The Grave Maurice (29 page)

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.

“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.”