The Tell-Tale Horse

CHAPTER 8

The sky, a brilliant blue, glittered overhead. Crawford Howard, spirits rising, drove his big S Mercedes just for the fun of driving. He needed a break. Not that things weren’t clipping along, but sometimes he’d let small problems nag him and spoil his day. Although he had come a long way in developing his foxhunting sense, he was only beginning to appreciate Sister’s and Shaker’s gifts with hounds, horses, and foxes. Exercising, feeding, breeding, maintaining a pack of hounds proved far more difficult than he had anticipated.

Foxhunting is art, instinct, and a dash of science.

He cruised past the stately home-fired brick country club. In the long slanting last rays of sunset, the faithful whacked away on the driving range. It was February 22, and the light was moving closer to the equinox.

He parked his car and waited until High Vajay finished his swing. “What are you doing out here in the cold? You’ll tear a muscle.”

High, one of the few who actually liked Crawford, nudged the bucket of balls with his Number Four driver. “I’ll get better at this game if it kills me.”

As it was not public knowledge that High was under suspicion for murder, he thought it best to keep cool and stick to his routine.

“It just might.” Crawford peered down into the bucket, counting eight left. “When I saw you out here I had to stop. These other people are as crazy as you, I guess.”

“Look who’s talking,” Cindy Chandler, a stalwart Jefferson Hunt member and a good golfer, called out to him. She said this with good humor so he smiled back.

“She’s right.” High needled him. “Any man who buys his own pack of outlaw hounds defies convention.”

Crawford smiled. He liked that he was the talk of the town. He just wished he hadn’t lost his pack at Paradise—a humiliating consequence of his fragile ego, and the result of his having deserted the JHC.

“Crawford, come back. We miss you.” Cindy was sincere. “Surely there’s a way to patch this up. Your Dumfriesshire hounds would flourish, and you’d save the money of building a kennel.”

“Shaker has to apologize first.”

Shaker had decked him at the last hunt ball.

“Unusual circumstances.”

Crawford, on the dance floor, had collided with Shaker and Lorraine Rasmussen, which somehow pulled down Lorraine’s strapless top, her glories exposed.

“Well-built woman.” Crawford had lived long enough in Virginia to know understatement worked better than overstatement.

Cindy shook her club at him. “You men!”

High bowed slightly to her. “As a beautiful woman, you know exactly how we are.”

She shook her head, returning to address the golf ball, which said not a word in return.

“I’ve had enough.” High picked up the bucket and walked back to his mud-splattered Range Rover. He prized all things British, and in truth the hideously expensive SUV could go through anything.

Out of earshot, Crawford asked, “You knew the Craig and Abrams woman who was killed, didn’t you?” Crawford had no way of knowing that High had denied such knowledge to the sheriff when first queried.

High lowered his voice as he opened the back door of the Rover. “Ben Sidell called on me, once they knew who she was and where she worked. Yes, I knew her. She was very sweet.”

“Sorry.”

“Me too. Her whole life was in front of her.”

Satisfied, Crawford switched to his favorite subject, business. “Do you still own Craig and Abrams stock?”

“I do. I bought Hutchison Essar stock too. That’s how much I believe in the industry. Eventually one or both of those companies, currently in competition, will build WiFi systems to blanket all of India. It’s happening here; it will happen there. WiFi is the real golden pot at the end of the rainbow.”

“Vodafone wanted to take a controlling interest in Hutchison Essar?”

Vodafone, a British mobile phone company, realizing that the European market was stagnating, had bid for a controlling interest in Hutchison Essar, India’s fourth largest mobile operation.

The street value hovered at $13.5 million. Vodafone wanted a 67 percent stake. India’s mobile phone market was booming, with customers signing up at the rate of 6.6 million subscribers a month.

This pushed Reliance Communications Ltd., the Mumbai-based second largest operator, and Blackstone, a private equity group, into bed to see if they couldn’t buy 100 percent of Hutchison Essar. A dollop of national pride also sparked this effort, since the Indians wanted to keep the British out, having been rid of them only for about sixty years.

“Vodafone is well managed, has foresight.” High pulled off his skin-tight golf gloves.

Warp Speed, Faye Spencer’s company in town, was working on a device that would translate basic language. So an English speaker could understand a German, a Chinese, and vice versa. At present the circuitry had proved complicated and unreliable. The goal was to reduce the complexity, get to market first. This device could revolutionize business worldwide.

Warp Speed had the wisdom to concentrate on English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and “government Indian” as there were so many dialects. They’d add French, Russian, and Portuguese later.

“What I’m really excited about is Warp Speed,” High said. “I’m not really an entrepreneur but I couldn’t resist the concept. Faye’s too smart to get sucked into the vortex of pie-in-the-sky research. She’s practical. The company has good management and accounting practices. If she can pull it off, triple digit millions will be hers, maybe more.”

“And ours.” Crawford smiled. “You talked me into investing in Warp Speed, remember?”

“I do. Talked Sister into a much smaller investment than ours, but she’s naturally conservative. The volatility in the electronics market, in software, escalates. That worries me.”

“What about this murder, though?” Crawford could be bold.

High frowned. “I doubt Aashi’s murder has to do with the market.”

“You’re right. When they start killing men, I’ll worry.” Crawford didn’t consider himself sexist, but in his mind, if men were killed, it might be more than some form of sexual revenge or release.

“Ah.” High leaned against his Rover.

“We might suggest that Faye Spencer hire security.”

“She’s pretty tough. I wouldn’t worry too much,” High countered.

“Maybe,” Crawford said, unconvinced.

High smiled. “I do allow myself to dream of future profits there.”

“Down the road. If it ever happens,” Crawford remarked. “Faye’s built a good team. She was smart enough to take on a real businessperson, since she’s not. Her mind is full of wires, chips, dots of platinum, and dreams, too, I guess.”

“Once people thought computers in the home were decades away.” High crossed his arms over his chest. “Everything happens so fast.”

“High, you believe in conspiracies?”

“Like I said, this sector of the market is highly volatile. Volatility can transform into violence. What difference does it make if it’s a conspiracy or one genius nutcase?”