Martha Grimes: The Grave Maurice

“Then maybe,” said Melrose, “it was the horse. What’s the name?”

“Aqueduct. Quite valuable, especially for breeding purposes. I wondered about that, too. I expect when you find an animal missing along with a human, you assume the target was the human.”

“They didn’t expect to find a girl along with the horse. Do you suppose they had to take her to keep her quiet?”

“Very possibly.” Jury looked again at the report from Cambridgeshire police. “A number of valuable Thoroughbreds: Beautiful Dreamer, Criminal Type-”

“Criminal Type, I like that name. Odd for a horse.”

“So is Seabiscuit,” Wiggins said. “Do you know how that name came about? Seabiscuit, I mean?”

Trust Wiggins to know the derivation of anything with biscuit in it. He was sitting there eating one right now.

“There was a horse named Hard Tack, which is what sailors are often left with to eat. See? Hard Tack/sailor.”

Both Jury and Melrose looked at him. Neither spoke. “ Sea relating to sailor; biscuit meaning a lesser version of hard tack. It’s rather clever.”

Jury and Melrose still looked at him, neither commenting.

Wiggins was leafing up pages in his notebook. “Ryder Stud Farm has diminished somewhat since Nell Ryder disappeared. It’s almost as if she were the heart of the place. Perhaps she really was, to her grandfather. Then there was also Danny Ryder. Not only was that a personal loss, but a real financial hit. When he was up on this Samarkand, they were virtually unbeatable.”

“What’s the chief source of income? The purses?”

“No. Breeding. Ryder has a stable full of Thoroughbreds retired from racing, but worth a lot in breeding.”

“Owners take their mares to Ryder Stud and pay for the pleasure?”

“Pay a lot for the pleasure for a stud such as Samarkand. It’s the practice, I heard, to sell shares. An owner pays, say, anywhere from a hundred thousand to a quarter million for the privilege of bringing one of his mares one time a year.”

Melrose sat up. “A quarter million? For that price I’d do it myself.”

“Who’d pay that much for you?” asked Jury. “So a return on the stallions set to stud in a given year could be how much?”

Wiggins again thumbed the pages of his notebook, said, “In ’92, for instance, over five million.”

Jury sat up. “What? And that’s just the breeding part of it?”

Wiggins nodded. “Just from breeding, yes.”

“How much from the purses?”

“From Samarkand alone-this would be a decade ago-1.8 million.”

“No wonder they call it the sport of kings,” said Melrose.

“Of course, looking at the other side of the ledger,” said Wiggins, “it’s an exceptionally pricey operation. The people you need working for you, many of whom are highly trained-jockeys, vets, trainers, grooms-do not come cheap. Arthur Ryder wanted the best of them. His trainer alone got a quarter million a year, and that’s low for a trainer. It’s expensive and it’s very dicey, as much as farming is, and farmers don’t have to carry insurance on each cow and plot of swede. Insurance on Samarkand alone was two million. But Arthur Ryder hasn’t been in tip-top shape since first his son Danny and then his granddaughter Nell went. Financial reverses, accidents with the horses, troubles seemed to heap themselves on Arthur Ryder’s head.”

Jury lay back, closed his eyes. “ ‘Not single spies but in battalions.’ ”

“Sir?”

“Trouble coming. Claudius.”

As if to bear out Claudius, Nurse Bell entered the room. But only single spies, Jury thought. A blessing.

“I’d say you two”-here she crossed her arms and glared at Melrose and Wiggins-“have visited quite enough for one day. And I warned you he”-she smiled ungraciously at Jury, it was more of a sneer-“shouldn’t be listening to police business. He’s supposed to be resting, not listening to you two. You don’t seem to appreciate he was at death’s door, and though we snatched him back once, we mightn’t be so lucky again.”

If she once more told him how close he’d come to death, Jury swore he’d hit her. Having been saved by so slight a margin, the unfortunate patient would feel that margin vanish in a moment. “Not out of the woods yet, my lad. So you’d better say an extra prayer tonight.”

Melrose said, “That’s ridiculous. He’s never looked healthier. It looks as if he’d hardly got shot at all. It’s your brilliant care of him.”

That put Nurse Bell on the horns of a dilemma. She certainly did not want her role diminished. “Even the best of care can’t guarantee a patient will make it.”

Jury, Melrose and Wiggins sighed.

Vernon Rice “did” money all right. He had his own investment firm in the City and moved a lot of money around, both for himself and his clients. He liked start-ups; however, he would warn his clients away from volatile-looking ones, but they didn’t always take his advice. It astonished him how reckless people were with their money, how eager to part with it at first sniff of something that looked promising (but probably wasn’t), like hounds on the trail of a fox.

Vernon’s days (and a lot of his nights) revolved around money. His primary moneymaker was his small investment firm in the City, a “boutique” firm, he supposed it would be called, consisting of himself, his receptionist, Samantha, and his two young assistants, Daphne and Bobby. They watched the daily financials for him, let him know how the market was operating and did some day trading on their own. He had hired both of them more or less off the streets and had never regretted it.

Daphne had appeared to be disoriented when Vernon came across her one day, standing on the corner of Thread-needle and Old Broad Street, just by the Stock Exchange. What he noticed about her was that she just stood there, not joining the foot traffic that crossed one street or crossed the other. She had dark hair, ringlets poking out from underneath a gray wool cap, which fit her head tightly and had two little gray ears sticking up in front. Her curls, her smooth oval face, wide brown eyes and-of course-the ears, put her, in Vernon’s estimation, at anywhere between twelve and thirty-two.

Probably she would think he was putting moves on her, but he took the chance, unable to resist both her apparent predicament and the ears on the wool cap. “Pardon me, don’t think I’m trying to pick you up or anything, but you seem to be having, well, a difficult time moving. I mean, more than the usual ‘which-street-is-it-I-want?’ challenge, and more of a ‘what-city-is-this-I’m-in?’ quandary. I thought perhaps I could assist you.” Vernon went on in this fashion, unable to stop explaining both her difficulty and his proffered role in it. Finally, he just wound down while she stood and stared and the foot soldiers coming from London Bridge flowed all over the place, too many of them, or at least T. S. Eliot thought so.

He even threw T. S. Eliot into the frying pan before he stopped.

She waited, squinting up at him. Then she said, “You’re finished, are you? You’re done? This is it for you? Through? Ended? Over? Fini? It’s a wrap?”

He nodded, started to say something and stopped when she held up her hand. “No, it’s the rest of the world’s turn. Around ten miles back you asked me, or I think you asked me, why I didn’t go one way or the other. The answer is: one way is like the other, and I don’t see the point in choosing. So I can’t cross over. It’s some existential turning point. I can’t go either way.”

“Um.” He wondered if he could say something now. Since she hadn’t pushed him in the way of an oncoming double-decker when he’d made the um sound, he thought perhaps he could. “How about not crossing either street?”