‘Do you know each other well?’ I asked.
The thin birdlike one said they did.
‘And the grooms. Do you know them? And do they know each other?’
‘Seen them around,’ said the heavy one. ‘The lazy so and sos.’
The thin one said, ‘One of them came from the Midway Farm.’
That was Dave Teller’s. ‘He came specially for Chrysalis. It’s him ought to be blamed for the whole thing.’
‘Did the boys know each other, before the trip?’
‘Sure,’ said the heavy one. ‘Way they talked they both been in the horse game all their lives.’
Walt sniffed and nodded. He’d checked all this, his resigned face said. Routine.
To the drivers I said, ‘I want you to think back, and make a list of all the cars and trucks you can remember seeing on the road, all the way from Kennedy to the place you lost the horses.’
They looked aghast and as if I were crazy.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘on those turnpikes you sometimes see the same cars over and over. The ones going your way, that is. You see them at the rest stops, and maybe you start off first, and then they pass you, and then you see them again maybe stopped at another diner while you go on to the next one, and then they come past you again. Right?’
They nodded.
‘So maybe you still remember some of the cars and trucks you saw on that trip? Especially any you saw on both days.’
They stared at me. The heavy one said, ‘It’s impossible. It was a week ago.’
‘I know. Try, anyway. Think it over. See if you can remember any at all, between you. Then write them down and leave the list here for us, sometime this evening.’
I took out my wallet and tried twenty dollars each for size. It went down well enough. They said they would try.
‘Don’t invent anything,’ I said. ‘I’d rather pay for nothing than a lot of hogwash.’
They nodded and went, with the beer postponed to their return.
‘What are you looking for?’ Walt said curiously.
‘Another horse van, I suppose.’
He thought it over. ‘They could just have planned to rendezvous where the empty van was found. They didn’t need to be seen on the road.’
‘I don’t think they can have been sure when they would be able to do the hi-jacking. They wouldn’t know where the drivers would stop for meals. No good fixing a rendezvous in Kentucky if the opportunity came earlier, up near Wheeling.’
‘They wouldn’t want to drive too far with a hot truck,’ Walt agreed. ‘In fact, it was twenty-five miles, mostly back roads. They made straight for the hills, where it would take longest to round up loose horses.’
‘Any tracks?’
‘No tyre tracks of any use. The nearest road was gravel, dry and dusty this time of year. There were the tracks of the van going off the road round behind a hillock, but on the road itself they were just a jumble. Every car which passed raised a cloud of dust and wiped out all tracks which were there before.’
I grunted. ‘Hoof prints?’
‘Dozens of those. In all directions.’
‘Back on to the gravel road?’
He shook his head resignedly. ‘Impossible to tell. None on top of the van’s tyre tracks, anyway. But we took a lot of soil samples, on the outside chance something would turn up later.’
‘You did it pretty thoroughly.’
The smile almost came. ‘A million and a half’, he said briefly, ‘is a lot of insurance.’
Midway Farm had prosperity printed on its gate posts, and I went through them alone, as Walt had said he felt the onset of a migraine headache.
A middle-aged Hungarian woman opened the door to me and in halting English asked me my business. Diagnosing her accent from long practice I replied in her own language, as it was simpler, and presently, having consulted in the drawing room, she showed me in there.
Dave’s wife stood in the centre of a quarter acre of deep green carpet, surrounded by deep green walls, white paint, and tomato red upholstery. She flicked my card with one thumb and said, ‘You’re the man who fished Dave out of the river.’
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised.
‘He telephoned to me yesterday,’ she explained. ‘He says I am to trust you entirely.’
She was a slim small-boned creature with the rounded tight little bottom which comes from riding horses a great deal in early girlhood. Her jawline was delicately square, nose narrow, eyes wide and bright. Grey speckled the mouse-brown springy hair, and if she was wearing cosmetics one would have needed to be nearer than I was to be certain of it. Decisive assurance showed from every crisp gesture, and from her tone I gathered that taking her husband’s word for things was not her habit.
‘Sit down,’ she said, pointing to a tomato chair. ‘Drink?’ It was two o’clock on a hot afternoon. ‘Scotch,’ she said without waiting for an answer, making it a statement, not a choice.
I watched her splash the pale golden liquid on to ice cubes in two tall glasses, and add a token drop of water. She came across and held out one of them with a graceful suntanned arm. A heavy gold chain bracelet loaded with fobs and charms clinked from her wrist, and into my nostrils floated a trace of ‘Joy’.
I tasted the whisky. Hedges and Butler’s Royal, I thought. Too fine and light for anything else. The flavour from one sip lasted a long time on my tongue.
‘Eva says you speak Hungarian,’ she said, moving away, picking up her own glass, and taking an adult swallow.
‘Mm, yes.’
‘She was most impressed.’
‘I came about Chrysalis,’ I began.
‘Do you speak any other languages?’ Her voice veered more to American than English and had the abrupt, inconsequential lurch of two drinks too many; but it didn’t show in her face.
‘German,’ I said, raising a dutiful social smile.
The way I’d been taught languages, it took a week for a smattering, three months for fluency, and two years to bring one to the point of recognizing typical speech and thought patterns when one heard them translated back into perfect English. In one period of seven years, in my twenties, I’d been crammed with German, Hungarian, and five Slavonic languages, from Russian and Czech to Serbo-Croat. None of them was likely to come in handy for finding stallions, and in any case they were almost out of date. The new boys were learning Swahili, Arabic, and Chinese.
‘And French, I suppose?’ she said.
‘A little,’ I agreed.
‘Enough for the necessities of life, I expect.’ Her expression and emphasis gave the word necessities a precise meaning, which wasn’t food and drink.
‘Absolutely,’ I agreed, acknowledging her definition.
She laughed. Nothing frail or fine-boned about that.
‘Chrysalis,’ she said, ‘is a right bloody nuisance. He wouldn’t have been my choice in the first place; that Purple Emperor strain is as soft as an old man’s pencil and he’s passing it on, they always do. Moth won the Derby in a shockingly bad year and if anything had given him half a race he’d have folded like a wet sheet.’ She took a deep swallow. ‘Do you know the first bloody thing about horses?’
‘What is the first bloody thing about horses?’
She gave me a startled stare which turned into an incredulous laugh. ‘The first bloody thing about horses is that they make bloody fools of men.’
I smiled back spontaneously, amused by the contrast between her robustness of thought and language and her delicacy of frame.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ she said. ‘Bring your drink.’
She mixed herself a new one in passing, and without looking back crossed the green carpet, pulled open a sliding glass door, pushed through the insect screen outside it, and walked with rock-like steadiness across a paved terrace and on to a deep green lawn. Sighing, I got to my feet and followed her. The grass was thick and resilient, a different species altogether from English turf, and a sprinkler on one side threw diamond sprays around like water.