‘Did you bring the angel fish?’ she demanded by way of greeting.
I held up the plastic bucket, which swung from my plastic wrist. Linda took it and removed the watertight lid, showing her daughter the shining black and silver fish that swam vigorously inside.
Rachel relaxed. ‘I’m going to call him Sid,’ she said.
She’d been a lively, blonde, pretty child once, according to her photographs: now she seemed all huge eyes in a bald head. Lassitude and anemia had made her frighteningly frail.
When her mother had first called me in to investigate an attack on Rachel’s pony, the illness had been in remission, the dragon temporarily sleeping. Rachel had become someone special to me and I’d given her a fish tank complete with lights, aeration, water plants, Gothic castle arches, sand and brilliant tropical swimming inhabitants. Linda had wept. Rachel had spent hours getting to know her new friends’ habits; the ones that skulked in corners, the one who bossed all the rest. Half of the fish were called Sid.
The fish tank stood in the Ferns’ sitting room at home and it seemed uncertain now whether Rachel would see the new Sid among his mates.
It was there, in the comfortable middle-sized room furnished with unaggressively expensive modern sofas, with glass-topped end tables and stained-glass Tiffany lamps, that I had first met my clients, Linda and Rachel Ferns.
There were no books in the room, only a few magazines; dress fashions and horses. Shiny striped curtains in crimson and cream; geometrically patterned carpet in merging fawn and gray; flower prints on pale pink walls. Overall the impression was a degree of lack of coordination which probably indicated impulsive inhabitants without strongly formed characters. The Ferns weren’t ‘old’ money, I concluded, but there appeared to be plenty of it.
Linda Ferns, on the telephone, had begged me to come. Five or six ponies in the district had been attacked by vandals, and one of the ponies belonged to her daughter, Rachel. The police hadn’t found out who the vandals were and now months had gone by, and her daughter was still very distressed and would I please, please, come and see if I could help.
‘I’ve heard you’re my only hope. I’ll pay you, of course. I’ll pay you anything if you help Rachel. She has these terrible nightmares. Please.’
I mentioned my fee.
‘Anything,’ she said.
She hadn’t told me, before I arrived in the far-flung village beyond Canterbury, that Rachel was ill unto death.
When I met the huge-eyed bald-headed slender child she shook hands with me gravely.
‘Are you really Sid Halley?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Mum said you would come. Daddy said you didn’t work for kids.’
‘I do sometimes.’
‘My hair is growing,’ she said; and I could see the thin fine blonde fuzz just showing over the pale scalp.
‘I’m glad.’
She nodded. ‘Quite often I wear a wig, but they itch. Do you mind if I don’t?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘I have leukemia,’ she said calmly.
‘I see.’
She studied my face, a child old beyond her age, as I’d found all sick young people to be.
‘You will find out who killed Silverboy, won’t you?’
‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘How did he die?’
‘No, no,’ Linda interrupted. ‘Don’t ask her. I’ll tell you. It upsets her. Just say you’ll sort them out, those pigs. And, Rachel, you take Pegotty out into the garden and push him round so that he can see the flowers.’
Pegotty, it transpired, was a contented-looking baby strapped into a buggy. Rachel without demur pushed him out into the garden and could presently be seen through the window giving him a close-up acquaintance with an azalea.
Linda Ferns watched and wept the first of many tears.
‘She needs a bone-marrow transplant,’ she said, trying to suppress sobs. ‘You’d think it would be simple, but no one so far can find a match to her, not even in the international register set up by the Anthony Nolan Trust.’
I said inadequately, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Her father and I are divorced,’ Linda said. ‘We divorced five years ago, and he’s married again.’ She spoke without bitterness. ‘These things happen.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I was at the Ferns house early in a June of languorous days and sweet-smelling roses, a time for the lotus, not horrors.
‘A bunch of vandals,’ Linda said with a fury that set her whole body trembling, ‘they maimed a lot of ponies in Kent… in this area particularly… so that poor loving kids went out into their paddocks and found their much-loved ponies mutilated. What sick, sick mind would blind a poor, inoffensive pony that had never done anyone any harm? Three ponies round here were blinded and others had had knives stuck up their back passages.’ She blinked on her tears. ‘Rachel was terribly upset. All the children for miles were crying inconsolably. And the police couldn’t find who’d done any of it.’
‘Was Silverboy blinded?’ I asked.
‘No… No… It was worse… For Rachel, it was worse. She found him, you see… out in the paddock…’ Linda openly sobbed. ‘Rachel wanted to sleep in a makeshift stable… a lean-to shed, really. She wanted to sleep there at nights with Silverboy tied up there beside her, and I wouldn’t let her. She’s been ill for nearly three years. It’s such a dreadful disease, and I feel so helpless…’ She wiped her eyes, plucking a tissue from a half-empty box. ‘She keeps saying it wasn’t my fault, but I know she thinks Silverboy would be alive if I’d let her sleep out there.’
‘What happened to him?’ I asked neutrally.
Linda shook her head miserably, unable still to tell me. She was a pretty woman in a conventional thirty-something way: trim figure, well-washed short fair hair, all the health and beauty magazine tips come to admirable life. Only the dullness in the eyes and the intermittent vibrations in many of her muscles spoke plainly of the long strain of emotional buffeting still assailing her.
‘She went out,’ she said eventually, ‘even though it was bitter cold, and beginning to rain… February… she always went to see that his water trough was filled and clean and not frozen over… and I’d made her put on warm clothes and gloves and a scarf and a real thick woolly hat… and she came back running, and screaming… screaming...’
I waited through Linda’s unbearable memories.
She said starkly, ‘Rachel found his foot.’
There was a moment of utter stillness, an echo of the stunned disbelief of that dreadful morning.
‘It was in all the papers,’ Linda said.
I moved and nodded. I’d read — months ago — about the blinded Kent ponies. I’d been busy, inattentive: hadn’t absorbed names or details, hadn’t realized that one of the ponies had lost a foot.
‘I’ve found out since you telephoned,’ I said, ‘that round the country, not just here in Kent, there have been another half a dozen or so scattered vandalizing attacks on ponies and horses in fields.’
She said unhappily, ‘I did see a paragraph about a horse in Lancashire, but I threw the paper away so that Rachel wouldn’t read it. Every time anything reminds her of Silverboy she has a whole week of nightmares. She wakes up sobbing. She comes into my bed, shivering, crying. Please, please find out why… find out who… She’s so ill… and although she’s in remission just now and able to live fairly normally, it almost certainly won’t last. The doctors say she needs the transplant.’
I said, ‘Does Rachel know any of the other children whose ponies were attacked?’
Linda shook her head. ‘Most of them belonged to the Pony Club, I think, but Rachel didn’t feel well enough to join the club. She loved Silverboy — her father gave him to her — but all she could do was sit in the saddle while we led her round. He was a nice, quiet pony, a very nice-looking gray with a darker, smoky-colored mane. Rachel called him Silverboy, but he had a long pedigree name, really. She needed something to love, you see, and she wanted a pony so much.’