The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  Had it not still been raining so hard perhaps someone might have noticed something different. As it was the rain had begun to come down even more heavily as the file of horses were led back after the race to the stableblock to be washed down and dried off, with the result that everyone who wasn’t actually in charge of a horse ran for cover. But then the whole scheme had obviously been so well planned that it did not have to rely on vagaries such as cloudbursts which turned almost immediately into vicious hailstorms.

  Even so, the storm must have helped the perpetrators of the deed since during the five minutes the hail continued to rocket down from the skies no-one in the horsebox park or the vicinity of the stables could have been clearly visible let alone even vaguely recognizable. Furthermore, because of the freak storm there was a certain amount of chaos reigning as those in charge tried to find shelter for the poor rain-soaked creatures in the stables or horseboxes, and given the prevailing conditions they could be forgiven for not noticing anything or anybody untoward. During those few all-important but rainswept minutes visibility was down to a matter of a few feet.

  For security reasons The Nightingale had been allocated a stable for his sole use throughout the entire length of his stay at the racecourse. Since the safety of the horse was everyone’s primary concern it had been agreed that he should leave the track as soon as possible after he had been washed down and allowed to cool off, although given the weather it was obvious that both these tasks would for once have to be performed in the stable rather than outside in what should have been the warm sunshine. Roger Harris’s travelling head lad Mick Molloy who was drying his own horse off in the next door box remembered calling out his congratulations to Fred and Bridie as they led The Nightingale into the VIP box, just as he clearly remembered that despite the downpour the two security guards were still on duty outside the stable.

  The next thing that anyone remembered with any clarity was the horsebox leaving the yard with Bridie at the wheel. Although the official on the gate did not know Bridie personally he was sure the young woman fitted the description given to him by the police, that of a small, slight dark-haired female in her twenties wearing a black and white cap pulled well down to her eyes. There was no-one else in the cab.

  The horsebox was last seen turning out of the box park in the direction of Reading. It was not seen again until it was found abandoned early the next morning on a disused trading estate on the outskirts of Woking.

  At first the failure of the horsebox to arrive at the airfield was attributed to all those usual things that can go wrong, mechanical breakdown, punctures, traffic accidents and particularly the appalling weather.

  ‘The roads were bad enough when we drove down,’ Cassie said. ‘We were diverted off the motorway twice because of flash flooding.’

  ‘But if the box had broken down we’d surely have seen it,’ Mattie reminded her. ‘We’d hardly miss a broken down horsebox on the motorway or the roads we’ve just travelled on. Particularly one disguised as Madigan’s Meats.’

  ‘Of course we would,’ Josephine contradicted him. ‘For a start it was still pouring with rain, at times so heavily you could hardly see the car in front, and secondly they could have pulled into a layby and that way we’d never see them. Particularly since we weren’t looking for them.’

  ‘They would have rung by now if they’d broken down,’ Cassie said curtly. ‘They’d either have rung me on my mobile, or they’d have rung here to say they were going to be late or that they were waiting for Horsebox Rescue. Fred would not just leave it in the air. God almighty, if Fred’s going to be five minutes late he rings me! He always rings me! They must have had an accident.’

  ‘But surely we’d have seen evidence of that as well?’ Josephine asked.

  ‘I don’t know! Why?’ Cassie asked back, pulling anxiously at the locket round her neck. ‘Suppose because of the weather they’d been forced to take another route? Supposing they’ve simply got lost? All I know is that something has happened! And if it has it’ll be all my fault!’

  ‘All right,’ Mattie said, going and putting his arm round his mother. ‘It’s OK, guv. There’s bound to be a perfectly logical explanation.’

  ‘No there is not, Mattie, and you know that as well as I do!’ Cassie retorted. ‘We have this whole thing covered! No loopholes, remember? If anything goes wrong, the orders were to pick up the phone! So don’t tell me about logical explanation! I’m telling you I know that something has gone horribly wrong!’

  Nobody knew precisely what until the next morning when they found the abandoned horsebox and even then it was only guesswork. Once the vehicle and its invaluable cargo had been reported missing they had waited agonizingly all evening and night for news, but none came. The police had no relevant reports of any accidents involving heavy vehicles or horseboxes and every time Mattie telephoned Claremore to see if any news had filtered through to there he drew a blank.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling home,’ Cassie said when he first rang Ireland. ‘They couldn’t have got back home any other way than to take the plane that was waiting for them, could they?’

  ‘I know that, and that’s not why I’m ringing,’ Mattie replied.

  ‘You’re thinking Nightie’s been kidnapped!’ Cassie said suddenly.

  ‘Surely the thought has crossed your mind as well?’

  ‘Like hell it has! How the hell could they kidnap a horse from one of the most secure racecourses in the country?’

  ‘By waiting in the lorry,’ Mattie replied quietly.

  Cassie whipped round on him. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘They could never have got past the security. You have to have passes to get into the stableblock—’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just a theory, that’s all.’

  They were in the safe house, the big Queen Anne house overlooking a lovely stretch of the Thames near Pangbourne which belonged to Cassie’s owner’s friend, a wealthy Dutch widow who was away on holiday in Italy and had willingly agreed to turn her house and staff over to the Rosse family, their horse and its entourage. But now, instead of being able to sit down and enjoy the fine dinner which had been prepared for them in celebration of their horse’s famous victory, the family had sequestered themselves away in the large and elegant drawing room which looked out over terraces of lawns which ran all the way down to the river itself.

  ‘A theory,’ Cassie repeated. ‘Right, so let’s hear it.’

  ‘There are lots of loose ends,’ Mattie said, pouring himself another drink. ‘You have to base everything on what we’ve always said. That you can get in anywhere on a racecourse with a lead rope and a bucket of water.’

  ‘Not past the security on the gate of the stableblock,’ Cassie disagreed. ‘Those guys see it all.’

  ‘Before the race maybe,’ Mattie continued, ‘and believe me, I’m not about to slag anyone off. When all the horses are coming back from the race, no-one’s looking for anyone suspicious. So maybe you could get in at that moment with just a halter and a bucket of water.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Jack Madigan said from the wing chair in the corner of the room. ‘Now I know this isn’t my affair, Matt me boy, but putting meself in the shoes of whoever it was who planned all this, I wouldn’t leave one damn’ thing to chance. I wouldn’t contemplate even one little maybe. The plan would have to be foolproof. Watertight. An open and shut job.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mattie said reluctantly, not wanting to lose the floor. ‘But even so, Mr Madigan—’

  ‘No, Matt, I’m sorry, me boy, but there can’t be any even sos, not in this scenario,’ Jack continued. ‘If they don’t get in with the bucket and lead rope scam, then where are they? Up the famous creek, that’s where. They have to guarantee a place in the stableblock yard. They have to guarantee a place in the stables. And how do you think you go about getting that? I’ll tell you.’

  ‘You have a runner,’ Cassie said.

  ‘Of course you have a runner, Cass,’ Jack agreed, holding out his gl
ass for Fiona to refill. ‘You have a runner, that’s what you have. Or maybe even more than one.’

  Mattie swished the ice round in his drink and stared into his glass. ‘Of course, if you have a runner or two you come and go as you like. Two of you. And the two of you wouldn’t have to be with your horses the whole time—’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to be with it at all once it had run, or for a certain time before it had.’

  ‘I’ll take once it had run, Mr Madigan. There’s always things to do when your race is coming up, and our horsebox left long before the last race. As far as we can gather it left during the second last, in fact.’

  ‘OK,’ Cassie said, prowling round the room. ‘Right, so whoever masterminded this had a runner today. That means it’s another trainer.’

  ‘A trainer or an owner,’ Josephine said helpfully. ‘The two of them could be in cahoots.’

  ‘It had to be somebody with a horse, Mr Madigan’s right,’ Mattie said. ‘They wouldn’t have got access into the yard otherwise. And if we’re right, then it had to be somebody with a horse in the first or second race.’ He picked up the day’s edition of the Sporting Life and collapsed backwards onto the sofa to study the racecard.

  ‘There were twenty-two runners in my race,’ Josephine said.

  ‘And fourteen in the second,’ Mattie replied.

  ‘It could even have been somebody in your race,’ Jack Madigan suggested.

  ‘Let’s forget who it might or might not have been for the moment,’ Cassie said. ‘I want you to tell me how they pulled it off. Because what you seem to be saying is once they were there under official sanction in the racecourse stables they could just take the horse. But it can’t have been as easy as that. What about the guards outside the stable?’

  ‘Whoever took your horse must have been in your lorry, Cass,’ Jack said, lighting up yet another cigarette. ‘I imagine it went like this. No-one was told to check the lorry, were they? I mean there were no specific orders for the lorry to be guarded while the horse was being hosed down and walked off, or to be checked before he was put back in, am I right?’ Cassie nodded. ‘Good. So anyone can walk into a horsebox. Let’s say there are two of them. Armed in all probability. It’s a big lorry, I imagine.’

  ‘It’ll take six horses herringbone, four square on,’ Mattie said from behind his paper.

  ‘And it’s got living, of course. Living accommodation for an easy two or three sitting up front in the cab en route. If necessary.’

  ‘So plenty of room to stow away,’ Jack continued with a nod. ‘They could go two ways. They could get the dirty work out of the way once the horse was loaded and then drive the box out themselves, which is the more unlikely of the possibilities, or they could make that lass of yours—’

  ‘Bridie,’ Cassie said.

  ‘They could make her do it at gunpoint from behind the cab. Either way, it worked, because they drove out of the place without anyone turning a hair.’

  ‘What about their own horse?’ Cassie asked. ‘And their own horsebox, come to that? If your theory is right and they had a runner today they couldn’t exactly leave a racehorse and a lorry behind them, could they? With the trainer’s name emblazoned on the side.’

  ‘Horseboxes aren’t checked leaving the place,’ Jack said. ‘So either they loaded their own horse up into your lorry and took it with them, or they loaded it up in their box and sent it home that way. If they were sharing transport that would be the safest way. Put their fellow on board and let the transporter take it away with all the others. Alternatively if they came in their own box they could have used it as a Trojan horse. To smuggle in a couple more people and leave ’em in the box to drive it home again. That’s probably the most watertight way. In these big state of the art horseboxes you could practically bring in your own private army.’

  ‘I’ll buy their own box,’ Mattie said. ‘It leaves everything covered with no questions asked. Let’s say the two who were smuggled in drive the horse home. The man on the gate’s not going to notice a change of driver exactly. Leaving the other two to take our box.’

  ‘And our horse,’ Josephine added quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ Cassie said, standing at the window which overlooked the gardens. ‘All right. OK. This is all very possible, I’ll grant you that. But will somebody please tell me why? Why? That’s what I want to know. Why?’

  When the police found the abandoned lorry the next morning they did not find the answer to Cassie’s question but they did find Fred and Bridie, tied up and locked away in the living quarters of the box.

  Neither of them was in very good shape, with Fred suffering from quite severe wounds on the back of his head from where he had been clubbed into unconsciousness and Bridie from the after-effects of a near overdose of chloroform. Nevertheless all they wanted to know was whether or not anything had been heard about The Nightingale and when they learned that not a word had been heard Bridie fell to crying and Fred to swearing fiercely in Gaelic.

  ‘I never got a sight of them,’ he told one of the policemen who found them as they waited for the ambulance. ‘They must have been waiting in the lorry for us for the next thing I knew I was coming to bundled up like a rabbit in there.’

  ‘I heard voices,’ Bridie said in a whisper. ‘When I come to I heard their voices when they must have been taking Nightie out of the lorry. I heard a man and a woman.’

  ‘Did you take note of their accents?’ the senior police officer enquired. ‘Did you hear them clearly enough to be able to notice how they spoke?’

  ‘The woman was English,’ Bridie replied, putting the back of one hand to her forehead. ‘But I couldn’t make the man out at all. He kept his voice very low at all times. Oh, God have mercy on us, for didn’t I say, Fred? Didn’t I say we shouldn’t both of us go up in the lorry together?’

  Fred put his arm round Bridie’s shoulder but it was small comfort.

  ‘We had it worked out every way except the one,’ he said. ‘The one thing none of us ever thought was that they’d come at us as we were leaving. After the bloody race was over.’

  It was as if a major world figure had been abducted rather than a racehorse. So great were the demands of the media that once the family had returned to Claremore a special staff with its own communication system had to be taken on to deal with the round-the-clock calls requesting updates on the situation. Another room was set up like a police incident room, where Mattie and Jack Madigan who had volunteered his services sifted through the hundreds of letters that came pouring in purporting to have information on The Nightingale’s whereabouts. Dublin Castle put an army of detectives on the case, four of whom were posted at Claremore where the two pairs took it in turns to do six-hour shifts through the twenty-four, supervising Mattie and Jack’s sifting of the letters and following up any information which had the slightest hint of authenticity.

  But over the next three weeks every chase was for wild geese. Every lead ran into a cul de sac. No-one actually knew anything. No-one had really heard a thing.

  None the less rumours abounded with everyone from terrorists to extraterrestrials being said to be responsible for the horse’s disappearance, but Cassie knew well enough if they had been terrorists she would have heard from them by now.

  ‘They wouldn’t know how to keep a horse like The Nightingale, not for a long period of time,’ she maintained. ‘At least not without running a very real danger of being traced, particularly if something went wrong with the horse. They would want a very quick exchange with no questions asked. But I’ve heard nothing from anyone, which leads me to suspect that what I’ve always thought is the truth. That this is the work of professional criminals fired by entirely different motives.’

  By this the media thought Cassie meant the villains had to be people with a professional interest in stopping the horse and at once began to point the finger at the bookmakers, who in turn began loudly to protest their innocence to a man, insisting that The Nightingale was to them a ‘good l
oser’, with liabilities they could well afford to meet. According to their spokesman there was absolutely no good reason why any bookmaker should wish to harm a hair of the horse. Again to a man they were ardent in their appreciation of a horse as great as The Nightingale and apparently as ‘gutted’ as anyone else over his abduction.

  By and large the public chose not to believe the bookmakers, not because holes could be picked in their arguments but because they could think of no-one else who was as likely to be responsible, despite two apparently serious newspaper reports of unidentified flying objects having been seen first over Watership Down and then Windsor Great Park the night before the race, leading the authors of the articles to suppose that aliens had abducted The Nightingale in order to find out what made him run so fast. One firm of bookmakers even opened a book on the most likely explanation for the kidnapping, only to learn to their astonishment that a punter in Bournemouth had walked into one of their shops and placed a £1000 cash bet at 1000/1 in favour of an extraterrestrial kidnapping.

  Within a month the whole dreadful and now possibly tragic affair had been turned into a media circus, so much to the disgust of Cassie that she closed down her own special operations unit, released the extra staff she’d taken on, and redirected all The Nightingale mail to Dublin Castle.

  ‘We are not going to learn one damn’ thing this way,’ she had told Mattie the day she had decided everyone must go. ‘Not one goddam thing. All we’re going to get is hurt even more every time we get our hopes raised, only for them to be dashed again.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ Mattie had wondered in return.

  ‘Nothing,’ Cassie had replied. ‘What can we do? Except wait and get on with everything else.’

  ‘How? I can’t handle this at all. Seriously. I mean this really is doing my head. Yet you – how do you do it? How are you so calm?’

  ‘I’m not, Mattie,’ Cassie had replied, suddenly going very quiet. ‘I just appear to be.’

  No-one could possibly have guessed at Cassie’s pain, not Josephine to whom Cassie talked practically every single evening, nor even Mattie who had been with his mother constantly since the horse had vanished. Just as her beloved horse’s feat that famous and now notorious Saturday at Ascot racecourse was considered indescribable, so too was the anguish of his owner. When The Nightingale was first gone and everyone was crying, or drinking, or shouting in fury and hatred at whatever sort of people could do such a thing, although it had been not easy it had been easier, for Cassie could hide behind all the noise.