The Stabbing in the Stables by Simon Brett

suits them even better.”
    â€œYou said you know he’s not guilty. How do you know?” asked Jude. “Have you got proof that he wasn’t at the stables at the relevant time?”
    â€œNo, I don’t. He could have been there, for all I know. But Donal’s not capable of murder.”
    â€œDid he and your husband get along?” asked Carole.
    â€œNo, they didn’t actually. Walter thought Donal was a thieving layabout—which he was sometimes—and Walter didn’t want him hanging around Long Bamber. I didn’t mind, because sometimes he was very useful to me. That was another issue on which my husband and I did not see eye to eye. Walter was always an intolerant bigot.”
    No inhibitions about speaking ill of the dead then. Lucinda Fleet was maintaining the detachment she’d shown when first informed of her husband’s death.
    â€œYou used the word ‘thieving,’” said Carole. “Was that just colourful language or do you mean Donal actually was—is a thief?”
    â€œOh, he’s a thief all right. I have to have eyes in the back of my head when he’s around the stables. But that’s part of the deal with him. If you want to take advantage of his knowledge of horses, then you have to reconcile yourself to losing a bit of small change, or tack, or anything else you’ve left lying around.”
    â€œHis knowledge of horses must be pretty exceptional,” Carole sniffed.
    â€œIt is. That’s the point.”
    There was an asperity in Lucinda’s tone that suggested Carole was rubbing her up the wrong way. Jude intervened to defuse the situation.
    â€œAnyway, why did you want to talk to us? We don’t even know Donal, so we can’t be much help providing an alibi for him or anything of that kind.”
    â€œNo, but you were the first there at the scene of…at the scene of the crime. You might have seen something that proves the police should be looking for someone else.”
    â€œDon’t imagine they didn’t ask us about that,” said Carole. “Those detectives gave us both quite a grilling.”
    â€œYes, but if there was just something…”
    â€œThe only detail that I remember,” said Jude, “—and I told the police this, so it’s nothing new—is that when I went in through the stable doors that night, I’m pretty sure I heard the noise of a gate or door closing the other side of the yard.”
    â€œThe murderer making his getaway?” asked Lucinda eagerly.
    â€œPossibly. Maybe even probably.”
    â€œBut you didn’t see anyone?”
    â€œNo, just heard the noise.”
    â€œSo that doesn’t help Donal at all.”
    â€œâ€™Fraid not.”
    â€œWhere does Donal live?” asked Carole suddenly.
    â€œHere, there, everywhere. Someone who knows as much about the local horse population as Donal can always find an empty loose box or outbuilding somewhere. So I suppose he’s officially ‘of no fixed abode.’ Which is of course another reason for the police to arrest him.”
    â€œThe reason I ask is that, that night at the stables”—Carole had gone too far to cover up her professional lapse now—“I went into what I believe you call the tack room…?”
    â€œThe big one?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThat’s my tack room, where I keep all the tack that belongs to the stables. Every owner has their own tack room too, but theirs are much smaller.”
    â€œWell, I went in there—you know, having seen the body—looking for someone to help, and I saw that there was a kind of bed made up there, with a sleeping bag.”
    â€œYes, that sometimes gets used—you know, if a horse is ill or foaling, some of the owners insist on staying on the premises. It’s not used very often.”
    â€œI got the impression, the night I was there, that it had been used quite