‘So,’ I said, fascinated, ‘where do I get one?’
‘Try Harrods,’ he said.
‘Harrods?’
‘Harrods is just round the corner from where you live, isn’t it?’
‘More or less.’
‘Try there, then. Or anywhere else that sells phones. You can use the same number that you have now. You just need to tell your service provider. And of course you’ll need an SIM card. You have one, of course?’
I said meekly, ‘No.’
‘Sid!’ he protested. He sneezed again. ‘Sorry. An SIM card is a Subscriber’s Identity Module. You can’t live without one.’
‘I can’t?’
‘Sid, I despair of you. Wake up to technology.’
‘I’m better at knowing what a horse thinks.’
Patiently he enlightened me, ‘An SIM card is like a credit card. It actually is a credit card. Included on it are your name and mobile phone number and other details, and you can slot it into any mobile that will take it. For instance, if you are someone’s guest in Athens and he has a mobile that accepts an SIM card, you can slot your card into his phone and the charge will appear on your account, not his.’
‘Are you serious?’ I asked.
‘With my problems, would I joke?’
‘Where do I get an SIM card?’
‘Ask Harrods.’ He sneezed. ‘Ask anyone who travels for a living. Your service provider will provide.’ He sniffed. ‘So long, Sid.’
Amused and grateful, I opened my mail and read the fax. The fax being most accessible got looked at first.
Handwritten, it scrawled simply, ‘Phone me,’ and gave a long number.
The writing was Kevin Mills’s, but the fax machine he’d sent it from was anonymously not The Pump’s.
I phoned the number given, which would have connected me to a mobile, and got only the infuriating instruction, ‘Please try later.’
There were a dozen messages I didn’t much want on my answering machine and a piece of information I definitely didn’t want in a large brown envelope from Shropshire.
The envelope contained a copy of a glossy county magazine, one I’d sent for as I’d been told it included lengthy coverage of the heir-to-the-dukedom’s coming-of-age dance. There were, indeed, four pages of pictures, mostly in color, accompanied by prose gush about the proceedings and a complete guest list.
A spectacular burst of fireworks filled half a page, and there in a group of heaven-gazing spectators, there in white tuxedo and all his photogenic glory, there unmistakably stood Ellis Quint.
My heart sank. The fireworks had started at three-thirty. At three-thirty, when the moon was high, Ellis had been a hundred miles northwest of the Windward Stud’s yearling.
There were many pictures of the dancing, and a page of black and white shots of the guests, names attached. Ellis had been dancing. Ellis smiled twice from the guests’ page, carefree, having a good time.
Damn it to hell, I thought. He had to have taken the colt’s foot off early. Say by one o’clock. He could then have arrived for the fireworks by three-thirty. I’d found no one who’d seen him arrive, but several who swore to his presence after five-fifteen. At five-fifteen he had helped the heir to climb onto a table to make a drunken speech. The heir had poured a bottle of champagne over Ellis’s head. Everyone remembered that. Ellis could not have driven back to Northampton before dawn.
For two whole days the previous week I’d traipsed around Shropshire, and next-door Cheshire, handed on from grand house to grander, asking much the same two questions (according to sex): Did you dance with Ellis Quint, or did you drink/eat with him? The answers at first had been freely given, but as time went on, news of my mission spread before me until I was progressively met by hostile faces and frankly closed doors. Shropshire was solid Ellis country. They’d have stood on their heads to prove him unjustly accused. They were not going to say that they didn’t know when he’d arrived.
In the end I returned to the duchess’s front gates, and from there drove as fast as prudence allowed to the Windward Stud Farm, timing the journey at two hours and five minutes. On empty roads at night, Northampton to the duchess might have taken ten minutes less. I’d proved nothing except that Ellis had had time.
Enough time was not enough.
As always before gathering at such dances, the guests had given and attended dinner parties both locally and farther away. No one that I’d asked had entertained Ellis to dinner.
No dinner was not enough.
I went through the guest list crossing off the people I’d seen. There were still far more than half unconsulted, most of whom I’d never heard of.
Where was Chico? I needed him often. I hadn’t the time or, to be frank, the appetite to locate and question all the guests, even if they would answer. There must have been people — local people — helping with the parking of cars that night. Chico would have chatted people up in the local pubs and found out if any of the car-parkers remembered Ellis’s arrival. Chico was good at pubs, and I wasn’t in his class.
The police might have done it, but they wouldn’t. The death of a colt still didn’t count like murder.
The police.
I phoned Norman Picton’s police station number and gave my name as John Paul Jones.
He came on the line in a good humor and listened to me without protest.
‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You want me to ask favors of the Northamptonshire police? What do I offer in return?’
‘Blood in the hinges of lopping shears.’
‘They’ll have made their own tests.’
‘Yes, and that Northamptonshire colt is dead and gone to the glue factory. An error, wouldn’t you say? Might they not do you a favor in exchange for commiseration?’
‘You’ll have my head off. What is it you actually want?’
‘Er…’ I began, ‘I was there when the police found the lopping shears in the hedge.’
‘Yes, you told me.’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking. Those shears weren’t wrapped in sacking, like the ones we took from the Quints.’
‘No, and the shears weren’t the same, either. The ones at Northampton are a slightly newer model. They’re on sale everywhere in garden centers. The problem is that Ellis Quint hasn’t been reported as buying any, not in the Northamptonshire police district, nor ours.’
‘Is there any chance,’ I asked, ‘of my looking again at the material used for wrapping the shears?’
‘If there are horse hairs in it, there’s nothing left to match them to, same as the blood.’
‘All the same, the cloth might tell us where the shears came from. Which garden center, do you see?’
‘I’ll see if they’ve done that already.’
‘Thanks, Norman.’
‘Thank Archie. He drives me to help you.’
‘Does he?’
He heard my surprise. ‘Archie has influence,’ he said, ‘and I do what the magistrate tells me.’
When he’d gone off the line I tried Kevin Mills again and reached the same electronic voice: ‘Please try later.’
After that I sat in an armchair while the daylight faded and the lights came on in the peaceful square. We were past the equinox, back in winter thoughts, the year dying ahead. Fall for me had for almost half my life meant the longed-for resurgence of major jump racing, the time of big winners and speed and urgency in the blood. Winter now brought only nostalgia and heating bills. At thirty-four I was growing old.