But she was gone from there. My voice fled away into darkness, and there was no answer.
May
On and off for the next two weeks I worked on Oliver’s financial chaos at my desk in the bank, and at a special board meeting argued the case for giving him time before we foreclosed and made him sell all he had.
I asked for three months, which was considered scandalously out of the question, but got him two, Gordon chuckling over it quietly as we went down together afterwards in the lift.
‘I suppose two months was what you wanted?’ he said.
‘Er... yes.’
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘They were talking of twenty-one days maximum before the meeting, and some wanted to bring in liquidators at once.’
I telephoned Oliver and told him. ‘For two months you don’t have to pay any interest or capital repayments, but this is only temporary, and it is a special, fairly unusual concession. I’m afraid, though, that if we can’t find a solution to Sand-castle’-S problem or come up with a cast-iron reason for the insurance company to pay out, the prognosis is not good.’
‘I understand,’ he said, his voice sounding calm. ‘I haven’t much hope, but thank you, all the same, for the respite — I will at least be able to finish the program for the other stallions, and keep all the foals here until they’re old enough to travel safely.’
‘Have you heard anything about Sandcastle?’
‘He’s been at the Research Establishment for a week, but so far they can’t find anything wrong with him. They don’t hold out much hope, I’d better tell you, of being able to prove anything one way or another about his sperm, even though they’re sending specimens to another laboratory, they say.’
‘They’ll do their best.’
‘Yes, I know. But... I walk around here as if this place no longer belongs to me. As if it isn’t mine. I know, inside, that I’m losing it. Don’t feel too badly, Tim. When it comes, I’ll be prepared.’
I put the receiver down not knowing whether such resignation was good because he would face whatever came without disintegration, or bad because he might be surrendering too soon. A great host of other troubles still lay ahead, mostly in the shape of breeders demanding the return of their stallion fees, and he needed energy to say that in most cases he couldn’t return them. The money had already been lodged with us, and the whole situation would have to be sorted out by lawyers.
The news of Sandcastle’s disgrace was so far only a doubtful murmur here and there, but when it all broke open with a screech it was, I suppose predictably, in What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t.
The bank’s six copies were read to rags before lunch on the day Alec fetched them, eyes lifting from the page with anything from fury to a wry smile.
Three short paragraphs headed ‘House on Sand’, said:
Build not your house on sand. Stake not your banking house on a Sandcastle.
The five million pounds advanced by a certain prestigious merchant bank for the purchase of the stallion Sandcastle now look like being washed away by the tide. Sadly, the investment has produced faulty stock, or in plain language, several deformed foals.
Speculation now abounds as to what the bank can do to minimize its losses, since Sandcastle himself must be considered as half a ton of highly priced dog-meat.
‘That’s done it,’ Gordon said, and I nodded: and the dailies, who always read What’s Going On as a prime news source, came up in the racing columns the next day with a more cautious approach, asking ‘Sandcastle’s Progeny Flawed?’ and saying things like ‘rumours have reached us’ and ‘we are reliably informed.’
Since our own home-grown leaker for once hadn’t mentioned the bank by name, none of the dailies did either, and for them of course the bank itself was unimportant compared with the implications of the news.
Oliver, in the next weekday issues, was reported as having been asked how many, precisely, of Sandcastle’s foals were deformed, and as having answered that he didn’t know. He had heard of some, certainly, yes. He had no further comment.
A day later still the papers began printing reports telephoned into them by the stud farms where Sandcastle’s scattered progeny had been foaled, and the tally of disasters mounted. Oliver was reported this time as having said the horse was at the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket, and everything possible was being done.
‘It’s a mess,’ Henry said gloomily at lunch, and even the dissenting director had run out of insults, beyond saying four times that we were the laughing-stock of the City and it was all my fault.
‘Have they found out who killed Knowles’ daughter?’ Val Fisher asked.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘He says the police no longer come to the house.’
Val looked regretful. ‘Such a sadness for him, on top of the other.’
There were murmurs of sympathy and I didn’t think I’d spoil it by telling them what the police thought of Oliver’s lads.
That man Wyfold,’ Oliver had said on the telephone during one of our almost daily conversations, ‘he more or less said I was asking for trouble, having a young girl on the place with all those lads. What’s more, it seems many of them were half-way drunk that night, and with three pubs in the village they weren’t even all together and have no idea of who was where at what time, so one of Wyfold’s theories is that one of them jumped her and Dave and Sammy interrupted him. Alternatively Nigel did it. Alternatively some stranger walking down the road did it. Wyfold’s manner is downright abrasive but I’m past caring. He despises my discipline. He says I shouldn’t let my lads get drunk — as if anyone could stop them. They’re free men. It’s their business, not mine, what they do with their money and time on Sunday nights. I can only take action if they don’t turn up on Monday morning. And as for Nigel being paralytic!’ Words momentarily failed him. ‘How can Nigel possibly expect the lads to stay more or less sober if he gets like that? And he says he can’t remember anything that happened the night Ginnie died. Nothing at all. Total alcoholic black-out. He’s been very subdued since.’
The directors, I felt, would not be any more impressed than the Detective Chief Inspector with the general level of insobriety, and I wondered whether Nigel’s slackness with the lads in general had always stemmed from a knowledge of his own occasional weakness.
The police had found no weapon, Oliver said on another day. Wyfold had told him that there was no way of knowing what had been used to cause the depressed fracture at the base of her brain. Her hair over the fracture bore no traces of anything unexpected. The forensic surgeon was of the opinion that there had been a single very heavy blow. She would have been knocked unconscious instantly. She wouldn’t even have known. The period of apparent semi-consciousness had been illusory: parts of her brain would have functioned but she would not have been aware of anything at all.
‘I suppose it’s a mercy,’ Oliver said. ‘With some girls you hear of... how do their parents bear it?’
His wife, he said, had gone back to Canada. Ginnie’s death seemed not to have brought mother and father together, but to have made the separation complete.
‘The dog shampoo?’ Oliver repeated, when I asked. ‘Wyfold says that’s just what it was, they checked it. He asked Nigel and all the lads if it was theirs, if they’d used it for washing Squibs, but none of them had. He seems to think Ginnie may have seen it lying in the road and picked it up, or that she got into conversation over the gate with a man who gave her the shampoo for Squibs as a come-on and then killed her afterwards.’