Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,17

want you to come and talk to him.’

My talking to Cranfield seemed likely to be as therapeutic as applying itching powder to a baby. However she hadn’t left me much room for kidding myself that fruitlessness was a good reason for not trying.

‘When?’

‘Now… Unless you have anything else to do.’

‘No,’ I said carefully. ‘I haven’t.’

She made a face and an odd little gesture with her hands. ‘Will you come now, then… please?’

She herself seemed surprised about the real supplication in that ‘please’. I imagined that she had come expecting to instruct, not to ask.

‘All right.’

‘Great.’ She was suddenly very cool, very employer’s daughter again. She put her coffee mug on the draining board and started towards the door. ‘You had better follow me, in your car. It’s no good me taking you, you’ll need your own car to come back in.’

‘That is so,’ I agreed.

She looked at me suspiciously, but decided not to pursue it. ‘My coat is in your bedroom.’

‘I’ll fetch it for you.’

‘Thank you.’

I walked across the sitting-room and into the bedroom. Her coat was lying on my bed in a heap. Black and white fur, in stripes going round. I picked it up and turned, and found she had followed me.

‘Thank you so much.’ She presented her back to me and put her arms in the coat-putting-on position. On went the coat. She swivelled slowly, buttoning up the front with shiny black saucers. ‘This flat really is fantastic. Who is your decorator?’

‘Chap called Kelly Hughes.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I know the professional touch when I see it.’

‘Thank you.’

She raised the chin. ‘Oh well, if you won’t say…’

‘I would say. I did say. I did the flat myself. I’ve been whitewashing pigsties since I was six.’

She wasn’t quite sure whether to be amused or offended, and evaded it by changing the subject.

‘That picture… that’s your wife, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘I remember her,’ she said. ‘She was always so sweet to me. She seemed to know what I was feeling. I was really awfully sorry when she was killed.’

I looked at her in surprise. The people Rosalind had been sweetest to had invariably been unhappy. She had had a knack of sensing it, and of giving succour without being asked. I would not have thought of Roberta Cranfield as being unhappy, though I supposed from twelve to fifteen, when she had known Rosalind, she could have had her troubles.

‘She wasn’t bad, as wives go,’ I said flippantly, and Miss Cranfield disapproved of that, too.

We left the flat and this time I locked the door, though such horses as I’d had had already bolted. Roberta had parked her Sunbeam Alpine behind the stables and across the doors of the garage where I kept my Lotus. She backed and turned her car with aggressive poise, and I left a leisurely interval before I followed her through the gates, to avoid a competition all the eighteen miles to her home.

Cranfield lived in an early Victorian house in a hamlet four miles out of Lambourn. A country gentleman’s residence, estate agents would have called it: built before the Industrial Revolution had invaded Berkshire and equally impervious to the social revolution a hundred years later. Elegant, charming, timeless, it was a house I liked very much. Pity about the occupants.

I drove up the back drive as usual and parked alongside the stable yard. A horsebox was standing there with its ramp down, and one of the lads was leading a horse into it. Archie, the head lad, who had been helping, came across as soon as I climbed out of the car.

‘This is a God awful bloody business,’ he said. ‘It’s wicked, that’s what it is. Downright bloody wicked.’

‘The horses are going?’

‘Some owners have sent boxes already. All of them will be gone by the day after tomorrow.’ His weather-beaten face was a mixture of fury, frustration, and anxiety. ‘All the lads have got the sack. Even me. And the missus and I have just taken a mortgage on one of the new houses up the road. Chalet bungalow, just what she’d always set her heart on. Worked for years, she has, saving for it. Now she won’t stop crying. We moved in only a month ago, see? How do you think we’re going to keep up the payments? Took every pound we had, what with the deposit and the solicitors, and curtains and all. Nice little place, too, she’s got it looking real nice. And it isn’t as if the Guvnor really fiddled the