Scout and the Mystery of the Marsh Ponies (4 page)

Chapter Six

The girls rode in silence as they headed off to Hawthorn Farm after quickly checking the map again. They managed to cut across country so that they came to the woods with the natural jumps that they’d found on their way over to Moonlight’s yard earlier in the summer.

Alice put all the swirling thoughts to the back of her mind for a moment as she pressed her lower legs to Scout’s warm sides. He twitched his ears back to Alice, then bounded forward, cantering eagerly to the row of fences: the log, the stone wall and the tyres. He flew over each one without breaking his stride, his hooves pounding the soft peaty woodland floor. As she patted him, Alice knew that it didn’t matter what secrets she
found out about Scout’s past: nothing would change how much she loved him. But that only made the thought of losing him even harder.

They broke out into the sunshine at the end of the path beyond the woods, patting their ponies, and trotted across the stubble fields until they reached Hawthorn Farm.

They looked into the neat, brick-built stables set back from the drive with their smart green doors and cleanly swept concrete. Hawthorn Farm was where Poppy lived, but her parents rented out the other five stables and they were full of ponies and horses. The only person they knew there was Poppy, so Mia called her name.

Poppy appeared out of a stable, moving a wheelbarrow piled with dirty straw to one side. Her long, naturally straight and sun-bleached hair was pulled back into a floppy ponytail and she looked surprised when she saw the girls waiting for her.

“Hi guys! Everything okay?” she beamed, strolling over to the gate.

Seeing Poppy’s bright smile suddenly made Alice wobble as she tried to smile back and explain what they’d come for. Mia noticed Alice struggling and stepped in.

“It’s Scout,” she explained. “His owner’s suddenly turned up and announced that she’s selling him. We tried to find her at the address she gave Alice a year ago, in Hollow Hill, only the address doesn’t exist and no one’s heard of her. But we bumped into someone called Beth, who thought she recognised Scout and said that he used to belong to a girl called Sammy. We’re pretty sure that she got it wrong, but we thought we’d better check, just in case.”

At that moment a girl with cropped auburn hair, a face full of pale freckles and bright green eyes bobbed out of the tack room.

“Did I hear my name?” she said, looking over to the gate. All of a sudden, the girl’s face lit up. “I don’t believe it! Pip!”

She ran over with a slight limp and gave Scout
a huge hug. As she stepped back, wiping her eyes, Scout blew hard, then nickered deep in his throat. They clearly recognised each other. Beyond any doubt, Scout
was
Pip, and any hopes that Beth had made a huge mistake vanished in an instant. The shock made Alice go cold and her face felt clammy. Alice looked at Scout; suddenly, it felt as if she was gripping the reins of a pony with a secret past, one that other people knew more about than she did.

“You’d better come in,” Poppy said, looking anxiously at Alice, who had turned worryingly pale. “You can put your ponies in one of Dad’s spare paddocks and I’ll get some drinks.”

They led the ponies to the water trough in the yard, where Dancer managed to splurge water over everyone before they untacked. They led them through the gate into the paddock once Poppy had checked that they were all up to date with their worming.

Within minutes the ponies were whizzing
round in the unfamiliar surroundings, rushing up to the fence and arching their necks, and blowing down their noses to Moonlight who was turned out in the field next to them. After squeals and hoof-stomping, they wheeled round again before Wish and Dancer settled and started to graze. Pirate and Scout continued to trot round, their tails and heads high.

Poppy quickly cleared her wheelbarrow away then rushed into the cottage next door. She soon came back out with a tray full of orange juice and home-made fairy cakes.

They decided to go into the light and airy office, with its big desk in one corner piled with bits of paperwork and diaries. Above it hung a huge noticeboard, every inch of it covered with photographs of the various ponies and riders at Hawthorn Farm, along with pictures of the sheep Poppy’s dad bred. Along the far wall were a couple of massive, ancient, cat-clawed and ragged but comfy, squishy sofas. The girls all flopped down.
Rosie grabbed two fairy cakes and popped one whole into her mouth before Mia saw her. She tried to smile innocently as Mia watched her suspiciously, only she started to choke, spraying fairy cake crumbs over Mia’s immaculate jods. Charlie was about to giggle, until she glanced over and caught the lost look on Alice’s face.

When they had all sat down, Mia gave Poppy and Sammy a fuller explanation of the situation while they both sat listening intently. Mia told them how Alice had first fallen in love with Scout as she cycled past Dragonfly Marsh and had taken him on loan after seeing an advert for him in
Pony Mad.
As Mia sipped her drink, Charlie continued telling them how Alice and her parents had met Mrs Valentine at the Marsh and how Mrs Valentine had claimed to have bought Scout for her daughter when he was a foal. Then Scarlett had got ill and could no longer look after him, so Scout had been turned out on the Marsh. Sammy shook her head, knowing they’d been lied to.

“Mrs Valentine never gave Alice the loan agreement she’d promised her at the start,” Mia finished. “In fact, Mrs Valentine disappeared completely for a year, and the first time Alice saw her again was yesterday at the show…”

“… when Mrs Valentine turned up out of the blue,” Rosie finished, “announcing that Scout was up for sale.”

“So you went to Hollow Hill to find Mrs Valentine, but found Beth instead, right?” Sammy asked, looking over at the girls.

Charlie nodded, and explained exactly what Beth had said.

“Well, Beth was partly right,” Sammy nodded. “I did own him, and I did fall off and break my leg pretty badly. But it didn’t exactly happen the way she told you.”

“So how
did
it happen?” Alice asked in a small voice. She was struggling to take everything in, but she had to – she was a Pony Detective after all, and Scout was depending on her. She would
have to piece together his past all over again, like a brand new jigsaw puzzle. The information from Beth was the first piece and now, from Sammy, they were about to get the second. She took a jagged breath, picking at a hole in her jods as Sammy started to speak.

“Well, I got Scout when he was just five years old, and my parents weren’t that sure about it because they were convinced he was too young,” she explained. “But I fell in love with him when I saw his ad in the local paper. I could tell as soon as I tried him that although he was only young he was really sweet natured and sensible. And he never put a hoof wrong until one day when we were coming back from a ride. Just as we walked past number twelve, Mrs Hawk dropped a metal dustbin lid on her garden path. It totally spooked Pip, understandably. His hooves skidded out from under him and he fell over, crushing my leg. But it was weird, because I remember Mrs Hawk watching us riding up the lane.
Then she dropped the lid just as we reached her.”

“So it wasn’t Scout’s fault, then?” Charlie asked, looking over to Alice. Sammy shook her head, frowning.

“Definitely not!” Sammy continued. “Mrs Hawk never owned up to anyone what really happened. I kept trying to tell my parents but they just said that I was covering up for Pip. After the accident she persuaded them to sell Pip, saying that he was dangerous.”

“Beth said that Mrs Hawk kept him,” Mia pointed out. “Is that right?”

Sammy nodded.

“Apparently, she knew about an auction that was coming up while I was still in hospital, Roger Green Auctions it was, and said that she’d take him and get the highest bid for him,” she explained. “But that bid happened to be very low, and from her, so she basically bought him at a knock-down price. I found out afterwards that she kept several horses on Hollow Common,
out of sight of the lane. I think she was a dealer of some kind, so I was always worried about what would happen to Pip. Anyway, this all went on when I was in hospital, and when I got out Mrs Hawk had disappeared and Pip had gone too. I never even got to say goodbye.”

“So have you ever heard of Mrs Valentine?” Rosie asked, looking puzzled.

Sammy shook her head, looking at Poppy, who said that she hadn’t heard of her either.

“But the person you bought Scout – or Pip – off, was she local?” Alice asked.

“She was. It was a lovely woman called Iris Evergreen. She’d had him for a while,” Sammy explained, “since he was about three. She broke him in, but I don’t know who had him before then, sorry. Iris emigrated to Australia, so couldn’t keep him. She was really happy that at least she could see he was going to a good home. I felt like I let her down as well as Pip when he was sold.”

“That wasn’t your fault, though,” Charlie said
as Rosie popped another fairy cake in her mouth.

“What I don’t get”, Alice said, feeling mystified, “is what happened after Mrs Hawk bought Scout. I mean, where does Mrs Valentine fit in to all this?”

“I guess if Mrs Hawk was a dealer she must have sold Pip on to Mrs Valentine,” Poppy suggested.

“Poor Scout,” Rosie said through a mouthful of cake. “What bad luck to have two horrible owners in a row.”

“Do you remember when Mrs Hawk took Pip to the auction?” Mia asked as she stood up, finding a crumb on her on her pink and purple-starred jods and flicking it off.

“Well, I don’t know exactly, but it was when I was in hospital,” Sammy said. “So it must have been some time in April last year.”

“I took Scout on loan in June,” Alice said, stepping back out into the sunshine from the shade of the office and feeling the warmth hit her as she bent down to pick up her tack. “And I saw him
for the first time in May, when his frightened little grey face just appeared through the long grass as I cycled along. But if Mrs Hawk bought Scout in April and had him for about a month, Mrs Valentine must only have had him for about two minutes before she put him out onto Dragonfly Marsh.”

“So why did she say she’d had him since he was a foal?” Charlie asked, as she and the others called out to their ponies. “Why did she need to lie?”

But as the ponies came thundering over, that was one question none of them could answer.

Chapter Seven

After they’d got back to Blackberry Farm, untacked and turned out the ponies, the girls headed straight round to the hay barn, just beyond the yard. They rushed through the huge open barn doors and bounced over the floor of spilt, loose hay and straw to the round snug of hay bales they’d pulled together. The walls were covered with lots of their favourite pony pics and posters from
Pony Mad.
The air was still; it was cool and peaceful in there, and they could watch the ponies grazing in the paddock.

Mia immediately picked up her notebook and flipped past the page headed ‘Moonlight’ from their last mystery, and in her neatest writing wrote Scout’s name at the top of the new page:

Alice got a picture of Scout off the barn wall and handed it to Mia, who stuck it in her notebook at the top of the page. Alice shivered seeing his name written there, just like Moonlight’s had been at the beginning of the summer when the Pony Detectives had taken on their first case. Now Scout had turned into their second. He might not have been stolen like the piebald, but he was in danger of being taken away from Alice unless they could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding his past.

As they sat on the edge of the hay bales Mia started to write down all the information they’d picked up that morning while the others pitched in:

“There’s definitely something seriously dodgy going on,” Charlie said, reading the list. “
Nothing
Mrs Valentine’s told Alice is true, and we have to find out why before she manages to sell Scout.”

Mia chewed her pen thoughtfully.

“Well, one thing’s obvious looking at all this: it’s pointless us trying to find Scarlett so we can change her mind,” she said, “because if she’d only had him for a couple of months, and most of that time he was on Dragonfly Marsh, I seriously doubt she’ll be bothered about the prospect of him being sold.”

“So that’s our first plan of action out of the window,” Rosie agreed, dismissing the apples that Mia offered round, and bringing out a slightly squished chocolate bar instead.

“The question is,” Mia said quietly, reading
and re-reading the clues and hoping that something would suddenly jump out at her and start making sense, “where do we go from here?”