“Okay.”
“Keep watch, baby,” Vernon said, squeezing Bobby’s shoulder. Daphne’s mouth was hanging open, as it often was when she was watching the screen. “Babies, I mean,” said Vernon.
FIFTY
“You could just have called Cambridge police, couldn’t you? There’s no real need for you to go there.” Wiggins was driving.
“Watch the road, will you? We nearly cut that lorry off. Listen: ever since I got in the way of a bullet, you’ve been telling me what I need, what I should or shouldn’t do, where I should or shouldn’t go. I wish you’d stop it.”
Wiggins spoke carefully, as if he were trying to calm a bad-tempered child. “I’m only concerned for your health, that’s all.”
He was negotiating a roundabout, and none too happily. In front of them was a Cortina that appeared to have no driver. No, Jury saw a blur of gray above the driver’s seat.
“Why do they let people like that out on the roads? It’s every bit as dangerous as speeding. Look-he can’t be going more than twenty miles an hour.” Wiggins leaned on his horn and the old car lurched, nearly stopped, then sputtered on. “He must be driving in sixth gear.”
As this diatribe continued, Jury said, “It’s Cambridge, Wiggins, not the tenth circle of hell.”
“It’s not much use,” said DS Styles, “trying to question her. Her solicitor told her not to say a word without him being there.”
“I didn’t think she would, Sergeant, certainly not anything that has to do with the charges against her. She might not answer, but I can still ask.”
“Suit yourself, but I say it’s a waste of time.”
Jury knew what he was really saying was that detectives from the Yard had no business being here. But since Jury was a personal friend of the DCI in charge of the case, then they’d probably do what he wanted. “I’m not really trying to interfere with your investigation; the case is yours; I know that.” This suggestion of amelioration at least got Styles’s hackles down. “I only want to talk to her for a few minutes.”
“Suit yourself,” DS Styles said again.
When Valerie Hobbs was led into the interview room, Jury was sitting at a table in one of the four institutional-looking gray metal chairs. Jury rose only a few inches from his chair and nodded at the WPC who brought her in and who then left. He judged Valerie Hobbs to be five two or three. He had not raised himself to his full height because he would have towered over her and he believed that might intimidate her.
He watched some response flicker in the light brown eyes. Her hair was not only bright, but silky, or rather the silkiness was what made it shine. She had a slightly cleft chin, a well-molded nose and a mouth that curved upward at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling, which she certainly wasn’t now. Still, some of the hardness left her face when she looked at Jury, who introduced himself.
She locked her arms across her chest. “What’s Scotland Yard got to do with this? Is it because it’s a kidnapping? Which I’m innocent of, incidentally. I’d like a cigarette, if you have some.”
He did. Although he’d stopped smoking-oh, baleful day!-he’d stopped in a newsagent’s and got a pack of Silk Cuts. He put the pack on the table. “You can have the lot.” She inched one from the pack and he lit a match. As she inhaled and exhaled with closed eyes, he knew full well the rush one of those could give after you’d been deprived for any time at all.
She said it again: “I didn’t abduct the girl.” Her voice hit the scale at some point between raspy and sexy. For a woman who’d refused to talk, Valerie Hobbs was doing a pretty fair job of it.
“But you know who did.”
She smoked in great long draws on her cigarette. “No, I don’t.”
“But someone had to bring her to your place. You say you didn’t, then-?” With a questioning but good-natured frown, he dipped his head to see her face, which was turned down.
“I wasn’t there.”
This was such a weak rejoinder he wondered how she could offer it. Jury let that rest for a moment and said, “You came to know the girl, Nell, quite well.”
“Not so very.”
“She was at your farm for nearly two years.”
“With someone like that, it could’ve been twenty and you still wouldn’t know her.” Her expression was one of self-satisfaction. It pleased her to frustrate his line of questioning.
But Jury wasn’t bothered by the answer; he was only a little surprised she could have assessed Nell in this way. “Someone like that? How was she different?”
Valerie actually thought for a moment, as if it were important to get it right. “Determined, kind of aimed, I guess you’d say.”
Jury sat back. That was interesting. “ ‘Aimed’? I’m not sure what you mean.”
She took another long draw on the cigarette, slowly exhaled. “Like an arrow. Her attention would be on only one thing, say.” She shrugged.
Jury waited a beat. “Why do you think she didn’t try to run away long before she did? Apparently, she had a fair amount of freedom.”
Valerie inspected a finger with chipped nail polish. “Those horses, I expect. I admit I did threaten to kill her own horse if she tried anything. Well, look at the bargain she drove after they brought me in: if I’d release the mares, then she’d testify on my behalf. I’ll say this for her, she doesn’t hold a grudge.”
Jury could hardly keep from laughing at that way of putting it. Twenty months of captivity turned simply to a grudge. “No, I can see she doesn’t. Either that or her forced imprisonment didn’t mean all that much to her.”
“That’s kind of funny, right? She’d been abducted and didn’t care? Oh, she did at first, hammering on her door and yelling to be let out. But then she just stopped, as if she knew it wasn’t smart. That girl was very smart. I could appreciate that, I’ll tell you.”
Jury’s look was intense. “I’m surprised she was allowed to live, frankly. She was a constant threat to you, and as it happened, you were charged with conspiracy.” He leaned closer to her across the table. “Valerie, you know what’s going to happen to you if you don’t cut a deal with the prosecution.”
“No, I don’t. She’s not testifying against me. She said she wouldn’t and I know that girl. You can’t flip her.”
In fresh astonishment, Jury sat back. That Nell Ryder had convinced this woman who’d held her captive for twenty months that she, Nell, would defend Valerie Hobbs was a feat of persuasion that even Vernon Rice would marvel at. It was all the more marvelous in that Valerie Hobbs read Nell correctly.
“Her testimony will probably reduce the sentence, but you’re still looking at prison, Valerie.”
She had fingered another cigarette from the pack and Jury cupped a match to light it. This time, as she leaned toward the flame, she touched his fingers, then looked at him through the smoke.
“The jury isn’t going to look kindly on the treatment of those horses. The animal-rights people will have a field day. You won’t be popular, to say the least.”
She kept shaking her head as he was saying this. “That won’t come into it; my solicitor says it’d bias the jury against me and it’s nothing to do with the abduction. Anyway, there’s nothing illegal about keeping those mares and even if that did come into it, we can just flood the court-room with photographs of these huge horse farms in Manitoba that make mine look like nothing at all. Compared to what goes on in some of them, mine would be a stay at the Dorchester. Anyway, it’s not down to me; I’m just paid to take care of them.”