Simon Brett - The Stabbing in the Stables

Suddenly Jude recalled the little hesitation in Imogen’s voice when she’d been asked where Donal was. Had she been lying? Was Donal Geraghty actually still present in the derelict stables?

Jude pulled herself up with difficulty from her crouched position on the bucket. Her limbs had almost locked in the cold, and she shook her legs to restore the circulation.

Conker got the reward of another carrot in anticipation of good behaviour, and a cheery “See you” as Jude set out to explore the rest of the building.

She gave the other five stables a cursory look. If there had been anyone holed up in them, she and Carole would, she felt sure, have seen or heard something. And so it proved. No human agency had stirred the mess in the stables for decades.

Jude went through the narrow passage to the left of the main entrance and found herself in a barnlike structure full of decaying farm carts and rusted machinery. Sagging doors and missing tiles gave her enough daylight to inspect the whole area and confirm that it was uninhabited.

She moved back to the central courtyard and continued in a straight line through the passage to the right of the main gates. The space she entered seemed as large as the one she had just left, but its roof was in better repair, so it took a moment for her eyes to accommodate to the darkness.

As she stood there, trying to make out the shapes that loomed around her, Jude heard a strange sound.

A whimper, like that of an animal in pain.

Except that it definitely came from a human being.

Jude moved towards the source of the sound. The space smelled of old grain, so damp as almost to be fermented. The floor was littered with ancient sacks, long predating plastic, shredded perhaps by the rats who had long ago made away with their contents. Everything underfoot felt slimy.

In the far corner lay what looked like just another pile of torn sacking, and it was from there that the human whimpering came. But the darkness was still intense. Prudent Carole of course would have her torch in the Renault, but Carole and the Renault were now far away. Jude looked around for a light source, and saw an old window, over which a whole sack appeared to have been nailed. But that had been a long time ago, and when she touched it the fabric tore away like tissue paper. The extant panes of the window were obscured by green slime, but enough were broken to let in the daylight.

Jude looked back to the corner and saw Donal Geraghty.

He lay on a pile of filthy sacks and looked as filthy himself. His face was discoloured with dried blood, which had also sprayed down over his clothes. The way he hugged himself suggested that his injuries might include broken ribs. One blue eye was closed by bruising, but the other looked up trying to identify the intruder.

“It’s Jude.”

“Oh God, that’s all a man needs when he’s in a state like this-a visit from the Fethering Miss Marple.”

The old insouciance was still in his voice, but the words were blurred, as though some of his teeth as well as his ribs had been broken.

“Donal, what happened to you?”

He did the nearest to a shrug his broken body could achieve. “I got into a fight,” he said with mock pathos. “Again.”

“Who with?”

“I don’t remember his name. I don’t know if I even knew it. He was just someone in the Cheshire Cheese last night. All I do know is that he was a lot younger and fitter than me.”

“How did you get here?”

“I suppose I must have walked.”

“Do you really not remember?”

“No, I really don’t remember. When I get into a fight, it’s like-you ever hear the expression ‘red mist’? Well, I guess that’s not a bad description for what happens. I don’t see anything else. I don’t think anything else. All I know is I have to lash out, and I do. And sometimes when I come back to myself, I’m all right, though I haven’t a clue what’s happened to the other guy. And sometimes when I come back to myself, well, it’s like today. One thing I know for sure-I lost.”

What he said did provide some explanation for the way he’d suddenly turned on Ted Crisp. And indeed why he hadn’t mentioned the incident when he next saw Carole and Jude. Maybe his mind had just blanked it out.

“But what are you going to do now, Donal? Don’t you think you should be in a hospital?”

“Nah. What good would a hospital ever do for me? There’s nothing broken, nothing that needs setting. And fractures, well, they just heal in their own time.”

“I imagine you’ve had a few over the years.”

He tried to laugh. “Few? That’s what might be termed an understatement. If you’re a jump jockey, the falls and the broken bones, they come with the job description. My collarbone’s been broken more times than a politician’s promises. First thing you learn in that business is to heal quick. Otherwise you’re out of a job.”

“But then, when you get older, with all those broken bones, the arthritis sets in.”

He looked at her bleakly, recognising the accuracy of her diagnosis.

“Which is why you drink so much. To deal with the pain.”

“So?” He looked at her with some of the old cockiness in his one open eye. “To my mind, Jameson’s has got a much better taste than bloody paracetamol.”

“But would paracetamol get you into so many fights?”

He attempted another shrug. “I lead my life the way I want to lead it.”

Looking at him, abject, in terrible pain, lying on filthy sacks, Jude found that hard to believe, but she didn’t take issue. Instead, she asked, “Is there anything I can do for you? You say you won’t go to hospital, but…”

“You don’t have any Jameson’s with you, do you?”

“No. Not normally something I carry about my person.”

“Ah, that’s a shame. I’m feeling shitty all over, but the most painful bit is the hangover. So, if you could fetch me some, you’d be doing a Christian act.”

“I think a more Christian act might be to get you off the stuff.”

“No, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know, Donal, there are other ways of controlling pain, apart from alcohol and drugs.”

“Oh yes? What are they-topping yourself?”

“No. Massage can help.”

He spat contempt at the idea. “I had a lot of massages when I was riding. Then they helped. I’m past that now.”

“And healing…”

He was silent.

“You know about healing, Donal. I saw you heal Sonia Dalrymple’s Chieftain. Well, I do a bit of that. And-before you say anything-my results are better with humans than they are with animals.”

“Bloody have to be, I’d have thought, by the law of averages.”

“Well, if you ever want to come to me and try a session, just to get the basics of pain management…”

“Does the process involve Jameson’s?”

“No, it doesn’t. But it’s a good offer.”

“A very good offer, for which I am appropriately grateful. But”-he put on a teasing voice again-“I’m a bit wary of these alternative medicines. You hear these terrible stories of people who take up with some quack and give up drinking the Jameson’s altogether. Now that’s not something I would want happening to me. I think it could seriously undermine my health.”

The argument was not worth pursuing. Jude moved onto another topic. “Presumably Imogen rang you last night?”

“Yes. Thank the Lord she got me while I was still sober.”

“She told you what she was planning to do?”

“She was worried about that little Conker. Got it into her head that the Horse Ripper was after her. I didn’t know, maybe she was right, maybe she did know something. So I told her how to find this place.”