Free Under Orders by Dick Francis Page B

had a powerful motive for killing Mr Walker,’ said Carlisle.
    ‘What motive?’ I asked. Their heads turned towards me.
    Carlisle seemed to realise that he had given away too much information. ‘Er, none of your business, sir.’
    On the contrary, I thought, it was very much my business.
    ‘Have you been speaking to Mrs Burton?’ I asked him.
    ‘That’s none of your business, either,’ he replied. But I could see that he had. He had known that Kate and the children were not in the house when he had arrived. There had been no female police officers in his party. He had expected Bill to be here on his own.
    So I assumed Carlisle’s ‘powerful motive’ was that Kate had told him that she was having an affair with Huw and that Bill had found out about it on Thursday evening. On Friday, Huw had turned up dead with his heart like a colander and Kate must have thought Bill was responsible. Not an unreasonable conclusion, I thought. No wonder she’d not come home. She believed her husband was a murderer.
    Juliet stood with her hands on her hips. I hadn’t seen her since she was a child but I’d known her family for years. She may have been small in stature but inside her petite frame was a giant of a woman trying to get out. Her mother had died bringing her into the world and she had been raised by her blacksmith father and her four elder brothers, growing up as the youngest in a household dominated by men. Childhood had consisted of wrestling in front of the television on a Saturday afternoon and playing rugby or football in the garden on Sunday mornings. And, of course, there was riding, plenty of riding, hunting in the winter and Pony Club gymkhanas in the summer. School had simply been a time-filler between more important pursuits. Now aged about twenty-five, I believed this wasJuliet’s first job as an assistant trainer after doing her time as a stable groom in and around Lambourn.
    ‘Hey, you can’t take that. It’s the entries record,’ she shouted at a policeman who was busy placing a large blue-bound ledger into a polythene bag.
    ‘We can take whatever we like,’ said Carlisle.
    ‘They’re also investigating race fixing,’ I said.
    Juliet stared at me with her mouth open.
    ‘Bill was arrested on suspicion of race fixing,’ I said. ‘As well as for murder. I was here.’
    ‘Bloody hell!’ She turned to Carlisle. ‘You’d better take all the bloody horses as well, then. They’ll be accessories.’
    Carlisle was not amused and politely asked us both if we would leave his men to their task.
    Juliet and I went out to the stable yard where the lads were busy with the horses. The daylight was fading fast and bright yellow rectangles from the stable lights extended out through the box doors. Steel buckets clanged as they were filled with water from the taps in the corners of the yard and figures carrying sacks of straw or hay scurried about in the shadows. Life in the yard, at least, was continuing as normal.
    ‘Evening, Miss Juliet,’ said one lad coming up to us, ‘I think old Leaded has a bit of heat in his near fore. Evening, Mr Halley. Nice to see you.’
    I smiled and nodded at him. Fred Manley had been Bill Burton’s head lad since Bill had started training, taking over the licence from his father-in-law, and had done his time in various stables around Lambourn before that. He had a wizened face from a life spent mostly outdoors with far too many early cold mornings on the gallops. He was actually in his late forties butlooked at least ten years older. One of the old school: hard working, respectful and all too rare these days.
    ‘OK, Fred,’ said Juliet, ‘I’ll take a look.’
    Juliet and Fred walked to a box midway down the left-hand bank and went in; I followed. Leaded Light turned and looked at the three of us. I had last seen him giving his all up the hill at Cheltenham on Friday, beaten a short head in the two-mile chase. Now he stood calmly in his straw-covered bedroom with a