‘Right. Also because it’s harder to hide someone in a place where there are lots of other people around. Even bound and gagged, a person can make some noise.’
‘And except in very large cities, neighbours notice unusual activity. One of the things I’ve always liked best about England is the way neighbours know each other, and look after each other.’
‘It isn’t that way in America?’
‘Not except in the very smallest towns. Back in Hillsburg, I knew almost everyone casually, but it would never have occurred to anyone to ask me, in the grocery store, how my Aunt Susie was coming along after her operation. Here that sort of thing is a commonplace.’
Alan slowed for a nasty corner, our headlights sweeping a hedgerow and illuminating for an instant the eyes of some wild creature on its nocturnal business. ‘You surprise me,’ he said. ‘Americans are such friendly people.’
‘Yes, in a way, but . . . well, anyway. We’re supposing Jo was kept somewhere out in the country. And that means . . .’
‘That means, among other things, that she must have escaped either at night or at some time when her captor had left the premises for some reason.’
‘How do you . . . oh. Because she would have had to take off across country, and would have been highly visible in the daytime.’
‘Exactly. Now. You’re Jo Carter. You’ve been abducted and mistreated. We’ll not think about how. You see your chance to get away. You get out of the house, or wherever you’re being held, and . . . do what?’
I shut my eyes and thought hard. Somewhere on the other side of that hedge, a horse whinnied. The dog sat up and gave a sharp bark, and then subsided.
‘I would try to think how to get the farthest away in the shortest possible time,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘Let’s say it’s night, and he, the villain of the piece, is still around. I don’t have the car keys, and even if I did, starting it would make too much noise. The country is very quiet at night. So I suppose I’d start out walking. Or no. You said she was barefoot.’
‘The smaller footprints the police found outside the shed were barefoot. It’s reasonable to suppose they were hers.’
‘So she didn’t start out walking. Some of the footpaths are very rocky, and some of them cross stubble fields. Clever of the guy to take away her shoes.’
‘Oh, we’re dealing with a wily one. But go on. You’re doing fine.’
Suddenly I smacked my head. ‘Oh! Of course! What an idiot I’ve been. The horse!’
‘I think so, don’t you?’
‘That’s how she got there!. Maybe that’s how they took her away, too, but she arrived on horseback. Either it belonged to her captor, or she stole it somewhere along the way. She could have walked a little way barefoot, I suppose.’
‘Depends on the terrain around wherever she was kept, but it’s possible. I’m inclined to think, though, that the horse belongs to the villain of the piece, because if she could walk as far as a nearby pasture, she could have walked on to the farmhouse and sought help. I think we’re looking for a fairly isolated farm where at least one horse is kept, though I’d prefer two.’
‘So he could ride the other one after her. And one of them is palomino, or at least has a blond mane and/or tail. Where are we, by the way?’ I peered out into the unrevealing darkness. ‘I may be completely turned around, but shouldn’t we be back at the cottage by now?’
‘We’re going to drop the horsehair, and our hypothesis, off at the Broadway police station.’
‘Broadway? Not Cheltenham?’
‘Broadway’s closer, and it’s the same force. I’ll ask that they get in touch with Superintendent Davids.’
Alan was tact itself when he presented our bit of evidence, and our conclusions, to the police. Even so, the sergeant on duty was not exactly overjoyed. ‘Very pretty piece of reasoning, Mr Nesbitt,’ he said, with a geniality that didn’t quite conceal his annoyance. ‘Quite the Sherlock Holmes, your lady wife, is she?’
I bared my teeth in what may have passed for a smile.
‘I’ll certainly see the inspector gets this in the morning, first thing,’ the sergeant went on. ‘He has your number if he needs more information?’
Alan murmured something and got me out of there before I exploded.
‘They’re not going to do a thing about it!’
‘Oh, they will. They don’t just discard leads, even if they are the product of amateurs.’
‘Amateur! You’re a chief inspector! You’re a famous policeman!’
‘Easy, love. Not any more, I’m not. I’m a doddering, interfering old busybody, with a wife who’s even worse, and American, to boot.’ He grinned to tamp down my fury.
‘Well, I think they’re being extremely stupid. Here we’ve come up with this brilliant idea, which is more than they have, and they patronize us.’
‘I told you from the start that we had to be careful about stepping on official toes.’
‘They need to be stepped on,’ I grumbled. We were back at the car by that time, where Buster was still asleep. He roused at my tone of voice, though, and whined a little.
‘No, it’s all right, dog. I’m not upset with you. You’re a fine boy. You led me to the most important find in a week. You’re a real . . . Alan, that’s his name! Watson! We’ll call him Watson.’
‘He is not,’ said Alan as he backed out of the parking space, ‘our dog.’
Alan and I have not always agreed on how to approach the unravelling of a problem, or even whether we ought to try. In the morning, though, we were as one. We didn’t even need to discuss it. We all ate breakfast, Watson went out briefly, and then we all piled in the car. It was Sunday, but for once there were more pressing duties than church. I had the OS map at the ready, along with our road atlas and a pencil.
It was another glorious day, what we used to call, back in Indiana, Chamber of Commerce weather. We would have enjoyed it more if it had not been for the urgency of our quest.
‘All right,’ I said briskly, unfolding the map. ‘Here’s the centre of our circle.’ I tapped my pencil on the location of the shed I’d found, the shed where Jo Carter had hidden, however briefly. ‘What kind of a radius do we want to use?’
‘We don’t actually know, do we?’ said Alan, negotiating an especially tricky curve. ‘We can’t speculate about the distance the horse might have travelled, because we know neither when Jo might have left her place of captivity, nor when she arrived at the shed.’
‘We know when she made that call from her mobile, though. I mean the mobile she had with her. I suppose the police told you the time.’
Alan consulted his capacious memory for a moment, and said, ‘Twenty forty-two.’
‘Eight forty-two p.m.,’ I translated. ‘Now, I think we’re safe in assuming she made that phone call the very first moment she could. So she arrived at the shed around eight thirty.’
‘No, I’m afraid we can’t make that assumption. She had to find a phone, don’t forget. That may have taken her some time.’
I chewed on that for a bit and then started to think out loud. ‘OK, let’s go back to our little scenario of yesterday. I’m Jo. The bad guy . . . can we call him Ben for the moment?’
Alan shrugged.
‘OK, Ben, then, has left me alone for a while. I think that’s more likely than our other hypothesis that she left at night. Because on a horse, if it took her almost twenty-four hours to get to that shed, she would have had to be very far away indeed. Agreed?’
Alan nodded.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t talk so much. You’re derailing my train of thought.’
He grinned, and I stuck my tongue out at him.
‘OK. Ben’s gone. I’m a sturdy sort of person, and I decide to take my chance. He’s taken my shoes, crafty villain that he is. I’m prepared to walk as far as I can barefoot, if that’s my only choice, but I look out a window and see some horses. I’ve ridden since I was big enough to clamber up on a pony.’
‘How do
you know that?’
‘It speaks! Miracle of miracles. I don’t know it. I’m forming a hypothesis. Inferences are allowed. I’m sure she wouldn’t have taken time to saddle the blasted animal, and it’s almost impossible for a person who’s never ridden to get on a strange, unsaddled horse. It’s hard enough for an experienced rider, but she was desperate.’
Alan nodded judiciously. ‘Very well. You’re an experienced and intrepid rider. You whistle to the horse; it obediently comes to you. You get yourself up on its back, presumably by climbing on the fence. Now what?’
I’d been working that out as he spoke.
‘Now I ride like the Headless Horseman. I have to take a chance on direction, since I don’t know where Ben went, but as the car isn’t there, he’s gone somewhere by road. Therefore I take off across country, avoiding roads. And . . . oh! I head away from Broadway, because Sarah is there, and even in my own desperate situation, I refuse to take the slightest risk of leading Ben to her. And I think . . . here’s another inference . . . I think I stay away from planted fields, for two reasons. Good manners, and a wholesome respect for my own skin. A horse leaves a trail through a crop that a blind man could follow.
‘So I use bridle paths, sometimes footpaths. My manners aren’t so good that I worry overmuch about leaving hazards for pedestrians. When it’s a matter of my life or death, they can step around a pile of horse droppings.
‘I need police help, but I don’t dare approach a village, or even a farmhouse, because he might be there. I have no money; he’s taken my handbag. Now that I’m over my first panicky flight and able to think sensibly, I don’t know what to do, where to go. It’s just blind luck that gives me what I think will be my salvation. Someone has dropped the mobile phone by the side of the bridle path. Maybe it fell out of a pocket while they were trotting along. At any rate, I stop and pick it up.’
‘Why don’t you use it right then?’
‘Hmm. Oh, because I don’t know where I am. Also, it’s hard enough to stay on this animal, which you will remember has no saddle or bridle, without also trying to make a phone call. I need to find a place where I can take shelter, work out where I might be, and then make the call,’ I finished triumphantly.
‘So you find the shed, get your bearings as best you can, make the call, and wait for the police, but Ben finds you first.’
‘Yes, and oh, Alan, we’ve got to find her, too! That man is a murderer!’
‘Easy, love. We’ll do better if we keep on thinking of it as a game. When too much emotion starts to work, logic flies out the window. Speaking of which, I think there’s one flaw in your reconstruction.’
‘Oh, and I was so proud of it!’ I tried to get back in the spirit. ‘Where did I go wrong?’
‘You think she wouldn’t have fled in the direction of Broadway. I would agree with you, except . . . how did she know where Broadway was? When Ben snatched her, wouldn’t he have made sure she didn’t know which way she was going? All the best kidnappers blindfold their victims.’
‘Oh. Good point. Unless maybe she could see the Tower, and work out directions from the sun. But that’s pretty iffy, I agree. And it might have been raining, too. It has a lot, these past few days. I do think she would have avoided the roads, though, don’t you?’
‘That’s a reasonable assumption. Of course,’ he added maddeningly, ‘you know we’re building up this entire elaborate scenario on the slender basis of one strand of what we think is horsehair.’
‘Well, we have to start somewhere,’ I retorted. ‘Now. We don’t know when she started out, but there’s another way to approach the problem. You know something about horses and riding, don’t you?’
‘Precious little. My father was a fisherman, not a farmer, and I’ve never owned a horse. But yes, I probably know more than you do, town mouse.’
‘Well, then. How far do you think someone could ride an unfamiliar mount, bareback?’
He thought about that for a while, as he drove on down twisty country roads. I tried to look for horses, but too often we were hemmed in by tall hedgerows on either side, and I could catch only the occasional glimpse of a chimney or rooftop.
‘Dorothy,’ he said at last, ‘I’m afraid the only answer I have is “It depends.” How fresh is the horse, how rough the terrain, how heavy and how practised the rider. Given ideal conditions, I should think a good horse could keep up a moderate pace for hours, and many miles.’
‘Oh, dear. That’s no help, then.’ I was beginning to get discouraged, and my voice showed it. ‘I won’t let myself think it’s hopeless, but these hedgerows . . . this could take days, and I’m sure we don’t have days. Hours, perhaps.’
Alan patted my knee. ‘Well, then, we just have to rely on the dog.’
‘To find her, you mean? But he’s not a hound, and anyway we don’t have anything of hers to give him.’
‘No, as an excuse, I meant. You used him as an excuse to go poking about yesterday. We can do the same. Call on every farm we find, and ask if they’ve lost a dog.’
Watson, in the back seat, barked what sounded like enthusiastic approval of that scheme, making us laugh. And then we both stopped laughing and looked at each other. The ruse was all very well, but what if we actually found the dog’s owner?
Well, I could do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about that tomorrow.
‘We passed a farm a few miles back,’ I said with determined brightness, ‘while we were trying to be brilliant and scientific about the search. At least I think we did. I saw a chimney.’
‘Good. As soon as I can find a place to turn around, we’ll go back.’
It would be tedious to relate how many farms we visited that morning, how many farmers we talked to, how many had no blond horses of any description, how many had lost no dog. Most were pleasant; a few were surly. None was in the least helpful.
We stopped at midday in a tiny village and found a delightful pub where we had an excellent ploughman’s lunch. Instead of the usual resident dog, the pub had a fat cat who made the rounds of the room letting it be known that if we happened to drop some food, she’d be happy to tidy it up for us. She didn’t exactly beg. Cats don’t beg. But her purpose was apparent.
Watson behaved admirably. When the cat first appeared, he uttered a low growl, but then with an almost visible shrug he conceded that this was the cat’s territory, not his, and proceeded to ignore her.
As we finished our lunch, I had an idea. ‘Alan, I’ve just thought of something. Do you remember that man who owns the horse farm? The one we saw in the pub, and I thought he was the mayor?’
‘I’ll never forget, my dear.’
‘Well, wouldn’t he know who in the area owned a palomino, or anyway a horse with a blond mane and tail?’
Alan smacked the table. ‘Do you know, he might. He just might. Shall we drive in to Broadway and ask him?’
‘We’ll have to be sort of careful, though. I really, really don’t want Ben to know we’re looking for him. I have the distinct impression that might not be good for our health.’
‘Make up a story, love. You’re good at that.’
So I racked my brains and cudgelled my imagination, and by the time we got to Broadway I was prepared.
‘I suppose we’re prospective buyers,’ said Alan in a low voice as he found a parking place near the horse farm.
‘Not at all. Follow my lead. I have the basic outline worked out, but we’ll have to play it by ear.’
‘Ah. Improvisatory theatre. I see.’
I had decided that it was risky to try to be anything but what we were. Broadway is a village, and we’d stayed there a week. By now, virtually everybody in town would have heard at least a little about us. So Alan directed me to the door at the side of the big barn where, he said, the office was likely to be.
Sure enough, a modern no-nonsense office had been set up in what might have been a tack room at one time. A couple of computer screens glowed, filing cabinets reached nearly to the ceiling, and
behind a sturdy if rather battered desk sat an attractive young woman who reminded me of someone I couldn’t place.
She looked up with a smile. ‘Good afternoon. Lovely dog.’
I smiled back. Watson, who of course had accompanied us, sat and offered the woman a paw to shake. I was as proud of him as if we’d taught him the trick ourselves. ‘We think he is, but unfortunately he’s not ours. He just walked in one day at our holiday cottage, and we’ve been looking after him until we can find the owner. You don’t know anyone who’s lost a nice spaniel, do you?’
‘No, but I’ll ask around. If he were mine, I’d certainly want him back. Such manners! But how may I help you?’
‘Well, I should tell you straight off that we’re not looking to buy a horse, just needing some advice, so I’ll understand if you’re too busy to talk to us.’
‘Not at all. Dad isn’t all that much of a slave-driver. Do sit down, if you can find a place.’
She stood, swept a pile of papers from one of the chairs, and offered Alan the one she’d been using, which he declined with a smile.
‘Now. What can I do for you?’
I had finally recognized her. ‘You’re very like your father,’ I said. ‘He’s an impressive-looking man. I thought at first he was the lord mayor.’
‘Oh, I remember you now! At the Swan. We noticed you because we didn’t know you, if you know what I mean.’
I was very glad I hadn’t invented an identity. ‘I know exactly what you mean, and I’m really impressed that you remember a couple of strangers seen briefly. My name’s Dorothy Martin, by the way, and this is my husband Alan Nesbitt.’
She held out a clean but work-worn hand. ‘Annette Burton.’
‘But I’m taking up your time,’ I went on. ‘I’m sorry. Let me explain my errand. I have a cousin back home . . . oh, you’ll have guessed that I’m from America.’
She simply smiled.
‘I can’t hide it,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Not that I want to. Anyway, I’ve lived here for a long time, but my family is still back in the States, and one of them, a distant cousin, told me in her latest letter that she’s moved to Wyoming and is planning to buy a horse, a golden palomino. Now that worried me a little, because my first husband always used to say that palominos were beautiful but really stupid, not unlike the common perception of some human blonds.
The Evil that Men Do Page 19