by Jo Bannister
I saw her out to her car. “By the way,” she added, “it’s Gilgamesh or The Big Bay Bastard. He doesn’t answer to Gillyflower. And the event is Bramham. Brand’s Hatch is for sissies: it’s all on one level and there aren’t any jumps.”
From her face and from her manner it was clear that Sally no longer believed my bland explanation of Harry’s interest in her. She knew now that it was personal, that the police were checking up on her activities in greater detail than they were for any other resident of The Brink; by now news of Harry’s official enquiries of the Parkers and the Maudsleys (as distinct from my amateur but perhaps more tactful probings) must have reached her. I couldn’t tell if she held me responsible, or if it was just the backwash of her resentment towards the police, and Harry in particular, I was picking up. But there was something in the air between us, something unstated but sharp and electric, and I knew she was watching me as closely as I was watching her. I wouldn’t be venturing too near the slurry tank again or any horse she was riding, unless there were a whole lot of other people around at the time.
I had made Ellen my offer in the full awareness that the work would be hard and probably unpleasant, but thinking there was a natural limit to how much hardship and unpleasantness could be crammed into any one morning. I suppose I was right, but I had seriously underestimated where that limit lay.
Have you any idea how much horse-shit weighs? How much it smells? How it rolls off the shovel and hides under the wheelbarrow the moment your concentration slips? Or how, when the last ill-favoured particle has been safely consigned to a muck-heap an inconvenient distance from the stables, the author of it catches your eye over his half-door, gives you a smug smile and lifts his tail again? King Augeas of Elis knew what he was about when he set Hercules to muck out his stables. Hercules had a bright idea, too, diverting the river Alpheus to do the job for him. I’d have given it a try, but the only river handy was the sweat streaming from my brow and it wasn’t quite enough. Nearly, but not quite.
Nothing happened on the first day, except that I nearly died of coronary insufficiency five separate times. That evening Harry and I argued again, but the argument was already assuming the outline of a ritual, observed more from duty than devotion. He didn’t want me having anything to do with Foxford until the mystery was resolved, but he knew he was on a losing wicket. I wanted to find out if Sally was involved. Let’s be honest here: I wanted to prove that I was right; bringing David’s assailant to book actually figured a little lower on my list of priorities, though I wouldn’t have admitted that then, but after a morning shovelling muck my missionary zeal was at a fairly low ebb. I would finish what I’d started, but I was no longer convinced anything was going to come of it.
So our argument was less vehement than the previous one. We had the TV on and we were arguing mostly in the adverts. You can’t call that passionate.
The next morning I saw him off to work, then pulled on my wellies and climbed the hill to Foxford. And a little before eleven-thirty, while she was working Lucy over the cross-country jumps in the big field below the wood, somebody took a pot-shot at Sally.
The first thing we knew was a clatter of hooves in the yard and the grey mare shoved me aside to get into her box. Karen, who had been saddling Gilgamesh for Sally’s next ride, slammed his door and came up the yard at a run. She cast a quick look over the horse, threw the biggest string vest you ever saw over it, and then towed me in her wake to the corner of the sand school where the field gate was standing open.
“We have to find Sally.”
That gate, where the big hedge ended behind the byre, was on the ridge of The Brink where it ran up towards the dark flank of Foxford Wood off to the left. The roof of my cottage nestled among the hedgerows away down to the right. Ahead and below Skipley itself was not much more than a grey stain on the green patchwork that was the Warwickshire countryside. It was hard to imagine all those people working there, my husband among them. There is no rift in the world as wide as that between urban and rural living. Down there people were living on the edge of their chairs and a heart attack, and running one another down with cars and cute accounting, and up here we were searching the fields for a young woman who had fallen off a horse. At least, I presumed that was what had happened.
“Probably,” agreed Karen. “Though she may have got off for some reason, and the horse pulled away and came home. In which case we’ll meet her half-way up the field, and she will not be in a good temper.”
I had trouble keeping up with her. She was a little taller than me, not much, and quite a lot younger, but mostly it was that half her working life was spent striding over fields in wellington boots and she knew how to do it efficiently. I alternated between clearing the tops of the grass with giant strides and stumbling over cowpats.
The hill ran away from us like the swell of the earth’s hips. Hedges interrupted it, but nothing stopped that fertile curve until it broke like a tide on the grey rocks of sterile Skipley, where the heat-haze was more than half smog. We walked across the breast of it rather than down towards the town, making for the wood.
“Would she have gone into the woods?”
Karen shook her head. “I don’t think so. David never did—does …” Her tongue stumbled on the thing that she’d got through the last days by walking round, and it took her a moment to regain her balance. “It’s not much good for riding; it’s too overgrown. Besides, I don’t think you can get in this way any more. There is a gate, but it’s rusted up.”
By now we could see most of the field, including the heavy timber obstacles, brown with creosote, clustered loosely between the hem of the wood and the bottom corner of the field. There was no sign of Sally, so she wasn’t on her feet and storming after Lucy with murder in her eyes. If she was there, she was still down, behind a jump or somewhere out of sight.
“The steps,” Karen said tersely, breaking into a run. I went with her.
David had used the steep slope to create a flight of giant steps, shored up with sleepers and carpeted with gravel, each of the three risers two feet high, each of the treads maybe twelve feet square. A shapeless huddle in purple and black lay at the foot of the staircase. We quickened our pace and Karen shouted her name, but there was no movement that I could see in response.
Her extra inches, her fewer years, or perhaps just her more active lifestyle brought Karen first to the foot of the steps, where she dropped on her knees beside Sally’s still sprawled figure. I called sharply, “Don’t move her!” and panted up in her wake, ready for broken bones at the very least.
When I touched her, she started to stir. If she’d been unconscious, she was already on her way back; perhaps she had been only stunned. Her hands made vague paddling motions towards her head. Her eyes flickered, and she looked shocked and puzzled and a little afraid. For a moment she didn’t seem sure where she was or who we were.
Then slowly I saw sense creeping back into her eyes. She said, “What happened?” and her voice was reedy but with a reassuring note of irritation.
“You must have fallen off,” I said. “Lie still for a moment while we see what the damage is.”
“Fell off be damned,” she said, quite tartly, and then, “My head hurts.”
The one thing you don’t do is whip off a protective helmet to see what’s going on underneath. I once saw the results of some well-meaning soul doing that to a motorcyclist. He’d been conscious and talking after the accident, but when I met him, he was on a mortuary slab with his head in pieces. So I went very slowly and very cautiously, and only eased Sally’s crash-hat off when I was confident that her brain wasn’t going to pop out.
I put the hat, bright in its purple silk, on the grass beside us and probed gently at the tender skull under Sally’s dark curly hair. I found an area of incipient swelling, but the damage was neither profound nor widespread. The hard hat had done its job of absorbing most of the force of her fall. Without it she would certainly have been a stretcher case.
&nbs
p; “I think you’ll live,” I said, straightening up. Essentially unhurt, she reverted from being a patient to being a suspect again. “Can you walk, or shall I fetch a car?”
“I can walk,” she said gruffly, climbing to her feet using the step behind her and a hand from Karen for support. “Where’s my hat?”
Karen bent for it, and froze rigid with it in her hands, staring at it, still half-bent. She couldn’t seem to speak, so I took it from her and looked for the cause of her consternation.
And found it: two holes about the size of my little finger, about four inches apart in the purple silk. They looked just like bullet holes. Under the silk the matt shell of the hat was scarred with a deep straight channel about as long. It looked just like a bullet crease.
It looked very much as if someone, having disposed of Gilgamesh’s own rider, was now using similar methods to dislodge the first substitute. It looked very much as if my favourite suspect had come within an inch and a half of being the next victim.
It looked very much as if I had been wrong.
Chapter Three
Harry’s people combed the field with metal detectors, but they never found the bullet. They found three old horseshoes, one still with a bit of wear in it, a length of rusty chain buried in the topsoil, and a hinge.
Even with metal detectors it was always going to be a long shot—a pin in a very large haystack, there was no judging how far it had travelled or in what direction after glancing off Sally’s hat—but it was a pity. Given the lump of lead, forensics could probably have confirmed that it came from the same gun which shot David. As it was, they could only look at the hat and the silk and say the damage was consistent with a .240 rifle bullet.
As the trauma of the blow and the fall began to fade, so the shock of being shot at surged towards a peak. Sally was talking to Harry about what had happened when, half-way through a sentence, suddenly she began to tremble. I made them stop for a minute, sent Karen for a mug of tea and Ellen for a warm cardigan, and only when Sally was wrapped in one and round the other and her voice was back under control did I let them continue.
Harry said, “Did you hear the shot?”
Rather carefully, Sally shook her head. “I don’t remember doing. But you’re surrounded by sound on top of a galloping horse, unless it was pretty close I wouldn’t expect to hear it.”
“You were moving at some speed, then.”
She thought. “Not cross-country pace, but more than a canter. Maybe about five hundred metres a minute.”
Harry, like me, grew up on the wrong side of metrification for this to make any sense to him. His face went still in the middle and fell round the edges. His eyes looked put-upon. “What’s that in real money?”
As we were too old to be genuinely bilingual, so Sally was too young. She wrestled with the mathematics for a moment, then made an educated guess. “About twenty miles an hour?”
Harry nodded slowly. “That’s marksman standard. Unless he was lucky.” I noted that the feminine pronoun had dropped out of fashion, but in all the circumstances did not feel inclined to complain. “What sort of line were you riding—what angle and which direction?”
He had brought one of the big maps up from the police station, the scale large enough to show the boundaries of individual fields. It was spread out on the coffee-table: we were gathered again in the drawing-room.
Sally leaned over it and sketched a line with a fingertip. “I was heading for the steps, going up. I’d just made the turn. As near as damn it I was heading straight for the wood.”
“So he fired from either the wood in front of you or the hedge behind. The distance would be about the same; maybe the hedge is a little closer.” He went to the door and spoke briskly with the constable outside. John Martin was directing the search in the field below the wood and the message was for him. Harry came back and sat down. “Did you see or hear anything while you were down the field—someone walking, perhaps, or the sound of a car—even well before the shot?”
“I really don’t think so.” She was trying to remember, but there didn’t seem to be anything there to recall. “I don’t know if it’s significant, but I remember that I fell forward. Does that mean I was hit from behind?”
“Probably, though it’s hard to be sure, particularly with a moving target. If your head was turned through just a few degrees at the critical moment, the shot could have been fired from a hundred yards either side of the obvious. If it’s the .240 again, you’re not going to be talking of a massive accurate range; but unless he’s left something behind we’re going to be hard put to pinpoint the place he fired from.”
“Does it matter?” I asked. “I mean, if he’s left nothing, does it matter where he was standing?” Even I had abandoned the feminine pronoun now.
“Hard to say,” said Harry. “It might have told us something about which way he’d come, or it might not. Not knowing whodunnit from the start means us real policemen have to clutch at straws like that.” It was a gentle little jibe at me, but I declined to rise. I thought I probably deserved it.
“Miss Fane,” he went on, and the sudden formality meant he was serious, “until we get this character, you’re obviously in danger from him. He’s already put David Aston in hospital; now he’s turned his attentions on you. Assuming that it is the same man and the same motive, there’s no reason to suppose he’ll stop until either he stops you or we stop him.
“We’ll be doing the best we can, but these things can take time. In the meantime, we can protect you, but we can’t protect you from a man in a hedge while you’re galloping across open country. If you’ll stay indoors, either here or at Standings, we can look after you.”
“Indoors?” Her chin came up pugnaciously, and outrage flared in her eyes. “How the hell do I train an eventer indoors?”
“I don’t imagine you can. That’s about the size of it. The horse is going to have to wait until we have this sorted out.”
“Wait?” The word exploded from her. “He’s a horse, not a bicycle. You can’t put him away in the potting shed until next time you want him. It takes twelve weeks to get an eventer fit, and a couple of hours’work a day to keep him that way. If he misses work now, he’s not going to be at Bramham and he’s not going to the World Championships.”
“Is there nowhere else he could go to the trained?”
“Of course,” Sally said shortly. “Any yard in the country would give its tiger-trap to get its hands on Gilgamesh. How many of them could actually cope with him is another matter. But let me get this straight. You’re saying he’s what this is all about—Gilgamesh? That David was shot because he was trying out for the team on him, and that I was shot at in case the selectors should give me the ride?”
Put like that, it sounded absurd. Harry nodded non-committally. “That seems to be one possibility. The horse is the only direct link between David and you.”
“But it wasn’t him I was riding; it was Lucy.”
Harry looked at me, one eyebrow cocked. But there was an explanation. I said, “It’s not the horse he wants to disable; it’s the rider. He didn’t want to risk Gilgamesh, so he waited till you were riding something else.”
Sally’s eyebrows knit, trying to follow my reasoning. “Supposing we accept that. If the horse goes somewhere else to be trained; what’s to stop this lunatic from following and shooting another rider off his back?”
To that question there was no answer. Harry nodded slowly. “You’re right. It’s not safe for anyone to ride him.”
“Then he—whoever—he’s won. He shot David and tried to shoot me, and we’ve let him win.”
“Only for now. It won’t feel like winning when we put him behind bars.”
“But by then, it’ll be too late—for Gilgamesh and for me.” Her colour was coming back; so was that light like wine or madness or religion in her eye. “Let’s not beat about the bush here. What happened to David was monstrous, but it’s given me a chance I would never otherwise have got. It’s
a pretty long chance, but even if it was a dead cert and giving it up would put David back on his feet, I’d do it, and I’d do it without a second thought. But it won’t, and I’m damned if I’m giving up a chance at the World Championships for no better reason than that some bastard with a gun wants me to and I don’t even know why.
“Harry, I’m sorry, I know I’m making it difficult for you; I know you can’t protect someone who won’t be protected. I take full responsibility. But I’m not going to be beaten, not like this. If he wants Gilgamesh’s place on the team, he’s going to have to find a horse that’s better than him; and if he wants the ride on Gilgamesh, he’s going to have to be better than me.”
“Or kill you.”
It was a bald statement of fact, and inarguable. For a moment it set Sally back on her heels. While her head still ached, the very real danger was too close to be rationalised away. But she rallied quickly, calling perhaps on that remarkably fluid sense of balance that keeps riders on top of horses when the two are moving in dissimilar ways in bare approximations of the same direction and everything that Newton and Einstein discovered points to an early parting.
“Yes, I dare say he will try again, unless you find him first. Now I know that, I can make it harder. Get me a flak jacket. Whatever protection you can give us, concentrate on the house and yard: I’ll do all my slow work in the sand school and make my fast work in the field as fast as I safely can. If we can work it that way, I’ll only ride out on Gilgamesh; if he’s worried about the horse, that’ll maybe clip his wings a bit. I’ll make it as difficult for him as I can, Harry, but unless David actually forbids me to ride his horse, I’m not going to be scared off before he’s had his chance. And I’ve had mine.”