Katie was as he had left her. He resisted the temptation to hold a mirror to her lips before he led Cyril Macenery from the room.
At the moment, they were in a room reserved for mourning families. Wiggins had his notebook open, sitting beneath a hospital lamp. He had taken down everything.
“Listen, I was here in this hospital—you saw me. I could hardly have been in Littlebourne murdering somebody.”
“I’m not talking about that at the moment. We’re on the subject of what happened to that necklace. The police knew Tree took it, no matter we’ve never found it.”
Macenery looked absolutely wrung out. “To think Trevor would have trusted me enough to toss a quarter-million-quids’ worth of jewelry into my violin case and walk away is ridiculous. He didn’t trust anybody.”
“He must have done, in some way. Somebody else was in on that theft with him. The somebody to whom he sent or left that diagram of the Underground.”
Wiggins had stopped writing and was turning his pencil over and over in his fingers, tapping it on his notebook. “The thing is, sir, it just doesn’t fit Macenery here. Tree was taken in by police and then watched all the while until that auto accident. He knew he was under surveillance. So since he couldn’t get to the necklace himself, he got this Wizards map off to his accomplice. Rather dirty trick, I’d say—leaving it to his mate to figure out what it meant. Well, it couldn’t very well have been you,” Wiggins said to Macenery. “Not if you had the necklace in the first place. Unless you’d given it back to him, but that’s not likely in the circumstances.”
Macenery’s relief was palpable. “You’re goddamned right it couldn’t have been me.”
Jury smiled. “I guess I run faster than I think, Wiggins.”
Wiggins sat there beneath the hospital lamp, bathed in his own little glow, and unwound the tiny red strip from a fresh box of cough drops.
III
Only a slant of murky light showed through the partially open stable door where Emily was in Shandy’s box, about to remove the pony’s saddle. She had exercised him for twenty minutes, until the cream cakes seemed to start oozing around in her stomach, and then brought him back to the stable.
As she started to unbuckle the saddle, the stable door slowly shut, cutting off what light there was.
No place was darker than the stable at night when the door was shut. No windows, no chinks between boards, no knotholes were here that light might filter through. The structure was as sturdily built as a house. She hadn’t bothered to switch on the electric light because she knew the stables like a blind man knows his own roomful of furniture.
Although she might have been afraid in her own room in the dark, she had never felt afraid in the stable; it had always been her sanctuary.
She was afraid now.
Anyone who had a legitimate reason for being out here would not have shut the door, would have flicked the switch inside, and, above all, would not have simply melted into the silence as though purposely becoming a part of it, the thick silence that fell after the first shuffling response of the horses to the sudden, sharp clatter of the door. The only sounds now were the usual rustling sounds of threshing hooves, soft whinnies and snorts.
Emily started to say, Who’s there? and stopped. Instinct told her to hold her tongue. She stood there with the towel she had used to wipe the tack, hearing footsteps on the floor of the stable. If she could get out of Shandy’s stall to the barrels . . . Katie had always said they made her think of Ali Baba. But, no, whoever it was would look there . . . for her? Who could be looking for her? The steps seemed to be moving very quickly straight down the line of boxes. Emily could hear the thrust of the outside bolts on each box door being shot—one, two, three—one after another.
Someone was locking each of the doors, locking the horses in. Someone was locking her in. There must have been an electric torch switched on down at the far end, because she saw the play of reflected light dimly on the boards and ceiling.
Why was she being locked in?
She heard the creaking of the door to the loose box at the far end, probably old Nellie’s box, and then a high neigh. The horse was objecting to this invasion. The door rattled shut. And once again there was the sound of a bolt thrown.
She pulled her knees right up to her chest, scarcely breathing. Now there came the same set of noises: gate to box opening, rustling of hooves, gate closing, bolt thrown. All repeated in Jupiter’s box.
There were seven boxes, three of them empty.
Now she knew what was happening: whoever it was was looking for her, and to make sure she didn’t sneak out in the pitch-darkness, sneak through to the outside stable door—that person had locked them all and was now methodically inspecting each one of the loose boxes. Now the next box was being inspected and bolted.
There was no way she could see of getting out. She had her eyes tightly shut in an effort of thinking. What she wanted to do was just sit here, not moving a muscle, and hope that the thin light would pass over her and mistake her for another bag of feed.
The fourth box was being opened, scrutinized, locked.
Very slowly, Emily got up on her knees, then into a crouching position, and then moved quietly to Shandy’s side. She gripped the mane for leverage and hoisted herself up on the pony’s back. Shandy made snorting sounds, but that was all right, considering the racket the other horses were making at this intrusion.
There was nothing to do now but wait, lying flattened out on Shandy’s back, her cheek against his neck. Whoever was there was now in the stall next to hers.
Shandy was whinnying and pawing the ground. He was not at all happy with this odd nocturnal performance. Emily locked her fingers round the reins and got her head as close to his ear as she could and waited . . .
She heard the bolt shoot back, saw the light from the torch stream across the horse’s flank, just missing her, saw it searching the corners of the stall—
“Go,” she whispered in the pony’s ear.
Shandy exploded from the stall. When they got to the outside door, which was closed but not latched, she rammed it with her crop and the pony with his head and they shot through.
They left behind them someone, she thought happily, with the wind against her face, who must now be lying in the dirt.
Emily was across the cobbles and onto the drive in less than a minute. Another minute and she could have cut across the grass to the house—but obviously, she couldn’t go there for help, because whoever it was in the stable could easily have come from there. To get to the High, she could ride through the gate at the end of the drive—
Too late she remembered the gate was shut; she’d been directed always to shut it behind her. Could she take the chance that the person (could it be anyone but nasty Derek with his wet mouth?) hadn’t picked himself up off the ground and would grab her the moment she stopped long enough to unlock the gate? Any of the other horses in that stable she could have made jump it. But not Shandy. And Rookswood was bounded for a good quarter mile by a stone wall along the Hertfield Road.
There were only two choices—either follow the wall until it finally ended, which meant going through the Horndean wood, or cut back across the pasture, which would allow her to gallop to some point beyond Rookswood. . . .
It came down to one choice. The sound coming down the gravel behind her was not the sound of feet, but of horse’s hooves.
So the Horndean wood it would have to be. Emily dug her heels into Shandy’s side and slapped the reins. There was no way of doubling back now.
As she galloped along with the wall to her right, the wind was cold on her face and brought the smell of rain. She prayed it would rain. At least it would make some noise; it would cover the noise she herself made. The noise the hooves made behind her spewing up dirt and gravel thundered in her ears.
Just once before she entered the wood did she look back over her shoulder to see some dark outline coming at her. If the dark outline was Julia’s horse, Jupiter,
Emily knew she wouldn’t have a prayer on the flat because Jupiter was simply faster than Shandy, even if Julia, who was a boring rider, was up on him.
When she reached the scattering of trees that began the Horndean wood, she picked out the line of an old bridle path and slowed Shandy to a trot. Somewhere off to her left, she heard the other horse gallop by.
Now she couldn’t keep going ahead, toward the end of the wall and the relative safety of the Hertfield-Horndean Road—because the rider would be up there. And if he were already starting back toward Rookswood, then doubling back might be the worst of all.
She could stand on Shandy’s back and scale the wall. But if Shandy were found riderless, the other one would know and be on the other side of the wall and looking for her. And he’d be on horseback and she’d be on foot. Probably he still had his torch, while she had nothing except her crop, and what good would that do?
He could leave false trails. The words of Superintendent Jury came back to her just as she heard the crackle of twig and brush, the sounds of the returning rider, now moving more slowly.
Leave false trails: it was as if Jimmy Poole, before he got so sick (and almost died, she was sure), were out here trying to tell her what to do.
Quickly and quietly she moved Shandy to a section of the wall, climbed up on his back, balanced herself carefully and clambered up on the wall. From her neck she took the towel which she’d used to wipe down the tack, let it fall on the wall, where it caught on a protruding vine. Good. It looked like it got caught there as she went over. She walked along the wall a few feet, caught hold of the lower branch of the tree, and swung herself up.
She didn’t have to wait long.
There was a thrashing through the branches and bracken, and the thin beam of a torch pointing into space below her, searching the outlines of trees before it.
The torch had picked out Shandy’s rump. The other horse stopped; someone got down from the saddle, squelched through the wet leaves, came to a stop just below her.
For the first time in her life, Emily Louise Perk’s curiosity hadn’t got the best of her. She was frozen to the tree, her face pressed against it, unbreathing.
In the few seconds when she knew this awful person was inspecting both horse and wall, she knew she should have looked down, but she couldn’t. She was too much of a coward.
Emily Louise had cried three times in her life: once, when her father had gone; once, when her cat had died; once, when Katie O’Brien had gone into the hospital.
This was the fourth time, and she was crying because she knew Jimmy Poole wouldn’t have been that much of a coward.
• • •
The rain stopped. The dark closed in, even thicker than before. The person had gone, getting back on the horse (she was sure it must be Jupiter) and trotting off. The rider would be looking for her somewhere else.
She climbed down from the tree onto Shandy’s back and wished she had something to give him for a reward for waiting so still and patiently.
Emily made for the end of the wall and the Hertfield-Horndean Road. At the point where the wall ended, the road was bisected by another road, narrower, going to the hamlet of St. Lyons.
• • •
Shandy was tired and breathing heavily, shaking his head as if he’d like to shake free of the bit. She was on the St. Lyon’s road now, and off to her right across the hedges and long pasture, she could make out the row of lights from the rear of cottages along Littlebourne High Street. That pink, milky light was cast by the lamp Mary O’Brien always lit in her bedroom. Far off and screened by trees, the lights winked on and off like stars. In just another quarter of a mile she would be at the turning where the little St. Lyons road went straight on and a rutted country lane branched off to the right and led back to connect up with the road that finally became Littlebourne’s High Street.
Emily was so exhausted that she just lay her face down on Shandy’s mane and let him walk on. In the distance, she heard a car.
It drove past her, a dark blur in the night. There was little traffic on the St. Lyons road.
Her mind went blank with fear when she saw it stop a distance behind her, reverse in the narrow road, trying to maneuver itself by backing halfway into the hedgerow.
And then she knew. She started Shandy at a canter and quickly changed from a canter to a gallop. Shandy was fast, at least with Emily riding, but no horse in the Bodenheims’ stable was fast enough to outrun a car.
She’d better outrun it, if she wanted to live through the night.
The car was now some distance behind her, but it was clear from the position of its headlamps that it had managed to turn and was coming straight on.
The fork in the road was just ahead. The turn to the right would screen her for a few seconds from the car. She slowed Shandy to a walk, took off her tweed coat and stuck the arms, one each side through the loops of the bridle. It was a silly ruse, but she remembered all those time she’d fooled her mum by stuffing pillows under her bedclothes to make it look as if she were still there after she’d crawled out the window on some midnight adventure. Right now, she wished she’d listened a little more to her mum over the years, though she still wasn’t sure what her mum had had to say.
She could hear the car gaining on the St. Lyons road and it was very near to the turn. With Shandy at a walk, Emily slid off, yelled, “Go!” and slapped his rump. Shandy broke into a gallop, the fluttering coat atop the saddle.
Just as the beam from the headlamps illuminated the legs of the pony, Emily fell back through the hedge, crying and hating herself.
What a traitorous thing to do to Shandy.
IV
Mr. William Francis Bevins Potts was clearly so proud of his position with the rolling stock engineer’s department that he hadn’t minded at all having his favorite television program interrupted to talk about London Transport. Whilst he offered up a smorgasboard of mind-numbing details about the history and adaptation of tube stock and rolling stock, Jury looked at the lathering of colorful Underground posters on the walls of Mr. Pott’s flat in the Edgeware Road—marvelous Edwardians being helped by equally marvelous London bobbies in their outings on the Underground. Indeed, Mr. Potts’s flat rather reminded Jury of a tube station, with its huge hoardings, but otherwise spartan furnishings.
Jury let him talk on for a few minutes, for he believed that people who were obsessed with a topic needed an outlet for that obsession and would come round much more quickly and fix much more clearly on the actual questions Jury wanted answered. Occasionally through this morass of exquisitely boring detail would flash an intriguing fact like an exotic fish. He hadn’t known, for instance, that the newer diesel hydraulic locomotives built in the late ’60s had Rolls-Royce engines. Plant might be interested in that detail.
“ . . . surface stock is used on the District, Circle and Metropolitan Lines, you see, and the tube stock is used on Northern, Jubilee . . . ”
Any mention of the Jubilee Line brought a spark to Mr. Potts’s eye. His description of the building of that sounded pretty much as if he’d been around at the Creation.
None of this seemed to bore Sergeant Wiggins, however; Wiggins had a mind for minutiae equal to William F. B. Potts—it was one of the reasons Jury found him to be invaluable, especially in the note-taking arena. When Jury finally felt he had to interrupt this getting-onto-ten-minutes of monologue, Wiggins looked at him almost reproachfully.
“That’s all very interesting, Mr. Potts. But what we’re concerned with here really has more to do with the stations themselves than with the actual stock. We came to you because we were told you probably knew as much as anyone about the technical details of the building—”
Emphatically, Mr. Potts nodded; apparently having had his fix for the day with his own special interest, he was willing to move on to broader matters. He ran his hands back over his sparse gray hair, made a tent of his fingers, and riveted his attention on Jury.
“If you had to dispose of somet
hing, something relatively small, by way of putting it in a safe place where you could come back and collect it later—where would you leave it in an Underground station?”
Mr. Potts, who seemingly could not be taken aback by any question related to the Underground, simply asked, crisply, “How small and how long left?”
Jury made a circle with thumb and index finger. “Maybe the size of a half-crown. And how long is questionable. I’d say from a day to . . . indefinitely.”
That, Mr. Potts’s expression told Jury, was a facer. “You mean hide some article so that no one else would come on it, either by design or accident?” Jury nodded. Mr. Potts thought for some time, looking from one to the other of them, looking at the posters on the wall, started several times to answer, drew his answer back, as it were, from the brink, shook his head, and then said, finally, “Odd as it seems, there’d be hardly anywhere. Except, perhaps, one of the grates.”
“Grates?”
Mr. Potts nodded. “You’ve seen them; everyone has. You just don’t notice them. Ventilation grates. Of course, it depends what station you’re talking about—there’re different sorts. You could probably stick something in there and it wouldn’t be found for a year. A lot of them are down at floor level. Just walk through the tunnel, you’ll see them. People never look down at their feet, do they?”
Jury rose and Wiggins slapped his notebook shut. “Mr. Potts, we’re extremely indebted to you. Sorry we can’t tell you any more.”
That did not seem to bother Mr. Potts at all, who could be, when it came to anything not connected with surface stock and tube stock, a master of economical language. “Pleasure,” was all he said, as he showed them to the door.
There, Wiggins turned and asked, “I was wondering, sir. How do they clean them? The tunnels, I mean. Don’t they have to clean them?”
William F. B. Potts’s chest swelled up, not with pride nor vanity, but to get plenty of air in his lungs. “Certainly. It’s the tunnel cleaning train that does that, Sergeant. It’s equipped with floodlights outside each one of the motor cars and behind the driver’s cab, that’s where the cleaning operator is. There’s the filter car and the nozzle car. Nozzle car draws the dust into the filter car. It operates at various speeds. Built at Acton Works, it was sometime in the ’70s . . . ”
The Anodyne Necklace Page 22