Mum, and the whole thing lacked flavour. You’ve been cooking too much for Romy and Martin.’
Thank God no one needed to stay the night. But once again there was general irritation that the major players, Shade and Valent, hadn’t bothered to answer. So rude. Joey, however, had already told Etta that Valent and Bonny had moved on to the Seychelles.
‘Keeping his eye off the ball, like Mark Antony distracted by Cleopatra,’ mused Etta.
‘Whatever,’ agreed Joey. ‘Bonny ’ates cold weather even more than the country, so they won’t be down for a month or so.’
And it was cold. Etta’s hand had shaken so much that morning she hardly needed to turn on her electric toothbrush.
23
Once again, after midnight, leaving Carrie talking to America, Alan passed out and Trixie locked in her room, Etta, singing ‘Don’t give up now, little donkey,’ set out on the perilous journey down the icy white path to Little Hollow. Her spirits, as before, were lifted by the beauty of the snow. Ancient sycamore and oaks had become suddenly youthful with their twigs thickening and their bent backs wrapped in Arctic fox furs of snow. The weeping willows crouched like shaggy white English sheepdogs. Close up, their tiny buds were flattened against their stems to escape the vicious east wind. Even the towers of Etta’s mature conifer hedge soared like a diamanté cathedral in the moonlight, their branches rising and falling in benediction over her plants.
After the heat of rushing around in Carrie’s kitchen, Etta relished the bitter cold. At least it wasn’t thawing, so the beauty would still be there in the morning. Although her torch was fading, she decided, instead of going in, to take a little ramble in the woods. Suddenly she saw white leaves trembling ahead, and gasped and crossed herself in terror as she caught sight of a horse’s white face drenched in blood – the ghost of Beau Regard.
Forcing herself to move closer, she was horrified to find the ghost was real, a filly tightly roped to a high branch of a willow, with a huge open gash across one closed-up eye. Although desperately weak, she was clearly terrified, shrinking as far away as possible, nearly strangling herself in the process.
Her legs were suppurating and ripped to pieces, her donkeygrey body a mass of cuts and bruises, and as though a musket ball had been gouged out, blood seeped from her neck.
She was also skeletally thin, and from the scraped-away snow and scattered earth Etta could see that someone had been trying to bury her alive but had left in a hurry. In her one open dark eye was total panic and dreadful pain.
What monster, thought Etta in outrage, could have dragged her deep into the wood and abandoned her to her fate on the coldest night of the year?
‘Oh, you poor angel,’ she moaned, tearing off her coat and wrapping it round the filly’s collapsing, shuddering body.
She then tried to untie the rope but in her struggle the filly had pulled the knot too tight. Her body went rigid, trembling at any contact.
Nor could Etta get a signal on her mobile.
‘I’ll be back in a minute, darling, please don’t die.’ Sobbing with rage, Etta stumbled back to Little Hollow, rang Woody and Jase and left a message on Joey’s mobile, telling them where the filly was. Then, snatching a couple of blankets and a knife, Etta rushed back and cut her free. Although she was still trembling frantically and desperate to escape, the filly, too weak to move, collapsed in the snow.
Woody and Jase were there in twenty minutes, held up by the difficulty of getting a trailer into the wood, the wheels slipping and whirring up the snow. At the sound of voices, the filly made another desperate attempt to get up, to hide anywhere, but again she slumped, shuddering helplessly.
Woody and Jase were appalled.
‘Bastards, bastards,’ hissed Jase, who dealt with horses every day but had never seen anything so dreadful.
She was so thin, the whole of her pelvic frame could be seen as well as her spine and ribcage.
‘Only answer is to shoot her.’
‘Oh please no, try and save her,’ pleaded Etta.
Jase pointed towards her neck. ‘Some druggie seems to have attacked her with a chisel,’ then, pointing to her feet, ‘She’s not wearing plates.’
‘We must find somewhere to put her,’ begged Etta.
‘Never get her back through the wood,’ mused Woody, ‘better take her to Valent’s. He’s away another month. There’s a gate up there into Badger’s Court.