‘You don’t quarrel with Sam Yaeger,’ the brightest of them said boldly. ‘You go to bed with him. Or in the hay.’
Gales of giggles.
They were all in their teens, I thought. Light-framed, hopeful, knowing.
The bold girl said, ‘But no one takes Sam seriously. It’s just a bit of fun. He makes a joke of it. If you don’t want to, you just say no. Most of us say no. He’d never try to force anyone.’
The others looked shocked at the idea. ‘It’s casual with him, like.’
I wondered if Doone were thinking that maybe with Angela it hadn’t been casual after all.
The bold girl, whose name was Tansy, asked when they’d found the poor little bitch.
‘When?’ Doone considered briefly. ‘Someone noticed her last Sunday morning. Mind you, he wasn’t in a great hurry to do anything because he could see she’d been lying there peacefully a long time, but then he phoned us and the message reached me late Sunday afternoon while I was sleeping off my wife’s Yorkshire pudding — great grub, that is — so Monday I went to see the lass and we started trying to find out who she was, because we have lists of missing people, runaways mostly, you see? Then yesterday we found her handbag, and it had this photo in it, so I came over this morning to check if she was the missing stable girl on our missing persons list. So I should think you could say we really found her this morning.’
His voice had lulled them into accepting him on friendly terms and they willingly looked at the photograph he passed round.
‘That’s Chickweed,’ they said, nodding.
‘You’re sure you can tell one horse from another?’
‘Of course you can,’ they said, ‘when you see them every day.’
‘And the man?’
‘Mr Goodhaven.’
Doone thanked them and tucked the photo away again. Rich took slow notes, none of the girls paying him any attention.
Doone asked if by any chance Angela Brickell had owned a dog. The girls, mystified, said no. Why would he think so? They’d found a dog’s collar near her, he explained, and a well-chewed ball. None of them had a dog, Tansy said.
Doone rose to go and told them if anything occurred to them, to send him a message.
‘What sort of thing?’ they asked.
‘Well now,’ he said kindly. ‘We know she’s dead, but we want to know how and why. It’s best to know. If you were found dead one day, you’d want people to know what happened, wouldn’t you?’
Yes, they nodded, they would.
‘Where did she go?’ Tansy asked.
Doone as near as dammit patted her head, but not quite. I thought that that would have undone all his good fatherly work. Willing they might be, but feminists all, too smart to be patronised.
‘We have to do more tests first, miss,’ he said obscurely. ‘But soon we hope to make a statement.’
They all accepted that easily enough and we said our goodbyes, travelling back through the village to a bungalow nearer Bob Watson’s house, where the unmarried lads lived.
The living-room in the lads’ hostel, in sharp contrast to the girls’, was plantless, without cushions and was grubbily scattered with newspapers, empty beer cans, pornography, dirty plates and muddy boots. Only the televisions and video players in both places looked the same.
The lads all knew that Angela Brickell had been found dead as one of them had learned it from Bob Watson. None of them seemed to care about her personally (exactly like the girls) and they too had no information and few opinions about her.
‘She rode all right,’ one of them said, shrugging.
‘She was a bit of a hot pants,’ said another.
They identified Chickweed’s picture immediately and one of them asked if he could have the photo when the police had done with it.
‘Why?’ Doone asked.
‘Because I look after the old bugger now, that’s why. Wouldn’t mind having a snap of him.’
‘Better take another one,’ Doone advised him. ‘By rights this belongs to the lass’s parents.’
‘Well,’ he later demanded of me, after we’d left. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s your job to think,’ I protested.
He half smiled. ‘There’s a long way to go yet. If you think of anything, you tell me. I’ll listen to everything anyone wants to say. I’m not proud. I don’t mind the public telling me the answers. Make sure everyone knows that, will you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The telephone in Shellerton House began ringing that afternoon in a clamour that lasted for days. However reticent Doone had been, the news had spread at once like a bush fire through the village that another young woman connected with Tremayne Vickers’ house and stables had been found dead. Newspapers, quickly informed, brusquely demanded to be told where, when and why. Dee-Dee repeated and repeated that she didn’t know until she was almost in tears. I took over from her after a while and dispensed enormous courtesy and goodwill but no facts, of which, at the time anyway, I knew very few.
I worked on the book and answered the phone most of Friday and didn’t see Doone at all, but on Saturday I learned that he had spent the day before scattering fear and consternation.
Tremayne had asked if I would prefer to go to Sandown with Fiona, Harry and Mackie, saying he thought I might find it more illuminating: he himself would be saddling five runners at Chepstow and dealing with two lots of demanding owners besides. ‘To be frank, you’d be under my feet. Go and carry things for Mackie.’
With old-fashioned views, which Mackie herself tolerated with affection, he persisted in thinking pregnant women fragile. I wondered if Tremayne understood how little Perkin would like my carrying things for Mackie and determined to be discreet.
‘Fiona and Harry are taking Mackie,’ Tremayne said, almost as if the same thought had occurred to him. ‘I’ll check that they’ll take you too, though it’s a certainty if they have room.’
They had room. They collected Mackie and me at the appointed time and they were very disturbed indeed.
Harry was driving. Fiona twisted round in the front seat to speak to Mackie and me directly and with deep lines of worry told us that Doone had paid two visits to them the day before, the first apparently friendly and the second menacing in the extreme.
‘He seemed all right in the morning,’ Fiona said. ‘Chatty and easy-going. Then he came back in the evening...’ She shivered violently, although it was warm in the car, ‘...and he more or less accused Harry of strangling that bloody girl.’
‘What?’ Mackie said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Doone doesn’t think so,’ Harry said gloomily. ‘He says she was definitely strangled. And did he show you that photo of me with Chickweed?’
Mackie and I both said yes.
‘Well, it seems he got it enlarged. I mean, blown up really big. He said he wanted to see me alone, without Fiona, and he showed me the enlargement which was just of me, not the horse. He asked me to confirm that I was wearing my own sunglasses in the photo. I said of course I was. Then he asked me if I was wearing my own belt, and I said of course. He asked me to look carefully at the buckle. I said I wouldn’t be wearing anyone else’s things. Then he asked me if the pen clipped onto the racecard I was holding in the photo was mine also... and I got a bit shirty and demanded to know what it was all about.’ He stopped for a moment, and then in depression went on. ‘You won’t believe it... but they found my sunglasses and my belt and my gold pen lying with that girl, wherever she was, and Doone won’t tell us where for some God-silly reason. I don’t know how the hell those things got there. I told Doone I hadn’t seen any of them for ages and he said he believed it. He thought they’d been with Angela Brickell all these months... that I’d dropped them when I was with her.’