The Grave Maurice

by Martha Grimes

  “Simone-could Simone have been going there to introduce herself? They’d never met.”

  “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?”

  “You tried to save her life, Danny.”

  “Tried to just doesn’t cut it, does it?”

  It sounded, oddly, like something Nell herself might say. That one could never do enough.

  “It does if that’s as close as you can get.”

  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.

  “I’m truly sorry about Maurice, Danny. I really am.”

  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.

  When Greene had the tape running in the interrogation room, Jury was once again holding up the wall.

  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.”

  Trevor said, “Well, but it wasn’t even a proper kidnapping, was it?”

  Jury loved that.

  “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.”

  Greene went on. “Why did Valerie Hobbs agree to have Nell Ryder there? That puts the Hobbs woman squarely in the middle of a conspiracy.”

  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.

  Jury said, “Maurice, Trevor. Tell me what he had to do with all this.”

  “Poor kid. I swear I’d hate to think-”

  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.”

  “The thing is, no one knew Dan Ryder was still alive.”

  “Roy knew it.”

  Jury pulled out a chair and sat down, leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Go on.”

  Trevor said, “Let me correct that: it was either Dan or his twin.”

  “What was?”

  “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.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was the race itself, see. You know what a walkover is?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  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-”

  (Jury preferred “buggers.”)

  “-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.”

  “And Roy Diamond knew all of this, that’s what you’re saying? He knew about it for two years and did nothing?”

  “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.”

  “You showed one to Maurice.”

  “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.”

  “He believed you?”

  “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, stand
ing 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…?”

  His voice trailed off.

  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.

  “Probably they need a little time to get used to freedom,” said Vernon.

  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.”

  “And the sky,” said Vernon, looking upward, “is so blue.”

  As if the day were a perfect setting for the horses to break away for a gallop, or perhaps as if nature had broken a bargain.

  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.

  There would always be a filly like Go for Wand, thought Jury; there would always be a girl to ride her.

  Together, they would wire the field.

  SIXTY-TWO

  The door of Tynedale Lodge was opened by the pretty maid Sarah, whose eyes widened even more when she saw him standing there. His image reflected in her eyes; he could almost see himself shaping up as a hero, which only made him feel more of an idiot. What had he done, after all, for the Tynedales?

  “Hello, Sarah. This isn’t an official visit; I came to see how Gemma’s doing. Is she about?”

  Sarah’s hand fell away from her hair. “Oh, why, yessir. I mean, I expect she is. I expect she’s out in the garden.”

  “Thanks. I’ll just have a look.”

  He made his way through the dining room to the study and the French doors that opened off Ian Tynedale’s study. Outside to the left of the patio was a long colonnade, a walk flanked by white pillars. He saw her, as he had seen her before, on the same walk across the garden in which a marble figure stood in a marble pool, pouring water from a marble jug. The path she was on ran parallel to his. A line of tall cypresses bordered it. As they both walked, he felt as he had the first time, that they were somehow woven together. There was a poignant sense of belonging: everything that was there-man, child, statue, pillars, trees-was rightly there.

  When they came to the end of their paths and she still didn’t see him, he called, “Gemma!”

  She didn’t so much turn as swerve toward him, as a car might do, hoping to ward off a collision. She stood transfixed, as if she were the marble figure in the fountain.

  “Gemma-” He walked toward her and then knelt down and kissed her cheek.

  She held her doll in one hand and put her other hand on the spot. “You got shot.”

  “I did.”

  “You didn’t die.”

  “No. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you think I had?”

  Very slowly, still holding her hand against her face, she nodded.

  “Come on, let’s sit down.”

  Seated with her (the doll Richard between them), Jury thought it was hard to believe no one had told her he was all right. Was it because she hadn’t asked? For Gemma wouldn’t, one of those children who felt so dangerously deeply they could only survive by pretending indifference.

  She was feigning it now, adjusting the doll’s bonnet as if that, not Jury’s life or death, was the issue.

  He said, “What happened to Richard’s black clothes? I thought he looked quite smart in that coat and hat.”

  “He’s being punished!” Her voice went up a decibel, nervously loud.

  “He is? But what did he do?”

  “He kicked you and yelled at you. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  It was Gemma herself who had used Richard as a club to give Jury several whacks because he’d left her in danger.

  “Well, if he hadn’t done that, you probably wouldn’t’ve got shot.”

  Jury looked at her solemn, remorseful face, which now gave tremulous signs of dissolving into tears, as if a pebble had been tossed into a pool. No little girl, he thought, should have to exert so much effort in trying not to cry. But from Gemma’s point of view, strong emotion can kill. She had displayed it once-she had cried and yelled-and look at the result: Jury had nearly died.

  Jury thought for a moment, then picked up the doll and sighed deeply. “Poor Richard,” he said. “No one understood, did they?”

  Her face free of incipient tears, now completely forestalled by this surprising new development, Gemma put her hand on Jury’s arm. “Understood what?”

  “Well, Richard helped save me, didn’t he?”

  “What? He wasn’t even there.” Remorse was fast giving way to testiness.

  “Not the night I was, no. But he’d been there before, when he and Sparky saved you.”

  This wasn’t going down a treat. “I did most of the work!”

  “I know, but, see, Sparky went back the second time-”

  “Christmas night.”

  “-because he had found you and Richard there once, he knew it was a place that needed watching. Richard understood that.”

  Her frown was deep: a dog and a doll. Jury could almost hear the words chasing around in her mind. Were a dog and a doll enough to keep a person from getting shot? If it was not so, if she had really saved herself, then why hadn’t she saved Jury?

  Nope: go with the dog and the doll. “Well, I guess he could have helped even if he wasn’t there. He could’ve been sending messages to Sparky, too. It’s not like us.”

  Isn’t it? Jury smiled.

  Gemma said to the doll Richard, “I’m sorry. I should’ve understood.” Then she yanked the bonnet down over the doll’s eyes, not altogether pleased with Jury’s solution, as it put her at least a little in the wrong. But in another instant, her face cleared completely.

  Jury asked, “Are you going to put his black clothes back on him?”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “He gets so bossy when he’s
wearing them, though.” Rearranging the bonnet so the doll could see again, she hesitated. “Your name is Richard, too,” wanting to clear this up about the two Richards. “You’re not bossy at all. I wish he was more like you.” She flicked a glance Jury’s way to see if he liked hearing this.

  “Thank you. I try not to be. But if I had a set of new black clothes to wear, I might be pretty bossy.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. I’ll bet you don’t even boss around the criminals you catch. Probably, you didn’t even boss them.”

  He knew who she meant by “them” and tried to track emotion across her face, but it was free of fear, yet not so much she would name their names. “I don’t remember if I did or not. Probably not. I was too upset by what happened to you and Benny.”

  “Benny? Nothing happened to Benny!” Not about to share the limelight with Benny, she got annoyed and stood the doll on his head. “Anyway, I’m sorry you got upset over me.”

  She said this in the most self-satisfied tone that Jury had ever heard, her mouth crimped like an old lady’s, as she righted Richard and adjusted his gown.

  A voice called her: “Gemma!”

  Gemma slid off the seat and grabbed Richard. “It’s time for me to read to Mr. Tynedale. You can come.”

  “I’d like to, but I’ve got to be getting back.”

  “To the Yard?”

  “Yes, the Yard.”

  “I’m glad you came,” she said before she scooted off.

  And then she turned and ran back. She put her hand on the cheek Jury had kissed, removed it and placed it against Jury’s own cheek. It was, he guessed, about as close as she dared come to a kiss. “Bye!”

  He stood up and watched her run and skip, skip and run, her black hair gleaming in the frosty winter light. Then he watched the space now empty of her.

  Because she almost made me wish she’d disappear, so I could find her.

  She was gone. In a moment, so was he.