Lying face down on the kitchen table was a broken photo frame, its glass badly cracked but still held in place by the silver surround. But there was no photograph in the frame and the back of it was hanging off. As with everything else, it was covered with the slimy fingerprint powder.
‘I wonder what was in here,’ I said to Bruce, holding up the frame to show him.
‘It was a picture of our Millie,’ said Mrs Barlow from the doorway.
‘Do you have it?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He must have taken it.’
The emphasis she placed on the word ‘he’ left me in no doubt that she meant Steve Mitchell. But why would he take it? I wondered if the police had found the photograph at Mitchell’s house, but, surely, even the most stupid of murderers wouldn’t take such a clue home with them from the scene of the crime, although I knew some did, like keeping a souvenir, or a trophy.
‘Was it a portrait picture?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was taken when she was at work in the equine hospital. It showed her with a horse. It used to be hers but Hamish had it when…’ She couldn’t finish. Tears began to well up in her eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Barlow,’ I said. I knew only too well the despair that grief can engender.
‘Thank you,’ she said, dabbing her face with a white handkerchief that she had deftly removed from the sleeve of her dress. I imagined that she must have shed many a tear over her dead children.
‘But it must have been a fairly significant photograph to have been in a silver frame,’ I said. ‘Do you remember which horse Millie was with?’ I looked at Mrs Barlow.
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ she said. ‘We lost touch with them both really, when they moved to England.’ She made it sound like England was half-way round the world from Glasgow. ‘But I recall seeing the picture in her room after she died. Hamish said he wanted it. To remember her by.’
‘Where did she live?’ I asked.
‘What? When she wasn’t living with that man?’ she said with unexpected anger. She quickly composed herself. ‘She had a flat at the equine hospital. She shared it with another vet.’
‘Do you know who?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t remember her name,’ she replied.
‘But you are sure it was a female vet?’
‘Oh, I think so,’ she said. ‘At least I always thought it was a woman. She wouldn’t have shared a flat with a man. Not my Millie.’ But her Millie had shared a bed with Steve Mitchell.
DC Hillier had listened to most of the exchanges between the Barlows and me but he seemed unconcerned and disinterested. He had been too busy looking at his watch.
‘Have you seen all you want?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got to go now and I need to lock up.’
Bruce held the Barlows at bay in the hallway while I had a quick peep at the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. There was nothing unusual or unexpected. There were no giveaway signs of a permanent female presence, like tampons in the medicine cabinet or a lady’s smalls in the airing cupboard. Overall there was not much to see. Hamish Barlow had been a tidy man with a wardrobe of smart designer clothes and two cupboards on his landing full of racing-related memorabilia like piles of race cards, bundled copies of the Racing Post and numerous horse-related magazines and books. But there were no skeletons with them for me to find. And no other photo frames, with or without photos. Nothing at all that seemed to me to be in any way abnormal.
The policeman ushered us all out of the house, and then he padlocked the clasp on the front door and invited us all to leave the premises. I would have liked to have had a little longer to look around the garden and the garage. Maybe next time. Oh God, I thought. Next time.
A cold sweat broke out briefly on my forehead and I felt foolish in spinning through 360 degrees just to ensure that Julian Trent was not creeping up behind me. He wasn’t. Of course, he wasn’t. Calm down, I told myself, and my heartbeat slowly returned to normal.
‘Do you have a telephone number where my solicitor could contact you?’ I asked the Barlows as they were getting into their car.
Mr Barlow, who had been mostly quiet after his earlier outburst, suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Why would he want to contact us?’
‘In case he has any more questions for you,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to answer any more of your questions,’ he said.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t want to help me, but I am as interested as you are in finding out who killed your son.’
‘Mitchell killed him,’ said Mr Barlow emphatically.
‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked him.
‘Because Hamish used to say that, one day, Mitchell would kill him as sure as he killed his sister. And now he has. I hope he rots in hell.’
There wasn’t much answer to that. I stood and watched them drive away. There were other ways of finding their telephone number if I needed it.
‘Mr Barlow seems a bit too keen on hell and damnation, if you ask me,’ said Bruce as he reversed his car back onto the road.
‘He’s a good Scottish Presbyterian, I expect,’ I said.
‘Bit too dour for my liking,’ said Bruce. ‘And I wouldn’t want to cross him in a dark alley.’
‘He’s all talk,’ I said. ‘He’s far too God fearing to actually break the law. That’s God’s law, of course. Ten Commandments and all that. All Presbyterians love their Bible.’
‘Not really my scene,’ said Bruce.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nor mine either.’ Except that English law owed much to the principles of the Ten Commandments, especially that one about bearing false witness against one’s neighbour. Who, I wondered, was bearing false witness against Steve Mitchell?
Bruce dropped me back at the Swan Inn to collect my rental car, before making his apologies and rushing off for a meeting with another client. Meanwhile I decided, as I was almost there, to go and revive some memories by driving around Lambourn, and also to take the opportunity to see Steve Mitchell’s place, at least from the outside.
It had been nearly fifteen years since I had lived in Lambourn and I had only been back there a couple of times in the interim, but nothing much had changed, except that there were now many more houses on the outskirts of the village and some of the shops had different names. The place felt the same. Just being here rekindled that feeling of excitement that had gripped me as a twenty-one-year-old starting an adventure, chasing a dream.
I stopped the car on the road opposite the end of the driveway belonging to the trainer for whom I had worked as an unpaid assistant all those years ago. Nicholas Osbourne still trained at the same establishment and I was tempted to drive up to his yard but, in truth, and for reasons I couldn’t really understand, our relationship had not been great since my departure. It was why, one day, I had suddenly transferred my horses from him to Paul Newington, and that hadn’t helped Nick’s feelings either. So I now moved on and went in search of Steve Mitchell’s house.
He lived in a modern red-brick detached monstrosity on the edge of the village set back from the Wantage Road. Behind the house was a small stable yard of half a dozen boxes with a small feed store and tack room. It wasn’t yet big enough to be a full commercial racehorse training concern but there was plenty of room for expansion on the grassy field behind. I imagined that Steve had built the place himself with a view to turning to training after retiring from the saddle.
Everywhere was quiet and deserted so I wandered around the empty yard and looked into the six stable boxes. Two of them showed evidence of recent equine habitation with brown peat horse bedding still down on the concrete floor and water in the troughs in the corners. Two of the others had an assortment of contents ranging from some wooden garden furniture put away for the winter and an old push-along mower in one, to an old disconnected central-heating boiler and a stack of large cardboard boxes in the other, the latter obviously still unpacked from some past house move.