The Grave Maurice (17 page)

“I agree.” Vernon frowned, considering. “Want to try it?”

Melrose laughed out loud. “Do I want to
try
it? Sit here for a half an hour saying nothing? If I'd walked in with a guillotine, would you want to try that, too? And don't pretend to think about it.”

Vernon laughed as the waiter, dressed in an olive drab T-shirt and black jeans, came to take their order. Grilled sea bass. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes.

“Tell me about your plans for Aggrieved. He's a wonderful horse, incidentally.”

Sorry that the talk of the murder had made a detour back to the horse, Melrose said, “He was talking about the business end, syndicating one or two of his horses.”

“Right. It's the best thing he could do, but he doesn't want to. He seems to look at that as filthy lucre, you know.”

“Well, he also told me the idea of selling ‘seasons,' which he apparently does.”

Vemon nodded. “He does, but not enough. Says he doesn't want his stallions overtaxed.”

“An interesting way of putting it. Anyway, I thought perhaps you could help me do this for Aggrieved. Sell seasons.”

“Why? You don't strike me as in need of capital. Not with what you paid for that horse.”

Melrose didn't comment on his need, rightly assessed by Rice. “Aggrieved has a very famous bloodline. I should think it would be easy.”

Vernon shook his head. “Not really, not if you don't have a working stud farm. See, when an owner buys what we call seasons, in this instance for Aggrieved, and if something happens to the horse, he'd expect to be switched to another equally valuable horse or have his money back. I think you'd be better off waiting. If you did it now, not understanding what's involved, you'd just be buying yourself a headache. Believe me. Ryder's business is a tricky one. Worse than farming in its unpredictability. When you acquire other horses, it would be best to stable them with a reliable stud farm and a reliable trainer. That's what most owners do.”

Melrose opened his mouth to argue, as if he really were serious about this horse business, realized he wasn't and closed his mouth. One could be convinced at times one's lies were the truth.

The waiter was setting down their plates and Melrose bathed his face in the fragrant steam rising from his meat loaf. “I'll give it some thought.” Then, as if suddenly recalling it, he said, “I got there just as the woman's body was loaded into the ambulance. Murder has a way of making other subjects irrelevant.”

“Well, this one's as peculiar as hell. Cambridge police want me up there this evening to have a look at the body, see if I know her. From Arthur's description, she doesn't sound familiar. I admit I'm curious as hell.” He shrugged. “But my car's in the shop. I'll rent a car, I suppose.”

Melrose could hardly believe his luck! “Cambridge isn't far. I could easily run you there.”

Vernon laughed. “You kidding? That's damned nice of you.”

“Not at all, not at all.” Melrose refilled their glasses with a very good Brunello, saying, “And I confess, like you, I'm curious. I've never been on the spot when somebody's been murdered and that she was found lying in the middle of the racecourse was really, well, weird; it couldn't have been an accident.”

“Hardly. When Arthur called to tell me, before the words ‘body on the course' were spoken, I froze. I thought it might be Nellie.” Vernon stopped eating and stared out over the tables and the plants, transfixed.

“The granddaughter?”

Vernon looked at Melrose absently, as if trying to place him, and said, “Nearly two years ago she was kidnapped or abducted, according to the police.” He turned his eyes on his plate, but didn't raise his fork.

“My God, but your family is not the luckiest around. Mr. Ryder told me a little about that kidnapping; he said there was never a ransom demand.”

“That's right.”

“It's a very strange story.”

Vernon nodded. “They also took one of Arthur's great Thoroughbreds, a horse named Aqueduct. We assume Nellie saw or heard them—she was in the stable herself, you see, looking after a sick horse—and they took her to keep her quiet.”

“Why take this particular horse, Aqueduct?”

“Aqueduct's a valuable 'chaser. But they couldn't have raced him under some fictitious name, unless they'd gone to a lot of trouble to make sure he wasn't recognized. Even then, George Davison—the trainer—would have known. George could have told from the horse's performance. He's amazing that way. Aqueduct could have been stolen for breeding purposes. His progeny have certainly measured up, won a lot of top races. But this wouldn't explain it because they couldn't put down Aqueduct as the sire.”

Vernon had given up all pretense of eating now and was sitting back with his wineglass in his hand. He kept raising it and replacing it on the table, untouched. He seemed to have given up the pretense of drinking, too. “So—?”

Melrose took his last bite of meat loaf, sorry to see it go, and pushed his clean-as-a-whistle plate away. “To do something to the whole stable? To all of the Thoroughbreds? Or to do something to your stepfather? The only person who saw what happened was the granddaughter. Everything else is speculation, an attempt at reconstruction. For all anyone knows they could have come for completely different reasons than you think.”

“I suppose you're right. But you have to start somewhere, and we started with what went missing. Aqueduct. Nellie.”

“That's reasonable.”

For the first time that afternoon, Vernon looked defeated. “She's not dead.”

“Even after twenty months?”

“Even so. She's not dead.”

“You seem so sure.”

“I am.” He returned to his cold plate then and cut off a bit of his cold fish, chewed it, swallowed. “I hardly knew her.”

That, thought Melrose, was the first indication of self-deception. He had known her, all right, just as Melrose felt he himself knew her after nothing but seeing her picture.

Vernon cut off another bite and chewed it. He looked as if he were eating ashes.

H
e had been sitting in the Bentley for twenty minutes parked on a double-yellow line, wondering how he could get a look at the body and how he could get past the policeman in reception. Not being a relative or a witness himself, it would be impossible. He had been there, though, in the aftermath, when the stretcher had come out of the woods. And he had been seen to be there by the detectives.

Melrose got out of the car and leaned against it, quietly smoking. He looked around for a call box and didn't see one. Jury might have some ideas about all of this if he could get him on the telephone. By now, Hannibal surely must have returned his telephone privileges. Why did Jury put up with it?

There was a pub down the street and of course they'd have a telephone. He searched his person and then his car for paper to write on. All he salvaged from the glove compartment was a theater program for
Cats. Cats
? When in God's name had he ever seen
Cats
? He wouldn't see
Cats
if someone threatened to swing him like one. Then why was he looking at this theater program as if he had? He frowned. What was he thinking?

Melrose slammed the car door, stood with his arms on top of the car and his head bent, hoping to come up with some clever approach to Cambridge police. When he stopped banging his head and looked over the top of the car, he saw two children standing on the pavement licking iced lollies and staring at him. What were they doing out after dark? They were apparently waiting for him to do his next number.

“Just look at yourselves. Are you auditioning for Cirque du Soleil?”

They neither spoke nor gave up their places on the pavement. They waited. The inherent pleasure of watching a grown-up being a total idiot seemingly had a stronger pull than running from that grown-up idiot. Melrose walked around to the pavement. “You haven't seen
Cats,
have you? And then planted the evidence in my car?” He produced the program.

But they just went on looking and licking. What was it about him that made children look at him as if their dog had suddenly started talking? Melrose threw up his hands, turned away and started toward the pub down the street. The need to look back was too strong and he did. Now they were leaning, backs against his car, licking their ices and staring at the park.

The Cricketer's Arms was the familiar world of smoke and beer. He told the bartender he'd have a pint of whatever was on tap and went to the telephone. He pinged coins into the slots, thinking he should probably get one of those cell phones, but he despised them. The whole earth had turned into a public call box.

Hannibal answered.

Melrose couldn't believe she was actually screening Jury's calls. He put on his best North London voice and said, “Is Mr. Joo-ry there, love?”

When she said the superintendent wasn't to be disturbed, Melrose raised his voice a disturbed notch. “It's his auntie Agatha; I'm ever so worried since I found out about that 'orrible business. Can't I just speak to 'im fer a moment?”

Melrose could hear Jury arguing with her in the background. Then finally his voice came over the line, “Aunt Agatha!”

“Has she gone?” Melrose asked on his end.

“No,” Jury answered.

“Well, can't you get her out of your room?”

“You're kidding. Aunt Agatha,” he quickly added.

Jury enjoyed this sort of thing, Melrose was sure; it must have been similar to the intractability of witnesses and to intractable circumstance. “Listen. I need you to do something. I'm in Cambridge. I've driven Vernon Rice here because the police wanted him to have a look at the body, see if he knows—or knew—her. I imagine they also wanted to ask him more questions since he's still there and it's been forty-five minutes. I want to see the body myself. Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

“So how can I? I'm not family or friend or anything that would get me a ticket in.”

“Simple. I'll just tell them you might have recognized her. Okay, Hannibal's gone, so I can speak freely.”

“Thank God. Only I didn't see the woman. How could I recognize her?”

“You said you were very near the stretcher as they brought it by, moving it toward the ambulance.”

“Yes, I was, but—”

“That's good enough.”

“How can it be?”

A huge sigh from Jury. “I'm not helping you out in a criminal act, for God's sake. All you want is to view a dead body. Where are you?”

“Pub down the street.”

“Go back to the station. I'll call Cambridge right away. I've a good friend there. Greene's his name in case someone asks. Detective chief inspector, he is.”

Melrose drank off most of the pint waiting for him at the bar, bought a packet of vinegar crisps and ate them while walking back down the road. He had nearly finished them when he realized a dead body might best be seen on an empty stomach.

 

Nothing of that nature occurred, however. As a young woman police constable led him on and off the elevator and down a corridor to the morgue, his stomach was perfectly fine. And it wasn't as if he'd never seen a body before. Last year in Cornwall, for instance. But that was a case of the very recently dead, when they looked exactly the same as they always had. Except for the blood and the bullet holes. But the blood had been hidden by the thick dark rug, and the bullet wounds were invisible, at least from where he stood.

In the long corridor, he hung back. This episode had turned suddenly serious on him. In his mind's eye he saw the face of Nell Ryder and marveled at Vernon Rice's conviction that she could not be dead. And he had this irrational fear that he would look down at this dead woman and he would see Nell Ryder. It was as if the others who had seen this woman—her grandfather, Maurice, even the trainer, Davison—had blinded themselves to the face they saw.

Why was he
doing
this? Why? The photograph had looked alive, as if it had captured Nell, and the old superstition was true about the camera's catching the soul of its subject.

He had been walking slowly, and now stopped dead. With a conviction to rival Rice's own, he was sure that she was dead. His throat felt constricted.

“Coming, sir?” The pleasant WPC turned toward him and smiled.

Melrose picked up his pace. “Sorry.”

“That's all right. Most people walk more slowly here. Is it a family member you've come to—sorry, you don't know yet, do you?”

“No.”

They had stopped for a moment. They started walking again.

“It's right here, sir. See, there's a panel they'll slide back, and you just look through that pane of glass.”

Melrose did not respond; he merely waited. The panel slid back and he was looking at the woman lying on the gurney. His eyes widened in astonishment.

“Is it who you thought?”

“No.”

“You don't recognize her, then?”

“Yes. I do.”

 

Sitting in one of the interview rooms, he had told the detective inspector working the case as much as he could about the woman at the bar in the Grave Maurice.

Unfortunately (Melrose told the detective), he hadn't paid much attention to the other woman, so couldn't help them there.

“Did she appear to know Dr. Ryder personally?”

“It's hard to say. She certainly knew
about
him. She knew about his niece, Nell Ryder.”

“You think, then, this woman knew the family, or at least one of them intimately.”