The last two stables in the line were empty, as was the tack room, save for a couple of horse rugs bundled in a corner. The feed store contained a small stack of hay and several bags of horse nuts, together with four bales of the brown horse bedding, one of them broken open and half used. Leaning up against the far end wall of the store were two long-handled, double-pronged pitchforks, identical, I imagined, to the one found embedded in Scot Barlow’s chest on Monday afternoon.
The house was not so conveniently open as the stable block so I walked round the outside, looking in turn into each of the plentiful ground-floor windows. The daylight was beginning to fade fast before I had made my way completely round the house and I might have missed something, but there was absolutely nothing I could see to help me either way. So dark had it become by the time I had finished that several of the security lights were switched on by their movement sensors as I made my way back to the Hertz Mondeo and drove away.
I looked at the car clock. It told me that it was almost five o’clock. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. The start of the weekend. Funny, I thought, I hadn’t liked weekends much since Angela had died. Occasionally I went racing and, more occasionally, I actually rode in a race, but overall I found the break from chambers life rather lonely.
I drove back into the centre of Lambourn, to the equine hospital on Upper Lambourn Road, and explained to the receptionist through a sliding glass panel that I was looking for someone who had shared a room with Millie Barlow before last June.
‘Sorry,’ she said in a high-pitched squeak, ‘I’m new here. You’ll have to ask one of the vets.’
‘OK,’ I said looking round the bare vestibule. ‘Where are they?’
‘We’ve got a bit of an emergency at the moment,’ she went on in her squeak. ‘They’re all in the operating theatre.’
‘How long are they going to be?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ she squeaked. ‘They have been in there for quite some time already. But you’re welcome to wait.’ I looked about me again, there were no chairs. ‘Oh,’ she said again with realization. ‘You can wait in the waiting room if you like. Through there.’ She pointed at a wooden door opposite.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Please will you let the vets know that I am here.’
‘Yes, OK,’ she said. ‘As soon as I can.’
I didn’t have much confidence that she would remember.
I went through the door into the waiting room. It reminded me of going to the dentist. Adozen pink upholstered armchairs with pale wooden legs and arms were arranged around the walls with a few occasional tables between some of them. There was another door at the far end with a half-full wire magazine rack standing beside it, and the hard floor was covered with a thin blue carpet. It was functional rather than comfortable.
A man sat on one of the chairs on the right-hand side and he looked up as I entered. We nodded at each other in informal greeting and he went back to reading some of the papers he had spread out around him. I sat down opposite him and glanced through a copy of Country Life that someone had left on a chair.
Ten minutes or so passed. I went back out to the receptionist, who assured me that the vets were still operating but shouldn’t be much longer. I was sure she actually had no notion how long they would be but, nevertheless, I went back into the waiting room and sat down.
I had looked at all the estate agents’ adverts in the Country Life and was beginning to read the book reviews when someone came through the far door. It was a woman wearing green scrub tunic and trousers with short green wellington boots. Avet, I surmised, fresh from the operating theatre. But it wasn’t me she was after. The other man stood up as she entered.
‘How’s it going?’ he said eagerly.
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘I think we have managed to save most of the muscle mass in the shoulder. It shouldn’t greatly impair him after proper healing.’
The man let out a sigh of relief. ‘Mr Radcliffe will be relieved to hear it.’ He didn’t sound to me like he was the only one.
‘I have to get back in there now,’ said the vet. ‘To finish off. We will keep him here overnight and see how he’s doing in the morning.’
‘Fine,’ said the man. ‘Thank you. I’ll call you around nine.’
‘OK,’ she said. The man knelt down and began to collect together some of the papers he had been working on. The vet turned to me and raised her eyebrows as a question. ‘Are you being looked after?’ she said.
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I was hoping to talk to someone who knew one of the vets that used to work here.’
‘Which vet?’ she asked.
‘Millie Barlow,’ I said.
The reaction from the man was dramatic. ‘Right little bitch,’ he said almost under his breath, but quite audibly in the quiet of the waiting room.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said to him.
‘I said that she was a right little bitch,’ he repeated standing up and looking at me. ‘And she was.’
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ the vet said to me. ‘I have to go and close up the wound on the horse we have been operating on. If you’d like to wait, I’ll talk to you when I’m finished.’
‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and she disappeared through the door.
The man had almost collected his stuff.
‘Why was she a right little bitch?’ I asked him.
‘Who wants to know?’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m Geoffrey Mason, I’m a barrister.’
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You have horses with Paul Newington.’
‘I do indeed,’ I said. ‘But you now have the advantage over me.’ I looked at him quizzically.
‘Simon Dacey,’ he said holding out his hand.
Ah, I thought, no wonder he thinks Millie Barlow was a little bitch, she had ruined his party by killing herself in one of his bedrooms.
‘Do you have a problem?’ I asked him, nodding towards the door through which the vet had disappeared.
‘One of my yearlings got loose,’ he said. ‘Gashed himself on a parked car. Always happens to one of the good ones.’
‘Will he be all right?’ I asked.
‘I sincerely hope so,’ he said. ‘He cost almost half a million at the sales last month.’
‘But he must be insured,’ I said.
‘Just for transport home and thirty days,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? That ran out last Monday.’
‘But surely,’ I said, ‘aren’t all racehorses insured?’ I knew mine was.
‘Mr Radcliffe, that’s the owner, he says that the premiums are too high. He has about a dozen with me and he says he would rather spend the money he saves on another horse. He maintains that’s the best insurance.’
I knew that my insurance premium on Sandeman was quite high, more than a tenth of his value. But that was relatively small as he’d been gelded and there were no stud prospects. For a potential stallion with a good bloodline the premium would be enormous. But, even so, it was quite a risk.
‘Doesn’t he insure any of them?’ I asked.
‘Not normally, but I know he insured Peninsula against being infertile or being injured so he couldn’t perform at stud.’
Oh, I thought, Mr Radcliffe owned Peninsula. He wouldn’t be short of a bob or two.
‘So tell me why Millie Barlow was a right little bitch,’ I said, bringing the subject back to what really interested me.
‘She ruined my party,’ he said.
‘That’s a bit ungracious,’ I said. ‘The poor girl was so troubled that she killed herself. She probably didn’t ruin your party on purpose.’