Perhaps through needing to solve at least one murder while reviled for not catching his rapist, Wyfold put his best muscle into the search. It took him two weeks only to find Shane, who was arrested on leaving a pub in the racing village of Malton, Yorkshire, where he had been heard boasting several times about secret exploits of undisclosed daring.
Wyfold told Oliver, who telephoned me in the office, to which I’d returned via a newly installed wheel-chair ramp up the front steps.
‘He called himself Dean,’ Oliver said. ‘Dean Williams. It seems the police are transferring him from Yorkshire back here to Hertfordshire, and Wyfold wants you to come to his police headquarters to identify Shane as the man called Jason at Calder’s yard.’
I said I would.
I didn’t say that with honesty I couldn’t.
‘Tomorrow,’ Oliver added. ‘They’re in a hurry because of holding him without a good enough charge, or something.’
‘I’ll be there.’
I went in a chauffeur-driven hired car, a luxury I seemed to have spent half my salary on since leaving Oliver’s house.
I was living nearer the office than usual with a friend whose flat was in a block with a lift, not up stairs like my own. The pains in my immobile joints refused obstinately to depart, but owing to a further gift from Pen (via Gordon) were forgettable most of the time. A new pattern of ‘normal’ life had evolved, and all I dearly wanted was a bath.
I arrived at Wyfold’s police station at the same time as Oliver, and together we were shown into an office, Oliver pushing me as if born to it. Two months minimum, they’d warned me to expect of life on wheels. Even if my shoulder would be mended before then, it wouldn’t stand my weight on crutches. Patience, I’d been told. Be patient. My ankle had been in bits and they’d restored it like a jig-saw puzzle and I couldn’t expect miracles, they’d said.
Wyfold arrived, shook hands briskly (an advance) and said that this was not a normal identity parade, as of course Oliver knew Shane very well, and I obviously knew him also, because of Ricky Barnet.
‘Just call him Jason,’ Wyfold told me, ‘If you are sure he’s the same man you saw at Calder Jackson’s.’
We left the office and went along a fiercely-lit institutional corridor to a large interview room which contained a table, three chairs, a uniformed policeman standing... and Shane, sitting down.
He looked cocky, not cowed.
When he saw Oliver he tilted his head almost jauntily, showing not shame but pride, not apology but a sneer. On me he looked with only a flickering glance, neither knowing me from our two very brief meetings nor reckoning on trouble from my direction.
Wyfold raised his eyebrows at me to indicate the need for action.
‘Hello, Jason,’ I said.
His head snapped round immediately and this time he gave me a full stare.
‘I met you at Calder Jackson’s yard,’ I said.
‘You never did.’
Although I hadn’t expected it, I remembered him clearly. ‘You were giving sun-lamp treatment to a horse and Calder Jackson told you to put on your sunglasses.’
He made no more effort to deny it. ‘What of it, then?’ he said.
‘Conclusive evidence of your link with the place, I should think,’ I said.
Oliver, seeming as much outraged by Shane’s lack of contrition as by his sins, turned with force to Wyfold and in half-controlled bitterness said, ‘Now prove he killed my daughter.’
‘What!’
Shane had risen in panic to his feet, knocking his chair over behind him and losing in an instant the smart-alec assurance. ‘I never did,’ he said.
We all watched him with interest, and his gaze travelled fast from one face to another, seeing only assessment and disbelief and nowhere admiration.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, his voice hoarse and rising. ‘I didn’t. Straight up, I didn’t. It was him. He did it.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Calder. Mr Jackson. He did it. It was him, not me.’ He looked across us all again with desperation. ‘Look, I’m telling you the truth, straight up I am. I never killed her, it was him.’
Wyfold began telling him in a flat voice that he had a right to remain silent and that anything he said might be written down and used in evidence, but Shane wasn’t clever and fright had too firm a hold. His fantasy world had vanished in the face of unimaginable reality, and I found myself believing every word he said.
‘We didn’t know she was there, see. She heard us talking, but we didn’t know. And when I carried the stuff back to the hostel he saw her moving so he hit her. I didn’t see him do it, I didn’t, but when I went back there he was with Ginnie on the ground and I said she was the boss’s daughter, which he didn’t even know, see, but he said all the worse if she was the boss’s daughter because she must have been standing there in the shadow listening and she would have gone straight off and told everybody.’
The words, explanations, excuses came tumbling out in self-righteous urgency and Wyfold thankfully showed no signs of regulating the flow into the careful officialese of a formal statement. The uniformed policeman, now sitting behind Shane, was writing at speed in a notebook, recording, I imagined, the gist.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Wyfold said impatiently. ‘What did he hit her with?’
Shane redoubled his efforts to convince, and from then on I admired Wyfold’s slyly effective interrogatory technique.
‘With a fire extinguisher,’ Shane said. ‘He kept it in his car, see, and he had it in his hand. He was real fussy about fire always. Would never let anyone smoke anywhere near the stables. That Nigel...’ the sneer came back temporarily,’... the lads all smoked in the feed room, I ask you, behind his back. He’d no idea what went on.’
‘Fire extinguisher...’ Wyfold spoke doubtfully, shaking his head.
‘Yeah, it was. It was. One of them red things about this long.’ Shane anxiously held up his hands about fifteen inches apart. ‘With the nozzle, sort of, at the top. He was holding it by that, sort of swinging it. Ginnie was lying flat on the ground, face down, like, and I said, “What have you gone and done?” and he said she’d been listening.’
Wyfold sniffed.
‘It was like that, straight up,’ Shane said urgently.
‘Listening to what?’
‘We were talking about the stuff, see.’
‘The shampoo...’
‘Yeah.’ He seemed only briefly to feel the slightest alarm at the mention of it. ‘I told him, see, that the stuff had really worked because there’d been a foal born that morning with half a leg, that Nigel he tried to hush it up but by afternoon he was half cut and he told one of the lads so we all knew. So I told Mr Jackson and he said great, because it was time we’d heard, and there hadn’t been a murmur in the papers and he was getting worried he hadn’t got the dose right, or something. So anyway when I told him about the foal with half a leg he laughed, see, he was so pleased, and he said this was probably the last lot I’d have to do, just do the six bottles he’d brought, and then scarper.’
Oliver looked very pale, with sweat along his hair-line and whitely clenched fists. His mouth was rigidly closed with the effort of self control, and he listened throughout without once interrupting or cursing.
‘I took the six bottles off to the hostel but when I got there I’d only got five, so I went back to look for the one I’d dropped, but I forgot it, see, when I saw him standing there over Ginnie and him saying she’d heard us talking, and then he said for me to come with him down to the village in his car and he’d drop me at a pub where the other lads were, so as I couldn’t have been back home killing the boss’s daughter, see? I remembered about the bottle I’d dropped when we were on our way to the village but I didn’t think he’d be best pleased and anyway I reckoned I’d find it all right when I went back, but I never did. I didn’t think it would matter much, because no one would know what it was for, it was just dog shampoo, and anyway I reckoned I’d skip using the new bottles after all because of the fuss there would be over Ginnie. But if it hadn’t been for that bottle I wouldn’t have gone out again at all, see, and I wouldn’t know it was him that killed her, and it wasn’t me, it wasn’t.’