Come to Grief

Chapter 4

On the Monday after the Derby, I trailed off on the one-day dig into the overblown reference and, without talking to the lady-employer herself (which would clearly have been counterproductive), I uncovered enough to phone the tight-fisted trainer with sound advice.

‘She wants to get rid of him without risk of being accused of unfair dismissal,’ I said. ‘He steals small things from her house which pass through a couple of hands and turn up in the local antique shop. She can’t prove they were hers. The antique shop owner is whining about his innocence. The lady has apparently said she won’t try to prosecute her houseman if he gets the heck out. Her testimonial is part of the bargain. The houseman is a regular in the local betting shop, and gambles heavily on horses. Do you want to employ him?’

‘Like hell.’

‘The report I’ll write and send to you,’ I told him, ‘will say only, “Work done on recruitment of staff.” You can claim tax relief on it.’

He laughed dryly: ‘Anytime you want a reference,’ he said, pleased, ‘I’ll write you an affidavit.’

‘You never know,’ I said, ‘and thanks.’

I had phoned the report from the car park of a motorway service station on my way home late in the dusky evening, but it was when I reached Pont Square that the day grew doubly dark. There was a two-page fax waiting on my machine and I read it standing in the sitting room with all thoughts of a friendly glass of scotch evaporating into disbelief and the onset of misery.

The pages were from Kevin Mills. ‘I don’t know why you want this list of the great and good,’ he wrote, ‘but for what it’s worth and because I promised, here is a list of the guests entertained by Topline Foods at lunch at Aintree on the day before the Grand National.’

The list contained the name of the angry Lancashire farmer, as was expected, but it was the top of the list that did the psychological damage.

‘Guest of Honor,’ it announced, ‘Ellis Quint.’

All the doubts I’d banished came roaring back with double vigor. Back too came self-ridicule and every defense mechanism under the sun.

I couldn’t, didn’t, couldn’t believe that Ellis could maim — and effectively kill — a child’s pony and three young racehorses. Not Ellis! No! It was impossible.

There had to be dozens of other people who could have learned where to find all four of those vulnerable, unguarded animals. It was stupid to give any weight to an unreliable coincidence. All the same, I pulled my box chart out of a drawer, and in very small letters, as if in that way I could physically diminish the implication, I wrote in each ‘Who knew of victim’s availability’ space the unthinkable words, Ellis Quint.

The ‘motive’ boxes had also remained empty. There was no apparent rational motive. Why did people poke out the eyes of ponies? Why did they stalk strangers and write poison-pen letters? Why did. they torture and kill children and tape-record their screams?

I wrote ‘self-gratification,’ but it seemed too weak. Insanity? Psychosis? The irresistible primordial upsurge of a hunger for pointless, violent destruction?

It didn’t fit the Ellis I knew. Not the man I’d raced against and laughed with and had deemed a close friend for years. One couldn’t know someone that well, and yet not know them at all.

Could one?

No.

Relentless thoughts kept me awake all night, and in the morning I sent Linda Ferns’ check back to her, uncashed.

‘I’ve got no further,’ I wrote. ‘I’m exceedingly sorry.’

Two days later the same check returned.

‘Dear Sid,’ Linda replied, ‘Keep the money. I know you’ll find the thugs one day. I don’t know what you said to Rachel but she’s much happier and she hasn’t had any bad dreams since you came last week. For that alone I would pay you double. Affectionately, Linda Ferns.’

I put the check in a pending file, caught up with paperwork and attended my usual judo training session.

The judo I practiced was the subtle art of self-defense, the shifting of balance that used an attacker’s own momentum to overcome him. Judo was rhythm, leverage and speed; a matter sometimes of applying pressure to nerves and always, in the way I learned, a quiet discipline. The yells and the kicks of karate, the arms slapped down on the padded mat to emphasize aggression, they were neither in my nature nor what I needed. I didn’t seek physical domination. I didn’t by choice start fights. With the built-in drawbacks of half an arm, a light frame and a height of about five feet seven, my overall requirement was survival.

I went through the routines absentmindedly. They were at best a mental crutch. A great many dangers couldn’t be wiped out by an ability to throw an assailant over one’s shoulder.

Ellis wouldn’t leave my thoughts.

I was wrong. Of course I was wrong.

His face was universally known. He wouldn’t risk being seen sneaking around fields at night armed with anything like a machete.

But he was bored with celebrity. Fame was no substitute for danger, he’d said. Everything he had was not enough.

All the same… he couldn’t.

In the second week after the Derby I went to the four days of the Royal Ascot meeting, drifting around in a morning suit, admiring the gleaming coats of the horses and the women’s extravagant hats. I should have enjoyed it, as I usually did. Instead, I felt as if the whole thing were a charade taking illusory place over an abyss.

Ellis, of course, was there every day: and, of course, he sought me out.

‘How’s it going, Hotline?’

‘The Hotline is silent.’

‘There you are, then,’ Ellis said with friendly irony, ‘you’ve frightened your foot merchant off.’

‘Forever, I hope.’

‘What if he can’t help it?’ Ellis said.

I turned my head: looked at his eyes. ‘I’ll catch him,’ I said.

He smiled and looked away. ‘Everyone knows you’re a whiz at that sort of thing, but I’ll bet you—’

‘Don’t,’ I interrupted. ‘Don’t bet on it. It’s bad luck.’

Someone came up to his other elbow, claiming his attention. He patted my shoulder, said with the usual affection, ‘See you, Sid,’ and was drawn away; and I couldn’t believe, I couldn’t, that he had told me why, even if not how.

‘What if he can’t help it?’

Could compulsion lead to cruel, senseless acts?

No…

Yes, it could, and yes, it often did.

But not in Ellis. No, not in Ellis.

Alibis, I thought, seeking for a rational way out. I would find out — somehow — exactly where Ellis had been on the nights the horses had been attacked. I would prove to my own satisfaction that it couldn’t have been Ellis, and I would return with relief to the beginning and admit I had no pointers at all and would never find the thugs for Linda, and would quite happily chalk up a failure.

At five-thirty in the morning on the day after the Ascot Gold Cup, I sleepily awoke and answered my ringing telephone to hear a high agitated female voice saying, ‘I want to reach Sid Halley.’

‘You have,’ I said, pushing myself up to sitting and squinting at the clock.

‘What?’

‘You are talking to Sid Halley.’ I stifled a yawn. Five-bloody-thirty.

‘But I phoned The Pump and asked for the Hotline!’

I said patiently, ‘They re-route the Hotline calls direct to me. This is Sid Halley you’re talking to. How can I help you?’

‘Christ,’ she said, sounding totally disorganized. ‘We have a colt with a foot off.’

After a breath-catching second I said, ‘Where are you?’

‘At home. Oh, I see, Berkshire.’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘Combe Bassett, south of Hungerford.’

‘And… um…’ I thought of asking, ‘What’s the state of play?’ and discarded it as less than tactful. ‘What is… happening?’

‘We’re all up. Everyone’s yelling and crying.’

‘And the vet?’

‘I just phoned him. He’s coming.’

‘And the police?’

‘They’re sending someone. Then we decided we’d better call you.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ll come now, if you like.’

‘That’s why I phoned you.’

‘What’s your name, then? Address?’

She gave them — ‘Betty Bracken, Manor House, Combe Bassett’ — stumbling on the words as if she couldn’t remember.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘ask the vet not to send the colt or his foot off to the knackers until I get there.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said jerkily. ‘For God’s sakes, why? Why our colt?’

‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ I said.

What if he can’t help it…

But it took such planning. Such stealth. So many crazy risks. Someone, sometime, would see him.

Let it not be Ellis, I thought. Let the compulsion be some other poor bastard’s ravening subconscious. Ellis would be able to control such a vicious appetite, even if he felt it.

Let it not be Ellis.

Whoever it was, he had to be stopped: and I would stop him, if I could.

I shaved in the car (a Mercedes), clasping the battery-driven razor in the battery-driven hand, and I covered the eighty miles to southwest Berkshire in a time down the comparatively empty M4 that had the speedometer needle quivering where it had seldom been before. The radar speed traps slept. Just as well.

It was a lovely high June morning, fine and fresh. I curled through the gates of Combe Bassett Manor, cruised to a stop in the drive and at six-thirty walked into a house where open doors led to movement, loud voices and a general gnashing of teeth.

The woman who’d phoned rushed over when she saw me, her hands flapping in the air, her whole demeanor in an out-of-control state of fluster.

‘Sid Halley? Thank God. Punch some sense into this lot.’

This lot consisted of two uniformed policemen and a crowd of what later proved to be family members, neighbors, ramblers and half a dozen dogs.

‘Where’s the colt?’ I asked. ‘And where’s his foot?’

‘Out in the field. The vet’s there. I told him what you wanted but he’s an opinionated Scot. God knows if he’ll wait, he’s a cantankerous old devil. He—’

‘Show me where,’ I said abruptly, cutting into the flow.

She blinked. ‘What? Oh, yes. This way.’

She set off fast, leading me through big-house, unevenly painted hinterland passages reminiscent of those of Aynsford, of those of any house built with servants in mind. We passed a gun room, flower room and mud room (ranks of green wellies) and emerged at last through a rear door into a yard inhabited by trash cans. From there, through a green wooden garden door, she led the way fast down a hedge-bordered grass path and through a metal-railing gate at the far end of it. I’d begun to think we were off to limbo when suddenly, there before us, was a lane full of vehicles and about ten people leaning on paddock fencing.

My guide was tall, thin, fluttery, at a guess about fifty, dressed in old cord trousers and a drab olive sweater. Her graying hair flopped, unbrushed, over a high forehead. She had been, and still was, beyond caring how she looked, but I had a powerful impression that she was a woman to whom looks mattered little anyway.

She was deferred to. The men leaning on the paddock rails straightened and all but touched their forelocks. ‘Morning, Mrs Bracken.’

She nodded automatically and ushered me through the wide metal gate that one of the men swung open for her.

Inside the field, at a distance of perhaps thirty paces, stood two more men, also a masculine-looking woman and a passive colt with three feet. All, except the colt, showed the facial and body language of impatience.

One of the men, tall, white-haired, wearing black-rimmed glasses, took two steps forward to meet us.

‘Now, Mrs Bracken, I’ve done what you asked, but it’s past time to put your poor boy out of his misery. And you’ll be Sid Halley, I suppose,’ he said, peering down as from a mountaintop. ‘There’s little you can do.’ He shook hands briefly as if it were a custom he disapproved of.

He had a strong Scottish accent and the manner of one accustomed to command. The man behind him, unremarkably built, self-effacing in manner, remained throughout a silent watcher on the fringe.

I walked over to the colt and found him wearing a head collar, with a rope halter held familiarly by the woman. The young horse watched me with calm, bright eyes, unafraid. I stroked my hand down his nose, talking to him quietly. He moved his head upward against the pressure and down again as if nodding, saying hello. I let him whiffle his black lips across my knuckles. I stroked his neck and patted him. His skin was dry: no pain, no fear, no distress.

‘Is he drugged?’ I asked.

‘I’d have to run a blood test,’ the Scotsman said.

‘Which you are doing, of course?’

‘Of course.’

One could tell from the faces of the other man and the woman that no blood test had so far been considered.

I moved around the colt’s head and squatted down for a close look at his off-fore, running my hand down the back of his leg, feeling only a soft area of no resistance where normally there would be the tough bowstring tautness of the leg’s main tendon. Pathetically, the fetlock was tidy, not bleeding. I bent up the colt’s knee and looked at the severed end. It had been done neatly, sliced through, unsplintered ends of bone showing white, the skin cleanly cut as if a practiced chef had used a dis jointing knife.

The colt jerked his knee, freeing himself from my grasp.

I stood up.

‘Well?’ the Scotsman challenged.

‘Where’s his foot?’

‘Over yon, out of sight behind the water trough.’ He paused, then, as I turned away from him, suddenly added, ‘It wasn’t found there. I put it there, out of sight. It was they ramblers that came to it first.’

‘Ramblers?’

‘Aye.’

Mrs Bracken, who had joined us, explained. ‘One Saturday every year in June, all the local rambling clubs turn out in force to walk the footpaths in this part of the country, to keep them legally open for the public.’

‘If they’d stay on the footpaths,’ the Scot said forbiddingly, ‘they’d be within their rights.’

Mrs Bracken agreed. ‘They bring their children and their dogs and their picnics, and act as if they own the place.’

‘But… what on earth time did they find your colt’s foot?’

‘They set off soon after dawn,’ Mrs Bracken observed morosely. ‘In the middle of June, that’s four-thirty in the morning, more or less. They gather before five o’clock, while it is still cool, and set off across my land first, and they were hammering on my door by five-fifteen. Three of the children were in full-blown hysteria, and a man with a beard and a pony-tail was screaming that he blamed the elite. What elite? One of the ramblers phoned the press and then someone fanatical in animal rights, and a carload of activists arrived with ‘ban horse racing’ banners.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I despair,’ she said. ‘It’s bad enough losing my glorious colt. These people are turning it into a circus.’

Hold on to the real tragedy at the heart of the farce, I thought briefly, and walked over to the water trough to look at the foot that lay behind it. There were horse-feed nuts scattered everywhere around. Without expecting much emotion, I bent and picked the foot up.

I hadn’t seen the other severed feet. I’d actually thought some of the reported reactions excessive. But the reality of that poor, unexpected, curiously lonely lump of bone, gristle and torn ends of blood vessels, that wasted miracle of anatomical elegance, moved me close to the fury and grief of all the owners.

There was a shoe on the hoof; the sort of small, light shoe fitted to youngsters to protect their forefeet out in the field. There were ten small nails tacking the shoe to the hoof. The presence of the shoe brought its own powerful message: civilization had offered care to the colt’s foot. barbarity had hacked it off.

I’d loved horses always: it was hard to explain the intimacy that grew between horses and those who tended or rode them. Horses lived in a parallel world, spoke a parallel language, were a mass of instincts, lacked human perceptions of kindness or guilt, and allowed a merging on an untamed, untamable mysterious level of spirit. The Great God Pan lived in racehorses. One cut off his foot at one’s peril.

On a more prosaic level I put the hoof back on the ground, unclipped the mobile phone I wore on my belt and, consulting a small diary/notebook for the number, connected myself to a veterinary friend who worked as a surgeon in an equine hospital in Lambourn.

‘Bill?’ I said. ‘This is Sid Halley.’

‘Go to sleep,’ he said.

‘Wake up. It’s six-fifty and I’m in Berkshire with the severed off-fore hoof of a two-year-old colt.’

‘Jesus.’ He woke up fast.

‘I want you to look at it. What do you advise?’

‘How long has it been off? Any chance of sewing it back on?’

‘It’s been off at least three hours, I’d say. Probably more. There’s no sign of the Achilles tendon. It’s contracted up inside the leg. The amputation is through the fetlock joint itself.’

‘One blow, like the others?’

I hesitated. ‘I didn’t see the others.’

‘But something’s worrying you?’

‘I want you to look at it,’ I said.

Bill Ruskin and I had worked on other, earlier puzzles, and got along together in a trusting, undemanding friendship that remained unaltered by periods of non-contact.

‘What shape is the colt in, generally?’ he asked.

‘Quiet. No visible pain.’

‘Is the owner rich?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘See if he’ll have the colt — and his foot, of course — shipped over here.’

‘She,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask her.’

Mrs Bracken gaped at me mesmerized when I relayed the suggestion, and said ‘Yes’ faintly.

Bill said, ‘Find a sterile surgical dressing for the leg. Wrap the foot in another dressing and a plastic bag and pack it in a bucket of ice cubes. Is it clean?’

‘Some early-morning ramblers found it.’

He groaned. ‘I’ll send a horse ambulance,’ he said. ‘Where to?’

I explained where I was, and added, ‘There’s a Scots vet here that’s urging to put the colt down at once. Use honey-tongued diplomacy.’

‘Put him on.’

I returned to where the colt still stood and, explaining who he would be talking to, handed my phone to the vet. The Scot scowled. Mrs Bracken said, ‘Anything, anything,’ over and over again. Bill talked.

‘Very well,’ the Scot said frostily, finally, ‘but you do understand, don’t you, Mrs Bracken, that the colt won’t be able to race, even if they do succeed in reattaching his foot, which is very, very doubtful.’

She said simply, ‘I don’t want to lose him. It’s worth a try.’

The Scot, to give him his due, set about enclosing the raw leg efficiently in a dressing from his surgical bag and in wrapping the foot in a businesslike bundle. The row of men leaning on the fence watched with interest. The masculine-looking woman holding the head collar wiped a few tears from her weather-beaten cheeks while crooning to her charge, and eventually Mrs Bracken and I returned to the house, which still rang with noise. The ramblers, making the most of the drama, seemed to be rambling all over the ground floor and were to be seen assessing their chances of penetrating upstairs. Mrs Bracken clutched her head in distraction and said, ‘Please, will everyone leave,’ but without enough volume to be heard.

I begged one of the policemen, ‘Shoo the lot out, can’t you?’ and finally most of the crowd left, the ebb revealing a large basically formal pale green and gold drawing room inhabited by five or six humans, three dogs and a clutter of plastic cups engraving wet rings on ancient polished surfaces. Mrs Bracken, like a somnambulist, drifted around picking up cups from one place only to put them down in another. Ever tidy minded, I couldn’t stop myself twitching up a wastepaper basket and following her, taking the cups from her fingers and collecting them all together.

She looked at me vaguely. She said, ‘I paid a quarter of a million for that colt.’

‘Is he insured?’

‘No. I don’t insure my jewelry, either.’

‘Or your health?’

‘No, of course not.’

She looked unseeingly around the room. Five people now sat on easy chairs, offering no help or succor.

‘Would someone make a cup of tea?’ she asked.

No one moved.

She said to me, as if it explained everything, ‘Esther doesn’t start work until eight.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Well… er… who is everybody?’

‘Goodness, yes. Rude of me. That’s my husband.’ Her gaze fell affectionately on an old bald man who looked as if he had no comprehension of anything. ‘He’s deaf, the dear man.’

‘I see.’

‘And that’s my aunt, who mostly lives here.’

The aunt was also old and proved unhelpful and selfish.

‘Our tenants.’ Mrs Bracken indicated a stolid couple. ‘They live in part of the house. And my nephew.’

Even her normal good manners couldn’t keep the irritation from either her voice or her face at this last identification. The nephew was a teenager with a loose mouth and an attitude problem.

None of this hopeless bunch looked like an accomplice in a spite attack on a harmless animal, not even the unsatisfactory boy, who was staring at me intensely as if demanding to be noticed: almost, I thought fleetingly, as if he wanted to tell me something by telepathy. It was more than an interested inspection, but also held neither disapproval nor fear, as far as I could see.

I said to Mrs Bracken, ‘If you tell me where the kitchen is, I’ll make you some tea.’

‘But you’ve only one hand.’

I said reassuringly, ‘I can’t climb Everest but I can sure make tea.’

A streak of humor began to banish the morning’s shocks from her eyes. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.

The kitchen, like the whole house, had been built on a grand scale for a cast of dozens. Without difficulties we made tea in a pot and sat at the well-scrubbed old wooden central table to drink it from mugs.

‘You’re not what I expected,’ she said. ‘You’re cozy.’

I liked her, couldn’t help it.

She went on, ‘You’re not like my brother said. I’m afraid I didn’t explain that it is my brother who is out in the field with the vet. It was he who said I should phone you. He didn’t say you were cozy, he said you were flint. I should have introduced you to him, but you can see how things are… Anyway, I rely on him dreadfully. He lives in the next village. He came at once when I woke him.’

‘Is he,’ I asked neutrally, ‘your nephew’s father?’ ‘Goodness, no. My nephew… Jonathan…’ She stopped, shaking her head. ‘You don’t want to hear about Jonathan.’

‘Try me.’

‘He’s our sister’s son. Fifteen. He got into trouble, expelled from school… on probation… his step-father can’t stand him. My sister was at her wits’ end so I said he could come here for a bit. It’s not working out, though. I can’t get through to him.’ She looked suddenly aghast. ‘You don’t think he had anything to do with the colt?’

‘No, no. What trouble did he get into? Drugs?’

She sighed, shaking her head. ‘He was with two other boys. They stole a car and crashed it. Jonathan was in the back seat. The boy driving was also fifteen and broke his neck. Paralyzed. Joy-riding, they called it. Some joy! Stealing, that’s what it was. And Jonathan isn’t repentant. Really, he can be a pig. But not the colt… not that.’

‘No,’ I assured her, ‘positively not.’ I drank hot tea and asked, ‘Is it well known hereabouts that you have this great colt in that field?’

She nodded. ‘Eva, who looks after him, she talks of nothing else. All the village knows. That’s why there are so many people here. Half the men from the village, as well as the ramblers. Even so early in the morning.’

‘And your friends?’ I prompted.

She nodded gloomily. ‘Everyone. I bought him at the Premium Yearling Sales last October. His breeding is a dream. He was a late foal — end of April — he’s… he was going into training next week. Oh dear.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. I screwed myself unhappily to ask the unavoidable question, ‘Who, among your friends, came here in person to admire the colt?’

She was far from stupid, and also vehement. ‘No one who came here could possibly have done this! People like Lord and Lady Dexter? Of course not! Gordon and Ginnie Quint, and darling Ellis? Don’t be silly. Though I suppose,’ she went on doubtfully, ‘they could have mentioned him to other people. He wasn’t a secret. Anyone since the Sales would know he was here, like I told you.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

Ellis.

We finished the tea and went back to the drawing room. Jonathan, the nephew, stared at me again unwaveringly, and after a moment, to test my own impression, I jerked my head in the direction of the door, walking that way; and, with hardly a hesitation, he stood up and followed.

I went out of the drawing room, across the hall and through the still-wide-open front door onto the drive.

‘Sid Halley,’ he said behind me.

I turned. He stopped four paces away, still not wholly committed. His accent and general appearance spoke of expensive schools, money and privilege. His mouth and his manner said slob.

‘What is it that you know?’ I asked.

‘Hey! Look here! What do you mean?’

I said without pressure, ‘You want to tell me something, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know. Why do you think so?’

I’d seen that intense bursting-at-the-seams expression too often by then to mistake it. He knew something that he ought to tell: it was only his own contrary rebelliousness that had kept him silent so far.

I made no appeal to a better nature that I wasn’t sure he had.

I said, guessing, ‘Were you awake before four o’clock?’

He glared but didn’t answer.

I tried again, ‘You hate to be helpful, is that it? No one is going to catch you behaving well — that sort of thing? Tell me what you know. I’ll give you as bad a press as you want. Your obstructive reputation will remain intact.’

‘Sod you,’ he said.

I waited.

‘She’d kill me,’ he said. ‘Worse, she’d pack me off home.’

‘Mrs Bracken?’

He nodded. ‘My Aunt Betty.’

‘What have you done?’

He used a few old Anglo-Saxon words: bluster to impress me with his virility, I supposed. Pathetic, really. Sad.

‘She has these effing stupid rules,’ he said. ‘Be back in the house at night by eleven-thirty.’

‘And last night,’ I suggested, ‘you weren’t?’

‘I got probation,’ he said. ‘Did she tell you?’

‘Yeah.’

He took two more steps towards me, into normal talking distance.

‘If she knew I went out again,’ he said, ‘I could get youth custody.’

‘If she shopped you, you mean?’

He nodded. ‘But… sod it… to cut a foot off a horse…’

Perhaps the better nature was somewhere there after all. Stealing cars was OK, maiming racehorses wasn’t. He wouldn’t have blinded those ponies: he wasn’t that sort of lout.

‘If I fix it with your aunt, will you tell me?’ I asked.

‘Make her promise not to tell Archie. He’s worse.’

‘Er,’ I said, ‘who is Archie?’

‘My uncle. Aunt Betty’s brother. He’s Establishment, man. He’s the flogging classes.’

I made no promises. I said, ‘Just spill the beans.’

‘In three weeks I’ll be sixteen.’ He looked at me intently for reaction, but all he’d caused in me was puzzlement. I thought the cut-off age for crime to be considered ‘juvenile’ was two years older. He wouldn’t be sent to an adult jail.

Jonathan saw my lack of understanding. He said impatiently, ‘You can’t be underage for sex if you’re a. man, only if you’re a girl.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘She says so.’

‘Your Aunt Betty?’ I felt lost.

‘No, stupid. The woman in the village.’

‘Oh… ah.’

‘Her old man’s a long-distance truck driver. He’s away for nights on end. He’d kill me. Youth custody would be apple pie.’

‘Difficult,’ I said.

‘She wants it, see? I’d never done it before. I bought her a gin in the pub.’ Which, at fifteen, was definitely illegal to start with.

‘So… um…’ I said, ‘last night you were coming back from the village… When, exactly?’

‘It was dark. Just before dawn. There had been more moonlight earlier, but I’d left it late. I was running. She — Aunt Betty — she wakes with the cocks. She lets the dogs out before six.’ His agitation, I thought, was producing what sounded like truth.

I thought, and asked, ‘Did you see any ramblers?’

‘No. It was earlier than them.’

I held my breath. I had to ask the next question, and dreaded the answer.

‘So, who was it that you saw?’

‘It wasn’t a “who”, it was a “what”.’ He paused and reassessed his position. ‘I didn’t go to the village,’ he said. ‘I’ll deny it.’

I nodded. ‘You were restless. Unable to sleep. You went for a walk.’

He said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ with relief.

‘And you saw?’

‘A Land-Rover.’

Not a who. A what. I said, partly relieved, partly disappointed, ‘That’s not so extraordinary, in the country.’

‘No, but it wasn’t Aunt Betty’s Land-Rover. It was much newer, and blue, not green. It was standing in the lane not far from the gate into the field. There was no one in it. I didn’t think much of it. There’s a path up to the house from the lane. I always go out and in that way. It’s miles from Aunt Betty’s bedroom.’

‘Through the yard with all the trash cans?’ I asked.

He was comically astounded. I didn’t explain that his aunt had taken me out that way. I said, ‘Couldn’t it have been a rambler’s Land-Rover?’

He said sullenly, ‘I don’t know why I bothered to tell you.’

I asked, ‘What else did you notice about the Land-Rover, except for its color?’

‘Nothing. I told you, I was more interested in getting back into the house without anyone spotting me.’.

I thought a bit and said, ‘How close did you get to it?’

‘I touched it. I didn’t see it until I was almost on top of it. Like I told you, I was running along the lane. I was mostly looking at the ground, and it was still almost dark.’

‘Was it facing you, or did you run into the back of it?’

‘Facing. There was still enough moonlight to reflect off the windshield. That’s what I saw first, the reflection.’

‘What part of it did you touch?’

‘The hood.’ Then he added, as if surprised by the extent of his memory, ‘It was quite hot.’

‘Did you see a number plate?’

‘Not a chance. I wasn’t hanging about for things like that.’

‘What else did you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘How did you know there was no one in the cab? There might have been a couple lying in there snogging.’

‘Well, there wasn’t. I looked through the window.’

‘Open or shut window?’

‘Open.’ He surprised himself again. ‘I looked in fast, on the way past. No people, just a load of machinery behind the front seats.’

‘What sort of machinery?’

‘How the eff do I know? It had handles sticking up. Like a lawn mower. I didn’t look. I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to be seen.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘How about an ignition key?’

‘Hey?’ It was a protest of hurt feelings. ‘I didn’t drive it away.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t take every car I see. Not alone, ever.’

‘There’s no fun in it if you’re alone?’

‘Not so much.’

‘So there was a key in the ignition?’

‘I suppose so. Yeah.’

‘Was there one key, or a bunch?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Was there a key ring?’

‘You don’t ask much!’

‘Think, then.’

He said unwillingly, ‘See, I notice ignition keys.’

‘Yes.’

‘It was a bunch of keys, then. They had a silver horseshoe dangling from them on a little chain. A little horseshoe. Just an ordinary key ring.’

We stared at each other briefly.

He said, ‘I didn’t think anything of it.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘You wouldn’t. Well, go back a bit. When you put your hand on the hood, were you looking at the windshield?’

‘I must have been.’

‘What was on it?’

‘Nothing. What do you mean?’

‘Did it have a tax disk?’

‘It must have done, mustn’t it?’ he said.

‘Well, did it have anything else? Like, say, a sticker saying “Save the Tigers”?’

‘No, it didn’t.’

‘Shut your eyes and think,’ I urged him. ‘You’re running. You don’t want to be seen. You nearly collide with a Land-Rover. Your face is quite near the windscreen—’

‘There was a red dragon,’ he interrupted. ‘A red circle with a dragon thing in it. Not very big. One of those sort of transparent transfers that stick to glass.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Anything else?’

For the first time he gave it concentrated thought, but came up with nothing more.

‘I’m nothing to do with the police,’ I said, ‘and I won’t spoil your probation and I won’t give you away to your aunt, but I’d like to write down what you’ve told me, and if you agree that I’ve got it right, will you sign it?’

‘Hey. I don’t know. I don’t know why I told you.’

‘It might matter a lot. It might not matter at all. But I’d like to find this bugger…’ God help me, I thought. I have to.

‘So would I.’ He meant it. Perhaps there was hope for him yet.

He turned on his heel and went rapidly alone into the house, not wanting to be seen in even semi-reputable company, I assumed. I followed more slowly. Jonathan had not returned to the drawing room, where the tenants still sat stolidly, the difficult old aunt complained about being woken early, the deaf husband said, ‘Eh?’ mechanically at frequent intervals and Betty Bracken sat looking into space. Only the three dogs, now lying down and resting their heads on their front paws, seemed fully sane.

I said to Mrs Bracken, ‘Do you by any chance have a typewriter?’

She said incuriously, ‘There’s one in the office.’

‘Er…’

‘I’ll show you.’ She rose and led me to a small, tidy back room containing the bones of communication but an impression of under-use.

‘I don’t know how anything works,’ Betty Bracken said frankly. ‘We have a part-time secretary, once a week. Help yourself.’

She left, nodding, and I thanked her, and I found an electric typewriter under a fitted dust cover, plugged ready into the current.

I wrote:

Under another fitted cover I located a copier, so I left the little office with three sheets of paper and went in search of Jonathan, running him to earth eating a haphazard breakfast in the kitchen. He paused over his cereal, spoon in air, while he read what I’d written. Wordlessly, I produced a ball-point pen and held it out to him.

He hesitated, shrugged and signed the first of the papers with loops and a flourish.

‘Why three?’ he asked suspiciously, pushing the copies away.

‘One for you,’ I said calmly. ‘One for my records. One for the on-going file of bits and pieces which may eventually catch our villain.’

‘Oh.’ He considered. ‘All right, then.’ He signed the other two sheets and I gave him one to keep. He seemed quite pleased with his civic-mindedness. He was rereading his edited deposition over his flakes as I left.

Back in the drawing room, looking for her, I asked where Mrs Bracken had gone. The aunt, the tenants and the deaf husband made no reply.

Negotiating the hinterland passage and the dustbin yard again, I arrived back at the field to see Mrs Bracken herself, the fence-leaners, the Scots vet and her brother watching the horse ambulance drive into the field and draw up conveniently close to the colt.

The horse ambulance consisted of a narrow, low-slung trailer pulled by a Land-Rover. There was a driver and a groom used to handling sick and injured horses and, with crooning noises from the solicitous Eva, the poor young colt made a painful-looking, head-bobbing stagger up a gentle ramp into the waiting stall.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Mrs Bracken whispered beside me. ‘My dear, dear young fellow… how could they?’

I shook my head. Rachel Ferns’ pony and four prized colts… How could anyone.

The colt was shut into the trailer, the bucket containing the foot was loaded, and the pathetic twelve-mile journey to Lambourn began.

The Scots vet patted Betty Bracken sympathetically on the arm, gave her his best wishes for the colt, claimed his car from the line of vehicles in the lane and drove away.

I unclipped my mobile phone and got through to The Pump, who forwarded my call to an irate newspaperman at his home in Surrey.

Kevin Mills yelled, ‘Where the hell are you? They say all anyone gets on the hotline now is your answering machine, saying you’ call back. About fifty people have phoned. They’re all rambling.’

‘Ramblers,’ I said.

‘What?’

I explained.

‘It’s supposed to be my day off,’ he grumbled. ‘Can you meet me in the pub? What time? Five o’clock?’

‘Make it seven,’ I suggested.

‘It’s no longer a Pump exclusive, I suppose you realize?’ he demanded. ‘But save yourself for me alone, will you, buddy? Give me the inside edge?’

‘It’s yours.’.

I closed my phone and warned Betty Bracken to expect the media on her doorstep.

‘Oh, no!’

‘Your colt is one too many.’

‘Archie!’ She turned to her brother for help with a beseeching gesture of the hand and, as if for the thousandth time in their lives, he responded with comfort and competent solutions.

‘My dear Betty,’ he said, ‘if you can’t bear to face the press, simply don’t be here.’

‘But…’ she wavered.

‘I shouldn’t waste time,’ I said.

The brother gave me an appraising glance. He himself was of medium height, lean of body, gray in color, a man to get lost in a crowd. His eyes alone were notable: brown, bright and aware. I had an uncomfortable feeling that, far beyond having his sister phone me, he knew a good deal about me.

‘We haven’t actually met,’ he said to me civilly. ‘I’m Betty’s brother. I’m Archie Kirk.’

I said, ‘How do you do,’ and I shook his hand.