I promised what I knew I wouldn’t be able to deliver, and offered her a lift home.
‘But you don’t know where I live!’
‘Wherever,’ I said.
‘Thanks. But there’s a bus.’
I didn’t press it. We parted on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. No kiss. No handshake. A nod from her. Then she turned and walked away, not looking back: and I had no faith at all in her mercy.
On Sunday morning I reopened the small blue suitcase Linda had lent me, and read again through all the clippings that had to do with the maimed Kent ponies.
I played again the videotape of the twenty-minute program Ellis had made of the child owners, and watched it from a different, and sickened, perspective.
There on the screen he looked just as friendly, just as charismatic, just as expert. His arms went around Rachel in sympathy. His good-looking face filled with compassion and outrage. Blinding ponies, cutting off a pony’s foot, he said, those were crimes akin to murder.
Ellis, I thought in wretchedness, how could you?
What if he can’t help it?
I played the tape a second time, taking in more details and attentively listening to what he had actually said.
His instinct for staging was infallible. In the shot where he’d commiserated with the children all together, he had had them sitting around on hay bales in a tack room, the children dressed in riding breeches, two or three wearing black riding hats. He himself had sat on the floor among them, casual in a dark open-necked jogging suit, a peaked cap pushed back on his head, sunglasses in-pocket. Several of the children had been in tears. He’d given them his handkerchief and helped them cope with grief.
There were phrases he had used when talking straight to the camera that had brought the children’s horrors sharply to disturbingly visual life: ‘pierced empty sockets, their eyesight running down their cheeks,’ and ‘a pure-bred silver pony, proud and shining in the moonlight.’
His caring tone of voice alone had made the word pictures bearable.
‘A silver pony shining in the moonlight.’ The basis of Rachel’s nightmare.
‘In the moonlight.’ He had seen the pony in the moonlight.
I played the tape a third time, listening with my eyes shut, undistracted by the familiar face, or by Rachel in his comforting hug.
He said, ‘A silver pony trotting trustfully across the field lured by a handful of horse-nuts.’
He shouldn’t have known that.
He could have known it if any of the Ferns had suggested it.
But the Ferns themselves wouldn’t have said it. They hadn’t fed Silverboy on nuts. The agent of destruction that had come by night had brought the nuts.
Ellis would say, of course, that he had made it up, and the fact that it might be true was simply a coincidence. I rewound the tape and stared for a while into space. Ellis would have an answer to everything. Ellis would be believed.
In the afternoon I wrote a long, detailed report for Norman Picton: not a joyous occupation.
Early Monday morning, as he had particularly requested it, I drove to the police station in Newbury and personally delivered the package into the Detective Inspector’s own hands.
‘Did you talk about this to anybody?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Especially not to Quint?’
‘Especially not. But…’ I hesitated, ‘they’re a close family. It’s more than likely that on Saturday evening or yesterday, Ginnie and Gordon told Ellis that you and I and Archie were sniffing round the Land-Rover and that you took away the shears. I think you must consider that Ellis knows the hunt is on.’
He nodded disgustedly. ‘And as Ellis Quint officially lives in the Metropolitan area, we in the Thames Valley district cannot pursue our inquiries as freely as we could have.’
‘You mean, you can’t haul him down to the local Regents Park nick and ask him awkward questions, like what was he doing at 3.00 a.m. on Saturday?’
‘We can ask him ourselves if the Met agrees.’
‘I thought these divisions were being done away with.’
‘Cooperation is improving all the time.’
I left him to sort out his problems and set off to drive to Kent. On the way, wanting to give Rachel Ferns a cheering-up present, I detoured into the maze of Kingston and, having parked, walked around the precincts looking for inspiration in the shops.
A windowful of tumbling puppies made me pause; perhaps Rachel needed an animal to love, to replace the pony. And perhaps Linda would not be pleased at having to house-train a growing nuisance that molted and chewed the furniture. I went into the pet shop, however, and that’s how I came to arrive at Linda Ferns’ house with my car full of fish tank, water weeds, miniature ruined castle walls, electric pump, lights, fish food, instructions, and three large lidded buckets of tropical fish.
Rachel was waiting by the gate for my arrival.
‘You’re half an hour late,’ she accused. ‘You said you’d be here by twelve.’
‘Have you heard of the M25?’
‘Everyone makes that motorway an excuse.’
‘Well, sorry.’
Her bald head was still a shock. Apart from that, she looked well, her cheeks full and rounded by steroids. She wore a loose sundress and clumpy sneakers on stick-like legs. It was crazy to love someone else’s child so comprehensively, yet for the first time ever, I felt the idea of fatherhood take a grip.
Jenny had refused to have children on the grounds that any racing day could leave her a widow, and at the time I hadn’t cared one way or another. If ever I married again, I thought, following Rachel into the house, I would long for a daughter.
Linda gave me a bright, bright smile, a pecking kiss and the offer of a gin and tonic while she threw together some pasta for our lunch. The table was laid. She set out steaming dishes.
‘Rachel was out waiting for you two hours ago!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done to the child.’
‘How are things?’
‘Happy.’ She turned away abruptly, tears as ever near the surface. ‘Have some more gin. You said you’d got news for me.’
‘Later. After lunch. And I’ve brought Rachel a present.’
The fish tank after lunch was the ultimate success. Rachel was enthralled, Linda interested and helpful. ‘Thank goodness you didn’t give her a dog,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand animals under my feet I wouldn’t let Joe give her a dog. That’s why she wanted a pony.’
The vivid fish swam healthily through the Gothic ruins, the water weeds rose and swelled, the lights and bubbles did their stuff. Rachel sprinkled fish food and watched her new friends eat. The pet shop owner had persuaded me to take a bigger tank than I’d thought best, and he had undoubtedly been right. Rachel’s pale face glowed. Pegotty, in a baby-bouncer, sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed beside the glass. Linda came with me into the garden.
‘Any news about a transplant?’ I asked.
‘It would have been the first thing I’d told you.’
We sat on the bench. The roses bloomed. It was a beautiful day, heartbreaking.
Linda said wretchedly, ‘In acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is what Rachel’s got, chemotherapy causes remission almost always. More than ninety per cent of the time. In seven out of ten children, the remission lasts forever, and after five years they can be thought of as cured for life. And girls have a better chance than boys, isn’t that odd? But in thirty per cent of children, the disease comes back.’
She stopped.
‘And it has come back in Rachel?’