Simon Brett - The Stabbing in the Stables

“Have to keep up my energy. The old blood sugar.” Her sweet tooth was the only thing she was going to apologise for. She sat down at the paper-strewn kitchen table and sighed heavily.

“It probably will get out, about Conker having been taken. Hard to keep secrets round a place like this. Owners are a gossipy lot.”

“And would that be such bad news?” asked Carole.

“Just another piece in a sequence of cumulative bad news. Another reason for existing owners to think of taking their horses away, and for new owners to look for another stable. There are plenty around here. They’d be spoiled for choice.”

She spoke wearily, someone who had battled against the rising tide of adverse circumstances and now was close to giving up the struggle.

“Are things really that bad?” asked Jude.

Lucinda Fleet nodded glumly.

“But presumably,” suggested Carole, “if you did have to give up, this place would fetch a pretty healthy price. You must have about ten acres.”

“Eight and a half.”

“In a very desirable part of West Sussex.”

“I agree. But if you knew the size of the mortgage…”

“Ah.”

Lucinda ran both hands back through her hair, unwittingly revealing the grey at its roots. Like the house, her appearance had been neglected.

“But have things got more difficult since Walter died?” asked Jude. “I mean, now you have to manage the place on your own?”

A short bark of laughter greeted that. “Hasn’t made a blind bit of difference. I’ve been managing this place on my own ever since we bought it. Walter always saw himself as ‘front of house’ in the project. He was the one who chatted up the owners-particularly the female owners-and regaled them with stories of his glory days as an eventer. He wasn’t very ‘hands on’-except, again, with the lady owners. I don’t think Walter even knew what mucking out a stable meant-if he did, it certainly wasn’t from personal experience. He was entirely useless, in almost every way.”

Carole, whose mind had been running recently on such matters, couldn’t help asking, “Then why did you stay with him?”

Lucinda shrugged and replied, as if the answer were self-evident, “I was married to him.” She grimaced and let out another harsh little laugh. “Quite honestly, it’s easier running the place without him constantly under my feet.”

“So you’re really thinking you may have to give it up?” asked Carole.

Another weary nod. “Unless someone who reckons Long Bamber Stables has potential comes along with a huge injection of cash-and I don’t think people like that exist outside of fairy tales.”

“Lucinda,” Jude began carefully, “you said that Walter was always coming on to the lady owners…”

“Yes. It’s no secret. He had a reputation round the place as the local groper.”

“In spite of his injuries, he was still an attractive man?”

“Apparently.”

“And do you know if any of these lady owners-”

Carole, who was getting tired of the “softly-softly” approach, butted in. “What Jude’s asking-in her roundabout way-is whether there were any women to whom your late husband was particularly close. I mean, for instance, Imogen’s mother Hilary implied to me that he fancied her. I just wonder if that attraction might have gone further?”

“You’re asking me if Walter had an affair with Hilary Potton?”

“Well, I…well, I…yes, I am. Or indeed with anyone else.”

Lucinda Fleet found this almost funny. At least, she laughed at the suggestion. But there wasn’t much humour in her laughter. Then she stopped, as if a tap had been turned off. “The answer is no. I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. You two don’t give the air of being gossips, and nothing I say can hurt Walter anymore.

“The fact is that he could come on to women as much as he liked-he could chat them up, and did. Yes, the lady owners-though in many cases with them ‘lady’ is not the appropriate word. And he’d also come on to the younger girls, which did worry me. I mean, there was no way he could do them any harm, but they didn’t know that-and teenage girls…It’s a difficult age. I think he frightened some of them. I tried to get him to stop that, but…” She shrugged at the hopelessness of the endeavour.

Jude picked up her words. “You said Walter could not do the girls any harm?”

Lucinda Fleet stared intently ahead. “Walter couldn’t do any woman any harm. He couldn’t even do me any harm…not in that way.”

She read the same question in both women’s eyes. “He was impotent. Another effect of the accident that destroyed his life-and I suppose my life at the same time.”

“But the accident happened before you were married, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but we were engaged. My father was an army man. I grew up in a household that believed that when you’d given your word about something, you stuck to it. I’d agreed to marry Walter, so I married him.”

“But it must have been…”

“Not much fun, no. I often used to wish I’d had a less rigid moral code. In retrospect I sometimes think I was completely stupid, but”-her sigh seemed to encompass all of her wasted life-“that’s the way I am.”

“I’m sorry,” murmured Jude.

Lucinda Fleet looked bleakly round the shabbiness of her kitchen. “I suppose that’s why there were a lot of things I just didn’t care about. Perhaps, if I’d had children…” For the first time, emotions threatened, but she quickly stifled them. “Anyway, I didn’t, and it’s probably a bit late to think about that now. If I met another man tomorrow”-she laughed bitterly at the unlikeliness-“I think the old biological clock would be against me.”

She took a sip of coffee, after which she became brusque, as though embarrassed by her momentary lapse. “So I concentrate on the horses. Horses are a lot easier to deal with than human beings-and a lot more rewarding. Certainly a lot more rewarding than Walter ever was.”

But she seemed immediately to regret this callousness and said, “I don’t know, though. The marriage was dreadful for me, but…poor Walter. He could never come to terms with what he had been and what he had become. I think it was probably worse for him. For that reason, I’m relieved he’s out of it.”

“But, Lucinda, surely-”

Her mobile rang. Hilary Potton responding to her message. Lucinda told her about Conker’s disappearance and asked if she could check with her mother that Imogen was still in Northampton.

Ten minutes later Hilary rang back. Imogen’s grandmother had just checked the girl’s bedroom. It hadn’t been slept in. And Imogen had shut herself in there in a teenage strop about seven the evening before. She could have escaped anytime after that. When Imogen spoke to Jude on the phone, she was fairly definitely not in Northampton, but probably changing trains in London, on her way down to Fethering.

All of which made Carole and Jude pretty certain that, wherever Conker was found, Imogen Potton would be there too.

Simon Brett

The Stabbing in the Stables

They were both silent as they drove back to Fethering, Carole because she was grumpy after her early start, and Jude because she was deep in thought. There was something at the back of her mind, a connection between two pieces of information that, if found, would suddenly make sense of a lot of other free-floating details. It concerned Imogen and Donal and someone else-but that person remained elusive.

She tried to think back through the weeks since Walter Fleet’s death, all the people she’d seen, all the people she’d spoken to. Someone, she felt sure, had said something that was relevant.

That line of thought didn’t prove constructive, though, so she tried another approach. Tried to put herself in the shoes of Imogen Potton. Where would Imogen go with Conker? A pony is not an easy thing to hide, but the girl thought Conker was in danger, so she definitely would try to hide her. But she had also gone to the trouble of taking pony nuts and carrots and the hay net. Imogen cared about Conker and would want to take her somewhere where she would be warm and comfortable. Which probably meant another stable, but a stable that was out of the way, where no one would think of looking for a missing pony…