One of the two-year-olds pranced around, lashed out, and caught another two-year-old on the knee. The boys' reactions had not been quick enough to keep them apart, and the second colt was walking lame. Etty cursed them coldly and told the second boy to dismount and lead his charge home.
I watched him following on foot behind the string, the horse's head ducking at every tender step. The knee would swell and fill and get hot, but with a bit of luck it would right itself in a few days. If it did not, someone would have to tell the owner. The someone would be me.
That made one horse dead and two damaged in one morning. If things went on at that rate there would soon be no stable left for the fat man to bother about.
When we got back there was a small police car in the drive and a large policeman in the office. He was sitting in my chair and staring at his boots, and rose purposefully to his feet as I came through the door.
'Mr Griffon?'
'Yes.'
He came to the point without preliminaries.
'We've had a complaint, sir, that one of your horses knocked over a cyclist on the Moulton Road this morning. Also a young woman has complained to us that this same horse endangered her life and that of her children.'
He was a uniformed sergeant, about thirty, solidly built, uncompromising. He spoke with the aggressive politeness that in some policemen is close to rudeness, and I gathered that his sympathies were with the complainants.
'Was the cyclist hurt sergeant?'
'I understand he was bruised, sir.'
'And his bicycle?'
'I couldn't say, sir.'
'Do you think that a- er- a settlement out of court, so to speak, would be in order?'
'I couldn't say, sir,' he repeated flatly. His face was full of the negative attitude which erects a barrier against sympathy or understanding. Into my mind floated one of the axioms that Russell Arletti lived by: in business matters with trade unions, the press, or the police, never try to make them like you. It arouses antagonism instead. And never make jokes: they are anti jokes.
I gave the sergeant back a stare of equal indifference and asked if he had the cyclist's name and address. After only the slightest hesitation he flicked over a page or two of notebook and read it out to me. Margaret took it down.
'And the young woman's?'
He provided that too. He then asked if he might take a statement from Miss Craig and I said certainly sergeant, and took him out into the yard. Etty gave him a rapid adding-up inspection and answered his questions in an unemotional manner. I left them together and went back to the office to finish the paper work with Margaret, who preferred to work straight through the lunch hour and leave at three to collect her children from school.
'Some of the account books are missing,' she observed.
'I had them last night,' I said. 'They're in the oak room- I'll go and fetch them.'
The oak room was quiet and empty. I wondered what reaction I would get from the sergeant if I brought him in there and said that last night two faceless men had knocked me out, tied me up, and removed me from my home by force. Also they had threatened to kill me, and had punched me full of anaesthetic to bring me back.
'Oh yes sir? And do you want to make a formal allegation?'
I smiled slightly. It seemed ridiculous. The sergeant would produce a stare of top-grade disbelief, and I could hardly blame him. Only my depressing state of health and the smashed telephone lying on the desk made the night's events seem real at all.
The fat man, I reflected, hardly needed to have warned me away from the police. The sergeant had done the job for him.
Etty came into the office fuming while I was returning the account books to Margaret.
'Of all the pompous clods-'
'Does this sort of thing happen often?' I asked.
'Of course not,' Etty said positively. 'Horses get loose, of course, but things are usually settled without all this fuss. And I told that old man that you would see he didn't suffer. Why he had to go complaining to the police beats me.'
'I'll go and see him this evening,' I said.
'Now, the old sergeant, Sergeant Chubb,' Etty said forcefully, 'he would have sorted it out himself. He wouldn't have come round taking down statements. But this one, this one is new here. They've posted him here from Ipswich and he doesn't seem to like it. Just promoted, I shouldn't wonder. Full of his own importance.'
The stripes were new,' Margaret murmured in agreement.
'We always have good relations with the police here,' Etty said gloomily. 'Can't think what they're doing, sending the town someone who doesn't understand the first thing about horses.'
The steam had all blown off. Etty breathed sharply through her nose, shrugged her shoulders, and produced a small resigned smile.
'Oh well- worse things happen at sea.'
She had very blue eyes, and light brown hair that went frizzy when the weather was damp. Middle age had roughened her skin without wrinkling it, and as with most undersexed women there was much in her face that was male. She had thin dry lips and bushy unkempt eyebrows, and the handsomeness of her youth was only something I remembered. Etty seemed a sad, wasted person to many who observed her, but to herself she was fulfilled, and was busily content.
She stamped away in her jodhpurs and boots and we heard her voice raised at some luckless boy caught in wrong doing.
Rowley Lodge needed Etty Craig. But it needed Alessandro Rivera like a hole in the head.
He came late that afternoon.
I was out in the yard looking round the horses at evening stables. With Etty alongside I had got as far round as bay five, from where we would go round the bottom yard before working up again towards the house.
One of the fifteen-year-old apprentices nervously appeared as we came out of one box and prepared to go into the next.
'Someone to see you, sir.'
'Who?'
'Don't know, sir.'
'An owner?'
'Don't know, sir.'
'Where is he?'
'Up by the drive, sir.'
I looked up, over his head. Beyond the yard, out on the gravel, there was parked a large white Mercedes with a uniformed chauffeur standing by the bonnet.
'Take over, Etty, would you?' I said.
I walked up through the yard and out into the drive. The chauffeur folded his arms and his mouth like barricades against fraternisation. I stopped a few paces away from him and looked towards the inside of the car.
One of the rear doors, the one nearest to me, opened. A small black-shod foot appeared, and then a dark trouser leg, and then, slowly straightening, the whole man.
It was clear at once who he was, although the resemblance to his father began and ended with the autocratic beak of the nose and the steadfast stoniness of the black eyes. The son was a little shorter, and emaciated instead of chubby. He had sallow skin that looked in need of a sun-tan, and strong thick black hair curving in springy curls round his ears. Over all he wore an air of disconcerting maturity, and the determination in the set of his mouth would have done credit to a steel trap. Eighteen he might be, but it was a long time since he had been a boy.
I guessed that his voice would be like his father's; definite, unaccented, and careful.
It was.
'I am Rivera,' he announced. 'Alessandro.'
'Good evening,' I said, and intended it to sound polite, cool, and unimpressed.
He blinked.
'Rivera,' he repeated. 'I am Rivera.'
'Yes,' I agreed. 'Good evening.'
He looked at me with narrowing attention. If he expected from me a lot of grovelling, he was not going to get it. And something of this message must have got across to him from my attitude, because he began to look faintly surprised and a shade more arrogant.