Requiem for a Dealer by Jo Bannister

Author:Jo Bannister
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

She started with Dieter Townes first thing the next morning. She gave him fifteen minutes’ notice, phoning ahead to tell him to stay in the yard because she needed him to help with her inquiries. To her that sounded sufficiently official to command obedience without actually containing a claim to be something she was not. Only on the drive to Cheyne Warren did it occur to her that it was a bit like sticking a note through someone’s door saying Fly – all is discovered. At least if she found him at the stables it suggested he had nothing much in his life to be ashamed of.

He was mucking out when Brodie got there. He looked up at the sound of her car, and neither hurried anxiously to meet her nor stood quaking, just waited calmly for her to come over. ‘And just what are these inquiries you need my help with, Mrs Farrell?’ he asked coolly.

She flashed him her most engaging smile. ‘Sorry about that, Mr Townes. I hope I didn’t alarm you. But it is important, and it’s important to be discreet – it may end up being a police matter. You won’t be involved in that, but I do need some technical advice.’

‘Try me.’

‘I need a pony,’ she said. Though she paused, he realised it wasn’t that simple and kept waiting. ‘I need it to be in Germany now but available to ship to England immediately. I need it to be an Exmoor pony, and I need to be able to pass it off as a daughter of a stallion called The Saracen. Where do I start looking?’

Townes gave it some thought, then shook his head. ‘I don’t think you can do it. It used to be possible to pass one horse off as another if you really wanted to but now they’ve all got passports that record their breeding. We might find you an Exmoor mare in Germany but I can’t see how you’d get away with lying about her sire.’ He eyed her disapprovingly. ‘Or why you’d want to, for that matter.’

‘I can’t tell you any more,’ said Brodie, ‘except that I’m working with the police on this and it’s not going to backfire on either of us. Especially if I can’t make it work. I couldn’t find a pony of unknown breeding and fib?’

‘You could find any number of ponies of unknown breeding, and that’s what it would say on their passports. But none of them will be Exmoors. There just aren’t that many true Exmoors around, and their breeding should be a matter of record. Why does it have to be an Exmoor?’

‘Because I said it was,’ she confessed ruefully. ‘It was just a story – I never thought I’d have to produce the damn pony.’

‘You’ve told someone you know of an Exmoor mare by The Saracen, and it’s in Germany but you can acquire it for them.’ It was an accurate enough assessment: Brodie nodded. ‘And you don’t, and you can’t, and you’re trying to lie your way out of trouble.

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