by Jo Bannister
“You’re a doctor,” said Harry, as if he’d heard it somewhere. “How long would it take a fit man to run from down there, up this hill, through the wood, and along to Foxford?”
I looked at him. “How long is a piece of string?”
He looked at me. “I don’t find that enormously helpful.”
“It depends what you mean by down there. It depends what you mean by a fit man.”
Harry considered. “Well—just for the sake of the argument, you understand—take Bobby Parker. He’s a professional athlete but not a runner. If he heard that, say, the MCC were offering a three-year contract to the first cricketer to reach Foxford, how long would it take him on foot?”
I let my eyes play over the distance, then back to Harry. My nose wrinkled with disfavour. “You don’t think Bobby—”
“No, of course not,” he said briskly. “He’s got an alibi, hasn’t he? But all the same—”
It was perhaps half a mile from the mill house to where we were standing, a mile or a little more through the wood and along its face to Foxford. “A top-class track athlete on level going would do a mile and a half in about seven minutes. A fell runner would cope better with the slope and the going, but he’d be slower—I don’t know by how much. And he’d waste a lot of time getting into and out of the wood without shredding himself on the wire.”
Harry nodded sagely. “That’s a very good point.” He turned his back on the superb vista, not with regret but with smugness. “Well, we’d better be getting back now.”
For a long time I tramped behind him in silence, glowering at the self-satisfied look on the back of his neck. I knew he was waiting for me to ask about the relevance of his questions and forbore to give him the gratification. But in time my curiosity outweighed my reluctance and I swallowed my pride with hardly a hiccup. “You don’t really think someone ran over The Brink in order to shoot David?”
He stopped and turned round, smiling happily. “No, as a matter of fact I don’t. But it’s an interesting comparison, isn’t it? A fast runner could get from Standings to Foxford in not much longer than it takes by car.”
I couldn’t see what he was getting at. “It’s a lot shorter as the crow flies than it is by road.” The map must have told him as much. But it didn’t get us anywhere. Time had stopped being a limiting factor when Sally became the gunman’s second victim. And how far could he have run, carrying a heavy coat and a rifle? True, he might have run away, but probably only as far as the car waiting for him at the wood or elsewhere in the lanes.
Finally Harry condescended to share his train of thought. “If a four-minute-miler could do the distance in seven minutes and a fell runner in rather more, I bet an event horse that isn’t even at full stretch at twenty miles an hour could do it in under six minutes. A four-minute-man does fifteen miles per hour. I bet those horses we were watching yesterday were doing twice that across open country. With the jumps, maybe they’d average twenty-five; that’s a mile and a half in well under four minutes. Allow extra for negotiating the wood, and there’s still time.”
I felt myself staring at him with an intensity that should have left scorch marks. “Time for what?”
“Time for Sally to ride from Standings to Foxford, shoot David, and ride back again in time to join her guests before the end of the news.”
Chapter Six
I stared and stared, and for minutes on end found nothing to say. Then I sat down heavily on a fallen log. I didn’t know it was there; if it hadn’t been, I think I’d have sat down heavily just the same. Harry regarded me kindly for a moment. Then he sat down beside me.
At length I said weakly, “But—Sally was shot too.”
“Sally’s hat was certainty shot,” said Harry. “It was not necessarily on her head at the time.”
What was he thinking? That she’d ridden Lucy out of the yard with a gun secreted on her person? That once down at the field she had dismounted, stuck her hat on a fence post, and shot it? Then, as the horse ran away, she had somehow disposed of the gun, crammed the hat back on her head and arranged herself artistically at the foot of the stairs, pausing only to hit herself on the head in order to produce the realistic swelling and other signs of trauma? It was incredible, literally. But I couldn’t think of any more convincing scenario.
Harry could. Harry had. And he hadn’t done it all in the last hour as we walked in the wood. Our Sunday stroll had not been to develop a theory but to test one.
“She could have done it the night before. Nobody heard a shot; it was just the horse coming home that alerted you. She could have shot the hat previously, taking as much time and care as she needed, and then put the gun back wherever she keeps it. All she had to do in the field was get off the horse, give herself a bang on the head—not enough to knock herself out, just enough to produce the bruise—and lie down. You and Karen did the rest.”
“She wouldn’t risk riding out with a hole in her hat. One of us would have noticed. At least, there was every chance that we would.”
“Yes—sorry,” said Harry. “She had to change the silk cover too. She had two the same colour: the perforated one was in her pocket when she rode out, and she changed them over in the field. The other one was in her pocket when you found her, but who was going to search her pockets then, and what matter if she was carrying a spare silk? She was taking it home to wash it or something.”
I was thinking about it, catching up slowly with the intellectual and emotional implications of what he was saying. The mind got there first. What he was saying would work. There were no practical obstacles to belief—maybe some details to resolve, but nothing fundamental. She could have done it.
The heart took longer. Once I had been convinced of Sally’s guilt. After the incident with the hat seemed to disprove it, perhaps in compensation I had found myself warming to her tough, determined, courageous manner. Of course, if there was no gunman, there was a lot less to be courageous about.
The heart was getting there. “If she did that, she shot David.”
“Yes. She knew she was under suspicion, even if it was only a casual one. The best way to avoid being considered as the culprit was to become a victim. It worked on you, didn’t it?”
I had to admit that it had. I had considered it conclusive, in-arguable. “Not you?”
He shrugged. “You made a good case against her. You were right: too many things slotted together for it to be only coincidence. After it seemed she’d been shot at, you felt guilty about suspecting her and didn’t think any more about it. I’m paid to be a nasty suspicious bastard and when I thought it through, it was still possible it was her—if she could travel quickly enough between Standings and Foxford. Well, across country on an event horse—and if Pasha isn’t among the top flight, I would guess he’s still good enough—she could. It becomes possible that she shot David. If she made the holes in her own hat, it’s certain.”
“My God.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Sally. Sally shot David?”
Harry nodded. “I think so.”
“Sally Fane shot David Aston because she wanted to ride his horse? It’s incredible!”
He laughed aloud at that, which was a little unkind if wholly understandable. “That’s what I said. I was wrong. You were right all along.”
“Sally. How could she?”
“Greed. Most crimes are committed for it. People wanting more of something than they’re entitled to: more money, more miles per hour, more freedom, more love, more future. Sally wanted the chance David had worked for, and she didn’t much care what she had to do to him to get it.”
I took a deep breath and let it out again slowly, and the wood stopped wobbling round me. “The wood though. She had to get the horse through here to make the time, but I don’t know how. That gate hasn’t been opened for years.”
“She jumped. Either the gate or the wire: neither of them is that high.”
&nbs
p; I shook my head. I had the sensation of something slipping out through my fingers like dry sand, and for the life of me I couldn’t have said if that was frustration or relief I felt. “The height isn’t the problem. Not every obstacle is jumpable. You need—” I groped round in my memory for facts. You can pick up a lot in just a few weeks, but I had no framework of basic knowledge on which to hang what I had learnt and it made recall harder. “You need an approach, and somewhere to land, and clearance over the jump for your head and the horse’s. You need well-defined top and groundlines to the jump or the horse can’t judge it. They can’t jump wire at all because they don’t see it in time to take off.”
We walked back to the gate. Looked at in that light, it seemed even less passable than before. The landing into David’s field was fine. The height was fine: it was higher than the cross-country fences but so much lower than the gate out of the sand school which I had seen Gilgamesh hurdle that I supposed it well within the scope of a competent eventer such as we knew Pasha to be.
There the pros ended and the cons began. The top of the gate was rusted to a series of jagged points connected only occasionally by the fragments of a top bar. The bottom was lost in undergrowth that, like the chain securing it, hadn’t been disturbed for years. Because of the trees growing near it, the only possible approach was at an acute angle, and even then the horse would have to jump with no rider to help or encourage him, except vocally from the low branches where she would undoubtedly be hanging.
I looked at it and I shook my head. “Harry, I’m only a three week expert in this, but I don’t think it’s on. I don’t see how she could jump that.”
Harry didn’t either. He said doubtfully, “It’s that or the wire.”
“No. It’s that or the wire, or we’re wrong.”
He considered, then said pontifically, “It’s that, or the wire, or we’re wrong, or she found some other way of doing it.”
“What about the hoofprints? Somebody rides in here; they must have got in somehow.”
“Up the lane, like us. Anyone could ride in the wood, but only someone who could jump in and and then jump out again could get from Standings to Foxford in six minutes.”
We were still standing at the gate, glaring at it for its unwarranted intrusion into a perfectly good theory, when the moon-white shape that was Lucy, her snake-like head and neck low as she loped over the ground with strides so long they appeared almost slow, cantered into view. It was the first time I’d seen Karen ride her outside the confines of the sand school. I doubt she’d have been doing it now, except that David was in hospital and Sally was in Yorkshire, and Lucy hadn’t stretched her legs over turf for five days.
I imagine she was a good enough rider to manage at all, but she hadn’t Sally’s skill and she hadn’t Sally’s confidence, and the other thing was that she rode as if the horse was a friend, a thing of blood and bone and feelings and some intelligence. Sally rode the same horse as if it was a tool, a conveyance, a biological machine. It occurred to me that thinking of people in much the same way, as animate instruments of her own will, would have made possible what she had done. She didn’t hate David when she shot him, any more than she hated Lucy when she jabbed her mouth and sides with demanding steel. She had a use for them both, and saw or chose to see no further than that. The medical profession, which is sometimes better at naming conditions than curing them, has a word for people who think like that. It calls them psychopaths.
I waited, watching, for the sweep of the horse’s progress round the field to bring her up towards the wood, and then for a break in the thunder of her stride that would let my voice through. “Karen. We’re over here.”
I saw that she had heard me by the way her body straightened abruptly out of its jockey’s crouch and her head turned all ways as she sought the source of the hail. Her face, in the moment before she saw me waving and recognised me, was afraid. Remorse stabbed at me. The last time she’d been in this field she’d found the apparent victim of a shooting.
“Karen, it’s me—Clio. We’re over here at the gate.”
Fast on recognition came embarrassment. Between the chin-strap and peak of her hard hat her cheeks were pink. She rode over and reined in. “What are you doing in there?”
Harry was bent almost double, inspecting the foot of the gate where it was firmly embedded in years of undergrowth. He gave it a morose rattle. “Detecting.”
I said, “Somebody’s been riding in here. Who would that be—any idea?”
“Local kids with ponies. In the winter people use the wood for exercise sometimes rather than chew up their fields.”
“How would they get in?”
She looked surprised. The answer was, after all, obvious enough.
“Up the road and along the lane. The same way you did. Why?” I took the easy way out. “We’re arguing. Harry thinks an event horse ought to be able to jump in and out. I said horses can’t jump wire.”
“Well,” she amended doubtfully, “some can. To some extent you can teach them, but it’s always a big risk. They’re forever making mistakes, even with jumps they can see clearly. If they misjudge a log they bump a fetlock. If they misjudge wire they can end up with cuts that literally never heal. Now many people want to risk that.”
Harry straightened up. “So what about hunting? Hunts must be constantly meeting barbed wire.”
“They do,” said Karen. “And most of the horses standing in fields with their legs carved up are hunters. Not many are eventers.”
Would she have risked it, even so? She had intended to cripple a man: would she have risked crippling her horse as well? Perhaps she might if she had wanted Gilgamesh so badly. But she needed Pasha to complete the task, and she needed to leave no clues to what she had done and how. Pasha with ripped knees in stable and chestnut hairs on the wire between Standings and Foxford, she absolutely could not risk.
“Mostly what they do,” said Karen by way of an afterthought, “is make hunt fences.”
“Hunt fences?”
She nodded. “If there’s a lot of wire in their country, they make jumpable places in the fences round about. It doesn’t take much. A couple of planks nailed across the wire between one fence post and the next makes it quite safe. The horses can see what they have to do then, and even if they make a mistake, they’re not going to get cut. Planks, poles, a few branches cut from a hedge, even a sheet of plywood leaned up against the wire: they use all sorts. I’ve seen whole fields jumping over a bit of tarpaulin hung over a wire fence before now. Half the horses thought their last hour had come, but I don’t think any of them touched it.”
I looked at Harry and he was walking along the wire fence with measured tread and slowly, slowly smiling. “Well, that seems to settle the—um—argument. I’m glad we bumped into you. Good heavens,” and he held up his wrist without bothering to look at it, “is that the time? Come on, Clio, we have to move. See you again, Karen.”
And with that he turned and ambled purposefully back into the wood, leaving Karen and I to exchange a puzzled, slightly embarrassed smile. I said, “Stick to horses,” not wholly in jest, and she grinned and I trotted off in his wake, feeling like an abbreviated Watson in pursuit of a more than usually obfuscatory Holmes.
“Now what are we looking for?” I asked when I caught up.
“Holes.”
“Holes?”
“Holes.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to tell me. He just wanted to be coaxed. “Any particular kind of holes, or are you not fussy?”
His smile was sunny. “Little ones, probably in pairs at the top of adjacent fence posts. There were two little holes at the top of that post you were leaning on, and funnily enough there were two more just like them at the top of the post next to it.”
She had nailed a rail over the wire to make a fence she could jump. She may have done it days or weeks before she needed it—who would notice, and if anyone noticed, who would care?—and returned later to pull it down. She
had probably used it for firewood. The stigmata of the nails would be the only evidence.
She had been very clever. You had to give her that. She had been very clever, very well prepared, and utterly cold-blooded in the planning of her crime.
But we could find no corresponding holes in the fence posts on the south side of the wood, though we trawled up and down, inside and out, for an hour. We narrowed the search to a stretch on a fairly direct route between the two houses which included the only approachable lengths of wire, but we couldn’t find any physical sign that we were on the right track. Still, we would have gone on looking, Harry sidling in one direction and me in the other, if he hadn’t found a viable alternative.
We were walking back towards one another again when I saw him break his stride and pause, and lean over the nettles to pluck something from the barbs of the wire.
I quickened my pace. “Found something?”
“Wool.” He looked up, his brow wrinkled in perplexity, turning the stuff carefully in his fingers. “This … means something to me.” The effort to remember added new creases to his already homely face.
“A three-day-event sheep?”
“No.” He didn’t even smile. “Not fleece; it’s—”
By then I was beside him and could see what it was: two or three strands of grey woollen fibre, slightly felted in appearance, wool from a woven rather than a knitted fabric.
“Army blankets,” I said.
Harry looked at me as if I was mad. “What?”
“Army blankets. My dad was in the Army during the war. By means I wot not of, he came home afterwards with two Army blankets. I slept under one of them for years. They felt just like that. They were even that colour.”