The Grave Maurice

by Martha Grimes

  But he wasn’t. “No. Disappointed, angry, sad-those things, but not cynical, which I suppose is another term for jaded.”

  “But you must constantly be dealing with lies, bad faith and betrayal. You must see that all the time.”

  Jury thought about Mickey Haggerty. Then he thought about Gemma Trimm, about Benny and Sparky. He smiled. “Yes, but there are things that counteract that. The good guys are still winning.”

  She was astonished. “How? Why? Because there are more of them?”

  “No. Because they’re good.”

  Smiling, she shook her head. “I don’t quite get that.” She paused to shake snow from a skeletal bush. “You know, you haven’t told me why you came back.”

  He watched her face. “To find out more about Danny Ryder.”

  “But I told you.”

  “No, I don’t think you did.”

  She looked down at the empty pond. Without looking back at him, she said. “I don’t know why you say that. It’s as if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t.”

  She hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

  “When I asked you to tell me what it was about Ryder that attracted you, you left the room. You couldn’t deal with it.”

  She waved an impatient hand at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “We could do it again,” he said, only half joking.

  Sourly, she regarded him.

  “You walked out because you couldn’t bear thinking about him, his physical self. You had an affair with him, didn’t you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “He must have been one hell of a charismatic guy because from the way I heard it in one blink a woman would be all over him. Since I’ve only seen pictures of him, I can’t quite fathom this. He’s good-looking all right, but not handsome enough it would compensate for his size. He was a fairly little guy, five five, and that’s actually tall for a jockey.”

  Sara put her head in her hands. “My God! Such machismo! You, of course, aren’t a ‘little guy,’ and I guess you set the standard.”

  Jury smiled. “Something like that.”

  Her head snapped round. “What conceit.”

  “Uh-huh. But back to Ryder-”

  “You’re so tenacious about this, about my knowing him. Why?” They were standing by a stone bench. She sat down.

  “Because you had more to do with Dan Ryder than you’re admitting to.”

  She sighed. “All right, damn it, but it won’t help you; it isn’t what you think. Call Dan Ryder a secret passion. It’s completely adolescent.” Ruefully, she smiled at Jury.

  He said, “Everyone’s had feelings like that.”

  “When we were thirteen or fourteen, maybe, but not thirty or forty.”

  “Do we ever stop being thirteen or fourteen? Or six or seven, for that matter? I think we carry all of that around with us; we just have more practice in hiding it.”

  “It was an-obsession. For two years, I’d be like one of those rock-star followers, what are they called, those girls?”

  “You mean ‘groupies’?”

  “I’m a racing groupie. Or I was. Whenever I could, I went to Cheltenham or Newmarket or Epsom Downs-that’s the last time I saw him, the Derby. After that he went to France. Wherever he was racing, I’d go. Of course, I couldn’t really see him, not amongst a dozen flying horses and riders. But I knew the colors and the number and name on the blanket. Given the way jockeys ride, their faces are invisible. I had binoculars. And the race itself, I suppose that had something to do with it. There’s something so romantic about it. I could sometimes see him on the telly in the winner’s circle. But in person? I only met him in person twice: once at the farm, the Ryder farm. Vernon Rice took me because I said I was interested in horse syndication.” She looked up at Jury. “Whatever that is; he talked about it at length, but I wasn’t paying attention. But it was certainly a way to get to where Dan was.”

  “So this obsession was fed by nothing on his part?”

  “Fed by nothing.” She looked ashamed.

  Jury thought, as she talked, that she was devolving into an ever-younger persona, versions of herself not at all arch, coy or evasive, and he thought of Carole-anne, who seemed to have kept her entire adolescent self intact. It bloomed and closed again, like the delicate petals of hibiscus furling and unfurling, night into morning. Perhaps he should ask Carole-anne about obsession.

  It was dusk now, bluer and colder. Still talking, Sara rubbed one arm to stave off the chilly air. Jury removed his jacket and put it around her shoulders.

  “Oh. Thank you.” Her smile was utterly genuine, vulnerable.

  “I didn’t mean to stop you talking.” He sat beside her.

  “I’m glad you did. You’re very good at this, you know.”

  He laughed. “At what?”

  “This. Getting people to talk. For a while there I wasn’t even aware of you; I was just talking to myself. I guess I wanted to talk about Danny.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “It’s hard to put it in words.” She looked at her feet, turning the ankles in and out in a way children had of doing. She sighed and shrugged. “That’s the sum of my experience with Dan Ryder.”

  “But when you heard he died, it must have been awful for you.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  She brought her hand up to her forehead and he thought she might be going to cry, but she didn’t. She just said it again, “Oh, yes.”

  It was nearly dark, that purple no-man’s-land before nightfall. “Let’s go in,” said Jury.

  As she had done before, she rose and held out her hand to him. He liked it; it was as if someone were wanting, for a change, to care for him, and he took advantage of it. With the hand she’d reached out, he pulled her toward him very quickly and kissed her quite hard. It happened in only a few seconds.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling at him. “Let’s continue this discussion inside. And why are you laughing?”

  Jury said, “I’m on sick leave; I’m supposed to relax.”

  “So? We’ll relax.”

  Once inside, she led him into the kitchen, also large, also cold. She opened a cupboard and reached in and brought out a bottle of red wine with a label that looked as if it had been picked at over decades.

  “Special occasion. Puligny-Montrachet. One of the absolute best years. Quite old, quite rare, and very relaxing.”

  “I’m depending on it.”

  With the wine held above her waist, she pressed up against him and kissed him lightly. “And if wine doesn’t do it, there’s always-” She laughed. “You know.”

  “Oh, I’m definitely depending on you know.”

  They climbed the back stairs leading from the kitchen to the first-floor bedrooms. She was holding his hand again.

  The bedroom that she led him into, obviously hers, had high windows that gave onto that part of the garden in which they had been sitting. Jury looked down at the bench and felt he was looking at some distant self, the one he had brought here, the one that would not be going back with him. You don’t need this, mate, he told himself. You really don’t. This woman is trapped in a dream and she’s not going to wake up because you’re so bloody wonderful. You know something’s wrong-

  Fuck off, friend.

  He tasted the wine. Delicious. But it could have been plonk and he’d still think it was delicious.

  Sara rested her head against his chest, and he ran his hand over her hair and smiled. Yep. Definitely taffy colored. Pulling away, he set down his glass, and she pulled him back and started unbuttoning his shirt. He reached his arms around her waist and unzipped the skirt, which fell to the floor in a black puddle. There was so little effort required in undressing. It was as if the clothes were so lightweight, so transparent, they blew off.

  In bed, with his mouth slightly opened, barely touching hers, he asked, “Is this better than a dream? What do you think?”

  And back she murmured, “It is a dream.”r />
  He looked off at the cold windows. A dream within a dream. He did not think he liked that.

  She said, “I just can’t seem to help it.”

  Jury rolled over, grabbed her. “That’s what they all say.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  She had wanted him to stay the night, but he had not, making the excuse that he really needed to return to London. He had promised Nell Ryder. She had argued, but not vehemently, that it wasn’t after all his case.

  “I think I made it mine.”

  “You’re supposed to be taking things easy. That’s what you said.”

  He laughed. “You call what we’ve been doing ‘taking things easy’?”

  So once again he was on the train, now its familiarity soothing. He wanted to sleep, not so much because he was tired but because he’d rather sleep than think. There were too many insensate moments in life not to be grateful for pure sensation and the last hours had certainly been that.

  At the station’s newsstand he had bought a Telegraph and The Sporting Life. Jury had read a racing form about as often as he’d read Ulysses and thought Joyce’s density no match for the racing form.

  It was something that Sara had said. It bothered him, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what it was, except that it had to do with racing. Cheltenham, Newmarket, Doncaster were places she’d gone to following Dan Ryder around. He didn’t doubt that she’d done this, for what man or woman would confess to such an obsession unless they were sociopaths? That kid who stalked Jodie Foster, the nutcase who shot John Lennon. Obsession was often not benign and harmless. But what was it, that detail that made him, right now, uncomfortable?

  It looked like the same attendant who’d been on the train before, and who now came clattering through the car, shoving the food and drink trolley. As he’d done before, Jury bought a cheese salad sandwich and tea in a plastic cup. He hadn’t eaten the other sandwich, and wouldn’t eat this one; there were so few people in the car that he felt it must be discouraging not to sell your wares. He’d give the sandwich to Carole-anne; he now remembered that she loved cheese salad. He’d tossed the first one in the dustbin at the station.

  Jury had called Plant to let him know he’d be spending the night in his Islington digs and would try to get to Ardry End tomorrow. The nice thing about Plant was that he didn’t ask questions beyond “Are you all right?”

  He took a few sips of the tea. He was getting to be as bad as Wiggins, who would have drunk the lot so as not to have the fellow think his tea wasn’t any good. Wiggins watched flight attendants going through safety precautions, too. The tea was the same tea that he’d had on the other trips. Why did train tea always have that bit of whitish foam on top, as if its ingredients couldn’t coalesce?

  He returned to his meditation on Sara Hunt. He opened the print-condensed pages of The Sporting Life and ran his eye over the various kinds of races-claim, handicap, stakes-and the horses entered in them. Nothing jarred his memory for whatever it was, or perhaps it wasn’t. It might have been something or someone else-

  Davison. George Davison, Ryder’s trainer. That afternoon they had been standing with Wiggins and Neil Epp in front of Criminal Type’s stall. The Derby, at Epsom-that was what Sara had said. The last time she’d seen Dan Ryder race before his defection to France a few weeks later was in the Derby, up on Criminal Type. But Davison had made a point of that race. “Only time I ever lost me temper at the board it was over that weight allowance. They said Criminal Type’d have to carry another twelve pounds. Bloody unfair. So I scratched ’im.”

  Davison had scratched the horse almost at the last minute. Criminal Type was taken out of the field, and the horse and its jockey didn’t race.

  Why had Sara told him she’d seen the race? It seemed such a pointless lie, as he wouldn’t have thought one way or the other about that race, the only thing setting it apart being that George Davison had taken his horse out. It made no sense, what Sara had said. He slid down in his seat and closed his eyes.

  She had been with Ryder that day? But in that case she would have known he wasn’t racing at Epsom. She could fairly well assume that Jury wouldn’t know that the Ryder horse was scratched. (Certainly, he’d pled ignorance of the racing world in general.) His head was hurting, probably in sympathetic response to his side, which throbbed. Dr. Ryder would thrash him if he knew Jury wasn’t following instructions. So would Wiggins. So would Carole-anne. He’d be thrice thrashed, a pleasant little tongue-twister. He made sure the cheese salad sandwich was in his coat pocket. It might fend her off for a little while.

  A very little while. Carole-anne, dressed in emerald green, had deposited the sandwich wrapper in the trash can and was now picking crumbs from her gorgeous green bosom.

  “Are you saying you went all the way to Wales-?”

  “And back. Twice, and lived to tell about it.”

  The eyes that leveled on him would have been cold had they not been so goddamned turquoise. Flashing turquoise, to boot. There she went now, hands on hips:

  “Super! You know you promised that doctor that you wouldn’t exert yourself in any way, that you wouldn’t go out pub-crawling, that you’d stay in bed as much as possible-”

  “I lied.”

  Well that flummoxed her. She was gathering up her argument, getting it into full gear, which of course demanded a fellow arguer, and Jury wasn’t doing it. He smiled.

  Carole-anne had to search around for another arguable topic.

  Ah! The consideration card!

  “It’s just not very considerate, that’s all, I mean to me and Mrs. W, as all we do is worry, wondering where you are and if you’re okay. Not dead in a ditch somewhere. Like Wales.”

  “But you thought I was in Northamptonshire with Melrose Plant.”

  “Well, but you weren’t! You were in Wales!”

  That she saw no flaw in this argument was one of the things he loved about her. Jury rose, walked over and embraced her. “Sorry.”

  Her words were muffled by her head’s burrowing against his chest.

  Jury thought of the rain-swept, snow-swept garden, of its oddly aromatic winter scent. Carole-anne gave off that scent somehow. He released her. She went back to the sofa, argument momentarily suspended. “Then why’d you go to Wales, anyway? Nobody I know goes there.” She uncapped her nail polish.

  “Apparently nobody anybody knows goes there. Except me.”

  “What’s she look like, this person?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “I know. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.”

  Not bloody likely. Jury thought he would doll up the description and ran the faces of several film stars by his mind’s eye, discarding each of them in turn as perhaps not beautiful enough to fan the fires of jealousy. Would Judi Dench or Helen Mirren capture her imagination? (They captured his.) No. Right now she was tapping her foot, which didn’t register very high on the impatience scale since she hadn’t any shoes on.

  “Well, if it takes you this long to describe what she looks like,” she said, drawing her unpainted toenails back to rest on the edge of the table-“then she mustn’t have made much of an impression.”

  “Juliette Binoche,” he said, a woman so far from resembling Sara Hunt it began to worry even him.

  “Oh, her.” Unmoved, Carole-anne dipped the tiny brush in the neon-bright pink polish and let it hover over her foot as if sizing it up for the glass slipper.

  “Am I to understand you do not think Ms. Binoche has the most alluring complexion in the whole world? No-the whole universe? Her skin is absolutely luminous.” Though luminosity in another when he had Carole-anne right in front of him was definitely coals to Newcastle.

  Carole-anne’s chin was on her up-drawn knee, as she dabbed the nail polish on her little toe. “She’s French.”

  Jury had always taken a secret delight in Carole-anne’s non sequiturs, but this one puzzled him. “She’s French. That removes her completely from our purview, does it?�
�

  “I guess it removes you. She lives in France.”

  Ah! That was it. Juliette was inaccessible! And in Carole-anne’s seamless accounting, Wales merely took off where Paris began. “Yes, she probably does live in France, but a man could easily have a lover there, what with the Chunnel making it so convenient.”

  “You’re claustrophobic.”

  Was she splurging on non sequiturs tonight? “I am?” She nodded. “You wouldn’t last five minutes in the Chunnel.” Down went that foot, up came the other.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, that’s ridiculous. Whatever gave you that impression?”

  “Suit yourself.” Her entire self rejected his argument as the work of a fool. Even her toes shrugged.

  “I get on elevators; I get on planes.”

  “I’m only talking about the Chunnel. You’d only be claustrophobic there. You don’t have all-over claustrophobia.”

  “Then I’ll fly!”

  “You can’t afford it. Between here and Paris it costs a fortune.”

  “So I have Chunnel claustrophobia. How interesting. All I can say is, either way, Juliette Binoche would be worth it.”

  “If you want to chance it.”

  By the time she was wriggling her toes to dry them, Jury was sure he was in love with Juliette Binoche.

  Damn, but did she have to live in Paris?

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “Ardry End has seen the last of him!” exclaimed Melrose, in answer to Jury’s question about Mr.

  Bramwell. “Let’s drink to that!” Melrose raised his teacup.

  “So you managed to fire him?” said Jury.

  “Not exactly. It was more of a job transfer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s gone to the Wrenn’s Nest.”

  “What?” Jury laughed. “How in hell did you foist him off on Theo Browne?”

  “By making it known that Trueblood intended to hire Bramwell. You know that if Browne could take away anything Trueblood has-a basket of vipers, a dram of strychnine-he’d do it. Makes no difference that the result would be poisonous to Theo, at least it would be poison Trueblood couldn’t have.”