Have your people call my people.”

“Who were you yelling at?” Jury was looking into the distance, his hand shading his eyes.

“Just the hermit. Come on inside!”

But Jury didn’t move while he pondered this answer. “Were you intending to elaborate on that, or-?”

“What? The hermit?” Melrose recounted the Bramwell saga.

“You’re crazy,” said Jury, as they walked across the lawn toward the hermitage.

Melrose stopped. “Crazy? Crazy? Do you see any sign of Agatha?” He spread his arms to take in Ardry End, its tower and gardens, its trees and paths, its hermitage.

Jury laughed. “You’re right there.”

Ruthven was on the steps of the house calling to Melrose, who stopped. Jury stopped, too. Melrose said, “Oh, no, you go on, hermit expert; I’ll catch you up.”

Jury walked on.

When Melrose did get to them, Bramwell was making a call on a cell phone.

“A cell phone, Mr. Bramwell?”

“Gotta call me turf accountant, don’t I? Mr. Jury ’ere was just tellin’ me what ’e liked in the fifth at Newmarket.”

As Bramwell turned away, Melrose gave Jury a look. “Oh, this is rich, this is.” He could hear Bramwell’s mumbled request of his bookie.

Bramwell turned back and slapped the little phone shut. “There now. Thanks, mate.” He had taken to Jury immediately.

“Come on!” Melrose veritably pulled Jury toward the house, filling him in on the plan for getting rid of Bramwell.

Jury just shook his head. “You couldn’t do something simple, could you? Like firing him or telling him to get lost and handing over a pay packet for the weeks he’d miss? Hell, no. You and your cohorts invent a plan that could go wrong in a dozen different ways. Why don’t I just go back and arrest him?” Jury turned.

Melrose grabbed his arm and dragged him back. “No! No, you can’t get rid of a hermit in the conventional ways. A hermit has to be schemed away. Otherwise-”

“Yes?”

“-it’s bad luck. But why are you acting so high and mighty about it? I seem to recall something about a notebook you absconded with. The memoirs of Franco Giappino? His adventures in Transylvania? His many brides?”

Jury waved this away as they walked up the front steps. “Oh, that.”

Ruthven was waiting inside. Ruthven waited as impeccably as he did everything.

“Superintendent, I’m happy to see you’ve returned.” He was helping Jury remove his coat.

“Tell me about Nell Ryder,” said Melrose. “What happened?”

“If you’ll just let me get this other sleeve off, ah, thank you, Ruthven.”

Ruthven bowed slightly and asked, or started to, “Would you care for tea, Superintendent?”

“I would, yes.” Jury claimed the sofa. “In case I want a bit of a lie-down.” He sank back against the soft cushions. “First, though, I talked to Barry-Chief Inspector?-Greene. Seems the dead woman was Ryder’s second wife.”

Melrose raised his eyebrows. “What do you make of that?”

“I don’t; I haven’t, yet.”

Melrose sat on the edge of his wing chair. “Well, go on, go on about Nell Ryder. You said she turned up at Rice’s office. Out of the blue.”

“Out of the blue indeed.”

Then Jury began and went on telling Melrose, over the lighting of Melrose’s cigarette, over the appearance of the tea, about Nell Ryder’s reappearance.

Melrose didn’t speak, but sat back and marveled at this story that should have begun, Melrose said, with “Once upon a time.”

“Maurice?” Melrose said, aghast. “But why would he have-he’s been, or seemed, so heartbroken by Nell’s disappearance-”

“Even more reason to be utterly miserable, if he had anything at all to do with her abduction.”

“But what?”

Jury shook his head.

Melrose grabbed a tiny sandwich from a plate that Agatha was not here to ravage. “For nearly two years he’d have kept it to himself?” Melrose shook his head and poured out more tea. “Uh-uh, I can’t buy that.”

“After a while, it would get even more difficult to tell anyone, more and more, because he’d have let everyone flounder for a week, month, then six months, then a year…” Jury shrugged, sipped his tea and took a bite of smoked salmon sandwich. He felt starved. “What’s for dinner?”

“I don’t know. A slab of cow or a dead duck?”

Jury smiled and they sat in silence for a moment. Then Jury asked, “Can you imagine the patience it took for Nell Ryder to do what she did? Not to mention courage.”

“ ‘Patience’ isn’t exactly the word, is it? ‘Determination,’ I’d say. No, ‘focus’ might be even nearer the mark. Those mares. They were the only thing that came within her line of vision. Everything else disappeared; everything else she just hacked down to clear the path. If her mind was trained on a distant light, she’d swim through a river of crocodiles to get to it. Someone like that”-Melrose shook his head-“is stepping to the beat of her own drummer, that’s certain.”

Dinner was, forensically speaking, a dead duck, but more specifically, a duck sautéed in a fig and marsala vinegar. Sour and sweet played off each other in a delicious and syrupy essence, not to mention the alcohol-laden one. With it were French green beans in a walnut vinaigrette and bourbon mashed sweet potatoes.

“Aren’t you interested in Wales?” asked Jury.

“Wales? No, should I be? Oh, yes, I forgot with so much else going on. What happened?”

Jury told him about Sara Hunt.

“You think she’s obsessed with Dan Ryder? Or was?”

“Still is. No, that flame has not gone out.”

They ate and drank in silence for a few minutes. Then Melrose looked at Jury. “What are you sniggering about?”

“Wondering how an alcoholic would deal with these soused dishes. Vernon Rice has one of those dotcom things called SayWhen.”

“What does it do?”

Jury speared a bite of marsala-soaked duck. “Nothing, really. It mostly commiserates.”

“What does he sell, then?” asked Melrose.

“ ‘With-a-Twist.’ ”

“Pardon?”

“It’s the newsletter that’s sold,” said Jury. “That’s what it’s called-‘With-a-Twist.’ It does some sort of riff on personal experiences. I’m not sure what. But the site is meant to give people incentive to stay off the booze.”

“Wouldn’t you think a grown man, a grown broker, a grown venture capitalist and day trader-wouldn’t you think he’d have better things to do with his time?”

“Don’t be so holier than thou.” Jury sniggered again. “I just wish he’d start up one on smoking. I could use some commiseration there.”

“But you stopped smoking two years ago!”

Jury gave him a look and shook his head. “Is today your ‘I’m a Simpleton’ day? For God’s sake, smoking is a complex matter. How many packs a day do you go through?”

“Only one. I limit myself to just the one so I won’t get addicted.”

Ruthven entered.

“Let’s have some more incredibly soused potatoes and another bottle of whatever.”

“The Hermitage?”

“That’s the ticket.”

Ruthven retreated.

Melrose asked, “Where was the place she was taken to?” “About two miles from Ryder’s, to the north. She was that close.”

“Weren’t they afraid she might be recognized?”

“Apparently not.” Jury thought about the walls. “If you were a good horseman, it’s more direct to jump those walls. And this person was apparently a very good horseman. Nell thinks he could easily have been a jockey.”

Ruthven returned with the wine and the potatoes. “These damn things are making me drunk,” said Melrose while Ruthven spooned up the potatoes for him.

“It wouldn’t be the whole bottle of wine, right?”

Ruthven tittered as he served Jury.

“No, it wouldn’t. That’s what I usually have and I’m sober as a judge.”

Ruthven said, “Will you be ready for dessert in fifteen minutes? The soufflé will be out of the oven then.”

“Yes, thanks.”

Ruthven made his exit with tray and server.

“Soufflé. What kind?”

“Chocolate. With fairy cakes.”

“Do those things really exist?”

“Of course. Fairies exist, after all. It’s a child’s confection, a cupcake with wings.”

They had cleaned their plates and Jury sat back with a sigh. “God, this is so nice. Waited on hand and foot, whiskey, wine, duck.”

“Is it?”

“You don’t think so?”

“I’m used to it. Mind if I smoke?”

“It’s bad manners to smoke between courses.” Melrose plucked a cigarette from a porcelain box, lit it with his Zippo. “And nor do I know why the second Mrs. Ryder was done in on a training course.”

Jury sat back. Then he said, “Possibly a joke.”

“Oh, how droll. ‘I saw the funniest thing the other day, a dead body on a racecourse.’ ”

“Not that kind of a joke. Or joke’s the wrong word.”

“Well, whoever did it is no doubt pleased to see all the trouble they’ve caused.”

“Yes. That’s the other part-”

Ruthven had returned with the soufflé, served with a raspberry confit in a delicate tracery of red.

“Delicious looking. Martha’s really outdone herself.”

They ate in silence for a while, savoring the mingling of chocolate and raspberry.

Jury looked up suddenly, holding his fork like a little spear. “Unless-”

“Yes? Unless what-”

Jury shook his head. “Nothing. It’s a bit far-fetched-”

“At Ardry End, you’re in the land of the far-fetched, believe me.”

“I was going to say, it reminds me of the way he died.

Dan Ryder. Thrown from his horse.”

“Hm. Interesting. What about this woman, then? This second wife. Your Cambridge detective-did he fill you in on anything?”

“Simone Ryder. She was here, apparently, to talk to an insurance adjuster.”

“But that accident occurred-when? Over two years ago, didn’t it? She hasn’t collected the insurance yet?”

“No. The thing is, there’s a double indemnity clause in the policy.”

“Ah-ha! Shades of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.”

“What?”

“Surely you’ve seen that classic noir film. Double Indemnity. They murder her husband after taking out insurance with one of those clauses. If the death is caused by accident, pay up twice the face amount.”

Jury looked up from the design he was making in the raspberry sauce with his fork. “Wouldn’t it be a bit difficult for Mrs. Ryder and her boyfriend to kill her husband by means of a fall from a horse?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I imagine you could plot a murder any old way.”

“So, she makes sure the indemnity clause is intact and then Ryder’s wife and her lover somehow orchestrate this riding accident. With the horse’s cooperation. Hm.”

“Then Edward G. Robinson starts smelling something fishy.”

“Edward G. Robinson?”

“He was in charge of claims,” said Melrose. “One of those terrier types who get their teeth into possible fraud and won’t let go.”

“How was Stanwyck’s husband supposed to have died in this film?”

“Train. Fell off the back; that’s when you could go out onto the platform for a smoke on American trains.” Melrose looked at his own cigarette and considered. “Why was she in the Grave Maurice? It isn’t exactly a pub one would seek out. Or a place where a woman like that would choose to meet someone. So I assume it was simply handy, and that would be because she’d been to the hospital, or was going to it. I don’t see how she could have been going to meet Roger Ryder, as he was there when I came in. Left just a moment after.”

“But she wouldn’t have recognized him. I doubt she was carrying a snapshot of the good doctor around. Remember, the Ryders had never met this woman.”

“So they say.”

“So they say, yes.”

They drank their coffee and were silent.

Jury asked, “What sort of racing do they have in Wales? Is there much of it?”

“Point to point. There’s a lot of that. Are you thinking of Dan Ryder’s going there because of this woman Sara Hunt? Point to point is mostly amateur stuff, but certainly professionals ride in it.”

Jury nodded. “I’m thinking of them, yes. Wondering how easily they could have seen each other.”

“You’re convinced she was.”

“Absolutely. You should have seen her reaction when I asked her about him. She had to leave the room.” Jury thought about Sara alone in that magnificent, desolate house in its setting of ruined gardens and broken statuary and felt a kind of longing he could not attach to any particular place in his own experience. Whatever it was, he felt a pull to go back. What seduced him? The woman? The house? The past?

Melrose went on. “From what we know about him, any halfway decent-looking woman who’d admit to so much as an acquaintance with Dan Ryder might as well go whole hog and admit to an affair.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to be thought of as one among many.”

“Unless-”

“Unless what? There you go again.”

Jury picked up his fork again and ran the tines through the slightly congealed raspberry confit. “There I go, yes.” He put down the fork. “I think perhaps I need to make another trip to Cardiff tomorrow.”

“Wales again?” Melrose sighed. “That means you’ll have to go to London. I’ll drive you.”

“Thanks.”

FORTY-SIX

Jury felt, when he’d sat down in the same seat he’d occupied on his return trip to London two days ago, that he might have found the answer to time travel, that he really was going back in time, but that to be able to do that was a sentimental fantasy; to want to do it was a failure of nerve, although he could not say expressly how or why. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be getting into one of those dreary discussions with himself that usually ended with part of him irritated and part of him smug and all of him losing.

He wondered about the lad with the CD player and earphones and when the train pulled into the station where the boy had got off, Jury looked for him on the platform. He wanted to repeat the process without knowing why and wondered if it was no more (and no less, of course) than that desire to have the past back again, which plagued him generally.

Yet, in this case, the meeting was not past-or at least not yet-but in the future. But he felt far more ambivalent this time than he had in his previous encounter with Sara Hunt. And he felt the future could be a wrenching disappointment.

Jury lay his head back against the seat and wished for the return of the lad with the earphones and Door Jam.

When she opened the door this time, she seemed more at ease, thinking (Jury supposed) anything bad that might happen would have happened in their first meeting. He wondered why, since the police generally didn’t have to come around twice unless there was a problem.

“I guess I feel flattered that you think I’m worth seeing again.”

“Oh, I think you’re worth seeing many agains.”

“Many agains.” She laughed. “I like that.”

They were standing in the large, square black-and-white marble entryway. She looked, he thought, quite beautiful in her plain skirt and sweater, the skirt long and black, the sweater cropped and a little boxy, a dusty blue, cashmere, probably. Brown eyes, toffee-colored hair, a color you felt you had to touch as well as see to know for certain. He restrained himself.

“I hope I’m not being too intrusive.”

“In seeing me? Lord, no, you can imagine the number of visitors I get out here.”

He smiled. “Actually, I can’t.”

“My point exactly.” She hung his coat on the coatrack. They walked into the living room, grown no warmer in its outer reaches than before. A pool of warmth collected around the chairs and sofa in front of the fireplace, some invisible boundary around them.

“You’re timing’s perfect. I’ve just made tea.”

As he had on the train, he sat again in the chair he had sat in last time and she sat again on the sofa. While she poured the tea, his eye canvassed the room, took in its feeling of emptiness largely owing to the sparse furnishings and the huge cast-iron Gothic window, cheated again of light by the tree outside.

“It’s so large and so isolated,” he said, “you must get lonely at times.” Yes, that was properly banal.

Perhaps because of the banality, her look was a little condescending. Probably, he deserved it. “I don’t think loneliness has much to do with size and isolation, really.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, please, Superintendent. Not again. You’re baiting me.”

This surprised him, for he hadn’t been. He was saving his baiting for later. At the moment, he was perfectly serious. “Why would I do that?”

She set down her cup. “Because of something you’d seen or heard when you were here last. You want something; I don’t know what. Information, I expect.”

She sounded quite matter-of-fact and undisturbed by all of this; she sounded, in a word, innocent, unconnected to anything involving the Ryders. He heard a tiny sharp snap and looked up. She had bitten into a crisp biscuit and was smiling at him around its edge.

“Yes, I do want to tell you something. Two things. One is that the Ryder girl, Nell, is back.”

Sara looked wide-eyed and said, “But that’s wonderful! What happened? Did someone bring her back?”

Jury told her a pared-down version of Nell’s return, an edited version, for he did not know what did or didn’t apply to her, if anything.

“Her father must be ecstatic. I can’t imagine, I really can’t, having something like that happen to a child.” She plunked another lump of sugar in her tea, as if the sweetness of the girl’s return called for some additional sweetness on her part. “What’s the second thing?”

“The woman found dead on that training track has turned out to be Dan Ryder’s second wife.”

She had raised her teacup, and it stopped and hovered at her mouth as her eyes widened. “But that’s-well, it’s damned strange, isn’t it? What did they think she was doing there? I mean-” She replaced the cup in the saucer, carefully. “It was one of the Ryders, then?”

“I don’t know.”

They drank their tea and looked at the fire in silence. Jury’s eye went to the silver-framed picture of the man who was probably her ex-husband. He rose, walked over to the kneehole desk and picked up the picture. “This your husband?”

“Ex-husband.”

“Then you didn’t part on such acrimonious terms after all. I mean-” He held it up.

She had turned her gaze to the big window and whatever she could see through the tree beyond it.

Nothing but a blank wall, thought Jury. “-to keep his photograph around?”

“I’ve always liked that picture.” She said, rising suddenly, “Let’s go for a walk in the dissolute gardens.” She held out her hand to him. He took it.

There had been snow over the last two days, but not much of it had stuck, only enough to make this landscape ghostly. Knots of snow lay in the stone hair and on the inner side of the elbow of the girl pouring from a jug, and in the open mouths of the fish waiting to receive the water. There was ice on the steps down to the path between the maples and on the path, too. It crusted the surface of the fountain. Skeletal flowers, brown and black, were adorned with pockets of snow and ice blisters that gave them an ethereal look, spiky, white-webbed plants on the pocked surface of some star up there that he could see faintly now in the half-light of a late afternoon.

“I love it in winter,” said Sara. “I shouldn’t say it, I guess, but I think I like it more now than in the spring or summer. It seems closer to the way things are. The truth, perhaps.”

“You think the truth is cold and colorless?”

“Well, I’ve usually found it to be not terribly warm and inviting.” She looked up at him. “In your line of work, I expect you think so, too.”

“Yes, but I have to begin with something cold and uninviting. Homicides generally are.”

“Still, I’d think you’d be more jaded than I am.”

But he wasn’t. “No. Disappointed, angry, sad-those things, but not cynical, which I suppose is another term for jaded.”

“But you must constantly be dealing with lies, bad faith and betrayal. You must see that all the time.”

Jury thought about Mickey Haggerty. Then he thought about Gemma Trimm, about Benny and Sparky. He smiled. “Yes, but there are things that counteract that. The good guys are still winning.”

She was astonished. “How? Why? Because there are more of them?”

“No. Because they’re good.”

Smiling, she shook her head. “I don’t quite get that.” She paused to shake snow from a skeletal bush. “You know, you haven’t told me why you came back.”

He watched her face. “To find out more about Danny Ryder.”

“But I told you.”

“No, I don’t think you did.”

She looked down at the empty pond. Without looking back at him, she said. “I don’t know why you say that. It’s as if you don’t believe me.”

“I don’t.”

She hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

“When I asked you to tell me what it was about Ryder that attracted you, you left the room. You couldn’t deal with it.”

She waved an impatient hand at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

“We could do it again,” he said, only half joking.

Sourly, she regarded him.

“You walked out because you couldn’t bear thinking about him, his physical self. You had an affair with him, didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“He must have been one hell of a charismatic guy because from the way I heard it in one blink a woman would be all over him. Since I’ve only seen pictures of him, I can’t quite fathom this. He’s good-looking all right, but not handsome enough it would compensate for his size. He was a fairly little guy, five five, and that’s actually tall for a jockey.”

Sara put her head in her hands. “My God! Such machismo! You, of course, aren’t a ‘little guy,’ and I guess you set the standard.”

Jury smiled. “Something like that.”

Her head snapped round. “What conceit.”

“Uh-huh. But back to Ryder-”

“You’re so tenacious about this, about my knowing him. Why?” They were standing by a stone bench. She sat down.

“Because you had more to do with Dan Ryder than you’re admitting to.”

She sighed. “All right, damn it, but it won’t help you; it isn’t what you think. Call Dan Ryder a secret passion. It’s completely adolescent.” Ruefully, she smiled at Jury.

He said, “Everyone’s had feelings like that.”

“When we were thirteen or fourteen, maybe, but not thirty or forty.”

“Do we ever stop being thirteen or fourteen? Or six or seven, for that matter? I think we carry all of that around with us; we just have more practice in hiding it.”

“It was an-obsession. For two years, I’d be like one of those rock-star followers, what are they called, those girls?”

“You mean ‘groupies’?”

“I’m a racing groupie. Or I was. Whenever I could, I went to Cheltenham or Newmarket or Epsom Downs-that’s the last time I saw him, the Derby. After that he went to France. Wherever he was racing, I’d go. Of course, I couldn’t really see him, not amongst a dozen flying horses and riders. But I knew the colors and the number and name on the blanket. Given the way jockeys ride, their faces are invisible. I had binoculars. And the race itself, I suppose that had something to do with it. There’s something so romantic about it. I could sometimes see him on the telly in the winner’s circle. But in person? I only met him in person twice: once at the farm, the Ryder farm. Vernon Rice took me because I said I was interested in horse syndication.” She looked up at Jury. “Whatever that is; he talked about it at length, but I wasn’t paying attention. But it was certainly a way to get to where Dan was.”

“So this obsession was fed by nothing on his part?”

“Fed by nothing.” She looked ashamed.

Jury thought, as she talked, that she was devolving into an ever-younger persona, versions of herself not at all arch, coy or evasive, and he thought of Carole-anne, who seemed to have kept her entire adolescent self intact. It bloomed and closed again, like the delicate petals of hibiscus furling and unfurling, night into morning. Perhaps he should ask Carole-anne about obsession.

It was dusk now, bluer and colder. Still talking, Sara rubbed one arm to stave off the chilly air. Jury removed his jacket and put it around her shoulders.

“Oh. Thank you.” Her smile was utterly genuine, vulnerable.

“I didn’t mean to stop you talking.” He sat beside her.

“I’m glad you did. You’re very good at this, you know.”

He laughed. “At what?”

“This. Getting people to talk. For a while there I wasn’t even aware of you; I was just talking to myself. I guess I wanted to talk about Danny.”

“I guess you did.”

“It’s hard to put it in words.” She looked at her feet, turning the ankles in and out in a way children had of doing. She sighed and shrugged. “That’s the sum of my experience with Dan Ryder.”

“But when you heard he died, it must have been awful for you.”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

She brought her hand up to her forehead and he thought she might be going to cry, but she didn’t. She just said it again, “Oh, yes.”

It was nearly dark, that purple no-man’s-land before nightfall. “Let’s go in,” said Jury.

As she had done before, she rose and held out her hand to him. He liked it; it was as if someone were wanting, for a change, to care for him, and he took advantage of it. With the hand she’d reached out, he pulled her toward him very quickly and kissed her quite hard. It happened in only a few seconds.

“Come on,” she said, pulling at him. “Let’s continue this discussion inside. And why are you laughing?”

Jury said, “I’m on sick leave; I’m supposed to relax.”

“So? We’ll relax.”

Once inside, she led him into the kitchen, also large, also cold. She opened a cupboard and reached in and brought out a bottle of red wine with a label that looked as if it had been picked at over decades.

“Special occasion. Puligny-Montrachet. One of the absolute best years. Quite old, quite rare, and very relaxing.”

“I’m depending on it.”

With the wine held above her waist, she pressed up against him and kissed him lightly. “And if wine doesn’t do it, there’s always-” She laughed. “You know.”

“Oh, I’m definitely depending on you know.”

They climbed the back stairs leading from the kitchen to the first-floor bedrooms. She was holding his hand again.

The bedroom that she led him into, obviously hers, had high windows that gave onto that part of the garden in which they had been sitting. Jury looked down at the bench and felt he was looking at some distant self, the one he had brought here, the one that would not be going back with him. You don’t need this, mate, he told himself. You really don’t. This woman is trapped in a dream and she’s not going to wake up because you’re so bloody wonderful. You know something’s wrong-

Fuck off, friend.

He tasted the wine. Delicious. But it could have been plonk and he’d still think it was delicious.

Sara rested her head against his chest, and he ran his hand over her hair and smiled. Yep. Definitely taffy colored. Pulling away, he set down his glass, and she pulled him back and started unbuttoning his shirt. He reached his arms around her waist and unzipped the skirt, which fell to the floor in a black puddle. There was so little effort required in undressing. It was as if the clothes were so lightweight, so transparent, they blew off.

In bed, with his mouth slightly opened, barely touching hers, he asked, “Is this better than a dream? What do you think?”

And back she murmured, “It is a dream.”

He looked off at the cold windows. A dream within a dream. He did not think he liked that.

She said, “I just can’t seem to help it.”

Jury rolled over, grabbed her. “That’s what they all say.”

FORTY-SEVEN

She had wanted him to stay the night, but he had not, making the excuse that he really needed to return to London. He had promised Nell Ryder. She had argued, but not vehemently, that it wasn’t after all his case.

“I think I made it mine.”

“You’re supposed to be taking things easy. That’s what you said.”

He laughed. “You call what we’ve been doing ‘taking things easy’?”

So once again he was on the train, now its familiarity soothing. He wanted to sleep, not so much because he was tired but because he’d rather sleep than think. There were too many insensate moments in life not to be grateful for pure sensation and the last hours had certainly been that.

At the station’s newsstand he had bought a Telegraph and The Sporting Life. Jury had read a racing form about as often as he’d read Ulysses and thought Joyce’s density no match for the racing form.

It was something that Sara had said. It bothered him, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what it was, except that it had to do with racing. Cheltenham, Newmarket, Doncaster were places she’d gone to following Dan Ryder around. He didn’t doubt that she’d done this, for what man or woman would confess to such an obsession unless they were sociopaths? That kid who stalked Jodie Foster, the nutcase who shot John Lennon. Obsession was often not benign and harmless. But what was it, that detail that made him, right now, uncomfortable?

It looked like the same attendant who’d been on the train before, and who now came clattering through the car, shoving the food and drink trolley. As he’d done before, Jury bought a cheese salad sandwich and tea in a plastic cup. He hadn’t eaten the other sandwich, and wouldn’t eat this one; there were so few people in the car that he felt it must be discouraging not to sell your wares. He’d give the sandwich to Carole-anne; he now remembered that she loved cheese salad. He’d tossed the first one in the dustbin at the station.

Jury had called Plant to let him know he’d be spending the night in his Islington digs and would try to get to Ardry End tomorrow. The nice thing about Plant was that he didn’t ask questions beyond “Are you all right?”

He took a few sips of the tea. He was getting to be as bad as Wiggins, who would have drunk the lot so as not to have the fellow think his tea wasn’t any good. Wiggins watched flight attendants going through safety precautions, too. The tea was the same tea that he’d had on the other trips. Why did train tea always have that bit of whitish foam on top, as if its ingredients couldn’t coalesce?

He returned to his meditation on Sara Hunt. He opened the print-condensed pages of The Sporting Life and ran his eye over the various kinds of races-claim, handicap, stakes-and the horses entered in them. Nothing jarred his memory for whatever it was, or perhaps it wasn’t. It might have been something or someone else-

Davison. George Davison, Ryder’s trainer. That afternoon they had been standing with Wiggins and Neil Epp in front of Criminal Type’s stall. The Derby, at Epsom-that was what Sara had said. The last time she’d seen Dan Ryder race before his defection to France a few weeks later was in the Derby, up on Criminal Type. But Davison had made a point of that race. “Only time I ever lost me temper at the board it was over that weight allowance. They said Criminal Type’d have to carry another twelve pounds. Bloody unfair. So I scratched ’im.”

Davison had scratched the horse almost at the last minute. Criminal Type was taken out of the field, and the horse and its jockey didn’t race.

Why had Sara told him she’d seen the race? It seemed such a pointless lie, as he wouldn’t have thought one way or the other about that race, the only thing setting it apart being that George Davison had taken his horse out. It made no sense, what Sara had said. He slid down in his seat and closed his eyes.

She had been with Ryder that day? But in that case she would have known he wasn’t racing at Epsom. She could fairly well assume that Jury wouldn’t know that the Ryder horse was scratched. (Certainly, he’d pled ignorance of the racing world in general.) His head was hurting, probably in sympathetic response to his side, which throbbed. Dr. Ryder would thrash him if he knew Jury wasn’t following instructions. So would Wiggins. So would Carole-anne. He’d be thrice thrashed, a pleasant little tongue-twister. He made sure the cheese salad sandwich was in his coat pocket. It might fend her off for a little while.

A very little while. Carole-anne, dressed in emerald green, had deposited the sandwich wrapper in the trash can and was now picking crumbs from her gorgeous green bosom.

“Are you saying you went all the way to Wales-?”

“And back. Twice, and lived to tell about it.”

The eyes that leveled on him would have been cold had they not been so goddamned turquoise. Flashing turquoise, to boot. There she went now, hands on hips:

“Super! You know you promised that doctor that you wouldn’t exert yourself in any way, that you wouldn’t go out pub-crawling, that you’d stay in bed as much as possible-”

“I lied.”

Well that flummoxed her. She was gathering up her argument, getting it into full gear, which of course demanded a fellow arguer, and Jury wasn’t doing it. He smiled.

Carole-anne had to search around for another arguable topic.

Ah! The consideration card!

“It’s just not very considerate, that’s all, I mean to me and Mrs. W, as all we do is worry, wondering where you are and if you’re okay. Not dead in a ditch somewhere. Like Wales.”

“But you thought I was in Northamptonshire with Melrose Plant.”

“Well, but you weren’t! You were in Wales!”

That she saw no flaw in this argument was one of the things he loved about her. Jury rose, walked over and embraced her. “Sorry.”

Her words were muffled by her head’s burrowing against his chest.

Jury thought of the rain-swept, snow-swept garden, of its oddly aromatic winter scent. Carole-anne gave off that scent somehow. He released her. She went back to the sofa, argument momentarily suspended. “Then why’d you go to Wales, anyway? Nobody I know goes there.” She uncapped her nail polish.

“Apparently nobody anybody knows goes there. Except me.”

“What’s she look like, this person?”

“You asked me that before.”

“I know. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.”

Not bloody likely. Jury thought he would doll up the description and ran the faces of several film stars by his mind’s eye, discarding each of them in turn as perhaps not beautiful enough to fan the fires of jealousy. Would Judi Dench or Helen Mirren capture her imagination? (They captured his.) No. Right now she was tapping her foot, which didn’t register very high on the impatience scale since she hadn’t any shoes on.

“Well, if it takes you this long to describe what she looks like,” she said, drawing her unpainted toenails back to rest on the edge of the table-“then she mustn’t have made much of an impression.”

“Juliette Binoche,” he said, a woman so far from resembling Sara Hunt it began to worry even him.

“Oh, her.” Unmoved, Carole-anne dipped the tiny brush in the neon-bright pink polish and let it hover over her foot as if sizing it up for the glass slipper.

“Am I to understand you do not think Ms. Binoche has the most alluring complexion in the whole world? No-the whole universe? Her skin is absolutely luminous.” Though luminosity in another when he had Carole-anne right in front of him was definitely coals to Newcastle.

Carole-anne’s chin was on her up-drawn knee, as she dabbed the nail polish on her little toe. “She’s French.”

Jury had always taken a secret delight in Carole-anne’s non sequiturs, but this one puzzled him. “She’s French. That removes her completely from our purview, does it?”

“I guess it removes you. She lives in France.”

Ah! That was it. Juliette was inaccessible! And in Carole-anne’s seamless accounting, Wales merely took off where Paris began. “Yes, she probably does live in France, but a man could easily have a lover there, what with the Chunnel making it so convenient.”

“You’re claustrophobic.”

Was she splurging on non sequiturs tonight? “I am?” She nodded. “You wouldn’t last five minutes in the Chunnel.” Down went that foot, up came the other.

“Oh, for God’s sake, that’s ridiculous. Whatever gave you that impression?”

“Suit yourself.” Her entire self rejected his argument as the work of a fool. Even her toes shrugged.

“I get on elevators; I get on planes.”

“I’m only talking about the Chunnel. You’d only be claustrophobic there. You don’t have all-over claustrophobia.”

“Then I’ll fly!”

“You can’t afford it. Between here and Paris it costs a fortune.”

“So I have Chunnel claustrophobia. How interesting. All I can say is, either way, Juliette Binoche would be worth it.”

“If you want to chance it.”

By the time she was wriggling her toes to dry them, Jury was sure he was in love with Juliette Binoche.

Damn, but did she have to live in Paris?

FORTY-EIGHT

“Ardry End has seen the last of him!” exclaimed Melrose, in answer to Jury’s question about Mr.

Bramwell. “Let’s drink to that!” Melrose raised his teacup.

“So you managed to fire him?” said Jury.

“Not exactly. It was more of a job transfer.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s gone to the Wrenn’s Nest.”

“What?” Jury laughed. “How in hell did you foist him off on Theo Browne?”

“By making it known that Trueblood intended to hire Bramwell. You know that if Browne could take away anything Trueblood has-a basket of vipers, a dram of strychnine-he’d do it. Makes no difference that the result would be poisonous to Theo, at least it would be poison Trueblood couldn’t have.”

“Who thought this up?”

“Trueblood.”

“That figures.” Jury laughed again, and finished his tea.

“I thought we might drop in at the pub before dinner. Pots of fun, it’ll be. Tell me what happened in Wales with that woman.”

Omitting the end of it, Jury recounted his visit to Sara Hunt, ending with his doubts about her account of the Derby before Dan Ryder quit and went to France. “What I want to know is why she’d fabricate that.”

Melrose thought about this. He said, “The race wasn’t being offered as an alibi.”

“No, probably not.”

“I’d say definitely not. It was just part of the whole story of this obsession with Dan Ryder.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I am, yes. The lie about the Derby wasn’t meant to go anywhere. It sounds like one of those lies told for the pleasure of lying. That it gives her a sense of power or control to lie to a Scotland Yard superintendent. I’d say the question isn’t why did she lie about the Derby, but why did she lie about everything else to boot?”

Jury leaned forward to pour more tea. “I don’t get it.”

“Oh, come on, Richard. Did she bewitch you-I see she did. Well. Have you told me everything, then?” Melrose smiled a little wickedly.

“Never mind. Why do you say the whole story’s a lie?”

“I suppose to conceal a real obsession with a counterfeit one.”

Jury looked at him.

“Ha! This woman must have you turned completely around. Look, it’s not as if I don’t believe in obsession-maybe it’s the only emotional experience worth having, I don’t know-but I don’t believe in the one she foisted on you. If Dan Ryder had had such a grip on her mind and heart, and she knew Arthur Ryder and Vernon Rice, why wouldn’t she have put herself in Ryder’s way by playing the family card? In other words, Sara Hunt is a relation; she didn’t need to keep her distance; she could have got herself invited to dinner, so to speak.”

“But does obsession work along such rational lines?”

“I have no idea. The only thing I’ve ever been obsessed with is getting rid of Agatha.”

“That sounds as if Sara Hunt thinks it’s a game.”

Melrose nodded. “Remember that suspect of yours who called herself Dana?”

Jury didn’t answer. He didn’t like this topic.

“Took you in completely.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” said Jury, glumly. “Are you saying this Derby story is the same thing?”

“Could be. It’s not easy to throw you off the scent. You must have been getting close.”

“Close to what, though? That she used to sleep with Dan Ryder? So did a lot of women. But why the ruse? You say it’s to cover up her real obsession. I still don’t get it.”

“Neither do I, even though I said it.” Melrose drained his cup. “Come on, let’s go to the pub.”

Vivian jumped up and kissed him; Diane set down her martini with barely a sip; Trueblood rose and pummeled Jury’s shoulder.

“I was here only two days ago,” said Jury. “Not that I don’t appreciate the boundless enthusiasm.”

“You’ve been running around when you should be relaxing,” said Vivian.

“When Uranus,” said Diane, expelling a stream of smoke, “is running neck and neck with Saturn.”

“But only half,” said Jury, putting his hand on hers.

“An odd racing analogy,” said Trueblood.

Melrose said to Vivian, “Jury wants to know the score on Giappino.”

Vivian said, in mock wonder, “You haven’t heard that Franco simply dumped me? Then you’re the only one who hasn’t.” She favored all of them with a mirthless smile. Melrose and Trueblood found some other place to look.

Jury looked round the table. “So how did you lot manage to chase him off?”

Fiddling with a cigarette, Trueblood said, “Well, we might have given Count Dracula the wrong impression.”

Vivian said, “You did indeed. I didn’t tell you, but I got a letter from him. He said that with his brothers all being alcoholics, he just wasn’t ready to take on this problem in a wife; that he was sorry he hadn’t the funds to help with the foreclosure on my house-or whatever they call it in Italy, probably beating someone with sticks-and he was so sorry about my mother’s dementia, but he couldn’t take the chance of my inheriting it and thus passing it along to ‘his’ children. I loved the ‘his.’ I marveled at you”-her glance swept the table-“managing to get in all of those things. He found it, clearly, a heady experience.”

Jury smiled, for he also knew what the others knew: it had been a huge relief to Vivian, who apparently was unable to call the wedding off herself; she needed all the help she could get. He said, “Vivian, if that sort of trivial stuff could set him off, be glad you found out in time.”

“Here, here,” cried Trueblood. “But next time, come clean, you know, tell the chap right up front about what he’d be taking on.”

Vivian hit him with a pillow from the window seat.

Jury said, “Why don’t you people stop messing about in other people’s lives?”

Diane made a little moue of distaste. “I really don’t think that showing up the real intentions of a prospective mate is ‘messing about.’ I’d certainly want to know. It’s rather amusing, don’t-Oh, good!” Diane, who had a clear view of the window, dropped the count like a hot potato and pointed. “Look! Theo’s coming across.” She said it as if the High Street were the Styx.

Theo Wrenn Browne, ever taken with the demands of fashion (yet never looking it), was wearing a green tweed suit that would have sent Hugo Boss back to sackcloth and ashes. Theo was also sporting a stubble of beard, deliberately unshaven. However, Theo, never quite able to meet the demands of masculinity, took two days to grow a day-old stubble. His suit jacket was buttoned only at the top button, his whole ensemble screaming Last year! Last year!

Diane, who would kill herself before putting a well-shod foot in last year’s doorway, always enjoyed Theo’s sartorial death throes, and said, as he stood by their table, “What a nice suit. It must be difficult to find just that shade of green. Aubergine, is it?”

Theo squinted and looked warily round at them much as the Cincinnati Kid might have scoured a table full of high rollers in some saloon. Unfortunately, he hadn’t the Kid’s savoir faire, and merely looked petulant, standing with his glass of beer, waiting for an invitation to sit down. Ordinarily, that got him nowhere, but today it did because they wanted to hear about Bramwell.

Trueblood pulled a chair round from another table and patted it. “Sit down, sit down and tell us about your new assistant.”

Theo sat, gingerly. “Well, he’s not that, is he? More a stock boy, I’d say. It takes training, doesn’t it?” Browne turned his inborn irritation upon Trueblood. “Too bad you lost out there; I expect Freddie prefers books to antiques.”

Freddie? Well, Melrose guessed he had to have a first name.

Theo went on: “Or the two of you just didn’t hit it off.”

His smile was vaguely vicious; Theo just didn’t know who or what to train his anger on, so he kept it up in the air like a spinning plate.

“Or perhaps you’re paying him more than I would.”

It was plain Theo wondered if he was paying him much more.

“I will say that I admire your largesse-” said Trueblood.

Theo’s smile was held in suspension as he couldn’t be sure what was coming.

“-in not holding that time in the nick against him.” Trueblood lit a cigarette and waved out the match.

“ ‘In the nick’?”

Poor Theo could never run a bluff-too bad, seeing he was sitting across from the fellow who had invented bluffery.

“Oh? He didn’t tell you?” Trueblood’s eyebrows sought the headier heights of his slowly receding hairline. “I guess he thought it would tell against him. Yes, Freddie is what his gang called him.”

“Gang? Are you really saying Freddie was with a criminal gang?”

Melrose gave Trueblood’s shin a smart rap. If he carried on in this way, Melrose might have to put up with Freddie the Hermit again. Theo Wrenn Browne would fire him; Theo, he was sure, could fire people twenty-four hours a day. “Stop exaggerating. I didn’t have a bit of trouble in that way.”

“Of course you didn’t. He never went inside the house; he was confined to his hermitage, wasn’t he?” Trueblood shifted his attention to Theo again. “What did he tell you his last job was?”

“Book reviewer for the Sidbury paper.”

Diane nearly choked and Vivian patted her back. Diane said, “There isn’t any book reviewer on that paper. Nobody can read past fifth form, including me.” Diane was always generous with her criticism.

“Freelance is what he said. Only the occasional review, which is why I didn’t see it, he said.”

Good God! thought Jury. This Bramwell ought to be working for M1.

“A stock boy,” said Vivian, “is quite a demotion from book reviewer.”

“Maybe, but I told him first he’d got to learn the ropes.”

“And is he a hard worker?” asked Trueblood. “I passed by your shop earlier and saw him sitting in that easy chair by the window, reading.”

This earned Trueblood another crack on the shin from Melrose.

It was clear Theo did not like this news, but had to defend Freddie-meaning, defend his own choice-and he said, “Well, when you’re dealing in lit’re’ture all day, it’s awful hard not to keep from sampling it.”

“Yes, except he was reading a racing form. Likes a flutter now and then, does he?”

Theo gripped his empty glass and went remarkably red. “I’m sure you’re mistaken. Probably what he was reading was an inventory sheet.”

“If your inventory lists Pieces of Eight in the sixth at Doncaster, yes, it could be.” Trueblood deflected yet another attack under the table.

Theo, as he always did when he was losing (which was always), tried to go on the attack. Smarmily, he said, “Speaking of racing-just how’s that horse of yours, Mr. Plant? ‘That nag’ as Freddie calls him.”

“Aggrieved? Oh, he’s doing well on his gallops. I’m considering the 2000 Guineas for him. Yes, I’m sure you’ll see Aggrieved given short odds.”

“He’ll wire the field,” said Diane, blowing smoke in more ways than one.

“What was that horse-Shergar? Is that his name?-kidnapped by the IRA and held for ransom? No one paid it. The horse disappeared.”

Jury thought of Nell.

Diane dipped into what appeared to be a bottomless well of racing lore. “This horse in the States named Spectacular Bid was so outstanding, he was one of the very few horses ever to do a walkover.” They all looked blank. “A ‘walk-over. ’ That’s when there are no other entries in a race because no trainer thinks his horse can beat you. The horse gallops round an otherwise empty track.”

Jury had to admit he liked that image. A horse galloping on an empty course and people in the stands cheering.

“Diane,” said Melrose, “when did you turn into a bottomless well of racing arcana? I’ve never known you to hold forth at such length.”

“One of my fans-if you can call them that, the gullible creatures-asked me-meaning the stars-who I liked in the seventh at Newmarket for the next day. He read off the list. I just picked the name I fancied most. Well, the damned horse won and this idiot is always pestering me for more tips. I did it again. Actually, I began to wonder if I had the gift. There are people who can do that sort of thing on a regular basis-”

“They’re called bookies.”

“-and it just got me interested in the whole thing. I read a book.”

News that was met with the perturbation of a stock market crash.

“Anyway, going back to Spectacular Bid. There’s a nice little story about him. His jockey was talking to a reporter who asked him if he was to die and come back, would he like to come back on Spectacular Bid? The jockey said, ‘No, I’d like to come back as Spectacular Bid.’ ”

They laughed. Jury, too, and then he stopped laughing. His mind had been tripped by what she’d said. He sat, the drink in his hand undrunk, thinking. But how could they be sure it would work? Jury asked himself. Answer: They couldn’t. He sat there in a slump, thinking, trying to work out what could have happened. He looked all around as if the vacuum might assist him in discovering what he wanted. He said, “Do you get Le Monde around here?”

They all stared at him with round eyes as if no one had ever made such a frivolous request.

Theo, obviously thinking he was one up in the culture department, said, “I’ve been considering getting some of the European papers in, you know, for those who wish to keep up on things.”

“Such as who?” said Diane, who returned to the subject of racing. “The one I really liked most was that other American horse, Go for Wand.”

Trueblood raised a polished eyebrow. “Gopher what?”

“Not ‘gopher,’ ‘Go for.’ Two words. Go for Wand.”

Trust Diane to rake over the course of American racing and come up with a name none of them had either heard of or could even sort a meaning from.

Melrose said, “That’s an odd name. Are you making it up?”

Diane sighed. “Of course not. It’s a name that was taken from an old Jamaican superstition that when one was accosted by a strange spirit who could cast spells, one had to go home for a wand to ward off the evil spirit.”

Melrose sat back, brow furrowed in question.

“It’s the truth. You know I don’t have the imagination to make up something like that.”

“No, I don’t. You manage once a week to make up the solar system.”

Diane ignored that. “She was good in mud-”

“So is Momaday, but I wouldn’t give odds on him.”

“-she nearly met Secretariat’s record on the one course. She was only two-fifths of a second off Secretariat’s time. Imagine, not just a second but a split second can mean the difference between winning and losing.” Diane sighed. “How exhausting. Anyway, her last race was the Breeders’ Cup. Right near the end she stumbled in the backstretch, threw her jockey and shattered her leg, went down, got up and kept on going. With a shattered leg, she kept on going. She collapsed in the home stretch. They had to put her down then and there. I’ve never been one to admire determination-it’s so tiring-but can you imagine? To keep at the gallop with a broken leg? It’s something to know that in this life of travail and tears-and, fortunately, vodka”-she raised her glass-“some things never give up.”

Jury thought of Nell. “And some people.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to your mare.”

“Go for Wand had that field wired,” said Diane, sadly. “She had it wired.”

FORTY-NINE

Vernon walked into his office at eight a.m. the next morning to find Bobby and Daphne already in theirs. He could hear them even before he passed by the door of their eerily dark room. They were fighting about something; they always were. They never agreed about stocks, bonds, IPOs, hedge funds, the Dow, NASDAQ-anything. It was almost like a deeply sworn feud that provided, together with a basic exchange of knowledge, their principal entertainment.

Divesting himself of coat and laptop, Vernon went back to the dark doorway. The only light came from five computer screens. Light pulsed, shadows moved. Vernon thought of Plato’s cave. (It came as a surprise to people that Vernon had taken a first at Oxford in philosophy.) The cold bluish light of their separate screens washed over their faces, Bobby’s and Daph’s, as if submerging them. Three other computers tuned to different networks, different sources of financial information were lined up on a long table where they could view them when they needed to. It had long been a marvel to Vernon that they could share these cramped quarters and not go crazy. Perhaps the nature of the work was already so crazy that they could factor in their own without noticing.

“I want you to look into this bunch”-he tossed Nell’s folder on Bobby’s desk-“see what’s going on with this drug. And with its stock offerings.”

Bobby tore himself away from his screen. You could almost hear the rip. Even as he talked, he kept peeking at it. “Wyeth? That American pharmaceutical company? It’s Wyeth-Ayerst Labs-yeah, that’s the one that put out that diet drug called fen phen the FDA is pulling off the market. Bad, bad news that thing was.”

“Anyway, I have a friend with a passion for horses and this company makes this drug”-Vernon nodded toward the folder. “They get it from the urine of pregnant mares. Premarin, it’s called.”

Daphne made a face. “Horse urine?”

“I’m sure the horses share your opinion. Unfortunately, they have nothing to say in the matter.”

Daphne swiveled her chair around. “Wait a minute; I’ve heard of that. It’s for menopausal women. Some sort of estrogen, a hormone-replacement drug?”

“Good for you,” said Vernon. “Especially considering you’re only twenty-five.”

Bobby leaned forward, frowning. “But that must take a hell of a lot of horses.”

“Oh, it does.” Vernon described the way the urine was collected.

“God,” said Daphne, “that is horrible.”

“Wait. I haven’t even told you the downside. Most of the foals are shipped off to slaughterhouses. A few are kept to replace the mares that die.”

“God,” she said again. “Do the women taking this stuff know this?”

“I doubt it. If they knew, most would find some other drug. And there are perfectly good ones out there that do the job and without the questionable side effects.”

Bobby cocked his head. “Sounds like you’ve been researching this.”

“I have. So what I want you to look for is some way of making life less than pleasant for this pharmaceutical company. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Eyes on screens, they both waved him away in friendly fashion.

Vernon opened his laptop, leaned back in his chair and thought about Nell. He always thought about Nell.

He looked at his screen and thought about Nell. He was thinking about taking SayWhen public. No, he was thinking about Nell.

Samantha put her head round the door and tapped on the doorframe. “I’m going to the caff for breakfast take-out. What do you want?”

“Oh. Pork pie with a ploughman’s.” He thought about Nell.

“That’s not breakfast, Vernon.”

“What?” He looked at her.

She shook her head. “That’s lunch, not breakfast.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his head. Then he ordered an egg sandwich, bacon and coffee. And thought about Nell. He looked at Samantha. “Is that breakfast?”

“That’s breakfast.” She tapped her knuckles against the door again, her silver ring rapping it.

“A blueprint,” said Bobby, when Vernon later went back to the room, “for success.” He turned his computer screen so that Vernon could see it. “This company’s PR people must be first rate. You market Premarin, first by covertly selling menopause to American women as a disease, making them think they’ve just got to have hormone-replacement therapy; second, you assure everyone the horse farms are meeting ‘guidelines’ ”-Bobby made squiggles in the air to indicate the quote marks-“not government guidelines but ones laid down by Wyeth itself and, of course, by employing its own inspectors to make sure the guidelines are met; third, you stomp all over any competition, especially any bunch that wants to make a generic. You’ve locked in your patent for half a century, of course. Now, by following this simple recipe you wind up as the only manufacturer of this drug, making a billion and a half a year. And think of this: it’s not a drug taken intermittently because of illness; it’s one the woman is taking for the long haul-in other words, forever.”

Daphne was chewing gum and staring at her screen. “I don’t believe this; I mean, how could this corporation get away with this? They took out the patent in ’42 and have had no competition. These poor horses-” She turned her screen toward Vernon so that he could see the picture of the mares in their stalls. “They’re tied so they can’t move or lie down. Even calves in crates aren’t much worse off. These mares are pregnant for God’s sake. And they can’t move. Are we back in the Dark Ages?”

Vernon looked at the screen, at the condition of the horses, at the narrow, narrow stalls. He shook his head. “Maybe we never left it.”

“Where’d you get this literature?”

“From the girl who was in my office a few days ago; you met her. She got the folders from a stud farm in Cambridgeshire. It looks as if someone was apparently going to try to market this stuff in the UK.”

“Never,” said Daph, “they’d never get away with it. In the States, yes, you can get away with keeping seventy-five thousand horses in these deplorable conditions-”

Bobby sat back in his swivel chair. “You’re saying Americans are more callous than we are?”

“No, Booby, I’m saying America is so much bigger than we are.” She balled up paper and threw it at him, then turned back to her screen, punched in some commands and said, “The Premarin Web site.” The page showed the face of a smiling woman. “Why’s she smiling? Look at the side effects: possible nausea, increased risk of blood clots and uterine cancer…” She scrolled past a few pages. “Here it is-description: ‘material derived from pregnant mares’ urine.’ You can’t say they never told us. Except this writing is as tiny as fairy tracks. Who could read it without a magnifying glass?”

Bobby didn’t appear to be hearing her, lost in one of his own stock-option meditations. “We could try selling short.”

Daph looked at his screen. “Uh-uh. I don’t like the downside potential.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “It’s unlimited. Bobby likes it; I don’t.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything less of both of you,” said Vernon, leaning down to look over Bobby’s shoulder.

Bobby loved all things chancy; he was staring at the display of the drug company’s stock options.

Daph had the same readout on her screen. She shook her head and clucked her tongue like a prissy schoolmistress. “It’s too strong, Bobby. You can’t short it.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, for God’s sake.” He looked round at Vernon. “I could post something on the Net. A rumor here, a rumor there.” He turned his thumb down, pushed it toward the floor. The stock would make the same trip, his look said.

Vernon’s return look was like a knuckle in the eye.

Bobby shrugged. “Just a thought.”

“Corporate assassin,” said Daphne. Then to Vernon,

“He’s going to land us all in the nick, Vernon, one of these days.” Then to Bobby. “You can’t short it, Bobby.”

Daphne, Vemon knew, really liked this sort of fox chase. “You’d sell your own gran for some dicey stock options,” he’d told her once. Now, he looked at her screen. The stock was still climbing, fractionally, but definitely on an upswing. Then it held steady.

Bobby’s fingers danced across his keyboard. He said, “Here’s something interesting.” Business World, a dependable money magazine, reported that another hormone-replacement drug was about to enter the market.

Daphne asked, “How can it if this pharmaceutical company holds the patent?”

Bobby shrugged. “What they’re really worried about is a generic. Look at this.” He scrolled down the page. “A synthetic alternative to estrogen is going on the market. Called Evista.”

Daphne had pulled up another article. “Listen. ‘One of its antidiabetics was causing almost universal dizziness, weakness, slurred speech and other symptoms and would almost certainly be up for review.’ I’m quoting here. There’s a report coming out on it.”

“When?” said Vernon.

“Couple of days, it looks like.”

“Get Hodges to go over it.” Dr. Hodges was a retired physician and more or less on Vernon’s payroll as a consultant for anything health related. “Then get Mike West to get hold of the report the minute it comes out.” West was a lawyer in the States, also retained by Vernon’s investment firm. “Also, see if you can turn up any studies on the other one-Evista?”

“Okay.”

“Keep watch, baby,” Vernon said, squeezing Bobby’s shoulder. Daphne’s mouth was hanging open, as it often was when she was watching the screen. “Babies, I mean,” said Vernon.

FIFTY

“You could just have called Cambridge police, couldn’t you? There’s no real need for you to go there.” Wiggins was driving.

“Watch the road, will you? We nearly cut that lorry off. Listen: ever since I got in the way of a bullet, you’ve been telling me what I need, what I should or shouldn’t do, where I should or shouldn’t go. I wish you’d stop it.”

Wiggins spoke carefully, as if he were trying to calm a bad-tempered child. “I’m only concerned for your health, that’s all.”

He was negotiating a roundabout, and none too happily. In front of them was a Cortina that appeared to have no driver. No, Jury saw a blur of gray above the driver’s seat.

“Why do they let people like that out on the roads? It’s every bit as dangerous as speeding. Look-he can’t be going more than twenty miles an hour.” Wiggins leaned on his horn and the old car lurched, nearly stopped, then sputtered on. “He must be driving in sixth gear.”

As this diatribe continued, Jury said, “It’s Cambridge, Wiggins, not the tenth circle of hell.”

“It’s not much use,” said DS Styles, “trying to question her. Her solicitor told her not to say a word without him being there.”

“I didn’t think she would, Sergeant, certainly not anything that has to do with the charges against her. She might not answer, but I can still ask.”

“Suit yourself, but I say it’s a waste of time.”

Jury knew what he was really saying was that detectives from the Yard had no business being here. But since Jury was a personal friend of the DCI in charge of the case, then they’d probably do what he wanted. “I’m not really trying to interfere with your investigation; the case is yours; I know that.” This suggestion of amelioration at least got Styles’s hackles down. “I only want to talk to her for a few minutes.”

“Suit yourself,” DS Styles said again.

When Valerie Hobbs was led into the interview room, Jury was sitting at a table in one of the four institutional-looking gray metal chairs. Jury rose only a few inches from his chair and nodded at the WPC who brought her in and who then left. He judged Valerie Hobbs to be five two or three. He had not raised himself to his full height because he would have towered over her and he believed that might intimidate her.

He watched some response flicker in the light brown eyes. Her hair was not only bright, but silky, or rather the silkiness was what made it shine. She had a slightly cleft chin, a well-molded nose and a mouth that curved upward at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling, which she certainly wasn’t now. Still, some of the hardness left her face when she looked at Jury, who introduced himself.

She locked her arms across her chest. “What’s Scotland Yard got to do with this? Is it because it’s a kidnapping? Which I’m innocent of, incidentally. I’d like a cigarette, if you have some.”

He did. Although he’d stopped smoking-oh, baleful day!-he’d stopped in a newsagent’s and got a pack of Silk Cuts. He put the pack on the table. “You can have the lot.” She inched one from the pack and he lit a match. As she inhaled and exhaled with closed eyes, he knew full well the rush one of those could give after you’d been deprived for any time at all.

She said it again: “I didn’t abduct the girl.” Her voice hit the scale at some point between raspy and sexy. For a woman who’d refused to talk, Valerie Hobbs was doing a pretty fair job of it.

“But you know who did.”

She smoked in great long draws on her cigarette. “No, I don’t.”

“But someone had to bring her to your place. You say you didn’t, then-?” With a questioning but good-natured frown, he dipped his head to see her face, which was turned down.

“I wasn’t there.”

This was such a weak rejoinder he wondered how she could offer it. Jury let that rest for a moment and said, “You came to know the girl, Nell, quite well.”

“Not so very.”

“She was at your farm for nearly two years.”

“With someone like that, it could’ve been twenty and you still wouldn’t know her.” Her expression was one of self-satisfaction. It pleased her to frustrate his line of questioning.

But Jury wasn’t bothered by the answer; he was only a little surprised she could have assessed Nell in this way. “Someone like that? How was she different?”

Valerie actually thought for a moment, as if it were important to get it right. “Determined, kind of aimed, I guess you’d say.”

Jury sat back. That was interesting. “ ‘Aimed’? I’m not sure what you mean.”

She took another long draw on the cigarette, slowly exhaled. “Like an arrow. Her attention would be on only one thing, say.” She shrugged.

Jury waited a beat. “Why do you think she didn’t try to run away long before she did? Apparently, she had a fair amount of freedom.”

Valerie inspected a finger with chipped nail polish. “Those horses, I expect. I admit I did threaten to kill her own horse if she tried anything. Well, look at the bargain she drove after they brought me in: if I’d release the mares, then she’d testify on my behalf. I’ll say this for her, she doesn’t hold a grudge.”

Jury could hardly keep from laughing at that way of putting it. Twenty months of captivity turned simply to a grudge. “No, I can see she doesn’t. Either that or her forced imprisonment didn’t mean all that much to her.”

“That’s kind of funny, right? She’d been abducted and didn’t care? Oh, she did at first, hammering on her door and yelling to be let out. But then she just stopped, as if she knew it wasn’t smart. That girl was very smart. I could appreciate that, I’ll tell you.”

Jury’s look was intense. “I’m surprised she was allowed to live, frankly. She was a constant threat to you, and as it happened, you were charged with conspiracy.” He leaned closer to her across the table. “Valerie, you know what’s going to happen to you if you don’t cut a deal with the prosecution.”

“No, I don’t. She’s not testifying against me. She said she wouldn’t and I know that girl. You can’t flip her.”

In fresh astonishment, Jury sat back. That Nell Ryder had convinced this woman who’d held her captive for twenty months that she, Nell, would defend Valerie Hobbs was a feat of persuasion that even Vernon Rice would marvel at. It was all the more marvelous in that Valerie Hobbs read Nell correctly.

“Her testimony will probably reduce the sentence, but you’re still looking at prison, Valerie.”

She had fingered another cigarette from the pack and Jury cupped a match to light it. This time, as she leaned toward the flame, she touched his fingers, then looked at him through the smoke.

“The jury isn’t going to look kindly on the treatment of those horses. The animal-rights people will have a field day. You won’t be popular, to say the least.”

She kept shaking her head as he was saying this. “That won’t come into it; my solicitor says it’d bias the jury against me and it’s nothing to do with the abduction. Anyway, there’s nothing illegal about keeping those mares and even if that did come into it, we can just flood the court-room with photographs of these huge horse farms in Manitoba that make mine look like nothing at all. Compared to what goes on in some of them, mine would be a stay at the Dorchester. Anyway, it’s not down to me; I’m just paid to take care of them.”

“Who is it down to, then?”

She looked away. “I’m not saying anything else without my solicitor being present.”

Fine time to think of that, thought Jury, reaching into his coat pocket for the snapshots.

Jury sat back, looking her up and down, making a point of doing so. “You’re about-what-five two?”

Surprised, she sat back. “What in God’s name has that got to do with anything?”

“I think you’re an extremely attractive woman.”

This earned him a false smile and a cloying tone. “I wouldn’t suit you; I’m only five three.” She looked him over, as he had done her, at least as much as she could with a table cutting them in two. “You’re way over six feet.”

“Four inches over, yes.”

“You’re not half bad yourself.”

“Thanks.” Jury was fascinated. Valerie Hobbs could and probably would-despite Nell’s testimony-go down for this crime all on her own, yet here she sat, confident enough to put moves on him. So what was it? How could she have been sold such a bill of goods? Assurance that she’d be all right, probably escape a prison term for this frightful crime? Someone with plenty of influence over her must have convinced her it would be a stroll in the park.

Jury took one of the snapshots he’d carried away from Sara’s collection and said: “Here’s another extremely attractive woman, also petite, like you. Ever seen her?” He pushed the picture across the table.

“No. Who is she?” She pushed it back toward him. “Should I know her?”

Jury sat looking at her.

She flicked ash from her cigarette onto the floor. She laughed briefly. “Are you trying to intimidate me?”

“No, not really. I think it would be difficult to do that. You really have nerves of steel, Valerie.” Jury was leaning toward her again, his hands folded on the table, managing to make steely nerves sound erotic. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he went on in the softest voice he could muster, “if you were a match for just about any man, even one who might be a match for any woman.”

She looked uncertain, gave a half laugh and said, “You speaking of yourself, then?”

Jury laughed and sat back again. “Good Lord, no. Me? I’m quite easily taken in.”

Valerie Hobbs uttered a soundless laugh. “That is such a lie.”

“Perhaps, but-” He leaned forward again, fixing her with a look that one might say spoke volumes yet was being forever misread. “Has he really got such a hold over you that you refuse to give him up?”

Her cigarette stopped on its way to her mouth. “Has who?”

Jury shrugged. “There’s somebody you’re protecting.”

Again, that mirthless little laugh. “You’re bonkers, Superintendent.”

Jury pulled out another snapshot, pushed that one toward her, too. “Same woman, only this time-”

Valerie Hobbs picked it up, looked from the snapshot to Jury and back again. And laughed. “The man she’s with? Yes, I know him: Dan Ryder. Isn’t that who this is? He’s dead, for God’s sake. D-E-A-D. You really haven’t a clue, have you?”

It wasn’t the reaction he’d expected.

Perhaps she was right; perhaps he hadn’t a clue.

FIFTY-ONE

It was dark, the middle of the night, when Maurice took Aqueduct from his stall, saddled and cantered out to the far field and Hadrian’s walls. Maurice knew Aqueduct could do it, whether with Maurice up on him was another matter.

The air was like crystal, clear and sharp. Aqueduct was the sort of horse you could feel glued to, as if horse and rider were one inseparable entity. That was a good feeling; it was also a dangerous one. You could stop paying attention because you thought the horse would do it for you.

Maurice had found it hard concentrating on anything since Nell’s return. Like the crystal air, he felt he could be seen through; he felt he could break. What had been a massive relief when he’d first seen her was now a dead weight. Nell had almost vanished off the face of the earth. Maurice didn’t want to think about it anymore.

The ground-hard, icy and wet-was soon churned to muddy slickness. The first three walls had been taken easily enough. Now they were approaching the fourth wall, which was higher than both the fifth and the sixth, so that if he could get over it, it would mean he could probably get over all of them.

It was this wall, the fourth, that had stopped Criminal Type (but he wasn’t a jumper, anyway) and it seemed suddenly to rise up before him. He had lifted himself above the saddle, with his head nearly on the bridle, and then Aqueduct was flying, sailing through the sharp midnight air. That was, at least, the feeling as the horse surged over the top of the wall, but on the descent, Aqueduct’s hind leg got caught in a stone outcrop and they came down like a thunderclap.

In a flash, Maurice knew, as he was thrown at lightning-bolt velocity against the wall, Maurice knew he would not have to feel it any longer: the betrayer betrayed.

FIFTY-TWO

When Jury got back from Cambridge, Carole-anne was glittering around his flat in midthigh black sequins, doing several nursey things, or at least what she imagined nurses must do-plumping pillows, lining up shoes, making tea, a steaming cup of which was sitting on the small table beside Jury’s chair.

It did not disturb Jury that she was in his flat when he wasn’t there; sometimes he wished she’d be in it more when he was there. He marveled that the three of them (with Stan Keeler making an often-absent fourth) were still here together. Mrs. Wasserman, of course, couldn’t be pried free of her “garden” flat (basement, in other words) for love or money. But it did surprise him that Carole-anne had remained stationary for all of these years. He didn’t wonder about her love life-well, not often-because it struck him as intrusive even to think about-

Put a sock in it, man.

– it, although he certainly watched whenever she was in Stan’s presence.

“What?”

Carole-anne was in her hands-on-hips posture, a stance he really liked because it was very hippy and tonight had sequins on it. “Just wondering about the dress. Where’re you going? To another rally of the public-footpath people?” Jury was taking off his shoes, feeling his tired feet had been to the rally themselves.

Doubtfully, she smoothed her hands down over the short black dress. “What’s wrong with it, then? Stan likes it.”

“I’m sure Stone likes it, too, but that doesn’t mean you have to lead it around on a leash.”

Puzzlement. “What’s that mean?”

Jury had no idea. He just said it. “There’s nothing wrong with it, nothing, believe me. Oh-ho and mmmmmm nothing. If you walked down a public footpath in that there’d be no argument from Lord Stickywicket about whether the footpath was his or yours.”

Carole-anne gave him a look. “Super, why does it always take you forever to say something?”

Jury smiled. It was exactly what he’d said to Melrose Plant.

She merely flapped her hand at him, saying, “Oh, never mind.” She began rearranging magazines on the cherry coffee table.

“Carole-anne, those magazines are ten years old; they don’t care anymore.”

“I’m going to the Nine-One-Nine.” She sighed and shook her head. “Too bad you’re recuperating or you could come, too.”

In high-pitched mimicry, Jury repeated, “ ‘Too bad you’re recuperating or you could come, too.’ I’m perfectly capable of going to the Nine-One-Nine. It’s only”-he checked his watch-“ten o’clock.”

“You really are behaving peculiar. I don’t know what’s got into you lately.”

He smiled. “Just three bullets.” He lost no opportunity to play the bullet card. Shameful.

Carole-anne went properly remorseful, put her hand on his forehead to check his temperature (or possibly to feel for brains) and left. He then poured himself another cup of tea and reseated himself. It was not because he was tired or “recuperating” that he hadn’t gone with her, but because he wanted only to think. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back. His thoughts were a blur.

Valerie Hobbs. She was a stubborn woman. Stubborn and seriously misled. He hadn’t really hoped for more than he’d gotten. Valerie had her impulses under control, so that her laugh and her “you haven’t a clue” response to the picture of Dan Ryder told him that he was wrong about Valerie. But that didn’t mean he was wrong about Sara Hunt.

Sara Hunt. Sara did not have as much to lose. Both of them would clearly go to the mat for a man they loved. Did women like danger? Did they find it romantic?

Suddenly, Jury thought of Maurice and sat up. Maurice needed to tell someone the truth about what he’d done.

With the receiver cradled between ear and shoulder, Jury hurriedly went through his address book, found the Ryder number and punched it in. The phone rang several times before someone got to it.

The voice, Jury was fairly certain, was Vernon Rice’s.

“It’s Richard Jury. Sorry, it’s a little late, but it’s important. I just wanted a word with Maurice, if he’s around.”

On Rice’s end, dead silence.

“Vernon?”

“Yes, I’m here. Sorry.” He cleared his throat as if that might get his voice working again. “I’m afraid this is…”

The voice just trailed off. Something must be seriously wrong. “Nell. Has something happened to her?”

“No. It’s not Nell.” Vernon tried again to clear his throat. “It’s Maurice. There was an accident. Maurice is dead.”

The words hit Jury one two three, as if he’d been clubbed. He got up, felt dizzy, sat down again. He could think of nothing to say as he shook and shook his head as if Vernon Rice could see he was reacting to this news. He couldn’t find his voice to ask what had happened. He sat staring at the listing picture of the horses gathered at the white fence.

Vernon inferred that Jury was having trouble and told him briefly what had happened. “Maurice was out earlier jumping Aqueduct over those walls-you know, Hadrian’s walls-and Aqueduct, well, who knows exactly what happened? Maurice was thrown, must have vaulted against the stone. Nell started looking for Aqueduct when she found the stall empty. She found the horse, unharmed. Then she found Maurice.”

Nell had to be the one to find him. Jury shut his eyes.

“Do you want to talk to her?”

“No, not now. Maybe tomorrow. That poor lad.”

“Yes. He went just the way his dad went. God.”

Jury held the dead receiver for a long time before he put it back, got up and went over to the picture and set it straight. He didn’t think he would ever be able to tell himself why. Where had he got it, this gentle scene? A hand on each side of the picture, as if either to imprison or protect it, he leaned against the wall and looked at the water-color of the horses at the fence. As far back as he could remember, he’d had it. He leaned his head against a fisted hand and his face so close to the glass he could make out only an amorphous white, brown, black. He wondered why he’d never paid any attention to it until the other night, and felt as people will feel a sense of loss that comes from neglect-the call you didn’t make, the book you didn’t read, the woman you didn’t kiss. Why did he feel that place, that pasture so infinitely desirable but inaccessible? Freedom, was that it?

Maurice, unless he’d known there at the end, would never know.

Jury turned and looked at the table near the window where sat his old turntable and records and felt himself spinning out of control. He could feel himself sobbing, but as if the sobs were those of another person, the arm another’s arm that shot out and swept the magazines, the keys, the heavy ashtray off the table. He retrieved the ashtray and hurled it against the bookshelves, where it landed and bounced onto the rug.

The door flew open.

“Super!”

Carole-anne rushed in and up to him and threw her arms around him as if to contain the fury. Then she pushed him down on the sofa, keeping her arm around his shoulders as if afraid to take away this support, fearful he might erupt.

Stone sat at his feet and whimpered. For Stone, that was out of control. Jury put his hand on the Lab’s head. “Sorry,” he said.

“Oh, Stone don’t mind. All the times he’s put up with Stan raging around.”

Stan Keeler raging?

“I should have gone with you. I could use a few lashings of his guitar.”

“Well, right now what you need’s a lashing of tea.” But she hesitated, not wanting to take her arm away. She moved her face back, frowned in question.

“I’m okay.”

She patted his shoulder and went toward the kitchen, stopping first at the record player and looking through the records. She took one from its sleeve, put it on and continued to the kitchen as the twangy voice of Willie Nelson sang of all the girls he loved before.

Pots and pans were rattling around and suggested more than tea was being prepared. Soon he heard the spit of something hitting grease.

Willie Nelson. Now he remembered where he’d gotten that recording. It was Carole-anne who’d walked in with it when Jury’s old fiancée, Susan, had been in the flat. Carole-anne had put it on and told Susan it was “their” song. Carole-anne in a Chinese red silk dress with “their” song was a force to be reckoned with, and Susan lost the reckoning. He listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen and the voice singing along with Willie Nelson.

She came out of the kitchen holding a plate and a cup. “Why’re you laughing?” A ton of relief was in her voice.

My God, he had been, hadn’t he? “I was remembering my old fiancée, Susan.”

“You don’t want to go wasting your time on old girl-friends. Here drink this”-she handed him a mug of tea-“and eat this.” She handed him a plate of fried eggs, sausages and a wedge of fried bread.

Carole-anne sat down across from him in his armchair and smiled.

Jury noticed that she had asked why he was laughing, but would not ask why he was crying. He knew she would love to hear why, but she would not ask.

Jury lifted his plate as if to toast her and said, “Shades of Little Chef.”

FIFTY-THREE

“He died just like his dad,” said Nell, seated limply in one of Vernon Rice’s metal-spoked, punishing-looking chairs as if she needed some hard and abrasive punishment because she hadn’t stopped Maurice from trying to jump those walls.

Vernon handed Nell a glass of mineral water and Jury a whiskey. He said to her, “Does that-” and he stopped.

Nell’s look implored him to say the right thing. “What?”

As if there were any right thing, thought Jury.

They all looked down into their glasses. No one spoke. After a full minute of silence, Jury asked Nell what he supposed Vernon had meant to ask but drew back from because it sounded insensitive. “Does that bother you? The similarity? Maurice certainly knew he shouldn’t have been jumping walls after dark. Not only putting himself in danger, but also the horse.”

“Of course it bothers me. And Maurice knew better than to do what he did. He’d been really… morose, I guess you’d say. He wasn’t that way two years ago. The jumping had to do with his dad. He needed him. I mean, with his mum gone, he had no one except Granddad and me.”

“He was lucky there,” said Jury.

Vernon had been walking round the room, stopping by the window to stare out over the gray City, looking at noon as if it were dusk, with its misty rain and blue-shadowed streets. He said, “I remember Maurice’s unhappiness after Danny’s death. But he got over that, or at least as ‘over’ as one can get when a parent dies. This was something more-I’m not putting this right.”

Jury said, “Yes, you are. Isn’t he, Nell?”

She set her glass on the rug and raised her eyes to give Jury a questioning look. “This was something more?” She rubbed her hands on her blue-jeaned knees. “We used to be really close; we were so much in the same position. Once, we could talk for hours. But in the little time I’ve been back, Maurice seemed to have changed so much.”

“Did he ask you what had happened during those twenty months?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t seem to want to know. I mean Dad and Granddad just pestered me for details. They wanted to know everything. But Maurice didn’t want to know. I thought it must have been just too painful for him.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“I hadn’t changed about Maurice.”

“No, I’m sure you hadn’t,” said Jury.

“But you seem to think I was the cause.”

“I think Maurice felt responsible for what happened.”

“For me? That’s ridiculous. He wasn’t, not at all. Why would he feel that way?”

Jury leaned toward her. “Nell, how did this fellow who took you know you were out there in Aqueduct’s stall?”

She looked from Jury to Vernon, as if she’d been set a puzzle to work out. “He didn’t. It was just coincidence I was there.”

Jury shook his head. “He came for you, Nell.”

“What-? Why would anyone want me?”

Vernon nearly choked.

Someone had wanted her badly to go to her room a dozen times. But the sex, in and of itself, Jury intuited, wasn’t the reason. “How did he know that you’d be there?” He paused. She said nothing. “Didn’t you say that the horse didn’t seem sick to you? Still, you stayed.”

“Yes, well, but just in case. And Maurice is very good at reading signs of illness in the horses…” Her voice trailed off. She shook her head. “No. I know what you’re saying. Absolutely no. Maurice could never have done such a thing. Never. Nothing, no one on earth could make Maurice do that. No one.”

“I don’t think Maurice knew what was actually going to happen. But I do think he did it. Wouldn’t it explain his attitude toward you now?” Jury didn’t add, Wouldn’t it further explain his accident?

But Nell simply couldn’t bring herself to believe that Maurice really had done what Jury said. She said again, “Nothing could have made him do it.” She flashed Jury a challenging look. “What? Who?”

He turned away from that look, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

FIFTY-FOUR

But he did know. Late the next morning, Jury was back in a taxi, driving from Cardiff to Sara Hunt’s house. This time, he hadn’t given her any warning.

When she opened the door and saw him, she froze. “I didn’t know you were coming.” She recovered quickly and smiled.

“No. I thought I’d surprise you. Nice little car, there.” He looked at the red Aston-Martin parked in what he imagined could be called the backstretch of the circular driveway. “Yours?”

“My char’s, if you can believe it. They live high on the hog these days. Come on in.”

He tossed his coat over the banister and followed her into the living room.

“What can I get you? Coffee? A drink?”

“Not a thing. I’m not stopping here for long.”

She sat down in the wing chair-perched in it, really, sitting nearly on the edge. She looked like a child. He wondered what he had seen in her that attracted him sexually, that had made him feel such a yearning, and wasn’t happy with himself finding that longing abated.

“Is something wrong? You sound rather official-” Her smile was uncertain.

Jury merely watched her, looking directly at her for a few beats, and she did what he expected-looked away. And then back. He was still looking at her.

“For heaven’s sake, Richard, why are you looking at me that way?” Small movements of her hands-brushing hair back from her face, fingering the gold chain around her neck, turning a ring with her thumb-showed how nervous she was.

Jury sat with one ankle hooked over his knee. “You’re pretty. Isn’t that enough reason?”

She didn’t know how to take this, smiled and stopped smiling.

There was the sound of something heavy falling in the rooms above them. “Oh, God! I’ll have to see what she’s doing up there. I could kill her sometimes.”

Jury smiled. “I’ll wait.”

As she left, her laugh-not a laugh at all-cut off abruptly.

Jury leaned his head back against the chair, looking up as if above him were a glass ceiling and he could see as well as hear. The voices were indistinguishable, words melting in a pool. There wasn’t, fortunately, any killing going on.

Then Sara came down the stairs. “Not too much damage-”

“Speaking of damage-of course you would only have seen him at the races, if you saw him at all, but Maurice Ryder-Dan Ryder’s son?-is dead.”

“Oh, my God.” She clamped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were barely visible above the hand and behind the tears. She rose uncertainly and walked to the window, clearly to get herself under control.

Jury said, “So you did know him? I’m surprised, given your fleeting association with the Ryders.” She had turned as he said this and he gave her a disingenuous, puzzled frown. “You did?”

It took her a moment to clear her throat. “Not well, no.”

Jury’s faux frown grew even more puzzled. “That’s quite a reaction you had for someone you didn’t know well.”

She still had not sat down, which was fine with Jury. He was quite comfortable. He rubbed the dark blue and gray diamond pattern of his silk sock, pulling it up a little, giving her a little room. But the brief hiatus wasn’t going to do her much good.

He said, “There’s something I’d like you to look at.” He pulled from an inside pocket the snapshot Nell had taken from Valerie Hobbs’s office, held it out, his arm extended toward her. Thus she had to come nearer, and she did.

“Do you know her?”

Sara let out a breath, relief, probably, for here was safe ground.

“No, I don’t. Why?”

“You’re sure?”

Her glance flicked from the picture to Jury. “Yes, I’m sure.” Again she asked why.

“Only because”-he pulled out the enlarged snapshot of Dan Ryder-“both of you seem to know him.”

She took a step back. “How-where-did you get that?”

“Dishonestly, but that’s hardly the point-”

“It’s my point.” Quickly, she moved to the writing table and turned the tasseled key in the little drawer under the top. After her eyes and fingers did a brief search, she turned to him.

He could almost smell the fury mixed with fear. She seemed unable to frame whatever invective she was looking for and settled for the rather Victorian “How dare you?” She paused. “You have to have a search warrant, don’t you, to do that?” She slapped the drawer shut.

“I’m not here in any official capacity. Just a nosy customer, a common sneak thief.” Jury knew that wouldn’t get him off the hook if she actually wanted to take it further, but she was going to have enough things on her mind to give her attention to a possible “investigative irregularity.” “The thing is, you clearly knew Dan Ryder a bit better than you allowed. Much better, it appears. Why so secretive, Sara? So far, love isn’t known to be a criminal offense. Why did you lie?” Now he watched her as she gave herself time to think of something plausible.

“Because I fancied you and didn’t want you to think-”

“That you fancied someone else. Sara”-he couldn’t help himself; he laughed-“I’ve got to credit you with originality. That’s the first time, the very first I’ve ever heard that as a reason for lying-”

“I didn’t lie-”

“-but I’m not really convinced I’m not a total mug and the love of your life. So why is there such a secret? Dan Ryder was hardly a Trappist monk. We know his reputation with women.” Jury held up the snapshot of Valerie Hobbs. “For instance-”

“I told you I’ve never seen her.” Suspicion incensed her. “What’s your interest in her?”

“She doesn’t know him, either. So she says. And then there’s always this one-” He held up a morgue shot of Simone Ryder.

She looked at him so coldly Jury felt a chill in the air. “I’ve never seen her in my life.”

Jury turned the picture and looked at it again himself. “You’re sure of that?”

“Damn it. I don’t have to listen to this.”

“Yes, you do, so sit down.”

“This is why you wound up in my bed.”

Jury shook his head. “No. That’s completely separate. Completely.” Now he wondered if it was, and felt slightly ashamed. “Don’t try to play the lover deceived; don’t play the victim. I wasn’t trying to get anything out of you. Sit down.”

She had been pacing, fidgeting with objects she passed-the tasseled shade of a lamp, a glass paperweight-but at the tone of his voice, she reseated herself.

He arranged the three pictures on the coffee table like cards in a poker hand. “Interesting story. Just sit there and I’ll tell it to you-”

“I expect I’d tell it better, mate.”

The voice came from behind Jury. He turned.

“Hello, Danny.” Almost ingratiatingly, Jury smiled.

“Christ, but you’ve been one busy little copper.”

Jury liked the “little” copper. He bet Danny was always throwing that word and others like it around to describe other men.

He was a small man-height, girth, bones, hands, feet-yet still big for a jockey, which must have been a source of continuing pleasure for him. Jury didn’t know what he planned to do with the gun, beyond pointing it at Jury, but he was perfectly set to let this film unreel.

“Danny!” said Sara. “What are you-?”

“Come on, girl. Sit.”

Not a wise thing to do, perhaps, but Jury stuck his feet up on the coffee table and leaned back, miming comfort. He only hoped his soigné attitude didn’t make him foolhardy, which was how he felt.

Danny Ryder laughed. “Christ, man, but you do take life and death neat, no chasers.”

Jury waved his arm, inviting Danny to join them.

Absurdly, Danny did. He sat on the sofa next to Sara.

“First,” said Jury, “I have no doubt you’d use that gun. It’s a.22. Which is interesting.” Danny was regarding it as if he’d never seen it before. “But it’s a strange thing about almost dying, as I recently almost did-you use up a lot of your scare quotient. It takes a hell of a lot to scare me now.”

Danny laughed.

“You ought to be able to relate to that. You’re always putting your life on the line, Dan. I imagine it’s part of the thrill, the rush you get when you’re up on one of those great horses of your father’s.”

“Get us a beer, love,” said Danny to Sara. “Us” meaning “me.”

Sara, who looked taut as piano wire, rose and went toward the kitchen.

Danny leaned over the coffee table. “Now, here’s an interesting photo collection.”

“Yeah. Sara’s dying to know who the brown-haired one is.”

“And where’d you get her picture?”

“Valerie Hobbs’s? From her photo collection.”

“Yeah? So what else did she share?”

“Not a damned thing. I’ve got to hand it to you, Danny; you’ve got these women going in circles. Nothing could make them give you up. Nell Ryder got away, but I expect you know that.”

Danny said nothing for a moment; he just regarded Jury. Then he said, “Hate to tell you this, but you’ve got this wrong if you think I’d anything to do with Nell’s getting nobbled. I’m a right bastard in a lot of ways, but not a total villain.”

“You weren’t in this with Valerie Hobbs? That’s what you’re saying?”

Sara was back with the beer, no glass. Danny took it from her without comment. She sat-perched, rather-beside him.

“That’s what I’m bloody saying, yes. As for Valerie Hobbs, I used to run into her at that flapping track outside of Newmarket. You know, Blaydon. Good sport, was old Val. Had a few drinks, a few laughs, but that’s about it.”

“Tell me about your wife, your so-called widow, Danny, now dead. You heard about that, I expect.” Jury was sure he had not heard about his son, Maurice, nor did he want to be the bearer of that bad news. When Danny didn’t respond right away, Jury said, “Sara did tell you about that? Or you read about her in the paper? You don’t seem visibly upset by it.”

The gun seemed to have become a prop that could be dispensed with. Danny set it down on the coffee table and said, “I hadn’t seen Simone in over a year. All that held us together really was the money. The insurance money. She was here to collect.”

“You shot her because she was in on the fraud.”

“I shot her?” His laugh was almost buoyant. “Why’d I do that? It makes no sense. She wasn’t the only one knew it wasn’t me took the fall in that race.” He hooked his thumb at Sara.

“By what sleight of hand did you manage that accident?”

“I can’t take all the credit for that; it was fate slapped the cards down there. Black Jack. They got us down wrong, me and a jockey named Delacroix, they mixed us up in the lineup. That horse, Up All Night? That was my ride, not Delacroix’s. He was supposed to be up on Bright Angel. It was dumb luck.”

“Not for Delacroix, it wasn’t. What about his own family-wife, Mum? Didn’t anyone wonder what happened to him? And didn’t anyone recognize you? In the UK your face was well known.”

“Not in France, it wasn’t. I never raced over there when I was working with Ryder Stud. All jockeys look the same in a race. You know the way they ride with their faces nearly mashed into their mount’s neck.” Danny gave a short, hard laugh. “It was bedlam, with Up All Night going down like he did. In all the aggravation, I couldn’t have found me own arse, much less somebody else’s. And who knows? Maybe there wasn’t any wife. But I do remember there was a bit in the paper that Delacroix hadn’t weighed in for the eighth race. But who was going to question who the body belonged to? My own wife identified me right on the spot. So if any of Delacroix’s relations or friends were there, why would they be upset? Nothing happened to him, as far as anyone knew, until his next race, like I said. Poor sod disappeared. Wouldn’t be the first time, right? What’d you think happened? You think I managed to engineer the whole thing? Listen, that horse’s leg was shattered, a triple fracture. Had to be put down then and there. You think I’d do that to a horse, boy-o?”

He actually cocked the gun that had been lying impotently on the table. It was as if he didn’t care sod-all if Jury landed him in the nick, but he certainly cared if Jury was saying he could do serious damage to a horse. It would be laughable except Jury knew he was perfectly serious.

“Sorry, Danny, if I have trouble believing in your equine devotion-not if you could stand by and watch those sixty mares tied up.”

“What,” asked Sara, “is he talking about?”

Danny looked utterly confused. “What in hell are you on about? That’s nothing to do with me.”

“Those mares were nothing to you? The jockey who could jump a horse over the moon without a whip? You’re fabled for your uncanny way with horses, Danny. I’m astonished that you’d put up with what was going on in those barns.”

“I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about.”

Jury knew then he’d got half of this whole thing wrong. Still, he was fascinated. “You mean those horses Valerie Hobbs kept-that wasn’t your gig?” It was Dan Ryder’s Achilles’ heel, his feeling for horses. It was also the firing pin, apparently, the match to the fuse. Oddly, this might have been the key to Ryder’s fatal charm: he did have one very real passion-horses. The women he was involved with must have mistaken this intense feeling as meant for them. Whereas, Jury bet Danny didn’t give sod-all for any of them.

“Whatever Valerie Hobbs is up to, that’s got nothing to do with me.”

He wasn’t denying it because of Sara Hunt, that was certain. He was denying it because what he said was true.

“So now you think,” Danny said, “since I shot Simone, I’m going to knock off my girl Sara here because she also knows I’m alive?”

“Maybe not. But that wasn’t the only reason you might want your wife dead. There was, after all, the money. Maybe you wanted it all. You waited until you got it, or Simone got it-I expect that they choked on that double indemnity clause. She had to collect it, of course. You waited until she did and then shot her.” Jury paused. “Why the Ryder training track, though? Why’d you meet Simone there? Or had she perhaps decided to have a meeting with your father-?”

Danny was getting increasingly irritated. Not enough, though, to make him aim the gun. “Oh, sod off, mate. You haven’t a clue.”

The second person who’d told him that in the last twenty-four hours. He couldn’t help but smile. “Perhaps not, but if you didn’t do it, who did?”

“It could have been the whole fucking Jockey Club, for all I know. Simone wasn’t known for her discretion.”

“That was it? You knew she’d give you away at some point?”

Danny flapped his hand at Jury, slammed the beer bottle on the table and said to Sara, “Get me a real drink, love, will you?”

Sara rose and went to the drinks cabinet, but kept her eye on them as she was pouring, as if one or the other might make a break for it while she was fixing drinks.

Jury realized how wrong he’d been. What was, after all, the point of Dan’s killing Simone? The man was already risking identification with Sara Hunt. If Dan Ryder hadn’t killed the woman, who had?

Dan was talking about Nell, now. “Always had a thing for that girl. Ashamed to admit it, but there it is. Always had a thing for her.”

Sara put the drink on the table. She said, “Is there any female you don’t have a ‘thing’ for?”

My God, thought Jury, the man’s a liar, a swindler, possibly a killer, yet all she reacts to is mention of another woman. Ryder must be like a snake charmer: this one, at least, seemed to be mesmerized.

“She was only thirteen, fourteen last time I saw her-”

“Last time you saw her she was seventeen. She still is.”

Danny stopped the whiskey in midair. Slowly, he put it down. “What the bloody hell are you on about now?”

“I’m talking about taking Nell Ryder, Danny.”

“What? You think that’s me.” He laughed, sat back and reclaimed his glass. “Well, you been wrong twice now, so you might as well go for three times.”

“Then who?”

“You ought to get me a job with the Yard, me. And you a detective superintendent.”

“Maurice-” Jury stopped, looked sharply at Sara, who looked away. He didn’t want to tell him Maurice was dead; he’d leave that for Sara to do. Yet Danny had given the boy up, hadn’t he, with this charade? And it struck Jury that perhaps Danny had given everything up-especially his riding career, his horses.

“What about Maurice?”

“I’m sure it was Maurice who got Nell out to that stable by lying about Aqueduct. I can’t see his doing this for anyone but you, Dan.”

“Then he didn’t do it. Because I didn’t take her. Lord knows I never took Aqueduct.”

Jury had to smile. Taking Aqueduct, clearly, was even more unbelievable to Danny.

“But it was Maurice. It’s the thing that explains his behavior.”

“What behavior?”

“The guilt. Imagine knowing he was responsible for Nell’s abduction.”

“You’re dreaming, friend.”

Jury didn’t say the rest: why else would Maurice take such a chance as to jump those impossible walls at night? It would take someone with a hell of a lot of practice to make that trip after dark. The sort of person who abducted Nell. A jump jockey.

“You did go to Valerie Hobbs’s place?”

“Yeah, I went there, but not more than a half dozen times in the months I’ve been here.”

“You went to see her, then?”

Danny nodded.

Sara asked again, “Who is this woman?”

Jury held up the shot of Valerie Hobbs, but said nothing.

Sara left her seat on the sofa beside Danny and moved to the fireplace, her back turned. In a way, Jury felt sorry for her; here she was, thinking she had the man all to herself, at last. Danny, he noticed, at least had the grace to look a little concerned.

Jury watched Dan Ryder sitting there in silence-his relaxed posture, leaning back into the softness of the cushions, one foot braced against the edge of the coffee table, dressed in flannels and a black cashmere sweater. Jury bet the sweater was a gift from Sara. There were a lot of gifts from Sara: her house, her bed, her unswerving loyalty, threatened now only by the chance of another woman. Danny’s charm was a gift from whatever god had a sense of humor. His manner was disarming. Even Jury felt a liking for him, or some sort of empathy, which had kept him from telling the news of his son’s death. There was a back-stage persona, something else going on in Danny Ryder that had nothing to do with hiding things; Jury was sure the man was hiding all sorts of things, but things not germane to the abduction of Nell Ryder or the murder of Simone.

“Then who took Nell, Danny? It would probably go a long way in reducing your sentence if I tell the police that you helped in this investigation.”

“You’re so sure I’ll be tossed into the nick?”

“Yes.”

Danny laughed as if this possibility concerned him not at all. “On whose say-so? You going to tell them you were around here for a deco and look who turned up? The jockey. The dead one.”

“That’s pretty much the way I’d say it, yes.”

Danny reached out and picked up the gun, braced it in both hands and pointed.

Sara whirled around. “Danny!”

Jury said, “You won’t shoot me, Danny. You’re devious as hell, but you’re not a killer. What you told me happened in Paris? I’ve no trouble believing it. You’re emotionally lazy; not even the danger of being exposed would prompt you to kill anyone. You live by chance, Danny. Chance is almost a religion with you. The only thing you don’t leave to chance is the course.”

For some reason, this seemed to dig at Danny more than anything. “You think I don’t take chances in a race?”

“Of course you do, you have to. But that’s not what I mean. You know every hoofbeat pounding around that course; you know exactly what your horse is doing and can do and will do. Horses are what you don’t take chances with. Your women are chance women, met by chance, bedded by chance and maybe even married by chance.” He was looking straight at Danny, but Jury detected Sara stirring from her gloomy dream. Quickly she moved toward Jury and dashed the rest of her whiskey in his face.

Danny laughed as he put the gun back on the table.

Sara’s face was splotchy with fury.

Jury pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face. “Shame to waste it.”

Danny laughed again. She looked daggers at him. “How can you let him go on that way? Maybe to you all this is bloody funny, but not to me!” In a second she’d put her hand on the gun, pulled it from the table and pointed it at Jury.

“No,” said Jury, “I can see it’s not funny to you at all.”

Danny threw up his hands. “Easy, love. He’s having you on; he’s doing it on purpose; he wants to get you riled, girl; he might learn something.”

Which he had.

“You,” he said to Sara, “on the other hand, might just shoot me. You’re more likely to do it than Danny, certainly. Because you are anything but emotionally lazy. Your emotions are incendiary.”

The room fell quiet. “How did you get Simone to the Ryder stables?”

Danny looked at her, eyebrows raised in what Jury took to be genuine surprise. “Sara? What the hell-?”

Her expression didn’t so much change as resettle into that look she had just turned on Danny, now leveled at Jury. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jury didn’t bother speaking to that denial. He said, “It could have been Valerie Hobbs who shot Simone-even more likely since she’s so close to the Ryder farm-but I don’t think Ms. Hobbs is murderously jealous. Just jealous. No one thought-no one would have-that the murder of his wife had to do with Danny himself because Danny was dead. But you traveled all the way from here to Cambridgeshire to kill her. I can’t get that part of it right in my mind. You didn’t know her; it’s a puzzle as to how you might have done all of this.”

Danny appeared more fascinated than anything else. He got up and took the gun from Sara’s hand.

Jury went on talking. “Did you even know his wife was here? Did he even tell you it was Simone who was collecting the insurance money? Anyway, it would be a total waste of time to shoot me because I couldn’t prove a thing.” He looked from one to the other, then reached over and slid his photos together and took them from the table.

“Too bad about the insurance money, Danny, too bad Simone didn’t live to collect it. But I wonder if not getting it is better than getting it, after all. You could never have reentered the only life that means anything to you. Is it so great a hurdle-the racing commission, the Jockey Club? You’re clever; you could surely concoct some story about Simone’s having the idea in the first place, that you were driven into exile… whatever. After all, she alone talked to the insurance adjusters. But I really can’t imagine you never racing again. No, I can’t imagine that.”

At the sound of an approaching car, tires on gravel, they all looked toward the front window.

“Never mind about that,” said Jury. “It isn’t the police; that’s just my cab. I told him to come back in an hour’s time.” Jury tucked the pictures into his pocket and rose. “Well, I’m off. I’ll leave you two to sort it.”

FIFTY-FIVE

“Wales?” said an astonished Melrose Plant before Jury had shed his coat and Ruthven had taken it. “Actually, it is part of the UK, if I remember correctly.” Melrose shrugged as if he would need more convincing than that.

Mindy preceded them into the drawing room, where she collapsed in front of the fire.

“Three times?” said Melrose.

Jury answered this indirectly. “Does it surprise you that Dan Ryder didn’t die in that racecourse accident?”

Melrose’s eyebrows shot up. “My Lord! You mean you saw him?”

“I did. I had an idea that Dan might still be alive.”

“What made you think that?”

“A couple of things: one was that anecdote Diane told us at the pub. The one about the jockey saying he’d like to come back not on but as that great American horse-what was his name?”

“Spectacular Bid.”

“It simply put a question into my mind, this ‘resurrection’ of a jockey, if it was possible that Ryder wasn’t dead. You see, I simply couldn’t imagine what would get Maurice to get Nell out to Aqueduct’s stall. Who on earth could talk him into it but the one person he cared more about than even Nell?”

“His father. I see what you mean.”

“But he wasn’t the person who abducted her.”

“If not Dan Ryder-? I don’t get it; Maurice wouldn’t have done it for anyone else, as you say.”

Jury shook his head. “It beats me. The only thing I can come up with is that somebody convinced Maurice he was acting for his father.”

Melrose leaned over and scratched Mindy’s head. “I must say I’m curious as to how Ryder managed to fake his own death in a race.”

“He didn’t manage it. The jockey riding that horse wasn’t Dan Ryder. He was supposed to be, but wasn’t.” Jury told him the rest. “It wouldn’t have worked, of course, if Simone Ryder hadn’t immediately identified the body as Dan’s.”

Melrose frowned. “That must have taken some extremely quick thinking.”

“Yes, it would. Now, where Maurice fits into all of this, I’m not sure. According to Danny, he didn’t ask Maurice for anything. He’s had no contact with him.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“That Maurice is dead? No. I left it to her to do that.”

“You believe that he wasn’t in contact with Maurice?”

“Yes. As I said, another person must have used his father to get Maurice to help.”

“Hm.” Melrose leaned back. He was about to speak when Ruthven entered the room.

“I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you should know that Mr. Bramwell is back.”

“What?” Melrose was out of his chair like a shot. “Where?”

“Why, in the hermitage, sir. He’s asked for some beef tea.”

Was that, Jury wondered, a smirk playing around Ruthven’s lips?

“Beef tea?”

“Yes, m’lord. He claims to have contracted a bad cold at Mr. Browne’s establishment.”

“Good Lord. Come on, Richard!” Melrose flung out an arm as if he’d yank Jury from his chair. “We’ll beef tea him!”

The hermitage, as if welcoming the hunter home from the hills, had a nice little fire going in the cast-iron stove.

Mr. Bramwell was holding his hands out to it as if fire were his prime source of comfort. He did not wait for Melrose to open his mouth before he opened his own.

“That book place you sent me to weren’t properly heated. I tol’ him to build a fire, but yea know ’im, tight as a tic, that ’un. It’s gone and got me all chesty.” Here, Bramwell demonstrated by beating a fist against his chest and hacking away.

“Properly heated? My God, man, at least you were inside!”

“Felt like ruddy outside t’me. And would your Mr. Browne bring me so much as a cuppa? Ha!”

Melrose put his face as close to Bramwell’s as he dared without catching a few things and said, “Mr. Bramwell, think: Theo Wrenn Browne wasn’t in your employ; you were in his.”

“Worse luck for me, then.” He opened the little door of the stove with a sturdy stick, which he then used to poke at the coals, a comforting red. “If that’s the way you treat those in yer employ, why I don’t see how any of you keep staff round ’ere.” Thunk went the little door as he slammed it shut.

“We seem to have had no trouble thus far.” Melrose accidentally knocked his head against the lintel bearing the skull and MEMENTO MORI. A clump of moss fell in his hair.

Bramwell repeated his phlegmy cough. “I ought t’be in bed, me, ’stead o’ sittin’ ’ere.”

“Well, perhaps we can find a nice hospital bed for you. Bedlam has a big turnover.”

“None o’yer doctors, no thanks, not after what ’appened t’ my Doris. Did I tell yea about-?”

“Your Doris? Yes-” Melrose would have banged his head on the skull again but he didn’t want more moss in his hair.

Bramwell swiveled his gaze to Jury, for here was one who hadn’t heard the story. “My Doris goes into ’ospital to get one o’them ovaries seen to, and what do they do but take out the whole womb. The whole bloody boiling, don’t they? Well, I tells ’er, fer God’s sake, lass, sue the bleedin’ place. Absolutely disgustin’ I calls it, doctor don’t even know what bleedin’ operation ’e’s supposed t’be doing. My God!” Turning again to Melrose, he said, “I’d sooner be right back ’ere sleepin’ rough, me. That Theo Browne puts me in mind of a weasel.” He settled himself back against his pillowcase of belongings.

Jury pulled at Melrose’s sleeve. “A word?” He backed away from the hermitage entrance.

“What?” Melrose scowled.

“Are you missing the point here? The point not being to evaluate you and Theo as respective employers; the point being to fire this bloody fool before he seeps into every crack and crevice of Ardry End.”

“He’s certifiable.” Melrose mumbled imprecations… um… mumm… ass…

“Fire him, for God’s sake!” Jury pushed Melrose back to the entrance.

“Mr. Bramwell!”

Bramwell could look quite piteous and imploring when it suited him, as it did at the moment. (Oh, he knew what the two were up to!) He pulled his collar tight with a trembling hand.

Melrose opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He felt like a fish. Fortunately, he was saved from continuing by Ruthven, who, coated and scarved, approached over the acre or two between house and hermitage. This momentary reprieve turned Melrose hearty: “Well, here comes your beef tea.”

Bramwell immediately dropped his orphan-in-the-storm persona and flexed his fingers, preparatory to picking up whatever was on the tray which Ruthven set down on the smooth stump that Bramwell used for his breakfast, lunch and dinner table, as well as for morning coffee and afternoon tea.

Melrose noted there was considerably more than beef tea on the tray. There was a substantial pile of sandwiches: cheese, chicken and prosciutto. This last really annoyed Melrose as he liked prosciutto with melon and there probably wasn’t any left. “I see your dicey health isn’t affecting your appetite, Mr. Bramwell.”

“Got to keep me strength up. Thank you, Mr. Ruthven,” he said as Ruthven shook out a big napkin, which the hermit spread carefully over his wide front. Selecting a sandwich of prosciutto, he said, “I’ll say this fer yea, yea don’t stint.”

He could have been saying this to Melrose, Jury, Ruthven or God.

No, thought Jury. God stints.

They were feeding carrots to Aggrieved, both of them looking and listening for Momaday.

“I am completely cowed by staff,” said Melrose. “Cowed.”

“By these two you seem to be.”

“It’s why I don’t have more.” It wasn’t, really; he was just enjoying feeling sorry for himself.

Aggrieved, seeing another carrot come out of Jury’s pocket, nudged his shoulder with some force. Jury shoved him back. Melrose, unaware of this small fracas, kept talking about the staff he didn’t have: “A chauffeur, a vegetable cook to help Martha-”

“Who wouldn’t be able to stand it-” Jury bumped Aggrieved’s elegant neck, payback for another muzzle in the face.

“-more stable staff, a valet de chambre, a maid. No, two maids, one a ’tweenie.” Melrose liked that word. “A ’tweenie.”

“Was there ever such a staff at Ardry End?”

“No. But it sounds good.”

“I swear,” said Jury, back inside the house, “I’m having a nap.”

“And I swear I’m having a drink.”

Each having had what he’d sworn he’d have, they were presently out driving along narrow country roads. Jury had said he wasn’t ready yet for the “vocal confusion” of the Jack and Hammer.

“I’ve heard it called a lot of things, but never vocally confused,” said Melrose.

Early evening was shading off into night. It had been one of those winter days when trees and houses had razor-sharp outlines and the air was clear as a bell. Jury looked off to his left and up a gentle-climbing hill. “Look up there.”

“The pub, you mean? It’s rather grand, isn’t it, the way it sits up there and looms over the village?” Melrose had already turned the car into the even narrower road sloping up the hillside. “Let’s go inside.”

Deserted. This was a word that conjured images of empty rooms, skewed curtains, of squares of deeper hue on walls where pictures have been taken down. The Man with a Load of Mischief did not seem so much deserted as sad. Had it not been for dust and leaves blown into corners, and wall sconces unresponsive to the push of a switch, it would not have surprised Jury to see the manager still behind the bar, or that arthritic old waiter passing by with a tray or customers spotted at tables and barstools around the room.

It was not dark but shortly would be, and filaments of what was left of mingy winter light managed to steal past the grime of the casement windows and suffuse the dead air with a bit of life. In the entrance hall, Melrose looked at those same framed prints of the hunt making its silly progress along the papered wall. Even the wallpaper had escaped the years’ abuse, where one would expect it to be hanging in long flaps, it still clung fast. He followed the sound of Jury’s voice into the saloon bar.

Jury said, “It’s all here: the equipment”-he rested his hand on the china beer pulls-“the drink, the glassware.” Bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka and dark syrupy liqueurs ranged across shelves, doubled by the mirror behind the bar. “I’m astonished the place hasn’t been vandalized. My Lord, it’s been-what? thirteen, fourteen years?”

Melrose brushed his hand over the barstool and sat down. “Do we have vandals around here? I mean, except for Agatha? And this place was vacated, if you remember, in rather a hurried way. I found Mindy up here, you know. Anyone who would leave his dog behind to fend for itself, well… I used to walk her up here in case she was homesick and so she could chase invisible stuff. She quite enjoyed that; I’ll have to bring her here again.” Melrose squinted at the row of bottles. “If those bottles of Johnny Walker and Bells are still here, what about the wine cellar?”

Down in the cellar they stood in more dead leaves and dust, but, of course, one expects, no, wants wine bottles to be dusty, for it proves something or other. Shelf after shelf, marching along the cold room, held the wines of Bordeaux, Tuscany, Spain; wines from the Médoc; Cabernet Franc and Merlot; grand cru from Puligny-Montrachet; Chardonnays from California; sherry from Spain; Sauternes-someone had known a lot about wine.

Jury said, “I never paid any attention to this.”

Melrose was running his finger over the bottles. “Of course not. You were too busy with the body.” He stopped, pulled out a bottle of white wine. “Grab a red.”

Jury grabbed and they hastened up the cellar steps.

Again behind the bar, where he’d set out glasses for Melrose to wipe, Jury sank the corkscrew into a bottle and pulled, gently.

“Be careful with that. It’s from Campania.”

Jury started to tug. “That near Northampton?”

“No, Naples. You’ve heard of Pompeii?” He nodded toward the bottle. “That’s a Falerno. Hard to find.”

“Time has been careful. I expect I can be.” The action of pulling made a pleasant little op and he poured the wine into the glasses.

They tasted. Jury held his up to the light. “Like the wine-dark sea.”

“Um, um umm, ummm!” said Melrose, nodding and shaking his head simultaneously. “Wow, wow! When did I last taste wine this good?”

“It is good.”

Melrose rapped the bar. “You know what we should do? We should buy this place. God knows why some family with a couple of Labs and disgusting children hasn’t snapped it up for a country home.”

“Because of its sinister past. People might like to come here for a drink, hoping the mystique rubs off, but I don’t think they’d want to live here. What do you mean, buy it?”

“We should.”

“Maybe you should; all I’ve got is the clothes I stand up in. Don’t be daft; do you know even half the difficulties of running a restaurant?”

“Can’t be all that hard.” Melrose slid his glass toward the bottle for more.

Jury poured. “First, there’s staff. Now, for someone who can’t fire a hermit, I’d say this alone would make the venture hopeless.”

“You could do the firing. So that’s one problem sorted.”

Jury braced his hands against the bar, preparatory to delivering his feelings about all this. “You are hopelessly naïve, do you know that? A restaurateur takes on fixed expenses, rent, equipment, maintenance-the linen alone would sink most so-called entrepreneurs-and has to deal with a volatile, transient, undertrained or overtrained, temperamental staff; a perishable inventory-my Lord, the list goes on and on. And do you know what percentage of these establishments succeed? Maybe thirty percent.”

“How is it you know so much about it?”

Jury took a drink of the rarefied wine. “Danny Wu.” “Who’s he?”

“One of the restaurateurs of whom I speak. He owns a restaurant called Ruiyi in Soho. He also does other things as a sideline. At least Racer is convinced of that.”

“Is his place successful?”

“Incredibly. You almost have to be a copper to get in.”

“Well, there you are.”

“No, there I’m not and neither are you. I know you see yourself swanning round the dining room recommending a wine to accompany braised llama and acorn saute. You’d be out a fortune just after opening night.”

“There’s always another fortune.”

“You know what your problem is? You’ve got too much money.”

“I do?”

Jury shook his head.

“Anyway, you were just doing the food part. What about the room part? That shouldn’t be difficult.”

Jury clapped his hand to his forehead. “You have no idea how much work is involved in this venture.”

“Work? Good God, I don’t intend to work. That’s what we’d be paying all of those volatile undertrained people for. Work?” Melrose made a pfffffff-ing sound, indicating his total abjuration of work. He pulled over one of the yellowing cocktail napkins, which Jury had slapped down on the bar, and took out his pen. “First, these napkins would probably have to be replaced, don’t you think?”

Jury just drank his wine and shut his eyes. The wine was even better when he didn’t have to look at Melrose. He wished he had Door Jam and a headset. Then he took the envelope from his inside pocket and found a pencil stub in a cup underneath the counter. “Let’s say the food for a month would cost a hundred thou.” Jury wrote it on the envelope. Underneath that he jotted in another hundred thou for pots and pans. As he turned the envelope for Melrose to see the absurdly fabricated sum, the snapshots fell out.

“What are these?”

“Our suspects.”

“This is definitely Simone Ryder,” said Melrose. “Or at least the dead woman I saw in the morgue. Who’re the ones-?” Melrose stopped and pulled over the pictures of Valerie Hobbs and Sara Hunt. He looked at the one of Sara Hunt for some moments as he lit a cigarette. “You said you didn’t have anything to connect this Sara Hunt to Simone Ryder?”

“Right. Not a shred of evidence.”

Melrose smiled. “Well, now you have.”

FIFTY-SIX

Melrose. held up the snapshot. “The woman in the Melrose held up the snapshot. “The woman in the Grave Maurice. The other woman. The one Simone Ryder was talking to.” Jury took the picture out of Melrose’s hand. “Sara Hunt. I’ll be damned.”

“I wasn’t paying any attention to her. She was, for the most part, the listener. Simone Ryder was the one telling the story.”

“And talking about her deceased husband?”

“I assume so. She was saying something about Roger’s brother. Then ‘insurance’ and then-well, she must have been referring to herself going to a warmer climate, like South America. Ironic, isn’t it? The very woman she’s talking to knows Dan Ryder is still alive.”

“But now,” said Jury, “Sara was becoming more and more convinced she’d be seeing the last of Dan Ryder. He’d be in South America with this woman in the pub. I wonder what Ryder told her about his wife.”

“But how in heaven’s name did Sara Hunt and Simone wind up at Ryder Stud?”

“Simone might have been going there herself for some reason. Some unfinished business. But whatever it was, Simone and Arthur Ryder had never met, or that’s what he said. But he had met Sara. Vernon drove her to the Ryder place. Beyond that I can’t sort it.”

“Could Sara have followed her?”

“Could have gone with her, for all we know. Sara is a very determined woman, count on it.” Jury plugged the cork back in the bottle.

“Sacrilege to waste this wine.”

“Who’s wasting? We’re taking it with us. Come on; I need to call Cambridge.”

They pulled their coats on, Melrose settling the bottle in his oversized pocket. He patted it like a baby.

As they went through the door of the pub, shoving the piece of wood back under the door to brace it, Jury said, “You’ll be needed as a witness, you know, if she’s indicted.”

“I expect so. Only, is there evidence enough to make an arrest?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I’ll let Barry Greene know-he’s the DCI in Cambridge-and he can get in touch with the police in Cardiff. I honestly don’t know. At least before we didn’t have a blind chance of arresting Sara Hunt. Now we do.”

After Jury had made his call and they’d toasted progress with another glass of wine, they decided to go out again, and Melrose told Martha to hold dinner. This time the Jack and Hammer was the destination of choice. “As long,” said Melrose, “as you feel ready for vocal confusion.”

“I’m ready. And it occurs to me there might be a way of handling the Bramwell crisis.”

“No, he’s not going with us.”

“I’m thinking we might pop in to see Theo Wrenn Browne.” Jury smiled thinly.

When it came to Richard Jury, Theo Wrenn Browne was, at best, ambivalent, at worst, wretchedly jealous. How he coveted the admiring glances slewed Jury’s way! Yes, he was jealous of Jury in the same way he was jealous of Melrose Plant: both had everything Theo wanted. Although Jury didn’t have a fortune to throw around (as did Plant), he easily made up for this in his job of detective superintendent at New Scotland Yard, and having all of that power over life and death. He could point a finger and nests of vipers would disappear. (This image sent a pleasant little shudder up and down his wiry body, the roots of which frisson Theo wasn’t eager to investigate.)

“Mr. Jury, how nice to see you again! And is this visit business or pleasure?”

“Both. You have an employee here named Bramwell? Frederick Edward Bramwell?”

Theo was brought up short. “I did have such a person here, but no longer. He left. He hinted he was returning to Mr. Plant’s place.” Theo tittered.

Or at least it sounded like a titter to Melrose, who had posted himself by the tiers of magazines where he could listen and pretend not to hear.

Mustering just the right amount of gravitas, Jury said, “That’s a rum go.”

Rum go? Melrose looked round. Had he mistakenly walked into an H. E. Bates novel?

Now Theo didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. Then realizing he could do better than “left,” he said, “Well, I had to fire him, didn’t I?”

“Damn! This would have been the perfect place.”

“Pardon?” Theo danced his eyebrows around, puzzled.

“Oh, sorry.” Jury sighed. “We’ve been trying to get the goods on Fast Eddie for years now.”

Get the goods on? Had Jury been filling up on TV cop shows? And “Fast Eddie”-Melrose knew he’d heard that name. “Fast Eddie.” It was from some American film, wasn’t it? They called people those kinds of names over there.

“Fast Eddie? I’m not following you, Superintendent.”

“We call him that. It’s the initials, isn’t it? Frederick Edward? His speciality is rare books, and I mean very rare. Like the Pleiades edition of Ulysses. Don’t see many of those lying around, do you?”

Theo was overcome with ignorance. “The Pleiades edition? I don’t think I’m familiar… I find all this hard to believe, Superintendent.”

You’re not the only one. Melrose turned a page of the Beano comic he was reading.

Theo went on. “You see, Mr. Bramwell didn’t appear to know a thing about books.”

Jury guffawed. “That’s his game, Mr. Browne. He presents himself as being quite unlettered, to say the least.”

The very, very, very least.

“But why on earth,” Theo said, looking pained, “would such a person want with working in my bookshop?”

Jury leaned across the well-polished counter which separated Theo from the rest of humanity and said in a low voice, “Because he always makes his contacts through bookshops.”

Theo drew in a breath, sharply.

“If Mr. Plant can persuade the man to come back here, you would be doing me a huge favor. And, of course, the Yard. This man’s got right up my nose over the last couple of years.”

Melrose sighed, wishing Jury would stop talking like a cop in a bad thriller.

Theo leaned closer to Jury so that now their noses were nearly touching. “Is he, well, dangerous at all?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so, Mr. Browne. But of course”-Jury stepped back and put his palms up-“I certainly wouldn’t ask you to do something you’d be uncomfortable with. After all, we can’t all be heroes.” Jury flashed him a heroic smile.

Well, that did it for Theo. Any appeal to his heroism completely unnerved him-not that there had ever been such an appeal up to now. Yes, he would have Mr. Bramwell back if it meant helping the police.

“So all we have to do is talk Bramwell into returning to the Wrenn’s Nest.”

Joanna Lewes, who was sitting next to Jury in the Jack and Hammer said, “Isn’t that illegal or criminal or something to impersonate a police detective?”

“I am a police detective,” said Jury.

“I know; but you were pretending this was a real case.”

Jury laughed. “You’re obviously unaware of all the ‘pretending’ the police do.”

“Anyway,” said Melrose, “how do I get him to agree to go back?”

Trueblood said, “Tell him Theo’s a bookie.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant.”

Trueblood lit a pink cigarette. “You have no imagination, you know that?”

Vivian said to Jury, “You’re supposed to be resting and yet you go gallivanting all over the country searching for”-she shrugged-“whatever. You’ll land yourself right back in the hospital with that dreadful nurse.”

“Hannibal.” Jury smiled. “You could say Hannibal was really into death. Nothing gave her more pleasure it appeared than an unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate some poor sod flailing like a fish in the OR.”

“Consider my Doris and be grateful they didn’t remove all of your organs.”

Jury laughed. “She was always-” He stopped, hearing Nurse Bell’s whiny voice. Dory. “Poor tike, poor little Dory… arrhythmia, and no one knew it…”

“Something wrong, old bean?” asked Trueblood.

“What? No. I just have to-” Jury rose suddenly and went to the bar where Dick Scroggs was reading the paper. “I need your phone, Dick.”

Dick fished it out from the shelf beneath the bar. “Here you are, sir.”

Jury passed behind some member of the Withersby clan, sullenly nursing a beer. He got out his address book and thumbed to what he wanted. Then he punched in the number of the hospital, called and asked for the surgical ward. A crisp voice answered, and he asked for Dr. Ryder. He was, of course, put on hold. A long silence, bleak as the Withersby face down the bar. (Why did they all look so alike? That cropped look of the face, the squarish jaw, stopped too soon?)

He waited. It would be forever, if the nurse came back at all. He hung up, redialed the hospital and asked again for the surgical ward. Only this time he asked for Nurse King. Christine. Was she on duty? On duty and right there, said the voice.

Chrissie King came on the line. Jury could almost hear the devotion throbbing at the other end. He asked her if she could locate Dr. Ryder, or at least find out where he was and get a message to him.

“But I know where he is, I mean, I know where he said he was going-to Cambridgeshire. It was late yesterday he left. He said something about a funeral.”

Dear God, Jury thought, taking the receiver from his ear and resting it against his forehead as if to cut short the bad news. Maurice. How could he have forgotten?

The receiver back against his ear, he said, “Chrissie, you’re a godsend, you are. Thanks.”

“Oh, yes. Glad to…”

She said it as if he’d just asked her to go steady.

Jury hung up, found the Ryder number in Cambridgeshire and called. No answer. He put the receiver back and thought for a moment. Then he went back to the table and asked their pardon as he had to leave.

“So do you,” he said to Melrose, pulling him out of his chair. “Come on.”

The others were not so much curious as enthralled.

“Revenge. We didn’t really explore that possibility.”

Melrose, floating the Bentley from park into drive, said, “But we did explore it.”

“Against Ryder Stud and Arthur himself, yes. How I could have overlooked Roger Ryder, God only knows.”

“Because the focus was on the stud farm. That’s where Nell lived, after all.”

Hell, Jury thought. His side throbbed unsympathetically.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Nell walked into the office to get the breeding book where she would record the foal’s birth and its forebears. She liked doing this; it seemed to give life an order that it otherwise didn’t have. At least these books presented the illusion, the appearance of orderly progression, and that was worth something and should be respected. The horses themselves certainly should be, and if these bracketed markings did that, well, good.

She had passed Davison, who was muttering a blue streak of profanities, making for Fool’s Money’s stall with a man who looked familiar. A small man, no doubt a jockey from some stable around here. There were so many of them. She stopped Davison and asked what was wrong. Ah, you know, they’re putting more weight on Fool’s Money than he ought to carry. Nell had reminded him (utterly unnecessarily, for Davison knew it) that the greater the Thoroughbred, the heavier the weight. It was to even things out for lesser horses. The small man nodded. They walked on.

Halo, son of Lucky Me by Lockout out of Angel Eyes by Treasure. She repeated it like a mantra as she looked for and found the breeding record beneath a stack of folders on her grandfather’s desk. Lying there, too, was his penknife and a bit of wood. She picked up the smooth wood, wondering what he was fashioning this time. She set it back down by the knife.

Halo, son of Lucky Me by… All of this should give the scrawny little Halo a promising start. The mare Angel Eyes stood at the Anderson stables. She had been bred to Lucky Me as part of the season Anderson had bought, his mare to be bred to the Ryder stable’s Lucky Me. Halo, son of Lucky Me-

It kept her, for a few moments, at least, from thinking about Maurice. She clasped the book in her arms and rested her chin on its scarred binding, and shut her eyes. Maurice. What disorder there had been in his poor life should have left the family unsurprised by his death, though of course she couldn’t mouth that thought. She did not tell her grandfather that she’d been afraid for a long time of something, not this, certainly, but something. Everyone had to think of it as an accident, pure and simple. Thrown from a horse against a stone wall-what else could it reasonably be?

It could be a great deal else. It could be Maurice trying to show that he really was Danny Ryder’s son. He’d been competing all of his life with the shadow of Dan Ryder. How could he not? Maurice was very smart: he knew the danger of jumping Hadrian’s walls after dark, if one wasn’t a good jumper.

She had liked her uncle, even despite his being such a deplorable father. She had liked him for his feeling for horses. It was strange to her how a man could be not much good in so many ways, ruinous to others, yet still retain a passion for one thing-in Dan Ryder’s case, horses. In that respect, they were alike. It made her uncomfortable to think they were alike in this way for that might imply they were in other ways, too. At times she was afraid that her passion for horses had drained her of feelings for people. But she did love people-her father, grandfather and Vernon. She really loved Vernon in ways she knew were hopeless for a seventeen-year-old girl. Ruefully, she hoped she’d never have to choose between Vern and a horse. She laughed. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’d choose Vern. And her other self said, Doesn’t that depend on the horse?

Nell laughed again, straightened, wondered how she could laugh with Maurice dead. She felt cold; she felt the blood drain from her face. Maurice. But she hadn’t cried. Tears sometimes came to her eyes, but didn’t fall. She wondered again if she was, after all, a cold person. When was the last time she’d cried over anything but the mares or flown into a rage? She couldn’t remember. Was it because of the last months at Valerie Hobbs’s place, where she’d schooled herself in repressing her feelings so that she could stay clearheaded? Or simply keep from shattering to bits? You’re so dramatic! But she had never really thought of herself as self-dramatizing.

In all of these ruminations her eyes traveled round the room-the books, the wall of photographs-Do I still look like my old self?-until her glance rested on the coatrack near the door. Silks.

She went nearly rigid. The green and silver silks were on a hanger. The stranger’s, the jockey’s, they must be. And then a shape came to her, burst into her consciousness like glass shards flying together, turned back to their recognizable shape. She felt as if she had in that moment turned into some other girl.

Nell whirled around and snatched the penknife from the desk. She flicked it open and moved to the rack and slashed the shirt, lacerating it again and again until it hung in rags. Then she dropped the knife on the floor and ran from the house to the stables.

In minutes she had Aqueduct saddled and was out of the stable yard and gone.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Diane had generously tossed Jury her cell phone, surprised that these weren’t routinely it issued to Scotland Yard detectives. Jury was using it as he and Melrose left the A45 for the A14, heading for Cambridge.

He snapped the cell phone closed. “I can’t get through. There’s something wrong with the damned thing.”

“What’s wrong,” said Melrose, easing the Bentley around an articulated lorry, “is probably that Diane forgot to pay up for more time. Doesn’t some voice tell you that?”

“I didn’t get a voice.”

Melrose entered a roundabout near Godmanchester. “Ryder will be there, not to worry.” He meant Roger Ryder. “With Maurice’s funeral coming up, he’d stay for Arthur’s sake.”

“Who is this creep ahead of us?” said Jury.

“Which creep? There are so many of them.”

“The one in what looks like one of those ice cream vans. You know, jingle, jingle, jingle, and going five miles per.”

It took them another hour to get to the turnoff that led to Cambridge, an hour filled with rather churlish observations from Jury about his fellow motorists; and okay okay okay from Melrose. Melrose tried to take Jury’s mind off the incompetency of British drivers (all of whom appeared to be driving to Cambridge this afternoon) by getting him to talk about the case, but Jury proved uncharacteristi-cally taciturn.

“You know, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

“Oh, stop being stupid. You know why what’s happened, happened.”

“Pass him” was Jury’s only comment, indicating the car ahead.

“I can’t. A car’s coming from the other direction. They do that, you know. This is a two-lane road and we’ve got hedgerows on either side and curves we can’t see around.”

Jury made a squiffy sound and stared out of the passenger window as if he’d happily roll up the hedgerow and toss it at the cows. There were several ruminating cows near the road.

“We’re nearly there, for heaven’s sake.”

No comment from his passenger.

“You’d be a total disaster at an AA meeting, you know that?” Melrose knew this comment, unrelated to anything at all in the present conversation, would pry a response from Jury.

“AA? What’s AA got to do with anything?”

“It doesn’t, for you. The thing is you’re supposed to share. ‘Thank you for your share’ is what they like to say.”

“That is so a thing I would not be caught dead saying.”

“Perhaps, but then you’re not an alcoholic.”

“A debatable point.”

“Anyway, I think ‘thank you for your share’ is rather warm and friendly.”

“Please don’t say it again.”

Melrose considered. “I’d say Long Piddleton is a really alcoholic place. I mean, there’s so little to do.”

The hedges gave way to dogwood and white birch trees and silver fern. The road widened.

“Does Vernon Rice have an alcoholics chat room on his Web site? I bet you’d always see ‘thank you for your share’ posted there.”

“The only share I want is ten percent of Microsoft.”

“Thank you for your share.” Melrose turned off onto the Ryder drive.

In the distance beyond the white fence horses grazed, one or two turning their heads to inspect the Bentley and its contents. The car spat up gravel as it stopped by the front door, which at the same time was opened by a haggard-looking Arthur Ryder.

“Saw the car. I remembered it.” He nodded toward Melrose and evinced no interest in his appearing here with Richard Jury. It was as if anything worth questioning had been nullified by the death of his grandson.

Jury apologized for intruding. “I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”

“No. Yes. Come in.”

Far from being annoyed by this unexpected visit from the two of them, Arthur Ryder seemed a little relieved to have something to focus on other than the upcoming funeral.

Standing by the large front window, Vernon Rice nodded to them and returned his gaze to the chilly scene outside.

Roger Ryder moved to shake Jury’s hand and ask him how he felt. “Is there much pain still?”

“No, not much,” Jury lied.

Roger knew it, too. He smiled. “You’re tiring yourself out; you should be relaxing-”

(A word Jury would be happy to shoot where it stood, along with “share.”)

“-but I think it very good of you to give so much time and effort to our family, Superintendent.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry for your loss. Maurice will be missed.”

“Awful, isn’t it?” said Arthur Ryder. “Nell come back, Maurice gone, as if we had to pay a price for her return. I feel as if it’s a kind of curse.” They had been drinking tea, and Arthur told them he could get some hot.

Jury shook his head, saying, “I can understand your feeling it’s a curse, but Maurice wasn’t a payment for Nell. If you think that way, you’ll find yourself wandering through mazes of pain and self-blame. Don’t go there.” He turned to Roger Ryder. “Dr. Ryder, it’s you I wanted to talk to. Could I have a word with you?”

“Yes, of course.” He looked around at the others. “Here?”

Jury nodded and they sat down on the sofa. Vernon turned from the window, his expression bleak. Jury looked at him. No one felt things more; he was as much of this family as any of them.

“When I was in hospital,” began Jury, “tended by the excellent Nurse Bell-”

Roger laughed a little. “Not your favorite person, I believe.”

“No, definitely not, but we might owe her a debt, or, rather, her mordant turn of mind. She was fond of bringing up unsuccessful cases. Wedged into her promenade of patients who hadn’t made it-one of whom she seemed to think I was likely to become-”

Roger smiled.

“-was a girl, a young girl who’d died in the OR when you were operating. Dory I think was her name.”

“Oh, Christ.” Roger put his head against his fist. “That was more than two years ago.” He leaned forward, forearms on knees, head bent as if in an act of contrition. “I blamed myself. The child had a heart condition-arrythmia, not dangerous in itself, it can be controlled with medication, but no one knew about it, including me, and I certainly should have; before operating, I should-”

Vernon Rice frowned. “What child?”

Arthur said, “That was not your fault, son.”

Jury turned to Arthur. “You knew her, then?”

“Of course, we all did. She-”

“Bloody hell!”

This outburst came from the office and was repeated twice before the speaker, a small man with a big temper, stormed into the room. “What the bloody hell’s goin’ on, Arthur?” He was holding up the shredded silk. “I got four bleedin’ races at Cheltenham tomorrow! I’ll look good in this lot, I will.”

“Billy, I don’t know-” said Arthur.

The jockey jiggled the hanger; the pieces of silk fluttered in the air of Billy’s shaking. Finally, they stilled into their green and silver diamond pattern.

Melrose stared. “You’re one of Roy Diamond’s jockeys?”

Billy nodded, muttering imprecations.

“He told me his daughter was dead,” said Jury. “She was the little girl.” It was only half a question.

Arthur said, “Dorothy, her name was. Dorothy Diamond.”

“She was in-” Jury stopped before he said, your care. He looked at the shredded silk and asked, “Where’s Nell?”

Vernon stared at him and bolted from the room.

Neil Epp, the groom, was still holding the tasty dish of carrots and fruits under Criminal Type’s nose and wondered what the bloody hell was going on, for here came Vernon Rice heading (it looked like) for them, for Neil and Criminal Type, still bridled and chewing his evening treat. Vernon yelled at him to saddle the horse.

Neil was completely discombobulated by this second assault on his stables-the first being young Nell grabbing Aqueduct as if her life depended on him, and now here came Rice yelling to saddle up the horse. Owing to Neil’s years of Dan Ryder’s “Do-it-don’t-ask” training he threw the saddle he’d been carrying over his arm onto Criminal Type’s back and he’d barely done this before Vernon had thrown himself up on the horse in one of the most efficient mountings Neil had ever witnessed.

Rice turned the horse and was now heading for the meadow and the walls.

Neil Epp ran, yelling, “Hey, Vernon! Criminal Type don’t go over the sticks!”

(Says who?)

Add to this the car that had just pulled onto the gravel lot and out of which got that Scotland Yard detective sergeant who’d been here before, and Neil thought it was the busiest day they’d seen since breeding rights to Samarkand had been initiated.

“Not fifteen minutes ago, Nell left,” he said to the party of worried-looking men who’d just come out of the house. “She came running out, saddled up Aqueduct and took off like Criminal Type on a fast track. Now he’s gone too, Criminal Type. With that Rice fellow up on him. Nell’d make a good ’chaser the way she takes those walls, or even a jockey. She’s flat-out brilliant-”

Jury cut across Neil’s career choices. “Where’s the Diamond farm?”

As Neil directed him, Roger turned disbelieving eyes on Jury. “You don’t think-?”

“Wiggins, you drive them”-he indicated Roger and Arthur-“and you drive me”-he turned to Melrose.

They ran toward the two cars.

Unfortunately, the quickest way to Roy Diamond’s place was not by the road, but by Hadrian’s walls, as the crow flies-or the horse.