‘That’s right,’ Flecker grinned. ‘Sometimes one policeman seems less intimidating than two.’
‘There you are,’ Browning looked at his handiwork with triumph, ‘and don’t you go having a smashing time again.’
‘But I didn’t, honestly,’ protested Sarah. ‘It just disintegrated with old age.’
‘Well, we all come to it in the end,’ observed Browning, handing her the hammer.
‘Did Mrs. Chesterfield have anything to add about horse-boxes?’ asked Flecker as they walked back to the car.
‘No, she’s not the noticing sort, that’s why we went out to see Sarah. She knew where everyone was parked. A nice straightforward girl that, not like her brother.’
‘What’s the matter with Hugh?’ asked Flecker in preoccupied tones.
‘Oh, he hadn’t time to mend her jump for her, he had other things to do. Sounded as though he’d got a real chip on his shoulder. His mother said she didn’t know what was the matter with him, but he’d been like it all the holidays. Where are we off to now?’ Browning inquired as they reached the car.
‘Whittam,’ answered Flecker, ‘to see if the scrapbook’s turned up. You didn’t notice anything unusual about Mrs. Chesterfield, did you?’ he asked as Browning turned the car. ‘I’ve an odd feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before.’
Whittam House seemed deserted and though the stables appeared to house almost their full complement of horses there was no sign of any human life, until a crash and the sound of splintering wood, followed by raised voices, drew the detectives towards the jumping paddock. At the gate they met a sad procession returning to the stables. Brenda Dix led a limping horse and behind her came Helen Farrell holding a handkerchief to her face while Laurence Keswick carried her hunting cap and riding whip. With them were the secretaries and a dark, broad-shouldered woman wearing a boldly patterned floral dress.
‘Mrs. Farrell’s just had a fall,’ explained Brenda Dix cheerfully.
‘Slap through the triple,’ Keswick elucidated further,
‘and she’s in for the most beautiful black eye.’
‘And a lame horse,’ added the dark woman in censorious tones.
Browning nudged Flecker. ‘Miss Scott,’ he said. ‘I’d have known her anywhere.’
‘Christ, I’m furious,’ announced Helen Farrell, removing the handkerchief and revealing a rapidly closing left eye. ‘Do I look absolutely hideous?’
‘Monstrous,’ Keswick told her, ‘and it’s going to get worse. You wait till it goes green.’
‘That looks a nasty bruise, madam. Painful too; bathe it in plenty of cold water,’ advised Browning, while Molly Steer, finding an ally, began to entreat Helen to go indoors and lie down.
‘She doesn’t deserve all this sympathy,’ Keswick told them. ‘She insisted on giving the horse a school, though we all told her the paddock was like a skating rink after the rain, and she wouldn’t even bother with studs.’
‘It was nothing to do with the going; it was your fault, you told me to take the triple faster,’ Helen retaliated sharply, ‘and if you’re going to fall who wants to be trodden on by a horse wearing studs?’
As Christina Scott weighed in with some advice on a standing martingale, Flecker detached the secretaries from the rest of the party.
‘Any news of the scrapbook?’ he asked.
‘Not a sign,’ Joy Hemming shook her head. ‘None of the dailies has seen it since Saturday morning. It was on the table in the drawing-room then.’
‘We’ve searched and searched, we’ve turned the whole house upside down, but it’s simply vanished into thin air,’ cried Molly Steer excitably. ‘Mr. Keswick says not to worry, but it is worrying; where can it have gone? Do you think the murderer took it?’ she asked Flecker.
‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ answered Flecker. ‘I think I’d better have a look at one of the other volumes, so that I can get an idea of the sort of information it contained.’
‘I’ll fetch you one, I’ll run at once; I won’t be a moment.’ Molly Steer began to scurry up the path towards the house, but Flecker called her back. ‘There’s no hurry about that,’ he told her, ‘and I’ve another question to ask you. I gather that normally Miss Thistleton took either one or both of you with her when she was walking about. Were you with her all day on Friday?’
‘Friday.’ Joy Hemming looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, I think we were. One or the other of us all day; but on Saturday she went off by herself for quite a while. We were very glad to be left in the enclosure. Poor old Molly’s feet were killing her.’ She laughed, and Molly Steer, obviously discomfited, flushed red.
‘If you’d let me get a word in edgeways, Joy, I might be able to help the Chief Inspector over Friday. I mean about T.T. going anywhere alone.’ She flushed again as Joy Hemming laughed. ‘I don’t mean the Ladies’ tent.’ She turned to Flecker. ‘It was after tea, at least I think it was after tea.’ She struggled with indecision. ‘It was when she went across to speak to Christina Scott. You remember, Joy, it was really your turn to go, but you wouldn’t, so I went instead.’
‘Don’t bother the Chief Inspector with those childish turns,’ said Joy whimsically. ‘Really, Molly, they’re too trivial and half the time you don’t really know whose turn it is; you know what a scatterbrain you are.’
‘It’s much fairer to have turns,’ observed Molly obstinately.
Flecker pushed back his hair. ‘Miss Thistleton went across to speak to Miss Scott,’ he said; he looked at Molly. ‘You went with her?’
‘Yes, all the way to the horse-boxes and then she was so unkind. She just dismissed me. “I don’t want you,” she said, “you’d better go back.”’
‘And did you go back?’
‘Not straight away. I was hot and tired.’ Molly looked embarrassed. ‘I sat down for a little on the grass.’
Flecker looked at her with interest. ‘You saw what Miss Thistleton did?’
‘I didn’t see her, but I could hear her speaking to Christina in a very unkind way, a very unpleasant way. Then she stopped speaking and I thought she was coming back.’ Molly was scarlet in the face. ‘I couldn’t hurry away, you see, I mean, well, I’d taken my shoes off and they wouldn’t go on again.’
Joy Hemming began to laugh. ‘Caught in the act,’ she said, ‘that’s just like Molly.’
‘Go on, Miss Steer. What happened next?’ asked Flecker.
‘She didn’t come back. She went on to the next row of horse-boxes and began talking to Mrs. Pratt. When I’d put my shoes on I went nearer to make sure and then I hurried back to the enclosure. She came back soon after me.’
‘Mrs. Pratt,’ said Flecker thoughtfully. ‘From what I’ve heard about her I wouldn’t have thought she was a person who’d have appealed to T.T.’
‘No, she didn’t. T.T. disliked her intensely,’ Joy told him. ‘And for once she was being quite reasonable.’ Flecker turned back to Molly. ‘You didn’t hear what they were talking about?’
‘No, I was too far away, but it didn’t sound a very nice conversation. T.T. was still speaking very loudly in a sort of bullying, no, I mean in an accusing sort of voice.’ Flecker said, ‘Well, that’s most illuminating, Miss Steer. Thank you very much and if you wouldn’t mind putting one of the scrapbooks in the car — it’s at the front door — that’ll save you coming back here.’
Keswick was waiting in the yard. ‘Did you want to see me?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t think so, not unless you can explain the mystery of the missing scrapbook,’ Flecker answered. ‘But since she’s here, I’ll save the ratepayers’ petrol and have a word with Miss Scott.’
Browning was already engaged in conversation with Christina.
‘Of course you’ve never had another one like Guardsman,’ he was saying as Flecker joined them. ‘Must have broken your heart to part with him after all those years. I remember you jumping off against Fred Hall at the White City — must have been about ’59, I suppose. My word, that was a
night. The wall was over seven feet by the time you finished.’
‘Yes, it was a wrench,’ admitted Christina. ‘But the offer was too good to refuse. I’d have been a fool to turn it down. I sold him to the Italians, of course, but they haven’t been very lucky with him; he’s been lame on and off ever since.’
‘Here’s the Chief Inspector.’ Browning had observed that Flecker was hovering round; ‘I expect he wants a word with you, madam.’
‘Yes, he does,’ said Flecker, producing his envelopes, ‘but it won’t take a minute. I gather that you were at the Upshott Show on Friday, but not Saturday and that your only conversation with Miss Thistleton was when she fired you, is that right?’ he asked, looking at Christina’s strong, determined face and her rather calculating dark eyes.
‘Yes,’ she answered stiffly, ‘except that I was hardly an employee so I don’t think that “fired” is the correct term. Let’s say we agreed to go our own ways.’
‘Just as you like,’ Flecker yielded easily. ‘Did you see Miss Thistleton in earnest conversation with anyone else?’
‘No, but as she spent the day in the enclosure and I was in the thick of the fray, I was hardly in a position to know what she did.’
‘I gather she spent some time talking to Mrs. Pratt after she’d — I mean, you’d agreed to go your own ways,’ said Flecker controlling his desire to grin.
‘That’s funny.’ Christina Scott became interested. ‘Normally T.T. wouldn’t have touched Betty Pratt with a barge pole. If there was one point on which T.T. and I saw eye to eye it was that people like the Pratts should be kept out of the ring. After all they don’t allow just anyone to train racehorses. People like the Pratts are in show-jumping entirely for money and they haven’t the smallest concept of sportsmanship.’
‘I wonder what that conversation was about,’ said Flecker thoughtfully.
‘I can’t imagine, unless it was a few remarks about the weather or the state of the ground,’ suggested Christina. ‘Of course Mrs. Pratt’s the sort of person who thrusts herself on you, especially when she’s had a drink or two. T.T. may have just replied.’
Browning was disappointed in Christina Scott. Over beer and the ready-sliced bread and processed cheese which they lunched off in a Whittam pub, he grumbled about the television commentator who’d led him astray. ‘Always made out she was such a nice person,’ he complained, ‘and really she’s as hard as nails — selling the old horse for all she could get. Not at all a pleasant personality and she didn’t look half the girl out of her riding things.’
‘Well, if you will believe in these packaged images,’ observed Flecker. ‘Nowadays we’re all so violently iconoclastic so far as anyone connected with Church or State is concerned, but absolutely worthless pop singers and show jumpers and footballers are built up into little gods. It’s a very odd state of affairs.’
‘Well, I shall think twice before I believe him again,’ said Browning, still indignantly pursuing his own train of thought.
‘Your commentator didn’t tell you anything about this depraved Mrs. Pratt, I suppose?’ asked Flecker and, when Browning shook his head, ‘Well, drink up, we’d better go and find out for ourselves.’
They found Brake Lane with difficulty. The halfdozen gimcrack villas and bungalows which lined it were the work of a local builder who’d hoped that Hamberley would develop in that direction. But Hamberley hadn’t and the unmade-up lane grew yearly more potholed and rutted, while the shabby little urban houses seemed to look wistfully across the flat, wire-fenced fields, across the railway line, the allotments and the gravel pit where the urban district refuse was dumped, to the street lights and gasometers of the town.
Two Ways stood at the top of the lane and looked squalid among the genteel shabbiness of its neighbours. The gate sagged from its hinges and was fastened with string. The front garden, which was simply trodden earth, was inhabited by a number of scrawny chickens; a missing window pane had been replaced by a square of cardboard and the dingy, half-drawn curtains draggled unevenly because of absent rings and hooks.
When Browning’s knocking on the warped and almost paintless front door brought no reply, the detectives made their way round the side of the house, where a collection of sheds from which ponies’ heads appeared convinced them that they’d come to the right place. Then beyond, in a dusty paddock whose only herbage seemed to consist of nettles and ragwort, they saw a woman and three girls unloading cut grass from a horsebox and spreading it about the field to dry in the sun.
‘Mrs. Pratt?’ asked Flecker, observing the haggard face, the almost shoulder-length hair with its harsh and partly outgrown auburn tint and blue Alice band; and then looking from the washed-out remnant of an elegant evening blouse, which she wore with a limp cotton skirt, to a pair of disreputable white sandals from which emerged nail-varnished but dirty toes.
‘Yes?’ answered Mrs. Pratt in surly tones while the three pony-tailed girls, armed with pitchforks, gathered round in menacing attitudes.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Flecker and Detective-Sergeant Browning from Scotland Yard,’ explained Flecker hastily, feeling that they had been taken for bailiffs. ‘We’re investigating the death of Miss Thistleton.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ Mrs. Pratt gave an unexpected smile, revealing horribly neglected teeth and then, assuming the mincing tones of extreme gentility, she inquired, ‘But why come to see me?’
‘I believe that you and your family were at the Upshott Show on both Friday and Saturday and that you talked to Miss Thistleton,’ explained Flecker, looking round at the three girls in their tattered and mostly buttonless blouses, grubby jeans rolled up above the knee and the most extraordinary assortment of once elegant but now broken shoes. He found the sullen ferocity in their dark eyes disconcerting and turned back to Mrs. Pratt.
‘Such a dear old thing,’ Mrs. Pratt was saying. ‘Such a character. She always had a kind word for the girls; they loved her. Didn’t you, girls?’ she asked sharply. ‘Yes, Mummy’, they chorused in unenthusiastic obedience.
‘You talked to Miss Thistleton late on Friday afternoon, I believe,’ said Flecker. ‘Can you remember what you talked about?’
‘Yes, that’s right. We had a little chat. Now let me see, what was it about?’ She cast round wildly for a subject. ‘Oh yes,’ she continued with relief, ‘of course, dear old T.T. stopped to congratulate me on Liz’s win on Top Ten in the Foxhunter. She said that she wished that Liz was just that much older and she could have taken her on instead of Christina Scott, who was really getting past it.’
‘Go on, Mum, did she really? You never told us,’ observed the smallest Pratt.
‘’Course she didn’t, Mum’s making it up.’ Virginia dismissed the idea scornfully. ‘Liz couldn’t jump an open course — she’s windy.’
‘Better’n you, I could,’ Liz turned on her sister shrilly. ‘But I wouldn’t ’ave jumped for bloody old T.T. anyway. Not if she’d asked me. She keeps telling you what to do — her and them bloody secretaries. I’ve ’eard ’em.’
Mrs. Pratt laughed genteelly. ‘Now girls, that’ll do. Finish unloading the grass.’ She turned to Flecker. ‘The things they pick up at school nowadays. I think we’d better go indoors, it’s quieter there. Of course my husband had a kink, he wouldn’t live with me; he left me when the girls were quite tiny,’ she explained as she led the way in through the back door. In the kitchen several chickens pecked about the floor, including one with a family of half grown chicks. Mrs. Pratt snatched up a grimy cloth, flapping it and, emitting weird and high-pitched shooing noises, she pursued the cackling poultry round the room, winkling them out from behind the boiler and under the sink with practised flicks of the cloth.
‘Of course, as I was saying,’ she went on rather breathlessly, as the last chick, half running, half flying, pursued the rest of its family across the back garden, ‘my husband left me so the girls haven’t had quite the upbringing I could wish. They need a father’s firm hand. Mothers,’ s
he added with a self-conscious little laugh, ‘find it very hard to refuse anything. I’m afraid you’ve caught us at rather an untidy moment,’ she continued talking rapidly. ‘With the haymaking and the horse shows and the holidays I haven’t had a moment for the house — but then as I say to the girls, you’re only young once.’
Browning, who’d been looking round at the uncared-for house with an expression of intense disapproval, brightened up when he saw the small, square sitting-room, one wall of which was entirely covered in rosettes. ‘My word, someone’s been doing well,’ he observed.
‘Just the three girls,’ explained Mrs. Pratt, ‘but those don’t include this year’s, we’ve quite a box full to put up at the end of the season. What about a little drink?’ she asked and she began to search among a collection of pathetically small and mostly empty gin bottles.
‘Not while we’re on duty, thank you very much,’ answered Flecker and Browning, recollecting the state of the kitchen, decided not to suggest a cup of tea.
‘Well, won’t you sit down?’ said Mrs. Pratt and then, patting back her dry, tangled hair she looked archly at Flecker and asked, ‘What else can I tell you, Chief Inspector?’
Flecker asked if she knew of the emergency basket or of T.T.’s scrapbooks and whether she had seen anyone unexpected near the Thistleton horse-box and received only negative replies. Then he tried a different approach.
‘I gathered from other witnesses that the conversation you had with Miss Thistleton on Friday afternoon was less amicable than you remember it,’ he said mildly. ‘In fact I’m told that it sounded remarkably like a row.’
Mrs. Pratt’s arch manner vanished abruptly. ‘Who told you that?’ she demanded. ‘That stuck-up prude Christina Scott, that’s who it was. She’d say anything. I’m tolerant, but I can’t stand hypocrites. Always trying to make out she’s a lady when we all know her father was a butcher. She’s no better than the rest of us, but from the airs she puts on you’d think she was God Almighty, and then, when she thinks no one’s looking, you see her running back to her car for a nip of gin on the sly. She’s the one who quarrelled with T.T. The old lady went for her over her riding.’
Murder Strikes Pink Page 9