Melrose nodded. “Now, of course, I’m sorry I didn’t listen more closely.”
“Hindsight. Even so, we’ve learned a fair amount about how things were and are with members of the Ryder family, that the jockey didn’t get along with them, especially with his father; that Arthur had borne with him to the limits of his ability, probably because his son’s one virtue was that Dan Ryder could ride a horse into hell and both come back unsinged.”
Melrose noticed again the sheet drawn up to Jury’s neck and his look of supreme self-satisfaction. On his bedside table, occupying a position beneath The Daughter of Time, lay a report sent to him by Cambridgeshire police.
Jury reached for it. “Aqueduct’s stall was down at the far end. The girl was with him. It was dark, the only illumination coming from dim lights at either end. She may or may not have seen whoever was there. But that doesn’t make any difference if he thought she saw him. Arthur Ryder told you the stall was always locked, that Davison did that last thing before he left?”
“That’s right.”
“And the lock wasn’t forced, so the person must have had a key. Either that or someone left the door unlocked.”
“You mean someone in the family?”
“Or in the employ of the family.”
Melrose didn’t like to think this. “I think that’s an assumption.”
“Maybe, but I’m holed up here. I can only go by what I’m told.”
There was that self-satisfied little smile again. Jury was now staring placidly at the ceiling. Wiggins, more and more. “How he got to the house is anybody’s guess. Could have walked, could have been dropped off-which would mean more than one person was involved in all this…”
“If he got there that way, he could have retraced his steps with the girl, probably a gun at her head-”
“He was either prevented from doing that or he took the course of action he’d planned all along: get the girl, get the horse. And don’t forget, Nell Ryder was-is-supposed to be an excellent horsewoman.”
“But none of this explains her twenty-month absence.”
Jury was looking at the police report. “It would if she’s dead, and she probably is.”
Melrose’s heart gave a lurch. He didn’t want to hear that from Jury; Jury was too often right. But then he hadn’t actually talked to these people, except for Dr. Ryder.
“The one I haven’t heard anything much about is Maurice.” As if awakening to the question, he asked, “Why is that?”
“You’re right; there’s been little if anything said of him. I don’t know why. The boy’s name rarely comes up. I think his grandfather is very fond of him. I spoke to him-Maurice-the night the woman was found on the track.”
“His mother left him cold and his father’s dead-that strikes me as warranting a mention. And where is the mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did she walk out on him-the boy, not the husband? Dan Ryder was a gambler, a womanizer, no kind of father and irresponsible-except when it came to racing and horses. Where’s your horse, incidentally?”
“At Ryder’s. I have to do another Cambridgeshire run. That’ll be the third one in twenty-four hours.”
“Good. This time take this boy Maurice aside and see what he has to say about all of this. See if you can get him talking about his father and mother. And does he know anything about his father’s second wife?”
“That I doubt. No one seems to have a clue about her.” Melrose was looking from bed to door. “Where’s Hannibal? I’ve been here for nearly a half hour and haven’t seen her.”
“Ah! I’ve a new nurse, or at least part of one. Her name’s Chrissie. Then there’s another one who relieves her occasionally.”
“A new nurse! Is she prettier than Hannibal?”
“Even you’re prettier than Hannibal. But Chrissie, oh, yes, very pretty. It’s rather nice, this. Having your food brought and your bed changed and all you have to do is sit and look, and give this a punch”-he held up the buzzer positioned beside him-“if you want anything. I could get quite used to it, living like you.”
“Like me? And where do you get that idea?”
Jury laughed. “Food prepared, linens changed. And don’t deny you have those bellpulls all over the house. Pull it and Ruthven comes on the double.” He held up the buzzer by way of analogy.
“It’s not the same at all.”
Jury settled back against his pillows again. “It is, too. Except for the horse.”
TWENTY-THREE
Maurice Ryder liked to talk about one thing-Thoroughbred horses-which made Melrose wonder what blew back in the wind of his riding. Melrose had declined the offer to race Aggrieved-now peacefully chomping some vegetation unearthed beneath a springy layer of frost and ice (grass? acorns? truffles?)-after Maurice had ridden him around the track to give Melrose an idea of what the horse could do. Aggrieved could do considerably more than Melrose could do, that was certain. He had never seen Aggrieved on the racecourse, but he wouldn’t want to see himself up on an animal that could even come close to Samarkand. How must he have raced as a two- or three-year-old, then? Racing past the stands he would have been a copper blur.
Maurice had taken Samarkand twice around the track and was going by again at full tilt, lifting the collar of Melrose’s coat where he leaned against the post and rail fence. This horse was fast. Melrose was in charge of the stopwatch, which he thought was a lot of fun and promised himself he’d buy one as soon as he could. Samarkand had gone a mile at 1:44:36. (“Pretty good,” said Maurice.) Melrose didn’t know; he just like pressing the stopwatch button. It was more fun even than Jury’s buzzer. Maurice had told him that he wouldn’t take Aggrieved to the top of his form because he hadn’t been really put through his paces for a while.
Melrose raised his binoculars once again looking to the far side and thought how wedded, how welded, really, horse and rider appeared. The boy was meant for this, thought Melrose. The racing gene must have come down from his father; what a misfortune the height gene hadn’t followed suit. At sixteen Maurice was but a shade under six feet and was possibly looking at even another growth spurt. It was Dan Ryder who had this rogue gene for the rest of the Ryders were tall.
“It’s not the height so much as the weight,” Maurice had told him. “Jockeys eat what would be a starvation diet for me; I wouldn’t even be able to get up on a horse, much less ride one. You’d be surprised the energy it takes.”
“If not a jockey, what? Do you want to be a trainer?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll inherit this place, won’t you? You can do whatever you like. You and your cousin, Nell-”
Couldn’t he have been a little more skillful? It was clear that this topic wasn’t merely sore; it was bleeding. He wished Jury was here. He handled such questions with a deftness Melrose couldn’t duplicate.
For a minute Maurice hadn’t answered, just flaked the thin ice from the root of the tree where they stood. “If she ever comes back.”
The boy hadn’t commented further. But it would certainly not be intrusive or suspicious to bring up the woman who’d been shot. Melrose had, after all, been a virtual witness to murder. Naturally, he’d be curious.
After Maurice dismounted and tossed a blanket over Samarkand, who strolled over to where Aggrieved was still bent on his hapless quest for food, Maurice leaned against the fence beside Melrose.
“That was a bizarre business the other night. No one knows yet who she is.” Since Vernon Rice would undoubtedly tell Arthur Ryder about the trip to Cambridge police headquarters, Melrose filled Maurice in on what had happened there.
“You knew her?”
“No, I didn’t know her. I’d merely seen her once in the pub near the hospital. A friend of mine is-well, never mind.” He’d better not bring that friendship up for the moment. “I just happened to be sitting near her when she was talking to someone.”
Maurice looked away, frowning. Melrose wondered if he’d
been a total chump bringing this up. He’d better have left it to come out in another way. “Didn’t your father send you a photo? A snapshot of his new wife?”
“No, nothing.” His look at Melrose now, although not outright antagonistic, was still not outright friendly. “Are you saying that’s who she was?”
“I have no idea who the woman was. It struck me that it’s a possibility. If you think about it, you’d wonder how anyone without any connection to the Ryder farm would end up shot dead on your track.”
Maurice was silent, gathering twigs as if he meant to break the place up inch by inch. “Say it was her-Dad’s wife-why would she come back here now?”
“Money. That’s generally a safe bet.”
Maurice frowned. “From Ryder Stud? From Granddad? Why would she expect any?”
“I don’t know. There might be some unfinished legal business. His will, perhaps; something like that.”
“But Dad died over two years ago. Why wouldn’t she have come then?”
“That’s a good question. Perhaps it’s something she only recently found out about.” Melrose paused. “Your mother. Where is she now?”
A pall seemed to settle over them, Maurice lifting his face toward the blank white sky. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t keep in touch?”
“No.”
Maurice executed in the single syllable an intensely complicated move, something such as his father must have done in threading his horse through the thicket of competing horses, taking it to the finish line. “Your father got custody?”
Maurice’s voice was strangely lacking in expression when he said, “I don’t think there was a big battle between them over it.”
It was a sad pronouncement. “But I imagine you’d much rather be here than anywhere else.”
The boy nodded and snapped a twig as if it were an icicle. “Things change.”
With that rather inscrutable comment, they got up and went to their horses.
They got Aggrieved-a patient animal, considering what it did for a living-into the trailer, and Melrose said good-bye to Arthur Ryder and Maurice, saying he would surely see them again shortly.
Of that, he was certain.
TWENTY-FOUR
Mr. Momaday would keep Aggrieved’s stall mucked out, and the rest of the small barn which he had managed to lather into excellent condition, making minor repairs to doors and posts. He had done as Melrose had instructed-he had gone to a saddlery in Sidbury for supplies. The hay net was up, the salt lick affixed to the wall, maize and bran and roots and fruits sitting about in tubs.
Melrose told Momaday that he would do morning stables and he, Melrose, would do evening. He wasn’t absolutely clear as to what that involved; he just liked the sound of “evening stables.” He pictured it as a Stubbs painting, or else one of the Romantics’ featuring a thatched-roof cottage and a lot of heavily leafed trees.
Momaday instructed Melrose that it was only the one horse, so “stables”-plural-wasn’t it.
“You want to call it ‘evening stable’? Think about that. Does it sound quite right? I prefer the plural and it’s my stables, so don’t argue. Furthermore, Momaday, you cannot go around here with your gun shooting at anything that moves.”
Momaday’s insubordinate mumbles were somewhat mitigated by the fact he’d never killed anything.
Ruthven and Martha were by turns hugely impressed and hugely perplexed by the horse’s presence, the presence being quite imposing. Aggrieved was a handsome horse, with his glowing reddish-brown coat and black mane. Martha made tiny clucks and cooing sounds as she would have done had Melrose brought round a bird or a baby. Ruthven went on about the color, Momaday saying the horse was chestnut, Ruthven saying he knew a bay when he saw one, Melrose not knowing the difference. Ruthven went on to inform the little group, stiff as the starched collar he wore, that Melrose had been an excellent horseman in his younger days.
“Younger days?”
“When you were five or six, m’lord.”
“My God, Ruthven, I wouldn’t even have fit on this horse then.”
“I’m thinking of your old pony.”
“Ruthven, somehow I don’t think ‘excellent horseman’ is an accurate description of a kid on a pony.”
Momaday thought this was rich and juggled laughter around, largely through indrawn snorts and said, “Prob’ly fell off that, too.” Snort, snort.
“What? Too? Where do you get ‘too’?”
“Ah, ya remember that big gray over to your friend’s house? Climbed up one side and fell right over t’other.” A succession of snorty breaths accompanied this nugget.
Melrose had, at the time when this happened, thought it a good joke; Momaday thought it a better one and told everyone who crossed his path about it. No matter how self-deprecating Melrose could be, Momaday could deprecate him even more. Momaday intuited that his boss would never fire him, and he was right. Melrose had never fired anyone. He had wanted to, he had tried to. But an image of the ex-servant and present wretch filled his field of vision, calling up a picture of this poor devil fighting his way through snowdrifts with nothing but a dry loaf to nibble on before complete snow blindness felled him where he stood. This person would have a faithful dog struggling beside him and when the old ex-retainer froze the dog would sit atop the snowy grave until it, too, froze. It was like that.
Melrose thanked his staff (for what, he wasn’t sure) and told Momaday to lead Aggrieved (whose patience was monumental) to his stall. As they walked away, he heard the undertones of man talking to horse, with a lot of snorty laughter, possibly on both sides.
He waited for Momaday to leave the barn and go about whatever his business was. Melrose was eager to saddle up his horse and walk it around. He realized he was giving Aggrieved short shrift, a horse that the trainer Davison had said could beat “anything on any track-slow or fast, turf, muddy, dry.” “Determined” is what Davison had called Aggrieved. “Determined.”
The horse was chomping away, his nose near the hay net. Melrose wondered about all the other stuff, the succulents and barley and so forth. He wondered how they were to be fed. He picked a nice apple from a bucket and tentatively held it. He was still trying to remember about looking at a horse straight on. He moved to the horse’s side and held the apple out, nearly under Aggrieved’s nose. The horse muzzled it up and chomped. Really, he was so easy-going in the benign setting of this stable that it was hard to picture him in the competitive world of racing.
Melrose looked about to see if Momaday was lurking, then took out his book Riding for Beginners. The “beginner” didn’t bother him; it was the cartoon figure of a very young girl, in jodhpurs and riding jacket, with her sappy smile, who was to put him through his paces. My Lord, were there no adult beginners? Did all beginning occur around age seven? By the time this child got to be his age she’d have won the Olympic Gold for dressage twice over. Her name was Cindy Lou. She was from Kentucky (naturally). But he supposed riding was the same, here or in the States.
Cindy Lou showed him how to get the bit in a horse’s mouth, and having done that successfully, Melrose led Aggrieved out of his stall so that he could saddle up. Ah, he liked the ring of it! “Saddle up.” It put him in mind of old American Westerns, which he had, actually, never seen. But one still knew the drill and the climate and the tone. Of course, he had seen High Noon, but that was much more than just a Western. As he was fastening the strap beneath the horse to secure the saddle, he replaced the image of Cindy Lou with Gary Cooper. He would like to adopt Gary Cooper’s elegant insouciance, his shy forbearance, to wit, his persona. That, of course, could only come with practice.
Melrose looked outside again to make certain no one was about, that Ruthven, for instance, wouldn’t come rushing up with a pot of tea and a carrot. Then he positioned a large wooden box by the horse’s side. Left foot in stirrup; hoist and swing right leg over. Those were the instructions from wall-eyed Cindy Lou, who, he was sure, could get to be a pain. O
kay, he was ready: one two three hoist and there he was sitting in the saddle! Actually up on one of the country’s premier racehorses and sitting! Oh why hadn’t they all been here to see this smooth-as-silk move?
Melrose shook the reins a little and they were out of the barn and walking through the grounds, which were extensive. Next, through the woods, by way of the public footpath. Aggrieved walked and Melrose swayed. The horse, he thought, was taking in the sun-dappled scenery, for his head moved up, down and around.
A narrow road ran between Ardry End and Watermeadows, a vast Italianate estate, gorgeously decayed, where lived the charming Flora Fludd. He would have a good reason to wind up over there at Watermeadows, now he could ride. Melrose gently pulled back on the reins, amazed again that the horse responded to his fingers. He considered a canter along this narrow road. He thumbed the book to see what the annoying Cindy Lou had to say. She warned against such a move, her palm held flat out like a white mollusk. It would be undertaking too much too soon. She advised at most a short trot and reminded him that one must fix one’s seat in the saddle and rise, fall, rise, fall to the rhythm of the horse.
Melrose tried to do all of this as Aggrieved trotted along, sure he was going up when he should be going down. Finally, he thought he had the hang of it. They trotted on for some twenty minutes and came to the main Northampton Road, which he had no intention of riding on, then turned back toward the house and the stable, outside of which he meant to slide off the horse’s back smooth as silk, but in pulling his left foot from the stirrup, caught it and fell to the ground.
Hell’s bells! There they all were, watching, especially Momaday. Ruthven walked toward him.
“You’re all right, m’lord?” he asked as Melrose righted himself.
The Grave Maurice Page 14
