FORTY-THREE
Jury looked at her for a long time, longer than was necessary for a simple introduction. The pictures on the wall of her grandfather’s study had not lied. He found it hard to wrench his eyes away, and “wrench” was just what he felt he was doing. This introduction took place in the course of seconds, but it felt like as many minutes, in which he had taken and dropped her hand and felt as if he were stuck in an afterglow the cause of which he had missed.
She was wearing dark designer jeans and a white silk blouse. For a girl of seventeen, she wore elegance well. But what she looked like—that she was extremely pretty—was almost beside the point. That wasn’t what held Jury, although he imagined many men would mistake this more mysterious quality for physical beauty. Rarely had Jury been unable to pin down a witness or suspect, to tease out what made the other person tick. But here he was, and would be, at sea.
Light from a low-glowing lamp behind her fretted her hair, the way light striking the surface of water filters down and diffuses. He had the eerie feeling he was looking at a scene underwater.
It surprised him when she apologized. “I’m sorry. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”
“It was no trouble.”
“I think it was. You’ve been in hospital. Vern told me.”
Vernon was pouring whiskey into a cut glass tumbler, looking ruefully at the empty bottle. He handed Jury the glass and said, “I’ll go down to Oddbins for some more. Nell,” he said, “go ahead and tell all. The superintendent needs to hear it.”
“But I’ve already told you every—”
Vernon shook his head, eyes closed. “He doesn’t want it from me, he wants it from you. It’s not just what’s said; it’s the way it’s said. Right?” He was shrugging into an anorak.
“He’s right,” said Jury. “Except I don’t want to put you through—”
Vernon said with a smile and a wave of his hand, “It seems to me it’s what Nell’s put us through, even though she wasn’t responsible. Nell.”
Vernon Rice seemed to have a lot of influence. But that didn’t surprise Jury, given it was to him she chose to come. She nodded. He said he’d be back in a few minutes.
Jury asked her about what had taken her out to the stables the night she was abducted. “I’ve been told,” he said, “but I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Aqueduct. Maurice told me he seemed sick. Stable cough, he said. It’s not unusual for a horse to get it. So I took my sleeping bag and went out to stay with him. I sometimes did that with a sick horse, though I didn’t really see any signs of stable cough. Still, better safe than sorry.” She smiled.
“Tell me what happened, Nell.”
She told the story unemotionally. It was as if emotion, at least in this instance, had been burned out of her. At the end of it, Jury sat silent for a few moments, then asked, “Were you treated well—or, at least, decently?”
There was a hesitation so brief that no one, not even Vernon, would have picked up on it except for a person trained to notice brief hesitations. Jury looked at Nell; she looked away. There was a silence she was not going to fill. He didn’t probe, at least for now. Instead, he said, “And you couldn’t leave because of the horses. The mares.”
She nodded; she shrugged.
“You didn’t think your grandfather would do something to get the horses out of there?”
“They aren’t, you see, doing anything illegal, so the authorities wouldn’t be able to shut them down. What they’d have done—Dad and Granddad, I mean—would have been to take their guns and find this place and shoot the lot of them.”
Her voice was near strident, almost to the point of desperation. That was it, he thought. That was what the child in her had wanted, what every child in danger prays for, no, expects: the protector to show up and “shoot the lot of them.” Only, the protector doesn’t turn up. So you find yourself in a position where there’s nothing to fall back on. Her mother had died; her father lived in London, too busy for her a lot of the time; that left her grandfather.
“You seem to feel—”
The look she turned on him seemed to implore him to explain herself to her.
“To feel guilty. Why?”
“If I was able to get away, I should have gone home. And I was able to.”
“They failed you; why should you go home?”
That startled her; it startled her, but at the same time made her utter a small, relieved sigh. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, balanced there, as if the suspense of this line of thought were a high-wire act. Then she laughed, but the sound was tight. “There was nothing any of them could do, though.”
“That might be literally true, but that’s not how you felt. They should have been looking for you—”
“They were.”
“But they stopped.”
For a moment she said nothing, then, “It was only reasonable to stop.”
“Vernon Rice didn’t stop.”
She dropped her head and seemed to be studying, as he had, the wavelike pattern in the carpet, a stormy gray growing fainter in color but the wave growing wider. “And you think that’s why I stayed away. That I was so spiteful—”
The notion of spite here was ludicrous. “Spiteful? That’s the last thing I’d think. No, I’m only looking for connections, for reasons.”
“Reasons. You think I’m lying to myself. You think the real reason I stayed there for all that time was for some sort of revenge. That my family couldn’t keep me safe. You don’t believe it was the horses.”
There was in what she said some deep truth that connected her with the mares. But Jury blamed himself for stating it so clumsily that she’d misunderstood. “On the contrary, I think the horses were absolutely the reason. By ‘connections’ and ‘reasons,’ I mean, how is it that you feel such compassion that you stayed when you could have left, and why were you willing to put yourself at risk again and again by going back, when you could simply have stopped? That first time, you could have taken Aqueduct and just ridden off. But you went back. Every time you went back it was more dangerous. You even went back to your room, your bed.”
“After the fourth mare I waited. So I needed to stay with the mares I had and take care of them. It was nearly three weeks between stealing the fourth one and the fifth, then the sixth. And after that, I just stayed in the barn. It was on Granddad’s property and we once used it, but not anymore.”
“You couldn’t have been far from there all along. How far was it?”
“I’m not sure; driving, I think it would be less than two miles.”
“And you didn’t know this Hobbs woman? I mean, before.”
She shook her head. “The farms are so far apart that unless you do business with one—” She shrugged and studied the rug again; it seemed to be the repository for their unspoken, perhaps unbidden, thoughts. “Being that close, all of this time . . .”
“But you still feel guilty.”
“Yes.” She looked up. “For the ones I left behind.”
Jury looked at her across this small sea of gray rug, at the pattern of barely distinguishable waves, by some illusion washing toward her, lapping at her feet. He felt a cold knot in his stomach, as if he had waded out into freezing water to reach her, but couldn’t. “The ones you left,” he said. For some people there was always something more to do, something more to save. “Did you think you could get all of those mares out?”
She nodded. “Maybe, at first. If I was clever enough. Brave enough.” Her smile was weak, as if she should never have expected to be either.
Astonished, Jury just looked at her. What she had already done was not enough to show her that she was both brave and clever. He hardly knew what to say in the face of such self-abnegation. He reverted to practical questions.
“This fellow who abducted you—would you know him if you saw him again?”
“I don’t think so, not to see him. Maybe if I felt him—”
She stopped so suddenly, Jury was suspicious. He thought of her former hesitation. “Nell, what else happened?” He knew the moment she looked at him and then didn’t look at him. Rather, she looked everywhere in the room, except at him. “This fellow, the one who abducted you, did he do anything else?”
She bent her head as if she couldn’t get it down far enough, far enough away from him. “It wasn’t him.”
Jury waited.
“Another one. Another man, but I only saw his face once, and not well. That’s because he came at night and made sure the room was always dark. He made me lie on my stomach and went at me that way. I never saw anything except his hands on either side of my face.” As if her listener might need this demonstrated, she put her own hands by her face, palms flat and turned inward. “Just his hands.” She seemed not to know what to do with them now.
Jury leaned over and took her hands in his. “This is part of the reason you feel you can’t go back.”
She was crying as she nodded. She said, “I didn’t fight it after the second time. To fight him off meant only that it would last longer.”
Jury moved to the sofa and put his arms around her. “None of this was your fault, Nell. None of it.”
“But you won’t tell anyone. Please don’t tell anyone. Vernon would kill him if he ever saw him.”
“No, I won’t.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her where she still had her face buried in his chest. She reached out a hand, took it. Interesting she’d chosen Vernon, and not her father or grandfather, to kill the bastard. Jury thought: And if I ever see him. I’ll kill him.
She had apparently made herself presentable enough to sit back. “If Mum hadn’t died—”
The if stayed unfinished. The if was always unfinished, wasn’t it? And death was no excuse for abandonment. It never had been, never would be. Such is our complete unreason when it comes to loss.
Was it the shutout, Jury wondered, that had evoked in her this love of creatures that could communicate only through signs and gestures? Was it herself she saw in these helpless mares and because of that was determined to do what her mother never could? Nor, when it came to it, her father or even her grandfather, though they were far better than her mother. They had at least stuck.
Nell went on. “She was a terrific horsewoman, Mum. Maybe that’s where I got the ability.”
That and a few other things, thought Jury, looking at the rug again. Loneliness, and an abiding rootlessness, an incurable homesickness. When Mum went, she took home with her.
“Mr. Jury.”
His head snapped up.
“What’re you thinking? I mean, you look so sad.”
“Oh. I was just remembering my own childhood. My own mum. I didn’t have a horse.”
“That’s too bad. You should’ve.”
He smiled. It was as if humankind were divided between the horse owners and the horseless, as if horses could take the place of missing parents.
Her expression was completely serious and concerned. “You’re going to Ryder Stud tomorrow?”
Her face clouded over a little. “Yes.” Then she surprised him by saying, “You could go with us. Would you?”
“Well . . . yes, if you want. I’d be glad to.”
They both turned at the sound of the door’s opening. Vernon came in with a large carryall that clinked.
“Sorry it took so long.”
“That Oddbins chap must have been giving you a detailed account of the slopes of Burgundy and Muligny.”
“Nope. I just ran into a pal of mine and we had a drink.” He set the bag on the floor beside the drinks cabinet.
Jury didn’t believe Vernon had met a pal. He had stayed away for this half hour to give Nell room to talk more freely.
“You both look like you could use a drink.” He held up a bottle of whiskey and one of red wine. “Okay? Interested?” They nodded and Vernon set about fixing the drinks.
“Tell me about the place,” said Jury.
“It was ordinary enough. Not as much land as we have.
The mares were kept in stalls some distance from the main building.” She described the barns, the narrow stalls, the way the urine was collected, the way the mares were tethered so they couldn’t move more than a few inches. All of this as if limning a picture he’d better not forget. But she said little about the rest of the farm. Her room, the kitchen, the locked office. “It was where I found out about this operation.”
Handing her a drink that looked to Jury as if it were right down Wiggins’s alley—a brightly colored club soda—Vernon asked: “That’s where you got the stuff you showed me?”
“Yes. Once I had a chance to look through her books. There were stud books. But what I was mainly interested in was the mares. Wait a minute.” She rose and went down the hall to her bedroom.
Jury took the moments to tell Rice what she’d said about going to the farm the next day. “What do you think? Is it okay?”
“Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we could—”
Nell was back with one of the Premarin folders and the snapshots and handed them to Jury. “That’s Valerie Hobbs, there.”
Jury looked at the two snapshots of the woman holding the reins of a horse and the third shot of what he presumed were the mares. He picked up the folder.
“It seems so benign, doesn’t it, when you read about it in there?”
Jury read about the drug. “I notice they don’t show you any horse farms, do they? What would women do if they knew about the way these mares are treated?”
Nell said, “Some would stop taking it—no, I imagine a lot of women would stop. Some would just go on. Like they go on wearing fur. I don’t blame them, really, even though it’s selfish and inhumane. There are so many things that make a person’s life hellish. I expect it’s hard to let go of any sort of comfort.”
“This is terrible,” he said, putting the folder on the table. “But you found nothing else?”
“I didn’t know what to look for, specifically. There was the book in which she kept an accounting of the mares and the amount of urine they produced, and breeding of each one.”
Jury held up one of the snapshots of Valerie Hobbs. “Do you mind if I keep this for a while?”
Nell shook her head. “No, take it.”
He pocketed the photo, then said, “About that night and those walls—”
“Hadrian’s walls is what we call them.” She seemed to like this and smiled in an almost sunny way.
Jury returned the smile. “What about the stable lads, the trainers? I’m just looking for whoever would be a good enough rider to jump those walls.”
“A jumper, a steeplechase jockey, could do it. He was small enough, I think, to be a jockey. With the right horse, maybe even Maurice could do it.”
“Maurice? I didn’t know he excelled as a rider.”
“That’s because he never talks about it. He always wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps and of course he’s not that good. He was well over five feet when I—left; maybe he’s grown since I saw him. Anyway, for Maurice, if he can’t be as good as his father, well, he doesn’t want to be anything. I’ve always tried to get him over that but I never could.”
Jury studied her for a while, then rose. “I should be getting back to my digs. What time are we leaving?”
Nell waited for Vernon. He said, “Ten o’clock all right for you?”
“Couldn’t be better.” He turned to Nell. “Thanks for talking to me.” He turned to go and Vernon said, “I’ll see you to the door.”
Outside the flat, Vernon said, “You know what I think?
I think it’d go down much better for Arthur and Roger if they didn’t know Nell had sought me out first. So couldn’t we just say we found her?”
Jury thought for a moment. “Say you found her. I agree with you. Make something up, and tell her what you’re going to say.” Looking at Vernon, he smiled. “You know for someone who spends his time shoving money around, you’re a sensitive chap. But why she wants me along, God only knows.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Vernon smiled.
As if God knew.