Come to Grief Read Online Free PDF Page B

again.” She spoke without bitterness. “These things happen.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    I was at the Ferns house early in a June of languorous days and sweet-smelling roses, a time for the lotus, not horrors.
    “A bunch of vandals,” Linda said with a fury that set her whole body trembling, “they maimed a lot of ponies in Kent ... in this area particularly ... so that poor loving kids went out into their paddocks and found their much-loved ponies mutilated. What sick, sick mind would blind a poor, inoffensive pony that had never done anyone any harm? Three ponies round here were blinded and others had had knives stuck up their back passages.” She blinked on her tears. “Rachel was terribly upset. All the children for miles were crying inconsolably. And the police couldn’t find who’d done any of it.”
    “Was Silverboy blinded?” I asked.
    “No ... No ... It was worse ... For Rachel, it was worse. She found him, you see ... out in the paddock...” Linda openly sobbed. “Rachel wanted to sleep in a makeshift stable... a lean-to shed, really. She . wanted to sleep there at nights with Silverboy tied up there beside her, and I wouldn’t let her. She’s been ill for nearly three years. It’s such a dreadful disease, and
    I feel so helpless....“ She wiped her eyes, plucking a tissue from a half-empty box. ”She keeps saying it wasn’t my fault, but I know she thinks Silverboy would be alive if I’d let her sleep out there.“
    “What happened to him?” I asked neutrally.
    Linda shook her head miserably, unable still to tell me. She was a pretty woman in a conventional thirty-something way: trim figure, well-washed short fair hair, all the health and beauty magazine tips come to admirable life. Only the dullness in the eyes and the intermittent vibrations in many of her muscles spoke plainly of the long strain of emotional buffeting still assailing her.
    “She went out,” she said eventually, “even though it was bitter cold, and beginning to rain ... February ... she always went to see that his water trough was filled and clean and not frozen over ... and I’d made her put on warm clothes and gloves and a scarf and a real thick woolly hat ... and she came back running, and screaming ... screaming. ..”
    I waited through Linda’s unbearable memories.
    She said starkly, “Rachel found his foot.”
    There was a moment of utter stillness, an echo of the stunned disbelief of that dreadful morning.
    “It was in all the papers,” Linda said.
    I moved and nodded. I’d read—months ago—about the blinded Kent ponies. I’d been busy, inattentive: hadn’t absorbed names or details, hadn’t realized that one of the ponies had lost a foot.
    “I’ve found out since you telephoned,” I said, “that round the country, not just here in Kent, there have been another half a dozen or so scattered vandalizing attacks on ponies and horses in fields.”
    She said unhappily, “I did see a paragraph about a horse in Lancashire, but I threw the paper away so that Rachel wouldn’t read it. Every time anything reminds her of Silverboy she has a whole week of nightmares. She wakes up sobbing. She comes into my bed, shivering, crying. Please, please find out why ... find out who ... She’s so ill ... and although she’s in remission just now and able to live fairly normally, it almost certainly won’t last. The doctors say she needs the transplant.”
    I said, “Does Rachel know any of the other children whose ponies were attacked?”
    Linda shook her head. “Most of them belonged to the Pony Club, I think, but Rachel didn’t feel well enough to join the club. She loved Silverboy—her father gave him to her—but all she could do was sit in the saddle while we led her round. He was a nice, quiet pony, a very nice-looking gray with a darker, smoky-colored mane. Rachel called him Silverboy, but he had a long pedigree name, really. She needed something to love, you see, and she wanted a pony so much.”
    I