“Well, Gemma seems to do pretty well on her own, Benny. She certainly did a great job that night.”
Benny didn’t like being reminded of “that night” when Gemma went missing because he hadn’t been in on the action; Sparky had, but not Benny. Sparky, thought Jury, smiling, had most definitely been primo doggereno.
But what Benny said was, “That ain’t-isn’t-no way to live though, Mr. Jury, I mean being on your own.”
Apparently, Benny didn’t think he himself was. Jury said, “The thing is, you get used to a certain way of-being, and it’s not always a good thing to change it. Take yourself, Benny. You don’t want to change how you’re living. It feels right to you.”
For that, thought Jury, was really it. It was balance. Balance lay in not deliberately changing things around. There was so much change thrust upon us (he thought of the death of Benny’s mother) that it helped to keep whatever we could unchanged, to keep unchanged whatever was in our power to do so.
“Benny, I’ve got to go. Let me know what you decide, will you?”
Benny nodded. “Sparky don’t want all them baths, I can tell you.”
Jury smiled. “I don’t blame him.”
Hearing either his name or “bath” or both, Sparky barked.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Cambridgeshire!” said Wiggins, after Jury got back to the car. “But-”
Jury sighed. “Not you, too, Wiggins. Look, I’m not going there for lessons in dressage; all I want is to ask Arthur Ryder some questions.”
“But, sir, I think your doctor should-”
“My doctor has.” Jury thought for a moment. “We’ll stop in at Victoria Street first-”
Wiggins stared at him as if Jury had spaced out in hospital. “What?” His palms shot out as if keeping Jury the lunatic back. “No. I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go, but not to the Yard!”
“I only want to see Fiona and Cyril.”
“Fiona,” Wiggins began as he pulled away from the illegal parking spot, “Fiona is fully aware of the situation. ‘Now you tell Mr. Jury to go straight home’ is what she said. Cyril, well, he keeps himself to himself, but I’m sure he’d agree if he wasn’t a cat.” The car flowed into traffic heading north.
Jury sighed. “Okay, then I expect we’ll just go on to Cambridgeshire.”
“I’m glad you’re seeing sense.”
There were rewards, Wiggins saw, in driving to Cambridge on the A10. Every half hour or so a Little Chef turned up, and they were pulling off into one now.
As they got out of the car and crunched across some tired gravel, Jury took comfort in the fact that Wiggins took comfort in a thing so common as a Little Chef.
“I’d sooner it was a Happy Eater, but Little Chefs will do.”
Jury passed through the door his sergeant held open, saying, “Not much to choose between them, is there?” He made this judgment only because he knew Wiggins would have such a good time refuting it.
“Oh, my goodness, there’s no comparison,” Wiggins said as the waitress led them to a booth near the back. “You remember that one”-he went on as they sat down and the waitress put menus on the paper placemats-“just outside of Spalding, wasn’t it? You remember, in Lincolnshire?”
Not wishing to take a stroll down Happy Eater memory lane, Jury said, “Hm” and picked up his menu. “What’ll I have? Anything looks like haute cuisine after hospital meals.”
“I’m having one of the specials.”
“They’re all specials. Maybe some eggs.”
“You should watch your cholesterol, sir.” Wiggins didn’t simply scan the menu; he analyzed it. “I’ll have the waffle with sausage.”
“Did you know that the connection between cholesterol in food and in the body has never been proven? An egg cannot deposit its cholesterol into your body. That’s the argument.”
Wiggins frowned. “That must not be accurate. Look at all the studies that’ve been done on cholesterol.”
“Yeah. But the scientific community, whatever that might be, has never demonstrated it as an actual fact. It’s only probabilities. Wine, now, and the occasional snort of booze, that absolutely has been shown.”
Wiggins just looked at him. “Dream on.”
When the waitress appeared, materializing out of some Little Chef netherworld, Jury ordered fried eggs, fried bread, fried bacon, fried sausage-
“Well, those things are already fried.” The waitress frowned.
“Fry them again, then. Skip the tomato.”
“Tea?”
“Of course.”
“Fried?”
Jury looked at her. “Funny.”
She shoved her order pad back in her pocket and walked away.
Wiggins said, mournfully, “And you just out of hospital.”
“Why do you think I’m having the cardiac arrest platter?” Jury snorted. “I’ve got connections.” He watched the waitress go through to the kitchen. “They don’t have this cabaret at the Happy Eaters, Wiggins.” Realizing that this would initiate further comparisons between the two fast-food chains, Jury quickly followed with, “What’s your feeling about this girl?”
“Nell Ryder? She must be dead, sir.”
Jury looked out of the window by their booth at the darkening sky. “I’m not so sure.”
“But I thought you said-”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why? Why do you think she’s still alive?”
Jury pulled a dessert menu from the aluminum holder, seemed to concentrate on it, then shoved it back.
“Sir?” Wiggins looked troubled.
“It looks as if whoever did this never planned on asking for a ransom because they never planned on kidnapping Nell. That wasn’t the object. They had to take her.”
“Why couldn’t it be a kidnapping that just went south? The girl died somehow, maybe they threw her in a trunk and she ran out of air. Something like that. She was dead, so of course they didn’t ask for ransom money.”
“Why not?” asked Jury.
“Because Ryder would have demanded some proof she was alive.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It was worth a shot. It’s happened before.”
“It just seems so unlikely, what you say, too dodgy.”
“Life is dodgy.”
Wiggins rolled his eyes. “And you a policeman, sir. You go on evidence.”
Then the waitress was there, setting their plates before them along with two mugs of tea.
Looking at Jury’s fry-up, Wiggins’s thoughts of the vanished girl vanished. “Sir, that food looks lethal.”
Jury grinned. “This coming from a man who’s about to dig into a plate of waffles and sausage? In the nutrition arena, nobody here wins.”
TWENTY-NINE
Even in January, its white fences glazed by the sun, Ryder Stud Farm looked rich and verdant. When it came into view round a curve, the house itself was a startling white. Off to the left was a wide pasture in which horses grazed the cold grass. Jury told Wiggins to stop. He got out and walked over to the fence. In another moment, Wiggins came to stand beside him and they both looked at the horses, two of which peeled away from the others, galloped across the meadow and then ran back again to the others.