‘Ma’am, they were shot. They knew nothing about it. They were shot with a humane killer. With a bolt.’
Six
Cascade was lying slantwise across the box, his head in shadow but not far from the door. Robin Curtiss stepped onto the peat and bent down, picking up the black forelock of hair which fell naturally forward from between the horse’s ears.
‘You can’t clearly see, ma’am, as he’s so dark, but there’s the spot, right under his forelock, where the bolt went in.’ He straightened up, dusting his fingers on a handkerchief. ‘Easy to miss,’ he said. ‘You can’t see what happened unless you’re looking for it.’
The princess turned away from her dead horse with a glitter of tears but a calm face. She stopped for a minute at the door of the next box, where Cotopaxi’s rump was nearest, his head virtually out of sight near the manger.
‘He’s the same,’ Robin Curtiss said. ‘Under the forelock, almost invisible. It was expert, ma’am. They didn’t suffer.’
She nodded, swallowing, then, unable to speak, put one hand on Wykeham’s arm and with the other waved towards the arch of the courtyard and Wykeham’s house beyond. Robin Curtiss and I watched them go and he sighed in sympathy.
‘Poor lady. It always takes them hard.’
‘They were murdered,’ I said. ‘That makes it harder.’
‘Yeah, they sure were murdered. Wykeham’s called the police, though I told him it wasn’t strictly necessary. The law’s very vague about killing animals. But with them belonging to Princess Casilia, I suppose he thought it best. And he’s in a tizzy about moving the bodies as soon as possible, but we don’t know where he stands with the insurance company... whether in a case like this, they have to be told first... and it’s Sunday...’ He stopped rambling and said more coherently, ‘You don’t often see wounds like these, nowadays.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Captive bullets are old hat. Almost no one uses them now.’
‘Captive bullets?’
‘The bolt. Called captive because the killing agent doesn’t fly free of the gun, but is retracted back into it. Surely you know that?’
‘Yes. I mean, I know the bolt retracts. I saw one, close to, years ago. I didn’t know they were old hat. What do you use now, then?’
‘You must have seen a horse put down,’ he said, astonished. ‘All those times, out on the course, when your mount breaks a leg...’
‘It’s only happened to me twice,’ I said. ‘And both times I took my saddle off and walked away.’
I found myself thinking about it, trying to explain. ‘One moment you’re in partnership with that big creature, and maybe you like him, and the next moment he’s going to die... So I’ve not wanted to stay to watch. It may be odd to you, especially as I was brought up in a racing stable, but I never have seen the gun actually put to the head, and I’ve always vaguely imagined it was shot from the side, like through a human temple.’
‘Well,’ he said, still surprised and mildly amused, ‘you’d better get educated. You of all people. Look,’ he said, ‘look at Cotopaxi’s head.’ He picked his way over the stiff chestnut legs until he could show me what he wanted. Cotopaxi’s eyes were half open and milky, and although Robin Curtiss was totally unmoved, to me it was still no everyday matter.
‘A horse’s brain is only the size of a bunched fist,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that?’
‘Yes, I know it’s small.’
He nodded. ‘Most of a horse’s head is empty space, all sinuses. The brain is up between the ears, at the top of the neck. The bone in that area is pretty solid. There’s only the one place where you can be sure a bolt will do the job.’ He picked up Cotopaxi’s forelock and pointed to a small disturbance of the pale hairs. ‘You take a line from the right ear to the left eye,’ he said, ‘and a line from the left ear to the right eye. Where the lines cross, that’s the best... more or less the only... place to aim. And see? The bolt went into Cotopaxi at that exact spot. It wasn’t any old haphazard job. Whoever did this knew exactly what to do.’
‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘now you’ve told me, I’d know what to do.’
‘Yes, but don’t forget, you have to get the angle right as well as the place. You have to aim straight at the spot where the spinal cord and the brain meet. Then the result’s instantaneous and, as you can see, there’s no blood.’
‘And meanwhile,’ I suggested ironically, ‘the horse is simply standing still letting all this happen?’
‘Funnily enough, most of them do. Even so, I’m told that for short people it’s difficult to get the hand up to the right angle at the right height.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I said. I looked down at the waste of the great racing spirit. I’d sat on that back, shared that mind, felt the fluid majesty of those muscles, enjoyed his triumphs, schooled him as a young horse, thrilled to his growing strengths. I would still walk away, I thought, if another time came.
I made my way back to the outside air and Robin Curtiss followed me out, still matter-of-factly continuing my education.
‘Apart from the difficulty of hitting the right spot, the bolt has another disadvantage, which is that although it retracts at once, the horse begins to fall just as quick, and the hard skull bones tend to bend the bolt after a lot of use, and the gun no longer works.’
‘So now you use something else?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘A free bullet. I’ll show you, if you like. I’ve a pistol in my car.’
We walked unhurriedly out of the courtyard to where his car was parked not far from the princess’s Rolls. He unlocked the boot, and in there unlocked an attaché case, and from it produced a brown cloth which he unwrapped.
Inside lay an automatic Luger-type pistol, which looked ordinary except for its barrel. Instead of the straight narrow barrel one would expect, there was a wide bulbous affair with a slanted oval opening at the end.
‘This barrel sends the bullet out spinning in a spiral,’ he explained.
‘Any old bullet?’
‘It has to be the right calibre, but yes, any old bullet, and any old gun. That’s one big advantage, you can weld a barrel like this onto any pistol you like. Well... the bullet leaves the gun with a lot of short-range energy, but because it’s going in a spiral, almost any obstruction will stop it. So if you shoot a horse, the bullet will stop in its head. Mostly, that is.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to be so accurate, as with a bolt, because the wobbling bullet does a lot more damage.’
I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How can you be so sure those two were killed with a bolt?’
‘Oh... with the free bullet you get powder burns at the entry, and also blood coming down the nose, and probably also from the mouth. Not much, sometimes, but it’s there, because of the widespread damage done inside, you see.’
‘Yes,’ I said, sighing, ‘I see.’ I watched him wrap up his gun again and said, ‘I suppose you have to have a licence for that.’
‘Sure. And for the captive bullet also.’
There must be thousands of humane killers about, I reflected. Every vet would have one. Every knackers’ yard. A great many sheep and cattle farmers. The huntsman of every pack of hounds. People dealing with police horses... the probabilities seemed endless.
‘So I suppose there are hundreds of the old bolt-types lying around, out of date and unused.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘under lock and key.’
‘Not last night.’
‘No.’
‘What time last night, would you say?’
He completed the stowing and locking away of his own pistol.
‘Early,’ he said positively. ‘Not much after midnight. I know it was a cold night, but both horses were stone cold this morning. No internal temperature. That takes hours... and they were found at half six.’ He grinned. ‘The knackermen don’t like fetching horses that have been dead that long. They have difficulty moving them when they’re stiff, and getting them out of the boxes is a right problem.’ He peeled off his overalls and put them in the boot. ‘There’ll have to be post-mortems. The insurance people insist on it.’ He closed the car boot and locked it. ‘We may as well go into the house.’