I left her to it and went back to the driveway: horses can get nervous with strangers around and hold off until they’ve gone. Half an hour later she went down, and I saw her continually looking back at her rear end and heaving. I went along behind the hedge of the adjoining field and had a closer look. The foal was on its way. Two tiny hooves had emerged, and I saw the membrane covering its snout being sucked in and out over its nostrils as it fought for air. Then its little head came forward, and the mare got to her feet. On average, foaling from this point usually lasts about fifteen minutes, with the mare getting up and down, until the widest part – the shoulders – emerge, then the rest comes much more easily.
When the mare was down, and with junior halfway out, I climbed through the fence and clipped a lunge lead to her halter. We were in business. All I had to do was arrange for the foal to fall into a six-foot-deep drainage ditch. A drainage ditch, for you city folk, is a trench that runs round the edge of a field. In winter when the ground is constantly wet, the rain drains into it through perforated pipes just below the topsoil. Drier land means better grass and fewer rushes. As far as my use of it was concerned, well it’s like this: because I’d studied this for so long, and because the law had first to see this not as a deliberate killing – make that killings – I’d been teaching myself all about life down on the farm.
And if you’re gonna arrange deaths that don’t have foul play stamped on them, use what the person does on a daily basis. That’s the conclusion I’d come to. In this case, farming books will tell you how to avoid fatalities. By reversing the process, they tell you how to bring them about.
This, for instance, was based on a farmer whose mare was due to foal. He went down in the middle of the night to see how she was getting on and found her flat out with her rear end hanging over a ditch, foaling. Being a dumb animal, she wasn’t able to tell what she was doing. The foal literally passed out of her and went ‘bonk’ into the ditch. The farmer went in to rescue it, and dumbo, all worried because she couldn’t see her baby, in a rush to get to her feet, back-kicked him, tried to go in and save junior and squashed her owner to death. It didn’t say whether Chilly Winters took her hoofprints and got her twenty years. Tragic, I know. But that’s the way it goes.
And Picasso was rapping Edna’s door. As per the instructions I’d emailed his laptop. He knew where to go and what to do. No detail was overlooked. I’d even included a few suggestions on how to get her to cooperate, plus info about her and their vet. The dialogue was his own. I was standing behind a hedge at the front of the cottage in my capacity as official observer.
She was in front of the TV with a fag in her mouth and her rollers in. She opened the window.
‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘So sorry to bother you. Might your name be Edna Donavan?’
‘It is, yes.’
‘Well, in that case, Amy sent me for you.’
‘Amy?’
‘Amy is the name I was given. I was fishing the river then making my way across the field when a lady of that name, tending a mare, called me, and here I am. I’ll be more than pleased to take you to her. I have to go back for my rod in any event.’
‘This is all very strange.’
‘Apropos?’
‘Eh?’
Yeah, it was definitely his own dialogue. I don’t remember including any apropos.
‘What’s she doing with the mare this time o’ night and her away to the dance?’
‘There’s a man called Cormac with her. He appears to have hurt his leg. Amy mentioned that you had nursing experience and may be of assistance.’
Homework. It’s the only way to get away with anything. Edna used to work in the General.
‘I’ll get my coat,’ she said. She also put on her wellingtons and Picasso shone a torch and led the way. I traipsed along behind a hedge for scene three.
The mare was still peering into the ditch and snorting when they reached her, and Edna took it by its halter and went to soothe it. ‘There, girl, there,’ she said, trying to calm her, and at the same reminding Picasso what he’d said about Amy and Cormac. ‘Where are they?’
‘In there, madam.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
I couldn’t see the bottom of the ditch, but when he pushed her she had to have landed straight on top of the foal. And she must’ve been eighteen stone. No newborn could’ve survived that, lungs or no lungs.
The mare started getting into an even bigger state over her foal and Picasso tried to lead her away. But she wouldn’t follow. She kept straining at the neck into the ditch.
So he clipped away under her girth with the crop to get her going and led her down into the ditch, jumping back up onto the grass as he trotted her along it towards where Edna was lying.
But the mare stopped. I heard Edna wailing, ‘Oh my God. In the name of God,’ and generally making it known that she wasn’t too keen on Picasso’s equestrian activities. He had to shut her up. They were behind a hedge and couldn’t be seen from the road, but with the mare
