Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [69]
Forty-five minutes after Kincaide was due at the station, there was still no sign of him. No answer on his home phone, and his mobile was diverted to voicemail. Goodhew told himself there was probably a good reason for this and refused the temptation of dropping back into anti-Kincaide mode.
But equally he did not feel like wasting any more time waiting, so he decided to leave without him, and therefore now stood alone on the doorstep of Jackie Moran’s cottage. The rain had not abated, and it drove at a forty-five degree angle at the unprotected front of the house. The front garden consisted of one raised stone-bordered bed planted with a couple of dozen petunias and, at the end furthest from the front door, young sweetpea plants growing up the sides of a black wrought-iron obelisk. The garden was hardly ambitious, but both sets of plants were being furiously battered by the weather, and only a few minutes passed before Goodhew himself deteriorated from damp to equally bedraggled.
It was a strong Suffolk accent that snapped him out of his moment of rain-muffled solitary confinement. ‘You won’t catch Jackie this late.’ The voice belonged to the postman, who was approaching him from the property next door. ‘She’s like clockwork; gone at eight every weekday.’
‘To work?’
The postman poked a couple of items of what looked like junk mail through Jackie Moran’s letterbox before answering, ‘I dunno.’
‘Damn,’ Goodhew sighed. ‘I really needed to speak to her this morning.’
‘Well, I can tell you where she’ll be – at the stables at Old Mile Farm, just out towards Quy. But I don’t know if it’s work or not, ’cept I s’pose anything involving horses is work. Worse than kids, they are. Probably why all these females love ’em so much.’
Goodhew had been vaguely aware of seeing the farm’s sign along one of the routes leading to Newmarket, but the postman was happy to give him precise directions before waving goodbye.
Newmarket: the home of flat racing, the sport of kings. Many of the racing yards were positioned near the centre of the town itself, tucked just out of sight of the main through roads. Or, more likely in a town where horses had right of way, the roads had been developed afterwards, deliberately planned to avoid disturbing the town’s main industry.
Further out from the centre, the surrounding villages remained horse rich, offering acres and acres of pristine post-and-rail heaven.
And it was with that limited amount of local knowledge that Goodhew drew himself a picture of what to expect at Old Mile Farm, while adding in a younger version of Alice Moran to represent Jackie herself.
The sign for the farm was the only thing visible from the road; it was made of wood and nailed to a telegraph pole. The words had been carved out and painted white. He turned down the unmade track alongside it, and immediately wrote himself a mental note against making such assumptions in the future. He was not, in fact, driving towards some smart racing yard, and none of the three horses turned out in the field bore any resemblance to a thoroughbred, instead belonging to the Heinz 57 varieties of the horse world. The two bays, both standing at about fourteen hands, looked like they were at least fifty per cent native breed, while the third was a heavy-set skewbald closer to sixteen hands. One of the bays trotted alongside the fence, its mane and tail sodden and steam rising from its back even as the rain continued to fall. It reached the far corner, then stretched its neck over the top rail, pricked its ears forward and whinnied.
Goodhew drove on past. The track opened out to a small area of uneven hard standing, just big enough to accommodate half a dozen cars. A RAV4 took up one corner, and although his was the only other vehicle, Goodhew still found it hard to park somewhere avoiding the puddles.
In front of him was a fenced-in manège, and facing on to that was a row of ten loose boxes. The air smelt of wet earth and manure from a giant muck heap, while a lone water butt caught the rain as it spurted from a strip of broken guttering on