The Horses of Follyfoot Read online

  ‘Ha, ha. Time’s up.’

  Bruce sighed and settled down again in the dingy room, with its long tables covered in papers and reference books, its overflowing waste-paper baskets, its grime and mess, its rusty kettle and cracked cups, which to him held the glamour of the Press.

  He sat at the night desk and drank his tea and read a book called, ‘How to Make it to the Top in Newspapers.’

  The telephone rang. Perhaps this was it.

  This was it.

  ‘Listen.’ The voice was urgent, conspiring. ‘Listen, I gotta red-hot story for you.’ The accent was a little strange. It sounded at first like a disguised voice, hoarse and unfamiliar, but the story sounded genuine, and tremendous.

  ‘There’s going to be this epidemic, take a note of this. The public has got to be warned. Imported from America … one horse dying, hundreds threatened … the lives of thousands of ’uman beens at risk.’

  ‘Human what?’

  ‘Beens. People.’

  ‘Who’s this speaking?’ Bruce asked for the third time.

  ‘Doctor, er – Doctor Dillon.’

  ‘A medical doctor?’

  ‘Veterinary. Fully-qualified veterinary doctor.’

  ‘And where is this horse?’ Bruce’s pencil was racing over the notepad.

  ‘I can’t tell you where. We don’t want a riot. I can tell you it’s a place with a lot of horses, that’s all.’

  When Bruce was at school, which wasn’t that long ago, he had gone on a field trip with the natural history class to see this place with all these old horses and some old Colonel or other who had been scared of the kids and hidden indoors. It was a ramshackle, rustic, manurey place by Bruce’s neat citified standards. Just the sort of place to harbour a fell disease.

  ‘Is it Follyfoot Farm?’

  ‘Might be. Might not. Can’t tell you.’

  ‘Doctor Dillon.’ Bruce’s mind was working like speeding machinery on how he would handle this scoop. ‘We’d like an interview.’

  ‘With me?’

  ‘If you agree. I’m off duty at six. Could you meet me at the stables at seven – at Follyfoot?’

  ‘Right on.’

  So it was Follyfoot. Bruce Ingersoll, ace investigator. He poured himself another cup of tea, tipped in a shot of the assistant editor’s rum from the bottle behind the encyclopaedias, sat down again and pulled the telephone towards him with a happy sigh.

  ‘Night Editor.’ Same voice. A bit more tired. He had probably handled sixteen dramas from all over the world since Bruce last talked to him.

  ‘This is the Chronicle again.’

  ‘What now?’ The voice was bored as well as tired.

  ‘I’ve really got something for you now. Something really big. A life and death thing, it could be.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Well – up in the hills above this town …’

  The phone call over, Bruce sat back in the broken swivel chair, breathed out and patted his stomach as if he were already a press magnate of international repute. The dingy Chronicle room with its filthy windows, scarred furniture and ravaged reporters’ table was a huge modern office of stainless steel and glass. The gas popped under the rusty kettle. The old wood floor creaked. The plumbing knocked and groaned like corpses clamouring. But Bruce’s head, as he sat back with a spreading smile, was filled with the roar of the presses, the clacking of typewriters, the ticking of tape bulletins, the sirens of motorbikes screaming in with stop-press news from all the trouble centres of the world.

  Chapter 21

  VERY EARLY IN the morning the pounding began on the door. The Colonel started awake and looked at his luminous watch. Five o’clock. He swung his feet to the floor and searched in vain for slippers. Beside him, Anna drew the sheet up to her chin.

  ‘Don’t go down,’ she murmured, still half-asleep.

  This old house would be easy to break into. She had always said that if thieves came, she would let them get on with it, since there was nothing worth stealing, except the Colonel’s collection of horse photographs, and what thief would bother with them?

  ‘Thieves don’t knock,’ the Colonel said.

  The knocking was on the front door. Anyone who knew the ways of the house would come to the back door, or the side door into his study.

  He went down, slid the bolt and opened the door to a small gathering of about half a dozen people waiting in the grey of dawn.

  ‘Is this Follyfoot Farm?’ The young man with crisp hair was carrying what looked like a tape recorder.

  ‘It is, but—’

  ‘This is where all the horses are, right? Sorry to wake you so early, sir, but this could be a big story and we want to get it into the late editions.’

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Where’s the horse?’ another man asked.

  ‘Horse? There’s dozens of them.’ The Colonel felt rather cross. These people, who had presumably driven here from somewhere, were wide awake. He was still officially in the middle of his sleep.

  ‘The one that’s sick.’

  ‘None of them is sick, as far as I know. There’s one with a leg wound that was kept in last night.’

  ‘The one that threw the girl?’

  ‘Well, she was knocked off by a tree, if you call that thrown. How do you know about this horse?’ He began to wake up.

  ‘News story came through from a vet, it’s understood.’ The crisp young man with the tape recorder took a step nearer to getting into the house. ‘Outbreak of encephalitis … the whole country threatened … dangerous to humans …’

  ‘What on earth—?’ For one desperate moment, the Colonel thought he was still asleep. He blinked hard, opened his eyes and accepted the fact that he was not. ‘Come with me.’

  He took them through the house and out by the back door to the stable yard towards Rebel’s loose box.

  The black horse was down, lying on his side, one foreleg bandaged, moving feebly in a kind of clawing motion. In the far corner of the box, somebody was curled up in the straw, asleep.

  ‘Dora!’

  She woke in a moment, jumped up and stood against the wall as the Colonel came in and the reporters crowded into the doorway. One of them took a flash picture. Dora flung her hand in front of her face.

  The Colonel stood between Dora and the intruders.

  ‘Did you telephone these people?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Who then? Was it Steve?’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  ‘Know what? Who does know it, whatever it is?’

  ‘Well—’ She bit her lip.

  ‘Dora, don’t be stupid. Who’s responsible for this? Is it one of Ron’s ridiculous games?’

  ‘It isn’t a game,’ Dora was looking down. ‘Rebel is very ill. I saw – I talked to the vet in America about equine encephalitis. I saw some pictures. I think he’s got it.’

  ‘Encephalitis?’ The Colonel said. ‘I’ve never heard of it over here.’

  ‘But if Robin could have carried the virus—’

  ‘He’d be ill too. But he had his shots before he came.’

  ‘Suppose he was ill before the shots?’ Dora groped desperately for something to say. She could not tell him the truth yet.

  ‘No, it’s not possible …’ The Colonel dropped down and put his hand on Rebel’s head. ‘Poor fellow. Take it easy, old man.’ The horse’s eyes looked dull and lifeless. ‘Robin was a bit sick when he first got here, wasn’t he?’

  He thought for a moment, then got to his feet, took Dora out of the loosebox, and shut the top and bottom doors.

  ‘Excuse me.’ He worked his way through the newspaper reporters.

  ‘Just a minute, sir.’

  ‘Excuse me I have to call the vet.’

  Woken by the noise in the yard, Steve came out of the tack room with his hair on end and found himself instantly the target of questions and speculations.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ve no idea what you’
re talking about.’

  ‘The encephalitis epidemic.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You work here, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know anything about it, I told you.’

  ‘This Doctor Dillon says—’

  ‘Never heard of him.’ Steve set his jaw.

  From the window of his cottage across the road, Slugger had seen the cars at the entrance to the farm. He ambled over, muttering to himself.

  He too was pounced on. ‘You work here?’

  ‘I hope so. Unless I’ve been sacked overnight.’

  ‘What do you think of all this excitement?’

  ‘What excitement? We’ve had no excitement here since the badger got into the chicken run.’

  He and Steve started to do their morning work. The reporters followed them round, taking pictures. Dora came up from the fields riding Robin bareback in a halter, and they took her picture too.

  ‘The vet’s on his way.’ The Colonel came out of the house with Callie. ‘It wasn’t him who called the newspaper.’

  He got Dora into an empty loosebox.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to her tensely. ‘It could be worse than we think. I’ve just checked Robin’s papers again. He wasn’t immunised.’

  ‘But it’s stamped, right on the papers.’

  ‘Not for Robin. For King Kong. And they’re not the same horse. It’s described as two white feet, white star and snip. Robin hasn’t got a white snip on his nose. You know what those swindling Yanks have done?’

  He was very angry. Dora wanted to shout, ‘Don’t tell me, I know!’ But she had to keep silent.

  ‘They sent him over with another horse’s papers. So he may not be immunised. This crazy story could be true.’

  He looked at Dora fiercely. She looked into his blue outdoor eyes, but did not read suspicion there. So she kept silent.

  When the vet arrived, the Colonel took him to Rebel’s stable, and would not let the reporters talk to him, until he had examined Rebel and Robin.

  ‘What do you think?’ the reporters asked him. ‘You want to make a statement about the danger?’

  ‘I’m prepared to say…’ The vet had been a country vet for many years. He had developed a way of moving and talking slowly with sick animals. A way which pleased the sick animals, but could be irritating to impatient healthy humans. ‘What I think … I’ve never seen a case of, er – eastern … equine … encephalitis.’ He measured the words. ‘But from my reading … the symptoms could suggest … but I, er – I, er – would never think of it if it wasn’t for the horse from America. However, I’ve a blood sample from both horses, of course. Tests on mice … Time to develop … There’s nowhere round here equipped to do the tests. I’ll be driving them up to London.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to run them up there for you.’ The crisp young man had seen the vet’s muddy old car, and could guess at his driving speed.

  ‘Thank you. It’s my responsibility.’

  The vet chugged off in his old workhorse of a car.

  ‘That’s about it then,’ the BBC man said. ‘Can we use your telephone, Colonel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not, sir?’

  Callie took a look at the Colonel and saw that he was near breaking point.

  ‘Because I just cut the wires,’ she said, took the Colonel inside and slammed the door.

  The reporters went up to the village and knocked on the door of the Three Horseshoes. The little pub had not had so many people in it since the bank holiday. It was not opening time, but Toby’s father gave everyone free beer, since fame had come to the village.

  Chapter 22

  BY THE NEXT day, the news had spread. The stories in the papers were mostly speculation, but it was enough to start wild rumours all over the country of an outbreak dangerous to humans.

  Spokesmen from across the Atlantic were heard on the radio talking about the epidemic in New England. A child was admitted to a Midland hospital with a fever of unknown origin. Straightaway the cry went up that the epidemic had indeed begun.

  Some people from the Royal Veterinary College drove a horse ambulance into the stable yard, somehow got a sling under poor old Rebel, hauled him into the ambulance and took him away.

  His loosebox was closed up, with a sign on the door saying KEEP OUT. Callie, who had recently done the history of the Great Plague, painted a cross on the door as they did in 1605 on stricken houses. Dora just caught her in time to stop her adding, Lord have mercy upon us.

  Reporters came constantly to the farm, including an eager young man from the local paper who claimed to have been the person contacted by the mysterious Dr Dillon. He was crushed to find the good doctor not available.

  ‘He promised me an exclusive interview.’

  ‘Very exclusive, it would be,’ the Colonel said grimly, shepherding him out of his study, ‘since as far as we know, he doesn’t exist.’

  The reporters hung about the yard in the sun, watching rather cynically as Dora and Steve went about their work. When Steve went into Woman’s stable with a bowl of feed, and Dora followed with a wheelbarrow and shovel, one of the newspapermen was heard to sing casually:

  ‘Will you take this advice I hand you like a brother?

  Or are you not seeing things too clear?

  Are you too much in love to hear?

  Is it all going in one end and out the other?’

  Slugger had his photograph taken in various poses. Robin, who was quarantined in the foaling stable, had a picture of his head looking over the door taken with a long-range camera. It appeared in the evening papers captioned UNWELCOME IMMIGRANT.

  Ron had not turned up for work. That was nothing unusual. Dora was thankful that he was out of the way. Shocked and appalled at what was happening, she could not face admitting that it was she who had broken the news.

  After the brief rain, the hot weather had returned. Since there was a greater risk of a horse being bitten by a mosquito out of doors, people in the area were urged to keep their horses and ponies in at night. All the Follyfoot horses were in, of course, fretting to be out in the fields, banging on doors, calling for attention every time someone they knew came into the yard. Having them all stabled made ten times the work, and the intruders didn’t help. The Colonel got his friend, a retired policeman, to sit on a stool by the gate and keep all visitors out. Being deaf and not understanding their involvement, he was rude to the Crowleys, and they went away, adding the insult to the long list they felt that life had handed them.

  Chapter 23

  GEOFFREY MASTERS GOT pretty fed up with his parents always going out at night.

  They were rather young to have a ten-year-old boy, especially a very bright boy who read all the magazines they left lying about and watched television programmes meant for grown-ups when his parents were out.

  When he said to them, ‘Family life in Britain is dying and people like you are the cause of it,’ they laughed good naturedly and ruffled his thatch of orange-coloured hair – he hated the ruffling and the colour – and they said that he should be proud to have parents who were not fuddy-duddies. When he complained about having to take off his shoes before stepping on the white carpet or not being allowed to have his cat in the house because it jumped on the dresser, his mother, who collected the kind of useless china that was too expensive to eat off, said, ‘Some day you’ll be proud to have been brought up in a house with such nice things.’

  He was not proud yet.

  His father’s mother, Grandma Masters, who was quite unmasterful, lived with them in a room of her own surrounded by every present anyone had ever given her and family pictures. Some of the old ones of his father looked like Geoffrey did now. Red hair and freckles, knock knees and long thin feet.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Grandma Masters was fond of saying. ‘You’ve got your father’s knees, that’s for sure. And that’s a funny thing,’ she added, ‘considering how much time you spend on that pony of yours, a person would ex
pect you to be bow-legged.

  Geoffrey’s pony was the most important thing in his life. His parents did not usually give him what he needed, since their idea of what a ten-year-old boy needed was different from his. But they had surprised him on his last birthday with Archibald.

  He had not known he wanted a pony, but when he saw this one, staked out on the back lawn eating the good clover grass, his heart rushed out to it and he knew that this was what had been lacking from his life.

  Archibald was a fine Dartmoor pony, glossy brown like conkers. His mane could not decide which side to lie on, so favoured both, with a parting in the middle. He had a long thick tail, which Geoffrey brushed and combed every day, and tied up in a knot when it was muddy.

  This winter, when the tennis club was closed and the Sunday barbecue parties finished, his dad was going to take some weekends off from the social round and build a little stable for Archie. Meanwhile, he stayed out in the small field behind the house and sheltered under the chestnut tree in the hot sun or the night-time rain.

  Geoffrey sometimes read bits of the evening paper to his grandmother after his parents had gone out. He read to her that everyone had been warned to keep their horses in at night because of the epidemic scare.

  ‘It’s all very well for those who have a stable,’ he said.

  ‘Archibald will be all right,’ Grandma said. ‘It’s only a stupid scare.’

  ‘That’s what you said about the building that collapsed in Rochester.’ Geoffrey was up with all the news. ‘That’s what you said about the lead in paint being dangerous to babies.’

  Grandma closed her eyes. Geoffrey was about to give her a lecture.

  ‘That’s what you said when I told you they were going to make the sweet shop into a supermarket.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, dear.’ She opened her eyes and turned them back to the television. He kissed her and went out. She was a decent enough grandmother, but no good for conversation.

  He went out to talk to Archie in the muggy night, full of the vibrations of insects. Fireflies glinted in the hedge. Geoffrey hung his arms over Archie’s back, which was just the right height for hanging your arms over and resting your chin on and thinking. A mosquito bit him on the forehead.