‘Surely the drivers locked up, and took the keys, at least?’
‘Oh sure. It was an expert job though. A direct wire contact from the battery terminals to the starter motor.’
‘So then what?’
‘When they found the van gone the drivers called the police but it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that the van was found off the road and out of sight around a hill in Kentucky. But — no horses. The ramps were down, and all the horses had been let loose.’
‘Deliberately.’
‘Sure. Untied. All the halters were still in the van. Those racehorses were all free with no bridle or anything to catch them by. The Kentucky boys reckon the horses were let out to create a diversion, to get the cops off the tails of the hi-jackers by making them chase horses all over.’
‘And it worked.’
‘Yeah,’ said Walt gloomily. ‘The owner kicked up stink. All the horses were valuable, not only Chrysalis. But only Chrysalis was insured with Buttress.’
‘Did they get all the others back?’
‘Yeah. But Chrysalis has as good as disappeared off the face of the earth.’
‘How do you know the hi-jackers meant to take the liquor truck?’
‘The only thing they left in the cab of the horse van was a screwed-up scrap of paper. It was a note of the time the liquor company’s truck made its daily run along that route.’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘Gloves. Even for writing the note.’
Walt had talked himself dry. I refuelled his glass and felt like sleep.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘It was Chrysalis they really wanted. The timetable note was the blind.’
‘But why? Why should anyone want to steal a stallion? That’s what’s got us all floored. I don’t know much about horses, I’m a false claims man really. I just got pitched into this between cripple cases, if you get me. But even I know that it’s the stallion’s name that brings in the stud fee. Say someone’s stolen Chrysalis, what’s the point? They can’t advertise him for stud, so he isn’t worth a dime. We figured someone might be nutty enough to want him all to themselves, like some world famous painting, but you can hide a painting quietly in a cellar, which you can’t do with a horse. The whole thing don’t make sense.’
I had my own views on that, but I said only, ‘What happened to Allyx?’
‘I only know about that from the files. I got the case out and looked it up this morning. Allyx was a French horse, apparently one of the best young sires in Europe. He was nine when he came over here, and already his get had won a list of races as long as your arm. Dave Teller was head of the syndicate which bought him; that’s why he was insured with us, as we do all the Teller estate work. Allyx was delivered safely to the Teller stud farm. No trouble in transit that time. But he was there only four days. Then there was a fire in the stables one night and they took all the horses out of the barn and turned them loose into a small corral.’
‘And when they came to fetch them — no horses?’
He nodded. ‘There was a broken rail over the far side, which no one knew about. All the horses had got through it, including Allyx. They caught all the others, though some were free for days. No sign ever of Allyx. The company had to face that he probably got into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and maybe broke his neck, and in the end they had to pay up.’
‘What about that fire?’
‘There was apparently nothing suspicious about it at the time. One of our very best men found no evidence of a fire being set. Still, stable fires can be started so easily... a cigarette butt in a pile of straw leaves no trace. This one didn’t do much damage before they put it out. No question of kerosene, for instance. The whole chain of events was agreed to be accidental.’
I smiled thinly.
‘What about Showman?’
Walt shook his head. ‘I don’t know how he got loose. But they found him. Dead, of course. He’d been dead some time, I think.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, in the Appalachians. He came from that area, same as the others. But then Lexington has more stud farms than anywhere else in the States, so there’s no significance in that really.’
‘You went down to Lexington last week?’
He nodded. ‘Flew there Wednesday, when Mrs Teller called us.’
‘Mrs Dave Teller?’
‘Uh huh.’ Something moved obscurely in Walt’s face. Dave’s wife had made an impression. ‘She’s English, like you.’
‘I’ll go down there tomorrow,’ I said. I watched him waver and decide not to tell me about her. Instead, he looked at his watch, put down his glass firmly, and stood up.
‘Must be off,’ he said. ‘It’s our anniversary, and my wife’s fixed something special.’
‘Give her my apologies for keeping you.’
‘That’s all right. It fitted in fine. I go home from Grand Central, right downstairs. A quarter of an hour to train time.’
I walked with him to the door.
‘Walt... would you be free to come down to Lexington in the morning?’ As he hesitated, I added, ‘There’s no point in my covering all the ground twice. I’d appreciate having you along.’
‘Be glad to, Gene,’ he said too politely, and I thought to hell with you Walt, to hell with everything on earth, including me, but I’m stuck with this horse nonsense for the next three weeks, and if I say go to Lexington, you go. I hid the violent moment of irritation in turning from him to open the door, and I understood his reluctance anyway, as who likes to be dragged down to do the same piece of work twice, especially under the critical eye of an imported limey busybody? He shook my hand. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he said, his feelings under better control than mine.
‘Seven-thirty?’
All right.’ He loosened his jaw muscles into what looked like going to be a smile but didn’t quite make it, sketched a salute with the thick-topped fingers, and ambled unhurriedly away down the passage.
I had dinner in the hotel restaurant. A steak. Never eat steak west of Nebraska, they used to say. The beef was bred on the prairie and walked eastwards to the markets: when it got to Nebraska it hit the corn belt and only after that was it fat enough to kill. New York steaks were mostly superb, but I didn’t suppose they’d walked in through the New Jersey Tunnel. Long distance haulage took care of that... and whoever had removed Allyx and Chrysalis had had a haulage problem too. You couldn’t ride a stallion along state highways. For one thing, they no longer took kindly to a saddle after years at stud, even if they had been reasonable to handle in the first place.
Nightclubs attract me like wet Mondays in Manchester, and apathy kept me from even reading the list of shows. I went straight upstairs after dinner to catch up on a lot of lost sleep and woke again infuriatingly at two, dead tired and with a restless brain.
From habit, the Luger lay under my pillow.
It was another long night.
Chapter Five
We flew down in the morning, Walt’s puffed eyes showing that the anniversary had been duly celebrated, and mine feeling as if they’d been rolled in grit.
The two drivers, reached by telephone, met us by appointment in the entrance hall of a motel near the centre of Lexington, where Walt had stayed on his previous trip. He booked rooms for us both, and we took the drivers up to his, which proved a mile short of Biltmore standards but hot on cleanliness and Kleenex.
Walt switched on the air-conditioning, shuffled chairs around, and promised beer later. The drivers, very much on the defensive, went sullenly through the disastrous tale again, aware beyond any doubt that they should never have left the horses unwatched and were more than likely to lose their jobs. Nothing they said added much to what Walt had already told me.