and incredibly ignoring that it was the self-same trusted jockey who for almost all of his career rode the brilliant trainer’s horses. I’d seen a cartoon once that summed it up neatly:‘Entrenched belief is never altered by the farts.’
I wished I hadn’t lashed out at Ferdinand. My idea of detection from the inside wasn’t going to be a riotous success if I let my own feelings get in the way so easily. I might think the family unjust, they might think me conniving: OK, I told myself, accept all that and forget it. I’d had to put up with their various resentments for much of my life and it was high time I developed immunity.
Easier said than done, of course.
Superintendent Yale had had enough of the reporters. The family had by this time divided into two larger clumps, Vivien’s and Alicia’s, with Joyce and I hovering between them, belonging to neither. The superintendent went from group to group asking that everyone should adjourn to the police station. ‘As you are all here,’ he was saying, ‘we may as well take your statements straight away, to save you being bothered later.’
‘Statements?’ Gervase said, eyebrows rising.
‘Your movements yesterday and last night, sir.’
‘Good God,’ Gervase said. ‘You don’t think any of us would have done this, do you?’
‘That’s what we have to find out.’
‘It’s preposterous.’
None of the others said anything, not even Joyce.
The superintendent conferred with a uniformed colleague who was busy stationing his men round the house so that the ever-increasing spectators shouldn’t get too close. The word must have spread, Ithought. The free peepshow was attracting the next villages, if not Twyford itself.
Much of the family, including Malcolm, Joyce and myself, packed into the three police cars standing in the front drive, and Gervase, Ferdinand and Serena set off on foot to go back to the transport they had come in.
‘I wouldn’t put it past Alicia,’ Joyce said darkly to the superintendent as we drove past them towards the gate, ‘to have incited that brood of hers to blow up Quantum.’
‘Do you have any grounds for that statement, Mrs Pembroke?’
‘Statement? It’s an opinion. She’s a bitch.’
In the front passenger seat, Yale’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
The road outside was still congested with cars, with still more people coming on foot. Yale’s driver stopped beside Joyce’s car, which she’d left in the centre of the road in her haste, and helped to clear room for her to turn in. With her following, we came next to the hired car Malcolm and I had arrived in, but as it was hopelessly shut in on three sides by other locked vehicles, we left it there and went on in the police car.
In his large modern police station with its bullet-proofed glass enquiry desk, the superintendent ushered us through riot-proofed doors to his office and detailed a policewoman to take Joyce off for some tea. Joyce went protesringly, and Yale with another sigh sat us down in his bare-looking Scandinavian-type place of business.
He looked at us broodingly from behind a large desk. He looked at his nails. He cleared his throat. Finally he said to Malcolm, ‘AH right. You don’t have to say it. I do not believe you would blow up your house just to make me believe that someone is trying to kill you.’
There was a long pause.
‘That being so,’ he said, as we both sat without speaking, ‘we must take the attack in the garage more seriously.’
He was having a hard time, I thought. He ran a finger and thumb down his large black moustache and waited for comments from us that still didn’t come.
He cleared his throat again. ‘We will redouble our efforts to find Mrs Moira Pembroke’s killer.’
Malcolm finally stirred, brought out his cigar case, put a cigar in his mouth and patted his pockets to find matches. There was a plastic notice on Yale’s desk saying NO SMOKING. Malcolm, his glance restingon it momentarily, lit the match and sucked the flame into the tobacco.
Yale decided on no protest and produced a glass ashtray from a lower drawer in his desk.
‘I would be dead twice over,’ Malcolm said, ‘if it weren’t for Ian.’
He told Yale about the car roaring straight at us at Newmarket.
‘Why didn’t you report this, sir?’ Yale said, frowning.
‘Why do you think?’
Yale groomed his moustache and didn’t answer.
Malcolm nodded. ‘I was tired of being disbelieved.’
‘And… er… last night?’ Yale asked.
Malcolm told him about our day at Cheltenham, and about Quantum’s inner doors. ‘I wanted to