Jury closed his eyes and tried to put himself in Sara’s place vis-a‘-vis Dan Ryder. If reports were true, Dan Ryder had as much charisma as the Thoroughbreds he rode: all the glamor of a Samarkand, all the cunning of a Criminal Type.
The needle stuck. The record replayed that thought: Criminal Type. The needle stayed in that mental groove for a moment and then let it go. He could not build upon it to flesh out the man.
Another little galvanic burst of music came from the headphones as the boy dropped them on the table and left his seat to hip-hop down the aisle, still hearing the music in his head. The music rattled in the headphones enough to move them, although that was probably a movement of the train’s making the headset inch across the table.
And now the lad was back and clamping the headset on.
Oblivion. A kind of oblivion, thought Jury, and who was he to deny someone else his road to oblivion to transport him to a better world or connect him with this one? Yet this one Jury thought to be infinitely superior to the one we imagine, imagination being full of such flashiness that we mistake it for light and color. There was far more flash than genius in our imagined worlds.
When the train finally approached the edge of London and slowed on the outskirts, the boy rose, his trip apparently over.
“Hey, man,” said Jury, not at all sure that this word was still in the teenage lexicon. When the boy turned toward him, surprised, Jury said, “I like your music.”
The lad smiled, seeming pleased to get a compliment out of some middle-aged stiff, something he wasn’t used to. “You like Door Jam?”
Jury nodded. “The best.”
“Cool!” the boy said, slapping his hand against Jury’s palm in that handshake that always looked like a prelude to arm wrestling.
“Way cool,” said Jury.
FORTY
“Of course you can do it,” Nell said, sitting atop her mare. “Of course you can. That’s Aqueduct you’re up on, remember?”
Vernon remembered. Aqueduct took no prisoners. He was mounted on the horse now, feeling less and less in command of the situation. “He’s got my number. Look at the way he’s turning his head and leering.”
True, the horse was turning his head and trying to look at Vernon.
“I don’t remember you being so diffident around horses.”
“ ‘Diffident’-good word. Better than ‘coward.’ ”
Aqueduct was shaking himself as if Vernon were a big, annoying fly. “He’s trying to get me off, just wait…”
Nell laughed; her horse whinnied. The whinny sounded amazingly like laughter.
“Anyway, the weight’s off. You should be giving me another ten or twelve pounds, at least.” As if Aqueduct actually needed it.
“I don’t have any weights. Don’t be such a stickler.”
She was moving back, positioning her horse to face the first wall, which was quite low. “Come on, starting gate.”
“Hold it, hold it. You said we weren’t jumping!”
“I lied. Vern, you’re a very good rider. Remember when we used to chase anything that moved around the pasture? Rabbits, foxes?”
Remember? Could he have forgotten? There had come to him, over the last two years, a recurrent dream that Nell had been up on Samarkand, a talented horse, but no ’chaser, about to jump Hadrian’s walls. She had taken the first three with perfect grace, but the horse had shied at the fourth. At that point, as if this were a flat race, the flag had dropped and when it was raised, the horse was cropping grass between the walls and Nell had disappeared.
Vernon-and it would have surprised anyone who knew him-was superstitious. He believed in portents and prophecies, although he hated to admit it. And this dream had come out of Nell’s disappearance. Only, he had dreamed it again just last night. The flag was dropped and she was gone. What worried Vernon was that he was the person with the flag. It was absurd for him to think that her disappearance had been somehow his fault. But he had set in motion a thought that plagued him. It was clear what it stemmed from: he was thirty-six and she was seventeen. All the same-
“That horse is no jumper, Nellie.”
She flicked Lili’s reins and turned the mare aside, saying, “Well, I admit we’ve been practicing a little.”
Aqueduct jerked the reins and turned in a circle.
“Cut it out!” said Vernon, who’d never ridden the horse before. “What in hell’s he doing?”
Nell laughed. “He’s a ’chaser, Vern. He wants to jump. With or without you, he’s going over that wall.”
“Hell. Okay, okay.”
He positioned himself beside her, both horses about forty feet from the first low wall. They flicked their reins and galloped toward it. Vernon was paying more attention to Nell’s horse than to his own, now sailing over the wall. Aqueduct didn’t need him to do it.
Lili did need Nell, though. Nell’s hands, legs, tongue. Vernon had never seen the horse she couldn’t get something out of. The horse made a graceful slide over the wall, though not with many inches to spare.
“Keep going!” yelled Nell.
Aqueduct seemed to want to keep Nell in view and slowed a little, but his what-the-hell? instincts sped him up again. It certainly wasn’t Vernon’s guidance that had the horse leaping four feet above the ground and sailing over the second wall. Vernon reined him in, thinking it was obvious Aqueduct had only just gotten started and aimed like an arrow at the third, even higher wall.
“Come on, Vern. You can do it. You’re on Aqueduct,” she yelled, coming up on the third wall.
“You can do it, you mean. You’ve done it!”
“Of course I haven’t. Where’d you get that-oh, you mean my vanishing act over Hadrian’s walls? You don’t think my kidnapper would trust me with the reins, do you?”
“I thought that might have been one reason he took you. Because you’re such a good horsewoman.”
She smiled. “Thanks very much, but I have a lot of trouble with a couple of those walls.”
“Then he must have been good.”
“I expect he was.” Nell thought for a moment. “He might have been a jockey.” She closed her eyes. “He felt like the right size for it. I think sometimes I could recognize everything by touch.” Her eyes opened. “Don’t you?”
Vernon glanced at her and bent to rub Aqueduct’s neck. He thought for a moment, then asked, “Do you have a cell phone? I forgot mine.” First time in his life, probably.
“Vern, do I look as if I had a cell phone?”
Still up on Aqueduct, Vernon craned his neck, looking around as if he expected to find a public call box on the land.
Nell asked, “Why? Who are you so eager to call?”
“Richard Jury.” He ran his thumb across his bottom lip, abstracted.
“Who’s Richard Jury?”
“Sorry, I meant to tell you about him. He’s a detective, a superintendent, Scotland Yard.”
“That’s pretty high up, isn’t it? For him to be taking an interest in where I am? I mean, especially after all this time?”
“It’s not official; I mean, he’s not doing it in any official capacity. He was in hospital and your dad’s patient. Roger talked about you-well, seeing who he was, I can understand.” He looked around again. “Look, I’d like to get back to London-”