Comeback (30 page)

Her eyes slowly widened in memory. “Russet Eaglewood did that once. Good job she did.”

“Yes, she told me.”

Ken gave me a hard stare.

Zoe reflected. “So you went to see her about the Eaglewoods’ dead horses?”

“Yours and theirs died in the same way.”

Zoe looked at Ken. I shook my head. “Not his fault.”

“Whose then?”

“We’re trying to find out.” I paused. “The horses all died in the hospital, except perhaps one. . . .”

“How many died?” she interrupted.

“Eight or nine,” I said.

“You’re kidding!”

Ken protested, “You shouldn’t have told her.”

“One death could be put down to your carelessness,” I said. “Perhaps even two. But eight unexplained deaths? Eight, when you are an expert surgeon? You’ve been carrying the can for someone else, Ken, and sensible people like Miss Mackintosh will realize it.”

The sensible Miss Mackintosh gave me an ironic glance, but all the same looked on Ken as victim not villain from then on.

“To get the horses to the hospital, after they’d been insured, of course,” I said, “they had to be made ill. Which is why we’d like you to concentrate hard on who had any opportunity to give your horses emergency-sized colic by feeding them atropine.”

Instead of answering directly she said, “Did the Eaglewood horses have atropine?”

“No,” I said. “They had appointments.”

She turned a gasp into a laugh. “Who
are
you?” she asked.

“Peter. Friend of Ken’s.”

“I’d say he’s lucky.”

I gave her the ironic look back.

“All right,” she said. “After Ken said that, even though I was furious, I did think about it. To be frank, any one of our lads would have fed their mothers to the horses for a tenner. A doctored apple? A quick agreement in the pub? Too easy. Sorry.”

“Worth a try,” Ken said.

A buzzer rasped loudly into the pause. “My father,” Zoe said briefly, rising. “I’ll have to go.”

“I’d very much like to meet your father,” I said.

She raised fair bushy eyebrows. “You’re five years too late. But come if you like.”

She went out into the passage and we followed her back into the hall and in through double doors to a large splendid drawing room whose far wall was glass from floor to ceiling. Just outside the glass was a mill wheel, a huge wooden paddle wheel, more than half of it visible, the lower part below floor level. It was decoration only; there was no movement.

“Where’s the stream?” I said, and remembered what was wrong about the house. No musty smell of everlasting water. No sound of the mill wheel turning.

“There isn’t one. It dried up years ago,” Zoe said, crossing the floor. “They mucked around with the water table, taking too much for a bloody power station. Dad,” she finished, coming to a halt by a high-backed chair, “you’ve got some visitors.”

The chair made no reply. Ken and I walked round to the front of it and met the man who had been Mac Mackintosh.

 

 

 

 

M
ackintosh was small and wrinkled, an old dried apple of a horseman. Set in the weather-beaten face, his startlingly deep blue eyes looked alert and intelligent enough, and it was only gradually one realized that the thoughts behind them were out of sequence, like a jumbled alphabet.

He was sitting facing the immobile wheel, looking through it, I supposed, to the field and hedge beyond. There was an impression that he’d sat there for a long time; that he sat there habitually. The arms of the chair, where his thin hands rested, had been patched and repatched from wear.

He said in a high scratchy voice, “Have you forgotten evening stables?”

“Of course not, Dad,” Zoe said patiently. “They’re not for another half hour.”

“Who’s that with you? I can’t see faces against the light.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Mackintosh,” Ken said.

“It’s Ken McClure,” Zoe informed him, “and a friend of his.”

“Peter,” Ken said.

“I thought you said Ken,” Mackintosh complained testily.

“I’m Peter,” I said.

Zoe reintroduced everyone with clarity but it was doubtful if the old man grasped it, as he kept looking at me with bewilderment every few seconds.

“You said,” he told Zoe, “that only Carey would come.”

“Yes, I know I did, but I’ve changed my mind. Carey will still come to play cards with you but Ken is back looking after the horses.” To us she quietly added, “They’ve played cards together for years but it’s a farce these days. Carey just pretends now, which is good of him.”

“What did you say?” Mackintosh asked crossly. “Do speak up.”

“Where’s your hearing aid, Dad?” Zoe asked.

“I don’t like it. It whistles.”

Ken and I were both standing in front of him, between him and the window, and it seemed to displease him that he couldn’t see the whole wheel, as he kept moving his head to look round and beyond us. Ken must have sensed the same thing, because he turned sideways as if to minimize the obstruction.

The backlight from the window fell on half of Ken’s bony face, the rest being still in shadow, and Mackintosh sat up sharply in his chair and stared at him joyfully.

“Kenny!” he said, “did you bring the stuff? I thought you were . . .” He broke off, fearfully confused. “Dead,” he said faintly.

“I’m not Kenny,” Ken said, moved.

Mackintosh flopped back in the chair. “We lost the money,” he said.

“What money?” I asked.

Zoe said, “Don’t bother him. You won’t get a sensible answer. He’s talking about the money he lost in a bad property investment. It preys on his mind. Every time anything worries him or he doesn’t understand something, he goes back to it.”

I asked Ken, “Is that what your mother was talking about?”

“Josephine?” Zoe involuntarily made a face. “She always enjoys a good disaster. Sorry Ken, but it’s true.” To me she added, “Dad lost a small fortune, but he wasn’t alone. The scheme looked all right on paper because you didn’t have to invest any actual cash and it should have been a good return. Dozens of people guaranteed slices of a huge loan to build an entertainment and leisure center between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury, and it did get built, but the location, and the design of it were all wrong and so no one would use it or buy it and the bank called in all the loans. I can’t bear to look at the damn thing. It’s still unfinished and just rotting away, and half my inheritance is in it.” She stopped ruefully. “I’m as bad as Dad, rabbiting on.”

“What was it called?” I asked.

“All our money,” Mackintosh said in his high voice.

“Porphyry Place,” Zoe said, smiling.

Ken nodded. “A great white elephant, except a lot of it’s dark red. I pass it sometimes. Rotten luck.”

“Ronnie Upjohn,” Mackintosh said gleefully, “got his comeuppance.”

Zoe looked resigned.

“What does he mean?” I asked.

“Ronnie Upjohn is a steward,” she explained. “For years he kept reporting Dad to the Jockey Club and accusing him of taking bribes from the bookies, which of course Dad never did.”

Mackintosh shrieked with laughter, his guilt plainly a satisfaction.

“Dad!” Zoe protested, knowing, I saw, that the charges were true.

“Ronnie Upjohn lost a packet.” Mackintosh shook with delight and then, under our gaze, seemed to lose the thread of thought and relapse into puzzlement. “Steinback laid it off at a hundred to six.”

“What does he mean?” I asked Zoe again.

She shrugged. “Old bets. Steinback was a bookie, died years ago. Dad remembers things but muddles them up.” She gave her father a look compounded of affection, exasperation and fear, the last, I guessed, the result of worry over the not-too-distant future. She and Russet Eaglewood had that in common: daughters holding together the crumbling lives of their fathers.

“As you’re here,” Zoe said to Ken, “would you like to look round at evening stables?”

Ken’s pleased acceptance pleased Zoe equally. My mission of reinstatement seemed to have succeeded with her as with Russet. The world, however, remained to be conquered.

“Come on, Dad,” Zoe said, helping her father to his feet. “Time for stables.”

The old man was physically much stronger than I’d somehow expected. Short, and with slightly bowed legs, he moved without hesitation and without stooping, heading straight down the big room in evident eagerness. The three of us followed him out into the tiled hall and passage, and down past the open door of Zoe’s room. She put her head in there and whistled, and the six dogs came bounding out, falling over their own feet with excitement.

This enlarged party crammed into a dusty Land Rover outside the back door and set off down a rear roadway that led to a brick-built white-painted stable yard a quarter mile distant. From a single-story white house at one side, the head lad had emerged to join us, and I attended the ritual of British evening stables in an invited capacity for the first time ever.

It seemed familiar enough. The slow progress from box to box, the brief discussion between trainer, lad and head lad as to each horse’s well-being, the pat and the carrot from the trainer, the occasional running of the trainer’s hand down a suspect equine leg. Ken discussed the inmates’ old injuries with Zoe, and old man Mackintosh gave the head lad an unending stream of instructions which were gravely acknowledged but which sounded to me contradictory.

At one point I asked Zoe which boxes had been occupied by the two atropine colics.

“Reg,” she said to the head lad, “talk to my friend here, will you? Answer any question.”

“Any?”
he queried.

She nodded. “He’s on the side of the angels.”

Reg, small and whippy like Mackintosh himself, gave me a suspicious inspection and no benefit of any doubt. Reg, I thought, might be on the side of the devil.

I asked him anyway about the boxes. Reluctantly he pointed and identified them: numbers 6 and 16. The numbers were painted in black on the white wall above the door of each box. Nothing else to distinguish them from all the others.

Reg, carrying the bag of carrots, was handing them to Zoe and her father at each box and didn’t want me getting in the way.

“Do you know anyone called Wynn Lees?” I asked him.

“No, I don’t.” The answer was immediate, without pause for thought.

Old Mackintosh, taking a carrot, had also heard the question, and gave a different answer.

“Wynn Lees?” he said cheerfully in his high loud voice. “He tacked a man’s trousers to his bollocks.” He laughed long and hard, wheezing slightly. “With a rivet gun,” he added.

I glanced at Ken. He was going rigid with shock, his mouth open.

“Dad!” Zoe protested automatically.

“True,” her father said. “I think it was true, you know.” He frowned, troubled, as the memory slid away. “I dream a bit, now and then.”

“Do you know him, sir?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Wynn Lees.”

The blue eyes sparkled at me. “He went away ... I expect he’s dead. Six is Vinderman.”

“Come on, Dad,” Zoe said, moving along the row of boxes.

He said mischievously, as if reciting a nursery rhyme, “Revised Edition, Wishywashy, Pennycracker, Glue.”

Zoe said, “They don’t want to be bothered with all that, Dad.”

I asked him lazily, “What comes after Glue?”

“Faldy, Vinderman, Kodak, Boy Blue.”

I smiled broadly. He laughed happily, pleased.

“They’re the names of horses he used to train long ago,” Zoe said. “He forgets the names of today’s.” She took his arm. “Let’s get on, the lads are all waiting.”

He went amenably, and we came to a horse that Zoe said had been much stronger and tougher since he’d been cut. For cut, read castrated, I thought. Most male steeplechasers were geldings.

“Oliver Quincy did it,” Zoe said.

Ken nodded. “He’s good at it.”

“He came out several times, did three or four of them. Dad likes him.”

Ken said neutrally, “Oliver can be good company when he chooses.”

“Oliver?” Mackintosh asked. “Did you say Oliver?”

“Yes, sir. Oliver Quincy.”

“He told me a joke. Made me laugh. I can’t remember it.”

“He does tell jokes,” Ken agreed.

Oliver’s joke had fallen flat on Sunday morning: “What four animals did a woman like most.” My mother would love it, I thought.

We came to the last box. “Poverty,” Mackintosh said, feeding a carrot to a chestnut with a white star. “How’s he doing, Reg?”

“Coming along fine, sir.”

“Is she still in season?” Zoe asked him.

Reg shook his head. “She’ll be fine for Saturday.”

“What’s her name?” I asked. “Shall I bet?”

“Metrella,” Zoe said, “and don’t. Well, thanks, Reg. That’s all. I’ll be down later.”

Reg nodded and Zoe swept everyone back into the Land Rover except for the dogs, who bounded home at varying speeds in the wake.

Zoe invited us halfheartedly to go in for a drink and didn’t mind when we declined.

“Come again,” Mackintosh said warmly.

“Thank you, sir,” Ken said.

I looked along the sweep of the fine mellow frontage, the mill wheel out of sight round the far end, the old stream gone forever.

“Splendid house,” I said. “A piece of history. I wonder who lived here before.”

“As it’s been here two centuries, I can’t tell you everyone,” Zoe said, “but the people Dad bought it from were a family called Travers.”

 

 

KEN WANTED TO talk not about the Mackintoshes but about his session with the Superintendent, which had pressing priority in his mind. When we reached his car we sat on for a while in mine and he told me what had gone on in the office after I’d left.