Come to Grief (6 page)

I said I’d heard it was so.

“I told them to bugger off. They weren’t interested in finding who took my colt’s foot off, only in proving I did it myself. They made me that
angry....”
His words failed him. I’d met many people unjustly accused of setting fires, battering children, stealing and taking bribes, and by then I knew the vocal vibrations of truly outraged innocence. The angry farmer, I would have staked all on it, had not taken the foot off his own colt, and I told him so. Some of his anger abated into surprise. “So you
believe
me?”

“I sure do.” I nodded. “The point is, who knew you’d bought a fine fast colt that you had at your farm in a field?”

“Who knew?” He suddenly looked guilty, as if he’d already had to face an unpalatable fact. “I’d blown my mouth off a bit. Half the county knew. And I’d been boasting about him at Aintree, the day before the Grand National. I was at one of those sponsors’ lunch things—Topline Foods, it was—and the colt was fine that night. I saw him in the morning. And it was the next night, after the National, that he was got at.”

He had taken his own color photographs (out of distrust of the police) and he showed them to me readily.

“The off-fore,” he said, pointing to a close-up of the severed foot. “He was cut just below the fetlock. Almost through the joint. You can see the white ends of the bones.”

The photographs jolted. It didn’t help that I’d seen my own left wrist in much the same condition. I said, “What was your vet’s opinion?”

“Same as mine.”

I went to see the vet. One chop, he said. Only one. No missed shots. Straight through at the leg’s most vulnerable point.

“What weapon?”

He didn’t know.

I pressed onwards to Yorkshire, where, barely a month earlier, at the time of the York Spring Meeting, a dark-brown two-year-old colt had been deprived of his off-fore foot on a moonlit night. One chop. No insurance. Sick and angry owners. No clues.

These owners were a stiff-upper-lip couple with elderly manners and ancient immutable values who were as deeply bewildered as repelled by the level of evil that would for no clear reason destroy a thing of beauty; in this case the fluid excellence of a fleet, glossy equine princeling.

“Why?”
they asked me insistently.
“Why
would anyone do such a pointlessly wicked thing?”

I had no answer. I prompted them only to talk, to let out their pain and deprivation. I got them to talk, and I listened.

The wife said, “We had such a lovely week. Every year we have people to stay for the York Spring Meeting

... because, as you can see, this is quite a large house ... so we have six or eight friends staying, and we get in extra staff and have a party—such fun, you see—and this year the weather was perfect and we all had a great time.“

“Successful, don’t you know,” said her husband, nodding.

“Dear Ellis Quint was one of our guests,” the hostess said with a smile, “and he lifted everyone’s spirits in that easy way of his so that it seemed we spent the whole week laughing. He was filming for one of his television programs at York races, so we were all invited behind the scenes and enjoyed it all so much. And then ... then ... the very night after all our guests had left ... well...”

“Jenkins came and told us—Jenkins is our groom—he told us while we were sitting at breakfast, that our colt... our colt ...”

“We have three brood-mares,” his wife said. “We love to see the foals and yearlings out in the fields, running free, you know ... and usually we sell the yearlings, but that colt was so beautiful that we kept him, and he was going into training soon.... All our guests had admired him.”

“Jenkins had made a splendid job of breaking him in.”

“Jenkins was in tears,” the wife said. “Jenkins! A tough, leathery old man. In
tears.”

The husband said with difficulty, “Jenkins found the foot by the gate, beside the water trough.”

His wife went on. “Jenkins told us that Ellis had done . a program a few months ago about a pony’s foot being cut off and the children being so devastated. So we wrote to Ellis about our colt and Ellis telephoned at once to say how
awful
for us. He couldn’t have been nicer. Dear Ellis. But there wasn’t anything he could do, of course, except sympathize.”

“No,” I agreed, and I felt only the faintest twitch of surprise that Ellis hadn’t mentioned the York colt when I’d been talking to him less than a week earlier about Rachel Ferns.

Back in London I met Kevin Mills, the journalist from
The Pump,
at lunchtime in the same pub as before.

“It’s time for both barrels,” I said.

He swigged his double gin. “What have you discovered?”

I outlined the rest of the pattern, beyond what he’d told me about two-year-old colts on moonlit nights. One chop from something like a machete. Always the off-fore foot. Always near a water trough. No insurance. And always just after a major local race meeting: the Gold Cup Festival at Cheltenham; the Grand National at Liverpool; the Spring Meeting at York.

“And this Saturday, two days from now,” I said levelly, “we have the Derby.”

He put his glass down slowly, and after a full silent minute said, “What about the kid’s pony?”

I shrugged resignedly. “It was the first that we know of.”

“And it doesn’t fit the pattern. Not a two-year-old colt, was he? And no major race meeting, was there?”

“The severed foot was by the water trough. The off-fore foot. Moon in the right quarter. One chop. No insurance.”

He frowned, thinking. “Tell you what,” he said eventually, “it’s worth a
warning.
I’m not a sports writer, as you know, but I’ll get the message into the paper somewhere. ‘Don’t leave your two-year-old colts unguarded in open fields during and after the Epsom meeting.’ I don’t think I can do more than that.”

“It might be enough.”

“Yeah.
If
all the owners of colts read
The Pump.”

“It will be the talk of the racecourse.. I’ll arrange that.”

“On Derby Day?” He looked skeptical. “Still, it will be better than nothing.” He drank again. “What we really need to do is catch the bugger red-handed.”

We gloomily contemplated that impossibility. Roughly fifteen thousand thoroughbred foals were born each year in the British Isles. Half would be colts. Many of those at two would already be in training for flat racing, tucked away safely in stables; but that still left a host unattended out of doors. By June, also, yearling colts, growing fast, could be mistaken at night for two-year-olds.

Nothing was safe from a determined vandal.

Kevin Mills went away to write his column and I traveled on to Kent to report to my clients.

“Have you found out
who?”
Linda demanded.

“Not yet.”

We sat by the sitting-room window again, watching Rachel push Pegotty in his buggy around the lawn, and I told her about the three colts and their shattered owners.

“Three more,” Linda repeated numbly. “In March, April and May? And Silverboy in February?”

“That’s right.”

“And what about
now?
This month ...
June?”

I explained about the warning to be printed in
The Pump.

“I’m not going to tell Rachel about the other three,” Linda said. “She wakes up screaming as it is.”

“I inquired into other injured horses all over England,” I said, “but they were all hurt differently from each other. I think ... well ... that there are several different people involved. And I don’t think the thugs that blinded and cut the ponies round here had anything to do with Silverboy.”

Linda protested. “But they must have done! There couldn’t be two lots of vandals.”

“I think there were.”

She watched Rachel and Pegotty, the habitual tears not far away. Rachel was tickling the baby to make him laugh.

“I’d do anything to save my daughter,” Linda said. “The doctor said that if only she’d had several sisters, one of them might have had the right tissue type. Joe—Rachel’s father—is half Asian. It seems harder to find a match. So I had the baby. I had Pegotty five months ago.” She wiped her eyes. “Joe has his new wife and he wouldn’t sleep with me again, not even for Rachel. So he donated sperm and I had artificial insemination, and it worked at once. It seemed an omen ... and I had the baby... but he doesn’t match Rachel.... There was only ever one chance in four that he would have the same tissue type. and antigens.... I hoped and prayed ... but he
doesn’t.”
She gulped, her throat closing. “So I have Pegotty ... he’s Peter, really, but we call him Pegotty ... but Joe won’t bond with him ... and we still can’t find a match anywhere for Rachel, and there isn’t much time for me to try with another baby ... and Joe
won‘t,
anyway. His wife objects ... and he didn’t want to do it the first time.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Joe’s wife goes on and on about Joe having to pay child support for Pegotty ... and now she’s pregnant herself.”

Life, I thought, brought unlimited and complicated cruelties.

“Joe isn’t mean,” Linda said. “He loves Rachel and he bought her the pony and he keeps us comfortable, but his wife says I could have
six
children without getting a match....” Her voice wavered and stopped, and after a while she said, “I don’t know why I burdened you with all that. You’re so easy to talk to.”

“And interested.”

She nodded, sniffing and blowing her nose. “Go out and talk to Rachel. I told her you were coming back today. She liked you.”

Obediently I went out into the garden and gravely shook hands with Rachel, and we sat side by side on a garden bench like two old buddies.

Though still warm, the golden days of early June were graying and growing damp: good for roses, perhaps, but not for the Derby.

I apologized that I hadn’t yet found out who had attacked Silverboy.

“But you will in the end, won’t you?”

“I hope so,” I said.

She nodded. “I told Daddy yesterday that I was sure you would.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. He took me out in his car. He does that sometimes, when Didi goes to London to do shopping.”

“Is Didi his wife?”

Rachel’s nose wrinkled in a grimace, but she made no audible judgment. She said, “Daddy says someone chopped your hand off, just like Silverboy.”

She regarded me gravely, awaiting confirmation.

“Er,” I said, unnerved, “not exactly like Silverboy.”

“Daddy says the man who did it was sent to prison, but he’s out again now on parole.”

“Do you know what ‘on parole’ means?” I asked curiously.

“Yes. Daddy told me.”

“Your daddy knows a lot.”

“Yes, but is it
true
that someone chopped your hand off?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“Yes, it does,” she said. “I was thinking about it in bed last night. I have awful dreams. I tried to stay awake because I didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about you having your hand chopped off.”

She was trying to be grown up and calm, but I could feel screaming hysteria too near the surface; so, stifling my own permanent reluctance to talk about it, I gave her an abbreviated account of what had happened.

“I was a jockey,” I began.

“Yes, I know. Daddy said you were the champion for years.”

“Well, one day my horse fell in a race, and while I was on the ground another horse landed over a jump straight onto my wrist and ... um ... tore it apart. It got stitched up, but I couldn’t use my hand much. I had to stop being a jockey, and I started doing what I do now, which is finding out things, like who hurt Silverboy.”

She nodded.

“Well, I found out something that an extremely nasty man didn’t want me to know, and he ... er ... he hit my bad wrist and broke it again, and that time the doctors couldn’t stitch it up, so they decided that I’d be better off with a useful plastic hand instead of the useless old one.”

“So he didn’t really ...not
really
chop it off. Not like with an axe or anything?”

“No. So don’t waste dreams on it.”

She smiled with quiet relief and, as she was sitting on my left, put her right hand down delicately but without hesitation on the replacement parts. She stroked the tough plastic, unfeeling skin and looked up with surprise at my eyes.

“It isn’t
warm,”
she said.

“Well, it isn’t cold, either.”

She laughed with uncomplicated fun. “How does it work?”

“I tell it what to do,” I said simply. “I send a message from my brain down my arm saying open thumb from fingers, or close thumb to fingers, to grip things, and the messages reach very sensitive terminals called electrodes, which are inside the plastic and against my skin.” I paused, but she didn’t say she didn’t understand. I said, “My real arm ends about there”—I pointed—“and the plastic arm goes up round my elbow. The electrodes are up in my forearm, there, against my skin. They feel my muscles trying to move. That’s how they work.”

“Is the plastic arm tied on or anything?”

“No. It just fits tightly and stays on by itself. It was specially made to fit me.”

Like all children she took marvels for granted, although to me, even though by then I’d had the false arm for nearly three years, the concept of nerve messages moving machinery was still extraordinary.

“There are three electrodes,” I said. “One for opening the hand, one for closing, and one for turning the wrist.”

“Do electrodes work on electricity?” It puzzled her. “I mean, you’re not plugged into the wall, or anything?”

“You’re a clever girl,” I told her. “It works on a special sort of battery which slots into the outside above where I wear my watch. I charge up the batteries on a charger which is plugged into the wall.”