Come to Grief

Chapter 8

So here we were in October, with the leaves weeping yellowly from the trees.

Here I was, perching on the end of Rachel Ferns’ bed, wearing a huge, fluffy orange clown wig and a red bulbous nose, making sick children laugh while feeling far from merry inside.

‘Have you hurt your arm?’ Rachel asked conversationally.

‘Banged it,’ I said.

She nodded. Linda looked surprised. Rachel said, ‘When things hurt it shows in people’s eyes.’

She knew too much about pain for a nine-year-old. I said, ‘I’d better go before I tire you.’

She smiled, not demurring. She, like the children wearing the other wigs I’d brought, all had very short bursts of stamina. Visiting was down to ten minutes maximum.

I took off the clown wig and kissed Rachel’s forehead. ‘Bye.’ I said.

‘You’ll come back?’

‘Of course.’

She sighed contentedly, knowing I would. Linda walked with me from the ward to the hospital door.

‘It’s… awful,’ she said, forlorn, on the exit steps. Cold air. The chill to come.

I put my arms around her. Both arms. Hugged her.

‘Rachel asks for you all the time,’ she said. ‘Joe cuddles her and cries. She cuddles him, trying to comfort him. She’s her daddy’s little girl. She loves him. But you… you’re her friend. You make her laugh, not cry. It’s you she asks for all the time — not Joe.’

‘I’ll always come if I can.’

She sobbed quietly on my shoulder and gulped, ‘Poor Mrs Quint.’

‘Mm,’ I said.

‘I haven’t told Rachel about Ellis…’

‘No. Don’t,’ I said.

‘I’ve been beastly to you.’

‘No, far from it.’

‘The papers have said such dreadful things about you.’ Linda shook in my arms. ‘I knew you weren’t like that… I told Joe I have to believe you about Ellis Quint and he thinks I’m stupid.’

‘Look after Rachel, nothing else matters.’

She went back into the hospital and I rode dispiritedly back to London in the TeleDrive car.

Even though I’d returned with more than an hour to spare, I decided against Pont Square and took the sharp memory of Gordon Quint’s attack straight to the restaurant in Piccadilly, where I’d agreed to meet the lawyer Davis Tatum.

With a smile worth millions, the French lady in charge of the restaurant arranged for me to have coffee and a sandwich in the tiny bar while I waited for my friend. The bar, in fact, looked as if it had been wholly designed as a meeting place for those about to lunch. There were no more than six tables, a bartender who brought drinks to one’s elbow, and a calm atmosphere. The restaurant itself was full of daylight, with huge windows and green plants, and was sufficiently hidden from the busy artery of Mayfair downstairs as to give peace and privacy and no noisy passing trade.

I sat at a bar table in the corner with my back to the entrance, though in fact few were arriving: more were leaving after long hours of talk and lunch. I took some ibuprofen, and waited without impatience. I spent hours in my job, sometimes, waiting for predators to pop out of their holes.

Davis Tatum arrived late and out of breath from having apparently walked up the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. He wheezed briefly behind my back, then came around into view and lowered his six-feet-three-inch bulk into the chair opposite.

He leaned forward and held out his hand for a shake. I gave him a limp approximation, which raised his eyebrows but no comment.

He was a case of an extremely agile mind in a totally unsuitable body. There were large cheeks, double chins, fat-lidded eyes and a small mouth. Dark, smooth hair had neither receded nor grayed. He had flat ears, a neck like a weight lifter, and a charcoal pin-striped suit straining over a copious belly. He might have difficulty, I thought, in catching sight of certain parts of his own body. Except in the brain-box, nature had dealt him a sad hand.

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘I have some bad news, and I possibly shouldn’t be here talking to you at all, according to how you read Archbold.’

‘Archbold being the dos and don’ts manual for trial lawyers?’

‘More or less.’

‘What’s the bad news, then?’ I asked. There hadn’t been much that was good.

‘Ellis Quint has retracted his “guilty” plea, and has gone back to “not guilty”.’

‘Retracted?’ I exclaimed. ‘How can one retract a confession?’

‘Very easily.’ He sighed. ‘Quint says he was upset yesterday about his mother’s death, and what he said about feeling guilty was misinterpreted. In other words, his lawyers have got over the shock and have had a rethink. They apparently know you have so far not been able to break Ellis Quint’s alibi for the night that last colt was attacked in Northamptonshire, and they think they can therefore get the Bracken colt charge dismissed, despite the Land-Rover and circumstantial evidence, so they are aiming for a complete acquittal, not psychiatric treatment, and, I regret to tell you, they are likely to succeed.’

He didn’t have to tell me that my own reputation would never recover if Ellis emerged with his intact.

‘And Archbold?’

‘If I were the Crown Prosecuting counsel in this case I could be struck off for talking to you, a witness. As you know, I am the senior barrister in the chambers where the man prosecuting Ellis Quint works. I have seen his brief and discussed the case with him. I can absolutely properly talk to you, though perhaps some people might not think it prudent.’

I smiled. ‘Bye bye, then.’

‘I may not discuss with you a case in which I may be examining you as a witness. But of course I will not be examining you. Also, we can talk about anything else. Like, for instance, golf.’

‘I don’t play golf.’

‘Don’t be obtuse, my dear fellow. Your perceptions are acute.’

‘Are we talking about angles?’

His eyes glimmered behind the folds of fat. ‘I saw the report package that you sent to the CPS.’

‘The Crown Prosecution Service?’

‘The same. I happened to be talking to a friend. I said your report had surprised me, both by its thoroughness and by your deductions and conclusions. He said I shouldn’t be surprised. He said you’d had the whole top echelon of the Jockey Club hanging on your every word. He said that, about a year ago, you’d cleared up two major racing messes at the same time. They’ve never forgotten it.’

‘A year last May,’ I said. ‘Is that what he meant?’

‘I expect so. He said you had an assistant then that isn’t seen around anymore. The job I’d like you to do might need an assistant for the leg-work. Don’t you have your assistant nowadays?’

‘Chico Barnes?’

He nodded. ‘A name like that.’

‘He got married,’ I said briefly. ‘His wife doesn’t like what I do, so he’s given it up. He teaches judo. I still see him — he gives me a judo lesson most weeks, but I can’t ask him for any other sort of help.’

‘Pity.’

‘Yes. He was good. Great company and bright.’

‘And he got deterred. That’s why he gave it up.’

I went, internally, very still. I said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I heard,’ he said, his gaze steady on my face, ‘that he got beaten with some sort of thin chain to deter him from helping you. To deter him from all detection. And it worked.’

‘He got married,’ I said.

Davis Tatum leaned back in his chair, which creaked under his weight.

‘I heard,’ he said, ‘that the same treatment was doled out to you, and in the course of things the Jockey Club mandarins made you take your shirt off. They said they had never seen anything like it. The whole of your upper body, arms included, was black with bruising, and there were vicious red weals all over you. And with your shirt hiding all that you’d calmly explained to them how and why you’d been attacked and how one of their number, who had arranged it, was a villain. You got one of the big shots chucked out.’

‘Who told you all that?’

‘One hears things.’

I thought in unprintable curses. The six men who’d seen me that day with my shirt off had stated their intention of never talking about it. They’d wanted to keep to themselves the villainy I’d found within their own walls; and nothing had been more welcome to me than that silence. It had been bad enough at the time. I didn’t want continually to be reminded.

‘Where does one hear such things?’ I asked.

‘Be your age, Sid. In the clubs… Bucks, the Turf, the RAC, the Garrick… these things get mentioned.’

‘How often… do they get mentioned? How often have you heard that story?’

He paused as if checking with an inner authority, and then said, ‘Once.’

‘Who told you?’

‘I gave my word.’

‘One of the Jockey Club?’

‘I gave my word. If you’d given your word, would you tell me?’

‘No.’

He nodded. ‘I asked around about you. And that’s what I was told. Told in confidence. If it matters to you, I’ve heard it from no one else.’

‘It matters.’

‘It reflects to your credit,’ he protested. ‘It obviously didn’t stop you.’

‘It could give other villains ideas.’

‘And do villains regularly attack you?’

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘Physically no one’s laid a finger on me since that time.’ Not until yesterday, I thought. ‘If you’re talking about nonphysical assaults… Have you read the papers?’

‘Scurrilous.’ Davis Tatum twisted in his seat until he could call the barman. ‘Tanqueray and tonic, please — and for you, Sid?’

‘Scotch. A lot of water.’

The barman brought the glasses, setting them out on little round white mats.

‘Health,’ Davis Tatum toasted, raising his gin.

‘Survival,’ I responded, and drank to both.

He put down his glass and came finally to the point.

‘I need someone,’ he said, ‘who is clever, unafraid and able to think fast in a crisis.’

‘No one’s like that.’

‘What about you?’

I smiled. ‘I’m stupid, scared silly a good deal of the time and I have nightmares. What you think you see is not what you get.’

‘I get the man who wrote the Quint report.’

I looked benignly at my glass and not at his civilized face.

‘If you’re going to do something to a small child that you know he won’t like,’ I said, ‘such as sticking a needle into him, you first tell him what a brave little boy he is — in the hope that he’ll then let you make a pincushion of him without complaint.’

There was a palpable silence, then he chuckled, the low, rich timbre filling the air. There was embarrassment in there somewhere; a ploy exposed.

I said prosaically, ‘What’s the job?’

He waited while four businessmen arrived, arranged their drinks and sank into monetary conversation at the table farthest from where we sat.

‘Do you know who I mean by Owen Yorkshire?’ Tatum asked, looking idly at the newcomers, not at me.

‘Owen Yorkshire.’ I rolled the name around in memory and came up with only doubts. ‘Does he own a horse or two?’

‘He does. He also owns Topline Foods.’

‘Topline… as in sponsored race at Aintree? As in Ellis Quint, guest of honor at the Topline Foods lunch the day before the Grand National?’

‘That’s the fellow.’

‘And the inquiry?’

‘Find out if he’s manipulating the Quint case to his own private advantage.’

I said thoughtfully, ‘I did hear that there’s a heavyweight abroad.’

‘Find out who it is, and why.’

‘What about poor old Archbold? He’d turn in his grave.’

‘So you’ll do it!’

‘I’ll try. But why me? Why not the police? Why not the old-boy internet?’

He looked at me straightly. ‘Because you include silence in what you sell.’

‘And I’m expensive,’ I said.

‘Retainer and refreshers,’ he promised.

‘Who’s paying?’

‘The fees will come through me.’

‘And it’s agreed,’ I said, ‘that the results, if any, are yours. Prosecution or otherwise will normally be your choice.’

He nodded.

‘In case you’re wondering,’ I said, ‘when it comes to Ellis Quint, I gave the client’s money back, in order to be able to stop him myself. The client didn’t at first believe in what he’d done. I made my own choice. I have to tell you that you’d run that risk.’

He leaned forward and extended his pudgy hand.

‘We’ll shake on it,’ he said, and grasped my palm with a firmness that sent a shock wave fizzing clear up to my jaw.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, sensing it.

‘Nothing.’

He wasn’t getting much of a deal, I thought. I had a reputation already in tatters, a cracked ulna playing up, and the prospect of being chewed to further shreds by Ellis’s defense counsel. He’d have done as well to engage my pal Jonathan of the streaky hair.

‘Mr Tatum,’ I began.

‘Davis. My name’s Davis.’

‘Will you give me your assurance that you won’t speak of that Jockey Club business around the clubs?’

‘Assurance?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I told you… it’s to your credit.’

‘It’s a private thing. I don’t like fuss.’

He looked at me thoughtfully. He said, ‘You have my assurance.’ And I wanted to believe in it, but I wasn’t sure that I did. He was too intensely a club man, a filler of large armchairs in dark paneled rooms full of old exploded reputations and fruitily repeated secrets: ‘Won’t say a word, old boy.’

‘Sid.’

‘Mm?’

‘Whatever the papers say, where it really counts, you are respected.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘The clubs are good for gossip, but these days that’s not where the power lies.’

‘Power wanders round like the magnetic North Pole.’

‘Who said that?’

‘I just did,’ I said.

‘No, I mean, did you make it up?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Power, these days, is fragmented,’ he said.

I added, ‘And where the power is at any one time is not necessarily where one would want to be.’

He beamed proprietorially as if he’d invented me himself.

There was a quick rustle of clothes beside my ear and a drift of flowery scent, and a young woman tweaked a chair around to join our table and sat in it, looking triumphant.

‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘Mr Davis Tatum and Sid Halley! What a surprise!’

I said, to Davis Tatum’s mystified face, ‘This is Miss India Cathcart, who writes for The Pump. If you say nothing you’ll find yourself quoted repeating things you never thought, and if you say anything at all, you’ll wish you hadn’t.’

‘Sid,’ she said mock-sorrowfully, ‘can’t you take a bit of kicking around?’

Tatum opened his mouth indignantly and, as I was afraid he might try to defend me, I shook my head. He stared at me, then with a complete change of manner said in smooth, lawyerly detachment, ‘Miss Cathcart, why are you here?’

‘Why? To see you, of course.’

‘But why?’

She looked from him to me and back again, her appearance just as I remembered it: flawless porcelain skin, light-blue eyes, cleanly outlined mouth, black shining hair. She wore brown and red, with amber beads.

She said, ‘Isn’t it improper for a colleague of the Crown Prosecutor to be seen talking to one of the witnesses?’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Tatum said, and asked me, ‘Did you tell her we were meeting here?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then how… why, Miss Cathcart, are you here?’

‘I told you. It’s a story.’

‘Does The Pump know you’re here?’ I asked.

A shade crossly she said, ‘I’m not a child. I’m allowed out on my own, you know. And anyway, the paper sent me.’

‘The Pump told you we’d be here?’ Tatum asked.

‘My editor said to come and see. And he was right!’

Tatum said, ‘Sid?’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

India said to me, ‘Kevin says you went to school in Liverpool.’

Tatum, puzzled, asked, ‘What did you say?’

She explained, ‘Sid wouldn’t tell me where he went to school, so I found out.’ She looked at me accusingly. ‘You don’t sound like Liverpool.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘You sound more like Eton. How come?’

‘I’m a mimic,’ I said.

If she really wanted to, she could find out also that between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one I’d been more or less adopted by a Newmarket trainer (who had been to Eton) who made me into a good jockey and by his example changed my speech and taught me how to live and how to behave and how to manage the money I earned. He’d been already old then, and he died. I often thought of him. He opened doors for me still.

‘Kevin told me you were a slum child,’ India said.

‘Slum is an attitude, not a place.’

‘Prickly, are we?’

Damn, I thought. I will not let her goad me. I smiled, which she didn’t like.

Tatum, listening with disapproval, said, ‘Who is Kevin?’

‘He works for The Pump,’ I told him.

India said, ‘Kevin Mills is The Pump’s chief reporter. He did favors for Halley and got kicked in the teeth.’

‘Painful,’ Tatum commented dryly.

‘This conversation’s getting nowhere,’ I said. ‘India, Mr Tatum is not the prosecutor in any case where I am a witness, and we may talk about anything we care to, including, as just now before you came, golf.’

‘You can’t play golf with one hand.’

It was Tatum who winced, not I. I said, ‘You can watch golf on television without arms, legs or ears. Where did your editor get the idea that you might find us here?’

‘He didn’t say. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It is of the essence,’ Tatum said.

‘It’s interesting,’ I said, ‘because to begin with, it was The Pump that worked up the greatest head of steam about the ponies mutilated in Kent. That was why I got in touch with Kevin Mills. Between us we set up a Hotline, as a “Save the Tussilago faifara” sort of thing.’

India demanded, ‘What did you say?’

‘Tussilago farfara,’ Tatum repeated, amused. ‘It’s the botanical name of the wildflower coltsfoot.’

‘How did you know that?’ she asked me fiercely.

‘I looked it up.’

‘Oh.’

‘Anyway, the minute I linked Ellis Quint, even tentatively, to the colts, and to Rachel Fems’s pony, The Pump abruptly changed direction and started tearing me apart with crusading claws. I can surely ask, India, why do you write about me so ferociously? Is it just your way? Is it that you do so many hatchet jobs that you can’t do anything else? I didn’t expect kindness, but you are… every week… extreme.’

She looked uncomfortable. She did what she had one week called me ‘diddums’ for doing: she defended herself.

‘My editor gives me guidelines.’ She almost tossed her head.

‘You mean he tells you what to write?’

‘Yes. No.’

‘Which?’

She looked from me to Tatum and back.

She said, ‘He subs my piece to align it with overall policy.’

I said nothing. Tatum said nothing. India, a shade desperately, said, ‘Only saints get themselves burned at the stake.’

Tatum said with gravitas, ‘If I read any lies or innuendos about my having improperly talked to Sid Halley about the forthcoming Quint trial, I will sue you personally for defamation, Miss Cathcart, and I will ask for punitive damages. So choose your stake. Flames seem inevitable.’

I felt almost sorry for her. She stood up blankly, her eyes wide.

‘Say we weren’t here,’ I said.

I couldn’t read her frozen expression. She walked away from us and headed for the stairs.

‘A confused young woman,’ Tatum said. ‘But how did she — or her paper — know we would be here?’

I asked, ‘Do you feed your appointments into a computer?’

He frowned. ‘I don’t do it personally. My secretary does it. We have a system which can tell where all the partners are, if there’s a crisis. It tells where each of us can be found. I did tell my secretary I was coming here, but not who I was going to meet. That still doesn’t explain…’

I sighed. ‘Yesterday evening you phoned my mobile number.’

‘Yes, and you phoned me back.’

‘Someone’s been listening on my mobile phone’s frequency. Someone heard you call me.’

‘Hell! But you called me back. They heard almost nothing.’

‘You gave your name… How secure is your office computer?’

‘We change passwords every three months.’

‘And you use passwords that everyone can remember easily?’

‘Well…’

‘There are people who crack passwords just for the fun of it. And others hack into secrets. You wouldn’t believe how careless some firms are with their most private information. Someone has recently accessed my own on-line computer — during the past month. I have a detector program that tells me. Much good it will do any hacker, as I never keep anything personal there. But a combination of my mobile phone and your office computer must have come up with the possibility that your appointment was with me. Someone in The Pump did it. So-they sent India along to find out… and here we are. And because they succeeded, we now know they tried.’

‘It’s incredible.’

‘Who runs The Pump? Who sets the policy?’

Tatum said thoughtfully, ‘The editor is George Godbar. The proprietor’s Lord Tilepit.’

‘Any connection with Ellis Quint?’

He considered the question and shook his head. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Does Lord Tilepit have an interest in the television company that puts on Ellis Quint’s program? I think I’d better find out.’

Davis Tatum smiled.

Reflecting that, as about thirty hours had passed since Gordon Quint had jumped me in Pont Square, he was unlikely still to be hanging about there with murderous feelings and his fencing post (not least because with Ginnie dead he would have her inquest to distract him), and also feeling that one could take self-preservation to shaming lengths, I left the Piccadilly restaurant in a taxi and got the driver to make two reconnoitering passes around the railed central garden.

All seemed quiet. I paid the driver, walked without incident up the steps to the front door, used my key, went up to the next floor and let myself into the haven of home.

No ambush. No creaks. Silence.

I retrieved a few envelopes from the wire basket clipped inside the letter box and found a page in my fax. It seemed a long time since I’d left, but it had been only the previous morning.

My cracked arm hurt. Well, it would. I’d ridden races — and winners — now and then with cracks: disguising them, of course, because the betting public deserved healthy riders to carry their money. The odd thing was that in the heat of a race one didn’t feel an injury. It was in the cooler ebbing of excitement that the discomfort returned.

The best way, always, to minimize woes was to concentrate on something else. I looked up a number and phoned the handy acquaintance who had set up my computers for me.

‘Doug,’ I said, when his wife had fetched him in from an oil change, ‘tell me about listening in to mobile phones.’

‘I’m covered in grease,’ he complained. ‘Won’t this do another time?’

‘Someone is listening to my mobile.’

‘Oh.’ He sniffed. ‘So you want to know how to stop it?’

‘You’re dead right.’

He sniffed again. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ he said, ‘my wife’s mother is coming to dinner and my sump is filthy.’

I laughed; couldn’t help it. ‘Please, Doug.’

He relented. ‘I suppose you’ve got an analog mobile. They have radio signals that can be listened to. It’s difficult, though. Your average bloke in the pub couldn’t do it.’

‘Could you?’

‘I’m not your average bloke in the pub. I’m a walking midlife crisis halfway through an oil change. I could do it if I had the right gear.’

‘How do I deal with it?’

‘Blindingly simple.’ He sneezed and sniffed heavily. ‘I need a tissue.’ There was a sudden silence on the line, then the distant sound of a nose being vigorously blown, then the hoarse voice of wisdom in my ear.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘You ditch the analog, and get a digital.’

‘I do?’

‘Sid, being a jockey does not equip the modem man to live in tomorrow’s world.’

‘I do see that.’

‘Everyone,’ he sniffed, ‘if they had any sense, would go digital.’

‘Teach me.’

‘The digital system,’ he said, ‘is based on two numbers, zero and one. Zero and one have been with us from the dawn of computers, and no one has ever invented anything better.’

‘They haven’t?’

He detected my mild note of irony. ‘Has anyone,’ he asked, ‘reinvented the wheel?’

‘Er, no.’

‘Quite. One cannot improve on an immaculate conception.’

‘That’s blasphemous.’ I enjoyed him always.

‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘Some things are perfect to begin with. E=mc², and all that.’

‘I grant that. How about my mobile?’

‘The signal sent to a digital telephone,’ he said, ‘is not one signal, as in analog, but is eight simultaneous signals, each transmitting one-eighth of what you hear.’

‘Is that so?’ I asked dryly.

‘You may bloody snigger,’ he said, ‘but I’m giving you the goods. A digital phone receives.eight simultaneous signals, and it is impossible for anyone to decode them, except the receiving mobile. Now, because the signal arrives in eight pieces, the reception isn’t always perfect. You don’t get the crackle or the fading in and out that you get on analog phones, but you do sometimes get bits of words missing. Still, no one can listen in. Even the police can never tap a digital mobile number.’

‘So,’ I said, fascinated, ‘where do I get one?’

‘Try Harrods,’ he said.

‘Harrods?’

‘Harrods is just round the corner from where you live, isn’t it?’

‘More or less.’

‘Try there, then. Or anywhere else that sells phones. You can use the same number that you have now. You just need to tell your service provider. And of course you’ll need an SIM card. You have one, of course?’

I said meekly, ‘No.’

‘Sid!’ he protested. He sneezed again. ‘Sorry. An SIM card is a Subscriber’s Identity Module. You can’t live without one.’

‘I can’t?’

‘Sid, I despair of you. Wake up to technology.’

‘I’m better at knowing what a horse thinks.’

Patiently he enlightened me, ‘An SIM card is like a credit card. It actually is a credit card. Included on it are your name and mobile phone number and other details, and you can slot it into any mobile that will take it. For instance, if you are someone’s guest in Athens and he has a mobile that accepts an SIM card, you can slot your card into his phone and the charge will appear on your account, not his.’

‘Are you serious?’ I asked.

‘With my problems, would I joke?’

‘Where do I get an SIM card?’

‘Ask Harrods.’ He sneezed. ‘Ask anyone who travels for a living. Your service provider will provide.’ He sniffed. ‘So long, Sid.’

Amused and grateful, I opened my mail and read the fax. The fax being most accessible got looked at first.

Handwritten, it scrawled simply, ‘Phone me,’ and gave a long number.

The writing was Kevin Mills’s, but the fax machine he’d sent it from was anonymously not The Pump’s.

I phoned the number given, which would have connected me to a mobile, and got only the infuriating instruction, ‘Please try later.’

There were a dozen messages I didn’t much want on my answering machine and a piece of information I definitely didn’t want in a large brown envelope from Shropshire.

The envelope contained a copy of a glossy county magazine, one I’d sent for as I’d been told it included lengthy coverage of the heir-to-the-dukedom’s coming-of-age dance. There were, indeed, four pages of pictures, mostly in color, accompanied by prose gush about the proceedings and a complete guest list.

A spectacular burst of fireworks filled half a page, and there in a group of heaven-gazing spectators, there in white tuxedo and all his photogenic glory, there unmistakably stood Ellis Quint.

My heart sank. The fireworks had started at three-thirty. At three-thirty, when the moon was high, Ellis had been a hundred miles northwest of the Windward Stud’s yearling.

There were many pictures of the dancing, and a page of black and white shots of the guests, names attached. Ellis had been dancing. Ellis smiled twice from the guests’ page, carefree, having a good time.

Damn it to hell, I thought. He had to have taken the colt’s foot off early. Say by one o’clock. He could then have arrived for the fireworks by three-thirty. I’d found no one who’d seen him arrive, but several who swore to his presence after five-fifteen. At five-fifteen he had helped the heir to climb onto a table to make a drunken speech. The heir had poured a bottle of champagne over Ellis’s head. Everyone remembered that. Ellis could not have driven back to Northampton before dawn.

For two whole days the previous week I’d traipsed around Shropshire, and next-door Cheshire, handed on from grand house to grander, asking much the same two questions (according to sex): Did you dance with Ellis Quint, or did you drink/eat with him? The answers at first had been freely given, but as time went on, news of my mission spread before me until I was progressively met by hostile faces and frankly closed doors. Shropshire was solid Ellis country. They’d have stood on their heads to prove him unjustly accused. They were not going to say that they didn’t know when he’d arrived.

In the end I returned to the duchess’s front gates, and from there drove as fast as prudence allowed to the Windward Stud Farm, timing the journey at two hours and five minutes. On empty roads at night, Northampton to the duchess might have taken ten minutes less. I’d proved nothing except that Ellis had had time.

Enough time was not enough.

As always before gathering at such dances, the guests had given and attended dinner parties both locally and farther away. No one that I’d asked had entertained Ellis to dinner.

No dinner was not enough.

I went through the guest list crossing off the people I’d seen. There were still far more than half unconsulted, most of whom I’d never heard of.

Where was Chico? I needed him often. I hadn’t the time or, to be frank, the appetite to locate and question all the guests, even if they would answer. There must have been people — local people — helping with the parking of cars that night. Chico would have chatted people up in the local pubs and found out if any of the car-parkers remembered Ellis’s arrival. Chico was good at pubs, and I wasn’t in his class.

The police might have done it, but they wouldn’t. The death of a colt still didn’t count like murder.

The police.

I phoned Norman Picton’s police station number and gave my name as John Paul Jones.

He came on the line in a good humor and listened to me without protest.

‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You want me to ask favors of the Northamptonshire police? What do I offer in return?’

‘Blood in the hinges of lopping shears.’

‘They’ll have made their own tests.’

‘Yes, and that Northamptonshire colt is dead and gone to the glue factory. An error, wouldn’t you say? Might they not do you a favor in exchange for commiseration?’

‘You’ll have my head off. What is it you actually want?’

‘Er…’ I began, ‘I was there when the police found the lopping shears in the hedge.’

‘Yes, you told me.’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking. Those shears weren’t wrapped in sacking, like the ones we took from the Quints.’

‘No, and the shears weren’t the same, either. The ones at Northampton are a slightly newer model. They’re on sale everywhere in garden centers. The problem is that Ellis Quint hasn’t been reported as buying any, not in the Northamptonshire police district, nor ours.’

‘Is there any chance,’ I asked, ‘of my looking again at the material used for wrapping the shears?’

‘If there are horse hairs in it, there’s nothing left to match them to, same as the blood.’

‘All the same, the cloth might tell us where the shears came from. Which garden center, do you see?’

‘I’ll see if they’ve done that already.’

‘Thanks, Norman.’

‘Thank Archie. He drives me to help you.’

‘Does he?’

He heard my surprise. ‘Archie has influence,’ he said, ‘and I do what the magistrate tells me.’

When he’d gone off the line I tried Kevin Mills again and reached the same electronic voice: ‘Please try later.’

After that I sat in an armchair while the daylight faded and the lights came on in the peaceful square. We were past the equinox, back in winter thoughts, the year dying ahead. Fall for me had for almost half my life meant the longed-for resurgence of major jump racing, the time of big winners and speed and urgency in the blood. Winter now brought only nostalgia and heating bills. At thirty-four I was growing old.

I sat thinking of Ellis and the wasteland he had made of my year. I thought of Rachel Ferns and Silverboy, and lymphoblasts. I thought of the press, and especially The Pump and India Cathcart and the orchestrated months of vilification. I thought of Ellis’s relentless jokes.

I thought for a long time about Archie Kirk, who had drawn me to Combe Bassett and given me Norman Picton. I wondered if it had been from Archie that Norman had developed a belief in a heavy presence behind the scenes. I wondered if it could possibly be Archie who had prompted Davis Tatum to engage me to find that heavyweight. I wondered if it could possibly have been Archie who told Davis Tatum about my run-in with the bad hat at the Jockey Club, and if so, how did he know?

I trusted Archie. He could pull my strings, I thought, as long as I was willing to go where he pointed, and as long as I was sure no one was pulling his.

I thought about Gordon Quint’s uncontrollable rage and the practical difficulties his fencing post had inflicted. I thought of Ginnie Quint and despair and sixteen floors down.

I thought of the colts and their chopped-off feet.

When I went to bed I dreamed the same old nightmare.

Agony. Humiliation. Both hands.

I awoke sweating.

Damn it all to hell.