by Jo Bannister
I said, a little too brightly, “David’s a lot better now. He’s walking—just a little and on crutches, but walking. He’s going to make a pretty good recovery.”
“Fine,” she said negligently. She couldn’t have cared less.
I was in no position to issue threats, but her attitude nettled me. “So it would be pretty bloody silly,” I said with some asperity, “to do something now that would get you in more trouble with the law. Wouldn’t it?”
She smiled slowly, a smile of pure malice, a psychopath’s smile if ever I saw one. Premonition shook me to my soles. “Are you afraid of me?” she asked.
There was no room for manoeuvre. It was a straight choice between telling the truth and lying. So I lied. “No.”
The smile went impish round the corners. Few things are more chilling than coyness in the violently insane. Because no matter what I had told Ellen, it was insanity to come back now, to turn her hand to what I could only presume was revenge, when she should have been half a continent away and still running or else talking to the best lawyer she could afford. It was crazy to be here, sitting on the horse of the man she had shot, in his own back yard, plotting revenge against the wife of the senior detective in the case and coyly smiling.
“Oh yes you are,” she said, “You’re sweating. I can see you sweating. It’s a hot day, but not that hot. You’re not bothered by my horse, are you?”
“Gilgamesh is not your horse.”
I suppose I could have sketched a rough target on my shirt, front and back, with the legend “Please shoot here,” but reminding Sally Fane that the big bay bastard was not her horse but David Aston’s was a reasonable alternative. I saw the smile die on her lips. Her negligent, indolent gaze hardened again. The iron rang in her voice.
“Every way that matters he’s my horse. I bred him—chose the stallion for our old mare Venus, who had a lot of decent foals in her but only one great one. I was with her the night he was born. I taught him everything from haltering to half-pass.”
“And then you sold him to David.”
“I did not sell him!” It was as if I’d accused her of selling a baby. Plain anger and something like grief supplanted the spite in her voice. The four-year-old wound still ached. “My dad sold him. He made me choose—between him and Pasha. He wouldn’t foot the bills for both of them. And Pasha was winning for me then, and Gilgamesh was only promising to. All he needed was a bit of time to come right, but the old sod wouldn’t give me any. So I kept Pasha. You need a horse on the day in this game. A nearly horse can’t take you the places you have to be.”
“All right, it was a tough break. But David only bought the horse, he didn’t make you sell him.”
“He knew what that horse meant to me! He knew I wanted to ride him. I was glad enough when David took him. I thought—” She stopped abruptly, the sentence unfinished.
So Harry’s shot in the dark had been close enough. “You thought you’d be coming to Foxford with him.”
“No!” I think she was a little shocked at how much she’d given away in her anger. “I mean, there was never anything official—an engagement, anything like that. It was just—Well, both our fathers wanted it. I thought David wanted it: he was always up at our place or dragging me over here. I just kind of assumed that sometime we’d probably do something about it.”
“You didn’t so much sell the horse as lend-lease him.”
But instead David had married Ellen and kicked Sally’s expectations out from under her. She might have forgiven him that and settled for friendship and a future like more of the past if he hadn’t kept her horse. That hadn’t been the deal she agreed to. The arrangement existed only in her head, but she held David guilty of breaking it. The World Championships had been why she acted as she did this season rather than next, but the tragedy had been stalking him, waiting for a time and a place to happen. She was always going to reclaim her horse and pay David back for welching on the contract with her that he didn’t know he’d entered into.
Now she was back, and standing between me and safety. I believed she could do anything to someone she blamed for her difficulties, and do it, moreover, without any compunction.
I took a deep breath and said reasonably, “Sally, I’ll have to go now; Harry’s waiting for me.” I think I kept the fear out of my voice.
“Superintendent Harry bloody Marsh,” she spat with an access of hatred that surprised me even after what had gone before, “is behind his bloody little desk in his bloody little office and has no idea that his bloody little wife is trying to talk her way out of a tight spot with a homicidal maniac.”
I said, “You’re not a maniac, Sally,” with as much quiet confidence as I could muster.
“No,” she agreed. Her voice had dropped back to a tone of near normality, but there was still a glitter in her eye. “I am homicidal though.”
She nudged the horse towards me. The broad chest in its gleaming conker-coloured hide came at me a step at a time, filling my sight like a wall. The long face, with its lofty, imperious eyes, hung over my head like a sentence, the warm breath stirring my hair. The vast, hard hooves were inches from my moccasins. I stepped back. And again and again.
I moved cautiously to one side. If I could see past the horse, perhaps I could run past him. He would hardly get turned in the narrow alley between the buildings; Sally would have to ride him into the lower yard and turn there. If it gave me only a few seconds’ head start, it might be enough to find a refuge where he could not follow. I had no wish to meet Sally Fane, young and strong and unbalanced, in any kind of combat, but if the choice was between that and facing up to her on the horse, it was no contest.
But she saw my purpose and the great, quiet, dangerous horse shadowed me, pushing me down the alley with his shoulder. The precision and delicacy with which his rider controlled his movements was remarkable but, to me at that time, something less than a delight. I had to get past him, because if Sally wanted me in the lower yard, it had to be in my interests to avoid going there. But my options were limited. The horse was too big to shoulder aside. I might conceivably dodge from his front to his rear end so quickly that he couldn’t follow, but then I’d have to squeeze between the wall and his lightning heels. John Wayne might have tried diving under his belly, and if the Duke could fit, then certainly I could. But Warner Brothers horses were probably more used to such liberties and less likely to dance the Duke to a bloody pulp than Gilgamesh was if I tried it.
I had to do something, and I had to do it before the fear that was rising inside me flooded over, gumming up my working parts and rendering me incapable of any action. I spun a mental coin and it came up tails, so I tried it. I feinted to one side, and as the head and shoulders swung to close the gap, I lurched the other way to race up the flank and past the rear end and up the yard and past the house and God knows where after that.
I hadn’t realised she had the same sort of control over the horse’s quarters as she had over his front. Instead of following my move with his head, Gilgamesh kept turning away from me, so that his rump moved over to the wall, closing the gap like a cork in a bottle. I couldn’t adjust to this new situation quickly enough; I ran into the powerful haunch while it was still turning, and the force locked up in that smooth muscularity not only stopped me in my tracks but slammed me back down the alley like a first service from Ivan Lendl.
I lost my footing and rolled in the dust. When I worked out which way was up and followed it with my eyes, I found the big, dark bulk standing over me and Sally Fane watching me with something akin to pleasure.
I spat the stable taste out of my mouth and climbed to my feet, watching her in return. My breath was coming fast—I could hear it in my sinuses like a tube train whistling through Green Park—but a tiny, detached part of me noted with interest and approval that resentment was fueling the adrenalin supply and the fear was turning at least partially to anger. I was forty-one years old, a married woman, and a professional in two disciplines, and ab
solutely nobody had the right to roll me in the dirt like a grubby schoolboy!
Except to me, it hardly mattered what I said. But I wanted her to know that if terror was what she craved, she’d have to get her satisfaction elsewhere. I was no longer afraid of her in that way. I was not, of course, unaware of what she and this brute of a horse could do to me, but that was different. Fearing what an enemy may do is only human; it’s fearing the enemy which paves the road to cowardice. I didn’t want to be hurt, but even less did I want to feel myself a coward before her.
I said gruffly, “Make the most of it. Where you’re going the only horses wear uniform, blow whistles at slopping-out time, and you address them as Ma’am.” As an assessment of the British penal system in the 1980s, perhaps it lacked sophistication, but it worked for me.
Sally seemed undismayed. I had expected her to strike at me or run me down, but she only smiled quite gently, as if I were a dim child who had once again confused the functions of its mouth and its ear when faced with a spoonful of porridge. “Prison? Oh, I’m not going to prison, Clio,” she said, as if that was that.
“You think you’ll get a secure hospital? Well, try for it by all means, though I imagine the security’s much the same and the food worse. Maybe the horses wear white starched caps, but any way you look at it, Sally, you have a great future behind you.”
“Nobody’s locking me up. I’d rather be dead.”
“Yes, OK.”
She laughed aloud at that, a rich peal of laughter that momentarily filled the yard, echoing between the byre and the stables and the brick back wall. Then the good humour drained out of her as swiftly and completely as if a plug had been pulled. Her eyes hardened and grew cold, her gaze snapping like icicles. The planes of her face set firm, the bone structure prominent beneath. Her voice dropped again to that low, husky register, charged with portent, but now the ambivalence was gone. She made no effort to disguise the hatred she bore me because her clever, comprehensive deception had failed. It showed in the stern, inhuman lines of her face and body, powerful and personal.
Maybe she overestimated my role in her downfall, but not by all that much. I had done my best to discover the identity of David’s assailant and to prove what she had done and how she had done it. If it was true that I couldn’t have completed the chain without Harry’s help, it was equally the case that he might not have begun it without mine. I was in a large measure responsible for Sally’s situation. My own notwithstanding, I could still find it in me to be proud of that.
Fury reverberated in her voice. “Do you think I don’t know? Why you did it—the whole damn pack of you, you and Harry and David and my dad—do you think I don’t know? You’re jealous of me, jealous of what I can do. You couldn’t rest, any of you, until you’d spoiled it for me.
“Other people get the support of their families and friends, but not me: my dad sells my horse from under me, and my best friend buys him to keep me from beating him. Hell, I don’t know why I expected any different. I’ve never had anything in my life that I haven’t worked my guts out for.
“One good season,” she said, the words running out of her like a river in spate, like a bitter tide. “That was all I needed: one good season four years ago, and it would have been me the selectors were after anyway. You’d think my dad could have given me that. You’d think David could have done that much for me: it didn’t have to come to him or me; he could have helped me without being made to. And you! All you had to do was stay out of it. Everything would have worked out, except for you. With Gilgamesh I’d have made the team, and after that, I’d never have been short of a good horse again. You couldn’t bear that, could you—you petty, jealous, little people!”
Listening to her, knowing nothing about the background, you could have believed her. You could have heard in the grief and the anger of her voice the authentic ring of martyrdom and believed that, for reasons best known to ourselves, her father and her neighbours had conspired at her downfall. It was undoubtedly how she saw it, which was itself graphic testimony to the disturbance of her mind and emotions. She was not only irrational; she was almost beyond reach of reason.
Her voice sank back to a chilly whisper and her eyes crackled with ice. “I’m going to make you sorry you ever got involved. I’m going to make you sorry you came here.”
My heart sank too. The posturing was over, the fencing and feinting, the game of cat and mouse. She was ready to do what she had come back for. “I’m going to make you sorry you ever heard of Foxford, or David Aston, or sweet, silly Ellen. I’m going to make you sorry—”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. I don’t know where that note of gruff, sardonic humour came from, but I was glad to hear it. “You’re going to make me sorry I was ever born.” But even as I said it, I knew I was spitting in the wind. The threat might lack originality, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t carry it out. Clichés get to be clichés by conveying some very specific meaning very accurately. I’d seen enough suffering in my time to know just how powerfully one could crave non-existence.
“Do you think it’s a joke? You have shattered my dreams and ruined my future, and you think it’s a joke? Damn you!” she cried, and all the emotion, all the hatred and rage and frustration banked up behind the wall of ice and words finally broke through. The force of it shook her shoulders where she loomed above me. “I had it all worked out! I was so careful. I was even careful not to hurt David more than I had to. If you hadn’t interfered, it would all have worked out. After I’d ridden the horse in the World Championships, there’d be no way he could have taken him back, he’d have had to offer me some kind of partnership. It would have been OK, it would have been good—him training and me riding. We’d have been a good team.”
“You shot him!”
“It was nobody’s business but ours!” I swear she believed it: that there was nothing fundamentally antisocial about wounding with intent between consenting adults in private. “We’d have worked it out if we’d been left to. But you had to stick your oar in, didn’t you? You had to get to the bottom of it. I can understand the police—at least they’re paid to be a bloody nuisance—but who the hell asked you to stick your nose in? I mean, what is it with you? Two careers aren’t enough; you want to be a detective as well?”
“Call me eccentric if you like,” I growled, still backing before the advancing horse. We were in the middle of the yard now, with space all round us. Any time I was going to have to try it again, but even as I steeled myself, I knew that the attempt would be futile. I could not move as fast as Gilgamesh. “But I happen to consider a world worth striving for in which people don’t cripple old friends for standing between them and something they want.”
“Friend?” she spat. “What kind of a friend was he to me? He took my horse!”
“And wouldn’t take you.” I saw lightning flash in the thunder-heads of her eyes, and as I had known she would, she came at me. The great bulk of the horse launched at me from the clap of her heels. But instead of falling back I shot out sideways, escaping the piston hooves by inches and the surging brown shoulder not at all, for I felt the hard concert of bone and muscle through my shirt thrusting me aside. I used its impetus to help me on my way as I fled.
Having them behind me as I ran was almost worse than facing them. I heard the wild hollow clatter as the horse spun round; then he was thunder on my trail. It took an effort of will almost greater than I was capable of not to look round, to concentrate every physical and intellectual energy on escape.
I managed it, just, though the thunder in my head was even louder than the beat of my own heart and the rush of my breathing, but still it wasn’t enough. After a dozen strides of mine, perhaps three of his, Gilgamesh ran me down like a train and the world slipped beyond my grasp or ken.
Chapter Four
I woke drowning. The shock of the cold water hitting me made me throw out arms and legs that collided bruisingly with the solid walls on both sides. I gasped air through the water I
had inhaled in great shuddering gulps that were little different to sobs in either sound or import. I had just enough self-awareness to be sorry about that.
For a moment I thought I couldn’t see, and a fast-forward of possibilities—detached retinae, brain damage—ripped through my mind before I realised that the least frightful explanation was also the most likely. While I was unconscious, she had dragged me off the yard into a dark place.
I took time—possibly quite a lot of time; I wasn’t yet working at optimum efficiency—to explore the idea and decided that was the way of it: I was huddled in a corner on a hard gritty floor currently awash with the minor flood that had woken me, in a place that was dark but not black, thanks to a short vertical slit of light entering on one side. I was in one of the stables, and the light was squeezing through where the bottom door was not quite closed. The top door was shut fast.
My first thought was that she had sluiced me and left. Actually she had sluiced me and stayed to watch the results. As my eyes learned to focus in the dim stable, they found her standing beside the door, just clear of the slit of light, the black rubber bucket swinging lightly in her hand. It must have been as near as damn it full, and she hadn’t so much poured it over me as thrown it at me. I could still feel the echo of its impact like a bruise in my chest and a sharp slap in my face.
When she saw my groping senses had found her, she chuckled softly in the half-dark. “Back in the land of the living, Clio? For the moment, at least.”
It was a threat, of course, but I wasn’t up to subtlety yet. I grunted with the effort to get a knee under me and rise. My whole body felt it had been trampled by a schoolgirl hockey XI. My head swam and I braced myself with a hand either side of me where the walls made the corner. The tutors at Quick Wit & Ready Repartee would have been proud of me. “Bugger off,” I said weakly.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I shall. In just a minute now. By the time they find you, I’ll be long gone, where that snoopy husband of yours is never going to follow. But before I go, because I know Harry’ll want to know and there might be enough of you left to tell him, I’m going to tell you where I’ve been. You know, all those weeks when policemen were leaping out from behind hoardings on every road from Skipley to the coast? When I was the favourite pin-up at passport control at every port and airport in the land, and the TV news kept showing the same clip of Harry saying, ‘Of course, it’s only a matter of time’?
