A Three Day Event (47 page)

“Here’s when it came to me. Gilles was the one who found the body and drove it to Montreal. He told me that this afternoon. That was when he confessed to being part of Liam’s little hate group cell. He told me about the fire Liam was going to set at the Jacobsons’. But I’m sure you know all about that, yes?” Guy nodded curtly. “He also told me that he was supposed to send a particularly nasty anti–Semitic cartoon to the Jacobsons’ house from the office. It was Benoit’s job to trash the office and spray the separatist slogans. You following so far? Or am I telling you stuff you already know?”

“I knew about the office. I knew about the proposed fire.”

“You left your files unlocked. That was your–not job, I guess–your gesture of trust in Liam. Am I right? If you didn’t, I have a feeling they’d have been trashed good and proper. I think Liam liked the idea of everyone being subservient to his authority, and proving it.”

“I wasn’t part of his cell, as you put it. Never that,” Guy said scornfully.

“No, but you knew a lot, so you had to expose yourself, just a teeny bit, to give Liam that extra little thrill, the power of the–the mafia Don or whatever.”

“He liked to tell me things.”

“Oh, I just bet. But we’ll come back to that. Let’s finish with the stallion. So Gilles is supposed to send that fax. But he gets cold feet. Instead of sending it, he panics and hides it in the first place he sees. In your files, which are of course conveniently open.

“So after dinner tonight I go and look for the cartoon. By now they’re locked again, but I know M–F has a duplicate key in her drawer, and Roch has given me office keys, so I open M–F’s desk and then the files. It wasn’t there. So that cartoon was taken out of your files and sent to the Jacobsons. But who else knew to look there to get it and send it? Who but you would have been rooting around in your files? The fact that it wasn’t there meant that you yourself found the cartoon and you had to be the one who sent it. And then got rid of it to make sure no one saw it in your files by accident. If you were thinking more cleverly, by the way, you would have replaced it in your files, so you could say someone was trying to incriminate you. That’s the trouble with spontaneous gestures.

“But it was sent at 4:17 a.m. What the hell were you doing in the office at that hour? There could be only one reason. You had come to cut the stallion, early enough in the morning that no one else would be there, late enough that the stallion wouldn’t have to wait too long to be seen to. You also wanted to see the kind of job Benoit had done, and to make sure he had left your files untouched. You found the cartoon that Gilles had stashed, and I’m thinking you said to yourself, hey, why not complicate things. You had buried Liam in the sand. Or at the very least you knew he was buried there. The plan was to have him discovered on the Monday. By that time it would be hard to establish the time of death.

“You left the hate material under Liam’s bed so it would be discovered. If I hadn’t found it, you would have ‘discovered’ it yourself. You wanted Liam identified with the material so when we looked at the time printed on the fax, we would assume it must have been Liam who sent it and therefore it had to be Liam who did the stallion. Then you’d be off the hook for the horse for sure. At the very least you meant to tangle up our thinking and complicate the process. And it worked, you know. We did get tangled up in our thinking. How’m I doing so far?” He popped another square of chocolate in his mouth. He must be striking home runs, or Guy would have stopped him.

Guy didn’t crumble. “I’m agog with admiration for your imaginative powers,” he said. “I can’t complain, can I, since I specifically said I was looking to talk to someone intelligent.”

“You did the stallion. And when you did, you thought it would be a one–off with little risk–who’d have figured a vet as both attacker and healer? You didn’t count on having to get rid of the gelding later on. A much riskier proposition, but by then you were too invested in protecting Bridget to back away from it. But you’re not actually going to say it out loud, are you–that you did it. You’re willing to confess to people murders, but not to horse abuse.
Chapeau
, you still have a sense of scale in your moral priorities. But I don’t know how hiding the horse stuff is so good for your soul and all that.”

“It was Liam I was prepared to talk about.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“A little too obvious. Like your stuttering mysteriously disappearing.”

Guy smiled wryly. “This isn’t the usual interrogation technique, trying to stop someone from confessing. Why don’t you want it to be me who killed Liam?”

“It’s not what I want. It’s what is in fact true. It could have been Bridget. It’s one of you, anyway. And you could be eager to confess to it to keep us off her trail. You seemed very keen for me to find the bag in the shed. So far today I’ve heard nothing but stories about people going to extraordinary lengths to protect those they love. You could be protecting Bridget. She had motive and opportunity.”

“But so did I, and so did others,” said Guy, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Even you did.”

“I had opportunity, but no motive.”

“You seem very sure about that,” said Guy.

“I am. I didn’t know Liam. Tell me about your own motives,” said Polo, as he put the rest of the chocolate in his mouth and sat back to listen.

Guy rose with his empty glass and went to the liquor cabinet. He poured and waved the bottle at Polo inquiringly. Polo shook his head. Guy settled himself in his chair, clasped his hands around the glass in his lap, and launched himself into his narrative.

“My life was perfect here at
Le Centre
–or as perfect as my life was ever going to get. Bridget and I may have seemed like an odd couple from the outside, but we got on very well. We complemented each other. No married couple could have been more content, I believe. We were both–fugitives, in a way, from our respective pasts, and we understood each other. I’d assumed life would go on forever the way it was–before Liam arrived on the scene.

“From the day he got here, everything started to change. I believe in good and evil. And he was almost completely evil. He only knew about hatred. Hatred and personal power. Except for the horses. I have to say he loved the horses. And it was because of that one spot of goodness that I misread his character. When he first came there was a coincidental run of problems–a colic, a horse cast in his stall, two bowed tendons, a hoof abscess, a bad skin infection, that sort of thing–and he was a fantastic help. He really would have made a great veterinarian. If he’d had the educational opportunities, it’s what he would have been. Anyway, because of that, because of seeing so much of his normal side, I was pretty friendly to him, and we spent a fair amount of time together.

“Liam hadn’t had a lot of friendship in his life. Any, really. He locked onto me like a space capsule docking into port. At first it was flattering, but then, as he started to talk about his–interests, his mission, all that craziness, I became quite horrified.

“You’re naturally wondering why I didn’t express my repugnance to him. Here’s why. Liam worked at Timberline Farm in Ontario before he came here. I’m sure you remember that Timberline is where Stephanie Ankstrom was killed in a Three Day Event. Did you know that she was my friend? From Thea? I thought so. Well, it was Liam who was made to collect all her belongings so they could be returned to Thea. And he did. Only he kept back something.”

“Ah. Her journal,” Polo said.

“Oh God, how did you–oh, of course, Thea…”

“She only mentioned it an hour ago, when we spoke after we left the barn. She feels rotten about it going missing.”

“Well, as you have probably already deduced, there was stuff about me in that journal, very personal, private information I never told anyone but Stephanie.”

“About your–difficulties…”

“Yes.”

“So he was blackmailing you.”

“On the contrary. He was most sympathetic. Empathetic, I mean. He was thrilled to be a friend of someone as–how should I say–
wounded
as himself. He’d had similar experiences in Ireland. He thought we were soul mates. I was terrified of rejecting him after he told me these things, for fear that he would expose me–or worse. By that time I knew he was mentally unbalanced. I knew he was the type to be far more punitive to a friend who turned on him than he would be with those he perceived as enemies from the start. He didn’t want money or favours or sex. He wanted friendship, a break from his loneliness. So I played along until I could figure out what to do.

“It wasn’t long before he began confiding the most appalling things to me. He just talked and talked and talked. People who stutter are used to listening. And people talking to them don’t expect a lot of feedback. They take your silence for interest and think they’re doing you a favour doing all the talking themselves He showed me his disgusting collection of hate material. He started boasting about all the things he knew about everyone at the barn. I have no idea how he managed to find out such personal information, but it frightened me, I can tell you.”

“It’s quite simple, really. He made a hole in the wall of his bedroom and listened to people’s phone calls.”

“Ah. That straightforward, was it?”

“And he got almost everything wrong, by the way. He heard things and made false assumptions. But you didn’t know that, so when he started talking about Bridget’s secrets you knew you had to act, right?”

“Right. At that point I knew that my little world might come tumbling down if I didn’t do something.”

“Was it the problem with the jump at Timberline that would screw up her political future in C–FES or the secret about her father that was the final straw?”

Guy gasped. “How could you possibly know about Bridget’s father?” He added quickly, “I mean, what exactly do you know?”

“That he’s alive, not dead. That he’s no aristocrat. That in fact he’s a gamekeeper at a private hunting club near Kingston.”

Guy stared and swallowed. “How? How?”

“Liam kept notes, along with phone numbers, didn’t you suspect that he must have?”

“Of course I did, but I searched through his belongings and his room, and I couldn’t find anything. I found Stephanie’s journal, thank God, and destroyed it, but no other personal material.”

“It was well hidden, but I found it.”

Guy was unnerved, Polo could see. That felt good. “What was the big deal about the father being working class? Who cares, here anyway, what class you come from?”

“Oh, it wasn’t just the class thing. It was a bit more complicated than that. But it isn’t important for you to know what the secrets were.”

“But I want to know. Of course if you won’t tell me, I suppose I could always write to Lord Fairclough–or the son. Her partner.”

Guy sighed heavily. “No, don’t do that. Do you know anything about Bridget’s partner, Philip Fairclough?”

“That would be Fig?”

“Yes. Fig.” The distaste, even hatred in Guy’s voice was palpable, Polo noted. “They grew up together, riding together, all very cozy, except for the one minor detail that Bridget’s father was Philip’s father’s gamekeeper. The Pendunnins lived on the estate. Hired help, though of course to Bridget that didn’t quite sink in for some time. Horses can be a great leveler up to a point.

“Bridget’s mother was a fiery Irish beauty who loved hunting–Bridget has her hair and eyes, and because she hated her mother, she hated the Irish. Her father was a decent, boring man who didn’t ride, while Lord Fairclough was rich, bold, a dashing horseman, etc, etc–well, fill in the blanks.”

“I see. The mother has an affair with the lord of the manor–you know, Guy, I don’t read novels, I just read the blurbs on the back when my plane is delayed, but this is beginning to sound a lot like the books with quilted covers you see in airports.”

“It was, actually. Very Harlequin Romance. Yes, the mother has an affair with Lord Fairclough, and then has Bridget. Bridget’s real father is Lord Fairclough. All three adults know this, but Fig and Bridget don’t. So when her half brother rapes her”–

“Fig rapes her?” Polo was now fascinated in spite of his determination to stay aloof from the sordid details.

“Yes. And they were observed by a stable lad. Stable lads don’t normally jeopardize their jobs by reporting their boss’s bad personal behaviour to authorities, but this lad had a serious grievance against Bridget–she never made clear to me what it stemmed from–so he doubtless thought she deserved it, but then he doubled down on his knowledge, and went to Fig’s father with the news that Fig and Bridget were sexually involved. Lord Fairclough freaked out, naturally, and had Bridget shipped over here with the promise of continuing financial support to make sure she’d stay put in Canada.”

“So Bridget is predisposed to panic and over–react when yet
another
stable boy threatens to turn her life upside down” –

“Indeed.”

“And that would also explain the cheque! And the elaborate charade about the so–called frequent but actually bogus trips to England.”

“Very quick of you. We knew the cheque would get you thinking.”

“Yes. So when
does
she find out?”

“Only recently. Her father–I mean George Pendunnin–has a drinking problem. It’s usually under control, but sometimes he gets careless. He had a bad episode and made a terrible mistake. Lord Fairclough had a shooting party. Pendunnin let some game stay uncollected on the ground too long. Did you know that it’s extremely dangerous to leave any dead game on the ground? Botulism. It seeps into the ground and gets picked up by the live birds. He’d gotten drunk and lost track of time. An infected live bird was then shot in the twenty–four hours it would have to live after infection, cooked and served to Lord Fairclough’s hunting guests. One of them got botulism poisoning and nearly died. Pendunnin was fired, of course, but threatened to reveal the dark family secret.

“So Fairclough did exactly what he had done for Bridget–shipped him off to the colonies, so to speak. He got him this position at the Grassmere Club, a very hotsy–totsy club in the Thousand Islands, only sixteen members, a half million a year in fees to shoot an unlimited number of birds. They swoop down in their private planes. Ninety days in a row a year, seven days a week, only eight guns allowed at a time. Captains of industry kind of thing. Very low profile. Very festive for the lucky few. Anyway, once here, George finally told Bridget the whole story. She made sure everyone thought he was dead to take him off the riding community’s radar screen. I daresay Liam overheard her speaking to him in Kingston.”