by Moody, Susan
He did some more lassoing while I read a poster attached to the fencing. ‘What exactly is barrel racing?’ I asked.
‘It’s a popular event at rodeos, ladies only,’ Piper said. ‘Basically, you race your horse in between big oil barrels arranged in a sort of clover-leaf pattern without knocking them over.’
‘Sounds a bit like slalom racing.’
‘I suppose it is. Sort of. It’s quite exciting. I used to do it when I was a child. As a matter of fact, my grandmother was a real champion.’
‘Fancy.’ I tried to imagine my own grandmother, Lady de Cuik, dressed in western shirt and jeans, navigating her way through a collection of barrels. Couldn’t be done.
Another guy appeared and began twirling a rope in an amazing series of artistic loops and swirls. ‘Yippee ye yi ay!’ he yelled, the lariat flying through the air, making complicated circles against the blue sky. Grinning, he took off his hat and waved it at them.
Well, now, I thought. Well, bugger me.
‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ Piper said admiringly.
‘How long has he been part of the act?’
‘He just showed up earlier this year. He had all sorts of recommendations. As it happened, we had a vacancy in the team and Dad took him on immediately, as soon as he’d demonstrated what he could do.’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘Tennessee, I believe.’ She pulled her dark brows together. ‘Or was that one of the other guys? I’m not sure.’
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘Jerry Baskin. Apparently his father raised horses, trained those Tennessee walking horses they have down there.’ She smiled. ‘And in fact, here comes one right now.’
Jerry Baskin, eh? Why did I feel so certain that someone had been eating ice cream just before being asked what his name was?
A very tall horse shuffled in and began a weird kind of trotting walk round the display ring. The front and back legs on each side moved at the same time, making its gait unlike anything I’d ever seen before, its front legs very high with each step. On its back crouched a man in a long black coat and a white shirt with a Mississippi gambler’s black ribbon tie, under a stiff black hat.
The show lasted another twenty minutes and was a good one, in which Jerry Baskin more than played his part, being an obvious expert in some of the manoeuvres presented.
At the end, as the audience began to shamble out, I turned back to Lady Paramore.
‘Any chance of saying hi to some of the guys?’ I asked. ‘I’d really like to congratulate them … that was a terrific display.’
‘I’m sure they’d be delighted to meet you,’ she said. ‘Though both Dad and Jerry are going to be pretty upset when you tell them about poor Tristan. Over the past few weeks they’ve become good friends.’ She sniffed hard. ‘So have I.’
Call me a cynic, but my (unspoken) response was I’ll just bet you have. Good as they come.
As the crowd dispersed, she led the way round to the back of the ring where a series of sheds made of weathered planks housed stables, barns and quarters for Hank Rogers and his team. The place reeked of hot animals and even hotter males, with an overlay of beer and leather. Three men stripped to the waist were standing about when we arrived, drinking beer from cans and wiping their faces with wet towels. They all turned as Piper stepped inside, with me following closely. One of them was Hank.
‘Hi, Dad,’ Piper said.
‘Well, hiya, honey.’ Hank’s voice twanged like an old guitar. I thought of poor Sam, and his dreams of struttin’ his stuff on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, dressed in fancy western-style duds. Maybe he could take up rodeo as a substitute. ‘And who’s your friend?’
I stepped forward, hand out. ‘Quick. Alexandra Quick. I really enjoyed your show, Mr Rogers.’
‘Why thank you, ma’am.’ He introduced the other two men: Marvin and Chuck.
‘I’d love to know where you get your broncos from,’ I said, ‘seeing as how cattle droving isn’t exactly a full-time occupation in twenty-first-century England.’
He laughed, showing a full set of ivory-white teeth. ‘We ship a few over from my place in the States,’ he said. ‘And there’s always a good supply right here of badly broken animals.’
A loo flushed somewhere, water ran, a planked door opened. The Lariat King emerged from the back, bejeaned and bechapped, his cowboy hat pushed rakishly on to the back of his head. ‘Well, howdy, ma’am,’ he said, when he saw Lady Paramore.
‘Good show, Jerry,’ said Piper. ‘Meet Alex Quick.’
Jerry turned to me. He gaped stupidly, the ‘Howdy, ma’am’ dying on his lips. ‘What the— What’re you doing here?’ he said.
‘Why, I just came by to get me a helping of that fine old Louisiana catfish pie and collard greens I’ve heard so much about,’ I drawled in my best down-home accent. ‘Don’t tell me you’re fresh out.’
The others were staring at us. ‘Do you two know each other?’ Hank asked.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said.
‘Dad,’ Piper said, her voice urgent. ‘We need to talk.’ She jerked her head at the door leading outside.
‘OK, honey. Gimme two minutes.’
I was very conscious of Jerry Baskin’s fish-hook gaze on my back as we left. I won’t say it sent shivers of apprehension up my spine, but it certainly wasn’t a very friendly stare. We were supposed to be having dinner together in a day or two. Cooked by him. I started to wonder what access he might have to toxic substances, and whether I should cancel.
‘We’ll go up to the house,’ said Piper. ‘My husband should be back from seeing the bank manager by now. I know he’d like to meet you.’
I couldn’t imagine why.
‘You can save your bad news until then,’ she added quickly.
Sir Piers was sitting on a terrace at the back of the house, gazing out at the artificial lake where mallards squawked and a heron looked down its beak at them. He was holding a cut-glass tumbler in which floated a hefty slice of lemon and some tonic which I could see was heavily laced with gin, since it had that give-away blue tinge to it. Ice cubes chinked as he rose to his feet. ‘Darling,’ he said.
‘Piers, I’d like you to meet Alexandra Quick.’
He was far too well-bred to ask who the hell I was. He shook my hand. Offered me a drink, which I refused. Poured one for his wife. He was very tall, very thin, very pale, very upper class. He was wearing a beige lightweight suit over a blue-striped shirt, open at the neck. A tie was draped over the back of a chair.
‘I wondered where you’d got to,’ he said.
‘I was showing our visitor Dad’s act,’ she said.
Dad himself appeared through the French windows leading out from the drawing room.
‘Hank, old boy …’ Genial as hell, Sir Piers picked up a decanter and poised it over a glass. ‘The usual?’
‘Thanks, son.’ Hank smiled. ‘Ain’t nothin’ like a slug of that good old sippin’ sweet Tennessee bourbon,’ he said, taking the glass his son-in-law held out to him. I couldn’t help but note that the hokey down-home accent was coming on a good deal stronger than it had been earlier, down at the rodeo ring.
Nor could I help taking on board the look of distaste which briefly crossed the well-bred features of Sir Piers. Did I detect a slightly cool atmosphere at play between the Englishman and his father-in-law?
‘Alexandra has some bad news,’ Lady Paramore said soberly. She turned to me. ‘Tell them.’
I explained about Tristan’s murder, and that I’d been asked to work in parallel with the police. I implied that I was official. I also implied that I was some kind of professional private eye. I didn’t have to be professional to take in the reactions of the two men. The colour drained from Sir Piers’s already austere face. He reached for the back of a chair, his knuckles white. ‘How … how perfectly appalling,’ he said, through lips as unbending as dinner plates. ‘How utterly … What do the police think happened?’
; ‘At the moment they have no idea.’
‘I was at school with him,’ Sir Piers said, as though to excuse his evident shock. ‘This is terrible.’
Meanwhile, beneath his tanned complexion, Hank Rogers had turned an unbecoming shade of red. ‘What the fuck happens now?’ he said. His mouth tightened over the words.
‘Da-ad,’ admonished his daughter.
Did she mean the rodeo star’s language? Or the sentiments he appeared to be expressing? And what sentiment was that exactly?
Hank recovered quickly. ‘That mural doodad he was painting for you … Not going to get finished now, is it?’
There was an awful lot going on below the surface of these civilized surroundings. I would have to delve a great deal deeper. But not now. Mainly because I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask them how and why Tristan’s death had affected them. Nor an impolite one, for that matter.
‘I’m sorry to have been the bearer of such bad tidings.’ I stood up. ‘I have to get back. I imagine the police will be visiting you at some point, since Tristan was apparently working here right up until he took a break.’
I left.
On my way back to Clarissa’s house, I reflected that up at the big house, they were probably going through a cat-on-hot-bricks routine, frantically trying to conceal whatever it was that they were involved in. Because that much was obvious: the three people I’d left behind at Rollins Park were up to their necks in something, whether it was criminal or otherwise.
What saddened me was the fact that Tristan Huber’s life, held up to public gaze, might be about to reveal itself as much less saintly than I had thought.
EIGHT
‘As I said last night,’ Clarissa said, ‘We’ve met both the Paramores from time to time but I can’t say they impinge on us in the slightest.’
‘She means our paths never cross,’ explained Mark. ‘In other words, we move in entirely different social circles.’
‘Ever heard any scandal about them?’
The two of them looked at each other. ‘Well,’ Mark said, ‘we had a couple of their personnel up before the Bench a year or so ago, on the grounds of cruelty.’
‘To horses,’ put in Clarissa.
Mark was the local Chairman of the Magistrates. ‘What were they doing?’
‘To give you a highly simplified version, they brought in a new trainer and it turned out he was using outlawed methods to exaggerate that peculiar walk the Walking Horses have. Injections, illegal weights which rubbed the fetlocks, nails inserted into the so-called pads or stacks, which build up the exaggerated gait. They walk like that because it’s so darned painful for them to put their feet on the ground.’
‘Mark had to bone up on all this before the guy appeared in front of him,’ Clarissa supplied. ‘It’s quite complicated.’
‘The point was that the RSPCA inspectors got on to the abuse and it was stopped. Fines were imposed and the head guy—’
‘Piper Paramore’s father.’
‘—immediately sacked that particular trainer. And since then, there hasn’t been anything untoward, as far as we know.’
‘Not to do with the horses, at any rate.’ Clarissa made a face involving raised eyebrows and pursed lips.
I looked from one to another. ‘Gossip!’ I said. ‘Tell me all.’
‘I yield to no one in my admiration for Piper … Lady Paramore,’ said Mark portentously. ‘And I’m well aware that she’s pulled Rollins round almost singlehandedly. I’d hate idle speculation to impact badly on her.’
‘But …’
‘But there have been rumours here and there. Particularly in the village round the estate.’
‘Rollingford,’ Clarissa said helpfully.
‘Rumours of what?’ I said, trying not to sound impatient.
‘Well, it seems that some of those rodeo riders or whatever they’re called can’t keep it in their pants.’
‘’Twas ever thus,’ I said. ‘Simple village maidens falling for the exotic stranger from across the seas.’
‘Except that this wasn’t—’
‘Isn’t,’ put in his wife.
‘—only village maidens, but village lads and, in some cases, even village children. Or so we were told.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘As you say,’ Mark said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. But I should emphasize that this is all pure speculation.’
‘Or impure,’ said Clarissa, ‘depending on how you look at it.’
‘And where does Tristan Huber fit into all this, I ask myself?’ Despite the wife, now vanished, I had from time to time wondered whether Tristan was gay, but even if he was, I couldn’t imagine him indulging in anything as sordid as seducing kids. ‘You’re not talking about a paedophile ring, are you?’
‘I’m afraid the answer to that,’ said Clarissa, ‘is that we don’t know. And history doesn’t relate. On top of that …’ She stopped.
‘Rumours,’ Mark said, shaking his head at her. ‘Village gossip.’
‘What about?’ I demanded.
‘Anything you care to mention, really. From people-trafficking to grand larceny.’
‘But nobody knows for sure. And you can’t go in and search the place without a warrant.’
‘And you can’t get a warrant without evidence, or at least reasonable suspicion.’
‘I shall have to find out more,’ I said. ‘It could have quite a bearing on his death. Where would I start?’
‘Try Sheila, the landlady at the Rollins Arms. Halfway up the village street. Hotbed of gossip, or so I hear from one of my fellow JPs.’
When I pushed open the door, the Rollins Arms seemed to be in full late-morning somnolence.
Three elderly blokes were seated at three different tables, one reading the Guardian, one absorbed in the Daily Mail, one staring morosely at nothing in particular.
I hoicked my bum on to a stool at the bar and ordered a double tomato juice with a slug of Worcestershire sauce and two ice cubes.
‘And what brings you to our neck of the woods,’ the woman behind the bar – Sheila, I presumed – asked me.
‘Just visiting,’ I said. ‘Having a look round. Casing the joint. I’m thinking of moving down from Northumberland.’
‘It’s a nice place to live, round here.’
‘It looks it.’ I sipped at my tomato juice. Got chatty. ‘I went to that rodeo show yesterday. That’ll be somewhere nice to take the children if we move down here.’
She pressed her lips together. Nodded several times. Said nothing.
C’mon lady, I thought, make with the tittle-tattle. I haven’t got all day. ‘I suppose those cowhands or whatever they’re called must come in here now and then. I guess it’s thirsty work, roping steers and bucking broncos.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
So much for the hotbed of rumour and innuendo. I was about to drain my glass and leave, when she leaned forward and opened her mouth. ‘Actually,’ she began.
‘Now, now, Sheila, watch what you’re saying.’ It was the guy reading the Guardian.
‘I haven’t said anything yet, Mr Watson.’
‘But you’re about to. I’ve warned you before about unsubstantiated libel, slander and defamation.’
‘I was merely going to inform this young lady of some of the other sights round here which she shouldn’t miss.’
‘I’m sure you were.’ Mr Watson returned to his paper. I took him to be a retired solicitor. Or even a functioning one.
Sheila winked at me. She held up eight fingers and tapped her watch, which I took to mean that Mr Watson would be off in eight minutes. Sure enough, eight minutes later he folded his paper, got up and left, nodding at me and the other men, wagging a reproving finger at Sheila.
‘What an old woman,’ she said, when he was safely out the door.
‘He’s right, you know.’ The kind of voice you might expect from a very elderly tortoise with laryngitis emerged from the throat of one of the other patrons. Impossible to know which
one, since neither of them lifted their heads. Or even seemed aware of our presence.
‘Mind you, it’s not nearly as harmless as it looks,’ she said.
‘What isn’t?’
‘The village. Murder, rape, wife-beating, child-abuse, bank-robbing—’
‘Incest,’ came the rusty old voice again.
‘—that too. You name it, we’ve got it.’ She didn’t mention paedophiles though.
‘What about people-smuggling or grand larceny?’
‘Ooh, no dear.’ She seemed quite shocked. ‘There’s none of that round her.’
‘But you still wouldn’t recommend this as a place for me to bring up children?’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Sheila cautiously, perhaps sensing business being turned away. ‘But we’ve had our share of scandals.’
‘What was the murder about?’
‘Peggy Mitchell … always was a bit odd, if you ask me. Same old boring story. Silly girl got involved with one of them Yanks up at the Park, fell pregnant, when he wouldn’t marry her she threatened to kill herself. Then lo and behold, they found her in Lyden Woods. Hanged herself.’
‘That’s suicide, not murder.’
‘Oh yes. So they all thought. Except some clever dick of a police detective came down from London, said it was impossible for her to have killed herself like that. Produced all the facts: height, weight, type of knot etc. Plus asked how she could have got the rope over the tree branch in the first place, since she was such an itty bitty little thing. Whereas her fancy man …’ She raised an arm towards the ceiling to imply height. ‘Next thing we know, this London cop and his sidekick are up at Rollins, waving warrants and demanding to see the feller she’d been with, accusing him of murder. Only by then he’d taken to his heels and gone back to his wife and kids in Oklahoma or somewhere.’
‘Goodness,’ I said.
‘And that’s not the only scandal we’ve had with those cowboys up there,’ Sheila continued, settling comfortably into her story.