Crisis

10

The knowledge that it was their sister whose body had been discovered in the burned-out stables briefly brought the remaining siblings together again, not that they were united in their grief.

Indeed, they blamed her for the fire.

It was an hour later and we were all again in Oliver’s kitchen, together with Arabella and Susan, this time both sans make-up. Only Maria had decided not to join this kangaroo court and I speculated that she might be already too worse for wear through drink, even at eight-thirty in the morning.

I, meanwhile, had simply remained and no one had yet asked me to leave, so I hadn’t. If they were foolish enough to discuss private family matters in front of me, I wasn’t about to stop them.

‘What the bloody hell was Zoe doing here anyway?’ Oliver asked no one in particular. ‘She hasn’t been here for years.’

‘She always was a selfish cow,’ Declan declared. ‘And completely barmy.’

Only Tony, her full brother, stood up for her, and even that seemed a tad half-hearted. ‘You lot treated her so badly that it was no wonder she had problems.’

‘Problems?’ Ryan almost shouted at him. ‘I’m the one with the bloody problems and it’s all her fault.’

‘You can’t be sure of that,’ Tony said.

‘She’s been arrested before for arson,’ Ryan was now shouting at him. ‘What more proof do you want? Bloody bitch deserves to be dead.’

‘Ryan!’ Susan said sharply. ‘Don’t talk about your sister like that. Think of her poor children now without a mother.’

He pulled a face at her as if he didn’t appreciate being chastised by his wife.

‘I’ll talk about her however I like,’ he said. ‘Even in death she’s ruining my life.’

‘As if you didn’t ruin hers first,’ Tony said.

‘You watch out,’ Ryan responded angrily, waving a finger into Tony’s face. ‘Without me, you’d have no future in this business.’

‘I’d rather have no future than be beholden to you.’

Tony went to grab Ryan’s finger but he pulled it away sharply.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Oliver shouted at them. ‘Have you no sense of decency. Zoe is lying in the morgue and all you can do is bicker between yourselves.’

I personally would have called it more than bickering but I kept silent.

And Declan wasn’t to be left out, wading in with his two penn’orth. ‘Whatever her problems, there’s no excuse for killing those horses.’

‘To hell with the bloody horses,’ Arabella said, smacking her husband none too gently on the arm. ‘This is your flesh and blood we’re talking about.’ There were tears in her eyes and Arabella, of all of them, was the only one who seemed in the slightest way grief-stricken. ‘Has anyone told Yvonne?’

‘Oh my God,’ Tony said. ‘I should be with her.’

Yvonne, it transpired, was an ex Mrs Oliver Chadwick. She was Tony and Zoe’s mother, and still lived quite close by, in a village four miles south of Newmarket. Indeed, Tony was still living with her and he had driven from there to Castleton House Stables that morning to ride Arab Dancer.

‘Surely the police will have told her,’ Oliver said.

‘I bet they haven’t,’ Tony replied. ‘She’s not her next of kin. That’s Peter.’

‘She’ll hear soon enough,’ Ryan said thoughtlessly. ‘It’ll be on the news before long.’

Tony gave him a look halfway between hate and pity. ‘You fucking idiot,’ he said. ‘I’m going home.’ And he went.

There was a brief silence as if the departure of Tony to go to his mother had finally brought home to the rest of them the enormity of the situation. All of them, that was, except Ryan, who seemed totally oblivious to the sombre mood that was descending.

‘What shall we do now?’ he said jauntily. ‘I have horses to train and York Races to go to.’

‘Tony was right,’ Declan said to him. ‘You are a fucking idiot. Come on, Bella, we’re going home. And we won’t be back.’

He took his wife by the hand and they too departed.

I decided that I had intruded long enough and it was time I made myself scarce. I walked out of the kitchen down the corridor to the yard office. Janie was sitting there with her head in her hands, her elbows resting on the desk. The bad news had obviously permeated through to her.

‘Hello,’ I said.

She sat up quickly.

‘Oh, hello, Harry. Isn’t it dreadful?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Awful. Did you know her?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I knew her quite well when we were young. I’m a year older than her but we went to the same primary school and then we both moved on to Newmarket College. She was still there when I started working for her father. In fact, it was through her I got the job here in the first place. We used to ride out together on ponies as kids, even though she hated it.’

‘Why did she do it then?’ I asked.

‘I think her father used to make her. Riding was a family tradition.’

‘But what was she like as a person?’

‘Quiet,’ Janie said. ‘Rather reserved. Not a very happy girl. She hated it here and couldn’t wait to get away. One day she just left. Didn’t even say goodbye to anyone. She just vanished. I remember there being a huge hoo-ha about it at the time. Everyone thought she’d been murdered but she turned up alive weeks later in London, living rough.’

No wonder DCI Eastwood had initially been sceptical about my theory that Zoe was the victim of the fire.

‘Tony said she had problems.’

‘She sure did,’ Janie agreed. ‘She didn’t get on with people easily. Most thought her a bit odd and she was bullied quite a lot by the other kids at secondary school. Nowadays she’d probably be diagnosed as autistic or something, but I don’t remember that term being used at the time. She was just thought of as weird. I was probably her only friend, but that wasn’t saying much. We were hardly bosom pals, but at least she talked to me. She used to self-harm quite a bit, you know, cut her arms with razor blades and stuff like that. She showed me. Really scary, it was. I thought she was just seeking attention but she claimed she was seriously depressed.’

‘How did she get on academically?’ I asked.

‘Fine, I suppose. Nothing to write home about, bit like me. But we both did reasonably well if I remember, not that either of us went to university or anything. And she disappeared before taking her A levels anyway.’

‘Had you seen her since she went to London?’ I asked.

‘Only once. About five years ago. She just turned up one day demanding to see her father. They had a flaming row. I think it was over him marrying Maria, but I’m not sure. There was lots of shouting, I know that. I could hear it in the office, not that I was trying to listen or anything. But it was so loud, I couldn’t help it.’

I had a mental vision of her having had her ear pressed up against the office door, but maybe I was being unkind.

‘I remember Oliver bellowing at her that, as far as he was concerned, she was no longer his daughter. It was dreadful. Went on for ages. I tried not to listen. I even put my hands over my ears but Zoe was shouting that she’d now obtained the DNA evidence to prove it. It was awful.’

‘Did you ever meet her husband?’

‘Yeah, at the same time. He came with her, along with their two children. I didn’t even know Zoe was married, let alone a mother. And the kids did nothing but cry all the time. I remember that all right. Poor Oliver. Not the best introduction to his grandchildren.’

‘What’s the husband like?’ I asked.

‘Older than Zoe. Quite a bit older, I’d say. And bald. I didn’t much take to him. He was very angry and was also involved in the row with Oliver. He was demanding money.’

‘Money?’

‘Yeah, something about Zoe being entitled to it. Her inheritance or something. Usual problem when an ageing father marries a younger woman. The only thing the kids see is the family fortune going to her instead of to them.’

At this point, Ryan came stomping into the office and clearly didn’t like me being there talking to Janie.

Time to change the subject, I thought, preferably to something that was nothing to do with the Chadwicks or racing. But I wondered how much of our conversation he had already heard.

‘Did you have a good birthday dinner last night?’ I asked.

‘Janie,’ Ryan said loudly before she could answer me. ‘Are all the declarations complete and ready?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All ready. Jockeys too. On your screen. You just need to check them, input your access code and then push the send button.’

He strode over to the computer on another desk and tapped a few keys on the keyboard, seemingly without even glancing at the information on the screen. Then he walked out again without saying another word, not even a ‘thank you’.

Janie and I watched him go and sat there in silence until we heard the kitchen door close.

‘We had a lovely birthday dinner,’ Janie said. ‘We had Chinese at The Fountain. Eight of us in all. Great food. I ate and drank far too much. As always. Had real trouble getting up this morning.’ She laughed but only briefly.

It was not really a morning for laughter.

‘What does your sister do?’ I asked.

‘I know what she did last night. She wouldn’t stop bloody talking about you. She wanted to know all about you and what you were doing here.’ Janie looked at me. ‘And that’s actually a very good question.’

She raised her eyebrows at me in a questioning manner.

‘I represent Sheikh Karim,’ I said. ‘He wants me to find out why his horses died.’

‘And have you?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Is that why you’re still snooping around the place?’

‘I wouldn’t call it snooping,’ I said in my defence.

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Because that’s exactly what you’re doing, asking me all these questions about Zoe.’

I was having some difficulty reading her. Was she actually angry with me? Or being playful?

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘No need. Snoop away. We all want to know why the horses died, and Zoe too. I’m loyal, but not that loyal. And I don’t know for how much longer I’m going to have a job here anyway.’

It was my turn to look quizzically at her. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? Whole place is going down the tubes if you ask me. The loss of those seven horses will be the last straw, I reckon, unless we get some winners soon. Mr Ryan even cut my pay last month. Said he couldn’t afford me.’

How odd, I thought. Oliver had told me that the business couldn’t run without her and yet his son had cut her wages. Ryan really was an idiot.

Suddenly Janie became very concerned that she’d revealed too much.

‘Well, no, it’s not that bad,’ she said, trying to back-pedal furiously. ‘It’s really not. I shouldn’t be telling you anything anyway, not with you representing one of our owners. I’m just tired, and upset about Zoe. Ignore what I just said.’

Difficult, I thought.

‘But that’s why Prince of Troy is such a huge loss for us,’ said Janie, digging herself back into the mire. ‘He would have won the Derby, no doubt about it, and that would’ve eased all our troubles.’

She fell silent and I could see from her facial expression that she regretted saying anything to me at all, let alone her prediction of doom and gloom at Castleton House Stables.

‘Did Kate really talk about me last night?’ I asked.

‘What?’ Her mind was elsewhere, and it clearly wasn’t a happy place.

‘Did your sister really talk about me all through dinner?’

‘Yes she bloody did. Yap, yap, yap. Never stopped. Harry Foster this, Harry Foster that. In the end we all had to tell her to shut up.’

I smiled.

‘Give her my number, will you?’ I wrote it down on a notepad on her desk. ‘Ask her to call me.’

Janie tore the piece of paper off the pad and looked at it.

‘I might,’ she said. ‘Or I might not.’