Comeback (22 page)

“Rapped their shins with a pole, while they were jumping, to teach them to lift their legs higher,” Ken said. “Difficult to prove. Show-jumpers are always rapping their legs, like hurdlers. Nagrebb’s horses always had lumps and contusions on their shins. They’re better these days, since he got a stiff warning.”

Belinda said, “Nagrebb’s daughter swore he didn’t do it.”

Ken smiled. “She does everything he tells her. She rode the horses while he hit their legs. She wants to win, and Daddy provides the wherewithal, and there’s no way she’s going to blow the whistle on him.”

“A wicked world,” Vicky said sadly.

Some degree of evil is the norm, my father had told me. Wholly good people are the aberration. What’s aberration? I’d said. Look it up in the dictionary, then you’ll remember it. Aberration, a deviation from what is common and normal. See the world as it is, he’d said, then see what good you can do in it. Lie abroad for your country. The inconsequential thoughts ended on the reflection that I, like Nagrebb’s daughter, had been molded by a father’s cast of mind.

 

 

WHEN THE LUNCH party broke up I left Thetford Cottage and drove to Riddlescombe village to see how much I remembered. I’d had only vague pictures in my mind but it was a revelation how much was vividly familiar as I drove down the long straggly main street.

The post office, the garage, the pubs; all were still there. Time hadn’t swept away the cottages or changed the stone houses. The pond I’d thrown stones into had shrunk as I had grown, and a small tree in whose bark I’d carved P.P. now spread limbs that would be shady in summer. I parked the car and walked, and remembered who had lived where and who had died and who had run away.

It was like walking back into a lost land that had existed for twenty years in mothballs. Henley’s, the all-purpose shop, still sold violent-colored sweets and plimsolls and horror comics. Graffiti still shocked the prim in the bus shelter. Notices threatened bigger fines for litter. Volunteers were needed for rebuilding the games pavilion. The village, unlike the supermarket, was territory still well known, though the red telephone box had vanished and there was a bright new medical center where the old doctor’s house had been.

Untouched by centuries, let alone twenty years, stood the tiny ancient church to which I’d gone on Christmas mornings and not much oftener. Surrounded still by a low stone wall, a patch of grass, haphazard yews and weathered gray anonymous gravestones, it remained as always an expression of hope against hope for the life everlasting.

I supposed that in these days of normal evil it would be locked between services and I walked up its crunchy gravel path without expectation, but in fact the old latch clicked up with a familiar hollow cluck under my thumb and I pushed open the heavy wooden door to smell the musty mixture of hymn books, hassocks and altar flowers that I’d thought was the presence of God when I was six.

An elderly woman, straightening the pile of hymn books, looked round as I entered and said, “You’re too early. Even song’s three hours yet.”

Perhaps I could just look round, I suggested, and she said she saw no objection, if I was quiet. I could have ten minutes. After that she was leaving and would be turning out the lights.

I sat in a pew and watched her busy about the little turrety pulpit, running a duster over the brass rails of what I used to think of as a Punch and Judy stage, where the vicar popped into view from the chest up and read sonorous incomprehensible poetry that echoed richly off the walls.

Prayer now, I supposed, was what was really called for, but I had lost the habit and seldom felt the need. If there were spiritual sustenance within those walls, for me it lay in timelessness and silence which couldn’t be achieved in the ten minutes.

I wandered to the rear of the church and read again the small brass plaque still fixed high up inconspicuously.

Paul Perry. Years of birth and death. Rest in Peace.

My mother had persuaded the vicar to let it be put there, even though Paul Perry had lived in Lambourn. My mother had blown a kiss every Christmas Day to the plaque, and although on this return I didn’t do that, I did wish him well, that very young horseman who’d given me life.

I thanked the old woman. There was an offertory box by the door, she said. I thanked her again and paid my dues to the past, and walked on down the road to the bungalow where we had lived.

It looked small, of course, and in the prosperous village still seemed a poor relation. The paint was old, the garden bare but tidy, the front gate, which I’d swung on, missing altogether. I paused outside and wondered whether or not to try to go in, but it would all be different inside and I would have to start explaining, and in the end I turned back with the old memories undisturbed and strolled again to the car.

I decided, before I left, that I’d go up to the end of the village, to the Eaglewood stables, and although Sunday afternoon was a taboo time for visiting racing stables I left the car outside and wandered in, hoping, if anyone should see me from the windows, to look like a lost tourist, harmless. A brief nostalgic look round was all I intended—to see if I could better remember the long-dead Jimmy.

In fact I got no more than six paces into the yard before being challenged with an authoritative “Yes? Can I help you?”

I swiveled. The voice came from a thin, fortyish woman in jeans and sweater who was up a stepladder fixing onto a stable wall a painted sign, bright white letters on newly varnished wood, reading “Don’t Feed the Horses.”

“Er,” I said, improvising, “I’d been hoping to talk to Mr. Eaglewood.”

“What about?”

I cleared my throat. “About insurance.” The first thing that came into my head.

“This is an absolutely ridiculous time to do any such thing. Also we have all the insurance we need.” She regarded the sign with her head on one side, nodded to herself and came down the ladder. Another two signs, identical, were propped against the wall at its foot.

“About insuring the horses,” I said, beginning to see a purpose.

“Go away, will you? You’re wasting your time.”

A chilly little breeze cooled the thin February sunshine and swirled her thick tawny hair across her face. Pushing it away, she was self-assured in her good looks. Her vitality and natural magnetism generated a force field all of their own. She was instantly, to me at least, attractive.

She tried to pick up the ladder with one hand and both signs with the other, and I caught one of the signs as it was sliding out of her grasp.

“Thanks,” she said briefly. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind carrying it for me, though it won’t get you anywhere except over there to the opposite wall.”

With a smile I followed her across the yard to where two hooks were screwed into the old brick wall at just above head height. She planted the ladder, went up a few rungs and maneuvered the sign she was carrying until two hoops on its back engaged onto the two hooks. Once the sign hung flat against the wall she gave it the formal nod of approval and descended to the concrete underfoot.

She held out her hand for the sign I was still holding.

“Thanks,” she said. “I can manage now.”

“I’ll take it to where you want to put it.”

She shrugged, turned, and went off through an arch into a further, smaller yard beyond, and immediately I went through there I knew where the hay was stored and how to get through a tiny trapdoor into a roof space, and how to look down on the lads without their knowing that Jimmy and I were up there, spying on them. They never did anything worse than pee in the boxes; it was simply the secret of our presence that had absorbed me and Jimmy.

The third “Don’t Feed the Horses,” also, was hung on pre-positioned hooks in an easily seen place.

“School parties come here once a term on projects,” she explained. “We try to stop the little buggers handing out sweets to the inmates. For one thing, they can get their fingers bitten off, as I always warn them. They think it’s clever not to listen.” She gave me a head-to-toe glance that felt like a moving X ray through flesh and spirit. “What sort of insurance?”

“Insuring the horses against death.”

She shook her head. “We don’t do that. It’s a matter for the owners.”

“Perhaps Mr. Eaglewood . . .”

“He’s asleep,” she interrupted. “And I’m the business manager. I run the finances. When the owners want to insure their horses we put them in touch with an agent. It’s no use you talking to Mr. Eaglewood. He leaves all such things to me.”

“Then . . . you couldn’t tell me if Mr. Wynn Lees insured the colt that died here in a coma last September?”

I didn’t repeat the question but watched a hundred speculations zip through her mind.

“Or,” I said, “did the owner of the horse that died during a respiratory operation insure him beforehand? And—er ... how long before the operation in which he died last Thursday did that horse split its cannon bone?”

She stared at me speechlessly as if not believing what she was hearing.

“Ken McClure is in a lot of trouble,” I said, “and I don’t think it’s of his own making.”

She found her voice, which came out more with plain curiosity than anger.

“Just who are you?” she said.

“A friend of Ken’s.”

“A policeman?”

“No, just a friend. The police rarely investigate the apparently normal deaths of horses.”

“What’s your name?”

“Peter Darwin.”

“Any relation to Charles?”

“No.”

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

I suggested slowly, “Mr. Eaglewood’s daughter?”

I kept every vestige of a smile out of my face but she must have known her reputation.

“Whatever you’ve heard of me,” she said severely, “revise it”

“I have.”

She seemed fairly satisfied, and in any case I’d spoken the truth. I hadn’t expected the brains.

“If you know Ken, you know he had a fling with my daughter,” she said.

“He’s fond of her,” I said.

She shrugged philosophically. “Izzy threw herself at him, poor little bitch. She’s only seventeen, half his age. He treated her decently enough. She just grew out of it.”

“He won’t hear a word against her ... or you.”

She tested that for cynicism, but seemed pleased enough.

“It’s windy out here,” she said, “and the lads will be along any minute for evening stables, making a racket. My father will be walking round. Why don’t you and I go inside where we can talk quietly?”

Without waiting for my assent, she set off with the ladder to return it to a shed, and then led the way not to the big looming main house but to a small separate two-story wing where she lived alone, she said.

“Izzy’s gone off on a music course. She’s much too impressionable. I expect hourly to hear she’s met the perfect man. There’s no such thing as a perfect man.”

Her taste in interiors ran to antique woods and classic fabrics, ultraconservative, cool color temperature; warm central heating. On the walls, original oils, mostly of horses. Overall, a relaxed accustomed prosperity.

She offered me an armchair and sat in another on the opposite side of the fireplace, her blue-clad legs crossed, a telephone and an address book on a small table at her elbow.

“There’s no way I’m going to talk to Wynn Lees if I don’t have to,” she said. “We don’t train for him anymore and I won’t have him in the yard. I can’t understand why my father agreed to train the colt for him in the first place, knowing his reputation. But the colt died of seizures, didn’t it? Or at least, Ken had to put it down.”

“Ken said that colt wasn’t insured. Do you know if the other two were?”

“I never heard so.” She lifted the telephone receiver, looked up a number, pressed a succession of buttons, and spoke to the owner of the respiratory-tract horse, asking about insurance. He seemed warm and friendly, and apparently the horse was not insured.

She repeated the conversation with the cannon-bone owner, with the same results.

“There were three days between the horse splitting its cannon bone and the operation,” she said. “It was a stress fracture in a race. He seemed all right afterwards but the following day he was hopping lame. Ken came out with a portable X ray and told us the bad news. My father discussed it with Ken and Carey and they both thought the leg could be screwed and the horse saved. The owner agreed to go ahead with the expense because the horse was still an entire and could be sent to stud if he didn’t get back his racing form. So those two horses just simply died in the hospital. They weren’t insured. My father and everyone else believes Ken was careless, if not plain negligent.”

I shook my head. “I’ve watched him do a difficult and critical operation on a broodmare, and I know he couldn’t be careless or negligent. He’s punctiliously careful every inch of the way.”

She sat for a while thinking it over.

“Are you seriously saying,” she asked, “that someone somehow engineered these two deaths?”

“Trying to find out.”

“And Ken can’t suggest how?”

“Not yet.”

“But if it wasn’t for insurance, what was the purpose?”

I sighed. “To discredit Ken, perhaps.”

“But why?”

“He doesn’t know.”

She looked at me broodingly. I thought she’d known a lot of lucky men, if the tales were true.

“Of course,” she said finally, “someone else besides the owner could have insured those horses.”

“How?” I asked.

“We had an owner once who wouldn’t pay the bills. In the end, he owed us a worrying amount. He wasn’t doing well in his business and couldn’t find the money. His best asset was the horse we were training for him, and eventually we could have claimed the horse against the bills, but we would have had to have sold it to get the money and my father thought he might win the Grand National and didn’t want to part with him. Do you follow?”