At five-thirty in the morning on the day after the Ascot Gold Cup, I sleepily awoke and answered my ringing telephone to hear a high agitated female voice saying, ‘I want to reach Sid Halley.’
‘You have,’ I said, pushing myself up to sitting and squinting at the clock.
‘What?’
‘You are talking to Sid Halley.’ I stifled a yawn. Five-bloody-thirty.
‘But I phoned The Pump and asked for the Hotline!’
I said patiently, ‘They re-route the Hotline calls direct to me. This is Sid Halley you’re talking to. How can I help you?’
‘Christ,’ she said, sounding totally disorganized. ‘We have a colt with a foot off.’
After a breath-catching second I said, ‘Where are you?’
‘At home. Oh, I see, Berkshire.’
‘Where, exactly?’
‘Combe Bassett, south of Hungerford.’
‘And… um…’ I thought of asking, ‘What’s the state of play?’ and discarded it as less than tactful. ‘What is… happening?’
‘We’re all up. Everyone’s yelling and crying.’
‘And the vet?’
‘I just phoned him. He’s coming.’
‘And the police?’
‘They’re sending someone. Then we decided we’d better call you.’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ll come now, if you like.’
‘That’s why I phoned you.’
‘What’s your name, then? Address?’
She gave them — ‘Betty Bracken, Manor House, Combe Bassett’ — stumbling on the words as if she couldn’t remember.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘ask the vet not to send the colt or his foot off to the knackers until I get there.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said jerkily. ‘For God’s sakes, why? Why our colt?’
‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ I said.
What if he can’t help it…
But it took such planning. Such stealth. So many crazy risks. Someone, sometime, would see him.
Let it not be Ellis, I thought. Let the compulsion be some other poor bastard’s ravening subconscious. Ellis would be able to control such a vicious appetite, even if he felt it.
Let it not be Ellis.
Whoever it was, he had to be stopped: and I would stop him, if I could.
I shaved in the car (a Mercedes), clasping the battery-driven razor in the battery-driven hand, and I covered the eighty miles to southwest Berkshire in a time down the comparatively empty M4 that had the speedometer needle quivering where it had seldom been before. The radar speed traps slept. Just as well.
It was a lovely high June morning, fine and fresh. I curled through the gates of Combe Bassett Manor, cruised to a stop in the drive and at six-thirty walked into a house where open doors led to movement, loud voices and a general gnashing of teeth.
The woman who’d phoned rushed over when she saw me, her hands flapping in the air, her whole demeanor in an out-of-control state of fluster.
‘Sid Halley? Thank God. Punch some sense into this lot.’
This lot consisted of two uniformed policemen and a crowd of what later proved to be family members, neighbors, ramblers and half a dozen dogs.
‘Where’s the colt?’ I asked. ‘And where’s his foot?’
‘Out in the field. The vet’s there. I told him what you wanted but he’s an opinionated Scot. God knows if he’ll wait, he’s a cantankerous old devil. He—’
‘Show me where,’ I said abruptly, cutting into the flow.
She blinked. ‘What? Oh, yes. This way.’
She set off fast, leading me through big-house, unevenly painted hinterland passages reminiscent of those of Aynsford, of those of any house built with servants in mind. We passed a gun room, flower room and mud room (ranks of green wellies) and emerged at last through a rear door into a yard inhabited by trash cans. From there, through a green wooden garden door, she led the way fast down a hedge-bordered grass path and through a metal-railing gate at the far end of it. I’d begun to think we were off to limbo when suddenly, there before us, was a lane full of vehicles and about ten people leaning on paddock fencing.
My guide was tall, thin, fluttery, at a guess about fifty, dressed in old cord trousers and a drab olive sweater. Her graying hair flopped, unbrushed, over a high forehead. She had been, and still was, beyond caring how she looked, but I had a powerful impression that she was a woman to whom looks mattered little anyway.
She was deferred to. The men leaning on the paddock rails straightened and all but touched their forelocks. ‘Morning, Mrs Bracken.’
She nodded automatically and ushered me through the wide metal gate that one of the men swung open for her.
Inside the field, at a distance of perhaps thirty paces, stood two more men, also a masculine-looking woman and a passive colt with three feet. All, except the colt, showed the facial and body language of impatience.
One of the men, tall, white-haired, wearing black-rimmed glasses, took two steps forward to meet us.
‘Now, Mrs Bracken, I’ve done what you asked, but it’s past time to put your poor boy out of his misery. And you’ll be Sid Halley, I suppose,’ he said, peering down as from a mountaintop. ‘There’s little you can do.’ He shook hands briefly as if it were a custom he disapproved of.
He had a strong Scottish accent and the manner of one accustomed to command. The man behind him, unremarkably built, self-effacing in manner, remained throughout a silent watcher on the fringe.
I walked over to the colt and found him wearing a head collar, with a rope halter held familiarly by the woman. The young horse watched me with calm, bright eyes, unafraid. I stroked my hand down his nose, talking to him quietly. He moved his head upward against the pressure and down again as if nodding, saying hello. I let him whiffle his black lips across my knuckles. I stroked his neck and patted him. His skin was dry: no pain, no fear, no distress.
‘Is he drugged?’ I asked.
‘I’d have to run a blood test,’ the Scotsman said.
‘Which you are doing, of course?’
‘Of course.’
One could tell from the faces of the other man and the woman that no blood test had so far been considered.
I moved around the colt’s head and squatted down for a close look at his off-fore, running my hand down the back of his leg, feeling only a soft area of no resistance where normally there would be the tough bowstring tautness of the leg’s main tendon. Pathetically, the fetlock was tidy, not bleeding. I bent up the colt’s knee and looked at the severed end. It had been done neatly, sliced through, unsplintered ends of bone showing white, the skin cleanly cut as if a practiced chef had used a dis jointing knife.
The colt jerked his knee, freeing himself from my grasp.
I stood up.
‘Well?’ the Scotsman challenged.
‘Where’s his foot?’
‘Over yon, out of sight behind the water trough.’ He paused, then, as I turned away from him, suddenly added, ‘It wasn’t found there. I put it there, out of sight. It was they ramblers that came to it first.’
‘Ramblers?’
‘Aye.’
Mrs Bracken, who had joined us, explained. ‘One Saturday every year in June, all the local rambling clubs turn out in force to walk the footpaths in this part of the country, to keep them legally open for the public.’
‘If they’d stay on the footpaths,’ the Scot said forbiddingly, ‘they’d be within their rights.’
Mrs Bracken agreed. ‘They bring their children and their dogs and their picnics, and act as if they own the place.’
‘But… what on earth time did they find your colt’s foot?’
‘They set off soon after dawn,’ Mrs Bracken observed morosely. ‘In the middle of June, that’s four-thirty in the morning, more or less. They gather before five o’clock, while it is still cool, and set off across my land first, and they were hammering on my door by five-fifteen. Three of the children were in full-blown hysteria, and a man with a beard and a pony-tail was screaming that he blamed the elite. What elite? One of the ramblers phoned the press and then someone fanatical in animal rights, and a carload of activists arrived with ‘ban horse racing’ banners.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I despair,’ she said. ‘It’s bad enough losing my glorious colt. These people are turning it into a circus.’