‘And you’re too big for that pony.’
Chapter 19
AS THE NIGHT of the race approached, excitement grew. Stories kept coming in about the other competitors, mostly exaggerated for good or bad.
Mrs Bunker reported that Mr Bunker had been up at the squash court at the Manor and had seen one of Sir Arthur’s ponies jump almost five feet. The carpenter had measured it.
Jim reported some highfaluting claims that Count Podgorsky had made about one of his other pupils.
But Jim had also seen the pupil fall off. ‘For no reason. She rides worse than me, if you can imagine that.’
Steve had heard from the feed merchant that Mrs Hatch from the Pony Club was buying cough medicine for her daughter’s pony.
Ron was still hanging about with his pal at the dealers, keeping out of sight of the Nicholsons, but watching the roan pony, now fancifully named Strawberry Sunday.
‘That’s your competition,’ he told Jim. ‘The Nicholsons have made up what they like to call their minds that they’re going to win. When they go after something, that lot, they get it. It’s not only the money and the sale of the pony, see. But people round here don’t think so much of them. They gotta win, see, and show who’s best.’
‘That’s that, then.’ Jim was sickeningly defeatist. ‘If they’re the best, they’ll win.’
‘You’ve got to win.’ Steve made a fist and held it under Jim’s pointed chin. ‘Think of Amigo. Get out of here, Ron. You’re bad news.’
‘I’m only saying what I see. Just thought you’d like to know, that’s all. I seen that strawberry roan last Saturday gallop alongside their big thoroughbred, and she was right there with him all the way.’
Steve groaned.
‘Just thought you’d like to know.’ Ron went across the yard, chucking a pebble at a swallow swooping under the barn roof, and out to his motorbike.
‘I thought you were going to help me hang that gate,’ Dora called. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Down the Nicholsons’. I got everybody here all sweated up about the roan. May as well get Chip into a lather by telling her how good our grey is.’
The excitement began to build up in the neighbourhood. Among people involved with the race, who talked of little else, it became clear that Strawberry Sunday and Grey Lady would be the favourites.
Poor Barnacle Bill. If he could not even gallop a mile on the flat, he would be lucky if he finished the steeplechase course at Broadlands. He needed to work, so Dora went on training him and Callie, if only to keep herself from worrying about what Bernard Fox and the committee were going to do to her.
What had he written to the Colonel? What would the Colonel write to Dora? She still had not told anyone about the moonlight gallop. One morning she almost told Steve, but when she opened her mouth the words sounded foolish before she even got them out.
‘Steve.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Get a move on then. Maggie’s all tacked up. I’m going to race you and Barney across the big stubble field.’
‘Let Callie ride him.’
‘Why not you?’
‘I think I’m too big for him.’
‘Since when?’
‘I just think so.’
Why care what Bernard Fox had said? But when someone you don’t like tells you something you don’t want to hear, you do care. You even begin to believe it.
After Steve and Callie had ridden off, Dora heard his bossy voice.
‘Anyone about?’ He was calling out of his car window, as if he expected a reception committee.
Dora ducked into the tack room. She heard the car door slam and his boots in the yard. No escape. Bernard would be sure to snoop in here to see if they had cleaned the tack, so she nipped up the stairs and hid in Steve’s room.
Crouching by the window, she heard him talking to Slugger.
‘Where is everyone? The place is deserted.’
‘No, it ain’t. I’m here.’
‘Where are those lazy kids at this time in the morning, with all the work to be done? Look at the bedding. Hasn’t been mucked out for days by the look of it.’
‘Well, you see, it’s like this.’ Dora heard Slugger go into the slow, maundering voice he put on to annoy people who annoyed him. ‘That there is the Weaver’s stable, that is.’
‘It’s a dirty stable. I don’t care whose it is.’
‘Ah, but if you knew the Weaver. Very messy, he is. I knew a horse like him once, long ago, before the war it must have been. Big brown horse with sickle hocks. Name of … name of, what was that beggar’s name?’
‘Where’s Dorothy?’ Bernard interrupted.
‘In the tack room,’ Slugger said. ‘Cleaning tack.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Dora heard him open the door and shut it. ‘If she was, she isn’t now, and from the look of the tack she ought to be. I can’t stop any longer. I came to tell her I’d heard from the Colonel.’
‘Oh yes?’ Slugger was interested. Dora’s heart fell into her stomach like a stone.
‘He said he’d written to the Farm and settled the matter. I wanted to know what he wrote.’
The stone leaped out of Dora’s stomach, suffocatingly into her throat.
The Colonel had settled it. How? The sack? When the letter came, she would not be able to read it.
But after she heard Bernard’s car leave, and turned to go down, she saw the letter with the familiar writing and the foreign stamp on Steve’s table, she had to pick it up. It was addressed to Steve, but she had to read it.
Dear Steve,
I owe you a letter, so I’ll send this one to you.
Sitting on the unmade bed, Dora glanced through the first pages, which were about the villa and his health and some people they had met who used to breed hunters, and some details about the Follyfoot horses, and the forms from the Ministry of Agriculture.
On the next page, her name stood out from the Colonel’s scrawly handwriting as if it were up in neon lights.
‘So Dora has been having some fun. Never a dull moment, eh? I’ve calmed Bernard Fox down, but tell her to watch her step like a good girl. We don’t want any trouble at the Farm. The old horses come first.’
When Steve and Callie came back, with Barney very blown, Grey Lady still on her toes, Dora said, before Steve had even got off, ‘I read the Colonel’s letter.’
‘In my room?’
‘I was making your bed.’ It was still unmade. ‘No, I wasn’t. I was hiding from Bernie.’
‘Oh God, is he—?’
‘It’s all right. He’s gone. He wanted to find out what the Colonel wrote. So did I. So I looked.’
‘You read other people’s letters.’
‘You don’t give other people’s messages. Why didn’t you tell me what the Colonel said?’
He turned away from her to dismount. With his face to the pony, putting up the stirrup, loosening the girth, he said, ‘I didn’t want you to know I knew.’
‘But you don’t know what I did.’
‘No, but I thought if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me.’
He did not ask a question with his face or voice, so Dora said nothing.
He led Grey Lady away. Dora went back to work.
Steve was the best friend Dora had ever had. He had told her once that she was the only real friend he had ever had. But sometimes they could not talk to each other.
Chapter 20
THREE DAYS BEFORE the race Mrs Bunker came over to Follyfoot, white and shaken.
She had been woken in the night by the barking of her miniature poodle, who wore a jewelled collar and slept on her bed.
‘Mimsy was quite hysterical. I knew she’d heard something. So I put the sheet over my head and sent Mr Bunker down to investigate. He took his gun. I told him not to, because it’s worse to kill someone than to be burgled, but he took his gun and when I heard the shot, I thought my heart had stopped.’
She put her ha
nd on her heart, to make sure that it was working now.
Mr Bunker had seen a figure in the shadows by the gate of Grey Lady’s paddock. As he came closer, the gate swung open. He shouted, and the figure – man? boy? girl? He couldn’t see – ran off. He fired a shot after it.
The shot had woken all the neighbours and, as Mrs Bunker had predicted, caused more trouble than the intruder. Mr Bunker was to pay a fine for possession of a shotgun without a licence, and Mrs Bunker had been embarrassed by stares in the supermarket, because word had spread round like a bush fire that he had shot her.
Worst of all was the knowledge that someone was trying to sabotage Grey Lady.
‘I think they were either going to kidnap her, or turn her loose to get killed on the road.’ Mrs Bunker’s eyes were round with horror. ‘Who would do such a dreadful thing?’
Ron snickered. ‘I got a good idea.’
‘The Nicholsons?’ Dora said. ‘Oh, that’s absurd.’
‘I told you they were desperate to win the race.’
‘And you’ve been scaring them about Grey Lady.’
Ron laughed. ‘Shook ’em up a bit, didn’t it?’
‘Better put a padlock on the gate,’ Dora told Mrs Bunker.
‘I told Jim to keep the pony in the stable,’ Steve said.
‘She bangs her foot on the door in the middle of the night,’ said Mrs Bunker.
‘Hang a sack full of gorse on the door,’ Steve said, ‘and put a dirty great padlock on the bolt.’
‘And on your oat bin,’ Ron added darkly. ‘There’s some people will stop at nothing.’
How much did he know? The curious thing about Ron was that he could seem to be on everybody’s side at once. He was mixed up in all sorts of things without ever actually taking part or getting caught. He lived on the fringes of many worlds – the Farm, the racecourse, horse trading, the motorcycle gangs – without belonging completely to any of them.
It was even impossible to find out whose side he was on to win the race – Strawberry Sunday or Grey Lady. He was taking bets on it, illegally. Ron would take or make a bet on anything. How many palings in a fence, or red cars passing in the next mile, or grains of maize in a handful. What time the rain would stop. What tin of soup Slugger would open for lunch. ‘Two to one against tomato. What’ll you bet me?’
Dora found him looking thoughtfully over Amigo’s door as the raw-boned old horse dozed in a shaft of sunlight, resting one back leg, his hip bone sticking up like the peak of Everest.
‘What will really happen if Grey Lady doesn’t win the money and I can’t pay you back?’ she asked.
‘I told you. The old skin will be mine.’
‘You don’t want him.’
‘He’d fetch a bit. The firewood chap still hasn’t got no horse for next winter.’
‘You wouldn’t really—’
‘You think I’m soft, don’t you, girl?’ Ron made his tough face, jaw twisted, eyes narrowed, talking what he thought was gangster American out of the side of his mouth. ‘You might get surprised one of these days.’
Ron was away from home that evening, ‘checking on a few situations.’ He never said exactly where he was going, or who he was going to see.
Before they went to bed, Steve and Dora decided to go and look at a situation of their own.
‘I’m still worried about Maggie,’ Steve told Slugger. ‘We’re going down to check the padlocks and make sure everything’s all right.’
‘And get a load of bird shot where it hurts,’ Slugger said. He began to push aside the clutter of mugs, letters, ornaments, combs, books, pebbles and hair clips on the wide shelf above the fireplace.
‘What are you doing?’ Callie asked.
‘They’ll be needing to eat breakfast off the mantelpiece tomorrow.’
Dora and Steve left the truck down the road from the Bunkers’ house, and walked barefoot up the drive. All was dark and quiet. No lights in the house. Padlocks on the loose-box door and on the oat bin in the shed.
Grey Lady had been lying down, but she got up nervously, and watched them over the door as they padded about, looking in sheds and behind bushes, up into the trees and down into the non-existent depths of the ornamental well.
Often they stopped and listened to the normal noises of a suburban night. Two dogs barking back and forth. A rooster who had set his alarm clock too early. A radio. The throb of drums from some distant café, the beat without the music. The endless faint roar of cars on the main road beyond the hill whose edge was rimmed with brightness from the stream of lights.
Nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Dora stopped again. Something to smell? She raised her face like a dog and put her hand on Steve’s arm.
‘I smell smoke.’ She gripped him tightly.
‘A chimney?’
‘No, nearer.’
They were by the bottom fence, looking for the footprints of the intruder at whom Mr Bunker had fired. As they ran back to the stable, the smell of smoke grew definite, grew stronger.
Steve shone the torch round the outside of the loose box. The grey pony was banging against the gorse-filled sack on the door. Dora pushed her head aside and saw, at the edge of the straw, a billow of smoke that burst, even as she looked, into a crackle of fire.
Uselessly she pulled at the padlock, bruising her fingers and yelling for Steve.
‘Get her out! We’ve got to get her out!’
As smoke began to fill the stable, Grey Lady plunged against the door, wild-eyed. Steve wrenched at the padlock, and swore.
‘Get up to the house,’ he told Dora. ‘Wake them. Get the key.’
Dora ran. She beat on the door of the Bunkers’ house and shouted. It seemed an eternity before a window went up and a head in a hair net looked out.
‘Go away. You’re drunk.’
‘The stable’s on fire!’ Dora was gasping for breath, her throat full of smoke fumes. ‘Get the firemen. Give me the key!’
‘Oh, my God.’ The head went inside and shouted, ‘James, James! Where’s the key?’
‘Key, what key?’ A sleepy rumble.
‘Grey Lady’s stable is on fire. Oh, my God. Oh, my heart.’
‘Hurry!’ Dora yelled. The fire would take hold fast in the straw bedding. She might already be too late to save the pony.
When the key came sailing out of the window, she scrabbled for it in a flowerbed and ran, choking with fear and the acrid fumes ahead. Gasping and sobbing, she turned the corner of the stable and saw Steve raise a huge stone in both hands and crash it down on to the bolt. Something snapped. The door splintered open, tearing away at the hinges, and fell with a noise like a cannon as the pony trampled over it and off into the night.
Running behind her, Steve and Dora heard the tattoo of her hooves on the road. They followed as far as they could in the dark, but she had run on the hard road and left no traces. They did not know where she might have turned.
‘Let’s go back and ring the police. Someone will stop her.’
A fire engine was in the drive, pumping water into the stable. The Bunkers stood desolately in their night clothes. The father chain-smoked nervously. The mother in her hair net clutched her shivering poodle. Jim was crying.
He ran to Dora. ‘Where’s Maggie?’
‘She ran off but she’ll be all right. We’ll find her.’ She put her arms round him. His thin body was trembling, even though it was a warm night.
Neighbours had come from all round. Raincoats over pyjamas. Mothers carrying babies. Barking dogs. Old men coughing. Children frantic with excitement. It was not until the fire was almost out, and smouldering sullenly in the wreck of the stable, that Steve and Dora saw that one of the people in the watching crowd was Ron Stryker.
‘What on earth?’ Steve grabbed him from behind and spun him round.
‘Hands off. I didn’t start it.’
‘Who said you had?’
Ron always made excuses before he was accused.
‘The fire engine passed me on the
road. When I saw where it went, you could have knocked me down with a—’
‘How did you know who lived here?’
‘I didn’t. I saw poor old Jim. What are you two doing here for that matter?’
‘We came to check. We were here when the fire started.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Ron leered.
What did he know? Was he mixed up in this himself?
Dora pulled Steve back into the shadows. ‘He couldn’t possibly—?’
‘He may know who did.’
‘If anyone did. It could have been an accident.’
One of the firemen, who had been looking for clues, came out of the loose box with something in his closed hand.
‘People who smoke in a stable,’ he said, ‘shouldn’t be allowed to keep horses.’
‘I’m always careful.’ Mr Bunker ground out a cigarette under his foot, but almost at once his hand went to his pyjama pocket and he lit another.
‘But you were out here late this evening, you said.’
‘To make sure the pony was all right before I went to bed.’
‘Excuse me.’ The fireman went up to him. ‘Is that a filter?’
Mr Bunker took the cigarette out of his mouth and showed him the filter tip.
‘Thank you.’ The fireman opened his hand and showed what he had found in the straw. The white plastic filter of a cigarette.
‘It couldn’t have been me.’
His wife and son were looking at him. Jim was still crying. Mr Bunker was blustery and red, as if he would cry too. ‘I told you. I’m always careful.’
‘Someone wasn’t,’ the fireman said.
Dora looked at Ron Stryker. Under the lank red hair, his face showed no expression. If he did know anything, he would never tell.
Accident or arson? To Steve and Dora it did not matter. All that mattered now was finding the terrified grey pony.
Chapter 21
IN THE MORNING, the police had heard nothing. Dora and Steve spent all day until dark driving round asking people, following up false leads, getting nowhere. Grey Lady had vanished.
‘She’ll never come back.’ Jim was heartbroken. The pony meant much more to him now that this terrible thing had happened.
Dora at Follyfoot Page 9
