High Stakes

by Dick Francis

  Books by Dick Francis

  THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)

  DEAD CERT

  NERVE

  FOR KICKS

  ODDS AGAINST

  FLYING FINISH

  BLOOD SPORT

  FORFEIT

  ENQUIRY

  RAT RACE

  BONECRACK

  SMOKESCREEN

  SLAY-RIDE

  KNOCK DOWN

  HIGH STAKES

  IN THE FRAME

  RISK

  TRIAL RUN

  WHIP HAND

  REFLEX

  TWICE SHY

  BANKER

  THE DANGER

  PROOF

  BREAK IN

  LESTER: The Official Biography

  BOLT

  HOT MONEY

  THE EDGE

  STRAIGHT

  LONGSHOT

  COMEBACK

  DRIVING FORCE

  DECIDER

  WILD HORSES

  COME TO GRIEF

  TO THE HILT

  10-lb PENALTY

  FIELD OF THIRTEEN

  SECOND WIND

  SHATTERED

  DICK FRANCIS

  High Stakes

  THE DICK FRANCIS LIBRARY

  Michael Joseph

  London

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain August 1975

  Second impression April 1982

  Third impression April 1984

  Fourth impression September 1988

  Fifth impression January 1993

  Sixth impression March 2000

  Seventh impression January 2003

  Copyright © Dick Francis, 1975

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN:978-0-14-192925-5

  1

  I looked at my friend and saw a man who had robbed me. Deeply disturbing. The ultimate in rejection.

  Jody Leeds looked back at me, half smiling, still disbelieving.

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Taking my horses away,’ I said.

  ‘But… I’m your trainer.’ He sounded bewildered. Owners, his voice and expression protested, never deserted their trainers. It simply wasn’t done. Only the eccentric or the ruthless shifted their horses from stable to stable, and I had shown no signs of being either.

  We stood outside the weighing room of Sandown Park racecourse on a cold windy day with people scurrying past us carrying out saddles and number cloths for the next steeplechase. Jody hunched his shoulders inside his sheepskin coat and shook his bare head. The wind blew straight brown hair in streaks across his eyes and he pulled them impatiently away.

  ‘Come on, Steven,’ he said. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No.’

  Jody was short, stocky, twenty-eight, hardworking, clever, competent and popular. He had been my constant adviser since I had bought my first racehorses three years earlier, and right from the beginning he had robbed me round the clock and smiled while doing it.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said, ‘I’ve just won you a race.’

  We stood, indeed, on the patch of turf where winners were unsaddled: where Energise, my newest and glossiest hurdler, had recently decanted his smiling jockey, had stamped and steamed and tossed his head with pride and accepted the crowd’s applause as simply his due.

  The race he had won had not been important, but the way he had won it had been in the star-making class. The sight of him sprinting up the hill to the winning post, a dark brown streak of rhythm, had given me a rare bursting feeling of admiration, of joy… probably even of love. Energise was beautiful and courageous and chockfull of will to win and it was because he had won, and won in that fashion, that my hovering intention to break with Jody had hardened into action.

  I should, I suppose, have chosen a better time and place.

  ‘I picked out Energise for you at the Sales,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And all your other winners.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I moved into bigger stables because of you.’

  I nodded briefly.

  ‘Well… You can’t let me down now.’

  Disbelief had given way to anger. His bright blue eyes sharpened to belligerence and the muscles tightened round his mouth.

  ‘I’m taking the horses away,’ I repeated. ‘And we’ll start with Energise. You can leave him here when you go home.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s he going then?’

  I actually had no idea. I said, ‘I’ll make all the arrangements. Just leave him in the stable here and go home without him.’

  ‘You’ve no right to do this.’ Full-scale anger blazed in his eyes. ‘You’re a bloody rotten shit.’

  But I had every right. He knew it and I knew it. Every owner had the right at any time to withdraw his custom if he were dissatisfied with his trainer. The fact that the right was seldom exercised was beside the point.

  Jody was rigid with fury. ‘I am taking that horse home with me and nothing is going to stop me.’

  His very intensity stoked up in me an answering determination that he should not. I shook my head decisively. I said, ‘No, Jody. The horse stays here.’

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  His body, alive, quivered with pugnaciousness.

  ‘As of this moment,’ I said, ‘I’m cancelling your authority to act on my behalf, and I’m going straight into the weighing room to make that clear to all the authorities who need to know.’

  He glared. ‘You owe me money,’ he said. ‘You can’t take your horses away until you’ve paid.’

  I paid my bills with him on the nail every month and owed him only for the current few weeks. I pulled my cheque book out of my pocket and unclipped my pen.

  ‘I’ll give you a cheque right now.’

  ‘No you bloody well won’t.’

  He snatched the whole cheque book out of my hand and ripped it in two. Then in the same movement he threw the pieces over his shoulder, and all the loose halves of the cheques scattered in the wind. Faces turned our way in astonishment and the eyes of the Press came sharply to life. I couldn’t have chosen anywhere more public for what was developing into a first class row.

  Jody looked around him. Looked at the men with notebooks. Saw his allies.

  His anger grew mean.

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll chew you into little bits.’

  The face that five minutes earlier had smiled with cheerful decisive fr
iendliness had gone for good. Even if I now retracted and apologised, the old relationship could not be re-established. Confidence, like Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put together again.

  His fierce opposition had driven me further than I had originally meant. All the same I still had the same objective, even if I had to fight harder to achieve it.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ I said, ‘you won’t keep my horses.’

  ‘You’re ruining me,’ Jody shouted.

  The Press advanced a step or two.

  Jody cast a quick eye at them. Maliciousness flooded through him and twisted his features with spite. ‘You big rich bastards don’t give a damn who you hurt.’

  I turned abruptly away from him and went into the weighing room, and there carried out my promise to disown him officially as my trainer. I signed forms cancelling his authority to act for me, and for good measure also included a separate handwritten note to say that I had expressly forbidden him to remove Energise from Sandown Park. No one denied I had the right: there was just an element of coolness towards one who was so vehemently and precipitately ridding himself of the services of the man who had ten minutes ago given him a winner.

  I didn’t tell them that it had taken a very long time for the mug to face the fact that he was being conned. I didn’t tell them how I had thrust the first suspicions away as disloyalty and had made every possible allowance before being reluctantly convinced.

  I didn’t tell them either that the reason for my determination now lay squarely in Jody’s first reaction to my saying I was removing my horses.

  Because he hadn’t, not then or afterwards, asked the one natural question.

  He hadn’t asked why.

  When I left the weighing room, both Jody and the Press had gone from the unsaddling enclosure. Racegoers were hurrying towards the stands to watch the imminent steeplechase, the richest event of the afternoon, and even the officials with whom I’d just been dealing were dashing off with the same intent.

  I had no appetite for the race. Decided, instead, to go down to the racecourse stables and ask the gatekeeper there to make sure Energise didn’t vanish in a puff of smoke. But as the gatekeeper was there to prevent villainous strangers walking in, not any bona fide racehorses walking out, I wasn’t sure how much use he would be, even if he agreed to help.

  He was sitting in his sentry box, a middle-aged sturdy figure in a navy blue serge uniform with brass buttons. Various lists on clip-boards hung on hooks on the walls, alongside an electric heater fighting a losing battle against the December chill.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I want to ask you about my horse…’

  ‘Can’t come in here,’ he interrupted bossily. ‘No owners allowed in without trainers.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I just want to make sure my horse stays here.’

  ‘What horse is that?’

  He was adept at interrupting, like many people in small positions of power. He blew on his fingers and looked at me over them without politeness.

  ‘Energise,’ I said.

  He screwed up his mouth and considered whether to answer. I supposed that he could find no reason against it except natural unhelpfulness, because in the end he said grudgingly, ‘Would it be a black horse trained by Leeds?’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘Gone, then,’ he said.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘S’right. Lad took him off, couple of minutes ago.’ He jerked his head in the general direction of the path down to the area where the motor horseboxes were parked. ‘Leeds was with him. Ask me, they’ll have driven off by now.’ The idea seemed to cheer him. He smiled.

  I left him to his sour satisfaction and took the path at a run. It led down between bushes and opened abruptly straight on to the gravelled acre where dozens of horseboxes stood in haphazard rows.

  Jody’s box was fawn with scarlet panels along the sides: and Jody’s box was already manoeuvring out of its slot and turning to go between two of the rows on its way to the gate.

  I slid my binoculars to the ground and left them, and fairly sprinted. Ran in front of the first row of boxes and raced round the end to find Jody’s box completing its turn from between the rows about thirty yards away, and accelerating straight towards me.

  I stood in its path and waved my arms for the driver to stop.

  The driver knew me well enough. His name was Andy-Fred. He drove my horses regularly. I saw his face, looking horrified and strained, as he put his hand on the horn button and punched it urgently.

  I ignored it, sure that he would stop. He was advancing between a high wooden fence on one side and the flanks of parked horseboxes on the other, and it wasn’t until it became obvious that he didn’t know what his brakes were for that it occurred to me that maybe Energise was about to leave over my dead body, not Jody’s.

  Anger, not fear, kept me rooted to the spot.

  Andy-Fred’s nerve broke first, thank God, but only just. He wrenched the wheel round savagely when the massive radiator grill was a bare six feet from my annihilation and the diesel throb was a roar in my ears.

  He had left it too late for braking. The sudden swerve took him flatly into the side of the foremost of the parked boxes and with screeching and tearing sounds of metal the front corner of Jody’s box ploughed forwards and inwards until the colliding doors of the cabs of both vehicles were locked in one crumpled mess. Glass smashed and tinkled and flew about with razor edges. The engine stalled and died.

  The sharp bits on the front of Jody’s box had missed me but the smooth wing caught me solidly as I leapt belatedly to get out of the way. I lay where I’d bounced, half against the wooden fence, and wholly winded.

  Andy-Fred jumped down unhurt from the unsmashed side of his cab and advanced with a mixture of fear, fury and relief.

  ‘What the bloody hell d’you think you’re playing at?’ he yelled.

  ‘Why…’ I said weakly, ‘didn’t… you… stop?’

  I doubt if he heard me. In any case, he didn’t answer. He turned instead to the exploding figure of Jody, who arrived at a run along the front of the boxes, the same way that I had come.

  He practically danced when he saw the crushed cabs and rage poured from his mouth like fire.

  ‘You stupid bugger? he shouted at Andy-Fred. ‘You stupid sodding effing…’

  The burly box driver shouted straight back.

  ‘He stood right in my way.’

  ‘I told you not to stop.’

  ‘I’d have killed him.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’m telling you. He stood there. Just stood there…’

  ‘He’d have jumped if you’d kept on going. You stupid bugger. Just look what you’ve done. You stupid…’

  Their voices rose, loud and acrimonious, into the wind. Further away the commentator’s voice boomed over the tannoy system, broadcasting the progress of the steeplechase. On the other side of the high wooden fence the traffic pounded up and down the London to Guildford road. I gingerly picked myself off the cold gravel and leaned against the weathered planks.

  Nothing broken. Breath coming back. Total damage, all the buttons missing from my overcoat. There was a row of small right-angled tears down the front where the buttons had been. I looked at them vaguely and knew I’d been lucky.

  Andy-Fred was telling Jody at the top of a raucous voice that he wasn’t killing anyone for Jody’s sake, he was bloody well not.

  ‘You’re fired,’ Jody yelled.

  ‘Right.’

  He took a step back, looked intensely at the mangled horseboxes, looked at me, and looked at Jody. He thrust his face close to Jody’s and yelled at him again.

  ‘Right.’

  Then he stalked away in the direction of the stables and didn’t bother to look back.

  Jody’s attention and fury veered sharply towards me. He took three or four purposeful steps and yelled, ‘I’ll sue you for this.’

  I said, ‘Why don’t you find out if the horse is all rig
ht?’

  He couldn’t hear me for all the day’s other noises.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Energise,’ I said loudly. ‘Is he all right?’

  He gave me a sick hot look of loathing and scudded away round the side of the box. More slowly, I followed. Jody yanked open the groom’s single door and hauled himself up inside and I went after him.

  Energise was standing in his stall quivering from head to foot and staring wildly about with a lot of white round his eyes. Jody had packed him off still sweating from his race and in no state anyway to travel and the crash had clearly terrified him: but he was none the less on his feet and Jody’s anxious search could find no obvious injury.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ Jody said bitterly.

  ‘Nor to you.’

  We faced each other in the confined space, a quiet oasis out of the wind.

  ‘You’ve been stealing from me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to believe it. But from now on… I’m not giving you the chance.’

  ‘You won’t be able to prove a thing.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe I won’t even try. Maybe I’ll write off what I’ve lost as the cost of my rotten judgement in liking and trusting you.’

  He said indignantly, ‘I’ve done bloody well for you.’

  ‘And out of me.’

  ‘What do you expect? Trainers aren’t in it for love, you know.’

  ‘Trainers don’t all do what you’ve done.’

  A sudden speculative look came distinctly into his eyes. ‘What have I done, then?’ he demanded.

  ‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘You haven’t even pretended to deny you’ve been cheating me.’

  ‘Look, Steven, you’re so bloody unworldly. All right, so maybe I have added a bit on here and there. If you’re talking about the time I charged you travelling expenses for Hermes to Haydock the day they abandoned for fog before the first… well, I know I didn’t actually send the horse… he went lame that morning and couldn’t go. But trainer’s perks. Fair’s fair. And you could afford it. You’d never miss thirty measley quid.’

  ‘What else?’ I said.

  He seemed reassured. Confidence and a faint note of defensive wheedling seeped into his manner and voice.

  ‘Well…’ he said. ‘If you ever disagreed with the totals of your bills, why didn’t you query it with me? I’d have straightened things out at once. There was no need to bottle it all up and blow your top without warning.’