Wyfold shook his head.

You could show me which ditch? Wyfold said.
Yeah, I could.
Good.
You mean, Shane said, with relief, you believe what I told you . . .
No, I don't mean that, Wyfold said repressively. I'll need to know what you ordinarily did with the shampoo.
What?
How you prepared it and gave it to the mares.
Oh. An echo of the cocky cleverness came back: a swagger to the shoulders, a curl to the lip. It was dead easy, see. Mr. Jackson showed me how. I just had to put a coffee filter in a wash basin and pour the shampoo through it, so's the shampoo all ran down the drain and there was that stuff left on the paper, then I just turned the coffee filter inside out and soaked it in a little jar with some linseed oil from the feed shed, and then I'd stir a quarter of it into the feed if it was for a mare I was looking after anyway, or let the stuff fall to the bottom and scrape up a teaspoonful and put it in an apple for the others. Mr. Jackson showed me how. Dead easy, the whole thing.
How many mares did you give it to?
Don't rightly know. Dozens, counting last year. Some I missed. Mr. Jackson said better to miss some than be found out. He liked me to do the oil best. Said too many apples would be noticed. A certain amount of anxiety returned. Look, now I've told you all this, you know I didn't kill her, don't you?
Wyfold said impassively, How often did Mr. Jackson bring you bottles of shampoo?
He didn't. I mean, I had a case of it under my bed. Brought it with me when I moved in, see, same as last year. But this year I ran out, like, so I rang him up from the village one night for some more. So he said he'd meet me at the back gate at nine on Sunday when all the lads would be down in the pub.
That was a risk he wouldn't take, Wyfold said skeptically.
Well, he did.