The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (13 page)

“An Arabian. A fine one, too.”

We stood looking over the half door while the horse rolled his eyes and snorted at us. He wasn’t large, under sixteen hands, but every line of him, from his long back to his clean cannon bones, sang out speed and breeding.

Harry ran a calming hand down the arched neck.

“We have to keep him here because he’s entire. Cover every mare in the yard if he had his way.”

A stallion, not gelded, therefore as wild as the wind and as unpredictable.

“No wonder Sir Percy got thrown. I suppose he was out for a hack, got bolted with into the lake and onto the island, then the horse reared up and threw him.”

Harry snorted, making a noise much like the horse.

“And I’m the Queen of Fairyland.”

I suppressed the picture of Harry in rosy wreaths and diaphanous draperies.

“You don’t think it happened that way?”

“No, I don’t, and if you think about it, neither do you.”

“Oh, and why don’t I?”

“For one thing, you know horses a touch better than that. Have you ever met an Arab in your life that was any use over water? Can’t stand it, coming from deserts like they do.”

“If he was bolting . . .”

“If he was bolting, he’d bolt away from water, not across it.”

“But he was on the island. I gather nobody disputes that?”

“Nobody’s likely to, given the trouble they had to get him off it.”

“So how did he get there?” Harry turned towards me with the glint in his eye that usually means the other man is about to get the worse of a bargain.

“That, Mr Ludlow, is the second most peculiar thing about this whole business.”

“Oh? So, what’s the first, Harry?” He paused, enjoying his moment.

“The most peculiar of the lot is what Sir Percy was doing with him in the first place.”

“Hacking out on him, surely.”

He gestured towards the horse, calmer now and watching us with interest, although still as ready to fly as a bird from a cage.

“You look at that animal and tell me if he’d let a fat counting-house man like Sir Percy Whitton throw a leg over him. A racing lord might ride him, a tinker boy as wild as he is might ride him, but he wouldn’t let any ordinary hacking man as much as put a toe in his stirrup iron.”

I looked at the horse and had to admit that I knew what he meant. Harry, seeing my face, nodded.

“Sir Percy couldn’t have ridden a hair of his tail.”

“But they were on the island together, and Sir Percy was dead.”

“That’s it.”

“So there must have been somebody else there?”

“Not when they got there. The chief groom’s a friend of mine. I had it all from him direct.”

“He can’t have dropped from the clouds. Was there any sign anybody else had been there?”

“By the time they’d got Sir Percy off the island, then the horse, the whole lot was as trampled as if they’d fought a battle over it.”

I thought of Charles Clawson and my mind went racing.

“Supposing, for the sake of argument, that somebody had wanted to harm Sir Percy. If he managed to get him alone on a little island with a horse that might be dangerous . . .”

“Be a damned sight easier to wait for him behind a bush with a brace of pistols, begging your pardon. Anyhow, you’ve still got to get the horse to the island.”

And Charles Clawson, as I remembered, was a hacking sort of counting-house man too – no rider for the white horse.

“It would be a complicated way to murder anybody.”

At the word murder, Harry turned away. He said, under his breath: “Suppose a man’s got to have an interest in life, but yours seems a damned odd one to me.”

We’d had this out before, but he’d keep worrying at it.

“Why so? Doesn’t it interest you, thinking that a person may be killed by another person and nobody ever know how it happened, or why? You could write whole books about it.”

“Funny sort of books they’d be. Who’d want to read them?”

“Just about everybody who’s curious about his fellow men and women.”

He shook his head. “What that doesn’t take into account is that there are what you might call public murders and there are private murders, and it doesn’t do to confuse the two of them.”

“What do you mean?”

We began walking slowly back across the yard. A dog dozed in the sun and a boy swept the already immaculate brick paving.

“What I call a public murder, let’s say a poacher shoots a keeper, everybody knows who’s done it, he’s tried at the assizes, people go to see him hanged, and that’s an end of it. A private murder – somebody kills somebody for a good or a bad reason and doesn’t want the whys and wherefores of it known, and mostly you wouldn’t do any good to anybody making them known, only stir up more trouble. What you’re doing is intruding on private murder.”

“You think it was murder then?”

He didn’t answer. I asked him how the Arab had come to be in his yard.

“Had to go somewhere until they find out who owns him, and he couldn’t have stopped at Sir Percy’s place, could he?”

“Why not?”

“The young widow. As soon as she hears about the white horse she faints clean away – thinking, I suppose, of her poor husband being trampled and so on. The doctor says he won’t be answerable if she sets eyes on the animal, so they call me in and I ride him over here.”

“Ah yes, the widow. Charles Clawson’s daughter. She must have been a lot younger than her husband.”

“About a quarter of a century younger. Down here they reckon her father gave her to Sir Percy in return for a parcel of railway shares.” Harry said it as matter-of-factly as you’d talk of trading one horse for another.

“She’ll be a rich widow now, Mr Ludlow, and a nice-looking young lady at that. Good chance for somebody.” He laughed and looked at me sidelong.

“I’m not bidding. Was she at the inquest?”

“Yes. Had to answer questions from the coroner about when she’d last seen her husband.”

“When had she?”

“Dinner the night before. She went up to bed early, having a headache from the heat. First she knew about it was when her maid woke her up in the morning.”

“Had he said anything to her about going out?”

“Not a word, but then he wouldn’t, would he?”

There was something odd about the way Harry said that, but I left that for later.

“It must have been a sad ordeal for her.”

“Very composed she was, while she was telling it. Afterwards, while she was walking out, she nearly collapsed on her brother’s arm. He’d come back from Oxford especially when he heard about it.”

“Did they say at the inquest whether Sir Percy was trampled? Were there marks of horseshoes on him?”

“Not one, just the back of his head caved in. The head groom said it looked as though he’d fallen and hit it on the base of the statue, the Venus.”

He stopped in front of another loose box in the middle of the long row. There was a dark bay mare inside, cobby sort, sixteen hands, facing away from us and munching hay. She looked quiet and steady, as unlike the Arab as anything on four legs.

“She’s Sir Percy’s.”

“What’s she doing here in a livery yard? Did his wife send her away too?”

He shook his head.

“I got up early in the morning and there she was tied to the hitching ring outside the gates. She was covered in mud and tired fit to drop, but whoever left her there had knotted up the reins and run up the stirrups properly.”

“When was this?”

“The morning they found Sir Percy’s body.”

“How far away from here is Sir Percy’s place?”

“Four miles.”

I could hardly take in what he was telling me, and I must have spluttered my questions. How did he know the mare was Sir Percy’s? Could the man have ridden her four miles in the night and walked back in time to be dead on his own island by sunrise, and if so, why? Had Harry told the coroner’s officer? The answer to that last question was no, as I should have guessed knowing his dislike for the law. As for how he’d known, it turned out that the mare was a frequent guest at his livery stables when Sir Percy rode into town.

“But you told me that the head groom checked the stables that morning and all Sir Percy’s horses were there.”

“So they were, all as were meant to be there. This mare was never in his stables. He kept her in his estate manager’s stable half a mile from the house and his wife never knew she existed.”

There could only be one reason for that.

“You’re telling me that Sir Percy kept a
petite amie
in the town here and used the mare to visit her?”

No need, with Harry, to pretend to be shocked. He lives by the morals of the reign before Her Majesty’s, if he can be credited with any at all.

“Tuesday and Thursday nights,” was all he said. Sir Percy’s body had been found early on Wednesday morning.

“Didn’t any of this come out at the inquest?”

“Wouldn’t have been decent, would it, with his body lying cold and his poor wife sitting there hearing it. I reckon half the jury knew about it and probably the coroner as well for that matter, but nobody was going to say so.”

“But it was relevant, wasn’t it? Sir Percy has dinner with his wife. Some time after that he walks to his estate manager’s house, collects the mare, and starts riding into town. Either on the way there or on the way back he is diverted, for no good reason, onto an island in his lake along with an Arab stallion from God knows where that doesn’t like crossing water. His mare, meanwhile, somehow finds her way back to your livery stables and ties herself neatly to a hitching ring. Isn’t that a sequence a coroner should know about?”

“Put that way, I’m not saying you’re wrong, Mr Ludlow, but I still don’t see what good it would do.”

“This woman he visited – do you know her?”

“Name of Lucy Dester. House with the green door, opposite the baker’s.”

I stood making up my mind, staring at the back view of the cobby mare. Aware of eyes on her, she twitched her tail, shifted her hind legs.

“Looks a touch short-tempered.”

“Not her. Quiet as a cushion, only she’s in season at the moment. Anyway, if you’re set on finding out what happened, you’ve seen both of them that matter now.”

He meant both horses in the case-horses being more important to Harry than people. He said just one thing more before we parted at the gate.

“Now don’t you go making her miserable. She’s a decent enough party in her own way.”

There was a man in bloodstained clothes hammering at Lucy Dester’s green front door. He looked as if he’d been there for some time, and a small crowd had gathered. I asked a loitering boy who the bloodstained man was and gathered he was the local butcher. I loitered with the rest of the crowd and when, after a few more minutes of beating, the door opened a crack I was able to get a glimpse of the person inside. At risk of being ungallant, she struck me as being ten years too old and a couple of stone too heavy to qualify as any sort of nymph. Her voice, when she told the butcher to go about his business, was not refined. He thrust a solidly booted foot into the door crack and pulled a paper from his pocket.

“Two pounds, three shillings, and fourpence halfpenny.”

That was the burden of his song, several times repeated. Mrs Dester owed him two pounds, three shillings, and fourpence halfpenny, and he wouldn’t budge from her doorstep until he got it. I fumbled in my pocket, approached the door.

“This is most uncivil behaviour to a lady. Now take your money and be off with you.”

He stared open-mouthed at me, then at the coins in his hand, and withdrew muttering. The crack in the doorway opened a little wider and I stepped inside. There were broken expressions of gratitude, explanations about money orders not arriving. I found myself sitting opposite her in a neat parlour, sipping a glass of Madeira.

“I kept it for him,” she said. “He always enjoyed his Madeira.”

There was no need to ask to whom she was referring. She’d taken me for a friend of his who knew about the relations between them and had come to offer sympathy. She was not an unpleasing woman in either person or conversation, with quantities of lustrous black hair, pink rounded cheeks, and a warmth of manner that compensated for her lack of refinement. She had been, by her account, employed as an actress in London until Sir Percy set her up in a small establishment in town. When he decided to spend more time on his estate, he moved her to the present lodgings.

“And last Tuesday night . . . ?”

She sighed deeply. “There was a nice cold collation laid out for him, ham and fowl, and his claret decanted all ready. He never came.”

“Did you think something had happened to him?”

“Not that, oh no. Unexpected guests, I thought, or business that had kept him at home. Nothing like what happened.”

“When did you know?”

“It was all round the town. I went out to buy some ribbons for my bonnet and that b— I mean a customer at the haberdashers said she supposed I’d heard about the accident.” Two plump tears trembled on her cheeks, ran down.