He came to what appeared in his own mind to be a halt, but as far as Wyfold, Oliver and myself were concerned he had stopped short of enough.
‘Are you saying,’ Wyfold said, ‘That you walked back from the village with the other grooms, knowing what you would find?’
‘Well, yeah. Only Dave and Sammy, see, they’d got back first, and when I got back there was an ambulance there and such, and I just kept in the background.’
‘What did you do with the other five bottles of shampoo?’ Wyfold asked. ‘We searched all the rooms in the hostel. We didn’t find any shampoo.’
The first overwhelming promptings of fear were beginning to die down in Shane, but he answered with only minimal hesitation, ‘I took them down the road a ways and threw them in a ditch. That was after they’d all gone off to the hospital.’ He nodded in the general direction of Oliver and myself. ‘Panicked me a bit, it did, when Dave said she was talking, like. But: I was glad I’d got rid of the stuff afterwards, when she was dead after all, with everyone snooping around.’
‘You could show me which ditch?’ Wyfold said.
‘Yeah, I could.’
‘Good.’
‘You mean,’ Shane said, with relief, ‘you believe what I told you...’
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ Wyfold said repressively. ‘I’ll need to know what you ordinarily did with the shampoo.’
‘What?’
‘How you prepared it and gave it to the mares.’
‘Oh.’ An echo of the cocky cleverness came back: a swagger to the shoulders, a curl to the lip. ‘It was dead easy, see. Mr Jackson showed me how. I just had to put a coffee filter in a wash basin and pour the shampoo through it, so’s the shampoo all ran down the drain and there was that stuff left on the paper, then I just turned the coffee filter inside out and soaked it in a little jar with some linseed oil from the feed shed, and then I’d stir a quarter of it into the feed if it was for a mare I was looking after anyway, or let the stuff fall to the bottom and scrape up a teaspoonful and put it in an apple for the others. Mr. Jackson showed me how. Dead easy, the whole thing.’
‘How many mares did you give it to?’
‘Don’t rightly know. Dozens, counting last year. Some I missed. Mr Jackson said better to miss some than be found out. He liked me to do the oil best. Said too many apples would be noticed.’ A certain amount of anxiety returned. ‘Look, now I‘ve told you all this, you know I didn’t kill her, don’t you?’
Wyfold said impassively, ‘How often did Mr Jackson bring you bottles of shampoo?’
‘He didn’t. I mean, I had a case of it under my bed. Brought it with me when I moved in, see, same as last year. But this year I ran out, like, so I rang him up from the village one night for some more. So he said he’d meet me at the back gate at nine on Sunday when all the lads would be down in the pub.’
‘That was a risk he wouldn’t take,’ Wyfold said sceptically.
‘Well, he did.’
Wyfold shook his head.
Shane’s panic resurfaced completely. ‘He was there,’ he almost shouted. ‘He was. He was.’
Wyfold still looked studiedly unconvinced and told Shane t hat it would be best if he now made a formal statement, which t he sergeant would write down for him to sign when he, Shane, was satisfied that it represented what he had already told us: and Shane in slight bewilderment agreed.
Wyfold nodded to the sergeant, opened the door of the loom, and gestured to Oliver and me to leave. Oliver in indiluted grimness silently pushed me out. Wyfold, with a satisfied air, said in his plain uncushioning way, ‘There you are then, Mr Knowles, that’s how your daughter died, and you’re luckier than some. That little sod’s telling the truth. Proud of himself, like a lot of crooks. Wants the world to know.’ He shook hands perfunctorily with Oliver and nodded briefly to me, and walked away to his unsolved horrors where the papers called for his blood and other fathers choked on their tears.
Oliver pushed me back to the outside world but not directly to where my temporary chauffeur had said he would wait. I found myself making an unscheduled turn into a small public garden, where Oliver abruptly left me beside the first seat we came to and walked jerkily away.
I watched his back, ramrod stiff, disappearing behind bushes and trees. In grief, as in all else, he would be tidy.
A boy came along the path on roller skates and wheeled round to a stop in front of me.
‘You want pushing?’ he said.
‘No. But thanks all the same.’
He looked at me judiciously. ‘Can you make that chair go straight, using just one arm?’
‘No. I go round in a circle and end where I started.’
‘Thought so.’ He considered me gravely. ‘Just like the earth,’ he said.
He pushed off with one foot and sailed away straight on the other and presently, walking firmly, Oliver came back.
He sat on the bench beside me, his eyelids slightly reddened, his manner calm.
‘Sorry,’ he said, after a while.
‘She died happy,’ I said. ‘It’s better than nothing.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She heard what they were doing. She picked up the shampoo Shane dropped. She was coming to tell you that everything was all right, there was nothing wrong with Sandcastle and you wouldn’t lose the farm. At the moment she died she must have been full of joy.’
Oliver raised his face to the pale summer sky.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then I’ll believe it,’ he said.
October
Gordon was coming up to sixty, the age at which everyone retired from Ekaterin’s, like it or not. The bustle of young brains, the founder Paul had said, was what kept money moving, and his concept still ruled in the house.
Gordon had his regrets but they were balanced, it seemed to me, by a sense of relief. He had battled for three years now against his palsy and had finished the allotted work span honorably in the face of the enemy within. He began saying he was looking forward to his leisure, and that he and Judith would go on a celebratory journey as soon as possible. Before that, however, he was to be away for a day of medical tests in. hospital.
‘Such a bore,’ he said, ‘but they want to make these checks and set me up before we travel.’
‘Very sensible,’ I said. ‘Where will you go?’
He smiled with enthusiasm. ‘I’ve always wanted to see Australia. Never been there, you know.’
‘Nor have I.’
He nodded and we continued with our normal work in the accord we had felt together for so many years. I would miss him badly for his own sake, I thought, and even more because through him I would no longer have constant news and contact with Judith. The days seemed to gallop towards his birthday and my spirits grew heavy as his lightened.
Oliver’s problems were no longer the day-to-day communiqués at lunch. The dissenting director had conceded that even blue-chip certainties weren’t always proof against well-planned malice and no longer grumbled about my part in things, particularly since the day that Henry in his mild-steel voice made observations about defending the bank’s money beyond the call of duty.