Sam scowled but spoke no evil. Tremayne told him what he would be riding on the morrow at Towcester and said he’d have no runners at all on Friday.
‘Saturday, I’m sending five or six to Chepstow. You’ll go there. So will I. With luck, Nolan rides Fiona’s horse in the Wilfred Johnstone Hunter Chase at Sandown. Maybe Mackie will go to Sandown; we’ll have to see.’
Dee-Dee came in composedly for her coffee and as before sat next to Sam. Sam might be a constant seducer, I thought, looking at them, but he wouldn’t want to leave a trail of paternity problems. Dee-Dee might get him into bed but not into fatherhood. Bad luck, try again.
Tremayne gave Dee-Dee instructions about engaging transport for Saturday, which she memorized as usual.
‘Remember to phone through the entries for Folkestone and Wolverhampton. I’ll decide on the Newbury entries this morning before I go to Windsor.’
Dee-Dee nodded.
‘Pack the colours for Windsor.’
Dee-Dee nodded.
‘Phone the saddler about collecting those exercise sheets for repair.’
Dee-Dee nodded.
‘Right then. That’s about it.’ He turned to me. ‘We’ll leave for Windsor at twelve-thirty.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
He went up to the Downs to watch the second lot, driving the newly acquired Land Rover. Sam Yaeger took the pick-up round to Perkin’s half of the house and loaded up his teak. Dee-Dee took her coffee into the office and I made a determined attempt to sort each year’s clippings into order of significance, the most newsworthy on top.
At about that time, Detective Chief Inspector Doone went into the formerly unused office that had been dubbed ‘Incident Room’ for the bones investigation and laid out on a trestle table the bits and pieces that his men had gleaned from the woodland.
There were the clothes found originally, now drying out in the centrally-heated air. There was also a pair of well-worn and misshapen trainers, still sodden, which might once have been white.
Apart from those, there were four old, empty and dirty soft drink cans, a heavily rusted toy fire-engine, a pair of broken sunglasses, a puckered leather belt with split stitches, a gin bottle, a blue plastic comb uncorrupted by time, a well-chewed rubber ball, a gold-plated ball-point pen, a pink lipstick, chocolate bar wrappers, a pitted garden spade and a broken dog collar.
Detective Chief Inspector Doone walked broodingly round the table staring at the haul from all angles.
‘Speak to me, girl,’ he said. ‘Tell me who you are.’
The clothes and the shoes made no answer.
He called in his men and told them to go back to the woods and widen the search, and he himself, as he had the day before, went through the lists of missing persons, trying to make a match.
He knew it was possible the young woman had been a far stranger to the area but thought it more likely that she was within fifty miles of her home. They usually were, these victims. He decided automatically to beam in on the locally lost.
He had a list of twelve persistent adolescent runaways: all possibles. A list of four defaulters from youth custody. A short list of two missing prostitutes. A list of six missing for ‘various reasons’.
One of those was Angela Brickell. The reason given was: ‘Probably doped a racehorse in her charge. Skipped out.’
Doone’s attention passed over her and fastened thoughtfully on the wayward daughter of a politician. Reason for being missing: ‘Mixed with bad crowd. Unmanageable.’
It might do his stalled career a bit of good, Doone reckoned, if it turned out to be
Tremayne told me that the only place that he couldn’t take me on Windsor racecourse was into the Holy of Holies, the weighing room. Everywhere else, he said, I should stay by his side. He wouldn’t forever be looking back to make sure I was with him: I was to provide my own glue.
Accordingly I followed him doggedly, at times at a run. Where he paused briefly to talk to other people he introduced me as a friend, John Kendall, not as Boswell. He left me to sort out for myself the information bombarding me from all sides, rarely offering explanations, and I could see that explanations would have been a burden for him when he was so busy. His four runners, as it happened, were in four consecutive races. He took me for a quick sandwich and a drink soon after our arrival on the racecourse and from then on began a darting progress: into the weighing room to fetch his jockey’s saddle and weight cloth containing the correct amount of lead; off at a trot to the saddling boxes to do up the girths himself and straighten the tack to send the horse out looking good; into the parade ring to join the owners and give last-minute orders to the jockey; off up to the stands to watch the horse run; down again to the unsaddling areas, hoping to greet a winner, otherwise to listen to the why-not story from the jockey, and then off to the weighing room to pick up another saddle and weight cloth to start all over again.
