Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye: Part Iii

By Elizabeth Greenwood

Elizabeth Greenwood studied sculpture at St. Martins School of Art in London and in Florence and Rome. She had a classical education, preferring Greek to Latin for the richness of its vocabulary, and her sculpture, with its reference to Greek mythology, reflects this preference. She started her writing career as a scriptwriter in the World Service of the BBC, where she learnt the value of dedicated researching. Apart from poetry, she enjoys producing emblematic fiction based on Mary Poppinss song A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down, thus fulfilling the writers task as an entertainer cum moralist. Both the poetry and the modeling activity date from early childhood. She was fortunate in having been born into a family where close relatives united a passion for literature with a keen interest in science (of space especially), politics and, the cinema. In later years, she has applied herself to creating works in the field of philosophy and religion. Her particular interest in Sherlock Holmes comes from the fact that as a famous character, Sherlock Holmes was born in America in a play on Broadway, where it was an immediate success with a famous leading actor of the time in the main part, while Conan Doyle, his creator, was fighting as a voluntary frontline surgeon in the Boer War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477241981

Elizabeth Greenwood

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, VICE, O, the Oprah Magazine, Longreads, GQ, and others. 

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© 2013 by Elizabeth Greenwood. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/19/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4196-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4197-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4198-1 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

1. Morning Star

2. The Gondoliers

3. Veteran Car Rally

4. Syndrome

5. Olympic Romp And Circumstance

6. Out Of The Blue

7. June Wedding

8. Appendix

FICTION by

ELIZABETH GREENWOOD

Utopia 2000 (1994)

Loftycross (1995)

Collected Short Stories and Four Novellas (2006)

Out of This World, a Space Romance (2009)

Sophie’s Friends and Other Stories (2011)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part I (2012)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part II (2012)

OTHER WORKS

Nietzsche, Redeemer of Chance (1998)

Sigmud Freud and the Decline of The Judeo-Christian Culture (2008)

POETRY

Pebbles on a Beach (2011)

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MORNING STAR

MORNING STAR

Looking back on Emile Cremieux’s confession, though he had had prior knowledge of it through Sinclair, what affected Sebastian most about it was not so much the way the swift ending had come but the nature of the provocation which had precipitated it; and, what made matters worse, Sinclair himself seemed shaken by it too. There was something epic about Cremieux’s deed at the eleventh hour that seemed to add an extra dimension to it after all those years in the sense that the antagonist Henri Dumas appeared as some sort of scarecrow fallen into disuse which the wind and the rain used as a desolate mouthpiece in a deserted field, representing the fragility of the human psyche in the face of hearsay. It took courage to track down consistently for decades such a meek-and-mild antagonist as Henri Dumas, knowing the outcome might be inconclusive . . . There was another point that Sinclair raised when they talked about the case and that was how a multitude—a whole nation in fact—which had so utterly embraced the Nazi ideology as a creed had vanished underground more or less overnight after the fall of Berlin. Where did they all go? At least, the post-war Stalinist era had been well-documented as far as individual dossiers were concerned. And Sinclair wondered at the lack of concern people in Britain showed towards the resurgence of Germany as a dominant industrial power in the European economy. Monsieur Cremieux expressed surprise at it; and he was not too happy either about the fact that France was exporting labour to Germany, thus assisting the recovery.

According to the latest e-mail received by Sinclair, Monsieur Cremieux had gone back to Strasbourg where he had been involved with the International Space University since its creation in 1987, giving informal talks on the campus about the Holocaust to students of all nationalities and encouraging them in their pioneering effort in an intercultural environment. Sinclair was happy for him, mingling with international graduates and young Space professionals to encourage the development of Space for peaceful purposes, though he did wonder whether there was a touch of Utopianism in the venture to advance humanity into space where the geometrical language used on earth for people to communicate with one another would be useless due to the lack of gravity, and the time spent on the scientific discipline required to achieve a modicum of astronautical hygiene in order to say alive would be so time-consuming as to leave little time for anything else, let alone ideological pursuits.

‘But, if it makes him happy . . .’, Sinclair would say, ‘after what he has gone through . . .’

It was lucky a new case had cropped up to draw both their attention away from the narrative of Emile Cremieux’s prolonged quest for justice which in itself offered little scope for initiative of the kind that a detective like Sinclair enjoyed, ‘bygones be bygones’ being the only morality. Already, as Sinclair paced the floor, repeating ‘now you see it, now you don’t’, Sebastian could sense that there had been an influx of curiosity mixed with excitement in the man.

‘What is it that thing which appears and disappears you keep muttering about?’

‘It’s the morning star. Because Venus is the closest planet to the earth and it is burning, so it is the last star that we see in the early morning before sunrise and the first star that we see in the evening when the sky starts getting dark.’

‘Met the Astronomer Royal lately?’

‘No; a distraught horse owner whose favourite race horse has vanished in mysterious circumstances. The horse’s name is ‘Morning Star’ because it has a white patch of hair called a ‘star’ on its forehead. But it won’t have that for long if it has been stolen; the thieves will conceal it with hair tincture. Do you remember a Sherlock Holmes story called Silver Blaze?’

‘Yes, I do. The race horse which was stolen was called Silver Blaze because it had a white forehead and in order to run it in the Wessex Cup the man who abducted the horse faked it by painting over the blaze.’

‘That’s right. That sort of thing happens a lot in the Show Ring with show horses. When the winning bug gets into the owner of a show horse, it’ll fake it to suit the taste of the judge in order to be pulled in first and get a trophy. Guess who recommended me to the owner, Sir Alistair Baring?’

‘I haven’t got the faintest idea.’

‘Lord Dexter. You remember him, don’t you?’

‘Lady Annabel’s father?’

‘Yes, poor man. He told Sir Alistair Baring there was only one detective in the land who could find his horse and that was Stewart Sinclair because I had found his daughter. He didn’t tell him that she was dead when I found her, but all the same it was jolly decent of him, don’t you think? I mean horses are big animals; they don’t simply disappear; it shouldn’t prove too difficult to trace it.’

‘Something tells me you’ve been taking Emily Hankey to the races again?’

‘I love to see the joy in her eyes as she winks at me from under her big hat. I can’t wait for the day when I’ll be able to say to her:

‘Live with me, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dales and fields,

And all the craggy mountains yields . . .’

‘Don’t you think something like Sinatra’s ‘Come, fly with me’ would be more up to date than Shakespeare’s sonnets? She’s only sixteen, for goodness’ sake!’

‘No; she’s also well-read. That reminds me; I think Cordelia is due for another bag of corn. See to it, will you? There’s a good lad. To go back to Morning Star. One thing we must bear in mind is that the horse is racing fit. In any case, horses are powerful animals whose sense of self-preservation has survived the brain-washing of domestication. They can dispose of people by shying into traffic because a pheasant flies out of a hedge by the roadside; their instinct is to bolt before danger and they can keep going for miles. This is not saying that Morning Star is roaming the Cotswold Hills; if he were he would be a lot easier to spot than Silver Blaze in Conan Doyle’s story.’

‘Oh, why is that?’

‘Because he has a goat with him as a stable companion; the two of them are inseparable. The horse refuses to go to race meetings without her. I recommended that myself, not for Morning Star, but for a race horse that belonged to one of the Royals the jockey of whom I happened to be friendly with; the horse walked the box, wasting energy; the goat had a calming effect on it. It’s a well-known remedy.’

‘Mingling with the rich and famous, Sinclair?’

‘It takes all sorts. Now, to elucidate what I was saying ‘now you see it, now you don’t’:—just as in the morning, looking up at the sky, one has the notion of seeing the morning star which by nightfall has become the evening star.’

‘You mean it’s an illusion?’

‘No, Barnard; it’s a scientific fact. An illusion is when you watch a film which shows a magician performing a levitation act in the street in front of a group of spectators. It is created in the cutting room by joining together two separate shots, one showing the on-lookers by themselves and the other the magician being lifted off the pavement by a crane which has been cut out of the picture. All right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, the last thing the general public saw, and by that I don’t mean just the crowds in the stands round the race course or the punters, but the millions of viewers watching the Gold Cup from home on Television, the last thing one saw was the horse being led away from the track by its trainer and its jockey after having been pulled out of the race by the jockey who claimed the horse had gone lame at the beginning of the race.’

‘How can a horse disappear in a place packed with thousands of spectators?’

‘Please bear in mind that at that particular moment all the cameras and all the spectators’ eyes were focused on the race away from the horse which presumably was taken back to its horsebox. That’s where the parallel with the morning star which is also the evening star comes in—: ‘now you see it, now you don’t.’ Incidentally, if you were to ask me what would be the best place to abduct a person, I’d say by a bus stop during the rush hour, especially if the bus stop happened to be by a tall hedge outside somebody’s garden. To go back to Morning Star; as he was led away, with the cameras focusing on him for the last time, the animal wasn’t prancing, but he didn’t look lame either. However, it had been lame three weeks before the race; in spite of that the odds were in its favour. That is something we need to look into; some forms of lameness in horses wear off on exercise; others are brought on by exercise. The horse had won the Gold Cup the year before and the stakes were high. One thing is certain; if the animal was stolen at that point, by that I mean if he was led to another horsebox, not his own, all the thieves had to do was to lead the goat up the ramp first and the horse would have followed her. Furthermore, so long as the goat stayed with him, he would have settled down for the night wherever.’

‘So, cherchez la chèvre?’

‘Well, yes, but goats can be temperamental and pugnacious. I had one as child and she was very handy with her head. She also had a taste for 5£ notes; she used to snatch them and gobble them in the twinkling of an eye as my father made generous hand-outs for refreshments. Goats love nothing better than browsing in wide open spaces; that’s why many of them are tethered.’

‘You mean she and the horse could be enjoying the countryside like a pair of escapees?’

‘It’s possible; the horse wasn’t hopping lame. Horses are herbivorous animals and during the racing season they don’t see much grass.’

‘Earlier on, when referring to the morning star you said ‘looking up at the sky’. Could the horse have been flown abroad?’

‘You mean from some deserted wartime airfield? It’s possible. Where to? Chantilly? Dubai? We need to study the racing calendar. At the moment, we stand in danger of assuming too many things through allowing ourselves to be influenced by the story of Silver Blaze which bears many similar features. ‘We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.’

‘Who said that? Sherlock Holmes?’

‘No. Surprise, surprise; G.H. Lewes. He was the young man who lived in intellectual contentment with Mary Ann Evans who wrote under the name of George Eliot. She was old enough to be his mother, and their union was thought in those days to be irregular. When seen in profile she looked like a horse.’

‘Actually, a lot of Victorians had big noses, if you think about it.’

‘What we need to do now, as quickly as possible, to stop speculating irresponsibly is to go and pay Sir Alistair a visit at his yard. He is likely to know who had an interest in the disappearance of his horse as favourite. He was, of course, in the stands at the time the drama unfolded. According to Lord Dexter, Sir Alistair does not possess his own racing yard. Morning Star was in livery at a yard managed by an ex-jockey who had ridden quite a few winners for him and whom he set up in business out of gratitude. The jockey’s sons acted as trainers. How about driving up to Gloucestershire to-morrow, at crack of dawn? Racing stables start early.’

As they came over the brow of the hill, in the early sun that filtered through the mist, outlined against the horizon, they saw a string of horses coming back from exercise, and a glorious sight it made to refresh their flagging spirits after motoring from London..

‘Impressive’, commented Sinclair, driving through a magnificent set of double ornamental wrought-iron gates with the initials AR picked out in gold.

‘Who’s AR?’ asked Sebastian.

‘That’s Sir Alistair’s old jockey, Arthur Rodgers , the one he endowed after years of service wearing the colours,—purple cap, black sleeves.’

The lay-out of the place was even more impressive than they imagined when they walked in. The yard was in a quadrangle with a green in the middle and an opening at the far end through which one could see another yard of similar proportions with the same lay-out except it was full of ponies whose heads were just visible above the top of the doors whereas in the first yard the stables accommodated race horses, except sadly for one which had Morning Star’s name on the door. In the far yard, a tall girl was giving the ponies their first feed of the day followed by two children and a couple of whippets whilst in the first yard the lads were busy putting away tack.

The sound of a helicopter landing in a near-by field diverted their attention from the early morning bustle. The horses were obviously used to it as none of them reacted, either inside the yard or outside in the surrounding paddocks where, driving in, Sinclair had observed a few horses grazing.

As Sir Alistair jumped into a quad, Sinclair noticed how much younger he looked than Lord Dexter. He had expected a much older man of approximately the same age as Lady Annabel’s father; perhaps he had been a suitor for his daughter’s hand?

‘Stewart Sinclair, private eye, and this is my assistant, Sebastian Barnard. I understand Lord Dexter has mentioned my name to you, sir?’

‘Ah, Sinclair, thank you for coming so promptly. This business will be the death of me. Do you realize how traumatic it was for me to watch Morning Star, the jewel in the crown, being led away out of the race while I stood helpless in the stands surrounded by friends and family? We were all devastated. The horse loved that course. And then to vanish . . .’

‘I do indeed, sir, and I am sure the racing public feels for you. Morning Star was a big favourite. I think Scotland Yard appreciate that; they’ve got one of their top men working on the case. On the way here, we saw the Police out in force searching for signs of the animal in the hills. But excuse me asking, do you live in the big house at the far end of the ponies’ yard?’

‘No, I live near-by. I did live here at one time, but when I decided to endow my old jockey, I wanted him to feel free and independent in every way, so I moved out and he moved in with his sons to conduct the business entirely as a family concern. Besides, the space for my private museum had become too cramped. I collect costume memorabilia and the last two items I was after for which I paid £35.000 at a private auction deserved to be properly displayed, they were that exceptional’.

I see. Those children over there in the ponies’ yard, are they yours?’

‘No; they’re friends of my children who