‘And, if you don’t mind, sir, will you please just tell everyone she’s been found, not that she was strangled.’
‘How do you know that she was strangled, if there’s nothing much left?’
‘The hyoid bone, sir. In the throat. Fractured. Only a direct blow or manual pressure does that. Fingers, usually, from behind.’
‘Oh, I see. All right, I’ll leave it to you. We’d better start with Mr Vickers’ secretary, Dee-Dee.’
I steered him into the office and introduced him. Detective Constable Rich followed everywhere like a shadow, a non-speaking taker of notes. I explained to Dee-Dee that Angela Brickell had probably been found.
‘Oh good,’ she said spontaneously, and then, seeing it wasn’t good at all, ‘Oh dear.’
Doone asked to use the telephone, Dee-Dee at once assenting. Doone called his people back at base.
‘Mr Vickers identified the horse as one that Angela Brickell tended in his stable, and the man as the owner of the horse, or rather the owner’s husband. I’d say it’s fairly sure we have Angela Brickell in the mortuary. Can you arrange to send round a WPC to her parents? They live out Wokingham way. The address is in my office. Do it pronto. We don’t want anyone from Shellerton upsetting them first. Break it to them kindly, see? Ask if they could recognise any clothes of hers, or handbag. Ask Mollie to go to them, if she’s on duty. She makes it more bearable for people. She mops up their grief. Get Mollie. Tell her to take another constable with her, if she wants.’
He listened for a moment or two and put down the receiver.
‘The poor lass has been dead six months or more,’ he said to Dee-Dee. ‘All that’s left is sweet clean bones.’
Dee-Dee looked as if that thought were sick-making enough, but I could see that Doone’s rough humanity would comfort in the end. He was like a stubby-fingered surgeon, I thought: delicate in his handiwork against the odds.
He asked Dee-Dee if she knew of any reason for Angela Brickell’s disappearance. Had the girl been unhappy? Having rows with a boyfriend?
‘I’ve no idea. We didn’t find out until after she’d gone that she must have given chocolate to Chickweed. Stupid thing to do.’
Doone looked lost. I explained about the theobromine. ‘That’s in those clippings, too,’ I said.
‘We found some chocolate bar wrappers with the lass,’ Doone said. ‘No chocolate. Is that what was meant in our notes by “possibly doped a horse in her charge”?’
‘Spot on,’ I said.
‘Chocolate!’ he said disgustedly. ‘Not worth dying for.’
I said, enlightened, ‘Were you looking for a big conspiracy? A doping ring?’
‘Have to consider everything.’
Dee-Dee said positively, ‘Angela Brickell wouldn’t have been in a doping ring. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Doone didn’t pursue it but said he’d like to talk to the rest of the stable staff, asking Dee-Dee meanwhile not to break the news to anyone else as he would prefer to do it himself. Also he didn’t want anyone springing the tragedy prematurely onto the poor parents.
‘Surely I can tell Fiona,’ she protested.
‘Who’s Fiona?’ He frowned, perhaps trying to remember.
‘Fiona Goodhaven, who owns Chickweed.’
‘Oh, yes. Well, not her either. Especially not her. I like to get people’s first thoughts, first impressions, not hear what they think after they’ve spent hours discussing something with all their friends. First thoughts are clearer and more valuable, I’ve found.’
He said it with more persuasion than command, with the result that Dee-Dee agreed to stay off the grapevine. She didn’t ask how the girl had died. If she realised Doone’s remarks best fitted a murder scenario, she didn’t say so. Perhaps she simply shied away from having to know.
Doone asked to be taken out to the stables. On the way I asked him to remember, if he met Mackie, Tremayne’s daughter-in-law and assistant trainer, that she was newly pregnant.
He gave me a sharp glance.
‘You’re considerate,’ I said mildly. ‘I thought you might want to modify the shocks.’
He looked disconcerted but made no promise either way and, as it happened, by the time we reached the yard, Mackie had gone home and Bob Watson was alone there, beavering away with saw, hammer and nails, making a new saddle-horse to hold the saddles in the tack room. We found him outside the tack-room door, not too pleased to be interrupted.
I introduced Bob to Doone, Doone to Bob. Doone told him that some human remains discovered by chance were thought to be those of Angela Brickell.
‘No!’ Bob said. ‘Straight up? Poor little bitch. What did she do, fall down a quarry?’ He looked absent-mindedly at a piece of wood he held as if he’d temporarily forgotten its purpose.
‘Why should you say that, sir?’ Doone asked attentively.
‘Manner of speaking,’ Bob said, shrugging. ‘I always thought she’d just scarpered. The guv’nor swore she’d given Chickweed chocolate, but I reckon she didn’t. I mean, we all know you mustn’t. Anyway, who found her? Where did she go?’
‘She was found by chance,’ Doone said again. ‘Was she unhappy over a boyfriend?’
‘Not that I know of. But there’s twenty lads and girls here, and they come and go all the time. Truth to tell, I can’t remember much about her, except she was sexy. Ask Mrs Goodhaven, she was always kind to her. Ask the other girls here, some of them lived in a hostel with her. Why did you want to know about a boyfriend? She didn’t take a high jump, did she? Is that what she did?’
Doone didn’t say yes or no, and I understood what he’d meant by preferring to listen to unadulterated first thoughts, to the first pictures and conclusions that minds leaped to when questioned.
He talked to Bob for a while longer but as far as I could see learned nothing much.
‘You want to see Mackie,’ Bob said in the end. ‘That’s young Mrs Vickers. The girls tell her things they’d never tell me.’
Doone nodded and I led him and the ubiquitous Rich round the house to Mackie and Perkin’s entrance, ringing the bell. It was Perkin himself who came to the door, appearing in khaki overalls, looking wholly artisan and smelling, fascinatingly, of wood and linseed oil.
‘Hello,’ he said, surprised to see me. ‘Mackie’s in the shower.’
Doone took it in his stride this time, introducing himself formally.
‘I came to let Mrs Vickers know that Angela Brickell’s been found,’ he said.
‘Who?’ Perkin said blankly. ‘I didn’t know anyone was lost. I don’t know any Angela... Angela who did you say?’
Doone patiently explained she’d been lost for seven or more months. Angela Brickell.
‘Good Lord. Really? Who is she?’ A thought struck him. ‘I say, is she the stable girl who buggered off sometime last year? I remember a bit of a fuss.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Good then, my wife will be glad she’s found. I’ll give her the message.’
He made as if to close the door but Doone said he would like to see Mrs Vickers himself.
‘Oh? All right. You’d better come in and wait. John? Come in?’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
He led the way into a kitchen-dining room where I hadn’t been before and offered us rattan armchairs round a table made of a circular slab of glass resting on three gothic plaster pillars. The curtains and chair covers were bright turquoise overprinted with blowsy grey, black and white flowers, and all the kitchen fitments were faced with grey-white streaked Formica; thoroughly modern.