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Gilgamesh

Page 14

by Jo Bannister


  If it had been my investigation, I’d have told her how far we had got and what we’d got stuck on, and asked for her help. But it wasn’t, and it would have been presumptuous, conceivably even dangerous, to reveal all without checking first with Harry. I settled for a compromise.

  “I will explain fully later. But I need to know now if this horse of Sally’s could be ridden across country, then tied to a hedge and left for ten minutes without him either kicking up a storm or hightailing it for home.”

  “You do, do you?” She looked at me and at the horse. “Ok, then we’d better find out.”

  She put a leather headcollar on the big chestnut and led him out of his box. “The headcollar’s no problem; he could wear that under his bridle. The rope would stuff in your pocket.” We went into the cross-country field. The high hedge that ran up to Foxford Wood was where the brief silhouette I thought was the gunman had disappeared. In the half-light of dusk I could quite easily have overlooked half a ton of horse standing there too.

  We found a convenient branch, and Karen looped the rope round it and tied it deftly. “You stay here now.” For a moment I thought she meant me, but she was talking to the horse. His big eye was kindly and amused.

  We went back to the gate, closed it behind us, and leaned on it. The brick wall of the byre was at our backs, the sand school between us and the house. We could just see the big ginger rump. It didn’t appear to be doing very much. Once it swung round quite gently, as if Pasha had grown bored with the game and decided to wander off, but the pressure of the rope brought him up short and he came to rest again. There was a slight ripple of movement that might have been him venting a patient sigh. After ten minutes we went back and found him waiting exactly as we had left him.

  “There’s always one,” said Karen cheerfully. “Any time you go on record with a statement about what horses will or won’t do, there’s always one ready to make an utter fool of you.” She rubbed the inquisitive big nose with no resentment whatever.

  There had been, while he had waited by this hedge before, a sudden sharp sound from the house, the crack of a rifle fired from inside the French windows of the study. I clapped my hands sharply to simulate it. Karen jumped out of her skin. The horse flicked his ears forward, recognised the sound as more unaccountable human behaviour, and lipped a bit more hawthorn out of the hedge. He was bombproof, unflappable—the exception that proved the rule.

  Karen pulled the rope loose and cast me something of a glare. “What was that good for?”

  “About eight years,” I said, and led the way back to the gate, trying not to give way to the oddly mingled senses of triumph and sorrow that I felt.

  3. Speed and Endurance

  Chapter One

  That afternoon, when Gilgamesh had completed his show-jumping round, Ellen phoned David in the hospital and David phoned me. Bless him, he sounded as thrilled for his horse as if he’d been able to ride him.

  He also sounded a lot stronger than last time I’d spoken to him. “He went clear,” he said. “He” for the horse, I noticed, not “she” for the rider. “Even with the penalties for yesterday’s run-out, he can’t finish below eighth. He might move up a place if someone above him has a cricket-score.”

  “That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

  “It’s bloody marvellous, in all the circumstances.”

  “It all comes down to the trainer, of course,” I said with a grin I wasn’t sure he’d be able to hear.

  “Bloody right it does,” he replied with a beam that was perfectly audible.

  “How are you feeling now?” I hadn’t been at the hospital for nearly a week, although at least twice in that time I had told myself I absolutely had to and the housework could wait. The housework had in fact waited, but I still hadn’t got down to see David, though the hospital was so close you could see it from the more open parts of The Brink. Time wasn’t the problem. The problem was how bad I felt about what had happened that I hadn’t been able to prevent, and now about what I knew that I couldn’t tell him. He’d have to be told, of course, at some point. It would be like a fresh bullet exploding in his flesh.

  For now, thank God, he could hear none of this in my voice, only the question I had asked. “Not bad; not at all bad. I can wiggle my toes now,” he added proudly.

  I knew: Ellen had called at the cottage all excited on the day the news broke. “That’s tremendous, David. Really—you could have been a lot longer with no real motor response. How are you getting on with your physiotherapist?”

  Awe and gloom floated down the wire. “She’s got a moustache and hands like the shovels on a D7. She’s called Sophi. I think she left Greece in disgust when the Colonels turned soft on her.” In view of how many men fall in love, however briefly, with their nurses, it’s odd how few people like their physiotherapists. Even their colleagues tend not to like physiotherapists.

  We chatted a little while longer, about his horses and his physiotherapist and his magnificent ability to wiggle his toes, and about how excruciatingly boring hospital is once you start feeling better. Then somebody come in with his tea and whisked the phone away while we were still shouting goodbyes.

  I was glad of his news, but more than that, I was glad to have heard from him, glad of the growing strength in his voice, the way he was beginning to relate to things beyond the end of his toes. Ellen had been right: whatever kind of a recovery he made, whether he was left with some disability, or none, or confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his days, David Aston lacked aptitude as a cripple. The worst he’d ever be was a man who couldn’t move round too well.

  And I can only assume that it was this sense of good cheer that came from talking to him which blinded me to the absolute certainty that after Ellen had phoned David with the news from Bramham, Sally would phone her dad.

  Which of course was why, when Ellen drove the horsebox into the yard at Foxford at two o’clock the next afternoon to find herself met by Harry and three other police, one of them a WPC, she was alone in the cab with no one to share her amazement.

  I was there because of the effect that Sally’s arrest was bound to have on Ellen; Harry wanted someone to stay with her when he took away the woman who had shot her husband. In the event, we were all pretty shaken and comforting one another.

  Before the box had come to a halt Harry was up on the running board peering through the open window. “Ellen, where’s Sally?”

  “She’s coming on later. Harry, what’s all this about?” Fear supplanted surprise in her face. “David? …”

  “Is fine,” Harry interjected quickly. “Really. It’s not you we were waiting for; it’s Sally. Where is she?”

  “I told you. She’s coming down later with some people she met. Harry, whatever is the matter?”

  Harry took her inside and told her. I gave Karen a hand unloading Gilgamesh—my main contribution was standing on one side of the ramp with the yard brush—then I followed them indoors.

  They were in the kitchen and Harry already had the kettle on. I sat down beside Ellen and took her hand over the scrubbed pine table. “It’s a bastard, isn’t it?”

  Shock had knocked the bottom out of her eyes and her voice. “I don’t believe it.” She didn’t mean that, of course; she meant she didn’t want to believe it, but the difference wasn’t significant.

  I nodded. “We could always be wrong.”

  She really didn’t believe that. “No,” she said slowly. “It fits—doesn’t it?”

  “We think so.”

  Harry said, “These people she said she’d come home with—when did she decide?”

  “Last night. There was a party after the prize-giving. We thought we’d stay the night rather than drive through it. Midway through the evening she came over and said she’d met these people from near Coventry who had a horse they’d like her to ride for them. She said she was going back with them today; she’d give it a try and see if she was interested. She said—” Ellen’s voice caught and she started aga
in, carefully. “She said she’d need a class horse for when David wanted his back.

  “She helped me load the box this morning and that was the last I saw of her. I thought it was a little odd—it’s a long way to travel a horse on your own—but damn it, she’s not a groom. I thought she was helping us out of the goodness of her heart, and I wasn’t about to complain if she wanted to do something about her own future as well. God damn it, Clio”—a rare outburst, this, from a woman who seldom swore—” what would you have done?”

  “Exactly the same.” I meant it. “What else could you do?”

  “So the last time you saw her,” said Harry, “was—what time this morning?”

  “About eight-thirty. I was on the road before nine.”

  “A shade over five hours then.” He sucked his lip. “She could travel a long way in five hours if she knew she had to. Blast Fane—he must have warned her.”

  “Of course he warned her,” I said. “Anyone would. You included.”

  He didn’t answer that, just scowled at me. “Right, I’m going over there.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  He returned forty minutes later even angrier than he had left—with Sally, with her father, mostly with himself. His face was set in hard, square lines and chequered with contrasting blocks of red and white. “She’s been there. At Standings, just a couple of hours ago. While we were here, watching down the road for the horsebox, she was over at Standings quietly packing a suitcase and filling her pockets with cash. She must have got a ride in something rather faster than a horsebox—not all that difficult, I suppose. Damn and blast! I should have anticipated that. At least I should have guarded against it.”

  “Did you see the Colonel?”

  “Oh yes. Poor bloody man’s absolutely shattered, of course. After he’d talked to her on the phone yesterday, he thought she was coming home to clear the mess up, convince us we’d gone off half-cocked again. He still really believed that when she walked in through the front door—that it was some dreadful misunderstanding, that the police had picked up the wrong end of the stick, and stupidity and circumstance had conspired to make a case against her. He didn’t still think so when she left half an hour later with her passport and all the cash and valuables she could carry. But he still didn’t call us, damn him.”

  Of course he didn’t. How could he? “So what did you do—charge him with being an accessory after the fact?”

  He glowered at me. “Don’t be bloody silly.”

  I understood his frustration. An hour ago a radio message to police cars in and around Skipley and on the motorway would have resulted in her arrest. Now that she had had time to change her car and get outside the immediate area of the West Midlands, she would be very much harder to find. I said, “You couldn’t have known.”

  His lip wrinkled, baring his teeth. “I didn’t have to know. I should have guessed. It’s my job. I should have covered the possibility. Damn it, I could have had her picked up at Bramham yesterday, but I thought it could wait. Three out of ten for judgement, Marsh.”

  He stood at the kitchen window, looking out on the empty yard. He had taken his cohorts with him to Standings, but he had not brought them back. They were probably on their way down to Skipley, returning to more profitable labours like finding lost dogs and confiscating catapults, and thanking their lucky stars that it hadn’t been their decision to make and their heads on the platter.

  But it wasn’t the first mistake he had made, it almost certainly wouldn’t be the last, and he’d live it down, even if Sally Fane remained at large. All the same, the repercussions would be milder if he had her in custody before the chief constable got wind of it.

  “Listen, I’d better get back to the station. We’re alerting ferries and airports; I’ve got a picture of her to put on the wire. It’s my bet she’ll head for Ireland: everyone in the horse world has friends in Ireland. But a fair number of them have friends with boats and light planes too, so just how much chance we have of picking her up I don’t know. Still, we’ll start getting feedback soon and questions like Does she have a wooden leg? and Could she be travelling as a plate-spinner with an Italian circus? and if I’m not there to field them the course of interforce relations could be set back ten years. I don’t know if I’ll be home tonight, or indeed at all.”

  I went back to Ellen. It seemed to me this latest revelation had knocked the feet from under her as nothing had since David was shot. It wasn’t surprising. For three weeks she had counted Sally among her closest friends. She had counted herself fortunate to have the friendship of someone who could offer so much help. They had lived under the same roof, shared meals and chores and late-night television, and Ellen had thought herself deeply in Sally Fane’s debt. After the second shooting, she had lived in fear that what had happened to David would also overtake the girl who had offered to take his place, and of the guilt and remorse she would feel then. Learning how much of this had been an illusion and how carefully and deliberately it had been created had come as a real shock.

  After quite a long time and quite a lot of coffee she looked up. “How did she do it?” Not why: why would take even longer to come to terms with and probably more than coffee.

  So I explained as best I could. “She left it as long as she could and still hope to get the selection. If David had laid himself up without help, she’d have offered her services in the same way; if the horse had knocked himself or lost form, that would have been the end of it anyhow. But with them both still on course for the team, she decided to take matters in hand.

  “She was lucky too. She counted on you being home around ten—you don’t go out much in the evenings, do you?—but she didn’t know you were entertaining. She expected to find David working in his study with the window open. That’s what she needed and what he usually did, and because of Mrs. Cooper’s phone call, that’s how it worked out. If Mrs. Cooper hadn’t phoned just then or if Harry had been home in time for dinner, I don’t know what she’d have done. Probably gone home and tried again another night.

  “She had it all planned when she invited the Parkers and the Maudsleys to dinner. She left Pasha tacked up in his stable, with a headcollar under his bridle and a change of clothes and a parka waiting ready for her. Earlier in the day she went up to Foxford Wood and draped a jute rug over the wire fence. She nailed a plank over the wire into your field; she may have done that some time before.

  “She arranged for dinner to be over just before ten so she’d be serving coffee as the sun was going down. After she spilt the stuff over herself, everyone there thought she was upstairs changing; but she changed in the stable and was already galloping up the fields to the wood when Colonel Fane’s news came on. She jumped through the wood, turned along the hedge here, and stopped somewhere short of the gate. She tied Pasha to a branch and left him there. We couldn’t see him from the house—the angle’s wrong—and it was a bit late for anybody to be wandering about the fields. If anyone had seen him, they’d assume he was one of yours anyway.

  “We don’t know yet where she got the gun. But she arrived here with it slung on her back, so it didn’t interfere with her riding, and she worked herself round the front of the house to the study window. She must have passed under the drawing-room window while we were in there, waiting for David to finish with Mrs. Cooper. I suppose the drop from the terrace would give all the cover she needed.

  “David had his back to the window. She walked close up behind him without him hearing her and put a bullet into him. She’s a good shot apparently. I think she placed that bullet quite carefully to end his chance of selection without ending his life or even his career. If she’d intended to kill him or hadn’t cared whether she killed him or not, she’d have been much safer shooting from further away.”

  What else? Oh yes, the painting. “The picture was supposed to be the motive, but she couldn’t risk being caught with it. She took it off the wall and immediately tried to dispose of it. She took the cover off the slurry tank
in the yard—that was the sound we heard—but she had some trouble fitting it through. That’s why she was still there when I came outside to watch for the ambulance. I saw her hurrying towards the hedge; then I lost sight of her in the dusk.

  “She must have seen me too. When she saw me looking at the hatch later, she ran the horse at me to take my mind off it. When I went back again, she tried to kill me. This time I was lucky. If she hadn’t heard Harry’s car coming, I’d be dead.”

  “But—who shot at her?” Ellen’s voice was tiny, her face perplexed. Neither of us was saying Sally’s name as if doing so might conjure her up. It conveyed a subtle impression of awe, if not actual reverence.

  “No one did.” I outlined the quite simple means by which she had managed this vitally convincing deception, and rather reluctantly added the information that it was Harry, not I, who worked it out.

  “Will they get her?”

  “I imagine so. Perhaps not right away.” But it’s difficult enough for someone to disappear for long out of a modern, computerized society when her name and appearance are known to the authorities seeking her. Hightailing it to the Colonies and going native isn’t a reliable means of vanishing in a world dominated by communications. Anyway, it’s hard to travel far without proving who you are. It’s hard to get work or somewhere to live. She might go down and stay down for months, but then she’d come up again and someone would notice. And Harry would hear.

  “It’s so strange,” said Ellen, shuddering. “I can’t get used to the game having changed ends. I keep starting a thought on the basis that she’s a friend who’s helping us out and then having to stop and change it all round because it’s not true; what happened to us was not only her doing but her choice, quite deliberate and calculating. I still don’t understand it. Is she mad?”

 

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