Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,71

late for it to matter.

‘And I suppose,’ I said, ‘that you didn’t hear any other bangs in the distance … you didn’t hear the shot?’

‘No, I didn’t. My ears were ringing and Ranger was kicking up a racket.’

‘So what did you do next?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I thought it was some of those lads who work here. Proper little monkeys. So I just went on with the patrols, regular like. There wasn’t anything wrong … it didn’t look like it, that’s to say.’

I turned to Wykeham, who had been gloomily listening. ‘Didn’t you hear the fireworks?’ I asked.

‘No, I was asleep.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘I don’t sleep very well … I can’t seem to sleep at all these days without sleeping pills. We’d had four quiet nights and I’d been awake most of those, so … last night I took a pill.’

I sighed. If Wykeham had been awake, he would anyway have gone towards the commotion and nothing would have been different.

I said to the dog-handler, ‘You were here on Wednesday, when you had the prowler?’

‘Yes, I was. Ranger was whining but I couldn’t find anyone.’

Nanterre, I thought, had come to the stable on Wednesday night, intending to kill, and had been thwarted by the dog’s presence: and he’d come back two nights later with his diversions.

He must have been at Ascot, I supposed, and learned what Col looked like, but I hadn’t seen him, as I hadn’t seen him at Bradbury either: but among large crowds on racecourses, especially while I was busy, that wasn’t extraordinary.

I looked down at Ranger, wondering about his responses.

‘When people arrive here,’ I asked, ‘like I did a short while ago, how does Ranger behave?’

‘He gets up and goes to the door and whines a bit. He’s a quiet dog, mostly. Doesn’t bark. That’s why I knew it was the bombs he was barking at.’

‘Well, er, during your spells in the kitchen, what would you be doing?’

‘Making a cuppa. Eating. Relieving myself. Reading. Watching the telly.’ He smoothed his moustache, not liking me or my questions. ‘I don’t doze off, if that’s what you mean.’

It was what I meant, and obviously what he’d done, at some point or another. During four long quiet cold nights I supposed it was understandable, if not excusable.

‘Over the weekend,’ I said to Wykeham, ‘we’ll have double and treble patrols. Constant.’

He nodded. ‘Have to.’

‘Have you told the police yet?’

‘Not yet. Soon, though.’ He looked with disgust at the dog-handler. ‘They’ll want to hear what you’ve said.’

The dog-handler however stood up, announced it was an hour after he should have left and if the police wanted him they could reach him through his firm. He, he said, was going to bed.

Wykeham morosely watched him go and said, ‘What the hell is going on, Kit? The princess knows who killed them all, and so do you. So tell me.’

It wasn’t fair, I thought, for him not to know, so I told him the outline: a man was trying to extract a signature from Roland de Brescou by attacking his family wherever he could.

‘But that’s… terrorism.’ Wykeham used the word at arm’s length, as if its very existence affronted him.

‘In a small way,’ I said.

‘Small?’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you call three dead great horses small?’

I didn’t. It made me sick and angry to think of them. It was small on a world scale of terrorism, but rooted in the same wicked conviction that the path to attaining one’s end lay in slaughtering the innocent.

I stirred. ‘Show me where all the princess’s horses are,’ I suggested to Wykeham, and together we went out again into the cold air and made the rounds of the courtyards.

Cascade’s and Cotopaxi’s boxes were still empty, and no others of the princess’s horses had been in the first courtyard. In the second had been only Col. In the one beyond that, Hillsborough and Berina, with Kinley in the deep corner box there.

About a third of the stable’s inmates were out at exercise on the Downs, and while we were leaving Kinley’s yard, they came clattering back, filling the whole place with noise and movement, the lads dismounting and leading their horses into the boxes. Wykeham and I sorted our way round as the lads brushed down their charges, tidied the bedding, filled the buckets, brought hay to the racks, propped their saddles outside the boxes, bolted the doors and went off to their breakfasts.

I saw all the old friends in their quarters; among them North Face, Dhaulagiri, Icicle