For some reason, this seemed to dig at Danny more than anything. “You think I don’t take chances in a race?”
“Of course you do, you have to. But that’s not what I mean. You know every hoofbeat pounding around that course; you know exactly what your horse is doing and can do and will do. Horses are what you don’t take chances with. Your women are chance women, met by chance, bedded by chance and maybe even married by chance.” He was looking straight at Danny, but Jury detected Sara stirring from her gloomy dream. Quickly she moved toward Jury and dashed the rest of her whiskey in his face.
Danny laughed as he put the gun back on the table.
Sara’s face was splotchy with fury.
Jury pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face. “Shame to waste it.”
Danny laughed again. She looked daggers at him. “How can you let him go on that way? Maybe to you all this is bloody funny, but not to me!” In a second she’d put her hand on the gun, pulled it from the table and pointed it at Jury.
“No,” said Jury, “I can see it’s not funny to you at all.”
Danny threw up his hands. “Easy, love. He’s having you on; he’s doing it on purpose; he wants to get you riled, girl; he might learn something.”
Which he had.
“You,” he said to Sara, “on the other hand, might just shoot me. You’re more likely to do it than Danny, certainly. Because you are anything but emotionally lazy. Your emotions are incendiary.”
The room fell quiet. “How did you get Simone to the Ryder stables?”
Danny looked at her, eyebrows raised in what Jury took to be genuine surprise. “Sara? What the hell-?”
Her expression didn’t so much change as resettle into that look she had just turned on Danny, now leveled at Jury. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jury didn’t bother speaking to that denial. He said, “It could have been Valerie Hobbs who shot Simone-even more likely since she’s so close to the Ryder farm-but I don’t think Ms. Hobbs is murderously jealous. Just jealous. No one thought-no one would have-that the murder of his wife had to do with Danny himself because Danny was dead. But you traveled all the way from here to Cambridgeshire to kill her. I can’t get that part of it right in my mind. You didn’t know her; it’s a puzzle as to how you might have done all of this.”
Danny appeared more fascinated than anything else. He got up and took the gun from Sara’s hand.
Jury went on talking. “Did you even know his wife was here? Did he even tell you it was Simone who was collecting the insurance money? Anyway, it would be a total waste of time to shoot me because I couldn’t prove a thing.” He looked from one to the other, then reached over and slid his photos together and took them from the table.
“Too bad about the insurance money, Danny, too bad Simone didn’t live to collect it. But I wonder if not getting it is better than getting it, after all. You could never have reentered the only life that means anything to you. Is it so great a hurdle-the racing commission, the Jockey Club? You’re clever; you could surely concoct some story about Simone’s having the idea in the first place, that you were driven into exile… whatever. After all, she alone talked to the insurance adjusters. But I really can’t imagine you never racing again. No, I can’t imagine that.”
At the sound of an approaching car, tires on gravel, they all looked toward the front window.
“Never mind about that,” said Jury. “It isn’t the police; that’s just my cab. I told him to come back in an hour’s time.” Jury tucked the pictures into his pocket and rose. “Well, I’m off. I’ll leave you two to sort it.”
FIFTY-FIVE
“Wales?” said an astonished Melrose Plant before Jury had shed his coat and Ruthven had taken it. “Actually, it is part of the UK, if I remember correctly.” Melrose shrugged as if he would need more convincing than that.
Mindy preceded them into the drawing room, where she collapsed in front of the fire.
“Three times?” said Melrose.
Jury answered this indirectly. “Does it surprise you that Dan Ryder didn’t die in that racecourse accident?”
Melrose’s eyebrows shot up. “My Lord! You mean you saw him?”
“I did. I had an idea that Dan might still be alive.”
“What made you think that?”
“A couple of things: one was that anecdote Diane told us at the pub. The one about the jockey saying he’d like to come back not on but as that great American horse-what was his name?”
“Spectacular Bid.”
“It simply put a question into my mind, this ‘resurrection’ of a jockey, if it was possible that Ryder wasn’t dead. You see, I simply couldn’t imagine what would get Maurice to get Nell out to Aqueduct’s stall. Who on earth could talk him into it but the one person he cared more about than even Nell?”
“His father. I see what you mean.”
“But he wasn’t the person who abducted her.”
“If not Dan Ryder-? I don’t get it; Maurice wouldn’t have done it for anyone else, as you say.”
Jury shook his head. “It beats me. The only thing I can come up with is that somebody convinced Maurice he was acting for his father.”
Melrose leaned over and scratched Mindy’s head. “I must say I’m curious as to how Ryder managed to fake his own death in a race.”
“He didn’t manage it. The jockey riding that horse wasn’t Dan Ryder. He was supposed to be, but wasn’t.” Jury told him the rest. “It wouldn’t have worked, of course, if Simone Ryder hadn’t immediately identified the body as Dan’s.”
Melrose frowned. “That must have taken some extremely quick thinking.”
“Yes, it would. Now, where Maurice fits into all of this, I’m not sure. According to Danny, he didn’t ask Maurice for anything. He’s had no contact with him.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
“That Maurice is dead? No. I left it to her to do that.”
“You believe that he wasn’t in contact with Maurice?”
“Yes. As I said, another person must have used his father to get Maurice to help.”
“Hm.” Melrose leaned back. He was about to speak when Ruthven entered the room.
“I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you should know that Mr. Bramwell is back.”
“What?” Melrose was out of his chair like a shot. “Where?”
“Why, in the hermitage, sir. He’s asked for some beef tea.”
Was that, Jury wondered, a smirk playing around Ruthven’s lips?
“Beef tea?”
“Yes, m’lord. He claims to have contracted a bad cold at Mr. Browne’s establishment.”
“Good Lord. Come on, Richard!” Melrose flung out an arm as if he’d yank Jury from his chair. “We’ll beef tea him!”
The hermitage, as if welcoming the hunter home from the hills, had a nice little fire going in the cast-iron stove.
Mr. Bramwell was holding his hands out to it as if fire were his prime source of comfort. He did not wait for Melrose to open his mouth before he opened his own.
“That book place you sent me to weren’t properly heated. I tol’ him to build a fire, but yea know ’im, tight as a tic, that ’un. It’s gone and got me all chesty.” Here, Bramwell demonstrated by beating a fist against his chest and hacking away.
“Properly heated? My God, man, at least you were inside!”
“Felt like ruddy outside t’me. And would your Mr. Browne bring me so much as a cuppa? Ha!”
Melrose put his face as close to Bramwell’s as he dared without catching a few things and said, “Mr. Bramwell, think: Theo Wrenn Browne wasn’t in your employ; you were in his.”