Imogen Potton stood in the doorway, wearing fleecy pyjamas with a design of rabbits on them. Her teeth had been cleaned and her brace was a line of unforgiving metal. From one hand dangled a teddy bear whose fur had almost all been loved away. The small breasts that pushed against her pyjama tops looked out of place on one so young.
“I don’t know where you were at that time,” she said. “I hadn’t seen you for the previous forty-eight hours. And I didn’t see you again until about quarter past eight that evening, when I assumed you had just come in from Allinstore. Go on, that’s true, isn’t it, Mummy?”
Hilary Potton nodded wordlessly, as her daughter went on. “I had been worried about Conker. I kept hearing these stories about someone going round and…attacking mares…always the mares…and I couldn’t have borne it if Conker…Conker was the only creature in the world I cared about.” She fixed her mother with a venomous eye. “I had long since stopped caring about you. I don’t think I ever cared about you. I think I always hated you…because of the way you treated Daddy and…
“I care about Daddy, but it was difficult to care about him…because he was always changing his mind…and always saying he’d be somewhere at a certain time and then not turning up…So I cared about Daddy, but I couldn’t rely on him…But Conker, Conker understood me. I couldn’t bear the idea of someone hurting Conker. If she’d died, I would have died.”
Imogen was silent, but the spell she exerted over the three women was so potent none of them spoke until she again picked up her narrative. “I was worried about Conker-particularly nighttimes. Lucinda or someone else was there all the day, but at night…And there was someone I’d seen looking at Conker in a certain way. I didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if he was planning how to hurt her…”
“Who was this person?” asked Jude, almost in a whisper.
“Someone who knows Conker well-but he doesn’t love her. He hates her.”
“Nicky Dalrymple?”
At this Hilary Potton burst out, “Don’t be ridiculous. Nicky Dalrymple is an international banker. He’s a pillar of the Fethering community-when he’s here, which granted is not all the time. Immy, you can’t go round making false accusations against people.”
The girl focused her eyes on her mother’s. “No, I should leave that to you, should I, Mummy? Like you did with Daddy?”
“I didn’t make false accusations against your father.”
“No, but you let him take the rap without raising a finger. There were things you could have told the police that would have got him off, but you didn’t say any of them.”
“Why should I go out of my way to help someone who’d made my life a total misery?”
The look of contempt Imogen cast on her mother was more eloquent than any words could have been.
“So,” Jude prompted, “you started to stay at Long Bamber overnight, to look after Conker?”
“Yes. Only when I knew there was danger.”
“When you knew that Mr. Dalrymple was at home?”
The girl nodded.
“Did you know about this, Hilary?” asked Carole.
“Yes. Immy was perfectly safe at the stables. I knew it was just a stupid adolescent fantasy, but if she wanted to live it out, I wasn’t about to stop her. And, quite honestly, the way she’d been behaving since Alec and I split up, it was a relief not to have her round the house.”
“It was a relief not to be around the house!” When it came to vitriol, Imogen could easily match her mother’s output.
“So,” said Jude easily, “you used to sleep in the sleeping bag on the top level of Lucinda’s tack room?”
“That’s right. And I’d go there for the evenings if…you know, if I knew he was about and Lucinda wasn’t.”
“Mm.” A thought came to Jude. “I’ve suddenly realised why you were happy to come back here this morning.”
The girl looked bewildered.
“You had come from Northampton to Fethering because you knew Nicky Dalrymple was home and you were worried about Conker. But, as soon as you heard that he was on his way to Heathrow to fly to America, you relaxed. You realised the danger to Conker was over.”
Jude didn’t think it was the time to add how far from over the danger to Conker had been.
Imogen gave a quick nod of agreement to what she had said.
“So,” said Carole, “you were there that Tuesday night, weren’t you? The night Walter Fleet died?”
“Yes, I was there.”
“What happened?”
“This is ridiculous!” Hilary Potton objected. “I won’t have you bullying my daughter. She’s in shock. She’s had quite enough of this badgering. She needs to get back to bed.”
“No, Mummy.” Imogen moved slowly forward, and sat on the vacant chair around the table. “I want to tell them what happened.”
“You’ll regret it,” her mother hissed.
“I don’t think I will.” The girl took a long pause, as if to gather her thoughts, and then launched into her account. “I was there in the tack room, kind of snuggling in the sleeping bag. It was a cold night, maybe I was dozing off a bit. I hadn’t slept much the night before. It’s never quiet round the stables, and that night I kept hearing noises I thought might be”-her voice faltered-“might be him coming.
“So the next evening I probably was half asleep. I’d gone to the stables straight from school and tried to do a bit of homework, but the light was bad, and I was too tired. So I just sort of snuggled down.
“And then a noise woke me. The front gate opening. Someone had come into the stables. There’s a little window up near where I put my sleeping bag, and I could look out on to the yard. I saw…I saw…” She struggled to get the words out. “I saw Mr. Dalrymple. He was…he was carrying a knife…”
The three listening women waited while the girl recovered herself sufficiently to continue.
“I rushed downstairs. I wanted to stop him. But when I got to the tack room door, there was nobody in sight. I could see Conker’s stall across the yard, and she was fine. I think she knew I was there, and she had her head over the door, hoping I’d give her a bit of carrot or a Polo.
“But I knew I’d seen Mr Dalrymple-there was no doubt about that. He was still around there somewhere…with…with his knife. So I hid behind the tack room door, and I just waited.
“I don’t know how long it was, but I was just about thinking he’d gone away, and I could get back into my sleeping bag, when I heard the front gate bang again. I waited, expecting to hear footsteps going towards Conker’s stable, but they didn’t. They came straight towards the tack room, straight towards me.
“I’m not quite sure what happened then. I was just furious, furious at the idea that anyone could treat horses like that. I grabbed the nearest thing on the bench-I didn’t even know it was a bot knife until afterwards-and when the man came into the tack room I leapt on him.” Her voice had now gone uncannily calm. “And I slashed at him, and slashed at him, and went on slashing as he backed away from me. I went on…I went on and on…until he fell over backwards in the yard.
“It was only then that I looked down at him, and realised it was Mr. Fleet.”
Hilary Potton, who had let out a little gasp earlier in her daughter’s narrative, was now sobbing softly, hopelessly.
“So what did you do?” asked Carole.
“I panicked. Of course I panicked. I threw away the bot knife. Then I looked down at myself. I was covered with blood. Daddy’s old Barbour, his gloves that I was wearing, they were all covered with blood.”
The recollection was too vivid for her. She swayed on her seat, as if she were about to faint. Jude went quickly to the sink and fetched a glass of water.
After a long sip, Imogen was ready to continue. “I left the stables and ran. I didn’t really know what was happening, what I was doing, but some instinct told me to go by the river, follow the Fether down to Fethering. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there. Mummy was at Allinstore…”
Carole directed a piercing look to Hilary Potton, who turned away.
“…and when I could manage to think, I knew it was Daddy I wanted, Daddy I wanted to talk to, Daddy who might be able to help me. So I rang him on his mobile, and he said he was at the stables at Unwins-you know, the Dalrymples’ house. And I couldn’t think why he was there, but it didn’t worry me at the time. I just went there and found him.
“And when I got there, I felt dreadful, because he said that Mr. and Mrs. Dalrymple were in the house, just there. The man who wanted to hurt Conker was right there, so close to us.
“And Daddy kept asking me what had happened and I tried to tell him, and I told him I’d killed Mr. Fleet, and he said I must get out of those clothes, and he bundled up the Barbour and the gloves and he hid them up in the hayloft-he said no one ever went up there.
“Then he took me home, and he took off my other clothes and…I think he said he was going to burn them…I don’t know what happened. But he made me have a bath, made me scrub everywhere very thoroughly, and then he spent ages washing the bath afterwards. And then I got dressed in jeans and a jumper, and Daddy went, and I watched television until Mummy got back from Allinstore.”
The girl looked up towards the window, her eyes unfocused. “It was as if it had never happened. I’d wake up in the mornings often, thinking it hadn’t happened, thinking I’d dreamed it. Then I’d slowly remember, but it still didn’t feel real. When I heard that Donal had been taken in for questioning, I almost managed to convince myself that he had done it. I mean, I like Donal, but it seemed to make more sense that he had killed Mr. Fleet than that I had. Daft, I know, but that was how my mind was working.
“Then they let Donal free, and suddenly they were questioning Daddy, and I knew what was real and what wasn’t. And for a few days I just didn’t know what to do. And then all at once it became very clear to me. I wanted to confess-I wanted to say everything that I’ve just said to you-but Mummy wouldn’t let me.”
Hilary Potton looked defensively at the other two women. “I didn’t know, did I? I just thought she was being self-dramatising again.” Rich, coming from you, thought Carole. “I thought her idea of confessing was just to get her precious father off the hook.”
“And you didn’t want him to come off the hook, did you? Ever?”
“Shut up, Carole! Stop making me feel like I’ve done something wrong in all this!”
“I think you have done a few things wrong,” said Jude. “You’ve lied about your alibi…”
“That was only to protect Immy.”
“There’s something else, though, isn’t there?”
“What?”
“You told the police where to find the bloodstained clothes.”
Hilary Potton’s face took on an expression of injured innocence. “That was my duty as a citizen. Once Alec had told me they were there, I had to do it.”
“Did Alec tell you everything? That Imogen had killed Walter Fleet?”
Now Hilary looked confused. “He garbled on about something. He said it involved Immy, but I didn’t take it seriously. I thought he was just trying to exonerate himself. The only information I retained was that Alec’s bloodstained Barbour was hidden in the hayloft at the Dalrymples’ stables.”
“And suddenly you saw the perfect way to get revenge on him for all the real and imagined slights he had inflicted on you during your marriage.”
“You make it sound so calculating.”
“I think,” said Jude, “it was pretty calculating.”
“I genuinely believed that Alec was the murderer!”
But Hilary Potton’s bluster was not convincing. She couldn’t meet the three implacable pair of eyes that were fixed on her, least of all Imogen’s.
“For heaven’s sake, I’m not the villain of the piece.” She pointed at her daughter. “There’s the villain of the piece.”
But neither Carole nor Jude thought that was completely true.