The Grave Maurice (49 page)

“He believed you?”

“Well, he would've done, wouldn't he? He
wanted
to believe me. There were the snapshots that showed the horse going round the Hialeah course and there was his dad, right by the fence.”

 

Yes, Jury thought, standing now in the stable, Maurice would have wanted to believe Trevor Gwyne. And when Nell disappeared that night, Maurice knew that something had gone horribly wrong and it could be down to him. The next few days must have been agonizing. For all he knew, Nell might be dead.

Jury remained standing by Criminal Type's stall, stroking the black face. Blacker than black. Probably the way Maurice had felt. Was Maurice one of those people who feed on guilt, like some mythological prince forced to eat his own heart?

For some reason, Jury thought then of the boy on the train from Cardiff. The winter angel. Maurice's polar opposite, who could wrap his music round his shoulders like a cloak.

Jury reached into his coat pocket where a few sugar cubes remained from the Little Chef raid. He unwrapped them and held them out to the horse. Criminal Type was not as polite as Aggrieved. He nearly got Jury's hand into the bargain. But that was the way when you were mobbed up: eat first, ask questions later. Jury smiled and left the stables.

Vernon had gathered thirty of the mares in the meadow and stood watching them, leaning against a post-and-rail fence, his foot hooked on the bottom rail.

He said, when Jury came up to him, “I thought I'd have to round them up, cowboy style, but they just seemed willing to follow one another out to the field.” He pointed at one. “That's Daisy and Daisy's foal. Nellie said”—he stopped and cleared his throat—“Nell said that Daisy was a kind of leader. But look at them. They just stand there.” He turned to look at Jury. “Do you think it's from being tethered in those narrow stalls for so long? But shouldn't they remember their lives before . . . ?”

His voice trailed off.

The mares were standing in a crescent, a head occasionally bent to look for graze, or a mother nudging at a foal—there were three foals now—but aside from that they stood quite still in that strange half-circle as if indeed they had been lined up there and tied.

“Probably they need a little time to get used to freedom,” said Vernon.

He appeared to Jury to be almost desperate to explain their eerie stillness. Jury said, “Freedom can be hard to get used to, you're right.”

“And the sky,” said Vernon, looking upward, “is so blue.”

As if the day were a perfect setting for the horses to break away for a gallop, or perhaps as if nature had broken a bargain.

They stood side by side in silence for a long time, not speaking. Then Jury saw one of the foals leave the line and run for several yards, then another foal, and then one of the mares. And after that it was like an ice slide, ice calving, glaciers tumbling into the sea.

At least it seemed to Jury as extraordinary as that. As if someone had actually waved a wand and broken the spell and raised them from their sad and anxious sleep; first one, then another and another of the mares were running, manes and tails flying, running for what was surely joy, pushing the race to its limits.

There would always be a filly like Go for Wand, thought Jury; there would always be a girl to ride her.

Together, they would wire the field.

T
he door of Tynedale Lodge was opened by the pretty maid Sarah, whose eyes widened even more when she saw him standing there. His image reflected in her eyes; he could almost see himself shaping up as a hero, which only made him feel more of an idiot. What had he done, after all, for the Tynedales?

“Hello, Sarah. This isn't an official visit; I came to see how Gemma's doing. Is she about?”

Sarah's hand fell away from her hair. “Oh, why, yessir. I mean, I expect she is. I expect she's out in the garden.”

“Thanks. I'll just have a look.”

He made his way through the dining room to the study and the French doors that opened off Ian Tynedale's study. Outside to the left of the patio was a long colonnade, a walk flanked by white pillars. He saw her, as he had seen her before, on the same walk across the garden in which a marble figure stood in a marble pool, pouring water from a marble jug. The path she was on ran parallel to his. A line of tall cypresses bordered it. As they both walked, he felt as he had the first time, that they were somehow woven together. There was a poignant sense of belonging: everything that was there—man, child, statue, pillars, trees—was rightly there.

When they came to the end of their paths and she still didn't see him, he called, “Gemma!”

She didn't so much turn as swerve toward him, as a car might do, hoping to ward off a collision. She stood transfixed, as if she were the marble figure in the fountain.

“Gemma—” He walked toward her and then knelt down and kissed her cheek.

She held her doll in one hand and put her other hand on the spot. “You got shot.”

“I did.”

“You didn't die.”

“No. Didn't anyone tell you?”

She shook her head.

“Did you think I had?”

Very slowly, still holding her hand against her face, she nodded.

“Come on, let's sit down.”

Seated with her (the doll Richard between them), Jury thought it was hard to believe no one had told her he was all right. Was it because she hadn't asked? For Gemma wouldn't, one of those children who felt so dangerously deeply they could only survive by pretending indifference.

She was feigning it now, adjusting the doll's bonnet as if that, not Jury's life or death, was the issue.

He said, “What happened to Richard's black clothes? I thought he looked quite smart in that coat and hat.”

“He's being punished!” Her voice went up a decibel, nervously loud.

“He is? But what did he do?”

“He kicked you and yelled at you. Don't you remember?”

“Yes.”

It was Gemma herself who had used Richard as a club to give Jury several whacks because he'd left her in danger.

“Well, if he hadn't done that, you probably wouldn't've got shot.”

Jury looked at her solemn, remorseful face, which now gave tremulous signs of dissolving into tears, as if a pebble had been tossed into a pool. No little girl, he thought, should have to exert so much effort in trying not to cry. But from Gemma's point of view, strong emotion can kill. She had displayed it once—she had cried and yelled—and look at the result: Jury had nearly died.

Jury thought for a moment, then picked up the doll and sighed deeply. “Poor Richard,” he said. “No one understood, did they?”

Her face free of incipient tears, now completely forestalled by this surprising new development, Gemma put her hand on Jury's arm. “Understood what?”

“Well, Richard helped save me, didn't he?”

“
What?
He wasn't even
there.
” Remorse was fast giving way to testiness.

“Not the night I was, no. But he'd been there before, when he and Sparky saved you.”

This wasn't going down a treat. “I did most of the work!”

“I know, but, see, Sparky went back the second time—”

“Christmas night.”

“—because he had found you and Richard there once, he knew it was a place that needed watching. Richard understood that.”

Her frown was deep: a dog and a doll. Jury could almost hear the words chasing around in her mind. Were a dog and a doll enough to keep a person from getting shot? If it was not so, if she had really saved herself, then why hadn't she saved Jury?

Nope: go with the dog and the doll. “Well, I guess he could have helped even if he wasn't there. He could've been sending messages to Sparky, too. It's not like us.”

Isn't it? Jury smiled.

Gemma said to the doll Richard, “I'm sorry. I should've understood.” Then she yanked the bonnet down over the doll's eyes, not altogether pleased with Jury's solution, as it put her at least a little in the wrong. But in another instant, her face cleared completely.

Jury asked, “Are you going to put his black clothes back on him?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “He gets so bossy when he's wearing them, though.” Rearranging the bonnet so the doll could see again, she hesitated. “Your name is Richard, too,” wanting to clear this up about the two Richards. “You're not bossy at all. I wish he was more like you.” She flicked a glance Jury's way to see if he liked hearing this.

“Thank you. I try not to be. But if I had a set of new black clothes to wear, I might be pretty bossy.”

“No, you wouldn't. I'll bet you don't even boss around the criminals you catch. Probably, you didn't even boss
them.
”

He knew who she meant by “them” and tried to track emotion across her face, but it was free of fear, yet not so much she would name their names. “I don't remember if I did or not. Probably not. I was too upset by what happened to you and Benny.”

“Benny? Nothing happened to Benny!” Not about to share the limelight with Benny, she got annoyed and stood the doll on his head. “Anyway, I'm sorry you got upset over me.”

She said this in the most self-satisfied tone that Jury had ever heard, her mouth crimped like an old lady's, as she righted Richard and adjusted his gown.

A voice called her: “Gemma!”

Gemma slid off the seat and grabbed Richard. “It's time for me to read to Mr. Tynedale. You can come.”

“I'd like to, but I've got to be getting back.”

“To the Yard?”

“Yes, the Yard.”

“I'm glad you came,” she said before she scooted off.

And then she turned and ran back. She put her hand on the cheek Jury had kissed, removed it and placed it against Jury's own cheek. It was, he guessed, about as close as she dared come to a kiss. “Bye!”

He stood up and watched her run and skip, skip and run, her black hair gleaming in the frosty winter light. Then he watched the space now empty of her.

She was gone. In a moment, so was he.

 

At the Man with a Load of Mischief, a dead man is found with his head stuck in a beer keg. At the Jack and Hammer, another body was stuck out on the beam of the pub's sign, replacing the mechanical man who kept the time. Two pubs. Two murders. One Scotland Yard inspector called in to help. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Jury arrives in Long Piddleton and finds everyone in the postcard village looking outside of town for the killer. Except for Melrose Plant. A keen observer of human nature, he points Jury in the right direction: toward the darkest parts of his neighbors' hearts. . . .

 

“Grimes captures the flavor of British village life. . . . Long may she write Richard Jury mysteries.”

—
Chicago Tribune

 

Stacked against the cliffs on the shore of the North Sea and nearly hidden by fog, the town of Rackmoor seems a fitting place for murder. But the stabbing death of a costumed young woman has shocked the close-knit village. When Richard Jury arrives on the scene, he's pulled up short by the fact that no one is sure who the victim is, much less the killer. Her questionable ties to one of the most wealthy and influential families in town send Jury and Melrose Plant on a deadly hunt to track down a very wily murderer.

 

“A superior writer.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“Warmth, humor, and great style . . . a thoroughly satisfying plot . . . one of the smoothest, richest traditional English mysteries ever to originate on this side of the Atlantic.”—
Kirkus Reviews

 

They were two women, strikingly similar in life . . . strikingly similar in death. Both were strangled with their own scarves—one in Devon, one outside a fashionable Mayfair pub called I Am the Only Running Footman. Richard Jury teams up with Devon's irascible local divisional commander, Brian Macalvie, to solve the murders. With nothing to tie the women together but the fatal scarves, Jury pursues his only suspect . . . and a trail of tragedy that just might lead to yet another victim—and her killer.

 

“Everything about Miss Grimes's new novel shows her at her best. . . . [She] gets our immediate attention. . . . She holds it, however, with something more than mere suspense.”—
The New Yorker

 

“Literate, witty, and stylishly crafted.”

—
The Washington Post

 

Richard Jury has yet to finish his first pint in the village of Long Piddleton when he finds a corpse inside a beautiful rosewood desk recently acquired by the local antiques dealer, Marshall Trueblood. The body belongs to Simon Lean, a notorious philanderer. An endless list of suspects leads Jury and his aristocratic sidekick, Melrose Plant, to the nearby country estate where Lean's long-suffering wife resides. But Jury's best clue comes in London at a pub called the Five Bells and Bladebone. There he learns about Lean's liaison with a disreputable woman named Sadie, who could have helped solve the case . . . if she wasn't already dead.