‘The farm’s moving out there, did you know?’ he said.
‘Are you going, yourself?’
‘Mebbe, mebbe not. Depends on the missus, and she can’t make up her mind.’ He grinned comfortably and accepted the note I gave him with dignity.
When I got back to the pool Dave’s wife had got her dress on again and Eva was brushing the splinters of whisky glass into a dustpan, which she carried carefully away across the lawn.
‘Well, what did you think of the place?’
‘The horses all looked very well. The stallions especially.’
‘So would you, if all you had to do was...’ she began, and then stopped and shrugged. ‘So would you.’
Apart from an occasional ‘bloody’ which crept in from habit, that was the last of her verbal squibs for the day. But my lack of scandalized reaction didn’t have the same effect on her drinking, and she kept up a slow but steady intake right through dusk and dinner. Her mental brakes remained half on, half off, as before.
Over thick slices of rare beef she said, ‘Are you married?’
‘No.’ I shook my head.
‘Divorced?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been married at all.’
‘Are you queer?’ she asked, as simply as if she’d said, ‘Are you comfortable?’
I smiled slightly. ‘No.’
‘Then why aren’t you married?’
‘I haven’t found anyone who will marry me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You must have women lying down for you in droves.’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
She looked at me broodingly over the rim of her glass. ‘So you live all alone?’
‘That’s right.’
‘No parents?’
‘They’re both dead,’ I said. ‘And I’ve no brothers, no sisters, no uncles, aunts, or cousins.’ I smiled. ‘Anything else?’
‘Stay the night.’
She said it abruptly, as if it came from a deeper level than her fairly harmless interrogation, and there was an element of surprise and alarm on her face afterwards.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘but I can’t.’
She looked at me without expression for about ten seconds.
I have a mother,’ she said. ‘And sisters, and brothers, and dozens of relations. And a husband, and a son, and all this.’ She waved a hand around the millionaire bracket walls. ‘I have everything.’ Her eyes filled with tears, but she went on looking straight across the table, without blinking.
‘I have... bloody... everything.’
Chapter Six
There was an envelope from Walt in my room at the motel containing a short note and a list.
Gene,
This is all the drivers came up with. I think it’s safe to bet that they actually did see these vehicles. The top three, they both remembered. The others, only one of them remembered. No horse vans, though.
The list read:
‘Impala, lilac, two years old, California number plates. Passengers included a fat child who made faces out of the rear window. Both days.
Grey station wagon trailing a load of furniture. Both days.
Dark green Ford Mustang, Nevada plates. Young couple, no description. The horse van drivers remember this one because they were discussing whether the Mustang was a good car or not. Second day only.
White convertible: young woman with blond hair wound on rollers. Second day only.
Army green pick-up truck with white lettering on the doors. Second day only.
The pick-up, one of the drivers thinks, was probably on Inter-state 70, after Zanesville and before they turned off south. He doesn’t remember clearly.’
I read the list through three times while I dressed. The load of furniture looked the most promising, but none of it exactly inspired.
Walt, driving to the airport in the morning, damped even the furniture.
‘It was only one of those Snail Express trailers.’
‘Like the U-Haul,’ I said.
‘That’s right. “Carry your house on your back, but let us take the weight”,’ he said, quoting the Snail Express advertising slogan. ‘The drivers said it wasn’t big enough to put a horse in.’
There were furniture trailers of all sizes all over the country: people moving house hired one at their old home, loaded up, and drove off to the new, maybe six states away. There they unloaded and simply left the trailer in a local depot, from where the haulage firm hired it to the next removing client. The bright orange U-Haul trailers and the aluminium and blue ones of the Snail Express were as frequent on the roads as the Greyhound buses.
‘How about the pick-up?’ I asked.
‘Much too small for a horse,’ Walt said gloomily.
He came back with me to New York and rubbed his thumb continuously over the finger pads while I went through the file we had made on the case.
There was a batch of photographs of the missing horse, mostly taken from stud book advertisements, by the look of them. Not a very remarkable creature on paper, I thought.
Sam Hengelman had sent his two most careful drivers to fetch Chrysalis. He had had a call from Mrs Teller informing him of the date fixed for the horse to fly over, and also a cable from England when he was on his way. Hengelman had telephoned Kennedy Airport and been told the horses would be through the twenty-four hour immigration regulations at noon, Tuesday. He had sent the van as soon as he got the cable, on Sunday. There was, he agreed, a system like the U-Haul in operation among horse vans, to avoid the need for long empty journeys, but some folks liked personal service, and Mr Teller was one of them.
The Buttress Life Insurance covered transport. Sam Hengelman had not had to take out a policy for the trip, and neither stood to lose nor gain from the hi-jacking.
Both drivers had clean records going way back.
Both grooms had been in their present jobs for more than three years. One of them came from Midway Farm; the other from another farm which had a horse coming in on the same trip.
An interview with Mrs Eunice Teller had produced no helpful information.
I shut the folder with a smile, and gave it back to Walt.
‘How about checking with Snail Express, on the off-chance?’
He looked sceptical. ‘The drivers said the trailer wasn’t high enough.’
‘They’re used to thinking in terms of ordinary horse vans. And they were looking down, from their cab. You could squeeze a racehorse into a box about seven feet by four, by six feet high, if you were ruthless enough. Find out how many trailers that size or larger Snail Express had out last Monday or Tuesday, which might conceivably have been on the turnpike.’
‘All right,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘If you say so.’
With the time lag working in reverse it was 3 AM Thursday morning when I landed at Heathrow, and 12 before I walked into Dave Teller’s room in a Reading hospital. Flaming June had come and gone: it was raining again.
If one discounted the ropes, pulleys, slings, and plaster suspending his leg in mid air, the patient looked healthy enough. He greeted me without fuss, the direct eyes steady and bright.
‘Tiring trip?’
‘So so.’
‘You’ve eaten?’ He waved vaguely at a collection of chocolates and grapes.
‘I had breakfast over Ireland, at two o’clock.’
He laughed, eased himself on the pillows, and stretched out a hand for a cigarette.
‘How’s my wife?’
‘Very well.’
He lit his cigarette and flicked shut the lighter.
‘What was she doing, when you called?’ His apprehension was pretty well concealed.
‘Sunbathing. Swimming. There’s a heatwave coast to coast.’