'Right.' We sped deeper into rural Kent, and then he said, 'You know why we've had such good results, on the whole, since we've been together on this job?'
'Why, then?'
'It's because all the villains know you. I mean, they know you by sight, most of them. So when they see you poking around on their patch, they get the heebies, and start doing silly things like setting the heavies on us, and then we see them loud and clear, and what they're up to, which we wouldn't have done if they'd sat tight.'
I sighed and said 'I guess so,' and thought about Trevor Deansgate; thought and tried not to. Without any hands one couldn't drive a car… Just don't think about it, I told myself. Just keep your mind off it, it's a one way trip into jellyfish.
I swung round another corner too fast and collected a sideways look from Chico, but no comment.
'Look at the map,' I said. 'Do something useful.'
We found the house of Peter Rammileese without much trouble, and pulled into the yard of a small farm that looked as if the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells had rolled round it like a sea, leaving it isolated and incongruous. There was a large white farmhouse, three storeys high, and a modern wooden stable block, and a long, extra large barn. Nothing significantly prosperous about the place, but no nettles either.
No one about. I put the brake on as we rolled to a stop, and we got out of the car.
'Front door?' Chico said.
'Back door, for farms.'
We had taken only five or six steps in that direction, however, when a small boy ran into the yard from a doorway in the barn, and came over to us, breathlessly.
'Did you bring the ambulance?'
His eyes looked past me, to my car, and his face puckered into agitation and disappointment. He was about seven, dressed in jodhpurs and T shirt, and he had been crying.
'What's the matter?' I said.
'I rang for the ambulance… A long time ago.'
'We might help,' I said.
'It's Mum,' he said. 'She's lying in there, and she won't wake up.'
'Come on, you show us.'
He was a sturdy little boy, brown haired and brown-eyed and very frightened. He ran ahead towards the barn, and we followed without wasting time. Once through the door we could see that it wasn't an ordinary barn, but an indoor riding school, a totally enclosed area of about twenty metres wide by thirty-five long, lit by windows in the roof. The floor, wall to wall, was covered with a thick layer of tan-coloured wood chippings, springy and quiet for horses to work on.
There was a pony and a horse careering about; and, in danger from their hooves, a crumpled female figure lying on the ground.
Chico and I went over to her, fast. She was young, on her side, face half downwards; unconscious, but not, I thought, deeply. Her breathing was shallow and her skin had whitened in a mottled fashion under her make-up, but the pulse in her wrist was strong and regular. The crash helmet which hadn't saved her lay several feet away on the floor.
'Go and ring again,' I said to Chico.
'Shouldn't we move her?'
'No… in case she's broken anything. You can do a lot of damage moving people too much when they're unconscious.'
'You should know.' He turned away and ran off towards the house.
'Is she all right?' the boy said anxiously. 'Bingo started bucking and she fell off, and I think he kicked her head.'
'Bingo is the horse?'
'His saddle slipped,' he said: and Bingo, with the saddle down under his belly was still bucking and kicking like a rodeo.
'What's your name?' I said.
'Mark.'
'Well, Mark, as far as I can see, your Mum is going to be all right, and you're a brave little boy.'
'I'm six,' he said, as if that wasn't so little.
The worst of the fright had died out of his eyes, now that he had help. I knelt on the ground beside his mother and smoothed the brown hair away from her forehead. She made a small moaning sound, and her eyelids fluttered. She was perceptibly nearer the surface, even in the short time we'd been there.
'I thought she was dying,' the boy said. 'We had a rabbit a little time ago… he panted and shut his eyes, and we couldn't wake him up again, and he died.'
'Your Mum will wake up again.'
'Are you sure?'
'Yes, Mark, I'm sure.'
He seemed deeply reassured, and told me readily that the pony was called Sooty, and was his own, and that his Dad was away until tomorrow morning, and there was only his Mum there, and him, and she'd been schooling Bingo because she was selling him to a girl for show-jumping.
Chico came back and said the ambulance was on its way. The boy, cheering up enormously, said we ought to catch the horses because they were cantering about and the reins were all loose, and if the saddles and bridles got broken his Dad would be bloody angry.
Both Chico and I laughed at the adult words, seriously spoken. While he and Mark stood guard over the patient, I caught the horses one by one, with the aid of a few horsenuts which Mark produced from his pockets, and tied their reins to tethering rings in the walls. Bingo, once the agitating girths were undone and the saddle safely off, stood quietly enough, and Mark darted briefly away from his mother to give his own pony some brisk encouraging slaps and some more horsenuts.
Chico said the emergency service had indeed had a call from a child fifteen minutes earlier, but he'd hung up before they could ask him where he lived.
'Don't tell him,' I said.
'You're a softie.'
'He's a brave little kid.'
'Not bad for a little bleeder. While you were catching the bucking bronco he told me his Dad gets bloody angry pretty often.' He looked down at the still unconscious girl. 'You really reckon she's O.K., do you?'
'She'll come out of it. It's a matter of waiting.'
The ambulance came in due course, but Mark's anxiety reappeared, strongly, when the men loaded his mother into the van and prepared to depart. He wanted to go with her, and the men wouldn't take him on his own. She was stirring and mumbling, and it distressed him.
I said to Chico, 'Drive him to the hospital… Follow the ambulance. He needs to see her wide awake and speaking to him. I'll take a look round in the house. His Dad's away until tomorrow.'
'Convenient,' he said sardonically. He collected Mark into the Scimitar, and drove away down the road, and I could see their heads talking to each other, through the rear window.
I went through the open back door with the confidence of the invited. Nothing difficult about entering a tiger's cage while the tiger was out. It was an old house filled with brash new opulent furnishings, which I found overpowering. Lush loud carpets, huge stereo equipment, a lamp standard of a golden nymph and deep armchairs covered in black and khaki zig-zags. Sitting and dining rooms shining and tidy, with no sign that a small boy lived there. Kitchen uncluttered, hygienic surfaces wiped clean. Study…
The positively aggressive tidiness of the study made me pause and consider. No horse trader that I'd ever come across had kept his books and papers in such neat rectangular stacks; and the ledgers themselves, when I opened them, contained up-to-the-minute entries.
I looked into drawers and filing cabinets, being extremely careful to leave everything squared up after me, but there was nothing there except the outward show of honesty. Not a single drawer or cupboard was locked. It was almost, I thought with cynicism, as if the whole thing were stage dressing, orchestrated to confound any invasion of tax snoopers. The real records, if he kept any, were probably somewhere outside, in a biscuit tin, in a hole in the ground.
I went upstairs. Mark's room was unmistakable, but all the toys were in boxes, and all the clothes in drawers. There were three unoccupied bedrooms with the outlines of folded blankets showing under covers, and a suite of bedroom, dressing room and bathroom furnished with the same expense and tidiness as downstairs.
An oval dark red bath with taps like gilt dolphins. A huge bed with a bright brocade cover clashing with wall-to-wall jazz on the floor. No clutter on the curvaceous cream and gold dressing table, no brushes on any surface in the dressing room.