“Delicious looking. Martha’s really outdone herself.”
They ate in silence for a while, savoring the mingling of chocolate and raspberry.
Jury looked up suddenly, holding his fork like a little spear. “Unless-”
“Yes? Unless what-”
Jury shook his head. “Nothing. It’s a bit far-fetched-”
“At Ardry End, you’re in the land of the far-fetched, believe me.”
“I was going to say, it reminds me of the way he died.
Dan Ryder. Thrown from his horse.”
“Hm. Interesting. What about this woman, then? This second wife. Your Cambridge detective-did he fill you in on anything?”
“Simone Ryder. She was here, apparently, to talk to an insurance adjuster.”
“But that accident occurred-when? Over two years ago, didn’t it? She hasn’t collected the insurance yet?”
“No. The thing is, there’s a double indemnity clause in the policy.”
“Ah-ha! Shades of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.”
“What?”
“Surely you’ve seen that classic noir film. Double Indemnity. They murder her husband after taking out insurance with one of those clauses. If the death is caused by accident, pay up twice the face amount.”
Jury looked up from the design he was making in the raspberry sauce with his fork. “Wouldn’t it be a bit difficult for Mrs. Ryder and her boyfriend to kill her husband by means of a fall from a horse?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I imagine you could plot a murder any old way.”
“So, she makes sure the indemnity clause is intact and then Ryder’s wife and her lover somehow orchestrate this riding accident. With the horse’s cooperation. Hm.”
“Then Edward G. Robinson starts smelling something fishy.”
“Edward G. Robinson?”
“He was in charge of claims,” said Melrose. “One of those terrier types who get their teeth into possible fraud and won’t let go.”
“How was Stanwyck’s husband supposed to have died in this film?”
“Train. Fell off the back; that’s when you could go out onto the platform for a smoke on American trains.” Melrose looked at his own cigarette and considered. “Why was she in the Grave Maurice? It isn’t exactly a pub one would seek out. Or a place where a woman like that would choose to meet someone. So I assume it was simply handy, and that would be because she’d been to the hospital, or was going to it. I don’t see how she could have been going to meet Roger Ryder, as he was there when I came in. Left just a moment after.”
“But she wouldn’t have recognized him. I doubt she was carrying a snapshot of the good doctor around. Remember, the Ryders had never met this woman.”
“So they say.”
“So they say, yes.”
They drank their coffee and were silent.
Jury asked, “What sort of racing do they have in Wales? Is there much of it?”
“Point to point. There’s a lot of that. Are you thinking of Dan Ryder’s going there because of this woman Sara Hunt? Point to point is mostly amateur stuff, but certainly professionals ride in it.”
Jury nodded. “I’m thinking of them, yes. Wondering how easily they could have seen each other.”
“You’re convinced she was.”
“Absolutely. You should have seen her reaction when I asked her about him. She had to leave the room.” Jury thought about Sara alone in that magnificent, desolate house in its setting of ruined gardens and broken statuary and felt a kind of longing he could not attach to any particular place in his own experience. Whatever it was, he felt a pull to go back. What seduced him? The woman? The house? The past?
Melrose went on. “From what we know about him, any halfway decent-looking woman who’d admit to so much as an acquaintance with Dan Ryder might as well go whole hog and admit to an affair.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Perhaps she didn’t want to be thought of as one among many.”
“Unless-”
“Unless what? There you go again.”
Jury picked up his fork again and ran the tines through the slightly congealed raspberry confit. “There I go, yes.” He put down the fork. “I think perhaps I need to make another trip to Cardiff tomorrow.”
“Wales again?” Melrose sighed. “That means you’ll have to go to London. I’ll drive you.”
“Thanks.”
FORTY-SIX
Jury felt, when he’d sat down in the same seat he’d occupied on his return trip to London two days ago, that he might have found the answer to time travel, that he really was going back in time, but that to be able to do that was a sentimental fantasy; to want to do it was a failure of nerve, although he could not say expressly how or why. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be getting into one of those dreary discussions with himself that usually ended with part of him irritated and part of him smug and all of him losing.
He wondered about the lad with the CD player and earphones and when the train pulled into the station where the boy had got off, Jury looked for him on the platform. He wanted to repeat the process without knowing why and wondered if it was no more (and no less, of course) than that desire to have the past back again, which plagued him generally.
Yet, in this case, the meeting was not past-or at least not yet-but in the future. But he felt far more ambivalent this time than he had in his previous encounter with Sara Hunt. And he felt the future could be a wrenching disappointment.
Jury lay his head back against the seat and wished for the return of the lad with the earphones and Door Jam.
When she opened the door this time, she seemed more at ease, thinking (Jury supposed) anything bad that might happen would have happened in their first meeting. He wondered why, since the police generally didn’t have to come around twice unless there was a problem.
“I guess I feel flattered that you think I’m worth seeing again.”
“Oh, I think you’re worth seeing many agains.”
“Many agains.” She laughed. “I like that.”
They were standing in the large, square black-and-white marble entryway. She looked, he thought, quite beautiful in her plain skirt and sweater, the skirt long and black, the sweater cropped and a little boxy, a dusty blue, cashmere, probably. Brown eyes, toffee-colored hair, a color you felt you had to touch as well as see to know for certain. He restrained himself.
“I hope I’m not being too intrusive.”
“In seeing me? Lord, no, you can imagine the number of visitors I get out here.”
He smiled. “Actually, I can’t.”
“My point exactly.” She hung his coat on the coatrack. They walked into the living room, grown no warmer in its outer reaches than before. A pool of warmth collected around the chairs and sofa in front of the fireplace, some invisible boundary around them.
“You’re timing’s perfect. I’ve just made tea.”
As he had on the train, he sat again in the chair he had sat in last time and she sat again on the sofa. While she poured the tea, his eye canvassed the room, took in its feeling of emptiness largely owing to the sparse furnishings and the huge cast-iron Gothic window, cheated again of light by the tree outside.
“It’s so large and so isolated,” he said, “you must get lonely at times.” Yes, that was properly banal.
Perhaps because of the banality, her look was a little condescending. Probably, he deserved it. “I don’t think loneliness has much to do with size and isolation, really.”
“Then what?”
“Oh, please, Superintendent. Not again. You’re baiting me.”
This surprised him, for he hadn’t been. He was saving his baiting for later. At the moment, he was perfectly serious. “Why would I do that?”