by Dick Francis
“Someone viciously assaulted him last Saturday ... in his garage ... as you know.”
“The poor fellow.”
“Was it your girlfriend who kicked hell out of him?”
“Inspector,” I said reasonably, “I was lying in that pond. How could I know?”
“She might have told you who did it.”
“No, she didn’t ... but I don’t repeat what I’m told.”
After a moment he said, “Fair enough.”
I smiled. He could hear it in my voice. “I do hope,” I said, “that poor Mr. Grantchester is still in a bad way.”
“I can tell you, off the record,” he said austerely, “that the testicular damage inflicted on Mr. Grantchester was of a severity that involved irreparable rupture and ... er ... surgical removal.”
“What a shame,” I said happily.
“Mr. Kinloch!”
“My friend has gone abroad, and she won’t be back,” I said. “Don’t bother looking. She wouldn’t have attacked anyone, I’m sure.”
Vernon didn’t sound convinced, but apart from no witnesses, it seemed he had no factual clues. The unknown assailant seemed to be getting away with it.
“How awful,” I said.
I supposed that when Chris found out, the gelding of Oliver Grantchester would cost me extra. Money well spent.
I said to Vernon, “Give Grantchester my best regards for a falsetto future.”
“That’s heartless!”
“You don’t say.”
I slept on the pill for three or four hours. Out in the yard life bustled along in the same old way, and by lunchtime I found myself falling into the same old role of general dogsbody, “popping” down to the village for such and such, ferrying blood samples to the veterinary’s office, collecting tack from repairs.
Emily and I ate dinner together and went to bed together, and even though this time I easily raised the necessary enthusiasm, she lay in my arms afterwards and told me it broke her heart.
“What does?” I asked.
“Seeing you try to be a husband.”
“But I am...”
“No.” She kissed my shoulder above the bandages. “You know you don’t belong here. Just come back sometimes. That’ll do.”
Patsy had organized the race day. Patsy had consulted with tent erectors and caterers, out to please. At Patsy’s command the hundred or so commercial guests—creditors, suppliers, landlords of brewery-owned pubs—were given a big welcome, unlimited drinks, free racecards, tickets to every enclosure, press-release photographs, lunch, tea.
Cheltenham racecourse, always forward-looking, had extended to the King Alfred Brewery, in Ivan’s memory, every red-carpet courtesy they could give to the chief sponsor of one of their top crowd-pulling early-season afternoons. Patsy had the whole racecourse executive committee tumbling over themselves to please her. Patsy’s social gifts were priceless.
To Patsy had been allocated the sponsor’s box in the grandstand, next best thing to the plushed-up suite designed for crowned heads and other princes.
Patsy had organized, in the sponsor’s box, a private family lunch for my mother, her stepmother, so that Ivan’s widow could be both present and apart.
Having met my mother at the club entrance, I walked with her to the box. Patsy faultlessly welcomed her with kisses; Patsy was dressed in dark gray, in mourning for her father, but with a bright Hermès silk scarf round her neck. She looked grave, businesslike and in full control of the day.
Behind her stood Surtees, who would not meet my eyes. Surtees shifted from foot to foot, gave my mother a desultory peck on the cheek and altogether behaved as if he wished he weren’t there.
“Hello, Surtees,” I said, to be annoying.
He gave me a silent, frustrated look, and took two paces backwards. What a grand change, I thought, from days gone by.
Patsy gave us both a puzzled look, and at one point later in the afternoon said, “What have you said to Surtees? He won’t talk about you at all. If I mention you he finds some reason for leaving the room. I don’t understand it.”
“Surtees and I,” I said, “have come to an understanding. He keeps his mouth shut, and so do I.”
“What about?”
“On my side about his behavior in Oliver Grantchester’s garden.”
“He didn’t really mean what he said.”
I clearly remembered Surtees urging Jazzo to hit me harder, when Jazzo was already hitting me as hard as he could. Surtees had meant it, all right: his revenge for my making him look foolish in Emily’s yard.
I said, “For quite a while I believed it was Surtees who sent those thugs to my house in Scotland, to find the King Alfred Gold Cup.”
It shook her. “But why?”
“Because he said, ‘Next time you’ll scream.’ ”
Her eyes darkened. She said slowly, “He was wrong about that.”
I shrugged. “You were telling everyone that I’d stolen the Cup. Surtees of course believed it.”
“You wouldn’t steal.”
I listened to the certainty in her voice, and asked, trying to suppress bitterness, “How long have you known that?”
Obliquely she told me the truth, revealing to me her own long years of unhappy fear. She said, “He would have given you anything you asked for.”
“Ivan?”
She nodded.
I said, “I would never have taken anything that was yours.”
“I thought you would.” She paused. “I did hate you.”
She made no more admissions, nor any excuses; but in the garden she had called me her brother, and in the bank she had said, “I’m sorry.” Perhaps, just perhaps, things had really changed.
“I suppose,” she began, “that it’s too late ...” She left the sentence unfinished, but it was a statement of acceptance, not a plea.
“Call it quits,” I said, “if you like.”
When Himself and his countess arrived to keep my mother company I went down to find out how things were going in the hospitality tent, and found that the mood, in spite of the brewery’s troubles, was upbeat, alcoholic and forgiving.
Margaret Morden greeted me with the sort of embrace that would have been over the top in any office but seemed appropriate to the abandon of a race day. Dressed in soft blue, with a reliable-looking husband by her side, she said she knew nothing about horses but would back Golden Malt.
She followed my gaze across the tent to where Patsy, flanked not by Surtees but by the perfect lieutenant, Desmond Finch, was encouraging about everyone’s future.
“You know,” I said to Margaret, “Patsy will make a great success of running the brewery. She’s a born manager. Better than her father. He was conscientious and a good man. She can bend and manipulate people to achieve her own ends ... and I’d guess she’ll lug the brewery out of the threat of bankruptcy faster than you can imagine.”
“How can you possibly forgive her?”
“I didn’t say I forgave her, I said she would be a good manager.”
“It was in your voice.”
I smiled into the clever eyes. “Find out for me,” I said, “whether Oliver Grantchester suggested the embezzlement, or just stumbled across it and muscled in. Not that it really matters, I just wonder, that’s all.”
“I can tell you now. It was Grantchester’s idea all along. Then Norman Quorn did some fancy footwork to keep the loot himself, and misjudged the strength and cruelty of his partner.”
“How do you know?” I asked, entranced.
“That weasel Desmond Finch told me. I leaned on him the tiniest bit. I said that as a deputy manager he should have spotted irregularities in the finance department, and he fell over himself to tell me that Norman Quorn had practically cried on his shoulder. I think—and to be honest I don’t see how we can prove it unless Grantchester confesses, which I can’t see him doing—”
“He’s not the man he used to be,” I murmured.
“I think,” Margaret said
, not hearing, or at least not understanding, “that Norman Quorn must have said in all good faith to Ivan’s trusted friend and lawyer, Oliver, how easy it would be in these days of electronic transfers to make oneself seriously rich. I think they worked it out together, maybe even as an academic exercise to begin with, and then, when the trial run succeeded, they did it in earnest, and then Quorn tried at the last minute to back out.”
“He did steal the money,” I said flatly. “He tried to cut his partner out.”
She agreed bleakly. “They both did.”
We drank champagne. Sweetish. Patsy was no spend-thrift fool.
I sighed. “I wish Tobe could have been here today,” I said.
Margaret hesitated. “He couldn’t bear that we hadn’t been able to find the money with that list, when you suffered so much to bring it to us.”
“Tell him not to be so soft.”
She bent forwards and unexpectedly kissed my cheek. “ ‘Soft,’ ” she said, “is the last word I would apply to Alexander Kinloch.”
Himself and I, as two of the executors in whose name the horse was running, stood by the saddling boxes and watched Emily fasten the racing-size saddle onto Golden Malt.
Himself said to me conversationally, “Word gets around, you know ...”
“What word?”
“What Oliver Grantchester put you through in his garden.”
“Forget it.”
“If you say so. But it is rippling outwards, and you can’t stop it.”
(He was right to the extent that a short while later I got a postcard from young Andrew at his prep school—“Is it true you were lying fully clothed in a goldfish pond one cold night in October?”—and I sent him back a single-word answer: “Yes.”)
Mad, weird Alexander. Who cared? Some have weirdness thrust upon them.
“Al,” Himself said, “would you have burned for the Kinloch Hilt?”
“It wasn’t for the list,” I said.
He smiled. He knew. He was the one person who wholly understood.
We stood in the parade ring with Emily, watching Golden Malt stride round, led by his groom.
Emily’s jockey joined us, dressed in Ivan’s racing colors, of gold, green blocks, gold cap.
Emily was all business, no excitement obvious, a shortness of breath the only sign. She told the jockey to be handy in fourth place all the way, if he could, and make his move only after he’d rounded the last bend and straightened up for the uphill run to the winning post.
“Don’t forget,” she said, “that he won’t accelerate on a curve. Wait, even though it hurts. He’ll deliver if you do. He’s a great fighter uphill.”
When the horses had gone out onto the track, Himself, Emily and I joined my mother up in the sponsor’s box.
My mother, in the black clothes she had worn to Ivan’s funeral, in the black sweeping hat with the white rose, gazed out over the autumnal racecourse and yearned for her lost consort, for the steadfast man of no great fire who had been all she needed as a companion.
It was Ivan’s race. Ivan’s day. Nothing would comfort her.
Patsy arrived, with Surtees. Patsy’s manner to her husband was impatient: she was looking at him with the fresh cold eyes of disillusion. I would give that marriage another year at most, I thought. The Surtees looks wouldn’t forever make up for the void inside.
Golden Malt looked splendid on the turf, but he faced no easy task: the generous money prize alongside the prestige of taking home the King Alfred Gold Cup, even in replica, had drawn out the best. Of the nine proven fast steeplechasers lining up, Golden Malt was generally counted only fourth or fifth in the hierarchy.
White knuckle time. Emily watched the start through raceglasses without trembling. Probably no one else in the box could have managed it. Emily stood rock-still for nearly all of the two miles.
It was one of those races at Cheltenham when neither the fences nor the undulating curves sorted the runners out into a straggling line: all nine runners went round in a bunch, no one fell, the crowd on the grandstands yelled and drowned out the commentator, and Golden Malt came round the last bend in close fourth place and headed for glory up the hill.
Emily put down her raceglasses and breathlessly watched.
Himself was shouting with powerful lungs. My mother clasped her hands over her heart.
Patsy murmured, “Oh, come on . . .”
Three horses crossed the line together.
One couldn’t tell by eye which head had nodded forwards. We all went down to the unsaddling area for first, second and third, and none of the little group could disguise the agony of the wait for the photograph.
When the result came it was in the impersonal voice of the course announcer.
“First, number five.”
Number five: Golden Malt.
There was a lot of kissing. Patsy gave me an uncomplicated smile, with no acid. Emily’s eyes outshone the stars.
Patsy had ordained that the trophy should be presented to the winning owner by my mother, as Ivan’s wife; so it happened that at the ceremony my mother presented the replica of the King Alfred Gold Cup to Emily, to universal cheers and a blaze of flashing cameras.
Ivan would have loved it.
When my mother and I were placidly breakfasting and reading congratulatory newspapers, my uncle Robert telephoned with a full head of steam.
“Whatever you’re doing, stop doing it; I’ve had Jed on the line. He is more or less foaming at the mouth. The conservationists have invaded the bothy with spades and pickaxes and metal detectors, and are tearing everything apart. He has told them they are trespassing, but it makes no difference, they won’t go away, and Zoë Lang is there, with the light of battle in her eyes as if she were on a crusade.”
“Does Jed mean they are there now?”
“Indeed he does,” he said. “They intend to stay all day and they are digging up all the ground round the bothy. He begs me to fly up there at once.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Of course I do,” he bellowed. “Meet me at Heathrow, terminal one, as soon as you can.”
I explained to my mother that I would have to go. Resignedly she told me to finish my toast.
I laughed and hugged her, and found a taxi who would go to Heathrow on a Sunday morning.
Himself was striding up and down, an awesome sight. We caught a flight to Edinburgh, where we were met by the helicopter pilot who had risked the bothy’s plateau once before.
Our arrival alarmed a crowd at the bothy, who scattered outwards like ants under an insect-killing spray. When the rotor stopped, the ants came back, led by Jed but with Zoë Lang close on his heels.
“How dare you?” Himself thundered to the fanatical lady.
She straightened, as if she would add inches to her stature. “This bothy,” she insisted, “was given to the nation with the castle.”
“It certainly was not,” my uncle said furiously. “It comes under the heading of my private apartment.”
Behind both of their backs, Jed raised his eyebrows to heaven.
No doubt the courts would decide, I thought, but meanwhile the conservationists were making almost as much mess of my home as the four thugs had done in the first place.
There were holes in the ground everywhere. Beside each hole lay a little heap of empty Coke cans and other metal debris.
In the ruined section of bothy that held trash bins, the comer that held the old bread oven had been excavated to a depth of three feet and the oven left belly up. In the carport end the earth had more or less been plowed, revealing old spanners and ancient pieces of iron machinery.
Staggered by the extent of the ruthless search, I left Himself arguing with Zoë Lang and went into my home to see what damage had been done inside.
To my surprise and relief, very little. Jed had brought back my pipes. The place looked tidy. The picture, wrapped in its sheet, stood on the easel. It seemed the searchers had left the core of the search
until last.
I went out to join Zoë Lang to protest the work of her fanatical friends, about ten of whom were still digging holes in every direction, but as I approached her my mobile phone, which I by now carried around out of habit, buzzed weakly in my hand, demanding attention.
Because of the bad reception in the mountains, and the whining noise of metal detectors and yelling all around of the conservationists, I could hear nothing in the receiver but a crackle, with the faintest of voices in the background.
To obliterate at least some of the noise, I carried the mobile phone into the bothy and closed the door.
I said loudly into the receiver, “Whoever you are, shout.”
I heard an earful of crackle, and one word, “Tobias.”
I shouted, unbelieving, “Tobias?”
Crackle.
His faint voice said, “I’ve found it.”
Another load of static.
His voice said again, “Al, I’ve found the money.”
I couldn’t believe it. His voice said, “Are you there?”
I bellowed, “Yes. Where are you?”
Crackle. Crackle. “In Bogotá. In Colombia.”
I still couldn’t believe it. There was a sudden clearing of the static and I could hear his voice plainly. “The money is all here. I found it by accident. The account here had three names on it, not just one or two. A person’s name and two corporate names. I put them all on an application form by mistake, and it was like pressing a button, a door opened, and they are asking for my onwards directions. The money will be back in Reading next week.”
“I can’t believe it. I thought you went away for the weekend.”
He laughed. “I went to Panama. We were getting nowhere electronically. I went to bang a fist ... and the trail led to Bogotá.”
“Tobe ...”
“See you soon,” he said.
The crackle came back. I switched off the telephone, and felt my knees weakening as in the phrase “weak at the knees,” which I had never believed in before.
After a while I took the wrapping sheet off the picture, and even to me the force of it filled the small room.