“Anyway, what do you want?” asked Imogen gracelessly.
“I just had a call from Sonia-Mrs. Dalrymple. She said she was worried about you.”
“So? What business is that of yours?”
That was actually a very good question. Imogen’s emotional state was no business at all of Jude’s, but she still replied, “Mrs. Dalrymple’s very busy at the moment, so she can’t help you. She thought I might be able to.”
“Why?” Imogen was proving to be rather good at relevant but difficult questions.
“Well, Sonia doesn’t like the thought of you being upset and…”
“I’m all right,” said the girl defiantly.
“And you’re at your grandmother’s?”
“Yes.”
“In Northampton?”
“Ooh, you’ve done your homework, haven’t you?”
“But you’re not in her house at the moment. I can hear traffic.”
“No, I’m nipping out to the corner shop to get some shopping for Granny. Is that all right? Am I allowed to do anything without reporting back to someone every ten minutes?”
“Yes, yes, of course you are, Imogen. Listen, I know you’re worried about Conker.”
“You don’t know what I’m worried about.” But suddenly the girl sounded very young, on the verge of tears.
“She’s not in any danger. Conker’s safe at Long Bamber Stables.”
“Thinking about what’s happened there in the last few weeks,” said Imogen bitterly, “it’s the last place I’d call ‘safe.’”
“But Conker’ll be all right there. Lucinda Fleet will look after her.”
“Huh.” But teenage toughness soon gave way to tears as she went on. “If anything happens to Conker… She’s the only one who’s really on my side. I’ll kill anyone who tries to hurt Conker.”
“Imogen, tell me why you’re worried about Conker? What is it that makes you think she’s in danger? If you tell me, then-”
“Oh, shut up!” said the girl in a burst of savagery. “All you grown-ups think you know what’s going on in my mind. And none of you have got a bloody clue!”
The line went dead. Imogen Potton had ended the connection.
Simon Brett
The Stabbing in the Stables
32
Jude was a heavy sleeper, but always woke up quickly, as she did when the phone rang at five forty-five the following morning. Sonia. She’d just had a call from Lucinda Fleet, who always-even on Sundays-started work in the stables at five-thirty.
Conker was missing. Her stall was empty. She’d been stolen.
While she threw on some clothes, it didn’t take long for Jude to decide to ring Carole. Her neighbour’s irritation at being woken early would be as nothing to the fury prompted by her exclusion from any part of the investigation. Besides, Jude’d get to Long Bamber Stables a lot quicker in the Renault.
Carole dressed quickly too. She rushed a very grumpy Gulliver out behind the house to do his business, ignored his complaints as she shut him in the kitchen, and hurried to get the car out. A few hundred yards down the road, she realised she should have got the joint out of the fridge for Stephen and Gaby’s lunch, but she didn’t go back.
It was still dark when they arrived, dark and cold. Sonia Dalrymple was there with Lucinda, both looking over-wrought and hopeless. Sonia, normally so rigidly in control of her emotions, had burst into tears at the confirmation of Conker’s disappearance. The door to the pony’s stable was still open; there was something pathetic about the strawlined empty space.
“Have you called the police?” asked Carole.
“There’s no need to do that,” Sonia replied quickly. “This isn’t a police matter.”
“Surely, if something’s been stolen-”
“I do not want the police involved,” Sonia snapped. “I’m Conker’s owner, so it’s up to me.”
Jude was beginning to have her own ideas about why Sonia might want the police kept away, but support for the decision came from Lucinda.
“I agree. I’ve had quite enough flatfoots around this place to last me a lifetime.”
“But if a horse has been stolen…”
“Don’t worry about it, Carole,” said Jude. “If Sonia and Lucinda don’t want to call the police, then we have to respect their decision.” The look she flashed at her friend carried the message’s subtext: besides, if there are no police, we have a better chance of finding out what’s really been going on.
“Yes, of course,” said Carole, getting the point.
“Apart from anything else,” said Lucinda, “I want to keep this as quiet as possible. What happened to Walter hasn’t exactly been good for business. I don’t want the owners to start thinking their horses aren’t safe here either.”
“No.” Carole turned practical. “So how did the thief-or thieves-get in?”
“Through the front gates.”
“Which were locked?”
“Yes, but there are lots of keys around. All the owners have keys-God knows how many people they give copies to. It wouldn’t be that difficult to find one.”
“So you think it’s ‘an inside job’?” Carole felt a slight thrill to be using such a professional criminal term.
“Could be,” Lucinda replied. “That’s the obvious explanation of how easily they got in. But then again logic’s against it being one of the owners. By definition, they’ve all already got horses, and where would any of them stable Conker in secret if they had taken her? No, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Then what are the other possibilities?” asked Jude.
“Well, it could just be a common or garden horse thief. They do still exist and”-Lucinda grimaced piously-“though it doesn’t do to say so in these politically correct times, most of them are still gypsies. If they’d taken her, they’d sell her on somewhere-possibly not in this country-so it’d be virtually impossible to track her down.”
“But she has got a freeze mark on her,” said Sonia. “We had it done so she could be identified. So whoever she was offered to might be able to guess that she’d been stolen.”
“I don’t think that’d bother them. The kind of people Conker’d be offered to for sale would know full well that she’d been stolen.”
“Oh,” said Sonia Dalrymple bleakly.
“What are the other possibilities?” asked Jude, trying to cheer things up. “If she wasn’t stolen by gypsies?”
“Well…” Lucinda Fleet sighed, but the sigh turned into a shudder. “There’s a chance-I hope I’m wrong, but there is a chance-that she might have been taken by the Horse Ripper.”
Sonia let out a little whimper.
“But why would he have taken her out?” asked Carole. “If mutilating a horse was what he wanted to do, surely he could just as easily done it in the stall?”
“Maybe, but that’s not his way. All the other injured horses have been discovered out in the fields. In some cases that’s where he found them, but other times he’s led them out of the stables into the fields. Maybe it’s just a security thing. Stables tend to be near houses. Out in the fields the injured creature’s cries wouldn’t be heard; they wouldn’t disturb the other horses.”
“So how can we find out if that has happened?”
