I laid aside the current box as it was still almost empty and worked through from January to December of the previous year, which had been a good one for Tremayne, embracing not only his Grand National win with Top Spin Lob but many other successes important enough to get the racing hacks excited. Tremayne’s face smiled steadily from clipping after clipping including, inappropriately, those dealing with the death of the girl, Olympia.
Drawn irresistibly, I read a whole batch of accounts of that death from a good many different papers, the number of them suggesting that someone had gone out and bought an armful of everything available. In total, they told me not much more than I already knew, except that Olympia was twice described as a ‘jockette’, a word I somehow found repulsive. It appeared that she had ridden in several ladies’ races at point-to-point meetings which one paper, to help the ignorant, described as ‘the days the hunting classes stop chasing the fox and chase each other instead’. Olympia the jockette had been twenty-three, had come from a ‘secure suburban background and had worked as an instructor in a riding-school in Surrey. Her parents, not surprisingly, were said to be ‘distraught’.
Dee-Dee came into the dining-room offering more coffee and saw what I was reading.
‘That Olympia was a sex-pot bimbo,’ she remarked flatly. ‘I was there at the party and you could practically smell it. Secure little suburban riding instructor, my foot.’
‘Really?’
‘Her father made her out to be a sweet innocent little saint. Perhaps he even believes it. Nolan never said any different because it wouldn’t have helped him, so no one told the truth.’
‘What was the truth?’
‘She had no underclothes on,’ Dee-Dee said calmly. ‘She wore only a long scarlet strapless dress slit halfway up her thigh. You ask Mackie. She knows, she tried to revive her.’
‘Er... quite a lot of women don’t wear underclothes,’ I said.
‘Is that a fact?’ She gave me an ironic look.
‘My blushing days are over.’
‘Well, do you or don’t you want any coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
She went out to the kitchen and I continued reading clippings, progressing from ‘no action on the death at Shellerton House’ to ‘Olympia’s father brings private prosecution’ and ‘Magistrates refer Nolan Everard case to Crown Court’. A
It was after a bunch of end-of-jumping-season statistics that I came across an oddity from a Reading paper published on a Friday in June.
‘Girl groom missing’, read the headline, and there was an accompanying photo of Tremayne, still looking cheerful.
Angela Brickell, 17, employed as a ‘lad’ by prominent racehorse trainer Tremayne Vickers, failed to turn up for work on Tuesday afternoon and hasn’t been seen in the stables since. Vickers says lads leave without notice all too often, but he is puzzled that she didn’t ask for pay due to her. Anyone knowing Angela Brickell’s whereabouts is asked to get in touch with the police.
Angela Brickell’s parents, like Olympia’s, were reported to be ‘distraught’.
By the following week, Angela Brickell’s disappearance had been taken up by the national dailies who all mentioned the death of Olympia at Shellerton two months earlier but drew no significant conclusions.
Angela, I learned, lived in a stable hostel with five other girls who described her as ‘moody’. An indistinct photograph of her showed the face of a child, not a young woman, and pleas to ‘Find This Girl’ could realistically never have been successful if they depended on recognising her from her likeness in newsprint.
There was no account, in fact, of her having been found, and after a week or so the clippings about her stopped.
There were no cuttings at all for July, when it seemed the jump racing fraternity took a holiday, but they began again with various accounts of the opening of the new season in Devon in August. ‘Vickers’ Victories Continue!’
Nolan had ridden a winner on one of Fiona’s horses: ‘the well-known amateur now out on bail facing charges of assault resulting in death...’
In early September Nolan had hit the news again, this time in giving evidence at a Jockey Club enquiry in defence of Tremayne, who stood accused of doping one of his horses.
With popping eyes, since Tremayne to me even on such short acquaintance seemed the last person to put his whole way of life in jeopardy for so trivial a reason, I read that one of his horses had tested positive to traces of the stimulants theobromine and caffeine, prohibited substances.
