The Stabbing in the Stables

by Simon Brett

  “I think we just call out as we approach,” said Carole. “Donal’s more likely to do something rash if we catch him by surprise.”

  “You’re right,” Jude agreed. She was impressed by her friend’s dominance since they had arrived at Cordham Manor, particularly by the duplicitous way she had handled Yolanta Brewis. And, of course, being Jude, she felt pleased rather than threatened by the shift in their customary roles.

  So they moved towards the derelict stables, gently identifying themselves and calling out Donal’s name. But there was no response.

  The main gates of the stable yard had long since rotted away, leaving only the drooping remnants of rusty hinges hanging from their pulpy uprights. The yard into which they stepped showed a few patches of bricked surface, but was mostly covered with the detritus of many year’s leaves and rubbish. The square had three stalls either side, and the far wall was open where another pair of gates had rotten away. Passages on either side led presumably to storage areas, a hay barn perhaps on one side and housing for wagons on the other.

  “Donal,” Jude called out softly. “Donal!”

  Still nothing. Though Cordham Manor was only a few miles from the busy thoroughfare of the A27, some acoustic trick of the South Downs cut off all the traffic noise. All they could hear was the susurration of wind in the nearby trees. And yet neither woman had the feeling that she was alone. Both felt, if they stayed silent long enough, they would hear some sound, some giveaway of another human presence.

  But it wasn’t a human who gave away the secret, it was an animal. They heard the unmistakable scrape of a horse hoof on a brick floor.

  It came from the furthest stall to their right. Both moved forward, and were unsurprised to find themselves, over what remained of the stable gate, facing a defiant Imogen Potton, standing in front of a very relaxed-looking Conker. Imogen looked terrified, exhausted. She’d got some shreds of food trapped in the brace on her teeth. The ginger streak of hair hung down like a rat tail over her forehead.

  Conker had been made very comfortable in her new home. Her saddle and tack had been hung on old rusted hooks and she was tethered by a rope from her head collar to a corroded metal ring. Unaware of the sensation she had caused, the pony was placidly tugging mouthfuls of stalks out of her hay net and munching them with noisy relish.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Imogen gracelessly, recognising Jude.

  “Yes. And this is my friend Carole Seddon.”

  “We met with your mother in the Seaview Café.”

  Whether or not she remembered the occasion, this information did not appear to interest the girl. She maintained her defensive posture in front of the pony.

  “So you’re not in Northampton.”

  “Oh, well done.” The words were ladled over with sarcasm.

  “Your mother’s been very worried about you,” said Carole. Though now she came to think of it, the phone call Lucinda Fleet had taken in her kitchen had not suggested that Hilary Potton was in a state of panic.

  Imogen didn’t seem too worried about her mother’s anxiety either. “She doesn’t care. She’s never cared about me.”

  “We’ll have to ring her to tell her you’re okay,” said Jude. “And where you are.”

  “I’m not moving. I’m not going to leave Conker. I’m not going to let anyone get at Conker.”

  “She’ll be safe back at Long Bamber.” Jude’s voice was infinitely soothing. “Or if you felt she was safer at Unwins, Sonia could take her back and look after her there.”

  “No!” There was panic in the girl’s eyes. “No, I’m not going to let Conker out of my sight. She certainly wouldn’t be safe with Mrs. Dalrymple.”

  “I think you underestimate how much Mrs. Dalrymple cares for that pony. She was terribly upset, in floods of tears this morning when she thought Conker had been stolen.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to protect Conker, and nobody’s going to stop me,” said the girl doggedly.

  “Is Donal around? Maybe he can make you see sense.”

  “No,” Imogen replied. “Donal’s gone. Once he’d showed me where to put Conker, he went away.”

  “Well,” said Jude, extracting her mobile from a pocket, “the first thing I’m going to do is let Sonia know that the pony’s safe. You’ve no idea how relieved she’ll be.”

  She moved a little away to make the call, leaving Carole the unrewarding task of trying to make conversation with Imogen. Sonia answered the phone immediately, and sobbed with relief when she heard that Conker was safe. She agreed with Jude that the best thing would be to get Imogen reunited with her mother as soon as possible. Then Sonia could make arrangements to pick up Conker later in the day. Maybe drive over with Lucinda and hack the pony back to Long Bamber Stables. That would probably be the solution.

  Sonia apologised that she couldn’t do anything earlier, but Nicky was there and needed her help getting stuff together for his trip to Chicago. He’d be driving up to Heathrow to get a lunchtime flight. Once he’d gone, everything would be simpler for her. In many ways, thought Jude.

  She finished the call and returned to the silent stand-off between Carole and Imogen. She thought again how tired and tense the girl looked. Presumably she’d had no sleep the night before, sneaking out of her bedroom in Northampton, catching a train to London, another to Fedborough, then staging her horse-stealing raid on Long Bamber Stables. No wonder the girl looked exhausted.

  She also looked very fragile. Her anxiety about Conker’s safety was a final screwing up of the tension that had been building throughout her parents’ estrangement. Jude got the feeling it would take very little to make the girl crack up completely.

  She reported back what Sonia had said. Imogen immediately vetoed the idea of her leaving Conker.

  “Well, look, maybe you can stay with her till Sonia and Lucinda arrive. But that probably won’t be till this afternoon. Sonia’s got to sort things out for her husband before he goes off to get a flight to Chicago.”

  “He’s going off today?” asked Imogen.

  “Yes. Lunchtime. Anyway, are you going to speak to your mother, Imogen?”

  A very determined shake of the head.

  “All right. One of us will. It’d better be you, actually, Carole. The last time we spoke, Hilary Potton wasn’t exactly my number-one fan.”

  Jude handed the mobile across and looked at Imogen. “I don’t know your home number.”

  The girl’s mouth set in a firm line. Jude certainly wasn’t going to get it from that source.

  But Carole’s photographic memory for phone numbers came to their aid. She got through straightaway.

  “Hilary, it’s Carole Seddon ringing.”

  “Oh, how nice to hear you.” The tone didn’t suggest a mother sick with worry about the disappearance of her teenage daughter.

  “Look, for reasons that are too complicated to explain at the moment, I am actually with Imogen.”

  “Good heavens. Where?”

  “She’s at Cordham Manor. Do you know it? Just outside Fedborough.”

  “I’ve driven past the turning. But what on earth is Immy doing there?”

  “She’s got Conker with her. She took the pony from Long Bamber Stables last night. She’s apparently worried about her safety. I don’t really understand. I’m sure Imogen herself can explain better than I can.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “I’m afraid she says she doesn’t want to talk to you.” Carole looked across, and was surprised to see that the girl’s eyes were welling full of tears. The rigidity had gone out of her body and her shoulders slumped. She had held herself together for as long as she could, but something—possibly the knowledge that her mother was now only a phone away—had made Imogen realise she could not maintain the tension any longer. She looked about seven, as she reached out for the mobile.

  The part of the conversation Carole and Jude heard was too tearful to be very coherent, but the message got through that Imogen did agree to retu
rn to Fethering. Then the mobile was handed back to Carole to make the arrangements.

  “Can you come and pick her up, Hilary?”

  “I wish I could. No car.”

  “But surely, with Alec being…er…” Carole didn’t know the graceful way to put this. “Well, he’s not using your car at the moment, is he?”

  “No. But the police have got it.”

  “Ah.”

  “Running all kinds of forensic tests, would you believe? Looking for Walter Fleet’s DNA on the upholstery, I suppose, building up the prosecution case. Let me tell you, it is extremely inconvenient being married to a murderer.”

  Not for the first time, Carole was struck by the oddness of Hilary Potton’s response to her situation. This flippancy seemed to be another facet of her self-dramatisation. What was happening to her husband was infinitely less important than the effect it was having on her. Maybe that was also the explanation for her lack of panic about Imogen’s disappearance. In Hilary Potton’s egocentric world, that was just another cross that the martyr had to bear.

  Carole arranged that she would drive Imogen home in the Renault. She expected resistance, but all fight seemed to have gone out of the girl. She looked feeble, a broken rag doll.

  Only as they were leaving did Imogen suddenly look back in panic at Conker.

  “I can’t leave her. I must ride her back.”

  “No, Imogen, you can’t,” said Carole firmly. “It’s a long way, and you’d have to ride on the main roads.”

  “Conker’s fine on the roads.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I’m not going to be responsible for you riding that pony back to Fethering.”

  “But suppose something happens to her?”

  Jude came to the rescue. “Nothing’s going to happen to her. I’ll stay here till Sonia arrives.”

  And even Imogen couldn’t find any objection to that arrangement.

  35

  JUDE WAS HUNGRY. All very well to agree to look after Conker, but she’d not had time for any breakfast when she was summoned to Long Bamber early that morning and was beginning to feel the effects.

  She inspected the pony’s temporary stable. Not being a hay eater, she wasn’t going to challenge Conker for the contents of her net. Nor did the pony nuts look very appealing. But a carrot…

  There were still some in a bucket, which Imogen had shrewdly placed out of Conker’s range. They looked unlike the kind of carrots that might appear in a supermarket. In fact, they were carrots that had been disqualified from appearing in supermarkets. The mandatory image in the world of supermarkets demands that a carrot be a perfect tapered cylinder built on the lines of a space rocket, whereas in nature carrots come in a variety of knobbly shapes and sizes. The perfect ones go to the customers of Sainsbury’s and Tesco; the imperfect ones are fed to horses.

  As well as being misshapen, the carrots in the bucket were a bit old and muddy, but Jude was very hungry. To ease her conscience, she also gave one to the pony, and the two of them chomped in contented unison. The carrots were pretty woody, but better than nothing.

  She decided to stay in the stall, not principally to keep an eye on Conker, but because the air was very cold outside its shelter. She put the remaining carrots in with the pony nuts, and sat on the upturned empty bucket.

  Her enforced wait was in many ways inconvenient but did at least give her a chance to think through the case and the various anomalies that it presented. Having met Alec Potton, she had great difficulty in casting him in the role of murderer. If half of what his wife said about his philandering were true, his behaviour was hardly admirable. Jude didn’t think much of men who kept their wives short while spending the family money on girlfriends, but he still seemed to her too weak a personality to make an attack like that which Walter Fleet had suffered.

  On the other hand, the blood-spattered Barbour found in the Dalrymples’ hayloft undoubtedly belonged to Alec Potton, and the police had had no hesitation about taking him in for questioning. Maybe, as ever, they knew a lot more than Carole and Jude would ever know.

  What about motivation, though? Hilary Potton’s suggestion, relayed by Carole, that Alec was jealous of Walter’s attention to her seemed pretty flimsy. Also, given the state of their marriage, would he have cared that much about anyone coming on to his soon-to-be-ex-wife?

  But then again, he had confessed to the murder. Alec Potton had actually told the police that he had killed Walter Fleet. That was quite a difficult fact to get round.

  Jude’s only explanation was that Alec had reacted instantly to the news that Imogen was planning to confess to the murder. Whatever his other character deficiencies, there was no questioning his love for his daughter. He would do anything to protect Imogen.

  In fact, Jude reckoned, daughter and father had behaved instinctively in exactly the same way. Very soon after hearing that Alec had been taken in for questioning, Imogen had planned to get him off the hook by confessing herself, an intention that her mother had only just managed to thwart.

  And as soon as Alec had heard what his daughter was proposing to do, he had immediately hoped to get her off the hook by confessing himself. By the time the details came out—that Imogen couldn’t have been at Long Bamber Stables at the relevant time because she was with her mother—the deed was done. A confession of murder had been made by the man whose clothes had been found stained with the victim’s blood. The police weren’t going to throw away a gift like that in a hurry.

  The other niggling questions that would not go away concerned Donal Geraghty: who exactly he was blackmailing, and did his blackmailing efforts have anything to do with Walter Fleet’s death?

  Well, from what they’d overheard at Fontwell—and indeed from Yolanta’s behaviour that morning—there seemed little doubt that Donal was putting the squeeze on the Brewises. Why he was putting the squeeze on them was a question Jude couldn’t at that moment answer, nor was it the highest in her order of priority. More significant was whether Donal was blackmailing anyone else. The Dalrymples kept coming back into Jude’s mind, and the more she had found out about the state of their marriage, the more reasons she could find why they might be open to blackmail.

  She was sure that Sonia was holding out on her. From working professionally with the woman, Jude knew the level of tension she was suffering, and Sonia had virtually admitted that its cause was information she dared not divulge. Her husband’s violence was a constant pressure on her life, but Jude got the feeling there was something else torturing Sonia Dalrymple. If only she could find out what the secrets were that seemed to be corroding the woman from the inside out. An early visit to Sonia was called for, one when a few more cards should be placed on the table.

  And then again there was Donal. Donal the disappearing Irishman. Vanished once again. Yolanta had thought he was in the stables where Jude was sitting; Imogen had implied that he had been there until recently. Where had he disappeared to this time?

  Suddenly Jude recalled the little hesitation in Imogen’s voice when she’d been asked where Donal was. Had she been lying? Was Donal Geraghty actually still present in the derelict stables?

  Jude pulled herself up with difficulty from her crouched position on the bucket. Her limbs had almost locked in the cold, and she shook her legs to restore the circulation.

  Conker got the reward of another carrot in anticipation of good behaviour, and a cheery “See you” as Jude set out to explore the rest of the building.

  She gave the other five stables a cursory look. If there had been anyone holed up in them, she and Carole would, she felt sure, have seen or heard something. And so it proved. No human agency had stirred the mess in the stables for decades.

  Jude went through the narrow passage to the left of the main entrance and found herself in a barnlike structure full of decaying farm carts and rusted machinery. Sagging doors and missing tiles gave her enough daylight to inspect the whole area and confirm that it was uninhabited.

  She moved back to the cent
ral courtyard and continued in a straight line through the passage to the right of the main gates. The space she entered seemed as large as the one she had just left, but its roof was in better repair, so it took a moment for her eyes to accommodate to the darkness.

  As she stood there, trying to make out the shapes that loomed around her, Jude heard a strange sound.

  A whimper, like that of an animal in pain.

  Except that it definitely came from a human being.

  36

  JUDE MOVED TOWARDS the source of the sound. The space smelled of old grain, so damp as almost to be fermented. The floor was littered with ancient sacks, long predating plastic, shredded perhaps by the rats who had long ago made away with their contents. Everything underfoot felt slimy.

  In the far corner lay what looked like just another pile of torn sacking, and it was from there that the human whimpering came. But the darkness was still intense. Prudent Carole of course would have her torch in the Renault, but Carole and the Renault were now far away. Jude looked around for a light source, and saw an old window, over which a whole sack appeared to have been nailed. But that had been a long time ago, and when she touched it the fabric tore away like tissue paper. The extant panes of the window were obscured by green slime, but enough were broken to let in the daylight.

  Jude looked back to the corner and saw Donal Geraghty.

  He lay on a pile of filthy sacks and looked as filthy himself. His face was discoloured with dried blood, which had also sprayed down over his clothes. The way he hugged himself suggested that his injuries might include broken ribs. One blue eye was closed by bruising, but the other looked up trying to identify the intruder.

  “It’s Jude.”

  “Oh God, that’s all a man needs when he’s in a state like this—a visit from the Fethering Miss Marple.”