The Stabbing in the Stables

by Simon Brett

  “No, I don’t deny that. I did give her the names.”

  “And do you deny that you encouraged her to ring them, and tell them a complete fabric of lies?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Potton, I deny that completely. I have no idea what Imogen told to the police. All she told me was that she had some information that might help to exonerate her father from suspicion.”

  “Oh?” For the first time, a bit of wind was taken from Hilary Potton’s furious sails. “But you have no idea what that information was.”

  “Absolutely none. I’d be very interested to know, but I don’t.”

  “And you think I’m about to tell you?”

  “No. I would say, from your tone of voice and general manner, that’s extremely unlikely.”

  “Well, you might be wrong there, Jude.” The loathing in the name had now been reduced to contempt.

  “Oh?”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t encourage Imogen to do what she’s done?”

  “Mrs. Potton, I promise you I have no idea what she’s done. And so far as I know, I’ve never encouraged your daughter to do anything. We’ve only met a couple of times. I hardly know her.”

  “Well,” said a disgruntled Hilary Potton, “if you didn’t put her up to it, I’m sure someone else did.”

  “Can you please tell me what it is that she’s done?”

  “Hm…” The woman seemed to assess this request before answering. “You know that my husband—my former husband—is being questioned by the police?”

  “Yes, I do know that.”

  “Of course you do. Everyone in bloody Fethering knows that! And whatever happens, I know I’ll never hear the end of it. Anyway, what you don’t probably know—if your acquaintance with my daughter is as minimal as you say it is”—but the suspicion was still there in her words—“that, in spite of the kind of man he is, Imogen is totally devoted to her father. Besotted. In her eyes he can do no wrong at all. So she just cannot cope with the idea that he might have committed murder.”

  “It’s a hard thing to think of anyone. I mean, don’t you have difficulty in believing it?”

  “I know Alec rather well.” Hilary Potton’s words came out in a long hard line. “And I keep finding out about more dreadful things he’s done. I wouldn’t be that surprised if murder turned out to be one of them.”

  “Very well,” said Jude, making her response sound less shocked than she might have done. “So, because Imogen’s so devoted to her father, she’s rung the police and given them some information that she hopes will get him off the hook?”

  “Fortunately, I have managed to stop her from contacting the police. No thanks to you,” she added savagely.

  “But that was what Imogen intended to do—tell the police something that would exonerate her father?”

  “Worse than that,” Hilary Potton almost shrieked. “She was intending to give the police a confession. She was going to tell them that she stabbed Walter Fleet!”

  25

  THE BARRAGE THAT came from the other end of the line when Jude asked whether there could be any truth in Imogen’s assertion made Hilary Potton’s previous fury seems as mild as a summer breeze. For a start, it was logistically impossible that her daughter could have committed the crime, since she was with her mother at the relevant time. And the idea that anyone should think Imogen capable of such an appalling atrocity was…It took some time for Jude to get herself off the phone.

  She rarely phoned Carole. Normally she just went round to High Tor and banged on the door. But it was late, so she rang the number.

  Carole sounded slightly disappointed when she heard who it was. Jude sensed her neighbour had been hoping for some contact from Stephen. But Carole livened up when she heard about the latest development in the case.

  “Imogen’s devoted to her father, isn’t she? And she’s at the age for dramatic gestures. Taking his guilt on herself—it’s like something out of A Tale of Two Cities.”

  “Yes, Carole, but there’s still something odd about the whole business. I mean, Hilary was in such a state of fury. You don’t know her that well, but have you ever heard her like that?”

  “Not the way you describe it, no. She’s certainly sounded off whenever she got onto the subject of Alec, but that was more vicious contempt than fury.”

  “The kind of thing you hear from every divorcée about her ex.”

  “Not every one,” said Carole frostily, making Jude feel guilty for her carelessness.

  “No, of course not. It’s odd, isn’t it? Everyone else involved in this case seems to be keeping secrets, holding their cards very close to their chests, except for Hilary Potton, and she seems prepared to sound off to anyone about anything.”

  “Not to anyone,” said Carole, offended. She was proud of the way she had nurtured her source of information, and didn’t want to have her achievements belittled.

  “No, sorry. You know what I meant.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Carole, unmollified. “Anyway, talking of sources of information…”

  “Mm?”

  “Don’t forget you’ve got one of our most promising ones coming to see you tomorrow morning.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “And don’t forget either that ethics is a comparative study. There are times when one ethical consideration—say the need to find out the truth—has to overrule another.”

  “Like, say, the confidentiality between therapist and client?”

  “Exactly, Jude.”

  Anyone who had seen Sonia Dalrymple getting out of her Range Rover outside Woodside Cottage the next morning would have laughed at the idea that she had a care in the world. She looked supermodel stunning in sleek black trousers, black silk top and perfectly cut black leather jacket. And if there still was any bruising around her eyes, it had been magicked away by expert makeup.

  But as soon as Jude got her facedown on the treatment bed and touched her back, the tensions within were immediately apparent. Jude parted the curtain of blond hair to feel the knots of muscle where the neck met the skull, and ran her fingers down the taut length of Sonia’s spine.

  “You’re holding a lot in, aren’t you?”

  The client grunted agreement.

  “You always hold a lot in, but this is exceptional.”

  “I know. If you can just get rid of the tension. It’s really hurting. I can’t get comfortable in bed, so I’m not sleeping.”

  “I’m not surprised. You must be very careful, otherwise you’ll do yourself permanent damage. Your balance is all over the place.”

  Jude lit some candles, opened her pots of oil and started a smooth gentle massage of Sonia Dalrymple’s beautiful back. She didn’t work into the flesh and joints like a physiotherapist; she hardly touched, just let the warmth—both real and spiritual—irradiate the woman’s body. After about ten minutes she moved her hands away.

  “Is that better?”

  “Mm.” Sonia’s voice was deep, throaty and grateful.

  “You know there’s a limited amount I can do, don’t you? Whatever it is that’s troubling you—effectively poisoning you—you have to get rid of it yourself.”

  “You mean by telling someone?”

  “If it’s something that can be told.”

  “That’s the whole point, Jude; it isn’t. I can’t tell anyone, which is why the pressure just builds and builds.”

  “Are you sure there’s no one you can talk to? I’m not offering myself as a listener.” Jude hastened to assure her.

  “No, there isn’t. I’ve got a wide range of acquaintances, Jude, but very few actual friends. And if had any, I couldn’t tell them anyway, because they know my domestic set-up and…” She trailed away.

  “Listen, Sonia, I don’t want to be nosey. It’s not my place, that’s not what I’m here for, but if there is anything you feel you can unload onto me…well, I’m not part of your family, you don’t see me that often…It’s up to you.”

  “I’d like to talk a
bout it, Jude, but it’s so complicated. Everything’s interlinked. Telling about one thing is automatically going to lead on to the next thing and…”

  “Very well. Don’t worry about it. Can you turn over? I’d like to work on your shoulders and neck at the front.”

  After a few minutes of this, Jude propped her client’s head onto a special pillow and started the lightest of cranial massages. Again, she used her fingers not to manipulate or apply pressure, but as a conduit for energy.

  “Sonia, let me talk. Not ask questions exactly, but make suggestions. If there are things you want to agree with, or to disagree with, fine. If you don’t want to say anything, equally fine. And if you want me to shut up, just say so.”

  Having received a guarded assent, Jude continued. “All right, you talked about your domestic set-up. Well, I know that your marriage is not entirely happy. You’ve told me that on previous sessions, and now I’ve met Nicky, I can see where some of the problems may lie. He is a very controlling personality, who doesn’t like people disagreeing with him.”

  There was no sound from the woman whose skull she was continuing to massage, so Jude asked, “You don’t mind my saying this. Tell me when to stop.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Sonia murmured. “As you say, I’ve already told you all this stuff.”

  “So it might just be the continuing unhappiness in your marriage that’s generating this tension in you. Except that it’s so much worse than when I last saw you, that I think there must be some new factor, something that’s happened recently to upset you, some new secret you have to hide…”

  Almost without words, Sonia agreed that there was.

  “Now I’m not asking you to tell me what that secret is. I don’t think you can tell me, anyway—that’s why the tension’s building up so much. As you said, you can’t tell anyone. But part of the trouble with your relationship with Nicky is that there are things you can’t tell him, or things you’ve tried to tell him, but you know he won’t listen to…”

  There was the lightest of nods from the head beneath Jude’s hands.

  “And it’s possible that only telling him these things can bring any kind of equality into your marriage, can give you perhaps an opportunity of saving it…?”

  Another quiver of assent.

  “So maybe when Nicky’s next home, you should try confronting him with some of these things you haven’t said to him.” Jude had a momentary doubt about the wisdom of her advice. “I don’t want to make things worse between you.”

  “You’d be hard put to do that.”

  “I mean, I don’t want to”—she phrased it as delicately as she could—“put you at risk.”

  “Nothing’ll put me more at risk than I am at the moment, Jude. Go on.”

  “When’s Nicky next home?”

  “The weekend.”

  “Can’t you try talking to him?”

  “Oh, Jude,” said Sonia tearfully, “you make it sound so easy. Just tell Nicky all the feelings I’ve been bottling up for all these years, not to mention what’s happened recently. You don’t know him. I’ve had years to say those things to him, and I’ve never managed in the past. Why should this weekend be any different from any of his other fleeting visits to our so-called home?”

  “I can’t answer that. But you know that’s the only chance you have of making the marriage workable.”

  “I do know. I’ve known for years. And for years I’ve put it off.”

  “Why? For fear such a confrontation might destroy the marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, is that such a terrible risk? Might that not be a solution? Is the marriage, as you currently have it, worth saving?”

  There was a long silence. Jude continued the cranial massage, in no particular expectation of a response. She felt no guilt. She had put no ideas into Sonia Dalrymple’s mind, merely organised the information that Sonia had already given her. The thought processes that had been set in motion were not new ones; Sonia had spent much of her married life weighing up the pros and cons of these issues.

  “But,” said Jude eventually, “I get the feeling that it’s not just Nicky who’s troubling you at the moment. You’re under pressure from some other source.”

  “Yes,” Sonia agreed, almost eagerly, as if the confession took a weight off her mind.

  “Donal Geraghty,” said Jude, and felt the body beneath her hands tremble at the name. “Donal Geraghty has implied to me that he’s either blackmailing or planning to blackmail someone in this area.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it you? Is Donal trying to blackmail you?”

  “Yes,” said Sonia Dalrymple, and then burst into tears from sheer relief.

  26

  AFTER THEIR SESSION had finished, Jude put away the treatment bed, recovering it with an array of throws and drapes that made it indistinguishable from all the other furniture in her sitting room. Then she sat on what she knew to be a sofa, deep in thought.

  Her worries followed on from her telephone conversation with Carole the night before, but it was not the first time they had troubled her. As a healer—or however people wanted to define what she did—Jude had a relationship of confidentiality to her clients. Like a priest taking confession, any medical—or quasi-medical—practitioner will from time to time hear things that he or she knows should not be spread abroad. And Sonia Dalrymple had told her things about her marriage that Jude would never dream of spreading abroad.

  But when the information given might be relevant to a murder enquiry, the moral issues became more blurred. Though she hadn’t directly questioned Sonia about any connections she might have to the Fleets, Jude felt she had been sailing dangerously close to that particular wind. Fortunately—well, in one sense fortunately—Sonia had not revealed the secret whose retention was so troubling her, so Jude’s moral dilemma was, at least on that occasion, resolved.

  But it was a problem that was almost bound to recur, and she just hoped she would have the moral courage to do the right thing when it did.

  However, she couldn’t sit there all morning agonising about the ethics of her profession—or vocation or whatever it was. There was one very positive, practical thing she had to do. Without revealing the secret knowledge Donal Geraghty held over her, Sonia Dalrymple had made it very clear that she was anxious to make contact with him. More than anxious—desperate. And since Jude seemed to have been one of the people who had seen Donal most recently, any help she could give in tracking him down would be most welcome.

  Well, after the fight with Ted Crisp, the ex-jockey was probably lying low. But there might be ways of finding out where he was lying low.

  Jude’s first instinct was to go on the next stage of the quest alone. But the more she thought about it, the more she was amused by the idea of Carole coming with her. So that was what was arranged.

  The Cheshire Cheese was no more welcoming than it had been the last time. Nor did the pub give the impression of having been cleaned since Jude’s last visit. But then again it didn’t give the impression of having been cleaned in the previous millennium. And then the cleaning smelled as though it had been done with a rag soaked in beer. She could sense Carole’s nose wrinkling behind her.

  Hopes for Chilean chardonnay were so remote that she didn’t bother asking the same anaemic girl at the counter for anything more elaborate than “two white wines.” These were silently produced.

  As they picked up their sticky glasses, Carole hissed, “I’ve looked round. He isn’t here.”

  “I wasn’t expecting him to be here. Too soon after his run-in with Ted.” Carole took a sip from her wine and grimaced at the taste, as Jude went on. “But there are people in here who might know where he is.”

  “You mean you know people in here? Jude, I am constantly surprised by the range of your friends.”

  “Hardly call them friends. Just people I’ve met before. Over there.”

  Carole followed her friend’s gesture with hardly disguised contemp
t. At the same table sat four short men, looking very similar to the four short men Jude had seen on her previous visit. All wore dirty weatherproof jackets, breeches and boots; one had a flat discoloured tweed cap. Clearly they weren’t the all same, because Donal wasn’t there for one, and she couldn’t be sure that she recognised the others.

  One of them recognised her, however. “Ah, look, it’s Donal’s bit of stuff, come to find him again. Did he not come home last night, dear?” he asked in a voice of mock concern.

  “You don’t think he could have been out drinking, do you?” asked another, ready to join in the game.

  Jude smiled easily. “I am actually looking for Donal. Do any of you know where he is?”

  But none of the old stable lads was going to give a direct answer. There was a lot of heavily mimed head-shaking and oohing and aahing at her request, then the one who’d spoken first said, “Now, if we did know where he was, should we tell you? We don’t know what you’re after him for, do we?”

  “Might be maintenance, you see,” suggested one of them.

  “Or a restraining order,” another proposed.

  “Or,” offered the fourth, “he might have got you into trouble.”

  “Well, it would be a genuine miracle if he’d done that,” said Jude with a grin.

  Carole recoiled inwardly. It was bad enough that Jude knew people like this; there was no need for her to sink to their conversational level.

  “Come on, I need to find him.” Jude went on. “Any suggestions?”

  “Plenty of suggestions,” one of the wags replied, “but not many of them printable.”

  “Anyway,” said the first speaker, “there’s other reasons Donal might not want to see you. He’s spent a fairly unpleasant few days with the police recently. How do we know it wasn’t you who put them onto him?”

  “I can assure you it wasn’t. My only interest in him is because of his skills as a healer.”

  “And of course his other skills,” roared one of the men. “The old sexual healing, eh?”

  They all found this extremely funny. Jude, smiling along and biding her time, was surprised to see Carole stepping past her and saying in a frosty voice, “Please! There is no need for this kind of smutty sexist vulgarity.”