Martha Grimes - The Grave Maurice

Roy Diamond’s solicitor came through the door looking as accommodating as razor wire.

Jury knew that voice. He turned to its source. It was Charly Moss. No!

Yes. “Superintendent Richard Jury! See? I remember.” The hand she held out to shake his was crisp and cold.

He took it in his warmer one. “Hello, Charly.”

“It’s been a long time. It’s been since that trial in Lincolnshire. Remember?”

As if he could forget.

But she looked at him as if he must have. “So.” Charly Moss slung her briefcase on the table, perhaps announcing her confidence in the knowledge that whatever she had was better than whatever they had. “Now.” She literally rolled up the sleeves of her copper-brown sweater, the exact shade of her hair. “How much to-and-froing has been going on here since my client requested an attorney?”

Greene said, “Very little.”

“That’s good. That means there’ll be very little which will be inadmissible as evidence, right?” She looked down. “Ah! Fingerprints! How unappreciated they will be.”

“But they’re-”

“Be quiet, Roy.” She gestured toward the pictures, cocked her head with a “please explain” expression.

“Your client,” said Barry Greene, “is being accused of kidnapping, rape and murder-just to name a few things.” He tapped one of the photos. “These belong to the rape charge.”

“I see.” Charly, who was still standing, bent over the picture. “Hm. The fatal bed, is that it?”

Jury said, trying to control his anger, “She would have found it so.” He shoved the photo of a dead Nell Ryder directly under her eyes and looked stonily at Charly Moss.

“This is terrible. The poor girl,” Charly said, looking downcast.

Jury knew there was no reason to question her sincerity, but sincerity didn’t mix with the evidence in the case.

“Only, it doesn’t mean that Mr. Diamond here shared the bed. At least not with Nell Ryder. I can give you a couple of alternatives off the top of my head: he was in the bed at some point, perhaps by himself, perhaps with”-Charly pressed on the briefcase’s silver catches and it opened like a trap sprung. She pulled out a notebook and ran her finger down one page-“with the attractive Valerie Hobbs-”

Charly Moss had not breezed in unprepared.

“-or he could have been looking for something that dropped behind the mattress or the bed, reaching down-” She held one arm up, hand grabbing at an imaginary bar. “I could go on…”

Please don’t, thought Jury. A cold finger touched his spine.

Charly looked from Greene to Jury. “Is this your evidence, then?”

“Thus far, yes.” Greene said coolly. “We’re still gathering it. We have witnesses to this shooting, of course.”

“Of course. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to speak to my client.” She smiled.

Jury had been a sucker for that smile the first time he’d met her. One of his favorite memories was of Charly and Melrose sitting on stools in that pub in Lincoln singing a drunken duet. He himself hadn’t been in a good mood.

“I’ll be talking to you, then,” said Greene.

Jury said nothing.

Outside, Greene asked about her. He said, “She seemed to make you nervous, and I suspect that’s hard to do. Have you seen her in action, then?”

“To tell the truth, Barry, it’s not Charly Moss that worries me-not that she’s not capable of blindsiding us. What worries me is who she’s briefing.”

Barry Greene frowned: “The barrister, you mean?” Jury nodded.

Melrose was at first delighted. “Charly Moss! How-” The smile faded. “Oh, God. She’s not briefing Pete Apted, is she?”

They were sitting in the Bentley; Jury slid down in the seat. “I was afraid to ask.”

“It could be someone else, you know. It could be she’s taking this on her own. More and more solicitors are doing that these days. She’s certainly good enough.”

Jury shook his head.

“But look at it another way: you don’t know Apted would take the case. Indeed, you don’t even know she’ll recommend it. Lawyers aren’t all without conscience.”

“They aren’t?”

Melrose laughed and aimed the Bentley into the night traffic.

They buried her next to Maurice in a small churchyard a mile from the stud farm. Very few people attended beyond the family-George Davison, Neil Epp and several stable lads.

The funeral took place five days after Maurice’s and a week after Nell died, the delay caused by the autopsy required in the case of a violent death, or an unexplained death or a death by misadventure. Nell’s had certainly been by misadventure. Jury couldn’t abide the thought of the Ryder family having to wait longer than that, as if they would for days be staring down into an unfilled grave, existing in that limbo of grief that has no end in sight. The end of grief would always be out of sight, but at least the ritual would help to confine it.

The problem was that the police pathologist simply had too much on his plate to do the postmortem immediately. Jury asked Barry Greene if he could possibly allow him to bring in someone he knew from the MPD and Greene got that permission for him.

When Jury rang Dr. Nancy and explained the problem, he said, “Listen, I know it’s what you hear once a day-it’s too hard on the deceased’s relations to have to wait…”

“You’re right there, except I hear it twice a day.” She paused. Then she said, “With good cause.” She paused again. “I can be there tomorrow afternoon, say around four. Okay?”

“I can’t thank you enough-”

“It’s all right, Richard. I’m not all that busy.”

Which he knew was a total lie.

“But you can buy me a drink after.”

“Phyllis, I’ll buy you the pub.”

“Oh, good. I can quit my day job.”

Dr. Nancy arrived exactly when she said she would-four p.m. the next day. Phyllis Nancy was legendary for (among other things, such as her fiery hair) her promptness, a quality hard to find in the Met, simply because time couldn’t be dealt out the way it could in other walks of life. If Dr. Nancy said four, she was there by four. In the field of police work, understandably chaotic, she offered a sense of respite, even of sanctuary. She had once told Jury that years before she had shown up an hour late at a crime scene. The detective in charge had told her, when she was apologizing, “Hell, that’s all right, Doc. The dead can wait.” She had told him, “How would you know?”

They gathered-Jury, Barry Greene and Phyllis Nancy-in the cool room with its permanent smell of blood that couldn’t be washed or mopped away, where a mortician stood over the plastic-sheeted body of Nell Ryder. Wearing a lab coat and a plastic apron, Dr. Nancy looked down and shook her head. “Poor child. What a dreadful waste.” Then she turned on the recording device supplied her into which she would speak her findings.

DCI Greene stayed; Jury left. He had observed a number of postmortems before, but they couldn’t have paid or promised him enough to stay and watch this one. He waited outside in the silent corridor. It was less than an hour later when Phyllis Nancy called him back. Barry Greene smiled ruefully and looked a bit bilious and left. Dr. Nancy told Jury she’d found nothing that would come as a surprise. One bullet had entered the abdomen, gone through the liver, ricocheted off the pelvic bone, gone through the stomach, hit a vertebra and lodged in an abdominal muscle. The course of the second bullet was less complicated; it had entered the chest wall, gone through the lung, nicked the esophagus and gone out the back.

“She would have died instantly,” she said. “The bullet-.38 caliber, but you know that-messed up everything in its path.”