Simon Brett - The Stabbing in the Stables

“Can I talk to her?”

“I’m afraid she says she doesn’t want to talk to you.” Carole looked across, and was surprised to see that the girl’s eyes were welling full of tears. The rigidity had gone out of her body and her shoulders slumped. She had held herself together for as long as she could, but something-possibly the knowledge that her mother was now only a phone away-had made Imogen realise she could not maintain the tension any longer. She looked about seven, as she reached out for the mobile.

The part of the conversation Carole and Jude heard was too tearful to be very coherent, but the message got through that Imogen did agree to return to Fethering. Then the mobile was handed back to Carole to make the arrangements.

“Can you come and pick her up, Hilary?”

“I wish I could. No car.”

“But surely, with Alec being…er…” Carole didn’t know the graceful way to put this. “Well, he’s not using your car at the moment, is he?”

“No. But the police have got it.”

“Ah.”

“Running all kinds of forensic tests, would you believe? Looking for Walter Fleet’s DNA on the upholstery, I suppose, building up the prosecution case. Let me tell you, it is extremely inconvenient being married to a murderer.”

Not for the first time, Carole was struck by the oddness of Hilary Potton’s response to her situation. This flippancy seemed to be another facet of her self-dramatisation. What was happening to her husband was infinitely less important than the effect it was having on her. Maybe that was also the explanation for her lack of panic about Imogen’s disappearance. In Hilary Potton’s egocentric world, that was just another cross that the martyr had to bear.

Carole arranged that she would drive Imogen home in the Renault. She expected resistance, but all fight seemed to have gone out of the girl. She looked feeble, a broken rag doll.

Only as they were leaving did Imogen suddenly look back in panic at Conker.

“I can’t leave her. I must ride her back.”

“No, Imogen, you can’t,” said Carole firmly. “It’s a long way, and you’d have to ride on the main roads.”

“Conker’s fine on the roads.”

“No. I’m sorry. I’m not going to be responsible for you riding that pony back to Fethering.”

“But suppose something happens to her?”

Jude came to the rescue. “Nothing’s going to happen to her. I’ll stay here till Sonia arrives.”

And even Imogen couldn’t find any objection to that arrangement.

Jude was hungry. All very well to agree to look after Conker, but she’d not had time for any breakfast when she was summoned to Long Bamber early that morning and was beginning to feel the effects.

She inspected the pony’s temporary stable. Not being a hay eater, she wasn’t going to challenge Conker for the contents of her net. Nor did the pony nuts look very appealing. But a carrot…

There were still some in a bucket, which Imogen had shrewdly placed out of Conker’s range. They looked unlike the kind of carrots that might appear in a supermarket. In fact, they were carrots that had been disqualified from appearing in supermarkets. The mandatory image in the world of supermarkets demands that a carrot be a perfect tapered cylinder built on the lines of a space rocket, whereas in nature carrots come in a variety of knobbly shapes and sizes. The perfect ones go to the customers of Sainsbury’s and Tesco; the imperfect ones are fed to horses.

As well as being misshapen, the carrots in the bucket were a bit old and muddy, but Jude was very hungry. To ease her conscience, she also gave one to the pony, and the two of them chomped in contented unison. The carrots were pretty woody, but better than nothing.

She decided to stay in the stall, not principally to keep an eye on Conker, but because the air was very cold outside its shelter. She put the remaining carrots in with the pony nuts, and sat on the upturned empty bucket.

Her enforced wait was in many ways inconvenient but did at least give her a chance to think through the case and the various anomalies that it presented. Having met Alec Potton, she had great difficulty in casting him in the role of murderer. If half of what his wife said about his philandering were true, his behaviour was hardly admirable. Jude didn’t think much of men who kept their wives short while spending the family money on girlfriends, but he still seemed to her too weak a personality to make an attack like that which Walter Fleet had suffered.

On the other hand, the blood-spattered Barbour found in the Dalrymples’ hayloft undoubtedly belonged to Alec Potton, and the police had had no hesitation about taking him in for questioning. Maybe, as ever, they knew a lot more than Carole and Jude would ever know.

What about motivation, though? Hilary Potton’s suggestion, relayed by Carole, that Alec was jealous of Walter’s attention to her seemed pretty flimsy. Also, given the state of their marriage, would he have cared that much about anyone coming on to his soon-to-be-ex-wife?

But then again, he had confessed to the murder. Alec Potton had actually told the police that he had killed Walter Fleet. That was quite a difficult fact to get round.

Jude’s only explanation was that Alec had reacted instantly to the news that Imogen was planning to confess to the murder. Whatever his other character deficiencies, there was no questioning his love for his daughter. He would do anything to protect Imogen.

In fact, Jude reckoned, daughter and father had behaved instinctively in exactly the same way. Very soon after hearing that Alec had been taken in for questioning, Imogen had planned to get him off the hook by confessing herself, an intention that her mother had only just managed to thwart.

And as soon as Alec had heard what his daughter was proposing to do, he had immediately hoped to get her off the hook by confessing himself. By the time the details came out-that Imogen couldn’t have been at Long Bamber Stables at the relevant time because she was with her mother-the deed was done. A confession of murder had been made by the man whose clothes had been found stained with the victim’s blood. The police weren’t going to throw away a gift like that in a hurry.

The other niggling questions that would not go away concerned Donal Geraghty: who exactly he was blackmailing, and did his blackmailing efforts have anything to do with Walter Fleet’s death?

Well, from what they’d overheard at Fontwell-and indeed from Yolanta’s behaviour that morning-there seemed little doubt that Donal was putting the squeeze on the Brewises. Why he was putting the squeeze on them was a question Jude couldn’t at that moment answer, nor was it the highest in her order of priority. More significant was whether Donal was blackmailing anyone else. The Dalrymples kept coming back into Jude’s mind, and the more she had found out about the state of their marriage, the more reasons she could find why they might be open to blackmail.

She was sure that Sonia was holding out on her. From working professionally with the woman, Jude knew the level of tension she was suffering, and Sonia had virtually admitted that its cause was information she dared not divulge. Her husband’s violence was a constant pressure on her life, but Jude got the feeling there was something else torturing Sonia Dalrymple. If only she could find out what the secrets were that seemed to be corroding the woman from the inside out. An early visit to Sonia was called for, one when a few more cards should be placed on the table.

And then again there was Donal. Donal the disappearing Irishman. Vanished once again. Yolanta had thought he was in the stables where Jude was sitting; Imogen had implied that he had been there until recently. Where had he disappeared to this time?