The Grave Maurice (27 page)

The maître d' at Aubergine raised no question of coat or tie. He wouldn't consider questioning Vernon Rice; Vernon was too good a customer and too big a tipper. They were sitting in a quiet corner while Nell read the menu.

“Oh, God, I just realized I haven't had a decent meal in weeks!” She put her hands to her face as if ashamed to admit it.

“Then you're in luck. The food here is unbelievably decent. I expect you're a vegetarian?”

“Well, yes, I guess I am.”

“They do something with mushrooms here that's just short of psychedelic.”

“Order for me, will you?”

He ordered for both of them, looked at the wine list, asked for a wine which made the sommelier extremely happy. Then Vernon shoved his silverware around and leaned on the table. “Okay, now, continue talking.”

Nell did, through a first course of a vegetable pate, a second course of green salad and a third course of the heavenly mushroom dish. She talked little about herself, a lot about the mares. “She had this literature—pamphlets, folders, estrogen studies. I read about all of this. An American firm has had the patent on a drug called Premarin forever. It takes hundreds of thousands of horses to meet its quota.” Her fork, like a tiny silver plane, appeared to be writing in air. “The way these mares are roped means they can't move more than a couple of inches any way. They can't lie down. Nine and ten months pregnant and they can't lie down.
Imagine
that kind of imprisonment for a horse, tied so they can't move. Horses are meant to run free. They only got the little bit of exercise I talked Valerie Hobbs into letting me give them.”

“But what's this Hobbs woman expect to get out of urine collected from only sixty mares? And I'm also curious about how she could have kept this going for several years with no one—I mean the animal-rights people—finding out about it? What about the people who work at that stud? They don't talk about it? I mean on the outside?”

Nell shook her head. “They must not. One reason is they're not really interested; they don't care. Another could be they want to keep their jobs.”

Vernon listened, taking her in all over again, like a climate once visited and never forgotten.

He pushed his plate aside and leaned toward her. “You want to rescue these mares more, I imagine, than you want to see this Hobbs woman behind bars.”

“I hadn't thought of it that way, but, yes, I do. She didn't treat me badly. Why?”

“Because you've got a bargaining chip. Sixty horses in return for keeping Ms. Hobbs out of the nick.”

She thought about that. “But that wouldn't be up to us, would it? My abduction's a police matter.”

Vernon liked that “us.” “Not entirely, but what you have to say about her will go a long way. She'll put up the ignorance defense: ‘I never did know who this girl was or that she was kidnapped—' You know.”

“Is it possible she really didn't? That it's the truth?”

“I suppose it's possible she wasn't the one who'd orchestrated the kidnapping, but she had to have known something. I can imagine the hell they caught for letting you get away. Although she seemed to have relaxed the rules on that to the point of—” He paused. “I could talk to Hobbs. She, and, possibly, the others who work there, they're easily bought, is my guess. I could buy the horses out of the stables.”

“There are fifty-four there now, Vern.”

He ignored that. “Could Arthur keep them?”

“I think so. I've had the ones I took in an empty barn and I know there's at least one more empty barn. It might mean building another. But the land—well, it's certainly big enough. I could personally watch over them.”

Vernon had put his fork down a while ago. The duck, which he had shoved to one side, was, as always, perfect; he just wasn't hungry.

She looked at his abandoned plate. “Aren't you going to eat that?”

“You're a vegetarian.” He smiled.

T
hey stayed up most of the night, talking and not talking, their silences comfortable. Vernon had tried once again to get her to tell Arthur and her father that she was here and all right and would be home soon. Vernon pictured their response: joy, pure and unalloyed with the anger they certainly could have felt because she hadn't told them before, hadn't said she had been living on Ryder property for three weeks. For that was three weeks of grief they could have been spared. Vernon said as much.

Nell protested: “I can't. I want to get those mares out of there first. Do you really think Dad or Granddad would be concerned over the fate of a bunch of horses they had no connection to? I mean, in all of their relief to get me back?”

“Probably not, no.” Vernon wondered if there wasn't something else preventing her, some completely irrational shame over being taken in the first place and then not immediately trying to escape. He couldn't pin it down. He swirled the brandy in his snifter, watching it lap the glass. “Okay. I understand that, Nell, but how would telling your father or grandfather jeopardize that, if you could convince them those mares are important to you?”

“For one thing, they wouldn't be thinking up ways to get them out, which is what is needed and is what you're doing. Dad wouldn't do that; he and Granddad would have Cambridge police at Hobbs's doorstep before you could turn around.”

“Yet . . . isn't it police we
want
?”

“In the time it took to get a warrant, Valerie Hobbs could kill the horses. If she hasn't done it already. I don't think she has, though; it was just a threat.”

“What was?”

“Killing the horses. I made a bargain: I wouldn't run if she'd let me take care of the mares.”

“My God.” Vernon turned away, angry with such recklessness, or was it such devotion to something he didn't understand. “You could have gotten away long before you did.”

She sat back and looked at him. “Believe me, I've given myself more hell than you or anyone else could on that score. Look, I know it was awful of me not to go home. But, in a sense, I
was
home. I
have been
home for three weeks.”

It wasn't as if she were denying her family for her own sake. Even as obsessive as she was about these mares, it wasn't her own welfare she was concerned with. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I won't keep pushing it.”

“Thank you. And there's something else I'd like to do. I'd like to put them out of business.”

“The Hobbs woman will
be
out of business.”

“It's not illegal, the operation she's running.”

“No, but it
is
illegal to conspire with kidnappers. Put who out of business?”

“The pharmaceutical company that produces this hormone drug.” She reached into a pocket of the coat tossed over the back of the leather sofa and pulled out several folders, which she then tossed on the table between them. “At least, I'd like to do them some damage.”

Vernon looked at her. He would have laughed had she not looked so implacably serious. He picked up the folder picturing a sweetly posed mare and her foal. “You want to put it out of business—that's what you're saying? Nellie, Wyeth-Ayerst is a major pharmaceutical company in the States. It's huge.”

“All the more reason, isn't it? You're a shareholder. You tried to get Dad and Granddad to invest. You said they should do ‘before the stock split.' ”

Vernon was openmouthed. “How in hell can you remember
that?
”

“Because—”
Because I always listened to what you said, because you were important to me, because I was always glad when you came to the farm.

There was a shift in her expression, a look not at all implacable, that Vernon could not read and wished he could, as if, like a horse, she had slipped her reins and could now run free, as if whatever drove her had stopped driving her for two seconds, and in that brief time, he felt he had her; had her worked out, clocked her pace, seen her colors. In the next second, the look was gone. It was amazing what could wash over a person in the blink of an eye. “Nellie, I'm a shareholder, but even if I dumped all of my stock tomorrow, it wouldn't hurt Wyeth that much.”

“Oh, I know that. But you're what they call a player; you have influence—”

Vernon tried out a self-deprecating laugh, but she didn't break stride.

“—in the market.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Vernon held up one protesting hand. “You mean you want me to manipulate this company's financial picture—”

She nodded. “They're the only ones who produce this stuff.”

“Oh. Do you want me to put British Telecom out of business at the same time?”

She just gave him a look.

Vernon sat back. “Even if I
could
do this, which I certainly doubt”—(but the prospect of such a trick excited him, that is, would, if such a manipulation was not illegal, which it was; he was doing this in a vacuum, or doing it theoretically. But it wasn't theoretical, that was the trouble—“even if I could, you do realize that the drug wouldn't be the only thing that you could say good-bye to. We'd be saying good-bye to God knows how many jobs.”

Nell looked away from him and out the window to the lightening sky. Not light but its adumbration in the faint lines of buildings showing through the darkness. “I know.”

“But you don't care?”

She turned back to look at him. “No.” She held up the folder. “Listen to me, Vern. Listen: the foals are slaughtered since there's no use for them, to keep women more comfortable during menopause. To help avoid
hot flashes,
Vernon. What in the bloody hell is the matter with us?”

She was relentless. He frowned. She could even be ruthless.

Nell smiled. “This is something you could do; you're reckless, Vernon.”

Actually, he wasn't; he only appeared to be because he would undertake tasks that would find most people running for cover.

“I'm sorry to lay all this at your doorstep. You haven't been living with it for nearly two years like I have. If you had done, if you had had all that time to think about it . . .” Her tone was rueful. “I'm sorry.”

“Not on my account.” He looked at the window, at the frosty light and the spire of St. Paul's spiking the early-morning mist that shrouded it. “I'll give this some thought. In the meantime—” He drank off his whiskey and made a face. “Why doesn't this stuff taste as good at six a.m. as if does at six p.m.? Come on, your room's at the end of the hall.”

She got up. He put his hands on her shoulders; they felt fragile, despite her being a girl toughened by sun and wind and hard work. It was that look of hers, a look at once solid and ethereal. He was for a moment afraid. You couldn't keep jumping through hoops of fire without getting burned. But the fear subsided when she yawned like any ordinary up-all-night child.

Only Nell wasn't ordinary, despite these glimpses of that other girl, the one he had seen before in that swift two seconds.

And who was she?

T
he house looked marble cold and cavernous, more the crumbling remains of a house of banished royalty than a home. She lived alone, or that was the impression Jury had gotten when he talked to her on the telephone.

The raised voice Jury heard on the other side of a partly open window appeared to be remonstrating with something not human—a dog or cat. If it was a cat, the cat would remain unregenerate. Used to the cat Cyril in DCS Racer's office, Jury knew as much as anyone about the persistence of cats. He rang and heard footsteps.

Sara Hunt blushed, whether from having to deal with a stranger and a policeman or because she'd been caught red-handed lecturing a cat, Jury didn't know. Over her shoulder he could see the big ginger-colored cat who paused in his blameless paw washing long enough to fix his eyes on Jury. The cat had exceptionally green eyes (rather the color of Melrose Plant's) and a precarious seat on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. One could tell the cat was hopelessly its own master and would get through any talking down with no other feeling than boredom.

Sara Hunt said immediately after she opened the door, as if in defense of her remonstrating with her cat, “He's just made a mess of my papers. He's shoved them on the floor and they weren't all that organized to begin with.” Vexed, she looked at Jury. “I'm sorry. You're Superintendent Jury?”

“New Scotland Yard.” He held out his ID.

Apparently she thought she was supposed to appropriate it for she didn't return it after taking a good look. She held the door wider and said, “They've come for you, Henry! Hear that, Henry?” She flung this over her shoulder. The cat went on washing. She turned back to Jury. “Hopeless. Oh, do come in.” He followed her through the large entrance hall. The cat jumped off the newel post and made its way, haughtily, toward the rear of the house.

Sara Hunt stood aside as Jury entered a living room, which would also have been cold had it not been for the fire burning in the grate. Above the fireplace were framed etchings, probably of the area, if not of these actual grounds, a great many moss- and ivy-clad crumbling walls, romantic and fantastic. Out of an enormous Gothic window, its view partly obscured by a huge oak, he could see just such a wall.

“Here,” she said, “let me take your coat.”

“I will if you give it back.” He nodded at the ID still clutched in her hand.

“What?”

“I'll need that. How else will I know who I am?” He smiled.