by Jo Bannister
“Well I’ll tell you, Clio, I was at home. Not the first week. The first week I stayed in Birmingham while Harry and the Keystone Kops crawled over Standings with their magnifying glasses and interrogated my dad in the full glare of the study reading-lamp. But after they’d gone, I slipped home and I’ve been there ever since, sleeping in my own bed, watching telly, waiting for all the fuss to die down. A couple of times I had to dive for the attic, when one of Harry’s little friends came calling, but they never really expected to find me there, so they never really looked. Somebody ought to do something about the sheer lack of imagination in the British police force.”
It was probably a valid criticism, but not coming from her. Establishing the link between Sally Fane and the shooting of David Aston had been a triumph of the imagination.
“Then there was the gun,” she said. “Anyone with a jot of imagination would have looked back the crime reports and noticed that a .240 deer rifle was among the items stolen from Standings back in January. I took a little bit of a risk with that, but what the hell, if Harry had by some miracle put two and two together and realised it was my gun, he had a report of it being stolen four months earlier. Nothing it did after that could be pinned at my door.”
“Four months. Is that how long you were planning it?”
“About that. Though to be fair, I didn’t plan the burglary. I didn’t even lie about the gun being stolen. But a couple of days later I found it lying in a ditch—I suppose they must have dropped it; maybe they thought someone was onto them and didn’t want to be caught with a gun—and I just never reported that I had it back. Having the rifle in those circumstances made the thing possible. I suppose that was when wishful thinking started hardening into a proper plan.”
She was boasting about it. I wasn’t wringing it out of her; I wasn’t even prompting her. She wanted to talk about it, to tell someone how clever she’d been. She wanted to be appreciated. If she couldn’t have public acclaim as a rider, she’d have it as a criminal. But it worried me how much she was talking. She’d delayed her escape because it would be easier after the hue and cry had died down. If she was ready to go now, the last thing she needed was me staggering to the nearest telephone before she had five miles under her belt. She wouldn’t be talking like this if there was any danger of that. She didn’t intend to leave me in any state to stagger to a phone.
She had lured me here quite deliberately, had clearly thought the implications through. She was talking to me so that I could talk to Harry, but she didn’t intend me to talk to him immediately or in the near future. She wanted first to be where he couldn’t follow. She had money. A private plane could take her to Ireland, and from Shannon she could go anywhere in the world. Six hours would do; twelve would do better. She meant me to be incommunicado for several hours at the least.
She had dragged me into a stable. Stable doors fasten on the outside, with fittings capable of containing half a ton of temperamental animal power. I wouldn’t break my way out in six hours, or twelve hours either. But I was bound to be found before that. When Ellen came home, I’d hear her car and she’d hear me yelling. If Harry came home first, he’d find my note and follow me up here. It might be an hour or two, but surely no more than that before I set the police on her trail.
If I was in any state to talk.
When she saw I had got there, she smiled. “I wondered what to do about you. I very much wanted to have this chat before I left, but I didn’t want to risk it rebounding on me. What I needed was someone to watch over you while I got on my way. I couldn’t ask my dad. He’s been very strange about the whole business: all the time I’ve been at home he’s been pretending I wasn’t. Anyway, I don’t want to get him into more trouble. Then I thought of someone who couldn’t be held legally responsible, even if he broke every bone in your body; someone who’s lost as much by your interference as I have. That’s why I brought you here. This is his house.”
She stepped back swiftly through the open door and latched it behind her. The darkness in the stable deepened. Even before I heard movement in the adjacent box, I knew what to expect. I just didn’t know what it would be like.
When she came back, she opened both upper and lower doors, but any hope of escape was blocked once more by an enormous bulk of brown horse.
Sally was grinning. “I can only tell you two things about Gilgamesh that might help you pass the next few hours more comfortably. One, he doesn’t like noise. And two, he doesn’t like being shut up in the dark.”
And she would, of course, shut us up in the dark together, and as the horse in his fear and anger trampled me, my screams would drive him mad. I felt myself beginning to shake, and it had nothing whatever to do with the baptism I had recently undergone.
I stammered, “Ellen will be back.”
“Of course she will,” agreed Sally, “but not soon. She’s taken David to Clent Hills for a picnic. David thinks it was Ellen’s idea and Ellen thinks it was David’s; both of them think the message came via a nurse at the hospital. They may be a little confused if they find out differently, but what the hell, they’ll be enjoying themselves and they won’t hurry back. I doubt if Ellen will be back here much before midnight. She probably won’t come down to the yard until Gilgamesh gets hungry enough to shout for food. There’s hay in the manger, so he’ll be all right until morning.
“Of course, you’ll have been missed by then, but there’s no reason anyone would look for you here, is there?”
There was, but I was keeping that to myself as if my life depended on it. Quite possibly my life did depend on it. I might go one round, or two, with the big bay bastard, but I wasn’t going to go the distance.
Holding the lead rope in one hand, she made a show of checking the watch on her other wrist. “Good grief, is that the time? Amazing how it flies when you’re enjoying yourself. Listen, Clio, I’ll have to go soon. I have a plane to catch. I’d just like you to know I shall think of you fondly whenever I see a road accident or someone using a pile-driver. I hope you get all you deserve. I hope you go through the rest of your life bent double. My only regret is that I couldn’t get your man Harry as well. Being nursemaid to a crippled wife will have to serve for him.”
With that, she urged the horse forward, stepping deftly back as he passed her and slamming the two doors in rapid and noisy succession, leaving me in near darkness with a big, dangerous animal whose frustration was filling the stable with the hot breath from his cracking nostrils.
I kept very still. You wouldn’t believe how still I kept. I breathed through one nostril at a time. I pushed my body so far into the corner that my backside was in danger of becoming wedge-shaped. I hardly knew I was there myself; I was sure the horse didn’t know I was there.
Like hell he didn’t know. He knew exactly where I was, and if he didn’t know exactly who I was, he knew two things about me: that I wasn’t one of his small band of friends and admirers and that I was responsible for him being shut up in this dark and scary stable. No, three things he knew. He could also smell my fear. Damn it, I could smell my fear, even using one nostril at a time.
I stayed where I was, very still, waiting for my eyes and his to adjust to the dark and both our nerves to steady. I wondered if I should say anything to him. Sally said he hated noise, but surely a soft and friendly greeting could do nothing but good?
“Easy, boy; there’s a good lad,” I murmured, soft as butter and friendly as a game-show groupie. My adjusting eyes saw his adjusting eyes flash whitely, his ears clamp flat, and his big rear end swing menacingly in my direction. The clatter of his own hooves on the bare floor sent his head up and down like a nodding Alsatian in the back window of a Renault 5.
The big bay bastard would have you as soon as look at you, Ellen had said. I had hoped she’d exaggerated, but nothing I had seen so far suggested it. I didn’t know if Gilgamesh was genuinely capable of the mayhem Sally claimed, but I had to work on the assumption that he was. I could bear to be proved wrong if she
was only trying to scare me.
Moving only my eyes. I searched the closed box for some way of improving my lot, if only marginally. Apart from my new authority on the product of their digestive systems, almost all I knew about horses was that one end bit and the other kicked. Since I’d never heard much adverse comment on the middle, I decided that was probably the safest place to be; and since the horse seemed to have settled with his head to the door and his eye pressed to the tiny horizontal slit between upper and lower halves, it seemed a good idea to move from my back corner up the side wall to a point midway between teeth and hooves. I took a deep, soft breath and edged forward.
It was a bad move. I saw the big muscles on the dark rump bunch, the strong, absurdly slender legs stiffen, the neck arch downward; then he took one quick, precise step backward and launched a mighty inch-perfect kick that would have knocked me into the middle of next week if the stable wall hadn’t been there to stop me.
Back on the floor in my corner, huddled round the sick hurt in my midriff and fighting for enough breath to cry with, managing only the tears and a sound like whooping cough that threatened to bring him down on me again, I considered stoically the possibility that things could have been worse: the big bay bastard could still have had his iron shoes on. I sniffed in admiration for my own courage, and a mournful tear dripped off the end of my nose.
But the tortured sound of me trying to refill lungs he’d knocked the air out of once didn’t provoke a second attack, so in due course I tried again. I waited until I could breathe quietly, until the spastic shaking of my limbs had died back to a gentle tremble, until my muscles had some strength again and my knees had stopped trying to bend both ways. Then I had another go.
He got me twice this time, once with both hooves in the chest and once with one on the point of my shoulder as I went down. His other hoof missed my head by inches, if that. I felt the wind of its passing in my ear.
For a long time, then, I lay in the gutter at the back of the stable, too hurt to move and anyway too scared to try. For the first time I understood what they had meant—Ellen and Sally and Karen, all treating this big, talented, dangerous horse with infinite caution and respect. He really could kill you. For the first time I realised that Sally’s threats were to be taken absolutely at face value. If help didn’t come soon, he would certainly cripple me. If it didn’t come until a romantic sun had set over Clent Hills, it wouldn’t matter whether it came or not.
He was back at the door, which meant his back end was pointing my way again. He was drinking in that sliver of light and air as greedily as a man thirsting in a desert drinks water, and every few moments his eye flicked back in its socket to check that I was still where he’d put me. It was a vicious look, right enough, but there was fear there too. He was afraid of this creature crawling round where he couldn’t see it in the hateful dark; it was only his nature to react aggressively to things he feared and didn’t know.
It was that which made him what he was, a superlative sportsman. When the urge to win is so powerful that it overrides the fierce instincts of pain and self-preservation, it’s separated from an urge to kill only by a veneer of civilisation so thin that the light shines through. In Gilgamesh the veneer was torn and everybody knew it. It had also worn through in Sally, but no one had realised until it was too late to avoid a tragedy. Neiher of them was wholly responsible for the monsters they had become.
All of which was interesting in a philosophical way but of no immediate help or comfort to me. I had to find some way of surviving the next minutes and hours. We’d been together like this, Gilgamesh and I in the dark intimacy of his stable, for maybe ten minutes, and already I had his footprints all over me. I had been lucky, to the extent that so far there didn’t seem to be anything broken, but you couldn’t expect it to last in the face of that sort of hammering. If he got me in the back, I’d spend the rest of my days in David Aston’s cast-off wheelchair. If he got me in the head, the best I could hope for was that he’d kill me stone-dead.
As long as I stayed absolutely still and absolutely quiet, he seemed content to watch me carefully from those flicking white-rimmed eyes. As long as he didn’t kick me again, I was content to lie there in the gutter, nursing my hurts and listening to the afternoon pass sunnily outside and waiting for someone to come. And hoping they would find us, because with the doors shut fast this stable looked like the other seven and I didn’t dare call out for fear of what I might provoke. My best chance was that the horse might make a noise. Surely to God, he couldn’t blame me for that?
I lay very still and very quiet and waited. The horse stood like a watchful statue at the door and waited too.
Outside someone got tired of waiting and started throwing stones onto the corrugated tin roof.
The horse’s head jerked up as if he’d been shot, his eyes saucering wildly, his nostrils stretched. I had time only to think, “Oh no; oh please God, please Sally, no more,” and then he was away, charging round the box, bouncing off the walls, his flying feet skidding on the corners, all that strength and energy under about as much intelligent control as a runaway train with no one in the cab.
Twice as the legs went from under him his big, angular body cannoned into me where I cringed in the corner. The second time, he regained his feet by thrusting off against my thigh. The edge of his hoof carved a deep gash in the unprotected flesh and I cried out, so he kicked me as well. Another stone landed on the roof and puttered tinkling down the slope to the guttering. The big horse crashed round his stable, almost screaming in his fear.
I began to lose track of what precisely was happening: whether he was running into me, or falling into me, or kicking me, or striking at me with his forefeet. I remember trying once to catch the lead rope that was flailing from his headcollar as he careered past, and he turned for a moment from his flight and reared over me, the hooves pawing way over my head. One of them struck my shoulder again as he came down and the pain was sickening. Such sense as there was in the scene began to fade, leaving a clattering chaos of fear and hurting and livid darkness.
Feeling my consciousness slipping, I did what I could to slump along the back wall, in the gutter, rather than out onto the floor in the path of those wild and crashing hooves.
But I didn’t go out, not quite. I retained enough awareness to know that when the clattering stopped and the stable was suddenly flooded with light, it meant someone had opened the doors and the horse was gone. My first reaction was profound relief. My second was the fear that it was Sally come to finish me off.
The hands that straightened my body and lifted me were bigger than Sally’s and gentle. I looked for a face and found Harry’s, and he looked shocked and anxious and characteristically suspicious, as if I might have locked myself in a stable with a dangerous horse just to annoy him.
“What the hell—” he began, and there was a quiver in his deep voice.
“Oh, put me down,” I said wearily. “It’s all right. I’m all right.”
We walked slowly into the yard. The sun hit me in the eyes. I kept his arm handy to lean on.
“What happened?“
I found a crumpled, unused handkerchief in his jacket pocket and held it over the congealing gash in my leg. “It was Sally.”
His jaw dropped. “Sally Fane was here? When?”
I shook my head to indicate uncertainty. “Five, ten minutes ago? Not much more. She said she had a plane to catch.”
“Jesus Christ!” He set off up the yard, towing me with him. “Come on, we’re breaking in. Ellen will forgive us when she knows why I need her phone.”
But Sally hadn’t been gone ten minutes. She hadn’t gone at all. She’d seen Harry coming up the drive—like me he’d left his car at home—and had ducked out of sight. She couldn’t have expected this, but she was prepared for it: she must have left the rifle handy when she went to catch Gilgamesh.
And as we turned up the alley beside the byre, she was waiting in the upper yard with the gun at her
shoulder. We stopped in our tracks. Harry raised one hand in warning.
“Sally—”
And she shot him in the chest.
Chapter Five
After Bramham, when Gilgamesh and Lucy and the babies were turned out to grass and Pasha returned to Standings, the stables were given a last thorough clean-out and then the implements—the barrow, the brooms, forks, and shovels—were stacked tidily against the wall of the stable block. As Harry clutched at himself with a grunt of surprise and then slowly subsided like a deflating balloon until he was half-sitting, half-lying on the concrete with his back against a stable door, I found myself reacting initially as neither a doctor nor a wife so much as a one-woman resistance army with something precious to defend. I looked round for something to fight with.
I was lucky on two counts. One was that among the heavy stable tools was a long-tined fork with a plastic handle, probably less sturdy for the job it was designed for but infinitely more wieldy for use as a weapon. Right then the chances of it surviving to be passed on to the Astons’heirs and assignees in forty years’time mattered less to me than the fact that, even in my bruised and battered condition, I could wield it without my arms dropping off.
And the other was that when Sally came round the corner after us, she came rifle first.
I swung the fork over my head, with the power of all the fear and fury and hatred within me and no regard for—in fact, no consciousness of—my own hurts, and the thing fell like an axe across the barrel, the steel shoulder hooking behind the gun and wrenching it out of her hands. Her cry was more startled than pained, but I had every hope that I had hurt her. If her finger had been through the trigger-guard, ready to fire again, I could have broken it.
