"There"s a man here, a man hurt. I think it"s Sir Percy." But long before the swaddled form was carried on a hurdle up the lawn and under the cedar with silent gardeners and grooms around it, the whole household knew that the groom had been only half right. The man on the island was indeed their employer, Sir Percy, but he wasn"t hurt he was dead.
The bare outline of Sir Percy"s death reached me on a June evening in London. I read it on a damp galley proof in my place of work, a subeditors" room in inky Fleet Street.
We have received reports from Berkshire that the director of the South Western Shires Railway Company, Sir Percy Whitton, has been killed in a riding accident on his estate near Maybridge. An inquest is to take place tomorrow. Funeral arrangements will be notified.
I hardly knew the man personally, having been in the same room as him on a couple of public occasions, and my first thought was what a sad loss this would be for the lawyers. Sir Percy and his neighbour Charles Clawson of the Wiltshire and Berkshire Railway were at daggers drawn. The Wiltshire and Berkshire had got an Act of Parliament to drive their new branch line along the hill opposite Sir Percy"s house. He said it was an abomination, and if a gentleman couldn"t live in his own home without steam engines scaring his cattle and blowing s.m.u.ts all over his guests, it was all up with the rights and liberties of old England. This in spite of the fact that his own money came from railways. The resulting court case, due to open in a week"s time, had been antic.i.p.ated as one of the great events of the legal season. Sir Percy was expected to win, if only because his purse was longer than Clawson"s and he"d take it all the way to the House of Lords if necessary. There was extra spice in the fact that the combatants were related by marriage. Clawson had given the hand of his only daughter, Emily, to Sir Percy at a time several years earlier when the two men were business partners, before they fell out.
It"s an unfortunate fact of working for a newspaper that all the most interesting things you get to know are those that law or society won"t allow you to print. I collect such stories as other men collect ferns or b.u.t.terflies. I sniffed one here and, by grace of those same railways that began the battle, I was in the little market town of Maybridge before lunchtime next morning. I already had a direct line into the gossip of the area through my old and disreputable friend, Harry Leather. Harry is a groom, jockey, livery keeper, dealer, in fact, in anything you please as long as it has a lot to do with horses and as little as possible to do with the law. He"s as small and agile as a street urchin but I suppose is a man in middle years, although from the wrinkles on his weatherbeaten face he looks old enough to have traded horses with the Pharaohs probably to their disadvantage. At that time he was managing a livery stables at Maybridge, so when I got there I made straight for his establishment on one side of the market square, knowing that nothing that moved on four legs and precious little on two escaped his network. I found him in the saddle room, cleaning tack, and after an exchange of civilities asked him the time of the inquest.
"You"ve missed it, Mr Ludlow. They opened it at nine o"clock and it was all over by eleven."
"What was the verdict?"
"Misadventure."
"Much interest in it locally?"
He hooked up a stirrup leather and ran a cloth slowly down it. The meaty smell of neat"s foot oil hung in the warm air, along with whiffs of horse from the loose boxes.
"What do you think?"
"Was he well-liked?"
"Well enough by those as liked him."
With Harry, this kind of game could go on all day. But I knew he was hugging information of some kind as closely as a child hugs a puppy. I watched while he oiled a few more leathers then asked him what he knew about the riding accident. It was then that I got most of the details about the island, the shivering white horse, and the man lying dead, with Harry going on with his work all the while, watching me sidelong to see what I was making of it.
"Do you want to see him?"
The sudden question jolted me. I thought at first that he was talking about Sir Percy"s corpse, surely now in the hands of the undertaker.
"See who?"
"The horse."
He got up unhurriedly and led the way across the yard. We went past the lines of worthy hacks and dependable carriage horses, round the corner to the few isolated boxes that he keeps for invalids or mares close to foaling. As we turned the corner a high whinnying came from one of the boxes. A head as white as new milk came over the half door, large wild eyes, wide pink nostrils.
"An Arabian. A fine one, too."
We stood looking over the half door while the horse rolled his eyes and snorted at us. He wasn"t large, under sixteen hands, but every line of him, from his long back to his clean cannon bones, sang out speed and breeding.
Harry ran a calming hand down the arched neck.
"We have to keep him here because he"s entire. Cover every mare in the yard if he had his way."
A stallion, not gelded, therefore as wild as the wind and as unpredictable.
"No wonder Sir Percy got thrown. I suppose he was out for a hack, got bolted with into the lake and onto the island, then the horse reared up and threw him."
Harry snorted, making a noise much like the horse.
"And I"m the Queen of Fairyland."
I suppressed the picture of Harry in rosy wreaths and diaphanous draperies.
"You don"t think it happened that way?"
"No, I don"t, and if you think about it, neither do you."
"Oh, and why don"t I?"
"For one thing, you know horses a touch better than that. Have you ever met an Arab in your life that was any use over water? Can"t stand it, coming from deserts like they do."
"If he was bolting . . ."
"If he was bolting, he"d bolt away from water, not across it."
"But he was on the island. I gather n.o.body disputes that?"
"n.o.body"s likely to, given the trouble they had to get him off it."
"So how did he get there?" Harry turned towards me with the glint in his eye that usually means the other man is about to get the worse of a bargain.
"That, Mr Ludlow, is the second most peculiar thing about this whole business."
"Oh? So, what"s the first, Harry?" He paused, enjoying his moment.
"The most peculiar of the lot is what Sir Percy was doing with him in the first place."
"Hacking out on him, surely."
He gestured towards the horse, calmer now and watching us with interest, although still as ready to fly as a bird from a cage.
"You look at that animal and tell me if he"d let a fat counting-house man like Sir Percy Whitton throw a leg over him. A racing lord might ride him, a tinker boy as wild as he is might ride him, but he wouldn"t let any ordinary hacking man as much as put a toe in his stirrup iron."
I looked at the horse and had to admit that I knew what he meant. Harry, seeing my face, nodded.
"Sir Percy couldn"t have ridden a hair of his tail."
"But they were on the island together, and Sir Percy was dead."
"That"s it."
"So there must have been somebody else there?"
"Not when they got there. The chief groom"s a friend of mine. I had it all from him direct."
"He can"t have dropped from the clouds. Was there any sign anybody else had been there?"
"By the time they"d got Sir Percy off the island, then the horse, the whole lot was as trampled as if they"d fought a battle over it."
I thought of Charles Clawson and my mind went racing.
"Supposing, for the sake of argument, that somebody had wanted to harm Sir Percy. If he managed to get him alone on a little island with a horse that might be dangerous . . ."
"Be a d.a.m.ned sight easier to wait for him behind a bush with a brace of pistols, begging your pardon. Anyhow, you"ve still got to get the horse to the island."
And Charles Clawson, as I remembered, was a hacking sort of counting-house man too no rider for the white horse.
"It would be a complicated way to murder anybody."
At the word murder, Harry turned away. He said, under his breath: "Suppose a man"s got to have an interest in life, but yours seems a d.a.m.ned odd one to me."
We"d had this out before, but he"d keep worrying at it.
"Why so? Doesn"t it interest you, thinking that a person may be killed by another person and n.o.body ever know how it happened, or why? You could write whole books about it."
"Funny sort of books they"d be. Who"d want to read them?"
"Just about everybody who"s curious about his fellow men and women."
He shook his head. "What that doesn"t take into account is that there are what you might call public murders and there are private murders, and it doesn"t do to confuse the two of them."
"What do you mean?"
We began walking slowly back across the yard. A dog dozed in the sun and a boy swept the already immaculate brick paving.
"What I call a public murder, let"s say a poacher shoots a keeper, everybody knows who"s done it, he"s tried at the a.s.sizes, people go to see him hanged, and that"s an end of it. A private murder somebody kills somebody for a good or a bad reason and doesn"t want the whys and wherefores of it known, and mostly you wouldn"t do any good to anybody making them known, only stir up more trouble. What you"re doing is intruding on private murder."
"You think it was murder then?"
He didn"t answer. I asked him how the Arab had come to be in his yard.
"Had to go somewhere until they find out who owns him, and he couldn"t have stopped at Sir Percy"s place, could he?"
"Why not?"
"The young widow. As soon as she hears about the white horse she faints clean away thinking, I suppose, of her poor husband being trampled and so on. The doctor says he won"t be answerable if she sets eyes on the animal, so they call me in and I ride him over here."
"Ah yes, the widow. Charles Clawson"s daughter. She must have been a lot younger than her husband."
"About a quarter of a century younger. Down here they reckon her father gave her to Sir Percy in return for a parcel of railway shares." Harry said it as matter-of-factly as you"d talk of trading one horse for another.
"She"ll be a rich widow now, Mr Ludlow, and a nice-looking young lady at that. Good chance for somebody." He laughed and looked at me sidelong.
"I"m not bidding. Was she at the inquest?"
"Yes. Had to answer questions from the coroner about when she"d last seen her husband."
"When had she?"
"Dinner the night before. She went up to bed early, having a headache from the heat. First she knew about it was when her maid woke her up in the morning."
"Had he said anything to her about going out?"
"Not a word, but then he wouldn"t, would he?"
There was something odd about the way Harry said that, but I left that for later.
"It must have been a sad ordeal for her."
"Very composed she was, while she was telling it. Afterwards, while she was walking out, she nearly collapsed on her brother"s arm. He"d come back from Oxford especially when he heard about it."
"Did they say at the inquest whether Sir Percy was trampled? Were there marks of horseshoes on him?"
"Not one, just the back of his head caved in. The head groom said it looked as though he"d fallen and hit it on the base of the statue, the Venus."
He stopped in front of another loose box in the middle of the long row. There was a dark bay mare inside, cobby sort, sixteen hands, facing away from us and munching hay. She looked quiet and steady, as unlike the Arab as anything on four legs.
"She"s Sir Percy"s."
"What"s she doing here in a livery yard? Did his wife send her away too?"
He shook his head.
"I got up early in the morning and there she was tied to the hitching ring outside the gates. She was covered in mud and tired fit to drop, but whoever left her there had knotted up the reins and run up the stirrups properly."
"When was this?"
"The morning they found Sir Percy"s body."
"How far away from here is Sir Percy"s place?"
"Four miles."
I could hardly take in what he was telling me, and I must have spluttered my questions. How did he know the mare was Sir Percy"s? Could the man have ridden her four miles in the night and walked back in time to be dead on his own island by sunrise, and if so, why? Had Harry told the coroner"s officer? The answer to that last question was no, as I should have guessed knowing his dislike for the law. As for how he"d known, it turned out that the mare was a frequent guest at his livery stables when Sir Percy rode into town.
"But you told me that the head groom checked the stables that morning and all Sir Percy"s horses were there."
"So they were, all as were meant to be there. This mare was never in his stables. He kept her in his estate manager"s stable half a mile from the house and his wife never knew she existed."
There could only be one reason for that.
"You"re telling me that Sir Percy kept a pet.i.te amie in the town here and used the mare to visit her?"
No need, with Harry, to pretend to be shocked. He lives by the morals of the reign before Her Majesty"s, if he can be credited with any at all.
"Tuesday and Thursday nights," was all he said. Sir Percy"s body had been found early on Wednesday morning.