I said to the dog-handler, ‘You were here on Wednesday, when you had the prowler?’
‘Yes, I was. Ranger was whining but I couldn’t find anyone.’
Nanterre, I thought, had come to the stable on Wednesday night, intending to kill, and had been thwarted by the dog’s presence: and he’d come back two nights later with his diversions.
He must have been at Ascot, I supposed, and learned what Col looked like, but I hadn’t seen him, as I hadn’t seen him at Bradbury either: but among large crowds on racecourses, especially while I was busy, that wasn’t extraordinary.
I looked down at Ranger, wondering about his responses.
‘When people arrive here,’ I asked, ‘like I did a short while ago, how does Ranger behave?’
‘He gets up and goes to the door and whines a bit. He’s a quiet dog, mostly. Doesn’t bark. That’s why I knew it was the bombs he was barking at.’
‘Well, er, during your spells in the kitchen, what would you be doing?’
‘Making a cuppa. Eating. Relieving myself. Reading. Watching the telly.’ He smoothed his moustache, not liking me or my questions. ‘I don’t doze off, if that’s what you mean.’
It was what I meant, and obviously what he’d done, at some point or another. During four long quiet cold nights I supposed it was understandable, if not excusable.
‘Over the weekend,’ I said to Wykeham, ‘we’ll have double and treble patrols. Constant.’
He nodded. ‘Have to.’
‘Have you told the police yet?’
‘Not yet. Soon, though.’ He looked with disgust at the dog-handler. ‘They’ll want to hear what you’ve said.’
The dog-handler however stood up, announced it was an hour after he should have left and if the police wanted him they could reach him through his firm. He, he said, was going to bed.
Wykeham morosely watched him go and said, ‘What the hell is going on, Kit? The princess knows who killed them all, and so do you. So tell me.’
It wasn’t fair, I thought, for him not to know, so I told him the outline: a man was trying to extract a signature from Roland de Brescou by attacking his family wherever he could.
‘But that’s... terrorism.’ Wykeham used the word at arm’s length, as if its very existence affronted him.
‘In a small way,’ I said.
‘Small?’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you call three dead great horses small?’
I didn’t. It made me sick and angry to think of them. It was small on a world scale of terrorism, but rooted in the same wicked conviction that the path to attaining one’s end lay in slaughtering the innocent.
I stirred. ‘Show me where all the princess’s horses are,’ I suggested to Wykeham, and together we went out again into the cold air and made the rounds of the courtyards.
Cascade’s and Cotopaxi’s boxes were still empty, and no others of the princess’s horses had been in the first courtyard. In the second had been only Col. In the one beyond that, Hillsborough and Berina, with Kinley in the deep corner box there.
About a third of the stable’s inmates were out at exercise on the Downs, and while we were leaving Kinley’s yard, they came clattering back, filling the whole place with noise and movement, the lads dismounting and leading their horses into the boxes. Wykeham and I sorted our way round as the lads brushed down their charges, tidied the bedding, filled the buckets, brought hay to the racks, propped their saddles outside the boxes, bolted the doors and went off to their breakfasts.
I saw all the old friends in their quarters; among them North Face, Dhaulagiri, Icicle and Icefall, and young Helikon, the four-year-old hurdler going to Sandown that afternoon. Wykeham got half of their names right, waiting for me to prompt him on the others. He unerringly knew their careers, though, and their personalities; they were real to him in a way that needed no name tags. His secretary was adept at sorting out what he intended when he wrote down his lists of entries to races.
In the last courtyard we came to Abseil and opened the top half of his door. Abseil came towards the opening daylight and put his head out enquiringly. I rubbed his grey nose and upper lip with my hand and put my head next to his and breathed out gently like a reversed sniff into his nostril. He rubbed his nose a couple of times against my cheek and then lifted his head away, the greeting done. Wykeham paid no attention. Wykeham talked to horses that way himself, when they were that sort of horse. With some, one would never do it, one could get one’s nose bitten off.
Wykeham gave Abseil a carrot from a deep pocket, and closed him back into his twilight.
Wykeham slapped his hand on the next box along. ‘That’s Kinley’s box usually. It’s empty now. I don’t like keeping him in that corner box, it’s dark and boring for him.’
‘It won’t be for much longer, I hope,’ I said, and suggested going round to see the ‘bombs’.
Wykeham had seen them earlier, and pointed them out to me, and as expected they were the bottom parts of cardboard containers, each four inches square in shape, the top parts burned away. They were both the same, with gaudy red and yellow pictured flames still visible on the singed surfaces, and the words GOLDEN BOMB in jazzy letters on the one under the harrow.
‘We’d better leave them there for the police,’ I said.
Wykeham agreed, but he said fireworks would convince the police even more that it was the work of boys.
We went back into the house, where Wykeham telephoned the police and received a promise of attention, and I got through to Dawson, asking him to tell the princess I was down at Wykeham’s and would go to Sandown from there.
Wykeham and I had breakfast and drove up to the Downs in his big-wheeled pick-up to see the second lot exercise, and under the wide cold windy sky he surprised me by saying apropos of nothing special that he was thinking of taking another assistant. He’d had assistants in the past, I’d heard, who’d never lasted long, but there hadn’t been one there in my time.
‘Are you?’ I said. ‘I thought you couldn’t stand assistants.’
‘They never knew anything,’ he said. ‘But I’m getting old... It’ll have to be someone the princess likes. Someone you get on with, too. So if you think of anyone, let me know. I don’t know who’s around so much these days.’
‘All right,’ I said, but with misgivings. Wykeham, for all his odd mental quirks, was irreplaceable. ‘You’re not going to retire, are you?’
‘No, I’m not. Never. I wouldn’t mind dying up here, watching my horses.’ He laughed suddenly, in his eyes a flash of the vigour that had been there always not so long ago, when he’d been a titan. ‘I’ve had a great life, you know. One of the best.’
‘Stick around,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Maybe next year,’ he said, ‘we’ll win the Grand National.’
Wykeham’s four runners at Sandown were in the first three races and the fifth, and I didn’t see the princess until she came down to the parade ring for Helikon’s race, which was the third on the card.
Beatrice was with her, and also Litsi, and also Danielle, who after the faintest of greetings was busy blanking me out, it seemed, by looking carefully at the circling horses. The fact that she was there, that she was still trying, was something, I supposed.
‘Good morning,’ the princess said, when I bowed to her. ‘Dawson said Wykeham telephoned early... again.’ There was a shade of apprehension in her face, which abruptly deepened at what she read in my own.
She walked a little away from her family, and I followed.
‘Again?’ she said, not wanting to believe it. ‘Which ones?’
‘One,’ I said. ‘Col.’
She absorbed the shock with a long blink.