by Dick Francis
“Yes,” she answered doubtfully, “but I don’t see how they could help. They didn’t help the police.”
“They’d be a start,” I said.
“All right, then.” She left the room and after a while returned with a small blue suitcase, the size for stowing under the seats of aircraft. “Everything’s in here,” she said, passing me the case, “including a tape of a program a television company made. Rachel and I are in it. You won’t lose it, will you? We never show it, but I wouldn’t want to lose it.” She blinked against tears. “It was actually the only good thing that happened. Ellis Quint came to see the children and he was utterly sweet with them. Rachel loved him. He was so kind.”
“I know him quite well,” I said. “If anyone could comfort the children, he could.”
“A really nice man,” Linda said.
I took the blue suitcase with its burden of many small tragedies back with me to London and spent indignant hours reading muted accounts of a degree of vandalism that must have been mind-destroying when fresh and bloody and discovered by loving children.
The twenty-minute videotape showed Ellis Quint at his best: the gentle, sympathetic healer of unbearable sorrows; the sensible, caring commentator urging the police to treat these crimes with the seriousness given to murders. How good he was, I thought, at pitching his responses exactly right. He put his arms around Rachel and talked to her without sentimentality, not mentioning, until right at the end of the program, when the children were off the screen, that for Rachel Ferns the loss of her pony was just one more intolerable blow in a life already full of burdens.
For that program, Rachel had chosen to wear the pretty blonde wig that gave her back her pre-chemotherapy looks. Ellis, as a final dramatic impact, had shown for a few seconds a photo of Rachel bald and vulnerable: an ending poignant to devastation.
I hadn’t seen the program when it had been broadcast: judging from the March date on the tape, I knew I’d been away in America trying to find an absconding owner who’d left a monstrous training account unpaid. There were, anyway, many of Ellis’s programs I hadn’t seen: he presented his twenty-minute twice-weekly journalistic segments as part of an hour-long sports news medley, and was too often on the screen for any one appearance to be especially fanfared.
Meeting Ellis, as I often did at the races, I told him about Linda Ferns calling me in, and asked him if he’d learned any more on the subject of who had mutilated the Kent ponies.
“My dear old Sid,” he said, smiling, “all of that was months ago, wasn’t it?”
“The ponies were vandalized in January and February and your program was aired in March.”
“And it’s now June, right?” He shook his head, neither distressed nor surprised. “You know what my life’s like, I have researchers digging out stories for me. Television is insatiably hungry. Of course if there were any more discoveries about these ponies, I would have been told, and I would have done a follow-up, but I’ve heard nothing.”
I said, “Rachel Ferns, who has leukemia, still has nightmares.”
“Poor little kid.”
“She said you were very kind.”
“Well...” he made a ducking, self-deprecating movement of his head, “... it isn’t so very difficult. Actually that program did marvels for my ratings.” He paused. “Sid, do you know anything about this book-maker kickback scandal I’m supposed to be doing an expose on next week?”
. “Nothing at all,” I regretted. “But, Ellis, going back to the mutilations, did you chase up those other scattered cases of foals and two-year-old thoroughbreds that suffered from vandalism?”
He frowned lightly, shaking his head. “The researchers didn’t think them worth more than a mention or two. It was copycat stuff. I mean, there wasn’t anything as strong as that story about the children.” He grinned. “There were no heartstrings attached to the others.”
“You’re a cynic,” I said.
“Aren’t we all?”
We had been close friends for years, Ellis and I. We had ridden against each other in races, he as a charismatic amateur, I as a dedicated pro, but both with the inner fire that made hurtling over large jumps on semi-wild half-ton horses at thirty miles an hour seem a wholly reasonable way of passing as many afternoons as possible.
Thinking, after three or four months of no results from the police or the Ellis Quint program, that I would probably fail also in the search for vandals, I nevertheless did my best to earn my fee by approaching the problem crabwise, from the side, by asking questions not of the owners of the ponies, but of the newspapermen who had written the columns in the papers.
I did it methodically on the telephone, starting with the local Kent papers, then chasing up the by-line reporters in the London dailies. Most of the replies were the same: the story had originated from a news agency that supplied all papers with condensed factual information. Follow-ups and interpretation were the business of the papers themselves.
Among the newspapers Linda Ferns had given me, The Pump had stirred up the most disgust, and after about six phone calls I ran to earth the man who’d practically burned holes in the page with the heat of his prose: Kevin Mills, The Pump’s chief bleeding-hearts reporter.
“A jar?” he said, to my invitation. “Don’t see why not.”
He met me in a pub (nice anonymous surroundings) and he told me he’d personally been down to Kent on that story. He’d interviewed all the children and their parents and also a fierce lady who ran one of the branches of the Pony Club, and he’d pestered the police until they’d thrown him out.
“Zilch,” he said, downing a double gin and tonic. “No one saw a thing. All those ponies were out in fields and all of them were attacked sometime between sunset and dawn, which in January and February gave the vandals hours and hours to do the job and vamoose.”
“All dark, though,” I said.
He shook his head. “They were all done over on fine nights, near the full moon in each month.”
“How many, do you remember?”
“Four altogether in January. Two of them were blinded. Two were mares with torn knife wounds up their ... well, birth passages, as our squeamish editor had me put it.”
“And February?”
“One blinded, two more chopped-up mares, one cut-off foot. A poor little girl found the foot near the water trough where her pony used to drink. Ellis Quint did a brilliant TV program about it. Didn’t you see it?”
“I was in America, but I’ve heard about it since.”
“There were trailers of that program all week. Almost the whole nation watched it. It made a hell of an impact. That pony was the last one in Kent, as far as I know. The police think it was a bunch of local thugs who got the wind up when there was so much fuss. And people stopped turning ponies out into unguarded fields, see?”
I ordered him another double. He was middle aged, half-bald, doing nicely as to paunch. He wiped an untidy mustache on the back of his hand and said that in his career he’d interviewed so many parents of raped and murdered girls that the ponies had been almost a relief.
I asked him about the later copycat attacks on thoroughbreds in other places, not Kent.
“Copycat?” he repeated. “So they say.”
“But?” I prompted.
He drank, thought it over, confided.
“All the others,” he said, “are not in bunches, like Kent. As far as I know—and there may be still others—there were about five very young horses, foals and yearlings, that had things done to them, bad enough mostly for them to have to be put down, but none of them was blinded. One had his muzzle hacked off. None of them were mares. But...” He hesitated; sure of his facts, I thought, but not of how I would react to them.
“Go on.”
“See, three others were two-year-olds, and all of those had a foot off.”
I felt the same revulsion that I saw in his face.
“One in March,” he said. “One in April. One last month.”
“Not,” I said slowly, “at the full moon?”
“Not precisely. Just on moonlit nights.”
“But why haven’t you written about it?”
“I get sent to major disasters,” he said patiently. “Air crashes, multiple deaths, dozens of accidents and murders. Some nutter driving around chopping off a horse’s foot now and again—it’s not my absolute priority, but maybe I’ll get round to it. The news agency hasn’t picked up on it, but I tend to read provincial papers. Old habit. There has been just a para or two here and there about animal vandals. It’s always happening. Horses, sheep, dogs—weirdos get their mucky hands on them. Come to think of it, though, if there’s another one this month I’ll insist on giving it the both-barrel treatment. And now, don’t you go feeding this to other papers. I want my scoop.”
“Silence,” I promised, “if...”
He asked suspiciously, “If what?”
“If you could give me a list of the people whose thoroughbreds have been damaged.”
He said cautiously, “It’ll cost you.”
“Done,” I said, and we agreed both on a fee and on my giving him first chance at any story I might come up with.
He fulfilled his commitment that same afternoon by sending a motorbike courier bearing a sealed brown envelope containing photocopies of several inconspicuous small paragraphs culled from provincial papers in Liverpool, Reading, Shrewsbury, Manchester, Birmingham and York. All the papers gave the names and vague addresses of the owners of vandalized thoroughbreds, so I set off by car and visited them.
Four days later, when I returned to Linda Ferns’s house in Kent, I had heard enough about man’s inhumanity to horses to last me for life. The injuries inflicted, from the hacked-off muzzle onwards, were truly beyond comprehension but, compared with three two-year-olds, were all random and without pattern. It was the severed feet that were connected.
“I came across his foot by the water trough in the field,” one woman said, her eyes screwing up at the memory. “I couldn’t believe it. Just afoot. Tell you the truth, I brought up my breakfast. He was a really nice two-year-old colt.” She swallowed. “He wasn’t standing anywhere near his foot. The off-fore, it was. He’d wandered away on three legs and he was eating grass. Just eating, as if nothing had happened. He didn’t seem to feel any pain.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I called the vet. He came ... He gave me a tranquilizer. He said I needed it more than the colt did. He looked after everything for me.”
“Was the colt insured?” I asked.
She took no offense at the question. I guessed it had been asked a dozen times already. She said there had been no insurance. They had bred the two-year-old themselves. They had been going to race him later in the year. They had been to Cheltenham races and had backed the winner of the Gold Cup, a great day, and the very next morning ...
I asked her for the vet’s name and address, and I went to see him at his home.
“How was the foot taken off?” I asked.
He wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t rightly know. It was neat. The colt had bled very little. There was a small pool of blood on the grass about a yard away from the foot, and that was all. The colt himself let me walk right up to him. He looked calm and normal, except that his off-fore ended at the fetlock.”
“Was it done with an axe?”
He hesitated. “I’d say more like a machete. Just the one cut, fast and clean. Whoever did it knew just where to aim for, unless he was simply lucky.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“Sure. A detective sergeant came out. He vomited, too. Then I called the knackers and put the colt down. Bloody vandals! I’d like to cut off their foot, see if they liked life with a stump.” He remembered suddenly about my own sliced-off hand, and reddened, looking confused and embarrassed. There had been a much publicized court case about my hand. Everyone knew what had happened. I had finally stopped wincing visibly when people referred to it.
“It’s all right,” I said mildly.
“I’m sorry. My big mouth...”
“Do you think the colt’s amputation was done by a vet? By any sort of surgical expert? Was it done with a scalpel? Was the colt given a local anesthetic?”
He said, disturbed, “I don’t know the answers. I’d just say that whoever did it was used to handling horses. That colt was loose in the field, though wearing a head collar.”
I went to see the detective sergeant, who looked as if he might throw up again at the memory.
“I see a lot of injured people. Dead bodies, too,” he said, “but that was different. Mindless. Fair turned my stomach.”
The police had found no culprit. It had been an isolated event, not part of a pattern. The only report they’d had was of the presence of a blue Land-Rover driving away along the lane from the colt’s field; and Land-Rovers were two a penny in the countryside. Case not closed, but also not being actively investigated. The colt and his hoof had long gone to the glue factory.
“Are there any photographs?” I asked.
The sergeant said that the photographs were a police matter, not open to the general public.
“I do know who you are,” he said, not abrasively, “but to us you’re the general public. Sorry.”
The colt’s owner, consulted, said she had been too upset to want photographs.
I drove onwards, northwards to Lancashire, into a gale of anger. Big, blustery and impressively furious, a hard competent large-scale farmer let loose his roaring sense of injustice, yelling in my face, spraying me with spittle, jabbing the air with a rigid forefinger, pushing his chin forward in a classic animal gesture of aggression.
“Best colt I ever owned,” he bellowed. “He cost me a packet, but he was a good ‘un. Breeding, conformation, the lot. And he was fast, I’ll tell you. He was going to Newmarket the next week.” He mentioned a prestigious trainer who I knew wouldn’t have accepted rubbish. “A good ’un,” the farmer repeated. “And then the sodding police asked if I’d killed him for the insurance. I ask you! He wasn’t insured, I told them. They said I couldn’t prove he wasn’t insured. Did you know that? Did you know you can prove something is insured, but you can’t prove it isn’t? Did you know that?”
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.”