‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘Back to their owners for the summer, most of them,’ he said. ‘Some have gone to Ireland. A few of the mares have gone back into training. I don’t really know.’ And it sounded like he didn’t really care.
‘So when’s your busy time?’ I asked.
‘January to April,’ he said. ‘That’s when most of them are born. Absolutely crazy here in February and March. Foals dropping every five minutes.’
‘How many?’ I asked.
‘Too many,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘About a hundred, and they want to double that next year.’
‘Is that more than in the past?’ I said.
‘Dunno,’ he said putting his feet up on his desk. ‘My first year here. But I think it must be. The Radcliffes built more foaling boxes last summer, and these offices. I think it was pretty small fry before then.’
I looked at his feet on the desk. He was wearing badly scuffed cowboy boots under tight blue jeans with a check-pattern open-necked shirt. I wondered if the Radcliffes knew that their manager was so casual with their guests. I had picked up some of their marketing material stacked upright in a rack in the reception area on my way in. It was a well produced large glossy brochure with plenty of impressive facts and figures about the equine care provided for the expectant mothers, and a smiling picture on the front of Roger and Deborah Radcliffe standing together next to some mares and foals in a paddock.
‘Are they at home?’ I asked Larry, indicating the picture. ‘I didn’t get an answer on their home phone when I called them yesterday.’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘They are in Kentucky for the sales and the Derby. Not back until next week.’
‘Can I have a look round?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ he said, lifting both his feet together off the desk. ‘Not much to see.’
We walked around the new complex of foaling boxes and other stalls, each angle covered by a closed-circuit television camera.
‘How many staff do you have?’ I asked.
‘About a dozen in the high season but only a couple now,’ he said. ‘We have an onsite delivery team who are on constant standby when we’re foaling. But they’ve gone now. We only have a few horses here at the moment and they mostly belong to the Radcliffes. Two of them are mares that dropped in early March and their foals will be fully weaned by the end of July, ready for the sales.’
We walked past the rows of deserted stables and looked into the new foaling boxes. They had hard concrete floors devoid of the soft cushion of straw that would be laid down for the arrival of a new foal, possibly a new superstar like Peninsula.
‘Where was Peninsula foaled?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Here somewhere. But lots has changed.’
‘Do you know if the stud groom still works here?’ I asked. ‘The one who helped with Peninsula.’
‘No idea,’ he said again. ‘Do you know who it was? Stud grooms come and go round here like wet Sundays.’
‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Julian Trent?’ I asked him.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Should I?’
I decided that it really hadn’t been a very helpful excursion. In fact, the whole day had been rather disappointing so far from start to finish. I could only hope that it would get better.
Bob dropped me back at Ranelagh Avenue around quarter to eight and, in spite of the bright spring evening light, I asked him to wait while I made it up the steps to the front door and then safely inside it.
But he had driven away before I realized that there was something very wrong. I was about half-way up the stairs when I first heard the sound of running water where there shouldn’t have been.
It was running through the light fitting in the ceiling of my sitting room onto the floor below. It wasn’t just a trickle, more of a torrent. And that wasn’t the only problem. My home had been well and truly trashed.
I made my way as quickly as possible up to the top floor to turn off the water only to discover that doing so was not going to be that easy. The washbasin in the second bathroom had been torn completely away from its fittings and the water was jetting out of a hole in the wall left by a broken pipe. The stream was adding to the inch depth that already existed on the bathroom floor and which was spreading across the landing and down the top few steps like a waterfall.
Where, I wondered, was the stop cock?
I carefully descended the wet stairs again and used the telephone to call my downstairs neighbours to ask for help. There was no answer. There wouldn’t be. It was Wednesday and they were always out late on Wednesdays, organizing a badminton evening class at the school where they both taught. I had become quite acquainted with their routine since I had needed to call on their assistance over the past six weeks. They would have stayed on at the school after lessons and would usually be back by nine, unless they stopped for some dinner on the way home, in which case it would be ten or even half past. By then, I thought, their lower floor, set as it was below ground level, might be more akin to an indoor swimming pool than a kitchen.
I sat on the torn arm of my sofa and looked about me. Everything that could have been broken had been. My brand-new expensive large flat-screen plasma television would show no pictures ever again. Angela’s collection of Royal Worcester figurines was no more, and the kitchen floor was littered deep with broken crockery and glass.
I looked at the phone in my hand. At least that was working, so I used it to dial 999 and I asked the emergency operator for the police.
They promised to try and send someone as soon as possible but it didn’t sound to me like it was an urgent case in their eyes. No one was hurt or imminently dying, they said, so I would have to wait. So I thumbed through a sopping copy of Yellow Pages to find an emergency plumbing service and promised them a big bonus to get here as soon as humanly possible. I was still speaking to them when the ceiling around the light fitting, which had been bulging alarmingly, decided to give up the struggle and collapsed with a crash. A huge mass of water suddenly fell into the centre of my sitting room and spread out towards my open-plan kitchen area like a mini tidal wave. I lifted my feet as it passed me by. The plumbing company promised that someone was already on the way.
I hobbled around my house inspecting the damage. There was almost nothing left that was usable. Everything had been broken or sliced through with what must have been a box cutter or a Stanley knife. My leather sofa would surely be unrepairable with so many cuts through the hide, all of which showed white from the stuffing beneath. A mirror that had hung this morning on my sitting-room wall now lay smashed amongst the remains of a glass-and-brass coffee table, and an original oil painting of a coastal landscape by a successful artist friend was impaled over the back of a dining chair.
Upstairs in my bedroom the mattress had also received the box-cutter treatment and so had most of the clothes hanging in my wardrobe. This had been a prolonged and determined assault on my belongings of which almost nothing had survived. Worst of all was that the perpetrator, and I had little doubt as to who was responsible, had smashed the glass and twisted to destruction the silver frame that had stood on the dressing table, and had then torn the photograph of Angela into dozens of tiny pieces.
I stood there looking at these confetti remains and felt not grief for my dead wife, but raging anger that her image had been so violated.
The telephone rang. How was it, I wondered, that he hadn’t broken that too?
I found out. ‘I told you that you’d regret it,’ Julian Trent said down the wire, his voice full of menace.
‘Fuck off, you little creep,’ I said and I slammed down the receiver.
The phone rang again almost immediately and I snatched it up.
‘I said to fuck off,’ I shouted into the mouthpiece.