Dick Francis - Under Orders

I bet you would, I thought. ‘I believe that Mr Burton has the right to have a friend present during any such search and, as he told me to look after things, I intend to remain.’

‘As you wish,’ said Carlisle, not showing any obvious disappointment. ‘But please keep out of our way.’

Instead, I fetched my digital camera from my car and took mega-pixel shots of the policemen as they systematically worked their way through the house. My presence was clearly an irritation to Carlisle who stamped around me and tut-tutted every time my camera flashed.

‘Is that really necessary?’ he finally asked.

‘I thought you had to make a detailed record of the search,’ I replied. ‘I’m just helping out. I’ll e-mail you a complete set of the pictures.’

‘Do you know if Mr Burton owned a gun?’ he asked. ‘In particular, a.38 inch revolver.’

‘No, but I think it most unlikely.’

I knew Bill would never give his children toy guns for Christmas or birthdays as he thought it would teach them to be violent. I couldn’t imagine that he would own a real one.

By the time Juliet Burns and the other stable staff arrived at four thirty for evening stables, the police had removed all Bill’s computer equipment from his desk, sealed it in large clear plastic bags, and loaded it into one of their vehicles. I was photographing them as they were bagging up his business record books when Juliet walked into the office.

‘Hello, Sid — what the bloody hell’s going on?’ she demanded.

‘And who are you, madam?’ asked Chief Inspector Carlisle, coming into the office before I could answer.

‘Juliet Burns, assistant trainer, and who the hell are you, and what the hell are you up to?’ She directed the last question at the uniformed policeman who went on filling his bag with papers off Bill’s desk.

‘I’m Chief Inspector Carlisle, Gloucestershire CID. We are searching these premises in the course of our investigations.’

‘Investigations into what?’ she demanded loudly. ‘And where’s Mr Burton?’

‘He is helping us with our enquiries.’

I wondered if being taught ‘police speak’ was part of the training.

‘Into what?’ she asked again.

‘Into a suspicious death at Cheltenham last Friday.’

‘You mean Huw Walker?’

‘Indeed.’

‘And you think Bill did it? Ha!’ She laughed. ‘Bill wouldn’t hurt a fly. You’ve got the wrong man.’

‘We have every reason to believe that Mr Burton had a powerful motive for killing Mr Walker,’ said Carlisle.

‘What motive?’ I asked. Their heads turned towards me.

Carlisle seemed to realise that he had given away too much information. ‘Er, none of your business, sir.’

On the contrary, I thought, it was very much my business.

‘Have you been speaking to Mrs Burton?’ I asked him.

‘That’s none of your business, either,’ he replied. But I could see that he had. He had known that Kate and the children were not in the house when he had arrived. There had been no female police officers in his party. He had expected Bill to be here on his own.

So I assumed Carlisle’s ‘powerful motive’ was that Kate had told him that she was having an affair with Huw and that Bill had found out about it on Thursday evening. On Friday, Huw had turned up dead with his heart like a colander and Kate must have thought Bill was responsible. Not an unreasonable conclusion, I thought. No wonder she’d not come home. She believed her husband was a murderer.

Juliet stood with her hands on her hips. I hadn’t seen her since she was a child but I’d known her family for years. She may have been small in stature but inside her petite frame was a giant of a woman trying to get out. Her mother had died bringing her into the world and she had been raised by her blacksmith father and her four elder brothers, growing up as the youngest in a household dominated by men. Childhood had consisted of wrestling in front of the television on a Saturday afternoon and playing rugby or football in the garden on Sunday mornings. And, of course, there was riding, plenty of riding, hunting in the winter and Pony Club gymkhanas in the summer. School had simply been a time-filler between more important pursuits. Now aged about twenty-five, I believed this was Juliet’s first job as an assistant trainer after doing her time as a stable groom in and around Lambourn.

‘Hey, you can’t take that. It’s the entries record,’ she shouted at a policeman who was busy placing a large blue-bound ledger into a polythene bag.

‘We can take whatever we like,’ said Carlisle.

‘They’re also investigating race fixing,’ I said.

Juliet stared at me with her mouth open.

‘Bill was arrested on suspicion of race fixing,’ I said. ‘As well as for murder. I was here.’

‘Bloody hell!’ She turned to Carlisle. ‘You’d better take all the bloody horses as well, then. They’ll be accessories.’

Carlisle was not amused and politely asked us both if we would leave his men to their task.

Juliet and I went out to the stable yard where the lads were busy with the horses. The daylight was fading fast and bright yellow rectangles from the stable lights extended out through the box doors. Steel buckets clanged as they were filled with water from the taps in the corners of the yard and figures carrying sacks of straw or hay scurried about in the shadows. Life in the yard, at least, was continuing as normal.

‘Evening, Miss Juliet,’ said one lad coming up to us, ‘I think old Leaded has a bit of heat in his near fore. Evening, Mr Halley. Nice to see you.’

I smiled and nodded at him. Fred Manley had been Bill Burton’s head lad since Bill had started training, taking over the licence from his father-in-law, and had done his time in various stables around Lambourn before that. He had a wizened face from a life spent mostly outdoors with far too many early cold mornings on the gallops. He was actually in his late forties but looked at least ten years older. One of the old school: hard working, respectful and all too rare these days.

‘OK, Fred,’ said Juliet, ‘I’ll take a look.’

Juliet and Fred walked to a box midway down the left-hand bank and went in; I followed. Leaded Light turned and looked at the three of us. I had last seen him giving his all up the hill at Cheltenham on Friday, beaten a short head in the two-mile chase. Now he stood calmly in his straw-covered bedroom with a heavy canvas rug hiding his bulk and keeping him warm against the March evening chill. He was also wearing a leather head-collar that was firmly attached to a ring in the wall to prevent him wandering out through the open door.

Juliet moved over to the left-hand side of the docile animal, faced away from its head, bent down and ran her hand slowly down the back of Leaded Light’s lower leg. I watched her make such a natural movement, a movement repeated thousands of times a day in Lambourn alone. Every trainer, every day, with almost every horse. The feel for heat in the tendon is as regular a part of looking after a racehorse as feeding it. Her left hand on the horse’s left front leg, feeling for the slightest variation in temperature. I looked at my own left hand. I could have plunged it into boiling water without it telling me a thing.

Juliet straightened. ‘Mmm. He obviously gave himself a bit of a knock on Friday,’ she said. ‘There’s a touch of heat there but nothing too bad. Thanks, Fred. We’ll give him light work for a day or two.’

‘OK, Miss,’ Fred replied. ‘Is the guv’nor not here? He asked me to find out about holiday dates for the lads.’

‘I’m afraid he’s a bit tied up this evening,’ said Juliet, only fractionally hesitating.

I hoped not and nearly laughed. Unlike in the United States where handcuffs were de rigueur, Bill had been driven away without restraint. I assumed that he would not have been shackled, dungeon-like, to some police cell wall.