‘You’re late,’ Walt said.
‘I told you not to wait dinner.’ I caught a passing waiter on the wing and arranged refills all round.
‘We were considering a search party,’ Eunice said.
I looked at all three of them more carefully. ‘You’ve been comparing notes,’ I said resignedly.
‘I think it’s terrible of you... wicked,’ Lynnie burst out. ‘To have made me go and deliberately... deliberately... put you in such frightful danger.’
‘Lynnie stop it. I wasn’t in any danger... here I am, aren’t I?’
‘But Walt said...’
‘Walt needs his brains seen to.’
Walt glared and compressed his mouth into a rigid line. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d arranged for Offen to know you were the man who took Chrysalis. And you didn’t tell me the Clives had tried to kill Mr Teller.’
‘And you didn’t tell me,’ Eunice added, ‘that the couple in the background of the photograph Lynnie showed Culham Offen had tried to kill you too.’
‘Or you’d never have let Lynnie show it to him?’
‘No,’ she said slowly.
‘Just as well I didn’t.’
‘And you deliberately misled me by saying you wanted to clear Offen. It wasn’t true.’
‘Er... no. But I did want you to behave naturally with him. And anyway, why all the fuss?’
‘We thought...’ Lynnie said in a subdued voice. ‘We almost thought... as you were gone so long... that you... that they...’
‘They didn’t,’ I pointed out obviously, smiling.
‘But won’t you please explain why?’ Lynnie said. ‘Why did you want me to give you away like that?’
‘Several reasons. One was to make Dave safer.’
‘I don’t see how,’ Eunice objected.
‘By letting Offen know, and through him the Clives, that we could prove the Clives were in England and beside the Thames on the day of Dave’s accident. Murder by accident is only a good idea as long as there’s no apparent motive and the murderers have no apparent connection with the victim. We’ve shown them that we know their motive and their connection, and they must now be aware that if Dave were killed they would be the first suspects. This makes it less likely they will try again.’
‘Crikey,’ Lynnie said, ‘Go on.’
‘When Walt and I went to Orpheus Farm this morning saying we were making a survey for new fire precautions, Offen wasn’t worried. He didn’t know me from Adam then, of course. It was before you showed him my photograph. But he showed no anxiety at all about two strangers turning up on a pretext that he didn’t even bother to check. None of the edginess one might have expected if he’d just had one stolen horse pinched back from him, and was in possession of two others standing in his barn. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right.’
‘He hasn’t got them,’ Eunice said with relief. ‘I was sure it couldn’t possibly be right that Culham Offen would steal horses. I mean, he’s respected.’
Walt and I exchanged a glance of barely perceptible amusement. To be respected was the best cover in the world for fraud. Fraud, in fact, could rarely exist without it.
‘So,’ I said, ‘I thought it would be helpful if he knew for certain that I was especially interested in Moviemaker and Centigrade, and that I wasn’t in fire insurance, but was the man he had to thank for losing Chrysalis. When I went back, after you two had left, he still wasn’t worried. On the contrary, he was enjoying the situation. It amused him enormously to think that I believed I was fooling him. I asked him a lot of questions about the security precautions surrounding Moviemaker and Centigrade, and he was still completely untroubled. So,’ I paused, ‘it’s now quite clear that the two horses standing in his barn called Moviemaker and Centigrade are in actual fact exactly what he says: Moviemaker and Centigrade. He isn’t worried about snoopers, he isn’t worried about me making clumsy preparations to steal them. He must therefore be confident that any legal proceedings will prove the horses to be the ones he says they are. He’d ambush me if I tried to steal them, and have me in real deep trouble, which would be to him some small compensation for losing Chrysalis.’
Walt nodded briefly.
Eunice said obstinately. ‘I think it only proves that you’re barking up the wrong damn tree. He isn’t worried simply because he isn’t guilty of anything.’
‘You liked him?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was bloody sweet.’
Lynnie nodded. ‘I thought so too.’
‘What did he say when you showed him the photographs?’
‘He just glanced at them at first,’ Lynnie said. ‘And then he took them over to the window. And then he asked me who had taken them, and where, and when. So I told him about the day on the river, and about you and Dave going under the weir...’
At the side of my vision Eunice gave me an I-told-you-so smile.
‘...and he said one or two nice things about you,’ Lynnie finished. ‘So I told him you came over here to look for Chrysalis, and somehow or other you found him.’
‘He asked where you found him,’ Eunice nodded. ‘But we didn’t know. I said you were now trying to find Allyx, and it certainly didn’t worry him. I’m sure you must be wrong.’
I smiled at her. She didn’t want the horse found, and as an ally she was as reliable as thin ice on a sunny day. I didn’t intend to tell her anything in future which I wasn’t prepared to have passed on to Offen. Like most law abiding citizens she had not grasped that a criminal mind didn’t show, that an endearing social manner could co-exist with fraud and murder. ‘Such a nice man,’ the neighbours say in bewilderment, when Mr Smith’s garden is found to be clogged with throttled ladies. ‘Always so pleasant.’
Eunice, propelled by a strong semi-conscious wish for him not to have Allyx, might tell Offen anything, simply because she couldn’t visualize a ‘sweet’ man being deadly. She might also tell him anything propelled by the same impulse which had made her point a gun at me.
‘Let’s have dinner,’ I suggested; and Eunice and Lynnie went away to freshen up.
Walt looked at me thoughtfully, then raised his eyebrows.
I nodded. ‘I put a bug on the underside of his desk, two feet from the telephone. I was late back because I was listening. He called Yola and told her about my visit but there wasn’t much else. I left the set hidden, and came back here.’
‘Do you mean it, that those two horses really are Moviemaker and Centigrade?’
‘Sure. He bought them, remember. Openly. At bloodstock sales. And obviously he’s kept them. I suppose he never could be certain that some ex-owner would turn up for a visit. Those horses will have been tattooed inside their mouths with an identity number when they first began to race. They have to be, over here, don’t they? It’ll be quite easy to establish that they’re the right two.’
‘You don’t think Mrs Teller’s right... that he never had Showman and Allyx after all?’
‘I’ll play you his call to Yola some time. He had the foresight to whisk those horses away from Orpheus when we got Chrysalis. He was more or less waiting for something like our visit this morning. No flies on Culham James, I’m afraid. Er... Walt, did you give Eunice and Lynnie any details about our jaunt in the Tetons?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I was annoyed with you.’
‘What exactly did you tell them?’
‘Not much. I was horrified at Lynnie having shown Offen that picture of the Clives, and when Mrs Teller said you’d planned it I said you must be mad, they’d tried to kill you once already.’