The Grave Maurice Read online

  If she once more told him how close he’d come to death, Jury swore he’d hit her. Having been saved by so slight a margin, the unfortunate patient would feel that margin vanish in a moment. “Not out of the woods yet, my lad. So you’d better say an extra prayer tonight.”

  Melrose said, “That’s ridiculous. He’s never looked healthier. It looks as if he’d hardly got shot at all. It’s your brilliant care of him.”

  That put Nurse Bell on the horns of a dilemma. She certainly did not want her role diminished. “Even the best of care can’t guarantee a patient will make it.”

  Jury, Melrose and Wiggins sighed.

  SIX

  Vernon Rice “did” money all right. He had his own investment firm in the City and moved a lot of money around, both for himself and his clients. He liked start-ups; however, he would warn his clients away from volatile-looking ones, but they didn’t always take his advice. It astonished him how reckless people were with their money, how eager to part with it at first sniff of something that looked promising (but probably wasn’t), like hounds on the trail of a fox.

  Vernon’s days (and a lot of his nights) revolved around money. His primary moneymaker was his small investment firm in the City, a “boutique” firm, he supposed it would be called, consisting of himself, his receptionist, Samantha, and his two young assistants, Daphne and Bobby. They watched the daily financials for him, let him know how the market was operating and did some day trading on their own. He had hired both of them more or less off the streets and had never regretted it.

  Daphne had appeared to be disoriented when Vernon came across her one day, standing on the corner of Thread-needle and Old Broad Street, just by the Stock Exchange. What he noticed about her was that she just stood there, not joining the foot traffic that crossed one street or crossed the other. She had dark hair, ringlets poking out from underneath a gray wool cap, which fit her head tightly and had two little gray ears sticking up in front. Her curls, her smooth oval face, wide brown eyes and-of course-the ears, put her, in Vernon’s estimation, at anywhere between twelve and thirty-two.

  Probably she would think he was putting moves on her, but he took the chance, unable to resist both her apparent predicament and the ears on the wool cap. “Pardon me, don’t think I’m trying to pick you up or anything, but you seem to be having, well, a difficult time moving. I mean, more than the usual ‘which-street-is-it-I-want?’ challenge, and more of a ‘what-city-is-this-I’m-in?’ quandary. I thought perhaps I could assist you.” Vernon went on in this fashion, unable to stop explaining both her difficulty and his proffered role in it. Finally, he just wound down while she stood and stared and the foot soldiers coming from London Bridge flowed all over the place, too many of them, or at least T. S. Eliot thought so.

  He even threw T. S. Eliot into the frying pan before he stopped.

  She waited, squinting up at him. Then she said, “You’re finished, are you? You’re done? This is it for you? Through? Ended? Over? Fini? It’s a wrap?”

  He nodded, started to say something and stopped when she held up her hand. “No, it’s the rest of the world’s turn. Around ten miles back you asked me, or I think you asked me, why I didn’t go one way or the other. The answer is: one way is like the other, and I don’t see the point in choosing. So I can’t cross over. It’s some existential turning point. I can’t go either way.”

  “Um.” He wondered if he could say something now. Since she hadn’t pushed him in the way of an oncoming double-decker when he’d made the um sound, he thought perhaps he could. “How about not crossing either street?”

  “How about-?” Again she squinted at him, as if finding him harder to believe than a saint’s vision. “Excuse me, but that’s just what I’ve spent the lunch hour explaining.”

  “No, no. What I mean is, why not just go back?” Vernon looked over his shoulder. “Back along this pavement you’re already on. There’s a coffee bar a few doors back and I’d be happy to buy us an espresso or latte‘.”

  She considered. “I hate those drinks. But I could do with some regular coffee.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They sat at the counter drinking plain coffee, hers with (he counted) five sugars, and Vernon asked Daphne where she lived. “Disneyland?”

  “Clapham. Same thing.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Nowhere. You know that ‘resting between plays’ that actors do? I’m resting between tending bar in the George and clerking at Debenham’s.”

  “Do you know anything about the stock market at all?”

  “Of course. My portfolio’s split fifteen different ways.”

  “Is it the poor-little-matchstick-girl life you lead that makes you so sarcastic?”

  Daphne appeared to like that image; she laughed the way some people sneeze, an ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha that segued into a brief explosion.

  “The reason I ask is that I might be able to use you.”

  “I doubt it.” She drank her coffee and stared at the phony turn-of-the-century signs.

  Vernon ignored this reply. “If you have, say, a head for numbers?” Only, looking at the head with its two little ears, he doubted it.

  She was holding her cup with both hands, frowning slightly. “Actually, I’m good with that. I took a first in maths at university.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oxford.”

  Vernon’s eyebrows shot nearly up to his hairline. “Oxford? You?”

  She turned her head to give him her signature squint. “Do you think I’m dumb just because my cap has ears?”

  Vernon offered her a job on the spot. On the spot, she declined.

  Finally, he talked her around to coming to work for him, aware that she could be a disaster, and she would probably try to sell his shares of British Telecom if the market took a tiny dip. But he found her caustic sense of humor bracing. And he couldn’t resist that damned cap.

  Bobby, now, was a whole different thing.

  Bobby (who might also be anywhere from twelve to thirty-two) ran into him on a skateboard. Bobby said he was “messengering” a document to someone in Vernon’s building. (He held up a manila envelope as if it were proof of legitimacy.) He’d knocked Vernon down in the lobby, given him a hand up and rattled off a stream of apologies. An apology dialectic, you could say, laying the groundwork for future apologies, if need be.

  “You belong to a messenger service that uses skateboards?”

  “No. But my bike got in an accident and I’ll use this until it’s fixed. Don’t tell them.”

  “Me? They could put hot pokers in my eyes and I’d never tell.”

  Then Bobby asked him what firm he worked at. When Vernon told him it was his own investment firm, Bobby asked him to recommend a good hedge fund and what did he think about this new company Sea ’n’ Sand?

  “How do you even know about Sea ’n’ Sand?” This was a brand-new travel business dealing exclusively in cruises and coastal vacations. Why it was becoming so popular Vernon put down to a masterly PR and ad department because it offered nothing new by way of destinations or service.

  Bobby shrugged. “Same way as you do, I guess. I think it’ll tank, myself.”

  And Bobby went on. He pointed out to Vernon that the Dow was really no barometer; it didn’t call any shots. It was too heavy with industrials. “I mean, where’s Yahoo!? Where’s Macintosh? Where’s any of the high techs?” Bobby was a day trader who “always checked the financials. Always.” He paid no attention to financial gurus such as Hortense Stud (her name arming her competitors with endless sobriquets), who, he said, was a Michelin tire with a serious leak.

  While the news in the manila envelope grew whiskers, Bobby talked. He asked Vernon what he thought about SayAgain, a purportedly hot new firm in the cellular war that was marketing phones for the almost-deaf. It was supposed to merge with CallBack-“You know about that, don’t you? Even hush-hush as it is?” Not only did Vernon not know about it, he wished to hell he’d thought of it. D
amn. Bobby said he was going to short the stock if the merger took place because a little down the road Call-Back’s image manipulators were going to have trouble with ads picturing old geezers plying these phones. “Remember,” said Bobby, “Planet Hollywood?” And he set his hand on a downward spiral.

  “Bummer,” said Vernon.

  Bobby, clutching his skateboard and envelope, just went on and on. He was every bit as bad as Vernon on the day Vernon had met Daphne. So Vernon offered him a job on the spot. Unlike Daphne, Bobby accepted on the spot.

  Vernon could easily have supplied each of them with an office, but they insisted on staying together. He called her Daffy; she called him Booby. They argued about everything-penny stocks, IPOs, short selling. Actually, they brawled a lot of the time. So what? Vernon said to Samantha. Let them brawl; they’re brilliant.

  And they, in turn, thought Vernon walked on water. He had saved them from running people down on skateboards and standing indefinitely on street corners.

  Vernon lived alone in a penthouse condo overlooking the Thames with white walls and three fireplaces, filled with angular, streamlined furniture by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and other seriously Swedish or German designers. He had never married. He was thirty-six years old. He did enjoy the company of women, two of them, one named Janet, a good-looking brunette who thought marriage for them was in the cards or the stars. Why she thought this he couldn’t imagine as he had never suggested it and never would. The other woman was a high-class whore named Taffy, whom he actually preferred to Janet, certainly on the sexual front-as well he should, when he was paying five hundred quid for two hours of her time. Taffy looked like her name-smooth and golden-tasted like it, stretched like it. She was inventive (but then, again, for that price, she ought to be).

  Vernon loved his life. He loved coming home to the white walls and slick furniture, the polished floors, the aquarium he had paid thirty thousand pounds to have installed in one wall, flanked by paintings by Pollock and Hockney. His cat oversaw this arrangement. He knew Barney’s seemingly relaxed position-tail encircling torso, paws curled into chest-masked a busy mind trying to work out how he could get in there. He had found Barney wandering along by the river near the Town of Ramsgate pub. Probably the cat remembered better times, when alleys were full of dumps and jellied eels was the plate du jour. He admired cats’ self-sufficiency; they weren’t always barking at him to be let out. Barney’s “out” was the patio, where he could look at the Thames and the night. The patio was utterly glamorous and exotic. There were palm trees and hibiscus and fruit trees. He was not a gardener but he did take very good care of everything and the plants and trees flourished. He bet it was the London rain, which more often was thick mist or drizzle, so that his plants were fanned with water, not beaten with it.

  Janet didn’t like cats; she felt they were sneaky. “On the contrary,” Vernon said, “they’re perfectly open about flouting rules or stealing shrimp from your plate.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Actually, he didn’t. It irritated him to death that she really thought “you-know-what-I-mean” was an answer.

  At this point in his evening return he always made a pitcher of Manhattans if he was feeling really Art Deco, or martinis, if he was feeling like a drink. Now he was finishing stirring their ten-to-oneness. He tapped the stirrer against the pitcher and poured the drink into a stemmed glass to which a paper-thin peel of lemon had been added. He sipped. It was cold and quick, knife-edged.

  In the last couple of weeks, when he drank this home-coming martini he had thought up his new dotcom start-up. He had been to a number of AA meetings, not for his own sake, but to see what they were selling, and for God’s sake, were they ever selling! No wonder this organization was so successful. What they had on offer was: one, salvation; two, friends for you everywhere-in every city, every country on the globe; and three, childhood’s return. At the very least these three things and a whole lot of others. Members probably stopped drinking because they couldn’t fit it in.

  Now, would he give up his two-martini predinner evening to have someone make his decisions? No, he wouldn’t, but a lot of people would. AA offered that, in addition to endless evenings of acceptance, no one trying to punch your clock or do you one better or go for you. And you had Dad back again in the form of a sponsor, an absolutely blood-chilling prospect to Vernon, not because he didn’t want his dad back, but because he didn’t want a sponsor.

  He found it interesting that any alcoholic, if asked What do you want most in the world? would gaily cry, “A drink!” But this was self-delusion, for they wanted something else even more: salvation, Dad, acceptance no matter what-one or all of these things, and Vernon supposed they blended together like Stoly and dry vermouth.

  He was calling his start-up SayWhen.

  Money gave Vernon the same rush he knew Arthur Ryder got out of watching Aqueduct win the Gold Cup at Cheltenham, not once, but twice, the second time carrying twenty-three pounds. Yet he could not get Art to see how the stud fees would quadruple if he incorporated Ryder Stud and made an initial public offering by selling seasons for, say, Beautiful Dreamer and Samarkand. “It would bring in millions, Art.”

  “Vernon, I don’t want millions.”

  Vernon was much too kind to point out that his stepfather had certainly wanted at least one near million two months before.

  “But listen, Art. Look what they did in the U.S. with horses like Seattle Slew. Just for one breeding season they pulled in three quarters of a million. Multiply that by the number of stallion slots for one horse like Aqueduct. Then multiply again by the stallions you have at stud.”

  Arthur continued his round of evening stables, Vernon walking with him. He shook his head and said, “Vernon, this is what you do for a living? Why not just play poker?”

  “Because this is more fun. And I’m trying to help you out, you know. How about foal sharing? That’s getting popular.”

  “Foal sharing? Jesus.” Arthur just shook his head.

  It was true that Vernon wanted to help; he very much wanted to lessen his stepfather’s money concerns. But in addition, of course, it would be fun to trade some of the Ryder Stud horses on the exchange. In the last twenty months, there had been a more compelling motive: Vernon wanted to get Arthur’s mind off Nell, if only for a few moments at a time.

  For he had never seen Arthur Ryder stopped dead in his tracks before. Not even the death of his son Danny had done this-turned him to stone, unable to act. Roger, too, despite the fact he dealt with death every day, and often in the most shocking way, could not work Nell’s disappearance into the equation. The two of them, Arthur and Roger, had stared too long into the same space. Perhaps, Vernon thought, sharing the same space might be some comfort to them.

  Vernon had tried to handle things. “Things” included the bulk of police questioning, at the outset, Arthur and Roger having been unable to answer anything beyond yes, no and possibly. He also hired the best private investigator in London, a man named Leon Stone, known for his chameleonlike ability to melt into the background. Nineteen months before, they were sitting in Vernon’s flat, as Vernon related the story. He told Stone, “It must not be money they want. It’s been nearly a month now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Leon Stone had said. “Ransom might have been the reason originally, and then something happened to change their minds.”

  Vernon leaned forward, toward Stone, who was occupying the deep leather chair on the other side of the glass-and-mahogany coffee table. He said, “So we have to factor into this search all of the circumstances that might have surrounded their change of plans. Bloody hell. That’s impossible.”

  Stone held up his hand. “I should have added that it’s unlikely they changed their minds. If they haven’t asked for money, they probably don’t want money, as you said.” He asked Vernon if there was any reason to believe the little girl’s father or grandfather might be responsible for this.

  Vernon was appalled, p
ossibly because he had thought about it. “You mean could they have staged it? Of course not!”

  “It does happen.” Stone shrugged.

  Over the last year and a half, Leon Stone had been thorough, no question of that. He’d earned his hefty fee. He’d visited every stud farm in Cambridgeshire and others elsewhere. Cambridgeshire, though, was the heart and soul of racing and breeding.

  “Why do you think this villain might have a stud farm?”

  “Proximity, for one reason. Knowledge of Arthur Ryder’s household for another. And for another, it’s possible there might be some bad feeling between Ryder and other owners. Mr. Rice, let’s look at the picture: one or more villains go to Ryder Stud in the night-no, let me change that-they might have been there during the day or sometime in the recent past to take in the situation before acting. Or the person might already have been there in the capacity of an employee-stable lads, exercise boys, trainers. There’s the vet, too. I have a list of those people.

  “Next: let’s go back to the incident. Someone comes to the stables, for what reason we don’t actually know-”

  “You mean the object might not have been Nellie?”

  “It’s possible. The thing is, if the target was the girl, the person must have known Nell’s habit of sleeping in stables if a horse was sick. That would certainly limit the suspects to family, friends and employees, wouldn’t it?

  “That’s one possibility,” Stone continued. “The other is that the villains were there for another reason altogether and Nell got in their way. Because she saw something, and they had to take her with them because she presented a threat.”

  “You think they came for the horse?”

  Leon Stone shrugged again. “That’s also possible. And not necessarily to take the horse, but to do something to the horse or horses. There are extremely valuable stallions there.”