She stopped, staring searchingly at my face for understanding.
‘What,’ I asked, feeling the way, ‘did you find in her belongings? Something that worries you... because she’s dead?’
Ingrid’s face showed relief at being invited to tell me.
‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘It was a do-it-yourself home kit for a pregnancy test. She’d used it. All I found was the empty box.’
Chapter 11
Tremayne came home and frightened Ingrid away like Miss Muffet and the spider.
‘What did she want?’ he asked, watching her scuttling exit. ‘She always seems scared of me. She’s a real mouse.’
‘She came to tell me something she thinks should be known,’ I said reflectively. ‘I suppose she thought I could do the telling, in her place.’
‘Typical,’ Tremayne said. ‘What was it?’
‘Angela Brickell was perhaps pregnant.’
‘What?’ He stared at me blankly. ‘Pregnant?’
I explained about the used test. ‘You don’t buy or use one of those tests unless you have good reason to.’
He said thoughtfully, ‘No, I suppose not.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘there are about twenty lusty males connected with this stable and dozens more in Shellerton and throughout the racing industry; and even if she were pregnant, and from what Doone said about bones I don’t see how they can tell yes or no, even if she were, it still might have nothing to do with her death.’
‘But it might.’
‘She was a Roman Catholic, Ingrid says.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘They’re against abortion.’
He stared into space.
I said, ‘Harry’s in trouble. Have you heard?’
‘No, what trouble?’
I told him about Doone’s accusations, and also about duckweed’s way of winning and about Lewis’s more or less explicit admission of perjury. Tremayne poured himself a gin and tonic of suitably gargantuan proportions and told me in his turn that he’d had a rotten day at Chepstow. ‘One of my runners broke down and another went crashing down arse over tip at the last fence with the race in his pocket. Sam dislocated his thumb, which swelled like a balloon, and although he’s OK he won’t realistically be fit again until Tuesday, which means I have to scratch around for a replacement for Monday. And one lot of owners groused and groaned until I could have knocked their heads together and all I can do is be nice to them and sometimes it all drives me up the bloody wall, to tell you the truth.’
He flopped his weight into an armchair, stretched out his legs and rested his gaze on his toecaps, thinking things over.
‘Are you going to tell Doone about the pregnancy test?’ he asked finally.
‘I suppose so. It’s on Ingrid’s conscience. If I don’t pass on what she’s said, she’ll find another mouthpiece.’
He sighed. ‘It won’t do Harry much good.’
‘Nor harm.’
‘It’s a motive. Juries believe in motives.’
I grunted. ‘Harry won’t come to trial.’
‘Nolan did. And a good motive would have jailed him, you can’t say it wouldn’t.’
‘The pregnancy test is a non-starter,’ I said. ‘Ingrid threw the empty box away; there’s no proof it really existed; there’s no saying if Angela used it or when; there’s no certainty about the result; there’s no knowing who she’d been sleeping with.’
‘You should have been a lawyer.’
Mackie and Perkin came through for their usual drink and news-exchange and even Chickweed’s win couldn’t disperse the general gloom.
‘Angela pregnant?’ Mackie shook her head, almost bewildered. ‘She didn’t say anything about it.’
‘She might have done, given time,’ Tremayne said, ‘if the test was positive.’
‘Damned careless of her,’ Perkin said. ‘That bloody girl’s nothing but trouble. It’s all upsetting Mackie just when she should be feeling relaxed and happy, and I don’t like it.’
Mackie stretched out a hand and squeezed her husband’s in gratitude, the underlying joy resurfacing, as persistent as pregnancy itself. Perhaps Angela Brickell too, I speculated, had been delighted to be needing her test. Who could tell?’
Gareth gusted in full of plans for an expedition I’d forgotten about, a fact he unerringly read on my face.
‘But you said you would teach us things, and we could light a fire.’ His voice rose high with disappointment. ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Ask your father.’
Tremayne listened to Gareth’s request for a patch of land for a camp fire and raised his eyebrows my way.
‘Do you really want to bother with all this?’
‘Actually, I suggested it, in a rash moment.’
Gareth nodded vigorously. ‘Coconut’s coming at ten.’
Mackie said, ‘Fiona asked us to go down in the morning to toast Chickweed and cheer Harry up.’
‘But John promised,’ Gareth said anxiously.
Mackie smiled at him indulgently. ‘I’ll make John’s excuses.
Sunday morning crept in greyly on a near-freezing drizzle, enough to test the spirits of all would-be survivors. Tremayne, drinking coffee in the kitchen with the lights on at nine-thirty, suggested scrubbing the whole idea. His son would vehemently have none of it. They compromised on a promise from me to bring everyone home at the first sneeze, and Coconut arrived on his bicycle in brilliant yellow oilskins with a grin to match.
It was easy to see how he’d got his name. He stood in the kitchen dripping and pulled off a sou’wester to reveal a wiry tuft of light brown hair sticking straight up from the top of his head. (It would never lie down properly, Gareth later explained.)
Coconut was nearly fifteen. Below the top-knot he had bright intelligent eyes, a big nose and a sloppy loose-lipped mouth, as if his face hadn’t yet synthesised with his emerging character. Give him a year, I thought, maybe two, then the shell would firm to define the man.
‘There’s a bit of wasteland at the top of the apple orchard,’ Tremayne said. ‘You can have that.’
‘But, Dad...’ Gareth began, raising objections.
‘It sounds fine,’ I said firmly. ‘Survivors can’t choose.’
Tremayne looked at me and then at Gareth thoughtfully and nodded as if to confirm a private thought.
‘But February’s a bad month for food,’ I said, ‘and I suppose we’d better not steal a pheasant, so we’ll cheat a bit and take some bacon with us. Bring gloves and a penknife each. We’ll go in ten minutes.’
The boys scurried to collect waterproofs for Gareth, and Tremayne asked what exactly I planned to do with them.
‘Build a shelter,’ I said. ‘Light a fire, gather some lunch and cook it. That’ll be enough, I should think. Everything takes forever when you start with nothing.’
‘Teach them they’re lucky.’
‘Mm.’
He came to the door to see off the intrepid expedition, all of us unequipped except for the survival kit (with added bacon) that I wore round my waist and the penknives in their pockets. The cold drizzle fell relentlessly but no one seemed to mind. I waved briefly to Tremayne and went where Gareth led; which was through a gate in a wall, through a patch of long-deserted garden, through another gate and up a slow gradient through about fifty bare-branched apple trees, fetching up on a small bedraggled plateau roughly fenced with ruined dry-stone walling on one side and a few trees in the remains of a hawthorn hedge full of gaps round the rest. Beyond that untidy boundary lay neat prosperous open acres of winter ploughing, the domain of the farmer next door.
Gareth looked at our terrain disgustedly and even Coconut was dismayed, but I thought Tremayne had chosen pretty well, on the whole. Whatever we did, we couldn’t make things worse.