The Grave Maurice (31 page)

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.

“O
f 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.

M
elrose 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.”