Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  Still, it was him and not Sally Fane who had been long-listed for the World Championships. Perhaps it was worth the price he and Ellen had paid, stepping round pans on the landing in wet weather and carrying water round the paddocks when it was cold because they couldn’t afford the equipment to keep the field pipes from freezing.

  Worth it, at least, up to last night, when everything he had worked and sacrificed for went up in a puff of cordite, leaving him with some first-class horses he couldn’t ride and a third-class farm that needed money he hadn’t got and labour he couldn’t give.

  Ellen said quietly, “I knew I could count on our friends for support. But I never expected this much kindness. I shall not forget it.”

  Harry came home for his lunch and to change the shirt he’d been wearing now for twenty-nine hours. Harry’s shirts tend to look as if he’s slept in them by the time he’s straightened his tie in front of the mirror. This one looked as though he’d polished the car with it.

  I’d made a stew. I’d made it in a pot the size of a bucket, and it would feed us for the next three days, regardless of what hours we kept and how long before we had to go out again. It was hot and filling; it even tasted quite good.

  Even in his clean shirt Harry looked dog-tired. He hadn’t been to bed at all last night and it showed. He’d only had his shoes off long enough for his feet to swell when John Martin called at our house on his way up to Foxford.

  He’d have been better left to eat in peace, but I wanted to know. “Are you making any progress?”

  He wrinkled his lip—at the question, I think, though it may have been the stew. “Yes and no. Yes, we’re getting answers to some questions, like how many guns could have fired the shot and how many sports shops in the Midlands could have sold the ammunition. And I have a description of sorts. I went in to see David. He’s still confused, of course, but he remembers being shot. And afterwards, when he was on the floor, he remembers the man stepping over him to take down the painting. But if you mean are we any nearer making an arrest, then no, I don’t honestly think we are.”

  “But if you have a description—”

  He gave me a jaundiced look. “Oh yes. Medium height, medium build, wearing a scarf over his face and a parka with the hood pulled up. I suppose that’s all you saw too.”

  “Probably, though I couldn’t be that precise about the detail,” I admitted. “Could David tell you nothing about him that was distinctive?”

  “Actually,” said Harry, thinking about it, “yes. He was wearing a parka.”

  “So you said.” I couldn’t see that whittling the list of suspects down much. It would be harder to find a man of medium height and build who didn’t own a parka.

  Harry’s gaze across the table was sharpening up. Behind the face like a square potato an agile brain was chewing over the facts like an intellectual garbage disposal unit. I knew that brain. It was dogged and determined, and capable of occasional feats of intuition, and I knew he’d been thinking about this on one level or another since he’d talked to David, aware that something he had said was out of synch and not aware until now what it was.

  “On a night so warm that David had to open the French windows to talk on the telephone? Even cold-blooded criminals tend to work up a bit of a sweat: last night, wearing a parka with the hood up, waiting with a gun to shoot a man in the back in his own house, he must have been standing in a puddle. Why?”

  To me it seemed obvious. “It was his disguise. Or rather—”

  “No,” he interrupted, a sort of grim triumph in his eyes, “you were right the first time. It was a disguise. The scarf prevented anyone seeing his face. The parka had another function: to disguise his outline.”

  “Face, outline—does it matter? He didn’t want anyone to see anything they could pick out of a line-up later.”

  Harry looked down his nose at me. “Nobody is ID’d on the shape of their shoulders. You can say if someone couldn’t be the man you saw, if he’s too tall or too wide or too thin. But for a positive ID you need a face to recognise, and his face was already covered.”

  “So he was being careful. Belt and braces.”

  “Not if the risk of being noticed wearing a parka on a warm evening was greater than the risk of being recognised if he wore shirt-sleeves like everyone else.”

  That was true. A successful crime depends more often on passing unnoticed than on passing unseen. Ask any novelist. “You think there was something distinctive about him, about the shape of him, that a thick coat would mask? You think maybe he’s a hunchback?” It was an attractive thought, but life isn’t usually that easy.

  “No harm in hoping, I suppose. But perhaps what our friend was trying to disguise was not so much his strangeness as his familiarity.”

  “You’re back to the friends and neighbours who might know about the painting and guess about the open window and the alarm.”

  Harry nodded slowly. “I suppose I am.” He works a bit the way the mills of God grind, slowly but exceeding fine. “Think about it. Suppose you’re meeting someone off a train. If you don’t know them too well, you look for their face and you’re quite close before you spot them. But if it’s someone you know, family or friends, you recognise the shape of them and the way they walk long before you can see their face.”

  Finally I caught up with him. “So the scarf would protect the thief from being ID’d by a stranger, but if David wasn’t a stranger to him, he’d need the parka as well. A bulky coat on a hot night would also make him move differently.”

  “Very good,” said Harry, and grinned. “I knew it was a good career move, marrying a writer of detective stories.”

  I don’t write detective stories; I write murder mysteries—but it’s a distinction which Harry, perhaps understandably, doesn’t appreciate.

  After lunch I kissed him, straightened his tie, and thought he’d gone. But a minute later his head popped round the kitchen door again. “And another thing. What was the metallic sound you heard in the yard, and why was our friend still arsing around the scene of the crime five minutes after committing it, with the police already on their way?”

  He really did go then, without waiting for an answer. I don’t think he expected an answer; he just wanted me to worry about it as well.

  Chapter Five

  I didn’t know what to do with myself. Incredibly, mixed up with the grief and tragedy was a sense of anticlimax. I had no place in this, no role. Fate had put me into the middle of it as if she’d had something in mind, but nothing I had seen, or heard, or done, justified my place in the dramatis personae. Even my skills as a doctor had not been required. I telephoned the police. That was a Second Grave-digger part if ever there was one.

  I pottered round the garden for ten minutes, didn’t do any weeding, didn’t cut any grass, felt a growing urge to lop the tops off the snapdragons with the sweep of a bamboo cane, and decided to go for a walk instead. Inevitably my feet turned up the hill towards Foxford.

  I had, of course, seen the man who shot my friend. But the brief sighting in the gathering dusk had been of so little help that it hardly seemed worth including in the plot at all. Even David, sprawled on his carpet with a hole in him, had seen more than I had—a height, a build, and scarf, and that improbable parka. I had seen nothing—a hurrying figure, possibly carrying a rifle, melting into the shadow of a hedge.

  I hadn’t even seen something that I should have seen. Unless it was about something nastier still, this was about a robbery, the theft of a valuable painting. Herring didn’t work in miniature: you could spend a night under most of his canvases, hold a wedding reception under a few. The man I had seen had not been carrying Gilgamesh, at least not in its frame. You can always cut a canvas out and roll it up—though such treatment rarely enhances the value of an old and possibly flaky painting—in which case he might conceivably have stuffed it inside his parka. But if he had, why hadn’t Harry found the frame? Nobody takes time and trouble hiding something they’re not actually g
oing to steal.

  And what took him so long? A whizz round with a Stanley knife would have released Gilgamesh from its wood and plaster stall in about the time it takes to write it. Even on foot, the thief could have been well away from Foxford by the time we discovered David and the theft. Why on earth was he still there so long afterwards?

  Walking slowly up The Brink, head down, almost unaware of my surroundings, I began to disentangle the entrails of two possible explanations. They were, of course, pure speculation; but if you know how a thing could have been done, you’re well on the way to knowing how it was done.

  If there had been not one thief but two, it might have been the job of the one with the gun to cover for the one with the painting while the latter removed that large and probably delicate item at a speed and in a manner consistent with its safety. It was the one with the gun I saw, the more mobile of the two, drawing any pursuit while his mate made unhindered for their vehicle. They must have had a vehicle waiting—a van or at least a hatchback, because you’d have trouble fitting that painting into an ordinary saloon, and however strange or ordinary their attire, they were bound to attract attention carrying a picture the size of a coffee table through the rural byways of The Brink as the sun set over Foxford Wood.

  The other possibility was that Gilgamesh never left Foxford, was there even now, wrapped in tarpaulin and stuffed down a well or into a hayrick until such time as it was safe for the thief to return, under cover of darkness or some plausible pretext, to effect its removal and profitable disposal.

  I liked that. It was how I’d have written it. It explained the delay before the thief made his get-away, and left him unencumbered to run off into the sunset, shed his parka and scarf, and face the prospect of a police roadblock with equanimity.

  The rifle posed me a problem. With the painting hidden, it was the only evidence linking him to the crime; the sensible thing would have been for him to hide the rifle with the painting, severing that link and freeing him from any suspicion at least until he was ready to go back for them. He shouldn’t have taken the gun away with him unless it could be traced to him, and nobody commits armed robbery with a weapon registered in his own name. Yet I had seen him running away, and by then, he had got rid of Gilgamesh but he still had the gun. Wasn’t that what I’d seen?

  The answer was, of course, that I couldn’t be entirely certain of what I’d seen. I had taken it for a gun he was carrying, but I could have been mistaken. I was back in the role of Second Grave-digger.

  But I would ask Harry how thoroughly they had searched the yard and environs. Obviously they would have searched—for evidence, for footprints, cigarette butts, or—since in Harry’s words, you never know your luck—a carelessly dropped library ticket. They would have looked for signs of a waiting car, or the snag of wool on an overhanging branch hand-plucked from a particular Jacob’s sheep and turned into just three Fair Isle pullovers sold on South Ronaldsay in the summer in 1986. They would not necessarily have been looking for a hiding place capable of accommodating something four feet long, three feet high, and just four inches thick.

  I was still trying, like a trainee juggler, to keep robber, gun, and painting in the air when the clash of iron on the road too close behind brought me jerking from my contemplation and diving for the hedge. I will never understand the countryman’s cavalier acceptance of roads without pavements.

  The laughter which greeted this performance was not altogether unkind, but not wholly sympathetic either. I looked up, nervous-ness giving way to embarrassment, followed by the automatic reflex of anger, and Sally Fane was grinning down at me from the top of a bright ginger horse hardly, if at all, smaller than St. Paul’s.

  “Blackberrying?”

  I cranked up a withering glare, gave it her full in the kneecap. “Have you got a licence for that thing?”

  “Are you coming in?” We were at the gates of Foxford. I’d walked half a mile with my head down and my eyes turned on the events of last night. By scrambling over our fuchsia hedge I could have been here in half the time: the rolling English drunkard certainly made the roads on The Brink. “Ellen’s away back to the hospital, but I’d quite like to have a doctor handy when I get back on the big bay bastard.”

  She was joking, mostly anyway, but I’d nothing better to do. “Yes, sure. How long is it since you rode him?”

  She thought back. “It must be four years. He’s eight now, and he was rising five before we sold him. He was that age before we could have sold him to anyone but the meat man.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a lunatic. He has all the ability in the world—never mind going to the World Championships, he’s good enough to win them—but he’s an absolute raving loony. I doubt there are half a dozen riders in Europe who could have tapped into his talent the way David has. It’ll be a real tragedy if they can’t go.”

  I looked at her and shook my head. “David isn’t going to be riding Pony Club games this autumn. Longer term than that, I just don’t know.”

  We walked a way in silence, particularly when the crunch of my feet and Pasha’s on the gravel drive was muffled by the occasional cushion of weeds. Then I said, “If David can’t go, who’ll go in his place?”

  Sally looked sharply at me, then shrugged. “It doesn’t really work like that. At this point there are still a lot more hopefuls than there are places. Some will weed themselves out over the next couple of months, with loss of form and soundness problems. The four team and two individual places won’t be decided until after the final training session, so you really couldn’t say who’ll take whose place. There are too many variables.”

  That little whistle and crunch was a theory biting the dust.

  Sally put her horse in an empty box and swung the tack off him. “Poor Pasha. The extent of his training over the next couple of weeks is going to be hacking over from Standings twice a day.”

  “How long does it take you?”

  “Twenty minutes. The main reason I went home for my lunch was to give him another outing. It’s a good job he’s an old hand; you couldn’t keep a young eventer ticking over on eighty minutes’ roads and tracks a day.”

  “Roads and tracks? I’d have thought you’d come across country.”

  She shot me a sharp look. “You may not have noticed, but there’s a damn great wood in the way.”

  “They don’t let little things like that stop them at Badminton.”

  She grinned. She didn’t have a great sense of humour, and it had taken until now for her to realise I was teasing her. “No. Well, they have certain advantages at Badminton. Like enough space to ride between the trees, and room under them for something bigger than a Shetland pony, and turf under foot instead of old snaggled roots and bedsteads, and to get into and out of Huntsman’s Close, you jump properly made fences, not thirty years’accumulation of barbed wire, and—”

  “There wouldn’t be the same risk of tripping over a courting couple either.”

  Sally thought for a moment. “They’d make an interesting jump,” she said then. “You could stick a red flag at the head end and a white flag at the feet end, and call it Lovers’Leap.”

  We chuckled, and the groom Karen led out Gilgamesh.

  He was as high as a house. The afternoon sun glinted off a hide like polished bronze, a rich darkness with blood and mahogany in its depths. His mane and tail flowed like black silk and tossed like a wild night sea. Chiselled ears raked the sky. From their lofty vantage, eyes as cold and hard and brilliant as obsidian scanned imperiously across distances we could not comprehend. Limbs as strong and improbably slender as steel cables fell plumb-straight from great bunching muscles that played constantly under the skin and sent ripples of sunshine shimmering across his coat.

  When the far distance ceased to occupy him, he turned the tapered head on its long flexible neck my way and condescended to give me a look. But it wasn’t a look of recognition, or curiosity, or just plain interest. It has been called the look of eagles
, but it was the sort of look an eagle only gives his lunch. A horse’s nose is two feet long and an excellent thing for looking down.

  I whispered, “Jesus,” reverently.

  “Jesus nothing,” said Sally, “he thinks he’s God. And I’ve got to get on him and tell him he’s rushing his transitions.”

  Karen the groom, her eyes fixed firmly on the toes of her boots, murmured, “David says he gets further by asking him than by telling him.” She’d been with David as long as I’d known him, and we’d nodded a greeting numerous times, but it was the first time I’d heard her speak. She was barely out of her teens.

  Sally looked at her rather as the horse had looked at me. “Do you want to ride him?”

  Karen looked up then. “Yes. But I’m not good enough.” It was an honest answer, and it must have cost her something to give it, and I admired her for it.

  “Well I am.” Sally swung herself up into the saddle, wheeled the horse deliberately and trotted him up the alley to the top yard. After a moment, I followed her round the byre to the sand school.

  I had expected—let’s be honest here, I had hoped for—fireworks. Eventing is one of those sports, like motor-racing, skiing, and dinghy-sailing, where the chief interest for the spectator lies in things going wrong. All those people clustered knee-deep in mud round the lake at Badminton aren’t jostling for the best possible view of people jumping it right. They’ve gathered like vultures for the prospect of distinguished and occasionally royal personages nosediving into two feet of cold water and pondweed. And it was in much the same spirit that I followed Sally Fane and the big bay bastard round to the school.

  And I was disappointed, because (a) there aren’t a lot of lakes in the average sand school and (b) they weren’t jumping anyway. Mostly they were trotting: forwards, sideways, in straight lines, on circles, even on the spot. I could tell that she was doing different things with him within that one pace and that some of them he accepted and some he fought until his frustration flew in foam from his bit and high kicks from his silver heels; but still it lacked the sheer élan of people diving fully clothed into a lake and horses diving in after them.