Come to Grief

Chapter 7

The week got worse, slightly alleviated only by a letter from Linda on Thursday morning. Variably slanting handwriting. Jerky. A personality torn this way and that.

I wrote, back thanking her for her letter, accepting her invitation and saying I would phone her soon.

On Tuesday Ellis was charged with ‘actual bodily harm’ for having inadvertently and without intention pushed ‘an assailant’ into the path of potential danger (under the wheels of a speeding motor) and was set free ‘pending inquiries.’

Norman Picton disillusionedly reported, ‘The only approximately good thing is that they confiscated his passport. His lawyers are pointing their fingers up any police nose they can confront, screeching that it’s a scandal.’

‘Where’s Ellis now?’

‘Look to your back. Your report is with the Crown Prosecution Service, along with mine.’

‘Do you mean you don’t know where he is?’

‘He’s probably in Britain or anywhere he can get to where he doesn’t need a passport. He told the magistrates in court that he’d decided to do a sports program in Australia, and he had to have his passport with him because he needed it to get a visa for Australia.’

‘Never underestimate his wits,’ I said.

‘And he’d better look out for yours.’

‘He and I know each other too well.’

On Wednesday afternoon Ellis turned up at his regular television studio as if life were entirely normal and, on completion of an audience-attended recording of a sports quiz, was quietly arrested by three uniformed police officers. Ellis spent the night in custody, and on Thursday morning was charged with severing the foot of a colt: to be exact, the off-fore foot of an expensive two-year-old thoroughbred owned by Mrs Elizabeth Bracken of Combe Bassett Manor, Berkshire. To the vociferous fury of most of the nation, the magistrates remanded him in custody for another seven days, a preliminary precaution usually applied to those accused of murder.

Norman Picton phoned me privately on my home number.

‘I’m not telling you this,’ he said. ‘Understand?’

‘I’ve got cloth ears.’

‘It would mean my job.’

‘I hear you,’ I said. ‘I won’t talk.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘that, I believe.’

‘Norman?’

‘Word gets around. I looked up the transcript of the trial of that man that smashed off your hand. You didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, did you?’

‘No… well… everyone’s a fool sometimes.’

‘Some fool. Anyway, pin back the cloth ears. The reason why Ellis Quint is remanded for seven days is because after his arrest he tried to hang himself in his cell with his tie.’

‘He didn’t!’

‘No one took his belt or tie away, because of who he was. No one in the station believed in the charge. There’s all hell going on now. The top brass are passing the parcel like a children’s party. No one’s telling anyone outside anything on pain of death, so, Sid…’

‘I promise,’ I said.

‘They’ll remand him next week for another. seven days, partly to stop him committing suicide and partly because…’ He faltered on the brink of utter trust, his whole career at risk.

‘I promise,’ I said again. ‘And if I know what it is you want kept quiet, then I’ll know what not to guess at publicly, won’t I?’

‘God,’ he said, half the anxiety evaporating, ‘then… there’s horse blood in the hinges of the shears, and horse blood and hairs on the oily rag, and horse blood and hairs in the sacking. They’ve taken samples from the colt in the hospital at Lambourn, and everything’s gone away for DNA testing. The results will be back next week.’

‘Does Ellis know?’

‘I imagine that’s why he tried the quick way out. It was a Hermès tie, incidentally, with a design of horseshoes. The simple knot he tied slid undone because the tie was pure smooth silk.’

‘For God’s sake…’

‘I keep forgetting he’s your friend. Anyway, his lawyers have got to him. They’re six deep. He’s now playing the lighthearted celebrity, and he’s sorrowful about you, Sid, for having got him all wrong. His lawyers are demanding proof that Ellis himself was ever at Combe Bassett by night, and we are asking for proof that he wasn’t. His lawyers know we would have to drop the case if they can come up with a trustable alibi for any of the other amputations, but so far they haven’t managed it. It’s early days, though. They’ll dig and dig, you can bet on it.’

‘Yeah.’

‘None of the Land-Rover evidence will get into the papers because the sub judice rule kicked in the minute they remanded him. Mostly that helps us, but you, as Sid Halley, won’t be able to justify yourself in print until after the trial.’

‘Even if I can then.’

‘Juries are unpredictable.’

‘And the law is, frequently, an ass.’

‘People in the force are already saying you’re off your rocker. They say Ellis is too well known. They say that wherever he went he would be recognized, therefore if no one recognized him, that in itself is proof he wasn’t there.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. Do you have time off at the weekend?’

‘Not this weekend, no. Monday do you?’

‘I’ll see if I can fix something up with Archie… and Jonathan.’

‘And there’s another thing,’ Norman said, ‘the Land-Rover’s presence at Combe Bassett is solid in itself, but Jonathan, if he gets as far as the witness box, will be a meal for Ellis’s lawyers. On probation for stealing cars! What sort of a witness is that?’

‘I understood the jury isn’t allowed to know anything about a witness. I was at a trial once in the Central Law Courts — the Old Bailey — when a beautifully dressed and blow-dried twenty-six-year-old glamour boy gave evidence — all lies — and the jury weren’t allowed to know that he was already serving a sentence for confidence tricks and had come to court straight from jail, via the barber and the wardrobe room. The jury thought him a lovely young man. So much for juries.’

‘Don’t you believe in the jury system?’

‘I would believe in it if they were told more. How can a jury come to a prison-or-freedom decision if half the facts are withheld? There should be no inadmissible evidence.’

‘You’re naive.’

‘I’m Sid Public, remember? The law bends over backwards to give the accused the benefit of the slightest doubt. The victim of murder is never there to give evidence. The colt in Lambourn can’t talk. It’s safer to kill animals. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand what Ellis has become.’

He said flatly, ‘Emotion works against you in the witness box.’

‘Don’t worry. In court, I’m a block of ice.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘You’ve heard too damned much.’

He laughed. ‘There’s an old-boy internet,’ he said. ‘All you need is the password and a whole new world opens up.’

‘What’s the password?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Don’t bugger me about. What’s the password?’

‘Archie,’ he said.

I was silent for all of ten seconds, remembering Archie’s eyes the first time I met him, remembering the awareness, the message of knowledge. Archie knew more about me than I knew about him.

I asked, ‘What exactly does Archie do in the civil service?’

‘I reckon,’ Norman said, amused, ‘that he’s very like you, Sid. What he don’t want you to know, he don’t tell you.’

‘Where can I reach you on Monday?’

‘Police station. Say you’re John Paul Jones.’

Kevin Mills dominated the front page of The Pump on Friday — a respite from the sexual indiscretions of cabinet ministers but a demolition job on me. ‘The Pump,’ he reminded readers, ‘had set up a Hotline to Sid Halley to report attacks on colts. Owners had been advised to lock their stable doors, and to great effect had done so after the Derby. The Pump disclaimed all responsibility for Sid Halley’s now ludicrously fingering Ellis Quint as the demon responsible for torturing defenseless horses. Ellis Quint, whose devotion to thoroughbreds stretches back to his own starry career as the country’s top amateur race-rider, the popular hero who braved all perils in the ancient tradition of gentlemen sportsmen…’

More of the same.

‘See also “Analysis,” on page ten, and India Cathcart, page 15.’

I supposed one had to know the worst. I read the leader column — ‘Should an ex-jockey be allowed free rein as pseudo sleuth? (Answer: no, of course not.)’ and then, dredging deep for steel, I finally turned to India Cathcart’s piece.

That was for starters. The next section pitilessly but not accurately dissected the impulse that led one to compete at speed (ignoring the fact that presumably Ellis himself had felt the same power-hungry inferiority complex).

My ruthless will to win, India Cathcart had written, had destroyed everything good in my own life. The same will to win now aimed to destroy my friend Ellis Quint. This was ambition gone mad.

The Pump would not let it happen. Sid Halley was a beetle ripe for squashing. The Pump would exterminate. The Halley myth was curtains.

Damn and blast her, I thought, and, for the first time in eighteen years, got drunk.

On Saturday morning, groaning around the apartment with a headache, I found a message in my fax machine.

Handwritten scrawl, Pump-headed paper same as before… Kevin Mills.

Most of Sunday I listened to voices on my answering machine delivering the same opinion.

Two calls relieved the gloom.

One from Charles Roland, my ex-father-in-law. ‘Sid, if you’re in trouble, there’s always Aynsford,’ and a second from Archie Kirk, ‘I’m at home. Norman Picton says you want me.’

Two similar men, I thought gratefully. Two men with cool, dispassionate minds who would listen before condemning.

I phoned back to Charles, who seemed relieved I sounded sane.

‘I’m all right,’ I said.

‘Ellis is a knight in shining armor, though.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sure, Sid?’

‘Positive.’

‘But Ginnie… and Gordon… they’re friends.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if I cut the foot off a horse, what would you do?’

‘But you wouldn’t.’

‘No.’

I sighed. That was the trouble. No one could believe it of Ellis.

‘Sid, come, anytime,’ Charles said.

‘You’re my rock,’ I said, trying to make it sound light. ‘I’ll come if I need to.’

‘Good.’

I phoned Archie and asked if Jonathan was still staying with Betty Bracken.

Archie said, ‘I’ve been talking to Norman. Jonathan is now addicted to water skiing and spends every day at the lake. Betty is paying hundreds and says it’s worth it to get him out of the house. He’ll be at the lake tomorrow. Shall we all meet there?’

We agreed on a time, and met.

When we arrived, Jonathan was out on the water.

‘That’s him,’ Norman said, pointing.

The flying figure in a scarlet wet-suit went up a ramp, flew, turned a somersault in the air and landed smoothly on two skis.

‘That,’ Archie said in disbelief, ‘is Jonathan?’

‘He’s a natural,’ Norman said. ‘I’ve been out here for a bit most days. Not only does he know his spatial balance and attitude by instinct, but he’s fearless.’

Archie and I silently watched Jonathan approach the shore, drop the rope and ski confidently up the sloping landing place with almost as much panache as Norman himself.

Jonathan grinned. Jonathan’s streaky hair blew wetly back from his forehead. Jonathan, changed, looked blazingly happy.

A good deal of the joy dimmed with apprehension as he looked at Archie’s stunned and expressionless face. I took a soft sports bag out of my car and held it out to him, asking him to take it with him to the dressing rooms.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘OK.’ He took the bag and walked off barefooted, carrying his skis.

‘Incredible,’ Archie said, ‘but he can’t ski through life.’

‘It’s a start,’ Norman said.

After we’d stood around for a few minutes discussing Ellis we were approached by a figure in a dark-blue tracksuit, also wearing black running shoes, a navy baseball cap and sunglasses and carrying a sheet of paper. He came to within fifteen feet of us and stopped.

‘Yes?’ Norman asked, puzzled, as to a stranger. ‘Do you want something?’

I said, ‘Take off the cap and the glasses.’

He took them off. Jonathan’s streaky hair shook forward into its normal startling shape and his eyes stared at my face. I gave him a slight jerk of the head, and he came the last few paces and handed the paper to Norman.

Archie for once looked wholly disconcerted. Norman read aloud what I’d written on the paper.

Norman lowered the paper, looked at Jonathan and said blankly, ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Is that the lot?’ Jonathan asked me.

‘Brilliant,’ I said.

‘Shall I get dressed now?’

I nodded, and he walked nonchalantly away.

‘He looked totally different,’ Archie commented, still amazed. ‘I didn’t know him at all.’

I said to Norman, ‘Did you look at the tape of Ellis’s program, that one I put in with my report?’

‘The tape covered with stickers saying it was the property of Mrs Linda Ferns? Yes, I did.’

‘When Ellis was sitting on the floor with those children,’ I said, ‘he was wearing a dark tracksuit, open at the neck. He had a peaked cap pushed back on his head. He looked young. Boyish. The children responded to him… touched him… loved him. He had a pair of sunglasses tucked into a breast pocket.’

After a silence Norman said, ‘But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t wear those clothes on television if he’d worn them to mutilate the Ferns pony.’

‘Oh yes he would. It would deeply amuse him. There’s nothing gives him more buzz than taking risks.’

‘A baseball cap,’ Archie said thoughtfully, ‘entirely changes the shape of someone’s head.’

I nodded. ‘A baseball cap and a pair of running shorts can reduce any man of stature to anonymity.’

‘We’ll never prove it,’ Norman said.

Jonathan slouched back in his own clothes and with his habitual half-sneering expression firmly in place. Archie’s exasperation with him sharply returned.

‘This is not the road to Damascus,’ I murmured.

‘Damn you, Sid.’ Archie glared, and then laughed.

‘What are you talking about?’ Norman asked.

‘Saint Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus happened like a thunderclap,’ Archie explained. ‘Sid’s telling me not to look for instant miracles by the gravel pit lake.’

Jonathan, not listening, handed me the bag. ‘Cool idea,’ he said. ‘No one knew me.’

‘They would, close to.’

‘It was still a risk,’ Norman objected.

‘I told you,’ I said, ‘the risk is the point.’

‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Cutting off a horse’s foot doesn’t make sense. Half of human actions don’t make sense. Sense is in the eye of the beholder.’

I drove back to London.

My answering machine had answered so many calls that it had run out of recording tape.

Among the general abuse, three separate calls were eloquent about the trouble I’d stirred up. All three of the owners of the other colt victims echoed Linda Ferns’ immovable conviction.

The lady from Cheltenham: ‘I can’t believe you can be so misguided. Ellis is absolutely innocent. I wouldn’t have thought of you as being jealous of him, but all the papers say so. I’m sorry, Sid, but you’re not welcome here anymore.’

The angry Lancashire farmer: ‘You’re a moron, do you know that? Ellis Quint! You’re stupid. You were all right as a jockey. You should give up this pretense of being Sherlock Holmes. You’re pitiful, lad.’

The lady from York: ‘How can you? Dear Ellis! He’s worth ten of you, I have to say.’

I switched off the critical voices, but they went on reverberating in my brain.

The press had more or less uniformly followed The Pump’s lead. Pictures of Ellis at his most handsome smiled confidently from newsstands everywhere. Trial by media found Ellis Quint the wronged and innocent hero, Sid Halley the twisted, jealous cur snapping at his heels.

I’d known it would be bad: so why the urge to bang my head against the wall? Because I was human, and didn’t have tungsten nerves, whatever anyone thought. I sat with my eyes shut, ostrich fashion.

Tuesday was much the same. I still didn’t bang my head. Close-run thing.

On Wednesday Ellis appeared again before magistrates, who that time set him free on bail.

Norman phoned.

‘Cloth ears?’ he said. ‘Same as before?’

‘Deaf,’ I assured him.

‘It was fixed beforehand. Two minutes in court. Different time than posted. The press arrived after it was over. Ellis greeted them, free, smiling broadly.’

‘Shit.’

Norman said, ‘His lawyers have done their stuff. It’s rubbish to. think the well-balanced personality intended to kill himself — his tie got caught somehow but he managed to free it. The policeman he pushed failed to identify himself adequately and is now walking about comfortably in a cast. The colt Ellis is accused of attacking is alive and recovering well. As bail is granted in cases of manslaughter, it is unnecessary to detain Ellis Quint any longer on far lesser charges. So… he’s walked.’

‘Is he still to be tried?’

‘So far. His lawyers have asked for an early trial date so-that he can put this unpleasantness behind him. He will plead not guilty, of course. His lawyers are already patting each other on the back. And… I think there’s a heavyweight maneuvering somewhere in this case.’

‘A heavyweight? Who?’

‘Don’t know. It’s just a feeling.’

‘Could it be Ellis’s father?’

‘No, no. Quite different. It’s just… since our reports, yours and mine, reached the Crown Prosecution Service, there’s been a new factor. Political, perhaps. It’s difficult to describe. It’s not exactly a cover-up. There’s already been too much publicity, it’s more a sort of redirection. Even officially, and not just to the press, someone with muscle is trying to get you thoroughly and, I’m afraid I must say, malignantly discredited.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

‘Sid, seriously, look out for yourself.’

I felt as prepared as one could be for some sort of catastrophic pulverization to come my way, but in the event the process was subtler and long drawn out.

As if nothing had happened, Ellis resumed his television program and began making jokes about Sid Halley — ‘Sid Halley? That friend of mine! Have you heard that he comes from Halifax? Halley facts — he makes them up.’

And ‘I like halibut — I eat it.’ And the old ones that I was used to, ‘halitosis’ and ‘Hallelujah.’

Hilarious.

When I went to the races, which I didn’t do as often as earlier, people either turned their backs or laughed, and I wasn’t sure which I disliked more.

I took to going only to jumping meetings, knowing Ellis’s style took him to the most fashionable meetings on the flat. I acknowledged unhappily to myself that in my avoidance of him there was an element of cringe. I despised myself for it. All the same, I shrank from a confrontation with him and truly didn’t know whether it was because of an ever-deepening aversion to what he had done, or because of the fear — the certainty — that he would publicly mock me.

He behaved as if there were never going to be a trial; as if awkward details like Land-Rovers, lopping shears and confirmed matching DNA tests tying the shears to the Bracken colt were never going to surface once the sub judice silence ended.

Norman, Archie and also Charles Roland worried that, for all the procedural care we had taken, Ellis’s lawyers would somehow get the Land-Rover disallowed. Ellis’s lawyers, Norman said, backed by the heavy unseen presence that was motivating them and possibly even paying the mounting fees, now included a defense counsel whose loss rate for the previous seven years was nil.

Surprisingly, despite the continuing barrage of ignominy, I went on being offered work. True, the approach was often tentative and apologetic — ‘Whether you’re right or pigheaded about Ellis Quint…’ and ‘Even if you’ve got Ellis Quint all wrong…’ the nitty gritty seemed to be that they needed me and there was no one else.

Well hooray for that. I cleaned up minor mysteries, checked credit ratings, ditto characters, found stolen horses, caught sundry thieves, all the usual stuff.

July came in with a deluge that flooded rivers and ruined the shoes of racegoers, and no colt was attacked at the time of the full moon, perhaps because the nights were wet and windy and black, dark with clouds.

The press finally lost interest in the daily trashing of Sid Halley and Ellis Quint’s show wrapped up for the summer break. I went down to Kent a couple of times, taking new fish for Rachel, sitting on the floor with her, playing checkers. Neither Linda nor I mentioned Ellis. She hugged me good-bye each time and asked when I would be coming back. Rachel, she said, had had no more nightmares. They were a thing of the past.

August came quietly and left in the same manner. No colts were attacked. The Hotline went cold. India Cathcart busied herself with a cabinet member’s mistress but still had a routinely vindictive jab at me each Friday. I went to America for two short weeks and rode horses up the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, letting the wide skies and the forests work their peace.

In September, one dew-laden early-fall English Saturday morning after a calm moonlit night, a colt was discovered with a foot off.

Nauseated, I heard the announcement on the radio in the kitchen while I made coffee.

Listeners would remember, the cool newsreader said, that in June Ellis Quint had been notoriously accused by ex-jockey Sid Halley of a similar attack. Quint was laughing off this latest incident, affirming his total ignorance on the matter.

There were no Hotline calls from The Pump, but Norman Picton scorched the wires.

‘Have you heard?’ he demanded.

‘Yes. But no details.’

‘It was a yearling colt this time. Apparently there aren’t many two-year-olds in the fields just now, but there are hundreds of yearlings.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘The yearling sales are starting.’

‘The yearling in question belonged to some people near Northampton. They’re frantic. Their vet put the colt out of his misery. But get this. Ellis Quint’s lawyers have already claimed he has an alibi.’

I stood in silence in my sitting room, looking out to the unthreatening garden.

‘Sid?’

‘Mm.’

‘You’ll have to break that alibi. Otherwise, it will break you.’

‘Mm.’

‘Say something else, dammit.’

‘The police can do it. Your lot.’

‘Face it. They’re not going to try very hard. They’re going to believe in his alibi, if it’s anything like solid.’

‘Do you think, do you really think,’ I asked numbly, ‘that an ultra-respected barrister would connive with his client to mutilate… to kill… a colt — or pay someone else to do it — to cast doubt on the prosecution’s case in the matter of a different colt?’

‘Put like that, no.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘So Ellis Quint has set it up himself, and what he has set up, you can knock down.’

‘He’s had weeks — more than two months — to plan it.’

‘Sid,’ he said, ‘it’s not like you to sound defeated.’

If he, I thought, had been on the receiving end of a long, pitiless barrage of systematic denigration, he might feel as I did, which, if not comprehensively defeated, was at least battle weary before I began.

‘The police at Northampton,’ I said, ‘are not going to welcome me with open arms.’

‘That’s never stopped you before.’

I sighed. ‘Can you find out from the Northampton police what his alibi actually is?’

‘Piece of cake. I’ll phone you back.’

I put down the receiver and went over to the window. The little square looked peaceful and safe, the railed garden green and grassy, a tree-dappled haven where generations of privileged children had run and played while their nursemaids gossiped. I’d spent my own childhood in Liverpool’s back streets, my father dead and my mother fighting cancer. I in no way regretted the contrast in origins. I had learned self-sufficiency and survival there. Perhaps because of the back streets I now valued the little garden more. I wondered how the children who’d grown up in that garden would deal with Ellis Quint. Perhaps I could learn from them. Ellis had been that sort of child.

Norman phoned back later in the morning.

‘Your friend,’ he said, ‘reportedly spent the night at a private dance in Shropshire, roughly a hundred miles to the northwest of the colt. Endless friends will testify to his presence, including his hostess, a duchess. It was a dance given to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the heir.’

‘Damn.’

‘He could hardly have chosen a more conspicuous or more watertight alibi.’

‘And some poor bitch will swear she lay down for him at dawn.’

‘Why dawn?’

‘It’s when it happens.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Never you mind,’ I said.

‘You’re a bad boy, Sid.’

Long ago, I thought. Before Jenny. Summer dances, dew, wet grass, giggles and passion. Long ago and innocent.

Life’s a bugger, I thought.

‘Sid,’ Norman’s voice said, ‘do you realize the trial is due to start two weeks on Monday?’

‘I do realize.’

‘Then get a move on with this alibi.’

‘Yes, sir, Detective Inspector.’

He laughed. ‘Put the bugger back behind bars.’

On the Tuesday I went to see the Shropshire duchess, for whom I had ridden winners in that former life. She even had a painting of me on her favorite horse, but I was no longer her favorite jockey.

‘Yes, of course Ellis was here all night,’ she confirmed. Short, thin, and at first unwelcoming, she led me through the armor-dotted entrance hall of her drafty old house to the sitting room, where she had been watching the jump racing on television when I arrived.

Her front door had been opened to me by an arthritic old manservant who had hobbled away to see if Her Grace was in. Her Grace had come into the hall clearly anxious to get rid of me as soon as possible, and had then relented, her old kindness towards me resurfacing like a lost but familiar habit.

A three-mile steeplechase was just finishing, the jockeys kicking side by side to the finish line, the horses tired and straining, the race going in the end to the one carrying less weight.

The duchess turned down the volume, the better to talk.

‘I cannot believe, Sid,’ she said, ‘that you’ve accused dear Ellis of something so disgusting. I know you and Ellis have been friends for years. Everyone knows that. I do think he’s been a bit unkind about you on television, but you did ask for it, you know.’

‘But he was here…?’ I asked.

‘Of course. All night. It was five or later when everyone started to leave. The band was playing still… we’d all had breakfast…’

‘When did the dance start?’ I asked.

‘Start? The invitations were for ten. But you know how people are. It was eleven or midnight before most people came. We had the fireworks at three-thirty because rain was forecast for later, but it was fine all night, thank goodness.’

‘Did Ellis say good night when he left?’

‘My dear Sid, there were over three hundred people here last Friday night. A succès fou, if I say it myself.’

‘So you don’t actually remember when Ellis left?’

‘The last I saw of him he was dancing an eightsome with that gawky Raven girl. Do drop it, Sid. I’m seeing you now for old times’ sake, but you’re not doing yourself any good, are you?’

‘Probably not.’

She patted my hand. ‘I’ll always know you, at the races and so on.’

‘Thank you,’! I said.

‘Yes. Be a dear and find your own way out. Poor old Stone has such bad arthritis these days.’

She turned up the volume in preparation for the next race, and I left.

The gawky Raven girl who had danced an eightsome reel with Ellis turned out to be the third daughter of an earl. She herself had gone off to Greece to join someone’s yacht, but her sister (the second daughter) insisted that Ellis had danced with dozens of people after that, and wasn’t I, Sid Halley, being a teeny-weeny twit?

I went to see Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany, joint owners of the Windward Stud Farm, home of the latest colt victim: and to my dismay found Ginnie Quint there as well.

All three women were in the stud farm’s office, a building separate from the rambling one-story dwelling house. A groom long-reining a yearling had directed me incuriously and I drew up outside the pinkish brick new-looking structure without relish for my mission, but not expecting a tornado.

I knocked and entered, as one does with such offices, and found myself in the normal clutter of desks, computers, copiers, wall charts and endless piles of paper.

I’d done a certain amount of homework before I went there, so it was easy to identify Miss Richardson as the tall, bulky, dominant figure in tweed jacket, worn cord trousers and wiry gray short-cropped curls. Fifty, I thought; despises men. Mrs Bethany, a smaller, less powerful version of Miss Richardson, was reputedly the one who stayed up at night when the mares were foaling, the one on whose empathy with horses the whole enterprise floated.

The women didn’t own the farm’s two stallions (they belonged to syndicates) nor any of the mares: Windward Stud was a cross between a livery stable and a maternity ward. They couldn’t afford the bad publicity of the victimized yearling.

Ginnie Quint, sitting behind one of the desks, leaped furiously to her feet the instant I appeared in the doorway and poured over me an accumulated concentration of verbal volcanic lava, scalding, shriveling, sticking my feet to the ground and my tongue in dryness to the roof of my mouth.

‘He trusted you. He would have died for you.’

I sensed Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany listening in astonishment, not knowing who I was nor what I’d done to deserve such an onslaught; but I had eyes only for Ginnie, whose long fondness for me had fermented to hate.

‘You’re going to go into court and try to send your best friend to prison… to destroy him… pull him down… ruin him. You’re going to betray him. You’re not fit to live.’

Emotion twisted her gentle features into ugliness. Her words came out spitting.

It was her own son who had done this. Her golden, idolized son. He had made of me finally the traitor that would deliver the kiss.

I said absolutely nothing.

I felt, more intensely than ever, the by now accustomed and bitter awareness of the futility of rebellion. Gagged by sub judice, I’d been unable all along to put up any defense, especially because the press had tended to pounce on my indignant protests and label them as ‘whining’ and ‘diddums,’ and ‘please, Teacher, he hit me…’ and ‘it’s not fair, I hit him first.’

A quick check with a lawyer had confirmed that though trying to sue one paper for libel might have been possible, suing the whole lot was not practical. Ellis’s jokes were not actionable and, unfortunately, the fact that I was still profitably employed in my chosen occupation meant that I couldn’t prove the criticism had damaged me financially.

‘Grit your teeth and take it,’ he’d advised cheerfully, and I’d paid him for an opinion I gave myself free every day.

As there was no hope of Ginnie’s listening to anything I might say, I unhappily but pragmatically turned to retreat, intending to return another day to talk to Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany, and found my way barred by two new burly arrivals, known already to the stud owners as policemen.

‘Sergeant Smith reporting, madam,’ one said to Miss Richardson.

She nodded. ‘Yes, Sergeant?’

‘We’ve found an object hidden in one of the hedges round the field where your horse was done in.’

No one objected to my presence, so I remained in the office, quiet and riveted.

Sergeant Smith carried a long, narrow bundle which he laid on one of the desks. ‘Could you tell us, madam, if this belongs to you?’

His manner was almost hostile, accusatory. He seemed to expect the answer to be yes.

‘What is it?’ Miss Richardson asked, very far from guilty perturbation.

‘This, madam,’ the sergeant said with a note of triumph, and lifted back folds of filthy cloth to reveal their contents, which were two long wooden handles topped by heavy metal clippers.

A pair of lopping shears.

Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany stared at them unmoved. It was Ginnie Quint who turned slowly white and fainted.