The Grave Maurice

They buried her next to Maurice in a small churchyard a mile from the stud farm. Very few people attended beyond the family—George Davison, Neil Epp and several stable lads.

The funeral took place five days after Maurice’s and a week after Nell died, the delay caused by the autopsy required in the case of a violent death, or an unexplained death or a death by misadventure. Nell’s had certainly been by misadventure. Jury couldn’t abide the thought of the Ryder family having to wait longer than that, as if they would for days be staring down into an unfilled grave, existing in that limbo of grief that has no end in sight. The end of grief would always be out of sight, but at least the ritual would help to confine it.

The problem was that the police pathologist simply had too much on his plate to do the postmortem immediately. Jury asked Barry Greene if he could possibly allow him to bring in someone he knew from the MPD and Greene got that permission for him.

When Jury rang Dr. Nancy and explained the problem, he said, “Listen, I know it’s what you hear once a day—it’s too hard on the deceased’s relations to have to wait . . .”

“You’re right there, except I hear it twice a day.” She paused. Then she said, “With good cause.” She paused again. “I can be there tomorrow afternoon, say around four. Okay?”

Dr. Nancy arrived exactly when she said she would—four p.m. the next day. Phyllis Nancy was legendary for (among other things, such as her fiery hair) her promptness, a quality hard to find in the Met, simply because time couldn’t be dealt out the way it could in other walks of life. If Dr. Nancy said four, she was there by four. In the field of police work, understandably chaotic, she offered a sense of respite, even of sanctuary. She had once told Jury that years before she had shown up an hour late at a crime scene. The detective in charge had told her, when she was apologizing, “Hell, that’s all right, Doc. The dead can wait.” She had told him, “How would you know?”

They gathered—Jury, Barry Greene and Phyllis Nancy—in the cool room with its permanent smell of blood that couldn’t be washed or mopped away, where a mortician stood over the plastic-sheeted body of Nell Ryder. Wearing a lab coat and a plastic apron, Dr. Nancy looked down and shook her head. “Poor child. What a dreadful waste.” Then she turned on the recording device supplied her into which she would speak her findings.

DCI Greene stayed; Jury left. He had observed a number of postmortems before, but they couldn’t have paid or promised him enough to stay and watch this one. He waited outside in the silent corridor. It was less than an hour later when Phyllis Nancy called him back. Barry Greene smiled ruefully and looked a bit bilious and left. Dr. Nancy told Jury she’d found nothing that would come as a surprise. One bullet had entered the abdomen, gone through the liver, ricocheted off the pelvic bone, gone through the stomach, hit a vertebra and lodged in an abdominal muscle. The course of the second bullet was less complicated; it had entered the chest wall, gone through the lung, nicked the esophagus and gone out the back.

“I’m sorry, Richard.” She seemed to think a greater show of concern was necessary and went on. “The trajectory was upward. The girl was on a horse, you said, and moving, which might account for the erratic path of the bullet. Was the horse running, or something?”

Phyllis Nancy frowned. “I wouldn’t think a movement to the side—you know, as happens when one dismounts—would account for the path of the shot.”

Taking off her apron, much like any woman who’d finished up in the kitchen, she said, “Where’s this pub you’re buying me? I’d like to hear the half of it.”

They had watched the coffin lowered into the ground beneath a sky that should have looked like lead, heavy enough to fall and kill; instead it was a piercing, traitorous blue. When the short service was over, people dispersed, wandered off in different directions to their cars.

Wiggins said he’d wait in the car for him, then changed his mind and decided to go in for the cup of tea Arthur Ryder had insisted he have. Jury saw Vernon Rice head in the direction of the meadow, probably to oversee the mares.

There had been a plea bargain. Crime passionale had been put forth briefly by the defense and just as briefly considered. Second-degree murder had been found to be slightly more acceptable, and it had in this case carried a twenty-year price tag. It was a gift, considering the shooting of Simone Ryder had been a perfectly cold-blooded and planned—however briefly—murder.

Jury smiled slightly. They had moved down the line to Criminal Type’s stall. Jury wondered if the horses, in Danny’s line of work, provided a comfort. “What route are you going to go, short of that?”

Since the insurance firm hadn’t had to pay out the whopping sum, he hadn’t been charged with fraud. “What with me being alive, and all.” Danny’s solicitor had come up with a partial amnesia (“First time I ever heard that one”) and the firm was perfectly happy to let it lie.

He said to Jury, “What in hell Simone was visiting Dad for, I can’t imagine. But that’s where she was going when she left the pub, to hire a car and go to Cambridgeshire, and she hoped she could find the stud farm. There were so many, weren’t there? So Sara said she wouldn’t mind seeing Arthur Ryder, too. It had been so long. And she knew where the place was.”

“Sorry about that, but yes.” He looked sheepish. “There’s an old road, just before you get to the main drive, and strangers sometimes think it is, then find it dead-ends on the field not far from the training track.”

“Well, she couldn’t do it in the Grave Maurice, could she? Anyway, I expect she shot her on the track out of pure malice. Malice, I mean, toward the Ryders. They snubbed her, she claimed. Sara is extremely sensitive to that sort of thing. In other words, she’s completely paranoid. And she thought it was a message to me—you know, since I died at the Auteuil racetrack.”

“Could be. Except she wasn’t known for her family feeling. There were times I thought she forgot I wasn’t dead.” Danny turned to Jury and looked him squarely, if sadly, in the eye. “Nell dies and I’m by way of being resurrected. Not much of a swap, is it?”

Danny sighed. “I’ll go in and see Dad and Rog. They’ve had their share of shocks in the last two weeks, I’d say.” He paused. “You asked me what I planned to do next. Well, I mean to get back into racing if I can convince the Board and the Jockey Club I’ve just come out of a two-year-long coma. Maybe I can borrow the ‘partial amnesia’ defense. The last two years haven’t been happy ones. Except for the time I was in the States.” He smiled. “I couldn’t hang around Paris very easily and didn’t much care to go to Dubai. But I’d always wanted to go to Kentucky, Florida—the Derby, the Preakness—the Triple Crown. I love racing over there.” The smile evaporated.

Danny looked off across the courtyard and up into the impossibly endless blue sky and shook his head. He brought two fingers to his forehead in a small salute. Then he left.

Maurice. That his death was completely accidental Jury believed less and less, especially after Barry Greene brought in Trevor Gwyne. Jury had thought the jockey would have had enough of a fright to go to ground after Roy Diamond had been gathered up by Cambridge police. But apparently, Greene found him in his London house sitting down to a meal.

Trevor Gwyne, who had either more sense than most or none at all, decided that cooperation would get him further than proclaiming his innocence. This surprised Jury, as the only people who could testify to his guilt were Roy Diamond and Valerie Hobbs and it wasn’t bloody likely they’d be saying anything soon. So it must have been owing to the persuasive powers of Barry Greene that Trevor saw the light. A deal could probably be struck (“Trev”), Barry had said, with the prosecution if Trev helped them out with Roy Diamond.

“Because what I think, Trev,” said Greene, in the softest voice, “I think that the defense could show how Roy Diamond manipulated you because he was holding something over your head. He wasn’t paying you to do this; he blackmailed you into abducting Nell Ryder.”

“I mean, Roy told me he wanted to talk to her. Nothing else. He said to spray this stuff in her eyes so she wouldn’t see me. She was too surprised even to fight it. Well, she’d just woke up, hadn’t she? I expect I gave her a bit of a fright.”

To say the least. Jury pushed himself away from the wall. All he wanted to do was give this plonker a couple of whacks up the side of the head. But he didn’t. He was here at Greene’s pleasure. And Barry was good, very good.

Barry Greene gave Trevor a sour smile. “Do we have to abduct everyone we just ‘want to talk to’?” No answer. “You’re a jump jockey, aren’t you, Trev?”

Trevor nodded. “You talking about those walls that went across the fields? For me, they weren’t all that bad. I’ve seen worse at Cheltenham. But with that horse, that Aqueduct, those walls were nothing. It was that easy, it really was. He’s one hell of a horse.”

Trevor shrugged. “Don’t know, guv. But I’ll tell you what I think: it’s that Roy Diamond had something on her, just like he had on me. That’s how he works. I tol’ you.” Here Trevor’s hand crept toward Greene’s pack of Marlboros. Greene told him, sure, go ahead. Then he glanced over at Jury, raising his eyebrows in an invitation to ask questions.

Trevor flushed with something Jury imagined was shame—as well he might. But for all of the man’s bad judgment, weakness, selfishness or whatever, that rush of blood to his face set him apart from Roy Diamond. Jury said to him, “Afraid you’ll have to think it, Trevor, hate to or not. I’m almost certain Maurice’s being the delivery boy, in a manner of speaking, had a lot to do with his death. It certainly had everything to do with his guilt. He loved Nell Ryder. He’d never have done anything to harm her. There’s only one person he’d have done something like this for—his father.”

Trevor nodded, took another deep drag of his cigarette. “You’re right there. I told the lad it’s his father that wanted to see Nell, but it couldn’t be there, not at his own place.”

“In the snapshot. An American friend of Roy’s sent him a couple dozen snapshots taken at a racecourse in the States. Florida, Hialeah Park it was. Three of them showed Dan standing at the fence, watching.”

Jury sat back. “A picture can be taken anytime.” “Yeah, right, except Danny’d never been to Florida. But that’s not it; the picture’s dated clear as a pane of glass.”

Trevor seemed by now to have forgotten the fix he was in and was enjoying educating these two cloth-eared coppers in the ways of the racing world. “A walkover is a one-horse race. It only happens when a horse is considered unbeatable by the trainers, so no other horses compete.” Trevor smiled broadly. “Now, how often do you bug—I mean, you police detectives—”

“—think that happens? Not bloody often, I can tell you. But it did a little less than two years ago at Hialeah, with a horse called Affirmation. Probably wanted to make the punters think of Affirmed, and I guess it did. It must have been something to see.” Trevor’s eyes actually filmed over. “A real thrill, that would be. Better than a flying finish. To see a horse that good go round the track by itself with all of that crowd cheering. Anyway, that was the race. First walkover I heard of since Spectacular Bid, back in the eighties. That’s what dated the snapshot; that race was run three months after Danny was supposed to have died.”

“What’s to do that would work to Roy’s benefit? Report it to you lot? Sooner tell it to me old gran. No, he had a bargaining point in those pictures.”

“Two of them. Roy wouldn’t let all three out of his hands. It was just a few days before I took the girl. Early morning, Maurice is at the training track; he always had a gallop after dawn, Roy said. I showed up, watched for a while through my binoculars. He was up on that great horse Samarkand. I wish I’d been around to ride him a decade ago. When Maurice stopped and dismounted and came over to the fence, I told him his father needed to see Nell. Of course, he didn’t believe me, thought I was bonkers. He got pretty mad until I showed him the snapshots.”

“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 . . . ?”

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.

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.”

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.