Provided for. Money. But no Walt. No picnic.
I said goodbye to Zeissen and went slowly back to Lynnie. When I told her Walt was dead, she cried for him.
Upstairs, when I packed his clothes, I lingered a good while over the framed photograph of him with Amy and the kids, and in the end put it in my suitcase, not his. It could hardly be the only photograph his wife would have of him, and I didn’t think she’d worry much if it didn’t return with his baggage.
Eunice came back tired and abstracted from Santa Monica, and after absorbing the shock of Walt’s death was unaffected when Lynnie told her over early dinner that she was going home with me.
‘Much better to travel with a man to look after you, honey,’ she agreed absent-mindedly: and then, giving me a more characteristic sharp glance, added, ‘Don’t let him get up to any tricks.’
Lynnie sighed. ‘He wouldn’t.’
‘Huh,’ she said, but without conviction, and then asked me, ‘Will you be seeing Dave when you get back?’
I nodded. ‘Very soon after.’
‘Tell him then, will you, that I’ve found a darling little business in Santa Monica. They’re looking for a partner with some capital, to open another branch, and if the accounts are right I’d like to do it. I’ll write to him, of course, but you could explain... I guess you could explain better than anyone.’
‘I’ll explain.’
She said she was too tired to come all the way back to Los Angeles to see us off, and we said goodbye to her in the lobby, where she kissed Lynnie and then me on the cheek with a quite surprising strength of feeling.
Lynnie said, as we drove away, ‘I’ll miss her. Isn’t that extraordinary. I’ll really miss her.’
‘You’ll come back.’
‘It won’t be the same...’
I returned the hired car to the Hertz agent at the airport, we caught the plane to Washington, and I made up on parts of the way for the three nights without sleep. Lynnie said at Lexington that she could quite see why I needed someone to wake me at the stops.
We went in a taxi to Jeff Roots’s house and his teenage daughters took Lynnie off for a swim in the pool while I sat with him under his vine-covered trellis and thought how cool and substantial he looked in his bright open-necked Sunday shirt.
‘Sam Hengelman should reach Lexington some time this afternoon or early evening,’ I said. ‘He’ll call you to know where to take the horses.’
‘That’s all fixed,’ Roots nodded.
‘Would you give him a message from me?’
‘Sure.’
‘Just tell him everything’s OK: that I said so.’
‘Sure. You are, aren’t you, one hundred per cent certain that those two definitely are Showman and Allyx?’
‘One hundred per cent. There isn’t the slightest doubt.’
He sighed. ‘I’ll get the identification started. Though who is to know Showman after ten years? A bay with no markings... and only a four-year-old when he came from England.’ He paused, then said, ‘Have you any suggestions as to how we can start prosecuting Offen for fraud and theft?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not a policeman. Not interested in punishment, only prevention.’ I smiled briefly. ‘I came to get the horses back. Nothing else. Well... they’re back. I’ve done what I was engaged for, and that’s as far as I go.’
He eyed me assessingly. ‘Do you want Offen to go on collecting huge stud fees, then?’
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘Not if someone starts a quick rumour immediately that both Moviemaker and Centigrade have been suffering from an obscure virus which will certainly have affected their virility. Owners of mares can be quietly advised to insist they don’t pay any stud fees until the foals have shown their quality. After that... well, Offen does legally own Moviemaker and Centigrade, and he’s entitled to the fees they earn on their own merits.’
‘You’re extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to see Offen behind bars?’
‘Not passionately,’ I said. Offen had enjoyed his prestige almost more than his income. He would be losing both. And Yola... she was going to have to work hard, without Matt, and probably without the expensive house on Pitts. Bars seemed superfluous.
He shook his head, giving me up as a bad job. ‘We’ll have to prosecute, I’m sure of it. I’ll have to get the lawyers to see about it.’
He called the houseman to bring our drinks, and merely sighed when I said I’d as soon share his sugar free tonic.
We sipped the well-iced innocuous stuff and he said again that Offen would have to be prosecuted, if only to provide a reason for Allyx and Showman having disappeared for so many years, and to account for tattoo marks inside their mouths.
‘I can see you would think that,’ I said. ‘I also think you’ll have a terrible job proving that any of the mares booked to Moviemaker and Centigrade were actually covered by Showman and Allyx. I didn’t find Showman and Allyx on Offen’s farm. I doubt if anyone would testify that they were ever there. Certainly Offen would deny it, and go on denying it to the bitter end. It’s his only hope.’ I paused. ‘I did manage to get some tape recordings, but unfortunately, even if they could be used as evidence, they are inconclusive. Offen never mentioned Showman or Allyx by name.’
Roots stared gloomily into space.
‘This makes it difficult,’ he said. ‘What you are in fact saying is that we know Offen switched the stallions, because of the tattoo marks, but no one will be able to prove it?’
I looked down to where Lynnie was jumping into the pool in a big splash contest with Roots’s daughters. Her lighthearted laughter floated up, carefree and very young.
‘I wouldn’t try,’ I said. ‘Rightly or wrongly I decided to repossess the stolen goods by stealing them back. First, so that Offen would have no chance of destroying them. Second, so that there shouldn’t be years of delay while lawyers argued the case, years of the stallions standing idle, with their value diminishing day by day and their blood lines wasting. Third, and most important, that there should be no chance of Offen getting them back once the dust had settled. Because if he had any sense he would swear, and provide witnesses to swear, that the horses in dispute were two unraced halfbred animals of no account, and he’d explain the tattoos on their lips by saying he’d used them to try out some new type of ink. What more likely, he would say, than that he should repeat the numbers of his two best horses? He could make it sound a lot more reasonable than that he should have stolen two world famous stallions and conducted a large scale fraud. He has great personal charm.’
Roots nodded. ‘I’ve met him.’
‘Showman and Allyx were being looked after by Offen’s nephew,’ I said. ‘Offen can say he’d lent him two old nags to hack around on, and he can’t imagine why anyone would want to steal them.’
‘He could put up an excellent defence, I see that,’ he admitted.
‘His present stud groom is innocent,’ I added. ‘And would convince anyone of it. If you leave things as they are, Offen won’t get Allyx and Showman back. If you prosecute him, he may.’
He looked shattered, staring into his glass but seeing with experienced eyes every side of the sticky problem.
‘We could try blood tests,’ he said at last.
‘Blood tests?’
‘For paternity,’ he nodded. ‘If there is any doubt about which horse has sired a certain foal, we take blood tests. If one disputed sire’s blood is of a similar group to the foal’s, and the other disputed sire’s is different, we conclude that the foal was sired by the similar sire.’
‘And like in humans,’ I asked, ‘you can tell which horse could not have sired which foal, but you couldn’t say which, of a similar blood group, actually did?’
‘That’s right.’