The Stabbing in the Stables

by Simon Brett

  “Donal,” Lucinda explained, “is always around Long Bamber Stables. He’s always around anywhere where there are horses.”

  “You mean he works for you?”

  “No, Jude. Not officially, anyway. I might give him the odd tenner for helping out, but he’s not on the payroll.”

  “So what does he do?”

  “He’s an ex-jockey. Really does know what makes horses tick. If you’ve got a stallion with a bad attitude, Donal’s your man to sort it out. You’ve got a mare who’s having trouble foaling, same thing. I recommend him to any of my owners who’ve got problems the vet can’t sort out. Donal seems genuinely to be able to communicate with horses.”

  “So, what, is he some kind of healer?” Carole couldn’t say the final word without an infusion of scepticism.

  “I don’t know about that, but he can sometimes work wonders. Mind you, great though his communication skills with horses, he’s not so hot when it comes to humans.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m afraid, Jude, that Donal had rather a propensity for getting into fights. He’s got a drink problem, and every drink he takes seems to shorten his temper a bit more. He’s been inside a good few times, because of the fighting.”

  “And that’s why the police have taken him in?” asked Carole.

  “Presumably. A violent death, and the first person the police look for is someone with a track record for that kind of thing. A prison record suits them even better.”

  “You said you know he’s not guilty. How do you know?” asked Jude. “Have you got proof that he wasn’t at the stables at the relevant time?”

  “No, I don’t. He could have been there, for all I know. But Donal’s not capable of murder.”

  “Did he and your husband get along?” asked Carole.

  “No, they didn’t actually. Walter thought Donal was a thieving layabout—which he was sometimes—and Walter didn’t want him hanging around Long Bamber. I didn’t mind, because sometimes he was very useful to me. That was another issue on which my husband and I did not see eye to eye. Walter was always an intolerant bigot.”

  No inhibitions about speaking ill of the dead then. Lucinda Fleet was maintaining the detachment she’d shown when first informed of her husband’s death.

  “You used the word ‘thieving,’” said Carole. “Was that just colourful language or do you mean Donal actually was—is a thief?”

  “Oh, he’s a thief all right. I have to have eyes in the back of my head when he’s around the stables. But that’s part of the deal with him. If you want to take advantage of his knowledge of horses, then you have to reconcile yourself to losing a bit of small change, or tack, or anything else you’ve left lying around.”

  “His knowledge of horses must be pretty exceptional,” Carole sniffed.

  “It is. That’s the point.”

  There was an asperity in Lucinda’s tone that suggested Carole was rubbing her up the wrong way. Jude intervened to defuse the situation.

  “Anyway, why did you want to talk to us? We don’t even know Donal, so we can’t be much help providing an alibi for him or anything of that kind.”

  “No, but you were the first there at the scene of…at the scene of the crime. You might have seen something that proves the police should be looking for someone else.”

  “Don’t imagine they didn’t ask us about that,” said Carole. “Those detectives gave us both quite a grilling.”

  “Yes, but if there was just something…”

  “The only detail that I remember,” said Jude, “—and I told the police this, so it’s nothing new—is that when I went in through the stable doors that night, I’m pretty sure I heard the noise of a gate or door closing the other side of the yard.”

  “The murderer making his getaway?” asked Lucinda eagerly.

  “Possibly. Maybe even probably.”

  “But you didn’t see anyone?”

  “No, just heard the noise.”

  “So that doesn’t help Donal at all.”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “Where does Donal live?” asked Carole suddenly.

  “Here, there, everywhere. Someone who knows as much about the local horse population as Donal can always find an empty loose box or outbuilding somewhere. So I suppose he’s officially ‘of no fixed abode.’ Which is of course another reason for the police to arrest him.”

  “The reason I ask is that, that night at the stables”—Carole had gone too far to cover up her professional lapse now—“I went into what I believe you call the tack room…?”

  “The big one?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s my tack room, where I keep all the tack that belongs to the stables. Every owner has their own tack room too, but theirs are much smaller.”

  “Well, I went in there—you know, having seen the body—looking for someone to help, and I saw that there was a kind of bed made up there, with a sleeping bag.”

  “Yes, that sometimes gets used—you know, if a horse is ill or foaling, some of the owners insist on staying on the premises. It’s not used very often.”

  “I got the impression, the night I was there, that it had been used quite recently.”

  “No,” said Lucinda firmly. “I’d know if someone was sleeping there.”

  “So Donal never slept there?”

  “Good God, no. I put up with a lot from him, but there’s no way I’d let him doss down in my stables. Other people’s stables, maybe. Well, I know he squats in other people’s stables. Not mine.”

  “Ah. Right.”

  The conversation was temporarily becalmed. Lucinda Fleet still reminded Jude of a smaller, more mature version of Sonia Dalrymple. But close to, the differences between the two women were more cruelly marked. Lucinda looked older than she had in the police spotlights at Long Bamber Stables. Probably late forties. Her face, which must once have been as pretty as Sonia’s, was scored with tiny lines and weathered by a lifetime of working out of doors. Though she took care of the nails, her hands were cracked and reddened. Even so, all the hard manual work—and presumably the riding—had left her with an enviably trim figure.

  Beneath the woman’s no-nonsense exterior, Jude could sense a deeply hidden thread of pain. Not the pain of her recent bereavement, but something longer-lived and more profound. Maybe one day Jude would find out its source.

  Carole jump-started the conversation again. “Just another thing about this Donal…”

  “Yes?”

  “You describe him as a kind of vagrant, whose always hanging around places where there are horses…”

  “If you like.”

  “Well, isn’t that exactly the sort of person the police suspect was responsible for all these knife attacks on horses?”

  “No!” Lucinda was suddenly animated and furious. “Donal would never do anything like that! He might hurt a human being—he’s done that often enough in his cups—but there’s no way he’d ever do harm to a horse. Donal loves horses.”

  Jude came in smoothly to ease the slight atmosphere following this exchange. “Could I get you another fizzy water, Lucinda?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Or…we were thinking of having lunch here. I don’t know if you—”

  “No. I never have lunch.” She looked at her watch, a man’s one on a battered leather strap. (Maybe Walter’s? Maybe her one gesture of mourning for her dead husband?) “I must get back to the stables. Always too much to do.”

  “Incidentally,” said Jude, “about the stables, Lucinda…”

  “Hm?”

  “What are your plans?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For Long Bamber Stables. I mean, now that Walter’s dead.”

  Lucinda looked at Jude curiously. “Well, keep the business going. I have no other visible means of support. Walter’s death doesn’t really make much difference to that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Walter was only ever ‘front of house.’ Schmoozing up to the owne
rs—particularly the women. He never did any of the actual hard work.”

  “Was that because his injuries prevented him from doing any?”

  Lucinda Fleet let out a derisive snort of laughter. “It was very variable—what Walter’s injuries did and didn’t allow him to do.”

  “Ah.”

  “No, he was fundamentally lazy. Loved life back when he was the golden boy of eventing, and people fell over themselves to do things for him. When he lost that status, he still expected people to fall over themselves to do things for him. Only the trouble was, by then he wasn’t surrounded by ‘people.’ Just me. Which meant that I ended up doing everything. I know it doesn’t do to say such things, but it’s a huge relief to me that Walter’s dead.”

  That was pretty unambiguous. The two neighbours exchanged a look. Carole reckoned they were both thinking exactly the same thing: that Lucinda Fleet was as tough as the old boots she was wearing. But that wasn’t what Jude was thinking.

  “Do you think there’s something going on with her and Donal?”

  “What—Lucinda?”

  “Yes, obviously, Jude.”

  “Why should there be?”

  “Well, she made no secret of the fact that her marriage was unhappy, so maybe she sought…I don’t know what the word is…solace perhaps?”

  “Sex.”

  “All right…outside the marriage? Maybe that was a reason why she liked having Donal around so much, and why Walter loathed him?”

  “I think you’ve been reading too much News of the World, Carole.”

  “I have never read the News of the World.”

  “I know you haven’t. Just a joke. But you do seem to be developing rather a prurient mind. Isn’t it possible that Lucinda just found Donal useful to help out with the horses—like she said?”

  “Well, yes, it’s possible,” Carole conceded, “but there has been a murder here. High emotions are involved. If Donal was Lucinda’s lover, he might well have wanted Walter out of the way. And the police must have had some stronger reason to arrest him, you know, beyond the fact that he’s a vagrant who hangs round horses.”

  “They haven’t arrested him. They’ve only taken him in for questioning.” Jude found it odd saying lines like that. Usually it was Carole, with her Home Office background, who was hot on details of police procedure.

  But her friend was too excited to bother about such things. “I think it’s very likely that Donal did kill Walter Fleet.”

  “Which Donal are we talking about here? The ex-jockey?”

  They hadn’t heard the approach of Ted Crisp to their alcove, bearing the steak-and-Guinness pies they’d both ordered.

  “Yes,” said Jude. “Why—do you know him?”

  “Certainly.” Ted scratched his beard. “He holds something of a record here, actually.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He is the only person I have ever banned from the Crown and Anchor. There have been people who I’ve warned, but generally speaking, the natives of Fethering are a biddable, docile lot. Donal’s the only one who’s ever started a fight in here.”

  “Who did he have a fight with? Was the other man one of your regulars?”

  “The other man used to come in occasionally. Won’t be doing that so much now, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Because he’s dead. He was that Walter Fleet—you know, the one who got stabbed up at Long Bamber.”

  “And Donal picked a fight with him? In here?” asked Carole.

  “That’s right. Six months ago, maybe a bit longer. Hot summer evening, I remember that.”

  “Do you know what the fight was about?”

  “Hard to tell. Donal was so drunk, he was hardly intelligible. And Walter wasn’t in a much better state either. They had this big slanging match, and then Donal went for Walter.”

  “If they had a slanging match,” said Jude, “you must have heard something.”

  “It was all pretty indistinct. But I do remember Donal shouting something like, ‘You’re not worthy of her! She’s beautiful and you don’t deserve her!’”

  10

  IN SPITE OF what Lucinda had said in his defence, Donal—who must also have a surname, though neither Carole nor Jude knew it—was looking the most likely candidate for the killer of Walter Fleet. And that impression was confirmed when Jude heard from Sonia Dalrymple that the horses were being allowed to return to Long Bamber Stables. That news definitely implied the police’s investigations were at an end. They had got their man.

  Carole and Jude were disappointed by this conclusion, but they couldn’t really argue with it. Starved of information as they were, they knew that any alternative theories they produced about the crime would be nothing more than conjecture. They weren’t privy to the facts at any level, whereas the police seemed to have more than enough facts at their fingertips to secure a conviction.

  So, without a murder mystery to worry away at, they would both have to return to their normal lives. For Jude that would not be too much hardship—back to the routine of Woodside Cottage, her clients, her occasional mysterious visits to London. (The mystery of these visits was really only in Carole’s mind. Jude had a wide circle of friends, many of whom her neighbour was destined never to meet. She also had lovers, though there were more of these in Carole’s imagination than in reality. Jude didn’t deliberately hide the details of her London relationships, but Carole was always too genteel to enquire directly about them. So the aura of mystery intensified—a situation that in fact suited Jude very well.)

  For Carole, however, the return to normal life would not be so easy. The murder had offered a welcome distraction from thoughts of Stephen and Gaby’s marriage. Her son still hadn’t rung back. She couldn’t put off much longer making a phone call to David.

  The evening after their meeting with Lucinda Fleet, she steeled herself to do the deed. Sunday, he was sure to be in. In his little flat in Swiss Cottage. The flat she had never seen and never intended to see. How did retired civil servants like David Seddon spend their time in little flats in Swiss Cottage? That was a question towards which she did not allow her mind to stray.

  She had to look his number up. It was the only number she ever had to look up. Every other one she remembered. A psychologist would have had a field day with that.

  “Hello.”

  “David, it’s Carole.”

  “Ah. Erm…hello.”

  He didn’t sound either surprised to hear her, or particularly moved by the fact that she’d rung him. It was impossible for her to know what he was thinking—as indeed it had been right through their marriage.

  “How are you?”

  “Not so bad. You, Carole?”

  “Mustn’t grumble.”

  Neither of them contemplated volunteering more about their lives than this. In the run-up to Stephen and Gaby’s wedding, David had tried to make some kind of rapprochement towards his ex-wife. Now he seemed to have given up the unequal struggle. Carole preferred it that way.

  “I was just wondering, David, whether you’d heard anything of Stephen and Gaby recently.”

  “Erm…not very recently.” Apparently it was the first time he’d thought about them for a while. “No, I suppose I haven’t, not…erm…very recently.”

  Carole had forgotten how much his little habit of hesitation grated on her. “So you haven’t seen them?”

  “Not since…well, not since Christmas, now I come to think of it.”

  How could he not have thought of it for so long? How did David actually spend his retirement? What thoughts did actually go through his head?

  “No, I haven’t either. I spoke to Gaby a few days ago, but…I just wondered if you had any news of them.”

  “No, I haven’t. But I’m…erm…sure they’ll be in touch…you know, when they’ve…erm…when they’ve got something to say.”

  Yes. So that was it. As she put the phone down, Carole wished bitterly that she hadn’t made the call. Hearing David’s voice
had only upset her more, and brought back to her mind Stephen’s inheritance of bad relationships.

  “Jude, it’s Sonia.”

  “Hello. Everything all right?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Tuesday had come round again. Walter Fleet had been dead for nearly a week. There had been no word of funeral plans, and there wouldn’t be any for a while. Police forensic investigations had not finished; they had yet to release the body.

  “You sound a bit uptight, Sonia.”

  “No, no, I’m fine.” But the tension in her voice contradicted her words. “I just, um…I just wondered whether you would come and have another look at Chieftain.”

  “I’m happy to, but I didn’t do him much good last time.”

  “No, but you were distracted. With Imogen around and everything. I really do think it’d be worth you having another go.”

  “Okay If that’s what you want.”

  “When could you come up here?”

  “I thought the horses had gone back to Long Bamber.”

  “Yes, most of them have. But Chieftain and Conker are still here.”

  “Right. Well, I could come when you like, really…”

  “This afternoon?”

  After the call ended, Jude had the very firm impression that Sonia Dalrymple wanted to see her about something. And it wasn’t Chieftain.

  As she walked up from the towpath towards the house, Jude surmised that she was not the only visitor that afternoon. A BMW, built on the lines of an ocean liner, stood on the gravel, and its appearance was quickly explained. As soon as she had opened the door to Jude’s ring, Sonia whispered, “Nicky’s here. He’s come back unexpectedly early from Frankfurt. He mustn’t know that you’ve come to see Chieftain.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m afraid he’d be rather sceptical about the idea of healing a horse.”

  “Just like my neighbour Carole. Well, look, don’t worry. I’ll just—”

  “Good afternoon. I don’t think we’ve met.”

  The man who stepped out of the sitting room behind Sonia moved in an aura of charm. Nicky Dalrymple was tall, dark-haired and almost unfeasibly handsome. His welcoming smile was formed by perfect teeth, and though his life seemed to be spent shuttling from one international hotel to another, he clearly spent plenty of time in those hotels’ gyms. The polo shirt, casual jacket and chinos he wore looked like a catalogue illustration. He and Sonia did make a dazzlingly attractive couple, entirely in keeping with their luxurious home and fleet of expensive cars.