Come to Grief Read online

  “Like hell.”

  “The report I’ll write and send to you,” I told him, “will say only, ‘Work done on recruitment of staff.’ You can claim tax relief on it.”

  He laughed dryly: “Anytime you want a reference,” he said, pleased, “I’ll write you an affidavit.”

  “You never know,” I said, “and thanks.”

  I had phoned the report from the car park of a motorway service station on my way home late in the dusky evening, but it was when I reached Pont Square that the day grew doubly dark. There was a two-page fax waiting on my machine and I read it standing in the sitting room with all thoughts of a friendly glass of scotch evaporating into disbelief and the onset of misery.

  The pages were from Kevin Mills. “I don’t know why you want this list of the great and good,” he wrote, “but for what it’s worth and because I promised, here is a list of the guests entertained by Topline Foods at lunch at Aintree on the day before the Grand National.”

  The list contained the name of the angry Lancashire farmer, as was expected, but it was the top of the list that did the psychological damage.

  “Guest of Honor,” it announced, “Ellis Quint.”

  All the doubts I’d banished came roaring back with double vigor. Back too came self-ridicule and every defense mechanism under the sun.

  I couldn‘t, didn’t, couldn’t believe that Ellis could maim—and effectively kill—a child’s pony and three young racehorses. Not Ellis! No! It was impossible.

  There had to be dozens of other people who could have learned where to find all four of those vulnerable, unguarded animals. It was stupid to give any weight to an unreliable coincidence. All the same, I pulled my box chart out of a drawer, and in very small letters, as if in that way I could physically diminish the implication, I wrote in each “Who knew of victim’s availability” space the unthinkable words, Ellis Quint.

  The “motive” boxes had also remained empty. There was no apparent rational motive. Why did people poke out the eyes of ponies? Why did they stalk strangers and write poison-pen letters? Why did. they torture and kill children and tape-record their screams?

  I wrote “self-gratification,” but it seemed too weak. Insanity? Psychosis? The irresistible primordial upsurge of a hunger for pointless, violent destruction?

  It didn’t fit the Ellis I knew. Not the man I’d raced against and laughed with and had deemed a close friend for years. One couldn’t know someone that well, and yet not know them at all.

  Could one?

  No.

  Relentless thoughts kept me awake all night, and in the morning I sent Linda Ferns’s check back to her, un-cashed.

  “I’ve got no further,” I wrote. “I’m exceedingly sorry.”

  Two days later the same check returned.

  “Dear Sid,” Linda replied, “Keep the money. I know you’ll find the thugs one day. I don’t know what you said to Rachel but she’s much happier and she hasn’t had any bad dreams since you came last week. For that alone I would pay you double. Affectionately, Linda Ferns.”

  I put the check in a pending file, caught up with paperwork and attended my usual judo training session.

  The judo I practiced was the subtle art of self-defense, the shifting of balance that used an attacker’s own momentum to overcome him. Judo was rhythm, leverage and speed; a matter sometimes of applying pressure to nerves and always, in the way I learned, a quiet discipline. The yells and the kicks of karate, the arms slapped down on the padded mat to emphasize aggression, they were neither in my nature nor what I needed. I didn’t seek physical domination. I didn’t by choice start fights. With the built-in drawbacks of half an arm, a light frame and a height of about five feet seven, my overall requirement was survival.

  I went through the routines absentmindedly. They were at best a mental crutch. A great many dangers couldn’t be wiped out by an ability to throw an assailant over one’s shoulder.

  Ellis wouldn’t leave my thoughts.

  I was wrong. Of course I was wrong.

  His face was universally known. He wouldn’t risk being seen sneaking around fields at night armed with anything like a machete.

  But he was bored with celebrity. Fame was no substitute for danger, he’d said. Everything he had was not enough.

  All the same ... he couldn’t.

  In the second week after the Derby I went to the four days of the Royal Ascot meeting, drifting around in a morning suit, admiring the gleaming coats of the horses and the women’s extravagant hats. I should have enjoyed it, as I usually did. Instead, I felt as if the whole thing were a charade taking illusory place over an abyss.

  Ellis, of course, was there every day: and, of course, he sought me out.

  “How’s it going, Hotline?”

  “The hotline is silent.”

  “There you are, then,” Ellis said with friendly irony, “you’ve frightened your foot merchant off.”

  “Forever, I hope.”

  “What if he can’t help it?” Ellis said.

  I turned my head: looked at his eyes. “I’ll catch him,” I said.

  He smiled and looked away. “Everyone knows you’re a whiz at that sort of thing, but I’ll bet you—”

  “Don‘t,” I interrupted. “Don’t bet on it. It’s bad luck.”

  Someone came up to his other elbow, claiming his attention. He patted my shoulder, said with the usual affection, “See you, Sid,” and was drawn away; and I couldn’t believe, I couldn‘t, that he had told me why, even if not how.

  “What if he can’t help it?”

  Could compulsion lead to cruel, senseless acts?

  No...

  Yes, it could, and yes, it often did.

  But not in Ellis. No, not in Ellis.

  Alibis, I thought, seeking for a rational way out. I would find out—somehow—exactly where Ellis had been on the nights the horses had been attacked. I would prove to my own satisfaction that it couldn’t have been Ellis, and I would return with relief to the beginning and admit I had no pointers at all and would never find the thugs for Linda, and would quite happily chalk up a failure.

  At five-thirty in the morning on the day after the Ascot Gold Cup, I sleepily awoke and answered my ringing telephone to hear a high agitated female voice saying, “I want to reach Sid Halley.”

  “You have,” I said, pushing myself up to sitting and squinting at the clock.

  “What?”

  “You are talking to Sid Halley.” I stifled a yawn. Five-bloody-thirty.

  “But I phoned The Pump and asked for the hotline!”

  I said patiently, “They reroute the hotline calls direct to me. This is Sid Halley you’re talking to. How can I help you?”

  “Christ,” she said, sounding totally disorganized. “We have a colt with a foot off.”

  After a breath-catching second I said, “Where are you?”

  “At home. Oh, I see, Berkshire.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Combe Bassett, south of Hungerford.”

  “And ... um...” I thought of asking, “What’s the state of play?” and discarded it as less than tactful. “What is ... happening?”

  “We’re all up. Everyone’s yelling and crying.”

  “And the vet?”

  “I just phoned him. He’s coming.”

  “And the police?”

  “They’re sending someone. Then we decided we’d better call you.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I’ll come now, if you like.”

  “That’s why I phoned you.”

  “What’s your name, then? Address?”

  She gave them—“Betty Bracken, Manor House, Combe Bassett”—stumbling on the words as if she couldn’t remember.

  “Please,” I said, “ask the vet not to send the colt or his foot off to the knackers until I get there.”

  “I’ll try,” she said jerkily. “For God’s sakes, why? Why our colt?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

  Wha
t if he can’t help it ...

  But it took such planning. Such stealth. So many crazy risks. Someone, sometime, would see him.

  Let it not be Ellis, I thought. Let the compulsion be some other poor bastard’s ravening subconscious. Ellis would be able to control such a vicious appetite, even if he felt it.

  Let it not be Ellis.

  Whoever it was, he had to be stopped: and I would stop him, if I could.

  I shaved in the car (a Mercedes), clasping the battery-driven razor in the battery-driven hand, and I covered the eighty miles to southwest Berkshire in a time down the comparatively empty M4 that had the speedometer needle quivering where it had seldom been before. The radar speed traps slept. Just as well.

  It was a lovely high June morning, fine and fresh. I curled through the gates of Combe Bassett Manor, cruised to a stop in the drive and at six-thirty walked into a house where open doors led to movement, loud voices and a general gnashing of teeth.

  The woman who’d phoned rushed over when she saw me, her hands flapping in the air, her whole demeanor in an out-of-control state of fluster.

  “Sid Halley? Thank God. Punch some sense into this lot.”

  This lot consisted of two uniformed policemen and a crowd of what later proved to be family members, neighbors, ramblers and half a dozen dogs.

  “Where’s the colt?” I asked. “And where’s his foot?”

  “Out in the field. The vet’s there. I told him what you wanted but he’s an opinionated Scot. God knows if he’ll wait, he’s a cantankerous old devil. He—”

  “Show me where,” I said abruptly, cutting into the flow.

  She blinked. “What? Oh, yes. This way.”

  She set off fast, leading me through big-house, unevenly painted hinterland passages reminiscent of those of Aynsford, of those of any house built with servants in mind. We passed a gun room, flower room and mud room (ranks of green wellies) and emerged at last through a rear door into a yard inhabited by trash cans. From there, through a green wooden garden door, she led the way fast down a hedge-bordered grass path and through a metal-railing gate at the far end of it. I’d begun to think we were off to limbo when suddenly, there before us, was a lane full of vehicles and about ten people leaning on paddock fencing.

  My guide was tall, thin, fluttery, at a guess about fifty, dressed in old cord trousers and a drab olive sweater. Her graying hair flopped, unbrushed, over a high forehead. She had been, and still was, beyond caring how she looked, but I had a powerful impression that she was a woman to whom looks mattered little anyway.

  She was deferred to. The men leaning on the paddock rails straightened and all but touched their forelocks. “Morning, Mrs. Bracken.”

  She nodded automatically and ushered me through the wide metal gate that one of the men swung open for her.

  Inside the field, at a distance of perhaps thirty paces, stood two more men, also a masculine-looking woman and a passive colt with three feet. All, except the colt, showed the facial and body language of impatience.

  One of the men, tall, white-haired, wearing black-rimmed glasses, took two steps forward to meet us.

  “Now, Mrs. Bracken, I’ve done what you asked, but it’s past time to put your poor boy out of his misery. And you’ll be Sid Halley, I suppose,” he said, peering down as from a mountaintop. “There’s little you can do.” He shook hands briefly as if it were a custom he disapproved of.

  He had a strong Scottish accent and the manner of one accustomed to command. The man behind him, un-remarkably built, self-effacing in manner, remained throughout a silent watcher on the fringe.

  I walked over to the colt and found him wearing a head collar, with a rope halter held familiarly by the woman. The young horse watched me with calm, bright eyes, unafraid. I stroked my hand down his nose, talking to him quietly. He moved his head upward against the pressure and down again as if nodding, saying hello. I let him whiffle his black lips across my knuckles. I stroked his neck and patted him. His skin was dry: no pain, no fear, no distress.

  “Is he drugged?” I asked.

  “I’d have to run a blood test,” the Scotsman said.

  “Which you are doing, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  One could tell from the faces of the other man and the woman that no blood test had so far been considered.

  I moved around the colt’s head and squatted down for a close look at his off-fore, running my hand down the back of his leg, feeling only a soft area of no resistance where normally there would be the tough bowstring tautness of the leg’s main tendon. Pathetically, the fetlock was tidy, not bleeding. I bent up the colt’s knee and looked at the severed end. It had been done neatly, sliced through, unsplintered ends of bone showing white, the skin cleanly cut as if a practiced chef had used a dis jointing knife.

  The colt jerked his knee, freeing himself from my grasp.

  I stood up.

  “Well?” the Scotsman challenged.

  “Where’s his foot?”

  “Over yon, out of sight behind the water trough.” He paused, then, as I turned away from him, suddenly added, “It wasn’t found there. I put it there, out of sight. It was they ramblers that came to it first.”

  “Ramblers?”

  “Aye.”

  Mrs. Bracken, who had joined us, explained. “One Saturday every year in June, all the local rambling clubs turn out in force to walk the footpaths in this part of the country, to keep them legally open for the public.”

  “If they’d stay on the footpaths,” the Scot said forbiddingly, “they’d be within their rights.”

  Mrs. Bracken agreed. “They bring their children and their dogs and their picnics, and act as if they own the place.”

  “But ... what on earth time did they find your colt’s foot?”

  “They set off soon after dawn,” Mrs. Bracken observed morosely. “In the middle of June, that’s four-thirty in the morning, more or less. They gather before five o‘clock, while it is still cool, and set off across my land first, and they were hammering on my door by five-fifteen. Three of the children were in full-blown hysteria, and a man with a beard and a pony-tail was screaming that he blamed the elite. What elite? One of the ramblers phoned the press and then someone fanatical in animal rights, and a carload of activists arrived with ’ban horse racing’ banners.” She rolled her eyes. “I despair,” she said. “It’s bad enough losing my glorious colt. These people are turning it into a circus.”

  Hold on to the real tragedy at the heart of the farce, I thought briefly, and walked over to the water trough to look at the foot that lay behind it. There were horse-feed nuts scattered everywhere around. Without expecting much emotion, I bent and picked the foot up.

  I hadn’t seen the other severed feet. I’d actually thought some of the reported reactions excessive. But the reality of that poor, unexpected, curiously lonely lump of bone, gristle and torn ends of blood vessels, that wasted miracle of anatomical elegance, moved me close to the fury and grief of all the owners.

  There was a shoe on the hoof; the sort of small, light shoe fitted to youngsters to protect their forefeet out in the field. There were ten small nails tacking the shoe to the hoof. The presence of the shoe brought its own powerful message: civilization had offered care to the colt’s foot. barbarity had hacked it off.

  I’d loved horses always: it was hard to explain the intimacy that grew between horses and those who tended or rode them. Horses lived in a parallel world, spoke a parallel language, were a mass of instincts, lacked human perceptions of kindness or guilt, and allowed a merging on an untamed, untamable mysterious level of spirit. The Great God Pan lived in racehorses. One cut off his foot at one’s peril.

  On a more prosaic level I put the hoof back on the ground, unclipped the mobile phone I wore on my belt and, consulting a small diary/notebook for the number, connected myself to a veterinary friend who worked as a surgeon in an equine hospital in Lambourn.

  “Bill?” I said. “This is Sid Halley.�
�

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  “Wake up. It’s six-fifty and I’m in Berkshire with the severed off-fore hoof of a two-year-old colt.”

  “Jesus.” He woke up fast.

  “I want you to look at it. What do you advise?”

  “How long has it been off? Any chance of sewing it back on?”

  “It’s been off at least three hours, I’d say. Probably more. There’s no sign of the Achilles tendon. It’s contracted up inside the leg. The amputation is through the fetlock joint itself.”

  “One blow, like the others?”

  I hesitated. “I didn’t see the others.”

  “But something’s worrying you?”

  “I want you to look at it,” I said.

  Bill Ruskin and I had worked on other, earlier puzzles, and got along together in a trusting, undemanding friendship that remained unaltered by periods of noncontact.

  “What shape is the colt in, generally?” he asked.

  “Quiet. No visible pain.”

  “Is the owner rich?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “See if he’ll have the colt—and his foot, of course—shipped over here.”

  “She,” I said. “I’ll ask her.”

  Mrs. Bracken gaped at me mesmerized when I relayed the suggestion, and said “Yes” faintly.

  Bill said, “Find a sterile surgical dressing for the leg. Wrap the foot in another dressing and a plastic bag and pack it in a bucket of ice cubes. Is it clean?”

  “Some early-morning ramblers found it.”

  He groaned. “I’ll send a horse ambulance,” he said. “Where to?”

  I explained where I was, and added, “There’s a Scots vet here that’s urging to put the colt down at once. Use honey-tongued diplomacy.”

  “Put him on.”

  I returned to where the colt still stood and, explaining who he would be talking to, handed my phone to the vet. The Scot scowled. Mrs. Bracken said, “Anything, anything,” over and over again. Bill talked.

  “Very well,” the Scot said frostily, finally, “but you do understand, don’t you, Mrs. Bracken, that the colt won’t be able to race, even if they do succeed in reattaching his foot, which is very, very doubtful.”