Strike Out Where Not Applicable by Nicolas Freeling

perhaps how to trot. He supposed there would be no room for more elaborate manoeuvres, and that it would be in the exercise ring that they would learn to change legs with the off fore leading, or whatever it was. He knew nothing about horses, and cared as little, and what was more felt disinclined to learn. It would get very rapidly as technical and wound in jargon as cars, which bored him equally – he asked nothing but that the wretched object should go when he pressed the button …
    He poked about in the grass verge with his stick. It was scythed from time to time; Francis kept his premises carefully, and would certainly take pains that rats should not breed, but junk accumulated terribly fast, and apart from the usual toffee-papers slung there by badly-brought-up children there were unlikely objects like a decaying tomato box with a moist and musty sack folded in it, the remnants of a worn-out woollen saddle-lining, and a rusty golf club. He stopped to stare at this carefully, and even lifted it before putting it back in the whitened track it had left in the grass. He didn’t want any technical staff out here; it wasn’t his style.… He went on poking, suspecting himself of wasting time, and after covering the whole length he had found an old enamel saucepan, chipped, the handle broken off, and an oval metal affair with zigzag holes punched in it that puzzled him for some time before he recognized it as a potato-masher.… Further on he found an old-fashioned round weight, half-kilo size, iron with a faint film of rust. It had crushed but not whitened the grass beneath it – going by that and the rust, it had not been there long. Mm, he remembered seeing a weighing machine in the stable-yard somewhere, and went in search of it. Yes, there it was; a thing doubtless much used around here, where they were always weighing themselves and their saddles; it was important somehow. But this was of a much more modern pattern, using no weights but a graduatedmetal arm, one sliding counterpoise for kilos, one for fractions of a kilo …
    He found Francis in the exercise ring, under an echoing roof that magnified and distorted a welter of horsy sounds.
    â€˜Ah, hallo. Anything I can do for you?’
    â€˜Did you ever have another weighing machine – the kind with weights?’
    â€˜Still do – use it for checkin’ sacks of feed; grain and so on. Has it any importance?’
    â€˜None at all. I found a weight, and I saw that the machine has a sliding scale, and wondered what a weight would be doing here.’
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜Outside,’ vaguely.
    â€˜Happens constantly. Machine’s in the store where we keep grain, but people keep on usin’ weights for doorstops or whatnot, very tiresome of them. Can I be of any service to you?’ Plainly he was busy, and anxious to get rid of this tedious visitor, with’ his gabble about weights.
    â€˜No, thanks. How far is the White Horse, across the fields that way?’
    â€˜About a kilometre and a half, I suppose. Make a pleasant little walk if you don’t mind gettin’ your boots dirty. Marguerite comes round the road with the car. Bernhard did too – too lazy to walk. So am I, come to that. See you later, perhaps.’
    â€˜Whenever you like.’
    He went back round his corner – nobody had passed him for a good quarter of an hour, he noticed. He got a magnifying glass out of his pocket and examined both the golf club and the weight carefully. There was nothing to see. Why should there be? That they should be there proved nothing at all. Of course there need not be anything. The golf club had rather too sharp an edge, he thought, but he wasn’t very taken with the golf club anyway. It made no difference that he could see whether Bernhard had been hit by somebody he knew well (equate possibly with trusted) or less well (equate with distrusted if you cared to but he didn’t) – if