The press finally lost interest in the daily trashing of Sid Halley and Ellis Quint’s show wrapped up for the summer break. I went down to Kent a couple of times, taking new fish for Rachel, sitting on the floor with her, playing checkers. Neither Linda nor I mentioned Ellis. She hugged me good-bye each time and asked when I would be coming back. Rachel, she said, had had no more nightmares. They were a thing of the past.
August came quietly and left in the same manner. No colts were attacked. The Hotline went cold. India Cathcart busied herself with a cabinet member’s mistress but still had a routinely vindictive jab at me each Friday. I went to America for two short weeks and rode horses up the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, letting the wide skies and the forests work their peace.
In September, one dew-laden early-fall English Saturday morning after a calm moonlit night, a colt was discovered with a foot off.
Nauseated, I heard the announcement on the radio in the kitchen while I made coffee.
Listeners would remember, the cool newsreader said, that in June Ellis Quint had been notoriously accused by ex-jockey Sid Halley of a similar attack. Quint was laughing off this latest incident, affirming his total ignorance on the matter.
There were no Hotline calls from The Pump, but Norman Picton scorched the wires.
‘Have you heard?’ he demanded.
‘Yes. But no details.’
‘It was a yearling colt this time. Apparently there aren’t many two-year-olds in the fields just now, but there are hundreds of yearlings.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘The yearling sales are starting.’
‘The yearling in question belonged to some people near Northampton. They’re frantic. Their vet put the colt out of his misery. But get this. Ellis Quint’s lawyers have already claimed he has an alibi.’
I stood in silence in my sitting room, looking out to the unthreatening garden.
‘Sid?’
‘Mm.’
‘You’ll have to break that alibi. Otherwise, it will break you.’
‘Mm.’
‘Say something else, dammit.’
‘The police can do it. Your lot.’
‘Face it. They’re not going to try very hard. They’re going to believe in his alibi, if it’s anything like solid.’
‘Do you think, do you really think,’ I asked numbly, ‘that an ultra-respected barrister would connive with his client to mutilate… to kill… a colt — or pay someone else to do it — to cast doubt on the prosecution’s case in the matter of a different colt?’
‘Put like that, no.’
‘Nor do I.’
‘So Ellis Quint has set it up himself, and what he has set up, you can knock down.’
‘He’s had weeks — more than two months — to plan it.’
‘Sid,’ he said, ‘it’s not like you to sound defeated.’
If he, I thought, had been on the receiving end of a long, pitiless barrage of systematic denigration, he might feel as I did, which, if not comprehensively defeated, was at least battle weary before I began.
‘The police at Northampton,’ I said, ‘are not going to welcome me with open arms.’
‘That’s never stopped you before.’
I sighed. ‘Can you find out from the Northampton police what his alibi actually is?’
‘Piece of cake. I’ll phone you back.’
I put down the receiver and went over to the window. The little square looked peaceful and safe, the railed garden green and grassy, a tree-dappled haven where generations of privileged children had run and played while their nursemaids gossiped. I’d spent my own childhood in Liverpool’s back streets, my father dead and my mother fighting cancer. I in no way regretted the contrast in origins. I had learned self-sufficiency and survival there. Perhaps because of the back streets I now valued the little garden more. I wondered how the children who’d grown up in that garden would deal with Ellis Quint. Perhaps I could learn from them. Ellis had been that sort of child.
Norman phoned back later in the morning.
‘Your friend,’ he said, ‘reportedly spent the night at a private dance in Shropshire, roughly a hundred miles to the northwest of the colt. Endless friends will testify to his presence, including his hostess, a duchess. It was a dance given to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the heir.’
‘Damn.’
‘He could hardly have chosen a more conspicuous or more watertight alibi.’
‘And some poor bitch will swear she lay down for him at dawn.’
‘Why dawn?’
‘It’s when it happens.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Never you mind,’ I said.
‘You’re a bad boy, Sid.’
Long ago, I thought. Before Jenny. Summer dances, dew, wet grass, giggles and passion. Long ago and innocent.
Life’s a bugger, I thought.
‘Sid,’ Norman’s voice said, ‘do you realize the trial is due to start two weeks on Monday?’
‘I do realize.’
‘Then get a move on with this alibi.’
‘Yes, sir, Detective Inspector.’
He laughed. ‘Put the bugger back behind bars.’
On the Tuesday I went to see the Shropshire duchess, for whom I had ridden winners in that former life. She even had a painting of me on her favorite horse, but I was no longer her favorite jockey.
‘Yes, of course Ellis was here all night,’ she confirmed. Short, thin, and at first unwelcoming, she led me through the armor-dotted entrance hall of her drafty old house to the sitting room, where she had been watching the jump racing on television when I arrived.
Her front door had been opened to me by an arthritic old manservant who had hobbled away to see if Her Grace was in. Her Grace had come into the hall clearly anxious to get rid of me as soon as possible, and had then relented, her old kindness towards me resurfacing like a lost but familiar habit.
A three-mile steeplechase was just finishing, the jockeys kicking side by side to the finish line, the horses tired and straining, the race going in the end to the one carrying less weight.
The duchess turned down the volume, the better to talk.
‘I cannot believe, Sid,’ she said, ‘that you’ve accused dear Ellis of something so disgusting. I know you and Ellis have been friends for years. Everyone knows that. I do think he’s been a bit unkind about you on television, but you did ask for it, you know.’
‘But he was here…?’ I asked.
‘Of course. All night. It was five or later when everyone started to leave. The band was playing still… we’d all had breakfast…’
‘When did the dance start?’ I asked.
‘Start? The invitations were for ten. But you know how people are. It was eleven or midnight before most people came. We had the fireworks at three-thirty because rain was forecast for later, but it was fine all night, thank goodness.’
‘Did Ellis say good night when he left?’
‘My dear Sid, there were over three hundred people here last Friday night. A succès fou, if I say it myself.’
‘So you don’t actually remember when Ellis left?’
‘The last I saw of him he was dancing an eightsome with that gawky Raven girl. Do drop it, Sid. I’m seeing you now for old times’ sake, but you’re not doing yourself any good, are you?’
‘Probably not.’
She patted my hand. ‘I’ll always know you, at the races and so on.’
‘Thank you,’! I said.
‘Yes. Be a dear and find your own way out. Poor old Stone has such bad arthritis these days.’
She turned up the volume in preparation for the next race, and I left.