‘The nurse at the hospital said it was tucked into the waistband of her skirt.’
A smile flickered. ‘She always did that when she was little. Plimsols, books, bits of string, anything. To keep her hands free, she said. They all used to slip down into her little knickers, and there would be a whole shower of things sometimes when we undressed her.’ His face went hopelessly bleak at this memory, I can’t believe it, you know,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll walk through the door.’ He paused. ‘My wife is flying over. She says she’ll be here tomorrow morning.’ His voice gave no indication as to whether that was good news or bad. ‘Stay tonight, will you?’
‘If you want.’
‘Yes.’
Chief Inspector Wyfold turned up again at that point and we gave him the shampoo bottle, Oliver explaining about Ginnie’s habit of carrying things in her clothes.
‘Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?’ he asked me.
‘I forgot I had it. It seemed so paltry at the time, compared with Ginnie dying.’
The Chief Inspector picked up the bottle by its serrated cap and read what one could see of the label, and to Oliver he said, ‘Do you have a dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would this be what you usually use, to wash him?’
‘I really don’t know. I don’t wash him myself. One of the lads does.’
‘The lads being the grooms?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Which lad washed your dog?’ Wyfold asked.
‘Um... any. Whoever I ask.’
The Chief Inspector produced a thin white folded paper bag from one of his pockets and put the bottle inside it. ‘Who to your knowledge has handled this, besides yourselves?’ he asked.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘the nurse at the hospital... and Ginnie.’
‘And it spent from last night until now in your pocket?’ He shrugged. ‘Hopeless for prints, I should think, but we’ll try.’ He fastened the bag shut and wrote on a section of it with a ball pen. To Oliver, almost as an aside, he said, i came to ask you about your daughter’s relationship with men.’
Oliver said wearily, ‘She didn’t have any. She’s only just left school.’
Wyfold made small negative movements with head and hands as if amazed at the naiveté of fathers. ‘No sexual relationship to your knowledge?’
Oliver was too exhausted for anger. ‘No,’ he said.
‘And you sir?’ he turned to me. ‘What were your relations with Virginia Knowles?’
‘Friendship.’
‘Including sexual intercourse?’
‘No.’
Wyfold looked at Oliver who said tiredly, ‘Tim is a business friend of mine. A financial adviser, staying here for the weekend, that’s all.’
The policeman frowned at me with disillusion as if he didn’t believe it. I gave him no amplified answer because I simply couldn’t be bothered, and what could I have said? That with much affection I’d watched a child grow into an attractive young woman and yet not wanted to sleep with her? His mind ran on carnal rails, all else discounted.
He went away in the end taking the shampoo with him, and Oliver with immense fortitude said he had better go out into the yards to catch the tail end of evening stables. ‘Those mares,’ he said. ‘Those foals... they still need the best of care.’
‘I wish I could help,’ I said, feeling useless.
‘You do.’
I went with him on his rounds, and when we reached the foaling yard, Nigel, resurrected, was there.
His stocky figure leaned against the doorpost of an open box as if without its support he would collapse, and the face he slowly turned towards us had aged ten years. The bushy eyebrows stood out starkly over charcoal shadowed eyes, puffiness in his skin swelling the eyelids and sagging in deep bags on his cheeks. He was also unshaven, unkempt and feeling ill.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Heard about Ginnie. Very sorry.’ I wasn’t sure whether he was sympathizing with Oliver or apologising for the drunkenness. ‘A big noise of a policeman came asking if I’d killed her. As if I would.’ He put a shaky hand on his head, almost as if physically to support it on his shoulders. ‘I feel rotten. My own fault. Deserve it. This mare’s likely to foal tonight. That shit of a policeman wanted to know if I was sleeping with Ginnie. Thought I’d tell you... I wasn’t.’
Wyfold, I reflected, would ask each of the lads individually the same question. A matter of time, perhaps, before he asked Oliver himself; though Oliver and I, he had had to concede, gave each other a rock-solid alibi.
We walked on towards the stallions and I asked Oliver if Nigel often got drunk, since Oliver hadn’t shown much surprise.
‘Very seldom,’ Oliver said. ‘He’s once or twice turned out in that state but we’ve never lost a foal because of it. I don’t like it, but he’s so good with the mares.’ He shrugged. ‘I overlook it,’
He gave carrots to all four stallions but scarcely glanced at Sandcastle, as if he could no longer bear the sight.
‘I’ll try the Research people tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Forgot about it, today.’
From the stallions he went, unusually, in the direction of the lower gate, past Nigel’s bungalow and the hostel, to stand for a while at the place where Ginnie had lain in the dark on the night before.
The asphalt driveway showed no mark. Oliver looked to where the closed gate sixty feet away led to the road and in a drained voice said, ‘Do you think she could have talked to someone out there?’
‘She might have, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’ He turned to go back. ‘It’s all so senseless. And unreal. Nothing feels real.’
Exhaustion of mind and body finally overtook him after dinner and he went grey-faced to bed, but I in the first quiet of the long day went out again for restoration: for a look at the stars, as Ginnie had said.
Thinking only of her I walked slowly along some of the paths between the paddocks, the way lit by a half-moon with small clouds drifting, and stopped eventually at the place where on the previous morning I’d held her tight in her racking distress. The birth of the deformed foal seemed so long ago, yet it was only yesterday: the morning of the last day of Ginnie’s life.
I thought about that day, about the despair in its dawn and the resolution of its afternoon. I thought of her tears and her courage, and of the waste of so much goodness. The engulfing, stupefying sense of loss which had hovered all day swamped into my brain until my body felt inadequate, as if it wanted to burst, as if it couldn’t hold in so much feeling.
When Ian Pargetter had been murdered I had been angry on his behalf and had supposed that the more one loved the dead person the greater one’s fury against the killer. But now I understood that anger could simply be crowded out by something altogether more overwhelming. As for Oliver, he had displayed shock, daze, desolation and disbelief in endless quantities all day, but of anger, barely a flicker.
It was too soon to care who had killed her. The fact of her death was too much. Anger was irrelevant, and no vengeance could give her life.
I had loved her more than I’d known, but not as I loved Judith, not with desire and pain and longing. I’d loved Ginnie as a friend; as a brother. I’d loved her, I thought, right back from the day when I’d returned her to school and listened to her fears. I’d loved her up on the hill, trying to catch Sand castle, and I’d loved her for her expertise and for her growing adult certainty that here, in these fields, was where her future lay.
I’d thought of her young life once as being a clear stretch of sand waiting for footprints, and now there would be none, now only a blank, chopping end to all she could have been and done, to all the bright love she had scattered around her.
‘Oh... Ginnie,’ I said aloud, calling to her hopelessly in tearing body-shaking grief. ‘Ginnie... little Ginnie... come back.’