The Grave Maurice

by Martha Grimes

  Black-haired and black-coated, the woman lying on her side looked as if she’d been thrown down, a rider thrown from her horse. Nell squatted down and took out the penlight she always carried. Its light accentuated the woman’s porcelain skin, so perfect that it reminded Nell of pictures she’d seen of geisha-flawless faces covered with white powder. On her left hand was a gold wedding band; her hands were too soft, her nails too manicured to belong to a woman who spent much time around horses.

  Nell could assimilate these details not because she was unmindful of the woman’s death itself, but because noticing details had been much of what kept her alive for the past two years and eventually permitted her to escape. She had developed a lot of the objectivity and emotional insularity of a detective or reporter. She stood, heart thudding, wanting to get up on Aqueduct and gallop away.

  She didn’t know much about fixing the time of death, little about rigor mortis, but she did know it came and then passed. This woman seemed completely relaxed, so that could mean she was killed either very recently or some hours before. Killed how? Nell ran the small light over the form and saw nothing. Had she been stabbed? Shot? Strangled? And it had to have been in the last eight hours because there was invariably someone at the track at five or six o’clock, Maurice or an exercise boy, someone. Probably she had died in the early-morning darkness. Nell looked at apt Aqueduct. “I should tell them. I should do something.” The horse’s head appeared to nod. “I can’t go to the farm, Duck.” She looked away. Then she looked down. Expressionless, the face of the woman whom she didn’t know was still beautiful.

  Who was she?

  In the time she’d been gone and after they had given up on her, anything could have happened. Her father might even have married again, needing someone, not to take her place, but to fill a lack. But that hardly explained this. Again she felt that urge to go to the house… No. It would all be too difficult, too painful for them to understand. A tear rolled down her face as she went on looking at the woman lying at her feet. She brushed it off.

  A call box. There was one a little down the road from there, and the road itself wasn’t far. “Come on then, Duck.”

  She saw the call box and clicked her tongue, moving the horse along at a canter. No cars, no houses along here, and she was grateful for that. She pulled Aqueduct onto the grassy verge and jumped down. She opened the glasspaneled door and slipped in, wondering if one had to have coins even to call emergency. No, thank God. When she heard the voice of the policewoman, Nell told her in a rush about the dead woman and her location. Questions tumbled from the policewoman’s lips, and in the midst of them, Nell apologized and hung up. Cambridgeshire police could certainly find the body.

  Fifteen minutes later, as Aqueduct jumped the lowest of Hadrian’s walls, she heard the sirens; looking over her shoulder, she thought she saw the turning blue lights, eerie through the predawn mist, turning on the top of the police car. Aqueduct’s breath steamed in the cold damp air as Nell tossed the bag of feed over his back and tied the hay to the saddle again. She figured she’d have five minutes to get into the covering line of trees.

  She could hear nothing now, not at this distance. None of it-the dead woman, the call box, the ghostly blue lights-none of it seemed to have any relation to her.

  The police would be wondering who had made the call, but she had nothing to tell them, no idea of who the woman was. Yet the woman made her uncomfortable for some reason, tugged at her memory as if some deep spot in her mind had been disturbed. But by what? It had something to do with her family-her dad, her granddad, Maurice, Vernon.

  This tug at memory made Nell wonder about the horses. Did they “remember” in the way of human remembrance? Or did they live only in the moment? But such thoughts only dragged her back to the mares she hadn’t saved. Not that she ever really thought she could save them all… Or had she? She tried to work out some other way of getting them away from the farm.

  Despite her disappointment in herself, she applauded herself on one score: acting. She must really have been hellishly convincing to get them to let her help with the mares. She laid her forearm across her eyes, thinking of them lined up in those narrow stalls. It’s almost worse, she thought, than if I’d done nothing. That thought made her feel like both a traitor and a coward. Had she thought she could save them all?

  EIGHTEEN

  Two unmarked police vehicles were angled in the courtyard when Melrose arrived in his Bentley the following morning. He assumed they were police from the light sitting atop one of the cars. He also thought the two men might be plainclothes detectives.

  The civilian standing there talking to them clearly needed a coat (for it was beastly cold this morning). He was probably in his late sixties or early seventies, and Melrose supposed he was Arthur Ryder, with whom he had an appointment. Ryder stood with his arms crossed, hands in his armpits, warming them, and looking down at the ground.

  Since police detectives don’t usually turn up for no good reason, something dire had happened; Melrose then saw what the something dire was: men carrying a stretcher out of a wooded area, then around the corner of the barn and heading for an ambulance he hadn’t noticed because it was parked on the other side of the house and had just now backed up a few feet.

  Had Jury been strangely prescient about all of this? Melrose thought he should, in the circumstances, be politely unobtrusive and come back at a later date. Ha! The hell with that idea…

  So he leaned against his car and lit a cigarette and waited. The detectives turned their heads and seemed to search his person with their eyes. It was then that Ryder looked up, a man sparing himself whatever lay before him as long as he possibly could. Finally, he shook the detectives’ hands and nodded, then walked across the horse yard to Melrose.

  “Mr. Plant? I’m Arthur Ryder.” For such a big man his voice was surprisingly soft.

  Melrose took the hand he offered and said, “Mr. Ryder.”

  “Look,” said Ryder, “I should have called you to postpone our meeting. We’ve had a bit of trouble here.”

  When there was no hint of Arthur Ryder’s elaborating on “a bit,” Melrose said, “I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too serious.” Which it clearly was, given the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance.

  “About as serious as things get, I think. There’s this woman who was murdered.”

  Melrose had already concluded that. “Good Lord. I hope it wasn’t a member of your own family.”

  “No. A stranger. Never saw her before in my life.”

  “Good Lord,” Melrose said again. “Well, then, I expect you’d rather not talk business-?”

  “No, that’s all right. Wait here until I finish with these policemen. They’re calling in police from the city. Cambridge, I mean. Apparently, it’s better handled by them.”

  Looking toward the horse stalls, Melrose said, “Would it be all right if I had a look at your horses?”

  “Go on. I’ll meet you there in a minute.”

  The ambulance pulled away. Melrose watched it down the long white-fenced drive. This certainly put another spin on the whole Ryder Stud Farm question. Melrose looked toward the place from which he’d seen the men carrying the stretcher through the trees and made out, in the distance, what might have been yellow crime-scene tape lifted slightly in the wind. He was sorely tempted to walk there, but thought it would appear too intrusive. Instead, he went off to the stalls.

  He approached the first horse box trying to recall if the book had said you should or should not look a horse directly in the eye. Here he was, some people’s idea of a country squire, and he didn’t know the first thing about the country.

  A small bronze sign on the stall door read SAMARKAND. The horse was a handsome specimen, not precisely light gray, very pale. Dawn, that was it, or twilight. The horse was busy chewing. Not busy, perhaps, for he was chewing too slowly for that, but he seemed to be more interested in Melrose-

  (Novice.)

  – than he was in food.
Melrose-

  (Toff.)

  – always seemed to excite no more than a soigné attitude in animals, a sort of “And you’re here because…?” response. He had often seen their shoulders (if they had any) move in what he would swear was a shrug. The next horse was glossy and as black as soot.

  “Wonderful horse,” said a voice behind Melrose.

  Arthur Ryder had come up behind him and was running his hand down the black muzzle. “Criminal Type. He’s twelve now, but he can still outrun most of them. Brilliant horse. One of my son’s favorites. He was a jockey.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen him race.” Whoa! That might lead him into troubled waters. It did.

  “Where?”

  Melrose appeared to be recollecting, his mind flowing with all the races over the years he’d seen with Dan Ryder on a horse. “Well, there was-”

  “Cheltenham Gold Cup? That was a great race, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. Your son was a great jockey.”

  Arthur Ryder had pulled something from his back pocket and then stuffed it back into the pocket again. It was a bit of wood. He said, “Look, I’m feeling too disoriented to talk business at the moment. Come on into the house. What I need is a stiff drink.”

  Melrose hesitated. “I can come back, Mr. Ryder-”

  But Arthur shook his head. “Not at all, not at all. Maybe a stranger’s the best sort of person to have around at a time like this. There’s no one here right now but me.”

  Melrose followed him into the rambling white house.

  They sat in Arthur’s office, a room overflowing with magazines, books, newspapers; a desk strewn with papers, ledgers bound in leather and other paraphernalia of record keeping. It was the sort of room one felt comfortable walking into, even more comfortable (despite the circumstances) having a drink in the morning with the person whose room it was.

  Arthur Ryder was turning his glass back and forth in both hands. “Obviously, I’m glad it isn’t anyone I know. Poor woman. But I’m completely mystified. My training track, for God’s sake!”

  “What did the police say?”

  “The same thing. They think it must be someone who doesn’t wish me well.” His tone had an edge to it.

  Melrose did not want to sound like the police. He was uncertain what pose to strike. “Is that feasible?”

  “A bit far-fetched, but yes. You know the thing is it’s not as if she were my own family yet… I feel a curious responsibility for her. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  Melrose nodded and sipped his whiskey and wondered. The question was rhetorical, anyway.

  The telephone interrupted them.

  “Excuse me.” Arthur went to his desk, snatched up the phone. “Vernon! Have you heard about… yes. Yes.”

  As Arthur went about explaining to the caller what had happened, Melrose moved to a wall, its length divided by a wooden molding. Above the molding, covering the wall, were small and large photographs and snapshots, all of them of horses, some with jockeys on them. He had looked at a multitude of horses in various books. Matching up the remembered ones to these pictures was a great deal harder than matching up faces. But this one, Samarkand, he knew because of his unusual pale, moonlike shading. He stood perfectly posed in the winner’s circle at some racecourse that Melrose didn’t know. But then he didn’t know any of them, did he? Melrose had had the sense to find a picture of Arthur Ryder’s son from an old newspaper. All of these horses looked terribly famous: the way they stood, the way they looked only tolerably interested in the goings-on, the way they seemed above it all. For they were famous and fame knows only itself. This seemed particularly true in the look of the soot-black horse, Criminal Type.

  “Sorry about that,” said Arthur. “My stepson.”

  Melrose smiled and sat down. He wanted to get Ryder back to the thoughts he was having before the telephone call, but didn’t know how to reintroduce the subject. Instead, he tapped the photograph of horse and jockey: “This is your son, isn’t it?” In silks and that headgear, it was hard to tell one jockey from another.

  Arthur looked and looked away, nodded briefly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah-” Arthur waved the sentiment away, impatient with himself, not with Melrose. He picked up the whiskey decanter. “Have another.” He splashed some more in both glasses.

  Melrose said, “Your son was one of the great jockeys from what I’ve heard. He’s been ranked up there with Piggot and that American, Shoemaker.”

  “He wasn’t as good as either. Has any jockey ever been?” This time Arthur smiled, a brief flash, like light striking water, gone in an instant. He unpinned one of the larger photos and turned it so Melrose could see it. “Grand National, this was, twelve years ago. They broke the record by one and a half seconds. Odd, you never know how long a second can be until you see it in something like this. Danny was only in his thirties when he died. His son? Maurice?” -he said this as if Melrose had known Maurice and possibly forgotten the boy-“always wanted to be a jockey like his father. But then he shot up to five nine a couple of years ago and hasn’t stopped yet. Now he’s sixteen and nearly six feet tall.”

  For a moment Arthur was silent and Melrose did not want to disturb any fragile and ephemeral thought process, causing the images to fly apart like the colored bits in a kaleidoscope. He wanted to keep Ryder’s train of thought intact and hoped the other man wouldn’t suddenly recall why Melrose Plant was there and want to get down to business. Melrose thought probably the murder of this unknown woman had simply turned Ryder’s world temporarily upside down so that practical matters would be for a little while in abeyance.

  Arthur Ryder looked sadly down at his already-empty glass as if finding the contents had fled, along with his dead son, his lost grandchild-

  – whom he had yet to mention.

  Instead, he said, “You pay a heavy price for success, don’t you? Yet that’s the reason you want success in the first place. So you can stop having to pay a heavy price. Ironic. You’d have enough capital, enough reputation that now things can be a bit of a lark. What I had here forty years ago was a small house, this room we’re sitting in part of it, some livestock-cows and pigs-and three horses. I caught the racing bug-well, at least the horse bug-after I went with a friend to Newmarket auction. My God, but weren’t they beautiful, those Thoroughbreds!” He picked another photo from the shelf behind him and handed it to Melrose. “This was the progeny of one of those first horses. Gold Rush was his name. And this was Golden Boy. I almost put him in a claims race, but thank God I didn’t. Some trainer would have claimed him in an eye blink. So little by little I built the place. And that’s the price, see. When Gold Rush won his first race I was beside myself with joy; it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me since my boys were born. Yet the way I felt then has been less and less duplicated by wins worth far higher stakes and with far more fame. Winning becomes everything. You get a taste, you want every dish in the kitchen.”

  “But it has to be that way, doesn’t it, if you want to get to the top or be the best? And to try to do it, that’s admirable. You’re right, of course, that you pay a price. But there’s a price either way.”

  “Hm. Yes, that’s true. Hm.”

  Melrose was going to ask him a direct question about the girl, when Arthur said, “I had a granddaughter-‘have,’ I mean-I catch myself using the past tense, which disturbs me.” He reflected on this.

  Melrose had to prompt him. “What happened to her?” “She vanished.”

  Vanished. It was a word to chill the air between them. It was a word that so evoked light flying into darkness that Melrose felt the loss of this girl was, for Arthur Ryder, a total eclipse.

  “She was taken.”

  That’s how Arthur began his story.

  “She was kidnapped, you could say, though there was never any contact with whoever did it and no ransom demand. Nothing. Ever. Which technically makes it an abduction, according to the police, and further puts it outside the
scope of a long-lasting investigation. Of course, the police looked first at the people who work here, or did at that time. I’ve had to let several people go. It happened at night. Of course detectives checked out everybody who had some connection with the farm here. Whoever took Nell also took Aqueduct. He was one of my most valuable stallions. In terms of breeding, probably the most valuable.”

  The papers hadn’t named the horse, to keep some piece of information out of public view so that the police could ignore false leads. “Then do you think the true object of this theft was the horse?”

  Ryder nodded. “I can’t think of why they’d take Nell if ransom wasn’t a factor. But Aqueduct, there’s an extremely valuable four-year-old, worth at least three million, even more when I sell seasons.”

  “Seasons?”

  Arthur looked at him, a little puzzled. “You know, at stud. I could get as much as a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand for one season, whoever owns the season brings his mare to breed. I don’t like to go over fifty seasons; it’s too hard on the stallion.”

  Melrose (who cursed himself for giving away the fact he didn’t know the meaning of a common practice) totted up the “seasons” figure. Lord. In one year the horse could bring in six or seven million quid. Valuable, you bet.

  “Without Aqueduct, I was in financial trouble. Big trouble. The breeders who were due to put their mares at stud and had paid for the privilege naturally wanted their money back. A few accepted other stallions, but wanted additional seasons to compensate.” He shrugged, as if going on were too depressing. “In the two years’ time, I haven’t recouped.”

  “You’ve thought about the motive’s being someone wanting to put you out of business?”

  He nodded. “I have, yes. The police suggested that. But I honestly couldn’t think who then and can’t now. It’s such a total mystery, the whole thing.”

  “But whoever did it couldn’t himself enter your horse in a race. There are methods of identification-”