Come to Grief (10 page)

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 noncontact.

“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 wastepa per 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.

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.”