The Stabbing in the Stables Read online

  “Simon Brett is a great wit and his inherent humor, lightness of touch, and undoubted skills as a storyteller make The Stabbing in the Stables a pleasure to read…It’s what curling up on the sofa was made for.”

  —Reviewing the Evidence

  Praise for the previous Fethering Mysteries

  THE WITNESS AT THE WEDDING

  “Readers who are tickled by this series will welcome [this] installment.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL

  “Offers comfortable pacing and plenty of plot twists…[and an] entertaining supporting cast.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  MURDER IN THE MUSEUM

  “An enticing tale, told wittily and eloquently.”

  —Hartford Courant

  THE TORSO IN THE TOWN

  “Like a little malice in your mysteries? Some cynicism in your cozies? Simon Brett is happy to oblige…Another witty entry in a blithely comic series.”

  —The New York Times

  DEATH ON THE DOWNS

  “The great British mystery writers, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Brett, have a way of making murder so, well, civilized.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  THE BODY ON THE BEACH

  “The characters are wonderful, their dialogue pungent, and their silliness quite engrossing. So too, ultimately, is the unraveling of the murders.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “A pair of sleuths who are winning enough to make the reader invite them back for more”

  —The Toronto Star

  Also by Simon Brett

  A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

  DEAD ROMANTIC

  SINGLED OUT

  THE PENULTIMATE CHANCE SALOON

  Fethering Mysteries

  THE BODY ON THE BEACH

  DEATH ON THE DOWNS

  THE TORSO IN THE TOWN

  MURDER IN THE MUSEUM

  THE HANGING IN THE HOTEL

  THE WITNESS AT THE WEDDING

  THE STABBING IN THE STABLES

  Mrs. Pargeter Novels

  A NICE CLASS OF CORPSE

  MRS. PRESUMED DEAD

  MRS. PARGETER’S PACKAGE

  MRS. PARGETER’S POUND OF FLESH

  MRS. PARGETER’S PLOT

  MRS. PARGETER’S POINT OF HONOUR

  Short Stories

  A BOX OF TRICKS

  CRIME WRITERS AND OTHER ANIMALS

  Charles Paris Novels

  CAST, IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE

  SO MUCH BLOOD

  STAR TRAP

  AN AMATEUR CORPSE

  A COMEDIAN DIES

  THE DEAD SIDE OF THE MIKE

  The Stabbing in the Stables

  A Fethering Mystery

  SIMON BRETT

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any resonsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE STABBING IN THE STABLES

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2006 by Simon Brett.

  Cover art by Joe Burleson copyright © 2006.

  Cover design by Annette Fiore-DeFex.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0612-6

  BERKLEY ® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To the Equestrian Trio

  of Sandie, Sophie and Coco

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  1

  “A HORSE?” CAROLE Seddon echoed with distaste. “You’re planning to heal a horse?”

  “Well, to have a go,” said Jude.

  “But I don’t see how it can possibly work. Horses don’t have human understanding. A horse won’t know it’s being healed, so how can it be healed?”

  Jude chuckled, and her bird’s nest of blond hair rippled before resettling around her plump face. “What you’re saying, Carole, is that because a horse doesn’t know it’s being healed, it’s not going to fall for the idea that it is being healed, as a human being might. You’re saying horses aren’t that gullible.”

  “Well…”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I know you don’t believe in healing…”

  Carole tried to find some form of denial, but all she could come up with was, “Let’s say I don’t understand it.”

  “I don’t understand it either. I just know that it sometimes works.”

  “Yes, but not with animals.”

  “There are many authenticated reports of animals’ ailments having been cured by healing.”

  “Huh.” That was Caro
le Seddon’s customary response to the world of alternative therapy—and to many other things that challenged the security of her sensible life.

  They were sitting in a part of that security, the kitchen of her house High Tor in the West Sussex seaside village of Fethering. The tidiness of the room, the gleaming surfaces, the neatly aligned pots and pans, the rack of spice jars whose labels had been dragooned into facing the front, all conspired to cancel out the cosiness that the Aga should have imparted. In front of the stove, Carole’s Labrador, Gulliver, satisfied by his late afternoon walk on Fethering Beach, snuffled in a contented dream of saving the world from killer seaweed.

  “So whose horse is it?”

  “Woman called Sonia Dalrymple.”

  “Do I know her?”

  “No. She’s a client.” Jude always used that word to describe the people who took advantage of her occasional healing and balancing services. “Patient” never sounded right to her.

  “Oh.” Carole managed to fill the monosyllable with exactly the same ration of scepticism that she had put into the “Huh.” Her attitude to Jude’s “clients” was that they were slightly flaky people with insufficient self-control—and probably more money than sense. Carole’s view was that when you were genuinely ill, you went to your GP. And when you weren’t genuinely ill, you put up and shut up.

  Carole Seddon suffered from the innate puritanism of a middle-class Southerner in her fifties, a system of values that had been dinned into her by timid parents in the postwar austerity of her upbringing. She was suspicious of the foreign, the unknown and, most of all, anything with the slightest whiff of mysticism. She hated herself for her hidebound worldview, but it was too much part of her personality to yield to major change.

  That personality was, she liked to think, reflected in her appearance. Her grey hair was cut sensibly short, and her pale blue eyes were assisted by sensible rimless glasses. Bright colours and patterns were eschewed, and the only part of her wardrobe aspiring beyond Marks & Spencer was a well-kept, though now ageing, Burberry raincoat.

  But over the previous few years chinks had appeared in the carapace of correctness with which Carole Seddon had deliberately surrounded herself. As she grew further away from the trauma of divorce from her husband David, as she became more reconciled to her unwarrantably early retirement from the Home Office, she had not exactly mellowed—indeed, the idea of “mellowing” would have been anathema to her—but she had entertained the possibility that there might exist valid attitudes other than those with which she had been brought up. This process had been partly assisted by a rapprochement with her son Stephen, engineered by Gaby, the girl to whom he was now married.

  But the greatest change in Carole Seddon had been effected by the serendipitous arrival of Jude in Woodside Cottage next door. Carole would never have admitted it, because she was not an advocate of any kind of sentimentality, but her friendship with Jude was the most potent agent in the recent thawing of her character’s permafrost.

  The attraction between the two women was unlikely. In spite of the fact that Carole wanted to organise every moment of the future to within an inch of its life while Jude was comfortably content to let events come to her, their relationship survived remarkably well. And the detail that from time to time that relationship had incorporated murder investigations was regarded by both women as an inestimable bonus.

  “So for what imagined ills does this Sonia come to you?” Carole continued sniffily.

  Jude smiled an easy smile. “There is such a thing as client confidentiality.”

  “Yes, I suppose there is…” The temptation to add “in your kind of world,” proved irresistible. “And it’s her horse?”

  “As I said. He’s called Chieftain.”

  “She must be rich.” There were certain triggers within Carole to this knee-jerk reaction, and all of them came from her childhood, when her parents had made sacrifices to put her through private education. Anyone who had a horse must be rich. Equally anyone who had a boat. The same went for anyone who went skiing—and certainly anyone who went water-skiing. The fact that all of these indulgences had now become widely available to the general public did not change Carole’s views. In the ineluctable way of prejudices, they stuck.

  “As a matter of fact, Sonia is quite well heeled.”

  “I thought so,” said Carole, prejudice vindicated.

  “But that’s not important.”

  Oh no, of course not. Owns a horse, and can afford to splash out on alternative therapies, but the money’s not important. But Carole kept such reactions to herself.

  Jude’s grin suggested she had read the thoughts without their being voiced. She sat at the kitchen table of High Tor, swathed in her customary layers of fabric—more of them now to fend off the February chill. Jude didn’t always wear the same clothes, but they always gave the same impression. She dressed in a profusion of floaty shirts, skirts and scarves, which never seemed to define where one garment ended and the other started. The outline around her plump body was always imprecise, but to everyone it generated a feeling of comfort—and, to men, an undoubted sexual allure. People were always at their ease around Jude, something that could never be said of Carole.

  “Anyway, what’s wrong with the horse?”

  “Chieftain’s lame. Trouble with his knee.”

  “Do horses have knees?”

  “Of course they do. Their legs are hinged in the middle, you know.”

  “Yes, I know they are, Jude. But ‘knee’ sounds a rather prosaic word for a horse. I thought they were all ‘fetlocks’ and ‘withers’ and…” Carole’s repertoire of equine anatomy ran out.

  “I can assure you they have knees, as well as fetlocks and withers.”

  “Ah.” She still needed something with which to come back at Jude. “I thought, if horses were ill, they were taken to vets.”

  “And if a horse is taken to the vet, and the vet can’t find anything wrong…?”

  “Oh, I see. Then they resort to alternative remedies,” and Carole couldn’t stop herself from adding, “just like gullible humans.”

  Jude grinned again. In anyone else, such a grin would have been infuriating. With her, somehow it wasn’t. “Except, you’ve already established that horses can’t be gullible.”

  “No. Well, maybe not,” Carole conceded. “Anyway, when you came in, some time ago, you asked if I could do you a favour. So far as I can recollect, you haven’t yet said what that favour is.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I wondered if you’d mind giving me a lift to the stables, so that I can have a look at Chieftain.”

  Carole’s first reaction was to refuse. They’d reached late afternoon, nearly time for a television chat show to which she was becoming secretly addicted. But her puritan instinct told her that that wasn’t really an excuse. And that if she used it as such, she’d have to admit to Jude that she actually watched the thing. So she said yes, she’d love to give her friend a lift to the stables.

  As they drove along in Carole’s sensible, recently vacuumed Renault, Jude provided a skimpy background to their destination. Long Bamber Stables were on the Fedborough Road, maybe a mile up the River Fether from Fethering. They advertised regularly in the Fethering Observer, offering “D.I.Y./Full/Part Livery, an Indoor School, Hacking, Riding Lessons” and other services.

  Though Jude had not been there before, she had heard from Sonia Dalrymple that the stables were owned by a married couple, Walter and Lucinda Fleet. In riding circles, Walter Fleet had apparently once been known as a promising eventer (whatever that might be, Carole inevitably interpolated) whose career had been cut short by a serious fall from a horse. Jude had also got the impression that Lucinda Fleet was not Sonia Dalrymple’s favourite person.

  But that was all she knew. Except for the fact that Sonia had agreed to meet her outside the stables at six that Tuesday evening.

  “And how would you have got here if I ha
dn’t given you a lift?”

  “I knew you would give me a lift.”

  Carole saw Jude’s teasing smile, illuminated by the headlights of an oncoming car, and seethed quietly.

  The parking at Long Bamber Stables was some way from the main gates, and when she switched off the engine, Carole insisted on staying in the Renault. She’d even brought a book with her—and there was always a torch in the glove compartment, because she had a paranoid fear of running down the car’s battery.

  Jude didn’t argue, although she knew Carole’s decision to stay arose from her unwillingness to meet Sonia Dalrymple, someone new, someone who believed in alternative therapy, someone who was rich enough to own a horse. Saying she wouldn’t be more than half an hour, Jude walked across the tarmac to the stable gates. She checked the large watch, fixed by a broad ribbon to her wrist. Three minutes to six.

  The buildings appeared to make up a timber-clad square, no doubt with loose boxes lining the inside and paddocks behind. There was no roof over the yard onto which the gates opened, though somewhere inside there had to be a covered indoor school and storage barns. A little way away from the stables stood a modest redbrick house, presumably the home of Walter and Lucinda Fleet. Although she couldn’t see it, Jude could hear the swishing flow of the River Fether, which ran alongside the site.

  To her surprise, there was no light over the gates, nor could she see any evidence of lights inside the compound. There was no sign of Sonia Dalrymple either.

  It was cold. Jude waited for a few minutes, stamping her feet to maintain circulation. But no other vehicle appeared to join the Renault in the car park.