The Grave Maurice (36 page)

“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.”

S
he 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.