I said to Norman, ‘Did you look at the tape of Ellis’s program, that one I put in with my report?’
‘The tape covered with stickers saying it was the property of Mrs Linda Ferns? Yes, I did.’
‘When Ellis was sitting on the floor with those children,’ I said, ‘he was wearing a dark tracksuit, open at the neck. He had a peaked cap pushed back on his head. He looked young. Boyish. The children responded to him… touched him… loved him. He had a pair of sunglasses tucked into a breast pocket.’
After a silence Norman said, ‘But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t wear those clothes on television if he’d worn them to mutilate the Ferns pony.’
‘Oh yes he would. It would deeply amuse him. There’s nothing gives him more buzz than taking risks.’
‘A baseball cap,’ Archie said thoughtfully, ‘entirely changes the shape of someone’s head.’
I nodded. ‘A baseball cap and a pair of running shorts can reduce any man of stature to anonymity.’
‘We’ll never prove it,’ Norman said.
Jonathan slouched back in his own clothes and with his habitual half-sneering expression firmly in place. Archie’s exasperation with him sharply returned.
‘This is not the road to Damascus,’ I murmured.
‘Damn you, Sid.’ Archie glared, and then laughed.
‘What are you talking about?’ Norman asked.
‘Saint Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus happened like a thunderclap,’ Archie explained. ‘Sid’s telling me not to look for instant miracles by the gravel pit lake.’
Jonathan, not listening, handed me the bag. ‘Cool idea,’ he said. ‘No one knew me.’
‘They would, close to.’
‘It was still a risk,’ Norman objected.
‘I told you,’ I said, ‘the risk is the point.’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Cutting off a horse’s foot doesn’t make sense. Half of human actions don’t make sense. Sense is in the eye of the beholder.’
I drove back to London.
My answering machine had answered so many calls that it had run out of recording tape.
Among the general abuse, three separate calls were eloquent about the trouble I’d stirred up. All three of the owners of the other colt victims echoed Linda Ferns’ immovable conviction.
The lady from Cheltenham: ‘I can’t believe you can be so misguided. Ellis is absolutely innocent. I wouldn’t have thought of you as being jealous of him, but all the papers say so. I’m sorry, Sid, but you’re not welcome here anymore.’
The angry Lancashire farmer: ‘You’re a moron, do you know that? Ellis Quint! You’re stupid. You were all right as a jockey. You should give up this pretense of being Sherlock Holmes. You’re pitiful, lad.’
The lady from York: ‘How can you? Dear Ellis! He’s worth ten of you, I have to say.’
I switched off the critical voices, but they went on reverberating in my brain.
The press had more or less uniformly followed The Pump’s lead. Pictures of Ellis at his most handsome smiled confidently from newsstands everywhere. Trial by media found Ellis Quint the wronged and innocent hero, Sid Halley the twisted, jealous cur snapping at his heels.
I’d known it would be bad: so why the urge to bang my head against the wall? Because I was human, and didn’t have tungsten nerves, whatever anyone thought. I sat with my eyes shut, ostrich fashion.
Tuesday was much the same. I still didn’t bang my head. Close-run thing.
On Wednesday Ellis appeared again before magistrates, who that time set him free on bail.
Norman phoned.
‘Cloth ears?’ he said. ‘Same as before?’
‘Deaf,’ I assured him.
‘It was fixed beforehand. Two minutes in court. Different time than posted. The press arrived after it was over. Ellis greeted them, free, smiling broadly.’
‘Shit.’
Norman said, ‘His lawyers have done their stuff. It’s rubbish to. think the well-balanced personality intended to kill himself — his tie got caught somehow but he managed to free it. The policeman he pushed failed to identify himself adequately and is now walking about comfortably in a cast. The colt Ellis is accused of attacking is alive and recovering well. As bail is granted in cases of manslaughter, it is unnecessary to detain Ellis Quint any longer on far lesser charges. So… he’s walked.’
‘Is he still to be tried?’
‘So far. His lawyers have asked for an early trial date so-that he can put this unpleasantness behind him. He will plead not guilty, of course. His lawyers are already patting each other on the back. And… I think there’s a heavyweight maneuvering somewhere in this case.’
‘A heavyweight? Who?’
‘Don’t know. It’s just a feeling.’
‘Could it be Ellis’s father?’
‘No, no. Quite different. It’s just… since our reports, yours and mine, reached the Crown Prosecution Service, there’s been a new factor. Political, perhaps. It’s difficult to describe. It’s not exactly a cover-up. There’s already been too much publicity, it’s more a sort of redirection. Even officially, and not just to the press, someone with muscle is trying to get you thoroughly and, I’m afraid I must say, malignantly discredited.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Sid, seriously, look out for yourself.’
I felt as prepared as one could be for some sort of catastrophic pulverization to come my way, but in the event the process was subtler and long drawn out.
As if nothing had happened, Ellis resumed his television program and began making jokes about Sid Halley — ‘Sid Halley? That friend of mine! Have you heard that he comes from Halifax? Halley facts — he makes them up.’
And ‘I like halibut — I eat it.’ And the old ones that I was used to, ‘halitosis’ and ‘Hallelujah.’
Hilarious.
When I went to the races, which I didn’t do as often as earlier, people either turned their backs or laughed, and I wasn’t sure which I disliked more.
I took to going only to jumping meetings, knowing Ellis’s style took him to the most fashionable meetings on the flat. I acknowledged unhappily to myself that in my avoidance of him there was an element of cringe. I despised myself for it. All the same, I shrank from a confrontation with him and truly didn’t know whether it was because of an ever-deepening aversion to what he had done, or because of the fear — the certainty — that he would publicly mock me.
He behaved as if there were never going to be a trial; as if awkward details like Land-Rovers, lopping shears and confirmed matching DNA tests tying the shears to the Bracken colt were never going to surface once the sub judice silence ended.
Norman, Archie and also Charles Roland worried that, for all the procedural care we had taken, Ellis’s lawyers would somehow get the Land-Rover disallowed. Ellis’s lawyers, Norman said, backed by the heavy unseen presence that was motivating them and possibly even paying the mounting fees, now included a defense counsel whose loss rate for the previous seven years was nil.
Surprisingly, despite the continuing barrage of ignominy, I went on being offered work. True, the approach was often tentative and apologetic — ‘Whether you’re right or pigheaded about Ellis Quint…’ and ‘Even if you’ve got Ellis Quint all wrong…’ the nitty gritty seemed to be that they needed me and there was no one else.
Well hooray for that. I cleaned up minor mysteries, checked credit ratings, ditto characters, found stolen horses, caught sundry thieves, all the usual stuff.
July came in with a deluge that flooded rivers and ruined the shoes of racegoers, and no colt was attacked at the time of the full moon, perhaps because the nights were wet and windy and black, dark with clouds.