‘But not a direct cash advantage?’
‘Sid!’
‘Well, sorry.’
‘I should frigging well hope so.’ He wrapped thick twine around the shrouded engine. ‘I’m not asking cash for a strip of rag from Northamptonshire.’
‘I grovel,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘That’ll be the day.’ He climbed into his boat and secured various bits of equipment against movement en route.
‘No one has entirely given in to the pressure,’ he pointed out. ‘The case against Ellis Quint has not been dropped. True, it’s now in a ropy state. You yourself have been relentlessly discredited to the point where you’re almost a liability to the prosecution, and even though that’s brutally unfair, it’s a fact.’
‘Mm.’
In effect, I thought, I’d been commissioned by Davis Tatum to find out who had campaigned to defeat me. It wasn’t the first time I’d faced campaigns to enforce my inactivity, but it was the first time I’d been offered a fee to save myself. To save myself, in this instance, meant to defeat Ellis Quint: so I was being paid for that, in the first place. And for what else?
Norman backed his car up to the boat trailer and hitched them together. Then he leaned through the open front passenger window of the car, unlocked the glove compartment there and drew out and handed to me a plastic bag.
‘One strip of dirty rag,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Cost to you, six grovels before breakfast for a week.’
I took the bag gratefully. Inside, the filthy strip, about three inches wide, had been loosely folded until it was several layers thick.
‘It’s about a meter long,’ Norman said. ‘It was all they would let me have. I had to sign for it.’
‘Good.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘Clean it, for a start.’
Norman said doubtfully, ‘It’s got some sort of pattern in it but there wasn’t any printing on the whole wrapping. Nothing to say where it came from. No garden center name, or anything.’
‘I don’t have high hopes,’ I said, ‘but frankly, just now every straw’s worth clutching.’
Norman stood with his legs apart and his hands on his hips. He looked a pillar of every possible police strength but what he was actually feeling turned out to be indecision.
‘How far can I trust you?’ he asked.
‘For silence?’
He nodded.
‘I thought we’d discussed this already.’
‘Yes, but that was months ago.’
‘Nothing’s changed,’ I said.
He made a decision, stuck his head into his car again and this time brought out a business-sized brown envelope which he held out to me.
‘It’s a copy of the analysis done on the horse nuts,’ he said. ‘So read it and shred it.’
‘OK. And thanks.’
I held the envelope and plastic bag together and knew I couldn’t take such trust lightly. He must be very sure of me, I thought, and felt not complimented but apprehensive.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, ‘do you remember, way back in June, when we took those things out of Gordon Quint’s Land-Rover?’
‘Of course I remember.’
‘There was a farrier’s apron in the Land-Rover. Rolled up. We didn’t take that, did we?’
He frowned. ‘I don’t remember it, but no, it’s not among the things we took. What’s significant about it?’
I said, ‘I’ve always thought it odd that the colts should stand still long enough for the shears to close round the ankle, even with head collars and those nuts. But horses have an acute sense of smell… and all those colts had shoes on — I checked with their vets — and they would have known the smell of a blacksmith’s apron. I think Ellis might have worn that apron to reassure the colts. They may have thought he was the man who shod them. They would have trusted him. He could have lifted an ankle and gripped it with the shears.’
He stared.
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
‘It’s you who knows horses.’
‘It’s how I might get a two-year-old to let me near his legs.’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘that’s how it was done.’
He held out his hand automatically to say good-bye, then remembered Gordon Quint’s handiwork, shrugged, grinned and said instead, ‘If there’s anything interesting about that strip of rag, you’ll let me know?’
‘Of course.’
‘See you.’
He drove off with a wave, trailing his boat, and I returned to my car, stowed away the bag and the envelope and made a short journey to Shelley Green, the home of Archie Kirk.
He had returned from work. He took me into his sitting room while his smiling wife cooked in the kitchen.
‘How’s things?’ Archie asked. ‘Whisky?’
I nodded. ‘A lot of water…’
He indicated chairs, and we sat. The dark room looked right in October: imitation flames burned imitation coals in the fireplace, giving the room a life that the sun of June hadn’t achieved.
I hadn’t seen Archie since then. I absorbed again the probably deliberate grayness of his general appearance, and I saw again the whole internet in the dark eyes.
He said casually, ‘You’ve been having a bit of a rough time.’
‘Does it show?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Will you answer some questions?’
‘It depends what they are.’
I drank some of his undistinguished whisky and let my muscles relax into the ultimate of nonaggressive, noncombative postures.
‘For a start, what do you do?’ I said.
‘I’m a civil servant.’
‘That’s not… well… specific.’
‘Start at the other end,’ he said.
I smiled. I said, ‘It’s a wise man who knows who’s paying him.’
He paused with his own glass halfway to his lips.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Then… do you know Davis Tatum?’
After a pause he answered, ‘Yes.’
It seemed to me he was growing wary; that he, as I did, had to sort through a minefield of facts one could not or should not reveal that one knew. The old dilemma — does he know I know he knows — sometimes seemed like child’s play.
I said, ‘How’s Jonathan?’
He laughed. ‘I hear you play chess,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re a whiz at misdirection. Your opponents think they’re winning, and then… wham.’
I played chess only with Charles at Aynsford, and not very often.
‘Do you know my father-in-law?’ I asked. ‘Ex-father-in-law, Charles Roland?’
With a glimmer he said, ‘I’ve talked to him on the telephone.’
At least he hadn’t lied to me, I thought; and, if he hadn’t lied he’d given me a fairly firm path to follow. I asked about Jonathan, and about his sister, Betty Bracken.
‘That wretched boy is still at Combe Bassett, and now that the water-skiing season is over he is driving everyone mad. You are the only person who sees any good in him.’
‘Norman does.’
‘Norman sees a talented water-skier with criminal tendencies.’
‘Has Jonathan any money?’
Archie shook his head. ‘Only the very little we give him for toothpaste and so on. He’s still on probation. He’s a mess.’ He paused. ‘Betty has been paying for the water ski-ing. She’s the only one in our family with real money. She married straight out of school. Bobby’s thirty years older — he was rich when they married and he’s richer than ever now. As you saw, she’s still devoted to him. Always has been. They had no children; she couldn’t. Very sad. If Jonathan had any sense he would be nice to Betty.’
‘I don’t think he’s that devious. Or not yet, anyway.’