Longshot (20 page)

“I don’t think I said, sir.”

“Well, where?”

Doone said, “All in good time, sir,” a shade uncomfortably, and it occurred to me that he was hoping someone would know, and anyone who knew would very likely have strangled her.

“Poor girl,” Tremayne said. “But all the same, Chief Inspector, I do now have to go to the races. Stay as long as you like, ask whatever you want. John here will explain to my assistant and head lad. John, tell Mackie and Bob what’s happened, will you? Phone the car if you need me. Right, I’m off.”

He continued purposefully and at good speed on his way and one could see and hear the Volvo start up and depart. In some bemusement Doone watched him go: his first taste of the difficulty of deflecting Tremayne from a chosen course.

“Well, Chief Inspector,” I said neutrally, “where do you want to begin?”

“Your name, sir?”

I gave it. He was a good deal more confident with me, I noticed: I didn’t have a personality that overshadowed his own.

“And your ... er ... position here?”

“I’m writing a history of the stables.”

He seemed vaguely surprised that anyone should be engaged on such an enterprise and said lamely, “Very interesting, I’m sure.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“And ... er ... did you know the deceased?”

“Angela Brickell? No, I didn’t. She vanished last summer, I believe, and I’ve been here only a short time, roughly ten days.”

“But you knew about her, sir,” he said shrewdly.

“Let me show you how I knew,” I said. “Come and look.”

I led him into the dining room and showed him the piles of clippings, explaining they were the raw materials of my future book.

“This is my workroom,” I said. “Somewhere in that pile of cuttings,” I pointed, “is an account of Angela Brickell’s disappearance. That’s how I know about her, and that’s all I know. No one has mentioned her outside of this room since I’ve been here.”

He looked through the past year’s cuttings and found the pieces about the girl. He nodded a few times and laid them back carefully where he’d found them, and seemed reassured about me personally. I got the first hint of the garrulity to come.

“Well, sir,” he said, relaxing, “you can start introducing me to all the people here and explain why I’m asking questions and, as I’ve found on other cases when only remains are found that people tend to think the worst and imagine all sorts of horrors so that it makes them feel sick and wastes a good deal of time altogether, I’ll tell you, sir, and you can pass it on, that what was found was
bones,
sir, quite clean and no smell, nothing horrible, you can assure people of that.”

“Thank you,” I said, a shade numbly.

“Animals and insects had cleaned her, you see.”

“Don’t you think that fact alone will make people feel sick?”

“Then don’t stress it, sir.”

“No.”

“We have her clothes and shoes and her handbag and lipstick back at the police station ... they were scattered around her and I’ve had my men searching ...” He stopped, not telling me then where the search had occurred; except that if she’d been scavenged it had to have been out of doors. Which for a stable girl, in a way, made sense.

“And, if you don’t mind, sir, will you please just tell everyone she’s been found, not that she was strangled.”

“How do you know that she was strangled if there’s nothing much left?”

“The hyoid bone, sir. In the throat. Fractured. Only a direct blow or manual pressure does that. Fingers, usually, from behind.”

“Oh, I see. All right, I’ll leave it to you. We’d better start with Mr. Vickers’s secretary, Dee-Dee.”

I steered him into the office and introduced him. Detective Constable Rich followed everywhere like a shadow, a non-speaking taker of notes. I explained to Dee-Dee that Angela Brickell had probably been found.

“Oh, good,” she said spontaneously, and then, seeing it wasn’t good at all, “Oh, dear.”

Doone asked to use the telephone, Dee-Dee at once assenting. Doone called his people back at base.

“Mr. Vickers identified the horse as one that Angela Brickell tended in his stable, and the man as the owner of the horse, or rather the owner’s husband. I’d say it’s fairly sure we have Angela Brickell in the mortuary. Can you arrange to send round a woman police constable to her parents? They live out Wokingham way. The address is in my office. Do it pronto. We don’t want anyone from Shellerton upsetting them first. Break it to them kindly, see? Ask if they could recognize any clothes of hers, or handbag. Ask Mollie to go to them, if she’s on duty. She makes it more bearable for people. She mops up their grief. Get Mollie. Tell her to take another constable with her if she wants.”

He listened for a moment or two and put down the receiver.

“The poor lass has been dead six months or more,” he said to Dee-Dee. “All that’s left is sweet clean bones.”

Dee-Dee looked as if that thought were sick-making enough, but I could see that Doone’s rough humanity would comfort in the end. He was like a stubby-fingered surgeon, I thought: delicate in his handiwork against the odds.

He asked Dee-Dee if she knew of any reason for Angela Brickell’s disappearance. Had the girl been unhappy? Having rows with a boyfriend?

“I’ve no idea, We didn’t find out until after she’d gone that she must have given chocolate to Chickweed. Stupid thing to do.”

Doone looked lost. I explained about the theobromine. “That’s in those clippings, too,” I said.

“We found some chocolate bar wrappers with the lass,” Doone said. “No chocolate. Is that what was meant in our notes by ‘possibly doped a horse in her charge’?”

“Spot on,” I said.

“Chocolate!” he said disgustedly. “Not worth dying for.”

I said, enlightened, “Were you looking for a big conspiracy? A doping ring?”

“Have to consider everything.”

Dee-Dee said positively, “Angela Brickell wouldn’t have been in a doping ring. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Doone didn’t pursue it but said he’d like to talk to the rest of the stable staff, asking Dee-Dee meanwhile not to break the news to anyone else as he would prefer to do it himself. Also he didn’t want anyone springing the tragedy prematurely onto the poor parents.

“Surely I can tell Fiona,” she protested.

“Who’s Fiona?” He frowned, perhaps trying to remember.

“Fiona Goodhaven, who owns Chickweed.”

“Oh, yes. Well, not her either.
Especially
not her. I like to get people’s first thoughts, first impressions, not hear what they think after they’ve spent hours discussing something with all their friends. First thoughts are dearer and more valuable, I’ve found.”

He said it with more persuasion than command, with the result that Dee-Dee agreed to stay off the grapevine. She didn’t ask how the girl had died. If she realized Doone’s remarks best fitted a murder scenario, she didn’t say so. Perhaps she simply shied away from having to know.

Doone asked to be taken out to the stables. On the way I asked him to remember, if he met Mackie, Tremayne’s daughter-in-law and assistant trainer, that she was newly pregnant.

He gave me a sharp glance.

“You’re considerate,” I said mildly. “I thought you might want to modify the shocks.”

He looked disconcerted but made no promise either way and, as it happened, by the time we reached the yard, Mackie had gone home and Bob Watson was alone there, beavering away with saw, hammer and nails, making a new saddle horse to hold the saddles in the tack room. We found him outside the tack-room door, not too pleased to be interrupted.

I introduced Bob to Doone, Doone to Bob. Doone told him that some human remains discovered by chance were thought to be those of Angela Brickell.

“No!” Bob said. “Straight up? Poor little bitch. What did she do, fall down a quarry?” He looked absentmindedly at a piece of wood he held, as if he’d temporarily forgotten its purpose.

“Why should you say that, sir?” Doone asked attentively.

“Manner of speaking,” Bob said, shrugging. “I always thought she’d just scarpered. The guv’nor swore she’d given Chickweed chocolate, but I reckon she didn’t. I mean, we all know you mustn’t. Anyway, who found her? Where did she go?”

“She was found by chance,” Doone said again. “Was she unhappy over a boyfriend?”

“Not that I know of. But there’s twenty lads and girls here, and they come and go all the time. Truth to tell, I can’t remember much about her, except she was sexy. Ask Mrs. Goodhaven, she was always kind to her. Ask the other girls here, some of them lived in a hostel with her. Why do you want to know about a boyfriend? She didn’t take a high jump, did she? Is that what she did?”

Doone didn’t say yes or no, and I understood what he’d meant by preferring to listen to unadulterated first thoughts, to the first pictures and conclusions that minds leaped to when questioned.

He talked to Bob for a while longer but as far as I could see learned nothing much.

“You want to see Mackie,” Bob said in the end. “That’s young Mrs. Vickers. The girls tell her things they’d never tell me.”

Doone nodded and I led him and the ubiquitous Rich around the house to Mackie and Perkin’s entrance, ringing the bell. It was Perkin himself who came to the door, appearing in khaki overalls, looking wholly an artisan and smelling, fascinatingly, of wood and linseed oil.

“Hello,” he said, surprised to see me. “Mackie’s in the shower.”

Doone took it in his stride this time, introducing himself formally.

“I came to let Mrs. Vickers know that Angela Brickell’s been found,” he said.

“Who?” Perkin said blankly. “I didn’t know anyone was lost. I don’t know any Angela ... Angela who did you say?”

Doone patiently explained she’d been lost for six or more months. Angela Brickell.

“Good Lord. Really? Who is she?” A thought struck him. “I say, is she the stable girl who buggered off sometime last year? I remember a bit of a fuss.”

“That’s the one.”

“Good then, my wife will be glad she’s found. I’ll give her the message.”

He made as if to close the door but Doone said he would like to see Mrs. Vickers himself.

“Oh? All right. You’d better come in and wait. John? Come in?”

“Thanks,” I said.

He led the way into a kitchen—dining room, where I hadn’t been before and offered us rattan armchairs around a table made of a circular slab of glass resting on three gothic plaster pillars. The curtains and chair covers were bright turquoise overprinted with blowsy gray, black and white flowers, and all the kitchen fitments were faced with gray-white-streaked Formica; thoroughly modern.

Perkin watched my surprise with irony and said, “Mackie chose everything in a revolt against good taste.”

“It’s happy,” I said. “Lighthearted.”

The remark seemed somehow to disturb him, but Mackie herself arrived with damp hair at that point looking refreshed and pleased with life. Her reaction to Doone’s first cautious words was the same as everyone else’s. “Great. Where is she?”

The gradual realization of the true facts drained the contentment and the color from her face. She listened to his questions and answered them, and faced the implications squarely.

“You’re telling us, aren’t you,” she said flatly, “that either she killed herself ... or somebody killed her?”

“I didn’t say that, madam.”

“As good as.” She sighed desolately. “All these questions about doping rings ... and boyfriends. Oh, God.” She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them to look at Doone and me.

“We’ve just had months and months of trouble and anxiety over Olympia and Nolan, we’ve had the TV people and reporters in droves, driving us mad with their questions, we’re only just beginning to feel free of it all ... and I can’t bear it ... I can’t bear it ... it’s
starting all over again.”

I
borrowed the Land-Rover and at Doone’s request led him down to the village and into Harry and Fiona’s drive. I was surprised that he still wanted me with him and said so, and he explained a little solemnly that he found people felt less
threatened
by a police officer if he turned up with someone they knew.

“Don’t you want them to feel threatened?” I asked. “Many policemen seem to like it that way.”

“I’m not many policemen.” He seemed uninsulted. “I work in my own way, sir, and if sometimes it’s not how my colleagues work then I get my results all the same and it’s the results that count in the end. It may not be the best way to the highest promotion”—he smiled briefly—“but I do tend to solve things, I assure you.”

“I don’t doubt it, Chief Inspector,” I said.

“I have three daughters,” he said, sighing, “and I don’t like cases like this one.”

We were standing in the drive looking at the noble façade of a fine Georgian manor.

“Never make assumptions,” he said absentmindedly, as if giving me advice. “You know the two most pathetic words a policeman can utter when his case falls apart around him?”

I shook my head.

“‘I assumed,”’ he said.

“I’ll remember.”

He looked at me calmly in his unthreatening way and said it was time to trouble the Goodhavens.

As it happened, only Fiona was there, coming to the kitchen door in a dark-blue tailored suit with a white silk blouse, gold chains, high-heeled black shoes and an air of rush. She smiled apologetically when she saw me.

“John,” she said. “What can I do for you? I’m going out to lunch. Can you make it quick?”

“Er ...” I said, “this is Detective Chief Inspector Doone, Thames Valley Police. And Constable Rich.”

“Policemen?” she asked, puzzled; and then in terrible flooding anxiety, “Nothing’s happened to Harry?”

“No. No. Nothing. It’s not about Harry. Well, not exactly. It’s about Angela Brickell. They’ve found her.”