I asked; ‘Did you keep any of the newspaper accounts of Silverboy and the other local ponies being attacked? If you did, can I see them?’
‘Yes,’ she answered doubtfully, ‘but I don’t see how they could help. They didn’t help the police.’
‘They’d be a start,’ I said.
‘All right, then.’ She left the room and after a while returned with a small blue suitcase, the size for stowing under the seats of aircraft. ‘Everything’s in here,’ she said, passing me the case, ‘including a tape of a program a television company made. Rachel and I are in it. You won’t lose it, will you? We never show it, but I wouldn’t want to lose it.’ She blinked against tears. ‘It was actually the only good thing that happened. Ellis Quint came to see the children and he was utterly sweet with them. Rachel loved him. He was so kind.’
‘I know him quite well,’ I said. ‘If anyone could comfort the children, he could.’
‘A really nice man,’ Linda said.
I took the blue suitcase with its burden of many small tragedies back with me to London and spent indignant hours reading muted accounts of a degree of vandalism that must have been mind-destroying when fresh and bloody and discovered by loving children.
The twenty-minute videotape showed Ellis Quint at his best: the gentle, sympathetic healer of unbearable sorrows; the sensible, caring commentator urging the police to treat these crimes with the seriousness given to murders. How good he was, I thought, at pitching his responses exactly right. He put his arms around Rachel and talked to her without sentimentality, not mentioning, until right at the end of the program, when the children were off the screen, that for Rachel Ferns the loss of her pony was just one more intolerable blow in a life already full of burdens.
For that program, Rachel had chosen to wear the pretty blonde wig that gave her back her pre-chemotherapy looks. Ellis, as a final dramatic impact, had shown for a few seconds a photo of Rachel bald and vulnerable: an ending poignant to devastation.
I hadn’t seen the program when it had been broadcast: judging from the March date on the tape, I knew I’d been away in America trying to find an absconding owner who’d left a monstrous training account unpaid. There were, anyway, many of Ellis’s programs I hadn’t seen: he presented his twenty-minute twice-weekly journalistic segments as part of an hour-long sports news medley, and was too often on the screen for any one appearance to be especially fanfared.
Meeting Ellis, as I often did at the races, I told him about Linda Ferns calling me in, and asked him if he’d learned any more on the subject of who had mutilated the Kent ponies.
‘My dear old Sid,’ he said, smiling, ‘all of that was months ago, wasn’t it?’
‘The ponies were vandalized in January and February and your program was aired in March.’
‘And it’s now June, right?’ He shook his head, neither distressed nor surprised. ‘You know what my life’s like, I have researchers digging out stories for me. Television is insatiably hungry. Of course if there were any more discoveries about these ponies, I would have been told, and I would have done a follow-up, but I’ve heard nothing.’
I said, ‘Rachel Ferns, who has leukemia, still has nightmares.’
‘Poor little kid.’
‘She said you were very kind.’
‘Well…’ he made a ducking, self-deprecating movement of his head, ‘…it isn’t so very difficult. Actually that program did marvels for my ratings.’ He paused. ‘Sid, do you know anything about this book-maker kickback scandal I’m supposed to be doing an expose on next week?’
‘Nothing at all,’ I regretted. ‘But, Ellis, going back to the mutilations, did you chase up those other scattered cases of foals and two-year-old thoroughbreds that suffered from vandalism?’
He frowned lightly, shaking his head. ‘The researchers didn’t think them worth more than a mention or two. It was copycat stuff. I mean, there wasn’t anything as strong as that story about the children.’ He grinned. ‘There were no heartstrings attached to the others.’
‘You’re a cynic,’ I said.
‘Aren’t we all?’
We had been close friends for years, Ellis and I. We had ridden against each other in races, he as a charismatic amateur, I as a dedicated pro, but both with the inner fire that made hurtling over large jumps on semi-wild half-ton horses at thirty miles an hour seem a wholly reasonable way of passing as many afternoons as possible.
Thinking, after three or four months of no results from the police or the Ellis Quint program, that I would probably fail also in the search for vandals, I nevertheless did my best to earn my fee by approaching the problem crabwise, from the side, by asking questions not of the owners of the ponies, but of the newspapermen who had written the columns in the papers.
I did it methodically on the telephone, starting with the local Kent papers, then chasing up the by-line reporters in the London dailies. Most of the replies were the same: the story had originated from a news agency that supplied all papers with condensed factual information. Follow-ups and interpretation were the business of the papers themselves.
Among the newspapers Linda Ferns had given me, The Pump had stirred up the most disgust, and after about six phone calls I ran to earth the man who’d practically burned holes in the page with the heat of his prose: Kevin Mills, The Pump’s chief bleeding-hearts reporter.
‘A jar?’ he said, to my invitation. ‘Don’t see why not.’
He met me in a pub (nice anonymous surroundings) and he told me he’d personally been down to Kent on that story. He’d interviewed all the children and their parents and also a fierce lady who ran one of the branches of the Pony Club, and he’d pestered the police until they’d thrown him out.
‘Zilch,’ he said, downing a double gin and tonic. ‘No one saw a thing. All those ponies were out in fields and all of them were attacked sometime between sunset and dawn, which in January and February gave the vandals hours and hours to do the job and vamoose.’
‘All dark, though,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘They were all done over on fine nights, near the full moon in each month.’
‘How many, do you remember?’
‘Four altogether in January. Two of them were blinded. Two were mares with torn knife wounds up their… well, birth passages, as our squeamish editor had me put it.’
‘And February?’
‘One blinded, two more chopped-up mares, one cut-off foot. A poor little girl found the foot near the water trough where her pony used to drink. Ellis Quint did a brilliant TV program about it. Didn’t you see it?’
‘I was in America, but I’ve heard about it since.’
‘There were trailers of that program all week. Almost the whole nation watched it. It made a hell of an impact. That pony was the last one in Kent, as far as I know. The police think it was a bunch of local thugs who got the wind up when there was so much fuss. And people stopped turning ponies out into unguarded fields, see?’
I ordered him another double. He was middle aged, half-bald, doing nicely as to paunch. He wiped an untidy mustache on the back of his hand and said that in his career he’d interviewed so many parents of raped and murdered girls that the ponies had been almost a relief.