by Dick Francis
‘What now?’ Oliver said.
‘A bottle of scotch.’
He gave me an austere look which then swept over my general state and softened to understanding.
‘Can you wait until we get home?’ he said.
That evening, bit by bit, I told Oliver about Pen’s analysis of the treasures from Calder’s surgery and of Calder’s patients’ drug-induced illnesses. I told him that Calder had killed Ian Pargetter, and why, and I explained again how the idea of first discrediting, then buying and re-building Sandcastle had followed the pattern of Indian Silk.
‘There may be others besides Indian Silk that we haven’t heard of,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Show jumpers, eventers, even prize ponies. You never know. Dissdale might have gone along more than twice with his offer to buy the no-hoper.’
‘He withdrew his offer for Sandcastle the same night Calder died.’
‘What exactly did he say?’ I asked.
‘He was very upset. Said he’d lost his closest friend, and that without Calder to work his miracles there was no point in buying Sandcastle.’
I frowned. ‘Do you think it was genuine?’
‘His distress? Yes, certainly.’
‘And the belief in miracles?’
‘He did sound as if he believed.’
I wondered if it was in the least possible that Dissdale was an innocent and duped accomplice and hadn’t known that his bargains had been first made ill. His pride in knowing the Great Man had been obvious at Ascot, and perhaps he had been flattered and foolish but not wicked after all.
Oliver asked in the end how I’d found out about the drug-induced illnesses and Ian Pargetter’s murder, and I told him that too, as flatly as possible.
He sat staring at me, his gaze on the plaster.
‘You’re very lucky to be in a wheel-chair, and not a coffin,’ he said. ‘Damn lucky.’
‘Yes.’
He poured more of the brandy we had progressed to after dinner. Anaesthesia was coming along nicely.
‘I’m almost beginning to believe,’ he said, ‘that somehow or other I’ll still be here next year, even if I do have to sell Sandcastle and whatever else is necessary.’
I drank from my replenished glass. ‘Tomorrow we’ll make a plan contingent upon Sandcastle’s being reinstated in the eyes of the world. Look out the figures, see what the final damage is likely to be, draw up a time scale for recovery. I can’t promise because it isn’t my final say-so, but if the bank gets all its money in the end, it’ll most likely be flexible about when.’
‘Good of you,’ Oliver said, hiding emotion behind his clipped martial manner.
‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘you’re more use to us salvaged than bust.’
He smiled wryly. ‘A banker to the last drop of blood.’
Because of stairs being difficult I slept on the sofa where Ginnie had dozed on her last afternoon, and I dreamed of her walking up a path towards me looking happy. Not a significant dream, but an awakening of fresh regret. I spent a good deal of the following day thinking of her instead of concentrating on profit and loss.
In the evening Ursula telephoned with triumph in her strong voice and also a continual undercurrent of amazement.
‘You won’t believe it,’ she said, ‘but I’ve already found three racing stables in Newmarket where he worked last summer and autumn, and in every case one of the horses in the yard fell sick!’
I hadn’t any trouble at all with belief and asked what sort of sickness.
‘They all had crystalluria. That’s crystals…’
‘I know what it is,’ I said.
‘And… it’s absolutely incredible… but all three were in stables which had in the past sent horses to Calder Jackson, and these were sent as well, and he cured them straight away. Two of the trainers said they would swear by Calder, he had cured horses for them for years.’
‘Was the lad called Shane?’ I asked.
‘No. Bret. Bret Williams. The same in all three places.’
She dictated the addresses of the stables, the names of the trainers, and the dates (approximate) when Shane – Jason – Bret had been in their yards.
‘These lads just come and go,’ she said. ‘He didn’t work for any of them for as long as a month. Just didn’t turn up one morning. It happens all the time.’
‘You’re marvellous,’ I said.
‘I have a feeling,’ she said with less excitement, ‘that what I’m telling you is what you expected to hear.’
‘Hoped.’
‘The implications are unbelievable.’
‘Believe them.’
‘But Calder,’ she protested. ‘He couldn’t…’
‘Shane worked for Calder,’ I said. ‘All the time. Permanently. Wherever he went, it was to manufacture patients tor Calder.’
She was silent so long that in the end I said ‘Ursula?’
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to go on with the photos?’
‘Yes, if you would. To find him.’
‘Hanging’s too good for him,’ she said grimly. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
She disconnected, and I told Oliver what she’d said.
‘Bret Williams? He was Shane Williams here.’
‘How did you come to employ him?’ I asked.
Oliver frowned, looking back. ‘Good lads aren’t that easy to lind, you know. You can advertise until you’re blue in the face and only get third- or fourth-rate applicants. But Nigel said Shane impressed him at the interview and that we should give him a month’s trial, and of course after that we kept him on, and took him back gladly this year when he telephoned asking, because he was quick and competent and knew the job backwards, and was polite and a good time-keeper…’
‘A paragon,’ I said dryly.
‘As lads go, yes.’
I nodded. He would have to have been good; to have taken pride in his deception, with the devotion of all traitors. I considered those fancy names and thought that he must have seen himself as a sort of macho hero, the great foreign agent playing out his fantasies in the day to day tasks, feeling superior to his employers while he tricked them with contempt.
He could have filled the hollowed cores of apples with capsules, and taken a bite or two round the outside to convince, and fed what looked like remainders to his victims. No one would ever have suspected, because suspicion was impossible.
I slept again on the sofa and the following morning Oliver telephoned to Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold and asked him to come to the farm. Wyfold needed persuading; reluctantly agreed; and nearly walked out in a U-turn when he saw me waiting in Oliver’s office.
‘No. Look,’ he protested, ‘Mr Ekaterin’s already approached me with his ideas and I simply haven’t time.…’
Oliver interrupted. ‘We have a great deal more now. Please do listen. We quite understand that you are busy with all those other poor girls, but at the very least we can take Ginnie off that list for you.’
Wyfold finally consented to sit down and accept some coffee and listen to what we had to say: and as we told him in turns and in detail what had been happening his air of impatience dis.sipated and his natural sharpness took over.
We gave him copies of Pen’s analyses, the names of ‘Bret’s’ recent employers and the last ten photographs of Ricky. He glanced at them briefly and said, ‘We interviewed this groom, but…’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Oliver said. ‘The photo is of a boy who looks like him if you don’t know either of them well.’
Wyfold pursed his lips, but nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘We do think he may have killed Ginnie, even if you couldn’t prove it,’ Oliver said.
Wyfold began putting together the papers we’d given him. ‘We will certainly redirect our enquiries,’ he said, and giving me a dour look added, ‘If you had left it to the police to search Calder’s surgery, sir, Calder Jackson would not have had the opportunity of disposing of Ian Pargetter’s case and any other material evid
ence. These things are always mishandled by amateurs.’ He looked pointedly at my plaster jacket. ‘Better have left it to the professionals.’
I gave him an amused look but Oliver was gasping. ‘Left to you,’ he said, ‘there would have been no search at all… or certainly not in time to save my business.’
Wyfold’s expression said plainly that saving people’s businesses wasn’t his prime concern, but beyond mentioning that picking locks and stealing medicinal substances constituted a breach of the law he kept any further disapproval to himself.
He was on his feet ready to go when Ursula rang again, and he could almost hear every word she said because of her enthusiasm.
‘I’m in Gloucestershire,’ she shouted. ‘I thought I’d work from the other end, if you see what I mean. I remembered Calder had miraculously cured Binty Rockingham’s utterly brilliant three-day-eventer who was so weak he could hardly totter, so I came here to her house to ask her, and guess what?’
‘What?’ I asked obligingly.
‘That lad worked for her!’ The triumph exploded. ‘A good lad, she says, would you believe it? He called himself Clint. She can’t remember his last name, it was more than two years ago and he was only here a few weeks.’
‘Ask her if it was Williams,’ I said.
There was some murmuring at the other end and then Ursula’s voice back again, ‘She thinks so, yes.’
‘You’re a dear, Ursula,’ I said.
She gave an unembarrassed laugh. ‘Do you want me to go on down the road to Rube Golby’s place? He had a show pony Calder cured a fair time ago of a weeping wound that wouldn’t heal.’
‘Just one more, then, Ursula. It’s pretty conclusive already, I’d say.’
‘Best to be sure,’ she said cheerfully. ‘And I’m enjoying myself, actually, now I’m over the shock.’
I wrote down the details she gave me and when she’d gone off the line I handed the new information to Wyfold.
‘Clint,’ he said with disillusion. ‘Elvis next, I shouldn’t wonder.’
I shook my head. ‘A man of action, our Shane.’
Perhaps through needing to solve at least one murder while reviled for not catching his rapist, Wyfold put his best muscle into the search. It took him two weeks only to find Shane, who was arrested on leaving a pub in the racing village of Malton, Yorkshire, where he had been heard boasting several times about secret exploits of undisclosed daring.
Wyfold told Oliver, who telephoned me in the office, to which I’d returned via a newly installed wheel-chair ramp up the front steps.
‘He called himself Dean,’ Oliver said. ‘Dean Williams. It seems the police are transferring him from Yorkshire back here to Hertfordshire, and Wyfold wants you to come to his police headquarters to identify Shane as the man called Jason at Calder’syard.’
I said I would.
I didn’t say that with honesty I couldn’t.
‘Tomorrow,’ Oliver added. ‘They’re in a hurry because of holding him without a good enough charge, or something.’
‘I’ll be there.’
I went in a chauffeur-driven hired car, a luxury I seemed to have spent half my salary on since leaving Oliver’s house.
I was living nearer the office than usual with a friend whose flat was in a block with a lift, not up stairs like my own. The pains in my immobile joints refused obstinately to depart, but owing to a further gift from Pen (via Gordon) were forgettable most of the time. A new pattern of ‘normal’ life had evolved, and all I dearly wanted was a bath.
I arrived at Wyfold’s police station at the same time as Oliver, and together we were shown into an office, Oliver pushing me as if born to it. Two months minimum, they’d warned me to expect of life on wheels. Even if my shoulder would be mended before then, it wouldn’t stand my weight on crutches. Patience, I’d been told. Be patient. My ankle had been in bits and they’d restored it like a jig-saw puzzle and I couldn’t expect miracles, they’d said.
Wyfold arrived, shook hands briskly (an advance) and said that this was not a normal identity parade, as of course Oliver knew Shane very well, and I obviously knew him also, because of Ricky Barnet.
‘Just call him Jason,’ Wyfold told me, ‘If you are sure he’s the same man you saw at Calder Jackson’s.’
We left the office and went along a fiercely-lit institutional corridor to a large interview room which contained a table, three chairs, a uniformed policeman standing… and Shane, sitting down.
He looked cocky, not cowed.
When he saw Oliver he tilted his head almost jauntily, showing not shame but pride, not apology but a sneer. On me he looked with only a flickering glance, neither knowing me from our two very brief meetings nor reckoning on trouble from my direction.
Wyfold raised his eyebrows at me to indicate the need for action.
‘Hello, Jason,’ I said.
His head snapped round immediately and this time he gave me a full stare.
‘I met you at Calder Jackson’s yard,’ I said.
‘You never did.’
Although I hadn’t expected it, I remembered him clearly. ‘You were giving sun-lamp treatment to a horse and Calder Jackson told you to put on your sunglasses.’
He made no more effort to deny it. ‘What of it, then?’ he said.
‘Conclusive evidence of your link with the place, I should think,’ I said.
Oliver, seeming as much outraged by Shane’s lack of contrition as by his sins, turned with force to Wyfold and in half-controlled bitterness said, ‘Now prove he killed my daughter.’
‘What!’
Shane had risen in panic to his feet, knocking his chair over behind him and losing in an instant the smart-alec assurance. ‘I never did,’ he said.
We all watched him with interest, and his gaze travelled fast from one face to another, seeing only assessment and disbelief and nowhere admiration.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, his voice hoarse and rising. ‘I didn’t. Straight up, I didn’t. It was him. He did it.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Calder. Mr Jackson. He did it. It was him, not me.’ He looked across us all again with desperation. ‘Look, I’m telling you the truth, straight up I am. I never killed her, it was him.’
Wyfold began telling him in a flat voice that he had a right to remain silent and that anything he said might be written down and used in evidence, but Shane wasn’t clever and fright had too firm a hold. His fantasy world had vanished in the face of unimaginable reality, and I found myself believing every word he said.
‘We didn’t know she was there, see. She heard us talking, but we didn’t know. And when I carried the stuff back to the hostel he saw her moving so he hit her. I didn’t see him do it, I didn’t, but when I went back there he was with Ginnie on the ground and I said she was the boss’s daughter, which he didn’t even know, see, but he said all the worse if she was the boss’s daughter because she must have been standing there in the shadow listening and she would have gone straight off and told everybody.’
The words, explanations, excuses came tumbling out in self-righteous urgency and Wyfold thankfully showed no signs of regulating the flow into the careful officialese of a formal statement. The uniformed policeman, now sitting behind Shane, was writing at speed in a notebook, recording, I imagined, the gist.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Wyfold said impatiently. ‘What did he hit her with?’
Shane redoubled his efforts to convince, and from then on I admired Wyfold’s slyly effective interrogatory technique.
‘With a fire extinguisher,’ Shane said. ‘He kept it in his car, see, and he had it in his hand. He was real fussy about fire always. Would never let anyone smoke anywhere near the stables. That Nigel…’ the sneer came back temporarily,’… the lads all smoked in the feed room, I ask you, behind his back. He’d no idea what went on.’
‘Fire extinguisher…‘Wyfold spoke doubtfully, shaking his head.
‘Yeah, it was. It was. One of t
hem red things about this long.’ Shane anxiously held up his hands about fifteen inches apart. ‘With the nozzle, sort of, at the top. He was holding it by that, sort of swinging it. Ginnie was lying flat on the ground, face down, like, and I said, “What have you gone and done?” and he said she’d been listening.’
Wyfold sniffed.
‘It was like that, straight up,’ Shane said urgently.
‘Listening to what?’
‘We were talking about the stuff, see.’
‘The shampoo…’
‘Yeah.’ He seemed only briefly to feel the slightest alarm at the mention of it. ‘I told him, see, that the stuff had really worked because there’d been a foal born that morning with half a leg, that Nigel he tried to hush it up but by afternoon he was half cut and he told one of the lads so we all knew. So I told Mr Jackson and he said great, because it was time we’d heard, and there hadn’t been a murmur in the papers and he was getting worried he hadn’t got the dose right, or something. So anyway when I told him about the foal with half a leg he laughed, see, he was so pleased, and he said this was probably the last lot I’d have to do, just do the six bottles he’d brought, and then scarper.’
Oliver looked very pale, with sweat along his hair-line and whitely clenched fists. His mouth was rigidly closed with the effort of self control, and he listened throughout without once interrupting or cursing.
‘I took the six bottles off to the hostel but when I got there I’d only got five, so I went back to look for the one I’d dropped, but I forgot it, see, when I saw him standing there over Ginnie and him saying she’d heard us talking, and then he said for me to come with him down to the village in his car and he’d drop me at a pub where the other lads were, so as I couldn’t have been back home killing the boss’s daughter, see? I remembered about the bottle I’d dropped when we were on our way to the village but I didn’t think he’d be best pleased and anyway I reckoned I’d find it all right when I went back, but I never did. I didn’t think it would matter much, because no one would know what it was for, it was just dog shampoo, and anyway I reckoned I’d skip using the new bottles after all because of the fuss there would be over Ginnie. But if it hadn’t been for that bottle I wouldn’t have gone out again at all, see, and I wouldn’t know it was him that killed her, and it wasn’t me, it wasn’t.’