The Winter Ground (22 page)

‘Nothing happened,’ he said.

‘She just left?’

They nodded.

‘Did she look at all perturbed or anxious?’

This they considered for a moment before answering, but very soon Donald began to shake his head and Teddy joined in.

‘And did it seem to you as though Anastasia was still in charge of her pony?’ I asked. This was something which had only occurred to me in the night: had the placid rosy-back had some kind of fit? He had seemed as calm as could have been reasonably expected when Andrew Merryman brought him back to the tent doors and had accepted Pa Cooke digging him in his heaving ribs really quite stoically, but it was one possible explanation and I had dispatched Alec this morning first to the stable tent to commune with Harlequin himself – Alec has an excellent sense for horses – and then to track down Andrew and quiz him about the pony’s state of mind.

Donald and Teddy glanced at one another again.

‘Hard to say,’ was what Donald plumped for at last. ‘Was it Ana or Harlequin bolting? What did you think, Ted?’

‘It could have been him,’ said Teddy, thoughtfully. ‘That would make most sense, wouldn’t it? If Harlequin had a sort of a brainstorm and he just leapt the ring fence and galloped off through the ring doors into the night. That would make sense of everything.’

‘But it’s a clear case of an improbable possibility,’ I said, more to myself than to them, ‘and so not to be preferred.’

‘Says you,’ said Alec Osborne a little later when we had rendezvoused in my motor car over a flask. ‘You might be impressed by that particular little riddle, Dan, but I’ve always found it to reveal itself as clever tosh if one wheels around suddenly and snaps one’s fingers.’

I unstoppered the flask and poured out a measure of steaming, rum-scented coffee into my silver cup. Mrs Tilling’s tender feelings towards me were never more evident than in her preparation of warming drinks on cold mornings.

‘What did you mean anyway?’ Alec said.

‘Just that while an ordinary pony might be prone to fits of temperament, bucking, bolting and what have you, surely such a pony could never do what Harlequin does every day of the week.’

‘That’s a probable impossibility, though, isn’t it?’ said Alec, squinting with the effort of concentration.

‘Yes, but what do you think of the idea itself?’

‘I’ll have some of that coffee, if you can spare it. The idea that …?’

‘That Harlequin – his years of excellent behaviour in the ring and out of it serving as his character witness – simply could not have had what my sons called “a brainstorm” and bolted, so Ana must have taken off deliberately, and so must have done it for a reason, and so it is worth our trying to find out what that reason was.’

Alec nodded but was prevented from answering immediately since he had just swallowed his first draught. Mrs Tilling’s idea of rum coffee was not a cup of coffee with a splash of rum in it, but a cup of rum with just enough coffee to warm it through.

‘Whewf!’ Alec said, after a couple of gulps. ‘Yes, I agree. I can’t believe that pony has a temperamental bone in his body. I’ve never seen a bigger eye nor a softer lip and I ran my hands right up and down all four legs – and this on first acquaintance and after his upsets yesterday evening – without him so much as flinching.’

‘You sound worse than Ma and her tea leaves,’ I told him.

‘And while he was most certainly frightened last night – plunging around in the dark – I hear he wasn’t the least bit angry and came over for kind words and strokes without even being called.’

‘This from Andrew Merryman?’ I guessed. Alec nodded. ‘And do we trust his judgement? Do we trust his
word
, come to that?’

‘I do,’ said Alec. ‘Because you’ll never guess what, Dan.’ I waited. ‘Andrew Merryman is the name of a circus clown.’ I waited again. ‘I mean to say, “Andrew Merryman” is a clown’s name. Like “Jack Pudding”.’

‘Who?’

‘Or Charlie. That’s not his real name, you know.’

‘Charlie Cooke?’

‘No, it’s Thomas.’

‘It can’t be. His brother’s name is Thomas.’

‘No, his brother’s name is William. He’s the younger one. He took on the name of Thomas because Tam Cooke is always the ringmaster of Cooke’s Circus. And Charlie is Charlie because he’s a clown.’

‘But he’s only been a clown since he gave up the trapeze,’ I said. ‘And everyone calls him Charlie all the time.’

‘Oh, Dandy, he’s always been a clown. I bet it was he himself who told you about the trapeze, wasn’t it? He used to do some wire work – a little – but he’s always only ever been just the clown. His brother was the boss from the beginning. Their father handed the circus on that way, cut out the older son.’

‘Poor Charlie,’ I said. ‘No wonder he’s so touchy about it all.’

‘But really, when you think about the way Ma clicked her fingers and got him to lie to the inspector about seeing Ana fall, you can see he’s not the commanding type.’

‘How did
you
know he lied? Where are you getting all of this?’

‘Miles Fanshawe told me,’ said Alec, enjoying the bewildered look on my face. Fanshawe was ringing a faint bell. ‘Remember, Dandy? Fanshawe from school, who growed and growed? It’s him.’ Illumination shone on me at last.

‘Andrew Merryman?’

‘And you have to admit that he was right to go for the change of name, wasn’t he? Tumbling Miles Fanshawe would be too silly for words.’

‘Amazing!’ I said. ‘My goodness, you must have been thunderstruck to see him.’

‘Didn’t recognise him,’ said Alec. ‘Believe it or not he’s filled out since schooldays and Fanshawe would never have had that look of … what would you call it? Quiet confidence? Manly competence? Fanshawe was a bit of a ninny, truth be told.’

I was having trouble reconciling any kind of confidence or competence with the wavering, blushing Andrew Merryman and my doubt must have shown.

‘Ah,’ said Alec, ‘no less hopeless in the presence of girls, eh? He spent one Easter with a pal we shared and hardly came out of his bedroom on account of an overdose of giggling sisters. Still, I think we can safely accept his word and his judgement, don’t you?’

I suppressed a snort of laughter.

‘Certainly not!’ I said. ‘Because he’s an old Harrovian? Because he’s “people like us, darling”? Of course not.’

Alec was staring at me, rather red, and he is always at his most endearingly peculiar-looking when he has turned red. It clashes so dreadfully with his tawny hair and makes his freckles look yellow.

‘Well, I think that’s a bit much,’ he said. ‘Miles – Fanshawe – Merryman,’ he announced this last with an air of finality, ‘Merryman wasn’t on our list of suspects for anything at all yesterday. And we already knew he was “people like us” as you so revoltingly put it – what a snob you are, Dandy – so the only thing we’ve found out really is that yes, he went to my school, and was in my house, and now all of a sudden he’s more suspicious than before? All of a sudden, he’s the one we need to keep our eye on? I just think that’s a bit much.’

I sensed that it was best to move to other matters. ‘And what about Topsy Turvy?’ I said. ‘Has one been insulting her dignity calling her that all this time?’

‘Strange to tell,’ said Alec, ‘Turvy is her family name and she was christened Topsy. One of a long line of Topsies, if you can credit it.’

‘I can. The circus is wrote through her like Blackpool through rock,’ I said. ‘And such sound knowledge of where one belongs is not be sniffed at, Alec dear. Ma is all too convincing on that score.’

‘Well, in any case,’ said Alec, uninterested in my quoting new friends if I would not listen to what he had got from his old ones, ‘whether Harlequin took it upon himself to leap the ring fence or Ana made him leave, it brings us back to the idea of an accident.’

‘Why?’

‘Because how could anyone know that she was going to be backstage when she shouldn’t have been?’

‘But darling, that’s the thing,’ I said. ‘She should have been. She was a tiny little bit early but she was just about to go off anyway and everyone in the circus knew it. Come with me.’ I stepped down from the motor car and made my way to the back door of the tent.

‘I’m not sure I see the import of that,’ Alec said, following me.

‘It was the inspector’s idea – one of the many, just mentioned in passing. A booby trap. A trip wire.’

‘When could it have been done?’ Alec asked. ‘It would have to be after the animals came in or they’d have broken it going the other way.’

‘But they came in first. There would have been heaps of time for anyone to stretch a rope across the passageway afterwards. And I just wondered … wouldn’t it leave a trace, a mark of some kind?’We had arrived. I could not help a shiver as I looked around, for that drab little corner was so familiar to me after the long wait for the police with Ma that I was sure I should never forget an inch of the canvas, a plank of its gangway or a single blade of the trodden, deadening grass.

‘This is the spot here, isn’t it?’ said Alec, nudging with his toe a place where the grass had been killed, scoured away, by – one guessed – a scrubbing brush and some fearsome caustic solution.

‘So if that’s where she fell,’ I said, ‘where would she have come off? Where would Harlequin have had to stumble for Ana to end up there? Would she fall forward, Alec, or backwards? How far?’

‘Forward,’ he said. ‘Just like a refusal.’

‘Of course.’ My first ever experience of carrying on without a pony who had decided to stop was over thirty years ago now, but I still remembered the sudden weightlessness, the seemingly endless flight over the spurned hedge and the sharp drop into the nettles beyond. ‘So let’s say between here and there,’ I said, pointing. Alec did a couple of knee-bends as though warming up for a PT display and then crouched down at one side of the passageway. I turned my attention to the other.

‘If we do find something,’ I said, presently, ‘let’s say a pair of stout nails with shreds of rope still clinging to them, we mustn’t touch anything. We must hand it straight over to the police.’

‘Who have probably already checked,’ said Alec. ‘And wouldn’t whoever put the rope across have made sure to come back and remove the nails afterwards?’

I sat back on my heels and looked over at him.

‘Would you? If you had got away with it, would you risk being seen tidying things away?’

‘Excellent point, Dan,’ said Alec and bent his head again.

The canvas walling of the tent was tacked every five feet or so to a thick post and while these posts bore all the marks of a long hard life, the only nails I could find were ancient, rusted and hammered in hard to the wood out of harm’s way.

‘I don’t think much of the tent men,’ said Alec. ‘Leaving so many good nails behind them instead of prying them out and keeping them in a jar for next time.’

I had never been convinced of the moral necessity to gather jars of old nails about one, even if one did not have to cart them around the country between standings, so I said nothing.

When we had worked our way back farther than remotely plausible, I stood up at last. There had not been a single new bruise showing white on the dirty wood, not a single new nail hole and not even any suspiciously soiled patches where someone might have ground in mud to hide them. I looked up, wondering if anything could have been rigged from above. Alec’s eyes followed mine. The roof of the tent was dizzyingly high and my shoulders and spirits slumped at the thought of clambering up somehow and inching around up there, fruitlessly searching.

‘It would have been nice to find something,’ said Alec, ‘but the absence of physical clues doesn’t prove that you’re wrong. You’ve always scoffed at the idea of them before.’

‘I’ve scoffed at inch-square swatches of unusual tweed smelling of unusual tobacco,’ I said, ‘but I think if there had been a trap rigged here we would have found something.’

‘Not if the cord or whatever was tied to a stake that was banged in and then pulled out again.’ Alec looked about as enthusiastic as I felt about the idea of crawling around the grass looking for holes or plugs of mud where holes had been and gone. ‘I’ll ask the tent men if they saw anything odd. It’ll give me an excuse to get talking to them – most welcome. What a great pity Donald and Teddy couldn’t be more firm about what they saw. But they hadn’t been briefed, had they?’

‘Alec, please,’ I said. ‘Of course they hadn’t been briefed. They are only here to lend my presence a respectable justification in the eyes of Hugh and the world at large. I’m hardly going to draft them on to my staff like …’

‘Special constables?’

‘Quite.’

‘Has Inspector Hutchinson grilled them yet? Lord –
grilled
? Skinned, filleted, diced and fried: I felt five years old last night when he started in on us, didn’t you?’

‘They are certainly in his sights,’ I said. ‘He’s already made short work of Charlie.’

‘And who’s next on
your
list?’ Alec asked.

‘I’m going to tackle Ina,’ I said, ‘which is a job best done by me alone, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

‘Tackle her about what?’

‘She wasn’t in her seat last night when Inya screamed, when you and I raced across the ring. I need to know where she had got to.’

Alec whistled and raised his eyebrows.

‘Ina Wilson?’ he said.

‘Well, no, not really, not for any reason that I can imagine. Apart from anything else she couldn’t possibly have known when Ana was going to leave the ring. But I need to check, don’t you agree?’

We parted company at that, Alec leaving by the back doors for the stable tent and I making my way to the front doors to begin my walk to the castle. It was rather a splendid winter’s day, half past eleven the very peak of it. The worst of the overnight chill was gone and the low sun was doing its best, dazzling through the tree branches and melting a little of the frost off the grass here and there. In another two hours it would give up the fight again, of course, and the cold would creep back across the lawns from where the shadows had hoarded it all day, but now was the moment to be out in it if one had to be out at all.

The sweet butler looked troubled when he answered the door and I suppose the very fact that he was on duty there instead of one of the maids, like a bear in the mouth of his cave ready to repel all invaders, was more evidence of the mood in the house.